Alas! Part 38

"Nor ask him to follow her?"

"If she did not tell him where she was going, is it likely that she would ask him to follow her?" cries Jim irritably, deeply annoyed to find that he is, by the series of negatives that is being forced from him, doing the very thing which he had just denied his own right to do.

"It is the most incomprehensible thing I ever heard in my life. I wonder"--with an air of even alerter interest than before--"what Mr.

Greenock will say? Perhaps he will now tell what he knows about them; if they are gone, there will no longer be any need to conceal it. I am afraid this looks rather as if there were something!"

For the second time in one day the mention of an amiable _flaneur's_ name makes Jim vault to his feet.

"Well, I will not keep you any longer from your luncheon," he cries hastily. "I will call in again later."

"Are you going?" asks Mr. Wilson dully, lifting his head from his chest, upon which it is sunk. "Well, you are about right; we are not much good to anyone when our mainspring is gone."

The phrase strikes cold on Jim's heart.

"Are you going back to the poor dear boy?" inquires Sybilla as he pa.s.ses her. "By-the-bye, if it is not too much trouble, would you mind tucking the Austrian blanket a little closer in on the left side?" and as he stoops to perform the asked-for service, she adds: "Let him know how sincerely I sympathize with him; and if he wants anything quieting for his nerves, tell him that there is nothing that I can more conscientiously recommend than----"

But what Sybilla can conscientiously recommend is shut into the closing door. Outside that door Jim finds that Cecilia has joined him. Anxiety has quite banished the not altogether disagreeable curiosity of five minutes ago, from the troubled face she lifts to his.

"You will come back, will not you?" she asks. "You are not of much use, I suppose; but still, one feels that you are there, and we are all so much at sea. You have not an idea how much we are at sea--without her."

"I think that I have a very good idea," he answers mournfully. "Tell me, Cis; do you think she is really very ill?"

As he puts the question, he feels its irrationality. He knows that the person to whom he is making his futile appeal has already given him all the scanty tidings she has to give; yet he cannot help indulging a faint hope that her response to this last query of his may perhaps set Amelia's condition in a slightly more favourable light. A look of helpless distress clouds Cecilia's already cloudy face.

"I tell you I do not know; I am no judge; I have seen so little real illness. Sybilla would kill me if she heard me say so, would not she"--with a slight parenthetical smile--"but I have seen so little real illness, that I do not know what things mean; I do not know what it means that she should be so heavy and stupid. As I told you before, the only time that she roused up at all was when I mentioned your--"

He stops her, breaking rudely into her sentence. He cannot bear to hear that it is only at the magic of his name that his poor faithful love lifts her sick head.

"Yes, yes; I remember."

"Some one ought to sit up with her, I am sure," pursues Cecilia, still with that same helpless air of disquiet; "she ought not to be left alone all night; but who? I should be more than willing to do it, but I know that I should fall asleep in five minutes, and I am such a heavy sleeper that, when once I am off, there is no possibility of waking me. I am a dreadfully bad sick-nurse; father can never bear to have me near him when he has the gout."

Burgoyne is too well aware of the perfect truth of this last statement to attempt any contradiction of it.

"Amelia has always been the one to sit up when any one was ill,"

continues she woefully; "and even now, by a stupid confusion of ideas, I catch myself thinking, 'Oh, Amelia will sit up with her!' before I can realize that _her_ is Amelia herself."

Jim can well sympathize with this same confusion, when, several times during his walk back to the Piazza d'Azeglio, a muddled thought of comfort, in the idea that he will go and tell Amelia what a terrible day of anxiety about some one he has been having, taps at the door of his brain. The portals of No. 12 are once again opened to him by Annunziata, who indicates to him, by a series of compa.s.sionate gestures and liquid Tuscan sentences, that the _povero_ is still within, and the Padrona, who this time also appears on the scene, and who is possessed of somewhat more English than her handmaid, intimates, albeit with a good deal of sympathy for his sufferings, yet with still more of determination, that it would be no bad thing were he to be removed, since, whether the sun s.h.i.+nes or the rain falls, people must live, and the apartment has to be prepared for new occupants.

Anything that speaks less intention of removing than Byng's pose, when his friend rejoins him, it would be difficult to imagine. He is stretched upon the parquet floor, with his head lying on the small footstool that has been wont to support Elizabeth's feet; her rifled workbasket stands on the floor beside him, while her bit of embroidery half shrouds his distorted face. The needle, still sticking in it, may p.r.i.c.k his eyes out for all he cares; the book she last read is open at the page where she has put her mark of a skein of pale silk; and the yellow anemones, that he must have plucked for her yesterday in drenched Vallombrosa, are crushed under his hot cheek. But outwardly he is quite quiet. Jim puts his hand on his shoulder.

"Come away, there is no use in your staying here any longer."

As he receives no answer, he repeats the exhortation more imperatively, "Come."

"Why should I come? Where should I come to?" says the young man, lifting his head, "where can I find such plain traces of her as here? I will stay."

He says this with an air of resolution, and once more lays down his face upon the footstool, which, being entirely worked in beads, has impressed the cheek thrust against it with a design in small hollows, a fact of which the sufferer is quite unaware.

"You cannot stay!" cries Burgoyne, the more impatiently that his own share of anxiety is fretting his temper almost past endurance; "you cannot stay, it is out of the question; they want to come into the rooms, to prepare them for new occupants."

"_New occupants!_" repeats Byng, turning over almost on his face, and flattening his nose and lips against the beaded surface of his stool, "other occupants than _her_. Never! never!"

It is to be placed to the credit side of Mr. Burgoyne's account that he does not, upon this declaration, withdraw the resting-place from his young friend's countenance and break it over his head. It is certainly not the temptation to do so that is lacking. Instead, he sits down at some distance off, and says quietly:

"I see, you will force them to call in the police. You will make a discreditable _esclandre_. How good for her; how conducive to her good name. I congratulate you!"

The other has lifted his head in a moment.

"What do you mean?"

"Do you think," asks Jim indignantly, "that it is ever very advantageous to a woman to have her name mixed up in a vulgar row? And do you suppose that hers will be kept out of it? Come"--seeing a look of shocked consternation breaking over the young man's face, and determined to strike while the iron is hot--"I will call a fiacre, and we will go home to the hotel. Put back her things into her basket. What right have you to meddle with them? You have no business to take advantage of her absence to do what you would not do if she were here."

Byng obeys with a scared docility; his eyes are so dim, and his fingers tremble so much, that Jim has to help him in replacing Elizabeth's small properties. His own heart is p.r.i.c.ked with a cruel smart that has no reference to Amelia's illness, as he handles the departed girl's spools and skeins, and awkwardly folds her sc.r.a.p of broidery. Byng offers no further resistance, and, equally indifferent to his own bunged-up eyes, bead-marked cheeks, and dishevelled locks, follows his companion dully, down the stone stairs, compa.s.sionately watched from the top by Annunziata, whose heart is an inconveniently tender one to be matched with so tough a face. They get into the fiacre, and drive in dead silence to the Minerva. Arrived there, Jim persuades his friend, who now seems prepared to acquiesce meekly in whatever he is told to do, to lie down on his bed, since the few words that he utters convey the fact of his being suffering from a burning headache, a phenomenon not very surprising, considering his late briny exercises, since, even at the superb age of twenty-two, it is difficult to spend six hours in banging your forehead against a parquet floor, in moaning, bellowing, and weeping, without leaving some traces of these gymnastics on your physique.

Burgoyne stands or sits patiently beside him, bathing his fiery temples with eau-de-Cologne, not teasing him with any questions, having, indeed, on his own part, the least possible desire for conversation; and so the heavy hours go by. The day has declined to evening before Burgoyne quits his _protege's_ side to dine, shortly and solitarily, previous making a third visit to the Anglo-Americain, to learn the latest news of his betrothed.

He had left Byng still stretched upon his bed, apparently asleep, and is therefore the more surprised, on returning to take a final look at him before setting out on his own errand, to find him up, with hat and stick in hand, evidently prepared for a walk.

"You are going out?"

"Yes."

"Where are you going?"

The other hesitates.

"I am going back there."

"Impossible!"

"But I am," replies Byng doggedly; "it will not do _her_ any injury, for I shall not attempt to go in, I shall only ask at the door whether any telegram has yet been received from--from them; they must telegraph to direct where their things are to be sent to, and it is most probable that they have done so already."

"It is most _im_probable."

"Well, at all events, it is possible, it is worth trying, and I mean to try it."

There is such a fixed resolution in his voice, which is no longer quavering with sobs, and in his ashy face, that Jim offers no further resistance. The only concession he can obtain from him is that of permitting him to accompany him.

"You will not mind coming with me to the Anglo-Americain first, will you?" inquires Jim, as they set off walking across the Piazza.

"It will delay us quite half-an-hour," answers the other restlessly.

"But stay" (a hazy look of reminiscence dawning over his preoccupied haggard face), "did you tell me that Amelia was ill--or did I dream it?"

"No, you did not dream it," replies the other sadly. "She _is_ ill."

Perhaps the wretchedness that pierces through his friend's quiet tones recalls the young dreamer to the fact that the world holds other miseries than his own. There is at all events something of his old quick sympathy in his next words, and in the way in which they are uttered: