People said Dr Gerard Fane was over-working, that he was not himself.
His manner to patients was sometimes very strange, brusque, impatient,
intolerant. A brutality stole over him, and impressed the world that
went to him for healing very unfavourably. The ills of humanity rendered
him now sarcastic instead of pitiful, a fatal attitude of mind for a
physician to adopt; and he was even known to pronounce on sufferers
sentence of death with a callous indifference that was inhuman as well
as impolitic. As the weeks went by, his reception-room became less
crowded than of old. There were even moments in his day when he had
leisure to sit down and think, to give a rein to his mood of impotent
misery and despair. Sydney had never consented to receive him again.
Woman-like--for she could be extravagantly yet calmly unreasonable--she
had clung to the idea that Fane had hastened, if not actually brought
about, her husband's death by his treatment. She made no accusation. She
simply closed her doors upon him. She had a horror of him, which never
left her.
Again and again Fane called. She was always denied to him. Then he met
her in the street. She cut him. He spoke to her. She passed on without a
reply. At last a dull fury took possession of him. Her treatment of him
was flagrantly unjust. He had wished the sculptor to die, but he had
allowed nature to accomplish her designs unaided, even to some extent
hampered and hindered by his medical skill and care. He loved Sydney
with the violence of a man whose emotions had been sedulously repressed
through youth, vanquished but not killed by ambition, and the need to
work for the realisation of that ambition. The tumults of early manhood,
never given fair play, now raged in his breast, from which they should
have been long since expelled, and played havoc with every creed of
sense, and every built-up theory of wisdom and experience. Fane became
by degrees a monomaniac.
He brooded incessantly over his developed but starved passion, over the
thought that Sydney chose to believe him a murderer. At first, when he
was trying day after day to see her, he clung to his love for her; but
when he found her obdurate, set upon wronging him in her thought, his
passion, verging towards despair, changed, and was coloured with hatred.
By degrees he came to dwell more upon the injury done to him by her
suspicion than upon his love of her, and then it was that a certain
wildness crept into his manner, and alarmed or puzzled those who
consulted him.
That his career was going to the dogs Fane understood, but he did not
care. The vision of Sydney was always before him. He was for ever
plotting and planning to be with her alone--against her will or not, it
was nothing to him. And when he was alone with her, what then?
He would know how to act.
It was just in the dawn of the spring season over London that further
inaction became insupportable to him. One evening, after a day of
listless inactivity spent in waiting for the patients who no longer came
in crowds to his door, he put on his hat and walked from Mayfair to
Kensington, vaguely, yet with intention. He looked calm, even absent;
but he was a desperate man. All fear of what the world thinks or says,
all consideration of outward circumstances and their relation to worldly
happiness, had died within him. He was entirely abstracted and
self-centred.
He reached the broad thoroughfare of Ilbury Road, with its line of
artistic red houses, detached and standing in their gardens. The
darkness was falling as he turned into it and began to walk up and down
opposite the house with the big studio in which he was once a welcome
visitor. There was a light in one of the bedroom windows and in the
hall, and presently, as Fane watched, a brougham drove up to the door.
It waited a few moments before the house, then some one entered the
carriage. The door was banged; the horse moved on. Through the windows
Fane saw a woman's face, pale, against the pane. It was the face of
Sydney. For a moment he thought he would call to the coachman to stop.
Then he restrained himself, and again walked up and down, waiting. She
must return presently. He would speak to her as she was getting out of
the carriage. He would force her to receive him.
Towards nine o'clock his plans were altered by an event which took
place. The house door opened, and the footman came out with a handful of
letters for the post. The pillar-box was very near, and the man
carelessly left the hall door on the jar while he walked down the road.
Fane caught a glimpse of the hall that he knew so well. A step, and he
could be in the house. He hesitated. He looked down the road. The man
had his back turned, and was putting the letters into the box. Fane
slipped into the garden, up the steps, through the door. The hall was
empty. At his right was the passage leading to the studio. He stole down
it, and tried the door. It opened. In the darkness the heavy curtain
blew against his face. In another instant he closed the door softly at
his back, and stood alone in the wide space and the blackness. Here
there was not a glimmer of light. Thick curtains fell over the windows.
No fire burned upon the hearth. There was no sound except when a
carriage occasionally rolled down the road, and even then the wheels
sounded distant.
The silence and darkness had their effect upon Fane. He had done a
desperate thing; but, until he found himself alone in the vacant
studio, he had not fully realised the madness of his conduct, and how it
would appear to the world. After the first moments of solitude had
passed he came to himself a little, and half opened the door with the
intention of stealing out; but he heard steps in the hall, and shrank
back again like a guilty creature. He must wait, at least, until the
household retired to rest.
And, waiting, the old, haunting thoughts came back to assail him once
more. He began to brood over Sydney's cruel treatment of him, over her
vile suspicions. Here, in the atmosphere which he knew so well--for a
faint, strange perfume always lingered about the studio, and gave to it
the subtle sense of life which certain perfumes can impart--his emotions
were gradually quickened to fury. He recalled the days of his intimacy
with the sculptor, of his unrestrained converse with Sydney. He recalled
his care for the invalid, persevered in, despite his passion, to the
end. And then his thought fastened upon the statue, which, strange to
say, he had almost forgotten.
The statue!
It must be there, with him, in the darkness, staring with those white
eyes in which he had seen a soul flicker.
As the recollection of it came to him, he trembled, leaning against the
wall.
He was in one of those states of acute mental tension in which the mind
becomes so easily the prey of the wildest fantasies, and slowly,
laboriously, he began to frame a connection between the lifeless marble
creature and his own dreary trouble.
Because of one moment of folly Sydney treated him as a pariah, as a
criminal. Her gentle nature had been transformed suddenly.
By what subtle influence?
Fane remembered the day of his first visit to Ilbury Road, and his
curious imagination that the statue recognised and hated him.
Had that hatred prompted action? Was there a devil lurking in the white,
cold marble to work his ruin? When Sydney sent him out of her presence
for ever, the watching face had seemed to smile.
Fane set his teeth in the darkness. He was no longer sane. He was
possessed. The tragedy of thought within him invited him to the
execution of another tragedy. He stretched out his hand with the
rehearsing action of one meditating a blow.
His hand fell upon an oak table that stood against the wall, and hit on
something smooth and cold. It was a long Oriental dagger that the dead
sculptor had brought from the East. Fane's fingers closed on it
mechanically. The frigid steel thrilled his hot palm, and a pulse in his
forehead started beating till there was a dull, senseless music in his
ears that irritated him.
He wanted to listen for the return of Sydney's carriage.
His soul was ablaze with defiance. He was alone in the darkness with his
enemy; the cold, deadly, blind, pulseless thing that yet was alive; the
silent thing that had yet whispered malign accusations of him to the
woman he loved; the nerveless thing that poisoned a beautiful mind
against him, that stole the music from his harp of life and let loose
the winds upon his summer.
His fingers closed more tightly, more feverishly upon the slippery
steel.
Sydney actually thought, or strove to think, him a criminal. What if he
should earn the title? A sound as of the sea beating was in his ears,
and flashes of strange light seem to leap to his vision. What would a
man worth the name do to his enemy?
And he and his enemy were shut up alone together.
He drew himself up straight and steadied himself against the wall,
peering through the blackness in the direction of the statue.
And, as he did so, there seemed to steal into the atmosphere the breath
of another living presence. He could fancy he heard the pulse of another
heart beating near to his. The sensation increased upon him powerfully
until suspicion grew into conviction.
His intention had subtly communicated itself to the thing he could not
see.
He knew it was on guard.
There was no actual sound, no movement, but the atmosphere became
charged by degrees with a deadly, numbing cold, like the breath of frost
in the air. A chill ran through Fane's blood. A sluggish terror began to
steal over him, folding him for the moment in a strange inertia of mind
and of body. A creeping paralysis crawled upon his senses, like the
paralysis of nightmare that envelops the dreamer. He opened his lips to
speak, but they chattered soundlessly. Mechanically his hand clutched
the thin, sharp steel of the dagger.
His enemy--then Sydney.
He would not be a coward. He struggled against the horror that was upon
him.
And still the cold increased, and the personality of Fane's invisible
companion seemed to develop in power. There was a sort of silent
violence in the hidden room, as if a noiseless combat were taking place.
Waves of darkness were stirred into motion; and Fane, as a man is drawn
by the retreating tides of the sea out and away, was drawn from the wall
where he had been crouching.
He stole along the floor, the dagger held in his right hand, his heart
barely beating, his lips white--nearer, nearer to his enemy.
He counted each step, until he was enfolded in the inmost circle of that
deadly frost emanating from the blackness before him.
Then, with a hoarse cry, he lifted his arm and sprang forward and
upward, dashing the dagger down as one plunging it through a human
heart.
The cry died suddenly into silence.
There was the sound of a heavy fall.
It reached the ears of the servants below stairs.
The footman took a light, and, with a scared face, went hesitatingly to
the studio door, paused outside and listened while the female servants
huddled in the passage.
The heavy silence succeeding the strange sound appalled them, but at
length the man thrust the door open and peered in.
The light from the candle flickered merrily upon Fane's bowed figure,
huddled face downwards upon the floor.
His neck was broken.
The statue, that was the dead sculptor's last earthly achievement, stood
as if watching over him. But it was no longer perfect and complete.
Some splinters of marble had been struck from the left breast, and among
them, on the smooth parquet, lay a bent Oriental dagger.