There was also an understanding, consecrated by the piety of their
renunciation, that Wilkinson was only waiting for his wife's death
to marry Mrs. Norman.
And Wilkinson's wife was a long time in dying. It was not to be
supposed that she would die quickly, as long as she could interfere
with his happiness by living.
With her genius for frustrating and tormenting, she kept the poor
man on tenter-hooks with perpetual relapses and recoveries. She
jerked him on the chain. He was always a prisoner on the verge of
his release. She was at death's door in March. In April she was to
be seen, convalescent, in a bath-chair, being wheeled slowly up and
down the Spaniard's Road. And Wilkinson walked by the chair, his
shoulders bent, his eyes fixed on the ground, his face set in an
expression of illimitable patience.
In the summer she gave it up and died; and in the following spring
Wilkinson resumed his converse with Mrs. Norman. All things
considered, he had left a decent interval.
By autumn Mrs. Norman's friends were all on tiptoe and craning their
necks with expectation. It was assumed among them that Wilkinson
would propose to her the following summer, when the first year of
his widowhood should be ended. When summer came there was nothing
between them that anybody could see. But it by no means followed
that there was nothing to be seen. Mrs. Norman seemed perfectly sure
of him. In her intense sympathy for Wilkinson she knew how to
account for all his hesitations and delays. She could not look for
any passionate, decisive step from the broken creature he had
become; she was prepared to accept him as he was, with all his
humiliating fears and waverings. The tragic things his wife had done
to him could not be undone in a day.
Another year divided Wilkinson from his tragedy, and still he stood
trembling weakly on the verge. Mrs. Norman began to grow thin. She
lost her bright air of defiance, and showed herself vulnerable by
the hand of time. And nothing, positively nothing, stood between
them, except Wilkinson's morbid diffidence. So absurdly manifest was
their case that somebody (the Troubadour man, in fact) interposed
discreetly. In the most delicate manner possible, he gave Wilkinson
to understand that he would not necessarily make himself obnoxious
to Mrs. Norman were he to approach her with--well, with a view to
securing their joint happiness--happiness which they had both earned
by their admirable behavior.
That was all that was needed: a tactful friend of both parties to
put it to Wilkinson simply and in the right way. Wilkinson rose from
his abasement. There was a light in his eye that rejoiced the
tactful friend; his face had a look of sudden, virile determination.
"I will go to her," he said, "now."
It was a dark, unpleasant evening, full of cold and sleet.
Wilkinson thrust his arms into an overcoat, jammed a cap down on his
forehead, and strode into the weather. He strode into Mrs. Norman's
drawing-room.
When Mrs. Norman saw that look on his face she knew that it was all
right. Her youth rose in her again to meet it.
"Forgive me," said Wilkinson. "I had to come."
"Why not?" she said.
"It's so late."
"Not too late for me."
He sat down, still with his air of determination, in the chair she
indicated. He waved away, with unconcealed impatience, the
trivialities she used to soften the violence of his invasion.
"I've come," he said, "because I've had something on my mind. It
strikes me that I've never really thanked you."
"Thanked me?"
"For your great kindness to my wife."
Mrs. Norman looked away.
"I shall always be grateful to you," said Wilkinson. "You were very
good to her."
"Oh, no, no," she moaned.
"I assure you," he insisted, "she felt it very much. I thought you
would like to know that."
"Oh, yes." Mrs. Norman's voice went very low with the sinking of her
heart.
"She used to say you did more for her--you and your sister, with her
beautiful music--than all the doctors. You found the thing that
eased her. I suppose _you_ knew how ill she was--all the time? I
mean before her last illness."
"I don't think," said she, "I did know."
His face, which had grown grave, brightened. "No? Well, you see, she
was so plucky. Nobody could have known; I didn't always realize it
myself."
Then he told her that for five years his wife had suffered from a
nervous malady that made her subject to strange excitements and
depressions.
"We fought it," he said, "together. Through it all, even on her
worst days, she was always the same to me."
He sank deeper into memory.
"Nobody knows what she was to me. She wasn't one much for society.
She went into it" (his manner implied that she had adorned it) "to
please me, because I thought it might do her good. It was one of the
things we tried."
Mrs. Norman stared at him. She stared through him and beyond him,
and saw a strange man. She listened to a strange voice that sounded
far off, from somewhere beyond forgetfulness.
"There were times," she heard him saying, "when we could not go out
or see anyone. All we wanted was to be alone together. We could sit,
she and I, a whole evening without saying a word. We each knew what
the other wanted to say without saying it. I was always sure of her;
she understood me as nobody else ever can." He paused. "All that's
gone."
"Oh, no," Mrs. Norman said, "it isn't."
"It is." He illuminated himself with a faint flame of passion.
"Don't say that, when you have friends who understand."
"They don't. They can't. And," said Wilkinson, "I don't want them
to."
Mrs. Norman sat silent, as in the presence of something sacred and
supreme.
She confessed afterward that what had attracted her to Peter
Wilkinson was his tremendous capacity for devotion. Only (this she
did not confess) she never dreamed that it had been given to his
wife.