Page:Braddon--Wyllard's weird.djvu/219

Rh like monuments in a Gothic cathedral. The bed, with its embroidered velvet hangings, fluted columns, and plumed ornaments, suggested a royal catafalque: while the fireplace, with its sculptured pillars and heavy decoration in black and white marble, recalled the entrance to the Capulets' tomb. Not a room assuredly for the occupation of an invalid—not a room in which to suffer sleepless nights and long hours of dull, wearing pain.

This was what Dora thought; and at her order her dressing-room, which was airy and sufficiently spacious, was transformed into a bedroom for Mr. Wyllard, while her morning-room was arranged for his daily occupation. It would be easy to wheel his sofa from one room to the other. All her orders had been telegraphed beforehand, and everything was in its place when the sufferer arrived.

"It is a special privilege to be nursed by a good fairy," he said, smiling up at his wife, with that rare smile which had so peculiar a charm in her eyes—the smile of a man who has not the same set graciousness for all comers.

After this there came the dull monotony of suffering—the life of routine, that death-in-life from which all possibility of action is gone, all power of choice, all changes and chances of the outer world cut off for ever—a life in which a man feels that he has suddenly dropped back into infancy, and is as helpless as a child upon his mother's knee. The child has all the unexplored future before him, the infinitive potentialities of life. The man turns his sad eyes backward and reviews the past. All the things he has done and the things he has left undone pass in a shadowy procession before his mind's eye. He sees how much wiser he might have been. The faults and follies of those departed years are unrolled before him as on a magic scroll. His maturer judgment, his colder blood, condemn the sins of his passionate youth.

Dora was her husband's companion through many an hour of gloom and depression. There were times when he would talk to her with a kind of feverish animation—talk of the books he had read, or of the men he had known—recall the memories of his youth—his boyhood even.

"I can only live in the past," he said, "and in your love. You are my present and my future, Dora. Were it not for you and your love I should have anticipated annihilation. The grave could hardly reduce me to more complete nothingness than this death-in-life here."

He looked round the room with an impatient sigh. And then, touched by the pathetic look in his wife's face, he added,

"Were it not for you, Dora. I have infinite riches while I possess your love. If I were to lose that now—"

"You know that you can never lose it. My love is a part of my life."