Alas! A Novel. Broughton Rhoda
the voice of Byng, assail his ear, mingled with music, or rather noise of a sort, but what sort his ear, without fuller evidence than is yet before it, is unable to decide. The person who has admitted him is an elderly Englishwoman, whose features at once strike him as familiar—so familiar that it needs scarcely one reaching back of memory's hand to capture the fact of her having filled the office of nurse at the Moat, at the period when the nursery there had been the scene of those frantic romps in which he himself had taken a prominent part, and in which Elizabeth had been to him by turns so able a second, or so vigorous an adversary. He would like to claim acquaintance with her, and, perhaps, if she had made any difficulty as to admitting him, might have screwed up his courage to do so; but as she lets him in without delay or hesitation, he follows her in silence along the passage of a by no means imposing little entresol—they are not so well off as they used to be, is his passing thought—is ushered into a small sitting-room, and, entering behind his own name, which has been completely drowned by the din issuing from within, has time, before the consciousness of his own appearance has disturbed it, to take in the details of a group which his entry naturally breaks up. Set slantwise across one angle of the room is an open cottage-piano, and beside it stands Elizabeth, her elbow resting on the top, and all her pensive face convulsed with helpless laughter. Upon the music-stool is seated a large collie dog, supported from behind in an upright position by Byng. Before him is a score of music, from which he is obviously supposed to be playing, as indeed he is doing in a sense—that is to say, he is bringing down first one large paw and then another heavily on the keys, accompanying each crash with a short howl to express the agony inflicted upon his nerves by his own performance. The scene is so entirely different a one from what he had expected: the immoderately laughing Elizabeth has so much more kinship with the sweet hoyden of the Moat than with the pale woman with a history of his two last meetings, that for a second or two Burgoyne stands in the doorway as if stunned. It is not till Mrs. Le Marchant, coming out of an inner room, advances to greet him, that he recovers himself.
"How do you do?" she says, smiling, and with less constraint than he has of late learnt to expect. "Are you fond of music?" (putting, as she speaks, her hands up to her ears). "I hope so! Did you ever hear such a shocking noise?"
"I do not know which I admire most, the vocal or the instrumental part of the performance," replies he, laughing; but even as he speaks both cease.
Elizabeth lifts her elbow from the piano, and Byng removes his hands from under the dog's arms, who at once, joyful and released, jumps down, upsetting his music-stool with the impetus of his descent, and yet immediately, with all a dog's real good-heartedness, begins to swing a handsome tail, to show that he bears no real malice for the odious practical joke that has been played upon him. The clamorous fall of dog and music-stool reveals an object which had been hidden behind both, in the shape of a little boy, in whose behalf, as it darts across Jim's mind, the eccentric concert, for which he has come in, must have been got up.
"Oh, do go on!" cries the child shrilly. "Oh, do make him do it again! Oh, why do you stop?"
And indeed through the whole of the ensuing conversation this cry recurs at short intervals with the iteration of a guinea-hen. But none of the three performers seems disposed to comply with this request. Two of them sit down decorously on chairs, and the third throws himself upon the floor panting, showing a fine red tongue, and dragging himself luxuriously along on his stomach to show his relief at his corvée being ended. The child has followed Elizabeth, and now stands beside her, tiresomely pulling at her white hands.
"Bertie has come to spend the day with us," she says, looking explanatorily up at Jim, but speaking with a formality very different, as he feels, from the exuberant ease and mirth that had marked her intercourse with Byng.
Jim had already had a flash of speculation about the child, as to whether he might be a late-come little brother, arrived on the scene at a period subsequent to his own connection with the family; since plainly the span of his small life did not stretch to a decade.
"Bertie is a new friend," he says kindly. "I do not know Bertie."
"His mother, Mrs. Roche, is a cousin of ours; she has a villa on Bellosguardo. Perhaps you know her?"
"I am going to a party at her house on Wednesday," cries Jim, in a tone of eager pleasure at the discovery of this fresh link, and of the vista of probable meetings which it opens up. "I shall meet you there?"
Elizabeth turns her head slightly aside and shakes it as slightly.
"No?"
"We are not going out."
The formula implies mourning, and yet the clothes both of Elizabeth and her mother are unmistakably coloured ones, and give no indication of an even moderately recent loss. But it is so clear that Miss Le Marchant means to add no explanation that he has to change the subject.
"Though Bertie is not an old friend," he says, smiling, "yet I have come across one here to-day—she opened the door to me; I should have liked to shake hands with her, only she looked so haughty—she never used to look haughty at the Moat."
"Do you mean nurse?" she asks.
"Yes, I knew her in an instant; she is not in the least changed, less even"—hesitating a little, as if doubtful whether the stiffness of their new relations warranted a personality—"less even than you."
She snatches a hasty look at him, a look upon which he sees, to his surprise, imprinted a character of almost fear.
"You must be laughing at me," she says, in a voice in which he detects an undoubted tremor; "I am very much changed."
There is such obvious apprehension in her whole manner, that his one thought—after a first flash of astonishment—is to reassure her.
"Of course I was only speaking of externals," he says quickly; "ten years could hardly be expected to leave any of us quite where we were as to our inner selves;" then, seeing her still look flurried, and becoming himself nervous, he adds, rather stupidly, the hackneyed Swinburnian couplet—
"'Time turns the old days to derision,
Our loves into corpses or wives!'
though I never could see that that was quite a necessary alternative!"
Ere the words are out of his mouth she has risen with precipitation, and begun hurriedly to re-arrange the branches of lilac in a scaldino on the table near her. She is apparently so awkward about it that one odorous white bough falls out on the floor. Before Jim can stoop to pick it up, Byng has rushed to the rescue. In eagerly thanking him, in receiving it back from him, and accepting his services in replacing it among its perfumed brothers, the girl, perhaps involuntarily, turns her back upon her former interlocutor, who sits for a moment staring rather blankly at her, and wondering what sting there could have lurked in his apparently harmless words to drive her away so abruptly. Whatever may have driven her away, there is certainly no doubt as to her being gone. Nor as Jim sees her moving about the room, followed by Byng, and showing him her treasures—the little wild red and yellow tulips she plucked in the field this morning; the chicken-skin box she bought at Ciampolini's yesterday, and mixing all that she shows with her delicate light laughter—can he buoy himself up with any reasonable hope of her ever, with her own good will, returning. He must be looking more blank than he is conscious of, for Mrs. Le Marchant's voice sounds quite apologetic in his ears, when, having been, like himself, deserted by her companion, she takes a seat near him.
"Elizabeth is so proud of her bargains," she says, glancing with a lenient smile towards her daughter; "she must show them to everybody."
"She never offered to show them to me," replies Jim, rather morosely; then, becoming aware of the almost puerile jealousy evidenced by his last remark, he adds:
"I am afraid I said something that annoyed Miss Le Marchant; I cannot think what it could have been. I told her how wonderfully little changed I thought her in the last ten years; but it could not have been that, could it?"
The mother's eye is still following her child, and, if it were not an absurd assumption, Burgoyne could have fancied that there was