Alas! A Novel

And meanwhile, how many times has he been within the portals of the Anglo-Américain? With all his arithmetic he cannot make it more than twice. This neglect of his betrothed, however, is not of quite so monstrous a cast as at the first blush it may appear. It is she herself who, true to her life-long principle of shielding him from all disagreeable experiences, has forbidden him her door. He can aid her neither to bandage her father's swollen foot in the severe gout-fit under which he is groaning, nor to allay Sybilla's mysterious sufferings, which always display a marked increase in acuteness whenever any other member of the family shows a disposition to set up claims as an invalid. Cecilia, indeed, is ready enough to give her help in nursing her father, but she has on former occasions shown such an unhappy aptitude for tumbling over his swathed and extended leg, and upsetting his physic all over him, that she is received with such objurgations as his cloth will permit, so often as she shows her short nose within his sick-room. Only twice in a whole week. Can Amelia have wished to be taken quite so literally when she had bidden him stay away? There is only one answer possible to this question, and he shows his consciousness of it by at once raising himself out of the chair in which he is sunk, and turning his steps hastily towards her.

It is morning. The east wind is clean gone, and the streets are full of the scent of the innumerable lilies of the valley, of which everybody's hands are full. He stops a minute and buys a great sheaf for a miraculously small sum, from one of the unnumbered sellers. It shall make his peace for him, if indeed it needs making, which it has never done yet. He almost smiles at the absurdity of the suggestion. He finds Cecilia alone in the sitting-room, Cecilia sitting by the window reading the Queen. Upon her large pink face there is a puzzled expression, which is perhaps to be accounted for by the fact that the portion of the journal which she is perusing is that entitled "Etiquette," and under it are the answers to last week's questions, upon nice points of social law, which, if you do not happen to have read the questions, have undoubtedly an enigmatical air, as in the following instances: "Your husband takes the Baronet's daughter, and you follow with the Prince." – "We do not understand your question – babies never dine out," etc.

Upon Jim's entrance Cecilia lays down her paper, and at once offers to go in search of her sister, with whom she shortly returns. He had been quite right. There is no peace to make. Amelia greets him with her usual patient and perfectly unrancorous smile, but his second glance at her tells him that she is looking old and fagged. It is only in very early youth that vigils and worries and self-denials do not write their names upon the skin.

"How – how pale you are!" he says. If he had given utterance to the word that hovered on his lips, he would have cried, "how yellow!"

"It would be very odd if she did not," says Cecilia with a shrug, looking up from her "Etiquette," to which she has returned; "she has sat up three nights with father, and last evening Sybilla bid us all good-bye. You know she never can bear anybody else to be ill, and when father has the gout she bids us all good-bye – and Amelia is always taken in and sheds torrents of tears – do not you, Amelia?"

Amelia has subsided rather wearily into a chair. "She really thinks that she is dying," says she apologetically – "and who knows? some day perhaps it may come true."

"Not it," rejoins her sister, with an exasperated sniff "she will see us all out – will not she, Jim?"

"I have not the remotest doubt of it," replies he heartily; and then his conscience-struck eyes revert to his betrothed's wan face, all the plainer for its wanness. "No sleep, no fresh air," in an injured tone, checking off the items on his fingers.

"But I have had fresh air," smiling at him with pale affection; "one day Mrs. Byng took me out for a drive. Mrs. Byng has been very kind to me."

She does not lay the faintest invidious accent on the name, as if contrasting it with another whose owner had been so far less kind; it is his own guilty heart that supplies the emphasis. His only resource is an anger which – so curiously perverse is human nature – is not even feigned.

"You can go out driving with Mrs. Byng then, though you could not spare time to come out with me," he says in a surly voice.

She does not defend herself but her lower lip trembles.

"Come out with me now," he cries, remorse giving a harshness even to the tone of the sincerely-meant invitation. "You look like a geranium in a cellar; it is a divine day, a day to make the old feel young, and the young immortal; come out and stay out with me all day. I will take you wherever you like. I will – "

The genuine eagerness of his proposal has tinged her sickly-coloured cheek with a healthier hue for the moment, but she shakes her head.

"I could not leave father this morning; he will not take his medicine from anyone else, and he likes me to sit with him while he eats his arrowroot."

The only sign of approval of this instance of filial piety given by Jim is that he rises and begins to stamp irritably about the room.

"He is really not at all exacting," continues Amelia in anxious deprecation; "he was quite pleased just now when I told him that Mrs. Byng was going to take me to a party at the Villa Schiavone this afternoon. He said – "

"Mrs. Byng! Mrs. Byng again!"

This is not what Mr. Wilson said, but is the expression of the unjust wrath which Burgoyne, feeling it much pleasanter to be angry with someone else than himself is artificially and not unsuccessfully fostering. Again Amelia's lip quivers.

"I thought," she says gently, "if – if you have no other engagement this afternoon; if – if you are free – "

Nothing can be milder than the form which this suggestion takes, and yet there is something in its shape that provokes him.

"Free!" he interrupts tartly, "of course I am free! Have I a gouty father and a hysteric sister? Why should not I be free?"

"I am very glad to hear it," rejoins she – the light that his first proposal to take her out had brought into her face growing brighter and more established – "because in that case there is nothing to prevent your meeting us at the villa, and – "

"And seeing you and Mrs. Byng walking about with your arms round each other's necks, like a couple of schoolgirls," cries he, with a sort of spurious grumpiness.

"I can't think why you should object to Amelia walking about with her arm round Mrs. Byng's neck," says Cecilia, whose attention to her "Etiquette" is apparently not so absorbing but that she has some to spare for the conversation going on in her neighbourhood.

They all laugh a little; and harmony being restored, and Jim graciously vouchsafing to forgive Amelia for having ignored her for a sennight, she returns to her patient, and he to his hotel, where he is at once, contrary to his wish, pounced upon by Byng.

For some reason, which he would be puzzled to explain to himself, he has for the last week rather avoided his friend's company – a task rendered easier by the disposition manifested by the young man's mother to monopolize him, a disposition to which Burgoyne has felt no inclination to run counter. It is without enthusiasm that he receives Byng's expressions of pleasure in their accidental meeting.

"I have been searching for you, high and low."

"Have you?"

"Where have you been?"

"I have been to the Anglo-Américain" – with a flash of inward self-congratulation at this query having been put to-day, instead of yesterday, or the day before. The other looks disappointed.

"To the Anglo-Américain? I thought – I hoped; have you – seen them lately?"

Burgoyne has ceased to feign lack of understanding to whom the personal pronoun refers, and he answers with as much carelessness as at a moment's notice he can put on: "Why, yes, I have, once or twice."

"Do they – do not they think it strange of me not to have been near them all this time?"

"They may do" – dryly.

"They did not say so?"

"They did not; perhaps" – sarcastically – "the subject was too acutely painful for them to allude to."

Frequently as he has exposed himself to them, his Mentor's sneers never fail to send the crimson racing into Byng's face, and it finds its way there now. It does not, however, prevent his proceeding, after a confused moment or two, with his anxious catechism.

"She – she has not referred to the subject?"

"What subject?"

"To – to me?"

"She has never mentioned your name. Stay" – his veracity winning a reluctant victory over his ill-nature – "one day she said that you were sunshiny, and that she liked sunshine."

As he speaks he looks down at his boots, too unaffectedly annoyed at the justification of Elizabeth's epithet which its retailing has worked on Byng's countenance to be able to contemplate him with any decent patience. But there is enough evidence in the boy's voice of the effect wrought upon him by Miss Le Marchant's adjective to make his comrade repent very heartily of having repeated it.

"I should have been over," says Byng in a low eager way, "every day, every hour, as often as they would have received me, only that I could not leave my mother; and she – she has taken them en grippe!"

"En grippe? Your mother?" repeats Jim, too honestly and disagreeably startled by this piece of news to be able any longer to maintain his ironical manner; "why?"

The other shrugs his shoulders dispiritedly.

"I have not an idea; it cannot be because they did not seem to wish to be introduced to her at the Accademia the other day; she is quite incapable of such pettiness, and she admired HER so tremendously at first, did not she? You heard her; but since then she has taken it into her head that there is something – I cannot bear even to say it" – dashing his hat and gloves vehemently upon the table – "something louche, as she calls it, about her. Mother thinks that she – she – she" – sinking his voice to an indistinct half-whisper – "has – has gone off the rails some time or other. Can you conceive?" – raising his tone again to one of the acutest pain and indignation – "that anyone – any human being could look in her face and harbour such a notion for a single instant?"

He stares with eyes ablaze with wrathful pity at his friend's face, expecting an answering outbreak to his own; but none such comes. Burgoyne only says, in a not much more assured key than that which the young man had employed:

"How – how can such an idea have got into your mother's head?"

"I do not know, but it is there; and what I wanted you, what I have been searching everywhere for you for, is to ask you to – to set her right, at once, without any delay. It is unbearable that she should go on thinking such things, and nothing could be easier for you, who know them so well, who know all about them!"

Burgoyne is at first too much stupefied by this appeal, and by the impossibility of answering it in a satisfactory manner, to make any response at all; but at length:

"Know all about them?" he says, in a voice whose surface impatience hides a much profounder feeling. "Who dares ever say that he knows all about any other living soul? How many times must I tell you that, until we met at Genoa, I had not set eyes on Miss Le Marchant for ten good years?"

At the tone of this speech, so widely different from the eager acceptance of the suggested task which he had expected, Byng's face takes on a crestfallen, almost frightened look.

"But when you knew them," he says, "in Devonshire, they – they were all right then, were not they? they were well thought of? – there was nothing against them?"

"Good Heavens – no!" replies Jim heartily, thankful that the appeal is now so worded as to enable him to give a warm testimony in favour of his poor friends. "There was not a family in all the neighbourhood that stood so high. Everybody loved them; everybody had a good word for them."

Byng's countenance clears a little.

"And there is no reason – you have no reason for supposing anything different now?"

Jim stirs uneasily in his chair. Can he truthfully give the same convinced affirmative to this question as to the last? It is a second or two before he answers it at all.

"The facts of life are enough for me; I do not trouble myself with its suppositions."

He gets up and walks towards the door as he speaks, resolved to bring to an end this to him intolerable catechism.

"But you must have an opinion – you must think," cries the other's voice, persistently pursuing him. He turns at bay, with the door-handle in his hand, his eyes lightening.

"I asked her permission to bring Amelia to see her," he says, in a low moved voice; "if I had thought as ill of her as your mother does, do you think I should have done that?"