He shudders. Must the accursed suburb pursue him even here?
"Let us go into the church," he says, in a tone that a little dulls his
companion's buoyancy.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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