Here, in the wakeful night, high up in the monstrous hills, with this everlasting torrent raging in his ears, and the camp-fire out of doors there flaring, flickering, glowing, dying down—here in the fog of the forest fires and the solitude of the mountains, it is so easy to see things as they truly were. A shrug, a smile, a word, a silence, the lift of an eyebrow—things which had no apparent meaning a dozen years ago, which were either unnoticed or forgotten in an instant—are alive with monitions now. Not to have seen! Not to have guessed ‘It looks incredible. A mule might have begun to read the riddle.
Paul read nothing.
And now, looking back from this smoky eyrie through all the intervening years, it seems as if the tragedy of a life might have been averted, as if a little weight, a little prescience, a little care, might have made the sum of life work out to a far other total.
There has been no star visible in the heavens, nor any glimpse of a moon for four nights. The sun is the dimmest red ball in the daytime, a danger-signal lantern, seen through dirty glass. There is a yeast at work in the Solitary’s mind It is as if the material universe being cut away from him—save just this solid remnant of it in which he lounges—there were space found for something not belonging to it to draw near him.
Over and over again the lonely man had read his father’s last letter, and now in the hot, oppressive midnight it repeated itself in his mind:
‘At my father’s death a change began to work in my opinions. I had convinced myself that this life was all that man enjoyed or suffered, but I began to be conscious that I was under tutelage. I began—at first faintly and with much doubting—to think that my father’s spirit and my own were in communion. I knew that he had loved me fondly, and to me he had always seemed a pattern of what is admirable in man. Now he seemed greater, wiser, milder. I grew to believe that he had survived the grave, and that he had found permission to be my guide and guardian. The creed which slowly grew up in my mind and heart, and is now fixed there, was simply this: that as a great Emperor rules his many provinces, God rules the universe, employing many officers—intelligences of loftiest estate, then intelligences less lofty; less lofty still beneath these, and at the last the humbler servants, who are still as gods to us, but within our reach, and His messengers and agents. Then God seemed no longer utterly remote and impossible to belief, and I believed. And whether this be true or false, I know one thing: this faith has made me a better man than I should have been without it. My beloved father, wise and kind, has seemed to lead me by the hand. I have not dared in the knowledge of his sleepless love to do many things to which I have been tempted. I have learned from him to know—if I know anything—that life from its lowest form is a striving upward through uncounted and innumerable grades, and that in each grade something is learned that fits us for the next, or something lost which has to be won back again after a great purgation of pain and repentance.
‘It is three days since I began to write, and I am so weak that I can barely hold the pen. Send this to Paul He has gone far wrong. He will come back again to the right. I have asked that I may guide him, and my prayer has been granted. From the hour at which I quit this flesh until he joins me my work is appointed me, and I shall not leave him. Good-bye, dear child Be at peace, for all will yet be well.
‘When Paul sees these last words of mine, he will know that I am with him.’
Thus, word for word, he went over it all again, for the hundredth time or more, and on a sudden his soul seemed to flow from him in a great longing. He rose unconsciously, and stepped beyond the doorway of his tent, and stretched his arms wide to the night.
‘Be with me! oh! be with me, and let me know and feel that you are here.’ If it be madness to believe so, I will not care!’
But that thought froze him. What right had he to welcome madness? Of what avail was it to crown a wasted life with such a folly?
‘You believed it, dear old dad?’ he said. ‘But how shall I? Can I dodge myself? Can I slink by a side-road out of sight of my own intelligence?’
He stood long with dejected head and drooping hands, and then groping his way back to his couch, lay down again.
And his dreams came back to him.
He was suddenly afire over a new idea for a comedy, and from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same he slaved at it and exulted in it day by day. He made long tramps into the country and lost himself continuously. Pretty generally he awoke from his fancies to find himself ravenously hungry, and without so much as a hint of an orient in his mind. But almost any village or hamlet was good for bread, of a sort, and for trustworthy eggs and new milk; and his necessities brought him into contact with the Walloon language, in which—or something very like it—Froissart wrote his chronicles. He picked up nuggets in the way of character—clean gold—and whether he were wandering with his own thoughts or struggling through the medium of this new tongue towards a knowledge of rustic Belgian life, or pruning and digging about his imaginations in his workshop, he was happy as a man need be.
Annette and he saw less and less of each other, but that was a circumstance to which he resigned himself with ease. They had taken two rooms at the corner of their corridor to begin with, a large room and a smaller one, and there was no need to move from their original quarters. The smaller chamber was used as a dressing-room. Paul’s circular tub was there, and the trunks with which the pair travelled, and coats and dresses were hung about the walls. But it was Annette’s whim one day in Paul’s absence to have a bed set up in this second apartment, and that same night, rising late from work, he found himself locked from his wife’s room. He had not been consulted as to this arrangement, and it struck a little cold upon him, but thinking that he would talk it over in the morning, he betook himself to sleep. Next day Annette complained of headache, and the pallor of her face and the heaviness of her eyes were a sufficing certificate to suffering.
‘I was very, very ill last night,’ she said pleadingly, ‘and I wanted to be alone. Oh! I can’t tell you how much I wanted to be alone.’
Paul took her hand in his, and smoothed it between his own. The skin was harsh and dry, and the little hand felt almost like a hot coal.
‘My dear,’ he said anxiously, ‘you are quite in a high fever. I shall run away for Laurent instantly.’
‘Why will you pester me?’ she asked, with a weary little spurt of temper. ‘I have no more need for a doctor than you have. I understand my own condition perfectly, and I want to go to sleep.’
‘But, my dear,’ said Paul, ‘these symptoms seem to be increasing, and you really ought to have advice. Laurent is an able man; you can trust him, I am sure.’
‘Oh! she cried, ‘your voice rasps me in the very middle of my brain. ‘Go away and let me sleep, for pity’s sake.’
‘Let me make you a cup of tea,’ he said, subduing his voice to a whisper. ‘I have a whole packet of that lovely stuff I bought before we left London.’
‘Pray go,’ she answered him.
There was nothing for it but to obey, and he went from the room a little disconsolate.
‘This,’ he said to himself as he walked down to thesalle à manger’ is what the poor things have to go through. Love and marriage are not all beer and skittles for either party, but they are pitiable for the woman.’ Even now there was no deep attachment in his mind towards Annette, and he blamed himself for his want of feeling. ‘I owe her everything,’ he thought—‘everything that I can bring her. I suppose she loved me when she came to me. God knows!’
He was sorry for her, but he upbraided himself for the thought that he would have been just as sorry for any other woman who suffered in the same way, if only her trouble were brought near enough for him to be aware of it. He had bound himself down to a life without love, but there was an exquisite disloyalty in the mere admission of that thought.
He was too disturbed to care for breakfast, and after drinking a cup of coffee he lit his pipe and strolled in search of the doctor. The good old Chinois was munching his pistolet, and sipping at a great bowl of hot milk just tinctured with coffee, and his man was already at the door with the queer old buggy and the queer old horse familiar to the country-side over a circuit of half a dozen leagues from its centre.
‘I have come,’ said Paul, ‘to talk to you about Mrs. Armstrong. I don’t like the look of things at all.’
‘Ha!’ said Laurent ‘Tell me, what do you observe?’
‘I notice,’ Paul answered, ‘a dreadful variableness of mood, a feverish exaltation, followed by a serious depression, an increasing desire to be alone, a sort of nervous resentment of any inquiry as to her state of health. That, I think, is about all. I dare say that everything I may have noticed may be attributable to her present condition, and that in my inexperience of such things I may be unduly nervous; but I wish you’d make an opportunity of seeing her casually in the course of the day. For Heaven’s sake, doctor,’ he added with a laugh, ‘don’t let her guess that I sent you. The one thing she most resents is having the mere suggestion offered that she should see a doctor.’
Laurent rubbed his close-cropped silver head with one hand, and with the other wrung a few drops of liquid from his huge moustache, looking up at Paul meanwhile with a crafty benevolence in his eye, like a supernaturally wise old parrot.
‘Ah yes!’ he hummed in a deep nasal tone, which Paul knew well already as being characteristic of him when he had to reason out a problem as he talked. ‘Monsieur Armstrong, the man who has half-confidences with his physician is in serious error.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Paul.
‘You know of nothing,’ said Laurent, ‘which would help to explain these symptoms apart from the fact that madame believes herself to be about to become a mother?’
‘Nothing else,’ Paul answered in some astonishment, ‘Unless——’
Laurent, holding up his bowl in both hands, echoed:
‘Sinon?——’
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘I’m afraid that I may have been a little neglectful lately. I have a piece of work in hand which occupies me a great deal. I may, perhaps, be too absorbed in it.’
‘That, of course, is perhaps possible,’ said Laurent ‘I will contrive to see her in the course of the day, and you may trust an old doctor’ssavoir faire. She shall not guess that you sent me.’
Immediately upon this the doctor’s servant rapped at the door to say that all was ready, and Paul took his leave. He went immediately to his study, and there the embers of last night’s fire, being fanned ever so little, began to glow again, and he became absorbed in his work, insomuch that when the bell rang for déjeûner at noon he was amazed to notice how quickly time had flown. When he got to table Annette was in her place, still looking a trifle pale and heavy-eyed, but evidently much relieved since he had last seen her.
‘I want you to do me a little favour, Paul,’ she said
‘Yes,’ he answered gaily.
‘I want what you call—what is your word for it? Oh yes, I know—I want what you call a pick-me-up. Will you share a pint of wine with me? I want a glass—just one glass of champagne. I quite long for it.’
‘Why, yes,’ said Paul, ‘that is a simple matter enough,’ and he gave the order for the wine.
Annette drank the greater part of it, and began to glow and sparkle. The colour came back to her cheeks and the light to her eyes. She was unusually bright and animated, and chattered all manner of good-humoured nonsense with the juge de paix and the garde-champêtre.
‘That is your medicine, my dear,’ said Paul, in a half-whisper, tapping the bottle with a finger-nail. ‘I shall prescribe it for you daily.’
She made a little face at him and laughed. ‘I don’t like the stuff,’ she said, ‘very often, but I longed for it this morning; and, oh! I am better for it.’
They were as much at home in the Hotel of the Three Friends by this time as if they had lived there all their lives. There was no stranger present at the meal, and it was not at all a surprising thing when Annette floated away to the piano at the further end of the room and began to tinkle at the keys there. She was by no means an accomplished musician, but she played a few little airs with a sort of spontaneity and grace, and she had a sweet, thin, bird-like voice, a clear and liquid note, which was perhaps her greatest charm. She searched among the music upon the top of the piano, flicking the untidy scattered leaves until she found a song she knew.
‘Music, messieurs,’ she said, ‘is an aid to digestion; I will make a sandwich of sentiment for you—cheese on the one side, dessert on the other, and love in the middle.’
The garde and the juge and the local huissier and the bachelor chemist all beat the hafts of their knives on the table in applause, and she sang, with a vivacity and archness Paul had never before observed in her, a snatch of cheap Belgian sentimentalism:
‘Toux les deux, la main dans la main,Nous poursuivions notre chemin,Sous la céleste voûte;Les doux échos mystérieuxRépéter nos baisers joyeuxTout le long—tout le long de la route.’
And whilst she was warbling the door of the salle opened and in walked Laurent.
‘Pardon, madame,’ he cried; ‘do not permit me to interrupt you.’
But Annette had already risen from the piano, and had closed the lid of the instrument.
‘My sister has gone to Janenne,’ he explained, ‘and I am left breakfastless. You hungry rascals have not eaten everything, I hope?’
The Flemish maid would lay an instant cover for Monsieur Laurent, and room was made for him at the table with something like enthusiasm. He began to talk vivaciously scraps of local news gathered on his morning rounds among his patients, and from time to time he turned to Paul to explain some rustic allusion or phrase. He made himself charming, and since he did not explain that he had purposely dismissed his sister for the day in order to find an excuse for his visit to the hotel, Annette had no present suspicion of him. They had a little playful badinage together, and Laurent, turning mock-sentimental, lamented his celibacy so quaintly that she broke into peals of silvery laughter over him. Paul was pleased with her, and half inclined to be proud of her for the first time in his life, though he had a nervous fear lest her gaiety should topple over like an unskilled artist on the slack wire.
By-and-by Laurent set about his meal in a business-like fashion, and Paul strolled quietly from the room. The others, juge and garde and huissier and chemist, chief of gendarmerie, and all the rest of the regular frequenters of the table, were called away by their own avocations. Paul, sitting with his study-door ajar, looking as if prepared to be absorbed in labour at any moment, watched them as they went out by ones and twos, and knew that at last Laurent and Annette were together. The heat of summer noon was in the air. Theplacewas empty, and there was everywhere a humming silence through which his ear discerned now and then the deeper hum of Laurent’s voice. Not a word was audible, or would have been even had Paul cared to play the eavesdropper, but one might have thought that the doctor was preaching a sermon.
‘He’s a wise old man, is Laurent,’ said Paul to himself, ‘and, for a bachelor, he seems to have an uncommon good knowledge of women. That comes out of a doctor’s practice, I dare say.’
The heat of the day, the single glass of wine he had taken, and the hearty meal he had eaten after his morning fast, all combined to make him drowsy, and he had fallen into a half-slumber in which he saw hazily the creatures of his fancy moving behind the footlights, when the door of the dining-room opened, and he heard Laurent’s words of farewell:
‘Croyez moi, Madame Armstrong, c’est une affaire assez grave. Mais courage, courage! Et—bon jour—et bonne espérance.’
Then the door closed, and the doctor’s sturdy feet in their thick-soled boots went echoing along the parquet, clattered for a moment on the pavement outside, and were lost to hearing.
Paul woke with a numbness at the heart. The affair was serious; but courage, and good hope! That sounded grave. He rose from his chair, the pipe between his lips still sending up a spiral of blue smoke. He was asking himself whether he should go in to the next apartment either to comfort or to question, when the door of thesalle à mangeragain opened, and Annette stole into his room. She pushed the door wide and stood framed for an instant against the shadow of the corridor. She was dressed in some filmy white stuff, with a great blue bow at the throat and a bow of scarlet in her hair. She had an odd taste in contrasts, but the Parisian touch was always evident in what she wore, and if her scheme of personal adornment were sometimes quaint, it was always artistic. Paul noticed then, and remembered always, a strange pathos in her look. She seemed for the moment curiously childlike. Her face had once more lost its colour, and her eyes, which were thick with tears, were like those of a child grown frightened in loneliness, and searching doubtfully and almost in terror for the homeward way.
She put out her hands towards him with a gesture of appeal. It seemed as if she asked his pardon, though why that should be he could not guess, and as he made a hasty movement towards her she entered the room suddenly, and thrust the door vehemently behind her so that the corridor rang with the echo of the sound.
‘Paul,’ she said, ‘Paul!’ and sinking on her knees before him, she threw her arms round him and began to cry bitterly.
He tried to raise her, but her arms clung tightly, and he could do nothing but stand there awkwardly and smooth her hair with foolish, half-articulate expressions of sympathy. She cried as if broken-hearted for a time, and when at last his caressing fingers raised her face towards his own, her chin and throat were wet with tears, and her eyes were still brimming. He coaxed her with much difficulty to an arm-chair, and when he had seated her there he knelt beside her with an arm about her waist.
‘What is it, little woman?’ he asked. ‘Dear little woman, what is it?’
He had striven in vain with his disengaged hand to draw away the interlaced fingers she had knitted across her eyes, but at this appeal she cast her arms abroad and looked at him with a swift intentness through her tears.
‘You mean it?’ she asked with an eager fierceness in her eyes and voice.
‘Mean it?’ he answered. ‘What, the dear little woman? Of course I mean it.’
‘Paul,’ she said, ‘if you will only love me, if you will only strive with me, I will love and worship you all my days.’
‘What can I do?’ he asked. ‘Tell me, and I will do it’
‘Oh!’ she cried, beating the air with her hands, ‘these moods, these follies! they are my own fault I am dividing myself from you. I am breaking my own heart; I am miserable for no reason. Help me, Paul, help me! Be at least my friend!’
He was not a man to whom such an appeal could be made in vain, and his heart acquitted him of any falsehood when he assured her that he loved her, and would yield her any earthly service in his power.
‘But, sweetheart,’ he said, ‘tell me how I am to help you. Don’t think that there is any reproach in what I say, but often when I wish to be near you you banish me, and I have to go, because all my thought is not to harass you. I heard what Laurent said just now——’
Her face hardened into an expression of inquiry. Her black brows shot down level, over her brown eyes, and the eyes gloomed at him with a threat in them.
‘You heard?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he responded caressingly, ‘I heard his parting words, “l’affaire est assez grave—mais courage, et bonne espérance.”’
‘Is that all you heard?’ she demanded, bending the level challenge of her brows still lower, and snaking away her form from his embrace as if she feared it.
‘I heard no more,’ said Paul.
‘Ah, well!’ she answered in a sudden lassitude. She fell back into the arm-chair with closed eyes, and suffered her hands to fall laxly on either side of her knees. ‘You will find me a changed girl, Paul. I am going to have done with my moods, and I am going to follow—I am going to follow—what is it I am going to follow? M. Laurent knows. Oh yes, it is the goddess of hygiene! I am to bathe, and I am to drive, and I am to walk, and I am to be equably cheerful, and I am to give up my black coffee and my strong tea and my eau des Carmes, and I am never to drink wine until dinner-time, and then only two glasses—two little glasses of claret or burgundy—and then I am to be quite an angel of good temper, and everybody is to adore me. That is the verdict of M. Laurent. Do you think, Paul, I shall be charming when I have done all these things?’
‘You would be charming, little sweetheart,’ said Paul, ‘whether you did them or no. It is not a question of charm, but of health, dear, and Laurent is a very sage old gentleman indeed, and you may follow his counsel with perfect certainty. I can’t help owning,’ he went on, ‘that I’ve been a little nervous lately about the fluctuation of your spirits, and I’m glad he happened to drop in and have a talk with you.’
She flashed from languor into a mood of vivid irony. Her lips curled, her eyes opened wide with a dancing beryl-coloured flame behind them, and her eyebrows arched in a sublime disdain.
‘You didn’t send him?’ she asked
‘I?’ said Paul, with a guilty stammer—’ I—send him?’
‘Now, before you lie,’ said Annette, with a tragic gesture of the hand, ‘hear me. The window of our dressing-room happens—just happens, by God’s providence to confute a fool—to command a view of Dr. Laurent’s door. I saw you go in; I could even hear you knock. Do you think you can deceive me? Pah!’
She rose, evaded his arm, swept from the room in a kind of torrential rage, banged the door behind her, and was gone.
He was so amazed at it all—the swift interchange of penitence to self-abasement, languor, challenge, suspicion, wrath, and accusation—that he stood dumfounded, not knowing what to think. He heard the flying feet and swirling skirts as Annette raced upstairs. In the drowsy stillness of the afternoon he heard the door of her bedroom close with a decisive click, and then the sharp shooting of the bolt and the shrieking of the key as it turned in its unaccustomed wards. Still standing there in wonderment, he listened to her footsteps overhead as she dashed through the dressing-room, and an instant later came the slamming and the locking of a second door.
He sat down, reached mechanically for his pipe, beat out the ashes from it on the level tiles of the hearth, and mechanically filled and lit it. He searched his mind for a clue to the whole extraordinary business of the last half-hour, and could find but one: the anxieties of coming maternity, and possibly the change of frame which women suffer at such times, had unhinged Annette, and had disturbed her mind and nerves from their ordinary balance. He longed for an interview with Laurent, but he dared not seek it. He would have sent a messenger to him, but he also might be watched by those keen and too observant eyes.
As he sat and thought things over he gradually gathered courage, and at length he began to discern a touch of comedy in that which had so much disturbed him. It was a very tender and touching comedy, but it was comedy all the same—a bird-soul of light and laughter hovering over a lake of tears. Thedearlittle woman! He had thought her unimpressionable, even a little stupid, and he saw now how much he had wronged her. She was full of emotions he had never suspected, and could not even now analyze. Her very waywardness, the strange caprices of feeling which had so astonished him as they chased each other, began to look charming in the new light his thoughts cast upon them.
‘Thus it is,’ said Paul to himself, ‘we come into the world casting our shadows before us, and making laughter and trouble of all sorts for our makers before we are born.’
It was obviously the mother’s lot to suffer much. It was obviously the man’s business to be very patient, very tender. He began to think himself exceeding good and wise. He was learning to appreciate a new feature in human nature, something which had its element of unpleasantness if not rightly seen and understood, but, being so seen and understood, a very beautiful and tender thing indeed. There was a sacred shyness in his thoughts, but overriding this a triumphant tender understanding of the humours of the situation which tickled him most delicately. It would be easy to be patient now that he understood so well, and he resolved upon patience comfortably.
He sat so absorbed in his own fancies and feelings that he was unaware of the rumble of a carriage and the ‘clicking of horses’ hoofs over the cobbles of theplace, but he knew of these things a moment later when the broad-beamed Evariste rapped at his study-door, and announced two gentlemen to see him. Straight upon her heels came Darco in a silk hat of splendid lustre, and a nobly frogged overcoat with costly astrachan at cuffs and collar, as though, instead of being the sweltering day it was, it had been mid-winter. Behind him came Pauer, in tweeds and a white waistcoat, his face gold colour with his ancient jaundice, and his eyes a pale saffron. They were both in the best of good humours, and Darco stood on tiptoe to take Paul by the shoulders.
‘Ve have done id!’ he cried in a voice of triumph. ‘Ve have done id this time, ant no mistake!’
‘What have you done?’ asked Paul.
‘Vot have we done, Pauer—eh? Vot haf we done?’ cried Darco. ‘Tell him and have done with it,’ said Pauer.
‘Ve have bought the Goncreve,’ said Darco, with a glowing air of triumph.
‘Bought the what?’ asked Paul.
‘The Congreve Theatre,’ Pauer explained.
‘Ah!’ said Paul.
‘That is vot I am zayink,’ cried Darco. ‘Ve haf bought the Goncreve. It is in the handts of the decorators now. Ve shall oben in the first week of Sebtemper, ant ve are coing for the gloves. Ve are coing to oben with a gomedy. Do you hear? A gomedy. Ant you ant I are coing to write that gomedy. Do you understandt?’ He slipped out of his overcoat, and threw it into the arm-chair in the corner. Then he banged the lustrous hat upon the table, and snatching up a pen, thrust it into Paul’s hand. ‘Ve are coing to wride that gomedy, ant ve are coing to begin at vonce—eh?’
‘Why, certainly,’ said Paul. ‘Have you got an idea to work on?’
‘My poy,’ said Darco, ‘I am primming with iteas. I am itching all ofer with iteas, as if I were living in a bag of vleas. I am Cheorge Dargo. Ven you find Cheorge Dargo without iteas you may co to the nearest ghemist ant ask for poison. Take your ben ant sit down, ant I will show you if I haf iteas or no.’
The work thus abruptly begun lasted for weeks, and Darco’s enthusiasm drove Paul before it as if it had been a hurricane. Pauer lounged for a day or two, and then betook his golden visage and saffron eyes to London, leaving the pair to their labours. Paul and Darco worked on an average twelve hours a day, and it happened occasionally that a group of terrifiedcommis voyageurswould assemble in the passage outside the study anticipating murder, whilst Darco, in Alsatian English, declaimed the passion of his heroine. There were deep wells of laughter here and there in the course of that dramatic pilgrimage.
‘Now, vat I want,’ said Darco, ‘is just this: It is Binda’s endrance. She is a leedle vat you would call distraught, not mat, but ankrished. She is very pretty, she is very bale. She stands at the door, and Raoul does not see her. She is there for vive zeconds to a tick, not more, not less—vive zeconds; write it down. Enter Binda, pause, unobserved, vive zeconds. Have you got it down? She is priddy, she is bale, a leedle touch of colour under the eyes; she is tressed in vite, some filmy kind of stuff, with a plue bow at the throat and a bit of scarlet ribbon, or red flower, or zomethings, in her hair. And zo she stands at the door and she looks at Raoul, and he toes not know she is there, ant vor just those vive zeconds there is no music, not a note, and then—— Look here, I am Cheorge Dargo; I can write a blay, and stage a blay, and baint the zeenery for a blay, and I can gompose the music for a blay, and I can berform on every damned inztrument in the orghestra. And this is vod Binda does: Bale and bretty, do you zee? at the door for vive zilent zeconds, and then with all her zoul one great appeal, she crosses to Raoul at his desk petween zecond and third O.P., ant she coes like this.’
The fat, brief-statured man waddled in his enthusiasm from Binda’s imaginary entering-place towards Paul with an allure of comedy-pathos so piercing in its effect that the amanuensis cast both hands in the air with a shriek of helpless mirth, and, losing his balance, wallowed on the floor amidst untidy heaps of books, newspapers, and manuscript.
‘Vod is the madder?’ Darco cried, rushing towards Paul, and leaning over him with instant solicitude.
Darco’s collaborateur was smitten with a sudden shame and repentance.
‘A kind of spasm,’ he said breathlessly—‘a pain just here.’
Darco helped him to his feet.
‘You are too emotional, tear poy,’ he said; ‘you are too easily vorked upon. I will rink the pell for a prandy-ant-zoda, ant you shall lie town vor a leettle while.’
It was the thick-set Evariste who brought the syphon bottle and the small carafe of brandy and the tumblers, and it was she who caught Paul on her broad Flemish bosom when the drink, which he had accepted soberly, went the wrong way, and with a wild snort into his tumbler he fell backwards.
‘Le bauvre cheune homme à dombé zupidement malade.’
The poor young man was horribly afraid at first of having irredeemably hurt Darco’s feelings, but that excellent enthusiast had not even the beginning of an idea that it was possible for anyone to laugh at him unless he chose of purpose aforethought to be laughable. Thus the episode passed lightly enough, but Paul was continually in danger of a reversion to it whenever the distraught heroine appeared upon the scene.
He saw but little of Annette during the weeks of labour to which Darco’s new enterprise enforced him. She slept alone, and was rarely accessible before the mid-day breakfast or later than the dinner-hour. Laurent visited her almost daily, and she seemed to submit to his attentions with a better grace than she had shown at first; but she was still subject to those rapid and violent alternations of mood which had already perplexed and alarmed her husband. She had apparently conceived an aversion to being seen abroad, and it was with the greatest difficulty that she could be persuaded to take an occasional carriage drive.
‘I shall venture to advise you,’ said Laurent to Paul ‘You tell me that your work is almost finished, and that in a day or two you are setting out for London.’
‘Yes,’ said Paul.
‘You will do well to take Mrs. Armstrong with you,’ Laurent said. ‘She is in need of change and distraction. This quiet, dead-alive existence is not good for her. You must insist upon her shaking herself free of the habits of seclusion into which she is falling. I should urge you very strongly to find some good creature of her own sex who would be a companion to her. She is living too much alone; she has too few interests.’
‘Well, of course,’ Paul answered, ‘that is very largely my fault; but the press of work is over now, and I shall be able to give more time and care to her.’
‘You will find it advisable,’ said Laurent, with a certain meaning in his face and voice which Paul at the moment could not fathom.
Something occurred to put an end to their conversation, and it was not resumed before Paul’s departure with Darco for London. When it came to the point Annette flatly refused to go to England. She averred that she was not strong enough to travel, that she was altogether better and happier where she was than she hoped to be elsewhere.
‘You will be back in a month’s time,’ she urged. ‘You will be busy all the while you are away. The theatre will claim you day and night, and I should be moping in some great hotel without a soul to speak to. I am quite at home amongst the people here, and they are used to me and to my ways.’
Paul urged Laurent’s suggestion upon her, and she received it with an unexpected anger.
‘What? A companion? And may I ask you why?’
‘For no other earthly reason than that you should have a friend at hand—somebody who might on occasion be useful to you.’
‘Oh no,’ said Annette, tossing her head, and then looking askance at him, with half-veiled eyes: ‘you would like to have me watched and spied upon, and to have a report of my conduct sent to you, as if I were a prisoner or a maniac.’
‘My dear child,’ said Paul, in sheer amazement, ‘what extraordinary dream is this? What has put so strange a fancy in your mind?’
‘Tell me,’ cried Annette, suddenly whirling round upon him, ‘what is it you suspect? What intrigue? What plot? What secret?’
‘Come, come,’ he said, ‘there is no plot—no secret But you know that you are not quite yourself of late, and it is not right or kind to leave you here in your present delicate health without some responsible person to look after you.’
‘Has M. Laurent been poisoning your mind against me?’ she demanded, with a curious slowness. She advanced a foot as she spoke, and moved forward towards him with a something between fear and anger in her eyes.
‘My dear child,’ he answered, ‘what strange illusions are you nursing? Intrigues and plots, and watching and reports! Don’t believe in any such nonsense, I implore you.’
‘What has Laurent been telling you about me? I insist—Iwillknow.’
‘Laurent has been telling me that he thinks you are likely to find a change beneficial, and that you ought not to be left here alone.’
‘Why not?’ she asked, with a flash of rage. ‘Why am I incapable of taking care of myself?’
‘You are not strong or well,’ said Paul. ‘You are not quite mistress of your own emotions.’
‘Ah!’ she cried, ‘now we are to have the accusation. I am going mad! Is that it? You would like to get rid of me on that ground? Do I understand at last?’
Paul would have been blind if he had failed to see that beneath the air of scorn she strove to wear there was some real terror in her mind, and he did his best to soothe it.
‘All these things are the merest fancies,’ he began.
‘Oh yes,’ she broke in. ‘Delusions! That is step number one. We suffer from delusions.’
‘If you believe in anything of the sort that you suggest, you are mistaken. If you wish to be happy, you must banish all that nonsense from your mind. Itispure nonsense, dearest. Why should Laurent try to poison my mind? He likes you very well. He takes a warm interest in you, to the best of my belief. But you are really very fanciful and strange to-day, and you have been giving yourself up far too much to solitude for two months past. It is your duty to yourself and me to accept Laurent’s advice. You must not be left here alone. You may choose your own companion. She shall be entirely at your orders. You shall engage her yourself; you shall pay her salary; she shall be at your own control.’
‘I know,’ she answered, tapping her foot upon the floor. ‘I know. The truth is, you never really cared for me, and now you have grown tired. You want to be rid of me.’
‘Now, that,’ said Paul, ‘is not only nonsense, it is very wicked nonsense, and I will not permit it The whole matter lies with yourself. If you continue to nurse those wrong and foolish thoughts, you will make it necessary for me to insist upon your obedience. If you will behave like a sensible creature, I may feel justified in yielding to your wish, and leaving you behind. But if I have any more of these absurd suspicions I shall not venture to leave you here.’
He spoke with a purposed sternness, but with something of a heartache, too. There was no escape in his own mind from the belief that the whole change which had of late revealed itself in Annette was due to the fact of approaching maternity, and he had a man’s natural pity for her sufferings. He bore her fancies with patience, but he thought it best for her that he should feign some anger at them.
The plan seemed to act for the time being at least, for after a moment’s incertitude, in which she seemed to battle with herself, she turned her humid brown eyes upon him, and said softly:
‘I am very foolishly suspicious sometimes, Paul. I know—oh, I know that I am not the girl I used to be. Bear with me, dear. I shall be different by-and-by.’
‘I am sure of that,’ he answered, and she approaching him with an appealing languor in her eyes, and in the carriage of her whole figure, he took her into his arms, and for a minute or two she cried quietly upon his shoulder. He patted and caressed her, and she looked up with a quivering face.
‘I will never think or say those things again. I know how wrong they are, but, Paul, they come into my mind, and I cannot resist them sometimes. But I will—I will in future. You shall never hear them any more. But I want you to believe me, dearest, in just this one little thing. It will be the best and kindest thing that you can do for me to leave me here alone whilst you are away in London. I am not without friends here, when I can find the courage and the strength to see them. M. Laurent will look after me. You will write to me every day, won’t you? I shall not be lonely. But the idea of having a stranger about me, fussing and inquiring, is horrible. I can’t bear it.’
‘Very well, dear,’ said Paul, greatly relieved at the turn things had taken, ‘you shall have your way. But you must remember, dear ‘—he spoke as soothingly as he could—’ it is my duty to see that you are cared for properly, and I must not leave you to yourself unless I am quite assured beforehand that you are certain to be bright and brave when I am gone.‘He placed his hand beneath her chin, and coaxed her eyes to meet his own. ‘You won’t nourish these distressing fancies any more, will you?’
‘No,’ she answered, clinging to him; ‘they are all gone. They are all done with. You will be kind and good to me, Paul—I know you will. It isn’t a very great favour for a grown-up woman to ask to be allowed to take care of herself, is it, Paul, darling?’
‘That must depend,’ he answered gaily, ‘whether the grown-up woman is well enough and strong enough for the task.’
‘Ah, well,’ said Annette with an equal brightness, ‘you shall see.’
There were still two days’ work to be done at the comedy, and Darco was resolute not to leave for London until all was finished. The first two acts were already in rehearsal at the Congreve, and Pauer, who was one of those old stagers of the profession who know their business upside down and inside out, was in superintendence until Darco should arrive to mould the whole production to his own exigent fancy.
The change in Annette was remarkable. She had evidently made up her mind for a struggle with herself, and she kept her inequalities of mood in astonishing control, all things considered. She became interested in the work in hand, and took some trifle of needlework to the study for the final reading of the piece between Darco and her husband Paul, with the manuscript before him, acted the whole comedy as brilliantly as an arm-chair rendering could go, and Darco with notebook and pencil listened in keenly attentive silence, note-taking here and there.
‘Id is a gread vork,’ he announced solemnly when it was all over. ‘Id is peautifully written, and that is your affair, younk Armstronk. But the goncebtion is clorious, ant that is my affair. Vot? Not? I am Cheorge Dargo, and I know my trade.’
They were both up at four o’clock next morning to catch the mail to Calais, and Paul was able to leave Annette without severe misgiving. Laurent had promised to look after her, and the improvement in her own hopes appeared so manifest that he felt safe about her, except for those slight inevitable uneasinesses which occur at such a time. But he was only to be away for a month at the outside, and he had Laurent’s assurance that he might make his mind easy. Annette herself rose to see Paul away, in spite of his remonstrances. She nestled by him whilst he stood to drink his coffee in the gray dawn of the morning, in the great, empty, echoingsalle à manger, with Darco rolling about the house like an exaggerated football impelled by unseen influences, and roaring tempestuous orders like a ship’s captain in a squall.
Never in his life had Paul felt so wholly tender as he did then towards Annette. He had begun to read so many new meanings into her of late. She seemed no longer the molluscous little creature he had once thought her, but a woman, capable of much suffering, of some determination, of real affection. He was leaving her at the very time at which she most needed his guardianship and care, and at the hour, too, when she seemed first really to confide in him and cling to him. His eyes were moist when he held her in a last embrace, and ran into the street in answer to Darco’s final call. His collaborateur was already seated in the voiture, glossy silk hat, astrachan cuffs and collar, gold-rimmed eyeglass, and all Thecocker’swhip cracked stormily, and the fat Flemish horse started off at a pace of four miles an hour.
‘Mark my vorts,’ said Darco, as they rolled along the country road towards the station at which they were to intercept the northward travelling Malle des Indes, ‘you are dravelling to vame ant vorchune.’
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘that’s pleasant to know, isn’t it, old Darco?’
‘It is very bleasant,’ returned Darco. ‘You ant I are an iteal gouple. We fit each other like the two halves of a pear. I am a boet. Do you hear me, younk Armstronk? I am a boet I am a berson of imachination. I can invent. I can gontrive. There is nopoty in the vorlt who can gonstruct a blot like me. But I gannot egspress myself. Now, you gan egspress me; that is your desdiny. You will egspress Cheorge Dargo. You will descend to future aitches as the dranslader of Cheorge Dargo.’
‘It is a happy lot, old chap,’ said Paul, ‘and I am so proud of it that I am going to sleep.’
‘Lacy tewle!’ said Darco, ‘give me the script. I haf been thinking of somethings.’
How Darco worked, stormed, domineered in the ensuing month, nobody outside the limits of the Congreve knew. He appalled the timid and maddened the courageous. He was up all night for half a week together, seeming to live with a teaspoon in one hand and a tin of some nutritive meat essence in the other, and always administering doses to himself as if he were a patient in danger of imminent exhaustion.
Mr. Warr was here, under solemn articles not once to varnish the work of art until the run of the piece was over.
‘A dreadful circumstance, truly, Mr. Armstrong,’ he complained. ‘I am deprived of the consolation of one device which has hitherto upheld me at such times of trial. The piece might run, sir, for a year; it might even run for two. There is no looking forward to a definite date of relief, sir. It is like being imprisoned at Her Majesty’s pleasure. A painful prospect, Mr. Armstrong—-a period of unassuaged incertitude, sir.’ Daroo burst down upon him like a stormy wind.
‘Don’t stand jattering there. Co ant do somethings.’
‘I have nothing at this moment which calls for my attention, I do assure you, Mr. Darco.’
‘Then find somethings. There is always blenty for efery-boty to do about a theadre.’
Mr. Warr drifted before the storm, and found a harbour in the painting-room, whence he was blasted five minutes later half shipwrecked and wholly demoralized. But Darco was a general who could spare his forces, and three days before the play was announced for production he addressed his army:
‘Laties and chentlemen, I nefer pelieve in worrying peoples. You haf all done noply. Tomorrow there will be no call. Next day at eleven sharp, eferything as at the broduction. Then it will debend upon yourselves whether you are galled upon to rehearse again or no.’
With this all engaged dispersed well pleased, and Darco announced his intention of dining and going to bed. He ordered dinner for two, and ate his double portion through seven courses, after which he went tranquilly home to his hotel and slept the clock round.
The rehearsal next day was so completely satisfactory that he was content to leave it on its merits, and on the following evening the first production of the new management at the Congreve went with a roar of triumph. There was no mistaking the verdict of the house, and the Press was as emphatic as the first night’s audience.
‘Vod did I dell you?’ Darco asked. ‘Vame and vorchune are at your veed. It vos a luggy day for us to meet. Vot? Not? I am Cheorge Darga!’
Paul was tired, excited, and elated all at once. He had promised to start for Belgium so soon as the verdict of the public was made clear, but he could afford to snatch the journey down to Castle Barfield, and to get a glimpse of the old father. He slept on the journey, and took the last five miles by cab. Armstrong was in his accustomed place amongst the dusty and neglected stock when Paul broke in upon him, somewhat grayer than ever, a little more bent, perhaps, but with just the old look of wise patience in his face, the shaggy eyebrows fringing just the old quiet twinkle in his eyes. He declined to express the least atom of surprise.
‘It’s you, Paul, is it?’ he asked tranquilly, rising to shake hands. ‘You’ve had a grand success, I’m learning. I read the notice in theTimes.’
‘The play’s all right,’ said Paul. ‘And how’s all here?’
‘Oh,’ said his father, ‘we have our dwallin’ in the middle parts of fortune. We’re neither uplifted nor cast down. Come in, lad. Well all be glad to see ye.’
The old place was exactly as it always had been in his memory, and yet it was all shrunken and narrowed, and had grown meaner and more poverty-stricken than it had used to seem.
He settled down in his old place by the fireside, lit his pipe, listened to the local annals, and prepared to be questioned with respect to his own prospects and affairs.
‘You’ll be growing pretty well to do, Paul?’ said Armstrong.
‘Well, yes,’ said Paul, feeling at a pocket-book which lay at the right side of his tweed coat. ‘I’m getting pretty well-to-do.’
‘Yell be getting married one of these fine days?’ his father asked, twinkling dryly at him.
‘Well, the fact is, sir,’ Paul answered in some embarrassment, ‘I am married.’
‘Holy Paul!’ said Armstrong, and dropped his pipe upon the patchwork rug. Paul stooped for it to cover his own confusion.
‘Yes,’ he said hurriedly, ‘I am married. And I felt such a beast for not having written to tell you all about it that I made up my mind to be my own messenger. The truth is it was all rather hurried, and unexpected—in a way. There had been an attachment for some time, but there was no immediate thought of marriage, and Annette—that is my wife’s name—Annette fell ill, and was not expected to recover, and it was really, to both our minds, a sort of death-bed ceremony, and now she is quite recovered.’
There was such a sense of awkwardness upon him that he boggled the simple story altogether. There was no amazement in his mind at all when his father spoke next. He could have foretold his words.
‘Man, ‘said Armstrong, ‘had ye led the gyirl astray?’
He had never meant to lie about the matter, but at this point-blank thrust he lied.
‘My dear old dad!’ he said, ‘whatareyou thinking of?’
‘I beg your pardon, Paul,’ said Armstrong—‘I beg your pardon.’
They seemed at once to have a gulf between them, though the simple, honest elder, who had probably never lied in the whole course of his life, did not perceive it. Before Paul it gaped unbridgable.
‘She’s a dear, good little creature,’ Paul boggled along, with a disastrous facility of words which had no guidance. ‘She’s French by descent, but she speaks very good English—very fair English. I taught her. I’ll bring her down to see you. We’re living in Belgium at present, at a little place called Montcourtois, a charming little place. She likes the quiet of it, and it’s very favourable for work. If one lives in town there are so many calls upon one’s time. You can’t get really settled down to the development of an idea, you know.’
‘Ay,’ said Armstrong, ‘I can imagine that. But, Paul, lad, I could have wished ye’d written.’
‘Don’t make it harder than it is, sir,’ Paul appealed. ‘I ought to have written. I’m very sorry that I didn’t, and I’ve come down purposely to explain it all.’
‘Well,’ said his father, ‘better late than never. What kind is she like, lad?’
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘you can’t expect a man to describe the girl he’s in love with so as to satisfy anybody else She’s slight and not very tall; she has brown hair and brown eyes; she has a very pretty voice, and very dainty ways.’
‘Ay, ay, lad!’ said Armstrong; ‘but her soul—her intelligence?’
‘She’s bright and clever,’ Paul cried, rather protestingly. ‘She takes a keen interest in my work. We’re dearly attached to each other, and I am looking forward to a happy life.’
‘What like are her people?’ Armstrong asked.
‘Well, I don’t know a great deal about her people. She’s an orphan. She has an elder sister, and an aunt and an uncle or two.’
‘She’ll be a Catholic, will she?’
‘No,’ said Paul; ‘her family is Huguenot. I think I should rather have shrunk from marrying a Catholic. There’s a sort of prejudice of which it isn’t easy to free the mind.’
He was sinking clean out of sight of his own esteem; but it was his sole business for the time being to save his father as far as possible, and he had grown reckless of himself.
‘She shall come to see you,’ he went on, ‘and you wont be able to help making friends with her. I’ve to be back in Montcourtois to-morrow night, or she’ll be worrying her life out. That means I must catch the one o’clock express for town, and that, again, means that I’ve only four hours to spend at home this time.’
‘Ye’ll have a glass of whisky, Paul?’
‘I will, sir,’ Paul answered, ‘with all the pleasure in life.’
So Armstrong went to the cupboard and brought out a bottle and the sugar basin, and set the kettle on the fire, and then sat down and loaded up his pipe in silence.
‘There’s much I’d like to say, Paul,’ he began at length.
There was nothing in the act which could have moved a stranger to anything but a smile at the oddity of it, but it touched Paul almost to tears when the gray old man lugged out of his coat-tail pocket a whole newspaper, and having pinched from it a most economical fragment, singed his fingers at the bars in the act of lighting it. He had laughed at that little quaintness a hundred times as a lad, and it was somehow the first thing that had come home to him as a real reminder to be in want of reformation.’
They grew more at ease. Armstrong took up the subject he had broken a few minutes earlier.
‘I don’t guess,’ he said, ‘whether you’re believe these thoughts for yourself, but there’s a gap between you and me, Paul. Ye’ve had grave troubles.
‘I have, sir,’ said Paul.
‘I’ve known it,’ said his father. ‘I’ve thoughts in my mind when ye’re away: “Paul’s blythe,” or I thenk of ye, lad; I sit here in the auld arm-chair and think of ye, and eh, man, I’m just as certain of myself as if I were aware of every fact in your existence. Promise me this. I’m wearing we meet this last time for ever, and I want ye to keep the auld feelings from time to time. Write a little more regularly, about ye. Take me into confidence when ye’re gone.
Paul promised, and all the estrangement seemed to melt away. This was to be their last meeting, both or them guessed it, and when at last it grew to the time Paul must go, the father went down the long hall the front-door. Paul fumbled for the pocket-book in the darkness of the passage found a piece of paper, and kissed the old man at parting he thrust this into his hand.
Arrived at the station nearest to Montcourtois; then the voiture from the hotel with the grinning Victor on the box, and Laurent waiting.
‘No bad news’ asked Paul.
‘Things are not quite what they might be or what they should be,’ Laurent answered. ‘But get in, and we will talk as we drive. Do you remember,’ he asked, whilst Victor filled the night with the noise of a fusillade of whip-crackings—‘do you remember that I told, you some time ago that a man should have no secrets from his physician?
‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘Well?’
‘Have you had any secrets from me in respect to Madame Armstrong?’
‘No; nothing that I can think of. I don’t quite see what you are driving at.’
‘Do you remember,’ Laurent asked, ‘the evening on which you first called me to attend her—the night on which she cried out that they were dancing in the wood, and that their bones were white? Do you remember?’
‘Good God!’ cried Paul; ‘do I remember?’
‘Did you ever diagnose that case? the doctor asked.
‘No. Do you mean to say that her mind is affected, that——
‘You never guessed?’ asked Laurent, leaning across to him and grasping him by the arm—‘you never guessed? Upon your life and honour?’
‘Guessed? Guessed what?’
‘Now,’ said Laurent, ‘I am going to hurt you, and I cannot help it. I am sorry, but it must be.’
‘Speak out, man!’ gasped Paul—‘speak out!’
‘That,’ said Laurent, ‘was delirium tremens.’
They had three miles to travel, and not another word was spoken on the road; but as they passed the doctor’s house a voice called out to him, and the driver pulled up.
‘Stay with me a moment, Mr. Armstrong,’ said Laurent ‘I will but give this man an ordonnance for the pharmacien, and I will be with you. Drive home, Victor!’
The carriage rattled off; the doctor, the messenger, and Paul stood at the kerb for a minute or so. The carriage rumbled into the distance; a window was heard to open and to dose. Laurent took Paul’s arm, and they walked together without a word until they came in front of the window of the room which Paul had used as a study. The blind was up, a lamp was lit, and the whole room was visible from the roadway.
‘Mon Dieu!’ said Laurent in a whisper.
Annette was there in her nightdress, looking from side to side like a hunted creature. A decanter stood upon the table. She approached it crouching, seized it with one hand, took a tumbler in the other, and three times poured and three times drank as if the draught were water; then she glided away and closed the door behind her.