Had he wandered about alone, saying to himself that
he had thrown himself away, and sacrificed his future prospects for a
pure, romantic boyish fancy? Had he got tired of her little, simple,
homely ways? Had he come back to the house, heartsick and disappointed,
and gone by himself into the working laboratory on purpose to avoid her? Why was he so silent? Why did he seem so preoccupied? Why would he not
look her straight in the face? Cyril could have done nothing to be
ashamed of, that Netta felt quite sure about, but why did he behave as
if he was ashamed of himself--as if there was something or other in his
mind he couldn't tell her? Meanwhile, poor Cyril was not less unhappy, though in a very different
and more masculine fashion. He wasn't thinking so much of Netta (except
when she looked at him so hard and curiously), but of the broken gods of
his poor little scientific and theological pantheon. He was passing
through a tempest of doubt and hesitation, compelled to conceal it under
the calm demeanour of everyday life. That horrid, wicked,
system-destroying fossil was never for a moment out of his mind. At
times he hated and loathed the godless thing with all the concentrated
force of his ardent nature. Ought he to harbour it under the shelter of
his hospitable roof? Ought he to give it the deadly chance of bearing
its terrible witness before the eyes of an innocent world? Ought he not
to get up rather in the dead of night, and burn it to ashes or grind it
to powder--a cruel, wicked, deceiving, anti-scriptural fossil that it
was? Then again at other times the love of Truth came uppermost once
more to chill his fiery indignation. Could the eternal hills lie to him? Could the evidence of his own senses deceive him? Was not the creature
there palpably and visibly present, a veritable record of real
existence; and ought he not loyally and reverently to accept its
evidence, at whatever violence to his own most cherished and sacred
convictions? If the universe was in reality quite other than what he had
always hitherto thought it; if the doctrines he had first learned and
then taught as certain and holy were proved by plain facts to be mere
ancient and fading delusions, was it not his bounden duty manfully to
resign his life-long day-dream, and to accept the Truth as it now
presented itself to him by the infallible evidence of mute nature, that
cannot possibly or conceivably lie to us? The evening wore away slowly, and Cyril and Netta said little to one
another, each absorbed in their own thoughts and doubts and
perplexities. At last bedtime came, but not much sleep for either. Cyril
lay awake, looking out into the darkness which seemed now to involve the
whole physical and spiritual world; seeing in fancy a vast chaotic
clashing universe, battling and colliding for ever against itself,
without one ray of hope, or light, or gladness left in it anywhere. Netta lay awake, too, wondering what could have come over Cyril; and
seeing nothing but a darkened world, in which Cyril's love was taken
away from her, and all was cold, and dull, and cheerless. Each in
imagination had lost the keystone of their own particular special
universe. Throughout the next week, Cyril went on mechanically with his daily
work, but struggling all the time against the dreadful doubt that was
rising now irresistibly within him. Whenever he came home from college,
he went straight to his laboratory, locked the door, and took the
skeleton out of the cupboard. It was only a very small skeleton indeed,
and a fossil one at that; but if it had been a murdered man, and he the
murderer, it could hardly have weighed more terribly than it actually
did upon Cyril Milliter's mind and conscience. Yet it somehow fascinated
him; and in all his spare time he was working away at the comparative
anatomy of his singular specimen. He had no doubts at all about it now:
he knew it perfectly for what it was--an intermediate form between birds
and reptiles. Meanwhile, he could not dare to talk about it even to
Netta; and Netta, though the feeling that there was something wrong
somewhere deepened upon her daily, would not say a word upon the subject
to Cyril. But she had discovered one thing--that the secret, whatever it
was, lay closed up in the laboratory cupboard; and as her fears
exaggerated her doubts, she grew afraid at last almost to enter the room
which held that terrible, unspeakable mystery. Thus more than a fortnight passed away, and Cyril and Netta grew daily
less and less at home with one another. At last, one evening, when Cyril
seemed gloomier and more silent than ever, Netta could bear the suspense
no longer. Rising up hastily from her seat, without one word of warning,
she went over to her husband with a half-despairing gesture of alarm,
and, flinging her arms around him with desperate force, she cried
passionately through her blinding tears, "Cyril, Cyril, Cyril, you
_must_ tell me all about it." "About what, darling?" Cyril asked, trembling with half-conscious
hypocrisy, for he knew in his heart at once what she meant as well as
she did. "Cyril," she cried again, looking him straight in the face steadily,
"you have a secret that you will not tell me." "Darling," he answered, smoothing her hair tenderly with his hand, "it
is no secret. It is nothing. You would think nothing of it if you knew. It's the merest trifle possible. But I can't tell you. I can _not_ tell
you." "But you must, Cyril," Netta cried bitterly. "You had never any secret
from me, I know, till that dreadful Sunday, when you went out alone, and
wouldn't even let me go with you. Then you came back stealthily by the
back door, and never told me. And you brought something with you: of
that I'm certain. And you've got the something locked up carefully in
the laboratory cupboard. I don't know how I found it all out exactly,
but I have found it out, and I can't bear the suspense any longer, and
so you _must_ tell me all about it. Oh, Cyril, dear Cyril, do, do tell
me all about it!" Cyril faltered--faltered visibly; but even so, he dare not tell her. His
own faith was going too terribly fast already; could he let hers go too,
in one dreadful collapse and confusion? It never occurred to him that
the fossil would mean little or nothing to poor Netta; he couldn't help
thinking of it as though every human being on earth would regard it with
the same serious solemnity and awe as he himself did. "I cannot tell
you, Netta," he said, very gently but very firmly. "No, I dare not tell
you. Some day, perhaps, but not now. I must not tell you." The answer roused all Netta's worst fears more terribly than ever. For a
moment she almost began to doubt Cyril. In her terror and perplexity she
was still too proud to ask him further; and she went back from her
husband, feeling stung and repulsed by his cruel answer, and made as
though she did not care at all for his strange refusal.