Irreparable.
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 hand-writing 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,
tomorrow--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."