Alas! Part 46

It is needless to say how innocent of the mental e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n attributed to him Jim has been, and the consciousness of it makes him inquire with guilty haste:

"But you were none the worse? you got over it all right?"

"I was really wonderful," replies she; "we sick people"--with a little air of playfulness--"do give you well ones these surprises sometimes; but I must not take the credit to myself: it is really every bit due to Dr. Crump, my new doctor, who is a perfect marvel of intuition. I always tell him that he never need ask; he _divines_ how one is; he says he is a mere bundle of nerves himself; that is, I suppose, why one can talk to him upon subjects that are sealed books with one's nearest and dearest."

Her voice has a suspicious tremble in it which frightens Jim anew.

He looks again apprehensively for help towards the two tiers of curving column and rounding arch, which rise in cool grace above each other, and sees, with relief, the figure of Cecilia leaning over the bal.u.s.trade that runs along the upper tier, and looking down upon him. At the same moment Mr. Wilson enters, and shortly afterwards they all go to luncheon. It is not a very pleasant repast, although the cool dining-room, with its beautiful old pierced stucco ceiling and its hanging bra.s.s lamps, contributes its part handsomely towards what should be their enjoyment. There is no overt family quarrel, but just enough of covert recrimination and sub-acid sparring to make an outsider feel thoroughly uncomfortable, and to prove how inharmonious a whole the soured little family now forms.

"We quarrel more than we used to do, do not we?" says Cecilia, when Jim, a little later, takes leave, and she walks, under her red sunshade, up the ilexed drive with him to the pillared gate; "and to-day we were better than usual, because you were by. Oh, I wish you were always by!"

He cannot echo the wish. He had thought that he had already held his dead Amelia at her true value; but never, until to-day, has he realized through what a long purgatory of obscure heroisms she had pa.s.sed to her reward.

"I do hope you will not drop us altogether. Of course, now that the link that bound us to you is broken"--her voice quivers, but he feels neither the fear nor the rage that a like phenomenon in Sybilla has produced in him--"there is nothing to hold you any longer; but I do trust you will not quite throw us over."

"My dear old girl, why should I? I hope that you and I shall always be the best of friends, and that before long I shall see you settled in a home of your own."

"You mean that I shall marry? Well, to be sure"--with a recurrence to that business-like tone which had always amused him formerly in her discussion of her affairs of the heart--"I ought to have a better chance now than ever, as I shall have a larger fortune; but"--with a lapse into depression--"this is not a good place for men--I mean Englishmen. There are troops of delightful-looking Frenchmen, Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique, and Zouaves; but, then, we do not know any of them--not one. Well, perhaps"--philosophically--"it is for the best; one always hears that Frenchmen make very bad husbands."

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 n.o.bly 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 pa.s.s 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:

"a la memoire de tous ceux, qui ont peri dans la mer, et ont ete 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 a.s.suage, witness the frequent votive tablets with which the church walls are covered:

"Merci, oh ma mere."

"J'ai prie, et j'ai ete exauce."

"Reconnaissance a Marie."

"Reconnaissance a 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'hote_ 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. Eugene, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 spa.r.s.e--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 sc.r.a.p 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-gla.s.s 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 plat.i.tude 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 c.r.a.pe 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 rea.s.suringly; "you are making a mistake; n.o.body is dead--n.o.body, 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 bra.s.s 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.