PART II.
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.