When Fane saw Mrs Brune leaning over her husband, touching the damp brow with her cool, soft fingers, or the dry, parched lips with her soft, rosy lips, he turned away in a sick fury, and said to himself:—
“He is dying, he is dying. It will soon be over.”
For with a desperate love had entered into him a desperate jealousy, and even while he ministered to Brune he hated him.
And the statue, with blind eyes, observed the drama enacted by those three people, the two men and the woman, till the curtain fell and one of the actors made his final exit.
Fane's nerves still played him tricks sometimes. He could not look at the statue without a shudder; and while Brune imaginatively read into the marble face love and protection, the doctor saw there menace and hatred. He came to feel almost jealous of the statue, because Sydney loved it and fell in with her husband's fancy that his life was fast ebbing into and vitalising the marble limbs, that his soul would watch her from the eyes that were now without expression and thought.
When Fane entered the studio, he always involuntarily cast a glance at the white figure—at first, a glance of shuddering distaste, then, as he acknowledged to himself his love for Sydney, a glance of defiance, of challenge.
One evening, after a day of many appointments and much mental stress and strain, he drove up to Ilbury Road, was admitted, and shown as usual into the studio. He found it empty. Only the statue greeted him silently in the soft lamplight, that scarcely accomplished more than the defining of the gloom.
“My master is upstairs, sir,” said the footman. “I will tell him you are here.”
In a moment Sydney entered, with a lagging step and pale cheeks. Without thinking of the usual polite form of greeting, she said to Fane, “He is much worse to-day. There is a change in him, a horrible change. Dr Fane, just now when I was talking to him it seemed to me that he was a long way off. I caught hold of his hands to reassure myself. I held them. I heard him speaking, but it was as if his words came from a distance. What does it mean? He is not—he is not—”
She looked the word he could not speak.