CHAPTER XXVII
The sun rides high, as Burgoyne issues into the open air, and beats, blinding hot, upon the great stone flags that pave the Florentine streets, and seem to have a peculiar power of absorbing and retaining light and heat. He must have been longer in the Piazza d'Azeglio than he had thought, and the reflection quickens his steps as he hurries, regardless of the midsummer blaze – for, indeed, it is more than equivalent to that of our midsummer – back to the Anglo-Américain. As he reaches it, he hears, with annoyance, the hotel clocks striking one. He is annoyed, both because the length of his absence seems to argue an indifference to the tidings he is expecting, and also because he knows that it is the Wilsons' luncheon hour, and that he will probably find that they have migrated to the salle-à-manger. In this case he will have to choose between the two equally disagreeable alternatives of following and watching them at their food, or that of undergoing a tête-à-tête with Sybilla, who, it is needless to say, does not accompany her family to the public dining-room; a tête-à-tête with Sybilla, which is, of all forms of social intercourse, that for which he has the least relish.
But as he apprehensively opens the salon door, he sees that his fears are unfounded. They have not yet gone to luncheon; they are all sitting in much the same attitudes as he had left them, except that Sybilla is eating or drinking something of a soupy nature out of a cup. There are very few hours of the day or night in which Sybilla is not eating something out of a cup. There is that about the entire idleness of the other couple which gives him a fright. Are they too unhappy? Have they heard too bad news to be able to settle to any occupation? Urged by this alarm, his question shoots out, almost before he is inside the door:
"Has not he come yet? Has not the doctor come yet?"
"He has been and gone; you see, you have been such a very long time away," replies Cecilia. She has no intention of conveying reproach, either by her words or tone; but to his sore conscience it seems as if both carried it.
"And what did he say?"
"He did not say much."
"Does he – does he think that it is anything – anything serious?"
"He did not say."
"Do you mean to tell me" – indignantly – "that you did not ask him?"
"If you had been here," replies Cecilia, with a not inexcusable resentment, "you might have asked him yourself."
"But did not you ask him?" in too real anxiety to be offended at, or even aware of, her fleer. "Did not he say?"
"I do not think he knew himself."
"But he must have thought – he must have had an opinion!" growing the more uneasy as there seems no tangible object for his fears to lay hold of.
"He says it is impossible to judge at so early a stage; it may be a chill – I told him about that detestable excursion yesterday, and he considered it quite enough to account for anything – it may be measles – they seem to be a good deal about; it may be malaria – there is a good deal of that too."
"And how soon will he know? How soon will it declare itself?"
"I do not know."
"But has he prescribed? Is there nothing to be done – to be done at once?" asks Jim feverishly, chafing at the idea of this inaction, which seems inevitable, with that helpless feeling which his own entire ignorance of sickness produces.
"Do not you suppose that if there was we should have done it?" cries Cecilia, rendered even more uncomfortable than she was before, by the contagion of his anxiety. "We are to keep her in bed – there is no great difficulty about that, poor soul; she has not the least desire to get up; she seems so odd and heavy!"
"So odd and heavy?"
"Yes; I went in to see her just now, and she scarcely took any notice of me; only when I told her that you had been to inquire after her, she lit up a little. I believe" – with a rather grudging smile – "that if she were dead, and someone mentioned your name, she would light up."
A sudden mountain rises in Jim's throat.
"If she is not better to-morrow, Dr. Coldstream will send a nurse."
"But does he think it will be necessary?"
"He does not know."
Jim writhes. It seems to him as if he were being blind-folded, and having his arms tied to his sides by a hundred strong yet invisible threads.
"Does no one know anything?" he cries miserably.
"I have told you exactly what the doctor said," says Cecilia, with the venial crossness bred of real anxiety. "I suppose you do not wish me to invent something that he did not say?"
"Of course not; but I wish I had been here – I wish I had been here!" – restlessly.
"Why were not you?"
No immediate answer.
"Why were not you?" repeats she, curiosity, for the moment, superseding her disquiet. "What prevented you? I thought, when you left us, that you meant to come back at once?"
"So I did, but – "
"But what?"
"I could not; I was with Byng."
"With Byng?" repeats Cecilia, too genuinely astonished to remember even to prefix a "Mr." to Byng's name. "Why, I should have thought that if there were one day of his life on which he could have done without you better than another, it would have been to-day!"
"Were not you rather de trop?" chimes in Sybilla's languid voice from the sofa. "Rather a bad third?"
"I was not a third at all."
"Do you mean to say," cries Cecilia, her countenance tinged with the pink of a generous indignation, "that you were four– that Mrs. Le Marchant stayed in the room the whole time? I must say that now that they are really and bonâ fide engaged, I think she might leave them alone together."
"Mrs. Le Marchant was not there at all." Then, seeing the open-mouthed astonishment depicted on the faces of his audience, he braces his mind to make the inevitable yet dreaded announcement. "I had better explain at once that neither Mrs. nor Miss Le Marchant was there; they are gone."
"Gone!"
"Yes; they left Florence at seven o'clock this morning." There is a moment of silent stupefaction.
"I suppose," says Cecilia, at last slowly recovering the power of speech, "that they were telegraphed for? Mr. Le Marchant is dead or ill? one of the married sisters? one of the brothers?"
Never in his life has Jim laboured under so severe a temptation to tell a lie, were it only the modified falsehood of allowing Cecilia's hypothesis to pass uncontradicted; but even if he were able for once to conquer his constitutional incapacity, he knows that in this case it would be useless. The truth must transpire to-morrow.
"I believe not."
"Gone!" repeats Cecilia, in a still more thunderstruck key than before – "and where are they gone?"
"I do not know."
"Why did they go?"
Jim makes an impatient movement, fidgeting on his chair. "I can only tell you their actions; they told me their motives as little as they did you."
"Gone! Why, they never said a word about it yesterday."
This being of the nature of an assertion – not an interrogation – Jim feels with relief that it does not demand an answer.
"Gone, at seven o'clock in the morning! Why, they could not have had time to pack their things!"
"They left them behind."
The moment that this admission is out of Burgoyne's mouth, he repents having made it; nor does his regret at all diminish under the shower of ejaculations from both sisters that it calls forth.
"Why, it was a regular flit! they must have taken French leave."
There is something so horribly jarring in the semi-jocosity of the last phrase that Jim jumps up from his chair and walks towards the window, where Mr. Wilson is sitting in dismal idleness.
Mr. Wilson has never cared much about the Le Marchants, and is now far too deeply absorbed in his own trouble to have anything but the most inattentive indifference to bestow upon the topic which to his daughters appears so riveting. Jim blesses him for his callousness. But the window of a small room is not so distant from any other part of it that sounds cannot, with perfect ease, penetrate thither, as Jim finds when Cecilia's next eager question pursues him.
"Did Mr. Byng know that they were going?"
"No."
There is a pause.
"It is absolutely incomprehensible!" says Cecilia, with almost a gasp. "I never saw any one human being so much in love with another as she was yesterday – there was so little disguise about it, that one was really quite sorry for her – and this morning at cockcrow she decamps and leaves him without a word."
"You are mistaken – she left a note for him."
"Poor dear boy!" sighs Sybilla, "is not he quite prostrated by the blow? I am not apt to pity men generally – they are so coarse-grained – but he is much more delicately strung than the general run."
"I suppose he is frightfully cut up," says Cecilia, with that inquisitiveness as to the details of a great affliction which we are all apt to experience.
For some perverse reason, inexplicable even to himself, Jim would like to be able to answer that his friend is not cut up at all; but truth again asserting its empire, he assents laconically, "Frightfully!"
"How did he take it?"
"How do people generally take such things?"
The impatience of the key in which this is uttered, coupled with the implied side-allusion to an acquaintance with sorrows of a somewhat similar nature on her own part, silences the younger and sounder Miss Wilson for a moment, but only for a moment – a moment long enough to be filled by another sighing "Poor dear boy!" from Sybilla.
"You say that she left a note for him?" – with a renewed light of curiosity in her eyes – "have you any idea what was in it?"
Jim hesitates; then, "Yes," he replies; "but as it was not addressed to me, I do not think that I have any right to repeat it."
"Of course not!" – reluctantly; "but did it throw no light – absolutely no light at all – upon this extraordinary stampede?"
"No."
"Did not she even tell him where they were going?"
"No."
"Nor whether they were coming back?"
"No."
"Nor ask him to follow her?"
"If she did not tell him where she was going, is it likely that she would ask him to follow her?" cries Jim irritably, deeply annoyed to find that he is, by the series of negatives that is being forced from him, doing the very thing which he had just denied his own right to do.
"It is the most incomprehensible thing I ever heard in my life. I wonder" – with an air of even alerter interest than before – "what Mr. Greenock will say? Perhaps he will now tell what he knows about them; if they are gone, there will no longer be any need to conceal it. I am afraid this looks rather as if there were something!"
For the second time in one day the mention of an amiable flâneur's name makes Jim vault to his feet.
"Well, I will not keep you any longer from your luncheon," he cries hastily. "I will call in again later."
"Are you going?" asks Mr. Wilson dully, lifting his head from his chest, upon which it is sunk. "Well, you are about right; we are not much good to anyone when our mainspring is gone."
The phrase strikes cold on Jim's heart.
"Are you going back to the poor dear boy?" inquires Sybilla as he passes her. "By-the-bye, if it is not too much trouble, would you mind tucking the Austrian blanket a little closer in on the left side?" and as he stoops to perform the asked-for service, she adds: "Let him know how sincerely I sympathize with him; and if he wants anything quieting for his nerves, tell him that there is nothing that I can more conscientiously recommend than – "
But what Sybilla can conscientiously recommend is shut into the closing door. Outside that door Jim finds that Cecilia has joined him. Anxiety has quite banished the not altogether disagreeable curiosity of five minutes ago, from the troubled face she lifts to his.
"You will come back, will not you?" she asks. "You are not of much use, I suppose; but still, one feels that you are there, and we are all so much at sea. You have not an idea how much we are at sea – without her."
"I think that I have a very good idea," he answers mournfully. "Tell me, Cis; do you think she is really very ill?"
As he puts the question, he feels its irrationality. He knows that the person to whom he is making his futile appeal has already given him all the scanty tidings she has to give; yet he cannot help indulging a faint hope that her response to this last query of his may perhaps set Amelia's condition in a slightly more favourable light. A look of helpless distress clouds Cecilia's already cloudy face.
"I tell you I do not know; I am no judge; I have seen so little real illness. Sybilla would kill me if she heard me say so, would not she" – with a slight parenthetical smile – "but I have seen so little real illness, that I do not know what things mean; I do not know what it means that she should be so heavy and stupid. As I told you before, the only time that she roused up at all was when I mentioned your – "
He stops her, breaking rudely into her sentence. He cannot bear to hear that it is only at the magic of his name that his poor faithful love lifts her sick head.
"Yes, yes; I remember."
"Some one ought to sit up with her, I am sure," pursues Cecilia, still with that same helpless air of disquiet; "she ought not to be left alone all night; but who? I should be more than willing to do it, but I know that I should fall asleep in five minutes, and I am such a heavy sleeper that, when once I am off, there is no possibility of waking me. I am a dreadfully bad sick-nurse; father can never bear to have me near him when he has the gout."
Burgoyne is too well aware of the perfect truth of this last statement to attempt any contradiction of it.
"Amelia has always been the one to sit up when any one was ill," continues she woefully; "and even now, by a stupid confusion of ideas, I catch myself thinking, 'Oh, Amelia will sit up with her!' before I can realize that her is Amelia herself."
Jim can well sympathize with this same confusion, when, several times during his walk back to the Piazza d'Azeglio, a muddled thought of comfort, in the idea that he will go and tell Amelia what a terrible day of anxiety about some one he has been having, taps at the door of his brain. The portals of No. 12 are once again opened to him by Annunziata, who indicates to him, by a series of compassionate gestures and liquid Tuscan sentences, that the povero is still within, and the Padrona, who this time also appears on the scene, and who is possessed of somewhat more English than her handmaid, intimates, albeit with a good deal of sympathy for his sufferings, yet with still more of determination, that it would be no bad thing were he to be removed, since, whether the sun shines or the rain falls, people must live, and the apartment has to be prepared for new occupants.
Anything that speaks less intention of removing than Byng's pose, when his friend rejoins him, it would be difficult to imagine. He is stretched upon the parquet floor, with his head lying on the small footstool that has been wont to support Elizabeth's feet; her rifled workbasket stands on the floor beside him, while her bit of embroidery half shrouds his distorted face. The needle, still sticking in it, may prick his eyes out for all he cares; the book she last read is open at the page where she has put her mark of a skein of pale silk; and the yellow anemones, that he must have plucked for her yesterday in drenched Vallombrosa, are crushed under his hot cheek. But outwardly he is quite quiet. Jim puts his hand on his shoulder.
"Come away, there is no use in your staying here any longer."
As he receives no answer, he repeats the exhortation more imperatively, "Come."
"Why should I come? Where should I come to?" says the young man, lifting his head, "where can I find such plain traces of her as here? I will stay."
He says this with an air of resolution, and once more lays down his face upon the footstool, which, being entirely worked in beads, has impressed the cheek thrust against it with a design in small hollows, a fact of which the sufferer is quite unaware.
"You cannot stay!" cries Burgoyne, the more impatiently that his own share of anxiety is fretting his temper almost past endurance; "you cannot stay, it is out of the question; they want to come into the rooms, to prepare them for new occupants."
"New occupants!" repeats Byng, turning over almost on his face, and flattening his nose and lips against the beaded surface of his stool, "other occupants than her. Never! never!"
It is to be placed to the credit side of Mr. Burgoyne's account that he does not, upon this declaration, withdraw the resting-place from his young friend's countenance and break it over his head. It is certainly not the temptation to do so that is lacking. Instead, he sits down at some distance off, and says quietly:
"I see, you will force them to call in the police. You will make a discreditable esclandre. How good for her; how conducive to her good name. I congratulate you!"
The other has lifted his head in a moment.
"What do you mean?"
"Do you think," asks Jim indignantly, "that it is ever very advantageous to a woman to have her name mixed up in a vulgar row? And do you suppose that hers will be kept out of it? Come" – seeing a look of shocked consternation breaking over the young man's face, and determined to strike while the iron is hot – "I will call a fiacre, and we will go home to the hotel. Put back her things into her basket. What right have you to meddle with them? You have no business to take advantage of her absence to do what you would not do if she were here."
Byng obeys with a scared docility; his eyes are so dim, and his fingers tremble so much, that Jim has to help him in replacing Elizabeth's small properties. His own heart is pricked with a cruel smart that has no reference to Amelia's illness, as he handles the departed girl's spools and skeins, and awkwardly folds her scrap of broidery. Byng offers no further resistance, and, equally indifferent to his own bunged-up eyes, bead-marked cheeks, and dishevelled locks, follows his companion dully, down the stone stairs, compassionately watched from the top by Annunziata, whose heart is an inconveniently tender one to be matched with so tough a face. They get into the fiacre, and drive in dead silence to the Minerva. Arrived there, Jim persuades his friend, who now seems prepared to acquiesce meekly in whatever he is told to do, to lie down on his bed, since the few words that he utters convey the fact of his being suffering from a burning headache, a phenomenon not very surprising, considering his late briny exercises, since, even at the superb age of twenty-two, it is difficult to spend six hours in banging your forehead against a parquet floor, in moaning, bellowing, and weeping, without leaving some traces of these gymnastics on your physique.
Burgoyne stands or sits patiently beside him, bathing his fiery temples with eau-de-Cologne, not teasing him with any questions, having, indeed, on his own part, the least possible desire for conversation; and so the heavy hours go by. The day has declined to evening before Burgoyne quits his protégé's side to dine, shortly and solitarily, previous making a third visit to the Anglo-Américain, to learn the latest news of his betrothed.
He had left Byng still stretched upon his bed, apparently asleep, and is therefore the more surprised, on returning to take a final look at him before setting out on his own errand, to find him up, with hat and stick in hand, evidently prepared for a walk.
"You are going out?"
"Yes."
"Where are you going?"
The other hesitates.
"I am going back there."
"Impossible!"
"But I am," replies Byng doggedly; "it will not do her any injury, for I shall not attempt to go in, I shall only ask at the door whether any telegram has yet been received from – from them; they must telegraph to direct where their things are to be sent to, and it is most probable that they have done so already."
"It is most improbable."
"Well, at all events, it is possible, it is worth trying, and I mean to try it."
There is such a fixed resolution in his voice, which is no longer quavering with sobs, and in his ashy face, that Jim offers no further resistance. The only concession he can obtain from him is that of permitting him to accompany him.
"You will not mind coming with me to the Anglo-Américain first, will you?" inquires Jim, as they set off walking across the Piazza.
"It will delay us quite half-an-hour," answers the other restlessly. "But stay" (a hazy look of reminiscence dawning over his preoccupied haggard face), "did you tell me that Amelia was ill – or did I dream it?"
"No, you did not dream it," replies the other sadly. "She is ill."
Perhaps the wretchedness that pierces through his friend's quiet tones recalls the young dreamer to the fact that the world holds other miseries than his own. There is at all events something of his old quick sympathy in his next words, and in the way in which they are uttered:
"Oh, poor Amelia, I am sorry! By all means let us go at once and ask after her. Is there nothing that we can get? – nothing that we can do for her?"
It is the question that Jim, in baffled anxiety, puts when he is admitted inside the dull salon, where no love-glorified, homely face to-night lights up the tender candles of its glad eyes, from over its stitching, at his entry.
Sybilla is lying less comfortably than usual on her sofa, her cushions not plumped up, and her bottle of smelling-salts rolled out of her reach. Mr. Wilson is walking uneasily up and down the room, instead of sitting placidly in his chair, with the soothing voice – which he had always thought as much to be counted on, and as little to be particularly thankful for, as the air that fills his lungs – lullingly reading him to sleep.
"Cecilia is with her just now," he says, in a voice of forlorn irritation. "I wish she would come down again; I have no great opinion of Cecilia as a sick-nurse, and she must know how anxious we are." A moment later, still pursuing his fidgety ramble from wall to wall, and exclaiming peevishly, as he stumbles over a footstool: "If it would only declare itself! There seems to be nothing to lay hold of, we are so completely in the dark – if it would only declare itself!"
A not very subdued sob from the sofa is the only answer he gets, an answer which evidently irritates still further his fretted nerves.
"I cannot think what Cecilia is doing!" he cries, hastening to the door, opening it noisily, and then listening.
"Let me run up and see," says Jim, his heart going out to the fractious old man in a sympathy of suffering. "Yes, I know where her room is —au troisième, is not it?" (a flash of recollection lighting up the fact that Amelia's is distinctly the worst room of the suite occupied by the Wilson family; the room with most stairs to climb to, and least accommodation when you reach it). "I will knock quite gently. Do not be afraid, I will not disturb her, and I will come down immediately to tell you."
Without waiting for permission, he springs up the stairs, and, standing on the landing, taps cautiously on the closed door, whose number (by one of those quirks of memory that furnish all our minds with insignificant facts) he has recollected. His first knock is so superfluously soft that it is evidently inaudible within, since no result follows upon it. His second, a shade louder, though still muffled by the fear of breaking into some little fitful yet salutary sleep, brings Cecilia out. His first glance at her face shows him that she has no good news, either to warm his own heart, or for him to carry down as a solace to the poor old man below.
"Oh, it is you, is it?" says she, shutting the door behind her with a clumsy carefulness that makes it creak. "No, I do not think she is any better; but it is so difficult to tell, I am no judge. She does not complain of anything particular; but she looks so odd."
It is the same adjective that Cecilia had applied earlier in the day to her sick sister, and it fills Jim with an impotent terror.
"If she is asleep, might not I just look in at her?" he asks. "I do not know what you mean when you say she looks odd."
"She is not asleep," replies Cecilia, in a noisy whisper, much more likely to pierce sick ears than a voice pitched in its normal key; "at least, I think not. But I am sure you ought not to see her; Dr. Coldstream said she was to be kept very quiet, and nothing would upset her so much as seeing you."
"She need not see me; I would only take just one look at her from behind the door," persists Jim who feels a desire, whose gnawing intensity surprises himself, to be assured by the evidence of his own eyes that his poor love's face has not undergone some strange and gruesome change, such as is suggested by Cecilia's disquieting epithet.
"Do you think she would not know you were there?" asks she scornfully, "Why, she hears your step three streets off!"