"Merci, oh ma mère.""J'ai prie, et j'ai été exaucé.""Reconnaissance à Marie.""Reconnaissance à Notre Dame d'Afrique."
"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 histable-d'hôteneighbour, 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 thenOur hopes, and then our fears, and whenThese are dead, the debt is due:Dust claims dust, and we die too."
"First our pleasures die, and thenOur hopes, and then our fears, and whenThese 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 evenyoumight 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 thesalle 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 whitehaiks, 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 issointeresting!"
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.
"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 alwayswerekind; 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 themselvestête-à-têtein the private apartment of the Le Marchants.
It is on therez-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 theentresol, 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 woollenhaik, 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!"
"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 herhaikwith 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 tothehappiness,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:
"Hardlyever, 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 12bis, Piazza d' Azeglio. "I do not know whether you have yet found it so" (to Jim); "but thisisa 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, abouthim?"
"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 itisunlucky 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 thathewould have gone out ofhismind," 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 itwasa 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—thatmore 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 requestnotto 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 sheisvery 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.
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 thesalle 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'clockdéjeûnerhe 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 thesalon, in hopes of there finding a Tauchnitz novel, or even a superannuatedPall MallorWorld. 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-oldCourt 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 evidentlyde 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 theCourt Journalthe 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 thesalle 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,whata long day!"
"Long!" repeats Jim emphatically; "it might choose to call itself aday; 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 thesalon.
"Do you think that that can be meant for apig?" 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 youallgoing to Hammam Rhira to-morrow?—allgoing 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 beingtête-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 doesnotlike 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 oflikingthem; but I alwaysadmiredthem. 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.