Alas! A Novel

But to this prudent if homely counsel Byng opposes an obstinate negation, adorned with excited asseverations that food shall never cross his lips until they have pastured upon his lady's pardoning hand.

The same prohibition does not, however, apparently apply to drink, as he pours more than half the bottle of happily not very potent wine, prepared for his refreshment, into a tumbler, and tosses it off at a draught. He offers an even stouter refusal to Burgoyne's suggestion that he should go to bed; and as he utters it a flash of cunning suspicion comes into his eyes, shocking his friend with a gleam as of possible and scarcely latent madness. Across the latter's brain darts the query, which had proposed itself more than once to him last spring at Florence:

"Is there insanity in Byng's blood"

Not certainly on the distaff side, the side of his eminently sane and wholesome mother; but can he be throwing back to some distempered ancestor?

"What security have I if I go to bed that she will not steal away from me in the night? It was in the night – almost in the night – that she stole away from me before."

From this logic it is impossible to move him; and although, with some return to his old sweet-natured kindliness of manner, he begs his friend not to think it necessary to keep him company, yet the latter is far too ill at ease as to his condition, both of mind and body, to comply.

The porter, having drawn the natural inference that as soon as the traveller has refreshed his body he will wish to retire to rest, has put out the lights in the smoking-room; the salle à manger is therefore the only room in the hotel where lamps still burn, and in it the two men spend the dreary remaining hours of the night, Byng walking up and down like a captive beast, frequently going to the door, opening it, putting his head out into the darkness, and listening suspiciously if, perchance, he may hear the footfall of Elizabeth fleeing away from him even through the hurricane. As the time goes on, his restlessness increases rather than diminishes. Jim has vainly tried to distract his thoughts by putting questions to him as to his pursuits and companions since their last parting – by inquiries as to the extent and direction of his travels.

Did he get as far as Palestine? How long is it since he left Cairo? etc. But to all his interrogations Byng gives brief and unsatisfactory answers, putting a final stop to them by breaking out excitedly:

"Why do you go on questioning me as to where I have been, and what I have done? I tell you I have been nowhere, and done nothing; I believe that my body has been here and there, but my soul has been nowhere; it has been lying dead! Would you expect a man who has been lying six months in his coffin to give you a catalogue of his adventures? My soul has been dead, I tell you – dead and putrescent. What is the use of putting me through a catechism about its doings?"

Before the long-delaying dawn shows its pale profile upon the deep obscurity, it seems to Jim as if six midwinter nights must have pieced themselves end to end. But it comes at last; and at last also, by dint of strenuous representations to his companion as to how unfit he is, in his present travel-stained and disordered condition, to offer himself to Elizabeth's eyes, he induces him to let himself be led to the bedroom prepared overnight for him, and to refresh himself with a bath and a change of clothes. Even this concession he obtains only in exchange for an exacted promise to seek out Elizabeth at the earliest possible hour at which she may be presumed accessible, and urgently to entreat of her an instant interview with his friend.

Jim feels that he is keeping his word handsomely when, not a minute later than nine o'clock, he finds himself knocking at the door of the Le Marchants' apartment – that door with which of late his knuckles have grown so pleasantly and friendlily familiar. It is opened to him by Elizabeth herself, and he follows her silently through the ante-room into the little salon. Arrived there, he looks mournfully round with a sort of feeling as of taking farewell of the familiar objects.

It is impossible that Elizabeth can have spent the just-past stormy night in gathering flowers, and yet the flowers have a freshened air. She must have been carefully rearranging them. The bits of brocade, too, the Turkish embroideries, the haiks, and the praying-carpets, wear a more festal appearance than usual. The little room looks decked as if for a gala. His jealous fancy cannot but admit that Elizabeth herself is dressed in her ordinary morning gown, but even over it some holiday transmutation has passed. He cannot trust himself to verify whether that holiday look is on her face too.

"He has come; you know that, I suppose?"

"Yes."

What a catch in her breath! He must steal a glance at her. She will think it unnatural if he does not; and perhaps his eye may not be offended by so much radiance as he feared. In her voice there was something not very distant from a sob. The result of his glance shows itself in what sounds like a reproach.

"I do not believe that you went to bed at all."

"Yes, I did! yes, I did!" hurrying away eagerly from the subject of herself, as from something irrelevant and importunate; "and – he – how is he? How does he look? Had not he a dreadful crossing? Does he want to see me? to see me soon? to-day?"

There is such a breathless passion in her tone, coupled with something so apologetic for putting her questions to him, that his heart, hitherto half touched, half angered by the pathos of her little preparations, melts wholly towards her.

"Of course he wants to see you – wants it very, very much," replies he; and, to his credit, replies without any harshness marring the cordial kindness of his tone. "As much as" – with a rather melancholy smile – "you want to see him. No, do not be angry. Why should not you wish to see each other?"

"Oh, there is every reason!" cries she miserably – "the same reason that there always was. But" – with rising agitation – "where is it to be? How soon? When does he wish it?"

"He is waiting outside now."

She starts painfully.

"Now! Oh, poor fellow! we must not keep him waiting; and yet" – stretching out her hand in detention – "tell me, before he comes in – tell me, is he changed? Is he? Is he the same as he was?"

Jim hesitates, and the painful perplexity written on his brow is misread by her.

"You are vexed with me for teasing you with so many tiresome questions. Oh, forgive me! I ought not to take advantage of your kindness; but we have grown to depend upon you so; and I will promise not to worry you with any other, if you will only answer me this one. Is he changed – much changed?"

"I am afraid," replies Jim, with the slowness of one who is trying to convey unpleasant tidings in the least unpleasant terms, "that you must be prepared to find him a good deal altered."

"Altered! How?"

"I do not quite know how to describe it" – uneasily – "but you must not be shocked if you find him a good deal changed in looks; and he is – he seems, in a very excited state."

She makes a clutch at his hand.

"Do you mean" – her voice has sunk to a horror-struck whisper – "that he is – mad?"

"Mad! Oh, of course not," with a strained laugh; "you must not jump to such conclusions. But I do not think he is quite himself, that is all. He looks as if he had not eaten or slept for a fortnight; and if you play such tricks as that with yourself, you must expect to get a little off your balance."

She is still terrifiedly clutching his hand, though with no consciousness of doing so, nor that the fingers so tightly gripped by her are not made of dry stick.

"You must not look so frightened," he says soothingly. "I would not have said anything to you, only that I thought it better you should be prepared – that it should not take you quite by surprise; and also because I wanted to give you a hint, that you might be a little careful what you say to him, or, at all events, how you say it."

Still she does not speak, and there is scarcely any diminution of the horror of her look.

"If you do not mind, I think it would be as well to have someone within call, if he – he – became – unreasonable."

"Do you think," she asks, with a sort of scorn, "that I am afraid of him – afraid for myself?"

"No, that I am sure you are not; but I cannot shake off the idea that – poor fellow! – he may be on the verge of some grave illness; and in that sort of case one never knows what may happen. So, if you do not mind – "

"As you please," she answers, docile even now. "Do as you think best; and will you tell him that I am ready to see him?"

The misgivings with which Jim complies with this request are not much allayed by the manner and voice of him who receives it, and who has been raging up and down the narrow corridor.

"She will not see me, I suppose?"

"On the contrary, she will see you now. But stay!" catching him by the arm as he springs past him. "One moment! For God's sake control yourself! Behave like a gentleman. Do not make her a scene; she is not up to it."

Byng's answer is to fling resentfully away the detaining hand of his Mentor, while he says, with a furious look coming into his bloodshot eyes:

"What do you mean by keeping me here, preaching to me, while she is waiting for me?"

The rudeness of both words and actions is so unlike the real Byng, that it is with an even more sinking spirit than before that Jim follows him with his eyes as he passes out of sight into the salon. As soon as the door is shut behind him, he himself takes up the position he had suggested in the ante-room.

CHAPTER IX

There are few things more trying to an active-minded person than to sit occupationless, vaguely waiting. At first, it is true, the keenness of Jim's alarm prevents his feeling the ennui which would be the natural result of his situation. Poignantly anxious questions succeed each other in his mind. Has he had any right to permit the interview at all? How far is Byng accountable for his actions? What chance is there that his already rocking reason will stand the shock of a meeting which, even in his sanest moments, would have so wildly excited him? And if not, what may be the consequences? Grisly headings of newspaper paragraphs write themselves in the air before him – "Homicidal Mania," "Murder and Suicide."

The details of a tragic story which, illustrated by sensational woodcuts, he had idly read a day or two ago in a venerable Police News, left lying on the smoking-room table, recur to his memory. It was a tale of a groom who, in an access of jealous madness, had shot a scullion sweetheart through the head, and then blown his own brains out. The tale had made but little impression on him at the time – unhappily, it is scarcely possible to take up a journal without the eye alighting upon some such – but it comes back to him now with terrifying vividness. What security is there that such tragedies may be confined to grooms and kitchen-maids? How does he know that Byng has not a revolver hidden in his breast-pocket? How can he tell that he is not at this very moment drawing it out? He (Jim) ought to have made sure, before exposing her to such a peril, that the danger was minimized by Byng's being weaponless. Is it too late to make sure of that even now?

He takes one step towards the salon door, then hastily retraces it. Pooh! he is growing as mad as Byng. They will come out and find him eavesdropping.

He retreats to the table, which is at the greatest distance allowed by the room's narrow enceinte from the scene of the drama whose dénouement he is expecting, and, sitting down, takes up a book. It happens to be Elizabeth's Italian exercise-book, and the sight of it conjures up before his memory her forlorn figure stooping disconsolately over the page, wrapped in her brown furs, as he had seen it on that rainy night that seems now so distant. He had pitied her for being lonely then. Well, whatever else she may be, she is not lonely now.

He catches his breath. It is quite a quarter of an hour since he began his watch. How quiet they are! There is a murmur of voices, but there is nothing that in the least indicates violence. Before his eyes there flashes in grotesque recollection the hideous picture in the Police News which illustrates the high words with which the catastrophe of the groom and kitchenmaid had been heralded. He has been making a mountain out of a mole-hill; has been exaggerating his friend's emotional temperament, naturally further heightened by sleeplessness and want of food, into incipient insanity. If he were mad, or at all tending that way, would he be talking in the low rational key which he obviously must be? It is evident that her presence, her eye, her – yes, what more likely? – her touch have soothed and conjured away what of excessive or perilous there was in his emotion.

They have been together half an hour now. All danger is certainly over. Why should he any longer continue his officious and needless watch? – superfluously spying upon them?

Relieved as to what he had thought his worst fear, and yet with an uncommon bitterness about his heart, he turns to withdraw, and his hand is already on the lock of the door which leads into the corridor, when suddenly, without any warning, there reaches his ear the noise of a loud, crashing fall, followed – accompanied, rather – by a piercing scream.

In infinitely less than a second he finds himself on his knees beside the prostrate body of Byng, who, with blood pouring from his forehead, is stretched upon the floor of the salon. Even at this second there flashes upon him, ludicrous and dreadful, the memory of the Police News. This scene has a grotesque likeness to the final one of the groom and kitchenmaid series, only that in the present case the heroine, instead of staggering backward with the top of her head flying up to the ceiling, is hanging unharmed over her fallen lover.

"Are you hurt?" cries Jim in frantic anxiety, looking at her across the prostrate figure, and unable to eradicate from his mind the revolver idea. "Did he hit you? I did not hear a shot."

"Oh no, no! but he," fetching her breath in terrible gasps, and hanging over the bleeding man with that utter abandonment of all disguise, in which a great naked grief sweeps away our sophistications – "he is dead!"

"Oh no, he is not," answers Jim hastily, tearing open Byng's waistcoat and laying his hand upon his heart. "He has only fainted. Get some water! Have you got any salts? No; do not lift his head" – seeing that she is agonizedly trying to raise his prone head and rest it upon her knees – "he had better be as flat as he can. Quick, some water!"

She does not need to be twice told. In an instant she has sprung to the table, and brought thence the china jug out of which she is wont to water her flowers, and also the big cut-glass bottle of smelling-salts with which Jim has often seen poor Mrs. Le Marchant solacing herself when racked with that neuralgic headache which means worry. He splashes water out of the one upon Byng's ashy face, and holds the other to his pale nostrils; while Elizabeth, once more flinging herself upon her knees, wipes the blood from his temples with her little useless gossamer inch of handkerchief.

"How did it happen?" asks Jim rapidly. "What did he do to himself?"

The heads of the two ministrants are very close to each other as they bend together over the swooned youth. Jim can see a little smear of Byng's blood upon one of her white cheeks. The sight gives him a shudder. Byng seems to have made her more his own by that gory baptism than by all his frenzied vows and tears.

"Oh, I do not know," she answers, still fetching both breath and words with difficulty. "He was standing up, and he seemed quite right; and then, all of a sudden, in a minute, he went down like a log, and hit his forehead against the sharp corner of the table" – with a convulsive shiver at the recollection. "I ought to have saved him! I ought; but I was not quick enough. I stood stock-still, and now he is dead! You say that he is not; but I am sure he is dead!"

"Oh no, nonsense! he is not," replies Jim brusquely, thinking a certain harshness of manner the best recipe for her. "He is alive, sure enough; and as for the cut on his forehead, now that you have wiped the blood away, you can see for yourself that it is not at all a deep one. It is merely a big scratch. I have often had a worse out hunting from a bramble, in jumping through a hedge. Oh, Mrs. Le Marchant, here you are! That is all right. We have had an accident, you see. He has fallen down in a faint, and given himself a bit of a knock. That is all; do not be frightened. It looks worse than it is – Oh, M. Cipriani, vous voilà! Envoyez chercher un médecin tout de suite! Il y a un M. Crump" – catching in his destitution at the thought of even Sybilla's objectionable friend.

But hereupon half a dozen voices – for by this time even more than that number of inmates of the hotel have thronged into the little room – raise themselves to pronounce another name – the name of one who both stands higher in medical fame and is more quickly procurable. In search of him Zameth, the porter, is instantly despatched, and meanwhile about the inanimate body sympathizers stand three deep, until reluctantly dispersed by a hint of a nature so broad as not to be misunderstood from Jim, to the effect that the patient would have a better chance of coming to himself if he were allowed to have a breath of air. By the time the doctor arrives – there is some small delay before he appears – all are got rid of, and, Mrs. Le Marchant having gone to give directions for having Jim's room arranged for the sick man, both because it is on the ground-floor and also of a better size than that allotted to him, Jim and Elizabeth are once again left tête-à-tête.

Once again they kneel on either side of the prone figure. How dreadfully dead and how extravagantly long it looks! Once again he sees that blood-smear on her face. It is just above her one dimple, and stands out in ghastly incongruity over that little pitfall for love and laughter. How passionately he wishes that he might ask her to go and wash it off! If he did she would not hear him. She has no ears left, no eyes, no sense, save for that livid face, splashed with the water which has not brought him back to life, and with the red drops still slowly trickling from the wound on his brow, and which have stained here and there the damp tendrils of his hair – for that livid face and for the flaccid hands, which she rubs between her own with an ever more terrified energy, as he still gives no sign of returning consciousness.

By-and-by he is taken out of her custody. She is robbed even of the wretched satisfaction of chafing his poor senseless fingers. On the arrival of the doctor he is carried off, and laid upon the bed that has been made ready for him. She follows them miserably as they bear him staggeringly across the hall – a powerfully-built young man of over six feet high, in the perfect inertness of syncope, is no light weight – and looks hungrily over the threshold of the bedroom; but when she attempts to cross it Jim puts her gently back.

"No, dear, no!" he says. (He is almost sure afterwards that for that once in his life he calls her "dear.") "You had better not. We think he is coming round, and if you are the first person he sees when he comes to himself it might be bad for him – might hurt him. You would not hurt him, would you?"

"No, I would not hurt him," she answers slowly. And so turns in her utter tractableness, and goes away meekly without a word.

It is evening again now, almost the same hour at which Jim and Elizabeth were beheading photographs twenty-four hours ago. Twenty-four hours! It feels more like twenty-four years. This is what he says to himself as he once again opens the door of the Le Marchants' apartment. It is the first time during the whole day, except to snatch a couple of mouthfuls of food, that he has left Byng's side; and it is only due to the fact that Mrs. Le Marchant is supplying his place, and has sent him on a message to her daughter, that he has quitted his post. He knows that she has meant to do him a kindness in despatching him upon this errand; but he is not sure that it is one.

Elizabeth is not in the salon, but the screen that masks the door separating that room from the little alcove beyond is folded back. Over the doorway is a hanging of Eastern embroidery – as to the meaning of the strange gold scrolls that look like Arab letters on whose red ground Elizabeth and he have often idly speculated. He pushes it aside, and sees her standing with her back towards him, the flimsy muslin window-curtains drawn back as she looks out on the night. The alcove is on ordinary occasions scarcely ever occupied, and there is something uneasy and uncomfortable that matches the wretchedness of her other circumstances in finding her standing there alone and idle.

The elements have long finished their raging, and fallen to boisterous play. It has been a fine day, and though the sun has long laid down his sceptre, he has passed it on with scarcely diminished, though altered, radiance to his white imitator. It is broad moonlight – startlingly broad. The moon hangs overhead, with never a cloud-kerchief about her great disk. The winds that, loudly sporting, are up and abroad have chased every vapour from the sky, which is full of throbbing white stars. Before he reaches her side she has heard him, and turned to meet him, with a mixed hunger and pitiful hope in her wan face. She thinks that he has come to fetch her. He must kill that poor hope, and the quicklier the more mercifully.

"Mrs. Le Marchant sent me. I came to tell you that he has recovered consciousness. You see, you were wrong" – with an attempt at a reassuring smile – "he is not dead, after all. He is conscious; that is to say, he is not insensible; but I am afraid he is not quite himself yet, and you must not – must not mind – must not be frightened, I mean – if he begins to shout out and talk nonsense by-and-by: the doctor says it is what we must expect."

"And may I – mayn't I – will not you let me?"

What a quivering voice the hope has, and yet how alive it is! However clumsily, and with whatever bitter yearnings over the pain he is causing her, he must knock it on the head at once.

"Go to him? – impossible! quite out of the question! The great object is to keep him perfectly quiet, and if once he caught sight of you – "

"But if he is not himself," interrupts she, with a pathetic pertinacity, "he would not know me. I could not do him any harm if he did not know me, and I might do something – oh, ever such a little thing for him! If you knew what it was to stand here and do nothing —do nothing indeed!" – with a change of tone to one of agonized self-reproach; – "have not I done enough already? Oh, would anyone have believed that it would be I that should kill him!"

She turns back to the window again, and dashes her forehead with violence against the frame. Outside the tall date-palm is shaken through all its plumes by the loud breeze; it is swaying and waving and blowing, and not less is its solid shadow cut out by the moonshine's keen knife on the terrace, wavering and shaking too, as if convulsed by laughter. The porch of the hotel – mere whitewash and plaster, as memory and reason tell one that it is – stands out in glorified ivory like the portals of such a palace as we see in vision, when

"Good dreams possess our fancy."

"I can't have you talking such nonsense," says Jim, in an exceedingly kind and not very steady voice, for his own feelings are horribly harrowed; and on thinking over the scene afterwards, he cannot swear that, at this point, he did not pass a most brotherly arm for one moment round the poor little heaving shoulder, which is shaking almost as much as the palm-tree's shadow. "He is not going to die; he is not thinking of dying. Nobody has killed him – least of all you."

She makes him no answer, nor lifts her stricken head, over which he looks out, while the ghostly mirth shakes the landscape; at his wits' end, in search of consolation. Below waves a sea of foliage, out of which the strong elfin light has stolen all the colour. From that colourless dark ocean rises far away to the right the dazzling little snowy dome of a mosque, showing like a transfigured mushroom; and down below the rounding bay is seen laying its foam-lips in white glory on the land.