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."