'But,' said Gertrude, 'my dear Paul, you must really do justice to my table; the pretence must be absolute.'

'I will try to make it so,' he answered; but the luxurious meal had no more relish for him than if it had been desert sand. He struggled with it manfully, however, and contrived to keep astride his end of the see-saw of pretence.

Who are the best and who the worst of women? Did any man ever venture to impugn the fair fame of Madame la Baronne de Wyeth? Yet, had the devil a better ally anywhere than this delicate little purring white-breasted epicure in the varying flavours of the ruined soul? Oh, the devil is, of course, a symbol! Let the phrase pa.s.s.

But the Paul Armstrong of ten years later, perched in his fog-bound eyrie, staring along the unseen gorge? He tells himself that had she been what he believed her, he might have been elsewhere than where he finds himself. There had been but a surface ash upon the seeming ruin of a life. There was something still to build upon, but she must needs destroy what was left. There was wholesome blood in the veins of the man who aspired to rebuild, and it was she who poisoned its fount.

'"Queen bee of the honey asps,"' quoth Paul of the eyrie: and he was back in Paris.

He was back at Gertrude's table, the worshipped, the immaculate Gertrude of those days.

They had reached the end of the repast, and coffee was served in little cups of eggsh.e.l.l china encased in filigree gold.

'A gift from the Khedive,' she said, indicating these. 'Sardou was with me when I was in Alexandria.' She laughed, and what with her eyes, to which a single gla.s.s of the rare hock had given an added sparkle, and what with her faultless teeth, she fairly dazzled on her companion.

'Yes, that is the creature's absurd name. Sardou is the solemn personage who has been waiting upon us all the morning, and his G.o.dfathers and G.o.dmothers had the impertinence to baptize him in the name of Victor. I was telling you that Sardou was with me in Alexandria when the Khedive was so gracious as to offer me this little souvenir, and I implored his Highness that he might be permitted to make a study in coffee in the palace kitchen. He made it, and the result is adorable. _Inter alia_,'

she said in the same tone, 'you, too, are adorable this morning, and now I think I may s.n.a.t.c.h a longed-for moment and tell you so in earnest.

Juliette, bring me a letter you will find upon my toilet-table, and call Sardou.'

Juliette tripped out like a stage soubrette, demurely pert from crown to sole. Possibly--just possibly--she guessed; probably she guessed nothing. The suggestion was no more than a suggestion in the mind of the watcher of all these bygone scenes.

Paul rose, but Gertrude waved him back.

'Not yet,' she whispered, 'not yet.'

He sat down again, his senses all awhirl with the aching desire he had to hold her in his arms.

'You must not allow Sardou's masterpiece to grow cold,' said Gertrude; and Juliette came tripping back again, with the grave man at her heels.

'You will take this to the post,' said Madame la Baronne, indicating the letter on the salver the maid carried. 'You will see it registered personally, and bring me the receipt.'

The grave man bowed, and retired, letter in hand.

'You like your coffee, Mr. Armstrong? And, oh, Juliette, bring to me that last little portfolio of watercolour drawings. You know where you will find them?'

'But, yes, Madame la Baronne, but they were locked in the escritoire.'

'You will find the key,' said the Baroness, sipping her coffee, 'in my purse. Make haste, for M. Armstrong has but a moment to spare.'

Juliette ran with a swirl of petticoats upstairs. Gertrude followed the footsteps with alert ear and eye. Ear and eye alike seemed to listen.

She rose to her feet and stretched her arms with an imploring gesture.

'Does this make amends to you?' she murmured. 'To me it atones for all'

'No, no; be careful Mind my hair, you silly darling--mind my hair! Shall you be content to wait for this just now and then? Oh, Paul, Paul, Paul!

how hard it is! Go now--go. Quickly! Sip your coffee, Paul, and try to look as little unnatural as you can. She is quicker than I fancied.

I've always a cigar to offer a departing breakfast guest. Juliette, the cigars.'

Juliette laid down the small portfolio she carried, and p.r.i.c.ked away a third time.

'You love me?' he said hoa.r.s.ely.

The sound of his own voice was in his ears, after everything that had happened.

'I adore you!'she responded. 'You know it all now. But duty calls you one way and me another. And oh, Paul, "of love that never found its earthly close, what sequel?"'

'The very words,' he cried, 'that ticked in my brain all night'

'You must look at the portfolio,' she murmured. 'Est tu content de moi?

'Je t'aime!' and with fumbling fingers he untied the strings of the portfolio.

And now was Paul Armstrong the tame cat of Madame la Baronne de Wyeth, and earned his t.i.tle well in many cities, from St Petersburg to Cadiz, and from London to Cairo.

CHAPTER XXIII

It would appear that in the course of time Gertrude grew a little tired of Paul's ceaseless devotion. It is quite likely that she sometimes found him in the way, and she was deprived of her best conversational theme. It was of no use to try to revive the legend of the Isolated Soul any longer, because of the frequent and earnest confession which had been made of the final discovery of a spiritual rapport absolute and complete. Paul and his angel had lived on terms of so much intimacy that they had earned the right to be acidulous with each other upon occasion.

Her pruderies and her abandonments of prudery afforded between them an atmosphere as unwholesome as it was easily possible for a man of fervent temperament to live in. Work of the hard and healthful sort was practically abandoned. There was a good deal of verse-turning done, and an anonymous volume of sonnets ent.i.tled 'Dialogues of the Soul' made a momentary splash on the surface of the literary deep, and then sank like a pebble to the bottom. The book distilled a faint odour of eroticism, a scent of the epicene; but the degenerates, sniffing it, thought poorly of it because of its want of downright rancidity, and the people of whom crowds are made misliked it for a better reason. Paul, with a diminishing exchequer, found himself aware of the first flat literary failure of his lifetime.

The exchequer failed rapidly, and there were several contributory reasons. In the first place, the Baroness had any amount of money to spend, and it was essential that anyone who aspired to follow her about the capitals of Europe on equal terms should live at a high rate. Then, Annette had proclaimed her rights of freedom, and had escaped from Laurent and his forces, and had run up bills in Paris, and in London, and elsewhere. The most successful of comedies will pa.s.s out of vogue.

To be idle, to be extravagant in one's own person, and to be milked perpetually by the extravagance of another--could better ways to ruin be discovered?

The two had their first real tiff at Naples on a Christmas Eve. Gertrude had set up a sheep-dog in the person of one Mrs. Diedrich, a sour and sallow remnant of New England fashion and beauty, a lady who both on her husband's side and her own claimed all the splendours of Knickerbocker descent. The husband was dead, the fortune--except for a meagre bone or two with little meat thereon--was eaten all away. Mrs. Diedrich and the sympathetic Gertrude's mother had been friends. There was nothing more natural or more befitting than that the wealthy Baroness de Wyeth should find an asylum for this superannuated slave of fortune, though Paul knew perfectly well that she was no more than a buckler against scandal at the first. But reasonable as he was compelled to admit such a precaution to be, he was not very long in discovering that the impoverished lady was a buckler against himself, and that she was used to prevent that old familiar laying of heads together, and the old familiar communion of hearts, in which, by dint of careful manoeuvring, a bare sixty seconds might sometimes he s.n.a.t.c.hed for a solitude of two.

There should have been a drive that afternoon--Gertrude and Paul, with Mrs. Diedrich to play gooseberry--and Mrs. Diedrich had fallen ill. Paul presented himself at the appointed hour, and no Gertrude was there to meet him. Instead of the Presence a note couched in the chilliest terms:

'Dear Friend,

'Mrs. Diedrich is shockingly unwell to-day, and I cannot leave her.

Profoundest regrets for a lost pleasure.

'Sincerely, 'G. de W.'

'My luck!' said Paul bitterly to himself; for he had been more than once disappointed of late. But he found grace enough to express his sorrow, send his compliments and good wishes, and to withdraw. He went strolling about in unknown ways, with all manner of unpleasant things to think of.

He not only made his momentary disappointment the greatest of them all, but strove to make it so. And yet the others would intrude. Here was a letter from Darco expressing grave disappointment with the end of the second act of their latest piece. Darco coughing up his stammering gutturals as a speaker of English was one man, and Darco with a pen in his hand was another.

'It crumbles,' wrote the critic, 'at the very instant at which it should triumph. It is vague, unconvincing, wrong. You leave me unanswered for six whole weeks, and at the end you send me this incoherent sandheap, when your promises had given me the right to expect a solid piece of well-worked marble. I do not know whether you are well or ill, whether you desire to continue the work or no. All of which I am certain is that the piece is wanted for March, and that we cannot work together at this distance. I will meet you where you like--Paris, Brussels, Vienna, London, Hong Kong. It is all one to me so long as I get you back to work in time. But, for whatever reason, this second act is so written that it will not do. And I cannot wait I am a poet, but I am a poet without a language. If you will not be my interpreter, I must find another. Is friendship friendship, or is business business? In the name of both I ask you to meet me and to work with me.'

Look at it how he would, and distort his own perspective as he might, Darco's angry and outspoken appeal was larger than anything his duty to Gertrude might ask of him. But, to tell the whole truth, his sense of duty was his curse, because the sense itself had grown distorted.

Because of some rooted infirmity of character, he must needs be true to the ideal which least merited truth. He saw this fact throughout his career. He had bowed at foolish shrines. Gertrude--oh yes, Gertrude was impeccable. But just as he was wasting the heart of ardent manhood now, he had wasted the heart of youth and the heart of boyhood The career was all of a piece. Born to be fooled, whether by a village coquette, or his own loftiest, or his own lowest, or by practised _femme de feu_ and _femme de glace_ in one--always born to be fooled, frustrated, enticed to the throwing away of real pa.s.sion and of real power.

And over and above all these, arrange them in what imaginary perspective he might choose, the sordid side of things, the bills--bills from lodging-house keepers of the better sort, from hotels, from milliners, and from modistes--and the shrinking exchequer, which barely, when all claims were satisfied, would leave him so much as two hundred and fifty pounds.

What had his year and a half of dalliance brought him? A dream of pleasure, a desert ache of hunger, an occasional delirious spur to appet.i.te. Now, what in the name of common-sense is the good of it all? And is Gertrude any better, after all, than an innocent Delilah, trapping no Samson, but a fool unmuscled, who has no strength to break the weakest of her withes? Innocent Delilah! He never profaned her in his thought.

But in this mood--with his conscience, literary-artistic and simply human, entirely endorsing old Darco's reproof of his work and his evasions; with a financial creva.s.se at his feet, and Annette chopping away his standing-place, and his own extravagances melting his foothold like b.u.t.ter in the sun; with a barren future staring him in the face--he was disposed alike to remorse and penitence.