Burgoyne's hopes have not been high, as to any salutary result of his own philippic while uttering it. But our words, sometimes, to our surprise, turn from wooden swords to steel daggers in our hands. For a moment Byng stands as if stunned; then he breaks into a tornado of sobs and tears, such tears as have often before angered his friend, but which now he welcomes the sight of, as perhaps precursors of a saner mood.
"Oh, my dear old chap!" he cries, catching at Jim's unresponsive hand, and wringing it hard, "she is not dying really? You do not mean it? You are only saying it to frighten me? Oh! dear, kind Amelia. Not dying! not dying?"
"I do not know: to-day is the turning-point, they say; even now it may have come."
"And why are not you with her? Why do not you go back to her?" cries Byng, in a broken voice of passionate excitement, the tears still racing down his face.
"And leave you to go tomfooling out there again?" asks Jim, with a nod of his head towards the balcony, seen from where they stand, grilling in the midday blaze.
The verb employed, if closely looked into, bears a ludicrous disproportion to the intended action indicated, but neither of the men sees anything ridiculous in it.
"I will not!" cries Byng, in eager asseveration; "I give you my word of honour I will not; if you do not believe me, take me with you! Keep me with you all day! Do you think that I, too, do not want to know how Amelia is? Do you think that I am indifferent as to whether she lives or dies? Poor, good Amelia! When I think of that drive to Vallombrosa, only ten days ago! They two sitting side by side, so happy, laughing and making friends with each other!"
He covers his face with his hands, and through them the scalding drops trickle; but only for a moment. In the next, he has dashed them away, and is moving restlessly about the room, looking for his hat.
"Let us go this instant," he says urgently; "my poor old man, do you think I would willingly add a feather weight to your burden? I should never forgive myself if I kept you a second longer from her at such a time; let us go at once."
Burgoyne complies; but under pretext of making some change in his dress, escapes from his friend, for just the few minutes necessary to write and despatch a telegram to the young man's mother. It runs thus:
"No cause for alarm, but come at once. He is perfectly well, but needs you."
If, as is to be hoped, Mrs. Byng is still in London, reaping the succession of the old relative whose death-bed she had quitted Florence to attend, his message will bring her hither within forty-eight hours, and the burden of responsibility, now grown so insupportable, will be shifted from his shoulders. Until those forty-eight hours have elapsed, he must not again let Byng out of his sight.
The day rolls by, the critical ninth day rolls by on its torrid wheels to eventide, and when that eventide comes, it finds Cecilia Wilson running down from Amelia's room, to give the last news of her to the three men and one woman waiting below.
"I think he seems quite satisfied," she says, in answer to the silent hungry looks of question addressed to her, and alluding to the doctor, who is still with the patient; "the strength is maintained; the temperature lower." What a dreadful parrot-sound the two phrases, so familiar to us all in the newspaper bulletins of distinguished men on their death-beds, have during the last week assumed in Burgoyne's ears; "you can speak to him yourself when he comes down, of course, Jim; but I am sure he is satisfied."
"She is better! – she is saved!" cries Byng, rushing forward and snatching both Cecilia's hands – "do you say that she is really saved?"
"Oh, are you here still, Mr. Byng? how very kind of you!" replies Cecilia, a tinge of colour rushing over her mealy face – that face, ten days ago, clothed in so many roses – "well, I am afraid he does not go quite so far as that, but he says it is as much as we can expect, and even I can see that she is not nearly so restless."
"Thank God! – thank God!"
In the ardour of his thanksgiving he presses her hands closer, instead of dropping them, a fact of which he is entirely unaware, but so is not she; and who knows, even at that serious moment, what tiny genial hope may slide into her plump heart!
Again this night Burgoyne does not go to bed, from a superstitious fear that if he does, if he seems to take for granted an improvement, that very taking for granted may annul it – may bring on a relapse. But when the next morning finds no such backsliding to have taken place, when each hour through the cheerfully broadening day brings falling fever and steadying pulse, then indeed he cautiously opens the door of his heart to let a tiny rose-pinioned hope creep in – then at last, on the third night, he stretches his tired limbs in deep slumber upon his bed.
He has received a brief telegram from Mrs. Byng to announce her arrival as fast as boat and train can bring her; and seven o'clock on Saturday morning – he having sent his despatch to her on the previous Wednesday – finds him pacing the platform of the railway-station, awaiting the incoming of the morning express from Turin. He is pacing it alone, for he has thought it best not to reveal to her son the fact of her expected return, not being at all sure in what spirit he will receive it, nor whether indeed the news of it might not even drive him, in his present unsound state of mind, to fly from the place at her approach.
The morning air, in its early clear coolness, blows sweet here, under the station-roof, unconquered even by engine smoke, and on Jim's face as he walks up and down – careworn as it still is – there comes, now and again, a half-born smile. He is never one to hope very easily, but surely now – now that yet another night has been prosperously tided over, there can, even to him, seem no reasonable ground for doubt that Amelia has turned the corner. Amelia, with the corner turned – Byng, in five minutes wholly off his hands! The only wonder is, that the small smile never comes quite to the birth.
The train is punctual, and almost at its due moment draws up in dusty length at the platform. Its passengers are comparatively few; for at this latening season most of the English are winging home to their rooky woods; and he has no difficulty in at once discovering among them the tall smart figure – smart even after forty-eight hours of the unluxurious luxury of a wagon-lit– of the lady he is awaiting. As he gives her his hand to help her down the high step, the admiring thought crosses his mind of what a large quantity of fatigue, dust, and uneasiness of mind a radically good-looking Englishwoman, in radically good clothes, can undergo without seeming much the worse for them. Before her neat narrow foot has touched the pavement, a brace of eager questions shoots out of her mouth.
"Am I in time? Am I too late?"
"In time for what? Too late for what?"
"Has he – has he done anything – anything irrevocable? Is he – is he? I suppose that horrid woman has got hold of him? I suppose that is why you sent for me!"
By this time she is safely landed at his side, which is possibly the reason why he at once lets fall her hand.
"I am not aware that there is any 'horrid woman' in the case."
"Oh, what does it matter what I call her?" cries the mother, fast becoming frantic at the delay in answering her passionate questions. "I will call her what you please; you know perfectly whom I mean; she has got hold of him, I suppose. I always knew she would! Did not I tell you so? but is it too late? is there no way of getting him off?"
Now that Burgoyne has a nearer view of Mrs. Byng, he sees that she has a more fagged and travel-worn air than he had at first supposed, and her dusty eyes are fastened upon him with such a hunger of interrogation, that, angered and jarred as he is by her tone, he has not the heart any longer to keep her in suspense.
"If you are alluding to Miss Le Marchant, I may as well tell you at once that she has left Florence."
"Left Florence! Do you mean to say that she has run away with someone else?"
She puts the question in all good faith, her lively imagination having easily made the not very wide jump from the fact already established in her own mind of Elizabeth being an adventuress, to the not much more difficult one to swallow, of her having devoured another fils de famille, as well as Mrs. Byng's own.
For a moment, Burgoyne turns away, voice and countenance alike beyond his control. He has by no means perfectly recovered either, when he answers —
"Yes, with someone else – she has reached the pitch of turpitude of leaving Florence with her mother."
"She is gone?" cries Mrs. Byng, with an accent of the highest relief and joy; "gone away altogether, do you mean? – oh, thank God!" – then, with a sudden lapse into affright, she adds rapidly – "and he is gone after her? – he is not here?"
"No, he is here."
"Then why has not he come to meet me?" – suspiciously.
"He did not know you were expected."
"You did not tell him?"
"No."
"Why did not you tell him?"
"I did not know how he would take it."
"Do you mean to say" – falling from her former rapidity of utterance to a dismayed incredulous slowness – "that he will not be glad to see me? – that Willy will not be glad to see me?"
"I mean to say that I am afraid you will not find him very much in sympathy with you; I do not think he will find it easy to hear you speak of Miss Le Marchant in the terms, and make the implication about her that you did just now," replies Jim, avenging by this sentence the wrongs done to Elizabeth, and doing it so well, that a moment later a feeling of compunction comes over him at the success of his own attempt at retributive justice.
Mrs. Byng turns pale.
"Then she has got hold of him?" she says under her breath.
"Got hold of him?" repeats Jim, his ire aroused again, no sooner than allayed, by this mode of expression; "you certainly have the most extraordinary way of misconceiving the situation! Got hold of him? when she had to leave Florence at a moment's notice to escape his importunities!"
But at this, Mr. Burgoyne's auditor looks so hopelessly bewildered that he thinks it the simplest plan at once, in the fewest possible words, to put her in possession of the tale of her son's achievements and disasters. He does this, partly to stem the torrent of her questions, the form that they have hitherto taken producing in him a feeling of frenzied indignation, which he doubts his own power much longer to conceal – partly in order to set Elizabeth's conduct with the least possible delay in its true light before her. Surely, when she has been told of her magnanimous renunciation, she will do her justice, will cease to load her with those hard names and insulting assertions that have made him grind his own teeth to listen to. But in this expectation he soon finds that he is mistaken. The wrath of Mrs. Byng against Elizabeth for having "drawn in" her son, as she persists in stating the case, is surpassed only by indignation at her insolence in having "thrown him over." As to the genuineness of this last action she expresses, it is true, the most complete incredulity.
"It was only to enhance her own value. Do you suppose that she expected him to take her at her word? She thought, of course, that he would follow her – that he would employ detectives – it is a proof" – with an angry laugh – "that he cannot be quite so bad as you make him out, that he has not done so."
"I would not put it into his head, if I were you," replies Jim, with an anger no less real, and a merriment no less spurious than her own.
By this time they have reached the hotel; and Jim, having helped his companion out of the fiacre, shows symptoms of leaving her.
"Will not you stay to breakfast with me?" she asks, a little aghast at this unexpected manœuvre; "I cannot make my toilette till the luggage arrives: and I suppose that he" – her eyes wandering wistfully over the hotel front till they rest on her son's closed persiennes – "that he is not up yet; it would be a sin to wake him; do stay with me."
"I am afraid I cannot."
"Why cannot you?" – with an impatient but friendly little mocking imitation of his tone. "You are not" – with a conciliatory smile – "angry with an old hen for standing up for her own chick?"
Jim smiles too.
"I do not think that the old hen need have clucked quite so loudly; but that is not why I am leaving her; I must go."
"Where must you go?"
"To the Anglo-Américain."
She lifts her eyebrows.
"At this hour – you forget how early it is. Well, Amelia has got you into good training; but I can assure you that you will still find her in bed."
He sighs.
"I am afraid that there is not much doubt of that."
"What do you mean? – she is not ill, surely?" – in a tone of lively surprise – "Amelia ill? – impossible!"
He looks at her with an irrational stupefaction. It appears to him now, in the distortion of all objects that the last fortnight has brought, as if Amelia's illness had spread over the whole of his life, as if there had never been a time when she had not been ill, and yet of this event, immense as it seems to him in its duration, the woman before him obviously has never heard. When he comes to think of it, how should she? In point of fact it is not a fortnight since Miss Wilson fell sick, and during that fortnight he himself has not written her a line; neither, he is equally sure, has her son.
"I am evidently very much behind the time," she says, noting the, to her, unintelligible astonishment in his face; "but you must remember that I have been kept completely in the dark – has she been ill?"
In answer he tells her, with as much brevity and compression as he had employed in the tale of Elizabeth's disappearance, that of Amelia's illness, often interrupted by her expressions of sympathy. At the end she says:
"I am so thankful I did not hear till she was getting better! It would have made me so wretched to be such a long way off!"
Her adoption of his trouble as her own, an adoption whose sincerity is confirmed by her impulsive seizure of his hand, and the feeling look in her handsome eyes make him forgive the exaggeration of her statement, and go some way towards replacing her in that position in his esteem which her diatribes against Elizabeth had gone near to making her forfeit.
"But it will be all right now," continues she sanguinely; "there will be nothing to do but to build up her strength again, and she is young – at least" – as the reminiscence of Amelia's unyouthful appearance evidently flashes across her mind, of that prematurely middle-aged look which an unequal fortune gives to some plain women – "at least, young enough for all practical purposes."
Whether it be due to the possession of this modified form of juvenility, to an excellent constitution, or to what other reason, certain it is that the next two days go by without any diminution, rather with a sensible and steady increase, in Miss Wilson's favourable symptoms, and, on the afternoon of the latter of these days, Cecilia, in rather impatient answer to Jim's long daily string of questions about her, says:
"You could judge much better if you saw her yourself. I do not see why you should not see her to-morrow for a minute, that is to say, if you would promise not to talk or ask her any questions."
"But would it be safe?" inquires he, with a tremble in his voice. He desires passionately to see her; until he does he will never believe that she is really going to live; he has a hunger to assure himself that no terrible metamorphosis has passed over her in these nightmare days; and yet, coupled with that hunger, is a deep dread, which translates itself into his next halting words.
"Shall I be – shall I be very much shocked? is she – is she very much changed?"
"She does look pretty bad," replies Cecilia half sadly, yet with the sub-lying cheerfulness of assured hope; "for one thing she is so wasted. I suppose that that is what makes her look so much older; but then you know Amelia never did look young."
It is the second time within two days that the fact of his betrothed's maturity has been impressed upon him, and formerly it would have caused him a pang; but now, of what moment is it to him that she looks a hundred, if only she is living, and going to live?
"Has she – has she asked after me?"
"We do not allow her to speak, but if anyone mentions your name there comes a sort of smile over her face; such a ridiculous-sized face as it is now!"
The tears have come into Cecilia's large stupid eyes, and Jim himself is, with regard to her, in the position of the great Plantagenet, when he heard the lovely tale of York and Suffolk's high death.
"I blame you not
For hearing this; I must perforce compound
With mistful eyes; or they will issue too!"
As he walks away he is filled with a solemn joy, one of those deep serious gladnesses with which not the stranger, no, nor even the close friend or loving kinsman intermeddleth. He is under an engagement to meet Mrs. Byng at a certain hour, but although that hour has already come and passed, he feels that he cannot face all her sincere congratulations without some preparatory toning down of his mood.
The streets, with their gay va-et-vient, their cracking whips and shouting drivers, seem all too secular and every-day to match the profundity of his reverent thankfulness. He takes it with him into the great cool church that stands so nigh at hand to his hotel, Santa Maria Novella. The doors fall behind him noiselessly as he enters, shutting out the fiery hot piazza, and the garish noises of the world. In the great dim interior, cold and tranquil, there is the usual sprinkling of tourists peering up at its soaring columns, trying to read themselves, out of their guide-books, into a proper admiration for Cimabue's large-faced Virgin and ugly Bambino, folded, with all its gold and sombre colours, in the dignity of its twice two centuries of gloom. There are the usual three or four blue-trousered soldiers strolling leisurely about, there is a curly-tailed little dog trotting hither and thither unforbidden, ringing his bell, and there are the invariable tanned peasant-women kneeling at the side-altars. He does not belong to the ancient Church, but to-day he kneels beside them, and the tears he had hastened away to hide from Cecilia come back to make yet dimmer to his view the details of the dim altar-pieces behind the tall candles. His eye, as he rises to his feet again, falls on the contadina nearest him. What is she praying for? In the expansion of his own deep joy he longs to tell her how much he hopes that, whatever it is, she will obtain it. It is not the contadina who, standing a little behind, joins him as he turns away from the altar.
"I saw you go into the church," says Mrs. Byng, her smile growing somewhat diffident as she sees the solemnity of his face, "so I thought I would follow you; do you mind? shall I go away?"
He would, of the two, have preferred that she had not followed him, that he had been given five more minutes to himself; but he naturally does not say so.
"Since we are here, shall we go into the cloisters?" and he assents.
A small Dominican monk, with a smile and a bunch of keys, is opening a door to some strangers, prowling like our friends about the church. The latter follow, the little monk enveloping them too in his civil smile. Down some steps into the great cloister, under whose arches pale frescoes cover the ancient walls – where in Florence are there not frescoes? – and the hands that painted them seem all to have wielded their brushes in that astounding fifteenth century, which was to Florence's life what May is to Italy's year. For some moments they stand silent, side by side, perhaps picking out familiar scenes from among the sweet faded groups – a slim Rebecca listening to Eliezar's tale, and looking maiden pleasure at his gifts; a shivering Adam and Eve chased out of Paradise; an Adam and Eve dismally digging and stitching respectively; Old Testament stories that time has blurred, that weather – even in this dry air – has rubbed out and bedimmed, and that yet, in many cases, still tell their curious faint tale decipherably.
"Good news this evening, I hope?" says Mrs. Byng presently, growing a little tired of her companion's taciturnity, being indeed always one of those persons who are of opinion that the gold of which silence is said to be made has a good deal of alloy in it.
"I am to see her to-morrow."
He speaks almost under his breath, either because he has no great confidence in his voice, if he employ a higher key, or because there seems to him a certain sanctity in this promised meeting on the kindly hither side of the grave which has so lately yawned.
Mrs. Byng is much too old and intimate a friend of Jim's not to have been pretty well aware of the state of his feelings during the past eight years, though certainly not through any communication from him. So it is, perhaps, scarcely to be wondered at that she presently says, in a tone tinged with admiring surprise:
"How fond you are of her!"
He receives the remark in a jarred silence, his eye resting on the square of neglected graves in the middle of the cloister, how unlike our turfy quads and lawns. A commonplace nineteenth century photographer, with his vulgar camera planted on the time-worn stones, is evidently trying to persuade the little monk to pose for his picture. The gentle-looking Fra laughs, and draws up his cowl, then lowers it again, folding his arms, and trying various postures.
"You are so much fonder of her than you were!"
This speech – though such is certainly far from the good-natured speaker's intention – stings Burgoyne like a whip-lash.
"I was always fond of her – I always thought her the very best woman in the world; you know!" – with an accent of almost anguished appeal – "that I always thought her the very best woman in the world."
"Oh, yes; of course, I know you did," replies she, astonished and concerned at the evident and extreme distress of his tone. "That is not quite the same thing as being fond of her, is it? But" – with a laugh that is at once uneasy and reassuring – "what does that matter now? Now your fondness for her is as indisputable as Tilburina's madness; and, for my part, I always think people get on quite as well, if not better, afterwards, if they do not begin quite so volcanically."
But her light and well-meant words fail to remove the painful impression from her hearer's mind. Has she, during all these years, been crediting him with a wish for Amelia's death, that she should be so much astonished at his thankfulness for her being given back to him?
"I believe that this illness is the best thing that could have happened to you both," continues Mrs. Byng, feeling uncomfortably that she has not been happy in her choice of a topic, and yet unable to leave it alone. "It will have drawn you so much together: in fact" – again laughing nervously – "I think we are all looking up. As I told you, after the first shock, Willy really was rather glad to see me; and you would not believe how discreetly I handle the burning subject – yes, everything is on the mend, and we are all going to have a lovely time, as the Yankees say!"