It was quite true: Mrs. Darkham was at the very portals of death.
Whether those great gates were to be opened for her, or she could
be dragged back from them, was the question that troubled the
physicians who attended her.
Perhaps it troubled her husband more than them. He was sitting
now in his library, in the big chair, with his arms hanging
listlessly over the arms of it, and his head pushed somewhat
forward. He was thinking.
The doctors had come and gone, and both were agreed. It was
almost an impossibility, but not quite; she might, if such and
such a change occurred, live. If not, death lay before her--a
death into which she would enter without revisiting, even in
thought, this world again. Dr. Bland, an elderly man, and one of
great and deserved reputation, gave it as his opinion that if
death did not ensue in a very few hours, hope might be
entertained. Dillwyn had nodded an assent, and had said a few
words too--to the effect that such grave cases _had_ been known
to recover even after hope seemed at an end. He had kept his eyes
carefully averted from the husband of the injured woman whilst
saying this. He had looked at him when he first entered the room,
but he could not trust himself to look again. There was something
terrible in Darkham's face, something hungry, ravenous. An animal
stalking its prey might have looked like that.
And now Darkham sat alone in his library thinking--thinking.
They had given it as their opinion that she would die--those
two who left--that she _would die!_ Would leave him free--
free of her accursed company!
A sort of fierce joy rose up and seized upon him. It caught and
shook him. Free! free! After all these years! Free! She was
dying. Surely, certainly! In a few hours her breath would cease,
and no more would her odious, vulgar words and accents make him
shrink and shudder. She would be gone to the Great Unknown, and
he---
And it would be none of his doing--none! Here the great
passionate joy that thrilled him seemed to culminate. He would be
rid of her, without a single effort of his own. Had he even
dreamed of making an effort?.... He would be quit of her in an
hour or two--a day at latest. Surely the stars in their courses
were fighting for him!
What was it they had said, those two? that if--if--he pressed
his hands, both of them, to his head--that if she lasted until
morning she might recover! Fools! She would not recover. Death
was on her face when last he saw her. Pshaw! he was a better
judge than either of them. Bland--an old man, too old; and
Dillwyn--a young idiot, who followed his leader naturally! But
he--he knew!--he who was in the prime of life, and had studied
death--and life--in all their varied ways.
Yes, he knew! Siva, the Destroyer, lay hovering above the woman
--whom the law called his wife--with outspread wings, awaiting
the moment to descend and clutch his prey. Soon--soon--let it
be!
Oh, to be delivered from her! From this creature who made life a
torture; who had dragged him with a chain all these interminable
years--the years of a marriage that had damned him! When he
could have risen, that chain had nailed him to the earth, had
clipped his soaring wings, had withered every moment of his life.
Truly a young man starting in life should look well to the way he
is going, and should choose a wife meet for him. Marriage is not
for an hour, but for all eternity--sometimes!
This one, however! It will not last so long. This marriage will
end soon, thank---
He broke off abruptly. Who was he thanking?
He rose suddenly and went to the door. He would go upstairs and
see how things were going on. He shook a little as he put his
foot upon the first step of the stairs, and looked back as if he
would willingly change his mind and return to the library. But
he overcame himself, and went steadily upstairs.
So he went, and entered the room, and beckoned to the nurse in
charge that she need not stay. She rose at his bidding, and
slipped through the farther door, glad enough to get away for and
hour or so. Her employer was a doctor and the husband of the sick
woman under her charge, and so she felt safe in leaving her.
Besides which, it was a hopeless case. The nurse had seen many
such in the London hospitals, and though some as bad had pulled
through, still, the percentage lay the other way.
Darkham went up to where the silent figure lay, and ruthlessly
pulled back one of the curtains at the end of the old-fashioned
bedstead.
The light from the dying day streamed in through the window, and
lay on the dull, yellow face that rested on the pillow. It lit it
up and showed it in all its ugliness.
Darkham bent over it--lower--lower still, and looked--and
looked again. Was there a change? _was_ there?
Already the face looked like that of a corpse. The lips were a
little parted, as if the strength to close them was gone, and the
upper teeth showed through them in a ghastly fashion.
And yet it seemed to the husband bending over her that there was
some slight return of strength, of consciousness, in the face
beneath him. It was so slight as to be all but unseen by any,
save one passionately interested either in her recovery or her
death. If, after all---
He bent still lower, and then raised himself with a frown and a
quick sigh. No, he had been mistaken. Death would be her portion
this night. The two men who had just left had said it. Well, they
were right. She would die to-night.
He sat down in a distant arm-chair that still gave him a full
view of the bed, and gazed with uncompromising sternness at the
form thereon.
He fell a-musing again. How death-like she looked! How close to
the last breath! Just a step one way or the other--this way to
life, that way to the grave. A touch, a single movement, and she
would be beyond the line that divides the darkness from the
light.
Great heavens! how, even in the helplessness of her, her face
retains its old expression! The vulgar sneer still dominates it,
the drawn lips are still replete with venom. What a life he has
had with her! A life? Nay, a death.
The night was descending, but out of the misty darkness of the
room a girl's face stood--calm, cold, lovely. There from the
end of the room it looked at him, the eyes shining clear as day
and full of truth.
He turned uneasily, and rose and began to pace the room
stealthily, silently, yet with a sort of cruel spring in every
step. It was as though he could hardly keep himself in; as if
some vitality within him was at work, and urged him forward--
forward--always forward.
Why had the accident been so slow a thing? Death--instantaneous
death--how much more merciful it would have been to her, to
him! A heavier fall, by half an inch or so, and all would have
been at an end. There would have been no more room left for
doubt, for fear, or for joy. He did not mince matters to himself
as he walked there to and fro like a caged lion. He was strong
enough to tell himself the truth.
He stopped himself in his strange hurrying up and down, and once
more approached the bed. He bent over her and lifted her hand
that lay so miserably helpless within his, and then let it fall
again.
It sank upon the coverlet with a little dull thud, scarce
audible, save to him whose ears were strained to hear, whose
senses were so preternaturally on the alert. Why had her head
been so hard, or else those flags so soft! A less thing had
killed a score of fools before this.
Something in her face again arrested him. Surely there was a
change. He placed his ear close to her mouth and listened. When
he uplifted himself presently his face had taken a grayish tinge.
Her breath was certainly stronger and steadier.
He went back to the arm-chair and seated himself slowly in it.
He rose, as though he found it impossible to be still, and laid
his hand upon the mantelpiece. His grasp was so hard that his
knuckles stood out white against the black marble. That devil,
Dillwyn, had said she might recover. No doubt his hope was father
to his opinion. He would do him, Darkham, a bad turn wherever he
could. There had been occasions lately in the neighbourhood when
this young fool thought--strove--to wrestle with him in
professional matters. There was that affair of General
Montgomery's the day before last when Dillwyn had been called in
to the Cedars. The general was an important person in the place,
and though scarcely _en rapport_ with Darkham, had generally
employed him up to this. He thought of Dillwyn, of Agatha's face
as he had seen it at Miss Firs-Robinson's dance--looking into
Dillwyn's--of the preference shown to the latter by General
Montgomery and a few other unimportant people, but people who
always mean the thin end of the wedge in such affairs, and his
clasp upon the arms of the chair grew tighter.
He broke off and glanced again at the bed, this time hurriedly,
shortly. He saw her there, motionless, torpid, her sullen breaths
coming with strange trouble from her breast. When would they
cease! That was the one thought. When they ceased he would be
free.
Presently he crept towards her again, and again bent over her and
listened. He had _not_ been mistaken, then! Yes, the breath was
stronger; he even imagined now that her hand stirred a little. He
stood up. A minute passed in which he hardly breathed.
In that minute he knew what he was going to do.