David Christie Murray

“ Was it, in truth, the father’s voice, the authentic voice of William Armstrong, Paul’s physical begetter, which preached this gospel through the lonely days and waking nights? The Exile could not tell, yet he believed, and the faith grew within him, that God’s inexorable justice and infinite mercy are one and the same, that the human spirit which has not sinned knows no virtue, that the flower of the soul’s hope strikes its root in the soil of the soul’s despair. ”

“ A more thoroughpaced small coquette than La Femme Incomprise never breathed, yet she must needs be a holy angel for the time being to Paul Armstrong, because she had fine eyes and teeth, and could talk with some eloquence about heart-sorrows she had never known. And he, he who lay there with his career like a stream which is poisoned at its source, might, had he guided his own destinies with anything but the judgment of a fool, have found himself just such a companion as he had but now parted from, and have known in her a life-long comrade, an undying solace and inspiration. ”

“ Paul had broken loose, and knew not what to look for, and cared little for the hour. For his head was full of verses, and his heart was full of the summer day, and for the first time in his life he had gone to Nature, and forgotten his thrice-thirty-times copied emotions, and had dared to speak in his own voice. The lines he had made that day were unutterably sacred and sweet to him. The dreaming Solitary, staring down the gorge, heard the boy’s awestruck whisper, and, forgetting all the rest of the verses, remembered this one only:
‘Why, all is happy! ”

“ Never in his life had Paul felt so wholly tender as he did then towards Annette. He had begun to read so many new meanings into her of late. She seemed no longer the molluscous little creature he had once thought her, but a woman, capable of much suffering, of some determination, of real affection. He was leaving her at the very time at which she most needed his guardianship and care, and at the hour, too, when she seemed first really to confide in him and cling to him. His eyes were moist when he held her in a last embrace, and ran into the street in answer to Darco’s final call. ”

“ But somehow he faded away in a sort of mist, and Paul’s last remembrance of him was that he was laughingly pulling at his arm and advising him to go home. He seemed to be blotted out suddenly in that very act.
The Exile flashed back from his memories to himself, and awoke with a faint, gasping cry, for his mind had led him to the hour of the lost innocence. There are thousands on thousands of men who have lived purer lives than he who would yet deride the shaft which struck him, and laugh to think of its poignant power to wound. ”

“ It is a year of anonymity for one thing, for his name is worse than worthless to him, and he hides it. There is a book yet extant, written in a black gall which is made fluent to the pen by a distillation of wormwood, and this is Paul Armstrong’s latest expression of his views of the world, which, if the book were true, one would take as a vast and daily injustice, in which there is no saving grace of any sort whatever. Ralston alone knew in what fiery haste this bitter volume was gathered out of the desert of the writer’s soul. ”

“ Do you think I care for myself?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Ralston. ‘If you hadn’t cared for yourself you would never have brought a child like Madge into such an evil as this.’
‘That’s true enough,’ said Paul; ‘that’s truth itself.’
He laid his elbows on the table, and leaned his head disconsolately upon his hands. His companion shook him by the shoulder in the rough amity which men use with one another.
‘Look here, Armstrong: willy-nilly, you’re the champion of a great cause, and you have the sweetest woman in the world to fight for. ”

“ There is nothing so exhilarating as the first sight of a foreign city, and Paul wandered on and on, past the Palace of Justice and over the bridge, and, turning to the left, made along the Rue de Rivoli, passed the far-stretching façade of the Louvre, and so went on till he reached the Place de la Concorde. There, staring into the basin of one of the fountains, as if he had been waiting for Paul to come to him, was Darco, fur-coated and silk-hatted as of yore, and looking neither older nor younger by a day than when they had parted. ”

“ Paul sat trembling on the bed-edge. The imminent interview disturbed him strangely, and set all manner of conflicting tides flowing in heart and brain. He was part coward and part hero; ready to face everything and to run away from everything. His pity for Annette was pity, and no more; his sympathy for Paul Armstrong amounted to a passion. He strove to bring himself to what he conceived to be a more fitting mood, but whilst he struggled with himself the inner door of the room in which he sat was suddenly torn open, and Annette stood before him. ”

“ No, sir, but in that profoundly philosophic observation of life your works declare you will have observed the state in which a man becomes drunk-sober.
He brims over after that stage. That I allow. He brims over, sir—he brims over, sir. If it is of any humorous value to you to make observations of the present case, I am brimming over, sir.’
The clean-cut, travel-hardened, sun-stained man was slipping from his original place in Paul’s mind, like a statue built in clay too soft to support its own weight. ”

“ The headlong, stammering, vivid man had made a mistake—the fat, unwieldy, diamond-hearted creature, all crusted with slag and scoria. Paul could have cried to know that Darco dreamed him ungrateful.
‘Who knows him as I do?’ he thought. ‘People laugh at his boasting, and run away from his blundering thunder; but the man has the heart of an angel.’
He thought of all those underground benefactions in which he himself had acted as almoner—the bank-notes to poverty, the Sandeman’s port and the evaporated turtle-soup to sickness. And the pity of it that such a man should so misjudge his Claudia! ”

“ It was in him to be constant if only truth were met with truth. He could have been faithful to Claudia. He could have been faithful to Annette. He could have been faithful to Gertrude. And though no man whose sense of the humour of life does not leave him wholly blind to the comedy of his own existence could fail to see the bitter jest that lay here against himself, he urged the point seriously. He had been true in each case until faith had grown into blind folly, and bare respect for an old idol had become impossible. ”

“ There is a disembodied skylark voice somewhere high up in the mare’s-tail clouds which veil the earth from too much heat and brightness; and the young heart is unhardened and unspotted from the world.
And oh! oho! the elysium of the summer mornings, when Dick and Paul, and the cousins, male and female, rose at four and strayed with their Devonian angel through lanes and fields as far as Beacon Hargate, gathering wild flowers and calling at the farm for milk. There are no more such flowers, there is no more such air, no more such merry sunshine ”

“ But in the full tide of this retired joy Paul hears a step at the bottom of the lumber-room stairs, and knows it for his mother’s. She is coming here, and there is no hiding-place for anything bigger than a rat. The motherly temper is sharp, and the motherly hand is heavy. He has been called and has not answered—a crime deserving punishment, and sure to earn it. The step grows nearer and trouble more assured. Suddenly a ray of hope darts through him, and he feigns sleep. His heart labours, but he keeps his breath regular by a great effort. Mother gazes for a minute, and goes away on tiptoe. ”

“ If she wouldn’t flirt, she’d be too good for this world.’
‘Flirt!’ cried Paul, in so much horror that Ralston laughed aloud.
‘I have taken advantage of my demi-semi-clerical dignity,’ he said, ‘to preach many sermons to her on that particular. Mind you, she’s a most estimable woman; and, as you said just now, brilliant and amiable and charming. But she flirts—she flirts with me; and, if I were not entrenched behind the fortress of threescore years, she’d enslave me as she enslaves everybody else. There’s an Isolation of the Soul which is very effective at short range. ”

“ A shrug, a smile, a word, a silence, the lift of an eyebrow—things which had no apparent meaning a dozen years ago, which were either unnoticed or forgotten in an instant—are alive with monitions now. Not to have seen! Not to have guessed ‘It looks incredible. A mule might have begun to read the riddle.
Paul read nothing.
And now, looking back from this smoky eyrie through all the intervening years, it seems as if the tragedy of a life might have been averted, as if a little weight, a little prescience, a little care, might have made the sum of life work out to a far other total. ”

“ Who are the best and who the worst of women? Did any man ever venture to impugn the fair fame of Madame la Baronne de Wyeth? Yet, had the devil a better ally anywhere than this delicate little purring white-breasted epicure in the varying flavours of the ruined soul? Oh, the devil is, of course, a symbol! Let the phrase pass.
But the Paul Armstrong of ten years later, perched in his fog-bound eyrie, staring along the unseen gorge? He tells himself that had she been what he believed her, he might have been elsewhere than where he finds himself. ”

“ When a man is in love with a woman, he cannot be expected to judge her actions or her meaning wisely, and the Baroness’s platonics, with the little flashes of earthly fire in amongst them here and there, had always seemed to him to indicate a nature throbbing with fervour which was held in restraint only by a delicacy of equal charm and beauty, and a lofty moral sense. But he was easily open to the influence of other men’s opinions, and he had never been able to think of Ralston’s smile without an inward twinge which had sometimes amounted to an actual tenor. ”

“ Why not for all? Why not one unending cycle of experience? Why not the passing of one growing intelligence through every form of life? The Eastern sages dreamed so.
He would sit there at his tent door buried deep in his thoughts, and often, without his being able to trace the faintest sign of any action in his own mental mechanism, his father’s voice would wake him with an interjection of, ‘Exactly!’ or ‘That’s the point, Paul!’ There was no sound, and yet the voice was there, and the old familiar Ayrshire accent seemed to mark it as strongly as it had done in his father’s lifetime. ”

“ There were trees for his boots; there was a dandy dressing-case; there were many things of the mere existence and use of which he had not known two years ago. They were all mementoes of Darco’s generosity. Surely no man had ever found so open-handed an employer. But, for all these reflections, Paul could not surrender Claudia.
He heard the clatter of the breakfast apparatus, and smelt the odours of coffee and the savoury meats the soul of which Darco loved; but he dared not face the man to whom he felt he had behaved so badly. ”