CHAPTER XXVIII
So that night Jim does not see Amelia. After all, as Cecilia says, it is better to be on the safe side, and to-morrow she will be brighter, and he can sit by her, and tell her lovingly – oh very lovingly! – what a fright she has given him. Yes, to-morrow she will be brighter. The adjective is Cecilia's; but, apparently, he cannot improve upon it, for he not only keeps repeating it to himself as he runs downstairs, but employs it for the reassurance of Miss Wilson's anxious relatives.
"She will be brighter to-morrow; sick people are always worse at night, are not they?" – rather vaguely, with again that oppressive sense of his own inexperience in illness. "Not that she is worse" – this is hastily subjoined, as he sees her father's face fall – "Cecilia never said she was worse– oh, no, not worse, only not distinctly better; and, after all, it would have been irrational to expect that. She will be brighter to-morrow – oh, yes, of course she will be brighter to-morrow!"
He leaves the hotel with the phrase, which sounds cut and dried and unreal, still upon his lips, after bidding a kinder good-night than usual to Mr. Wilson, after having offered to supply Amelia's place by reading aloud to him, a feat he has not performed since the evening of his disastrous experience of the Provident Women of Oxford; and lastly, having even – as a reward to Sybilla, who has been understood to murmur something tearful about letting her maid look in upon Amelia at intervals through the night – tucked in her Austrian blanket, and picked up her smelling-bottle. He has expected to rejoin Byng outside, as he had promised to wait for him with such patience as a cigar could lend, and on the condition that his absence should not exceed a stipulated period. But either the promise has been broken, or the period exceeded, for Byng is gone. The fact does not greatly surprise Burgoyne, though it causes him a slight uneasiness, which is, perhaps, rather a blessing for him, distracting his mind in some slight measure from the heaviness of his own trouble.
He walks fast to the Piazza d'Azeglio; but he neither overtakes him of whom he is in pursuit, nor finds him at 12 bis. He has been there, has inquired with agitation for the telegrams, which have naturally not been received, and has then gone away again immediately. Whither? The Padrona, who has answered the door-bell herself and, with Italian suavity, is doing her best to conceal that she is beginning to think she has heard nearly enough of the subject, does not know. For a few moments Jim stands irresolute, then he turns his steps towards the Arno. It is not yet too late for the charming riverside promenade, the gay Lung'Arno, to be still alive with flâneurs; the stars have lit their lamps above, and the hotels below. The pale planets, and the yellow lights from the opposite bank of the river, lie together, sweet and peaceful upon her breast. In both cases the counterfeits are as clear and bright as the real luminaries; and it seems as if one had only to plunge in an arm to pick up stars and candles out of the stream's depths.
Leaning over the parapet near the Ponte Vecchio, Burgoyne soon discovers a familiar figure, a figure which starts when he touches its arm.
"I thought I would wait about here for an hour or so," says Byng, with a rather guilty air of apology, "until I could go back and inquire again. The telegram has not arrived yet – I suppose it is too early. Of course they would not telegraph until they get in to-night. You do not think" – with a look of almost terror – "that they are going through to England, and that they will not telegraph till they get there?"
"How can I tell?"
"There is nothing in the world less likely," cries Byng feverishly, irritated at not having drawn forth the reassurance he had hoped for. "I do not for a moment believe that they have gone home; I feel convinced that they are still in Italy! Why should they leave it, when they – when she is so fond of it?"
Jim looks down sadly at the calm, strong stream.
"I do not know, I cannot give an opinion – I have no clue."
"I will ask again in about an hour," says Byng, lifting his arms from the parapet, "in an hour it is pretty certain to have arrived; and meanwhile, I thought I would just stroll about the town, but there is no reason – none at all – why I should keep you! You – you must be wanting to go back to Amelia."
He glances at his friend in a nervous, sidelong way, as he makes this suggestion.
"I am not going back again to-night," replies Jim quietly, without giving any evidence of an intention to acquiesce in his dismissal. "There is nothing that I can do for her – there is nothing to be done."
His tone, in making this statement, must be yet more dreary than he is aware, as it arouses even Byng's self-absorbed attention.
"Nothing to be done for her?" he echoes, with a shocked look. "My dear old chap, you do not mean to say – to imply – "
"I mean to imply nothing," interrupts Jim sharply, in a superstitious panic of hearing some unfavourable augury as to his betrothed put into words. "I mean just what I say – neither more nor less; there is nothing to be done for her to-night, nothing but to let her sleep – a good sleep will set her up: of course a good sleep will quite set her up."
He speaks almost angrily, as if expecting and challenging contradiction. But Byng's spirit has already flown back to his own woes. He may make what sanguine statements he pleases about Amelia's to-morrow, without fearing any demurrer from his companion. What attention the latter has to spare is evidently only directed to the solving of the problem, how best, with amicable civility, to be rid of him. Before he can hit upon any expedient for attaining this desired end, Burgoyne speaks again, his eye resting with a compassionate expression upon his junior's face, whose wild pallor is heightened by the disorder of his hair, and the hat crushed down over his brows.
"You have not had anything to eat all day – had not you better come back to the hotel and get something to eat?"
"Eat!" cries the other, with almost a scream; "you must have very little comprehension of – " Then, checking himself and with a strong and palpable effort for composure: "It would not be worth while, I should not have time; in an hour – less than an hour now, for I must have been here quite ten minutes at the least – I have to return to the Piazza d'Azeglio."
"Then go to Doney's; why not get something to eat at Doney's? It will not take you five minutes to reach the Via Tornabuoni."
"What should I do when I got there?" asks Byng impatiently. "If I tried to swallow food, it would stick in my throat; no food shall pass my lips till I learn where she is; after that" – breaking out into a noisy laugh – "you may do what you please with me – we will make a night of it with all my heart, we will —
"'Drink, drink,
Till the pale stars blink!'"
Jim looks blankly at him. Is he going mad?
"If you think that you will get me to go back to the hotel to-night, you are very much mistaken," continues Byng recklessly; "no roof less high than this" – jerking back his head, to throw his fevered look up to the cool stars – "shall shelter my head; and besides, where would be the use of going to bed when I should have to be up again so early? I shall be off by one of the morning expresses: until I have learnt – as, of course, I shall do to-night – where she has gone, I cannot tell which; but neither of them starts much later than seven."
For a moment Jim stands dumb with consternation at the announcement of this intention; but, reflecting that it would not be a whit more irrational to attempt to reason with a madman who had reached the padded-room stage of lunacy, than with his present companion, he contents himself with saying:
"And supposing that you do not learn to-night where she has gone?"
"There is no use in supposing anything so impossible!"
But as the hours go by, the possibility becomes a probability, the probability a certainty! Midnight comes, and the closed telegraph-office puts a final extinguisher upon the expectation, which no one but the unhappy lover had ever entertained, that Florence would be enlightened before the dawn of another day as to the place whither her two truants have fled.
Burgoyne has accompanied his friend upon his last importunate visit to the now-going-to-bed and justly-incensed 12 bis. He has been ashamed again to present himself at the so-often-attacked door, so has awaited at the bottom of the stairs, has heard Byng's hoarse query, and the negative – curter and less suave than the last one – that follows it; has heard the door shut again, and the hopeless footsteps that come staggering down to him.
"You will go home now?"
"'Perchance, Iago, I shall ne'er go home!'"
replies Byng; and, though he is compelled to admit that there is no longer any possibility of his to-night obtaining the information for which he so madly hungers, that there can consequently be no question of his setting off by one of the early trains, since he would not know in which direction to go, and might only be fleeing further from her whom he would fain rejoin, yet he still keeps with fevered pertinacity to his project of spending the night à la belle étoile.
Finding it impossible to dissuade him, Jim resigns himself to bearing him company. It is with very little reluctance that he does so. There is no truer truism than that all sorrows, however mountainous, are more easily carried under God's high roof than man's low ones, and he who does not sleep has for compensation that at least he can have no dreadful waking. So the two men wander about all night in the boon southern air, and see —
"The moon exactly round,
And all those stars with which the brows of ample heaven are crown'd;
Orion, all the Pleiades, and those seven Atlas got;
The close-beam'd Hyades, the Bear, surnamed the Chariot,
That turns about heaven's axle-tree, holds ope a constant eye
Upon Orion, and of all the cressets in the sky,
His golden forehead never bows to the Ocean's empery."
There are not many hours of a summer's night during which the stir of life has ceased and has not yet reawaked in an Italian town, the talk and the tread and the mule bells, and the flutes of the voiceful people lasting on till near the small hours, and beginning again ere those hours have had strength to grow big. But yet there is a space of time when Florence lies silent, baring her beauty to the constellations alone; and under this unfamiliar and solemn and lovely aspect the two night-wanderers see her. They see her Campanile
"Commercing with the skies,"
with no distracting human bustle about her feet; they see her Perseus battling beneath her Loggia, and her San Giorgio standing wakeful at his post on Or san Michele. They see her scowling palace rows, her stealing river, and her spanning bridges – palaces out of which no head peeps, a river on which no boat oars, bridges upon which no horse-hoof rings. They have all her churches – Santa Croce, Arnolpho's great "Bride," that new Maria that is now four hundred years old or more, the humbly glorious San Marco – to themselves; all her treasure houses, all her memories, all her flower-embalmed air – for a few hours they possess them all. She is but a little city, this fair Firenze, and in these few hours they traverse her in her length and breadth, rambling aimlessly wherever Byng's feverishly miserable impulses lead them. Burgoyne offers no opposition to any of these, but accompanies his friend silently down slumbrous thoroughfare, or across sleeping Piazza, by Arno side, under colonnade or arch. It is all one to him; nor is he sensible of any fatigue, when at length, at about the hour when Byng had meant to have caught the early morning train, they return to the hotel, and the younger man, happily dead-beat at last, worn out with want of food, tears, and weariness, flings himself down, dressed, upon his bed, and instantly falls into a leaden sleep. Jim feels no desire, nor indeed any power of following his example. He is not easily tired, and his former life of travel and hardship has made him always willing to dispense with the – to him – unnecessary luxury of a bed; and, under ordinary circumstances, a night passed in the open air would have had an effect upon him rather exhilarating than otherwise. He has his bath, dresses, breakfasts, and then jumps into a fiacre, and has himself driven to the Anglo-Américain.
The day is so exactly the counterpart of its predecessor, in its even assured splendour, that Jim has a hazy feeling that they both make only one divided into two parts by the narrow dark blue ribbon of the exquisite brief night. When did yesterday end and to-day begin? As he is borne along, his memory, made more alert by sleeplessness, reproduces – merely, as it seems to him, the better to fill him with pain and remorse – the different states of mind in which he has passed over the often trodden ground. Here, at the street corner, what a nausea had come over him at the thought of the interest he would have to feign in those humdrum details, so dear to Amelia's soul, of their future ménage, with all its candle-end economies and depressing restrictions. Here, in the church shadow, how he had tried to lash himself up into a more probable semblance of pleasure in her expected and dreaded caresses. There seems to be scarcely an inch of the way where he has not had some harsh or weary thought of her; he is thankful when the brief transit, that has appeared to him so long, is over. And yet the change is only from the sharp sting of recollected unkindness to the dull bruising ache of anticipated ill. A garçon is sweeping out the salon, for the hour is not much beyond eight, so Jim goes into the dreary little dining-room, where two places are laid with coffee-cups and rolls. Only two. And, though he knows that nothing short of a miracle could have already restored Amelia so completely as to enable her to come down to breakfast, yet the ocular demonstration of the fact that her place is and will be empty, strikes a chill to his boding heart. He is presently joined by Cecilia, whose carelessly-dressed hair, heavy eyelids, and tired puffy face, sufficiently show that not to her, any more than to himself has night brought
"Sweet child sleep, the filmy-eyed."
"How fresh and cool you are!" she cries, with an almost reproachful intonation. "Do not look at me!" – covering her face with her hot hands – "I am not fit to be seen; but what does that matter? What do I care?" – beginning to cry – "Oh, she is so bad! We have spent such a dreadful night! As I tell you, I am a shocking sick-nurse; I never know what to do; I lose my head completely; and she has been so odd – she has been talking such gibberish!"
"Delirious?"
"Yes, I suppose that is what you would call it. I never saw anybody delirious before, so I do not know. I have seen Sybilla in hysterics, but I never believed that they were real – I always thought that a bucket of water would bring her round."
As a general rule, Jim may be counted upon for cordial co-operation in any hit directed against Sybilla, but now he is too spiritless even to notice it.
"I was so frightened," continues Cecilia; "it is not cheerful being all alone at the dead of night with a person talking such nonsense as she was. Amelia, of all people, to talk nonsense! I could not quite make out what it was about, but it seemed to have more or less reference to you. She was begging you to forgive her for something she had done, as far as I could gather; some treat she had prepared for you, and that you had not liked. Have you the least idea what she could have meant?"
He has every idea; but it would seem profanation to explain that her poor wandering brain is still distressedly labouring with the abortive project she had so happily framed for his enjoyment.
"She is quieter now. Sybilla's maid is with her; Sybilla really has not behaved badly —for her; she let her maid look in several times during the night; but still, for the most part I was alone with her! Oh, I do trust" – shuddering – "that I may never again have to be alone at night with a person who is not right in her head!"
This aspiration on the youngest Miss Wilson's part is, for the present occasion, at least, likely to be gratified; for, by the time that another night settles down on Florence, Amelia's illness has been declared by Dr. Coldstream to have every symptom of developing into the malarious Florentine fever, which not unfrequently lays low the chilled or over-fatigued, or generally imprudent foreign visitor to that little Eden. Amelia has Florentine fever; and the verification of this fact is followed by all the paraphernalia of serious sickness – night and day nurses, disinfectants, physic phials.
The announcement of her being attacked by a definite and recognised disease brings at first a sort of relief to Burgoyne's mind, which, under Cecilia's frightened and frightening word-pictures, had been beset by terrors great in proportion to their vagueness. Now that Amelia is confessedly sick of a fever, there is nothing abnormal in her being "odd," and "stupid," and "wandering," these being only the inevitable stages on a road which will – which must lead to ultimate recovery. His heart is heavy, yet scarcely so heavy as it had been upon his arrival in the morning, when, late in the afternoon – not sooner do the claims upon him of the disorganized and helpless family of his betrothed relax – he returns to the Minerva to look after Byng. Having had every reason to fear that he will not find him at the hotel, but will be obliged again to set off in pursuit of him through the streets and squares so repeatedly traversed last night, he is relieved to learn from the hotel servants that the young man is in his bedroom. He finds him there indeed; no longer stretched in the blessed oblivion of deep sleep upon his bed, but sitting on a hard chair by the open window, his arms resting upon the back, and his face crushed down upon them. By no slightest movement does he show consciousness of his friend's entrance.
"I am afraid I have been a long time away," says the latter kindly.
"Have you?" answers Byng, his voice coming muffled through lips still buried in his own coat-sleeve. "I do not know; I have done with time!"
"I do not know how you have managed that," rejoins Jim, still indulgently, though a shade dryly. "Have you been here all day?"
"I do not know where I have been. Yes," – lifting his head – "I do; I have been to the Piazza d'Azeglio."
"Well?"
"They know where she is. They were packing her things; through the door I saw them tying the label on the box; if I had tried I could have read the address on the label, but I did not. She had forbidden them to give it to me; in her telegram she had forbidden them to give it to anyone."
CHAPTER XXIX
Jim refrains from saying how likely this culmination of his friend's woes has appeared to him, since it would have been the height of the illogical for the Le Marchants to have put themselves to extreme inconvenience in order to escape from a person to whom they immediately afterwards gave the power of following them. He refrains from saying it, because he knows of how very little consoling power the "told you so" philosophy is possessed.
"And what will you do now?"
"Do! What is there to do? What does a man do when he is shot through the heart?"
"I believe that in point of fact he jumps his own height in the air. I know that a buffalo does," replies Burgoyne with a matter-of-fact dryness, which proceeds less from want of sympathy, than from an honest belief that it is the best and kindest method of dealing with Byng's heroics.
"Shot through the heart!" murmurs the latter, repeating his own phrase as if he found a dismal pleasure in it. "I had always been told that it was a painless death; I now know to the contrary."
"Shall you stay here? There is no longer any use in your staying here."
"There is no longer any use in my doing anything, or leaving anything undone.
"'There's nothing in this world can make me joy;
Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.'"
So saying, he replaces his head upon his arms, and his arms upon the chair-rail, with the air of one who, upon mature consideration, has decided to maintain that attitude for the remainder of his life.
A week has passed; a week upon which Burgoyne looks back as upon a blur of wretchedness, with distinct points of pain sticking up here and there out of it. It is a blur; for it is a time-space, without the usual limitations and divisions of time; a week not cut up into orderly lengths of day and night, but in which each has puzzlingly run into and overlapped each. There have been nights when he has not been in bed at all, and there have been days when he has slept heavily at unaccustomed hours. He has not dined at any particular time; he has shared forlorn breakfast, dotted about the morning as the less or more anxiety about Amelia dictated, with the Wilsons. He has drunk more tea than he ever did in his life before, and the result of this whole condition of things is, that he cannot for the life of him tell whether the day of the week is Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday, and that he has lost all sense of proportion. He has not the least idea whether the dreadful moments when he stood on the landing outside Amelia's door, and heard her heartrendingly beg him not to go away from her for quite so long, to be a little gladder to see her when he came back; or again affectingly assure him that she can do quite well, be quite cheerful without him – whether, I say, those dreadful moments were really only moments, or stretched into hours.
Besides the agony of remorse that the impotent listening to those pathetic prayers and unselfish assurances causes him, he suffers too from another agony of shame, that the father and sister, standing like himself with ears stretched at that shut door, should be let into the long secret of his cruelty and coldness, that secret which for eight years she has so gallantly been hiding. It is an inexpressible relief to him that at least the old man's thickened hearing admits but very imperfectly his daughter's rapid utterances.
"Poor soul! I cannot quite make out what it is all about," he says, with his hand to his ear; "but I catch your name over and over again, Jim; I suppose it is all about you."
Cecilia, however, naturally hears as well as he himself does, and apparently pitying the drawn misery of his face, whispers to him comfortingly —
"You must not mind, you know it is all nonsense. She talks very differently when she is well."
The Wilson family have never hitherto shown any very marked affection for Burgoyne, but now it seems as if they could hardly bear him out of their sight. They cling to him, not because he is he– Jim makes himself no illusion on that head – but because they have got into such a habit of leaning, that it is no longer possible to them to stand upright. He had never realized till now how helpless they are. He had known that Amelia was the pivot upon which the whole family turned; but he had not brought home to himself how utterly the machine fell to pieces when that pivot was withdrawn.
In the course of the past week each member of the family has confided to him separately how far more she or he misses Amelia, than can be possible to either of the others. Upon this head Sybilla's lamentations are the loudest and most frequent. She had at first refused to admit that there was anything at all the matter with her sister, but has now fallen into the no less trying opposite extreme of refusing to allow that there is any possibility of her recovery, talking of her as if she were almost beyond the reach of human aid. Sybilla's grief for her sister is perfectly genuine; none the less so that it is complicated by irritation at her own deposition from her post of first invalid, at having been compelled to confess the existence in the bosom of her own family of a traitor, with an indisputably higher temperature and more wavering pulse than she.
"It is ridiculous to suppose that a person in such rude health as Cecilia can miss her as I do," she says querulously; "I was always her first object, she always knew by instinct when I was more suffering than usual; who cares now" – breaking into a deluge of self-compassionating tears – "whether I am suffering or not?"
Then, when next he happens to be alone with Cecilia, it is her turn to assert a superiority of woe; a superiority claimed with still more emphasis the next half hour by the father. With a patience which would have surprised those persons who had seen him only in his former relations with the family of his betrothed he tries to soothe the sorrow of each – even that of Sybilla – in turn; but to his own heart he says that not one of their griefs is worthy to be weighed in the balance with his. In the case of none of theirs is the woof crossed by the hideous warp of self-reproach that is woven inextricably into his. They have worked her to death, they have torn her to pieces by their conflicting claims; their love has been exacting, selfish, inconsiderate; but at least it has been love; they have prized her at almost her full worth while they had her. For him it has been reserved as for the base Indian, to
"Throw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe."
In the intervals – neither long nor many – between his ministrations at the Anglo-Américain, Burgoyne hurries back to the Minerva to see that Byng has not blown his brains out. In the present state of mind of that young gentleman this catastrophe does not appear to be among the least likely ones. He has refused to leave Florence, always answering the suggestion with the same question, "Where else should I go?" and if pressed, adding invariably in the same words as those employed by him on the first day of his loss, when his friend had urged the advisability of his removing his countenance from the beaded stool – "Where shall I find such recent and authentic traces of her as here?"
He passes his time either on the Lung' Arno, staring at the water, or stretched face downwards upon his bed. He walks about the town most of the night, and Jim suspects him of beginning to take chloral. Occasionally he rouses up into a quick and almost passionate sympathy with his friend's trouble, asking for nothing better than to be sent on any errand, however trivial, or however tiresome, in Amelia's behalf. But no sooner have the immediate effects of the appeal to his kind-heartedness died away, than he sinks back into his lethargy, and Jim is at once too much occupied and too miserable to use any very strenuous endeavours to shake him out of it. But yet the consciousness of the tacit engagement, under which he lies to the young man's mother, to look after him, coupled with the absolute impossibility, under his present circumstances, of fulfilling that engagement, and his uneasiness as to what new form the insanity of Byng's grief may take on, from day to day, add very perceptibly to the weight of his own already sufficiently ponderous burden.
It is the ninth day since Amelia fell sick, that ninth day which, in maladies such as hers, is, or is at least reckoned to be, the crisis and turning-point of the disease. Jim has been up all night, and has just rushed back to the Minerva, for the double purpose of taking a bath, and of casting an uneasy eye upon his charge. He finds the latter not in his room, but leaning over the little spiky balcony, out of his window, hanging over it so far, and so absorbedly, that he does not hear his friend's approach, and starts violently when Jim lays a hand on his shoulder.
"What are you looking at?"
"I; oh – nothing particular! What should I be looking at? What is there to look to? I was only – only – wondering as a mere matter of curiosity, how many feet it is from here to the pavement? Sixteen? eighteen? twenty?"
Jim's only answer is to look at him sadly and sternly; then he says coldly:
"I do not recommend it; it would be a clumsy way of doing it."
"What matter how clumsy the way, so that one attains the end?" asks Byng extravagantly, throwing off even the thin pretence he had at first assumed; "who cares how bad the road is so that it leads him to the goal?
"'Oh, amiable lovely death!
Thou odoriferous stench, sound rottenness!'"
Jim shudders. Death has been so near to him for the last nine days, that the terrific realism of Constance's apostrophe seems to be almost more than he can bear.
"It is silliness to live when to live is a torment, and then, have we a prescription to die, when death is our physician?" continues Byng loudly and wildly, clasping his hands above his head, and apparently perfectly indifferent as to whether the other inmates of the hotel, or passers-by on the piazza, overhear him.
"If you stay here much longer you will spare yourself the trouble of putting an end to your existence," replies Jim, glancing at the other's head, exposed hatless to the scorch of the Tuscan sun, "for you will certainly get a sunstroke."
So saying, he takes him quietly, yet decidedly, by the arm, and leads him within the room. Either his matter-of-fact manner, or the sight of his face, upon which, well-seasoned as it is, vigil and sorrow have begun to write their unavoidable marks, brings the young madman back to some measure of sense and self-control.
"I had no fixed intention," he says apologetically, still looking white and wild; "you must not think I meant anything; but, even if I had – do you know – have you ever happened to read anything about the statistics of suicide? Do you know what an increasing number of people every year find life intolerable?"
"I know that you are fast making my life intolerable," answers Jim, fixing his tired, sleepless eyes with melancholy severity upon his companion. "Amelia is – you are as well aware of it as I am – probably dying, and yet even now, thanks to you, into my thoughts of her is continually pushing the fear that I may have to tell your mother that you have had the colossal selfishness to rush out of the world, because, for the first time in your pampered life, the toy you cried for has not been put into your hand."