Elizabeth.
CHAPTER I.
"It was a chosen plot of fertile land,
Amongst wide waves set like a little nest,
As if it had by Nature's cunning hand
Been choycely picked out from all the rest,
And laid forth for ensample of the best.
No daintie flower or herb that grows on ground,
No arborete with painted blossomes drest,
And smelling sweete, but there it might be found
To bud out faire, and throwe her sweet smell all around."
Time has stepped upon another year; not much more than stepped, since that year's first month is not yet out; and Burgoyne has stepped upon another continent before we again rejoin him. There are few, if any of us, who, in the course of our lives, have not had occasion to wish that certain spaces in those lives might be represented by the convenient asterisks that cover them in books; but this is unfortunately impossible to Jim, as to the rest of us; and he has fought through each minute and its minuteful of pain (happily no minute can contain two minutefuls) during the seven months that have elapsed since we parted from him. At first those minutes held nothing but pain; he could not tell you which of them it was that first admitted within its little compass any alien ingredient; and he was shocked and remorseful when he discovered that any such existed. But that did not alter the fact. He has not sold his guns; on the contrary, he has bought two new ones, and he has visited his old friends, the Rockies. Since Amelia's funeral—immediately after which he again quitted England—he has seen no member of his dead betrothed's family, nor has he held any intercourse, beyond the exchange of an infrequent letter, with Mrs. Byng or her son. From the thought of both these latter he shrinks, with a distaste equal in degree, though inspired by different causes. From Mrs. Byng, because he knows that she was aware of his weariness of his poor love—that poor love whom, had he but known it, he had so short a time to be weary of; and from Byng, because, despite the ocean of sorrow, of remorse, of death that rolls in its hopelessness between him and her, he cannot even yet think, without a bitter pang, of the woman who had inspired the young man's hysterical tears and sincere, though silly, suicidal impulses. Jim took that pang with him to the Rockies, stinging, even through the overlying load of his other and acknowledged burden of repentant ache and loss, and he has brought it back with him. He packs it into his portmanteau as much as a matter of course as he does his shirts—in fact more so, for he has once inadvertently left his shirts behind, but the pang never.
It is the 20th day of January; here, in England, the most consistently detestable month in the year. The good Januaries of a British octogenarian's life might be counted upon the thumbs of that octogenarian's hands. The favoured inhabitants of London have breakfasted and lunched by gaslight; have groped their way along their dirty streets through a fog of as thick and close a fabric as the furs gathered round their chilled throats; have, even within their houses, seen each other dimly across a hideous yellow vapour that kills their expensive flowers, and makes their unwilling palm-trees droop in homesick sadness. There is no fog about the Grand Hotel, Mustapha Supérieur, Algiers; no lightest blur of mist to dim the intensity of the frame of green in which its white face is set. It is not so very grand, despite its unpromising big name, as it stands high aloft on the hillside, looking out over the bay and down on the town, looking down more immediately upon tree-tops, and on the Governor's summer palace. It is an old Moorish house, enlarged into an hotel, with little arched windows sunk in the thick walls, with red-tiled floors, and balconies, with low white balustrades of pierced brick, up which the lush creepers climb and wave—yes, climb and wave on this 20th of January.
From the red-floored balcony over the creepers, between the perennial leafage of the unchanging trees, one can daily descry in the azure bay the tiny puff of smoke that tells that the mail steamer from Marseilles has safely breasted the Gulf of Lyons, threaded her away among the Isles, and brought her freight of French and English and American news to the hands and ears of the various expectant nationalities. To-day, blown by a gently prosperous wind, the boat is punctual. It is the Eugène Perrère, the pet child of the Transatlantic Company, the narrow and strong-engined little vessel which is wont to accomplish the transit in a period of time less by an hour than her brother craft. To-day she has brought but one guest to the Grand Hotel, who, having left the bulk of his luggage to be struggled for by Arabs, and by the hotel-porter at the Douane, arrives at the modest Moorish-faced hostelry, having, with British mercifulness, walked up the break-neck green lane that leads from the steep main road in order to spare the wretched little galled, pumped horse that has painfully dragged him and his bag from the pier. He has travelled straight through from London—fifty-five hours without a pause—so that it is not to be wondered at that his thoughts turn affectionately towards a wash and a change of raiment. Having extracted from the case of unclaimed letters in the bar two or three that bear the address of James Burgoyne, Esq., he is ushered to his room by the civil little fussy Italian landlord, who, in order to enhance his appreciation of the apartment provided for him, assures him, in voluble bad French, that only yesterday he had been obliged to turn away a party of eight.
It is not until refreshed by a completed toilette—and who can overrate the joy of a bath after a journey?—that it occurs to him to look out of window. His room possesses two. One faces the hill's rich-clothed steepness, and a row of orange-trees covered with fruit, and at whose feet tumbled gold balls lie. But the dusk is falling fast, and he can only dimly see the prodigality of green in which the modest Grand Hotel lies buried. The other window looks out—but a very little way lifted above it, for the room is on the ground floor—upon the red-tiled terrace. It is growing very dim too. At the present moment it is empty and deserted, but the chairs studded over its surface in talkative attitudes, as if sociable twos and threes had drawn together in chat, tell plainly that earlier in the day it had been frequented, and that several people had been sitting out on it. Jim's London memories are too fresh upon him for him not to find something ludicrous in the idea of sitting out of doors on the 20th of January. How pleasant it would have been to do so to-day in Hyde Park! He turns back to the table with a smile at the idea, and, taking out a writing-case, sits down to scribble a line. Jim's correspondence is neither a large nor an interesting one. On the present occasion, his note is merely one of reminder as to some trifling order, addressed to the landlord of his London lodgings. It does not take him ten minutes to pen, and when it is finished he turns to have one final look out of window before leaving the room. How quickly the dark has fallen! The empty chairs show indistinct outlines, and the heavy green trees have turned black. But the terrace is no longer quite empty. A footfall sounds—coming slowly along it. One of the waiters, no doubt, sent to fetch in the chairs; but, no! an overworked Swiss waiter, hurried by electric bells, and with an imminent swollen table table d'hôte upon his burdened mind, never paced so slowly, nor did anything male ever step so lightly.
It must be a woman; and even now her white gown makes a patch of light upon the dark background of the quickly on-coming night. A white gown on the 20th of January! Again that pleasing sense of the ludicrous tickles his fancy. She must be one of the persons who lately occupied the empty chairs, and have come in search of some object left behind. He recollects having noticed an open book lying on the low parapet. She has a white gown; but what more can be predicated of her in this owl-light? The radiance from the candle behind him makes a small illuminated square upon the terrace, falling between the bars of the window through which the Moorish ladies once darted their dark and ineffectual ogles.
Having apparently accomplished her errand, the white-gowned figure obligingly steps into the illumined square, and still more obligingly lifts her face and looks directly up at him. It is clear that the action is dictated only by the impulse which prompts all seeing creatures to turn lightwards, and no gleam of recognition kindles in the eyes that are averted almost as soon as directed towards him. Placed as he is, with his back to the light, his own mother could not have distinguished his features; and, after her one careless glance, the white-gowned lady turns away and disappears again into the gloom. She has one more oasis of light to traverse before she reaches the hotel porch, just discernible, gleaming in its whitewash, at the far end of the terrace; just one more lit window throws its chequered lustre on the tiles. He presses his face against the bars of his own lattice, and holds his breath until she has reached and crossed that tell-tale patch. Her traversing of it does not occupy the tenth part of a second, and yet it puts the seal upon what he already knows.
Five minutes later he is standing before the case, hung on the wall of the entrance hall, which contains the names and numbers of the rooms of the visitors, eagerly scanning them with eye and finger. He scans them in vain. The name he seeks is not among them. Had it not been for that five minutes' delay—that five minutes of stunned and stupid staring out into the dark after her—he must have met her in the hall. He is turning away in baffled disappointment, when the little host again accosts him.
Monsieur must excuse him, but he must explain that the list of visitors that monsieur has been so obliging as to peruse is by no means a full or correct one. To-morrow morning he shall have the pleasure of placing beneath monsieur's eye a proper and complete list of the visitors; but, in point of fact, there has been such a press of business, he has been daily obliged to turn away such large and comme il faut families from the door, that time has been inadequate for all his obligations, which must be his excuse.
Burgoyne accepts his apologies in silence. It would seem easy enough to inquire whether among the English visitors there are any of the name of Le Marchant; but the question sticks in his throat. It is seven months since he has pronounced that name aloud, and he appears to have lost the faculty of doing it. The host comes to his aid.
Is there perhaps a family—a friend whom monsieur expects to meet? But monsieur only shakes his head, and moves away. He has ascertained that the table d'hôte is at seven, and it is now half-past five. He has, therefore, only an hour and a half of suspense ahead of him. She will surely appear at the table d'hôte? But will she?
As the hour of seven approaches, ever graver and graver doubts upon this head assail his mind, both when he reflects upon how much it is a habit with the better sort of travelling English to dine in their own rooms, and also when he calls to mind the extremely retired character of Elizabeth's and her mother's habits. Even if she does appear in the public room—and the more he thinks of it, the less probable, it seems—it is most unlikely that he will be placed near her. But he might possibly intercept her in the hall on her way to the salle à manger.
In pursuance of this project he takes up his position before the bell, tingling so lengthily as to reach the ears of the deafest and most distant, has summoned the company together; and it is several minutes before enough are assembled to justify, according to the etiquette prevailing at the Grand Hotel, a move to the dining-room. Men, at that hotel, although in a very distinct minority—as when, indeed, are they not?—are yet not quite the same choice rarities as at some of the Swiss and Italian ones. But the young of the one sex are perennially interesting to the other; and Burgoyne, as "the new man," is an object of some attention to half a dozen young girls, and even to two or three sprightly-hearted old ones. His eyes are eagerly shining as each opening door, each step on the staircase, raises his hopes afresh. But neither door nor staircase yields the form he seeks, and he is at last obliged, under penalty of exciting remark, reluctantly to follow the band that go trooping hungrily down a flight of steps to the whitewashed dining-room. He finds himself placed between a bouncing widow who is too much occupied in fondling an old valetudinarian on her other side to have much notice to spare for him; and a sparkling creature of five-and-thirty in a red shirt, who, before dinner is over, confides to him that she fears she has not got a nice nature, and that she cannot get on at home because her mother and the servants insist upon having cold supper instead of dinner on Sunday. When she tells him that she has not a nice nature, he absently replies that he is very sorry for it, and her confidence about the Sunday supper provokes from him only the extremely stupid observation that he supposes she does not like cold meat. It is a wonder that he can answer her even as rationally as he does. It is more by good luck than good management that there is any sense at all in his responses. And yet he may as well give his full attention to his neighbour, for now every place at the E-shaped table is filled up, and, travel as his eye may over those who sit, both at the long and cross-boards, it fails to discover any face in the least resembling that which lifted itself from the dusk terrace into his candle-light.
Was it her little ghost, then, that he had seen, her dainty delicate ghost? But why should it appear to him here? Why haunt these unfamiliar shores? The only places in the room which still remain untenanted are those at a round table laid for three, in the embrasure of a Moorish window, not very distant from where he sits. On first catching sight of it his hopes had risen, only immediately to fall again, as he realizes that it is destined for a trio. Why should three places be laid for Elizabeth and her mother?
With a disheartened sigh he tums to his neighbour, intending to put to her a question as to the habitual occupants of the empty table; but she is apparently affronted at his tepidness, and presents to him only the well-frizzled back of her expensive head. He is reduced to listening to the conversation of his vis-à-vis, an elderly couple, who have been upon some excursion, and are detailing their experiences to those around them. They have been to Blidah apparently, and seen real live monkeys hopping about without organs or red coats on real palm trees. He is drawn into the conversation by a question addressed to him as to his journey.
It is five minutes before he again looks towards the table in the window. His first glance reveals that the three persons for whom it is destined have at length arrived and taken their seats. Idiot that he is! he had forgotten Mr. Le Marchant's existence.
"They are nice-looking people, are they not?" says his neighbour in the red shirt, apparently repenting of her late austerity, and following the direction of his eyes; "but they give themselves great airs; nobody in the hotel is good enough for them to speak to. M. Cipriani evidently thinks them people of importance; he makes twice as much fuss about them as he does about anyone else. Look at him now!"
And in effect the obsequious little host may be seen hanging anxiously over the newcomers, evidently asking them with solicitous civility whether the not particularly appetizing fish (the strongest point of the blue Mediterranean does not lie in her fishes, of which some are coarse, some tasteless, and some even lie under the suspicion of having poisonous qualities)—whether it is not to their liking.
At something that M. Cipriani says they all laugh. Elizabeth, indeed, throws back her little head, and shows all her perfect teeth, in a paroxysm of the most genuine mirth. It gives Burgoyne a sort of shock to see her laugh.
Not a day, scarcely an hour, has passed since he last saw her in which he has not pictured her as doing or suffering, or living through something; he has never pictured her laughing. It seems to him now but a moment since he was reading her broken-hearted, tear-stained note; since he was seeing Byng grovelling in all the utter collapse of his ungoverned grief on the floor of the little Florentine entresol. What business has she to laugh? And how unchanged she is! How much less outwardly aged than he himself is conscious of being! Sitting as she now is, in her simple white tea-gown, with one slight elbow rested on the table, her eyes all sparkling with merriment and laughter, bringing into prominence that one enchanting dimple of hers, she does not look more than twenty. But a few moments later he forgives her even her dimple. However empressé may be the little landlord, he has to move away after a time; and the merriment moves away, too, out of Elizabeth's face. Jim watches it decline, through the degrees of humorous disgust, as she pushes the coarse white fish about her plate, without tasting it (she was always a very delicate eater), into a settled gravity. And now that she is grave he sees that she is aged, almost as much as he himself, after all. Her eyes had ever had the air of having shed in their time many tears; but since he last saw her, it is now evident to him that the tale of those tears has been a good deal added to.
There is no pleasing him. He was angry with her when he thought her gay, and now he quarrels with her for looking sad. As if, in her unconsciousness of his neighbourhood, she was yet determined to give him no cause of complaint, she presently again lays aside her sorrowful looks, and, drawing her chair confidentially nearer to her mother's, makes some remark of an evidently comic nature upon the company into her ear.
They stoop their heads together—what friends they always were, she and her mother!—and again the blue twinkle comes into her eyes; the dimple's little pitfall is dug anew in her white cheek. Was there ever such an April creature? Mr. Le Marchant appears to take no part in the jokes; he goes on eating his dinner silently, and his back, which is turned towards Burgoyne, looks morose.
How is it that Elizabeth's roving eye has not yet hit upon himself? He sees presently that the cause lies in the fact of her look alighting upon old and known objects of entertainment, rather than going in search of new ones. But it must sooner or later embrace him in its range. The fond fat widow beside him must surely be one of her favourites, and, in point of fact, as he feverishly watches to see the inevitable moment of recognition arrive, he perceives that Miss Le Marchant and her mother are delightedly—though not so openly as to be patent to the rest of the room—observing her. And then comes the expected careless glance at him, and the no less expected transformation. Her elbows have been carelessly resting on the table, and she has just been pressing her laughing lips against her lightly-joined hands to conceal their merriment. In an instant he sees the right hand go out in a silent desperate clutch at her mother's, and the next second he knows that she also has seen him. They both stare helplessly at him—at least, the one at him, and the other beyond him! How well he remembers that look of hers over his shoulder in search of someone else. But yet it is not the old look, for that was one of hope and red expectation. Is there any hope or expectation lurking even under the white dread of this one? His jealous heart is afraid quite to say no to this question, and yet an indisputable look of relief spreads over her face as she ascertains that he is alone. She even collects herself enough to give him a tiny inclination of the head—an example followed by her mother; but they are, in both cases, so tiny as to be unperceived, save by the person to whom they are addressed.
He would not have been offended by the minuteness of their salutations, even had he not divined that it was dictated by a desire—however futile—to conceal the fact of his presence from their companion. His heart goes out in all the profundity of his former pity towards them, as he sees how entirely that one glance at him (for she does not look again in his direction) has dried the fountain of Elizabeth's poor little jests; of how white and grave and frightened, and even shrunk, his mere presence has made her. Now that they have detected him, good breeding, and even humanity, forbid his continuing any longer his watch upon them. The better to set them at ease he turns the back of his head towards their table, and compels the reluctant widow to relinquish her invalid booty for fully ten minutes in his favour. Perhaps when Elizabeth can see only the back of his head she may resume her jokes. But all the same he knows that, for her, there will be no more mirth to-day.
"That is what they always do!" cries a voice on Burgoyne's left hand—the voice of his other neighbour, who begins to think that his attention has been usurped quite long enough by her plump rival. "That is what they always do—come long after dinner has begun, and go out long before it has ended. Such swagger!"
There is a tinge of exasperation in both words and voice, nor is the cause far to seek.
The table in the window is again empty. In the meantime the "swaggering" Elizabeth is clinging tremblingly about her mother's neck in the privacy of their own little salon. The absence of the husband and father for the moment in the smoking-room has removed the irksome restraint from both the poor women.
"Did you see him?" asks Elizabeth breathlessly, as soon as the door is safely closed upon them, flinging herself down upon her knees beside Mrs. Le Marchant, who has sunk into a chair, and cowering close to her as if for shelter. "What is he doing here? Why has he come? When first I caught sight of him I thought that of course—" She breaks off, sobbing; "and when I saw that he was alone I was relieved; but I was disappointed too! Oh, I must be a fool—a bad fool—but I was disappointed! Oh, mammy! mammy! how seeing him again brings it all back!"
"Do not cry, dear child! do not cry!" answers Mrs. Le Marchant apprehensively; though the voice in which she gives the exhortation is shaking too. "Your father will be in directly; and you know how angry——"
"I will not! I will not!" cries Elizabeth, trying, with her usual extreme docility, to swallow her tears; "and I do not show it much when I have been crying; my eyes do not mind it as much as most people's; I suppose"—with a small rainy smile—"because they are so used to it!"
"Perhaps he will not stay long," murmurs the mother, dropping a fond rueful kiss on the prone blonde head that lies on her knees; "perhaps if we are careful we may avoid speaking to him."
"But I must speak to him," breaks in the girl, lifting her head, and panting; "I must ask him; I must find out; why, we do not even know whether Willy is dead or alive!"
"He is not dead," rejoins the elder woman, with melancholy common-sense; "if he had been, we should have seen it in the papers; and, besides, why should he be? Grief does not kill; nobody, Elizabeth, is better able to attest that than you and I."
Elizabeth is now sitting on the floor, her hands clasped round her knees.
"He is aged," she says presently; and this time it is evident that the pronoun refers to Burgoyne.
Mrs. Le Marchant assents.
"He must have cared more for that poor creature than we gave him credit for. Get up, darling; dry your eyes, and sit with your back to the light; here comes your father!"
CHAPTER II.
One of the reasons, though not the sole or even the main one, of Burgoyne's visit to Algiers is that the Wilson family are wintering there. And yet he dreads the meeting with them inexpressibly. When they last parted, immediately after having stood together round Amelia's open grave, they had all been at a high pressure of emotion, and of demonstrative affectionateness, which nothing in their tastes, habits, or natures could possibly make continuous. He has a horrible fear that they will expect to take up their relations at the same point at which he had left them. He would do it if he could, but he feels that it is absolutely impossible to him. The door of that room in his memory which is labelled "Amelia" is for ever locked. It is only in deepest silence and solitude that he permits himself now and again to turn the key and sparely and painfully look in. How will he bear it if they insist on throwing the portals wide, dragging its disused furniture to the light, rummaging in its corners?
He sleeps ill on this, his first night of Africa; and even when at length he succeeds in losing importunate consciousness, he is teased by absurd yet painful dreams, in which Amelia and Elizabeth jostle each other impossibly with jumbled personalities and changed attributes. Extravagant as his visions are, they have yet such a solid vividness that, at his first waking, he feels a strange sense of unsureness as to which of the two women that have beset his pillow is the dead, and which the living one. In dreams, how often our lost ones, and those whom we still possess, take hands together on equal terms! Even when he is wide awake, nay more, dressed and breakfasted, that feeling of uncertainty, that something akin to the
"Blank misgivings of a creature,
Moving about in worlds not realized,"
remains strong enough to drive him once again to the list of visitors in the entrance-hall, in order to assure himself that his brain has not been the dupe of his eye.
M. Cipriani has been as good as his word. The corrected list, promised overnight, has replaced the incomplete one, and almost the first names that Jim's eye alights upon are those of "Mr., Mrs., and Miss Le Marchant, England." His own name immediately follows, and he takes as a good augury what is merely an accident due to the fact of his room and theirs being on one floor. Elizabeth is, beyond question, beneath the same roof as himself; nay, even now she may probably be sunning herself like a white pigeon on that terrace, whose red tiles he sees shining in the morning sun through an open side-door.
The thought is no sooner formed than he follows whither it leads him; but she is not on the terrace; and though a moment ago his nerves were tingling at the thought of speech with her, yet he is conscious of a feeling of relief that their meeting is, for the moment, deferred. What can he say to her? What can she say to him?
He stands looking down on the green sea of richly-clothed dark trees beneath him—ilex and eucalyptus, and all the unfamiliar verdure of the soft South. From the fiercely-blazing red purple of a Bougainvillia, so unlike the pale, cold lilac blossom, to which in our conservatories we give that name, his eye travels over tree-tops and snowy villas, cool summer palace and domy mosque, to the curving bay, round which the Atlas Mountains are gently laying their arms; and Cape Matifou, with the haze of day's young prime about it, is running out into the Mediterranean.
He is alone at first, but presently other people come forth; the old valetudinarian, for once delivered from his fostering widow, sits down with a pile of English newspapers to enjoy himself in the sun, which does not yet ride so high as to be sun-strokey. Jim's last night's neighbour in the red shirt comes out too, bonneted and prayer-booked. She is going to church; so is he: but he does not tell her so, for fear she should offer to accompany him. She observes to him that the climate is a fraud; that this is the first day for three weeks in which she is able to go out without a mackintosh and umbrella.
"We are not so green for nothing, I can tell you," says she, with a laugh, and a rather resentful glance at the splendid verdure around her, and so leaves him.
He, too, as I have said, is going to church, and is presently asking his way to the English chapel. The Wilson family will certainly be there, and it has struck him that the dreaded meeting will be robbed of half its painful awkwardness if it takes place in public. At a church-porch, crowded with issuing congregation, Sybilla cannot fall into hysterics—it is true that Sybilla never attends divine service—nor can Cecilia weepingly throw her arms about his neck. But whatever means he may take to lessen the discomfort and smart of that expected encounter, the thought of it sits like lead upon his spirits, as he walks quickly—it is difficult to descend slowly so steep a hill—down the precipitous lane, which is the only mode of approach for man or labouring beast to the high-perched hotel he has chosen. But he is young, and presently the cheerful, clean loveliness of the day and the sight of Nature's superb vigour work their natural effect upon him. It must, indeed, be an inveterate grief that refuses to be soothed by the influences of this green Eden.
What a generosity of vegetation, as evidenced by the enormous garlands of great-leaved ivy, waving from tree to tree as for some perpetual fête! Along the high hill bank that skirts this steep by-road, eucalyptus rear their lofty heads and their faintly-scented blossoms, aloe draws her potent sword, and thick-fleshed prickly pear displays her uncouth malignity. Beneath, what a lush undergrowth of riotous great-foliaged plants—acanthus, and a hundred other green sisters, all flourishing and waxing, so unstinted, so at large! He has reached the main road—the shady road that leads by a three-mile descent from Mustapha Supérieur to the town.
How shady it is! Pepper-trees hang their green hair, so thick and fine, over it; and ilexes hold the thatch of their little dark leaves. Past the Governor's summer palace, with its snowy dome and Moorish arcades gleaming through its iron gates. From a villa garden a flowering shrub sends a mixed perfume of sweet and bitter, as of honey and hops, from its long yellow flower-tassels to his pleased nostrils.
At a sharp turn, where the hill falls away more precipitously than before, the bay, the mole, the shipping, the dazzling little city, burst upon him—the little city swarming up her hill, from where the French town bathes its feet in the azure ripples, to where the Arab town loses the peak of its triangle, in the Casbah and the fort of the now execrated Emperor. Blinding white, ardent blue, profound green—what a pleasant picture for a summer Sunday morning! And how gay the road is too, as the East and the West step along it together!
Here is a tram tearing down the steep incline with five poor little thin horses abreast. It is full of English church-goers, and yet, oh anomaly! standing up in the vulgarest of modern vehicles, with his slight dark hands grasping the tramrail, is a tall Arab, draped with the grave grace of the Vatican Demosthenes. But alas! alas! even upon him the West has laid its claw, for, as the tram rushes past, Jim's shocked eyes realize that he, who in other respects might have fed the flocks of Laban in Padan-aram, wears on his feet a pair of old elastic-sided boots.
Here come clattering a couple of smart Chasseurs d'Afrique, in blue and red, followed by a woman dressed as Rachel was at the palmy well—so dressed, that is to say, as to her white-shrouded upper woman, for, indeed, there is no reason for supposing that Rachel wore a pair of Rob Roy Tartan trousers! Past the Plateau Saulière, where, in the lichen-roofed lavoir Frenchwomen are sousing their linen in water that—oh, hideous thought!—is changed but once a week; along an ugly suburb, and past a little wood; through the arch in the fortifications, the Porte d'Isly, till at length the Episcopal chapel—why are the Protestant places of worship scattered over the habitable globe everywhere so frightful?—stands before him.
He had thought himself in good time, but he must have loitered more than he had been aware of, as the bell is silent and the porch closed. He enters as quietly as may be, and takes his place near the door. The building strikes damp and chilly, despite the warming presence of the whole English colony, emptied out of the four hotels sacred to Anglo-Saxons, and out of many an ilex-shaded orange-groved campagne besides. The building is quite full, which is, no doubt, the reason why Jim fails to catch any glimpse of the Wilson family throughout the service. He has plenty of time to interrogate with his eye the numerous rows of backs before him, as the sermon is long. Jim had known that it would be so from the moment when the clergyman entered the pulpit with an open Bible—no written sermon—in his hand. The sound of a brogue, piercing, even through the giving out of the text, soon puts him in possession of the further fact that he is in the clutches, and at the mercy, of an entirely uneducated yet curiously fluent Irishman.
Is Elizabeth writhing under the infliction too? Never, in the Moat days, was she very patient under prolonged pulpit eloquence. He can see her with his memory's eye not very covertly reading her hymn-book—can hear her foot tapping. Several people around him now are, not very covertly, reading their hymn-books, but she is not among them. He has no more sight of her than he has of Cecilia; but in neither case—such are the disadvantages of his position—does his failure to see prove the absence of the object he seeks. He is one of the first persons to be out of church when at length set free, and stands just outside the porch while the long stream of worshippers defiles before him. It takes some time to empty itself into the sunshine, and nearly as long before he catches sight of any member of either of the families he is on the look-out for. Of the Le Marchants, indeed, he never catches sight, for the excellent reason that they are not to be caught sight of, not being there. In the case of the Wilsons he is more fortunate, though here, too, a sort of surprise is in store for him. He has involuntarily been scanning, in his search for them, only those of the congregation who are dressed in mourning. The picture that the retina of his eye has kept of Cecilia is of one tear-swollen and crape-swaddled; and though, if he had thought of it, his reason would have told him that, after seven months, she is probably no longer sobbing and sabled, yet even then the impression that he would expect to receive from her would be a grave and a black one. This is why, although he is on the look-out for her, she yet comes upon him at last as a surprise.
"Jim!" cries a voice, pitched a good deal higher than is wont to make itself heard within the precincts of a church—a female voice of delighted surprise and cheerful welcome; "father, here is Jim!"
Burgoyne turns, and sees a lady in a very smart bonnet, full of spring flowers, and with a red en tout cas—for they have now issued into the day's potent beam—shading her rosy face; a lady whose appearance presents about as wide a contrast to the serious and inky figure he had expected to see as it is well possible to imagine.
Cecilia, indeed, is looking, what her maid admiringly pronounced her before sending her forth to triumph, "very dressy." Mr. Wilson is black, certainly—but, then, clergymen always are black—and he still has a band upon his hat; but it is a very narrow one—sorrow nearing its vanishing-point. In answer to his daughter's joyous apostrophe, he answers:
"'Sh, Cecilia! do not talk so loud. How are you, Jim?"
And then the meeting is over—that first meeting which Jim had shrunk from with such inexpressible apprehension—as certain to be so fraught with intolerable emotion; with calls upon him that he would not be able to answer; with baring of incurable wounds. The contrast with the reality is so startling that at first it makes him almost dizzy. Can the showy creature beside him, preening herself under her gay sunshade, be the same overwhelmed, shrunk, tear-drenched Cecilia whom at their last meeting he had folded in so solemn an embrace? Her cheerful voice answers for herself:
"It is so nice to see you again! When did you come? We did not expect you quite so soon; in your last letter you were rather vague as to dates; I can't say that you shine as a correspondent. You will come back to luncheon with us, of course, will not you? déjeûner, as they call it here; I always thought déjeûner meant breakfast. You will come, will not you? Sybilla will be so glad to see you—glad, that is to say, in her dismal way."
She ends with a laugh, which he listens to in a silence that is almost stunned. The sound of her voice, though set to so different a tune from what he had anticipated, has brought back the past with such astonishing vividness to him; her very fleer at Sybilla seems so much a part of the old life that he half turns his head, expecting once more to see Amelia's deprecating face, to hear her peace-making voice put in a plea, as it has done so many hundred times, for the peevish malade imaginaire.
They have been strolling towards the carriages waiting outside, and have now reached one, driven by an indigène, a Moor, dusky as Othello, solemn as Rhadamanthus, and with his serious charms set off by a striped yellow and white jacket and a red sash.
"Is not he beautiful?" asks Cecilia, with another laugh, alluding to her coachman, as she and Burgoyne set off upon their tête-à-tête drive, Mr. Wilson seeing, apparently, no reason in the fact of his (Burgoyne's) appearance on the scene for departing from his invariable custom of walking home from church; "is not he beautiful? When first we came here we were in mourning; as if"—catching herself up with a stifled sigh—"there were any need to tell you that; and father wanted to put him into black, but I would not hear of it: was not I right? He would have been nothing in black; it is his red and yellow that give him his cachet."
Jim feels inclined to burst out laughing. There is something so ludicrous in the disproportion between his fears and their fulfilment, in the fact of the whole importance of Amelia's death resolving itself into a sash or no sash for an Arab coachman, that he has some difficulty in answering in a key of which the irony shall not be too patent:
"I think you were perfectly right."
He does not know whether she perceives the dryness of his tone; he thinks probably not, as she goes on to ask him a great many questions as to his journey, etc., talking quickly and rather flightily, scarcely leaving room between her queries for his monosyllabic replies, and ending with the ejaculation:
"How nice it is to see you again!"
"Thank you." His acknowledgment seems to himself so curt that, after a moment, he feels constrained to add something to it. That something is the bald and trivial inquiry: "And you—how have you all been getting on?"
Cecilia shrugs her shoulders.
"We are better off than we were; you know that, of course. Nobody ever thought that father's brother would have died before him. Wait till you see our villa—it is one of the show ones here; and of course it is very pleasant having more money; but one cannot help wishing that it had come earlier." She sighs as she speaks; not an ostentatious sigh, but a repressed and strangled one; and, despite the flower-garden in her bonnet, his heart softens to her. Perhaps his look has rested on that flower-garden with a more open disapprobation than he knows, for she says presently: "I think that one may be very bright-coloured outside, and very black inside. Father and I are sometimes very black inside."
"Are you?"
"We do very well when we are alone together, father and I; we like to talk about her. Dear me! what a place Algiers is for dust! that is why there are so many blind people here. How it gets into one's eyes!" She puts her handkerchief up hastily to her face as she speaks; but Jim is not taken in by the poor little ruse, and he listens to her in a silence that is almost tender, as she goes on: "Sybilla begins to cry if we even distantly allude to her; yet I know"—with exasperation—"that she talks of her by the hour to strangers—to her new doctor, for instance; yes, she has picked up a new doctor here—a dreadful little adventurer! She will probably talk of nothing else but her to you."
"God forbid!"
They have by this time left the town behind them, and have turned through a stone-pillared gate down an ilex and ficus-sheltered drive, along which the indigène, whipping up his horses to an avenue canter, lands them at the arched door of a snowy Moorish house, whose whitewash shows dazzling through the interstices of a Bougainvillia fire blazing all over its front.
Two minutes later Jim is standing by Sybilla's couch. She is holding both his hands in hers, and there is something in her face which tells him that she means that he shall kiss her.
"When I think—when I think of our last meeting!" she says hysterically.
"Yes," he says, gasping; "yes, of course. What a beautiful villa you have here!"
The observation is a true one, though, for the moment, he has not the least idea whether it is beautiful or not, as he turns his tormented eyes round upon the delicious little court, with its charming combination of slender twisted marble columns, of mellow-tinted tiles, of low plashing fountain. Originally it has been open, roofless to the eye and the breath and the rains of heaven; but its Northern purchaser has covered it in with glass, and set low divans and luxuriantly cushioned bamboo chairs about its soft-tumbling water.
Sybilla has let fall her hands, and the expression of the wish for a sisterly embrace has disappeared out of her face. For a few moments she remains absolutely silent. He looks round anxiously for Cecilia, but she has gone to take off her bonnet, and Mr. Wilson has not yet come in. Under pretence of examining the tiles, he walks towards the lovely little colonnade of horseshoe arches that form the court, and his uneasy look rests, scarcely seeing them, upon the vertical lines of lovely old faïence that intersect the whitewash with softest blues and greens and yellows.
When will Cecilia return? Behind him he presently hears the invalid's voice, steadied and coldened.
"It is very beautiful; and, of course, it is everything for weary eyes to have such pleasant objects to rest upon. I believe"—with a little laugh—"that we sick people really take in most of our nourishment through the eyes. Was not it wonderfully enterprising of us to come here? I suppose your first thought when you heard the news was, 'How mad of Sybilla to attempt it!'"
It is needless to say how innocent of the mental ejaculation attributed to him Jim has been, and the consciousness of it makes him inquire with guilty haste:
"But you were none the worse? you got over it all right?"
"I was really wonderful," replies she; "we sick people"—with a little air of playfulness—"do give you well ones these surprises sometimes; but I must not take the credit to myself: it is really every bit due to Dr. Crump, my new doctor, who is a perfect marvel of intuition. I always tell him that he never need ask; he divines how one is; he says he is a mere bundle of nerves himself; that is, I suppose, why one can talk to him upon subjects that are sealed books with one's nearest and dearest."
Her voice has a suspicious tremble in it which frightens Jim anew.
He looks again apprehensively for help towards the two tiers of curving column and rounding arch, which rise in cool grace above each other, and sees, with relief, the figure of Cecilia leaning over the balustrade that runs along the upper tier, and looking down upon him. At the same moment Mr. Wilson enters, and shortly afterwards they all go to luncheon. It is not a very pleasant repast, although the cool dining-room, with its beautiful old pierced stucco ceiling and its hanging brass lamps, contributes its part handsomely towards what should be their enjoyment. There is no overt family quarrel, but just enough of covert recrimination and sub-acid sparring to make an outsider feel thoroughly uncomfortable, and to prove how inharmonious a whole the soured little family now forms.
"We quarrel more than we used to do, do not we?" says Cecilia, when Jim, a little later, takes leave, and she walks, under her red sunshade, up the ilexed drive with him to the pillared gate; "and to-day we were better than usual, because you were by. Oh, I wish you were always by!"
He cannot echo the wish. He had thought that he had already held his dead Amelia at her true value; but never, until to-day, has he realized through what a long purgatory of obscure heroisms she had passed to her reward.
"I do hope you will not drop us altogether. Of course, now that the link that bound us to you is broken"—her voice quivers, but he feels neither the fear nor the rage that a like phenomenon in Sybilla has produced in him—"there is nothing to hold you any longer; but I do trust you will not quite throw us over."
"My dear old girl, why should I? I hope that you and I shall always be the best of friends, and that before long I shall see you settled in a home of your own."
"You mean that I shall marry? Well, to be sure"—with a recurrence to that business-like tone which had always amused him formerly in her discussion of her affairs of the heart—"I ought to have a better chance now than ever, as I shall have a larger fortune; but"—with a lapse into depression—"this is not a good place for men—I mean Englishmen. There are troops of delightful-looking Frenchmen, Chasseurs d'Afrique, and Zouaves; but, then, we do not know any of them—not one. Well, perhaps"—philosophically—"it is for the best; one always hears that Frenchmen make very bad husbands."
CHAPTER III.
Notre Dame d'Afrique—Lady of Africa—is an ugly lady, homely and black; and the church that is dedicated to her is ugly too—new and mock-Moorish; but, like many another ugly lady, being very nobly placed, she has a great and solemn air. It is Our Lady of Africa who first gives us our greeting as we steam in from seawards; it is to Our Lady of Africa that the fisher-people climb to vespers, and to the touching office that follows, when priests and acolytes pass out of the church to the little plateau outside, where, sheer against the sky, stands a small Latin cross, with a plain and, as it seems, coffin-shaped stone beneath it, on which one reads the inscription:
"À la mémoire de tous ceux, qui ont péri dans la mer, et ont été ensevelis dans ses flots."
"All those who have perished in the sea, and been buried in her waves."
What a gigantic company to be covered with one little epitaph!
Notre Dame d'Afrique stands grandly on the cliff-tops, overlooking the sea, whose cruel deeds she is so agonizedly prayed to avert, whose cruelty she is sometimes powerful to assuage, witness the frequent votive tablets with which the church walls are covered:
"Merci, oh ma mère."
"J'ai prie, et j'ai été exaucé."
"Reconnaissance à Marie."
"Reconnaissance à Notre Dame d'Afrique."
She does not look very lovable, this coal-black Marie, who stands in her stiff brocade, with her ebon hands stretched straight out above the high-altar; but how tenderly these poor fisherwives must have felt towards her when she brought them back their Pierre or their Jean, from the truculent deeps of the ocean!
Burgoyne has been told, both by his guide-book and by his table-d'hôte neighbour, that he ought to see Notre Dame d'Afrique; nor is he loth to pay further obeisance to that high lady who already yesterday beckoned to him across the blue floor of her waters. He does not tell Cecilia of his intention, as he knows that she would offer to accompany him; but on leaving her he takes his way through the gay French town, along its Arab-named streets, Bab-a-Zoun and Bab-el-Oued, towards the village of St. Eugène, and breasts the winding road that, with many an elbow and bend, heading a deep gorge that runs up from the sea to the church-foot, leads him within her portals. The congregation is sparse—a few peasants, a blue and red Zouave, and several inevitable English. Now and again a woman, clad in humble black that tells of prayers in vain, goes up with her thin candle, and, lighting it, sticks it in its sconce among the others that burn before the altar. For awhile Burgoyne finds it pleasant after his climb to sit and watch her, and speculate pityingly with what hope of still possible good to herself she is setting her slender taper alight—now that her treasure has all too obviously gone down beneath the waves; to sit and speculate, and smell the heady incense, and listen to the murmur of chanted supplication; but presently, growing weary of the uncomprehended service, he slips outside to the little plateau, with its view straight out—no importunate land-object intervening—towards the sea, across which a little steamer is cutting her way; and on the horizon two tiny shining sails are lying.
Here, on this bold headland, it seems as if one were one's self in mid-ocean; and one has to lean far over the low wall in order to realize that there is some solid earth between us and it; that two full cities of the dead—a Jewish and a Christian—lie below. From the land-cemeteries to the vast sea-cemetery—for read by the light of that plain inscription upon which his eyes are resting, what is even the azure Mediterranean but a grave? For the matter of that, what is all life but a grave?
"First our pleasures die, and then
Our hopes, and then our fears, and when
These are dead, the debt is due:
Dust claims dust, and we die too."
He turns away, and, muttering these words half absently between his lips, begins to make the circuit of the church; and in doing so, comes suddenly upon three persons who are apparently similarly employed. The party consists of a man and two ladies. Being a little ahead of him, they are, for the first moment or two, not aware of his presence, an ignorance by which he, rather to his own discomfiture, profits to overhear a scrap of their conversation certainly not intended for his ears.
"I suppose that you were wool-gathering, as usual?" Mr. Le Marchant is saying, with an accent of cold severity, to his daughter; "but I should have thought that even you might have remembered to bring a wrap of some kind for your mother!"
Jim starts, partly at having happened so unexpectedly upon the people before him, partly in shocked astonishment at the harshness both of voice and words.
In the old days Elizabeth had been the apple of her father's eye, to oppose whose lightest fancy was a capital offence, for whom no words could be too sugared, no looks too doting. Yet now she answers, with the sweetest good-humour, and without the slightest sign of surprise or irritation, or any indication that the occurrence is not a habitual one:
"I cannot think how I could have been so stupid; it was inexcusable of me."
"I quite agree with you," replies the father, entirely unmollified; "I am sure you have been told often enough how liable to chills insufficient clothing makes people in this beastly climate at sundown."
"But it is not near sundown," breaks in Mrs. Le Marchant, throwing herself anxiously, and with a dexterity which shows how frequently she is called upon to do so, between the two others; "look what a great piece of blue sky the sun has yet to travel."
"You shall have my jacket," cries Elizabeth impetuously, but still with the same perfect sweetness; "it will be absurdly short for you, but, at least, it will keep you warm." So saying, she, with the speed of lightning, whips off the garment alluded to, and proceeds to guide her mother's arms into its inconveniently tight sleeves, laughing the while with her odd childish light-heartedness, and crying, "You dear thing, you do look too ridiculous!"
The mother laughs too, and aids her daughter's efforts; nor does it seem to occur to any of the three that the fatal Southern chill may possibly strike the delicate little frame of Elizabeth, now exposed, so lightly clad in her tweed gown, to its insidious influence.
"I wish you had a looking-glass to see yourself in!" cries she, rippling into fresh mirth; "does not she look funny, father!" appealing to him with as little resentment for his past surliness as would be shown by a good dog (I cannot put it more strongly), and yet, as it seems to Jim, with a certain nervous deprecation.
The next moment one of them—he does not know which—has caught sight of himself, and the moment after he is shaking hands with all three. It is clear that the fact of his presence in Algiers has been notified to Mr. Le Marchant, for there is no surprise in his coldly civil greeting. He makes it as short as possible, and almost at once turns to continue his circuit of the church, his wife at his side, and his daughter meekly following. Doubtless they do not wish for his (Jim's) company; but yet, as he was originally, and without any reference to them, going in their direction, it would seem natural that he should walk along with them.
He is hesitating as to whether or no to adopt this course, when he is decided by a very slight movement of Elizabeth's head. She does not actually look over her shoulder at him, and yet it seems to him as if, were her gesture completed, it would amount to that; but it is arrested by some impulse before it is more than sketched. Such as it is, it suffices to take him to her side; and it seems to him that there is a sort of satisfaction mingled with the undoubted apprehension in her face, as she realizes that it is so. Her eyes, as she turns them upon him, have a hungry question in them which her lips seem afraid to put. Apparently she cannot get nearer to it than this—very tremblingly and hurriedly uttered, with a timid glance at her father's back, as if she were delivering herself of some compromising secret instead of the mere platitude which she so indistinctly vents:
"A—a—great many things have happened since—since we last met!"
Her eye travels for a moment to his hat, from which, unlike Cecilia's rainbow raiment, the crape band has not yet been removed; and he understands that she is comprehending his troubles as well as her own in the phrase.
"A great many!" he answers baldly.
He has not the cruelty to wish to keep her on tenterhooks, and he knows perfectly what is the question that is written in the wistful blue of her look, and whom it concerns; but it would be impertinence in him to take for granted that knowledge, and answer that curiosity which, however intense and apparent, has yet not become the current coin of speech. Probably she sees that he is unable or unwilling to help her, for she makes another tremendous effort.
"I hope that—that—all your friends are well."
"All my friends!" repeats he, half sadly; "they are not such a numerous band; I have not many friends left still alive."
His thoughts have reverted to his own loss, for, at the moment, Amelia is very present to him; but the words are no sooner out of his mouth than he sees how false is the impression produced by his reply—sees it written in the sudden dead-whiteness of her cheek and the terror in her eye.
"Do you mean"—she stammers—"that anybody—any of your friends—is—is lately dead?"
"Oh no! no!" he cries reassuringly; "you are making a mistake; nobody is dead—nobody, that is"—with a sigh—"that you do not already know of. All our friends—all our common friends—are, as far as I know——"
"Elizabeth!" breaks in Mr. Le Marchant's voice, in severe appellation; he has only just become aware that his daughter is not unaccompanied, and the discovery apparently does not please him.
Without a second's delay, despite her twenty-seven years, she has sprung forwards to obey the summons; and Jim has the sense to make no further effort to rejoin her. By the time that their circuit is finished, and they have again reached the front of the church, vespers are ended, and there is a movement outwards among the worshippers. They stream—not very numerous—out on the little terrace. The priests follow, tonsured, but—which looks strange—with beards and whiskers. The acolytes, in their red chasubles, carry a black and white pall, and lay it over the memorial stone below the cross. On either hand stand a band of decently clad youths—sons of drowned seamen—playing on brass instruments. It is a poor little music, doubtfully in tune; but surely no rolling organ, no papal choir, could touch the heart so much as this simple ceremonial. The little Latin cross standing sheer out against the sea; the black pall thrown over the stone that commemorates the sea's innumerable dead; the red-clad acolytes, standing with eyes cast down, holding aloft their high tapers, whose flickering flame the sea-wind soon puffs out; and the sons of the drowned sailors, making their homely music to the accompaniment of the salt breeze. The little service is brief and those who have taken part in it are soon dispersing. As they do so, Jim once more finds himself for a moment close to Elizabeth.
The sun has nearly touched the sea-line by this time, and he sees, or thinks he sees, her shiver.
"You are cold," he says solicitously; "you will get a chill."
She looks back at him, half surprised, half grateful, at the anxiety of his tone.
"Not I!" she answers, with a gentle air of indifference and recklessness; "naught never comes to harm!"
"But you shivered! I saw you shiver."
"Did I? It was only"—smiling—"that a goose walked over my grave. Does a goose never walk over your grave?"
And once more she is gone.
He does not see her again that day. Of the three places laid for dinner at the round table in the salle à manger, only two are occupied; hers is, and remains, empty. She is not with her parents, and, what is more, she does not appear to be missed by them. It fills Jim with something of the same shocked surprise as he had felt on hearing the cold and surly tone in which she had been addressed by her father, to see how much more, and more genially, that father talks; how much less morose his back looks than had been the case on the previous evening.
The next morning rises superb in steady splendour, and Jim, on issuing out on the little red-tiled terrace, finds the whole strength of the hotel gathered upon it. Even the worst invalids, who have not shown their noses outside their rooms for a fortnight, are sunning themselves, wrapped in apparently unnecessary furs. The Arabs and Turks have spread their gay rugs and carpets, and displayed their bits of stuff, their brasswork, and their embroidery. They make a charming garden of colour under the blue. One is lying beside his wares, in an azure jacket and a rose-red sash, twanging a "gunébri," or little Arab mandolin. Apart from the rest of the company, at the extreme end of the terrace, in a place which is evidently hers by prescriptive right, close to the balustrade, upon whose blue and white tiled top her books are lying, Elizabeth is sitting—and sitting alone, neither truculent father not frightened mother barring approach to her. He makes his way at once to her.
"You were not at dinner last night?"
"No."
"I hope that did not mean that you were ill?"
Her eyes are not lifted to his—resting rather on the balustrade, through whose pierced brickwork little boughs of Bougainvillia are pushing.
"No, I was not ill," she replies slowly; "but I had made such a figure of myself by crying that mammy thought I had better stay away. When I looked in the glass," she adds humorously, "I thought so myself."
"There was not much sign of tears about you when we parted at Notre Dame d'Afrique," he says brusquely.
"No, but"—with a sudden lifting of her pretty lashes—"you know there is never any medium in me; I am always either laughing or crying; and, of course, seeing you again brought—brought things back to me."
She looks wistfully at him as she makes this leading remark.
He can no longer have any doubt as to her wish to embark upon the subject which, even in the three minutes of their meeting on the previous day, she had sought to approach. If he is kind, he will enter into her wish, he will make her path easier for her; but for the moment he does not feel kind—angry, rather, and rebellious.
Is his intercourse with her to be a mere repetition of that which, although now seven months ago, makes him still writhe, in the recollection of his latter intercourse with Byng? Is he again to be spitted upon the skewer of reminiscences of the Vallombrosan wood? Never!
He looks obstinately away from her—towards where first an ivied bank rises, with red gladioli flowering upon it; then a little space of bare ground, then a row of orange-trees; then some young stone-pines, holding their heads against the blue to show what an exquisite contrast they make to it; then, topping, or seeming to top the hill, a white villa, with little blue jewels of sky, seen through the interstices of the balustrade on its roof, its whitewash making the solid wall of sapphire behind it look even more desperately and unnameably blue than elsewhere. What a blue! sapphire! turquoise! lapis! To what poor shifts are we driven to express it! How could we describe its glory to a blind person? If to such a one the colour of scarlet is represented by the sound of a trumpet, surely this divine tint above us can be best conveyed by the whole heavenly hierarchy of burning seraphs and winged angels, harping and quiring together.
"I always think," says Elizabeth, following the direction of his eyes—"perhaps it may be fancy—that this particular corner of the sky is much bluer than any other."
There is a shade of disappointment in her tone at his failure to take up her challenge, but she is far too gentle to make any further effort in a direction which, for some reason, is disagreeable to him; and since he will not follow her inclination, she is pliantly willing to follow his.
The Arabs have come up in might to-day, and, no longer fearing rain, have carpeted almost the whole terrace with their wares. They hang over the low wall, and cover the red tiles; blue and purple, and Moslem green, and Venetian red; dazzling white haiks, blinding in the blinding sunshine; carpets, embroidered jackets, flashing back gold in the gold light. A pert English miss is standing over them, and saying disparagingly about each:
"You can get this 7-1/2d. cheaper at Whiteley's. I saw a much better one than this for half the price at Marshall's," etc., etc.
One longs to ask the "miss" whether she saw the sunlight, and the cobalt sea, and the glorified whitewash, with its amethyst shadows, for 7-1/2d. at Whiteley's too, and, if so, why she did not stay there?
Burgoyne's friend in the red shirt is beating down a one-eyed Kabyle, and having a happy haggle with him over a Mozambique coat.
"She does not get on with her own family at home, and she has quarrelled with all her travelling companions!" says Elizabeth, in a delighted explanatory whisper. Wistfulness and disappointment have alike vanished out of her small face, which is one ripple of mischief. "The fat widow in the weepers, who is preening herself like a great pouter pigeon, is trying to marry the wizened old gentleman in the bamboo chair. Sometimes we think she will succeed; sometimes we think she will not: it is so interesting!"
Jim looks down at her with an astonishment bordering on indignation.
Is this the woman who cried herself sick last night over memories of the so recent past? In this mobile nature, is there nothing that one can lay hold of?
"Mammy and I get an infinity of amusement out of them," continues she, still playfully, but faltering a little under the severity of his look; "oh, we know a great deal about them all; and those that we do not know about we make stories for!"
"Indeed!"
His tone is so curt that the stream of her gaiety dries up under it, and she relapses into silence, looking towards the flashing sea, and the ficus-tree, that is casting its now grateful shade.
CHAPTER IV.
"You said just now that seeing me brought things back to you."
It is partly remorse at having snubbed her, and partly perversity, which dictates this sentence on Jim's part. The perversity is, perhaps, the predominating element in his motive—a perversity which, having chilled her away from the subject when she was eagerly seeking an opening to it, now forces her to return to it. She starts a little.
"Yes—yes," she answers; "but 'brought things back' is not quite the right phrase; they"—her voice growing low and tremulous—"had not very far to come."
The quiver in her voice annoys him almost as much as Byng's tears used to do.
"If you would like to ask me any questions," he says stiffly, "I am ready to answer them."
"Are you?" she cries hungrily; "oh, that is kind of you! but, then, you always were kind; but not here"—looking apprehensively round—"I could not trust myself to talk about—about him here; I—I should break down, and nothing"—with a smile that, though watery, is still humorous—"would induce me to make a fool of myself before the widow Wadman." Then, seeing him look at a loss: "Come indoors!" she says impulsively, standing up, and half stretching out her hand as if to draw him after her. "Come into our salon—no, you need not be afraid; we shall have it all to ourselves; father and mother have gone out for their usual constitutional on the Boulevard Mustapha."
He follows her silently, and neither speaks till they find themselves tête-à-tête in the private apartment of the Le Marchants.
It is on the rez-de-chaussée, a suite of three little whitewashed rooms, transmogrified from their original hotel nakedness by flowers and brocade bits. Three large green jars on the chimney-piece, full of generous rose-branches, and boughs of salvia and iris, and stalwart yellow jessamine, make the air sweetly and lightly perfumed. On the table is a litter of Tauchnitz novels, disastrously old English papers, the little scurrilous Algerian sheet, and, lastly, Elizabeth's workbasket—the big workbasket which Jim had last seen standing on the floor in the entresol, at the Piazza d'Azeglio, with its contents strewn all over his friend's prostrate body. At the sight a bitter smile breaks over his face.
"An old acquaintance!" he says, making a mock salutation to it; "it is in better order than when last I had the pleasure of seeing it."
"Do you mean in Florence?" she asks, very slowly.
"Yes"—still with that acrid smile—"after you were gone, I had the honour of helping to pack it to send after you. I am afraid I was rather clumsy over it; but, at any rate, I managed better than he. By-the-bye, did you find any rust on your scissors and thimble when next you had occasion to use them? Poor boy! he cried enough over them to take all the polish off!"
She has sunk down upon the sofa, over which a great woollen haik, dyed with harmonious dull tints, is thrown.
"Do not sneer at me!" she says faintly. "You would not if you knew how you hurt me. Is he—is he—how is he?"
"He is not ill."
The answer ought to be reassuring; but there is something in the manner in which it is uttered that tells her that it neither is, nor is meant to be so. It is so ominous that her lips, after a feeble effort or two, give up the endeavour to frame any query. All her power of interrogation has passed into those eyes, out of which her companion has been so brilliantly successful in chasing their transient morning mirth.
"When a man," says Jim gravely, "at the outset of his life, gets such a facer as he did, if he has not a very strong character, it is apt to drive him off the rails, to give him a shove downwards."
"I see; and you think I have given him a shove downwards?"
"Yes."
There is a pause. Jim's eyes are resolutely turned away from the face of Elizabeth, upon whose small white area twitches of pain are making cruel disfigurement. He does not want to have his heart softened towards her, so he stares persistently over her head at a Mussulman praying-carpet, which, old and still rich-toned, despite the wearing of pious knees, hangs on the wall. At length she speaks, in a key as low as—were not the room so entirely still—would be inaudible.
"If I had married him, I should have given him a much worse shove down."
Jim holds his breath. Is he about to hear from her own lips that secret which he has magnanimously resisted all opportunities of hearing from other sources? But the words that, after a pause, follow this almost whispered statement are not a confession. They are only an appeal.
"You would be doing the kindest thing that you ever did in your life, if you could bring yourself to say that you thought I did it for the best."
He feels that if he submits his eyes to hers, his will must go with them; he will have no power left of dissent from any request she may choose to make; so he still stares over her head at a screen which hides the doorless entrance to the third room of the little suite. One leaf, folded back, gives a peep through the little chamber, through its deep-arched window to where a date-palm stands up straight against the sea.
"I could not possibly say that unless I knew the circumstances of the case," he answers judicially.
He hears a low sigh, not of impatience, but of melancholy acquiescence.
"Then you must go on thinking ill of me."
There is such a depth of dejection, as well as such an unalterable sweetness, in her voice, that the words of little Prince Arthur, addressed to Hubert, flash upon his mind:
"If Heaven be pleased that you should use me ill,
Why, then you must!"
After all, what power in earth or sky has appointed him her executioner?
"I do not wish to think ill of you," he answers sadly. "Good heavens! do I need to tell you that? I have tried all along to keep myself from judging you; but I should not be human—you must know that I should not be human—if I did not ask myself why you did it."
"Why I left Florence?"
"Yes."
She sits stock-still for a moment, the very little colour that there ever was in it retreating out of her face.
"If I told you that, I should be telling you everything."
He is looking at her now; after all, he cannot keep his gaze pinned to the screen for ever, and, as he looks, he sees an emotion of so transcendently painful a nature set her little sad features working, that the one impulse that dominates him is to ease her suffering.
Poor little docile creature! She is going to tell him her secret, since he exacts it, though it is only with a rending asunder of soul and body that it can be revealed. He puts out his hand hurriedly, with a gesture as of prohibition.
"Then do not tell me."
She sinks back upon her haik with a movement of relief, and puts up her fine handkerchief to her pale lips. There is a perfect silence between them for awhile. At his elbow is a great un-English, unwintry nosegay of asphodel and iris. He passes his fingers absently over the freakish spikes.
"How did he take it? how did he take it at first?"
Her voice, though now tolerably distinct, is stamped with that character of awe which fills us all at approaching a great calamity.
"He would not believe it at first; and then he cried a great deal—oh, an immense deal!"—with an accent of astonishment, even at the recollection of his friend's tear-power—"and then—oh, then, he thought of putting an end to himself!"
Jim had meant to have made this relation in a tone of dispassionate narrative, but against his will and intention, as his memory recalls what seem to him the unworthy antics played by Byng's grief, his voice takes a sarcastic inflection. The horror written on his auditor's face as he utters the latest clause of his sentence recalls him to himself.
"Do not be afraid!" he says, in a tone which has no longer anything akin to a sneer in it, though it is not devoid of bitterness; "the impulse was a short-lived one; he is not thinking of putting an end to himself now, I can assure you of that; he is only thinking of how he can best amuse himself. Whether he is much more successful in that than he was in the former, I am not so sure."
Her eyes have dropped to her own fragile, ringless hands as they lie on her lap.
"Poor boy! poor boy!" she says over softly twice, moving her head up and down with a little compassionate movement.
At the pity expressed by her gesture, an unjust and unjustifiable hard anger takes harsh possession of him.
"It was a pity you let it go so far," he says austerely; "you must allow me to say that much; but I suppose, in point of fact, the ball once set rolling, it was past your power to stop it."
She listens to his philippic, with her head meekly bent.
"I did not try," she answers, in a half·whisper; then, after a pause, raising her down-dropped eyes, lit with a blue fire of excitement, almost inspiration, to his, "I said to myself, 'If I have any luck, I shall die before the smash comes;' and I just lived on from day to day. I had not the heart to stop it; I knew it would stop of itself before long; I had never—hardly ever"—correcting herself, as it seems, with a modifying afterthought—"in my life before known what happiness meant; and oh! oh! OH!"—with a groan of deepening intensity at each repeated interjection—"what a big word it is!"
Never—hardly ever—known what happiness meant before! Why, surely she was happy at the Moat! and before his mind's eye there rises an image of her in her riotous rosy gaiety; but even as it does, there flashes upon him a comprehension of her speech.
It is not the careless merriment of childhood to which she is alluding; it is to the happiness, par excellence, of life. If this is the case, why did she correct herself and modify her negative with a "hardly"? A jealous feeling of someone else—someone beside Byng; a jealousy none the less keen for being vague—for not knowing on what object it can lay hold—sharpens his tone as he repeats aloud, and with an accent of interrogation, her qualifying adverb:
"Hardly ever, that implies——"
But she breaks in hurriedly, as if dreading—and at the same time doubting her own power of baffling—cross-examination upon that subject on whose borders they are continually hovering.
"Talking of happiness makes one think of unhappiness, does not it? We both know something about that, do not we?"
She pauses, and he sees that she is alluding to his own sorrow, and that her eye is sounding his to see whether he would wish her to approach it more nearly. His eye, in answer, must give but a dubious beam, since he himself is quite unsure of what his wishes on the subject are; and she goes on with the haste and yet unsteadiness of one who is treading on swampy ground, that gives beneath his feet.
"We saw it in the papers; I could not believe it at first. It was the last thing I ever expected to happen. I thought of writing to you, but I did not."
She looks at him rather wistfully, and although but two minutes ago she had been confessing to him her passion for another man, he sees that she is anxious he should tell her that her sympathy would have been precious to him. He feels the same sensation as before of mixed anger and fascination at the ductility of her nature. What business has she to care whether he would have liked to hear from her or not?
"It seemed such a pity that it was she, and not I!"
Again her eye interrogates his, as if asking for acquiescence in this suggestion, but he cannot give it. With a shock of surprise—nay, horror—at himself, he finds that he is unable to echo the wish that Elizabeth had died and Amelia lived.
"I said so to mammy at the time. Ah, here is mammy!"
And, indeed, as she speaks the door opens, and Mrs. Le Marchant enters in her walking-dress. At the sight of Jim, a look, which certainly does not betoken pleasure, though good breeding prevents its representing the opposite emotion, crosses her handsome, worn face.
"I brought Mr. Burgoyne in here," says Elizabeth, in what seems rather precipitate explanation, "because we could not talk comfortably out on the terrace; they listen to everything we say: they have such long ears—the Widow Wadman and Miss Strutt!"
"I do not know what State secrets you and Mr. Burgoyne can have to discuss," replies the mother, with a smile that, though courteous, but ill disguises the underlying anxiety. "Yes, dear child, I shall be very much obliged if you will take my bonnet upstairs for me"—this in answer to little tender overtures from Elizabeth, overtures that remind Jim of 12 bis, Piazza d' Azeglio. "I do not know whether you have yet found it so" (to Jim); "but this is a slack place."
No sooner has the door closed upon her daughter than her tone changes.
"What have you been talking about to her," she inquires rapidly; "not, I hope, about him?"
"I could not help it; she asked me."
Mrs. Le Marchant strikes her hands together, and gives utterance to that short and shapeless monosyllable which has a prescriptive right to express vexation.
"Th! th!" A moment later, "I am sure you will understand that I do not mean to imply any ill-will to you; but it is unlucky that we should have happened to meet you here; it has brought it all back to her, and she was just beginning to pluck up her spirits a little."
"Did she—did she take it so much to heart?" inquires Jim, in a tone of almost as awed concern as Elizabeth had employed but a quarter of an hour before in putting nearly the same question with regard to Byng.
"Did she take it to heart!" repeats Mrs. Le Marchant, with the irritation of one to whom a perfectly senseless and superfluous inquiry is put; "why, of course she did! I thought at one time that she would have gone out of her mind!"
No one can feel less merry than Jim; and yet his lips at this juncture cannot resist the impulse to frame themselves into a gloomy smile.
"And I thought that he would have gone out of his mind," he rejoins.
As he speaks, it flashes upon his memory that one of the hypotheses that have formerly occurred to him to account for the mystery that hangs over Elizabeth's past was that she had been mad; and though he had long abandoned the idea, her losing her wits now recurs to him with a shock as a possibility. Might not that changeful, mobile, emotional mind lose its balance under the blow either of a sudden calamity or of a long wearing sorrow? It has escaped—evidently but barely escaped the first. Will it escape the second too?
His heart goes out in a great yearning to her at the thought of what a touching little lunatic she would make; and, with an oblivion of his own personal feelings, which is generous, if not very lasting, he says compassionately:
"It seems a pity—a great pity!"
"A pity!" repeats the mother, with a sort of wrath, down which he detects a broad stripe of agony running; "I should think it was a pity! Pity is a weak word! The whole thing is piteous! her whole history! If you only knew——"
She breaks off.
He is silent, waiting to see whether that impulse towards confidence in him will go any further; but it does not. She has evidently gone beyond her intention, and is passionately vexed with herself for having done so.
"They were so well suited to each other," continues Jim slowly, but still generously. Possibly his generosity becomes more easy as he sees how hopeless is the plea upon which he employs it. "Is it—I do not wish to intrude upon your confidence, but in the interests of my friend you will allow me to say that much—is it quite out of the question?"
"Quite! quite!" replies the mother, in painful excitement; "what, poor soul, is not out of the question for her that has any good or happiness in it? and that—that more than anything! If you have any mercy in you, do not put it into her head that it is not!"
"If it is not in her head already, I could not put it there," replies Jim gravely; "but I will not—I promise you I will not."
As he speaks, a slight smile touches the corners of his serious mouth as he reflects how entirely easy it is to comply with a request not to urge Byng's suit upon its object, and how cheaply a character for magnanimity may sometimes be bought.
"That is very kind of you!" replies the poor woman gratefully; "and I am sure when you say a thing I can depend upon you for it; and though, of course, it was unlucky our happening to meet you, yet you need not see much of her. Although it is not in the least 'out of sight, out of mind' with her"—sighing—"yet she is very much influenced by the objects around her; and when you are gone—I dare say you do not mean to make a long stay; this is not a place where there is much for a man to do—for a man like you——"
She breaks off, and her imploring eye invites him to reassure her by naming a speedy day for his own departure. But magnanimity may have calls made upon it that exceed its power to answer, and Jim's silence sufficiently proves that he is not going to allow himself to be seduced into a promise to go.
CHAPTER V.
The next morning proves the truth of Miss Strutt's words that "we are not so green here in Algiers for nothing." The weather changes some time after dark has fallen. A mighty wind arises. Jim's slumbers are broken by the fact that somebody's outside shutters bang, loose and noisy all night. The great sign at the top of the hotel swings and creaks and groans. In the morning, as far as can be seen through blurred panes, the trees—eucalyptus, ilex, stone-pine—are all cowering and stooping before the wind's lash. The fan palm before Mrs. Le Marchant's window, with its fans all pinched and bent, is staggering before the gale. One cannot conceive what that unlucky tropical product can be doing in this galley, and it requires a strong effort of reason and will to resist the conviction that the oranges and lemons are tied upon the shivering trees instead of growing naturally there.
"And this is 'Afric's burning strand'!" says Jim to himself, over his breakfast in the salle à manger, through whose shut windows the mad rain forces itself; and the blast, coming to his wet sister's aid, bursts them open now and again.
The day seems enormously long. He gets through the morning tolerably well with letter-writing, and after the twelve o'clock déjeûner he faces the gale in a determined walk down into the town. Seldom in the course of his wide wanderings has he felt the furious scourge of more tremendous rain. The side-path is whitened with big hailstones; red torrents tear with ferocious speed and violence down the steep incline. The great acanthus-leaves, and all the plentiful undergrowth, are dripping and rejoicing.
Through the blinding white deluge he gets forlorn peeps of the villas that had shone yesterday with the white splendour one associates with the city of the saints of God; and instead of, as yesterday, "laced with heaven's own tinct," the Mediterranean is whitening the bay's rounded curve with its angry breakers, and the snow is sprinkling the Atlas crests. A few Arabs are sitting on the ground under the Pont d'Isly, packed up into whitish woollen parcels, knees to nose, and arms and hands all withdrawn into the protection of the sheltering burnous. But no one else, who can help it, is abroad.
It seems to Jim as if his disagreeable tussle with the elements had lasted a long time, and yet, on his return to the hotel, he finds that it is only half-past two. He thinks at first that the clocks must have stopped, but finds, on examination, that they are all ticking, and all unanimous. His drenched condition is at least a resource, necessitating an entire and fundamental change of raiment; but even this expedient, though dragged out to its utmost possible limit, does not carry him further than three. How is he to dispose of the seven or eight hours that must elapse before he can seek refuge in bed? He has exhausted his correspondence, which is never a large one, and he has seldom in his life been so short of books.
He makes his way through the hall, which is crammed with young people playing battledore, and noisily counting; with elder persons, dreadfully short of a job, looking on and applauding; to the salon, in hopes of there finding a Tauchnitz novel, or even a superannuated Pall Mall or World. But half a dozen other weather-bound sufferers have been before him, and the tables are swept clean of all literature save a three-months-old Court Journal.
Miss Strutt and the pert votary of Whiteley are sitting shawled, and with their heads close together. By their titters, and the fragments he catches of their talk, they seem to be concocting a practical joke of some kind. The widow Wadman, shawled too, and her valetudinarian in a comforter, are stopping over a wood-fire, which refuses to burn, the souches being wringing wet. Jim rather injudiciously approaches them, and offers his assistance in piling the damp logs; but he is so evidently de trop, that he retires discomfited. On the other hand, the invitation in Miss Strutt's and her coadjutor's eye is so apparent that he beats a hasty retreat out of the room, in dread lest he should be drawn into their mysterious pleasantry.
He never is quite clear afterwards how he gets over the hours that intervene before dinner—whether sleep comes to his aid, or whether he is after all reduced to perusing in the Court Journal the narrative of which direction the Queen and Princess Henry of Battenburg took their walk in, in October. But at length the welcome bell rings, drowning even, for two minutes, the banging of the wind; and the whole hotel, unwontedly punctual, rushes in answer to its summons. People who have hitherto scarcely exchanged words, have eyed each other with hardly veiled distrust, now show a feverish desire to enter into conversation, to detain one another after dinner on the steps of the salle à manger.
As the evening advances, Jim sees an intention among the younger portion of the company to launch out into noisy, romping games, to institute a Dumb Crambo. He feels it is far from impossible that he himself may fall so low as to be drawn into it. Miss Strutt's eye is on him, but before he succumbs he will make one effort on his own behalf. He embraces a desperate resolution. He has seen the Le Marchants eating their dinner near, and yet hopelessly far from him. Elizabeth had given him one furtive smile, and her mother a hurried bow; this is, to tell the truth, all the encouragement he has to go upon—all that he can find to keep his courage up as he knocks at their door, telling himself that his excuse—that of asking them to lend him a book—is a quite sufficient and legitimate one. He knocks, and Elizabeth's voice at once answers:
"Herein!"
It is clear that she takes him for the German waiter, Fritz. She remains in this belief even after he has opened the door, since she does not at first look up. She is alone—not in the pretty flowered room in which she had yesterday received him, but in the first and less adorned of the little series—one that he had, on his former visit, cursorily supposed to be chiefly used as an ante-room—sitting alone at a table, and before her are spread writing-materials, over which she is stooping. An odious and ridiculous thought darts, with a prick, across his mind.
Is she sitting here, all alone, in order to write to Byng?
"I came——" he begins; and at the unexpected voice she looks up with a start:
"Oh, it is you!" she says, in a low key, glancing rather apprehensively at the closed door, which separates them from the inner room, in a manner which tells him that her parents are within.
"I came"—his voice almost unconsciously sinking to the level hers has indicated to him—"to ask you to lend me a book."
"A book!" she repeats doubtfully, with another and still more nervous glance at the shut door; "I am afraid that they are all in there."
"Oh, it is of no consequence!" rejoins Burgoyne hastily, unwittingly quoting the words of the immortal Mr. Toots; "it does not matter in the least."
As he speaks, he begins to retreat towards the door, but so slowly as to give her plenty of time to recall him had she so wished. But she does not. She only stands looking uncertain and distressed. He cannot take such a melancholy impression of her little face away for the whole night with him—it would give him the blues too seriously after this dismal day—so he takes a step or two forward again.
"Are not you rather lonely?" he asks, with an expressive look round.
She gives a small, uncomplaining smile.
"Oh no; I do very well. I am generally alone at this time of day; they like to have their evenings to themselves—at least, father likes to have mammy to himself; I am sure it is quite natural."
There is not the slightest trace of any sense of being aggrieved in either words or tone.
Again that picture of the adored Elizabeth of former days, of whose prattle her father was never weary, whose jokes were always considered so unequalled, and whose pre-eminence in favour was so allowed that her intercession and influence were always employed by the others as certain in their efficacy, rises before Jim's eyes.
"They are like lovers still," continues Elizabeth softly; "it is very pretty when people are lovers still after nearly thirty years."
"And you—you write letters?"
"No, I do not; I have not anyone to write to."
A pang of shame at his unworthy suspicion, coupled with a sense of astonishment at her simple confession of friendlessness, prevent his speaking; and it is she who goes on:
"I was writing an Italian exercise; I began to learn Italian in Florence"—with the inevitable low sigh that always accompanies her mention of that name—"and to-day, for something to do, I took it up again. It has been a long day, has not it? Oh, what a long day!"
"Long!" repeats Jim emphatically; "it might choose to call itself a day; but many a century has been shorter."
"Someone was playing battledore and shuttlecock in the hall. I wonder to what number they kept it up? how many years it is since I have played battledore and shuttlecock!"
There is a suppressed envy in her tone, which tells how far from disagreeable the innocent noisy pastime to which she alludes would be to her even now. She has sat down again on the straight-backed chair from whose elevation she had commanded her Italian studies; a large grayish cloak, lined and heavily collared, and bordered with fur, hangs, unfastened at the throat, about her. Out of the dark beaver her delicate neck and head rise, like a pale primrose from out of piled dead oak-leaves in a yet wintry wood. Through the door, which he has left open behind him, come bursts of maniac mirth from the votaries of Dumb Crambo.
"What a noise they are making!"
"I should think they were!"
"I wonder what they are doing?"
"I can inform you on that point; they are playing Dumb Crambo."
She repeats the words after him with a lingering intonation, in which there again is, or, at least, he thinks that he detects it, a tinge of envy.
"Dumb Crambo!"
"Would you like to join them?"
"No"—slowly—"not quite that; but—it sounds ridiculous—but I should like to play Dumb Crambo again. We used"—in an affectionate, lingering tone—"to play it when we were children."
It is the first time that she has ever voluntarily alluded to the Moat, and he calls to mind her earnest prohibition addressed to him at Florence against any mention of it.
"I know you did; once or twice I played with you."
"You?"
She starts. It is evident that the unimportant fact of his having taken part in their games has quite escaped her; but, a moment later, her soft and courteous nature evidently making her fear that he will look upon her obliviousness as unkind—
"Oh yes, to be sure!" Then again lapsing into reminiscence, "What odd words we used to choose sometimes—words that nobody could guess! I wonder what words they have chosen?"
He thinks of saying jocosely, "Shall I go and ask them?" but refrains, because he fears it would put it into her head to send him away.
A sort of piercing squeal makes itself heard from the salon.
"Do you think that that can be meant for a pig?" asks Elizabeth, her line ears pricked in unaffected interest. "Oh!"—with a return of uneasiness—"I wish that they would not make so much noise; father does so dislike noise. They might as well have put it off till to-morrow."
"Why would to-morrow's noise be more endurable than to-night's?"
"It would not have mattered to-morrow; father will not be here; he is going to Hammam Rhira."
Burgoyne's jaw drops. Is this the alternative course decided upon by
Mrs. Le Marchant? Having failed to dislodge him from Algiers, is she going to remove herself and her daughter out of his reach?
"Do you mean—are you all going to Hammam Rhira to-morrow?—all going away?"
Is it some effect of light from the rose-shaded lamp that makes it seem to him as if a tiny smile, and a yet smaller blush, swept over Elizabeth's face at the aghastness of his tone—an aghastness much more marked than he had intended it should be.
"Not to-morrow; not all of us. Father and mammy are going there for a couple of nights to see what the place is like—one hears such contradictory accounts; and if they are pleased with it—"
"Yes?"
"If they are pleased with it we shall all probably move on there in a day or two."
He would like to be sure that this sentence ends with a sigh, but a prodigious storm of hand-clapping from the extempore theatre prevents his hearing whether it has that regretful finish.
"And they are going to leave you behind?"
"Why not? there would not be much use in taking me; and, as I tell you, they love being tête-à-tête."
"And you love being alone?"
The moment that the question is out of his mouth, he realizes its full unkindness. He is perfectly aware that she does not like being alone; that she is naturally a most sociable little being; that, even now, these frightened five minutes of unsatisfactory broken talk with himself have made her look less chilled, less wobegone, less white. Her answer, if it can be looked upon as one, must be taken by him as a rebuke. It is only that she says nervously:
"One certainly does hear dreadfully plainly here with the door open."
Her tone is of the gentlest, her look no angrier than a dove's, and yet he would be obtuser than he is if he did not at once comprehend that her remark implies a wish that he should presently shut that door behind him on the outside. He complies. With that newly-gained knowledge as to to-morrow's Hammam Rhira, he can afford to comply.
The next morning's light reveals that the weather, pleased with having so indisputably proved its power of being odious, has recovered its good-humour.
Beyond the tree-tops a radiant sea is seen laughing far below; and the wet red tiles on the little terrace shine like jewels. A sea even more wonderful than radiant; no servile copy of the sky and clouds to-day, but with astonishing colours of its own—a faint yet glorious green for a part of its watery breadth; then what our poverty compels us to call blue; and then a great tablecloth of inky purple, which looks so solid that the tiny white boats that are crossing it seem to be sailing on dry land. From amongst the glossy green of the wooded hill, mosque and campagne start out, dazzling, in their recovered lustre; one cool entrancing villa in especial, backed with a broken line of dusky stone-pines, stands, snowy-arcaded, enthroned high up among the verdure.
Jim is very anxious to be out of the way at the hour of the Le Marchants' departure. He has a panic fear of being waylaid by the mother, and having some earnest supplication addressed to him to abstain, during her absence, from any converse with Elizabeth. He is not quite clear at what time they will set off, so, to insure himself against mistakes, he resolves to spend the morning and lunch at the Villa Wilson. Arrived there, he is shown by an Arab man-servant into the court, and, finding it empty, sinks down into a cane chair, and lets his eyes wander round to the fountain, lullingly dripping into its basin; to the tiles, the white-arched doorways, carved in low relief, and themselves so low that it must be a humble-statured person who enters them without stooping. What a home for love in idleness! Who can picture any of the vulgar work of the world done in such a house? any harder labour ever entered upon than a listening to some lady singing "with ravishing division to her lute"?
The lady who presently joins Jim appears, by her ruffled air, to have been engaged upon no such soothing occupation as luting to a recumbent lover.
"You will not mind staying here?" asks Cecilia; "Dr. Crump is in the drawing-room with Sybilla; I am sure that you do not want to see Dr. Crump!"
"I cannot express how little I wish it."
"I cannot think what has happened to Sybilla"—wrinkling up her forehead into annoyed furrows—"but she is so dreadfully sprightly when he is there; she never was sprightly with Dr. Coldstream, and he is such an impossible man!—the sort of man who, when first he comes in, always says, 'Well, how are we this morning?' Do not you think that it stamps a man to say 'How are we?'"
"I think it does."
"He talks such nonsense to her!"—with irritation—"he tells her that he, too, is a bundle of nerves! if you could only see him! And one day he told her that when first he came here he had seen the Angel of Death waving his fans above her head! and she swallows it all!"
"I am not at all surprised."
"It makes me sick!" cries she energetically; "let us go into the garden."
So into the garden they go; both the new one, whose luxuriant growth of verdure is the outcome of but eight or nine years; and the old one, along whose straight walks the feet of the Moorish ladies used to patter under the orange-trees. Beneath them now there are no white bundles of muslin; only on the ground the oranges lie thick, no one in this plenteous land thinking it worth while to pick them up. Jim and his companion pace rather silently to a pretty Moorish summer-house, dug, a few years ago, by the English architect out of a farm-house, into which it had been built. It is dainty and cool, with a little dome and lovely green and blue tiles; and an odd small spring, which is taught to wander by tiny snaky channels into a little basin. They go into the summer-house and sit down.
"Yes, it is pretty," says the girl absently! but her mind is evidently preoccupied by some other subject than the beauty of the giant bignonia which is expanding the multitude of its orange-red clusters all over a low wall, making it into one burning hedge, and has called forth an exclamation of delight from Burgoyne. What that subject is immediately appears.
"Do you know who is in Algiers—whom I saw driving through the Place Bressant on Sunday afternoon?"
"Who?"
"The Le Marchants. Ah, you are not surprised!"—rather suspiciously. "You knew already!"
Jim hesitates a second; then, reflecting that, whether or not he acknowledges the fact now, Cecilia is certain to learn it in a day or two at latest, he answers with a slight laugh:
"It would be odd if I did not, seeing that they are staying at my hotel."
"You knew that when you went there?"—very quickly.
"Of course not!"—with a movement of impatience.
A pause.
"I suppose," says Cecilia, rather cautiously, as if aware that she is treading on dangerous ground, "that you have not found out why they stampeded from Florence in that extraordinary way? Oh no, of course not!"—as this suggestion is received with a still more accented writhe than her former one. "It is not a thing upon which you could question them; and, after all, it was their own affair; it was no business of ours, was it?"
"Not the slightest."
"I always used to like them," continues Cecilia pensively; "at least"—becoming aware of an involuntary movement of surprise at this statement on the part of her neighbour—"at least, they never gave me the chance of liking them; but I always admired them. I wonder are they more accessible than they were in Florence? There are so few nice English here this year; everybody says that there never was a year when there were so few nice English!"
The tentative towards sociability implied in this last speech is received by Jim in a discouraging silence. He has not the slightest desire to promote any overture on the part of Cecilia towards intimacy with Elizabeth. He knows that they would be unsuccessful; and, moreover, he is conscious that he would be annoyed if they were not.
"I can fancy that this would be a very pleasant place if one had someone to go about with," continues she; "but father grows less and less inclined to move. Poor dear! he is not so young as he was, and I am not quite old enough yet, I suppose, to go about alone."
She makes a rather wistful pause—a pause which he feels that she intends him to fill by an offer of himself as her escort. But none such comes. Realizing this, she goes on with a sigh:
"There are not many advantages in being old; but, at least, one is freer, and in a youth spent as mine is, there is really not much profit or pleasure."
The tone in which she makes this lugubrious reflection is so extremely doleful that Jim cannot refrain from a laugh.
"Cheer up, old girl! there is a good time coming! It is a long lane that has no turning."
But he contents himself with these vague forms of consolation. He has no engagements of his own. Why, then, is he conscious of so strong a reluctance towards tying himself by any promise to the broadly-hinting lady beside him? There is another pause, during which Cecilia looks down on the floor with a baffled air, and traces the outlines of the tiles with the point of her red sunshade.
"There is a band plays twice a week in the Place de Gouvernement—plays admirably. Now, I suppose that there would be nothing odd; that no one could say anything; that it would not be the least improper, considering our connection and everything, if you were to take me to hear it some day?"
"I never have the slightest idea of what is improper and what is not," replies he; but there is more of alarm than of encouragement in his tone.
"No more have I"—laughing rather awkwardly—"but in this case I am pretty sure. Tuesdays and Fridays are the days on which the band plays."
"Oh!"
"To-day is Tuesday, is not it?"
"Yes."
Another pause.
"I thought that perhaps, if you had nothing better to do, you might take me to-day?"
The direct proposal which he has in vain tried to avert has come. If he accept it, of what profit to him will the absence of the Le Marchant parents be? He does not formulate this fact to himself, not having, indeed, owned to his own heart that he has any set design upon Elizabeth's company for the afternoon.
"I am afraid——" he begins slowly.
"You are vamping up an excuse!" cries Cecilia, reddening. "I see it in your eyes. You cannot have made any engagements here yet. You do not know anybody, do you, except the Le Marchants?"
"And they have gone to Hammam Rhira," replies he precipitately.
He is ashamed the moment that the words are out of his mouth, for he knows that they convey a falsehood.
"At least——"
But she interrupts him before he can add his conscience clause.
"To-morrow, then?"
Again he hesitates. The same objections apply with even greater force to the morrow.
"But the band does not play to-morrow."
"Oh! what does that matter?" rejoins she impatiently. "I had just as soon go somewhere else—the Arab town, the Kabyle village, anywhere."
He is driven into a corner, and remains there silent so long that there is a distinct element of offence in the tone and large sigh with which the girl resumes.
"Well, times are changed! I always used to make one in those happy excursions at Florence; and somehow—thanks to her, I suppose—I never felt a bad third."
She rises as she speaks, and takes a couple of huffy steps towards the house; but he overtakes and stops her. The allusion to Amelia has annoyed and yet stirred in him the sea of remorse, which is always lying but a very little way below the surface in his soul.
"Why, Cis!" he says, in a tone of affectionate rallying, "are we going to quarrel at this time of day—you and I? Of course I will take you to the band and the Kabyle village, and any other blessed sight you choose to name, only tell me by which of them you would like to begin to ride round."
As he leaves the house and the appeased fair one, after luncheon, an hour and a half later, he tells himself that he has got off cheaply in having vaguely sacrificed the whole of his Algerian future, but having preserved to-day and to-morrow.
CHAPTER VI.
"And therein sat a lady fresh and fayre,
Making sweet solace to herself alone.
Sometimes she sang as lowd as lark in ayre,
Sometimes she laught, as mery as Pope Joan."
Jim's first care on returning to his hotel is to ascertain that the departure for Hammam Rhira has really taken place, and, having been reassured on this point, retires to his own bedroom to reconnoitre the terrace, upon which it gives. The sun has long drunk up the rain from the tiles, and the chairs have been set out again. The hotel guests, in all the sociability of their after-luncheon mood, are standing and sitting about. The widow Wadman, with great play of eyebrow and lip, is pacing up and down in arch conversation with her habitual victim. Snatches of her alluring talk reach Jim behind his muslin curtain as she comes and goes:
"I think that caged birds ought to be loved!" "The Prophet was a wise man, was not he? he knew a little about us," etc.
In her usual place, aloof from the rest of the company, Elizabeth is sitting in a clinging white gown of some woolly stuff. With a dainty white kerchief twisted about her head, and a bundle of many-tinted Eastern stuffs on her knees, she looks like a little Romney. Now and again, as fragments of the widow's siren strains reach her ears, he sees her lips curl up into delighted laughter; but, for the most part, she seems to be looking round rather uneasily, as if seeking something or someone. Can it be himself that she, in her innocence of being observed, is on the watch for? He has no right to be playing the spy on her in any case. It is clear that, dressed as she is, she cannot be meditating going out. He must not frighten her by any too direct or sudden attentions. In a little while the other occupants of the terrace will drift away, and he will stroll out and join her, and together they will watch the shade of the ficus-tree, lengthening over the red flags. But she presently baffles his calculations by rising, and, with her rainbow-tinted pile of brocades clasped in her slender arms, slowly passes into the house. Has she retreated thither for good? and will he have to frame some new flimsy excuse for knocking at her door? But again he is out of his reckoning, for in about a quarter of an hour she re-issues, dressed for walking; and after one more lingering and, as it seems to him, disappointed glance around her, paces, a solitary little figure, down the hill. He lays his watch before him, and, having counted five minutes on its dial-plate, sets off in pursuit. He overtakes her just as she reaches the point where the lane debouches into the highroad. She stands, looking rather disconsolately, first up the hill, then down it, evidently uncertain which direction to choose.
"You cannot make up your mind?" he says, pausing beside her, and taking off his hat.
She gives a slight start, and a friendly, pleased smile runs all over her face and up into her eyes—a smile that makes him say to himself confidently that it was he whom her glance had been seeking on the terrace.
"Which do you advise?"
"I advise the town."
He has long known her teachableness, so it is no great surprise to him that she at once turns in the direction counselled.
"As I am going there myself, will you allow me to walk a little way with you?"
He makes the request with respectful diffidence; and she, after one small troubled look, evidently given to the memory of her father, assents.
They set off down the hill together, the air, sharp after the rain—as sharp, at least, as Algiers' stingless air ever is—bringing the colour to Elizabeth's cheeks, as she steps along light-heartedly, scarcely refraining from breaking into a run, down the steep incline. Her spirits are so evidently rising at every yard that he hazards his next step.
"I am going to see the Arab town; Miss Strutt says that I ought."
"She meant you to ask her to show it you!" cries Elizabeth, with a laugh; "but she was quite right—it is delightful; I am sure you will like it."
"You have been there?"
"Yes, once or twice; not half so often"—regretfully—"as I should like to have been."
Dare he speak upon the last innocent hint? But while he is doubting she goes on:
"You must take care not to lose yourself; it is such a puzzling place; all the streets are exactly like each other."
"You do not feel inclined to show me the way about it?"
He throws out the suggestion in a semi-bantering voice, so that if it meet with obvious disapproval he may at once withdraw it. She stops suddenly stock-still, and faces him.
"Are you speaking seriously? It would be very delightful; but do you think I might? do you think I ought?"
She lifts her eyes, widely opened, like a child's at hearing of some unexpected treat, to his. How astonishingly clear they are! and how curiously guileless! He has not the least doubt that she will sweetly acquiesce in his decision, whichever way it tends; and, for a second, a movement of irritation with her for her pliability crosses his mind. She ought to be able to have an opinion of her own. While he hesitates, she speaks again.
"It is just the afternoon to do something pleasant on," she says wistfully, and yet gaily too. "Oh, how good the air tastes! and how dearly I love the sun!"—lifting her face with sensitive lips, half open, as if to suck in his beams, to the great gold luminary pouring down his warmth through the pepper-trees upon them. "But I will take your advice; I know of old"—with a pretty flattering smile—"that you always give good advice. Do you think that I ought—do you really think that I ought?"
He throws conscience to the winds, and although not two hours ago he had professed to Cecilia his inability to decide upon the propriety or impropriety of any given course of female action, now answers with an almost brutal decisiveness:
"I do not think that there is the smallest doubt about it."
A relieved look crosses her features.
"Then I am sure it is all right," she says, with a joyful surrendering of her judgment into his keeping, and so, once again, steps along with her quick feather-light feet at his side.
For the moment she is the happier of the two, since he is not perfectly pleased either with himself or her. It is in vain that he tells himself that it is no babe whom he is beguiling; that, difficult as it is to believe it, those limpid eyes have looked at the sun for seven-and-twenty years. He still has a lingering sense of discomfort at having availed himself, for his own profit, of her ductility. And yet, five minutes later, he takes yet further advantage of that quality in her. They have reached the Plateau Saulière, and the stand of fiacres that "stationnent" there. Jim pauses.
"It is a good distance to the Arab town, I fancy, and very tiring walking when you get there."
"It is as steep as the side of a house; we shall be like flies on a wall," cries she delightedly.
"It would be a pity to be too tired to enjoy it before you got there, would not it?" says he doubtfully, and eyeing her bright slenderness with an air of uncertainty as to her powers of endurance. "Had not we better—would you mind—our driving there?"
"I am not at all tired," replies she; "I do not feel as if I ever should be tired to-day; but if you think it better——"
Still he looks at her dubiously. To him there appears to be a much greater degree of the compromising in a tête-à-tête drive than in a walk. In the one case the meeting may have been accidental; in the other there can be no mistake as to the deliberate intention. But either this does not strike Elizabeth, or she thinks, "In for a penny, in for a pound"; or, lastly, and most probably, having given up her judgment into his keeping, she finds it easiest and most natural to acquiesce in whatever he may propose.
The ungenerous thought flashes across him that if this is the principle on which she has guided her life, it is small wonder if she have made shipwreck of it. He hails a fiacre, and silently hands her in, and again they are off.
Elizabeth has disclaimed fatigue, and yet the restful position is evidently agreeable to her delicate body; and she thanks him so gratefully for his thought of her that his hard thoughts of her dissolve into remorse, and by-and-by change into an enjoyment almost as entire and uncalculating as her own.
Elizabeth has astonishing powers of enjoying herself. If he had not known that fact before, the afternoon would have revealed it to him.
She must have driven through the French town almost every day since her arrival, and yet its cheerful white-shuttered houses, its boulevards of glossy-leaved ficus-trees, its cafés, its arcaded streets with their polyglot promenaders, seem to fill her with as lively a pleasure as if she had but just landed from the steamboat that brought her.
The three Spahis, eternally sitting in a row on a bench outside some general officer's quarters, robed in their great red cloaks, with muslin-swathed swart heads and long red-leather boots, dimly descried beneath the stately sweep of their mantles, sitting there motionless, solemn and silent as the Fates; a venerable Arab, only to be distinguished from Abraham or Isaac by his carrying a vulgar brown umbrella; a short Kabyle seen in back view, with his rope-bound headdress, his brown-and-white striped frock, and his bare red legs striding along, looking exactly like a ludicrous and indelicate old woman; a Biskrah water-carrier, poising a great burnished copper pot on his shoulder; two little baggy trousered white ladies waddling along; a dozen of smart blue Turcos. She is enraptured with them all.
They leave their fiacre in the Place de la Cathédrale, and enter upon the mysterious recesses of the Arab town. Up and down endless flights of steps, up street after street—if streets they can be called, that are not wider than a yard in their widest part—and above their heads the rafter-supported houses lean together, letting scarce a glint of daylight drip down upon the dusky path far below.
They pass arched doorways, with pretty designs in plaster—doorways whose doors open inwards upon mysterious interiors—house or court, or mosque or Marabé. All along stand tiny shops, like wild-beast dens, as far as light and space go, lit only by the tempered light—in reality, only semi-darkness—that enters in front. How can they see to work—plait straw, for instance? as the three ebon-black negroes are doing, upon whom they stare in, asquat upon the ground. The turbans, and the red sashes, and the burnouses glimmer out of the little dim frontages, where charming pierced-brass Moorish lamps hang and swing aloft; and tempting piles of dully splendid brocades and bright gold-laminated gauzes gleam from the crowded shelves.
The narrow streetlets are full of unbusy, un-hurrying Easterns, hideous old negresses grinning like monkeys, idle Arabs sauntering along in their lazy grace, draped like Greek statues, sauntering along between the blue-washed walls that look in their effective variation upon the blinding whitewash as if some of the sky-colour had rubbed off upon them.
Jim and Elizabeth have paused, in their leisurely strolling and staring, to look from the straight shadowed alley in which they are standing up a long flight of steps to a low carved doorway, and a bit of starch-blue wall at the top. Down the steep flight a veiled, trousered woman is waddling, her immense pantaloons waggling awkwardly as she descends.
Elizabeth stands still, shaking with laughter at the sight. Jim laughs too.
"There is no expense spared in material there, is there? It would not be a bad dress for a fancy ball. Did you ever go to a fancy ball as a Moorish lady?"
Her laughter lessens, though her face is still alight with mirth.
"I never was at a fancy ball."
"Never?"
"Never; I never was at any ball in my life."
Her laughter is quite dead now.
"Never at any ball in your life!" repeats he, his surprise betraying him into one of those flights back into the past for which she has always showed such repugnance. "Why, you used to love dancing madly! I remember your dancing like a dervish. What is more, I remember dancing with you."
"Oh, do not remember anything to-day!" cries she, with a sort of writhe in her voice; "do not let either of us remember anything! let us have a whole holiday from remembering!"
So saying, she moves on quickly; and yet with the dance gone out of her feet. It never quite comes back. They look into an Arab club, where men are squatting, playing with odd-looking cards and drinking muddy coffee. Then a loud noise of jabbering young voices makes them peep in upon an Arab school, where a circle of little Moslems is sitting on the ground, scribbling Arabic on slates; while between the knees of the turbaned master a tiny baby scholar, of three or four, is standing in a lovely dull green coatlet. Elizabeth strokes the baby-learner's coppery cheek with her light hand, and says, with a laugh, that it seems odd to see little street-boys writing Arabic; but her laughter is no longer the bubbling, irrepressible joy-drunk thing it was before he had indulged in his tactless reminiscences; it is the well-bred, civil, grown-up sound that so often has no inside gladness to match it. In his vexation with himself for the clouding over of his little heaven that he himself has effected, he tries to persuade himself that it is caused by bodily fatigue.
"If I were asked," he says, by-and-by, looking down affectionately at her pallid profile, "I should say that you had had about enough of this; your spirit"—smiling—"is so very much too big for your body that one has to keep an eye upon you."
"It would not be much of a spirit if it were not," replies she, with a pretty air of perfectly sincere disparagement of her own slight proportions; "I know that I look a poor thing, but I am rather a fraud: I do not tire easily; I am not tired now."
"Bored, then?" with a slight accent of pique.
She lifts her sweet look, with a sort of hurry of denial in it.
"Most distinctly not."
"You would like to go on, then?"
"Yes."
"Or back?"
She hesitates, her eye exploring his with, as he feels, a genuine anxiety in it to discover what his own wishes are, so that her decision may jump with them.
"Yes—perhaps; I have really no choice."
He both looks at and speaks to her with a streak of exasperation.
"Do you never have a will—a preference of your own?"
It is evidently no unfamiliar thing to her to be addressed with causeless irritability. The recollection of her father's tone in speaking to her flashes back remorsefully upon Jim's memory. Is he himself going to take a leaf out of that book? It would be a relief to him were she to answer him sharply; but to do that is apparently not within her capabilities, though the tender red that tinges her cheek shows that she has felt his snub.
"In this case I really have not," she answers gently; "but I dare say that it was tiresome of me not to speak more decidedly; let us—let us"—another swift and apparently quite involuntary glance at him to see that she is not, after all, running counter to his inclinations—"let us go home!"
So they go home. It is near sun-setting as they drive along the Boulevard de la République, the fitting end to so princely a day. At the quay the moored vessels lie, their masts and spars making a dark design against an ineffable evening sky of mother-of-pearl and translucent pink. The sea, which to-day has not been of sapphire, but of "watchet-blue," pierced and shot with white, now copies exactly the heavens. It, too, shades from opal to translucent pink. How many changes of raiment there are in the wardrobe of the great wet mother!
"If I had as many gowns as the Mediterranean, how well-dressed I should be!" says Elizabeth, with a smile.
It is the first time she had spoken since they had set off on their return-drive. She is lying back, with her hands carefully shielding in her lap a few little crockery pots that she has bought of a fat Turk for some children at her hotel Her face looks tired; and yet over its small area is spread an expression of content that makes his heart warm. Is it only the pageant of sky and ocean that has called forth that look of real, if passing, happiness on the features of her who is always so tremblingly sensitive an instrument for all influences of beauty and grandeur to play upon? or has his own neighbourhood anything to say to it? Before he can give himself an answer to this anxious question, she speaks again.
"You do not mind my not talking, do you?" she asks, half apologetically, and yet with a confidence in his sympathy that still further quickens the beats of his already not very still heart.
"No, I am sure you do not. Somehow—it is a great gift—you always feel in tune with one, and one does not chatter most when one is most greatly pleased, does one? Oh, what a treat you have given me!"
As she speaks, her humid eyes travel from his face to where, beyond the long Atlas range, delicately toothed and cut out, rises the gold-washed snow of the Kabyle mountains, that retire majestically invisible on dull days, and only come out, candescent and regal, when the great sun rides in pomp. Above their heads wild plumes of deep rose, that it seems ridiculous to call clouds, tuft the sky.
Jim's look has followed his companion's; the chins of both are in the air; the cheerful va et vient of the boulevard is lost upon them. They see neither the Frenchmen nor plump Frenchwomen drinking coffee outside the cafés, nor the idle indigènes leaning draped against the sea-wall. (Never does that industrious race seem to attempt any severer exertion.)
"Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired."
But it is brought back to life with a jump.
"Arrêtez! arrêtez!" cries a female voice. "Jim! Jim! do you not see us? Arrêtez! arrêtez!"
Obedient to his ears, Burgoyne's eyes make one bound from the heavenly spectacle down to earth, and alight upon the Wilsons' carriage, which, going in the same direction as himself, has just been brought to a standstill alongside of his fiacre, by the solemnly beautiful, yellow-jacketed native coachman.
It is, of course, Cecilia's voice that has apostrophized him, but oh, portent! does his vision, so lately recalled from the skyey bowers, play him false? or is it really the moribund Sybilla, stretched beside her, with only two instead of three cushions at her back, with a bonnet on her head—he did not even know that she possessed a bonnet—and with a colour in her cheek and a lustre in her eye that may owe their origin either to the freshness of the evening air, or to the invigorating properties of the conversation of the very ordinary-looking young man seated opposite to her?
In a second Jim has leapt out of his own vehicle, and gone to the side of the other. It is a perfectly futile impulse that leads him to do so. Not all the leaping in the world from her side now can alter the fact that he has been driving tête-à-tête with Elizabeth Le Marchant, and that the Wilson sisters have seen him so doing; but yet it is a dim instinct of preservation towards, and shielding of her, that leads him to adopt this useless course of action. It is Cecilia who has summoned him, and yet, when he reaches her side, she does not seem to have anything particular to say to him. Sybilla is the one to address him.
"A miracle! a miracle! I know you are saying to yourself!" cries she, in a sprightly voice; "and well you may! This is the miracle-monger!" indicating with a still sprightlier air her vis-à-vis. "Dr. Crump, let me present to you Mr. Burgoyne—Jim, our Jim, whom I have so often talked to you about."
The person thus apostrophized responds by a florid bow, and an over-gallant asseveration that any person introduced to his acquaintance by Miss Sybilla needs no further recommendation.
"It is an experiment, of course; there is no use in pretending that it is not an experiment," continues she, with a slight relapse into languor; "but"—lowering her voice a little—"they wished me to make the effort."
It is a favourite allocation of Sybilla's that any course of action towards which she is inclined is adopted solely under the pressure of urgent wishes on the part of her family. Burgoyne has long known, and been exasperated by, this peculiarity; but at present she may say what she pleases; he hears no word of it, for his ear is pricked to catch the sentences that Cecilia is leaning over the carriage-side to shoot at Elizabeth.
"Oh, Miss Le Marchant! is it you? I beg your pardon, I did not recognise you at the first moment. One does not recognise people—does one?—when one is not expecting to see them"—is an intended sting lurking in this implication? "How are you? How do you like Algiers? I hope Mrs. Le Marchant is well. What a long time it is since we met! I hope we shall see something of you."
(No, evidently no sting was meant. Cecilia, with all her faults, is really a good soul, and he will take her to hear the band play next Tuesday.)
There seems to him to be a slight falter in the tone with which Elizabeth responds, and her voice sounds curiously small and low; but that may be merely owing to its flute quality, following upon and contrasting the other's powerful organ.
It is not till the two parties have again separated, and that he is once more seated by her side in the fiacre, that he dares steal a look at her face to see how plainly written on it are the traces of vexation caused by a meeting which has produced in his own breast such acute annoyance. Good heavens! it is even worse than he had expected. Down the cheek nearest to him two good-sized tears are unmistakably trickling. No doubt the consciousness of the mysterious story attaching to her past makes her smartingly aware of how doubly discreet her own conduct should be—makes her bitterly repent of her present indiscretion.
He is a strait-laced man, and it seems to him as if there were something gravely compromising to her in this tête-à-tête drive with himself, in the known absence of her parents at Hammam Rhira. Why was he fool enough this morning to admit to Cecilia that they had gone thither? He had no business to have led her into temptation, and she had no business to have fallen into it. Remorse and irritation give a tartness to his tone as he says:
"After all, I do not think you need take it so much to heart."
"Take what to heart?" she asks, in unaffected surprise, turning her full face, and her eyes, each with one hot raindrop dimming its slate-blue, upon him. "Oh, I see"—a sudden enlightenment coming to her, and changing her with instant spring from a snowdrop to a carnation—"I see what you mean; but you are mistaken. I—I—it had not occurred to me; I was only thinking—only remembering that the last time I saw her was at—at Vallombrosa."
Vallombrasa! Is he never to hear the last of Vallombrosa?
CHAPTER VII.
The latest waking impression left on Jim's fancy is that it is the golden rule of Elizabeth Le Marchant's life to comply with any and every request that is made to her; moreover, that in her mind the boundary-line which parts the permitted from the unpermitted is not so clearly defined as, did she belong to him (the naked hypothesis makes his strait-laced heart give a jump), he should wish it to be. If on the morrow, with the sun shining and the leaf-shadows dancing on the fretted balcony-wall, he invite her to some fresh junket, he is sure that she will readily and joyfully acquiesce; that her spirits will go up like rockets at the prospect; and that her one anxiety will be that she may be sure to hit in her choice upon the form of dissipation most congenial to him. He will therefore not invite her. He will have a greater care for her reputation than apparently she has for it herself. Not until the return of her parents, not until the difficulties of intercourse with her are centupled, and the pleasure minimized, will he again seek her.
To put himself beyond the reach of temptation, he sets off immediately after breakfast on a long walking expedition, which he means to occupy the whole of the daylight hours. He wanders about the great plain of the Metidje; he visits a Kabyle village, with its hovels cowering among its hideous fat-fleshed cactus; later on in the afternoon he finds himself in the little French hamlet of Biermandreis, and finally drops down upon the Jardin d'Essai, that delightful botanic garden which is one of the many blessings for which Algerian France has to thank the much-vilipended Napoleon III.
It is difficult for even the reddest Republican to think hardly of that dead ruler as he walks down the avenue of gigantic palms that lead, straight as a die, to where, like a deep blue gem far away, the Mediterranean shows
"No bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman."
Jim walks along beneath the huge date-palms that give him a crick in the neck to gape up at ere he can perceive their towering head of waving plumes far up against the blue. They remind him absurdly of the pictures in the missionary books of his youth—the palm-tree, the log cabin, the blackamoors, and the missionary in a palm hat. Is he the missionary, and is this inky negress in a black bonnet, scarcely distinguishable from her face, his one catechumen?
Alternating with the date are superb fan-palms, of which it is difficult to realize that it is their stunted, puny brothers which, anxiously tended, sponged, and cosseted, drag out a languid existence in London drawing-rooms. Among their Titan fans lies their mighty fruit, like a bunch of grapes, a yard and a half long, strung upon ropes of yellow worsted.
Half-way down its length the main avenue is intersected by a splendid alley of bamboos, which lean their smooth-jointed stems and their luxuriant narrow leaves towards each other across the dimmed interspace, and unite in a pointed Gothic arch of living green.
Jim paces objectlessly down the long arcade, stooping now and again to pick up a fragment of the peeled bark that looks so strangely like a papyrus roll with a mother-of-pearl glaze upon it. He pulls it idly open, as if expecting to find the secret of some forgotten race written upon its shining surface; but if he reads any secret there, it is only his own, which, after all, is not much of a secret. He merely sees written there that it is too early to go home yet; that there is no security that Elizabeth may not still be sitting on the terrace stitching away with her gold thimble and her coloured silks. The sun, it is true, has left the garden, but he departs thence over-early. It will be safer to stay away yet half an hour or so.
Thus resolving, he retraces his steps, and explores in a new direction; saunters down a rose-alley, where, climbing immoderately high up tall palms, seeming as if they would strangle them with their long bowery arms, rose-trees wave far above him in the still air; and upon them, though it is still but the month of January, when people are skating, blue-nosed, in England, creamy tea-roses show their pale-yellow hearts, fair and frequent, on the unpruned boughs, rioting in licensed liberty above his head. The walk ends in a circle of gigantic magnolias, which take hands round a square fountain-basin. Each huge trunk is, as it were, a little commonwealth of trees rolled into one, instead of a single tree. Beneath them benches stand. Upon one his negress sits, chatting with a French bonne; on a second there is also something female and slender, something with its little white profile—how white it looks in this deceiving light!—lifted, although white, yet smiling, animated, and talking to a man standing beside it.
He has dawdled and kicked his heels, and run the chance of contracting a spiteful Southern chill, in order to avoid Elizabeth; and he has succeeded in running straight into her arms.
He does not at the first glance recognise her companion, but a second look shows him that he is one of the inmates of the hotel—a French Vicomte; and though Jim knows that he is both consumptive and the father of a family, that knowledge does not hinder the rising in his breast of the jealous and censorious thought that he has detected Elizabeth in throwing a great deal more than the necessary modicum of amiability into her manner to him.
As Jim comes into sight, the Frenchman clicks his heels, doubles up his body, lifts his hat, and walks away. It is evident, at all events, that their meeting was a casual one; and the reflection brings with it a sense of relief, coupled with a feeling of shame at his own rooted readiness to suspect her, on any or no evidence, which yet, on the other hand, is not strong enough, when she turns her sweet bright look towards him, to hinder the thought that it is scarcely, if at all, sweeter or brighter than that which he had caught her squandering on the casual table d'hôte acquaintance who has just quitted her.
"You, too!" she says; "why, the whole hotel seems to be emptied out into these gardens; the widow Wadman is buying violets—mark if they do not appear upon Uncle Toby at dinner to-night. The Vicomte——"
"Yes, I saw you engaged in animated dialogue with him," interrupts Jim, with slight acrimony; "I had no idea that you were such allies."
"Had not you?" rejoins she innocently. "He was telling me about his English governess, what a treasure she is"—her face dimpling mischievously—"and how wonderfully pure her accent. So it is—pure Cockney. You should hear the little Vicomte talk of the biby and the pipers."
He rewards her small pleasantry only by an absent smile, and she speaks again—rather wistfully this time.
"Have you been on another expedition?"
"No, not an expedition; only a walk. If"—yielding to the temptation of putting a question which no one would have judged more severely than he, had it been put by anyone else—"if I had invited you to do me the honour of making another excursion with me to-day, do you think that you would have consented?"
As he speaks, he departs yet further from the line of conduct he has marked out for himself by sitting down on the bench at her side.
Her eyes are fixed upon the soaring date-palm, which stands, instead of a water-jet, in the middle of the fountain-basin, and on which last year's dead plumes hang sapless, and ready to fall off, in contrast to this year's verdant vigour.
"Is not that rather a tantalizing question when you did not ask me?" inquires she, with soft archness. "Yes, I suspect that I should; I was so very happy yesterday; and although you told me the other night"—swallowing a sigh—"that you supposed I must love my own society, in point of fact, I do not think I do."
After all, the sun is not quite gone; there are flashes of light in the verdant gloom, and green reflections in the water.
"And yet," says Jim thoughtfully, "you seem to have a good deal of it; I suppose, in your position, it is unavoidable."
He had meant an allusion to her situation as bad third to her uxorious parents; before his mind's eye has risen a picture of the little forlorn shawled figure he had seen studying its Italian Grammar with the door shut upon its loneliness; but almost before the words have left his lips, he sees of how different, of how cruel, a construction they may be capable.
He snatches a glance of real terror at her, to see whether she has made that erroneous, yet all too plausible application—a glance which confirms his worst fears. She has turned as white as the pocket-handkerchief which she is passing over her trembling lips.
"Yes," she says in a hollow whisper; "you are right. In my position it is unavoidable, and it is cowardly of me not to accept it as such."
"I mean"—he cries desperately—"I only meant—I mean——"
But she does not suffer him to finish his stuttered explanation.
"It is cold," she says, rising. "I will go home."
He does not attempt to accompany or follow her.
After she is gone, he rages about the garden, and passes beyond it to where—still sunlight-smitten—the blue Mediterranean is breaking in joyous foam.
He sits down on the shelly strand, and, in futile anger, hurls back the wet pebbles into the sea's azure lap. Away to the left, the three-cornered town swarms candescent up the hill, and the white lighthouse stands out against the lapis-coloured air.
How sharp-cut and intense it all is!—none of our dear undecided grays. Here, if you are not piercing blue, you are dazzling white or profound green. There is, indeed, something less sharp-cut and uncompromising—a something more of mystery in the glory that—bright, too, but not making its full revelation—envelopes the long hill range that, ending in Cape Matifou, stretches away to the far right. Round the corner, to the right too, a party of Arabs, sitting sideways on little donkeys, white draped, with their haik-swathed heads, are disappearing on their small beasts in the clear air. It is like a page out of the Bible—a flight into Egypt—and they are going towards Egypt too.
Jim's eye follows the placid Easterns, but without catching the infection of their tranquillity. "Whenever I see her, I stick a knife into her! It is impossible! There is no use trying! I will give up the attempt. It is out of the question to have any happy relations with a woman who has a past!"
After all, Mr. Le Marchant does not like Hammam Rhira. He thinks the hotel cold and the roads bad. Jim overhears him telling someone this, and his own heart leaps.
It is true that he takes it to task for doing so. Perhaps, after all, Elizabeth's removal would have been the best solution of his problem. Had she left Algiers, he could scarcely have followed her, and she would have been freed from the chance of his clumsy stabs.
But all the same his heart leaps. It leaps yet higher a day or two later when he discovers that, though Hammam Rhira has not met with Mr. Le Marchant's approbation, yet that, by his trip to it, he has been bitten with a taste for travel, the outcome of which is his solitary departure on an expedition to Constantin, Tunis, etc., which must occupy him at least a week. His wife accompanies him to the station, but his daughter is not allowed to go beyond the hotel steps.
Jim surreptitiously watches her hovering with diffident affection round her father, unobtrusively and unthanked fetching and carrying for him. He sees the cold kiss that just brushes her cheek, and hears the chill parting admonition to look well after her mother and see that she does not overtire herself.
It is accepted with ready meekness, but leaves the recipient so crestfallen, as she stands looking after the departing vehicle, that Burgoyne cannot forbear joining her, with some vague and, as he knows, senseless velleity of championship and consolation.
"He is gone for a week, is not he?" is the form that his sympathy takes, in a tone which he is at but small pains not to render congratulatory.
"Yes, quite a week."
"Are you"—he is perfectly conscious while asking it that he has not the slightest right to put the question—"are you glad or sorry?"
She starts perceptibly.
"Why should I be glad? Do you mean"—with an unconquerable streak of satisfaction in her own voice—"because I shall have mammy all to myself? You must not think"—with an obvious rush of quickly following compunction—"that I am not fond of him, because he sometimes speaks a little roughly to me." After a pause, in a lowered voice: "You see, when you have broken a person's heart, you can scarcely blame him for not having a very high opinion of you."
So saying, she suddenly leaves him as she had left him in the Jardin d'Essai. He does not again approach her that day, but at dinner-time he has the answer to his question as to her being glad or sorry at her father's departure. She is apparently in the best of spirits, sitting nestled close up to her mother for the better convenience of firing a series of little jokes and comments into that parent's appreciative ear.
"They make fun of the whole hotel," observes Miss Strutt with exasperation. "I do not believe that one of us escapes! When he is not there to check them, there is no holding them!"
No holding Elizabeth! The phrase recurs to him several times during the next few days, as not without its justness, when he sees its object flitting about the house, gay as a linnet; when he meets her singing subduedly to herself upon the stairs; when he watches her romping with the French children, and mischievously collecting flowers of Clapham eloquence from their governess, which she is good enough to retail for his own and her mother's benefit when evening unites the three in the retirement of their little salon. For, strange and improbably blissful as it seems, he has somehow, ere three days are over, effected an entrance into that small and fragrant sanctuary.
Mrs. Le Marchant's first fears that the meeting with him again would re-open sorrow have disappeared in the light of her daughter's childish gaiety, and are even exchanged for a compunctious gratitude to him for having been in part the cause of her new light-heartedness. The weather has again broken, a fact which he alone of the whole hotel does not deplore, since it was his own ostentatiously displayed wet-day dreariness that was the cause of his first admission within the doors that are closed upon all others. Moreover, had it not been wet weather, could he have held an umbrella over Elizabeth's head when he met her in the eucalyptus wood, and they walked among the naked trunks, while the long, loose, pale foliage waved like dishevelled hair in the rain, and the pungent asphodels grew thick about their feet in the red earth? And when, by-and-by, the clouds disperse again, and there comes a fair day, bracketed between three or four foul ones—the usual Algerian proportion—it has grown quite natural to all three that he should sit opposite to them in their drives; that he should haggle with Arabs for them, and remonstrate with the landlord, and generally transfer all the smaller roughnesses of life from their shoulders to his own. Brought into more intimate communion with them than he has ever been before, Burgoyne realizes how much they belong to the kneeling, leaning, spoiling type of womankind. Elizabeth would be the easiest woman in the world to manage. How is it that in her ten years of womanhood no man has been found to undertake the lovely facile task? He himself knows perfectly the treatment that would befit her; the hinted wishes—her tact is too fine and her spirit too meek to need anything so coarse as commands—the infinitesimal rebukes and the unlimited—oh! limitless—caresses:
"Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles."
Every day he finds himself repeating Wordsworth's line, and every day, in his fancied guidance of her, he tells himself that the blame should be less and the kisses more.
Mr. Le Marchant has been gone more than a week, and February has come wetly in, with rain wildly weeping against the easements, and angry-handed rain boxing the unlucky orange-trees' ears. It has rained for forty-eight hours without a break. The Grand Hotel is at the end of its resources. Uncle Toby, his struggle ended, lies vanquished in the widow's net; and there is murder in the lurid eye which Miss Strutt turns on the votary of Whiteley.
Jim alone, outdoor man as he habitually is, looking upon a house merely in the light of a necessary shelter, has no quarrel either with the absent sun or the present deluge? for are not they the cause of his having spent two whole afternoons in the company of Elizabeth and her mother? To-day has not Elizabeth been singing to him, and cutting him orange-flower bread-and-butter, when Fritz brought in the afternoon tea, and set the real English kettle fizzing over its spirit-lamp? And, in return, has not he now, after dinner, been helping her to weed out her own and her mother's photograph-books? As he does so the idea strikes him of how very meagre her own collection of acquaintances seems to be. From that weeding have they not, by an easy transition, at her suggestion, passed to the more playful and ingenious occupation of amputating the heads of some of the rejected friends and applying them to the bodies of others? Each armed with a pair of scissors, and with Mrs. Le Marchant for umpire, they have been vying with each other as to who can produce the most startling results by this clever process.
The palm has just been awarded to Elizabeth for a combination which presents the head of an elderly lady, in a widow's cap, mounted upon the cuirass and long boots of a Life Guardsman. Jim's application of the cornet's discarded head to the body of a baby in long clothes, although allowed to be a pretty conceit, commands but little real admiration—an instance of nepotism which he does not allow to pass without protest.
Elizabeth, elated by her triumph, has flown out of the room to examine her private stores for fresh material, and Jim and her mother—for the first time, as it happens, since that early meeting, when her anxious eye had so plainly implored him to leave Algiers—are tête-à-tête. Her changed aspect towards him as she sits, with a lingering laugh still on her face, beside the wood fire—which, after having twice gone out, as it almost always does, the souches being invariably wet, burns bright and crackly—strikes him with such a feeling of warm pleasure that he says in a voice of undisguised triumph:
"What spirits she is in, is not she?"
"Yes; is not she?" assents the mother eagerly. "Oh, I cannot say how grateful I am to you for having cheered her up as you have done! Oh," with a low sigh that seems to bear away on its slow wings the last echoes of her late mirth, "if it could only last!"
"Why should not it last?"
"If nothing fresh would happen!"
"Why should anything fresh happen?"
She answers only indirectly;
"'Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
The life-blood seemed to sip.'
"Sometimes I think that Coleridge wrote those lines expressly for me." After a pause, in a voice of anxious asking: "She has not mentioned him to you lately, has she?"
"No."
"That is a good sign. Do not you think that that is a good sign? I think that she is getting better; do not you?"
For a moment he cannot answer, both because he is deeply touched by the confidence in him and his sympathy evidenced by her appeal, and for a yet more potent reason. Little she guesses how often, and with what heart-searchings and spirit-sinkings, he has put that question to himself.
"I do not know," he replies at last, with difficulty; "it is hard to judge."
"You have not told him that we are here?" in a quick, panic-struck tone, as of one smitten with a new and sharp apprehension.
"Oh no!"
"You do not think that he is at all likely to join you here?"
"Not in the least!" with an almost angry energy, which reveals to himself how deeply distasteful the mere suggestion of Byng's reappearance on the scene is to him.
Mrs. Le Marchant heaves a second sigh. This time it is one of relief.
"Then I do not see," with a sudden bound upwards into sanguineness which reminds him of her daughter, "why we should not all be very comfortable."
Jim is pondering in his mind upon the significance of this "all," whether it is meant to include only Mr. Le Marchant, or whether, under its shelter, he himself may creep into that promised comfort, when she of whom they have been speaking re-enters. She has a packet of photographs, presumably suitable for amputation, in her hand, in which is also held a telegram, which she extends to Burgoyne.
"I met M. Cipriani bringing you this. It seems that you ought to have had it two days ago, but, by some mistake, it was put into another gentleman's room—a gentleman who has never arrived—and there it has remained. He was full of apologies, but I told him what culpable carelessness it showed. I do trust," with a sweetly solicitous look, "that it is not anything that matters."
"It cannot be of much consequence," replies Jim indifferently, while a sort of pang darts through him at the thought of how strangely destitute he is of people to be uncomfortably anxious about, and so tears it open.
An English telegram transmitted by French clerks often wears a very different air from that meant to be imparted to it by the sender, which is, perhaps, the reason why Jim remains staring so long at his—so long that the two women's good manners prompt them to remove their sympathetic eyes from him, and to attempt a little talk with each other.
"I hope you have no bad news?"
The elder one permits herself this inquiry after a more than decent interval has elapsed, during which he has made no sign.
He gives a start, as one too suddenly awaked out of deep sleep.
"Bad news?" he repeats in an odd voice—"what is bad news? That depends upon people's tastes. It is for you to judge of that; it concerns you as much or more than it does me."
So saying, he places the paper in her hand, and, walking away to the little square window—open, despite the wildness of the weather—looks out upon the indigo-coloured night.
Although his back is turned towards them, he knows that Elizabeth is reading over her mother's shoulder—reading this:
"Bourgouin,
"Grand Hotel,
"Algiers."Have heard of Le Marchants. If you do not wire to the contrary, shall cross to-morrow.—Byng, Marseille."
He is not left long in doubt as to their having mastered the meaning of the missive.
"He is coming!" says Mrs. Le Marchant with a species of gasp; "and you told me—not five minutes ago you told me"—with an accent of reproach—"that there was not the remotest chance of it. Oh, stop him! stop him! Telegraph at once! The office will be open for two or three hours yet! There is plenty, plenty of time! Oh, telegraph at once—at once!"
"It is too late," replies Jim, retracing his steps to the table; "you forget that it is two days old. You see, they have spelt my name wrong; that accounts for the mistake. Bourgouin! It looks odd spelt Bourgouin, does not it?"
He hears himself giving a small, dry laugh, which nobody echoes.
"He must have sailed yesterday," continues the young man, wishing he could persuade his voice to sound more natural; "he may be here at any moment. If the weather had been decent, he would have arrived ere now."
"Then there is nothing to be done!" rejoins Mrs. Le Marchant in a tone of flat desperation, sitting down again on the chair out of which she had instinctively risen at the little stir of the telegram's arrival.
Elizabeth is dead silent. Though there is no direction by the eye to show that Jim's next remark is aimed at her, there can be no doubt that it is awkwardly thrown in her direction.
"If this had not been delayed—if it had not been too late, would you have wished, would you have decided to stop him?"
"What is the use of asking me such a question now that it is too late?" replies she, with more of impatience, almost wrath, in her voice than he has ever before heard that most gentle organ express.
But besides the ire and irritation, there is another quality in it which goads him to snatch a reluctant glance at her. She is extremely agitated, but underlying the distress and disturbance of her face there is an undoubted light shining like a lamp through a pale pink shade—a light that, with all her laughter and her jokes, was not there half an hour ago. He had often reproached himself that, by his clumsiness, he had stuck a knife into her tender heart. She is even with him to-night. To-night the tables are turned. It is she that has stuck a knife into him. It is clear as day that she is glad it is too late.
CHAPTER VIII.
"After all," says Mrs. Le Marchant presently, rallying a little, her naturally buoyant temperament—that temperament which she has transmitted with such curious fidelity to her child, coming to her rescue; "after all, there is no reason why you should see him, Elizabeth. There is no reason why she should see him, is there, Mr. Burgoyne? It could serve no possible end—could it?—and only be exceedingly painful to them both. You will explain to him, will not you? You will take any message from her? You will tell him that she really is not up to it, will not you? It is quite true, I am sure. You are not, are you darling? She is not, is she?"
The mother turns as she speaks eagerly from one to the other, addressing each in turn; but from neither does she obtain any answer.
"Or I would speak to him myself; if you thought that better," continues she, still interrogating them with her handsome, careworn eyes. "I would say anything you wished said to him, and I would be careful to say it as kindly as possible. I am sure he would understand; he would see the sense, the justice of it, would not he? There is no need for her to expose herself to such useless suffering, is there, Mr. Burgoyne?"—appealing desperately to him by name, since he will not respond to any less direct address—"when either you or I are more than ready to shield her from it, are not we?"
Thus apostrophized, Jim is compelled to break the silence, which seems to himself to wall him round like a petrifaction. It is to Elizabeth that he offers his hardly-won speech.
"I think I need not tell you," he says gravely, and with passable steadiness, "that I would help you in any way I could."
She stands a moment or two irresolute, her features all quivering as if with pain; and yet, underlying and under-shining the pain, something that is not pain. Then she puts out a hand impulsively to each. If the one that gives itself to Burgoyne had struck him on the mouth, instead of offering itself with affectionate confidence to his clasp, it could not have hurt him more than do those small fingers that lie in his, trembling with a passion that is not for him.
"You are both very good to me," she says brokenly. "As to you, mammy, that is an old story. But I really believe that there is nothing disagreeable that you, too"—with a slight grateful pressure of the lifeless hand that so slackly keeps possession of hers—"would not do for me. But do not think me obstinate if I say that I think—I am sure—that it would be better—that it would hurt him less—if I spoke to him myself."
"It is not a question of what will hurt him least," cries Mrs. Le Marchant, with an agony of impatience in her tone. "The thing to be considered is what will hurt you least. Mr. Burgoyne, am I not right? Do tell her that I am! Ought not she to think of what will hurt her least?"
But Jim is incapable of coming a second time to her rescue. His eyes are painfully fastened upon Elizabeth, and he is watching the pain fall off, as it were, from her face, and the light spread rosily over it. Some instinct makes her withdraw that hand of hers which he has shown so little eagerness to retain, ere she says, in a low but perfectly firm voice:
"Well, then, I think it will hurt me least, too."
Five minutes later Jim has left the room—ostensibly to make arrangements for his friend's arrival, in reality because he cannot count upon his own self-control if he remain in it. The survivors of Elizabeth Le Marchant's acquaintance remain undecapitated. The widow-headed Life Guardsman and the baby-bodied cornet lie unregarded on the table, while Elizabeth herself is stretched along the floor, with her face pressed against her mother's knees. Jim has decided to sit up for his friend. He is perfectly aware that neither will the two women go to bed. But he has no desire that their vigil should be shared in common. It is equally impossible to him to take part in the noisy mirth of the rest of the hotel, which, having taken the place of their measureless daylight ennui, now boils over in ebullient laughter, in dancing, squeaking, and noisily scampering out of the public drawing-room into the hall and up the stairs. It is not till the clamour has declined, until, indeed, its total cessation tells him that the promiscuous revellers have retired to their apartments, that he issues from his, and takes possession of the now empty smoking-room, whence he can hear more distinctly than from his own bedroom any noise of wheels approaching the hotel. The wind has risen again, and it needs an ear very finely pricked to dissever from its mad singing, and from the storming of the frantic rain, any lesser and alien sound. What a terrific night in which to be out on the raging sea! Worse even than that one last week, when the Moïse broke her shaft, and tossed for twenty-four hours at the mercy of the waves. Possibly the weather may have already yesterday been so rough at Marseille as to prevent his setting off. But the idea—at the first blush eagerly welcomed by him—is dismissed from his mind almost as soon as entertained. If the boat has started—and it is only under such heavy penalties that the mail-boats do not start, that this contingency hardly ever occurs—Byng will have started too. A terrific bang at the casement seems to come as a comment upon this conviction. He will have started; but will he ever arrive? It is said that in eight years during which they have been running no catastrophe has ever sent one of this line of steamers to the bottom; but yet they are cranky little craft, with engines too big for them—built rather for speed than safety. The clock has struck, with a repetition that seems strangely frequent through the sleeping house: 11, 11.30, 12, 12.30.
"I will give him half an hour more," says the watcher to himself, "and then I will turn in."
Of this allotted half-hour only five minutes are yet left to run, when, in a lull in the hurricane, the sound which Jim's hearing has been so long stretched to catch—the sound of wheels on the gravel—is at length audible. During the last two hours he has heard many phantom wheels—many of those ghostly coaches that the wind drives shrieking through the winter nights. But these are real ones. Before the drowsy porter, nodding in his little den, can reach the hall-door, Jim has opened it—opened it just in time to admit a man who, his pace still further accelerated by the mighty hands of the pushing blast, is bounding up the steps. If any doubt as to this person's identity lingered in Jim's mind, his first words would dispel it.
"She is here? There is no mistake? She is here?"
"How late you are!" cries the other, apparently regarding the new arrival's utterance more as an ejaculation than as a question expecting or needing an answer. "Why are you so late? Did the engines break down?"
"She is here?" repeats Byng insistently, taking no notice of the queries addressed to him. "You have not deceived me? For mercy's sake say that you have not deceived me!"
"Why should I deceive you?" rejoins Jim impatiently. "Yes; certainly she is here."
They are in the hall by now—the hall which, the Grand Hotel being gasless, is lit by only one weak paraffin lamp, which the gust from the door, necessarily still open to admit of the carrying in of the traveller's bags and rugs, is making even more faint and flickering than its wont.
"You must have had a fine tossing!"
"I believe you; they all thought we were going to make a dinner for the fishes—ha, ha! All but I. I knew better. I knew that I could not come to grief when she had called me to her."
Byng's hat is rammed down over his brows, and his fur coat turned up so high round his ears that it is impossible in the obscurity to see his face; but there is something in the tone of his voice—a loud, wild rollicking—that makes the idea cross Jim's mind that he has been drinking. What a shock it will give to Elizabeth if, in her covert vigil—he has no more doubt that she has been watching than that he has been doing so himself—she overhears that thick, raised voice! Prompted by this thought, he says hastily:
"Come into the dining-room. I told them to put something to eat for you there."
Byng complies; and when they have reached the empty salle à manger, whose whitewash looks weird and unnatural in the chill of the night, he sends his hat skimming down one of the long tables, and, grasping both Jim's hands in his, cries out, in the same loud tone of intoxicated triumph:
"Oh, my dear old chap, how good it is to see your ugly old mug again! If you had known—oh, if you had only known!—what I went through during the twenty-four hours after I sent you that telegram, when through every hour, through every minute and second of every hour, I said to myself, 'It may come now—my death-warrant may come now! In five minutes it may have come!' But it did not, it did not! I ought to have known"—with an accent of ecstasy—"that of her pitifulness she would relent at last. She is infinitely pitiful, is not she? but I shall upbraid her a little—oh, do not be afraid; it will be gently, most gently—for having kept me so long, so inhumanly long, upon my gridiron! I had always"—breaking into a rather wild laugh—"something of a tenderness for St. Lawrence, but during the last seven months I have loved him like a brother!"
He goes on again, with scarcely a pause, or apparently any consciousness of the unresponsive silence of his auditor:
"But what does it matter now?" beginning to stride about with his eyes cast up to the beamed ceiling and his lifted hands locked together—"what does it matter? 'After long grief and pain, to feel the arms of my true love round me once again!' You may think that I word it extravagantly," returning to Jim as he leans downcast and shocked upon one of the chairs of the monotonous table-d'hôte row; "but in the hope itself, the more than hope, there is nothing extravagant; you must own that yourself. If she had not meant to put an end to my long agony, she would not have sent for me; not to stop me was to send for me."
"You are labouring under a mistake," says Jim coldly, and yet with an inward quaking as to the effect that his words may produce; "she had not the option of stopping you. By some accident I did not receive your telegram till four hours ago. She could not have stopped you if she had wished."
The idea, as I have already said, has occurred to Burgoyne that his companion is under the influence of intoxication; but either this is not the case, or the shock of the last words has the effect of instantly sobering him.
"I—I—do not understand," he says in a voice out of which all the insane exhilaration has been conjured as if by magic; "I do not follow you. What do you mean?"
"I mean," replies Jim, in a matter-of-fact, level tone, meant to have a calming effect upon his auditor, "that owing, I suppose, to my name being spelt wrongly—Bourgouin instead of Burgoyne—your telegram was given to someone else, and did not reach me till nine o'clock this evening."
Byng puts up his hand to his throat, and, unfastening the collar of his fur coat as if it were strangling him, throws back the coat itself. Now that he sees him freed from enveloping wrap and concealing hat-brim, Jim can realize the full amount of change and deterioration that are visible in his appearance; can see how bloodshot his eyes are; how lined his mouth; and how generally ravaged and dimmed his good looks.
"I am to understand, then, that—that she would have stopped my coming if she could."
Jim is silent. He cannot answer that question with any certainty even to himself.
"She would have escaped me again if she had had the chance! What am I saying?"—with a sudden access of terror in his tone—"she may have escaped me already! She may be gone! Tell me the truth—do not dare to tell me anything but the bare truth. I saw that you hesitated when I asked you whether she was really here. Is she gone?"
"Gone!" repeats Jim, with an exasperated jerk of the head towards the window, against which the rain and wind are hurling themselves with threefold rage, as if to recapture the victim just escaped them. "To-night—in this storm? How likely! Come, be rational; try to keep your head, and let us have a truce to this ranting. I give you my word of honour that she is here, under this roof; asleep, I should hope, if your bellowings have not awoke her."
The latter clause may perhaps come under the head of a pardonable fiction; at all events, it has, despite its incivility, the desired effect of soothing, to some extent, the agitation of him to whom it is addressed.
"Asleep!" he repeats, while an ecstatic smile breaks over his handsome, dissipated face. "Good angels guard her slumbers! But"—with a rather ominous return of excitement—"are you sure that she is asleep—that she has gone to bed yet? They used to sit up very late in Florence sometimes. If she has not gone to bed, why should not I see her; why should not I fall at her feet now—to-night?"
"My dear boy," rejoins Jim, with a praiseworthy attempt to answer this modest and sensible proposal with patient good-humour, "have you any idea what time it is? I should have thought it might have occurred even to you that 1.30 A.M. is scarcely a suitable hour for paying a morning call! Do not be a fool! Pull yourself together. I swear to you that she has every intention of seeing you to-morrow. Come"—trying to laugh—"you will not have long to wait! It is to-morrow already; and, meantime, sit down and eat something; you must be as empty as a drum."
But to this prudent if homely counsel Byng opposes an obstinate negation, adorned with excited asseverations that food shall never cross his lips until they have pastured upon his lady's pardoning hand.
The same prohibition does not, however, apparently apply to drink, as he pours more than half the bottle of happily not very potent wine, prepared for his refreshment, into a tumbler, and tosses it off at a draught. He offers an even stouter refusal to Burgoyne's suggestion that he should go to bed; and as he utters it a flash of cunning suspicion comes into his eyes, shocking his friend with a gleam as of possible and scarcely latent madness. Across the latter's brain darts the query, which had proposed itself more than once to him last spring at Florence:
"Is there insanity in Byng's blood"
Not certainly on the distaff side, the side of his eminently sane and wholesome mother; but can he be throwing back to some distempered ancestor?
"What security have I if I go to bed that she will not steal away from me in the night? It was in the night—almost in the night—that she stole away from me before."
From this logic it is impossible to move him; and although, with some return to his old sweet-natured kindliness of manner, he begs his friend not to think it necessary to keep him company, yet the latter is far too ill at ease as to his condition, both of mind and body, to comply.
The porter, having drawn the natural inference that as soon as the traveller has refreshed his body he will wish to retire to rest, has put out the lights in the smoking-room; the salle à manger is therefore the only room in the hotel where lamps still burn, and in it the two men spend the dreary remaining hours of the night, Byng walking up and down like a captive beast, frequently going to the door, opening it, putting his head out into the darkness, and listening suspiciously if, perchance, he may hear the footfall of Elizabeth fleeing away from him even through the hurricane. As the time goes on, his restlessness increases rather than diminishes. Jim has vainly tried to distract his thoughts by putting questions to him as to his pursuits and companions since their last parting—by inquiries as to the extent and direction of his travels.
Did he get as far as Palestine? How long is it since he left Cairo? etc. But to all his interrogations Byng gives brief and unsatisfactory answers, putting a final stop to them by breaking out excitedly:
"Why do you go on questioning me as to where I have been, and what I have done? I tell you I have been nowhere, and done nothing; I believe that my body has been here and there, but my soul has been nowhere; it has been lying dead! Would you expect a man who has been lying six months in his coffin to give you a catalogue of his adventures? My soul has been dead, I tell you—dead and putrescent. What is the use of putting me through a catechism about its doings?"
Before the long-delaying dawn shows its pale profile upon the deep obscurity, it seems to Jim as if six midwinter nights must have pieced themselves end to end. But it comes at last; and at last also, by dint of strenuous representations to his companion as to how unfit he is, in his present travel-stained and disordered condition, to offer himself to Elizabeth's eyes, he induces him to let himself be led to the bedroom prepared overnight for him, and to refresh himself with a bath and a change of clothes. Even this concession he obtains only in exchange for an exacted promise to seek out Elizabeth at the earliest possible hour at which she may be presumed accessible, and urgently to entreat of her an instant interview with his friend.
Jim feels that he is keeping his word handsomely when, not a minute later than nine o'clock, he finds himself knocking at the door of the Le Marchants' apartment—that door with which of late his knuckles have grown so pleasantly and friendlily familiar. It is opened to him by Elizabeth herself, and he follows her silently through the ante-room into the little salon. Arrived there, he looks mournfully round with a sort of feeling as of taking farewell of the familiar objects.
It is impossible that Elizabeth can have spent the just-past stormy night in gathering flowers, and yet the flowers have a freshened air. She must have been carefully rearranging them. The bits of brocade, too, the Turkish embroideries, the haiks, and the praying-carpets, wear a more festal appearance than usual. The little room looks decked as if for a gala. His jealous fancy cannot but admit that Elizabeth herself is dressed in her ordinary morning gown, but even over it some holiday transmutation has passed. He cannot trust himself to verify whether that holiday look is on her face too.
"He has come; you know that, I suppose?"
"Yes."
What a catch in her breath! He must steal a glance at her. She will think it unnatural if he does not; and perhaps his eye may not be offended by so much radiance as he feared. In her voice there was something not very distant from a sob. The result of his glance shows itself in what sounds like a reproach.
"I do not believe that you went to bed at all."
"Yes, I did! yes, I did!" hurrying away eagerly from the subject of herself, as from something irrelevant and importunate; "and—he—how is he? How does he look? Had not he a dreadful crossing? Does he want to see me? to see me soon? to-day?"
There is such a breathless passion in her tone, coupled with something so apologetic for putting her questions to him, that his heart, hitherto half touched, half angered by the pathos of her little preparations, melts wholly towards her.
"Of course he wants to see you—wants it very, very much," replies he; and, to his credit, replies without any harshness marring the cordial kindness of his tone. "As much as"—with a rather melancholy smile—"you want to see him. No, do not be angry. Why should not you wish to see each other?"
"Oh, there is every reason!" cries she miserably—"the same reason that there always was. But"—with rising agitation—"where is it to be? How soon? When does he wish it?"
"He is waiting outside now."
She starts painfully.
"Now! Oh, poor fellow! we must not keep him waiting; and yet"—stretching out her hand in detention—"tell me, before he comes in—tell me, is he changed? Is he? Is he the same as he was?"
Jim hesitates, and the painful perplexity written on his brow is misread by her.
"You are vexed with me for teasing you with so many tiresome questions. Oh, forgive me! I ought not to take advantage of your kindness; but we have grown to depend upon you so; and I will promise not to worry you with any other, if you will only answer me this one. Is he changed—much changed?"
"I am afraid," replies Jim, with the slowness of one who is trying to convey unpleasant tidings in the least unpleasant terms, "that you must be prepared to find him a good deal altered."
"Altered! How?"
"I do not quite know how to describe it"—uneasily—"but you must not be shocked if you find him a good deal changed in looks; and he is—he seems, in a very excited state."
She makes a clutch at his hand.
"Do you mean"—her voice has sunk to a horror-struck whisper—"that he is—mad?"
"Mad! Oh, of course not," with a strained laugh; "you must not jump to such conclusions. But I do not think he is quite himself, that is all. He looks as if he had not eaten or slept for a fortnight; and if you play such tricks as that with yourself, you must expect to get a little off your balance."
She is still terrifiedly clutching his hand, though with no consciousness of doing so, nor that the fingers so tightly gripped by her are not made of dry stick.
"You must not look so frightened," he says soothingly. "I would not have said anything to you, only that I thought it better you should be prepared—that it should not take you quite by surprise; and also because I wanted to give you a hint, that you might be a little careful what you say to him, or, at all events, how you say it."
Still she does not speak, and there is scarcely any diminution of the horror of her look.
"If you do not mind, I think it would be as well to have someone within call, if he—he—became—unreasonable."
"Do you think," she asks, with a sort of scorn, "that I am afraid of him—afraid for myself?"
"No, that I am sure you are not; but I cannot shake off the idea that—poor fellow!—he may be on the verge of some grave illness; and in that sort of case one never knows what may happen. So, if you do not mind——"
"As you please," she answers, docile even now. "Do as you think best; and will you tell him that I am ready to see him?"
The misgivings with which Jim complies with this request are not much allayed by the manner and voice of him who receives it, and who has been raging up and down the narrow corridor.
"She will not see me, I suppose?"
"On the contrary, she will see you now. But stay!" catching him by the arm as he springs past him. "One moment! For God's sake control yourself! Behave like a gentleman. Do not make her a scene; she is not up to it."
Byng's answer is to fling resentfully away the detaining hand of his Mentor, while he says, with a furious look coming into his bloodshot eyes:
"What do you mean by keeping me here, preaching to me, while she is waiting for me?"
The rudeness of both words and actions is so unlike the real Byng, that it is with an even more sinking spirit than before that Jim follows him with his eyes as he passes out of sight into the salon. As soon as the door is shut behind him, he himself takes up the position he had suggested in the ante-room.
CHAPTER IX.
There are few things more trying to an active-minded person than to sit occupationless, vaguely waiting. At first, it is true, the keenness of Jim's alarm prevents his feeling the ennui which would be the natural result of his situation. Poignantly anxious questions succeed each other in his mind. Has he had any right to permit the interview at all? How far is Byng accountable for his actions? What chance is there that his already rocking reason will stand the shock of a meeting which, even in his sanest moments, would have so wildly excited him? And if not, what may be the consequences? Grisly headings of newspaper paragraphs write themselves in the air before him—"Homicidal Mania," "Murder and Suicide."
The details of a tragic story which, illustrated by sensational woodcuts, he had idly read a day or two ago in a venerable Police News, left lying on the smoking-room table, recur to his memory. It was a tale of a groom who, in an access of jealous madness, had shot a scullion sweetheart through the head, and then blown his own brains out. The tale had made but little impression on him at the time—unhappily, it is scarcely possible to take up a journal without the eye alighting upon some such—but it comes back to him now with terrifying vividness. What security is there that such tragedies may be confined to grooms and kitchen-maids? How does he know that Byng has not a revolver hidden in his breast-pocket? How can he tell that he is not at this very moment drawing it out? He (Jim) ought to have made sure, before exposing her to such a peril, that the danger was minimized by Byng's being weaponless. Is it too late to make sure of that even now?
He takes one step towards the salon door, then hastily retraces it. Pooh! he is growing as mad as Byng. They will come out and find him eavesdropping.
He retreats to the table, which is at the greatest distance allowed by the room's narrow enceinte from the scene of the drama whose dénouement he is expecting, and, sitting down, takes up a book. It happens to be Elizabeth's Italian exercise-book, and the sight of it conjures up before his memory her forlorn figure stooping disconsolately over the page, wrapped in her brown furs, as he had seen it on that rainy night that seems now so distant. He had pitied her for being lonely then. Well, whatever else she may be, she is not lonely now.
He catches his breath. It is quite a quarter of an hour since he began his watch. How quiet they are! There is a murmur of voices, but there is nothing that in the least indicates violence. Before his eyes there flashes in grotesque recollection the hideous picture in the Police News which illustrates the high words with which the catastrophe of the groom and kitchenmaid had been heralded. He has been making a mountain out of a mole-hill; has been exaggerating his friend's emotional temperament, naturally further heightened by sleeplessness and want of food, into incipient insanity. If he were mad, or at all tending that way, would he be talking in the low rational key which he obviously must be? It is evident that her presence, her eye, her—yes, what more likely?—her touch have soothed and conjured away what of excessive or perilous there was in his emotion.
They have been together half an hour now. All danger is certainly over. Why should he any longer continue his officious and needless watch?—superfluously spying upon them?
Relieved as to what he had thought his worst fear, and yet with an uncommon bitterness about his heart, he turns to withdraw, and his hand is already on the lock of the door which leads into the corridor, when suddenly, without any warning, there reaches his ear the noise of a loud, crashing fall, followed—accompanied, rather—by a piercing scream.
In infinitely less than a second he finds himself on his knees beside the prostrate body of Byng, who, with blood pouring from his forehead, is stretched upon the floor of the salon. Even at this second there flashes upon him, ludicrous and dreadful, the memory of the Police News. This scene has a grotesque likeness to the final one of the groom and kitchenmaid series, only that in the present case the heroine, instead of staggering backward with the top of her head flying up to the ceiling, is hanging unharmed over her fallen lover.
"Are you hurt?" cries Jim in frantic anxiety, looking at her across the prostrate figure, and unable to eradicate from his mind the revolver idea. "Did he hit you? I did not hear a shot."
"Oh no, no! but he," fetching her breath in terrible gasps, and hanging over the bleeding man with that utter abandonment of all disguise, in which a great naked grief sweeps away our sophistications—"he is dead!"
"Oh no, he is not," answers Jim hastily, tearing open Byng's waistcoat and laying his hand upon his heart. "He has only fainted. Get some water! Have you got any salts? No; do not lift his head"—seeing that she is agonizedly trying to raise his prone head and rest it upon her knees—"he had better be as flat as he can. Quick, some water!"
She does not need to be twice told. In an instant she has sprung to the table, and brought thence the china jug out of which she is wont to water her flowers, and also the big cut-glass bottle of smelling-salts with which Jim has often seen poor Mrs. Le Marchant solacing herself when racked with that neuralgic headache which means worry. He splashes water out of the one upon Byng's ashy face, and holds the other to his pale nostrils; while Elizabeth, once more flinging herself upon her knees, wipes the blood from his temples with her little useless gossamer inch of handkerchief.
"How did it happen?" asks Jim rapidly. "What did he do to himself?"
The heads of the two ministrants are very close to each other as they bend together over the swooned youth. Jim can see a little smear of Byng's blood upon one of her white cheeks. The sight gives him a shudder. Byng seems to have made her more his own by that gory baptism than by all his frenzied vows and tears.
"Oh, I do not know," she answers, still fetching both breath and words with difficulty. "He was standing up, and he seemed quite right; and then, all of a sudden, in a minute, he went down like a log, and hit his forehead against the sharp corner of the table"—with a convulsive shiver at the recollection. "I ought to have saved him! I ought; but I was not quick enough. I stood stock-still, and now he is dead! You say that he is not; but I am sure he is dead!"
"Oh no, nonsense! he is not," replies Jim brusquely, thinking a certain harshness of manner the best recipe for her. "He is alive, sure enough; and as for the cut on his forehead, now that you have wiped the blood away, you can see for yourself that it is not at all a deep one. It is merely a big scratch. I have often had a worse out hunting from a bramble, in jumping through a hedge. Oh, Mrs. Le Marchant, here you are! That is all right. We have had an accident, you see. He has fallen down in a faint, and given himself a bit of a knock. That is all; do not be frightened. It looks worse than it is—Oh, M. Cipriani, vous voilà! Envoyez chercher un médecin tout de suite! Il y a un M. Crump"—catching in his destitution at the thought of even Sybilla's objectionable friend.
But hereupon half a dozen voices—for by this time even more than that number of inmates of the hotel have thronged into the little room—raise themselves to pronounce another name—the name of one who both stands higher in medical fame and is more quickly procurable. In search of him Zameth, the porter, is instantly despatched, and meanwhile about the inanimate body sympathizers stand three deep, until reluctantly dispersed by a hint of a nature so broad as not to be misunderstood from Jim, to the effect that the patient would have a better chance of coming to himself if he were allowed to have a breath of air. By the time the doctor arrives—there is some small delay before he appears—all are got rid of, and, Mrs. Le Marchant having gone to give directions for having Jim's room arranged for the sick man, both because it is on the ground-floor and also of a better size than that allotted to him, Jim and Elizabeth are once again left tête-à-tête.
Once again they kneel on either side of the prone figure. How dreadfully dead and how extravagantly long it looks! Once again he sees that blood-smear on her face. It is just above her one dimple, and stands out in ghastly incongruity over that little pitfall for love and laughter. How passionately he wishes that he might ask her to go and wash it off! If he did she would not hear him. She has no ears left, no eyes, no sense, save for that livid face, splashed with the water which has not brought him back to life, and with the red drops still slowly trickling from the wound on his brow, and which have stained here and there the damp tendrils of his hair—for that livid face and for the flaccid hands, which she rubs between her own with an ever more terrified energy, as he still gives no sign of returning consciousness.
By-and-by he is taken out of her custody. She is robbed even of the wretched satisfaction of chafing his poor senseless fingers. On the arrival of the doctor he is carried off, and laid upon the bed that has been made ready for him. She follows them miserably as they bear him staggeringly across the hall—a powerfully-built young man of over six feet high, in the perfect inertness of syncope, is no light weight—and looks hungrily over the threshold of the bedroom; but when she attempts to cross it Jim puts her gently back.
"No, dear, no!" he says. (He is almost sure afterwards that for that once in his life he calls her "dear.") "You had better not. We think he is coming round, and if you are the first person he sees when he comes to himself it might be bad for him—might hurt him. You would not hurt him, would you?"
"No, I would not hurt him," she answers slowly. And so turns in her utter tractableness, and goes away meekly without a word.
It is evening again now, almost the same hour at which Jim and Elizabeth were beheading photographs twenty-four hours ago. Twenty-four hours! It feels more like twenty-four years. This is what he says to himself as he once again opens the door of the Le Marchants' apartment. It is the first time during the whole day, except to snatch a couple of mouthfuls of food, that he has left Byng's side; and it is only due to the fact that Mrs. Le Marchant is supplying his place, and has sent him on a message to her daughter, that he has quitted his post. He knows that she has meant to do him a kindness in despatching him upon this errand; but he is not sure that it is one.
Elizabeth is not in the salon, but the screen that masks the door separating that room from the little alcove beyond is folded back. Over the doorway is a hanging of Eastern embroidery—as to the meaning of the strange gold scrolls that look like Arab letters on whose red ground Elizabeth and he have often idly speculated. He pushes it aside, and sees her standing with her back towards him, the flimsy muslin window-curtains drawn back as she looks out on the night. The alcove is on ordinary occasions scarcely ever occupied, and there is something uneasy and uncomfortable that matches the wretchedness of her other circumstances in finding her standing there alone and idle.
The elements have long finished their raging, and fallen to boisterous play. It has been a fine day, and though the sun has long laid down his sceptre, he has passed it on with scarcely diminished, though altered, radiance to his white imitator. It is broad moonlight—startlingly broad. The moon hangs overhead, with never a cloud-kerchief about her great disk. The winds that, loudly sporting, are up and abroad have chased every vapour from the sky, which is full of throbbing white stars. Before he reaches her side she has heard him, and turned to meet him, with a mixed hunger and pitiful hope in her wan face. She thinks that he has come to fetch her. He must kill that poor hope, and the quicklier the more mercifully.
"Mrs. Le Marchant sent me. I came to tell you that he has recovered consciousness. You see, you were wrong"-with an attempt at a reassuring smile—"he is not dead, after all. He is conscious; that is to say, he is not insensible; but I am afraid he is not quite himself yet, and you must not—must not mind—must not be frightened, I mean—if he begins to shout out and talk nonsense by-and-by: the doctor says it is what we must expect."
"And may I—mayn't I—will not you let me?"
What a quivering voice the hope has, and yet how alive it is! However clumsily, and with whatever bitter yearnings over the pain he is causing her, he must knock it on the head at once.
"Go to him?—impossible! quite out of the question! The great object is to keep him perfectly quiet, and if once he caught sight of you—"
"But if he is not himself," interrupts she, with a pathetic pertinacity, "he would not know me. I could not do him any harm if he did not know me, and I might do something—oh, ever such a little thing for him! If you knew what it was to stand here and do nothing—do nothing indeed!"—with a change of tone to one of agonized self-reproach;—"have not I done enough already? Oh, would anyone have believed that it would be I that should kill him!"
She turns back to the window again, and dashes her forehead with violence against the frame. Outside the tall date-palm is shaken through all its plumes by the loud breeze; it is swaying and waving and blowing, and not less is its solid shadow cut out by the moonshine's keen knife on the terrace, wavering and shaking too, as if convulsed by laughter. The porch of the hotel—mere whitewash and plaster, as memory and reason tell one that it is—stands out in glorified ivory like the portals of such a palace as we see in vision, when
"Good dreams possess our fancy."
"I can't have you talking such nonsense," says Jim, in an exceedingly kind and not very steady voice, for his own feelings are horribly harrowed; and on thinking over the scene afterwards, he cannot swear that, at this point, he did not pass a most brotherly arm for one moment round the poor little heaving shoulder, which is shaking almost as much as the palm-tree's shadow. "He is not going to die; he is not thinking of dying. Nobody has killed him—least of all you."
She makes him no answer, nor lifts her stricken head, over which he looks out, while the ghostly mirth shakes the landscape; at his wits' end, in search of consolation. Below waves a sea of foliage, out of which the strong elfin light has stolen all the colour. From that colourless dark ocean rises far away to the right the dazzling little snowy dome of a mosque, showing like a transfigured mushroom; and down below the rounding bay is seen laying its foam-lips in white glory on the land.
"Dr. Stephens feels sure that he must have had a sunstroke. You know that he has been in the East. He was a month in Cairo; the sun has great power there, even in winter, and he is sure to have exposed himself recklessly. He was on his way home—had got as far as Paris, it seems—when he accidentally heard that you were here. Since then, no doubt, he has neither eaten nor slept; so you see how little you are to blame. You know that I told you how odd he was before you even saw him. Do not you remember?"—trying to recall every circumstance that may tend to reassure her—"I warned you that you would have to be careful what you said to him?"
His words have a very different effect from that intended by him.
"Oh, that is why I cannot forgive myself!" says she, with what sounds almost like a cry of physical pain. "You did warn me; I had no excuse. In his state I ought never—it was murdering him to tell him—"
She breaks off. To tell him what? Jim bites his lips hard to hinder himself from putting this question, as he again, in mercy to her, looks away from her out into the night.
The moon has swum over the housetop by now; but one can see her handiwork as plainly as ever in the broad argent fringe, like the border of a cloak, that marks where the waves are breaking on the beach.
One often talks of a fringe without really meaning that there is much likeness to one; but to-night the moon-washed breakers really do wear that aspect—a fringe of silver with long silver tags and ends.
"But I was so deceived," she continues, with that wail still in her voice; "he was not violent. After what you had told me, I expected him to be violent; but he was not: he was quite gentle and quiet, and he did beg so hard, and I was so glad to see him again, that I felt I was giving in—that I should give way altogether if I did not tell him—tell him at once, without giving myself time to think; and so I did"—growing very breathless and incoherent—"and in a second; and then all in a minute, without any warning, just as if I had shot him through the head, he went down with a crash. I did not see it, for I was not looking at him. I could not bear to look at him while I told him. I had both hands over my face, and then—and then—I heard him fall."
What can Jim say to her? Fear lest any dastardly unchivalrous curiosity may seem to pierce through whatever sympathetic question he might put to her keeps him dumb, and stupidly staring at the bowing, ironically merry palm.
"And now," she goes on, lifting her face, and he is shocked to see how livid it is in the moonlight, "he will go out of the world thinking me much worse than I really am, for I had not time to tell him all. He heard only the bare fact; he did not hear what excuse I had—that I was not really so wicked as—as—he will die thinking me."
The sob with which she ends alarms him by its kinship to a convulsion.
"I do not know what to say to you," he says, desperately making a snatch at her two hands, as if by the violence of his grip he could convey to her some little portion of the deep compassion that is swelling up in his heart for her; "I am so much in the dark. No, no, no!" with a return of that terror lest this ejaculation should seem the outcome of any inquisitiveness; "I do not want you to tell me anything! What is more, I will not listen to you if you attempt it; but what there is not the least manner of doubt about is that his fainting had no sort of reference to what you said to him: he would have fainted whatever you had said to him, or if you had said nothing at all. He was as mad as a hatter when he went in to you. It is all part of the same thing—over-fatigue, sunstroke. But he is not going to die"—with a hurried trip back to his former strain of consolation—"he is not thinking of it; I promise you, I give you my word of honour"—becoming perfectly reckless and completely insensate—"that he shall not!"
But she is too strangled with sobs to make any rejoinder.
"He shall have the best of nursing," goes on Jim. "I have telegraphed for a nurse to Nice. How astonishing it is that in a place of this size you cannot get a decent sick-nurse! I hoped we might have caught the one who nursed General Smith before——"
He stops abruptly, with a too tardy recollection that the allusion is not a happy once, since the General died two days ago. Unfortunately, she also remembers, as is evidenced by the strong shudder that passes over her.
"If he dies, will he be buried in that deep narrow, red grave that they showed us in the Protestant cemetery, and which they said that they always kept open for English visitors? If he dies! if he dies! Oh, if I could but have told him! if he would but have waited for me to tell him how it really was!"
CHAPTER X.
Though "February Fill-dyke" was never and nowhere truer to her name than this year, and in Algiers—coming laden with wet days to make the green Sahel, if possible, greener than it was before; yet the inhabitants of the Grand Hotel do not again, for a matter of three weeks, relieve their ennui or let off their energies in far from Dumb Crambo, or loud charade. The voice of the battledore is silent in the entrance-hall, and the shuttlecock sleeps. M. Cipriani has scarcely had to do more than mention his request that they would lay aside their more noisy pastimes, for they are, most of them, rather good-natured persons than otherwise, since, indeed, it is quite as uncommon to be very ill-natured as to be very selfless, or very foolish, or very wise. Those of them who have been fortunate enough to be present at the catastrophe have carried away such a moving image of a wounded Adonis, apparently several yards long, stretched upon Mrs. Le Marchant's Persian carpet, that they have infected those less happy persons who know of him only by hearsay with a compassionate interest scarcely inferior to their own.
The only person in the hotel who makes much noise is poor Byng himself, and for awhile he falls it with clamour enough to furnish two or three of those bump suppers of which, not so long ago, he was a conspicuous ornament.
There had never, even when he was in his wits, been much disguise as to the state of his feelings; now that he is out of them, the whole house rings with his frantic callings upon the name of Elizabeth, uttered in every key of rage, expostulation, tenderness, and appeal. These cries reach Elizabeth herself as she sits cowering in that one of the little suite of rooms which is nearest the door of entrance—sits there cowering, and yet with the door, through which those dreadful sounds penetrate to her, ajar, in order the better to hear them—cowering, and for several days alone.
Owing to various accidents, similar in their results, though differing in character, almost a week elapses from the first breaking out of Byng's malady before the arrival of either the hospital nurse or of Mrs. Byng. When the latter event occurs, Mrs. Le Marchant retires from her post at the sick man's bedside with the same unostentatious matter-of-factness with which she had assumed it, and Elizabeth is no longer alone. But to set against this advantage is the counterbalancing evil that, after the arrival of Byng's mother, she can no longer steal out, as she had before done a hundred times a day, to his door, to glean fragments of tidings from any outcomer thence. She is never able to repeat those little surreptitious excursions after that occasion when Mrs. Byng, coming suddenly out upon her, passes her with such speaking, if silent, hostility and scorn in her tired and grief-stricken eyes, that the luckless spy slinks back sobbing to her own tender mother; and there Jim, flying out a while after to carry them a crumb of reassurance, finds them, to his indignation, mingling their bitter tears.
Whatever else his faults may be, Mr. Burgoyne is a man of his word; he certainly keeps his promise to Elizabeth that Byng shall be well nursed. He keeps his other promise, too—though that is more by good luck than good management—that Byng shall not die. Whether to hinder his friend from being made a liar, or because he himself is loth to leave a world which he has found so pretty, cruel, and amusing, Byng does not die—Byng lives.
By her 25th day February has dried her tears, though they still hang on her green lashes, and a great galleon of a sun steers through a tremendous sea of blue, as Jim persuades Byng's mother to go out for her first delicious drive in that fresh and satin-soft air of the Algerian February, which matches our best poets' May. He takes her along the Route des Aqueduques, that lovely route which runs high along the hillside among the villas above the town, so high as to be on a level with the roofs of the lofty-standing Continental and Orient Hotels. It is a most twisting road, which in curves and loops winds about the head of narrow deep gorges, full of pale olive-trees, caroubiers, and ilex. Below lies the red-roofed white town. Slowly they trot past the campagne of the "English Milor," "L'Epicier Anglais," and many others, over whose high walls bougainvillias light their now waning purple fires, and big bushes of fleurs de Marie stoop their milky stars.
Mrs. Byng's eyes, sunk and diminished by watching and weariness, have been lying restfully on the delightful spring spectacle—on the great yellow sorrels by the wayside; she now turns them tear-brimmed to her companion.
"I could jump out of my skin!" she says shakily. "What a sun! what a sea! And to think that, after all, we have pulled him through."
Jim's only answer is a sympathetic pressure of the extremely well-fitting glove nearest him. If Willy had died instead of lived, her gloves would have fitted all the same.
"But we are not out of the wood yet," continues she, with a shake of the head. "He is cured, or nearly cured, of one disease, but what about the other?"
"What other?" inquires he, obstinately stupid, and with somewhat of a heart-sinking at the prospect of the engagement which he sees ahead of him.
How many elbows the road makes! It seems to have been cut in places right through the wet red rock, now overhung by such a torrent of vegetation.
At the head of one of the deep clefts that run up from the sea they pause, and look down upon a second sea of greenery that would seem to belong to no month less leafy than June. To June, too, belong the murmur and hum and summer trickle of running water at the ravine bottom.
"I do not see why, if he goes on as swimmingly as he is now doing," says Mrs. Byng in a restless voice—"why we should not get him off in a week, even if he were carried on board the boat."
"A week? Is not that rather sanguine?"
"I do not think so, the sooner the better; and during that week I should think she could hardly make any attempt to see him."
"Has she shown any signs of making one hitherto?"
"Well, no"—rather grudgingly. "In fact, between you and me, considering that it is they who have brought him into this plight, I think they might have shown a little more solicitude about him. In the last ten days I do not believe that they have been once to the door to inquire."
"You do not seem to be aware," says Jim, in a voice which, though quiet, is not pacific, "and that is odd, considering how often I told you, that until you came Mrs. Le Marchant nursed him like a mother; not like a mother, indeed"—correcting himself with a somewhat malicious intention—"for mothers grow flurried, and she never did."
"You mean that she nursed him better than I do," in a jealous tone. "Well"—more generously—"how shabby of me to mind, if she did! I do not mind. God bless her for it! I always thought"—compunctiously—"that she looked a nice woman."
"She is nice—as nice"—descending into a slang unworthy of his ripe years—"as they make 'em."
"And the girl—I suppose one can hardly call her a girl—looks nice too."
They are passing the Casbah, the solid Moorish fortifications, about which now hang only a few gaitered, sunburnt, baggy Zouaves.
Jim has a silly hope that, if he maintains an entire silence, the current of his companion's ideas may drift into another channel; but he is soon undeceived.
"I suppose that she must have been quite, quite young when—when those dreadful things happened that Willy talked about in his delirium?"
"Is it possible"—indignantly—"that you take the ravings of a fever-patient au pied de la lettre?"
"No, I do not; but"—with an obstinate sticking to her point—"there was a substratum of truth in them; that was only too evident."
Jim shuts his teeth tight together. His vow of silence is harder to keep than he had thought.
"Since he came to himself he has never mentioned her to me," continues his companion anxiously; "has he to you?"
"No."
"I quite tremble whenever he opens his lips, lest he should be going to begin the subject, and one could not contradict him yet awhile; he is so quixotic, it is quite likely that he may have some distorted idea that her being—how shall I say?—flétrie—is an additional reason for standing by her, rehabilitating her, marrying her. He is so chivalrous."
They have left the Prison Civile and the Zouave Barracks behind them. A longer interval than that usually supposed to elapse between a remark and its rejoinder has passed, before Jim can bring himself to utter the following sentence with the calmness which he wishes:
"Has it never occurred to you that she may be chivalrous too?"
Perhaps Mrs. Byng does not readily find a response to this question; perhaps it sets her off upon a train of speculation which does not conduce to garrulity. Certain it is that, for the rest of the drive, she is as silent as Jim could wish her. It is a sharp surprise to him two days later to be mysteriously called outside the sick man's door by her, in order to be informed that she has invited Miss Le Marchant to accompany her on a drive.
"I went to call upon them," she says, avoiding—or so he fancies it—his eye as she speaks; "and I asked the girl to drive with me to the Mole, and get a good blowing about."
"How kind of you!" cries Jim, a flash of real pleasure in his serious look; "how like you—like your real self, that is!"
And he takes her hand to thank it by a friendly pressure. But she draws it away rather hastily.
"Oh, it was nothing so very wonderful—nothing to thank me for."
She seems confused and a little guilty, and escapes with some precipitation from his gratitude. Mrs. Byng is not a woman addicted to double-dealing, and if she ever makes any little essays in that direction, she does them, as on this present occasion, villainously.
Burgoyne is not at the hall-door to help the ladies into the carriage when they set off. Perhaps this may be because he is in attendance upon the invalid. Perhaps because—glad as he had at first felt and expressed himself at their friendliness—some misgiving may, upon reflection, have beset him at so strange a conjunction. At all events, it is only Fritz who throws the light Arab rug over their knees and gives them his encouraging parting smile.
Poor Miss Le Marchant needs his encouragement, for, indeed, it is in a very frightened spirit that she sets forth on her pleasuring. But before the horse-bells have jingled to the bottom of Mustapha Supérieur, her spirits are rising. The sun shines, and he has shone so seldom in Elizabeth's life that a very few of his beams, whether real or metaphorical, suffice to send up her quicksilver. She does not consciously admit for a second the hope that in the present overture on the part of her companion lies any significance. But yet a tiny trembling bliss now and then taps at her heart's door, and she pushes it away but feebly.
Before they have reached the Amirauté, where they are to get out, she has thanked Mrs. Byng with such pretty and unsuspecting gratitude for bringing her, and has made her laugh so irrepressibly by her gay and naïve comments upon the motley passers-by, that the latter is filled with a compunctious regret that a person with such lovely manners, and such a sense of a joke, should have made so disastrous a fiasco of her life as renders necessary the extremely distasteful errand on which she herself is at present bound. At the Amirauté, as I say, they get out; and, turning under a groined roof that looks as if it were the crypt of a church, find themselves presently upon the long stone breakwater that runs out into the bay. It was built, they tell us, in old days by the wretched Christian captives; but the sea has taken care that not much of the original labour of blood and tears has survived.
The wind is high, and the sunshine ardent and splendid. On their right as they walk, with the wind officiously helping them from behind, is a world of dancing sapphire, each blue billow white-tipped. On their left are great blocks of masonry, built strong and square, with narrow intervals between to break the might of the water. How little their strength has availed against that of their tremendous opponent is seen at every step, since nearly half the blocks are overthrown or in semi-ruin; though the date engraved upon them shows for how few seasons they have been exposed to the ravages of the tempestuous sea. They walk on to the end, till they can go no further, since, just ahead of them, the waves are rolling in half-fierce play—though the day is all smiles—over the breakwater; and even where they stand, their footing is made unsure by lengths of slimy seaweed that set them slipping along. Elizabeth insists upon the elder woman taking her slight arm—insists upon carrying her wraps, and generally waiting upon and ministering to her. From the bottom of her heart Mrs. Byng wishes that she would not, since every instance of her soft helpfulness, so innocent and spontaneous, makes more difficult the answer to that question which she has been asking herself ever since they set foot upon the Mole:
"How shall I begin?"
It is unanswered still, when, retracing their steps a little, they sit down under the lee of one of the half-wrecked blocks to enjoy the view.
From here the sea is a lake, the distant mountains and the breakwater seeming—though in reality parted by how wide a wet waste—to join in embracing it. The mountains are dim and filmy to-day, Cape Matifou scarcely visible; but the Koubah shows white-domed on the hillside, and all the dazzling water is shot through with blinding light. The town, Arab-French, is dazzling too; the arcaded quay, the fortifications, one can scarcely look at any of them. Two or three steamers, with a little vapour issuing from their ugly black and red funnels, lie moored; and other smaller craft lift their spars against the heaven. Near by a man is sitting with his legs dangling over the water, fishing with a line; and two or three Arabs, draped in the dignity of their poetic rags, lie couched round a fire that they have kindled. Beneath and around them is the banging and thundering of the sea. August noise! "A voice like the sound of many waters." Could there be a more awful comparison? Just underneath them, where the sea has made a greater breach than usual, it is boiling as in a caldron. Looking down and in, they see the water comparatively quiet for a moment; then, with a shout of its great jubilant voice, rushing and surging in, tossing its mane. Elizabeth's eyes are resting on the heavenly sapphire plain.
"How blue!" she says, under her breath; "one cannot believe that it is not really blue; one feels that if one took up a little in a spoon it would be just as blue as it is now."
"I dare say it will not feel so blue when we are on it," replies Mrs. Byng, lugging in somewhat awkwardly, as she feels, the subject which she finds it so hard to introduce, "as I suppose we shall be within a week now."
Her charity bids her not glance at her companion as she speaks, so she is not quite sure whether or not she gives a start.
"Mr. Burgoyne thinks that I am sanguine; but I am all for moving him as soon as possible; it cannot be too soon."
She tries to throw as much significance as they are capable of holding into the latter words, and feels that she has succeeded.
"Of course he may refuse to go," continues she, with a rather strained laugh. "Do you remember Victor Hugo's definition of heaven as a place where children are always little and parents are always young? I am continually quoting it. But, unfortunately, one's children will not stay little; they grow big, and get wills of their own, and it is quite possible he may refuse to go."
"Yes?" almost inaudibly.
"But"—reddening slightly at the patently-intended application of her next sentence—"anyone that was fond of him—anyone that liked him really and—and disinterestedly, I mean, must see that the only happy course for him would be to go; that it would be his salvation to get away; they—they would not try to hinder him."
"I should think that no one would do that."
There is not a touch of asperity in the dove-soft voice; but there is a shade of dignity.
"When he was ill—while he was delirious" ("How dreadfully unpleasant it is!" in an anguished internal aside)—"I could not help hearing—gathering—drawing inferences."
The ardour of the chase has vanquished her charity, and she is looking at her victim. But, to do her justice, the success of her labours shocks her. Can this little aged, pinched face, with its dilated eyes, so full of woe and terror, be the same one that dimpled into riotous laughter half an hour ago at the sight of the two dirty old men, in Jewish gaberdines and with gingham umbrellas, kissing each other by the Mosquée de la Pêcherie?
"Of course it was all incoherent," she goes on hurriedly, snatching at the first expression that occurs to her as likely to undo, or at least a little modify, her work—"nothing that one could make sense of. Only your name recurred so incessantly; it was nothing but 'Elizabeth, Elizabeth.' I am sure"—with a remorseful if clumsy attempt to be kind, and a most uneasy smile—"that I do not wonder at it!"
In the narrow interspace between the blocks and the path—not more than a couple of fingers wide—how the sea forces itself! and up race its foam-fountains, throwing their spray aloft in such mighty play, as if they would hit heaven's arch. What exhilaration in its great glad noise, superb and battle-ready!
"I cannot express how distasteful a task this is to me"—in a tone that certainly gives no reason to doubt the truth of her statement; "but, after all, I am his mother; he is all I have in the world, and I am sure that you are the very last person who would wish to do him an injury."
"No; I do not think that I would do him an injury."
How curiously still and slow her voice is! Mrs. Byng has resolutely averted her eyes, so that her purpose may not again be shaken by the sight of the havoc she has wrought, and has fixed them upon some sea gulls that are riding up and down upon the merry waves, making them, with their buoyant motion, even more jocund than they were before.
"It seems an impossible thing to say to you—a thing too bad to apologize for—but yet I must say it"—in a tone of excessive distress, yet firmness. "Under the circumstances, it would—would throw a blight over his whole life."
"Yes, I know that it would; I have always known it; that is why we left Florence."
"And very good it was of you, too! Not that I am quite certain of the judiciousness of the way in which you did it; but, however, I am sure you meant it for the best."
"Yes, I meant it for the best."
The sea-gulls have risen from the billow, and are turning and wheeling in the air. The light is catching their wings, and making them look like whitest silver. It seems as if they were at conscious play with it, trying experiments as to how they can best catch their bright playfellow, and again shake it off, and yet again recapture it.
"What a monster you must think me!" breaks out the elder woman presently.
Now that the impression has somehow been conveyed to her mind that her mission is likely to be completely successful, the full brutality of the method by which she has accomplished it bursts upon her mind.
"How treacherous! luring you out here, under the pretence of friendliness, to say such horrible things to you!"
Elizabeth's narrow hands are clasped upon her knee, and her small heart-broken, white face is looking out straight before her.
"No, I do not think you a monster," she answers—"you are a kind-hearted woman! and it must have been very, very unpleasant to you. I am quite sorry"—with a sort of smile—"for you, having to do it; but you are his mother. If I had been his mother, I should have done the same; at least, I suppose so."
"I am sure, if things had been different, there is no one that I should have—I do not know when I ever saw anyone whom I took such a fancy to. If it had not been for the disparity—I mean, if he had been less young and unfit to take upon himself the serious responsibilities of life——"
How deplorably lame even to Mrs. Byng's ears sound her tardy efforts to place the grounds of her objection on a less cruel basis than that which she has already made so nakedly plain to be the real one! Even the sweet-mannered Elizabeth does not think it necessary to express gratitude for such insulting civilities.
"I do not quite understand what you wish me to do," she says, with quiet politeness; "if you will explain to me——"
"Oh, I do not want to dictate to you; please do not imagine I could think of being so impertinent; but, of course, he will be asking for you. Since he came to himself, he has not mentioned you as yet; but of course he will. I am expecting it every moment; probably he has not felt up to embarking on the subject. He will ask for you—will want to see you."
"And you wish me not to see him?"
Her delicate suffering mouth quivers; but she is perfectly composed.
"Oh, but of course you must see him! you quite, quite misunderstand me! Much chance there would be"—with a wretched stunted laugh—"of getting him away without a sight of you! How little you know him!"
Elizabeth does not dispute the fact of her want of acquaintance with Byng's character, nor does she help his floundering parent by any suggestion. She merely goes on listening to her with that civil white look, while the sportive sea-mews still play at hide-and-seek with the sun-rays on the wide blue fields of heaven.
"It is dreadful that I should have to say these things to you," says Mrs. Byng, in a voice of the strongest revolt and ire against her destiny—"insult you in this unprovoked way; but, in point of fact, you are the only person in the world who can convince him that—that—it is impossible—that it cannot be. Of course he will be very urgent and pressing, and I know how persuasive he is. Do not you suppose that I, his own mother, know how hard it is to refuse him anything? and of course, in his present weak state, it must be very carefully done. He could not stand any violent contradiction. You would have to be very gentle; dear me!"—with a fresh access of angry remorse—"as if you ever could be anything else."
This compliment also its pale object receives in silence.
"You know one has always heard that there are two kinds of 'No,'" goes on Mrs. Byng with another dwarfish laugh, which has a touch of the hysteric in it—"a woman's 'No,' as it is called, that means 'Yes'; and a 'No' which anyone—which even he—must understand to be final. If you could—I dare say I am asking you an impossibility—but if you could make him understand that this time it is final!"
There is a silence between them. An unrulier billow than usual, yet more masterless in its Titan play, is hurling itself with a colossal thud and bang against the causeway; and Elizabeth waits till its clamour is subsided before she speaks.
"Yes," she answers slowly, "I understand; thank you for telling me what you wish. I think I may promise that I shall be able to—that I shall make him understand that it is final."
A moment or two later they are on their way back to the Amirauté. The ocean is at its glorious pastimes all around them; the hill-climbing, shining town smiles upon them from its slope; but upon both has fallen a blindness. The feelings of Mrs. Byng are perhaps the least enviable of the two.
They are nearly back at the beginning of the breakwater, when she stops short. Probably when cool reflection comes, when she is removed from the charm and pathos of Elizabeth's meek white presence, lovely and unreproachful, she will not repent her work; but at the present moment of impulse and remorse she feels as if the expunging of the last half-hour would be cheaply purchased by the sacrifice of six months of her remaining life.
"I suppose it is not the least use my asking you to try and forgive me—to make allowances for me?" she says, with unsteady-toned humility; "oh, how you must hate me! If the case were reversed, how I should hate you! How you will hate me all your life!"
The tears are rolling down her cheeks, and in an instant Elizabeth's hand has gone out to her. As it does so, the grotesque regret flashes across the elder woman's mind that any future daughter-in-law of hers will be most unlikely to be the possessor of such a hand.
"Why should I hate you? you cannot"—with a heart-wrung smile—"possibly think me more undesirable than I do myself; and even if it were not so, I do not think it is in me to hate anyone very much."
On their drive home they meet with one or two little incidents quite as funny as the old Jews kissing each other; but this time they do not move poor Miss Le Marchant to any laughter.
CHAPTER XI.
"I do remember an apothecary,—
And hereabouts he dwells."
Two days later she is called upon to perform the task she has undertaken. Probably she has spent those two days, and also the appertaining nights, in bracing her mind to it, for Jim can plainly see the marks of that struggle, though he is not aware of its existence, graved upon her face, on the third morning after the excursion to the Mole, when he comes in search of her. He does not find her in her accustomed corner of the terrace, but, looking down over the balustrade, sees her sitting below and alone on a small tree-shaded plateau that seems to have been levelled for lawn-tennis or bowls. Probably the giggling and chaffering of the girls on the terrace, and the respectful but persistent importunities of the Omars and Ahmeds to buy their colourful wares outspread on the hot flags have oppressed her spirits.
Fritz has carried down for her an arm-chair, a cane table, and a Persian rug for her feet, and she looks as if she were established for the day.
Since Byng has been out of danger Elizabeth has returned to her embroidery. She is one of those women to whom needlework is unaffectedly dear, like that other sweet woman "who was so delicate with her needle."
Before she catches sight of him he watches for a few moments her bright bent head and flying white fingers, and is able to perceive how many sighs she is sewing into the pattern.
"What a morning!" he says, running down the steps and joining her. "No one has any excuse for being an invalid to-day, has he?"
There is no second seat, so he stands beside her, looking up over her head at the tall trees above her, from which immense garlands of ivy are hanging and swinging in the warm breeze. That potent ivy has killed one tree altogether.
She glances up at him mutely, knowing that he has not come merely to tell her that the day is fine.
"We can hardly keep him on his sofa; he is virtually almost well, so well that he is quite up to seeing people. He would like—he has been asking—to see you."
He had thought her nearly as pale as it was possible for her to be when he had first come upon her. He now realizes how many degrees of colour she then had left to lose. While he speaks she has been mechanically pulling her thread through, and as he ceases, her lifted hand stops as if paralyzed, and remains holding her needle in the air.
It has come, then. For all her two days' bracing, is she ready for it?
"Now?"
The whisper in which this monosyllable is breathed is so stamped with a fear that borders on terror, that his one astonished thought is bow best to reassure her.
"Not if you do not feel inclined, of course—not unless you like. It can perfectly well be put off to another time. I can tell him—there will not be the least difficulty in making him understand—that you do not feel up to it this morning: that you would rather have more notice."
"But I would not," she says, standing up suddenly, and with trembling hands laying her work down upon the table, and beginning from dainty habit to pin it up in its protecting white cloth. "What good would more notice—a year's notice—do me?"
She turns away from him and fixes her unseeing eyes, glassy and dilated, upon a poplar tree that is hanging tasselled catkins out against the sky. Then once again she faces him, and he sees that there are cold beads of agony upon her forehead.
"Wish for me," she says huskily—"wish very hard for me, that I may get through it—that we may both get through it—alive!"
Then, motioning to him with her hand not to follow her, she walks quickly towards the hotel.
It is impossible to him to stay quiet. He wanders restlessly away, straying he knows not whither. The mimosas are out charmingly in the gardens, sending delicious whiffs of perfume from the soft yellow fluff of their flowers. The pinky almond-trees are out too, but not till long afterwards does he know it.
By-and-by he finds himself strolling, unhindered by a gardener placidly digging, through the grounds of a villa to let. Gigantic violets send their messages to his nostrils, the big and innumerable blue blossoms predominating over the leaves, which in England have to be so carefully searched for them. Superabundant oranges tumble about his feet; arum lilies, just discovering the white secret hid in their green sheaths, stand in tall rows on either side of him; a bed of broad beans points out the phenomenon of her February flowers to him. He sees and smells none of them. Have his senses stolen away with his heart into Byng's bedchamber? They must have done so, or he could not see with such extraordinary vividness the scene enacting there. He has himself helped to place it in such astonishing reality before himself. Does not he know the exact position of the chair she is to occupy? Did not he place it for her before he went to fetch her? Nor can his reason prevent his distorted fancy from presenting the interview as one between happy and confessed lovers. Even the recollection of her features, ghastly and with beads of agony dewing them, cannot correct the picture of his mind as he persistently sees it. That she meant, when he parted from her, to renounce Byng, he has no manner of doubt. But does not he know the pliancy of her nature? Is not he convinced that the rock on which her life has split is her inability ever to refuse anyone anything that they ask with sufficient urgency or with enough plausibility to persuade her that she can do them a kindness by yielding?
How much more, then, will she be incapable of resisting the importunate passion of her own heart's chosen one, freshly risen from a bed of death? Presently his restless feet carry him away out of the villa grounds again. He finds himself on the Boulevard Mustapha, and sits down on the low wall by the roadside, staring absently at a broken line of dusky stone-pines, cutting the ardent blue of the African sky on the hill opposite, and at an arcaded campagne throned high up among the verdure. He knows that it belongs to an Englishman who made reels of cotton, and the idle thought saunters across his mind how strange it is that reels of cotton should wind anyone into such a lofty white Eden! Can the interview be lasting all this while? Is not it yet ended? May not his tormented fancy see the chair by Byng's sofa once again empty or occupied by nurse or mother? Will not Mrs. Byng, will not Elizabeth herself; have seen the unfitness of taxing the sick man's faint powers by so extreme a strain upon them? But no sooner has this suggested idea shed a ray of light upon his darkness than an opposing one comes and blows it out. Has not Byng a will of his own? Will he be likely so soon to let her go? Nay, having once recovered her, will he ever let her out of his sight again? The thought restores him to restless action, and, although with sedulous slowness, he begins to retrace his steps towards the hotel. At a point about a quarter of a mile distant from it, the lane which leads to the Villa Wilson debouches into the road, and debouching also into the road he sees the figure of Cecilia, who, catching sight of him, as if unable to wait for him to join her, almost runs to meet him.
"I was coming to call upon you," says she eagerly. "Oh!"—with a laugh—"to-day I really cannot stay to think of the proprieties, and you have not been to see us for such centuries!"
"I have been nursing Byng."
"Oh yes; poor man! How dreadfully ill he must have been! I was so glad to hear he was better."
There is such a flat tepidity in the tone of these expressions of commiseration, something so different from the tender alertness of Cecilia's former interest in their object, that Jim, roused out of his own reflections to regard her more attentively than he has yet done, sees that she is preoccupied by some subject quite alien to the invalid.
"I have a piece of news to tell you"—with a sort of angry chuckle. "Such a piece of news! I am sure you will be delighted at it."
At her words a wonder as idle and slack as his late thought about the reels of cotton crosses him as to what possible piece of news to be told him by the buxom and excited person, before him could give him the faintest pleasure. That wonder sends up his eyebrows, and throws a mild animation into his voice.
"Indeed?"
"Do you like"—still chuckling—"to be told a piece of news or to guess it?"
"I like to be told it."
"Well, then"—with a dramatic pause—"we are going to have a wedding in the family!"
"My dear girl!" cries he, smiling very good-naturedly, and with a sensation that, though not violent, is the reverse of annoyance. "Hurrah! So he has come at last! Who is he? How dark you have kept him!"
Cecilia shakes her head and gives a short and rosy laugh.
"Oh, it is not I! You are wide of the mark."
"Your father?"—in a shocked voice.
He has a confused and illogical feeling that a second marriage on the part of Mr. Wilson would be a slight upon Amelia's memory.
"Father!"—with an accent that plainly shows him he is still further afield than in his first conjecture—"poor father! No, indeed; Heaven forbid! Fancy me with a stepmother!"
She pauses to give a shudder at the idea, while Jim gapes blankly at her, wondering whether she has gone off her head.
"Oh no; it is neither father nor I! No wonder you look mystified. It is—Sybilla!"
"Sybilla!!!!"
Although Mr. Burgoyne has not got it on his conscience that he has ever either expressed or felt anything but the most strenuous and entire disbelief in Sybilla's maladies, yet it has never occurred to him as possible that she should engage in any occupation nearer akin to the ordinary avocations of life than imbibing tonics through tubes and eating beef essences out of cups.
"She is going to marry Dr. Crump!" continues Cecilia, not on the whole dissatisfied with the effect of her torpedo. "When she told father, she said that he had saved her life, and that the least she could do was to dedicate the poor remainder of it to him. She tells other people that she is marrying him because we wish it! You know that that was always her way."
"Sybilla!!"
"I thought that there must be something in the wind, as since the beginning of the month she has never once wished us good-bye; and the housemaid upset the ink-bottle over the book of prescriptions without her ever finding it out; and the clinical thermometer has not appeared for a week!"
"Sybilla!!!"
"I thought I should surprise you; it gives one a disgust for the idea of marrying altogether, does not it? I have come to the conclusion that I do not care now if I never marry. Father and I get on quite happily together; and when one is well off, one can really be very fairly content in a single state; and, at all events, I am sure I do not envy Sybilla."
"Nor I Crump"—with an emphasis so intense that Cecilia bursts out into a laugh of a more genuine character than any she has yet indulged in.
"You will have to give her away!" she cries, as soon as she can again speak distinctly. "Father will marry her, of course, and you must give her away. I am sure she will insist upon it."
"She will have to make haste, then," returns he, recovering enough from his first stupefaction to join Cecilia in her mirth; "for I shall not be here much longer."
"You are not going away?"—raising her eyebrows, and with a tinge of meaningness in her tone which vaguely frets him.
"Why should not I go?" he asks irritably, his short and joyless merriment quite quenched. "What is there for a man to do here? I have stayed already much longer than I meant. I am engaged to meet a friend at Tunis—the man with whom I went to the Himalayas three years ago; we are going to make an excursion into the interior. I am only waiting for some guns and things. Why should not I go?"
"There is no earthly reason," replies she demurely; "only that I did not know you had any such intention. But then, to be sure, it is so long since I have seen you—not, I think," glancing at him for confirmation of her statement rather too innocently, "since the lovers—ha! ha!—and I met you and Miss Le Marchant driving on the quay."
CHAPTER XII.
Elizabeth's feeble tap at Byng's door is instantly answered by the nurse, who, opening it smilingly to admit her, the next moment, evidently in accordance with directions received, passes out herself and shuts it behind her. Elizabeth, deprived of the chaperonage of her cap and apron, and left stranded upon the threshold, has no resource but to cross the floor as steadily as a most trembling pair of legs will let her.
The room is a square one, two of its thick walls pierced by Moorish windows. Drawn up to one of those windows—the one through which Jim had caught his first glimpse of Elizabeth on the night of his arrival—is the sick man's sofa. At the side of that sofa his visitor has, all too soon, arrived. She had prepared a little set speech to deliver at once—a speech which will give the keynote to the after-interview; but, alas! every word of it has gone out of her head. Unable to articulate a syllable, she stands beside him, and if anyone is to give the keynote, it must be he.
"This is very, very good of you. It seems a shame to ask you to come here, with all this horrid paraphernalia of physic about; but I really could not wait until they let me be moved into another room."
She has not yet dared to lift her eyes to his face, in terror lest the sight of the change in it shall overset her most unsure composure. Already, indeed, she has greedily asked and obtained every detail of the alteration wrought in him. She knows that his head is shaved, that his features are sharp, and that his voice is faint; and when, as he ceases speaking, she at last wins resolution enough to look at him, she sees that she has been told the truth. His head is shaven, his nose is as sharp as a pen, and his voice is faint. She has been told all this; but what is there that she has not been told? What is his voice besides faint?
"Will not you sit down? It seems monstrous that I should be lying here letting you wait upon yourself. Will you try that one?" pointing to the chair which is figuring at the same moment so prominently in Jim's tormented fancy. "I am afraid you will not find it very comfortable. I have not tried it yet, but it looks as hard as a board."
She sits down meekly as he bids her, glad to be no longer obliged to depend upon her shaky limbs, and answers:
"Thank you; it is quite comfortable."
"Would not it be better if you had a cushion?"—looking all round the room for one.
His voice is courteous, tender almost, in its solicitude for her ease. But is she asleep or awake? Can this be the same voice that poured the frenzy of its heartrending adjurations into her ear scarce a month ago? Can this long, cool, white saint—he looks somehow like a young saint in his emaciation and his skull-cap—be the stammering maniac who, when last she saw him, crashed down nigh dead at her feet, slain by three words from her mouth?
At the stupefaction engendered by these questions, her own brain seems turning, but she feebly tries to recover herself.
"I—I am so glad you are better."
"Thank you so much. Yes, it is nice; nice to be
"'Not burnt with thirsting,
Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting.'
Do you remember Keats?"
After all, there is something of the original Byng left, and the ghost of his old spouting voice in which he recites the above couplet gives her back a greater measure of composure than could almost anything else.
"It is nice, only one would like to be able to jump, not 'the life to come'—ha! ha!—but the convalescence to come. My mother is even more impatient than I am. She has made up her mind that we are to be off in three days, even if I am carried on board on a shutter."
She can see now that he is very much embarrassed—that his fluency is but the uneasy cover of some emotion—and the discovery enables her yet further to regain possession of herself.
"I should think," she says in her gentle voice, "that you would be very glad to get out of this room, where—where you have suffered so much."
"Well, yes; one does grow a little tired of seeing
"'The casement slowly grow a glimmering square;'
but"—with a rather forced laugh—"at least, I have had cause to be thankful that there is no wall-paper to count the pattern of. I have blessed the white wall for its featureless face."
She moves a little in her chair, as if to assure herself that she is really awake. That stupefaction is beginning to numb her again—that hazy feeling that this is not Byng at all, this polite invalid, making such civil conversation for her; this is somebody else.
"But I must not tire myself out before I have said what I want to say to you," he continues, his embarrassment perceptibly deepening, while his transparent hand fidgets uneasily with the border of the coverlet thrown over him, "or"—laughing again—"I shall have that tyrant of a nurse down upon me, and—and I do wish—I have wished so much—so unspeakably—to see you, to speak to you."
She sits immovable, listening, while a ray of something—can it be hope? why should it be hope?—darts across her heart. After all, this may be Byng—her Byng; this strange new manner may be only the garment in which sickness has dressed his passion—a worn-out garment soon to drop away from him in rags and tatters, and in which cannot she already discern the first rent? After all, she may have need for her armour—that armour which, so far, has seemed so pitifully needless.
"I knew that it would be no use asking leave to send for you any sooner; they would have told me I was not up to it—would have put me off with some excuse; so I kept a 'still sough.' Do you know that I never mentioned your name until to-day? But it has been hard work, I can tell you; for the last two days I have scarcely been able to bear it, I have so hungered to see you."
Her eyelids tremble, and she instinctively puts up her hand to cover her tell-tale mouth. Surely this is the old language. Surely there is, at all events, a snatch of it in his last words; and again that prick of illogical joy quickens the beats of her fainting heart, though she tries to chide it away, asking herself why she should be in any measure glad that the love which she has come here for no other purpose than to renounce, still lives and stirs.
"You may think I am exaggerating, but in point of fact I cannot by any expression less strong than the gnaw of downright hunger convey the longing I have had to see you."
He pauses with a momentary failure of his still feeble powers.
She catches her breath. Now is the time for her to strike in, to arrest him before he has time to say anything more definite. Now is the time for her to fulfil her promise, her inhuman promise, which yet never for one instant strikes her as anything but irrevocably binding. Does he see her intention, that he plunges, in order to anticipate it, into so hurried a resumption of his interrupted sentence?
"To see you, in order to beg—to supplicate you to forgive me for my conduct to you."
She gives an almost imperceptible start. This ending is not what she had expected, not the one to defend herself against which she has been fastening on her buckler and grasping her shield. The words that it demands in answer are not those with which she has been furnishing herself, and it is a moment or two before she can supply herself with others. He must be referring, of course, to his last meeting with her—that one so violently broken off by the catastrophe of his collapse.
"I do not know what I am to forgive," she says, half bewildered. "You were not accountable for your actions. You were too ill to know what you were doing."
"Oh, you think I am alluding to that last time," cries he, precipitately correcting her. "No, no; you are right. I was not accountable then. You might as well have reasoned with a wild beast out of a menagerie. I was a perfect Bedlamite then. No"—going on very rapidly, as it in desperate anxiety to make her comprehend with the least possible delay—"what I am asking you—asking you on my knees—to forgive me for, is my whole conduct to you from the beginning."
The two white faces are looking breathlessly into each other, and though of late he has been tussling with death on a bed, and she has been walking about, and plying her embroidery, and dining at a public table, hers is far the whiter of the two. It must be the unwonted exertion of talking so much that makes him bring out his next speech in jerks and gasps.
"I forced my acquaintance upon you at the very beginning; I watched you like a detective; I beset you wherever you went; I pestered you with my visits. Jim always told me that it was not the conduct of a gentleman, but I would not believe him—not even when"—how difficult it is! he finds it almost as hard work as his mother had done upon the Mole—"not even when, by my importunities, I had driven you away—obliged you to rush away almost by night from a place you liked—a place you were happy in—to escape me. And I have no excuse to offer you—none; unless, indeed, as I sometimes think, my mind was off its balance even then. I express myself wretchedly!"—in a tone of deep distress—"but you will overlook that, will not you? You will—will understand what I mean?"
She makes an assenting motion with her head. At this moment she cannot speak: she will be able to do so again directly, but she must have just a minute or two. Yet she must not leave him for an instant in doubt that she understands him. Oh yes, she understands him—understands that he is apologizing for having ever loved her; that he is awkwardly trying to draw the mantle of insanity over even the Vallombrosan wood. It is true that he does it with every sign of discomfort and pain; and he looks away from her, as Mrs. Byng, too, had found it pleasanter to do.
"Do you remember what Schiller said when he was dying? 'Many things are growing clearer to me.' I thought a good deal of those words as I lay over there"—glancing towards the now neatly-arranged and empty bed. "One night they thought it was all up with me—I heard them say so. They did not think I was conscious, but I was; and it did strike me that I had made a poor thing of it, and that if ever I was given the chance I would make a new start."
Again that little assenting movement of her fair head. How perfectly comprehensible he still is! How well she understands that he is renouncing her among the other follies of his "salad days"—college bear-fights, music-halls, gambling clubs. Well, why should not he? Has not she come here on purpose to renounce him? Can she quarrel with him for having saved her the trouble?
"And I thought that I could not begin better than by falling on my knees to you. I wish I could fall on my real knees to you!"—with a momentary expression of extreme impatience at his own bodily weakness—"and ask you most humbly and tenderly and reverently to pardon me."
She looks at him, and sees his wasted face flushing with fatigue and worry and mental suffering. Oh, what a bitter wave of desolateness rolls over her! But she smiles.
"I still do not understand what I am to forgive you for. I suppose that you could no more help having once thought you loved me, than you can help"—she stops abruptly in compassion for the look of acute regret, shame and remorse that crosses his sharp features, and, in her mercy to him, gives a different close to her phrase from that which its beginning had seemed to bespeak—"than you can help having been so ill."
Her tone, quite unconsciously to herself is inexpressibly touching; and Byng, weakened by illness, turns his face upon the pillow, and breaks into violent weeping. His mother had cried too. It seems to be in the family.
She has risen—what further is there for her to stay for?—and pauses quietly at his side till the paroxysm is past. Her standing posture tells him that she is going, and he consequently struggles to recover himself in some degree; but having never cultivated self-control when he was in health, it declines to come at his enfeebled bidding now.
"Forgive me! forgive me!" is all he can stammer.
She looks down upon him with a strange and tender smile, in which for the moment the selfless, pitying sweetness has swallowed up the misery.
"Which am I to forgive you for—for having loved me? or for having ceased to love me? For having been mad? or for being sane? Yes, of course I forgive you from the very bottom of my heart! God bless you! Make haste and get well!"
She walks cheerfully to the door, and, reaching it, turns, still wearing that smile, that he may see how perfectly friendly is her last look; but he does not see it. He has rolled over on his face, and the whole sofa is shaking with his sobs.
CHAPTER XIII.
"The pity of it, Iago! The pity of it!"
The Byngs are gone, having got off just within the time first suggested by the sick man's mother. But, after all, he has to be carried on board the Eugène Perrère. Since his interview with Miss Le Marchant, his progress towards recovery has scarcely been so smooth or so fast as before; and perhaps his mother is right to bear him away with what seems such overhaste, even though it be on men's shoulders that he has to make his exit. At all events, he is gone. The hotel—of which a part of the inmates have seen him only prostrate and bleeding, and the other and larger part have not seen him at all, but have had their curiosity whetted by the tale of his calamitous arrival, only to have it balked by his hurried departure—crowd into the entrance-hall, some on one pretext, some on another, most on no pretext at all, to see him go. There are only two of the visitors whose faces cannot be seen among the good-naturedly curious and sympathetically pitiful group that watch the exodus of the little party. Who shall say how those two spend the hour of Byng's departure out of their lives? Jim has accompanied the invalid to the quay to see the last of him; has stayed with him till the final bell warns non-passengers off the boat; has left him with all the proper requests and adjurations to let him know how the sick man bears the voyage; how they get on, etc. But as Mrs. Byng stands on the upper deck and watches the trail of churned water lengthening between her and the dwindling high white town, she has a feeling that her old friend does not like her as well as he did, and that it will never again be quite the same thing between them.
The Byngs are gone—have been gone a fortnight—and March is here. Over the villa faces the begonias have broken into riotous flower, and the snowy-blossomed fruit-trees, that have put on their snowy garments but lately, stand out in bright fragility against the heavy green that never, even in January, ceases to wrap itself about the lovely Moslem town.
Every day for the last fortnight, Jim, too, has been going, but he is not yet gone. His guns have arrived ten days ago, and his friend has expressed by post and wire his weariness of exploring the bazaars of Tunis alone. But he is not yet gone to join that impatient friend. Why does he still linger in a place where, as he had justly explained to Cecilia, there is nothing for him to do? Why indeed? It is a question that, by night and day, by the insolence of the staring moonlight which slides in upon his restless open eyes by night, under the fires of the great spring sun at noon, he asks himself. All the answer he can give is that it would be hardly friendly to choose this moment, when she is so down in the world, to leave Elizabeth.
She is down in the world; there can be no mistake about that. Even her father, who has returned from his wanderings, must be aware of this fact. Perhaps that is the reason why he no longer snubs her as much as he did; why he even accepts, with some semblance of graciousness, those affectionate and watchful ministrations which she tenders him with as gentle an assiduity as in her brighter days. But he has still no great appetite for her society; and she, unresentfully divining it, gives up to him, without repining, the one great solace of her melancholy—her mother's company. If Jim were gone, the more part of her life would be spent alone. She tells him so—tells him, with a sweet flattering smile, how much his comradeship is to her. Has he any right to rob her of that last prop? It is only to himself that the breathless clamberings up the steep short cut to El Biar, deep and brambly as her own Devonshire lanes, that the gazings in common over the pigeon-necked sea and the amaranth hills, can do any harm. They may put a sting into his own after-life—a sting that all the empty years that follow may be powerless to extract; but to her they serve only as a narcotic to numb the intensity of that ache which the cured madness of Byng has left behind it. Some day, of course, he must leave her; he cannot pass his whole life at her side; some day soon leave her to walk and sit and study her Italian Grammar forlornly alone. But it must not be until she has a little plucked up her spirits.
As soon as he sees any signs of this occurring, he will quit Algiers—quit it comfortably, with the consciousness of having done a good-natured thing, by which nobody is the worse. This is the compromise at which he arrives with the inward adviser—conscience, common-sense, what you will—that is hourly admonishing him to be gone. Does Elizabeth guess that her retention of the companion, to whom she so desolately clings, hangs on her remaining always as crushed as the first ten days after those cruel interviews with the Byngs, mother and son, had left her? If she did, she would probably seek to check the first faint revivings of cheerfulness in her inveterately gay spirit. Instead, while her heart is yet at its sickest, she earnestly tries to foster the tiny seeds of cheerfulness, saying to herself that it is mere selfishness in her to inflict her dismalness upon her one friend; seeking rather to lift his spirits, which seem scarcely less drooping than her own.
Does he enter into her motive? Does not it rather strike him with a species of shock how superficial must be the nature, how on the surface the suffering, of one who can already begin again to take a mischievous interest in the Widow Wadman's amours, and to mimic afresh the Cockney twang of the French Vicomte's English governess?
It is three weeks to-day since the Byngs left. The weather is fine, and a hot sunbeam is lighting up the painful indecision of Jim's face, as he stands in his bedroom with an open telegram in his hand, which two hours ago was put into it. It is from his friend at Tunis, and is conceived in terms which demonstrate that the indignation of the sender has got the better of his economy. It contains a stringent representation of his inability any longer to dance attendance upon Burgoyne's whims, and a peremptory request, answer paid, to be at once informed either that he will join him immediately, or that the idea of their joint excursion has been entirely abandoned. He is standing holding the paper in miserable uncertainty, torn by doubts, rent in twain by conflicting emotions, when the noise of voices and laughter outside the house draws him to the window.
The room he has occupied since he vacated his own for Byng looks out over the hall-door, and in front of that door a small group is gathered—the Vicomte, his two boys, his girl, her governess, a coal-black negro who serves as kitchenmaid to the establishment, and—Elizabeth. They are all gathered round a tiny donkey, such a bourriquot as the valiant Tartarin slew, which has evidently been brought up for sale by its Arab master. Attached to its head gear are two long reins, and holding these reins is Miss Le Marchant. As Jim looks out, the bourriquot, taking some strange freak into its little brown head, sets off galloping at a prodigious rate; and Elizabeth—white gown and blonde hair flying—gallops after it. As she is dragged at racing pace down the drive, her immoderate laughter comes borne back on the wind to the spectator of whom she is unconscious.
The latter has turned away from the window, and sat down to his writing-table, where he is scribbling a hasty answer to the missive which has cost him such long deliberation. It does not take a minute to pen now that he has once made up his mind, nor can it be more than five from the moment of the donkey's start to that when the telegram is on its way to the Post Office in Zameth the porter's hand. The die is cast. When this is the case after long irresolution, there must always be a sense of relief, and perhaps, therefore, it is relief which Jim's face, thrown down upon his arms rested on the table, expresses. Since no one can see that hidden face, it is impossible to say. He has certainly no wish that Elizabeth should be unhappy. Her patient white misery had filled him with tender pity and ruth; and yet her laugh, sweet and delicate as it was with all its excess of merriment, rings jarringly in his ears. She is incapable of a great constancy. He had promised himself to stay with her until her spirits were restored. Well, he has kept his promise handsomely. He has done with her and her contradictions now. It will be someone else's turn with her next. Whose? The Vicomte's, perhaps.
By-and-by he rouses himself. Only a part of his task is yet done. He must tell them that he is going. As he passes the looking-glass, he sees that his hair is roughened and erected by his late attitude. He passes a brush hastily over it. He must not look a Bedlamite like Byng. He finds Mr. and Mrs. Le Marchant sitting under the ficus-tree on the terrace—the terrace which, at this hour, they have to themselves. She is reading aloud to him paragraphs out of the Algerian paper, translating as she goes along, since his French is about on a par with that of most Englishmen of his standing.
He is leaning back in a wicker chair, with an expression of placid good-humour on his face. Across his knees the hotel cat—a plain and ill-natured animal—lies, loudly purring, while he obligingly scratches her judiciously whenever she indicates a wish for that relaxation. As Burgoyne remembers, Mr. Le Marchant had always been on very friendly terms with the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air. About the little group there is such an air of content, of harmony, of completeness in itself, that none can connect the idea of a third person with it in anything but an interloping attitude. And yet there is a third person whose presence must be continually infringing its happy duality, since niche of her own in life has she none.
"Are you looking for Elizabeth?" asks Elizabeth's mother, laying down her paper as the new-comer draws near; "she has walked to Biermandreis."
The intimate friendliness of her smile as she gives him this bit of information—the matter of course taking for granted that he must be seeking her whose society he has so wholly monopolized of late—plants a new sting in Jim's sore heart, and robs him for the moment of the power to make his announcement.
"She has not been gone more than ten minutes"—still with that bright look of kindly confidence that she is answering his thoughts.
"I am looking for you all," he answers abruptly. "I came to tell you that I am off to-morrow."
The shaft is sped. Though he is not looking at Mrs. Le Marchant, he knows that her face has fallen. Upon Mr. Le Marchant's, on the contrary, an added shade of cheerfulness is visible. Mr. Le Marchant has ceased any overt opposition to the young man's intimacy with his family; but none the less is the young man aware that the father has acquiesced but grudgingly in the footing on which he had found Jim on his return from his tour.
"I have had a wire from my friend in Tunis; he is becoming dangerous"—laughing, oh, how forcedly!
"You are going to Tunis?" says Mr. Le Marchant, almost cordially. "You are quite right; it is a very interesting place. One does really see the genuine East there, not the mongrel hotch-potch one has here."
"Is not it rather late for a trip into the interior?" asks the wife. The geniality has gone out of her tone, and the sunshine out of her face. There is a touch of involuntary wistfulness in both.
"The interior? Oh yes, of course. My dawdling"—more laughter—"has knocked that on the head. I have let the time for that go by. We intend to run over to Spain and see the Alhambra and the Escurial."
There is a general silence. Well, it is done. Neither husband nor wife makes any effort to alter his resolution or detain him. They do not even put any questions to him as to his future projects. He has nothing to do but remove himself and allow them to resume that happy little duet which he had disturbed.
"The train sets off at such an unearthly hour to-morrow morning—six o'clock or thereabouts; it would take three days to get there if it did not—that I must put my things together this afternoon. I shall see you again, of course, before I go."
"Oh, of course," replies Mr. Le Marchant, in the easy and comfortable tone of one to whom it is a matter of supreme indifference whether or not that farewell meeting ever takes place, and Mrs. Le Marchant says nothing at all.
He has adduced his necessary packings as an excuse for leaving them; though, indeed, they neither wished for nor asked any excuse; yet nothing is further from his intentions than to enter at once upon that occupation. She has walked to Biermandreis. In five minutes he is walking thither too. There are a couple of roads that lead there, and of course he takes the wrong one—the same, that is, that she had taken, so that, although he walks fast, yet, thanks to her start of him, he has reached the pretty little flower-shaded French village which, with its white church and its École Communale, looks as if it were taken to pieces at night and put to bed in a toy-box—he has reached it, and has, moreover, traced half his homeward way, before he overtakes her. The path by which he returns is a rough Arab track, cut in low steps up the hill, each step a mass of fossil-shells—whelk, and scallop and oyster shells, whose inhabitants died—strange thought!—before Adam saw Eden's fair light. It is a charming road, cut, in part, through the red rock, over which the southern greenery tumbles. He has approached quite close to her before she sees him. She is sitting on a camp-stool by the wayside, looking vacantly before her. Her figure is rather stooped, and her straight back bent, as if it were not worth the trouble to hold it up. Beside her, on the ground, lie a little tin colour-box and water-bottle and a drawing-board. He wishes, with a new pang, that he had not come upon her so suddenly. He is afraid that this is one of the aspects of her that will stick most pertinaciously in his memory. Catching sight of him, her whole sad, listless face lights up.
"It is you! I was sure you would come. I told them to tell you where I had gone. I meant to sketch"—with a glance at her neglected implements—"but"—with a sigh—"as you see, I did not."
"Are you down on your luck?" he asks, sitting down by her side; "you did not seem so"—trying to harden his heart by forcing a recollection of her extravagant gaiety—"a little while ago, when you were prancing after that jackass."
"Is not he a darling?" cries she, hurrying up the end of her sigh to make room for a smile of pleasure. "I want to buy him; only I am afraid he might die of sea-sickness going home."
"Perhaps"—scarcely knowing what he is saying.
"I should like to buy a little cart to harness him to—such a one as I saw just now going along the road, drawn by a tiny bourriquot that might have been twin brother to mine. Some Arab children had dressed out both him and his cart with branches of that great yellow fennel—his long ears and his little nose peeped out so pathetically between; another child walked after barefoot, waving a great acanthus-leaf. You never saw anything so pretty! Yes, you must break mine in for me," smiling again; "it will not take more than a week, I am sure."
"If it did not take more than a day even, I am afraid I should have to decline the appointment"—seizing this opening to blurt out his news. "I am off at six o'clock to-morrow morning. I—I want to see the Escurial."
She had been almost garrulous about the little donkey, and he had wished to stop her. In that he has undoubtedly succeeded.
How the asphodels cover the banks on either hand! They have come into full flower since last he passed this way: tall branching stem, white blossom, and pinky bud; here they are in thousands.
It is a soft day, on which scents lie heavy, and their strong odour—that is scarcely perfume, and yet has an odd, acrid charm—fills the air.
"Everything must come to an end," he says baldly.
She is apparently not going to make any more effort to detain him than had her mother. He has every right to come and go where and when he pleases. Since Amelia died, to no human being is he accountable for his actions, and yet there is both guilt and misery in his voice as he utters his platitude.
"It has been great good luck for me that you have stayed so long; I know that it is out of pure kindness that you have done it, and it has made all the difference to me. I—I am quite set up again now, thanks to you; and—and summer is coming on, and I shall do very well—capitally!"
She has detected—what is, indeed, pretty obvious—the deep distress of his face and voice, and, in her habitual unselfishness, her one thought is to relieve him of any self-reproachful misgiving that he is doing aught cruel in robbing her of the support of his companionship. In her tone is nothing but the meekest gratitude. It is her misfortune, not her fault, that in it there is not cheerfulness too. But her "gentle physic," instead of curing, seems to aggravate his ill.
"It must come to an end some time or other!" he murmurs wretchedly, as if to himself.
"Yes!"
Dead silence.
Below the slight eminence where they sit, the road winds white, and upon the opulent low green hills on its further side, what a banquet of colour! On one steep slope the plough is driving its difficult furrows, turning up the rich red earth, shaded with deeper claret and lighter pink stains.
Beneath, a square of stone-pines looks like a green velvet handkerchief spread on the hillside, and over the rest of the upland eucalyptus, and olive, and cactus hold their riot of various verdure; while, on the tiptop of everything, against a weirdly pale-blue sky-field, a Moorish villa lifts its white flank.
How long have they both been staring dully at that fair prospect before Elizabeth again speaks!—
"You were a very good friend to me!"
She had not meant that past tense as an arrow to shoot into his heart; but it sticks there, barbed.
"I do not know how."
"And friends—real, good friends—should not have concealments from each other, should they? They should tell one another about themselves?"
"Yes."
A pause.
"I have often wished—often tried to tell you about myself; but I could not. I never could! I can tell you to-day if you wish, if you care to hear. Do you care?"
"Do I care?"
What a small battlefield those three words make for the anger and agony they express to fight upon!
Another longer pause.
She has taken off her hat, and now passes her handkerchief over her damp forehead.
"I shall be all right when I have once begun, but it is bad to make a start."
"Do not make it! do not tell me! I adjure you not to tell me! it hurts you too much!"
"It would hurt me more to let you go without telling you. Do you remember"—rushing desperately into her subject—"at the time you stayed with us at the Moat, that there was a great talk among us of my having my portrait painted?"
He knits his brow in an eager straining of his memory.
"Yes, I recollect."
"Father was wonderfully proud of me in those days; it seems impossible to believe it now"—with a passing look of incredulity at her own statement—"but he was."
"Yes, yes."
"Do you remember all the arranging and planning as to who was to be the artist, and that he was to come and stay in the house to paint it?"
Jim has put his hand up to his forehead as if to quicken the return of those faint and distant impressions which are coming out in stronger and stronger colours on memory's surface.
"Yes, yes; he was not an Englishman, was he? We used to laugh about him"—adding stroke to stroke in order to convince her of the accuracy of his recollections—"used to call him the 'distinguished foreigner.'"
"Did we? Yes"—slowly—"I remember now that we did. Well"—gathering herself up for a supreme effort, panting painfully, and turning her head quite aside so that he may have no glimpse of her face—"he came, and he stayed two months, and at the end of those two months I—I—ran away with him!"