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?
CHAPTER IV
In a ripe civilization such as ours there are formulas provided to meet the requirements of every exigency that may possibly arise; but amongst them there is not one which teaches us how to greet a person come back from the dead, because it is held impossible that such a contingency can occur. Perhaps this is the reason why Jim Burgoyne, usually a docile and obedient member of the society to which he belongs, now flies in the face of all the precepts instilled into him by that society's code. At the sight of Elizabeth Le Marchant entering the room, clad in a very neat tailor gown, instead of the winding-sheet with which he had credited her, he at first stands transfixed, staring at her with a hardness of intensity which is allowed to us in the case of Titian's "Bella," or Botticelli's "Spring," but has never been accounted permissible in the case of a more living loveliness. Then, before he can control, or even question the impulse that drives him, it has carried him to her.
"Elizabeth!" he says, in that sort of awed semi-whisper with which one would salute a being plainly returned from the other side, fearing that the fulness of a living voice might strike too strongly on his disused ear – "is it really Elizabeth?"
Had Burgoyne been quite sure, even now, of that fact; if he had had his wits well about him, he would certainly not have addressed her by her Christian name. But from the dead the small pomps and ceremonies of earth fall off. We think of them by their naked names – must we not then appeal to them by the same when they reappear before us?
The girl – for she does not look much more – thus rudely and startlingly bombarded, drops her Baedeker out of her slim-gloved hand, and with a positive jump at the suddenness of the address, looks back apprehensively at her interlocutor. In her eyes is, at first, only the coldly frightened expression of one discourteously assailed by an insolent stranger; but in a space of time as short as had served him to note the same metamorphosis in the case of her parents, he sees the look of half – three-quarter – whole recognition dawn in her eyes, followed – alas! there can be no mistake about it – by the same aspiration after flight. There is no reason why she should not recognise him again at once. He has fallen a prey neither to hair nor fat – the two main disguisers and disfigurers of humanity. His face is as smooth and his figure as spare as when, ten years ago, he had given the pretty tomboy of sixteen lessons in jumping the ha-ha. And as to her identity, no shadow of doubt any longer lingers in his mind.
The violence and shock of his attack have made her crimson, have matched her cheeks with those long-withered damasks 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
