[CHAPTER VII.]
Brooding.
The effect of her husband's letter on Mrs. Wilmot's mind, strengthened by the view taken of its contents by Henrietta Prendergast, was of the most serious and injurious nature. Hitherto the unhappiness which had possessed her had been negative--had been literally unhappiness, the absence of joy; but from the hour she read Wilmot's letter, and talked over it with her friend, all that was negative in her state of mind changed to the positive. Hitherto she had been jealous--jealous as only a woman of a thoroughly proud, sensitive, secretive, and sullen nature can be--of an abstraction. Her husband's profession was the bête noir of her existence, was the barrier between her and the happiness for which she vainly longed and pined. She had looked around her, and seen other women whose husbands were also working bees in the world's great hive; but their work did not absorb them to the exclusion of home interests, and the deadening of the sweet and blessed sympathies which lent happiness all its glow, and robbed sorrow of half its gloom. Her husband had never spoken an unkind word to her in his life, had never refused her a request, or denied her a pleasure; but he had never spoken a word to her which told her that the first place in his life was hers; he had never cared to anticipate a request or to share a pleasure. To a woman like Mabel Wilmot, in whose character there was a strong though wholly unsuspected element of romance, there was an inexhaustible source of suffering in these facts, combined with her husband's proverbial devotion to his profession. Not a clever woman, thoroughly conventional in all her ideas, without a notion of the possibility of altering the routine of her life to any pattern which might take her fancy, a dreamer, and incurably shy, especially with him, who never discerned that there was anything beneath the surface of her placid, equable, rather cold manner to be understood, she had ample materials within herself for misery; and she had always made the most of them.
An incalculable addition had been made to her store by Wilmot's letter, and Henrietta Prendergast's comments. Mabel wrote to Mr. Foljambe, under the observation and by the dictation of her friend, merely repeating the words of her husband's letter; and during that performance, and the ensuing conversation, she had felt sufficiently black and bitter to have satisfied any fiend who might have been waiting about for the chance of gratifying his malignity by the coming to grief of human affairs. But it was when she was left alone, when her friend had gone away, and she was in her solitary room--all the trivial occupations of the day at an end, and only the long hours of the night, often sleepless hours to her, to be faced--that she gave way to the intensity of the bitterness of her spirit; that she looked into and sounded the darkness and the depth of the gulf of sorrow which had opened before her feet.
That her husband sought and found all his happiness in the duties of his profession; that he had no consciousness, comprehension, or care for the disappointed feelings which occupied her wholly, had been hard enough to bear--how hard, the lonely woman who had borne the burden knew; but such a state of things, the state from which only a few hours divided her, was happy in comparison with that which now opened suddenly before her. He had neglected her for the profession he preferred; he was going to neglect his own interests, to depart from his accustomed law of life, to throw the best friend he had in the world over--for a woman: yes, a woman, a sick girl had done what she had failed to do: she had never swayed his judgment, or turned him aside from a purpose for a moment; and now he was changed by the touch of a more potent hand than hers, and there was an end of the old settled melancholy peacefulness of her life; active wretchedness had come in, and the repose, dear-bought in its deadness of disappointment and blight, was all gone.
Mabel Wilmot sat opposite the long glass in her room that night, and turned the branch-candles so as to throw a full light upon her face, at which she gazed steadily and long, frowning as she did so. It was a fair face, and the fresh bloom of youth was still upon it. It was a face in which a skilful observer might have read strange matters; but there were none curious to read the story in the face of the pretty wife of the prosperous rising man. Her eyes were soft and dark, well shaded by long lashes, and marked by finely-arched eyebrows; and there were none to see that there was frequent gloom and brooding in their darkness--a shadow from the gloominess of the soul within. She was fair rather than pale, and had abundant dark hair; and as she sat and gazed in the glass, she let its dusky masses loose, and caught them in her hands. The fair face was not pleasant to look upon; and so she seemed to think, for she muttered:
"She is very pretty, I suppose, and a great deal younger than I am; never looks sullen, and has no cause. And yet he's not a man I should have thought to have been beguiled by any woman. I never beguiled him, and I was pretty in my time, ay, and new too! And I have lived in his sight all these years, and he has never sacrificed an hour of time or thought to me. And now he leaves me without hesitation, though I am ill. I have not talked about it, to be sure; but what is his skill worth, if he did not see it in my face and hear it in my voice without being told! I was not a case--I was only his wife; and he never thought of looking, never thought of caring whether I was ill or well. I appear at breakfast, and I go out every day; that's quite enough for him. I wonder if he knew what I suspect, what I should once have said I hope, is the cause; but that is a long time ago. Would it have made any difference? I don't mean now; of course it would not now; nothing makes any difference to a man when once his heart is turned aside, and quite filled by another. I don't think I ever touched his heart; I know only too well I never filled it."
Mabel Wilmot was right. She had never filled her husband's heart. She had touched it though, for a time and after a light holiday kind of fashion, which had subsided when life began in earnest for them, and which he had laid aside and forgotten, as a boy might have abandoned and lost sight of the toys with which he had amused himself during a school vacation. And the girl had been deceived; had built silently in the inveterately undemonstrative recesses of her heart and fancy a fairy palace, destined to stand for ever empty. It had been swept and garnished; but the prince had never come to dwell there: he with busy feet had passed by on the other side, and she had nothing to do but to sit and mourn in the empty chambers. She had borne her grief valiantly until now; she had only known the passive side of it. But that was all over for ever; and the day that dawned after Wilmot's wife had received his letter found her a different woman from what she had been.
"Are you sure you are not ill, Mabel?" asked Mrs. Prendergast the day after their colloquy over the letter. "You are so black under the eyes, and your face is so pinched, I fancy you must be ill."
"Not more so than usual," said Mrs. Wilmot shortly.