"Anywhere, anywhere,
Out of the world!"
that was another couplet from the same poem that was fixed in his brain, and that he found himself constantly quoting, when he was trying to assign reasons for his wife's suicide. Was Henrietta Prendergast right, after all? Had his whole married life been a mistake, a Dead-Sea apple without even the gorgeous external, a hollow sham, a delusion, and a mockery culminating in the semblance of a crime? "Anywhere out of the world," eh? And "out of the world" had meant at first, in the early days, when the first faint dawnings of discontent rose in her mind,--then "anywhere out of the world" was a poor dejected cry of repining at her want of power to influence her husband, to make herself the successful rival of his profession, to wean him from the constant pursuit of science to the exclusion of all domestic bliss, and to render him her companion and her lover. But if Henrietta Prendergast were right, that must have been a mere fancy, which, compared to the wild despair that prompted the heart-broken shriek of "anywhere out of the world" at the last, and which, according to that authority, meant--anywhere for rest and peace and quiet, anywhere where I may stifle the love which I bear him, may be no longer a fetter and a clog to him, and might have to suffer the knowledge that though bound to me, he loves Madeleine Kilsyth.
He loves Madeleine Kilsyth! As the thought rose in his mind, he found himself audibly repeating the sentence. His dead wife thought that; and in that thought found life insupportable to her, and destroyed herself! His dead wife! Straightway his thoughts flew back through a series of years, and he saw himself first married,--young, earnest, and striving. Not in love with his wife--that he never had been, he reflected with something like self-excuse--not in love with Mabel, but actually proud of her. When he first commenced his connection, and earned the gratitude of the great railway contractor's wife at Clapham, and that great dame, who was the ruling star in her own circle, intimated her intention of calling on Mrs. Wilmot, Wilmot remembered how he had thanked his stars that while some of his fellow-students had married barmaids of London taverns, or awkward hoydens from their provincial pasture, he had had the good luck to espouse a girl than whom the great Mrs. Sleepers herself was not more thoroughly presentable, more perfectly well-mannered. He recollected the first interview at his little, modest, badly-furnished house, with the dingy maid-servant decorated with one of Mabel's cast-off gowns (not cast off until every scrap of bloom had been ruthlessly worn off it), and the arrival of the great lady in her banging, swinging barouche, with her tawdry ill-got-up footman, and her evident astonishment at the way in which everything was made the most of, and at the taste which characterised the rooms, and her open-mouthed wonder at Mabel herself, in her turned black-silk dress and her neat linen cuffs and collar, and her impossibility to patronise, and her declaration delivered to him the next day, that his wife was "the nicest little woman in the world, and a real lady!"
Out of the gloom of long-since vanished days came a thousand little reminiscences, each "garlanded with its peculiar flower," each touchingly remindful of something pleasant connected with the dead woman whom he had lost. Long dreary nights which he had passed in reading and working, and which she had spent in vaguely wondering what was to be the purport and result of all his labour. No sympathy! that had been his cry! Good God!--as though he had not been demented in fancying that a young woman could have had sympathy with his dry studies, his physiological experiments. No sympathy! what sympathy had he shown to her? The mere physical struggle in the race, the hope of winning, the dawning of success, had irradiated his life, had softened the stony path, and pushed aside the briers, and tempered the difficulties in his career; but how had she benefited? In sharing them? But had he permitted her to share them? had he ever made her a portion of himself? had he not laughed aside the notion of her entering into the vital affairs of his career, and told her that any assistance from her was an impossibility? That she was self-contained and unsympathetic, he had said to himself a thousand times. Now, for the first time, he asked himself who had made her so;--and the answer was anything but consoling to him in his then desolate frame of mind.
These thoughts were constantly present to him; he found it impossible to shake them off; in the few minutes' interval between the exit of one patient and the entrance of another, in his driving from house to house, his mind instantly gave up the case with which it had recently been occupied, and turned back to the dead woman. He would sit, apparently looking vacantly before him, but in reality trying to recall the looks, words, ways of his dead wife. He tried--O, how hard!--to recall one look of content, of happiness, of thorough trust and love; but he tried in vain. A general expression of quiet suffering, which had become calm through continuance, varied by an occasional glance of querulous impatience when he might have been betrayed into dilating on the importance of some case in which he happened to be engaged and the interest with which it filled him,--these were his only recollections of Mabel's looks. Nor did his remembrance of her words and ways afford him any more comfort. True she had never said, certainly had never said to him, that her life was anything but a happy one; but she had looked it often. Even he felt that now, reading her looks by the light of memory, and wondered that the truth had never struck him at the time. He remembered how he would look up off his work and see her, her hands lying listlessly in her lap, her eyes staring vacantly before, so entranced, so rapt in her own thoughts, that she would start violently when he spoke to her. She always had the same answer for his questions at those times. What was the matter with her? Nothing! What should be the matter with her?--What was she thinking of? Nothing, at least nothing that could possibly interest him. Did her presence there annoy him, because she would go away willingly if it did? And the voice in which this was said--the cold, hard, dry, unsympathising voice! Good God! if he had not been sufficiently mindful of her, if he had not bestowed such attention and affection as is due from a husband to his wife, surely there was some small excuse for him in the manner in which his clumsy approaches had been received!
At times he felt a wild inexplicable desire to have her back again with him, and fell into a long train of thought as to what he should do supposing all the events of the past three months were to turn out to have been a dream--as indeed he often fancied they would; and on his return he were to go up into the drawing-room, whither he had never penetrated since his return, and were to find Mabel sitting there, prim and orderly, among the prim and orderly furniture. Should he alter his method of life, and endeavour to make it more acceptable to her? How was it to be done? It would be impossible for him now to give up his confirmed ways; impossible for him to give up his reading and his work, and fritter away his evenings in taking his wife to the gaieties to which they were invited. Perkins might do that--did it, and found it answer; but the profession knew that Perkins was a charlatan, and he--What wild nonsense was he thinking of? It was done--it was over; he should never find his wife waiting for him again when he returned: she was dead; she had destroyed herself!
As this horrible thought burst upon him again with tenfold its original horror, he buried his face in his hands, and bowed his head upon the writing table in front of him in an agony of despair. He could bear it no longer; it was driving him mad. If he only knew--and yet he dared not inquire more closely; the presumptive evidence was horribly strong, was thoroughly sufficient to rob him of his peace of mind, of his clearness of intellect. Then the terrible consequences of the discovery, the awful duty which it imposed upon him, flashed upon his labouring consciousness. He dared not inquire more closely? No, not he. As a physician, he knew perfectly well what the result of any such inquiry would be. He knew perfectly well that in any other case, where he was merely professionally and not personally interested, his first idea for the solution of such doubts as then oppressed him, had they existed in anyone else, would have been to suggest the exhumation of the body, and its rigid examination. He knew perfectly well that, harbouring such doubts as were then racking and torturing his distracted mind, it was clearly his duty to insist on such steps being taken. He was no squeamish woman, no nervous man, to be alarmed at the sight of death's dread handiwork; that was familiar to him from constant experience, from old hospital custom, from his education and his studies. Should this dread idea of Mabel's self-destruction, now ever haunting him, ever present to his mind--should it cross the thoughts of anyone else, would not the necessity for exhumation be the first notion that would present itself? Suppose he were to suggest it? Suppose he were to profess himself dissatisfied with the accounts of Mabel's illness given him by Whittaker, and were to insist upon positive proof, professionally satisfactory to him, of his wife's disease? Of course he would make a deadly enemy of Whittaker; but that he thought but little of: his name stood high enough to bear any slur that might be thrown upon it from that quarter, and his reputation would stand higher than ever from the mere fact of his boldly determining to face a disagreeable inquiry, rather than allow such a case to be slurred over. And the inquiry made, and Whittaker's statement proved to be generally correct, at best it would be thought that Dr. Wilmot was somewhat morbidly anxious as to the cause of his wife's death; an anxiety which would be anything but prejudicial to him in the minds of many of his friends, while the relief to his own overcharged mind would be immediate and complete. Relief! Ah, once more to feel relief would be worth all the responsibility. He would see about it at once; he would give the necessary information, and--But suppose the result did not turn out as he would hope to see it? suppose all the information given, the coroner's warrant obtained, the exhumation made, the examination complete, and the result--that Mabel had destroyed herself? The first step taken in such a matter would be an immediate challenge to public attention; the press would bear the whole matter broadcast on its wings; Dr. Wilmot and his domestic affairs would become a subject for gossip throughout the land; and if it proved that Mabel had destroyed herself, her memory would, at his instance, remain ever crime-tainted. Even if the best happened; if Whittaker's judgment were indorsed, would not people ask whether it was not odd that a suspicion of foul play should have crossed the husband's mind, whether Mrs. Wilmot in her lifetime may not have used such a threat; and if so, might not the circumstances which led to the supposed use of the threat be inquired into, the motives questioned, the home-life discussed? Hour after hour he revolved this in his mind, purposeless, wavering. Finally he decided that he would leave matters as they were, saying to himself that such a course was merely justice to his dead wife, on whose memory, were she guilty of self-slaughter, he should be the last to bring obloquy, or even suspicion. He felt more comfortable after having come to this decision--more comfortable in persuading himself that he was guided by a tender feeling towards the dead woman. He said "Poor Mabel!" to himself several times in thinking over it, and shook his head dolefully; and actually felt that if she had been prompted by his neglect to take this step, his omitting to call public attention to it was in itself some amende for his neglect. But even to himself he would not allow this soul-guiding influence in the matter. He blinked it, and shut his eyes to it; refused to listen to it, and--was led by it all the same. Chudleigh Wilmot tried to persuade himself, did persuade himself that he was acting solely in deference to his dead wife's memory; but what really influenced his conduct was the knowledge that the arousal of the smallest suspicion as to the cause of his wife's death, the smallest scandal about himself, would inevitably separate him hopelessly, and for ever, from Madeleine Kilsyth. The great question as to whether Mabel had destroyed herself still remained unanswered. He was powerless to shake off the impression, and under the impression he was useless; he could do justice neither to himself nor his patients. He must get away; give up practice at least for a time, and go abroad; go somewhere where he knew no one, and where he himself was quite unknown--somewhere where he could have rest and quiet and surcease of brainwork; where he could face this dreadful incubus, and either get rid of it, or school himself to bear it without its present dire effect on his life.
He would do that, and do it at once. The death of his wife would afford him sufficient excuse to the world, which knew him as a highly nervous and easily impressible man, and which would readily understand that he had been shattered by the suddenness of the blow. As to his practice, he was well content to give that up for a short time: he knew his own value without being in the least conceited--knew that he could pick it up again just where he left it, and that his patients would be only too glad to see him. He had felt that when he was at Kilsyth.
At Kilsyth! The word jarred upon him at once. To give up his practice even for a time meant a temporary estrangement from Madeleine; meant a shutting out, so far as he was concerned, of sun and warmth and light and life, at the very time when his way was darkest and his path most beset. His mind had been so fully occupied since his return, that he had only been able to give a few fleeting thoughts to Madeleine. He felt a kind of horror at permitting her even in his thoughts to be connected with the dreadful subject which filled them. But now when the question of departure was being considered by him, he naturally turned to Madeleine.