Alas! Part 45

CHAPTER II.

One of the reasons, though not the sole or even the main one, of Burgoyne's visit to Algiers is that the Wilson family are wintering there. And yet he dreads the meeting with them inexpressibly. When they last parted, immediately after having stood together round Amelia's open grave, they had all been at a high pressure of emotion, and of demonstrative affectionateness, which nothing in their tastes, habits, or natures could possibly make continuous. He has a horrible fear that they will expect to take up their relations at the same point at which he had left them. He would do it if he could, but he feels that it is absolutely impossible to him. The door of that room in his memory which is labelled "Amelia" is for ever locked. It is only in deepest silence and solitude that he permits himself now and again to turn the key and sparely and painfully look in. How will he bear it if they insist on throwing the portals wide, dragging its disused furniture to the light, rummaging in its corners?

He sleeps ill on this, his first night of Africa; and even when at length he succeeds in losing importunate consciousness, he is teased by absurd yet painful dreams, in which Amelia and Elizabeth jostle each other impossibly with jumbled personalities and changed attributes.

Extravagant as his visions are, they have yet such a solid vividness that, at his first waking, he feels a strange sense of unsureness as to which of the two women that have beset his pillow is the dead, and which the living one. In dreams, how often our lost ones, and those whom we still possess, take hands together on equal terms! Even when he is wide awake, nay more, dressed and breakfasted, that feeling of uncertainty, that something akin to the

"Blank misgivings of a creature, Moving about in worlds not realized,"

remains strong enough to drive him once again to the list of visitors in the entrance-hall, in order to a.s.sure himself that his brain has not been the dupe of his eye.

M. Cipriani has been as good as his word. The corrected list, promised overnight, has replaced the incomplete one, and almost the first names that Jim's eye alights upon are those of "Mr., Mrs., and Miss Le Marchant, England." His own name immediately follows, and he takes as a good augury what is merely an accident due to the fact of his room and theirs being on one floor. Elizabeth is, beyond question, beneath the same roof as himself; nay, even now she may probably be sunning herself like a white pigeon on that terrace, whose red tiles he sees s.h.i.+ning in the morning sun through an open side-door.

The thought is no sooner formed than he follows whither it leads him; but she is not on the terrace; and though a moment ago his nerves were tingling at the thought of speech with her, yet he is conscious of a feeling of relief that their meeting is, for the moment, deferred. What can he say to her? What can she say to him?

He stands looking down on the green sea of richly-clothed dark trees beneath him--ilex and eucalyptus, and all the unfamiliar verdure of the soft South. From the fiercely-blazing red purple of a Bougainvillia, so unlike the pale, cold lilac blossom, to which in our conservatories we give that name, his eye travels over tree-tops and snowy villas, cool summer palace and domy mosque, to the curving bay, round which the Atlas Mountains are gently laying their arms; and Cape Matifou, with the haze of day's young prime about it, is running out into the Mediterranean.

He is alone at first, but presently other people come forth; the old valetudinarian, for once delivered from his fostering widow, sits down with a pile of English newspapers to enjoy himself in the sun, which does not yet ride so high as to be sun-strokey. Jim's last night's neighbour in the red s.h.i.+rt comes out too, bonneted and prayer-booked.

She is going to church; so is he: but he does not tell her so, for fear she should offer to accompany him. She observes to him that the climate is a fraud; that this is the first day for three weeks in which she is able to go out without a mackintosh and umbrella.

"We are not so green for nothing, I can tell you," says she, with a laugh, and a rather resentful glance at the splendid verdure around her, and so leaves him.

He, too, as I have said, is going to church, and is presently asking his way to the English chapel. The Wilson family will certainly be there, and it has struck him that the dreaded meeting will be robbed of half its painful awkwardness if it takes place in public. At a church-porch, crowded with issuing congregation, Sybilla cannot fall into hysterics--it is true that Sybilla never attends divine service--nor can Cecilia weepingly throw her arms about his neck. But whatever means he may take to lessen the discomfort and smart of that expected encounter, the thought of it sits like lead upon his spirits, as he walks quickly--it is difficult to descend slowly so steep a hill--down the precipitous lane, which is the only mode of approach for man or labouring beast to the high-perched hotel he has chosen. But he is young, and presently the cheerful, clean loveliness of the day and the sight of Nature's superb vigour work their natural effect upon him. It must, indeed, be an inveterate grief that refuses to be soothed by the influences of this green Eden.

What a generosity of vegetation, as evidenced by the enormous garlands of great-leaved ivy, waving from tree to tree as for some perpetual fete! Along the high hill bank that skirts this steep by-road, eucalyptus rear their lofty heads and their faintly-scented blossoms, aloe draws her potent sword, and thick-fleshed p.r.i.c.kly pear displays her uncouth malignity. Beneath, what a lush undergrowth of riotous great-foliaged plants--acanthus, and a hundred other green sisters, all flouris.h.i.+ng and waxing, so unstinted, so at large! He has reached the main road--the shady road that leads by a three-mile descent from Mustapha Superieur to the town.

How shady it is! Pepper-trees hang their green hair, so thick and fine, over it; and ilexes hold the thatch of their little dark leaves. Past the Governor's summer palace, with its snowy dome and Moorish arcades gleaming through its iron gates. From a villa garden a flowering shrub sends a mixed perfume of sweet and bitter, as of honey and hops, from its long yellow flower-ta.s.sels to his pleased nostrils.

At a sharp turn, where the hill falls away more precipitously than before, the bay, the mole, the s.h.i.+pping, the dazzling little city, burst upon him--the little city swarming up her hill, from where the French town bathes its feet in the azure ripples, to where the Arab town loses the peak of its triangle, in the Casbah and the fort of the now execrated Emperor. Blinding white, ardent blue, profound green--what a pleasant picture for a summer Sunday morning! And how gay the road is too, as the East and the West step along it together!

Here is a tram tearing down the steep incline with five poor little thin horses abreast. It is full of English church-goers, and yet, oh anomaly!

standing up in the vulgarest of modern vehicles, with his slight dark hands grasping the tramrail, is a tall Arab, draped with the grave grace of the Vatican Demosthenes. But alas! alas! even upon him the West has laid its claw, for, as the tram rushes past, Jim's shocked eyes realize that he, who in other respects might have fed the flocks of Laban in Padan-aram, wears on his feet a pair of old elastic-sided boots.

Here come clattering a couple of smart Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique, in blue and red, followed by a woman dressed as Rachel was at the palmy well--so dressed, that is to say, as to her white-shrouded upper woman, for, indeed, there is no reason for supposing that Rachel wore a pair of Rob Roy Tartan trousers! Past the Plateau Sauliere, where, in the lichen-roofed lavoir Frenchwomen are sousing their linen in water that--oh, hideous thought!--is changed but once a week; along an ugly suburb, and past a little wood; through the arch in the fortifications, the Porte d'Isly, till at length the Episcopal chapel--why are the Protestant places of wors.h.i.+p scattered over the habitable globe everywhere so frightful?--stands before him.

He had thought himself in good time, but he must have loitered more than he had been aware of, as the bell is silent and the porch closed. He enters as quietly as may be, and takes his place near the door. The building strikes damp and chilly, despite the warming presence of the whole English colony, emptied out of the four hotels sacred to Anglo-Saxons, and out of many an ilex-shaded orange-groved campagne besides. The building is quite full, which is, no doubt, the reason why Jim fails to catch any glimpse of the Wilson family throughout the service. He has plenty of time to interrogate with his eye the numerous rows of backs before him, as the sermon is long. Jim had known that it would be so from the moment when the clergyman entered the pulpit with an open Bible--no written sermon--in his hand. The sound of a brogue, piercing, even through the giving out of the text, soon puts him in possession of the further fact that he is in the clutches, and at the mercy, of an entirely uneducated yet curiously fluent Irishman.

Is Elizabeth writhing under the infliction too? Never, in the Moat days, was she very patient under prolonged pulpit eloquence. He can see her with his memory's eye not very covertly reading her hymn-book--can hear her foot tapping. Several people around him now are, not very covertly, reading _their_ hymn-books, but she is not among them. He has no more sight of her than he has of Cecilia; but in neither case--such are the disadvantages of his position--does his failure to see prove the absence of the object he seeks. He is one of the first persons to be out of church when at length set free, and stands just outside the porch while the long stream of wors.h.i.+ppers defiles before him. It takes some time to empty itself into the suns.h.i.+ne, and nearly as long before he catches sight of any member of either of the families he is on the look-out for.

Of the Le Marchants, indeed, he never catches sight, for the excellent reason that they are not to be caught sight of, not being there. In the case of the Wilsons he is more fortunate, though here, too, a sort of surprise is in store for him. He has involuntarily been scanning, in his search for them, only those of the congregation who are dressed in mourning. The picture that the retina of his eye has kept of Cecilia is of one tear-swollen and c.r.a.pe-swaddled; and though, if he had thought of it, his reason would have told him that, after seven months, she is probably no longer sobbing and sabled, yet even then the impression that he would expect to receive from her would be a grave and a black one.

This is why, although he is on the look-out for her, she yet comes upon him at last as a surprise.

"Jim!" cries a voice, pitched a good deal higher than is wont to make itself heard within the precincts of a church--a female voice of delighted surprise and cheerful welcome; "father, here is Jim!"

Burgoyne turns, and sees a lady in a very smart bonnet, full of spring flowers, and with a red _en tout cas_--for they have now issued into the day's potent beam--shading her rosy face; a lady whose appearance presents about as wide a contrast to the serious and inky figure he had expected to see as it is well possible to imagine.

Cecilia, indeed, is looking, what her maid admiringly p.r.o.nounced her before sending her forth to triumph, "very dressy." Mr. Wilson is black, certainly--but, then, clergymen always are black--and he still has a band upon his hat; but it is a very narrow one--sorrow nearing its vanis.h.i.+ng-point. In answer to his daughter's joyous apostrophe, he answers:

"'Sh, Cecilia! do not talk so loud. How are you, Jim?"

And then the meeting is over--that first meeting which Jim had shrunk from with such inexpressible apprehension--as certain to be so fraught with intolerable emotion; with calls upon him that he would not be able to answer; with baring of incurable wounds. The contrast with the reality is so startling that at first it makes him almost dizzy. Can the showy creature beside him, preening herself under her gay sunshade, be the same overwhelmed, shrunk, tear-drenched Cecilia whom at their last meeting he had folded in so solemn an embrace? Her cheerful voice answers for herself:

"It is so nice to see you again! When did you come? We did not expect you quite so soon; in your last letter you were rather vague as to dates; I can't say that you s.h.i.+ne as a correspondent. You will come back to luncheon with us, of course, will not you? _dejeuner_, as they call it here; I always thought _dejeuner_ meant breakfast. You will come, will not you? Sybilla will be so glad to see you--glad, that is to say, in her dismal way."

She ends with a laugh, which he listens to in a silence that is almost stunned. The sound of her voice, though set to so different a tune from what he had antic.i.p.ated, has brought back the past with such astonis.h.i.+ng vividness to him; her very fleer at Sybilla seems so much a part of the old life that he half turns his head, expecting once more to see Amelia's deprecating face, to hear her peace-making voice put in a plea, as it has done so many hundred times, for the peevish _malade imaginaire_.

They have been strolling towards the carriages waiting outside, and have now reached one, driven by an _indigene_, a Moor, dusky as Oth.e.l.lo, solemn as Rhadamanthus, and with his serious charms set off by a striped yellow and white jacket and a red sash.

"Is not he beautiful?" asks Cecilia, with another laugh, alluding to her coachman, as she and Burgoyne set off upon their _tete-a-tete_ drive, Mr. Wilson seeing, apparently, no reason in the fact of his (Burgoyne's) appearance on the scene for departing from his invariable custom of walking home from church; "is not he beautiful? When first we came here we were in mourning; as if"--catching herself up with a stifled sigh--"there were any need to tell _you_ that; and father wanted to put him into black, but I would not hear of it: was not I right? He would have been nothing in black; it is his red and yellow that give him his _cachet_."

Jim feels inclined to burst out laughing. There is something so ludicrous in the disproportion between his fears and their fulfilment, in the fact of the whole importance of Amelia's death resolving itself into a sash or no sash for an Arab coachman, that he has some difficulty in answering in a key of which the irony shall not be too patent:

"I think you were perfectly right."

He does not know whether she perceives the dryness of his tone; he thinks probably not, as she goes on to ask him a great many questions as to his journey, etc., talking quickly and rather flightily, scarcely leaving room between her queries for his monosyllabic replies, and ending with the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n:

"How nice it is to see you again!"

"Thank you." His acknowledgment seems to himself so curt that, after a moment, he feels constrained to add something to it. That something is the bald and trivial inquiry: "And you--how have you all been getting on?"

Cecilia shrugs her shoulders.

"We are better off than we were; you know that, of course. n.o.body ever thought that father's brother would have died before him. Wait till you see our villa--it is one of the show ones here; and of course it is very pleasant having more money; but one cannot help wis.h.i.+ng that it had come earlier." She sighs as she speaks; not an ostentatious sigh, but a repressed and strangled one; and, despite the flower-garden in her bonnet, his heart softens to her. Perhaps his look has rested on that flower-garden with a more open disapprobation than he knows, for she says presently: "I think that one may be very bright-coloured outside, and very black inside. Father and I are sometimes very black inside."

"Are you?"

"We do very well when we are alone together, father and I; we like to talk about her. Dear me! what a place Algiers is for dust! that is why there are so many blind people here. How it gets into one's eyes!" She puts her handkerchief up hastily to her face as she speaks; but Jim is not taken in by the poor little ruse, and he listens to her in a silence that is almost tender, as she goes on: "Sybilla begins to cry if we even distantly allude to her; yet I know"--with exasperation--"that she talks of her by the hour to strangers--to her new doctor, for instance; yes, she has picked up a new doctor here--a dreadful little adventurer! She will probably talk of nothing else but her to you."

"G.o.d forbid!"

They have by this time left the town behind them, and have turned through a stone-pillared gate down an ilex and ficus-sheltered drive, along which the _indigene_, whipping up his horses to an avenue canter, lands them at the arched door of a snowy Moorish house, whose whitewash shows dazzling through the interstices of a Bougainvillia fire blazing all over its front.

Two minutes later Jim is standing by Sybilla's couch. She is holding both his hands in hers, and there is something in her face which tells him that she means that he shall kiss her.

"When I think--when I think of our last meeting!" she says hysterically.

"Yes," he says, gasping; "yes, of course. What a beautiful villa you have here!"

The observation is a true one, though, for the moment, he has not the least idea whether it is beautiful or not, as he turns his tormented eyes round upon the delicious little court, with its charming combination of slender twisted marble columns, of mellow-tinted tiles, of low plas.h.i.+ng fountain. Originally it has been open, roofless to the eye and the breath and the rains of heaven; but its Northern purchaser has covered it in with gla.s.s, and set low divans and luxuriantly cus.h.i.+oned bamboo chairs about its soft-tumbling water.

Sybilla has let fall her hands, and the expression of the wish for a sisterly embrace has disappeared out of her face. For a few moments she remains absolutely silent. He looks round anxiously for Cecilia, but she has gone to take off her bonnet, and Mr. Wilson has not yet come in.

Under pretence of examining the tiles, he walks towards the lovely little colonnade of horseshoe arches that form the court, and his uneasy look rests, scarcely seeing them, upon the vertical lines of lovely old faence that intersect the whitewash with softest blues and greens and yellows.

When will Cecilia return? Behind him he presently hears the invalid's voice, steadied and coldened.

"It is very beautiful; and, of course, it is everything for weary eyes to have such pleasant objects to rest upon. I believe"--with a little laugh--"that we sick people really take in most of our nourishment through the eyes. Was not it wonderfully enterprising of us to come here? I suppose your first thought when you heard the news was, 'How mad of Sybilla to attempt it!'"