Despair's Last Journey Part 40

'You can do no good here,' he said; 'you will only distress yourself.'

'There is no danger?' he asked, panting after his homeward run.

'There is not the slightest atom of danger,' said the doctor.

CHAPTER XVI

Here, in the wakeful night, high up in the monstrous hills, with this everlasting torrent raging in his ears, and the camp-fire out of doors there flaring, flickering, glowing, dying down--here in the fog of the forest fires and the solitude of the mountains, it is so easy to see things as they truly were. A shrug, a smile, a word, a silence, the lift of an eyebrow--things which had no apparent meaning a dozen years ago, which were either unnoticed or forgotten in an instant--are alive with monitions now. Not to have seen! Not to have guessed 'It looks incredible. A mule might have begun to read the riddle.

Paul read nothing.

And now, looking back from this smoky eyrie through all the intervening years, it seems as if the tragedy of a life might have been averted, as if a little weight, a little prescience, a little care, might have made the sum of life work out to a far other total.

There has been no star visible in the heavens, nor any glimpse of a moon for four nights. The sun is the dimmest red ball in the daytime, a danger-signal lantern, seen through dirty gla.s.s. There is a yeast at work in the Solitary's mind It is as if the material universe being cut away from him--save just this solid remnant of it in which he lounges--there were s.p.a.ce found for something not belonging to it to draw near him.

Over and over again the lonely man had read his father's last letter, and now in the hot, oppressive midnight it repeated itself in his mind:

'At my father's death a change began to work in my opinions. I had convinced myself that this life was all that man enjoyed or suffered, but I began to be conscious that I was under tutelage. I began--at first faintly and with much doubting--to think that my father's spirit and my own were in communion. I knew that he had loved me fondly, and to me he had always seemed a pattern of what is admirable in man. Now he seemed greater, wiser, milder. I grew to believe that he had survived the grave, and that he had found permission to be my guide and guardian. The creed which slowly grew up in my mind and heart, and is now fixed there, was simply this: that as a great Emperor rules his many provinces, G.o.d rules the universe, employing many officers--intelligences of loftiest estate, then intelligences less lofty; less lofty still beneath these, and at the last the humbler servants, who are still as G.o.ds to us, but within our reach, and His messengers and agents. Then G.o.d seemed no longer utterly remote and impossible to belief, and I believed. And whether this be true or false, I know one thing: this faith has made me a better man than I should have been without it. My beloved father, wise and kind, has seemed to lead me by the hand. I have not dared in the knowledge of his sleepless love to do many things to which I have been tempted. I have learned from him to know--if I know anything--that life from its lowest form is a striving upward through uncounted and innumerable grades, and that in each grade something is learned that fits us for the next, or something lost which has to be won back again after a great purgation of pain and repentance.

'It is three days since I began to write, and I am so weak that I can barely hold the pen. Send this to Paul He has gone far wrong. He will come back again to the right. I have asked that I may guide him, and my prayer has been granted. From the hour at which I quit this flesh until he joins me my work is appointed me, and I shall not leave him.

Good-bye, dear child Be at peace, for all will yet be well.

'When Paul sees these last words of mine, he will know that I am with him.'

Thus, word for word, he went over it all again, for the hundredth time or more, and on a sudden his soul seemed to flow from him in a great longing. He rose unconsciously, and stepped beyond the doorway of his tent, and stretched his arms wide to the night.

'Be with me! oh! be with me, and let me know and feel that you are here.'

If it be madness to believe so, I will not care!'

But that thought froze him. What right had he to welcome madness? Of what avail was it to crown a wasted life with such a folly?

'You believed it, dear old dad?' he said. 'But how shall I? Can I dodge myself? Can I slink by a side-road out of sight of my own intelligence?'

He stood long with dejected head and drooping hands, and then groping his way back to his couch, lay down again.

And his dreams came back to him.

He was suddenly afire over a new idea for a comedy, and from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same he slaved at it and exulted in it day by day. He made long tramps into the country and lost himself continuously. Pretty generally he awoke from his fancies to find himself ravenously hungry, and without so much as a hint of an orient in his mind. But almost any village or hamlet was good for bread, of a sort, and for trustworthy eggs and new milk; and his necessities brought him into contact with the Walloon language, in which--or something very like it--Froissart wrote his chronicles. He picked up nuggets in the way of character--clean gold--and whether he were wandering with his own thoughts or struggling through the medium of this new tongue towards a knowledge of rustic Belgian life, or pruning and digging about his imaginations in his workshop, he was happy as a man need be.

Annette and he saw less and less of each other, but that was a circ.u.mstance to which he resigned himself with ease. They had taken two rooms at the corner of their corridor to begin with, a large room and a smaller one, and there was no need to move from their original quarters.

The smaller chamber was used as a dressing-room. Paul's circular tub was there, and the trunks with which the pair travelled, and coats and dresses were hung about the walls. But it was Annette's whim one day in Paul's absence to have a bed set up in this second apartment, and that same night, rising late from work, he found himself locked from his wife's room. He had not been consulted as to this arrangement, and it struck a little cold upon him, but thinking that he would talk it over in the morning, he betook himself to sleep. Next day Annette complained of headache, and the pallor of her face and the heaviness of her eyes were a sufficing certificate to suffering.

'I was very, very ill last night,' she said pleadingly, 'and I wanted to be alone. Oh! I can't tell you how much I wanted to be alone.'

Paul took her hand in his, and smoothed it between his own. The skin was harsh and dry, and the little hand felt almost like a hot coal.

'My dear,' he said anxiously, 'you are quite in a high fever. I shall run away for Laurent instantly.'

'Why will you pester me?' she asked, with a weary little spurt of temper. 'I have no more need for a doctor than you have. I understand my own condition perfectly, and I want to go to sleep.'

'But, my dear,' said Paul, 'these symptoms seem to be increasing, and you really ought to have advice. Laurent is an able man; you can trust him, I am sure.'

'Oh! she cried, 'your voice rasps me in the very middle of my brain. 'Go away and let me sleep, for pity's sake.'

'Let me make you a cup of tea,' he said, subduing his voice to a whisper. 'I have a whole packet of that lovely stuff I bought before we left London.'

'Pray go,' she answered him.

There was nothing for it but to obey, and he went from the room a little disconsolate.

'This,' he said to himself as he walked down to the _salle a manger_' is what the poor things have to go through. Love and marriage are not all beer and skittles for either party, but they are pitiable for the woman.' Even now there was no deep attachment in his mind towards Annette, and he blamed himself for his want of feeling. 'I owe her everything,' he thought--'everything that I can bring her. I suppose she loved me when she came to me. G.o.d knows!'

He was sorry for her, but he upbraided himself for the thought that he would have been just as sorry for any other woman who suffered in the same way, if only her trouble were brought near enough for him to be aware of it. He had bound himself down to a life without love, but there was an exquisite disloyalty in the mere admission of that thought.

He was too disturbed to care for breakfast, and after drinking a cup of coffee he lit his pipe and strolled in search of the doctor. The good old Chinois was munching his pistolet, and sipping at a great bowl of hot milk just tinctured with coffee, and his man was already at the door with the queer old buggy and the queer old horse familiar to the country-side over a circuit of half a dozen leagues from its centre.

'I have come,' said Paul, 'to talk to you about Mrs. Armstrong. I don't like the look of things at all.'

'Ha!' said Laurent 'Tell me, what do you observe?'

'I notice,' Paul answered, 'a dreadful variableness of mood, a feverish exaltation, followed by a serious depression, an increasing desire to be alone, a sort of nervous resentment of any inquiry as to her state of health. That, I think, is about all. I dare say that everything I may have noticed may be attributable to her present condition, and that in my inexperience of such things I may be unduly nervous; but I wish you'd make an opportunity of seeing her casually in the course of the day. For Heaven's sake, doctor,' he added with a laugh, 'don't let her guess that I sent you. The one thing she most resents is having the mere suggestion offered that she should see a doctor.'

Laurent rubbed his close-cropped silver head with one hand, and with the other wrung a few drops of liquid from his huge moustache, looking up at Paul meanwhile with a crafty benevolence in his eye, like a supernaturally wise old parrot.

'Ah yes!' he hummed in a deep nasal tone, which Paul knew well already as being characteristic of him when he had to reason out a problem as he talked. 'Monsieur Armstrong, the man who has half-confidences with his physician is in serious error.'

'I don't understand,' said Paul.

'You know of nothing,' said Laurent, 'which would help to explain these symptoms apart from the fact that madame believes herself to be about to become a mother?'

'Nothing else,' Paul answered in some astonishment, 'Unless----'

Laurent, holding up his bowl in both hands, echoed:

'Sinon?----'

'Well,' said Paul, 'I'm afraid that I may have been a little neglectful lately. I have a piece of work in hand which occupies me a great deal. I may, perhaps, be too absorbed in it.'

'That, of course, is perhaps possible,' said Laurent 'I will contrive to see her in the course of the day, and you may trust an old doctor's _savoir faire_. She shall not guess that you sent me.'

Immediately upon this the doctor's servant rapped at the door to say that all was ready, and Paul took his leave. He went immediately to his study, and there the embers of last night's fire, being fanned ever so little, began to glow again, and he became absorbed in his work, insomuch that when the bell rang for dejeuner at noon he was amazed to notice how quickly time had flown. When he got to table Annette was in her place, still looking a trifle pale and heavy-eyed, but evidently much relieved since he had last seen her.

'I want you to do me a little favour, Paul,' she said

'Yes,' he answered gaily.