Despair's Last Journey Part 41

'I want what you call--what is your word for it? Oh yes, I know--I want what you call a pick-me-up. Will you share a pint of wine with me? I want a gla.s.s--just one gla.s.s of champagne. I quite long for it.'

'Why, yes,' said Paul, 'that is a simple matter enough,' and he gave the order for the wine.

Annette drank the greater part of it, and began to glow and sparkle.

The colour came back to her cheeks and the light to her eyes. She was unusually bright and animated, and chattered all manner of good-humoured nonsense with the juge de paix and the garde-champetre.

'That is your medicine, my dear,' said Paul, in a half-whisper, tapping the bottle with a finger-nail. 'I shall prescribe it for you daily.'

She made a little face at him and laughed. 'I don't like the stuff,'

she said, 'very often, but I longed for it this morning; and, oh! I am better for it.'

They were as much at home in the Hotel of the Three Friends by this time as if they had lived there all their lives. There was no stranger present at the meal, and it was not at all a surprising thing when Annette floated away to the piano at the further end of the room and began to tinkle at the keys there. She was by no means an accomplished musician, but she played a few little airs with a sort of spontaneity and grace, and she had a sweet, thin, bird-like voice, a clear and liquid note, which was perhaps her greatest charm. She searched among the music upon the top of the piano, flicking the untidy scattered leaves until she found a song she knew.

'Music, messieurs,' she said, 'is an aid to digestion; I will make a sandwich of sentiment for you--cheese on the one side, dessert on the other, and love in the middle.'

The garde and the juge and the local huissier and the bachelor chemist all beat the hafts of their knives on the table in applause, and she sang, with a vivacity and archness Paul had never before observed in her, a s.n.a.t.c.h of cheap Belgian sentimentalism:

'Toux les deux, la main dans la main, Nous poursuivions notre chemin, Sous la celeste voute; Les doux echos mysterieux Repeter nos baisers joyeux Tout le long--tout le long de la route.'

And whilst she was warbling the door of the salle opened and in walked Laurent.

'Pardon, madame,' he cried; 'do not permit me to interrupt you.'

But Annette had already risen from the piano, and had closed the lid of the instrument.

'My sister has gone to Janenne,' he explained, 'and I am left breakfastless. You hungry rascals have not eaten everything, I hope?'

The Flemish maid would lay an instant cover for Monsieur Laurent, and room was made for him at the table with something like enthusiasm. He began to talk vivaciously sc.r.a.ps of local news gathered on his morning rounds among his patients, and from time to time he turned to Paul to explain some rustic allusion or phrase. He made himself charming, and since he did not explain that he had purposely dismissed his sister for the day in order to find an excuse for his visit to the hotel, Annette had no present suspicion of him. They had a little playful badinage together, and Laurent, turning mock-sentimental, lamented his celibacy so quaintly that she broke into peals of silvery laughter over him. Paul was pleased with her, and half inclined to be proud of her for the first time in his life, though he had a nervous fear lest her gaiety should topple over like an unskilled artist on the slack wire.

By-and-by Laurent set about his meal in a business-like fashion, and Paul strolled quietly from the room. The others, juge and garde and huissier and chemist, chief of gendarmerie, and all the rest of the regular frequenters of the table, were called away by their own avocations. Paul, sitting with his study-door ajar, looking as if prepared to be absorbed in labour at any moment, watched them as they went out by ones and twos, and knew that at last Laurent and Annette were together. The heat of summer noon was in the air. The _place_ was empty, and there was everywhere a humming silence through which his ear discerned now and then the deeper hum of Laurent's voice. Not a word was audible, or would have been even had Paul cared to play the eavesdropper, but one might have thought that the doctor was preaching a sermon.

'He's a wise old man, is Laurent,' said Paul to himself, 'and, for a bachelor, he seems to have an uncommon good knowledge of women. That comes out of a doctor's practice, I dare say.'

The heat of the day, the single gla.s.s of wine he had taken, and the hearty meal he had eaten after his morning fast, all combined to make him drowsy, and he had fallen into a half-slumber in which he saw hazily the creatures of his fancy moving behind the footlights, when the door of the dining-room opened, and he heard Laurent's words of farewell:

'Croyez moi, Madame Armstrong, c'est une affaire a.s.sez grave. Mais courage, courage! Et--bon jour--et bonne esperance.'

Then the door closed, and the doctor's st.u.r.dy feet in their thick-soled boots went echoing along the parquet, clattered for a moment on the pavement outside, and were lost to hearing.

Paul woke with a numbness at the heart. The affair was serious; but courage, and good hope! That sounded grave. He rose from his chair, the pipe between his lips still sending up a spiral of blue smoke. He was asking himself whether he should go in to the next apartment either to comfort or to question, when the door of the _salle a manger_ again opened, and Annette stole into his room. She pushed the door wide and stood framed for an instant against the shadow of the corridor. She was dressed in some filmy white stuff, with a great blue bow at the throat and a bow of scarlet in her hair. She had an odd taste in contrasts, but the Parisian touch was always evident in what she wore, and if her scheme of personal adornment were sometimes quaint, it was always artistic. Paul noticed then, and remembered always, a strange pathos in her look. She seemed for the moment curiously childlike. Her face had once more lost its colour, and her eyes, which were thick with tears, were like those of a child grown frightened in loneliness, and searching doubtfully and almost in terror for the homeward way.

She put out her hands towards him with a gesture of appeal. It seemed as if she asked his pardon, though why that should be he could not guess, and as he made a hasty movement towards her she entered the room suddenly, and thrust the door vehemently behind her so that the corridor rang with the echo of the sound.

'Paul,' she said, 'Paul!' and sinking on her knees before him, she threw her arms round him and began to cry bitterly.

He tried to raise her, but her arms clung tightly, and he could do nothing but stand there awkwardly and smooth her hair with foolish, half-articulate expressions of sympathy. She cried as if broken-hearted for a time, and when at last his caressing fingers raised her face towards his own, her chin and throat were wet with tears, and her eyes were still br.i.m.m.i.n.g. He coaxed her with much difficulty to an arm-chair, and when he had seated her there he knelt beside her with an arm about her waist.

'What is it, little woman?' he asked. 'Dear little woman, what is it?'

He had striven in vain with his disengaged hand to draw away the interlaced fingers she had knitted across her eyes, but at this appeal she cast her arms abroad and looked at him with a swift intentness through her tears.

'You mean it?' she asked with an eager fierceness in her eyes and voice.

'Mean it?' he answered. 'What, the dear little woman? Of course I mean it.'

'Paul,' she said, 'if you will only love me, if you will only strive with me, I will love and worship you all my days.'

'What can I do?' he asked. 'Tell me, and I will do it'

'Oh!' she cried, beating the air with her hands, 'these moods, these follies! they are my own fault I am dividing myself from you. I am breaking my own heart; I am miserable for no reason. Help me, Paul, help me! Be at least my friend!'

He was not a man to whom such an appeal could be made in vain, and his heart acquitted him of any falsehood when he a.s.sured her that he loved her, and would yield her any earthly service in his power.

'But, sweetheart,' he said, 'tell me how I am to help you. Don't think that there is any reproach in what I say, but often when I wish to be near you you banish me, and I have to go, because all my thought is not to hara.s.s you. I heard what Laurent said just now----'

Her face hardened into an expression of inquiry. Her black brows shot down level, over her brown eyes, and the eyes gloomed at him with a threat in them.

'You heard?' she said.

'Yes,' he responded caressingly, 'I heard his parting words, "l'affaire est a.s.sez grave--mais courage, et bonne esperance."'

'Is that all you heard?' she demanded, bending the level challenge of her brows still lower, and snaking away her form from his embrace as if she feared it.

'I heard no more,' said Paul.

'Ah, well!' she answered in a sudden la.s.situde. She fell back into the arm-chair with closed eyes, and suffered her hands to fall laxly on either side of her knees. 'You will find me a changed girl, Paul. I am going to have done with my moods, and I am going to follow--I am going to follow--what is it I am going to follow? M. Laurent knows. Oh yes, it is the G.o.ddess of hygiene! I am to bathe, and I am to drive, and I am to walk, and I am to be equably cheerful, and I am to give up my black coffee and my strong tea and my eau des Carmes, and I am never to drink wine until dinner-time, and then only two gla.s.ses--two little gla.s.ses of claret or burgundy--and then I am to be quite an angel of good temper, and everybody is to adore me. That is the verdict of M. Laurent. Do you think, Paul, I shall be charming when I have done all these things?'

'You would be charming, little sweetheart,' said Paul, 'whether you did them or no. It is not a question of charm, but of health, dear, and Laurent is a very sage old gentleman indeed, and you may follow his counsel with perfect certainty. I can't help owning,' he went on, 'that I've been a little nervous lately about the fluctuation of your spirits, and I'm glad he happened to drop in and have a talk with you.'

She flashed from languor into a mood of vivid irony. Her lips curled, her eyes opened wide with a dancing beryl-coloured flame behind them, and her eyebrows arched in a sublime disdain.

'You didn't send him?' she asked

'I?' said Paul, with a guilty stammer--' I--send him?'

'Now, before you lie,' said Annette, with a tragic gesture of the hand, 'hear me. The window of our dressing-room happens--just happens, by G.o.d's providence to confute a fool--to command a view of Dr. Laurent's door. I saw you go in; I could even hear you knock. Do you think you can deceive me? Pah!'

She rose, evaded his arm, swept from the room in a kind of torrential rage, banged the door behind her, and was gone.

He was so amazed at it all--the swift interchange of penitence to self-abas.e.m.e.nt, languor, challenge, suspicion, wrath, and accusation--that he stood dumfounded, not knowing what to think. He heard the flying feet and swirling skirts as Annette raced upstairs. In the drowsy stillness of the afternoon he heard the door of her bedroom close with a decisive click, and then the sharp shooting of the bolt and the shrieking of the key as it turned in its unaccustomed wards. Still standing there in wonderment, he listened to her footsteps overhead as she dashed through the dressing-room, and an instant later came the slamming and the locking of a second door.

He sat down, reached mechanically for his pipe, beat out the ashes from it on the level tiles of the hearth, and mechanically filled and lit it.

He searched his mind for a clue to the whole extraordinary business of the last half-hour, and could find but one: the anxieties of coming maternity, and possibly the change of frame which women suffer at such times, had unhinged Annette, and had disturbed her mind and nerves from their ordinary balance. He longed for an interview with Laurent, but he dared not seek it. He would have sent a messenger to him, but he also might be watched by those keen and too observant eyes.

As he sat and thought things over he gradually gathered courage, and at length he began to discern a touch of comedy in that which had so much disturbed him. It was a very tender and touching comedy, but it was comedy all the same--a bird-soul of light and laughter hovering over a lake of tears. The _dear_ little woman! He had thought her unimpressionable, even a little stupid, and he saw now how much he had wronged her. She was full of emotions he had never suspected, and could not even now a.n.a.lyze. Her very waywardness, the strange caprices of feeling which had so astonished him as they chased each other, began to look charming in the new light his thoughts cast upon them.

'Thus it is,' said Paul to himself, 'we come into the world casting our shadows before us, and making laughter and trouble of all sorts for our makers before we are born.'