'You and Laurent,' cried Annette, 'have conspired to kill me. Oh, I know you both! but if there is justice in earth or heaven, I will have it Do not think because I am a woman and alone that I can find no protector. I am not so helpless as you fancy.'

'I am very busy, dear,' Paul answered in a cold desperation, 'and we might discuss these important questions at another moment.'

'Oh,' cried Annette, 'anything to avoid the truth!'

'Yes,' said Paul, with the first flush of anger he had permitted himself, 'anything to avoid the truth--anything, or almost anything; but if you stay here one other moment I will avoid the truth no longer.'

He cast the door wide open, and Annette with an amazing submissiveness pa.s.sed through it.

It was long past mid-autumn by this time, and was indeed fast drawing on towards winter, so that in the little study a fire was lit in the earlier hours of the day to air the room. It had been lighted that morning, and the first true nip of winter was in the air. Paul sat alone with his head between his hands until a violent shiver aroused him from his thoughts. The air was growing dark as well as chilly; a pale yellow light gleamed already from the windows of the Cafe de la Regence across the _place_, and the outlook was as chilly as the air, as comfortless as the thoughts which filled his mind.

'Hands up,' said Paul to himself; 'hands up and sink down into the waste waters, and have done with it.'

Of what act of desperation he would have been guilty in this mood he could never have told, but at this instant the door was opened very softly, and Annette was back again. She had been somewhat dishevelled at her last appearance, and carelessly attired. She had now, to all seeming, called in the aid of the solitary coiffeur of the village, and her pretty brown locks were done up in l.u.s.trous coils. She was attired in a charming little dressing-gown of pale-blue, with lace at the wrists and throat, and her complexion had been somewhat rudely brightened by a touch of red upon the cheeks. She closed the door softly behind her, and advanced with pleading hands.

'Paul dear,' she said, 'I do not know if ever you can forgive me, but I think you would, perhaps, if you knew the real truth about me. Oh, Paul, Paul, Paul, I am afraid--I am afraid that I am going mad! I have no self-control. I say cruel and wicked things without believing them, and I cannot help it There is a devil in my soul who tempts me. What is a poor little girl like me to do against the devil? Won't you help me, Paul dear? Give me back my ring; I never meant to throw it away. There is nothing I value so much in the world. Give it back to me, Paul.

There; put it on my finger. G.o.d bless you for ever, you dearest, dearest, kindest, patient dear! And now, Paul, take me in your arms as you used to do. Kiss me, and tell me that you love me. I'm only a little creature, Paul, when everything's said and done; I'm five feet three, English measure, and how can _I_ be expected to fight a devil! Kiss me, kiss me again, Paul.'

She thrust him back with rage, tore the ring once more from her finger, and cast it again upon the floor. Then, with an air of comedy disdain, 'It is really too cheap a thing to fool a fool like you.' And so, with a shrill peal of stagey laughter, she curtseyed low to him and glided from the room.

He stood with clenched hands for a single instant, and--how he never knew--came to a sudden calm. He took up his hat from the desk on which he had thrown it on entering the room, and sauntered out to the front of the hotel in a complete vacancy of thought and emotion; and as he lounged there, thinking of nothing and caring for nothing, there was woven into the woof of life the next thread of his destiny, for who should drive up to the main door of the Three Friends, with her maid and her luggage, and all the airs and impertinences of a person of fashion, but La Femme Incomprise.

CHAPTER XIX

And who should be La Femme Incomprise but Madame la Baronne de Wyeth, a lady more or less known to fame in two continents, but whom the unwitting Paul had not yet so much as heard of in the whole course of his life. He was conscious in the chill and gloom of the November evening of a lively and slender figure, which danced as if upon springs for a mere instant as it alighted from the carriage, of an accompanying rich rustle of silk, the exhalation of a fine perfume, the glance of a dark eye towards him as he raised his hat and stood aside from the doorway, and then the first encounter was over and was dismissed from mind.

There was no Annette at dinner, but he had not expected her, and was glad to know that she was in hiding. But when, after an hour or two's aimless ramble under the shadow of the Terre de Falaise, he returned to the hotel and entered the _salle a manger_, he found there a certain unwonted sense of warmth and brightness. Not only was the stove blooming cherry-red at the far end of the apartment, but the little-used fireplace was aglow with blazing pine-logs, and two extra lamps were set upon the table. He noted these things with that particularity a man spends upon detail at those times of subdued and profound emotion when he seems incapable of noting anything, and took his seat carelessly at the table in his accustomed place. The juge, and the garde, and the bachelor chemist, and the chief of the gendarmerie, and all the rest of the customary convives, dribbled in one by one, and exchanged the customary salutations. Time was when they had been immensely interesting as types of mankind more or less rural or townish, but to-night he was weary of them, and would very willingly have been alone. The half-seen vision of two hours ago had pa.s.sed completely from his mind, and the broad-beamed, apple-cheeked Evariste had already served the soup when Madame la Baronne de Wyeth rustled into the room with an aspect so commanding and stately that all the Belgian gentlemen rose to their feet and bowed as she took her seat at table. Paul rose and bowed with the rest, and the lady, with an easy and graceful inclination from left to right, offered to him a kind of specialized salute as she sat down immediately opposite to him. She was full between the glow of the two extra lamps, and at a first glance, by dint of bright eyes, sparkling teeth, a high complexion, and a Parisian half-toilet, she looked as if she might have been a beauty. She was barely that, as a second glance discovered, but she had an undoubted charm of grace and manner, and Paul, whose native origin and customs of life had led him far from the scene of fine ladyhood, was greatly impressed by her. So were the rest of the diners for that matter, and the customary rough banter of the table was hushed in the presence of this new arrival. The men conversed in whispers when they spoke at all, and in the intervals between the courses they crumbled their bread upon the tablecloth in a manifest embarra.s.sment. Not a word was exchanged between Paul and his vis-a-vis until, towards the close of the meal, the lady's attendant brought to her a small tray of silver with a fine little flacon of transparent Venetian ware, and a liqueur-gla.s.s upon it She had drunk nothing but water throughout the repast, but she now poured out a spoonful of some amber-coloured and highly aromatic liqueur, and, leaning slightly across the table, said, with a marked American-English accent:

'May I trouble you for a single small lump of sugar, Mr. Armstrong?'

She held out the liqueur-gla.s.s towards him, and Paul, in answer to an imperious little nod of the head, which seemed to indicate that he was obeying orders correctly, dropped a square nodule of sugar into it, and looked up with a questioning aspect.

'My name appears to be known to you, madam?' he said.

'My dear sir,'she purred back again in what he learned to recognise later on as the true Bostonian tone, 'your name is known to everybody--or, at least, to everyone who is worth knowing. Haven't we all been going wild in London and New York about your last comedy, and isn't your portrait in the photographers' windows everywhere?'

Paul was young, and therefore, if not vain, at least accessible to the a.s.saults of vanity, and he blushed to the ears with pleasure. He had not noticed until the moment when the lady set her thickly-jewelled hand upon it that a little silver bell was placed at her side. She touched it, and her maid entered, and at a murmured aside retired, returning in a moment with a filigree card-case.

'That is my name,' said the lady; 'you may not have heard it before.'

There was so complete a certainty of recognition in her voice and manner that Paul, though a very poor courtier indeed, bowed as he read the card, and murmured that everybody knew the name of Madame la Baronne de Wyeth.

This, as it turned out, was destined to embarra.s.s him a little; but Madame was graciously communicative, and he was not long in learning that she was the auth.o.r.ess of a volume of poems which bore the t.i.tle 'Le Cour Soupir.' She would be proud and delighted, she told him, to have his judgment alike on the original work and its rendition in French, which was also the labour of her own hands.

'You see, Mr. Armstrong,' she said, 'I was born in Paris, though of American parentage, and I have lived there nearly all my life, so that I am really and truly quite bilingual. French and English are exactly one and the same to me, so far as facility of expression goes; and I did not care to entrust the expression of my most intimate and sacred thoughts into a stranger's hands. To appeal to the readers of French and English is to appeal to the whole world of intellect. Perhaps that is not a very modest desire; but it is mine, Mr. Armstrong, as I think it must be that of all those who are conscious of great thoughts. By the way,' she asked, with a comprehensive glance around the table, 'do any of these gentlemen speak English?'

'Not a word,' Paul answered.

'If you are quite sure of that, Mr. Armstrong,' said the lady, 'we can pursue our talk in peace; but there is nothing so disconcerting as to dread an eavesdropper when one is exchanging confidences.'

Paul had not, so far, begun to exchange confidences, and he rather wondered in his own bourgeois mind if this fascinating lady were offering him a challenge to a flirtation. It might very well have appeared, so thought the Exile who recalled these things with so clear an after-light upon them, that the lady had that object, and no other; but for the moment there was a natural embarra.s.sment in thinking so.

'You have written verse, Mr. Armstrong?' asked the Baroness.

'Reams,' Paul answered, with a laugh, though he was not entirely at his ease.

'Oh,' said the lady, 'you must show me some of it; you must show it to me all. I am sure, from your prose, that you have the true singing gift; and when one can both think and sing, one is a poet, you know, Mr.

Armstrong.'

'I have nothing to show,' Paul answered; 'I have burnt all my poor stuff long and long ago.'

'And you write no longer?' she asked--'you write verse no more? Oh, but that is wicked--it is criminal to have the gift and not to use it 'But then, of course, one knows how much depends upon congeniality of surrounding and society. There have been times when I have thought that my own poor little pipe was silenced for ever. It is so easy to lose heart; it is sometimes so very difficult to retain one's courage and animation. Do the gentlemen remain here, by-the-by, to smoke, Mr.

Armstrong?'

There was a something odd in the way in which she used his name--a something not at all easy to be defined--and it influenced Paul strangely every time she spoke it. It was not altogether unlike a caress, if one could a.s.sociate an idea of that sort with the manner and meaning of a great lady with whom one had not exchanged a word until within the last half-hour. Paul knew not what to make of the grand dame; but she fluttered and flattered him prodigiously, and in his excitement the troubles which had seemed so chokingly bitter so brief a time ago were all for the moment forgotten.

'They sit about the table for an hour or two after dinner,' Paul responded, in answer to her last question.

'I notice,' said the lady, 'that there is a fire in the salon next door.

If you are not too wedded to your tobacco, I shall be grateful for your society.'

'Oh, madam!' cried Paul, 'I am honoured beyond measure.'

And so, when the Baroness had sipped her small liqueur and rose, with a queenly little inclination to the company, Paul rose also, and having opened the door for her, followed her lead into the next apartment, a s.p.a.cious room, very dimly lighted, and as bare as if it had been made ready for a ball. Here the Baroness established her seat upon a settee, and Paul was encouraged to bring a chair into her neighbourhood, and was there held in discourse. And though he might in the review of later experiences have arrived at the conclusion that Madame la Baronne was a somewhat heartless and not particularly brainy little fribble, he was never able to forget or deny a certain charm of manner which he had not elsewhere encountered, and which had in it a seductive warmth and gentleness. Before he fairly knew it, he was talking with something of the ease and intimacy of an old friend. He had been so sore-hearted of late and so removed from all feminine companionship, that this unexpected, unlooked-for intercourse with a woman of culture and of such undoubted airs of refinement soothed like a poultice. It was water to the thirsty, bread to the hungry heart; it was fire and shelter to the houseless wanderer. Madame drew him into little confidences, all sufficiently simple, harmless, and discreet They related mainly to his methods of work, to his acquaintance with brother men of letters, to incidents of youthful life, to the early hopes and failures of his career.

'How profoundly interesting!' Madame purred from time to time. 'Oh, you men of the people, Mr. Armstrong, you men of the people, how you do surpa.s.s and captivate us all when you just happen to have brains!'

The 'man of the people 'was certainly making no concealment of his origin, as he certainly never made any parade of it; but he did not quite like this, and perhaps his face revealed as much, for the Baroness hastened with great agility to quit the theme. She began to offer to Paul some little insight into her own history. It would be a prudery, she said, to pretend to be sensitive about it any longer--the whole world knew the sordid and melancholy truth; and this sounded like a prelude to a much fuller explanation than she was for the moment disposed to make, and it helped Paul to understand the hints in which she chose to set forward the fact that she was a person of a lonely heart, that her husband pursued his affairs in Wall Street and elsewhere without her greatly concerning herself as to what those affairs might be, and apparently leaving her much to her own devices. He learned to think afterwards that these confidences, coming upon so very brief an acquaintance, were barely indicative of that exquisite delicacy of soul for which the lady gave herself credit, but it did not occur to him to think so for one moment at the time. The two extra lamps upon the dinner-table had probably been placed there at her own request, but it was beyond dispute that she showed to far greater advantage in the subdued light in which she now sat Time had had no great opportunity of ravishing her good looks as yet, but a certain boldness and bluntness of feature which denied her complete right to beauty was lost here, and her complexion was subdued, so that to the eye of her companion she looked bewitching, and everybody knows how far easier it is to condone a breach of taste in a beautiful woman than in a plain one. But now as the talk went on and grew momentarily more intimate, Paul was made to see that he was in the presence of a suffering heart, that he was speaking with one who had never been able to come into contact with another soul. 'We live apart from each other, all of us, Mr. Armstrong,' she said. 'It is only the artist, only the thinker and dreamer, who cares to grieve over it all; but there is something appalling in the thought that no one soul really touches another. You shake your head,' she said. 'Forgive me, but you are young, and you are not yet disillusionized.'

'I have a right to be in some things,' Paul said to himself; but he made no verbal answer.

'No,' she went on in a tone of tender regret in the pretty purring American voice, which of itself was like the touch of a soft hand. 'We are born to isolation. As one grows older----'

Paul laughed at that outright It was his first laugh for quite a lengthy s.p.a.ce of time, and he enjoyed it.

'Oh,' said the lady, taking the implied compliment quite seriously, 'I am not a centenarian, but I am two-and-thirty, Mr. Armstrong, and in the course of two-and-thirty years one may do a very considerable amount of living. I say it advisedly, as one grows older the recognition of that isolation of which I have spoken grows more and more complete. It beats one down into despair at times; but then one is here for other things than despair: one is here for duty; one is here to suffer, and to gather strength by suffering; that is the whole secret of our destiny. It is simple enough, and yet how long it takes to learn the lesson truly!'

Beyond this no great progress was made on that first evening, but it appeared that the lady had come to stay for at least a little time.

It is probable that she had not often found so very responsive an instrument to play upon, for Paul Armstrong's one lifelong weakness was that any woman of average intelligence, who chose to take the trouble, could sound him through every note of his gamut, and the Baroness de Wyeth seemed to find a lively satisfaction in the exercise of her own power in that direction.

There was no further sign of Annette that evening, and it was not until the Baroness had retired that Paul began again seriously to remember her. It would at any moment, since his discovery of the lure by which she had beguiled him into marriage, have seemed a mere ridiculous prudery of conscience to hide from himself that he had thrown the better part of his life away; but he had meant to do his duty as it seemed to lie plain and straight before him, and he meant it still, increasingly difficult as it appeared. But all the talk of the lonely soul, of the eternal isolation of the spirit, in which man was doomed to live, all the tinsel sentimentalisms of which the talk of the bilingual poetess had mainly consisted, afforded perhaps as poor a pabulum as he could anywhere have found. There was he, with that sore-stricken heart of his, so sore-stricken, indeed, that it was well-nigh numbed, and here for the first time in his life he had met a woman of more than common surface breeding, of high family--for the Baroness de Wyeth was guilty of no mere vulgar brag in claiming so much for herself--of more than ordinary attractiveness in person, and of far more than common faculty in the direction of a dangerous, sympathetic semi-humbug. Was it any wonder if, when he lay down that night, he contrasted the hours of the evening with those of the afternoon, or if he recalled the fact that at the very turning of the road which had led him to fortune and to fame he had thrown away all that could make them really worth the having?

Annette was sleeping off the fumes of brandy and the insane hysteria which went along with them. The dainty lady from whom he had just parted was going to her repose with her own beautiful, sad thoughts in a refinement of surrounding which he could only fancy. His thoughts followed her to her chamber until it seemed to him that he was in some sort guilty of a profanation, and with that touch of self-chiding the born s.e.x-worshipper must needs flash into a mood of adoration. A more thoroughpaced small coquette than La Femme Incomprise never breathed, yet she must needs be a holy angel for the time being to Paul Armstrong, because she had fine eyes and teeth, and could talk with some eloquence about heart-sorrows she had never known. And he, he who lay there with his career like a stream which is poisoned at its source, might, had he guided his own destinies with anything but the judgment of a fool, have found himself just such a companion as he had but now parted from, and have known in her a life-long comrade, an undying solace and inspiration. Oh, fool! and fool! and fool! through all the wretched, lonely hours of night--fool! and fool! and again fool unutterable!

Annette, on the morrow, was repentant and pitiable. The contrabandist supplies had been of a very limited nature, and now they were over she suffered a more than common misery of reaction from excess. For a while she was sullen, and sulked in her own chamber; but when her headache had worn itself out, she began to creep listlessly about the hotel Paul and the Baroness had spent a second evening _tete-a-tete_ and Paul's first judgment of the sympathetic nature of her character had been admirably confirmed.