CHAPTER XXVI
"Cressid, I love thee in so strained a purity,
That the blest gods – as angry at my fancy,
More bright in zeal than the devotion which
Cold lips blow to their deities – take thee from me."
"What does this mean?"
The question has to be twice repeated before the person to whom it is addressed gives any sign of having heard it. His ears must be so deeply embedded in the pillow that the passage to his hearing is blocked. It is not till the interrogation is put a second time, in a louder key, and accompanied by a not very gentle shake of the shoulder, that he at length looks up, and reveals what Jim knows to be, and yet has some difficulty in recognising, as the features of Byng – features so altered, so distorted, so swollen by excessive weeping, that no one less intimately acquainted with them than the person who has been already contemplating them, under the influence of a variety of circumstances for a couple of months, could possibly put the owner's name to them. Jim has expected that his young friend would spend some portion of this day in crying, knowing well both his powers of, and his taste for, "turning on the water-works," as he but lately cruelly and uncivilly phrased it to his own mind. But the warm tears of emotion, few and undisfiguring, with which he had credited him, have not much kinship with the scalding torrents that have made his handsome young eyes mere red blurs on his ashen face, that have furrowed his cheeks, and damped his disordered curls, and taken all the starch out of his immaculate "masher" collar. They have wetted, too, into a state of almost pulp, a crumpled sheet of note-paper, which his head seems to have been burrowing in, upon the pillow.
"What does it mean?" repeats Burgoyne, for the third time, a hideous fear assailing him, at the sight of the young man's anguish, that he himself may have mistaken Annunziata's meaning; that her "gone" may have stood for the final one; that some instant stroke may have snatched lovely Elizabeth away, out of the world. Surely no catastrophe less than death can account for such a metamorphosis as that wrought in Byng. "Why do you look like that?" he goes on, his voice taking that accent of rage which extreme fear sometimes gives. "Why do not you speak?"
The other, thus adjured, plainly makes a violent effort for articulation; but his dry throat will let pass nothing but a senseless sob.
"What does that paper mean?" goes on Burgoyne, realizing the impotence of his friend to obey his behest, and rendered doubly terrified by it; "what is it? what does it say? Does it – does it – explain anything?"
He points as he speaks to the blurred and rumpled billet, and Byng catches it up convulsively, and thrusts it into his hand.
"It is the first letter I ever had from her," he says, the words rushing out broken and scarcely intelligible upon a storm of sobs, and so flings his head violently down upon the floor again in a new access of furious weeping.
Burgoyne holds the paper in his fingers, but for a moment or two he is unable to read it. There is an ugly swimming before his eyes for one thing; for another, Byng's treatment has not improved it as a specimen of caligraphy; but it never in its best days could have been a very legible document. And yet it is not long. Its few words, when at length he makes them out, ran thus:
"Good-bye, I was mad yesterday. I shall never marry you; I have no right to marry anyone. For God's sake do not ask me what I mean; and oh! don't, don't, DON'T come after me!"
There is neither date nor signature. As Jim stands staring at the five crooked, straggling sentences, a great swelling compassion fills his heart. Did ever poor little scribble make it so easy to construct the small shaking hand, and the tender breaking heart that penned it? An immense pity fills his soul; yet does it quite fill it? Is there room besides, in one corner, for a small pinch of devilish joy?
"There's many a slip
'Twixt the cup and the lip."
His own words of ill-natured croaking, uttered not an hour ago, to Cecilia Wilson, recur to his mind. How little he thought that that prophecy would so soon be fulfilled! He remains so long motionless and silent, his fingers still holding the paper, whose contents he has long ago mastered, that Byng – the violence of his paroxysm of grief at length exhausted – struggles to his feet and speaks – speaks as well as the catch in his sobbing breath and his quivering lips will let him.
"It is not her doing! You may think it is her doing, but I know it is not! I know her better than you do."
"I never made any pretensions to knowing her well," replies the other sadly, and relinquishing as he speaks the note to its owner.
"Is it likely, I ask you?" cries Byng excitedly. "I put it to you fairly: is it likely that she, with her seraph nature, all love and burning, she that is tender over drowning flies, would have put me to this horrible pain? – O God, you do not know what pain it is" ["Do not I?" aside] – "of her own free will?"
"I do not know; as you say, I do not know her well."
"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'"
says Byng, beginning to walk up and down the room with the tears still rolling down his cheeks, but in his spouting voice – a voice which at once assures Jim of an amelioration in his friend's condition, and hardens his heart against him. As a broad rule, indeed, it may be laid down that that sorrow which courses through one of the numberless channels cut by the poets for it will not bring its owner to Waterloo Bridge.
"But what am I saying?" lapsing out of his quotation into broken-hearted prose again. "It was not she! If I thought it were she, could I live a moment? It is her mother; no sane person can doubt that it is her mother's doing! She was always so sweetly docile, and her mother has conceived some prejudice against me. Did not I tell you how barbarously she shut the door upon me last night? – shut the door of my heaven in my face just as I thought I had won the right to enter it. Who would not have thought that it was won who had seen us together in the wood?"
Jim writhes.
"Oh, never mind the wood now!"
"Someone has prejudiced her against me, but who? I did not know that I had an enemy in the world. Someone has told her about – about Oxford – about my being sent down."
Jim is silent.
"If it is only that – " a tearful buoyancy beginning to pierce through his despair.
"It is not that."
"Someone has put a spoke in my wheel; but who? You are the only person who could, and you, dear old chap, are the last person who would, though you were not very encouraging to me last night! You did not?"
There is so direct an interrogation in the last words, accompanied by so confiding a look of affection, that yet has an uneasy touch of doubt in it, that Jim is obliged to answer.
"No, I did not put a spoke in your wheel; but" – his honesty forcing the admission – "I am not at all so sure that I am the last person who would have done so, if I could."
Byng has wiped his eyes to clear his vision of the blinding tears, and has again directed them to the note, which he has all this while been alternately pressing against his heart, laying upon his forehead, and crushing against his mouth.
"It seems blasphemy to say so of anything that came from her hand," he says, poring for the hundredth time over each obscure word, "but it reads like nonsense, does it not? 'I shall never marry you! I have no right to marry anyone!' No right? what does she mean?"
Jim shakes his head sadly.
"How can I tell?"
"Do you think it is possible" – lifting his disfigured eyes in horrified appeal to his friend – "it is a dreadful hypothesis, but I can think of no other – that that bright intelligence was clouded – that – that her dear little wits were touched when she wrote this?"
"No, I do not think so."
"You – you are not keeping anything from me?" – coming a step nearer, and convulsively clutching his friend's arm – "you – you do not know anything – anything that could throw light upon – upon this? I do not know whether you are conscious of it, but there is something in your manner that might lead me to that conclusion. Do you know – have you heard anything?"
"I know nothing," replies Jim slowly, and looking uncomfortably away from the questioner, "but I conjecture, I fear, I believe that – that – "
"That what? For God's sake, be a little quicker!"
"That – that – there is a – a – something in her past."
Byng falls back a pace or two, and puts up his hand to his head.
"What – what do you mean? What are you talking about? Her past? What" – soaring into extravagance again – "what can there be written on that white page? – so white that it bedazzles the eyes of even the angels who read it."
"I do not know what there is," replies Jim miserably, irritated almost beyond endurance by this poetic flight, and rendered even more wretched than he was before by the rôle that seems to be forced upon him, of conjecturally blackening Elizabeth's character. "How many times must I tell you that I know no more than you, only from – from various indications I have been led to believe that she has something– some great sorrow behind her?"
There is a silence, and when it is broken it is infringed by what is not much more than a whisper.
"What – what do you mean; what – what sort of a sorrow?"
"I tell you, I do not know."
Byng's tears have stopped flowing, and he now lifts his eyes, full of a madness of exaltation, to the ceiling.
"I will go to her," he cries; "if sorrow has the audacity to approach her again, it will have to reckon with me. There is no sorrow, none, in the whole long gamut of woe, for which love such as mine is not a balm. Reciprocal love!" – trailing the words in a sort of slow rapture – "no one that had seen her in the wood could have doubted that it was reciprocal."
"No doubt, no doubt."
"I will go to her!" – clasping his hands high in the air – "I will pour the oil and spikenard of my adoration into her gaping wounds! I will kiss the rifts together, though they yawn as wide as hell – yes, I will."
"For heaven's sake, do not talk such dreadful gibberish," breaks in Jim, at length at the end of his patience, which had run quite to the extreme of its tether indeed at the last mention of that ever-recurring wood. "It is a knockdown blow for you, I own, and I would do what I could to help you; but if you will keep on spouting and talking such terrible bosh – "
"I suppose I am making an ass of myself," replies Byng, thus brought down with a run from his heroics. "I beg your pardon, I am sure, old man. I have no right to victimize you," his sweet nature asserting itself even at this bitter moment; "but you see it is so horribly sudden. If you had seen her when I parted from her last night at the door! She lingered a moment behind Mrs. Le Marchant – just a moment, just time enough to give me one look, one wordless look. She did not speak; she was so divinely dutiful and submissive that nothing would have persuaded her by the lightest word to imply any censure of her mother; but she gave me just a look, which said plainly, 'It is not my fault that you are turned away! I would have welcomed you in!' Upon that look I banqueted in heaven all night."
He stops, choked.
"Well?"
"And then this morning, when I got here – I think I ran all the way; I am sure I did, for I saw people staring at me as I passed – to be met by Annunziata with the news that they were gone! I did not believe her; I laughed in her face, and then she grew angry, and bid me come in and see for myself! And I rushed past her, in here, with my arms stretched out, confident that in one short moment more she would be filling them, and instead of her" – dropping upon his knees by the table with a groan – "I find this!" – dashing the note upon the floor – "all that she leaves me to fill my embrace instead of her is this poor little pillow, that still seems to keep a faint trace of the perfume of her delicate head!"
He buries his own in it again as he speaks, beginning afresh to sob loudly.
Jim stands beside him, his mind half full of compassion and half of a burning exasperation, and his body wholly rigid.
"When did they go? at what hour? last night or this morning?"
"This morning early, quite early."
"They have left all their things behind them" – looking round at the room, strewn with the traces of recent and refined occupation.
"Yes" – lifting his wet face out of his cushion – "and at first, seeing everything just as usual, even to her very workbasket – she has left her very workbasket behind – I was quite reassured. I felt certain that they could have gone for only a few hours – for the day perhaps; but – "
He breaks off
"Yes?"
"They left word that their things were to be packed and sent after them to an address they would give."
"And you do not know where they have gone?"
"I know nothing, nothing, only that they are gone.
"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'
Oh! oh!! oh!!!"
"You never heard them speak of their plans, mention any place they intended to move to on leaving Florence?"
"Never!"
"It is too late for Rome," says Jim musingly; "England? I hardly think England," recalling Elizabeth's forlorn admission made to him at Monte Senario, "Why should we go home? We have nothing pleasant to go to."
"I do not think they had any plans," says Byng, speaking in a voice which is thick with much weeping; "they never seemed to me to have any. She was so happy here, so gay, there never was anything more lovely than her gaiety, except – except – her tenderness."
"Yes, yes, no doubt. Then you are absolutely without a clue?"
"Absolutely."
"Do you mean to say that up to yesterday – all through yesterday, even – she never gave you a hint of any intention of leaving Florence?"
"Never, never. On the contrary, in the – " (he is going to say "the wood," but thinks better of it), "we were planning many more such expeditions as yesterday's. At least, I was planning them."
"And she assented?"
"She did not dissent. She met me with a look of divine acquiescence."
Jim turns away his head. He is involuntarily picturing to himself what that look was like, and with what sweet dumb-show it was accompanied.
"What powers of hell" – banging his head down upon the table again – "could have wrought such a hideous change in so few hours? Only ten! for it was eight in the evening before I left them, and they were off at six this morning. They could have seen no one; they had received no letters, no telegrams, for I inquired of Annunziata, and she assured me that they had not. Oh no!" – lifting his face with a gleam of moist hope upon it – "there is only one tenable hypothesis about it – it is not her doing at all. She wrote this under pressure. It is her handwriting, is it not? – though I would not swear even to that. I – I have played the mischief with my eyes" – pulling out his drenched pocket-handkerchief, and hastily wiping them – "so that I cannot see properly; but it is hers, is not it?"
"I do not know; I never saw her handwriting; she never wrote to me."
"It was evidently dictated to her," cries Byng, his sanguine nature taking an upward spring again; "there are clear traces, even in the very way the letters are formed, of its being written to order reluctantly. She did it under protest. See how her poor little hand was shaking, and she was crying all the while, bless her! There, do not you see a blister on the paper – here on this side?"
Burgoyne does not see any blister, but as he thinks it extremely probable that there was one, he does not think himself called upon to wound his friend by saying so.
"I declare I think we have got hold of the right clue at last," cries Byng, his dimmed eyes emitting such a flash as would have seemed impossible to them five minutes ago. "Read in this light, it is not nearly so incomprehensible: 'I shall never marry you, I have no right to marry anyone.' Of course, I see now! What an ass I was not to see it at once! What she means is that she has no right to leave her mother! To anyone who knew her lofty sense of duty as well as I ought to have done it is quite obvious that that is what she means. Is not it quite obvious? is not it as clear as the sun in heaven?"
Jim shakes his head.
"I am afraid that it is rather a forced interpretation."
"I do not agree with you," rejoins the other hotly; "I see nothing forced about it. You do not know as well as I do – how should you? – her power of delicate, self-sacrificing devotion. It is overstrained, I grant you; but there it is – she thinks she has no right to leave her mother now that she is all alone."
"She is not alone; she has her husband."
"I mean now that all her other children are married and scattered. There are plenty more – are not there? – though I never could get her to talk about them."
"There are two sisters and two brothers."
"But they are no longer any good to their mother," persists Byng, clinging to his theory with all the greater tenacity as he sees that it meets with no very great acceptance in his friend's eyes; "as far as she is concerned they are non-existent."
"I do not know what right you have to say that."
"And so she, with her lofty idea of self-sacrifice, immolates her own happiness on the altar of her filial affection. It is just like her!" – going off into a sort of rapture – "blind mole that I was not to divine the motive, which her ineffable delicacy forbade her to put into words. She thought she had a right to think that I should have comprehended her without words!"
He has talked himself into a condition of such exalted confidence before he reaches the end of this sentence that Jim is conscious of a certain brutality in applying to him the douche contained in his next words.
"I do not know why you should credit Mrs. Le Marchant with such colossal selfishness; she never used to be a selfish woman."
But Burgoyne's cold shower-bath does not appear even to damp the shoulders for which it is intended.
"'Since you left me, taking no farewell,'"
murmurs Byng, beginning again to tramp up and down the little room, with head thrown back and clasped hands high lifted; and in his rapt poet voice:
"'Since you left me, taking no farewell,'
I must follow you, sweet! Despite your prohibition, I must follow you.
"'We two that with so many thousand sighs,
Did buy each other.'"
Then, coming abruptly down to prose – "Though they left no address, it will of course be possible, easy, to trace them. I will go to the station and make inquiries. They will have been seen. It is out of the question that she can have passed unnoticed! No eye that has once been enriched by the sight of her can have forgotten that heavenly vision. I will telegraph to Bologna, to Milan, to Venice. Before night I shall have learnt her whereabouts. I shall be in the train, following her track. I shall be less than a day behind her. I shall fall at her feet, I shall – "
"You are talking nonsense," answers Burgoyne impatiently; and yet with a distinct shade of pity in his voice; "you cannot do anything of the kind. When the poor woman has given so very unequivocal a proof of her wish to avoid you, as is implied in leaving the place at a moment's notice, without giving herself even time to pack her clothes, it is impossible that you can force your company again upon her – it would be persecution."
"And do you mean to tell me," asks Byng slowly, and breathing hard, while the fanatical light dies out of his face, and leaves it chalk white; "do you mean to say that I am to acquiesce, to sit down with my hands before me, and submit without a struggle to the loss of – O my God" – breaking out into an exceeding bitter cry – "why did you make me
"'so rich in having such a jewel,
As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearl,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold,'
if it were only to rob me of her?"
"I do not see what other course is open to you," replies Jim, answering only the first part of the young sufferer's appeal, and ignoring the rhetoric, terribly genuine as is the feeling of which it is the florid expression. "It is evident that she has some cogent reasons – or at least that appear cogent to her – for breaking off her relations with you."
"What cogent reasons can she have that she had not yesterday?" says Byng violently – "yesterday, when she lay in my arms, and her lips spoke their acquiescence in my worship – if not in words, yet oh, far, far more – "
"Why do you reiterate these assertions?" cries Burgoyne sternly, since to him there seems a certain indecency in – even in the insanity of loss – dragging to the eye of day the record of such sacred endearments. "I neither express nor feel any doubt as to the terms you were on yesterday; what I maintain is that to-day– I do not pretend to explain the why – she has changed her mind; it is not" – with a sarcasm, which he himself at the very moment of uttering it feels to be cheap and unworthy – "it is not the first time in the world's history that such a thing has happened. She has changed her mind."
"I do not believe it," cries Byng, his voice rising almost to a shout in the energy of his negation; "till her own mouth tell me so I will never believe it. If I thought for a moment that it was true I should rush to death to deliver me from the intolerable agony of such a thought. You do not believe it yourself" – lifting his spoilt sunk eyes in an appeal that is full of pathos to his friend's harsh face. "Think what condemnation it implies of her – her whom you always affected to like, who thought so greatly of you – her whose old friend you were – her whom you knew in her lovely childhood!"
"You are right," replies Jim, looking down, moved and ashamed; "I do not believe that she has changed her mind. What I do believe is that yesterday she let herself go; she gave way for one day, only for one day, after all, poor soul, to that famine for happiness which, I suppose" – with a sigh and a shrug – "gnaws us all now and then – gave way to it even to the pitch of forgetting that – that something in her past of whose nature I am as ignorant as you are, which seems to cast a blight over all her life."
He pauses; but as his listener only hangs silently on his utterance he goes on:
"After you left her, recollection came back to her; and because she could not trust herself again with you, probably for the very reason that she cared exceedingly about you" – steeling himself to make the admission – "she felt that there was nothing for it but to go."
Either the increased kindness of his friend's tone, or the conviction that there is, at least, something of truth in his explanations, lets loose again the fountain of Byng's tears, and once more he throws his head down upon his hands and cries extravagantly.
"It is an awful facer for you, I know," says Burgoyne, standing over him, and, though perfectly dry-eyed, yet probably not very much less miserable than the young mourner, whose loud weeping fills him with an almost unbearable and yet compunctious exasperation.
"What is he made of? how can he do it?" are the questions that he keeps irefully putting to himself; and for fear lest in an access of uncontrollable irritation he shall ask them out loud, he moves to the door. At the slight noise he makes in opening it Byng lifts his head.
"Are you going?"
"Yes; if it is any consolation to you, you have not a monopoly of wretchedness to-day. Things are not looking very bright for me either. Amelia is ill."
"Amelia," repeats the other, with a hazy look, as if not at first able to call to mind who Amelia is; then, with a return of consciousness, "Is Amelia ill? Oh poor Amelia! Amelia was very good to her. Amelia tried to draw her out. She liked Amelia!"
"Well" – with an impatient sigh – "unfortunately that did not hinder Amelia from falling ill."
"She is not ill really?" – his inborn kind-heartedness struggling for a moment to make head against the selfishness of his absorption.
"I do not know" – uneasily – "I am going back to the hotel to hear the doctor's verdict. Will you walk as far as to the Anglo-Américain with me? There is no use in your staying here."
But at this proposition the lover's sobs break out louder and more infuriating than ever.
"I will stay here till I die – till I am carried over the threshold that her cruel feet have crossed.
"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'"
Against a resolution at once so fixed and so rational, Jim sees that it is useless to contend.