Alas! Part 35

"This morning early, quite early."

"They have left all their things behind them"--looking round at the room, strewn with the traces of recent and refined occupation.

"Yes"--lifting his wet face out of his cus.h.i.+on--"and at first, seeing everything just as usual, even to her very workbasket--she has left her very workbasket behind--I was quite rea.s.sured. I felt certain that they could have gone for only a few hours--for the day perhaps; but----"

He breaks off

"Yes?"

"They left word that their things were to be packed and sent after them to an address they would give."

"And you do not know where they have gone?"

"I know nothing, nothing, only that they are gone.

"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'

Oh! oh!! oh!!!"

"You never heard them speak of their plans, mention any place they intended to move to on leaving Florence?"

"Never!"

"It is too late for Rome," says Jim musingly; "England? I hardly think England," recalling Elizabeth's forlorn admission made to him at Monte Senario, "Why should we go home? We have nothing pleasant to go to."

"I do not think they had any plans," says Byng, speaking in a voice which is thick with much weeping; "they never seemed to me to have any.

She was so happy here, so gay, there never was anything more lovely than her gaiety, except--except--her tenderness."

"Yes, yes, no doubt. Then you are absolutely without a clue?"

"Absolutely."

"Do you mean to say that up to yesterday--all through yesterday, even--she never gave you a hint of any intention of leaving Florence?"

"Never, _never_. On the contrary, in the----" (he is going to say "the wood," but thinks better of it), "we were planning many more such expeditions as yesterday's. At least, I was planning them."

"And she a.s.sented?"

"She did not _dis_sent. She met me with a look of divine acquiescence."

Jim turns away his head. He is involuntarily picturing to himself what that look was like, and with what sweet dumb-show it was accompanied.

"What powers of h.e.l.l"--banging his head down upon the table again--"could have wrought such a hideous change in so few hours? Only ten! for it was eight in the evening before I left them, and they were off at six this morning. They could have seen no one; they had received no letters, no telegrams, for I inquired of Annunziata, and she a.s.sured me that they had not. Oh no!"--lifting his face with a gleam of moist hope upon it--"there is only one tenable hypothesis about it--it is not _her_ doing at all. She wrote this under pressure. It is her handwriting, is it not?--though I would not swear even to that. I--I have played the mischief with my eyes"--pulling out his drenched pocket-handkerchief, and hastily wiping them--"so that I cannot see properly; but it _is_ hers, is not it?"

"I do not know; I never saw her handwriting; she never wrote to me."

"It was evidently dictated to her," cries Byng, his sanguine nature taking an upward spring again; "there are clear traces, even in the very way the letters are formed, of its being written to order reluctantly.

She did it under protest. See how her poor little hand was shaking, and she was crying all the while, bless her! There, do not you see a blister on the paper--here on this side?"

Burgoyne does not see any blister, but as he thinks it extremely probable that there was one, he does not think himself called upon to wound his friend by saying so.

"I declare I think we have got hold of the right clue at last," cries Byng, his dimmed eyes emitting such a flash as would have seemed impossible to them five minutes ago. "Read in this light, it is not nearly so incomprehensible: '_I shall never marry you, I have no right to marry anyone._' Of course, I see now! What an a.s.s I was not to see it at once! What she means is that she has no right to leave her mother! To anyone who knew her lofty sense of duty as well as I ought to have done it is quite obvious that that is what she means. Is not it quite obvious? is not it as clear as the sun in heaven?"

Jim shakes his head.

"I am afraid that it is rather a forced interpretation."

"I do not agree with you," rejoins the other hotly; "I see nothing forced about it. You do not know as well as I do--how should you?--her power of delicate, self-sacrificing devotion. It is overstrained, I grant you; but there it is--she thinks she has no right to leave her mother now that she is all alone."

"She is not alone; she has her husband."

"I mean now that all her other children are married and scattered. There are plenty more--are not there?--though I never could get her to talk about them."

"There are two sisters and two brothers."

"But they are no longer any good to their mother," persists Byng, clinging to his theory with all the greater tenacity as he sees that it meets with no very great acceptance in his friend's eyes; "as far as she is concerned they are non-existent."

"I do not know what right you have to say that."

"And so she, with her lofty idea of self-sacrifice, immolates her own happiness on the altar of her filial affection. It is just like her!"--going off into a sort of rapture--"blind mole that I was not to divine the motive, which her ineffable delicacy forbade her to put into words. She thought she had a right to think that I should have comprehended her without words!"

He has talked himself into a condition of such exalted confidence before he reaches the end of this sentence that Jim is conscious of a certain brutality in applying to him the douche contained in his next words.

"I do not know why you should credit Mrs. Le Marchant with such colossal selfishness; she never used to be a selfish woman."

But Burgoyne's cold shower-bath does not appear even to damp the shoulders for which it is intended.

"'Since you left me, taking no farewell,'"

murmurs Byng, beginning again to tramp up and down the little room, with head thrown back and clasped hands high lifted; and in his rapt poet voice:

"'Since you left me, taking no farewell,'

I must follow you, sweet! Despite your prohibition, I must follow you.

"'We two that with so many thousand sighs, Did buy each other.'"

Then, coming abruptly down to prose--"Though they left no address, it will of course be possible, easy, to trace them. I will go to the station and make inquiries. They will have been seen. It is out of the question that she can have pa.s.sed unnoticed! No eye that has once been enriched by the sight of her can have forgotten that heavenly vision. I will telegraph to Bologna, to Milan, to Venice. Before night I shall have learnt her whereabouts. I shall be in the train, following her track. I shall be less than a day behind her. I shall fall at her feet, I shall----"

"You are talking nonsense," answers Burgoyne impatiently; and yet with a distinct shade of pity in his voice; "you cannot do anything of the kind. When the poor woman has given so very unequivocal a proof of her wish to avoid you, as is implied in leaving the place at a moment's notice, without giving herself even time to pack her clothes, it is impossible that you can force your company again upon her--it would be persecution."

"And do you mean to tell me," asks Byng slowly, and breathing hard, while the fanatical light dies out of his face, and leaves it chalk white; "do you mean to say that I am to acquiesce, to sit down with my hands before me, and submit without a struggle to the loss of----O my G.o.d"--breaking out into an exceeding bitter cry--"why did you make me

"'so rich in having such a jewel, As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearl, The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold,'

if it were only to rob me of her?"

"I do not see what other course is open to you," replies Jim, answering only the first part of the young sufferer's appeal, and ignoring the rhetoric, terribly genuine as is the feeling of which it is the florid expression. "It is evident that she has some cogent reasons--or at least that appear cogent to her--for breaking off her relations with you."