Alas! A Novel. Broughton Rhoda
head is averted; but on her mother's features he sees, or fancies he sees, slight evidences of a feeling not unlike relief.
"It is not of the least consequence," she says cheerfully; "we can go any other day just as well."
Burgoyne's heart sinks. In these last sentences he too surely traces signs of the evasive and would-be-retrograde nature which has all along characterized Mrs. Le Marchant's relations with him. It has seemed to him that he has been looking forward to the expedition with sensations of almost unmixed dread, and yet, now that he seems to be going to be delivered from it, what he experiences certainly does not come under the head of elation.
"You wish to give up the excursion?" he asks, in a tone which he honestly tries to make as neutral and colourless as he can.
"Well, I thought so – we thought so, did not we, Elizabeth?"
The person thus addressed lifts her head, and all over her features he, eagerly scanning them, sees written a warm acquiescence in her motherly decision, an acquiescence which, as her eyes meet his – his, in which his disappointment is written a good deal more plainly than he is aware – changes slowly and sweetly into indecision.
"I do not know," she answers, her gentle look clouded a little, and yet kindly interrogating his; "if Mr. Burgoyne is willing to burden himself with us; and Bertie must play at being a grown-up gentleman, and help to take care of us! Bertie, will you play at being a grown-up gentleman?"
To this proposition Bertie assents warmly, and begins thrasonically to recount to inattentive ears the high and singular deeds with which he will celebrate his arrival at maturity. But, as Mrs. Le Marchant puts a strenuous veto upon his adoption as escort, and as his nurse appears at the same juncture to fetch him, he and his dog are presently removed; and the other three set off without him.
Burgoyne has chartered a fiacre, with a horse as little lame as is ever to be found in Florence, and in this vehicle they are presently rolling along. None of them are in very exuberant spirits. Burgoyne is as well aware as if her sensitive lips had put the fact into words, that for Elizabeth the pleasure of the outing has evaporated with the absence of Byng, and that it is only the soft-hearted shrinking of a sweet nature from inflicting mortification on a fellow-creature that has set her opposite to him in her white gown. He has never seen her dressed in white before, and says to himself that it was for Byng's sake that she has made herself so summer-fine. But even if it be so, it is not Byng who is profiting by it. It is for him, not Byng, that the large Italian light is glorifying its thin fabric. Lily-pure, snow-clean she looks, sitting under her sunshade; and he sits over against her in a stupid silence. It seems to him as if his only safety were in silence, as if, did he speak at all, he must put into brutal words the brutal questions that are dinging in his head, that seem knocking for utterance against the gate of his set teeth.
"What is the 'screw loose'? How is she an 'unfortunate girl'? Why have they 'never held up their heads since'? Since what?" He looks, in a fierce perplexity, from one to the other of those delicately poised heads, held aloft with such modest dignity. Surely it is beyond the bounds of possibility that any heavily hideous shame or leaden disgrace can ever have weighed upon them! Probably the intensity of his thought has given an intensity to his look, of which he is unaware; for he presently finds the soft veiled voice of Elizabeth – Elizabeth who has hitherto been as mute as himself – addressing him:
"How very grave you look! I wonder what you are thinking of?"
The question, striking in so strangely pat, brings him back with a start. For a second an almost overpowering temptation assails him to tell her what is the object of his thought, to answer her with that whole and naked truth which we can so seldom employ in our intercourse with our fellow-men. But one glance at her innocent face, which has a vague trouble in it, chases the lunatic impulse, though he dallies with the temptation to the extent of saying:
"Would you really like to know? Do you really wish me to tell you?"
He looks at her penetratingly as he puts the question. Before either his eyes or his manner she shrinks.
"Oh, no – no!" she cries with tremulous haste, "of course not! I was only joking. What business have I with your thoughts? I never wish to know people's thoughts; if their looks and words are kind, that is all that concerns me!"
He relapses into silence; but her words, and still more the agitated manner in which they are pronounced, make a vague yet definite addition to the disquiet of his soul.
By setting off at so judiciously late an hour as five o'clock, they have avoided the greater part of the flood of tourists which daily sets towards Certosa, and which they meet, tightly packed in crowded vehicles, sweeping Florence-wards in a choking cloud of white dust; so that on reaching the Certosa Monastery, sitting so grandly on its hilltop, they have the satisfaction of finding that it is temporarily all their own – all their own but for the few white-frocked figures and tonsured heads which an economico-democratic Government has left to hint what in its palmy days was the state of that which is now only a Government museum.
A burly monk receives them. He does not look at all a prey to the pensive sorrow one would expect at the desecration of his holy things and the dispersion of his fraternity. Probably, in his slow peasant mind there is room for nothing but self-congratulation at his being one of the few – only fifteen in all – left to end their days in the old home. He leads them stolidly through chapels and refectory – the now too roomy refectory, where the poor remnant of Carthusians dine together only on Sundays – through meagrely furnished cells, in one of which he matter-of-factly lets down the front flap of a cupboard to show what forms his daily dining-table except on the happy Sunday, to which he must look forward so warmly.
"Must not he love Sunday!" cries Elizabeth, with sparkling eyes. "Do not you long to know what they have for dinner on Sundays? Do you think he would mind telling us?"
Elizabeth's spirits are going up like quicksilver. It is evident, despite the delicate melancholy of her face, that she is naturally of an extremely joyous and enjoying nature, and gifted with a freshness of sensation which belongs ordinarily rather to the green age at which Jim first remembers her, than to the mature one which he knows for a certainty that she has now reached. She is filled with such a lively and surprised delight at all the little details of arrangement of the monastic life that he is at last impelled to say to her, something wonderingly:
"But you must have seen hundreds of monasteries before?"
"Not one."
"But there are, or were, such swarms of them all over Italy."
"I dare say. I was never in Italy before."
"Not really?"
She lifts up her hand, and waves it at him with an air of hasty deprecation of further question, growing suddenly grave.
"Don't ask me whether I have been here or there, or whether I have done this or that. I have never been anywhere or done anything."
Her desire for a cessation of all inquiries as to her doings is obviously so earnest that Jim of course complies with it. Once or twice before he has been struck by her strange want of acquaintance with facts and phenomena, which would have come as a matter of course within the range of observation of every woman of her age and station. Against his will, a horrid recollection flashes upon him of a novel he had once read, in which the hero exhibits a singular ignorance of any events or incidents that had occurred within the ten years preceding the opening of the story – an ignorance which towards the end of the third volume was accounted for by its transpiring that he has spent the intervening period in a convict prison! He drives the grotesque and monstrous idea with scourges out of his mind; but it recurs, and recurs to be displaced by another hardly less painful, if in some degree more probable. Can it be possible that the crushing blow which has fallen upon the Le Marchant family, and upon Elizabeth in particular, whitening the mother's hair, and giving that tear-washed look to the daughter's sweet eyes – can it be possible that that heavy stroke was insanity? Can Elizabeth have been out of her mind? Can she have spent in confinement any of that past, from all allusion to which she shies away with a sensitiveness more shrinking than that of
"The tender horns of cockled snails"?
He