'I cannot talk much,' she says, in her pretty foreign accent

It has been the one ambition of her mind during these three or four years to speak English like an Englishwoman, and she has very nearly succeeded, only there is still a rhythm left which is charming to hear.

'I shall not be with you long.'

'What?'says Paul. 'Nonsense, sweetheart! that's a mere sick fancy. Chase it away.'

'It is no fancy,' says Annette--'no fancy at all. I heard the doctor this morning. They did not think I could hear, and he was talking with the housekeeper. He said he feared the worst. You know what that means, Paul.'

What should he say? A man of ardent blood and active brain does not live with a jelly-fish for sole home society for a year or two without a certain weariness, yet his manhood scorned him for it, and even if pa.s.sion had never been alive at all there was tenderness and the camaraderie which comes of close a.s.sociation. He kissed her, and he lied in kissing her, but it was not a wicked or an evil lie.

'My dear,' he said, 'this is all fancy. You will be well and strong again in a month or two. I have talked to the doctor, and I can a.s.sure you he has no sort of fear about you. Look here, now. Darco is coming down to-morrow, and we shall revise our play. Within a week it shall be finished, and then we will have you packed carefully in cotton-wool and will carry you back to Paris. Or if you think it will be too cold in Paris we will take train to Nice, and pa.s.s the winter there.'

'No,' she said, 'I shall spend my winter here, and it will be my last.'

Her eyebrows had a pathetic lift, and her gaze was on the sky, beyond the curtains and the window-panes. 'Paul! Paul dear! Do one thing for me.' She turned her frightened appealing brown eyes upon him, and stole her hand softly and timidly into his.

'Yes, dear,' he answered. 'Anything that is in my power--anything.'

She had never seemed so human.

'I shall not live to plague you,' said Annette. 'You are strong and brave and clever, and you have ambitions, you big boy, and I have been a weight about your neck.'

'No, no, no!' he cried.

'Oh yes,' she answered mournfully. 'I know it I have seen it all along.

But all that will soon be over. Only there is one thing, Paul.'

She stretched out her arms to him, and he bent his head so that she might embrace him. He had always fought in his own heart for the fiction that he loved her, and sometimes he had won in that difficult conflict; now he was sure of it, and he put his arms about her. Was he to lose her just as she revealed herself in this sweet way?

'Paul,' she asked him, 'are you sorry that I am going? Shall you grieve--a little?'

'You mustn't talk so, dear,' said Paul; 'you break my heart.'

He spoke with a genuine vehemence. He was astonished at the strength of his own feeling.

'Then,' she said, 'do this one little thing for me. Whisper. Let me whisper. Can you hear me like that?

'Yes, sweetheart, yes. What is it?'

'Make me an honest woman before I die,' said Annette, in a voice that barely reached him. 'I was brought up to be a good girl, and I have suffered--oh Paul, dear, I have suffered! Promise me.'

Here were depths he had not looked for or suspected, and he thought within himself how blind he had been; how much he had misread her; how like a doll he had treated her. His whole heart smote him with self-scorn, with pity, with remorse.

'You are not dying, dear Annette,' he said; 'you will live, and we shall love each other a thousand times better than we have ever done before, because this fear of yours has broken the ice between us.'

'No, Paul,' she answered. Her arms fell languidly on the counterpane. 'I shall not live, but promise me that. Let me die happy. Tu sais, cheri, que ma mere est morte. Je voudrais encontrer ma mere au ciel, comme fille honnete, ne c'est pas? Ah! pour l'amour de Dieu, Paul!'

'My darling,' he answered, 'I'll do it! I'll do anything. But don't talk nonsense about dying. We shall have many a happy year together yet.'

It was his facile, ardent way to think of himself as brokenhearted if he lost her, and he had never seen her in such a mood as this before, or anything approaching to it It was no pretence for the moment that he loved her. He felt for the first time that their two hearts were near.

And though he had been loyal to her, and through times good, bad and indifferent had brought her of his best, and had done what he could in a cool, husbandly sort of way to make her happy, he knew his moral debt to her, and was sore about it, and had been sore about it often. It had never been in his mind for an instant to evade his burden, even when he had felt the weight of it most heavily, and he was willing and even eager to offer this small and laggard reparation.

'We have lived here much more than the statutory time,' he said. 'I will go and see the district registrar at once, and we will be married at the earliest possible minute. That will only be a legal union, dear, but if you care for anything further we can be married in a church when you get strong enough.'

'Thank you, Paul,' she answered. 'You _are_ good to me.'

'Poor, sweet little woman!' he answered, for now he was touched deeply by his own remorse. 'There, you are happy now?

'So happy, Paul! So happy!'

He kissed her and left her there, and loading up his pipe, set out at a brisk pace across the common in the direction of the little township in which the registrar was to be found. Half an hour's walk brought him there, and the functionary was at home. Paul explained his errand and its urgency. A special fee obviated publicity, and he paid it. Money smoothes all kinds of roads, and in arrangements for marriage it will almost abolish time.

Arrangements concluded, the coming bridegroom hastened home, his heart warm with resolve and tender with a new-born affection. It was curious, he thought, that he should so have misunderstood a woman with whom he had been so long in the closest intercourse. That placid, yielding way of hers, that habit of mind which he had regarded in his mannish fashion as being altogether gelatinous and invertebrate--how ill he had construed it all. What a depth of feeling lay concealed beneath it! 'Je voudrais encontrer ma mere au ciel, comme fille honnete.' Ah! the poor creature, who had yielded too easily to his embraces and his flatteries, whom he had led astray with professions of love and admiration which had never been real--what amends were too large to repay her? And the promised amend seemed little enough, for he had not contemplated life away from Annette. His a.s.sociation with her had isolated him in a certain degree, but if good women were out of his life, and he missed them sometimes rather sadly, good fellows were plentiful, married and single, and the length of time for which his liaison had lasted had lent it a kind of respectability. Possibly, after all, even if Annette had not been about to release him, marriage would have been the best solution of a difficulty. He wondered now why he had never thought of it earlier. Simply because a trustful girl in her innocence and ignorance had permitted herself to repose her whole future on one who might have played the scoundrel with her, he had been content to forget his duty.

Well, he would atone.

The ceremony, when it came, was of the simplest, and had a bald and business air about it which was discomfiting to a man who felt that he was giving rein to a n.o.ble sentiment The registrar, as he pocketed his fee, and shook hands in congratulation, a.s.sured him it was efficacious.

It took place, of course, in Annette's bedroom, but it was done with so much delicacy that not even the landlady suspected it. The registrar and his a.s.sistant pa.s.sed to her mind as medical men called to the bedside of the patient.

Paul sat for half an hour after they had gone with Annette's hand in his, and then, seeing that she had fallen asleep, softly withdrew himself. He strolled to the common, and there, wading through gorse, he found the doctor who had attended her from the time of their arrival.

'Well, Mr. Armstrong,' said the medico cheerfully, 'how's the patient?'

'Better, I think,' said Paul. 'But, doctor, tell me--what made you take so gloomy a view a week ago? Don't you think she'll mend?'

'Mend, my dear sir? said the doctor. 'Of course she'll mend. You'll have her on her feet again in a week or two. She's never been in danger for a moment.'

'But didn't you say a week ago----'

'That she _was_ in danger?'

'Yes. That she was in danger.'

'I give you my word, Mr. Armstrong, that the idea never crossed my mind.

I've never had a touch of anxiety from the first. I'd like you to give me a game at chess to-night, if you're not otherwise engaged. I'm just going across to have a look at Mrs. Armstrong now. But it's a mere matter of form, I a.s.sure you. Good morning.'

'Why didn't I ask that question earlier?' said Paul to himself. But he scarcely knew as yet in what direction his thoughts were pointing.

CHAPTER XV

Paul Armstrong--the real Paul Armstrong who dreamed these dreams of memory--sat day by day in his mountain solitude surrounded by the smoke-fog which obliterated all but the nearer objects from his view. He could faintly distinguish the bluff on the other side of the canon. It was like a pale, flat, and barely perceptible stain on grayish-brown paper. The mountains were all abolished, but their ghostly voices lived.

Here and there the slumbering heat upon their flanks would provoke a snow-slide, and the long-drawn roar and rumble of it would go rolling and echoing apparently in a dozen regions all at once, so that it would be impossible to tell from what direction the original sound proceeded.

Two voices of the solitude were ceaseless--the reverberating roar of the river and the chatter of the mountain brook which ran to meet it; but in ears long accustomed to them they seemed to weave a silence of their own. Twice a day, at least, his sole reminders of the living, pulsing outer world went by. Sometimes as the panting train rushed east or west, its reminder of the world from which he had parted brought a bitter pang with it.

He found but little occupation for his hands, and, apart from his memories, little for his mind. He read and reread his father's dying words until he knew them by rote, and could read them with shut eyes as he lay in his blanket in the wakeful hours of night. He would not admit to himself that he had a real belief in their message, and yet it was always with him in a fainter or a stronger fashion, and it made a part of life.