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Kitabı oku: «Alas! A Novel», sayfa 24

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"I brought Mr. Burgoyne in here," says Elizabeth, in what seems rather precipitate explanation, "because we could not talk comfortably out on the terrace; they listen to everything we say: they have such long ears – the Widow Wadman and Miss Strutt!"

"I do not know what State secrets you and Mr. Burgoyne can have to discuss," replies the mother, with a smile that, though courteous, but ill disguises the underlying anxiety. "Yes, dear child, I shall be very much obliged if you will take my bonnet upstairs for me" – this in answer to little tender overtures from Elizabeth, overtures that remind Jim of 12 bis, Piazza d' Azeglio. "I do not know whether you have yet found it so" (to Jim); "but this is a slack place."

No sooner has the door closed upon her daughter than her tone changes.

"What have you been talking about to her," she inquires rapidly; "not, I hope, about him?"

"I could not help it; she asked me."

Mrs. Le Marchant strikes her hands together, and gives utterance to that short and shapeless monosyllable which has a prescriptive right to express vexation.

"Th! th!" A moment later, "I am sure you will understand that I do not mean to imply any ill-will to you; but it is unlucky that we should have happened to meet you here; it has brought it all back to her, and she was just beginning to pluck up her spirits a little."

"Did she – did she take it so much to heart?" inquires Jim, in a tone of almost as awed concern as Elizabeth had employed but a quarter of an hour before in putting nearly the same question with regard to Byng.

"Did she take it to heart!" repeats Mrs. Le Marchant, with the irritation of one to whom a perfectly senseless and superfluous inquiry is put; "why, of course she did! I thought at one time that she would have gone out of her mind!"

No one can feel less merry than Jim; and yet his lips at this juncture cannot resist the impulse to frame themselves into a gloomy smile.

"And I thought that he would have gone out of his mind," he rejoins.

As he speaks, it flashes upon his memory that one of the hypotheses that have formerly occurred to him to account for the mystery that hangs over Elizabeth's past was that she had been mad; and though he had long abandoned the idea, her losing her wits now recurs to him with a shock as a possibility. Might not that changeful, mobile, emotional mind lose its balance under the blow either of a sudden calamity or of a long wearing sorrow? It has escaped – evidently but barely escaped the first. Will it escape the second too?

His heart goes out in a great yearning to her at the thought of what a touching little lunatic she would make; and, with an oblivion of his own personal feelings, which is generous, if not very lasting, he says compassionately:

"It seems a pity – a great pity!"

"A pity!" repeats the mother, with a sort of wrath, down which he detects a broad stripe of agony running; "I should think it was a pity! Pity is a weak word! The whole thing is piteous! her whole history! If you only knew – "

She breaks off.

He is silent, waiting to see whether that impulse towards confidence in him will go any further; but it does not. She has evidently gone beyond her intention, and is passionately vexed with herself for having done so.

"They were so well suited to each other," continues Jim slowly, but still generously. Possibly his generosity becomes more easy as he sees how hopeless is the plea upon which he employs it. "Is it – I do not wish to intrude upon your confidence, but in the interests of my friend you will allow me to say that much – is it quite out of the question?"

"Quite! quite!" replies the mother, in painful excitement; "what, poor soul, is not out of the question for her that has any good or happiness in it? and that —that more than anything! If you have any mercy in you, do not put it into her head that it is not!"

"If it is not in her head already, I could not put it there," replies Jim gravely; "but I will not – I promise you I will not."

As he speaks, a slight smile touches the corners of his serious mouth as he reflects how entirely easy it is to comply with a request not to urge Byng's suit upon its object, and how cheaply a character for magnanimity may sometimes be bought.

"That is very kind of you!" replies the poor woman gratefully; "and I am sure when you say a thing I can depend upon you for it; and though, of course, it was unlucky our happening to meet you, yet you need not see much of her. Although it is not in the least 'out of sight, out of mind' with her" – sighing – "yet she is very much influenced by the objects around her; and when you are gone – I dare say you do not mean to make a long stay; this is not a place where there is much for a man to do – for a man like you – "

She breaks off, and her imploring eye invites him to reassure her by naming a speedy day for his own departure. But magnanimity may have calls made upon it that exceed its power to answer, and Jim's silence sufficiently proves that he is not going to allow himself to be seduced into a promise to go.

CHAPTER V

The next morning proves the truth of Miss Strutt's words that "we are not so green here in Algiers for nothing." The weather changes some time after dark has fallen. A mighty wind arises. Jim's slumbers are broken by the fact that somebody's outside shutters bang, loose and noisy all night. The great sign at the top of the hotel swings and creaks and groans. In the morning, as far as can be seen through blurred panes, the trees – eucalyptus, ilex, stone-pine – are all cowering and stooping before the wind's lash. The fan palm before Mrs. Le Marchant's window, with its fans all pinched and bent, is staggering before the gale. One cannot conceive what that unlucky tropical product can be doing in this galley, and it requires a strong effort of reason and will to resist the conviction that the oranges and lemons are tied upon the shivering trees instead of growing naturally there.

"And this is 'Afric's burning strand'!" says Jim to himself, over his breakfast in the salle à manger, through whose shut windows the mad rain forces itself; and the blast, coming to his wet sister's aid, bursts them open now and again.

The day seems enormously long. He gets through the morning tolerably well with letter-writing, and after the twelve o'clock déjeûner he faces the gale in a determined walk down into the town. Seldom in the course of his wide wanderings has he felt the furious scourge of more tremendous rain. The side-path is whitened with big hailstones; red torrents tear with ferocious speed and violence down the steep incline. The great acanthus-leaves, and all the plentiful undergrowth, are dripping and rejoicing.

Through the blinding white deluge he gets forlorn peeps of the villas that had shone yesterday with the white splendour one associates with the city of the saints of God; and instead of, as yesterday, "laced with heaven's own tinct," the Mediterranean is whitening the bay's rounded curve with its angry breakers, and the snow is sprinkling the Atlas crests. A few Arabs are sitting on the ground under the Pont d'Isly, packed up into whitish woollen parcels, knees to nose, and arms and hands all withdrawn into the protection of the sheltering burnous. But no one else, who can help it, is abroad.

It seems to Jim as if his disagreeable tussle with the elements had lasted a long time, and yet, on his return to the hotel, he finds that it is only half-past two. He thinks at first that the clocks must have stopped, but finds, on examination, that they are all ticking, and all unanimous. His drenched condition is at least a resource, necessitating an entire and fundamental change of raiment; but even this expedient, though dragged out to its utmost possible limit, does not carry him further than three. How is he to dispose of the seven or eight hours that must elapse before he can seek refuge in bed? He has exhausted his correspondence, which is never a large one, and he has seldom in his life been so short of books.

He makes his way through the hall, which is crammed with young people playing battledore, and noisily counting; with elder persons, dreadfully short of a job, looking on and applauding; to the salon, in hopes of there finding a Tauchnitz novel, or even a superannuated Pall Mall or World. But half a dozen other weather-bound sufferers have been before him, and the tables are swept clean of all literature save a three-months-old Court Journal.

Miss Strutt and the pert votary of Whiteley are sitting shawled, and with their heads close together. By their titters, and the fragments he catches of their talk, they seem to be concocting a practical joke of some kind. The widow Wadman, shawled too, and her valetudinarian in a comforter, are stopping over a wood-fire, which refuses to burn, the souches being wringing wet. Jim rather injudiciously approaches them, and offers his assistance in piling the damp logs; but he is so evidently de trop, that he retires discomfited. On the other hand, the invitation in Miss Strutt's and her coadjutor's eye is so apparent that he beats a hasty retreat out of the room, in dread lest he should be drawn into their mysterious pleasantry.

He never is quite clear afterwards how he gets over the hours that intervene before dinner – whether sleep comes to his aid, or whether he is after all reduced to perusing in the Court Journal the narrative of which direction the Queen and Princess Henry of Battenburg took their walk in, in October. But at length the welcome bell rings, drowning even, for two minutes, the banging of the wind; and the whole hotel, unwontedly punctual, rushes in answer to its summons. People who have hitherto scarcely exchanged words, have eyed each other with hardly veiled distrust, now show a feverish desire to enter into conversation, to detain one another after dinner on the steps of the salle à manger.

As the evening advances, Jim sees an intention among the younger portion of the company to launch out into noisy, romping games, to institute a Dumb Crambo. He feels it is far from impossible that he himself may fall so low as to be drawn into it. Miss Strutt's eye is on him, but before he succumbs he will make one effort on his own behalf. He embraces a desperate resolution. He has seen the Le Marchants eating their dinner near, and yet hopelessly far from him. Elizabeth had given him one furtive smile, and her mother a hurried bow; this is, to tell the truth, all the encouragement he has to go upon – all that he can find to keep his courage up as he knocks at their door, telling himself that his excuse – that of asking them to lend him a book – is a quite sufficient and legitimate one. He knocks, and Elizabeth's voice at once answers:

"Herein!"

It is clear that she takes him for the German waiter, Fritz. She remains in this belief even after he has opened the door, since she does not at first look up. She is alone – not in the pretty flowered room in which she had yesterday received him, but in the first and less adorned of the little series – one that he had, on his former visit, cursorily supposed to be chiefly used as an ante-room – sitting alone at a table, and before her are spread writing-materials, over which she is stooping. An odious and ridiculous thought darts, with a prick, across his mind.

Is she sitting here, all alone, in order to write to Byng?

"I came – " he begins; and at the unexpected voice she looks up with a start:

"Oh, it is you!" she says, in a low key, glancing rather apprehensively at the closed door, which separates them from the inner room, in a manner which tells him that her parents are within.

"I came" – his voice almost unconsciously sinking to the level hers has indicated to him – "to ask you to lend me a book."

"A book!" she repeats doubtfully, with another and still more nervous glance at the shut door; "I am afraid that they are all in there."

"Oh, it is of no consequence!" rejoins Burgoyne hastily, unwittingly quoting the words of the immortal Mr. Toots; "it does not matter in the least."

As he speaks, he begins to retreat towards the door, but so slowly as to give her plenty of time to recall him had she so wished. But she does not. She only stands looking uncertain and distressed. He cannot take such a melancholy impression of her little face away for the whole night with him – it would give him the blues too seriously after this dismal day – so he takes a step or two forward again.

"Are not you rather lonely?" he asks, with an expressive look round.

She gives a small, uncomplaining smile.

"Oh no; I do very well. I am generally alone at this time of day; they like to have their evenings to themselves – at least, father likes to have mammy to himself; I am sure it is quite natural."

There is not the slightest trace of any sense of being aggrieved in either words or tone.

Again that picture of the adored Elizabeth of former days, of whose prattle her father was never weary, whose jokes were always considered so unequalled, and whose pre-eminence in favour was so allowed that her intercession and influence were always employed by the others as certain in their efficacy, rises before Jim's eyes.

"They are like lovers still," continues Elizabeth softly; "it is very pretty when people are lovers still after nearly thirty years."

"And you – you write letters?"

"No, I do not; I have not anyone to write to."

A pang of shame at his unworthy suspicion, coupled with a sense of astonishment at her simple confession of friendlessness, prevent his speaking; and it is she who goes on:

"I was writing an Italian exercise; I began to learn Italian in Florence" – with the inevitable low sigh that always accompanies her mention of that name – "and to-day, for something to do, I took it up again. It has been a long day, has not it? Oh, what a long day!"

"Long!" repeats Jim emphatically; "it might choose to call itself a day; but many a century has been shorter."

"Someone was playing battledore and shuttlecock in the hall. I wonder to what number they kept it up? how many years it is since I have played battledore and shuttlecock!"

There is a suppressed envy in her tone, which tells how far from disagreeable the innocent noisy pastime to which she alludes would be to her even now. She has sat down again on the straight-backed chair from whose elevation she had commanded her Italian studies; a large grayish cloak, lined and heavily collared, and bordered with fur, hangs, unfastened at the throat, about her. Out of the dark beaver her delicate neck and head rise, like a pale primrose from out of piled dead oak-leaves in a yet wintry wood. Through the door, which he has left open behind him, come bursts of maniac mirth from the votaries of Dumb Crambo.

"What a noise they are making!"

"I should think they were!"

"I wonder what they are doing?"

"I can inform you on that point; they are playing Dumb Crambo."

She repeats the words after him with a lingering intonation, in which there again is, or, at least, he thinks that he detects it, a tinge of envy.

"Dumb Crambo!"

"Would you like to join them?"

"No" – slowly – "not quite that; but – it sounds ridiculous – but I should like to play Dumb Crambo again. We used" – in an affectionate, lingering tone – "to play it when we were children."

It is the first time that she has ever voluntarily alluded to the Moat, and he calls to mind her earnest prohibition addressed to him at Florence against any mention of it.

"I know you did; once or twice I played with you."

"You?"

She starts. It is evident that the unimportant fact of his having taken part in their games has quite escaped her; but, a moment later, her soft and courteous nature evidently making her fear that he will look upon her obliviousness as unkind —

"Oh yes, to be sure!" Then again lapsing into reminiscence, "What odd words we used to choose sometimes – words that nobody could guess! I wonder what words they have chosen?"

He thinks of saying jocosely, "Shall I go and ask them?" but refrains, because he fears it would put it into her head to send him away.

A sort of piercing squeal makes itself heard from the salon.

"Do you think that that can be meant for a pig?" asks Elizabeth, her line ears pricked in unaffected interest. "Oh!" – with a return of uneasiness – "I wish that they would not make so much noise; father does so dislike noise. They might as well have put it off till to-morrow."

"Why would to-morrow's noise be more endurable than to-night's?"

"It would not have mattered to-morrow; father will not be here; he is going to Hammam Rhira."

Burgoyne's jaw drops. Is this the alternative course decided upon by

Mrs. Le Marchant? Having failed to dislodge him from Algiers, is she going to remove herself and her daughter out of his reach?

"Do you mean – are you all going to Hammam Rhira to-morrow? —all going away?"

Is it some effect of light from the rose-shaded lamp that makes it seem to him as if a tiny smile, and a yet smaller blush, swept over Elizabeth's face at the aghastness of his tone – an aghastness much more marked than he had intended it should be.

"Not to-morrow; not all of us. Father and mammy are going there for a couple of nights to see what the place is like – one hears such contradictory accounts; and if they are pleased with it – "

"Yes?"

"If they are pleased with it we shall all probably move on there in a day or two."

He would like to be sure that this sentence ends with a sigh, but a prodigious storm of hand-clapping from the extempore theatre prevents his hearing whether it has that regretful finish.

"And they are going to leave you behind?"

"Why not? there would not be much use in taking me; and, as I tell you, they love being tête-à-tête."

"And you love being alone?"

The moment that the question is out of his mouth, he realizes its full unkindness. He is perfectly aware that she does not like being alone; that she is naturally a most sociable little being; that, even now, these frightened five minutes of unsatisfactory broken talk with himself have made her look less chilled, less wobegone, less white. Her answer, if it can be looked upon as one, must be taken by him as a rebuke. It is only that she says nervously:

"One certainly does hear dreadfully plainly here with the door open."

Her tone is of the gentlest, her look no angrier than a dove's, and yet he would be obtuser than he is if he did not at once comprehend that her remark implies a wish that he should presently shut that door behind him on the outside. He complies. With that newly-gained knowledge as to to-morrow's Hammam Rhira, he can afford to comply.

The next morning's light reveals that the weather, pleased with having so indisputably proved its power of being odious, has recovered its good-humour.

Beyond the tree-tops a radiant sea is seen laughing far below; and the wet red tiles on the little terrace shine like jewels. A sea even more wonderful than radiant; no servile copy of the sky and clouds to-day, but with astonishing colours of its own – a faint yet glorious green for a part of its watery breadth; then what our poverty compels us to call blue; and then a great tablecloth of inky purple, which looks so solid that the tiny white boats that are crossing it seem to be sailing on dry land. From amongst the glossy green of the wooded hill, mosque and campagne start out, dazzling, in their recovered lustre; one cool entrancing villa in especial, backed with a broken line of dusky stone-pines, stands, snowy-arcaded, enthroned high up among the verdure.

Jim is very anxious to be out of the way at the hour of the Le Marchants' departure. He has a panic fear of being waylaid by the mother, and having some earnest supplication addressed to him to abstain, during her absence, from any converse with Elizabeth. He is not quite clear at what time they will set off, so, to insure himself against mistakes, he resolves to spend the morning and lunch at the Villa Wilson. Arrived there, he is shown by an Arab man-servant into the court, and, finding it empty, sinks down into a cane chair, and lets his eyes wander round to the fountain, lullingly dripping into its basin; to the tiles, the white-arched doorways, carved in low relief, and themselves so low that it must be a humble-statured person who enters them without stooping. What a home for love in idleness! Who can picture any of the vulgar work of the world done in such a house? any harder labour ever entered upon than a listening to some lady singing "with ravishing division to her lute"?

The lady who presently joins Jim appears, by her ruffled air, to have been engaged upon no such soothing occupation as luting to a recumbent lover.

"You will not mind staying here?" asks Cecilia; "Dr. Crump is in the drawing-room with Sybilla; I am sure that you do not want to see Dr. Crump!"

"I cannot express how little I wish it."

"I cannot think what has happened to Sybilla" – wrinkling up her forehead into annoyed furrows – "but she is so dreadfully sprightly when he is there; she never was sprightly with Dr. Coldstream, and he is such an impossible man! – the sort of man who, when first he comes in, always says, 'Well, how are we this morning?' Do not you think that it stamps a man to say 'How are we?'"

"I think it does."

"He talks such nonsense to her!" – with irritation – "he tells her that he, too, is a bundle of nerves! if you could only see him! And one day he told her that when first he came here he had seen the Angel of Death waving his fans above her head! and she swallows it all!"

"I am not at all surprised."

"It makes me sick!" cries she energetically; "let us go into the garden."

So into the garden they go; both the new one, whose luxuriant growth of verdure is the outcome of but eight or nine years; and the old one, along whose straight walks the feet of the Moorish ladies used to patter under the orange-trees. Beneath them now there are no white bundles of muslin; only on the ground the oranges lie thick, no one in this plenteous land thinking it worth while to pick them up. Jim and his companion pace rather silently to a pretty Moorish summer-house, dug, a few years ago, by the English architect out of a farm-house, into which it had been built. It is dainty and cool, with a little dome and lovely green and blue tiles; and an odd small spring, which is taught to wander by tiny snaky channels into a little basin. They go into the summer-house and sit down.

"Yes, it is pretty," says the girl absently! but her mind is evidently preoccupied by some other subject than the beauty of the giant bignonia which is expanding the multitude of its orange-red clusters all over a low wall, making it into one burning hedge, and has called forth an exclamation of delight from Burgoyne. What that subject is immediately appears.

"Do you know who is in Algiers – whom I saw driving through the Place Bressant on Sunday afternoon?"

"Who?"

"The Le Marchants. Ah, you are not surprised!" – rather suspiciously. "You knew already!"

Jim hesitates a second; then, reflecting that, whether or not he acknowledges the fact now, Cecilia is certain to learn it in a day or two at latest, he answers with a slight laugh:

"It would be odd if I did not, seeing that they are staying at my hotel."

"You knew that when you went there?" – very quickly.

"Of course not!" – with a movement of impatience.

A pause.

"I suppose," says Cecilia, rather cautiously, as if aware that she is treading on dangerous ground, "that you have not found out why they stampeded from Florence in that extraordinary way? Oh no, of course not!" – as this suggestion is received with a still more accented writhe than her former one. "It is not a thing upon which you could question them; and, after all, it was their own affair; it was no business of ours, was it?"

"Not the slightest."

"I always used to like them," continues Cecilia pensively; "at least" – becoming aware of an involuntary movement of surprise at this statement on the part of her neighbour – "at least, they never gave me the chance of liking them; but I always admired them. I wonder are they more accessible than they were in Florence? There are so few nice English here this year; everybody says that there never was a year when there were so few nice English!"

The tentative towards sociability implied in this last speech is received by Jim in a discouraging silence. He has not the slightest desire to promote any overture on the part of Cecilia towards intimacy with Elizabeth. He knows that they would be unsuccessful; and, moreover, he is conscious that he would be annoyed if they were not.

"I can fancy that this would be a very pleasant place if one had someone to go about with," continues she; "but father grows less and less inclined to move. Poor dear! he is not so young as he was, and I am not quite old enough yet, I suppose, to go about alone."

She makes a rather wistful pause – a pause which he feels that she intends him to fill by an offer of himself as her escort. But none such comes. Realizing this, she goes on with a sigh:

"There are not many advantages in being old; but, at least, one is freer, and in a youth spent as mine is, there is really not much profit or pleasure."

The tone in which she makes this lugubrious reflection is so extremely doleful that Jim cannot refrain from a laugh.

"Cheer up, old girl! there is a good time coming! It is a long lane that has no turning."

But he contents himself with these vague forms of consolation. He has no engagements of his own. Why, then, is he conscious of so strong a reluctance towards tying himself by any promise to the broadly-hinting lady beside him? There is another pause, during which Cecilia looks down on the floor with a baffled air, and traces the outlines of the tiles with the point of her red sunshade.

"There is a band plays twice a week in the Place de Gouvernement – plays admirably. Now, I suppose that there would be nothing odd; that no one could say anything; that it would not be the least improper, considering our connection and everything, if you were to take me to hear it some day?"

"I never have the slightest idea of what is improper and what is not," replies he; but there is more of alarm than of encouragement in his tone.

"No more have I" – laughing rather awkwardly – "but in this case I am pretty sure. Tuesdays and Fridays are the days on which the band plays."

"Oh!"

"To-day is Tuesday, is not it?"

"Yes."

Another pause.

"I thought that perhaps, if you had nothing better to do, you might take me to-day?"

The direct proposal which he has in vain tried to avert has come. If he accept it, of what profit to him will the absence of the Le Marchant parents be? He does not formulate this fact to himself, not having, indeed, owned to his own heart that he has any set design upon Elizabeth's company for the afternoon.

"I am afraid – " he begins slowly.

"You are vamping up an excuse!" cries Cecilia, reddening. "I see it in your eyes. You cannot have made any engagements here yet. You do not know anybody, do you, except the Le Marchants?"

"And they have gone to Hammam Rhira," replies he precipitately.

He is ashamed the moment that the words are out of his mouth, for he knows that they convey a falsehood.

"At least – "

But she interrupts him before he can add his conscience clause.

"To-morrow, then?"

Again he hesitates. The same objections apply with even greater force to the morrow.

"But the band does not play to-morrow."

"Oh! what does that matter?" rejoins she impatiently. "I had just as soon go somewhere else – the Arab town, the Kabyle village, anywhere."

He is driven into a corner, and remains there silent so long that there is a distinct element of offence in the tone and large sigh with which the girl resumes.

"Well, times are changed! I always used to make one in those happy excursions at Florence; and somehow – thanks to her, I suppose – I never felt a bad third."

She rises as she speaks, and takes a couple of huffy steps towards the house; but he overtakes and stops her. The allusion to Amelia has annoyed and yet stirred in him the sea of remorse, which is always lying but a very little way below the surface in his soul.

"Why, Cis!" he says, in a tone of affectionate rallying, "are we going to quarrel at this time of day – you and I? Of course I will take you to the band and the Kabyle village, and any other blessed sight you choose to name, only tell me by which of them you would like to begin to ride round."

As he leaves the house and the appeased fair one, after luncheon, an hour and a half later, he tells himself that he has got off cheaply in having vaguely sacrificed the whole of his Algerian future, but having preserved to-day and to-morrow.

Yaş sınırı:
12+
Litres'teki yayın tarihi:
25 haziran 2017
Hacim:
530 s. 1 illüstrasyon
Telif hakkı:
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