And who should be La Femme Incomprise but Madame la Baronne de Wyeth,
a lady more or less known to fame in two continents, but whom the
unwitting Paul had not yet so much as heard of in the whole course
of his life. He was conscious in the chill and gloom of the November
evening of a lively and slender figure, which danced as if upon springs
for a mere instant as it alighted from the carriage, of an accompanying
rich rustle of silk, the exhalation of a fine perfume, the glance of
a dark eye towards him as he raised his hat and stood aside from the
doorway, and then the first encounter was over and was dismissed from
mind.
There was no Annette at dinner, but he had not expected her, and was
glad to know that she was in hiding. But when, after an hour or two’s
aimless ramble under the shadow of the Terre de Falaise, he returned
to the hotel and entered the _salle à manger_, he found there a certain
unwonted sense of warmth and brightness. Not only was the stove
blooming cherry-red at the far end of the apartment, but the little-used
fireplace was aglow with blazing pine-logs, and two extra lamps were
set upon the table. He noted these things with that particularity a man
spends upon detail at those times of subdued and profound emotion when
he seems incapable of noting anything, and took his seat carelessly
at the table in his accustomed place. The juge, and the garde, and the
bachelor chemist, and the chief of the gendarmerie, and all the rest
of the customary convives, dribbled in one by one, and exchanged the
customary salutations. Time was when they had been immensely interesting
as types of mankind more or less rural or townish, but to-night he was
weary of them, and would very willingly have been alone. The half-seen
vision of two hours ago had passed completely from his mind, and the
broad-beamed, apple-cheeked Evariste had already served the soup when
Madame la Baronne de Wyeth rustled into the room with an aspect so
commanding and stately that all the Belgian gentlemen rose to their feet
and bowed as she took her seat at table. Paul rose and bowed with the
rest, and the lady, with an easy and graceful inclination from left
to right, offered to him a kind of specialized salute as she sat down
immediately opposite to him. She was full between the glow of the two
extra lamps, and at a first glance, by dint of bright eyes, sparkling
teeth, a high complexion, and a Parisian half-toilet, she looked as if
she might have been a beauty. She was barely that, as a second glance
discovered, but she had an undoubted charm of grace and manner, and
Paul, whose native origin and customs of life had led him far from the
scene of fine ladyhood, was greatly impressed by her. So were the rest
of the diners for that matter, and the customary rough banter of the
table was hushed in the presence of this new arrival. The men conversed
in whispers when they spoke at all, and in the intervals between the
courses they crumbled their bread upon the tablecloth in a manifest
embarrassment. Not a word was exchanged between Paul and his vis-à-vis
until, towards the close of the meal, the lady’s attendant brought to
her a small tray of silver with a fine little flacon of transparent
Venetian ware, and a liqueur-glass upon it She had drunk nothing but
water throughout the repast, but she now poured out a spoonful of some
amber-coloured and highly aromatic liqueur, and, leaning slightly across
the table, said, with a marked American-English accent:
‘May I trouble you for a single small lump of sugar, Mr. Armstrong?’
She held out the liqueur-glass towards him, and Paul, in answer to an
imperious little nod of the head, which seemed to indicate that he was
obeying orders correctly, dropped a square nodule of sugar into it, and
looked up with a questioning aspect.
‘My name appears to be known to you, madam?’ he said.
‘My dear sir,’ she purred back again in what he learned to recognise
later on as the true Bostonian tone, ‘your name is known to
everybody--or, at least, to everyone who is worth knowing. Haven’t we
all been going wild in London and New York about your last comedy, and
isn’t your portrait in the photographers’ windows everywhere?’
Paul was young, and therefore, if not vain, at least accessible to the
assaults of vanity, and he blushed to the ears with pleasure. He had
not noticed until the moment when the lady set her thickly-jewelled hand
upon it that a little silver bell was placed at her side. She touched
it, and her maid entered, and at a murmured aside retired, returning in
a moment with a filigree card-case.
‘That is my name,’ said the lady; ‘you may not have heard it before.’
There was so complete a certainty of recognition in her voice and manner
that Paul, though a very poor courtier indeed, bowed as he read the
card, and murmured that everybody knew the name of Madame la Baronne de
Wyeth.
This, as it turned out, was destined to embarrass him a little; but
Madame was graciously communicative, and he was not long in learning
that she was the authoress of a volume of poems which bore the title ‘Le
Cour Soupir.’ She would be proud and delighted, she told him, to have
his judgment alike on the original work and its rendition in French,
which was also the labour of her own hands.
‘You see, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said, ‘I was born in Paris, though of
American parentage, and I have lived there nearly all my life, so that I
am really and truly quite bilingual. French and English are exactly one
and the same to me, so far as facility of expression goes; and I did not
care to entrust the expression of my most intimate and sacred thoughts
into a stranger’s hands. To appeal to the readers of French and English
is to appeal to the whole world of intellect. Perhaps that is not a very
modest desire; but it is mine, Mr. Armstrong, as I think it must be
that of all those who are conscious of great thoughts. By the way,’ she
asked, with a comprehensive glance around the table, ‘do any of these
gentlemen speak English?’
‘Not a word,’ Paul answered.
‘If you are quite sure of that, Mr. Armstrong,’ said the lady, ‘we can
pursue our talk in peace; but there is nothing so disconcerting as to
dread an eavesdropper when one is exchanging confidences.’
Paul had not, so far, begun to exchange confidences, and he rather
wondered in his own bourgeois mind if this fascinating lady were
offering him a challenge to a flirtation. It might very well have
appeared, so thought the Exile who recalled these things with so clear
an after-light upon them, that the lady had that object, and no other;
but for the moment there was a natural embarrassment in thinking so.
‘You have written verse, Mr. Armstrong?’ asked the Baroness.
‘Reams,’ Paul answered, with a laugh, though he was not entirely at his
ease.
‘Oh,’ said the lady, ‘you must show me some of it; you must show it to
me all. I am sure, from your prose, that you have the true singing
gift; and when one can both think and sing, one is a poet, you know, Mr.
Armstrong.’
‘I have nothing to show,’ Paul answered; ‘I have burnt all my poor stuff
long and long ago.’
‘And you write no longer?’ she asked--‘you write verse no more? Oh, but
that is wicked--it is criminal to have the gift and not to use it
‘But then, of course, one knows how much depends upon congeniality of
surrounding and society. There have been times when I have thought that
my own poor little pipe was silenced for ever. It is so easy to lose
heart; it is sometimes so very difficult to retain one’s courage and
animation. Do the gentlemen remain here, by-the-by, to smoke, Mr.
Armstrong?’
There was a something odd in the way in which she used his name--a
something not at all easy to be defined--and it influenced Paul
strangely every time she spoke it. It was not altogether unlike a
caress, if one could associate an idea of that sort with the manner and
meaning of a great lady with whom one had not exchanged a word until
within the last half-hour. Paul knew not what to make of the grand dame;
but she fluttered and flattered him prodigiously, and in his excitement
the troubles which had seemed so chokingly bitter so brief a time ago
were all for the moment forgotten.
‘They sit about the table for an hour or two after dinner,’ Paul
responded, in answer to her last question.
‘I notice,’ said the lady, ‘that there is a fire in the salon next door.
If you are not too wedded to your tobacco, I shall be grateful for your
society.’
‘Oh, madam!’ cried Paul, ‘I am honoured beyond measure.’
And so, when the Baroness had sipped her small liqueur and rose, with
a queenly little inclination to the company, Paul rose also, and having
opened the door for her, followed her lead into the next apartment, a
spacious room, very dimly lighted, and as bare as if it had been made
ready for a ball. Here the Baroness established her seat upon a settee,
and Paul was encouraged to bring a chair into her neighbourhood, and
was there held in discourse. And though he might in the review of later
experiences have arrived at the conclusion that Madame la Baronne was
a somewhat heartless and not particularly brainy little fribble, he was
never able to forget or deny a certain charm of manner which he had
not elsewhere encountered, and which had in it a seductive warmth and
gentleness. Before he fairly knew it, he was talking with something of
the ease and intimacy of an old friend. He had been so sore-hearted
of late and so removed from all feminine companionship, that this
unexpected, unlooked-for intercourse with a woman of culture and of such
undoubted airs of refinement soothed like a poultice. It was water to
the thirsty, bread to the hungry heart; it was fire and shelter to
the houseless wanderer. Madame drew him into little confidences, all
sufficiently simple, harmless, and discreet They related mainly to his
methods of work, to his acquaintance with brother men of letters, to
incidents of youthful life, to the early hopes and failures of his
career.
‘How profoundly interesting!’ Madame purred from time to time. ‘Oh,
you men of the people, Mr. Armstrong, you men of the people, how you do
surpass and captivate us all when you just happen to have brains!’
The ‘man of the people ‘was certainly making no concealment of his
origin, as he certainly never made any parade of it; but he did not
quite like this, and perhaps his face revealed as much, for the Baroness
hastened with great agility to quit the theme. She began to offer to
Paul some little insight into her own history. It would be a prudery,
she said, to pretend to be sensitive about it any longer--the whole
world knew the sordid and melancholy truth; and this sounded like
a prelude to a much fuller explanation than she was for the moment
disposed to make, and it helped Paul to understand the hints in which
she chose to set forward the fact that she was a person of a lonely
heart, that her husband pursued his affairs in Wall Street and elsewhere
without her greatly concerning herself as to what those affairs might
be, and apparently leaving her much to her own devices. He learned to
think afterwards that these confidences, coming upon so very brief an
acquaintance, were barely indicative of that exquisite delicacy of soul
for which the lady gave herself credit, but it did not occur to him
to think so for one moment at the time. The two extra lamps upon the
dinner-table had probably been placed there at her own request, but
it was beyond dispute that she showed to far greater advantage in the
subdued light in which she now sat Time had had no great opportunity of
ravishing her good looks as yet, but a certain boldness and bluntness of
feature which denied her complete right to beauty was lost here, and her
complexion was subdued, so that to the eye of her companion she looked
bewitching, and everybody knows how far easier it is to condone a breach
of taste in a beautiful woman than in a plain one. But now as the talk
went on and grew momentarily more intimate, Paul was made to see that he
was in the presence of a suffering heart, that he was speaking with one
who had never been able to come into contact with another soul. ‘We live
apart from each other, all of us, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said. ‘It is only
the artist, only the thinker and dreamer, who cares to grieve over it
all; but there is something appalling in the thought that no one soul
really touches another. You shake your head,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, but
you are young, and you are not yet disillusionized.’
‘I have a right to be in some things,’ Paul said to himself; but he made
no verbal answer.
‘No,’ she went on in a tone of tender regret in the pretty purring
American voice, which of itself was like the touch of a soft hand. ‘We
are born to isolation. As one grows older----’
Paul laughed at that outright It was his first laugh for quite a lengthy
space of time, and he enjoyed it.
‘Oh,’ said the lady, taking the implied compliment quite seriously, ‘I
am not a centenarian, but I am two-and-thirty, Mr. Armstrong, and in the
course of two-and-thirty years one may do a very considerable amount of
living. I say it advisedly, as one grows older the recognition of that
isolation of which I have spoken grows more and more complete. It beats
one down into despair at times; but then one is here for other things
than despair: one is here for duty; one is here to suffer, and to gather
strength by suffering; that is the whole secret of our destiny. It is
simple enough, and yet how long it takes to learn the lesson truly!’
Beyond this no great progress was made on that first evening, but it
appeared that the lady had come to stay for at least a little time.
It is probable that she had not often found so very responsive an
instrument to play upon, for Paul Armstrong’s one lifelong weakness was
that any woman of average intelligence, who chose to take the trouble,
could sound him through every note of his gamut, and the Baroness de
Wyeth seemed to find a lively satisfaction in the exercise of her own
power in that direction.
There was no further sign of Annette that evening, and it was not until
the Baroness had retired that Paul began again seriously to remember
her. It would at any moment, since his discovery of the lure by which
she had beguiled him into marriage, have seemed a mere ridiculous
prudery of conscience to hide from himself that he had thrown the better
part of his life away; but he had meant to do his duty as it seemed to
lie plain and straight before him, and he meant it still, increasingly
difficult as it appeared. But all the talk of the lonely soul, of the
eternal isolation of the spirit, in which man was doomed to live, all
the tinsel sentimentalisms of which the talk of the bilingual poetess
had mainly consisted, afforded perhaps as poor a pabulum as he could
anywhere have found. There was he, with that sore-stricken heart of his,
so sore-stricken, indeed, that it was well-nigh numbed, and here for the
first time in his life he had met a woman of more than common surface
breeding, of high family--for the Baroness de Wyeth was guilty of no
mere vulgar brag in claiming so much for herself--of more than ordinary
attractiveness in person, and of far more than common faculty in the
direction of a dangerous, sympathetic semi-humbug. Was it any wonder if,
when he lay down that night, he contrasted the hours of the evening
with those of the afternoon, or if he recalled the fact that at the
very turning of the road which had led him to fortune and to fame he had
thrown away all that could make them really worth the having?
Annette was sleeping off the fumes of brandy and the insane hysteria
which went along with them. The dainty lady from whom he had just
parted was going to her repose with her own beautiful, sad thoughts in
a refinement of surrounding which he could only fancy. His thoughts
followed her to her chamber until it seemed to him that he was in some
sort guilty of a profanation, and with that touch of self-chiding the
born sex-worshipper must needs flash into a mood of adoration. A more
thoroughpaced small coquette than La Femme Incomprise never breathed,
yet she must needs be a holy angel for the time being to Paul Armstrong,
because she had fine eyes and teeth, and could talk with some eloquence
about heart-sorrows she had never known. And he, he who lay there with
his career like a stream which is poisoned at its source, might, had he
guided his own destinies with anything but the judgment of a fool, have
found himself just such a companion as he had but now parted from,
and have known in her a life-long comrade, an undying solace and
inspiration. Oh, fool! and fool! and fool! through all the wretched,
lonely hours of night--fool! and fool! and again fool unutterable!
Annette, on the morrow, was repentant and pitiable. The contrabandist
supplies had been of a very limited nature, and now they were over she
suffered a more than common misery of reaction from excess. For a while
she was sullen, and sulked in her own chamber; but when her headache had
worn itself out, she began to creep listlessly about the hotel Paul and
the Baroness had spent a second evening _tête-à-tête_ and Paul’s first
judgment of the sympathetic nature of her character had been admirably
confirmed.
Husband and wife had had but one interview with each other since the
latest outbreak, and this had not tended to improve their relations or
to sweeten the temper of either one or die other. Paul had not mentioned
the existence of his wife to the Baroness until he had learned of the
lady’s intention to make a stay of some length in Montcourtois. Then
he had said to himself dismally: She will think I have hidden something
from her unless I mention Annette; and he had named her in a mere
instinct of self-protection.
‘My wife,’ he had said simply, ‘would be very happy and honoured to meet
you, but she is confined to her room by a slight indisposition which I
hope will pass away in a little time.’
‘I shall hope, then, to make her acquaintance to-morrow,’ said the
Baroness, and thereupon they got back to transcendentalisms and soul
solitude, and made up their minds how sweet a thing it would be if
only it were possible for any one human creature to know and thoroughly
understand another. With this unfailing battle-horse ready to prance
into the arena under the Baroness’s poetic spur, they were never in
danger of being gravelled for lack of matter, but found each other’s
society mutually and beautifully stimulative to the heart and mind.
After Paul’s short and unhappy interview with Annette, the Baroness
requested the pleasure of his society upon a drive she proposed to
take. He acceding with great willingness, they rolled away together, and
Madame confided to Paul the purpose of her visit to these solitudes at a
so inclement season of the year. It was her intent to study the ancient
Walloon tongue upon its own ground, and to put her studies to some
literary effect by an elaborate comparison of the language spoken by
the peasantry of the present day with that of the earliest of the French
_jongleurs_ and chroniclers.
‘So you see, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said sweetly, ‘that if you are resolved
upon keeping your artistic quiet here throughout the greater part of the
winter, you and I will have some opportunity of becoming known to each
other.’
Paul did not dare to say how warm a welcome he accorded to this
suggestion, but it was dangerously sweet to him, and he had
self-understanding enough to recognise that fact. But he was in no mood
to struggle against whatever Fate might bring. He was not coxcomb enough
to conceive himself likely to be dangerous to a witty and experienced
woman of the world, and as to what might happen to himself he did not
care. He was desolate enough to be desperate, and if in two short days
he had learned to believe that the final loss of the new interest he had
found would be among the gravest of troubles, he had learned also as
a part of that lesson that the society would be strangely sweet to him
whilst it lasted. On Paul’s side there was no thought of a flirtation,
and on the side of the Baroness there was not much thought of anything
else, so that they got on most famously together, for it is always
richer sport in a case of this kind to have one of the parties concerned
in earnest Paul took all the soulful shop, on the strength of which the
lady had patrolled Europe and the United States on a sort of sentimental
journey, to be as serious as the Evangels, and the discussion of it made
the drive an undiluted pleasure to him.
But when the carriage returned to the hotel and passed Paul’s study at
a walking pace, he caught sight of Annette at the window, and her face
seemed to him to offer some promise of a scene. She certainly bent a
look of surprised anger upon her husband and the strange, richly-dressed
lady with whom he was seated, but he waved his hand to her as he went by
and made up a mind to trust to the chapter of chances. As it turned out,
Annette was not inclined to be disagreeable, and hearing of the lady’s
rank, and being casually informed that she was the wife of the great
American-Belgian millionaire, she became resolved to be gracious, and
made a careful toilet in preparation for dinner. She and the Baroness
met at table, and Annette did not shine by contrast with the newcomer.
The poor thing probably knew it, and when Paul and Madame talked
together of books she had never seen or heard of, and of people whose
names were strange to her, she could scarcely have been altogether
happy. Her husband led her into the conversation now and then, but there
was nothing for it but for her to dwindle out again, and when the meal
was over she made a real or pretended excuse of headache to retire.
Paul was disposed to be grateful to her for what he felt to be a genuine
forbearance, and he would have given some sign to this effect had
Annette afforded him an opportunity. But she kept herself sedulously
apart from him, and it was only at the table that they met at all.
Things pursued this course until the approach of Christmas, and then an
incident happened which brought about, or at least very much helped to
bring about, disaster.
When two people of opposite sexes are constantly in each other’s society
and their main topic of conversation--however hashed, ragouted, rissoled
and spiced--is the loneliness of the Ego, certain little familiarities
are likely to ensue which, though they may be of the most platonic
order in the world, are not likely to be made a subject of outspoken
confidence between a husband and a wife, or a married lady and her
husband. Thus, when Madame la Baronne and Paul were quite alone it was
‘Gertrude’ on the one side, and it was ‘Paul’ upon the other, and the
lady, being the elder, and a little more the elder than she cared
to say, would occasionally venture upon ‘Paul dear,’ with an air so
matronly that the most censorious of observers could have found no
cavil with the manner of it. It came about in due time, let Laurent’s
watch-dogs do what they would, that the contrabandists once more
succeeded in running their cargo into the Hotel of the Three Friends. It
was a very small one, but it was large enough to serve its turn.
Annette had not appeared all day, and Paul’s summons at her chamber-door
had elicited no response. He and the Baroness had dined together and had
talked in the way now grown customary to them, being neither more nor
less affectionate towards each other than common, and they were now
together in the public salon, and, as fate would have it, they were
alone. The Baroness dropped something with a metallic sound upon the
floor, and uttered a little cry of dismay.
‘Oh, my bracelet!’ she exclaimed; ‘my favourite, my precious bracelet!
It is broken, and I would not have had anything happen to it for the
world!’
Paul ran to lift it from the floor, and assured himself by examination
that it was not broken. The hasp by which it was fastened had come open,
whether as the result of accident or design may not be known. Ladies
have ways of saving a platonic converse from mere dulness, and this
may have been one of them, or may not. But Paul, having shown to
demonstration that the ornament was undamaged, the Baroness held out a
very prettily-rounded, plump, white arm, and Paul, trembling a little at
the slight contact the task involved, proceeded rather clumsily to fix
the bracelet in its place. He looked up, and the lady’s eyes were fixed
upon his face with an expression of grave and serene tenderness. His own
eyes were humid, and he looked back at her as an earth-bound soul might
look towards paradise. And on a sudden, before a sound of warning had
been heard by either of them, their two hands were struck violently
apart, and Annette stood between them, her eyes flaming with rage
and the spirit of temporary insanity last imported by the domestic
smugglers.