Alas! A Novel

On reaching Florence and the Anglo-Américain, he would fain enter and spend the evening with his betrothed. He has a feverish horror of being left alone with his own thoughts, but she gently forbids him.

"It would not be fair upon father and Sybilla," she says. "I am afraid they have not been getting on very well téte-à-téte together all this wet day, and I should not be much good to you in any case. I feel stupid. You will say" – smiling – "that there is nothing very new in that; but I am quite beyond even my usual mark to-night. Good-night, dear; I humbly beg your pardon for having caused you to spend such a wretched day. I will never give you another treat – never, never! it was my first and last attempt."

She turns from him dejectedly, and he is himself too dejected to attempt any reassuring falsities. She would not have believed him if he had told her that it had not been a wretched day to him, and the publicity of their place of parting forbids him to administer even the silent consolation of a kiss. And yet he feels a sort of remorse at having said nothing, as the door closes upon her depressed back. Backs can look quite as depressed as faces. The lateness of their start home has thrown their return late. Burgoyne reflects that he may as well dine at once, and then trudge through his solitary evening as best he may. Heaven knows at what hour Byng may return. Shall he await his coming, and so get over the announcement of his bliss to-night, or put the dark hours between himself and it?

He decides in favour of getting it over to-night, up to whatever small hour he may be obliged to attend his friend's arrival. But he has not to wait nearly so long as he expects. He has not to wait at all, hardly. Before he has left his own room, while he is still making such toilette for his own company as self-respect requires, the person whom he had not thought to behold for another four or five hours enters – enters with head held high, with joy-tinged, smooth cheeks, and with a superb lamp of love and triumph lit in each young eye. A passing movement of involuntary admiration traverses the other's heart as he looks at him. This is how the human animal ought to – was originally intended to – look! How very far the average specimen has departed from the type! There is not much trace of admiration, however, in the tone which he employs for his one brief word of interrogation:

"Already?"

"I was sent away," replies Byng, in a voice whose intoxication pierces even through the first four small words; "they sent me away – they would not let me go further than the house-door. I say 'they,' but of course she had no hand in it —she, not she. She would not have sent me away, God bless her! it was her mother, of course – how could she have had the heart?"

Burgoyne would no doubt have made some answer in time; though the "she," the implication of Elizabeth's willingness for an indefinite amount of her lover's company, the "God bless her," gave him a sense of choking.

"But I do not blame Mrs. Le Marchant," pursues Byng, in a rapt, half-absent key. "Who would not wish to monopolize her? Who would not grudge the earth leave to kiss her sweet foot?

"'All I can is nothingTo her whose worth makes other worthies nothing.She is alone!'"

"That at least is not your fault," replies Burgoyne dryly; "you have done your best to avert that catastrophe."

But to speak to the young man now is of as much avail as to address questions or remonstrances to one walking in his sleep.

"If she had allowed me, I would have lain on her threshold all night; I would have been the first thing that her heavenly eye lit on; I would – "

But Burgoyne's phial of patience is for the present emptied to the dregs.

"You would have made a very great fool of yourself, I have not the least doubt. Why try to persuade a person of what he is already fully convinced? But as Miss Le Marchant happily did not wish for you as a doormat, perhaps it is hardly worth while telling me what you would have done if she had."

The sarcastic words, ill-natured and unsympathetic as they sound in their own speaker's ears, yet avail to bring the young dreamer but a very few steps lower down his ladder of bliss.

"I beg your pardon," he says sweet-temperedly; "I suppose I am a hideous bore to-night; I suppose one must always be a bore to other people when one is tremendously happy."

"It is not your being tremendously happy that I quarrel with," growls Burgoyne, struggling to conquer, or at least tone down, the intense irritability of nerves that his friend's flights provoke. "You are perfectly right to be that if you can manage to compass it; but what I should be glad to arrive at is your particular ground for it in the present case."

The question, sobering in its tendency, has yet for sole effect the setting Byng off again with spread pinions into the empyrean.

"What particular ground I have?" he repeats, in a dreamy tone of ecstasy. "You ask what particular ground I have? Had ever anyone cause to be so royally happy as I?"

He pauses a moment or two, steeped in a rapture of oblivious reverie, then goes on, still as one only half waked from a beatific vision:

"I had a prognostic that to-day would be the culminating day – something told me that to-day would be the day; and when you gave me up your seat in her carriage – how could you be so magnificently generous? How can I ever adequately show you my gratitude?"

"Yes, yes; never mind that."

"Then, later on, in the wood" – his voice sinking, as that of one who approaches a Holy of Holies – "when that blessed mist wrapped her round, wrapped her lovely body round, so that I was able to withdraw her from you, so that you did not perceive that she was gone – were not you really aware of it? Did not it seem to you as if the light had gone out of the day? When we stood under those dripping trees, as much alone as if – "

"I do not think that there is any need to go into those details," interrupts Burgoyne, in a hard voice; "I imagine that in these cases history repeats itself with very trifling variations; what I should be glad if you would tell me is, whether I am to understand that you have to-day asked Miss Le Marchant to marry you?"

Byng brings his eyes, which have been lifted in a sort of trance to the ceiling, down to the prosaic level of his Mentor's severe and tight-lipped face.

"When you put it in that way," he says, in an awed half-whisper, "it does seem an inconceivable audacity on my part that I, who but a few days ago was crawling at her feet, should dare to-day to reach up to the heaven of her love."

Burgoyne had known perfectly well that it was coming; but yet how much worse is it than he had expected!

"Then you did ask her to marry you?"

But Byng has apparently fled back on the wings of fantasy into the wet woods of Vallombrosa, for he makes no verbal answer.

"She said yes?" asks Burgoyne, raising his voice, as if he were addressing someone deaf. "Am I to understand that she said yes?"

At the sound of that hard naked query the dreamer comes out of his enchanted forest again.

"I do not know what she said; I do not think she said anything," he answers, murmuring the words laggingly; while, as he goes on, the fire of his madness spires high in his flashing eyes. "We have got beyond speech, she and I! We have reached that region where hearts and intelligences meet without the need of those vulgar go-betweens – words."

There is a moment's pause, broken only by the commonplace sound of an electric bell rung by some inmate of the hotel.

"And has Mrs. Le Marchant reached that region too?" inquires Jim presently, with an irony he cannot restrain. "Does she, too, understand without words, or have you been obliged, in her case, to employ those vulgar go-betweens?"

"She must understand – she does– undoubtedly she does!" cries Byng, whose drunkenness shares with the more ordinary kind the peculiarity of believing whatever he wishes to be not only probable but inevitable. "Who could see us together and be in uncertainty for a moment? And her mother has some of her fine instincts, her delicate intuitions; not, of course, to the miraculous extent that she possesses them. In her they amount to genius!"

"No doubt, no doubt; but did you trust entirely to Mrs. Le Marchant's instincts, or did you broach the subject to her at all? You must have had time, plenty of time, during that long drive home."

"Well, no," answers Byng slowly, and with a slight diminution of radiance. "I meant to have approached it; I tried to do so once or twice; but I thought, I fancied – probably it was only fancy – that she wished to avoid it."

"To avoid it?"

"Oh, not in any offensive, obvious way; it was probably only in my imagination that she shirked it at all – and I did not make any great efforts. It was all so perfect" – the intoxication getting the upper hand again – "driving along in that balmy flood of evening radiance – did you see how even the tardy sun came out for us? – with that divine face opposite to me! Such a little face!" – his voice breaking into a tremor. "Is not it inconceivable, Jim, how so much beauty can be packed into so tiny a compass?"

Burgoyne has all the time had his brushes in his hand, the brushes with which he has been preparing himself for his solitary dinner. He bangs them down now on the table. How can he put a period to the ravings of this maniac? And yet not so maniac either. What gives the sharpest point to his present suffering is the consciousness that he would have made quite as good a maniac himself if he had had the chance. This consciousness instils a few drops of angry patience into his voice, as, disregarding the other's high-flown question, he puts one that is not at all high-flown himself.

"Then you have not told Mrs. Le Marchant yet?"

But the smile that the memory – so fresh, only half an hour old – of Elizabeth's loveliness has laid upon Byng's lips still lingers there; and makes his response dreamy and vague.

"No, not yet; not yet! She had taken one of her gloves off; her little hand lay, palm upward, on her knees almost all the way; once or twice I thought of taking it, of taking possession of it, of telling her mother in that way; but I did not. It seemed – out in the sunshine, no longer in the sacred mist of that blessed wood – too high an audacity, and I did not!"

He stops, his words dying away into a whisper, his throat's too narrow passage choked by the rushing ocean of his immense felicity.

Burgoyne looks at him in silence, again with a sort of admiration mixed with wrath. How has this commonplace, pink-and-white boy managed to scale such an altitude, while he himself, in all his life, though with a better intelligence, and, as he had thought, with a deeper heart, had but prowled around the foot? Why should he try to drag him down? On the peak of that great Jungfrau of rapture no human foot can long stand.

"As I told you, Mrs. Le Marchant turned me away from their door," pursues Byng. "It struck me – I could not pay much attention to the fact, for was not I bidding her good-night – taking farewell of those heavenly eyes? – did you ever see such astonishing eyes? – for four colossal hours – but it struck me that her mother's manner was a little colder to me than it usually is. It had been a little cold all day – at least, so I fancied. Had the same idea occurred to you?"

Burgoyne hesitates.

"But even if it were so," continues Byng, his sun breaking out again in full brilliancy from the very little cloud that, during his last sentence or two, had dimmed its lustre, "how can I blame her? Does one throw one's self into the arms of the burglar who has broken open one's safe and stolen one's diamonds?"

Burgoyne still hesitates. Shall he tell the young ranter before him what excellent reasons he has for knowing that any filial disposition on his part to throw himself on Mrs. Le Marchant's neck will be met by a very distinct resistance on that lady's part, or shall he leave him poised on till morning? The morning light will certainly see him tumbling at the least some few kilometres down. He decides generously to leave him in present possession of his peak; but yet, so inconsistent is human nature, his next speech can have no drift but that of giving a slight jog to his friend's towering confidence.

"The jagOf his mountain crag"

"And your own mother?"

It may generally be concluded that a person has not a very pertinent response to give to a question if his only answer to that question be to repeat it in the same words.

"My own mother?"

"Yes; you will write at once to tell her, I suppose?"

For a second the young man's forehead clouds, then he breaks into an excited laugh.

"Tell her? I should rather think I should! Do you suppose that I shall lose a moment in telling everybody I know – everybody I ever heard of? I want you to tell everybody too – every single soul of your acquaintance!"

"I?"

"Tell Amelia; tell Cecilia" – quite unaware, in his excitement, of the freedom he is taking, for the first time in his life, with those young ladies' Christian names – "tell the other one – the sick one; tell them all! I want her to feel that all my friends, everybody I know, welcome her – hold out their arms to her. I want them all to tell her they are glad – you most of all, of course, old chap; she will not think it is all right till you have given your consent!" – laughing again with that bubbling-over of superfluous joy. "Do you know – it seems incomprehensible now – but there was a moment when I was madly jealous of you? I was telling her about it to-day; we were laughing over it together in the wood."

Burgoyne feels that one more mention of that wood will convert him into a lunatic, quite as indisputable as his companion, only very much more dangerous.

"Indeed!" he says grimly. "I should have thought you might have found a more interesting subject of conversation."

"Perhaps I was not so very far out either" – possibly dimly perceiving, even through the golden haze of his own glory, the lack of enjoyment of his last piece of news conveyed by Jim's tone – "for she has an immense opinion of you. I do not know anyone of whom she has so high an opinion; she says you are so dependable."

The adjective, as applied to himself by Elizabeth and her mother, has not the merit of novelty in the hearer's ears, which is perhaps the reason why the elation that he must naturally feel on hearing it does not translate itself into words.

"So dependable," repeats Byng, apparently pleased with the epithet. "She says you give her the idea of being a sort of rock; you will come to-morrow, and wish her joy, will not you?"

"I am afraid that my wishing it her will not help her much to it," answers Burgoyne, rather sadly; "but I do not think you need much doubt that I do wish it. Joy" – repeating the word over reflectively – "it is a big thing to wish anyone."

The extreme dampness of his tone arrests for a few minutes Byng's jubilant pæan.

"You do not think that my mother will be pleased with the news?" he asks presently, in a changed and hesitating key.

"I do not think about it; I know she will not!"

"I suppose not; and yet" – with an accent of stupefaction – "it is inconceivable that she, who has always shown such a tender sympathy for me in any paltry little bit of luck that has happened to me, should not rejoice with me when all heaven ope – "

"Yes, yes; of course."

"Do you think" – with a gleam of hope – "that my mother may have tried to dissuade me because she thought I was only laying up disappointment for myself – because she thought it so unlikely that she should deign to stoop to me?"

Burgoyne shakes his head.

"Perhaps," he says, with the slowness of a man who is saying what he himself does not believe, "a part of your mother's dislike to the idea may be in the fact of Miss Le Marchant's being older than you."

"Older!" cries Byng, with almost a shout of angry derision at the suggestion. "What have creatures like her to do with age? I neither know nor care what her age is! If you know, do not tell me! I will not listen! Upon that exquisite body time and change are powerless to work their hideous metamorphoses!"

"Fiddlesticks!" replies Burgoyne gruffly. "If she live long enough, she will be an old woman, and will look like one, I suppose!" though, even as he speaks, he realizes that to him this is almost as incredible as to the young madman whom he is so pitilessly snubbing. "But, however that may be, I think you had better make up your mind to meeting the most resolved opposition on the part of your mother."

"I believe you are right," replies Byng, out of whose voice his kind Mentor has at last succeeded in momentarily conjuring the exaltation. "Her prejudice against them, against her, always filled me with stupefaction. I never dared trust myself to discuss it with her; I was afraid that if I did I might be led into saying something to her, something I should be sorry for afterwards. Thank God, I have never spoken unkindly to her in all my life!"

"You would have been a sweep if you had!" interjects Jim.

"I never heard her give any reason for it, did you? It was as baseless as it was senseless." After a pause, his voice taking on again its inflection of confident, soaring triumph: "But it cannot last – it is absolutely beyond the wildest bounds of possibility that it can last! After five minutes' talk mother will be at her feet; I know my mother so well! Not one of her exquisite ways will be lost upon her, and she will do her very best to win her! Jim, I ask you – I put it to you quietly and plainly – I know you think I am mad, but I am not – I am speaking quite rationally and coolly – but I ask you —you, an impartial bystander – do you think that any human being, anything made of flesh and blood, could resist her—her when she puts herself out to please —her at her very best?"

As Burgoyne is conscious of not being in a position to answer this question with much satisfaction to himself, he leaves it unanswered.

CHAPTER XXV

"Some say the genius soCries 'Come' to him that instantly must die."

A new day has awaked, and Firenze, fresh-washed after yesterday's rain, smelling through all her streets of lilies, laughs up, wistaria-hung, to a fleckless sky. If poor Amelia had but deferred her treat for twenty-four hours, what a different Vallombrosa would she and her companions have carried home in their memories! Amelia's treat!

"I shall not forget Amelia's treat in a hurry!" Burgoyne says to himself, as he sits appetiteless over his solitary breakfast. "I had better go and tell her the result of it."

As he makes this reflection, he rises with some alacrity, and, leaving his scarcely-tasted coffee and his not-at-all-tasted omelette, walks out of the salle-à-manger. His motive for so early a visit to the Anglo-Américain is less an excessive eagerness to proclaim his piece of news than the thought that by so doing he will, at least for a few hours, escape the necessity of being in his young friend's company. As to where that young friend at present is, whether, after having wandered about the town all night, he is now sleeping late, or whether he is already off to persecute poor Mrs. Le Marchant for that maternal blessing which she has so little inclination to give, Jim is ignorant. All he knows is that such another dose of Byng's erotic eloquence as he had to swallow last night will leave him (Burgoyne) either a murderer or suicide.

Owing to his arrival at the Anglo-Américain so much sooner than usual, he finds himself coming in for the ceremony of Sybilla's installation for the day in the drawing-room. There is always a little pomp and fussy bustle about this rite. Sybilla totters in (grave doubts have occasionally crossed the minds of her family as to whether she does not in reality possess a pair of excellent and thoroughly dependable legs), supported on one side by Amelia and on the other by her maid. Cecilia goes before with an air cushion, and Mr. Wilson follows, when he does not turn restive – which is sometimes the case – with a duvet. To-day, as I have said, this rite is in full celebration when Jim arrives, but it is being performed with mutilated glories. The rite is going forward, but the high priest is absent. That ministrant, upon whose arm the sufferer is wont to lean far the most heavily; she upon whom devolves the whole responsibility of arranging the three cushions behind the long limp back; the properly covering the languid feet; the nice administering of the reviving cordial drops that are to repair the fatigue of the transit from bedroom to sitting-room – that most important and unfailing ministrant is nowhere to be seen. No artist wishes his picture to be viewed in an inchoate, unfinished stage, nor is Sybilla at all anxious to have the public admitted to the sight of that eminent work of art herself until she is stretched in faint, moribund, graceful completeness on her day-bed. At the moment of Burgoyne's entry she has just reached that unbecoming point, where she is sitting sideways on her sofa, before her wasted limbs – Burgoyne is one of those heretics who have never believed that they are wasted – have been carefully lifted into their final posture of extension upon the Austrian blanket. It is, of all moments, the one at which interruption is least welcome; nor is the intruder at all surprised at being greeted by the invalid with a more than sub-acid accent.

"My dear Jim, already! Why you become more matinale every day! you are the early bird indeed! You do not" – with an annoyed laugh – "give us poor worms a chance of being beforehand with you."

"I am very sorry if I am too soon," replies he, his eyes wandering away from the fretful features before him in search of others upon which he knows he shall find written no complaint of his prematureness – "but I came to – Where's Amelia?"

"You may well ask," replies Sybilla, with a sort of hysterical laugh. "It is pretty evident that she is not here! My dear Cis, would you mind remembering that my head is not made of mahogany? you gave it such a bang with that cushion. I am very sorry to trouble you. The heaviest load a sick person has to bear is the feeling that she is such a burden to those around her; and certainly, my dear, you do not help me to forget it."

"Where is she?" repeats Burgoyne hastily, both because he wants to know, and because he is anxious to strangle in its infancy one of those ignoble family bickerings, to assist at many of which has been the privilege or penalty of his state of intimacy.

"She is not well," replies Cecilia shortly, her rosy face rosier than usual, either with the joy of imminent battle, or with the exertion of swaddling, under protest, the invalid's now elevated legs.

"Not well! Amelia not well," echoes he, in a tone of incredulity.

During all the years of their acquaintance not once has he heard his patient sweetheart complain of ache or pain. Manlike, he has therefore concluded that she can never have felt either.

"It is very thoughtless of her," says Cecilia, with a not altogether amiable laugh, and giving a final irritated slap to Sybilla's coverlet – "considering how much illness we already have in the house; ha! ha! but it is true all the same: she is not well, not at all well; she is in bed."

"In bed!"

"She must have caught a chill yesterday on that disgusting excursion; driving home that long distance in wet shoes and stockings."

"But I thought, I hoped that – I asked her to change them."

"She had them dried in a sort of way; but I could see when she put them on again that they were really wringing wet still. I told her so, but she only answered that even if they were, what matter? she never caught cold. You know that Amelia never thinks that anything matters that concerns herself."

This would be an even handsomer tribute to Amelia than it is, if it did not suggest a secondary intention of administering a back-hander to someone else.

"In the case of my children," says Mr. Wilson, making his voice heard for the first time from the window, where he is discontentedly peering up and down the sheets of a journal through his spectacles, "there seems to be no mean possible between senseless rashness and preposterous self-indulgence."