"His professional advancement, I suppose?" said Lady Muriel.
"Well, not exactly that. I think he must retard that by any, and especially by an indefinite, absence. It is rather to his profession itself, to science in the abstract, I allude. He always had a perfect thirst for knowledge, and the greatest powers of application I have ever known any man possessed of. A 'case' was in his eyes the most important of human affairs. He would throw himself into the interest of his attendance upon a patient with preternatural energy. I am sure you discovered that while he was at Kilsyth."
"Yes indeed; his care of Madeleine was beyond all praise, or indeed description. No doubt, had any other opportunity offered, we should have found, as you say, that such devotion was not a solitary instance."
"O no, Wilmot is always the same. You know, I presume, that I required his services very urgently indeed just then; but he would not leave Miss Kilsyth's case for even so old and near a friend as I am."
Madeleine's colour deepened, and she listened to the conversation, in which she had taken no share, with increased eagerness.
"I know that some one telegraphed to him, but that he kindly said Madeleine's case being the more urgent of the two, he would remain with her. And you were none the worse, it seems, Mr. Foljambe?"
"No indeed, Lady Muriel," replied the old gentleman with a good-humoured smile. "Wilmot's deputy did quite as well for me as the mighty potentate of medicine himself. But I acknowledge I was a little annoyed; and if anyone but my old friend Kilsyth's daughter had been the detaining cause, I should have been tempted to play Wilmot a trick, by pretending that some extraordinary and entirely novel symptoms had appeared. He would have come fast enough then, I warrant you, for the chance of finding out something new about gout."
Lady Muriel laughed, but Madeleine apparently did not perceive the joke. Soon some other callers dropped in, and Mr. Foljambe took his leave. But the subject of Wilmot and his contemplated abandonment of London was not abandoned on his departure. He was well known to the "set" in which the Kilsyths moved, though their own acquaintance with him was so recent, and everyone had something to say about the rising man. The sentimental view of the subject was very general. It was so very charming to think of any man, especially one so talented, so popular, so altogether delightful as Wilmot, being "broken-hearted" by the death of his wife. Lady Muriel gently insinuated, once or twice, a doubt whether there was any ground for this very congenial but rather romantic supposition: her doubts, however, were by no means well received, and she found herself overwhelmed with evidence of the irremediably desolate condition of Wilmot's heart.
When the afternoon calls had come to an end, and Lady Muriel and her stepdaughter were in their respective rooms and about to dress for dinner, the mind of each was in accord with that of the other, inasmuch as the same subject of contemplation engrossed both. But the harmony went no farther. Nothing could be more opposite than the effect produced upon Madeleine and Lady Muriel by Mr. Foljambe's news, and by all the desultory discussion and speculation which had followed its announcement.
To Madeleine the knowledge that she should see Wilmot no more for an indefinite period was like a sentence of death. The young girl was profoundly unconscious of the meaning of her own feelings. That the sentiment which she entertained towards Wilmot was love, she never for a moment dreamed. In him the ideal of an elevated and refined fancy had found its realisation; he was altogether different from the men she had hitherto met since her emancipation from the schoolroom; different from the hunting, shooting devotees of field-sports, or the heavy country gentlemen given to farming and local politics, who frequented Kilsyth; different from the associates of her brother, who, whether they were merely fashionable and empty, or formal and priggish like Ronald himself, were essentially distasteful to her. She was of a dreamy and romantic temperament, to which the delicacy of health and the not quite congenial conditions of her life at home contributed not a little; and she had seen in Wilmot the man of talent, action, and resolve, the realisation of the nineteenth-century heroic ideal. To admire and reverence him; to find the best and most valuable of resources in his friendship, the wisest and truest guidance in his intellect, the most exquisite of pleasures in his society; to triumph in his fame, and try to merit his approval,--such was the girl's scheme for the future. But it never occurred to her that there was one comprehensive and forbidden word in which the whole of this state of feeling might be accurately defined. She had grieved for Wilmot's grief when she heard of the death of his wife, but at the same time a subtle instinct, which she never questioned and could not have defined, told her that his marriage had not been a happy one, according to her enthusiastic girlish notion of a happy marriage. She did not know anything about it; she had no idea what sort of woman Chudleigh Wilmot's wife was, but she had felt, by the nameless sense which, had she been an elder woman with ever so little experience, would have enlightened her as to the nature of her own feelings, that he was not really attached to her to the extent which alone seemed to her to imply happiness in the conjugal relation. So, when Madeleine heard that Wilmot was going abroad, and heard her stepmother's visitors talk about his being "broken-hearted," she felt equally wretched and incredulous. Sentimental reason for this resolution she did not, she could not accept; the other was exquisitely painful to her. Had he, indeed, so absorbing a love for his professional studies? Was he really occupied by them to the exclusion of all else; had her "case," and not herself, been his attraction at Kilsyth? If Mr. Foljambe had really resorted to the device he had spoken of, would Wilmot have left her? To none of these questions could Madeleine find an answer inside her own breast, or without it; so they tortured her. Her vision of seeing him frequently, of making him her friend--the vision which had so strangely beautified the prospect of her stay in London,--faded suddenly; and unconscious of all the idea meant and implied, the girl said to herself, "If he had cared for me--not as I care for him, of course that could not be--but ever so little, he would not go away."