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CHAPTER VI

 
"And therein sat a lady fresh and fayre,
Making sweet solace to herself alone.
Sometimes she sang as lowd as lark in ayre,
Sometimes she laught, as mery as Pope Joan."
 

Jim's first care on returning to his hotel is to ascertain that the departure for Hammam Rhira has really taken place, and, having been reassured on this point, retires to his own bedroom to reconnoitre the terrace, upon which it gives. The sun has long drunk up the rain from the tiles, and the chairs have been set out again. The hotel guests, in all the sociability of their after-luncheon mood, are standing and sitting about. The widow Wadman, with great play of eyebrow and lip, is pacing up and down in arch conversation with her habitual victim. Snatches of her alluring talk reach Jim behind his muslin curtain as she comes and goes:

"I think that caged birds ought to be loved!" "The Prophet was a wise man, was not he? he knew a little about us," etc.

In her usual place, aloof from the rest of the company, Elizabeth is sitting in a clinging white gown of some woolly stuff. With a dainty white kerchief twisted about her head, and a bundle of many-tinted Eastern stuffs on her knees, she looks like a little Romney. Now and again, as fragments of the widow's siren strains reach her ears, he sees her lips curl up into delighted laughter; but, for the most part, she seems to be looking round rather uneasily, as if seeking something or someone. Can it be himself that she, in her innocence of being observed, is on the watch for? He has no right to be playing the spy on her in any case. It is clear that, dressed as she is, she cannot be meditating going out. He must not frighten her by any too direct or sudden attentions. In a little while the other occupants of the terrace will drift away, and he will stroll out and join her, and together they will watch the shade of the ficus-tree, lengthening over the red flags. But she presently baffles his calculations by rising, and, with her rainbow-tinted pile of brocades clasped in her slender arms, slowly passes into the house. Has she retreated thither for good? and will he have to frame some new flimsy excuse for knocking at her door? But again he is out of his reckoning, for in about a quarter of an hour she re-issues, dressed for walking; and after one more lingering and, as it seems to him, disappointed glance around her, paces, a solitary little figure, down the hill. He lays his watch before him, and, having counted five minutes on its dial-plate, sets off in pursuit. He overtakes her just as she reaches the point where the lane debouches into the highroad. She stands, looking rather disconsolately, first up the hill, then down it, evidently uncertain which direction to choose.

"You cannot make up your mind?" he says, pausing beside her, and taking off his hat.

She gives a slight start, and a friendly, pleased smile runs all over her face and up into her eyes – a smile that makes him say to himself confidently that it was he whom her glance had been seeking on the terrace.

"Which do you advise?"

"I advise the town."

He has long known her teachableness, so it is no great surprise to him that she at once turns in the direction counselled.

"As I am going there myself, will you allow me to walk a little way with you?"

He makes the request with respectful diffidence; and she, after one small troubled look, evidently given to the memory of her father, assents.

They set off down the hill together, the air, sharp after the rain – as sharp, at least, as Algiers' stingless air ever is – bringing the colour to Elizabeth's cheeks, as she steps along light-heartedly, scarcely refraining from breaking into a run, down the steep incline. Her spirits are so evidently rising at every yard that he hazards his next step.

"I am going to see the Arab town; Miss Strutt says that I ought."

"She meant you to ask her to show it you!" cries Elizabeth, with a laugh; "but she was quite right – it is delightful; I am sure you will like it."

"You have been there?"

"Yes, once or twice; not half so often" – regretfully – "as I should like to have been."

Dare he speak upon the last innocent hint? But while he is doubting she goes on:

"You must take care not to lose yourself; it is such a puzzling place; all the streets are exactly like each other."

"You do not feel inclined to show me the way about it?"

He throws out the suggestion in a semi-bantering voice, so that if it meet with obvious disapproval he may at once withdraw it. She stops suddenly stock-still, and faces him.

"Are you speaking seriously? It would be very delightful; but do you think I might? do you think I ought?"

She lifts her eyes, widely opened, like a child's at hearing of some unexpected treat, to his. How astonishingly clear they are! and how curiously guileless! He has not the least doubt that she will sweetly acquiesce in his decision, whichever way it tends; and, for a second, a movement of irritation with her for her pliability crosses his mind. She ought to be able to have an opinion of her own. While he hesitates, she speaks again.

"It is just the afternoon to do something pleasant on," she says wistfully, and yet gaily too. "Oh, how good the air tastes! and how dearly I love the sun!" – lifting her face with sensitive lips, half open, as if to suck in his beams, to the great gold luminary pouring down his warmth through the pepper-trees upon them. "But I will take your advice; I know of old" – with a pretty flattering smile – "that you always give good advice. Do you think that I ought – do you really think that I ought?"

He throws conscience to the winds, and although not two hours ago he had professed to Cecilia his inability to decide upon the propriety or impropriety of any given course of female action, now answers with an almost brutal decisiveness:

"I do not think that there is the smallest doubt about it."

A relieved look crosses her features.

"Then I am sure it is all right," she says, with a joyful surrendering of her judgment into his keeping, and so, once again, steps along with her quick feather-light feet at his side.

For the moment she is the happier of the two, since he is not perfectly pleased either with himself or her. It is in vain that he tells himself that it is no babe whom he is beguiling; that, difficult as it is to believe it, those limpid eyes have looked at the sun for seven-and-twenty years. He still has a lingering sense of discomfort at having availed himself, for his own profit, of her ductility. And yet, five minutes later, he takes yet further advantage of that quality in her. They have reached the Plateau Saulière, and the stand of fiacres that "stationnent" there. Jim pauses.

"It is a good distance to the Arab town, I fancy, and very tiring walking when you get there."

"It is as steep as the side of a house; we shall be like flies on a wall," cries she delightedly.

"It would be a pity to be too tired to enjoy it before you got there, would not it?" says he doubtfully, and eyeing her bright slenderness with an air of uncertainty as to her powers of endurance. "Had not we better – would you mind – our driving there?"

"I am not at all tired," replies she; "I do not feel as if I ever should be tired to-day; but if you think it better – "

Still he looks at her dubiously. To him there appears to be a much greater degree of the compromising in a tête-à-tête drive than in a walk. In the one case the meeting may have been accidental; in the other there can be no mistake as to the deliberate intention. But either this does not strike Elizabeth, or she thinks, "In for a penny, in for a pound"; or, lastly, and most probably, having given up her judgment into his keeping, she finds it easiest and most natural to acquiesce in whatever he may propose.

The ungenerous thought flashes across him that if this is the principle on which she has guided her life, it is small wonder if she have made shipwreck of it. He hails a fiacre, and silently hands her in, and again they are off.

Elizabeth has disclaimed fatigue, and yet the restful position is evidently agreeable to her delicate body; and she thanks him so gratefully for his thought of her that his hard thoughts of her dissolve into remorse, and by-and-by change into an enjoyment almost as entire and uncalculating as her own.

Elizabeth has astonishing powers of enjoying herself. If he had not known that fact before, the afternoon would have revealed it to him.

She must have driven through the French town almost every day since her arrival, and yet its cheerful white-shuttered houses, its boulevards of glossy-leaved ficus-trees, its cafés, its arcaded streets with their polyglot promenaders, seem to fill her with as lively a pleasure as if she had but just landed from the steamboat that brought her.

The three Spahis, eternally sitting in a row on a bench outside some general officer's quarters, robed in their great red cloaks, with muslin-swathed swart heads and long red-leather boots, dimly descried beneath the stately sweep of their mantles, sitting there motionless, solemn and silent as the Fates; a venerable Arab, only to be distinguished from Abraham or Isaac by his carrying a vulgar brown umbrella; a short Kabyle seen in back view, with his rope-bound headdress, his brown-and-white striped frock, and his bare red legs striding along, looking exactly like a ludicrous and indelicate old woman; a Biskrah water-carrier, poising a great burnished copper pot on his shoulder; two little baggy trousered white ladies waddling along; a dozen of smart blue Turcos. She is enraptured with them all.

They leave their fiacre in the Place de la Cathédrale, and enter upon the mysterious recesses of the Arab town. Up and down endless flights of steps, up street after street – if streets they can be called, that are not wider than a yard in their widest part – and above their heads the rafter-supported houses lean together, letting scarce a glint of daylight drip down upon the dusky path far below.

They pass arched doorways, with pretty designs in plaster – doorways whose doors open inwards upon mysterious interiors – house or court, or mosque or Marabé. All along stand tiny shops, like wild-beast dens, as far as light and space go, lit only by the tempered light – in reality, only semi-darkness – that enters in front. How can they see to work – plait straw, for instance? as the three ebon-black negroes are doing, upon whom they stare in, asquat upon the ground. The turbans, and the red sashes, and the burnouses glimmer out of the little dim frontages, where charming pierced-brass Moorish lamps hang and swing aloft; and tempting piles of dully splendid brocades and bright gold-laminated gauzes gleam from the crowded shelves.

The narrow streetlets are full of unbusy, un-hurrying Easterns, hideous old negresses grinning like monkeys, idle Arabs sauntering along in their lazy grace, draped like Greek statues, sauntering along between the blue-washed walls that look in their effective variation upon the blinding whitewash as if some of the sky-colour had rubbed off upon them.

Jim and Elizabeth have paused, in their leisurely strolling and staring, to look from the straight shadowed alley in which they are standing up a long flight of steps to a low carved doorway, and a bit of starch-blue wall at the top. Down the steep flight a veiled, trousered woman is waddling, her immense pantaloons waggling awkwardly as she descends.

Elizabeth stands still, shaking with laughter at the sight. Jim laughs too.

"There is no expense spared in material there, is there? It would not be a bad dress for a fancy ball. Did you ever go to a fancy ball as a Moorish lady?"

Her laughter lessens, though her face is still alight with mirth.

"I never was at a fancy ball."

"Never?"

"Never; I never was at any ball in my life."

Her laughter is quite dead now.

"Never at any ball in your life!" repeats he, his surprise betraying him into one of those flights back into the past for which she has always showed such repugnance. "Why, you used to love dancing madly! I remember your dancing like a dervish. What is more, I remember dancing with you."

"Oh, do not remember anything to-day!" cries she, with a sort of writhe in her voice; "do not let either of us remember anything! let us have a whole holiday from remembering!"

So saying, she moves on quickly; and yet with the dance gone out of her feet. It never quite comes back. They look into an Arab club, where men are squatting, playing with odd-looking cards and drinking muddy coffee. Then a loud noise of jabbering young voices makes them peep in upon an Arab school, where a circle of little Moslems is sitting on the ground, scribbling Arabic on slates; while between the knees of the turbaned master a tiny baby scholar, of three or four, is standing in a lovely dull green coatlet. Elizabeth strokes the baby-learner's coppery cheek with her light hand, and says, with a laugh, that it seems odd to see little street-boys writing Arabic; but her laughter is no longer the bubbling, irrepressible joy-drunk thing it was before he had indulged in his tactless reminiscences; it is the well-bred, civil, grown-up sound that so often has no inside gladness to match it. In his vexation with himself for the clouding over of his little heaven that he himself has effected, he tries to persuade himself that it is caused by bodily fatigue.

"If I were asked," he says, by-and-by, looking down affectionately at her pallid profile, "I should say that you had had about enough of this; your spirit" – smiling – "is so very much too big for your body that one has to keep an eye upon you."

"It would not be much of a spirit if it were not," replies she, with a pretty air of perfectly sincere disparagement of her own slight proportions; "I know that I look a poor thing, but I am rather a fraud: I do not tire easily; I am not tired now."

"Bored, then?" with a slight accent of pique.

She lifts her sweet look, with a sort of hurry of denial in it.

"Most distinctly not."

"You would like to go on, then?"

"Yes."

"Or back?"

She hesitates, her eye exploring his with, as he feels, a genuine anxiety in it to discover what his own wishes are, so that her decision may jump with them.

"Yes – perhaps; I have really no choice."

He both looks at and speaks to her with a streak of exasperation.

"Do you never have a will – a preference of your own?"

It is evidently no unfamiliar thing to her to be addressed with causeless irritability. The recollection of her father's tone in speaking to her flashes back remorsefully upon Jim's memory. Is he himself going to take a leaf out of that book? It would be a relief to him were she to answer him sharply; but to do that is apparently not within her capabilities, though the tender red that tinges her cheek shows that she has felt his snub.

"In this case I really have not," she answers gently; "but I dare say that it was tiresome of me not to speak more decidedly; let us – let us" – another swift and apparently quite involuntary glance at him to see that she is not, after all, running counter to his inclinations – "let us go home!"

So they go home. It is near sun-setting as they drive along the Boulevard de la République, the fitting end to so princely a day. At the quay the moored vessels lie, their masts and spars making a dark design against an ineffable evening sky of mother-of-pearl and translucent pink. The sea, which to-day has not been of sapphire, but of "watchet-blue," pierced and shot with white, now copies exactly the heavens. It, too, shades from opal to translucent pink. How many changes of raiment there are in the wardrobe of the great wet mother!

"If I had as many gowns as the Mediterranean, how well-dressed I should be!" says Elizabeth, with a smile.

It is the first time she had spoken since they had set off on their return-drive. She is lying back, with her hands carefully shielding in her lap a few little crockery pots that she has bought of a fat Turk for some children at her hotel Her face looks tired; and yet over its small area is spread an expression of content that makes his heart warm. Is it only the pageant of sky and ocean that has called forth that look of real, if passing, happiness on the features of her who is always so tremblingly sensitive an instrument for all influences of beauty and grandeur to play upon? or has his own neighbourhood anything to say to it? Before he can give himself an answer to this anxious question, she speaks again.

"You do not mind my not talking, do you?" she asks, half apologetically, and yet with a confidence in his sympathy that still further quickens the beats of his already not very still heart.

"No, I am sure you do not. Somehow – it is a great gift – you always feel in tune with one, and one does not chatter most when one is most greatly pleased, does one? Oh, what a treat you have given me!"

As she speaks, her humid eyes travel from his face to where, beyond the long Atlas range, delicately toothed and cut out, rises the gold-washed snow of the Kabyle mountains, that retire majestically invisible on dull days, and only come out, candescent and regal, when the great sun rides in pomp. Above their heads wild plumes of deep rose, that it seems ridiculous to call clouds, tuft the sky.

Jim's look has followed his companion's; the chins of both are in the air; the cheerful va et vient of the boulevard is lost upon them. They see neither the Frenchmen nor plump Frenchwomen drinking coffee outside the cafés, nor the idle indigènes leaning draped against the sea-wall. (Never does that industrious race seem to attempt any severer exertion.)

 
"Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired."
 

But it is brought back to life with a jump.

"Arrêtez! arrêtez!" cries a female voice. "Jim! Jim! do you not see us? Arrêtez! arrêtez!"

Obedient to his ears, Burgoyne's eyes make one bound from the heavenly spectacle down to earth, and alight upon the Wilsons' carriage, which, going in the same direction as himself, has just been brought to a standstill alongside of his fiacre, by the solemnly beautiful, yellow-jacketed native coachman.

It is, of course, Cecilia's voice that has apostrophized him, but oh, portent! does his vision, so lately recalled from the skyey bowers, play him false? or is it really the moribund Sybilla, stretched beside her, with only two instead of three cushions at her back, with a bonnet on her head – he did not even know that she possessed a bonnet – and with a colour in her cheek and a lustre in her eye that may owe their origin either to the freshness of the evening air, or to the invigorating properties of the conversation of the very ordinary-looking young man seated opposite to her?

In a second Jim has leapt out of his own vehicle, and gone to the side of the other. It is a perfectly futile impulse that leads him to do so. Not all the leaping in the world from her side now can alter the fact that he has been driving tête-à-tête with Elizabeth Le Marchant, and that the Wilson sisters have seen him so doing; but yet it is a dim instinct of preservation towards, and shielding of her, that leads him to adopt this useless course of action. It is Cecilia who has summoned him, and yet, when he reaches her side, she does not seem to have anything particular to say to him. Sybilla is the one to address him.

"A miracle! a miracle! I know you are saying to yourself!" cries she, in a sprightly voice; "and well you may! This is the miracle-monger!" indicating with a still sprightlier air her vis-à-vis. "Dr. Crump, let me present to you Mr. Burgoyne – Jim, our Jim, whom I have so often talked to you about."

The person thus apostrophized responds by a florid bow, and an over-gallant asseveration that any person introduced to his acquaintance by Miss Sybilla needs no further recommendation.

"It is an experiment, of course; there is no use in pretending that it is not an experiment," continues she, with a slight relapse into languor; "but" – lowering her voice a little – "they wished me to make the effort."

It is a favourite allocation of Sybilla's that any course of action towards which she is inclined is adopted solely under the pressure of urgent wishes on the part of her family. Burgoyne has long known, and been exasperated by, this peculiarity; but at present she may say what she pleases; he hears no word of it, for his ear is pricked to catch the sentences that Cecilia is leaning over the carriage-side to shoot at Elizabeth.

"Oh, Miss Le Marchant! is it you? I beg your pardon, I did not recognise you at the first moment. One does not recognise people – does one? – when one is not expecting to see them" – is an intended sting lurking in this implication? "How are you? How do you like Algiers? I hope Mrs. Le Marchant is well. What a long time it is since we met! I hope we shall see something of you."

(No, evidently no sting was meant. Cecilia, with all her faults, is really a good soul, and he will take her to hear the band play next Tuesday.)

There seems to him to be a slight falter in the tone with which Elizabeth responds, and her voice sounds curiously small and low; but that may be merely owing to its flute quality, following upon and contrasting the other's powerful organ.

It is not till the two parties have again separated, and that he is once more seated by her side in the fiacre, that he dares steal a look at her face to see how plainly written on it are the traces of vexation caused by a meeting which has produced in his own breast such acute annoyance. Good heavens! it is even worse than he had expected. Down the cheek nearest to him two good-sized tears are unmistakably trickling. No doubt the consciousness of the mysterious story attaching to her past makes her smartingly aware of how doubly discreet her own conduct should be – makes her bitterly repent of her present indiscretion.

He is a strait-laced man, and it seems to him as if there were something gravely compromising to her in this tête-à-tête drive with himself, in the known absence of her parents at Hammam Rhira. Why was he fool enough this morning to admit to Cecilia that they had gone thither? He had no business to have led her into temptation, and she had no business to have fallen into it. Remorse and irritation give a tartness to his tone as he says:

"After all, I do not think you need take it so much to heart."

"Take what to heart?" she asks, in unaffected surprise, turning her full face, and her eyes, each with one hot raindrop dimming its slate-blue, upon him. "Oh, I see" – a sudden enlightenment coming to her, and changing her with instant spring from a snowdrop to a carnation – "I see what you mean; but you are mistaken. I – I – it had not occurred to me; I was only thinking – only remembering that the last time I saw her was at – at Vallombrosa."

Vallombrasa! Is he never to hear the last of Vallombrosa?