It was just after Helen went home that Lilian's health began to fail—to fail gently and slowly, but surely. She shut herself up at first, and lay all day listless and melancholy. She did not come down in the morning before John went out, but he usually found her on the sofa when he came in. And there she stayed, either on the sofa or half lost among the cushions of an arm-chair, during the evenings when John's friends came. But by and by the house-friends one by one ceased to drop in as they passed down the hall; other friends ceased to ring the bell: the old lively evenings were impossible with one so frail and delicate to be cared for.
Reyburn, to be sure, came every day, and no message could shut him out. If Lilian was not in the parlors, he ran up stairs into the little sitting-room: if he could not see Lilian, he would walk in and see her mother. Sometimes John took her out to drive—to give her a color, as he said—but he was unable to do it often, and then Reyburn took his place till she declared she would ride no more. It was not so easy to discover what ailed Lilian as it was to see she failed. One doctor said she had merely functional derangement of the heart; another talked about complicated depression of the nerves; and a third said she was whimsical, and nothing at all was the matter with her, and she had better marry and taste the hard realities of life, and she would soon be cured of her follies. But Lilian firmly and quietly refused to be married yet: possibly she knew that her emotions were not what they should be for marriage with the man to whom she was plighted; possibly hoped that time might make it right; possibly wanted nothing more definite than delay. Once John impressed Reyburn into his service in the matter: they were so thoroughly intimate, so like brothers of one family, that he appealed to him without a second thought. What Reyburn meant by urging her to fix the day for her wedding with John, Lilian might have marveled had he not kept his eyes on the floor while he spoke the few curt sentences, and held her hand with the grip of death. It was no marriage with John that Reyburn wanted for her, she knew too well: he also looked forward to delay. But she told John that when she was herself again it would be time enough to talk of marriage: she should not bind him to a dead woman. And somehow, though the relation between her and John remained the same, the usual evidences of it, one by one, had disappeared. If he took her in his arms, she slipped away; if he bent to kiss her lips, she held her cheek. Still, though caresses ceased, the tender word and the kindly glance remained. John fancied the rest to be but a part of the nervous whims of her illness, from which she was to recover in time; and he waited with all the old love in his soul. And as for Lilian, the old affection was with her too—the affection of childhood and girlhood, the deep and grateful feeling associated with all her life—but it struggled and wrestled with a novel power that while it promised pleasure gave only pain. It made her suffer to see John suffer: she hurt him as little as she could, but for the life of her she was able to do no differently. She thought it would be better for him if she should die; and when she found his great sad eyes fastened on her, with their longing for her return to him, she wished to disappear out of the world and his memory together. She grew whiter and thinner, more tired and sore at heart, all the time, till the two years that had been fixed as the period of their engagement had passed—grew so transparent and spiritual that sometimes, as John hung over her in despair, he felt as if, instead of being bound to a dead woman, he were already bound to an angel.
One evening, after an absence, Reyburn came in as John sat reading by Lilian's side: he brushed away the book and insisted on their playing an odd new game of cards, and Lilian unaccountably brightened and sparkled and laughed, as in the old time, for more than an hour; and as he left them at last he came back to declare his belief that a change was all Lilian needed—other climates, other scenes. "Come, Sterling," said he, "my little yacht, the Beachbird, sails on a cruise next week. I will have a cabin fitted up for Miss Lilian if you will take her and her mother and come along. The house can keep itself; your clerks can keep your books; we shall all escape the east winds. It will be a certain cure for her, and do you good yourself."
And talking of it lightly at first, presently it grew feasible—all the more so that Helen and her father were spending their second winter down there in one of those "summer isles of Eden," and word could be sent to them in advance to be in readiness to join the Beachbird. And the end of all the talk was that at the close of the next week John's business had been left in the hands of others, and John and Lilian and her mother were on the Beachbird's deck as she slipped down the harbor.
Mr. Reyburn's prophecy proved true: whether the sea-breeze fanned Lilian into fresh life, whether there were healing balms in the perpetual summer through which they sailed, or whether she abandoned herself to the pleasures of the flying hours, she began to regain strength and color, her languor disappeared, she spent the day in the soft blissful air with her books or work, her mother knitting and nodding near by; while John, if not sick himself, yet feeling very miserable, lay on a mattress on the deck, sometimes dozing, sometimes following with his eye the graceful lines and snowy dazzle of the perfect little yacht as mast and sheet and shroud made their relief upon the sky; sometimes listening to Lilian and Reyburn; sometimes watching them as they walked up and down in the twilight, her dress fluttering round her and her fair hair blowing in the wind. John wondered at her as he watched her: she seemed to be possessed with an unnatural life; a flickering, dancing sort of fire burned in her eye, on her cheek and lip, in her restless manner: she was like one who after long slumber felt herself alive and receiving happiness at every pore, but a strange, treacherous sort of happiness that might slip away and leave her at any moment, and which she was ever on the alert to keep.
One night Lilian's mother had gone below, John had followed, and they were long since folded in their quiet dreams; and Lilian, unable to sleep, had at last arisen and thrown on some garments, and wrapping a great cloak about her, had stolen on deck. The person still pacing the deck, who saw her ascend and flit along with her fair hair streaming over her white cloak and her face shining white in the starlight, might have taken her for a spirit. But he was not the kind of man that believes in spirits. He went and leaned with her as she leaned over the vessel's edge, and watched the glittering rent they made in the water. They were side by side: now and then the wind blew the silken ends of her hair across his cheek, and his hand lay over hers as it rested on the rail; now and then they looked at one another; now and then they spoke.
"Are you happy, Lilian?" he said.
"Oh, perfectly!" she answered him.
As she said it there was an outcry, a sudden lurch of the vessel, a flapping of the sails and ropes, and a vast shadow swept by them, the hull of a huge steamer, so near that they could almost have touched it with an outstretched hand. But as it ploughed its way on and left them unharmed and rocking on its great waves, Reyburn released her from the arm he had flung about her in the moment's dismay—the arm that had never folded her before, that never did again.
"Oh no! no!" sighed Lilian with a shiver as she quickly drew away—"not perfectly, oh not perfectly! That is impossible here, where that black death can at any moment extinguish all our light."