"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?"