‘Let me make you a cup of tea,’ he said, subduing his voice to a whisper. ‘I have a whole packet of that lovely stuff I bought before we left London.’
‘Pray go,’ she answered him.
There was nothing for it but to obey, and he went from the room a little disconsolate.
‘This,’ he said to himself as he walked down to the salle à manger’ is what the poor things have to go through. Love and marriage are not all beer and skittles for either party, but they are pitiable for the woman.’ Even now there was no deep attachment in his mind towards Annette, and he blamed himself for his want of feeling. ‘I owe her everything,’ he thought—‘everything that I can bring her. I suppose she loved me when she came to me. God knows!’
He was sorry for her, but he upbraided himself for the thought that he would have been just as sorry for any other woman who suffered in the same way, if only her trouble were brought near enough for him to be aware of it. He had bound himself down to a life without love, but there was an exquisite disloyalty in the mere admission of that thought.
He was too disturbed to care for breakfast, and after drinking a cup of coffee he lit his pipe and strolled in search of the doctor. The good old Chinois was munching his pistolet, and sipping at a great bowl of hot milk just tinctured with coffee, and his man was already at the door with the queer old buggy and the queer old horse familiar to the country-side over a circuit of half a dozen leagues from its centre.
‘I have come,’ said Paul, ‘to talk to you about Mrs. Armstrong. I don’t like the look of things at all.’
‘Ha!’ said Laurent ‘Tell me, what do you observe?’
‘I notice,’ Paul answered, ‘a dreadful variableness of mood, a feverish exaltation, followed by a serious depression, an increasing desire to be alone, a sort of nervous resentment of any inquiry as to her state of health. That, I think, is about all. I dare say that everything I may have noticed may be attributable to her present condition, and that in my inexperience of such things I may be unduly nervous; but I wish you’d make an opportunity of seeing her casually in the course of the day. For Heaven’s sake, doctor,’ he added with a laugh, ‘don’t let her guess that I sent you. The one thing she most resents is having the mere suggestion offered that she should see a doctor.’
Laurent rubbed his close-cropped silver head with one hand, and with the other wrung a few drops of liquid from his huge moustache, looking up at Paul meanwhile with a crafty benevolence in his eye, like a supernaturally wise old parrot.