Rhoda Broughton

“ The hills have put on their summer look of dreamy warmth and distance. Before they have reached the hilltop the boon Italian air has kissed most of the creases out of Jim's temper, and the brick-red from Amelia's cheek-bones. He looks remorsefully from the triumphant beauty around, into the poor, fond face opposite to him—looks at her with a sort of compassion for being so unlovely, mixed with a compunctious admiration and tenderness for her gentle qualities. He may touch her hand without fear of observation, so wholly is Byng enveloped in the mantle of Cecilia's voluble tenderness. ”

“ At the quay the moored vessels lie, their masts and spars making a dark design against an ineffable evening sky of mother-of-pearl and translucent pink. The sea, which to-day has not been of sapphire, but of "watchet-blue," pierced and shot with white, now copies exactly the heavens. It, too, shades from opal to translucent pink. How many changes of raiment there are in the wardrobe of the great wet mother!
"If I had as many gowns as the Mediterranean, how well-dressed I should be!" says Elizabeth, with a smile. ”

“ The beauty of the world has always been very much to Burgoyne, though hitherto it has been chiefly in the austerity of her high and desert places that he has bowed the knee before the Universal Mother. This little gold evening city, sunset clad in the colours of the New Jerusalem, lifting her heavenly campanile to as heavenly a sky, is to him a new and wonderful thing. Her loveliness sinks into his soul, and with it a companion sadness as deep. From henceforth the sight of earth's fair shows will be, for the most part, forbidden him. He has always loved to look and adore in silence and alone ”

“ It seems to him now but a moment since he was reading her broken-hearted, tear-stained note; since he was seeing Byng grovelling in all the utter collapse of his ungoverned grief on the floor of the little Florentine entresol. What business has she to laugh? And how unchanged she is! How much less outwardly aged than he himself is conscious of being! Sitting as she now is, in her simple white tea-gown, with one slight elbow rested on the table, her eyes all sparkling with merriment and laughter, bringing into prominence that one enchanting dimple of hers, she does not look more than twenty. ”

“ Jim is really in a hurry to find Amelia, and yet he cannot choose but stop to look at it—from Galileo's tower on the right, to where, far down the plain of the Arno, Carrara loses itself in mist. It is all dark at first, sullen, purple-gray, without variation or stir—city, Duomo, Arno, Fiesole, and all her chain of sister-hills—one universal frown over every slope and jag, over street and spire, over Campanile with its marbles, and Santa Croce with its dead. ”

“ It is possible that an extremely ardent love may be independent of surroundings; may burn with as fierce a flame, when its owner or victim is seated on a hard horsehair chair beside a dining-room table, in a little dull hotel back room, as when the senses are courted by softly-cushioned lounges, penetrating flower-scents, and cunningly arranged bric-à-brac; but perhaps Jim's passion is not of this intense and Spartan quality. At all events a chill steals over him as Amelia leads the way into that small and uncheerful chamber where the Wilson family daily banquet. ”

“ The moon-tinted olives, twilight and ghostly, even in the dazzling radiance of this superb morning hour, with the blinding green of the young corn about their gray feet, the cypress taper-flames, the gay white houses, terrace gardened, and, above all, the vast smile of the Tuscan heaven.
At first Amelia's muteness seems natural and grateful to Jim, as the outcome of the awe and hush that exceeding beauty breathes on the human heart, but by-and-by, as it is prolonged beyond the limits that seem to him fit or agreeable, it begins to get on his nerves. ”

“ Burgoyne shakes his head.
"Perhaps," he says, with the slowness of a man who is saying what he himself does not believe, "a part of your mother's dislike to the idea may be in the fact of Miss Le Marchant's being older than you."
"Older!" cries Byng, with almost a shout of angry derision at the suggestion. "What have creatures like her to do with age? I neither know nor care what her age is! If you know, do not tell me! I will not listen! Upon that exquisite body time and change are powerless to work their hideous metamorphoses!" ”

“ Do you know what an increasing number of people every year find life intolerable?"
"I know that you are fast making my life intolerable," answers Jim, fixing his tired, sleepless eyes with melancholy severity upon his companion. "Amelia is—you are as well aware of it as I am—probably dying, and yet even now, thanks to you, into my thoughts of her is continually pushing the fear that I may have to tell your mother that you have had the colossal selfishness to rush out of the world, because, for the first time in your pampered life, the toy you cried for has not been put into your hand." ”

“ It is not a happy moment to look at poor Amelia, as she has not yet cooled down from the heat of her climb through the fir-wood—a heat that translates itself into patchy flushes all over her face, not sparing even her forehead. Elizabeth is flushed too. She has not met Miss Wilson since she had declined Burgoyne's offer of bringing his betrothed to see her, and in her deprecating eyes there is a guilty and tremulous recollection of this fact. But below the guilt and the deprecation and the tremor, what else is there in Elizabeth's eyes? ”

“ Is there a prime minister, a princess, a poet, a prima donna, of the time, that has not toiled up the steep path to the welcome rest of the bench on the high plateau, on the hillside? Jim and Amelia are certainly not likely to figure in the annals of their time, but the peasants look at them with as much or as little interest as if they were. An immortal, unless his immortality is printed on his back in letters as large as those that announce Colman's mustard to the world, has, to the vulgar, very much the air of one of themselves. ”

“ Jim looks quickly in the direction indicated, and at once recognises a slender gray figure which to-day has not assumed its white holiday gown. Elizabeth, whom he had been pitifully picturing lying heart-struck on a sofa in the seclusion of her own little entresol, probably with lowered blinds and tear-smarting eyes, is leaning on the window-ledge with her back to the pictures—she whom he had always credited with so delicate a sensibility for Art, with her back to the pictures, as if the live picture which Byng's eager face presents to her pleases her better. ”

“ At that mart of nations it can never be matter for wonder to meet anyone; but who is this to whom her observation is addressed? It is not Mr. Le Marchant, it is not a man at all; it is a slight woman—
"White as a lily, and small as a wand"—
like Lance's sister, dressed with that neat, tight, gray-tinted simplicity, severe yet smart, which marks the well-bred Englishwoman on her travels. Is it one of the younger ones, who has grown up so startlingly like her? Miriam? Rose? or is it, can it be, the dead Elizabeth? ”

“ The garden-party at the villa on Bellosguardo had proved to her that the fruit is hung too high for her fingers to reach, and that philosophy, which had enabled her genuinely to relish the wedding-cake of the man who had jilted her, now teaches her to lay to heart the sarcastic advice offered her by Jim, to look at the young man as poor women look at diamonds. Beyond one or two trifling gallantries, for which no one can judge her harshly, she leaves him alone, even though out of good-nature, and from inveterate force of habit, he gives her several openings to make love to him. ”

“ Without the powerful aid of Byng, Elizabeth has found it a task considerably beyond her strength to hold a large collie, poised on his hind-legs, on a music-stool. He has jumped down repeatedly, and now lies on his back—an attitude in which experience has taught him he is less attackable than in any other—sawing the air with his fore-paws, and lifting his lip in a deprecating grin.
"Where is Mr. Byng?" cries Bertie fretfully, baulked in his efforts to make his wily victim resume the perpendicular. "I want Mr. Byng! Why does not Mr. Byng come?" ”

“ Upon Elizabeth's small face, turned suddenly towards him, seems reflected some of the ineffable radiance of the Tuscan light.
"When next I dream of heaven," she says, in her tender, vibrating voice, "it will be like this. Do you ever dream of heaven? I often do, and I always wake crying because it is not true; but"—with a joyful change of key—"I will not cry any more without better cause. Since I came here I have found earth beautiful and delightful enough for me!" ”

“ As he hears her words, as he watches her patient profile, the sole suffering thing in the universal morning joy, a great revulsion of feeling, a great compassion mixed with as large a remorse pours in torrent over his heart. These emotions are so strong that they make him deceive even himself as to their nature. It seems to him as if scales had suddenly fallen from his eyes, showing him how profoundly he prizes the now departing good, telling him that life can neither ask nor give anything better than the undemanding, selfless, boundless love about to withdraw its shelter from him. ”

“ She ends with a laugh, which he listens to in a silence that is almost stunned. The sound of her voice, though set to so different a tune from what he had anticipated, has brought back the past with such astonishing vividness to him; her very fleer at Sybilla seems so much a part of the old life that he half turns his head, expecting once more to see Amelia's deprecating face, to hear her peace-making voice put in a plea, as it has done so many hundred times, for the peevish malade imaginaire. ”

“ How can he put a period to the ravings of this maniac? And yet not so maniac either. What gives the sharpest point to his present suffering is the consciousness that he would have made quite as good a maniac himself if he had had the chance. This consciousness instils a few drops of angry patience into his voice, as, disregarding the other's high-flown question, he puts one that is not at all high-flown himself.
"Then you have not told Mrs. Le Marchant yet?"
But the smile that the memory—so fresh, only half an hour old—of Elizabeth's loveliness has laid upon Byng's lips still lingers there ”

“ Is there nothing to be done—to be done at once?" asks Jim feverishly, chafing at the idea of this inaction, which seems inevitable, with that helpless feeling which his own entire ignorance of sickness produces.
"Do not you suppose that if there was we should have done it?" cries Cecilia, rendered even more uncomfortable than she was before, by the contagion of his anxiety. "We are to keep her in bed—there is no great difficulty about that, poor soul; she has not the least desire to get up; she seems so odd and heavy!" ”

“ Into Burgoyne's mind has come a sense of disgust with the present, a revolt against steam trams and the Cromwell Road—most perfect symbol of that bald, unending, vulgar ugliness, which, in some moods, must seem to everyone the dominant note of nineteenth-century life. The light-hearted Byng, who always takes his colour from his surroundings, is hushed into a silence that is almost reverent too. ”

“ The tone in which she makes this lugubrious reflection is so extremely doleful that Jim cannot refrain from a laugh.
"Cheer up, old girl! there is a good time coming! It is a long lane that has no turning."
But he contents himself with these vague forms of consolation. He has no engagements of his own. Why, then, is he conscious of so strong a reluctance towards tying himself by any promise to the broadly-hinting lady beside him? There is another pause, during which Cecilia looks down on the floor with a baffled air, and traces the outlines of the tiles with the point of her red sunshade. ”

“ A dead silence supervenes—a silence of shocked stupefaction on the one side, of rather dismal brooding on the other. At length Amelia nerves herself to put a question upon which it seems to her, not very incorrectly, that her whole future hangs. She does it in such a low voice that none but very sharp ears could have caught it. Jim's ears are so; practised as they are in listening for the stealthy tread of wild animals, and for the indescribable sounds of mountain solitudes at night. ”

“ It has been a fine day, and though the sun has long laid down his sceptre, he has passed it on with scarcely diminished, though altered, radiance to his white imitator. It is broad moonlight—startlingly broad. The moon hangs overhead, with never a cloud-kerchief about her great disk. The winds that, loudly sporting, are up and abroad have chased every vapour from the sky, which is full of throbbing white stars. Before he reaches her side she has heard him, and turned to meet him, with a mixed hunger and pitiful hope in her wan face. She thinks that he has come to fetch her. ”

“ But Jim divines the quivering even under the morsel of cambric, and looks away again.
"Her money is almost entirely in her own power," he continues, in an unemotional voice; "and when she announced her marriage to me, she also announced her intention of settling the whole of it upon her—her"—he pauses a second, as if resolved to keep out of his voice the accent of satire and bitterness that pierces through its calm—"her husband."
Amelia has dropped both shielding hand and handkerchief into her lap. She has forgotten her effort to conceal the blankness of her dismay. ”

“ With a patience which would have surprised those persons who had seen him only in his former relations with the family of his betrothed he tries to soothe the sorrow of each—even that of Sybilla—in turn; but to his own heart he says that not one of their griefs is worthy to be weighed in the balance with his. In the case of none of theirs is the woof crossed by the hideous warp of self-reproach that is woven inextricably into his. They have worked her to death, they have torn her to pieces by their conflicting claims; their love has been exacting, selfish, inconsiderate ”

“ Jim has expected that his young friend would spend some portion of this day in crying, knowing well both his powers of, and his taste for, "turning on the water-works," as he but lately cruelly and uncivilly phrased it to his own mind. But the warm tears of emotion, few and undisfiguring, with which he had credited him, have not much kinship with the scalding torrents that have made his handsome young eyes mere red blurs on his ashen face, that have furrowed his cheeks, and damped his disordered curls, and taken all the starch out of his immaculate "masher" collar. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The air is so clear that one can go nigh to counting the marbles on the Duomo walls. In a more transparent amber light, fuller of joy and gaiety, cannot the saved be dancing around, as in Fra Angelico's divine picture? cannot they be walking in the New Jerusalem of St. John's great dream? Only in the New Jerusalem there are no galled and trembling-kneed fiacre horses.
Elizabeth is sitting on the wall, her light figure—is it possible that it has been in the world only four years less than Amelia's solid one?—half-supported by one small gray hand outspread on the stone ”

“ He asks Byng no question as to the disposition of his day. He sees but little of him, having, indeed, changed the hours of his own breakfast and dinner in order to avoid having his appetite spoilt by the sight of so much unnecessary radiance opposite him; but he knocks up against him, flower-laden, at the Strozzi steps; he notes the splendour of his ties and waistcoats; he grows to know the Elizabeth-look on his face, when he comes singing home at evening, as one knows the look of the western clouds that the sun's red lips have only just ceased to kiss, though no sun is any longer in sight ”

“ It seems as if he must crowd into the last fortnight of Amelia's stay in Florence all the sight-seeing, all the junkets, all the enjoyment which ought to have been temperately spread over the eight years of their engagement.
One day—all nearer excursions being exhausted—they drive to Monte Senario, that sweet and silent spot, happily too far from Florence for the swarm of tourists to invade, where earth-weary men have set up a rest scarcely less dumb than the grave in a lonely monastery of the Order of La Trappe. Through the Porta San Gallo, along the Bologna Road they go. ”

“ It is virtually a tête-à-tête, as their tonsured guide, seeing their evident harmlessness, has left them to their own devices; and Mrs. Le Marchant has sat down to rest upon a camp-stool which Elizabeth has been carrying ever since they left the carriage. It has fidgeted Jim to see her burdened with it; for let a man be ever so little in love with a woman, his tendency always is to think her as brittle as spun glass, to believe that any weight, however light, will bruise her arm—any pebble, however tiny, wound her tender foot. ”

“ To be married at once! To sit down for all time to Amelia and £800 a year! To forego for ever the thrilling wandering life; the nights under the northern stars, the stealthy tracking of shy forest creatures; the scarce coarse delicious food, the cold, the fatigue, the hourly peril, that, since its probable loss is ever in sight, make life so sweetly worth having—all, in short, that goes to make up so many an Englishman's ideal of felicity; that has certainly hitherto gone to make up Jim's. ”

“ There are few things more difficult than when one's mind is full of the interests, cares, and sorrows of one set of friends, to have to empty it suddenly of them, and refill it as suddenly with the entirely different, and perhaps discrepant interests, cares, and sorrows of an altogether alien set.
Seldom in the course of their old and tried friendship has Jim Burgoyne felt less disposed for the company and conversation of his valued ally, Mrs. Byng, than when he knocks at the door of her sitting-room on the morning following the excursion to Certosa. ”

“ It is but a little way to Fiesole, as we all know, but yet, as the slow hired vehicle crawls up the steep ascent, with the driver walking alongside, or even lagging behind, there would be time and opportunity to say a good deal. But Amelia says next to nothing. Perhaps the heat makes her sleepy, for it is so hot, so hot between the garden walls, where the rose hedges are beginning to show a pale flush of plenteous pink among their multitude of green buds. Young, indeed, just born as the roses are, the highway dust has already powdered them with its ash-toned white. ”

“ It is quite impossible that the sound of the child's voice can reach down to the open portal of No. 12 bis, at which Jim has now arrived, and it is also certain that neither of the ladies whom he has come to visit is likely to word her surprise at his having arrived alone with the frank brutality which is confined to the utterances of infancy; and yet Jim, as he presents himself, announced by Annunziata, the hard-featured possessor of a lovely name, is quite as conscious, as if he had overheard the boy's slighting remark, of being "only the other one!" ”

“ There is not much mirth in his own carriage. What a kill-joy he has grown! Cecilia, though her heart is as pure as the babe unborn of any serious designs on Byng, of which indeed she has long seen the fruitlessness, yet thinks a sulky brother-in-law-elect but a poor exchange for a handsome young acquaintance, whom neither his good manners nor the amount of his intimacy allow to sit opposite to her in grumpy silence. ”

“ Perhaps when Elizabeth can see only the back of his head she may resume her jokes. But all the same he knows that, for her, there will be no more mirth to-day.
"That is what they always do!" cries a voice on Burgoyne's left hand—the voice of his other neighbour, who begins to think that his attention has been usurped quite long enough by her plump rival. "That is what they always do—come long after dinner has begun, and go out long before it has ended. Such swagger!"
There is a tinge of exasperation in both words and voice, nor is the cause far to seek. ”

“ A week has passed; a week upon which Burgoyne looks back as upon a blur of wretchedness, with distinct points of pain sticking up here and there out of it. It is a blur; for it is a time-space, without the usual limitations and divisions of time; a week not cut up into orderly lengths of day and night, but in which each has puzzlingly run into and overlapped each. There have been nights when he has not been in bed at all, and there have been days when he has slept heavily at unaccustomed hours. ”

“ They are all gathered round a tiny donkey, such a bourriquot as the valiant Tartarin slew, which has evidently been brought up for sale by its Arab master. Attached to its head gear are two long reins, and holding these reins is Miss Le Marchant. As Jim looks out, the bourriquot, taking some strange freak into its little brown head, sets off galloping at a prodigious rate; and Elizabeth—white gown and blonde hair flying—gallops after it. As she is dragged at racing pace down the drive, her immoderate laughter comes borne back on the wind to the spectator of whom she is unconscious. ”