“His condition is such that the slightest shock might, I should think, be fatal, and I cannot venture to try experiments.”
“Is there no hope, no hope?” asked Audrey in a stifled voice.
“Well, I feared not when I first saw him a couple of days ago. But the fact that he is still alive gives me hopes. If I can get him away to a warmer climate before the winter comes, and rouse him out of his depression, I think we may pull him through.”
“What is the matter with him? Is it consumption?”
“That’s what we are afraid of. At present we don’t know that it is that. He suffers from extreme weakness after pneumonia and the general breakdown which preceded that,” went on Lord Clanfield, who could not help answering her questions, they were put so modestly and with such evident warmth of feeling. But he replied with his eyes turned away, reluctantly, as if by an effort. If she was really his nephew’s wife, she was certainly not a person to be received otherwise than in the most distant manner, and even then she must understand that such reception was accorded under protest.
“Poor boy, my poor boy! What he must have suffered! And don’t you think it would do him good, not harm, to see me, to know I am safe? Oh, I know very well it is on my account, because he doesn’t know what has become of me, that he is so miserable. And it’s his misery that prevents his getting well! Oh, Lord Clanfield, can’t you see that it is?”
The viscount moved nervously.
“I’ve no doubt,” said he stiffly, “that if, when the prison authorities thought of releasing him, they had been able to find his wife, and to give him back to her care, it would have been better for him, much better. But you had disappeared; you had hidden yourself under a fresh name. And—really I’m sorry to have to say it, as I see you are truly sorry for the situation you have brought about, I cannot but think that, if he were to learn the truth about you and about the life you’ve been leading while he was in prison, it would be the last straw. He would never hold up his head again.”
Audrey heard these words with the wildest despair. Well though she knew that Lord Clanfield exaggerated the case, that he looked upon her as a woman who had deliberately chosen to give up her name and her enforced widowhood for a life of pleasure and for companions of the most undesirable type, she knew too that even the truth was bad enough to shock poor Gerard and to wake all sorts of terrible suspicions in his breast.
She was sure that, if she could broach the matter at her own time and in her own way, when the joy of reunion should have soothed his anguish and softened the remembrance of his trials, the sudden and unsympathetic recital of the circumstances of her life, even without exaggeration, would be more than he could bear.