The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett

Chapter 55

"I wish I knew what they were calling each other," said Sylvia.

"Something highly insulting, I should think," Mrs. Gainsborough answered. "Wonderful the way they use their hands. He doesn't seem to be worrying himself so very much. I suppose he'll start in shooting in the end."

She pointed to the soldier, who was regarding the dispute with contemptuous gravity. Another window in a tower on the other side of the gate was opened, and the first porter was reinforced. Perspiration was dripping from Don Alfonso's forehead; he looked more like a candle stump than ever, when presently he stood aside from the argument to say that he had been forced to offer one franc seventy-five to enter Tetuan.

"Tetuan," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "Tetuarn't, I should say."

Sylvia asked Don Alfonso what he was calling the porter, and it appeared, though he minimized the insult by a gesture, that he had just invited forty-three dogs to devour the corpse of the porter's grandmother. This, however, he hastened to add, had not annoyed him so much as his withdrawal from one franc fifty to one franc twenty-five.

In the end the porter agreed to open the gate for one franc seventy-five.

"Which is just as well," said Mrs. Gainsborough, "for I'm sure Mohamet would have thrown a fit soon. He's got to banging his forehead with his fists, and that's a very bad sign."

They rode through the darkness between double walls, disturbing every now and then a beggar who whined for alms or cursed them if the mule trod upon his outspread legs. They found an inn called the Hotel Splendide, a bug-ridden tumble-down place kept by Spanish Jews as voracious as the bugs. Yet out on the roof, looking at the domes and minarets glimmering under Venus setting in the west from a sky full of stars, listening to the howling of distant dogs, breathing the perfume of the East, Sylvia felt like a conqueror.

Next morning Mrs. Gainsborough, finding that the bugs had retreated with the light, decided to spend the morning in sleeping off some of her bruises. Sylvia wandered through the bazaars with Don Alfonso, and sat for a while in the garden of a French convent, where a fountain whispered in the shade of pomegranates. Suddenly, walking along the path toward her she saw Maurice Avery.

Sylvia had disliked Avery very much when she met him in London nearly two years ago; but the worst enemy, the most flagitious bore, is transformed when encountered alone in a distant country, and now Sylvia felt well disposed toward him and eager to share with any one who could appreciate her pleasure the marvel of being in Tetuan. He too, by the way his face lighted up, was glad to see her, and they shook hands with a cordiality that was quite out of proportion to their earlier acquaintance.

"I say, what a queer place to meet!" he exclaimed. "Are you alone, then?"

"I've got Mrs. Gainsborough with me, that's all. I'm not married... or anything."

It was absurd how eager she felt to a.s.sure Avery of this; and then in a moment the topic had been started.

"No, have you really got Mrs. Gainsborough?" he exclaimed. "Of course I've heard about her from Michael. Poor old Michael!"

"Why, what's the matter?" Sylvia asked, sharply.

"Oh, he's perfectly all right, but he's lost to his friends. At least I suppose he is--buried in a monastery. He's not actually a monk. I believe he's what's called an oblate, pursuing the Fata Morgana of faith--a sort of dream...."

"Yes, yes," Sylvia interrupted. "I understand the allusion. You needn't talk down to me."

Avery blushed. The color in his cheeks made him seem very young.

"Sorry. I was thinking of somebody else for the moment. That sounds very discourteous also. I must apologize again. What's happened to Lily Haden?"

Sylvia told him briefly the circ.u.mstances of Lily's marriage at Rio.

"Does Michael ever talk about her?" she asked.

"Oh no, never!" said Avery. "He's engaged in saving his own soul now.

That sounds malicious, but seriously I don't think she was ever more to him than an intellectual landmark. To understand Michael's point of view in all that business you've got to know that he was illegitimate. His father, Lord Saxby, had a romantic pa.s.sion for the daughter of a country parson--a

"You think one can't afford to bury the past?"

Avery looked at her quickly. "What made you ask me that?"

"I thought you seemed to admire Michael's youthful foolishness."

"I do really. I admire any one that's steadfast even to a mistaken idea.

It's strange to meet an Englishwoman here," he said, looking intently at Sylvia. "One's guard drops. I'm longing to make a confidante of you, but you might be bored. I'm rather frightened of you, really. I always was."

"I sha'n't exchange confidences," Sylvia said, "if that's what you're afraid of."

"No, of course not," Avery said, quickly. "Last spring I was in love with a girl...."

Sylvia raised her eyebrows.

"Oh yes, it's a very commonplace beginning and rather a commonplace end, I'm afraid. She was a ballet-girl--the incarnation of May and London.

That sounds exaggerated, for I know that lots of other Jenny Pearls have been the same to somebody, but I do believe most people agreed with me.

I wanted her to live with me. She wouldn't. She had sentimental, or what I thought were sentimental, ideas about her mother and family. I was called away to Spain. When my business was finished I begged her to come out to me there. That was last April. She refused, and I was piqued, I suppose, at first, and did not go back to England. Then, as one does, I made up my mind to the easiest thing at the moment by letting myself be enchanted by my surroundings into thinking that I was happier as it was.

For a while I was happier; in a way our love had been a great strain upon us both. I came to Morocco, and gradually ever since I've been realizing that I left something unfinished. It's become a kind of obsession. Do you know what I mean?"

"Indeed I do, very well indeed," Sylvia said.

"Thanks," he said with a grateful look. "Now comes the problem. If I go back to England this month, if I arrive in England on the first of May exactly a year later, there's only one thing I can do to atone for my behavior--I must ask her to marry me. You see that, don't you? This little thing is proud, oh, but tremendously proud. I doubt very much if she'll forgive me, even if I show the sincerity of my regret by asking her to marry me now; but it's my only chance. And yet--oh, I expect this will sound d.a.m.nable to you, but it's the way we've all been molded in England--she's common. Common! What an outrageous word to use. But then it is used by everybody. She's the most frankly c.o.c.kney thing you ever saw. Can I stand her being snubbed and patronized? Can I stand my wife's being snubbed and patronized? Can love survive the sort of ambushed criticism that I shall perceive all round us? For I wouldn't try to change her. No, no, no! She must be herself. I'll have no throaty 'aws'

masquerading as 'o's.' She must keep her own clear 'aou's.' There must not be any 'naceness' or patched-up shop-walker's English. I love her more at this moment than I ever loved her, but can I stand it? And I'm not asking this egotistically: I'm asking it for both of us. That's why you meet me in Tetuan, for I dare not go back to England lest the first c.o.c.kney voice I hear may kill my determination, and I really am longing to marry her. Yet I wait here, staking what I know in my heart is all my future happiness on chance, a.s.suring myself that presently impulse and reason will be reconciled and will send me back to her, but still I wait."

He paused. The fountain whispered in the shade of the pomegranates. A nun was gathering flowers for the chapel. Outside, the turmoil of the East sounded like the distant chattering of innumerable monkeys.

"You've so nearly reached the point at which a man has the right to approach a woman," Sylvia said, "that if you're asking my advice, I advise you to wait until you do actually reach that point. Of course you may lose her by waiting. She may marry somebody else."

"Oh, I know; I've thought of that. In a way that would be a solution."

"So long as you regard her marriage with somebody else as a solution, you're still some way from the point. It's curious she should be a ballet-girl, because Mrs. Gainsborough, you know, was a ballet-girl. In 1869, when she took her emotional plunge, she was able to exchange the wings of Covent Garden for the wings of love easily enough. In 1869 ballet-girls never thought of marrying what were and are called 'gentlemen.' I think Mrs. Gainsborough would consider her life a success; she was not too much married to spoil love, and the captain was certainly more devoted to her than most husbands would have been. The proof that her life was a success is that she has remained young. Yet if I introduce you to her you'll see at once your own Jenny at sixty like her--that won't be at all a hard feat of imagination. But you'll still be seeing yourself at twenty-five or whatever you are; you'll never be able to see yourself at sixty; therefore I sha'n't introduce you. I'm too much of a woman not to hope with all my heart that you'll go home to England, marry your Jenny, and live happily ever afterward, and I think you'd better not meet Mrs. Gainsborough, in case she prejudices your resolve. Thanks for giving me your confidence."

"Oh no! Thank _you_ for listening," said Avery.

"I'm glad you're not going to develop her. I once suffered from that kind of vivisection myself, though I never had a c.o.c.kney accent. Some souls can't stand straight lacing, just as some bodies revolt from stays. And so Michael is in a monastery? I suppose that means all his soul spasms are finally allayed?"

"O Lord! No!" said Avery. "He's in the very middle of them."

"What I really meant to say was heart palpitations."

"I don't think, really," said Avery, "that Michael ever had them."

"What was Lily, then?"

"Oh, essentially a soul spasm," he declared.

"Yes, I suppose it was," Sylvia agreed, pensively.

"I think, you know, I must meet Mrs. Gainsborough," said Avery. "Fate answers for you. Here she comes."

Don Alfonso, with the pain that every dog and dragoman feels in the separation of his charges, had taken advantage of Sylvia's talk with Avery to bring Mrs. Gainsborough triumphantly back to the fold.

"Here we are again," said Mrs. Gainsborough, limping down the path. "And my behind looks like a magic lantern. Oh, I beg your pardon! I didn't see you'd met a friend. So that's what Alfonso was trying to tell me.

He's been going like an alarm-clock all the way here. Pleased to meet you, I'm sure. How do you like Morocco? We got shut out last night."



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