Alas! Part 59

CHAPTER X.

Though "February Fill-d.y.k.e" was never and nowhere truer to her name than this year, and in Algiers--coming laden with wet days to make the green Sahel, if possible, greener than it was before; yet the inhabitants of the Grand Hotel do not again, for a matter of three weeks, relieve their ennui or let off their energies in far from Dumb Crambo, or loud charade. The voice of the battledore is silent in the entrance-hall, and the shuttlec.o.c.k sleeps. M. Cipriani has scarcely had to do more than mention his request that they would lay aside their more noisy pastimes, for they are, most of them, rather good-natured persons than otherwise, since, indeed, it is quite as uncommon to be very ill-natured as to be very selfless, or very foolish, or very wise. Those of them who have been fortunate enough to be present at the catastrophe have carried away such a moving image of a wounded Adonis, apparently several yards long, stretched upon Mrs. Le Marchant's Persian carpet, that they have infected those less happy persons who know of him only by hearsay with a compa.s.sionate interest scarcely inferior to their own.

The only person in the hotel who makes much noise is poor Byng himself, and for awhile he falls it with clamour enough to furnish two or three of those b.u.mp suppers of which, not so long ago, he was a conspicuous ornament.

There had never, even when he was in his wits, been much disguise as to the state of his feelings; now that he is out of them, the whole house rings with his frantic callings upon the name of Elizabeth, uttered in every key of rage, expostulation, tenderness, and appeal. These cries reach Elizabeth herself as she sits cowering in that one of the little suite of rooms which is nearest the door of entrance--sits there cowering, and yet with the door, through which those dreadful sounds penetrate to her, ajar, in order the better to hear them--cowering, and for several days alone.

Owing to various accidents, similar in their results, though differing in character, almost a week elapses from the first breaking out of Byng's malady before the arrival of either the hospital nurse or of Mrs.

Byng. When the latter event occurs, Mrs. Le Marchant retires from her post at the sick man's bedside with the same unostentatious matter-of-factness with which she had a.s.sumed it, and Elizabeth is no longer alone. But to set against this advantage is the counterbalancing evil that, after the arrival of Byng's mother, she can no longer steal out, as she had before done a hundred times a day, to his door, to glean fragments of tidings from any outcomer thence. She is never able to repeat those little surrept.i.tious excursions after that occasion when Mrs. Byng, coming suddenly out upon her, pa.s.ses her with such speaking, if silent, hostility and scorn in her tired and grief-stricken eyes, that the luckless spy slinks back sobbing to her own tender mother; and there Jim, flying out a while after to carry them a crumb of rea.s.surance, finds them, to his indignation, mingling their bitter tears.

Whatever else his faults may be, Mr. Burgoyne is a man of his word; he certainly keeps his promise to Elizabeth that Byng shall be well nursed.

He keeps his other promise, too--though that is more by good luck than good management--that Byng shall not die. Whether to hinder his friend from being made a liar, or because he himself is loth to leave a world which he has found so pretty, cruel, and amusing, Byng does not die--Byng lives.

By her 25th day February has dried her tears, though they still hang on her green lashes, and a great galleon of a sun steers through a tremendous sea of blue, as Jim persuades Byng's mother to go out for her first delicious drive in that fresh and satin-soft air of the Algerian February, which matches our best poets' May. He takes her along the Route des Aqueduques, that lovely route which runs high along the hillside among the villas above the town, so high as to be on a level with the roofs of the lofty-standing Continental and Orient Hotels. It is a most twisting road, which in curves and loops winds about the head of narrow deep gorges, full of pale olive-trees, caroubiers, and ilex.

Below lies the red-roofed white town. Slowly they trot past the campagne of the "English Milor," "L'Epicier Anglais," and many others, over whose high walls bougainvillias light their now waning purple fires, and big bushes of fleurs de Marie stoop their milky stars.

Mrs. Byng's eyes, sunk and diminished by watching and weariness, have been lying restfully on the delightful spring spectacle--on the great yellow sorrels by the wayside; she now turns them tear-brimmed to her companion.

"I could jump out of my skin!" she says shakily. "What a sun! what a sea! And to think that, after all, we have pulled him through."

Jim's only answer is a sympathetic pressure of the extremely well-fitting glove nearest him. If w.i.l.l.y had died instead of lived, her gloves would have fitted all the same.

"But we are not out of the wood yet," continues she, with a shake of the head. "He is cured, or nearly cured, of one disease, but what about the other?"

"What other?" inquires he, obstinately stupid, and with somewhat of a heart-sinking at the prospect of the engagement which he sees ahead of him.

How many elbows the road makes! It seems to have been cut in places right through the wet red rock, now overhung by such a torrent of vegetation.

At the head of one of the deep clefts that run up from the sea they pause, and look down upon a second sea of greenery that would seem to belong to no month less leafy than June. To June, too, belong the murmur and hum and summer trickle of running water at the ravine bottom.

"I do not see why, if he goes on as swimmingly as he is now doing," says Mrs. Byng in a restless voice--"why we should not get him off in a week, even if he were carried on board the boat."

"A week? Is not that rather sanguine?"

"I do not think so, the sooner the better; and during that week I should think she could hardly make any attempt to see him."

"Has she shown any signs of making one hitherto?"

"Well, no"--rather grudgingly. "In fact, between you and me, considering that it is they who have brought him into this plight, I think they might have shown a little more solicitude about him. In the last ten days I do not believe that they have been once to the door to inquire."

"You do not seem to be aware," says Jim, in a voice which, though quiet, is not pacific, "and that is odd, considering how often I told you, that until you came Mrs. Le Marchant nursed him like a mother; not like a mother, indeed"--correcting himself with a somewhat malicious intention--"for mothers grow flurried, and she never did."

"You mean that she nursed him better than I do," in a jealous tone.

"Well"--more generously--"how shabby of me to mind, if she did! I do not mind. G.o.d bless her for it! I always thought"--compunctiously--"that she looked a nice woman."

"She _is_ nice--as nice"--descending into a slang unworthy of his ripe years--"as they make 'em."

"And the girl--I suppose one can hardly call her a girl--_looks_ nice too."

They are pa.s.sing the Casbah, the solid Moorish fortifications, about which now hang only a few gaitered, sunburnt, baggy Zouaves.

Jim has a silly hope that, if he maintains an entire silence, the current of his companion's ideas may drift into another channel; but he is soon undeceived.

"I suppose that she must have been quite, _quite_ young when--when those dreadful things happened that w.i.l.l.y talked about in his delirium?"

"Is it possible"--indignantly--"that you take the ravings of a fever-patient au pied de la lettre?"

"No, I do not; but"--with an obstinate sticking to her point--"there was a substratum of truth in them; that was only too evident."

Jim shuts his teeth tight together. His vow of silence is harder to keep than he had thought.

"Since he came to himself he has never mentioned her to me," continues his companion anxiously; "has he to you?"

"No."

"I quite tremble whenever he opens his lips, lest he should be going to begin the subject, and one could not contradict him yet awhile; he is so quixotic, it is quite likely that he may have some distorted idea that her being--how shall I say?--_fletrie_--is an additional reason for standing by her, rehabilitating her, marrying her. He is so chivalrous."

They have left the Prison Civile and the Zouave Barracks behind them. A longer interval than that usually supposed to elapse between a remark and its rejoinder has pa.s.sed, before Jim can bring himself to utter the following sentence with the calmness which he wishes:

"Has it never occurred to you that she may be chivalrous too?"

Perhaps Mrs. Byng does not readily find a response to this question; perhaps it sets her off upon a train of speculation which does not conduce to garrulity. Certain it is that, for the rest of the drive, she is as silent as Jim could wish her. It is a sharp surprise to him two days later to be mysteriously called outside the sick man's door by her, in order to be informed that she has invited Miss Le Marchant to accompany her on a drive.

"I went to call upon them," she says, avoiding--or so he fancies it--his eye as she speaks; "and I asked the girl to drive with me to the Mole, and get a good blowing about."

"How kind of you!" cries Jim, a flash of real pleasure in his serious look; "how like you--like your real self, that is!"

And he takes her hand to thank it by a friendly pressure. But she draws it away rather hastily.

"Oh, it was nothing so very wonderful--nothing to thank me for."

She seems confused and a little guilty, and escapes with some precipitation from his grat.i.tude. Mrs. Byng is not a woman addicted to double-dealing, and if she ever makes any little essays in that direction, she does them, as on this present occasion, villainously.

Burgoyne is not at the hall-door to help the ladies into the carriage when they set off. Perhaps this may be because he is in attendance upon the invalid. Perhaps because--glad as he had at first felt and expressed himself at their friendliness--some misgiving may, upon reflection, have beset him at so strange a conjunction. At all events, it is only Fritz who throws the light Arab rug over their knees and gives them his encouraging parting smile.

Poor Miss Le Marchant needs his encouragement, for, indeed, it is in a very frightened spirit that she sets forth on her pleasuring. But before the horse-bells have jingled to the bottom of Mustapha Superieur, her spirits are rising. The sun s.h.i.+nes, and he has shone so seldom in Elizabeth's life that a very few of his beams, whether real or metaphorical, suffice to send up her quicksilver. She does not consciously admit for a second the hope that in the present overture on the part of her companion lies any significance. But yet a tiny trembling bliss now and then taps at her heart's door, and she pushes it away but feebly.

Before they have reached the Amiraute, where they are to get out, she has thanked Mrs. Byng with such pretty and unsuspecting grat.i.tude for bringing her, and has made her laugh so irrepressibly by her gay and nave comments upon the motley pa.s.sers-by, that the latter is filled with a compunctious regret that a person with such lovely manners, and such a sense of a joke, should have made so disastrous a fiasco of her life as renders necessary the extremely distasteful errand on which she herself is at present bound. At the Amiraute, as I say, they get out; and, turning under a groined roof that looks as if it were the crypt of a church, find themselves presently upon the long stone breakwater that runs out into the bay. It was built, they tell us, in old days by the wretched Christian captives; but the sea has taken care that not much of the original labour of blood and tears has survived.

The wind is high, and the suns.h.i.+ne ardent and splendid. On their right as they walk, with the wind officiously helping them from behind, is a world of dancing sapphire, each blue billow white-tipped. On their left are great blocks of masonry, built strong and square, with narrow intervals between to break the might of the water. How little their strength has availed against that of their tremendous opponent is seen at every step, since nearly half the blocks are overthrown or in semi-ruin; though the date engraved upon them shows for how few seasons they have been exposed to the ravages of the tempestuous sea. They walk on to the end, till they can go no further, since, just ahead of them, the waves are rolling in half-fierce play--though the day is all smiles--over the breakwater; and even where they stand, their footing is made unsure by lengths of slimy seaweed that set them slipping along.

Elizabeth insists upon the elder woman taking her slight arm--insists upon carrying her wraps, and generally waiting upon and ministering to her. From the bottom of her heart Mrs. Byng wishes that she would not, since every instance of her soft helpfulness, so innocent and spontaneous, makes more difficult the answer to that question which she has been asking herself ever since they set foot upon the Mole:

"How shall I begin?"

It is unanswered still, when, retracing their steps a little, they sit down under the lee of one of the half-wrecked blocks to enjoy the view.