‘Indeed, I do wish it. My coming to live here has made everything so uncomfortable for him and the children. Even his friends can’t visit him as they would; I feel that, though he won’t admit that it’s made any difference.’
Sidney looked to the ground. He heard her voice falter as it continued.
‘If I’m to live here still, it mustn’t be at the cost of all his comfort. I keep almost always in the one room. I shouldn’t be in the way if anyone came. I’ve been afraid, Mr. Kirkwood, that perhaps you feared to come lest, whilst I was not very well, it might have been an inconvenience to us. Please don’t think that. I shall never—see either friends or strangers unless it is absolutely needful.’
There was silence.
‘You do feel much better, I hope?’ fell from Sidney’s lips.
‘Much stronger. It’s only my mind; everything is so dark to me. You know how little patience I always had. It was enough if any one said, ‘You must do this,’ or ‘You must put up with that’—at once I resisted. It was my nature; I couldn’t bear the feeling of control. That’s what I’ve had to struggle with since I recovered from my delirium at the hospital, and hadn’t even the hope of dying. Can you put yourself in my place, and imagine what I have suffered?’
Sidney was silent. His own life had not been without its passionate miseries, but the modulations of this voice which had no light of countenance to aid it raised him above the plane of common experience and made actual to him the feelings he knew only in romantic story. He could not stir, lest the slightest sound should jar on her speaking. His breath rose visibly upon the chill air, but the discomfort of the room was as indifferent to him as to his companion. Clara rose, as if impelled by mental anguish; she stretched out her hand to the mantel-piece, and so stood, between him and the light, her admirable figure designed on a glimmering background.
‘I know why you say nothing,’ she continued, abruptly but without resentment. ‘You cannot use words of sympathy which would be anything but formal, and you prefer to let me understand that. It is like you. Oh, you mustn’t think I mean the phrase as a reproach. Anything but that. I mean that you were always honest, and time hasn’t changed you—in that.’ A slight, very slight, tremor on the close. ‘I’d rather you behaved to me like your old self. A sham sympathy would drive me mad.’
‘I said nothing,’ he replied, ‘only because words seemed meaningless.’
‘Not only that. You feel for me, I know, because you are not heartless; but at the same time you obey your reason, which tells you that all I suffer comes of my own self-will.’