"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.".