Part 37 (1/2)

”He only knew this for certain yesterday?”

”Only yesterday.”

”Ah! but he must have suspected it long ago,”--she pointed towards the statue--”when he began that.”

”I don't understand,” Fane said. ”What can that marble have to do with his health or illness?”

”When we first began to love each other,” she said, ”he began to work on that. It was to be his marriage gift to me, my guardian angel. He told me he would put all his soul into it, and that sometimes he fancied, if he died before me, his soul would really enter into that statue and watch over and guard me. 'A Silent Guardian' he has always called it.

He must have known.”

”I do not think so,” Fane said. ”It was impossible he should.”

The girl stood up. The tears were running over her face now. She turned towards the statue.

”And he will be cold--cold like that!” she cried in a heart-breaking voice. ”His eyes will be blind and his hands nerveless, and his voice silent.”

She suddenly swayed and fainted into Fane's arms. He held her a moment; and when he laid her down, a reluctance to let the slim form, lifeless though it was, slip out of his grasp, came upon him. He remembered the previous day, the doomed man going down the street--his thought as he looked from the window of his consulting-room, ”I am sorry that man is going to die.”

Now, as he leant over the white girl, he whispered, forming the very words with his lips, ”I am not sorry.”

And the statue seemed to bend and to listen.

III

Six weeks pa.s.sed away. Winter was deepening. Through the gloom and fog that shrouded London, Christmas approached, wrapped in seasonable snow.

The dying man had finished his work, and a strange peace stole over him. Now, when he suffered, when his body s.h.i.+vered and tried to shrink away, as if it felt the cold hands of death laid upon it, he looked at the completed statue, and found he could still feel joy. There had always been in his highly-strung, sensitive nature an element, so fantastic that he had ever striven to conceal it, of romance; and in his mind, affected by constant pain, by many sleepless nights, grew the curious idea that his life, as it ebbed away from him, entered into his creation. As he became feeble, he imagined that the man he had formed towered above him in more G.o.d-like strength, that light flowed into the sightless eyes, that the marble muscles were tense with vigour, that a soul was born in the thing which had been soulless. The theory, held by so many, of re-incarnation upon earth, took root in his mind, and he came to believe that, at the moment of death, he would pa.s.s into his work and live again, unconscious, it might be, of his former existence.

He loved the statue as one might love a breathing man; but he seldom spoke of his fancies, even to Sydney.

Only, he sometimes said to her, pointing to his work:--

”You will never be alone, unprotected, while he is there.”

And she tried to smile through the tears she could not always keep back.

Gerard Fane was often with them. He sunk the specialist in the friend, and not a day pa.s.sed without a visit from him to the great studio, in which the sculptor and his wife almost lived.

He was unwearied in his attendance upon the sick man, unwavering in his attempts to soothe his sufferings. But, in reality, and almost against his will, the doctor numbered each breath his patient drew, noted with a furious eagerness each sign of failing vitality, bent his ear to catch every softest note in the prolonged _diminuendo_ of this human symphony.

When Fane saw Mrs Brune leaning over her husband, touching the damp brow with her cool, soft fingers, or the dry, parched lips with her soft, rosy lips, he turned away in a sick fury, and said to himself:--

”He is dying, he is dying. It will soon be over.”

For with a desperate love had entered into him a desperate jealousy, and even while he ministered to Brune he hated him.

And the statue, with blind eyes, observed the drama enacted by those three people, the two men and the woman, till the curtain fell and one of the actors made his final exit.

Fane's nerves still played him tricks sometimes. He could not look at the statue without a shudder; and while Brune imaginatively read into the marble face love and protection, the doctor saw there menace and hatred. He came to feel almost jealous of the statue, because Sydney loved it and fell in with her husband's fancy that his life was fast ebbing into and vitalising the marble limbs, that his soul would watch her from the eyes that were now without expression and thought.

When Fane entered the studio, he always involuntarily cast a glance at the white figure--at first, a glance of shuddering distaste, then, as he acknowledged to himself his love for Sydney, a glance of defiance, of challenge.