For any and every episode of his life save this, Paul, when he chose to think about it, could make a fairly expressive picture in his mind, and could bring back something of the emotion of the time. Here he could remember only that Laurent clutched him by the arm, and that he turned on Laurent with something of the vague appeal for aid which might be imagined in the mind of a frightened child. He saw that a thousand signs which he should have recognised had escaped him, and in the flush of real apprehension which followed this thought he seemed to himself to have been almost wilfully blind to the truth. There were so many things which might have guided him, and he had taken warning by none of them.
‘I beg your pardon, old chap,’ he said to Laurent, speaking unconsciously in English, ‘but I’m a little bit upset. You would not mind lending me your arm inside?’
‘Assuredly not,’ cried Laurent, still supporting him; and the two men entered the hotel together.
The Solitary still remembered how his clumsy footsteps seemed to fumble at the stone stairs, and the very pressure of Laurent’s arm upon his own shoulder was still a living sensation with him; yet for the actual moment thought and sensation alike seemed to have been abolished. Laurent, when the study had once been reached, helped Paul into a chair, and stood over him with a look of friendly solicitude.
‘A little stimulant, I think,’ he said at last, in a tone of commonplace, and set a hand on the decanter which Annette had so recently laid down.
‘Not that, Laurent!’ cried Paul, with a gesture the other was swift to interpret.
The doctor left the room with a meaningless, friendly tap on Paul’s shoulder, and came back a few instants later with a bottle of brandy.
‘I insist,’ he said commandingly, in answer to Paul’s rejecting wave of the hand.
When Laurent insisted there were few people who said him nay, and Paul took the potion which was poured out for him.
He could remember it all, from this point onward, as if he had been a mere disinterested spectator of the scene. He could see his own figure straightening itself mechanically in the chair in which it sat. He could see himself mechanically throwing one leg over another, and assuming an attitude of indifference and ease. He could see himself distinctly in the act of knocking out the ashes of his pipe upon the grate; in the refilling and lighting of it; in the numberless little gestures which seemed to indicate an entire possession of himself And all the while something was booming in his mind as if the word ‘lost ‘were only half articulated there—a scarcely uttered word that carried doom with it.
‘I do not know,’ said Laurent, speaking, for a man of his experience and authority, rather brokenly—‘I do not know whether it was my duty to have spoken earlier. I have not known you very long; but we have learned to like each other, and I would have done you the service to tell you what I knew a month or two ago if I could have found the courage. But I will ask you to believe that I was much perplexed, and that I could not resolve in my own mind whether or not you knew already. It would have seemed a cruel thing to intrude upon such a secret.’
‘Yes,’ said Paul, breaking silence for the first time since he had entered the house, ‘I understand that’ He pulled gravely at his pipe, and sipped again at the glass Laurent had poured out for him. ‘What’s going to be done?’ he asked; and then, with a sudden petulance, ‘What have I got to do?’
‘In a patient so young,’ said Laurent, ‘unless there is some hereditary taint to combat, there should be no impossibility in establishing a cure. What of Madame Armstrong’s heredity?’ What did Paul know of Madame Armstrong’s heredity? Save for a casual glimpse of her sister, who had seemed to him as commonplace as candle-light, he had no knowledge of any person of her name or family. He sat silent, not knowing how to express his ignorance without compromising Annette and himself. But Laurent pressed him.
‘Do you know of anything,’ he asked, ‘which should make the task of cure difficult?’ And, being thus pressed, there seemed nothing for it but for Paul to say that he knew nothing. ‘Then,’ said Laurent, ‘we must not despair. I have already spoken to your wife, and have pointed out to her the very serious nature of her danger, and she has promised me amendment. With what result,’ he added, throwing his arms abroad, ‘you see.’
‘You think it a serious danger? Paul asked him.
‘My God!’ ejaculated Laurent—‘serious! But an instant, my dear Armstrong. We are not thinking of a male inebriate; we are thinking of a woman—a question so different that there is barely any comparison to be made.’
‘Is that so? said Paul, in a voice of little interest, though he felt for the moment as if his heart were breaking.
‘That is so,’ returned Laurent, with emphasis; ‘and I can assure you that, if you desire to effect a cure here, you must betake yourself—and betake yourself at once—to heroic measures. Your wife must be placed, without delay, in competent hands, and no restraint must be placed upon those who undertake to treat her.’
‘Very well,’ said Paul dully, ‘I understand all that We’ll have another talk in the morning, if you don’t mind.’
Laurent forbore to speak further just then, but he kept Paul in silent company for an hour, and was more useful in that way than he could have been if he had poured out the gathered knowledge of an encyclopaedia upon him. He gave that dumb sense of sympathy which, in hours of deep distress, is so very much more potent than the spoken word. Paul at last rose and shook him by the hand.
‘Good-night,’ he said, ‘and thank you.’
Laurent accepted his dismissal, returned the grip, took up his hat and moved away. It would appear that he had not gone far, for when an instant later Paul poured out a second or third glass of cognac for himself, there came a tap upon the study window, and Laurent’s face was visible there dose to one of the lower panes. Paul threw the window open and looked out at him.
‘You have something to say?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Laurent, with a grave and tender face, ‘I have this one thing to say: Do not follow that sorrowful example.’
‘Oh,’ said Paul, ‘have no fear there; my temptation does not lie in that direction.’
‘My dear young friend,’ said Laurent, ‘no man until he is tempted knows in what direction his temptation lies.’
They shook hands again through the open window and then parted definitely for the night.
Paul sat long in the silence, not thinking of anything in particular or conscious of any particular emotion. The café on the opposite side of theplacehad long since closed. When Laurent’s footsteps had faded out of hearing there was no sound abroad for which it was not necessary to listen, except when a distant dog barked now and then, or the slow rumble of a far-off train came once into hearing and disappeared in the valley with which the railway clove the low hills beyond Janenne. The dark air of night flowed in through the open window, cool and sweet, bringing with it the familiar odours of the pine plantations in which the countryside abounded. Paul smoked pipe after pipe, and he knew very well that if anybody had been there to look at him, he would have seemed unmoved, and yet he seemed to himself more than once to be playing the mountebank with his own trouble, as when, for instance, the lines came into his mind:
‘Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,That grief has shaken into frost’
But all the while there was a slow anguish rising within him or around him. It seemed to reach his breast quite suddenly and almost to stop the beating of his heart. Then it ebbed away again, and he found himself crooning unemotionally, ‘For years—a measureless ill—for ever, for ever!’ The pain came back, and once more ebbed away. What was it? he asked in the self-torturing way which besets the analyst of his own nature. Self-pity, he answered. Self-pity, pure and simple. He, Paul Armstrong, furnished with heart and brains and social powers, with fortune at hand, and fame to be had for the beckoning, had slid into this sickening quagmire thus early in his life’s pilgrimage, and had come to an arrest there.
Then, out of this profound despondency he arose to a sudden resolution. This was not a matter to be despaired of. It was a thing to fight against, an ill not to be endured, but to be cured. Laurent would help, but the main share of the conflict must fall upon himself. Almost for the first time in his life he was conscious of a clear and definite call to manhood. He was entered for a real strife with Fate—a fight to a finish. Well, he would not shrink from it He set himself to ask what weapons he could use. Patience, tact, determination, sleepless vigilance—they all seemed as if they were to be had for the asking. He resolved upon them all, and so, having closed the window and put out the lamp, he walked heavily up to bed.
Annette’s doors were locked, both that which gave upon the corridor and that which communicated with his own little room. He could but remember how often they had been closed before, and what varying reasons he had been forced to seek and find for her isolation of herself. That riddle was read now. There would be a stormy scene in the morning when he came to tell Annette that he had solved it, and thinking of how he should face it, and of what means were the likeliest to lead to ultimate victory, he lost something of the sickness of his pain. He undressed and lay down in the dark, but there was no sleep for him until long after the window-blind had grown amber-tinted with the gleam of the level sun upon it.
When he awoke his watch told him that it was near ten o’clock. He rang for his bath, dressed, breakfasted, met the people of the house, and answered their friendly inquiries as to his journey all pretty much as if nothing had occurred to change the whole horizon of his life. He made no inquiries as to Annette, and no news came to him with regard to her.
It was near noonday when Laurent came into his study, very grave and gray, and looking as if he, too, had had a night of severe trouble. Paul read the sympathy in his face, and rose to meet him. The two shook hands, and from that moment there was a real friendship between them. ‘You have seen her? Laurent asked.
‘Not yet,’ said Paul
‘You have thought over what I was compelled to tell you—what you saw?’
‘Yes; I have thought it all over.
‘And your conclusions?’
‘To ask the aid of your experience, and to abide by your advice.’
‘Thank you,’ said Laurent gravely. ‘I, too, have been thinking, and perhaps, in my judgment, it may be better that I should first see her alone. In my capacity of physician I can speak impersonally.’
‘I am in your hands,’ Paul answered, ‘and I shall accede to whatever you think is best.’
‘Well,’ returned Laurent, with a gray smile, ‘I do not commonly advocate eavesdropping, but I think perhaps it may be as well for you to hear our talk together. It will guide you as to what you may say or do hereafter. I will send up my name now, and when I am admitted you may follow to your own small room. Is that espionage? I do not very greatly care myself, for I shall warn her from the first that I shall faithfully report every spoken word so far as I can remember it.’
‘I will come,’ said Paul. ‘I have the right And the more I know the better I can use it.’
Laurent twirled the milled button of the call-bell which stood upon the desk.
‘My respects to Madame Armstrong,’ he said, when the landlady’s middle-aged daughter came in and smoothed her apron as a sign of respect to Monsieur le Médecin. ‘I am a few moments late, but I am here to keep my appointment.’
Out went Mademoiselle Adèle, and her slippered footsteps faded up the staircase. There was a sound of knocking, a conversation inaudible to the two who strained their ears to listen, and then mademoiselle was back again.
Madame wasmalade—bien malade—would beg Monsieur le Médecin to excuse her.
‘Then I will try,’ said Laurent ‘I have your authority?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Paul, and the doctor went creaking up the stairs in his heavy, country-made boots.
Paul sat alone again and listened with his heart in his ears.
A series of raps sounded upon the door above, at first quiet and persuasive, and then increasing in intensity. There came a faint sound of protesting inquiry, and in answer:
‘Dr. Laurent, s’il vous plait, madame.’
There was another protest, and Laurent spoke again:
‘But I am here by appointment, madame, and I cannot afford to waste my time.’
And just here a curious and rather embarrassing thing happened, for the doctor, laying a nervous hand upon the door, found it suddenly opened to him with no symptom of resistance.
‘A thousand pardons!’ he exclaimed. ‘Pray tell me when you are ready.’
Annette was at the door like a wild cat, but the square-built toe of Laurent’s foot was between it and the jamb. Paul raced up the stairs in his stocking-feet, his boots in his hand. This was not a time for delicacies of sentiment He wished to save Annette. He wished even more to save himself from the misery of a lifelong degradation. He darted into his own room whilst Laurent was still standing like a statue at the door of the adjoining chamber, but reached it barely in time, for on a sudden the door of Annette’s apartment was thrown open, and a voice of imperious sarcasm demanded to know to what Madame Armstrong was indebted for this unexpected honour.
‘It will be well,’ said Laurent in his professional tone, ‘for Madame Armstrong to return to bed.’
He turned the key in the door, and at this Annette sent out shriek on shriek, until the whole corridor seemed to shrill with the outcry.
‘Madame,’ said Laurent in his deep nasal voice, when the clamour died down for a moment, ‘your husband is in the house. He is within hearing. I have his entire authority to speak to you, and I am intent to use it I am here to tell you that you have abused his absence and his confidence, and that on his arrival at Janenne last night I told him the result of my observations during the last four or five weeks.’
Paul, boots in hand, sat on the edge of his own bed, and heard a kind of gasping noise. Then for a moment there was silence until Laurent spoke again.
‘If you will permit, madame,’ he said, ‘this interview may go smoothly. If you choose to be angry, that is your affair. I am authorized by your husband, as your physician, to speak plain truths to you. You need not trouble to deny me, but I see you have already been drinking.’
‘How dare you!’ she flashed out, and Paul heard the stamp of her little naked foot upon the fox-skin rug which lay beside their bed.
‘Madame,’ said Laurent, ‘there is no question of daring or not daring. I have told your husband everything, and he is sitting in the next room at this moment, and hears every word we speak.’
‘Paul!’ she cried, ‘Paul is here? Why hasn’t he been to see me? Why has he no word for me?’
‘Madame,’ said Laurent sternly, ‘I bid you cease these theatrical pretences. Your unhappy husband saw you last night when you three times seized the decanter which had been left for him.’
She gasped: ‘You liar!’
‘That is all very well, madame,’ responded Laurent, ‘but my eyes are mine, and I have known the truth for months past. Why do you venture on a hope so vain? Now, I will tell you plainly, Madame Armstrong, you are going on the way to hell. You are to be stopped, and you shall be stopped. Pray make no mistake as to the authority that is to be exerted. It shall be exerted as mildly as you permit. It shall be exerted as inexorably as the necessities of the case demand I have told you already many times into what a pitfall you were descending, but until last night I never dared to warn your husband. He knows the truth now, knows it all, and he leaves you in my hands. You have not heeded advice or beseeching, and—I say it, believe me, with deep reluctance—we must draw a cordon about you, and protect you from yourself. Pray understand, madame, it is a protective cordon only, and your own action may relax it at any time; but your actions will be watched, as it is my duty to tell you, to the extremest scruple.’
‘What do you mean to do? Paul heard her ask in a husky, panting voice, which made him figure in his own mind a hunted creature almost run to ground.
‘Nothing more,’ Laurent replied, ‘nothing more, madame, believe me—nothing more than is dictated by the necessities of the case. You have an ordonnance dating from Paris.
I have instructed the pharmacien that he is no longer to respect it.’
Annette whined at this like a child robbed of a toy.
‘I have forbidden him this morning,’ Laurent pursued, ‘to supply you, without my special direction, with any drug whatever, and I have given him particular orders about the eau’des Carmes. I am now about to tell the hotel people that you are under my care and treatment, and that you will be allowed only a measured quantity of wine per diem.’
‘You mean to expose me to them?’ Annette asked
‘I do not propose to expose madame to anybody,’ Laurent responded, ‘but if madame chooses to expose herself——’
The listener could imagine the shrug of the broad shoulders and the outward cast of the persuasive hands.
‘Voyons, madame,’ pursued the doctor, ‘we wish nothing but your good, but that we are determined to accomplish. I have nothing to add to what I have said already, and perhaps it is time that you should see your husband.’
Paul hastily thrust his feet into his slippers, and awaited the opening of the door.
‘He is there,’ said Laurent; ‘he has probably listened to every word we have spoken.’
Paul sat trembling on the bed-edge. The imminent interview disturbed him strangely, and set all manner of conflicting tides flowing in heart and brain. He was part coward and part hero; ready to face everything and to run away from everything. His pity for Annette was pity, and no more; his sympathy for Paul Armstrong amounted to a passion. He strove to bring himself to what he conceived to be a more fitting mood, but whilst he struggled with himself the inner door of the room in which he sat was suddenly torn open, and Annette stood before him. He could not have believed, without that actual visual revelation, that such a wreck could have been achieved in so small a space of time. Whatever of spirituality, whatever of youthful foolishespiègleriethe face had held, had vanished. The visage was like a mask—and a mask of death. There was a splash of purplish crimson beneath either eyelid, but for the rest the face was of the yellow of a week-old bone; the eyelids were puffy, and the lips were lax. The whole face quivered like a shaken jelly as she looked at him.
‘Paul,’ she said—’ Paul, Paul!’
And with that she cast herself upon his breast in a very storm of tears.
For a moment he stood helpless and confused, and then a sudden flux of pity came upon him, and he held her steadily and firmly in answer to the hysteric grip with which her arms encircled him, now tightening and now relaxing. She fawned upon him piteously from the very beginning of this embrace, and at the last she fell, both knees thudding upon the carpet, and abased her head between his ankles, crying bitterly the while. And at this whatever manhood was within the man fled for the time being, and he, kneeling to raise her from her self-abasement, also lifted up his voice and wept bitterly.
Before things had quite reached this melancholy pass Laurent had stolen from the room, and had closed both doors behind him, so that husband and wife were alone.
‘Dearest,’ said Paul, ‘what can I do to help you?’
The word was not wholly sincere, but it held more than the average ounce of sincerity to the ton which keeps human speech a possibility. At least his desire was to help her, if it were only a way of helping himself. But the whole thing was so miserable that to analyze emotions at such a moment was surely to mount the very Appenines of folly. Annette cried and cried, with her yet young and supple figure clinging to him, and, in spite of the debauched, melancholy face, what could he do but stroke her hair and kiss her cheek, and promise kindness and encouragement? Most of the time he was inwardly murmuring, ‘Poor devil!’ and was assuring himself that he had taken up a most hopeless handful; but the whole wretched tangle of feeling was too intricate to be unravelled by so much as a straight inch. What could he do? He asked the question despairingly; he asked it in genuine pity of Annette; he asked it in a yet more genuine pity of himself. The man who deals professionally with the emotions of other people cannot preserve the simplicity of his own; it would be out of nature to believe it.
There was a reconciliation of a sort, but it could hardly be very real at first, and to give it any aspect of permanence time was necessary.
Laurent and Paul concocted a plan of campaign. It was essential in the doctor’s opinion to avoid as far as possible all open evidence of watchfulness, and yet to know very accurately what was being done. Innumerable attempts were made to break the cordon of guardianship which was drawn around Annette. She feigned, of course, as people in her position always feign, to acquiesce entirely in the means which were adopted to guard her from herself, but there were eternal skirmishes between the outlying posts of the two armies which came in a very short time to be established. In that newfound prosperity of his Paul had grown absolutely careless about money, and he had not the faintest idea as to the extent of his wife’s supplies. That she had enough, for the time being, to corrupt quite a small regiment was speedily made manifest, and a silent contest, in which the victor acknowledged victory no more than the vanquished admitted defeat, set in. How wide the ramifications of this strange war might be Paul could not guess, but on occasion some circumstance would reveal that they had reached unexpected distances. It was a perfectly understood thing in the hotel itself that no supplies of wine or of more potent liquor were to be supplied at Madame Armstrong’s order. The village pharmacien sold nothing to her without Laurent’s consent, but there were ways and means of one sort or another by which she contrived to procure her poison, and at such times the old signs were always perceptible: the passion for solitude, the tricksy, changing spirit which varied from extravagant mirth to unreasonable anger. Laurent watched the contest with a sleepless loyalty, and Annette, finding herself foiled by him a thousand times oftener than by the less vigilant Paul, grew to hate him. But in spite of all the unfortunate creature could do to accelerate her own ruin, she grew slowly back to health, and to something more than her original personal attractiveness. For a kind of experience was marked upon her, and the indefinable yet universally recognised expression which betokens this was present in her looks. When watchfulness prevailed over the strange craft which was brought into conflict with it, Annette knew how to be charming, even to the man who suffered so much at her hands; but when the contrabandists succeeded in running in their supplies there were hours of horror—scenes in which rage and accusation were succeeded by storms of tears and tempestuous self-reproach. On one such occasion Paul sat in his study, for the moment oblivious of the world. His dissipation and his best relief from the cares which beset him was labour, and he laboured hard. It was his fashion at this time to stand at his desk—a rude thing built for him by the village carpenter—and in the pauses which came in between his actual spells of writing, to stride about his limited territory, enacting the scenes he was striving to portray, and shaping his sentences in such an impassioned undertone as an actor will employ in the study of a part. He was at the limit of his walk from the window, thus engaged, when the door was violently and without warning broken open in such fashion that its edge struck him on the face. Here was Annette, blazing with some newly-discovered injury, and Paul at once recognised the ancient and too-well-remembered symptoms. The contrabandists had got through again, and this time with a vengeance. When he could gather his scattered wits—the blow in itself had been a shrewd thing—he found that he was being stormily assailed in respect of an amour with the cook of the Hotel of the Three Friends, a highly respectable person of fifty summers and a waist of sixty inches in circumference. He closed the door, and, mopping his injured nose, invited Annette to a seat.
‘Talk lower, dear,’ he asked her. ‘It shall be perfectly understood between us that I deserve all your reproaches, but don’t give the poor, dear old cook away, or, if you must assail her, speak in English.’
‘That is your ring,’ said Annette. She drew her wedding-ring from her finger and cast it to the floor. ‘I have done with you for ever; you are a traitor and a villain.’
Paul stooped for the ring as it rolled to his feet, and bestowed it in his pocket.
‘You and Laurent,’ cried Annette, ‘have conspired to kill me. Oh, I know you both! but if there is justice in earth or heaven, I will have it Do not think because I am a woman and alone that I can find no protector. I am not so helpless as you fancy.’
‘I am very busy, dear,’ Paul answered in a cold desperation, ‘and we might discuss these important questions at another moment.’
‘Oh,’ cried Annette, ‘anything to avoid the truth!’
‘Yes,’ said Paul, with the first flush of anger he had permitted himself, ‘anything to avoid the truth—anything, or almost anything; but if you stay here one other moment I will avoid the truth no longer.’
He cast the door wide open, and Annette with an amazing submissiveness passed through it.
It was long past mid-autumn by this time, and was indeed fast drawing on towards winter, so that in the little study a fire was lit in the earlier hours of the day to air the room. It had been lighted that morning, and the first true nip of winter was in the air. Paul sat alone with his head between his hands until a violent shiver aroused him from his thoughts. The air was growing dark as well as chilly; a pale yellow light gleamed already from the windows of the Café de la Régence across theplace, and the outlook was as chilly as the air, as comfortless as the thoughts which filled his mind.
‘Hands up,’ said Paul to himself; ‘hands up and sink down into the waste waters, and have done with it.’
Of what act of desperation he would have been guilty in this mood he could never have told, but at this instant the door was opened very softly, and Annette was back again. She had been somewhat dishevelled at her last appearance, and carelessly attired. She had now, to all seeming, called in the aid of the solitary coiffeur of the village, and her pretty brown locks were done up in lustrous coils. She was attired in a charming little dressing-gown of pale-blue, with lace at the wrists and throat, and her complexion had been somewhat rudely brightened by a touch of red upon the cheeks. She closed the door softly behind her, and advanced with pleading hands.
‘Paul dear,’ she said, ‘I do not know if ever you can forgive me, but I think you would, perhaps, if you knew the real truth about me. Oh, Paul, Paul, Paul, I am afraid—I am afraid that I am going mad! I have no self-control. I say cruel and wicked things without believing them, and I cannot help it There is a devil in my soul who tempts me. What is a poor little girl like me to do against the devil? Won’t you help me, Paul dear? Give me back my ring; I never meant to throw it away. There is nothing I value so much in the world. Give it back to me, Paul. There; put it on my finger. God bless you for ever, you dearest, dearest, kindest, patient dear! And now, Paul, take me in your arms as you used to do. Kiss me, and tell me that you love me. I’m only a little creature, Paul, when everything’s said and done; I’m five feet three, English measure, and how canIbe expected to fight a devil! Kiss me, kiss me again, Paul.’
She thrust him back with rage, tore the ring once more from her finger, and cast it again upon the floor. Then, with an air of comedy disdain, ‘It is really too cheap a thing to fool a fool like you.’ And so, with a shrill peal of stagey laughter, she curtseyed low to him and glided from the room.
He stood with clenched hands for a single instant, and—how he never knew—came to a sudden calm. He took up his hat from the desk on which he had thrown it on entering the room, and sauntered out to the front of the hotel in a complete vacancy of thought and emotion; and as he lounged there, thinking of nothing and caring for nothing, there was woven into the woof of life the next thread of his destiny, for who should drive up to the main door of the Three Friends, with her maid and her luggage, and all the airs and impertinences of a person of fashion, but La Femme Incomprise.
And who should be La Femme Incomprise but Madame la Baronne de Wyeth, a lady more or less known to fame in two continents, but whom the unwitting Paul had not yet so much as heard of in the whole course of his life. He was conscious in the chill and gloom of the November evening of a lively and slender figure, which danced as if upon springs for a mere instant as it alighted from the carriage, of an accompanying rich rustle of silk, the exhalation of a fine perfume, the glance of a dark eye towards him as he raised his hat and stood aside from the doorway, and then the first encounter was over and was dismissed from mind.
There was no Annette at dinner, but he had not expected her, and was glad to know that she was in hiding. But when, after an hour or two’s aimless ramble under the shadow of the Terre de Falaise, he returned to the hotel and entered thesalle à manger, he found there a certain unwonted sense of warmth and brightness. Not only was the stove blooming cherry-red at the far end of the apartment, but the little-used fireplace was aglow with blazing pine-logs, and two extra lamps were set upon the table. He noted these things with that particularity a man spends upon detail at those times of subdued and profound emotion when he seems incapable of noting anything, and took his seat carelessly at the table in his accustomed place. The juge, and the garde, and the bachelor chemist, and the chief of the gendarmerie, and all the rest of the customary convives, dribbled in one by one, and exchanged the customary salutations. Time was when they had been immensely interesting as types of mankind more or less rural or townish, but to-night he was weary of them, and would very willingly have been alone. The half-seen vision of two hours ago had passed completely from his mind, and the broad-beamed, apple-cheeked Evariste had already served the soup when Madame la Baronne de Wyeth rustled into the room with an aspect so commanding and stately that all the Belgian gentlemen rose to their feet and bowed as she took her seat at table. Paul rose and bowed with the rest, and the lady, with an easy and graceful inclination from left to right, offered to him a kind of specialized salute as she sat down immediately opposite to him. She was full between the glow of the two extra lamps, and at a first glance, by dint of bright eyes, sparkling teeth, a high complexion, and a Parisian half-toilet, she looked as if she might have been a beauty. She was barely that, as a second glance discovered, but she had an undoubted charm of grace and manner, and Paul, whose native origin and customs of life had led him far from the scene of fine ladyhood, was greatly impressed by her. So were the rest of the diners for that matter, and the customary rough banter of the table was hushed in the presence of this new arrival. The men conversed in whispers when they spoke at all, and in the intervals between the courses they crumbled their bread upon the tablecloth in a manifest embarrassment. Not a word was exchanged between Paul and his vis-à-vis until, towards the close of the meal, the lady’s attendant brought to her a small tray of silver with a fine little flacon of transparent Venetian ware, and a liqueur-glass upon it She had drunk nothing but water throughout the repast, but she now poured out a spoonful of some amber-coloured and highly aromatic liqueur, and, leaning slightly across the table, said, with a marked American-English accent:
‘May I trouble you for a single small lump of sugar, Mr. Armstrong?’
She held out the liqueur-glass towards him, and Paul, in answer to an imperious little nod of the head, which seemed to indicate that he was obeying orders correctly, dropped a square nodule of sugar into it, and looked up with a questioning aspect.
‘My name appears to be known to you, madam?’ he said.
‘My dear sir,’ she purred back again in what he learned to recognise later on as the true Bostonian tone, ‘your name is known to everybody—or, at least, to everyone who is worth knowing. Haven’t we all been going wild in London and New York about your last comedy, and isn’t your portrait in the photographers’ windows everywhere?’
Paul was young, and therefore, if not vain, at least accessible to the assaults of vanity, and he blushed to the ears with pleasure. He had not noticed until the moment when the lady set her thickly-jewelled hand upon it that a little silver bell was placed at her side. She touched it, and her maid entered, and at a murmured aside retired, returning in a moment with a filigree card-case.
‘That is my name,’ said the lady; ‘you may not have heard it before.’
There was so complete a certainty of recognition in her voice and manner that Paul, though a very poor courtier indeed, bowed as he read the card, and murmured that everybody knew the name of Madame la Baronne de Wyeth.
This, as it turned out, was destined to embarrass him a little; but Madame was graciously communicative, and he was not long in learning that she was the authoress of a volume of poems which bore the title ‘Le Cour Soupir.’ She would be proud and delighted, she told him, to have his judgment alike on the original work and its rendition in French, which was also the labour of her own hands.
‘You see, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said, ‘I was born in Paris, though of American parentage, and I have lived there nearly all my life, so that I am really and truly quite bilingual. French and English are exactly one and the same to me, so far as facility of expression goes; and I did not care to entrust the expression of my most intimate and sacred thoughts into a stranger’s hands. To appeal to the readers of French and English is to appeal to the whole world of intellect. Perhaps that is not a very modest desire; but it is mine, Mr. Armstrong, as I think it must be that of all those who are conscious of great thoughts. By the way,’ she asked, with a comprehensive glance around the table, ‘do any of these gentlemen speak English?’
‘Not a word,’ Paul answered.
‘If you are quite sure of that, Mr. Armstrong,’ said the lady, ‘we can pursue our talk in peace; but there is nothing so disconcerting as to dread an eavesdropper when one is exchanging confidences.’
Paul had not, so far, begun to exchange confidences, and he rather wondered in his own bourgeois mind if this fascinating lady were offering him a challenge to a flirtation. It might very well have appeared, so thought the Exile who recalled these things with so clear an after-light upon them, that the lady had that object, and no other; but for the moment there was a natural embarrassment in thinking so.
‘You have written verse, Mr. Armstrong?’ asked the Baroness.
‘Reams,’ Paul answered, with a laugh, though he was not entirely at his ease.
‘Oh,’ said the lady, ‘you must show me some of it; you must show it to me all. I am sure, from your prose, that you have the true singing gift; and when one can both think and sing, one is a poet, you know, Mr. Armstrong.’
‘I have nothing to show,’ Paul answered; ‘I have burnt all my poor stuff long and long ago.’
‘And you write no longer?’ she asked—‘you write verse no more? Oh, but that is wicked—it is criminal to have the gift and not to use it ‘But then, of course, one knows how much depends upon congeniality of surrounding and society. There have been times when I have thought that my own poor little pipe was silenced for ever. It is so easy to lose heart; it is sometimes so very difficult to retain one’s courage and animation. Do the gentlemen remain here, by-the-by, to smoke, Mr. Armstrong?’
There was a something odd in the way in which she used his name—a something not at all easy to be defined—and it influenced Paul strangely every time she spoke it. It was not altogether unlike a caress, if one could associate an idea of that sort with the manner and meaning of a great lady with whom one had not exchanged a word until within the last half-hour. Paul knew not what to make of the grand dame; but she fluttered and flattered him prodigiously, and in his excitement the troubles which had seemed so chokingly bitter so brief a time ago were all for the moment forgotten.
‘They sit about the table for an hour or two after dinner,’ Paul responded, in answer to her last question.
‘I notice,’ said the lady, ‘that there is a fire in the salon next door. If you are not too wedded to your tobacco, I shall be grateful for your society.’
‘Oh, madam!’ cried Paul, ‘I am honoured beyond measure.’
And so, when the Baroness had sipped her small liqueur and rose, with a queenly little inclination to the company, Paul rose also, and having opened the door for her, followed her lead into the next apartment, a spacious room, very dimly lighted, and as bare as if it had been made ready for a ball. Here the Baroness established her seat upon a settee, and Paul was encouraged to bring a chair into her neighbourhood, and was there held in discourse. And though he might in the review of later experiences have arrived at the conclusion that Madame la Baronne was a somewhat heartless and not particularly brainy little fribble, he was never able to forget or deny a certain charm of manner which he had not elsewhere encountered, and which had in it a seductive warmth and gentleness. Before he fairly knew it, he was talking with something of the ease and intimacy of an old friend. He had been so sore-hearted of late and so removed from all feminine companionship, that this unexpected, unlooked-for intercourse with a woman of culture and of such undoubted airs of refinement soothed like a poultice. It was water to the thirsty, bread to the hungry heart; it was fire and shelter to the houseless wanderer. Madame drew him into little confidences, all sufficiently simple, harmless, and discreet They related mainly to his methods of work, to his acquaintance with brother men of letters, to incidents of youthful life, to the early hopes and failures of his career.
‘How profoundly interesting!’ Madame purred from time to time. ‘Oh, you men of the people, Mr. Armstrong, you men of the people, how you do surpass and captivate us all when you just happen to have brains!’
The ‘man of the people ‘was certainly making no concealment of his origin, as he certainly never made any parade of it; but he did not quite like this, and perhaps his face revealed as much, for the Baroness hastened with great agility to quit the theme. She began to offer to Paul some little insight into her own history. It would be a prudery, she said, to pretend to be sensitive about it any longer—the whole world knew the sordid and melancholy truth; and this sounded like a prelude to a much fuller explanation than she was for the moment disposed to make, and it helped Paul to understand the hints in which she chose to set forward the fact that she was a person of a lonely heart, that her husband pursued his affairs in Wall Street and elsewhere without her greatly concerning herself as to what those affairs might be, and apparently leaving her much to her own devices. He learned to think afterwards that these confidences, coming upon so very brief an acquaintance, were barely indicative of that exquisite delicacy of soul for which the lady gave herself credit, but it did not occur to him to think so for one moment at the time. The two extra lamps upon the dinner-table had probably been placed there at her own request, but it was beyond dispute that she showed to far greater advantage in the subdued light in which she now sat Time had had no great opportunity of ravishing her good looks as yet, but a certain boldness and bluntness of feature which denied her complete right to beauty was lost here, and her complexion was subdued, so that to the eye of her companion she looked bewitching, and everybody knows how far easier it is to condone a breach of taste in a beautiful woman than in a plain one. But now as the talk went on and grew momentarily more intimate, Paul was made to see that he was in the presence of a suffering heart, that he was speaking with one who had never been able to come into contact with another soul. ‘We live apart from each other, all of us, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said. ‘It is only the artist, only the thinker and dreamer, who cares to grieve over it all; but there is something appalling in the thought that no one soul really touches another. You shake your head,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, but you are young, and you are not yet disillusionized.’
‘I have a right to be in some things,’ Paul said to himself; but he made no verbal answer.
‘No,’ she went on in a tone of tender regret in the pretty purring American voice, which of itself was like the touch of a soft hand. ‘We are born to isolation. As one grows older——’
Paul laughed at that outright It was his first laugh for quite a lengthy space of time, and he enjoyed it.
‘Oh,’ said the lady, taking the implied compliment quite seriously, ‘I am not a centenarian, but I am two-and-thirty, Mr. Armstrong, and in the course of two-and-thirty years one may do a very considerable amount of living. I say it advisedly, as one grows older the recognition of that isolation of which I have spoken grows more and more complete. It beats one down into despair at times; but then one is here for other things than despair: one is here for duty; one is here to suffer, and to gather strength by suffering; that is the whole secret of our destiny. It is simple enough, and yet how long it takes to learn the lesson truly!’
Beyond this no great progress was made on that first evening, but it appeared that the lady had come to stay for at least a little time. It is probable that she had not often found so very responsive an instrument to play upon, for Paul Armstrong’s one lifelong weakness was that any woman of average intelligence, who chose to take the trouble, could sound him through every note of his gamut, and the Baroness de Wyeth seemed to find a lively satisfaction in the exercise of her own power in that direction.
There was no further sign of Annette that evening, and it was not until the Baroness had retired that Paul began again seriously to remember her. It would at any moment, since his discovery of the lure by which she had beguiled him into marriage, have seemed a mere ridiculous prudery of conscience to hide from himself that he had thrown the better part of his life away; but he had meant to do his duty as it seemed to lie plain and straight before him, and he meant it still, increasingly difficult as it appeared. But all the talk of the lonely soul, of the eternal isolation of the spirit, in which man was doomed to live, all the tinsel sentimentalisms of which the talk of the bilingual poetess had mainly consisted, afforded perhaps as poor a pabulum as he could anywhere have found. There was he, with that sore-stricken heart of his, so sore-stricken, indeed, that it was well-nigh numbed, and here for the first time in his life he had met a woman of more than common surface breeding, of high family—for the Baroness de Wyeth was guilty of no mere vulgar brag in claiming so much for herself—of more than ordinary attractiveness in person, and of far more than common faculty in the direction of a dangerous, sympathetic semi-humbug. Was it any wonder if, when he lay down that night, he contrasted the hours of the evening with those of the afternoon, or if he recalled the fact that at the very turning of the road which had led him to fortune and to fame he had thrown away all that could make them really worth the having?
Annette was sleeping off the fumes of brandy and the insane hysteria which went along with them. The dainty lady from whom he had just parted was going to her repose with her own beautiful, sad thoughts in a refinement of surrounding which he could only fancy. His thoughts followed her to her chamber until it seemed to him that he was in some sort guilty of a profanation, and with that touch of self-chiding the born sex-worshipper must needs flash into a mood of adoration. A more thoroughpaced small coquette than La Femme Incomprise never breathed, yet she must needs be a holy angel for the time being to Paul Armstrong, because she had fine eyes and teeth, and could talk with some eloquence about heart-sorrows she had never known. And he, he who lay there with his career like a stream which is poisoned at its source, might, had he guided his own destinies with anything but the judgment of a fool, have found himself just such a companion as he had but now parted from, and have known in her a life-long comrade, an undying solace and inspiration. Oh, fool! and fool! and fool! through all the wretched, lonely hours of night—fool! and fool! and again fool unutterable!
Annette, on the morrow, was repentant and pitiable. The contrabandist supplies had been of a very limited nature, and now they were over she suffered a more than common misery of reaction from excess. For a while she was sullen, and sulked in her own chamber; but when her headache had worn itself out, she began to creep listlessly about the hotel Paul and the Baroness had spent a second eveningtête-à-têteand Paul’s first judgment of the sympathetic nature of her character had been admirably confirmed.
Husband and wife had had but one interview with each other since the latest outbreak, and this had not tended to improve their relations or to sweeten the temper of either one or die other. Paul had not mentioned the existence of his wife to the Baroness until he had learned of the lady’s intention to make a stay of some length in Montcourtois. Then he had said to himself dismally: She will think I have hidden something from her unless I mention Annette; and he had named her in a mere instinct of self-protection.
‘My wife,’ he had said simply, ‘would be very happy and honoured to meet you, but she is confined to her room by a slight indisposition which I hope will pass away in a little time.’
‘I shall hope, then, to make her acquaintance to-morrow,’ said the Baroness, and thereupon they got back to transcendentalisms and soul solitude, and made up their minds how sweet a thing it would be if only it were possible for any one human creature to know and thoroughly understand another. With this unfailing battle-horse ready to prance into the arena under the Baroness’s poetic spur, they were never in danger of being gravelled for lack of matter, but found each other’s society mutually and beautifully stimulative to the heart and mind. After Paul’s short and unhappy interview with Annette, the Baroness requested the pleasure of his society upon a drive she proposed to take. He acceding with great willingness, they rolled away together, and Madame confided to Paul the purpose of her visit to these solitudes at a so inclement season of the year. It was her intent to study the ancient Walloon tongue upon its own ground, and to put her studies to some literary effect by an elaborate comparison of the language spoken by the peasantry of the present day with that of the earliest of the Frenchjongleursand chroniclers.
‘So you see, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said sweetly, ‘that if you are resolved upon keeping your artistic quiet here throughout the greater part of the winter, you and I will have some opportunity of becoming known to each other.’
Paul did not dare to say how warm a welcome he accorded to this suggestion, but it was dangerously sweet to him, and he had self-understanding enough to recognise that fact. But he was in no mood to struggle against whatever Fate might bring. He was not coxcomb enough to conceive himself likely to be dangerous to a witty and experienced woman of the world, and as to what might happen to himself he did not care. He was desolate enough to be desperate, and if in two short days he had learned to believe that the final loss of the new interest he had found would be among the gravest of troubles, he had learned also as a part of that lesson that the society would be strangely sweet to him whilst it lasted. On Paul’s side there was no thought of a flirtation, and on the side of the Baroness there was not much thought of anything else, so that they got on most famously together, for it is always richer sport in a case of this kind to have one of the parties concerned in earnest Paul took all the soulful shop, on the strength of which the lady had patrolled Europe and the United States on a sort of sentimental journey, to be as serious as the Evangels, and the discussion of it made the drive an undiluted pleasure to him.
But when the carriage returned to the hotel and passed Paul’s study at a walking pace, he caught sight of Annette at the window, and her face seemed to him to offer some promise of a scene. She certainly bent a look of surprised anger upon her husband and the strange, richly-dressed lady with whom he was seated, but he waved his hand to her as he went by and made up a mind to trust to the chapter of chances. As it turned out, Annette was not inclined to be disagreeable, and hearing of the lady’s rank, and being casually informed that she was the wife of the great American-Belgian millionaire, she became resolved to be gracious, and made a careful toilet in preparation for dinner. She and the Baroness met at table, and Annette did not shine by contrast with the newcomer. The poor thing probably knew it, and when Paul and Madame talked together of books she had never seen or heard of, and of people whose names were strange to her, she could scarcely have been altogether happy. Her husband led her into the conversation now and then, but there was nothing for it but for her to dwindle out again, and when the meal was over she made a real or pretended excuse of headache to retire. Paul was disposed to be grateful to her for what he felt to be a genuine forbearance, and he would have given some sign to this effect had Annette afforded him an opportunity. But she kept herself sedulously apart from him, and it was only at the table that they met at all. Things pursued this course until the approach of Christmas, and then an incident happened which brought about, or at least very much helped to bring about, disaster.
When two people of opposite sexes are constantly in each other’s society and their main topic of conversation—however hashed, ragouted, rissoled and spiced—is the loneliness of the Ego, certain little familiarities are likely to ensue which, though they may be of the most platonic order in the world, are not likely to be made a subject of outspoken confidence between a husband and a wife, or a married lady and her husband. Thus, when Madame la Baronne and Paul were quite alone it was ‘Gertrude’ on the one side, and it was ‘Paul’ upon the other, and the lady, being the elder, and a little more the elder than she cared to say, would occasionally venture upon ‘Paul dear,’ with an air so matronly that the most censorious of observers could have found no cavil with the manner of it. It came about in due time, let Laurent’s watch-dogs do what they would, that the contrabandists once more succeeded in running their cargo into the Hotel of the Three Friends. It was a very small one, but it was large enough to serve its turn.
Annette had not appeared all day, and Paul’s summons at her chamber-door had elicited no response. He and the Baroness had dined together and had talked in the way now grown customary to them, being neither more nor less affectionate towards each other than common, and they were now together in the public salon, and, as fate would have it, they were alone. The Baroness dropped something with a metallic sound upon the floor, and uttered a little cry of dismay.
‘Oh, my bracelet!’ she exclaimed; ‘my favourite, my precious bracelet! It is broken, and I would not have had anything happen to it for the world!’
Paul ran to lift it from the floor, and assured himself by examination that it was not broken. The hasp by which it was fastened had come open, whether as the result of accident or design may not be known. Ladies have ways of saving a platonic converse from mere dulness, and this may have been one of them, or may not. But Paul, having shown to demonstration that the ornament was undamaged, the Baroness held out a very prettily-rounded, plump, white arm, and Paul, trembling a little at the slight contact the task involved, proceeded rather clumsily to fix the bracelet in its place. He looked up, and the lady’s eyes were fixed upon his face with an expression of grave and serene tenderness. His own eyes were humid, and he looked back at her as an earth-bound soul might look towards paradise. And on a sudden, before a sound of warning had been heard by either of them, their two hands were struck violently apart, and Annette stood between them, her eyes flaming with rage and the spirit of temporary insanity last imported by the domestic smugglers.