“I'm glad you 've come, Mr. Sylvester. He's took worse, nurse says. His temperature has gone up to 104.”
He nodded, swallowed the drink, and went upstairs. The nurse was bending over the bed in the dimly lit room, adjusting the ice-bag. The sick man's portmanteau had been unpacked, and the contents were piled upon a chest of drawers. The clothes he had been wearing were hanging from a row of pegs against the door. The flap of the jacket turned outward, revealed in the breast-pocket a letter-case stuffed with papers. With the air of a man accustomed to prompt action, Sylvester withdrew the letter-case and locked it up. The nurse confirmed the housekeeper's statements.
“He has been delirious at times,” she added.
Sylvester bent down and placed the thermometer in position, then waited, looking gravely down upon his friend. Leroux's face was congested. His hands moved feebly.
Now and then he moaned. Sylvester examined him closely, inspected the temperature chart of the last few hours, questioned the nurse as to their history. A surmise that had been troubling him most of the day now converted itself into a certainty. Leroux must have been drinking heavily of late. Thus it was that meningitis had set in from the concussion. But why should Leroux, once the sanest and cleanest of men, have taken to drink? The pity of it smote Sylvester. The gay spirit brutalised, the noble mind o'erthrown. His heart yearned over the unconscious man. His father had spoken of Leroux being in trouble. He conjectured pitiful histories of downfall. With a sigh he turned away, gave final directions, and went to bed.
Three hours later he was waked. The nurse outside the door was calling him. Accustomed to sudden rising, he leaped up, and thrusting on dressing-gown and slippers, went back to the sick room. Leroux was in full tide of violent delirium, his words, wonderfully articulate, striking almost spectrally upon the utter silence of the house—“It is better to die than to live in hell on earth. If you give me up, God Almighty will give me up. … What is his love to mine?”
The nurse, who had been on duty since ten, was young and nervous.
“He has been like this for an hour. I couldn't stand it any longer.”
“We will go away to the south,” continued Leroux. “No one minds what a painter does—For God's sake don't give me up—”
“You can go to bed, nurse,” said Sylvester. “I'll sit with him.”
The tired girl, glad to gain some extra and unexpected hours of slumber, retired gratefully. Sylvester sat by the bedside. It was as well, he thought, that the man's poor secrets should be blabbed into a friend's ears instead of a stranger's. He tried not to listen, but to think of other things—Ella and his meeting with her on the morrow. But the clear voice, now rising in ghastly emphasis, now sinking to a murmur losing itself in guttural incoherence, continued its tale of love and despair, so that Sylvester could not choose but piece it together in his mind. It was a common tale of unlawful love: a passionate man, a yielding woman, a deceived and adoring husband. Sylvester, whose reserved, chaste nature had caused him to train himself in a narrow groove of orthodox morality, felt strangely repelled by the confession. He had always regarded Leroux as the soul of honour. The thief of a man's wife was lowered in his esteem.
There was a silence. He rested his head on his hand and wearily dozed. Suddenly came a cry from the bed, a cry of great pain and longing—
“Constance—Constance!”
The name, fitting in with a waking dream, brought Sylvester with a leap to his feet, and he looked in foolish bewilderment at Leroux. The latter murmured incoherently. Had he dreamed the voice crying out the name so distinctly? He held his breath, trying to seize the half-formed syllables. “Constance—my love—” had come again. He had not been dreaming. The voice rose once more, and each word came sharply cut from the sick man's lips.
“Sylvester will never know.”
Then the tremendous horror of the revelation crashed down upon the man, stunning his brain, paralysing his limbs. The great drops of sweat stood on his forehead, and his eyes were staring. And Leroux, who had struck upon a quieter vein of reminiscence, babbled on of the happy days of his love.
The first thunder-clap had passed. Thought began to return. Sylvester sank into a chair and stared at the ground. The once clear vision of the past was distorted into a phantasmagoria of leering shapes. He shivered as with an ague, rubbed his eyes, and looked sharply at the man on the bed. Which of the two was delirious? Leroux raved of death and despair. The involuntary confession was too complete; mistake was impossible. Yet the other was impossible. Constance guilty of this hideousness? Her life a lie? The firm anchorage of his soul but shifting sand? He had worshipped her as more than woman—as the purest, chastest thing that God had ever given to man for his guidance. It was a ghastly figment of Leroux's drink-besotted brain.
He rose, went to the drawer in which he had locked Leroux's letter-case, and taking it out with shaking hands, deliberately turned the contents on to the corner of the chest. In spite of the revulsion of faith he had a sickening certainty of finding there what he hoped he would not find.
There it was, staring him in the face amid a heap of stamps, visiting cards, pencilled memoranda slips, letters, and law papers: a soiled, crumpled letter in his dead wife's hand. He took it up, and from it dropped a lock of fair hair—her hair. He read it through steadily. It was a letter of passionate love, leaving no doubt as to guilt; of despair, almost madness; such a letter of abandonment as a woman writes but to one man in a lifetime. It bore no date save the day of the week—Wednesday. Even in his agony he contrasted the difference between this woman and the serene, methodical wife who would as soon have left a letter undated as the household dinner unordered. He threw the letter and the lock of hair into the fire, and watched the two little flames in the glowing coals. The paper curled, the hair writhed; then a little light ash remained.
Methodically he replaced the cards and papers in the letter-case and locked it up again in the drawer. Then he stood at the foot of the bed and watched the man who had done him this great wrong, his brain on fire with bewildering fury. The name of his wife came again from the man's lips. A red cloud passed before Sylvester's eyes. For a moment he seemed to lose consciousness of manhood, to become a wild beast. When he recovered, he found himself glaring into Leroux's eyes with his fingers at his throat. How near he had been to murder he did not know.
He drew himself up and wiped the sweat from his forehead, shaken to the depths by the beast impulse. The reaction brought self-control. He resumed his vigil by the bedside, listening grimly to the words of Leroux, now less frequent and distinct. Yet though he could master his actions, he did not combat with the increasing hatred that took the place of the old affection. At times he considered calmly whether such a man should be allowed to live. In his weak state one quick blow over the heart would stop its beating for ever. The man had done more than wrong him. He had killed his soul, made it an awful thing to live. Yet, as if in contempt of such imaginings, he rose once or twice and changed the bandages with a surgeon's delicate handling, and moistened the swollen lips with ice.
Gradually all the phases of realisation developed themselves in his mind. Far off memories recurred, touched the flesh. It was their marriage bed whereon Leroux was lying.
He shuddered from the manifold horror of it, and for the first time broke into a hoarse cry.
Toward morning the fever lowered and Leroux lay still. Streaks of a ghostly daylight crept in through the Venetian blinds and barred the floor. The nurse came to take over her watch. Sylvester gave brief instructions, and, going to his room, threw himself on his bed and slept heavily. At the moment of waking he had a sense of nightmare, was all but congratulating himself on his release; but another instant brought the full flood of memory. He rose, shaved, dressed himself as usual, and went down to breakfast. At the bottom of the stairs was a quick patter of feet and two little arms were thrown around his limbs. It was Dorothy. He started back, looked at her stupidly. Then roughly disengaging her, he thrust her