"It was a chosen plot of fertile land,Amongst wide waves set like a little nest,As if it had by Nature's cunning handBeen 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 foundTo bud out faire, and throwe her sweet smell all around."
"It was a chosen plot of fertile land,Amongst wide waves set like a little nest,As if it had by Nature's cunning handBeen 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 foundTo 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 theEugène 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 tabletable d'hôteupon 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 andcomme il fautfamilies 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 thetable d'hôteis 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 thetable 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 thesalle 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 himhere? 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 hisvis-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 Florentineentresol. 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. Howeverempressémay 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 oneathim, 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 Iwasrelieved; but I was disappointed too! Oh, I must be a fool—a bad fool—but Iwasdisappointed! 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 Imustspeak to him," breaks in the girl, lifting her head, and panting; "Imustask him; Imustfind 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!"
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,"
"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, readingtheirhymn-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 reden 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 thoughtdéjeûnermeant 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 peevishmalade imaginaire.
They have been strolling towards the carriages waiting outside, and have now reached one, driven by anindigène, 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 theirtête-à-têtedrive, 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 tellyouthat; 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 hiscachet."
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 theindigène, 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; hedivineshow 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."
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."
"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: