Alas! Part 43

He would, of the two, have preferred that she had not followed him, that he had been given five more minutes to himself; but he naturally does not say so.

"Since we are here, shall we go into the cloisters?" and he a.s.sents.

A small Dominican monk, with a smile and a bunch of keys, is opening a door to some strangers, prowling like our friends about the church. The latter follow, the little monk enveloping them too in his civil smile.

Down some steps into the great cloister, under whose arches pale frescoes cover the ancient walls--where in Florence are there not frescoes?--and the hands that painted them seem all to have wielded their brushes in that astounding fifteenth century, which was to Florence's life what May is to Italy's year. For some moments they stand silent, side by side, perhaps picking out familiar scenes from among the sweet faded groups--a slim Rebecca listening to Eliezar's tale, and looking maiden pleasure at his gifts; a s.h.i.+vering Adam and Eve chased out of Paradise; an Adam and Eve dismally digging and st.i.tching respectively; Old Testament stories that time has blurred, that weather--even in this dry air--has rubbed out and bedimmed, and that yet, in many cases, still tell their curious faint tale decipherably.

"Good news this evening, I hope?" says Mrs. Byng presently, growing a little tired of her companion's taciturnity, being indeed always one of those persons who are of opinion that the gold of which silence is said to be made has a good deal of alloy in it.

"I am to see her to-morrow."

He speaks almost under his breath, either because he has no great confidence in his voice, if he employ a higher key, or because there seems to him a certain sanct.i.ty in this promised meeting on the kindly hither side of the grave which has so lately yawned.

Mrs. Byng is much too old and intimate a friend of Jim's not to have been pretty well aware of the state of his feelings during the past eight years, though certainly not through any communication from him. So it is, perhaps, scarcely to be wondered at that she presently says, in a tone tinged with admiring surprise:

"How fond you are of her!"

He receives the remark in a jarred silence, his eye resting on the square of neglected graves in the middle of the cloister, how unlike our turfy quads and lawns. A commonplace nineteenth century photographer, with his vulgar camera planted on the time-worn stones, is evidently trying to persuade the little monk to pose for his picture. The gentle-looking Fra laughs, and draws up his cowl, then lowers it again, folding his arms, and trying various postures.

"You are so much fonder of her than you were!"

This speech--though such is certainly far from the good-natured speaker's intention--stings Burgoyne like a whip-lash.

"I was always fond of her--I always thought her the very best woman in the world; you know!"--with an accent of almost anguished appeal--"that I always thought her the very best woman in the world."

"Oh, yes; of course, I know you did," replies she, astonished and concerned at the evident and extreme distress of his tone. "That is not quite the same thing as being _fond_ of her, is it? But"--with a laugh that is at once uneasy and rea.s.suring--"what does that matter _now_?

_Now_ your fondness for her is as indisputable as Tilburina's madness; and, for my part, I always think people get on quite as well, if not better, afterwards, if they do not begin quite so volcanically."

But her light and well-meant words fail to remove the painful impression from her hearer's mind. Has she, during all these years, been crediting him with a wish for Amelia's death, that she should be so much astonished at his thankfulness for her being given back to him?

"I believe that this illness is the best thing that could have happened to you both," continues Mrs. Byng, feeling uncomfortably that she has not been happy in her choice of a topic, and yet unable to leave it alone. "It will have drawn you so much together: in fact"--again laughing nervously--"I think we are all looking up. As I told you, after the first shock, w.i.l.l.y really was rather glad to see me; and you would not believe how discreetly I handle the burning subject--yes, everything is on the mend, and we are all going to have a lovely time, as the Yankees say!"

CHAPTER x.x.x.

"The world's a city full of straying streets, And Death the market-place where each one meets."

The words are scarcely out of Mrs. Byng's mouth before she adds, in a changed key, and with an altered direction of the eyes--

"Is this person looking for you? He seems to be coming straight towards us."

Jim turns his head at her speech, and at once recognises in the figure hastening towards them the porter of the Anglo-Americain hotel. The man looks strangely, and carries a slip of paper, unfolded and open, in his hand.

In a second Jim has sprung to his side, has s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper, and is staring at its contents. They are hardly legible, scrawled tremblingly with a pencil, and for a moment he cannot make them out. Then, as he looks, in one horrible flash their import has sprung into his eyes and brain.

"_She is gone; come to us!_"

Mrs. Byng is reading too, over his shoulder.

In going over the scene in memory afterwards, he believes that she gives a sort of scream, and says, "Oh, what does it mean? It is not true!" But at the time he hears, he knows nothing.

He is out of the church; he is in the fiacre waiting at the door: he is tearing through the streets, with the hot summer air flowing in a quick current against his face. He thinks afterwards at what a pace the horse must have been going, and how the poor jade must have been lashed to keep it up to that useless speed. At the time he thinks nothing, he feels nothing. He rushes through the court of the hotel, rushes through what seem to be people; he thinks afterwards that they must have been waiters and chambermaids, and that there came a sort of compa.s.sionate murmur from them as he pa.s.sed. He is up the stairs, the three flights; as he tears up, three steps at a time, there comes across his numbed intelligence a flash of wonder why they always give Amelia the worst room. He is at that door, outside which he has spent so many hours of breathless listening; he need no longer stay outside it now. It is open, inviting him in. He is across that, as yet, unpa.s.sed threshold, that threshold over which he was to have stepped in careful, soft-footed joy to-morrow. He has pushed through the people--why must there be people everywhere?--of whom the room seems full, unnecessarily full; he is at the bedside. Across the foot a figure seems thrown--he learns afterwards that _that_ is Sybilla. Another figure is prostrate on the floor, heaving, in dreadful dry sobs; that is Cecilia. A third is standing upright and tearless, looking down upon what, an hour ago, was his most patient daughter. They have left her alone now--have ceased to tease her. They no longer hold a looking-gla.s.s to her pale mouth, or beat her tired feet, or pour useless cordials between her lips. They have ceased to cry out upon her name, having realized that she is much too far away to hear them. Neither does he cry out. He just goes and stands by the father, and takes his thin old hand in his; and together they gaze on that poor temple, out of which the spirit that was so much too lovely for it has fleeted. Later on they tell him how it came about; later on, when they are all sitting huddled in the little dark _salon_. Cecilia is the spokeswoman, and Sybilla puts in sobbing corrections now and again.

"She was sitting up the moment before; the nurse was holding her propped up--she said she was so tired of lying. She had been quite laughing, the nurse said."

"Almost laughing," corrects Sybilla, who has forgotten to lie down upon her sofa, and is sitting on a hard chair like anyone else.

"Quite laughing," continues Cecilia, "at her own arm for being so thin.

She had pushed up her sleeve to look at it, and had said something--something quite funny, only the nurse could not remember the exact words--and then, all in a minute, she called out, in quite an altered voice, 'The salts! Quick! Quick!' and her head just fell back, and she was gone!"

"And she had not bid one of us good-bye!" cries Sybilla, breaking into a loud wail.

Then comes a dreadful and incongruous flash of that ridiculous, which is the underlining to all our tragedies, across Jim's mind at this last lament. The going, "taking no farewell," naturally seems to Sybilla the most terrible feature in the whole case, to her who has so repeatedly taken heartrending last farewells of her family.

"Who would ever have thought that I should have survived her?" pursues Sybilla, still sobbing noisily, and without the least attempt at self-control. Cecilia, who is sitting with her head on her arms resting on the table, lifts her tear-blurred face and answers this apostrophe in a voice choked with weeping.

"Jim always did; he always said that you would see us all out."

Again that dreadful impulse towards mirth a.s.sails Burgoyne. Is it possible that, at such an hour, he can feel a temptation to laugh out loud? But, later again, this horrible mood pa.s.ses; later, when they have all grown more composed, when their tears run more gently, when their voices are less suffocated, and they are telling each other little anecdotes of her, aiding each other's memories to recall half-effaced traits of her homely kindness, of her noiseless self-denials, of her deep still piety.

They bring out her photographs, mourning over their being so few, and such old and long-ago ones. There are effigies by the dozen of Cecilia, and even touching presentments of Sybilla stretched in wasted grace upon her day bed; but it had never occurred to anyone--least of all to Amelia herself--that there is any need for _her_ image to be perpetuated. And now they are searching out, as treasures most precious, the scanty faded likenesses that exist of her, planning how they can be enlarged, and repeated, and daintily framed, and generally done homage and tender reverence to.

Jim listens, occasionally putting in a low word or two, when appealed to to confirm or correct the details of some little story about her. But it seems to him as if his anguish only begins when the stream of their reminiscences turns into the channel of her love for him.

"Oh, Jim, she _was_ fond of you! We were none of us anywhere, compared to you; she wors.h.i.+pped the ground you trod upon. We all knew--did not we, Sybilla?--did not we, father?--when you used to be away for so long, and wrote to her so seldom----Oh, I know!"--hastily--"that you were not to blame, that you were in out-of-the-way places, where there was no post: but there were sometimes long gaps between your letters; and we always knew--did not we?--when she had heard from you by her face, long before she spoke."

Next it is--

"How she fired up if anyone said anything slightingly of you: she never cared in the least if one abused herself; she always thought she quite deserved it; but if anybody dared to say the least disparaging thing of _you_"--it is pretty evident, though at the moment in his agony of preoccupation the idea does not occur to Jim, that this has not been an uncommon occurrence--"she was like a lioness at once."

"The saddest thing of all," says Sybilla, taking up the antiphonal strain, "is that she should have died just as she was beginning to be so happy!"

_Just beginning to be so happy?_ And he might have made her heavenly happy so easily, since she asked so little--for eight years. The groan he utters is low in proportion to the depth of the fountain whence it springs, and they do not hear it. If they did, they would in mercy stop; instead, they go on.

"Did you ever see anything so radiant as she was--that last fortnight?

She used to say that she was quite ashamed of being so much more fortunate than anyone else, she seemed always trying to make up to us for not being so happy as she. Oh, she was happy that last fortnight!"

This time he does not groan, he seems to himself to have pa.s.sed into that zone of suffering which cannot be expressed or alleviated by the utterance of any sound. Perhaps, by-and-by, Cecilia dimly divines something, some faint shadow of what he is enduring; for she begins with well-intentioned labour to try to a.s.sert lamely that Amelia had always been happy, well, _fairly_ happy, as happy as most people. You could not expect, in this dreadful world, to be always in the best of spirits, but she had never complained. And, oh! that last fortnight she _had_ been happy, it was a pleasure to see her! And, oh, what a comfort it must be now to Jim to think that it was all owing to him.

She puts out her hand kindly to him as she speaks, and he takes it, and silently wrings it in acknowledgment of the endeavour--however clumsy--to lay balm upon that now immedicable wound.

He stays most of the night with them; and when at length, overcome with weariness and sorrow, they rise from their grief-stricken postures to go to bed, he kisses them all solemnly, even the old man. He has never kissed any of them before, except once or twice Cecilia on some return of his from the Antipodes, and because she seemed to expect it.

Three days later Burgoyne leaves Florence; and, as his arrival in the City of Flowers had been motived by Amelia alive, so is his departure to companion her dead.