He was in one of those states of acute mental tension in which the mind becomes so easily the prey of the wildest fantasies, and slowly, laboriously, he began to frame a connection between the lifeless marble creature and his own dreary trouble.
Because of one moment of folly Sydney treated him as a pariah, as a criminal. Her gentle nature had been transformed suddenly.
By what subtle influence?
Fane remembered the day of his first visit to Ilbury Road, and his curious imagination that the statue recognised and hated him.
Had that hatred prompted action? Was there a devil lurking in the white, cold marble to work his ruin? When Sydney sent him out of her presence for ever, the watching face had seemed to smile.
Fane set his teeth in the darkness. He was no longer sane. He was possessed. The tragedy of thought within him invited him to the execution of another tragedy. He stretched out his hand with the rehearsing action of one meditating a blow.
His hand fell upon an oak table that stood against the wall, and hit on something smooth and cold. It was a long Oriental dagger that the dead sculptor had brought from the East. Fane's fingers closed on it mechanically. The frigid steel thrilled his hot palm, and a pulse in his forehead started beating till there was a dull, senseless music in his ears that irritated him.
He wanted to listen for the return of Sydney's carriage.
His soul was ablaze with defiance. He was alone in the darkness with his enemy; the cold, deadly, blind, pulseless thing that yet was alive; the silent thing that had yet whispered malign accusations of him to the woman he loved; the nerveless thing that poisoned a beautiful mind against him, that stole the music from his harp of life and let loose the winds upon his summer.