Name and Fame Part 59

So at four Sydney was admitted, and it would have been hard to say whether husband or wife felt the more embarra.s.sment. Sydney tried hard to behave as though nothing were amiss between them. He kissed her and asked after her well-being; but he did so with an inward tremor and a great uncertainty as to the reception that he should meet with. But she allowed him to kiss her; she even kissed him in return and smiled a very little, more than once, while he was talking to her; and he, feeling his heart grow lighter while she smiled, fancied that the shadow of sadness in her eyes, the lifelessness of her voice and hand, came simply from bodily weakness and from no deeper cause.

After this first visit, he saw her each day for longer intervals, and realized very quickly that she had no intention of shunning him or punishing him before the world, as he had feared that she would do. She was so quiet, so gentle to him, that, with all a man's obtuseness where women are concerned, he congratulated himself on being let off so easily, and thought that the matter was to be buried in oblivion. He even wondered a little at Nan's _savoir-faire_, and felt a vague sense of disappointment mingling with his relief. Was he to hear no more about it, although she had been struck down and brought almost to death's door by the discovery of his wretched story?

It seemed to be so, indeed. For some time he was kept in continual suspense, expecting her to speak to him on the subject; but he waited in vain. Then, with great reluctance, he himself made some slight approach, some slight reference to it; a reference so slight that if, as he sometimes fancied, her illness _had_ destroyed her memory of the conversation which she had overheard in the study, he need not betray himself. But there was no trace of lack of memory in Nan's face, when he brought out the words which he hoped would lead to some fuller understanding between them. She turned scarlet and then white as snow.

Turning her face aside, she said, in a low but very distinct voice,

"I want to hear no more about it, Sydney."

"But, Nan----"

"_Please_ say no more," she interrupted. And something in her tone made him keep silence. He looked at her for a minute or two, but she would not look at him and so he got up and left her, with a sense of mingled injury and defeat.

No, she had not forgotten: she was not oblivious; and he doubted whether she had forgiven him as he thought. The prohibition to speak on the subject chafed him, although he had previously said to himself that it was next to impossible for him to mention it to her. And he was puzzled, for he had not followed the workings of Nan's mind in the least, and the words, concerning his marriage with her and his reasons for it had slipped past him unheeded, while his thoughts were fixed upon other things.

CHAPTER XL.

"WHO WITH REPENTANCE IS NOT SATISFIED--."

Before the summer came, Mrs. Sydney Campion was well enough to drive out in an open carriage, and entertain visitors; but it was painfully apparent to her friends that her health had received a shock from which it had not by any means recovered. She grew better up to a certain point, and there she seemed to stay. She had lost all interest in life.

Day after day, when Sydney came home, he would find her sitting or lying on a sofa, white and still, with book or work dropped idly in her lap, her dark eyes full of an unspoken sorrow, her mouth drooping in mournful curves, her thin cheek laid against a slender hand, where the veins looked strangely blue through the delicate whiteness of the flesh. But she never complained. When her husband brought her flowers and presents, as he still liked to do, she took them gently, and thanked him; but he noticed that she laid them aside and seldom looked at them again. The spirit seemed to have gone out of her. And in his own heart Sydney raged and fretted--for why, he said to himself, should she not be like other women?--why, if she had a grudge against him, should she not tell him so? She might reproach him as bitterly as she pleased; the storm would spend itself in time and break in sunshine; but this terrible silence was like a nightmare about them both! He wished that he had the courage to break through it, but he was experiencing the truth of the saying that conscience makes cowards of us all, and he dared not break the silence that she had imposed.

One day, when he had brought her some flowers, she put them away from her with a slight unusual sign of impatience.

"Don't bring me any more," she said.

Her husband looked at her intently. "You don't care for them?"

"No."

"I thought," he said, a little mortification struggling with natural disappointment in his breast, "that I had heard you say you liked them--or, at any rate, that you liked me to bring them----"

"That was long ago," she answered softly, but coldly. She lay with her eyes closed, her face very pale and weary.

"One would think," he went on, spurred by puzzled anger to put a long unspoken thought into bare words, "that you did not care for me now--that you did not love me any longer?"

She opened her eyes and looked at him steadily. There was something almost like pity in her face.

"I am afraid it is true, Sydney. I am very sorry."

He stood staring at her a little longer, as if he could not believe his ears. The red blood slowly mounted to his forehead. She returned his gaze with the same look of almost wistful pity, in which there was an aloofness, a coldness, that showed him as nothing else had ever done the extent of her estrangement from himself. Somehow he felt as though she had struck him on the lips. He walked away from her without another word, and shut himself into his study, where he sat for some minutes at his writing-table, seeing nothing, thinking of nothing, dumbly conscious that he was, on the whole, more wretched than he had ever been in the course of a fairly prosperous and successful life.

He loved Nan, and Nan did not love him. Well, there was an end of his domestic happiness. Fortunately, there was work to be done still, success to be achieved, prizes to win in the world of men. He was not going to sit down and despair because he had lost a woman's love. And so, with set lips and frowning brow he once more set to work, and this time with redoubled vigor; but he knew all the while that he was a very miserable man.

Perhaps if he had seen Nan crying over the flowers that she had just rejected, he might have hoped that there was still a chance of recovering the place in her heart which he had lost.

But after this short conversation life went on in the old ways. Sydney appeared to be more than ever engrossed in his work. Nan grew paler and stiller every day. Lady Pynsent became anxious and distressed.

"Sydney, what are you doing? what are you thinking about?" she said to him one day, when she managed to catch him for five minutes alone.

"Don't you see how ill Nan is?"

"She looks ill; but she always says there is nothing the matter with her."

"That is a very bad sign. I hope you have made her consult a good doctor? There is Burrows--I should take her to him."

"Burrows! Why, he is a specialist!"

"Nan's mother died of decline. Burrows attended her."

Sydney went away with a new fear implanted in his heart.

Dr. Burrows was sent for, and saw his patient; but he did not seem able to form any definite opinion concerning her. He said a few words to Sydney, however, which gave him food for a good deal of reflection during the next day or two.

At the end of that time, he came to Nan's sitting-room with a look of quiet purpose on his face. "May I speak to you for a minute?" he began formally--he had got into the way of speaking very formally and ceremoniously to her now. "Can you listen to me?"

"Certainly. Won't you sit down?"

But he preferred to remain standing at an angle where she could not see his face without turning her head. "I have been talking to Dr. Burrows about you. He tells me, I am sorry to say, that you are still very weak; but he thinks that there is nothing wrong but weakness, though that is bad enough in itself. But he wishes me also to say--you will remember that it is he who speaks, not I--that if you could manage to rouse yourself, Nan, if _you_ would made an effort to get stronger, he thinks you might do it, if you chose."

"Like Mrs. Dombey," said Nan, with a faint, cheerless smile.

"He is afraid," Sydney went on, with the air of one who repeats a lesson, "that you are drifting into a state of hopeless invalidism, which you might still avoid. Once in that state you would not die, Nan, as you might like to do: you would live for years in helpless, useless, suffering. Nan, my dear, it is very hard for me to say this to you"--his voice quivering--"but I promised Burrows, for your own sake, that I would. Such a life, Nan, would be torture to you; and you have still within your power--you can prevent it if you chose."

"It seems to me very cruel to say so," Nan answered, quietly. "What can I do that I have not done? I have taken all the doctors' remedies and done exactly as they bade me. I am very tired of being ill and weak, I a.s.sure you. It is not my fault that I should like to die."

She began to cry a little as she spoke. Her mouth and chin quivered: the tears ran slowly over her white cheeks. Sydney drew a step nearer.

"No, it isn't your fault," he said, hoa.r.s.ely, "it is mine. I believe I am killing you by inches. Do you want to make me feel myself a murderer?

Could you not--even for my poor sake--_try_ to get stronger, Nan, _try_ to take an interest in something--something healthy and reasonable? That is what Dr. Burrows says you need; and I can't do this thing for you; I, whom you don't love any longer," he said, with a sudden fury of pa.s.sion which stopped her tears at once, "but who love _you_ with all my heart, as I never loved in all my life before--I swear it before G.o.d!"

He stopped short: he had not meant to speak of his love for her, only to urge her to make that effort over her languor and her indifference which the great physician said she must make before her health could be restored. Nan lay looking at him, the tears drying on her pale cheeks, her lips parted, her eyes unusually bright; but she did not speak.

"If there was anything I could do to please you," her husband went on in a quieter tone, "I would do it. Would you care, for instance, to live abroad? Burrows recommends a bracing air. If you would go with me to Norway or Switzerland--at once; and then pa.s.s the winter at Davos, or any place you liked; perhaps you would care for that? Is there nothing you would like to do? You used to say you wanted to see India----"

"But your work!" she broke in suddenly. "_You_ could not go: it is useless to talk of an impossibility."

"If it would make you better or happier, I would go."

"But the House?----"

"Nothing easier than to accept the Chiltern Hundreds," said Sydney.

"And your profession?" said Nan, raising herself on one arm and looking keenly at him.

She saw that he winced at the question, but he scarcely paused before he replied.