Dr Fane looked again at the statue, and said slowly, "You have wrought
it so finely that in this light my nerves tell me it is alive."
Mrs Brune looked triumphant.
"All the world would feel so if they could see it," she said; "but it is
not to be exhibited. That is our fancy--his and mine. And now I will
leave you together for a few minutes. Heal him of his ills, Dr Fane,
won't you?"
She vanished through the door at the end of the studio. The two men
stood together by the hearth.
"She does not know?" Fane asked.
The other leaned his head upon his hand, which was pressed against the
oak mantelpiece.
"I am too cowardly to tell her," he said in a choked voice. "You must."
"And when?"
"To-day."
There was a silence. Then, in his gravest professional manner, Fane gave
some directions, and wrote others down, while the sculptor looked into
the dancing fire. When Fane had finished:--
"Shall I tell her now?" he asked gently.
Brune nodded without speaking. His face looked drawn and contorted as he
moved towards the door. His emotion almost strangled him, and the effort
to remain calm put a strain upon him that was terrible.
Gerard Fane was left alone for a moment--alone with the statue whose
personality, it seemed to him, pervaded the great studio. In its
attitude there was a meaning, in its ghost-like face and blind eyes a
resolution of intention, that took possession of his soul. He told
himself that it was lifeless, inanimate, pulseless, bloodless marble;
that it contained no heart to beat with love or hate, no soul to burn
with impulse or with agony; that its feet could never walk, its hands
never seize or slay, its lips never utter sounds of joy or menace. Then
he looked at it again, and he shuddered.
"I am over-working," he said to himself; "my nerves are beginning to
play me tricks. I must be careful."
And he forcibly turned his thoughts from the marble that could never
feel to the man and woman so tragically circumstanced, and to his
relation towards them.
A doctor is so swiftly plunged into intimacy with strangers. To the
sculptor it was as if Fane held the keys of the gates of life and death
for him; as if, during that quarter of an hour in the consulting-room,
the doctor had decided, almost of his own volition, that death should
cut short a life of work and of love. And even to Fane himself it seemed
as if his fiat had precipitated, even brought about, a tragedy that
appealed to his imagination with peculiar force. His position towards
this curiously interesting girl was strange. He had seen her for a
quarter of an hour only, and now it was his mission to cause her the
most weary pain that she might, perhaps, ever know. The opening of the
studio door startled him, and his heart, that usually beat so calmly,
throbbed almost with violence as Mrs Brune came up to him.
"What is it?" she asked, facing him, and looking him full in the eyes
with a violence of interrogation that was positively startling. "What is
it you have to tell me? Reginald says you have ordered him to keep
quiet--that you wish me to help you in--in something. Is he ill? May he
not finish his commissions?"
"He is ill," said Gerard Fane, with a straightforward frankness that
surprised himself.
She kept her eyes on his face.
"Very ill?"
"Sit down," the doctor said, taking her hands and gently putting her
into a chair.
With the rapidity of intellect peculiar to women, she heard in those
two words the whole truth. Her head drooped forward. She put out her
hands as if to implore Fane's silence.
"Don't speak," she murmured. "Don't say it; I know."
He looked away. His eyes rested on the statue that made a silent third
in their sad conference. How its attitude suggested that of a stealthy
listener, bending to hear the more distinctly! Its expressionless eyes
met his, and was there not a light in them? He knew there was not, yet
he caught himself saying mentally:--
"What does he think of this?" and wondering about the workings of a soul
that did not, could not, exist.