Page:Braddon--Wyllard's weird.djvu/220

212 "Yes, but there might come a crushing blow that would kill it. Or if I were to sink into feebleness and imbecility—if the mind were to decay like the body—"

"The only difference would be to make me love you more fondly, knowing that you stood in greater need of my love," answered his wife quietly.

"Yes, I believe you are noble enough for the extremity of self-sacrifice," he said, gazing at her with a searching look, a look of the deepest love and keenest pain, a look that told of anguish surpassing the common woes of humanity. "Yes, I believe it is within the compass of a woman's nature to love a human wreck like me, or even to love a creature stained with blackest sin. There is no limit to the sublimity of a woman's love."

His wife was kneeling by his couch, her head leaning against his pillow. There were times when she could find no words of comfort, when she could only comfort him with the light touch of her lips upon his brow, her sympathy, her presence, her hand laid gently upon his.

"I love to hear you talk of your youth," she said one day, when he had been talking of his boyhood at Marlborough, and at home—the dull old parsonage—the house-mother, always busy, and often scolding, troubled about many things; the father, chewing the cud of somebody else's sermon, in a shabby little den of a study, reeking of tobacco; a sermon to be dribbled out slowly next Sunday morning, in a style of elocution, or non-elocution, happily almost extinct.

"Tell me about your life in Paris," she went on, encouraging him to forget his present pains in those old memories. "That must have been full of interest."

"It was a life of grinding toil, and gnawing anxiety," he answered impatiently. "There is not a detail that could interest you."

"Everything in your past history interests me, Julian. I know how hard you worked in Paris. I saw your desk, the place where you sat night after night, the lamp that lighted you. Mr. Blümenlein has altered nothing in your rooms."

"Vastly civil of him," muttered Wyllard, as if revolting against patronage from a dealer in fancy goods.

"But however hard you worked, you must have had some associations with the outer world," pursued Dora. "You must have felt the fever and the excitement of that time. You must have been interested in the men who governed France."

"I was interested in the stocks that went up and down, and in the men who governed France, so far as their conduct influenced the Bourse. A man who is running a race, neck or nothing, a race that means life or death, has no time to think of anything outside the course. The external world has no existence for him."