'Pour connaître il faut savoir ignorer.'--AMIEL.
'Doll,' said Mr. Loftus, the morning after the ball, when all the guests
had departed, except the Pierpoints, 'I do not expect absolute
perfection in my fellow-creatures, but it appeared to me that you fell
rather below your usual near approach to it last night. What do _you_
think?'
Doll answered nothing.
'You see,' went on Mr. Loftus, 'after twelve o'clock, when everyone
unmasked, was the time when I should naturally have introduced Sibyl to
many of our friends and neighbours, as this was her first public
appearance since her marriage, and I could not do so on our arrival. The
fact that she had left the house without me, and--without my
knowledge--was unfortunate.'
It had been more than unfortunate in reality. Mr. Loftus, whose marriage
had made a great sensation in his own county, had been begged on all
sides, as soon as the masks were off, to introduce his wife, and, though
he had not shown any surprise at her non-appearance and Doll's, he had
at last been obliged to retire to the men's cloak-room and wait there
till his carriage came, so as to obscure the fact that she had departed
without him. He had been annoyed at what he took to be Doll's
heedlessness of appearances.
'She felt ill, and wished to go home,' said Doll, reddening, and not
perceiving that he was offering an explanation which did not cover the
ground. He would have been perfectly satisfied with it himself.
'I greatly fear that she _is_ ill,' said Mr. Loftus; 'but she was quite
well when she went to the ball last night. She is very delicate and
excitable. Is it possible that anything occurred to upset her?'
Mr. Loftus fixed his keen steel-gray eyes on Doll. He had seen, as he
saw everything, Doll's momentary jealousy of him the evening before.
For the life of him Doll could not think what to say. It seemed
impossible to tell Mr. Loftus the truth, and he had but little of that
inventive talent which envious persons with a small vocabulary call
lying. That little had been used up the night before. Yet, perhaps, if
he had been aware that Mr. Loftus had seen him with Sibyl in the gallery
in an attitude which allowed of but few interpretations, his slow mind
might have grasped the nettly fact that he must explain.
Mr. Loftus waited.
'My boy,' he said at last, 'I am not only Sibyl's husband'--he saw Doll
wince--'but I am also, I verily believe, her best friend.'
There was no answer.
A slight, almost imperceptible, change came over Mr. Loftus's face. He
paused a moment, and then went on quietly:
'Sibyl is most generous about money--too generous. I am almost afraid of
taking an unfair advantage of it, though she presses me to do so. But I
am pushing on the repairs everywhere; and I am rebuilding Greenfields
and Springlands from the ground. They will get to work again directly
the frost is over. I have the plans here, if you would like to look at
them.'
He drew a roll out of the writing-table drawer, and spread it on the
table. Doll perceived with intense relief that the subject was dropped,
and he knew Mr. Loftus well enough to be certain that it would never
under any circumstances be reopened. But as he looked at the plans, and
Mr. Loftus pointed out the new well and the various advantages of the
designs, it dawned upon Doll's consciousness that he was losing
something which he had always regarded as a secure possession, and which
nothing could replace--Mr. Loftus's confidence.
He had seen it withdrawn in this gentle fashion from other people, who
did not find out for years afterwards that it was irrevocably gone. And
he became aware that he could not bear to lose it.
'Here,' said Mr. Loftus, putting on his silver-rimmed pince-nez, 'is, or
ought to be, the new private road leading out on to the H---- highroad.
I decided to make it, Doll, not only for the convenience of the farm,
but also because I cannot let that row of cottages with any certainty
until there is an easier means of access to them. My father always
intended to make a road there. I only hope,' he said at last, letting
the map fly back into a roll, 'that I shall live to pay for all I am
doing, but I can't pay for unfinished contracts. If I don't, Doll, you
will have to raise a mortgage on the property to pay for the actual
improvements on it. Sibyl has left all her fortune to me, I believe;
but as I am certain to go first, Wilderleigh will not be the gainer.'
And it passed through Mr. Loftus's mind for the first time that perhaps,
after all, Sibyl might still marry Doll some day. How he had once wished
for that marriage he remembered with a sigh.
'It may be. Youth turns to youth,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, as he
went up to his wife's room after Doll had left.
Sibyl was ill. A chill, or a shock, or excitement--who shall say
which?--had just touched the delicate balance of her health and overset
it. It toppled over suddenly without warning, without any of the
preliminary struggles by which a strong constitution or a strong will
staves off the advance of illness. She gave way entirely and at once,
and the night after the night of the ball it would have been difficult
to recognise, in the sunk, colourless face and motionless figure, the
brilliant, lovely young girl in her little diamond crown.
Sibyl's illness did not prove dangerous, but it was long. Lady
Pierpoint, who had nursed her before, sent her daughters home, and took
her place again by the bedside, with the infinite patience which she had
learned in helping her husband down the valley towards the death which
at last became the one goal of all their longing, and which had receded
before them with every toiling step towards it, till they had both wept
together because he could not, could not die. Perhaps it was because her
husband had gone through the slow mill of consumption that Lady
Pierpoint's heart had so much tenderness for Sibyl, for whom only a
year ago she had dreaded the same fate.
Mr. Loftus had the nervous horror of, and repugnance to, every form of
illness which as often accompanies a refined and sympathetic nature as
it does an obtuse and selfish one. And his lonely existence had not
brought him into contact with that inevitable side of domestic life. He
was extraordinarily ignorant about it, and his natural impulse was to
avoid it.
But he stood by his wife's bedside, adjusted his pince-nez, and accepted
the situation. For many days Sibyl would take nothing unless given it by
himself, would rouse herself for no voice but his. Lady Pierpoint
marvelled to see him come into Sibyl's room at night in his long gray
dressing-gown, to administer the food or medicine which the nurse put
into his hand. His patience and his kindness did not flag, but it
seemed to Lady Pierpoint as if at this eleventh hour they should not
have been demanded of him; and it wounded her--why, it would be hard to
say--to watch him do for Sibyl with painstaking care the little things
which in her own youth her young husband had done for her, the little
things which in wedded life are the great things.
Mr. Loftus sometimes made a mistake, and once he forgot that he was
married, and was found pacing in the rose-garden oblivious of everything
except a political crisis--but only once. He was faithful in that which
is least.
Lady Pierpoint felt with a twinge of conscience that when she had
endeavoured to bring about this marriage she had been selfishly
engrossed in Sibyl's welfare. She had not thought enough of his.
And gradually Sibyl recovered, and went about the house again, wan and
feeble, and Lady Pierpoint left Wilderleigh.