Alas! Part 40

replies Byng; and, though he is compelled to admit that there is no longer any possibility of his to-night obtaining the information for which he so madly hungers, that there can consequently be no question of his setting off by one of the early trains, since he would not know in which direction to go, and might only be fleeing further from her whom he would fain rejoin, yet he still keeps with fevered pertinacity to his project of spending the night _a la belle etoile_.

Finding it impossible to dissuade him, Jim resigns himself to bearing him company. It is with very little reluctance that he does so. There is no truer truism than that all sorrows, however mountainous, are more easily carried under G.o.d's high roof than man's low ones, and he who does not sleep has for compensation that at least he can have no dreadful waking. So the two men wander about all night in the boon southern air, and see--

"The moon exactly round, And all those stars with which the brows of ample heaven are crown'd; Orion, all the Pleiades, and those seven Atlas got; The close-beam'd Hyades, the Bear, surnamed the Chariot, That turns about heaven's axle-tree, holds ope a constant eye Upon Orion, and of all the cressets in the sky, His golden forehead never bows to the Ocean's empery."

There are not many hours of a summer's night during which the stir of life has ceased and has not yet reawaked in an Italian town, the talk and the tread and the mule bells, and the flutes of the voiceful people lasting on till near the small hours, and beginning again ere those hours have had strength to grow big. But yet there is a s.p.a.ce of time when Florence lies silent, baring her beauty to the constellations alone; and under this unfamiliar and solemn and lovely aspect the two night-wanderers see her. They see her Campanile

"Commercing with the skies,"

with no distracting human bustle about her feet; they see her Perseus battling beneath her Loggia, and her San Giorgio standing wakeful at his post on Or san Michele. They see her scowling palace rows, her stealing river, and her spanning bridges--palaces out of which no head peeps, a river on which no boat oars, bridges upon which no horse-hoof rings.

They have all her churches--Santa Croce, Arnolpho's great "Bride," that _new_ Maria that is now four hundred years old or more, the humbly glorious San Marco--to themselves; all her treasure houses, all her memories, all her flower-embalmed air--for a few hours they possess them all. She is but a little city, this fair Firenze, and in these few hours they traverse her in her length and breadth, rambling aimlessly wherever Byng's feverishly miserable impulses lead them. Burgoyne offers no opposition to any of these, but accompanies his friend silently down slumbrous thoroughfare, or across sleeping Piazza, by Arno side, under colonnade or arch. It is all one to him; nor is he sensible of any fatigue, when at length, at about the hour when Byng had meant to have caught the early morning train, they return to the hotel, and the younger man, happily dead-beat at last, worn out with want of food, tears, and weariness, flings himself down, dressed, upon his bed, and instantly falls into a leaden sleep. Jim feels no desire, nor indeed any power of following his example. He is not easily tired, and his former life of travel and hards.h.i.+p has made him always willing to dispense with the--to him--unnecessary luxury of a bed; and, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, a night pa.s.sed in the open air would have had an effect upon him rather exhilarating than otherwise. He has his bath, dresses, breakfasts, and then jumps into a fiacre, and has himself driven to the Anglo-Americain.

The day is so exactly the counterpart of its predecessor, in its even a.s.sured splendour, that Jim has a hazy feeling that they both make only one divided into two parts by the narrow dark blue ribbon of the exquisite brief night. When did yesterday end and to-day begin? As he is borne along, his memory, made more alert by sleeplessness, reproduces--merely, as it seems to him, the better to fill him with pain and remorse--the different states of mind in which he has pa.s.sed over the often trodden ground. Here, at the street corner, what a nausea had come over him at the thought of the interest he would have to feign in those humdrum details, so dear to Amelia's soul, of their future _menage_, with all its candle-end economies and depressing restrictions.

Here, in the church shadow, how he had tried to lash himself up into a more probable semblance of pleasure in her expected and dreaded caresses. There seems to be scarcely an inch of the way where he has not had some harsh or weary thought of her; he is thankful when the brief transit, that has appeared to him so long, is over. And yet the change is only from the sharp sting of recollected unkindness to the dull bruising ache of antic.i.p.ated ill. A _garcon_ is sweeping out the _salon_, for the hour is not much beyond eight, so Jim goes into the dreary little dining-room, where two places are laid with coffee-cups and rolls. Only two. And, though he knows that nothing short of a miracle could have already restored Amelia so completely as to enable her to come down to breakfast, yet the ocular demonstration of the fact that her place is and will be empty, strikes a chill to his boding heart. He is presently joined by Cecilia, whose carelessly-dressed hair, heavy eyelids, and tired puffy face, sufficiently show that not to her, any more than to himself has night brought

"Sweet child sleep, the filmy-eyed."

"How fresh and cool you are!" she cries, with an almost reproachful intonation. "Do not look at me!"--covering her face with her hot hands--"I am not fit to be seen; but what does that matter? What do I care?"--beginning to cry--"Oh, she is so bad! We have spent such a dreadful night! As I tell you, I am a shocking sick-nurse; I never know what to do; I lose my head completely; and she has been so odd--she has been talking such gibberis.h.!.+"

"Delirious?"

"Yes, I suppose that is what you would call it. I never saw anybody delirious before, so I do not know. I have seen Sybilla in hysterics, but I never believed that they were real--I always thought that a bucket of water would bring her round."

As a general rule, Jim may be counted upon for cordial co-operation in any hit directed against Sybilla, but now he is too spiritless even to notice it.

"I was so frightened," continues Cecilia; "it is not cheerful being all alone at the dead of night with a person talking such nonsense as she was. Amelia, of all people, to talk nonsense! I could not quite make out what it was about, but it seemed to have more or less reference to you.

She was begging you to forgive her for something she had done, as far as I could gather; some treat she had prepared for you, and that you had not liked. Have you the least idea what she could have meant?"

He has every idea; but it would seem profanation to explain that her poor wandering brain is still distressedly labouring with the abortive project she had so happily framed for his enjoyment.

"She is quieter now. Sybilla's maid is with her; Sybilla really has not behaved badly--_for her_; she let her maid look in several times during the night; but still, for the most part I was alone with her! Oh, I do trust"--shuddering--"that I may never again have to be alone at night with a person who is not right in her head!"

This aspiration on the youngest Miss Wilson's part is, for the present occasion, at least, likely to be gratified; for, by the time that another night settles down on Florence, Amelia's illness has been declared by Dr. Coldstream to have every symptom of developing into the malarious Florentine fever, which not unfrequently lays low the chilled or over-fatigued, or generally imprudent foreign visitor to that little Eden. Amelia has Florentine fever; and the verification of this fact is followed by all the paraphernalia of serious sickness--night and day nurses, disinfectants, physic phials.

The announcement of her being attacked by a definite and recognised disease brings at first a sort of relief to Burgoyne's mind, which, under Cecilia's frightened and frightening word-pictures, had been beset by terrors great in proportion to their vagueness. Now that Amelia is confessedly sick of a fever, there is nothing abnormal in her being "odd," and "stupid," and "wandering," these being only the inevitable stages on a road which will--which _must_ lead to ultimate recovery. His heart is heavy, yet scarcely so heavy as it had been upon his arrival in the morning, when, late in the afternoon--not sooner do the claims upon him of the disorganized and helpless family of his betrothed relax--he returns to the Minerva to look after Byng. Having had every reason to fear that he will not find him at the hotel, but will be obliged again to set off in pursuit of him through the streets and squares so repeatedly traversed last night, he is relieved to learn from the hotel servants that the young man is in his bedroom. He finds him there indeed; no longer stretched in the blessed oblivion of deep sleep upon his bed, but sitting on a hard chair by the open window, his arms resting upon the back, and his face crushed down upon them. By no slightest movement does he show consciousness of his friend's entrance.

"I am afraid I have been a long time away," says the latter kindly.

"Have you?" answers Byng, his voice coming m.u.f.fled through lips still buried in his own coat-sleeve. "I do not know; I have done with time!"

"I do not know how you have managed that," rejoins Jim, still indulgently, though a shade dryly. "Have you been here all day?"

"I do not know where I have been. Yes,"--lifting his head--"I do; I have been to the Piazza d'Azeglio."

"Well?"

"They know where she is. They were packing her things; through the door I saw them tying the label on the box; if I had tried I could have read the address on the label, but I did not. She had forbidden them to give it to me; in her telegram she had forbidden them to give it to anyone."

CHAPTER XXIX.

Jim refrains from saying how likely this culmination of his friend's woes has appeared to him, since it would have been the height of the illogical for the Le Marchants to have put themselves to extreme inconvenience in order to escape from a person to whom they immediately afterwards gave the power of following them. He refrains from saying it, because he knows of how very little consoling power the "told you so"

philosophy is possessed.

"And what will you do now?"

"Do! What is there to do? What does a man do when he is shot through the heart?"

"I believe that in point of fact he jumps his own height in the air. I know that a buffalo does," replies Burgoyne with a matter-of-fact dryness, which proceeds less from want of sympathy, than from an honest belief that it is the best and kindest method of dealing with Byng's heroics.

"_Shot through the heart!_" murmurs the latter, repeating his own phrase as if he found a dismal pleasure in it. "I had always been told that it was a painless death; I now know to the contrary."

"Shall you stay here? There is no longer any use in your staying here."

"There is no longer any use in my doing anything, or leaving anything undone.

"'There's nothing in this world can make me joy; Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale, Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.'"

So saying, he replaces his head upon his arms, and his arms upon the chair-rail, with the air of one who, upon mature consideration, has decided to maintain that att.i.tude for the remainder of his life.

A week has pa.s.sed; a week upon which Burgoyne looks back as upon a blur of wretchedness, with distinct points of pain sticking up here and there out of it. It is a blur; for it is a time-s.p.a.ce, without the usual limitations and divisions of time; a week not cut up into orderly lengths of day and night, but in which each has puzzlingly run into and overlapped each. There have been nights when he has not been in bed at all, and there have been days when he has slept heavily at unaccustomed hours. He has not dined at any particular time; he has shared forlorn breakfast, dotted about the morning as the less or more anxiety about Amelia dictated, with the Wilsons. He has drunk more tea than he ever did in his life before, and the result of this whole condition of things is, that he cannot for the life of him tell whether the day of the week is Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday, and that he has lost all sense of proportion. He has not the least idea whether the dreadful moments when he stood on the landing outside Amelia's door, and heard her heartrendingly beg him not to go away from her for _quite_ so long, to be a little gladder to see her when he came back; or again affectingly a.s.sure him that she can do quite well, be quite cheerful without him--whether, I say, those dreadful moments were really only moments, or stretched into hours.

Besides the agony of remorse that the impotent listening to those pathetic prayers and unselfish a.s.surances causes him, he suffers too from another agony of shame, that the father and sister, standing like himself with ears stretched at that shut door, should be let into the long secret of his cruelty and coldness, that secret which for eight years she has so gallantly been hiding. It is an inexpressible relief to him that at least the old man's thickened hearing admits but very imperfectly his daughter's rapid utterances.

"Poor soul! I cannot quite make out what it is all about," he says, with his hand to his ear; "but I catch your name over and over again, Jim; I suppose it is all about you."

Cecilia, however, naturally hears as well as he himself does, and apparently pitying the drawn misery of his face, whispers to him comfortingly--

"You must not mind, you know it is all nonsense. She talks very differently when she is well."

The Wilson family have never hitherto shown any very marked affection for Burgoyne, but now it seems as if they could hardly bear him out of their sight. They cling to him, not because he is _he_--Jim makes himself no illusion on that head--but because they have got into such a habit of leaning, that it is no longer possible to them to stand upright. He had never realized till now how helpless they are. He had known that Amelia was the pivot upon which the whole family turned; but he had not brought home to himself how utterly the machine fell to pieces when that pivot was withdrawn.

In the course of the past week each member of the family has confided to him separately how far more she or he misses Amelia, than can be possible to either of the others. Upon this head Sybilla's lamentations are the loudest and most frequent. She had at first refused to admit that there was anything at all the matter with her sister, but has now fallen into the no less trying opposite extreme of refusing to allow that there is any possibility of her recovery, talking of her as if she were almost beyond the reach of human aid. Sybilla's grief for her sister is perfectly genuine; none the less so that it is complicated by irritation at her own deposition from her post of first invalid, at having been compelled to confess the existence in the bosom of her own family of a traitor, with an indisputably higher temperature and more wavering pulse than she.

"It is ridiculous to suppose that a person in such rude health as Cecilia _can_ miss her as I do," she says querulously; "I was always her first object, she always knew by instinct when I was more suffering than usual; who cares now"--breaking into a deluge of self-compa.s.sionating tears--"whether I am suffering or not?"

Then, when next he happens to be alone with Cecilia, it is her turn to a.s.sert a superiority of woe; a superiority claimed with still more emphasis the next half hour by the father. With a patience which would have surprised those persons who had seen him only in his former relations with the family of his betrothed he tries to soothe the sorrow of each--even that of Sybilla--in turn; but to his own heart he says that not one of their griefs is worthy to be weighed in the balance with his. In the case of none of theirs is the woof crossed by the hideous warp of self-reproach that is woven inextricably into his. They have worked her to death, they have torn her to pieces by their conflicting claims; their love has been exacting, selfish, inconsiderate; but at least it has been love; they have prized her at almost her full worth while they had her. For him it has been reserved as for the base Indian, to

"Throw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe."

In the intervals--neither long nor many--between his ministrations at the Anglo-Americain, Burgoyne hurries back to the Minerva to see that Byng has not blown his brains out. In the present state of mind of that young gentleman this catastrophe does not appear to be among the least likely ones. He has refused to leave Florence, always answering the suggestion with the same question, "Where else should I go?" and if pressed, adding invariably in the same words as those employed by him on the first day of his loss, when his friend had urged the advisability of his removing his countenance from the beaded stool--"Where shall I find such recent and authentic traces of her as here?"

He pa.s.ses his time either on the Lung' Arno, staring at the water, or stretched face downwards upon his bed. He walks about the town most of the night, and Jim suspects him of beginning to take chloral.

Occasionally he rouses up into a quick and almost pa.s.sionate sympathy with his friend's trouble, asking for nothing better than to be sent on any errand, however trivial, or however tiresome, in Amelia's behalf.