"And therein sat a lady fresh and fayre,Making sweet solace to herself alone.Sometimes she sang as lowd as lark in ayre,Sometimes she laught, as mery as Pope Joan."
"And therein sat a lady fresh and fayre,Making sweet solace to herself alone.Sometimes she sang as lowd as lark in ayre,Sometimes she laught, as mery as Pope Joan."
Jim's first care on returning to his hotel is to ascertain that the departure for Hammam Rhira has really taken place, and, having been reassured on this point, retires to his own bedroom to reconnoitre the terrace, upon which it gives. The sun has long drunk up the rain from the tiles, and the chairs have been set out again. The hotel guests, in all the sociability of their after-luncheon mood, are standing and sitting about. The widow Wadman, with great play of eyebrow and lip, is pacing up and down in arch conversation with her habitual victim. Snatches of her alluring talk reach Jim behind his muslin curtain as she comes and goes:
"I think that caged birds ought to beloved!" "The Prophet was a wise man, was not he? he knew a little about us," etc.
In her usual place, aloof from the rest of the company, Elizabeth is sitting in a clinging white gown of some woolly stuff. With a dainty white kerchief twisted about her head, and a bundle of many-tinted Eastern stuffs on her knees, she looks like a little Romney. Now and again, as fragments of the widow's siren strains reach her ears, he sees her lips curl up into delighted laughter; but, for the most part, she seems to be looking round rather uneasily, as if seeking something or someone. Can it be himself that she, in her innocence of being observed, is on the watch for? He has no right to be playing the spy on her in any case. It is clear that, dressed as she is, she cannot be meditating going out. He must not frighten her by any too direct or sudden attentions. In a little while the other occupants of the terrace will drift away, and he will stroll out and join her, and together they will watch the shade of the ficus-tree, lengthening over the red flags. But she presently baffles his calculations by rising, and, with her rainbow-tinted pile of brocades clasped in her slender arms, slowly passes into the house. Has she retreated thither for good? and will he have to frame some new flimsy excuse for knocking at her door? But again he is out of his reckoning, for in about a quarter of an hour she re-issues, dressed for walking; and after one more lingering and, as it seems to him, disappointed glance around her, paces, a solitary little figure, down the hill. He lays his watch before him, and, having counted five minutes on its dial-plate, sets off in pursuit. He overtakes her just as she reaches the point where the lane debouches into the highroad. She stands, looking rather disconsolately, first up the hill, then down it, evidently uncertain which direction to choose.
"You cannot make up your mind?" he says, pausing beside her, and taking off his hat.
She gives a slight start, and a friendly, pleased smile runs all over her face and up into her eyes—a smile that makes him say to himself confidently that itwashe whom her glance had been seeking on the terrace.
"Which do you advise?"
"I advise the town."
He has long known her teachableness, so it is no great surprise to him that she at once turns in the direction counselled.
"As I am going there myself, will you allow me to walk a little way with you?"
He makes the request with respectful diffidence; and she, after one small troubled look, evidently given to the memory of her father, assents.
They set off down the hill together, the air, sharp after the rain—as sharp, at least, as Algiers' stingless air ever is—bringing the colour to Elizabeth's cheeks, as she steps along light-heartedly, scarcely refraining from breaking into a run, down the steep incline. Her spirits are so evidently rising at every yard that he hazards his next step.
"I am going to see the Arab town; Miss Strutt says that I ought."
"She meant you to ask her to show it you!" cries Elizabeth, with a laugh; "but she was quite right—it is delightful; I am sure you will like it."
"You have been there?"
"Yes, once or twice; not half so often"—regretfully—"as I should like to have been."
Dare he speak upon the last innocent hint? But while he is doubting she goes on:
"You must take care not to lose yourself; it is such a puzzling place; all the streets are exactly like each other."
"You do not feel inclined to show me the way about it?"
He throws out the suggestion in a semi-bantering voice, so that if it meet with obvious disapproval he may at once withdraw it. She stops suddenly stock-still, and faces him.
"Are you speaking seriously? It would be very delightful; but do you think I might? do you think I ought?"
She lifts her eyes, widely opened, like a child's at hearing of some unexpected treat, to his. How astonishingly clear they are! and how curiously guileless! He has not the least doubt that she will sweetly acquiesce in his decision, whichever way it tends; and, for a second, a movement of irritation with her for her pliability crosses his mind. She ought to be able to have an opinion of her own. While he hesitates, she speaks again.
"It is just the afternoon to do something pleasant on," she says wistfully, and yet gaily too. "Oh, how good the air tastes! and how dearly I love the sun!"—lifting her face with sensitive lips, half open, as if to suck in his beams, to the great gold luminary pouring down his warmth through the pepper-trees upon them. "But I will take your advice; I know of old"—with a pretty flattering smile—"that you always give good advice. Do you think that I ought—do youreallythink that I ought?"
He throws conscience to the winds, and although not two hours ago he had professed to Cecilia his inability to decide upon the propriety or impropriety of any given course of female action, now answers with an almost brutal decisiveness:
"I do not think that there is the smallest doubt about it."
A relieved look crosses her features.
"Then I am sure it is all right," she says, with a joyful surrendering of her judgment into his keeping, and so, once again, steps along with her quick feather-light feet at his side.
For the moment she is the happier of the two, since he is not perfectly pleased either with himself or her. It is in vain that he tells himself that it is no babe whom he is beguiling; that, difficult as it is to believe it, those limpid eyes have looked at the sun for seven-and-twenty years. He still has a lingering sense of discomfort at having availed himself, for his own profit, of her ductility. And yet, five minutes later, he takes yet further advantage of that quality in her. They have reached the Plateau Saulière, and the stand of fiacres that "stationnent" there. Jim pauses.
"It is a good distance to the Arab town, I fancy, and very tiring walking when you get there."
"It is as steep as the side of a house; we shall be like flies on a wall," cries she delightedly.
"It would be a pity to be too tired to enjoy it before you got there, would not it?" says he doubtfully, and eyeing her bright slenderness with an air of uncertainty as to her powers of endurance. "Had not we better—would you mind—our driving there?"
"I am not at all tired," replies she; "I do not feel as if I ever should be tired to-day; but if you think it better——"
Still he looks at her dubiously. To him there appears to be a much greater degree of the compromising in atête-à-têtedrive than in a walk. In the one case the meeting may have been accidental; in the other there can be no mistake as to the deliberate intention. But either this does not strike Elizabeth, or she thinks, "In for a penny, in for a pound"; or, lastly, and most probably, having given up her judgment into his keeping, she finds it easiest and most natural to acquiesce in whatever he may propose.
The ungenerous thought flashes across him that if this is the principle on which she has guided her life, it is small wonder if she have made shipwreck of it. He hails a fiacre, and silently hands her in, and again they are off.
Elizabeth has disclaimed fatigue, and yet the restful position is evidently agreeable to her delicate body; and she thanks him so gratefully for his thought of her that his hard thoughts of her dissolve into remorse, and by-and-by change into an enjoyment almost as entire and uncalculating as her own.
Elizabeth has astonishing powers of enjoying herself. If he had not known that fact before, the afternoon would have revealed it to him.
She must have driven through the French town almost every day since her arrival, and yet its cheerful white-shuttered houses, its boulevards of glossy-leaved ficus-trees, its cafés, its arcaded streets with their polyglot promenaders, seem to fill her with as lively a pleasure as if she had but just landed from the steamboat that brought her.
The three Spahis, eternally sitting in a row on a bench outside some general officer's quarters, robed in their great red cloaks, with muslin-swathed swart heads and long red-leather boots, dimly descried beneath the stately sweep of their mantles, sitting there motionless, solemn and silent as the Fates; a venerable Arab, only to be distinguished from Abraham or Isaac by his carrying a vulgar brown umbrella; a short Kabyle seen in back view, with his rope-bound headdress, his brown-and-white striped frock, and his bare red legs striding along, looking exactly like a ludicrous and indelicate old woman; a Biskrah water-carrier, poising a great burnished copper pot on his shoulder; two little baggy trousered white ladies waddling along; a dozen of smart blue Turcos. She is enraptured with them all.
They leave their fiacre in the Place de la Cathédrale, and enter upon the mysterious recesses of the Arab town. Up and down endless flights of steps, up street after street—if streets they can be called, that are not wider than a yard in their widest part—and above their heads the rafter-supported houses lean together, letting scarce a glint of daylight drip down upon the dusky path far below.
They pass arched doorways, with pretty designs in plaster—doorways whose doors open inwards upon mysterious interiors—house or court, or mosque or Marabé. All along stand tiny shops, like wild-beast dens, as far as light and space go, lit only by the tempered light—in reality, only semi-darkness—that enters in front. How can they see to work—plait straw, for instance? as the three ebon-black negroes are doing, upon whom they stare in, asquat upon the ground. The turbans, and the red sashes, and the burnouses glimmer out of the little dim frontages, where charming pierced-brass Moorish lamps hang and swing aloft; and tempting piles of dully splendid brocades and bright gold-laminated gauzes gleam from the crowded shelves.
The narrow streetlets are full of unbusy, un-hurrying Easterns, hideous old negresses grinning like monkeys, idle Arabs sauntering along in their lazy grace, draped like Greek statues, sauntering along between the blue-washed walls that look in their effective variation upon the blinding whitewash as if some of the sky-colour had rubbed off upon them.
Jim and Elizabeth have paused, in their leisurely strolling and staring, to look from the straight shadowed alley in which they are standing up a long flight of steps to a low carved doorway, and a bit of starch-blue wall at the top. Down the steep flight a veiled, trousered woman is waddling, her immense pantaloons waggling awkwardly as she descends.
Elizabeth stands still, shaking with laughter at the sight. Jim laughs too.
"There is no expense spared in material there, is there? It would not be a bad dress for a fancy ball. Did you ever go to a fancy ball as a Moorish lady?"
Her laughter lessens, though her face is still alight with mirth.
"I never was at a fancy ball."
"Never?"
"Never; I never was at any ball in my life."
Her laughter is quite dead now.
"Never at any ball in your life!" repeats he, his surprise betraying him into one of those flights back into the past for which she has always showed such repugnance. "Why, you used to love dancing madly! I remember your dancing like a dervish. What is more, I remember dancing with you."
"Oh, do not remember anything to-day!" cries she, with a sort of writhe in her voice; "do not let either of us remember anything! let us have a whole holiday from remembering!"
So saying, she moves on quickly; and yet with the dance gone out of her feet. It never quite comes back. They look into an Arab club, where men are squatting, playing with odd-looking cards and drinking muddy coffee. Then a loud noise of jabbering young voices makes them peep in upon an Arab school, where a circle of little Moslems is sitting on the ground, scribbling Arabic on slates; while between the knees of the turbaned master a tiny baby scholar, of three or four, is standing in a lovely dull green coatlet. Elizabeth strokes the baby-learner's coppery cheek with her light hand, and says, with a laugh, that it seems odd to see little street-boys writing Arabic; but her laughter is no longer the bubbling, irrepressible joy-drunk thing it was before he had indulged in his tactless reminiscences; it is the well-bred, civil, grown-up sound that so often has no inside gladness to match it. In his vexation with himself for the clouding over of his little heaven that he himself has effected, he tries to persuade himself that it is caused by bodily fatigue.
"If I were asked," he says, by-and-by, looking down affectionately at her pallid profile, "I should say that you had had about enough of this; your spirit"—smiling—"is so very much too big for your body that one has to keep an eye upon you."
"It would not be much of a spirit if it were not," replies she, with a pretty air of perfectly sincere disparagement of her own slight proportions; "I know that I look a poor thing, but I am rather a fraud: I do not tire easily; I am not tired now."
"Bored, then?" with a slight accent of pique.
She lifts her sweet look, with a sort of hurry of denial in it.
"Most distinctly not."
"You would like to go on, then?"
"Yes."
"Or back?"
She hesitates, her eye exploring his with, as he feels, a genuine anxiety in it to discover what his own wishes are, so that her decision may jump with them.
"Yes—perhaps; I have really no choice."
He both looks at and speaks to her with a streak of exasperation.
"Do you never have a will—a preference of your own?"
It is evidently no unfamiliar thing to her to be addressed with causeless irritability. The recollection of her father's tone in speaking to her flashes back remorsefully upon Jim's memory. Is he himself going to take a leaf out of that book? It would be a relief to him were she to answer him sharply; but to do that is apparently not within her capabilities, though the tender red that tinges her cheek shows that she has felt his snub.
"In this case I really have not," she answers gently; "but I dare say that it was tiresome of me not to speak more decidedly; let us—let us"—another swift and apparently quite involuntary glance at him to see that she is not, after all, running counter to his inclinations—"let us go home!"
So they go home. It is near sun-setting as they drive along the Boulevard de la République, the fitting end to so princely a day. At the quay the moored vessels lie, their masts and spars making a dark design against an ineffable evening sky of mother-of-pearl and translucent pink. The sea, which to-day has not been of sapphire, but of "watchet-blue," pierced and shot with white, now copies exactly the heavens. It, too, shades from opal to translucent pink. How many changes of raiment there are in the wardrobe of the great wet mother!
"If I had as many gowns as the Mediterranean, how well-dressed I should be!" says Elizabeth, with a smile.
It is the first time she had spoken since they had set off on their return-drive. She is lying back, with her hands carefully shielding in her lap a few little crockery pots that she has bought of a fat Turk for some children at her hotel Her face looks tired; and yet over its small area is spread an expression of content that makes his heart warm. Is it only the pageant of sky and ocean that has called forth that look of real, if passing, happiness on the features of her who is always so tremblingly sensitive an instrument for all influences of beauty and grandeur to play upon? or has his own neighbourhood anything to say to it? Before he can give himself an answer to this anxious question, she speaks again.
"You do not mind my not talking, do you?" she asks, half apologetically, and yet with a confidence in his sympathy that still further quickens the beats of his already not very still heart.
"No, I am sure you do not. Somehow—it is a great gift—you always feel in tune with one, and one does not chatter most when one is most greatly pleased, does one? Oh, what a treat you have given me!"
As she speaks, her humid eyes travel from his face to where, beyond the long Atlas range, delicately toothed and cut out, rises the gold-washed snow of the Kabyle mountains, that retire majestically invisible on dull days, and only come out, candescent and regal, when the great sun rides in pomp. Above their heads wild plumes of deep rose, that it seems ridiculous to call clouds, tuft the sky.
Jim's look has followed his companion's; the chins of both are in the air; the cheerfulva et vientof the boulevard is lost upon them. They see neither the Frenchmen nor plump Frenchwomen drinking coffee outside the cafés, nor the idleindigènesleaning draped against the sea-wall. (Never does that industrious race seem to attempt any severer exertion.)
"Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired."
"Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired."
But it is brought back to life with a jump.
"Arrêtez! arrêtez!" cries a female voice. "Jim! Jim! do you not see us?Arrêtez! arrêtez!"
Obedient to his ears, Burgoyne's eyes make one bound from the heavenly spectacle down to earth, and alight upon the Wilsons' carriage, which, going in the same direction as himself, has just been brought to a standstill alongside of his fiacre, by the solemnly beautiful, yellow-jacketed native coachman.
It is, of course, Cecilia's voice that has apostrophized him, but oh, portent! does his vision, so lately recalled from the skyey bowers, play him false? or is it really the moribund Sybilla, stretched beside her, with only two instead of three cushions at her back, with a bonnet on her head—he did not even know that she possessed a bonnet—and with a colour in her cheek and a lustre in her eye that may owe their origin either to the freshness of the evening air, or to the invigorating properties of the conversation of the very ordinary-looking young man seated opposite to her?
In a second Jim has leapt out of his own vehicle, and gone to the side of the other. It is a perfectly futile impulse that leads him to do so. Not all the leaping in the world from her side now can alter the fact that he has been drivingtête-à-têtewith Elizabeth Le Marchant, and that the Wilson sisters have seen him so doing; but yet it is a dim instinct of preservation towards, and shielding of her, that leads him to adopt this useless course of action. It is Cecilia who has summoned him, and yet, when he reaches her side, she does not seem to have anything particular to say to him. Sybilla is the one to address him.
"A miracle! a miracle! I know you are saying to yourself!" cries she, in a sprightly voice; "and well you may! This is the miracle-monger!" indicating with a still sprightlier air hervis-à-vis. "Dr. Crump, let me present to you Mr. Burgoyne—Jim, our Jim, whom I have so often talked to you about."
The person thus apostrophized responds by a florid bow, and an over-gallant asseveration that any person introduced to his acquaintance by Miss Sybilla needs no further recommendation.
"It is an experiment, of course; there is no use in pretending that it is not an experiment," continues she, with a slight relapse into languor; "but"—lowering her voice a little—"they wished me to make the effort."
It is a favourite allocation of Sybilla's that any course of action towards which she is inclined is adopted solely under the pressure of urgent wishes on the part of her family. Burgoyne has long known, and been exasperated by, this peculiarity; but at present she may say what she pleases; he hears no word of it, for his ear is pricked to catch the sentences that Cecilia is leaning over the carriage-side to shoot at Elizabeth.
"Oh, Miss Le Marchant! is it you? I beg your pardon, I did not recognise you at the first moment. One does not recognise people—does one?—when one is not expecting to see them"—is an intended sting lurking in this implication? "How are you? How do you like Algiers? I hope Mrs. Le Marchant is well. What a long time it is since we met! I hope we shall see something of you."
(No, evidently no sting was meant. Cecilia, with all her faults, is really a good soul, and he will take her to hear the band play next Tuesday.)
There seems to him to be a slight falter in the tone with which Elizabeth responds, and her voice sounds curiously small and low; but that may be merely owing to its flute quality, following upon and contrasting the other's powerful organ.
It is not till the two parties have again separated, and that he is once more seated by her side in the fiacre, that he dares steal a look at her face to see how plainly written on it are the traces of vexation caused by a meeting which has produced in his own breast such acute annoyance. Good heavens! it is even worse than he had expected. Down the cheek nearest to him two good-sized tears are unmistakably trickling. No doubt the consciousness of the mysterious story attaching to her past makes her smartingly aware of how doubly discreet her own conduct should be—makes her bitterly repent of her present indiscretion.
He is a strait-laced man, and it seems to him as if there were something gravely compromising to her in thistête-à-têtedrive with himself, in the known absence of her parents at Hammam Rhira. Why was he fool enough this morning to admit to Cecilia that they had gone thither? He had no business to have led her into temptation, and she had no business to have fallen into it. Remorse and irritation give a tartness to his tone as he says:
"After all, I do not think you need take it so much to heart."
"Take what to heart?" she asks, in unaffected surprise, turning her full face, and her eyes, each with one hot raindrop dimming its slate-blue, upon him. "Oh, I see"—a sudden enlightenment coming to her, and changing her with instant spring from a snowdrop to a carnation—"I see what you mean; but you are mistaken. I—I—it had not occurred to me; I was only thinking—only remembering that the last time I saw her was at—at Vallombrosa."
Vallombrasa!Is he never to hear the last of Vallombrosa?
The latest waking impression left on Jim's fancy is that it is the golden rule of Elizabeth Le Marchant's life to comply with any and every request that is made to her; moreover, that in her mind the boundary-line which parts the permitted from the unpermitted is not so clearly defined as, did she belong to him (the naked hypothesis makes his strait-laced heart give a jump), he should wish it to be. If on the morrow, with the sun shining and the leaf-shadows dancing on the fretted balcony-wall, he invite her to some fresh junket, he is sure that she will readily and joyfully acquiesce; that her spirits will go up like rockets at the prospect; and that her one anxiety will be that she may be sure to hit in her choice upon the form of dissipation most congenial to him. He will therefore not invite her. He will have a greater care for her reputation than apparently she has for it herself. Not until the return of her parents, not until the difficulties of intercourse with her are centupled, and the pleasure minimized, will he again seek her.
To put himself beyond the reach of temptation, he sets off immediately after breakfast on a long walking expedition, which he means to occupy the whole of the daylight hours. He wanders about the great plain of the Metidje; he visits a Kabyle village, with its hovels cowering among its hideous fat-fleshed cactus; later on in the afternoon he finds himself in the little French hamlet of Biermandreis, and finally drops down upon the Jardin d'Essai, that delightful botanic garden which is one of the many blessings for which Algerian France has to thank the much-vilipended Napoleon III.
It is difficult for even the reddest Republican to think hardly of that dead ruler as he walks down the avenue of gigantic palms that lead, straight as a die, to where, like a deep blue gem far away, the Mediterranean shows
"No bigger than an agate stoneOn the forefinger of an alderman."
"No bigger than an agate stoneOn the forefinger of an alderman."
Jim walks along beneath the huge date-palms that give him a crick in the neck to gape up at ere he can perceive their towering head of waving plumes far up against the blue. They remind him absurdly of the pictures in the missionary books of his youth—the palm-tree, the log cabin, the blackamoors, and the missionary in a palm hat. Ishethe missionary, and is this inky negress in a black bonnet, scarcely distinguishable from her face, his one catechumen?
Alternating with the date are superb fan-palms, of which it is difficult to realize that it is their stunted, puny brothers which, anxiously tended, sponged, and cosseted, drag out a languid existence in London drawing-rooms. Among their Titan fans lies their mighty fruit, like a bunch of grapes, a yard and a half long, strung upon ropes of yellow worsted.
Half-way down its length the main avenue is intersected by a splendid alley of bamboos, which lean their smooth-jointed stems and their luxuriant narrow leaves towards each other across the dimmed interspace, and unite in a pointed Gothic arch of living green.
Jim paces objectlessly down the long arcade, stooping now and again to pick up a fragment of the peeled bark that looks so strangely like a papyrus roll with a mother-of-pearl glaze upon it. He pulls it idly open, as if expecting to find the secret of some forgotten race written upon its shining surface; but if he reads any secret there, it is only his own, which, after all, is not much of a secret. He merely sees written there that it is too early to go home yet; that there is no security that Elizabeth may not still be sitting on the terrace stitching away with her gold thimble and her coloured silks. The sun, it is true, has left the garden, but he departs thence over-early. It will be safer to stay away yet half an hour or so.
Thus resolving, he retraces his steps, and explores in a new direction; saunters down a rose-alley, where, climbing immoderately high up tall palms, seeming as if they would strangle them with their long bowery arms, rose-trees wave far above him in the still air; and upon them, though it is still but the month of January, when people are skating, blue-nosed, in England, creamy tea-roses show their pale-yellow hearts, fair and frequent, on the unpruned boughs, rioting in licensed liberty above his head. The walk ends in a circle of gigantic magnolias, which take hands round a square fountain-basin. Each huge trunk is, as it were, a little commonwealth of trees rolled into one, instead of a single tree. Beneath them benches stand. Upon one his negress sits, chatting with a Frenchbonne; on a second there is also something female and slender, something with its little white profile—how white it looks in this deceiving light!—lifted, although white, yet smiling, animated, and talking to a man standing beside it.
He has dawdled and kicked his heels, and run the chance of contracting a spiteful Southern chill, in order to avoid Elizabeth; and he has succeeded in running straight into her arms.
He does not at the first glance recognise her companion, but a second look shows him that he is one of the inmates of the hotel—a French Vicomte; and though Jim knows that he is both consumptive and the father of a family, that knowledge does not hinder the rising in his breast of the jealous and censorious thought that he has detected Elizabeth in throwing a great deal more than the necessary modicum of amiability into her manner to him.
As Jim comes into sight, the Frenchman clicks his heels, doubles up his body, lifts his hat, and walks away. It is evident, at all events, that their meeting was a casual one; and the reflection brings with it a sense of relief, coupled with a feeling of shame at his own rooted readiness to suspect her, on any or no evidence, which yet, on the other hand, is not strong enough, when she turns her sweet bright look towards him, to hinder the thought that it is scarcely, if at all, sweeter or brighter than that which he had caught her squandering on the casualtable d'hôteacquaintance who has just quitted her.
"You, too!" she says; "why, the whole hotel seems to be emptied out into these gardens; the widow Wadman is buying violets—mark if they do not appear upon Uncle Toby at dinner to-night. The Vicomte——"
"Yes, I saw you engaged in animated dialogue with him," interrupts Jim, with slight acrimony; "I had no idea that you were such allies."
"Had not you?" rejoins she innocently. "He was telling me about his English governess, what a treasure she is"—her face dimpling mischievously—"and how wonderfully pure her accent. So it is—pure Cockney. You should hear the little Vicomte talk of the biby and the pipers."
He rewards her small pleasantry only by an absent smile, and she speaks again—rather wistfully this time.
"Have you been on another expedition?"
"No, not an expedition; only a walk. If"—yielding to the temptation of putting a question which no one would have judged more severely than he, had it been put by anyone else—"if I had invited you to do me the honour of making another excursion with me to-day, do you think that you would have consented?"
As he speaks, he departs yet further from the line of conduct he has marked out for himself by sitting down on the bench at her side.
Her eyes are fixed upon the soaring date-palm, which stands, instead of a water-jet, in the middle of the fountain-basin, and on which last year's dead plumes hang sapless, and ready to fall off, in contrast to this year's verdant vigour.
"Is not that rather a tantalizing question when you did not ask me?" inquires she, with soft archness. "Yes, I suspect that I should; I was so very happy yesterday; and although you told me the other night"—swallowing a sigh—"that you supposed I must love my own society, in point of fact, I do not think I do."
After all, the sun is not quite gone; there are flashes of light in the verdant gloom, and green reflections in the water.
"And yet," says Jim thoughtfully, "you seem to have a good deal of it; I suppose, in your position, it is unavoidable."
He had meant an allusion to her situation as bad third to her uxorious parents; before his mind's eye has risen a picture of the little forlorn shawled figure he had seen studying its Italian Grammar with the door shut upon its loneliness; but almost before the words have left his lips, he sees of how different, of how cruel, a construction they may be capable.
He snatches a glance of real terror at her, to see whether she has made that erroneous, yet all too plausible application—a glance which confirms his worst fears. She has turned as white as the pocket-handkerchief which she is passing over her trembling lips.
"Yes," she says in a hollow whisper; "you are right. In my position itisunavoidable, and it is cowardly of me not to accept it as such."
"I mean"—he cries desperately—"I only meant—I mean——"
But she does not suffer him to finish his stuttered explanation.
"It is cold," she says, rising. "I will go home."
He does not attempt to accompany or follow her.
After she is gone, he rages about the garden, and passes beyond it to where—still sunlight-smitten—the blue Mediterranean is breaking in joyous foam.
He sits down on the shelly strand, and, in futile anger, hurls back the wet pebbles into the sea's azure lap. Away to the left, the three-cornered town swarms candescent up the hill, and the white lighthouse stands out against the lapis-coloured air.
How sharp-cut and intense it all is!—none of our dear undecided grays. Here, if you are not piercing blue, you are dazzling white or profound green. There is, indeed, something less sharp-cut and uncompromising—a something more of mystery in the glory that—bright, too, but not making its full revelation—envelopes the long hill range that, ending in Cape Matifou, stretches away to the far right. Round the corner, to the right too, a party of Arabs, sitting sideways on little donkeys, white draped, with theirhaik-swathed heads, are disappearing on their small beasts in the clear air. It is like a page out of the Bible—a flight into Egypt—and they are going towards Egypt too.
Jim's eye follows the placid Easterns, but without catching the infection of their tranquillity. "Whenever I see her, I stick a knife into her! It is impossible! There is no use trying! I will give up the attempt. It is out of the question to have any happy relations with a woman who has a past!"
After all, Mr. Le Marchant does not like Hammam Rhira. He thinks the hotel cold and the roads bad. Jim overhears him telling someone this, and his own heart leaps.
It is true that he takes it to task for doing so. Perhaps, after all, Elizabeth's removal would have been the best solution of his problem. Had she left Algiers, he could scarcely have followed her, and she would have been freed from the chance of his clumsy stabs.
But all the same his heart leaps. It leaps yet higher a day or two later when he discovers that, though Hammam Rhira has not met with Mr. Le Marchant's approbation, yet that, by his trip to it, he has been bitten with a taste for travel, the outcome of which is his solitary departure on an expedition to Constantin, Tunis, etc., which must occupy him at least a week. His wife accompanies him to the station, but his daughter is not allowed to go beyond the hotel steps.
Jim surreptitiously watches her hovering with diffident affection round her father, unobtrusively and unthanked fetching and carrying for him. He sees the cold kiss that just brushes her cheek, and hears the chill parting admonition to look well after her mother and see that she does not overtire herself.
It is accepted with ready meekness, but leaves the recipient so crestfallen, as she stands looking after the departing vehicle, that Burgoyne cannot forbear joining her, with some vague and, as he knows, senseless velleity of championship and consolation.
"He is gone for a week, is not he?" is the form that his sympathy takes, in a tone which he is at but small pains not to render congratulatory.
"Yes, quite a week."
"Are you"—he is perfectly conscious while asking it that he has not the slightest right to put the question—"are you glad or sorry?"
She starts perceptibly.
"Why should I be glad? Do you mean"—with an unconquerable streak of satisfaction in her own voice—"because I shall have mammy all to myself? You must not think"—with an obvious rush of quickly following compunction—"that I am not fond of him, because he sometimes speaks a little roughly to me." After a pause, in a lowered voice: "You see, when you have broken a person's heart, you can scarcely blame him for not having a very high opinion of you."
So saying, she suddenly leaves him as she had left him in the Jardin d'Essai. He does not again approach her that day, but at dinner-time he has the answer to his question as to her being glad or sorry at her father's departure. She is apparently in the best of spirits, sitting nestled close up to her mother for the better convenience of firing a series of little jokes and comments into that parent's appreciative ear.
"They make fun of the whole hotel," observes Miss Strutt with exasperation. "I do not believe that one of us escapes! When he is not there to check them, there is no holding them!"
No holdingElizabeth! The phrase recurs to him several times during the next few days, as not without its justness, when he sees its object flitting about the house, gay as a linnet; when he meets her singing subduedly to herself upon the stairs; when he watches her romping with the French children, and mischievously collecting flowers of Clapham eloquence from their governess, which she is good enough to retail for his own and her mother's benefit when evening unites the three in the retirement of their little salon. For, strange and improbably blissful as it seems, he has somehow, ere three days are over, effected an entrance into that small and fragrant sanctuary.
Mrs. Le Marchant's first fears that the meeting with him again would re-open sorrow have disappeared in the light of her daughter's childish gaiety, and are even exchanged for a compunctious gratitude to him for having been in part the cause of her new light-heartedness. The weather has again broken, a fact which he alone of the whole hotel does not deplore, since it was his own ostentatiously displayed wet-day dreariness that was the cause of his first admission within the doors that are closed upon all others. Moreover, had it not been wet weather, could he have held an umbrella over Elizabeth's head when he met her in the eucalyptus wood, and they walked among the naked trunks, while the long, loose, pale foliage waved like dishevelled hair in the rain, and the pungent asphodels grew thick about their feet in the red earth? And when, by-and-by, the clouds disperse again, and there comes a fair day, bracketed between three or four foul ones—the usual Algerian proportion—it has grown quite natural to all three that he should sit opposite to them in their drives; that he should haggle with Arabs for them, and remonstrate with the landlord, and generally transfer all the smaller roughnesses of life from their shoulders to his own. Brought into more intimate communion with them than he has ever been before, Burgoyne realizes how much they belong to the kneeling, leaning, spoiling type of womankind. Elizabeth would be the easiest woman in the world to manage. How is it that in her ten years of womanhood no man has been found to undertake the lovely facile task? He himself knows perfectly the treatment that would befit her; the hinted wishes—her tact is too fine and her spirit too meek to need anything so coarse as commands—the infinitesimal rebukes and the unlimited—oh! limitless—caresses:
"Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles."
"Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles."
Every day he finds himself repeating Wordsworth's line, and every day, in his fancied guidance of her, he tells himself that the blame should be less and the kisses more.
Mr. Le Marchant has been gone more than a week, and February has come wetly in, with rain wildly weeping against the easements, and angry-handed rain boxing the unlucky orange-trees' ears. It has rained for forty-eight hours without a break. The Grand Hotel is at the end of its resources. Uncle Toby, his struggle ended, lies vanquished in the widow's net; and there is murder in the lurid eye which Miss Strutt turns on the votary of Whiteley.
Jim alone, outdoor man as he habitually is, looking upon a house merely in the light of a necessary shelter, has no quarrel either with the absent sun or the present deluge? for are not they the cause of his having spent two whole afternoons in the company of Elizabeth and her mother? To-day has not Elizabeth been singing to him, and cutting him orange-flower bread-and-butter, when Fritz brought in the afternoon tea, and set the real English kettle fizzing over its spirit-lamp? And, in return, has not he now, after dinner, been helping her to weed out her own and her mother's photograph-books? As he does so the idea strikes him of how very meagre her own collection of acquaintances seems to be. From that weeding have they not, by an easy transition, at her suggestion, passed to the more playful and ingenious occupation of amputating the heads of some of the rejected friends and applying them to the bodies of others? Each armed with a pair of scissors, and with Mrs. Le Marchant for umpire, they have been vying with each other as to who can produce the most startling results by this clever process.
The palm has just been awarded to Elizabeth for a combination which presents the head of an elderly lady, in a widow's cap, mounted upon the cuirass and long boots of a Life Guardsman. Jim's application of the cornet's discarded head to the body of a baby in long clothes, although allowed to be a pretty conceit, commands but little real admiration—an instance of nepotism which he does not allow to pass without protest.
Elizabeth, elated by her triumph, has flown out of the room to examine her private stores for fresh material, and Jim and her mother—for the first time, as it happens, since that early meeting, when her anxious eye had so plainly implored him to leave Algiers—aretête-à-tête. Her changed aspect towards him as she sits, with a lingering laugh still on her face, beside the wood fire—which, after having twice gone out, as it almost always does, the souches being invariably wet, burns bright and crackly—strikes him with such a feeling of warm pleasure that he says in a voice of undisguised triumph:
"What spirits she is in, is not she?"
"Yes; is not she?" assents the mother eagerly. "Oh, I cannot say how grateful I am to you for having cheered her up as you have done! Oh," with a low sigh that seems to bear away on its slow wings the last echoes of her late mirth, "if it could only last!"
"Why should not it last?"
"If nothing fresh would happen!"
"Why should anything fresh happen?"
She answers only indirectly;
"'Fear at my heart, as at a cup,The life-blood seemed to sip.'
"'Fear at my heart, as at a cup,The life-blood seemed to sip.'
"Sometimes I think that Coleridge wrote those lines expressly for me." After a pause, in a voice of anxious asking: "She has not mentioned him to you lately, has she?"
"No."
"That is a good sign. Do not you think that that is a good sign? I think that she is getting better; do not you?"
For a moment he cannot answer, both because he is deeply touched by the confidence in him and his sympathy evidenced by her appeal, and for a yet more potent reason. Little she guesses how often, and with what heart-searchings and spirit-sinkings, he has put that question to himself.
"I do not know," he replies at last, with difficulty; "it is hard to judge."
"You have not told him that we are here?" in a quick, panic-struck tone, as of one smitten with a new and sharp apprehension.
"Oh no!"
"You do not think that he is at all likely to join you here?"
"Not in the least!" with an almost angry energy, which reveals to himself how deeply distasteful the mere suggestion of Byng's reappearance on the scene is to him.
Mrs. Le Marchant heaves a second sigh. This time it is one of relief.
"Then I do not see," with a sudden bound upwards into sanguineness which reminds him of her daughter, "why we should not all be very comfortable."
Jim is pondering in his mind upon the significance of this "all," whether it is meant to include only Mr. Le Marchant, or whether, under its shelter, he himself may creep into that promised comfort, when she of whom they have been speaking re-enters. She has a packet of photographs, presumably suitable for amputation, in her hand, in which is also held a telegram, which she extends to Burgoyne.
"I met M. Cipriani bringing you this. It seems that you ought to have had it two days ago, but, by some mistake, it was put into another gentleman's room—a gentleman who has never arrived—and there it has remained. He was full of apologies, but I told him what culpable carelessness it showed. I do trust," with a sweetly solicitous look, "that it is not anything that matters."
"It cannot be of much consequence," replies Jim indifferently, while a sort of pang darts through him at the thought of how strangely destitute he is of people to be uncomfortably anxious about, and so tears it open.
An English telegram transmitted by French clerks often wears a very different air from that meant to be imparted to it by the sender, which is, perhaps, the reason why Jim remains staring so long at his—so long that the two women's good manners prompt them to remove their sympathetic eyes from him, and to attempt a little talk with each other.
"I hope you have no bad news?"
The elder one permits herself this inquiry after a more than decent interval has elapsed, during which he has made no sign.
He gives a start, as one too suddenly awaked out of deep sleep.
"Bad news?" he repeats in an odd voice—"what is bad news? That depends upon people's tastes. It is for you to judge of that; it concerns you as much or more than it does me."
So saying, he places the paper in her hand, and, walking away to the little square window—open, despite the wildness of the weather—looks out upon the indigo-coloured night.
Although his back is turned towards them, he knows that Elizabeth is reading over her mother's shoulder—reading this:
"Bourgouin,"Grand Hotel,"Algiers."Have heard of Le Marchants. If you do not wire to the contrary, shall cross to-morrow.—Byng, Marseille."
"Bourgouin,"Grand Hotel,"Algiers.
"Bourgouin,"Grand Hotel,"Algiers.
"Have heard of Le Marchants. If you do not wire to the contrary, shall cross to-morrow.—Byng, Marseille."
He is not left long in doubt as to their having mastered the meaning of the missive.
"He is coming!" says Mrs. Le Marchant with a species of gasp; "and you told me—not five minutes ago you told me"—with an accent of reproach—"that there was not the remotest chance of it. Oh, stop him! stop him! Telegraph at once! The office will be open for two or three hours yet! There is plenty, plenty of time! Oh, telegraph at once—at once!"
"It is too late," replies Jim, retracing his steps to the table; "you forget that it is two days old. You see, they have spelt my name wrong; that accounts for the mistake.Bourgouin!It looks odd speltBourgouin, does not it?"
He hears himself giving a small, dry laugh, which nobody echoes.
"He must have sailed yesterday," continues the young man, wishing he could persuade his voice to sound more natural; "he may be here at any moment. If the weather had been decent, he would have arrived ere now."
"Then there is nothing to be done!" rejoins Mrs. Le Marchant in a tone of flat desperation, sitting down again on the chair out of which she had instinctively risen at the little stir of the telegram's arrival.
Elizabeth is dead silent. Though there is no direction by the eye to show that Jim's next remark is aimed at her, there can be no doubt that it is awkwardly thrown in her direction.
"If this had not been delayed—if it had not been too late, would you have wished, would you have decided to stop him?"
"What is the use of asking me such a question now that itistoo late?" replies she, with more of impatience, almost wrath, in her voice than he has ever before heard that most gentle organ express.
But besides the ire and irritation, there is another quality in it which goads him to snatch a reluctant glance at her. She is extremely agitated, but underlying the distress and disturbance of her face there is an undoubted light shining like a lamp through a pale pink shade—a light that, with all her laughter and her jokes, was not there half an hour ago. He had often reproached himself that, by his clumsiness, he had stuck a knife into her tender heart. She is even with him to-night. To-night the tables are turned. It is she that has stuck a knife into him. It is clear as day that she isgladit is too late.
"After all," says Mrs. Le Marchant presently, rallying a little, her naturally buoyant temperament—that temperament which she has transmitted with such curious fidelity to her child, coming to her rescue; "after all, there is no reason why you should see him, Elizabeth. There is no reason why she should see him, is there, Mr. Burgoyne? It could serve no possible end—could it?—and only be exceedingly painful to them both. You will explain to him, will not you? You will take any message from her? You will tell him that she really is not up to it, will not you? It is quite true, I am sure. You are not, are you darling? She is not, is she?"
The mother turns as she speaks eagerly from one to the other, addressing each in turn; but from neither does she obtain any answer.
"Or I would speak to him myself; if you thought that better," continues she, still interrogating them with her handsome, careworn eyes. "I would say anything you wished said to him, and I would be careful to say it as kindly as possible. I am sure he would understand; he would see the sense, the justice of it, would not he? There is no need for her to expose herself to such useless suffering, is there, Mr. Burgoyne?"—appealing desperately to him by name, since he will not respond to any less direct address—"when either you or I are more than ready to shield her from it, are not we?"
Thus apostrophized, Jim is compelled to break the silence, which seems to himself to wall him round like a petrifaction. It is to Elizabeth that he offers his hardly-won speech.
"I think I need not tell you," he says gravely, and with passable steadiness, "that I would help you in any way I could."
She stands a moment or two irresolute, her features all quivering as if with pain; and yet, underlying and under-shining the pain, something that is not pain. Then she puts out a hand impulsively to each. If the one that gives itself to Burgoyne had struck him on the mouth, instead of offering itself with affectionate confidence to his clasp, it could not have hurt him more than do those small fingers that lie in his, trembling with a passion that is not for him.
"You are both very good to me," she says brokenly. "As to you, mammy, that is an old story. But I really believe that there is nothing disagreeable that you, too"—with a slight grateful pressure of the lifeless hand that so slackly keeps possession of hers—"would not do for me. But do not think me obstinate if I say that I think—I am sure—that it would be better—that it would hurt him less—if I spoke to him myself."
"It is not a question of what will hurt him least," cries Mrs. Le Marchant, with an agony of impatience in her tone. "The thing to be considered is what will hurtyouleast. Mr. Burgoyne, am I not right? Do tell her that I am! Ought not she to think of what will hurt her least?"
But Jim is incapable of coming a second time to her rescue. His eyes are painfully fastened upon Elizabeth, and he is watching the pain fall off, as it were, from her face, and the light spread rosily over it. Some instinct makes her withdraw that hand of hers which he has shown so little eagerness to retain, ere she says, in a low but perfectly firm voice:
"Well, then, I think it will hurt me least, too."
Five minutes later Jim has left the room—ostensibly to make arrangements for his friend's arrival, in reality because he cannot count upon his own self-control if he remain in it. The survivors of Elizabeth Le Marchant's acquaintance remain undecapitated. The widow-headed Life Guardsman and the baby-bodied cornet lie unregarded on the table, while Elizabeth herself is stretched along the floor, with her face pressed against her mother's knees. Jim has decided to sit up for his friend. He is perfectly aware that neither will the two women go to bed. But he has no desire that their vigil should be shared in common. It is equally impossible to him to take part in the noisy mirth of the rest of the hotel, which, having taken the place of their measureless daylight ennui, now boils over in ebullient laughter, in dancing, squeaking, and noisily scampering out of the public drawing-room into the hall and up the stairs. It is not till the clamour has declined, until, indeed, its total cessation tells him that the promiscuous revellers have retired to their apartments, that he issues from his, and takes possession of the now empty smoking-room, whence he can hear more distinctly than from his own bedroom any noise of wheels approaching the hotel. The wind has risen again, and it needs an ear very finely pricked to dissever from its mad singing, and from the storming of the frantic rain, any lesser and alien sound. What a terrific night in which to be out on the raging sea! Worse even than that one last week, when theMoïsebroke her shaft, and tossed for twenty-four hours at the mercy of the waves. Possibly the weather may have already yesterday been so rough at Marseille as to prevent his setting off. But the idea—at the first blush eagerly welcomed by him—is dismissed from his mind almost as soon as entertained. If the boat has started—and it is only under such heavy penalties that the mail-boats do not start, that this contingency hardly ever occurs—Byng will have started too. A terrific bang at the casement seems to come as a comment upon this conviction. He will have started; but will he ever arrive? It is said that in eight years during which they have been running no catastrophe has ever sent one of this line of steamers to the bottom; but yet they are cranky little craft, with engines too big for them—built rather for speed than safety. The clock has struck, with a repetition that seems strangely frequent through the sleeping house: 11, 11.30, 12, 12.30.
"I will give him half an hour more," says the watcher to himself, "and then I will turn in."
Of this allotted half-hour only five minutes are yet left to run, when, in a lull in the hurricane, the sound which Jim's hearing has been so long stretched to catch—the sound of wheels on the gravel—is at length audible. During the last two hours he has heard many phantom wheels—many of those ghostly coaches that the wind drives shrieking through the winter nights. But these are real ones. Before the drowsy porter, nodding in his little den, can reach the hall-door, Jim has opened it—opened it just in time to admit a man who, his pace still further accelerated by the mighty hands of the pushing blast, is bounding up the steps. If any doubt as to this person's identity lingered in Jim's mind, his first words would dispel it.
"She is here? There is no mistake? She is here?"
"How late you are!" cries the other, apparently regarding the new arrival's utterance more as an ejaculation than as a question expecting or needing an answer. "Why are you so late? Did the engines break down?"
"She is here?" repeats Byng insistently, taking no notice of the queries addressed to him. "You have not deceived me? For mercy's sake say that you have not deceived me!"
"Why should I deceive you?" rejoins Jim impatiently. "Yes; certainly she is here."
They are in the hall by now—the hall which, the Grand Hotel being gasless, is lit by only one weak paraffin lamp, which the gust from the door, necessarily still open to admit of the carrying in of the traveller's bags and rugs, is making even more faint and flickering than its wont.
"You must have had a fine tossing!"
"I believe you; they all thought we were going to make a dinner for the fishes—ha, ha! All but I. I knew better. I knew that I could not come to grief whenshehad called me to her."
Byng's hat is rammed down over his brows, and his fur coat turned up so high round his ears that it is impossible in the obscurity to see his face; but there is something in the tone of his voice—a loud, wild rollicking—that makes the idea cross Jim's mind that he has been drinking. What a shock it will give to Elizabeth if, in her covert vigil—he has no more doubt that she has been watching than that he has been doing so himself—she overhears that thick, raised voice! Prompted by this thought, he says hastily:
"Come into the dining-room. I told them to put something to eat for you there."
Byng complies; and when they have reached the emptysalle à manger, whose whitewash looks weird and unnatural in the chill of the night, he sends his hat skimming down one of the long tables, and, grasping both Jim's hands in his, cries out, in the same loud tone of intoxicated triumph:
"Oh, my dear old chap, how good it is to see your ugly old mug again! If you had known—oh, if you had only known!—what I went through during the twenty-four hours after I sent you that telegram, when through every hour, through every minute and second of every hour, I said to myself, 'It may comenow—my death-warrant may comenow! In five minutes it may have come!' But it did not, it did not! I ought to have known"—with an accent of ecstasy—"that of her pitifulness she would relent at last. She is infinitely pitiful, is not she? but I shall upbraid her a little—oh, do not be afraid; it will be gently,mostgently—for having kept me so long, so inhumanly long, upon my gridiron! I had always"—breaking into a rather wild laugh—"something of a tenderness for St. Lawrence, but during the last seven months I have loved him like a brother!"
He goes on again, with scarcely a pause, or apparently any consciousness of the unresponsive silence of his auditor:
"But what does it matter now?" beginning to stride about with his eyes cast up to the beamed ceiling and his lifted hands locked together—"what does it matter? 'After long grief and pain, to feel the arms of my true love round me once again!' You may think that I word it extravagantly," returning to Jim as he leans downcast and shocked upon one of the chairs of the monotonoustable-d'hôterow; "but in the hope itself, the more than hope, there is nothing extravagant; you must own that yourself. If she had not meant to put an end to my long agony, she would not have sent for me;notto stop me was to send for me."
"You are labouring under a mistake," says Jim coldly, and yet with an inward quaking as to the effect that his words may produce; "she had not the option of stopping you. By some accident I did not receive your telegram till four hours ago. She could not have stopped you if she had wished."
The idea, as I have already said, has occurred to Burgoyne that his companion is under the influence of intoxication; but either this is not the case, or the shock of the last words has the effect of instantly sobering him.
"I—I—do not understand," he says in a voice out of which all the insane exhilaration has been conjured as if by magic; "I do not follow you. What do you mean?"
"I mean," replies Jim, in a matter-of-fact, level tone, meant to have a calming effect upon his auditor, "that owing, I suppose, to my name being spelt wrongly—Bourgouin instead of Burgoyne—your telegram was given to someone else, and did not reach me till nine o'clock this evening."
Byng puts up his hand to his throat, and, unfastening the collar of his fur coat as if it were strangling him, throws back the coat itself. Now that he sees him freed from enveloping wrap and concealing hat-brim, Jim can realize the full amount of change and deterioration that are visible in his appearance; can see how bloodshot his eyes are; how lined his mouth; and how generally ravaged and dimmed his good looks.
"I am to understand, then, that—that she would have stopped my coming if she could."
Jim is silent. He cannot answer that question with any certainty even to himself.
"She would have escaped me again if she had had the chance! What am I saying?"—with a sudden access of terror in his tone—"she may have escaped me already! She may be gone! Tell me the truth—do not dare to tell me anything but the bare truth. I saw that you hesitated when I asked you whether she was really here. Is she gone?"
"Gone!" repeats Jim, with an exasperated jerk of the head towards the window, against which the rain and wind are hurling themselves with threefold rage, as if to recapture the victim just escaped them. "To-night—in this storm? How likely! Come, be rational; try to keep your head, and let us have a truce to this ranting. I give you my word of honour that she is here, under this roof; asleep, I should hope, if your bellowings have not awoke her."
The latter clause may perhaps come under the head of a pardonable fiction; at all events, it has, despite its incivility, the desired effect of soothing, to some extent, the agitation of him to whom it is addressed.
"Asleep!" he repeats, while an ecstatic smile breaks over his handsome, dissipated face. "Good angels guard her slumbers! But"—with a rather ominous return of excitement—"are you sure that sheisasleep—that she has gone to bed yet? They used to sit up very late in Florence sometimes. If she has not gone to bed, why should not I see her; why should not I fall at her feetnow—to-night?"
"My dear boy," rejoins Jim, with a praiseworthy attempt to answer this modest and sensible proposal with patient good-humour, "have you any idea what time it is? I should have thought it might have occurred even to you that 1.30A.M.is scarcely a suitable hour for paying a morning call! Do not be a fool! Pull yourself together. I swear to you that she has every intention of seeing you to-morrow. Come"—trying to laugh—"you will not have long to wait! It is to-morrow already; and, meantime, sit down and eat something; you must be as empty as a drum."
But to this prudent if homely counsel Byng opposes an obstinate negation, adorned with excited asseverations that food shall never cross his lips until they have pastured upon his lady's pardoning hand.
The same prohibition does not, however, apparently apply to drink, as he pours more than half the bottle of happily not very potent wine, prepared for his refreshment, into a tumbler, and tosses it off at a draught. He offers an even stouter refusal to Burgoyne's suggestion that he should go to bed; and as he utters it a flash of cunning suspicion comes into his eyes, shocking his friend with a gleam as of possible and scarcely latent madness. Across the latter's brain darts the query, which had proposed itself more than once to him last spring at Florence:
"Is there insanity in Byng's blood"
Not certainly on the distaff side, the side of his eminently sane and wholesome mother; but can he be throwing back to some distempered ancestor?
"What security have I if I go to bed that she will not steal away from me in the night? It was in the night—almost in the night—that she stole away from me before."
From this logic it is impossible to move him; and although, with some return to his old sweet-natured kindliness of manner, he begs his friend not to think it necessary to keep him company, yet the latter is far too ill at ease as to his condition, both of mind and body, to comply.
The porter, having drawn the natural inference that as soon as the traveller has refreshed his body he will wish to retire to rest, has put out the lights in the smoking-room; thesalle à mangeris therefore the only room in the hotel where lamps still burn, and in it the two men spend the dreary remaining hours of the night, Byng walking up and down like a captive beast, frequently going to the door, opening it, putting his head out into the darkness, and listening suspiciously if, perchance, he may hear the footfall of Elizabeth fleeing away from him even through the hurricane. As the time goes on, his restlessness increases rather than diminishes. Jim has vainly tried to distract his thoughts by putting questions to him as to his pursuits and companions since their last parting—by inquiries as to the extent and direction of his travels.
Did he get as far as Palestine? How long is it since he left Cairo? etc. But to all his interrogations Byng gives brief and unsatisfactory answers, putting a final stop to them by breaking out excitedly:
"Why do you go on questioning me as to where I have been, and what I have done? I tell you I have been nowhere, and done nothing; I believe that my body has been here and there, but my soul has been nowhere; it has been lying dead! Would you expect a man who has been lying six months in his coffin to give you a catalogue of his adventures? My soul has been dead, I tell you—dead and putrescent. What is the use of putting me through a catechism about its doings?"
Before the long-delaying dawn shows its pale profile upon the deep obscurity, it seems to Jim as if six midwinter nights must have pieced themselves end to end. But it comes at last; and at last also, by dint of strenuous representations to his companion as to how unfit he is, in his present travel-stained and disordered condition, to offer himself to Elizabeth's eyes, he induces him to let himself be led to the bedroom prepared overnight for him, and to refresh himself with a bath and a change of clothes. Even this concession he obtains only in exchange for an exacted promise to seek out Elizabeth at the earliest possible hour at which she may be presumed accessible, and urgently to entreat of her an instant interview with his friend.
Jim feels that he is keeping his word handsomely when, not a minute later than nine o'clock, he finds himself knocking at the door of the Le Marchants' apartment—that door with which of late his knuckles have grown so pleasantly and friendlily familiar. It is opened to him by Elizabeth herself, and he follows her silently through the ante-room into the littlesalon. Arrived there, he looks mournfully round with a sort of feeling as of taking farewell of the familiar objects.
It is impossible that Elizabeth can have spent the just-past stormy night in gathering flowers, and yet the flowers have a freshened air. She must have been carefully rearranging them. The bits of brocade, too, the Turkish embroideries, thehaiks, and the praying-carpets, wear a more festal appearance than usual. The little room looks decked as if for a gala. His jealous fancy cannot but admit that Elizabeth herself is dressed in her ordinary morning gown, but even over it some holiday transmutation has passed. He cannot trust himself to verify whether that holiday look is on her face too.
"He has come; you know that, I suppose?"
"Yes."
What a catch in her breath! He must steal a glance at her. She will think it unnatural if he does not; and perhaps his eye may not be offended by so much radiance as he feared. In her voice there was something not very distant from a sob. The result of his glance shows itself in what sounds like a reproach.
"I do not believe that you went to bed at all."
"Yes, I did! yes, I did!" hurrying away eagerly from the subject of herself, as from something irrelevant and importunate; "and—he—how is he? How does he look? Had not he a dreadful crossing? Does he want to see me? to see me soon? to-day?"
There is such a breathless passion in her tone, coupled with something so apologetic for putting her questions to him, that his heart, hitherto half touched, half angered by the pathos of her little preparations, melts wholly towards her.
"Of course he wants to see you—wants it very, very much," replies he; and, to his credit, replies without any harshness marring the cordial kindness of his tone. "As much as"—with a rather melancholy smile—"you want to see him. No, do not be angry. Why should not you wish to see each other?"
"Oh, there is every reason!" cries she miserably—"the same reason that there always was. But"—with rising agitation—"where is it to be? How soon? When does he wish it?"
"He is waiting outside now."
She starts painfully.
"Now!Oh, poor fellow! we must not keep him waiting; and yet"—stretching out her hand in detention—"tell me, before he comes in—tell me, is he changed? Is he? Is he the same as he was?"
Jim hesitates, and the painful perplexity written on his brow is misread by her.
"You are vexed with me for teasing you with so many tiresome questions. Oh, forgive me! I ought not to take advantage of your kindness; but we have grown to depend upon you so; and I will promise not to worry you with any other, if you will only answer me this one. Is he changed—much changed?"
"I am afraid," replies Jim, with the slowness of one who is trying to convey unpleasant tidings in the least unpleasant terms, "that you must be prepared to find him a good deal altered."
"Altered! How?"
"I do not quite know how to describe it"—uneasily—"but you must not be shocked if you find him a good deal changed in looks; and he is—he seems, in a very excited state."
She makes a clutch at his hand.
"Do you mean"—her voice has sunk to a horror-struck whisper—"that he is—mad?"
"Mad! Oh, of course not," with a strained laugh; "you must not jump to such conclusions. But I do not think he is quite himself, that is all. He looks as if he had not eaten or slept for a fortnight; and if you play such tricks as that with yourself, you must expect to get a little off your balance."
She is still terrifiedly clutching his hand, though with no consciousness of doing so, nor that the fingers so tightly gripped by her are not made of dry stick.