"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 shivered 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.
One evening, after a day of many appointments and much mental stress and strain, he drove up to Ilbury Road, was admitted, and shown as usual into the studio. He found it empty. Only the statue greeted him silently in the soft lamplight, that scarcely accomplished more than the defining of the gloom.
"My master is upstairs, sir," said the footman. "I will tell him you are here."
In a moment Sydney entered, with a lagging step and pale cheeks. Without thinking of the usual polite form of greeting, she said to Fane, "He is much worse to-day. There is a change in him, a horrible change. Dr Fane, just now when I was talking to him it seemed to me that he was a long way off. I caught hold of his hands to rea.s.sure myself. I held them. I heard him speaking, but it was as if his words came from a distance.
What does it mean? He is not--he is not--"
She looked the word he could not speak.
Fane made her sit down.
"I will go to him immediately," he said. "I may be able to do something."
"Yes, go--do go!" she exclaimed with feverish excitement.
Then suddenly she sprang up, and seizing his hands with hers, she said in a piercing voice: "You are a great doctor. Surely--surely you can keep this one life for me a little longer."
As they stood, Fane was facing the statue, which was at her back, and while she spoke his eyes were drawn from the woman he loved to the marble thing he senselessly hated. It struck him that a ghastly change had stolen over it. A sudden flicker of absolute life surely infused it, quickened it even while she spoke, stole through the limbs one by one, welled up to the eyes as light pierces from a depth, flowed through all the marble. A pulse beat in the dead, cold heart. A mind rippled into the rigid, watching face. There was no absolute movement, and yet there was the sense of stir. Fane, absorbed in horror, seemed to watch an act of creation, to see life poured from some invisible and unknown source into the bodily chamber that had been void and dark.
Motionless he saw the statue dead; motionless he saw the statue live.
He drew his hands from Sydney"s. He was too powerfully impressed to speak, but she looked up into his face, turned, and followed his eyes.
She, too, observed the change, for her lips parted, and a wild amazement shone in her eyes. Then she touched Fane"s arm, and whispered, rather in awe than in horror, "Go--go to him. See if anything has happened. I will stay and watch here."
With a hushed tread Fane left the studio, pa.s.sed through the hall, ascended the stairs to the sculptor"s room. Outside the door he hesitated for a moment. He was trembling. He heard a clock ticking within. It sounded very loud, like a hammer beating in his ears. He pushed the door open at length, and entered. Brune"s tall figure was sitting in an armchair, bowed over a table on which lay an open Art magazine.
His head lay hidden on his arms, which were crossed.
Fane raised the face and turned it up towards him.
It was the face of a dead man.
He looked at it, and smiled.
Then he stole down again to the studio, where Sydney was still standing.
"Yes?" she said interrogatively, as he entered.
"He is dead," Fane answered.
She only bowed her head, as if in a.s.sent. She stood a moment, then she turned her tearless eyes to him, and said:--
"Why could not you save him?"
"Because I am human," Fane answered.
"And we did not say good-bye," she said.