‘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.