'O World, O Life, O Time.
O these last steps on which I climb.'
SHELLEY.
For those who do not sleep, life has two sides--the side of night as
well as day--and the heaviest hour of the day or night is the hour
before the dawn, when the night-lamp totters and dies, and the ashen
light of another day falls like despair on the familiar articles of
furniture, the chairs, the table, the wardrobe, which have been up all
night like ourselves, taking the imprint of our exhaustion through the
interminable hours, and which look older and more haggard than ever in
the changed light which brings nor change nor rest.
Those who sleep at night, for whom each day is not divided by a gulf of
pain, who look upon the darkness as a time of rest, and the morning as a
time of waking, know one side of life, perhaps, as the passers-by in the
street know one side of the hospital as they skirt it--the outside wall.
Mr. Loftus slept ill, and the night after Sibyl's return he woke early.
The gray light was just showing above the white blinds as he had seen it
so many, many times. Would the morning ever come, he wondered, when he
should no longer open his eyes upon the dawn, when 'these last steps'
should be climbed, and effort would cease, and weariness might lie down
and cease also?
The premonitory tremor, the shudder of coming illness, laid its hand
upon him, and with it came that physical recoil of the flesh from
solitude before which the strongest will goes down.
Involuntarily he got up and went to Sibyl's room. He opened the door
noiselessly and looked in.
The room felt deserted. He went up to the bed; it was empty. A great
fear fell upon him. Had she left him? Poor, poor child! had she left
him, as that other wife had left him in the half-forgotten past, buried
beneath so many years? Can any man whose wife has forsaken him ever
quite forget that he has once been deserted, that the road which leads
away from him has known a woman's footsteps, and another may walk in it?
He stood still and listened. The spirit had over-mastered the flesh.
All suffering had vanished.
From the next room, Sibyl's sitting-room, which opened out of her
bedroom, a faint sound came. He noiselessly crossed, and looked through
the half-open door, and thanked God.
Sibyl was lying on her face on the polished floor in her night-gown,
moaning and sobbing, a white blot upon the dark boards.
He had seen her lie like that once before, among the bracken in the
park, in the entire abandonment of young despair. The vague suspicion of
many weeks dropped its disguise, and stood revealed, an awful figure
between them, between the old man in his gray hair and the young, young
wife.
He withdrew stealthily, regained his own room, and sat down in the
armchair.
That passion of tears could flow from one source only. He knew Sibyl
well enough to know that she had no tears, no strong emotion, for
anything except that which affected her own personal happiness. Her
slight nature could not reach to impersonal love, any more than it could
reach to righteous anger. All this apparent failure of health and
listlessness had a mental cause, as he had always feared, as he now knew
for certain. She was unhappy.
'She has ceased to love me,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, 'and she is in
despair. Doll loves her, and she has found it out. Those tears are for
Doll.'
There was a long pause of thought.
He started at the remembrance that she was probably still lying on the
floor in her thin night-gown.
He got up, and tapped distinctly at the door of her bedroom. At first
there was no reply, but after the second time there was a slight hurried
movement and a faint 'Come in.' He went in. She had crept back into bed,
as he had hoped she would at the sound of his tap.
'May I have your salts?' he said, taking them from the dressing-table.
'I have waked with a headache.'
'Can I do anything for it?' she asked, but without moving, her miserable
eyes following his thin, gaunt figure in its gray dressing-gown.
'Nothing, my dear, except forgive me for disturbing you.'
'I was not asleep,' said Sibyl, yielding to the impulse, irresistible to
some women, to approach the subject which they are trying to conceal.
He took the salts, and went back to his own room, closing the door
carefully. But he did not use them. He sighed heavily as he sat down
again in the old armchair in which he had so often watched the light
grow behind the Welsh hills.
There was another pause of thought, and he remembered again Doll's
confession of the day before.
'Poor children!' he said--'poor children!'
And he remembered his own youth and its devastating passions, and the
woman whom he had loved in middle life, and how nearly once--how
nearly---- And he and she had been stronger than Doll and Sibyl.
'God forgive me!' he said; 'I meant well.'
There was another pause.
'I knew her love could not last,' his mind went on. 'It was too
extravagant, and it had no foundation. But I thought it would last my
time, and it has not. I have outlived it; I am in the way.'
Mr. Loftus had never willingly been in the way of anyone before. His
tact had so far saved him. But a kind intention had betrayed him at
last.
'I am in the way,' he repeated, 'and I am fond of them both, and I think
they are both fond of me. But they will come to hate me.'
The light was strong and white now, and a butterfly on the window-sill,
that had mistaken spring for summer, waked, and began to beat its wings
against the pane.
He rose wearily, and opened the old-fashioned window wide upon its
hinges. The butterfly flew away into the spring morning.
'My other butterfly,' he said--'my pretty butterfly, who mistook the
spring for summer, breaking your heart against the prison windows of my
worn-out life--I will release you, too!'
He took up the little silver flask that always stood on his
dressing-table at night and lived in his pocket by day, and which
contained the only remedy which a great doctor could find for his
attacks of the heart, by means of which he had been till now kept in
life.
'I have a right to do it,' he said. 'I can only help them by going away.
And if I am in the wrong, upon my head be it.'
He checked himself in the act of emptying the contents of the flask
into the dead fire.
'A right?' he said. 'What right have I to shirk the consequences of my
own actions? what right to be a coward? No; I will not go away until I
receive permission to do so. I will stay while it is required of me.'
He sighed heavily, and replaced the flask upon the dressing-table.
'Patience,' he said. 'I thought I had seen the last of you. I am tired
of you. But, nevertheless, I must put up with you a little longer.'