"That is quite true," replies Cecilia, one of whose most salient merits is an extreme unreadiness to be affronted, wiping her eyes as she speaks, "and I have no luck; such promising things turn up, and then come to nothing. Now, that clergyman the other day, whom we met at the Villa Careggi—such a pleasant gentlemanlike man—he was on the look-out for a wife, he told me so himself, and I know so much about the working of a parish, and next day he was off, Heaven knows where!"
Jim gives a slight shudder.
"I do not think you had any great loss in him," he says hastily; then, seeing her surprised air, "I mean, you know, that it is always said that a man is a better judge of another man than a woman is, and I did not like his looks; give us time, and we will do better for you than that."
Cecilia can no longer accuse her future relation of any slackness in the matter of expeditions. There is something of fever in the way in which he arrives each morning, armed with some new plan for the day, giving no one any peace until his project is carried out. 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 a soft summer morning, with not much sun. Up, past the villas and gardens, where the Banksia roses and wistarias are rioting over wall, and berceau and pergola, climbing even the tall trees. Round the very head of one young poplar two rose-trees—a yellow and a white one—are flinging their arms; flowered so lavishly that hardly a pin's point could be put between the blossoms. Up and up, a white wall on either hand. The dust lies a foot thick on the road; thick too on the monthly roses, just breaking into full pink flush; thick on themselves as the endless mulecarts come jingling down the hill with bells and red tassels, and a general air of what would be jollity were not that feeling so given the lie to by the poor jaded, suffering beasts. Up and up, till they leave stone walls and villas and oliveyards behind them, and are away among the mountains. At a very humble little house that has no air of an inn they leave the carriage, and climb up a rocky road, and through a perfumed pine-wood, to where the Trappist Monastery stands, in its perfect silence and isolation, on its hilltop, looking over its fir-woods at the ranges of the Apennines, lying one behind the other in the stillness of the summer-day; looking to distant Florence, misty and indistinct in her Arno plain; looking to Fiesole, dwarfed to a molehill's dimensions.
"I am told that one of the brothers is an Englishman; I did not hear his name, but he is certainly English," says Cecilia, as they mount the shallow, grass-grown steps to the monastery door. "If I send up word that I am a fellow-countrywoman, perhaps he will come out and speak to me; I am sure that it would be a very nice change for him, poor fellow!"
And it is the measure of the amount of Cecilia's acquaintance with the rules of the Order, that it is only half in jest that she makes the suggestion. But she does not repeat it to the lay-brother who stands, civil yet prohibitory, at the top of the flight, and who, in answer to Burgoyne's halting questions as to where they may go, politely answers that they may go anywhere—anywhere, bien entendu, outside. So they wander aimlessly away. They push open a rickety gate, and passing an old dog, barking angry remonstrances at them from the retirement of a barrel, step along a grassy path that leads they know not whither. Two more young lay-brothers meet them, with their hands full of leopard's-bane flowers, which they have been gathering, probably to deck their altar with.
Amelia has passed her hand through Jim's arm—since his late increased kindness to her she has been led to many more little freedoms with him than she had hitherto permitted herself—and though she is very careful not to lean heavily or troublesomely upon him, yet the slight contact of her fingers keeps him reminded that she is there. Perhaps it is as well, since to-day he is conscious of such a strange tendency to forget everything, past, present, and to come. Has one of the monks' numb hands been laid upon his heart to lull it into so frozen a quiet? To-day he feels as if it were absolutely impossible to him to experience either pleasure or pain; as if to hold Elizabeth in his own arms, or see her in Byng's, would be to him equally indifferent. His apathy in this latter respect is to be put to the test sooner than he expects. Not indeed that Elizabeth is lying in Byng's arms—it would be a gross misrepresentation to say so, she being, on the contrary, most decorously poised on a camp-stool—least romantic of human resting places—when they come suddenly upon her and him in the course of their prowl round the inhospitable walls. She is sitting on her camp-stool, and he is lying on his face in the grass, just not touching her slim feet.
The advancing party perceive the couple advanced upon before the latter are aware of their nearness; long enough for the former to realize how very much de trop they will be, yet not long enough to enable them to escape unnoticed. Jim becomes aware of the very second at which Amelia recognises the unconscious pair, by an involuntary pinch of her fingers upon his arm, which a moment later she hastily drops. His own first feeling on catching sight of them—no, not his very first—his very first is as if someone had run a darning-needle into his heart—but almost his first is to shout out to them in loud warning:
"Be on your guard! we are close to you!"