Alas! Part 49

"I do not know what State secrets you and Mr. Burgoyne can have to discuss," replies the mother, with a smile that, though courteous, but ill disguises the underlying anxiety. "Yes, dear child, I shall be very much obliged if you will take my bonnet upstairs for me"--this in answer to little tender overtures from Elizabeth, overtures that remind Jim of 12 _bis_, Piazza d' Azeglio. "I do not know whether you have yet found it so" (to Jim); "but this _is_ a slack place."

No sooner has the door closed upon her daughter than her tone changes.

"What have you been talking about to her," she inquires rapidly; "not, I hope, about _him_?"

"I could not help it; she asked me."

Mrs. Le Marchant strikes her hands together, and gives utterance to that short and shapeless monosyllable which has a prescriptive right to express vexation.

"Th! th!" A moment later, "I am sure you will understand that I do not mean to imply any ill-will to you; but it _is_ unlucky that we should have happened to meet you here; it has brought it all back to her, and she was just beginning to pluck up her spirits a little."

"Did she--did she take it so much to heart?" inquires Jim, in a tone of almost as awed concern as Elizabeth had employed but a quarter of an hour before in putting nearly the same question with regard to Byng.

"_Did she take it to heart!_" repeats Mrs. Le Marchant, with the irritation of one to whom a perfectly senseless and superfluous inquiry is put; "why, of course she did! I thought at one time that she would have gone out of her mind!"

No one can feel less merry than Jim; and yet his lips at this juncture cannot resist the impulse to frame themselves into a gloomy smile.

"And I thought that _he_ would have gone out of _his_ mind," he rejoins.

As he speaks, it flashes upon his memory that one of the hypotheses that have formerly occurred to him to account for the mystery that hangs over Elizabeth's past was that she had been mad; and though he had long abandoned the idea, her losing her wits now recurs to him with a shock as a possibility. Might not that changeful, mobile, emotional mind lose its balance under the blow either of a sudden calamity or of a long wearing sorrow? It has escaped--evidently but barely escaped the first.

Will it escape the second too?

His heart goes out in a great yearning to her at the thought of what a touching little lunatic she would make; and, with an oblivion of his own personal feelings, which is generous, if not very lasting, he says compa.s.sionately:

"It seems a pity--a great pity!"

"A pity!" repeats the mother, with a sort of wrath, down which he detects a broad stripe of agony running; "I should think it _was_ a pity! Pity is a weak word! The whole thing is piteous! her whole history! If you only knew----"

She breaks off.

He is silent, waiting to see whether that impulse towards confidence in him will go any further; but it does not. She has evidently gone beyond her intention, and is pa.s.sionately vexed with herself for having done so.

"They were so well suited to each other," continues Jim slowly, but still generously. Possibly his generosity becomes more easy as he sees how hopeless is the plea upon which he employs it. "Is it--I do not wish to intrude upon your confidence, but in the interests of my friend you will allow me to say that much--is it quite out of the question?"

"Quite! quite!" replies the mother, in painful excitement; "what, poor soul, is not out of the question for her that has any good or happiness in it? and that--_that_ more than anything! If you have any mercy in you, do not put it into her head that it is not!"

"If it is not in her head already, I could not put it there," replies Jim gravely; "but I will not--I promise you I will not."

As he speaks, a slight smile touches the corners of his serious mouth as he reflects how entirely easy it is to comply with a request _not_ to urge Byng's suit upon its object, and how cheaply a character for magnanimity may sometimes be bought.

"That is very kind of you!" replies the poor woman gratefully; "and I am sure when you say a thing I can depend upon you for it; and though, of course, it was unlucky our happening to meet you, yet you need not see much of her. Although it is not in the least 'out of sight, out of mind'

with her"--sighing--"yet she _is_ very much influenced by the objects around her; and when you are gone--I dare say you do not mean to make a long stay; this is not a place where there is much for a man to do--for a man like you----"

She breaks off, and her imploring eye invites him to rea.s.sure her by naming a speedy day for his own departure. But magnanimity may have calls made upon it that exceed its power to answer, and Jim's silence sufficiently proves that he is not going to allow himself to be seduced into a promise to go.

CHAPTER V.

The next morning proves the truth of Miss Strutt's words that "we are not so green here in Algiers for nothing." The weather changes some time after dark has fallen. A mighty wind arises. Jim's slumbers are broken by the fact that somebody's outside shutters bang, loose and noisy all night. The great sign at the top of the hotel swings and creaks and groans. In the morning, as far as can be seen through blurred panes, the trees--eucalyptus, ilex, stone-pine--are all cowering and stooping before the wind's lash. The fan palm before Mrs. Le Marchant's window, with its fans all pinched and bent, is staggering before the gale. One cannot conceive what that unlucky tropical product can be doing in this galley, and it requires a strong effort of reason and will to resist the conviction that the oranges and lemons are tied upon the s.h.i.+vering trees instead of growing naturally there.

"And this is 'Afric's burning strand'!" says Jim to himself, over his breakfast in the _salle a manger_, through whose shut windows the mad rain forces itself; and the blast, coming to his wet sister's aid, bursts them open now and again.

The day seems enormously long. He gets through the morning tolerably well with letter-writing, and after the twelve o'clock _dejeuner_ he faces the gale in a determined walk down into the town. Seldom in the course of his wide wanderings has he felt the furious scourge of more tremendous rain. The side-path is whitened with big hailstones; red torrents tear with ferocious speed and violence down the steep incline.

The great acanthus-leaves, and all the plentiful undergrowth, are dripping and rejoicing.

Through the blinding white deluge he gets forlorn peeps of the villas that had shone yesterday with the white splendour one a.s.sociates with the city of the saints of G.o.d; and instead of, as yesterday, "laced with heaven's own tinct," the Mediterranean is whitening the bay's rounded curve with its angry breakers, and the snow is sprinkling the Atlas crests. A few Arabs are sitting on the ground under the Pont d'Isly, packed up into whitish woollen parcels, knees to nose, and arms and hands all withdrawn into the protection of the sheltering burnous. But no one else, who can help it, is abroad.

It seems to Jim as if his disagreeable tussle with the elements had lasted a long time, and yet, on his return to the hotel, he finds that it is only half-past two. He thinks at first that the clocks must have stopped, but finds, on examination, that they are all ticking, and all unanimous. His drenched condition is at least a resource, necessitating an entire and fundamental change of raiment; but even this expedient, though dragged out to its utmost possible limit, does not carry him further than three. How is he to dispose of the seven or eight hours that must elapse before he can seek refuge in bed? He has exhausted his correspondence, which is never a large one, and he has seldom in his life been so short of books.

He makes his way through the hall, which is crammed with young people playing battledore, and noisily counting; with elder persons, dreadfully short of a job, looking on and applauding; to the _salon_, in hopes of there finding a Tauchnitz novel, or even a superannuated _Pall Mall_ or _World_. But half a dozen other weather-bound sufferers have been before him, and the tables are swept clean of all literature save a three-months-old _Court Journal_.

Miss Strutt and the pert votary of Whiteley are sitting shawled, and with their heads close together. By their t.i.tters, and the fragments he catches of their talk, they seem to be concocting a practical joke of some kind. The widow Wadman, shawled too, and her valetudinarian in a comforter, are stopping over a wood-fire, which refuses to burn, the souches being wringing wet. Jim rather injudiciously approaches them, and offers his a.s.sistance in piling the damp logs; but he is so evidently _de trop_, that he retires discomfited. On the other hand, the invitation in Miss Strutt's and her coadjutor's eye is so apparent that he beats a hasty retreat out of the room, in dread lest he should be drawn into their mysterious pleasantry.

He never is quite clear afterwards how he gets over the hours that intervene before dinner--whether sleep comes to his aid, or whether he is after all reduced to perusing in the _Court Journal_ the narrative of which direction the Queen and Princess Henry of Battenburg took their walk in, in October. But at length the welcome bell rings, drowning even, for two minutes, the banging of the wind; and the whole hotel, unwontedly punctual, rushes in answer to its summons. People who have hitherto scarcely exchanged words, have eyed each other with hardly veiled distrust, now show a feverish desire to enter into conversation, to detain one another after dinner on the steps of the _salle a manger_.

As the evening advances, Jim sees an intention among the younger portion of the company to launch out into noisy, romping games, to inst.i.tute a Dumb Crambo. He feels it is far from impossible that he himself may fall so low as to be drawn into it. Miss Strutt's eye is on him, but before he succ.u.mbs he will make one effort on his own behalf. He embraces a desperate resolution. He has seen the Le Marchants eating their dinner near, and yet hopelessly far from him. Elizabeth had given him one furtive smile, and her mother a hurried bow; this is, to tell the truth, all the encouragement he has to go upon--all that he can find to keep his courage up as he knocks at their door, telling himself that his excuse--that of asking them to lend him a book--is a quite sufficient and legitimate one. He knocks, and Elizabeth's voice at once answers:

"Herein!"

It is clear that she takes him for the German waiter, Fritz. She remains in this belief even after he has opened the door, since she does not at first look up. She is alone--not in the pretty flowered room in which she had yesterday received him, but in the first and less adorned of the little series--one that he had, on his former visit, cursorily supposed to be chiefly used as an ante-room--sitting alone at a table, and before her are spread writing-materials, over which she is stooping. An odious and ridiculous thought darts, with a p.r.i.c.k, across his mind.

Is she sitting here, all alone, in order to write to Byng?

"I came----" he begins; and at the unexpected voice she looks up with a start:

"Oh, it is you!" she says, in a low key, glancing rather apprehensively at the closed door, which separates them from the inner room, in a manner which tells him that her parents are within.

"I came"--his voice almost unconsciously sinking to the level hers has indicated to him--"to ask you to lend me a book."

"A book!" she repeats doubtfully, with another and still more nervous glance at the shut door; "I am afraid that they are all in there."

"Oh, it is of no consequence!" rejoins Burgoyne hastily, unwittingly quoting the words of the immortal Mr. Toots; "it does not matter in the least."

As he speaks, he begins to retreat towards the door, but so slowly as to give her plenty of time to recall him had she so wished. But she does not. She only stands looking uncertain and distressed. He cannot take such a melancholy impression of her little face away for the whole night with him--it would give him the blues too seriously after this dismal day--so he takes a step or two forward again.

"Are not you rather lonely?" he asks, with an expressive look round.

She gives a small, uncomplaining smile.

"Oh no; I do very well. I am generally alone at this time of day; they like to have their evenings to themselves--at least, father likes to have mammy to himself; I am sure it is quite natural."

There is not the slightest trace of any sense of being aggrieved in either words or tone.

Again that picture of the adored Elizabeth of former days, of whose prattle her father was never weary, whose jokes were always considered so unequalled, and whose pre-eminence in favour was so allowed that her intercession and influence were always employed by the others as certain in their efficacy, rises before Jim's eyes.