Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

The word was not wholly sincere, but it held more than the average ounce of sincerity to the ton which keeps human speech a possibility. At least his desire was to help her, if it were only a way of helping himself. But the whole thing was so miserable that to analyze emotions at such a moment was surely to mount the very Appenines of folly. Annette cried and cried, with her yet young and supple figure clinging to him, and, in spite of the debauched, melancholy face, what could he do but stroke her hair and kiss her cheek, and promise kindness and encouragement? Most of the time he was inwardly murmuring, ‘Poor devil!’ and was assuring himself that he had taken up a most hopeless handful; but the whole wretched tangle of feeling was too intricate to be unravelled by so much as a straight inch. What could he do? He asked the question despairingly; he asked it in genuine pity of Annette; he asked it in a yet more genuine pity of himself. The man who deals professionally with the emotions of other people cannot preserve the simplicity of his own; it would be out of nature to believe it.

There was a reconciliation of a sort, but it could hardly be very real at first, and to give it any aspect of permanence time was necessary.

Laurent and Paul concocted a plan of campaign. It was essential in the doctor’s opinion to avoid as far as possible all open evidence of watchfulness, and yet to know very accurately what was being done. Innumerable attempts were made to break the cordon of guardianship which was drawn around Annette. She feigned, of course, as people in her position always feign, to acquiesce entirely in the means which were adopted to guard her from herself, but there were eternal skirmishes between the outlying posts of the two armies which came in a very short time to be established. In that newfound prosperity of his Paul had grown absolutely careless about money, and he had not the faintest idea as to the extent of his wife’s supplies. That she had enough, for the time being, to corrupt quite a small regiment was speedily made manifest, and a silent contest, in which the victor acknowledged victory no more than the vanquished admitted defeat, set in. How wide the ramifications of this strange war might be Paul could not guess, but on occasion some circumstance would reveal that they had reached unexpected distances. It was a perfectly understood thing in the hotel itself that no supplies of wine or of more potent liquor were to be supplied at Madame Armstrong’s order. The village pharmacien sold nothing to her without Laurent’s consent, but there were ways and means of one sort or another by which she contrived to procure her poison, and at such times the old signs were always perceptible: the passion for solitude, the tricksy, changing spirit which varied from extravagant mirth to unreasonable anger. Laurent watched the contest with a sleepless loyalty, and Annette, finding herself foiled by him a thousand times oftener than by the less vigilant Paul, grew to hate him. But in spite of all the unfortunate creature could do to accelerate her own ruin, she grew slowly back to health, and to something more than her original personal attractiveness. For a kind of experience was marked upon her, and the indefinable yet universally recognised expression which betokens this was present in her looks. When watchfulness prevailed over the strange craft which was brought into conflict with it, Annette knew how to be charming, even to the man who suffered so much at her hands; but when the contrabandists succeeded in running in their supplies there were hours of horror—scenes in which rage and accusation were succeeded by storms of tears and tempestuous self-reproach. On one such occasion Paul sat in his study, for the moment oblivious of the world. His dissipation and his best relief from the cares which beset him was labour, and he laboured hard. It was his fashion at this time to stand at his desk—a rude thing built for him by the village carpenter—and in the pauses which came in between his actual spells of writing, to stride about his limited territory, enacting the scenes he was striving to portray, and shaping his sentences in such an impassioned undertone as an actor will employ in the study of a part. He was at the limit of his walk from the window, thus engaged, when the door was violently and without warning broken open in such fashion that its edge struck him on the face. Here was Annette, blazing with some newly-discovered injury, and Paul at once recognised the ancient and too-well-remembered symptoms. The contrabandists had got through again, and this time with a vengeance. When he could gather his scattered wits—the blow in itself had been a shrewd thing—he found that he was being stormily assailed in respect of an amour with the cook of the Hotel of the Three Friends, a highly respectable person of fifty summers and a waist of sixty inches in circumference. He closed the door, and, mopping his injured nose, invited Annette to a seat.

‘Talk lower, dear,’ he asked her. ‘It shall be perfectly understood between us that I deserve all your reproaches, but don’t give the poor, dear old cook away, or, if you must assail her, speak in English.’

‘That is your ring,’ said Annette. She drew her wedding-ring from her finger and cast it to the floor. ‘I have done with you for ever; you are a traitor and a villain.’

Paul stooped for the ring as it rolled to his feet, and bestowed it in his pocket.

‘You and Laurent,’ cried Annette, ‘have conspired to kill me. Oh, I know you both! but if there is justice in earth or heaven, I will have it Do not think because I am a woman and alone that I can find no protector. I am not so helpless as you fancy.’

‘I am very busy, dear,’ Paul answered in a cold desperation, ‘and we might discuss these important questions at another moment.’

‘Oh,’ cried Annette, ‘anything to avoid the truth!’

‘Yes,’ said Paul, with the first flush of anger he had permitted himself, ‘anything to avoid the truth—anything, or almost anything; but if you stay here one other moment I will avoid the truth no longer.’