Alas! A Novel

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 cheerful va et vient of the boulevard is lost upon them. They see neither the Frenchmen nor plump Frenchwomen drinking coffee outside the cafés, nor the idle indigènes leaning draped against the sea-wall. (Never does that industrious race seem to attempt any severer exertion.)

"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 driving tête-à-tête with 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 her vis-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 this tête-à-tête drive 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?

CHAPTER VII

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."

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. Is he the 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 French bonne; 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 casual table d'hôte acquaintance 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 it is unavoidable, 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 their haik-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 holding Elizabeth! 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.