Alas! Part 56

To-night the tables are turned. It is she that has stuck a knife into him. It is clear as day that she is _glad_ it is too late.

CHAPTER VIII.

"After all," says Mrs. Le Marchant presently, rallying a little, her naturally buoyant temperament--that temperament which she has transmitted with such curious fidelity to her child, coming to her rescue; "after all, there is no reason why you should see him, Elizabeth. There is no reason why she should see him, is there, Mr.

Burgoyne? It could serve no possible end--could it?--and only be exceedingly painful to them both. You will explain to him, will not you?

You will take any message from her? You will tell him that she really is not up to it, will not you? It is quite true, I am sure. You are not, are you darling? She is not, is she?"

The mother turns as she speaks eagerly from one to the other, addressing each in turn; but from neither does she obtain any answer.

"Or I would speak to him myself; if you thought that better," continues she, still interrogating them with her handsome, careworn eyes. "I would say anything you wished said to him, and I would be careful to say it as kindly as possible. I am sure he would understand; he would see the sense, the justice of it, would not he? There is no need for her to expose herself to such useless suffering, is there, Mr.

Burgoyne?"--appealing desperately to him by name, since he will not respond to any less direct address--"when either you or I are more than ready to s.h.i.+eld her from it, are not we?"

Thus apostrophized, Jim is compelled to break the silence, which seems to himself to wall him round like a petrifaction. It is to Elizabeth that he offers his hardly-won speech.

"I think I need not tell you," he says gravely, and with pa.s.sable steadiness, "that I would help you in any way I could."

She stands a moment or two irresolute, her features all quivering as if with pain; and yet, underlying and under-s.h.i.+ning the pain, something that is not pain. Then she puts out a hand impulsively to each. If the one that gives itself to Burgoyne had struck him on the mouth, instead of offering itself with affectionate confidence to his clasp, it could not have hurt him more than do those small fingers that lie in his, trembling with a pa.s.sion that is not for him.

"You are both very good to me," she says brokenly. "As to you, mammy, that is an old story. But I really believe that there is nothing disagreeable that you, too"--with a slight grateful pressure of the lifeless hand that so slackly keeps possession of hers--"would not do for me. But do not think me obstinate if I say that I think--I am sure--that it would be better--that it would hurt him less--if I spoke to him myself."

"It is not a question of what will hurt him least," cries Mrs. Le Marchant, with an agony of impatience in her tone. "The thing to be considered is what will hurt _you_ least. Mr. Burgoyne, am I not right?

Do tell her that I am! Ought not she to think of what will hurt her least?"

But Jim is incapable of coming a second time to her rescue. His eyes are painfully fastened upon Elizabeth, and he is watching the pain fall off, as it were, from her face, and the light spread rosily over it. Some instinct makes her withdraw that hand of hers which he has shown so little eagerness to retain, ere she says, in a low but perfectly firm voice:

"Well, then, I think it will hurt me least, too."

Five minutes later Jim has left the room--ostensibly to make arrangements for his friend's arrival, in reality because he cannot count upon his own self-control if he remain in it. The survivors of Elizabeth Le Marchant's acquaintance remain undecapitated. The widow-headed Life Guardsman and the baby-bodied cornet lie unregarded on the table, while Elizabeth herself is stretched along the floor, with her face pressed against her mother's knees. Jim has decided to sit up for his friend. He is perfectly aware that neither will the two women go to bed. But he has no desire that their vigil should be shared in common. It is equally impossible to him to take part in the noisy mirth of the rest of the hotel, which, having taken the place of their measureless daylight ennui, now boils over in ebullient laughter, in dancing, squeaking, and noisily scampering out of the public drawing-room into the hall and up the stairs. It is not till the clamour has declined, until, indeed, its total cessation tells him that the promiscuous revellers have retired to their apartments, that he issues from his, and takes possession of the now empty smoking-room, whence he can hear more distinctly than from his own bedroom any noise of wheels approaching the hotel. The wind has risen again, and it needs an ear very finely p.r.i.c.ked to dissever from its mad singing, and from the storming of the frantic rain, any lesser and alien sound. What a terrific night in which to be out on the raging sea! Worse even than that one last week, when the _Mose_ broke her shaft, and tossed for twenty-four hours at the mercy of the waves. Possibly the weather may have already yesterday been so rough at Ma.r.s.eille as to prevent his setting off. But the idea--at the first blush eagerly welcomed by him--is dismissed from his mind almost as soon as entertained. If the boat has started--and it is only under such heavy penalties that the mail-boats do not start, that this contingency hardly ever occurs--Byng will have started too. A terrific bang at the cas.e.m.e.nt seems to come as a comment upon this conviction. He will have started; but will he ever arrive? It is said that in eight years during which they have been running no catastrophe has ever sent one of this line of steamers to the bottom; but yet they are cranky little craft, with engines too big for them--built rather for speed than safety. The clock has struck, with a repet.i.tion that seems strangely frequent through the sleeping house: 11, 11.30, 12, 12.30.

"I will give him half an hour more," says the watcher to himself, "and then I will turn in."

Of this allotted half-hour only five minutes are yet left to run, when, in a lull in the hurricane, the sound which Jim's hearing has been so long stretched to catch--the sound of wheels on the gravel--is at length audible. During the last two hours he has heard many phantom wheels--many of those ghostly coaches that the wind drives shrieking through the winter nights. But these are real ones. Before the drowsy porter, nodding in his little den, can reach the hall-door, Jim has opened it--opened it just in time to admit a man who, his pace still further accelerated by the mighty hands of the pus.h.i.+ng blast, is bounding up the steps. If any doubt as to this person's ident.i.ty lingered in Jim's mind, his first words would dispel it.

"She is here? There is no mistake? She is here?"

"How late you are!" cries the other, apparently regarding the new arrival's utterance more as an e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n than as a question expecting or needing an answer. "Why are you so late? Did the engines break down?"

"She is here?" repeats Byng insistently, taking no notice of the queries addressed to him. "You have not deceived me? For mercy's sake say that you have not deceived me!"

"Why should I deceive you?" rejoins Jim impatiently. "Yes; certainly she is here."

They are in the hall by now--the hall which, the Grand Hotel being gasless, is lit by only one weak paraffin lamp, which the gust from the door, necessarily still open to admit of the carrying in of the traveller's bags and rugs, is making even more faint and flickering than its wont.

"You must have had a fine tossing!"

"I believe you; they all thought we were going to make a dinner for the fishes--ha, ha! All but I. I knew better. I knew that I could not come to grief when _she_ had called me to her."

Byng's hat is rammed down over his brows, and his fur coat turned up so high round his ears that it is impossible in the obscurity to see his face; but there is something in the tone of his voice--a loud, wild rollicking--that makes the idea cross Jim's mind that he has been drinking. What a shock it will give to Elizabeth if, in her covert vigil--he has no more doubt that she has been watching than that he has been doing so himself--she overhears that thick, raised voice! Prompted by this thought, he says hastily:

"Come into the dining-room. I told them to put something to eat for you there."

Byng complies; and when they have reached the empty _salle a manger_, whose whitewash looks weird and unnatural in the chill of the night, he sends his hat skimming down one of the long tables, and, grasping both Jim's hands in his, cries out, in the same loud tone of intoxicated triumph:

"Oh, my dear old chap, how good it is to see your ugly old mug again! If you had known--oh, if you had only known!--what I went through during the twenty-four hours after I sent you that telegram, when through every hour, through every minute and second of every hour, I said to myself, 'It may come _now_--my death-warrant may come _now_! In five minutes it may have come!' But it did not, it did not! I ought to have known"--with an accent of ecstasy--"that of her pitifulness she would relent at last.

She is infinitely pitiful, is not she? but I shall upbraid her a little--oh, do not be afraid; it will be gently, _most_ gently--for having kept me so long, so inhumanly long, upon my gridiron! I had always"--breaking into a rather wild laugh--"something of a tenderness for St. Lawrence, but during the last seven months I have loved him like a brother!"

He goes on again, with scarcely a pause, or apparently any consciousness of the unresponsive silence of his auditor:

"But what does it matter now?" beginning to stride about with his eyes cast up to the beamed ceiling and his lifted hands locked together--"what does it matter? 'After long grief and pain, to feel the arms of my true love round me once again!' You may think that I word it extravagantly," returning to Jim as he leans downcast and shocked upon one of the chairs of the monotonous _table-d'hote_ row; "but in the hope itself, the more than hope, there is nothing extravagant; you must own that yourself. If she had not meant to put an end to my long agony, she would not have sent for me; _not_ to stop me was to send for me."

"You are labouring under a mistake," says Jim coldly, and yet with an inward quaking as to the effect that his words may produce; "she had not the option of stopping you. By some accident I did not receive your telegram till four hours ago. She could not have stopped you if she had wished."

The idea, as I have already said, has occurred to Burgoyne that his companion is under the influence of intoxication; but either this is not the case, or the shock of the last words has the effect of instantly sobering him.

"I--I--do not understand," he says in a voice out of which all the insane exhilaration has been conjured as if by magic; "I do not follow you. What do you mean?"

"I mean," replies Jim, in a matter-of-fact, level tone, meant to have a calming effect upon his auditor, "that owing, I suppose, to my name being spelt wrongly--Bourgouin instead of Burgoyne--your telegram was given to someone else, and did not reach me till nine o'clock this evening."

Byng puts up his hand to his throat, and, unfastening the collar of his fur coat as if it were strangling him, throws back the coat itself. Now that he sees him freed from enveloping wrap and concealing hat-brim, Jim can realize the full amount of change and deterioration that are visible in his appearance; can see how bloodshot his eyes are; how lined his mouth; and how generally ravaged and dimmed his good looks.

"I am to understand, then, that--that she would have stopped my coming if she could."

Jim is silent. He cannot answer that question with any certainty even to himself.

"She would have escaped me again if she had had the chance! What am I saying?"--with a sudden access of terror in his tone--"she may have escaped me already! She may be gone! Tell me the truth--do not dare to tell me anything but the bare truth. I saw that you hesitated when I asked you whether she was really here. Is she gone?"

"Gone!" repeats Jim, with an exasperated jerk of the head towards the window, against which the rain and wind are hurling themselves with threefold rage, as if to recapture the victim just escaped them.

"To-night--in this storm? How likely! Come, be rational; try to keep your head, and let us have a truce to this ranting. I give you my word of honour that she is here, under this roof; asleep, I should hope, if your bellowings have not awoke her."

The latter clause may perhaps come under the head of a pardonable fiction; at all events, it has, despite its incivility, the desired effect of soothing, to some extent, the agitation of him to whom it is addressed.

"Asleep!" he repeats, while an ecstatic smile breaks over his handsome, dissipated face. "Good angels guard her slumbers! But"--with a rather ominous return of excitement--"are you sure that she _is_ asleep--that she has gone to bed yet? They used to sit up very late in Florence sometimes. If she has not gone to bed, why should not I see her; why should not I fall at her feet _now_--to-night?"

"My dear boy," rejoins Jim, with a praiseworthy attempt to answer this modest and sensible proposal with patient good-humour, "have you any idea what time it is? I should have thought it might have occurred even to you that 1.30 A.M. is scarcely a suitable hour for paying a morning call! Do not be a fool! Pull yourself together. I swear to you that she has every intention of seeing you to-morrow. Come"--trying to laugh--"you will not have long to wait! It is to-morrow already; and, meantime, sit down and eat something; you must be as empty as a drum."

But to this prudent if homely counsel Byng opposes an obstinate negation, adorned with excited a.s.severations that food shall never cross his lips until they have pastured upon his lady's pardoning hand.

The same prohibition does not, however, apparently apply to drink, as he pours more than half the bottle of happily not very potent wine, prepared for his refreshment, into a tumbler, and tosses it off at a draught. He offers an even stouter refusal to Burgoyne's suggestion that he should go to bed; and as he utters it a flash of cunning suspicion comes into his eyes, shocking his friend with a gleam as of possible and scarcely latent madness. Across the latter's brain darts the query, which had proposed itself more than once to him last spring at Florence:

"Is there insanity in Byng's blood"

Not certainly on the distaff side, the side of his eminently sane and wholesome mother; but can he be throwing back to some distempered ancestor?

"What security have I if I go to bed that she will not steal away from me in the night? It was in the night--almost in the night--that she stole away from me before."