Alas! A Novel

There is a silence, and when it is broken it is infringed by what is not much more than a whisper.

"What – what do you mean; what – what sort of a sorrow?"

"I tell you, I do not know."

Byng's tears have stopped flowing, and he now lifts his eyes, full of a madness of exaltation, to the ceiling.

"I will go to her," he cries; "if sorrow has the audacity to approach her again, it will have to reckon with me. There is no sorrow, none, in the whole long gamut of woe, for which love such as mine is not a balm. Reciprocal love!" – trailing the words in a sort of slow rapture – "no one that had seen her in the wood could have doubted that it was reciprocal."

"No doubt, no doubt."

"I will go to her!" – clasping his hands high in the air – "I will pour the oil and spikenard of my adoration into her gaping wounds! I will kiss the rifts together, though they yawn as wide as hell – yes, I will."

"For heaven's sake, do not talk such dreadful gibberish," breaks in Jim, at length at the end of his patience, which had run quite to the extreme of its tether indeed at the last mention of that ever-recurring wood. "It is a knockdown blow for you, I own, and I would do what I could to help you; but if you will keep on spouting and talking such terrible bosh – "

"I suppose I am making an ass of myself," replies Byng, thus brought down with a run from his heroics. "I beg your pardon, I am sure, old man. I have no right to victimize you," his sweet nature asserting itself even at this bitter moment; "but you see it is so horribly sudden. If you had seen her when I parted from her last night at the door! She lingered a moment behind Mrs. Le Marchant – just a moment, just time enough to give me one look, one wordless look. She did not speak; she was so divinely dutiful and submissive that nothing would have persuaded her by the lightest word to imply any censure of her mother; but she gave me just a look, which said plainly, 'It is not my fault that you are turned away! I would have welcomed you in!' Upon that look I banqueted in heaven all night."

He stops, choked.

"Well?"

"And then this morning, when I got here – I think I ran all the way; I am sure I did, for I saw people staring at me as I passed – to be met by Annunziata with the news that they were gone! I did not believe her; I laughed in her face, and then she grew angry, and bid me come in and see for myself! And I rushed past her, in here, with my arms stretched out, confident that in one short moment more she would be filling them, and instead of her" – dropping upon his knees by the table with a groan – "I find this!" – dashing the note upon the floor – "all that she leaves me to fill my embrace instead of her is this poor little pillow, that still seems to keep a faint trace of the perfume of her delicate head!"

He buries his own in it again as he speaks, beginning afresh to sob loudly.

Jim stands beside him, his mind half full of compassion and half of a burning exasperation, and his body wholly rigid.

"When did they go? at what hour? last night or this morning?"

"This morning early, quite early."

"They have left all their things behind them" – looking round at the room, strewn with the traces of recent and refined occupation.

"Yes" – lifting his wet face out of his cushion – "and at first, seeing everything just as usual, even to her very workbasket – she has left her very workbasket behind – I was quite reassured. I felt certain that they could have gone for only a few hours – for the day perhaps; but – "

He breaks off

"Yes?"

"They left word that their things were to be packed and sent after them to an address they would give."

"And you do not know where they have gone?"

"I know nothing, nothing, only that they are gone.

"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'

Oh! oh!! oh!!!"

"You never heard them speak of their plans, mention any place they intended to move to on leaving Florence?"

"Never!"

"It is too late for Rome," says Jim musingly; "England? I hardly think England," recalling Elizabeth's forlorn admission made to him at Monte Senario, "Why should we go home? We have nothing pleasant to go to."

"I do not think they had any plans," says Byng, speaking in a voice which is thick with much weeping; "they never seemed to me to have any. She was so happy here, so gay, there never was anything more lovely than her gaiety, except – except – her tenderness."

"Yes, yes, no doubt. Then you are absolutely without a clue?"

"Absolutely."

"Do you mean to say that up to yesterday – all through yesterday, even – she never gave you a hint of any intention of leaving Florence?"

"Never, never. On the contrary, in the – " (he is going to say "the wood," but thinks better of it), "we were planning many more such expeditions as yesterday's. At least, I was planning them."

"And she assented?"

"She did not dissent. She met me with a look of divine acquiescence."

Jim turns away his head. He is involuntarily picturing to himself what that look was like, and with what sweet dumb-show it was accompanied.

"What powers of hell" – banging his head down upon the table again – "could have wrought such a hideous change in so few hours? Only ten! for it was eight in the evening before I left them, and they were off at six this morning. They could have seen no one; they had received no letters, no telegrams, for I inquired of Annunziata, and she assured me that they had not. Oh no!" – lifting his face with a gleam of moist hope upon it – "there is only one tenable hypothesis about it – it is not her doing at all. She wrote this under pressure. It is her handwriting, is it not? – though I would not swear even to that. I – I have played the mischief with my eyes" – pulling out his drenched pocket-handkerchief, and hastily wiping them – "so that I cannot see properly; but it is hers, is not it?"

"I do not know; I never saw her handwriting; she never wrote to me."

"It was evidently dictated to her," cries Byng, his sanguine nature taking an upward spring again; "there are clear traces, even in the very way the letters are formed, of its being written to order reluctantly. She did it under protest. See how her poor little hand was shaking, and she was crying all the while, bless her! There, do not you see a blister on the paper – here on this side?"

Burgoyne does not see any blister, but as he thinks it extremely probable that there was one, he does not think himself called upon to wound his friend by saying so.

"I declare I think we have got hold of the right clue at last," cries Byng, his dimmed eyes emitting such a flash as would have seemed impossible to them five minutes ago. "Read in this light, it is not nearly so incomprehensible: 'I shall never marry you, I have no right to marry anyone.' Of course, I see now! What an ass I was not to see it at once! What she means is that she has no right to leave her mother! To anyone who knew her lofty sense of duty as well as I ought to have done it is quite obvious that that is what she means. Is not it quite obvious? is not it as clear as the sun in heaven?"

Jim shakes his head.

"I am afraid that it is rather a forced interpretation."

"I do not agree with you," rejoins the other hotly; "I see nothing forced about it. You do not know as well as I do – how should you? – her power of delicate, self-sacrificing devotion. It is overstrained, I grant you; but there it is – she thinks she has no right to leave her mother now that she is all alone."

"She is not alone; she has her husband."

"I mean now that all her other children are married and scattered. There are plenty more – are not there? – though I never could get her to talk about them."

"There are two sisters and two brothers."

"But they are no longer any good to their mother," persists Byng, clinging to his theory with all the greater tenacity as he sees that it meets with no very great acceptance in his friend's eyes; "as far as she is concerned they are non-existent."

"I do not know what right you have to say that."

"And so she, with her lofty idea of self-sacrifice, immolates her own happiness on the altar of her filial affection. It is just like her!" – going off into a sort of rapture – "blind mole that I was not to divine the motive, which her ineffable delicacy forbade her to put into words. She thought she had a right to think that I should have comprehended her without words!"

He has talked himself into a condition of such exalted confidence before he reaches the end of this sentence that Jim is conscious of a certain brutality in applying to him the douche contained in his next words.

"I do not know why you should credit Mrs. Le Marchant with such colossal selfishness; she never used to be a selfish woman."

But Burgoyne's cold shower-bath does not appear even to damp the shoulders for which it is intended.

"'Since you left me, taking no farewell,'"

murmurs Byng, beginning again to tramp up and down the little room, with head thrown back and clasped hands high lifted; and in his rapt poet voice:

"'Since you left me, taking no farewell,'

I must follow you, sweet! Despite your prohibition, I must follow you.

"'We two that with so many thousand sighs,Did buy each other.'"

Then, coming abruptly down to prose – "Though they left no address, it will of course be possible, easy, to trace them. I will go to the station and make inquiries. They will have been seen. It is out of the question that she can have passed unnoticed! No eye that has once been enriched by the sight of her can have forgotten that heavenly vision. I will telegraph to Bologna, to Milan, to Venice. Before night I shall have learnt her whereabouts. I shall be in the train, following her track. I shall be less than a day behind her. I shall fall at her feet, I shall – "

"You are talking nonsense," answers Burgoyne impatiently; and yet with a distinct shade of pity in his voice; "you cannot do anything of the kind. When the poor woman has given so very unequivocal a proof of her wish to avoid you, as is implied in leaving the place at a moment's notice, without giving herself even time to pack her clothes, it is impossible that you can force your company again upon her – it would be persecution."

"And do you mean to tell me," asks Byng slowly, and breathing hard, while the fanatical light dies out of his face, and leaves it chalk white; "do you mean to say that I am to acquiesce, to sit down with my hands before me, and submit without a struggle to the loss of – O my God" – breaking out into an exceeding bitter cry – "why did you make me

"'so rich in having such a jewel,As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearl,The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold,'

if it were only to rob me of her?"

"I do not see what other course is open to you," replies Jim, answering only the first part of the young sufferer's appeal, and ignoring the rhetoric, terribly genuine as is the feeling of which it is the florid expression. "It is evident that she has some cogent reasons – or at least that appear cogent to her – for breaking off her relations with you."

"What cogent reasons can she have that she had not yesterday?" says Byng violently – "yesterday, when she lay in my arms, and her lips spoke their acquiescence in my worship – if not in words, yet oh, far, far more – "

"Why do you reiterate these assertions?" cries Burgoyne sternly, since to him there seems a certain indecency in – even in the insanity of loss – dragging to the eye of day the record of such sacred endearments. "I neither express nor feel any doubt as to the terms you were on yesterday; what I maintain is that to-day– I do not pretend to explain the why – she has changed her mind; it is not" – with a sarcasm, which he himself at the very moment of uttering it feels to be cheap and unworthy – "it is not the first time in the world's history that such a thing has happened. She has changed her mind."

"I do not believe it," cries Byng, his voice rising almost to a shout in the energy of his negation; "till her own mouth tell me so I will never believe it. If I thought for a moment that it was true I should rush to death to deliver me from the intolerable agony of such a thought. You do not believe it yourself" – lifting his spoilt sunk eyes in an appeal that is full of pathos to his friend's harsh face. "Think what condemnation it implies of her – her whom you always affected to like, who thought so greatly of you – her whose old friend you were – her whom you knew in her lovely childhood!"

"You are right," replies Jim, looking down, moved and ashamed; "I do not believe that she has changed her mind. What I do believe is that yesterday she let herself go; she gave way for one day, only for one day, after all, poor soul, to that famine for happiness which, I suppose" – with a sigh and a shrug – "gnaws us all now and then – gave way to it even to the pitch of forgetting that – that something in her past of whose nature I am as ignorant as you are, which seems to cast a blight over all her life."

He pauses; but as his listener only hangs silently on his utterance he goes on:

"After you left her, recollection came back to her; and because she could not trust herself again with you, probably for the very reason that she cared exceedingly about you" – steeling himself to make the admission – "she felt that there was nothing for it but to go."

Either the increased kindness of his friend's tone, or the conviction that there is, at least, something of truth in his explanations, lets loose again the fountain of Byng's tears, and once more he throws his head down upon his hands and cries extravagantly.

"It is an awful facer for you, I know," says Burgoyne, standing over him, and, though perfectly dry-eyed, yet probably not very much less miserable than the young mourner, whose loud weeping fills him with an almost unbearable and yet compunctious exasperation.

"What is he made of? how can he do it?" are the questions that he keeps irefully putting to himself; and for fear lest in an access of uncontrollable irritation he shall ask them out loud, he moves to the door. At the slight noise he makes in opening it Byng lifts his head.

"Are you going?"

"Yes; if it is any consolation to you, you have not a monopoly of wretchedness to-day. Things are not looking very bright for me either. Amelia is ill."

"Amelia," repeats the other, with a hazy look, as if not at first able to call to mind who Amelia is; then, with a return of consciousness, "Is Amelia ill? Oh poor Amelia! Amelia was very good to her. Amelia tried to draw her out. She liked Amelia!"

"Well" – with an impatient sigh – "unfortunately that did not hinder Amelia from falling ill."

"She is not ill really?" – his inborn kind-heartedness struggling for a moment to make head against the selfishness of his absorption.

"I do not know" – uneasily – "I am going back to the hotel to hear the doctor's verdict. Will you walk as far as to the Anglo-Américain with me? There is no use in your staying here."

But at this proposition the lover's sobs break out louder and more infuriating than ever.

"I will stay here till I die – till I am carried over the threshold that her cruel feet have crossed.

"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'"

Against a resolution at once so fixed and so rational, Jim sees that it is useless to contend.

CHAPTER XXVII

The sun rides high, as Burgoyne issues into the open air, and beats, blinding hot, upon the great stone flags that pave the Florentine streets, and seem to have a peculiar power of absorbing and retaining light and heat. He must have been longer in the Piazza d'Azeglio than he had thought, and the reflection quickens his steps as he hurries, regardless of the midsummer blaze – for, indeed, it is more than equivalent to that of our midsummer – back to the Anglo-Américain. As he reaches it, he hears, with annoyance, the hotel clocks striking one. He is annoyed, both because the length of his absence seems to argue an indifference to the tidings he is expecting, and also because he knows that it is the Wilsons' luncheon hour, and that he will probably find that they have migrated to the salle-à-manger. In this case he will have to choose between the two equally disagreeable alternatives of following and watching them at their food, or that of undergoing a tête-à-tête with Sybilla, who, it is needless to say, does not accompany her family to the public dining-room; a tête-à-tête with Sybilla, which is, of all forms of social intercourse, that for which he has the least relish.

But as he apprehensively opens the salon door, he sees that his fears are unfounded. They have not yet gone to luncheon; they are all sitting in much the same attitudes as he had left them, except that Sybilla is eating or drinking something of a soupy nature out of a cup. There are very few hours of the day or night in which Sybilla is not eating something out of a cup. There is that about the entire idleness of the other couple which gives him a fright. Are they too unhappy? Have they heard too bad news to be able to settle to any occupation? Urged by this alarm, his question shoots out, almost before he is inside the door:

"Has not he come yet? Has not the doctor come yet?"

"He has been and gone; you see, you have been such a very long time away," replies Cecilia. She has no intention of conveying reproach, either by her words or tone; but to his sore conscience it seems as if both carried it.

"And what did he say?"

"He did not say much."

"Does he – does he think that it is anything – anything serious?"

"He did not say."

"Do you mean to tell me" – indignantly – "that you did not ask him?"

"If you had been here," replies Cecilia, with a not inexcusable resentment, "you might have asked him yourself."

"But did not you ask him?" in too real anxiety to be offended at, or even aware of, her fleer. "Did not he say?"

"I do not think he knew himself."

"But he must have thought – he must have had an opinion!" growing the more uneasy as there seems no tangible object for his fears to lay hold of.

"He says it is impossible to judge at so early a stage; it may be a chill – I told him about that detestable excursion yesterday, and he considered it quite enough to account for anything – it may be measles – they seem to be a good deal about; it may be malaria – there is a good deal of that too."

"And how soon will he know? How soon will it declare itself?"

"I do not know."

"But has he prescribed? Is there nothing to be done – to be done at once?" asks Jim feverishly, chafing at the idea of this inaction, which seems inevitable, with that helpless feeling which his own entire ignorance of sickness produces.

"Do not you suppose that if there was we should have done it?" cries Cecilia, rendered even more uncomfortable than she was before, by the contagion of his anxiety. "We are to keep her in bed – there is no great difficulty about that, poor soul; she has not the least desire to get up; she seems so odd and heavy!"

"So odd and heavy?"

"Yes; I went in to see her just now, and she scarcely took any notice of me; only when I told her that you had been to inquire after her, she lit up a little. I believe" – with a rather grudging smile – "that if she were dead, and someone mentioned your name, she would light up."

A sudden mountain rises in Jim's throat.

"If she is not better to-morrow, Dr. Coldstream will send a nurse."

"But does he think it will be necessary?"

"He does not know."

Jim writhes. It seems to him as if he were being blind-folded, and having his arms tied to his sides by a hundred strong yet invisible threads.

"Does no one know anything?" he cries miserably.

"I have told you exactly what the doctor said," says Cecilia, with the venial crossness bred of real anxiety. "I suppose you do not wish me to invent something that he did not say?"

"Of course not; but I wish I had been here – I wish I had been here!" – restlessly.

"Why were not you?"

No immediate answer.

"Why were not you?" repeats she, curiosity, for the moment, superseding her disquiet. "What prevented you? I thought, when you left us, that you meant to come back at once?"

"So I did, but – "

"But what?"

"I could not; I was with Byng."

"With Byng?" repeats Cecilia, too genuinely astonished to remember even to prefix a "Mr." to Byng's name. "Why, I should have thought that if there were one day of his life on which he could have done without you better than another, it would have been to-day!"

"Were not you rather de trop?" chimes in Sybilla's languid voice from the sofa. "Rather a bad third?"

"I was not a third at all."

"Do you mean to say," cries Cecilia, her countenance tinged with the pink of a generous indignation, "that you were four– that Mrs. Le Marchant stayed in the room the whole time? I must say that now that they are really and bonâ fide engaged, I think she might leave them alone together."

"Mrs. Le Marchant was not there at all." Then, seeing the open-mouthed astonishment depicted on the faces of his audience, he braces his mind to make the inevitable yet dreaded announcement. "I had better explain at once that neither Mrs. nor Miss Le Marchant was there; they are gone."

"Gone!"

"Yes; they left Florence at seven o'clock this morning." There is a moment of silent stupefaction.

"I suppose," says Cecilia, at last slowly recovering the power of speech, "that they were telegraphed for? Mr. Le Marchant is dead or ill? one of the married sisters? one of the brothers?"

Never in his life has Jim laboured under so severe a temptation to tell a lie, were it only the modified falsehood of allowing Cecilia's hypothesis to pass uncontradicted; but even if he were able for once to conquer his constitutional incapacity, he knows that in this case it would be useless. The truth must transpire to-morrow.

"I believe not."

"Gone!" repeats Cecilia, in a still more thunderstruck key than before – "and where are they gone?"

"I do not know."

"Why did they go?"

Jim makes an impatient movement, fidgeting on his chair. "I can only tell you their actions; they told me their motives as little as they did you."

"Gone! Why, they never said a word about it yesterday."

This being of the nature of an assertion – not an interrogation – Jim feels with relief that it does not demand an answer.

"Gone, at seven o'clock in the morning! Why, they could not have had time to pack their things!"

"They left them behind."

The moment that this admission is out of Burgoyne's mouth, he repents having made it; nor does his regret at all diminish under the shower of ejaculations from both sisters that it calls forth.

"Why, it was a regular flit! they must have taken French leave."

There is something so horribly jarring in the semi-jocosity of the last phrase that Jim jumps up from his chair and walks towards the window, where Mr. Wilson is sitting in dismal idleness.

Mr. Wilson has never cared much about the Le Marchants, and is now far too deeply absorbed in his own trouble to have anything but the most inattentive indifference to bestow upon the topic which to his daughters appears so riveting. Jim blesses him for his callousness. But the window of a small room is not so distant from any other part of it that sounds cannot, with perfect ease, penetrate thither, as Jim finds when Cecilia's next eager question pursues him.

"Did Mr. Byng know that they were going?"

"No."

There is a pause.

"It is absolutely incomprehensible!" says Cecilia, with almost a gasp. "I never saw any one human being so much in love with another as she was yesterday – there was so little disguise about it, that one was really quite sorry for her – and this morning at cockcrow she decamps and leaves him without a word."

"You are mistaken – she left a note for him."

"Poor dear boy!" sighs Sybilla, "is not he quite prostrated by the blow? I am not apt to pity men generally – they are so coarse-grained – but he is much more delicately strung than the general run."

"I suppose he is frightfully cut up," says Cecilia, with that inquisitiveness as to the details of a great affliction which we are all apt to experience.