Читать книгу Alas! A Novel - Broughton Rhoda - Страница 13

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It would seem natural that, after so long a separation, Burgoyne should dine and spend the evening with his betrothed; but such is not the case. For this, however, he is not to blame; he is quite prepared to stay with her until she turns him out. Had he not better school himself to domestic habits, since he is so soon to assume them for life? But in consideration for Sybilla he is dismissed undined. It is not that she ever shares the family dinner at their table à part in the salle à manger, but the thought of their entertaining a guest with a conviviality far greater in her imagination than would be the case in reality, while she herself lies lonely on her couch of suffering, preys upon her spirits so much that her family have to abandon the idea. So, towards sunset, Jim is dismissed. He has no opportunity for any parting endearments to his lady-love, as the whole family are in the room, and it is Cecilia, not Amelia, who volunteers to walk across the hotel courtyard with him, for the advantage of a last word. What that last word is he is not slow to learn.

"You will take us some excursions, will not you?" she says, with a persuasive air, putting her arm through his. "Father is so unenterprising, we have really seen scarcely anything; but you will take us some excursions now, will not you?"

"Are you sure that your spirits are equal to them?" inquires Burgoyne unkindly.

"I do not know about that, I am sure," replies she, growing pink at his tone; "but one must make an exertion sometime, and I think a little distraction would do me good, and so I am sure it would to poor Amelia!"

"Poor Amelia will shortly have the distraction of being married," rejoins the young man, who feels as if he could not repeat the statement of this fact too often to himself and others.

"And I think it would be only civil," continues Cecilia persistently, "in fact, I do not see how you could avoid it, if you invited your friend to join us."

But Jim escapes without having committed himself to this promise, and wanders about the town in the lovely, lowering light; finds himself on the Lung Arno, strolling along with the leisurely loiterers, among whom, for every two soft Tuscan voices, there is a loud metallic Anglo-Saxon one. He watches the carriages rolling back from their drive on the Cascine; the river falling over the weir; the river yellow as Tiber yesterday, and to day shot with blue and green and silver, as it tumbles with a pleasant noise. The houses on either side of the Arno, the domes and roofs, are all clothed in a strange serenity of yellow light; a golden air so transparent and line and crystal clear, so free from the soft blur of mist—lovely too—through which we see objects in our wet green home, that Jim feels as if he could stretch out his hand and touch the hill that backs gold towers and bridges, and see whether it really is made out of one whole amethyst, as it looks. The beauty of the world has always been very much to Burgoyne, though hitherto it has been chiefly in the austerity of her high and desert places that he has bowed the knee before the Universal Mother. This little gold evening city, sunset clad in the colours of the New Jerusalem, lifting her heavenly campanile to as heavenly a sky, is to him a new and wonderful thing. Her loveliness sinks into his soul, and with it a companion sadness as deep. From henceforth the sight of earth's fair shows will be, for the most part, forbidden him. He has always loved to look and adore in silence and alone; henceforth he will never have the right to be alone; henceforth he will never have the right to go anywhere without his wife. Strange and terrible word to which he tries in vain to accustom his mental ears; and, thanks to the narrowness of their means, neither of them will be able to stir from the strait precincts of their pinched home.

He comes back to his hotel, through the Piazza of the Duomo. All the infinite richness of cupola and arch, high up, are still wrapped in the fiery rose cloak of sunset, while below the body of the great church, with all its marbles and traceries and carved wonders, is clad in the sobriety of twilight.

On reaching the Minerva, he finds that Byng has not yet returned, or rather that he has been in and gone out again. He waits dinner half-an-hour for him, and then dines without him; dines in solitude, since it is not till his cup of coffee is before him, and his cigarette between his lips, that his young friend appears. It is evidently no unpleasant errand that has detained him, for he arrives beaming, and too excited even to perceive the menu which a waiter offers him.

"They have arrived!" he cries. Oddly enough it never occurs to Burgoyne to inquire who "they" may be; it seems as much a matter-of-course to him as to the handsome pink and white boy before him, that the pronoun must relate to Elizabeth Le Marchant and her mother.

His only answer, however, is an "Oh!" whose tone is rather more eagerly interested than he could have wished.

"I thought that they could not stay more than another day in Genoa," continues Byng, at length becoming aware of the menu at his elbow; but only to wave it impatiently away. "So I thought I would just run down to the station to meet the evening train, the one we came by last night; however, it must have been more punctual than yesterday, for before I reached the station, I met them; I mean they passed me in a fiacre. I only caught a glimpse of her face, but I saw her hand; it was lying on the carriage door like a snow-flake."

"Like my grandmother!" cries Burgoyne in a rage, for which he cannot quite account to himself, at this ingenious and novel simile.

Byng laughs; the laugh of a thoroughly sweet-natured person, who, in addition, has some special cause for good-humour.

"I do not know what colour your grandmother was; but she must have been very unlike most people's if she was like a snow-flake."

Jim's cross mouth unbends into a reluctant smile. It is not the first time that he has discovered how useless, and also impossible, it is to be out of humour with Byng.

"I had a good mind to tell my fiacre man to follow them," continued Byng, in an excited voice; "but, in the first place, I did not know how to say it—really, Jim, we must get up a little of the lingo—and, in the second place, I thought it would perhaps be rather too much in the private detective line."

"I think it would have been extremely ungentlemanlike!" rejoins Jim severely.

Byng reddens; but still without losing his temper.

"That is coming it rather strong, is not it? but anyhow, I did not do it." And then, by tacit agreement, they both drop the subject.

During the next three or four days it is not named between them, nor indeed do they see much of each other. Burgoyne spends the greater part of his days with Amelia. Whatever cause for the accusation he may have given during the previous eight years, nobody can say that he neglects her now. He passes long hours at her side, on the same hard chair that had supported him on their first interview, in the little dismal dining-room; going into calculations of house-rent and taxes, drawing up lists of necessary furniture. He even makes a bid for Cecilia's drawing-room grate; but that young lady, whose forecasting mind can look beyond present grief to future sunshine, refuses to part with it. The lovers are not always, however, studying Maple's and Oetzmann's lists. Sometimes Jim varies the diversion by taking his future wife to picture-galleries and churches, to the Uffizi, the Accademia, San Lorenzo. It is doubtful whether Amelia enjoys these excursions as much as she does the selection of bedsteads and saucepans, her pleasure being in some degree marred by a feverish anxiety to say what she thinks her lover expects of her as they stand before each immortal canvas. In her heart she thinks the great statues in the Medici Chapel frightful, a heresy in which she is kept in countenance by no less a light than George Eliot, who in one of her letters dares to say of them, "they remained to us as affected and exaggerated in the original, as in copies and casts." To Amelia many of the frescoes appear lamentably washed out, nor are her efforts to hide these sentiments attended with any conspicuous success, since nothing is more hopeless than for one utterly destitute of a feeling for works of art to feign it, without having the imposture at once detected.

Burgoyne's mind during these expeditions is a battle-ground for pity and rage; pity at the pathos of his poor love's endeavours; rage at their glaring failure. Cecilia sometimes accompanies the lovers, but this does not make matters much better. Cecilia devotes but a very cursory notice to the pictures; her attention being almost wholly centred on the visitors, and on finding resemblances for them among the inhabitants of her own village at home, for the accuracy of which she appeals at every moment to her sister. Every day she asks Burgoyne to fulfil his promise—a promise which he as punctually assures her that he never made—to introduce his friend to her. He has a strangely strong reluctance to comply with this simple request, which yet, he knows, will have to be complied with some day. When Amelia is his wife, Byng will have to know Cecilia, for she will probably spend a great deal of her time with them—make their house a second home, in fact.

And meanwhile Jim is keenly, and for some reason sorely, conscious of the fact that, during the hours in which he is stooping his weary head over catalogues of fenders and fire-irons, carving-knives and fish-slices, blankets and ticking, Byng is searching Florence through her length and breadth for their two countrywomen. It is not indeed necessary to credit his friend with any special quest to account for his wanderings through the "adorable little city," as Henry James most truly calls it, since he is a young man of a wide and alert curiosity, with a large appetite for pleasure both intellectual and the reverse. Jim, whose acquaintance with him has chiefly been with his rowdy undergraduate side, bear-fighting, and proctor-defying, is astonished at his almost tremulous appreciation of the Ghirlandajos, the Lorenzo di Credis, the Giottos, that in a hundred chapels, from a hundred walls, shine down in their mixed glory of naïve piety and blinding colour upon him.

One day the elder man is sitting in his bedroom with a despatch-box and a sheet of paper before him. He is embarked upon a dreary calculation as to what his guns will fetch. He has made up his mind to sell them. Of what further use can they be to him? He will not be allowed to shoot at the Bayswater omnibuses, which will be the only game henceforth within his reach. While he is thus employed upon an occupation akin to, and about as cheerful as, that of Rawdon Crawley before Waterloo, Byng enters.

"You look as if you had a headache, old chap," he says, sitting down upon his friend's bed.

"If you had been going through as many kitchen-ranges as I have this morning, perhaps you would have a headache," replies Jim gravely. "You know that I am going to be married as soon as I get home."

Byng nods; and Burgoyne, while inwardly blessing the tact that spares him any congratulations, takes himself to task for having made the announcement so lugubriously as to render felicitation obviously inapplicable.

"When are you going to introduce me to Miss Wilson?" asks Byng presently. "If you shirk it much longer, I shall think that you are ashamed of me."

Jim glances affectionately, yet not quite comfortably, at his young friend, and the thought dashes across his mind that, in his last remark, the latter has put the saddle on the wrong horse.

"You have so large an acquaintance in Florence already," he says, with some stiffness, "that I did not know that you would care to add to it."

"One cannot have too much of a good thing," replies the other joyously. "You know I love my fellow-creatures; and in this case," he adds civilly, "I do care very much."

Burgoyne's eyes are bent on the paper before him, which contains the melancholy enumeration of his firearms—"A 500 double-barrelled express, by Henry, of Edinburgh; a 450 single-barrelled ditto, by same maker," etc., etc.—as he says slowly:

"I shall be very happy."

His acceptance of the proposition can hardly be called eager; but of this Byng appears unawares.

"When shall it be, then? To-day—this afternoon?"

"No-o-o; not to-day, I think. It has been arranged that we are to go to San Miniato—Amelia, her sister, and I."

"Three of you?" cries Byng, raising his eyebrows. "Then why not four? Why may not I come too?"

There being, in point of fact, no reason why he should not, and Cecilia's morning prayer being still ringing in her future brother-in-law's ears, he gives a dull and lagging assent; so that at about three o'clock the two men present themselves at the door of the Wilsons' apartment at the Anglo-Américain Hotel. That Sybilla is not expecting visitors is evident by the fact that, at the moment of their entrance, she is taking her own temperature—a very favourite relaxation of hers—with a clinical thermometer. She removes the instrument from her mouth without indecent haste, and holds out a languid white hand to Byng.

"So you are going off on a long afternoon's pleasuring?" she says, with a pathetic smile. "I am so glad that neither of my sisters is going to stay at home with me. We invalids must guard against growing selfish, though I think that is perhaps more the danger with malades imaginaires; we real ones have learnt our lesson of suffering better, I hope."

"You do not look so very ill," replies Byng, in his sympathetic voice, letting his eyes rest caressingly on the prostrate figure, which has yet no smallest sign of emaciation about it.

"Ah, that is because of my colour," replies Sybilla, with an animation slightly tinged with resentment. "You, too, fall into that common error. My London doctor tells me that there is no such unerring indication of radical delicacy of constitution as a fixed pink colour like mine; the more feverish I am, the deeper it grows. It is very hard"—smiling again sadly—"for one gets no pity!"

"Where is Cecilia?" cries Jim brusquely, and fidgeting in his chair. "Why is not she ready?"

As he speaks, the young lady in question enters—so obviously arrayed for conquest, in so patently new a hat, and such immaculate pale gloves, that across Burgoyne's mind there flashes, in vexed mirth, the recollection of the immortal caution addressed by Major O'Dowd to his friend and comrade, "Moind your oi, Dob, my boy!" Would he not do well to repeat it to his friend?