"It's an ugly sight to look at, that is," he muttered; "but I don't think I went too far."
He went out at the little door, and into the glade, where a nightingale was singing high up amongst the clustering foliage, and where the air was filled with the faint perfume of honeysuckle and starry wild roses. Once he looked, with something like terror in his face, towards the spot where he had left his prostrate enemy; and then he turned and walked away at a rapid pace in the other direction, crossing the rustic wooden bridge, and ascending the rising ground that led towards the Briargate Road.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
RETROSPECTIVE.
The parish surgeon lay in his darkened bedchamber at Graybridge day after day and night after night, and Mr. Pawlkatt, coming twice a day to look at him, could give very small comfort to the watchers. George Gilbert had been ill nearly a fortnight—not quite a fortnight—but it seemed now a common thing for the house to be hushed and darkened, and the once active master lying dull, heavy, and lethargic, under the shadow of the dimity bed-curtains. Those who watched him lost all count of time. It seemed almost as if the surgeon had always been ill. It was difficult, somehow, to remember that not quite two weeks ago he had been one of the most active inhabitants of Graybridge; it was still more difficult to imagine that he could ever again be what he had been.
No patient, in the dull anguish of an obstinate fever, could have desired better or more devoted nurses than those who waited on George Gilbert. To Isabel this experience of a sick room was altogether a new thing. She had known her father to be laid up for the space of a day with a vague sort of ailment which he called "bile," but which generally arose after a dinner in London with certain choice spirits of his acquaintance, and a stealthy return to the sanctuary of his Camberwell home in the chill grey glimmer of early morning. She had known her step-mother to complain perpetually of divers aches, and pains, and "stitches," and stiffness of her ribs and shoulder-blades and loins, and other complicated portions of her bony structure, and to throw out dismal prophecies to the effect that she would be worried into a premature grave by the breakage and waste of boys, and the general aggravation of a large family. But illness, a real and dangerous malady, with all its solemn accompaniments of hushed voices and darkness, and grave faces and stealthy footsteps, was quite new to the Doctor's Wife.
If she had loved her sick husband with that romantic love which it had been her sin and her misfortune to bestow elsewhere, she could not have watched quietly in that darkened chamber. She would have fled away from the patient's presence to fling herself on the ground somewhere, wholly abandoned to her anguish. But she had never loved George Gilbert; only that womanly tenderness, which was the chief attribute of her nature, that sympathetic affection for everything that was suffering or sorrowful, held her to the invalid's bedside. She was so sorry for him, and she was so horribly afraid that he would die. The thought that she might step across the darksome chasm of his grave into those fair regions inhabited by Roland Lansdell, could not hold a place in her heart. Death, the terrible and the unfamiliar, stood a black and gaunt figure between her and all beyond the sick room. Edith Dombey and Ernest Maltravers were alike forgotten during those long days and nights in which the surgeon's rambling delirious talk only broke the silence. Isabel Gilbert's ever-active imagination was busy with more terrible images than any to be found in her books. The pictures of a funeral cortège in the dusky lane, a yawning grave in the familiar churchyard, forced themselves upon her as she sat watching the black shadow of the perforated lantern that held the rushlight, looming gigantic on the whitewashed wall.
And, thinking thus of that dark hour which might be before her, she thought much less of Roland Lansdell than in the days before her husband's illness. She was not a wicked woman; she was only very foolish. The thought that there was a handsome young country gentleman with a fine estate and fifteen thousand a year waiting to be her second husband, if death loosened her present bondage, could not have a place amongst those tender poetical dreams engendered out of her books. A woman of the world, hardened by worldly experience, might have sat in that dusky chamber watching the sick man, and brooding, half remorsefully, half impatiently, upon the thought of what might happen if his malady should have a fatal ending. But this poor sentimental girl, nourished upon the airiest fancies of poets and romancers, had no such loathsome thoughts. Roland Lansdell's wealth and position had never tempted her; it had only dazzled her; it had only seemed a bright and splendid atmosphere radiating from and belonging to the Deity himself. If, in some dreamy rapture, she had ever fancied herself far away from all the common world, united to the man she loved, she had only pictured herself as a perpetual worshipper in white muslin, kneeling at the feet of her idol, with wild-flowers in her hair. The thought that he had fifteen thousand a year, and a superb estate, never disturbed by its gross influence her brighter dreams; it was not in her to be mercenary, or even ambitious. That yearning for splendour and glitter which had made her envious of Edith Dombey's fate was only a part of her vague longing for the beautiful; she wanted to be amongst beautiful things, made beautiful herself by their influence; but whether their splendour took the form of a boudoir in May Fair all a-glow with wonderful pictures and Parian statues, rare old china and tapestry hangings, or the floral luxuriance of a forest on the banks of the Amazon, was of very little consequence to this sentimental young dreamer. If she could not be Mrs. Dombey, sublime in scornful indignation and ruby silk velvet, she would have been contented to be simple Dorothea, washing her tired feet in the brook, with her hair about her shoulders. She only wanted the vague poetry of life, the mystic beauty of romance infused somehow into her existence; and she was as yet too young to understand that latent element of poetry which underlies the commonest life.
In the meantime a very terrible trouble had come to her—the trouble occasioned by her father's presence in the neighbourhood of Graybridge. Never, until some days after his apprehension at Liverpool, had Mr. Sleaford's wife and children known the nature of the profession by which the master of the house earned a fluctuating income,—enough for reckless extravagance sometimes, at others barely enough to keep the wolf from the door. This is not a sensation novel. I write here what I know to be the truth. Jack the Scribe's children were as innocently ignorant of their father's calling as if that gentleman had been indeed what he represented himself—a barrister. He went every day to his professional duties, and returned at night to his domestic hearth; he was a very tolerable father; a faithful, and not unkind husband; a genial companion amongst the sort of men with whom he associated. He had only that awkward little habit of forging other people's names; by which talent, exercised in conjunction with a gang whose cunningly-organized plan of operations won for them considerable celebrity, he had managed to bring up a numerous family in comparative comfort and respectability. If any one had been good enough to die and leave Mr. Sleaford a thousand a year, Jack the Scribe would have willingly laid down his pen and retired into respectability; but in the meantime he found it necessary to provide for himself and a hungry family; and having no choice between a clerk's place with a pound a week and the vaguely-glorious chances of a modern freebooter, he had joined the gang in question, to whom he was originally made known by some very pretty little amateur performances in the accommodation-bill line.