Alas! A Novel

Burgoyne is pacing along a brown walk, like a raised causeway, with a sheet of white water on either hand, rolling strong ripples to the bank. Gnarled willows stand islanded in the coldly argent water. A blackbird is flying out of the bushes, with a surprised look at finding himself turned into a sea-bird. No sun; an even sweep of dull silver to right and left. No sun; and yet as he looks, after days of rain, the "grand décorateur," as someone happily called him, rides out in royalty on a cleared sky-field, turning the whole drenched country into mother-of-pearl – a sheet of opal stretched across the drowned meadows; the distance opal too, a delicate, dainty, evanescent loveliness snatched from the ugly brown jaws of winter.

Burgoyne is leaning over the wooden bridge beneath which, in its normal state, the water of the lasher rushes down impetuously; but it is now raised to such a height that it lies level, almost flush with the planking. He is staring across the iridescent water-plain to where, in the poetic atmosphere of sun and mist, dome, and schools and soaring spires stand etherealized.

"Dear old place!" he says, under his breath, "everybody is dead; and I am dead; and Brown is deader than anyone. I am glad that you, at least, are still alive!"

Are these more ghosts coming round the corner? A man and a woman ghost strolling along, and looking about them as strangers look. When they are within a pace or two of him the woman says something – something about the floods – to her companion, and at the sound Burgoyne starts.

"She did not speak last night; if she had spoken I should have known her at once. She always had such a sweet voice."

He raises his arms from the bridge-top, and, turning, meets them face to face, eye to eye, and in an instant he has seen that both recognise him. At the same instant he is aware of a simultaneous inclination on the part of man and wife to avert their heads, and pass him without claiming his acquaintance. Perhaps, if he had had time to reflect, he would have allowed them to do so, but the impulse of the moment forbids it. Why should they wish to cut him? What has he done to deserve it? Ten years ago, they were his very good friends, and he was the familiar comrade of their children, the daily guest at their table. What has the unavoidable lapse of those years done to make him less fit for their company at twenty-nine than he was at nineteen? There must be some misconception, which a moment will set right.

"I am afraid that you do not remember me, Mrs. Le Marchant," he says, lifting his hat.

This is not quite true, as he is perfectly convinced that they are as much aware of his identity as he is of theirs. But what formula has a man to employ in such a case? They both look back at him with a sort of irresolution. To his astonishment, in their eyes is a velleity of flight, but apparently she – women's minds moving more quickly than men's – is the first to realize that flight is out of the question.

"I am sure that you have no intention of cutting me," Jim goes on, with a smile, seeing that she is apparently struggling with a difficulty in utterance; "at least, you must be very much changed from what you were ten years ago if you have. My name is – "

"I know – I know!" she interrupts, finding speech at last – speech low and hurried. "I remember perfectly. You are Mr. Burgoyne."

Her confusion – she used always to be such a placid, even-mannered woman – is so patent, born of whatever unaccountable feeling it may be, that he now heartily wishes he had let the poor woman pass unmolested. But such repentance is too late. He has arrested her; she is standing on the gravel path before him, and though he feels that her extraordinary shyness —mauvaise honte, whatever it may be – has infected himself, he must make some further remark to her. Nothing better occurs to him than the obvious one:

"It is a long time – it is ten years since we met."

"Yes, ten years; it must be quite ten years," she assents, evidently making a great effort to regain composure.

She does not feign the slightest pleasure in the meeting, and Burgoyne feels that the one thought that occupies her mind is how she can soonest end it. But his roused curiosity, together with the difficulty of parting without further observation after having forced his presence upon them, combine to prevent her succeeding.

"And how is the Moat?" he asks, reflecting that this, at least, is a safe question; a brick and mortar house, at all events, cannot be dead. "How is Devonshire?"

Apparently it is not so harmless a question as he had imagined; at least, Mrs. Le Marchant is obviously quite incapable of answering it. Her husband, for the first time, comes to her rescue.

"The Moat is let," he says, in a dry voice; "we have left Devonshire a long while – nine, nine and a half years ago."

The Moat let! Judging by the light of Burgoyne's recollections, it would have seemed less surprising to him to hear that Windsor Castle had been turned into a Joint Stock Company Hotel. It is probably, then, some money trouble that has turned Mrs. Le Marchant's hair white – snow white, as he now sees it to be. But no; he rejects the explanation as insufficient. She is not the woman to have taken a diminished income so much to heart.

Good manners forbid him to ask, "Why is the Moat let?" so all that he says is, "Nine and a half years ago? Why, that must have been very soon after I left Devonshire."

He addresses his remark involuntarily rather to the wife than the husband, but she does not answer it. Her eyes are fixed upon the bubbles sailing so fast upon the swollen river, which is distinguishable only by its current from the sameness of the surrounding water. A lark – there is always a lark in Mesopotamia – a tiny, strong-throated singer, that never seems to have to stop to take breath, fills up the silence, shouting somewhere out of sight among the black clouds, in and out of which the uncertain sun is plunging. Whether of a moneyed nature or not, there is evidently something very unpleasant connected with their leaving their native county and their immemorial home, so he had better get away from the subject as fast as possible.

"Anyhow," he says, with a rather nervous smile, "I hope that the world has been treating you kindly – that things have gone well with you since those dear old days when you were so good to me."

There is an instant's pause – perhaps he would not have noticed it had not his suspicions been already roused – before the husband, again taking upon him the task of replying, answers, with a sort of laboured carelessness:

"Oh, yes, thanks; we do not complain. It has not been a very rosy time for landlords lately, as you are aware."

"And you?" cries the wife, striking in with a species of hurry in her voice – a hurry due, as his instinct tells him, to the fact of her fear of his entering into more detailed inquiries. "And you? We must not forget you. Have you been well, flourishing, all this long time? Do you still live with your – "

She stops abruptly. It is apparent that she has entirely forgotten what was the species of relation with whom he lived. There is a little tinge of bitterness in his heart, though not in his tone, as he supplies the missing word "aunt." After all, he had forgotten her name; why should not she forget his aunt?

"With my aunt? Well, I never exactly lived with her; I made, and make my headquarters there when I am in England, which is not very often. I have been a rolling stone; I have rolled pretty well round the world since we parted."

They do not care in the least where he has rolled, nor how much nor how little moss he has collected in the process. They are only thinking how they can best get rid of him. But the past is strong upon him; he cannot let them slide out of his life again for another ten – twenty years perhaps, without finding out from them something about his five merry playmates. His inquiry must needs be a vague one. Who dares ask specifically after this or that man, woman, or even child, when ten years have rolled their tides between?

"And you are all well?" he says, with a certain wistfulness lurking in the indifferent banal phrase. "Dear me, what a jolly party we used to be! I suppose that – that they are all out in the world now?"

His eyes are fixed apprehensively upon the mother of those young comrades, to whom he thus cautiously alludes. Perhaps, carefully as he has worded his question, he may have touched some terrible raw. Her face is turned aside, presenting only its profile to him, but she answers almost at once:

"Yes; we are all scattered now. Charlie is planting oranges in Florida – he does not mind the heat; you know he always said no weather could be too hot for him; and Tom has an ostrich farm in Australia; and Rose has been married two years – she has a dear little baby; and Miriam is married too; we have just come down from her wedding."

"Miriam married!" repeats Burgoyne in a tone of wonder. "Miriam with a husband instead of a white rat!"

The mother laughs. It is the first time that he has heard her laugh, and she used to laugh so often.

"I think she likes the exchange."

There is another little pause, again filled by the lark's crowding notes. There are two words battering against the gate of Burgoyne's lips for egress – two words that he dares not utter.

"And Elizabeth?" She was the eldest. She would naturally have been mentioned first; but neither first nor last is there any speech of her. She must, then, be dead – dead long ago, too; for there is no trace of mourning in her parents' dress. Elizabeth is dead – bright Elizabeth, the beauty and the pet! Charles Lamb's tender lines come pensively back to him —

"My sprightly neighbour gone beforeTo that unknown and silent shore,Shall we not meet as heretofore,Some summer morning?"

Is it only fancy that he sees in the eye of Elizabeth's mother a dread lest he shall ask tidings of her, as she says, hastily, and with a smile, "Well, I am afraid we must be going; it has been very pleasant meeting you again, but I am afraid that the Warden will be expecting us"?

She adds to her parting hand-shake no wish for a repetition of that meeting, and he watches them down the Willow Walk with a sort of sadness in his heart.

"Elizabeth is dead! Elizabeth is undoubtedly dead!"

CHAPTER III

"Do you know that Willy has been sent down again?"

Six weeks have passed since Burgoyne's eye followed his quondam friends down Mesopotamia, and he is not in Oxford now. He left it, indeed, twenty-four hours after the rencounter described; left it with something of a determination never to revisit it. This, too, in spite of the good Brown's vociferously reiterated invitation to him to run down for another Sunday, whenever he should feel inclined, and which he accepted civilly, knowing that he should never feel inclined.

At the present moment he is pacing up and down the still wintry, north-windswept walks of a country-house garden in Shropshire, in the company of a lady whom he has known as long as he can remember; a lady who would have been a friend of circumstance, even if she had not been one of choice, since her home has been in the immediate neighbourhood of the only one he has ever had; a lady whose friendship he has tested by letters on thin paper from New Guinea and Central Africa all about himself; at whose feet he has laid on his return more heads, and skins, and claws than she has well known what to do with; whose husband he thought a very good fellow, and to whom he wrote a very nice letter on that husband's death; lastly, concerning whose only child has been made the communication that opens this chapter – "Do you know that Willy has been sent down again?"

"I did not know it; but I am very sorry now that I do know."

"You need not be," returns she cheerfully; "he does not mind it in the least; indeed, happily for him, most of his friends have been sent down too."

"What has he been doing this time? Putting the porter into the fountain? or screwing up the Dean? or what other playful little pleasantry?"

"You need not speak in that nasty sarcastic voice," says she, half laughing and half vexed. "After all, you must know that young men will be young men, or, at least, if you do not know it now, you must have known it once."

"If you take that tone to me," retorts Burgoyne, smiling, "I shall have to souse your gardener in your fountain, to prove my juvenility; but come, what has he done?"

"Absolutely nothing, as far as I can make out," replies she, spreading out her hands as if to emphasize the statement.

"Do you mean to say that the authorities have sent him down de gaieté de cœur, without any provocation at all?" asks Burgoyne, in a tone out of which he is unable to keep a shade of incredulity.

"I mean to say," replies she, nettled, "that he had a few men to supper, and I suppose they were making a little noise; did you ever in your day hear of an undergraduate supper where there was not noise? However, in this case, from what he tells me, Willy was taking positively no part in it."

"He was sitting in a corner, with cotton-wool in his ears, reading Aristotle," suggests Burgoyne teasingly.

"And it seems," continued she, not deigning to notice the interruption, "that the Proctor came in, and was very rude, and Willy was told to go to the Dean next morning, and he either was a little late, or mistook the hour, or some trifle of that sort; and when he did go he was told that he was sent down. However" – with some triumph in her voice – "it did not matter in the least – he did not mind; in fact, he was rather glad, as he has long wanted to go to Italy in the spring."

"To Italy? Then perhaps we shall meet; I too am going to Italy."

"Are you?" she says. "Why should you go to Italy? There is nothing to kill there, is there? Is not it at Naples that they go out in full chasseur uniform to shoot tomtits?" Which speech is her revenge for his sarcasms upon her son.

But Burgoyne's face has taken on a rather careworn look; and her little arrow misses its mark.

"You see, Amelia is at Florence," he says explanatorily; "her father, Mr. Wilson, had a clergyman's throat in the autumn, and was obliged to give up duty, so they all went abroad. They have been abroad all the winter; you know that I have not seen her since I came back from the Rockies."

They are now walking in a winding shrubbery path, whose laurels protect them from the pinching wind. They have turned several corners, and traversed half a quarter of a mile before either again breaks silence. It is the lady who does so finally.

"Jim, how long have you been engaged to Amelia?"

There is a sigh mixed with his answer.

"Eight years – eight years this next June; it was the second summer term after I came up."

"And as far as you can see, you are likely to be engaged for another eight years?"

"As far as I can see – yes; but then I cannot see far."

Perhaps his companion is a fanciful woman; but she notices that this time he does not sigh.

"Poor Amelia!" she says, half under her breath.

"Poor Amelia!" repeats he sharply; "why poor? – for being engaged to me? You are not very complimentary, Mrs. Byng."

She looks up friendlily at him. "For being engaged to you, or being only engaged to you? – which? I leave you a choice of interpretation."

But either Jim is too ruffled by the pity expressed in her tone towards his betrothed, or her remarks have provoked in him a train of thought which does not tend towards loquacity. The loud rooks, balancing themselves on improbably small twigs above their heads, and, hoarsely melodious, calling out their airy vernal news to each other, make for some time the only sound that breaks the silence of the cold spring afternoon. It is again Mrs. Byng who at last infringes it.

"If you and Willy are both going to Italy, why should not you go together?"

Jim does not immediately answer; the project is sprung upon him with such suddenness that he does not at once know whether it is agreeable to him or the reverse.

"You do not like the idea?" continues the mother, trying, not very successfully, to keep out of her tone the surprise she feels at his not having jumped at a plan so obviously to his own advantage.

"I did not say so. I did not even think so."

"Willy is an ideal fellow-traveller," says she, "excepting in the matter of punctuality; I warn you" – laughing – "that you would always have to drag him out of bed."

"But," suggests Jim slowly, "even supposing that I embraced your design with the warmth which I see you think it deserves, how can you tell that it would meet with his approbation? He has probably made up a party with some of the other innocent victims of a corrupt University system."

"No, he has not; the friend with whom he was to have gone has thrown him over; at least, poor man, that is hardly the way to express it, for he has broken his leg; but anyhow he is hors de combat. If you went with Willy," she adds, after a pause, and with a rather wistful air, "I should be sure of knowing if anything went wrong."

"I am to dry-nurse him, in fact, only I stipulate that, if he brings you home a Contadina daughter-in-law, or 'commits himself with a countess,' like the commercial gentleman at Todgers's, you are not to hold me responsible."

And so it came to pass that a fortnight later, while April is still young, Burgoyne, en route to his Amelia, is standing at a window of the Hotel de Gênes at Genoa, noisiest of hotels, though, to be sure, that is its only fault. He is looking out at the gay market that is held in the piazza below – the gay market that is over and gone by nine o'clock.

It seems odd that so many women, so many umbrellas, so many baskets, so many oranges and lemons – each lemon with a glossy green leaf still adhering to its inch of stalk – so many fresh vegetables can be swept away in so short a time. But they are; all the gay kerchiefs are fled, and have been replaced by a row of fiacres with sad droop-headed horses, a good hour before Byng appears – appears radiantly well washed and apologetic.

"How many morning chapels did you attend last term?" asks Burgoyne with some dryness.

"It is a vile habit," replies the other sweetly, sitting down at a little table, and unfolding his breakfast napkin. "I do not mean going to chapel, but being so late; however, I really am improving. I am a quarter of an hour – twenty minutes earlier than I was yesterday, and, thank God, we have no train to catch to-day."

Burgoyne is rather inclined to echo the thanksgiving a little later in the day, as they stroll with the pleasant vagueness with which one strays about a little-known foreign town, not exactly knowing whither, through the streets of the queenly city, with which neither of them has much acquaintance; Byng's twenty-two years of school and college, of cricket, and grouse, and stalking, having left not much margin for aught else; and Burgoyne being in the case of some widely-wandered shots and explorers, to whom the Nyanza Lake and the Australian Bush are more familiar than Giotto's Campanile or the Lagoons. There is a grayish-looking English sky, with now and then little sprays of rain, and now and then flashes of warm sun.

Neither of the young men knows much Italian, and such as they possess they are ashamed to air before each other in asking their way, so they wander wherever chance or fancy leads them. They look curiously into churches, they walk down deep narrow streets, whose houses have for three centuries been threatening to embrace each other across the strait sky strip far, far above their heads. They glance at palace-fronts, and wonder at the sculptured portals where fresco and fruit garland and fine tracery speak of a time at more leisure for delicate work that has no end but beauty, than this breathless one. Everywhere in the gardens they see budding green, untrained roses making bowers, ripe oranges hanging over the walls. They jostle against women, each made charming, even the ugliest of them, by the black lace kerchief tied about her head.

"Henry James says that an English crowd is the best-looking in the world," says Byng, in a tone of strong dissent, following with his eyes a little tripping figure, and with an expression of pronounced approbation in those eyes, which gives Burgoyne a momentary twinge of misgiving as to his chaperonship. "I should put it the other way up, and say that they are the ugliest."

"All crowds are ugly, and most individuals," replies Burgoyne, misanthropically looking up from his guide-book.

They are sauntering down the Via Garibaldi, street of palaces that deserves an antiquer name than that of the somewhat shoddy and recent hero who has god-fathered it. Noblest Via, down whose stately length great towering bulks succeed each other in solid majesty on either hand; bulks on whose high fronts, lofty-portaled, o'errun with fresco, glorified by brush and chisel, strength and beauty take hands in unending wedlock. Into the noblest of all, up the echoing stone stairs, down which the feet of the masters have for ever ceased to tread, they enter. As we all know, it has been given to the city of Genoa – lovely queen-city meriting so great a gift – by the dying hand of its latest possessor, the last of that high and beautiful race – if we may judge of the dead by their pictures – who paced its floors, and went forth in final funeral pomp through its worthy-to-be-imperial portals.

Burgoyne and Byng are standing before the great Vandyke. The custode, opening a shutter, and throwing wider a door, casts a brighter ray of light for the staring Britons – several others have joined themselves to our friends – to gape at it by. What does the stately gentleman on his great white horse, whom Vandyke has made able to set at naught death's effacement, think of them, as the custode slowly swings him forward on his hinges, so that the day-beams may bring out more clearly still the arresting charm of his serious face, his outstretched arm, and grave, gallant bearing? Looking at him, whose heart among us is not besieged by an ache of longing that that "young and princely" gentleman on the brave white charger should ride down to us out of his frame, and bring back his world with him? probably not a better world than ours, but surely, surely a handsomer one.

After awhile the other tourists drift away, but the two men still stand and gaze. Into Burgoyne's mind has come a sense of disgust with the present, a revolt against steam trams and the Cromwell Road – most perfect symbol of that bald, unending, vulgar ugliness, which, in some moods, must seem to everyone the dominant note of nineteenth-century life. The light-hearted Byng, who always takes his colour from his surroundings, is hushed into a silence that is almost reverent too.

"What a difference there is between his Italian and his English pictures," he says presently. "Do you remember the Marchesa Balbi, and those divine Balbi children in the Grosvenor, last year? Oh, no! by-the-bye, you were in America. The fog seemed to get into his brush whenever he painted an Englishwoman, always excepting Henrietta Maria, who was not an Englishwoman, and whom he was obviously rather in love with."

"Is that a piece of scandal of your own invention, or is it founded on fact?" asks Burgoyne, rousing himself, and looking over his shoulder towards the entrance to the next frescoed, mirrored, pictured room, whence he hears the sound of approaching voices. In his eye is an idle and mechanical curiosity, mixed with vexation that his short respite from his fellow-countrymen is ended; in this case, it is fellow-countrywomen, for the tones that are nearing are those of a woman, a woman who is saying in a key of satisfaction, "Oh, here it is! I thought I remembered that it was in this room."

At the same moment the speaker, as well as the person addressed, came into sight; and in an instant out of Burgoyne's eye has raced away the lack-lustre curiosity, and has given way to an expression of something beyond surprise, of something more nearly verging on consternation; and yet, after all, there is nothing very astonishing in the fact that it is Mrs. Le Marchant who is the woman in search of the Vandyke. There is nothing more surprising in her being at Genoa than in his being there himself. At that mart of nations it can never be matter for wonder to meet anyone; but who is this to whom her observation is addressed? It is not Mr. Le Marchant, it is not a man at all; it is a slight woman —