Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘Come here, Madge,’ she cried, opening her arms wide, and speaking with a sobbing voice; ‘come here.’

She hugged her sister fiercely, and cried over her.

‘I can understand,’ she said—‘I can understand.’ She repeated the words again and again. ‘It isn’t a pretty thing to have to face; but it’s your trouble, darling, and we must stick together. As for me,’ she added, with a new outbreak of tears, which a laugh made half hysteric, ‘I shall stick like wax.’

Annette’s threat was no brutum fulmen, as the society newspapers soon began to show. Paragraphs appeared here and there indicating that the unprosperous matrimonial affairs of a popular playwright would shortly excite the interest of the public; and one day Paul, driving along the Strand, and finding his cab momentarily arrested by a block in the traffic, was frozen to the marrow by the sight of a newspaper placard which by way of sole contents bore the words, ‘Who is the real Mrs. Armstrong? Divorce proceedings instituted against a famous playwright.’

At first his thought was: ‘Some enemy has done this;’ but he knew the journal and most of the influential members of its staff, and he could not guess that he counted an enemy among them. He had dined with the editor a week before at the same club-table, and had found him not less cordial than he had ever been before.

‘I suppose the man is justified,’ Paul thought when the power of reflection returned to him. ‘The whole story is on its way to the public ears, and neither he nor any other man can stop it It’s his business to be first in the field with it if he can.’

He turned his cab homeward, for he had no heart to face the people he had meant to meet, and on his way, just to gratify the natural instinct of self-torture, he bought a copy of the journal, and read there that Messrs. Berry and Smythe, the well-known firm of solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn, had that day filed a petition for divorce against Mr. Paul Armstrong, the well-known dramatist, and that remarkable revelations were expected.

For these past few years home had seemed Paradise. He had never for any fraction of an instant wavered in his love, and use and wont had helped to set a seal of sanctity upon it With the passage of the months and years, with the growth of many intimate acquaintanceships, and not a few closer and dearer ties about him, home had grown to be as sacred to him as if the union on which it was founded had been blessed by all the priests of all the churches. No purer and more tranquil spirit of affectionate loyalty had breathed in any home in England, and now the balm of his soul was vitriol, and that which had been the bread of life to him was steeped in gall and wormwood. The very honest purpose of his life, his constant and sober pursuit of a worthy fame, recoiled upon him here as if it had been in itself a crime. Not to have striven, to have been content with a dull obscurity of fortune, to have wasted his days in idleness and his nights in foolish revel, would have seemed a happier course to him. And as it was the better part of life which chastised him most cruelly, so it was the best and worthiest affection he had ever known which turned upon him with a cup of poison in its hand and bade him drink it to the dregs. Life and the world are so made that only the most desolate can suffer by themselves. If by any trick of magic he could have borne his chastisement alone, he would have accepted it with something like a scorn of fate.

He had discharged his cab within a hundred yards of home, and had read the stinging paragraph beneath a lamp-post almost at his own doorstep. He entered the house noiselessly, and from Madge’s music-room there floated down to him the sound of Chopin’s great Funeral March. She played this and some other favourites of her own as few musicians play them, for music had been the one delight of her life, and but for the fleeting theatrical ambition, and for Paul, she might have become famous as an executant He stood in the hall to listen as the alternate wail and triumph filled and thrilled the air, and thinking that she was alone, he strolled silently to his dressing-room, and then in smoking-jacket and slippers went to join her. Except for the glow of the fire the room was in darkness, and a voice which came out of the darkness startled him.

‘I had prepared myself to wait for hours,’ said the voice; and Ralston emerged from a shadowed corner with an outstretched hand—Ralston, with his big sagacious head, all unexpectedly silver-white, and moustache and beard of snow, but with the same old hand-grip, and the same half-dictatorial, half-affectionate tone. Madge struck a resolving chord, rose, and with a kiss and a whispered ‘I know the news,’ slipped from the room before he could make an effort to detain her.