Matthew and Miss Lanyon were standing under the front porch talking
over poor Frank Leroux when Ella came up with a very happy face.
“What a colour you 've got, child!” cried Agatha Lanyon.
“It is the fresh country air. I was being choked in town.”
“And the country people,” suggested the elder lady, archly.
“And the fresh country people,” assented Ella.
“My dear,” said Matthew to his sister, “this is the first time we've
been complimented on our adorable rusticity.”
“We don't count,” said Miss Lanyon.
“I never knew you could be so wicked,” cried Ella, taking her by her
shoulders and kissing her. Whereupon she disappeared into the house.
“I do hope it is settled,” said Miss Lanyon, with a little sentimental
sigh.
“What?”
“Sylvester and Ella. Do you mean to say you haven't noticed? I have been
following it all for months.”
Miss Lanyon had reached the age when one lives in the romances of
others.
“I believe you amuse yourself, Agatha, by mixing up your young friends
and sorting them out in pairs, like gloves,” remarked Matthew.
Miss Lanyon denied the charge indignantly. This was quite a different
matter. Anybody with eyes could see how things were tending. It was a
match. She was sure it was a marriage made in heaven.
“I like heaven-made marriages as little as machine-made boots,” said
Matthew. “Both are apt to come undone in unexpected places. But if
these two are thinking of a wholesome earth-made union--well, I shall be
delighted.”
“But hasn't Syl told you anything?”
“Not a word.”
“Couldn't you ask him, Matthew?”
“My dear Agatha,” said he, drawing himself up, “how can you suggest my
committing such an impertinence?”
Miss Lanyon worshipped her brother, but she felt there were many odd
corners of his mind which needed the housewifely besom; just as there
were cobwebs in his office which, on the rare occasions when she entered
it, made her fingers twitch. But being organically acquiescent she
sighed again sentimentally, and brought Matthew his hat and stick.
For Ella, the hours of that day were winged with sunshine. She loved
Sylvester as deeply as one of our untried, pure-minded Northern girls
can love; and with larger wisdom, too, than most. For she had lived a
free life in her aunt's eccentric house in London, and had sifted the
vanities of many men. Passion would only be evoked by the clasp of
encircling arms and would rise to meet claiming lips. As yet in Ella it
lay a pure fire hidden in the depths of a fervent nature. But all the
sweet thrills of a woman's early love were hers,--the pride in a
strong man's wooing, the fluttering fears as to her sufficiency for
his happiness, the resolves, scarce formulated, to raise herself to his
level, the dim dreams of a noble life together, striving for the great
things of the world that are worth the winning. Added thereto was the
delicate charm, essentially feminine, of triumph over the shadows that
had fought with her for possession of his heart.
When she entered her room to dress for dinner that evening, she took
down her frocks and laid them on the bed, and stood a while in deep
thought. She must look her best tonight. She chose a simple cream dress
with chiffon round the bodice and sleeves. Halfway through her toilette
she clasped her white arms over her neck, and looking in the glass held
long converse with her image. It seemed so strange that she, with all
her imperfections of soul and body, should be chosen to guide a man's
destiny. Then lighter fancies prevailed, and she spent anxious moments
in arranging her thick auburn hair. When she came down at last, with a
diamond-hilted dagger thrust through the coils, and a bunch of violets
peeping shyly from the chiffon in her corsage, Matthew paid her an old
man's compliment.
“Do I look nice?” she asked, gratified. “I'm glad; for you once told me
that you liked me in this frock.”
There are times when the sincerest of women can be most blandly
deceitful.
*****
A general practitioner may propose to himself many pleasant occupations
for his spare hours, but his patients dispose of them effectually. On
this particular day, when Sylvester craved leisure to watch over Leroux
and to open his heart finally to Ella, impossible people fell sick at
interminable distances, tiny human beings came with preposterous haste
into this world of trouble, and larger ones gave sudden and alarming
symptoms of leaving it. It was one of those well-known days of sudden
stress when a country doctor eats his meals standing and wearing his
overcoat. Finally, an evening visit from which he reckoned on being free
by nine kept him by an anxious bedside till nearly eleven. But he had
found time to despatch to Ella a few lines scribbled on a leaf of his
pocket-book:--
_Dearest,--I can't come, much as I long to. Will see you in
the morning. S. L._
This was almost the first letter he had ever written to her; certainly
the first love-letter. The new sweetness of it soothed Ella's
disappointment.
At half-past eleven he reached his house, a very weary man. He put on
his slippers, stretched himself, yawned, and thought wistfully of bed.
But first he must go to Leroux, whom he had only seen at odd intervals
during the day. He was pouring himself out some whisky when the
housekeeper entered the dining-room, smoothing her apron.
“I'm glad you 've come, Mr. Sylvester. He's took worse, nurse says. His
temperature has gone up to 104.”
He nodded, swallowed the drink, and went upstairs. The nurse was bending
over the bed in the dimly lit room, adjusting the ice-bag. The sick
man's portmanteau had been unpacked, and the contents were piled upon
a chest of drawers. The clothes he had been wearing were hanging from
a row of pegs against the door. The flap of the jacket turned outward,
revealed in the breast-pocket a letter-case stuffed with papers. With
the air of a man accustomed to prompt action, Sylvester withdrew the
letter-case and locked it up. The nurse confirmed the housekeeper's
statements.
“He has been delirious at times,” she added.
Sylvester bent down and placed the thermometer in position, then waited,
looking gravely down upon his friend. Leroux's face was congested. His
hands moved feebly.
Now and then he moaned. Sylvester examined him closely, inspected the
temperature chart of the last few hours, questioned the nurse as to
their history. A surmise that had been troubling him most of the day
now converted itself into a certainty. Leroux must have been drinking
heavily of late. Thus it was that meningitis had set in from the
concussion. But why should Leroux, once the sanest and cleanest of men,
have taken to drink? The pity of it smote Sylvester. The gay spirit
brutalised, the noble mind o'erthrown. His heart yearned over the
unconscious man. His father had spoken of Leroux being in trouble. He
conjectured pitiful histories of downfall. With a sigh he turned away,
gave final directions, and went to bed.
Three hours later he was waked. The nurse outside the door was calling
him. Accustomed to sudden rising, he leaped up, and thrusting on
dressing-gown and slippers, went back to the sick room. Leroux was
in full tide of violent delirium, his words, wonderfully articulate,
striking almost spectrally upon the utter silence of the house,--“It
is better to die than to live in hell on earth. If you give me up, God
Almighty will give me up.... What is his love to mine?”
The nurse, who had been on duty since ten, was young and nervous.
“He has been like this for an hour. I couldn't stand it any longer.”
“We will go away to the south,” continued Leroux. “No one minds what a
painter does--For God's sake don't give me up--”
“You can go to bed, nurse,” said Sylvester. “I'll sit with him.”
The tired girl, glad to gain some extra and unexpected hours of slumber,
retired gratefully. Sylvester sat by the bedside. It was as well, he
thought, that the man's poor secrets should be blabbed into a friend's
ears instead of a stranger's. He tried not to listen, but to think of
other things,--Ella and his meeting with her on the morrow. But the
clear voice, now rising in ghastly emphasis, now sinking to a murmur
losing itself in guttural incoherence, continued its tale of love and
despair, so that Sylvester could not choose but piece it together in
his mind. It was a common tale of unlawful love: a passionate man,
a yielding woman, a deceived and adoring husband. Sylvester, whose
reserved, chaste nature had caused him to train himself in a narrow
groove of orthodox morality, felt strangely repelled by the confession.
He had always regarded Leroux as the soul of honour. The thief of a
man's wife was lowered in his esteem.
There was a silence. He rested his head on his hand and wearily dozed.
Suddenly came a cry from the bed, a cry of great pain and longing,--
“Constance--Constance!”
The name, fitting in with a waking dream, brought Sylvester with a leap
to his feet, and he looked in foolish bewilderment at Leroux. The latter
murmured incoherently. Had he dreamed the voice crying out the name
so distinctly? He held his breath, trying to seize the half-formed
syllables. “Constance--my love--” had come again. He had not been
dreaming. The voice rose once more, and each word came sharply cut from
the sick man's lips.
“_Sylvester will never know_.”
Then the tremendous horror of the revelation crashed down upon the man,
stunning his brain, paralysing his limbs. The great drops of sweat stood
on his forehead, and his eyes were staring. And Leroux, who had struck
upon a quieter vein of reminiscence, babbled on of the happy days of his
love.
The first thunder-clap had passed. Thought began to return. Sylvester
sank into a chair and stared at the ground. The once clear vision of the
past was distorted into a phantasmagoria of leering shapes. He shivered
as with an ague, rubbed his eyes, and looked sharply at the man on the
bed. Which of the two was delirious? Leroux raved of death and despair.
The involuntary confession was too complete; mistake was impossible. Yet
the other was impossible. Constance guilty of this hideousness? Her
life a lie? The firm anchorage of his soul but shifting sand? He had
worshipped her as more than woman,--as the purest, chastest thing that
God had ever given to man for his guidance. It was a ghastly figment of
Leroux's drink-besotted brain.
He rose, went to the drawer in which he had locked Leroux's letter-case,
and taking it out with shaking hands, deliberately turned the contents
on to the corner of the chest. In spite of the revulsion of faith he had
a sickening certainty of finding there what he hoped he would not find.
There it was, staring him in the face amid a heap of stamps, visiting
cards, pencilled memoranda slips, letters, and law papers: a soiled,
crumpled letter in his dead wife's hand. He took it up, and from it
dropped a lock of fair hair,--her hair. He read it through steadily.
It was a letter of passionate love, leaving no doubt as to guilt; of
despair, almost madness; such a letter of abandonment as a woman writes
but to one man in a lifetime. It bore no date save the day of the
week,--Wednesday. Even in his agony he contrasted the difference between
this woman and the serene, methodical wife who would as soon have left
a letter undated as the household dinner unordered. He threw the letter
and the lock of hair into the fire, and watched the two little flames
in the glowing coals. The paper curled, the hair writhed; then a little
light ash remained.
Methodically he replaced the cards and papers in the letter-case and
locked it up again in the drawer. Then he stood at the foot of the bed
and watched the man who had done him this great wrong, his brain on fire
with bewildering fury. The name of his wife came again from the man's
lips. A red cloud passed before Sylvester's eyes. For a moment he
seemed to lose consciousness of manhood, to become a wild beast. When he
recovered, he found himself glaring into Leroux's eyes with his fingers
at his throat. How near he had been to murder he did not know.
He drew himself up and wiped the sweat from his forehead, shaken to
the depths by the beast impulse. The reaction brought self-control.
He resumed his vigil by the bedside, listening grimly to the words of
Leroux, now less frequent and distinct. Yet though he could master his
actions, he did not combat with the increasing hatred that took the
place of the old affection. At times he considered calmly whether such a
man should be allowed to live. In his weak state one quick blow over the
heart would stop its beating for ever. The man had done more than wrong
him. He had killed his soul, made it an awful thing to live. Yet, as if
in contempt of such imaginings, he rose once or twice and changed the
bandages with a surgeon's delicate handling, and moistened the swollen
lips with ice.
Gradually all the phases of realisation developed themselves in his
mind. Far off memories recurred, touched the flesh. It was their
marriage bed whereon Leroux was lying.
He shuddered from the manifold horror of it, and for the first time
broke into a hoarse cry.
Toward morning the fever lowered and Leroux lay still. Streaks of a
ghostly daylight crept in through the Venetian blinds and barred the
floor. The nurse came to take over her watch. Sylvester gave brief
instructions, and, going to his room, threw himself on his bed and slept
heavily. At the moment of waking he had a sense of nightmare, was all
but congratulating himself on his release; but another instant brought
the full flood of memory. He rose, shaved, dressed himself as usual, and
went down to breakfast. At the bottom of the stairs was a quick patter
of feet and two little arms were thrown around his limbs. It was
Dorothy. He started back, looked at her stupidly. Then roughly
disengaging her, he thrust her aside and hurried into the breakfast
room. A new and sickening doubt convulsed him. Was she his child?
She came in a while later, shyly holding by the maid-servant's skirts,
regarding him with scared reproach. Never had her father been cross or
rough. Ungentleness from him was incomprehensible to her child's mind.
“Run away upstairs,” he said, controlling his voice, then added to the
servant, “Take Miss Dorothy into the nursery.”
The child burst into tears, as the maid led her out. Tender-hearted a
man as he was, for all the world he could not have called her back.