Alas! Part 36

"What cogent reasons can she have that she had not yesterday?" says Byng violently--"yesterday, when she lay in my arms, and her lips spoke their acquiescence in my wors.h.i.+p--if not in words, yet oh, far, far more----"

"Why do you reiterate these a.s.sertions?" cries Burgoyne sternly, since to him there seems a certain indecency in--even in the insanity of loss--dragging to the eye of day the record of such sacred endearments.

"I neither express nor feel any doubt as to the terms you were on _yesterday_; what I maintain is that _to-day_--I do not pretend to explain the why--she has changed her mind; it is not"--with a sarcasm, which he himself at the very moment of uttering it feels to be cheap and unworthy--"it is not the first time in the world's history that such a thing has happened. She has changed her mind."

"I do not believe it," cries Byng, his voice rising almost to a shout in the energy of his negation; "till her own mouth tell me so I will never believe it. If I thought for a moment that it was true I should rush to death to deliver me from the intolerable agony of such a thought. You do not believe it yourself"--lifting his spoilt sunk eyes in an appeal that is full of pathos to his friend's harsh face. "Think what condemnation it implies of her--her whom you always affected to like, who thought so greatly of you--her whose old friend you were--her whom you knew in her lovely childhood!"

"You are right," replies Jim, looking down, moved and ashamed; "I do not believe that she has changed her mind. What I do believe is that yesterday she let herself go; she gave way for one day, only for one day, after all, poor soul, to that famine for happiness which, I suppose"--with a sigh and a shrug--"gnaws us all now and then--gave way to it even to the pitch of forgetting that--that something in her past of whose nature I am as ignorant as you are, which seems to cast a blight over all her life."

He pauses; but as his listener only hangs silently on his utterance he goes on:

"After you left her, recollection came back to her; and because she could not trust herself again with you, probably for the very reason that she cared exceedingly about you"--steeling himself to make the admission--"she felt that there was nothing for it but to go."

Either the increased kindness of his friend's tone, or the conviction that there is, at least, something of truth in his explanations, lets loose again the fountain of Byng's tears, and once more he throws his head down upon his hands and cries extravagantly.

"It is an awful facer for you, I know," says Burgoyne, standing over him, and, though perfectly dry-eyed, yet probably not very much less miserable than the young mourner, whose loud weeping fills him with an almost unbearable and yet compunctious exasperation.

"What is he made of? how can he do it?" are the questions that he keeps irefully putting to himself; and for fear lest in an access of uncontrollable irritation he shall ask them out loud, he moves to the door. At the slight noise he makes in opening it Byng lifts his head.

"Are you going?"

"Yes; if it is any consolation to you, you have not a monopoly of wretchedness to-day. Things are not looking very bright for me either.

Amelia is ill."

"Amelia," repeats the other, with a hazy look, as if not at first able to call to mind who Amelia is; then, with a return of consciousness, "Is Amelia ill? Oh poor Amelia! Amelia was very good to her. Amelia tried to draw her out. She liked Amelia!"

"Well"--with an impatient sigh--"unfortunately that did not hinder Amelia from falling ill."

"She is not ill _really_?"--his inborn kind-heartedness struggling for a moment to make head against the selfishness of his absorption.

"I do not know"--uneasily--"I am going back to the hotel to hear the doctor's verdict. Will you walk as far as to the Anglo-Americain with me? There is no use in your staying here."

But at this proposition the lover's sobs break out louder and more infuriating than ever.

"I will stay here till I die--till I am carried over the threshold that her cruel feet have crossed.

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

Against a resolution at once so fixed and so rational, Jim sees that it is useless to contend.

CHAPTER XXVII.

The sun rides high, as Burgoyne issues into the open air, and beats, blinding hot, upon the great stone flags that pave the Florentine streets, and seem to have a peculiar power of absorbing and retaining light and heat. He must have been longer in the Piazza d'Azeglio than he had thought, and the reflection quickens his steps as he hurries, regardless of the midsummer blaze--for, indeed, it is more than equivalent to that of our midsummer--back to the Anglo-Americain. As he reaches it, he hears, with annoyance, the hotel clocks striking one. He is annoyed, both because the length of his absence seems to argue an indifference to the tidings he is expecting, and also because he knows that it is the Wilsons' luncheon hour, and that he will probably find that they have migrated to the _salle-a-manger_. In this case he will have to choose between the two equally disagreeable alternatives of following and watching them at their food, or that of undergoing a _tete-a-tete_ with Sybilla, who, it is needless to say, does not accompany her family to the public dining-room; a _tete-a-tete_ with Sybilla, which is, of all forms of social intercourse, that for which he has the least relish.

But as he apprehensively opens the _salon_ door, he sees that his fears are unfounded. They have not yet gone to luncheon; they are all sitting in much the same att.i.tudes as he had left them, except that Sybilla is eating or drinking something of a soupy nature out of a cup. There are very few hours of the day or night in which Sybilla is not eating something out of a cup. There is that about the entire idleness of the other couple which gives him a fright. Are they too unhappy? Have they heard too bad news to be able to settle to any occupation? Urged by this alarm, his question shoots out, almost before he is inside the door:

"Has not he come yet? Has not the doctor come yet?"

"He has been and gone; you see, you have been such a very long time away," replies Cecilia. She has no intention of conveying reproach, either by her words or tone; but to his sore conscience it seems as if both carried it.

"And what did he say?"

"He did not say much."

"Does he--does he think that it is anything--anything serious?"

"He did not say."

"Do you mean to tell me"--indignantly--"that you did not ask him?"

"If you had been here," replies Cecilia, with a not inexcusable resentment, "you might have asked him yourself."

"But did not you ask him?" in too real anxiety to be offended at, or even aware of, her fleer. "Did not he say?"

"I do not think he knew himself."

"But he must have thought--he must have had an opinion!" growing the more uneasy as there seems no tangible object for his fears to lay hold of.

"He says it is impossible to judge at so early a stage; it may be a chill--I told him about that detestable excursion yesterday, and he considered it quite enough to account for anything--it may be measles--they seem to be a good deal about; it may be malaria--there is a good deal of that too."

"And how soon will he know? How soon will it declare itself?"

"I do not know."

"But has he prescribed? Is there nothing to be done--to be done _at once_?" asks Jim feverishly, chafing at the idea of this inaction, which seems inevitable, with that helpless feeling which his own entire ignorance of sickness produces.

"Do not you suppose that if there was we should have done it?" cries Cecilia, rendered even more uncomfortable than she was before, by the contagion of his anxiety. "We are to keep her in bed--there is no great difficulty about that, poor soul; she has not the least desire to get up; she seems so odd and heavy!"

"So _odd and heavy_?"

"Yes; I went in to see her just now, and she scarcely took any notice of me; only when I told her that you had been to inquire after her, she lit up a little. I believe"--with a rather grudging smile--"that if she were dead, and someone mentioned your name, she would light up."

A sudden mountain rises in Jim's throat.

"If she is not better to-morrow, Dr. Coldstream will send a nurse."

"But does he think it will be necessary?"

"He does not know."

Jim writhes. It seems to him as if he were being blind-folded, and having his arms tied to his sides by a hundred strong yet invisible threads.

"Does no one know anything?" he cries miserably.

"I have told you exactly what the doctor said," says Cecilia, with the venial crossness bred of real anxiety. "I suppose you do not wish me to invent something that he did not say?"