There are not many hours of a summer's night during which the stir of life has ceased and has not yet reawaked in an Italian town, the talk and the tread and the mule bells, and the flutes of the voiceful people lasting on till near the small hours, and beginning again ere those hours have had strength to grow big. But yet there is a space of time when Florence lies silent, baring her beauty to the constellations alone; and under this unfamiliar and solemn and lovely aspect the two night-wanderers see her. They see her Campanile
"Commercing with the skies,"
with no distracting human bustle about her feet; they see her Perseus battling beneath her Loggia, and her San Giorgio standing wakeful at his post on Or san Michele. They see her scowling palace rows, her stealing river, and her spanning bridges—palaces out of which no head peeps, a river on which no boat oars, bridges upon which no horse-hoof rings. They have all her churches—Santa Croce, Arnolpho's great "Bride," that new Maria that is now four hundred years old or more, the humbly glorious San Marco—to themselves; all her treasure houses, all her memories, all her flower-embalmed air—for a few hours they possess them all. She is but a little city, this fair Firenze, and in these few hours they traverse her in her length and breadth, rambling aimlessly wherever Byng's feverishly miserable impulses lead them. Burgoyne offers no opposition to any of these, but accompanies his friend silently down slumbrous thoroughfare, or across sleeping Piazza, by Arno side, under colonnade or arch. It is all one to him; nor is he sensible of any fatigue, when at length, at about the hour when Byng had meant to have caught the early morning train, they return to the hotel, and the younger man, happily dead-beat at last, worn out with want of food, tears, and weariness, flings himself down, dressed, upon his bed, and instantly falls into a leaden sleep. Jim feels no desire, nor indeed any power of following his example. He is not easily tired, and his former life of travel and hardship has made him always willing to dispense with the—to him—unnecessary luxury of a bed; and, under ordinary circumstances, a night passed in the open air would have had an effect upon him rather exhilarating than otherwise. He has his bath, dresses, breakfasts, and then jumps into a fiacre, and has himself driven to the Anglo-Américain.
The day is so exactly the counterpart of its predecessor, in its even assured splendour, that Jim has a hazy feeling that they both make only one divided into two parts by the narrow dark blue ribbon of the exquisite brief night. When did yesterday end and to-day begin? As he is borne along, his memory, made more alert by sleeplessness, reproduces—merely, as it seems to him, the better to fill him with pain and remorse—the different states of mind in which he has passed over the often trodden ground. Here, at the street corner, what a nausea had come over him at the thought of the interest he would have to feign in those humdrum details, so dear to Amelia's soul, of their future ménage, with all its candle-end economies and depressing restrictions. Here, in the church shadow, how he had tried to lash himself up into a more probable semblance of pleasure in her expected and dreaded caresses. There seems to be scarcely an inch of the way where he has not had some harsh or weary thought of her; he is thankful when the brief transit, that has appeared to him so long, is over. And yet the change is only from the sharp sting of recollected unkindness to the dull bruising ache of anticipated ill. A garçon is sweeping out the salon, for the hour is not much beyond eight, so Jim goes into the dreary little dining-room, where two places are laid with coffee-cups and rolls. Only two. And, though he knows that nothing short of a miracle could have already restored Amelia so completely as to enable her to come down to breakfast, yet the ocular demonstration of the fact that her place is and will be empty, strikes a chill to his boding heart. He is presently joined by Cecilia, whose carelessly-dressed hair, heavy eyelids, and tired puffy face, sufficiently show that not to her, any more than to himself has night brought
"Sweet child sleep, the filmy-eyed."
"How fresh and cool you are!" she cries, with an almost reproachful intonation. "Do not look at me!"—covering her face with her hot hands—"I am not fit to be seen; but what does that matter? What do I care?"—beginning to cry—"Oh, she is so bad! We have spent such a dreadful night! As I tell you, I am a shocking sick-nurse; I never know what to do; I lose my head completely; and she has been so odd—she has been talking such gibberish!"
"Delirious?"
"Yes, I suppose that is what you would call it. I never saw anybody delirious before, so I do not know. I have seen Sybilla in hysterics, but I never believed that they were real—I always thought that a bucket of water would bring her round."
As a general rule, Jim may be counted upon for cordial co-operation in any hit directed against Sybilla, but now he is too spiritless even to notice it.
"I was so frightened," continues Cecilia; "it is not cheerful being all alone at the dead of night with a person talking such nonsense as she was. Amelia, of all people, to talk nonsense! I could not quite make out what it was about, but it seemed to have more or less reference to you. She was begging you to forgive her for something she had done, as far as I could gather; some treat she had prepared for you, and that you had not liked. Have you the least idea what she could have meant?"