Alas! Part 32

"Yes, yes; of course."

"Do you think"--with a gleam of hope--"that my mother may have tried to dissuade me because she thought I was only laying up disappointment for myself--because she thought it so unlikely that _she_ should deign to stoop to me?"

Burgoyne shakes his head.

"Perhaps," he says, with the slowness of a man who is saying what he himself does not believe, "a part of your mother's dislike to the idea may be in the fact of Miss Le Marchant's being older than you."

"_Older!_" cries Byng, with almost a shout of angry derision at the suggestion. "What have creatures like _her_ to do with age? I neither know nor care what her age is! If you know, do not tell me! I will not listen! Upon that exquisite body time and change are powerless to work their hideous metamorphoses!"

"Fiddlesticks!" replies Burgoyne gruffly. "If she live long enough, she will be an old woman, and will look like one, I suppose!" though, even as he speaks, he realizes that to him this is almost as incredible as to the young madman whom he is so pitilessly snubbing. "But, however that may be, I think you had better make up your mind to meeting the most resolved opposition on the part of your mother."

"I believe you are right," replies Byng, out of whose voice his kind Mentor has at last succeeded in momentarily conjuring the exaltation.

"Her prejudice against them, against _her_, always filled me with stupefaction. I never dared trust myself to discuss it with her; I was afraid that if I did I might be led into saying something to her, something I should be sorry for afterwards. Thank G.o.d, I have never spoken unkindly to her in all my life!"

"You would have been a sweep if you had!" interjects Jim.

"I never heard her give any reason for it, did you? It was as baseless as it was senseless." After a pause, his voice taking on again its inflection of confident, soaring triumph: "But it cannot last--it is absolutely beyond the wildest bounds of possibility that it can last!

After five minutes' talk mother will be at her feet; I know my mother so well! Not one of her exquisite ways will be lost upon her, and _she_ will do her very best to win her! Jim, I ask you--I put it to you quietly and plainly--I know you think I am mad, but I am not--I am speaking quite rationally and coolly--but I ask you--_you_, an impartial bystander--do you think that any human being, anything made of flesh and blood, could resist _her_--_her_ when she puts herself out to please--_her_ at her very best?"

As Burgoyne is conscious of not being in a position to answer this question with much satisfaction to himself, he leaves it unanswered.

CHAPTER XXV.

"Some say the genius so Cries 'Come' to him that instantly must die."

A new day has awaked, and Firenze, fresh-washed after yesterday's rain, smelling through all her streets of lilies, laughs up, wistaria-hung, to a fleckless sky. If poor Amelia had but deferred her treat for twenty-four hours, what a different Vallombrosa would she and her companions have carried home in their memories! Amelia's treat!

"I shall not forget Amelia's treat in a hurry!" Burgoyne says to himself, as he sits appet.i.teless over his solitary breakfast. "I had better go and tell her the result of it."

As he makes this reflection, he rises with some alacrity, and, leaving his scarcely-tasted coffee and his not-at-all-tasted omelette, walks out of the _salle-a-manger_. His motive for so early a visit to the Anglo-Americain is less an excessive eagerness to proclaim his piece of news than the thought that by so doing he will, at least for a few hours, escape the necessity of being in his young friend's company. As to where that young friend at present is, whether, after having wandered about the town all night, he is now sleeping late, or whether he is already off to persecute poor Mrs. Le Marchant for that maternal blessing which she has so little inclination to give, Jim is ignorant.

All he knows is that such another dose of Byng's erotic eloquence as he had to swallow last night will leave him (Burgoyne) either a murderer or suicide.

Owing to his arrival at the Anglo-Americain so much sooner than usual, he finds himself coming in for the ceremony of Sybilla's installation for the day in the drawing-room. There is always a little pomp and fussy bustle about this rite. Sybilla totters in (grave doubts have occasionally crossed the minds of her family as to whether she does not in reality possess a pair of excellent and thoroughly dependable legs), supported on one side by Amelia and on the other by her maid. Cecilia goes before with an air cus.h.i.+on, and Mr. Wilson follows, when he does not turn restive--which is sometimes the case--with a duvet. To-day, as I have said, this rite is in full celebration when Jim arrives, but it is being performed with mutilated glories. The rite is going forward, but the high priest is absent. That ministrant, upon whose arm the sufferer is wont to lean far the most heavily; she upon whom devolves the whole responsibility of arranging the three cus.h.i.+ons behind the long limp back; the properly covering the languid feet; the nice administering of the reviving cordial drops that are to repair the fatigue of the transit from bedroom to sitting-room--that most important and unfailing ministrant is nowhere to be seen. No artist wishes his picture to be viewed in an inchoate, unfinished stage, nor is Sybilla at all anxious to have the public admitted to the sight of that eminent work of art herself until she is stretched in faint, moribund, graceful completeness on her day-bed. At the moment of Burgoyne's entry she has just reached that unbecoming point, where she is sitting sideways on her sofa, before her wasted limbs--Burgoyne is one of those heretics who have never believed that they are wasted--have been carefully lifted into their final posture of extension upon the Austrian blanket. It is, of all moments, the one at which interruption is least welcome; nor is the intruder at all surprised at being greeted by the invalid with a more than sub-acid accent.

"My dear Jim, _already_! Why you become more _matinale_ every day! you _are_ the early bird indeed! You do not"--with an annoyed laugh--"give us poor worms a chance of being beforehand with you."

"I am very sorry if I am too soon," replies he, his eyes wandering away from the fretful features before him in search of others upon which he knows he shall find written no complaint of his prematureness--"but I came to----Where's Amelia?"

"You may well ask," replies Sybilla, with a sort of hysterical laugh.

"It is pretty evident that she is not _here_! My dear Cis, would you mind remembering that my head is not made of mahogany? you gave it such a bang with that cus.h.i.+on. I am very sorry to trouble you. The heaviest load a sick person has to bear is the feeling that she is such a burden to those around her; and certainly, my dear, you do not help me to forget it."

"Where is she?" repeats Burgoyne hastily, both because he wants to know, and because he is anxious to strangle in its infancy one of those ign.o.ble family bickerings, to a.s.sist at many of which has been the privilege or penalty of his state of intimacy.

"She is not well," replies Cecilia shortly, her rosy face rosier than usual, either with the joy of imminent battle, or with the exertion of swaddling, under protest, the invalid's now elevated legs.

"Not well! Amelia not well," echoes he, in a tone of incredulity.

During all the years of their acquaintance not once has he heard his patient sweetheart complain of ache or pain. Manlike, he has therefore concluded that she can never have felt either.

"It is very thoughtless of her," says Cecilia, with a not altogether amiable laugh, and giving a final irritated slap to Sybilla's coverlet--"considering how much illness we already have in the house; ha! ha! but it is true all the same: she is not well, not at all well; she is in bed."

"_In bed!_"

"She must have caught a chill yesterday on that disgusting excursion; driving home that long distance in wet shoes and stockings."

"But I thought, I hoped that--I asked her to change them."

"She had them dried in a sort of way; but I could see when she put them on again that they were really wringing wet still. I told her so, but she only answered that even if they were, what matter? she never caught cold. You know that Amelia never thinks that anything matters that concerns herself."

This would be an even handsomer tribute to Amelia than it is, if it did not suggest a secondary intention of administering a back-hander to someone else.

"In the case of my children," says Mr. Wilson, making his voice heard for the first time from the window, where he is discontentedly peering up and down the sheets of a journal through his spectacles, "there seems to be no mean possible between senseless rashness and preposterous self-indulgence."

Mr. Wilson likes his eldest daughter. He is uneasy and upset, and rather angry at her indisposition, and this is his way of showing his paternal tenderness.

"_In bed!_"

The human animal is the most adaptive of created beings; but even it requires some little time to adjust itself to entirely new conditions of existence.

"Amelia," continues Mr. Wilson, fanning the flame of his ire with the bellows of his own rhetoric, "is the one among you whom I did credit with the possession of a head upon her shoulders, and now here she is wantonly laying herself up!"

"You talk as if she did it on purpose, father," says Cecilia, with an indignant laugh--"as if she enjoyed it. I do not think that anyone, even Sybilla"--with a resentful side-glance at the sofa--"could enjoy having her teeth chattering with cold, her head as heavy as lead, and her knees knocking together under her."

"Good heavens!" cries Jim, his bewildered surprise swallowed up in genuine alarm; "you do not mean to say that she is as bad as that?"

Sybilla laughs, and even in the midst of his real anxiety, Burgoyne has time for the reflection that the Wilson family seem this morning to have _se donne le mot_ to show in how many different styles it is possible to be merry without the least tinge of genuine mirth in any.

"My dear Jim, have not you known Cis long enough not to take her _au pied de la lettre_? Do not you know of old what a magnificent colourist she is?--a perfect Tintoret! Of course Amelia is not quite the thing, poor dear--she has no one but herself to blame for that!--but equally of course, to a colossally healthy person such as she, any little ailment appears a mountain."

This speech is uttered with the accent of such entire conviction that it ought to carry rea.s.surance into the heart of the person to whom it is addressed. Sybilla really and honestly disbelieves in the reality of any claims but her own to sincere sickness. But Jim unreasonably neither is nor feigns to be rea.s.sured.

"You have had advice for her? You have sent for Dr. Coldstream?" he asks rapidly of the two sound members of the family, turning his back unceremoniously upon the invalid.

"I was going to send for him at once," answers Cecilia, her own latent anxiety quickened by the evident alarm of her interlocutor, "but Sybilla said it was needless, as in any case he was coming to see her this afternoon."

"I think he wishes to change my medicine," puts in Sybilla in a piano voice, that shows an evident desire to a.s.sert her threatened position of prime and only genuine invalid, a sort of "beware of imitations" tone; "he is not quite satisfied with the effect of the last, I think; it has not brought up the pulse and quickened the appet.i.te in the way he hoped.

I thought that he might run up and look at Amelia at the end of his visit to me."

"And is it possible," inquires Jim, with some heat, "that you are going to let half a day go by without doing anything for her? I suppose you have not exaggerated, have you?" turning with an earnest appeal in his eyes to Cecilia; "but in any case I am very sure that nothing short of being really and gravely ill would have kept her in bed--she who is always waiting hand and foot upon us all, whom we all allow to spend her life in hewing wood and drawing water for us."

"Send for Dr. Coldstream at once," says Mr. Wilson irritably; "at once, I tell you; he is so very seldom out of the house that I have often thought of suggesting to him to take a room here; and now, on the only occasion on which he is really needed, he is not at hand."

"If you will write the note," says Jim, a shade relieved at having at last succeeded in rousing Amelia's relations to prompt action, and feeling a feverish desire to be doing something, "I will take it at once; it will be the quickest way; I may catch him before he goes out and bring him back with me."