the effect of her husband's letter on mrs. wilmot's mind, strengthened by the view taken of its contents by henrietta prendergast, was of the most serious and injurious nature. hitherto the unhappiness which had possessed her had been negative--had been literally unhappiness, the absence of joy; but from the hour she read wilmot's letter, and talked over it with her friend, all that was negative in her state of mind changed to the positive. hitherto she had been jealous--jealous as only a woman of a thoroughly proud, sensitive, secretive, and sullen nature can be--of an abstraction. her husband's profession was the bête noir of her existence, was the barrier between her and the happiness for which she vainly longed and pined. she had looked around her, and seen other women whose husbands were also working bees in the world's great hive; but their work did not absorb them to the exclusion of home interests, and the deadening of the sweet and blessed sympathies which lent happiness all its glow, and robbed sorrow of half its gloom. her husband had never spoken an unkind word to her in his life, had never refused her a request, or denied her a pleasure; but he had never spoken a word to her which told her that the first place in his life was hers; he had never cared to anticipate a request or to share a pleasure. to a woman like mabel wilmot, in whose character there was a strong though wholly unsuspected element of romance, there was an inexhaustible source of suffering in these facts, combined with her husband's proverbial devotion to his profession. not a clever woman, thoroughly conventional in all her ideas, without a notion of the possibility of altering the routine of her life to any pattern which might take her fancy, a dreamer, and incurably shy, especially with him, who never discerned that there was anything beneath the surface of her placid, equable, rather cold manner to be understood, she had ample materials within herself for misery; and she had always made the most of them.
an incalculable addition had been made to her store by wilmot's letter, and henrietta prendergast's comments. mabel wrote to mr. foljambe, under the observation and by the dictation of her friend, merely repeating the words of her husband's letter; and during that performance, and the ensuing conversation, she had felt sufficiently black and bitter to have satisfied any fiend who might have been waiting about for the chance of gratifying his malignity by the coming to grief of human affairs. but it was when she was left alone, when her friend had gone away, and she was in her solitary room--all the trivial occupations of the day at an end, and only the long hours of the night, often sleepless hours to her, to be faced--that she gave way to the intensity of the bitterness of her spirit; that she looked into and sounded the darkness and the depth of the gulf of sorrow which had opened before her feet.
that her husband sought and found all his happiness in the duties of his profession; that he had no consciousness, comprehension, or care for the disappointed feelings which occupied her wholly, had been hard enough to bear--how hard, the lonely woman who had borne the burden knew; but such a state of things, the state from which only a few hours divided her, was happy in comparison with that which now opened suddenly before her. he had neglected her for the profession he preferred; he was going to neglect his own interests, to depart from his accustomed law of life, to throw the best friend he had in the world over--for a woman: yes, a woman, a sick girl had done what she had failed to do: she had never swayed his judgment, or turned him aside from a purpose for a moment; and now he was changed by the touch of a more potent hand than hers, and there was an end of the old settled melancholy peacefulness of her life; active wretchedness had come in, and the repose, dear-bought in its deadness of disappointment and blight, was all gone.
mabel wilmot sat opposite the long glass in her room that night, and turned the branch-candles so as to throw a full light upon her face, at which she gazed steadily and long, frowning as she did so. it was a fair face, and the fresh bloom of youth was still upon it. it was a face in which a skilful observer might have read strange matters; but there were none curious to read the story in the face of the pretty wife of the prosperous rising man. her eyes were soft and dark, well shaded by long lashes, and marked by finely-arched eyebrows; and there were none to see that there was frequent gloom and brooding in their darkness--a shadow from the gloominess of the soul within. she was fair rather than pale, and had abundant dark hair; and as she sat and gazed in the glass, she let its dusky masses loose, and caught them in her hands. the fair face was not pleasant to look upon; and so she seemed to think, for she muttered:
"she is very pretty, i suppose, and a great deal younger than i am; never looks sullen, and has no cause. and yet he's not a man i should have thought to have been beguiled by any woman. i never beguiled him, and i was pretty in my time, ay, and new too! and i have lived in his sight all these years, and he has never sacrificed an hour of time or thought to me. and now he leaves me without hesitation, though i am ill. i have not talked about it, to be sure; but what is his skill worth, if he did not see it in my face and hear it in my voice without being told! i was not a case--i was only his wife; and he never thought of looking, never thought of caring whether i was ill or well. i appear at breakfast, and i go out every day; that's quite enough for him. i wonder if he knew what i suspect, what i should once have said i hope, is the cause; but that is a long time ago. would it have made any difference? i don't mean now; of course it would not now; nothing makes any difference to a man when once his heart is turned aside, and quite filled by another. i don't think i ever touched his heart; i know only too well i never filled it."
mabel wilmot was right. she had never filled her husband's heart. she had touched it though, for a time and after a light holiday kind of fashion, which had subsided when life began in earnest for them, and which he had laid aside and forgotten, as a boy might have abandoned and lost sight of the toys with which he had amused himself during a school vacation. and the girl had been deceived; had built silently in the inveterately undemonstrative recesses of her heart and fancy a fairy palace, destined to stand for ever empty. it had been swept and garnished; but the prince had never come to dwell there: he with busy feet had passed by on the other side, and she had nothing to do but to sit and mourn in the empty chambers. she had borne her grief valiantly until now; she had only known the passive side of it. but that was all over for ever; and the day that dawned after wilmot's wife had received his letter found her a different woman from what she had been.
"are you sure you are not ill, mabel?" asked mrs. prendergast the day after their colloquy over the letter. "you are so black under the eyes, and your face is so pinched, i fancy you must be ill."
"not more so than usual," said mrs. wilmot shortly.
"than usual, my dear! what do you mean? have you been feeling ill lately?"
"yes, henrietta, very ill."
"and have you been doing nothing for yourself? have you not had advice?"
"you know i have not. you have seen me very nearly every day, and you know i have done nothing without your knowledge."
"but wilmot?" said mrs. prendergast.
"o wilmot! much he knows and much he cares about me! don't talk nonsense, henrietta. if i were dying, he would not see it while i could keep on my feet, which, i certainly should do as long as i could."
"my dear mabel," remonstrated henrietta, "do you mean to tell me that, feeling very ill, you have actually suffered your husband to leave you? is that right, mabel? is it right to yourself or fair to him?"
"fair to him!" returned mrs. wilmot with a scornful emphasis. "the idea of anything i do being fair or unfair to him. i am so important to him, am i not? his life is so largely influenced by me? really, henrietta, i don't understand you."
"o yes, you do," said her friend; and she seated herself beside her, and took her feverish hands firmly in hers; "you understand me perfectly. what is the illness, mabel? how do you suffer, and why are you concealing it?"
"i suffer always, and in all ways," said mabel, twitching her hands impatiently from her friend's grasp, and averting her face, down which tears began slowly to trickle. "i have not been well for a long time; and would not one think that he might have seen it? he can be full of skill and perception in everyone's case but mine."
henrietta prendergast was troubled. she was a woman with an odd kind of conscience. so long as a fact did not come too forcibly before her, so long as a duty did not imperatively confront her, she would ignore it; but she would not do the absolutely, the undeniably wrong, nor leave the obviously and pressingly right undone. here was a dilemma. she believed that wilmot's ignorance of his wife's state of health was solely the result of her own studious avoidance of complaint, or of letting him see, during the short periods of every day that they were together, that she was suffering in any way. any man whose perceptions were not quickened by the inspiration of love would be naturally deceived by the calm tranquillity of mrs. wilmot's manner, which, if occasionally sullen, was apparently influenced in that direction by trivial causes,--household annoyances, and so forth. and though henrietta prendergast had a grudge against chudleigh wilmot, which was all the stronger and the more lasting that it was utterly unreasonable, she could not turn a deaf ear to the promptings of her conscience, which told her she must speak the truth on his behalf now.
"i must say, mabel," she began, "that i think it is your own fault that wilmot has not perceived your state of health. you have carefully concealed it from him, and now you are angry at your own success. you must not continue to act thus, mabel; you will destroy his happiness and your own."
"his happiness!" repeated mrs. wilmot with indescribable bitterness; "his happiness and mine! i know nothing about his happiness, or what he has found it in hitherto, and may find it in for the future. i only know that it has nothing to do with mine; and that i have no happiness, and never can have any now."
the sullen conviction in mabel wilmot's voice impressed her friend painfully, and kept her silent for a while. then she said:
"you are unjust, mabel. you have concealed your suffering and illness from me as effectually as from him."
"do you attempt to compare the cases?" said mrs. wilmot with a degree of passion extremely unusual to her. "i deny that they admit of comparison. however, there is an end of the subject; let us talk of something else. if i am not better in a day or so, i can do as mr. foljambe has had to do: i can call in whittaker, or somebody else. it does not matter. let us turn to some more agreeable topic." and the friends talked of something else. they lunched together, and they went out driving; they did some very consolatory shopping, and paid a number of afternoon calls. but henrietta prendergast watched her friend closely and unremittingly; and came to the conclusion that she was really ill, and also that it was imperatively right her husband should be informed of the fact. henrietta dined at charles-street; and when the two women were alone in the evening, and the confidence-producing tea-tray had been removed, she tried to introduce the interdicted subject. ordinarily she was anything but a timid woman, anything but likely to be turned from her purpose; but there was something new in mabel's manner, a sad intensity and abstraction, which puzzled and distressed her, and she had never in her life felt it so hard to say the things she had determined to say.
argument and persuasion mrs. wilmot took very ill; and at length her friend told her, in an accent of resolution, that she had made up her mind as to her own course of action.
"it is wrong to leave wilmot in ignorance, mabel," she said; "wrong to him and wrong to you. if only a little of all you have acknowledged to me were the matter with you, it would still be wrong to conceal it from him. if you will not tell him, i will. if you will not promise me to write to him tonight, i will write to him to-morrow. mind, mabel, i mean what i say; and i will keep my word."
mrs. wilmot had been leaning, almost lying, back in a deep easy-chair, when her friend spoke. she raised herself slowly while she was speaking, her dark eyes fixed upon her, and when she had finished, caught her by the wrist.
"if you do this thing, henrietta, i most solemnly declare to you that i will never speak to you or see you again. in this, in all that concerns my husband and myself, i claim, i insist upon perfect freedom of action. no human being--on my side at least--shall come between him and me. i am thoroughly in earnest in this, henrietta. now choose between him and me."
"choose between him and you! what can you mean, mabel?"
"i know what i mean, henrietta, and i am determined in this. when you know all, you will see that only i can speak to him; and that i must speak, not write."
"then you will speak?"
"yes, i will speak. i suppose he will return in a few days; and then i will speak."
then mabel wilmot told her friend intelligence which surprised her very much, and they stayed together until late; and when they parted mrs. prendergast looked very thoughtful and serious.
"this will make things either better or worse," she said to herself that night. "if he returns soon, and receives the news well, all may go on well afterwards; but if he stays away for this girl's sake much longer, i don't think even the child will do any good."
many times within the next few days, in thinking of her friend, mrs. prendergast said, "there's a desperation about her that i never saw before, and that i don't like."
the days passed over, and wilmot's patients were obliged either to content themselves with the attendance of the insinuating whittaker, or to exercise their own judgment and call in some other physician of their own choice. there was no doubt that the delay was injuring wilmot. he might have had his week's holiday, and passed it with sir saville rowe, and welcome; but he was not at sir saville's, and the week had long been over. as for mr. foljambe, his indignation was extreme.
"hang it!" he observed, "if chudleigh can't come back when he might, why does he pretend to keep up a london practice? and to send me whittaker too; a fellow i hate like--like colchicum. i suppose i can choose my doctor for myself, can't i?"
thus the worthy and irascible old gentleman, who was more attached to chudleigh wilmot than to any other living being, would discourse to droppers-in concerning his absent favourite; and as the droppers-in to the invalid room of the rich banker were numerous, and of the class to whom wilmot was especially well known, the old gentleman's talk led to somewhat wide and varied speculation on the causes and inducements of his absence. mr. foljambe had ascertained all the particulars which wilmot had given his wife; and kilsyth of kilsyth was soon a familiar phrase in connection with the rising man. everybody knew where he was, and "all about it;" and when the unctuous and deprecating whittaker talked of the "specially interesting case" which was detaining wilmot, glances of unequivocal intelligence, but of somewhat equivocal meaning, were interchanged among his hearers; and guesses were made that miss kilsyth was a "doosed nice" girl, or her stepmother lady muriel,--"young enough to be kilsyth's daughter, you know, and never lets him forget it, by jove,"--was a "doosed fine" woman. "the kilsyths" began to be famous among wilmot's clientèle and the old banker's familiars; the peerage, lying on his bookshelves, and hitherto serenely undisturbed, with its covering of dust, was frequently in demand; and young lothbury, of lombard, lothbury, & co., made quite a sensation when he informed a select circle of mr. foljambe's visitors that he knew ronald kilsyth very well--was in his club in fact.
"old kilsyth's son," he explained; "a very good fellow in his way, and quite the gentleman, as he ought to be of course, but a queer-tempered one, and a bit of a prig."
"have you written to your husband, mabel?" said mrs. prendergast with solemn anxiety, when the third week of wilmot's absence was drawing to a close, and his wife's illness had increased day by day, so that now it was a common topic of conversation among their acquaintance.
"no," returned mabel, "i have not. i have told you i will not write, but speak to him; and i am resolved."
"but whittaker? surely he does not know your husband is ignorant of your state?"
"o, dear no," returned mrs. wilmot, with a smile by no means pleasant to see. "he is the jolliest and simplest of men in all matters of this kind. mrs. whittaker wouldn't, in fact couldn't, have a finger ache unknown to him; and he never suspects that things are different with me."
"mabel," said her friend, "you do very, very wrong; but i will not interfere or argue with you. only, remember, i believe much will depend on your reception of him."
"don't be alarmed, henrietta," said mabel wilmot. "i promise you, unhesitatingly, that wilmot will not be dissatisfied with the reception he shall have from me.".
