Only his interest in his book sustained him. He was deep enough in it for it to have a fascination for him now, and, though there were still days when he did not produce more than a single page, there were others on which composition was spontaneous and delightful, and happy sentences seemed to fall off his pen of their own accord. He wrote under difficulties when the summer came, for Cynthia required more and more attention; but while he often devoted a whole morning or afternoon to her, he made up for it by working on the novel half the night. More than once he worked on it all night, and after a bath and a shave he joined her at breakfast on very good terms with himself. To support the sprightliness, however, he needed to breakfast with someone to whom he could report his progress, and cry, "I've come to such a point," or, "That difficulty that we foresaw, you know, is overcome—a grand idea!" His exhilaration speedily evaporated at breakfast, and, if he returned to his room an hour later, he did so feeling far less fresh than when he had left it.
Yes, Cynthia demanded many attentions through the summer months; she was petulant, capricious, and dissolved into tears at the smallest provocation. There was much for Kent to consider besides the novel. Also there were anticipations in which they momentarily united and he felt her to be as close to him as she was dear. But these moments could not make a life; and despite the fact that the time when they expected their baby to be born was rapidly approaching, he was living more and more within himself. Cynthia had no complaint to make against him; if marriage was not altogether the elysium that she had imagined it would prove, she did not hold that to be Humphrey's fault. She found him, if eccentric, tender and considerate. But he was bored and weary. His feeling for her was the affection of a man for a child, tinged more or less consciously by compassion, since he knew that she would sob her heart out if she suspected how tedious she appeared to him. Though she would have been a happier woman with a different man, the cost of the mistake that they had made was far more heavy to him than to her. He realised what a mistake it had been, while she was ignorant of it. And of this, at least, he was glad.
[CHAPTER X]
She was very ill after her confinement, and for several weeks it was doubtful if she would recover. The boy throve, but the mother seemed to be sinking. The local doctor came three times a day, and a physician was called in, and then other consultations were held between the physician and a specialist, and it appeared to Kent that he was never remembered by Mrs. Walford, or the nurse, during this period, excepting when he was required to write a cheque. "You shall see her for a moment by-and-by," one or the other of them would say; "she is to be kept very quiet this afternoon. Yes, yes, now you're not to worry; go and work, and you shall be sent for later on!" Then he would wander round the neglected little sitting-room, and note drearily, and without its striking him that he might attend to them, that the ferns in the dusty majolica pots were dying for want of water—or he would sit down and write, by a dogged effort, at the rate of a word a minute, asking himself anxiously what sum it was safe to expect from Messrs. Cousins. His banking account was diminishing rapidly under the demands made upon it now, and he found it almost as hard to write a chapter of a novel as if he had never attempted to do such a thing before. He returned thanks to Heaven that he was not a journalist, to whom the necessity for covering a certain number of pages by a stated hour daily was unavoidable; but he wished himself a mechanic or a petty tradesman, whose vocations, he presumed, were independent of their moods.
It was not till the crisis was past and Cynthia was downstairs again, in a wrapper on the sofa, that he began to feel that he was within measurable distance of the conclusion. The nine months that he had allotted to the task had long gone by, but that it would have taken him a year did not trouble him, for he knew the work to be good. He told her so one afternoon when they were alone together again, she with her couch drawn to the fire, and he sitting at the edge, holding her hand.
"I'm satisfied," he declared. "When I say 'satisfied,' you know what I mean, of course? It's as well done as I expected to do it. Another week 'll see it finished, darling."
She patted his arm.
"Poor old boy! it hasn't been a happy time for him either, has it?"
"I've known jollier. But you're all right again now, thank God! and I'm going to pack you off to Bournemouth or somewhere soon, to bring your colour back. I was speaking to Dr. Roberts about it this morning. He says it's just what you need."