Despair's Last Journey Part 39

It was not merely that he had little to do and little to think about apart from his memories, that he dwelt so constantly upon them. He thought often that there was something within himself which led him gently yet inexorably to these contemplations, and it happened more than once that while he was in the very act of thinking thus his dream came upon him as if a spell had been cast upon his mind Forgotten emotions lived again; facial expressions of people he had known; tones of voices not remarkable, and not much remarked, came back. It was like a curiously vivid dream; but it had all happened, and he was living it over again.

Bring what intellectual denial he would to the problem his father's letter had set before his mind, his nerves at least accepted it, and he had a settled consciousness that he was not alone. He fought against this as a mere superst.i.tious folly. He was often angry with himself for ever stooping to discuss it in his own mind. He had long ago resolved that the man dies as the beast dies, and that there is no more a bourne of new life for the one than for the other. And now all manner of doubts began to pester him. No more for the one than for the other? Why not for all? Why not one unending cycle of experience? Why not the pa.s.sing of one growing intelligence through every form of life? The Eastern sages dreamed so.

He would sit there at his tent door buried deep in his thoughts, and often, without his being able to trace the faintest sign of any action in his own mental mechanism, his father's voice would wake him with an interjection of, 'Exactly!' or 'That's the point, Paul!' There was no sound, and yet the voice was there, and the old familiar Ayrs.h.i.+re accent seemed to mark it as strongly as it had done in his father's lifetime.

It was all very well to deride it as a mere delusion; it was easy to put it on one side for a moment and to stand over it in an intelligent superiority, tracking it to its sources in some obscure action of nerve and brain. But howsoever often he might eject belief from his mind, it came back with a clinging, gentle insistence which would not be denied; and little by little, though sorely against his will, he began to have a sence of it. A verse of 'In Memoriam 'was often in his mind:

'How pure in heart, and sound in head, With what divine affections bold, Should be the man whose heart would hold An hour's communion with the dead.'

He began at last to think that his own unfitness for such a communion helped him to his disbelief in its possibility, and from that hour the feeling of his father's nearness weighed more and more upon him.

Sitting at his tent door hour on hour, feeling himself, with the pa.s.sage of each day, more completely isolated from the world, he seemed forced to a clear appreciation of the inner truth of his own retrospect; and, so far as any exercise of will was concerned, he found it a record of folly and weakness. There had been hours of high good fortune there, but they had been barely of his seeking, and of his own actual making not at all. Folly and weakness had stung him many and many a time, but it was not until he had reached the last recorded effort of memory that they had laid a weight upon his shoulders. Now he knew that he had tied a millstone about his neck; that he had permanently denied to himself all the sweet and vivifying influences of the higher social life. Sometimes detached from him, as though it watched from outside and waited for further confessions from his memory, and sometimes seeming an intimate part of him, as if it were a const.i.tuent of that desolate ache which filled and possessed his soul, there was always there the image of the gray old father, wistful, sagacious, patient--no ghost, but veritably a haunting thought, and at last, in spite of all contention, as real to him as his own hands. Yet when he went back to his dreams his obsession vanished, and it was only in the pauses of his vision that it returned.

Here were the dreams again.

He had come to understand quite clearly that a trick had been played upon him, but he was not constantly unhappy in its contemplation, or altogether resentful at it Annette improved in health with a startling rapidity, and he had the doctor's a.s.surance on that head.

'Mrs. Armstrong is as sound as a roach, sir, and will probably outlive either of us.'

'That is well,' said Paul, and he set himself to bear the burden he had gathered.

At this time he found the greatest happiness in work, and alike with Darco, and for his own hand, he laboured unceasingly. Money came fast--more money than he had ever hoped for. Fame came also, in a fas.h.i.+on, and many genial societies were open to him. But Annette was not a person to be defrauded of anything she conceived to be a right, and he soon found upon how slight a thread domestic content might hang.

Invitations to Mr. Paul Armstrong were plentiful, but of Mrs. Paul Armstrong his world had no knowledge outside the jolly bachelor contingent which overflowed house and table upon Sundays. When these single invitations came Annette invariably retired to her bedroom, and, having locked herself in there, refused to hold any sort of intercourse with Paul.

'My dear,' he would say to soothe her, 'I am not going without you; but I can't force people to invite you, and we must just make the best of things.'

So he grew to be something of a hermit; and all on a sudden he resolved to cut himself adrift from England, and to live abroad. Before his wanderings were over, he was destined to know Europe pretty thoroughly; but at this time his knowledge of it was limited to Paris, and here and there a bit of Northern France. He would break new ground. Antwerp would do as well as any other city for a starting-place, and within a day or two of the hour at which the fancy first occurred to him he was ready to start He crossed by the _Baron Osy_, took rooms in a hotel on the Groen Plate, and lived and worked there for a month or two under the dropping music of the cathedral chimes. The outfit of a man of letters is the simplest in the world. With a ream of writing-paper, a pint of ink, and sixpennyworth of pens, he is professionally provisioned for half a year. Paul had no need to be in personal touch either with publisher or stage-manager, and he knew his absence from England to be unmarked and unregretted. Annette and he seemed to get on well enough together. There was no real communion between them. Paul was all on fire about his work, and she had no more comprehension of his thoughts than a canary-bird would have had. But it was not possible for a man of his temperament to live constantly under the same roof, and to sit daily at the same table with anybody, male or female, without developing some kind of camaraderie. Mrs. Armstrong seemed to like the life fairly well, and to find a pleasure in the fleeting society of the birds of pa.s.sage who went and came. She had dresses to her heart's content, and in her pretty gelid way enjoyed a good deal of popularity; but by-and-by, as summer again drew near, she wearied of her surroundings, and incited Paul to move. The work on which he had been engaged was finished and disposed of; there were a good many loose hundreds at the bank, and more were coming. He was ready for a holiday, and for Annette's sake was willing to persuade himself that he was in need of one. So in May weather they set off to make a round of the old Flemish country--Ghent, and Bruges, and Aix, and Mechlin. Thence they slid on to Namur, working slowly towards Switzerland in Paul's fancy, but stopping by mere hazard at Janenne, and being by a very simple accident enticed some four or five miles from the main line of their route to Montcourtois. They had been drawn aside in the first place to visit the famous grottoes of Janenne, and the jolly old _doyen_ of Montcourtois was their fellow-pa.s.senger in the brake which conveyed them to the station. The old priest was a man of learning, and in his day he had travelled, and had known the world.

Paul and he fell into animated converse, and struck up an immediate liking for each other. It turned out, curiously enough, that, though the old gentleman had lived for twenty years within half a dozen miles of the wonderful grottoes, he had never been prompted to visit them until now. He was on the way to wipe out his reproach, and by the time the sight-seeing was over Paul found himself so fascinated by his simplicity, his bonhomie, and the charming, varied stream of his talk, that he must needs invite the old gentleman to dinner at the Hotel of the Three Friends, where preparations for his own reception for the night had been made. The old priest accepted the invitation at once, and early evening found them the only occupants of a great salon in which a hundred people might have dined with case. A bra.s.s lamp, suspended by chains from the ceiling, illumined their corner of the' centre table, and at the far end of the room a big stove bloomed red-hot all round like a magnified cherry. These preparations were scarcely needed, for the air was balmy, the windows were open, and the sky was yet full of the evening light of early summer. The voice of a stream not far away ran on with a ceaseless, light-hearted babble, and through the open windows the one street of the village was visible until it swerved away to the left There are a thousand villages like Montcour-tois; but it was the first of its genus Paul had known, and he found a quiet charm in it The Hotel of the Three Friends stood in the Place Publique, dominated by a brand-new town-hall; but all the rest of the place was quaint and old-fas.h.i.+oned. All the houses were distempered in various colours, and all their architects had worked after the decrees of the destinies, so that the street-line itself was full of gable-ends, and the edifices faced in as many directions as was possible. A st.u.r.dy, thick-set village girl, neat as a new pin, with cheeks hard and red, and s.h.i.+ning like hard red apples, brought in the soup--a _soupe a la bonne femme_, and admirable of its kind--brought in a dish of fresh-caught trout excellently fried; followed this with veal cutlets; with a tart, and a local cheese which, though it had no fame beyond its own borders, was a surprise for an epicure. With the fish came a dusty, cobwebbed bottle in a cradle, and at the sight of it the _doyen_ lifted his eyebrows, and faintly smacked his lips. Paul, in ordering dinner, had asked the square-built Flemish waitress:

'You have Burgundy?

'But yes, sir,' the girl had answered, 'and of the best.'

'Bring me a bottle of your best,' Paul had said, and had thought no more of the matter.

But when the venerable cleric so twinkled at the sight of the dusty flagon in the threadbare bid wicker cradle, he was tempted to ask if they had anything very special before them.

'My dear sir,' returned the _doyen_, 'it is a wine for an Emperor, and if I may be permitted to tell you so, its appearance is attributable to my presence here.'

It was a n.o.ble vintage, and the _doyen_ grew eloquent over it.

'It is here in the Ardennes,' he said, 'that you find the best Burgundy of the world. We have no vineyards of our own, though, if tradition can be trusted, they grew a good grape here hundreds of years ago; but we have cellarage, and here beneath our feet is a vault cut out of the living rock, the temperature of which does not vary one degree Reaumur on the hottest day in summer and the coldest night in winter. That is the right harbour for such a craft as this to sail into.' He touched the bottle affectionately with the tips of his beautifully-trimmed white fingers. 'You must not take me for a wine-bibber,' he said smilingly, 'but all gifts of G.o.d are good, and this is the best that Heaven affords in this direction.'

Paul rang the bell no great time later, and called for a second bottle.

The _doyen_ protested, but with a discernible faintheartedness. He talked of vintages as the twilight fell and the lamp beamed more brightly on the snowy napery. Well, he had travelled, he had seen the world, he had been young. Of all wines in the world for him Johannesberg. One bottle, one truly imperial bottle, he remembered.

'It was a physician of Paris, the most eminent, who travelled for his pleasure, and whose acquaintance I made in Rome. It is very long ago.

The Holy Father was suffering agonies, and he endured them like a hero.

But everybody feared that he was dying, and our Roman doctors could make nothing of the case at all. It occurred to somebody to speak to His Holiness of the doctor Gaston. The physicians in attendance were glad to invite him, and by a very simple and almost painless operation he removed the seat of trouble, and in a week His Holiness was himself again. His Holiness was full of grat.i.tude, and would gladly have paid any fee the doctor had chosen to name. But he would have no fee at all.

He was not a good son of the Church, but he was an excellent Christian all the same, and it was his pride to have restored so valuable a life. Gaston told me the whole story. "My child," said the Pope, "some souvenir of your own skill and kindness you shall accept from me; I insist upon it." Then the good doctor hardened his heart, and he said: "I am for these many years a collector of wines, and I have in Paris my little cellar, which is without its rival for its size. But there is one treasure which I cannot buy, nor beg, nor steal. It is the Imperial Johannes-berg. It goes alone to the crowned heads of Europe and to your Holiness. Rothschild cannot buy it with his millions. If I may beg but a bottle----" And His Holiness laughed, and "My good son," he said, "you shall have a dozen." And Papa was better than his word, for he sent thirteen. Gaston,' continued the ancient priest, laying a hand on the listener's sleeve, 'had six friends in Rome, of whom I was one. He resolved that the thirteenth bottle should be expended, and that he would store the rest We a.s.sembled--ah! my son, we a.s.sembled. There were little gla.s.ses of fair water handed round and cubes of bread like dice, and we sipped and nibbled, that our palates might be clean. Then the bottle was brought in with the tray of gla.s.ses, the right Rhine wine-gla.s.ses of pale green, with the vine-leaves and grape-bunches about the stem. And the bottle was opened, and---- You know your Scott?

Do you remember how the bottle of claret "parfumed ze apartment"? Oh, it was so when that cork was drawn! Odours of flowers and old memories! It was nectar when we came to taste it It was of the kingliest, the most imperial.'

Paul filled the priest's gla.s.s again and replenished his own, but the old man rose laughingly from the table.

'I am something of a poet,' he said, 'in my imaginations, but I do not carry my fancies into practice. No more wine to-night.'

Paul pressed him, but the old gentleman was firm. He yielded to the temptation of coffee and a cigar, and the two went on talking of trifles for half an hour. Annette had long since risen from the table, and had strolled to the far end of the room beyond the glowing stove. She had thrown open a French window there, and had stood for some time looking out upon the night when she called for Paul.

'Come here; I want to speak to you.'

Paul excused himself, and obeyed the summons. Beyond the French window lay a little alcove, about which a barren but full-leaved vine was trailed. The sky was still filled with a diffuse light, and the May moon, pale as yet, was rising like a silver canoe above the edge of a hill a mile away.

'Paul,' said Annette, 'I want to stay here. There's a sort of peace about the place, and I should like to be here for a little while.'

'Well, dear,' he answered, 'there are worse places in the world.'

'No,' she whispered, drawing him down to her; 'I want to tell you something.' With her arm about his neck, she breathed into his ear: 'There are only two of us, Paul; you must look out for a third.'

He turned her face to his, and he saw that her eyes were moist and that her face was pale. The momentous thing had been prettily said, as if only a touch of fun and a touch of commonplace could make the sacredness of it bearable to either. In that second he forgot everything.

Indifference melted, vanished, and he took her in his arms with a feeling he had never known before. How long they stood there he could not have told, but the voice of the priest awoke him from his thoughts.

'I am afraid, Monsieur Armstrong,' said the _doyen_, 'that I delay my departure too long.'

'Go to bed, darlipg,' Paul whispered. 'Good-night. I'll make your excuses. You mustn't show up before strangers with a face like that.'

He pressed his lips to hers, took both hands ardently in his own for a second, and walked hastily back into the _salle a manger_. The _doyen_ stood with his beaver on the table before him, and his white hands smoothing the folds of his soutane.

'I beg your pardon,' cried Paul, 'but my wife called me away. She is suffering from some slight indisposition, and we have made up our minds to rest here for a little while.'

'Indisposition!' cried the priest; 'I am sorry to hear that. But in one respect you are fortunate. Here in this _infecte_ little village--you would barely believe it, but 'tis true--we have the king of all European doctors. Shall I bring him to you?'

'Are you indeed so fortunate? Paul asked laughingly. 'Bring him by all means.'

'There is nothing pressing about the case? the _doyen_ asked.

'Nothing pressing,' Paul responded.

'The morrow will do, then?'

'The morrow will do admirably.'

The old priest withdrew with a cordial hand-shake, and Paul lit a cigar and sat down to look at the newly-revealed position of affairs. The alliance between Annette and himself had been of the most trivial sort, and he had condemned himself for it a thousand times. But now a new feeling took possession of him, and she had grown suddenly sacred in his eyes. The burden which had sometimes galled him had grown welcome in a single instant.

The doctor came next day, a rotund man of benevolent aspect, with little smiling slits of eyes slightly turned up at the outer end, like a Chinaman's. He was familiarly known in the village as Le Chinois. But it did not take Paul long to learn that, in spite of the nickname, he was idolized by every inhabitant of the district for miles round. He was a man of private income, and all his professional earnings were spent upon his poor. In a fortnight Paul and he were thick as thieves. Le Chinois had travelled extensively, and appeared to be on terms of intimacy with the literature of every European people. He had not the faintest idea of the p.r.o.nunciation of the English language, but he wrote it currently and with some approach to elegance, and his knowledge of English letters put Paul to shame. With all his learning and his philosophic agnosticism, he was as simple-hearted as a child. Annette took the greatest fancy to him and welcomed his visits, and played round him with a sprightliness her husband had never before observed in her. 'She is changing,' he thought, 'and changing for the better.' The new conditions seemed as if they brought new life and developed a novel character. But he noticed that her outbursts of gaiety were followed invariably by deep depression. She would sit in the garden in the dusk of the early summer evenings alone, and if her solitude were intruded upon would wave him away without a word. It irritated her at such times even to be looked at, and Paul, deeply anxious for the time being to fall in with her every whim, would betake himself to the little cafe opposite, and chat there with the simple village folk. Sometimes M. le Prince, a scion of one of the n.o.blest houses of Europe, who lived in retirement on an income of some three hundred sterling per annum, would drop in and sip his little gla.s.s of orgeat, and chatter with the peasants about crops and weather.

Sometimes the doctor would spend a spare half-hour there in the evening, and sometimes the venerable _doyen_ himself, though he never actually entered the house except upon a pastoral visit, would take a seat outside and drink his after-dinner coffee amongst the members of his flock.

Always after these quiet dissipations when Paul went home he found Annette asleep, and in a very little while each day became like another, and a routine was established. Annette was invariably a little fatigued in the morning, but brightened as the day went on. She was vivacious in the afternoon; by dinner-time she was in feverish high spirits. After dinner she became depressed and moody. Paul, observing these symptoms with tender interest, attributed them all to her condition, and a.s.sumed that they were natural.

But one evening in mid-June an incident happened which for a time gave him genuine concern. Since he had resolved to settle in the village for some time, he had rented a small office in the hotel, which he had transformed into a study, and there he spent most of his waking time at work. On this particular day he had gone to his den immediately after luncheon, and had grown so absorbed in his labours that the dinner-bell had sounded unheard. He was aroused from his work by the apple-cheeked maid, and was told that dinner was already served. He dashed upstairs two steps at a time, laved his hands and face, and descended to the dining-room. Annette was not there. He inquired for her, and learned that she had gone out an hour or two before and had not yet returned.

This caused him no anxiety, for she had made some acquaintances in the place, and had one or two houses at which she was accustomed to visit But when the meal was over and there was still no sign of her, he began to be vaguely inquiet, and, taking up his hat, he walked out into the tranquil brightness of the summer evening, and called from house to house to ask after her. But Madame Bulot had not seen her, nor had Madame Gerard, nor had the doctor, nor had little Mademoiselle Coquelin, the dressmaker. Madame Armstrong had been observed on the road which led to the Bois de Falaise some four hours ago, and that was the latest news of her. The vague inquiet began to deepen into serious misgiving. Paul walked rapidly to the Terre de Falaise, scoured the broad carriage-drive which had been cut through the wood, beat up one or two favourite little haunts of Annette's, and found no trace of her. He returned to the hotel, only to learn that she had not been seen. A terror of a thousand imagined accidents took hold of him, and he flew to the gendarmerie with intent to organize a search. But while he was discussing ways and means with the Juge d'Instruction, who had been hastily sent for from next door, a stable-keeper from the hotel ran up to inform him that Madame had been found, that she had been evidently dreadfully frightened, and was in hysterics. When he reached the hotel, breathless, he found a group of startled people in the corridor, and from the bedroom he could hear Annette's voice shrieking that they were dancing in the wood, and that their bones were white. He pushed eagerly through the knot of listeners, and made his way into the bedroom. The doctor was there, and warned him away at once.