“Sydney! Sydney!” he said.
“Why, then he bought death from you. Ah!”
She put her hand on the bell, and kept it there till the servant hurried in.
“Show Dr Fane out,” she said. “He will not come here again.”
And Fane, seeing the uselessness of protest, ready to strike himself for his folly, went without a word. Only, as he went, he cast one look at the statue. Was there not the flicker of a smile in its marble eyes?
IV
People said Dr Gerard Fane was over-working, that he was not himself. His manner to patients was sometimes very strange, brusque, impatient, intolerant. A brutality stole over him, and impressed the world that went to him for healing very unfavourably. The ills of humanity rendered him now sarcastic instead of pitiful, a fatal attitude of mind for a physician to adopt; and he was even known to pronounce on sufferers sentence of death with a callous indifference that was inhuman as well as impolitic. As the weeks went by, his reception-room became less crowded than of old. There were even moments in his day when he had leisure to sit down and think, to give a rein to his mood of impotent misery and despair. Sydney had never consented to receive him again. Woman-like—for she could be extravagantly yet calmly unreasonable—she had clung to the idea that Fane had hastened, if not actually brought about, her husband's death by his treatment. She made no accusation. She simply closed her doors upon him. She had a horror of him, which never left her.
Again and again Fane called. She was always denied to him. Then he met her in the street. She cut him. He spoke to her. She passed on without a reply. At last a dull fury took possession of him. Her treatment of him was flagrantly unjust. He had wished the sculptor to die, but he had allowed nature to accomplish her designs unaided, even to some extent hampered and hindered by his medical skill and care. He loved Sydney with the violence of a man whose emotions had been sedulously repressed through youth, vanquished but not killed by ambition, and the need to work for the realisation of that ambition. The tumults of early manhood, never given fair play, now raged in his breast, from which they should have been long since expelled, and played havoc with every creed of sense, and every built-up theory of wisdom and experience. Fane became by degrees a monomaniac.
He brooded incessantly over his developed but starved passion, over the thought that Sydney chose to believe him a murderer. At first, when he was trying day after day to see her, he clung to his love for her; but when he found her obdurate, set upon wronging him in her thought, his passion, verging towards despair, changed, and was coloured with hatred. By degrees he came to dwell more upon the injury done to him by her suspicion than upon his love of her, and then it was that a certain wildness crept into his manner, and alarmed or puzzled those who consulted him.