Kitabı oku: «Alas! A Novel», sayfa 11

He stares with eyes ablaze with wrathful pity at his friend's face, expecting an answering outbreak to his own; but none such comes. Burgoyne only says, in a not much more assured key than that which the young man had employed:

"How – how can such an idea have got into your mother's head?"

"I do not know, but it is there; and what I wanted you, what I have been searching everywhere for you for, is to ask you to – to set her right, at once, without any delay. It is unbearable that she should go on thinking such things, and nothing could be easier for you, who know them so well, who know all about them!"

Burgoyne is at first too much stupefied by this appeal, and by the impossibility of answering it in a satisfactory manner, to make any response at all; but at length:

"Know all about them?" he says, in a voice whose surface impatience hides a much profounder feeling. "Who dares ever say that he knows all about any other living soul? How many times must I tell you that, until we met at Genoa, I had not set eyes on Miss Le Marchant for ten good years?"

At the tone of this speech, so widely different from the eager acceptance of the suggested task which he had expected, Byng's face takes on a crestfallen, almost frightened look.

"But when you knew them," he says, "in Devonshire, they – they were all right then, were not they? they were well thought of? – there was nothing against them?"

"Good Heavens – no!" replies Jim heartily, thankful that the appeal is now so worded as to enable him to give a warm testimony in favour of his poor friends. "There was not a family in all the neighbourhood that stood so high. Everybody loved them; everybody had a good word for them."

Byng's countenance clears a little.

"And there is no reason – you have no reason for supposing anything different now?"

Jim stirs uneasily in his chair. Can he truthfully give the same convinced affirmative to this question as to the last? It is a second or two before he answers it at all.

"The facts of life are enough for me; I do not trouble myself with its suppositions."

He gets up and walks towards the door as he speaks, resolved to bring to an end this to him intolerable catechism.

"But you must have an opinion – you must think," cries the other's voice, persistently pursuing him. He turns at bay, with the door-handle in his hand, his eyes lightening.

"I asked her permission to bring Amelia to see her," he says, in a low moved voice; "if I had thought as ill of her as your mother does, do you think I should have done that?"

CHAPTER XIX

Camille. – "Que me conseilleriez-vous de faire le jour où je verrais que vous ne m'aimez plus?"

There is no greater fiction than that for time to go quickly implies that it must needs go pleasantly. Jim has seldom spent a more disagreeable period than the hours which follow his conversation with Byng, and which he passes in his own bedroom, with his elbows on the window-ledge, looking blankly out at the Piazza, and at the great "Bride" of Arnolpho's planning, the church of Santa Maria Novella. And yet, when the city clocks, which have chimed unnoticed by him several times, at length convey to his inattentive ear what the hour is, he starts up, shocked and confused at its lateness. He had meant to have reached the Villa Schiavone in time to receive Amelia, and now she must have long preceded him, and be attributing his tardiness to some fresh neglect and indifference. In five minutes he has rearranged his dress, and jumped into a fiacre. Through the Porta Romana, and up between the straight row of still and inky cypresses, up and up to where the villa door, promising so little and performing so much, opens as so many do, straight upon the road.

The day has changed its ravishing blue gaiety for a pensive cloudy gloom, and the guests at the villa are walking about without any sunshades. They are numerous, though few indeed in comparison of the Banksia roses on the laden wall, over which, too, a great wistaria – put in, as the host with a just pride relates, only last year – is hanging and flinging its lilac abundance. And seen above its clusters, and above the wall, what a view from this raised terrace! Jim is really in a hurry to find Amelia, and yet he cannot choose but stop to look at it – from Galileo's tower on the right, to where, far down the plain of the Arno, Carrara loses itself in mist. It is all dark at first, sullen, purple-gray, without variation or stir – city, Duomo, Arno, Fiesole, and all her chain of sister-hills – one universal frown over every slope and jag, over street and spire, over Campanile with its marbles, and Santa Croce with its dead. But now, as it draws on towards sun-setting, in the western sky there comes a beginning of light, a faint pale tint at first, but quickly broadening across the firmament, while the whole huge cloud canopy is drawn aside like a curtain, and, as a great bright eye from under bent brows, the lowering sun sends arrows of radiance over plain, and river, and city. All of a sudden there is a vertical rain of dazzling white rays on the plain, and the olive shadows, merged all the afternoon in the universal gray, fall long and soft upon the blinding green of the young corn. He has forgotten Amelia. Oh, that that other, that creature herself made out of sun-rays and sweet rain-drops, were beside him, her pulses beating, as they so surely would, to his tune, her whole tender being quivering with delicate joy at this heavenly spectacle.

Someone touches him on the shoulder, and he starts violently. Has the intensity of his invocation called her spirit out of her light body, and is she indeed beside him?

"What a bad conscience you must have! Did you think that I was a bailiff?" cries Mrs. Byng, laughing.

"Where is Amelia?" he asks, rather curtly, the memory of Byng's communication about his mother being too fresh in his mind to make it possible for him to answer her in her own rallying key. "What have you done with Amelia?"

"What a 'Stand-and-deliver' tone!" says she, laughing still, but looking not unnaturally surprised. "Well, where is she?" glancing round. "She was here five minutes ago with Willy. Poor Amelia!" lowering her voice to a more confidential key. "I am so glad you have come at last; she is patience personified. I must congratulate you upon the excellent training into which you have got her, but I think that she was beginning to look a little anxious."

"And I think that you have been giving the reins to your imagination, as usual," replies he, walking off in a huff.

There is another delightful garden at the back of the villa, and there, having failed to find her in the first, he now with growing irritation at her for not being more immediately conspicuous, seeks Amelia. It is a sheltered leisurely paradise, where white rose-trees, with millions of bursting buds, are careering over the walls in leafy luxuriance, where double wallflowers – bloody warriors, one should call them, if one could connect any warlike idea with this Eden of scented peace – stocks in fragrant row are flowering as we Britons never see them flower in our chary isle, save in the plates of a Gardeners' Chronicle. But among them he finds no trace of his homely English blossom. He finds, indeed, him who had been named as her late companion, Byng; but it is not with Amelia, but with one of the pretty young daughters of the house that he is pacing the straight walk in lively dialogue. Jim accosts him formally:

"I understood that Miss Wilson was with you? Do you happen to know where she is?"

Byng stops short in his leisurely pacing.

"Why, where is she?" he says, looking round, as his mother had done, but with a more guilty air. "She was here five minutes ago. Where can she have disappeared to?"

It is but too obvious that in greeting and being greeted by their numerous acquaintances, both poor Amelia's chaperon and that chaperon's son have completely forgotten her existence. Always nervously afraid of being burdensome, Jim feels convinced from what he knows of her character that she is going about in unobtrusive forlornness, the extreme smallness of her Florentine acquaintances making it unlikely that she has found anyone to supply the place of the friends who have become so entirely oblivious of her. The conviction, pricking his conscience as he hastens contritely away from the vainly-repentant Byng, lends speed and keenness to his search. But thorough and earnest as it is, it is for some time quite unsuccessful. She makes one of no group, she loiters under no Banksia rose-bower, she is no gazer from the terrace at gold-misted valley or aureoled town, she is to be found neither in hidden nook, nor evident path. She is not beneath the loggia, she is nowhere out-of-doors. She must then, in her loneliness, have taken refuge in the house. He finds himself in a long, noble room, with a frescoed ceiling, a room full of signs of recent habitation and recent tea, but which has apparently been deserted for the sunset splendours on the terrace. He can see no single occupant. He walks slowly down it to assure himself of the fact of its entire emptiness.

By a singular and unaccountable freak of the builders, the windows are set so high in the wall that each has had to have a little raised daïs erected before it to enable the inmates to look comfortably out. Upon each small platform stands a chair or two, and low over them the curtains sweep. As he passes one recess, he notices that the drapery is stirring a little, and examining more closely, sees the tail of a well-known gown – of that gown which has met with his nearest approach to approval among Amelia's rather scanty stock – peeping from beneath the stiff rich folds of the old Italian brocade. It is the work of a second to sweep the latter aside, and discover his poor fiancée all alone, and crouching desolately in a low arm-chair. There is something so unlike her in the attitude, something so different from her usual uncomplaining, unpretending fortitude, something so disproportioned to the cause – his own careless but not criminal delay, as he supposes – in the despair evidenced by her whole pose, that he feels at once terrified and angry. In a second he, too, has stepped up on to the little platform beside her.

"Amelia!" he cries. "Amelia! What are you doing up here? With whom are you playing hide-and-seek?"

Her words and her smiles are apt to be prompt enough, Heaven knows, to spring out, answering his least hint; but now she neither speaks nor moves a muscle of her face. She scarcely starts at all at his sudden apparition and address, and no light comes across her features – those features which, now that he looks at them more closely, he sees to be set in a much more pinched pallor than even three watching nights and a week of airless worry can account for.

"Are you ill?"

"No; I am not ill."

The sting of irritation which, mixed with genuine alarm, had besieged Jim's mind on his first realizing her crouched and unnatural attitude, now entirely supersedes any other feeling. Is the accidental delay of half an hour, an hour, say even an hour and a half, enough to justify such a parade of anguish as this?

"Is it possible," he inquires, in a tone of cold displeasure, "that I am to attribute this – this state of things – to my being accidentally late? It was a mere accident: it is not like you to make a scene. I do not recognise you; I am very sorry that I was late, and that I have made you angry."

The chill reproach of his words seems to rouse her to a state more akin to her natural one, to the humble and unexacting one which is habitual to her.

"Angry!" she repeats: "angry with you for being late? Oh, you are quite mistaken! In all these years how often have I been angry with you?"

There is such a meek upbraiding in her tone that his ill-humour gives way to a vague apprehension.

"Then what is it?" he cries brusquely; "what is it all about? I think I have a right to ask you that; since I saw you last something must have happened to you to produce this extraordinary change."

She heaves a long dragging sigh.

"Something has happened to me; yes, something has happened!"

"But what – what kind of a something? I have a right to know – I insist upon knowing; tell me!"

He has grasped both her hands, whose unnatural coldness he feels even through her rather ill-fitting gloves. So strange and mean a thing is human nature that even at this moment it flashes across him, with a sense of annoyance, what bad gloves Amelia always wears. However, he is not troubled with them long, for she takes them and her cold hands quietly back.

"I will tell you, there is no question of insisting. I should have told you anyhow; but not here" – glancing nervously round the dropped curtains – "not now!"

"Why not here? Why not now?"

Her face quivers.

"I could not," she says piteously. "I do not quite know how I shall get through telling it; it must be somewhere – somewhere where it will not matter if I do break down!"

He stares at her in an unfeigned bewilderment, again slightly streaked with wrath.

"Have you gone mad, Amelia? or are you taking a leaf out of Sybilla's book? If you do not clear up this extraordinary mystification at once, I shall be compelled to believe either the one or the other."

Again her face contracts with pain.

"Oh, if it were only a mystification!" she says, with a low cry. "I cannot tell you here; it is physically impossible to me. But do not be afraid" – with an accent of bitterness, which he is quite at a loss to account for – "you shall not have long to wait; I will tell you, without fail, to-morrow; to-morrow morning, if you like. Come as early as you please, I shall be ready to tell you; and now would you mind leaving me? I want to have a few moments to myself before I see anybody – before I see Mrs. Byng; will you please leave me?"

It is so apparent that she is in deadly earnest, and resolute to have her request complied with, that he can do nothing but step dizzily down off the little daïs, feeling as if the world were turning round with him.

A quarter of an hour later he sees her leaving the party with Mrs. Byng, looking as simple, as collected, and not very perceptibly paler than usual.

CHAPTER XX

There is always something in the nature of a mountain in a night that is interposed between us and either any promised pleasure or any threatened pain. In the case of pleasure, we are naturally in a hurry to scale it, in order to see how full of sunshine and flowers is the happy valley on the other side; and in the case of pain, we are all scarcely less eager to ascertain how deep is the abyss, how choking the swamp, how angry the waves that wait us beyond the dusty hill.

Burgoyne has no expectation of finding anything agreeable on the further slope of his mountain, and yet the time seems long to him, till he has climbed its crest, and slidden down its other side. Early and splendid as is the new light that takes possession of him and his shutterless bedroom, he upbraids it as a laggard; and the hours that pace by till the one appointed for the explanation of yesterday's mystery seem to him to hobble on crutches. What can Amelia have to say to him that needs such a pomp of preparation? What can have turned Amelia into a Tragedy Queen? What miracle can have made her take the imperative mood? For it was the imperative mood unquestionably which, contrary to all precedent, she had made use of when she had commanded him, most gently it is true, since, being by her nature gentle, she can do nothing ungently, to leave her. He absolutely laughs at the topsy-turviness of the idea. What can she have to say that requires so carefully selected a spot to say it in? – a spot where "it does not matter if she does break down." What, in Heaven's name, can she be going to say that inspires her with such a cold-blooded intention beforehand of breaking down?

Jim's state of mind is something that of the Baron's in "On ne badine pas avec l'amour," on hearing that his daughter's governess had been turning somersaults in a field of luzerne. "Non, en vérité, non, mon ami, je n'y comprends absolûment rien. Tout cela me paraît une conduite désordonnée, il est vrai, mais sans motif comme sans excuse." If she were any other woman, he should ascribe her behaviour to some tiresome but passing tantrum, evoked by his delay in appearing? But in the past eight years how many hundred times has he kept her waiting? and has she ever failed to meet him with the same meek good-humour that has not had even a tinge of reproachful forgiveness in it. As she herself had said, "In all these years how often have I been angry with you?" He has been angry with her times out of mind, angry with her on a thousand unjust and unkind counts; angry with her for her slowness, her bad complexion, her want of a sense of humour; for a hundred things that she cannot help, that she would have altered – oh, how gladly! – if she could! But how often has she been angry with him? In vain he searches his memory, hoping to overtake some instance of ill-humour, or even pettishness, that may make the balance between them hang a little more equal. But in vain. She has never been angry with him. And even now neither her face nor her manner – whatever else of strange and unparalleled they may have conveyed – have conveyed the idea of anger.

But if not anger, what then can be the cause that has produced a change so startling in one so little given to impulsive action or eccentricities of emotion? Can she have heard anything about him? anything to his discredit? He searches his conscience, but whether it be that that organ is not a particularly sensitive one, or that it really has no damaging facts to give up, it is silent, or almost so. He has perhaps been rather slack in his attendance upon her of late, but at her own bidding. At his visits to the Le Marchants' no one could take exception, dictated as they so obviously have been by philanthropy, and his conversations with Elizabeth – how few and scant! his heart heaves a rebellious sigh at their paucity – might be proclaimed without excision at the market cross. Our thoughts are our own, and are, moreover, so safely padlocked in our minds that he does not think it worth while to inquire whether, if his future wife could have looked in and seen the restive fancies capering, saddleless and bridleless, there, she might have been justified in assuming a crouching attitude and a sorrowfully commanding manner.

He is as far as ever from solving the problem, when – for once in his life before his time at the rendezvous – he presents himself at the familiar door. It is opened to him by Amelia herself. She has often done it before, seeming to know by instinct his ring from that of any other person, but to-day the familiar action disconcerts him. He had expected to be received with a formality and pomp of woe such as yesterday had seemed to threaten; and here is Amelia looking exactly like her ordinary self, except that she is perhaps rather more carefully dressed than usual; but that may be due to the fact of her having, for the first time, assumed the fresh calico gown, which the high summer of the Italian April morning seems to justify. Whether it be due to the calico gown or not, there is an indisputable air of gala about her, and she is smiling. A revulsion of feeling comes over the man, to whom her tragic semi-swooning airs had given a wakeful night. It was a tantrum after all, then; a storm in a teacup. And now her common sense has come to the rescue, and she has seen the folly of quarrelling with her bread and butter. These reflections naturally do not translate themselves into responsive smiles on his face, but she does not seem to notice his dour looks.

"I have a proposal to make to you," she says, still smiling. "Father is so well this morning, quite easy, and he has been wheeled into the sitting-room to see Sybilla. She has been very good about him this time, and quite believes that he has been really bad."

"How good of her!" comments Jim grimly; "it would be so easy and so amusing to play at having a swollen toe, would not it?"

"And so," continues Miss Wilson, wisely ignoring his fleer at her sister, "I am perfectly free, and I want you to take me somewhere, some little drive or expedition; you see," with a conciliatory glance at her own modest finery, "I counted upon your saying 'yes'; I dressed so as not to keep you waiting."

Every word of this sentence confirms Burgoyne in the idea implanted by her first address. This is her amende, and she is quite right to make it. But she would have been more right still if her conduct had not rendered it necessary.

Amelia is not the type of woman who through life will gain much by pouts. Perhaps, by-and-by, very kindly and delicately, he may obliquely hint this to her. But all that he says aloud is the rather stiff acquiescence conveyed in the words:

"By all means. I am quite at your service."

"And now where shall we go?" continues Amelia, shutting the door behind her and beginning to cross the hotel courtyard at his side; "that is the next thing – not to any gallery or church, I think, if you do not mind; I say such stupid things about Art, and the more I try, the stupider they are; let us go somewhere into the country – I can understand the country. I am not afraid of saying stupid things about it."

Into Burgoyne's mind comes the odious thought that he would not put it past his betrothed to say stupid things even about the Tuscan landscape, but he only awaits her decision in a respectful silence while helping her into a fiacre.

"It would be a sin to be under any roof to-day but this one," she says, looking up to the immeasurable azure bridge above her head; "would you mind – could you spare time to go to Fiesole?"

His only answer is to repeat the word Fiesole to the driver, who, with the inevitable tiny poodle-shaven dog beside him, is awaiting the order as to his destination. It is but a little way to Fiesole, as we all know, but yet, as the slow hired vehicle crawls up the steep ascent, with the driver walking alongside, or even lagging behind, there would be time and opportunity to say a good deal. But Amelia says next to nothing. Perhaps the heat makes her sleepy, for it is so hot, so hot between the garden walls, where the rose hedges are beginning to show a pale flush of plenteous pink among their multitude of green buds. Young, indeed, just born as the roses are, the highway dust has already powdered them with its ash-toned white. He does not know it at the time, but those dust-filmed rosebuds have found a home in his memory from which no after-sights, however numerous, will dislodge them. They have reached the village, and left their carriage, and begun, silently still, to ascend the steep lane up which the feet of most of Europe and America have in turn climbed to see the famous view that rewards the little effort. Past the cottages, whose inmates, tranquilly sitting in their doorways, or leaning idly against their door-posts, have probably seen all that is illustrious, notorious, history-making of the day, pass pantingly. Is there a prime minister, a princess, a poet, a prima donna, of the time, that has not toiled up the steep path to the welcome rest of the bench on the high plateau, on the hillside? Jim and Amelia are certainly not likely to figure in the annals of their time, but the peasants look at them with as much or as little interest as if they were. An immortal, unless his immortality is printed on his back in letters as large as those that announce Colman's mustard to the world, has, to the vulgar, very much the air of one of themselves.

Our friends have reached the haven of the stone seat, and, thanks to the earliness of the hour, have it all to themselves, save for a trio of sunburnt women of the people, with handkerchiefs tied over their tanned heads, who tease them to buy straw hand-screens. And when they have bought a couple, and made it kindly but distinctly evident that no amount of worrying will induce them to buy any more, even these leave them in peace and descend the hill again, in search of newer victims. They are alone under the sky's warm azure. Beneath their eyes spreads one of those nobly lovely spectacles that Italy and spring, hand in hand, alone can offer. To some, indeed, it may seem that the prospect from the Bellosguardo side of the valley is even more beautiful, since Fiesole, sitting so high as she does, dwarfs the opposite hills, and makes the looker lose their wavy line. They seem flat in comparison, the plain appears wider, the beloved city more distant, and does not show the same exquisite distinctness of separate tower and spire and palace. But yet such comparison is mere carping. Who can wish for a sight more divinely suave and fair than this from the bench above Fiesole? Not a breath of smoke dares to hang about the glorious old town, dimming its lustre, and between them and it what a spread of manifold colour, of more "mingled hue" than the rainbow's "purfled scarf doth show!" The moon-tinted olives, twilight and ghostly, even in the dazzling radiance of this superb morning hour, with the blinding green of the young corn about their gray feet, the cypress taper-flames, the gay white houses, terrace gardened, and, above all, the vast smile of the Tuscan heaven.

At first Amelia's muteness seems natural and grateful to Jim, as the outcome of the awe and hush that exceeding beauty breathes on the human heart, but by-and-by, as it is prolonged beyond the limits that seem to him fit or agreeable, it begins to get on his nerves. After having so genuinely and wantonly alarmed him, has she brought him here, without any expressions of regret or remorse, simply to steep herself in a silent luxury of selfish enjoyment? After brooding resentfully on this idea for a considerable time, he translates it into speech.

"I thought that you had something to say to me?"

It seems as if her soul had gone out into the sun and April-painted champaign country, and that it is only with an effort and a sigh that she fetches it home again:

"So I have."

"And how much longer am I to wait for it?"

There is no indication of any capacity for patience in his tone.

She brings her look back from the shining morning city, and fixes it wistfully upon him.

"Are you in such a hurry to hear?"

The pathetic streak in her voice, instead of conciliating, chafes him. What is the sense of this paraphernalia of preliminaries? Why not come to the point at once? if indeed there is a point – a fact of which he begins to entertain grave doubts.

"I do not know what you call hurry," he replies drily; "I have been awaiting this mystic utterance for sixteen or seventeen hours."

Her sallow cheek takes on a pinky tinge of mortification at his accent.

"You are quite right," she answers quickly; "I have no business to keep you waiting. I meant to tell you as soon as we got here; I asked you to bring me here on purpose, only – "

"You told me that you must make the communication at some place where it would not matter if you did break down," says he, rather harshly helping her memory; "you must allow that that was not an encouraging exordium. Do you look upon this" – glancing ironically round – "as a particularly suitable place for breaking down?"

Again that pain-evidencing wave of colour flows into her face. There is such an unloving mockery in his displeased voice.

"I shall not break down," she replies, forcing herself to speak with quiet composure; "you need not be afraid that I shall. I know that yesterday I was foolish enough to say the very words you quote, but I was not quite myself then; I did not quite know what I was saying; I had only just heard it."

"It? What IT? Is this a new riddle? For Heaven's sake let us hear the answer to the first before we embark on any fresh one!"

"It is no riddle," replies she, her low patient tones contrasting with his exasperated ones, "nothing could be plainer; it was only that I happened to overhear something rather – rather painful – something that was not intended for me."

His angry cheek blanches as his thought flies arrow-quick to the one subject of his perennial apprehension. Someone has been poisoning her ear with cowardly libels, or yet more dreadful truths about Elizabeth Le Marchant. For a moment or two his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth, then he says in a tone which he uselessly tries to make one of calm contempt alone:

"If you had lived longer in Florence, you would know how much importance to attach to its tittle-tattle and cancans."

She shakes her head with a sorrowful obstinacy.

"This was no tittle-tattle – no cancan."

Her answer seems but to confirm him in this first horrible suspicion.

"It is astonishing," he says, in a strangled voice, "how ready even the best women are to believe evil; what – what evidence have you of the truth of – of these precious stories?"

"What evidence?" she repeats, fastening her sad eyes upon him – "the evidence of my own heart. I realize now that I have known it all along."

Read by the light of his fears, this response is so enigmatic that it dawns upon him with a flash of inexpressible solace that perhaps he may be on the wrong track after all. His ideas are precipitated into such a state of confusion by this blessed possibility that he can only echo in a stupefied tone:

"Have known what all along?"

She has turned round on the stone bench upon which they have hitherto been sitting side by side, and, as he in the eagerness of his listening has done the same thing, they are now opposite to one another, and he feels as well as sees her hungry eyes devouring his face.

"That you are sick of me," she answers, in a heart-wrung whisper, "sick to death of me – that was what she said."

It is impossible to deny that Burgoyne's first impulse is one of relief. He has been mistaken, then. Elizabeth's secret is in the same state of precarious safety as her enemy's departure from Florence had left it in. His second impulse – our second impulses are mostly our best ones, equally free from the headlongness of our first, and the cold worldly wisdom of our third – is one of genuine indignation, concern, and amazement.