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-American _pschutt_,
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,”’ 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?”’
‘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.