Alas! Part 64

"It has been great good luck for me that you have stayed so long; I know that it is out of pure kindness that you have done it, and it has made all the difference to me. I--I am quite set up again now, thanks to you; and--and summer is coming on, and I shall do very well--capitally!"

She has detected--what is, indeed, pretty obvious--the deep distress of his face and voice, and, in her habitual unselfishness, her one thought is to relieve him of any self-reproachful misgiving that he is doing aught cruel in robbing her of the support of his companions.h.i.+p. In her tone is nothing but the meekest grat.i.tude. It is her misfortune, not her fault, that in it there is not cheerfulness too. But her "gentle physic," instead of curing, seems to aggravate his ill.

"It must come to an end some time or other!" he murmurs wretchedly, as if to himself.

"Yes!"

Dead silence.

Below the slight eminence where they sit, the road winds white, and upon the opulent low green hills on its further side, what a banquet of colour! On one steep slope the plough is driving its difficult furrows, turning up the rich red earth, shaded with deeper claret and lighter pink stains.

Beneath, a square of stone-pines looks like a green velvet handkerchief spread on the hillside, and over the rest of the upland eucalyptus, and olive, and cactus hold their riot of various verdure; while, on the tiptop of everything, against a weirdly pale-blue sky-field, a Moorish villa lifts its white flank.

How long have they both been staring dully at that fair prospect before Elizabeth again speaks!--

"You were a very good friend to me!"

She had not meant that past tense as an arrow to shoot into his heart; but it sticks there, barbed.

"I do not know how."

"And friends--real, good friends--should not have concealments from each other, should they? They should tell one another about themselves?"

"Yes."

A pause.

"I have often wished--often tried to tell you about myself; but I could not. I never could! I can tell you to-day if you wish, if you care to hear. Do you care?"

"_Do I care?_"

What a small battlefield those three words make for the anger and agony they express to fight upon!

Another longer pause.

She has taken off her hat, and now pa.s.ses her handkerchief over her damp forehead.

"I shall be all right when I have once begun, but it is bad to make a start."

"Do not make it! do not tell me! I adjure you not to tell me! it hurts you too much!"

"It would hurt me more to let you go without telling you. Do you remember"--rus.h.i.+ng desperately into her subject--"at the time you stayed with us at the Moat, that there was a great talk among us of my having my portrait painted?"

He knits his brow in an eager straining of his memory.

"Yes, I recollect."

"Father was wonderfully proud of me in those days; it seems impossible to believe it now"--with a pa.s.sing look of incredulity at her own statement--"but he was."

"Yes, yes."

"Do you remember all the arranging and planning as to who was to be the artist, and that he was to come and stay in the house to paint it?"

Jim has put his hand up to his forehead as if to quicken the return of those faint and distant impressions which are coming out in stronger and stronger colours on memory's surface.

"Yes, yes; he was not an Englishman, was he? We used to laugh about him"--adding stroke to stroke in order to convince her of the accuracy of his recollections--"used to call him the 'distinguished foreigner.'"

"Did we? Yes"--slowly--"I remember now that we did. Well"--gathering herself up for a supreme effort, panting painfully, and turning her head quite aside so that he may have no glimpse of her face--"he came, and he stayed two months, and at the end of those two months I--I--ran away with him!"

CHAPTER XIV.

VALE?

One would have thought that Jim had been in some measure prepared for the just-fallen blow, both by the overheard fragments of Mr. Greenock's conversation with the Devons.h.i.+re clergyman at Florence last year; by the acc.u.mulated evidence of there being some blight upon Elizabeth's life; and, lastly and chiefly, by the ravings of Byng. But there is something so different from all these, so infinitely more dreadful, in hearing this naked statement from her own lips, that it stuns him as much as if he had never received any hint of that ruinous secret in the background of her life.

Having now uttered it, she stops, either to pick up her own spent strength or to give him the opportunity for some question or comment.

He makes neither.

"I thought--I hoped--that you had guessed, from what Mr. Byng said. I believed that when he was not himself----"

Again she breaks off, but still no sound comes from Jim.

"You understand, of course, that that was what I told him. I wanted to tell him the rest, but that time he could not hear it, and the last time he--he--did not care to hear it."

His continued muteness must daunt her, for she here makes a longer pause than before. Indeed, it is only the fear lest she should mean it for a final one that enables him to force out the two husky monosyllables:

"Go on."

She is always most obedient, and she now obeys.

"He came only two days after you left us; that was why the sight of you was so--so painful to us at first. It was not your fault, but we could not help mixing you up with him. You remember how we tried to avoid you--how discourteous we were? You forgave us afterwards, but you must have observed it."

The listener makes a slight motion of a.s.sent.

"He was a Hungarian, and had been recommended to father by Sir ----, who, as you know, is always so extraordinarily kind to struggling artists, and who thought highly of his talent, and wished to get him commissions. He was almost starving in London; that was one great reason, I think, why father employed him."

Even at this moment the thought darts across Jim's mind that he has never known Elizabeth miss an opportunity of implying some praise of that father whose harshness towards herself he has so often had an opportunity of witnessing.

"He was quite young--not more than twenty-three--and he looked very ill when he first came; indeed, he was really half starved. It has always been the surest pa.s.sport to mammy's heart to be poor and sick and down in the world, and nothing could have been kinder than they both were to him."

"And well he repaid their kindness," says Jim, indignation at last giving him words.

She puts out her hand, as if to stop him.