Alas! A Novel

Is it some effect of light from the rose-shaded lamp that makes it seem to him as if a tiny smile, and a yet smaller blush, swept over Elizabeth's face at the aghastness of his tone – an aghastness much more marked than he had intended it should be.

"Not to-morrow; not all of us. Father and mammy are going there for a couple of nights to see what the place is like – one hears such contradictory accounts; and if they are pleased with it – "

"Yes?"

"If they are pleased with it we shall all probably move on there in a day or two."

He would like to be sure that this sentence ends with a sigh, but a prodigious storm of hand-clapping from the extempore theatre prevents his hearing whether it has that regretful finish.

"And they are going to leave you behind?"

"Why not? there would not be much use in taking me; and, as I tell you, they love being tête-à-tête."

"And you love being alone?"

The moment that the question is out of his mouth, he realizes its full unkindness. He is perfectly aware that she does not like being alone; that she is naturally a most sociable little being; that, even now, these frightened five minutes of unsatisfactory broken talk with himself have made her look less chilled, less wobegone, less white. Her answer, if it can be looked upon as one, must be taken by him as a rebuke. It is only that she says nervously:

"One certainly does hear dreadfully plainly here with the door open."

Her tone is of the gentlest, her look no angrier than a dove's, and yet he would be obtuser than he is if he did not at once comprehend that her remark implies a wish that he should presently shut that door behind him on the outside. He complies. With that newly-gained knowledge as to to-morrow's Hammam Rhira, he can afford to comply.

The next morning's light reveals that the weather, pleased with having so indisputably proved its power of being odious, has recovered its good-humour.

Beyond the tree-tops a radiant sea is seen laughing far below; and the wet red tiles on the little terrace shine like jewels. A sea even more wonderful than radiant; no servile copy of the sky and clouds to-day, but with astonishing colours of its own – a faint yet glorious green for a part of its watery breadth; then what our poverty compels us to call blue; and then a great tablecloth of inky purple, which looks so solid that the tiny white boats that are crossing it seem to be sailing on dry land. From amongst the glossy green of the wooded hill, mosque and campagne start out, dazzling, in their recovered lustre; one cool entrancing villa in especial, backed with a broken line of dusky stone-pines, stands, snowy-arcaded, enthroned high up among the verdure.

Jim is very anxious to be out of the way at the hour of the Le Marchants' departure. He has a panic fear of being waylaid by the mother, and having some earnest supplication addressed to him to abstain, during her absence, from any converse with Elizabeth. He is not quite clear at what time they will set off, so, to insure himself against mistakes, he resolves to spend the morning and lunch at the Villa Wilson. Arrived there, he is shown by an Arab man-servant into the court, and, finding it empty, sinks down into a cane chair, and lets his eyes wander round to the fountain, lullingly dripping into its basin; to the tiles, the white-arched doorways, carved in low relief, and themselves so low that it must be a humble-statured person who enters them without stooping. What a home for love in idleness! Who can picture any of the vulgar work of the world done in such a house? any harder labour ever entered upon than a listening to some lady singing "with ravishing division to her lute"?

The lady who presently joins Jim appears, by her ruffled air, to have been engaged upon no such soothing occupation as luting to a recumbent lover.

"You will not mind staying here?" asks Cecilia; "Dr. Crump is in the drawing-room with Sybilla; I am sure that you do not want to see Dr. Crump!"

"I cannot express how little I wish it."

"I cannot think what has happened to Sybilla" – wrinkling up her forehead into annoyed furrows – "but she is so dreadfully sprightly when he is there; she never was sprightly with Dr. Coldstream, and he is such an impossible man! – the sort of man who, when first he comes in, always says, 'Well, how are we this morning?' Do not you think that it stamps a man to say 'How are we?'"

"I think it does."

"He talks such nonsense to her!" – with irritation – "he tells her that he, too, is a bundle of nerves! if you could only see him! And one day he told her that when first he came here he had seen the Angel of Death waving his fans above her head! and she swallows it all!"

"I am not at all surprised."

"It makes me sick!" cries she energetically; "let us go into the garden."

So into the garden they go; both the new one, whose luxuriant growth of verdure is the outcome of but eight or nine years; and the old one, along whose straight walks the feet of the Moorish ladies used to patter under the orange-trees. Beneath them now there are no white bundles of muslin; only on the ground the oranges lie thick, no one in this plenteous land thinking it worth while to pick them up. Jim and his companion pace rather silently to a pretty Moorish summer-house, dug, a few years ago, by the English architect out of a farm-house, into which it had been built. It is dainty and cool, with a little dome and lovely green and blue tiles; and an odd small spring, which is taught to wander by tiny snaky channels into a little basin. They go into the summer-house and sit down.

"Yes, it is pretty," says the girl absently! but her mind is evidently preoccupied by some other subject than the beauty of the giant bignonia which is expanding the multitude of its orange-red clusters all over a low wall, making it into one burning hedge, and has called forth an exclamation of delight from Burgoyne. What that subject is immediately appears.

"Do you know who is in Algiers – whom I saw driving through the Place Bressant on Sunday afternoon?"

"Who?"

"The Le Marchants. Ah, you are not surprised!" – rather suspiciously. "You knew already!"

Jim hesitates a second; then, reflecting that, whether or not he acknowledges the fact now, Cecilia is certain to learn it in a day or two at latest, he answers with a slight laugh:

"It would be odd if I did not, seeing that they are staying at my hotel."

"You knew that when you went there?" – very quickly.

"Of course not!" – with a movement of impatience.

A pause.

"I suppose," says Cecilia, rather cautiously, as if aware that she is treading on dangerous ground, "that you have not found out why they stampeded from Florence in that extraordinary way? Oh no, of course not!" – as this suggestion is received with a still more accented writhe than her former one. "It is not a thing upon which you could question them; and, after all, it was their own affair; it was no business of ours, was it?"

"Not the slightest."

"I always used to like them," continues Cecilia pensively; "at least" – becoming aware of an involuntary movement of surprise at this statement on the part of her neighbour – "at least, they never gave me the chance of liking them; but I always admired them. I wonder are they more accessible than they were in Florence? There are so few nice English here this year; everybody says that there never was a year when there were so few nice English!"

The tentative towards sociability implied in this last speech is received by Jim in a discouraging silence. He has not the slightest desire to promote any overture on the part of Cecilia towards intimacy with Elizabeth. He knows that they would be unsuccessful; and, moreover, he is conscious that he would be annoyed if they were not.

"I can fancy that this would be a very pleasant place if one had someone to go about with," continues she; "but father grows less and less inclined to move. Poor dear! he is not so young as he was, and I am not quite old enough yet, I suppose, to go about alone."

She makes a rather wistful pause – a pause which he feels that she intends him to fill by an offer of himself as her escort. But none such comes. Realizing this, she goes on with a sigh:

"There are not many advantages in being old; but, at least, one is freer, and in a youth spent as mine is, there is really not much profit or pleasure."

The tone in which she makes this lugubrious reflection is so extremely doleful that Jim cannot refrain from a laugh.

"Cheer up, old girl! there is a good time coming! It is a long lane that has no turning."

But he contents himself with these vague forms of consolation. He has no engagements of his own. Why, then, is he conscious of so strong a reluctance towards tying himself by any promise to the broadly-hinting lady beside him? There is another pause, during which Cecilia looks down on the floor with a baffled air, and traces the outlines of the tiles with the point of her red sunshade.

"There is a band plays twice a week in the Place de Gouvernement – plays admirably. Now, I suppose that there would be nothing odd; that no one could say anything; that it would not be the least improper, considering our connection and everything, if you were to take me to hear it some day?"

"I never have the slightest idea of what is improper and what is not," replies he; but there is more of alarm than of encouragement in his tone.

"No more have I" – laughing rather awkwardly – "but in this case I am pretty sure. Tuesdays and Fridays are the days on which the band plays."

"Oh!"

"To-day is Tuesday, is not it?"

"Yes."

Another pause.

"I thought that perhaps, if you had nothing better to do, you might take me to-day?"

The direct proposal which he has in vain tried to avert has come. If he accept it, of what profit to him will the absence of the Le Marchant parents be? He does not formulate this fact to himself, not having, indeed, owned to his own heart that he has any set design upon Elizabeth's company for the afternoon.

"I am afraid – " he begins slowly.

"You are vamping up an excuse!" cries Cecilia, reddening. "I see it in your eyes. You cannot have made any engagements here yet. You do not know anybody, do you, except the Le Marchants?"

"And they have gone to Hammam Rhira," replies he precipitately.

He is ashamed the moment that the words are out of his mouth, for he knows that they convey a falsehood.

"At least – "

But she interrupts him before he can add his conscience clause.

"To-morrow, then?"

Again he hesitates. The same objections apply with even greater force to the morrow.

"But the band does not play to-morrow."

"Oh! what does that matter?" rejoins she impatiently. "I had just as soon go somewhere else – the Arab town, the Kabyle village, anywhere."

He is driven into a corner, and remains there silent so long that there is a distinct element of offence in the tone and large sigh with which the girl resumes.

"Well, times are changed! I always used to make one in those happy excursions at Florence; and somehow – thanks to her, I suppose – I never felt a bad third."

She rises as she speaks, and takes a couple of huffy steps towards the house; but he overtakes and stops her. The allusion to Amelia has annoyed and yet stirred in him the sea of remorse, which is always lying but a very little way below the surface in his soul.

"Why, Cis!" he says, in a tone of affectionate rallying, "are we going to quarrel at this time of day – you and I? Of course I will take you to the band and the Kabyle village, and any other blessed sight you choose to name, only tell me by which of them you would like to begin to ride round."

As he leaves the house and the appeased fair one, after luncheon, an hour and a half later, he tells himself that he has got off cheaply in having vaguely sacrificed the whole of his Algerian future, but having preserved to-day and to-morrow.

CHAPTER VI

"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 be loved!" "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 it was he 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 you really think 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 a tête-à-tête drive 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!"