Alas! Part 5

"And are you really glad to see me again?" asks the woman--she is scarcely a girl, having the doubtful advantage of being her betrothed's senior by two years. The horsehair chairs are obviously powerless to take the edge off her bliss; and she can scarcely command her voice as she asks the question.

"I decline to answer all such futile inquiries," replies he, smiling not unkindly; but there is no tremor in his voice. "Even if I did not discourage them on principle, I should have no time to answer them to-day; I have so much to say to you that I do not know where to begin."

"After ten months that is not very surprising," rejoins she, with a stifled sigh. There is no sentimental reproach in her words or tone; but in both lurks a note of wistfulness which gives his conscience a p.r.i.c.k.

"Of course not! of course not!" he rejoins hastily; "but it is not really ten months--no, surely----"

"Ten months, one week, two days, four hours and a half!"

Against such exact.i.tude of memory what appeal has he? He attempts none, and only thinks with a faint unjust irritation that she might have spared him the odd hours.

"And how are things going? How are you all getting on?" he asks, precipitating himself upon a fresh subject, since he feels prevented by circ.u.mstances from saying anything likely to bring him much distinction upon the old one. "Your father?"

"His throat is better"--with an accent of hesitating filial piety, as if there were something else about him that was not better.

"And Sybilla?"

"Oh, poor Sybilla! she has her bad days now and then."

"And, like the early Christians, she resolves to have all things in common. I expect that her family have their bad days too," says Jim dryly.

"Well, we do sometimes," replies Amelia with reluctant admission; "but she really does try to control herself, poor thing; she is hardly ever unbearable now."

"And Cecilia?"

"She is rather in trouble just now; I fear there is no doubt that the man she was engaged to has thrown her over. You never saw him? Oh no! Of course, the affair came on after you left England."

Burgoyne's eyebrows have gone up, and his face has a.s.sumed an expression less of surprise than admiration at this piece of news.

"How many does that make? Four? Well, courage! There is luck in odd numbers; perhaps she will land the fifth."

"She will tell you about it herself," says Amelia; "she tells everybody; she likes talking about it--it is very odd, but she does. When you throw me over"--rubbing his hand which she holds, with shy and deprecating caressingness, against her own cheek--"I shall tell n.o.body; I shall keep my misfortune very dark."

"When I do!" repeats he with laughing emphasis; but to his own ear both the emphasis and the laughter sound flat. This is perhaps the cause why he, a second time, runs away from his subject; or, more probably, he is really in haste to get to the new one. "Meanwhile," he says, his eyes involuntarily dropping to the carpet, as if he had rather not see the effect of his words upon her; "meanwhile, someone has thrown me over."

"You?"

"Yes, me; I did not write it to you, because I do not see much use in putting down bad news in black and white, and even with this little delay, I am afraid," with a dry smile, "that you will have plenty of time to enjoy it."

He pauses for an instant, and she does not hurry him with any teasing questions; but waits, with meek patience, till he feels inclined to go on.

"My aunt is going to be married."

If he has wished that his news shall produce the effect of a torpedo, he has no cause to complain of his want of success. His placid Amelia vaults to her feet.

"Married!" she repeats with a gasp. "Why, she is quite, quite old!"

"She is sixty-five!"

The colour has flooded all Amelia's face; the blazing colour that means not pleasure, but consternation. It is some moments before she can frame her next query.

"And is he?--do you?--has she chosen wisely, I mean?"

Jim laughs again.

"Can one choose wisely at sixty-five? Well, whether she has or no is a matter of opinion; she has chosen the curate of the parish, who, by reason of his extreme juvenility, is still in deacon's orders."

Miss Wilson's limbs are shaking so that she cannot maintain her standing att.i.tude. She sinks down by the dining-table again in her hard chair. It is a very hard chair on which to receive such ill news.

"And cannot you hinder it, cannot you dissuade her?" she asks falteringly.

"I shall not try; poor old woman! After all, she has a right to pursue her own happiness in her own way, only I wish that she had made up her mind twenty years ago; though, to be sure, how could she?"--with another smile--"since, at that time, her bridegroom was not much more than born."

A dead silence supervenes--a silence of shocked stupefaction on the one side, of rather dismal brooding on the other. At length Amelia nerves herself to put a question upon which it seems to her, not very incorrectly, that her whole future hangs. She does it in such a low voice that none but very sharp ears could have caught it. Jim's ears are so; practised as they are in listening for the stealthy tread of wild animals, and for the indescribable sounds of mountain solitudes at night.

"Will it--will it--make a great difference to you?"

Burgoyne lifts his eyes, which have been idly bent on the floor, and looks straight and full at her across the corner of the table.

"It will make all the difference!" he answers slowly.

Poor Amelia is holding her handkerchief in her hand. She lifts it to her mouth and bites a corner of it to hide the quivering of her lips and chin. She does not wish to add to his pain by any breakdown on her own part. But Jim divines the quivering even under the morsel of cambric, and looks away again.

"Her money is almost entirely in her own power," he continues, in an unemotional voice; "and when she announced her marriage to me, she also announced her intention of settling the whole of it upon her--her"--he pauses a second, as if resolved to keep out of his voice the accent of satire and bitterness that pierces through its calm--"her husband."

Amelia has dropped both s.h.i.+elding hand and handkerchief into her lap.

She has forgotten her effort to conceal the blankness of her dismay.

Unless she conceals the whole of her face, indeed, the attempt would be in vain, since each feature speaks it equally.

"Her whole fortune?" she repeats, almost inaudibly. "_All?_"

"What, all my pretty chickens and their dam?"

says Jim, oppressed by her overwhelmed look into an artificial and dreary levity, and in not particularly apt quotation. "My dear, do not look so broken-hearted. I am not absolutely dest.i.tute; I need not become a sandwich man. I have still got my 800 a year, my very own, which neither man nor mouse, neither curate nor vicar, can take from me. I can still go on rioting upon that; the question is"--his words coming more slowly, and his tone growing graver--"have I any right to ask you to riot on it too?"

Her hand has gone in feverish haste out to his for answer, and her eyes, into which the tears are welling, look with an intense dumb wistfulness into his; but, for the moment, it remains dumb. There is something painful to Burgoyne in that wistfulness, almost more painful than the telling of that news which has produced it. He looks down upon the tablecloth, and, with his disengaged hand, the one not imprisoned in his betrothed's fond hold, draws patterns with a paper-knife accidentally left there.

"The one thing that I blame her for," he continues, not following up the branch of the subject that his last speech had begun to open up, and speaking with a composure which, to the stricken Amelia, appears to evidence his attainment of the highest pinnacle of manly fort.i.tude, "the only thing I blame her for, is her having hindered my adopting any profession. Poor old woman, it was not malice prepense, I know; she had not seen her Jessamey then, probably had not even a prophetic instinct of him, but as things turned out"--stifling a sigh--"it would have been kinder to have put me in the way of earning my own living."

Amelia's head has sunk down upon his hand--he feels her hot tears upon it; but now that the theme has no longer reference to herself, she can speak. She straightens herself, and there is a flash, such as he has very seldom seen there, in her rather colourless...o...b...

"It was monstrous of her!" she cries, with the almost exaggerated pa.s.sion of a usually very self-controlled person. "After having always told you that you were to be her heir!"

"But _had_ she told me so?" replies Jim, pa.s.sing his hand with a perplexed air over his own face. "That is what I have been trying to recall for the last few days. I never remember the time when I did not believe it, so I suppose that someone must have told me so; but I could not swear that she herself had ever put it down in black and white.

However," tossing his head back with a gesture as of one who throws off his shoulders a useless burden, "what does that matter now? I am not her heir, I am n.o.body's heir; we must look facts in the face! Amelia, dear"--in a tone of reluctant tender affection, as of one compelled, yet most unwilling, to give a little child, or some other soft, helpless creature, pain--"we must look facts in the face!" There is something in his voice that makes Amelia's heart stand still; but she attempts no interruption.

"It is very hard for me, dear, after all these"--he pauses a second; he is about to say "weary years' waiting," but his conscience arrests him; to him they have not been weary, so, after a hardly-perceptible break, he goes on--"after all these many years' waiting, to have come to this, is not it?"