Alas! A Novel

"No, I do not think you a monster," she answers – "you are a kind-hearted woman! and it must have been very, very unpleasant to you. I am quite sorry" – with a sort of smile – "for you, having to do it; but you are his mother. If I had been his mother, I should have done the same; at least, I suppose so."

"I am sure, if things had been different, there is no one that I should have – I do not know when I ever saw anyone whom I took such a fancy to. If it had not been for the disparity – I mean, if he had been less young and unfit to take upon himself the serious responsibilities of life – "

How deplorably lame even to Mrs. Byng's ears sound her tardy efforts to place the grounds of her objection on a less cruel basis than that which she has already made so nakedly plain to be the real one! Even the sweet-mannered Elizabeth does not think it necessary to express gratitude for such insulting civilities.

"I do not quite understand what you wish me to do," she says, with quiet politeness; "if you will explain to me – "

"Oh, I do not want to dictate to you; please do not imagine I could think of being so impertinent; but, of course, he will be asking for you. Since he came to himself, he has not mentioned you as yet; but of course he will. I am expecting it every moment; probably he has not felt up to embarking on the subject. He will ask for you – will want to see you."

"And you wish me not to see him?"

Her delicate suffering mouth quivers; but she is perfectly composed.

"Oh, but of course you must see him! you quite, quite misunderstand me! Much chance there would be" – with a wretched stunted laugh – "of getting him away without a sight of you! How little you know him!"

Elizabeth does not dispute the fact of her want of acquaintance with Byng's character, nor does she help his floundering parent by any suggestion. She merely goes on listening to her with that civil white look, while the sportive sea-mews still play at hide-and-seek with the sun-rays on the wide blue fields of heaven.

"It is dreadful that I should have to say these things to you," says Mrs. Byng, in a voice of the strongest revolt and ire against her destiny – "insult you in this unprovoked way; but, in point of fact, you are the only person in the world who can convince him that – that – it is impossible – that it cannot be. Of course he will be very urgent and pressing, and I know how persuasive he is. Do not you suppose that I, his own mother, know how hard it is to refuse him anything? and of course, in his present weak state, it must be very carefully done. He could not stand any violent contradiction. You would have to be very gentle; dear me!" – with a fresh access of angry remorse – "as if you ever could be anything else."

This compliment also its pale object receives in silence.

"You know one has always heard that there are two kinds of 'No,'" goes on Mrs. Byng with another dwarfish laugh, which has a touch of the hysteric in it – "a woman's 'No,' as it is called, that means 'Yes'; and a 'No' which anyone – which even he– must understand to be final. If you could– I dare say I am asking you an impossibility – but if you could make him understand that this time it is final!"

There is a silence between them. An unrulier billow than usual, yet more masterless in its Titan play, is hurling itself with a colossal thud and bang against the causeway; and Elizabeth waits till its clamour is subsided before she speaks.

"Yes," she answers slowly, "I understand; thank you for telling me what you wish. I think I may promise that I shall be able to – that I shall make him understand that it is final."

A moment or two later they are on their way back to the Amirauté. The ocean is at its glorious pastimes all around them; the hill-climbing, shining town smiles upon them from its slope; but upon both has fallen a blindness. The feelings of Mrs. Byng are perhaps the least enviable of the two.

They are nearly back at the beginning of the breakwater, when she stops short. Probably when cool reflection comes, when she is removed from the charm and pathos of Elizabeth's meek white presence, lovely and unreproachful, she will not repent her work; but at the present moment of impulse and remorse she feels as if the expunging of the last half-hour would be cheaply purchased by the sacrifice of six months of her remaining life.

"I suppose it is not the least use my asking you to try and forgive me – to make allowances for me?" she says, with unsteady-toned humility; "oh, how you must hate me! If the case were reversed, how I should hate you! How you will hate me all your life!"

The tears are rolling down her cheeks, and in an instant Elizabeth's hand has gone out to her. As it does so, the grotesque regret flashes across the elder woman's mind that any future daughter-in-law of hers will be most unlikely to be the possessor of such a hand.

"Why should I hate you? you cannot" – with a heart-wrung smile – "possibly think me more undesirable than I do myself; and even if it were not so, I do not think it is in me to hate anyone very much."

On their drive home they meet with one or two little incidents quite as funny as the old Jews kissing each other; but this time they do not move poor Miss Le Marchant to any laughter.

CHAPTER XI

"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 see you."

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."

CHAPTER XII

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, very good 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, it is nice; nice to be

"'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;'

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 so hungered to 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?