Alas! Part 29

They are off again. Being now second in the little procession, Burgoyne has but meagre and difficult views of the first; but now and again, when the road describes an acuter angle than usual, he can by turning his whole body, under pretext of admiring the view, s.n.a.t.c.h a glimpse of all three occupants leaning their heads sociably together, evidently in bright light talk. After all, he had deceived himself. It is he and not Amelia who had made her shy. Even when he cannot see her, there come to his ears little wafts of laughter, in which her voice is mixed. He catches himself trying to recall whether she had laughed even once during the period of his being her companion. There is not much mirth in his own carriage. What a kill-joy he has grown! Cecilia, though her heart is as pure as the babe unborn of any serious designs on Byng, of which indeed she has long seen the fruitlessness, yet thinks a sulky brother-in-law-elect but a poor exchange for a handsome young acquaintance, whom neither his good manners nor the amount of his intimacy allow to sit opposite to her in grumpy silence. Mrs. Le Marchant is obviously as ill at ease as was her daughter when in his fellows.h.i.+p, though in this case a little observation shows him that he counts for nothing in her discomfort of mind, but that she is watching the other half of the party with an anxiety as keen, if almost as covert, as his own. She is too well-bred indeed not to endeavour to keep up a decent show of conversation, but as neither of her companions makes any effort to second her, an ever-deepening silence falls upon them as they advance, nor, as the day grows older, is the weather calculated to exhilarate their spirits.

The sky's frown becomes more and more p.r.o.nounced the higher they mount.

Through a village n.o.bly seated on its hilltop, but, like most Italian townlets, squalid enough on a nearer view--up and up--up and up--till they reach what were once groves of stately chestnuts, but where the hungry Tuscan axe has left nothing but twigs and saplings, but never a spreading tree; then on into the fir-woods, which are woods indeed, though even here the hatchet's cruel tooth has begun to bite. No sooner is their dark umbrage reached than the mist, that has been hanging with threatening lowness above the travellers' heads, comes down close, blinding, clinging like wet flannel, and as thick.

"Perhaps it will lift," Jim says, with a sort of dismal unlikely hopefulness as he strains his eyes, trying to look down the straight solemn fir aisles, with their files upon files of tall stems, that seem to be seen only as if through a thick gauze. Neither of his companions has the spirit necessary to echo the supposition. The road winds endlessly, steeper and steeper up through the mist. The tired horses step wearily, and the unfortunate pleasure-seekers are beginning to think that the m.u.f.fled monotony of firs, of winding road, of painfully labouring horses, will never end, when the vetturino turns round with a smile on his fog-wet face, and says, "Vallombrosa!"

Under other circ.u.mstances, the announcement might have been cheering, might have excited a poetic curiosity; but as it is, the hood of the vehicle--necessarily raised some miles back--is so far poked forward that nothing is to be seen but a pour of rain--the rain has begun to descend in torrents--a gla.s.s-door in a house-wall opening to admit them, and a waiter holding up a green umbrella to protect their descent.

Neither he nor the landlord, nor yet the chambermaid, show any signs of mirth or wonder at their arrival among the clouds on such a day. They are used to mad Inglese. And amongst the mad Inglese themselves there is certainly no temptation to mad merriment. On such an occasion there is nothing to do but eat, so they lunch dismally in a long, bare dining-room, with a carpetless floor, a table laid for a grossly improbable number of guests, and a feeling of searching cold. Having spun out their scanty meal to the utmost limits of possibility, and washed it down with the weakest red wine that ever lived in a wicker bottle, they pa.s.s into a funereal _salon_, to which the waiter invites them. Someone makes the cheering announcement that they have as yet been here only half an hour, and that the horses must have two full hours to bait before there can be any question of beginning the return journey.

And then they amble about the room, looking at the dreadful lithographs of Italy's plain King and fair Queen on the walls; at the venerable journals and gaudy English storybook, so dull as to have been forgotten by its owner, on the table. Their spirits are not heightened by a pervading sense as of being in a cellar, minus the wine. The equipment of this pleasant apartment is completed by a half-dead nosegay of what must once have been charming mountain blossoms. The sight decides them.

They must go out. Perhaps even through this opaque cloud they may dimly see the mountain flowers growing, the mountain brooks das.h.i.+ng, which John Milton has told them that--

"the Etrurian shades, High over-arch'd imbower."

They all catch at the suggestion, when made by Byng, and presently sally forth to see as much of Vallombrosa as a fog that would not have disgraced the Strand, as a close blanket of almost _confluent_ rain, and as umbrellas held well down over their cold noses, will let them; Mrs.

Le Marchant alone declines to be one of the party, and is left sitting, swaddled in all the superfluous wraps, on a horsehair chair in the _salon_, to stare at the wall and at King Humbert's ugly face, until such time as her companions see fit to release her. It is no wonder that Burgoyne overhears her eagerly whispering to Elizabeth a request that she will not stay too long away. And Elizabeth, whose spirits have gone up like a rocket at the prospect of a taste of the fresh air, and who knows what else, lays her little face, crowned with a deer-stalking cap, against her mother's, and promises, and skips away.

At first they all five keep together, wet but sociable. They ask their way to the Paradiso--the name sounds ironical--and set off climbing up through the fir-wood in the direction indicated; along a path which in fair weather must be heavenly with piny odours, but which is now only a miry alternative of dripping stones and muddy puddles. Through the mist they see indeed fair flowers gleaming, yellow anemones, unfamiliar and lovely, but they are too drenched to pluck. The sound of falling water guides them to where the clear brook--clear even to-day--falls in little cascades down the hill's face between the pines. How delicious to sit on its flat stones some hot summer's noon, with your hands coolly straying among its gra.s.ses, or dabbling in its bright water; but to-day they can but look at it sadly from the low bridge, saying sighingly, "If!"

They reach the goal, some cross, and all floundering, the ladies with draggled skirts and cold, dank ankles. The Paradiso is a little house, a _dependance_ apparently of the hotel below--apparently also tenantless and empty. It is built on the bare rock, looking sheer down on--what? on a blanket of fog. What does, what can, that maddening blanket conceal?

Oh, if they could but tear it in pieces, rend it asunder, hack it with knives, by any means abolish its unsightly veil from over the lovely face they will now, with all their climbing, all their early rising, never see! But will not they? Even as they look, despairingly straining their eyes, in the vain effort to pierce that obscure and baffling veil, there is a movement in it, a stirring of the inert ma.s.s of vapour; a wind has risen, and is blowing coldly on their brows, and in a moment, as it seems, the maddening wet curtain is swept away and up, as by some G.o.d-hand, the hand of some spirit that has heard their lament and has pitied them and said, "They have come from afar; it is their only chance; let us show it to them." The curtain has rolled up and up, the sombre fir-wood starts out, and the emerald meadows, the lowest and nearest range of hills, then the next, and then the next, and then the furthest and highest of all. There they stand revealed, even the city, Florence, far away. They can make out her Duomo, small and dim with distance, yet certainly there; in the sudden effulgence all the valley alight and radiant. Range behind range stand the hills; belated vapour wreaths floating, thin as lawn, up their flanks; wonderful dreamy patches of radiance on the far slopes; marvellous amethysts starring their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Mystery and beauty, colour and s.p.a.ce, sky and lovely land, where, five minutes ago, there was nothing but choking fog.

Burgoyne stands as in a trance, vaguely conscious--trance-wise too--that Elizabeth is near him; all his soul pa.s.sed into his eyes; stands--how long? He hardly knows. Before that fair sight time seems dead; but even as he yet looks, smiling as one smiles at anything surpa.s.singly lovely, the cloud-wreaths float downwards again, wreaths at first, then great volumes, then one universal sheet of vapour, impenetrably dense as before. Vanished are the Apennine slopes, sun-kissed and dreamy; vanished the distant Arno plain; vanished even the near pines. He can scarce see his hand before him. And yet he can see Elizabeth's face transfigured and quivering, lifted to his--yes, to _his_--though Byng is on her other side; her eyes full of tender tears of ravishment, while her low voice says sighingly:

"It is gone; but we have seen it! Nothing can ever take that from us!

nothing! nothing!"

And although the next moment she is reabsorbed into the fog and Byng, though for the rest of the deplorable walk he scarce catches sight again of the little brown head and the soaked deer-stalking cap, yet it makes a gentle warmth about his chilled heart to think that, in her moments of highest emotion, it is her impulse to turn to him.

CHAPTER XXIV.

"Oh, gentle Proteus, Love's a mighty lord, And hath so humbled me that I confess There is no grief to his correction Nor to his service no such joy on earth.

Now no discourse except it be of Love; Now can I break my fast, dine, sup and sleep Upon the very naked name of Love."

Not once again, so long as they remain at Vallombrosa, does the envious cloud-blanket lift; and, after slopping about for some time longer, in the vain hope that it will, Burgoyne and his two female relatives-elect return to the inn, all fallen very silent. The other two members of the party have disappeared into the fog. At the door of the hotel they find Mrs. Le Marchant, who has broken from her cerements, and is looking anxiously out. As she catches sight of them the look of tension on her face lessens.

"Oh, here you are!" says she. "I am so glad; and the others--no doubt the others are close behind."

"We know nothing about the others," replies Cecilia, with some ill-humour, taking upon her the office of spokeswoman, which neither of her companions seems in any hurry to a.s.sume; "the others took French leave of us an hour ago. Oh dear, how wet I am! What a horrible excursion! How I detest Vallombrosa!"

Amelia is to the full as wet as her sister; nothing can well be more lamentable than the appearance of either; and upon Amelia's face there is, in addition to a handsome share of splashes of rain, a look of mortification and crestfallenness; but she now puts in her word, with her usual patience and thoughtful good-temper.

"I do not think you need be in the least anxious about them," she says, observing the immediate relapse into what seems an exaggerated concern following instantly upon Cecilia's remark on Mrs. Le Marchant's features; "they were with us not long ago. We were certainly all together not so long ago; they were with us at the Paradiso--they were certainly with us at the Paradiso?" turning with an interrogative air to Burgoyne.

"Yes, they were certainly with us at the Paradiso," he a.s.sents, not thinking it necessary to add why he is so very certain as to this fact.

"They must have so much inducement to loiter this charming weather,"

cries Cecilia, with an exasperated laugh. "Oh, how wet I am! I do not expect that we shall any of us forget Vallombrosa in a hurry! I shall go and ask the chambermaid to lend me some dry shoes and stockings."

With these words she walks towards the staircase and climbs it, leaving a muddy imprint on each step to mark her progress as she mounts.

Amelia does not at once follow her example. She remains standing where she was, her arms hanging listlessly by her sides, and the expression of crestfallenness deepened on her f.a.gged face. Her lover is touched by her look, and, going up to her, lays his hand kindly and solicitously on her shoulder.

"Umbrellas are not what they were in my days," he says, trying to smile.

"You are quite as wet as Cis, though you do not proclaim your sufferings nearly so loudly. Had not you better go and see whether the chambermaid owns two pairs of dry stockings?"

She lifts her eyes with wistful grat.i.tude to his. "This is my treat,"

she says slowly; "my first treat to you; oh, poor Jim!"

There is a depth of compa.s.sion in her tone as disproportioned to the apparent cause as had been Mrs. Le Marchant's anxiety for her daughter's return, and beneath it he winces.

"Why do you pity me?" he inquires half indignantly.

"Am I--

"'A milksop; one that never in his life Felt so much cold as over shoes in snow?'

What do I care for a little rain?" Adding cheerfully, "You shall give me a second treat, dear; we will come here again by ourselves when the sun s.h.i.+nes."

"By ourselves--when the sun s.h.i.+nes!" echoes she, as if repeating a lesson; and then she goes off docilely, in obedience to his suggestion, in search of dry raiment.

He rejoins Mrs. Le Marchant, whose unaccountable fears have led her beyond the house's shelter out into the rain, where she stands looking down that river of mud which represents the road by which she hopes to see the truants reappear.

"I think you are unnecessarily alarmed," he says, in a rea.s.suring and remonstrating tone. "What harm could have happened to them?"

She does not answer, her eyes, into which the rain is beating under her umbrella brim, still fixed upon the empty road.

"Is she--is she apt to take cold?" he asks, his own tone catching the infection of her vague and nameless disquiet.

"Yes--no--not particularly, I think. Oh, it is not that!"--her composure breaking down into an unaffected outburst of distress. "It is not that!

Do not you understand? Oh, how unwilling I was to come here to-day! It is--do not you see? Oh, I should not mind in the least if it had been you that were with her!"

"If it had been I that was with her?" repeats Jim slowly, not at the first instant comprehending, nor even at the second quite taking in the full, though unintentional, uncomplimentariness of this speech; which, however, before his companion again takes up her parable, has tinglingly reached--what? His heart, or only his vanity? They lie very close together.

"Why did not he go home with his mother?" pursues Mrs. Le Marchant, still in that voice of intense vexation. "It would have been so much more natural that he should, and I am sure that she wished it."

"You are making me feel extremely uncomfortable," says Burgoyne gravely; "when I remember that it was I who introduced him to you."

"Oh, I am not blaming you!" replies she, with an obvious effort to resume her usual courteous manner. "Please do not think that I am blaming you. How could you help it?"

"I thought you liked him."

"Oh, so I do--so we both do!" cries the poor woman agitatedly. "That is the worst of it! If I did not like him, I should not mind; at least, I should not mind half so much."

"I am very sorry," he begins; but she interrupts him.