Elizabeth is not in the _salon_, but the screen that masks the door

separating that room from the little alcove beyond is folded back. Over

the doorway is a hanging of Eastern embroidery--as to the meaning of the

strange gold scrolls that look like Arab letters on whose red ground

Elizabeth and he have often idly speculated. He pushes it aside, and

sees her standing with her back towards him, the flimsy muslin

window-curtains drawn back as she looks out on the night. The alcove is

on ordinary occasions scarcely ever occupied, and there is something

uneasy and uncomfortable that matches the wretchedness of her other

circumstances in finding her standing there alone and idle.

The elements have long finished their raging, and fallen to boisterous

play. It has been a fine day, and though the sun has long laid down his

sceptre, he has passed it on with scarcely diminished, though altered,

radiance to his white imitator. It is broad moonlight--startlingly

broad. The moon hangs overhead, with never a cloud-kerchief about her

great disk. The winds that, loudly sporting, are up and abroad have

chased every vapour from the sky, which is full of throbbing white

stars. Before he reaches her side she has heard him, and turned to meet

him, with a mixed hunger and pitiful hope in her wan face. She thinks

that he has come to fetch her. He must kill that poor hope, and the

quicklier the more mercifully.

"Mrs. Le Marchant sent me. I came to tell you that he has recovered

consciousness. You see, you were wrong"-with an attempt at a reassuring

smile--"he is not dead, after all. He is conscious; that is to say, he

is not insensible; but I am afraid he is not quite himself yet, and you

must not--must not mind--must not be frightened, I mean--if he begins to

shout out and talk nonsense by-and-by: the doctor says it is what we

must expect."

"And may I--mayn't I--will not you let me?"

What a quivering voice the hope has, and yet how alive it is! However

clumsily, and with whatever bitter yearnings over the pain he is causing

her, he must knock it on the head at once.

"Go to him?--impossible! quite out of the question! The great object is

to keep him perfectly quiet, and if once he caught sight of you--"

"But if he is not himself," interrupts she, with a pathetic pertinacity,

"he would not know me. I could not do him any harm if he did not know

me, and I might do something--oh, ever such a little thing for him! If

you knew what it was to stand here and do nothing--_do nothing_

indeed!"--with a change of tone to one of agonized self-reproach;--"have

not I done enough already? Oh, would anyone have believed that it would

be I that should kill him!"

She turns back to the window again, and dashes her forehead with

violence against the frame. Outside the tall date-palm is shaken through

all its plumes by the loud breeze; it is swaying and waving and blowing,

and not less is its solid shadow cut out by the moonshine's keen knife

on the terrace, wavering and shaking too, as if convulsed by laughter.

The porch of the hotel--mere whitewash and plaster, as memory and reason

tell one that it is--stands out in glorified ivory like the portals of

such a palace as we see in vision, when

"Good dreams possess our fancy."

"I can't have you talking such nonsense," says Jim, in an exceedingly

kind and not very steady voice, for his own feelings are horribly

harrowed; and on thinking over the scene afterwards, he cannot swear

that, at this point, he did not pass a most brotherly arm for one moment

round the poor little heaving shoulder, which is shaking almost as much

as the palm-tree's shadow. "He is not going to die; he is not thinking

of dying. Nobody has killed him--least of all you."

She makes him no answer, nor lifts her stricken head, over which he

looks out, while the ghostly mirth shakes the landscape; at his wits'

end, in search of consolation. Below waves a sea of foliage, out of

which the strong elfin light has stolen all the colour. From that

colourless dark ocean rises far away to the right the dazzling little

snowy dome of a mosque, showing like a transfigured mushroom; and down

below the rounding bay is seen laying its foam-lips in white glory on

the land.

"Dr. Stephens feels sure that he must have had a sunstroke. You know

that he has been in the East. He was a month in Cairo; the sun has great

power there, even in winter, and he is sure to have exposed himself

recklessly. He was on his way home--had got as far as Paris, it

seems--when he accidentally heard that you were here. Since then, no

doubt, he has neither eaten nor slept; so you see how little you are to

blame. You know that I told you how odd he was before you even saw him.

Do not you remember?"--trying to recall every circumstance that may tend

to reassure her--"I warned you that you would have to be careful what

you said to him?"

His words have a very different effect from that intended by him.

"Oh, that is why I cannot forgive myself!" says she, with what sounds

almost like a cry of physical pain. "You _did_ warn me; I had no excuse.

In his state I ought never--it was murdering him to tell him--"

She breaks off. To tell him what? Jim bites his lips hard to hinder

himself from putting this question, as he again, in mercy to her, looks

away from her out into the night.

The moon has swum over the housetop by now; but one can see her

handiwork as plainly as ever in the broad argent fringe, like the border

of a cloak, that marks where the waves are breaking on the beach.

One often talks of a fringe without really meaning that there is much

likeness to one; but to-night the moon-washed breakers really do wear

that aspect--a fringe of silver with long silver tags and ends.

"But I was so deceived," she continues, with that wail still in her

voice; "he was not violent. After what you had told me, I expected him

to be violent; but he was not: he was quite gentle and quiet, and he did

beg so hard, and I was so glad to see him again, that I felt I was

giving in--that I should give way altogether if I did not tell him--tell

him at once, without giving myself time to think; and so I did"--growing

very breathless and incoherent--"and in a second; and then all in a

minute, without any warning, just as if I had shot him through the head,

he went down with a crash. I did not see it, for I was not looking at

him. I could not bear to look at him while I told him. I had both hands

over my face, and then--and then--I heard him fall."

What can Jim say to her? Fear lest any dastardly unchivalrous curiosity

may seem to pierce through whatever sympathetic question he might put to

her keeps him dumb, and stupidly staring at the bowing, ironically merry

palm.

"And now," she goes on, lifting her face, and he is shocked to see how

livid it is in the moonlight, "he will go out of the world thinking me

much worse than I really am, for I had not time to tell him all. He

heard only the bare fact; he did not hear what excuse I had--that I was

not really so wicked as--as--he will die thinking me."

The sob with which she ends alarms him by its kinship to a convulsion.

"I do not know what to say to you," he says, desperately making a snatch

at her two hands, as if by the violence of his grip he could convey to

her some little portion of the deep compassion that is swelling up in

his heart for her; "I am so much in the dark. No, no, no!" with a return

of that terror lest this ejaculation should seem the outcome of any

inquisitiveness; "I do not want you to tell me anything! What is more, I

will not listen to you if you attempt it; but what there is not the

least manner of doubt about is that his fainting had no sort of

reference to what you said to him: he would have fainted whatever you

had said to him, or if you had said nothing at all. He was as mad as a

hatter when he went in to you. It is all part of the same

thing--over-fatigue, sunstroke. But he is not going to die"--with a

hurried trip back to his former strain of consolation--"he is not

thinking of it; I promise you, I give you my word of honour"--becoming

perfectly reckless and completely insensate--"that he shall not!"

But she is too strangled with sobs to make any rejoinder.

"He shall have the best of nursing," goes on Jim. "I have telegraphed

for a nurse to Nice. How astonishing it is that in a place of this size

you cannot get a decent sick-nurse! I hoped we might have caught the one

who nursed General Smith before----"

He stops abruptly, with a too tardy recollection that the allusion is

not a happy once, since the General died two days ago. Unfortunately,

she also remembers, as is evidenced by the strong shudder that passes

over her.

"If he dies, will he be buried in that deep narrow, red grave that they

showed us in the Protestant cemetery, and which they said that they

always kept open for English visitors? If he dies! if he dies! Oh, if I

could but have told him! if he would but have waited for me to tell him

how it really was!"

CHAPTER X.

Though "February Fill-dyke" was never and nowhere truer to her name than

this year, and in Algiers--coming laden with wet days to make the green

Sahel, if possible, greener than it was before; yet the inhabitants of

the Grand Hotel do not again, for a matter of three weeks, relieve their

ennui or let off their energies in far from Dumb Crambo, or loud

charade. The voice of the battledore is silent in the entrance-hall, and

the shuttlecock sleeps. M. Cipriani has scarcely had to do more than

mention his request that they would lay aside their more noisy pastimes,

for they are, most of them, rather good-natured persons than otherwise,

since, indeed, it is quite as uncommon to be very ill-natured as to be

very selfless, or very foolish, or very wise. Those of them who have

been fortunate enough to be present at the catastrophe have carried away

such a moving image of a wounded Adonis, apparently several yards long,

stretched upon Mrs. Le Marchant's Persian carpet, that they have

infected those less happy persons who know of him only by hearsay with a

compassionate interest scarcely inferior to their own.

The only person in the hotel who makes much noise is poor Byng himself,

and for awhile he falls it with clamour enough to furnish two or three

of those bump suppers of which, not so long ago, he was a conspicuous

ornament.

There had never, even when he was in his wits, been much disguise as to

the state of his feelings; now that he is out of them, the whole house

rings with his frantic callings upon the name of Elizabeth, uttered in

every key of rage, expostulation, tenderness, and appeal. These cries

reach Elizabeth herself as she sits cowering in that one of the little

suite of rooms which is nearest the door of entrance--sits there

cowering, and yet with the door, through which those dreadful sounds

penetrate to her, ajar, in order the better to hear them--cowering, and

for several days alone.

Owing to various accidents, similar in their results, though differing

in character, almost a week elapses from the first breaking out of

Byng's malady before the arrival of either the hospital nurse or of Mrs.

Byng. When the latter event occurs, Mrs. Le Marchant retires from her

post at the sick man's bedside with the same unostentatious

matter-of-factness with which she had assumed it, and Elizabeth is no

longer alone. But to set against this advantage is the counterbalancing

evil that, after the arrival of Byng's mother, she can no longer steal

out, as she had before done a hundred times a day, to his door, to glean

fragments of tidings from any outcomer thence. She is never able to

repeat those little surreptitious excursions after that occasion when

Mrs. Byng, coming suddenly out upon her, passes her with such speaking,

if silent, hostility and scorn in her tired and grief-stricken eyes,

that the luckless spy slinks back sobbing to her own tender mother; and

there Jim, flying out a while after to carry them a crumb of

reassurance, finds them, to his indignation, mingling their bitter

tears.

Whatever else his faults may be, Mr. Burgoyne is a man of his word; he

certainly keeps his promise to Elizabeth that Byng shall be well nursed.

He keeps his other promise, too--though that is more by good luck than

good management--that Byng shall not die. Whether to hinder his friend

from being made a liar, or because he himself is loth to leave a world

which he has found so pretty, cruel, and amusing, Byng does not

die--Byng lives.

By her 25th day February has dried her tears, though they still hang on

her green lashes, and a great galleon of a sun steers through a

tremendous sea of blue, as Jim persuades Byng's mother to go out for her

first delicious drive in that fresh and satin-soft air of the Algerian

February, which matches our best poets' May. He takes her along the

Route des Aqueduques, that lovely route which runs high along the

hillside among the villas above the town, so high as to be on a level

with the roofs of the lofty-standing Continental and Orient Hotels. It

is a most twisting road, which in curves and loops winds about the head

of narrow deep gorges, full of pale olive-trees, caroubiers, and ilex.

Below lies the red-roofed white town. Slowly they trot past the campagne

of the "English Milor," "L'Epicier Anglais," and many others, over whose

high walls bougainvillias light their now waning purple fires, and big

bushes of fleurs de Marie stoop their milky stars.

Mrs. Byng's eyes, sunk and diminished by watching and weariness, have

been lying restfully on the delightful spring spectacle--on the great

yellow sorrels by the wayside; she now turns them tear-brimmed to her

companion.

"I could jump out of my skin!" she says shakily. "What a sun! what a

sea! And to think that, after all, we have pulled him through."

Jim's only answer is a sympathetic pressure of the extremely

well-fitting glove nearest him. If Willy had died instead of lived, her

gloves would have fitted all the same.

"But we are not out of the wood yet," continues she, with a shake of the

head. "He is cured, or nearly cured, of one disease, but what about the

other?"

"What other?" inquires he, obstinately stupid, and with somewhat of a

heart-sinking at the prospect of the engagement which he sees ahead of

him.

How many elbows the road makes! It seems to have been cut in places

right through the wet red rock, now overhung by such a torrent of

vegetation.

At the head of one of the deep clefts that run up from the sea they

pause, and look down upon a second sea of greenery that would seem to

belong to no month less leafy than June. To June, too, belong the murmur

and hum and summer trickle of running water at the ravine bottom.

"I do not see why, if he goes on as swimmingly as he is now doing," says

Mrs. Byng in a restless voice--"why we should not get him off in a week,

even if he were carried on board the boat."

"A week? Is not that rather sanguine?"

"I do not think so, the sooner the better; and during that week I should

think she could hardly make any attempt to see him."

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

"Well, no"--rather grudgingly. "In fact, between you and me, considering

that it is they who have brought him into this plight, I think they

might have shown a little more solicitude about him. In the last ten

days I do not believe that they have been once to the door to inquire."

"You do not seem to be aware," says Jim, in a voice which, though quiet,

is not pacific, "and that is odd, considering how often I told you, that

until you came Mrs. Le Marchant nursed him like a mother; not like a

mother, indeed"--correcting himself with a somewhat malicious

intention--"for mothers grow flurried, and she never did."

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

"Well"--more generously--"how shabby of me to mind, if she did! I do not

mind. God bless her for it! I always thought"--compunctiously--"that

she looked a nice woman."

"She _is_ nice--as nice"--descending into a slang unworthy of his ripe

years--"as they make 'em."

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

too."

They are passing the Casbah, the solid Moorish fortifications, about

which now hang only a few gaitered, sunburnt, baggy Zouaves.

Jim has a silly hope that, if he maintains an entire silence, the

current of his companion's ideas may drift into another channel; but he

is soon undeceived.

"I suppose that she must have been quite, _quite_ young when--when those

dreadful things happened that Willy talked about in his delirium?"

"Is it possible"--indignantly--"that you take the ravings of a

fever-patient au pied de la lettre?"

"No, I do not; but"--with an obstinate sticking to her point--"there was

a substratum of truth in them; that was only too evident."

Jim shuts his teeth tight together. His vow of silence is harder to keep

than he had thought.

"Since he came to himself he has never mentioned her to me," continues

his companion anxiously; "has he to you?"

"No."

"I quite tremble whenever he opens his lips, lest he should be going to

begin the subject, and one could not contradict him yet awhile; he is so

quixotic, it is quite likely that he may have some distorted idea that

her being--how shall I say?--_fletrie_--is an additional reason for

standing by her, rehabilitating her, marrying her. He is so chivalrous."

They have left the Prison Civile and the Zouave Barracks behind them. A

longer interval than that usually supposed to elapse between a remark

and its rejoinder has passed, before Jim can bring himself to utter the

following sentence with the calmness which he wishes:

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

Perhaps Mrs. Byng does not readily find a response to this question;

perhaps it sets her off upon a train of speculation which does not

conduce to garrulity. Certain it is that, for the rest of the drive, she

is as silent as Jim could wish her. It is a sharp surprise to him two

days later to be mysteriously called outside the sick man's door by her,

in order to be informed that she has invited Miss Le Marchant to

accompany her on a drive.

"I went to call upon them," she says, avoiding--or so he fancies it--his

eye as she speaks; "and I asked the girl to drive with me to the Mole,

and get a good blowing about."

"How kind of you!" cries Jim, a flash of real pleasure in his serious

look; "how like you--like your real self, that is!"

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

it away rather hastily.

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

She seems confused and a little guilty, and escapes with some

precipitation from his gratitude. Mrs. Byng is not a woman addicted to

double-dealing, and if she ever makes any little essays in that

direction, she does them, as on this present occasion, villainously.

Burgoyne is not at the hall-door to help the ladies into the carriage

when they set off. Perhaps this may be because he is in attendance upon

the invalid. Perhaps because--glad as he had at first felt and expressed

himself at their friendliness--some misgiving may, upon reflection, have

beset him at so strange a conjunction. At all events, it is only Fritz

who throws the light Arab rug over their knees and gives them his

encouraging parting smile.

Poor Miss Le Marchant needs his encouragement, for, indeed, it is in a

very frightened spirit that she sets forth on her pleasuring. But before

the horse-bells have jingled to the bottom of Mustapha Superieur, her

spirits are rising. The sun shines, and he has shone so seldom in

Elizabeth's life that a very few of his beams, whether real or

metaphorical, suffice to send up her quicksilver. She does not

consciously admit for a second the hope that in the present overture on

the part of her companion lies any significance. But yet a tiny

trembling bliss now and then taps at her heart's door, and she pushes it

away but feebly.

Before they have reached the Amiraute, where they are to get out, she

has thanked Mrs. Byng with such pretty and unsuspecting gratitude for

bringing her, and has made her laugh so irrepressibly by her gay and

naive comments upon the motley passers-by, that the latter is filled

with a compunctious regret that a person with such lovely manners, and

such a sense of a joke, should have made so disastrous a fiasco of her

life as renders necessary the extremely distasteful errand on which she

herself is at present bound. At the Amiraute, as I say, they get out;

and, turning under a groined roof that looks as if it were the crypt of

a church, find themselves presently upon the long stone breakwater that

runs out into the bay. It was built, they tell us, in old days by the

wretched Christian captives; but the sea has taken care that not much of

the original labour of blood and tears has survived.

The wind is high, and the sunshine ardent and splendid. On their right

as they walk, with the wind officiously helping them from behind, is a

world of dancing sapphire, each blue billow white-tipped. On their left

are great blocks of masonry, built strong and square, with narrow

intervals between to break the might of the water. How little their

strength has availed against that of their tremendous opponent is seen

at every step, since nearly half the blocks are overthrown or in

semi-ruin; though the date engraved upon them shows for how few seasons

they have been exposed to the ravages of the tempestuous sea. They walk

on to the end, till they can go no further, since, just ahead of them,

the waves are rolling in half-fierce play--though the day is all

smiles--over the breakwater; and even where they stand, their footing is

made unsure by lengths of slimy seaweed that set them slipping along.

Elizabeth insists upon the elder woman taking her slight arm--insists

upon carrying her wraps, and generally waiting upon and ministering to

her. From the bottom of her heart Mrs. Byng wishes that she would not,

since every instance of her soft helpfulness, so innocent and

spontaneous, makes more difficult the answer to that question which she

has been asking herself ever since they set foot upon the Mole:

"How shall I begin?"

It is unanswered still, when, retracing their steps a little, they sit

down under the lee of one of the half-wrecked blocks to enjoy the view.

From here the sea is a lake, the distant mountains and the breakwater

seeming--though in reality parted by how wide a wet waste--to join in

embracing it. The mountains are dim and filmy to-day, Cape Matifou

scarcely visible; but the Koubah shows white-domed on the hillside, and

all the dazzling water is shot through with blinding light. The town,

Arab-French, is dazzling too; the arcaded quay, the fortifications, one

can scarcely look at any of them. Two or three steamers, with a little

vapour issuing from their ugly black and red funnels, lie moored; and

other smaller craft lift their spars against the heaven. Near by a man

is sitting with his legs dangling over the water, fishing with a line;

and two or three Arabs, draped in the dignity of their poetic rags, lie

couched round a fire that they have kindled. Beneath and around them is

the banging and thundering of the sea. August noise! "A voice like the

sound of many waters." Could there be a more awful comparison? Just

underneath them, where the sea has made a greater breach than usual, it

is boiling as in a caldron. Looking down and in, they see the water

comparatively quiet for a moment; then, with a shout of its great

jubilant voice, rushing and surging in, tossing its mane. Elizabeth's

eyes are resting on the heavenly sapphire plain.

"_How_ blue!" she says, under her breath; "one cannot believe that it is

not really blue; one feels that if one took up a little in a spoon it

would be just as blue as it is now."

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

Byng, lugging in somewhat awkwardly, as she feels, the subject which she

finds it so hard to introduce, "as I suppose we shall be within a week

now."

Her charity bids her not glance at her companion as she speaks, so she

is not quite sure whether or not she gives a start.

"Mr. Burgoyne thinks that I am sanguine; but I am all for moving him as

soon as possible; it cannot be too soon."

She tries to throw as much significance as they are capable of holding

into the latter words, and feels that she has succeeded.

"Of course he may refuse to go," continues she, with a rather strained

laugh. "Do you remember Victor Hugo's definition of heaven as a place

where children are always little and parents are always young? I am

continually quoting it. But, unfortunately, one's children will not stay

little; they grow big, and get wills of their own, and it is quite

possible he may refuse to go."

"Yes?" almost inaudibly.

"But"--reddening slightly at the patently-intended application of her

next sentence--"anyone that was fond of him--anyone that liked him

_really_ and--and _disinterestedly_, I mean, must see that the only

happy course for him would be to go; that it would be his salvation to

get away; they--they would not try to hinder him."

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

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

shade of dignity.

"When he was ill--while he was delirious" ("How dreadfully unpleasant it

is!" in an anguished internal aside)--"I could not help

hearing--gathering--drawing inferences."

The ardour of the chase has vanquished her charity, and she is looking

at her victim. But, to do her justice, the success of her labours shocks

her. Can this little aged, pinched face, with its dilated eyes, so full

of woe and terror, be the same one that dimpled into riotous laughter

half an hour ago at the sight of the two dirty old men, in Jewish

gaberdines and with gingham umbrellas, kissing each other by the Mosquee

de la Pecherie?

"Of course it was all incoherent," she goes on hurriedly, snatching at

the first expression that occurs to her as likely to undo, or at least a

little modify, her work--"nothing that one could make sense of. Only

your name recurred so incessantly; it was nothing but 'Elizabeth,

Elizabeth.' I am sure"--with a remorseful if clumsy attempt to be kind,

and a most uneasy smile--"that I do not wonder at it!"

In the narrow interspace between the blocks and the path--not more than

a couple of fingers wide--how the sea forces itself! and up race its

foam-fountains, throwing their spray aloft in such mighty play, as if

they would hit heaven's arch. What exhilaration in its great glad noise,

superb and battle-ready!

"I cannot express how distasteful a task this is to me"--in a tone that

certainly gives no reason to doubt the truth of her statement; "but,

after all, I am his mother; he is all I have in the world, and I am sure

that you are the very last person who would wish to do him an injury."

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

How curiously still and slow her voice is! Mrs. Byng has resolutely

averted her eyes, so that her purpose may not again be shaken by the

sight of the havoc she has wrought, and has fixed them upon some sea

gulls that are riding up and down upon the merry waves, making them,

with their buoyant motion, even more jocund than they were before.

"It seems an impossible thing to say to you--a thing too bad to

apologize for--but yet I _must_ say it"--in a tone of excessive

distress, yet firmness. "Under the circumstances, it would--would throw

a blight over his whole life."

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

Florence."

"And very good it was of you, too! Not that I am quite certain of the

judiciousness of the way in which you did it; but, however, I am sure

you meant it for the best."

"Yes, I meant it for the best."

The sea-gulls have risen from the billow, and are turning and wheeling

in the air. The light is catching their wings, and making them look like

whitest silver. It seems as if they were at conscious play with it,

trying experiments as to how they can best catch their bright

playfellow, and again shake it off, and yet again recapture it.

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

presently.

Now that the impression has somehow been conveyed to her mind that her

mission is likely to be completely successful, the full brutality of the

method by which she has accomplished it bursts upon her mind.

"How treacherous! luring you out here, under the pretence of

friendliness, to say such horrible things to you!"

Elizabeth's narrow hands are clasped upon her knee, and her small

heart-broken, white face is looking out straight before her.

"No, I do not think you a monster," she answers--"you are a kind-hearted

woman! and it must have been very, very unpleasant to you. I am quite

sorry"--with a sort of smile--"for you, having to do it; but you are his

mother. If I had been his mother, I should have done the same; at least,

I suppose so."

"I am sure, if things had been different, there is no one that I should

have--I do not know when I ever saw anyone whom I took such a fancy to.

If it had not been for the disparity--I mean, if he had been less young

and unfit to take upon himself the serious responsibilities of life----"

How deplorably lame even to Mrs. Byng's ears sound her tardy efforts to

place the grounds of her objection on a less cruel basis than that which

she has already made so nakedly plain to be the real one! Even the

sweet-mannered Elizabeth does not think it necessary to express

gratitude for such insulting civilities.

"I do not quite understand what you wish me to do," she says, with quiet

politeness; "if you will explain to me----"

"Oh, I do not want to dictate to you; please do not imagine I could

think of being so impertinent; but, of course, he will be asking for

you. Since he came to himself, he has not mentioned you as yet; but of

course he will. I am expecting it every moment; probably he has not felt

up to embarking on the subject. He will ask for you--will want to see

you."

"And you wish me not to see him?"

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

"Oh, but of course you must see him! you quite, _quite_ misunderstand

me! Much chance there would be"--with a wretched stunted laugh--"of

getting him away without a sight of you! How little you know him!"

Elizabeth does not dispute the fact of her want of acquaintance with

Byng's character, nor does she help his floundering parent by any

suggestion. She merely goes on listening to her with that civil white

look, while the sportive sea-mews still play at hide-and-seek with the

sun-rays on the wide blue fields of heaven.

"It is dreadful that I should have to say these things to you," says

Mrs. Byng, in a voice of the strongest revolt and ire against her

destiny--"insult you in this unprovoked way; but, in point of fact, you

are the only person in the world who can convince him that--that--it is

impossible--that it cannot be. Of course he will be very urgent and

pressing, and I know how persuasive he is. Do not you suppose that I,

his own mother, know how hard it is to refuse him anything? and of

course, in his present weak state, it must be very carefully done. He

could not stand any violent contradiction. You would have to be very

gentle; dear me!"--with a fresh access of angry remorse--"as if you ever

could be anything else."

This compliment also its pale object receives in silence.

"You know one has always heard that there are two kinds of 'No,'" goes

on Mrs. Byng with another dwarfish laugh, which has a touch of the

hysteric in it--"a woman's 'No,' as it is called, that means 'Yes'; and

a 'No' which anyone--which even _he_--must understand to be final. If

you _could_--I dare say I am asking you an impossibility--but if you

_could_ make him understand that this time it is final!"

There is a silence between them. An unrulier billow than usual, yet more

masterless in its Titan play, is hurling itself with a colossal thud and

bang against the causeway; and Elizabeth waits till its clamour is

subsided before she speaks.

"Yes," she answers slowly, "I understand; thank you for telling me what

you wish. I think I may promise that I shall be able to--that I shall

make him understand that it is final."

A moment or two later they are on their way back to the Amiraute. The

ocean is at its glorious pastimes all around them; the hill-climbing,

shining town smiles upon them from its slope; but upon both has fallen a

blindness. The feelings of Mrs. Byng are perhaps the least enviable of

the two.

They are nearly back at the beginning of the breakwater, when she stops

short. Probably when cool reflection comes, when she is removed from the

charm and pathos of Elizabeth's meek white presence, lovely and

unreproachful, she will not repent her work; but at the present moment

of impulse and remorse she feels as if the expunging of the last

half-hour would be cheaply purchased by the sacrifice of six months of

her remaining life.

"I suppose it is not the least use my asking you to try and forgive

me--to make allowances for me?" she says, with unsteady-toned humility;

"oh, _how_ you must hate me! If the case were reversed, _how_ I should

hate you! How you will hate me all your life!"

The tears are rolling down her cheeks, and in an instant Elizabeth's

hand has gone out to her. As it does so, the grotesque regret flashes

across the elder woman's mind that any future daughter-in-law of hers

will be most unlikely to be the possessor of such a hand.

"Why should I hate you? you cannot"--with a heart-wrung smile--"possibly

think me more undesirable than I do myself; and even if it were not so,

I do not think it is in me to hate anyone very much."

On their drive home they meet with one or two little incidents quite as

funny as the old Jews kissing each other; but this time they do not move

poor Miss Le Marchant to any laughter.

CHAPTER XI.

"I do remember an apothecary,--

And hereabouts he dwells."

Two days later she is called upon to perform the task she has

undertaken. Probably she has spent those two days, and also the

appertaining nights, in bracing her mind to it, for Jim can plainly see

the marks of that struggle, though he is not aware of its existence,

graved upon her face, on the third morning after the excursion to the

Mole, when he comes in search of her. He does not find her in her

accustomed corner of the terrace, but, looking down over the balustrade,

sees her sitting below and alone on a small tree-shaded plateau that

seems to have been levelled for lawn-tennis or bowls. Probably the

giggling and chaffering of the girls on the terrace, and the respectful

but persistent importunities of the Omars and Ahmeds to buy their

colourful wares outspread on the hot flags have oppressed her spirits.

Fritz has carried down for her an arm-chair, a cane table, and a Persian

rug for her feet, and she looks as if she were established for the day.

Since Byng has been out of danger Elizabeth has returned to her

embroidery. She is one of those women to whom needlework is unaffectedly

dear, like that other sweet woman "who was so delicate with her needle."

Before she catches sight of him he watches for a few moments her bright

bent head and flying white fingers, and is able to perceive how many

sighs she is sewing into the pattern.

"What a morning!" he says, running down the steps and joining her. "No

one has any excuse for being an invalid to-day, has he?"

There is no second seat, so he stands beside her, looking up over her

head at the tall trees above her, from which immense garlands of ivy are

hanging and swinging in the warm breeze. That potent ivy has killed one

tree altogether.

She glances up at him mutely, knowing that he has not come merely to

tell her that the day is fine.

"We can hardly keep him on his sofa; he is virtually almost well, so

well that he is quite up to seeing people. He would like--he has been

asking--to see _you_."

He had thought her nearly as pale as it was possible for her to be when

he had first come upon her. He now realizes how many degrees of colour

she then had left to lose. While he speaks she has been mechanically

pulling her thread through, and as he ceases, her lifted hand stops as

if paralyzed, and remains holding her needle in the air.

It has come, then. For all her two days' bracing, is she ready for it?

"_Now?_"

The whisper in which this monosyllable is breathed is so stamped with a

fear that borders on terror, that his one astonished thought is bow best

to reassure her.

"Not if you do not feel inclined, of course--not unless you like. It can

perfectly well be put off to another time. I can tell him--there will

not be the least difficulty in making him understand--that you do not

feel up to it this morning: that you would rather have more notice."

"But I would not," she says, standing up suddenly, and with trembling

hands laying her work down upon the table, and beginning from dainty

habit to pin it up in its protecting white cloth. "What good would more

notice--a year's notice--do me?"

She turns away from him and fixes her unseeing eyes, glassy and dilated,

upon a poplar tree that is hanging tasselled catkins out against the

sky. Then once again she faces him, and he sees that there are cold

beads of agony upon her forehead.

"Wish for me," she says huskily--"wish very hard for me, that I may get

through it--that we may both get through it--alive!"

Then, motioning to him with her hand not to follow her, she walks

quickly towards the hotel.

It is impossible to him to stay quiet. He wanders restlessly away,

straying he knows not whither. The mimosas are out charmingly in the

gardens, sending delicious whiffs of perfume from the soft yellow fluff

of their flowers. The pinky almond-trees are out too, but not till long

afterwards does he know it.

By-and-by he finds himself strolling, unhindered by a gardener placidly

digging, through the grounds of a villa to let. Gigantic violets send

their messages to his nostrils, the big and innumerable blue blossoms

predominating over the leaves, which in England have to be so carefully

searched for them. Superabundant oranges tumble about his feet; arum

lilies, just discovering the white secret hid in their green sheaths,

stand in tall rows on either side of him; a bed of broad beans points

out the phenomenon of her February flowers to him. He sees and smells

none of them. Have his senses stolen away with his heart into Byng's

bedchamber? They must have done so, or he could not see with such

extraordinary vividness the scene enacting there. He has himself helped

to place it in such astonishing reality before himself. Does not he know

the exact position of the chair she is to occupy? Did not he place it

for her before he went to fetch her? Nor can his reason prevent his

distorted fancy from presenting the interview as one between happy and

confessed lovers. Even the recollection of her features, ghastly and

with beads of agony dewing them, cannot correct the picture of his mind

as he persistently sees it. That she meant, when he parted from her, to

renounce Byng, he has no manner of doubt. But does not he know the

pliancy of her nature? Is not he convinced that the rock on which her

life has split is her inability ever to refuse anyone anything that they

ask with sufficient urgency or with enough plausibility to persuade her

that she can do them a kindness by yielding?

How much more, then, will she be incapable of resisting the importunate

passion of her own heart's chosen one, freshly risen from a bed of

death? Presently his restless feet carry him away out of the villa

grounds again. He finds himself on the Boulevard Mustapha, and sits down

on the low wall by the roadside, staring absently at a broken line of

dusky stone-pines, cutting the ardent blue of the African sky on the

hill opposite, and at an arcaded campagne throned high up among the

verdure. He knows that it belongs to an Englishman who made reels of

cotton, and the idle thought saunters across his mind how strange it is

that reels of cotton should wind anyone into such a lofty white Eden!

Can the interview be lasting all this while? Is not it yet ended? May

not his tormented fancy see the chair by Byng's sofa once again empty or

occupied by nurse or mother? Will not Mrs. Byng, will not Elizabeth

herself; have seen the unfitness of taxing the sick man's faint powers

by so extreme a strain upon them? But no sooner has this suggested idea

shed a ray of light upon his darkness than an opposing one comes and

blows it out. Has not Byng a will of his own? Will he be likely so soon

to let her go? Nay, having once recovered her, will he ever let her out

of his sight again? The thought restores him to restless action, and,

although with sedulous slowness, he begins to retrace his steps towards

the hotel. At a point about a quarter of a mile distant from it, the

lane which leads to the Villa Wilson debouches into the road, and

debouching also into the road he sees the figure of Cecilia, who,

catching sight of him, as if unable to wait for him to join her, almost

runs to meet him.

"I was coming to call upon you," says she eagerly. "Oh!"--with a

laugh--"to-day I really cannot stay to think of the proprieties, and you

have not been to see us for such centuries!"

"I have been nursing Byng."

"Oh yes; poor man! How dreadfully ill he must have been! I was so glad

to hear he was better."

There is such a flat tepidity in the tone of these expressions of

commiseration, something so different from the tender alertness of

Cecilia's former interest in their object, that Jim, roused out of his

own reflections to regard her more attentively than he has yet done,

sees that she is preoccupied by some subject quite alien to the invalid.

"I have a piece of news to tell you"--with a sort of angry chuckle.

"Such a piece of news! I am sure you will be delighted at it."

At her words a wonder as idle and slack as his late thought about the

reels of cotton crosses him as to what possible piece of news to be told

him by the buxom and excited person, before him could give him the

faintest pleasure. That wonder sends up his eyebrows, and throws a mild

animation into his voice.

"Indeed?"

"Do you like"--still chuckling--"to be told a piece of news or to guess

it?"

"I like to be told it."

"Well, then"--with a dramatic pause--"we are going to have a wedding in

the family!"

"My dear girl!" cries he, smiling very good-naturedly, and with a

sensation that, though not violent, is the reverse of annoyance.

"Hurrah! So he has come at last! Who is he? How dark you have kept him!"

Cecilia shakes her head and gives a short and rosy laugh.

"Oh, it is not I! You are wide of the mark."

"Your father?"--in a shocked voice.

He has a confused and illogical feeling that a second marriage on the

part of Mr. Wilson would be a slight upon Amelia's memory.

"_Father!_"--with an accent that plainly shows him he is still further

afield than in his first conjecture--"poor father! No, indeed; Heaven

forbid! Fancy me with a stepmother!"

She pauses to give a shudder at the idea, while Jim gapes blankly at

her, wondering whether she has gone off her head.

"Oh no; it is neither father nor I! No wonder you look mystified. It

is--_Sybilla!_"

"SYBILLA!!!!"

Although Mr. Burgoyne has not got it on his conscience that he has ever

either expressed or felt anything but the most strenuous and entire

disbelief in Sybilla's maladies, yet it has never occurred to him as

possible that she should engage in any occupation nearer akin to the

ordinary avocations of life than imbibing tonics through tubes and

eating beef essences out of cups.

"She is going to marry Dr. Crump!" continues Cecilia, not on the whole

dissatisfied with the effect of her torpedo. "When she told father, she

said that he had saved her life, and that the least she could do was to

dedicate the poor remainder of it to him. She tells other people that

she is marrying him because we wish it! You know that that was always

her way."

"SYBILLA!!"

"I thought that there must be something in the wind, as since the

beginning of the month she has never once wished us good-bye; and the

housemaid upset the ink-bottle over the book of prescriptions without

her ever finding it out; and the clinical thermometer has not appeared

for a week!"

"SYBILLA!!!"

"I thought I should surprise you; it gives one a disgust for the idea of

marrying altogether, does not it? I have come to the conclusion that I

do not care now if I never marry. Father and I get on quite happily

together; and when one is well off, one can really be very fairly

content in a single state; and, at all events, I am sure I do not envy

Sybilla."

"Nor I Crump"--with an emphasis so intense that Cecilia bursts out into

a laugh of a more genuine character than any she has yet indulged in.

"You will have to give her away!" she cries, as soon as she can again

speak distinctly. "Father will marry her, of course, and you must give

her away. I am sure she will insist upon it."

"She will have to make haste, then," returns he, recovering enough from

his first stupefaction to join Cecilia in her mirth; "for I shall not be

here much longer."

"You are not going away?"--raising her eyebrows, and with a tinge of

meaningness in her tone which vaguely frets him.

"Why should not I go?" he asks irritably, his short and joyless

merriment quite quenched. "What is there for a man to do here? I have

stayed already much longer than I meant. I am engaged to meet a friend

at Tunis--the man with whom I went to the Himalayas three years ago; we

are going to make an excursion into the interior. I am only waiting for

some guns and things. Why should not I go?"

"There is no earthly reason," replies she demurely; "only that I did not

know you had any such intention. But then, to be sure, it is so long

since I have seen you--not, I think," glancing at him for confirmation

of her statement rather too innocently, "since the lovers--ha! ha!--and

I met you and Miss Le Marchant driving on the quay."

CHAPTER XII.

Elizabeth's feeble tap at Byng's door is instantly answered by the

nurse, who, opening it smilingly to admit her, the next moment,

evidently in accordance with directions received, passes out herself and

shuts it behind her. Elizabeth, deprived of the chaperonage of her cap

and apron, and left stranded upon the threshold, has no resource but to

cross the floor as steadily as a most trembling pair of legs will let

her.

The room is a square one, two of its thick walls pierced by Moorish

windows. Drawn up to one of those windows--the one through which Jim had

caught his first glimpse of Elizabeth on the night of his arrival--is

the sick man's sofa. At the side of that sofa his visitor has, all too

soon, arrived. She had prepared a little set speech to deliver at

once--a speech which will give the keynote to the after-interview; but,

alas! every word of it has gone out of her head. Unable to articulate a

syllable, she stands beside him, and if anyone is to give the keynote,

it must be he.

"This is very, _very_ good of you. It seems a shame to ask you to come

here, with all this horrid paraphernalia of physic about; but I really

could not wait until they let me be moved into another room."

She has not yet dared to lift her eyes to his face, in terror lest the

sight of the change in it shall overset her most unsure composure.

Already, indeed, she has greedily asked and obtained every detail of the

alteration wrought in him. She knows that his head is shaved, that his

features are sharp, and that his voice is faint; and when, as he ceases

speaking, she at last wins resolution enough to look at him, she sees

that she has been told the truth. His head is shaven, his nose is as

sharp as a pen, and his voice is faint. She has been told all this; but

what is there that she has not been told? What is his voice besides

faint?

"Will not you sit down? It seems monstrous that I should be lying here

letting you wait upon yourself. Will you try that one?" pointing to the

chair which is figuring at the same moment so prominently in Jim's

tormented fancy. "I am afraid you will not find it very comfortable. I

have not tried it yet, but it looks as hard as a board."

She sits down meekly as he bids her, glad to be no longer obliged to

depend upon her shaky limbs, and answers:

"Thank you; it is quite comfortable."

"Would not it be better if you had a cushion?"--looking all round the

room for one.

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

But is she asleep or awake? Can this be the same voice that poured the

frenzy of its heartrending adjurations into her ear scarce a month ago?

Can this long, cool, white saint--he looks somehow like a young saint in

his emaciation and his skull-cap--be the stammering maniac who, when

last she saw him, crashed down nigh dead at her feet, slain by three

words from her mouth?

At the stupefaction engendered by these questions, her own brain seems

turning, but she feebly tries to recover herself.

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

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

"'Not burnt with thirsting,

Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting.'

Do you remember Keats?"

After all, there is something of the original Byng left, and the ghost

of his old spouting voice in which he recites the above couplet gives

her back a greater measure of composure than could almost anything else.

"It is nice, only one would like to be able to jump, not 'the life to

come'--ha! ha!--but the convalescence to come. My mother is even more

impatient than I am. She has made up her mind that we are to be off in

three days, even if I am carried on board on a shutter."

She can see now that he is very much embarrassed--that his fluency is

but the uneasy cover of some emotion--and the discovery enables her yet

further to regain possession of herself.

"I should think," she says in her gentle voice, "that you would be very

glad to get out of this room, where--where you have suffered so much."

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

"'The casement slowly grow a glimmering square;'

but"--with a rather forced laugh--"at least, I have had cause to be

thankful that there is no wall-paper to count the pattern of. I have

blessed the white wall for its featureless face."

She moves a little in her chair, as if to assure herself that she is

really awake. That stupefaction is beginning to numb her again--that

hazy feeling that this is not Byng at all, this polite invalid, making

such civil conversation for her; this is somebody else.

"But I must not tire myself out before I have said what I want to say to

you," he continues, his embarrassment perceptibly deepening, while his

transparent hand fidgets uneasily with the border of the coverlet thrown

over him, "or"--laughing again--"I shall have that tyrant of a nurse

down upon me, and--and I do wish--I have wished so much--so

unspeakably--to see you, to speak to you."

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

why should it be hope?--darts across her heart. After all, this may be

Byng--her Byng; this strange new manner may be only the garment in which

sickness has dressed his passion--a worn-out garment soon to drop away

from him in rags and tatters, and in which cannot she already discern

the first rent? After all, she may have need for her armour--that armour

which, so far, has seemed so pitifully needless.

"I knew that it would be no use asking leave to send for you any sooner;

they would have told me I was not up to it--would have put me off with

some excuse; so I kept a 'still sough.' Do you know that I never

mentioned your name until to-day? But it has been hard work, I can tell

you; for the last two days I have scarcely been able to bear it, I have

so _hungered_ to see you."

Her eyelids tremble, and she instinctively puts up her hand to cover her

tell-tale mouth. Surely this is the old language. Surely there is, at

all events, a snatch of it in his last words; and again that prick of

illogical joy quickens the beats of her fainting heart, though she tries

to chide it away, asking herself why she should be in any measure glad

that the love which she has come here for no other purpose than to

renounce, still lives and stirs.

"You may think I am exaggerating, but in point of fact I cannot by any

expression less strong than the gnaw of downright hunger convey the

longing I have had to see you."

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

She catches her breath. Now is the time for her to strike in, to arrest

him before he has time to say anything more definite. Now is the time

for her to fulfil her promise, her inhuman promise, which yet never for

one instant strikes her as anything but irrevocably binding. Does he see

her intention, that he plunges, in order to anticipate it, into so

hurried a resumption of his interrupted sentence?

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

conduct to you."

She gives an almost imperceptible start. This ending is not what she had

expected, not the one to defend herself against which she has been

fastening on her buckler and grasping her shield. The words that it

demands in answer are not those with which she has been furnishing

herself, and it is a moment or two before she can supply herself with

others. He must be referring, of course, to his last meeting with

her--that one so violently broken off by the catastrophe of his

collapse.

"I do not know what I am to forgive," she says, half bewildered. "You

were not accountable for your actions. You were too ill to know what you

were doing."

"Oh, you think I am alluding to that last time," cries he, precipitately

correcting her. "No, no; you are right. I was not accountable then. You

might as well have reasoned with a wild beast out of a menagerie. I was

a perfect Bedlamite then. No"--going on very rapidly, as it in desperate

anxiety to make her comprehend with the least possible delay--"what I am

asking you--asking you on my knees--to forgive me for, is my whole

conduct to you from the beginning."

The two white faces are looking breathlessly into each other, and though

of late he has been tussling with death on a bed, and she has been

walking about, and plying her embroidery, and dining at a public table,

hers is far the whiter of the two. It must be the unwonted exertion of

talking so much that makes him bring out his next speech in jerks and

gasps.

"I forced my acquaintance upon you at the very beginning; I watched you

like a detective; I beset you wherever you went; I pestered you with my

visits. Jim always told me that it was not the conduct of a gentleman,

but I would not believe him--not even when"--how difficult it is! he

finds it almost as hard work as his mother had done upon the Mole--"not

even when, by my importunities, I had driven you away--obliged you to

rush away almost by night from a place you liked--a place you were happy

in--to escape me. And I have no excuse to offer you--none; unless,

indeed, as I sometimes think, my mind was off its balance even then. I

express myself wretchedly!"--in a tone of deep distress--"but you will

overlook that, will not you? You will--will understand what I mean?"

She makes an assenting motion with her head. At this moment she cannot

speak: she will be able to do so again directly, but she must have just

a minute or two. Yet she must not leave him for an instant in doubt that

she understands him. Oh yes, she understands him--understands that he is

apologizing for having ever loved her; that he is awkwardly trying to

draw the mantle of insanity over even the Vallombrosan wood. It is true

that he does it with every sign of discomfort and pain; and he looks

away from her, as Mrs. Byng, too, had found it pleasanter to do.

"Do you remember what Schiller said when he was dying? 'Many things are

growing clearer to me.' I thought a good deal of those words as I lay

over there"--glancing towards the now neatly-arranged and empty bed.

"One night they thought it was all up with me--I heard them say so. They

did not think I was conscious, but I was; and it did strike me that I

had made a poor thing of it, and that if ever I was given the chance I

would make a new start."

Again that little assenting movement of her fair head. How perfectly

comprehensible he still is! How well she understands that he is

renouncing her among the other follies of his "salad days"--college

bear-fights, music-halls, gambling clubs. Well, why should not he? Has

not she come here on purpose to renounce him? Can she quarrel with him

for having saved her the trouble?

"And I thought that I could not begin better than by falling on my knees

to you. I wish I could fall on my real knees to you!"--with a momentary

expression of extreme impatience at his own bodily weakness--"and ask

you most humbly and tenderly and reverently to pardon me."

She looks at him, and sees his wasted face flushing with fatigue and

worry and mental suffering. Oh, what a bitter wave of desolateness rolls

over her! But she smiles.

"I still do not understand what I am to forgive you for. I suppose that

you could no more help having once thought you loved me, than you can

help"--she stops abruptly in compassion for the look of acute regret,

shame and remorse that crosses his sharp features, and, in her mercy to

him, gives a different close to her phrase from that which its beginning

had seemed to bespeak--"than you can help having been so ill."

Her tone, quite unconsciously to herself is inexpressibly touching; and

Byng, weakened by illness, turns his face upon the pillow, and breaks

into violent weeping. His mother had cried too. It seems to be in the

family.

She has risen--what further is there for her to stay for?--and pauses

quietly at his side till the paroxysm is past. Her standing posture

tells him that she is going, and he consequently struggles to recover

himself in some degree; but having never cultivated self-control when he

was in health, it declines to come at his enfeebled bidding now.

"Forgive me! forgive me!" is all he can stammer.

She looks down upon him with a strange and tender smile, in which for

the moment the selfless, pitying sweetness has swallowed up the misery.

"Which am I to forgive you for--for having loved me? or for having

ceased to love me? For having been mad? or for being sane? Yes, of

course I forgive you from the very bottom of my heart! God bless you!

Make haste and get well!"

She walks cheerfully to the door, and, reaching it, turns, still wearing

that smile, that he may see how perfectly friendly is her last look; but

he does not see it. He has rolled over on his face, and the whole sofa

is shaking with his sobs.

CHAPTER XIII.

"The pity of it, Iago! The pity of it!"

The Byngs are gone, having got off just within the time first suggested

by the sick man's mother. But, after all, he has to be carried on board

the _Eugene Perrere_. Since his interview with Miss Le Marchant, his

progress towards recovery has scarcely been so smooth or so fast as

before; and perhaps his mother is right to bear him away with what seems

such overhaste, even though it be on men's shoulders that he has to make

his exit. At all events, he is gone. The hotel--of which a part of the

inmates have seen him only prostrate and bleeding, and the other and

larger part have not seen him at all, but have had their curiosity

whetted by the tale of his calamitous arrival, only to have it balked by

his hurried departure--crowd into the entrance-hall, some on one

pretext, some on another, most on no pretext at all, to see him go.

There are only two of the visitors whose faces cannot be seen among the

good-naturedly curious and sympathetically pitiful group that watch the

exodus of the little party. Who shall say how those two spend the hour

of Byng's departure out of their lives? Jim has accompanied the invalid

to the quay to see the last of him; has stayed with him till the final

bell warns non-passengers off the boat; has left him with all the proper

requests and adjurations to let him know how the sick man bears the

voyage; how they get on, etc. But as Mrs. Byng stands on the upper deck

and watches the trail of churned water lengthening between her and the

dwindling high white town, she has a feeling that her old friend does

not like her as well as he did, and that it will never again be quite

the same thing between them.

The Byngs are gone--have been gone a fortnight--and March is here. Over

the villa faces the begonias have broken into riotous flower, and the

snowy-blossomed fruit-trees, that have put on their snowy garments but

lately, stand out in bright fragility against the heavy green that

never, even in January, ceases to wrap itself about the lovely Moslem

town.

Every day for the last fortnight, Jim, too, has been going, but he is

not yet gone. His guns have arrived ten days ago, and his friend has

expressed by post and wire his weariness of exploring the bazaars of

Tunis alone. But he is not yet gone to join that impatient friend. Why

does he still linger in a place where, as he had justly explained to

Cecilia, there is nothing for him to do? Why indeed? It is a question

that, by night and day, by the insolence of the staring moonlight which

slides in upon his restless open eyes by night, under the fires of the

great spring sun at noon, he asks himself. All the answer he can give is

that it would be hardly friendly to choose this moment, when she is so

down in the world, to leave Elizabeth.

She is down in the world; there can be no mistake about that. Even her

father, who has returned from his wanderings, must be aware of this

fact. Perhaps that is the reason why he no longer snubs her as much as

he did; why he even accepts, with some semblance of graciousness, those

affectionate and watchful ministrations which she tenders him with as

gentle an assiduity as in her brighter days. But he has still no great

appetite for her society; and she, unresentfully divining it, gives up

to him, without repining, the one great solace of her melancholy--her

mother's company. If Jim were gone, the more part of her life would be

spent alone. She tells him so--tells him, with a sweet flattering smile,

how much his comradeship is to her. Has he any right to rob her of that

last prop? It is only to himself that the breathless clamberings up the

steep short cut to El Biar, deep and brambly as her own Devonshire

lanes, that the gazings in common over the pigeon-necked sea and the

amaranth hills, can do any harm. They may put a sting into his own

after-life--a sting that all the empty years that follow may be

powerless to extract; but to her they serve only as a narcotic to numb

the intensity of that ache which the cured madness of Byng has left

behind it. Some day, of course, he must leave her; he cannot pass his

whole life at her side; some day soon leave her to walk and sit and

study her Italian Grammar forlornly alone. But it must not be until she

has a little plucked up her spirits.

As soon as he sees any signs of this occurring, he will quit

Algiers--quit it comfortably, with the consciousness of having done a

good-natured thing, by which nobody is the worse. This is the compromise

at which he arrives with the inward adviser--conscience, common-sense,

what you will--that is hourly admonishing him to be gone. Does Elizabeth

guess that her retention of the companion, to whom she so desolately

clings, hangs on her remaining always as crushed as the first ten days

after those cruel interviews with the Byngs, mother and son, had left

her? If she did, she would probably seek to check the first faint

revivings of cheerfulness in her inveterately gay spirit. Instead, while

her heart is yet at its sickest, she earnestly tries to foster the tiny

seeds of cheerfulness, saying to herself that it is mere selfishness in

her to inflict her dismalness upon her one friend; seeking rather to

lift his spirits, which seem scarcely less drooping than her own.

Does he enter into her motive? Does not it rather strike him with a

species of shock how superficial must be the nature, how on the surface

the suffering, of one who can already begin again to take a mischievous

interest in the Widow Wadman's amours, and to mimic afresh the Cockney

twang of the French Vicomte's English governess?

It is three weeks to-day since the Byngs left. The weather is fine, and

a hot sunbeam is lighting up the painful indecision of Jim's face, as he

stands in his bedroom with an open telegram in his hand, which two hours

ago was put into it. It is from his friend at Tunis, and is conceived in

terms which demonstrate that the indignation of the sender has got the

better of his economy. It contains a stringent representation of his

inability any longer to dance attendance upon Burgoyne's whims, and a

peremptory request, answer paid, to be at once informed either that he

will join him immediately, or that the idea of their joint excursion has

been entirely abandoned. He is standing holding the paper in miserable

uncertainty, torn by doubts, rent in twain by conflicting emotions, when

the noise of voices and laughter outside the house draws him to the

window.

The room he has occupied since he vacated his own for Byng looks out

over the hall-door, and in front of that door a small group is

gathered--the Vicomte, his two boys, his girl, her governess, a

coal-black negro who serves as kitchenmaid to the establishment,

and--Elizabeth. They are all gathered round a tiny donkey, such a

_bourriquot_ as the valiant Tartarin slew, which has evidently been

brought up for sale by its Arab master. Attached to its head gear are

two long reins, and holding these reins is Miss Le Marchant. As Jim

looks out, the _bourriquot_, taking some strange freak into its little

brown head, sets off galloping at a prodigious rate; and

Elizabeth--white gown and blonde hair flying--gallops after it. As she

is dragged at racing pace down the drive, her immoderate laughter comes

borne back on the wind to the spectator of whom she is unconscious.

The latter has turned away from the window, and sat down to his

writing-table, where he is scribbling a hasty answer to the missive

which has cost him such long deliberation. It does not take a minute to

pen now that he has once made up his mind, nor can it be more than five

from the moment of the donkey's start to that when the telegram is on

its way to the Post Office in Zameth the porter's hand. The die is cast.

When this is the case after long irresolution, there must always be a

sense of relief, and perhaps, therefore, it is relief which Jim's face,

thrown down upon his arms rested on the table, expresses. Since no one

can see that hidden face, it is impossible to say. He has certainly no

wish that Elizabeth should be unhappy. Her patient white misery had

filled him with tender pity and ruth; and yet her laugh, sweet and

delicate as it was with all its excess of merriment, rings jarringly in

his ears. She is incapable of a great constancy. He had promised himself

to stay with her until her spirits were restored. Well, he has kept his

promise handsomely. He has done with her and her contradictions now. It

will be someone else's turn with her next. Whose? The Vicomte's,

perhaps.

By-and-by he rouses himself. Only a part of his task is yet done. He

must tell them that he is going. As he passes the looking-glass, he sees

that his hair is roughened and erected by his late attitude. He passes a

brush hastily over it. He must not look a Bedlamite like Byng. He finds

Mr. and Mrs. Le Marchant sitting under the ficus-tree on the

terrace--the terrace which, at this hour, they have to themselves. She

is reading aloud to him paragraphs out of the Algerian paper,

translating as she goes along, since his French is about on a par with

that of most Englishmen of his standing.

He is leaning back in a wicker chair, with an expression of placid

good-humour on his face. Across his knees the hotel cat--a plain and

ill-natured animal--lies, loudly purring, while he obligingly scratches

her judiciously whenever she indicates a wish for that relaxation. As

Burgoyne remembers, Mr. Le Marchant had always been on very friendly

terms with the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air. About the

little group there is such an air of content, of harmony, of

completeness in itself, that none can connect the idea of a third person

with it in anything but an interloping attitude. And yet there is a

third person whose presence must be continually infringing its happy

duality, since niche of her own in life has she none.

"Are you looking for Elizabeth?" asks Elizabeth's mother, laying down

her paper as the new-comer draws near; "she has walked to Biermandreis."

The intimate friendliness of her smile as she gives him this bit of

information--the matter of course taking for granted that he must be

seeking her whose society he has so wholly monopolized of late--plants a

new sting in Jim's sore heart, and robs him for the moment of the power

to make his announcement.

"She has not been gone more than ten minutes"--still with that bright

look of kindly confidence that she is answering his thoughts.

"I am looking for you all," he answers abruptly. "I came to tell you

that I am off to-morrow."

The shaft is sped. Though he is not looking at Mrs. Le Marchant, he

knows that her face has fallen. Upon Mr. Le Marchant's, on the contrary,

an added shade of cheerfulness is visible. Mr. Le Marchant has ceased

any overt opposition to the young man's intimacy with his family; but

none the less is the young man aware that the father has acquiesced but

grudgingly in the footing on which he had found Jim on his return from

his tour.

"I have had a wire from my friend in Tunis; he is becoming

dangerous"--laughing, oh, how forcedly!

"You are going to Tunis?" says Mr. Le Marchant, almost cordially. "You

are quite right; it is a very interesting place. One does really see the

genuine East there, not the mongrel hotch-potch one has here."

"Is not it rather late for a trip into the interior?" asks the wife. The

geniality has gone out of her tone, and the sunshine out of her face.

There is a touch of involuntary wistfulness in both.

"The interior? Oh yes, of course. My dawdling"--more laughter--"has

knocked that on the head. I have let the time for that go by. We intend

to run over to Spain and see the Alhambra and the Escurial."

There is a general silence. Well, it is done. Neither husband nor wife

makes any effort to alter his resolution or detain him. They do not even

put any questions to him as to his future projects. He has nothing to do

but remove himself and allow them to resume that happy little duet which

he had disturbed.

"The train sets off at such an unearthly hour to-morrow morning--six

o'clock or thereabouts; it would take three days to get there if it did

not--that I must put my things together this afternoon. I shall see you

again, of course, before I go."

"Oh, of course," replies Mr. Le Marchant, in the easy and comfortable

tone of one to whom it is a matter of supreme indifference whether or

not that farewell meeting ever takes place, and Mrs. Le Marchant says

nothing at all.

He has adduced his necessary packings as an excuse for leaving them;

though, indeed, they neither wished for nor asked any excuse; yet

nothing is further from his intentions than to enter at once upon that

occupation. She has walked to Biermandreis. In five minutes he is

walking thither too. There are a couple of roads that lead there, and of

course he takes the wrong one--the same, that is, that she had taken, so

that, although he walks fast, yet, thanks to her start of him, he has

reached the pretty little flower-shaded French village which, with its

white church and its Ecole Communale, looks as if it were taken to

pieces at night and put to bed in a toy-box--he has reached it, and has,

moreover, traced half his homeward way, before he overtakes her. The

path by which he returns is a rough Arab track, cut in low steps up the

hill, each step a mass of fossil-shells--whelk, and scallop and oyster

shells, whose inhabitants died--strange thought!--before Adam saw Eden's

fair light. It is a charming road, cut, in part, through the red rock,

over which the southern greenery tumbles. He has approached quite close

to her before she sees him. She is sitting on a camp-stool by the

wayside, looking vacantly before her. Her figure is rather stooped, and

her straight back bent, as if it were not worth the trouble to hold it

up. Beside her, on the ground, lie a little tin colour-box and

water-bottle and a drawing-board. He wishes, with a new pang, that he

had not come upon her so suddenly. He is afraid that this is one of the

aspects of her that will stick most pertinaciously in his memory.

Catching sight of him, her whole sad, listless face lights up.

"It is you! I was sure you would come. I told them to tell you where I

had gone. I meant to sketch"--with a glance at her neglected

implements--"but"--with a sigh--"as you see, I did not."

"Are you down on your luck?" he asks, sitting down by her side; "you did

not seem so"--trying to harden his heart by forcing a recollection of

her extravagant gaiety--"a little while ago, when you were prancing

after that jackass."

"Is not he a darling?" cries she, hurrying up the end of her sigh to

make room for a smile of pleasure. "I want to buy him; only I am afraid

he might die of sea-sickness going home."

"Perhaps"--scarcely knowing what he is saying.

"I should like to buy a little cart to harness him to--such a one as I

saw just now going along the road, drawn by a tiny _bourriquot_ that

might have been twin brother to mine. Some Arab children had dressed out

both him and his cart with branches of that great yellow fennel--his

long ears and his little nose peeped out so pathetically between;

another child walked after barefoot, waving a great acanthus-leaf. You

never saw anything so pretty! Yes, you must break mine in for me,"

smiling again; "it will not take more than a week, I am sure."

"If it did not take more than a day even, I am afraid I should have to

decline the appointment"--seizing this opening to blurt out his news. "I

am off at six o'clock to-morrow morning. I--I want to see the Escurial."

She had been almost garrulous about the little donkey, and he had wished

to stop her. In that he has undoubtedly succeeded.

How the asphodels cover the banks on either hand! They have come into

full flower since last he passed this way: tall branching stem, white

blossom, and pinky bud; here they are in thousands.

It is a soft day, on which scents lie heavy, and their strong

odour--that is scarcely perfume, and yet has an odd, acrid charm--fills

the air.

"Everything must come to an end," he says baldly.

She is apparently not going to make any more effort to detain him than

had her mother. He has every right to come and go where and when he

pleases. Since Amelia died, to no human being is he accountable for his

actions, and yet there is both guilt and misery in his voice as he

utters his platitude.

"It has been great good luck for me that you have stayed so long; I know

that it is out of pure kindness that you have done it, and it has made

all the difference to me. I--I am quite set up again now, thanks to you;

and--and summer is coming on, and I shall do very well--capitally!"

She has detected--what is, indeed, pretty obvious--the deep distress of

his face and voice, and, in her habitual unselfishness, her one thought

is to relieve him of any self-reproachful misgiving that he is doing

aught cruel in robbing her of the support of his companionship. In her

tone is nothing but the meekest gratitude. It is her misfortune, not her

fault, that in it there is not cheerfulness too. But her "gentle

physic," instead of curing, seems to aggravate his ill.

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

if to himself.

"Yes!"

Dead silence.

Below the slight eminence where they sit, the road winds white, and upon

the opulent low green hills on its further side, what a banquet of

colour! On one steep slope the plough is driving its difficult furrows,

turning up the rich red earth, shaded with deeper claret and lighter

pink stains.

Beneath, a square of stone-pines looks like a green velvet handkerchief

spread on the hillside, and over the rest of the upland eucalyptus, and

olive, and cactus hold their riot of various verdure; while, on the

tiptop of everything, against a weirdly pale-blue sky-field, a Moorish

villa lifts its white flank.

How long have they both been staring dully at that fair prospect before

Elizabeth again speaks!--

"You were a very good friend to me!"

She had not meant that past tense as an arrow to shoot into his heart;

but it sticks there, barbed.

"I do not know how."

"And friends--real, good friends--should not have concealments from each

other, should they? They should tell one another about themselves?"

"Yes."

A pause.

"I have often wished--often tried to tell you about myself; but I could

not. I never could! I can tell you to-day if you wish, if you care to

hear. Do you care?"

"_Do I care?_"

What a small battlefield those three words make for the anger and agony

they express to fight upon!

Another longer pause.

She has taken off her hat, and now passes her handkerchief over her damp

forehead.

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

start."

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

you too much!"

"It would hurt me more to let you go without telling you. Do you

remember"--rushing desperately into her subject--"at the time you stayed

with us at the Moat, that there was a great talk among us of my having

my portrait painted?"

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

"Yes, I recollect."

"Father was wonderfully proud of me in those days; it seems impossible

to believe it now"--with a passing look of incredulity at her own

statement--"but he was."

"Yes, yes."

"Do you remember all the arranging and planning as to who was to be the

artist, and that he was to come and stay in the house to paint it?"

Jim has put his hand up to his forehead as if to quicken the return of

those faint and distant impressions which are coming out in stronger and

stronger colours on memory's surface.

"Yes, yes; he was not an Englishman, was he? We used to laugh about

him"--adding stroke to stroke in order to convince her of the accuracy

of his recollections--"used to call him the 'distinguished foreigner.'"

"Did we? Yes"--slowly--"I remember now that we did. Well"--gathering

herself up for a supreme effort, panting painfully, and turning her head

quite aside so that he may have no glimpse of her face--"he came, and he

stayed two months, and at the end of those two months I--I--ran away

with him!"

CHAPTER XIV.

VALE?

One would have thought that Jim had been in some measure prepared for

the just-fallen blow, both by the overheard fragments of Mr. Greenock's

conversation with the Devonshire clergyman at Florence last year; by the

accumulated evidence of there being some blight upon Elizabeth's life;

and, lastly and chiefly, by the ravings of Byng. But there is something

so different from all these, so infinitely more dreadful, in hearing

this naked statement from her own lips, that it stuns him as much as if

he had never received any hint of that ruinous secret in the background

of her life.

Having now uttered it, she stops, either to pick up her own spent

strength or to give him the opportunity for some question or comment.

He makes neither.

"I thought--I hoped--that you had guessed, from what Mr. Byng said. I

believed that when he was not himself----"

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

"You understand, of course, that that was what I told him. I wanted to

tell him the rest, but that time he could not hear it, and the last time

he--he--did not care to hear it."

His continued muteness must daunt her, for she here makes a longer pause

than before. Indeed, it is only the fear lest she should mean it for a

final one that enables him to force out the two husky monosyllables:

"Go on."

She is always most obedient, and she now obeys.

"He came only two days after you left us; that was why the sight of you

was so--so painful to us at first. It was not your fault, but we could

not help mixing you up with him. You remember how we tried to avoid

you--how discourteous we were? You forgave us afterwards, but you must

have observed it."

The listener makes a slight motion of assent.

"He was a Hungarian, and had been recommended to father by Sir ----,

who, as you know, is always so extraordinarily kind to struggling

artists, and who thought highly of his talent, and wished to get him

commissions. He was almost starving in London; that was one great

reason, I think, why father employed him."

Even at this moment the thought darts across Jim's mind that he has

never known Elizabeth miss an opportunity of implying some praise of

that father whose harshness towards herself he has so often had an

opportunity of witnessing.

"He was quite young--not more than twenty-three--and he looked very ill

when he first came; indeed, he was really half starved. It has always

been the surest passport to mammy's heart to be poor and sick and down

in the world, and nothing could have been kinder than they both were to

him."

"And well he repaid their kindness," says Jim, indignation at last

giving him words.

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

"Wait, wait!" she says, almost authoritatively; "do not abuse him. He

seemed very grateful to them, and they all--we all--became quite fond of

him. When he grew stronger, he turned out to be very lively and

light-hearted--almost as light-hearted as we."

She pauses, pulled up by a deep sigh, at the reminiscence of that young

gaiety, then hurries on, as if afraid of his again breaking in upon her

narrative with some scathing ejaculation.

"Before three weeks were over--you know how cheerful and easy-going we

were--he was quite one of us--quite as--as intimate as you were."

Jim stirs uneasily, galled by the comparison.

"He was a long time painting my picture--could not satisfy himself with

the likeness--and began it over again several times. At first there was

always someone in the room with us when I sat to him, but by-and-by, as

he became more and more one of us--as his presence among us grew to be a

matter of course--we were allowed often to be _tete-a-tete_."

She stops to let pass two Frenchmen and a Frenchwoman of the _petit

bourgeois_ class who are sauntering homewards, frisked about by two

little cheerful curs, and with armfuls of hawthorn--yes; real English

hawthorn--in their embrace. They look inquisitively, but not rudely, at

the pale couple, and now they are out of sight.

"It was a very fine autumn, as you may remember, and we used to go out

sketching together. He was supposed to give us sketching lessons--the

children and me. The governess was by way of always being there, but she

was a sentimental creature, generally straying away by herself with a

poetry-book, and we were virtually alone."

Jim sees how increasingly, how horribly difficult of relation is the

tale as it nears its catastrophe; but he is quite incapable of helping

her.

"We fell in love with one another"--almost brusquely--"and he asked me

to marry him. What did his miserable poverty matter to us? He knew

almost as little of the practical business of life as I, and he was full

of hope and ambition. He was convinced that he had a future before him.

Perhaps he had. Who knows?"

There is mixed with the hurry and shame and anguish of her tone such an

element of almost regretful compassion as she pronounces these last

words, that Jim's jealous wrath awakes. Does she, then, love him still?

In her heart for how many is there lodging at once? For Byng? For this

unknown? For how many more?

"Even he, high-flown as he was, knew that it was impossible that father

could permit our marriage if we asked his consent; but what he laboured

to convince me of was, that if the thing were once done and irrevocable,

father would soon, doting as he did on me--you know he _did_ dote on me,

poor father!--he would soon forgive us; and I, after awhile--oh! it was

after awhile; do not think it was at once"--with a piteous effort to

mitigate the severity of her silent judge--"and I have always all my

life been terribly easily persuaded--I gave in."

Far away a dull cloud, rain-charged, is settling over the Kabyle

mountains, rubbing out their toothed ridge. Can she hold out to the end?

She has not reached the worst yet.

"We were soon given an opportunity. Father and mother went away for a

couple of nights upon a visit, and left us under the nominal chaperonage

of a deaf old aunt of mother's, and of the governess, who, as I have

told you, was worse than useless. You know that our railway-station was

not more than a mile from the lodge gates; we had, therefore, no

difficulty in slipping away from the others while we were all out

walking, making our way there, and getting into the little branch-line

train which caught the London express at Exeter."

She has repeatedly put up her handkerchief, and passed it over her brow,

but it is useless. The cold sweat breaks out afresh and afresh.

"That journey! I did not know that it was the end of my life. We both

set off laughing and saying to each other what a good joke it was. That

was at the beginning, but long and long before we reached London--it was

not till very late that we did so--I would have given all the world to

go back. I did not tell him so, because I thought it would hurt him, but

I have often thought since that perhaps he was feeling the same."

Again that touch of almost tender ruth in her voice makes her auditor

writhe.

"We went to an hotel. I think it must have been in some very

out-of-the-way part of the town, probably the only one he knew of, and

at first they would not take us in because we had no luggage; but they

consented at last. I heard him telling the landlady that I was his

sister. I suppose she did not believe it, as she looked very oddly at

me. I did not understand why she should; but it made me feel very

wretched--so wretched that I could scarcely swallow a mouthful of the

supper he ordered. I do not think that he had much more appetite than I;

but we tried very hard to laugh and keep up each other's spirits. They

gave me a very dismal bedroom--I can see it now"--shuddering--"and as I

had no change of clothes I lay all night outside my bed. It took a great

deal to keep me awake in those days, and, wretched as I was, I slept a

good deal. The next morning I awoke, feeling more cheerful. We should be

married in the forenoon, return home in the afternoon, to spring our

surprise upon the children and Fraeulein, and be ready to receive and be

pardoned by father and mother on their return to-morrow. It had not

occurred to either of us that there would be the slightest difficulty in

pursuing this course. We had decided upon at once inquiring the name and

address of the clergyman in whose parish the hotel was--going together

to ask for an interview, and beg him to marry us at once. We had a vague

idea that a licence might be needed, but relied upon the clergyman also

to inform us where that might be got. In one respect our plans had to be

at once modified. When I came down I found that there was such a dense

fog that he would not hear of my venturing out into it, particularly, he

said, as my staying behind would entail no delay; since, when he had

obtained the licence and engaged the clergyman, he would, of course, at

once come back to fetch me to church. I gave in, though I had rather

have gone with him, and fought my way through the fog than stayed

behind, alone in that dreary sitting-room. I was there nearly all day by

myself until late in the afternoon. The fog was so thick that I could

not see a finger's length beyond the window, nor even across the room. I

had neither book nor work. I had nothing to do but walk up and down by

the flickering light of the bad gas, which was burning all day, and look

at a wretched little dead aucuba in a pot. Sometimes I went out on the

landing to see if there were any signs of his return. I had done this

for the fiftieth time, when at last I saw him through the gas and the

fog, coming up the staircase. I could not wait till he had reached me,

but called out over the banisters, 'Well? Well?' His only answer was a

sort of sign to me to go back into the room; but I did not understand it

at first. Not until I saw, coming up the stairs too, a little behind

him, the face of--of--that clergyman you saw at Certosa--our clergyman

whom we used to make fun of. Oh, why did we?"

She breaks off with a low moan, but at once resumes as if she could not

trust herself to pause:

"As soon as I caught sight of him I ran back; but it was too late. I

knew that he had recognised me. I do not, to this day, understand how he

came to be in that out-of-the-way place; whether it was a most

unfortunate coincidence, or whether he had seen us in the train or at

Paddington, and tracked us there. I ran back, as I have said, into the

room; but I did not really mind much his having seen me; it would all be

explained so soon, and I was too much taken up with the bitter

disappointment in store for me to give him more than a passing thought.

Of course you will understand that it was not in the power of any

clergyman to marry us, as neither of us had lived in the parish for the

requisite time beforehand, nor could we be married at a registry office,

as our names had not been entered in the registrar's book for the legal

time. I think I should have broken down altogether when I heard this if

I had not had to comfort him. He was so overwhelmed with the fear that I

should think that it was his fault--that he had not done his best.

Heaven knows I had no such hard thought of him! Although we consulted

together all that evening, and till late into the night, we could not

hit upon any expedient. He had been told vaguely that the Scotch

marriage law differed from the English, and that in Edinburgh we might

be married at once. But we had not enough money to take us there. Our

whole stock would only just buy an ordinary licence, keep us one day

more at the hotel, and take us home third class. What _should_ we do? We

did not even try to laugh that evening--that last evening!"

In her voice is the same echo of some pitying sorrow that had before

offended him; but his interest is now too strung up for him to notice

it.

"I did not once close my eyes that night, and when I came down next

morning I had made up my mind to beg him to let me go home and ask

father to make everything right. I had such confidence that father could

set everything right. When I came into the sitting-room he was not

there. I waited for him, and after awhile the breakfast was brought up;

but still he did not come. I waited on. It seemed to me odd that, at

such a crisis, when we were both so miserable, he should be able to

oversleep himself I am afraid"--with an accent of most regretful

remorse--"that I did think hardly of him then. I looked at the clock; I

had been down an hour. I rang for the waiter, and asked him to go and

tell the gentleman this. He was so long in coming back that I lost

patience, and went out into the passage. I saw a little group of people

gathered round a door some way down it. They seemed to be whispering and

speaking excitedly, and one chambermaid was crying. In an instant I was

among them, through them, in the room. It was his bedroom. He was lying

half on, half off the bed. He had evidently not undressed all night, and

had taken off nothing but his coat. Before they could stop me--I believe

that they humanely tried--I had caught a glimpse of his face, and had

heard someone, as if at a great distance off, pronounce the word

'_dead_'! Then everything went away. I believe I crashed down like a

log, as Mr. Byng did. When next I came to myself mammy was leaning over

me. The people in the hotel had found a letter in my pocket, with my

address, and had telegraphed for her and father. They took me home. I do

not remember anything about that, but so I was told afterwards, as I was

also told that he had died of deep-seated heart-disease, aggravated by

his anxiety about me. I have never brought good-luck to anyone that had

to do with me!"

She is crying quietly now. Is it her tale or her tears that have

softened Jim's heart? He no longer grudges her that tribute to the lover

of her youth.

"For the first few days after I came home I did not feel anything at

all, and I saw nobody but mammy. At the end of a week she came to me,

and told me that I must pull myself together, for that my father wished

me to go with him to an agricultural meeting at Exeter, which we were

always in the habit of attending. She said that there were reports about

me in the county, which nothing but my appearing in public would

contradict She said she knew how hard it was for me, but that she knew,

too, that I would try to make the effort for their sakes. _For their

sakes!_"--in a heart-wrung voice--"was not it the least I could do, _for

their sakes_? I got up; my legs felt as if they did not belong to me.

She dressed me herself--darling mammy!--and she tied on my veil,

and--put some rouge on my cheeks! Think of mammy rouging anyone! If you

remember, we had had some charades while you were with us, and had

bought some rouge for them. And then she took me down to father, and we

went--he and I."

Her breath has grown shorter, and her narrative more disjointed; but she

perseveres. Is not she near the end?

"We went--and we walked about--among the shorthorns--and the prize

poultry--and the tents--father and I--and we met a great many people

whom we knew--the whole county was there--but we were too late. Our

Rector had been before us with them--and not one of them would speak to

me! Not one of them would have anything to say to me! And then we went

home. Oh, poor father!"

She has covered her face with her transparent hands. The emotion that

she would not permit herself for herself has mastered her at the

recollection of that father's abasement and agony.

"He was quite right--it was quite natural that he should not allow me to

live at home, after that. He said I must not blight the children's

lives--must not stand in the light of the others. So I was sent away to

live with some old friends of mammy's--two kind old ladies--with whom

she had been at school; and they were very good to me, and I lived with

them until, as Miriam and Rose were married, father thought I could not

do anyone any more harm, and he let me come home again. There! that is

all!"

She stops, her tale ended, sighing with the inexpressible relief of that

lifted load. Speech from him now would be no interruption--would be

kindly, rather, and welcome. Yet he still stares blankly before him. Why

has she told him that painful tale? Is it that he may carry a more

lenient judgment of her through the rest of his life--that life to be

finally severed from hers? Or is it with some hope that that told tale

may keep him for ever beside her? She does not love him. She loves Byng.

But, as he has often told himself, she is not of the stuff of which

great constancies are made. And, since Byng has forsaken her, whom has

this pliant creature, that nature made so clinging and circumstances so

lonely, left to throw her tendrils round, except him? She does not love

him, and yet in the depth of his heart he knows that, if he wished it,

he could make her love him. Shall he wish it? Shall he stay--stay to

have those exquisite eyes, tear-washed, and yet laughing, watching for

his lightest wish; that tripping step keeping time to his up the hills

and through the valleys of life; that delicate sympathy, soaring with

his highest thoughts, and yet playing with his lightest fancies? Shall

he?

Elizabeth is looking down upon the asphodels, stooping to stroke, as if

it were a sentient thing, a great plumy plant, like a sort of glorified

fennel, out of whose fluthery breast a puissant sheath rises, from which

an unfamiliar flower is pushing. What a fascination there is in this

alien vegetation, in which every shut calyx holds a delightful secret!

Shall he? For himself, he believes her story implicitly, feeling,

indeed, with a shock of mixed surprise and remorse, what a past want of

faith in her is evidenced by his unspeakable relief at its being no

worse a one. But who else will believe it? And the more penetratingly

sweet, the more poignantly dear she is to him, the sharper to him will

be the agony of the eye averted from her, the suspicious whisper, or the

contemptuous smile. Is his heart stout enough, is his courage high

enough, to support and uphold her through her life's long contumely?

Dares he undertake that hard task? Dares he?

Elizabeth is never one apt to take offence, or she might resent his

delay in making any observation on her ended story. Probably she divines

that whatever may be the cause of his slowness, it is certainly not want

of emotion.

At length his tardy speech makes itself heard.

"I do not know how--I have not words strong enough with which to thank

you for telling me."

"I did not want my one friend to go away thinking more hardly of me than

he need," she answers, with a poor, small smile.

This is one of the bitterest cups to which her lips have ever been set

in the course of her sad history.

His next sentence is almost inaudible.

"I could not well think much better of you than I have done all along."

He knows, without seeing it, that her trembling hand makes a half-motion

to go out to him at those kind-sounding words, but it is drawn back

again before the action has passed much beyond the stage of a project.

The wind has fallen. With how almost disagreeable a strength does the

sharp and pungent smell of the innumerable asphodels assail the

nostrils. The light grows lower. Dares he? Has he the steady selfless

valour that will be needed to fight through many years by the side of

this forlorn creature against an enemy uglier--and, oh! how much more

potent!--than any of the fierce forest creatures in contest with which

he has so often lightly perilled his life? Dares he? He has never been

lacking in self-reliance--been, perhaps, too little apt to blench at the

obstacles strewn in his life-path. Is he going to blench now? Whether it

be to his credit or his shame, the answer does not come all at once.

Dares he? The response comes at last--comes slowly, comes solemnly, yet

comes certainly:

"Yes."

He can never again laugh at Byng for his tears, for he is undoubtedly

crying himself now.

"Elizabeth! Elizabeth!"--he cannot get further than that at

first--"you--you are the worst-used woman in the world! and I--I have

not the least desire to see the Escurial!"

THE END.