Alas! A Novel - Broughton Rhoda

Скачать книгу

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

Скачать книгу