The carriage rattled off; the doctor, the messenger, and Paul stood at the kerb for a minute or so. The carriage rumbled into the distance; a window was heard to open and to dose. Laurent took Paul’s arm, and they walked together without a word until they came in front of the window of the room which Paul had used as a study. The blind was up, a lamp was lit, and the whole room was visible from the roadway.
‘Mon Dieu!’ said Laurent in a whisper.
Annette was there in her nightdress, looking from side to side like a hunted creature. A decanter stood upon the table. She approached it crouching, seized it with one hand, took a tumbler in the other, and three times poured and three times drank as if the draught were water; then she glided away and closed the door behind her.
CHAPTER XVIII
For any and every episode of his life save this, Paul, when he chose to think about it, could make a fairly expressive picture in his mind, and could bring back something of the emotion of the time. Here he could remember only that Laurent clutched him by the arm, and that he turned on Laurent with something of the vague appeal for aid which might be imagined in the mind of a frightened child. He saw that a thousand signs which he should have recognised had escaped him, and in the flush of real apprehension which followed this thought he seemed to himself to have been almost wilfully blind to the truth. There were so many things which might have guided him, and he had taken warning by none of them.
‘I beg your pardon, old chap,’ he said to Laurent, speaking unconsciously in English, ‘but I’m a little bit upset. You would not mind lending me your arm inside?’
‘Assuredly not,’ cried Laurent, still supporting him; and the two men entered the hotel together.
The Solitary still remembered how his clumsy footsteps seemed to fumble at the stone stairs, and the very pressure of Laurent’s arm upon his own shoulder was still a living sensation with him; yet for the actual moment thought and sensation alike seemed to have been abolished. Laurent, when the study had once been reached, helped Paul into a chair, and stood over him with a look of friendly solicitude.
‘A little stimulant, I think,’ he said at last, in a tone of commonplace, and set a hand on the decanter which Annette had so recently laid down.