Here, in the wakeful night, high up in the monstrous hills, with this
everlasting torrent raging in his ears, and the camp-fire out of doors
there flaring, flickering, glowing, dying down--here in the fog of the
forest fires and the solitude of the mountains, it is so easy to see
things as they truly were. A shrug, a smile, a word, a silence, the lift
of an eyebrow--things which had no apparent meaning a dozen years ago,
which were either unnoticed or forgotten in an instant--are alive
with monitions now. Not to have seen! Not to have guessed ‘It looks
incredible. A mule might have begun to read the riddle.
Paul read nothing.
And now, looking back from this smoky eyrie through all the intervening
years, it seems as if the tragedy of a life might have been averted, as
if a little weight, a little prescience, a little care, might have made
the sum of life work out to a far other total.
There has been no star visible in the heavens, nor any glimpse of a
moon for four nights. The sun is the dimmest red ball in the daytime,
a danger-signal lantern, seen through dirty glass. There is a yeast at
work in the Solitary’s mind It is as if the material universe being
cut away from him--save just this solid remnant of it in which he
lounges--there were space found for something not belonging to it to
draw near him.
Over and over again the lonely man had read his father’s last letter,
and now in the hot, oppressive midnight it repeated itself in his mind:
‘At my father’s death a change began to work in my opinions. I had
convinced myself that this life was all that man enjoyed or suffered,
but I began to be conscious that I was under tutelage. I began--at first
faintly and with much doubting--to think that my father’s spirit and my
own were in communion. I knew that he had loved me fondly, and to me he
had always seemed a pattern of what is admirable in man. Now he seemed
greater, wiser, milder. I grew to believe that he had survived the
grave, and that he had found permission to be my guide and guardian. The
creed which slowly grew up in my mind and heart, and is now fixed there,
was simply this: that as a great Emperor rules his many provinces, God
rules the universe, employing many officers--intelligences of loftiest
estate, then intelligences less lofty; less lofty still beneath these,
and at the last the humbler servants, who are still as gods to us, but
within our reach, and His messengers and agents. Then God seemed no
longer utterly remote and impossible to belief, and I believed. And
whether this be true or false, I know one thing: this faith has made me
a better man than I should have been without it. My beloved father, wise
and kind, has seemed to lead me by the hand. I have not dared in the
knowledge of his sleepless love to do many things to which I have been
tempted. I have learned from him to know--if I know anything--that
life from its lowest form is a striving upward through uncounted and
innumerable grades, and that in each grade something is learned that
fits us for the next, or something lost which has to be won back again
after a great purgation of pain and repentance.
‘It is three days since I began to write, and I am so weak that I can
barely hold the pen. Send this to Paul He has gone far wrong. He will
come back again to the right. I have asked that I may guide him, and my
prayer has been granted. From the hour at which I quit this flesh
until he joins me my work is appointed me, and I shall not leave him.
Good-bye, dear child Be at peace, for all will yet be well.
‘When Paul sees these last words of mine, he will know that I am with
him.’
Thus, word for word, he went over it all again, for the hundredth time
or more, and on a sudden his soul seemed to flow from him in a great
longing. He rose unconsciously, and stepped beyond the doorway of his
tent, and stretched his arms wide to the night.
‘Be with me! oh! be with me, and let me know and feel that you are here.’
If it be madness to believe so, I will not care!’
But that thought froze him. What right had he to welcome madness? Of
what avail was it to crown a wasted life with such a folly?
‘You believed it, dear old dad?’ he said. ‘But how shall I? Can I dodge
myself? Can I slink by a side-road out of sight of my own intelligence?’
He stood long with dejected head and drooping hands, and then groping
his way back to his couch, lay down again.
And his dreams came back to him.
He was suddenly afire over a new idea for a comedy, and from the rising
of the sun to the going down of the same he slaved at it and exulted
in it day by day. He made long tramps into the country and lost himself
continuously. Pretty generally he awoke from his fancies to find himself
ravenously hungry, and without so much as a hint of an orient in his
mind. But almost any village or hamlet was good for bread, of a sort,
and for trustworthy eggs and new milk; and his necessities brought him
into contact with the Walloon language, in which--or something very like
it--Froissart wrote his chronicles. He picked up nuggets in the way
of character--clean gold--and whether he were wandering with his own
thoughts or struggling through the medium of this new tongue towards
a knowledge of rustic Belgian life, or pruning and digging about his
imaginations in his workshop, he was happy as a man need be.
Annette and he saw less and less of each other, but that was a
circumstance to which he resigned himself with ease. They had taken two
rooms at the corner of their corridor to begin with, a large room and a
smaller one, and there was no need to move from their original quarters.
The smaller chamber was used as a dressing-room. Paul’s circular tub
was there, and the trunks with which the pair travelled, and coats and
dresses were hung about the walls. But it was Annette’s whim one day in
Paul’s absence to have a bed set up in this second apartment, and that
same night, rising late from work, he found himself locked from his
wife’s room. He had not been consulted as to this arrangement, and it
struck a little cold upon him, but thinking that he would talk it over
in the morning, he betook himself to sleep. Next day Annette complained
of headache, and the pallor of her face and the heaviness of her eyes
were a sufficing certificate to suffering.
‘I was very, very ill last night,’ she said pleadingly, ‘and I wanted to
be alone. Oh! I can’t tell you how much I wanted to be alone.’
Paul took her hand in his, and smoothed it between his own. The skin was
harsh and dry, and the little hand felt almost like a hot coal.
‘My dear,’ he said anxiously, ‘you are quite in a high fever. I shall
run away for Laurent instantly.’
‘Why will you pester me?’ she asked, with a weary little spurt of
temper. ‘I have no more need for a doctor than you have. I understand my
own condition perfectly, and I want to go to sleep.’
‘But, my dear,’ said Paul, ‘these symptoms seem to be increasing, and
you really ought to have advice. Laurent is an able man; you can trust
him, I am sure.’
‘Oh! she cried, ‘your voice rasps me in the very middle of my brain. ‘Go
away and let me sleep, for pity’s sake.’
‘Let me make you a cup of tea,’ he said, subduing his voice to a
whisper. ‘I have a whole packet of that lovely stuff I bought before we
left London.’
‘Pray go,’ she answered him.
There was nothing for it but to obey, and he went from the room a little
disconsolate.
‘This,’ he said to himself as he walked down to the _salle à manger_’ is
what the poor things have to go through. Love and marriage are not
all beer and skittles for either party, but they are pitiable for
the woman.’ Even now there was no deep attachment in his mind towards
Annette, and he blamed himself for his want of feeling. ‘I owe her
everything,’ he thought--‘everything that I can bring her. I suppose she
loved me when she came to me. God knows!’
He was sorry for her, but he upbraided himself for the thought that he
would have been just as sorry for any other woman who suffered in the
same way, if only her trouble were brought near enough for him to be
aware of it. He had bound himself down to a life without love, but there
was an exquisite disloyalty in the mere admission of that thought.
He was too disturbed to care for breakfast, and after drinking a cup of
coffee he lit his pipe and strolled in search of the doctor. The good
old Chinois was munching his pistolet, and sipping at a great bowl of
hot milk just tinctured with coffee, and his man was already at the
door with the queer old buggy and the queer old horse familiar to the
country-side over a circuit of half a dozen leagues from its centre.
‘I have come,’ said Paul, ‘to talk to you about Mrs. Armstrong. I don’t
like the look of things at all.’
‘Ha!’ said Laurent ‘Tell me, what do you observe?’
‘I notice,’ Paul answered, ‘a dreadful variableness of mood, a feverish
exaltation, followed by a serious depression, an increasing desire to
be alone, a sort of nervous resentment of any inquiry as to her state
of health. That, I think, is about all. I dare say that everything I may
have noticed may be attributable to her present condition, and that in
my inexperience of such things I may be unduly nervous; but I wish you’d
make an opportunity of seeing her casually in the course of the day. For
Heaven’s sake, doctor,’ he added with a laugh, ‘don’t let her guess that
I sent you. The one thing she most resents is having the mere suggestion
offered that she should see a doctor.’
Laurent rubbed his close-cropped silver head with one hand, and with the
other wrung a few drops of liquid from his huge moustache, looking up
at Paul meanwhile with a crafty benevolence in his eye, like a
supernaturally wise old parrot.
‘Ah yes!’ he hummed in a deep nasal tone, which Paul knew well already
as being characteristic of him when he had to reason out a problem as he
talked. ‘Monsieur Armstrong, the man who has half-confidences with his
physician is in serious error.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Paul.
‘You know of nothing,’ said Laurent, ‘which would help to explain these
symptoms apart from the fact that madame believes herself to be about to
become a mother?’
‘Nothing else,’ Paul answered in some astonishment, ‘Unless----’
Laurent, holding up his bowl in both hands, echoed:
‘Sinon?----’
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘I’m afraid that I may have been a little neglectful
lately. I have a piece of work in hand which occupies me a great deal. I
may, perhaps, be too absorbed in it.’
‘That, of course, is perhaps possible,’ said Laurent ‘I will contrive
to see her in the course of the day, and you may trust an old doctor’s
_savoir faire_. She shall not guess that you sent me.’
Immediately upon this the doctor’s servant rapped at the door to say
that all was ready, and Paul took his leave. He went immediately to his
study, and there the embers of last night’s fire, being fanned ever
so little, began to glow again, and he became absorbed in his work,
insomuch that when the bell rang for déjeûner at noon he was amazed to
notice how quickly time had flown. When he got to table Annette was in
her place, still looking a trifle pale and heavy-eyed, but evidently
much relieved since he had last seen her.
‘I want you to do me a little favour, Paul,’ she said
‘Yes,’ he answered gaily.
‘I want what you call--what is your word for it? Oh yes, I know--I want
what you call a pick-me-up. Will you share a pint of wine with me? I
want a glass--just one glass of champagne. I quite long for it.’
‘Why, yes,’ said Paul, ‘that is a simple matter enough,’ and he gave the
order for the wine.
Annette drank the greater part of it, and began to glow and sparkle.
The colour came back to her cheeks and the light to her eyes. She was
unusually bright and animated, and chattered all manner of good-humoured
nonsense with the juge de paix and the garde-champêtre.
‘That is your medicine, my dear,’ said Paul, in a half-whisper, tapping
the bottle with a finger-nail. ‘I shall prescribe it for you daily.’
She made a little face at him and laughed. ‘I don’t like the stuff,’
she said, ‘very often, but I longed for it this morning; and, oh! I am
better for it.’
They were as much at home in the Hotel of the Three Friends by this
time as if they had lived there all their lives. There was no stranger
present at the meal, and it was not at all a surprising thing when
Annette floated away to the piano at the further end of the room and
began to tinkle at the keys there. She was by no means an accomplished
musician, but she played a few little airs with a sort of spontaneity
and grace, and she had a sweet, thin, bird-like voice, a clear and
liquid note, which was perhaps her greatest charm. She searched among
the music upon the top of the piano, flicking the untidy scattered
leaves until she found a song she knew.
‘Music, messieurs,’ she said, ‘is an aid to digestion; I will make a
sandwich of sentiment for you--cheese on the one side, dessert on the
other, and love in the middle.’
The garde and the juge and the local huissier and the bachelor chemist
all beat the hafts of their knives on the table in applause, and she
sang, with a vivacity and archness Paul had never before observed in
her, a snatch of cheap Belgian sentimentalism:
‘Toux les deux, la main dans la main,
Nous poursuivions notre chemin,
Sous la céleste voûte;
Les doux échos mystérieux
Répéter nos baisers joyeux
Tout le long--tout le long de la route.’
And whilst she was warbling the door of the salle opened and in walked
Laurent.
‘Pardon, madame,’ he cried; ‘do not permit me to interrupt you.’
But Annette had already risen from the piano, and had closed the lid of
the instrument.
‘My sister has gone to Janenne,’ he explained, ‘and I am left
breakfastless. You hungry rascals have not eaten everything, I hope?’
The Flemish maid would lay an instant cover for Monsieur Laurent, and
room was made for him at the table with something like enthusiasm. He
began to talk vivaciously scraps of local news gathered on his morning
rounds among his patients, and from time to time he turned to Paul to
explain some rustic allusion or phrase. He made himself charming, and
since he did not explain that he had purposely dismissed his sister for
the day in order to find an excuse for his visit to the hotel, Annette
had no present suspicion of him. They had a little playful badinage
together, and Laurent, turning mock-sentimental, lamented his celibacy
so quaintly that she broke into peals of silvery laughter over him. Paul
was pleased with her, and half inclined to be proud of her for the first
time in his life, though he had a nervous fear lest her gaiety should
topple over like an unskilled artist on the slack wire.
By-and-by Laurent set about his meal in a business-like fashion, and
Paul strolled quietly from the room. The others, juge and garde and
huissier and chemist, chief of gendarmerie, and all the rest of
the regular frequenters of the table, were called away by their own
avocations. Paul, sitting with his study-door ajar, looking as if
prepared to be absorbed in labour at any moment, watched them as they
went out by ones and twos, and knew that at last Laurent and Annette
were together. The heat of summer noon was in the air. The _place_ was
empty, and there was everywhere a humming silence through which his ear
discerned now and then the deeper hum of Laurent’s voice. Not a word
was audible, or would have been even had Paul cared to play the
eavesdropper, but one might have thought that the doctor was preaching a
sermon.
‘He’s a wise old man, is Laurent,’ said Paul to himself, ‘and, for a
bachelor, he seems to have an uncommon good knowledge of women. That
comes out of a doctor’s practice, I dare say.’
The heat of the day, the single glass of wine he had taken, and the
hearty meal he had eaten after his morning fast, all combined to make
him drowsy, and he had fallen into a half-slumber in which he saw hazily
the creatures of his fancy moving behind the footlights, when the door
of the dining-room opened, and he heard Laurent’s words of farewell:
‘Croyez moi, Madame Armstrong, c’est une affaire assez grave. Mais
courage, courage! Et--bon jour--et bonne espérance.’
Then the door closed, and the doctor’s sturdy feet in their thick-soled
boots went echoing along the parquet, clattered for a moment on the
pavement outside, and were lost to hearing.
Paul woke with a numbness at the heart. The affair was serious; but
courage, and good hope! That sounded grave. He rose from his chair, the
pipe between his lips still sending up a spiral of blue smoke. He was
asking himself whether he should go in to the next apartment either
to comfort or to question, when the door of the _salle à manger_ again
opened, and Annette stole into his room. She pushed the door wide and
stood framed for an instant against the shadow of the corridor. She was
dressed in some filmy white stuff, with a great blue bow at the throat
and a bow of scarlet in her hair. She had an odd taste in contrasts,
but the Parisian touch was always evident in what she wore, and if
her scheme of personal adornment were sometimes quaint, it was always
artistic. Paul noticed then, and remembered always, a strange pathos in
her look. She seemed for the moment curiously childlike. Her face had
once more lost its colour, and her eyes, which were thick with tears,
were like those of a child grown frightened in loneliness, and searching
doubtfully and almost in terror for the homeward way.
She put out her hands towards him with a gesture of appeal. It seemed as
if she asked his pardon, though why that should be he could not guess,
and as he made a hasty movement towards her she entered the room
suddenly, and thrust the door vehemently behind her so that the corridor
rang with the echo of the sound.
‘Paul,’ she said, ‘Paul!’ and sinking on her knees before him, she threw
her arms round him and began to cry bitterly.
He tried to raise her, but her arms clung tightly, and he could do
nothing but stand there awkwardly and smooth her hair with foolish,
half-articulate expressions of sympathy. She cried as if broken-hearted
for a time, and when at last his caressing fingers raised her face
towards his own, her chin and throat were wet with tears, and her eyes
were still brimming. He coaxed her with much difficulty to an arm-chair,
and when he had seated her there he knelt beside her with an arm about
her waist.
‘What is it, little woman?’ he asked. ‘Dear little woman, what is it?’
He had striven in vain with his disengaged hand to draw away the
interlaced fingers she had knitted across her eyes, but at this appeal
she cast her arms abroad and looked at him with a swift intentness
through her tears.
‘You mean it?’ she asked with an eager fierceness in her eyes and voice.
‘Mean it?’ he answered. ‘What, the dear little woman? Of course I mean
it.’
‘Paul,’ she said, ‘if you will only love me, if you will only strive
with me, I will love and worship you all my days.’
‘What can I do?’ he asked. ‘Tell me, and I will do it’
‘Oh!’ she cried, beating the air with her hands, ‘these moods, these
follies! they are my own fault I am dividing myself from you. I am
breaking my own heart; I am miserable for no reason. Help me, Paul, help
me! Be at least my friend!’
He was not a man to whom such an appeal could be made in vain, and his
heart acquitted him of any falsehood when he assured her that he loved
her, and would yield her any earthly service in his power.
‘But, sweetheart,’ he said, ‘tell me how I am to help you. Don’t think
that there is any reproach in what I say, but often when I wish to be
near you you banish me, and I have to go, because all my thought is not
to harass you. I heard what Laurent said just now----’
Her face hardened into an expression of inquiry. Her black brows shot
down level, over her brown eyes, and the eyes gloomed at him with a
threat in them.
‘You heard?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he responded caressingly, ‘I heard his parting words, “l’affaire
est assez grave--mais courage, et bonne espérance.”’
‘Is that all you heard?’ she demanded, bending the level challenge of
her brows still lower, and snaking away her form from his embrace as if
she feared it.
‘I heard no more,’ said Paul.
‘Ah, well!’ she answered in a sudden lassitude. She fell back into the
arm-chair with closed eyes, and suffered her hands to fall laxly on
either side of her knees. ‘You will find me a changed girl, Paul. I am
going to have done with my moods, and I am going to follow--I am going
to follow--what is it I am going to follow? M. Laurent knows. Oh yes, it
is the goddess of hygiene! I am to bathe, and I am to drive, and I am
to walk, and I am to be equably cheerful, and I am to give up my black
coffee and my strong tea and my eau des Carmes, and I am never to drink
wine until dinner-time, and then only two glasses--two little glasses of
claret or burgundy--and then I am to be quite an angel of good temper,
and everybody is to adore me. That is the verdict of M. Laurent. Do you
think, Paul, I shall be charming when I have done all these things?’
‘You would be charming, little sweetheart,’ said Paul, ‘whether you
did them or no. It is not a question of charm, but of health, dear,
and Laurent is a very sage old gentleman indeed, and you may follow his
counsel with perfect certainty. I can’t help owning,’ he went on, ‘that
I’ve been a little nervous lately about the fluctuation of your spirits,
and I’m glad he happened to drop in and have a talk with you.’
She flashed from languor into a mood of vivid irony. Her lips curled,
her eyes opened wide with a dancing beryl-coloured flame behind them,
and her eyebrows arched in a sublime disdain.
‘You didn’t send him?’ she asked
‘I?’ said Paul, with a guilty stammer--’ I--send him?’
‘Now, before you lie,’ said Annette, with a tragic gesture of the hand,
‘hear me. The window of our dressing-room happens--just happens, by
God’s providence to confute a fool--to command a view of Dr. Laurent’s
door. I saw you go in; I could even hear you knock. Do you think you can
deceive me? Pah!’
She rose, evaded his arm, swept from the room in a kind of torrential
rage, banged the door behind her, and was gone.
He was so amazed at it all--the swift interchange of penitence
to self-abasement, languor, challenge, suspicion, wrath, and
accusation--that he stood dumfounded, not knowing what to think. He
heard the flying feet and swirling skirts as Annette raced upstairs. In
the drowsy stillness of the afternoon he heard the door of her bedroom
close with a decisive click, and then the sharp shooting of the bolt and
the shrieking of the key as it turned in its unaccustomed wards. Still
standing there in wonderment, he listened to her footsteps overhead
as she dashed through the dressing-room, and an instant later came the
slamming and the locking of a second door.
He sat down, reached mechanically for his pipe, beat out the ashes from
it on the level tiles of the hearth, and mechanically filled and lit it.
He searched his mind for a clue to the whole extraordinary business
of the last half-hour, and could find but one: the anxieties of coming
maternity, and possibly the change of frame which women suffer at such
times, had unhinged Annette, and had disturbed her mind and nerves from
their ordinary balance. He longed for an interview with Laurent, but he
dared not seek it. He would have sent a messenger to him, but he also
might be watched by those keen and too observant eyes.
As he sat and thought things over he gradually gathered courage, and at
length he began to discern a touch of comedy in that which had so much
disturbed him. It was a very tender and touching comedy, but it was
comedy all the same--a bird-soul of light and laughter hovering over
a lake of tears. The _dear_ little woman! He had thought her
unimpressionable, even a little stupid, and he saw now how much he had
wronged her. She was full of emotions he had never suspected, and could
not even now analyze. Her very waywardness, the strange caprices of
feeling which had so astonished him as they chased each other, began to
look charming in the new light his thoughts cast upon them.
‘Thus it is,’ said Paul to himself, ‘we come into the world casting our
shadows before us, and making laughter and trouble of all sorts for our
makers before we are born.’
It was obviously the mother’s lot to suffer much. It was obviously
the man’s business to be very patient, very tender. He began to think
himself exceeding good and wise. He was learning to appreciate a
new feature in human nature, something which had its element of
unpleasantness if not rightly seen and understood, but, being so seen
and understood, a very beautiful and tender thing indeed. There was a
sacred shyness in his thoughts, but overriding this a triumphant tender
understanding of the humours of the situation which tickled him most
delicately. It would be easy to be patient now that he understood so
well, and he resolved upon patience comfortably.
He sat so absorbed in his own fancies and feelings that he was unaware
of the rumble of a carriage and the ‘clicking of horses’ hoofs over the
cobbles of the _place_, but he knew of these things a moment later when
the broad-beamed Evariste rapped at his study-door, and announced two
gentlemen to see him. Straight upon her heels came Darco in a silk hat
of splendid lustre, and a nobly frogged overcoat with costly astrachan
at cuffs and collar, as though, instead of being the sweltering day
it was, it had been mid-winter. Behind him came Pauer, in tweeds and a
white waistcoat, his face gold colour with his ancient jaundice, and
his eyes a pale saffron. They were both in the best of good humours, and
Darco stood on tiptoe to take Paul by the shoulders.
‘Ve have done id!’ he cried in a voice of triumph. ‘Ve have done id this
time, ant no mistake!’
‘What have you done?’ asked Paul.
‘Vot have we done, Pauer--eh? Vot haf we done?’ cried Darco. ‘Tell him
and have done with it,’ said Pauer.
‘Ve have bought the Goncreve,’ said Darco, with a glowing air of
triumph.
‘Bought the what?’ asked Paul.
‘The Congreve Theatre,’ Pauer explained.
‘Ah!’ said Paul.
‘That is vot I am zayink,’ cried Darco. ‘Ve haf bought the Goncreve. It
is in the handts of the decorators now. Ve shall oben in the first week
of Sebtemper, ant ve are coing for the gloves. Ve are coing to oben with
a gomedy. Do you hear? A gomedy. Ant you ant I are coing to write that
gomedy. Do you understandt?’ He slipped out of his overcoat, and threw
it into the arm-chair in the corner. Then he banged the lustrous hat
upon the table, and snatching up a pen, thrust it into Paul’s hand. ‘Ve
are coing to wride that gomedy, ant ve are coing to begin at vonce--eh?’
‘Why, certainly,’ said Paul. ‘Have you got an idea to work on?’
‘My poy,’ said Darco, ‘I am primming with iteas. I am itching all ofer
with iteas, as if I were living in a bag of vleas. I am Cheorge Dargo.
Ven you find Cheorge Dargo without iteas you may co to the nearest
ghemist ant ask for poison. Take your ben ant sit down, ant I will show
you if I haf iteas or no.’