"I do remember an apothecary,—And hereabouts he dwells."
"I do remember an apothecary,—And hereabouts he dwells."
Two days later she is called upon to perform the task she has undertaken. Probably she has spent those two days, and also the appertaining nights, in bracing her mind to it, for Jim can plainly see the marks of that struggle, though he is not aware of its existence, graved upon her face, on the third morning after the excursion to the Mole, when he comes in search of her. He does not find her in her accustomed corner of the terrace, but, looking down over the balustrade, sees her sitting below and alone on a small tree-shaded plateau that seems to have been levelled for lawn-tennis or bowls. Probably the giggling and chaffering of the girls on the terrace, and the respectful but persistent importunities of the Omars and Ahmeds to buy their colourful wares outspread on the hot flags have oppressed her spirits.
Fritz has carried down for her an arm-chair, a cane table, and a Persian rug for her feet, and she looks as if she were established for the day.
Since Byng has been out of danger Elizabeth has returned to her embroidery. She is one of those women to whom needlework is unaffectedly dear, like that other sweet woman "who was so delicate with her needle."
Before she catches sight of him he watches for a few moments her bright bent head and flying white fingers, and is able to perceive how many sighs she is sewing into the pattern.
"What a morning!" he says, running down the steps and joining her. "No one has any excuse for being an invalid to-day, has he?"
There is no second seat, so he stands beside her, looking up over her head at the tall trees above her, from which immense garlands of ivy are hanging and swinging in the warm breeze. That potent ivy has killed one tree altogether.
She glances up at him mutely, knowing that he has not come merely to tell her that the day is fine.
"We can hardly keep him on his sofa; he is virtually almost well, so well that he is quite up to seeing people. He would like—he has been asking—to seeyou."
He had thought her nearly as pale as it was possible for her to be when he had first come upon her. He now realizes how many degrees of colour she then had left to lose. While he speaks she has been mechanically pulling her thread through, and as he ceases, her lifted hand stops as if paralyzed, and remains holding her needle in the air.
It has come, then. For all her two days' bracing, is she ready for it?
"Now?"
The whisper in which this monosyllable is breathed is so stamped with a fear that borders on terror, that his one astonished thought is bow best to reassure her.
"Not if you do not feel inclined, of course—not unless you like. It can perfectly well be put off to another time. I can tell him—there will not be the least difficulty in making him understand—that you do not feel up to it this morning: that you would rather have more notice."
"But I would not," she says, standing up suddenly, and with trembling hands laying her work down upon the table, and beginning from dainty habit to pin it up in its protecting white cloth. "What good would more notice—a year's notice—do me?"
She turns away from him and fixes her unseeing eyes, glassy and dilated, upon a poplar tree that is hanging tasselled catkins out against the sky. Then once again she faces him, and he sees that there are cold beads of agony upon her forehead.
"Wish for me," she says huskily—"wish very hard for me, that I may get through it—that we may both get through it—alive!"
Then, motioning to him with her hand not to follow her, she walks quickly towards the hotel.
It is impossible to him to stay quiet. He wanders restlessly away, straying he knows not whither. The mimosas are out charmingly in the gardens, sending delicious whiffs of perfume from the soft yellow fluff of their flowers. The pinky almond-trees are out too, but not till long afterwards does he know it.
By-and-by he finds himself strolling, unhindered by a gardener placidly digging, through the grounds of a villa to let. Gigantic violets send their messages to his nostrils, the big and innumerable blue blossoms predominating over the leaves, which in England have to be so carefully searched for them. Superabundant oranges tumble about his feet; arum lilies, just discovering the white secret hid in their green sheaths, stand in tall rows on either side of him; a bed of broad beans points out the phenomenon of her February flowers to him. He sees and smells none of them. Have his senses stolen away with his heart into Byng's bedchamber? They must have done so, or he could not see with such extraordinary vividness the scene enacting there. He has himself helped to place it in such astonishing reality before himself. Does not he know the exact position of the chair she is to occupy? Did not he place it for her before he went to fetch her? Nor can his reason prevent his distorted fancy from presenting the interview as one between happy and confessed lovers. Even the recollection of her features, ghastly and with beads of agony dewing them, cannot correct the picture of his mind as he persistently sees it. That she meant, when he parted from her, to renounce Byng, he has no manner of doubt. But does not he know the pliancy of her nature? Is not he convinced that the rock on which her life has split is her inability ever to refuse anyone anything that they ask with sufficient urgency or with enough plausibility to persuade her that she can do them a kindness by yielding?
How much more, then, will she be incapable of resisting the importunate passion of her own heart's chosen one, freshly risen from a bed of death? Presently his restless feet carry him away out of the villa grounds again. He finds himself on the Boulevard Mustapha, and sits down on the low wall by the roadside, staring absently at a broken line of dusky stone-pines, cutting the ardent blue of the African sky on the hill opposite, and at an arcaded campagne throned high up among the verdure. He knows that it belongs to an Englishman who made reels of cotton, and the idle thought saunters across his mind how strange it is that reels of cotton should wind anyone into such a lofty white Eden! Can the interview be lasting all this while? Is not it yet ended? May not his tormented fancy see the chair by Byng's sofa once again empty or occupied by nurse or mother? Will not Mrs. Byng, will not Elizabeth herself; have seen the unfitness of taxing the sick man's faint powers by so extreme a strain upon them? But no sooner has this suggested idea shed a ray of light upon his darkness than an opposing one comes and blows it out. Has not Byng a will of his own? Will he be likely so soon to let her go? Nay, having once recovered her, will he ever let her out of his sight again? The thought restores him to restless action, and, although with sedulous slowness, he begins to retrace his steps towards the hotel. At a point about a quarter of a mile distant from it, the lane which leads to the Villa Wilson debouches into the road, and debouching also into the road he sees the figure of Cecilia, who, catching sight of him, as if unable to wait for him to join her, almost runs to meet him.
"I was coming to call upon you," says she eagerly. "Oh!"—with a laugh—"to-day I really cannot stay to think of the proprieties, and you have not been to see us for such centuries!"
"I have been nursing Byng."
"Oh yes; poor man! How dreadfully ill he must have been! I was so glad to hear he was better."
There is such a flat tepidity in the tone of these expressions of commiseration, something so different from the tender alertness of Cecilia's former interest in their object, that Jim, roused out of his own reflections to regard her more attentively than he has yet done, sees that she is preoccupied by some subject quite alien to the invalid.
"I have a piece of news to tell you"—with a sort of angry chuckle. "Such a piece of news! I am sure you will be delighted at it."
At her words a wonder as idle and slack as his late thought about the reels of cotton crosses him as to what possible piece of news to be told him by the buxom and excited person, before him could give him the faintest pleasure. That wonder sends up his eyebrows, and throws a mild animation into his voice.
"Indeed?"
"Do you like"—still chuckling—"to be told a piece of news or to guess it?"
"I like to be told it."
"Well, then"—with a dramatic pause—"we are going to have a wedding in the family!"
"My dear girl!" cries he, smiling very good-naturedly, and with a sensation that, though not violent, is the reverse of annoyance. "Hurrah! So he has come at last! Who is he? How dark you have kept him!"
Cecilia shakes her head and gives a short and rosy laugh.
"Oh, it is not I! You are wide of the mark."
"Your father?"—in a shocked voice.
He has a confused and illogical feeling that a second marriage on the part of Mr. Wilson would be a slight upon Amelia's memory.
"Father!"—with an accent that plainly shows him he is still further afield than in his first conjecture—"poor father! No, indeed; Heaven forbid! Fancy me with a stepmother!"
She pauses to give a shudder at the idea, while Jim gapes blankly at her, wondering whether she has gone off her head.
"Oh no; it is neither father nor I! No wonder you look mystified. It is—Sybilla!"
"Sybilla!!!!"
Although Mr. Burgoyne has not got it on his conscience that he has ever either expressed or felt anything but the most strenuous and entire disbelief in Sybilla's maladies, yet it has never occurred to him as possible that she should engage in any occupation nearer akin to the ordinary avocations of life than imbibing tonics through tubes and eating beef essences out of cups.
"She is going to marry Dr. Crump!" continues Cecilia, not on the whole dissatisfied with the effect of her torpedo. "When she told father, she said that he had saved her life, and that the least she could do was to dedicate the poor remainder of it to him. She tells other people that she is marrying him because we wish it! You know that that was always her way."
"Sybilla!!"
"I thought that there must be something in the wind, as since the beginning of the month she has never once wished us good-bye; and the housemaid upset the ink-bottle over the book of prescriptions without her ever finding it out; and the clinical thermometer has not appeared for a week!"
"Sybilla!!!"
"I thought I should surprise you; it gives one a disgust for the idea of marrying altogether, does not it? I have come to the conclusion that I do not care now if I never marry. Father and I get on quite happily together; and when one is well off, one can really be very fairly content in a single state; and, at all events, I am sure I do not envy Sybilla."
"Nor I Crump"—with an emphasis so intense that Cecilia bursts out into a laugh of a more genuine character than any she has yet indulged in.
"You will have to give her away!" she cries, as soon as she can again speak distinctly. "Father will marry her, of course, and you must give her away. I am sure she will insist upon it."
"She will have to make haste, then," returns he, recovering enough from his first stupefaction to join Cecilia in her mirth; "for I shall not be here much longer."
"You are not going away?"—raising her eyebrows, and with a tinge of meaningness in her tone which vaguely frets him.
"Why should not I go?" he asks irritably, his short and joyless merriment quite quenched. "What is there for a man to do here? I have stayed already much longer than I meant. I am engaged to meet a friend at Tunis—the man with whom I went to the Himalayas three years ago; we are going to make an excursion into the interior. I am only waiting for some guns and things. Why should not I go?"
"There is no earthly reason," replies she demurely; "only that I did not know you had any such intention. But then, to be sure, it is so long since I have seen you—not, I think," glancing at him for confirmation of her statement rather too innocently, "since the lovers—ha! ha!—and I met you and Miss Le Marchant driving on the quay."
Elizabeth's feeble tap at Byng's door is instantly answered by the nurse, who, opening it smilingly to admit her, the next moment, evidently in accordance with directions received, passes out herself and shuts it behind her. Elizabeth, deprived of the chaperonage of her cap and apron, and left stranded upon the threshold, has no resource but to cross the floor as steadily as a most trembling pair of legs will let her.
The room is a square one, two of its thick walls pierced by Moorish windows. Drawn up to one of those windows—the one through which Jim had caught his first glimpse of Elizabeth on the night of his arrival—is the sick man's sofa. At the side of that sofa his visitor has, all too soon, arrived. She had prepared a little set speech to deliver at once—a speech which will give the keynote to the after-interview; but, alas! every word of it has gone out of her head. Unable to articulate a syllable, she stands beside him, and if anyone is to give the keynote, it must be he.
"This is very,verygood of you. It seems a shame to ask you to come here, with all this horrid paraphernalia of physic about; but I really could not wait until they let me be moved into another room."
She has not yet dared to lift her eyes to his face, in terror lest the sight of the change in it shall overset her most unsure composure. Already, indeed, she has greedily asked and obtained every detail of the alteration wrought in him. She knows that his head is shaved, that his features are sharp, and that his voice is faint; and when, as he ceases speaking, she at last wins resolution enough to look at him, she sees that she has been told the truth. His head is shaven, his nose is as sharp as a pen, and his voice is faint. She has been told all this; but what is there that she has not been told? What is his voice besides faint?
"Will not you sit down? It seems monstrous that I should be lying here letting you wait upon yourself. Will you try that one?" pointing to the chair which is figuring at the same moment so prominently in Jim's tormented fancy. "I am afraid you will not find it very comfortable. I have not tried it yet, but it looks as hard as a board."
She sits down meekly as he bids her, glad to be no longer obliged to depend upon her shaky limbs, and answers:
"Thank you; it is quite comfortable."
"Would not it be better if you had a cushion?"—looking all round the room for one.
His voice is courteous, tender almost, in its solicitude for her ease. But is she asleep or awake? Can this be the same voice that poured the frenzy of its heartrending adjurations into her ear scarce a month ago? Can this long, cool, white saint—he looks somehow like a young saint in his emaciation and his skull-cap—be the stammering maniac who, when last she saw him, crashed down nigh dead at her feet, slain by three words from her mouth?
At the stupefaction engendered by these questions, her own brain seems turning, but she feebly tries to recover herself.
"I—I am so glad you are better."
"Thank you so much. Yes, itisnice; nice to be
"'Not burnt with thirsting,Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting.'
"'Not burnt with thirsting,Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting.'
Do you remember Keats?"
After all, there is something of the original Byng left, and the ghost of his old spouting voice in which he recites the above couplet gives her back a greater measure of composure than could almost anything else.
"It is nice, only one would like to be able to jump, not 'the life to come'—ha! ha!—but the convalescence to come. My mother is even more impatient than I am. She has made up her mind that we are to be off in three days, even if I am carried on board on a shutter."
She can see now that he is very much embarrassed—that his fluency is but the uneasy cover of some emotion—and the discovery enables her yet further to regain possession of herself.
"I should think," she says in her gentle voice, "that you would be very glad to get out of this room, where—where you have suffered so much."
"Well, yes; one does grow a little tired of seeing
"'The casement slowly grow a glimmering square;'
"'The casement slowly grow a glimmering square;'
but"—with a rather forced laugh—"at least, I have had cause to be thankful that there is no wall-paper to count the pattern of. I have blessed the white wall for its featureless face."
She moves a little in her chair, as if to assure herself that she is really awake. That stupefaction is beginning to numb her again—that hazy feeling that this is not Byng at all, this polite invalid, making such civil conversation for her; this is somebody else.
"But I must not tire myself out before I have said what I want to say to you," he continues, his embarrassment perceptibly deepening, while his transparent hand fidgets uneasily with the border of the coverlet thrown over him, "or"—laughing again—"I shall have that tyrant of a nurse down upon me, and—and I do wish—I have wished so much—so unspeakably—to see you, to speak to you."
She sits immovable, listening, while a ray of something—can it be hope? why should it be hope?—darts across her heart. After all, this may be Byng—her Byng; this strange new manner may be only the garment in which sickness has dressed his passion—a worn-out garment soon to drop away from him in rags and tatters, and in which cannot she already discern the first rent? After all, she may have need for her armour—that armour which, so far, has seemed so pitifully needless.
"I knew that it would be no use asking leave to send for you any sooner; they would have told me I was not up to it—would have put me off with some excuse; so I kept a 'still sough.' Do you know that I never mentioned your name until to-day? But it has been hard work, I can tell you; for the last two days I have scarcely been able to bear it, I have sohungeredto see you."
Her eyelids tremble, and she instinctively puts up her hand to cover her tell-tale mouth. Surely this is the old language. Surely there is, at all events, a snatch of it in his last words; and again that prick of illogical joy quickens the beats of her fainting heart, though she tries to chide it away, asking herself why she should be in any measure glad that the love which she has come here for no other purpose than to renounce, still lives and stirs.
"You may think I am exaggerating, but in point of fact I cannot by any expression less strong than the gnaw of downright hunger convey the longing I have had to see you."
He pauses with a momentary failure of his still feeble powers.
She catches her breath. Now is the time for her to strike in, to arrest him before he has time to say anything more definite. Now is the time for her to fulfil her promise, her inhuman promise, which yet never for one instant strikes her as anything but irrevocably binding. Does he see her intention, that he plunges, in order to anticipate it, into so hurried a resumption of his interrupted sentence?
"To see you, in order to beg—to supplicate you to forgive me for my conduct to you."
She gives an almost imperceptible start. This ending is not what she had expected, not the one to defend herself against which she has been fastening on her buckler and grasping her shield. The words that it demands in answer are not those with which she has been furnishing herself, and it is a moment or two before she can supply herself with others. He must be referring, of course, to his last meeting with her—that one so violently broken off by the catastrophe of his collapse.
"I do not know what I am to forgive," she says, half bewildered. "You were not accountable for your actions. You were too ill to know what you were doing."
"Oh, you think I am alluding to that last time," cries he, precipitately correcting her. "No, no; you are right. I was not accountable then. You might as well have reasoned with a wild beast out of a menagerie. I was a perfect Bedlamite then. No"—going on very rapidly, as it in desperate anxiety to make her comprehend with the least possible delay—"what I am asking you—asking you on my knees—to forgive me for, is my whole conduct to you from the beginning."
The two white faces are looking breathlessly into each other, and though of late he has been tussling with death on a bed, and she has been walking about, and plying her embroidery, and dining at a public table, hers is far the whiter of the two. It must be the unwonted exertion of talking so much that makes him bring out his next speech in jerks and gasps.
"I forced my acquaintance upon you at the very beginning; I watched you like a detective; I beset you wherever you went; I pestered you with my visits. Jim always told me that it was not the conduct of a gentleman, but I would not believe him—not even when"—how difficult it is! he finds it almost as hard work as his mother had done upon the Mole—"not even when, by my importunities, I had driven you away—obliged you to rush away almost by night from a place you liked—a place you were happy in—to escape me. And I have no excuse to offer you—none; unless, indeed, as I sometimes think, my mind was off its balance even then. I express myself wretchedly!"—in a tone of deep distress—"but you will overlook that, will not you? You will—will understand what I mean?"
She makes an assenting motion with her head. At this moment she cannot speak: she will be able to do so again directly, but she must have just a minute or two. Yet she must not leave him for an instant in doubt that she understands him. Oh yes, she understands him—understands that he is apologizing for having ever loved her; that he is awkwardly trying to draw the mantle of insanity over even the Vallombrosan wood. It is true that he does it with every sign of discomfort and pain; and he looks away from her, as Mrs. Byng, too, had found it pleasanter to do.
"Do you remember what Schiller said when he was dying? 'Many things are growing clearer to me.' I thought a good deal of those words as I lay over there"—glancing towards the now neatly-arranged and empty bed. "One night they thought it was all up with me—I heard them say so. They did not think I was conscious, but I was; and it did strike me that I had made a poor thing of it, and that if ever I was given the chance I would make a new start."
Again that little assenting movement of her fair head. How perfectly comprehensible he still is! How well she understands that he is renouncing her among the other follies of his "salad days"—college bear-fights, music-halls, gambling clubs. Well, why should not he? Has not she come here on purpose to renounce him? Can she quarrel with him for having saved her the trouble?
"And I thought that I could not begin better than by falling on my knees to you. I wish I could fall on my real knees to you!"—with a momentary expression of extreme impatience at his own bodily weakness—"and ask you most humbly and tenderly and reverently to pardon me."
She looks at him, and sees his wasted face flushing with fatigue and worry and mental suffering. Oh, what a bitter wave of desolateness rolls over her! But she smiles.
"I still do not understand what I am to forgive you for. I suppose that you could no more help having once thought you loved me, than you can help"—she stops abruptly in compassion for the look of acute regret, shame and remorse that crosses his sharp features, and, in her mercy to him, gives a different close to her phrase from that which its beginning had seemed to bespeak—"than you can help having been so ill."
Her tone, quite unconsciously to herself is inexpressibly touching; and Byng, weakened by illness, turns his face upon the pillow, and breaks into violent weeping. His mother had cried too. It seems to be in the family.
She has risen—what further is there for her to stay for?—and pauses quietly at his side till the paroxysm is past. Her standing posture tells him that she is going, and he consequently struggles to recover himself in some degree; but having never cultivated self-control when he was in health, it declines to come at his enfeebled bidding now.
"Forgive me! forgive me!" is all he can stammer.
She looks down upon him with a strange and tender smile, in which for the moment the selfless, pitying sweetness has swallowed up the misery.
"Which am I to forgive you for—for having loved me? or for having ceased to love me? For having been mad? or for being sane? Yes, of course I forgive you from the very bottom of my heart! God bless you! Make haste and get well!"
She walks cheerfully to the door, and, reaching it, turns, still wearing that smile, that he may see how perfectly friendly is her last look; but he does not see it. He has rolled over on his face, and the whole sofa is shaking with his sobs.
"The pity of it, Iago! The pity of it!"
"The pity of it, Iago! The pity of it!"
The Byngs are gone, having got off just within the time first suggested by the sick man's mother. But, after all, he has to be carried on board theEugène Perrère. Since his interview with Miss Le Marchant, his progress towards recovery has scarcely been so smooth or so fast as before; and perhaps his mother is right to bear him away with what seems such overhaste, even though it be on men's shoulders that he has to make his exit. At all events, he is gone. The hotel—of which a part of the inmates have seen him only prostrate and bleeding, and the other and larger part have not seen him at all, but have had their curiosity whetted by the tale of his calamitous arrival, only to have it balked by his hurried departure—crowd into the entrance-hall, some on one pretext, some on another, most on no pretext at all, to see him go. There are only two of the visitors whose faces cannot be seen among the good-naturedly curious and sympathetically pitiful group that watch the exodus of the little party. Who shall say how those two spend the hour of Byng's departure out of their lives? Jim has accompanied the invalid to the quay to see the last of him; has stayed with him till the final bell warns non-passengers off the boat; has left him with all the proper requests and adjurations to let him know how the sick man bears the voyage; how they get on, etc. But as Mrs. Byng stands on the upper deck and watches the trail of churned water lengthening between her and the dwindling high white town, she has a feeling that her old friend does not like her as well as he did, and that it will never again be quite the same thing between them.
The Byngs are gone—have been gone a fortnight—and March is here. Over the villa faces the begonias have broken into riotous flower, and the snowy-blossomed fruit-trees, that have put on their snowy garments but lately, stand out in bright fragility against the heavy green that never, even in January, ceases to wrap itself about the lovely Moslem town.
Every day for the last fortnight, Jim, too, has been going, but he is not yet gone. His guns have arrived ten days ago, and his friend has expressed by post and wire his weariness of exploring the bazaars of Tunis alone. But he is not yet gone to join that impatient friend. Why does he still linger in a place where, as he had justly explained to Cecilia, there is nothing for him to do? Why indeed? It is a question that, by night and day, by the insolence of the staring moonlight which slides in upon his restless open eyes by night, under the fires of the great spring sun at noon, he asks himself. All the answer he can give is that it would be hardly friendly to choose this moment, when she is so down in the world, to leave Elizabeth.
She is down in the world; there can be no mistake about that. Even her father, who has returned from his wanderings, must be aware of this fact. Perhaps that is the reason why he no longer snubs her as much as he did; why he even accepts, with some semblance of graciousness, those affectionate and watchful ministrations which she tenders him with as gentle an assiduity as in her brighter days. But he has still no great appetite for her society; and she, unresentfully divining it, gives up to him, without repining, the one great solace of her melancholy—her mother's company. If Jim were gone, the more part of her life would be spent alone. She tells him so—tells him, with a sweet flattering smile, how much his comradeship is to her. Has he any right to rob her of that last prop? It is only to himself that the breathless clamberings up the steep short cut to El Biar, deep and brambly as her own Devonshire lanes, that the gazings in common over the pigeon-necked sea and the amaranth hills, can do any harm. They may put a sting into his own after-life—a sting that all the empty years that follow may be powerless to extract; but to her they serve only as a narcotic to numb the intensity of that ache which the cured madness of Byng has left behind it. Some day, of course, he must leave her; he cannot pass his whole life at her side; some day soon leave her to walk and sit and study her Italian Grammar forlornly alone. But it must not be until she has a little plucked up her spirits.
As soon as he sees any signs of this occurring, he will quit Algiers—quit it comfortably, with the consciousness of having done a good-natured thing, by which nobody is the worse. This is the compromise at which he arrives with the inward adviser—conscience, common-sense, what you will—that is hourly admonishing him to be gone. Does Elizabeth guess that her retention of the companion, to whom she so desolately clings, hangs on her remaining always as crushed as the first ten days after those cruel interviews with the Byngs, mother and son, had left her? If she did, she would probably seek to check the first faint revivings of cheerfulness in her inveterately gay spirit. Instead, while her heart is yet at its sickest, she earnestly tries to foster the tiny seeds of cheerfulness, saying to herself that it is mere selfishness in her to inflict her dismalness upon her one friend; seeking rather to lift his spirits, which seem scarcely less drooping than her own.
Does he enter into her motive? Does not it rather strike him with a species of shock how superficial must be the nature, how on the surface the suffering, of one who can already begin again to take a mischievous interest in the Widow Wadman's amours, and to mimic afresh the Cockney twang of the French Vicomte's English governess?
It is three weeks to-day since the Byngs left. The weather is fine, and a hot sunbeam is lighting up the painful indecision of Jim's face, as he stands in his bedroom with an open telegram in his hand, which two hours ago was put into it. It is from his friend at Tunis, and is conceived in terms which demonstrate that the indignation of the sender has got the better of his economy. It contains a stringent representation of his inability any longer to dance attendance upon Burgoyne's whims, and a peremptory request, answer paid, to be at once informed either that he will join him immediately, or that the idea of their joint excursion has been entirely abandoned. He is standing holding the paper in miserable uncertainty, torn by doubts, rent in twain by conflicting emotions, when the noise of voices and laughter outside the house draws him to the window.
The room he has occupied since he vacated his own for Byng looks out over the hall-door, and in front of that door a small group is gathered—the Vicomte, his two boys, his girl, her governess, a coal-black negro who serves as kitchenmaid to the establishment, and—Elizabeth. They are all gathered round a tiny donkey, such abourriquotas the valiant Tartarin slew, which has evidently been brought up for sale by its Arab master. Attached to its head gear are two long reins, and holding these reins is Miss Le Marchant. As Jim looks out, thebourriquot, taking some strange freak into its little brown head, sets off galloping at a prodigious rate; and Elizabeth—white gown and blonde hair flying—gallops after it. As she is dragged at racing pace down the drive, her immoderate laughter comes borne back on the wind to the spectator of whom she is unconscious.
The latter has turned away from the window, and sat down to his writing-table, where he is scribbling a hasty answer to the missive which has cost him such long deliberation. It does not take a minute to pen now that he has once made up his mind, nor can it be more than five from the moment of the donkey's start to that when the telegram is on its way to the Post Office in Zameth the porter's hand. The die is cast. When this is the case after long irresolution, there must always be a sense of relief, and perhaps, therefore, it is relief which Jim's face, thrown down upon his arms rested on the table, expresses. Since no one can see that hidden face, it is impossible to say. He has certainly no wish that Elizabeth should be unhappy. Her patient white misery had filled him with tender pity and ruth; and yet her laugh, sweet and delicate as it was with all its excess of merriment, rings jarringly in his ears. She is incapable of a great constancy. He had promised himself to stay with her until her spirits were restored. Well, he has kept his promise handsomely. He has done with her and her contradictions now. It will be someone else's turn with her next. Whose? The Vicomte's, perhaps.
By-and-by he rouses himself. Only a part of his task is yet done. He must tell them that he is going. As he passes the looking-glass, he sees that his hair is roughened and erected by his late attitude. He passes a brush hastily over it. He must not look a Bedlamite like Byng. He finds Mr. and Mrs. Le Marchant sitting under the ficus-tree on the terrace—the terrace which, at this hour, they have to themselves. She is reading aloud to him paragraphs out of the Algerian paper, translating as she goes along, since his French is about on a par with that of most Englishmen of his standing.
He is leaning back in a wicker chair, with an expression of placid good-humour on his face. Across his knees the hotel cat—a plain and ill-natured animal—lies, loudly purring, while he obligingly scratches her judiciously whenever she indicates a wish for that relaxation. As Burgoyne remembers, Mr. Le Marchant had always been on very friendly terms with the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air. About the little group there is such an air of content, of harmony, of completeness in itself, that none can connect the idea of a third person with it in anything but an interloping attitude. And yet there is a third person whose presence must be continually infringing its happy duality, since niche of her own in life has she none.
"Are you looking for Elizabeth?" asks Elizabeth's mother, laying down her paper as the new-comer draws near; "she has walked to Biermandreis."
The intimate friendliness of her smile as she gives him this bit of information—the matter of course taking for granted that he must be seeking her whose society he has so wholly monopolized of late—plants a new sting in Jim's sore heart, and robs him for the moment of the power to make his announcement.
"She has not been gone more than ten minutes"—still with that bright look of kindly confidence that she is answering his thoughts.
"I am looking for you all," he answers abruptly. "I came to tell you that I am off to-morrow."
The shaft is sped. Though he is not looking at Mrs. Le Marchant, he knows that her face has fallen. Upon Mr. Le Marchant's, on the contrary, an added shade of cheerfulness is visible. Mr. Le Marchant has ceased any overt opposition to the young man's intimacy with his family; but none the less is the young man aware that the father has acquiesced but grudgingly in the footing on which he had found Jim on his return from his tour.
"I have had a wire from my friend in Tunis; he is becoming dangerous"—laughing, oh, how forcedly!
"You are going to Tunis?" says Mr. Le Marchant, almost cordially. "You are quite right; it is a very interesting place. One does really see the genuine East there, not the mongrel hotch-potch one has here."
"Is not it rather late for a trip into the interior?" asks the wife. The geniality has gone out of her tone, and the sunshine out of her face. There is a touch of involuntary wistfulness in both.
"The interior? Oh yes, of course. My dawdling"—more laughter—"has knocked that on the head. I have let the time for that go by. We intend to run over to Spain and see the Alhambra and the Escurial."
There is a general silence. Well, it is done. Neither husband nor wife makes any effort to alter his resolution or detain him. They do not even put any questions to him as to his future projects. He has nothing to do but remove himself and allow them to resume that happy little duet which he had disturbed.
"The train sets off at such an unearthly hour to-morrow morning—six o'clock or thereabouts; it would take three days to get there if it did not—that I must put my things together this afternoon. I shall see you again, of course, before I go."
"Oh, of course," replies Mr. Le Marchant, in the easy and comfortable tone of one to whom it is a matter of supreme indifference whether or not that farewell meeting ever takes place, and Mrs. Le Marchant says nothing at all.
He has adduced his necessary packings as an excuse for leaving them; though, indeed, they neither wished for nor asked any excuse; yet nothing is further from his intentions than to enter at once upon that occupation. She has walked to Biermandreis. In five minutes he is walking thither too. There are a couple of roads that lead there, and of course he takes the wrong one—the same, that is, that she had taken, so that, although he walks fast, yet, thanks to her start of him, he has reached the pretty little flower-shaded French village which, with its white church and its École Communale, looks as if it were taken to pieces at night and put to bed in a toy-box—he has reached it, and has, moreover, traced half his homeward way, before he overtakes her. The path by which he returns is a rough Arab track, cut in low steps up the hill, each step a mass of fossil-shells—whelk, and scallop and oyster shells, whose inhabitants died—strange thought!—before Adam saw Eden's fair light. It is a charming road, cut, in part, through the red rock, over which the southern greenery tumbles. He has approached quite close to her before she sees him. She is sitting on a camp-stool by the wayside, looking vacantly before her. Her figure is rather stooped, and her straight back bent, as if it were not worth the trouble to hold it up. Beside her, on the ground, lie a little tin colour-box and water-bottle and a drawing-board. He wishes, with a new pang, that he had not come upon her so suddenly. He is afraid that this is one of the aspects of her that will stick most pertinaciously in his memory. Catching sight of him, her whole sad, listless face lights up.
"It is you! I was sure you would come. I told them to tell you where I had gone. I meant to sketch"—with a glance at her neglected implements—"but"—with a sigh—"as you see, I did not."
"Are you down on your luck?" he asks, sitting down by her side; "you did not seem so"—trying to harden his heart by forcing a recollection of her extravagant gaiety—"a little while ago, when you were prancing after that jackass."
"Is not he a darling?" cries she, hurrying up the end of her sigh to make room for a smile of pleasure. "I want to buy him; only I am afraid he might die of sea-sickness going home."
"Perhaps"—scarcely knowing what he is saying.
"I should like to buy a little cart to harness him to—such a one as I saw just now going along the road, drawn by a tinybourriquotthat might have been twin brother to mine. Some Arab children had dressed out both him and his cart with branches of that great yellow fennel—his long ears and his little nose peeped out so pathetically between; another child walked after barefoot, waving a great acanthus-leaf. You never saw anything so pretty! Yes, you must break mine in for me," smiling again; "it will not take more than a week, I am sure."
"If it did not take more than a day even, I am afraid I should have to decline the appointment"—seizing this opening to blurt out his news. "I am off at six o'clock to-morrow morning. I—I want to see the Escurial."
She had been almost garrulous about the little donkey, and he had wished to stop her. In that he has undoubtedly succeeded.
How the asphodels cover the banks on either hand! They have come into full flower since last he passed this way: tall branching stem, white blossom, and pinky bud; here they are in thousands.
It is a soft day, on which scents lie heavy, and their strong odour—that is scarcely perfume, and yet has an odd, acrid charm—fills the air.
"Everything must come to an end," he says baldly.
She is apparently not going to make any more effort to detain him than had her mother. He has every right to come and go where and when he pleases. Since Amelia died, to no human being is he accountable for his actions, and yet there is both guilt and misery in his voice as he utters his platitude.
"It has been great good luck for me that you have stayed so long; I know that it is out of pure kindness that you have done it, and it has made all the difference to me. I—I am quite set up again now, thanks to you; and—and summer is coming on, and I shall do very well—capitally!"
She has detected—what is, indeed, pretty obvious—the deep distress of his face and voice, and, in her habitual unselfishness, her one thought is to relieve him of any self-reproachful misgiving that he is doing aught cruel in robbing her of the support of his companionship. In her tone is nothing but the meekest gratitude. It is her misfortune, not her fault, that in it there is not cheerfulness too. But her "gentle physic," instead of curing, seems to aggravate his ill.
"It must come to an end some time or other!" he murmurs wretchedly, as if to himself.
"Yes!"
Dead silence.
Below the slight eminence where they sit, the road winds white, and upon the opulent low green hills on its further side, what a banquet of colour! On one steep slope the plough is driving its difficult furrows, turning up the rich red earth, shaded with deeper claret and lighter pink stains.
Beneath, a square of stone-pines looks like a green velvet handkerchief spread on the hillside, and over the rest of the upland eucalyptus, and olive, and cactus hold their riot of various verdure; while, on the tiptop of everything, against a weirdly pale-blue sky-field, a Moorish villa lifts its white flank.
How long have they both been staring dully at that fair prospect before Elizabeth again speaks!—
"You were a very good friend to me!"
She had not meant that past tense as an arrow to shoot into his heart; but it sticks there, barbed.
"I do not know how."
"And friends—real, good friends—should not have concealments from each other, should they? They should tell one another about themselves?"
"Yes."
A pause.
"I have often wished—often tried to tell you about myself; but I could not. I never could! I can tell you to-day if you wish, if you care to hear. Do you care?"
"Do I care?"
What a small battlefield those three words make for the anger and agony they express to fight upon!
Another longer pause.
She has taken off her hat, and now passes her handkerchief over her damp forehead.
"I shall be all right when I have once begun, but it is bad to make a start."
"Do not make it! do not tell me! I adjure you not to tell me! it hurts you too much!"
"It would hurt me more to let you go without telling you. Do you remember"—rushing desperately into her subject—"at the time you stayed with us at the Moat, that there was a great talk among us of my having my portrait painted?"
He knits his brow in an eager straining of his memory.
"Yes, I recollect."
"Father was wonderfully proud of me in those days; it seems impossible to believe it now"—with a passing look of incredulity at her own statement—"but he was."
"Yes, yes."
"Do you remember all the arranging and planning as to who was to be the artist, and that he was to come and stay in the house to paint it?"
Jim has put his hand up to his forehead as if to quicken the return of those faint and distant impressions which are coming out in stronger and stronger colours on memory's surface.
"Yes, yes; he was not an Englishman, was he? We used to laugh about him"—adding stroke to stroke in order to convince her of the accuracy of his recollections—"used to call him the 'distinguished foreigner.'"
"Did we? Yes"—slowly—"I remember now that we did. Well"—gathering herself up for a supreme effort, panting painfully, and turning her head quite aside so that he may have no glimpse of her face—"he came, and he stayed two months, and at the end of those two months I—I—ran away with him!"
One would have thought that Jim had been in some measure prepared for the just-fallen blow, both by the overheard fragments of Mr. Greenock's conversation with the Devonshire clergyman at Florence last year; by the accumulated evidence of there being some blight upon Elizabeth's life; and, lastly and chiefly, by the ravings of Byng. But there is something so different from all these, so infinitely more dreadful, in hearing this naked statement from her own lips, that it stuns him as much as if he had never received any hint of that ruinous secret in the background of her life.
Having now uttered it, she stops, either to pick up her own spent strength or to give him the opportunity for some question or comment.
He makes neither.
"I thought—I hoped—that you had guessed, from what Mr. Byng said. I believed that when he was not himself——"
Again she breaks off, but still no sound comes from Jim.
"You understand, of course, that that was what I told him. I wanted to tell him the rest, but that time he could not hear it, and the last time he—he—did not care to hear it."
His continued muteness must daunt her, for she here makes a longer pause than before. Indeed, it is only the fear lest she should mean it for a final one that enables him to force out the two husky monosyllables:
"Go on."
She is always most obedient, and she now obeys.
"He came only two days after you left us; that was why the sight of you was so—so painful to us at first. It was not your fault, but we could not help mixing you up with him. You remember how we tried to avoid you—how discourteous we were? You forgave us afterwards, but you must have observed it."
The listener makes a slight motion of assent.
"He was a Hungarian, and had been recommended to father by Sir ——, who, as you know, is always so extraordinarily kind to struggling artists, and who thought highly of his talent, and wished to get him commissions. He was almost starving in London; that was one great reason, I think, why father employed him."
Even at this moment the thought darts across Jim's mind that he has never known Elizabeth miss an opportunity of implying some praise of that father whose harshness towards herself he has so often had an opportunity of witnessing.
"He was quite young—not more than twenty-three—and he looked very ill when he first came; indeed, he was really half starved. It has always been the surest passport to mammy's heart to be poor and sick and down in the world, and nothing could have been kinder than they both were to him."
"And well he repaid their kindness," says Jim, indignation at last giving him words.
She puts out her hand, as if to stop him.
"Wait, wait!" she says, almost authoritatively; "do not abuse him. He seemed very grateful to them, and they all—we all—became quite fond of him. When he grew stronger, he turned out to be very lively and light-hearted—almost as light-hearted as we."
She pauses, pulled up by a deep sigh, at the reminiscence of that young gaiety, then hurries on, as if afraid of his again breaking in upon her narrative with some scathing ejaculation.
"Before three weeks were over—you know how cheerful and easy-going we were—he was quite one of us—quite as—as intimate as you were."
Jim stirs uneasily, galled by the comparison.
"He was a long time painting my picture—could not satisfy himself with the likeness—and began it over again several times. At first there was always someone in the room with us when I sat to him, but by-and-by, as he became more and more one of us—as his presence among us grew to be a matter of course—we were allowed often to betête-à-tête."
She stops to let pass two Frenchmen and a Frenchwoman of thepetit bourgeoisclass who are sauntering homewards, frisked about by two little cheerful curs, and with armfuls of hawthorn—yes; real English hawthorn—in their embrace. They look inquisitively, but not rudely, at the pale couple, and now they are out of sight.
"It was a very fine autumn, as you may remember, and we used to go out sketching together. He was supposed to give us sketching lessons—the children and me. The governess was by way of always being there, but she was a sentimental creature, generally straying away by herself with a poetry-book, and we were virtually alone."
Jim sees how increasingly, how horribly difficult of relation is the tale as it nears its catastrophe; but he is quite incapable of helping her.
"We fell in love with one another"—almost brusquely—"and he asked me to marry him. What did his miserable poverty matter to us? He knew almost as little of the practical business of life as I, and he was full of hope and ambition. He was convinced that he had a future before him. Perhaps he had. Who knows?"
There is mixed with the hurry and shame and anguish of her tone such an element of almost regretful compassion as she pronounces these last words, that Jim's jealous wrath awakes. Does she, then, love him still? In her heart for how many is there lodging at once? For Byng? For this unknown? For how many more?
"Even he, high-flown as he was, knew that it was impossible that father could permit our marriage if we asked his consent; but what he laboured to convince me of was, that if the thing were once done and irrevocable, father would soon, doting as he did on me—you know hediddote on me, poor father!—he would soon forgive us; and I, after awhile—oh! it was after awhile; do not think it was at once"—with a piteous effort to mitigate the severity of her silent judge—"and I have always all my life been terribly easily persuaded—I gave in."
Far away a dull cloud, rain-charged, is settling over the Kabyle mountains, rubbing out their toothed ridge. Can she hold out to the end?
She has not reached the worst yet.
"We were soon given an opportunity. Father and mother went away for a couple of nights upon a visit, and left us under the nominal chaperonage of a deaf old aunt of mother's, and of the governess, who, as I have told you, was worse than useless. You know that our railway-station was not more than a mile from the lodge gates; we had, therefore, no difficulty in slipping away from the others while we were all out walking, making our way there, and getting into the little branch-line train which caught the London express at Exeter."
She has repeatedly put up her handkerchief, and passed it over her brow, but it is useless. The cold sweat breaks out afresh and afresh.
"That journey! I did not know that it was the end of my life. We both set off laughing and saying to each other what a good joke it was. That was at the beginning, but long and long before we reached London—it was not till very late that we did so—I would have given all the world to go back. I did not tell him so, because I thought it would hurt him, but I have often thought since that perhaps he was feeling the same."
Again that touch of almost tender ruth in her voice makes her auditor writhe.
"We went to an hotel. I think it must have been in some very out-of-the-way part of the town, probably the only one he knew of, and at first they would not take us in because we had no luggage; but they consented at last. I heard him telling the landlady that I was his sister. I suppose she did not believe it, as she looked very oddly at me. I did not understand why she should; but it made me feel very wretched—so wretched that I could scarcely swallow a mouthful of the supper he ordered. I do not think that he had much more appetite than I; but we tried very hard to laugh and keep up each other's spirits. They gave me a very dismal bedroom—I can see it now"—shuddering—"and as I had no change of clothes I lay all night outside my bed. It took a great deal to keep me awake in those days, and, wretched as I was, I slept a good deal. The next morning I awoke, feeling more cheerful. We should be married in the forenoon, return home in the afternoon, to spring our surprise upon the children and Fräulein, and be ready to receive and be pardoned by father and mother on their return to-morrow. It had not occurred to either of us that there would be the slightest difficulty in pursuing this course. We had decided upon at once inquiring the name and address of the clergyman in whose parish the hotel was—going together to ask for an interview, and beg him to marry us at once. We had a vague idea that a licence might be needed, but relied upon the clergyman also to inform us where that might be got. In one respect our plans had to be at once modified. When I came down I found that there was such a dense fog that he would not hear of my venturing out into it, particularly, he said, as my staying behind would entail no delay; since, when he had obtained the licence and engaged the clergyman, he would, of course, at once come back to fetch me to church. I gave in, though I had rather have gone with him, and fought my way through the fog than stayed behind, alone in that dreary sitting-room. I was there nearly all day by myself until late in the afternoon. The fog was so thick that I could not see a finger's length beyond the window, nor even across the room. I had neither book nor work. I had nothing to do but walk up and down by the flickering light of the bad gas, which was burning all day, and look at a wretched little dead aucuba in a pot. Sometimes I went out on the landing to see if there were any signs of his return. I had done this for the fiftieth time, when at last I saw him through the gas and the fog, coming up the staircase. I could not wait till he had reached me, but called out over the banisters, 'Well? Well?' His only answer was a sort of sign to me to go back into the room; but I did not understand it at first. Not until I saw, coming up the stairs too, a little behind him, the face of—of—that clergyman you saw at Certosa—our clergyman whom we used to make fun of. Oh, why did we?"
She breaks off with a low moan, but at once resumes as if she could not trust herself to pause:
"As soon as I caught sight of him I ran back; but it was too late. I knew that he had recognised me. I do not, to this day, understand how he came to be in that out-of-the-way place; whether it was a most unfortunate coincidence, or whether he had seen us in the train or at Paddington, and tracked us there. I ran back, as I have said, into the room; but I did not really mind much his having seen me; it would all be explained so soon, and I was too much taken up with the bitter disappointment in store for me to give him more than a passing thought. Of course you will understand that it was not in the power of any clergyman to marry us, as neither of us had lived in the parish for the requisite time beforehand, nor could we be married at a registry office, as our names had not been entered in the registrar's book for the legal time. I think I should have broken down altogether when I heard this if I had not had to comfort him. He was so overwhelmed with the fear that I should think that it was his fault—that he had not done his best. Heaven knows I had no such hard thought of him! Although we consulted together all that evening, and till late into the night, we could not hit upon any expedient. He had been told vaguely that the Scotch marriage law differed from the English, and that in Edinburgh we might be married at once. But we had not enough money to take us there. Our whole stock would only just buy an ordinary licence, keep us one day more at the hotel, and take us home third class. Whatshouldwe do? We did not even try to laugh that evening—that last evening!"
In her voice is the same echo of some pitying sorrow that had before offended him; but his interest is now too strung up for him to notice it.
"I did not once close my eyes that night, and when I came down next morning I had made up my mind to beg him to let me go home and ask father to make everything right. I had such confidence that father could set everything right. When I came into the sitting-room he was not there. I waited for him, and after awhile the breakfast was brought up; but still he did not come. I waited on. It seemed to me odd that, at such a crisis, when we were both so miserable, he should be able to oversleep himself I am afraid"—with an accent of most regretful remorse—"that I did think hardly of him then. I looked at the clock; I had been down an hour. I rang for the waiter, and asked him to go and tell the gentleman this. He was so long in coming back that I lost patience, and went out into the passage. I saw a little group of people gathered round a door some way down it. They seemed to be whispering and speaking excitedly, and one chambermaid was crying. In an instant I was among them, through them, in the room. It was his bedroom. He was lying half on, half off the bed. He had evidently not undressed all night, and had taken off nothing but his coat. Before they could stop me—I believe that they humanely tried—I had caught a glimpse of his face, and had heard someone, as if at a great distance off, pronounce the word 'dead'! Then everything went away. I believe I crashed down like a log, as Mr. Byng did. When next I came to myself mammy was leaning over me. The people in the hotel had found a letter in my pocket, with my address, and had telegraphed for her and father. They took me home. I do not remember anything about that, but so I was told afterwards, as I was also told that he had died of deep-seated heart-disease, aggravated by his anxiety about me. I have never brought good-luck to anyone that had to do with me!"
She is crying quietly now. Is it her tale or her tears that have softened Jim's heart? He no longer grudges her that tribute to the lover of her youth.
"For the first few days after I came home I did not feel anything at all, and I saw nobody but mammy. At the end of a week she came to me, and told me that I must pull myself together, for that my father wished me to go with him to an agricultural meeting at Exeter, which we were always in the habit of attending. She said that there were reports about me in the county, which nothing but my appearing in public would contradict She said she knew how hard it was for me, but that she knew, too, that I would try to make the effort for their sakes.For their sakes!"—in a heart-wrung voice—"was not it the least I could do,for their sakes? I got up; my legs felt as if they did not belong to me. She dressed me herself—darling mammy!—and she tied on my veil, and—put some rouge on my cheeks! Think of mammy rouging anyone! If you remember, we had had some charades while you were with us, and had bought some rouge for them. And then she took me down to father, and we went—he and I."
Her breath has grown shorter, and her narrative more disjointed; but she perseveres. Is not she near the end?
"We went—and we walked about—among the shorthorns—and the prize poultry—and the tents—father and I—and we met a great many people whom we knew—the whole county was there—but we were too late. Our Rector had been before us with them—and not one of them would speak to me! Not one of them would have anything to say to me! And then we went home. Oh, poor father!"
She has covered her face with her transparent hands. The emotion that she would not permit herself for herself has mastered her at the recollection of that father's abasement and agony.
"He was quite right—it was quite natural that he should not allow me to live at home, after that. He said I must not blight the children's lives—must not stand in the light of the others. So I was sent away to live with some old friends of mammy's—two kind old ladies—with whom she had been at school; and they were very good to me, and I lived with them until, as Miriam and Rose were married, father thought I could not do anyone any more harm, and he let me come home again. There! that is all!"
She stops, her tale ended, sighing with the inexpressible relief of that lifted load. Speech from him now would be no interruption—would be kindly, rather, and welcome. Yet he still stares blankly before him. Why has she told him that painful tale? Is it that he may carry a more lenient judgment of her through the rest of his life—that life to be finally severed from hers? Or is it with some hope that that told tale may keep him for ever beside her? She does not love him. She loves Byng. But, as he has often told himself, she is not of the stuff of which great constancies are made. And, since Byng has forsaken her, whom has this pliant creature, that nature made so clinging and circumstances so lonely, left to throw her tendrils round, except him? She does not love him, and yet in the depth of his heart he knows that, if he wished it, he could make her love him. Shall he wish it? Shall he stay—stay to have those exquisite eyes, tear-washed, and yet laughing, watching for his lightest wish; that tripping step keeping time to his up the hills and through the valleys of life; that delicate sympathy, soaring with his highest thoughts, and yet playing with his lightest fancies? Shall he?
Elizabeth is looking down upon the asphodels, stooping to stroke, as if it were a sentient thing, a great plumy plant, like a sort of glorified fennel, out of whose fluthery breast a puissant sheath rises, from which an unfamiliar flower is pushing. What a fascination there is in this alien vegetation, in which every shut calyx holds a delightful secret!
Shall he? For himself, he believes her story implicitly, feeling, indeed, with a shock of mixed surprise and remorse, what a past want of faith in her is evidenced by his unspeakable relief at its being no worse a one. But who else will believe it? And the more penetratingly sweet, the more poignantly dear she is to him, the sharper to him will be the agony of the eye averted from her, the suspicious whisper, or the contemptuous smile. Is his heart stout enough, is his courage high enough, to support and uphold her through her life's long contumely? Dares he undertake that hard task? Dares he?
Elizabeth is never one apt to take offence, or she might resent his delay in making any observation on her ended story. Probably she divines that whatever may be the cause of his slowness, it is certainly not want of emotion.
At length his tardy speech makes itself heard.
"I do not know how—I have not words strong enough with which to thank you for telling me."
"I did not want my one friend to go away thinking more hardly of me than he need," she answers, with a poor, small smile.
This is one of the bitterest cups to which her lips have ever been set in the course of her sad history.
His next sentence is almost inaudible.
"I could not well think much better of you than I have done all along."
He knows, without seeing it, that her trembling hand makes a half-motion to go out to him at those kind-sounding words, but it is drawn back again before the action has passed much beyond the stage of a project.
The wind has fallen. With how almost disagreeable a strength does the sharp and pungent smell of the innumerable asphodels assail the nostrils. The light grows lower. Dares he? Has he the steady selfless valour that will be needed to fight through many years by the side of this forlorn creature against an enemy uglier—and, oh! how much more potent!—than any of the fierce forest creatures in contest with which he has so often lightly perilled his life? Dares he? He has never been lacking in self-reliance—been, perhaps, too little apt to blench at the obstacles strewn in his life-path. Is he going to blench now? Whether it be to his credit or his shame, the answer does not come all at once. Dares he? The response comes at last—comes slowly, comes solemnly, yet comes certainly:
"Yes."
He can never again laugh at Byng for his tears, for he is undoubtedly crying himself now.
"Elizabeth! Elizabeth!"—he cannot get further than that at first—"you—you are the worst-used woman in the world! and I—I have not the least desire to see the Escurial!"