Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

She lingered for a mere instant as if in expectation of some further adieu, but he had none to offer. He saw no more clearly now into the truth than he had done at the beginning of the interview, but he had in a measure hardened himself by the spoken definition of his own attitude, and, partly because he could not as yet retreat from it, he permitted her to go without another word She floated away in the alternate soft splendour of the moon and the deep shadow of the overhanging boughs, and he watched her gloomily until her figure disappeared at the end of the avenue. He stood for a minute or two with a vacant mind, digging his walking-cane into the dry, friable earth at his feet, and scoring the thin, scum-like growth of moss upon it with unmeaning lines. Then he lit a cigar, and, avoiding the crowded vestibule, skirted the dark western wall of the hotel, and so walked homeward. The thing was done now, and, whether it were rightly done or wrongly he cared very little for the moment He stood at one of those pauses of emotion in which the mind is able logically to balance pros and cons without the intervention of any gust of feeling. If Gertrude were really what she professed to be, he had acted with great cruelty. If she were not what she professed to be, he had acted with great wisdom for the first time in his life so far as the woman as protagonist was concerned He looked at the probabilities on both sides with a cynical coolness which would have been impossible to him at any earlier stage in his career. He had met but two men who had known the Baroness de Wyeth well, and they had both looked upon her from pretty much the same standpoint. Ralston’s view was the more genial, but even in his opinion she was a born flirt, a creature who loved to tyre her chariot-wheels with hearts; and in the view of the coarser mind she was a coquette mere and simple—a Queen Rabesqurat, who kept a sackful of the human eyes which had turned to her in adoration. Then, in spite of momentary indifference, his nerves tingled and his blood sparkled at the memory of that rare and fleeting instant at which she had seemed to surrender herself to his embraces, and to make him immortal with a kiss. All the same, he could look on that fine second’s immortality with a cold indifference when the thrill was over. Granted the very lowest scale for passion, could the thing be real? Could he, for example, have stayed the torrent of his own blood in full course? He laughed to think of it, and a line and a half of his favourite poet sang in his brain:

‘And thy passions matched with mine Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.’

On the whole he began to conceive that he had done rightly, and in that half-belief, which drew slowly towards conviction, he went to bed and slept in a stolidity which surprised him later. The fact was that he was less resolved than tired.

Whilst he was at his deepest sleep a thundering summons at his door aroused him. A dream which came between the first prelude to this orchestral drumming and his awaking had advised him of a fainter disturbance, but by the time he was fairly awake the knocking had grown so exigent that it bade fair to raise the house.

‘Come in I’ he cried, and suddenly remembering that he had locked the door before getting into bed, he scrambled out in the darkness and turned back the key. ‘What the devil is the matter here?’ he asked, and the night porter of the hotel handed him a letter.

‘I was told, sir,’ he said, in indifferent French, ‘to deliver this at once, but the messenger is gone, and there is no answer called for.’

There was light enough in the corridor to read by, and Paul recognised Gertrude’s superscription.

‘Thank you,’ he answered. ‘Light the gas for me in my room, and that will do.’

The man obeyed, bowed himself out, and went his way, closing the door behind him.

The letter Paul held in his hand was bulky, and when he had broken the envelope open he found that it held no fewer than seven sheets of Gertrude’s crested paper. They were all covered in a hasty and sprawling hand, and on the first page was a scrawled date and a ‘Sir’ which had been written with so much energy that the upward sweeping course of the pen had bespattered the whole white surface with inky dots of greater or less magnitude.