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.
Fane caught a glimpse of the hall that he knew so well. A step, and he could be in the house. He hesitated. He looked down the road. The man had his back turned, and was putting the letters into the box. Fane slipped into the garden, up the steps, through the door. The hall was empty. At his right was the pa.s.sage leading to the studio. He stole down it, and tried the door. It opened. In the darkness the heavy curtain blew against his face. In another instant he closed the door softly at his back, and stood alone in the wide s.p.a.ce and the blackness. Here there was not a glimmer of light. Thick curtains fell over the windows.
No fire burned upon the hearth. There was no sound except when a carriage occasionally rolled down the road, and even then the wheels sounded distant.
The silence and darkness had their effect upon Fane. He had done a desperate thing; but, until he found himself alone in the vacant studio, he had not fully realised the madness of his conduct, and how it would appear to the world. After the first moments of solitude had pa.s.sed he came to himself a little, and half opened the door with the intention of stealing out; but he heard steps in the hall, and shrank back again like a guilty creature. He must wait, at least, until the household retired to rest.
And, waiting, the old, haunting thoughts came back to a.s.sail him once more. He began to brood over Sydney"s cruel treatment of him, over her vile suspicions. Here, in the atmosphere which he knew so well--for a faint, strange perfume always lingered about the studio, and gave to it the subtle sense of life which certain perfumes can impart--his emotions were gradually quickened to fury. He recalled the days of his intimacy with the sculptor, of his unrestrained converse with Sydney. He recalled his care for the invalid, persevered in, despite his pa.s.sion, to the end. And then his thought fastened upon the statue, which, strange to say, he had almost forgotten.
The statue!
It must be there, with him, in the darkness, staring with those white eyes in which he had seen a soul flicker.
As the recollection of it came to him, he trembled, leaning against the wall.
He was in one of those states of acute mental tension in which the mind becomes so easily the prey of the wildest fantasies, and slowly, laboriously, he began to frame a connection between the lifeless marble creature and his own dreary trouble.
Because of one moment of folly Sydney treated him as a pariah, as a criminal. Her gentle nature had been transformed suddenly.
By what subtle influence?
Fane remembered the day of his first visit to Ilbury Road, and his curious imagination that the statue recognised and hated him.
Had that hatred prompted action? Was there a devil lurking in the white, cold marble to work his ruin? When Sydney sent him out of her presence for ever, the watching face had seemed to smile.
Fane set his teeth in the darkness. He was no longer sane. He was possessed. The tragedy of thought within him invited him to the execution of another tragedy. He stretched out his hand with the rehearsing action of one meditating a blow.
His hand fell upon an oak table that stood against the wall, and hit on something smooth and cold. It was a long Oriental dagger that the dead sculptor had brought from the East. Fane"s fingers closed on it mechanically. The frigid steel thrilled his hot palm, and a pulse in his forehead started beating till there was a dull, senseless music in his ears that irritated him.
He wanted to listen for the return of Sydney"s carriage.
His soul was ablaze with defiance. He was alone in the darkness with his enemy; the cold, deadly, blind, pulseless thing that yet was alive; the silent thing that had yet whispered malign accusations of him to the woman he loved; the nerveless thing that poisoned a beautiful mind against him, that stole the music from his harp of life and let loose the winds upon his summer.
His fingers closed more tightly, more feverishly upon the slippery steel.
Sydney actually thought, or strove to think, him a criminal. What if he should earn the t.i.tle? A sound as of the sea beating was in his ears, and flashes of strange light seem to leap to his vision. What would a man worth the name do to his enemy?
And he and his enemy were shut up alone together.
He drew himself up straight and steadied himself against the wall, peering through the blackness in the direction of the statue.
And, as he did so, there seemed to steal into the atmosphere the breath of another living presence. He could fancy he heard the pulse of another heart beating near to his. The sensation increased upon him powerfully until suspicion grew into conviction.
His intention had subtly communicated itself to the thing he could not see.
He knew it was on guard.
There was no actual sound, no movement, but the atmosphere became charged by degrees with a deadly, numbing cold, like the breath of frost in the air. A chill ran through Fane"s blood. A sluggish terror began to steal over him, folding him for the moment in a strange inertia of mind and of body. A creeping paralysis crawled upon his senses, like the paralysis of nightmare that envelops the dreamer. He opened his lips to speak, but they chattered soundlessly. Mechanically his hand clutched the thin, sharp steel of the dagger.
His enemy--then Sydney.
He would not be a coward. He struggled against the horror that was upon him.