It dwelt there scarcely for a moment, and if every nerve had not been vibrant with feeling, the touch was so light that it might almost have pa.s.sed unnoticed. As things happened it was like a torch touching a torch as yet unlighted, and the young man flamed. He caught the caressing hand as it left his hair, and kissed it.

Ah! the weeping tears and the melancholy Touchstone humour that smiled wryly to see them, each as big as a pea.

The Baroness surrendered her hand, and Paul kissed it with that pa.s.sion which inspires a pilgrim at the shrine, and the odd something superadded which has made fools of men since Eve plucked her first girdle of fig-leaves. He wept above the hand, and he fondled the hand, and he kissed it with protesting murmurs of undying affection and esteem, and whilst this storm was in danger of playing itself out, and the unsuing suitor was likely to make an end of the business and go, the disengaged hand of the Baroness stole out and took him maternally by the chin, under the rain-soaked beard.

'Paul dear,' said the Baroness, 'I did not think that you would have felt our parting like this. We can't help it, we literary people--we must quote, we must express the profoundest feelings of our souls in the words of other people. What's the Shakespearian line? "I hold it good that we shake hands and part", Good-bye, Paul.'

He was on his feet again, and they were hand in hand. Her left hand was on his right shoulder. Their eyes met and lingered on each other.

'We're saying good-bye, Paul,' purred the Baroness in a voice of tenderest cadence. 'You see the need for it, don't you, you dear boy?

Perhaps we may see each other later on, but it _is_ good-bye now, for the time being. It must be so. You see that, don't you, Paul dear?

'Oh yes,' he said, 'I see it. Who could fail to see it? You shall have my thanks when I can offer them for having asked no explanation, no apology.'

'Paul,' said the Baroness, and the left hand on his right shoulder drew him a little nearer to her. Once, a year or two before, he had been up in the Yorkshire dales, and had strolled along by the side of the Wharfe on a day when the river ran beryl-brown or sapphire clear as it glanced over pebbly shallow or rocky depth. There was the beryl glint in her eye--the darling brown with the liquid light playing upon it. He looked now. The woodlands were about him; the river murmured near. The d.a.m.nable artistic gift which made use of all accomplished experience helped him to obey the impulse of the slow, persuasive hand. The beryl light in the eyes invited him, and the faint droop of languishing eyelid did the rest 'Paul dear,' she whispered, 'it is good-bye. You may kiss me just this once and go. Kiss me, Paul dear, as you would kiss your mother's ghost, and go.'

He stooped and kissed her, reverently and lingeringly, upon the forehead.

'Good-bye,' he said--'good-bye.'

Then, with an electric amazement, her lips were on his for a single instant, and she strained him near to her.

'Now, go,' she said, withdrawing herself before he had found time to answer her embrace. 'Go, and farewell!'

He was in the upper corridor almost before he knew it, in the confusion of his nerves. The key snapped quickly in the lock, and he was alone. He groped his way along the darkened pa.s.sage until he reached the head of the stairs, and there he recovered some consciousness of fact. He drooped slowly down into his study, and sat there in the dark and cold for hours, swearing fealty to contradictory deities of pa.s.sion and of friendship.

CHAPTER XXI

That year winter had advanced with a delaying foot thus far across the Belgian Ardennes, but this was the hour chosen by the icy king for the beginning of his real siege of that region. Whilst Paul sat in his study in the dark, the cold gathered about him tenser and more tense until he was fain to seek the warmer shelter of his own room. There across the gleaming darkness of the window-panes he could discern great broad snowflakes loitering down one after the other as if intent on no business in the world, and yet in spite of their seeming want of purpose they had covered the earth six inches deep before daybreak.

He awoke in the morning to look out upon a world of virgin white:--street, and roofs, and far-spread trees and fields all dazzling in their winter cloak beneath a sky of cloudless blue, white towards the horizon where it could catch the l.u.s.tre of the up-beating brightness of the snow. In the dark cold mornings of the year the hotel people had fallen into a habit of bringing up his coffee and pistolet to his bedroom. He had been willing enough to acquiesce in the custom; but as he sat sipping and munching in dressing-gown and slippers, with a travelling-rug about his knees, and revolving the events of last night in his mind, he heard a noise in the stables, and, thrusting the window open, looked out into the cold, still, clear air. Victor, the shock-headed driver, was leading out a pair of flea-bitten grays already accoutred for a journey, part of their harness dragging through the as yet untrodden snow.

'Holla!' he called--'Victor!' The man looked up, knuckling at his forehead. 'Are they shooting to-day?' Paul asked. 'It ought to be a good day for the trackers.'

'No, monsieur,' Victor answered; 'it is Madame la Baronne who departs.

She takes the express to Verviers at half-past nine. Monsieur will excuse; I am afraid of being late already.'

From the moment at which he had heard the horses moving down below, he had antic.i.p.ated this without wholly knowing to what he had looked forward. He thrust aside with his foot the ice-cold tub in which it was his custom to rejoice--as befitted an Englishman of his years--and, hastily sponging his face and hands, made a hurried toilet, listening meanwhile for any sound which might bring definite tidings to his mind.

When he descended the carriage was still at the main entrance to the hotel, and Victor was pulling on to his chapped hands a huge pair of sheepskin gloves, the wool worn inside.

'We have but thirty-five minutes,' the driver grumbled, 'and two miles to go, and all uphill.'

'Is that a very awful task?' Paul asked, for the mere sake of saying something.

He was intent on retaining his name, and on saying farewell in such a fashion that his manner should cast no reflection on the dear departing divinity. Mademoiselle Adele was already at the door, wiping her hands upon her ap.r.o.n. Madame Alexis, the cook, was ranged up alongside, and beyond her was the apple-cheeked Flamande maid One of the male hangers-on of the establishment came stumbling down the staircase with a great travelling-trunk upon his shoulders, and arranged his burden alongside the driver's seat. Then down tripped the Baroness's maid, carrying a dressing-bag in one hand and a despatch-box in the other.

Then followed a nondescript female who charred about the house and did scullery-work, and sometimes, in a borrowed dress, served at table. She came enveloped in rugs and furs, and at every note of preparation for departure Paul's heart beat faster. At last he could bear to look for the last figure in the procession no longer, for he was bent on an aspect of entire nonchalance, and the desolation of an actual farewell struck more and more on his spirit as he waited.

At last the expected frou-frou, and the soft footfall of the beautifully-shod feet, warned him of the Baroness's coming.

She paused in the hall to say a gracious word here and there, and to press something of evidently unexpected value into the hands of the attendant trio, for they all curtseyed low, and said, as if awestricken, 'Reellement, Madame la Baronne est trop bonne,' as if their strings had been mechanically pulled, and they had been trained to speak the words in unison.

Paul dared not turn his head, but the gracious little figure paused in pa.s.sing him. Madame la Baronne was richly befurred and so thickly veiled that he could discern nothing, or little, apart from the sparkling brightness of her eyes. She sprinkled her adieux around her in French to an accompaniment of thanks and curtsies, but she spoke to Paul in English.

'I am going to Venders,' she said, 'and I am afraid my studies will be a little broken. In the meantime I will write to you and give you an address, and I shall be glad if you will answer me.'

She held out her hand, and Paul held it for a mere instant, no longer--he was careful of that--than the occasion would have demanded had but the merest friendly acquaintance existed between them. He dared not trust himself to speak, but he raised his hat and pressed the hand, and the pressure was returned. Then the Baroness entered the carriage, Victor cracked his whip impatiently, and the slow Flemish horses bowled away, their hoof-beats silenced by the snow. They had reached the corner, and in another instant would have been out of sight, when Paul gave an artificial start, as if he had suddenly called to mind something of importance, and dashed after the retreating carriage. He overtook it easily enough, and, laying a hand upon it, ran alongside.

'This is not good-bye?'he said. 'Tell me that this is not good-bye.'

'I hope it is not good-bye,' she answered. 'But go now, dear heart, I beg you; you know why I am going.'

The 'dear heart' thrilled him through and through.

'You will write?' he asked.

'I will write to-night,' she said, 'but you must leave me now.'

He fell from the carriage side, and the vehicle went on its leisurely course, leaving him standing in the snow and staring after it; but recollecting himself in a moment, he turned and plodded slowly back to the hotel, with as unconcerned and commonplace a look as he could summon at short notice.

Annette had one of her old spells of secrecy, and was hidden all day long. He was glad to miss her and to be left alone with his own thoughts. He could not realize himself and he could not realize the Baroness; her promised letter would, however, tell him something. It might enable him at once to find his orient.

He pa.s.sed through a strange day--a day of resentment and of tenderness, a day of despair and of hope. He could not work or plan, and reading was impossible, and to-morrow morning looked absurdly distant Yet it came at last, after an almost sleepless night, in the course of which he heard Annette moving and the occasional clink of gla.s.s. He could see a light gleaming underneath her door half a dozen times, and these reminders of her came to him always with a dull ache of wretchedness, yet he fell asleep at last and overslept himself, so that he escaped the final hours of waiting. The promised letter was to hand, and he tore its envelope open with trembling fingers, not knowing what to expect within.

'My very dear Friend' (it began),

'All day I have thought of you; I do not know what feeling has been strongest in my mind. I make no secret of the esteem I have for you, or of the sorrow I have felt at being forced to end the pleasantest friendship I have ever known. I should not say to end it, for such a companionship of spirit as we have experienced can never be ended, but we must close the first chapter of the book, and the rest will not make such happy reading. I have felt my heart ache more than once in the contemplation of your unhappiness, for though you have never spoken of it, I knew without the episode of last night--I have known almost from the first--how profoundly you have suffered and will continue to suffer.

Ah, my dear friend, it is only those who have suffered in that way who can truly sympathize with you. To have found a completer isolation in the search for companionship--that is the tragedy of many souls. It is yours, and I know it and feel it, because it is mine also.

'I am weary with my journey, and I am so sad and lonely that I have scarce the heart to write; but promise me just this one thing: Give me half an hour of your thoughts each day, and let me know what part of the day you choose, so that I may think of you at the same time. Do you believe that any actual communion of the mind is possible in such conditions? I should like to believe it. How pure, how spiritual, how exquisite a friendship might exist if it were only so!'

Exactly. And what a quagmire a properly experienced lady may lead a man into if she so wills! This particular experiment suggested by the Baroness is singularly successful in the enslaving of the eager, and it has the great merit of permitting the willing horse to do all the work.

The lover can moon and rhapsodise at a safe distance, and it makes not a pennyworth of difference to him whether the mistress moons and rhapsodises also, or whether she is engaged in a flirtation through another telepathic line, or whether she has a score of different lines converging upon her all at once.

Paul, of course, most willingly accorded the lady the daily half-hour demanded. He became persuaded in a very little while that the soul of Gertrude met his midway, and when she sent him a description of her little boudoir, so that he might the better realize her in her own surroundings, he used to float away to Verviers in vision, and sit by Gertrude in fancy, and hold Gertrude's hand, and express to Gertrude all his ardours of friendship and esteem--for, of course, it never got beyond that, or was ever to be permitted to get beyond it--and Gertrude used to give him vow for vow, all in the range of the highest moral feeling. It is possible that there are people who might imbibe this sort of mental liquor and come to no damage by it, but Paul found it remarkably heady. At first he thought the draught stimulative, but in a while he began to know that it was enervating. He began to rebel at himself.

'I am throwing away my manhood for a dream,' he said.

For Gertrude, whose letters were fairly frequent and most sisterly tender, would hear nothing of Paul's pet.i.tion that he might be allowed to visit her--would not even listen to any suggestion that they might ever meet again in any approach to the happy seclusion and privacy of the first sweet days.

But Paul Armstrong was feeble in rebellion against himself, and he was here caught firmly in the toils of the first pa.s.sion of his manhood. The May Gold episode and the Claudie Belmont episode had long been things to laugh at. Marriage had turned out an unredeemed tragedy, which had never had even the poor excuse of a pa.s.sing infatuation behind it He had never loved Annette, and she was fast growing into a terror and an aversion.

And now all this tomfoolery of telepathic communion, this wilful brooding over an absent woman, this summoning of her features to mind, this recalling of her tones, this yearning in which his own soul seemed to beat its mortal bars in the strife to draw her spirit near, made a clean end of the platonic theory so far as he was concerned. The Baroness, at her end of the spirit-wire, appears to have been less potently disturbed. Perhaps she took less pains to disturb herself; possibly she took none whatever.

It came at last on Paul's side to amount to something very like a possession. Night and day his thoughts hovered about her. He would not admit to his mind one dishonouring thought of her.

'Charlotte was a married woman, and a moral man was Werther, And for all the wealth of Indies would do nothing for to hurt her.'