Paul Armstrong--the real Paul Armstrong who dreamed these dreams of
memory--sat day by day in his mountain solitude surrounded by the
smoke-fog which obliterated all but the nearer objects from his view. He
could faintly distinguish the bluff on the other side of the cañon. It
was like a pale, flat, and barely perceptible stain on grayish-brown
paper. The mountains were all abolished, but their ghostly voices lived.
Here and there the slumbering heat upon their flanks would provoke a
snow-slide, and the long-drawn roar and rumble of it would go rolling
and echoing apparently in a dozen regions all at once, so that it would
be impossible to tell from what direction the original sound proceeded.
Two voices of the solitude were ceaseless--the reverberating roar of the
river and the chatter of the mountain brook which ran to meet it; but
in ears long accustomed to them they seemed to weave a silence of their
own. Twice a day, at least, his sole reminders of the living, pulsing
outer world went by. Sometimes as the panting train rushed east or west,
its reminder of the world from which he had parted brought a bitter pang
with it.
He found but little occupation for his hands, and, apart from his
memories, little for his mind. He read and reread his father’s dying
words until he knew them by rote, and could read them with shut eyes as
he lay in his blanket in the wakeful hours of night. He would not admit
to himself that he had a real belief in their message, and yet it was
always with him in a fainter or a stronger fashion, and it made a part
of life.
It was not merely that he had little to do and little to think about
apart from his memories, that he dwelt so constantly upon them. He
thought often that there was something within himself which led him
gently yet inexorably to these contemplations, and it happened more than
once that while he was in the very act of thinking thus his dream came
upon him as if a spell had been cast upon his mind Forgotten emotions
lived again; facial expressions of people he had known; tones of
voices not remarkable, and not much remarked, came back. It was like
a curiously vivid dream; but it had all happened, and he was living it
over again.
Bring what intellectual denial he would to the problem his father’s
letter had set before his mind, his nerves at least accepted it, and
he had a settled consciousness that he was not alone. He fought against
this as a mere superstitious folly. He was often angry with himself for
ever stooping to discuss it in his own mind. He had long ago resolved
that the man dies as the beast dies, and that there is no more a bourne
of new life for the one than for the other. And now all manner of doubts
began to pester him. No more for the one than for the other? Why not for
all? Why not one unending cycle of experience? Why not the passing of
one growing intelligence through every form of life? The Eastern sages
dreamed so.
He would sit there at his tent door buried deep in his thoughts, and
often, without his being able to trace the faintest sign of any action
in his own mental mechanism, his father’s voice would wake him with an
interjection of, ‘Exactly!’ or ‘That’s the point, Paul!’ There was no
sound, and yet the voice was there, and the old familiar Ayrshire accent
seemed to mark it as strongly as it had done in his father’s lifetime.
It was all very well to deride it as a mere delusion; it was easy to
put it on one side for a moment and to stand over it in an intelligent
superiority, tracking it to its sources in some obscure action of nerve
and brain. But howsoever often he might eject belief from his mind, it
came back with a clinging, gentle insistence which would not be denied;
and little by little, though sorely against his will, he began to have a
sence of it. A verse of ‘In Memoriam ‘was often in his mind:
‘How pure in heart, and sound in head,
With what divine affections bold,
Should be the man whose heart would hold
An hour’s communion with the dead.’
He began at last to think that his own unfitness for such a communion
helped him to his disbelief in its possibility, and from that hour the
feeling of his father’s nearness weighed more and more upon him.
Sitting at his tent door hour on hour, feeling himself, with the passage
of each day, more completely isolated from the world, he seemed forced
to a clear appreciation of the inner truth of his own retrospect; and,
so far as any exercise of will was concerned, he found it a record of
folly and weakness. There had been hours of high good fortune there, but
they had been barely of his seeking, and of his own actual making not at
all. Folly and weakness had stung him many and many a time, but it was
not until he had reached the last recorded effort of memory that they
had laid a weight upon his shoulders. Now he knew that he had tied a
millstone about his neck; that he had permanently denied to himself all
the sweet and vivifying influences of the higher social life. Sometimes
detached from him, as though it watched from outside and waited for
further confessions from his memory, and sometimes seeming an intimate
part of him, as if it were a constituent of that desolate ache which
filled and possessed his soul, there was always there the image of the
gray old father, wistful, sagacious, patient--no ghost, but veritably
a haunting thought, and at last, in spite of all contention, as real to
him as his own hands. Yet when he went back to his dreams his obsession
vanished, and it was only in the pauses of his vision that it returned.
Here were the dreams again.
He had come to understand quite clearly that a trick had been played
upon him, but he was not constantly unhappy in its contemplation, or
altogether resentful at it Annette improved in health with a startling
rapidity, and he had the doctor’s assurance on that head.
‘Mrs. Armstrong is as sound as a roach, sir, and will probably outlive
either of us.’
‘That is well,’ said Paul, and he set himself to bear the burden he had
gathered.
At this time he found the greatest happiness in work, and alike with
Darco, and for his own hand, he laboured unceasingly. Money came
fast--more money than he had ever hoped for. Fame came also, in a
fashion, and many genial societies were open to him. But Annette was not
a person to be defrauded of anything she conceived to be a right, and
he soon found upon how slight a thread domestic content might hang.
Invitations to Mr. Paul Armstrong were plentiful, but of Mrs. Paul
Armstrong his world had no knowledge outside the jolly bachelor
contingent which overflowed house and table upon Sundays. When these
single invitations came Annette invariably retired to her bedroom, and,
having locked herself in there, refused to hold any sort of intercourse
with Paul.
‘My dear,’ he would say to soothe her, ‘I am not going without you; but
I can’t force people to invite you, and we must just make the best of
things.’
So he grew to be something of a hermit; and all on a sudden he resolved
to cut himself adrift from England, and to live abroad. Before his
wanderings were over, he was destined to know Europe pretty thoroughly;
but at this time his knowledge of it was limited to Paris, and here and
there a bit of Northern France. He would break new ground. Antwerp would
do as well as any other city for a starting-place, and within a day or
two of the hour at which the fancy first occurred to him he was ready to
start He crossed by the _Baron Osy_, took rooms in a hotel on the Groen
Plate, and lived and worked there for a month or two under the dropping
music of the cathedral chimes. The outfit of a man of letters is the
simplest in the world. With a ream of writing-paper, a pint of ink, and
sixpennyworth of pens, he is professionally provisioned for half a
year. Paul had no need to be in personal touch either with publisher or
stage-manager, and he knew his absence from England to be unmarked and
unregretted. Annette and he seemed to get on well enough together. There
was no real communion between them. Paul was all on fire about his work,
and she had no more comprehension of his thoughts than a canary-bird
would have had. But it was not possible for a man of his temperament to
live constantly under the same roof, and to sit daily at the same
table with anybody, male or female, without developing some kind of
camaraderie. Mrs. Armstrong seemed to like the life fairly well, and to
find a pleasure in the fleeting society of the birds of passage who
went and came. She had dresses to her heart’s content, and in her pretty
gelid way enjoyed a good deal of popularity; but by-and-by, as summer
again drew near, she wearied of her surroundings, and incited Paul to
move. The work on which he had been engaged was finished and disposed
of; there were a good many loose hundreds at the bank, and more were
coming. He was ready for a holiday, and for Annette’s sake was willing
to persuade himself that he was in need of one. So in May weather they
set off to make a round of the old Flemish country--Ghent, and Bruges,
and Aix, and Mechlin. Thence they slid on to Namur, working slowly
towards Switzerland in Paul’s fancy, but stopping by mere hazard at
Janenne, and being by a very simple accident enticed some four or five
miles from the main line of their route to Montcourtois. They had been
drawn aside in the first place to visit the famous grottoes of Janenne,
and the jolly old _doyen_ of Montcourtois was their fellow-passenger in
the brake which conveyed them to the station. The old priest was a man
of learning, and in his day he had travelled, and had known the world.
Paul and he fell into animated converse, and struck up an immediate
liking for each other. It turned out, curiously enough, that, though the
old gentleman had lived for twenty years within half a dozen miles of
the wonderful grottoes, he had never been prompted to visit them until
now. He was on the way to wipe out his reproach, and by the time
the sight-seeing was over Paul found himself so fascinated by his
simplicity, his bonhomie, and the charming, varied stream of his talk,
that he must needs invite the old gentleman to dinner at the Hotel of
the Three Friends, where preparations for his own reception for the
night had been made. The old priest accepted the invitation at once, and
early evening found them the only occupants of a great salon in which
a hundred people might have dined with case. A brass lamp, suspended by
chains from the ceiling, illumined their corner of the’ centre table,
and at the far end of the room a big stove bloomed red-hot all round
like a magnified cherry. These preparations were scarcely needed, for
the air was balmy, the windows were open, and the sky was yet full of
the evening light of early summer. The voice of a stream not far away
ran on with a ceaseless, light-hearted babble, and through the open
windows the one street of the village was visible until it swerved away
to the left There are a thousand villages like Montcour-tois; but it was
the first of its genus Paul had known, and he found a quiet charm in it
The Hotel of the Three Friends stood in the Place Publique, dominated
by a brand-new town-hall; but all the rest of the place was quaint and
old-fashioned. All the houses were distempered in various colours, and
all their architects had worked after the decrees of the destinies, so
that the street-line itself was full of gable-ends, and the edifices
faced in as many directions as was possible. A sturdy, thick-set village
girl, neat as a new pin, with cheeks hard and red, and shining like
hard red apples, brought in the soup--a _soupe à la bonne femme_,
and admirable of its kind--brought in a dish of fresh-caught trout
excellently fried; followed this with veal cutlets; with a tart, and a
local cheese which, though it had no fame beyond its own borders, was a
surprise for an epicure. With the fish came a dusty, cobwebbed bottle
in a cradle, and at the sight of it the _doyen_ lifted his eyebrows,
and faintly smacked his lips. Paul, in ordering dinner, had asked the
square-built Flemish waitress:
‘You have Burgundy?
‘But yes, sir,’ the girl had answered, ‘and of the best.’
‘Bring me a bottle of your best,’ Paul had said, and had thought no more
of the matter.
But when the venerable cleric so twinkled at the sight of the dusty
flagon in the threadbare bid wicker cradle, he was tempted to ask if
they had anything very special before them.
‘My dear sir,’ returned the _doyen_, ‘it is a wine for an Emperor, and
if I may be permitted to tell you so, its appearance is attributable to
my presence here.’
It was a noble vintage, and the _doyen_ grew eloquent over it.
‘It is here in the Ardennes,’ he said, ‘that you find the best Burgundy
of the world. We have no vineyards of our own, though, if tradition can
be trusted, they grew a good grape here hundreds of years ago; but we
have cellarage, and here beneath our feet is a vault cut out of the
living rock, the temperature of which does not vary one degree Reaumur
on the hottest day in summer and the coldest night in winter. That is
the right harbour for such a craft as this to sail into.’ He touched
the bottle affectionately with the tips of his beautifully-trimmed white
fingers. ‘You must not take me for a wine-bibber,’ he said smilingly,
‘but all gifts of God are good, and this is the best that Heaven affords
in this direction.’
Paul rang the bell no great time later, and called for a second bottle.
The _doyen_ protested, but with a discernible faintheartedness. He
talked of vintages as the twilight fell and the lamp beamed more
brightly on the snowy napery. Well, he had travelled, he had seen
the world, he had been young. Of all wines in the world for him
Johannesberg. One bottle, one truly imperial bottle, he remembered.
‘It was a physician of Paris, the most eminent, who travelled for his
pleasure, and whose acquaintance I made in Rome. It is very long ago.
The Holy Father was suffering agonies, and he endured them like a hero.
But everybody feared that he was dying, and our Roman doctors could
make nothing of the case at all. It occurred to somebody to speak to His
Holiness of the doctor Gaston. The physicians in attendance were glad
to invite him, and by a very simple and almost painless operation he
removed the seat of trouble, and in a week His Holiness was himself
again. His Holiness was full of gratitude, and would gladly have paid
any fee the doctor had chosen to name. But he would have no fee at all.
He was not a good son of the Church, but he was an excellent Christian
all the same, and it was his pride to have restored so valuable a
life. Gaston told me the whole story. “My child,” said the Pope, “some
souvenir of your own skill and kindness you shall accept from me; I
insist upon it.” Then the good doctor hardened his heart, and he said:
“I am for these many years a collector of wines, and I have in Paris my
little cellar, which is without its rival for its size. But there is
one treasure which I cannot buy, nor beg, nor steal. It is the Imperial
Johannes-berg. It goes alone to the crowned heads of Europe and to your
Holiness. Rothschild cannot buy it with his millions. If I may beg but a
bottle----” And His Holiness laughed, and “My good son,” he said, “you
shall have a dozen.” And Papa was better than his word, for he sent
thirteen. Gaston,’ continued the ancient priest, laying a hand on the
listener’s sleeve, ‘had six friends in Rome, of whom I was one. He
resolved that the thirteenth bottle should be expended, and that he
would store the rest We assembled--ah! my son, we assembled. There were
little glasses of fair water handed round and cubes of bread like dice,
and we sipped and nibbled, that our palates might be clean. Then the
bottle was brought in with the tray of glasses, the right Rhine
wine-glasses of pale green, with the vine-leaves and grape-bunches
about the stem. And the bottle was opened, and---- You know your Scott?
Do you remember how the bottle of claret “parfumèd ze apartment”? Oh, it
was so when that cork was drawn! Odours of flowers and old memories! It
was nectar when we came to taste it It was of the kingliest, the most
imperial.’
Paul filled the priest’s glass again and replenished his own, but the
old man rose laughingly from the table.
‘I am something of a poet,’ he said, ‘in my imaginations, but I do not
carry my fancies into practice. No more wine to-night.’
Paul pressed him, but the old gentleman was firm. He yielded to the
temptation of coffee and a cigar, and the two went on talking of trifles
for half an hour. Annette had long since risen from the table, and had
strolled to the far end of the room beyond the glowing stove. She had
thrown open a French window there, and had stood for some time looking
out upon the night when she called for Paul.
‘Come here; I want to speak to you.’
Paul excused himself, and obeyed the summons. Beyond the French window
lay a little alcove, about which a barren but full-leaved vine was
trailed. The sky was still filled with a diffuse light, and the May
moon, pale as yet, was rising like a silver canoe above the edge of a
hill a mile away.
‘Paul,’ said Annette, ‘I want to stay here. There’s a sort of peace
about the place, and I should like to be here for a little while.’
‘Well, dear,’ he answered, ‘there are worse places in the world.’
‘No,’ she whispered, drawing him down to her; ‘I want to tell you
something.’ With her arm about his neck, she breathed into his ear:
‘There are only two of us, Paul; you must look out for a third.’
He turned her face to his, and he saw that her eyes were moist and that
her face was pale. The momentous thing had been prettily said, as if
only a touch of fun and a touch of commonplace could make the sacredness
of it bearable to either. In that second he forgot everything.
Indifference melted, vanished, and he took her in his arms with a
feeling he had never known before. How long they stood there he could
not have told, but the voice of the priest awoke him from his thoughts.
‘I am afraid, Monsieur Armstrong,’ said the _doyen_, ‘that I delay my
departure too long.’
‘Go to bed, darlipg,’ Paul whispered. ‘Good-night. I’ll make your
excuses. You mustn’t show up before strangers with a face like that.’
He pressed his lips to hers, took both hands ardently in his own for a
second, and walked hastily back into the _salle à manger_. The _doyen_
stood with his beaver on the table before him, and his white hands
smoothing the folds of his soutane.
‘I beg your pardon,’ cried Paul, ‘but my wife called me away. She is
suffering from some slight indisposition, and we have made up our minds
to rest here for a little while.’
‘Indisposition!’ cried the priest; ‘I am sorry to hear that. But in one
respect you are fortunate. Here in this _infecte_ little village--you
would barely believe it, but ‘tis true--we have the king of all European
doctors. Shall I bring him to you?’
‘Are you indeed so fortunate? Paul asked laughingly. ‘Bring him by all
means.’
‘There is nothing pressing about the case? the _doyen_ asked.
‘Nothing pressing,’ Paul responded.
‘The morrow will do, then?’
‘The morrow will do admirably.’
The old priest withdrew with a cordial hand-shake, and Paul lit a cigar
and sat down to look at the newly-revealed position of affairs. The
alliance between Annette and himself had been of the most trivial sort,
and he had condemned himself for it a thousand times. But now a new
feeling took possession of him, and she had grown suddenly sacred in his
eyes. The burden which had sometimes galled him had grown welcome in a
single instant.
The doctor came next day, a rotund man of benevolent aspect, with
little smiling slits of eyes slightly turned up at the outer end, like a
Chinaman’s. He was familiarly known in the village as Le Chinois. But it
did not take Paul long to learn that, in spite of the nickname, he was
idolized by every inhabitant of the district for miles round. He was a
man of private income, and all his professional earnings were spent upon
his poor. In a fortnight Paul and he were thick as thieves. Le Chinois
had travelled extensively, and appeared to be on terms of intimacy with
the literature of every European people. He had not the faintest idea of
the pronunciation of the English language, but he wrote it currently and
with some approach to elegance, and his knowledge of English letters put
Paul to shame. With all his learning and his philosophic agnosticism, he
was as simple-hearted as a child. Annette took the greatest fancy to him
and welcomed his visits, and played round him with a sprightliness her
husband had never before observed in her. ‘She is changing,’ he thought,
‘and changing for the better.’ The new conditions seemed as if they
brought new life and developed a novel character. But he noticed that
her outbursts of gaiety were followed invariably by deep depression. She
would sit in the garden in the dusk of the early summer evenings alone,
and if her solitude were intruded upon would wave him away without a
word. It irritated her at such times even to be looked at, and Paul,
deeply anxious for the time being to fall in with her every whim, would
betake himself to the little café opposite, and chat there with the
simple village folk. Sometimes M. le Prince, a scion of one of the
noblest houses of Europe, who lived in retirement on an income of some
three hundred sterling per annum, would drop in and sip his little
glass of orgeat, and chatter with the peasants about crops and weather.
Sometimes the doctor would spend a spare half-hour there in the evening,
and sometimes the venerable _doyen_ himself, though he never actually
entered the house except upon a pastoral visit, would take a seat
outside and drink his after-dinner coffee amongst the members of his
flock.
Always after these quiet dissipations when Paul went home he found
Annette asleep, and in a very little while each day became like another,
and a routine was established. Annette was invariably a little fatigued
in the morning, but brightened as the day went on. She was vivacious in
the afternoon; by dinner-time she was in feverish high spirits. After
dinner she became depressed and moody. Paul, observing these symptoms
with tender interest, attributed them all to her condition, and assumed
that they were natural.
But one evening in mid-June an incident happened which for a time gave
him genuine concern. Since he had resolved to settle in the village
for some time, he had rented a small office in the hotel, which he had
transformed into a study, and there he spent most of his waking time at
work. On this particular day he had gone to his den immediately after
luncheon, and had grown so absorbed in his labours that the dinner-bell
had sounded unheard. He was aroused from his work by the apple-cheeked
maid, and was told that dinner was already served. He dashed upstairs
two steps at a time, laved his hands and face, and descended to the
dining-room. Annette was not there. He inquired for her, and learned
that she had gone out an hour or two before and had not yet returned.
This caused him no anxiety, for she had made some acquaintances in the
place, and had one or two houses at which she was accustomed to visit
But when the meal was over and there was still no sign of her, he began
to be vaguely inquiet, and, taking up his hat, he walked out into the
tranquil brightness of the summer evening, and called from house to
house to ask after her. But Madame Bulot had not seen her, nor had
Madame Gerard, nor had the doctor, nor had little Mademoiselle Coquelin,
the dressmaker. Madame Armstrong had been observed on the road which led
to the Bois de Falaise some four hours ago, and that was the latest news
of her. The vague inquiet began to deepen into serious misgiving. Paul
walked rapidly to the Terre de Falaise, scoured the broad carriage-drive
which had been cut through the wood, beat up one or two favourite little
haunts of Annette’s, and found no trace of her. He returned to the
hotel, only to learn that she had not been seen. A terror of a thousand
imagined accidents took hold of him, and he flew to the gendarmerie with
intent to organize a search. But while he was discussing ways and means
with the Juge d’Instruction, who had been hastily sent for from next
door, a stable-keeper from the hotel ran up to inform him that Madame
had been found, that she had been evidently dreadfully frightened, and
was in hysterics. When he reached the hotel, breathless, he found a
group of startled people in the corridor, and from the bedroom he could
hear Annette’s voice shrieking that they were dancing in the wood,
and that their bones were white. He pushed eagerly through the knot of
listeners, and made his way into the bedroom. The doctor was there, and
warned him away at once.
‘You can do no good here,’ he said; ‘you will only distress yourself.’
‘There is no danger?’ he asked, panting after his homeward run.
‘There is not the slightest atom of danger,’ said the doctor.