'My respects to Madame Armstrong,' he said, when the landlady's middle-aged daughter came in and smoothed her ap.r.o.n as a sign of respect to Monsieur le Medecin. 'I am a few moments late, but I am here to keep my appointment.'

Out went Mademoiselle Adele, and her slippered footsteps faded up the staircase. There was a sound of knocking, a conversation inaudible to the two who strained their ears to listen, and then mademoiselle was back again.

Madame was _malade--bien malade_--would beg Monsieur le Medecin to excuse her.

'Then I will try,' said Laurent 'I have your authority?'

'Absolutely,' said Paul, and the doctor went creaking up the stairs in his heavy, country-made boots.

Paul sat alone again and listened with his heart in his ears.

A series of raps sounded upon the door above, at first quiet and persuasive, and then increasing in intensity. There came a faint sound of protesting inquiry, and in answer:

'Dr. Laurent, s'il vous plait, madame.'

There was another protest, and Laurent spoke again:

'But I am here by appointment, madame, and I cannot afford to waste my time.'

And just here a curious and rather embarra.s.sing thing happened, for the doctor, laying a nervous hand upon the door, found it suddenly opened to him with no symptom of resistance.

'A thousand pardons!' he exclaimed. 'Pray tell me when you are ready.'

Annette was at the door like a wild cat, but the square-built toe of Laurent's foot was between it and the jamb. Paul raced up the stairs in his stocking-feet, his boots in his hand. This was not a time for delicacies of sentiment He wished to save Annette. He wished even more to save himself from the misery of a lifelong degradation. He darted into his own room whilst Laurent was still standing like a statue at the door of the adjoining chamber, but reached it barely in time, for on a sudden the door of Annette's apartment was thrown open, and a voice of imperious sarcasm demanded to know to what Madame Armstrong was indebted for this unexpected honour.

'It will be well,' said Laurent in his professional tone, 'for Madame Armstrong to return to bed.'

He turned the key in the door, and at this Annette sent out shriek on shriek, until the whole corridor seemed to shrill with the outcry.

'Madame,' said Laurent in his deep nasal voice, when the clamour died down for a moment, 'your husband is in the house. He is within hearing.

I have his entire authority to speak to you, and I am intent to use it I am here to tell you that you have abused his absence and his confidence, and that on his arrival at Janenne last night I told him the result of my observations during the last four or five weeks.'

Paul, boots in hand, sat on the edge of his own bed, and heard a kind of gasping noise. Then for a moment there was silence until Laurent spoke again.

'If you will permit, madame,' he said, 'this interview may go smoothly.

If you choose to be angry, that is your affair. I am authorized by your husband, as your physician, to speak plain truths to you. You need not trouble to deny me, but I see you have already been drinking.'

'How dare you!' she flashed out, and Paul heard the stamp of her little naked foot upon the fox-skin rug which lay beside their bed.

'Madame,' said Laurent, 'there is no question of daring or not daring. I have told your husband everything, and he is sitting in the next room at this moment, and hears every word we speak.'

'Paul!' she cried, 'Paul is here? Why hasn't he been to see me? Why has he no word for me?'

'Madame,' said Laurent sternly, 'I bid you cease these theatrical pretences. Your unhappy husband saw you last night when you three times seized the decanter which had been left for him.'

She gasped: 'You liar!'

'That is all very well, madame,' responded Laurent, 'but my eyes are mine, and I have known the truth for months past. Why do you venture on a hope so vain? Now, I will tell you plainly, Madame Armstrong, you are going on the way to h.e.l.l. You are to be stopped, and you shall be stopped. Pray make no mistake as to the authority that is to be exerted.

It shall be exerted as mildly as you permit. It shall be exerted as inexorably as the necessities of the case demand I have told you already many times into what a pitfall you were descending, but until last night I never dared to warn your husband. He knows the truth now, knows it all, and he leaves you in my hands. You have not heeded advice or beseeching, and--I say it, believe me, with deep reluctance--we must draw a cordon about you, and protect you from yourself. Pray understand, madame, it is a protective cordon only, and your own action may relax it at any time; but your actions will be watched, as it is my duty to tell you, to the extremest scruple.'

'What do you mean to do? Paul heard her ask in a husky, panting voice, which made him figure in his own mind a hunted creature almost run to ground.

'Nothing more,' Laurent replied, 'nothing more, madame, believe me--nothing more than is dictated by the necessities of the case. You have an ordonnance dating from Paris.

I have instructed the pharmacien that he is no longer to respect it.'

Annette whined at this like a child robbed of a toy.

'I have forbidden him this morning,' Laurent pursued, 'to supply you, without my special direction, with any drug whatever, and I have given him particular orders about the eau'des Carmes. I am now about to tell the hotel people that you are under my care and treatment, and that you will be allowed only a measured quant.i.ty of wine per diem.'

'You mean to expose me to them?' Annette asked

'I do not propose to expose madame to anybody,' Laurent responded, 'but if madame chooses to expose herself----'

The listener could imagine the shrug of the broad shoulders and the outward cast of the persuasive hands.

'Voyons, madame,' pursued the doctor, 'we wish nothing but your good, but that we are determined to accomplish. I have nothing to add to what I have said already, and perhaps it is time that you should see your husband.'

Paul hastily thrust his feet into his slippers, and awaited the opening of the door.

'He is there,' said Laurent; 'he has probably listened to every word we have spoken.'

Paul sat trembling on the bed-edge. The imminent interview disturbed him strangely, and set all manner of conflicting tides flowing in heart and brain. He was part coward and part hero; ready to face everything and to run away from everything. His pity for Annette was pity, and no more; his sympathy for Paul Armstrong amounted to a pa.s.sion. He strove to bring himself to what he conceived to be a more fitting mood, but whilst he struggled with himself the inner door of the room in which he sat was suddenly torn open, and Annette stood before him. He could not have believed, without that actual visual revelation, that such a wreck could have been achieved in so small a s.p.a.ce of time. Whatever of spirituality, whatever of youthful foolish _espieglerie_ the face had held, had vanished. The visage was like a mask--and a mask of death.

There was a splash of purplish crimson beneath either eyelid, but for the rest the face was of the yellow of a week-old bone; the eyelids were puffy, and the lips were lax. The whole face quivered like a shaken jelly as she looked at him.

'Paul,' she said--' Paul, Paul!'

And with that she cast herself upon his breast in a very storm of tears.

For a moment he stood helpless and confused, and then a sudden flux of pity came upon him, and he held her steadily and firmly in answer to the hysteric grip with which her arms encircled him, now tightening and now relaxing. She fawned upon him piteously from the very beginning of this embrace, and at the last she fell, both knees thudding upon the carpet, and abased her head between his ankles, crying bitterly the while. And at this whatever manhood was within the man fled for the time being, and he, kneeling to raise her from her self-abas.e.m.e.nt, also lifted up his voice and wept bitterly.

Before things had quite reached this melancholy pa.s.s Laurent had stolen from the room, and had closed both doors behind him, so that husband and wife were alone.

'Dearest,' said Paul, 'what can I do to help you?'

The word was not wholly sincere, but it held more than the average ounce of sincerity to the ton which keeps human speech a possibility. At least his desire was to help her, if it were only a way of helping himself.

But the whole thing was so miserable that to a.n.a.lyze emotions at such a moment was surely to mount the very Appenines of folly. Annette cried and cried, with her yet young and supple figure clinging to him, and, in spite of the debauched, melancholy face, what could he do but stroke her hair and kiss her cheek, and promise kindness and encouragement? Most of the time he was inwardly murmuring, 'Poor devil!' and was a.s.suring himself that he had taken up a most hopeless handful; but the whole wretched tangle of feeling was too intricate to be unravelled by so much as a straight inch. What could he do? He asked the question despairingly; he asked it in genuine pity of Annette; he asked it in a yet more genuine pity of himself. The man who deals professionally with the emotions of other people cannot preserve the simplicity of his own; it would be out of nature to believe it.

There was a reconciliation of a sort, but it could hardly be very real at first, and to give it any aspect of permanence time was necessary.

Laurent and Paul concocted a plan of campaign. It was essential in the doctor's opinion to avoid as far as possible all open evidence of watchfulness, and yet to know very accurately what was being done.

Innumerable attempts were made to break the cordon of guardianship which was drawn around Annette. She feigned, of course, as people in her position always feign, to acquiesce entirely in the means which were adopted to guard her from herself, but there were eternal skirmishes between the outlying posts of the two armies which came in a very short time to be established. In that newfound prosperity of his Paul had grown absolutely careless about money, and he had not the faintest idea as to the extent of his wife's supplies. That she had enough, for the time being, to corrupt quite a small regiment was speedily made manifest, and a silent contest, in which the victor acknowledged victory no more than the vanquished admitted defeat, set in. How wide the ramifications of this strange war might be Paul could not guess, but on occasion some circ.u.mstance would reveal that they had reached unexpected distances. It was a perfectly understood thing in the hotel itself that no supplies of wine or of more potent liquor were to be supplied at Madame Armstrong's order. The village pharmacien sold nothing to her without Laurent's consent, but there were ways and means of one sort or another by which she contrived to procure her poison, and at such times the old signs were always perceptible: the pa.s.sion for solitude, the tricksy, changing spirit which varied from extravagant mirth to unreasonable anger. Laurent watched the contest with a sleepless loyalty, and Annette, finding herself foiled by him a thousand times oftener than by the less vigilant Paul, grew to hate him. But in spite of all the unfortunate creature could do to accelerate her own ruin, she grew slowly back to health, and to something more than her original personal attractiveness. For a kind of experience was marked upon her, and the indefinable yet universally recognised expression which betokens this was present in her looks. When watchfulness prevailed over the strange craft which was brought into conflict with it, Annette knew how to be charming, even to the man who suffered so much at her hands; but when the contrabandists succeeded in running in their supplies there were hours of horror--scenes in which rage and accusation were succeeded by storms of tears and tempestuous self-reproach. On one such occasion Paul sat in his study, for the moment oblivious of the world. His dissipation and his best relief from the cares which beset him was labour, and he laboured hard. It was his fashion at this time to stand at his desk--a rude thing built for him by the village carpenter--and in the pauses which came in between his actual spells of writing, to stride about his limited territory, enacting the scenes he was striving to portray, and shaping his sentences in such an impa.s.sioned undertone as an actor will employ in the study of a part. He was at the limit of his walk from the window, thus engaged, when the door was violently and without warning broken open in such fashion that its edge struck him on the face. Here was Annette, blazing with some newly-discovered injury, and Paul at once recognised the ancient and too-well-remembered symptoms. The contrabandists had got through again, and this time with a vengeance. When he could gather his scattered wits--the blow in itself had been a shrewd thing--he found that he was being stormily a.s.sailed in respect of an amour with the cook of the Hotel of the Three Friends, a highly respectable person of fifty summers and a waist of sixty inches in circ.u.mference. He closed the door, and, mopping his injured nose, invited Annette to a seat.

'Talk lower, dear,' he asked her. 'It shall be perfectly understood between us that I deserve all your reproaches, but don't give the poor, dear old cook away, or, if you must a.s.sail her, speak in English.'

'That is your ring,' said Annette. She drew her wedding-ring from her finger and cast it to the floor. 'I have done with you for ever; you are a traitor and a villain.'

Paul stooped for the ring as it rolled to his feet, and bestowed it in his pocket.