CHAPTER XXIII.

Arrived at the house, Fulvia was met almost at once by a servant, who told her that her husband was very ill and in severe pain.

‘I will go to him,’ she said in a perfectly unmoved voice, and when the servant had gone she closed her eyes for a moment, as if to shut out what was immediately around her.

In truth, she needed all the strength that lay in her nature to give her the courage, coming from the interviews she had just had, to encounter what she knew lay before her.

Marchmont, as an invalid, was not agreeable to talk with. Tortured with pain, to which he brought no sort of self-control or resolution to endure, his incessant cry was for morphia or chloral to drown his sufferings, and although utterly dependent on the kindness of those about him for help, for relief, and for attention, he never attempted to conciliate any one of them, but, losing all sense of decency, would shriek at them all manner of accusations--that they wished for his death, and had endeavoured to compass it; that they had purposely given him something to put him into this state of torture; everything, in short, that a good man who is being martyred could possibly throw at a set of miscreants who were taking advantage of his weakness to murder him was hurled by Marchmont at the heads of his attendants, who, if they had spoken out their minds, would have told him that only self-control on their parts prevented them from doing what he accused them of, and so getting rid of him for ever.

If the attack lasted only a short time, perhaps the nurse and servants would hold out without bursting into open rebellion; if it endured long, Fulvia generally found herself left at the end of it in almost sole attendance. The servants were free: they did not receive their wages and render their services in order to be abused and maltreated; but a wife must surely succour her husband, must be devoted to him in sickness and in health. Very faithfully, very coldly, very determinedly, had she, so far, performed her duty. The attack this time was an even worse one than usual. Mr. Brownrigg became uneasy, and at last said to Fulvia that further advice would be desirable. The invalid, he plainly intimated, besides being so very ill, was so captious and dissatisfied that he, Mr. Brownrigg, would be glad that his treatment should have the approval of a high authority. Fulvia at once agreed--anything that Mr. Brownrigg thought desirable. She would beg him to telegraph to Sir Simon Sykes, the specialist whom Marchmont had already seen. They arranged this, and Mr. Brownrigg rode away. Then Fulvia went to Marchmont, and told him what had been settled. At first he seemed satisfied, then suddenly, with a vicious snarl, exclaimed:

‘It’s all rubbish. He’ll want at least two hundred guineas for taking such a journey here and back to London.’

‘Quite, I should say,’ replied his wife coldly. ‘And what difference can it make to you if he wanted five hundred guineas?’

‘Trust a beggar to be apt at spending other people’s money,’ was the gracious retort.

Fulvia did not speak. She slightly shrugged her shoulders, without any perceptible change of countenance, only her whole aspect expressed a supreme disdain, which Marchmont himself saw. Absorbed, however, in the wrongs which were being done to him and his money, he proceeded, after a glance at her:

‘And he’ll sit here for ten minutes, and tell us nothing that we didn’t know before, and then he’ll go away, and jabber with you in the drawing-room. You are all in league against me--every one of you.’

‘Do you think we should find it very difficult to dispose of you if we were?’ she asked, with icy contempt. ‘As you do not wish to have Sir Simon, I will send a man after Mr. Brownrigg, and ask him not to telegraph.’

‘Do if you dare!’ almost shrieked Marchmont. ‘I’m ill, I dare say, but I have the use of my brains yet, and I know what I am doing. You want to leave me in the hands of this wretched village ignoramus, so that I may get partial recovery, and then you will be satisfied.’

‘You credit me with complicated motives. I am quite sure of this, that if you don’t behave more civilly to the “village ignoramus,” as you call him, he will refuse to come near you any more; and you will have to trust me alone as your physician. Of course no man, not to mention a gentleman, will stand being spoken to as if he were a thief and an impostor. I really think you had better try to understand that thoroughly.’

Marchmont subsided a little. There was nothing he feared so much as being left alone with his illness; rather than suffer that, he would have grovelled before the meanest apothecary and would have implored him not to leave him to his fate.

That afternoon an answer came from Sir Simon to say he would come on the following afternoon. Fulvia had promised Hans to meet him on the morning of that day, but she sent him a note to say:

‘I cannot leave the house this morning, nor at all till evening. But I must see you before I try to sleep to-night. I have much to explain to you. All scruples have disappeared. I cannot live in this any longer. Meet me after nine, at the same place. I will come and will tell you what I have arranged.’

The day wore on. She scarcely left Marchmont’s side, sitting near him, ministering to him during the hours in which the nurse was to take her rest; looking at him every now and then, with a strange, sombre light in her eyes, the inner glow of all the suppressed passion and wrong, and injustice and wretchedness, which for five years had been accumulating in her heart--the only light which can be given by the eyes which belong to a ruined life. All the day she was saying to herself, with fixed, immovable resolution:

‘Only this day more--then an end of it. I will wait till it is over. I will see this man, who will tell me just what they have all told me--the same wretched platitudes, meaning nothing; trying to cover up the one word, “hopeless,” trying to conceal the fact that it is death coming on. It has begun--it will be a long time before it is over, and I will not wait all that time. To-night, oh, Dio mio! to leave the house, and never to return to it--never, never! Never to see this thing again, nor to hear his voice, nor to feel the shudder which comes whenever I go near him. I will tell Hans everything when I meet him to-night. Then I shall make him take me to the inn in the village, and leave me there till to-morrow. I won’t go to Minna--oh no, impossible! I would not pollute--no, pollute is not the word: it is remaining here which is pollution. I would not deceive her--that is it. I would not tell her one thing while all the time I was meaning to do quite another. That is a sort of pollution--yes, it is the kind at which I have never yet arrived. I will stay at the inn till to-morrow morning, and then he will come for me, and we will go away together. I shall make no secret of it. He can do as he likes. He may tell them or not. It is nothing to me now. My life has been so ruined that, if I am to keep my friends who have never gone through this fire, I must live in undying misery and inward degradation. If I choose happiness and freedom, I must lose all my friends. Some lucky people can keep both. I have tried the one thing, and as long as there was nothing else I could just live in it--only just. But now ... one may be good when one does wrong sometimes. I can see that very plainly. One may be doing everything that is right and proper, and at the same time be a very bad person.

‘Wrong and right--what is wrong, and what is right? Because I was sold shamefully when I could not help myself, and could see no way out of it, does that deprive me of the power of judging, when I am older and have had much experience? Who is to settle for us, if not ourselves? Oh, how wrong I was not to go away with Beppo--to run away, when he said he would take me with him! Now people will all say I have done wrong, but I will live rightly. It is quite right. I am not afraid. I wonder why I stay here now? Oh, it is better, I think. I will go on till night--till I have said good-night to him. He will expect to see me again in the morning, and time will pass, and I shall not be there. I shall not take any notice of him at all. It is not necessary. He may wonder and inquire and speculate, and say what he pleases. He may learn all his humiliation in public, for aught I care. It does not matter ... what time is it now, I wonder? Lunch-time, nearly. Then there is the afternoon, and it will be almost evening when the doctor comes, and--he will stay all night, I suppose.

‘Well, I will give orders that all is to be ready for him. I shall dine with him, and talk to him, in that awful room, which is just like a sepulchre. The servants will be about, behind our chairs, waiting upon us, just as usual. The doctor will think me a very charming woman, and will be quite pleased to talk to me. We shall not mention him’--she cast a side-glance towards Marchmont, who, under the influence of a morphia injection, was now lying still, with eyes closed and yellowish, waxy-looking face, like a dead man. ‘We shall both know that there is no need to say anything; talking about unpleasant subjects is not appetising. Nothing will make any difference. In his heart the doctor will say to himself: “I wonder what she married him for--money, I suppose. He must have been a horror when she first met him. Women will do anything to get money and money’s worth.”

‘After dinner I shall say that I am going to see my husband; that I am very tired, and shall not see him again to-night; that he is to ask for everything he wants, and that I have given orders that he is to be attended to. Then we shall shake hands, and I shall leave him in the dining-room with the dessert and the wine. Then I shall come back here, and shall make inquiries, and shall speak to the nurse, and shall say, to her more than to him, “Well, I hope you will have a good-night.” I shall then look round as one does before one leaves a room in which someone is ill, and I shall repeat, “Good-night,” and shall go.... In ten minutes more I shall be on the path to the pond, breathing.’ She suddenly lifted her arms above her head, and stretched them out wide and high, as if to take in a deep draught of air, then heaved a huge sigh, and slowly let them fall again. The sigh was repeated, and her face looked worn, and almost desperate. Almost mechanically her thoughts went on, and with none of the excited hope which had heretofore floated them through her mind: ‘I shall breathe--oh, to breathe again, after being stifled for five years!’

She sat motionless again, until a servant came and told her that lunch was ready. Marchmont was still sleeping or stupefied. She went away, leaving the nurse, who had just come in, to take her place. In the dining-room she dismissed the servant who was in waiting, and sat down alone in the immense, rather light, cold room, at a great table spread with snowy linen and glittering with silver and glass. There was perhaps no need for her to endure this solitary, cold, and comfortless splendour; but it is happy people who think of comforts and who arrange pleasant places in which to eat and drink and chat, not those whose lives are spoiled by a great wrong, so that they have no energy to attend to such trifles.

She took something on her plate, but found she could not eat it.

‘Am I excited, feverish? How ridiculous’ she thought, shrugging her shoulders and realizing for the first time that her lips were dry and her mouth parched. She took a draught of water, and sat looking at the untasted food, and thinking of quite other things.

‘How hungry I used to be once! How delicious everything tasted! How well I remember one day when Beppo took me! We walked--we could not afford carriages, not even a little carriage for a franc, to the gate--we walked on to the Appian Way. How beautiful it was! It was a spring morning. How the larks sang! how the little flowers gleamed in the grass, and the lizards ran in and out of the crevices of the tombs! and how the aqueducts marched away over the campagna towards the hills--those hills! How many things he told me! I put my arm through his, and we went on, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, looking at things and talking about them till we got past Casale Rotondo. There I grew impatient, and said it was time to have our lunch. We sat down by the roadside and ate. What had we? Each a hard-boiled egg and some of the household bread, without any butter; an orange or two, and a little bottle of red wine, with a tin cup from which to drink it. When it was done I was still hungry, and said so. He looked at me suddenly--I remember it well--with a cloud on his face.

‘“Ma che! why did you not speak?” he said. “I would have given you mine.”

‘How I laughed! I was a mere child, and I thought a man like Beppo, so strong and so big compared with me, must be much more in need of food than I. Then he told me, I remember, how people like me, who were growing still and to whom all the world was new, needed so much more nourishment and so much oftener than those who were quite grown up and established, and who were not surprised at anything any more--like him. I said, “How could being surprised make one hungry?” and I told him he was silly. He said, “Wait, my child. By the time you are ready to tell me that you understand what I say, I shall be dead; but I think, if you come to my grave and tell it to me there, I shall hear it.” Oh, how awfully sad were the things he sometimes said--all mixed with curious, funny observations at the same time! For the rest of our excursion he kept regretting every now and then that I had not had the other egg, and at the first little shop within the gate, as we returned, he bought me a _panino_ with butter. It was very good.’

Fulvia had forgotten in her reminiscences the meal that actually stood before her. She had scarcely tasted food, but rose suddenly from the table, and very soon went back to her charge.

Presently he awoke from his drugged sleep to fresh pain, fresh fury, to ever more exacting demands and wilder accusations. The hours dragged on until about six o’clock, when a servant came and told her that Sir Simon Sykes had arrived, and was in the library with Mr. Brownrigg. She went towards the room slowly, saying to herself, as if it were not really clear in her own mind:

‘It is coming nearer now, much nearer. There are not many hours more. Six o’clock, seven, eight, nine; in three hours I shall be free.’

She lifted her eyes towards the open hall door; the sunshine streamed in. All without was light and bright and warm. That was freedom.

She opened the library door and went into the room.