Mrs. Wilmot.
"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 key-note to Mrs. Wilmot's character; a
key-note 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_."