Despair's Last Journey Part 51

'I am going to keep you for a living, large-brained, human-hearted friend, and I hope that if we do not see too much of each other, we may both grow content with that arrangement.'

She spoke with a smiling vivacity, but she set a delicate little trifle of lace and cambric to her eyes, and then looked up and smiled again.

'You do not wish,' he asked, 'that we should see much of each other?'

His face was very gloomy.

'I mean,' she said gently, laying her hand upon his shoulder, and looking into his mournful eyes, 'that we should be discreet I do not mean that at all as regards the opinion of others, for there I can trust myself and you without a fear. I mean with respect to ourselves. It will not be well for your own happiness that we should meet often as we are meeting now.'

She rose, and moved away from him a little, standing with the fingers of her hands interlaced, and the palms downward. This is a very pleasing sort of att.i.tude when adopted by the right kind of person. Taken in conjunction with a pensive, sidelong droop of the head, it will yield an expression of gently sorrowing coy confidence when employed by a competent artist.

'You will promise me,' said the Baroness, with a voice not wholly steady, 'that you will never repeat to me what I am going to tell you.'

'You may command me anything,' Paul answered. 'I promise.'

'It will not be well,' she went on, repeating the words she had spoken so little a while before, 'for your own happiness that we should meet often as we are meeting now. Nor will it be well for mine, Paul. That is why I have hesitated so long before I have dared to permit you to see me--before I have dared to permit myself to see you. I am strong enough now to trust myself, and I put faith, too, in your friendship and your chivalry. You will not add to my unhappiness?'

Paul also had left his seat. He stood almost at her shoulder. He was near enough to have taken her in his arms.

'Gertrude,' he murmured, 'if anything could add to what I feel for you, this would do it. You shall have my tenderest adoration, my constant obedience.'

She turned her head slowly, as if she did it almost against her will.

She raised her eyes and looked at him with a strange steadfastness. She spoke in a soft, half-whisper.

'This is our good-bye to love. We have met and we have spoken, and we part again. In half an hour we shall meet as friends, and never, never, never again as we part now.'

She faced round upon him. Her fingers unlaced themselves and she stood with both arms open to him. For one burning instant he held her.

'Your promise!' she whispered, in a frightened voice. 'Your promise, Paul! Your promise!'

He suffered her to escape, and she drew herself away lingeringly, with the same strange steadfast glance.

'Good-bye, my lover. Good-bye, my king. I shall never meet him again. I shall come back to meet my friend.'

The words were but breathed so as to reach the ear, and she turned and walked droopingly from the room. So might a bruised lily have been borne away.

As for Paul, he had half an hour before the earliest guest was expected to arrive, and he tried hard to compose himself. It was heavy work, for he was constantly rolling down the hill of endeavour with exclamations of wonder and worship. What a woman! What a pearl among women! What candour! What courage! What tenderness! What purity! What beauty! He was at the height of felicity and the depth of misery with such rapid alternations that he lost the sense of difference, and could not tell one from the other. But when the half-hour of waiting had almost vanished he drank another gla.s.s of the wine his _deesse_ had commanded for him, and was at least prepared to face the world with a pretence of self-possession.

The guests began to arrive. There were but six more, and all were masculine. The Baroness made a radiant entrance to greet them. She made Paul known to each of them in turn, and all were men of mark. He heard everywhere a name which had been long familiar to him, but the latest comer of all, whom he had not found time to notice, was familiar in something more than name. For it was Ralston--Ralston the great, who had been the G.o.d of his boyhood--Ralston with his big gray head worn on one shoulder or another, with the look of fighting wisdom in his face, quite as of old.

'Mr. Ralston,' said the hostess, 'you must know my young friend Mr.

Armstrong. We saw his comedy together, you remember.'

Ralston remembered, and seemed to remember more than the name.

'We have met before this?' he asked.

'Once,' Paul replied.

'Castle Barfield?'

'Exactly.'

'If you'd rather shelve that----'

'Certainly not--between ourselves.'

The hostess took the escort of the eminent diplomatist who was the _doyen_ of the party. The men followed as it pleased them. Ralston and Paul went last.

'I am a prophet,' said Ralston, subduing that richly hoa.r.s.e voice of his. 'I told you you would do, and you have done.'

CHAPTER XXII

The evening was memorable to Paul for many reasons. There was not a great deal of the talk to carry away with one; but if it had not the solid brilliance of the diamond, it had the cheaper glitter of the sharded gla.s.s epigram which sparkles and cuts--an admirable subst.i.tute on most occasions, though it has the disadvantage of leaving dangerous fragments for people to tread upon. The conversation was carried on exclusively in French, and, though Paul's ears were quick enough to keep abreast of it, his tongue was not, and he was a silent listener for the most part Ralston, having pathetically bidden farewell to ease and English, seemed as much at home as any person at table; but he told Paul, as they walked home together, that he hated to speak a foreign language.

'Give me the old familiar tool that one has handled since babyhood. See how it adjusts itself to the hand! how one can carve with it! with how much comfort and dexterity! English, besides that, is the only language in the world. The things that are not to be said in English are not worth thinking--if they are speakable at all; and some things are not.

Look up yonder!' They were in the Place Vendome. His upward gesture sent Paul's eyes to the sky, which was sown thick with stars. 'Do you care for a talk across a whisky-and-soda and a cigar?' asked Ralston. 'I am here in the Rue Castiglione. Come to my room. I have the right nectar. I bring it with me when I come to Paris, and let them charge for corkage.'

When the guests had scattered, Paul had looked for one more private word with Gertrude; but she had left him no excuse to linger. She had said her 'Good-bye, Paul,' with an almost icy sweetness. He wanted to get away into solitude to think about her, and was half inclined to excuse himself from Ralston.

'Dear little, queer little body, our hostess, eh? Have you known her long?'

'Not very long,' Paul answered 'But she and you seemed to have quite ancient memories.'

If Ralston would talk about Gertrude, he would be glad to sit with him till morning light.

'Oh, I?' said Ralston--'I have known her from her childhood. If she makes any secret of her affairs, I mustn't babble, though. Do you know the Baron?'

'Not personally.'

'Ah, well---- This way in. I am no higher than the first-floor, and we needn't trouble the man at the lift. Here's the room. And now that I'm on my own territory, let me say how glad I am to have lighted upon you again. I've often wondered what you were making of yourself.

"Paul Armstrong" is individual enough, and when I saw the name on the play-bill, I recalled it, and wondered if it meant you. Whisky, soda, cigars. Now we are provided for.'

Paul made himself look as disengaged and easy as possible.

'You asked me if I knew the Baron. What kind of man is he? A strange sort of fellow, rather--one-and-thirty--to be indifferent to such a woman: brilliant, amiable, charming.'

He spoke with no enthusiasm. He wanted to talk about Gertrude, but he did not mean to betray his own concerns.

'The Baron's a very decent fellow; but he has a rather muddy German accent, and he can't understand the lady's verses. There's nothing worse than that in it. She elects to travel; he elects to stay at home.

There's no sort of scandal or impropriety. She's a dear little woman, and a good little woman, and she has the French-American _pschutt_, as the idiot word goes now. She's a bit of a sentimentalist, and an exquisite flirt, but the most genuine little creature, too. If she wouldn't flirt, she'd be too good for this world.'

'Flirt!' cried Paul, in so much horror that Ralston laughed aloud.

'I have taken advantage of my demi-semi-clerical dignity,' he said, 'to preach many sermons to her on that particular. Mind you, she's a most estimable woman; and, as you said just now, brilliant and amiable and charming. But she flirts--she flirts with me; and, if I were not entrenched behind the fortress of threescore years, she'd enslave me as she enslaves everybody else. There's an Isolation of the Soul which is very effective at short range. Do you happen to have met it yet?'

Was Ralston warning him of set purpose? Had he observed anything--any little subtle thing--which had told him how the land lay? Was he conceivably speaking as the husbands friend? Was his speech accidental or designed? Whatever it might be, and it was certainly enough to discomfit the listener greatly, it was not enough to shake his faith in Gertrude. When he found time to think about it, he marvelled that so shrewd a man as Ralston should have formed so mistaken an estimate of a character so sincere and transparent.