As soon as the woman had left the room, May took the candle, and shading it with her hand, approached the bed. Her husband lay there, sleeping heavily. May thought him much changed; his cheeks were hollow and sunken, thus giving greater prominence to the hard cynical expression which had always detracted from his good looks. His lips were shut, his brow was contracted, and from time to time he uttered sounds more like the ebullitions of wrath than the wailings of despair. As she stood by the bedside gazing at him, he turned round, and soon afterwards opened his eyes. As soon as she perceived this, May shrank behind the curtain, but it was too late; Lord Forestfield had seen her, or, rather, had noticed the fluttering of her robe without recognising its wearer, and, after one or two inarticulate efforts, he said, in a low and feeble voice:
'Are you there again, Mélanie? For how many nights now have I seen you standing there, glaring at me with those bright black eyes, but never saying a word? What makes me so weak, I wonder? I seem to be tied to this bed without a possibility of moving from it. Mélanie darling, have some pity on me Why are you always so cruel now? You were not so once; recollect the happy days we have passed together. Sing to me, Mélanie, my loved one; sing what you first sang to me that day at the Gorge de Franchard--"Pour que je t'aime, ô mon poëte!" Ah, I have forgotten it like everything else; my memory is all gone now. No, stay; sing me this verse:
"L'oiseau qui marche dans l'allée
S'effraye et part au moindre bruit;
Ma passion est chose ailée
Et s'envole quand on la suit."'
As he ceased murmuring these words he made an attempt to touch her hand, but May hastily drew back.
'This is too much,' she said, as she sank into a chair; 'I had not looked for anything like this;' and she burst into tears.
[CHAPTER XIX.]
RELEASED.
Some ten days after May's arrival in Seamore-place, owing principally to her constant care and watchfulness, and the unremitting attention with which she devoted herself to him, Lord Forestfield was pronounced not merely to be out of danger, but well on his way to convalescence. It had been a desperate trial for May, not only as regards her bodily strength, which during her long vigils was taxed beyond its powers of endurance, but to her mind, which, so long at least as her husband's delirium continued, was kept ever on the rack. When, with his returning senses, Lord Forestfield recognised his wife, and realised all that she had done for him during his illness, he seemed, for the first time in his life, to be profoundly touched, and indeed became so excited as to give ground for fearing that, in his then weak and almost prostrate condition, he would suffer a relapse. As his strength gradually returned to him, he grew more anxious that May should be constantly in his sight, more exacting in his demands on her time and attention; and this, not in the usual querulous and complaining tone of an invalid, which he adopted towards all others, but with that yearning tenderness of which he had never previously manifested any sign.
One day, as he was sitting propped up with pillows in an easy-chair, and she, at his request, was reading to him from the newspaper, he took her hand between his, still thin and gaunt, but freed now from the burning fever, and spoke to her as he had never spoken for years, as he had probably never spoken at all before. In his weak-voice there was something of the earnest fervour which took her back to the time of their first acquaintance--all his words then were tinged with the roseate hue of youth and love--what he said now was spoken falteringly, and seemed at least to bear the impress of truth. He told her that he had done her grievous wrong, and that whatever faults she might have committed he was, in the first instance, to blame for the manner in which he had neglected her and left her at the mercy of others. He acknowledged that he had been cruel, harsh, and unsympathetic, blaming his bringing-up, by which he had never been taught to bridle his passions or to look for the possibility of the non-fulfilment of any of his wishes, and he promised her that if, when his strength was fully recovered, she would remain with him, as forgiving and as loyal as she had been during his illness, he would prove to her the alteration that time and trouble had worked in him, and devote himself for the remainder of his life to secure her happiness.
Was May to believe in so radical a reformation thus easily worked? The experience of her past life convinced her to the contrary; and yet the attempt must be made. She would shut out all those recollections of insult suffered and misery undergone, which came thronging upon her at the mere idea of renewing her life with her husband; she would forget the more recent horror with which the revelations in his ravings had inspired her; it was her duty to accept his proposition, and she would do it. Lord Forestfield was exhausted by the fatigue which he had undergone in speaking to her at such length, and May, telling him that she had been warned against allowing him to excite himself, promised to talk to him on the subject to-morrow.