Alas! Part 62

"You will have to give her away!" she cries, as soon as she can again speak distinctly. "Father will marry her, of course, and you must give her away. I am sure she will insist upon it."

"She will have to make haste, then," returns he, recovering enough from his first stupefaction to join Cecilia in her mirth; "for I shall not be here much longer."

"You are not going away?"--raising her eyebrows, and with a tinge of meaningness in her tone which vaguely frets him.

"Why should not I go?" he asks irritably, his short and joyless merriment quite quenched. "What is there for a man to do here? I have stayed already much longer than I meant. I am engaged to meet a friend at Tunis--the man with whom I went to the Himalayas three years ago; we are going to make an excursion into the interior. I am only waiting for some guns and things. Why should not I go?"

"There is no earthly reason," replies she demurely; "only that I did not know you had any such intention. But then, to be sure, it is so long since I have seen you--not, I think," glancing at him for confirmation of her statement rather too innocently, "since the lovers--ha! ha!--and I met you and Miss Le Marchant driving on the quay."

CHAPTER XII.

Elizabeth's feeble tap at Byng's door is instantly answered by the nurse, who, opening it smilingly to admit her, the next moment, evidently in accordance with directions received, pa.s.ses out herself and shuts it behind her. Elizabeth, deprived of the chaperonage of her cap and ap.r.o.n, and left stranded upon the threshold, has no resource but to cross the floor as steadily as a most trembling pair of legs will let her.

The room is a square one, two of its thick walls pierced by Moorish windows. Drawn up to one of those windows--the one through which Jim had caught his first glimpse of Elizabeth on the night of his arrival--is the sick man's sofa. At the side of that sofa his visitor has, all too soon, arrived. She had prepared a little set speech to deliver at once--a speech which will give the keynote to the after-interview; but, alas! every word of it has gone out of her head. Unable to articulate a syllable, she stands beside him, and if anyone is to give the keynote, it must be he.

"This is very, _very_ good of you. It seems a shame to ask you to come here, with all this horrid paraphernalia of physic about; but I really could not wait until they let me be moved into another room."

She has not yet dared to lift her eyes to his face, in terror lest the sight of the change in it shall overset her most unsure composure.

Already, indeed, she has greedily asked and obtained every detail of the alteration wrought in him. She knows that his head is shaved, that his features are sharp, and that his voice is faint; and when, as he ceases speaking, she at last wins resolution enough to look at him, she sees that she has been told the truth. His head is shaven, his nose is as sharp as a pen, and his voice is faint. She has been told all this; but what is there that she has not been told? What is his voice besides faint?

"Will not you sit down? It seems monstrous that I should be lying here letting you wait upon yourself. Will you try that one?" pointing to the chair which is figuring at the same moment so prominently in Jim's tormented fancy. "I am afraid you will not find it very comfortable. I have not tried it yet, but it looks as hard as a board."

She sits down meekly as he bids her, glad to be no longer obliged to depend upon her shaky limbs, and answers:

"Thank you; it is quite comfortable."

"Would not it be better if you had a cus.h.i.+on?"--looking all round the room for one.

His voice is courteous, tender almost, in its solicitude for her ease.

But is she asleep or awake? Can this be the same voice that poured the frenzy of its heartrending adjurations into her ear scarce a month ago?

Can this long, cool, white saint--he looks somehow like a young saint in his emaciation and his skull-cap--be the stammering maniac who, when last she saw him, crashed down nigh dead at her feet, slain by three words from her mouth?

At the stupefaction engendered by these questions, her own brain seems turning, but she feebly tries to recover herself.

"I--I am so glad you are better."

"Thank you so much. Yes, it _is_ nice; nice to be

"'Not burnt with thirsting, Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting.'

Do you remember Keats?"

After all, there is something of the original Byng left, and the ghost of his old spouting voice in which he recites the above couplet gives her back a greater measure of composure than could almost anything else.

"It is nice, only one would like to be able to jump, not 'the life to come'--ha! ha!--but the convalescence to come. My mother is even more impatient than I am. She has made up her mind that we are to be off in three days, even if I am carried on board on a shutter."

She can see now that he is very much embarra.s.sed--that his fluency is but the uneasy cover of some emotion--and the discovery enables her yet further to regain possession of herself.

"I should think," she says in her gentle voice, "that you would be very glad to get out of this room, where--where you have suffered so much."

"Well, yes; one does grow a little tired of seeing

"'The cas.e.m.e.nt slowly grow a glimmering square;'

but"--with a rather forced laugh--"at least, I have had cause to be thankful that there is no wall-paper to count the pattern of. I have blessed the white wall for its featureless face."

She moves a little in her chair, as if to a.s.sure herself that she is really awake. That stupefaction is beginning to numb her again--that hazy feeling that this is not Byng at all, this polite invalid, making such civil conversation for her; this is somebody else.

"But I must not tire myself out before I have said what I want to say to you," he continues, his embarra.s.sment perceptibly deepening, while his transparent hand fidgets uneasily with the border of the coverlet thrown over him, "or"--laughing again--"I shall have that tyrant of a nurse down upon me, and--and I do wish--I have wished so much--so unspeakably--to see you, to speak to you."

She sits immovable, listening, while a ray of something--can it be hope?

why should it be hope?--darts across her heart. After all, this may be Byng--her Byng; this strange new manner may be only the garment in which sickness has dressed his pa.s.sion--a worn-out garment soon to drop away from him in rags and tatters, and in which cannot she already discern the first rent? After all, she may have need for her armour--that armour which, so far, has seemed so pitifully needless.

"I knew that it would be no use asking leave to send for you any sooner; they would have told me I was not up to it--would have put me off with some excuse; so I kept a 'still sough.' Do you know that I never mentioned your name until to-day? But it has been hard work, I can tell you; for the last two days I have scarcely been able to bear it, I have so _hungered_ to see you."

Her eyelids tremble, and she instinctively puts up her hand to cover her tell-tale mouth. Surely this is the old language. Surely there is, at all events, a s.n.a.t.c.h of it in his last words; and again that p.r.i.c.k of illogical joy quickens the beats of her fainting heart, though she tries to chide it away, asking herself why she should be in any measure glad that the love which she has come here for no other purpose than to renounce, still lives and stirs.

"You may think I am exaggerating, but in point of fact I cannot by any expression less strong than the gnaw of downright hunger convey the longing I have had to see you."

He pauses with a momentary failure of his still feeble powers.

She catches her breath. Now is the time for her to strike in, to arrest him before he has time to say anything more definite. Now is the time for her to fulfil her promise, her inhuman promise, which yet never for one instant strikes her as anything but irrevocably binding. Does he see her intention, that he plunges, in order to antic.i.p.ate it, into so hurried a resumption of his interrupted sentence?

"To see you, in order to beg--to supplicate you to forgive me for my conduct to you."

She gives an almost imperceptible start. This ending is not what she had expected, not the one to defend herself against which she has been fastening on her buckler and grasping her s.h.i.+eld. The words that it demands in answer are not those with which she has been furnis.h.i.+ng herself, and it is a moment or two before she can supply herself with others. He must be referring, of course, to his last meeting with her--that one so violently broken off by the catastrophe of his collapse.

"I do not know what I am to forgive," she says, half bewildered. "You were not accountable for your actions. You were too ill to know what you were doing."

"Oh, you think I am alluding to that last time," cries he, precipitately correcting her. "No, no; you are right. I was not accountable then. You might as well have reasoned with a wild beast out of a menagerie. I was a perfect Bedlamite then. No"--going on very rapidly, as it in desperate anxiety to make her comprehend with the least possible delay--"what I am asking you--asking you on my knees--to forgive me for, is my whole conduct to you from the beginning."

The two white faces are looking breathlessly into each other, and though of late he has been tussling with death on a bed, and she has been walking about, and plying her embroidery, and dining at a public table, hers is far the whiter of the two. It must be the unwonted exertion of talking so much that makes him bring out his next speech in jerks and gasps.

"I forced my acquaintance upon you at the very beginning; I watched you like a detective; I beset you wherever you went; I pestered you with my visits. Jim always told me that it was not the conduct of a gentleman, but I would not believe him--not even when"--how difficult it is! he finds it almost as hard work as his mother had done upon the Mole--"not even when, by my importunities, I had driven you away--obliged you to rush away almost by night from a place you liked--a place you were happy in--to escape me. And I have no excuse to offer you--none; unless, indeed, as I sometimes think, my mind was off its balance even then. I express myself wretchedly!"--in a tone of deep distress--"but you will overlook that, will not you? You will--will understand what I mean?"

She makes an a.s.senting motion with her head. At this moment she cannot speak: she will be able to do so again directly, but she must have just a minute or two. Yet she must not leave him for an instant in doubt that she understands him. Oh yes, she understands him--understands that he is apologizing for having ever loved her; that he is awkwardly trying to draw the mantle of insanity over even the Vallombrosan wood. It is true that he does it with every sign of discomfort and pain; and he looks away from her, as Mrs. Byng, too, had found it pleasanter to do.

"Do you remember what Schiller said when he was dying? 'Many things are growing clearer to me.' I thought a good deal of those words as I lay over there"--glancing towards the now neatly-arranged and empty bed.

"One night they thought it was all up with me--I heard them say so. They did not think I was conscious, but I was; and it did strike me that I had made a poor thing of it, and that if ever I was given the chance I would make a new start."

Again that little a.s.senting movement of her fair head. How perfectly comprehensible he still is! How well she understands that he is renouncing her among the other follies of his "salad days"--college bear-fights, music-halls, gambling clubs. Well, why should not he? Has not she come here on purpose to renounce him? Can she quarrel with him for having saved her the trouble?

"And I thought that I could not begin better than by falling on my knees to you. I wish I could fall on my real knees to you!"--with a momentary expression of extreme impatience at his own bodily weakness--"and ask you most humbly and tenderly and reverently to pardon me."