Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

But Paul Armstrong was feeble in rebellion against himself, and he was here caught firmly in the toils of the first passion of his manhood. The May Gold episode and the Claudie Belmont episode had long been things to laugh at. Marriage had turned out an unredeemed tragedy, which had never had even the poor excuse of a passing infatuation behind it He had never loved Annette, and she was fast growing into a terror and an aversion. And now all this tomfoolery of telepathic communion, this wilful brooding over an absent woman, this summoning of her features to mind, this recalling of her tones, this yearning in which his own soul seemed to beat its mortal bars in the strife to draw her spirit near, made a clean end of the platonic theory so far as he was concerned. The Baroness, at her end of the spirit-wire, appears to have been less potently disturbed. Perhaps she took less pains to disturb herself; possibly she took none whatever.

It came at last on Paul’s side to amount to something very like a possession. Night and day his thoughts hovered about her. He would not admit to his mind one dishonouring thought of her.

‘Charlotte was a married woman, and a moral man was Werther,
And for all the wealth of Indies would do nothing for to hurt her.’

And Gertrude was a married woman also, and Paul—who had not too rigidly obeyed the precepts of morality in his day—was bent on honour in this instance. He wrote reams of letters, all of which might have been printed without harm to anybody; but by-and-by his passion began to carry him off his feet, as passion has carried stronger men than he, and the fever of his pulses got into his ink, and he began to make love, but with a dreadful guardedness and a deadly fear lest he should offend the susceptibilities of this creature of the skies. She rebuked him by implication and in a parable. She had had a mournful letter from a friend in Boston, an old and valued correspondent, a lady whose domestic relations were of the saddest sort, who had long believed herself to have established a pure and tender friendship with a person of the opposite sex, and who had now been shocked and horrified beyond measure by a proposal of elopement How rare a genuine friendship between men and women seemed to be! How happy was she in the security she enjoyed in the solidity of his character, in that delicacy of mind and heart which permitted the most delightful intimacies of thought without danger. He wrote back fiercely that he was unworthy of the confidence she reposed in him, that he loved her passionately, adoringly, and without any dream of hope.

‘I will not soil my worship of you by even asking for your forgiveness,’ so he wrote. ‘I have told you what I had to tell. There is no longer any power in me to hide it And now I know that it is good-bye indeed. In the sorrow and the loneliness which are rightly mine—since I earned them with much foolish painstaking—I shall never cease to love you, but I shall not presume to write to you again.’

‘My poor Paul,’ she wrote back to him, ‘what madness!

And how great a cruelty to snatch from me the solace of your friendship ‘Forget the madness, dearest friend. Undo the cruelty. Let us bury the memory of this outburst, let us go back to the past. Alas! did ever man or woman return to the past? But we must not part in this way. You must write to me at times. You must let me know of your artistic hopes. You must give me news of your career.’

He was amazed to find that he was answered at all, and even in his misery he joyed to find himself reprieved from the sentence his own conscience had passed upon him. He was still free to write, and he wrote almost every day, though he sent off his budget only once a week. He did not make love in the sense of seeking to persuade his goddess to descend to him, but he made no further disguise of himself, and he was not again reproved.

This all led to a long space of infertility, and it was stretched still further by the departure of the Baroness to Paris. There, she wrote Paul, she would be much in society, and if he should find himself in the gay city at any time during her stay, she could introduce him to charming and useful people. But she was very round in her warnings to him.

‘You must not come,’ she told him, ‘unless you are absolutely sure that there is no danger of making me absurd in the eyes of my friends. Dearly as I esteem you, I should never forgive you that. You have been so very outspoken of late, and I have permitted you to write your heart so freely, that I should be guilty of the foolishest affectation if I were silent on this one matter. We cannot control our affections. It is not given to us to love and dislike at discretion, but we can control our language and our conduct, and I must exact your promise ere you meet me. And I will tell you this once, and I will never breathe it any more: Had we met under happier conditions, had we both been free to choose, I know that I could have loved you. I am thus candid with you because I wish you to know how entirely I rely upon your discretion and respect. We may have happiness denied us, and to choose it now would be to suffer miserably, but we have each a personal esteem to guard. Ah, Paul! be kind to me. Do not make it hard to see you again.’