Alas! Part 53

Her laughter is quite dead now.

"Never at any ball in your life!" repeats he, his surprise betraying him into one of those flights back into the past for which she has always showed such repugnance. "Why, you used to love dancing madly! I remember your dancing like a dervish. What is more, I remember dancing with you."

"Oh, do not remember anything to-day!" cries she, with a sort of writhe in her voice; "do not let either of us remember anything! let us have a whole holiday from remembering!"

So saying, she moves on quickly; and yet with the dance gone out of her feet. It never quite comes back. They look into an Arab club, where men are squatting, playing with odd-looking cards and drinking muddy coffee.

Then a loud noise of jabbering young voices makes them peep in upon an Arab school, where a circle of little Moslems is sitting on the ground, scribbling Arabic on slates; while between the knees of the turbaned master a tiny baby scholar, of three or four, is standing in a lovely dull green coatlet. Elizabeth strokes the baby-learner's coppery cheek with her light hand, and says, with a laugh, that it seems odd to see little street-boys writing Arabic; but her laughter is no longer the bubbling, irrepressible joy-drunk thing it was before he had indulged in his tactless reminiscences; it is the well-bred, civil, grown-up sound that so often has no inside gladness to match it. In his vexation with himself for the clouding over of his little heaven that he himself has effected, he tries to persuade himself that it is caused by bodily fatigue.

"If I were asked," he says, by-and-by, looking down affectionately at her pallid profile, "I should say that you had had about enough of this; your spirit"--smiling--"is so very much too big for your body that one has to keep an eye upon you."

"It would not be much of a spirit if it were not," replies she, with a pretty air of perfectly sincere disparagement of her own slight proportions; "I know that I look a poor thing, but I am rather a fraud: I do not tire easily; I am not tired now."

"Bored, then?" with a slight accent of pique.

She lifts her sweet look, with a sort of hurry of denial in it.

"Most distinctly not."

"You would like to go on, then?"

"Yes."

"Or back?"

She hesitates, her eye exploring his with, as he feels, a genuine anxiety in it to discover what his own wishes are, so that her decision may jump with them.

"Yes--perhaps; I have really no choice."

He both looks at and speaks to her with a streak of exasperation.

"Do you never have a will--a preference of your own?"

It is evidently no unfamiliar thing to her to be addressed with causeless irritability. The recollection of her father's tone in speaking to her flashes back remorsefully upon Jim's memory. Is he himself going to take a leaf out of that book? It would be a relief to him were she to answer him sharply; but to do that is apparently not within her capabilities, though the tender red that tinges her cheek shows that she has felt his snub.

"In this case I really have not," she answers gently; "but I dare say that it was tiresome of me not to speak more decidedly; let us--let us"--another swift and apparently quite involuntary glance at him to see that she is not, after all, running counter to his inclinations--"let us go home!"

So they go home. It is near sun-setting as they drive along the Boulevard de la Republique, the fitting end to so princely a day. At the quay the moored vessels lie, their masts and spars making a dark design against an ineffable evening sky of mother-of-pearl and translucent pink. The sea, which to-day has not been of sapphire, but of "watchet-blue," pierced and shot with white, now copies exactly the heavens. It, too, shades from opal to translucent pink. How many changes of raiment there are in the wardrobe of the great wet mother!

"If I had as many gowns as the Mediterranean, how well-dressed I should be!" says Elizabeth, with a smile.

It is the first time she had spoken since they had set off on their return-drive. She is lying back, with her hands carefully s.h.i.+elding in her lap a few little crockery pots that she has bought of a fat Turk for some children at her hotel Her face looks tired; and yet over its small area is spread an expression of content that makes his heart warm. Is it only the pageant of sky and ocean that has called forth that look of real, if pa.s.sing, happiness on the features of her who is always so tremblingly sensitive an instrument for all influences of beauty and grandeur to play upon? or has his own neighbourhood anything to say to it? Before he can give himself an answer to this anxious question, she speaks again.

"You do not mind my not talking, do you?" she asks, half apologetically, and yet with a confidence in his sympathy that still further quickens the beats of his already not very still heart.

"No, I am sure you do not. Somehow--it is a great gift--you always feel in tune with one, and one does not chatter most when one is most greatly pleased, does one? Oh, what a treat you have given me!"

As she speaks, her humid eyes travel from his face to where, beyond the long Atlas range, delicately toothed and cut out, rises the gold-washed snow of the Kabyle mountains, that retire majestically invisible on dull days, and only come out, candescent and regal, when the great sun rides in pomp. Above their heads wild plumes of deep rose, that it seems ridiculous to call clouds, tuft the sky.

Jim's look has followed his companion's; the chins of both are in the air; the cheerful _va et vient_ of the boulevard is lost upon them. They see neither the Frenchmen nor plump Frenchwomen drinking coffee outside the cafes, nor the idle _indigenes_ leaning draped against the sea-wall.

(Never does that industrious race seem to attempt any severer exertion.)

"Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired."

But it is brought back to life with a jump.

"_Arretez! arretez!_" cries a female voice. "Jim! Jim! do you not see us? _Arretez! arretez!_"

Obedient to his ears, Burgoyne's eyes make one bound from the heavenly spectacle down to earth, and alight upon the Wilsons' carriage, which, going in the same direction as himself, has just been brought to a standstill alongside of his fiacre, by the solemnly beautiful, yellow-jacketed native coachman.

It is, of course, Cecilia's voice that has apostrophized him, but oh, portent! does his vision, so lately recalled from the skyey bowers, play him false? or is it really the moribund Sybilla, stretched beside her, with only two instead of three cus.h.i.+ons at her back, with a bonnet on her head--he did not even know that she possessed a bonnet--and with a colour in her cheek and a l.u.s.tre in her eye that may owe their origin either to the freshness of the evening air, or to the invigorating properties of the conversation of the very ordinary-looking young man seated opposite to her?

In a second Jim has leapt out of his own vehicle, and gone to the side of the other. It is a perfectly futile impulse that leads him to do so.

Not all the leaping in the world from her side now can alter the fact that he has been driving _tete-a-tete_ with Elizabeth Le Marchant, and that the Wilson sisters have seen him so doing; but yet it is a dim instinct of preservation towards, and s.h.i.+elding of her, that leads him to adopt this useless course of action. It is Cecilia who has summoned him, and yet, when he reaches her side, she does not seem to have anything particular to say to him. Sybilla is the one to address him.

"A miracle! a miracle! I know you are saying to yourself!" cries she, in a sprightly voice; "and well you may! This is the miracle-monger!"

indicating with a still sprightlier air her _vis-a-vis_. "Dr. Crump, let me present to you Mr. Burgoyne--Jim, our Jim, whom I have so often talked to you about."

The person thus apostrophized responds by a florid bow, and an over-gallant a.s.severation that any person introduced to his acquaintance by Miss Sybilla needs no further recommendation.

"It is an experiment, of course; there is no use in pretending that it is not an experiment," continues she, with a slight relapse into languor; "but"--lowering her voice a little--"they wished me to make the effort."

It is a favourite allocation of Sybilla's that any course of action towards which she is inclined is adopted solely under the pressure of urgent wishes on the part of her family. Burgoyne has long known, and been exasperated by, this peculiarity; but at present she may say what she pleases; he hears no word of it, for his ear is p.r.i.c.ked to catch the sentences that Cecilia is leaning over the carriage-side to shoot at Elizabeth.

"Oh, Miss Le Marchant! is it you? I beg your pardon, I did not recognise you at the first moment. One does not recognise people--does one?--when one is not expecting to see them"--is an intended sting lurking in this implication? "How are you? How do you like Algiers? I hope Mrs. Le Marchant is well. What a long time it is since we met! I hope we shall see something of you."

(No, evidently no sting was meant. Cecilia, with all her faults, is really a good soul, and he will take her to hear the band play next Tuesday.)

There seems to him to be a slight falter in the tone with which Elizabeth responds, and her voice sounds curiously small and low; but that may be merely owing to its flute quality, following upon and contrasting the other's powerful organ.

It is not till the two parties have again separated, and that he is once more seated by her side in the fiacre, that he dares steal a look at her face to see how plainly written on it are the traces of vexation caused by a meeting which has produced in his own breast such acute annoyance.

Good heavens! it is even worse than he had expected. Down the cheek nearest to him two good-sized tears are unmistakably trickling. No doubt the consciousness of the mysterious story attaching to her past makes her smartingly aware of how doubly discreet her own conduct should be--makes her bitterly repent of her present indiscretion.

He is a strait-laced man, and it seems to him as if there were something gravely compromising to her in this _tete-a-tete_ drive with himself, in the known absence of her parents at Hammam Rhira. Why was he fool enough this morning to admit to Cecilia that they had gone thither? He had no business to have led her into temptation, and she had no business to have fallen into it. Remorse and irritation give a tartness to his tone as he says:

"After all, I do not think you need take it so much to heart."

"Take what to heart?" she asks, in unaffected surprise, turning her full face, and her eyes, each with one hot raindrop dimming its slate-blue, upon him. "Oh, I see"--a sudden enlightenment coming to her, and changing her with instant spring from a snowdrop to a carnation--"I see what you mean; but you are mistaken. I--I--it had not occurred to me; I was only thinking--only remembering that the last time I saw her was at--at Vallombrosa."

_Vallombrasa!_ Is he never to hear the last of Vallombrosa?

CHAPTER VII.

The latest waking impression left on Jim's fancy is that it is the golden rule of Elizabeth Le Marchant's life to comply with any and every request that is made to her; moreover, that in her mind the boundary-line which parts the permitted from the unpermitted is not so clearly defined as, did she belong to him (the naked hypothesis makes his strait-laced heart give a jump), he should wish it to be. If on the morrow, with the sun s.h.i.+ning and the leaf-shadows dancing on the fretted balcony-wall, he invite her to some fresh junket, he is sure that she will readily and joyfully acquiesce; that her spirits will go up like rockets at the prospect; and that her one anxiety will be that she may be sure to hit in her choice upon the form of dissipation most congenial to him. He will therefore not invite her. He will have a greater care for her reputation than apparently she has for it herself. Not until the return of her parents, not until the difficulties of intercourse with her are centupled, and the pleasure minimized, will he again seek her.