Chapter II

Gerard Fane's victoria drew up at the iron gate of No. 5 Ilbury Road, Kensington, at a quarter past four the following afternoon. A narrow strip of garden divided the sculptor's big red house from the road. Ornamental ironwork on a brick foundation closed it in. The great studio, with its huge windows and its fluted pillars, was built out at one end. The failing sunlight glittered on its glass, and the dingy sparrows perched upon the roof to catch the parting radiance as the twilight fell. The doctor glanced round him and thought, "How hard this man must have worked! In London this is a little palace."

"Will you come into the studio, sir, please?" said the footman in answer to his summons. "Mr Brune is there at present."

"Surely he cannot be working," thought the doctor, as he followed the man down a glass-covered paved passage, and through a high doorway across which a heavy curtain fell. "If so, he must possess resolution almost more than mortal."

He passed beyond the curtain, and looked round him curiously.

The studio was only dimly lit now, for daylight was fast fading. On a great open hearth, with dogs, a log-fire was burning; and beside it, on an old-fashioned oaken settle, sat a woman in a loose cream-coloured tea-gown. She was half turning round to speak to Reginald Brune, who stood a little to her left, clad in a long blouse, fastened round his waist with a band. He had evidently recently finished working, for his hands still bore evident traces of labour, and in front of him, on a raised platform, stood a statue that was not far from completion. The doctor's eyes were attracted from the woman by the log-fire, from his patient, by the lifeless, white, nude figure that seemed to press forward out of the gathering gloom. The sculptor and his wife had not heard him announced, apparently, for they continued conversing in low tones, and he paused in the doorway, strangely fascinated--he could scarcely tell why--by the marble creation of a dying man.

The statue, which was life size, represented the figure of a beautiful, grave youth, standing with one foot advanced, as if on the point of stepping forward. His muscular arms hung loosely; his head was slightly turned aside as in the attitude of one who listens for a repetition of some vague sound heard at a distance. His whole pose suggested an alert, yet restrained, watchfulness. The triumph of the sculptor lay in the extraordinary suggestion of life he had conveyed into the marble. His creature lived as many mollusc men never live. Its muscles seemed tense, its body quivering with eagerness to accomplish--what? To attack, to repel, to protect, to perform some deed demanding manfulness, energy, free, fearless strength.

"That marble thing could slay if necessary," thought Gerard Fane, with a thrill of the nerves all through him that startled him, and recalled him to himself.

He stepped forward to the hearth quietly, and Brune turned and took him by the hand.

"I did not hear you," the sculptor said. "The man must have opened the door very gently. Sydney, this is Dr Gerard Fane, who is kindly looking after me."

The woman by the fire had risen, and stood in the firelight and the twilight, which seemed to join hands just where she was. She greeted the specialist in a girl's young voice, and he glanced at her with the furtive thought, "Does she know yet?"

She looked twenty-two, not more.

Her eyes were dark grey, and her hair was bronze. Her figure was thin almost to emaciation; but health glowed in her smooth cheeks, and spoke in her swift movements and easy gestures. Her expression was responsive and devouringly eager. Life ran in her veins with turbulence, never with calm. Her mouth was pathetic and sensitive, but there was an odd suggestion of almost boyish humour in her smile.

Before she smiled, Fane thought, "She knows."

Afterwards, "She cannot know."

"Have you a few moments to spare?" Brune asked him. "Will you have tea with us?"

Fane looked at Mrs Brune and assented. He felt a strange interest in this man and this woman. The tragedy of their situation appealed to him, although he lived in a measure by foretelling tragedies. Mrs Brune touched an electric bell let into the oak-panelled wall, and her husband drew a big chair forward to the hearth.

As he was about to sit down in it, Gerard Fane's eyes were again irresistibly drawn towards the statue; and a curious fancy, born, doubtless, of the twilight that invents spectres and of the firelight that evokes imaginations, came to him, and made him for a moment hold his breath.

It seemed to him that the white face menaced him, that the white body had a soul, and that the soul cried out against him.

His hand trembled on the back of the chair. Then he laughed to himself at the absurd fancy, and sat down.

"Your husband has been working?" he said to Mrs Brune.

"Yes, all the day. I could not tempt him out for even five minutes. But then, he has had a holiday, as he says, although it was only a fortnight. That was not very long for--for a honeymoon."

As she said the last sentence she blushed a little, and shot a swift, half-tender, half-reproachful glance at her husband. But he did not meet it; he only looked into the fire, while his brows slightly contracted.

"I think Art owns more than half his soul," the girl said, with the flash of a smile. "He only gives to me the fortnights and to Art the years."

There was a vague jealousy in her voice; but then the footman brought in tea, and she poured it out, talking gaily.

From her conversation, Fane gathered that she had no idea of her husband's condition. With a curious and fascinating naturalness she spoke of her marriage, of her intentions for the long future.

"If Reginald is really seedy, Dr Fane," she said, "get him well quickly, that he may complete his commissions. Because, you know, he has promised, when they are finished, to take me to Italy, and to Greece, to the country of Phidias, whose mantle has fallen upon my husband."

"Do not force Dr Fane into untruth," said Brune, with an attempt at a smile.

"And is that statue a commission?" Fane asked, indicating the marble figure, that seemed to watch them and to listen.

"No; that is an imaginative work on which I have long been engaged. I call it, 'A Silent Guardian.'"

"It is very beautiful," the doctor said. "What is your idea exactly? What is the figure guarding?"

Brune and his wife glanced at one another--he gravely, she with a confident smile.

Then he said, "I leave that to the imagination."

Dr Fane looked again at the statue, and said slowly, "You have wrought it so finely that in this light my nerves tell me it is alive."

Mrs Brune looked triumphant.

"All the world would feel so if they could see it," she said; "but it is not to be exhibited. That is our fancy--his and mine. And now I will leave you together for a few minutes. Heal him of his ills, Dr Fane, won't you?"

She vanished through the door at the end of the studio. The two men stood together by the hearth.

"She does not know?" Fane asked.

The other leaned his head upon his hand, which was pressed against the oak mantelpiece.

"I am too cowardly to tell her," he said in a choked voice. "You must."

"And when?"

"To-day."

There was a silence. Then, in his gravest professional manner, Fane gave some directions, and wrote others down, while the sculptor looked into the dancing fire. When Fane had finished:--

"Shall I tell her now?" he asked gently.

Brune nodded without speaking. His face looked drawn and contorted as he moved towards the door. His emotion almost strangled him, and the effort to remain calm put a strain upon him that was terrible.

Gerard Fane was left alone for a moment--alone with the statue whose personality, it seemed to him, pervaded the great studio. In its attitude there was a meaning, in its ghost-like face and blind eyes a resolution of intention, that took possession of his soul. He told himself that it was lifeless, inanimate, pulseless, bloodless marble; that it contained no heart to beat with love or hate, no soul to burn with impulse or with agony; that its feet could never walk, its hands never seize or slay, its lips never utter sounds of joy or menace. Then he looked at it again, and he shuddered.

"I am over-working," he said to himself; "my nerves are beginning to play me tricks. I must be careful."

And he forcibly turned his thoughts from the marble that could never feel to the man and woman so tragically circumstanced, and to his relation towards them.

A doctor is so swiftly plunged into intimacy with strangers. To the sculptor it was as if Fane held the keys of the gates of life and death for him; as if, during that quarter of an hour in the consulting-room, the doctor had decided, almost of his own volition, that death should cut short a life of work and of love. And even to Fane himself it seemed as if his fiat had precipitated, even brought about, a tragedy that appealed to his imagination with peculiar force. His position towards this curiously interesting girl was strange. He had seen her for a quarter of an hour only, and now it was his mission to cause her the most weary pain that she might, perhaps, ever know. The opening of the studio door startled him, and his heart, that usually beat so calmly, throbbed almost with violence as Mrs Brune came up to him.

"What is it?" she asked, facing him, and looking him full in the eyes with a violence of interrogation that was positively startling. "What is it you have to tell me? Reginald says you have ordered him to keep quiet--that you wish me to help you in--in something. Is he ill? May he not finish his commissions?"

"He is ill," said Gerard Fane, with a straightforward frankness that surprised himself.

She kept her eyes on his face.

"Very ill?"

"Sit down," the doctor said, taking her hands and gently putting her into a chair.

With the rapidity of intellect peculiar to women, she heard in those two words the whole truth. Her head drooped forward. She put out her hands as if to implore Fane's silence.

"Don't speak," she murmured. "Don't say it; I know."

He looked away. His eyes rested on the statue that made a silent third in their sad conference. How its attitude suggested that of a stealthy listener, bending to hear the more distinctly! Its expressionless eyes met his, and was there not a light in them? He knew there was not, yet he caught himself saying mentally:--

"What does he think of this?" and wondering about the workings of a soul that did not, could not, exist.

Presently the girl moved slightly, and said:--

"He only knew this for certain yesterday?"

"Only yesterday."

"Ah! but he must have suspected it long ago,"--she pointed towards the statue--"when he began that."

"I don't understand," Fane said. "What can that marble have to do with his health or illness?"

"When we first began to love each other," she said, "he began to work on that. It was to be his marriage gift to me, my guardian angel. He told me he would put all his soul into it, and that sometimes he fancied, if he died before me, his soul would really enter into that statue and watch over and guard me. 'A Silent Guardian' he has always called it. He must have known."

"I do not think so," Fane said. "It was impossible he should."

The girl stood up. The tears were running over her face now. She turned towards the statue.

"And he will be cold--cold like that!" she cried in a heart-breaking voice. "His eyes will be blind and his hands nerveless, and his voice silent."

She suddenly swayed and fainted into Fane's arms. He held her a moment; and when he laid her down, a reluctance to let the slim form, lifeless though it was, slip out of his grasp, came upon him. He remembered the previous day, the doomed man going down the street--his thought as he looked from the window of his consulting-room, "I am sorry that man is going to die."

Now, as he leant over the white girl, he whispered, forming the very words with his lips, "I am not sorry."

And the statue seemed to bend and to listen.