Chapter Seven.
After the first shock of horror came relief, for Wilbraham was only momentarily stunned, got up, shook himself, and laughed at their anxious faces. Sylvia flew to his side, and was brushing the dust and rubble from his coat before her face had recovered its colour, or a question had been asked. At another time the others would have smiled at the helpless and incongruous action, but their smiles had been frightened out of them for a while, and Miss Sandiland was the first to find a voice.
“You must be hurt—somewhere!” she exclaimed.
Wilbraham laughed ruefully.
“I don’t deny it,” he said, beginning to feel himself over, and wincing. “But nothing serious, nothing broken—only bruises. Let’s get out of it. Where’s the child? All right?”
A crowd had quickly collected. There were exclamations, gestures, and presently a very Babel of grateful cries, which, to Wilbraham’s disgust, pursued them as he limped stiffly away.
“One child more or less,” he said grimly. “Can it matter?”
After they had gone a few steps he remarked: “I didn’t do much good. Who pulled it out?”
Miss Sandiland had a high bird-like voice. She broke into admiration of Teresa’s courage; Sylvia, recovering her speech, admired them both; Teresa, who had not yet spoken, began to share Wilbraham’s uneasy shyness, and to hurry on; Miss Sandiland, with a proper sense of leaving the lovers together, following her closely. They did not, either of them, know where they were going, but they found themselves in the piazza of the great church, and Mrs Brodrick came to meet them from its porch.
“What is the matter?” she asked, for Teresa’s face was still white.
“Nothing,” said the girl briefly. “But there might have been something.”
Miss Sandiland began the story, and Teresa slipped away into the darkness of the lower church. She went straight into its deepest gloom, and knelt, as the peasants kneel, on the stones, worn by the weight of countless sorrows. She had been very near death, and she knew it, but Sylvia had been nearer to what might have crushed the joy out of her life, and though she thought of the one, she thought a great deal more of the other deliverance.
Mrs Brodrick was quietly waiting for her when she came into the sunlight again, and put out her hand.
“My dear!” was all she said.
“Don’t pity me,” said Teresa, smiling, “I had no time to be frightened. It was a brave thing for him to do, and I don’t know how he got out of it. Have you seen him?”
“Yes. He has hurt his leg, and bruised himself; nothing worse, I hope. We shall get back to Rome this evening.”
“And Sylvia?”
“Sylvia was in a flutter, and I gave her sal volatile.”
“Of course; it was worst of all for her,” said Teresa, instantly on the defensive.
“It must have been,” agreed her grandmother gravely. She was glad that Teresa had not seen Sylvia’s queer little ways of showing her agitation, which she fancied Wilbraham found irritating, although she told herself constantly that grandmothers were, perhaps, the most ineffective of people to judge the sensations of a man in love. But Sylvia had talked too much, of that she was convinced. And it was already no longer like old days, when the girl was hesitating and uncertain of herself. Now it would have been difficult to stop her.
Teresa owned this—she owned things occasionally to herself, though she fought valiantly with others—when she had wearily climbed the stairs to their room, and found her sister stretched on her bed. For Sylvia started up on her elbow, and poured forth a flood of small exclamations, small lamentations, small congratulations, small wonderings. What had been stirred in her? How deep were the springs? or were there really no springs, only a little sheet of thin water, giving back the blue of heaven, it is true, but soon plumbed, and altogether unsatisfying for a thirsty soul? Donna Teresa found herself putting this question, and then ready to beat herself for putting it. For was Sylvia to-day really different from yesterday, when she had so longed for the thing which had come to pass? Was Wilbraham different that he should have awakened a sudden sympathy? And there she paused, for her nature was frankly honest, and she had to own that his personality had, at least, come home to her in a different light. He had done a very brave thing, and he had done it simply. Those few moments in which, by sheer force, he had held back the falling wall, had saved the child’s life, and she liked even the physical strength which he had shown, as a strong woman is pretty sure to like strength in a man. It becomes a type to her, and she almost always idealises it.
So as Sylvia talked, Teresa grew more silent.
Wilbraham treated his hurts too lightly, and had two or three weeks of lameness after they reached Rome. Naturally he spent most of his time in the Porta Pinciana—that beautiful, soft, fresh, early winter-time of Rome, when day after day the sun shines gaily out, when the sky is of an ineffable colour, when beyond the broad stretch of the campagna the bordering mountains take wonderful tints of clear yet veiled blue; and across the campagna itself flocks of sheep and lambs, guarded by shepherds in goatskin leggings, wander knee-deep in aromatic pastures, pale grey thistles, fennel withered into tall and slender stalks of yellow, and, underneath, a growth of grass and red-brown herbage. Then, as the sun goes down in a daffodil sky, wherever you may be you find some new expression of loveliness: churches and towers stand out against it; the great dome of Saint Peter’s draws all eyes to its splendid curve; the Palatine ruins stand solemn and deserted; and the brick tower of Saint Andrea, where by day the pigeons crowd, holds up its flower cap of a belfry softly dark against rosy bars of cloud.
Mary Maxwell and Teresa were much taken up with their drawing in those days. A vague uneasiness which possessed Teresa could best be laid to rest by the absorption of a sketch. She no longer watched Sylvia, having hastily determined that it was an idiotic idea to suppose that her help was necessary. Of course Wilbraham was in love, and, being in love, he would not be annoyed by trifling mistakes. At any rate—but this she said quite to herself—he must get used to them. Sylvia was happy, that was the great, the real thing, and in spite of such philosophy she was anxious. In an indifferent and casual manner she tried to extract a little information from her grandmother as to what was talked about, but Mrs Brodrick answered briefly.
“Oh, well,” Teresa went on, “everybody says the same thing in the same circumstances.”
“Everybody says the same thing, only some people say it differently.”
“Some people are not half so pretty!” cried Teresa triumphantly and illogically.
She went away into her own room at once lest she should weaken Sylvia’s cause by remaining, and the next moment Sylvia herself appeared. Her sister glanced quickly at her. Were disquieting confidences at hand? But no; the charming eyes were quite untroubled.
“I heard you come in,” she said.
“Yes,” said Teresa, sticking up a half-finished sketch for contemplation. “All the lights changed, so we had to stop. What have you been doing? Has Mr Wilbraham been here?”
“No. We are to drive by-and-by, but he had letters to write this morning—he often has,” said Sylvia simply. “I think it a good thing that a man should have plenty to do,” she added, with the touch of decision which was now accentuating her truisms.
“There’s a discovery!” Teresa cried gaily, and then was smitten with compunction. She need not have minded.
“You don’t agree with me,” said Sylvia in the same tone, “because you don’t appreciate Walter. Of course, I understand him better; I understand him very well indeed. And I wish you wouldn’t call him Mr Wilbraham, Teresa. It sounds so funny with your own brother-in-law.”
“My dear! He isn’t my brother-in-law yet.”
“It’s just as if he were,” announced the girl calmly.
“Oh,” cried Teresa rashly, “but it isn’t! You know people who are engaged don’t always marry. They find out that they have different tastes, or that they don’t care enough, or—”
She stopped suddenly, wondering what force had laid bare her own fears.
Sylvia smiled pityingly.
“People are silly,” she said.
“And,” said the marchesa, almost breathlessly—“and you are never afraid?”
“Of course not. Why should I be?”
“Why should you be,” repeated Teresa, kissing her after a momentary pause, “when he loves you?”
“Of course he loves me. He told me so,” said Sylvia conclusively.
“What has come to me that I shouldn’t be content to let well alone?” her sister asked herself. “It would be another matter if I had seen anything to make me uneasy. But I haven’t. No, I haven’t,” she repeated determinedly. Then her eager face brightened again. “Sylvia,” she said, “I’ll try to call him Walter. If I choke, you won’t mind?”
“Why should you choke?” said Sylvia, opening her eyes in surprise.
When she and Wilbraham were driving along the Via Appia that afternoon, for Wilbraham as yet could not walk without difficulty, she told him, with satisfaction and a good deal of emphasis, of Teresa’s promise.
“Yes,” he returned indifferently. But he began to fidget. He often fidgeted over Sylvia’s careful explanations.
“Because, you see, it really seemed so strange that you two should not call each other by your Christian names! If you’re not related, you’re going to be related, quite nearly related, and then I don’t see how you could help it. Do you?”
“No.”
“No. Exactly. That’s what I said to Teresa,”—Sylvia’s voice was very low and confidential—“I said I thought it sounded so funny for her to call her brother-in-law Mr Wilbraham, and she said you weren’t her brother-in-law yet.”
“And what,” he asked, forcing himself into interest, “did you answer to that obvious fact?”
“Of course I said it was all the same, and she said that sometimes people who were engaged did not marry, and I said that people were very silly. So they are, aren’t they?”
There was a twist, a muttered exclamation by her side, and Sylvia turned anxiously.
“Does your leg hurt you so much to-day?”
“Yes—no!” The words sounded like a groan, but Wilbraham recovered himself at once. “You’re too good to me, Sylvia, and I’m—a brute.”
She laughed happily.
“I wonder why you all like to call yourselves names? You and granny and Teresa so often do it, and I never do. But I’m so glad you’re not worse. I don’t think you could hide it away from me if you were. Well, and don’t you want to hear a little more what Teresa said?”
“I don’t think I do just now,” he said desperately. “I want you to look at the mountains. Stand up, and you’ll see them better.”
She always did what he suggested.
“How pretty!” she commented.
“And the tombs,” he hurried on. “I expect you can see a good many behind you.”
“It was so funny of them to like to have their tombs out here, and spread all about. People are generally buried together, as they should be,” said Sylvia disapprovingly, as she dropped again by Wilbraham’s side. “Don’t let us talk about the tombs, dear. We were having such a comfortable chat, and I do so like it! Now, are you sure your leg is quite comfortable?”
“Quite,” he returned, trying hard to keep impatience out of his voice.
“Quite.”
“That’s right.” She nestled closer to him, and he hated himself for the small irritation with which he always received her intonation of the two words, the first pitched on a higher key than the second. “I like coming out here, where no one can interrupt us.”
“It’s a wonderful place.”
“Because we’re here together, isn’t it?”
“Dear, you mustn’t expect me to say too many pretty things.”
“Of course not,” said the girl simply.
“You’ve said so many, and of course I remember them all. I’m not so silly as to expect you to go on. Whatever you say and do I like.”
“Don’t,” he said with unusual vehemence, “don’t set me up on a pedestal, whatever you do! I’m clay. Poor clay, too.”
“Clay?” She looked bewildered.
A rush of irritable shame was upon him, a nightmare weight as if all that he did at this time was false. It had touched him before, but he had succeeded in arguing with it, for to a man of his self-contained character it was easy to argue that, after so many precautions and limitations, it was impossible he should have given himself away. It was easy to argue, and he was able to bring incontrovertible reasons to support his case. The reasons had not changed. Sylvia was the same: as sweet-tempered, as amenable, as pretty as ever. The same, the same, the same—why, there lay the sting! If in three or four weeks this sameness, this insipidity, was making him sick to death, why, what—oh, God, what would a whole married lifetime do? She had not a thought which branched in a wrong direction, but he said to himself bitterly that he did not believe she owned anything which could be dignified with the name of thought; she only made scrappy little applications of other people’s ideas when they reached her in their simplest forms. His intellect was judging, despising her, scourging him with the belief that he had chosen a fool for his wife, mocking his vanity, his hopes, dropping him into depths of despair. Time, which brings healings for most sorrows, looked his worst enemy. Time—Eternity—and Sylvia!