Alas! A Novel

by Rhoda Broughton

To Mrs. Byng, who is of almost as enjoying a nature as her son, and whose spirits have been raised to a pitch even higher than their usual one, by the disproof of her presentiments, it is all one where she goes, so that she is taken somewhere, to see something. They stare up at the big young David, and stand before Fra Angelico's ineffably happy Paradiso, which yet brings the tears to the looker's eyes, perhaps out of sheer envy of the little blissful saints dancing and frolicking so gaily, or pacing so softly in the assured joy of the heavenly country. They look at Botticelli's "Spring," fantastic wanton, with her wildly-flowered gown, and her lapful of roses. The room in which she and her joyous mates stand, with their odd smiles, is one of the smaller of the gallery. It is rather a narrow one, and has an open window, giving upon a little court, where, in a neglected garden-close, wallflowers are growing, and sending in their familiar perfume. The sweet Francia saints in the picture hung on the wall directly opposite, and the rapt Madonna, must surely smell them. If they do not, it must be because a young couple, he and she, who are leaning out in their eagerness to enjoy it, have intercepted all the homely fragrance. Jim's eyes are still on the "Spring," and he is thinking half absently how little kinship she has with the goitred green women, whom his nineteenth-century disciples present to the confiding British public as representatives of Sandro Botticelli's manner, when his attention is diverted by hearing the voice of Mrs. Byng at his elbow addressing him in an excited tone:

"Why, there's Willy! Do not you see? There! leaning out of that window, and who—who is the lady whom he has with him?"

Jim looks quickly in the direction indicated, and at once recognises a slender gray figure which to-day has not assumed its white holiday gown. Elizabeth, whom he had been pitifully picturing lying heart-struck on a sofa in the seclusion of her own little entresol, probably with lowered blinds and tear-smarting eyes, is leaning on the window-ledge with her back to the pictures—she whom he had always credited with so delicate a sensibility for Art, with her back to the pictures, as if the live picture which Byng's eager face presents to her pleases her better. A sense of indignation at having been tricked out of his compassion—who had ever seemed to need it less than the suave little figure about whose blonde head a Tuscan sunbeam, stolen through the easement, is amorously playing?—makes him forget to answer the question addressed to him, until it is repeated in a still more urgent key.

"Who is she? Who can she be? Have not you an idea? He has not seen us! Had not we better creep quietly away? Most likely he would rather not meet me; I could not bear to make him look foolish!"

The suggestion that there can be anything calculated to put Willy to the blush in being discovered in conversation with Miss Le Marchant has the effect of giving Burgoyne rapidly back his power of speech.

"What nonsense!" he cries almost rudely; "I wish you would not let your imagination run away with you so, and of course I know who she is; she is an—an acquaintance of mine. I—I presented Willy to her; she is Miss Le Marchant."

"Miss Le Who?" repeats the mother eagerly, catching the name imperfectly, as we usually do a name that is unfamiliar to us, proving how much of imagination and memory must go to eke out all our hearing—"an acquaintance of yours, is she? Oh, then, of course" (drawing a long breath of relief), "she is all right."

"All right!" echoes Jim, with an unconscious snappishness of tone, greater than he would have employed in defence of the reputation of any other lady of his acquaintance, probably because, ever since the day when he stood an unwilling eaves-dropper by that well on Bellosguardo, a hideous low voice has been whispering to his own sick heart that perhaps she is not "all right!" "All right! of course she is all right."

"But she is lovely!" cries Mrs. Byng, not paying much heed to the testy emphasis of her companion's asseveration, and continuing to stare at the unwitting girl; "what a dear little face! but," the alarm returning again into her voice, "is it possible that she is here alone with him? If so, of course she is American. Oh! do not say that she is American."

"Of course she is not," answers Burgoyne, half laughing at the plaintive intensity of this last appeal; "of course she is all that there is of most English, and there is her mother, as large as life, within a yard and a half of her; there, do not you see? looking at the Ghirlandajo."