Cabs rolled by, and every one brought Claudia to his fancy, but scores of them passed without pause. One o'clock sounded and no Claudia. Two o'clock, and no Claudia. Then the rumble of a lonely hansom, a slippery stoppage of a horse's feet, and Claudia's voice crying, 'Two doors higher up.' Then a renewed motion, a pause, the scrape of a latchkey at the lock, and Paul was on his feet, candlestick in hand.

'Mayn't I come in?' asked the hateful voice of Captain MacMadden. 'On'y a moment, upon my word.'

'Certainly not,' Claudia answered curtly. 'Good-night.'

'You'll think of what I asked you?'

'Indeed,' said Claudia, in a voice of scorn, 'I will do nothing of the kind. I have never been so insulted in my life, and I shall be obliged if you will put an end to your attentions.'

The heart of the involuntary listener glowed within him, but Captain MacMadden's drawl broke in and chilled him horribly.

'Well, look here, Claudia, damn it all! Will you marry me? I'll go that far, if nothing else will do for you. I will, upon my word.'

'You may ask me that question in a week's time,' said Claudia. 'At present I have no more to say to you than just "Good-night."'

The door closed and there was a silence. Claudia laughed quietly to herself, and rustled towards the gas-jet. Paul stepped out and intercepted her, the unlit candle in his hand, his hair disordered, and his face stained with the dye the rain had soaked from his hat His teeth were chattering noisily and rapidly, and he and Claudia faced each other. Paul lit his candle mechanically, and set it on the hall table, below the jet, which blinked with a faint intermittent hum.

'Are you spying upon me, Mr. Armstrong? asked Claudia, with a touch of the manner of the stage.

'Not I,' Paul answered bluntly; 'I waited up to speak to you. Are you going to marry that grinning nincompoop?'

'You presume,' said Claudia, with yet more of the manner of the stage. 'You presume abominably. Allow me to pass, sir.'

'The man has offered you a life of shame,' said Paul. 'You mean to listen to him after that? She looked at him scornfully and defiantly. 'Well,' he said, shivering strangely from head to foot, 'you're not the woman I took you for. It's good-bye to Claudia.'

He stood aside for her to pass. She lit her candle and swept by him. He heard her door close, and the key turn in the lock. He stood shuddering in the hall, the chance-held candle dropping grease upon the oil-cloth. He gave one big dry sob and mounted to his garret-room. There was no sleep for him, and he did not undress. The candle burned down in its socket, the light flared up and died, and the nauseous stink of wick and tallow filled the room. His mind was strangely vacant, but even in the darkness and the silence he found a thousand things in which to take a leaden interest: as the swaying of the window-curtains where a slight draught caught them; the faintly-seen progress of the rain-drops down the window-pane; the wet glints of light where the street gas-lamp dimly irradiated the windows and the houses on the opposite side of the way; a ticking insect in the wall-paper; sounds of night traffic in the great thoroughfare a quarter of a mile off; the squashing tramp of a policeman on his rounds; the moaning voices of wind and rain; the very beating of his own pulses in his head; the very stupor of his own intelligence.

It was still raining when the dismal dawn crept up, and he was chilled to the marrow. He rose stupidly from the chair in which he had passed the night, and began to change his dress, stiffly and with difficulty. During the greater part of the night he had been sitting in a drooping posture, and he found without trouble or interest that he could not change it. There was an aching weight upon his loins, but he had no interest in that either. He sat in his room all day. The chambermaid came to the door and tapped, and receiving no answer, entered. She stared to see him sitting at the window and the bed undisturbed, but she went away again. Somehow the day crawled on, and as the darkness fell he crept downstairs, and crawled, an aching stoop, to the theatre. He was an hour before the time, but by hazard he met the manager at the stage-door.

'Why, great God, Armstrong! what's the matter?'

'I got wet last night,' Paul answered, in a voice which startled him and pained his throat.

He had not spoken a word since he had said good-bye to Claudia.

'You've no right to be out like this,' said the manager brusquely; 'it's suicide. You're no good here, you know,' he added, in a kinder voice. 'Here, you, Collins; call a cab, and help Mr. Armstrong into it.'

'Can you do without me?' Paul asked, in that strange voice.

'Do without you? Yes. I've a man at hand that will swallow your lines and biz in half an hour. Get a fire in your bedroom; have a good stiff glass of rum as hot as you can drink it. Get somebody to make you cayenne pills—cayenne-pepper and bread-crumbs. Take three or four, and have 'em hot. Why, man alive, you've got an ague!'

The cab was brought, and Paul was helped into it and driven home. He could not lift his hand above his head to pay the fare, and the cabman descended grumblingly to take it; but seeing how his fare's feet fumbled at the steps, got down a second time to help him to the door. Paul walked into the dining-room, hat in hand, and bent The boarders were at dessert, and Claudia for once was with them.

'No beggars allowed in this bar,' said one of the professional boarders jocularly, thinking the entrance a bit of playful masquerade.

'I'm not very well,'said Paul, with a frog-like roop. 'I've been down to the theatre, and Walton has sent me home again. I'm afraid I can't quite manage to get upstairs.'

He did not look at Claudia, but he was conscious of her gaze, and he knew somehow that there was fright in her eyes.

Two of the boarders engineered him to his room, and one undressed him whilst the other ran for rum and cayenne-pepper. They were all theatrical folk in the house, and kindly in case of trouble, as their tribe is always. Paul was put to bed, and had extra blankets heaped upon him, and a fire was lit in the grate. He was dosed with hot rum-and-water and the cayenne pills, and was then left, first to grow maudlin, and next to fall into a sleep which was full of monstrous dreams. At one time he lay in a great cleft between two hills, and stones rolled down upon him, causing him dull pain; then the stones formed themselves into a fence—a kind of rough arch on which other stones battered without ceasing till he was walled in thickly. At another time he had to climb up an endless hill, with hot chains about his loins and knees.

Somebody came into his room with a candle, and the light awoke him. It was one of his fellow-boarders back from the theatre, with news that it was nearly midnight. He forced more hot rum on the patient, and sat with him until he was sound asleep. The liquor did its work, and he slept without dreams until daylight. He strove to rise and dress, but the task was beyond him, and there was nothing left but to lie and stare at the ceiling, and to say to himself over and over again, without a touch of interest or feeling: 'It's good-bye to Claudia.' The landlady came to see him, and found him burning and shivering, and complaining of the bitter cold. She went away, and came back again with a doctor, who told him cheerfully that he was in for rheumatic fever, big or little, as sure as a gun.

'But he's young, ma'am,' said the doctor—'he's young, and we shall pull him through.'

'Can he be moved?' asked the landlady.

'Moved? No, possibly not for weeks.'

'Have you any money, Mr. Armstrong?' said the landlady, 'or shall I write to your friends?'

'There's fifty-one pounds in my dressing-bag,' croaked Paul. 'When you've buried me and paid your bill, send the balance to my father.'

'Buried you?' said the doctor. 'You don't suppose you're going to peg out, do you?'

'I hope so,' said Paul.

'Oh,' said the doctor, casting a shrewd, good-humoured eye at him, 'you feel like that, do you? But you've got me to reckon with, and the British Pharmacopoeia. When did you eat last?

'Day before yesterday.'

'All right, young man; I'll fettle you, and if you think you're going to slip your cable, you're mightily in error.'

'Well,' said Paul, 'it doesn't matter to me one way or the other.'

The time went on, and a day later he was light-headed, and babbled, as he learned afterwards, of Claudia. Sometimes he upbraided her savagely, and sometimes he made tragic love to her. He had intervals of complete sanity, in which the thought of her was like an inward fire; then he had a five weeks' spell of madness, and awoke from it free from pain, but a mere crate of bones which felt heavier than lead. He remembered some of his own delusions clearly, but lost count of whole weeks of time, and had yet to learn how long he had lain there. When he awoke he knew that somebody was in the room, and made an effort to turn his head. That failed, but the somebody heard the faint rustle he made, and the first face his eyes looked at was the face of Darco.

'Ah!' said Darco, 'you haf got your prains pack again. You know me, eh?'

Paul tried to nod, but succeeded only in closing his eyes in sign of assent.

'I am a bid of a dogtor,' said Darco; 'led me veel your bulse. Goot—goot, ant your demberadure is normal. It is now begome your business to ead and trink.' He waddled across the room, and came back with a tin of jelly and a spoon, and fed the invalid 'That is enough,' he said, after the fifth spoonful. 'Liddle and often; that is the came to blay.'

Paul was too weak to wonder at anything, or he would have wondered at Darco's presence; but Nature was too wise to let him waste his forces on any such unprofitable exercise as thinking, and sent him to sleep again. When he awoke he was ravenously hungry, and in a day or two he began to abuse the nurse who tended him for stinting his victuals. But the nurse was a good-humoured old campaigner.

'Why, bless your heart, Mr. Armstrong,' she said, when in an interval of contrition Paul apologised, 'it do me good to hear you swear that hearty! Most gentlemen does it when they're picking up a bit.'

There was in his mind barely a thought of Claudia; the one fever seemed to have burned the other out of him.

'The heart,' said the doctor—'the heart's the thing we're always afraid of in rheumatic fever, and the heart's as sound as a nut.'

Paul stretched feebly, and thought he had his jest wholly to himself; but the doctor undeceived him.

'It wasn't always so, my young friend.'

Paul blushed like fire.

'Have I been babbling? he asked guiltily.

'A bit,' said the doctor; 'enough to justify those gloomy hopes of yours.'

Paul hung his head in a transient shame, and murmured that he was sorry.

'Pooh, pooh!' cried the doctor; 'you're all right now. You can bear to hear a little bit of news about the lady?'

'Yes,' said Paul, 'anything.'

'She's married,' said the doctor—'married to the Honourable Captain MacMadden, and has left the stage.'

'Did she ever come to see me?' Paul asked.

'No,' said the doctor.

The passion of the youth went to join the calf-love of the boy, and the man accomplished looked on them both with a half-humorous wonder. He was learning his world, he thought. It would not be easy to fool him in that way again.

He sat propped up with pillows in an arm-chair now, and could hold a book; but the lubricant at his joints had all been licked up by the fever, and it was slow to come back again, so that he had hideous twinges when he moved. He had plenty of society now that he was fit for it, for the fellow-boarders were idle during the day, and spared time to sit and talk with him.

'You recognised old Darco when you saw him, didn't you?' one of them asked.

'Oh yes,' said Paul, 'I knew him. What brought him here? I behaved very badly toold Darco.'

'Well, to tell you the truth,' said the other, 'he said so. "Ant I nefer forgive an incradidude," says he, and proved it by paying the doctor's bill.'

Every man in the profession had a more or less plausible imitation of old Darco's 'leedle beguliaridies.' He was as well known as the Strand, and loved and hated as few men are.

'I treated Darco very badly,' said Paul. 'I can't rest under that sort of obligation to him. How much did he pay?'

'You'd better ask the doctor.'

Paul asked the doctor next time he saw him, but elicited nothing.

'But I can't allow it,' Paul cried; 'I can't endure it I behaved abominably to Darco; I behaved like a beast and a fool. I'd take his scorn and hatred if he thought I was worth either; but I can't accept his benefits after the way in which I served him. I left the kindest friend I ever had, the man who took me out of the gutter—and that's God's truth, doctor; and I left him to follow that——'

He ground his teeth hard on the word he was fain to use.

'Steady!' said the doctor—' steady!'

'That Ignis Fatuus,' groaned Paul. 'Is that mild enough for you?'

The doctor knew everything. There was no further shame in making a clean breast of it.

'It's better than what you were going to say,' the doctor answered, 'whatever it was. I hate vulgarity as the devil hates virtue. It's a pretty sex; I know something about it You seem to have lighted upon a pretty sample.'

Just at this instant there came a tap at the door, and the voice of the maid was heard saying, 'This is the room, sir.' The door opened, and in walked Armstrong the elder.

'Dad!' cried Paul

His father held his hand and looked at him.

'I've been sore troubled by your silence, lad,'he said. 'I've had hard work to find ye. Ye might have written.'

'I was coming to see you,' said Paul, 'so soon as I could travel. When will that be, doctor?'

'In a fortnight's time, perhaps,' the doctor answered—'not much earlier.'

The doctor went his way, and the father and son were together.

'You're out of Darco's service, I understand?' said Armstrong. 'He wrote kindly about ye, but he said you'd parted. Why did you leave him, Paul?'

Paul was penitent and feeble of body, and his father was his dearest. Bit by bit he told his story, or as much of it as he could be told.

'Man,' said Armstrong, 'ye're beginning airly.'



CHAPTER XIII

The Dreamer dreamed, and the dream showed the old ramshackle, bankrupt printing-office at Castle Barfield again. Paul was back there. The thing had happened with a strange in-evitableness. He had gone home and had suffered a relapse, and had again recovered, and all his savings were expended. There had come a rush of work with which the solitary journeyman and his boy could not cope. Paul had gone to their assistance, and, the unusual flow of work continuing, he had stayed there. He made many applications by letter for other employment, and answered many advertisements, but nothing happened to deliver him. His heart galled him daily, for he had seen something of the world, and had tasted a first-night triumph as part-author of a play, and had mixed on equal terms with people who were very far away from his present sphere. The county election, which had brought the increase of business, was over and done with. Paul succeeded the journeyman, who went his way and found employment elsewhere.

In the dim local yokel mind Paul was a failure, and he knew it. He had gone away, and his brothers and sisters had magnified his successes, and he was back again, a refugee, as it were, from a world which he had apparently misused. He was taciturn and gloomy, and, to the fancy of those who held themselves his equals and superiors, was disposed to give himself airs. Two years with Darco had made him something of an epicure. He had grown to hate soiled hands and coarse clothes, and the trivial talk of people who only lived for trifles. He suffered doubly, therefore, as one who had failed, and as one who took the airs which belong only to success. Life was not happy for a while.

The 'stand-by' of Armstrong's poor business was the printing of a certain coarse label from stereotype plates, and, when there was nothing else to be done, this would be taken in hand for unbroken days together. It was an operation as purely mechanical as any in the world, and the thoughts of the worker had time and chance to roam anywhere. Paul made hundreds of verses. The clean sheet set home to the pins, frisket and tympan down, the turn of the drum-handle, the pull of the bar, the backward turn of the drum, frisket and tympan up, and the printed sheet laid on the ordered pile-day in, day out, ten hours a day, the same things done and done again. Hands growing into horn; muscles swelling like a blacksmith's. A healthy life enough, with a rough, plain diet, and yet a purgatory in its way, with prospect and horizon bound.

In a year or more they widened, for Paul had set up for himself something of a study in the old lumber-room, where on a broken table, with an upturned box for a chair, and a candle stuck in a gingerbeer-bottle, he wrote down the verses he had hammered out during the day, and he began stealthily to send these here and there to magazine editors, who sometimes sent them back and sometimes printed them, but never seemed to dream of payment, until at last one offered him two guineas for a long Christmas story in rhyme, and he began to see a hope of escape from the treadmill round. He set to work on a blank-verse play, and spent the greater part of a year on it, and was prepared to find himself enthroned with Shakespeare. He put his drama into type, a page at a time, pulling but a single impression of each page, and distributing the type jealously before he went to bed, and jealously hiding his pages. And when it was all complete, and his brows were familiar with the touch of laurel, he sent the great work to a London manager, and never heard word of it afterwards, good, bad, or indifferent He waited for months in sick hope and sick despair, and then wrote asking for a judgment. He waited more months, and no answer came. He wrote for the return of his work, humbly, then impatiently, and finally with wrathful insult No answer ever came. The muse seemed as vile a jade as Claudia. But he had his tattered and stained old manuscript, interlined and entangled so that no creature but, himself could read it, and he put it all in type once more, and sent his printed copy to an eminent firm of publishers, who, after considering the matter for six months, offered to take the risk of publication for a hundred pounds, on which he burned his manuscript in the cracked office stove, and left the printed copy of it in the publishers' hands to do as they pleased with it.

He turned to prose and wrote short stories, and sent them broadcast They came back, and he sent them out again. He made a list of magazines and a list of the stories, and each one went the rounds. One stuck and brought proof-sheets, and in due time a ten-pound note. He poured in all the rest on the one discerning editor, who had already refused one half of them. In a month the man of discernment offered ten shillings per page for the lot. Paul accepted, and in another month was back in London, resolute to try a new backfall with the world.

He found lodgings far away in the northern district, apprised the one discerning editor of his whereabouts, and sat down to wait and work for glory. And, oh! how kind again on a sudden seemed the Fates who for four years had been so harsh with him. Scarce had he been settled a week when there came a letter addressed to Paul Armstrong, Esq., care of Messrs. Blank and Blank, reporting that the editor of a certain magazine had read with much pleasure a tale from Mr. Armstrong's pen, and would be happy to receive from him one of the same length. Paul danced and sang, and then plunged into labour, wrote his story, received his proof-sheet and his cheque, and with the letter a request that he would submit anything he might have in the way of a three-volume story. He was assured that it would receive instant attention.

'I'm five-and-twenty,' said Paul, 'and the world is at my feet'

But books are not to be written in a day, though they may be commissioned in an instant, and the financial stock was small, seeing how big an enterprise was to be started on it, and somehow the story would not form. What ghostly wrestling of the spirit with vague shadows which would take no shape! what sleepless tossings there were!—what fruitless rambles in the darkened streets! what hurried walks to Hampstead Heath! and what slow prowlings there amongst the gone! And, then, how the Concept came suddenly from nowhere, without a warning, without an effort, and stood up serene and strong, and bursting through and through with passion as if it had been alive and fully grown for years. Then to pen and ink and paper, not yet a weariness to soul and flesh! as they were to be in after days, the virgin page an invitation, the ink-pot a magic fountain, the very feel of the pen between thumb and finger a pleasure. There was no thought in those fresh days of stinting labour or of making rules for it—so many hours for work and so many hours for recreation, and such and such hours for meals. The book—the book was everything. He went to sleep with his people. He awoke to them. He lived all day with them. He found them more real than the living. Life was one vivid rage of emotion, of laughter, and of tears. His own pathetics and his own humours were the sweetest things he had ever known, and he cried at the one and laughed at the other more than the most sentimental of readers ever laughed and cried over any book that was ever written. And it was at this time that he wrote certain verses in which he set forth his beliefs in art. The lonely man in his eyrie in the Rockies, reviewing the bygone time, murmured what he could recall of these:

'"A land of fire and a land of frost Build!" said the Lord of the Soul; "And lay me an ocean from coast to coast, And let it be awful with many a ghost Of galleons laden with gold, and lost In the smothering surge's roll.

'"And make me a myriad rounded stars To spangle my firmament, Sweet like Hesper, glad with the balm Of a ceaseless, passionless, changeless calm And hot like Sirius, and red like Mars With a god-like discontent.

'"And frame in the land of fire," he said, "Frame me a soul like thine: Swift as the snail's soft horn to feel, Yet hard and keen as the tempered steel, And be there a fire in heart and head Demoniac and divine."'

The rest of the words had no duelling in his memory, though he was sure they had been made and written; but they were meant to say that all labour conceived and executed in a land of fire should be remodelled in the land of frost at the risk of being cast away in its passage from one to the other. This in plain English meant the union of hot zeal and cold diligence, which is a worthy recipe for any worker in any craft It served Paul's turn for six prodigious weeks, from the rising of the sun until long after the going down of the same. The book was done in a quarter of the time he had apportioned to it. For six weeks the forces of every waking minute had strained fiercely forward to one purpose, and at seven o'clock on an autumn Friday he wrote the words 'The End,' and, looking up, saw the sunlight in dazzling strips between the green painted laths of the blind, and found that his lamp was pale. He drew up the blind and opened the window, and the sweet air bathed his head. There was a deep sadness in his heart, and when he arose and by chance saw his face in the glass it was the face of a ghost If the halest of young men will live in alternations of frost and fire for six weeks on end, he must expect to pay for it.

Paul paid dearly in lassitude, and broken sleep, and loss of appetite, and afterwards in six weeks of idle waiting in poverty, for there was no work or power of thought left in him for the time. He pawned the dressing-case old Darco had given him and the dress-suit which he had not worn for four years, and he had his meals, such as they were, at a cabman's restaurant, and his last penny went, and tobacco famine set in; and his landlord, who was a maudlin man with a cultured turn for drink, would come in at night to his sitting-room and cry, and say that the water-rates were going to cut the supply; and the butcher had said, 'No more credit after Saturday.'

And whilst he was thus agreeably engaged on one occasion a knock came to the door, and a slattern slavey came in with a plate in her hand, and on the plate a wet and flabby oblong something crusted with dirt and slime.

'I can't quite make it out, sir,'said the slavey, 'but I think as this is a letter, and it hasn't been opened, sir, and I fancy it's addressed to you.'

And within the slimy envelope was a soaked letter, in which the ink had so run as to leave it scarcely legible, and being diligently pored upon, the letter was found to indicate that the recipient of the story had read it with great charm and interest, and was willing to purchase the serial rights of the same for the sum of L250, L150 on the author's signature to terms, and L100 on the day of the publication of the first number.

'It's 'ard for a poor working man to be kep' out of his money like this, sir,' the landlord moaned.

'Damn you!' said Paul. 'Listen to this.' He read the letter, and with a start reverted to the date: 'September 27th, and this is October 27th! I haven't tasted food these three days, or had a pinch of tobacco, and this has been waiting for me—this—this—for a whole month! Explain, you execrable! or, as sure as the brother of the sun reigns over the Heavenly Empire, I will brain you with the poker. Shell out, you villain!—shell out, to your last halfpenny! 'Ard for a poor working man to be kep' out of his money, is it? Somebody in this infernal house has kept me waiting and half starving for a month, whilst I have two hundred and fifty pounds to my credit. What are you worth, you hoary inebriate? Speak, or die!'

'Seven and eight,' said the landlord, 'and a bogus thrip-penny.'

'Give me five shillings!' cried Paul, snatching up the poker, and the landlord pottered out the money.

Away tore Paul to the house round the corner. There were sausages there frizzling in a metal-pan with a little row of blue gas-jets below it. There was brandy there; there was beer. There was tobacco of a sort, and there was an admirable whisky, not the diluted vitriol common to the outlying London house before the passing of the Adulteration Act, but honest whisky, mellow and old.

Paul, full of meat, and singing to himself behind his pipe, walked homeward with a flask of that good liquor in his pocket, and there behind was the landlord clinging to the railings at the bottom of the area-steps and maundering to a policeman.

'Five shillings—'storted by threats. Tha's the man,' said the landlord.

'Come in, officer, and have a drink,' said Paul, and the officer, after an upward and downward look along the street, marched into the house. Paul gave him a drink instantly, and whilst the landlord hiccuped ''Started by threats 'he explained the situation. 'Of course, I made him shell out,' said Paul. 'Wouldn't you?

'Well, I'm a guardian of the peace, myself, sir,' said the officer; 'but it wouldn't ha' been more than five bob and costs if you'd ha' dressed him down. Speaking as a man of uniform, as I may say, I should ha' thought that cheap at the money.'

''Storted by threats,' said the landlord.

'Take another,' cried Paul, 'and go to bed. You'll be paid in the morning, and you can stick up "To Let" as soon as you like. I'm off to the Continent.'

There was still a cab fare in Paul's pocket when he awoke and dressed in the morning, and he booked away to the publisher's office and received his cheque. Then away to the bank, and away from the bank with fifteen ten-pound notes of the Bank of England. Then a breakfast at a restaurant, and a pint of champagne to drink his own health in—the first wine tasted for nearly five years. Next to 'my uncle's' to redeem the dressing-bag and the dress-suit, and next home to stagger the landlord with that pile of wealth. Then to pack, singing; to drive back to town; to lunch late after the purchase of a suit of reach-me-downs, new hat, boots, gloves, and paletot; and last, away to the Continental train for a first look at Paris. And all the while it was richly comic to himself to feel how he exulted, and to say within doors demurely to the shopman, to the waiter, the ticket clerk, the porter: 'I am an author, sir, an accepted author, with the first fruits of my first book in my pocket I am on the way to Paris and distinction.' The four years of lost prospect and horizon looked nothing, less than nothing. But the Channel waters were rough, and he was chilled by the solemn gentlemen who sat battened down with basins in their laps, turning green and yellow in the sickly light; and the railway journey beyond was cold and uncomfortable, and Paris in the gray fog of a late October morning was less gay than he had expected. What little he knew of the language seemed to be recognised by the natives of the land, but what they had to say to him was as rapid as the clatter of a running boy's hoop-stick on a row of railings, and as intelligible. An English-speaking tout seized him, and he was grateful to be decoyed into a dirty hotel on the other side of the river, where people understood him more or less when he asked a question. Here he entered himself in the guest-book, and under the head of 'Profession 'wrote the world 'Literature 'with great pride. He ate his cutlets and chipped potatoes at breakfast with an unwonted relish, in spite of a revolting table-cloth, encrusted with mustard and spilt sauces, and blue with wine-stains, over which salt had been spilled to restore the whiteness of the fabric in case it should ever have the good chance to be washed. The yard of bread was a novelty. The distempered houses opposite—pink and green and blue—were novelties. The jalousied windows gave the street a delicious foreign look. The little cavalry officer who came clanking in with his baggy trousers and his spurs and dangling sword, almost as long as its wearer, was a delight. Paul went to the window to look at the middle-aged bonne who went by in her Alsatian cap and flying coloured ribbons.

At five-and-twenty a night of wearisome and broken sleep makes small difference to the spirits, and when he had washed as well as he could by the aid of a cream-jug full of water and a saucer, and a towel handkerchief, and without the aid of soap, he dressed, and sallied out with the intent to lose himself in Paris. There is nothing so exhilarating as the first sight of a foreign city, and Paul wandered on and on, past the Palace of Justice and over the bridge, and, turning to the left, made along the Rue de Rivoli, passed the far-stretching facade of the Louvre, and so went on till he reached the Place de la Concorde. There, staring into the basin of one of the fountains, as if he had been waiting for Paul to come to him, was Darco, fur-coated and silk-hatted as of yore, and looking neither older nor younger by a day than when they had parted.

'Darco!' said Paul, with his heart in his mouth. 'How glad I am! You dear old Darco!'

Darco stared a moment, for the young man's beard and moustache were fully grown, and they disguised him.

'Oh!' he said at last. 'Id is Armstronk. How do you do?' He held out his hand somewhat laxly, but Paul took it in both his and wrung it fervently.

'I can't tell you how glad I am to see you. I can't tell you how bitterly sorry I've been for the brutal way in which I paid you for all your kindness. Try and forgive me, old chap. Do now. It wasn't ingratitude, Darco, though it looked like it It was a boy's infatuation for a woman.'

'I dold you,' said Darco—' I rememper as if it was yesterday. I said: "You are a tarn fool, and you will be zorry."'

'I have been sorry this five years or nearly,' said Paul, still clinging to his hand. 'Make it up, old chap, and come and have lunch somewhere.'

'Zo pe id,' said Darco, stolid as an ox. 'Do you vant a virst-glass restaurant, or a second-glass, or vat?'

'The best in Paris!' cried Paul gaily, though he had to blow his nose and to cry 'Hem!' to clear his throat, the sight, of old Darco touched his heart so.

'Gome along, then,' said Darco, and rolled off sturdily like a barrel on barrels in the direction of the Boulevards. 'Rue Gasdilione,' he said, playing guide as he walked along. 'Blace Fendome. Golumn Fendome. Rue de la Baix. You haf not been in Baris until now?

'I got here this morning,' Paul answered.

'I am here four tays,' said Darco. 'I shall be here four tays longer. I am puying a gomedy, ant a blay in five agds.'

'Buying?' said Paul 'I thought the one recognised custom was to steal'

'That's a vool's game,' Darco declared. 'If you sdeal, and if what you sdeal is worth sdealing, anypoty can sdeal from you. If you burchase it, it is yours, and nopoty can take it away. Honesty is the best policy. And, pesides that, I am Cheorge Dargo. I know my way apout.'

Paul could have hugged him for sheer joy at hearing the familiar brag again: 'I am Cheorge Dargo.' The old countersign was like music.

'Where are we going?' asked Paul.

'Ve are koink,' said Darco, 'to the Hareng d'Or, where they haf a dry champagne, and where they can give you such a preakfast as you cannot get in the world. Ant I shall have a Cloria with a zeventy-year-old Gogniag in it. Ant the Blat de chour is a Navarin de mouton. I saw that as I passed the house two hours aco. I shall haf two boitions, mind you.'

'Twenty!' cried Paul.

'No,' said Darco. 'I could not ead twenty.'

They reached the restaurant, one of those jolly little houses which are all down now—short as is the time since that in which they flourished—where the host knew almost all his guests, and luxury went hand in hand with a sort of camaraderie which cannot breathe in our new palaces. The chef was a treasure, but as yet no American millionaires strove to coax him across the Atlantic. There were no better wines in the world, there was no better coffee, and, by way of a wonder, there were no better cigars. Darco shook hands with the host, and broke out at him in a brash of Alsatian French, which to Paul's ears was like a rolling of drums. He caught his own name in the torrent of noise, and distinguished the words 'un homme lideraire, cheune, gomme fous foyez, mais deja pien tisdangue.' The host bowed, and Paul bowed, and blushed a little, and Darco ordered a dejeuner at the host's discretion, stipulating only for his own double portion of the Navarin de mouton. So there came oysters, with a cobwebbed bottle of old hock in a cradle, and an unknown delicate fish with burnt butter, and then the Navarin with champagne in an ice-pail, and fruit, and delicate foreign cheeses, and coffee which is a dream to the man whose unjaded palate first tries it in perfection. The seventy-years-old cognac was there also, and Paul's head was humming ever so little before the feast was over.

'And the dopacco?' said Darco lazily—' eh?'

'The true believer smokes it in Paradise,' said Paul; and Darco translated the saying to the host, who bowed and smiled.

'How did you know that I was un homme litteraire?' asked Paul, stumbling at the unaccustomed words.

'I haf seen your name to half a tozen short stories,' said Darco. 'It was no mere gomparison of names to me. I know your sdyle. It has changed. It has changed for the petter, but I know id. You gannot deceive me apout a sdyle. I am Cheorge Dargo. I know my way anywhere.' They smoked and sipped their coffee in a splendid contentment 'Vat prings you to Baris?' Darco asked lazily.

'I sold a book yesterday,' said Paul—'my first I had worked hard; I thought I deserved a little holiday—I have got to learn my world. And I was beastly hungry the day before yesterday.'

'I have been there,' returned Darco. 'There was an English Duke—he is dead now—I did a liddle service in Puda Besth. He vanted to bay me. I said "I am Cheorge Dargo. I do not take money excebt in the way of business." Ven I was ruint in the United States I game back to England, and I hat not one benny. I galled on the Duke. He was at bregfasd. He got ub, ant he took me py the shoulders begause he was glad to see me, and he said, "My tear Dargo, you are wet"; and I said: "You would be wet if you had slept in the rain in St Chames's Bank."'

'You've had hard times, old Darco?'

'I have had a million dollars. I haf had nothings. Once I sdole a loaf. I gave the paker ten dollars the week after and dold him vat I had done.' He puffed idly and sipped his Gloria. 'I am Cheorge Dargo,' he murmured nosily. 'There is nothings I haf not been. There is nothings I have not seen.

There is nothings worth doing that I have not done.' He smoked and sipped again. 'But I haf not got a liderary sdyle. You haf a liderary sdyle. Come again with me to write blays. We will both great fortunes make.'

'Shake hands on that,' said Paul vehemently; and Darco shook hands with phlegm.

'It is a pargain,' he said. 'See me in five hours' time—Hotel Meurice, Rue de Rivoli I will write it for you. And now I must go apout my work. I am encaged in ten minutes.'

Paul paid the bill, slipped Darco's address into his waistcoat pocket, shook hands with him at the door, and walked away, unconscious, to his life's undoing.



CHAPTER XIV

The voice of the river spoke from the great gorge in accents of exultation and despair, and the voice was a part of the primeval silence, as it had been from the moment when the Solitary had first listened to it. The impalpable, formless brown fog was about him Its acrid scent of burning was in his nostrils. And, all the same, he was in Paris, in the Rue de Quenailles, where he had lived so long, and where he had begun the real troubles of his lifetime.

He saw and heard as if he had been there. The street was lined on either side with picturesque houses of an ancient date, the fronts of which were parcel-coloured, blue, pink, buff, white, green, all worn into a varied grayish harmony by years of exposure to the weather. The cobbled roadway was drenched in sunlight, and the green jalousies on the sunny side of the street had their own effect on the physiognomy of the thoroughfare.

Paul made his way towards his hotel, foreboding nothing, but full of youth and high spirits, and somewhat unfairly inspired by wine, considering the hour of the day. He was aware of this, and his one desire was to reach his own cool and shadowed chamber, and there sleep himself back into a sober possession of his faculties. Had any person suggested to him that he was tipsy, he would have had a right to repel the accusation with scorn. He walked without hesitation or uncertainty; he saw quite clearly and thought quite clearly. He had taken a glass more champagne than was entirely good for him, and that was all. Had the thing happened after dinner, he would simply have put on the brake for the rest of the evening, and would have carried his load with ease. As it was, nothing but a nap was needed to bring him back to a comfortable afternoon sensation. He told himself this as he strolled homeward, tasting his cigar in an occasional whiff, but using it mainly as a sort of fairy baton with which to beat time to the spirit ditties of no tune which filled his harmless mind.

On the side of the street on which he walked he saw the figure of a girl, but he took no especial notice of her until he was almost in the act of passing. Then he noticed that she was tall and lithe, and that she had fine brown eyes and hair. There was nothing in the slightest degree compulsive or imperative about her. She was just a girl, and there was an end of it He might have passed her a thousand times without a second thought, or without a thought at all, but that unhappy extra glass of wine was in his blood, and he must needs accost her—more, perhaps, to show off his French than for any other reason. His attitude towards women had hitherto been chivalrous and shy, and he was aware of the overcoming of a difficulty which had frequently given him some concern when he flourished off his hat and asked, with a smiling insolence:

'Why are you wandering here, I pray?'

The girl looked at him innocently enough, with a gaze quite free from anger, coquetry, or embarrassment. It might have been a common thing in her experience to be thus accosted by a stranger.

'I am waiting for my sister,'she responded simply.

Did she suppose she would have to wait long? asked Paul. The girl did not know. Would she wait under shelter from the sun? She shrugged her shoulders, and inclined her head on one shoulder with lifted eyebrows.

'Come along,' said the vacuous idiot 'Let us have a glass of wine together.'

The girl smiled sedately, and they went off together.

The extraordinary part of this business was not that a young man who had lunched a little too freely should make a fool of himself, but that the girl was a good girl, of average breeding, and, as Paul lived to convince himself, in spite of all the unhappiness she brought him, had never entered upon anything remotely resembling such an adventure as the present in all her life. But the readiness of her acquiescence misled him, and in the little hard-trodden wjne-garden in which they sipped a sugary champagne together, in a trellised alcove like a relic of old Vauxhall, he grew amorous, and told her that her eyes were like beryls, and that their whites were like porcelain. The lonely man in the brown smoke-fog, with the roar of the river in his ears, as unregarded as the roar of traffic in a city, recalled it all, and laughed as he threw his hands abroad, and fell into a frowning thoughtfulness as he allowed them to drop laxly between his knees. The girl had eyes, to be sure—two of them—and they were brown, with a touch of beryl in the brown, and, conceivably, they had a soul behind them, of one sort or another, but she had as much personality as a jelly-fish. She was neither pleased nor affronted by the vacuous ass's compliments, and when he praised her hair and her complexion, she accepted it as placidly as if she had been a waxen lady in a barber's window.

It may have been that this very aloofness of stupidity appealed to him as a thing to conquer, but, anyway, he got an arm about her waist, and went on praising her with ridiculous emphasis. She allowed him to squeeze, and she allowed him to praise, and when he pressed her glass upon her she sipped at it with reasonable relish and set it down again. When they had been sitting in the arbour for a quarter of an hour or so she became loquacious. She said it was a fine day, but that she had feared in the morning that it would rain. It was a much finer day than the Thursday of last week had been, for then it had rained in the afternoon, and since she had been beguiled from home by the treacherous pretence of the day without an umbrella she had had a feather spoiled—a feather 'que m'a coute cinq francs, m'sieu!' Paul answered that she was a little angel, and she told him a parcel of nothings which under fair and reasonable conditions would have bored his head off. But it is a notable thing that when a youth is beginning to learn a foreign language—and Paul was only now entering upon a colloquial familiarity with French—he has so much satisfaction in understanding what is said to him that a very stupid conversation can interest him. It is not what is said which pleases, but the fact that he can follow it, and this, with a man who is not easily susceptible of boredom, will last him well into the knowledge of a novel tongue. He gathered from the confidences exchanged that the young lady lived at home with papa and mamma and her sister; that papa was engaged in a big drapery establishment, and came home late at night; that mamma was a suburban modiste, and was also away from home all day; that her sister and herself did some kind of fancy work at home—his French was not complete enough to enable him to understand accurately what it was—and that she always made holiday on a Thursday afternoon.

Now, Paul had never played the conquering dog until now. He had so far been the victim of the sex, and in his own small way had suffered scorn and beguilement enough. What with the luncheon and the sticky champagne, he began to feel mighty and vainglorious, and he took the airs which he supposed to be appropriate to the situation. He praised the lady, therefore, with a humorous appreciation of the manner in which she accepted flatteries which were passed, so to say, upon a shovel, and he tasted with a gratified palate his own fine flavour as a man of the world.

That was the silly beginning of it, and the lonely man, recalling it all as if he had been back in the midst of it again, asked himself with that tired scorn of his own career and nature which had become a part of him, if any creature with as much brain as earwax had ever before been so easily beckoned to the devil.

'Millions, I suppose,' he said half aloud, in answer to his own mental query—'millions.'

And so went on with his dream.

Of the variety of fools there is literally no end, but for the king of fool who is predestined to come a cropper in the field of life, and to spill other people in his own downfall, there is no rival for the Quixote. The man who is over-anxious to pay in the market of morals is the man who goes bankrupt You may be a good deal of a scoundrel and retain your own esteem and that of the world, but you must not palter with your own offences. The world resents a half-virtue, and the world is right It is the half-virtue which breeds hypocrisy and self-deception, and these are the most despicable of human vices. Courage is at the root of manhood, and even the courage which dares to do wrong and have done with it is better than the cowardice which patches vice with virtue until it can no longer discern the colour of either.

Here, for instance, began a liaison of the vulgarest and simplest kind, for which a man of any wisdom would have repented in due course whilst he would have compounded with it, and would have parted from it, and, whilst counting it amongst the sins and follies of his youth, would have left it behind him.

Paul and the girl parted innocently that night, but made an appointment to meet again on the morrow. He had no stomach for the encounter, but he would not break his word, and so, for the sake of a punctilio, he wrecked himself. He and Annette went to the Mabille together, and in his character of man of the world he made love to her with as fine a relish as if he had sat down to bread-and-water after dinner; then, in order not to be quite a blackguard, he met her again, and, to save himself from his own conscience, again, and at last the compound of vanity, weakness, and virtue landed him with her in London, where they set up housekeeping together.

For a time this was great, with its twang of Rue Monsieur le Prince and Murger and the old Bohemia, and Paul was convinced that he had done a noble thing in not deserting the little woman. In a flaccid sort of a way she seemed to love him, and in that respect, since his own mind was by no means urgent, he was satisfied. He was faithful to the tie, and flaunted his own magnanimity.

But his true mistress was his work, and this he loved with an increasing ardour. How devotedly he laboured he never knew until long afterwards, when what had once been a passion of delight and a necessity of nature degenerated into a stale drudgery practised for the sake of mere money. But, oh! the sweetness of brain-toil whilst the heart was fresh and whilst it still seemed worth while to preach some kind of gospel to mankind! To pace the streets and read the faces of people as they went by, to weave a thousand stories in a day around the destinies of strangers, to sit far into the night fed with rich and glowing fancies, to express them with conscious power, to work with living vigour for the love of work alone!

These were rich days, and if the domestic intercourse were poverty-stricken there was the bachelor intercourse at the clubs to make up for it, and even amongst his married friends Annette was an ignorable quantity unless he took to waving her like a flag of virtue.

There was Fortescue, a man of medium fame, but of real genius, whose delightful home was always open to him. Mrs. Fortescue probably knew all about Paul's eccentric menage, but she had been an opera-singer in her day, had known a good many open secrets of the kind, and was a woman of the world. It was not her business to pry into that kind of secret, and she liked the young fellow for many reasons. Considering what a fool he was, he had grown to an astonishing charm of manner. The lonely man smoking his idle pipe at his tent door in the canon looked back at him across such a distance of time and fate that his inspection of the youth was almost impersonal. The lad passed for a piece of naive nature, and not altogether unjustly. He was eager and ardent, and absurdly tender-hearted. He loved all his friends, and he had a crowd of them. 'Because,' as Balzac says, 'he had known a time when a sou'sworth of fried potatoes would have been a luxury,' he threw about his money with a lordly liberality. A simple ballad, if sung with any approach to art, would bring tears into his eyes. He had all the virtues which came easy to him, and, leaving Annette out of question for the moment, he was without vices. He had rubbed against the world long enough to have grown polished. Nobody questioned his origin or upbringing. His talk was brilliant, if it bore no searching analysis, and he had his circle of listeners wherever he went. He was a born raconteur, and had proved himself in that particular, and his increasing acquaintance with the stage and the professors of its trifling art helped him in this direction.

Fortescue's house was his one haunt apart from the clubs, the one civilized and civilizing home he knew with intimacy, and one night there over a cigarette and a whisky-and-soda he turned his jejune philosophy of life upon his host.

'I confess,' he said, 'that I have no great opinion of the marriage tie. Let there be a loyal association between man and woman, let each recognise the responsibilities which belong to it, and where's the fear of any priestly ban or the need of any priestly blessing?'

'My dear Armstrong,' said Fortescue, who was very much his senior, and a man of a rather starched propriety by nature, 'I would beg you, if you permit me, to avoid that theme. The marriage tie to me means a full half of the whole sanctity of life. To my mind, the man who derides it is, so far as his derision carries him, an ass.'

'Oh,' cried Paul, laughing, 'I like a straight hitter.'

Fortescue shifted the theme with some adroitness, but the talk grew stiff and formal. The younger man felt the disapproval of the elder, and was ill at ease under it. He rather shied at the house from that time forward, and, since an awkwardness of that kind grows easily and rapidly, his visits dwindled into rarity, until they ceased by automatic process.

It was years before he found a home again.

'Along with many noble and admirable qualities the English people have one defect, which is recognised in the satires of every neighbouring nation, but is never acknowledged by themselves.' Thus Paul Armstrong at his tent door, with the voice of the torrent to emphasize the waste silence of his dwelling-place, and the fog to clear his mental vision by shutting out from his perception all extraneous things; not thinking in these words, or thinking in words at all, but dunking thus: 'Propriety is a British legend and a British lie.'

He was back in the old chambers, which were in one of the smaller Inns of Court, and was looking at the stale mirth and madness of the bygone days. Eight out of ten of the men he remembered had settled down, and two of the ten, to make an average, had gone to the devil The two were mainly of the better sort—fellows who stuck to an absurd responsibility, and let it ruin them. The eight were the good citizens who had had the wit to cut responsibility adrift. That was life as he knew it, as the boys of his day who studied divinity or medicine, or who read for the Bar, or who worked in painting or at journalism or letters, all knew it. Clerics, lawyers, painters, authors, men on 'Change, all married and settled and respected, admirable citizens by the dozen and the score, and where are Lorna, and Clara, and Kate, and Caroline, and Fanny? Heaven knows—possibly. The knack of prosperity, surely, is to bury your indiscretions.

Oh, bitter, bitter, bitter to have loaded life with such a burden, not to have had the courage of a hundred others, and to have left the poor responsibility to sink or swim, to have compounded between vice or virtue instead of making a clean bargain with one or the other like the rest of the world, to have permitted a foolish pity to look like a resolute manhood to his eyes, to have throttled his own soul for a scruple!

He stages his own soul, and this is what he sees and hears and knows.

Annette is ailing, is seriously ill indeed, and he has taken her into the country. He has rented a cottage, in the front of which there is a great level common reaching for a mile or two on either side, and covered with golden gorse. In front of the cottage and across the common is a coppice, all browns and purples and yellows and siennas, and beyond that, as seen from the upper windows of the cottage, the land fades into misty autumnal blues, to join a whitened horizon which seems to shun the meeting, until for very weariness it can postpone it no longer—a bell-tent of sky, as it were, with a lifted edge, and beyond the skirts of the nearer sky another. Annette is lying in bed, and Paul is looking out of the window; he will see the landscape in that way always. He has known it under broad summer sunshine, in springtide freshness, under winter snow, obscured in sheeting rain, in moonlight, starlight, dawn, sunset; but whenever his thoughts go backwards to the place he is looking out of the window on that particular aspect of the scene, and Annette is behind him, propped in her bed with pillows.

'Paul!' He turns.

'Come to me a moment. Sit down beside me. Take my hand'

He lays down the empty pipe he has been twirling in his fingers, and obeys her.

'Paul!'

'Yes, dear.'

'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 passion had never been alive at all there was tenderness and the camaraderie which comes of close association. 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 assure 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 pass 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 association 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 noble sentiment The registrar, as he pocketed his fee, and shook hands in congratulation, assured 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 assistant passed 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 assure 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.

It was not merely that he had little to do and little to think about apart from his memories, that he dwelt so constantly upon them. He thought often that there was something within himself which led him gently yet inexorably to these contemplations, and it happened more than once that while he was in the very act of thinking thus his dream came upon him as if a spell had been cast upon his mind Forgotten emotions lived again; facial expressions of people he had known; tones of voices not remarkable, and not much remarked, came back. It was like a curiously vivid dream; but it had all happened, and he was living it over again.

Bring what intellectual denial he would to the problem his father's letter had set before his mind, his nerves at least accepted it, and he had a settled consciousness that he was not alone. He fought against this as a mere superstitious folly. He was often angry with himself for ever stooping to discuss it in his own mind. He had long ago resolved that the man dies as the beast dies, and that there is no more a bourne of new life for the one than for the other. And now all manner of doubts began to pester him. No more for the one than for the other? Why not for all? Why not one unending cycle of experience? Why not the passing of one growing intelligence through every form of life? The Eastern sages dreamed so.

He would sit there at his tent door buried deep in his thoughts, and often, without his being able to trace the faintest sign of any action in his own mental mechanism, his father's voice would wake him with an interjection of, 'Exactly!' or 'That's the point, Paul!' There was no sound, and yet the voice was there, and the old familiar Ayrshire accent seemed to mark it as strongly as it had done in his father's lifetime. It was all very well to deride it as a mere delusion; it was easy to put it on one side for a moment and to stand over it in an intelligent superiority, tracking it to its sources in some obscure action of nerve and brain. But howsoever often he might eject belief from his mind, it came back with a clinging, gentle insistence which would not be denied; and little by little, though sorely against his will, he began to have a sence of it. A verse of 'In Memoriam 'was often in his mind:

'How pure in heart, and sound in head, With what divine affections bold, Should be the man whose heart would hold An hour's communion with the dead.'

He began at last to think that his own unfitness for such a communion helped him to his disbelief in its possibility, and from that hour the feeling of his father's nearness weighed more and more upon him.

Sitting at his tent door hour on hour, feeling himself, with the passage of each day, more completely isolated from the world, he seemed forced to a clear appreciation of the inner truth of his own retrospect; and, so far as any exercise of will was concerned, he found it a record of folly and weakness. There had been hours of high good fortune there, but they had been barely of his seeking, and of his own actual making not at all. Folly and weakness had stung him many and many a time, but it was not until he had reached the last recorded effort of memory that they had laid a weight upon his shoulders. Now he knew that he had tied a millstone about his neck; that he had permanently denied to himself all the sweet and vivifying influences of the higher social life. Sometimes detached from him, as though it watched from outside and waited for further confessions from his memory, and sometimes seeming an intimate part of him, as if it were a constituent of that desolate ache which filled and possessed his soul, there was always there the image of the gray old father, wistful, sagacious, patient—no ghost, but veritably a haunting thought, and at last, in spite of all contention, as real to him as his own hands. Yet when he went back to his dreams his obsession vanished, and it was only in the pauses of his vision that it returned.

Here were the dreams again.

He had come to understand quite clearly that a trick had been played upon him, but he was not constantly unhappy in its contemplation, or altogether resentful at it Annette improved in health with a startling rapidity, and he had the doctor's assurance on that head.

'Mrs. Armstrong is as sound as a roach, sir, and will probably outlive either of us.'

'That is well,' said Paul, and he set himself to bear the burden he had gathered.

At this time he found the greatest happiness in work, and alike with Darco, and for his own hand, he laboured unceasingly. Money came fast—more money than he had ever hoped for. Fame came also, in a fashion, and many genial societies were open to him. But Annette was not a person to be defrauded of anything she conceived to be a right, and he soon found upon how slight a thread domestic content might hang. Invitations to Mr. Paul Armstrong were plentiful, but of Mrs. Paul Armstrong his world had no knowledge outside the jolly bachelor contingent which overflowed house and table upon Sundays. When these single invitations came Annette invariably retired to her bedroom, and, having locked herself in there, refused to hold any sort of intercourse with Paul.

'My dear,' he would say to soothe her, 'I am not going without you; but I can't force people to invite you, and we must just make the best of things.'

So he grew to be something of a hermit; and all on a sudden he resolved to cut himself adrift from England, and to live abroad. Before his wanderings were over, he was destined to know Europe pretty thoroughly; but at this time his knowledge of it was limited to Paris, and here and there a bit of Northern France. He would break new ground. Antwerp would do as well as any other city for a starting-place, and within a day or two of the hour at which the fancy first occurred to him he was ready to start He crossed by the Baron Osy, took rooms in a hotel on the Groen Plate, and lived and worked there for a month or two under the dropping music of the cathedral chimes. The outfit of a man of letters is the simplest in the world. With a ream of writing-paper, a pint of ink, and sixpennyworth of pens, he is professionally provisioned for half a year. Paul had no need to be in personal touch either with publisher or stage-manager, and he knew his absence from England to be unmarked and unregretted. Annette and he seemed to get on well enough together. There was no real communion between them. Paul was all on fire about his work, and she had no more comprehension of his thoughts than a canary-bird would have had. But it was not possible for a man of his temperament to live constantly under the same roof, and to sit daily at the same table with anybody, male or female, without developing some kind of camaraderie. Mrs. Armstrong seemed to like the life fairly well, and to find a pleasure in the fleeting society of the birds of passage who went and came. She had dresses to her heart's content, and in her pretty gelid way enjoyed a good deal of popularity; but by-and-by, as summer again drew near, she wearied of her surroundings, and incited Paul to move. The work on which he had been engaged was finished and disposed of; there were a good many loose hundreds at the bank, and more were coming. He was ready for a holiday, and for Annette's sake was willing to persuade himself that he was in need of one. So in May weather they set off to make a round of the old Flemish country—Ghent, and Bruges, and Aix, and Mechlin. Thence they slid on to Namur, working slowly towards Switzerland in Paul's fancy, but stopping by mere hazard at Janenne, and being by a very simple accident enticed some four or five miles from the main line of their route to Montcourtois. They had been drawn aside in the first place to visit the famous grottoes of Janenne, and the jolly old doyen of Montcourtois was their fellow-passenger in the brake which conveyed them to the station. The old priest was a man of learning, and in his day he had travelled, and had known the world. Paul and he fell into animated converse, and struck up an immediate liking for each other. It turned out, curiously enough, that, though the old gentleman had lived for twenty years within half a dozen miles of the wonderful grottoes, he had never been prompted to visit them until now. He was on the way to wipe out his reproach, and by the time the sight-seeing was over Paul found himself so fascinated by his simplicity, his bonhomie, and the charming, varied stream of his talk, that he must needs invite the old gentleman to dinner at the Hotel of the Three Friends, where preparations for his own reception for the night had been made. The old priest accepted the invitation at once, and early evening found them the only occupants of a great salon in which a hundred people might have dined with case. A brass lamp, suspended by chains from the ceiling, illumined their corner of the' centre table, and at the far end of the room a big stove bloomed red-hot all round like a magnified cherry. These preparations were scarcely needed, for the air was balmy, the windows were open, and the sky was yet full of the evening light of early summer. The voice of a stream not far away ran on with a ceaseless, light-hearted babble, and through the open windows the one street of the village was visible until it swerved away to the left There are a thousand villages like Montcour-tois; but it was the first of its genus Paul had known, and he found a quiet charm in it The Hotel of the Three Friends stood in the Place Publique, dominated by a brand-new town-hall; but all the rest of the place was quaint and old-fashioned. All the houses were distempered in various colours, and all their architects had worked after the decrees of the destinies, so that the street-line itself was full of gable-ends, and the edifices faced in as many directions as was possible. A sturdy, thick-set village girl, neat as a new pin, with cheeks hard and red, and shining like hard red apples, brought in the soup—a soupe a la bonne femme, and admirable of its kind—brought in a dish of fresh-caught trout excellently fried; followed this with veal cutlets; with a tart, and a local cheese which, though it had no fame beyond its own borders, was a surprise for an epicure. With the fish came a dusty, cobwebbed bottle in a cradle, and at the sight of it the doyen lifted his eyebrows, and faintly smacked his lips. Paul, in ordering dinner, had asked the square-built Flemish waitress:

'You have Burgundy?

'But yes, sir,' the girl had answered, 'and of the best.'

'Bring me a bottle of your best,' Paul had said, and had thought no more of the matter.

But when the venerable cleric so twinkled at the sight of the dusty flagon in the threadbare bid wicker cradle, he was tempted to ask if they had anything very special before them.

'My dear sir,' returned the doyen, 'it is a wine for an Emperor, and if I may be permitted to tell you so, its appearance is attributable to my presence here.'

It was a noble vintage, and the doyen grew eloquent over it.

'It is here in the Ardennes,' he said, 'that you find the best Burgundy of the world. We have no vineyards of our own, though, if tradition can be trusted, they grew a good grape here hundreds of years ago; but we have cellarage, and here beneath our feet is a vault cut out of the living rock, the temperature of which does not vary one degree Reaumur on the hottest day in summer and the coldest night in winter. That is the right harbour for such a craft as this to sail into.' He touched the bottle affectionately with the tips of his beautifully-trimmed white fingers. 'You must not take me for a wine-bibber,' he said smilingly, 'but all gifts of God are good, and this is the best that Heaven affords in this direction.'

Paul rang the bell no great time later, and called for a second bottle. The doyen protested, but with a discernible faintheartedness. He talked of vintages as the twilight fell and the lamp beamed more brightly on the snowy napery. Well, he had travelled, he had seen the world, he had been young. Of all wines in the world for him Johannesberg. One bottle, one truly imperial bottle, he remembered.

'It was a physician of Paris, the most eminent, who travelled for his pleasure, and whose acquaintance I made in Rome. It is very long ago. The Holy Father was suffering agonies, and he endured them like a hero. But everybody feared that he was dying, and our Roman doctors could make nothing of the case at all. It occurred to somebody to speak to His Holiness of the doctor Gaston. The physicians in attendance were glad to invite him, and by a very simple and almost painless operation he removed the seat of trouble, and in a week His Holiness was himself again. His Holiness was full of gratitude, and would gladly have paid any fee the doctor had chosen to name. But he would have no fee at all. He was not a good son of the Church, but he was an excellent Christian all the same, and it was his pride to have restored so valuable a life. Gaston told me the whole story. "My child," said the Pope, "some souvenir of your own skill and kindness you shall accept from me; I insist upon it." Then the good doctor hardened his heart, and he said: "I am for these many years a collector of wines, and I have in Paris my little cellar, which is without its rival for its size. But there is one treasure which I cannot buy, nor beg, nor steal. It is the Imperial Johannes-berg. It goes alone to the crowned heads of Europe and to your Holiness. Rothschild cannot buy it with his millions. If I may beg but a bottle——" And His Holiness laughed, and "My good son," he said, "you shall have a dozen." And Papa was better than his word, for he sent thirteen. Gaston,' continued the ancient priest, laying a hand on the listener's sleeve, 'had six friends in Rome, of whom I was one. He resolved that the thirteenth bottle should be expended, and that he would store the rest We assembled—ah! my son, we assembled. There were little glasses of fair water handed round and cubes of bread like dice, and we sipped and nibbled, that our palates might be clean. Then the bottle was brought in with the tray of glasses, the right Rhine wine-glasses of pale green, with the vine-leaves and grape-bunches about the stem. And the bottle was opened, and—— You know your Scott? Do you remember how the bottle of claret "parfumed ze apartment"? Oh, it was so when that cork was drawn! Odours of flowers and old memories! It was nectar when we came to taste it It was of the kingliest, the most imperial.'

Paul filled the priest's glass again and replenished his own, but the old man rose laughingly from the table.

'I am something of a poet,' he said, 'in my imaginations, but I do not carry my fancies into practice. No more wine to-night.'

Paul pressed him, but the old gentleman was firm. He yielded to the temptation of coffee and a cigar, and the two went on talking of trifles for half an hour. Annette had long since risen from the table, and had strolled to the far end of the room beyond the glowing stove. She had thrown open a French window there, and had stood for some time looking out upon the night when she called for Paul.

'Come here; I want to speak to you.'

Paul excused himself, and obeyed the summons. Beyond the French window lay a little alcove, about which a barren but full-leaved vine was trailed. The sky was still filled with a diffuse light, and the May moon, pale as yet, was rising like a silver canoe above the edge of a hill a mile away.

'Paul,' said Annette, 'I want to stay here. There's a sort of peace about the place, and I should like to be here for a little while.'

'Well, dear,' he answered, 'there are worse places in the world.'

'No,' she whispered, drawing him down to her; 'I want to tell you something.' With her arm about his neck, she breathed into his ear: 'There are only two of us, Paul; you must look out for a third.'

He turned her face to his, and he saw that her eyes were moist and that her face was pale. The momentous thing had been prettily said, as if only a touch of fun and a touch of commonplace could make the sacredness of it bearable to either. In that second he forgot everything. Indifference melted, vanished, and he took her in his arms with a feeling he had never known before. How long they stood there he could not have told, but the voice of the priest awoke him from his thoughts.

'I am afraid, Monsieur Armstrong,' said the doyen, 'that I delay my departure too long.'

'Go to bed, darlipg,' Paul whispered. 'Good-night. I'll make your excuses. You mustn't show up before strangers with a face like that.'

He pressed his lips to hers, took both hands ardently in his own for a second, and walked hastily back into the salle a manger. The doyen stood with his beaver on the table before him, and his white hands smoothing the folds of his soutane.

'I beg your pardon,' cried Paul, 'but my wife called me away. She is suffering from some slight indisposition, and we have made up our minds to rest here for a little while.'

'Indisposition!' cried the priest; 'I am sorry to hear that. But in one respect you are fortunate. Here in this infecte little village—you would barely believe it, but 'tis true—we have the king of all European doctors. Shall I bring him to you?'

'Are you indeed so fortunate? Paul asked laughingly. 'Bring him by all means.'

'There is nothing pressing about the case? the doyen asked.

'Nothing pressing,' Paul responded.

'The morrow will do, then?'

'The morrow will do admirably.'

The old priest withdrew with a cordial hand-shake, and Paul lit a cigar and sat down to look at the newly-revealed position of affairs. The alliance between Annette and himself had been of the most trivial sort, and he had condemned himself for it a thousand times. But now a new feeling took possession of him, and she had grown suddenly sacred in his eyes. The burden which had sometimes galled him had grown welcome in a single instant.

The doctor came next day, a rotund man of benevolent aspect, with little smiling slits of eyes slightly turned up at the outer end, like a Chinaman's. He was familiarly known in the village as Le Chinois. But it did not take Paul long to learn that, in spite of the nickname, he was idolized by every inhabitant of the district for miles round. He was a man of private income, and all his professional earnings were spent upon his poor. In a fortnight Paul and he were thick as thieves. Le Chinois had travelled extensively, and appeared to be on terms of intimacy with the literature of every European people. He had not the faintest idea of the pronunciation of the English language, but he wrote it currently and with some approach to elegance, and his knowledge of English letters put Paul to shame. With all his learning and his philosophic agnosticism, he was as simple-hearted as a child. Annette took the greatest fancy to him and welcomed his visits, and played round him with a sprightliness her husband had never before observed in her. 'She is changing,' he thought, 'and changing for the better.' The new conditions seemed as if they brought new life and developed a novel character. But he noticed that her outbursts of gaiety were followed invariably by deep depression. She would sit in the garden in the dusk of the early summer evenings alone, and if her solitude were intruded upon would wave him away without a word. It irritated her at such times even to be looked at, and Paul, deeply anxious for the time being to fall in with her every whim, would betake himself to the little cafe opposite, and chat there with the simple village folk. Sometimes M. le Prince, a scion of one of the noblest houses of Europe, who lived in retirement on an income of some three hundred sterling per annum, would drop in and sip his little glass of orgeat, and chatter with the peasants about crops and weather. Sometimes the doctor would spend a spare half-hour there in the evening, and sometimes the venerable doyen himself, though he never actually entered the house except upon a pastoral visit, would take a seat outside and drink his after-dinner coffee amongst the members of his flock.