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.".
CHAPTER V.
A Resolve, and its Results.
The illness of Madeleine Kilsyth engrossed the attention and engaged the sympathy of her father so completely, and so entirely blinded him to other considerations, that when he chanced to encounter a servant on his way to Wilmot's room, in whose hand he recognised the ominous yellow cover which indicated a telegraphic despatch, he immediately accompanied the man to the door. He then hardly gave his guest time to peruse the message before he said impetuously:
"Nothing to take you away from us, I trust. Pray tell me?" and the otherwise polite gentleman did his best to peer at the pencilled characters on the flimsy sheet of paper which Wilmot held in his hand. For a moment his eager question remained unanswered, and his guest stood frowning and uncertain. The next, though the frown remained,