“You must not misunderstand me—must not jump to the conclusion that there is any certainty to go upon; there are not yet sufficient data to build upon either way.”
There was none of the too-frequent irony and sarcasm in her tone, and yet he realized with a horrible pang that she was warning him not to be too hopeful of—not to count too confidently upon—a speedy release.
“You have been suffering pain and misery all this time, and I have never guessed it! Could brutish stupidity go further?” he ejaculated, finding speech at last, though of a choked sort.
“No,” she answered, her rigid truthfulness in revolt against the exaggeration of his self-accusation. “You have no cause to blame yourself; there has been nothing noticeably different in me. There need not be, as far as I can gather”—she paused a moment—“for some little while yet; and I have suffered no pain to speak of. If pain comes, I am under no apprehension of not being well able to endure it.”
The steady confidence of Mrs. Tancred’s tone was not needed to assure one who had lived beside her for fifteen years of her endowments in the way of dogged endurance. But the certainty that she would face the reality of death with the same high courage as she had faced the mockery of life did not go far to allay the stings and bites of his remorse. While she had been quietly bracing herself to meet the grip of a mortal disease, he had been mooning unobservantly along beside her, full of vapourish half-guilty dreams and sickly discontents.
Presently Camilla spoke again. “I do not think that I should have mentioned the subject to you yet awhile—not until I had something more definite to tell, if”—a very slight pause this time—“I had not made up my mind, after full consideration given to the subject during the hours of last night, that, in view of the possibilities ahead of me—of us, it would be advisable to make some changes—one change, at least—in the arrangement of my—of our lives.”
No sound broke the reverence of his listening silence, but he felt as if there were a ton’s weight on the top of his head.
“If this is the beginning of the end—if, whether by inches or by some quicker action of the malady, I am to die, I think it would be better that Bonnybell should leave us.”
Edward bent his head in acquiescence. He had not consciously suspected what his wife was leading up to, yet when the climax came he felt that he had known all along that it was coming. A very sensible addition to the tumultuous wretchedness of his feelings lay in the fact that he could not disguise from himself that it came as a blow.
“I quite understand,” he answered. “It is perfectly natural that if you have to lead an invalid life, you should not wish to have a stranger living in your house.”