Alas! Part 39

"Oh, poor Amelia, I _am_ sorry! By all means let us go at once and ask after her. Is there nothing that we can get?--nothing that we can do for her?"

It is the question that Jim, in baffled anxiety, puts when he is admitted inside the dull _salon_, where no love-glorified, homely face to-night lights up the tender candles of its glad eyes, from over its st.i.tching, at his entry.

Sybilla is lying less comfortably than usual on her sofa, her cus.h.i.+ons not plumped up, and her bottle of smelling-salts rolled out of her reach. Mr. Wilson is walking uneasily up and down the room, instead of sitting placidly in his chair, with the soothing voice--which he had always thought as much to be counted on, and as little to be particularly thankful for, as the air that fills his lungs--lullingly reading him to sleep.

"Cecilia is with her just now," he says, in a voice of forlorn irritation. "I wish she would come down again; I have no great opinion of Cecilia as a sick-nurse, and she must know how anxious we are." A moment later, still pursuing his fidgety ramble from wall to wall, and exclaiming peevishly, as he stumbles over a footstool: "If it would only declare itself! There seems to be nothing to lay hold of, we are so completely in the dark--if it would only declare itself!"

A not very subdued sob from the sofa is the only answer he gets, an answer which evidently irritates still further his fretted nerves.

"I cannot think what Cecilia is doing!" he cries, hastening to the door, opening it noisily, and then listening.

"Let me run up and see," says Jim, his heart going out to the fractious old man in a sympathy of suffering. "Yes, I know where her room is--_au troisieme_, is not it?" (a flash of recollection lighting up the fact that Amelia's is distinctly the worst room of the suite occupied by the Wilson family; the room with most stairs to climb to, and least accommodation when you reach it). "I will knock quite gently. Do not be afraid, I will not disturb her, and I will come down immediately to tell you."

Without waiting for permission, he springs up the stairs, and, standing on the landing, taps cautiously on the closed door, whose number (by one of those quirks of memory that furnish all our minds with insignificant facts) he has recollected. His first knock is so superfluously soft that it is evidently inaudible within, since no result follows upon it. His second, a shade louder, though still m.u.f.fled by the fear of breaking into some little fitful yet salutary sleep, brings Cecilia out. His first glance at her face shows him that she has no good news, either to warm his own heart, or for him to carry down as a solace to the poor old man below.

"Oh, it is you, is it?" says she, shutting the door behind her with a clumsy carefulness that makes it creak. "No, I do not think she is any better; but it is so difficult to tell, I am no judge. She does not complain of anything particular; but she looks so _odd_."

It is the same adjective that Cecilia had applied earlier in the day to her sick sister, and it fills Jim with an impotent terror.

"If she is asleep, might not I just look in at her?" he asks. "I do not know what you mean when you say she looks _odd_."

"She is not asleep," replies Cecilia, in a noisy whisper, much more likely to pierce sick ears than a voice pitched in its normal key; "at least, I think not. But I am sure you ought not to see her; Dr.

Coldstream said she was to be kept very quiet, and nothing would upset her so much as seeing you."

"She need not see me; I would only take just one look at her from behind the door," persists Jim who feels a desire, whose gnawing intensity surprises himself, to be a.s.sured by the evidence of his own eyes that his poor love's face has not undergone some strange and gruesome change, such as is suggested by Cecilia's disquieting epithet.

"Do you think she would not know you were there?" asks she scornfully, "Why, she hears your step three streets off!"

CHAPTER XXVIII.

So that night Jim does not see Amelia. After all, as Cecilia says, it is better to be on the safe side, and to-morrow she will be brighter, and he can sit by her, and tell her lovingly--oh very lovingly!--what a fright she has given him. Yes, to-morrow she will be brighter. The adjective is Cecilia's; but, apparently, he cannot improve upon it, for he not only keeps repeating it to himself as he runs downstairs, but employs it for the rea.s.surance of Miss Wilson's anxious relatives.

"She will be brighter to-morrow; sick people are always worse at night, are not they?"--rather vaguely, with again that oppressive sense of his own inexperience in illness. "Not that she is _worse_"--this is hastily subjoined, as he sees her father's face fall--"Cecilia never said she was _worse_--oh, no, not _worse_, only not distinctly better; and, after all, it would have been irrational to expect that. She will be brighter to-morrow--oh, yes, of course she will be brighter to-morrow!"

He leaves the hotel with the phrase, which sounds cut and dried and unreal, still upon his lips, after bidding a kinder good-night than usual to Mr. Wilson, after having offered to supply Amelia's place by reading aloud to him, a feat he has not performed since the evening of his disastrous experience of the Provident Women of Oxford; and lastly, having even--as a reward to Sybilla, who has been understood to murmur something tearful about letting her maid look in upon Amelia at intervals through the night--tucked in her Austrian blanket, and picked up her smelling-bottle. He has expected to rejoin Byng outside, as he had promised to wait for him with such patience as a cigar could lend, and on the condition that his absence should not exceed a stipulated period. But either the promise has been broken, or the period exceeded, for Byng is gone. The fact does not greatly surprise Burgoyne, though it causes him a slight uneasiness, which is, perhaps, rather a blessing for him, distracting his mind in some slight measure from the heaviness of his own trouble.

He walks fast to the Piazza d'Azeglio; but he neither overtakes him of whom he is in pursuit, nor finds him at 12 bis. He has been there, has inquired with agitation for the telegrams, which have naturally not been received, and has then gone away again immediately. Whither? The Padrona, who has answered the door-bell herself and, with Italian suavity, is doing her best to conceal that she is beginning to think she has heard nearly enough of the subject, does not know. For a few moments Jim stands irresolute, then he turns his steps towards the Arno. It is not yet too late for the charming riverside promenade, the gay Lung'Arno, to be still alive with _flaneurs_; the stars have lit their lamps above, and the hotels below. The pale planets, and the yellow lights from the opposite bank of the river, lie together, sweet and peaceful upon her breast. In both cases the counterfeits are as clear and bright as the real luminaries; and it seems as if one had only to plunge in an arm to pick up stars and candles out of the stream's depths.

Leaning over the parapet near the Ponte Vecchio, Burgoyne soon discovers a familiar figure, a figure which starts when he touches its arm.

"I thought I would wait about here for an hour or so," says Byng, with a rather guilty air of apology, "until I could go back and inquire again.

The telegram has not arrived yet--I suppose it is too early. Of course they would not telegraph until they get in to-night. You do not think"--with a look of almost terror--"that they are going through to England, and that they will not telegraph till they get there?"

"How can I tell?"

"There is nothing in the world less likely," cries Byng feverishly, irritated at not having drawn forth the rea.s.surance he had hoped for. "I do not for a moment believe that they have gone home; I feel convinced that they are still in Italy! Why should they leave it, when they--when she is so fond of it?"

Jim looks down sadly at the calm, strong stream.

"I do not know, I cannot give an opinion--I have no clue."

"I will ask again in about an hour," says Byng, lifting his arms from the parapet, "in an hour it is pretty certain to have arrived; and meanwhile, I thought I would just stroll about the town, but there is no reason--none at all--why I should keep you! You--you must be wanting to go back to Amelia."

He glances at his friend in a nervous, sidelong way, as he makes this suggestion.

"I am not going back again to-night," replies Jim quietly, without giving any evidence of an intention to acquiesce in his dismissal.

"There is nothing that I can do for her--there is nothing to be done."

His tone, in making this statement, must be yet more dreary than he is aware, as it arouses even Byng's self-absorbed attention.

"Nothing to be done for her?" he echoes, with a shocked look. "My dear old chap, you do not mean to say--to imply--"

"I mean to imply nothing," interrupts Jim sharply, in a superst.i.tious panic of hearing some unfavourable augury as to his betrothed put into words. "I mean just what I say--neither more nor less; there is nothing to be done for her to-night, nothing but to let her sleep--a good sleep will set her up: of course a good sleep will quite set her up."

He speaks almost angrily, as if expecting and challenging contradiction.

But Byng's spirit has already flown back to his own woes. He may make what sanguine statements he pleases about Amelia's to-morrow, without fearing any demurrer from his companion. What attention the latter has to spare is evidently only directed to the solving of the problem, how best, with amicable civility, to be rid of him. Before he can hit upon any expedient for attaining this desired end, Burgoyne speaks again, his eye resting with a compa.s.sionate expression upon his junior's face, whose wild pallor is heightened by the disorder of his hair, and the hat crushed down over his brows.

"You have not had anything to eat all day--had not you better come back to the hotel and get something to eat?"

"Eat!" cries the other, with almost a scream; "you must have very little comprehension of----" Then, checking himself and with a strong and palpable effort for composure: "It would not be worth while, I should not have time; in an hour--less than an hour now, for I must have been here quite ten minutes at the least--I have to return to the Piazza d'Azeglio."

"Then go to Doney's; why not get something to eat at Doney's? It will not take you five minutes to reach the Via Tornabuoni."

"What should I do when I got there?" asks Byng impatiently. "If I tried to swallow food, it would stick in my throat; no food shall pa.s.s my lips till I learn where she is; after that"--breaking out into a noisy laugh--"you may do what you please with me--we will make a night of it with all my heart, we will--

"'Drink, drink, Till the pale stars blink!'"

Jim looks blankly at him. Is he going mad?

"If you think that you will get me to go back to the hotel to-night, you are very much mistaken," continues Byng recklessly; "no roof less high than this"--jerking back his head, to throw his fevered look up to the cool stars--"shall shelter my head; and besides, where would be the use of going to bed when I should have to be up again so early? I shall be off by one of the morning expresses: until I have learnt--as, of course, I shall do to-night--where she has gone, I cannot tell which; but neither of them starts much later than seven."

For a moment Jim stands dumb with consternation at the announcement of this intention; but, reflecting that it would not be a whit more irrational to attempt to reason with a madman who had reached the padded-room stage of lunacy, than with his present companion, he contents himself with saying:

"And supposing that you do not learn to-night where she has gone?"

"There is no use in supposing anything so impossible!"

But as the hours go by, the possibility becomes a probability, the probability a certainty! Midnight comes, and the closed telegraph-office puts a final extinguisher upon the expectation, which no one but the unhappy lover had ever entertained, that Florence would be enlightened before the dawn of another day as to the place whither her two truants have fled.

Burgoyne has accompanied his friend upon his last importunate visit to the now-going-to-bed and justly-incensed 12 bis. He has been ashamed again to present himself at the so-often-attacked door, so has awaited at the bottom of the stairs, has heard Byng's hoa.r.s.e query, and the negative--curter and less suave than the last one--that follows it; has heard the door shut again, and the hopeless footsteps that come staggering down to him.

"You will go home now?"

"'Perchance, Iago, I shall ne'er go home!'"