Alas! A Novel

And meanwhile, how many times has he been within the portals of the Anglo-Américain? With all his arithmetic he cannot make it more than twice. This neglect of his betrothed, however, is not of quite so monstrous a cast as at the first blush it may appear. It is she herself who, true to her life-long principle of shielding him from all disagreeable experiences, has forbidden him her door. He can aid her neither to bandage her father's swollen foot in the severe gout-fit under which he is groaning, nor to allay Sybilla's mysterious sufferings, which always display a marked increase in acuteness whenever any other member of the family shows a disposition to set up claims as an invalid. Cecilia, indeed, is ready enough to give her help in nursing her father, but she has on former occasions shown such an unhappy aptitude for tumbling over his swathed and extended leg, and upsetting his physic all over him, that she is received with such objurgations as his cloth will permit, so often as she shows her short nose within his sick-room. Only twice in a whole week. Can Amelia have wished to be taken quite so literally when she had bidden him stay away? There is only one answer possible to this question, and he shows his consciousness of it by at once raising himself out of the chair in which he is sunk, and turning his steps hastily towards her.

It is morning. The east wind is clean gone, and the streets are full of the scent of the innumerable lilies of the valley, of which everybody's hands are full. He stops a minute and buys a great sheaf for a miraculously small sum, from one of the unnumbered sellers. It shall make his peace for him, if indeed it needs making, which it has never done yet. He almost smiles at the absurdity of the suggestion. He finds Cecilia alone in the sitting-room, Cecilia sitting by the window reading the Queen. Upon her large pink face there is a puzzled expression, which is perhaps to be accounted for by the fact that the portion of the journal which she is perusing is that entitled "Etiquette," and under it are the answers to last week's questions, upon nice points of social law, which, if you do not happen to have read the questions, have undoubtedly an enigmatical air, as in the following instances: "Your husband takes the Baronet's daughter, and you follow with the Prince." – "We do not understand your question – babies never dine out," etc.

Upon Jim's entrance Cecilia lays down her paper, and at once offers to go in search of her sister, with whom she shortly returns. He had been quite right. There is no peace to make. Amelia greets him with her usual patient and perfectly unrancorous smile, but his second glance at her tells him that she is looking old and fagged. It is only in very early youth that vigils and worries and self-denials do not write their names upon the skin.

"How – how pale you are!" he says. If he had given utterance to the word that hovered on his lips, he would have cried, "how yellow!"

"It would be very odd if she did not," says Cecilia with a shrug, looking up from her "Etiquette," to which she has returned; "she has sat up three nights with father, and last evening Sybilla bid us all good-bye. You know she never can bear anybody else to be ill, and when father has the gout she bids us all good-bye – and Amelia is always taken in and sheds torrents of tears – do not you, Amelia?"

Amelia has subsided rather wearily into a chair. "She really thinks that she is dying," says she apologetically – "and who knows? some day perhaps it may come true."

"Not it," rejoins her sister, with an exasperated sniff "she will see us all out – will not she, Jim?"

"I have not the remotest doubt of it," replies he heartily; and then his conscience-struck eyes revert to his betrothed's wan face, all the plainer for its wanness. "No sleep, no fresh air," in an injured tone, checking off the items on his fingers.

"But I have had fresh air," smiling at him with pale affection; "one day Mrs. Byng took me out for a drive. Mrs. Byng has been very kind to me."

She does not lay the faintest invidious accent on the name, as if contrasting it with another whose owner had been so far less kind; it is his own guilty heart that supplies the emphasis. His only resource is an anger which – so curiously perverse is human nature – is not even feigned.

"You can go out driving with Mrs. Byng then, though you could not spare time to come out with me," he says in a surly voice.

She does not defend herself but her lower lip trembles.

"Come out with me now," he cries, remorse giving a harshness even to the tone of the sincerely-meant invitation. "You look like a geranium in a cellar; it is a divine day, a day to make the old feel young, and the young immortal; come out and stay out with me all day. I will take you wherever you like. I will – "

The genuine eagerness of his proposal has tinged her sickly-coloured cheek with a healthier hue for the moment, but she shakes her head.

"I could not leave father this morning; he will not take his medicine from anyone else, and he likes me to sit with him while he eats his arrowroot."

The only sign of approval of this instance of filial piety given by Jim is that he rises and begins to stamp irritably about the room.

"He is really not at all exacting," continues Amelia in anxious deprecation; "he was quite pleased just now when I told him that Mrs. Byng was going to take me to a party at the Villa Schiavone this afternoon. He said – "

"Mrs. Byng! Mrs. Byng again!"

This is not what Mr. Wilson said, but is the expression of the unjust wrath which Burgoyne, feeling it much pleasanter to be angry with someone else than himself is artificially and not unsuccessfully fostering. Again Amelia's lip quivers.

"I thought," she says gently, "if – if you have no other engagement this afternoon; if – if you are free – "

Nothing can be milder than the form which this suggestion takes, and yet there is something in its shape that provokes him.

"Free!" he interrupts tartly, "of course I am free! Have I a gouty father and a hysteric sister? Why should not I be free?"

"I am very glad to hear it," rejoins she – the light that his first proposal to take her out had brought into her face growing brighter and more established – "because in that case there is nothing to prevent your meeting us at the villa, and – "

"And seeing you and Mrs. Byng walking about with your arms round each other's necks, like a couple of schoolgirls," cries he, with a sort of spurious grumpiness.

"I can't think why you should object to Amelia walking about with her arm round Mrs. Byng's neck," says Cecilia, whose attention to her "Etiquette" is apparently not so absorbing but that she has some to spare for the conversation going on in her neighbourhood.

They all laugh a little; and harmony being restored, and Jim graciously vouchsafing to forgive Amelia for having ignored her for a sennight, she returns to her patient, and he to his hotel, where he is at once, contrary to his wish, pounced upon by Byng.

For some reason, which he would be puzzled to explain to himself, he has for the last week rather avoided his friend's company – a task rendered easier by the disposition manifested by the young man's mother to monopolize him, a disposition to which Burgoyne has felt no inclination to run counter. It is without enthusiasm that he receives Byng's expressions of pleasure in their accidental meeting.

"I have been searching for you, high and low."

"Have you?"

"Where have you been?"

"I have been to the Anglo-Américain" – with a flash of inward self-congratulation at this query having been put to-day, instead of yesterday, or the day before. The other looks disappointed.

"To the Anglo-Américain? I thought – I hoped; have you – seen them lately?"

Burgoyne has ceased to feign lack of understanding to whom the personal pronoun refers, and he answers with as much carelessness as at a moment's notice he can put on: "Why, yes, I have, once or twice."

"Do they – do not they think it strange of me not to have been near them all this time?"

"They may do" – dryly.

"They did not say so?"

"They did not; perhaps" – sarcastically – "the subject was too acutely painful for them to allude to."

Frequently as he has exposed himself to them, his Mentor's sneers never fail to send the crimson racing into Byng's face, and it finds its way there now. It does not, however, prevent his proceeding, after a confused moment or two, with his anxious catechism.

"She – she has not referred to the subject?"

"What subject?"

"To – to me?"

"She has never mentioned your name. Stay" – his veracity winning a reluctant victory over his ill-nature – "one day she said that you were sunshiny, and that she liked sunshine."

As he speaks he looks down at his boots, too unaffectedly annoyed at the justification of Elizabeth's epithet which its retailing has worked on Byng's countenance to be able to contemplate him with any decent patience. But there is enough evidence in the boy's voice of the effect wrought upon him by Miss Le Marchant's adjective to make his comrade repent very heartily of having repeated it.

"I should have been over," says Byng in a low eager way, "every day, every hour, as often as they would have received me, only that I could not leave my mother; and she – she has taken them en grippe!"

"En grippe? Your mother?" repeats Jim, too honestly and disagreeably startled by this piece of news to be able any longer to maintain his ironical manner; "why?"

The other shrugs his shoulders dispiritedly.

"I have not an idea; it cannot be because they did not seem to wish to be introduced to her at the Accademia the other day; she is quite incapable of such pettiness, and she admired HER so tremendously at first, did not she? You heard her; but since then she has taken it into her head that there is something – I cannot bear even to say it" – dashing his hat and gloves vehemently upon the table – "something louche, as she calls it, about her. Mother thinks that she – she – she" – sinking his voice to an indistinct half-whisper – "has – has gone off the rails some time or other. Can you conceive?" – raising his tone again to one of the acutest pain and indignation – "that anyone – any human being could look in her face and harbour such a notion for a single instant?"

He stares with eyes ablaze with wrathful pity at his friend's face, expecting an answering outbreak to his own; but none such comes. Burgoyne only says, in a not much more assured key than that which the young man had employed:

"How – how can such an idea have got into your mother's head?"

"I do not know, but it is there; and what I wanted you, what I have been searching everywhere for you for, is to ask you to – to set her right, at once, without any delay. It is unbearable that she should go on thinking such things, and nothing could be easier for you, who know them so well, who know all about them!"

Burgoyne is at first too much stupefied by this appeal, and by the impossibility of answering it in a satisfactory manner, to make any response at all; but at length:

"Know all about them?" he says, in a voice whose surface impatience hides a much profounder feeling. "Who dares ever say that he knows all about any other living soul? How many times must I tell you that, until we met at Genoa, I had not set eyes on Miss Le Marchant for ten good years?"

At the tone of this speech, so widely different from the eager acceptance of the suggested task which he had expected, Byng's face takes on a crestfallen, almost frightened look.

"But when you knew them," he says, "in Devonshire, they – they were all right then, were not they? they were well thought of? – there was nothing against them?"

"Good Heavens – no!" replies Jim heartily, thankful that the appeal is now so worded as to enable him to give a warm testimony in favour of his poor friends. "There was not a family in all the neighbourhood that stood so high. Everybody loved them; everybody had a good word for them."

Byng's countenance clears a little.

"And there is no reason – you have no reason for supposing anything different now?"

Jim stirs uneasily in his chair. Can he truthfully give the same convinced affirmative to this question as to the last? It is a second or two before he answers it at all.

"The facts of life are enough for me; I do not trouble myself with its suppositions."

He gets up and walks towards the door as he speaks, resolved to bring to an end this to him intolerable catechism.

"But you must have an opinion – you must think," cries the other's voice, persistently pursuing him. He turns at bay, with the door-handle in his hand, his eyes lightening.

"I asked her permission to bring Amelia to see her," he says, in a low moved voice; "if I had thought as ill of her as your mother does, do you think I should have done that?"

CHAPTER XIX

Camille. – "Que me conseilleriez-vous de faire le jour où je verrais que vous ne m'aimez plus?"

There is no greater fiction than that for time to go quickly implies that it must needs go pleasantly. Jim has seldom spent a more disagreeable period than the hours which follow his conversation with Byng, and which he passes in his own bedroom, with his elbows on the window-ledge, looking blankly out at the Piazza, and at the great "Bride" of Arnolpho's planning, the church of Santa Maria Novella. And yet, when the city clocks, which have chimed unnoticed by him several times, at length convey to his inattentive ear what the hour is, he starts up, shocked and confused at its lateness. He had meant to have reached the Villa Schiavone in time to receive Amelia, and now she must have long preceded him, and be attributing his tardiness to some fresh neglect and indifference. In five minutes he has rearranged his dress, and jumped into a fiacre. Through the Porta Romana, and up between the straight row of still and inky cypresses, up and up to where the villa door, promising so little and performing so much, opens as so many do, straight upon the road.

The day has changed its ravishing blue gaiety for a pensive cloudy gloom, and the guests at the villa are walking about without any sunshades. They are numerous, though few indeed in comparison of the Banksia roses on the laden wall, over which, too, a great wistaria – put in, as the host with a just pride relates, only last year – is hanging and flinging its lilac abundance. And seen above its clusters, and above the wall, what a view from this raised terrace! Jim is really in a hurry to find Amelia, and yet he cannot choose but stop to look at it – from Galileo's tower on the right, to where, far down the plain of the Arno, Carrara loses itself in mist. It is all dark at first, sullen, purple-gray, without variation or stir – city, Duomo, Arno, Fiesole, and all her chain of sister-hills – one universal frown over every slope and jag, over street and spire, over Campanile with its marbles, and Santa Croce with its dead. But now, as it draws on towards sun-setting, in the western sky there comes a beginning of light, a faint pale tint at first, but quickly broadening across the firmament, while the whole huge cloud canopy is drawn aside like a curtain, and, as a great bright eye from under bent brows, the lowering sun sends arrows of radiance over plain, and river, and city. All of a sudden there is a vertical rain of dazzling white rays on the plain, and the olive shadows, merged all the afternoon in the universal gray, fall long and soft upon the blinding green of the young corn. He has forgotten Amelia. Oh, that that other, that creature herself made out of sun-rays and sweet rain-drops, were beside him, her pulses beating, as they so surely would, to his tune, her whole tender being quivering with delicate joy at this heavenly spectacle.

Someone touches him on the shoulder, and he starts violently. Has the intensity of his invocation called her spirit out of her light body, and is she indeed beside him?

"What a bad conscience you must have! Did you think that I was a bailiff?" cries Mrs. Byng, laughing.

"Where is Amelia?" he asks, rather curtly, the memory of Byng's communication about his mother being too fresh in his mind to make it possible for him to answer her in her own rallying key. "What have you done with Amelia?"

"What a 'Stand-and-deliver' tone!" says she, laughing still, but looking not unnaturally surprised. "Well, where is she?" glancing round. "She was here five minutes ago with Willy. Poor Amelia!" lowering her voice to a more confidential key. "I am so glad you have come at last; she is patience personified. I must congratulate you upon the excellent training into which you have got her, but I think that she was beginning to look a little anxious."

"And I think that you have been giving the reins to your imagination, as usual," replies he, walking off in a huff.

There is another delightful garden at the back of the villa, and there, having failed to find her in the first, he now with growing irritation at her for not being more immediately conspicuous, seeks Amelia. It is a sheltered leisurely paradise, where white rose-trees, with millions of bursting buds, are careering over the walls in leafy luxuriance, where double wallflowers – bloody warriors, one should call them, if one could connect any warlike idea with this Eden of scented peace – stocks in fragrant row are flowering as we Britons never see them flower in our chary isle, save in the plates of a Gardeners' Chronicle. But among them he finds no trace of his homely English blossom. He finds, indeed, him who had been named as her late companion, Byng; but it is not with Amelia, but with one of the pretty young daughters of the house that he is pacing the straight walk in lively dialogue. Jim accosts him formally:

"I understood that Miss Wilson was with you? Do you happen to know where she is?"

Byng stops short in his leisurely pacing.

"Why, where is she?" he says, looking round, as his mother had done, but with a more guilty air. "She was here five minutes ago. Where can she have disappeared to?"

It is but too obvious that in greeting and being greeted by their numerous acquaintances, both poor Amelia's chaperon and that chaperon's son have completely forgotten her existence. Always nervously afraid of being burdensome, Jim feels convinced from what he knows of her character that she is going about in unobtrusive forlornness, the extreme smallness of her Florentine acquaintances making it unlikely that she has found anyone to supply the place of the friends who have become so entirely oblivious of her. The conviction, pricking his conscience as he hastens contritely away from the vainly-repentant Byng, lends speed and keenness to his search. But thorough and earnest as it is, it is for some time quite unsuccessful. She makes one of no group, she loiters under no Banksia rose-bower, she is no gazer from the terrace at gold-misted valley or aureoled town, she is to be found neither in hidden nook, nor evident path. She is not beneath the loggia, she is nowhere out-of-doors. She must then, in her loneliness, have taken refuge in the house. He finds himself in a long, noble room, with a frescoed ceiling, a room full of signs of recent habitation and recent tea, but which has apparently been deserted for the sunset splendours on the terrace. He can see no single occupant. He walks slowly down it to assure himself of the fact of its entire emptiness.

By a singular and unaccountable freak of the builders, the windows are set so high in the wall that each has had to have a little raised daïs erected before it to enable the inmates to look comfortably out. Upon each small platform stands a chair or two, and low over them the curtains sweep. As he passes one recess, he notices that the drapery is stirring a little, and examining more closely, sees the tail of a well-known gown – of that gown which has met with his nearest approach to approval among Amelia's rather scanty stock – peeping from beneath the stiff rich folds of the old Italian brocade. It is the work of a second to sweep the latter aside, and discover his poor fiancée all alone, and crouching desolately in a low arm-chair. There is something so unlike her in the attitude, something so different from her usual uncomplaining, unpretending fortitude, something so disproportioned to the cause – his own careless but not criminal delay, as he supposes – in the despair evidenced by her whole pose, that he feels at once terrified and angry. In a second he, too, has stepped up on to the little platform beside her.

"Amelia!" he cries. "Amelia! What are you doing up here? With whom are you playing hide-and-seek?"

Her words and her smiles are apt to be prompt enough, Heaven knows, to spring out, answering his least hint; but now she neither speaks nor moves a muscle of her face. She scarcely starts at all at his sudden apparition and address, and no light comes across her features – those features which, now that he looks at them more closely, he sees to be set in a much more pinched pallor than even three watching nights and a week of airless worry can account for.

"Are you ill?"

"No; I am not ill."

The sting of irritation which, mixed with genuine alarm, had besieged Jim's mind on his first realizing her crouched and unnatural attitude, now entirely supersedes any other feeling. Is the accidental delay of half an hour, an hour, say even an hour and a half, enough to justify such a parade of anguish as this?

"Is it possible," he inquires, in a tone of cold displeasure, "that I am to attribute this – this state of things – to my being accidentally late? It was a mere accident: it is not like you to make a scene. I do not recognise you; I am very sorry that I was late, and that I have made you angry."

The chill reproach of his words seems to rouse her to a state more akin to her natural one, to the humble and unexacting one which is habitual to her.

"Angry!" she repeats: "angry with you for being late? Oh, you are quite mistaken! In all these years how often have I been angry with you?"

There is such a meek upbraiding in her tone that his ill-humour gives way to a vague apprehension.

"Then what is it?" he cries brusquely; "what is it all about? I think I have a right to ask you that; since I saw you last something must have happened to you to produce this extraordinary change."

She heaves a long dragging sigh.

"Something has happened to me; yes, something has happened!"

"But what – what kind of a something? I have a right to know – I insist upon knowing; tell me!"

He has grasped both her hands, whose unnatural coldness he feels even through her rather ill-fitting gloves. So strange and mean a thing is human nature that even at this moment it flashes across him, with a sense of annoyance, what bad gloves Amelia always wears. However, he is not troubled with them long, for she takes them and her cold hands quietly back.

"I will tell you, there is no question of insisting. I should have told you anyhow; but not here" – glancing nervously round the dropped curtains – "not now!"

"Why not here? Why not now?"

Her face quivers.

"I could not," she says piteously. "I do not quite know how I shall get through telling it; it must be somewhere – somewhere where it will not matter if I do break down!"

He stares at her in an unfeigned bewilderment, again slightly streaked with wrath.

"Have you gone mad, Amelia? or are you taking a leaf out of Sybilla's book? If you do not clear up this extraordinary mystification at once, I shall be compelled to believe either the one or the other."

Again her face contracts with pain.

"Oh, if it were only a mystification!" she says, with a low cry. "I cannot tell you here; it is physically impossible to me. But do not be afraid" – with an accent of bitterness, which he is quite at a loss to account for – "you shall not have long to wait; I will tell you, without fail, to-morrow; to-morrow morning, if you like. Come as early as you please, I shall be ready to tell you; and now would you mind leaving me? I want to have a few moments to myself before I see anybody – before I see Mrs. Byng; will you please leave me?"

It is so apparent that she is in deadly earnest, and resolute to have her request complied with, that he can do nothing but step dizzily down off the little daïs, feeling as if the world were turning round with him.