Alas! Part 58

He catches his breath. It is quite a quarter of an hour since he began his watch. How quiet they are! There is a murmur of voices, but there is nothing that in the least indicates violence. Before his eyes there flashes in grotesque recollection the hideous picture in the _Police News_ which ill.u.s.trates the high words with which the catastrophe of the groom and kitchenmaid had been heralded. He has been making a mountain out of a mole-hill; has been exaggerating his friend's emotional temperament, naturally further heightened by sleeplessness and want of food, into incipient insanity. If he were mad, or at all tending that way, would he be talking in the low rational key which he obviously must be? It is evident that her presence, her eye, her--yes, what more likely?--her touch have soothed and conjured away what of excessive or perilous there was in his emotion.

They have been together half an hour now. All danger is certainly over.

Why should he any longer continue his officious and needless watch?--superfluously spying upon them?

Relieved as to what he had thought his worst fear, and yet with an uncommon bitterness about his heart, he turns to withdraw, and his hand is already on the lock of the door which leads into the corridor, when suddenly, without any warning, there reaches his ear the noise of a loud, cras.h.i.+ng fall, followed--accompanied, rather--by a piercing scream.

In infinitely less than a second he finds himself on his knees beside the prostrate body of Byng, who, with blood pouring from his forehead, is stretched upon the floor of the _salon_. Even at this second there flashes upon him, ludicrous and dreadful, the memory of the _Police News_. This scene has a grotesque likeness to the final one of the groom and kitchenmaid series, only that in the present case the heroine, instead of staggering backward with the top of her head flying up to the ceiling, is hanging unharmed over her fallen lover.

"Are you hurt?" cries Jim in frantic anxiety, looking at her across the prostrate figure, and unable to eradicate from his mind the revolver idea. "Did he hit you? I did not hear a shot."

"Oh no, no! but he," fetching her breath in terrible gasps, and hanging over the bleeding man with that utter abandonment of all disguise, in which a great naked grief sweeps away our sophistications--"he is dead!"

"Oh no, he is not," answers Jim hastily, tearing open Byng's waistcoat and laying his hand upon his heart. "He has only fainted. Get some water! Have you got any salts? No; do not lift his head"--seeing that she is agonizedly trying to raise his p.r.o.ne head and rest it upon her knees--"he had better be as flat as he can. Quick, some water!"

She does not need to be twice told. In an instant she has sprung to the table, and brought thence the china jug out of which she is wont to water her flowers, and also the big cut-gla.s.s bottle of smelling-salts with which Jim has often seen poor Mrs. Le Marchant solacing herself when racked with that neuralgic headache which means worry. He splashes water out of the one upon Byng's ashy face, and holds the other to his pale nostrils; while Elizabeth, once more flinging herself upon her knees, wipes the blood from his temples with her little useless gossamer inch of handkerchief.

"How did it happen?" asks Jim rapidly. "What did he do to himself?"

The heads of the two ministrants are very close to each other as they bend together over the swooned youth. Jim can see a little smear of Byng's blood upon one of her white cheeks. The sight gives him a shudder. Byng seems to have made her more his own by that gory baptism than by all his frenzied vows and tears.

"Oh, I do not know," she answers, still fetching both breath and words with difficulty. "He was standing up, and he seemed quite right; and then, all of a sudden, in a minute, he went down like a log, and hit his forehead against the sharp corner of the table"--with a convulsive s.h.i.+ver at the recollection. "I ought to have saved him! I ought; but I was not quick enough. I stood stock-still, and now he is dead! You say that he is not; but I am sure he is dead!"

"Oh no, nonsense! he is not," replies Jim brusquely, thinking a certain harshness of manner the best recipe for her. "He is alive, sure enough; and as for the cut on his forehead, now that you have wiped the blood away, you can see for yourself that it is not at all a deep one. It is merely a big scratch. I have often had a worse out hunting from a bramble, in jumping through a hedge. Oh, Mrs. Le Marchant, here you are!

That is all right. We have had an accident, you see. He has fallen down in a faint, and given himself a bit of a knock. That is all; do not be frightened. It looks worse than it is--Oh, M. Cipriani, vous voila!

Envoyez chercher un medecin tout de suite! Il y a un M. Crump"--catching in his dest.i.tution at the thought of even Sybilla's objectionable friend.

But hereupon half a dozen voices--for by this time even more than that number of inmates of the hotel have thronged into the little room--raise themselves to p.r.o.nounce another name--the name of one who both stands higher in medical fame and is more quickly procurable. In search of him Zameth, the porter, is instantly despatched, and meanwhile about the inanimate body sympathizers stand three deep, until reluctantly dispersed by a hint of a nature so broad as not to be misunderstood from Jim, to the effect that the patient would have a better chance of coming to himself if he were allowed to have a breath of air. By the time the doctor arrives--there is some small delay before he appears--all are got rid of, and, Mrs. Le Marchant having gone to give directions for having Jim's room arranged for the sick man, both because it is on the ground-floor and also of a better size than that allotted to him, Jim and Elizabeth are once again left _tete-a-tete_.

Once again they kneel on either side of the p.r.o.ne figure. How dreadfully dead and how extravagantly long it looks! Once again he sees that blood-smear on her face. It is just above her one dimple, and stands out in ghastly incongruity over that little pitfall for love and laughter.

How pa.s.sionately he wishes that he might ask her to go and wash it off!

If he did she would not hear him. She has no ears left, no eyes, no sense, save for that livid face, splashed with the water which has not brought him back to life, and with the red drops still slowly trickling from the wound on his brow, and which have stained here and there the damp tendrils of his hair--for that livid face and for the flaccid hands, which she rubs between her own with an ever more terrified energy, as he still gives no sign of returning consciousness.

By-and-by he is taken out of her custody. She is robbed even of the wretched satisfaction of chafing his poor senseless fingers. On the arrival of the doctor he is carried off, and laid upon the bed that has been made ready for him. She follows them miserably as they bear him staggeringly across the hall--a powerfully-built young man of over six feet high, in the perfect inertness of syncope, is no light weight--and looks hungrily over the threshold of the bedroom; but when she attempts to cross it Jim puts her gently back.

"No, dear, no!" he says. (He is almost sure afterwards that for that once in his life he calls her "dear.") "You had better not. We think he is coming round, and if you are the first person he sees when he comes to himself it might be bad for him--might hurt him. You would not hurt him, would you?"

"No, I would not hurt him," she answers slowly. And so turns in her utter tractableness, and goes away meekly without a word.

It is evening again now, almost the same hour at which Jim and Elizabeth were beheading photographs twenty-four hours ago. Twenty-four hours! It feels more like twenty-four years. This is what he says to himself as he once again opens the door of the Le Marchants' apartment. It is the first time during the whole day, except to s.n.a.t.c.h a couple of mouthfuls of food, that he has left Byng's side; and it is only due to the fact that Mrs. Le Marchant is supplying his place, and has sent him on a message to her daughter, that he has quitted his post. He knows that she has meant to do him a kindness in despatching him upon this errand; but he is not sure that it is one.

Elizabeth is not in the _salon_, but the screen that masks the door separating that room from the little alcove beyond is folded back. Over the doorway is a hanging of Eastern embroidery--as to the meaning of the strange gold scrolls that look like Arab letters on whose red ground Elizabeth and he have often idly speculated. He pushes it aside, and sees her standing with her back towards him, the flimsy muslin window-curtains drawn back as she looks out on the night. The alcove is on ordinary occasions scarcely ever occupied, and there is something uneasy and uncomfortable that matches the wretchedness of her other circ.u.mstances in finding her standing there alone and idle.

The elements have long finished their raging, and fallen to boisterous play. It has been a fine day, and though the sun has long laid down his sceptre, he has pa.s.sed it on with scarcely diminished, though altered, radiance to his white imitator. It is broad moonlight--startlingly broad. The moon hangs overhead, with never a cloud-kerchief about her great disk. The winds that, loudly sporting, are up and abroad have chased every vapour from the sky, which is full of throbbing white stars. Before he reaches her side she has heard him, and turned to meet him, with a mixed hunger and pitiful hope in her wan face. She thinks that he has come to fetch her. He must kill that poor hope, and the quicklier the more mercifully.

"Mrs. Le Marchant sent me. I came to tell you that he has recovered consciousness. You see, you were wrong"-with an attempt at a rea.s.suring smile--"he is not dead, after all. He is conscious; that is to say, he is not insensible; but I am afraid he is not quite himself yet, and you must not--must not mind--must not be frightened, I mean--if he begins to shout out and talk nonsense by-and-by: the doctor says it is what we must expect."

"And may I--mayn't I--will not you let me?"

What a quivering voice the hope has, and yet how alive it is! However clumsily, and with whatever bitter yearnings over the pain he is causing her, he must knock it on the head at once.

"Go to him?--impossible! quite out of the question! The great object is to keep him perfectly quiet, and if once he caught sight of you--"

"But if he is not himself," interrupts she, with a pathetic pertinacity, "he would not know me. I could not do him any harm if he did not know me, and I might do something--oh, ever such a little thing for him! If you knew what it was to stand here and do nothing--_do nothing_ indeed!"--with a change of tone to one of agonized self-reproach;--"have not I done enough already? Oh, would anyone have believed that it would be I that should kill him!"

She turns back to the window again, and dashes her forehead with violence against the frame. Outside the tall date-palm is shaken through all its plumes by the loud breeze; it is swaying and waving and blowing, and not less is its solid shadow cut out by the moons.h.i.+ne's keen knife on the terrace, wavering and shaking too, as if convulsed by laughter.

The porch of the hotel--mere whitewash and plaster, as memory and reason tell one that it is--stands out in glorified ivory like the portals of such a palace as we see in vision, when

"Good dreams possess our fancy."

"I can't have you talking such nonsense," says Jim, in an exceedingly kind and not very steady voice, for his own feelings are horribly harrowed; and on thinking over the scene afterwards, he cannot swear that, at this point, he did not pa.s.s a most brotherly arm for one moment round the poor little heaving shoulder, which is shaking almost as much as the palm-tree's shadow. "He is not going to die; he is not thinking of dying. n.o.body has killed him--least of all you."

She makes him no answer, nor lifts her stricken head, over which he looks out, while the ghostly mirth shakes the landscape; at his wits'

end, in search of consolation. Below waves a sea of foliage, out of which the strong elfin light has stolen all the colour. From that colourless dark ocean rises far away to the right the dazzling little snowy dome of a mosque, showing like a transfigured mushroom; and down below the rounding bay is seen laying its foam-lips in white glory on the land.

"Dr. Stephens feels sure that he must have had a sunstroke. You know that he has been in the East. He was a month in Cairo; the sun has great power there, even in winter, and he is sure to have exposed himself recklessly. He was on his way home--had got as far as Paris, it seems--when he accidentally heard that you were here. Since then, no doubt, he has neither eaten nor slept; so you see how little you are to blame. You know that I told you how odd he was before you even saw him.

Do not you remember?"--trying to recall every circ.u.mstance that may tend to rea.s.sure her--"I warned you that you would have to be careful what you said to him?"

His words have a very different effect from that intended by him.

"Oh, that is why I cannot forgive myself!" says she, with what sounds almost like a cry of physical pain. "You _did_ warn me; I had no excuse.

In his state I ought never--it was murdering him to tell him--"

She breaks off. To tell him what? Jim bites his lips hard to hinder himself from putting this question, as he again, in mercy to her, looks away from her out into the night.

The moon has swum over the housetop by now; but one can see her handiwork as plainly as ever in the broad argent fringe, like the border of a cloak, that marks where the waves are breaking on the beach.

One often talks of a fringe without really meaning that there is much likeness to one; but to-night the moon-washed breakers really do wear that aspect--a fringe of silver with long silver tags and ends.

"But I was so deceived," she continues, with that wail still in her voice; "he was not violent. After what you had told me, I expected him to be violent; but he was not: he was quite gentle and quiet, and he did beg so hard, and I was so glad to see him again, that I felt I was giving in--that I should give way altogether if I did not tell him--tell him at once, without giving myself time to think; and so I did"--growing very breathless and incoherent--"and in a second; and then all in a minute, without any warning, just as if I had shot him through the head, he went down with a crash. I did not see it, for I was not looking at him. I could not bear to look at him while I told him. I had both hands over my face, and then--and then--I heard him fall."

What can Jim say to her? Fear lest any dastardly unchivalrous curiosity may seem to pierce through whatever sympathetic question he might put to her keeps him dumb, and stupidly staring at the bowing, ironically merry palm.

"And now," she goes on, lifting her face, and he is shocked to see how livid it is in the moonlight, "he will go out of the world thinking me much worse than I really am, for I had not time to tell him all. He heard only the bare fact; he did not hear what excuse I had--that I was not really so wicked as--as--he will die thinking me."

The sob with which she ends alarms him by its kins.h.i.+p to a convulsion.

"I do not know what to say to you," he says, desperately making a s.n.a.t.c.h at her two hands, as if by the violence of his grip he could convey to her some little portion of the deep compa.s.sion that is swelling up in his heart for her; "I am so much in the dark. No, no, no!" with a return of that terror lest this e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n should seem the outcome of any inquisitiveness; "I do not want you to tell me anything! What is more, I will not listen to you if you attempt it; but what there is not the least manner of doubt about is that his fainting had no sort of reference to what you said to him: he would have fainted whatever you had said to him, or if you had said nothing at all. He was as mad as a hatter when he went in to you. It is all part of the same thing--over-fatigue, sunstroke. But he is not going to die"--with a hurried trip back to his former strain of consolation--"he is not thinking of it; I promise you, I give you my word of honour"--becoming perfectly reckless and completely insensate--"that he shall not!"

But she is too strangled with sobs to make any rejoinder.

"He shall have the best of nursing," goes on Jim. "I have telegraphed for a nurse to Nice. How astonis.h.i.+ng it is that in a place of this size you cannot get a decent sick-nurse! I hoped we might have caught the one who nursed General Smith before----"

He stops abruptly, with a too tardy recollection that the allusion is not a happy once, since the General died two days ago. Unfortunately, she also remembers, as is evidenced by the strong shudder that pa.s.ses over her.

"If he dies, will he be buried in that deep narrow, red grave that they showed us in the Protestant cemetery, and which they said that they always kept open for English visitors? If he dies! if he dies! Oh, if I could but have told him! if he would but have waited for me to tell him how it really was!"