Alas! A Novel - Broughton Rhoda

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it is resting on Cecilia. She thinks that he is engaged to Cecilia. The mistake is intolerable to him, and yet a second's reflection tells him that it is a natural one. In a second he sees his Amelia as she presents herself to a strange eye. Miss Wilson is only thirty-one, but upon her has already come that set solid look of middle age, which overtakes some women before they are well over the borders of youth, and which other women manage to stave off till they are within near hail of forty. Yes; the mistake is quite a natural one. Most people would suppose that the showy Cecilia, still fairly youthful, and with so many obvious and well-produced "points," must be his choice; and yet, as I have said, the idea that anyone should credit him with her ownership is intolerable to him.

      "Here she is!" he cries precipitately. "The one to the right side, the other is her sister; may I – may I present them to you?"

      Perhaps it is his irritated fancy that dictates the idea, but it seems to him as if he detected a sort of surprise in Mrs. Le Marchant's face, when he effects the introduction he has proposed, and to which she accedes courteously, after a pause of hesitation about as long as had followed his inquiry of Elizabeth as to their address.

      Five minutes later they have all sauntered out again on the terrace, and Burgoyne is again leaning on the wall; but this time he has no fear of hearing of Bayswater, for it is Elizabeth who is beside him. Since last he looked at it half an hour ago, a sort of glorification has passed over the divine view. Down where the river twists through the plain country, there is a light, dainty mist, but the mountains have put on their fullest glory. They are not green, or brown, or purple, or blue; but clad in that ineffable raiment woven by the sun, that defies our weak vocabulary to provide it with a name. A little snow-chain lies on the sun-warmed neck of Morello, and along the tops of the further Apennines, right against the acute blue of the heavens, lies a line of snow, that looks like a fleece-soft cloud resting from its journeyings on their crests; but it is no cloud, nor is there any speck upon the gigantic complete arch that over-vaults town and valley and radiant mountains. In the folds of these last, the shadows slumber; but over all the city is the great gold glory of spring. The one thing in Florence that frowns among so many smiles is the scowling Pitti, and that, from here, is invisible. Nearer to him, against the azure, stand the solemn flame-shaped cypresses arow, and beside them – as unlike as life to death – a band of quivering poplars, a sort of transparent gold-green in their young spring livery. The air is so clear that one can go nigh to counting the marbles on the Duomo walls. In a more transparent amber light, fuller of joy and gaiety, cannot the saved be dancing around, as in Fra Angelico's divine picture? cannot they be walking in the New Jerusalem of St. John's great dream? Only in the New Jerusalem there are no galled and trembling-kneed fiacre horses.

      Elizabeth is sitting on the wall, her light figure – is it possible that it has been in the world only four years less than Amelia's solid one? – half-supported by one small gray hand outspread on the stone; her little fine features all tremulous with emotion, and half a tear gathered again in each sweet eye. As Jim looks at her, a sort of cold covetous gripe pinches his heart.

      "What a woman with whom to look at all earth's loveliness – with whom to converse without speech!"

      Even as he so thinks, she turns her head towards him, and, drawing in her breath with a long low sigh, says:

      "Oh, how glad I am I did not die before to-day!"

      Her eyes are turned towards him, and yet, as once before, he realizes that it is not to him that either her look or her thoughts are directed. Both are aimed at an object over his shoulder, and, as before, that object is Byng. Byng, too, has been gazing at the view. There are tears in Byng's eyes also. Stevenson says that some women like a man who cries. Byng cries easily and genuinely, and enjoys it; and, as he is a remarkably fine young man, there is something piquant in the contrast between his wet blue orbs and his shoulders.

      As Burgoyne rolls home that afternoon in his fiacre, as before, placed opposite Amelia, his mental vision is no longer fixed upon a "double-barrelled, central fire, breech-loading gun;" it is fixed with a teasing tenacity upon the figure of a smallish woman, perennially looking, through brilliant tears, over his shoulder at somebody else.

      CHAPTER IX

      "Was it 12, or 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio?"

      There are no tears in Byng's eyes as he asks this question next morning – asks it of his friend, as the latter sits in the Fumoir, with an English paper in his hands, and a good cigar between his clean-shaven lips. It has struck him several times lately that he will have to give up good cigars, and take to a churchwarden pipe and shag instead. But, so far, the churchwarden and the shag remain in the future.

      "12, or 12 bis, Piazza d'Azeglio?" inquires Byng.

      "Was what 12 or 12 bis?" replies his friend, with a somewhat obviously intentional obtuseness; but Byng is far too thoroughly healthy and happy a young animal this morning to take offence easily.

      "I mean Miss Le Marchant's address," he answers, explaining as amiably as if he had not been perfectly aware that it was only "cussedness" that had dictated the query.

      There is a slight pause. Burgoyne would like to answer that he does not remember – would like still more to answer that he does not see what business it can be of Byng's; but, since he is not destitute of common-sense, a second's reflection shows him that he has no good reason for either the lie or the incivility, so he replies, pretty calmly, with his eyes still on his leading article:

      "I believe Miss Le Marchant said 12 bis."

      Having obtained the information he wanted, and finding his companion not conversationally disposed, Byng is moving away again, when he is arrested by Jim's voice, adding to the intelligence he has just given the monosyllable:

      "Why?"

      "Why what?" asks Byng, returning readily, and laughingly mimicking the intentional obtuseness so lately practised on himself by the other.

      "Why did you ask?"

      "I am thinking of paying my respects there this afternoon, and I did not want to ring at the wrong bell."

      A short silence. Jim's head is partly hidden by his Galignani.

      "Did Miss or Mrs. Le Marchant ask you to call?"

      Byng laughs.

      "Both of them are as innocent of it as the babe unborn!"

      "You asked yourself then?" (in a snubbing voice).

      Byng nods.

      "And she said yes?"

      The plural pronoun has dropped out of sight, but neither of them perceives it. The younger man shakes his sleek head. Jim lays down his paper with an air of decision.

      "If she did not say 'Yes' – if she said 'No,'" he begins, with an accent of severity, "I fail to understand – "

      "She did not say 'No,'" interrupts Byng, still half laughing, and yet reddening as well. "She began to say it; but I suppose that I looked so broken-hearted – I am sure I felt it – that she stopped."

      As Jim makes no rejoinder, he continues by-and-by:

      "After all, she can but send me away. One is always being sent away" (Jim wishes he could think this truer than he does); "but now and again one is not sent, and those are the times that pay for the others! I'll risk it."

      There is a hopeful ring in his voice as he ends, and again a pause comes, broken a third time by the younger man.

      "Come now, Jim" – looking with a straight and disarming good humour into his friend's overcast countenance – "speak up! Do you know of any cause or impediment why I should not?"

      Thus handsomely and fairly appealed to, Burgoyne, who is by nature a just man, begins to put his conscience through her paces as to the real source of his dislike to the idea of his companion's taking advantage of that introduction which he himself has been the means – however unwillingly – of procuring for him. It is true that Byng's mother had adjured him, with tears in her eyes, to preserve her boy from undesirable acquaintances; but can he, Burgoyne, honestly say that he looks upon Elizabeth Le Marchant as an undesirable acquaintance for anyone? The result of his investigations is the discovery of how infinitesimal

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