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CHAPTER XXX

 
"The world's a city full of straying streets,
And Death the market-place where each one meets."
 

The words are scarcely out of Mrs. Byng's mouth before she adds, in a changed key, and with an altered direction of the eyes —

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

Jim turns his head at her speech, and at once recognises in the figure hastening towards them the porter of the Anglo-Américain hotel. The man looks strangely, and carries a slip of paper, unfolded and open, in his hand.

In a second Jim has sprung to his side, has snatched the paper, and is staring at its contents. They are hardly legible, scrawled tremblingly with a pencil, and for a moment he cannot make them out. Then, as he looks, in one horrible flash their import has sprung into his eyes and brain.

"She is gone; come to us!"

Mrs. Byng is reading too, over his shoulder.

In going over the scene in memory afterwards, he believes that she gives a sort of scream, and says, "Oh, what does it mean? It is not true!" But at the time he hears, he knows nothing.

He is out of the church; he is in the fiacre waiting at the door: he is tearing through the streets, with the hot summer air flowing in a quick current against his face. He thinks afterwards at what a pace the horse must have been going, and how the poor jade must have been lashed to keep it up to that useless speed. At the time he thinks nothing, he feels nothing. He rushes through the court of the hotel, rushes through what seem to be people; he thinks afterwards that they must have been waiters and chambermaids, and that there came a sort of compassionate murmur from them as he passed. He is up the stairs, the three flights; as he tears up, three steps at a time, there comes across his numbed intelligence a flash of wonder why they always give Amelia the worst room. He is at that door, outside which he has spent so many hours of breathless listening; he need no longer stay outside it now. It is open, inviting him in. He is across that, as yet, unpassed threshold, that threshold over which he was to have stepped in careful, soft-footed joy to-morrow. He has pushed through the people – why must there be people everywhere? – of whom the room seems full, unnecessarily full; he is at the bedside. Across the foot a figure seems thrown – he learns afterwards that that is Sybilla. Another figure is prostrate on the floor, heaving, in dreadful dry sobs; that is Cecilia. A third is standing upright and tearless, looking down upon what, an hour ago, was his most patient daughter. They have left her alone now – have ceased to tease her. They no longer hold a looking-glass to her pale mouth, or beat her tired feet, or pour useless cordials between her lips. They have ceased to cry out upon her name, having realized that she is much too far away to hear them. Neither does he cry out. He just goes and stands by the father, and takes his thin old hand in his; and together they gaze on that poor temple, out of which the spirit that was so much too lovely for it has fleeted. Later on they tell him how it came about; later on, when they are all sitting huddled in the little dark salon. Cecilia is the spokeswoman, and Sybilla puts in sobbing corrections now and again.

"She was sitting up the moment before; the nurse was holding her propped up – she said she was so tired of lying. She had been quite laughing, the nurse said."

"Almost laughing," corrects Sybilla, who has forgotten to lie down upon her sofa, and is sitting on a hard chair like anyone else.

"Quite laughing," continues Cecilia, "at her own arm for being so thin. She had pushed up her sleeve to look at it, and had said something – something quite funny, only the nurse could not remember the exact words – and then, all in a minute, she called out, in quite an altered voice, 'The salts! Quick! Quick!' and her head just fell back, and she was gone!"

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

Then comes a dreadful and incongruous flash of that ridiculous, which is the underlining to all our tragedies, across Jim's mind at this last lament. The going, "taking no farewell," naturally seems to Sybilla the most terrible feature in the whole case, to her who has so repeatedly taken heartrending last farewells of her family.

"Who would ever have thought that I should have survived her?" pursues Sybilla, still sobbing noisily, and without the least attempt at self-control. Cecilia, who is sitting with her head on her arms resting on the table, lifts her tear-blurred face and answers this apostrophe in a voice choked with weeping.

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

Again that dreadful impulse towards mirth assails Burgoyne. Is it possible that, at such an hour, he can feel a temptation to laugh out loud? But, later again, this horrible mood passes; later, when they have all grown more composed, when their tears run more gently, when their voices are less suffocated, and they are telling each other little anecdotes of her, aiding each other's memories to recall half-effaced traits of her homely kindness, of her noiseless self-denials, of her deep still piety.

They bring out her photographs, mourning over their being so few, and such old and long-ago ones. There are effigies by the dozen of Cecilia, and even touching presentments of Sybilla stretched in wasted grace upon her day bed; but it had never occurred to anyone – least of all to Amelia herself – that there is any need for her image to be perpetuated. And now they are searching out, as treasures most precious, the scanty faded likenesses that exist of her, planning how they can be enlarged, and repeated, and daintily framed, and generally done homage and tender reverence to.

Jim listens, occasionally putting in a low word or two, when appealed to to confirm or correct the details of some little story about her. But it seems to him as if his anguish only begins when the stream of their reminiscences turns into the channel of her love for him.

"Oh, Jim, she was fond of you! We were none of us anywhere, compared to you; she worshipped the ground you trod upon. We all knew – did not we, Sybilla? – did not we, father? – when you used to be away for so long, and wrote to her so seldom – Oh, I know!" – hastily – "that you were not to blame, that you were in out-of-the-way places, where there was no post: but there were sometimes long gaps between your letters; and we always knew – did not we? – when she had heard from you by her face, long before she spoke."

Next it is —

"How she fired up if anyone said anything slightingly of you: she never cared in the least if one abused herself; she always thought she quite deserved it; but if anybody dared to say the least disparaging thing of you" – it is pretty evident, though at the moment in his agony of preoccupation the idea does not occur to Jim, that this has not been an uncommon occurrence – "she was like a lioness at once."

"The saddest thing of all," says Sybilla, taking up the antiphonal strain, "is that she should have died just as she was beginning to be so happy!"

Just beginning to be so happy? And he might have made her heavenly happy so easily, since she asked so little – for eight years. The groan he utters is low in proportion to the depth of the fountain whence it springs, and they do not hear it. If they did, they would in mercy stop; instead, they go on.

"Did you ever see anything so radiant as she was – that last fortnight? She used to say that she was quite ashamed of being so much more fortunate than anyone else, she seemed always trying to make up to us for not being so happy as she. Oh, she was happy that last fortnight!"

This time he does not groan, he seems to himself to have passed into that zone of suffering which cannot be expressed or alleviated by the utterance of any sound. Perhaps, by-and-by, Cecilia dimly divines something, some faint shadow of what he is enduring; for she begins with well-intentioned labour to try to assert lamely that Amelia had always been happy, well, fairly happy, as happy as most people. You could not expect, in this dreadful world, to be always in the best of spirits, but she had never complained. And, oh! that last fortnight she had been happy, it was a pleasure to see her! And, oh, what a comfort it must be now to Jim to think that it was all owing to him.

She puts out her hand kindly to him as she speaks, and he takes it, and silently wrings it in acknowledgment of the endeavour – however clumsy – to lay balm upon that now immedicable wound.

He stays most of the night with them; and when at length, overcome with weariness and sorrow, they rise from their grief-stricken postures to go to bed, he kisses them all solemnly, even the old man. He has never kissed any of them before, except once or twice Cecilia on some return of his from the Antipodes, and because she seemed to expect it.

Three days later Burgoyne leaves Florence; and, as his arrival in the City of Flowers had been motived by Amelia alive, so is his departure to companion her dead.

END OF PART ONE

PART II.
Elizabeth

CHAPTER I

 
"It was a chosen plot of fertile land,
Amongst wide waves set like a little nest,
As if it had by Nature's cunning hand
Been choycely picked out from all the rest,
And laid forth for ensample of the best.
No daintie flower or herb that grows on ground,
No arborete with painted blossomes drest,
And smelling sweete, but there it might be found
To bud out faire, and throwe her sweet smell all around."
 

Time has stepped upon another year; not much more than stepped, since that year's first month is not yet out; and Burgoyne has stepped upon another continent before we again rejoin him. There are few, if any of us, who, in the course of our lives, have not had occasion to wish that certain spaces in those lives might be represented by the convenient asterisks that cover them in books; but this is unfortunately impossible to Jim, as to the rest of us; and he has fought through each minute and its minuteful of pain (happily no minute can contain two minutefuls) during the seven months that have elapsed since we parted from him. At first those minutes held nothing but pain; he could not tell you which of them it was that first admitted within its little compass any alien ingredient; and he was shocked and remorseful when he discovered that any such existed. But that did not alter the fact. He has not sold his guns; on the contrary, he has bought two new ones, and he has visited his old friends, the Rockies. Since Amelia's funeral – immediately after which he again quitted England – he has seen no member of his dead betrothed's family, nor has he held any intercourse, beyond the exchange of an infrequent letter, with Mrs. Byng or her son. From the thought of both these latter he shrinks, with a distaste equal in degree, though inspired by different causes. From Mrs. Byng, because he knows that she was aware of his weariness of his poor love – that poor love whom, had he but known it, he had so short a time to be weary of; and from Byng, because, despite the ocean of sorrow, of remorse, of death that rolls in its hopelessness between him and her, he cannot even yet think, without a bitter pang, of the woman who had inspired the young man's hysterical tears and sincere, though silly, suicidal impulses. Jim took that pang with him to the Rockies, stinging, even through the overlying load of his other and acknowledged burden of repentant ache and loss, and he has brought it back with him. He packs it into his portmanteau as much as a matter of course as he does his shirts – in fact more so, for he has once inadvertently left his shirts behind, but the pang never.

It is the 20th day of January; here, in England, the most consistently detestable month in the year. The good Januaries of a British octogenarian's life might be counted upon the thumbs of that octogenarian's hands. The favoured inhabitants of London have breakfasted and lunched by gaslight; have groped their way along their dirty streets through a fog of as thick and close a fabric as the furs gathered round their chilled throats; have, even within their houses, seen each other dimly across a hideous yellow vapour that kills their expensive flowers, and makes their unwilling palm-trees droop in homesick sadness. There is no fog about the Grand Hotel, Mustapha Supérieur, Algiers; no lightest blur of mist to dim the intensity of the frame of green in which its white face is set. It is not so very grand, despite its unpromising big name, as it stands high aloft on the hillside, looking out over the bay and down on the town, looking down more immediately upon tree-tops, and on the Governor's summer palace. It is an old Moorish house, enlarged into an hotel, with little arched windows sunk in the thick walls, with red-tiled floors, and balconies, with low white balustrades of pierced brick, up which the lush creepers climb and wave – yes, climb and wave on this 20th of January.

From the red-floored balcony over the creepers, between the perennial leafage of the unchanging trees, one can daily descry in the azure bay the tiny puff of smoke that tells that the mail steamer from Marseilles has safely breasted the Gulf of Lyons, threaded her away among the Isles, and brought her freight of French and English and American news to the hands and ears of the various expectant nationalities. To-day, blown by a gently prosperous wind, the boat is punctual. It is the Eugène Perrère, the pet child of the Transatlantic Company, the narrow and strong-engined little vessel which is wont to accomplish the transit in a period of time less by an hour than her brother craft. To-day she has brought but one guest to the Grand Hotel, who, having left the bulk of his luggage to be struggled for by Arabs, and by the hotel-porter at the Douane, arrives at the modest Moorish-faced hostelry, having, with British mercifulness, walked up the break-neck green lane that leads from the steep main road in order to spare the wretched little galled, pumped horse that has painfully dragged him and his bag from the pier. He has travelled straight through from London – fifty-five hours without a pause – so that it is not to be wondered at that his thoughts turn affectionately towards a wash and a change of raiment. Having extracted from the case of unclaimed letters in the bar two or three that bear the address of James Burgoyne, Esq., he is ushered to his room by the civil little fussy Italian landlord, who, in order to enhance his appreciation of the apartment provided for him, assures him, in voluble bad French, that only yesterday he had been obliged to turn away a party of eight.

It is not until refreshed by a completed toilette – and who can overrate the joy of a bath after a journey? – that it occurs to him to look out of window. His room possesses two. One faces the hill's rich-clothed steepness, and a row of orange-trees covered with fruit, and at whose feet tumbled gold balls lie. But the dusk is falling fast, and he can only dimly see the prodigality of green in which the modest Grand Hotel lies buried. The other window looks out – but a very little way lifted above it, for the room is on the ground floor – upon the red-tiled terrace. It is growing very dim too. At the present moment it is empty and deserted, but the chairs studded over its surface in talkative attitudes, as if sociable twos and threes had drawn together in chat, tell plainly that earlier in the day it had been frequented, and that several people had been sitting out on it. Jim's London memories are too fresh upon him for him not to find something ludicrous in the idea of sitting out of doors on the 20th of January. How pleasant it would have been to do so to-day in Hyde Park! He turns back to the table with a smile at the idea, and, taking out a writing-case, sits down to scribble a line. Jim's correspondence is neither a large nor an interesting one. On the present occasion, his note is merely one of reminder as to some trifling order, addressed to the landlord of his London lodgings. It does not take him ten minutes to pen, and when it is finished he turns to have one final look out of window before leaving the room. How quickly the dark has fallen! The empty chairs show indistinct outlines, and the heavy green trees have turned black. But the terrace is no longer quite empty. A footfall sounds – coming slowly along it. One of the waiters, no doubt, sent to fetch in the chairs; but, no! an overworked Swiss waiter, hurried by electric bells, and with an imminent swollen table table d'hôte upon his burdened mind, never paced so slowly, nor did anything male ever step so lightly.

It must be a woman; and even now her white gown makes a patch of light upon the dark background of the quickly on-coming night. A white gown on the 20th of January! Again that pleasing sense of the ludicrous tickles his fancy. She must be one of the persons who lately occupied the empty chairs, and have come in search of some object left behind. He recollects having noticed an open book lying on the low parapet. She has a white gown; but what more can be predicated of her in this owl-light? The radiance from the candle behind him makes a small illuminated square upon the terrace, falling between the bars of the window through which the Moorish ladies once darted their dark and ineffectual ogles.

Having apparently accomplished her errand, the white-gowned figure obligingly steps into the illumined square, and still more obligingly lifts her face and looks directly up at him. It is clear that the action is dictated only by the impulse which prompts all seeing creatures to turn lightwards, and no gleam of recognition kindles in the eyes that are averted almost as soon as directed towards him. Placed as he is, with his back to the light, his own mother could not have distinguished his features; and, after her one careless glance, the white-gowned lady turns away and disappears again into the gloom. She has one more oasis of light to traverse before she reaches the hotel porch, just discernible, gleaming in its whitewash, at the far end of the terrace; just one more lit window throws its chequered lustre on the tiles. He presses his face against the bars of his own lattice, and holds his breath until she has reached and crossed that tell-tale patch. Her traversing of it does not occupy the tenth part of a second, and yet it puts the seal upon what he already knows.

Five minutes later he is standing before the case, hung on the wall of the entrance hall, which contains the names and numbers of the rooms of the visitors, eagerly scanning them with eye and finger. He scans them in vain. The name he seeks is not among them. Had it not been for that five minutes' delay – that five minutes of stunned and stupid staring out into the dark after her – he must have met her in the hall. He is turning away in baffled disappointment, when the little host again accosts him.

Monsieur must excuse him, but he must explain that the list of visitors that monsieur has been so obliging as to peruse is by no means a full or correct one. To-morrow morning he shall have the pleasure of placing beneath monsieur's eye a proper and complete list of the visitors; but, in point of fact, there has been such a press of business, he has been daily obliged to turn away such large and comme il faut families from the door, that time has been inadequate for all his obligations, which must be his excuse.

Burgoyne accepts his apologies in silence. It would seem easy enough to inquire whether among the English visitors there are any of the name of Le Marchant; but the question sticks in his throat. It is seven months since he has pronounced that name aloud, and he appears to have lost the faculty of doing it. The host comes to his aid.

Is there perhaps a family – a friend whom monsieur expects to meet? But monsieur only shakes his head, and moves away. He has ascertained that the table d'hôte is at seven, and it is now half-past five. He has, therefore, only an hour and a half of suspense ahead of him. She will surely appear at the table d'hôte? But will she?

As the hour of seven approaches, ever graver and graver doubts upon this head assail his mind, both when he reflects upon how much it is a habit with the better sort of travelling English to dine in their own rooms, and also when he calls to mind the extremely retired character of Elizabeth's and her mother's habits. Even if she does appear in the public room – and the more he thinks of it, the less probable, it seems – it is most unlikely that he will be placed near her. But he might possibly intercept her in the hall on her way to the salle à manger.

In pursuance of this project he takes up his position before the bell, tingling so lengthily as to reach the ears of the deafest and most distant, has summoned the company together; and it is several minutes before enough are assembled to justify, according to the etiquette prevailing at the Grand Hotel, a move to the dining-room. Men, at that hotel, although in a very distinct minority – as when, indeed, are they not? – are yet not quite the same choice rarities as at some of the Swiss and Italian ones. But the young of the one sex are perennially interesting to the other; and Burgoyne, as "the new man," is an object of some attention to half a dozen young girls, and even to two or three sprightly-hearted old ones. His eyes are eagerly shining as each opening door, each step on the staircase, raises his hopes afresh. But neither door nor staircase yields the form he seeks, and he is at last obliged, under penalty of exciting remark, reluctantly to follow the band that go trooping hungrily down a flight of steps to the whitewashed dining-room. He finds himself placed between a bouncing widow who is too much occupied in fondling an old valetudinarian on her other side to have much notice to spare for him; and a sparkling creature of five-and-thirty in a red shirt, who, before dinner is over, confides to him that she fears she has not got a nice nature, and that she cannot get on at home because her mother and the servants insist upon having cold supper instead of dinner on Sunday. When she tells him that she has not a nice nature, he absently replies that he is very sorry for it, and her confidence about the Sunday supper provokes from him only the extremely stupid observation that he supposes she does not like cold meat. It is a wonder that he can answer her even as rationally as he does. It is more by good luck than good management that there is any sense at all in his responses. And yet he may as well give his full attention to his neighbour, for now every place at the E-shaped table is filled up, and, travel as his eye may over those who sit, both at the long and cross-boards, it fails to discover any face in the least resembling that which lifted itself from the dusk terrace into his candle-light.

Was it her little ghost, then, that he had seen, her dainty delicate ghost? But why should it appear to him here? Why haunt these unfamiliar shores? The only places in the room which still remain untenanted are those at a round table laid for three, in the embrasure of a Moorish window, not very distant from where he sits. On first catching sight of it his hopes had risen, only immediately to fall again, as he realizes that it is destined for a trio. Why should three places be laid for Elizabeth and her mother?

With a disheartened sigh he tums to his neighbour, intending to put to her a question as to the habitual occupants of the empty table; but she is apparently affronted at his tepidness, and presents to him only the well-frizzled back of her expensive head. He is reduced to listening to the conversation of his vis-à-vis, an elderly couple, who have been upon some excursion, and are detailing their experiences to those around them. They have been to Blidah apparently, and seen real live monkeys hopping about without organs or red coats on real palm trees. He is drawn into the conversation by a question addressed to him as to his journey.

It is five minutes before he again looks towards the table in the window. His first glance reveals that the three persons for whom it is destined have at length arrived and taken their seats. Idiot that he is! he had forgotten Mr. Le Marchant's existence.

"They are nice-looking people, are they not?" says his neighbour in the red shirt, apparently repenting of her late austerity, and following the direction of his eyes; "but they give themselves great airs; nobody in the hotel is good enough for them to speak to. M. Cipriani evidently thinks them people of importance; he makes twice as much fuss about them as he does about anyone else. Look at him now!"

And in effect the obsequious little host may be seen hanging anxiously over the newcomers, evidently asking them with solicitous civility whether the not particularly appetizing fish (the strongest point of the blue Mediterranean does not lie in her fishes, of which some are coarse, some tasteless, and some even lie under the suspicion of having poisonous qualities) – whether it is not to their liking.

At something that M. Cipriani says they all laugh. Elizabeth, indeed, throws back her little head, and shows all her perfect teeth, in a paroxysm of the most genuine mirth. It gives Burgoyne a sort of shock to see her laugh.

Not a day, scarcely an hour, has passed since he last saw her in which he has not pictured her as doing or suffering, or living through something; he has never pictured her laughing. It seems to him now but a moment since he was reading her broken-hearted, tear-stained note; since he was seeing Byng grovelling in all the utter collapse of his ungoverned grief on the floor of the little Florentine entresol. What business has she to laugh? And how unchanged she is! How much less outwardly aged than he himself is conscious of being! Sitting as she now is, in her simple white tea-gown, with one slight elbow rested on the table, her eyes all sparkling with merriment and laughter, bringing into prominence that one enchanting dimple of hers, she does not look more than twenty. But a few moments later he forgives her even her dimple. However empressé may be the little landlord, he has to move away after a time; and the merriment moves away, too, out of Elizabeth's face. Jim watches it decline, through the degrees of humorous disgust, as she pushes the coarse white fish about her plate, without tasting it (she was always a very delicate eater), into a settled gravity. And now that she is grave he sees that she is aged, almost as much as he himself, after all. Her eyes had ever had the air of having shed in their time many tears; but since he last saw her, it is now evident to him that the tale of those tears has been a good deal added to.

There is no pleasing him. He was angry with her when he thought her gay, and now he quarrels with her for looking sad. As if, in her unconsciousness of his neighbourhood, she was yet determined to give him no cause of complaint, she presently again lays aside her sorrowful looks, and, drawing her chair confidentially nearer to her mother's, makes some remark of an evidently comic nature upon the company into her ear.

They stoop their heads together – what friends they always were, she and her mother! – and again the blue twinkle comes into her eyes; the dimple's little pitfall is dug anew in her white cheek. Was there ever such an April creature? Mr. Le Marchant appears to take no part in the jokes; he goes on eating his dinner silently, and his back, which is turned towards Burgoyne, looks morose.

How is it that Elizabeth's roving eye has not yet hit upon himself? He sees presently that the cause lies in the fact of her look alighting upon old and known objects of entertainment, rather than going in search of new ones. But it must sooner or later embrace him in its range. The fond fat widow beside him must surely be one of her favourites, and, in point of fact, as he feverishly watches to see the inevitable moment of recognition arrive, he perceives that Miss Le Marchant and her mother are delightedly – though not so openly as to be patent to the rest of the room – observing her. And then comes the expected careless glance at him, and the no less expected transformation. Her elbows have been carelessly resting on the table, and she has just been pressing her laughing lips against her lightly-joined hands to conceal their merriment. In an instant he sees the right hand go out in a silent desperate clutch at her mother's, and the next second he knows that she also has seen him. They both stare helplessly at him – at least, the one at him, and the other beyond him! How well he remembers that look of hers over his shoulder in search of someone else. But yet it is not the old look, for that was one of hope and red expectation. Is there any hope or expectation lurking even under the white dread of this one? His jealous heart is afraid quite to say no to this question, and yet an indisputable look of relief spreads over her face as she ascertains that he is alone. She even collects herself enough to give him a tiny inclination of the head – an example followed by her mother; but they are, in both cases, so tiny as to be unperceived, save by the person to whom they are addressed.

He would not have been offended by the minuteness of their salutations, even had he not divined that it was dictated by a desire – however futile – to conceal the fact of his presence from their companion. His heart goes out in all the profundity of his former pity towards them, as he sees how entirely that one glance at him (for she does not look again in his direction) has dried the fountain of Elizabeth's poor little jests; of how white and grave and frightened, and even shrunk, his mere presence has made her. Now that they have detected him, good breeding, and even humanity, forbid his continuing any longer his watch upon them. The better to set them at ease he turns the back of his head towards their table, and compels the reluctant widow to relinquish her invalid booty for fully ten minutes in his favour. Perhaps when Elizabeth can see only the back of his head she may resume her jokes. But all the same he knows that, for her, there will be no more mirth to-day.