A Devotee Part 11

Sh.e.l.lEY.

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 pa.s.sers-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 G.o.d.

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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sions, 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.

'G.o.d 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 b.u.t.terfly 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-fas.h.i.+oned window wide upon its hinges. The b.u.t.terfly flew away into the spring morning.

'My other b.u.t.terfly,' he said--'my pretty b.u.t.terfly, 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 s.h.i.+rk 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.'

CHAPTER XIV.

'As the water is dried upon sands, so a life flieth back to the dust.'--SIR ALFRED LYALL.

How Sibyl spent the morning that followed she never knew. She dared not go out of doors. The world of spring, with the new breath of life in it, mocked her. The song of the birds hurt her. She felt as if she should scream outright if she saw the may-blossom against the sky. She wandered aimlessly about the house, and at last crept back to her own room and lay down on her bed, and turned her face to the wall.

The day went on. Her maid brought her soup, and drew down the blinds, and was pettishly dismissed.

The afternoon came. They were mowing the gra.s.s on the terrace on the south front. The faint scent of newly-cut gra.s.s came in through the open window, and seemed, through the senses, to reach some acute nerve of the brain. She moaned, and buried her face in the pillows. Presently the mowing ceased, and everything became very silent. A bluebottle fly, pressed for time, rushed in, made the circuit of the room, and rushed out again.

Far away in the other wing, on the ground-floor, she heard the library door open. She knew Mr. Loftus's slow, even step. It crossed the hall; it entered the orangery; it came out through the orangery door, down the stone steps to the terrace below her window. She could hear his step on the gravel outside in the crisp air. Crack gave a short bark in recognition of the spring, and satisfaction that the long morning of arranging papers and the afternoon of letter-writing were at last over.

The steps dwindled and died away into the sunny silence. It seemed to Sibyl's overwrought mind that he was walking slowly out of her life, and that unless she made haste to follow him she would lose him altogether.