Alas! Part 60

From here the sea is a lake, the distant mountains and the breakwater seeming--though in reality parted by how wide a wet waste--to join in embracing it. The mountains are dim and filmy to-day, Cape Matifou scarcely visible; but the Koubah shows white-domed on the hillside, and all the dazzling water is shot through with blinding light. The town, Arab-French, is dazzling too; the arcaded quay, the fortifications, one can scarcely look at any of them. Two or three steamers, with a little vapour issuing from their ugly black and red funnels, lie moored; and other smaller craft lift their spars against the heaven. Near by a man is sitting with his legs dangling over the water, fis.h.i.+ng with a line; and two or three Arabs, draped in the dignity of their poetic rags, lie couched round a fire that they have kindled. Beneath and around them is the banging and thundering of the sea. August noise! "A voice like the sound of many waters." Could there be a more awful comparison? Just underneath them, where the sea has made a greater breach than usual, it is boiling as in a caldron. Looking down and in, they see the water comparatively quiet for a moment; then, with a shout of its great jubilant voice, rus.h.i.+ng and surging in, tossing its mane. Elizabeth's eyes are resting on the heavenly sapphire plain.

"_How_ blue!" she says, under her breath; "one cannot believe that it is not really blue; one feels that if one took up a little in a spoon it would be just as blue as it is now."

"I dare say it will not _feel_ so blue when we are on it," replies Mrs.

Byng, lugging in somewhat awkwardly, as she feels, the subject which she finds it so hard to introduce, "as I suppose we shall be within a week now."

Her charity bids her not glance at her companion as she speaks, so she is not quite sure whether or not she gives a start.

"Mr. Burgoyne thinks that I am sanguine; but I am all for moving him as soon as possible; it cannot be too soon."

She tries to throw as much significance as they are capable of holding into the latter words, and feels that she has succeeded.

"Of course he may refuse to go," continues she, with a rather strained laugh. "Do you remember Victor Hugo's definition of heaven as a place where children are always little and parents are always young? I am continually quoting it. But, unfortunately, one's children will not stay little; they grow big, and get wills of their own, and it is quite possible he may refuse to go."

"Yes?" almost inaudibly.

"But"--reddening slightly at the patently-intended application of her next sentence--"anyone that was fond of him--anyone that liked him _really_ and--and _disinterestedly_, I mean, must see that the only happy course for him would be to go; that it would be his salvation to get away; they--they would not try to hinder him."

"I should think that no one would do that."

There is not a touch of asperity in the dove-soft voice; but there is a shade of dignity.

"When he was ill--while he was delirious" ("How dreadfully unpleasant it is!" in an anguished internal aside)--"I could not help hearing--gathering--drawing inferences."

The ardour of the chase has vanquished her charity, and she is looking at her victim. But, to do her justice, the success of her labours shocks her. Can this little aged, pinched face, with its dilated eyes, so full of woe and terror, be the same one that dimpled into riotous laughter half an hour ago at the sight of the two dirty old men, in Jewish gaberdines and with gingham umbrellas, kissing each other by the Mosquee de la Pecherie?

"Of course it was all incoherent," she goes on hurriedly, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the first expression that occurs to her as likely to undo, or at least a little modify, her work--"nothing that one could make sense of. Only your name recurred so incessantly; it was nothing but 'Elizabeth, Elizabeth.' I am sure"--with a remorseful if clumsy attempt to be kind, and a most uneasy smile--"that I do not wonder at it!"

In the narrow inters.p.a.ce between the blocks and the path--not more than a couple of fingers wide--how the sea forces itself! and up race its foam-fountains, throwing their spray aloft in such mighty play, as if they would hit heaven's arch. What exhilaration in its great glad noise, superb and battle-ready!

"I cannot express how distasteful a task this is to me"--in a tone that certainly gives no reason to doubt the truth of her statement; "but, after all, I am his mother; he is all I have in the world, and I am sure that you are the very last person who would wish to do him an injury."

"No; I do not think that I would do him an injury."

How curiously still and slow her voice is! Mrs. Byng has resolutely averted her eyes, so that her purpose may not again be shaken by the sight of the havoc she has wrought, and has fixed them upon some sea gulls that are riding up and down upon the merry waves, making them, with their buoyant motion, even more jocund than they were before.

"It seems an impossible thing to say to you--a thing too bad to apologize for--but yet I _must_ say it"--in a tone of excessive distress, yet firmness. "Under the circ.u.mstances, it would--would throw a blight over his whole life."

"Yes, I know that it would; I have always known it; that is why we left Florence."

"And very good it was of you, too! Not that I am quite certain of the judiciousness of the way in which you did it; but, however, I am sure you meant it for the best."

"Yes, I meant it for the best."

The sea-gulls have risen from the billow, and are turning and wheeling in the air. The light is catching their wings, and making them look like whitest silver. It seems as if they were at conscious play with it, trying experiments as to how they can best catch their bright playfellow, and again shake it off, and yet again recapture it.

"What a monster you must think me!" breaks out the elder woman presently.

Now that the impression has somehow been conveyed to her mind that her mission is likely to be completely successful, the full brutality of the method by which she has accomplished it bursts upon her mind.

"How treacherous! luring you out here, under the pretence of friendliness, to say such horrible things to you!"

Elizabeth's narrow hands are clasped upon her knee, and her small heart-broken, white face is looking out straight before her.

"No, I do not think you a monster," she answers--"you are a kind-hearted woman! and it must have been very, very unpleasant to you. I am quite sorry"--with a sort of smile--"for you, having to do it; but you are his mother. If I had been his mother, I should have done the same; at least, I suppose so."

"I am sure, if things had been different, there is no one that I should have--I do not know when I ever saw anyone whom I took such a fancy to.

If it had not been for the disparity--I mean, if he had been less young and unfit to take upon himself the serious responsibilities of life----"

How deplorably lame even to Mrs. Byng's ears sound her tardy efforts to place the grounds of her objection on a less cruel basis than that which she has already made so nakedly plain to be the real one! Even the sweet-mannered Elizabeth does not think it necessary to express grat.i.tude for such insulting civilities.

"I do not quite understand what you wish me to do," she says, with quiet politeness; "if you will explain to me----"

"Oh, I do not want to dictate to you; please do not imagine I could think of being so impertinent; but, of course, he will be asking for you. Since he came to himself, he has not mentioned you as yet; but of course he will. I am expecting it every moment; probably he has not felt up to embarking on the subject. He will ask for you--will want to see you."

"And you wish me not to see him?"

Her delicate suffering mouth quivers; but she is perfectly composed.

"Oh, but of course you must see him! you quite, _quite_ misunderstand me! Much chance there would be"--with a wretched stunted laugh--"of getting him away without a sight of you! How little you know him!"

Elizabeth does not dispute the fact of her want of acquaintance with Byng's character, nor does she help his floundering parent by any suggestion. She merely goes on listening to her with that civil white look, while the sportive sea-mews still play at hide-and-seek with the sun-rays on the wide blue fields of heaven.

"It is dreadful that I should have to say these things to you," says Mrs. Byng, in a voice of the strongest revolt and ire against her destiny--"insult you in this unprovoked way; but, in point of fact, you are the only person in the world who can convince him that--that--it is impossible--that it cannot be. Of course he will be very urgent and pressing, and I know how persuasive he is. Do not you suppose that I, his own mother, know how hard it is to refuse him anything? and of course, in his present weak state, it must be very carefully done. He could not stand any violent contradiction. You would have to be very gentle; dear me!"--with a fresh access of angry remorse--"as if you ever could be anything else."

This compliment also its pale object receives in silence.

"You know one has always heard that there are two kinds of 'No,'" goes on Mrs. Byng with another dwarfish laugh, which has a touch of the hysteric in it--"a woman's 'No,' as it is called, that means 'Yes'; and a 'No' which anyone--which even _he_--must understand to be final. If you _could_--I dare say I am asking you an impossibility--but if you _could_ make him understand that this time it is final!"

There is a silence between them. An unrulier billow than usual, yet more masterless in its t.i.tan play, is hurling itself with a colossal thud and bang against the causeway; and Elizabeth waits till its clamour is subsided before she speaks.

"Yes," she answers slowly, "I understand; thank you for telling me what you wish. I think I may promise that I shall be able to--that I shall make him understand that it is final."

A moment or two later they are on their way back to the Amiraute. The ocean is at its glorious pastimes all around them; the hill-climbing, s.h.i.+ning town smiles upon them from its slope; but upon both has fallen a blindness. The feelings of Mrs. Byng are perhaps the least enviable of the two.

They are nearly back at the beginning of the breakwater, when she stops short. Probably when cool reflection comes, when she is removed from the charm and pathos of Elizabeth's meek white presence, lovely and unreproachful, she will not repent her work; but at the present moment of impulse and remorse she feels as if the expunging of the last half-hour would be cheaply purchased by the sacrifice of six months of her remaining life.

"I suppose it is not the least use my asking you to try and forgive me--to make allowances for me?" she says, with unsteady-toned humility; "oh, _how_ you must hate me! If the case were reversed, _how_ I should hate you! How you will hate me all your life!"

The tears are rolling down her cheeks, and in an instant Elizabeth's hand has gone out to her. As it does so, the grotesque regret flashes across the elder woman's mind that any future daughter-in-law of hers will be most unlikely to be the possessor of such a hand.

"Why should I hate you? you cannot"--with a heart-wrung smile--"possibly think me more undesirable than I do myself; and even if it were not so, I do not think it is in me to hate anyone very much."

On their drive home they meet with one or two little incidents quite as funny as the old Jews kissing each other; but this time they do not move poor Miss Le Marchant to any laughter.