CHAPTER XXVII

There was nothing unusual in Camilla’s spending a day of unexplained occupation in London. It therefore excited no surprise when, on a certain Saturday at the end of the first week in February, she departed on one of her silent excursions. It could not have had for object shopping, an occupation for which Mrs. Tancred cherished a dislike as vigorous as were most of her feelings and opinions. If her companions gave a thought to the subject, it was to decide that her errand must be one of the many noiseless good deeds which she hid as if they were crimes. The trumpet blown before actions, so inspiriting a sound in Felicity’s ears, was harshest discord in her sister-in-law’s.

Camilla returned by dinner-time, but did not during or after that repast give any of the slight indications which sometimes escaped her as to the where or the what of the day’s work. She was rather, though not very noticeably, more silent than usual. Not till after luncheon on Sunday did any perceptible change in her habits appear.

To Edward, dreamily puffing in the smoking-room, where Bonnybell, despite all her delicate hints, had never been invited to join him, his wife appeared. It was the hour when she was wont to retire to her religious exercises; and the inexorable rigidity with which, in the face of any and every obstacle, she adhered to the rule caused a look of surprise to dawn on her husband’s face as he took his cigarette out of his mouth, and rose courteously, as he always did, to receive her.

“You are surprised, and I dare say not particularly pleased to see me?” she said, with her usual crude directness.

“Why that fleer?” he asked kindly and playfully.

“Why indeed?” she answered. “It is not the spirit in which I wish to enter upon a subject that has grave bearings on both our lives.”

Her tone made him a little uneasy, though not so much so as if she had been any one else, since he knew her habit of viewing all life--even its slightnesses--from a serious standpoint.

“Whatever it is, let us at least face it under as comfortable conditions as we can,” he answered with a resigned smile, wheeling the austerest of his armchairs, and the one therefore best suited to her liking, nearer the fire for her.

He was surprised at not receiving a rebuke for the luxuriousness and self-indulgence of the sentiment, but she only assented mildly--

“Yes, if you do not mind, I will sit down, as what I have to say must take a certain amount of time.”

There was a pause. Camilla had laid aside her spectacles--a sign of good augury in her husband’s experience for her amiability; and now sat with her gaze abstractedly fixed on the old sporting and coaching coloured prints, which the eyes of her ugly solemn childhood had contemplated. He waited with an air of patient deference. Once, long ago, an ill-natured remark had reached his ears to the effect that his manner to his wife was charmingly _filial_, and though the jeer had cut him to the quick, he had made no consequent change in it.

In a few minutes Camilla had apparently collected and marshalled her ideas, and began to speak. The opening took him by surprise.

“I do not think that I have ever been open to the charge of being a _malade imaginaire_.”

There was a startled touch in his answer. “I think you have often been a _bien portante imaginaire_, and overworked yourself grossly in consequence.”

“I have not felt in quite my usual health for the last three months. At first I attached no importance to the fact, recognizing that at fifty-one cannot expect to have the vigour of twenty-five.” The appearance in conversation of the grand climacteric was always, as they both knew, a bugbear to Edward; but for once he recognized that there was no intention of galling him in its introduction. “But of late”--she paused, as if to choose the words best fitted for a weighty communication; then went on steadily--“I have had reason to suspect that something further must be wrong with me than the failure of power attendant upon the approach of age.”

At another moment he would have reproached her with a phrasing that might have better befitted her had twenty more years been added to the detestable fifty, which were always being thrown in his teeth, but now a painful suspense as to what was coming kept him dumb.

“Such being the case, I thought it wise to consult a specialist upon cases such as I concluded mine to be. I therefore made an appointment with Dr.----, which I went up to London yesterday to keep.”

“And never told me a word about it!” he broke in, with an almost angry upbraiding in his tone.

“Why should I?” she answered, looking at him with a stoical kindness. “Have you the power of life and death in your hands? I knew”--an expression of resolute pride settling on and dignifying her rugged face--“that whatever he told me, I should be well able to bear it.”

“What did he tell you?”

The question shot out with an abruptness most unlike Edward’s doubtful and suggestive methods, but the tidings sprung upon him had taken him by the throat.

“He could give no decided opinion; there was mischief undoubtedly--yes, but whether malignant or _benignant_” (a scornful accent on the last word)--“you know the patter of medical phraseology!--it was impossible, at the present stage of the disease, to decide. I am to visit him a second time at the end of two months, when he may perhaps be better able to judge, though even then my fate may be still uncertain. The malady may successfully attack life, it may be comparatively harmless; it may be arrested, it may not; its progress may be slow, may be fast. There, you know as much as I do!”

Looking in his face, she could not think that it was indifference which kept him still mute at the end of her cool and lucid statement.

“I have never been much afraid to die,” Camilla went on presently, in a voice absolutely destitute of all excitement, but with a sort of reverence in it. “Death or life! If I do not deceive myself, I am ready to face the one, I am willing to face the other.” (Across the remorseful smart in the husband’s heart there flashed the painful doubt as to which alternative the willingness applied to.) “The point of the trial lies to me in the uncertainty. I have always been too fond of certainties; that is, doubtless”--with an acquiescent awe in her tone--“why this particular form of ordeal has been sent me.”

Edward had never been much a master of words, and out of the tumult of rueful pain and dazing surprise which now filled his heart and brain, none came to his aid. He could only catch the lean hand nearest him as it hung over the arm of its owner’s chair and press the oldfashioned rings into the spare flesh in an access of remorseful sympathy.

She let her fingers lie in his clasp for a moment, then quickly withdrew them.

“You must not misunderstand me--must not jump to the conclusion that there is any certainty to go upon; there are not yet sufficient data to build upon either way.”

There was none of the too-frequent irony and sarcasm in her tone, and yet he realized with a horrible pang that she was warning him not to be too hopeful of--not to count too confidently upon--a speedy release.

“You have been suffering pain and misery all this time, and I have never guessed it! Could brutish stupidity go further?” he ejaculated, finding speech at last, though of a choked sort.

“No,” she answered, her rigid truthfulness in revolt against the exaggeration of his self-accusation. “You have no cause to blame yourself; there has been nothing noticeably different in me. There need not be, as far as I can gather”--she paused a moment--“for some little while yet; and I have suffered no pain to speak of. If pain comes, I am under no apprehension of not being well able to endure it.”

The steady confidence of Mrs. Tancred’s tone was not needed to assure one who had lived beside her for fifteen years of her endowments in the way of dogged endurance. But the certainty that she would face the reality of death with the same high courage as she had faced the mockery of life did not go far to allay the stings and bites of his remorse. While she had been quietly bracing herself to meet the grip of a mortal disease, he had been mooning unobservantly along beside her, full of vapourish half-guilty dreams and sickly discontents.

Presently Camilla spoke again. “I do not think that I should have mentioned the subject to you yet awhile--not until I had something more definite to tell, if”--a very slight pause this time--“I had not made up my mind, after full consideration given to the subject during the hours of last night, that, in view of the possibilities ahead of me--of us, it would be advisable to make some changes--one change, at least--in the arrangement of my--of our lives.”

No sound broke the reverence of his listening silence, but he felt as if there were a ton’s weight on the top of his head.

“If this is the beginning of the end--if, whether by inches or by some quicker action of the malady, I am to die, I think it would be better that Bonnybell should leave us.”

Edward bent his head in acquiescence. He had not consciously suspected what his wife was leading up to, yet when the climax came he felt that he had known all along that it was coming. A very sensible addition to the tumultuous wretchedness of his feelings lay in the fact that he could not disguise from himself that it came as a blow.

“I quite understand,” he answered. “It is perfectly natural that if you have to lead an invalid life, you should not wish to have a stranger living in your house.”

“You quite misunderstand me,” she retorted, with a good infusion of the wonted sharpness in her tone. “Bonnybell is no longer a stranger to either you or me, and it is a farce to pretend that she is; and I have not the least intention of leading an invalid life. I hope to do a good deal of work yet, to go on working, if possible, nearly to the end.”

He had heartily hailed the surliness of her voice, as something normal and healthy, but he left her free from interruption to explain the idea which he had failed to comprehend. It was a minute or two before she did so.

“I think,” she said, the pettishness of eye and tone giving place to a deep solemnity, “that if these are to be the final months of my life, I ought to try and keep them as free as possible from unnecessary temptations to irritability and anger; from profitless friction to a temper which through all these years I have failed--as you know, to your cost--to bring under proper control.”

Courteous as he was by nature and training, it did not occur to Edward to utter a polite contradiction of a statement whose truth was so painfully well known to them both. He only made a slight gesture that might mean assent.

“My motive, as I have stated it, sounds wholly selfish; but it is not so”--her voice sank slightly--“for you, too, it is better that she should go.”

At that he turned white. “Of what do you suspect me?”

“Of what do I suspect you?” she repeated, looking at him with a remorseful kindness. “Of nothing worse than of wishing to put a little colour into the life I have made so grey for you.”

There was none of the satiric bitterness with which she often alluded to the failure in the matter of happiness of their joint life voyage, only pitying pain; and only pitying pain, in full measure, rang in the remonstrance of his reply.

“Do not you think that you have made it greyer by always taking for granted that it must be grey?”

She assented almost gently. “It is possible. Since the great initial mistake, I have gone from one error of judgment to another, and I am not sure”--with an accent of humiliation--“that though I did it for the best, though I thought I saw the path of duty plain before me, that the last has not been the gravest of all.”

He did not ask her what that last and crowning lapse from wisdom had been. He made neither protest nor asseveration, and for a minute or two they sat gravely looking at the ashes in the grate, as if they had been those of her long-departed and his wasted youth. He had taken her hand again, and she suffered him to hold it longer this time. But even while it lay in its cold dryness in his, even while his heart seemed too brimful of ruth, of horrified sorrow and stunned surprise, to have room for any other denizens, there stole into it the insidious thought, “If Bonnybell is to be turned out, what will become of her?”