A Devotee Part 10

'Oh! did Doll tell you?' she gasped, turning crimson.

'My dear, he told me nothing,' said Mr. Loftus gently, moving slightly away from her, and looking at her with grave attention. He greatly feared that unhappiness was before her in some form or other. He waited in the hope that she would speak to him of her own accord. But she only began to cry again. She was still weak. Was it possible that she was afraid of him? What could be troubling her that she, who did not know what reticence meant, could fear to tell him, which yet Doll knew? Doll was in love with her. Had he lost his head on the night of the ball?

Had she discovered that she and Doll were young?

'Crack,' said Mr. Loftus, 'I have a very neglectful wife. I come to ask for something for my headache, and she pays no attention to me at all.'

In earlier days Sibyl would have been on the alert in a moment if Mr.

Loftus's sacred head confessed an ache. Now she moved slowly to the writing-table and produced certain innocuous remedies which he had brought to her and asked her to apply for him after that terrible time when he had had an attack of the heart and had repulsed her.

Presently the headache was better, and Mr. Loftus went back to the library and lit his pipe, which was remarkable, because he was as a rule unable to smoke after a headache.

He sat motionless a long time, his eyes fixed.

'I hope,' he said at last, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, 'that I shall not live to become Sibyl's natural enemy, for I think I am about the only real friend she has in the world.'

And the small seed that would have quickened in another man's heart into a deep-rooted jealousy remained upon the surface of his mind as a misgiving, which took the form of anxiety for her.

CHAPTER XII.

'Oui, sans doute, tout meurt; ce monde est un grand reve, Et le peu de bonheur qui nous vient en chemin, Nous n'avons pas plus tot ce roseau dans la main, Que le vent nous l'enleve.'

ALFRED DE MUSSET.

Sibyl continued pale and listless, and presently Mr. Loftus found fault with her gowns. They were not new enough. The colours of her tea-gowns did not suit her. He suggested that she should go to London to Lady Pierpoint's house for a few days to see her dressmaker, and added, as an afterthought, that he should like her to consult the specialist to whom she had gone on former occasions, and whose name he had reason to remember.

Sibyl received the suggestion of this visit in silence. She did not oppose herself to it, but left the room to shed a torrent of angry tears in private. The truth, which seldom visited her feeble judgment, did not tell her that Mr. Loftus was anxious about her health. Hysteria took up the tale instead, and officiously informed her that he was tired of her.

He wanted to get rid of her. Men were always like that after they had been married a little time. What was a woman's love and devotion to them when the first novelty had worn off? She would go. She would certainly go; and when she was gone she would write to him, telling him that she saw only too plainly that his love for her was dead, and that she had decided never to return, and at the same time making over to him her entire fortune, reserving only for herself a pittance, on which she would live in seclusion in a cottage in some remote locality.

She was somewhat consoled as she thought over the dignified, the harrowing letter which she would compose in London. Parts of it, as she repeated them to herself, moved her to tears. A new sullenness was added to the previous listlessness of her demeanour. She parted from Mr.

Loftus with studied indifference.

Mr. Loftus missed her, not altogether unpleasantly, when she left him.

It was the first time that she had been a day away from him since their marriage. Life was certainly very tranquil without her. He wrote her a charming little letter every day of the three days she was away.

Doll was with him on business. Now that Sibyl was absent, something of the old affection and confidence returned between them, which shrank away in her presence; but not quite all. At times, as they were talking, the younger man longed to break down the slight, almost imperceptible barrier that his stupid untimely silence had raised. But he could not do it. He could not take the plunge. Mr. Loftus, however, who would not have done such a thing for worlds, unwittingly gave him a push.

'The spring coppice wants thinning,' he said to Doll the third morning.

'We will go up and mark the trees this afternoon.'

'I am going away to-day,' said Doll sullenly.

'Stay another day,' said Mr. Loftus. 'Mrs. Gresley tells me that the sight of her happy home, and Mr. Gresley, and the church-tower as viewed from the spare bedroom of the Vicarage, have proved a turning-point in the lives of many wild young men. Stay another day, Doll, and I will emulate Mrs. Gresley. It will do you good.'

'Uncle George,' stammered the young man with sudden anger, 'will you never, never understand? Have you forgotten that it is not a year ago since I told you--in this very room--and you said you would help me. I can't meet Sibyl; and--and she is coming back to-day. I tried in the winter, and--it was a failure.'

Mr. Loftus had momentarily forgotten Sibyl, as he had done once before when she was ill.

'I beg your pardon, Doll,' he said, his pale face reddening. 'I ought to have remembered.'

There was a constrained silence.

'It need not come between us,' said Mr. Loftus at last. 'You must not let it do that.'

'I can't help it,' said Doll. 'It does. It must.'

'Sibyl's happiness,' said Mr. Loftus sadly, 'seems to be a costly article. A great deal has been spent upon it, apparently without making it secure. If we have any real regard for her, we must manage to save that between us, Doll, whatever else goes by the board.'

'What do you take me for?' said Doll fiercely.

'A good man,' said Mr. Loftus, 'and the person I care for most in the world.'

Sibyl's letter to Mr. Loftus was never written. At least it was written, as, indeed, were several, and read over and retouched at night in her own room; but even the best of the a.s.sortment remained unposted. Sibyl brought back her wan face and limp figure to Wilderleigh a few hours after Doll had left it, and heard with bitterness that he had been staying there. She had pictured to herself Mr. Loftus alone, missing her at every moment of the day, realizing the withdrawal of the suns.h.i.+ne of her presence. This was a 'high jump,' on the bar of which, it must be owned, even her practised imagination caught its toe. And now she found that Doll had been with him all the time--Doll, whom he cared for more than for his wife. He had not missed her, after all. Probably he and Doll had been discussing her. She had been jealous of Doll ever since she had seen Mr. Loftus take his arm during her first visit to Wilderleigh before she was married.

Her jealousy revived now. For the remainder of the day Sibyl met Mr.

Loftus with averted eyes and monosyllabic answers, rehearsing in her mind parting scenes with him which were to prove more poignantly distressing to him than the best of the letters, and in which he was to appeal in vain (imagination caught its toe once more) against her irrevocable determination to leave for ever one who had married her for other motives than love.

She could see herself in evening dress, pale as the jasmine flower in her breast, mournful but unflinching, withdrawing her hand, and saying, in reply to the moving representation which he would of course make of his loneliness:

'You have Doll!'

She decided that she would not say more than that. No reproach should pa.s.s her lips.

'You have Doll!'

What words for a young wife to be forced to use to her husband! Her hands clenched in an agony of self-pity. What a cruel situation was hers!

So Sibyl walked in her waking dream, and her husband watched her.

'Is it the body that is ill, or is it the mind?' he asked himself.

Later in the day the doctor's letter to himself--Mr. Loftus had written to him asking for a frank statement of Sibyl's condition--confirmed his worst fears for her.

'Mrs. Loftus's health is endangered, not by her recent illness, of which no trace appears, but by some anxiety. She does not deny that she is suffering from great depression. Unless that anxiety, whatever it may be, can be removed, her morbid condition, if prolonged, will give rise to grave apprehension as to her future.'

Mr. Loftus had heard something very like this before--about nine months ago. He had removed a mountain in order to remove with it the first cause of her unhappiness, and now unhappiness had reappeared. No one had guessed--no one had been allowed to guess--what an effort his marriage had been to him. And it had availed nothing. He dropped the letter into the fire, and, as he did so, exhaustion and an intense weariness of life laid hold upon him. He knew well the touch of those stern hands, but this evening, as he sat alone in the library, it seemed to him as if he had never endured their full pressure until now.

CHAPTER XIII.

'O World, O Life, O Time.

O these last steps on which I climb.'