“My darling, my beloved!” he heard Inez whisper; “open your eyes just once, and tell me that I may call you mine if only for this one terrible moment.... This is our moment, dear—no one can take it from us!... Have you not seen how I have loved you, how I have struggled to keep you from knowing it?... Jack! Jack! this is the beginning and the end!”
He could endure the scene no longer. With a look of horror on his face, he sprang to his feet and glanced about him. He was alone in the garden. He stumbled rather than walked to the retaining wall, and rested against it for support.
“Great God!” he cried, aloud, “have I regained my mind only to lose it again?”
He glanced toward the house. There was no one in sight, but Helen was playing Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” upon the piano in the hall, and the sound of the music soothed him.
“Dreams—hallucinations,” he repeated to himself. “God! what an experience!”
XXVI
With Armstrong’s convalescence progressing so satisfactorily, Helen returned to her music with a clear conscience. She was determined that the influence upon him of her personal presence should be reduced as nearly as possible to a minimum. Naturally, during the period of his illness and the attendant weakness, she had been with him almost constantly; naturally he had turned to her with what seemed to be his former affection. But the die was cast, and the accident which for the time being interrupted the progress of events predestined to occur could in no way prevent their final accomplishment. Helen thought often of Uncle Peabody’s optimistic suggestion that the present condition was bound to straighten matters out, but she refused to be buoyed up by false hopes, only to suffer a harder blow when once again Armstrong became what she believed to be himself. She saw no gain in tuning up the heart-strings to their former pitch, when neither she nor Jack could again play upon them with any degree of harmony.
Helen was with her husband for whatever portion of the day he needed her, whether it was to read aloud to him, or to converse, or to wander about the garden. She served each meal to him with her own hands, and watched the progress of his improvement so carefully that nothing remained undone. Yet, with deliberate intention, she was with him no more than this. Whenever she found him interested in something or with some one who engaged his attention for the time being, she slipped away so quietly that he scarcely noticed it and devoted herself to her own interests, which she was desperately trying to make fill the void in her life. Her music was her greatest solace, for in it she found a response to her every mood. In the dim-lit hall of the villa she sat for hours at the piano, her fingers running over the keys, her mind pondering upon her complex problem—each action apparently separated from the other, yet in exact accord. Sometimes it was a nocturne of Chopin’s, sometimes an impromptu of Schubert’s; but always she found in the unspoken, poetic expression of the composer’s soul an answering sympathy which was lacking in other forms more tangible.