Kendal had been startled by her words about Isabel Bretherton. He had not heard of any illness; it could hardly be serious, for he vaguely remembered that in the newspapers he had tried to read on the journey his eye had caught the familiar advertisement of the Calliope. It must have happened while he was in Surrey. He vaguely speculated about it now and then as he sat watching through the afternoon. But nothing seemed to matter very much to him—nothing but Marie and the slow on-coming of death.
At last when the wintry light was fading, when the lamps were being lit outside, and the bustle of the street seemed to penetrate in little intermittent waves of sound into the deep quiet of the room, Marie Raised herself and, with a fluttering sigh, withdrew her hand softly from her brother, and laid her arm round her husband's neck. He stooped to her—kissed the sweet lips and the face on which the lines of middle age had hardly settled—caught a wild alarm from her utter silence, called the nurse and Kendal, and all was over.
CHAPTER IX
The morning of Marie's funeral was sunny but bitterly cold; it was one of those days when autumn finally passes into winter, and the last memory of the summer warmth vanishes from the air. It had been the saddest, dreariest laying to rest. The widowed sister, of whom Marie had spoken in her last hours, had been unable to come, and the two men had gone through it all alone, helped only by the tearful, impulsive sympathy and the practical energy of the maid who had been with Marie ever since her marriage, and was as yet hardly capable of realising her mistress's death.
It was she who, while they were away, had done her best to throw a little air of comfort over the forsaken salon. She had kindled the fire, watered the plants, and thrown open the windows to the sunshine, finding in her toil and movement some little relief from her own heart-ache and oppression. When Paul came back, and with numb, trembling fingers had stripped himself of his scarf and his great-coat, he stepped over the threshold into the salon, and it seemed to him as though the sunlight and the open windows and the crackling blaze of the fire dealt him a sudden blow. He walked up to the windows, and, shuddering, drew them down and closed the blinds, Félicie watching him anxiously from the landing through the half-open door. Then he had thrown himself into a chair; and Kendal, coming softly upstairs after him, had gently closed the door from the outside, said a kind word to Félicie, and himself slipped noiselessly down again and out into the Champs Elysées. There he had paced up and down for an hour or more under the trees, from which a few frosty leaves were still hanging in the December air.
He himself had been so stunned and bewildered by the loss which had fallen upon him, that, when he found himself alone and out of doors again, he was for a while scarcely able to think consecutively about it. He walked along conscious for some time of nothing but a sort of dumb physical congeniality in the sunshine, in the clear blue and white of the sky, in the cheerful distinctness and sharpness of every outline. And then, little by little, the cheated grief reasserted itself, the numbed senses woke into painful life, and he fell into broken musings on the past, or into a bitter wonder over the precarious tenure by which men hold those good things whereon, so long as they are still their own, they are so quick to rear an edifice of optimist philosophy. A week before, his sister's affection had been to him the one sufficient screen between his own consciousness and the desolate threatening immensities of thought and of existence. The screen had fallen, and the darkness seemed to be rushing in upon him. And still, life had to be lived, work to be got through, duties to be faced. How is it done? he kept vaguely wondering. How is it that men live on to old age and see bond after bond broken, and possession after possession swept away, and still find the years tolerable and the sun pleasant, still cherish in themselves that inexhaustible faith in an ideal something which supplies from century to century the invincible motive power of the race?
Presently—by virtue of long critical and philosophical habit—his mind brought itself to bear more and more steadily upon his own position; he stepped back, as it were, from himself and became his own spectator. The introspective temper was not common with him; his mind was naturally turned outward—towards other people, towards books, towards intellectual interests. But self-study had had its charm for him of late, and, amongst other things, it was now plain to him that up to the moment of his first meeting with Isabel Bretherton his life had been mostly that of an onlooker—a bystander. Society, old and new, men and women of the past and of the present, the speculative achievements of other times and of his own,—these had constituted a sort of vast drama before his eyes, which he had watched and studied with an ever-living curiosity. But his interest in his particular rôle had been comparatively weak, and in analysing other individualities he had run some risk of losing his own.
Then love came by, and the half-dormant personality within him had been seized upon and roused, little by little, into a glowing, although a repressed and hidden energy. He had learnt in his own person what it means to crave, to thirst, to want. And now, grief had followed and had pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human spectacle. The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone. He had loved, and lost, and despaired. Beside those great experiences how trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went before them! He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton, and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so insignificant, that for the moment he could hardly realise them. The artistic and aesthetic questions which had seemed to him so vital six months before had faded almost out of view in the fierce neighbourhood of sorrow and passion. His first relation to her had been that of one who knows to one who is ignorant; but that puny link had dropped, and he was going to meet her now, fresh from the presence of death, loving her as a man loves a woman, and claiming from her nothing but pity for his grief, balm for his wound,—the answer of human tenderness to human need.
How strange and sad that she should be still in ignorance of his loss and hers! In the early morning after Marie's death, when he woke up from a few heavy hours of sleep, his mind had been full of her. How was the news to be broken to her? He himself did not feel that he could leave his brother-in-law. There was a strong regard and sympathy between them; and his presence in the house of mourning would undoubtedly be useful to Paul for a while; besides, there were Marie's words—'Will you stay with him a few days—after—?'—which were binding on him. He must write, then; but it was only to be hoped that no newspaper would bring her the news before his letter could reach.
However, as the day wore on, Paul came noiselessly out of the quiet room where the white shrouded form seemed still to spread a tender presence round it, and said to Eustace with dry, piteous lips: