Alas! Part 42

"She is gone?" cries Mrs. Byng, with an accent of the highest relief and joy; "gone away altogether, do you mean?--oh, thank G.o.d!"--then, with a sudden lapse into affright, she adds rapidly--"and he is gone after her?--he is not here?"

"No, he is here."

"Then why has not he come to meet me?"--suspiciously.

"He did not know you were expected."

"You did not tell him?"

"No."

"Why did not you tell him?"

"I did not know how he would take it."

"Do you mean to say"--falling from her former rapidity of utterance to a dismayed incredulous slowness--"that he will not be glad to see me?--that _w.i.l.l.y_ will not be glad to see _me_?"

"I mean to say that I am afraid you will not find him very much in sympathy with you; I do not think he will find it easy to hear you speak of Miss Le Marchant in the terms, and make the implication about her that you did just now," replies Jim, avenging by this sentence the wrongs done to Elizabeth, and doing it so well, that a moment later a feeling of compunction comes over him at the success of his own attempt at retributive justice.

Mrs. Byng turns pale.

"Then she has got hold of him?" she says under her breath.

"Got hold of him?" repeats Jim, his ire aroused again, no sooner than allayed, by this mode of expression; "you certainly have the most extraordinary way of misconceiving the situation! _Got hold of him?_ when she had to leave Florence at a moment's notice to escape his importunities!"

But at this, Mr. Burgoyne's auditor looks so hopelessly bewildered that he thinks it the simplest plan at once, in the fewest possible words, to put her in possession of the tale of her son's achievements and disasters. He does this, partly to stem the torrent of her questions, the form that they have hitherto taken producing in him a feeling of frenzied indignation, which he doubts his own power much longer to conceal--partly in order to set Elizabeth's conduct with the least possible delay in its true light before her. Surely, when she has been told of her magnanimous renunciation, she will do her justice, will cease to load her with those hard names and insulting a.s.sertions that have made him grind his own teeth to listen to. But in this expectation he soon finds that he is mistaken. The wrath of Mrs. Byng against Elizabeth for having "drawn in" her son, as she persists in stating the case, is surpa.s.sed only by indignation at her insolence in having "thrown him over." As to the genuineness of this last action she expresses, it is true, the most complete incredulity.

"It was only to enhance her own value. Do you suppose that she expected him to take her at her word? She thought, of course, that he would follow her--that he would employ detectives--it is a proof"--with an angry laugh--"that he cannot be quite so bad as you make him out, that he has not done so."

"I would not put it into his head, if I were you," replies Jim, with an anger no less real, and a merriment no less spurious than her own.

By this time they have reached the hotel; and Jim, having helped his companion out of the fiacre, shows symptoms of leaving her.

"Will not you stay to breakfast with me?" she asks, a little aghast at this unexpected manoeuvre; "I cannot make my toilette till the luggage arrives: and I suppose that he"--her eyes wandering wistfully over the hotel front till they rest on her son's closed persiennes--"that he is not up yet; it would be a sin to wake him; do stay with me."

"I am afraid I cannot."

"Why cannot you?"--with an impatient but friendly little mocking imitation of his tone. "You are not"--with a conciliatory smile--"angry with an old hen for standing up for her own chick?"

Jim smiles too.

"I do not think that the old hen need have clucked quite so loudly; but that is not why I am leaving her; I _must_ go."

"Where _must_ you go?"

"To the Anglo-Americain."

She lifts her eyebrows.

"At this hour--you forget how early it is. Well, Amelia _has_ got you into good training; but I can a.s.sure you that you will still find her in bed."

He sighs.

"I am afraid that there is not much doubt of that."

"What do you mean?--she is not ill, surely?"--in a tone of lively surprise--"Amelia ill?--impossible!"

He looks at her with an irrational stupefaction. It appears to him now, in the distortion of all objects that the last fortnight has brought, as if Amelia's illness had spread over the whole of his life, as if there had never been a time when she had not been ill, and yet of this event, immense as it seems to him in its duration, the woman before him obviously has never heard. When he comes to think of it, how should she?

In point of fact it is not a fortnight since Miss Wilson fell sick, and during that fortnight he himself has not written her a line; neither, he is equally sure, has her son.

"I am evidently very much behind the time," she says, noting the, to her, unintelligible astonishment in his face; "but you must remember that I have been kept completely in the dark--has she been ill?"

In answer he tells her, with as much brevity and compression as he had employed in the tale of Elizabeth's disappearance, that of Amelia's illness, often interrupted by her expressions of sympathy. At the end she says:

"I am so thankful I did not hear till she was getting better! It would have made me so wretched to be such a long way off!"

Her adoption of his trouble as her own, an adoption whose sincerity is confirmed by her impulsive seizure of his hand, and the feeling look in her handsome eyes make him forgive the exaggeration of her statement, and go some way towards replacing her in that position in his esteem which her diatribes against Elizabeth had gone near to making her forfeit.

"But it will be all right now," continues she sanguinely; "there will be nothing to do but to build up her strength again, and she is young--at least"--as the reminiscence of Amelia's unyouthful appearance evidently flashes across her mind, of that prematurely middle-aged look which an unequal fortune gives to some plain women--"at least, young enough for all practical purposes."

Whether it be due to the possession of this modified form of juvenility, to an excellent const.i.tution, or to what other reason, certain it is that the next two days go by without any diminution, rather with a sensible and steady increase, in Miss Wilson's favourable symptoms, and, on the afternoon of the latter of these days, Cecilia, in rather impatient answer to Jim's long daily string of questions about her, says:

"You could judge much better if you saw her yourself. I do not see why you should not see her to-morrow for a minute, that is to say, if you would promise not to talk or ask her any questions."

"But would it be safe?" inquires he, with a tremble in his voice. He desires pa.s.sionately to see her; until he does he will never believe that she is really going to live; he has a hunger to a.s.sure himself that no terrible metamorphosis has pa.s.sed over her in these nightmare days; and yet, coupled with that hunger, is a deep dread, which translates itself into his next halting words.

"Shall I be--shall I be very much shocked? is she--is she very much changed?"

"She does look pretty bad," replies Cecilia half sadly, yet with the sub-lying cheerfulness of a.s.sured hope; "for one thing she is so wasted.

I suppose that that is what makes her look so much older; but then you know Amelia never did look young."

It is the second time within two days that the fact of his betrothed's maturity has been impressed upon him, and formerly it would have caused him a pang; but now, of what moment is it to him that she looks a hundred, if only she is living, and going to live?

"Has she--has she asked after me?"

"We do not allow her to speak, but if anyone mentions your name there comes a sort of smile over her face; such a ridiculous-sized face as it is now!"

The tears have come into Cecilia's large stupid eyes, and Jim himself is, with regard to her, in the position of the great Plantagenet, when he heard the lovely tale of York and Suffolk's high death.

"I blame you not For hearing this; I must perforce compound With mistful eyes; or they will issue too!"

As he walks away he is filled with a solemn joy, one of those deep serious gladnesses with which not the stranger, no, nor even the close friend or loving kinsman intermeddleth. He is under an engagement to meet Mrs. Byng at a certain hour, but although that hour has already come and pa.s.sed, he feels that he cannot face all her sincere congratulations without some preparatory toning down of his mood.

The streets, with their gay _va-et-vient_, their cracking whips and shouting drivers, seem all too secular and every-day to match the profundity of his reverent thankfulness. He takes it with him into the great cool church that stands so nigh at hand to his hotel, Santa Maria Novella. The doors fall behind him noiselessly as he enters, shutting out the fiery hot piazza, and the garish noises of the world. In the great dim interior, cold and tranquil, there is the usual sprinkling of tourists peering up at its soaring columns, trying to read themselves, out of their guide-books, into a proper admiration for Cimabue's large-faced Virgin and ugly Bambino, folded, with all its gold and sombre colours, in the dignity of its twice two centuries of gloom.

There are the usual three or four blue-trousered soldiers strolling leisurely about, there is a curly-tailed little dog trotting hither and thither unforbidden, ringing his bell, and there are the invariable tanned peasant-women kneeling at the side-altars. He does not belong to the ancient Church, but to-day he kneels beside them, and the tears he had hastened away to hide from Cecilia come back to make yet dimmer to his view the details of the dim altar-pieces behind the tall candles.

His eye, as he rises to his feet again, falls on the contadina nearest him. What is she praying for? In the expansion of his own deep joy he longs to tell her how much he hopes that, whatever it is, she will obtain it. It is not the contadina who, standing a little behind, joins him as he turns away from the altar.

"I saw you go into the church," says Mrs. Byng, her smile growing somewhat diffident as she sees the solemnity of his face, "so I thought I would follow you; do you mind? shall I go away?"