Alas! A Novel

It is not exactly a question, yet her great shallow orbs do not seem to be going to leave his face until he makes some response. He forces himself to do so.

"I understood Miss Le Marchant to say that they are not going out just now."

"And why are not they, pray?" inquires Cecilia, in an injured voice, as if the retirement from the world of the two ladies in question were a personal injury to herself; "they are not in mourning, all their gowns are coloured ones, and they do not look as if they had bad health – perhaps, however" (after a moment's thoughtful attempt to find a solution) – "perhaps, however, they may have something – one never knows – people have such unexpected diseases nowadays – hysteria, perhaps, or fits."

At this ingenious suggestion Jim is conscious of a writhing motion passing over the stalwart form of Byng beside him. In his own brain, if there is room for anything but the desire to evade Amelia's eyes, is a dim sense of relief at a suggestion so grotesquely wide of the mark as that made by the younger Miss Wilson. In perfect innocence of the effect produced upon her companions by her bright hypothesis, Cecilia goes on to remind her sister of the parallel case of a very handsome girl whom they had once reckoned among their acquaintance, and who was periodically being found by her family with her head under the fender. But Amelia rises but faintly to the reminiscence, and the remainder of the drive is accomplished in a general silence.

The next day is the one which had been fixed upon for the expedition to Certosa. It was only with a very large admixture of wormwood in his prospective pleasure that Jim had ever looked forward to this party, but now he anticipates it with absolute dread. How can he face Elizabeth and her mother, with that ominous phrase of the "screw loose" still ringing in his ears? He feels a traitor towards them, in that he has, however unwillingly, overheard it. To add to his mental uneasiness is the fact of his having as yet not broken to Amelia his intentions with regard to the disposal of his afternoon. Amelia's eyes have for years had the habit of covertly watching him to read his wishes almost before they rose; but in their gaze yesterday he had, unless misled by his guilty conscience, detected a new quality, a quality of alarm and enlightenment. He will get over the communication of his piece of news as early in the day as may be; so, having finished breakfast before Byng has put in his, as usual, tardy appearance, he takes his hasty way to the Anglo-Américain. He finds the family there in a more placid frame of mind than that which they had presented on one or two of his recent visits. Sybilla is expecting her doctor, on which occasions she always likes to have a more lacy coverlet than usual thrown over her languid feet; a greater efflorescence of pink ribbons about her thin throat, and a disposition of pots of lilies about her wan head. Amelia, active and long-suffering as usual, is moving about in patient execution of her vain and tiresome whimsies. Cecilia sits tranquilly in the window, knitting an elaborate pair of men's woollen gloves, not indeed – to do her justice – for anyone in particular, but with a wise forethought for the accidents and possibilities of life. Since, on this occasion, his sweetheart shows no inclination to draw him away into the dining-room for a tête-à-tête, Jim has to take the bull by the horns, and rush into his subject in a more public manner than he had intended. But the one desire to get it over outbalances all minor considerations.

"Amelia," he begins suddenly, and even to himself his voice sounds discourteous and abrupt, "shall you want me this afternoon?"

The moment that the words are out of his mouth it strikes him that the form into which he has thrown his question is more than necessarily untender. She stops in the patting of Sybilla's smart pillows, and perhaps there is something a little abrupt too in her monosyllabic "Why?"

"Because," standing before the fireplace, with his back to the three women, and throwing the words over his shoulder, "because, if you do not, Byng and I were thinking of going to Certosa."

There is a pause. He hears that Cecilia's needles have stopped clicking; her work has dropped into her lap. In another moment she will have proposed to come too. "With the Le Marchants," he goes on, shooting out the fateful words like bullets; "a partie carrée."

Still silence behind him. He cannot go on staring for ever at the billets of wood of the unlit fire. He has to turn round and face his companions. The only one of them whose pleasure or displeasure in his announcement he at all heeds – Amelia – is stooping over Sybilla, rearranging in a high, picturesque tier behind the invalid's long back, three cushions, and her face is almost entirely hidden from him by her attitude.

"Of course if it is in the least inconvenient, if you have made any other plans for me – if, in fact, you want me," he continues in a tone that is at once apologetic and dogged.

"But I do not," cries she, answering at last, and with a distinct laugh in her voice, a laugh into whose quality he is not anxious too curiously to inquire. "You must not be so conceited as to think that I always want you! In point of fact, you could not have hit upon a day that suited me better. I am really rather 'throng' to-day, as they say in Yorkshire. I have quite a hundred things to do, and father wants me to help him to correct the proofs of his sermon, the sermon he preached at Mr. Moffat's church on the Holy Innocents' Day. He has been asked to publish it – is not that flattering? Poor father, I believe he will end by being a popular preacher – in fact" (laughing again), "the whole family is going up in the world!"

There is such a forced mirth in her tone that Jim feels much more guiltily uncomfortable than if she had treated him to hysterics or sulks. Nor does his satisfaction with himself increase, when, upon his rising to depart, she runs out of the room after him, to say to him, while her homely face twitches against her will, how much she hopes that he will enjoy himself; how perfectly happy she shall be without him; and how eagerly she shall look forward to hearing all about it from him to-morrow. "It will be almost better than going to Certosa herself," she ends.

But against the unnatural altitude of this last flight of abnegation nature revolts, and, becoming conscious of a break in her voice, she hastily retreats and gets back into the salon, in time to see Cecilia shaking her elaborate head, and to hear her remarking with slow emphasis, "Mark my words! There is something odd about those people, and it is not hysteria!"

With spirits sensibly worsened by his interview, Burgoyne returns to the Minerva, and, mounting to Byng's bedroom, finds that young gentleman stretched upon his bed, gloom in his usually jocund eye, and an open letter lying on the floor beside him. But Jim is far too preoccupied to notice anybody's gloom but his own.

"I came to ask at what hour we are to set off this afternoon?" he says with a sort of flat moroseness in his tone.

"We, indeed!" rejoins the other with a groan, and rolling over with a sort of petulance on the bed, dishevelling the neatly-smoothed pillow by burrowing his ruffled head in it – "we!"

There is such a heart-rent woe in the accent with which the last monosyllable is pronounced that for a moment Burgoyne has no other idea but that his young friend, too, has become aware of the "screw loose," has heard, perhaps in detail, that story from before whose ominous opening he himself had fled. The thought sends his heart into his throat, so as to render him incapable of asking an explanation of the other's affliction.

"We!" repeats Byng for the third time, and very indistinctly, as he is now lying entirely on his face.

"Why do you go on saying 'we' in that idiotic way?" asks Jim at last, recovering his voice – recovering it only to employ it in imitating the younger man's accents, in a manner which displays more exasperation than natural talent for mimicry. It is not a politely-worded inquiry, but it has the desired result of acting as a tonic on him at whom it is aimed, making him not only roll over once again, but actually sit up.

"Why do I say we?" repeats he, his young eyes looking lamentably out from under the fall of his tumbled hair – "because it is not we! it is you! You lucky dog, you will have her all to yourself!"

Jim heaves an inaudible sigh of relief. Whatever may be the cause of his companion's enigmatical conduct, it is evidently not what he had feared. There is, however, no evidence of relief or any other mild quality in his next remark.

"If you would talk less like an ass, I should have a better chance of knowing what you are driving at!"

The query seems only to renew and deepen the other's tribulation. He falls back into his former attitude.

"You will hold the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand!" he groans. "No, do not go" (with a sudden and startling change of tone, springing off the bed, as he becomes aware that his friend is making for the door, unable to bear those rhapsodies, whose full distastefulness to their hearer the utterer little conjectures). "I'll tell you! I'll explain. Why are you in such a deuce of a hurry? I cannot go to Certosa because I have just heard from my mother that she is to arrive to-day. She will be here in another hour."

Jim's fingers are already on the door handle, but this piece of news arrests him.

"Your mother? I did not know that she was coming abroad."

"No more did I!"

"It must have been a very sudden thought!"

"Very!"

"What a delightful surprise for you!"

"Delightful!" There is so ludicrous a discrepancy between the adjective and the accent with which it is rendered that Jim bursts into a bitter laugh.

"She would be flattered if she could see your elation at the prospect of meeting her!"

Byng's blood rushes up under his clear smooth skin at his friend's jeer, but he answers, with some dignity:

"I do not think you have any right to imply that I am not always glad to see my mother; I do not deny that, if it had been equally convenient to her, I had rather she should have come twenty-four hours later."

Jim feels ashamed of himself, though, being an Anglo-Saxon, he has far too much false shame to confess it directly, and what he means for an amende, when it comes, is of an oblique nature.

"I think far the best plan will be to put off the excursion altogether; I am sure that I am not particularly keen about it."

The indignant red has rapidly died out of Byng's face; his placability being only to be surpassed by his slowness to take offence.

"Is it possible?" he asks in a tone of stupefaction; then, with a sudden tardy recollection of the rosy fetters in which his friend is held by another lady, he adds – "But, of course, you are not – I was forgetting!"

Jim winces.

"As it is your party, you had better send up a note at once to the Piazza d'Azeglio."

"No, do not let us both throw them over!" cries Byng eagerly. "Heaven knows it was hard enough to persuade them to accept in the first instance. If you go we shall at all events keep our communications open; and you – you will say something to her for me?"

"What kind of something?" inquires the older man carpingly. "Am I to tell her only what a fine fellow you are in general, or anything more circumstantial?"

"Tell her – " begins Byng in a rapt voice; but apparently the sight of his companion, who has somewhat ostentatiously pulled out a note-book and pencil, and assumed the patient air of one about to write to dictation, dries the stream of his young eloquence; "tell her —nothing."

"'Nothing speaks our grief like to speak nothing!'"

replies Jim, leaving the room with this quotation on his lips, rather hastily, for fear lest the other should change his mind.

CHAPTER XIII

It is five o'clock, the hour fixed for the expedition to Certosa, and in the entresol of 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio, Mrs. and Miss Le Marchant are sitting – hatted, gloved, and en-tout-cas-ed– in expectation of the arrival of their double escort. Elizabeth's afternoon has, so far, not been a lazy one, as her little cousin Bertie and his dog have again been good enough to pay her a lengthy visit, and the former has insisted upon a repetition of the musical performance of the other day, though with truncated rites. Without the powerful aid of Byng, Elizabeth has found it a task considerably beyond her strength to hold a large collie, poised on his hind-legs, on a music-stool. He has jumped down repeatedly, and now lies on his back – an attitude in which experience has taught him he is less attackable than in any other – sawing the air with his fore-paws, and lifting his lip in a deprecating grin.

"Where is Mr. Byng?" cries Bertie fretfully, baulked in his efforts to make his wily victim resume the perpendicular. "I want Mr. Byng! Why does not Mr. Byng come?"

"Perhaps if you went to the window," suggests Mrs. Le Marchant, in that patiently coaxing voice in which we are wont to address a tiresome child on a visit, instead of the buffet which we should bestow upon it were it resident – "perhaps if you went to the window and looked out, you would see him coming round the corner of the Piazza."

The suggestion is at once accepted, and the child, balancing his fidgety body on a chair, and craning his neck over the window-ledge, is shouting shrill pieces of information as to the passers-by to his friends within the room. Presently he shrieks out in triumph:

"I see him! He is just coming into sight! He is walking so fast! No!" – a moment later, with a changed and disgusted note, as a nearer view corrects the first impression – "it is not he at all! It is only the other one!"

"Only the other one!" It is quite impossible that the sound of the child's voice can reach down to the open portal of No. 12 bis, at which Jim has now arrived, and it is also certain that neither of the ladies whom he has come to visit is likely to word her surprise at his having arrived alone with the frank brutality which is confined to the utterances of infancy; and yet Jim, as he presents himself, announced by Annunziata, the hard-featured possessor of a lovely name, is quite as conscious, as if he had overheard the boy's slighting remark, of being "only the other one!"

Before he can begin his apologies, the eager little boy has run up to him.

"Where is Mr. Byng? I want Mr. Byng! Why has not he come? Elizabeth wants Mr. Byng!"

At this last clause Burgoyne is conscious of a dark, hot flush rising to his face, and, partly to hide it, partly to avoid seeing what the effect of his communication may be upon her for whom it is meant, he stoops over the child, addressing his answer to him:

"Mr. Byng is very sorry, very sorry indeed, but he cannot come."

"Cannot come! Why cannot he come?"

"Because he has gone to meet his mammy," replies Jim, trying to speak in a light and playful voice; "she is to arrive unexpectedly in Florence to-day; no good boy would leave his mammy when she had come all the way from England to see him, would he?"

But to this fustian and copy-book generality the young gentleman addressed is too angry to reply.

"It is a great disappointment to Byng; he bid me tell you what a great disappointment it is to him!" says Jim, turning to the two ladies, and looking apologetically from one to the other.

Elizabeth's head is averted; but on her mother's features he sees, or fancies he sees, slight evidences of a feeling not unlike relief.

"It is not of the least consequence," she says cheerfully; "we can go any other day just as well."

Burgoyne's heart sinks. In these last sentences he too surely traces signs of the evasive and would-be-retrograde nature which has all along characterized Mrs. Le Marchant's relations with him. It has seemed to him that he has been looking forward to the expedition with sensations of almost unmixed dread, and yet, now that he seems to be going to be delivered from it, what he experiences certainly does not come under the head of elation.

"You wish to give up the excursion?" he asks, in a tone which he honestly tries to make as neutral and colourless as he can.

"Well, I thought so – we thought so, did not we, Elizabeth?"

The person thus addressed lifts her head, and all over her features he, eagerly scanning them, sees written a warm acquiescence in her motherly decision, an acquiescence which, as her eyes meet his – his, in which his disappointment is written a good deal more plainly than he is aware – changes slowly and sweetly into indecision.

"I do not know," she answers, her gentle look clouded a little, and yet kindly interrogating his; "if Mr. Burgoyne is willing to burden himself with us; and Bertie must play at being a grown-up gentleman, and help to take care of us! Bertie, will you play at being a grown-up gentleman?"

To this proposition Bertie assents warmly, and begins thrasonically to recount to inattentive ears the high and singular deeds with which he will celebrate his arrival at maturity. But, as Mrs. Le Marchant puts a strenuous veto upon his adoption as escort, and as his nurse appears at the same juncture to fetch him, he and his dog are presently removed; and the other three set off without him.

Burgoyne has chartered a fiacre, with a horse as little lame as is ever to be found in Florence, and in this vehicle they are presently rolling along. None of them are in very exuberant spirits. Burgoyne is as well aware as if her sensitive lips had put the fact into words, that for Elizabeth the pleasure of the outing has evaporated with the absence of Byng, and that it is only the soft-hearted shrinking of a sweet nature from inflicting mortification on a fellow-creature that has set her opposite to him in her white gown. He has never seen her dressed in white before, and says to himself that it was for Byng's sake that she has made herself so summer-fine. But even if it be so, it is not Byng who is profiting by it. It is for him, not Byng, that the large Italian light is glorifying its thin fabric. Lily-pure, snow-clean she looks, sitting under her sunshade; and he sits over against her in a stupid silence. It seems to him as if his only safety were in silence, as if, did he speak at all, he must put into brutal words the brutal questions that are dinging in his head, that seem knocking for utterance against the gate of his set teeth.

"What is the 'screw loose'? How is she an 'unfortunate girl'? Why have they 'never held up their heads since'? Since what?" He looks, in a fierce perplexity, from one to the other of those delicately poised heads, held aloft with such modest dignity. Surely it is beyond the bounds of possibility that any heavily hideous shame or leaden disgrace can ever have weighed upon them! Probably the intensity of his thought has given an intensity to his look, of which he is unaware; for he presently finds the soft veiled voice of Elizabeth – Elizabeth who has hitherto been as mute as himself – addressing him:

"How very grave you look! I wonder what you are thinking of?"

The question, striking in so strangely pat, brings him back with a start. For a second an almost overpowering temptation assails him to tell her what is the object of his thought, to answer her with that whole and naked truth which we can so seldom employ in our intercourse with our fellow-men. But one glance at her innocent face, which has a vague trouble in it, chases the lunatic impulse, though he dallies with the temptation to the extent of saying:

"Would you really like to know? Do you really wish me to tell you?"

He looks at her penetratingly as he puts the question. Before either his eyes or his manner she shrinks.

"Oh, no – no!" she cries with tremulous haste, "of course not! I was only joking. What business have I with your thoughts? I never wish to know people's thoughts; if their looks and words are kind, that is all that concerns me!"

He relapses into silence; but her words, and still more the agitated manner in which they are pronounced, make a vague yet definite addition to the disquiet of his soul.

By setting off at so judiciously late an hour as five o'clock, they have avoided the greater part of the flood of tourists which daily sets towards Certosa, and which they meet, tightly packed in crowded vehicles, sweeping Florence-wards in a choking cloud of white dust; so that on reaching the Certosa Monastery, sitting so grandly on its hilltop, they have the satisfaction of finding that it is temporarily all their own – all their own but for the few white-frocked figures and tonsured heads which an economico-democratic Government has left to hint what in its palmy days was the state of that which is now only a Government museum.

A burly monk receives them. He does not look at all a prey to the pensive sorrow one would expect at the desecration of his holy things and the dispersion of his fraternity. Probably, in his slow peasant mind there is room for nothing but self-congratulation at his being one of the few – only fifteen in all – left to end their days in the old home. He leads them stolidly through chapels and refectory – the now too roomy refectory, where the poor remnant of Carthusians dine together only on Sundays – through meagrely furnished cells, in one of which he matter-of-factly lets down the front flap of a cupboard to show what forms his daily dining-table except on the happy Sunday, to which he must look forward so warmly.

"Must not he love Sunday!" cries Elizabeth, with sparkling eyes. "Do not you long to know what they have for dinner on Sundays? Do you think he would mind telling us?"

Elizabeth's spirits are going up like quicksilver. It is evident, despite the delicate melancholy of her face, that she is naturally of an extremely joyous and enjoying nature, and gifted with a freshness of sensation which belongs ordinarily rather to the green age at which Jim first remembers her, than to the mature one which he knows for a certainty that she has now reached. She is filled with such a lively and surprised delight at all the little details of arrangement of the monastic life that he is at last impelled to say to her, something wonderingly:

"But you must have seen hundreds of monasteries before?"

"Not one."

"But there are, or were, such swarms of them all over Italy."

"I dare say. I was never in Italy before."

"Not really?"

She lifts up her hand, and waves it at him with an air of hasty deprecation of further question, growing suddenly grave.

"Don't ask me whether I have been here or there, or whether I have done this or that. I have never been anywhere or done anything."

Her desire for a cessation of all inquiries as to her doings is obviously so earnest that Jim of course complies with it. Once or twice before he has been struck by her strange want of acquaintance with facts and phenomena, which would have come as a matter of course within the range of observation of every woman of her age and station. Against his will, a horrid recollection flashes upon him of a novel he had once read, in which the hero exhibits a singular ignorance of any events or incidents that had occurred within the ten years preceding the opening of the story – an ignorance which towards the end of the third volume was accounted for by its transpiring that he has spent the intervening period in a convict prison! He drives the grotesque and monstrous idea with scourges out of his mind; but it recurs, and recurs to be displaced by another hardly less painful, if in some degree more probable. Can it be possible that the crushing blow which has fallen upon the Le Marchant family, and upon Elizabeth in particular, whitening the mother's hair, and giving that tear-washed look to the daughter's sweet eyes – can it be possible that that heavy stroke was insanity? Can Elizabeth have been out of her mind? Can she have spent in confinement any of that past, from all allusion to which she shies away with a sensitiveness more shrinking than that of

"The tender horns of cockled snails"?

He is so much absorbed in his tormenting speculations about her that for the moment he forgets her bodily presence; and it is only her voice, her soft sane voice, that brings him back to a consciousness of it. They have been led into a salon, in which, as their guide tells them, the confraternity used to receive any "personage" that came to visit them. Alas, no personage ever visits the poor frocked remnant now! It is a charming lightsome room, that gives one no monastic idea, with pretty airy fancies of flower-wreaths and arabesques, and dainty dancing figures painted on wall and ceiling and doors. One of these latter is half open, and through it comes an exquisite sudden view of the hills, with their sharp-cut shadows and their sunlit slopes; of shining Florence at their feet, of the laugh of young verdure, and the wedded gloom and glory of cypress and poplar filling the foreground. Upon Elizabeth's small face, turned suddenly towards him, seems reflected some of the ineffable radiance of the Tuscan light.