Alas! Part 4

"But I am not society," replies he, chilled, yet resolute. "I wish"--glancing rather wistfully from one to the other--"that I _could_ give you a little of my memory. If I could, you would see that, after being so infinitely good to me at the Moat, you cannot expect me to meet you as total strangers now."

In the sense of ill-usage that fills his breast, the fact of how almost entirely oblivious he had been of the persons before him, during the greater part of the long interval that had parted them, has--such is human nature--quite slipped his recollection. It is brought back to him in some degree with a twinge by Mrs. Le Marchant saying in a relenting tone, and with an accent of remorse, "And you have remembered us all these years?"

He cannot, upon reflection, conscientiously say that he has; but is yet disingenuous enough to allow a speaking silence to imply acquiescence.

"And you are on your way to Florence too?" continues she, mistaking the cause of his dumbness; the tide of compunction evidently setting more strongly towards him, in her womanly heart, at the thought of the entire want of interest she has manifested in the case of one whose long faithfulness to her and her family had deserved a better treatment.

"Yes."

His face clouds so perceptibly as he p.r.o.nounces this monosyllable, that his interlocutor inquires, with a growing kindness:

"Not on any unpleasant errand, I hope?"

He laughs the uneasy laugh of an Anglo-Saxon obliged to tell, or at all events telling, some intimate detail about himself.

"I am going to see my young woman--the girl I am engaged to."

"Well, that is a pleasant errand, surely?" (smiling).

"_C'est salon!_" replies Jim gloomily. "I have a piece of ill-news to tell her;" then, with a half-shy effort to escape into generalities, "which way do you think that ill-news read best--on paper or _viva voce_?"

She s.h.i.+vers a little.

"I do not know. I do not like them either way."

Then, taking out her watch, with the evident determination to be surprised at the lateness of the hour, she cries, "It is actually a quarter to two! Are not you famished, Elizabeth? I am!"

There is such apparent and imminent departure in her eye that Burgoyne feels that there is no time to be lost.

"Have you decided upon your hotel in Florence?" he asks precipitately.

"We have decided against them all," is her answer. "We have taken a little apartment--a poor little _entresol_; but it is such a poor little one, that I should be ashamed to ask any of my friends to come and see me there."

She accompanies the last words, as if to take the sting out of them, with as sweet and friendly a smile as any he remembers in the Devons.h.i.+re days. But the sting is not taken out, all the same; it lingers, p.r.i.c.king and burning still, after both the tall, thin, black figure, and the slim, little gray one have disappeared.

The moment that this is the case, Byng rejoins his friend; a curiosity and alert interest in his young eyes, which his companion feels no desire to gratify. He is unable, however, to maintain the entire silence he had intended upon the subject, since Byng, after waiting for what, to his impatience, appears a more than decent interval, is constrained to remark--

"Did I hear you tell that lady, when first you spoke to her, that she was dead?"

"I thought she was."

"Had you heard it?"

"No."

"Did you see it in the papers?"

"No."

A pause.

"I wonder why you thought she was dead."

The other makes a rather impatient movement.

"I had no reason--none whatever. It was an idiotic inference."

Byng draws a long breath of satisfaction.

"Well, at all events, I am very glad that she is not."

Jim turns upon him with something of the expression of face worn by Mrs.

Sarah Gamp on hearing Mrs. Prig express her belief that it was not by Mrs. Harris that her services would be required. "Why should you be glad of that, Betsy? She is unbeknown to you except by hearing. Why should you be glad?"

As Byng's case is a more aggravated one than Mrs. Prig's, seeing that Elizabeth Le Marchant is 'unbeknown' to him even by hearing, so is the warmth, or rather coldness, with which his friend receives his remark not inferior to that of "Sairey."

"I do not quite see how it affects you. Why are you glad?"

"_Why am I glad?_" replies the younger man, with a lightening eye. "For the same reason that I am glad that Vand.y.k.e painted that picture"--pointing to it--"or that Shakespeare wrote _As You Like It_.

The world is the richer by them all three."

But to this poetic and flattering a.n.a.logy, Jim's only answer is a surly "Humph!"

CHAPTER V.

"There are no more by-path meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. You may think you had a conscience and believed in G.o.d; but what is conscience to a wife?.... To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left for you--not even suicide--but to be good."

There is no particular reason why Burgoyne should not impart to his companion what he knows--after all it is not very much--about their two countrywomen. Upon reflection he had told himself this, and conquered a reluctance, that he cannot account for, to mentioning their name; and to relating the story of those shadowy idyllic two months of his life, which form all of it that has ever come into contact with theirs. So that by the time--some thirty-six hours later--when they reach Florence, the younger man is in possession of as much information about the objects of their common interest as it is in the power of the elder one to impart.

To neither of them, meanwhile, is any second glimpse vouchsafed of those objects, eagerly--though with different degrees of overtness in that eagerness--as they both look out for them among the luggage-piles and the tweed-clad English ladies at the station. It had been the intention of Burgoyne that he and his friend should put up at the same hotel as that inhabited by his betrothed and her family; hut, finding that it is full, he orders rooms at the Minerva, and in the fallen dusk of a rather chill spring night, finds himself traversing the short distance from the railway to that hotel.

As he and Byng sit over their coffee after dinner in the _salle a manger_, almost its only tenants at that late hour, the younger man remarks matter-of-factly, as if stating a proposition almost too obvious to be worth uttering--

"I suppose you are off to the Anglo-Americain now."

"I think not," replies Jim slowly; "it is past ten, you see, and they are early people." He adds a moment later, as if suspecting his own excuse of insufficiency, "Mr. Wilson is rather an invalid, and there is also an invalid or semi-invalid sister; I think that I had better not disturb them to-night."

Byng has never been engaged to be married, except in theory, and it is certainly no business of his to blow his friend's flagging ardour into flame, so he contents himself with an acquiescent observation to the effect that the train must have been late. But at all events the next morning finds Burgoyne paying his fiacre at the door of the Anglo-Americain, with the confidence of a person who is certain of finding those he seeks, a confidence justified by the result; for, having followed a waiter across a courtyard, and heard him knock at a door on the ground-floor, that door opens with an instantaneousness which gives the idea of an ear having been p.r.i.c.ked to catch the expected rap, and the next moment, the intervening _garcon_ having withdrawn, Jim stands face to face with his Amelia. Her features are all alight with pleasure, but her first words are not particularly amorous.

"Would you mind coming into the dining-room? Sybilla is in the drawing-room already this morning. She said she was afraid it was going to be one of her bad days, so I thought" (rather regretfully) "that possibly she would be a little later than usual in coming down; but, on the contrary, she is much earlier."

It is possible that an extremely ardent love may be independent of surroundings; may burn with as fierce a flame, when its owner or victim is seated on a hard horsehair chair beside a dining-room table, in a little dull hotel back room, as when the senses are courted by softly-cus.h.i.+oned lounges, penetrating flower-scents, and cunningly arranged _bric-a-brac_; but perhaps Jim's pa.s.sion is not of this intense and Spartan quality. At all events a chill steals over him as Amelia leads the way into that small and uncheerful chamber where the Wilson family daily banquet. He is not so lost to all sense of what England and Amelia expect of him as not to take her in his arms and kiss her very kindly and warmly, before they sit down on two hard chairs side by side; and even when they have done so, he still holds her hand, and kisses it now and then. He has a great many things to say to her, but "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh" is not invariably true.

Sometimes that very abundance clogs the utterance, and, after a ten months' separation, the hinges of even lovers' tongues are apt at first to be somewhat rusty.