CHAPTER XXX.

"The world's a city full of straying streets,

And Death the market-place where each one meets."

The words are scarcely out of Mrs. Byng's mouth before she adds, in a

changed key, and with an altered direction of the eyes--

"Is this person looking for you? He seems to be coming straight towards

us."

Jim turns his head at her speech, and at once recognises in the figure

hastening towards them the porter of the Anglo-Americain hotel. The man

looks strangely, and carries a slip of paper, unfolded and open, in his

hand.

In a second Jim has sprung to his side, has snatched the paper, and is

staring at its contents. They are hardly legible, scrawled tremblingly

with a pencil, and for a moment he cannot make them out. Then, as he

looks, in one horrible flash their import has sprung into his eyes and

brain.

"_She is gone; come to us!_"

Mrs. Byng is reading too, over his shoulder.

In going over the scene in memory afterwards, he believes that she gives

a sort of scream, and says, "Oh, what does it mean? It is not true!" But

at the time he hears, he knows nothing.

He is out of the church; he is in the fiacre waiting at the door: he is

tearing through the streets, with the hot summer air flowing in a quick

current against his face. He thinks afterwards at what a pace the horse

must have been going, and how the poor jade must have been lashed to

keep it up to that useless speed. At the time he thinks nothing, he

feels nothing. He rushes through the court of the hotel, rushes through

what seem to be people; he thinks afterwards that they must have been

waiters and chambermaids, and that there came a sort of compassionate

murmur from them as he passed. He is up the stairs, the three flights;

as he tears up, three steps at a time, there comes across his numbed

intelligence a flash of wonder why they always give Amelia the worst

room. He is at that door, outside which he has spent so many hours of

breathless listening; he need no longer stay outside it now. It is open,

inviting him in. He is across that, as yet, unpassed threshold, that

threshold over which he was to have stepped in careful, soft-footed joy

to-morrow. He has pushed through the people--why must there be people

everywhere?--of whom the room seems full, unnecessarily full; he is at

the bedside. Across the foot a figure seems thrown--he learns afterwards

that _that_ is Sybilla. Another figure is prostrate on the floor,

heaving, in dreadful dry sobs; that is Cecilia. A third is standing

upright and tearless, looking down upon what, an hour ago, was his most

patient daughter. They have left her alone now--have ceased to tease

her. They no longer hold a looking-glass to her pale mouth, or beat her

tired feet, or pour useless cordials between her lips. They have ceased

to cry out upon her name, having realized that she is much too far away

to hear them. Neither does he cry out. He just goes and stands by the

father, and takes his thin old hand in his; and together they gaze on

that poor temple, out of which the spirit that was so much too lovely

for it has fleeted. Later on they tell him how it came about; later on,

when they are all sitting huddled in the little dark _salon_. Cecilia is

the spokeswoman, and Sybilla puts in sobbing corrections now and again.

"She was sitting up the moment before; the nurse was holding her propped

up--she said she was so tired of lying. She had been quite laughing, the

nurse said."

"Almost laughing," corrects Sybilla, who has forgotten to lie down upon

her sofa, and is sitting on a hard chair like anyone else.

"Quite laughing," continues Cecilia, "at her own arm for being so thin.

She had pushed up her sleeve to look at it, and had said

something--something quite funny, only the nurse could not remember the

exact words--and then, all in a minute, she called out, in quite an

altered voice, 'The salts! Quick! Quick!' and her head just fell back,

and she was gone!"

"And she had not bid one of us good-bye!" cries Sybilla, breaking into a

loud wail.

Then comes a dreadful and incongruous flash of that ridiculous, which is

the underlining to all our tragedies, across Jim's mind at this last

lament. The going, "taking no farewell," naturally seems to Sybilla the

most terrible feature in the whole case, to her who has so repeatedly

taken heartrending last farewells of her family.

"Who would ever have thought that I should have survived her?" pursues

Sybilla, still sobbing noisily, and without the least attempt at

self-control. Cecilia, who is sitting with her head on her arms resting

on the table, lifts her tear-blurred face and answers this apostrophe in

a voice choked with weeping.

"Jim always did; he always said that you would see us all out."

Again that dreadful impulse towards mirth assails Burgoyne. Is it

possible that, at such an hour, he can feel a temptation to laugh out

loud? But, later again, this horrible mood passes; later, when they have

all grown more composed, when their tears run more gently, when their

voices are less suffocated, and they are telling each other little

anecdotes of her, aiding each other's memories to recall half-effaced

traits of her homely kindness, of her noiseless self-denials, of her

deep still piety.

They bring out her photographs, mourning over their being so few, and

such old and long-ago ones. There are effigies by the dozen of Cecilia,

and even touching presentments of Sybilla stretched in wasted grace upon

her day bed; but it had never occurred to anyone--least of all to Amelia

herself--that there is any need for _her_ image to be perpetuated. And

now they are searching out, as treasures most precious, the scanty faded

likenesses that exist of her, planning how they can be enlarged, and

repeated, and daintily framed, and generally done homage and tender

reverence to.

Jim listens, occasionally putting in a low word or two, when appealed to

to confirm or correct the details of some little story about her. But it

seems to him as if his anguish only begins when the stream of their

reminiscences turns into the channel of her love for him.

"Oh, Jim, she _was_ fond of you! We were none of us anywhere, compared

to you; she worshipped the ground you trod upon. We all knew--did not

we, Sybilla?--did not we, father?--when you used to be away for so long,

and wrote to her so seldom----Oh, I know!"--hastily--"that you were not

to blame, that you were in out-of-the-way places, where there was no

post: but there were sometimes long gaps between your letters; and we

always knew--did not we?--when she had heard from you by her face, long

before she spoke."

Next it is--

"How she fired up if anyone said anything slightingly of you: she never

cared in the least if one abused herself; she always thought she quite

deserved it; but if anybody dared to say the least disparaging thing of

_you_"--it is pretty evident, though at the moment in his agony of

preoccupation the idea does not occur to Jim, that this has not been an

uncommon occurrence--"she was like a lioness at once."

"The saddest thing of all," says Sybilla, taking up the antiphonal

strain, "is that she should have died just as she was beginning to be so

happy!"

_Just beginning to be so happy?_ And he might have made her heavenly

happy so easily, since she asked so little--for eight years. The groan

he utters is low in proportion to the depth of the fountain whence it

springs, and they do not hear it. If they did, they would in mercy stop;

instead, they go on.

"Did you ever see anything so radiant as she was--that last fortnight?

She used to say that she was quite ashamed of being so much more

fortunate than anyone else, she seemed always trying to make up to us

for not being so happy as she. Oh, she was happy that last fortnight!"

This time he does not groan, he seems to himself to have passed into

that zone of suffering which cannot be expressed or alleviated by the

utterance of any sound. Perhaps, by-and-by, Cecilia dimly divines

something, some faint shadow of what he is enduring; for she begins with

well-intentioned labour to try to assert lamely that Amelia had always

been happy, well, _fairly_ happy, as happy as most people. You could not

expect, in this dreadful world, to be always in the best of spirits, but

she had never complained. And, oh! that last fortnight she _had_ been

happy, it was a pleasure to see her! And, oh, what a comfort it must be

now to Jim to think that it was all owing to him.

She puts out her hand kindly to him as she speaks, and he takes it, and

silently wrings it in acknowledgment of the endeavour--however

clumsy--to lay balm upon that now immedicable wound.

He stays most of the night with them; and when at length, overcome with

weariness and sorrow, they rise from their grief-stricken postures to go

to bed, he kisses them all solemnly, even the old man. He has never

kissed any of them before, except once or twice Cecilia on some return

of his from the Antipodes, and because she seemed to expect it.

* * * * *

Three days later Burgoyne leaves Florence; and, as his arrival in the

City of Flowers had been motived by Amelia alive, so is his departure to

companion her dead.

END OF PART ONE.

PART II.

Elizabeth.

CHAPTER I.

"It was a chosen plot of fertile land,

Amongst wide waves set like a little nest,

As if it had by Nature's cunning hand

Been choycely picked out from all the rest,

And laid forth for ensample of the best.

No daintie flower or herb that grows on ground,

No arborete with painted blossomes drest,

And smelling sweete, but there it might be found

To bud out faire, and throwe her sweet smell all around."

Time has stepped upon another year; not much more than stepped, since

that year's first month is not yet out; and Burgoyne has stepped upon

another continent before we again rejoin him. There are few, if any of

us, who, in the course of our lives, have not had occasion to wish that

certain spaces in those lives might be represented by the convenient

asterisks that cover them in books; but this is unfortunately impossible

to Jim, as to the rest of us; and he has fought through each minute and

its minuteful of pain (happily no minute can contain two minutefuls)

during the seven months that have elapsed since we parted from him. At

first those minutes held nothing but pain; he could not tell you which

of them it was that first admitted within its little compass any alien

ingredient; and he was shocked and remorseful when he discovered that

any such existed. But that did not alter the fact. He has not sold his

guns; on the contrary, he has bought two new ones, and he has visited

his old friends, the Rockies. Since Amelia's funeral--immediately after

which he again quitted England--he has seen no member of his dead

betrothed's family, nor has he held any intercourse, beyond the exchange

of an infrequent letter, with Mrs. Byng or her son. From the thought of

both these latter he shrinks, with a distaste equal in degree, though

inspired by different causes. From Mrs. Byng, because he knows that she

was aware of his weariness of his poor love--that poor love whom, had he

but known it, he had so short a time to be weary of; and from Byng,

because, despite the ocean of sorrow, of remorse, of death that rolls in

its hopelessness between him and her, he cannot even yet think, without

a bitter pang, of the woman who had inspired the young man's hysterical

tears and sincere, though silly, suicidal impulses. Jim took that pang

with him to the Rockies, stinging, even through the overlying load of

his other and acknowledged burden of repentant ache and loss, and he has

brought it back with him. He packs it into his portmanteau as much as a

matter of course as he does his shirts--in fact more so, for he has once

inadvertently left his shirts behind, but the pang never.

It is the 20th day of January; here, in England, the most consistently

detestable month in the year. The good Januaries of a British

octogenarian's life might be counted upon the thumbs of that

octogenarian's hands. The favoured inhabitants of London have

breakfasted and lunched by gaslight; have groped their way along their

dirty streets through a fog of as thick and close a fabric as the furs

gathered round their chilled throats; have, even within their houses,

seen each other dimly across a hideous yellow vapour that kills their

expensive flowers, and makes their unwilling palm-trees droop in

homesick sadness. There is no fog about the Grand Hotel, Mustapha

Superieur, Algiers; no lightest blur of mist to dim the intensity of the

frame of green in which its white face is set. It is not so very grand,

despite its unpromising big name, as it stands high aloft on the

hillside, looking out over the bay and down on the town, looking down

more immediately upon tree-tops, and on the Governor's summer palace. It

is an old Moorish house, enlarged into an hotel, with little arched

windows sunk in the thick walls, with red-tiled floors, and balconies,

with low white balustrades of pierced brick, up which the lush creepers

climb and wave--yes, climb and wave on this 20th of January.

From the red-floored balcony over the creepers, between the perennial

leafage of the unchanging trees, one can daily descry in the azure bay

the tiny puff of smoke that tells that the mail steamer from Marseilles

has safely breasted the Gulf of Lyons, threaded her away among the

Isles, and brought her freight of French and English and American news

to the hands and ears of the various expectant nationalities. To-day,

blown by a gently prosperous wind, the boat is punctual. It is the

_Eugene Perrere_, the pet child of the Transatlantic Company, the narrow

and strong-engined little vessel which is wont to accomplish the transit

in a period of time less by an hour than her brother craft. To-day she

has brought but one guest to the Grand Hotel, who, having left the bulk

of his luggage to be struggled for by Arabs, and by the hotel-porter at

the Douane, arrives at the modest Moorish-faced hostelry, having, with

British mercifulness, walked up the break-neck green lane that leads

from the steep main road in order to spare the wretched little galled,

pumped horse that has painfully dragged him and his bag from the pier.

He has travelled straight through from London--fifty-five hours without

a pause--so that it is not to be wondered at that his thoughts turn

affectionately towards a wash and a change of raiment. Having extracted

from the case of unclaimed letters in the bar two or three that bear the

address of James Burgoyne, Esq., he is ushered to his room by the civil

little fussy Italian landlord, who, in order to enhance his appreciation

of the apartment provided for him, assures him, in voluble bad French,

that only yesterday he had been obliged to turn away a party of eight.

It is not until refreshed by a completed toilette--and who can overrate

the joy of a bath after a journey?--that it occurs to him to look out of

window. His room possesses two. One faces the hill's rich-clothed

steepness, and a row of orange-trees covered with fruit, and at whose

feet tumbled gold balls lie. But the dusk is falling fast, and he can

only dimly see the prodigality of green in which the modest Grand Hotel

lies buried. The other window looks out--but a very little way lifted

above it, for the room is on the ground floor--upon the red-tiled

terrace. It is growing very dim too. At the present moment it is empty

and deserted, but the chairs studded over its surface in talkative

attitudes, as if sociable twos and threes had drawn together in chat,

tell plainly that earlier in the day it had been frequented, and that

several people had been sitting out on it. Jim's London memories are too

fresh upon him for him not to find something ludicrous in the idea of

sitting out of doors on the 20th of January. How pleasant it would have

been to do so to-day in Hyde Park! He turns back to the table with a

smile at the idea, and, taking out a writing-case, sits down to scribble

a line. Jim's correspondence is neither a large nor an interesting one.

On the present occasion, his note is merely one of reminder as to some

trifling order, addressed to the landlord of his London lodgings. It

does not take him ten minutes to pen, and when it is finished he turns

to have one final look out of window before leaving the room. How

quickly the dark has fallen! The empty chairs show indistinct outlines,

and the heavy green trees have turned black. But the terrace is no

longer quite empty. A footfall sounds--coming slowly along it. One of

the waiters, no doubt, sent to fetch in the chairs; but, no! an

overworked Swiss waiter, hurried by electric bells, and with an imminent

swollen table _table d'hote_ upon his burdened mind, never paced so

slowly, nor did anything male ever step so lightly.

It must be a woman; and even now her white gown makes a patch of light

upon the dark background of the quickly on-coming night. A white gown on

the 20th of January! Again that pleasing sense of the ludicrous tickles

his fancy. She must be one of the persons who lately occupied the empty

chairs, and have come in search of some object left behind. He

recollects having noticed an open book lying on the low parapet. She has

a white gown; but what more can be predicated of her in this owl-light?

The radiance from the candle behind him makes a small illuminated square

upon the terrace, falling between the bars of the window through which

the Moorish ladies once darted their dark and ineffectual ogles.

Having apparently accomplished her errand, the white-gowned figure

obligingly steps into the illumined square, and still more obligingly

lifts her face and looks directly up at him. It is clear that the action

is dictated only by the impulse which prompts all seeing creatures to

turn lightwards, and no gleam of recognition kindles in the eyes that

are averted almost as soon as directed towards him. Placed as he is,

with his back to the light, his own mother could not have distinguished

his features; and, after her one careless glance, the white-gowned lady

turns away and disappears again into the gloom. She has one more oasis

of light to traverse before she reaches the hotel porch, just

discernible, gleaming in its whitewash, at the far end of the terrace;

just one more lit window throws its chequered lustre on the tiles. He

presses his face against the bars of his own lattice, and holds his

breath until she has reached and crossed that tell-tale patch. Her

traversing of it does not occupy the tenth part of a second, and yet it

puts the seal upon what he already knows.

Five minutes later he is standing before the case, hung on the wall of

the entrance hall, which contains the names and numbers of the rooms of

the visitors, eagerly scanning them with eye and finger. He scans them

in vain. The name he seeks is not among them. Had it not been for that

five minutes' delay--that five minutes of stunned and stupid staring out

into the dark after her--he must have met her in the hall. He is turning

away in baffled disappointment, when the little host again accosts him.

Monsieur must excuse him, but he must explain that the list of visitors

that monsieur has been so obliging as to peruse is by no means a full or

correct one. To-morrow morning he shall have the pleasure of placing

beneath monsieur's eye a proper and complete list of the visitors; but,

in point of fact, there has been such a press of business, he has been

daily obliged to turn away such large and _comme il faut_ families from

the door, that time has been inadequate for all his obligations, which

must be his excuse.

Burgoyne accepts his apologies in silence. It would seem easy enough to

inquire whether among the English visitors there are any of the name of

Le Marchant; but the question sticks in his throat. It is seven months

since he has pronounced that name aloud, and he appears to have lost the

faculty of doing it. The host comes to his aid.

Is there perhaps a family--a friend whom monsieur expects to meet? But

monsieur only shakes his head, and moves away. He has ascertained that

the _table d'hote_ is at seven, and it is now half-past five. He has,

therefore, only an hour and a half of suspense ahead of him. She will

surely appear at the _table d'hote_? But will she?

As the hour of seven approaches, ever graver and graver doubts upon this

head assail his mind, both when he reflects upon how much it is a habit

with the better sort of travelling English to dine in their own rooms,

and also when he calls to mind the extremely retired character of

Elizabeth's and her mother's habits. Even if she does appear in the

public room--and the more he thinks of it, the less probable, it

seems--it is most unlikely that he will be placed near her. But he might

possibly intercept her in the hall on her way to the _salle a manger_.

In pursuance of this project he takes up his position before the bell,

tingling so lengthily as to reach the ears of the deafest and most

distant, has summoned the company together; and it is several minutes

before enough are assembled to justify, according to the etiquette

prevailing at the Grand Hotel, a move to the dining-room. Men, at that

hotel, although in a very distinct minority--as when, indeed, are they

not?--are yet not quite the same choice rarities as at some of the Swiss

and Italian ones. But the young of the one sex are perennially

interesting to the other; and Burgoyne, as "the new man," is an object

of some attention to half a dozen young girls, and even to two or three

sprightly-hearted old ones. His eyes are eagerly shining as each opening

door, each step on the staircase, raises his hopes afresh. But neither

door nor staircase yields the form he seeks, and he is at last obliged,

under penalty of exciting remark, reluctantly to follow the band that go

trooping hungrily down a flight of steps to the whitewashed dining-room.

He finds himself placed between a bouncing widow who is too much

occupied in fondling an old valetudinarian on her other side to have

much notice to spare for him; and a sparkling creature of

five-and-thirty in a red shirt, who, before dinner is over, confides to

him that she fears she has not got a nice nature, and that she cannot

get on at home because her mother and the servants insist upon having

cold supper instead of dinner on Sunday. When she tells him that she has

not a nice nature, he absently replies that he is very sorry for it, and

her confidence about the Sunday supper provokes from him only the

extremely stupid observation that he supposes she does not like cold

meat. It is a wonder that he can answer her even as rationally as he

does. It is more by good luck than good management that there is any

sense at all in his responses. And yet he may as well give his full

attention to his neighbour, for now every place at the E-shaped table is

filled up, and, travel as his eye may over those who sit, both at the

long and cross-boards, it fails to discover any face in the least

resembling that which lifted itself from the dusk terrace into his

candle-light.

Was it her little ghost, then, that he had seen, her dainty delicate

ghost? But why should it appear to him _here_? Why haunt these

unfamiliar shores? The only places in the room which still remain

untenanted are those at a round table laid for three, in the embrasure

of a Moorish window, not very distant from where he sits. On first

catching sight of it his hopes had risen, only immediately to fall

again, as he realizes that it is destined for a trio. Why should three

places be laid for Elizabeth and her mother?

With a disheartened sigh he tums to his neighbour, intending to put to

her a question as to the habitual occupants of the empty table; but she

is apparently affronted at his tepidness, and presents to him only the

well-frizzled back of her expensive head. He is reduced to listening to

the conversation of his _vis-a-vis_, an elderly couple, who have been

upon some excursion, and are detailing their experiences to those around

them. They have been to Blidah apparently, and seen real live monkeys

hopping about without organs or red coats on real palm trees. He is

drawn into the conversation by a question addressed to him as to his

journey.

It is five minutes before he again looks towards the table in the

window. His first glance reveals that the three persons for whom it is

destined have at length arrived and taken their seats. Idiot that he is!

he had forgotten Mr. Le Marchant's existence.

"They are nice-looking people, are they not?" says his neighbour in the

red shirt, apparently repenting of her late austerity, and following the

direction of his eyes; "but they give themselves great airs; nobody in

the hotel is good enough for them to speak to. M. Cipriani evidently

thinks them people of importance; he makes twice as much fuss about them

as he does about anyone else. Look at him now!"

And in effect the obsequious little host may be seen hanging anxiously

over the newcomers, evidently asking them with solicitous civility

whether the not particularly appetizing fish (the strongest point of the

blue Mediterranean does not lie in her fishes, of which some are coarse,

some tasteless, and some even lie under the suspicion of having

poisonous qualities)--whether it is not to their liking.

At something that M. Cipriani says they all laugh. Elizabeth, indeed,

throws back her little head, and shows all her perfect teeth, in a

paroxysm of the most genuine mirth. It gives Burgoyne a sort of shock to

see her laugh.

Not a day, scarcely an hour, has passed since he last saw her in which

he has not pictured her as doing or suffering, or living through

something; he has never pictured her laughing. It seems to him now but a

moment since he was reading her broken-hearted, tear-stained note; since

he was seeing Byng grovelling in all the utter collapse of his

ungoverned grief on the floor of the little Florentine _entresol_. What

business has she to laugh? And how unchanged she is! How much less

outwardly aged than he himself is conscious of being! Sitting as she now

is, in her simple white tea-gown, with one slight elbow rested on the

table, her eyes all sparkling with merriment and laughter, bringing into

prominence that one enchanting dimple of hers, she does not look more

than twenty. But a few moments later he forgives her even her dimple.

However _empresse_ may be the little landlord, he has to move away after

a time; and the merriment moves away, too, out of Elizabeth's face. Jim

watches it decline, through the degrees of humorous disgust, as she

pushes the coarse white fish about her plate, without tasting it (she

was always a very delicate eater), into a settled gravity. And now that

she is grave he sees that she is aged, almost as much as he himself,

after all. Her eyes had ever had the air of having shed in their time

many tears; but since he last saw her, it is now evident to him that the

tale of those tears has been a good deal added to.

There is no pleasing him. He was angry with her when he thought her gay,

and now he quarrels with her for looking sad. As if, in her

unconsciousness of his neighbourhood, she was yet determined to give him

no cause of complaint, she presently again lays aside her sorrowful

looks, and, drawing her chair confidentially nearer to her mother's,

makes some remark of an evidently comic nature upon the company into her

ear.

They stoop their heads together--what friends they always were, she and

her mother!--and again the blue twinkle comes into her eyes; the

dimple's little pitfall is dug anew in her white cheek. Was there ever

such an April creature? Mr. Le Marchant appears to take no part in the

jokes; he goes on eating his dinner silently, and his back, which is

turned towards Burgoyne, looks morose.

How is it that Elizabeth's roving eye has not yet hit upon himself? He

sees presently that the cause lies in the fact of her look alighting

upon old and known objects of entertainment, rather than going in search

of new ones. But it must sooner or later embrace him in its range. The

fond fat widow beside him must surely be one of her favourites, and, in

point of fact, as he feverishly watches to see the inevitable moment of

recognition arrive, he perceives that Miss Le Marchant and her mother

are delightedly--though not so openly as to be patent to the rest of the

room--observing her. And then comes the expected careless glance at him,

and the no less expected transformation. Her elbows have been carelessly

resting on the table, and she has just been pressing her laughing lips

against her lightly-joined hands to conceal their merriment. In an

instant he sees the right hand go out in a silent desperate clutch at

her mother's, and the next second he knows that she also has seen him.

They both stare helplessly at him--at least, the one _at_ him, and the

other beyond him! How well he remembers that look of hers over his

shoulder in search of someone else. But yet it is not the old look, for

that was one of hope and red expectation. Is there any hope or

expectation lurking even under the white dread of this one? His jealous

heart is afraid quite to say no to this question, and yet an

indisputable look of relief spreads over her face as she ascertains that

he is alone. She even collects herself enough to give him a tiny

inclination of the head--an example followed by her mother; but they

are, in both cases, so tiny as to be unperceived, save by the person to

whom they are addressed.

He would not have been offended by the minuteness of their salutations,

even had he not divined that it was dictated by a desire--however

futile--to conceal the fact of his presence from their companion. His

heart goes out in all the profundity of his former pity towards them, as

he sees how entirely that one glance at him (for she does not look again

in his direction) has dried the fountain of Elizabeth's poor little

jests; of how white and grave and frightened, and even shrunk, his mere

presence has made her. Now that they have detected him, good breeding,

and even humanity, forbid his continuing any longer his watch upon them.

The better to set them at ease he turns the back of his head towards

their table, and compels the reluctant widow to relinquish her invalid

booty for fully ten minutes in his favour. Perhaps when Elizabeth can

see only the back of his head she may resume her jokes. But all the same

he knows that, for her, there will be no more mirth to-day.

"That is what they always do!" cries a voice on Burgoyne's left

hand--the voice of his other neighbour, who begins to think that his

attention has been usurped quite long enough by her plump rival. "That

is what they always do--come long after dinner has begun, and go out

long before it has ended. Such swagger!"

There is a tinge of exasperation in both words and voice, nor is the

cause far to seek.

The table in the window is again empty. In the meantime the "swaggering"

Elizabeth is clinging tremblingly about her mother's neck in the privacy

of their own little salon. The absence of the husband and father for the

moment in the smoking-room has removed the irksome restraint from both

the poor women.

"Did you see him?" asks Elizabeth breathlessly, as soon as the door is

safely closed upon them, flinging herself down upon her knees beside

Mrs. Le Marchant, who has sunk into a chair, and cowering close to her

as if for shelter. "What is he doing here? Why has he come? When first I

caught sight of him I thought that of course--" She breaks off, sobbing;

"and when I saw that he was alone I _was_ relieved; but I was

disappointed too! Oh, I must be a fool--a bad fool--but I _was_

disappointed! Oh, mammy! mammy! how seeing him again brings it all

back!"

"Do not cry, dear child! do not cry!" answers Mrs. Le Marchant

apprehensively; though the voice in which she gives the exhortation is

shaking too. "Your father will be in directly; and you know how

angry----"

"I will not! I will not!" cries Elizabeth, trying, with her usual

extreme docility, to swallow her tears; "and I do not show it much when

I have been crying; my eyes do not mind it as much as most people's; I

suppose"--with a small rainy smile--"because they are so used to it!"

"Perhaps he will not stay long," murmurs the mother, dropping a fond

rueful kiss on the prone blonde head that lies on her knees; "perhaps if

we are careful we may avoid speaking to him."

"But I _must_ speak to him," breaks in the girl, lifting her head, and

panting; "I _must_ ask him; I _must_ find out; why, we do not even know

whether Willy is dead or alive!"

"He is not dead," rejoins the elder woman, with melancholy common-sense;

"if he had been, we should have seen it in the papers; and, besides, why

should he be? Grief does not kill; nobody, Elizabeth, is better able to

attest that than you and I."

Elizabeth is now sitting on the floor, her hands clasped round her

knees.

"He is aged," she says presently; and this time it is evident that the

pronoun refers to Burgoyne.

Mrs. Le Marchant assents.

"He must have cared more for that poor creature than we gave him credit

for. Get up, darling; dry your eyes, and sit with your back to the

light; here comes your father!"

CHAPTER II.

One of the reasons, though not the sole or even the main one, of

Burgoyne's visit to Algiers is that the Wilson family are wintering

there. And yet he dreads the meeting with them inexpressibly. When they

last parted, immediately after having stood together round Amelia's open

grave, they had all been at a high pressure of emotion, and of

demonstrative affectionateness, which nothing in their tastes, habits,

or natures could possibly make continuous. He has a horrible fear that

they will expect to take up their relations at the same point at which

he had left them. He would do it if he could, but he feels that it is

absolutely impossible to him. The door of that room in his memory which

is labelled "Amelia" is for ever locked. It is only in deepest silence

and solitude that he permits himself now and again to turn the key and

sparely and painfully look in. How will he bear it if they insist on

throwing the portals wide, dragging its disused furniture to the light,

rummaging in its corners?

He sleeps ill on this, his first night of Africa; and even when at

length he succeeds in losing importunate consciousness, he is teased by

absurd yet painful dreams, in which Amelia and Elizabeth jostle each

other impossibly with jumbled personalities and changed attributes.

Extravagant as his visions are, they have yet such a solid vividness

that, at his first waking, he feels a strange sense of unsureness as to

which of the two women that have beset his pillow is the dead, and which

the living one. In dreams, how often our lost ones, and those whom we

still possess, take hands together on equal terms! Even when he is wide

awake, nay more, dressed and breakfasted, that feeling of uncertainty,

that something akin to the

"Blank misgivings of a creature,

Moving about in worlds not realized,"

remains strong enough to drive him once again to the list of visitors in

the entrance-hall, in order to assure himself that his brain has not

been the dupe of his eye.

M. Cipriani has been as good as his word. The corrected list, promised

overnight, has replaced the incomplete one, and almost the first names

that Jim's eye alights upon are those of "Mr., Mrs., and Miss Le

Marchant, England." His own name immediately follows, and he takes as a

good augury what is merely an accident due to the fact of his room and

theirs being on one floor. Elizabeth is, beyond question, beneath the

same roof as himself; nay, even now she may probably be sunning herself

like a white pigeon on that terrace, whose red tiles he sees shining in

the morning sun through an open side-door.

The thought is no sooner formed than he follows whither it leads him;

but she is not on the terrace; and though a moment ago his nerves were

tingling at the thought of speech with her, yet he is conscious of a

feeling of relief that their meeting is, for the moment, deferred. What

can he say to her? What can she say to him?

He stands looking down on the green sea of richly-clothed dark trees

beneath him--ilex and eucalyptus, and all the unfamiliar verdure of the

soft South. From the fiercely-blazing red purple of a Bougainvillia, so

unlike the pale, cold lilac blossom, to which in our conservatories we

give that name, his eye travels over tree-tops and snowy villas, cool

summer palace and domy mosque, to the curving bay, round which the Atlas

Mountains are gently laying their arms; and Cape Matifou, with the haze

of day's young prime about it, is running out into the Mediterranean.

He is alone at first, but presently other people come forth; the old

valetudinarian, for once delivered from his fostering widow, sits down

with a pile of English newspapers to enjoy himself in the sun, which

does not yet ride so high as to be sun-strokey. Jim's last night's

neighbour in the red shirt comes out too, bonneted and prayer-booked.

She is going to church; so is he: but he does not tell her so, for fear

she should offer to accompany him. She observes to him that the climate

is a fraud; that this is the first day for three weeks in which she is

able to go out without a mackintosh and umbrella.

"We are not so green for nothing, I can tell you," says she, with a

laugh, and a rather resentful glance at the splendid verdure around her,

and so leaves him.

He, too, as I have said, is going to church, and is presently asking his

way to the English chapel. The Wilson family will certainly be there,

and it has struck him that the dreaded meeting will be robbed of half

its painful awkwardness if it takes place in public. At a church-porch,

crowded with issuing congregation, Sybilla cannot fall into

hysterics--it is true that Sybilla never attends divine service--nor can

Cecilia weepingly throw her arms about his neck. But whatever means he

may take to lessen the discomfort and smart of that expected encounter,

the thought of it sits like lead upon his spirits, as he walks

quickly--it is difficult to descend slowly so steep a hill--down the

precipitous lane, which is the only mode of approach for man or

labouring beast to the high-perched hotel he has chosen. But he is

young, and presently the cheerful, clean loveliness of the day and the

sight of Nature's superb vigour work their natural effect upon him. It

must, indeed, be an inveterate grief that refuses to be soothed by the

influences of this green Eden.

What a generosity of vegetation, as evidenced by the enormous garlands

of great-leaved ivy, waving from tree to tree as for some perpetual

fete! Along the high hill bank that skirts this steep by-road,

eucalyptus rear their lofty heads and their faintly-scented blossoms,

aloe draws her potent sword, and thick-fleshed prickly pear displays her

uncouth malignity. Beneath, what a lush undergrowth of riotous

great-foliaged plants--acanthus, and a hundred other green sisters, all

flourishing and waxing, so unstinted, so at large! He has reached the

main road--the shady road that leads by a three-mile descent from

Mustapha Superieur to the town.

How shady it is! Pepper-trees hang their green hair, so thick and fine,

over it; and ilexes hold the thatch of their little dark leaves. Past

the Governor's summer palace, with its snowy dome and Moorish arcades

gleaming through its iron gates. From a villa garden a flowering shrub

sends a mixed perfume of sweet and bitter, as of honey and hops, from

its long yellow flower-tassels to his pleased nostrils.

At a sharp turn, where the hill falls away more precipitously than

before, the bay, the mole, the shipping, the dazzling little city, burst

upon him--the little city swarming up her hill, from where the French

town bathes its feet in the azure ripples, to where the Arab town loses

the peak of its triangle, in the Casbah and the fort of the now

execrated Emperor. Blinding white, ardent blue, profound green--what a

pleasant picture for a summer Sunday morning! And how gay the road is

too, as the East and the West step along it together!

Here is a tram tearing down the steep incline with five poor little thin

horses abreast. It is full of English church-goers, and yet, oh anomaly!

standing up in the vulgarest of modern vehicles, with his slight dark

hands grasping the tramrail, is a tall Arab, draped with the grave grace

of the Vatican Demosthenes. But alas! alas! even upon him the West has

laid its claw, for, as the tram rushes past, Jim's shocked eyes realize

that he, who in other respects might have fed the flocks of Laban in

Padan-aram, wears on his feet a pair of old elastic-sided boots.

Here come clattering a couple of smart Chasseurs d'Afrique, in blue and

red, followed by a woman dressed as Rachel was at the palmy well--so

dressed, that is to say, as to her white-shrouded upper woman, for,

indeed, there is no reason for supposing that Rachel wore a pair of Rob

Roy Tartan trousers! Past the Plateau Sauliere, where, in the

lichen-roofed lavoir Frenchwomen are sousing their linen in water

that--oh, hideous thought!--is changed but once a week; along an ugly

suburb, and past a little wood; through the arch in the fortifications,

the Porte d'Isly, till at length the Episcopal chapel--why are the

Protestant places of worship scattered over the habitable globe

everywhere so frightful?--stands before him.

He had thought himself in good time, but he must have loitered more than

he had been aware of, as the bell is silent and the porch closed. He

enters as quietly as may be, and takes his place near the door. The

building strikes damp and chilly, despite the warming presence of the

whole English colony, emptied out of the four hotels sacred to

Anglo-Saxons, and out of many an ilex-shaded orange-groved campagne

besides. The building is quite full, which is, no doubt, the reason why

Jim fails to catch any glimpse of the Wilson family throughout the

service. He has plenty of time to interrogate with his eye the numerous

rows of backs before him, as the sermon is long. Jim had known that it

would be so from the moment when the clergyman entered the pulpit with

an open Bible--no written sermon--in his hand. The sound of a brogue,

piercing, even through the giving out of the text, soon puts him in

possession of the further fact that he is in the clutches, and at the

mercy, of an entirely uneducated yet curiously fluent Irishman.

Is Elizabeth writhing under the infliction too? Never, in the Moat days,

was she very patient under prolonged pulpit eloquence. He can see her

with his memory's eye not very covertly reading her hymn-book--can hear

her foot tapping. Several people around him now are, not very covertly,

reading _their_ hymn-books, but she is not among them. He has no more

sight of her than he has of Cecilia; but in neither case--such are the

disadvantages of his position--does his failure to see prove the absence

of the object he seeks. He is one of the first persons to be out of

church when at length set free, and stands just outside the porch while

the long stream of worshippers defiles before him. It takes some time to

empty itself into the sunshine, and nearly as long before he catches

sight of any member of either of the families he is on the look-out for.

Of the Le Marchants, indeed, he never catches sight, for the excellent

reason that they are not to be caught sight of, not being there. In the

case of the Wilsons he is more fortunate, though here, too, a sort of

surprise is in store for him. He has involuntarily been scanning, in his

search for them, only those of the congregation who are dressed in

mourning. The picture that the retina of his eye has kept of Cecilia is

of one tear-swollen and crape-swaddled; and though, if he had thought of

it, his reason would have told him that, after seven months, she is

probably no longer sobbing and sabled, yet even then the impression that

he would expect to receive from her would be a grave and a black one.

This is why, although he is on the look-out for her, she yet comes upon

him at last as a surprise.

"Jim!" cries a voice, pitched a good deal higher than is wont to make

itself heard within the precincts of a church--a female voice of

delighted surprise and cheerful welcome; "father, here is Jim!"

Burgoyne turns, and sees a lady in a very smart bonnet, full of spring

flowers, and with a red _en tout cas_--for they have now issued into the

day's potent beam--shading her rosy face; a lady whose appearance

presents about as wide a contrast to the serious and inky figure he had

expected to see as it is well possible to imagine.

Cecilia, indeed, is looking, what her maid admiringly pronounced her

before sending her forth to triumph, "very dressy." Mr. Wilson is black,

certainly--but, then, clergymen always are black--and he still has a

band upon his hat; but it is a very narrow one--sorrow nearing its

vanishing-point. In answer to his daughter's joyous apostrophe, he

answers:

"'Sh, Cecilia! do not talk so loud. How are you, Jim?"

And then the meeting is over--that first meeting which Jim had shrunk

from with such inexpressible apprehension--as certain to be so fraught

with intolerable emotion; with calls upon him that he would not be able

to answer; with baring of incurable wounds. The contrast with the

reality is so startling that at first it makes him almost dizzy. Can the

showy creature beside him, preening herself under her gay sunshade, be

the same overwhelmed, shrunk, tear-drenched Cecilia whom at their last

meeting he had folded in so solemn an embrace? Her cheerful voice

answers for herself:

"It is so nice to see you again! When did you come? We did not expect

you quite so soon; in your last letter you were rather vague as to

dates; I can't say that you shine as a correspondent. You will come back

to luncheon with us, of course, will not you? _dejeuner_, as they call

it here; I always thought _dejeuner_ meant breakfast. You will come,

will not you? Sybilla will be so glad to see you--glad, that is to say,

in her dismal way."

She ends with a laugh, which he listens to in a silence that is almost

stunned. The sound of her voice, though set to so different a tune from

what he had anticipated, has brought back the past with such astonishing

vividness to him; her very fleer at Sybilla seems so much a part of the

old life that he half turns his head, expecting once more to see

Amelia's deprecating face, to hear her peace-making voice put in a plea,

as it has done so many hundred times, for the peevish _malade

imaginaire_.

They have been strolling towards the carriages waiting outside, and have

now reached one, driven by an _indigene_, a Moor, dusky as Othello,

solemn as Rhadamanthus, and with his serious charms set off by a striped

yellow and white jacket and a red sash.

"Is not he beautiful?" asks Cecilia, with another laugh, alluding to her

coachman, as she and Burgoyne set off upon their _tete-a-tete_ drive,

Mr. Wilson seeing, apparently, no reason in the fact of his (Burgoyne's)

appearance on the scene for departing from his invariable custom of

walking home from church; "is not he beautiful? When first we came here

we were in mourning; as if"--catching herself up with a stifled

sigh--"there were any need to tell _you_ that; and father wanted to put

him into black, but I would not hear of it: was not I right? He would

have been nothing in black; it is his red and yellow that give him his

_cachet_."

Jim feels inclined to burst out laughing. There is something so

ludicrous in the disproportion between his fears and their fulfilment,

in the fact of the whole importance of Amelia's death resolving itself

into a sash or no sash for an Arab coachman, that he has some difficulty

in answering in a key of which the irony shall not be too patent:

"I think you were perfectly right."

He does not know whether she perceives the dryness of his tone; he

thinks probably not, as she goes on to ask him a great many questions as

to his journey, etc., talking quickly and rather flightily, scarcely

leaving room between her queries for his monosyllabic replies, and

ending with the ejaculation:

"How nice it is to see you again!"

"Thank you." His acknowledgment seems to himself so curt that, after a

moment, he feels constrained to add something to it. That something is

the bald and trivial inquiry: "And you--how have you all been getting

on?"

Cecilia shrugs her shoulders.

"We are better off than we were; you know that, of course. Nobody ever

thought that father's brother would have died before him. Wait till you

see our villa--it is one of the show ones here; and of course it is very

pleasant having more money; but one cannot help wishing that it had come

earlier." She sighs as she speaks; not an ostentatious sigh, but a

repressed and strangled one; and, despite the flower-garden in her

bonnet, his heart softens to her. Perhaps his look has rested on that

flower-garden with a more open disapprobation than he knows, for she

says presently: "I think that one may be very bright-coloured outside,

and very black inside. Father and I are sometimes very black inside."

"Are you?"

"We do very well when we are alone together, father and I; we like to

talk about her. Dear me! what a place Algiers is for dust! that is why

there are so many blind people here. How it gets into one's eyes!" She

puts her handkerchief up hastily to her face as she speaks; but Jim is

not taken in by the poor little ruse, and he listens to her in a silence

that is almost tender, as she goes on: "Sybilla begins to cry if we even

distantly allude to her; yet I know"--with exasperation--"that she talks

of her by the hour to strangers--to her new doctor, for instance; yes,

she has picked up a new doctor here--a dreadful little adventurer! She

will probably talk of nothing else but her to you."

"God forbid!"

They have by this time left the town behind them, and have turned

through a stone-pillared gate down an ilex and ficus-sheltered drive,

along which the _indigene_, whipping up his horses to an avenue canter,

lands them at the arched door of a snowy Moorish house, whose whitewash

shows dazzling through the interstices of a Bougainvillia fire blazing

all over its front.

Two minutes later Jim is standing by Sybilla's couch. She is holding

both his hands in hers, and there is something in her face which tells

him that she means that he shall kiss her.

"When I think--when I think of our last meeting!" she says hysterically.

"Yes," he says, gasping; "yes, of course. What a beautiful villa you

have here!"

The observation is a true one, though, for the moment, he has not the

least idea whether it is beautiful or not, as he turns his tormented

eyes round upon the delicious little court, with its charming

combination of slender twisted marble columns, of mellow-tinted tiles,

of low plashing fountain. Originally it has been open, roofless to the

eye and the breath and the rains of heaven; but its Northern purchaser

has covered it in with glass, and set low divans and luxuriantly

cushioned bamboo chairs about its soft-tumbling water.

Sybilla has let fall her hands, and the expression of the wish for a

sisterly embrace has disappeared out of her face. For a few moments she

remains absolutely silent. He looks round anxiously for Cecilia, but she

has gone to take off her bonnet, and Mr. Wilson has not yet come in.

Under pretence of examining the tiles, he walks towards the lovely

little colonnade of horseshoe arches that form the court, and his uneasy

look rests, scarcely seeing them, upon the vertical lines of lovely old

faience that intersect the whitewash with softest blues and greens and

yellows.

When will Cecilia return? Behind him he presently hears the invalid's

voice, steadied and coldened.

"It is very beautiful; and, of course, it is everything for weary eyes

to have such pleasant objects to rest upon. I believe"--with a little

laugh--"that we sick people really take in most of our nourishment

through the eyes. Was not it wonderfully enterprising of us to come

here? I suppose your first thought when you heard the news was, 'How mad

of Sybilla to attempt it!'"

It is needless to say how innocent of the mental ejaculation attributed

to him Jim has been, and the consciousness of it makes him inquire with

guilty haste:

"But you were none the worse? you got over it all right?"

"I was really wonderful," replies she; "we sick people"--with a little

air of playfulness--"do give you well ones these surprises sometimes;

but I must not take the credit to myself: it is really every bit due to

Dr. Crump, my new doctor, who is a perfect marvel of intuition. I always

tell him that he never need ask; he _divines_ how one is; he says he is

a mere bundle of nerves himself; that is, I suppose, why one can talk to

him upon subjects that are sealed books with one's nearest and dearest."

Her voice has a suspicious tremble in it which frightens Jim anew.

He looks again apprehensively for help towards the two tiers of curving

column and rounding arch, which rise in cool grace above each other, and

sees, with relief, the figure of Cecilia leaning over the balustrade

that runs along the upper tier, and looking down upon him. At the same

moment Mr. Wilson enters, and shortly afterwards they all go to

luncheon. It is not a very pleasant repast, although the cool

dining-room, with its beautiful old pierced stucco ceiling and its

hanging brass lamps, contributes its part handsomely towards what should

be their enjoyment. There is no overt family quarrel, but just enough of

covert recrimination and sub-acid sparring to make an outsider feel

thoroughly uncomfortable, and to prove how inharmonious a whole the

soured little family now forms.

"We quarrel more than we used to do, do not we?" says Cecilia, when Jim,

a little later, takes leave, and she walks, under her red sunshade, up

the ilexed drive with him to the pillared gate; "and to-day we were

better than usual, because you were by. Oh, I wish you were always by!"

He cannot echo the wish. He had thought that he had already held his

dead Amelia at her true value; but never, until to-day, has he realized

through what a long purgatory of obscure heroisms she had passed to her

reward.

"I do hope you will not drop us altogether. Of course, now that the link

that bound us to you is broken"--her voice quivers, but he feels neither

the fear nor the rage that a like phenomenon in Sybilla has produced in

him--"there is nothing to hold you any longer; but I do trust you will

not quite throw us over."

"My dear old girl, why should I? I hope that you and I shall always be

the best of friends, and that before long I shall see you settled in a

home of your own."

"You mean that I shall marry? Well, to be sure"--with a recurrence to

that business-like tone which had always amused him formerly in her

discussion of her affairs of the heart--"I ought to have a better chance

now than ever, as I shall have a larger fortune; but"--with a lapse into

depression--"this is not a good place for men--I mean Englishmen. There

are troops of delightful-looking Frenchmen, Chasseurs d'Afrique, and

Zouaves; but, then, we do not know any of them--not one. Well,

perhaps"--philosophically--"it is for the best; one always hears that

Frenchmen make very bad husbands."

CHAPTER III.

Notre Dame d'Afrique--Lady of Africa--is an ugly lady, homely and black;

and the church that is dedicated to her is ugly too--new and

mock-Moorish; but, like many another ugly lady, being very nobly placed,

she has a great and solemn air. It is Our Lady of Africa who first gives

us our greeting as we steam in from seawards; it is to Our Lady of

Africa that the fisher-people climb to vespers, and to the touching

office that follows, when priests and acolytes pass out of the church to

the little plateau outside, where, sheer against the sky, stands a small

Latin cross, with a plain and, as it seems, coffin-shaped stone beneath

it, on which one reads the inscription:

"A la memoire de tous ceux, qui ont peri dans la mer, et ont

ete ensevelis dans ses flots."

"_All those who have perished in the sea, and been buried in

her waves._"

What a gigantic company to be covered with one little epitaph!

Notre Dame d'Afrique stands grandly on the cliff-tops, overlooking the

sea, whose cruel deeds she is so agonizedly prayed to avert, whose

cruelty she is sometimes powerful to assuage, witness the frequent

votive tablets with which the church walls are covered:

"Merci, oh ma mere."

"J'ai prie, et j'ai ete exauce."

"Reconnaissance a Marie."

"Reconnaissance a Notre Dame d'Afrique."

She does not look very lovable, this coal-black Marie, who stands in her

stiff brocade, with her ebon hands stretched straight out above the

high-altar; but how tenderly these poor fisherwives must have felt

towards her when she brought them back their Pierre or their Jean, from

the truculent deeps of the ocean!

Burgoyne has been told, both by his guide-book and by his _table-d'hote_

neighbour, that he ought to see Notre Dame d'Afrique; nor is he loth to

pay further obeisance to that high lady who already yesterday beckoned

to him across the blue floor of her waters. He does not tell Cecilia of

his intention, as he knows that she would offer to accompany him; but on

leaving her he takes his way through the gay French town, along its

Arab-named streets, Bab-a-Zoun and Bab-el-Oued, towards the village of

St. Eugene, and breasts the winding road that, with many an elbow and

bend, heading a deep gorge that runs up from the sea to the church-foot,

leads him within her portals. The congregation is sparse--a few

peasants, a blue and red Zouave, and several inevitable English. Now and

again a woman, clad in humble black that tells of prayers in vain, goes

up with her thin candle, and, lighting it, sticks it in its sconce among

the others that burn before the altar. For awhile Burgoyne finds it

pleasant after his climb to sit and watch her, and speculate pityingly

with what hope of still possible good to herself she is setting her

slender taper alight--now that her treasure has all too obviously gone

down beneath the waves; to sit and speculate, and smell the heady

incense, and listen to the murmur of chanted supplication; but

presently, growing weary of the uncomprehended service, he slips outside

to the little plateau, with its view straight out--no importunate

land-object intervening--towards the sea, across which a little steamer

is cutting her way; and on the horizon two tiny shining sails are lying.

Here, on this bold headland, it seems as if one were one's self in

mid-ocean; and one has to lean far over the low wall in order to realize

that there is some solid earth between us and it; that two full cities

of the dead--a Jewish and a Christian--lie below. From the

land-cemeteries to the vast sea-cemetery--for read by the light of that

plain inscription upon which his eyes are resting, what is even the

azure Mediterranean but a grave? For the matter of that, what is all

life but a grave?

"First our pleasures die, and then

Our hopes, and then our fears, and when

These are dead, the debt is due:

Dust claims dust, and we die too."

He turns away, and, muttering these words half absently between his

lips, begins to make the circuit of the church; and in doing so, comes

suddenly upon three persons who are apparently similarly employed. The

party consists of a man and two ladies. Being a little ahead of him,

they are, for the first moment or two, not aware of his presence, an

ignorance by which he, rather to his own discomfiture, profits to

overhear a scrap of their conversation certainly not intended for his

ears.

"I suppose that you were wool-gathering, as usual?" Mr. Le Marchant is

saying, with an accent of cold severity, to his daughter; "but I should

have thought that even _you_ might have remembered to bring a wrap of

some kind for your mother!"

Jim starts, partly at having happened so unexpectedly upon the people

before him, partly in shocked astonishment at the harshness both of

voice and words.

In the old days Elizabeth had been the apple of her father's eye, to

oppose whose lightest fancy was a capital offence, for whom no words

could be too sugared, no looks too doting. Yet now she answers, with the

sweetest good-humour, and without the slightest sign of surprise or

irritation, or any indication that the occurrence is not a habitual one:

"I cannot think how I could have been so stupid; it was inexcusable of

me."

"I quite agree with you," replies the father, entirely unmollified; "I

am sure you have been told often enough how liable to chills

insufficient clothing makes people in this beastly climate at sundown."

"But it is not near sundown," breaks in Mrs. Le Marchant, throwing

herself anxiously, and with a dexterity which shows how frequently she

is called upon to do so, between the two others; "look what a great

piece of blue sky the sun has yet to travel."

"You shall have my jacket," cries Elizabeth impetuously, but still with

the same perfect sweetness; "it will be absurdly short for you, but, at

least, it will keep you warm." So saying, she, with the speed of

lightning, whips off the garment alluded to, and proceeds to guide her

mother's arms into its inconveniently tight sleeves, laughing the while

with her odd childish light-heartedness, and crying, "You dear thing,

you do look too ridiculous!"

The mother laughs too, and aids her daughter's efforts; nor does it seem

to occur to any of the three that the fatal Southern chill may possibly

strike the delicate little frame of Elizabeth, now exposed, so lightly

clad in her tweed gown, to its insidious influence.

"I wish you had a looking-glass to see yourself in!" cries she, rippling

into fresh mirth; "does not she look funny, father!" appealing to him

with as little resentment for his past surliness as would be shown by a

good dog (I cannot put it more strongly), and yet, as it seems to Jim,

with a certain nervous deprecation.

The next moment one of them--he does not know which--has caught sight of

himself, and the moment after he is shaking hands with all three. It is

clear that the fact of his presence in Algiers has been notified to Mr.

Le Marchant, for there is no surprise in his coldly civil greeting. He

makes it as short as possible, and almost at once turns to continue his

circuit of the church, his wife at his side, and his daughter meekly

following. Doubtless they do not wish for his (Jim's) company; but yet,

as he was originally, and without any reference to them, going in their

direction, it would seem natural that he should walk along with them.

He is hesitating as to whether or no to adopt this course, when he is

decided by a very slight movement of Elizabeth's head. She does not

actually look over her shoulder at him, and yet it seems to him as if,

were her gesture completed, it would amount to that; but it is arrested

by some impulse before it is more than sketched. Such as it is, it

suffices to take him to her side; and it seems to him that there is a

sort of satisfaction mingled with the undoubted apprehension in her

face, as she realizes that it is so. Her eyes, as she turns them upon

him, have a hungry question in them which her lips seem afraid to put.

Apparently she cannot get nearer to it than this--very tremblingly and

hurriedly uttered, with a timid glance at her father's back, as if she

were delivering herself of some compromising secret instead of the mere

platitude which she so indistinctly vents:

"A--a--great many things have happened since--since we last met!"

Her eye travels for a moment to his hat, from which, unlike Cecilia's

rainbow raiment, the crape band has not yet been removed; and he

understands that she is comprehending his troubles as well as her own in

the phrase.

"A great many!" he answers baldly.

He has not the cruelty to wish to keep her on tenterhooks, and he knows

perfectly what is the question that is written in the wistful blue of

her look, and whom it concerns; but it would be impertinence in him to

take for granted that knowledge, and answer that curiosity which,

however intense and apparent, has yet not become the current coin of

speech. Probably she sees that he is unable or unwilling to help her,

for she makes another tremendous effort.

"I hope that--that--all your friends are well."

"All my friends!" repeats he, half sadly; "they are not such a numerous

band; I have not many friends left still alive."

His thoughts have reverted to his own loss, for, at the moment, Amelia

is very present to him; but the words are no sooner out of his mouth

than he sees how false is the impression produced by his reply--sees it

written in the sudden dead-whiteness of her cheek and the terror in her

eye.

"Do you mean"--she stammers--"that anybody--any of your friends--is--is

lately dead?"

"Oh no! no!" he cries reassuringly; "you are making a mistake; nobody is

dead--nobody, that is"--with a sigh--"that you do not already know of.

All our friends--all our common friends--are, as far as I know----"

"Elizabeth!" breaks in Mr. Le Marchant's voice, in severe appellation;

he has only just become aware that his daughter is not unaccompanied,

and the discovery apparently does not please him.

Without a second's delay, despite her twenty-seven years, she has sprung

forwards to obey the summons; and Jim has the sense to make no further

effort to rejoin her. By the time that their circuit is finished, and

they have again reached the front of the church, vespers are ended, and

there is a movement outwards among the worshippers. They stream--not

very numerous--out on the little terrace. The priests follow, tonsured,

but--which looks strange--with beards and whiskers. The acolytes, in

their red chasubles, carry a black and white pall, and lay it over the

memorial stone below the cross. On either hand stand a band of decently

clad youths--sons of drowned seamen--playing on brass instruments. It is

a poor little music, doubtfully in tune; but surely no rolling organ, no

papal choir, could touch the heart so much as this simple ceremonial.

The little Latin cross standing sheer out against the sea; the black

pall thrown over the stone that commemorates the sea's innumerable dead;

the red-clad acolytes, standing with eyes cast down, holding aloft their

high tapers, whose flickering flame the sea-wind soon puffs out; and the

sons of the drowned sailors, making their homely music to the

accompaniment of the salt breeze. The little service is brief and those

who have taken part in it are soon dispersing. As they do so, Jim once

more finds himself for a moment close to Elizabeth.

The sun has nearly touched the sea-line by this time, and he sees, or

thinks he sees, her shiver.

"You are cold," he says solicitously; "you will get a chill."

She looks back at him, half surprised, half grateful, at the anxiety of

his tone.

"Not I!" she answers, with a gentle air of indifference and

recklessness; "naught never comes to harm!"

"But you shivered! I saw you shiver."

"Did I? It was only"--smiling--"that a goose walked over my grave. Does

a goose never walk over your grave?"

And once more she is gone.

He does not see her again that day. Of the three places laid for dinner

at the round table in the _salle a manger_, only two are occupied; hers

is, and remains, empty. She is not with her parents, and, what is more,

she does not appear to be missed by them. It fills Jim with something of

the same shocked surprise as he had felt on hearing the cold and surly

tone in which she had been addressed by her father, to see how much

more, and more genially, that father talks; how much less morose his

back looks than had been the case on the previous evening.

The next morning rises superb in steady splendour, and Jim, on issuing

out on the little red-tiled terrace, finds the whole strength of the

hotel gathered upon it. Even the worst invalids, who have not shown

their noses outside their rooms for a fortnight, are sunning themselves,

wrapped in apparently unnecessary furs. The Arabs and Turks have spread

their gay rugs and carpets, and displayed their bits of stuff, their

brasswork, and their embroidery. They make a charming garden of colour

under the blue. One is lying beside his wares, in an azure jacket and a

rose-red sash, twanging a "gunebri," or little Arab mandolin. Apart from

the rest of the company, at the extreme end of the terrace, in a place

which is evidently hers by prescriptive right, close to the balustrade,

upon whose blue and white tiled top her books are lying, Elizabeth is

sitting--and sitting alone, neither truculent father not frightened

mother barring approach to her. He makes his way at once to her.

"You were not at dinner last night?"

"No."

"I hope that did not mean that you were ill?"

Her eyes are not lifted to his--resting rather on the balustrade,

through whose pierced brickwork little boughs of Bougainvillia are

pushing.

"No, I was not ill," she replies slowly; "but I had made such a figure

of myself by crying that mammy thought I had better stay away. When I

looked in the glass," she adds humorously, "I thought so myself."

"There was not much sign of tears about you when we parted at Notre Dame

d'Afrique," he says brusquely.

"No, but"--with a sudden lifting of her pretty lashes--"you know there

is never any medium in me; I am always either laughing or crying; and,

of course, seeing you again brought--brought things back to me."

She looks wistfully at him as she makes this leading remark.

He can no longer have any doubt as to her wish to embark upon the

subject which, even in the three minutes of their meeting on the

previous day, she had sought to approach. If he is kind, he will enter

into her wish, he will make her path easier for her; but for the moment

he does not feel kind--angry, rather, and rebellious.

Is his intercourse with her to be a mere repetition of that which,

although now seven months ago, makes him still writhe, in the

recollection of his latter intercourse with Byng? Is he again to be

spitted upon the skewer of reminiscences of the Vallombrosan wood?

_Never!_

He looks obstinately away from her--towards where first an ivied bank

rises, with red gladioli flowering upon it; then a little space of bare

ground, then a row of orange-trees; then some young stone-pines, holding

their heads against the blue to show what an exquisite contrast they

make to it; then, topping, or seeming to top the hill, a white villa,

with little blue jewels of sky, seen through the interstices of the

balustrade on its roof, its whitewash making the solid wall of sapphire

behind it look even more desperately and unnameably blue than elsewhere.

What a blue! sapphire! turquoise! lapis! To what poor shifts are we

driven to express it! How could we describe its glory to a blind person?

If to such a one the colour of scarlet is represented by the sound of a

trumpet, surely this divine tint above us can be best conveyed by the

whole heavenly hierarchy of burning seraphs and winged angels, harping

and quiring together.

"I always think," says Elizabeth, following the direction of his

eyes--"perhaps it may be fancy--that this particular corner of the sky

is much bluer than any other."

There is a shade of disappointment in her tone at his failure to take up

her challenge, but she is far too gentle to make any further effort in a

direction which, for some reason, is disagreeable to him; and since he

will not follow her inclination, she is pliantly willing to follow his.

The Arabs have come up in might to-day, and, no longer fearing rain,

have carpeted almost the whole terrace with their wares. They hang over

the low wall, and cover the red tiles; blue and purple, and Moslem

green, and Venetian red; dazzling white _haiks_, blinding in the

blinding sunshine; carpets, embroidered jackets, flashing back gold in

the gold light. A pert English miss is standing over them, and saying

disparagingly about each:

"You can get this 7-1/2d. cheaper at Whiteley's. I saw a much better one

than this for half the price at Marshall's," etc., etc.

One longs to ask the "miss" whether she saw the sunlight, and the cobalt

sea, and the glorified whitewash, with its amethyst shadows, for 7-1/2d.

at Whiteley's too, and, if so, why she did not stay there?

Burgoyne's friend in the red shirt is beating down a one-eyed Kabyle,

and having a happy haggle with him over a Mozambique coat.

"She does not get on with her own family at home, and she has quarrelled

with all her travelling companions!" says Elizabeth, in a delighted

explanatory whisper. Wistfulness and disappointment have alike vanished

out of her small face, which is one ripple of mischief. "The fat widow

in the weepers, who is preening herself like a great pouter pigeon, is

trying to marry the wizened old gentleman in the bamboo chair. Sometimes

we think she will succeed; sometimes we think she will not: it is _so_

interesting!"

Jim looks down at her with an astonishment bordering on indignation.

Is this the woman who cried herself sick last night over memories of the

so recent past? In this mobile nature, is there nothing that one can lay

hold of?

"Mammy and I get an infinity of amusement out of them," continues she,

still playfully, but faltering a little under the severity of his look;

"oh, we know a great deal about them all; and those that we do not know

about we make stories for!"

"Indeed!"

His tone is so curt that the stream of her gaiety dries up under it, and

she relapses into silence, looking towards the flashing sea, and the

ficus-tree, that is casting its now grateful shade.

CHAPTER IV.

"You said just now that seeing me brought things back to you."

It is partly remorse at having snubbed her, and partly perversity, which

dictates this sentence on Jim's part. The perversity is, perhaps, the

predominating element in his motive--a perversity which, having chilled

her away from the subject when she was eagerly seeking an opening to it,

now forces her to return to it. She starts a little.

"Yes--yes," she answers; "but 'brought things back' is not quite the

right phrase; they"--her voice growing low and tremulous--"had not very

far to come."

The quiver in her voice annoys him almost as much as Byng's tears used

to do.

"If you would like to ask me any questions," he says stiffly, "I am

ready to answer them."

"Are you?" she cries hungrily; "oh, that is kind of you! but, then, you

always _were_ kind; but not here"--looking apprehensively round--"I

could not trust myself to talk about--about him here; I--I should break

down, and nothing"--with a smile that, though watery, is still

humorous--"would induce me to make a fool of myself before the widow

Wadman." Then, seeing him look at a loss: "Come indoors!" she says

impulsively, standing up, and half stretching out her hand as if to draw

him after her. "Come into our salon--no, you need not be afraid; we

shall have it all to ourselves; father and mother have gone out for

their usual constitutional on the Boulevard Mustapha."

He follows her silently, and neither speaks till they find themselves

_tete-a-tete_ in the private apartment of the Le Marchants.

It is on the _rez-de-chaussee_, a suite of three little whitewashed

rooms, transmogrified from their original hotel nakedness by flowers and

brocade bits. Three large green jars on the chimney-piece, full of

generous rose-branches, and boughs of salvia and iris, and stalwart

yellow jessamine, make the air sweetly and lightly perfumed. On the

table is a litter of Tauchnitz novels, disastrously old English papers,

the little scurrilous Algerian sheet, and, lastly, Elizabeth's

workbasket--the big workbasket which Jim had last seen standing on the

floor in the _entresol_, at the Piazza d'Azeglio, with its contents

strewn all over his friend's prostrate body. At the sight a bitter smile

breaks over his face.

"An old acquaintance!" he says, making a mock salutation to it; "it is

in better order than when last I had the pleasure of seeing it."

"Do you mean in Florence?" she asks, very slowly.

"Yes"--still with that acrid smile--"after you were gone, I had the

honour of helping to pack it to send after you. I am afraid I was rather

clumsy over it; but, at any rate, I managed better than he. By-the-bye,

did you find any rust on your scissors and thimble when next you had

occasion to use them? Poor boy! he cried enough over them to take all

the polish off!"

She has sunk down upon the sofa, over which a great woollen _haik_, dyed

with harmonious dull tints, is thrown.

"Do not sneer at me!" she says faintly. "You would not if you knew how

you hurt me. Is he--is he--how is he?"

"He is not ill."

The answer ought to be reassuring; but there is something in the manner

in which it is uttered that tells her that it neither is, nor is meant

to be so. It is so ominous that her lips, after a feeble effort or two,

give up the endeavour to frame any query. All her power of interrogation

has passed into those eyes, out of which her companion has been so

brilliantly successful in chasing their transient morning mirth.

"When a man," says Jim gravely, "at the outset of his life, gets such a

facer as he did, if he has not a very strong character, it is apt to

drive him off the rails, to give him a shove downwards."

"I see; and you think I have given him a shove downwards?"

"Yes."

There is a pause. Jim's eyes are resolutely turned away from the face of

Elizabeth, upon whose small white area twitches of pain are making cruel

disfigurement. He does not want to have his heart softened towards her,

so he stares persistently over her head at a Mussulman praying-carpet,

which, old and still rich-toned, despite the wearing of pious knees,

hangs on the wall. At length she speaks, in a key as low as--were not

the room so entirely still--would be inaudible.

"If I had married him, I should have given him a much worse shove down."

Jim holds his breath. Is he about to hear from her own lips that secret

which he has magnanimously resisted all opportunities of hearing from

other sources? But the words that, after a pause, follow this almost

whispered statement are not a confession. They are only an appeal.

"You would be doing the kindest thing that you ever did in your life, if

you could bring yourself to say that you thought I did it for the best."

He feels that if he submits his eyes to hers, his will must go with

them; he will have no power left of dissent from any request she may

choose to make; so he still stares over her head at a screen which hides

the doorless entrance to the third room of the little suite. One leaf,

folded back, gives a peep through the little chamber, through its

deep-arched window to where a date-palm stands up straight against the

sea.

"I could not possibly say that unless I knew the circumstances of the

case," he answers judicially.

He hears a low sigh, not of impatience, but of melancholy acquiescence.

"Then you must go on thinking ill of me."

There is such a depth of dejection, as well as such an unalterable

sweetness, in her voice, that the words of little Prince Arthur,

addressed to Hubert, flash upon his mind:

"If Heaven be pleased that you should use me ill,

Why, then you must!"

After all, what power in earth or sky has appointed him her executioner?

"I do not wish to think ill of you," he answers sadly. "Good heavens! do

I need to tell you that? I have tried all along to keep myself from

judging you; but I should not be human--you must know that I should not

be human--if I did not ask myself why you did it."

"Why I left Florence?"

"Yes."

She sits stock-still for a moment, the very little colour that there

ever was in it retreating out of her face.

"If I told you that, I should be telling you everything."

He is looking at her now; after all, he cannot keep his gaze pinned to

the screen for ever, and, as he looks, he sees an emotion of so

transcendently painful a nature set her little sad features working,

that the one impulse that dominates him is to ease her suffering.

Poor little docile creature! She is going to tell him her secret, since

he exacts it, though it is only with a rending asunder of soul and body

that it can be revealed. He puts out his hand hurriedly, with a gesture

as of prohibition.

"Then do not tell me."

She sinks back upon her _haik_ with a movement of relief, and puts up

her fine handkerchief to her pale lips. There is a perfect silence

between them for awhile. At his elbow is a great un-English, unwintry

nosegay of asphodel and iris. He passes his fingers absently over the

freakish spikes.

"How did he take it? how did he take it at first?"

Her voice, though now tolerably distinct, is stamped with that character

of awe which fills us all at approaching a great calamity.

"He would not believe it at first; and then he cried a great deal--oh,

an immense deal!"--with an accent of astonishment, even at the

recollection of his friend's tear-power--"and then--oh, then, he thought

of putting an end to himself!"

Jim had meant to have made this relation in a tone of dispassionate

narrative, but against his will and intention, as his memory recalls

what seem to him the unworthy antics played by Byng's grief, his voice

takes a sarcastic inflection. The horror written on his auditor's face

as he utters the latest clause of his sentence recalls him to himself.

"Do not be afraid!" he says, in a tone which has no longer anything akin

to a sneer in it, though it is not devoid of bitterness; "the impulse

was a short-lived one; he is not thinking of putting an end to himself

now, I can assure you of that; he is only thinking of how he can best

amuse himself. Whether he is much more successful in that than he was in

the former, I am not so sure."

Her eyes have dropped to her own fragile, ringless hands as they lie on

her lap.

"Poor boy! poor boy!" she says over softly twice, moving her head up and

down with a little compassionate movement.

At the pity expressed by her gesture, an unjust and unjustifiable hard

anger takes harsh possession of him.

"It was a pity you let it go so far," he says austerely; "you must allow

me to say that much; but I suppose, in point of fact, the ball once set

rolling, it was past your power to stop it."

She listens to his philippic, with her head meekly bent.

"I did not try," she answers, in a half.whisper; then, after a pause,

raising her down-dropped eyes, lit with a blue fire of excitement,

almost inspiration, to his, "I said to myself, 'If I have any luck, I

shall die before the smash comes;' and I just lived on from day to day.

I had not the heart to stop it; I knew it would stop of itself before

long; I had never--hardly ever"--correcting herself, as it seems, with a

modifying afterthought--"in my life before known what happiness meant;

and oh! _oh!_ OH!"--with a groan of deepening intensity at each repeated

interjection--"what a big word it is!"

_Never--hardly ever--known what happiness meant before!_ Why, surely she

was happy at the Moat! and before his mind's eye there rises an image of

her in her riotous rosy gaiety; but even as it does, there flashes upon

him a comprehension of her speech.

It is not the careless merriment of childhood to which she is alluding;

it is to _the_ happiness, _par excellence_, of life. If this is the

case, why did she correct herself and modify her negative with a

"hardly"? A jealous feeling of someone else--someone beside Byng; a

jealousy none the less keen for being vague--for not knowing on what

object it can lay hold--sharpens his tone as he repeats aloud, and with

an accent of interrogation, her qualifying adverb:

"_Hardly_ ever, that implies----"

But she breaks in hurriedly, as if dreading--and at the same time

doubting her own power of baffling--cross-examination upon that subject

on whose borders they are continually hovering.

"Talking of happiness makes one think of unhappiness, does not it? We

both know something about that, do not we?"

She pauses, and he sees that she is alluding to his own sorrow, and that

her eye is sounding his to see whether he would wish her to approach it

more nearly. His eye, in answer, must give but a dubious beam, since he

himself is quite unsure of what his wishes on the subject are; and she

goes on with the haste and yet unsteadiness of one who is treading on

swampy ground, that gives beneath his feet.

"We saw it in the papers; I could not believe it at first. It was the

last thing I ever expected to happen. I thought of writing to you, but I

did not."

She looks at him rather wistfully, and although but two minutes ago she

had been confessing to him her passion for another man, he sees that she

is anxious he should tell her that her sympathy would have been precious

to him. He feels the same sensation as before of mixed anger and

fascination at the ductility of her nature. What business has she to

care whether he would have liked to hear from her or not?

"It seemed such a pity that it was she, and not I!"

Again her eye interrogates his, as if asking for acquiescence in this

suggestion, but he cannot give it. With a shock of surprise--nay,

horror--at himself, he finds that he is unable to echo the wish that

Elizabeth had died and Amelia lived.

"I said so to mammy at the time. Ah, here is mammy!"

And, indeed, as she speaks the door opens, and Mrs. Le Marchant enters

in her walking-dress. At the sight of Jim, a look, which certainly does

not betoken pleasure, though good breeding prevents its representing the

opposite emotion, crosses her handsome, worn face.

"I brought Mr. Burgoyne in here," says Elizabeth, in what seems rather

precipitate explanation, "because we could not talk comfortably out on

the terrace; they listen to everything we say: they have such long

ears--the Widow Wadman and Miss Strutt!"

"I do not know what State secrets you and Mr. Burgoyne can have to

discuss," replies the mother, with a smile that, though courteous, but

ill disguises the underlying anxiety. "Yes, dear child, I shall be very

much obliged if you will take my bonnet upstairs for me"--this in answer

to little tender overtures from Elizabeth, overtures that remind Jim of

12 _bis_, Piazza d' Azeglio. "I do not know whether you have yet found

it so" (to Jim); "but this _is_ a slack place."

No sooner has the door closed upon her daughter than her tone changes.

"What have you been talking about to her," she inquires rapidly; "not, I

hope, about _him_?"

"I could not help it; she asked me."

Mrs. Le Marchant strikes her hands together, and gives utterance to that

short and shapeless monosyllable which has a prescriptive right to

express vexation.

"Th! th!" A moment later, "I am sure you will understand that I do not

mean to imply any ill-will to you; but it _is_ unlucky that we should

have happened to meet you here; it has brought it all back to her, and

she was just beginning to pluck up her spirits a little."

"Did she--did she take it so much to heart?" inquires Jim, in a tone of

almost as awed concern as Elizabeth had employed but a quarter of an

hour before in putting nearly the same question with regard to Byng.

"_Did she take it to heart!_" repeats Mrs. Le Marchant, with the

irritation of one to whom a perfectly senseless and superfluous inquiry

is put; "why, of course she did! I thought at one time that she would

have gone out of her mind!"

No one can feel less merry than Jim; and yet his lips at this juncture

cannot resist the impulse to frame themselves into a gloomy smile.

"And I thought that _he_ would have gone out of _his_ mind," he rejoins.

As he speaks, it flashes upon his memory that one of the hypotheses that

have formerly occurred to him to account for the mystery that hangs over

Elizabeth's past was that she had been mad; and though he had long

abandoned the idea, her losing her wits now recurs to him with a shock

as a possibility. Might not that changeful, mobile, emotional mind lose

its balance under the blow either of a sudden calamity or of a long

wearing sorrow? It has escaped--evidently but barely escaped the first.

Will it escape the second too?

His heart goes out in a great yearning to her at the thought of what a

touching little lunatic she would make; and, with an oblivion of his own

personal feelings, which is generous, if not very lasting, he says

compassionately:

"It seems a pity--a great pity!"

"A pity!" repeats the mother, with a sort of wrath, down which he

detects a broad stripe of agony running; "I should think it _was_ a

pity! Pity is a weak word! The whole thing is piteous! her whole

history! If you only knew----"

She breaks off.

He is silent, waiting to see whether that impulse towards confidence in

him will go any further; but it does not. She has evidently gone beyond

her intention, and is passionately vexed with herself for having done

so.

"They were so well suited to each other," continues Jim slowly, but

still generously. Possibly his generosity becomes more easy as he sees

how hopeless is the plea upon which he employs it. "Is it--I do not wish

to intrude upon your confidence, but in the interests of my friend you

will allow me to say that much--is it quite out of the question?"

"Quite! quite!" replies the mother, in painful excitement; "what, poor

soul, is not out of the question for her that has any good or happiness

in it? and that--_that_ more than anything! If you have any mercy in

you, do not put it into her head that it is not!"

"If it is not in her head already, I could not put it there," replies

Jim gravely; "but I will not--I promise you I will not."

As he speaks, a slight smile touches the corners of his serious mouth as

he reflects how entirely easy it is to comply with a request _not_ to

urge Byng's suit upon its object, and how cheaply a character for

magnanimity may sometimes be bought.

"That is very kind of you!" replies the poor woman gratefully; "and I am

sure when you say a thing I can depend upon you for it; and though, of

course, it was unlucky our happening to meet you, yet you need not see

much of her. Although it is not in the least 'out of sight, out of mind'

with her"--sighing--"yet she _is_ very much influenced by the objects

around her; and when you are gone--I dare say you do not mean to make a

long stay; this is not a place where there is much for a man to do--for

a man like you----"

She breaks off, and her imploring eye invites him to reassure her by

naming a speedy day for his own departure. But magnanimity may have

calls made upon it that exceed its power to answer, and Jim's silence

sufficiently proves that he is not going to allow himself to be seduced

into a promise to go.

CHAPTER V.

The next morning proves the truth of Miss Strutt's words that "we are

not so green here in Algiers for nothing." The weather changes some time

after dark has fallen. A mighty wind arises. Jim's slumbers are broken

by the fact that somebody's outside shutters bang, loose and noisy all

night. The great sign at the top of the hotel swings and creaks and

groans. In the morning, as far as can be seen through blurred panes, the

trees--eucalyptus, ilex, stone-pine--are all cowering and stooping

before the wind's lash. The fan palm before Mrs. Le Marchant's window,

with its fans all pinched and bent, is staggering before the gale. One

cannot conceive what that unlucky tropical product can be doing in this

galley, and it requires a strong effort of reason and will to resist the

conviction that the oranges and lemons are tied upon the shivering trees

instead of growing naturally there.

"And this is 'Afric's burning strand'!" says Jim to himself, over his

breakfast in the _salle a manger_, through whose shut windows the mad

rain forces itself; and the blast, coming to his wet sister's aid,

bursts them open now and again.

The day seems enormously long. He gets through the morning tolerably

well with letter-writing, and after the twelve o'clock _dejeuner_ he

faces the gale in a determined walk down into the town. Seldom in the

course of his wide wanderings has he felt the furious scourge of more

tremendous rain. The side-path is whitened with big hailstones; red

torrents tear with ferocious speed and violence down the steep incline.

The great acanthus-leaves, and all the plentiful undergrowth, are

dripping and rejoicing.

Through the blinding white deluge he gets forlorn peeps of the villas

that had shone yesterday with the white splendour one associates with

the city of the saints of God; and instead of, as yesterday, "laced with

heaven's own tinct," the Mediterranean is whitening the bay's rounded

curve with its angry breakers, and the snow is sprinkling the Atlas

crests. A few Arabs are sitting on the ground under the Pont d'Isly,

packed up into whitish woollen parcels, knees to nose, and arms and

hands all withdrawn into the protection of the sheltering burnous. But

no one else, who can help it, is abroad.

It seems to Jim as if his disagreeable tussle with the elements had

lasted a long time, and yet, on his return to the hotel, he finds that

it is only half-past two. He thinks at first that the clocks must have

stopped, but finds, on examination, that they are all ticking, and all

unanimous. His drenched condition is at least a resource, necessitating

an entire and fundamental change of raiment; but even this expedient,

though dragged out to its utmost possible limit, does not carry him

further than three. How is he to dispose of the seven or eight hours

that must elapse before he can seek refuge in bed? He has exhausted his

correspondence, which is never a large one, and he has seldom in his

life been so short of books.

He makes his way through the hall, which is crammed with young people

playing battledore, and noisily counting; with elder persons, dreadfully

short of a job, looking on and applauding; to the _salon_, in hopes of

there finding a Tauchnitz novel, or even a superannuated _Pall Mall_ or

_World_. But half a dozen other weather-bound sufferers have been before

him, and the tables are swept clean of all literature save a

three-months-old _Court Journal_.

Miss Strutt and the pert votary of Whiteley are sitting shawled, and

with their heads close together. By their titters, and the fragments he

catches of their talk, they seem to be concocting a practical joke of

some kind. The widow Wadman, shawled too, and her valetudinarian in a

comforter, are stopping over a wood-fire, which refuses to burn, the

souches being wringing wet. Jim rather injudiciously approaches them,

and offers his assistance in piling the damp logs; but he is so

evidently _de trop_, that he retires discomfited. On the other hand, the

invitation in Miss Strutt's and her coadjutor's eye is so apparent that

he beats a hasty retreat out of the room, in dread lest he should be

drawn into their mysterious pleasantry.

He never is quite clear afterwards how he gets over the hours that

intervene before dinner--whether sleep comes to his aid, or whether he

is after all reduced to perusing in the _Court Journal_ the narrative of

which direction the Queen and Princess Henry of Battenburg took their

walk in, in October. But at length the welcome bell rings, drowning

even, for two minutes, the banging of the wind; and the whole hotel,

unwontedly punctual, rushes in answer to its summons. People who have

hitherto scarcely exchanged words, have eyed each other with hardly

veiled distrust, now show a feverish desire to enter into conversation,

to detain one another after dinner on the steps of the _salle a manger_.

As the evening advances, Jim sees an intention among the younger portion

of the company to launch out into noisy, romping games, to institute a

Dumb Crambo. He feels it is far from impossible that he himself may fall

so low as to be drawn into it. Miss Strutt's eye is on him, but before

he succumbs he will make one effort on his own behalf. He embraces a

desperate resolution. He has seen the Le Marchants eating their dinner

near, and yet hopelessly far from him. Elizabeth had given him one

furtive smile, and her mother a hurried bow; this is, to tell the truth,

all the encouragement he has to go upon--all that he can find to keep

his courage up as he knocks at their door, telling himself that his

excuse--that of asking them to lend him a book--is a quite sufficient

and legitimate one. He knocks, and Elizabeth's voice at once answers:

"Herein!"

It is clear that she takes him for the German waiter, Fritz. She remains

in this belief even after he has opened the door, since she does not at

first look up. She is alone--not in the pretty flowered room in which

she had yesterday received him, but in the first and less adorned of the

little series--one that he had, on his former visit, cursorily supposed

to be chiefly used as an ante-room--sitting alone at a table, and before

her are spread writing-materials, over which she is stooping. An odious

and ridiculous thought darts, with a prick, across his mind.

Is she sitting here, all alone, in order to write to Byng?

"I came----" he begins; and at the unexpected voice she looks up with a

start:

"Oh, it is you!" she says, in a low key, glancing rather apprehensively

at the closed door, which separates them from the inner room, in a

manner which tells him that her parents are within.

"I came"--his voice almost unconsciously sinking to the level hers has

indicated to him--"to ask you to lend me a book."

"A book!" she repeats doubtfully, with another and still more nervous

glance at the shut door; "I am afraid that they are all in there."

"Oh, it is of no consequence!" rejoins Burgoyne hastily, unwittingly

quoting the words of the immortal Mr. Toots; "it does not matter in the

least."

As he speaks, he begins to retreat towards the door, but so slowly as to

give her plenty of time to recall him had she so wished. But she does

not. She only stands looking uncertain and distressed. He cannot take

such a melancholy impression of her little face away for the whole night

with him--it would give him the blues too seriously after this dismal

day--so he takes a step or two forward again.

"Are not you rather lonely?" he asks, with an expressive look round.

She gives a small, uncomplaining smile.

"Oh no; I do very well. I am generally alone at this time of day; they

like to have their evenings to themselves--at least, father likes to

have mammy to himself; I am sure it is quite natural."

There is not the slightest trace of any sense of being aggrieved in

either words or tone.

Again that picture of the adored Elizabeth of former days, of whose

prattle her father was never weary, whose jokes were always considered

so unequalled, and whose pre-eminence in favour was so allowed that her

intercession and influence were always employed by the others as certain

in their efficacy, rises before Jim's eyes.

"They are like lovers still," continues Elizabeth softly; "it is very

pretty when people are lovers still after nearly thirty years."

"And you--you write letters?"

"No, I do not; I have not anyone to write to."

A pang of shame at his unworthy suspicion, coupled with a sense of

astonishment at her simple confession of friendlessness, prevent his

speaking; and it is she who goes on:

"I was writing an Italian exercise; I began to learn Italian in

Florence"--with the inevitable low sigh that always accompanies her

mention of that name--"and to-day, for something to do, I took it up

again. It has been a long day, has not it? Oh, _what_ a long day!"

"_Long!_" repeats Jim emphatically; "it might choose to call itself a

_day_; but many a century has been shorter."

"Someone was playing battledore and shuttlecock in the hall. I wonder to

what number they kept it up? how many years it is since I have played

battledore and shuttlecock!"

There is a suppressed envy in her tone, which tells how far from

disagreeable the innocent noisy pastime to which she alludes would be to

her even now. She has sat down again on the straight-backed chair from

whose elevation she had commanded her Italian studies; a large grayish

cloak, lined and heavily collared, and bordered with fur, hangs,

unfastened at the throat, about her. Out of the dark beaver her delicate

neck and head rise, like a pale primrose from out of piled dead

oak-leaves in a yet wintry wood. Through the door, which he has left

open behind him, come bursts of maniac mirth from the votaries of Dumb

Crambo.

"What a noise they are making!"

"I should think they were!"

"I wonder what they are doing?"

"I can inform you on that point; they are playing Dumb Crambo."

She repeats the words after him with a lingering intonation, in which

there again is, or, at least, he thinks that he detects it, a tinge of

envy.

"Dumb Crambo!"

"Would you like to join them?"

"No"--slowly--"not quite that; but--it sounds ridiculous--but I should

like to play Dumb Crambo again. We used"--in an affectionate, lingering

tone--"to play it when we were children."

It is the first time that she has ever voluntarily alluded to the Moat,

and he calls to mind her earnest prohibition addressed to him at

Florence against any mention of it.

"I know you did; once or twice I played with you."

"_You?_"