The evening was memorable to Paul for many reasons. There was not a great deal of the talk to carry away with one; but if it had not the solid brilliance of the diamond, it had the cheaper glitter of the sharded glass epigram which sparkles and cuts—an admirable substitute on most occasions, though it has the disadvantage of leaving dangerous fragments for people to tread upon. The conversation was carried on exclusively in French, and, though Paul’s ears were quick enough to keep abreast of it, his tongue was not, and he was a silent listener for the most part Ralston, having pathetically bidden farewell to ease and English, seemed as much at home as any person at table; but he told Paul, as they walked home together, that he hated to speak a foreign language.
‘Give me the old familiar tool that one has handled since babyhood. See how it adjusts itself to the hand! how one can carve with it! with how much comfort and dexterity! English, besides that, is the only language in the world. The things that are not to be said in English are not worth thinking—if they are speakable at all; and some things are not. Look up yonder!’ They were in the Place Vendôme. His upward gesture sent Paul’s eyes to the sky, which was sown thick with stars. ‘Do you care for a talk across a whisky-and-soda and a cigar?’ asked Ralston. ‘I am here in the Rue Castiglione. Come to my room. I have the right nectar. I bring it with me when I come to Paris, and let them charge for corkage.’
When the guests had scattered, Paul had looked for one more private word with Gertrude; but she had left him no excuse to linger. She had said her ‘Good-bye, Paul,’ with an almost icy sweetness. He wanted to get away into solitude to think about her, and was half inclined to excuse himself from Ralston.
‘Dear little, queer little body, our hostess, eh? Have you known her long?’
‘Not very long,’ Paul answered ‘But she and you seemed to have quite ancient memories.’
If Ralston would talk about Gertrude, he would be glad to sit with him till morning light.
‘Oh, I?’ said Ralston—‘I have known her from her childhood. If she makes any secret of her affairs, I mustn’t babble, though. Do you know the Baron?’
‘Not personally.’
‘Ah, well—— This way in. I am no higher than the first-floor, and we needn’t trouble the man at the lift. Here’s the room. And now that I’m on my own territory, let me say how glad I am to have lighted upon you again. I’ve often wondered what you were making of yourself. “Paul Armstrong†is individual enough, and when I saw the name on the play-bill, I recalled it, and wondered if it meant you. Whisky, soda, cigars. Now we are provided for.’
Paul made himself look as disengaged and easy as possible.
‘You asked me if I knew the Baron. What kind of man is he? A strange sort of fellow, rather—one-and-thirty—to be indifferent to such a woman: brilliant, amiable, charming.’
He spoke with no enthusiasm. He wanted to talk about Gertrude, but he did not mean to betray his own concerns.
‘The Baron’s a very decent fellow; but he has a rather muddy German accent, and he can’t understand the lady’s verses. There’s nothing worse than that in it. She elects to travel; he elects to stay at home. There’s no sort of scandal or impropriety. She’s a dear little woman, and a good little woman, and she has the French-Americanpschutt, as the idiot word goes now. She’s a bit of a sentimentalist, and an exquisite flirt, but the most genuine little creature, too. If she wouldn’t flirt, she’d be too good for this world.’
‘Flirt!’ cried Paul, in so much horror that Ralston laughed aloud.
‘I have taken advantage of my demi-semi-clerical dignity,’ he said, ‘to preach many sermons to her on that particular. Mind you, she’s a most estimable woman; and, as you said just now, brilliant and amiable and charming. But she flirts—she flirts with me; and, if I were not entrenched behind the fortress of threescore years, she’d enslave me as she enslaves everybody else. There’s an Isolation of the Soul which is very effective at short range. Do you happen to have met it yet?’
Was Ralston warning him of set purpose? Had he observed anything—any little subtle thing—which had told him how the land lay? Was he conceivably speaking as the husbands friend? Was his speech accidental or designed? Whatever it might be, and it was certainly enough to discomfit the listener greatly, it was not enough to shake his faith in Gertrude. When he found time to think about it, he marvelled that so shrewd a man as Ralston should have formed so mistaken an estimate of a character so sincere and transparent.
If ever a woman had laid the pure recesses of her heart and soul open to the inspection of a human eye, Gertrude had done so. He was confident that he knew her, and it seemed to him that no two hearts had ever lived together in an intimacy at once so chaste and fiery. Gertrude a flirt? The tenderness she had shown him that night a pretence? The thing was so incredible and ridiculous that it was not worth while to bother one’s brains with it for even the fraction of a minute. He had found his soul’s partner—the twin Half of the Pear—and he was more than content with his discovery.
Whether Ralston meant much or little, whether, indeed, he virtually meant nothing or anything, Paul could not guess; but he was uneasy beneath the humorous gravity of the elder’s eye, and he changed the theme. They had a good hour together, and shook hands and parted with a mutual liking, and at the instant at which he reached the street Paul was free to take up his station at his end of the telepathic wire and to call Gertrude to the other. He walked miles and miles whilst engaged in this wholesome and reasonable enterprise, and at length, without in the least knowing how he had got there, found himself, dog-tired, in a strange quarter of the city. He rambled on until he met a gendarme, who put him upon his way, and within ten minutes of this encounter he awoke with a start to the fact that he was pacing the pavement of the thoroughfare in which he had first seen Annette. The interregnum of fatigue which had come in between his passionate dreams and this reminder of the sordid realities of his lot went for nothing. The dream and the truth flashed together like the electric opposites in clouds and awoke a rare thunderstorm within doors. But by the time he had got to his hotel this was over, and he crawled wearily upstairs to a fireless room, the air of which struck chill and lonely. The apartment in itself was well enough, and not many years before he would have thought it palatial in its stateliness and luxury; but he would have given a thousand pounds at that instant if he could have translated himself to the old kitchen hearth at home and into the sight of the old familiar faces. He had taken a little champagne before dinner, a moderate allowance of wine in the course of the meal, and two rather liberal tumblers of whisky-and-soda with Ralston. This was not the direction in which he was accustomed to approach excess, but he remembered gladly that he had a carafe of brandy in the room. He was chill and tired, and in that contradictory condition of discomfort in which a man is at once painfully sleepy and distressfully wide awake. He poured a quantity of spirit into a tumbler, filled the glass to the brim with water, undressed, blew out his candles, and went to bed, and the demons of a sleepless night came to him and tormented him. The opening line of Tennyson’s ‘Love and Duty’ got into his brain and ticked there: ‘Of love that never found its earthly close, what sequel?’ It recurred with a damnable iteration. He tried all the devices for wooing slumber he had ever heard of. He assembled an innumerable flock of sheep, for he had the knack of making pictures in his mind, and he set them one by one to leap through a gap in a hedge, counting them as they went by. He had not counted a dozen when the words were back again: ‘Of love that never found its earthly close, what sequel?’
He repeated the experiment scores of times, but it was always interrupted by the same query. He set an unending line of soldiers on the march, all as like each other as peas in the same pod. He resolutely denuded his mind of thought; he repeated the multiplication table. It was all of no service; the question came back remorselessly, and at last he set himself to face it. It was dismal enough to look at To think of the world without Gertrude was to conceive a barren waste in which it was worth no man’s while to dwell. To anticipate a life-long continuance of the experiences and emotions of the past three months was scarcely to invite a more cheerful prospect To hint, even in his own thoughts, at any attempt to draw her from her own height of purity was a profanation. The quarters and the hours chimed, until the gray spring dawn crept through the interstices of the blinds, and fatigue grew more leaden than ever. But the devil of insomnia was unconquerable. He relit his candles, found a book, and tried to read; but that was as hopeless as the rest.
He had no claim to call upon Gertrude again until he learned that it was her goodwill and pleasure he should do so; but he was not forbidden to write, and there at least was an occupation to which he could bend his mind. He dressed and sat down, dull and haggard, to the task. He wrote page on page, feeling as though he dipped his pen in his own heart’s blood; but when he came to read what he had written, it was no more what he had meant it to be than a Hortus Siccus is a living garden, or a mummy a live Prometheus. He wrote at last: ‘I cannot bear this banishment in nearness, and if I am not to see you I must go away. I have had a night of fever, and have not slept I dare not trust myself to write, but for pity’s sake let me have an answer by the messenger who brings this.’
He fixed in his mind ten o’clock as the earliest possible hour at which he could venture to have the note delivered, and until then he must needs have patience. When he went to place his missive in the hands of the concierge, with instructions for the time of its delivery, the servants had only just begun to stir about the house. He had come down great-coated and gloved, as if for an early walk, but the walk was no more than a pretext to allay some remotely imaginable suspicion on the part of the concierge.
‘Imust leave this with you now,’ he said, ‘because it must be delivered at ten o’clock precisely, and I shall probably not be able to return till later. The messenger will wait for an answer.’
The man promised that his instructions should be obeyed, and he walked into the streets feeling quite aimless and forlorn, and with the fatigues of the night still heavy on him. He had not gone far when he found a fiacre, and bade the man drive to the Bois and back, and fill up two hours with the journey. Now, the chill morning air and the bright light falling on tired eyes began to work upon him, and in a little while he was peacefully asleep. The cocher awoke him at the door of his hotel. He looked at his watch, and it was ten o’clock to the minute. His heart turned a somersault as he thought that this was the hour at which Gertrude would receive his letter. Breakfast was out of question, but by this time either the Bodega or the English bar would be open, and he needed a stimulant of some sort before he could face an interview if such a favour were to be accorded him. It would be unreasonable to expect that the messenger would return in less than half an hour, and he spent that time in the society of a glass of well-watered absinthe and the English newspapers of yesterday. He read industriously, but the only printed words which reached his consciousness were those of the theatrical advertisement which told him that the joint work of Messrs. George Darco and Paul Armstrong was still being played nightly to crowded houses. That did not interest him in the least, and the news of Parliament and the police courts might as well have been written in Sanscrit for all the impression it made upon him.
He endured his own impatience resolutely for the stated time, and then walked back to the hotel. His messenger had not yet returned, but there in the vestibule was Ralston, in his brigandish sombrero and his black velvet jacket, looking so fit and wholesome that Paul envied him.
‘I have just met two of the boys,’ said Ralston, ‘and we are going to breakfast at the Poule d’Or at twelve o’clock. Will you make one of us? I can promise you good talk, and honest fare, and wholesome wine.’
‘I should like it,’ Paul answered awkwardly; ‘but the fact is, I can’t tell whether I am free to go. I dare say I shall be able to give you an answer in an hour, if that will do?’
‘We must make it do,’ said Ralston, and at that instant Paul’s messenger returned, and handed to him a large envelope of faint saffron tone.
It bore an armorial device on one side in gold and scarlet, and on the other a superscription in a handwriting which had been so trained to affectation that it was recognisable at a glance to anyone who had once seen it.
‘You will excuse me,’ said Paul; ‘I may have to answer this at once.’
He stepped a little on one side and broke the envelope open with the certainty in his mind that Ralston had noticed his eagerness and saw how his fingers trembled. The thick embossed notepaper held three words only, or, rather, two words and an initial: ‘Breakfast, noon.—G.’ His face flushed with triumph, and he turned impulsively on Ralston.
‘I find,’ he said, with a vivacity in strong contrast with his previous manner, ‘that I can’t come to-day, but I hope you’ll give me another chance. Supposing you and your friends are at liberty for this evening, will you bring them to dine with me? I can trust the Poule d’Or; I know it of old.’
‘Good,’ said Ralston. ‘If they are at liberty, we’ll be there. What time shall we say? Seven?’
‘Seven,’ Paul answered brightly.
But a new confusion fell upon him. Not a muscle of Ralston’s swarthy clear-cut face or the full-bearded lips moved, but there was a dancing little demon of not more than half-malicious humour in his eyes.
‘Seven,’ Paul repeated. ‘You’ll excuse me now? You won’t think my haste unfriendly?’
‘My dear fellow!’ cried Ralston, the fun rioting in his eyes by this time, though his features were as still as those of a graven image.
‘Well,’ said Paul, with a desperate, fruitless effort to recover himself, ‘until seven.’
Ralston shook hands and went his way, and Paul raced upstairs two steps at a time and burst into the room he had left less than three hours ago in a mood so cheerless and despondent He kissed the letter and clapped it to his heart, and strolled up and down exulting. He was not to be dismissed; he was not to be sent into the desert, after all.
And, then, what about Ralston? It was really a most unpleasant, a most unlucky, chance which had brought him there at that particular instant. There was no blinking the fact that Ralston had enjoyed Paul’s discomfiture, and his talk of the previous night came back to mind—the fun he had made of the Isolated Soul; his good-humoured allowance for the one foible in the character of a lady whom he had known from childhood, and for whom he professed both affection and esteem. It matters not how impossible a suggestion of this kind may seem to a lover’s mind. His rejection of it with a natural scorn is of no manner of consequence except inasmuch as it confirms his loyalty. The suggestion will stick and will worry, and it will stick the longer and worry the more because it will make the sufferer suspicious of himself. ‘Trust me not at all, or all in all,’ is a native motto for the man of candid soul, and for him an implanted mistrust will not touch his mistress, though it may anguish him with a sense of his own unworthiness.
But—for the time, at least—these things were no more than mere trickeries of self-torment for Paul’s mind, and he was on fire to meet the mid-day. He got out his handsomest morning raiment and brushed it with his own hands, and made a second toilet lest there should be a speck on cuff or collar after the morning’s drive, and then he promenaded the streets at a snail’s pace to kill the hour which intervened between himself and heaven.
Heaven was a trifle chilly when, after all this patient waiting, he reached its portals. Gertrude was like frozen honey. She met him in an exquisite morning confection of the latest Parisian design—a something, to the uninstructed male eye, between a peignoir and a tea-gown, but of costly simplicity, and of colours cunningly suited to match Madame’s complexion in the daylight. The table was exquisitely appointed, but to Paul’s dismay the couverts laid upon it were as for apart as the length of the table would permit. He looked so comically discomfited at this discovery, and his face so easily expressed his disappointment, that Gertrude laughed and relented.
‘Well, M. Paul,’ she said, still laughing, ‘I will make a side-dish of you,’ and with her own pretty hands she re-arranged the table, assigning him a position with great demureness in the exact centre of it.
Paul would have made at least an effort to break through the crust of sweet ice which enveloped her this morning but for the presence of a piquante small brunette of a waiting-maid, who stood on guard, as it were, over a service-table at the end of the apartment.
‘My maid,’ said Gertrude, ‘neither speaks nor understands a word of any language but her own, but I can assure you that she has eyes, and can use them. She invariably attends me at breakfast, and to send her away would be——’
She paused.
‘What would it be? said Paul. ‘Surely Madame la Baronne de Wyeth has the right to choose what form of service she pleases at her own table?’
‘Madame la Baronne,’ replied the lady, with a slight curtsey, ‘has chosen.’
‘But surely, Gertrude——’ Paul began.
She stopped him with a significant gesture of the hand.
‘Not my Christian name this morning, if you please. And remember,’ she added, ‘my little watch-dog there has eyes, as I have already told you, and though she knows nothing of English, I should guess her to be a very fair judge of tone. Come now, you stupid boy,’ she continued in a voice so level and cool that no one who did not understand her words could have guessed their purport, ‘I will make a bargain with you. If you will be kind to me, I will be kind to you. If I receive here a distinguished and handsome young Englishman all alone—if in order to receive him I make a marked alteration in my household appointments—— Come, now, is it worth while to go on with that?’
‘No,’ said Paul, calling his stage practice to his aid, and following her lead,’ it is not worth while; but,’ he added with a ceremonious bow, ‘I shall not break my heart if I must needs go on with Madame la Baronne. The right which you have given me to use a dearer name is so precious to me ‘—he drew out his watch and pretended to compare it with the fairy pendule on the mantel-shelf—‘is so precious,’ he continued, ‘that I cannot resign it, and if I am absolutely driven to it in self-defence, I shall have to invent a dearer name.’
‘Now, that, M. Paul,’ said Madame, with her tone and face of chill sweetness, ‘is excellently well done, except for the one little circumstance that you do not disguise your ardour. I read in your eyes,’ she said as calmly as if she were announcing a trifle of news she had read in the morning’s papers, ‘all the fervour of your mind, and I do not wish to read it there—that is to say, I do not wish my little maid to read it there.’
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘I will try. If you will let me say what I want to say, I will keep a straight face over it.’
‘Within measure,’ said the lady, with a passing touch of gaiety—‘within measure.’
‘Most things have their measure,’ Paul answered, ‘until you come to the crucial matters of the heart, and they go beyond measure.’
The maid broke in at this point to ask if Madame la Baronne would be served.
‘At once,’ said the mistress, and waved Paul to his place. He bowed and took it. The maid served a number of elegant kickshaws, and the grave serving-man who had superintended the dinner-table on the previous evening entered with a bottle of hock in a cradle and stealthily withdrew.
‘You gave me but little time,’ said Gertrude, ‘to prepare for you, but I think you will find that we have done very well. Try that hock, M. Paul.’
Paul looked down his nose, and in a dry-at-dust voice recited the first verse of old Ben’s immortal lyric. His voice quavered a little on the last lines—
‘But might I of Jove’s nectar sip, I would not change from thine!’ and Gertrude broke in with a laugh and an airy little wave of her hand.
‘Now, my dear M. Paul,’ she said, ‘you are really and truly admirable. That is quite perfect, and if you will promise me, upon your sacred word of honour as a man, not to betray me by a word or a look, I will tell you something I never told you before. I have never admired you so much, or loved you so dearly, as I do at this hour. You must believe me,’ she continued, pushing her plate away and beckoning the maid with a slight backward gesture of the head, ‘I hate this tone of persiflage, but what is there left for us if we would be blamelessly alone, and yet speak our hearts to each other?’
‘Madame,’ said Paul, ‘I find it a masterstroke of genius.’ Their tones were ice on both sides, but their words were fire. The maid most probably thought her mistress bored, and the guest a dullard. She had seemed at first interested in the new arrival, but she lapsed now into an attitude of indifference, and the dangerous pretence went on. In this intoxicating whirl of passion, when interchange of vows was offered under the necessity of constant watchfulness and self-guardianship, the meal was not an important matter.
‘But,’ said Gertrude, ‘my dear Paul, you must really do justice to my table; the pretence must be absolute.’
‘I will try to make it so,’ he answered; but the luxurious meal had no more relish for him than if it had been desert sand. He struggled with it manfully, however, and contrived to keep astride his end of the see-saw of pretence.
Who are the best and who the worst of women? Did any man ever venture to impugn the fair fame of Madame la Baronne de Wyeth? Yet, had the devil a better ally anywhere than this delicate little purring white-breasted epicure in the varying flavours of the ruined soul? Oh, the devil is, of course, a symbol! Let the phrase pass.
But the Paul Armstrong of ten years later, perched in his fog-bound eyrie, staring along the unseen gorge? He tells himself that had she been what he believed her, he might have been elsewhere than where he finds himself. There had been but a surface ash upon the seeming ruin of a life. There was something still to build upon, but she must needs destroy what was left. There was wholesome blood in the veins of the man who aspired to rebuild, and it was she who poisoned its fount.
‘“Queen bee of the honey asps,â€â€™ quoth Paul of the eyrie: and he was back in Paris.
He was back at Gertrude’s table, the worshipped, the immaculate Gertrude of those days.
They had reached the end of the repast, and coffee was served in little cups of eggshell china encased in filigree gold.
‘A gift from the Khedive,’ she said, indicating these. ‘Sardou was with me when I was in Alexandria.’ She laughed, and what with her eyes, to which a single glass of the rare hock had given an added sparkle, and what with her faultless teeth, she fairly dazzled on her companion. ‘Yes, that is the creature’s absurd name. Sardou is the solemn personage who has been waiting upon us all the morning, and his godfathers and godmothers had the impertinence to baptize him in the name of Victor. I was telling you that Sardou was with me in Alexandria when the Khedive was so gracious as to offer me this little souvenir, and I implored his Highness that he might be permitted to make a study in coffee in the palace kitchen. He made it, and the result is adorable.Inter alia,’ she said in the same tone, ‘you, too, are adorable this morning, and now I think I may snatch a longed-for moment and tell you so in earnest. Juliette, bring me a letter you will find upon my toilet-table, and call Sardou.’
Juliette tripped out like a stage soubrette, demurely pert from crown to sole. Possibly—just possibly—she guessed; probably she guessed nothing. The suggestion was no more than a suggestion in the mind of the watcher of all these bygone scenes.
Paul rose, but Gertrude waved him back.
‘Not yet,’ she whispered, ‘not yet.’
He sat down again, his senses all awhirl with the aching desire he had to hold her in his arms.
‘You must not allow Sardou’s masterpiece to grow cold,’ said Gertrude; and Juliette came tripping back again, with the grave man at her heels. ‘You will take this to the post,’ said Madame la Baronne, indicating the letter on the salver the maid carried. ‘You will see it registered personally, and bring me the receipt.’
The grave man bowed, and retired, letter in hand.
‘You like your coffee, Mr. Armstrong? And, oh, Juliette, bring to me that last little portfolio of watercolour drawings. You know where you will find them?’
‘But, yes, Madame la Baronne, but they were locked in the escritoire.’
‘You will find the key,’ said the Baroness, sipping her coffee, ‘in my purse. Make haste, for M. Armstrong has but a moment to spare.’
Juliette ran with a swirl of petticoats upstairs. Gertrude followed the footsteps with alert ear and eye. Ear and eye alike seemed to listen. She rose to her feet and stretched her arms with an imploring gesture.
‘Does this make amends to you?’ she murmured. ‘To me it atones for all’
‘No, no; be careful Mind my hair, you silly darling—mind my hair! Shall you be content to wait for this just now and then? Oh, Paul, Paul, Paul! how hard it is! Go now—go. Quickly! Sip your coffee, Paul, and try to look as little unnatural as you can. She is quicker than I fancied. I’ve always a cigar to offer a departing breakfast guest. Juliette, the cigars.’
Juliette laid down the small portfolio she carried, and pricked away a third time.
‘You love me?’ he said hoarsely.
The sound of his own voice was in his ears, after everything that had happened.
‘I adore you!’ she responded. ‘You know it all now. But duty calls you one way and me another. And oh, Paul, “of love that never found its earthly close, what sequel?â€â€™
‘The very words,’ he cried, ‘that ticked in my brain all night’
‘You must look at the portfolio,’ she murmured. ‘Est tu content de moi?
‘Je t’aime!’ and with fumbling fingers he untied the strings of the portfolio.
And now was Paul Armstrong the tame cat of Madame la Baronne de Wyeth, and earned his title well in many cities, from St Petersburg to Cadiz, and from London to Cairo.
It would appear that in the course of time Gertrude grew a little tired of Paul’s ceaseless devotion. It is quite likely that she sometimes found him in the way, and she was deprived of her best conversational theme. It was of no use to try to revive the legend of the Isolated Soul any longer, because of the frequent and earnest confession which had been made of the final discovery of a spiritual rapport absolute and complete. Paul and his angel had lived on terms of so much intimacy that they had earned the right to be acidulous with each other upon occasion. Her pruderies and her abandonments of prudery afforded between them an atmosphere as unwholesome as it was easily possible for a man of fervent temperament to live in. Work of the hard and healthful sort was practically abandoned. There was a good deal of verse-turning done, and an anonymous volume of sonnets entitled ‘Dialogues of the Soul’ made a momentary splash on the surface of the literary deep, and then sank like a pebble to the bottom. The book distilled a faint odour of eroticism, a scent of the epicene; but the degenerates, sniffing it, thought poorly of it because of its want of downright rancidity, and the people of whom crowds are made misliked it for a better reason. Paul, with a diminishing exchequer, found himself aware of the first flat literary failure of his lifetime.
The exchequer failed rapidly, and there were several contributory reasons. In the first place, the Baroness had any amount of money to spend, and it was essential that anyone who aspired to follow her about the capitals of Europe on equal terms should live at a high rate. Then, Annette had proclaimed her rights of freedom, and had escaped from Laurent and his forces, and had run up bills in Paris, and in London, and elsewhere. The most successful of comedies will pass out of vogue. To be idle, to be extravagant in one’s own person, and to be milked perpetually by the extravagance of another—could better ways to ruin be discovered?
The two had their first real tiff at Naples on a Christmas Eve. Gertrude had set up a sheep-dog in the person of one Mrs. Diedrich, a sour and sallow remnant of New England fashion and beauty, a lady who both on her husband’s side and her own claimed all the splendours of Knickerbocker descent. The husband was dead, the fortune—except for a meagre bone or two with little meat thereon—was eaten all away. Mrs. Diedrich and the sympathetic Gertrude’s mother had been friends. There was nothing more natural or more befitting than that the wealthy Baroness de Wyeth should find an asylum for this superannuated slave of fortune, though Paul knew perfectly well that she was no more than a buckler against scandal at the first. But reasonable as he was compelled to admit such a precaution to be, he was not very long in discovering that the impoverished lady was a buckler against himself, and that she was used to prevent that old familiar laying of heads together, and the old familiar communion of hearts, in which, by dint of careful manoeuvring, a bare sixty seconds might sometimes he snatched for a solitude of two.
There should have been a drive that afternoon—Gertrude and Paul, with Mrs. Diedrich to play gooseberry—and Mrs. Diedrich had fallen ill. Paul presented himself at the appointed hour, and no Gertrude was there to meet him. Instead of the Presence a note couched in the chilliest terms:
‘Dear Friend,
‘Mrs. Diedrich is shockingly unwell to-day, and I cannot leave her. Profoundest regrets for a lost pleasure.
‘Sincerely, ‘G. de W.’
‘My luck!’ said Paul bitterly to himself; for he had been more than once disappointed of late. But he found grace enough to express his sorrow, send his compliments and good wishes, and to withdraw. He went strolling about in unknown ways, with all manner of unpleasant things to think of. He not only made his momentary disappointment the greatest of them all, but strove to make it so. And yet the others would intrude. Here was a letter from Darco expressing grave disappointment with the end of the second act of their latest piece. Darco coughing up his stammering gutturals as a speaker of English was one man, and Darco with a pen in his hand was another.
‘It crumbles,’ wrote the critic, ‘at the very instant at which it should triumph. It is vague, unconvincing, wrong. You leave me unanswered for six whole weeks, and at the end you send me this incoherent sandheap, when your promises had given me the right to expect a solid piece of well-worked marble. I do not know whether you are well or ill, whether you desire to continue the work or no. All of which I am certain is that the piece is wanted for March, and that we cannot work together at this distance. I will meet you where you like—Paris, Brussels, Vienna, London, Hong Kong. It is all one to me so long as I get you back to work in time. But, for whatever reason, this second act is so written that it will not do. And I cannot wait I am a poet, but I am a poet without a language. If you will not be my interpreter, I must find another. Is friendship friendship, or is business business? In the name of both I ask you to meet me and to work with me.’
Look at it how he would, and distort his own perspective as he might, Darco’s angry and outspoken appeal was larger than anything his duty to Gertrude might ask of him. But, to tell the whole truth, his sense of duty was his curse, because the sense itself had grown distorted. Because of some rooted infirmity of character, he must needs be true to the ideal which least merited truth. He saw this fact throughout his career. He had bowed at foolish shrines. Gertrude—oh yes, Gertrude was impeccable. But just as he was wasting the heart of ardent manhood now, he had wasted the heart of youth and the heart of boyhood The career was all of a piece. Born to be fooled, whether by a village coquette, or his own loftiest, or his own lowest, or by practisedfemme de feuandfemme de glacein one—always born to be fooled, frustrated, enticed to the throwing away of real passion and of real power.
And over and above all these, arrange them in what imaginary perspective he might choose, the sordid side of things, the bills—bills from lodging-house keepers of the better sort, from hotels, from milliners, and from modistes—and the shrinking exchequer, which barely, when all claims were satisfied, would leave him so much as two hundred and fifty pounds.
What had his year and a half of dalliance brought him? A dream of pleasure, a desert ache of hunger, an occasional delirious spur to appetite. Now, what in the name of common-sense is the good of it all? And is Gertrude any better, after all, than an innocent Delilah, trapping no Samson, but a fool unmuscled, who has no strength to break the weakest of her withes? Innocent Delilah! He never profaned her in his thought.
But in this mood—with his conscience, literary-artistic and simply human, entirely endorsing old Darco’s reproof of his work and his evasions; with a financial crevasse at his feet, and Annette chopping away his standing-place, and his own extravagances melting his foothold like butter in the sun; with a barren future staring him in the face—he was disposed alike to remorse and penitence.
The city in which he rambled was strange to him, and, according to his fashion when absorbed in thought, he took any turning which suggested itself, and lost himself in a labyrinth of byways. He had done the same kind of thing in a hundred towns and cities without any result worth mentioning, but just for once he was destined to find a purpose wrapped up in the folds of this simple habit.
He was plodding along miserably enough, and did not know whether he were at Naples or the North Pole, when a familiar voice awoke him from his bitter reveries, and he looked about him to discover that he was between a high wall and & hedge of aloes on a strip of grass which had no pathway on it, and apparently led nowhere. He had a vague idea that he had set out in this direction upon a footpath more or less distinct, and making avolte-face, he saw that the path had come to a termination at a door in the high wall a wicket’s length behind him.
The voice he had heard was the voice of Gertrude, and the words it had spoken were: ‘Ah! but my dear friend, that inevitable, that unceasing isolation of the mind!’
A swift pang of jealousy ran through him, and he listened with an almost fierce anxiety. There was nothing in his nature to induce him to play the eavesdropper, but he could not have refrained from listening just then had it been to save his soul. Some deep undetermined murmur of a voice in answer seemed to reach his ears, but they were drumming so to the startled music of his heart that his sense failed to record it. He went back swiftly and stealthily to the spot at which the pathway terminated, and there he found an old green-painted door in a small archway in the wall. It half drooped upon its rusty hinges, and across the gap it left between its own rim and the postern, he had view enough to tell him whither his rambling footsteps had led him. He was looking at the terraced gardens in the rear of the Baroness’s hotel, and whilst he looked Gertrude herself floated into sight. Some trifle of a lace mantilla was thrown over her head, and in her right hand she balanced a parasol daintily between thumb and finger. Her companion was a man apparently of middle age, frock-coated, silk-hatted, booted and gloved as if for Rotten Row. He bore himself with an air of distinction, and the looker-on saw the gloved hand caress a big moustache of sweeping silver. The owner of the moustache was bending over the Baroness with an unmistakable air of gallant attention, and Paul’s blood boiled within him. He had no real sense of the impulse which moved him, and no calculation as to what might happen; but he pushed the door aside, and, entering the garden, walked along the gravelled main path which led to the hotel. He made a feint of holding his head straight, and of looking neither to left nor right, but he watched Gertrude and her companion with a keen sidelong glance. His brisk footstep set a pebble rolling in the pathway, and a second later he heard his own name called. A low-growing orange-tree, all lustrous with globes of green and gold and shiny leafage, had intercepted his view of the pair for just the instant which intervened between the sound and the call.
‘Mr. Armstrong,’ said Gertrude’s voice, ‘Mr. Armstrong!’ He turned in a pretence of amazement, and, hat in hand, crossed a small space of turf.
‘I had just sent round to you,’ said the smiling little lady, ‘at your hotel.’ She transferred the parasol to her left hand, and held out the right in an almost effusive greeting. ‘I suppose you have not been back yet?’
‘No,’ Paul answered. ‘I have been walking and had lost myself, until I recognised the garden through the open door yonder. Then I made sure of myself again, and thought I might secure a short-cut home.’
‘How fortunate!’ said Gertrude, smiling; ‘and how curious, too!’ she added. ‘At the very moment at which I caught sight of you your name was in my mind. Are you a believer in the Aura, Colonel Brunton—the something which envelops personality and diffuses itself in such a manner that you recognise a friend’s presence before you are made aware of it by sight or hearing? Don’t you recognise the reality of those things? But, oh, I forgot! You gentlemen are, I am afraid, strangers to each other. This is Colonel Brunton, our great traveller in the Himalayas and Thibet, and this is Mr. Paul Armstrong, the author of I dare not say how many charming books and comedies—Mr. Darco’s collaborateur.’
‘Whose work,’ said Colonel Brunton in a voice typically American, but profoundly deep, ‘I have, bafore my trip to Asia, seen performed with a splendid eclaw both in London and New York. I am proud to meet you, Mr. Armstrong.’
He was a rugged man, brown as a sun-burned brick, with a cascading moustache of silver, jet-black eyebrows, and eyes which danced defiance at his gray hairs and wrinkles. Paul could do no less than accept the hearty hand he offered, and Gertrude set herself to soothe him.
‘You know,’ she said, laying her finger-tips upon his arm, ‘you are a very inattentive cavalier, Mr. Armstrong. Poor Mrs. Diedrich was taken ill so suddenly and alarmingly that I had time to do no more than just to scribble that little hasty note to you. You might at least have paused to make inquiry.’
‘That would never have done,’ said Paul ‘One does not inquire into a lady’s decision at any moment.’
He spoke with a capital assumption of gaiety, but to the keen instinct of that experienced trifler with hearts it was an assumption only, and Gertrude turned the question with the easy skill of a woman of the world.
‘Those geological researches now,’ she said, with a charming air of mocking schoolgirl ignorance about such matters. ‘Do you really mean to tell me that right away in the Himalayas you found the same little protozoic blot in the same limestone that you find in our own Andes? Has that little creature really built the mountains of the world? Why, it is the story of the Coral Islands over again; but on what an enormous scale, ‘Dear me, what creatures of a day we are!’
Colonel Brunton, who, as it appeared, was a member of many learned societies, and a most indefatigable besieger of the world’s inaccessible places, turned out to be a man of so much simplicity, sincerity, and charm, and Gertrude drew him to his best so skilfully, that it was not easy to be sulky for a long time together in his society. It was Paul’s cue to disguise himself as far as possible, and this delightful American helped him greatly. He could barely think of the man as a rival; he was so very upright, downright complimentary.
‘Why, Lord!’ he said once in the course of that afternoon’s talk, ‘when you were in short frocks, and I was over head and ears in love with you——’
The Baroness snatched a fan which girdled her, and tapped him with it reprovingly.
‘Well,’ he said, twinkling, ‘when all is said and done, habit is the conqueror. I got into that habit when you were a baby: twenty years ago, I’ll swear, though it’s not legitimate, I know, to guess a lady’s age. I’ve found a new habit since—a Satanic habit—of going to and fro about the earth, and roaming up and down on it, but I have never forgotten the old one.’
The Baroness laughed and made fun of this proclamation, which was accompanied by certain old-fashioned bows and flourishes of deportment.
‘But now,’ she said, ‘I must really run away and look after my patient, and must leave you, gentlemen, to console each other for my loss. I left Mrs. Diedrich asleep, and could just afford to snatch half an hour for so old a friend as you, Colonel If you care to come back and have tea with me at six, I shall be glad to meet you, if I may dare run away again. But if Ishouldbe compelled to send down my excuses, you will understand.’
She had already started a movement towards the hotel, and the two men sauntered along with her, one on either side. She left them in the flower-perfumed dimness of the shaded hall, and the whole business of the afternoon had by this time so explained and reconciled itself to Paul’s mind that he would have been a brute to fret about it longer.
‘I say,’ said the Colonel, ‘I have been for three years outside civilization, and I should like a John Collins. I came here last night by the Messagerie Maritime. They are good people, and they cook as well as anybody can be expected to cook outside the United States, but their ideas of drink are curiously simple. Can you be my guide, Mr. Armstrong?’
‘Need I guide you farther?’ asked Paul ‘I should fancy that your materials are to be found here in an absurd plenty, and if you have a skilful hand——’
‘Sir,’ said the Colonel, with a burlesque flourish, interrupting him, ‘there is not a man from Marble Head to the Golden Gate who can make a John Collins to compare with mine.’
Paul knew the house, and led his new acquaintance to a shady veranda where a polyglot waiter chipped his ice to his fancy, found him lemon, pounded sugar, fresh mint, square-faced Hollands, and syphon-water, and left the Colonel compounding in a high state of content.
‘This is like home,’ he said, ‘bar the celestial straw, the use of which these blahsted Continentals have not learned. This is quite like home. Three years I have been roughing it, up hill and down dale, camp and field Seen a little bit o’fightin’ on the Burmah side ‘long of your British troops.
Mr. Armstrong; better boys I donotwant to meet And here’s to them and you, sir. But, Lord!’—he caressed his tumbler with a lean brown hand, and looked contemplatively into space—‘I must smoke. Try a Burmese cigarette, sir. Lord ‘I land here last night after three years. I just break my journey on the way to London, and I run against the little girl that broke my heart when I was fifteen years of age, and broke it again when I was one-and-twenty, and would just go on breaking it for the mere fun of the thing for the next million years, if she and me could only live as long.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Paul, in a cold insolence which made him hot to think of a thousand times later, ‘have you been drinking?’
‘Well, I guess,’ said Mr. Brunton, and, leaning back in his deck-chair, drew a great volume of smoke into his lungs, expelled it in a cloud, and laughed; ‘after a three years’ drought, the man who is not game to drink deserves to go dry. But, by Heaven, sir, to strike up against that mighty little flirt after a space of fifteen years—to come across it all again by accident! Look here! I land out of theGrande Marie de Luxembourgat Naples, with no more idea of revivin’ old times than of escapin’ into the next century, and who’s the first person that I meet but little Gertie, and what’s the first word that I hear but the isolation of the soul!’
Paul sat in a chill, tense agony.
‘I was,’ said the Colonel, growing more and more clearly articulate in accordance with his needs, ‘about as full up as any Christian need be when I landed, and I was going to bed like a clean Christian gentleman. Then I ran up against Gertie. I have been Turkish bathed, I have been sluiced and washed and shaved and perfumed, and I can stand and talk straight. What do you say? What would you have said about me amongst the oranges and lemons in the garden there?’ He sat up in a momentary fierceness. ‘Am I intoxicated, or, at least, was I till I turned the lock-gate winch and set the waters foaming? No, sir, but in that profoundly philosophic observation of life your works declare you will have observed the state in which a man becomes drunk-sober.
He brims over after that stage. That I allow. He brims over, sir—he brims over, sir. If it is of any humorous value to you to make observations of the present case,Iam brimming over, sir.’
The clean-cut, travel-hardened, sun-stained man was slipping from his original place in Paul’s mind, like a statue built in clay too soft to support its own weight. He slipped at the chin, at the mouth, at the base of the nostril, at the eyebrow, and yet, in spite of these deflections from the original, he appeared to recover himself with an extraordinary swiftness at moments, and to be again the alert, adventurous creature of the woods and wilds his extraordinary career proclaimed him.
It was in a moment of supreme sobriety that he touched Paul’s arm and said:
‘I’ll tell you all about little Gertie right away.’