"Yes," said Henrietta; "I did not know how long or how short a time you might be within my reach; and so I determined to lose no time in endeavouring to gain your assent to a wish of poor Mabel's."
The conscious blood rushed into Wilmot's face. This, then, was the double connection of his present visit with his grief and his fortune. And he had not been thinking of Mabel! His dead wife's friend believed him indifferent to the wealth that had come too late to be shared by her; and except for the first sudden remembrance which the sight of Henrietta had produced, he had not thought of his dead wife at all. He thought of her now with keen remorse--keener because it had not occurred to him to think of her before, in connection with his wealth. Yes, the life which had had so dark an ending might have been very bright and prosperous now, with all this useless money to gild it. He shrunk from Mrs. Prendergast's steady eyes with all the shame and uneasiness of a candid nature when given credit for motives or deeds superior to the truth. No vision of the dead face he had seen, awfully white and still, in his little loved home, had arisen to blot out the prospect of a future rich in all that wealth can give, to teach him how infinitely little is that all, how poor that richness! But he carried about for ever between him and the sunshine a vision of a fair girlish face, with pleading innocent blue eyes, with golden hair and faintly flushing cheeks, with sweet sensitive lips, and over all a look which he knew well and interpreted only too accurately. And that face, it did not lie in a coffin indeed, but as far, as hopelessly away from him--it lay on another man's breast This was his grief; the other--well, the other was his shield from suspicion, from observation, his defence. He seized upon it, feeling unutterably the degradation of the evasion, and answered:
"I will be more than grateful, Mrs. Prendergast, if you can show me any way in which I can fulfil any wish of hers. If there is anything within the power of any effort of mine, let me know it."
Then Henrietta, in her turn, putting the dead woman forward as a pretext, began to discuss with Wilmot the provisions of a certain charitable institution, to which she knew it had been Mrs. Wilmot's wish to contribute, but which she had not felt entitled by her means to assist. Wilmot acceded to all her suggestions with the utmost readiness, besought her to tax her memory for any other resource for doing honour to Mabel's memory, and prolonged his visit considerably beyond Henrietta's expectation. In her softened manner there was now no reproach, and her sense and calmness refreshed his jaded spirits. It was a relief to him to be in the company of a woman who did not expect him to be anything but sorrowful, and who yet had no suspicion of the cause and origin of his sorrow. So thought Wilmot, as he left Henrietta, having asked her permission to call on her again speedily.
And at the same moment Henrietta was thinking--
"He knows something of the torture of love unrequited and in vain now. It won't last, of course; but for the present, if she could only know it, poor Mabel is avenged!"
[CHAPTER VIII].
Mrs. Ramsay Caird at Home.
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay Caird lived, it is needless to say, in a fashionable quarter of the town. They could not have lived in any other. Their lot being essentially cast among fashionable people, it was necessary for them to reside somewhere within fashionable people's ken; and that ken is, to say the least of it, limited. It is known to vulgarians and common persons that there are buildings beyond Oxford-street on the north side; but it is not known to fashionable people. They, to be sure, know that some "old families"--and this is said with an emphasis which conveys that the families in question are almost pre-Adamite in their age--reside in Portman-square. The fashionable world allows this as a kind of old-world eccentricity, as it allows male members of said families to appear in the evening in blue tailcoats and brass buttons, and to swathe their necks in rolls of cravat, instead of donning the ordinary small tie. It is a respectable eccentricity; but it is an eccentricity after all. North of Oxford-street is as much "the other side" to the fashionable world as is Suez to the Eastern travellers by the Peninsular and Oriental route. The fashionable world has heard of the big terraces of splendid mansions which Messrs. Kelk and Austin have built in the Bayswater-road facing the Park; they have seen them occasionally when they have been driving to Kensington-gardens; they believe them to be inhabited by a respectable moneyed class; but the idea of looking upon them as residences for themselves has never once struck them. These houses are such an enormous distance from "anywhere," which to the fashionable world is bounded by the Regent-circus on the east, Belgrave-square on the south, the Marble Arch on the west, and Oxford-street on the north.
It is possible that if the choice of district had been left to Madeleine herself, poor child, she, never particularly caring about such matters, and not being in a very critical or very argumentative state of mind at the period of her marriage, would have fixed upon some comfortable pleasant house, cheerful, roomy, airy, but in a wrong situation. If the choice had been left to her father, there is no doubt that he would have made some tremendous blunder of the like kind; for Kilsyth when in London was always opening his arms and expanding his chest and gasping for air. Accustomed to the free atmosphere of his native Highlands, the worthy gentleman suffered torture in the dull, dead, confined and vitiated air of the London street; and amidst the many sufferings which he underwent for the sake of society of during the few weeks when he remained in town during the few weeks when he remained in town was the martyrdom which he was put to in the tiny ill-ventilated rooms in which he had occasionally to dine or pass a ghastly half-hour "assisting" at a reception. But Lady Muriel and Mr. Ramsay Caird took this matter in hand. Of their own express wish as it was to them the task of selecting the residence of the about-to-be-married couple was to be confided; and there was no doubt that they would take care that their choice should not be open to question.