Part 11

'Thank you, dear Philip;' she stooped over him and kissed his lips. 'Dear, dear Philip, I shall never part with them. It was most kind of you, and brave, too, to go in search of them for me.'

'Salome,' said he, 'don't let Lambert, and above all Mrs. Sidebottom, come and worry me to-day. I am in horrible pain, I cannot move, and I cannot bear to be bothered. You go down and take a little stroll; do not mind about me. I will try to doze. I had no sleep last night. I am turning all the colours of the rainbow, I was so bruised. I shall be right in a day or two. No bones are broken, but I cannot stir, and cannot endure to be worried; let me be quiet and a good deal to myself. I will sleep when I can.'

'May I sit by you a little?' she asked timidly. 'I will not speak--only hold your hand.'

She look his silence for consent. And he found comfort in her presence; a soothing feeling crept up his arm from her hands that clasped his, and spread over his heart.

He was somewhat ashamed of himself. He had not made his expedition among the rocks, and met with his fall in searching for edelweiss for her, but for Artemisia. Salome had accepted the flower, and cherished it as if he had sought it for her, and he allowed her to remain in this delusion. Was this honourable? Was it in accordance with that strict rectitude on which he plumed himself? Yet he could not tell her the truth; it would wound her too deeply, and--humble himself too considerably.

Two days ago Artemisia Durham had taken his hand on the Ober-Alp, beside the lake, when he extended it to her in pledge that he would do great things for her; and now, in redemption of his pledge, he had tried to get her a bit of edelweiss, and had tumbled through the snow in his efforts. And what could he do for her? She had not asked for legal advice or for figured table-linen, the two things he could furnish her with without offence. It was as well that his hand was hurt--it served him right; he had no right to offer what he was unable to perform. How differently he had felt as Artemisia held his hand! Then an intoxicating current had set boiling through his veins, turning his head, maddening him. Now the cool hand of Salome conveyed balm to his aching joints, and what was a better medicine, though a bitter one, self-reproach to his conscience.

Now, also, for the first time since his walk with Miss Durham, some of his old suspicion oozed up through the joints of his thoughts. What was the reason of her laughter? Thrice it had occurred; first she had said something laughingly about him to Beaple Yeo at table, and provoked that odious creature to an explosion of laughter. Then, on the Ober-Alp Pass she had laughed for no particular reason that Philip could see, and had made Philip laugh with her. And, lastly, she had laughed mockingly, alone, when he was rescued from the very verge of a dreadful death.

He shut his eyes and lay still. Salome sat by him for an hour, and then, thinking he was asleep, released his hand, kissed him quietly, and stole from the room. Mrs. Sidebottom wanted to take a short walk; it was tedious in the inn, with only a few old and odd volumes of Tauchnitz novels about; and cold or inactivity was rendering the Labarte girls torpid, and they were clinging about Aunt Janet, or dropping upon her, at embarrassing times. Mrs. Sidebottom did not feel equal to managing all three unaided, and as Miss Durham declined to accompany her, she insisted on Salome lending her aid. Salome consented. Her husband had wished that she should go out, and he was asleep and could be left without anxiety. The girls had been shown at Andermatt beads and seals made of a sparkling stone, which was said to be found on the St. Gothard road, half-way down the Val Tremola, and when Mrs. Sidebottom proposed a walk they entreated to be allowed to search for this precious stone, of which they resolved to compose necklaces for themselves, or at least bracelets. It would create quite a sensation at Elboeuf; not one of the girls there had seen this beautiful stone--not one probably had heard the name of Tremoline, by which it was called.

There was another reason why Mrs. Sidebottom, on this occasion, particularly desired the companionship of Salome. She was commissioned to break to her the news that Janet and Lambert were engaged, and to use her endeavours to overcome any prejudice Salome might entertain against the marriage being solemnized shortly, at Berne, at the Embassy. And Mrs. Sidebottom was about to attack her on this point by representing that she, Salome, was not the person to make objections when she herself had married Philip within a very short time of the supposed death of Uncle Jeremiah, who, though he was not her father, had stood to her much in the light of a parent.

Salome had observed that Janet and the captain took much delight in each other's society, but she had not given their association a serious thought; she knew that her sister liked lively society, and the captain had exhibited, whilst at Andermatt, an amount of vivacity and humour which she had not given him the credit of possessing. They were both interested in things of which she knew nothing, and naturally, therefore, sought each other's society. They were also connections in a roundabout fashion. Through Philip, Lambert became her cousin, and as Janet was her sister, he must be some sort of cousin to Janet. Quite near enough relation to remove starchness of intercourse, and place them on easy terms of cousinly association, that excused a good deal which would be inadmissible were they unrelated.

Philip heard the voices of the party outside the house, the crisp laughter of the girls, and the sawing tones of Mrs. Sidebottom, and then the sounds became distant, and ceased. His meditations were interrupted about a quarter of an hour later by three raps against the wall by his head. The several rooms in the inn were small, and divided from each other and from the passage by wood--not very thick deal boarding, papered over, but which in places had warped and split the paper. Signora Lombardi, every spring, with a pot of paste and some strips of paper, went about the rooms pasting over the rifts, disguising them, and preventing the partitions from being as diaphanous as they were diaphonous. German, Swiss and Italian beds are wooden boxes, narrow and short; and in such a bed against such a wall lay Philip, unable to move without torture.

Again three loud raps.

'Who is that?' he called.

'You are awake, Mr. Pennycomequick?' asked the voice of Miss Durham, almost in his ear. 'We are in adjoining stalls. I want a word with you, because I leave this insufferable place to-morrow, I can endure the cold and tedium no longer; and before you return to the nether world, I may be away unless you descend in a _glissade_, and shoot through the roof of the Hotel Imperial upon us into the midst of the table at dinner.'

Philip felt the partition between them shake. She was laughing. She had her chair against it, and leaned against it--to speak to him and to laugh at him.

'I must ask your pardon,' she said presently with a twitter in her tones from suppressed merriment; 'I did not realize your danger, or rather the danger you had escaped, when pulled out of the snow. But my laughter was excusable; you can have no conception how infinitely comic an object you presented; and the whole affair was so ridiculous. You--going aloft after edelweiss without the smallest acquaintance with its habitat, and with no experience to teach you how to keep your footing in Alpine altitudes, and shooting down, pop! through a hole into the nether world. And then--to see the men about the hole extracting you--it was like Esquimaux fishing.'

Philip was not only vastly offended, but he was also greatly shocked, at the conduct of the young Chicago lady, holding a conversation with him through the wall when he was in bed. To show his sense of the indelicacy of her course, he said nothing in return.

She tapped again.

'Well, Mr. Pennycomequick! have I scandalized you? We are in the land of freedom; and I am a daughter of the Stars and Stripes, and we American girls are not so particular about trifles as are your English misses. Are you very much bruised and crumpled?'

'Very,' groaned Philip.

'Do you good; take some of the starch out of you. You had the temerity to browbeat and insult me, when first you came to Andermatt. Now I have served you out, and I may tell you this to your consolation, that it is a lucky thing for you that you had your fall and contusions. But for that I would have turned you inside out, and twisted your silly head off your shoulders. I intended to do it, for no man offends me and escapes stings. I am content to leave you as you are, black and blue, and disjointed, like a wretch on the rack.'

She was stretching his mind on the rack and disjointing that as well, sitting, leaning against the wall, and working the mechanism.

'Mr. Pennycomequick, I heard about you from your wife before you arrived; how different you proved to the idea I had formed, you have too much conceit to imagine. I found a wooden man, with his limbs affixed to his trunk by pegs, with a wooden face, wooden ideas, wooden manners--and when this wooden figure-head had the audacity to insult me----'

Philip exclaimed, 'What I said was true. You yourself admitted its truth, when you told me your story.'

'My dear dolt!' said Miss Durham, 'I admit it. But who likes to have the truth skewered on a bayonet, and rammed down his throat? And now--what I say would splutter about like Japanese fireworks and do no one any harm, were it not that it is true, true in every word, and this it is that turns each word into duck-shot, with which I pepper you--through the wall.'

It was a wonder that next day Signora Lombardi did not find the sheets of No. 18 singed, so hot did Philip become between them with offended modesty, with anger, anguish, and shame.

'The game is up, so I do not mind showing you my hand,' cried Artemisia. She had folded her arms over her breast, and leaned back, with her head against the wall, and talked hastily, passionately. 'That little wife of yours, who is a thousand times too good for you, and whom I pity, yoked to such a fellow as yourself, she told me that it was not possible for you to come to love me, because she was your wife. Not, she hastened to explain, that she esteemed herself irresistible, and very superior, but because she had such a towering opinion of your rectitude, equal to your own of yourself. That was as much as daring me to attempt the conquest; and your own absurd self-esteem was another provocation. When you threw down the glove I accepted the challenge, and you know how in an hour or two I had spun you round like a teetotum.'

She stayed talking to laugh. As she laughed she shook the wall, and the wall rattled Philip's bed, and the rattling bed rattled his aching joints; but he felt these pains no more in the intensity of the agony of shame that he endured in his racked mind.

'You were quite fetching!' she continued. 'When you held out your hand and offered to be my stay, I was obliged to jump up. With all my powers of self-control I could hardly keep from boxing your ears and sending you into the lake for your impudence. However, I had no wish that the transformation scene should come off too soon. I intended to lead you on through other follies till I had ruined your reputation and your self-respect. But the fates have been against me; I cannot wait longer here. I abandon you to yourself and to your good little wife. I cannot waste time over you. I have other matters to attend to; better game to pursue than such a wooden leaping frog as you.' She stood up from her chair, and went to the window; it commanded a bleak prospect. She could not see the returning party on it. The girls Labarte had perhaps found the desired minerals and would not desist from collecting till they had each enough to form a _parure_ of Tremoline.

Artemisia returned to her seat against the wall, and said, 'As for that romance I told you about myself, believe of it as much or as little as you please. When you tell your own story, with your autobiography, the little episode of Artemisia Durham will not be found in it. We only remember and write of ourselves as we would like others to know us, not as we are. Is it not so?'

Then suddenly she broke into a song, a popular Viennese opera air, which she had turned into rough English verse to enable her to sing it at concerts elsewhere than in Germany. She had a beautiful, a naturally flexible voice, and every note was like an articulate crystal drop.

'A little grain of falsehood Is found in all that's said, It penetrates as leaven Whatever's uttered. No man is what he seemeth. No woman what appears. There's falsehood oft in laughter, And falsehood e'en in tears. Both fact and fib together go In everything we say or do. To a peck of truth--a pinch of lie, As the spice in the pudding, to qualify.'

*CHAPTER L.*

*IN THE HOSPICE.*

There is a toy, the delight of children, that consists in a manikin with his legs curled under him, weighted with lead in his globular nether parts. This manikin, however, persistently held down, or violently knocked over, always rights himself.

And there are human beings similarly constituted. With them self-conceit supplies the place of lead. There is no disturbing their equilibrium for more than a moment. Lay their heads in the dust, and the instant the finger that depressed them is removed, up go the heads again, nose in air. Strike them with horsewhip or poker, and they shiver in mute anger, unconscious of humiliation, and they are steady again, nose in air. Bore holes in them, and you cannot let out their ponderosity and disturb their equilibrium; set them on the fire, and you cannot melt the self-conceit out of them. It oozes out of their pores, it distils from their finger-tips, it streams out of their eyes, it pours from their lips, and yet never exhausts itself, any more than the oil in the cruse of the widow of Sarepta. Kick them, and they travel upright, nose in air, along the carpet; pitch them out of the window, and they go down head uppermost; sink them in the deepest well, and they sit, slowly disintegrating at the bottom, head up.

Philip was not one of these. It was true that in him was a large amount of self-esteem--or what religious people would call self-righteousness, but it was not an organic inbred quality; it had been developed by his education, by the circumstances of his early life, and could therefore be expelled from his system by sharp medicine. By one of those exquisitely pitiful provisions of Nature, which compensates to the nightingale for his plainness by giving him a tuneful voice, and to the peacock for his harsh notes by surrounding him with a glory of gold and green, men of little acquirements, little minds, little presence, are furnished with the blessed gift of bumptiousness, which makes them unconscious of their insignificance, which induces those who can by no probability be heroes to others to be heroes to themselves. Just as the most ignorant men are the most positive, so are the most empty men the most self-contained. They can blow themselves out with the breath of their own nostrils.

Success in life is not necessary to make a man conceited, nor beauty to superinduce vanity in a woman. The extravagances of conceit are found in those men who have made a botch of life, and of vanity in those women who have least personal charms. Every disappointment, every rebuff, throws them in on themselves, and they seek in themselves that approval and appreciation which is denied them without. Like Narcissus, but lacking his excuse, they fall in love with themselves, because no one else will love them. Is it not possible that appreciation may be an element as necessary to the psychical as oxygen is necessary to the physical life, that when it is not freely given or wrested from the world without, we may set to work to engender it for ourselves within, just as in Jules Verne's romance those who voyaged ten thousand leagues under the sea, being out of the element that naturally fed the lungs, manufactured it for themselves under water?

Had Philip been constitutionally conceited, had bumptiousness been congenital, like scrofula in the blood, or tubercle in the brain, the overthrow he had met with at the hands of Miss Durham would not have seriously affected him, would have had no educative effect on him. He would have sighed and resigned himself to the conviction that Miss Durham was to be pitied, not he, because an inscrutable Providence, which denies to some eyes the faculty of seeing colour, and to some ears the power to distinguish and enjoy melodies, and to some noses the capacity to delight in odours, had denied to Miss Durham the ability to admire and adore him.

In the classic tale, Achilles was plunged by his mother Thetis in the waters of Styx, which made him invulnerable, save in the heel by which she held him. So our good mother, Nature, takes some of her children, not the robust of brain and the Achillean in vigour and beauty, and renders them callous, so that they can pass through life unhurt by shaft of ridicule, scourge of rebuke, and flout of fortune. Every arrow glances off their skin, every blade used on them has its edge turned, every cudgel breaks without bruising. What happiness is theirs! They are whole and unhurt, whereas their richer endowed brothers are hacked, and pierced, and heart-broken.

The author had once to do with a worthy, pious man, put in a situation under him, who was triple-panoplied in the hide of self-esteem. As is usual with such persons, he was not much short of a fool, and did very foolish, inconsiderate things. When called to task for some egregious act, he bore the reprimand with meekness, then retired to his closet, where he prayed for him who had rebuked him, as for a persecutor. Never for one particle of a moment did it occur to him that he himself deserved blame. And the author knows full well that the callous-skinned who read these pages will feel no cut from his words, but draw up their heels under them, out of the way of his scythe.

It has been proved by experiment that the tortoise can live though deprived of its brains, but the tortoise is the animal with the hardest epidermis known. Perhaps the converse may be true, that those animals with the largest proportion of brain may have the most sensitive skins.

Now Philip was no fool. He had plenty of sound sense, but his moral faculties had been warped by the circumstances of his early career, and he had grown up with great suspicion of others, but sure confidence in himself. Now, suddenly, his eyes had been opened by a rude shock; his moral nature had been subjected to a _glissade_ and a jolt almost as severe as that which his body had undergone, and as he was not tough and horny-hided in mind, he felt the results as acutely. If he ached with bruises and sprains in flesh and sinew, so did he ache with bruise and sprain in all the tissues and fibres of his inner spiritual self.

When Salome returned to Philip's room she found him disinclined to talk; he was still twitching and quivering from the lashes he had received, conscious only of his present pain, covered with humiliation. He had not been given time to think of his future conduct, even to consider the retrospect; the present torture occupied and made to tingle every nerve of his soul.

With the innate tact which Salome possessed, she saw at once that he did not wish to be disturbed; though she could not divine that he had other cause for suffering than his fall, or that other injuries had been done him than those which made his body black and blue. She knew that he was in pain, and that he sought to disguise the fact from her, and though full of solicitude for him, she did not harass him with attentions.

She drew a little stool beside his bed, and seated herself on it, with needlework for the baby, and did not look at him.

He lay on his back, but turned his head, and saw her beautiful auburn hair, with the evening sun tinging it with orange fire. For some time he looked at it without thought of her, only of himself, his shame, his jarred self-respect. That jest of Artemisia about the Esquimaux watching about a hole in the ice, to pull out of it a fish, was present to him; he saw the fish come up flapping its tail and tossing to escape the barb; and then thought of himself being hauled out of the hole in the snow through which he had plunged. Then he considered how that she--this malicious woman--had held him with a hook in his jaws and had played with him, and then how he had been suddenly plunged out of a world of light and smoothness into an abyss where all was darkness and horror. Where was he? Into what had he fallen? Had he not almost shot over the precipice, and gone down into the uttermost depths of degradation? What if this accident had not befallen him? What if that woman had gone on playing with him, and had lured him further, as in the folk-tales the nixies of the waterfalls lure shepherds to throw themselves over, with the vain belief that by so doing they will fall into the arms and be received into the realm of the water sprites?

His ideas became confused. At one moment he was a fish caught by a barb, then he was clinging to a rock, withdrawing from the enticements of a siren. The sun had set, or no longer crowned Salome with fire, she continued her needlework till dusk closed in rapidly and prevented her seeing her stitches. But she sat on, upon her little stool, resting her cheek against the bedclothes. Philip, half dreaming, had caught a lock of her hair and twisted it round his finger, and held it as if it were something that was so firm, so sure that if he clung to it, if he would retain it about his finger as a golden hoop, he could not continue his slide and fall, and so thinking, or fancying, in a confused condition of mind, bred of, or fostered by pain and shame, he had fallen asleep. Salome sat on, did not venture to move her head lest she should disturb his sleep by withdrawing her hair from his fingers.