chudleigh wilmot was a strong man, and he possessed much of the pride and reticence which ordinarily accompany strength of character. hitherto he can hardly be said to have suffered much in his life. affliction had come to him, as it comes to every man born of woman; but it had come in the ordinary course of human life, unattended by exceptional circumstances, above all not intensified, not warped from its wholesome purposes by self-reproach. his life had been commonplace in its joys and in its griefs alike, and he had never suffered from any cause which was not as palpable, as apparent, to all who knew him as to himself. his had been the sorrows, chiefly his parents' death, which are rather gravely acknowledged and respected, than whispered about in corners with dubious head-shaking and suggestive shoulder-shrugging. so far the experience of the rising man had in it nothing distinctive, nothing peculiarly painful.
but there was an end of this now. a new phase of life had begun for chudleigh wilmot, when he recoiled, like one who has received a deadly thrust, and whose life-blood rushes forth in answer to it, from the announcement made to him by his servant. he realised the truth of the man's statement as the words passed his lips; he was not a man whose brain was ever slow to take any impression, and he knew in an instant and thoroughly understood that his wife was dead. a very few minutes more sufficed to show him all that was implied by that tremendous truth. his wife was dead; not of a sudden illness assailing the fortress of life and carrying it by one blow, but of an illness that had had time in which to do its deadly work. his wife was dead; had died alone, in the care of hirelings, while he had been away in attendance upon a stranger, one out of his own sphere, not even a regular patient, one for whom he had already neglected pressing duties--not so sacred indeed as that which he could now never fulfil or recall, but binding enough to have brought severe reflections upon him for their neglect. the thought of all this surged up within him, and overwhelmed him in a sea of trouble, while yet his face had not subsided from the look of horror with which he had heard his servant's awful announcement.
he turned abruptly into his consulting-room and shut the door between him and the man, who had attempted to follow him, but who now turned his attention to dismissing the cab and getting in his master's luggage, during which process he informed cabby of the state of affairs.
"i thought there were something up," remarked that individual, "when i see the two-pair front with the windows open and the blinds down, and all the house shut up; but he didn't notice it." an observation which the servant commented upon later, and drew certain conclusions from, considerably nearer the truth than wilmot would have liked, had he had heart or leisure for any minor considerations. presently wilmot called the man; who entered the consulting-room, and found his master almost as pale as the corpse upstairs in "the two-pair front," where the windows were open and the blinds were down, but perfectly calm and quiet.
"is there a nurse in the house?"
"yes, sir; a nurse has been here since this day week, sir."
"send her here--stay--has dr. whittaker been here to-day?"
"no, sir; he were here last night, a half an hour after my missus departed, sir; but he ain't been here since. he said he would come at one, sir, to see your answer to the telegraft, sir."
"very well; send the nurse to me;" and wilmot strode towards the darkened window, and leaned against the wire-blind which covered the lower compartment. he had not to wait long. presently the man returned.
"if you please, sir, the nurse has gone home to fetch some clothes, and susan is a-watchin' the body."
chudleigh wilmot started, and ground his teeth. it was perfectly true; the proper phrase had been used by this poor churl, who had no notion of fine susceptibilities and no intention of wounding them, who would not have remained away from his own wife if she had been ill, not to say dying, for the highest wages and the best perquisites to be had in any house in london, but to whom a corpse was a corpse, and that was all about it. the phrase did not make the dreadful truth a bit more dreadful or more true, but it made wilmot wince and quiver.
"is there no one else--upstairs?" he asked.
"no, sir. mrs. prendergast were here all night, sir, and she is coming again to meet dr. whittaker; but there's no one but susan a-watchin' now, sir. we was waiting for orders from you."
wilmot turned away from the man, and spoke without permitting him to see his face.
"tell susan to leave the room, if you please; i am going upstairs."
the man went away, and returned in a few minutes with a key, which he laid upon the table, and then silently withdrew. his master was still standing by the window, his face turned away. a considerable interval elapsed before the silent group of listeners, comprising all the servants of the establishment, upon the kitchen-stairs, heard the widower's slow and heavy step ascending the front staircase.
the sight which chudleigh wilmot had to see, the strife of feeling which he had to encounter, were none the less terrible to him that death was familiar to him in every shape, in every preliminary of anguish and fear, in all that distorts its repose and renders its features terrible. it is an error surely to suppose that the familiarity of the physician with suffering and death, with all the ills that render the pilgrimage of life burdensome and the earthy vesture repulsive, makes the experience of these things when brought home to him easier to bear. the sickness that defies his skill, the life that eludes his grasp, is as dark an enigma, as terrible a defeat to him as to the man who knows nothing about the dissolving frame but that it holds the being he loves and is doomed to lose.
if chudleigh wilmot had had a deadly, vindictive, and relentless enemy,--one of those creatures of romance, but incredible in real life, who gloat over the misery of a hated object, and would increase it by every fiendish device within their ingenuity and power,--that fabulous being might have been satisfied with the mental torture which he endured when he found himself within the room, so formally arranged, so faultlessly orderly, so terribly suggestive of the cessation of life, in which his dead wife lay. as he turned the key in the lock, for the first time a sense of unreality, of impossibility came over him, with a swift bewildering remembrance--rather a vision than a recollection--of the last time he had seen her. he saw her standing in the hall, in the low light of the autumn evening, her pretty fresh dinner-dress lifted daintily out of the way of the servant carrying his portmanteau to the cab; her head, with its coronet of dark hair, held up to receive her husband's careless kiss, as he followed the man to the door. he remembered how carelessly he had kissed her, and how--he had never thought of it before--she had not returned the caress. when had she kissed him last? this was a trifling thing, that he had never thought about till now--a question he could not answer, and had never asked till now; and in another moment he would be looking at her dead face!
the window-blinds fluttered in the faint autumn wind as wilmot opened the door, then quickly closed and locked it; and the rustling sound added to the impressiveness of the great human silence. the hands of the stern woman who loved her had ordered all the surroundings of the dead tenderly and gracefully; and the tranquil form lay in its deep rest very fair and solemn, and not terrible to look upon, if that can ever be said of death, in its garments of linen and lace. the head was a little bent, the face turned gently to one side, and the long dark eyelashes lay on the cheek, which was hardly at all sunken, as if they might be lifted up again and the light of life seen under them. death was indeed there, but the sign and the seal were not impressed upon the face yet for a little while. wilmot looked upon the dead tearless and still for some minutes, and then a quick short shudder ran through him, and he replaced the covering which had concealed the features, and sat down by the bedside, hiding his face with his hands.
who could put on paper the thoughts that swept over him then, and swept his mind away in their turmoil, and tossed him to and fro in a tempest of anguish which even the majestic tranquillity of death in presence was powerless to quell? who could measure the punishment, the tremendous retribution of those hours, in which, if the world could have known anything about them, the world would have seen only the natural, the praiseworthy grief of bereavement? who shall say through what purifying fires of self-knowledge and self-abasement the nature of the erring man passed in that dreadful vigil? and yet he did not know the truth. his conscience had been rudely awakened, but his comprehension had not yet been enlightened. he did not yet know the terrible depths of meaning which he had still to explore in the words which were the only articulate sounds that had formed themselves amid the chaos of his grief--"too late; too late!" the failure in duty, the poverty, the niggardliness in love, the negligence, the dallying with right, in so far as his wife had been concerned, were all there, keeping him ghastly company, as he sat by the side of the dead; but the grimmest and the ghastliest phantoms which were to swarm around him were not yet evoked.
to do chudleigh wilmot justice, he had no notion that his wife had been unhappy. that he had never rightly understood her character or read her heart, was the soundest proof that he had not loved her; but he had never taken himself to task on that point, and had been quite satisfied to impute such symptoms of discontent as he could not fail to notice to her sullenness of temper, of which he considered himself wonderfully tolerant. so little did this wise, rising man understand women, that he actually believed that indifference to his wife's moods was a good-humoured sort of kindness she could not fail to appreciate. she had appreciated it only too truly. the source of much of the remorse and self-condemnation which tortured him now was to be traced to his own newly-awakened feelings, to the fresh and novel susceptibility which the experience of the past few weeks had aroused, and in which lay the germs of some terrible lessons for the man whose studies in all but the lore of the human heart had been so deep, whose knowledge of that had been so strangely shallow. and now no knowledge could avail. the harm, the wrong, the cruel ill that had been done, was gone before him to the judgment; and he must live to learn its extent, to feel its bitterness with every day of life, which could never avail to lessen or repair it.
when dr. whittaker arrived, he found wilmot in his consulting-room, quite calm and steady, and prepared to receive his professional account of the "melancholy occurrence," on which he condoled with the bereaved husband after the most approved models. he did not attempt to disguise from wilmot that he had been disagreeably surprised by his non-return under the circumstances. "also," he added, "by your not sending me any instructions, though indeed at that stage nothing could have availed, i am convinced."
wilmot received these observations with such unmistakable surprise that an explanation ensued, which elicited the fact that he had never received any letter from dr. whittaker, and indeed had had no intimation of his wife's illness, beyond that conveyed in a letter from herself a fortnight previous to her death, and in which she treated it as quite a trifling matter.
"very extraordinary indeed," said dr. whittaker in a dry and unsatisfactory tone. "i can only repeat that i sent you the fullest possible report, and entreated you to return at once. i was particularly anxious, as mrs. wilmot confessed to me that you were unaware of her situation."
"i never had the letter," said wilmot; "i never heard of or from you, beyond the memoranda enclosed in my wife's letters."
"very extraordinary," repeated dr. whittaker still more drily than before. "she took the letter at her own particular request, saying she would direct it, that the sight of her handwriting on the envelope, she being unable to write more, might reassure you."
wilmot coloured deeply and angrily under his brother physician's searching gaze. he had not looked for his wife's infrequent letters with any anxiety; he had had no quick, love-inspired apprehension to be assuaged by her womanly considerateness. he felt an uneasy sort of gladness that she had thought he had had such apprehension--better so, even now, when all mistakes were doomed to be everlasting,--or when they were quite cleared up. which was it? he did not know; he did not like to think. all was over; all was too late.
"i never received any such letter," he said again; "and i am astonished you did not write again when you got no answer."
"i did not write again, because mrs. wilmot gave me so very decidedly to understand that you had told her you could not, under any circumstances, leave kilsyth; and danger was not imminent until monday, when i telegraphed, just too late to catch you."
no more was said upon the point; but on wilmot's mind was left a painful and disagreeable impression that dr. whittaker had received his explanation with distrust. the colloquy between the two physicians lasted long; and wilmot was further engaged for a long time in giving the necessary attention to the distressing details which claim a hearing just at the time when they most disturb and jar with the tone of feeling. a sense of shock and hurry--a difficulty of realising the event which had occurred, quite other than the stunned feeling of conviction which had come with the first reception of the intelligence--beset him, while the nameless evidences of death were constantly pressed upon his attention. he sat in his consulting-room, receiving messages and communications of every kind, hearing the subdued voices of the servants as they replied to inquiries, feeling as though he were living through a terrible feverish dream, conscious of all around him, and yet strangely, awfully conscious too of the dead white face upstairs growing, as he knew, more stiff and stark and awful as the hours, so crowded yet so lonely, so busy yet so dreary, flew, no, dragged--which was it?--along.
many times that day, as chudleigh wilmot sat cold and grave, and, although deeply sad, more composed, more like himself than most men would have been in similar circumstances--a vision rose before his mind. it was a vision such as has come to many a mourner--a vision of what might have been. for it was not only his wife's death that the new-made widower had learned that day; he had learned that which had made her death doubly sad, far more untimely. the vision chudleigh saw in his day-dream was of a fair young mother and her child, a happy wife in the summer-time of her beauty and her pride of motherhood--this was what might have been. what was, was a dead white face upstairs upon the bed, waiting for the coffin and the grave, and a blighted hope, a promise never to be fulfilled, which had never even been whispered between the living and the dead.
mrs. prendergast had been in the darkened house for many hours of that long day. wilmot knew she was there; but she had sent him no message, and he had made no attempt to see her. he shrank from seeing her; and yet he wished to know all that she, and she alone, could tell him. if he had ever loved his wife sufficiently to be jealous of any other sharing or even usurping her confidence, to have resented that any other should have a more intimate knowledge of mabel's sentiments and tastes, should have occupied her time and her attention more fully than he, henrietta prendergast's intimacy with her might have elicited such feeling. but chudleigh wilmot had not loved his wife enough for jealousy of the nobler, and was too much of a gentleman for jealousy of the baser kind. no such insidious element of ill ever had a place in his nature; and, except that he did not like mrs. prendergast, whom he considered a clever woman of a type more objectionable than common--and wilmot was not an admirer of clever women generally--he never resented, or indeed noticed, the exceptional place she occupied among the number of his wife's friends. but there was something lurking in his thoughts to-day; there was some unfaced, some unquestioned misery at work within him, something beyond the tremendous shock he had received, the deep natural grief and calamity which enshrouded him, that made him shrink from seeing henrietta until he should have had more time to get accustomed to the truth.
when the night had fallen, he heard the light tread of women's feet in the hall and a gentle whispering. then the street-door was softly shut, and carriage-wheels rolled away. the gas had been lighted in wilmot's room, but he had turned it almost out, and was sitting in the dim light, when a knock at the door aroused his attention. the intruder was the "susan" already mentioned. mrs. wilmot had not boasted an "own maid;" but this girl, one of the housemaids, had been in fact her personal attendant. she came timidly towards her master, her eyes red and her face pale with grief and watching.
"well, what is it now?" said wilmot impatiently. he was weary of disturbance; he wanted to be securely alone, and to think it out.
"mrs. prendergast desired me to give you this, sir," the girl replied, handing him a small packet, "and to say she wants to see you, sir, to-morrow--respecting some messages from missus."
he took the parcel from her, and susan left the room. before she reached the stairs, her master called her back. "susan," he said, "where's the seal-ring your mistress always wore? this parcel contains her keys and her wedding-ring; where is the seal-ring? has it been left on her hand?"
"no, sir," said susan; "and i can't think where it can have got to. missus hasn't wore it, sir, not this fortnight; and i have looked everywhere for it. you'll find all her things quite right, sir, except that ring; and mrs. prendergast, she knows nothing about it neither; for i called her my own self to take off missus's wedding-ring, as it was missus's own wish as she should do it, and she missed the seal-ring there and then, sir, and couldn't account for it no more than me."
"very well, susan, it can't be helped," replied wilmot; and susan again left him.
he sat long, looking at the golden circlet as it lay in the broad palm of his hand. it had never meant so much to him before; and even yet he was far from knowing all it had meant to her from whose dead hand it had been taken. at last, and with some difficulty, he placed the ring upon the little finger of his left hand, saying as he did so, "i must find the other, and always wear them both.".
