CHAPTER XXV
"Some say the genius so
Cries 'Come' to him that instantly must die."
A new day has awaked, and Firenze, fresh-washed after yesterday's rain, smelling through all her streets of lilies, laughs up, wistaria-hung, to a fleckless sky. If poor Amelia had but deferred her treat for twenty-four hours, what a different Vallombrosa would she and her companions have carried home in their memories! Amelia's treat!
"I shall not forget Amelia's treat in a hurry!" Burgoyne says to himself, as he sits appetiteless over his solitary breakfast. "I had better go and tell her the result of it."
As he makes this reflection, he rises with some alacrity, and, leaving his scarcely-tasted coffee and his not-at-all-tasted omelette, walks out of the salle-à-manger. His motive for so early a visit to the Anglo-Américain is less an excessive eagerness to proclaim his piece of news than the thought that by so doing he will, at least for a few hours, escape the necessity of being in his young friend's company. As to where that young friend at present is, whether, after having wandered about the town all night, he is now sleeping late, or whether he is already off to persecute poor Mrs. Le Marchant for that maternal blessing which she has so little inclination to give, Jim is ignorant. All he knows is that such another dose of Byng's erotic eloquence as he had to swallow last night will leave him (Burgoyne) either a murderer or suicide.
Owing to his arrival at the Anglo-Américain so much sooner than usual, he finds himself coming in for the ceremony of Sybilla's installation for the day in the drawing-room. There is always a little pomp and fussy bustle about this rite. Sybilla totters in (grave doubts have occasionally crossed the minds of her family as to whether she does not in reality possess a pair of excellent and thoroughly dependable legs), supported on one side by Amelia and on the other by her maid. Cecilia goes before with an air cushion, and Mr. Wilson follows, when he does not turn restive – which is sometimes the case – with a duvet. To-day, as I have said, this rite is in full celebration when Jim arrives, but it is being performed with mutilated glories. The rite is going forward, but the high priest is absent. That ministrant, upon whose arm the sufferer is wont to lean far the most heavily; she upon whom devolves the whole responsibility of arranging the three cushions behind the long limp back; the properly covering the languid feet; the nice administering of the reviving cordial drops that are to repair the fatigue of the transit from bedroom to sitting-room – that most important and unfailing ministrant is nowhere to be seen. No artist wishes his picture to be viewed in an inchoate, unfinished stage, nor is Sybilla at all anxious to have the public admitted to the sight of that eminent work of art herself until she is stretched in faint, moribund, graceful completeness on her day-bed. At the moment of Burgoyne's entry she has just reached that unbecoming point, where she is sitting sideways on her sofa, before her wasted limbs – Burgoyne is one of those heretics who have never believed that they are wasted – have been carefully lifted into their final posture of extension upon the Austrian blanket. It is, of all moments, the one at which interruption is least welcome; nor is the intruder at all surprised at being greeted by the invalid with a more than sub-acid accent.
"My dear Jim, already! Why you become more matinale every day! you are the early bird indeed! You do not" – with an annoyed laugh – "give us poor worms a chance of being beforehand with you."
"I am very sorry if I am too soon," replies he, his eyes wandering away from the fretful features before him in search of others upon which he knows he shall find written no complaint of his prematureness – "but I came to – Where's Amelia?"
"You may well ask," replies Sybilla, with a sort of hysterical laugh. "It is pretty evident that she is not here! My dear Cis, would you mind remembering that my head is not made of mahogany? you gave it such a bang with that cushion. I am very sorry to trouble you. The heaviest load a sick person has to bear is the feeling that she is such a burden to those around her; and certainly, my dear, you do not help me to forget it."
"Where is she?" repeats Burgoyne hastily, both because he wants to know, and because he is anxious to strangle in its infancy one of those ignoble family bickerings, to assist at many of which has been the privilege or penalty of his state of intimacy.
"She is not well," replies Cecilia shortly, her rosy face rosier than usual, either with the joy of imminent battle, or with the exertion of swaddling, under protest, the invalid's now elevated legs.
"Not well! Amelia not well," echoes he, in a tone of incredulity.
During all the years of their acquaintance not once has he heard his patient sweetheart complain of ache or pain. Manlike, he has therefore concluded that she can never have felt either.
"It is very thoughtless of her," says Cecilia, with a not altogether amiable laugh, and giving a final irritated slap to Sybilla's coverlet – "considering how much illness we already have in the house; ha! ha! but it is true all the same: she is not well, not at all well; she is in bed."
"In bed!"
"She must have caught a chill yesterday on that disgusting excursion; driving home that long distance in wet shoes and stockings."
"But I thought, I hoped that – I asked her to change them."
"She had them dried in a sort of way; but I could see when she put them on again that they were really wringing wet still. I told her so, but she only answered that even if they were, what matter? she never caught cold. You know that Amelia never thinks that anything matters that concerns herself."
This would be an even handsomer tribute to Amelia than it is, if it did not suggest a secondary intention of administering a back-hander to someone else.
"In the case of my children," says Mr. Wilson, making his voice heard for the first time from the window, where he is discontentedly peering up and down the sheets of a journal through his spectacles, "there seems to be no mean possible between senseless rashness and preposterous self-indulgence."
Mr. Wilson likes his eldest daughter. He is uneasy and upset, and rather angry at her indisposition, and this is his way of showing his paternal tenderness.
"In bed!"
The human animal is the most adaptive of created beings; but even it requires some little time to adjust itself to entirely new conditions of existence.
"Amelia," continues Mr. Wilson, fanning the flame of his ire with the bellows of his own rhetoric, "is the one among you whom I did credit with the possession of a head upon her shoulders, and now here she is wantonly laying herself up!"
"You talk as if she did it on purpose, father," says Cecilia, with an indignant laugh – "as if she enjoyed it. I do not think that anyone, even Sybilla" – with a resentful side-glance at the sofa – "could enjoy having her teeth chattering with cold, her head as heavy as lead, and her knees knocking together under her."
"Good heavens!" cries Jim, his bewildered surprise swallowed up in genuine alarm; "you do not mean to say that she is as bad as that?"
Sybilla laughs, and even in the midst of his real anxiety, Burgoyne has time for the reflection that the Wilson family seem this morning to have se donné le mot to show in how many different styles it is possible to be merry without the least tinge of genuine mirth in any.
"My dear Jim, have not you known Cis long enough not to take her au pied de la lettre? Do not you know of old what a magnificent colourist she is? – a perfect Tintoret! Of course Amelia is not quite the thing, poor dear – she has no one but herself to blame for that! – but equally of course, to a colossally healthy person such as she, any little ailment appears a mountain."
This speech is uttered with the accent of such entire conviction that it ought to carry reassurance into the heart of the person to whom it is addressed. Sybilla really and honestly disbelieves in the reality of any claims but her own to sincere sickness. But Jim unreasonably neither is nor feigns to be reassured.
"You have had advice for her? You have sent for Dr. Coldstream?" he asks rapidly of the two sound members of the family, turning his back unceremoniously upon the invalid.
"I was going to send for him at once," answers Cecilia, her own latent anxiety quickened by the evident alarm of her interlocutor, "but Sybilla said it was needless, as in any case he was coming to see her this afternoon."
"I think he wishes to change my medicine," puts in Sybilla in a piano voice, that shows an evident desire to assert her threatened position of prime and only genuine invalid, a sort of "beware of imitations" tone; "he is not quite satisfied with the effect of the last, I think; it has not brought up the pulse and quickened the appetite in the way he hoped. I thought that he might run up and look at Amelia at the end of his visit to me."
"And is it possible," inquires Jim, with some heat, "that you are going to let half a day go by without doing anything for her? I suppose you have not exaggerated, have you?" turning with an earnest appeal in his eyes to Cecilia; "but in any case I am very sure that nothing short of being really and gravely ill would have kept her in bed – she who is always waiting hand and foot upon us all, whom we all allow to spend her life in hewing wood and drawing water for us."
"Send for Dr. Coldstream at once," says Mr. Wilson irritably; "at once, I tell you; he is so very seldom out of the house that I have often thought of suggesting to him to take a room here; and now, on the only occasion on which he is really needed, he is not at hand."
"If you will write the note," says Jim, a shade relieved at having at last succeeded in rousing Amelia's relations to prompt action, and feeling a feverish desire to be doing something, "I will take it at once; it will be the quickest way; I may catch him before he goes out and bring him back with me."
"Do you really think it is necessary?" asks Sybilla, as Jim hustles Cecilia to her writing-table, and stands, nervously fidgeting beside her as she writes; "do you think, if it is only a common cold, as I suspect, that it is quite fair to worry a man who is so run off his legs already? He will probably laugh in your face; still, if you are so set upon it, it is perhaps more satisfactory."
"You need not go into details – just a line – make haste!" cries Jim, hanging tiresomely over Cecilia, rather impeding her than the reverse by his impatience, and leaving entirely unnoticed Sybilla's observation, which indeed has been uttered more to preserve her own self-respect than with much hope that in the present wrong-headed state of mind of her family any member will pay much heed to it.
In five minutes more, Jim, with Cecilia's note in his pocket, is being borne rapidly in a fiacre through the sweet, gay streets. But, drive as rapidly as he may, he is not quick enough to intercept the popular English doctor, who, although, as his servant tantalizingly informs Jim, he is almost always at home at that hour, has, on this occasion, been sent for to an urgent case of sudden illness out of Florence, at the village of Peretola. Jim has to content himself with the assurance that immediately on his return the note will be given him; and with this unsatisfactory intelligence Mr. Burgoyne reappears at the Anglo-Américain. He finds the three persons whom he had left much as he had quitted them – uneasy, cross, and unemployed.
"It is all the fault of that odious expedition yesterday," says Cecilia, harking back to her old cry. "Why we set out at all, I can't imagine; on such a day, it was madness, and – "
"It is not much use thinking of that now," interrupts Burgoyne impatiently, and wincing at these philippics against his poor bride's miserable treat as if they had been directed against herself.
"Well, it is an ill-wind that blows nobody any good," pursues the young lady. "I suppose that two of us enjoyed it enough to make up for the wretchedness of the other four."
Her large prominent eyes are fixed upon Jim as she speaks with a sort of knowingness overlying their former lugubrious expression.
"Do you mean Mr. Byng and Miss Le Marchant?" inquires he, pronouncing both names with a laboured distinctness, while his voice sounds to himself loud and wooden. "You are perfectly right in your conjecture; no doubt they enjoyed themselves. Byng wished me to tell you that they are engaged to be married."
If the essence of a good piece of news is to surprise, Jim can certainly not flatter himself that his comes under that head.
"It did not require a conjurer to prophesy that," is Cecilia's comment. "I never saw two people who troubled themselves less to disguise their feelings. I saw that they neither of them knew whether they were on their heads or on their heels, when they emerged dripping from that horrid pine wood. Dear me!" – with a good-sized sigh – "how smoothly things run for some people! how easily some of these affairs come off, without a hitch anywhere from beginning to end!"
She pauses, and it is plain to those acquainted with her heart history that her thoughts are coursing mournfully back to the all-along reluctant and ultimately entirely faithless clergyman who had last possessed her young affections.
"Without a hitch from beginning to end?" cries Jim hotly, jarred more than he would like to own to himself by this phrase. "How can you possibly tell? These are early days to assert that so dogmatically.
"'There's many a slip
'Twixt the cup and the lip.'"
"Do you mean to say that you think it will not come off?" asks Cecilia, a slightly pleasurable light coming into her eyes as she asks – not that she has any ill-will towards Elizabeth, nor any distinct design of her own upon Byng; but that there is something not absolutely disagreeable to her in the idea of his being still among the ranks of the possible.
"I am sure he would make a delightful husband," puts in Sybilla, her praise given emphasis by her desire to employ it as a weapon of offence against one who is at present more deeply than usual in her black books; "he has such gentle, feminine ways; he comes into a room so quietly, and when he asks one how one is really listens for the answer."
"Perhaps you are right, and it will fall through," says Cecilia thoughtfully; "many engagements do!" (sighing again). "She is a sweet, pretty creature, and looks as if butter would not melt in her mouth; but she is evidently older than he."
"Jim will not allow that to be an objection," cries Sybilla, with a faint laugh, "will you, Jim? How much older than you is Amelia? I always forget."
"I never can help thinking that she has a history," resumes Cecilia, in a meditative voice, "and that Mr. Greenock knows it. If ever her name is mentioned he always begins to look wise, as if there were something that he was longing to tell one about her; it is continually on the tip of his tongue – some day it will tumble over the tip."
"I do not think that there is any use in my staying all this while!" cries Jim, jumping up. "Dr. Coldstream cannot be here at soonest for another hour; and I do not think that we are, any of us, very good company for each other to-day, so I will look in again later."
He is out of the room and out of the hotel before his companions can take exception to his disappearance. For some time he walks along aimlessly, his mind a jumble of misery, and dull, remorseful anxiety about Amelia; intolerable comparisons between his own lot and his friend's; sharp knives of jealousy as often as – which is almost unintermittently – his imagination wings its cruel way to the Piazza d'Azeglio – through one opulent week, his Piazza. At this moment – this moment, while his own leaden feet are treading goalless the hot flags that for him lead nowhere – Byng is enthroned with her in the heaven of the mean little salon. He unconsciously shows his teeth in a stern smile to the surprised passers-by. He had jeered Byng for his hyperboles, and now he is out-hyperboling him. What a detestable verb he has invented! He laughs out loud. Are they sitting at the window, looking out at the judas tree and the Paulownia? Not they! The window is commanded to a certain extent by the roadway. The window is for acquaintances, banal acquaintances, like himself – no place for the permitted freedoms of exquisite new love. Are they then on the sofa, the vulgar walnut sofa, over which Elizabeth has thrown her blue Neapolitan tablecloth? It is a little sofa, scarcely room for two upon it, but, oh! plenty of room for them! Or are they at the piano? Is she singing him some sugared ditty "lovely well" until he breaks into her song with the storm of his kisses, and her little white hands drop from the keys, and they lie sobbing with ecstasy in each other's arms? It is quite certain that Byng will sob. He is always delighted at having an opportunity for turning on the water-works. Is there a bare possibility that Mrs. Le Marchant may carry her disapprobation to the pitch of impeding by her presence their tête-à-tête? The idea gives him a momentary alleviation. Why should not he go and see for himself whether it is so? It will be a method of passing the tedious interval before he can hear the doctor's verdict on Amelia. He must at some time or other comply with Byng's pressing prayer to him to offer his congratulations to Elizabeth, and he may as well have a day of complete and perfect pain – pain of various flavours and essences mixed into one consummate draught – a day of which not one hour shall be without its ache.
Having come to this conclusion, his aimless walk quickens, and changes into a purposeful striding through streets and Piazzas, till he finds himself standing at the door of 12a. He looks up at the entresol windows – they are all open, but no one is either sitting in or looking out at them. It is as he had thought. The window is too public for them; neither can they be at the piano, for not a sound of either voice or instrument is wafted down to him. He runs up the stone stairs, and rings the electric bell. The standing before the unopened portal, and the trembling jar of the bell, bring back to him, with a vividness he could do without, those other long-ago days – they seem to him long ago – when he stood there last, with no easy heart even then, but yet with how different anticipations. He has found it hard enough to bear the brunt of Byng's furious inhuman joy when alone with him. How will he stand it when he sees them together?
He is recalled from these reflections by the opening of the door, and the appearance in it of the ministering angel who has usually admitted him into his Eden – Annunziata. It strikes him that Annunziata looks older and more dishevelled than ever, and is without that benevolent smile of welcoming radiance which her hard-featured face generally wears. Nor does she, as has been her wont, stand back to let him pass in almost before he has put his question, as if she could not admit him quickly enough. But to-day she stands, on the contrary, in the doorway without a smile. In a second the idea flashes across Jim's mind that Byng has forbidden anyone to be let in. It turns him half sick for the moment, and it is with an unsteady voice that he stammers:
"The Signora? The Signorina?"
Annunziata lifts her shoulders in a dismal shrug, and stretches out her hands:
"Gone!"
"Gone? You mean gone out driving?" Then remembering that her English is as minus a quantity as his Italian, he adds in eager explanation, "En fiacre?"
She shakes her head, and then nods vaguely in the direction of the whole of the rest of the world – the whole, that is, that is not 12 bis.
"No, gone!"
"But where? Dove?" cries he, frantic with irritation at his own powerlessness either to understand or be understood.
Again she shakes her head.
"I do not know; they did not say."
He gathers this to be her meaning, and hurriedly puts another query.
"When? Quando?"
But her answer being longer and more voluble, he can't take in its drift, seeing which she retreats a step, and, motioning him with her hand to enter, points down the passage. He does not require to have the dumb-show of invitation twice repeated, but, rushing past her, hurries down the well-known little corridor to the salon door. It is open, and he stands within. At the first glance it seems to him to wear much its usual air. There is even a score of music standing on the piano, the copper pots are full of rose-branches, and the scaldini brimming with Firenze's own lilies, the bit of red Venetian brocade, with the little old tinsel fringe, still hangs over the arm-chair by the fireplace, and the blue Neapolitan table-cover still disguises the vulgarity of the sofa. He has misunderstood Annunziata – it is really monstrous to be so helplessly ignorant of the language of the country you are living in – or she has lost her wits, or – He had thought the room empty, but as he advances a step further into it, he discovers that he is not the sole occupant: that lying stretched upon the floor, with his fair head buried in a little pillow, against which both men have often seen Elizabeth's small white cheek resting, is Byng! – the Byng whose riotous, insolent happiness he had doubted his own powers of witnessing without murdering him! – the splendid felicity of whose lot he has been so bitterly laying beside his own destiny – the Byng whom he had been gnashing his teeth at the thought of – at the thought of him lying in Elizabeth's arms!