In a moment her commands are obeyed; in another moment Byng has sprung out of the second carriage and is standing beside her. The door of Byng's vehicle is stiff apparently, and a sardonic smile breaks over the elder man's face as he hears the noise of the resounding kicks administered to it by the younger one's impatient foot. But he need not have been in such a hurry—no one interferes with his office of rifling the hedge of its creamy and coral bugles.
Burgoyne gets out of the carriage; but it is only to walk to the other one and assume Byng's vacated seat.
"Are you going to change places?" Amelia has asked rather chapfallenly as he leaves her; and he has given her hand a hasty pressure, and answered affectionately—
"It will not be for long, dear; but you know"—with an expressive glance, and what he rather too sanguinely hopes looks like a smile in the direction of the flower-gatherers—"fair play is a jewel!"
If his departure from the one vehicle is deplored, it is not welcomed at the other. Cecilia asks the same question as her sister had put, though the intonation is different.
"Are you going to change places?"—adding—"do not you think we did very well as we were?"
But probably he is too much occupied in wrestling with the stiff door to hear her, for he makes no answer beyond getting in. The only reward that he receives for his piece of self-sacrifice is a rapturous look of gratitude from Byng, when he perceives the changed position of his affairs, and that recompense Jim had far rather have been without.
They are off again. Being now second in the little procession, Burgoyne has but meagre and difficult views of the first; but now and again, when the road describes an acuter angle than usual, he can by turning his whole body, under pretext of admiring the view, snatch a glimpse of all three occupants leaning their heads sociably together, evidently in bright light talk. After all, he had deceived himself. It is he and not Amelia who had made her shy. Even when he cannot see her, there come to his ears little wafts of laughter, in which her voice is mixed. He catches himself trying to recall whether she had laughed even once during the period of his being her companion. 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. Mrs. Le Marchant is obviously as ill at ease as was her daughter when in his fellowship, though in this case a little observation shows him that he counts for nothing in her discomfort of mind, but that she is watching the other half of the party with an anxiety as keen, if almost as covert, as his own. She is too well-bred indeed not to endeavour to keep up a decent show of conversation, but as neither of her companions makes any effort to second her, an ever-deepening silence falls upon them as they advance, nor, as the day grows older, is the weather calculated to exhilarate their spirits.
The sky's frown becomes more and more pronounced the higher they mount. Through a village nobly seated on its hilltop, but, like most Italian townlets, squalid enough on a nearer view—up and up—up and up—till they reach what were once groves of stately chestnuts, but where the hungry Tuscan axe has left nothing but twigs and saplings, but never a spreading tree; then on into the fir-woods, which are woods indeed, though even here the hatchet's cruel tooth has begun to bite. No sooner is their dark umbrage reached than the mist, that has been hanging with threatening lowness above the travellers' heads, comes down close, blinding, clinging like wet flannel, and as thick.
"Perhaps it will lift," Jim says, with a sort of dismal unlikely hopefulness as he strains his eyes, trying to look down the straight solemn fir aisles, with their files upon files of tall stems, that seem to be seen only as if through a thick gauze. Neither of his companions has the spirit necessary to echo the supposition. The road winds endlessly, steeper and steeper up through the mist. The tired horses step wearily, and the unfortunate pleasure-seekers are beginning to think that the muffled monotony of firs, of winding road, of painfully labouring horses, will never end, when the vetturino turns round with a smile on his fog-wet face, and says, "Vallombrosa!"