Alas! A Novel

"We will do our best for you," replies he, with a rather rueful smile and a sense of degradation; "but you know, my dear Cis, anybody can lead a horse to the water, but it is not so easy to make him drink."

"That is quite true," replies Cecilia, one of whose most salient merits is an extreme unreadiness to be affronted, wiping her eyes as she speaks, "and I have no luck; such promising things turn up, and then come to nothing. Now, that clergyman the other day, whom we met at the Villa Careggi – such a pleasant gentlemanlike man – he was on the look-out for a wife, he told me so himself, and I know so much about the working of a parish, and next day he was off, Heaven knows where!"

Jim gives a slight shudder.

"I do not think you had any great loss in him," he says hastily; then, seeing her surprised air, "I mean, you know, that it is always said that a man is a better judge of another man than a woman is, and I did not like his looks; give us time, and we will do better for you than that."

Cecilia can no longer accuse her future relation of any slackness in the matter of expeditions. There is something of fever in the way in which he arrives each morning, armed with some new plan for the day, giving no one any peace until his project is carried out. It seems as if he must crowd into the last fortnight of Amelia's stay in Florence all the sight-seeing, all the junkets, all the enjoyment which ought to have been temperately spread over the eight years of their engagement.

One day – all nearer excursions being exhausted – they drive to Monte Senario, that sweet and silent spot, happily too far from Florence for the swarm of tourists to invade, where earth-weary men have set up a rest scarcely less dumb than the grave in a lonely monastery of the Order of La Trappe. Through the Porta San Gallo, along the Bologna Road they go. It is a soft summer morning, with not much sun. Up, past the villas and gardens, where the Banksia roses and wistarias are rioting over wall, and berceau and pergola, climbing even the tall trees. Round the very head of one young poplar two rose-trees – a yellow and a white one – are flinging their arms; flowered so lavishly that hardly a pin's point could be put between the blossoms. Up and up, a white wall on either hand. The dust lies a foot thick on the road; thick too on the monthly roses, just breaking into full pink flush; thick on themselves as the endless mulecarts come jingling down the hill with bells and red tassels, and a general air of what would be jollity were not that feeling so given the lie to by the poor jaded, suffering beasts. Up and up, till they leave stone walls and villas and oliveyards behind them, and are away among the mountains. At a very humble little house that has no air of an inn they leave the carriage, and climb up a rocky road, and through a perfumed pine-wood, to where the Trappist Monastery stands, in its perfect silence and isolation, on its hilltop, looking over its fir-woods at the ranges of the Apennines, lying one behind the other in the stillness of the summer-day; looking to distant Florence, misty and indistinct in her Arno plain; looking to Fiesole, dwarfed to a molehill's dimensions.

"I am told that one of the brothers is an Englishman; I did not hear his name, but he is certainly English," says Cecilia, as they mount the shallow, grass-grown steps to the monastery door. "If I send up word that I am a fellow-countrywoman, perhaps he will come out and speak to me; I am sure that it would be a very nice change for him, poor fellow!"

And it is the measure of the amount of Cecilia's acquaintance with the rules of the Order, that it is only half in jest that she makes the suggestion. But she does not repeat it to the lay-brother who stands, civil yet prohibitory, at the top of the flight, and who, in answer to Burgoyne's halting questions as to where they may go, politely answers that they may go anywhere – anywhere, bien entendu, outside. So they wander aimlessly away. They push open a rickety gate, and passing an old dog, barking angry remonstrances at them from the retirement of a barrel, step along a grassy path that leads they know not whither. Two more young lay-brothers meet them, with their hands full of leopard's-bane flowers, which they have been gathering, probably to deck their altar with.

Amelia has passed her hand through Jim's arm – since his late increased kindness to her she has been led to many more little freedoms with him than she had hitherto permitted herself – and though she is very careful not to lean heavily or troublesomely upon him, yet the slight contact of her fingers keeps him reminded that she is there. Perhaps it is as well, since to-day he is conscious of such a strange tendency to forget everything, past, present, and to come. Has one of the monks' numb hands been laid upon his heart to lull it into so frozen a quiet? To-day he feels as if it were absolutely impossible to him to experience either pleasure or pain; as if to hold Elizabeth in his own arms, or see her in Byng's, would be to him equally indifferent. His apathy in this latter respect is to be put to the test sooner than he expects. Not indeed that Elizabeth is lying in Byng's arms – it would be a gross misrepresentation to say so, she being, on the contrary, most decorously poised on a camp-stool – least romantic of human resting places – when they come suddenly upon her and him in the course of their prowl round the inhospitable walls. She is sitting on her camp-stool, and he is lying on his face in the grass, just not touching her slim feet.

The advancing party perceive the couple advanced upon before the latter are aware of their nearness; long enough for the former to realize how very much de trop they will be, yet not long enough to enable them to escape unnoticed. Jim becomes aware of the very second at which Amelia recognises the unconscious pair, by an involuntary pinch of her fingers upon his arm, which a moment later she hastily drops. His own first feeling on catching sight of them – no, not his very first – his very first is as if someone had run a darning-needle into his heart – but almost his first is to shout out to them in loud warning:

"Be on your guard! we are close to you!"

He will never forgive either himself or them if they ignorantly indulge in any endearment under his very eyes. But they do not. There are no interlacing arms to disentwine, nothing to make them spring apart, when at length they look up and take in the fact – an unwelcome fact it must needs be – of their invasion.

On hearing approaching footsteps, Byng rolls over on his back in the grass; on perceiving that most of the footsteps are those of ladies, he springs to his feet. Elizabeth remains sitting on her camp-stool.

"What a coincidence!" cries Cecilia, breaking into a laugh.

They are all grateful to her for the remark, though it is rather a silly one, as there is no particular coincidence in the case. Burgoyne is irritatedly conscious that Amelia is covertly observing him, and before he can check himself he has thrown over his shoulder at her one of those snubbing glances from which, for the last ten days, he has painstakenly and remorsefully refrained. It is not a happy moment to look at poor Amelia, as she has not yet cooled down from the heat of her climb through the fir-wood – a heat that translates itself into patchy flushes all over her face, not sparing even her forehead. Elizabeth is flushed too. She has not met Miss Wilson since she had declined Burgoyne's offer of bringing his betrothed to see her, and in her deprecating eyes there is a guilty and tremulous recollection of this fact. But below the guilt and the deprecation and the tremor, what else is there in Elizabeth's eyes? What of splendid and startling, and that comes but once in a lifetime? Rather than be obliged to give a name to that vague radiance, Jim turns his look back upon his own too glowing dear one.

"Did you come here all alone? You two all alone? What fun!" asks Cecilia, with an air of delighted curiosity.

Again her companions inwardly thank her. It is the question that both – though with different degrees of eagerness – have been thirsting to ask.

"Alone? – oh no!" replies Elizabeth, with that uneasy, frightened look that Burgoyne has always noticed on her face when she has been brought into unwilling relation with strangers. "My mother is here – she came with us; why, where is she?" – looking round with a startled air – "she was here a moment ago."

A grim smile curves Jim's mouth. It is evident that the unhappy Mrs. Le Marchant, worn out with her rôle of duenna, has slipped away without being missed by either of her companions. Would they have even discovered her absence but for Cecilia's query?

"Mrs. Le Marchant was here a moment ago," echoes Byng, addressing the company generally; "but" – dodging his friend's eyes – "she said she was a little stiff from sitting so long; she must be quite close by."

"I will go and look for her," says Elizabeth, confused, and rising from her rickety seat as she speaks; but Amelia, who is nearest to her, puts out a friendly hand in prohibition.

"Oh, do not stir!" she cries, smiling kindly and admiringly. "You look so comfortable. Let me go and search for Mrs. Le Marchant; I – I – should be afraid to sit down, I am so hot. I should like to find her; Cecilia will help me, and Mr. Byng will show us the way."

It is not always that generous actions meet their meed of gratitude from those for whose sake they are performed; and, though Burgoyne recognises the magnanimity of his fiancée's line of conduct, thankfulness to her for it is not the feeling uppermost in his mind when, a few moments later, he finds himself standing in uneasy tête-à-tête over the seated Elizabeth.

"Will not you sit down?" she asks presently, adding, with a low, timid laugh, "I do not know why I should invite you, as if" – glancing round at the sun-steeped panorama – "this were my drawing-room."

He complies, taking care to occupy a quite different six feet of herbage from that which still bears the imprint of Byng's lengthy limbs. The grass grows cool and fresh, full of buttercups and tall blue bugle; out of them the gray monastery wall rises, in its utter lifeless silence, with its small barred windows. Was ever any building, within which is human life, so unutterably still? As he leans his elbow among the king-cups, Jim says to himself that the lovers had chosen their place well and wisely – that the consciousness of the austere, denied lives going on so close behind them, in their entire joylessness, must have given an added point, a keener edge to the poignancy of their own enjoyment of the sweet summer day outside.

"You have not been to see us for a long time," says Elizabeth presently, in a small and diffident voice, after having waited until the probability of his speaking first has become a mere possibility, and even that a faint one.

He replies baldly, "No."

His look is fixed on a knoll, whence the monks must have gathered their leopard's bane. They cannot have gathered much, so bounteously do the gay yellow flowers still wave on the hillock. Nearer stands a colony of purple orchises, and from them the eye travels away to the silent fir-wood, to the range of misty hills and the distant plain, touched now and again by a vague hint of sunshine, that makes one for the moment feel sure that one has detected Duomo or Campanile. How many hill ranges there are! One can count six or seven, like the ridges in a gigantic ploughed field, one behind another – all solemnly beautiful on this windless day of grave and ungaudy sweetness. Has the young man been reckoning the ranks of the Apennines, that it is so long before he adds a low-voiced, mocking question to his monosyllable?

"Have you missed me very much?"

The woman addressed seems in no hurry to answer. She has drawn her narrow brown brows together, as if in the effort to hit truth in her nicest shade in her answer. Then she speaks with a sort of soft self-remonstrance:

"Oh, surely! I must have missed you – you were so extraordinarily, so unaccountably kind to us!"

There is not one of us who would not rather be loved for what we are than for what we do; so it is perhaps no wonder if the young woman's reply strikes with an unreasonable chill upon the asker's heart.

"You must have been very little used to kindness all your life," he says, with some brusqueness, "to be so disproportionately grateful for my trumpery civilities."

She hesitates a moment, then:

"You are right," she replies; "I have not received any great kindness in my life – justice, well, yes, I suppose so – but no, not very much mercy."

Her candid and composed admission of a need for mercy whets yet farther that pained curiosity which has always been one of the strongest elements in his uncomfortable interest in her. But the very sharpness of that interest makes him shy away awkwardly from the subject of her past.

"I always think," he says, "that there is something fatuous in a man's apologizing to a lady for not having been to see her, as if the loss were hers, and not his."

"Is there? All the same, I am sorry that you did not come."

This simple and unsophisticated implication of a liking for him would have warmed again the uneasy heart that her former speech had chilled had not he, under the superficial though genuine regret of her face, seen, still shining with steady lustre, that radiance which has as little been called forth by, as it can be dimmed by him or anything relating to him. And so he passes by in silence the expression of that sorrow which he bitterly knows to be so supportable.

The still spirit of the day seems to have touched the very birds. They sing a few low notes in veiled, chastened voices from the fir-wood, and again are silent. The clock tells the hours in quarters to the doomed lives inside the monastery, self-doomed to suffering and penance and incarceration, even with the winning blue of the Tuscan sky above their tonsured heads, with the forget-me-nots pressing their feet, and the nightingales singing endless love-songs to them from the little dark forest nigh at hand.

"I suppose," says Elizabeth presently, in a reflective tone, "that the fact is, when people are in your position – I mean on the brink of a great deep happiness – they forget all lesser things?"

He snatches a hasty glance of suspicion at her. Is this her revenge for his neglect of her? But nothing can look more innocent or less ironical than her small profile, bent towards the gigantic forget-me-nots and the pulmonaria, azure as gentians.

"Perhaps."

"The big fish" – her little face breaking into one of her lovely smiles, which, by a turn of her head from side to full, she offers in its completeness to his gaze – "swallows up all the little gudgeons! Poor little gudgeons."

"Poor little gudgeons!" he echoes stupidly, and then begins to laugh at his own wool-gathering.

"And now I suppose you will be going directly – going home?" pursues she, looking at him and his laughter with a soft surprise.

"I hope so; and – and – you too?"

She gives a start, and the sky-coloured nosegay in her hand drops into her lap.

"We – we? Why should we go home? We have nothing pleasant to go to, and" – looking round with a passionate relish at mountain, and suffused far plain, and sappy spring grass – "we are so well – so infinitely well here!" Then, pulling herself together, and speaking in a more composed key, "But yes, of course we, too, shall go by-and-by; this cannot last for ever – nothing lasts for ever. That is the one thought that has kept me alive all these years; but now – "

She breaks off.

"But now?"

Even as he watches her, putting this echoed interrogation, he sees the radiance breaking through the cloud his question had gathered, as a very strong sun breaks through a very translucent exhalation.

"But now?" she repeats vaguely, and smiling to herself, forgetful of his very presence beside her – "But now? Did I say 'But now?' Ah, here they are back again!"

CHAPTER XXIII

"I am going to turn the tables on you," says Amelia next morning to her lover, after the usual endearments, which of late he has been conscientiously anxious not to scant or slur, have passed between them, very fairly executed by him, and adoringly accepted and returned by her; "you are always arranging treats for me; now I have planned one for you!"

She looks so beaming with benevolent joy as she makes this statement, that Jim stoops and drops an extra kiss – not in the bond – upon her lifted face. "Indeed, dear!" he answers kindly, "I do not quite know what I have done to deserve it; but I hope it is a nice one."

"It is very nice – delightful."

"Delightful, eh?" echoes he, raising his brows, while a transient wonder crosses his mind as to what project she or anyone else could suggest to him that, at this juncture of his affairs, could merit that epithet; "well, am I to guess what it is? or are you going to tell me?"

Amelia's face still wears that smile of complacent confidence in having something pleasant to communicate which has puzzled her companion.

"We have never been at Vallombrosa, have we?" asks she.

"Never."

"Well, we are going there to-morrow."

"Are we? is that your treat?" inquires he, wondering what of peculiarly and distinctively festal for him this expedition may be supposed to have above all their former ones.

"And we are not going alone."

"There is nothing very exceptional in that; Cecilia is mostly good enough to lend us her company."

"I am not thinking of Cecilia; I have persuaded" – the benevolent smile broadening across her cheeks – "I have persuaded some friends of yours to join us."

It does not for an instant cross his mind either to doubt or to affect uncertainty as to who the friends of whom she speaks may be; but the suggestion is so profoundly unwelcome to him, that not even the certainty of mortifying the unselfish creature before him can hinder him from showing it. Her countenance falls.

"You are not glad?" she asks crestfallenly, "you are not pleased?"

It is impossible for him to say that he is, and all that is left to him is to put his vexation into words that may be as little as possible fraught with disappointment to his poor hearer's ear.

"I – I – had rather have had you to myself."

"Would you really?" she asks, in the almost awed tones of one who, from being quite destitute, has had the Koh-i-Noor put into his hand, and whose fingers are afraid to close over the mighty jewel; "would you really? then I am sorry I asked them; but" – with intense wistfulness – "if you only knew how I long to give you a little pleasure, a little enjoyment – you who have given me so infinitely much."

If Miss Wilson were ever addicted to the figure of speech called irony, she might be supposed to be employing it now; but one glance at her simple face would show that it expressed nothing but adoring gratitude. Her one good fortnight has spread its radiant veil backwards over her eight barren years.

He takes her hand, and passes the fingers across his lips, murmuring indistinctly and guiltily behind them:

"Do I really make you happy?"

"Do you?" – echoes she, while the transfiguring tears well into her glorified pale eyes – "I should not have thought it possible that so much joy could have been packed into any fortnight as I have had crammed into mine!"

They have to set off to Vallombrosa at seven o'clock in the morning, an hour at which few of us are at our cleverest, handsomest, or our best tempered; nor is the party of six, either in its proportion of women to men – four to two – or in its component parts, a very well adjusted one. They are too numerous to be contained in one carriage, and are therefore divided into two separate bands – three and three. Whether by some manœuvre of the well-meaning Amelia, or by some scarcely fortunate accident, Burgoyne finds himself seated opposite to his betrothed and to Elizabeth; while Byng follows in the second vehicle as vis-à-vis to Cecilia and Mrs. Le Marchant. There is a general feeling of wrongness about the whole arrangement – a sense of mental discomfort equivalent to that physical one of having put on your clothes inside out, or buttoned your buttons into unanswering buttonholes.

Mrs. Le Marchant's face, as Burgoyne catches sight of it now and then, as some turn in the road reveals the inmates of the closely-following second carriage to his view, wears that uneasy and disquieted look which always disfigures it when there is any question of her being brought into personal relation with strangers. And Elizabeth, of whom he has naturally a much nearer and more continuous view, is plainly ill-at-ease. Miss Wilson has not thought it necessary to mention to her lover how strong had been the opposition to her plan on the part of the objects of it; nor, that it was only because her proposal was made vivâ voce, and therefore unescapable, that it had been reluctantly accepted at last. At first Burgoyne had attributed Elizabeth's evident ill-at-easeness to her separation from Byng; but he presently discovers that it is what she possesses, and not what she lacks, that is the chief source of her malaise. During the latter part of his own personal intercourse with her she had been, when in his company, sometimes sad, sometimes wildly merry; but always entirely natural. Strange as it may seem, it is obviously the presence of Amelia that puts constraint upon her. Before the spirit of that most unterrifying of God's creatures, Elizabeth's "stands rebuked." Once or twice he sees her inborn gaiety – that gaiety whose existence he has so often noted as it struggles up from under the mysterious weight of sorrow laid upon it – spurt into life, only to be instantly killed by the reassumption of that nervous formal manner which not all Amelia's gentle efforts can break through.

A very grave trio they drive along through the grave day. For it is, alas! a grave day – overcast, now turning to rain, now growing fair again awhile. Not a grain of Italy's summer curse, her choking white dust, assails their nostrils. It must have rained all night. Through the suburbs by the river, crossing and recrossing that ugly iron interloper the railway; by the river flowing at the foot of the fair green hills, so green, so green on this day of ripe accomplished spring. The whole country is one giant green garland, of young wheat below and endless vine necklaces above – necklaces of new juicy, just-born, yet vigorous vine-leaves. The very river runs green with the reflection of the endless verdure on its banks. The road is level as far as Pontassieve, the town through which they roll, and then it begins to mount – mounts between garden-like hills, dressed in vine leaves and iris-flowers, and the dull fire of red clover; while the stream twists in flowing companionship at the valley bottom, until they turn abruptly away from it, up into a steep and narrow valley, almost a gorge, and climb up and up one side of it, turning and winding continually to break the steepness of the ascent. However broken, it is steep still. But who would wish to pass at more than a foot's pace through this great sheet of lilac irises wrapping the mountain side, past this bean-field that greets the nostrils with its homely familiar perfume, along this wealthy bit of hedge, framed wholly of honeysuckle in flower? At sight of the latter Elizabeth gives a little cry.

"Oh, what honeysuckle! I must have some! I must get out! Tell him to stop!"

In a moment her commands are obeyed; in another moment Byng has sprung out of the second carriage and is standing beside her. The door of Byng's vehicle is stiff apparently, and a sardonic smile breaks over the elder man's face as he hears the noise of the resounding kicks administered to it by the younger one's impatient foot. But he need not have been in such a hurry – no one interferes with his office of rifling the hedge of its creamy and coral bugles.

Burgoyne gets out of the carriage; but it is only to walk to the other one and assume Byng's vacated seat.

"Are you going to change places?" Amelia has asked rather chapfallenly as he leaves her; and he has given her hand a hasty pressure, and answered affectionately —

"It will not be for long, dear; but you know" – with an expressive glance, and what he rather too sanguinely hopes looks like a smile in the direction of the flower-gatherers – "fair play is a jewel!"