Alas! Part 37

"Of course not; but I wish I had been here--I wish I had been here!"--restlessly.

"Why were not you?"

No immediate answer.

"Why were not you?" repeats she, curiosity, for the moment, superseding her disquiet. "What prevented you? I thought, when you left us, that you meant to come back at once?"

"So I did, but----"

"But what?"

"I could not; I was with Byng."

"With Byng?" repeats Cecilia, too genuinely astonished to remember even to prefix a "Mr." to Byng's name. "Why, I should have thought that if there were one day of his life on which he could have done without you better than another, it would have been to-day!"

"Were not you rather _de trop_?" chimes in Sybilla's languid voice from the sofa. "Rather a bad third?"

"I was not a third at all."

"Do you mean to say," cries Cecilia, her countenance tinged with the pink of a generous indignation, "that you were _four_--that Mrs. Le Marchant stayed in the room the whole time? I must say that now that they are really and _bona fide_ engaged, I think she might leave them alone together."

"Mrs. Le Marchant was not there at all." Then, seeing the open-mouthed astonishment depicted on the faces of his audience, he braces his mind to make the inevitable yet dreaded announcement. "I had better explain at once that neither Mrs. nor Miss Le Marchant was there; they are gone."

"Gone!"

"Yes; they left Florence at seven o'clock this morning." There is a moment of silent stupefaction.

"I suppose," says Cecilia, at last slowly recovering the power of speech, "that they were telegraphed for? Mr. Le Marchant is dead or ill?

one of the married sisters? one of the brothers?"

Never in his life has Jim laboured under so severe a temptation to tell a lie, were it only the modified falsehood of allowing Cecilia's hypothesis to pa.s.s uncontradicted; but even if he were able for once to conquer his const.i.tutional incapacity, he knows that in this case it would be useless. The truth must transpire to-morrow.

"I believe not."

"Gone!" repeats Cecilia, in a still more thunderstruck key than before--"and where are they gone?"

"I do not know."

"Why did they go?"

Jim makes an impatient movement, fidgeting on his chair. "I can only tell you their actions; they told me their motives as little as they did you."

"Gone! Why, they never said a word about it yesterday."

This being of the nature of an a.s.sertion--not an interrogation--Jim feels with relief that it does not demand an answer.

"Gone, at seven o'clock in the morning! Why, they could not have had time to pack their things!"

"They left them behind."

The moment that this admission is out of Burgoyne's mouth, he repents having made it; nor does his regret at all diminish under the shower of e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns from both sisters that it calls forth.

"Why, it was a regular flit! they must have taken French leave."

There is something so horribly jarring in the semi-jocosity of the last phrase that Jim jumps up from his chair and walks towards the window, where Mr. Wilson is sitting in dismal idleness.

Mr. Wilson has never cared much about the Le Marchants, and is now far too deeply absorbed in his own trouble to have anything but the most inattentive indifference to bestow upon the topic which to his daughters appears so riveting. Jim blesses him for his callousness. But the window of a small room is not so distant from any other part of it that sounds cannot, with perfect ease, penetrate thither, as Jim finds when Cecilia's next eager question pursues him.

"Did Mr. Byng know that they were going?"

"No."

There is a pause.

"It is absolutely incomprehensible!" says Cecilia, with almost a gasp.

"I never saw any one human being so much in love with another as she was yesterday--there was so little disguise about it, that one was really quite sorry for her--and this morning at c.o.c.kcrow she decamps and leaves him without a word."

"You are mistaken--she left a note for him."

"Poor dear boy!" sighs Sybilla, "is not he quite prostrated by the blow?

I am not apt to pity men generally--they are so coa.r.s.e-grained--but he is much more delicately strung than the general run."

"I suppose he is frightfully cut up," says Cecilia, with that inquisitiveness as to the details of a great affliction which we are all apt to experience.

For some perverse reason, inexplicable even to himself, Jim would like to be able to answer that his friend is not cut up at all; but truth again a.s.serting its empire, he a.s.sents laconically, "Frightfully!"

"How did he take it?"

"How do people generally take such things?"

The impatience of the key in which this is uttered, coupled with the implied side-allusion to an acquaintance with sorrows of a somewhat similar nature on her own part, silences the younger and sounder Miss Wilson for a moment, but only for a moment--a moment long enough to be filled by another sighing "Poor dear boy!" from Sybilla.

"You say that she left a note for him?"--with a renewed light of curiosity in her eyes--"have you any idea what was in it?"

Jim hesitates; then, "Yes," he replies; "but as it was not addressed to me, I do not think that I have any right to repeat it."

"Of course not!"--reluctantly; "but did it throw no light--absolutely no light at all--upon this extraordinary stampede?"

"No."

"Did not she even tell him where they were going?"

"No."

"Nor whether they were coming back?"

"No."