She flashed from languor into a mood of vivid irony. Her lips curled, her eyes opened wide with a dancing beryl-coloured flame behind them, and her eyebrows arched in a sublime disdain.
‘You didn’t send him?’ she asked
‘I?’ said Paul, with a guilty stammer—’ I—send him?’
‘Now, before you lie,’ said Annette, with a tragic gesture of the hand, ‘hear me. The window of our dressing-room happens—just happens, by God’s providence to confute a fool—to command a view of Dr. Laurent’s door. I saw you go in; I could even hear you knock. Do you think you can deceive me? Pah!’
She rose, evaded his arm, swept from the room in a kind of torrential rage, banged the door behind her, and was gone.
He was so amazed at it all—the swift interchange of penitence to self-abasement, languor, challenge, suspicion, wrath, and accusation—that he stood dumfounded, not knowing what to think. He heard the flying feet and swirling skirts as Annette raced upstairs. In the drowsy stillness of the afternoon he heard the door of her bedroom close with a decisive click, and then the sharp shooting of the bolt and the shrieking of the key as it turned in its unaccustomed wards. Still standing there in wonderment, he listened to her footsteps overhead as she dashed through the dressing-room, and an instant later came the slamming and the locking of a second door.
He sat down, reached mechanically for his pipe, beat out the ashes from it on the level tiles of the hearth, and mechanically filled and lit it. He searched his mind for a clue to the whole extraordinary business of the last half-hour, and could find but one: the anxieties of coming maternity, and possibly the change of frame which women suffer at such times, had unhinged Annette, and had disturbed her mind and nerves from their ordinary balance. He longed for an interview with Laurent, but he dared not seek it. He would have sent a messenger to him, but he also might be watched by those keen and too observant eyes.
As he sat and thought things over he gradually gathered courage, and at length he began to discern a touch of comedy in that which had so much disturbed him. It was a very tender and touching comedy, but it was comedy all the same—a bird-soul of light and laughter hovering over a lake of tears. The dear little woman! He had thought her unimpressionable, even a little stupid, and he saw now how much he had wronged her. She was full of emotions he had never suspected, and could not even now analyze. Her very waywardness, the strange caprices of feeling which had so astonished him as they chased each other, began to look charming in the new light his thoughts cast upon them.
‘Thus it is,’ said Paul to himself, ‘we come into the world casting our shadows before us, and making laughter and trouble of all sorts for our makers before we are born.’
It was obviously the mother’s lot to suffer much. It was obviously the man’s business to be very patient, very tender. He began to think himself exceeding good and wise. He was learning to appreciate a new feature in human nature, something which had its element of unpleasantness if not rightly seen and understood, but, being so seen and understood, a very beautiful and tender thing indeed. There was a sacred shyness in his thoughts, but overriding this a triumphant tender understanding of the humours of the situation which tickled him most delicately. It would be easy to be patient now that he understood so well, and he resolved upon patience comfortably.