Alas! A Novel. Broughton Rhoda
in the Moat garden, with which they used to vie in bloomy vividness. But even yet he does not treat her quite as if she were really and veritably living; he has not yet got back his conventional manners.
"I thought you were dead," he says, his voice not even yet raised to its ordinary key, some vague awe still subduing it.
It must be a trick of his excited imagination that makes it seem to him as if she said under her breath, "So I am!"
But before he has had time to do more than distrust the testimony of his ears, Mrs. Le Marchant strikes in quickly —
"We cannot help what Mr. Burgoyne thinks," says she, with a constrained laugh; "but you are not dead, are you, Elizabeth? We are neither of us dead; on the contrary, we are very much alive. Who can help being alive in this heavenly place? And you? When did you come? What hotel are you at? Have you been here long? Do you make a long stay?"
She pours out her questions with such torrent-force and rapidity, as gives to her auditor the conviction that it is her aim to have a monopoly of them.
After one look of unbounded astonishment at his companion's onslaught, Byng has withdrawn to a discreet distance.
"You never mentioned her when I met you in Oxford," says Burgoyne, disregarding her trivial and conventional questions, and turning his eyes away with difficulty from his old playfellow.
Mrs. Le Marchant laughs again, still constrainedly.
"Probably you never asked after her."
"I was afraid," he says solemnly; "after ten years one is afraid; and as you did not mention her – you know you mentioned all the others – I thought you had lost her!"
A sort of slight shiver passes over the woman's frame.
"No, thank God! No!"
During the foregoing little dialogue about herself, Elizabeth has stood with her eyes on the ground; but at the end of it she lifts them to smile lovingly at her mother. They are very pretty eyes still, but surely they seem to have cried a good deal; and now that the hurrying blood has left her cheek again, Burgoyne sees that she looks more nearly her age than he had imagined at the first glance. He has not heard her voice yet; she has not spoken, unless that first shaken whisper – so much more likely to be the freak of his own heated fancy – could count for speech. He must hear her tones. Do they keep an echo of the other world, as he still imagines that he sees a shade from it lying lingeringly across her face?
"Do you ever climb apple-trees now?" he asks abruptly. She starts slightly, and again, though with a weaker red wave, her rather thin cheeks grow tinged.
"Did I ever climb them?" she says, with a bewildered look, and speaking in a somewhat tremulous voice. "Yes" – slowly, as if with an effort of memory – "I believe I did."
"You have forgotten all about it?" cries Jim, in an accent of absurdly disproportioned disappointment. "Have you forgotten the kangaroo too? have you forgotten everything?"
Perhaps she is putting her memory to the same strain as he had done his in the case of her mother's name on the occasion of their Oxford meeting. At all events, she leaves the question unanswered, and the elder woman again hurries to her help against this persistent claimant of reminiscences.
"You must not expect us all to have such memories as you have," she says with a touch of friendliness in her look.
"I must own that I too had quite forgotten the kangaroo; and so I fear had Robert, until you reminded us of it in Mesopotamia."
"How is Mr. Le Marchant?" inquires Jim, thus reminded to put his tardy query – "is he with you?"
"No, he is not very fond of being abroad; it is not" – smiling – "'dear abroad' to him, but I think that he will very likely come out to Florence to fetch us."
"You are going to Florence?" cries the young man eagerly. "So am I! oh, hurrah! then we shall often meet."
But the touch of friendliness, whose advent he had hailed so joyfully, has vanished out of Mrs. Le Marchant's voice, or, at least, is overlaid with a species of stiffness, as she answers distantly, "We do not intend to go out at all in Florence – I mean into society."
"But I am not society," replies he, chilled, yet resolute. "I wish" – glancing rather wistfully from one to the other – "that I could give you a little of my memory. If I could, you would see that, after being so infinitely good to me at the Moat, you cannot expect me to meet you as total strangers now."
In the sense of ill-usage that fills his breast, the fact of how almost entirely oblivious he had been of the persons before him, during the greater part of the long interval that had parted them, has – such is human nature – quite slipped his recollection. It is brought back to him in some degree with a twinge by Mrs. Le Marchant saying in a relenting tone, and with an accent of remorse, "And you have remembered us all these years?"
He cannot, upon reflection, conscientiously say that he has; but is yet disingenuous enough to allow a speaking silence to imply acquiescence.
"And you are on your way to Florence too?" continues she, mistaking the cause of his dumbness; the tide of compunction evidently setting more strongly towards him, in her womanly heart, at the thought of the entire want of interest she has manifested in the case of one whose long faithfulness to her and her family had deserved a better treatment.
"Yes."
His face clouds so perceptibly as he pronounces this monosyllable, that his interlocutor inquires, with a growing kindness:
"Not on any unpleasant errand, I hope?"
He laughs the uneasy laugh of an Anglo-Saxon obliged to tell, or at all events telling, some intimate detail about himself.
"I am going to see my young woman – the girl I am engaged to."
"Well, that is a pleasant errand, surely?" (smiling).
"C'est salon!" replies Jim gloomily. "I have a piece of ill-news to tell her;" then, with a half-shy effort to escape into generalities, "which way do you think that ill-news read best – on paper or vivâ voce?"
She shivers a little.
"I do not know. I do not like them either way."
Then, taking out her watch, with the evident determination to be surprised at the lateness of the hour, she cries, "It is actually a quarter to two! Are not you famished, Elizabeth? I am!"
There is such apparent and imminent departure in her eye that Burgoyne feels that there is no time to be lost.
"Have you decided upon your hotel in Florence?" he asks precipitately.
"We have decided against them all," is her answer. "We have taken a little apartment – a poor little entresol; but it is such a poor little one, that I should be ashamed to ask any of my friends to come and see me there."
She accompanies the last words, as if to take the sting out of them, with as sweet and friendly a smile as any he remembers in the Devonshire days. But the sting is not taken out, all the same; it lingers, pricking and burning still, after both the tall, thin, black figure, and the slim, little gray one have disappeared.
The moment that this is the case, Byng rejoins his friend; a curiosity and alert interest in his young eyes, which his companion feels no desire to gratify. He is unable, however, to maintain the entire silence he had intended upon the subject, since Byng, after waiting for what, to his impatience, appears a more than decent interval, is constrained to remark —
"Did I hear you tell that lady, when first you spoke to her, that she was dead?"
"I thought she was."
"Had you heard it?"
"No."
"Did you see it in the papers?"
"No."
A pause.
"I wonder why you thought she was dead."
The other makes a rather impatient movement.
"I had no reason – none whatever. It was an idiotic inference."
Byng