Page:Braddon--Wyllard's weird.djvu/218

210 and now he was the dependent, looking to her for help and comfort.

He bore his calamity with an almost awful calmness, which at times was more painful to the tender, sympathetic wife than fretfulness and complaining would have been. The dull agony of neuralgic pain wrung no groan from him; he endured the anguish of racked nerves and aching limbs with stoical composure.

"It is not a surprise to me, Dora," he said quietly, when his wife praised his patience; "I have expected some such attack. There have been sensations—strange feelings at odd times—which, although slight enough, have not been without their meaning. Life was very smooth for me here at Penmorval. Very different from my life in the past; the struggles of my boyhood; the hard work and hard thinking of my manhood. Your love made existence full of sweetness. I had the world's esteem too, which must always count for something, let a man pretend to despise the world as he may. Yes; it was a full and perfect life, and I told myself that I had come off a winner in the lottery of Fate. And now all things are changed. There was this last lot waiting for me at the bottom of the urn."

"My dearest," murmured his wife, nestling closer to him among the heaped-up pillows of his sofa, "it would be too hard, too cruel that you should be thus smitten, if this life were all. But, praised be God, it is not all! There is a bright eternity waiting for us—a long day of rest in the land where there is neither sorrow nor pain."

Her husband answered with an impatient sigh.

"My dear Dora, I have neither your sweet simplicity nor your pious faith in the letter of an old book," he answered. "This life is so palpable and so painful just now, that I cannot comfort myself by looking beyond it towards a life of which I know nothing."

They were at Penmorval. Mrs. Wyllard had established her husband in her own particular sanctum, which was the prettiest room in the house—a spacious airy room on the first floor, with a large Tudor window facing southward, and an oriel in the south-western angle. Julian Wyllard had decorated and furnished this room for his young wife; and all things it contained had been chosen with reference to her tastes and pursuits. It opened into her dressing-room, and beyond the dressing-room there was the chief bedchamber of Penmorval, the chamber of the lord of the manor from time immemorial, the birth-chamber and the death-chamber. Its very spaciousness and grandeur gave to this state apartment an air of gloom, a gloom intensified by the prevailing tints of the tapestry, a series of hunting scenes, executed in a sombre gradation of bluish greens and grayish browns. The elaborately carved oak wardrobes were