Alas! Part 9

"I do not think that I contradicted you," she answers, smiling.

He may steal another look at Elizabeth now. She is not crying any longer. Indeed, despite the real moisture on her cheeks, she strikes him as looking happier than at their last meeting; and though the interval between now and then is too short for any such alteration to have taken place in reality, yet he cannot help imagining that the hollows in those very cheeks are less deep than when they stood together before the great Vand.y.k.e in the Brignoli Sala Palace.

"And the _entresol_? is it all your fancy painted it?" he asks quickly, feeling a sort of panic fear, that if he stops putting questions for one minute they will slip out of his grasp again, as they did in the Genoese Palace.

Elizabeth's face breaks into a soft bright smile. She has a dimple in one cheek and not in the other. She must have had it ten years ago; how comes he to have forgotten so sweet and strange a peculiarity?

"It is delightful--perfectly delightful!"

"Large enough to receive your friends in, after all?"

But the moment that the words are out of his mouth, he perceives that he has made a false step, and is somehow treading dangerous ground.

Elizabeth's smile goes out, like a light blown into nothingness by a sudden wind.

"We have not many friends," she murmurs; "we--we are not going out at all."

He hastens to change his cue.

"Byng and I are at the Minerva," he says, beginning to talk very fast; "I wonder if, by any chance, you are in our neighbourhood; have I forgotten, or did you never tell me where the _entresol_ lies? Where is it, by-the-bye?"

Ensnared by the wily and brazen suddenness of this demand, Miss Le Marchant has evidently no evasion ready, and, after an almost imperceptible pause of hesitation, answers:

"We are at 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio."

She is looking doubtfully and half uneasily in his face, as she gives this answer, but he has scarcely time for a flash of self-congratulation at having obtained the information, which he had never realized the eagerness of his desire for until this moment, before he becomes aware that his interlocutor's eyes are no longer meeting his, but have wandered to some object over his shoulder. What that object is he is not long left in doubt. Whether it is a genuine accident, or one of those spurious ones, of which those who profit by them are the artificers, Jim does not know; and, as he is at the time, and will be when he thinks of the circ.u.mstance to the end of his life, too angry to question Byng on the subject, it is pretty certain that he never _will_ know; but so it is that at this moment the voice of his _protege_ breaks upon his ear:

"You are not going to give us the slip like this, old chap--oh! I beg your pardon!"

But begging pardon ever so sweetly does not alter the fact that he has rushed, like a bull in a china shop, into the middle of the dialogue.

All four look at each other for a second; then, since there is no help for it, Jim presents his disciple, and the next moment the latter has slid into talk with Elizabeth, and she is responding with an ease and freedom from embarra.s.sment such as had never marked her spa.r.s.e and hardly won utterances to the elder man.

Byng has the advantage of him, as he somewhat bitterly thinks. Byng has no connection with "old times;" those poor old times which she and her mother have so unaccountably taken _en grippe_. He seems suddenly relegated, as by some natural affinity, to the mother. On their two last meetings the eagerness to converse has been all on his side; yet now he has nothing to say to her. It is she who addresses him.

"I hope that you found your young lady flouris.h.i.+ng," she says civilly.

He gives a slight inward start, though--as he is thankful to feel--his body is quiet. "His young lady!" Yes, of course he has a young lady! Has there been any danger during the last five minutes of his forgetting that fact? and has Mrs. Le Marchant done him an unnecessary service in recalling it?

"Oh, yes, thanks, she is all right!"

"Is she still in Florence?"

"Yes, she is here; by-the-bye"--looking round with a sudden sense that he ought to have missed her--"what has become of her? Oh, here she is!"

For even while the words are on his lips, Amelia and Cecilia come into sight. Amelia with a shut Baedeker, and the serene look of an easy conscience and a thoroughly performed duty on her amiable face; Cecilia with a something of search and disquiet in her large rolling eye, which would have made him laugh at another time.

A sudden instinct, with which his will has nothing to do, makes him flash a look back at Mrs. Le Marchant, as if to gauge the effect produced upon her by his betrothed; and, following her glance, he finds that it is resting on Cecilia. She thinks that he is engaged to Cecilia.

The mistake is intolerable to him, and yet a second's reflection tells him that it is a natural one. In a second he sees his Amelia as she presents herself to a strange eye. Miss Wilson is only thirty-one, but upon her has already come that set solid look of middle age, which overtakes some women before they are well over the borders of youth, and which other women manage to stave off till they are within near hail of forty. Yes; the mistake is quite a natural one. Most people would suppose that the showy Cecilia, still fairly youthful, and with so many obvious and well-produced "points," must be his choice; and yet, as I have said, the idea that anyone should credit him with her owners.h.i.+p is intolerable to him.

"Here she is!" he cries precipitately. "The one to the right side, the other is her sister; may I--may I present them to you?"

Perhaps it is his irritated fancy that dictates the idea, but it seems to him as if he detected a sort of surprise in Mrs. Le Marchant's face, when he effects the introduction he has proposed, and to which she accedes courteously, after a pause of hesitation about as long as had followed his inquiry of Elizabeth as to their address.

Five minutes later they have all sauntered out again on the terrace, and Burgoyne is again leaning on the wall; but this time he has no fear of hearing of Bayswater, for it is Elizabeth who is beside him. Since last he looked at it half an hour ago, a sort of glorification has pa.s.sed over the divine view. Down where the river twists through the plain country, there is a light, dainty mist, but the mountains have put on their fullest glory. They are not green, or brown, or purple, or blue; but clad in that ineffable raiment woven by the sun, that defies our weak vocabulary to provide it with a name. A little snow-chain lies on the sun-warmed neck of Morello, and along the tops of the further Apennines, right against the acute blue of the heavens, lies a line of snow, that looks like a fleece-soft cloud resting from its journeyings on their crests; but it is no cloud, nor is there any speck upon the gigantic complete arch that over-vaults town and valley and radiant mountains. In the folds of these last, the shadows slumber; but over all the city is the great gold glory of spring. The one thing in Florence that frowns among so many smiles is the scowling Pitti, and that, from here, is invisible. Nearer to him, against the azure, stand the solemn flame-shaped cypresses arow, and beside them--as unlike as life to death--a band of quivering poplars, a sort of transparent gold-green in their young spring livery. The air is so clear that one can go nigh to counting the marbles on the Duomo walls. In a more transparent amber light, fuller of joy and gaiety, cannot the saved be dancing around, as in Fra Angelico's divine picture? cannot they be walking in the New Jerusalem of St. John's great dream? Only in the New Jerusalem there are no galled and trembling-kneed fiacre horses.

Elizabeth is sitting on the wall, her light figure--is it possible that it has been in the world only four years less than Amelia's solid one?--half-supported by one small gray hand outspread on the stone; her little fine features all tremulous with emotion, and half a tear gathered again in each sweet eye. As Jim looks at her, a sort of cold covetous gripe pinches his heart.

"What a woman with whom to look at all earth's loveliness--with whom to converse without speech!"

Even as he so thinks, she turns her head towards him, and, drawing in her breath with a long low sigh, says:

"Oh, how glad I am I did not die before to-day!"

Her eyes are turned towards him, and yet, as once before, he realizes that it is not to him that either her look or her thoughts are directed.

Both are aimed at an object over his shoulder, and, as before, that object is Byng. Byng, too, has been gazing at the view. There are tears in Byng's eyes also. Stevenson says that some women like a man who cries. Byng cries easily and genuinely, and enjoys it; and, as he is a remarkably fine young man, there is something piquant in the contrast between his wet blue orbs and his shoulders.

As Burgoyne rolls home that afternoon in his fiacre, as before, placed opposite Amelia, his mental vision is no longer fixed upon a "double-barrelled, central fire, breech-loading gun;" it is fixed with a teasing tenacity upon the figure of a smallish woman, perennially looking, through brilliant tears, over his shoulder at somebody else.

CHAPTER IX.

"Was it 12, or 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio?"

There are no tears in Byng's eyes as he asks this question next morning--asks it of his friend, as the latter sits in the Fumoir, with an English paper in his hands, and a good cigar between his clean-shaven lips. It has struck him several times lately that he will have to give up good cigars, and take to a churchwarden pipe and s.h.a.g instead. But, so far, the churchwarden and the s.h.a.g remain in the future.

"12, or 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio?" inquires Byng.

"Was _what_ 12 or 12 bis?" replies his friend, with a somewhat obviously intentional obtuseness; but Byng is far too thoroughly healthy and happy a young animal this morning to take offence easily.

"I mean Miss Le Marchant's address," he answers, explaining as amiably as if he had not been perfectly aware that it was only "cussedness" that had dictated the query.

There is a slight pause. Burgoyne would like to answer that he does not remember--would like still more to answer that he does not see what business it can be of Byng's; but, since he is not dest.i.tute of common-sense, a second's reflection shows him that he has no good reason for either the lie or the incivility, so he replies, pretty calmly, with his eyes still on his leading article:

"I believe Miss Le Marchant said 12 bis."

Having obtained the information he wanted, and finding his companion not conversationally disposed, Byng is moving away again, when he is arrested by Jim's voice, adding to the intelligence he has just given the monosyllable:

"Why?"

"Why what?" asks Byng, returning readily, and laughingly mimicking the intentional obtuseness so lately practised on himself by the other.

"Why did you ask?"

"I am thinking of paying my respects there this afternoon, and I did not want to ring at the wrong bell."

A short silence. Jim's head is partly hidden by his _Galignani_.