Alas! A Novel
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"Dr. Stephens feels sure that he must have had a sunstroke. You know that he has been in the East. He was a month in Cairo; the sun has great power there, even in winter, and he is sure to have exposed himself recklessly. He was on his way home – had got as far as Paris, it seems – when he accidentally heard that you were here. Since then, no doubt, he has neither eaten nor slept; so you see how little you are to blame. You know that I told you how odd he was before you even saw him. Do not you remember?" – trying to recall every circumstance that may tend to reassure her – "I warned you that you would have to be careful what you said to him?"
His words have a very different effect from that intended by him.
"Oh, that is why I cannot forgive myself!" says she, with what sounds almost like a cry of physical pain. "You did warn me; I had no excuse. In his state I ought never – it was murdering him to tell him – "
She breaks off. To tell him what? Jim bites his lips hard to hinder himself from putting this question, as he again, in mercy to her, looks away from her out into the night.
The moon has swum over the housetop by now; but one can see her handiwork as plainly as ever in the broad argent fringe, like the border of a cloak, that marks where the waves are breaking on the beach.
One often talks of a fringe without really meaning that there is much likeness to one; but to-night the moon-washed breakers really do wear that aspect – a fringe of silver with long silver tags and ends.
"But I was so deceived," she continues, with that wail still in her voice; "he was not violent. After what you had told me, I expected him to be violent; but he was not: he was quite gentle and quiet, and he did beg so hard, and I was so glad to see him again, that I felt I was giving in – that I should give way altogether if I did not tell him – tell him at once, without giving myself time to think; and so I did" – growing very breathless and incoherent – "and in a second; and then all in a minute, without any warning, just as if I had shot him through the head, he went down with a crash. I did not see it, for I was not looking at him. I could not bear to look at him while I told him. I had both hands over my face, and then – and then – I heard him fall."
What can Jim say to her? Fear lest any dastardly unchivalrous curiosity may seem to pierce through whatever sympathetic question he might put to her keeps him dumb, and stupidly staring at the bowing, ironically merry palm.
"And now," she goes on, lifting her face, and he is shocked to see how livid it is in the moonlight, "he will go out of the world thinking me much worse than I really am, for I had not time to tell him all. He heard only the bare fact; he did not hear what excuse I had – that I was not really so wicked as – as – he will die thinking me."
The sob with which she ends alarms him by its kinship to a convulsion.
"I do not know what to say to you," he says, desperately making a snatch at her two hands, as if by the violence of his grip he could convey to her some little portion of the deep compassion that is swelling up in his heart for her; "I am so much in the dark. No, no, no!" with a return of that terror lest this ejaculation should seem the outcome of any inquisitiveness; "I do not want you to tell me anything! What is more, I will not listen to you if you attempt it; but what there is not the least manner of doubt about is that his fainting had no sort of reference to what you said to him: he would have fainted whatever you had said to him, or if you had said nothing at all. He was as mad as a hatter when he went in to you. It is all part of the same thing – over-fatigue, sunstroke. But he is not going to die" – with a hurried trip back to his former strain of consolation – "he is not thinking of it; I promise you, I give you my word of honour" – becoming perfectly reckless and completely insensate – "that he shall not!"
But she is too strangled with sobs to make any rejoinder.
"He shall have the best of nursing," goes on Jim. "I have telegraphed for a nurse to Nice. How astonishing it is that in a place of this size you cannot get a decent sick-nurse! I hoped we might have caught the one who nursed General Smith before – "
He stops abruptly, with a too tardy recollection that the allusion is not a happy once, since the General died two days ago. Unfortunately, she also remembers, as is evidenced by the strong shudder that passes over her.
"If he dies, will he be buried in that deep narrow, red grave that they showed us in the Protestant cemetery, and which they said that they always kept open for English visitors? If he dies! if he dies! Oh, if I could but have told him! if he would but have waited for me to tell him how it really was!"
CHAPTER X
Though "February Fill-dyke" was never and nowhere truer to her name than this year, and in Algiers – coming laden with wet days to make the green Sahel, if possible, greener than it was before; yet the inhabitants of the Grand Hotel do not again, for a matter of three weeks, relieve their ennui or let off their energies in far from Dumb Crambo, or loud charade. The voice of the battledore is silent in the entrance-hall, and the shuttlecock sleeps. M. Cipriani has scarcely had to do more than mention his request that they would lay aside their more noisy pastimes, for they are, most of them, rather good-natured persons than otherwise, since, indeed, it is quite as uncommon to be very ill-natured as to be very selfless, or very foolish, or very wise. Those of them who have been fortunate enough to be present at the catastrophe have carried away such a moving image of a wounded Adonis, apparently several yards long, stretched upon Mrs. Le Marchant's Persian carpet, that they have infected those less happy persons who know of him only by hearsay with a compassionate interest scarcely inferior to their own.
The only person in the hotel who makes much noise is poor Byng himself, and for awhile he falls it with clamour enough to furnish two or three of those bump suppers of which, not so long ago, he was a conspicuous ornament.
There had never, even when he was in his wits, been much disguise as to the state of his feelings; now that he is out of them, the whole house rings with his frantic callings upon the name of Elizabeth, uttered in every key of rage, expostulation, tenderness, and appeal. These cries reach Elizabeth herself as she sits cowering in that one of the little suite of rooms which is nearest the door of entrance – sits there cowering, and yet with the door, through which those dreadful sounds penetrate to her, ajar, in order the better to hear them – cowering, and for several days alone.
Owing to various accidents, similar in their results, though differing in character, almost a week elapses from the first breaking out of Byng's malady before the arrival of either the hospital nurse or of Mrs. Byng. When the latter event occurs, Mrs. Le Marchant retires from her post at the sick man's bedside with the same unostentatious matter-of-factness with which she had assumed it, and Elizabeth is no longer alone. But to set against this advantage is the counterbalancing evil that, after the arrival of Byng's mother, she can no longer steal out, as she had before done a hundred times a day, to his door, to glean fragments of tidings from any outcomer thence. She is never able to repeat those little surreptitious excursions after that occasion when Mrs. Byng, coming suddenly out upon her, passes her with such speaking, if silent, hostility and scorn in her tired and grief-stricken eyes, that the luckless spy slinks back sobbing to her own tender mother; and there Jim, flying out a while after to carry them a crumb of reassurance, finds them, to his indignation, mingling their bitter tears.
Whatever else his faults may be, Mr. Burgoyne is a man of his word; he certainly keeps his promise to Elizabeth that Byng shall be well nursed. He keeps his other promise, too – though that is more by good luck than good management – that Byng shall not die. Whether to hinder his friend from being made a liar, or because he himself is loth to leave a world which he has found so pretty, cruel, and amusing, Byng does not die – Byng lives.
By her 25th day February has dried her tears, though they still hang on her green lashes, and a great galleon of a sun steers through a tremendous sea of blue, as Jim persuades Byng's mother to go out for her first delicious drive in that fresh and satin-soft air of the Algerian February, which matches our best poets' May. He takes her along the Route des Aqueduques, that lovely route which runs high along the hillside among the villas above the town, so high as to be on a level with the roofs of the lofty-standing Continental and Orient Hotels. It is a most twisting road, which in curves and loops winds about the head of narrow deep gorges, full of pale olive-trees, caroubiers, and ilex. Below lies the red-roofed white town. Slowly they trot past the campagne of the "English Milor," "L'Epicier Anglais," and many others, over whose high walls bougainvillias light their now waning purple fires, and big bushes of fleurs de Marie stoop their milky stars.
Mrs. Byng's eyes, sunk and diminished by watching and weariness, have been lying restfully on the delightful spring spectacle – on the great yellow sorrels by the wayside; she now turns them tear-brimmed to her companion.
"I could jump out of my skin!" she says shakily. "What a sun! what a sea! And to think that, after all, we have pulled him through."
Jim's only answer is a sympathetic pressure of the extremely well-fitting glove nearest him. If Willy had died instead of lived, her gloves would have fitted all the same.
"But we are not out of the wood yet," continues she, with a shake of the head. "He is cured, or nearly cured, of one disease, but what about the other?"
"What other?" inquires he, obstinately stupid, and with somewhat of a heart-sinking at the prospect of the engagement which he sees ahead of him.
How many elbows the road makes! It seems to have been cut in places right through the wet red rock, now overhung by such a torrent of vegetation.
At the head of one of the deep clefts that run up from the sea they pause, and look down upon a second sea of greenery that would seem to belong to no month less leafy than June. To June, too, belong the murmur and hum and summer trickle of running water at the ravine bottom.
"I do not see why, if he goes on as swimmingly as he is now doing," says Mrs. Byng in a restless voice – "why we should not get him off in a week, even if he were carried on board the boat."
"A week? Is not that rather sanguine?"
"I do not think so, the sooner the better; and during that week I should think she could hardly make any attempt to see him."
"Has she shown any signs of making one hitherto?"
"Well, no" – rather grudgingly. "In fact, between you and me, considering that it is they who have brought him into this plight, I think they might have shown a little more solicitude about him. In the last ten days I do not believe that they have been once to the door to inquire."
"You do not seem to be aware," says Jim, in a voice which, though quiet, is not pacific, "and that is odd, considering how often I told you, that until you came Mrs. Le Marchant nursed him like a mother; not like a mother, indeed" – correcting himself with a somewhat malicious intention – "for mothers grow flurried, and she never did."
"You mean that she nursed him better than I do," in a jealous tone. "Well" – more generously – "how shabby of me to mind, if she did! I do not mind. God bless her for it! I always thought" – compunctiously – "that she looked a nice woman."
"She is nice – as nice" – descending into a slang unworthy of his ripe years – "as they make 'em."
"And the girl – I suppose one can hardly call her a girl —looks nice too."
They are passing the Casbah, the solid Moorish fortifications, about which now hang only a few gaitered, sunburnt, baggy Zouaves.
Jim has a silly hope that, if he maintains an entire silence, the current of his companion's ideas may drift into another channel; but he is soon undeceived.
"I suppose that she must have been quite, quite young when – when those dreadful things happened that Willy talked about in his delirium?"
"Is it possible" – indignantly – "that you take the ravings of a fever-patient au pied de la lettre?"
"No, I do not; but" – with an obstinate sticking to her point – "there was a substratum of truth in them; that was only too evident."
Jim shuts his teeth tight together. His vow of silence is harder to keep than he had thought.
"Since he came to himself he has never mentioned her to me," continues his companion anxiously; "has he to you?"
"No."
"I quite tremble whenever he opens his lips, lest he should be going to begin the subject, and one could not contradict him yet awhile; he is so quixotic, it is quite likely that he may have some distorted idea that her being – how shall I say? —flétrie– is an additional reason for standing by her, rehabilitating her, marrying her. He is so chivalrous."
They have left the Prison Civile and the Zouave Barracks behind them. A longer interval than that usually supposed to elapse between a remark and its rejoinder has passed, before Jim can bring himself to utter the following sentence with the calmness which he wishes:
"Has it never occurred to you that she may be chivalrous too?"
Perhaps Mrs. Byng does not readily find a response to this question; perhaps it sets her off upon a train of speculation which does not conduce to garrulity. Certain it is that, for the rest of the drive, she is as silent as Jim could wish her. It is a sharp surprise to him two days later to be mysteriously called outside the sick man's door by her, in order to be informed that she has invited Miss Le Marchant to accompany her on a drive.
"I went to call upon them," she says, avoiding – or so he fancies it – his eye as she speaks; "and I asked the girl to drive with me to the Mole, and get a good blowing about."
"How kind of you!" cries Jim, a flash of real pleasure in his serious look; "how like you – like your real self, that is!"
And he takes her hand to thank it by a friendly pressure. But she draws it away rather hastily.
"Oh, it was nothing so very wonderful – nothing to thank me for."
She seems confused and a little guilty, and escapes with some precipitation from his gratitude. Mrs. Byng is not a woman addicted to double-dealing, and if she ever makes any little essays in that direction, she does them, as on this present occasion, villainously.
Burgoyne is not at the hall-door to help the ladies into the carriage when they set off. Perhaps this may be because he is in attendance upon the invalid. Perhaps because – glad as he had at first felt and expressed himself at their friendliness – some misgiving may, upon reflection, have beset him at so strange a conjunction. At all events, it is only Fritz who throws the light Arab rug over their knees and gives them his encouraging parting smile.
Poor Miss Le Marchant needs his encouragement, for, indeed, it is in a very frightened spirit that she sets forth on her pleasuring. But before the horse-bells have jingled to the bottom of Mustapha Supérieur, her spirits are rising. The sun shines, and he has shone so seldom in Elizabeth's life that a very few of his beams, whether real or metaphorical, suffice to send up her quicksilver. She does not consciously admit for a second the hope that in the present overture on the part of her companion lies any significance. But yet a tiny trembling bliss now and then taps at her heart's door, and she pushes it away but feebly.
Before they have reached the Amirauté, where they are to get out, she has thanked Mrs. Byng with such pretty and unsuspecting gratitude for bringing her, and has made her laugh so irrepressibly by her gay and naïve comments upon the motley passers-by, that the latter is filled with a compunctious regret that a person with such lovely manners, and such a sense of a joke, should have made so disastrous a fiasco of her life as renders necessary the extremely distasteful errand on which she herself is at present bound. At the Amirauté, as I say, they get out; and, turning under a groined roof that looks as if it were the crypt of a church, find themselves presently upon the long stone breakwater that runs out into the bay. It was built, they tell us, in old days by the wretched Christian captives; but the sea has taken care that not much of the original labour of blood and tears has survived.
The wind is high, and the sunshine ardent and splendid. On their right as they walk, with the wind officiously helping them from behind, is a world of dancing sapphire, each blue billow white-tipped. On their left are great blocks of masonry, built strong and square, with narrow intervals between to break the might of the water. How little their strength has availed against that of their tremendous opponent is seen at every step, since nearly half the blocks are overthrown or in semi-ruin; though the date engraved upon them shows for how few seasons they have been exposed to the ravages of the tempestuous sea. They walk on to the end, till they can go no further, since, just ahead of them, the waves are rolling in half-fierce play – though the day is all smiles – over the breakwater; and even where they stand, their footing is made unsure by lengths of slimy seaweed that set them slipping along. Elizabeth insists upon the elder woman taking her slight arm – insists upon carrying her wraps, and generally waiting upon and ministering to her. From the bottom of her heart Mrs. Byng wishes that she would not, since every instance of her soft helpfulness, so innocent and spontaneous, makes more difficult the answer to that question which she has been asking herself ever since they set foot upon the Mole:
"How shall I begin?"
It is unanswered still, when, retracing their steps a little, they sit down under the lee of one of the half-wrecked blocks to enjoy the view.
From here the sea is a lake, the distant mountains and the breakwater seeming – though in reality parted by how wide a wet waste – to join in embracing it. The mountains are dim and filmy to-day, Cape Matifou scarcely visible; but the Koubah shows white-domed on the hillside, and all the dazzling water is shot through with blinding light. The town, Arab-French, is dazzling too; the arcaded quay, the fortifications, one can scarcely look at any of them. Two or three steamers, with a little vapour issuing from their ugly black and red funnels, lie moored; and other smaller craft lift their spars against the heaven. Near by a man is sitting with his legs dangling over the water, fishing with a line; and two or three Arabs, draped in the dignity of their poetic rags, lie couched round a fire that they have kindled. Beneath and around them is the banging and thundering of the sea. August noise! "A voice like the sound of many waters." Could there be a more awful comparison? Just underneath them, where the sea has made a greater breach than usual, it is boiling as in a caldron. Looking down and in, they see the water comparatively quiet for a moment; then, with a shout of its great jubilant voice, rushing and surging in, tossing its mane. Elizabeth's eyes are resting on the heavenly sapphire plain.
"How blue!" she says, under her breath; "one cannot believe that it is not really blue; one feels that if one took up a little in a spoon it would be just as blue as it is now."
"I dare say it will not feel so blue when we are on it," replies Mrs. Byng, lugging in somewhat awkwardly, as she feels, the subject which she finds it so hard to introduce, "as I suppose we shall be within a week now."
Her charity bids her not glance at her companion as she speaks, so she is not quite sure whether or not she gives a start.
"Mr. Burgoyne thinks that I am sanguine; but I am all for moving him as soon as possible; it cannot be too soon."
She tries to throw as much significance as they are capable of holding into the latter words, and feels that she has succeeded.
"Of course he may refuse to go," continues she, with a rather strained laugh. "Do you remember Victor Hugo's definition of heaven as a place where children are always little and parents are always young? I am continually quoting it. But, unfortunately, one's children will not stay little; they grow big, and get wills of their own, and it is quite possible he may refuse to go."
"Yes?" almost inaudibly.
"But" – reddening slightly at the patently-intended application of her next sentence – "anyone that was fond of him – anyone that liked him really and – and disinterestedly, I mean, must see that the only happy course for him would be to go; that it would be his salvation to get away; they – they would not try to hinder him."
"I should think that no one would do that."
There is not a touch of asperity in the dove-soft voice; but there is a shade of dignity.
"When he was ill – while he was delirious" ("How dreadfully unpleasant it is!" in an anguished internal aside) – "I could not help hearing – gathering – drawing inferences."
The ardour of the chase has vanquished her charity, and she is looking at her victim. But, to do her justice, the success of her labours shocks her. Can this little aged, pinched face, with its dilated eyes, so full of woe and terror, be the same one that dimpled into riotous laughter half an hour ago at the sight of the two dirty old men, in Jewish gaberdines and with gingham umbrellas, kissing each other by the Mosquée de la Pêcherie?
"Of course it was all incoherent," she goes on hurriedly, snatching at the first expression that occurs to her as likely to undo, or at least a little modify, her work – "nothing that one could make sense of. Only your name recurred so incessantly; it was nothing but 'Elizabeth, Elizabeth.' I am sure" – with a remorseful if clumsy attempt to be kind, and a most uneasy smile – "that I do not wonder at it!"
In the narrow interspace between the blocks and the path – not more than a couple of fingers wide – how the sea forces itself! and up race its foam-fountains, throwing their spray aloft in such mighty play, as if they would hit heaven's arch. What exhilaration in its great glad noise, superb and battle-ready!
"I cannot express how distasteful a task this is to me" – in a tone that certainly gives no reason to doubt the truth of her statement; "but, after all, I am his mother; he is all I have in the world, and I am sure that you are the very last person who would wish to do him an injury."
"No; I do not think that I would do him an injury."
How curiously still and slow her voice is! Mrs. Byng has resolutely averted her eyes, so that her purpose may not again be shaken by the sight of the havoc she has wrought, and has fixed them upon some sea gulls that are riding up and down upon the merry waves, making them, with their buoyant motion, even more jocund than they were before.
"It seems an impossible thing to say to you – a thing too bad to apologize for – but yet I must say it" – in a tone of excessive distress, yet firmness. "Under the circumstances, it would – would throw a blight over his whole life."
"Yes, I know that it would; I have always known it; that is why we left Florence."
"And very good it was of you, too! Not that I am quite certain of the judiciousness of the way in which you did it; but, however, I am sure you meant it for the best."
"Yes, I meant it for the best."
The sea-gulls have risen from the billow, and are turning and wheeling in the air. The light is catching their wings, and making them look like whitest silver. It seems as if they were at conscious play with it, trying experiments as to how they can best catch their bright playfellow, and again shake it off, and yet again recapture it.
"What a monster you must think me!" breaks out the elder woman presently.
Now that the impression has somehow been conveyed to her mind that her mission is likely to be completely successful, the full brutality of the method by which she has accomplished it bursts upon her mind.
"How treacherous! luring you out here, under the pretence of friendliness, to say such horrible things to you!"
Elizabeth's narrow hands are clasped upon her knee, and her small heart-broken, white face is looking out straight before her.