"'TWERE BEST AT ONCE TO SINK TO PEACE."
After that farewell meeting with Mr. Sleaford in Nessborough Hollow, a
sense of peace came upon Isabel Gilbert. She had questioned her father
about his plans, and he had told her that he should leave Midlandshire
by the seven o'clock train from Wareham on the following morning. He
should be heartily rejoiced to get to London, he said, and to leave a
place where he felt like a fox in a hole. The sentimental element was by
no means powerfully developed in the nature of Jack the Scribe, to whom
the crowded pavements of Fleet Street and the Strand were infinitely
more agreeable than the wild roses and branching fern of Midlandshire.
His daughter slept tranquilly that night for the first time after Mr.
Sleaford's appearance before the surgeon's door. She slept in peace,
worn out by the fatigue and anxiety of the last fortnight; and no evil
dream disturbed her slumbers. The odic forces must be worth very little
after all, for there was no consciousness in the sleeper's mind of that
quiet figure lying among the broken fern; no shadow, however dim, of the
scene that had been enacted in the tranquil, summer moonlight, while she
was hurrying homeward through the dewy lanes, triumphant in the thought
that her difficult task was accomplished. Only once in a century does
the vision of Maria Martin appear to an anxious dreamer; only so often
as to shake the formal boundary-wall of common sense which we have so
rigidly erected between the visible and invisible, and to show us that
there are more things in heaven and earth than our dull philosophy is
prepared to recognize.
Isabel woke upon the morning after that interview in the Hollow, with a
feeling of relief still in her mind. Her father was gone, and all was
well. He was not likely to return; for she had told him, with most
solemn protestations, that she had obtained the money with extreme
difficulty, and would never be able to obtain more. She had told him
this, and he had promised never again to assail her with any demands. It
was a very easy thing for Jack the Scribe to make that or any other
promise; but even if he broke his word, Isabel thought, there was every
chance that Roland Lansdell would leave Midlandshire very speedily, and
become once more an alien and a wanderer.
The Doctor's Wife was at peace, therefore; the dreadful terror of the
past fortnight was lifted away from her mind, and she was prepared to do
her duty; to be true to Mr. Colborne's solemn teaching, and to watch
dutifully, undistracted by any secret fear and anguish, by George
Gilbert's sick bed.
Very dismal faces greeted her beside that bed. Mr. Jeffson never left
his post now at the pillow of his young master. The weeds grew unheeded
in the garden; and Brown Molly missed her customary grooming. The
gardener had thrown half a load of straw in the lane, below the doctor's
window, so that no rumbling of the waggon-wheels carrying home the
new-mown hay should disturb George Gilbert's feverish sleep, if the
brief fitful dozes into which he fell now and then could be called by so
sweet a name.
Mr. Pawlkatt sat looking at his patient longer than usual that morning.
George Gilbert lay in a kind of stupor, and did not recognize his
medical attendant, and sometime rival. He had long since ceased to be
anxious about his poor patients in the lanes behind the church, or about
anything else upon this earth, as it seemed; and now that her great
terror had been lifted from her mind, Isabel saw a new and formless
horror gliding swiftly towards her, like a great iceberg sailing fast
upon an arctic sea. She followed Mr. Pawlkatt out of the room, and down
the little staircase, and clung to his arm as he was about to leave her.
"Oh, do you think he will die?" she said. "I did not know until this
morning that he was so very ill. Do you think he will die?"
The surgeon looked inquisitively into the earnest face lifted to
his--looked with some expression of surprise upon his countenance.
"I am very anxious, Mrs. Gilbert," he answered, gravely. "I will not
conceal from you that I am growing very anxious. The pulse is feeble and
intermittent; and these low fevers--there, there, don't cry. I'll drive
over to Wareham, as soon as I've seen the most important of my cases;
and I'll ask Dr. Herstett to come and look at your husband. Pray try to
be calm."
"I am so frightened," murmured Isabel, between her low half-stifled
sobs. "I never saw any one ill--like that--before."
Mr. Pawlkatt watched her gravely as he drew on his gloves.
"I am not sorry to see this anxiety on your part, Mrs. Gilbert," he
remarked sententiously. "As the friend and brother-professional of your
husband, and as a man who is--ahem!--old enough to be your father, I
will go so far as to say that I am gratified to find that you--I may
say, your heart is in the right place. There have been some very awkward
reports about you, Mrs. Gilbert, during the last few days. I--I--of
course should not presume to allude to those reports, if I did not
believe them to be erroneous," the surgeon added, rather hastily, not
feeling exactly secure as to the extent and bearing of the law of libel.
But Isabel only looked at him with bewilderment and distress in her
face.
"Reports about me!" she repeated. "What reports?"
"There has been a person--a stranger--staying at a little inn down in
Nessborough Hollow; and you,--in fact, I really have no right to
interfere in this matter, but my very great respect for your
husband,-and, in short----"
"Oh, that person is gone now," Isabel answered frankly. "It was very
unkind of people to say anything against him, or against me. He was a
relation,--a very near relation,--and I could not do otherwise than see
him now and then while he was in the neighbourhood. I went late in the
evening, because I did not wish to leave my husband at any other time. I
did not think that the Graybridge people watched me so closely, or were
so ready to think that what I do must be wrong."
Mr. Pawlkatt patted her hand soothingly.
"A relation, my dear Mrs. Gilbert?" he exclaimed. "That, of course,
quite alters the case. I always said that you were no doubt perfectly
justified in doing as you did; though it would have been better to
invite the person here. Country people will talk, you know. As a medical
man, with rather a large field of experience, I see all these little
provincial weaknesses. They will talk; but keep up your courage, Mrs.
Gilbert. We shall do our best for our poor friend. We shall do our very
best."
He gave Isabel's tremulous hand a little reassuring squeeze, and
departed complacently.
The Doctor's Wife stood absently watching him as he walked away, and
then turned and went slowly into the parlour--the empty,
miserable-looking parlour, which had not been used now for more than a
week. The dust lay thick upon the shabby old furniture, and the
atmosphere was hot and oppressive.
Here Isabel sat down beside the chiffonier, where her poor little
collection of books was huddled untidily in a dusty corner. She sat down
to think--trying to realize the nature of that terror which seemed so
close to her, trying to understand the full significance of what Mr.
Pawlkatt had said of her husband.
The surgeon had given no hope that George Gilbert would recover; he had
only made little conventional speeches about calmness and fortitude.
She tried to think, but could not. She had only spoken the truth just
now, when she cried out that she was frightened. This kind of terror was
so utterly new to her that she could not understand the calm
business-like aspect of the people who watched and waited on her
husband. Could he be dying? That strong active man, whose rude health
and hearty appetite had once jarred so harshly upon all her schoolgirl
notions of consumptive and blood-vessel-breaking heroes! Could he be
dying?--dying as heroic a death as any she had ever read of in her
novels: the death of a man who speculates his life for the benefit of
his fellow-creatures, and loses by the venture. The memory of every
wrong that she had ever done him--small wrongs of neglect, or
contemptuous opinions regarding his merits--wrongs that had been quite
impalpable to the honest unromantic doctor,--crowded upon her now, and
made a dull remorseful anguish in her breast. The dark shadow brooding
over George Gilbert--the dread gigantic shadow, growing darker day by
day--made him a new creature in the mind of this weak girl. No thought
of her own position had any place in her mind. She could not think; she
could only wait, oppressed by a dread whose nature she dared not
realize. She sat for a long time in the same forlornly listless
attitude, almost as helpless as the man who lay in the darkened chamber
above her. Then, rousing herself with effort, she crept up-stairs to the
room where the grave faces of the watchers greeted her, with very little
sympathy in their gaze.
Had not Mr. and Mrs. Jeffson heard the reports current in Graybridge;
and was it likely they could have any pity for a woman who crept
stealthily at nightfall from her invalid husband's house to meet a
stranger?
Isabel would have whispered some anxious question about the patient; but
Matilda Jeffson frowned sternly at her, commanding silence with an
imperious forefinger; and she was fain to creep into a dark corner,
where it had been her habit to sit since the Jeffsons had, in a manner,
taken possession of her husband's sick bed. She could not dispute their
right to do so. What was she but a frivolous, helpless creature,
fluttering and trembling like a leaf when she essayed to do any little
service for the invalid?
The day seemed painfully long. The ticking of an old clock on the
stairs, and the heavy troubled breathing of the sick man, were the only
sounds that broke the painful silence of the house. Once or twice Isabel
took an open Testament from a little table near her, and tried to take
some comfort from its pages. But she could not feel the beauty of the
words as she had in the little church at Hurstonleigh, when her mind had
been exalted by all manner of vague spiritualistic yearnings; now it
seemed deadened by the sense of dread and horror. She did not love her
husband; and those tidings of heavenly love which have so subtle an
affinity with earthly affection could not touch her very nearly in her
present frame of mind. She did not love her husband well enough to pray
that something little short of a miracle might be wrought for his sake.
She was only sorry for him; tenderly compassionate of his suffering;
very fearful that he might die. She did pray for him; but there was no
exaltation in her prayers, and she had a dull presentiment that her
supplications would not be answered.
It was late in the afternoon when the physician from Wareham came with
Mr. Pawlkatt; and when he did arrive, he seemed to do very little,
Isabel thought. He was a grey-whiskered important-looking man, with
creaking boots; he seated himself by the bedside, and felt the patient's
pulse, and listened to his breathing, and lifted his heavy eyelids, and
peered into his dim blood-shot eyes. He asked a good many questions, and
then went down-stairs with Mr. Pawlkatt, and the two medical men were
closeted together some ten or twelve minutes in the little parlour.
Isabel did not follow Mr. Pawlkatt down-stairs this time. She was awed
by the presence of the strange physician, and there was nothing in the
manner of the two men that inspired hope or comfort. She sat quite still
in her dusky corner; but Mrs. Jeffson stole out of the room soon after
the medical men had quitted it, and went slowly down-stairs. George was
asleep; in a very sound and heavy sleep this time; and his breathing was
more regular than it had been--more regular, but still a laboured
stertorous kind of respiration that was very painful to hear. In less
than ten minutes Mrs. Jeffson came back, looking very pale, and with
traces of tears upon her face. The good woman had been listening to the
medical consultation in the little parlour below.
Perhaps Isabel dimly comprehended this; for she got up from her chair,
and went a little way towards her husband's housekeeper.
"Oh, tell me the truth," she whispered, imploringly; "do they think that
he will die?"
"Yes," Matilda Jeffson answered, in a hard cruel voice, strangely at
variance with her stifled sobs, "yes, Mrs. Gilbert; and you'll be free
to take your pleasure, and to meet Mr. Lansdell as often as you like;
and go gadding about after dark with strange men. You might have waited
a bit, Mrs. Gilbert; you wouldn't have had to wait very long--for they
say my poor dear master--and I had him in my arms the day he was born,
so I've need to love him dearly, even if others haven't!--I heard the
doctor from Wareham tell Mr. Pawlkatt that he will never live to see
to-morrow morning's light. So you might have waited, Mrs. Gilbert; but
you're a wicked woman and a wicked wife!"
But just at this moment the sick man started suddenly from his sleep,
and lifted himself into a sitting position. Mr. Jeffson's arm was about
him directly, supporting the wasted figure that had very lately been so
strong.
George Gilbert had heard Matilda's last words, for he repeated them in a
thick strange voice, but with sufficient distinctness. It was a surprise
to those who nursed him to hear him speak reasonably, for it was some
time since he had been conscious of passing events.
"Wicked! no! no!" he said. "Always a good wife; always a very good
wife! Come, Izzie; come here. I'm afraid it has been a dull life, my
dear," he said very gently, as she came to him, clinging to him,
and looking at him with a white scared face,--"dull--very dull;
but it wouldn't have been always so. I thought--by-and-by to--new
practice--Helmswell--market-town--seven thousand inhabitants--and
you--drive--pony-carriage, like Laura Pawlkatt--but--the Lord's will be
done, my dear!--I hope I've done my duty--the poor people--better
rooms--ventilation--please God, by-and-by. I've seen a great deal of
suffering--and--my duty----"
He slid heavily back upon William Jeffson's supporting arm; and a rain
of tears--passionate remorseful tears never to be felt by him--fell on
his pallid face. His death was very sudden, though his illness had been,
considering the nature of his disease, a long and tedious one. He died
supremely peaceful in the consciousness of having done his duty. He
died, with Isabel's hand clasped in his own; and never, throughout his
simple life, had one pang of doubt or jealousy tortured his breast.