"I like Amelia," she says confidentially, "such a nice pillowy sort of woman; not too clever, and oh, Jim, poor soul, how fond she is of you!"
It must always be pleasant to hear that the one absolutely good thing which this life has to offer is lavishly heaped upon us by the person with whom we are to pass that life; and perhaps pleasure is the emotion evidenced by the silent writhe with which Jim receives this piece of information.
"Not, of course, that she told me so in so many words," continues his friend, perceiving that her speech is received in a silence that may mean disapproval of any intrusion into the sanctuary of his affections; "but one can see with half an eye: poor Amelia, she beamed all over when I said one or two little civil things about you! She worships the very ground you tread on!"
He writhes again. "I hope that that is one of your figures of speech," he answers constrainedly.
The not unnatural result of the tone in which he utters this sentence, no less than the words themselves, is to quench the fire of Mrs. Byng's benevolent eulogies; and, as she cannot at once hit upon another topic, and is by no means sure that her countenance does not betray the rather snubbed dismay produced by the reception of her amenities, she is not sorry when Jim presently leaves her. Being, however, of a very sanguine disposition, and seeing him a little later sitting peacefully on a garden-seat beside his fiancée, she hopes that her words, though not very handsomely received at the time, may bear fruit later for Amelia's benefit. "And he always was very undemonstrative," she adds to herself consolatorily. "Nobody would have guessed that he was delighted to see me this morning; and yet, of course, he was."
The sun is growing visibly lower, and the Ave Maria comes ringing solemnly from the city. The seat to which Jim has somewhat remorsefully led his lady-love is a stone bench, shaded by a honeysuckle bower, close to a fountain. The fountain is not playing now; but round about it first a marten wheels, dipping in the water the end of her fleet wings; then a little bat prematurely flits, for it is still broad daylight. Broad indeed and bounteous is the daylight of Italy. Around them is the lush unmown grass; full of homely field-flowers, buttercups, catch-flies, daisies, ragged robins, while from some bush near by a nightingale is pouring out all the infinite variety of her ravishing song. She says so many different things that one never can feel sure that one has heard all that she has to say. Jim leans back listening, with his hands behind his head, steeped in a half-voluptuous sadness. He is oppressed by the thought of Amelia's great love. Is the nightingale's splendid eloquence really the voice of the poor dumb passion beside him, lent to Amelia to plead her cause? The high-flown poetry of the idea fills his heart with an imaginative yearning kindness towards her. He is in the act of turning to face her, with a more lover-like speech on his lips than has hovered there for years, when Amelia herself anticipates him.
"And to think that it is only April!" she says, with an air of prosaic astonishment. "Last April we had four inches of snow on the front drive. It was when Cecilia had the mumps."
"When Cecilia had the mumps?" repeats Burgoyne in a rather dazed voice. "I did not know that Cecilia had ever had the mumps."
This is the form into which are frozen the love-words that the nightingale and the perfume of the Tuscan flowers and the Ave Maria had so nearly brought to his tongue. Had Amelia known what an unwonted burst of tenderness her unlucky reminiscence had choked, she would have regretted it probably with a good deal deeper bitterness than would many a woman with a happier gift of utterance. But she is blessedly ignorant of what Cecilia's mumps have robbed her, and presently again strikes athwart the nightingale's song with the placid remark:
"I like your friend very much; I think that she is a very nice woman."