Alas! Part 30

"Do not be sorry," she says remorsefully; "you have nothing to say to it. I do not know, I am sure"--looking gratefully at him through the rain--"why I am always regaling you with my worries; but you are so dependable--we both feel that you are so dependable."

"Am I?" says he, with a melancholy air that does not argue much gratification at the compliment. "Do not be too sure of that."

But she does not heed his disclaimer.

"We have been so happy here," she goes on; "I do not mean _here_"--looking round with an involuntary smile at the envelope of wet vapour that encases them both--"but at Florence; so peacefully, blessedly happy, she and I--you do not know"--with an appealing touch of pathos--"what a dear little companion she is!--so happy that I naturally do not want our memory of the place to be spoilt by any painful _contretemps_. You can understand that, cannot you?"

It is senseless of him; but yet, little as he can comprehend why it should be so, the idea of Byng's love being described as a "painful _contretemps_" presents itself not disagreeably to his mind. For whatever mysterious reason, it is apparent that even Byng's own mother cannot be much more adverse to his suit than is the lady before him.

"I can perfectly enter into your feelings," he answers, with sympathetic gravity; "but do not you know that 'a watched pot never boils'? As long as you are looking for them, they will never appear; but the moment that your back is turned they will probably come round the corner at once."

"I think it is the truest proverb in the world," she says, with an impatient sigh; but she allows him to guide her and her umbrella back to the inn.

Burgoyne's prediction is not verified; probably he had no very great faith in it himself. Mrs. Le Marchant's back has, for the best part of an hour, been turned upon the mountain road, and the stragglers have not yet rejoined the main body. There has been plenty of time for Cecilia to be thoroughly dried, warmed, comforted, and restored to good humour; for the _vetturino_ to send in and ask whether he shall not put the horses to; for Amelia to exhaust all her little repertory of soothing hypotheses; for Mrs. Le Marchant to stray in restless misery from _salon_ to _salle-a-manger_ and back again, and for Burgoyne to pull gloomily at a large cigar in the hall by himself before at length the voices of the truants are heard.

Burgoyne being, as I have said, in the hall, and therefore nearest the door of entrance, has the earliest sight of them. His first glance tells him that the blow apprehended by Mrs. Le Marchant has fallen. Of Elizabeth, indeed, he scarcely catches a glimpse, as she pa.s.ses him precipitately, hurrying to meet her mother, who, at the sound of her voice, has come running into the outer room. But Byng! Byng has not experienced so many very strong emotions in his short life as to have had much practice in veiling them from the eyes of others when they come, and the gauze now drawn over his intolerable radiance is of the thinnest description. Again that earnest desire to hit him _hard_ a.s.sails the elder friend.

"Why, you are back before us!" cries the young man.

"Yes, we are back before you," replies Burgoyne; and if the penalty had been death, he could not at that moment have added one syllable to the acrid a.s.sent.

"Are we late?" asks Elizabeth tremulously; "I am afraid we are late--I am afraid we have kept you waiting! Oh, I am so sorry!"

She looks with an engaging timidity of apology from one to other of the sulky countenances around her; and Burgoyne stealing a look at her, their eyes meet. He is startled by the singularity of expression in hers. Whatever it denotes, it certainly is not the stupid simplicity of rapture to be read, in print as big as a poster's, in Byng's. And yet, among the many ingredients that go to make up that shy fevered beam, rapture is undoubtedly one.

"Did you lose yourselves? Did you go further into the wood?" asks Cecilia, with a curiosity that is, considering the provocation given, not unjustifiable.

They both reply vaguely that they had lost themselves, that they had gone deeper into the wood. It is obvious to the meanest intelligence that neither of them has the slightest idea where they have been.

"I may as well tell the driver to put the horses in," says Burgoyne, in a matter-of-fact voice, glad of an excuse to absent himself.

When he comes back, he finds the Le Marchants standing together in the window, talking in a low voice, and Byng hovering near them. It is evident to Jim that the elder woman has no wish for converse with the young man; but in his present condition of dizzy exhilaration, he is quite unaware of that fact. He approaches her indeed (as the un.o.bserved watcher notes) with a dreadful air of filial piety, and addresses her in a tone of apology it is true, but with a tw.a.n.g of intimacy that had never appeared in his voice before.

"You must not blame her; indeed you must not! it was entirely my fault.

I am awfully sorry that you were alarmed, but indeed there was no cause.

What did you think had happened? Did you think"--with an excited laugh of triumph and a bright blush--"that I had run off with her?"

The speech is in extremely bad taste, since, whatever may be the posture of affairs between himself and Elizabeth, it is morally impossible that her mother can yet be enlightened as to it; the familiarity of it is therefore premature and the jocosity ill-placed. No one can be more disposed to judge it severely than its unintended auditor; but even he is startled by the effect it produces.

Without making the smallest attempt at an answer, Mrs. Le Marchant instantly turns her shoulder upon the young man--a snub of which Jim would have thought so gentle-mannered a person quite incapable, and walks away from him with so determined an air that not even a person in the seventh heaven of drunkenness can mistake her meaning. Nor does Elizabeth's conduct offer him any indemnification. She follows her mother a little more slowly; and, as she pa.s.ses Jim, he sees that she is shaking violently, and that her face is as white as chalk. A sort of generous indignation against the mother for spoiling the poor little soul's first moments of bliss mixes curiously in his mind with a less n.o.ble satisfaction at the reflection that there are undoubtedly breakers ahead of Byng.

"How--how are we to divide?" cries Cecilia, as they all stand at the door while the two carriages drive up.

No one answers. The arrangement seems planned by no one in particular, and yet, as he drives down the hill, Burgoyne finds himself sitting opposite the two Misses Wilson. He is thankful that the raised hood and unfurled umbrellas of the second equipage prevent his having any ocular evidence of the ecstasy that that wet leather and that dripping silk veil. But even this consolation is not long left him. As they leave the fir-wood, they come out of the clouds too, into clear, lower air. Hoods are pushed back and umbrellas shut. The horses, in good heart, with homeward-turned heads, p.r.i.c.ked with emulation by another carriage ahead of them, trot cheerfully down the road--the road with all its bent-elbow turnings--down, down, into the valley beneath. But the clouds that have rolled away off the evening sky seem to have settled down with double density upon the spirit of Burgoyne and his companions. Even the fountain of Cecilia's chatter is dried. Once she says suddenly _a propos de bottes_:

"She must be years older than he!" To which Amelia quickly rejoins--

"But she does not look it."

It is almost the only remark she makes during the long drive, and Burgoyne is thankful to her for her silence. Conscious of and grateful for her magnanimity as he is, there is yet something that jars upon him in her intuition of his thoughts, and in her eager champions.h.i.+p of that other woman. He looks out blankly at the flowers, wetly smiling from field and bank, at the endless garden of embracing vines and embraced mulberries, joining their young leaf.a.ge; at the stealing river and the verdurous hill-sides. In vain for him Italy's spring laughter broadens across the eternal youth of her face.

On reaching Florence and the Anglo-Americain, he would fain enter and spend the evening with his betrothed. He has a feverish horror of being left alone with his own thoughts, but she gently forbids him.

"It would not be fair upon father and Sybilla," she says. "I am afraid they have not been getting on very well _tete-a-tete_ together all this wet day, and I should not be much good to you in any case. I feel stupid. You will say"--smiling--"that there is nothing very new in that; but I am quite beyond even my usual mark to-night. Good-night, dear; I humbly beg your pardon for having caused you to spend such a wretched day. I will never give you another treat--never, _never!_ it was my first and last attempt."

She turns from him dejectedly, and he is himself too dejected to attempt any rea.s.suring falsities. She would not have believed him if he had told her that it had not been a wretched day to him, and the publicity of their place of parting forbids him to administer even the silent consolation of a kiss. And yet he feels a sort of remorse at having said nothing, as the door closes upon her depressed back. Backs can look quite as depressed as faces. The lateness of their start home has thrown their return late. Burgoyne reflects that he may as well dine at once, and then trudge through his solitary evening as best he may. Heaven knows at what hour Byng may return. Shall he await his coming, and so get over the announcement of his bliss to-night, or put the dark hours between himself and it?

He decides in favour of getting it over to-night, up to whatever small hour he may be obliged to attend his friend's arrival. But he has not to wait nearly so long as he expects. He has not to wait at all, hardly.

Before he has left his own room, while he is still making such toilette for his own company as self-respect requires, the person whom he had not thought to behold for another four or five hours enters--enters with head held high, with joy-tinged, smooth cheeks, and with a superb lamp of love and triumph lit in each young eye. A pa.s.sing movement of involuntary admiration traverses the other's heart as he looks at him.

This is how the human animal ought to--was originally intended to--look!

How very far the average specimen has departed from the type! There is not much trace of admiration, however, in the tone which he employs for his one brief word of interrogation:

"Already?"

"I was sent away," replies Byng, in a voice whose intoxication pierces even through the first four small words; "they sent me away--they would not let me go further than the house-door. I say 'they,' but of course _she_ had no hand in it--_she_, not _she_. _She_ would not have sent me away, G.o.d bless her! it was her mother, of course--how could she have had the heart?"

Burgoyne would no doubt have made some answer in time; though the "she,"

the implication of Elizabeth's willingness for an indefinite amount of her lover's company, the "G.o.d bless her," gave him a sense of choking.

"But I do not blame Mrs. Le Marchant," pursues Byng, in a rapt, half-absent key. "Who would not wish to monopolize her? Who would not grudge the earth leave to kiss her sweet foot?

"'All I can is nothing To her whose worth makes other worthies nothing.

She is alone!'"

"That at least is not your fault," replies Burgoyne dryly; "you have done your best to avert that catastrophe."

But to speak to the young man now is of as much avail as to address questions or remonstrances to one walking in his sleep.

"If she had allowed me, I would have lain on her threshold all night; I would have been the first thing that her heavenly eye lit on; I would--"

But Burgoyne's phial of patience is for the present emptied to the dregs.

"You would have made a very great fool of yourself, I have not the least doubt. Why try to persuade a person of what he is already fully convinced? But as Miss Le Marchant happily did not wish for you as a doormat, perhaps it is hardly worth while telling me what you would have done if she had."

The sarcastic words, ill-natured and unsympathetic as they sound in their own speaker's ears, yet avail to bring the young dreamer but a very few steps lower down his ladder of bliss.

"I beg your pardon," he says sweet-temperedly; "I suppose I am a hideous bore to-night; I suppose one must always be a bore to other people when one is tremendously happy."

"It is not your being tremendously happy that I quarrel with," growls Burgoyne, struggling to conquer, or at least tone down, the intense irritability of nerves that his friend's flights provoke. "You are perfectly right to be that if you can manage to compa.s.s it; but what I should be glad to arrive at is your particular ground for it in the present case."

The question, sobering in its tendency, has yet for sole effect the setting Byng off again with spread pinions into the empyrean.

"What particular ground I have?" he repeats, in a dreamy tone of ecstasy. "You ask what particular ground I have? Had ever anyone cause to be so royally happy as I?"

He pauses a moment or two, steeped in a rapture of oblivious reverie, then goes on, still as one only half waked from a beatific vision:

"I had a prognostic that to-day would be the culminating day--something told me that to-day would be the day; and when you gave me up your seat in her carriage--how could you be so magnificently generous? How can I ever adequately show you my grat.i.tude?"

"Yes, yes; never mind that."