Alas! Part 52

"And therein sat a lady fresh and fayre, Making sweet solace to herself alone.

Sometimes she sang as lowd as lark in ayre, Sometimes she laught, as mery as Pope Joan."

Jim's first care on returning to his hotel is to ascertain that the departure for Hammam Rhira has really taken place, and, having been rea.s.sured on this point, retires to his own bedroom to reconnoitre the terrace, upon which it gives. The sun has long drunk up the rain from the tiles, and the chairs have been set out again. The hotel guests, in all the sociability of their after-luncheon mood, are standing and sitting about. The widow Wadman, with great play of eyebrow and lip, is pacing up and down in arch conversation with her habitual victim.

s.n.a.t.c.hes of her alluring talk reach Jim behind his muslin curtain as she comes and goes:

"I think that caged birds ought to be _loved_!" "The Prophet was a wise man, was not he? he knew a little about us," etc.

In her usual place, aloof from the rest of the company, Elizabeth is sitting in a clinging white gown of some woolly stuff. With a dainty white kerchief twisted about her head, and a bundle of many-tinted Eastern stuffs on her knees, she looks like a little Romney. Now and again, as fragments of the widow's siren strains reach her ears, he sees her lips curl up into delighted laughter; but, for the most part, she seems to be looking round rather uneasily, as if seeking something or someone. Can it be himself that she, in her innocence of being observed, is on the watch for? He has no right to be playing the spy on her in any case. It is clear that, dressed as she is, she cannot be meditating going out. He must not frighten her by any too direct or sudden attentions. In a little while the other occupants of the terrace will drift away, and he will stroll out and join her, and together they will watch the shade of the ficus-tree, lengthening over the red flags. But she presently baffles his calculations by rising, and, with her rainbow-tinted pile of brocades clasped in her slender arms, slowly pa.s.ses into the house. Has she retreated thither for good? and will he have to frame some new flimsy excuse for knocking at her door? But again he is out of his reckoning, for in about a quarter of an hour she re-issues, dressed for walking; and after one more lingering and, as it seems to him, disappointed glance around her, paces, a solitary little figure, down the hill. He lays his watch before him, and, having counted five minutes on its dial-plate, sets off in pursuit. He overtakes her just as she reaches the point where the lane debouches into the highroad. She stands, looking rather disconsolately, first up the hill, then down it, evidently uncertain which direction to choose.

"You cannot make up your mind?" he says, pausing beside her, and taking off his hat.

She gives a slight start, and a friendly, pleased smile runs all over her face and up into her eyes--a smile that makes him say to himself confidently that it _was_ he whom her glance had been seeking on the terrace.

"Which do you advise?"

"I advise the town."

He has long known her teachableness, so it is no great surprise to him that she at once turns in the direction counselled.

"As I am going there myself, will you allow me to walk a little way with you?"

He makes the request with respectful diffidence; and she, after one small troubled look, evidently given to the memory of her father, a.s.sents.

They set off down the hill together, the air, sharp after the rain--as sharp, at least, as Algiers' stingless air ever is--bringing the colour to Elizabeth's cheeks, as she steps along light-heartedly, scarcely refraining from breaking into a run, down the steep incline. Her spirits are so evidently rising at every yard that he hazards his next step.

"I am going to see the Arab town; Miss Strutt says that I ought."

"She meant you to ask her to show it you!" cries Elizabeth, with a laugh; "but she was quite right--it is delightful; I am sure you will like it."

"You have been there?"

"Yes, once or twice; not half so often"--regretfully--"as I should like to have been."

Dare he speak upon the last innocent hint? But while he is doubting she goes on:

"You must take care not to lose yourself; it is such a puzzling place; all the streets are exactly like each other."

"You do not feel inclined to show me the way about it?"

He throws out the suggestion in a semi-bantering voice, so that if it meet with obvious disapproval he may at once withdraw it. She stops suddenly stock-still, and faces him.

"Are you speaking seriously? It would be very delightful; but do you think I might? do you think I ought?"

She lifts her eyes, widely opened, like a child's at hearing of some unexpected treat, to his. How astonis.h.i.+ngly clear they are! and how curiously guileless! He has not the least doubt that she will sweetly acquiesce in his decision, whichever way it tends; and, for a second, a movement of irritation with her for her pliability crosses his mind. She ought to be able to have an opinion of her own. While he hesitates, she speaks again.

"It is just the afternoon to do something pleasant on," she says wistfully, and yet gaily too. "Oh, how good the air tastes! and how dearly I love the sun!"--lifting her face with sensitive lips, half open, as if to suck in his beams, to the great gold luminary pouring down his warmth through the pepper-trees upon them. "But I will take your advice; I know of old"--with a pretty flattering smile--"that you always give good advice. Do you think that I ought--do you _really_ think that I ought?"

He throws conscience to the winds, and although not two hours ago he had professed to Cecilia his inability to decide upon the propriety or impropriety of any given course of female action, now answers with an almost brutal decisiveness:

"I do not think that there is the smallest doubt about it."

A relieved look crosses her features.

"Then I am sure it is all right," she says, with a joyful surrendering of her judgment into his keeping, and so, once again, steps along with her quick feather-light feet at his side.

For the moment she is the happier of the two, since he is not perfectly pleased either with himself or her. It is in vain that he tells himself that it is no babe whom he is beguiling; that, difficult as it is to believe it, those limpid eyes have looked at the sun for seven-and-twenty years. He still has a lingering sense of discomfort at having availed himself, for his own profit, of her ductility. And yet, five minutes later, he takes yet further advantage of that quality in her. They have reached the Plateau Sauliere, and the stand of fiacres that "stationnent" there. Jim pauses.

"It is a good distance to the Arab town, I fancy, and very tiring walking when you get there."

"It is as steep as the side of a house; we shall be like flies on a wall," cries she delightedly.

"It would be a pity to be too tired to enjoy it before you got there, would not it?" says he doubtfully, and eyeing her bright slenderness with an air of uncertainty as to her powers of endurance. "Had not we better--would you mind--our driving there?"

"I am not at all tired," replies she; "I do not feel as if I ever should be tired to-day; but if you think it better----"

Still he looks at her dubiously. To him there appears to be a much greater degree of the compromising in a _tete-a-tete_ drive than in a walk. In the one case the meeting may have been accidental; in the other there can be no mistake as to the deliberate intention. But either this does not strike Elizabeth, or she thinks, "In for a penny, in for a pound"; or, lastly, and most probably, having given up her judgment into his keeping, she finds it easiest and most natural to acquiesce in whatever he may propose.

The ungenerous thought flashes across him that if this is the principle on which she has guided her life, it is small wonder if she have made s.h.i.+pwreck of it. He hails a fiacre, and silently hands her in, and again they are off.

Elizabeth has disclaimed fatigue, and yet the restful position is evidently agreeable to her delicate body; and she thanks him so gratefully for his thought of her that his hard thoughts of her dissolve into remorse, and by-and-by change into an enjoyment almost as entire and uncalculating as her own.

Elizabeth has astonis.h.i.+ng powers of enjoying herself. If he had not known that fact before, the afternoon would have revealed it to him.

She must have driven through the French town almost every day since her arrival, and yet its cheerful white-shuttered houses, its boulevards of glossy-leaved ficus-trees, its cafes, its arcaded streets with their polyglot promenaders, seem to fill her with as lively a pleasure as if she had but just landed from the steamboat that brought her.

The three Spahis, eternally sitting in a row on a bench outside some general officer's quarters, robed in their great red cloaks, with muslin-swathed swart heads and long red-leather boots, dimly descried beneath the stately sweep of their mantles, sitting there motionless, solemn and silent as the Fates; a venerable Arab, only to be distinguished from Abraham or Isaac by his carrying a vulgar brown umbrella; a short Kabyle seen in back view, with his rope-bound headdress, his brown-and-white striped frock, and his bare red legs striding along, looking exactly like a ludicrous and indelicate old woman; a Biskrah water-carrier, poising a great burnished copper pot on his shoulder; two little baggy trousered white ladies waddling along; a dozen of smart blue Turcos. She is enraptured with them all.

They leave their fiacre in the Place de la Cathedrale, and enter upon the mysterious recesses of the Arab town. Up and down endless flights of steps, up street after street--if streets they can be called, that are not wider than a yard in their widest part--and above their heads the rafter-supported houses lean together, letting scarce a glint of daylight drip down upon the dusky path far below.

They pa.s.s arched doorways, with pretty designs in plaster--doorways whose doors open inwards upon mysterious interiors--house or court, or mosque or Marabe. All along stand tiny shops, like wild-beast dens, as far as light and s.p.a.ce go, lit only by the tempered light--in reality, only semi-darkness--that enters in front. How can they see to work--plait straw, for instance? as the three ebon-black negroes are doing, upon whom they stare in, asquat upon the ground. The turbans, and the red sashes, and the burnouses glimmer out of the little dim frontages, where charming pierced-bra.s.s Moorish lamps hang and swing aloft; and tempting piles of dully splendid brocades and bright gold-laminated gauzes gleam from the crowded shelves.

The narrow streetlets are full of unbusy, un-hurrying Easterns, hideous old negresses grinning like monkeys, idle Arabs sauntering along in their lazy grace, draped like Greek statues, sauntering along between the blue-washed walls that look in their effective variation upon the blinding whitewash as if some of the sky-colour had rubbed off upon them.

Jim and Elizabeth have paused, in their leisurely strolling and staring, to look from the straight shadowed alley in which they are standing up a long flight of steps to a low carved doorway, and a bit of starch-blue wall at the top. Down the steep flight a veiled, trousered woman is waddling, her immense pantaloons waggling awkwardly as she descends.

Elizabeth stands still, shaking with laughter at the sight. Jim laughs too.

"There is no expense spared in material there, is there? It would not be a bad dress for a fancy ball. Did you ever go to a fancy ball as a Moorish lady?"

Her laughter lessens, though her face is still alight with mirth.

"I never was at a fancy ball."

"_Never?_"

"Never; I never was at any ball in my life."