Alas! A Novel

She says neither yes nor no. He remains unanswered, unless the faint smile in her weary eyes and about her drooped mouth can count for a reply.

"And all because you have heard some fool say that I was tired of you?"

The tight smile spreads a little wider, and invades her pale cheeks.

"Worse than tired! sick! sick to death!"

She is looking straight before her, at the landscape simmering in the climbing sun, the divine landscape new and young as it was before duomo and bell-tower sprang and towered heavenwards. Why should her gaze dwell any more upon him? She has renounced him, her eyes must fain renounce him too. As he hears her words, as he watches her patient profile, the sole suffering thing in the universal morning joy, a great revulsion of feeling, a great compassion mixed with as large a remorse pours in torrent over his heart. These emotions are so strong that they make him deceive even himself as to their nature. It seems to him as if scales had suddenly fallen from his eyes, showing him how profoundly he prizes the now departing good, telling him that life can neither ask nor give anything better than the undemanding, selfless, boundless love about to withdraw its shelter from him. His arm steals round her waist, and not once does it flash across his mind – as, to his shame be it spoken, it has often flashed before – what a long way it has to steal!

"Am I sick of you, Amelia?"

She makes no effort to release herself. It does him no harm that she should once more rest within his clasp. But she still looks straight before her at lucent Firenze and her olives, and says three times, accompanying each repetition of the word with a sorrowful little head-shake:

"Yes! yes! YES!"

He will compel her to look at him, his own Amelia. Have not all her tender looks been his for eight long years? He puts out his disengaged hand, and with it determinately turns her poor quivering face round so as to meet his gaze.

"Am I sick of you, Amelia?"

In the emotion of the moment, it appears to him as if there were something almost ludicrously improbable and lying about that accusation, in which, when first brought against him, his guilty soul had admitted more than a grain of truth. Her faded eyes turn to his, like flowers to their sun; the veracity of his voice and of his eager gray orbs – still softened from their habitual severity by the tears that had so lately wet them – making such a hope, as, five minutes ago, she had thought never again to cherish, leap into splendid life in her sick heart.

"Is it possible?" she murmurs, almost inaudibly, "do you mean – that you are not?"

They go down the hill, past the cottages, and the incurious peasants, hand in hand, her soul running over with a deep joy; and his occupied by an unfamiliar calm, that is yet backed by an ache of remorse, and by – what else? That "else" he himself neither could nor would define. He spends the whole of that day with Amelia, both lunching and dining with her and her family; a course which calls forth expressions of unaffected surprise, not at all tinctured with malice – unless it be in the case of Sybilla, who has never been partial to him – from each of them.

"We have been thinking that Jim was going to jilt you, Amelia!" Cecilia has said with graceful badinage; nor, strange to say, has she been at all offended when Jim has retorted, with equal grace and much superior ill-nature, that on such a subject no one could speak with more authority than she.

The large white stars are making the nightly sky almost as gorgeous as the day's departed majesty had done, ere Jim finds himself back at his hotel. His intention of quietly retreating to his own room is traversed by Byng, who, having evidently been on the watch for him, springs up the stairs, three steps at a time, after him.

"Where have you been all day?" he inquires impatiently.

"At the Anglo-Américain. I wonder you are not tired of always asking the same question and receiving the same answer to it."

"I am not so sure that I should always receive the same answer," replies the other, with a forced laugh – "but stop a bit!" – seeing a decided quickening of speed in his friend's upward movements – "my mother is asking for you; she has been asking for you all the afternoon; she wants to speak to you before she goes."

"Goes?"

"Yes, she is off at seven o'clock to-morrow morning – back to England: she had a telegram to-day to say that her old aunt, the one who brought her up, has had a second stroke. No!" – seeing Jim begin to arrange his features in that decorous shape of grave sympathy which we naturally assume on such occasions – "it is no case of great grief; the poor old woman has been quite silly ever since her last attack; but mother thinks that she ought to be there, at – at the end; to look after things, and so forth."

There is an alertness, a something that expresses the reverse of regret in the tone employed by Mrs. Byng's son in this detailed account of the causes of her imminent departure, which, even if his thoughts had not already sprung in that direction, would have set Burgoyne thinking as to the mode in which the young man before him is likely to employ the liberty that his parent's absence will restore to him.

"I offered to go with her," says Byng, perhaps discerning a portion at least of his companion's disapprobation.

"And she refused?"

Byng looks down, and begins to kick the banisters – they are still on the stairs – idly with one foot.

"Mother is so unselfish that it is always difficult to make out what she really wishes; but – but I do not quite see of what use I should be to her if I did go."

There is a moment's pause; then Burgoyne speaks, in a dry, hortatory elder brother's voice:

"If you take my advice you will go home."

The disinterested counsel of wise elder brothers is not always taken in the spirit it merits; and there is no trace of docile and unquestioning acquiescence in Byng's monosyllabic —

"Why?"

"Because, if you stay here, I think you will most likely get into mischief."

The young man's usually good-humoured eyes give out a blue spark that looks rather like fight.

"The same kind of mischief that you have been getting into during the past week?" he inquires slowly.

The acquaintance with his movements evidenced by this last sentence, no less than the light they throw upon his own motives, stagger Jim, to the extent of making him accept the sneer in total silence. Is not it a richly deserved one? But the sweet-natured Byng is already repenting it; and there is something conciliatory and almost entreating in the spirit of his last remark:

"I do not know what has happened to my mother," he says, lowering his voice; "there is no one less of a mauvaise langue than she, as you know; but in the case of – " – he breaks off and begins his sentence afresh; "she has been warning me against them again; I can't find that she has any reason to go upon; but she has taken a violent prejudice against her. She says that it is one of her instincts; and you – you have done nothing towards setting her right?"

Perhaps it may be that his young friend's reported metaphor of the "hippopotamus hide" has not served to render him any dearer to Jim; but there is certainly no great suavity in his reply:

"Why should I? – it is no concern of mine."

"No concern of yours to stand by and see an angel's white robe besmirched by the foul mire of slander?" cries Byng indignantly, and lapsing into that high-flown mood which never fails to make his more work-a-day companion "see blood."

"When I come across such a disagreeable sight it will be time enough to decide whether I will interfere or not. At present I have not met with anything of the kind," returns he, resolutely putting an end to the dialogue by knocking at Mrs. Byng's portal, within which he is at once admitted.

The door of the bedroom communicating with the salon is open, and through it he sees the lady he has come to visit standing surrounded by gaping dress-baskets, strewn raiment, and scattered papers; all the uncomfortable litter that speaks of an imminent departure. She joins him at once, and, shutting the door behind her, sits down with a fagged air.

"I hear," he begins – "Willy tells me – I am very sorry to hear – "

"Oh, there is no great cause for sorrow," rejoins she quickly, as if anxious to disclaim a grief which might be supposed to check or limit her conversation – "poor dear old auntie! – the people who love her best could not wish to keep her in the state she has been in for the last year; oh, dear!" – sighing – "how very dismal the dregs of life are! do not you hope, Jim, that we shall die before we come to be 'happy releases'?"

"I do indeed," replies he gravely; "I expect to be sick – dead-sick of life long before I reach that stage of it."

He looks at her resentfully as she speaks, but she has so entirely forgotten her own application of the accented adjectives to his feelings for Amelia, that she replies only by a rather puzzled but perfectly innocent glance.

"I never was so unwilling to leave any place in my life," she goes on presently, pursuing her own train of thought; "I do not know how to describe it – a sort of presentiment."

He smiles.

"And yet I do not think that there are any owls in the Piazza to hoot under your windows!"

"Perhaps not," rejoins she, with some warmth; "but what is still more unlucky than that happened to me last night; they passed the wine the wrong way round the table at the MacIvors. I was on thorns!"

"And you think that the wine going the wrong way round the table gave your aunt a stroke?" inquires Jim, with an irritating air of asking for information.

Mrs. Byng reddens slightly.

"I think nothing of the kind; I draw no inference; I only state a fact; it is a very unlucky thing to send the wine round the wrong way: if you had not spent your life among grizzly bears and cannibals you would have known it too!"

"There are no cannibals in the Rocky Mountains," corrects Jim quietly; and then they both laugh, and recommence their talk on a more friendly footing.

"I am not at all happy about Willy."

"No?"

"It is not his health so much – his colour is good, and his appetite not bad."

"Except the Fat Boy in 'Pickwick,' I never heard of anyone who had a better."

"But he is not himself; there is something odd about him!"

"Indeed!"

"Have not you noticed it yourself? – do not you think that there is something odd about him? Does not he strike you as odd?"

"Odd?" repeats Burgoyne slowly, reflecting in how extremely commonplace a light both the virtues and vices of his fellow-traveller have always presented themselves to him; "it would never have occurred to me that Willy was odd; I cannot" – smiling – "encourage you in the idea that you have added one to the number of the world's eccentrics."

She sighs rather impatiently at his apparently intentional misunderstanding of her drift.

"'Children are avenues to misfortune,' as somebody said, and I think that, whoever he was, he was right. 'If Jacob take a wife of the daughters of Heth, such as are those in the land, what good shall my life do to me?'"

"Why should you credit Jacob with any such intention?"

"I do not half like leaving him here by himself."

"By himself? You count me as no one then?"

"Oh yes, I do – I count you as a great deal; that is why I was so anxious to speak to you before I went; of course I do not expect you to take upon yourself the whole responsibility of him, but you might keep an eye upon him."

He shrugs his shoulders.

"As I have to keep the other eye upon myself, I am afraid that the effort would but make me squint."

"It is his own generosity that I am afraid of – his self-sacrificing impulses; I am always in terror of his marrying someone out of pure good-nature, just to oblige her, just because she looked as if she wished it."

"Stevenson thinks that it does not much matter whom we marry, whether 'noisy scullions,' or 'acidulous vestals.'"

"I do not care what Stevenson thinks: ever since Willy was in Eton jackets, I have had a nightmare of his bringing me home as daughter-in-law some poor little governess with her nose through her veil, and her fingers through her gloves!"

Burgoyne smiles involuntarily as a vision of Elizabeth's daintily-clad hands flashes before his mental eye.

"I think you overrate his magnanimity; I never saw him at all tender to anyone whose gloves were not beyond suspicion."

Mrs. Byng laughs constrainedly.

"Well, if she has not holes in her gloves, she may have holes in her reputation, which is worse."

Jim draws in his breath hard. The tug of war is coming, as the preceding leading remark, lugged in by the head and shoulders, sufficiently evidences. At all events he will do nothing to make its approach easier or quicker. He awaits it in silence.

"These Le Marchants – as they are friends of yours – I suppose that I ought not to say anything against them?"

"I am sure that you are too well-bred to do anything of the kind," replies he precipitately, with a determined effort to stop her mouth with a compliment, which she is equally determined not to deserve.

"I do not think I am; I am only well-bred now and then, when it suits me; I am not going to be well-bred to-night."

"I am sorry to hear it."

"Whether they are friends of yours or not, I do not like them."

"I do not think that that matters much, either to you or to them."

"I have an instinct that they are adventuresses."

"I know for a certainty " – with growing warmth – "that they are nothing of the kind."

"Then why do not they go out anywhere?"

"Because they do not choose."

"Because no one asks them, more likely! Why were they so determined not to be introduced to me?"

"How can I tell? Perhaps" – with a wrathful laugh – "they did not like your looks!"

She echoes his false mirth with no inferior exasperation.

"Who is ill-bred now?"

Her tone calls him back to a sense of the ungentleman-likeness and puerility of his conduct.

"I!" – he replies contritely – "undoubtedly I! but – "

"Do not apologize," interrupts she, recovering her equanimity with that ease which she has transmitted to her son; "I like you for standing up for them if they are your friends; and I hope that you will do the same good office for me when someone sticks pins into me behind my back; but come now, let us be rational; surely we may talk quietly about them without insulting each other, may not we?"

"I do not know; we can try."

"I suppose" – a little ironically – "that you are not so sensitive about them but that you can bear me to ask a few perfectly harmless questions?"

He writhes. "Of course! of course! what are they to me? – they are nothing to me!"

A look of incredulity, which she perhaps does not take any very great pains to conceal, spreads over her face.

"Then you really will be doing me a great service if you tell me just exactly all you know about them, good and bad."

"All I know about them," replies Jim in a rapid parrot-voice, as if he were rattling over some disagreeable lesson – "is that they were extremely kind to me ten years ago; that they had a beautiful place in Devonshire, and were universally loved and respected: I hear that they have let their place; so no doubt they are not so much loved and respected as they were; and now you know as much about the matter as I do!"

CHAPTER XXII

"Welcome ever smiles; and Farewell goes out sighing."

This last clause is not always true. For example, there is very little sighing in the farewells made to Mrs. Byng by the two young men who see her off at the Florence Railway Station. And Mrs. Byng herself has been too much occupied in manœuvring to get a few last private words with each of her escort to have much time for sighing either.

She would have been wounded if her old friend Jim had not come to see the last of her, and she would have been broken-hearted if her son had not paid her this final attention; and yet each necessarily destroys the tête-à-tête she is burning to have with the other. It is indelicate to implore your adored child not to go to the devil in the presence of an intimate friend, and it would give a not unnatural umbrage to that child if you urged the guardian friend to check his downward tendency while he himself is standing by. Nor do her two companions at all aid her in her strategy; rather, they show a tendency to unite in baffling her, hanging together round her like a bodyguard, and effectually hindering the last words which she is pining to administer. Only once for a very few minutes does she succeed in outwitting them, when she despatches Willy to the bookstall to buy papers for her – an errand from which he returns with an exasperating celerity. The instant that his back is turned, Mrs. Byng addresses her companion in an eager voice of hurry and prayer:

"You will keep an eye upon him?"

Silence.

"You will keep an eye upon him – promise?"

"I do not know what 'keeping an eye upon him' means in your vocabulary; often you and I do not use the same dictionary; until I know, I will not promise."

"You will look after him; do, Jim!"

"My dear madam" – with irritation – "let me go and buy your papers; and meanwhile urge him to look after me; I assure you that it is quite as necessary."

"Fiddlesticks, with your unimaginative, unemotional nature – "

"H'm!"

"Your head will always take care of your heart."

"Will it?"

"While he – promise me at least that, if you see him rushing to his ruin, you will telegraph to me?"

"Certainly, if you wish it; I will telegraph, 'Willy rushing Ruin.' At five-and-twenty centimes a word, it will cost you sevenpence halfpenny; not dear at the price, is it?"

The mother reddens.

"You have become a very mauvais plaisant of late, Jim; oh dear me! here he is back again, tiresome boy!"

It is with feelings tied into a knot of complications, which he scarcely seeks to unravel, that Burgoyne walks away from the station, and from the good-natured staunch woman, whose last few moments in fair Firenze he has done his best to embitter. He is glad that she is gone, and he is sorry that she is gone. He is remorseful at his gladness, and he is ashamed of his sorrow, knowing and acknowledging that it results from no regret for her companionship, which he had been wont to prize; but to the consciousness that she had stood like an angel with a drawn sword between her son and the Piazza d'Azeglio. Both angel and drawn sword are steaming away now, covered by a handsome travelling cloak down to the heels in a coupé toilette, and the road to the Piazza lies naked and undefended, open to the light feet that are so buoyantly treading the flags beside him.

The step of youth is always light, but there is something aggressively springy in Byng's this morning; and though he does not say anything offensively cheerful, there is a ring in his voice that makes his kind friend long to hit him. He, the kind friend, is thankful when their ways part, without his having done him any bodily violence.

"You are late to-day," says Cecilia, as he enters the salon, giving him a nod of indifferent friendliness, while Sybilla crossly asks him to shut the door more quietly, and Amelia lays her hand lingeringly in his, with a silent smile of rapture; "we began to think you had had a relapse. I was just telling Amelia that the pace had been too good to last – ha, ha!"

Burgoyne has always found it difficult to laugh at Cecilia's jokes, and his now perfect intimacy with her relieves him from the necessity of even feigning to do so.

"I have been seeing Mrs. Byng off," he replies, with that slight shade of awkwardness in his tone which has accompanied his every mention of the mother or son since his explanation with his betrothed.

"You let her go without getting that wedding present out of her, after all?" cries Cecilia, who is in a rather tryingly playful mood.

"Gone, is she?" says Sybilla, with a somewhat ostentatious sigh of resentful relief; "well, I, for one, shall not cry. I am afraid that she was not very simpatica to me; she was so dreadfully robust. Perhaps, now that she is no longer here to monopolise him, we shall be allowed to see something more of that nice boy."

No one answers. Not one of her three listeners is at the moment disposed to chant or even echo praises of the "nice boy." Sybilla perversely pursues the subject.

"I dare say that he has a delicacy about coming without a special invitation," she says, "where there is an invalid; but you might tell him that on my good days no one is more pleased to see their friends than I; it does not even send my temperature up; you might tell him that on my good days Dr. Coldstream says it does not even send my temperature up!"

Again no one answers.

"You do not seem to be listening to what I am saying," cries Sybilla fractiously; "will you please tell him, Jim?"

Jim lifts his heavy eyes from the ugly carpet on which they have been resting, and looks distastefully back at her.

"I do not think that I will, Sybilla," he replies slowly; "I do not think he cares a straw whether your temperature goes up or down. I think that he does not come here because – because he has found metal more attractive elsewhere."

He makes this statement for no other reason than because it is so intensely unpleasant to him, because he realizes that he must have to face the fact it embodies, and to present it not only to himself, but to others. And each day that passes proves to him more and more conclusively that it is a fact. He asks Byng no question as to the disposition of his day. He sees but little of him, having, indeed, changed the hours of his own breakfast and dinner in order to avoid having his appetite spoilt by the sight of so much unnecessary radiance opposite him; but he knocks up against him, flower-laden, at the Strozzi steps; he notes the splendour of his ties and waistcoats; he grows to know the Elizabeth-look on his face, when he comes singing home at evening, as one knows the look of the western clouds that the sun's red lips have only just ceased to kiss, though no sun is any longer in sight; and yet he does not interfere. He has received from the young man's mother a hasty letter, pencilled in the train, not an hour after she had quitted him; another more leisurely, yet as anxious, from Turin; a third from Paris, and lastly a telegram from Charing Cross. All bear the same purport.

"Write; keep an eye upon him!" "Write; keep an eye upon him! Write!"

And yet, though a full week has passed, though he sees the son of his old ally drifting, faster than ever autumn leaf drifted on a flush October river, to the whirlpool she had dreaded for him, yet he sends her never a word. He writes her long letters, it is true, covers telegram-forms with pregnant messages, but they all find their ultimate home in the wood fire. When the moment comes, he finds it impossible to send them, since, upon searching his heart for the motives that have dictated them, he finds those motives to be no fidelity to an ancient friendship, no care for the boy's welfare, but, simply and nakedly, the satisfaction of his own spite, the easing of his own bitter jealousy.

So the Florentine post goes out daily, bearing no tale of Byng's backslidings to his native land, and Jim, brushing past him, answering him curtly, never going nearer to the Piazza d'Azeglio than the Innocenti – a good long street off – devotes himself to the frantic prosecution of a suit long since won, to the conquest of a heart for eight weary years hopelessly, irrecoverably, pitiably his. His presence at the Anglo-Américain is so incessant, and his monopolizing of Amelia so unreasonable, that Sybilla – for the first time in her life really a little neglected – alternately runs up her pulse to 170 and drops it to 40.

"And then you wonder that I am anxious to be married," says Cecilia, accompanying her future brother-in-law to the door, on the day on which the latter phenomenon has occurred, and wiping the angry tears from her plump cheeks. "I make no secret of it, I am madly anxious, I would marry anyone, I am desperate. Just think what my life will be when Amelia is gone; and though of course I shall be a great deal with her – she has promised that I shall be almost always with her" (Jim winces) – "yet of course it can't be the same thing as having a home of your own."