"SHE ONLY SAID, 'MY LIFE IS WEARY!'"
When the chill discomfort of that first evening at Graybridge was past
and done with, Isabel felt a kind of remorseful regret for the mute
passion of discontent and disappointment that had gone along with it.
The keen sense of misery passed with the bad influence of the day and
hour. In the sunlight her new home looked a little better, her new life
seemed a little brighter. Yes, she would do her duty; she would be a
good wife to dear George, who was so kind to her, and loved her with
such a generous devotion.
She went to church with him at Graybridge for the first time on the
morning after that dreary wet Saturday evening; and all through the
sermon she thought of her new home, and what she would do to make it
bright and pretty. The Rector of Graybridge had chosen one of the
obscurest texts in St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews for his sermon that
morning, and Isabel did not even try to understand him. She let her
thoughts ramble away to carpets and curtains, and china flower-pots and
Venetian blinds, and little bits of ornamentation, which should
transform George's house from its square nakedness into a bowery
cottage. Oh, if the trees had only grown differently! if there had been
trailing parasites climbing up to the chimneys, and a sloping lawn, and
a belt of laurels, and little winding pathways, and a rustic seat
half-hidden under a weeping willow, instead of that bleak flat of
cabbages and gooseberry-bushes, and raw clods of earth piled in black
ridges across the dreary waste!
After church there was an early dinner of some baked meat, prepared by
Mrs. Jeffson. Isabel did not take much notice of what she ate. She was
at that early period of life when a young person of sentimental
temperament scarcely knows roast beef from boiled veal; but she observed
that there were steel forks on the surgeon's table,--steel forks with
knobby horn handles suggestive of the wildest species of deer,--and a
metal mustard-pot lined with blue glass, and willow-pattern plates, and
a brown earthenware jug of home-brewed beer; and that everything was
altogether commonplace and vulgar.
After dinner Mrs. Gilbert amused herself by going over the house with
her husband. It was a very tolerable house, after all; but it wasn't
pretty; it had been inhabited by people who were fully satisfied so long
as they had chairs to sit upon, and beds to sleep on, and tables and
cups and plates for the common purposes of breakfast, dinner, and
supper, and who would have regarded the purchase of a chair that was not
intended to be sat upon, or a cup that was never designed to be drunk
out of, as something useless and absurd, or even, in an indirect manner,
sinful, because involving the waste of money that might be devoted to a
better use.
"George," said Isabel, gently, when she had seen all the rooms, "did you
never think of re-furnishing the house?"
"Re-furnishing it! How do you mean, Izzie?"
"Buying new furniture, I mean, dear. This is all so old-fashioned."
George the conservative shook his head.
"I like it all the better for that, Izzie," he said; "it was my
father's, you know, and his father's before him. I wouldn't change a
stick of it for the world. Besides, it's such capital substantial
furniture; they don't make such chairs and tables nowadays."
"No," Izzie murmured with a sigh; "I'm very glad they don't."
Then she clasped her hands suddenly upon his arm, and looked up at him
with her eyes opened to their widest extent, and shining with a look of
rapture.
"Oh, George," she cried, "there was an ottoman in one of the shops at
Conventford with seats for three people, and little stands for people to
put their cups and saucers upon, and a place in the middle for FLOWERS!
And I asked the price of it,--I often ask the price of things, for it's
almost like buying them, you know,--and it was only eleven pounds ten,
and I dare say they'd take less; and oh, George, if you'd make the best
parlour into a drawing-room, and have that ottoman in the centre, and
chintz curtains lined with rose-colour, and a white watered paper on the
walls, and Venetian shutters outside--"
George put his hand upon the pretty mouth from which the eager words
came so rapidly.
"Why, Izzie," he said, "you'd ruin me before the year was out. All that
finery would make a hole in a hundred pounds. No, no, dear; the best
parlour was good enough for my father and mother, and it ought to be
good enough for you and me. By-and-by, when my practice extends, Izzie,
as I've every reason to hope it will, we'll talk about a new
Kidderminster carpet,--a nice serviceable brown ground with a drab spot,
or something of that kind,--but until then--"
Isabel turned away from him with a gesture of disgust.
"What do I care about new carpets?" she said; "I wanted it all to look
pretty."
Yes; she wanted it to look pretty; she wanted to infuse some beauty into
her life--something which, in however remote a degree, should be akin to
the things she read of in her books. Everything that was beautiful gave
her a thrill of happiness; everything that was ugly gave her a shudder
of pain; and she had not yet learned that life was never meant to be all
happiness, and that the soul must struggle towards the upper light out
of a region of pain and darkness and confusion, as the blossoming plant
pushes its way to the sunshine from amongst dull clods of earth. She
wanted to be happy, and enjoy herself in her own way. She was not
content to wait till her allotted portion of joy came to her; and she
mistook the power to appreciate and enjoy beautiful things for a kind of
divine right to happiness and splendour.
To say that George Gilbert did not understand his wife is to say very
little. Nobody, except perhaps Sigismund Smith, had ever yet understood
Isabel. She did not express herself better than other girls of her age;
sometimes she expressed herself worse; for she wanted to say so much,
and a hopeless confusion would arise every now and then out of that
entanglement of eager thought and romantic rapture which filled her
brain. In Miss Sleaford's own home people had been a great deal too much
occupied with the ordinary bustle of life to trouble themselves about a
young lady's romantic reveries. Mrs. Sleaford had thought that she had
said all that was to be said about Isabel when she had denounced her as
a lazy, selfish thing, who would have sat on the grass and read novels
if the house had been blazing, and all her family perishing in the
flames. The boys had looked upon their half-sister with all that
supercilious mixture of pity and contempt with which all boys are apt to
regard any fellow-creature who is so weak-minded as to be a girl.
Mr. Sleaford had been very fond of his only daughter; but he had loved
her chiefly because she was pretty, and because of those dark eyes whose
like he had never seen except in the face of that young broken-hearted
wife so early lost to him.
Nobody had ever quite understood Isabel; and least of all could George
Gilbert understand the woman whom he had chosen for his wife. He loved
her and admired her, and he was honestly anxious that she should be
happy; but then he wanted her to be happy according to his ideas of
happiness, and not her own. He wanted her to be delighted with stiff
little tea-parties, at which the Misses Pawlkatt, and the Misses
Burdock, and young Mrs. Henry Palmer, wife of Mr. Henry Palmer junior,
solicitor, discoursed pleasantly of the newest patterns in crochet, and
the last popular memoir of some departed Evangelical curate. Isabel did
not take any interest in these things, and could not make herself happy
with these people. Unluckily she allowed this to be seen; and, after a
few tea-parties, the Graybridge aristocracy dropped away from her, only
calling now and then, out of respect for George, who was heartily
compassionated on account of his most mistaken selection of a wife.
So Isabel was left to herself, and little by little fell back into very
much the same kind of life as that which she had led at Camberwell.
She had given up all thought of beautifying the house which was now her
home. After that struggle about the ottoman, there had been many other
struggles in which Isabel had pleaded for smaller and less expensive
improvements, only to be blighted by that hard common sense with which
Mr. George Gilbert was wont--on principle--to crush his wife's
enthusiasm. He had married this girl because she was unlike other women;
and now that she was his own property, he set himself conscientiously to
work to smooth her into the most ordinary semblance of every-day
womanhood, by means of that moral flat-iron called common sense.
Of course he succeeded to admiration. Isabel abandoned all hope of
making her new home pretty, or transforming George Gilbert into a Walter
Gay. She had made a mistake, and she accepted the consequences of her
mistake; and fell back upon the useless dreamy life she had led so long
in her father's house.
The surgeon's duties occupied him all day long, and Isabel was left to
herself. She had none of the common distractions of a young matron. She
had no servants to scold, no china to dust, no puddings or pies or soups
or hashes to compound for her husband's dinner. Mrs. Jeffson did all
that kind of work, and would have bitterly resented any interference
from the "slip of a girl" whom Mr. Gilbert had chosen for his wife.
Isabel did as she liked; and this meant reading novels all day long, or
as long as she had a novel to read, and writing unfinished verses of a
lachrymose nature on half-sheets of paper.
When the spring came she went out--alone; for her husband was away among
his patients, and had no time to accompany her. She went for long
rambles in that lovely Elizabethan Midlandshire, and thought of the life
that never was to be hers. She wandered alone in the country lanes where
the hedgerows were budding; and sat alone, with her book on her lap,
among the buttercups and daisies in the shady angle of a meadow, where
the untrimmed hawthorns made a natural bower above her head. Stray
pedestrians crossing the meadows near Graybridge often found the
doctor's young wife sitting under a big green parasol, with a little
heap of gathered wild-flowers fading on the grass beside her, and with
an open book upon her knees. Sometimes she went as far as Thurston's
Crag, the Midlandshire seat of Lord Thurston; a dear old place, an
island of mediæval splendour amidst a sea of green pasture-land, where,
under the very shadow of a noble mansion, there was a waterfall and a
miller's cottage that was difficult to believe in out of a picture.
There was a wooden bridge across that noisiest of waterfalls, and a
monster oak, whose spreading branches shadowed all the width of the
water; and it was on a rough wooden bench under this dear old tree that
Isabel loved best to sit.
The Graybridge people were not slow to remark upon Mrs. Gilbert's
habits, and hinted that a young person who spent so much of her time in
the perusal of works of fiction could scarcely be a model wife. Before
George had been married three months, the ladies who had been familiar
with him in his bachelorhood had begun to pity him, and had already
mapped out for him such a career of domestic wretchedness as rarely
falls to the lot of afflicted man.
Mrs. Gilbert was _not_ pretty. The Graybridge ladies settled that
question at the very first tea-party from which George and his wife were
absent. She was not pretty--when you looked into her. That was the point
upon which the feminine critics laid great stress. At a distance,
certainly, Mrs. Gilbert might look showy. The lady who hit upon the
adjective "showy" was very much applauded by her friends. At a distance
Isabel might be called showy; always provided you like eyes that are so
large as only by a miracle to escape from being goggles, and lips that
are so red as to be unpleasantly suggestive of scarlet-fever. But _look
into_ Mrs. Gilbert, and even this show of beauty vanished, and you only
saw a sickly young person, with insignificant features and coarse black
hair--so coarse and common in texture, that its abnormal length and
thickness--of which Isabel was no doubt inordinately proud--were very
little to boast of.
But while the Graybridge ladies criticised his wife and prophesied for
him all manner of dismal sufferings, George Gilbert, strange to say, was
very happy. He had married the woman he loved, and no thought that he
had loved unwisely or married hastily ever entered his mind. When he
came home from a long day's work, he found a beautiful creature waiting
to receive him--a lovely and lovable creature, who put her arms around
his neck and kissed him, and smiled at him. It was not in his nature to
see that the graceful little embrace, and the welcoming kiss, and the
smile, were rather mechanical matters that came of themselves. He took
his dinner, or his weak tea, or his supper, as the case might be, and
stretched his long legs across the familiar hearth-rug, and talked to
his wife, and was happy. If she had an open book beside her plate, and
if her eyes wandered to the page every now and then while he was talking
to her, she had often told him that she could listen and read at the
same time; and no doubt she could do so. What more than sweet smiles and
gentle looks could the most exacting husband demand? And George Gilbert
had plenty of these; for Isabel was very grateful to him, because he
never grumbled at her idleness and novel-reading, or worried and scolded
as her step-mother had done. She was fond of him, as she would have been
fond of a big elder brother, who let her have a good deal of her own
way; and so long as he left her unassailed by his common sense, she was
happy, and tolerably satisfied with her life. Yes; she was satisfied
with her life, which was the same every day, and with the dull old town,
where no change ever came. She was satisfied as an opium-eater is
satisfied with the common every-day world; which is only the frame that
holds together all manner of splendid and ever-changing pictures. She
was content with a life in which she had ample leisure to dream of a
different existence.
Oh, how she thought of that other and brighter life! that life in which
there was passion, and poetry, and beauty, and rapture, and despair!
Here among these meadows, and winding waters, and hedgerows, life was a
long sleep: and one might as well be a brown-eyed cow, browsing from
week's end to week's end in the same pastures, as a beautiful woman with
an eager yearning soul.
Mrs. Gilbert thought of London--that wonderful West-End, May-Fair
London, which has no attribute in common with all the great metropolitan
wilderness around and about it. She thought of that holy of holies, that
inner sanctuary of life, in which all the women are beautiful and all
the men are wicked, in which existence is a perpetual whirlpool of balls
and dinner-parties and hothouse flowers and despair. She thought of that
untasted life, and pictured it, and thrilled with a sense of its
splendour and brightness, as she sat by the brawling waterfall, and
heard the creaking wheel of the mill, and the splashing of the trailing
weeds. She saw herself amongst the light and music of that other world;
queen of a lamplit boudoir, where loose patches of ermine gleamed
whitely upon carpets of velvet-pile; where, amid a confusion of glitter
and colour, she might sit, nestling among the cushions of a low gilded
chair, and listening contemptuously (she always imagined herself
contemptuous) to the eloquent compliments of a wicked prince. And then
the Row! She saw herself in the Row sometimes, upon an Arab--a black
Arab--that would run away with her at the most fashionable time in the
afternoon, and all but kill her; and then she would rein him up as no
mortal woman ever reined in an Arab steed before, and would ride slowly
back between two ranks of half-scared, half-admiring faces, with her
hair hanging over her shoulders and her eyelashes drooping on her
flushed cheeks. And then the wicked prince, goaded by an unvarying
course of contemptuous treatment, would fall ill, and be at the point of
death; and one night, when she was at a ball, with floating robes of
cloud-like lace and diamonds glimmering in her hair, he would send for
her--that wicked, handsome, adorable creature would send his valet to
summon her to his deathbed, and she would see him there in the dim
lamplight, pale and repentant, and romantic and delightful; and as she
fell on her knees in all the splendour of her lace and diamonds, he
would break a blood-vessel and die! And then she would go back to the
ball, and would be the gayest and most beautiful creature in all that
whirlpool of elegance and beauty. Only the next morning, when her
attendants came to awaken her, they would find her--_dead_!
Amongst the books which Mrs. Gilbert most often carried to the bench by
the waterfall was the identical volume which Charles Raymond had looked
at in such a contemptuous spirit in Hurstonleigh Grove--the little thin
volume of poems entitled "An Alien's Dreams." Mr. Raymond had given his
nursery-governess a parcel of light literature soon after her marriage,
and this poor little book of verses was one of the volumes in the
parcel; and as Isabel knew her Byron and her Shelley by heart, and could
recite long melancholy rhapsodies from the works of either poet by the
hour together, she fastened quite eagerly upon this little green-covered
volume by a nameless writer.
The Alien's dreams seemed like her own fancies, somehow; for they
belonged to that bright _other_ world which she was never to see. How
familiar the Alien was with that delicious region; and how lightly _he_
spoke of the hothouse flowers and diamonds, the ermine carpets and Arab
steeds! She read the poems over and over again in the drowsy June
weather, sitting in the shabby little common parlour when the afternoons
were too hot for out-door rambles, and getting up now and then to look
at her profile in the glass over the mantel-piece, and to wonder whether
she was like any of those gorgeous but hollow-hearted creatures upon
whom the Alien showered such torrents of melodious abuse.
Who was the Alien? Isabel had asked Mr. Raymond that question, and had
been a little crashed by the reply. The Alien was a Midlandshire squire,
Mr. Raymond had told her; and the word 'squire' suggested nothing but a
broad-shouldered, rosy-faced man, in a scarlet coat and top-boots.
Surely no squire could have written those half-heartbroken, half-cynical
verses, those deliciously scornful elegies upon the hollowness of lovely
woman and things in general! Isabel had her own image of the writer--her
own ideal poet, who rose in all his melancholy glory, and pushed the
red-coated country squire out of her mind when she sat with the "Alien's
Dreams" in her lap, or scribbled weak imitations of that gentleman's
poetry upon the backs of old envelopes and other scraps of waste paper.
Sometimes, when George had eaten his supper, Isabel would do him the
favour of reading aloud one of the most spasmodic of the Alien's dreams.
But when the Alien was most melodiously cynical, and the girl's voice
tremulous with sudden exaltation of feeling, her eyes, wandering by
chance to where her husband sat, would watch him yawning behind his
glass of ale, or reckoning a patient's account on the square tips of his
fingers. On one occasion poor George was terribly perplexed to behold
his wife suddenly drop her book upon her lap and burst into tears. He
could imagine no reason for her weeping, and he sat aghast, staring at
her for some moments before he could utter any word of consolation.
"You don't care for the poetry, George," she cried, with the sudden
passion of a spoiled child. "Oh, why do you let me read to you, if you
don't care for the poetry?"
"But I do care for it, Izzie, dear," Mr. Gilbert murmured,
soothingly,--"at least I like to hear you read, if it amuses _you_."
Isabel flung the "Alien" into the remotest corner of the little parlour,
and turned from her husband as if he had stung her.
"You don't understand me," she said; "you don't understand me."
"No, my dear Isabel," returned Mr. Gilbert, with dignity (for his common
sense reasserted itself after the first shock of surprise); "I certainly
do _not_ understand you when you give way to such temper as this without
any visible cause."
He walked over to the corner of the room, picked up the little volume,
and smoothed the crumpled leaves; for his habits were orderly, and the
sight of a book lying open upon the carpet was unpleasant to him.
Of course poor George was right, and Isabel was a very capricious,
ill-tempered young woman when she flew into a passion of rage and grief
because her husband counted his fingers while she was reading to him.
But then such little things as these make the troubles of people who are
spared from the storm and tempest of life. Such sorrows as these are the
Scotch mists, the drizzling rains of existence. The weather doesn't
appear so very bad to those who behold it from a window; but that sort
of scarcely perceptible drizzle chills the hapless pedestrian to the
very bone. I have heard of a lady who was an exquisite musician, and
who, in the dusky twilight of a honeymoon evening, played to her
husband,--played as some women play, pouring out all her soul upon the
keys of the piano, breathing her finest and purest thoughts in one of
Beethoven's sublime sonatas.
"That's a very _pretty tune_," said the husband, complacently.
She was a proud reserved woman, and she closed the piano without a word
of complaint or disdain; but she lived to be old, and she never touched
the keys again.