Alas! A Novel - Broughton Rhoda

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must own that it was enough to provoke him," strikes in Amelia's mild voice.

      "What was enough to provoke him? How has he shown his childishness? For Heaven's sake, some of you explain!" cries Jim impatiently, looking from one to the other.

      But with this request none of the three appears in any hurry to comply. There is a distinct pause before Cecilia, seeing neither of her seniors shows any signs of relieving her of the burden of explanation, takes that burden upon herself.

      "The fact is," she says, setting her little rescued packet on the table beside her, and beginning to fan herself, "that Mr. Dashwood, the man to whom I was engaged, has chosen to marry. I am sure"—with a shrug—"no one has the least desire to deny his perfect right to do so; and this morning there arrived by post a bit of his wedding-cake! I suppose he meant it civilly; but father chose to take it as an insult to himself, and though it was addressed to me, he threw it into the fire. I am very fond of wedding-cake; so, as soon as father's back was turned, I fished it out again!"

      Jim laughs, with more vigour perhaps than heartfelt amusement.

      "Bravo, Cis! You are a real philosopher! We might all learn a lesson from you."

      "What have you done with your nice friend?" asked Sybilla languidly. "Amelia, dear, this couvre-pied is slipping off me again. What a sympathetic voice he has! I am sure he has been a great deal with sick people."

      "I left him putting on his best tie to go out calling. No, calm yourself, Cecilia, not on you; it is not your turn to-day."

      "Whose turn is it then?" asks the girl, with an interest not at all blunted by the mortifying incident of the cake, which, indeed, she has begun to nibble with apparent relish.

      Jim hesitates a second—a second during which it strikes him with a shock that he already finds a difficulty in pronouncing Elizabeth Le Marchant's name. He manages to evade the necessity even now by a circumlocution.

      "I believe it is the Piazza d'Azeglio upon which that luminary is to shine."

      "Is he going to see that lovely creature to whom you introduced me yesterday?" cries Amelia, with good-natured enthusiasm. "I heard her telling him that she lived in the Piazza d'Azeglio. Oh, Jim, how pretty she is! One ought to pay for being allowed to look at her."

      Many women, whose plainness is incontestable, are able to be just to their better favoured sisters; but Amelia is more than just—she is lavishly generous.

      Burgoyne rewards her with an affectionate look—a look such as would make her swear that, beside Miss Le Marchant, as beside Dumain's fair love,

      "Juno but an Ethiop were!"

      "She looks as if she had had a history; that always improves a woman's appearance," says Cecilia pensively, holding a fragment of the fateful cake suspended in air, and regarding it with a melancholy eye. "Has she?"

      "I never asked her."

      "Why did not you go too?" inquires Amelia, judiciously striking in, as is her habit, as often as she perceives that her younger sister is beginning to get too obviously upon her own fiancé's nerves; a catastrophe which something in the tone of his last remark tells her—though she does not quite understand why it should—is imminent. "They are old friends of yours, are not they? They may be hurt if they find that a perfect stranger like Mr. Byng is in a greater hurry to visit them than you are."

      Before Burgoyne's mental vision rises a picture of Elizabeth's heavenly eye wandering indifferently over the dear old friend's shoulder to find its home in that of the perfect stranger. But he says kindly, and even playfully:

      "Why did not I go too? Because I was under the impression that I was engaged to go with another lovely being to choose crockery, was I not? Am I not?"

      Amelia's answer is conveyed by a series of nods and winks executed behind her sisters' backs, which he presently understands to imply that she desires a private interview. It is not immediately that he grasps what she is driving at, since dumb-show is often puzzling to the person at whom it is aimed, though clear as day to the dumb-shower. As soon, however, as he masters what her wish is, he hastens to comply with it; and five minutes later finds them tête-à-tête in the hideous little dining-room which had been the scene of their reunion, and of many after-meetings.

      "I could not say so, of course, before her," remarks Miss Wilson, as soon as they are out of earshot, "or she might have insisted upon my going. She is very unselfish sometimes; but the fact is, I do not think I ought to leave Sybilla again to-day. You see, she was alone the whole of yesterday afternoon; and when we came back we found her in a very low way. She had been reading her book of prescriptions—you know the book; all the prescriptions which she has had for the last ten years bound up together—and we rather dread her bringing it out, as she always fancies that she is going to have the disease prescribed for."

      "Humph!"

      "And, after all, happiness ought not to make one selfish, ought it?" says Amelia, with a gentle sigh of abnegation, as she ruffles her pale-haired head against his coat-sleeve. "I have so much of you now—oh, so much!—not to speak of——"

      "Cecilia, of course, is incapacitated by grief?" interrupts Jim brusquely. "She will be going up and down upon the mountains like another unfortunate fair one. But your father? He will be at home, will he not?"

      "Yes, he will be at home," replies Amelia, slowly and doubtfully, as if not finding a very satisfactory solution in this suggested arrangement; "but, as you know, it never answers to leave father and Sybilla alone together for long. You see, he does not believe that there is anything the matter with her; he thinks that she is as well as you or I" (a gush of warm feeling towards his father-in-law rushes over Jim's heart); "and though he tries to prevent himself from showing it to her, yet I am afraid, poor dear, that he is not very successful."

      Jim laughs.

      "And to-day," continues Amelia, "he is naturally a good deal upset about Cecilia and that wedding-cake; it was very impertinent to send it—was not it?—though she does not seem to see it. I hope"—with a wistful smile, and a repetition of the fond friction of her head against his sleeve—"that when you throw me over——"

      This is a hypothesis, suggested with perhaps unwise frequency by poor Miss Wilson, which never fails to exasperate Jim.

      "If we are going to talk nonsense," he breaks in brusquely, and with no attempt to return or reward her caressing gesture, "I may as well go."

      "Go to the Piazza d'Azeglio," says she coaxingly, her spirits raised by the harshness of tone of his interruption of her speech, and half persuading herself that it owes its birth to the supposition being too painful to be faced by him.

      He looks at her strangely for a moment, then—"Why do you wish me to go to the Piazza d'Azeglio?" he asks, in a tone that is no longer overtly cross, only constrained and odd. "Why are you driving me there?"

      "Because I think you would like it," she answers; "because"—taking his hand and passing her lips, which he feels to be trembling a little, very gently over the back of it—"because all through your life I want you to have exactly what you like, always."

      He draws his hand away; not unkindly, but as if shocked at the humility of her action.

      "That is so likely," he says mournfully.

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      There is no particular mirth in Burgoyne's mind as he mounts the stone stairs of the house which announces itself as 12 bis, in the commonplace new square of the Piazza d'Azeglio. But yet it is evident that, if he wishes to be in tune with the mood of the family to whom he is going to pay his respects, he must be not only mirthful, but musical. As the door of the entresol, to which he is directed by the porter, opens in answer to his ring, bursts of laughter, among

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