Despair's Last Journey Part 56

'Helped you?' she asked, pausing once more in her walk, and looking up at him in an innocent bewilderment.

'Helped me,' he repeated stonily. 'The words are plain enough.'

There was a garden-seat near at hand. She hastened to it, and sinking down upon it, seemed to surrender herself to tears. He moved moodily after her, and stood looking down at the pathway, tracing haphazard figures on its moss-grown surface with the cane he carried.

'I understand you now,' sobbed Gertrude. 'I have a right to reproach myself because my own undisciplined heart has gone beyond control sometimes; but does it lie in your province, Paul, to blame me for that?

Have I not an equal right,' she went on, 'to tell you that you have not helped me in the daily struggle I have had to make? You are unjust, you are ungenerous. I could never have believed it of you.'

'I can foresee nothing,' Paul said, 'but misery.'

'Nor can I,' she answered. She rose and faced him, and in the patch of moonlight in which she stood he could see that her tears at least were real. 'What you have to say to me, in effect,' she said, with an air of sudden quiet dignity, but with a quiver in her voice, 'is just this: that I am a heartless coquette, and have never cared for you; that I have wilfully lured you on to your own unhappiness. If you really think that, Paul, if it means anything more than a mere pa.s.sing gust of temper, we had better say good-bye at once. I have at least an equal right to bring the same charge against you, but I should disdain to harbour such a thought about you. There are many ways in which you may be cruel to a woman, Paul, and be forgiven, but you must not wound her pride in that way. That is the cruellest stab of all. The blade is poisoned, dear, and the wound will rankle for a lifetime.'

'Tell me,' he said, with his eyes blazing upon her, and the guarded voice in which he spoke shaking--'tell me that you have really cared for me; tell me, on your conscience and your honour, that you have not deliberately led me to this madness.'

'You can ask me that? she said. 'You can insult me so?'

'I ask it,' he responded.

'If my conduct has not shown it clearly,' said Gertrude, 'it is quite in vain to protest. I have given you better proof than words.'

'There is only one proof,' Paul answered. 'Are you strong enough to brave the world with me?'

'No, no,' she whispered; 'you must not ask me that I am not afraid of the world, but I am afraid of my own conscience.'

'Do you think,' he asked pa.s.sionately, 'that love could not sanctify a union such as ours? Be my Georges Sand, and I will be your De Musset; be my Stella, and I will be your Swift.'

'You choose your instances unfortunately, Mr. Armstrong,' Gertrude answered. 'Georges and Alfred lived to write vile and bitter books about each other, and Stella broke her heart under the despotism of a brute. I do not care for such a prospect.'

The 'Mr. Armstrong 'lashed him like an actual whip, and under the sting of it he barely followed the meaning of what came after. He was so staggered that he could only repeat the words:

'Mr. Armstrong.'

'You force me to my defence,' she answered gently. 'I am a woman, Paul; but I have my code of honour.'

'Im Gott's und Teufel's namen,' he groaned, 'what is it? You give me lips and arms; you have sworn you love me. What is loyalty?'

She drew herself to her full height:

'I do not pretend to define loyalty,' she said; 'but I know it when I see it. It may be less definite than insult; but the last, at least, is clearly outlined. I have been mistaken, and I will correct my error now.

Good-bye, Mr. Armstrong.'

'Good-bye,' said Paul.

She lingered for a mere instant as if in expectation of some further adieu, but he had none to offer. He saw no more clearly now into the truth than he had done at the beginning of the interview, but he had in a measure hardened himself by the spoken definition of his own att.i.tude, and, partly because he could not as yet retreat from it, he permitted her to go without another word She floated away in the alternate soft splendour of the moon and the deep shadow of the overhanging boughs, and he watched her gloomily until her figure disappeared at the end of the avenue. He stood for a minute or two with a vacant mind, digging his walking-cane into the dry, friable earth at his feet, and scoring the thin, sc.u.m-like growth of moss upon it with unmeaning lines. Then he lit a cigar, and, avoiding the crowded vestibule, skirted the dark western wall of the hotel, and so walked homeward. The thing was done now, and, whether it were rightly done or wrongly he cared very little for the moment He stood at one of those pauses of emotion in which the mind is able logically to balance pros and cons without the intervention of any gust of feeling. If Gertrude were really what she professed to be, he had acted with great cruelty. If she were not what she professed to be, he had acted with great wisdom for the first time in his life so far as the woman as protagonist was concerned He looked at the probabilities on both sides with a cynical coolness which would have been impossible to him at any earlier stage in his career. He had met but two men who had known the Baroness de Wyeth well, and they had both looked upon her from pretty much the same standpoint. Ralston's view was the more genial, but even in his opinion she was a born flirt, a creature who loved to tyre her chariot-wheels with hearts; and in the view of the coa.r.s.er mind she was a coquette mere and simple--a Queen Rabesqurat, who kept a sackful of the human eyes which had turned to her in adoration. Then, in spite of momentary indifference, his nerves tingled and his blood sparkled at the memory of that rare and fleeting instant at which she had seemed to surrender herself to his embraces, and to make him immortal with a kiss.

All the same, he could look on that fine second's immortality with a cold indifference when the thrill was over. Granted the very lowest scale for pa.s.sion, could the thing be real? Could he, for example, have stayed the torrent of his own blood in full course? He laughed to think of it, and a line and a half of his favourite poet sang in his brain:

'And thy pa.s.sions matched with mine Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.'

On the whole he began to conceive that he had done rightly, and in that half-belief, which drew slowly towards conviction, he went to bed and slept in a stolidity which surprised him later. The fact was that he was less resolved than tired.

Whilst he was at his deepest sleep a thundering summons at his door aroused him. A dream which came between the first prelude to this orchestral drumming and his awaking had advised him of a fainter disturbance, but by the time he was fairly awake the knocking had grown so exigent that it bade fair to raise the house.

'Come in I' he cried, and suddenly remembering that he had locked the door before getting into bed, he scrambled out in the darkness and turned back the key. 'What the devil is the matter here?' he asked, and the night porter of the hotel handed him a letter.

'I was told, sir,'he said, in indifferent French, 'to deliver this at once, but the messenger is gone, and there is no answer called for.'

There was light enough in the corridor to read by, and Paul recognised Gertrude's superscription.

'Thank you,' he answered. 'Light the gas for me in my room, and that will do.'

The man obeyed, bowed himself out, and went his way, closing the door behind him.

The letter Paul held in his hand was bulky, and when he had broken the envelope open he found that it held no fewer than seven sheets of Gertrude's crested paper. They were all covered in a hasty and sprawling hand, and on the first page was a scrawled date and a 'Sir' which had been written with so much energy that the upward sweeping course of the pen had bespattered the whole white surface with inky dots of greater or less magnitude.

'I had thought you my friend,' the epistle began; 'you have professed to be something more, and, as 'have heard you say, the greater should include the less.'

There the writing suddenly changed in character, and the letter went on, as it were, in calmer and more measured cali-graphic accents.

'How could you treat me so, knowing my friends.h.i.+p and even my foolish fondness? Was it not cruel to urge me as you did? I will confess to you what I have striven in vain to disguise. Had we met in earlier days, had I known you before I was bound in honour to the course I am compelled to run until my footsteps lead me to my grave, I might have been a happy woman. But a woman may love, and may yet place her honour before everything. I shall not care if, when I am dead and gone, you choose to boast that you won a woman's heart, and I will not even put you on your honour now to keep this silly secret; but you shall not go from me without my a.s.surance of this one fact. When I married, marriage was to me a sacrament, and if it were not for that------ But no more of this, dear Paul Dear, dear, and dearest Paul! I hardly know how I am writing, but the anguish you have caused me is unspeakable, and I am not guarded in my words. A woman's heart may err, and her principle of honour may yet be strong. I bid you good-bye with an aching heart, and I wish you all good fortune. It would seem that our stars are in opposition to each other, and fighting against each other in their courses. I agree with you in thinking that we are best apart, but I shall watch your career with a more than sisterly devotion, and my heart tells me that I shall have the right to acclaim your future.'

The letter said much more than this so far as the mere extension of the same sentiments might appear to be concerned, but in effect this was all until the final paragraph was reached.

'I have adhered to duty,' this ran, 'and I will. Nothing--neither the thought of your suffering nor of my own--shall draw me from it, but I recognise none the less the kindred soul I should have met had I been fortunate--as I am far from being. Write this in your private memoirs of me: "She loved too well, yet wisely," and think sometimes that it is possible for a woman to feel sometimes like a man, and to think I "could not love thee, dear, so well, loved I not honour more."

'I shall not add another word to this,' Gertrude concluded, 'except to say, I wish you all prosperity, all happiness. But just this remember always, that if I were a mischievous influence in your life, I meant it far otherwise, and I am always your devoted friend and well-wisher.

'G. DEW.'

For some reason or another by no means clear to himself the letter moved Paul less than it seemed to him that it should have done. He read it sitting in his pyjamas on the bedside, kicking his bare heels against the valance, and when he had done with it he tossed it on to the centre table, on which his ma.n.u.scripts, now too rarely looked at, lay scattered, and said rather grimly:

'Footlights.'

Then he mused awhile, half desiring to confirm the word, and half recalling it. He had made many desperate efforts to be loyal in his thoughts, but he was less disposed to struggle in that direction than he had been. His mind strayed back to Ralston, and to the bibulous explorer. Memory went further than either of them, and carried him back to the days when he had broken his career in two for the sake of Miss Belmont, old Darco's Middle Jarley Prown.' He had played the flat traitor to Darco once already for the sake of one woman, and now, as he began to see, he was once more using him very ill for the sake of another. He sat kicking his heels against the valance of the bed, and thinking. May Gold, Norah MacMulty, the dreadful hour of the lost innocence, Claudia, Annette, Gertrude--what an incredible list of follies for one man to have committed! He grew intensely bitter and self-disdainful.

There was no answer for the letter of the heart-wounded Gertrude. He was not quite sure whether he were a mere insensate brute or no, but he packed, and took the homeward train without a word of farewell. If Gertrude's friends.h.i.+p were a real thing, he was a beast unspeakable.

If it were a selfish sentimental sham--why, then--anything. He began to taste life with a very nausea of weariness.

But when London was reached, and the physical fatigue of travel shaken off, and the tornado of Darco's energies had engulfed him as of old, he found himself another man. Darco was terrible at their earliest interview.

'Led me haf a look at you,' he said, dragging Paul to his study-window.

'What haf you peen doing with yourseluf? I have known an Armstrong for some years who was rather a glever vellow. Vot? Ant now I gome agross an Armstrong who is a plithering impecile. Eh?'

'Now, my dear Darco,'Paul answered, 'I dare say that your criticism of the stuff I sent you is quite just I haven't, indeed, the remotest doubt about it But I have been out of health and worried, and now I am here for work. You shall have the best I can give you.'

'I shall speag to you,' said Darco, 'with an egsdreme blain-ness. I haf not forgotten our first parting. You did not dreat me well.'

'I know I didn't,' Paul said.