Part 38 (1/2)

Fane was strung up. Conflicting feelings found a wild playground in his soul. His nerves were in a state of abnormal excitement, and something seemed to let go in him--the something that holds us back, normally, from mad follies. He suddenly caught Sydney's hand, and in a choked voice said:--

”He is dead. Think a little of the living.”

She looked at him, wondering.

”Think of the living that love you. He neither hates nor loves any more.

Sydney! Sydney!”

As she understood his meaning she wrung her hand out of his, and said, as one trying to clear the road for reason:--

”You love me, and he bought you to keep him alive. Why, then--”

A sick, white change came over her face.

”Sydney! Sydney!” he said.

”Why, then he bought death from you. Ah!”

She put her hand on the bell, and kept it there till the servant hurried in.

”Show Dr Fane out,” she said. ”He will not come here again.”

And Fane, seeing the uselessness of protest, ready to strike himself for his folly, went without a word. Only, as he went, he cast one look at the statue. Was there not the flicker of a smile in its marble eyes?

IV

People said Dr Gerard Fane was over-working, that he was not himself.

His manner to patients was sometimes very strange, brusque, impatient, intolerant. A brutality stole over him, and impressed the world that went to him for healing very unfavourably. The ills of humanity rendered him now sarcastic instead of pitiful, a fatal att.i.tude of mind for a physician to adopt; and he was even known to p.r.o.nounce on sufferers sentence of death with a callous indifference that was inhuman as well as impolitic. As the weeks went by, his reception-room became less crowded than of old. There were even moments in his day when he had leisure to sit down and think, to give a rein to his mood of impotent misery and despair. Sydney had never consented to receive him again.

Woman-like--for she could be extravagantly yet calmly unreasonable--she had clung to the idea that Fane had hastened, if not actually brought about, her husband's death by his treatment. She made no accusation. She simply closed her doors upon him. She had a horror of him, which never left her.

Again and again Fane called. She was always denied to him. Then he met her in the street. She cut him. He spoke to her. She pa.s.sed on without a reply. At last a dull fury took possession of him. Her treatment of him was flagrantly unjust. He had wished the sculptor to die, but he had allowed nature to accomplish her designs unaided, even to some extent hampered and hindered by his medical skill and care. He loved Sydney with the violence of a man whose emotions had been sedulously repressed through youth, vanquished but not killed by ambition, and the need to work for the realisation of that ambition. The tumults of early manhood, never given fair play, now raged in his breast, from which they should have been long since expelled, and played havoc with every creed of sense, and every built-up theory of wisdom and experience. Fane became by degrees a monomaniac.

He brooded incessantly over his developed but starved pa.s.sion, over the thought that Sydney chose to believe him a murderer. At first, when he was trying day after day to see her, he clung to his love for her; but when he found her obdurate, set upon wronging him in her thought, his pa.s.sion, verging towards despair, changed, and was coloured with hatred.

By degrees he came to dwell more upon the injury done to him by her suspicion than upon his love of her, and then it was that a certain wildness crept into his manner, and alarmed or puzzled those who consulted him.

That his career was going to the dogs Fane understood, but he did not care. The vision of Sydney was always before him. He was for ever plotting and planning to be with her alone--against her will or not, it was nothing to him. And when he was alone with her, what then?

He would know how to act.

It was just in the dawn of the spring season over London that further inaction became insupportable to him. One evening, after a day of listless inactivity spent in waiting for the patients who no longer came in crowds to his door, he put on his hat and walked from Mayfair to Kensington, vaguely, yet with intention. He looked calm, even absent; but he was a desperate man. All fear of what the world thinks or says, all consideration of outward circ.u.mstances and their relation to worldly happiness, had died within him. He was entirely abstracted and self-centred.

He reached the broad thoroughfare of Ilbury Road, with its line of artistic red houses, detached and standing in their gardens. The darkness was falling as he turned into it and began to walk up and down opposite the house with the big studio in which he was once a welcome visitor. There was a light in one of the bedroom windows and in the hall, and presently, as Fane watched, a brougham drove up to the door.

It waited a few moments before the house, then some one entered the carriage. The door was banged; the horse moved on. Through the windows Fane saw a woman's face, pale, against the pane. It was the face of Sydney. For a moment he thought he would call to the coachman to stop.

Then he restrained himself, and again walked up and down, waiting. She must return presently. He would speak to her as she was getting out of the carriage. He would force her to receive him.

Towards nine o'clock his plans were altered by an event which took place. The house door opened, and the footman came out with a handful of letters for the post. The pillar-box was very near, and the man carelessly left the hall door on the jar while he walked down the road.