Alas! Part 41

But no sooner have the immediate effects of the appeal to his kind-heartedness died away, than he sinks back into his lethargy, and Jim is at once too much occupied and too miserable to use any very strenuous endeavours to shake him out of it. But yet the consciousness of the tacit engagement, under which he lies to the young man's mother, to look after him, coupled with the absolute impossibility, under his present circ.u.mstances, of fulfilling that engagement, and his uneasiness as to what new form the insanity of Byng's grief may take on, from day to day, add very perceptibly to the weight of his own already sufficiently ponderous burden.

It is the ninth day since Amelia fell sick, that ninth day which, in maladies such as hers, is, or is at least reckoned to be, the crisis and turning-point of the disease. Jim has been up all night, and has just rushed back to the Minerva, for the double purpose of taking a bath, and of casting an uneasy eye upon his charge. He finds the latter not in his room, but leaning over the little spiky balcony, out of his window, hanging over it so far, and so absorbedly, that he does not hear his friend's approach, and starts violently when Jim lays a hand on his shoulder.

"What are you looking at?"

"I; oh--nothing particular! What should I be looking at? What is there to look to? I was only--only--wondering as a mere matter of curiosity, how many feet it is from here to the pavement? Sixteen? eighteen?

twenty?"

Jim's only answer is to look at him sadly and sternly; then he says coldly:

"I do not recommend it; it would be a clumsy way of doing it."

"What matter how clumsy the way, so that one attains the end?" asks Byng extravagantly, throwing off even the thin pretence he had at first a.s.sumed; "who cares how bad the road is so that it leads him to the goal?

"'Oh, amiable lovely death!

Thou odoriferous stench, sound rottenness!'"

Jim shudders. Death has been so near to him for the last nine days, that the terrific realism of Constance's apostrophe seems to be almost more than he can bear.

"It is silliness to live when to live is a torment, and then, have we a prescription to die, when death is our physician?" continues Byng loudly and wildly, clasping his hands above his head, and apparently perfectly indifferent as to whether the other inmates of the hotel, or pa.s.sers-by on the piazza, overhear him.

"If you stay here much longer you will spare yourself the trouble of putting an end to your existence," replies Jim, glancing at the other's head, exposed hatless to the scorch of the Tuscan sun, "for you will certainly get a sunstroke."

So saying, he takes him quietly, yet decidedly, by the arm, and leads him within the room. Either his matter-of-fact manner, or the sight of his face, upon which, well-seasoned as it is, vigil and sorrow have begun to write their unavoidable marks, brings the young madman back to some measure of sense and self-control.

"I had no fixed intention," he says apologetically, still looking white and wild; "you must not think I meant anything; but, even if I had--do you know--have you ever happened to read anything about the statistics of suicide? Do you know what an increasing number of people every year find life intolerable?"

"I know that you are fast making _my_ life intolerable," answers Jim, fixing his tired, sleepless eyes with melancholy severity upon his companion. "Amelia is--you are as well aware of it as I am--probably dying, and yet even now, thanks to you, into my thoughts of her is continually pus.h.i.+ng the fear that I may have to tell your mother that you have had the colossal selfishness to rush out of the world, because, for the first time in your pampered life, the toy you cried for has not been put into your hand."

Burgoyne's hopes have not been high, as to any salutary result of his own philippic while uttering it. But our words, sometimes, to our surprise, turn from wooden swords to steel daggers in our hands. For a moment Byng stands as if stunned; then he breaks into a tornado of sobs and tears, such tears as have often before angered his friend, but which now he welcomes the sight of, as perhaps precursors of a saner mood.

"Oh, my dear old chap!" he cries, catching at Jim's unresponsive hand, and wringing it hard, "she is not dying _really_? You do not mean it?

You are only saying it to frighten me? Oh! dear, kind Amelia. Not dying!

not dying?"

"I do not know: to-day is the turning-point, they say; even now it may have come."

"And why are not you with her? Why do not you go back to her?" cries Byng, in a broken voice of pa.s.sionate excitement, the tears still racing down his face.

"And leave you to go tomfooling out there again?" asks Jim, with a nod of his head towards the balcony, seen from where they stand, grilling in the midday blaze.

The verb employed, if closely looked into, bears a ludicrous disproportion to the intended action indicated, but neither of the men sees anything ridiculous in it.

"I will not!" cries Byng, in eager a.s.severation; "I give you my word of honour I will not; if you do not believe me, take me with you! Keep me with you all day! Do you think that I, too, do not want to know how Amelia is? Do you think that I am indifferent as to whether she lives or dies? Poor, good Amelia! When I think of that drive to Vallombrosa, only ten days ago! They two sitting side by side, so happy, laughing and making friends with each other!"

He covers his face with his hands, and through them the scalding drops trickle; but only for a moment. In the next, he has dashed them away, and is moving restlessly about the room, looking for his hat.

"Let us go this instant," he says urgently; "my poor old man, do you think I would willingly add a feather weight to your burden? I should never forgive myself if I kept you a second longer from her at such a time; let us go at once."

Burgoyne complies; but under pretext of making some change in his dress, escapes from his friend, for just the few minutes necessary to write and despatch a telegram to the young man's mother. It runs thus:

"_No cause for alarm, but come at once. He is perfectly well, but needs you._"

If, as is to be hoped, Mrs. Byng is still in London, reaping the succession of the old relative whose death-bed she had quitted Florence to attend, his message will bring her hither within forty-eight hours, and the burden of responsibility, now grown so insupportable, will be s.h.i.+fted from his shoulders. Until those forty-eight hours have elapsed, he must not again let Byng out of his sight.

The day rolls by, the critical ninth day rolls by on its torrid wheels to eventide, and when that eventide comes, it finds Cecilia Wilson running down from Amelia's room, to give the last news of her to the three men and one woman waiting below.

"I think he seems quite satisfied," she says, in answer to the silent hungry looks of question addressed to her, and alluding to the doctor, who is still with the patient; "the strength is maintained; the temperature lower." What a dreadful parrot-sound the two phrases, so familiar to us all in the newspaper bulletins of distinguished men on their death-beds, have during the last week a.s.sumed in Burgoyne's ears; "you can speak to him yourself when he comes down, of course, Jim; but I am sure he is satisfied."

"She is better!--she is saved!" cries Byng, rus.h.i.+ng forward and s.n.a.t.c.hing both Cecilia's hands--"do you say that she is really saved?"

"Oh, are you here still, Mr. Byng? how very kind of you!" replies Cecilia, a tinge of colour rus.h.i.+ng over her mealy face--that face, ten days ago, clothed in so many roses--"well, I am afraid he does not go quite so far as that, but he says it is as much as we can expect, and even I can see that she is not nearly so restless."

"Thank G.o.d!--thank G.o.d!"

In the ardour of his thanksgiving he presses her hands closer, instead of dropping them, a fact of which he is entirely unaware, but so is not she; and who knows, even at that serious moment, what tiny genial hope may slide into her plump heart!

Again this night Burgoyne does not go to bed, from a superst.i.tious fear that if he does, if he seems to take for granted an improvement, that very taking for granted may annul it--may bring on a relapse. But when the next morning finds no such backsliding to have taken place, when each hour through the cheerfully broadening day brings falling fever and steadying pulse, then indeed he cautiously opens the door of his heart to let a tiny rose-pinioned hope creep in--then at last, on the third night, he stretches his tired limbs in deep slumber upon his bed.

He has received a brief telegram from Mrs. Byng to announce her arrival as fast as boat and train can bring her; and seven o'clock on Sat.u.r.day morning--he having sent his despatch to her on the previous Wednesday--finds him pacing the platform of the railway-station, awaiting the incoming of the morning express from Turin. He is pacing it alone, for he has thought it best not to reveal to her son the fact of her expected return, not being at all sure in what spirit he will receive it, nor whether indeed the news of it might not even drive him, in his present unsound state of mind, to fly from the place at her approach.

The morning air, in its early clear coolness, blows sweet here, under the station-roof, unconquered even by engine smoke, and on Jim's face as he walks up and down--careworn as it still is--there comes, now and again, a half-born smile. He is never one to hope very easily, but surely now--now that yet another night has been prosperously tided over, there can, even to him, seem no reasonable ground for doubt that Amelia has turned the corner. Amelia, with the corner turned--Byng, in five minutes wholly off his hands! The only wonder is, that the small smile never comes quite to the birth.

The train is punctual, and almost at its due moment draws up in dusty length at the platform. Its pa.s.sengers are comparatively few; for at this latening season most of the English are winging home to their rooky woods; and he has no difficulty in at once discovering among them the tall smart figure--smart even after forty-eight hours of the unluxurious luxury of a _wagon-lit_--of the lady he is awaiting. As he gives her his hand to help her down the high step, the admiring thought crosses his mind of what a large quant.i.ty of fatigue, dust, and uneasiness of mind a radically good-looking Englishwoman, in radically good clothes, can undergo without seeming much the worse for them. Before her neat narrow foot has touched the pavement, a brace of eager questions shoots out of her mouth.

"Am I in time? Am I too late?"

"In time for _what_? Too late for _what_?"

"Has he--has he done anything--anything irrevocable? Is he--is he? I suppose that horrid woman has got hold of him? I suppose that is why you sent for me!"

By this time she is safely landed at his side, which is possibly the reason why he at once lets fall her hand.

"I am not aware that there is any 'horrid woman' in the case."

"Oh, what does it matter what I call her?" cries the mother, fast becoming frantic at the delay in answering her pa.s.sionate questions. "I will call her what you please; you know perfectly whom I mean; she _has_ got hold of him, I suppose. I always knew she would! Did not I tell you so? but is it too late? is there no way of getting him off?"

Now that Burgoyne has a nearer view of Mrs. Byng, he sees that she has a more f.a.gged and travel-worn air than he had at first supposed, and her dusty eyes are fastened upon him with such a hunger of interrogation, that, angered and jarred as he is by her tone, he has not the heart any longer to keep her in suspense.

"If you are alluding to Miss Le Marchant, I may as well tell you at once that she has left Florence."

"Left Florence! Do you mean to say that she has run away with someone else?"

She puts the question in all good faith, her lively imagination having easily made the not very wide jump from the fact already established in her own mind of Elizabeth being an adventuress, to the not much more difficult one to swallow, of her having devoured another _fils de famille_, as well as Mrs. Byng's own.

For a moment, Burgoyne turns away, voice and countenance alike beyond his control. He has by no means perfectly recovered either, when he answers--

"Yes, with someone else--she has reached the pitch of turpitude of leaving Florence with her mother."