Mr. Loftus had the nervous horror of, and repugnance to, every form of illness which as often accompanies a refined and sympathetic nature as it does an obtuse and selfish one. And his lonely existence had not brought him into contact with that inevitable side of domestic life. He was extraordinarily ignorant about it, and his natural impulse was to avoid it.
But he stood by his wife's bedside, adjusted his pince-nez, and accepted the situation. For many days Sibyl would take nothing unless given it by himself, would rouse herself for no voice but his. Lady Pierpoint marvelled to see him come into Sibyl's room at night in his long gray dressing-gown, to administer the food or medicine which the nurse put into his hand. His patience and his kindness did not flag, but it seemed to Lady Pierpoint as if at this eleventh hour they should not have been demanded of him; and it wounded her—why, it would be hard to say—to watch him do for Sibyl with painstaking care the little things which in her own youth her young husband had done for her, the little things which in wedded life are the great things.
Mr. Loftus sometimes made a mistake, and once he forgot that he was married, and was found pacing in the rose-garden oblivious of everything except a political crisis—but only once. He was faithful in that which is least.
Lady Pierpoint felt with a twinge of conscience that when she had endeavoured to bring about this marriage she had been selfishly engrossed in Sibyl's welfare. She had not thought enough of his.
And gradually Sibyl recovered, and went about the house again, wan and feeble, and Lady Pierpoint left Wilderleigh.
[CHAPTER XI.]
'Dark is the world to thee? Thyself art the reason why.'
Tennyson.
Convalescence is often accompanied by a depression of spirits rarely experienced during the illness itself. A weak nature seeks for a cause for this depression in its surroundings, and when it finds one, as it invariably does, it hugs it. These causes, thanks to the assiduity of one whom we are given to understand has seen better days, are seldom far to seek; and it requires a very strong will to hold fast the conviction that these paroxysms of depression arise from physical weakness, and not from some secret woe. Sibyl had not a very strong will. After the first novelty of convalescence was past, and she had been installed in her sitting-room in a cascade of lace and ribbons, which her dressmaker called a saut du lit, and after Mr. Loftus had gravitated back towards the library on the ground-floor and his article for the Millennium, Sibyl began to experience that vague weariness and distaste of life which all know who know ill health.