The news which she had learned from Doctor Joyce, and had in her brief pencil-note communicated to her husband, was horribly annoying to Lady Muriel Kilsyth. To have her party broken up--and there was no doubt that, as soon as the actual condition of affairs was known, many would at once take to flight--was bad enough; but to have an infectious disorder in the house, and to be necessarily compelled to keep up a semblance of sympathy with the patient labouring under that disorder, even if she were not required to visit and tend her, was to Lady Muriel specially galling; more specially galling as she happened not to possess the smallest affection for the individual in question, indeed to regard her rather with dislike than otherwise. When Lady Muriel Inchgarvie married Kilsyth of Kilsyth,--the Inchgarvie estates being heavily involved, and her brother the Earl, who had recently succeeded to the title, strongly counselling the match,--she agreed to love, honour, and obey the doughty chieftain whom she espoused; but she by no means undertook any responsibilities with regard to the two children by his former marriage. The elder of these, Ronald, was just leaving Eton when his stepmother appeared upon the scene; and as he had since been at once gazetted to the Life-guards, and but rarely showed in his father's house, he had caused Lady Muriel very little anxiety. But it was a very different affair with Madeleine. She had the disadvantage of being perpetually en évidence; of being very pretty; of causing blundering new acquaintances to say, "Impossible, Lady Muriel, that this can be your daughter!" of riling her stepmother in every possible way--notably by her perfect high-breeding, her calm quiet ignoring of intended slights, her determinate persistence in keeping up the proper relations with her father, and her invariable politeness--nothing but politeness--to her stepmother. One is necessarily cautious of using strong terms in these days of persistent repression of all emotions; but it is scarcely too much to say that Lady Muriel hated her stepdaughter very cordially. They were too nearly of an age for the girl to look up to the matron, or for the matron to feel a maternal interest in the girl. They were too nearly of an age for the elder not to feel jealous of the younger--of her personal attractions, and of the influence which she undoubtedly exercised over her father. Not that Lady Muriel either laid herself out for attraction, or was so devotedly attached to her husband as to desire the monopoly of his affection. By nature she was hard, cold, self-contained, and very proud. Portionless as she had been, and desirable as it was that she should marry a rich man, she had refused several offers from men more coeval with her than the husband she at last accepted, simply because they were made by men who were wealthy, and nothing else. Either birth or talent would, in conjunction with wealth, have won her; but Mr. Burton, the great pale-ale brewer, and Sir Coke Only, the great railway carrier, proffered their suits in vain, and retired in the deepest confusion after Lady Muriel's very ladylike, but thoroughly unmistakable, rejection of their offers. She married Kilsyth because he was a man of ancient family, large income, warm heart, and good repute. At no period, either immediately before or after her marriage, had she professed herself to be what is called "in love" with the worthy Scottish gentleman. She respected, humoured, and ruled him. But not for one instant did she forget her duty, or give a chance for scandalmongers to babble of her name over their five-o'clock tea. No woman married to a man considerably her senior need be at any loss for what, as Byron tells us, used to be called a cicisbeo, and was in his time called a cortejo, if she be the least attractive. And Lady Muriel Kilsyth was considerably more than that. She had a perfectly-formed, classical little head, round which her dark hair was always lightly bound, culminating in a thick knot behind, large deep liquid brown eyes, an impertinent retroussé nose, a pretty mouth, an excellent complexion, and a ripe melting figure. You might have searched the drawing-rooms of London through and through without finding a woman better calculated to fascinate every body save the youngest boys, and there were many even of them who would gladly have boasted of a kind look or word from Lady Muriel. When her marriage was announced, they discussed it at the clubs, as they will discuss such things, the dear genial old prosers, the bibulous captains, the lip-smacking Bardolphs of St. James'-street; and they prophesied all kinds of unhappiness and woe to Kilsyth. But that topic of conversation had long since died out for want of fuel to feed it. Lady Muriel had visited London during the season; had gone every where; had been reported as perfectly adoring her two little children; and had no man's name invidiously coupled with hers. Peace reigned at Kilsyth, and the intimates of the house vied with each other in attention and courtesy to its new mistress; while the gossips of the outside world had never a word to say against her. I don't say that Lady Muriel Kilsyth was thoroughly happy, any more than that Kilsyth himself was in that beatific state; because I simply don't believe that such a state of things is compatible with the ordinary conditions of human life. It is not because the old stories of our none of us being better than we should be, of our all having some skeleton in our cupboards, and some ulcerated sores beneath our flannel waistcoats, have been so much harped upon, that I am going to throw my little pebble on the great cairn, and add my testimony to the doctrine of vanitas vanitatum. It would be very strange indeed, if, as life is nowadays constituted, we had not our skeleton, and a time when we could confront him; when we could calmly untwist the button on the door and let him out, and pat his skull, and look at his articulated ribs, and notice how deftly his wire-hooked thigh-bones jointed on to the rest of his carcass; and see whether there were no means of ridding ourselves of him,--say by flinging him out of window, when the police would find him, or of stowing him away in the dust-bin, when he would be noticed by the contractor; and of finally putting him back, and acknowledging ourselves compelled to suffer him even unto the end. I do not say that in the broad-shouldered, kind-hearted, jovial sportsman Lady Muriel had found exactly what she dreamed upon when, in the terraced garden at Inchgarvie, she used to read Walter Scott, and, looking over the flashing stream that wound through her father's domain, fancy herself the Lady of the Lake, and await the arrival of Fitzjames. I do not say that Kilsyth himself might not, in the few moments of his daily life which he ever spared to reflection, and which were generally when he was shaving himself in the morning,--I do not say that Kilsyth himself might not have occasionally thought that his elegant and stately wife might have been a little kinder to Madeleine, a little more recognisant of the girl's charms, a little more thoughtful of her wants, and a little more tender towards her girlish vagaries. But neither of them, however they may have thought the other suspected them, ever spoke of their secret thoughts; and to the outer world there was no more well-assorted couple than the Kilsyths. It was a great thing for the comfort of the entire party that Lady Muriel was a woman of nerve, and that Kilsyth took his cue from her, backed up by the fact that it was his darling Madeleine who was ill, and that any inconvenience that might accrue to any of the party in consequence of her illness would be set down to her account. Lady Muriel gave a good general answer, delivered with a glance round the table, and was inclusive of every body, so as to prevent any further questioning. Dr. Joyce had said that Madeleine was not so well that night; but that was to be expected; her cold was very bad, she was slightly feverish: any one--and Lady Muriel turned deftly to the Duchess of Northallerton--who knew any thing, would have expected that, would they not? The Duchess, who knew nothing, but who didn't like to say so, declared that of course they would; and then Lady Muriel, feeling it necessary that conversation should be balked, turned to Sir Duncan Forbes, and began to ask him questions as to his doings since the end of the season. Forbes replied briskly,--there was no better man in London to follow a lead, whether in talk or at cards,--and so turned the talk that most of those present were immediately interested. The names which Duncan Forbes mentioned were known to all present; all were interested in their movements; all had something to say about them; so that the conversation speedily became general, and so remained until the ladies quitted the table. When they had retired, Kilsyth ordered in the tumblers; and it was nearly eleven o'clock before the gentlemen appeared in the drawing-room. Then Lady Fairfax, with one single wave of her fan, beckoned Charley Jefferson into an empty seat on the ottoman by her side,--a seat which little Lord Towcester, immediately on entering the door, had surveyed with vinous eyes,--and, while one of the anonymous young ladies was playing endless variations on the "Harmonious Blacksmith," commenced and continued a most vivid one-sided, conversation, to all of which the infatuated Colonel only replied by shrugs of his shoulders, and tugs at his heavy moustache. Then the Duchess pursued the Duke into a corner; and rescuing from him the Morning Post, which his grace had pounced upon on entering the room with the hope of further identifying Mr. Bright with Judas Iscariot, began addressing him in a low monotone, like the moaning of the sea; now rising into a little hum, now falling into a long sweeping hiss, but in each variety evidently confounding the Duke, who pulled at his cravat and rubbed his right ear in the height of nervous dubiety. In the behaviour of the other guests there was nothing pronounced, save occasional and unwonted restlessness. The Danish Minister and his wife played their usual game at backgammon; and the customary talk, music, and flirtation were carried on by the remainder of the company; but Lady Muriel knew that some suspicion of the actual truth had leaked out, and determined on her plan of action.
So that night, when the men had gone to the smoking-room, and the ladies were some of them talking in each other's bedrooms, and others digesting and thinking over, as is the feminine manner, under the influence of hair-brush, the events of the day; when Kilsyth had made a tip-toe visit to his darling's chamber, and had shaken his head sadly over a whispered statement from her little German maid that she was "bien malade," and had returned to his room and dismissed his man, and was kicking nervously at the logs on the hearth, and mixing his "tumbler preparatory to taking his narcotic instalment of Blackwood,--he heard a tap at his door, and Lady Muriel, in a most becoming dressing-gown of rose-coloured flannel, entered the room. The tumbler was put down, the Blackwood was thrown, aside, and in a minute Kilsyth had wheeled an easy-chair round to the hearth, and handed his wife to it.
"You're tired, Alick, I know, and I wouldn't have disturbed you now had there not been sufficient reason--"
"Madeleine's not worse, Muriel? I was there this minute, and Gretchen said that--"
"O no, she's no worse! I was in her room too just now,--though I think it is a little absurd my going,--and there does not seem to be much change in her since I saw her, just before dinner. She is asleep just now."
"Thank God for that!" said Kilsyth heartily. "After all, it may be a fright this doctor is giving us. I don't think so very much of his opinion and--"
"I could not say that. Joyce is very highly thought of at Glasgow, and was selected from among all the competitors to take charge of this district, and that, in these days of competition, is no ordinary distinction. And it is on this very point I came to speak to you. You got my pencil-note at dinner? Very well. Just now you contented yourself with asking a question of Gretchen--"
"She said Madeleine was asleep, and would not let me into the room."
"And quite rightly; but I went in to the bedside. Madeleine is asleep certainly; but her sleep is restless, broken, and decidedly feverish. There is not the smallest doubt that Dr. Joyce is right in his opinion, and that she is attacked with scarlet-fever."
"You think so, Muriel?" said Kilsyth anxiously. "I mean not blindly following Joyce's opinion; but do you think so yourself?"
"I do; and not I alone, but half the house thinks so too. How do they know it? Heaven knows how these things ever get known, but they get wind somehow; and you will see that by to-morrow there will be a general flight. It is on this point that I have come to speak to you, if you will give me five minutes."
"Of course, Muriel; of course, my lady. But I think I've done the best that could be done; at all events, the first thing that occurred to me after you wrote me that note. Duncan Forbes had been saying in the drawing-room before dinner, before you came in, that the great London fever-physician, Dr. Wilmot, was staying at Burnside, away from here about fifty miles, with old Sir Saville Rowe, whom I recollect when I was a boy. Duncan had left him this morning, and he was going to stay at Burnside just a day or two longer; and I sent one of the men with a telegram to the station, to ask Dr. Wilmot to come over at once, and see Maddy."
Lady Muriel was so astonished at this evidence of prompt action on her husband's part that she remained silent for a minute. Then she said,
"That was quite right, quite right so far as Madeleine was concerned; but my visit related rather to other people. You see, so soon as it is actually known that there is an infectious disorder in the house, the house will be deserted. Now my question is this: will it not be better to announce it to our guests, making the best and the lightest of it, as of course one naturally would, rather than let them--"
"Ye-es, I see what you mean, my lady," said Kilsyth slowly; "and of course it would not do to keep people here under false pretences, and when we knew there was actual danger. Still I think as this story of scarlet-fever is only Joyce's opinion, and as I have telegraphed for Dr. Wilmot, who will be here to-morrow; and as it seems strange, you know, to think that poor darling Maddy should be the cause of any one's leaving Kilsyth, perhaps, eh? one might put off making the announcement until Joyce's opinion were corroborated by Dr. Wilmot."
"I am afraid the mischief is already done, Alick, and that its results will be apparent long before Dr. Wilmot can reach here," said Lady Muriel. "However, let us sleep upon it. I am sure to hear whether the news has spread in the house long before breakfast, and we can consult again." And Lady Muriel took leave of her husband, and retired to her room.
Trust a woman for observation. Lady Muriel was perfectly right. The nods and shoulder-shrugs and whisperings which she had observed in the drawing-room had already borne fruit. On her return to her own room she saw a little note lying on her table--a little note which, as she learned from Pinner, her attendant, had just been brought by Lady Fairfax's maid. It ran thus:
"Dearest Lady Muriel,--A frightful attack of neuralgia (my neuralgia)--which, as you know, is so awful--has been hanging over me for the last three days, and now has come upon me in its fullest force. I am quite out of my mind with it. I have striven--O, how I have striven!--to keep up and try to forget it, when surrounded by your pleasant circle, and when looking at your dear self. But it is all in vain. I am in agonies. The torture of the rack itself can be nothing to what I am suffering tonight.
"Poor dear Sir Benjamin Brodie used to say that I should never be well in a northern climate. I fear he was right. I fear that the air of this darling Kilsyth, earthly Paradise though it is--and I am sure that I have found it so during three weeks of bliss; O, such happiness!--is too bracing, too invigorating for poor me. But I should loathe myself if I were to make this an open confession. So I will steal away, dearest Lady Muriel, without making any formal adieux. When all your dear friends assemble at breakfast to-morrow, I shall be on my sorrowing way south, and only regret that my wretched health prevents me longer remaining where I have been so entirely happy.
"With kindest regards to your dear husband, I am, dearest Lady Muriel, ever your loving
";Emily Fairfax.
"P.S.--I have told my maid to beg some of your people to get me horses from the Kilsyth Arms; so that I shall speed away early in the morning without disturbing any one. I hope dear Madeleine will soon be quite herself again."
Lady Muriel read this letter through twice with great calmness, though a very scornful smile curled her lip during its perusal. She then twisted the note up into a wisp, and was about to burn it in the flame of the candle, when she heard a short solemn tap at her chamber-door. She turned round, bade Pinner open the door, and looked with more displeasure than astonishment at the Duchess of Northallerton, who appeared in the entrance. The Duchess had the credit in society of being a "haughty-looking woman." Her stronghold in life, beyond the fact of her being a duchess, had been in her Roman nose and arched eyebrows. But, somehow, haughty looks become wonderfully modified in déshabillé, and Roman noses and arched eyebrows lose a good deal of their potency when taken in conjunction with two tight little curls twisted up in hairpins, and a headdress which, however much fluted and gauffered, is unmistakably a nightcap. The Duchess's nocturnal adornments were unmistakably of this homely character, and her white wrapper was of a hue, which, if she had not been a duchess, would have been pronounced dingy. But her step was undoubtedly tragic, and the expression of her face solemn to a degree. Lady Muriel received her with uplifted eyebrows, and motioned her to a chair. The Duchess dropped stiffly into the appointed haven of rest; but arched her eyebrows at Pinner with great significance.
"You can go, Pinner. I shall not require you any more," said Lady Muriel; adding, "I presume that was what you wished, Duchess?" as the maid left the room.
"Precisely, dear Muriel; but you always were so wonderfully ready to interpret one's thoughts. I remember your dear mother used to say--but I won't worry you with my stories. I came to speak to you about dear Madeleine."
"Ye-es," said Lady Muriel quietly, finding the Duchess paused.
"Well, now, she's worse than any of them suspect. Ah, I can see it by your face. And I know what is the matter with her. Don't start; I won't even ask you; I won't let you commit yourself in any way; but I know that it's measles."
Lady Muriel kept her countenance admirably while the Duchess proceeded. "I know it by a sort of instinct. When Madeleine first complained of her head, I looked narrowly at her, and I said to myself, 'Measles! undoubtedly measles!' Now, you know, Muriel, though there is nothing dangerous in measles to a young person like Madeleine,--and she will shake them off easily, and be all the better afterwards,--they are very dangerous when taken by a person of mature age. And the fact is, the Duke has never had them--never. When Errington was laid up with them, I recollect the Duke wouldn't remain in the house, but went off to the Star and Garter, and stayed there until all trace of the infection was gone. And he's horribly afraid of them. You know what cowards men are in such matters; and he said just now he thought there was a rash on his neck. Such nonsense! Only where his collar had rubbed him, as I told him. But he's dreadfully frightened; and he has suggested that instead of waiting till the end of the week, as we had intended, we had better go to-morrow."
"I think that perhaps under all circumstances it would be the best course," said Lady Muriel, quite calmly.
"I knew your good sense would see it in the right light, my dear Muriel," said the Duchess, who had been nervously anticipating quite a different answer, and who was overjoyed. "I was perfectly certain of your coincidence in our plan. Now, of course, we shall not say a word as to the real reason of our departure--the Duke, I know, would not have that for the world. We shall not mention it at Redlands either; merely say we--O, I shall find some good excuse, for Mrs. Murgatroyd is a chattering little woman, as you know, Muriel. And now I won't keep you up any longer, dear. You'll kindly tell some one to get us horses to be ready by--say twelve to-morrow. Stay to luncheon? No, dear. I think we had better go before luncheon. The Duke, you see, is so absurd about his ridiculous rash. Goodnight, dear." And the Duchess stalked off to tell the Duke, who was not the least frightened, and whose rash was entirely fictitious, how well she had sped on her mission.
Lady Muriel accurately obeyed the requests made to her in Lady Fairfax's letter, and verbally by the Duchess; and each of them found their horses ready at the appointed time. Lady Emily departed mysteriously before breakfast; but as the Duchess's horses were not ordered till twelve, and as the post came in at eleven, her grace had time to receive a letter from Mrs. Murgatroyd, of Redlands, whither they were next bound, requesting them to postpone their arrival for a day or two, as a German prince, who had by accident shot a stag, had been so elated by the feat, that he had implored to be allowed to stay on, with the chance of repeating it; and as he occupied the rooms intended for the Duke and Duchess, it was impossible to receive them until he left. After reading this letter, the Duchess went to Lady Muriel, and expressed her opinion that she had been too precipitate; that, after all, nothing positive had been pronounced; that there were no symptoms of the Duke's rash that morning, which had been undoubtedly caused, as she had said last night, by his collar, and which was no rash at all; and that perhaps, after all, their real duty was to stay and help their dear Muriel to nurse her dear invalid. But they had miscalculated the possibility of deceiving their dear Muriel. Lady Muriel at once replied that it was impossible that they could remain at Kilsyth; that immediately on the Duchess's quitting her on the previous night she had made arrangements as to the future disposition of the rooms which they occupied; that she would not for the world take upon herself the responsibility which would necessarily accrue to her if any of them caught the disease; and that she knew the Duchess's own feelings would tell her that she, Lady Muriel, however ungracious it might seem, was in the right in advising their immediate departure. The Duchess tried to argue the point, but in vain; and so she and the Duke, and their servants and baggage, departed, and passed the next three days at a third-rate roadside inn between Kilsyth and Redlands, where the Duke got lumbago, and the Duchess got bored; and where they passed their time alternately wishing that they had not left Kilsyth, or that the people at Redlands were ready to receive them.
Very little difference was made by the other guests at Kilsyth in the disposition of their day. If they were surprised at the sudden defection of the Northallertons and Lady Fairfax, they were too well-bred to show it. Charley Jefferson mooned about the house and grounds, a thought more disconsolate than ever; but he was the only member of the party who at all bemoaned the departure of the departed. Lady Dunkeld congratulated her cousin Muriel on being rid of "those awful wet blankets," the Northallertons. Captain Severn, in whispered colloquy with his wife, "hoped to heaven Charley Jefferson would see what a stuck-up selfish brute that Emily Fairfax was." Lord Roderick Douglas and Mr. Pitcairn went out for their stalk; and all the rest of the company betook themselves to their usual occupations.
"Where's her ladyship?"
"In the boudoir, sir, waiting for the doctor."
"What doctor? Dr. Joyce?"
"And the strange gentleman, sir. They're both together in Miss Madeleine's room."
"Ah, Muriel! So Dr. Wilmot has arrived?"
"Yes, and gone off straight with Joyce to Madeleine. You see I was right in recommending you to go out as usual. Your fine London physician never asked for you, never mentioned your name."
"Well, perhaps you were right. I should have worried myself into a fever here; not that I've done any good out--missed every shot. What's he like?"
"He! Who? Dr. Wilmot? I had scarcely an opportunity of observing, but I should say brusque and self-sufficient. He and Joyce went off at once. I thanked him for coming, and welcomed him in your name and my own; but he did not seem much impressed."
"Full of his case, no doubt; these men never think of anything but--Ah, here he is!--Dr. Wilmot, a thousand thanks for this prompt reply to my hasty summons. Seeing the urgency, you'll forgive the apparent freedom of my telegraphing to you."
"My dear sir," said Wilmot, "I am only too happy to be here; not that, if you could have engrossed the attention of this gentleman, there would have been any necessity for the summons. Dr. Joyce has done every thing that could possibly be done for Miss Kilsyth up to this point."
"A laudato viro laudari," murmured
Dr. Joyce. "But, fortunately or unfortunately, as I learn from him, a district of thirty miles in circumference looks to him for its health. Now I am, for the next few days at least, a free man, and at liberty to devote myself to Miss Kilsyth."
"And you will do so?"
"With the very greatest pleasure. In two words let me corroborate the opinion already given. I understand by my friend here Miss Kilsyth has an attack, more or less serious, of scarlet-fever. She must be kept completely isolated from every one, and must be watched with unremitting attention. Dr. Joyce will send to Aberdeen for a skilled nurse, upon whom he can depend; until her arrival I will take up my position in the sick-room."
"Ten thousand thanks; but--is there any danger?"
"So far all is progressing favourably. We must look to Providence and our own unremitting attention for the result."
"I'm so hot and so thirsty, and these pillows are so uncomfortable! Thanks! Ah, is that you, Dr. Wilmot? I was afraid you had gone. You won't leave me--at least not just yet--will you?"
"Not I, my dear. There--that's better, isn't it? The pillow is cooler, and the lemonade--"
"Ah, so many thanks! I'm very weak tonight; but your voice is so kind, and your manner, and--"
"There; now try and sleep.--Good heavens, how lovely she is! What a mass of golden hair falling over her pillow, and what a soft, innocent, childish manner! And to think that only this morning I--ah, you must never hear the details of this case, my dear old master. When I get back to town I will tell you the result: but the details--never.".
"I wonder what sort of woman Chudleigh Wilmot's wife is," was a phrase very often used by his acquaintances; and the sentiment it expressed was not unnatural or inexcusable. There are some men concerning whom people instinctively feel that there is something peculiar in their domestic history, that their everyday life is not like the everyday life of other people. Sometimes this impression is positive and defined; it takes the shape of certain conviction that things are wrong in that quarter; that So-and-so's marriage is a mistake, a misfortune, or a calamity, just as the grade of the blunder makes itself felt by his manner, or even by the expression of the countenance. Sometimes the impression is quite vague, and the questioner is conscious only that there must be something of interest to be known. The man's wife may be dear to him, with a special dearness and nearness, too sacred, too much a part of his inmost being to be betrayed to even the friendliest eyes; or there may be an estrangement, which pride and rectitude combine to conceal. At all events--and whichever of these may be the true condition of affairs, or whatever modification of them may be true--the man's acquaintance feel that there is something in his domestic story different from that of other men, and they regard him with a livelier curiosity, if he be a man of social or intellectual mark, in consequence.
It was in the vaguest form that the question, "What sort of a woman is Chudleigh Wilmot's wife?" suggested itself to his acquaintances. Naturally, and necessarily, the greater number of those to whom the rising man became known knew him only in his professional capacity; but that capacity involved a good deal of knowledge, and not a little social intercourse; and there was hardly one among their number who did not say, sooner or later, to himself, or to other people, "I wonder what sort of woman Chudleigh Wilmot's wife is?" This question had been asked mentally, and of each other, by several of the inmates of the old mansion of Kilsyth; while the grave, preoccupied, and absorbed physician dwelt within its walls, devoting all his energies of mind and body to the battle with disease, in which he was resolved to conquer. But no one who was there, or likely to be there, could have answered the question, strange to say--not even Wilmot himself.
Chudleigh Wilmot's marriage had come about after a fashion in which there was nothing very novel, remarkable, or interesting. Mabel Darlington was a pretty girl, who came of a good family, with which Wilmot's mother had been connected; had a small fortune, which was very acceptable to the young man just starting in his arduous profession; and was as attractive to him as any woman could have been at that stage of his life. Partly inclination, partly convenience, and in some measure persuasion, were the promoters of the match. Wilmot knew that a medical man had a better chance of success as a married than as a single man; and as this was a fixed, active, and predominant idea among his relatives and friends--in fact, an article of faith, and a perpetual text of continual discourses--he had everything to encourage him in the design which had formed itself, though somewhat faintly, in his mind, when he renewed his acquaintance with Miss Darlington, on the occasion of her appearance at his mother's house in the character of a "come out" young lady. He had often seen her as a child and a little girl, being himself at the time a somewhat older child and a much bigger boy; but he had never entertained for her that disinterested, ardent, wretchedness-producing passion known as "calf love;" so that the impression she made upon him at a later period owed nothing to earlier recollection. His mother liked the girl, and praised her eloquently and persistently to Chudleigh; so eloquently and persistently indeed, that if he had not happened to be of her opinion from the beginning, she would probably have inspired him with a powerful dislike to Miss Darlington, by placing that young lady in his catalogue of bores. He was not by any means the sort of man to marry a woman for whom he did not care at all, to please his mother, or secure his own prosperity; but he was just the sort of man to care all the more for a girl because his mother liked her, and to make up his mind to marry her, if she would have him, the more quickly on that account.
The courtship was a short one; and even in its brief duration Chudleigh Wilmot never felt, never tried to persuade himself, that Mabel was his first object in life. He knew that his profession had his heart, his brain, his ambition in its grasp; that he loved it, and thought of it, and lived for it in a way, and to a degree, which no other object could ever compete with. It never occurred to him for a moment that there was any injustice to Mabel in this. He would be an affectionate and faithful husband; but he was a practical man--not an enthusiast, not a dreamer. If he succeeded--and he was determined to succeed--she would share his success, the realisation of his ambition, and would secure all its advantages to herself. A man to do real work in the world, and to do it as a man ought--as alone he could feel the answer of a good conscience in doing anything he should undertake--must put his work above and before every thing. He would do this; he would be an eminent physician, a celebrated and rich man; a good husband too; and his wife should never have reason to find fault with him, or to envy the wives of other men--men who might indeed be more sentimental and demonstrative, but who could not have a stronger sense of duty than he. Thus thought, thus resolved Mabel Darlington's lover; and very good thoughts, very admirable resolves his were. They had only one defect; but he never suspected its existence. It was a rather radical defect too, being this: that they were not those of a lover at all.
They were married, and all went very well with the modest and exemplary household. At first the Wilmot ménage was not so fashionably located as afterwards; but Mrs. Wilmot's house was always a model of neatness, propriety, and the precise degree of elegance which the rising man's income justified at each level which he attained. Wilmot's mother continued to like her daughter-in-law, and to regard her son's marriage as most propitious, though she had sometimes a doubt whether she really did understand his wife quite so thoroughly as she had understood Mabel Darlington. But Wilmot's mother had now been dead some years. Mrs. Wilmot had no near relatives, and she was a woman of few intimacies; her life was placid, prosperous, conventional. She had, at the period with which this story deals, a handsome house, a good income, an agreeable and eminently respectable social circle; a handsome, irreproachable husband, rapidly rising into distinction; one intimate friend, and--a broken heart.
Chudleigh Wilmot's wife was young; if not beautiful, at least very attractive, accomplished, ladylike, and "amiable," in the generally accepted interpretation of that unsatisfactory word. What better or what worse description could possibly be given? It describes a thousand women in a breath, and it designates not one in particular. There was only one person in existence who could have given a more clear, intelligible, and distinct description of Mrs. Wilmot than this stereotyped one. This person was her friend Mrs. Prendergast--a lady somewhat older than herself, and whose natural and remarkable quickness and penetration were aided in this instance by close acquaintance and sleepless jealousy. If Mrs. Prendergast had been an ordinary woman, as silly as her sisterhood and no sillier, the fact that she was extremely jealous of Mrs. Wilmot would have so obscured and perverted her judgment, that her opinion would not have been worth having. But Mrs. Prendergast was very unlike her sisterhood. Not only was she negatively less silly, but she was positively clever; and being severe, suspicious, and implacable as well, if not precisely a pleasant, she was at least a remarkable woman. Nothing obscured or perverted Mrs. Prendergast's judgment; neither did anything touch her heart. She had mind, and a good deal of it; she had experience and tact, insight, foresight, and caution. She was a woman who might possibly be a very valuable friend, but who could not fail to be a very dangerous enemy. In such a nature the power of enmity would probably be greater than the power of friendship, and the one would be likely to crush the other if ever they came into collision. Mrs. Prendergast was Mrs. Wilmot's friend. Whether she was the friend of Mrs. Wilmot's husband remains to be seen. If she had been asked to say what manner of woman the rising man's wife was, and had thought proper to satisfy the inquirer, her portraiture might have been relied upon as implicitly for its truthfulness as that of the most impartial observer, which is saying at once that Mrs. Prendergast was a woman of exceptional mental qualities, and of a temperament rare among those charming creatures to whom injustice is easy and natural.
The two women were habitually much together. Mrs. Prendergast was a childless widow. Mrs. Wilmot was a childless wife. Neither had absorbing domestic occupations to employ her,--each had a good deal of time at the other's disposal; hence it happened that few days passed without their meeting, and enjoying that desultory kind of companionship which is so puzzling to the male observer of the habits and manners of womankind. Their respective abodes were within easy distance of each other. Mrs. Prendergast lived in Cadogan-place, and Mrs. Wilmot lived in Charles-street, St. James's. When they did not see one another, they exchanged notes; and in short they kept up all the ceremonial of warm feminine friendship; and each really did like the other better than any one else in the world, with one exception. In Mrs. Wilmot's case the exception was her husband; in Mrs. Prendergast's, the exception was herself. There was a good deal of sincerity and warmth in their friendship, but on one point there was a decided inequality. Mrs. Prendergast understood Mrs. Wilmot thoroughly; she read her through and through, she knew her off by heart; but Mrs. Wilmot knew very little of her friend--only just as much as her friend chose she should know. Which was a convenient state of things, and tended to preserve their pleasant and salutary relations unbroken. Mrs. Prendergast had played Eleanor Galligaí to Mrs. Wilmot's Marie de' Medicis for a considerable time, and with uninterrupted success, when Chudleigh Wilmot was sent for, in the perplexity and distress at Kilsyth; and as a matter of course she had heard from his wife about his prolonged visit to Sir Saville Rowe, whom she was well aware Mrs. Wilmot disliked with the quiet, rooted, persistent aversion so frequently inspired in the breasts of even the very best and most conscientious of women by their husbands' intimate friends. Wilmot was utterly unconscious that his wife entertained any such feeling; and Sir Saville Rowe himself would have been hardly more astonished than Wilmot, if it had been revealed to him that the confidence and regard which existed between the former master and pupil were counted a grievance, and Wilmot's visit to Burnside resented, silently indeed, in grief rather than in anger, as an injury.
In this fact may be found the keynote to Mrs. Wilmot's character; a keynote often struck by her friend's hand, and never with an erring, a faltering, or a rough touch.
There was not much of the tragic element in Henrietta Prendergast's jealousy of Mabel Wilmot, but there was a great deal of the mean. When Mabel was a young girl, Henrietta was a not much older widow. She was Mabel's cousin; had married, when very young, a man who had survived their marriage only one year. She had more money than Mabel; their connections were the same; she had as much education, and even better manners. She met Chudleigh Wilmot on the occasion of his renewing his acquaintance with Mabel Darlington, and she was as much, though differently, fascinated with him as Mabel herself. She compared her qualifications with those of her cousin; and she arrived at the not unnatural conclusion that their charms were equal, supposing him incapable of discerning how much cleverer a woman than Mabel she was,--and hers very superior, should he prove capable of understanding and appreciating her intellectual superiority. She forgot one simple element in the calculation, and it made all the difference--she forgot Mabel's prettiness. Henrietta Prendergast made very few mistakes, but she did constantly make one blunder; she forgot her plain face, she under-estimated the power of beauty. Perhaps no plain woman ever does understand that power, ever does make sufficient allowance for it, when arrayed against her in any kind of combat; it is certain that Henrietta did not in this instance. It is certain that though Chudleigh Wilmot thought of marrying Mabel Darlington without being very much in love with her, he never thought of marrying Henrietta Prendergast at all.
And now, when she had come to the conclusion that Chudleigh Wilmot had not loved Mabel Darlington, and did not love his wife,--was, in short, a man to whom love was unknown, by whom it was unvalued, undesired,--she was still steadily, sleeplessly jealous of Mabel Wilmot. "I would have made him love me," she would say to herself, as she read the thoughts of her friend; "I would have been as ambitious for him as he is for himself; I would have shown him that his aim was the highest and the worthiest. I would have loved him, and sympathised with him too. She only loves him; she does not understand him. Why did she come in between him and me?" For this very clever woman had actually deluded herself into the belief that, but for Mabel, Chudleigh Wilmot would have loved, or at least have married her. She would have made him love her afterwards, as she said. So for a long time she disliked her cousin, and hankered after her cousin's husband, and believed that she would have been the best, the most suitable, and the happiest of wives to the man who evidently had not a wife of that pattern in Mabel, but who somehow did not seem to perceive the fact. That time had come to an end long before people at Kilsyth asked themselves and each other what sort of woman Chudleigh Wilmot's wife was. But though Mrs. Prendergast no longer hankered after her cousin's husband, though the love, in which her active imagination had a large share, had given place to a much more real and genuine hatred, she was jealous of Mabel still. This woman's brain was larger than her heart; her intellectual was higher than her moral nature; and a lofty feeling would be more transient than a low one. She pitied Mabel Wilmot too, however contradictory such an assertion may seem to shallow perceptions, which do not recognise in life that nothing is so reasonably to be expected, so invariably to be found, as contradictions in character. She liked her, she understood her, but she was jealous of her--jealous because Mabel had the position she had vainly desired. If she had had her husband's love, Mrs. Prendergast would have been still more jealous of her, and would not have liked, because she could not have pitied her. But she knew she had not that; she had made the discovery as soon as Mabel, who had made it fatally soon.
What had the girl's ideal been? was a question none could answer, and which it is certain her husband never asked. He was very kind to her; she had every comfort, every luxury that he could give her; but she lived in a world of which he knew nothing, and he in and for his profession. He could not have been brought to recognise the possibility of over devotion to the business of his life. He would not have listened to the advance of any claims upon his time, attention, or interest, beyond those which he fulfilled with enthusiasm in the interests of his work, and the courteous observance which he never denied to the rules of his well-regulated household. Chudleigh Wilmot was a clever man in many ways beside that one way in which he was eminently so; but one study had long lain near his hand, and he had never given time or thought to it; one book was close to him, and he had never turned its leaves--the study of his wife's character, the book of his wife's heart.
Mabel Wilmot was inveterately, incurably shy, extremely reserved and reticent by nature, and rather sullen. The latter fault of temper had made itself apparent to her husband very early in their married life; and having rebuked it without effect, he made the great mistake of treating it with disregard. He never noticed it now; the symptoms escaped him, the disease did not interest him, and it grew and grew. Proud, cold in manner, distant; scrupulously deferential and dutiful in externals; silent, except where speech was necessary to the management of such affairs as lay within her sphere; calmly indifferent, to all appearance, to all that did not absolutely concern her individually in the course of their life, her shyness and her sullenness were not perceptible to others now--never to him. He did not know that it was so much the worse; he did not understand that it had been better to know and feel her faults than to be ignorant of her and them, unconscious of their growth, or their yielding, or their transformation into others, uglier, worse, harder of eradication, more hopeless of cure. He did not love her. The whole story was in that one sentence.
And she? She loved him; certainly not wisely, all things considered, and much too well for her own peace. She had outgrown her girlhood since her marriage; and her character had hardened, darkened, deepened, everything but strengthened, with her advance into womanhood. The girl Chudleigh Wilmot had married, and the graceful languid woman who appeared barely conscious of, and not at all interested in, the fact of his existence, were widely different beings. Mabel had shrunk from the knowledge of the thraldom in which her love for her husband--her calm, cold, generous, irreproachable husband--held her when she had first realised its strength, when the growth of her own love had revealed to her that his was but a puny changeling, with all the sensitiveness of a shy, sullen, and reticent nature. She could not deny, but she could conceal the bondage in which it held her. The qualities of her heart and the defects of her temper had a fight for the mastery, and temper won. Chudleigh Wilmot, if he had been obliged to think about the matter, would have unhesitatingly declared that his wife's temper had improved considerably since the early days of their marriage: the truth was, it had only lost impulsiveness, and acquired sulk and secretiveness.
All this, and the terrible pain at the young woman's unsatisfied heart,--the pain which devoured her the more ruthlessly as success waited more closely upon the devotion to his profession of the man she loved, and in whose life she had but a nominal share,--was well known to Henrietta Prendergast. It had been long in coming, that burst of agonised confidence, which had made her friend officially aware of all that her acute mind had long believed; but it had come, and like all the confidences of very shy people, it had been complete and expansive. All restraint was over. Mabel might yield to any mood now in Henrietta's presence; she might talk of him with pride, with love, with anger, with questioning wonder, with despair; she, whose armour of pride and silence no other hand, not even the hand of the husband she loved, had ever pierced, was defenceless, unarmed, at the mercy of her friend, who fancied she had supplanted her, who was jealous of her.
Chudleigh Wilmot had been nearly a week at Kilsyth, when Mrs. Prendergast, entering her cousin's drawing-room rather earlier than usual, found her agitated, and in a state of perplexity.
"I am so glad you have come, Henrietta," said Mrs. Wilmot, as she kissed her visitor. "I have been in such anxiety to see you. A message was sent early this morning from Mr. Foljambe--you know Wilmot's friend, Mr. Foljambe the banker, of Portland-place--requesting that he would go to him at once. The poor old man has the gout again very badly. Since then a note has come; written by himself too, and hardly legible. Poor creature! I'm sure he is in horrid pain. Here it is. You see he says, 'the enemy is advancing on the citadel'--he means his heart or his stomach, I suppose--and he entreats Wilmot to go to him at once. What ought I to do, Henrietta?"
"You must tell him, of course, that Mr. Wilmot is out of town. I should not say he was so far away as Scotland; I think the mere idea is enough to terrify a nervous old man with a superstition in favour of a particular doctor."
"Yes, yes, you are right; so it is. But about Wilmot. Of course he will not like to leave Sir Saville's friends. He thinks more of Sir Saville than of any one in the world, I do believe."
"Hardly more, Mabel, than of his reputation and Mr. Foljambe, I should think. Why, this Mr. Foljambe is the oldest friend he has in the world--his godfather, his father's friend,--a childless old man, without kith or kin in the world, who may leave him a fortune any day, and is certain to leave him something very handsome! He would never be so mad or so ungrateful--is he of an ungrateful disposition, Mabel?"
"I don't know exactly," said Mrs. Wilmot, as her colour deepened, and tears rose to her dark gray eyes. "If he has any feeling, it is certainly for his friends--at least he wastes none of it on me."
"You are always brooding over that, Mabel," said her cousin, "and it is labour and sorrow wasted. No man is worth being miserable about, dear, and Wilmot is no more worth it than his neighbours. Besides, this is a matter of business, you know, and we must look at it so. You had better telegraph at once, I think. Put on your bonnet, and come to the office; don't trust to a servant, and don't lose time. The message will take some time to reach him, at the quickest. I fancy Kilsyth is a long way from any station."
Her practical tone had a beneficial effect on Mabel. Besides, she brightened at the hope, the expectation of Wilmot's return before the appointed time. The two ladies drove to Charing-cross, and Mabel telegraphed to Wilmot:
"Mr. Foljambe is dangerously ill. Come at once.".