Despair's Last Journey Part 48

Husband and wife had had but one interview with each other since the latest outbreak, and this had not tended to improve their relations or to sweeten the temper of either one or die other. Paul had not mentioned the existence of his wife to the Baroness until he had learned of the lady's intention to make a stay of some length in Montcourtois. Then he had said to himself dismally: She will think I have hidden something from her unless I mention Annette; and he had named her in a mere instinct of self-protection.

'My wife,' he had said simply, 'would be very happy and honoured to meet you, but she is confined to her room by a slight indisposition which I hope will pa.s.s away in a little time.'

'I shall hope, then, to make her acquaintance to-morrow,' said the Baroness, and thereupon they got back to transcendentalisms and soul solitude, and made up their minds how sweet a thing it would be if only it were possible for any one human creature to know and thoroughly understand another. With this unfailing battle-horse ready to prance into the arena under the Baroness's poetic spur, they were never in danger of being gravelled for lack of matter, but found each other's society mutually and beautifully stimulative to the heart and mind.

After Paul's short and unhappy interview with Annette, the Baroness requested the pleasure of his society upon a drive she proposed to take. He acceding with great willingness, they rolled away together, and Madame confided to Paul the purpose of her visit to these solitudes at a so inclement season of the year. It was her intent to study the ancient Walloon tongue upon its own ground, and to put her studies to some literary effect by an elaborate comparison of the language spoken by the peasantry of the present day with that of the earliest of the French _jongleurs_ and chroniclers.

'So you see, Mr. Armstrong,' she said sweetly, 'that if you are resolved upon keeping your artistic quiet here throughout the greater part of the winter, you and I will have some opportunity of becoming known to each other.'

Paul did not dare to say how warm a welcome he accorded to this suggestion, but it was dangerously sweet to him, and he had self-understanding enough to recognise that fact. But he was in no mood to struggle against whatever Fate might bring. He was not c.o.xcomb enough to conceive himself likely to be dangerous to a witty and experienced woman of the world, and as to what might happen to himself he did not care. He was desolate enough to be desperate, and if in two short days he had learned to believe that the final loss of the new interest he had found would be among the gravest of troubles, he had learned also as a part of that lesson that the society would be strangely sweet to him whilst it lasted. On Paul's side there was no thought of a flirtation, and on the side of the Baroness there was not much thought of anything else, so that they got on most famously together, for it is always richer sport in a case of this kind to have one of the parties concerned in earnest Paul took all the soulful shop, on the strength of which the lady had patrolled Europe and the United States on a sort of sentimental journey, to be as serious as the Evangels, and the discussion of it made the drive an undiluted pleasure to him.

But when the carriage returned to the hotel and pa.s.sed Paul's study at a walking pace, he caught sight of Annette at the window, and her face seemed to him to offer some promise of a scene. She certainly bent a look of surprised anger upon her husband and the strange, richly-dressed lady with whom he was seated, but he waved his hand to her as he went by and made up a mind to trust to the chapter of chances. As it turned out, Annette was not inclined to be disagreeable, and hearing of the lady's rank, and being casually informed that she was the wife of the great American-Belgian millionaire, she became resolved to be gracious, and made a careful toilet in preparation for dinner. She and the Baroness met at table, and Annette did not s.h.i.+ne by contrast with the newcomer.

The poor thing probably knew it, and when Paul and Madame talked together of books she had never seen or heard of, and of people whose names were strange to her, she could scarcely have been altogether happy. Her husband led her into the conversation now and then, but there was nothing for it but for her to dwindle out again, and when the meal was over she made a real or pretended excuse of headache to retire.

Paul was disposed to be grateful to her for what he felt to be a genuine forbearance, and he would have given some sign to this effect had Annette afforded him an opportunity. But she kept herself sedulously apart from him, and it was only at the table that they met at all.

Things pursued this course until the approach of Christmas, and then an incident happened which brought about, or at least very much helped to bring about, disaster.

When two people of opposite s.e.xes are constantly in each other's society and their main topic of conversation--however hashed, ragouted, rissoled and spiced--is the loneliness of the Ego, certain little familiarities are likely to ensue which, though they may be of the most platonic order in the world, are not likely to be made a subject of outspoken confidence between a husband and a wife, or a married lady and her husband. Thus, when Madame la Baronne and Paul were quite alone it was 'Gertrude' on the one side, and it was 'Paul' upon the other, and the lady, being the elder, and a little more the elder than she cared to say, would occasionally venture upon 'Paul dear,' with an air so matronly that the most censorious of observers could have found no cavil with the manner of it. It came about in due time, let Laurent's watch-dogs do what they would, that the contrabandists once more succeeded in running their cargo into the Hotel of the Three Friends. It was a very small one, but it was large enough to serve its turn.

Annette had not appeared all day, and Paul's summons at her chamber-door had elicited no response. He and the Baroness had dined together and had talked in the way now grown customary to them, being neither more nor less affectionate towards each other than common, and they were now together in the public salon, and, as fate would have it, they were alone. The Baroness dropped something with a metallic sound upon the floor, and uttered a little cry of dismay.

'Oh, my bracelet!' she exclaimed; 'my favourite, my precious bracelet!

It is broken, and I would not have had anything happen to it for the world!'

Paul ran to lift it from the floor, and a.s.sured himself by examination that it was not broken. The hasp by which it was fastened had come open, whether as the result of accident or design may not be known. Ladies have ways of saving a platonic converse from mere dulness, and this may have been one of them, or may not. But Paul, having shown to demonstration that the ornament was undamaged, the Baroness held out a very prettily-rounded, plump, white arm, and Paul, trembling a little at the slight contact the task involved, proceeded rather clumsily to fix the bracelet in its place. He looked up, and the lady's eyes were fixed upon his face with an expression of grave and serene tenderness. His own eyes were humid, and he looked back at her as an earth-bound soul might look towards paradise. And on a sudden, before a sound of warning had been heard by either of them, their two hands were struck violently apart, and Annette stood between them, her eyes flaming with rage and the spirit of temporary insanity last imported by the domestic smugglers.

CHAPTER XX

[Note: The print copy had a missing page here.]

'No man knows the s.e.x. Women are like Tennyson's description of the law--a wilderness of single instances; but except for those surprising examples which are detected for us only by the talisman of a great love, there is a family likeness amongst them. The woman is the tougher-fibred creature, and there is excellent good reason why she should be so. She suffers as no man ever suffers, and she could not bear her pangs--she would go mad under them--if she were half as sensitive to suffering as the less-tried male; and on the moral side the lady is a pachyderm and the average workman an un-sh.e.l.led polype in comparison. I invoke,' he cried, striding the little gra.s.sy platform on which his feet had worn a pathway between his tent-door and the chattering runnel--'I invoke the unnumbered squads and battalions and armies of shame which are known, and always have been known, to every town and city which has ever dared to call itself civilized since history began. From Lais in her jewelled litter to Cora in her English landau in the Bois, and on to the shabbiest small s.l.u.t who flaunts her raddle and her broken feather in the slums of London, the same story is told and the same moral preached.

Where is an equal army of men to be found to invite the contumely of their own s.e.x? A woman's virtue is her continence, and a man's virtues are truthfulness and courage. There is an unspeakably great army of the one s.e.x which makes a show and a lure of its penal uniform. Find me anywhere a band of men who flaunt themselves in an equal denial of the virtues proper to man, who parade themselves as cowards and liars, and strive to make a living by the parade of their own desertion from the manly principle. The tender sensibility of the generic woman is a fraud, and I should know that better than most men, because I so long believed in it and had so many rude awakenings from faith. But, oh I now and again--happy the man who learns it early!--there is a woman to be found so strong and delicate, so tender yet courageous, so much beyond the best that men ever find in men, that there is nothing for us but to abase our souls in grat.i.tude and wors.h.i.+p and wonder. We--we have genius of a hundred sorts, and still genius is rare; we invent, we construct, we drag new sciences, patient fact by fact, from the regions of darkness; we think great thoughts and speak great words--there is no limit set to the pa.s.sion of our intellectual greed, no limit to the conquering march of eternal achievement; and when all is said and done there never lived a woman who had true genius for anything but love and goodness. There in that glorious small specialized field they s.h.i.+ne, and they s.h.i.+ne the brighter and more splendid because of their contrast with a sordid, heartless, stupid, and greedy s.e.x. And there,' he said, kneeling to stir the slumbering embers of his camp-fire--'there, s.h.i.+ning in that little s.h.i.+ning field, are you, Madge, brightest amongst the brightest and saddest among the saddest, and here am I who wrecked your life for you with such admirable good intent'

The rage flamed out. He took his seat upon his camp-stool, and shredded tobacco for his pipe, staring with vacant eyes into the smoke-fog which everywhere imprisoned his gaze, and in a minute he was back at his dreams again, and the past once more unrolled itself before him.

He was back in Montcourtois, marching the cobbled pavement of the _place_ in front of the Hotel of the Three Friends, hatless and just half conscious of the touch of the wintry air on his cheek. The Baroness was newly rankling under an insult now so many years of age; and Annette, clearly visible at moments between the slits of the Venetian blinds, was still pacing the lamplit salon. The whole thing happened in his mind again precisely as it had happened in fact so very long ago.

A sudden remembrance and a sudden impulse moved him almost in the same instant. When the bracelet had fallen from her arm, the Baroness had cried out to the effect that it was her most valued treasure, and Paul suddenly called to mind the fact that it still lay on the floor of the salon. Annette might observe it at any moment, and might choose to wreak her supposed offence upon it; and, thinking thus, he hastened back to the apartment, prepared for any storm that might a.s.sail him. But Annette, who, in the inexplicable changes of mood which affected her at such times as these, was marching gaily up and down the room singing 'Tout le long de la route 'to a swinging rhythm, chose to disregard him. He saw the precious ornament lying where it had fallen, possessed himself of it, and pa.s.sed out at the further door. For any sign she gave Annette may not have seen him, and Paul had time, as he crossed the corridor to his study, to remark upon a form of alcoholism which allowed its victim unembarra.s.sed speech in combination with a steady gait and an entire irresponsibility of thought. The manifestation was comparatively new to him, and he had spent some thought upon it It was so foreign to the popular idea of drunkenness that it accounted to him for his long-continued blindness to the truth.

He was tarred with the literary brush, which is to say that he was eternally bent upon the examination of all human symptoms, whether they displayed themselves in himself or in another. He had made it the business of his life to a.n.a.lyze those symptoms, though he was but as yet a chemist's apprentice, wandering and wondering through the vast laboratory of the world. Yet, apprentice as he was, he had learned enough of the secret of his own craft to know that the professional a.n.a.lyst of emotion quickens perception at the expense of sensation. The man who is always pulling emotion to pieces as a part of the day's work grows to a philosophic indifference about it, as a vivisector becomes dead to a sense of pain. Yet neither the anatomist of the living soul nor the anatomist of the living body becomes insensible in any appreciable degree to the exigence of his own pains, and the memories of a thousand triumphant operations will not hinder the start and outcry of the greatest of surgeons if you stick an unexpected pin into any part of his anatomy.

Paul had laid his hand upon the handle of the door of the study, and with his disengaged hand was fumbling in his pocket for a match, when he heard a tripping footstep on the stairs behind him, and he was hailed by the Baroness's Parisian maid. Madame la Baronne, so the maid explained, had let fall a valuable ornament in the salon; had Mr. Armstrong seen it, and, if not, would he give orders that it should be sought for and returned? Paul felt the precious object in his pocket.

'I do not know Madame's arrangements,' he said, 'but I have the bracelet, and, if it were possible for her to receive me, I should like to hand it to her personally.'

'Oh, but yes,' said the maid. Madame la Baronne had her little suite of rooms, and was quite in position to receive. M. Armstrong's desire should be named to her, and the maid would bring an answer.

She fluttered upstairs with swas.h.i.+ng petticoats and a flutter of ribbons, and Paul waited in the corridor below. On the waxed floor of the salon Annette's feet still moved to a rhythmic, half-dancing walk, and her bird-like voice soared to--

'Tons les deux, la main dans la main, Nous poursuivions notre chemin, Sous la celeste voute.'

'Under the celestial vault,' said Paul; 'and bent on the discovery of what infernal regions?'

The maid came back, pruning herself with coquettish graces, to answer that Madame la Baronne would have pleasure in receiving M. Armstrong in five minutes, and, having delivered her message, rustled rapidly upstairs again. She paused at the turning of the stair, and leaned over to say:

'Numero quinze, the fifth door to the right of monsieur.'

'Thank you,' Paul answered, and, turning into the darkened study, struck a light and consulted his watch. It was ten minutes past nine, and he sat still to await the quarter hour. There was a clattering of pots and pans in the distant kitchen, and Annette was still singing and walking in the near apartment An occasional murmur of voices, a click of billiard-b.a.l.l.s, and even the faint noise made by the shuffle of a set of dominoes in the cafe over the road reached his ears, but save for these slight signs of life the world seemed asleep. Annette suddenly ceased to sing in the middle of a bar. He heard her open the door of the salon.

She pa.s.sed the little corridor in silence, and ascended the stair. He heard the key turn, first in the lock of one door and then in that of another. He consulted his watch once more by the flickering light of a lucifer match. He was within a minute of the appointed time, and he began to ask himself with a fluttering heart what he was to say, and how he was to bear himself in the coming interview. Upstairs outraged purity and dignity were waiting for him, and he himself, innocent as he had meant to be, was yet in a sense the author of the outrage. The minute crawled. It ticked its final second out at last, and he arose holding the bracelet in his hand. He mounted the stair, knocked at the door the maid had indicated to him, and was bidden to enter. The Baroness was seated in a sea-green dressing-gown ornamented by many pretty devices in lace of priceless fabric, which had taken a coffee tint by reason of its age. A book was lying on her knees, and she was toying with an ivory paper-knife which had its haft in a silver embossed rhinoceros tooth.

She nodded Paul to a chair which had evidently been placed for him.

'I see,' she said, 'that you have found my bracelet'

He handed it to her without a word. She purred a 'Thank you,' and tested its clasp about her arm.

'Sit down, Mr. Armstrong,' she said.

Paul was still voiceless, but he echoed the coldly courteous Mr.

Armstrong 'in his mind with some dismay.

'I do not see,' said the Baroness de Wyeth, 'how it is possible to pa.s.s over the incident of to-night in silence. Perhaps we may speak one explanatory word about it and let it go. What have you to tell me, Mr.

Armstrong?'

'Well----'

Paul balanced appealing hands in front of him, waved them, suffered them to fall at his sides, and said no more.

'You must be conscious,' said the Baroness, tapping the book which lay before her with her paper-knife, 'that it was by accident that the incident which is only known to ourselves did not happen in public. In a measure I have compromised myself, and, if you will permit me to say so, I am not a woman who is accustomed to be compromised. Your wife objects--a little unconventionally perhaps--to our a.s.sociation. I am a woman of the world, and I know very well what construction might be placed on such an episode. We can both see clearly that such a thing might happen again at any instant under circ.u.mstances less favourable to my reputation, and I cannot afford to risk the renewing of it I am seriously afraid that I shall have in future to deny myself the privileges of a very pleasant friends.h.i.+p.'

'Your will shall be my law,' said Paul 'I have no excuse to urge, and have certainly no complaint to make of your decision. I shall go at your command, Gertrude----'

She waved the paper-knife against him with a gesture which seemed to protest against that one dear familiarity.

'I beg your pardon,' he cried; 'the name escaped me. I shall not have the chance to use it often after this, and you may let it pa.s.s. I am going, but I must tell you this: I have not been very fortunate in my choice of friends amongst women, or in the choice which has been thrust upon me, and so long as I live I shall remember----' He paused, and waited for a while until he regained the mastery of himself. Then he went on steadily, with a level voice almost as if he were a schoolboy reading from a lesson-book: 'I shall remember as long as I live the beautiful thoughts with which you have inspired me, your kindness, your friends.h.i.+p--and, and----'

He never knew how it happened--men of his temperament never do know--but he was on his knees before her, and the words burst from him with a sob.

'And--you!'

She smiled upon him from the maternal height of the coquette who is a year or two older than the man she coquets with.

The tears were in his eyes and on his cheeks, and glistened in the virgin beard. She stooped forward and laid a hand upon his head.

'Do you care so much to leave me, Paul?' she asked.

A man of the world would have known the studied quaver in the voice--the throaty, stagey sweetness of it. What was to be expected of a yokel of genius who had been rushed through a hundred towns or so in everlasting a.s.sociation with De Vavasours and Montmorencys--rushed through London and through Paris under much the same inauspicious petticoat influences, and had hardly ever met a real live lady in his life on terms of intimacy until now? And Madame la Baronne de Wyeth had told him enough and had shown him enough in the way of correspondence with distinguished people of both hemispheres to let him know that she could play the part of _grand dame_ at discretion anywhere. That was possibly the preponderant influence in his mind. Had he himself been a gentleman by extraction, had he been able to meet this exquisite and delicate creature of old dreams and modern conditions on any terms of equality, he would not have abased himself in spirit as he did. The woman was regnant The woman is always regnant, whether she be queen or dairymaid, but the barrier between himself and her was built of the old hurdles of low birth and iron fortune. Here anyway in his heart rang the knell 'Good-bye,' the farewell, farewell, farewell which every poet worth his salt has heard not once but many times, and, in the middle of the dirge the bell rang so remorselessly, came the exquisite chrysm of a fondling hand upon his head.