She follows him crestfallenly, asking herself whether she has answered amiss here also. She does not trust herself to any comment upon the interior.
Byng and Cecilia are standing before the high altar, from over which a mosaic Madonna stiffly beams upon them; and as the other couple approach them, Burgoyne hears the words "drawing-room grate" issue from his future sister-in-law's lips.
"Bravo, Cis!" he says in a dry aside; "you are getting on nicely! I did not think that you would have reached the drawing-room grate till to-morrow."
To avoid intruding further on her delicate confidences, and also to escape from two Americans, who are nasally twanging Hare and Horner at each other, varied by trips into Baedeker, he passes into a side chapel made famous by one of the loveliest tombs that ever feigned to simulate in marble death's ugliness. The Yankee voices are high and shrill, but they had need to be higher and shriller still before they could break the slumber of him whose resting-place Jim has invaded in his flight from Cecilia and New York. Was ever rest so beautiful as this of the young sleeper? A priest he was, nay cardinal, and youthful and lovely and chaste! and now in how divine a slumber is he lapt! But how should that four hundred years' slumber not be divine, watched by such a gentle Mary-mother as is watching his; smiling as if to tell him that he does well to sleep, that sleep is better than waking, that death is better than life! There is a sunken look about his fair eyelids, as if he had gone through suffering to his rest; and his reposeful hands are thin; but below him, as he lies in his spotless marble tranquillity, upon his sarcophagus, the rose garlands wave in lovely frieze, and the riotous horses rear and plunge in fulness of life.
Burgoyne has not perceived that Amelia did not follow him. She has, in point of fact, remained in the body of the church, immersed in her guide-book, steadily working through the marble screen and pulpit, and still five good minutes off the side chapel, in which her lover stands in so deeply brown a study, that he is not aware of the intrusion upon his solitude of two women, until he is roused with a leap by the voice of one of them addressing—not him, of whose presence she is obviously as unaware as was he of hers, until this moment—but her companion.
"Oh, mother! am I not a fool, at my age, too? but I cannot help it, it makes me cry so!"
Burgoyne does not need the evidence of his eyes. His ears and his startled heart have enough assured him whose are the tears called forth by that indeed most touching effigy at which he himself has been so pensively staring.
The mother's answer is inaudible; and then again comes the voice of Elizabeth Le Marchant, tearful and vibrating.
"You know I have seen so few beautiful things in my life, I shall get used to them presently; it is only sheer happiness that makes me——"
She stops abruptly, having evidently discovered for herself, or been made aware by her mother of his vicinity; and even if she had not done so, he feels that he must lose no time in announcing himself.