The Colonel’s capacity for the holding of liquid substances looked
abnormal even to a man of Paul’s experience.
‘Thirst is now assuaged,’ he said solemnly at the end of his third deep
tumbler, ‘and a man may begin to enjoy himself. There ought to be a boy
here who can make a cocktail.’
He kept the boy fairly busy, and he talked. He had recovered himself
curiously, and there was now no more than a hint of coming intoxication
in his eye and in his voice. It seemed as if he had arrived at a settled
stage, and was able to make a longish stay there.
‘You’re pretty thick with our little friend, ain’t you?’ he asked,
rolling round in his seat.
‘If you are speaking of the lady who left us a little while ago----’
‘Why, certainly,’ said the Colonel.
‘I have the honour of her friendship,’ said Paul with an icy air.
The Colonel was no longer smoking, but he chewed the end of his cigar
with a lazy appetite, and he smiled.
‘Funny little devil she is,’ he said contemplatively. ‘Women are odd,
however you take ‘em; but she’s odder than odd. By God, sir, she’s
odder than Dick’s hat-band! I suppose she wants me to believe that she’s
forgotten how I bowled her out years ago. Soul! Heart ‘It was before she
got married. She made me believe that I was the only man she ever came
across who had either. There were twenty-three of us met in New York
City, and we had a dinner on the strength of it. I was that mad, sir, at
the time, I drummed up the whole contingent. I believe that evening
left some of us a little sore, but it cured us, and little Gertie had
three-and-twenty play-fellows the fewer next morning. And I’m damned if
she didn’t open fire on me again in the first half-hour after all these
years. It’s funny, ain’t it?’
‘I am afraid I must bid you good-afternoon, sir,’ said Paul. ‘And if you
will permit a stranger to intrude in your affairs, I would suggest that
you should make that cocktail your last.’
‘Wha-at?’ asked the Colonel, placidly smiling, and eating his cigar.
‘Should we have made it four-and-twenty if you had been in Noo Yawk City
at the time of that banquet.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ Paul answered stiffly. ‘I don’t care to
continue this conversation, and I will take the liberty to end it.’
‘I say,’ said the Colonel, ‘wait there. I never began a quarrel in my
life, Mr. Armstrong, but I have ended--lemme see----’ He began to count
upon his fingers with an inward look. ‘I have ended eight,’ he said.
‘Do you wish to quarrel now?’ Paul demanded.
‘Why, no, sir, no,’ said the Colonel; ‘I am a man of peace. But when you
presoom, sir, to dictate what a man shall drink, and when you presoom
to object to the theme upon which he chooses to converse--why, don’t you
see?’
‘No,’ said Paul, ‘I do not see. If you choose to renew this conversation
to-morrow, that is my hotel, and I shall be pleased to meet you there at
any hour before noon.’
‘Now,’ the Colonel answered, taking him by the sleeve in alcoholic
friendship, ‘you are becoming shirty, and your tone is warlike. And
that, Mr. Armstrong, is unreasonable. Perhaps you know now that I am an
old traveller. I’m a little bit of an explorer, sir, and I have never
objected to being guided over a bit of country that I didn’t know, if
I happened to meet a man that knew it Now, that’s enough said, Mr.
Armstrong. If you find my conversation distasteful, just damn my eyes
and go. But don’t you let me hear you. You can curse outside to your
heart’s content, and, you see, that needn’t breed a quarrel.’
‘Very well,’ said Paul. The Solemn drunken man made him laugh in spite
of his own anger and bewildered misery of mind. ‘Whatever cursing I may
have to do shall be done outside.’
‘Good,’ the Colonel answered, and having by this time eaten his cigar to
its burned ash, he ejected the remnant and permitted Paul to escape.
As he came out upon the mild widespread sunshine of the street at the
close of the afternoon, he seemed to realize himself for the first time
in his whole life. He did not trouble himself to curse the Colonel,
but he cursed Paul Armstrong soundly, and, striding rapidly towards his
hotel, resolved on instant action. He mounted to his own room, and there
he wrote a letter.
‘I must see you,’ it ran, ‘and I must see you to-day. I must catch
to-morrow’s train for London, and I cannot guess when I may be able to
return. I have neglected both work and business too long, and I must
shake myself awake. On the whole, perhaps the kindest and best thing you
could do for me would be to send me away for good and all. I have lived
in a fool’s dream too long.’
There was much more, but this was the gist of it, and the writer sealed
and despatched it, not daring to tempt himself to a new effort by
reading it over. The answer reached him in an hour:
‘What is it, my poor friend, which has so disturbed you as to prompt you
to the writing of such a letter as I have just received? I had thought
myself safe in counting upon your esteem. If you are really called to
London by affairs of urgency, I must not keep you, and, of course, I
should be hurt if you went without telling me good-bye. It happens that
I have engaged to dine at table-d’hôte tonight with passing friends, but
I shall be free at ten o’clock. Ask for me then.’
Paul had been conscious and jealous of a good many small rivalries since
he and the Baroness had first set up that platonic communion of soul
in which they had now lived so long, but on the whole he had to confess
that Gertrude had acted with complete discretion in these matters,
and he had been repeatedly forced to admit to himself that he had been
unable to find any real ground for his tremors. He had never once felt
himself in actual danger of being deposed from his position of high
priest in that ridiculous temple. When a man is in love with a woman, he
cannot be expected to judge her actions or her meaning wisely, and the
Baroness’s platonics, with the little flashes of earthly fire in amongst
them here and there, had always seemed to him to indicate a nature
throbbing with fervour which was held in restraint only by a delicacy of
equal charm and beauty, and a lofty moral sense. But he was easily open
to the influence of other men’s opinions, and he had never been able to
think of Ralston’s smile without an inward twinge which had sometimes
amounted to an actual tenor. Suppose he were merely being played with
by a heartless woman, who found it minister to her vanity to have him
perpetually dangling at her heels in public and burning incense in
private before her day by day? Suppose he were throwing away the best
and freshest years of his manhood in the pursuit of such a mocking
shadow? These, of course, were a sort of lover’s blasphemies against his
idol, and he resented them with all his heart and soul, exactly as any
other worshipper would resent the insinuations of the devil against the
powers and perfections of his deity. His resentment could not lead
him to oblivion, and his memory of Ralston’s humorous and mischievous
enjoyment was with him often. And now came this American man, this
boozing Colonel, with none of Ralston’s reticence, and apparently with
none of his respect for the character of a lady whom he had known long
and well, and the coarser accusation travelled on the same lines as the
other, and only differed from it in going a good deal further.
‘I will know to-night,’ Paul said to himself savagely a hundred times
in the course of that afternoon and evening, and when at length the
slow hours had rolled themselves on to the time of his appointment,
he presented himself in the vestibule of the Baroness’s hotel in a
condition of tragic resolve.
Gertrude was there in the very act of saying farewell to her _passagère_
American friends, and he thought to himself, with as much of anger as
admiration, that he had never seen her look altogether so charming
as she did at that instant. The vivacity of colouring which commonly
distinguished her was softened, and the unaccustomed pallor of her face
lent a tender softness to her whole aspect. Her eyes, too, had lost
something of their brilliance, and seemed faintly humid. He could have
sworn that she had been crying, but when she turned to meet him after
the departure of her friends, there was a gentle sparkle of welcome in
her face, and she held out her beautiful jewelled little hand with a
charming frankness.
‘I am so glad you are here,’ she said, ‘and I was so much afraid that
those dear tiresome people were going to overstay their time, and that I
should have to keep you waiting.’
She had a hooded opera-cloak thrown over her left arm, and she held
this out to him, and turned away so that he might adjust it about her
shoulders.
‘It is a lovely night,’ she said, ‘like a night in our Indian summer in
dear old Massachusetts. Let us talk in the garden, Paul.’
He walked by her side, still half saturnine, but in part conquered
already by the soft seduction of her voice and face. He did not speak a
word until they reached the garden terrace, and then only in answer to
her question:
‘You must really go, Paul?’
‘Yes,’ he answered gloomily, ‘I must really go.’
For the season of the year it was a wonderful night even for Naples.
The air was like balm, and was loaded with the scent of flowers. Lights
twinkled here and there about the garden, and the moon shone broad and
bright almost at the zenith, half drowning the lustre of the stars in
the haze of light it spread. Scattered about the gardens were a dozen
parties, more or less, all chattering gaily, and here and there disposed
to frolic Their presence jarred on Paul, but there was no removing it He
allowed Gertrude to lead the way, and she; strolling in pensive silence,
brought him to a shaded avenue on the western side of the garden, where
a gentleman and lady were promenading slowly arm-in-arm away from them.
Gertrude laid a hand upon his arm, and stood still until the couple in
front had strayed out of hearing, and then resumed her pensive march.
‘How came you, Paul,’ she asked, looking suddenly up to him, ‘to write
so strange a letter?’
‘I had to write it,’ Paul answered in a constricted voice, in which a
certain note of anger sounded. It disturbed him to find that his resolve
was melting away from him, and he felt that he must needs harden his
heart if be were but partly to fulfil his purpose. ‘What is there in the
letter,’ he asked therefore, ‘which you find strange?
‘You have never told me,’ she responded, ‘one word of your purpose until
this afternoon, and you are leaving me tomorrow. Is not that a little
strange, Paul?’
Her voice trembled and almost broke upon his name.
‘I knew nothing of it myself until yesterday,’ he answered ‘I have had
letters of the most urgent importance, and must answer them in person.’
‘How long do you expect to be away,’ she asked.
‘The one wise thing,’ he answered, ‘I could do would be to stay away
altogether.’
‘Ah, Paul,’ she half whispered, wreathing her arm through his, ‘there
is your “fool’s dream” again. What do you mean by the “fool’s dream”?
Haven’t we been happy for a time?’
‘Is it happiness,’ Paul asked, ‘to pay for a week’s emptiness and
longing with one minute of delirium? Is it a happy thing to be so set
on one unattainable hope as to be able, dreaming or waking, to think of
nothing else? A man is not to be made happy by the life I live.’
‘Paul,’ she whispered, ‘what more can you ask than I have given you?’
‘Everything,’ he answered.
She drew her arm away lingeringly. He let it go, and for a minute they
walked in silence side by side. They reached the avenue, and turned back
again.
‘Can you tell me anything,’ she asked after this pause--‘do you care to
tell me anything about your business in England.’
‘That’s simple enough,’ he answered. ‘I am within some few months of
poverty, and I must get to work again. I have had a tremendous letter
from old Darco, slanging me for breach of faith, and for having sent him
a piece of intolerably bad work. I have deserved every word he has to
say, and now I must make amends to him.’
‘You have not been fortunate in your work lately?’ she asked.
‘I have not been fortunate,’ he answered; ‘I have been so far from
fortunate that’ I have been writing like an untrained schoolboy. I could
have done better before I was fifteen.’
‘But why is that? she asked. ‘Your mind should only just now be
ripening. Your time is all your own.’
‘There is not one minute of my time my own,’ he answered in a
smouldering wrathfulness.
‘Why not?’ she questioned.
‘Come,’ said Paul, ‘isn’t that just a little disingenuous? Don’t you
know why not? Here am I,’ he went on, ‘as I do most solemnly believe,
as madly in love as ever man was in the history of the world; petted,
encouraged, and caressed, and ignored, and repulsed, until in the insane
weakness of my own nature I have let all manhood ooze out of me. I am
unlike Hamlet, my dear Gertrude. I am both to be fretted and played
upon.’
‘Played upon?’ she said reproachfully.
‘Played upon,’ he repeated with what sounded like a weighty
deliberation.
Gertrude began to cry, and set a dainty handkerchief to her eyes, but
she said nothing, and Paul’s only resource was to go on talking, to keep
himself in sight of his own injuries.
‘You and I made a bargain, Gertrude: we were to be friends, and no
more than friends. You have known all along how much it cost me to
keep within those limits; and have you helped me? I put that to your
conscience.’
‘Helped you?’ she asked, pausing once more in her walk, and looking up
at him in an innocent bewilderment.
‘Helped me,’ he repeated stonily. ‘The words are plain enough.’
There was a garden-seat near at hand. She hastened to it, and sinking
down upon it, seemed to surrender herself to tears. He moved moodily
after her, and stood looking down at the pathway, tracing haphazard
figures on its moss-grown surface with the cane he carried.
‘I understand you now,’ sobbed Gertrude. ‘I have a right to reproach
myself because my own undisciplined heart has gone beyond control
sometimes; but does it lie in your province, Paul, to blame me for that?
Have I not an equal right,’ she went on, ‘to tell you that you have not
helped me in the daily struggle I have had to make? You are unjust, you
are ungenerous. I could never have believed it of you.’
‘I can foresee nothing,’ Paul said, ‘but misery.’
‘Nor can I,’ she answered. She rose and faced him, and in the patch of
moonlight in which she stood he could see that her tears at least were
real. ‘What you have to say to me, in effect,’ she said, with an air
of sudden quiet dignity, but with a quiver in her voice, ‘is just this:
that I am a heartless coquette, and have never cared for you; that I
have wilfully lured you on to your own unhappiness. If you really
think that, Paul, if it means anything more than a mere passing gust
of temper, we had better say good-bye at once. I have at least an equal
right to bring the same charge against you, but I should disdain to
harbour such a thought about you. There are many ways in which you may
be cruel to a woman, Paul, and be forgiven, but you must not wound
her pride in that way. That is the cruellest stab of all. The blade is
poisoned, dear, and the wound will rankle for a lifetime.’
‘Tell me,’ he said, with his eyes blazing upon her, and the guarded
voice in which he spoke shaking--‘tell me that you have really cared
for me; tell me, on your conscience and your honour, that you have not
deliberately led me to this madness.’
‘You can ask me that? she said. ‘You can insult me so?’
‘I ask it,’ he responded.
‘If my conduct has not shown it clearly,’ said Gertrude, ‘it is quite in
vain to protest. I have given you better proof than words.’
‘There is only one proof,’ Paul answered. ‘Are you strong enough to
brave the world with me?’
‘No, no,’ she whispered; ‘you must not ask me that I am not afraid of
the world, but I am afraid of my own conscience.’
‘Do you think,’ he asked passionately, ‘that love could not sanctify a
union such as ours? Be my Georges Sand, and I will be your De Musset; be
my Stella, and I will be your Swift.’
‘You choose your instances unfortunately, Mr. Armstrong,’ Gertrude
answered. ‘Georges and Alfred lived to write vile and bitter books about
each other, and Stella broke her heart under the despotism of a brute. I
do not care for such a prospect.’
The ‘Mr. Armstrong ‘lashed him like an actual whip, and under the sting
of it he barely followed the meaning of what came after. He was so
staggered that he could only repeat the words:
‘Mr. Armstrong.’
‘You force me to my defence,’ she answered gently. ‘I am a woman, Paul;
but I have my code of honour.’
‘Im Gott’s und Teufel’s namen,’ he groaned, ‘what is it? You give me
lips and arms; you have sworn you love me. What is loyalty?’
She drew herself to her full height:
‘I do not pretend to define loyalty,’ she said; ‘but I know it when I
see it. It may be less definite than insult; but the last, at least, is
clearly outlined. I have been mistaken, and I will correct my error now.
Good-bye, Mr. Armstrong.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Paul.
She lingered for a mere instant as if in expectation of some further
adieu, but he had none to offer. He saw no more clearly now into the
truth than he had done at the beginning of the interview, but he had in
a measure hardened himself by the spoken definition of his own attitude,
and, partly because he could not as yet retreat from it, he permitted
her to go without another word She floated away in the alternate soft
splendour of the moon and the deep shadow of the overhanging boughs, and
he watched her gloomily until her figure disappeared at the end of the
avenue. He stood for a minute or two with a vacant mind, digging his
walking-cane into the dry, friable earth at his feet, and scoring the
thin, scum-like growth of moss upon it with unmeaning lines. Then he lit
a cigar, and, avoiding the crowded vestibule, skirted the dark western
wall of the hotel, and so walked homeward. The thing was done now, and,
whether it were rightly done or wrongly he cared very little for the
moment He stood at one of those pauses of emotion in which the mind is
able logically to balance pros and cons without the intervention of any
gust of feeling. If Gertrude were really what she professed to be, he
had acted with great cruelty. If she were not what she professed to be,
he had acted with great wisdom for the first time in his life so far as
the woman as protagonist was concerned He looked at the probabilities on
both sides with a cynical coolness which would have been impossible to
him at any earlier stage in his career. He had met but two men who had
known the Baroness de Wyeth well, and they had both looked upon her from
pretty much the same standpoint. Ralston’s view was the more genial, but
even in his opinion she was a born flirt, a creature who loved to tyre
her chariot-wheels with hearts; and in the view of the coarser mind she
was a coquette mere and simple--a Queen Rabesqurat, who kept a sackful
of the human eyes which had turned to her in adoration. Then, in spite
of momentary indifference, his nerves tingled and his blood sparkled at
the memory of that rare and fleeting instant at which she had seemed to
surrender herself to his embraces, and to make him immortal with a kiss.
All the same, he could look on that fine second’s immortality with a
cold indifference when the thrill was over. Granted the very lowest
scale for passion, could the thing be real? Could he, for example, have
stayed the torrent of his own blood in full course? He laughed to think
of it, and a line and a half of his favourite poet sang in his brain:
‘And thy passions matched with mine Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and
as water unto wine.’
On the whole he began to conceive that he had done rightly, and in that
half-belief, which drew slowly towards conviction, he went to bed and
slept in a stolidity which surprised him later. The fact was that he was
less resolved than tired.
Whilst he was at his deepest sleep a thundering summons at his door
aroused him. A dream which came between the first prelude to this
orchestral drumming and his awaking had advised him of a fainter
disturbance, but by the time he was fairly awake the knocking had grown
so exigent that it bade fair to raise the house.
‘Come in I’ he cried, and suddenly remembering that he had locked the
door before getting into bed, he scrambled out in the darkness and
turned back the key. ‘What the devil is the matter here?’ he asked, and
the night porter of the hotel handed him a letter.
‘I was told, sir,’ he said, in indifferent French, ‘to deliver this at
once, but the messenger is gone, and there is no answer called for.’
There was light enough in the corridor to read by, and Paul recognised
Gertrude’s superscription.
‘Thank you,’ he answered. ‘Light the gas for me in my room, and that
will do.’
The man obeyed, bowed himself out, and went his way, closing the door
behind him.
The letter Paul held in his hand was bulky, and when he had broken
the envelope open he found that it held no fewer than seven sheets of
Gertrude’s crested paper. They were all covered in a hasty and sprawling
hand, and on the first page was a scrawled date and a ‘Sir’ which had
been written with so much energy that the upward sweeping course of the
pen had bespattered the whole white surface with inky dots of greater or
less magnitude.
‘I had thought you my friend,’ the epistle began; ‘you have professed
to be something more, and, as ‘have heard you say, the greater should
include the less.’
There the writing suddenly changed in character, and the letter went on,
as it were, in calmer and more measured cali-graphic accents.
‘How could you treat me so, knowing my friendship and even my foolish
fondness? Was it not cruel to urge me as you did? I will confess to you
what I have striven in vain to disguise. Had we met in earlier days, had
I known you before I was bound in honour to the course I am compelled
to run until my footsteps lead me to my grave, I might have been a
happy woman. But a woman may love, and may yet place her honour before
everything. I shall not care if, when I am dead and gone, you choose to
boast that you won a woman’s heart, and I will not even put you on
your honour now to keep this silly secret; but you shall not go from me
without my assurance of this one fact. When I married, marriage was to
me a sacrament, and if it were not for that------ But no more of this,
dear Paul Dear, dear, and dearest Paul! I hardly know how I am writing,
but the anguish you have caused me is unspeakable, and I am not guarded
in my words. A woman’s heart may err, and her principle of honour may
yet be strong. I bid you good-bye with an aching heart, and I wish you
all good fortune. It would seem that our stars are in opposition to each
other, and fighting against each other in their courses. I agree with
you in thinking that we are best apart, but I shall watch your career
with a more than sisterly devotion, and my heart tells me that I shall
have the right to acclaim your future.’
The letter said much more than this so far as the mere extension of the
same sentiments might appear to be concerned, but in effect this was all
until the final paragraph was reached.
‘I have adhered to duty,’ this ran, ‘and I will. Nothing--neither the
thought of your suffering nor of my own--shall draw me from it, but I
recognise none the less the kindred soul I should have met had I been
fortunate--as I am far from being. Write this in your private memoirs
of me: “She loved too well, yet wisely,” and think sometimes that it is
possible for a woman to feel sometimes like a man, and to think I “could
not love thee, dear, so well, loved I not honour more.”
‘I shall not add another word to this,’ Gertrude concluded, ‘except to
say, I wish you all prosperity, all happiness. But just this remember
always, that if I were a mischievous influence in your life, I meant it
far otherwise, and I am always your devoted friend and well-wisher.
‘G. DEW.’
For some reason or another by no means clear to himself the letter moved
Paul less than it seemed to him that it should have done. He read it
sitting in his pyjamas on the bedside, kicking his bare heels against
the valance, and when he had done with it he tossed it on to the
centre table, on which his manuscripts, now too rarely looked at, lay
scattered, and said rather grimly:
‘Footlights.’
Then he mused awhile, half desiring to confirm the word, and half
recalling it. He had made many desperate efforts to be loyal in his
thoughts, but he was less disposed to struggle in that direction than
he had been. His mind strayed back to Ralston, and to the bibulous
explorer. Memory went further than either of them, and carried him back
to the days when he had broken his career in two for the sake of Miss
Belmont, old Darco’s Middle Jarley Prown.’ He had played the flat
traitor to Darco once already for the sake of one woman, and now, as
he began to see, he was once more using him very ill for the sake of
another. He sat kicking his heels against the valance of the bed,
and thinking. May Gold, Norah MacMulty, the dreadful hour of the lost
innocence, Claudia, Annette, Gertrude--what an incredible list of
follies for one man to have committed! He grew intensely bitter and
self-disdainful.
There was no answer for the letter of the heart-wounded Gertrude. He
was not quite sure whether he were a mere insensate brute or no, but
he packed, and took the homeward train without a word of farewell. If
Gertrude’s friendship were a real thing, he was a beast unspeakable.
If it were a selfish sentimental sham--why, then--anything. He began to
taste life with a very nausea of weariness.
But when London was reached, and the physical fatigue of travel shaken
off, and the tornado of Darco’s energies had engulfed him as of old,
he found himself another man. Darco was terrible at their earliest
interview.
‘Led me haf a look at you,’ he said, dragging Paul to his study-window.
‘What haf you peen doing with yourseluf? I have known an Armstrong for
some years who was rather a glever vellow. Vot? Ant now I gome agross an
Armstrong who is a plithering impecile. Eh?’
‘Now, my dear Darco,’ Paul answered, ‘I dare say that your criticism of
the stuff I sent you is quite just I haven’t, indeed, the remotest doubt
about it But I have been out of health and worried, and now I am here
for work. You shall have the best I can give you.’
‘I shall speag to you,’ said Darco, ‘with an egsdreme blain-ness. I haf
not forgotten our first parting. You did not dreat me well.’
‘I know I didn’t,’ Paul said.
‘Ant now,’ continued Darco, refusing to be mollified all at once, ‘you
haf wasted months of valuable dime, ant you ant I are both the poorer
by hundrets ant hundrets of pounts. I will haf your bromise, your sacred
wort of honour, before I will gollaborate again, that you will no more
blay with me these farces. I like you, yourself, Armstrong. I am very
font of you. I haf a very creat atmiration for your worg. But you haf
not been reliaple. You haf no right to resent what I am sayink.’
‘I have some excuses, of which I can’t talk,’ said Paul; ‘but I don’t
resent what you are saying. I am very sorry to have kept you waiting. I
promise you that you shall have all my time and all my best energies for
this one spell of work in any case. After that----’
‘Veil,’ said Darco, ‘afder that?
‘Heaven knows!’ Paul answered. ‘Don’t say any more just now, Darco. Let
us go to work.’
Darco looked at him for a second or two, and began then to stump about
the room.
‘Goot! he said suddenly; ‘let us go to work.’
To work they went. Whatever else might be said for Darco, it was at
least impossible to brood in his society. The man’s tireless enthusiasm
did one of two things for everybody with whom he encountered. It
repelled either through terror or distaste, or it inspired a sentiment
which corresponded with itself. He frightened timid people; he made the
pugnacious angry and resentful. But here and there he kindled a fire.
Paul’s love for work had gone to sleep very soundly, but Darco’s
storming awoke it, and in a day or two the new remedy had got hold of
him, and he came back to a moderately healthy state of mind. He wrote to
Gertrude, and she responded, and a peace was patched between them, but
it was not easy on either side to climb back to the old existence of
confidence, and Paul at least was shaken in allegiance. Nor was this
all, for he had begun to have some apprehension of his own character,
and to take soundings of those emotional shallows which had always
seemed to him so profound. When a man has once learned to distrust his
own raptures they do not rise easily.
He took up his quarters with Darco, and they worked all day together,
and, on occasion, far into the night, for they were entered on a race
against time, and an extended run of the piece which then held the stage
at Darco’s theatre meant loss. Act by act was put in rehearsal as
it left the writers’ hands, and the final scenes were written in the
theatre itself, and the parts copied in one of the dressing-rooms. For
the last fortnight of the work there was time to think of nothing
else, and when the very tag was written there was labour enough left to
satisfy even Darco.
No better medicine for Paul’s malady could have been prescribed than
he found in this ceaseless mental occupation. It shook him out of
his useless moonings, and brought his mind back to its old healthy
elasticity, and when at last the decisive night came, and the play went
with a roar from start to finish, he went to bed to sleep the clock
round, and awoke to triumph.
Out of an idea which had cropped up in the course of work, and had
been abandoned as being too heavy to be employed as a mere episode, the
indefatigable Darco had already constructed a new plot, and was fain to
begin at once upon its development. But Paul insisted upon at least a
fortnight’s holiday, and carried his point. There was no further fear of
financial embarrassment for many months to come. Annette’s liabilities
were paid. A lawyer was engaged to make settled arrangements with her,
and for awhile there was a clear prospect and free air to breathe. Then
came the new work, carried on at a less fiery pressure than the old, but
yet pursued with diligence. It lasted six months, and was not likely
to be in demand for another half-year. Gertrude was back in Paris,
and thither went Paul, prepared to study the platonic theory in a more
philosophical spirit than he had hitherto displayed. She was charming.
She could not easily cease to be charm ing, but she maddened no longer,
and if she had had a heart at all, her lover’s extreme placidity might
have piqued her into love. It could not do that, but it served to
introduce upon the scene an episode of some humour.
Madame la Baronne de Wyeth could not exist without an adorer. It was
an agreeable thing enough to have two at a time, and would have been
agreeable to have had a dozen had the creatures been manageable. Mr.
Ricardo P. Janes, of Boston, Massachusetts, was a young man of excellent
family connections, and in enjoyment of liberal means. He was a very
handsome boy of four- or five-and-twenty, and having a taste for art and
the Muses in general, he was studying in the atelier of a famous French
painter. He took life seriously, and wrote nice verses. He was simple
and enthusiastic, pure-minded and romantic, and altogether eligible as
a candidate for a place in the list of Gertrude’s soulful friends.
When Paul reached Paris he had an immediate introduction to this young
gentleman, and conceived a real liking for him. There was hardly an
escape from the recognition of the fact that Mr. Janes, in his serious,
romantic way, was in love with Gertrude, but it was evident that he had
been held well in hand, and that with him the platonic path had strict
barriers, beyond which he did not even aspire to pass. He made Paul his
confidant when the two came to intimacy, as they very easily did; and
from his simple talk the elder learned again a great deal of what he had
learned already from Gertrude--how, for instance, there was a certain
isolation of the soul from which it was impossible to escape even in the
closest and most genuine friendship, and how the Individual was never
truly apprehended by any other Individual, but was doomed to go its
way in eternal solitude towards its goal. Mr. Janes, despite his
romanticisms and enthusiasms, was in the main a sensible young man, and
he would not have said these things had he known or guessed that
their ground of inspiration would be recognised by his companion. But
Gertrude’s ideas had seemed to him--they would appear to have seemed
so to many for a time--to hold a most true and beautiful though sad
philosophy, and he was of that time of life when such thoughts are
full of serious interest and charm. Had Mr. Janes appeared nine months
earlier under the same conditions, Paul would probably have conceived
a fiery hatred for him, but now he felt a kind of superiority to
him, which was in part cynical, and in part affectionate, and in part
self-disdainful. He had gone thrilling at all this for years on end,
because it came from the lips of a pretty and engaging woman, with
whom it was no more than a canting shibboleth. Of course it helped to
disillusionize him, and he began even to see that Gertrude was not as
beautiful as he had once believed her to be. This is almost a fatal
symptom in the history of love’s decay, unless the perception be
attended, as it is in happy cases, by the perception of new beauties
whose presence more than atones for the absence of the old. And Paul
did not find new beauties. Gertrude was simply a pretty woman now, and a
pretty woman is a very different creature from an angel whose effulgence
so dazzles that it blinds the eyes. It was pleasant enough to philander
with her, to touch the skirts of topics which had once been dangerous,
but were dangerous no longer, but the glamour was gone, and young Mr.
Janes had done as much to banish it in a single fortnight as Ralston
and the bibulous explorer and the nine months of diligent labour all put
together.
It happened that the Baroness herself planned a little pleasure trip,
which resulted in the closing of this chapter of Paul Armstrong’s life.
It placed him incidentally in a position of extreme awkwardness, and
he was never able to decide whether he had acted well or ill in it. The
point may be reckoned a fine one.
Gertrude had made accidental acquaintance with a charming old house in
the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau, a country château of the old-world
sort, which was for sale, with all its furniture, its plate and its
pictures, and a rather exceptionally good library. Failing a sale,
it was provisionally for hire, and she, having, always, practically
unlimited funds at her disposal, was inclined to take it and to spend
some half-year in retirement, within easy reach of the capital and her
friends, whilst she added the last touches to a volume of poems on which
she had been engaged from time to time for some three or four years past
She was in negotiation for the place, and just by way of experiment
she had thought it a charming idea to give a little--a very
little--house-party there. There were to be only five people--Gertrude’s
own Knickerbocker sheepdog, then one Comtesse de Cassault, Gertrude
herself, and Mr. Janes and Paul. The servants of the departed family
were available for a day; a chef and one or two kitchen assistants might
be sent down from Paris. The party would assemble in time for luncheon,
would spend the afternoon in a country excursion, would return to
dinner, and so Pariswards by a special train. It was a pretty programme,
and would cost M. le Baron de Wyeth a pretty penny, but the last
consideration was Gertrude’s affair alone. The Comtesse de Cassault was
a beautiful person, a flirt of the demurest kind. The Knickerbocker was
virtually nobody. In effect it was a _partie carrée_ and bade fair to be
enjoyable.
It was the very loveliest of October days, and Paul began his adventures
by a little accident to the voiture which should have borne him to the
station. It was no very great matter, but he found himself entangled
with the horses of an omnibus, and though he escaped personal injury,
apart from an inconsiderable bruise or two, he had to make an awkward
jump for safety, and, falling, split the knees of his trousers, and
plastered his shirt-cuffs with the mud which an overnight shower had
left behind. This petty disaster involved a return home, and the loss of
his train. He despatched a wire and made inquiries. The quickest way of
arriving at his destination appeared to be to book by train to a point
some ten miles from it, and then to secure a conveyance of some sort
to get the rest of the distance. He was turned out at a lonely rural
station with no vehicle for hire within miles. Very good, he would make
the best of a small misfortune, and would walk. He got directed by a
stupid peasant, and set off in the wrong direction. When he had walked
some two miles out of his way, he made further inquiries and retraced
his steps. The roads were a little heavy, the sun was hot, and Paul of
late had taken but little physical exercise. When, after three hours
hard walking, he reached the retired chateau which was the scene of the
day’s festivity, luncheon had been over two hours before, and Gertrude
and her party were away for a drive. But Mr. Armstrong was expected and
was welcomed, and when he had a little repaired the ravages the journey
had made upon his aspect, he was provided with a pleasant little repast
and a bottle of excellent Moselle. The room in which he took this
meal was on the ground-floor, and was an extension from the original
building. It stood a few feet above a sloping lawn, and it had wide
French windows on either side of it A balcony travelled round it on
three sides, and on that which faced the sun heavy velvet curtains had
been drawn. A full light which brought no dazzle with it came in from
the windows opposite.
When Paul had finished his meal, which he ate with great relish after
the unaccustomed exercise of the day, he explored the balcony, and
finding on the sunny side one of those long American cane-chairs which,
when furnished with cushions, offer so agreeable a lounge, he sat down
there and smoked a cigar. A while ago the small contretemps which had
delayed him would have caused him profound trouble, or, at least, he
would have made himself think so; but he took the matter quite easily
now, and occupied himself in rehearsing the history he would have
to tell on his hostess’s return. The day was exquisitely mild, the
temperature perfect, now that he was no longer in hasty effort; he had
eaten heartily, had half emptied the bottle of excellent Moselle, and he
was very tired. Before he had begun to realize fairly the fact that he
was drowsy, he had fallen asleep.
When he awoke there were voices in the room he had quitted some two
hours before. The sun had gone down behind the trees in the blue
distance, and he was just a trifle stiff and chilly. He was barely
conscious of these things, when the voice of young Mr. Janes startled
him broad awake.
‘It is dangerous,’ said Mr. Janes; ‘it is seriously dangerous.’
‘Silly boy!’ said Gertrude, in a voice half mocking and half caressing.
‘How can an old woman like me be dangerous to the peace of a child like
you?’
‘It is not dangerous to you, Gertrude,’ said Mr. Janes, with a tremor
which bespoke him very much in earnest ‘I know your purity, and I
reverence it. I know that I have done wrong in speaking as I have done,
but I could not help it I must go.’
‘No, Ricardo,’ said Gertrude, ‘you must not go. You must only put this
foolish fancy by--it is only a foolish fancy--and there will be no need
to disturb a friendship which has been so sweet, so valuable, to both of
us.’
By this time it occurred suddenly to Paul that he had perhaps heard
enough, but he had hitherto been held so entirely by surprise that he
had not had time to think that this conversation was not intended for
his ears. He arose, and began to creep stealthily away, when he saw that
the curtains through which he had passed from the room were partly open
as he had left them. And whilst he stood irresolute, wondering how
he should escape, and trying to devise some means of declaring his
presence, the talk went on.
‘Oh, damn it all!’ he said to himself desperately. ‘It isn’t my fault.
I know that line of country pretty well, and I have been so often
introduced to it that I am hardly an intruder on it. I can’t get away
without being seen, and that will be awkward for everybody. And I can’t
stay here and listen to this rot.’
But the talk went on, and what with the absurd misery of his own
position and the well-known lines the conversation followed, he was
fairly aflame with embarrassment and self-disdain. Exactly what this
gifted and amiable young ass of a Bostonian was doing, and saying, and
thinking, and feeling, he had been doing, saying, thinking, feeling a
year ago. And Gertrude was playing with young Mr. Janes exactly as
she had played with young Mr. Armstrong. Mr. Janes took a good deal of
coaxing--more than Paul had done--but the trained coquette was equal to
the task, and she brought him to the climax just as she had brought his
predecessor. And there was the one little embrace granted, and there was
a rustle of skirts, and the click of a door-latch, and Gertrude’s voice
said, ‘You will stay _now_ Ricardo?’ and Ricardo groaned. Then the door
was closed, and there was silence. Then Ricardo groaned again, and
Paul heard his disordered footsteps as he paced the room. The unwilling
listener returned to the cane-chair and stretched himself upon it with
great stealth, and feigned sleep in case of contingencies. But after
five dreary minutes young Mr. Janes withdrew, and the way of escape was
open.
Paul made his way to the drawing-room, and found there the Knickerbocker
lady and the demure Countess, with whom he had already a slight but
agreeable acquaintance. He had had time to recover his self-possession,
and though he wished himself a hundred miles away, he did his best to
set the kite of conversation flying. He was making an attempt in his
somewhat halting French to tell the story of his delay when Gertrude
entered, and he told the tale to her, leaving her to translate it. His
narrative was so vivacious that she trilled with laughter at it, and
broke in upon it with a rapid paraphrase in French here and there, so
that she and the Countess and the historian were all laughing heartily
together when Mr. Janes came in with a sombre countenance, and made so
funereal an effort to join in the mirth that Paul was fiercely tickled.
And whilst he made a comedy of the morning’s accident for her amusement,
he was thinking all the while, ‘You heartless, cruel, dangerous little
jade!’ and thinking it, too, with a real savagery of hatred. ‘How
many have you betrayed,’ he asked in his heart ‘To how many hungers of
passion deliberately awakened have you offered that heart of stone?’
The Baroness knew him mainly on the sentimental side, but that evening
he launched out as a raconteur, and was gay and brilliant. Even Mr.
Janes was awakened to sporadic laughter at the dinner-table, where they
sat by preconcerted arrangement without the formality of evening-dress,
and fared admirably from the _hors d’oeuvres_ to the coffee--a flawless
meal. And dinner being over, they drove away under a noble moon to the
railway-station, and bowled back to Paris.
Paul, still with an air of gaiety, begged Gertrude to accord him ten
minutes on the following day.
‘I have something to tell you,’ he said, ‘in which I am sure you will
take the warmest interest. May I trespass on your time for just ten
minutes in the morning? I got a curious little bit of intelligence
to-day which will carry me, I fancy, to the United States.’
‘The United States? cried Gertrude. ‘I can send you to the nicest people
there. But shall you be long away?’
‘I shall be able to tell you that to-morrow,’ Paul answered. ‘May I?
‘Certainly,’ she replied graciously. ‘Shall we all breakfast together at
twelve?’
‘I am sorry,’ said Paul, ‘but for me that is impossible. But if I may
see you at a quarter to the hour----’
‘Certainly,’ she said again.
‘Thank you,’ he said, and turning away somewhat abruptly, as he thought
afterwards, he began to talk to the irresponsive Janes, who sat, as it
were, in fog.
‘You come with me?’ said Paul to the young Bostonian when the terminus
was reached, and the final adieux had been said amongst the rest.
‘Well, no,’ said Mr. Janes. ‘I am a little out of sorts for some reason
or another, and I think that I’ll go home.’
‘Well, then,’ said Paul, ‘I go with you. It’s all the same; but I have
something to say to you. It won’t keep, Janes, and whether you and I
like it or no, it has to be spoken.’
‘Oh,’ said Janes, ‘that sounds serious!’
‘Come to the Rue Castiglione with me,’ Paul answered, ‘and I will tell
you exactly how serious it is.’
‘Very well,’ the younger man answered, and Paul having chartered a
fiacre, they drove home together.
Arrived at his hotel, Paul ordered, and his guest refused, a
whisky-and-soda, and the two sat down at a table in Paul’s bedroom.
‘Mr. Janes,’ he began, ‘I hope very sincerely that what am about to say
will not wound you--much. It is sure to hurt you a little at first, but
it is meant in friendship. Let me begin by telling you that for some
three years of my life, more or less, I made an unexampled ass of myself
about a certain lady. And now let me confess that I was put into
a beastly corner this afternoon, and could not help overhearing a
conversation in which the lady held a part. That conversation was
identical in result, and almost identical in terms, with one in which I
took part about a year and a half ago.’
Young Mr. Janes set his elbows on the table, and rested his face upon
his hands. He was silent for a long time, but at last he said:
‘I cannot judge of the delicacy or otherwise of your statement, Mr.
Armstrong, but I leave Paris to-morrow morning, and I shall not return.
I should have gone, sir, without this revelation from you, and I am
sorry that you have made it.’
‘I am not,’ said Paul stanchly. ‘Nor do I think that you will be in a
little time. I wasted three years, Mr. Janes, in worship at that empty
shrine, and when I had most accidentally and most unwittingly surprised
another worshipper----’
‘Don’t mock at it, for God’s sake!’ said young Mr. Janes. ‘I’m going
home. Good-night. I think you were right to tell me. I think I should
have done the same. You’re going----’ He paused there, and looked up
with a white face. ‘You’re going to see her in the morning?’
‘On that one errand,’ Paul answered.
‘Well,’ said Mr. Janes, ‘good-bye, Armstrong.’
He offered his hand, and Paul took it warmly. Janes went dejectedly
away.
At ten minutes before the strike of noon next day Paul and Gertrude
met for the last time. She came gaily towards him with both hands
outstretched in welcome, but her face changed as he stood before her
with no recognition of her proffered salute.
‘What is the matter?’ she asked.
‘I am here to tell you, Gertrude,’ he responded. ‘I told you a part of
my adventures of yesterday, but I did not tell you all. When my walk was
finished I had luncheon, and after luncheon I lay down on a chair upon
the veranda and fell asleep there. I awoke at the moment when Mr. Janes
was telling you that it was dangerous. I had not the courage to break
in upon a conversation so intimate, and--may I say it?--so familiar. I
could not get away without a risk of being seen, and so I stayed where I
was.’
She had gone white to the lips, and she was trembling, but she faced
him.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I had thought you a little worthier than that! An
eavesdropper!’
‘An eavesdropper!’ Paul answered. ‘That is understood; but not a willing
one. You have wasted a good part of my life, but of that I have no right
to complain. But I do lament a little that you should have taken away
my last illusion. I had learned a little of your adorable sex, Gertrude,
before I met you, and nothing in my experience had taught me to think
well of it. But I believed I had found in you a proof of the monstrous
falsity of the belief into which I was being thrust. Well, you see, you
confirm that belief. I shall go to my grave now in the certainty that
one-half the world is made to wheedle and befool the other half, and
that every woman is born to treason as the sparks fly upward. You lied
to me, Gertrude, and I believed you. You lured me on deliberately, with
a cold cruelty for which there is no name. I shall never hate you as
well as I have loved you, for I have a rather poor capacity in that way.
You found a man with a bruised heart, and for your own wicked pleasure
you set to work to torture him. There is no use in words, and I have
said all I came to say.’
That was the end of that episode, and a minute later he was striding
along the street. In three days he was aboard ship at Havre, and the
disconsolate Janes was one of his fellow-voyagers.