by Grant Allen
‘I’ve what?’ Psyche repeated, very much at sea.
‘I suppose you’ve graduated?’ Sirena said once more, with perfect self-possession. ‘Completed the curriculum at some European academy?’
‘Oh no,’ Psyche answered, catching at her drift, and blushing crimson by this time, for the eyes of all the table were upon her. ‘I — I’m not at all learned. I’ve been brought up at home. I never went away to school even anywhere.’
‘Your poppa’s been education enough by himself, I guess?’ Corona put in, with a friendly nod over the table towards Dumaresq: from which gesture Psyche concluded that the grand young lady meant to allude obliquely to her father.
‘I expect you’re a philosopher yourself by this time,’ Sirena went on, glancing over at her curiously. ‘Corona and I graduated at Vassar, and the philosophy class there read the first volume of the “Encyclopædic Philosophy” for their second year’s recitation. It’s stiff, Mr. Dumaresq, but our girls like it. Most of our students accept your fundamentals. They adopt your view of the cosmical substratum.’
Dumaresq twirled his gray moustache nervously. Criticism of this type was a decided novelty to him.
‘It will be a pleasure to me to think,’ he murmured, half aloud, ‘as I approach my end, that my labours are approved of by the young ladies of the philosophy class at Vassar College. Few previous philosophers have been cheered by such success. Descartes and Leibnitz went to their graves unrefreshed by the applause of the young ladies of Vassar.’
‘But in Amurrica nowadays we manage things better,’ Sirena answered, dashing on, all unconscious still of his undercurrent of banter. ‘Our women read and think some, Mr. Dumaresq, I assure you. Your philosophy’s very much studied in Cincinnati. We run a Dumaresquian Society of our own, lately inaugurated in our city; and when the members learn you’re over here in Algiers with us, I expect the ladies and gentlemen of the club’ll send along the pages out of their birthday books to get you to write your autograph on them. There’s a heap of intelligent appreciation of literatoor in Amurrica: most all of us’d be proud to have your autograph.’
‘That’s what I admire at so much in Europe,’ Cyprus interposed with a pensive air. ‘It brings you into contact with literatoor and art in a way you don’t get it across our side. Why, lots of our ladies’d give their eyes almost to be brought up in the way Miss Dumaresq’s been. In the thick of the literary society of Europe!’
Psyche smiled and answered nothing. Fortunately at that moment another member of the party intervened, and spared poor Psyche’s blushes any further.
As they sat for awhile in their own little room before retiring for their first night in Africa, Haviland Dumaresq remarked to his daughter, with a slight shudder:
‘Did you ever meet anybody so terrible, Psyche, as that awful American man and his unspeakable sisters? Such a quality as reserve seems utterly unknown to them.’
‘But do you know, papa,’ Psyche answered, half smiling, ‘they’re really such kind, good girls, after all. They almost made me sink under the table with shame at dinner, of course; but I’ve been talking with them all the evening in the salon since, and I find, in spite of their terrible ways, they’re so sweet and frank and natural, for all that. One of them — the one they call Sirena — told me I was a “real nice girl”; and when she said it, I could almost have kissed her, she seemed so kind and sympathetic and friendly.’
‘Oh, the women are well enough,’ her father answered, with masculine tolerance: most men will tolerate a pretty girl, no matter how vulgar. ‘But the brother! what a specimen of Cincinnati culture! It almost made me ashamed to think so many of my books had been sold in America when I reflected that that was the kind of man who must mostly buy them. And then the fulsomeness of the fellow’s flattery! Why couldn’t he leave poor philosophy alone? What had philosophy ever done to hurt him? I remember Mill’s saying to me once: “A thinker should never go into general society unless he knows he can go as a leader and a prophet.” That young man would go far to make one say the exact contrary: a thinker should never go at all, unless he knows he can pass in the crowd and remain unnoticed.’
CHAPTER XXX.
PSYCHE IN AFRICA.
For some time after her arrival in Algiers, Psyche seemed to improve a little on the air of Africa. In the first flush of the new Oriental life, her eyes grew stronger for awhile, as Dr. Godichau had confidently predicted. There was always something fresh to look at that roused for the moment her passing attention. And to have her attention roused was exactly what Psyche now most needed. Even a broken-hearted girl can’t be placed for the first time in her life in the midst of that wonderful phantasmagoria of Eastern costume and Eastern manners without being momentarily excited and interested. Psyche wished to see, and she saw accordingly.
The three Vanrenens and Geraldine Maitland accompanied her everywhere on her first walks among those enchanted African hillsides. From the pension itself, to be sure, the sea was invisible; but a few hundred yards along the cactus-bordered lane that leads to Ali Cherif’s villa brought them full in sight of that exquisite bay, and the high snow-capped summits of the glistening Djurjuras. With a little cry of surprise, the first time she went there, Psyche stopped for a moment and gazed entranced at the endless variety of that beautiful panorama. Straight below them, on its three rounded peaks, the town of Algiers, with its dazzling white houses, basked and glowed in the full African sunlight. The whole mass rose up sheer like a series of steps from the water’s edge to the mouldering citadel of the Deys that crowns the hilltop. In the antique Arab quarter, each house stood square and flat as a die, whitewashed without, though doubtless dirty enough within; and clustering as they did in tiers one above another with their flat roofs, on the steep slope, nothing could be quainter or more artistic in effect than their general outline. All round, the suburbs spread over the ravine-cut hills, each French château, or Moorish villa, or Arab palace, gleaming apart, surrounded by its own green stretch of olive orchard or pine-grove.
To Psyche, all these Southern sights were new and surprising. She had never set her foot before beyond the four sea-walls of Britain. The tall cypress hedges, the waving date-palms, the scrubby vineyards, the canes and aloes, which to most of us only recall that familiar Riviera, were novelty itself to the untravelled Petherton girl. The glowing white houses with their green tiles, the mosques and minarets, the domes and cupolas, the arcades and the Arabs, the brown-legged boys and veiled women on the road below, all showed her at once she was indeed in Islam. She sighed profoundly. So this was Africa! This was the land where her painter lay buried.
But it was beautiful, too, undeniably beautiful. She felt as she gazed something of that calm subdued pleasure one might naturally feel in some sweet garden cemetery where one’s loved one slept among bright clustered flowers. The first poignant anguish of disappointment and loss was over now, and a tender regret had grown up in its place which was almost pleasant. Psyche’s heart was fading so gently away that she could look with a certain half-tearful joy at that exquisite view over the sweeping blue bay and the clambering white town that ramped and climbed in successive steps from the purple harbour to the green summit of the Sahel.
Gradually, however, during those first few days in Africa, it began to dawn upon Psyche that the Vanrenens were wealthy — enormously wealthy. And gradually, too, as the same idea came home to Haviland Dumaresq’s mind, Psyche noticed with a certain little thrill of horror that her father began to make excuses and apologies for Cyrus Vanrenen’s brusque American manner.
‘The young man’s really a good-hearted young fellow,’ he said more than once to Psyche, ‘though of course uncultured. But I dare say he might be brought into shape after a time. Young men are plastic — remarkably plastic.’
One of those days, as Psyche and Geraldine returned from a country walk, they found Haviland Dumaresq, in his gray morning suit and his rough woollen cap, engaged in examining the Arab wares which a couple of tawny
pedlars in turban and burnous had unrolled from their pack and spread on the ground under the open piazza.
The scene was indeed a curiously picturesque one. On one side stood the great European philosopher, tall and erect, with his pointed gray beard and his luminous eyes, the furthest artistic development, as it were, of the Western idea in costume and humanity. On the other hand lay stretched the two lithe and graceful Orientals, in their flowing robes and not unbecoming dirt, with their oval faces and big melancholy eyes, reclined at their ease on their own Persian rugs, flung down for sale on the tiled floor of the piazza. All round stood piled in picturesque confusion the quaint bric-à-brac which forms the universal stock-in-trade of all these lazy and romantic old-world packmen. Coarse hand-made pots of red and yellow earthenware; tortoiseshell guitars and goat-skin tambourines; inlaid brass trays, with Arabic inscriptions in silver lettering; native jewellery, set thick with big beads of bright-red coral and lumps of lapis lazuli; swords and daggers of antique make; embroideries rich with silver and gold; pierced brazen lamps stolen from desecrated Tunisian mosques; haiks and burnouses of Tlemçen workmanship. All lay tumbled on the ground in one great glittering mass, and Haviland Dumaresq, with attentive eyes, stood propped against the parapet of the arcaded balustrade and glanced at them hard in philosophic reverie.
‘Hello! pedlars again!’ Cyrus Vanrenen exclaimed with boyish glee as he opened the door and came face to face with them. ‘They’ve set up store in the front piazza! Been making any purchase to-day, Mr. Dumaresq? The one-eyed calendar there’ (for the younger of the Arabs had lost an eye), ‘he knows how to charge; he’s a rare old rascal. How much do you want for the ostrich egg, mister? Combien l’[oe]uf, mon ami — comprenez-vous — combien?’
He took the thing up in his hands as he spoke. It was a half-egg richly set as a cup in Kabyle metal-work, and suspended from three graceful silver chains to hang from the ceiling.
‘Fifty francs,’ the Arab answered in French, showing all his teeth in the regular melancholy Arab smile.
‘Here you are, then,’ Cyrus said, taking out his purse. ‘Tenez; vous voici. May I offer it to you for a little souvenir, Miss Dumaresq? It’d look real pretty hung down from the gas in the centre of a parlour.’
‘Oh, Mr. Vanrenen!’ Geraldine cried, aghast; ‘you oughtn’t to pay what they ask, offhand, you know. You’ll spoil the market. You should offer them half. You ought to marchander for everything with the Arabs. If you’d marchandé’d for that, you’d have got it easily for at least thirty.’
‘I guess so,’ Cyrus answered with a careless air, handing the egg over to Psyche, who took it half irresolutely. ‘But time’s money, you see, across our way — a fact which these gentlemen in the bare legs don’t seem to catch on at; and twenty francs ain’t worth standing and bargaining about in the sun for half an hour.’
‘Oh, thank you ever so much!’ Psyche said, admiring it. ‘Do you really mean I’m to take it, Mr. Vanrenen? How very kind of you! Isn’t it lovely, papa? It’d look just sweet hung up in the recess over the sideboard at Petherton.’
‘It is pretty,’ her father said, taking it from her with evident embarrassment. ‘Extremely pretty in its own curious barbaric way, though, of course, it exhibits the usual extravagant barbaric tendency towards reckless profusion of ornament over the entire field. In the best decorative art, the ornament, instead of being lavished on all parts alike, is concentrated on important constructive features.’
‘Oh, you look here, Cyrus!’ Corona cried, gazing up at the wall, where the Arabs had hung an exquisite embroidered satin portière. ‘Ain’t that just lovely? Ain’t the colours sweet? Did you ever see anything prettier in your life than that, now?’
‘And wouldn’t it look elegant.’ Sirena continued in the same breath, ‘hung up in the archway between the drawing-room and the ante-room at Cincinnati?’
Cyrus put his head on one side and eyed it critically. It was indeed a charming piece of old Oriental needlework, torn from the spoils of some far inland mosque. The ground was of dainty old-gold satin; and the embroidery, rich in many tints of silk, was thoroughly Saracenic in type and colouring.
‘Combien?’ Cyrus asked laconically, after a brief pause. His stock of French was remarkable for its scantiness; but he beat it out thin for active service, and made each word do the utmost duty of which it was capable.
‘Douze cent francs,’ the Arab merchant answered, holding up the fingers of both hands, and then two over, as an aid to comprehension.
‘Je vous donne six cent,’ Cyrus observed tentatively, well warned by Geraldine’s superior wisdom.
‘C’est à vous, monsieur. Prenez-le,’ the Arab answered, as he bowed and shrugged his shoulders with perfect coolness.
And Cyrus, pulling out the twenty-four pounds in good French gold, handed it over at once, and seized the portière.
‘That’s for you, Sirena,’ he said, laying the thing lightly across his eldest sister’s arm. ‘You can hang it in the archway when we go back to Amurrica.’
‘You’re real good, Cyrus,’ Sirena answered, kissing him fraternally before the scandalized faces of those disconcerted Arabs. (The conduct of these Frank women is really too abandoned!)
‘That’s just like Cyrus!’ Corona said laughingly. ‘He don’t know how to get rid of his dollars fast enough. If he went into the market and took a fancy to a camel, I guess he’d purchase it to take it across to Amurrica. Yes, sir; he’s a first-rate hand at spending money, Cyrus is. But, then, you see, he’s a first-rate hand, come to think, at making it.’
‘It’s easier to make a dollar in Amurrica than a shilling in England,’ Cyrus answered apologetically; ‘and it’s easier to spend it than to spend sixpence. That’s what I always say when I come across this side. A man’s got to work pretty hard at his spending hereabouts, or he finds the money accumulate inconveniently in his waistcoat-pocket.’
‘I’ve never been inconvenienced in that way myself,’ Dumaresq murmured with grim irony.
‘No, sir, I reckon you haven’t,’ Cyrus answered with refreshing American frankness. ‘But, then, you’ve never put your brains into the business, or you’d have struck it rich. You’ve been otherwise occupied. You’ve made what’s better than money — fame, reputation, an honoured name in the world’s history. Why, I’d rather have written the “Encyclopædic Philosophy” any day, Mr. Dumaresq, than boss the biggest and most successful pork concern in all Cincinnati!’
Haviland Dumaresq shrank into his shoes. Great heavens, what an ideal of earthly success! And yet — the man was evidently rich. Besides, Americans have the plasticity of youth. Young communities resemble in some respects young individuals. As is the mass, so are the units. There’s no knowing what you may not make out of an American, if you catch him young, take him in hand firmly, and expose him consistently for two or three years to the mellowing influence of a fresh environment. Americans have plenty of undeveloped tact: it needs but intercourse with more refined societies to bring that latent faculty visibly to the surface.
CHAPTER XXXI.
A NILE TOURIST.
Somewhere about the same time when these things were passing at Algiers, the Reverend Francis Austen Linnell, Vicar of Hambledon-cum-Thornyhaugh, Northumberland, sat with his legs dangling over a huge block of sculptured sandstone, among the massive ruins of the vast and many-chambered temple of Rameses the Great by the quay at Luxor.
The Reverend Francis Austen Linnell, to say the truth, was in a gloomy humour. He revenged himself upon the world, indeed, by hammering with his stick at the crumbling figures of Khem and Isis that covered the huge sandstone block on whose top he was seated. Time and invaders had gently spared those sculptured forms for six thousand years; the Persian, the Greek, the Roman, and the Arab, had all swept over the land, and let them go by unhurt: but the Reverend Francis Austen Linnell, with his iron-shod stick, took a malicious pleasure now, like a veritable British tourist that he was, in defacing the nose of the gray goddess wh
om so many ages and so many conquerors had looked down upon without injury. Things had gone badly with the last of the Linnells on the Upper Nile. He had pushed as far up towards Wady Halfa as the courtesy of the military authorities would permit during those stormy times: he had questioned every real or supposed refugee from Khartoum whom he could find anywhere among the native bazaars; but he had elicited nothing of the slightest importance about his half-brother or his cousin. Their fate remained as absolutely doubtful as the fate of all the other defenders of the conquered city. Vague rumours and surmises there were plenty, to be sure, but of solid fact or certain assurance, not a single item.
So the Reverend Francis Austen Linnell had returned to Luxor in a very ill humour, and had left his dahabeeah now moored close under the bank by the Karnak Hotel, while he himself sat, disconsolate and alone, chipping bits from the bas-reliefs, among the ruins of the temple.
To be sure, there was some hope of news still; for a strange report went about at Luxor that day. A European refugee, it was rumoured — a newspaper correspondent or somebody of the sort, who had remained in Khartoum up to the very last moment — had yesterday arrived across the desert at Assouan. Now, if this European refugee turned out a reality, there might still be some chance of learning Sir Austen’s fate from a presentable witness. So the Reverend Frank sat and gazed around with a somewhat contemptuous glance at the mass of dust and dirt and rubbish that encumbers the base of that gigantic ruin, and waited impatiently for the expected traveller.
Of course Frank Linnell was not alone. Nobody is ever alone for ten seconds in Egypt. The custom of the country does not permit solitude. A crowd of pestering little native boys, picturesquely arrayed in torn and ragged commissariat corn-sacks, with flies clustering thickly on their bleared eyes, held out their tawny hands, and showed their hideous artificial sores, and clamoured for backshish with true Egyptian persistence. The Reverend Frank regarded them cynically.
