Kitabı oku: «Alas! A Novel», sayfa 23

CHAPTER III

Notre Dame d'Afrique – Lady of Africa – is an ugly lady, homely and black; and the church that is dedicated to her is ugly too – new and mock-Moorish; but, like many another ugly lady, being very nobly placed, she has a great and solemn air. It is Our Lady of Africa who first gives us our greeting as we steam in from seawards; it is to Our Lady of Africa that the fisher-people climb to vespers, and to the touching office that follows, when priests and acolytes pass out of the church to the little plateau outside, where, sheer against the sky, stands a small Latin cross, with a plain and, as it seems, coffin-shaped stone beneath it, on which one reads the inscription:

"À la mémoire de tous ceux, qui ont péri dans la mer, et ont été ensevelis dans ses flots."

"All those who have perished in the sea, and been buried in her waves."

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

Notre Dame d'Afrique stands grandly on the cliff-tops, overlooking the sea, whose cruel deeds she is so agonizedly prayed to avert, whose cruelty she is sometimes powerful to assuage, witness the frequent votive tablets with which the church walls are covered:

 
"Merci, oh ma mère."
"J'ai prie, et j'ai été exaucé."
"Reconnaissance à Marie."
"Reconnaissance à Notre Dame d'Afrique."
 

She does not look very lovable, this coal-black Marie, who stands in her stiff brocade, with her ebon hands stretched straight out above the high-altar; but how tenderly these poor fisherwives must have felt towards her when she brought them back their Pierre or their Jean, from the truculent deeps of the ocean!

Burgoyne has been told, both by his guide-book and by his table-d'hôte neighbour, that he ought to see Notre Dame d'Afrique; nor is he loth to pay further obeisance to that high lady who already yesterday beckoned to him across the blue floor of her waters. He does not tell Cecilia of his intention, as he knows that she would offer to accompany him; but on leaving her he takes his way through the gay French town, along its Arab-named streets, Bab-a-Zoun and Bab-el-Oued, towards the village of St. Eugène, and breasts the winding road that, with many an elbow and bend, heading a deep gorge that runs up from the sea to the church-foot, leads him within her portals. The congregation is sparse – a few peasants, a blue and red Zouave, and several inevitable English. Now and again a woman, clad in humble black that tells of prayers in vain, goes up with her thin candle, and, lighting it, sticks it in its sconce among the others that burn before the altar. For awhile Burgoyne finds it pleasant after his climb to sit and watch her, and speculate pityingly with what hope of still possible good to herself she is setting her slender taper alight – now that her treasure has all too obviously gone down beneath the waves; to sit and speculate, and smell the heady incense, and listen to the murmur of chanted supplication; but presently, growing weary of the uncomprehended service, he slips outside to the little plateau, with its view straight out – no importunate land-object intervening – towards the sea, across which a little steamer is cutting her way; and on the horizon two tiny shining sails are lying.

Here, on this bold headland, it seems as if one were one's self in mid-ocean; and one has to lean far over the low wall in order to realize that there is some solid earth between us and it; that two full cities of the dead – a Jewish and a Christian – lie below. From the land-cemeteries to the vast sea-cemetery – for read by the light of that plain inscription upon which his eyes are resting, what is even the azure Mediterranean but a grave? For the matter of that, what is all life but a grave?

 
"First our pleasures die, and then
Our hopes, and then our fears, and when
These are dead, the debt is due:
Dust claims dust, and we die too."
 

He turns away, and, muttering these words half absently between his lips, begins to make the circuit of the church; and in doing so, comes suddenly upon three persons who are apparently similarly employed. The party consists of a man and two ladies. Being a little ahead of him, they are, for the first moment or two, not aware of his presence, an ignorance by which he, rather to his own discomfiture, profits to overhear a scrap of their conversation certainly not intended for his ears.

"I suppose that you were wool-gathering, as usual?" Mr. Le Marchant is saying, with an accent of cold severity, to his daughter; "but I should have thought that even you might have remembered to bring a wrap of some kind for your mother!"

Jim starts, partly at having happened so unexpectedly upon the people before him, partly in shocked astonishment at the harshness both of voice and words.

In the old days Elizabeth had been the apple of her father's eye, to oppose whose lightest fancy was a capital offence, for whom no words could be too sugared, no looks too doting. Yet now she answers, with the sweetest good-humour, and without the slightest sign of surprise or irritation, or any indication that the occurrence is not a habitual one:

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

"I quite agree with you," replies the father, entirely unmollified; "I am sure you have been told often enough how liable to chills insufficient clothing makes people in this beastly climate at sundown."

"But it is not near sundown," breaks in Mrs. Le Marchant, throwing herself anxiously, and with a dexterity which shows how frequently she is called upon to do so, between the two others; "look what a great piece of blue sky the sun has yet to travel."

"You shall have my jacket," cries Elizabeth impetuously, but still with the same perfect sweetness; "it will be absurdly short for you, but, at least, it will keep you warm." So saying, she, with the speed of lightning, whips off the garment alluded to, and proceeds to guide her mother's arms into its inconveniently tight sleeves, laughing the while with her odd childish light-heartedness, and crying, "You dear thing, you do look too ridiculous!"

The mother laughs too, and aids her daughter's efforts; nor does it seem to occur to any of the three that the fatal Southern chill may possibly strike the delicate little frame of Elizabeth, now exposed, so lightly clad in her tweed gown, to its insidious influence.

"I wish you had a looking-glass to see yourself in!" cries she, rippling into fresh mirth; "does not she look funny, father!" appealing to him with as little resentment for his past surliness as would be shown by a good dog (I cannot put it more strongly), and yet, as it seems to Jim, with a certain nervous deprecation.

The next moment one of them – he does not know which – has caught sight of himself, and the moment after he is shaking hands with all three. It is clear that the fact of his presence in Algiers has been notified to Mr. Le Marchant, for there is no surprise in his coldly civil greeting. He makes it as short as possible, and almost at once turns to continue his circuit of the church, his wife at his side, and his daughter meekly following. Doubtless they do not wish for his (Jim's) company; but yet, as he was originally, and without any reference to them, going in their direction, it would seem natural that he should walk along with them.

He is hesitating as to whether or no to adopt this course, when he is decided by a very slight movement of Elizabeth's head. She does not actually look over her shoulder at him, and yet it seems to him as if, were her gesture completed, it would amount to that; but it is arrested by some impulse before it is more than sketched. Such as it is, it suffices to take him to her side; and it seems to him that there is a sort of satisfaction mingled with the undoubted apprehension in her face, as she realizes that it is so. Her eyes, as she turns them upon him, have a hungry question in them which her lips seem afraid to put. Apparently she cannot get nearer to it than this – very tremblingly and hurriedly uttered, with a timid glance at her father's back, as if she were delivering herself of some compromising secret instead of the mere platitude which she so indistinctly vents:

"A – a – great many things have happened since – since we last met!"

Her eye travels for a moment to his hat, from which, unlike Cecilia's rainbow raiment, the crape band has not yet been removed; and he understands that she is comprehending his troubles as well as her own in the phrase.

"A great many!" he answers baldly.

He has not the cruelty to wish to keep her on tenterhooks, and he knows perfectly what is the question that is written in the wistful blue of her look, and whom it concerns; but it would be impertinence in him to take for granted that knowledge, and answer that curiosity which, however intense and apparent, has yet not become the current coin of speech. Probably she sees that he is unable or unwilling to help her, for she makes another tremendous effort.

"I hope that – that – all your friends are well."

"All my friends!" repeats he, half sadly; "they are not such a numerous band; I have not many friends left still alive."

His thoughts have reverted to his own loss, for, at the moment, Amelia is very present to him; but the words are no sooner out of his mouth than he sees how false is the impression produced by his reply – sees it written in the sudden dead-whiteness of her cheek and the terror in her eye.

"Do you mean" – she stammers – "that anybody – any of your friends – is – is lately dead?"

"Oh no! no!" he cries reassuringly; "you are making a mistake; nobody is dead – nobody, that is" – with a sigh – "that you do not already know of. All our friends – all our common friends – are, as far as I know – "

"Elizabeth!" breaks in Mr. Le Marchant's voice, in severe appellation; he has only just become aware that his daughter is not unaccompanied, and the discovery apparently does not please him.

Without a second's delay, despite her twenty-seven years, she has sprung forwards to obey the summons; and Jim has the sense to make no further effort to rejoin her. By the time that their circuit is finished, and they have again reached the front of the church, vespers are ended, and there is a movement outwards among the worshippers. They stream – not very numerous – out on the little terrace. The priests follow, tonsured, but – which looks strange – with beards and whiskers. The acolytes, in their red chasubles, carry a black and white pall, and lay it over the memorial stone below the cross. On either hand stand a band of decently clad youths – sons of drowned seamen – playing on brass instruments. It is a poor little music, doubtfully in tune; but surely no rolling organ, no papal choir, could touch the heart so much as this simple ceremonial. The little Latin cross standing sheer out against the sea; the black pall thrown over the stone that commemorates the sea's innumerable dead; the red-clad acolytes, standing with eyes cast down, holding aloft their high tapers, whose flickering flame the sea-wind soon puffs out; and the sons of the drowned sailors, making their homely music to the accompaniment of the salt breeze. The little service is brief and those who have taken part in it are soon dispersing. As they do so, Jim once more finds himself for a moment close to Elizabeth.

The sun has nearly touched the sea-line by this time, and he sees, or thinks he sees, her shiver.

"You are cold," he says solicitously; "you will get a chill."

She looks back at him, half surprised, half grateful, at the anxiety of his tone.

"Not I!" she answers, with a gentle air of indifference and recklessness; "naught never comes to harm!"

"But you shivered! I saw you shiver."

"Did I? It was only" – smiling – "that a goose walked over my grave. Does a goose never walk over your grave?"

And once more she is gone.

He does not see her again that day. Of the three places laid for dinner at the round table in the salle à manger, only two are occupied; hers is, and remains, empty. She is not with her parents, and, what is more, she does not appear to be missed by them. It fills Jim with something of the same shocked surprise as he had felt on hearing the cold and surly tone in which she had been addressed by her father, to see how much more, and more genially, that father talks; how much less morose his back looks than had been the case on the previous evening.

The next morning rises superb in steady splendour, and Jim, on issuing out on the little red-tiled terrace, finds the whole strength of the hotel gathered upon it. Even the worst invalids, who have not shown their noses outside their rooms for a fortnight, are sunning themselves, wrapped in apparently unnecessary furs. The Arabs and Turks have spread their gay rugs and carpets, and displayed their bits of stuff, their brasswork, and their embroidery. They make a charming garden of colour under the blue. One is lying beside his wares, in an azure jacket and a rose-red sash, twanging a "gunébri," or little Arab mandolin. Apart from the rest of the company, at the extreme end of the terrace, in a place which is evidently hers by prescriptive right, close to the balustrade, upon whose blue and white tiled top her books are lying, Elizabeth is sitting – and sitting alone, neither truculent father not frightened mother barring approach to her. He makes his way at once to her.

"You were not at dinner last night?"

"No."

"I hope that did not mean that you were ill?"

Her eyes are not lifted to his – resting rather on the balustrade, through whose pierced brickwork little boughs of Bougainvillia are pushing.

"No, I was not ill," she replies slowly; "but I had made such a figure of myself by crying that mammy thought I had better stay away. When I looked in the glass," she adds humorously, "I thought so myself."

"There was not much sign of tears about you when we parted at Notre Dame d'Afrique," he says brusquely.

"No, but" – with a sudden lifting of her pretty lashes – "you know there is never any medium in me; I am always either laughing or crying; and, of course, seeing you again brought – brought things back to me."

She looks wistfully at him as she makes this leading remark.

He can no longer have any doubt as to her wish to embark upon the subject which, even in the three minutes of their meeting on the previous day, she had sought to approach. If he is kind, he will enter into her wish, he will make her path easier for her; but for the moment he does not feel kind – angry, rather, and rebellious.

Is his intercourse with her to be a mere repetition of that which, although now seven months ago, makes him still writhe, in the recollection of his latter intercourse with Byng? Is he again to be spitted upon the skewer of reminiscences of the Vallombrosan wood? Never!

He looks obstinately away from her – towards where first an ivied bank rises, with red gladioli flowering upon it; then a little space of bare ground, then a row of orange-trees; then some young stone-pines, holding their heads against the blue to show what an exquisite contrast they make to it; then, topping, or seeming to top the hill, a white villa, with little blue jewels of sky, seen through the interstices of the balustrade on its roof, its whitewash making the solid wall of sapphire behind it look even more desperately and unnameably blue than elsewhere. What a blue! sapphire! turquoise! lapis! To what poor shifts are we driven to express it! How could we describe its glory to a blind person? If to such a one the colour of scarlet is represented by the sound of a trumpet, surely this divine tint above us can be best conveyed by the whole heavenly hierarchy of burning seraphs and winged angels, harping and quiring together.

"I always think," says Elizabeth, following the direction of his eyes – "perhaps it may be fancy – that this particular corner of the sky is much bluer than any other."

There is a shade of disappointment in her tone at his failure to take up her challenge, but she is far too gentle to make any further effort in a direction which, for some reason, is disagreeable to him; and since he will not follow her inclination, she is pliantly willing to follow his.

The Arabs have come up in might to-day, and, no longer fearing rain, have carpeted almost the whole terrace with their wares. They hang over the low wall, and cover the red tiles; blue and purple, and Moslem green, and Venetian red; dazzling white haiks, blinding in the blinding sunshine; carpets, embroidered jackets, flashing back gold in the gold light. A pert English miss is standing over them, and saying disparagingly about each:

"You can get this 7-1/2d. cheaper at Whiteley's. I saw a much better one than this for half the price at Marshall's," etc., etc.

One longs to ask the "miss" whether she saw the sunlight, and the cobalt sea, and the glorified whitewash, with its amethyst shadows, for 7-1/2d. at Whiteley's too, and, if so, why she did not stay there?

Burgoyne's friend in the red shirt is beating down a one-eyed Kabyle, and having a happy haggle with him over a Mozambique coat.

"She does not get on with her own family at home, and she has quarrelled with all her travelling companions!" says Elizabeth, in a delighted explanatory whisper. Wistfulness and disappointment have alike vanished out of her small face, which is one ripple of mischief. "The fat widow in the weepers, who is preening herself like a great pouter pigeon, is trying to marry the wizened old gentleman in the bamboo chair. Sometimes we think she will succeed; sometimes we think she will not: it is so interesting!"

Jim looks down at her with an astonishment bordering on indignation.

Is this the woman who cried herself sick last night over memories of the so recent past? In this mobile nature, is there nothing that one can lay hold of?

"Mammy and I get an infinity of amusement out of them," continues she, still playfully, but faltering a little under the severity of his look; "oh, we know a great deal about them all; and those that we do not know about we make stories for!"

"Indeed!"

His tone is so curt that the stream of her gaiety dries up under it, and she relapses into silence, looking towards the flashing sea, and the ficus-tree, that is casting its now grateful shade.

CHAPTER IV

"You said just now that seeing me brought things back to you."

It is partly remorse at having snubbed her, and partly perversity, which dictates this sentence on Jim's part. The perversity is, perhaps, the predominating element in his motive – a perversity which, having chilled her away from the subject when she was eagerly seeking an opening to it, now forces her to return to it. She starts a little.

"Yes – yes," she answers; "but 'brought things back' is not quite the right phrase; they" – her voice growing low and tremulous – "had not very far to come."

The quiver in her voice annoys him almost as much as Byng's tears used to do.

"If you would like to ask me any questions," he says stiffly, "I am ready to answer them."

"Are you?" she cries hungrily; "oh, that is kind of you! but, then, you always were kind; but not here" – looking apprehensively round – "I could not trust myself to talk about – about him here; I – I should break down, and nothing" – with a smile that, though watery, is still humorous – "would induce me to make a fool of myself before the widow Wadman." Then, seeing him look at a loss: "Come indoors!" she says impulsively, standing up, and half stretching out her hand as if to draw him after her. "Come into our salon – no, you need not be afraid; we shall have it all to ourselves; father and mother have gone out for their usual constitutional on the Boulevard Mustapha."

He follows her silently, and neither speaks till they find themselves tête-à-tête in the private apartment of the Le Marchants.

It is on the rez-de-chaussée, a suite of three little whitewashed rooms, transmogrified from their original hotel nakedness by flowers and brocade bits. Three large green jars on the chimney-piece, full of generous rose-branches, and boughs of salvia and iris, and stalwart yellow jessamine, make the air sweetly and lightly perfumed. On the table is a litter of Tauchnitz novels, disastrously old English papers, the little scurrilous Algerian sheet, and, lastly, Elizabeth's workbasket – the big workbasket which Jim had last seen standing on the floor in the entresol, at the Piazza d'Azeglio, with its contents strewn all over his friend's prostrate body. At the sight a bitter smile breaks over his face.

"An old acquaintance!" he says, making a mock salutation to it; "it is in better order than when last I had the pleasure of seeing it."

"Do you mean in Florence?" she asks, very slowly.

"Yes" – still with that acrid smile – "after you were gone, I had the honour of helping to pack it to send after you. I am afraid I was rather clumsy over it; but, at any rate, I managed better than he. By-the-bye, did you find any rust on your scissors and thimble when next you had occasion to use them? Poor boy! he cried enough over them to take all the polish off!"

She has sunk down upon the sofa, over which a great woollen haik, dyed with harmonious dull tints, is thrown.

"Do not sneer at me!" she says faintly. "You would not if you knew how you hurt me. Is he – is he – how is he?"

"He is not ill."

The answer ought to be reassuring; but there is something in the manner in which it is uttered that tells her that it neither is, nor is meant to be so. It is so ominous that her lips, after a feeble effort or two, give up the endeavour to frame any query. All her power of interrogation has passed into those eyes, out of which her companion has been so brilliantly successful in chasing their transient morning mirth.

"When a man," says Jim gravely, "at the outset of his life, gets such a facer as he did, if he has not a very strong character, it is apt to drive him off the rails, to give him a shove downwards."

"I see; and you think I have given him a shove downwards?"

"Yes."

There is a pause. Jim's eyes are resolutely turned away from the face of Elizabeth, upon whose small white area twitches of pain are making cruel disfigurement. He does not want to have his heart softened towards her, so he stares persistently over her head at a Mussulman praying-carpet, which, old and still rich-toned, despite the wearing of pious knees, hangs on the wall. At length she speaks, in a key as low as – were not the room so entirely still – would be inaudible.

"If I had married him, I should have given him a much worse shove down."

Jim holds his breath. Is he about to hear from her own lips that secret which he has magnanimously resisted all opportunities of hearing from other sources? But the words that, after a pause, follow this almost whispered statement are not a confession. They are only an appeal.

"You would be doing the kindest thing that you ever did in your life, if you could bring yourself to say that you thought I did it for the best."

He feels that if he submits his eyes to hers, his will must go with them; he will have no power left of dissent from any request she may choose to make; so he still stares over her head at a screen which hides the doorless entrance to the third room of the little suite. One leaf, folded back, gives a peep through the little chamber, through its deep-arched window to where a date-palm stands up straight against the sea.

"I could not possibly say that unless I knew the circumstances of the case," he answers judicially.

He hears a low sigh, not of impatience, but of melancholy acquiescence.

"Then you must go on thinking ill of me."

There is such a depth of dejection, as well as such an unalterable sweetness, in her voice, that the words of little Prince Arthur, addressed to Hubert, flash upon his mind:

 
"If Heaven be pleased that you should use me ill,
Why, then you must!"
 

After all, what power in earth or sky has appointed him her executioner?

"I do not wish to think ill of you," he answers sadly. "Good heavens! do I need to tell you that? I have tried all along to keep myself from judging you; but I should not be human – you must know that I should not be human – if I did not ask myself why you did it."

"Why I left Florence?"

"Yes."

She sits stock-still for a moment, the very little colour that there ever was in it retreating out of her face.

"If I told you that, I should be telling you everything."

He is looking at her now; after all, he cannot keep his gaze pinned to the screen for ever, and, as he looks, he sees an emotion of so transcendently painful a nature set her little sad features working, that the one impulse that dominates him is to ease her suffering.

Poor little docile creature! She is going to tell him her secret, since he exacts it, though it is only with a rending asunder of soul and body that it can be revealed. He puts out his hand hurriedly, with a gesture as of prohibition.

"Then do not tell me."

She sinks back upon her haik with a movement of relief, and puts up her fine handkerchief to her pale lips. There is a perfect silence between them for awhile. At his elbow is a great un-English, unwintry nosegay of asphodel and iris. He passes his fingers absently over the freakish spikes.

"How did he take it? how did he take it at first?"

Her voice, though now tolerably distinct, is stamped with that character of awe which fills us all at approaching a great calamity.

"He would not believe it at first; and then he cried a great deal – oh, an immense deal!" – with an accent of astonishment, even at the recollection of his friend's tear-power – "and then – oh, then, he thought of putting an end to himself!"

Jim had meant to have made this relation in a tone of dispassionate narrative, but against his will and intention, as his memory recalls what seem to him the unworthy antics played by Byng's grief, his voice takes a sarcastic inflection. The horror written on his auditor's face as he utters the latest clause of his sentence recalls him to himself.

"Do not be afraid!" he says, in a tone which has no longer anything akin to a sneer in it, though it is not devoid of bitterness; "the impulse was a short-lived one; he is not thinking of putting an end to himself now, I can assure you of that; he is only thinking of how he can best amuse himself. Whether he is much more successful in that than he was in the former, I am not so sure."

Her eyes have dropped to her own fragile, ringless hands as they lie on her lap.

"Poor boy! poor boy!" she says over softly twice, moving her head up and down with a little compassionate movement.

At the pity expressed by her gesture, an unjust and unjustifiable hard anger takes harsh possession of him.

"It was a pity you let it go so far," he says austerely; "you must allow me to say that much; but I suppose, in point of fact, the ball once set rolling, it was past your power to stop it."

She listens to his philippic, with her head meekly bent.

"I did not try," she answers, in a half·whisper; then, after a pause, raising her down-dropped eyes, lit with a blue fire of excitement, almost inspiration, to his, "I said to myself, 'If I have any luck, I shall die before the smash comes;' and I just lived on from day to day. I had not the heart to stop it; I knew it would stop of itself before long; I had never – hardly ever" – correcting herself, as it seems, with a modifying afterthought – "in my life before known what happiness meant; and oh! oh! OH!" – with a groan of deepening intensity at each repeated interjection – "what a big word it is!"

Never – hardly ever – known what happiness meant before! Why, surely she was happy at the Moat! and before his mind's eye there rises an image of her in her riotous rosy gaiety; but even as it does, there flashes upon him a comprehension of her speech.

It is not the careless merriment of childhood to which she is alluding; it is to the happiness, par excellence, of life. If this is the case, why did she correct herself and modify her negative with a "hardly"? A jealous feeling of someone else – someone beside Byng; a jealousy none the less keen for being vague – for not knowing on what object it can lay hold – sharpens his tone as he repeats aloud, and with an accent of interrogation, her qualifying adverb:

"Hardly ever, that implies – "

But she breaks in hurriedly, as if dreading – and at the same time doubting her own power of baffling – cross-examination upon that subject on whose borders they are continually hovering.

"Talking of happiness makes one think of unhappiness, does not it? We both know something about that, do not we?"

She pauses, and he sees that she is alluding to his own sorrow, and that her eye is sounding his to see whether he would wish her to approach it more nearly. His eye, in answer, must give but a dubious beam, since he himself is quite unsure of what his wishes on the subject are; and she goes on with the haste and yet unsteadiness of one who is treading on swampy ground, that gives beneath his feet.

"We saw it in the papers; I could not believe it at first. It was the last thing I ever expected to happen. I thought of writing to you, but I did not."

She looks at him rather wistfully, and although but two minutes ago she had been confessing to him her passion for another man, he sees that she is anxious he should tell her that her sympathy would have been precious to him. He feels the same sensation as before of mixed anger and fascination at the ductility of her nature. What business has she to care whether he would have liked to hear from her or not?

"It seemed such a pity that it was she, and not I!"

Again her eye interrogates his, as if asking for acquiescence in this suggestion, but he cannot give it. With a shock of surprise – nay, horror – at himself, he finds that he is unable to echo the wish that Elizabeth had died and Amelia lived.

"I said so to mammy at the time. Ah, here is mammy!"

And, indeed, as she speaks the door opens, and Mrs. Le Marchant enters in her walking-dress. At the sight of Jim, a look, which certainly does not betoken pleasure, though good breeding prevents its representing the opposite emotion, crosses her handsome, worn face.