Alas! A Novel - Broughton Rhoda

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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?

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      They are off now, there being nothing further to retard them, leaving Sybilla tête-à-tête with her thermometer. They are off, sociably packed in one fiacre—

      "Four precious souls, and all agog

       To dash thro' thick and thin."

      Not, indeed, that there is much dash about the Florentine cab-horses—saddest among God's many sad creatures—with not a sound leg among them, with staring coats and starting ribs, and poor broken knees; and with their sadness emphasized by the feathers stuck in their tired heads, as if to mock their wretchedness by a sort of melancholy smartness! Sad as they are, it must be owned that they are the only sad things in the cheerful Florentine streets, where no one seems over-busy, where, out of the deep-eaved, green-shuttered houses, people lean, talking to acquaintances on the shadowed pavement below. All the narrow thorough-fares are full of bustling life; but there is no haggard squalor apparently, no dreadful gin-palace gaiety. It does not follow here that a man must be drunk because he sings. And down the strait, colourful streets one looks—down a vista of houses diversely tall, each with its cream-yellow face and its green shutters, varied here and there by the towering bulk of some giant-blocked mountain-palace, through whose grim, barred windows a woman peeps, or a little dog shows his pointed nose—looks to where, in dwindling perspective, the view is closed by a narrow picture of lucent purple hill, Fiesole or Bellosguardo—names to which the tongue cleaves lovingly. Through the gay streets, over bridge and blue Arno, our travellers go; their driver cracking a prodigious whip, and with a tiny red dog, absurdly shaven, and with nothing but a small woolly head and tail left of the original design, seated gravely beside him. Away they go, pleasuring; but pleasure and pleasuring are not always identical.

      Burgoyne sits opposite Amelia; and as for Cecilia, it is to be supposed that her heartache is for the moment dulled, since the same carriage-rug covers her knees and those of Byng. Burgoyne does not look at Amelia; nor, though his eyes are fixed upon the passing objects, does he at first see aught of them. His vision is turned inwards, and to his own soul he is mechanically repeating in dismal recitative, "A double-barrelled, central fire, breech-loading gun, by Lancaster; made strong enough at the breech to shoot a spherical bullet."

      As for Amelia, her features are not of a build to express any emotion with much brilliancy; but over them lies a deep and brooding content. Amelia has not had much undiluted happiness in her life, but she is exceedingly happy to-day. She is even strangely free from the carking fear which usually assails her, of praising mistakenly, of being enthusiastic in the wrong places, and passing over the right ones unnoticed. If she keep to a vague generality of handsome adjectives, she will surely do well enough, and, on this high holiday that her heart is holding, he cannot be cross to her.

      As to Byng, he is emphatically of the school of divinity taught by Tommy Moore, nor was he ever known, when lacking "the lips that he loved," to fail to make love to "the lips that are near." His taste is too good for him to have chosen Cecilia as a companion; but, since fate has allotted her to him for the afternoon, he finds no difficulty

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