ought, so far as his relaxed face and dimmed eyes gave
evidence of any desire. And besides--yes, Lady Mildmay was a good nurse;
he might find none so good if he were moved away. No sense of duty, no
punctilious performance of offices, no such constancy of attendance as a
wife is bound to render, could give what Lady Mildmay gave. Yet more than
these May could not achieve. It was rather cruel, as it seemed to her,
that the great and sudden call on her sympathy should come at the moment
of all others when the spring of her sympathy was choked, when anger
still burnt in her heart, when passionate resentment for a wound to her
own pride and her own honour still inflamed her, when the mood in which
she had broken out in her talk with Marchmont was still predominant. Such
a falling-out of events sometimes made this real and heavy sickness seem
like one of Quisante's tricks, of at least suggested that he might be
making the most of it in his old way, as he had of his faintness at the
Imperial League banquet, or of his headache when old Foster's letter
followed on the declaration of the poll at Henstead. Such feelings as
these, strong enough to chill her pity till Lady Mildmay wondered at a
wife so cold, were not deep or sincere enough to blind May Quisante's
eyes. Even without the doctor's story--which she had insisted on being
told in all its plainness--she thought that she would have known the
meaning of what had befallen her husband and herself, and have grasped at
once its two great features, the great certainty and the great
uncertainty; the certainty that his career was at an end, the uncertainty
as to how near his life was to its end. Such a position chimed in too
well with the bitter mood of Ashwood not to seem sent to crown it by a
malicious device of fate's. At the very moment when she least could love,
she was left no resource but love; at the moment when she would have
turned her eyes most away from him and most towards his deeds, the deeds
were taken away and he only was left; at the time when her hot anger
against him drove her into a cry for release, she received no promise of
release, or a promise deferred beyond an indefinitely stretching period
of a worse imprisonment. For she clung to no such hope as that which made
Dick Benyon dream of a resurrection of activity and of power, and had
nothing to look for save years of a life both to herself and to him
miserable. It might be sin to wish him dead; but was it sin