A Devotee Part 9

Doll answered nothing.

'You see,' went on Mr. Loftus, 'after twelve o'clock, when everyone unmasked, was the time when I should naturally have introduced Sibyl to many of our friends and neighbours, as this was her first public appearance since her marriage, and I could not do so on our arrival. The fact that she had left the house without me, and--without my knowledge--was unfortunate.'

It had been more than unfortunate in reality. Mr. Loftus, whose marriage had made a great sensation in his own county, had been begged on all sides, as soon as the masks were off, to introduce his wife, and, though he had not shown any surprise at her non-appearance and Doll's, he had at last been obliged to retire to the men's cloak-room and wait there till his carriage came, so as to obscure the fact that she had departed without him. He had been annoyed at what he took to be Doll's heedlessness of appearances.

'She felt ill, and wished to go home,' said Doll, reddening, and not perceiving that he was offering an explanation which did not cover the ground. He would have been perfectly satisfied with it himself.

'I greatly fear that she _is_ ill,' said Mr. Loftus; 'but she was quite well when she went to the ball last night. She is very delicate and excitable. Is it possible that anything occurred to upset her?'

Mr. Loftus fixed his keen steel-gray eyes on Doll. He had seen, as he saw everything, Doll's momentary jealousy of him the evening before.

For the life of him Doll could not think what to say. It seemed impossible to tell Mr. Loftus the truth, and he had but little of that inventive talent which envious persons with a small vocabulary call lying. That little had been used up the night before. Yet, perhaps, if he had been aware that Mr. Loftus had seen him with Sibyl in the gallery in an att.i.tude which allowed of but few interpretations, his slow mind might have grasped the nettly fact that he must explain.

Mr. Loftus waited.

'My boy,' he said at last, 'I am not only Sibyl's husband'--he saw Doll wince--'but I am also, I verily believe, her best friend.'

There was no answer.

A slight, almost imperceptible, change came over Mr. Loftus's face. He paused a moment, and then went on quietly:

'Sibyl is most generous about money--too generous. I am almost afraid of taking an unfair advantage of it, though she presses me to do so. But I am pushing on the repairs everywhere; and I am rebuilding Greenfields and Springlands from the ground. They will get to work again directly the frost is over. I have the plans here, if you would like to look at them.'

He drew a roll out of the writing-table drawer, and spread it on the table. Doll perceived with intense relief that the subject was dropped, and he knew Mr. Loftus well enough to be certain that it would never under any circ.u.mstances be reopened. But as he looked at the plans, and Mr. Loftus pointed out the new well and the various advantages of the designs, it dawned upon Doll's consciousness that he was losing something which he had always regarded as a secure possession, and which nothing could replace--Mr. Loftus's confidence.

He had seen it withdrawn in this gentle fashion from other people, who did not find out for years afterwards that it was irrevocably gone. And he became aware that he could not bear to lose it.

'Here,' said Mr. Loftus, putting on his silver-rimmed pince-nez, 'is, or ought to be, the new private road leading out on to the H---- highroad.

I decided to make it, Doll, not only for the convenience of the farm, but also because I cannot let that row of cottages with any certainty until there is an easier means of access to them. My father always intended to make a road there. I only hope,' he said at last, letting the map fly back into a roll, 'that I shall live to pay for all I am doing, but I can't pay for unfinished contracts. If I don't, Doll, you will have to raise a mortgage on the property to pay for the actual improvements on it. Sibyl has left all her fortune to me, I believe; but as I am certain to go first, Wilderleigh will not be the gainer.'

And it pa.s.sed through Mr. Loftus's mind for the first time that perhaps, after all, Sibyl might still marry Doll some day. How he had once wished for that marriage he remembered with a sigh.

'It may be. Youth turns to youth,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, as he went up to his wife's room after Doll had left.

Sibyl was ill. A chill, or a shock, or excitement--who shall say which?--had just touched the delicate balance of her health and overset it. It toppled over suddenly without warning, without any of the preliminary struggles by which a strong const.i.tution or a strong will staves off the advance of illness. She gave way entirely and at once, and the night after the night of the ball it would have been difficult to recognise, in the sunk, colourless face and motionless figure, the brilliant, lovely young girl in her little diamond crown.

Sibyl's illness did not prove dangerous, but it was long. Lady Pierpoint, who had nursed her before, sent her daughters home, and took her place again by the bedside, with the infinite patience which she had learned in helping her husband down the valley towards the death which at last became the one goal of all their longing, and which had receded before them with every toiling step towards it, till they had both wept together because he could not, could not die. Perhaps it was because her husband had gone through the slow mill of consumption that Lady Pierpoint's heart had so much tenderness for Sibyl, for whom only a year ago she had dreaded the same fate.

Mr. Loftus had the nervous horror of, and repugnance to, every form of illness which as often accompanies a refined and sympathetic nature as it does an obtuse and selfish one. And his lonely existence had not brought him into contact with that inevitable side of domestic life. He was extraordinarily ignorant about it, and his natural impulse was to avoid it.

But he stood by his wife's bedside, adjusted his pince-nez, and accepted the situation. For many days Sibyl would take nothing unless given it by himself, would rouse herself for no voice but his. Lady Pierpoint marvelled to see him come into Sibyl's room at night in his long gray dressing-gown, to administer the food or medicine which the nurse put into his hand. His patience and his kindness did not flag, but it seemed to Lady Pierpoint as if at this eleventh hour they should not have been demanded of him; and it wounded her--why, it would be hard to say--to watch him do for Sibyl with painstaking care the little things which in her own youth her young husband had done for her, the little things which in wedded life are the great things.

Mr. Loftus sometimes made a mistake, and once he forgot that he was married, and was found pacing in the rose-garden oblivious of everything except a political crisis--but only once. He was faithful in that which is least.

Lady Pierpoint felt with a twinge of conscience that when she had endeavoured to bring about this marriage she had been selfishly engrossed in Sibyl's welfare. She had not thought enough of his.

And gradually Sibyl recovered, and went about the house again, wan and feeble, and Lady Pierpoint left Wilderleigh.

CHAPTER XI.

'Dark is the world to thee? Thyself art the reason why.'

TENNYSON.

Convalescence is often accompanied by a depression of spirits rarely experienced during the illness itself. A weak nature seeks for a cause for this depression in its surroundings, and when it finds one, as it invariably does, it hugs it. These causes, thanks to the a.s.siduity of one whom we are given to understand has seen better days, are seldom far to seek; and it requires a very strong will to hold fast the conviction that these paroxysms of depression arise from physical weakness, and not from some secret woe. Sibyl had not a very strong will. After the first novelty of convalescence was past, and she had been installed in her sitting-room in a cascade of lace and ribbons, which her dressmaker called a _saut du lit_, and after Mr. Loftus had gravitated back towards the library on the ground-floor and his article for the _Millennium_, Sibyl began to experience that vague weariness and distaste of life which all know who know ill health.

It is at this stage that the unprincipled invalid becomes 'the terror of the household and its shame.' It is at this stage that lengths of felt are laid down in pa.s.sages by tender and injudicious parents, because no sound can be borne by sensitive ears, that the children are 'hushed,'

the blinds are drawn down, and doctors who encourage exercise and light are speedily discovered to have misunderstood the delicate const.i.tution with which they have to deal.

If Sibyl had not had a cause for depression, she would most certainly have manufactured one. But unfortunately she had a real one. The incident of the masked ball rankled. Doll had lied. He had done his poor best, but he had not lied well. His eyes had not quite looked her in the face when he told her that Mr. Loftus had married her for love. His voice had not that emphatic ring which the crude mind ever recognises as the ring of truth, and which in consequence the progressive one applies itself to acquire.

Her mind, dulled by illness and narcotics, had half forgotten that she had been momentarily distressed. But now the remembrance came back like a nightmare. The grain of sand, blown by chance into her eye, p.r.i.c.ked, and she sedulously rubbed it into an inflammation.

She remembered now that there had been an earlier incident in his courtship which had not been satisfactorily explained, _when he proposed to her the second time_. Sibyl always regarded his offer under the mountain-ash as _the second time_. She had a vague feeling that he had proposed before. She had said as much to one or two friends in confidence. But now that she came to think of it, she remembered that it was she who had proposed _the first time_, and had been refused. This minor detail of an uncomfortable incident had until now almost slipped out of her memory, which, like that of many women whose buoyancy depends on the conviction of the admiration of others, seldom harboured anything likely to prove a worm in that bud.

But now she applied to the whole subject that mental friction which morbid minds believe to be reflection, until it became, so to speak, inflamed.

Why had he sworn before the altar and the Bishop to love her, if he did not love her? She became tearful, listless, apathetic. She sat for hours looking into the fire, unemployed, uninterested. The evil spirit which ever lurks in sofas and couches whispered in her ear, when it pressed the cushions, that she was indeed miserable, that her husband avoided her, that she was an unloved martyr, that no one felt for her or sympathized with her. It did not tell her that she had been married for her money, simply because no sane person could look at Mr. Loftus and believe that. But she changed in manner towards him. She was cold, formal. She turned away her head when he came into the room, and then when he had left it wept in secret because she had been married out of pity.

And yet in her heart of hearts, if she had such a thing, had she not partly guessed that fact long ago, and wilfully shut her eyes to it? The chance words she had overheard were only the confirmation of a latent misgiving. Does any woman ever really remain in ignorance if she is not loved, or if she has been married for other reasons than love? What constant props and supports she had given to Mr. Loftus's love for her!

It had never been allowed to stand alone. Why had she from the first always bolstered it up by continually saying to herself and others, until she almost believed it: 'My husband is so devoted to me. My love is such a little thing beside his. What have I done to deserve such a great devotion?' How often she had said all these things that tepidly-loved women say!

Seeming to observe nothing, Mr. Loftus saw all, and pondered over the reason of her altered appearance, and her visibly changed feeling towards himself since the night of the masked ball. If it were that her health was threatened as it had been before her marriage, why should her affection towards himself have undergone this change? Could it be anything to do with Doll? And in these days Sibyl was more frequently in his thoughts than in the early days of his marriage with her. The thought of her came between him and the political article which the editor of the _Millennium_ had asked for.

'Time will show,' he would say to himself, with a sigh, taking up his pen again.

One afternoon soon afterwards he came into her sitting-room, and found her in tears.

'Has Crack said anything unkind?' he asked gently, while Crack beat his tail in the depths of the fur rug in courteous recognition of his own name.

'No,' she said, turning her head away.

'Have I, then?' sitting down by her.

'No.'

'Then, my child, what is it?'

'Nothing,' she said faintly.

There was a pause.

'Is it the same nothing that troubled you the night of the ball?'

He saw her start and shrink away from him.