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, to-morrow--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.".