CHAPTER XXXVI.
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS.
A solemn calm came down upon the house at Graybridge, and for the first time Isabel Gilbert felt the presence of death about and around her, shutting out all the living world by its freezing influence. The great iceberg had come down upon the poor frail barque. It almost seemed to Isabel as if she and all in that quiet habitation had been encompassed by a frozen wall, through which the living could not penetrate.
She suffered very much; the morbid sensibility of her nature made her especially liable to such suffering. A dull, remorseful pain gnawed at her heart. Ah, how wicked she had been! how false, how cruel, how ungrateful! But if she had known that he was to die—if she had only known—it might all have been different. The foreknowledge of his doom would have insured her truth and tenderness; she could not have wronged, even by so much as a thought, a husband whose days were numbered. And amid all her remorse she was for ever labouring with the one grand difficulty—the difficulty of realizing what had happened. She had needed the doctor's solemn assurance that her husband was really dead before she could bring herself to believe that the white swoon, the chill heaviness of the passive hand, did indeed mean death. And even when she had been told that all was over, the words seemed to have very little influence upon her mind. It could not be! All the last fortnight of anxiety and trouble was blotted out, and she could only think of George Gilbert as she had always known him until that time, in the full vigour of health and strength.
She was very sorrowful; but no passionate grief stirred her frozen breast. It was the shock, the sense of horror that oppressed her, rather than any consciousness of a great loss. She would have called her husband back to life; but chiefly because it was so horrible to her to know that he was there—near her—what he was. Once the thought came to her—the weak selfish thought—that it would have been much easier for her to bear this calamity if her husband had gone away, far away from her, and only a letter had come to tell her that he was dead. She fancied herself receiving the letter, and wondering at its black-edged border. The shock would have been very dreadful; but not so horrible as the knowledge that George Gilbert was in that house, and yet there was no George Gilbert. Again and again her mind went over the same beaten track; again and again the full realization of what had happened slipped away from her, and she found herself framing little speeches—penitent, remorseful speeches—expressive of her contrition for all past shortcomings. And then there suddenly flashed back upon her the too vivid picture of that deathbed scene, and she heard the dull thick voice murmuring feebly words of love and praise.
In all this time Roland Lansdell's image was shut out of her mind. In the dense and terrible shadow that filled all the chambers of her brain, that bright and splendid figure could have no place. She thought of Mr. Colborne at Hurstonleigh now and then, and felt a vague yearning for his presence. He might have been able to comfort her perhaps, somehow; he might have made it easier for her to bear the knowledge of that dreadful presence in the room up-stairs. She tried once or twice to read some of the chapters that had seemed so beautiful on the lips of the popular curate; but even out of that holy volume dark and ghastly images arose to terrify her, and she saw Lazarus emerging from the tomb livid in his grave-clothes: and death and horror seemed to be everywhere and in everything.
After the first burst of passionate grief, bitterly intermingled with indignation against the woman whom she believed to have been a wicked and neglectful wife, Matilda Jeffson was not ungentle to the terror-stricken girl so newly made a widow. She took a cup of scalding tea into the darkened parlour where Isabel sat, shivering every now and then as if with cold, and persuaded the poor frightened creature to take a little of that comforting beverage. She wiped away her own tears with her apron while she talked to Isabel of patience and resignation, submission to the will of Providence, and all those comforting theories which are very sweet to the faithful mourner, even when the night-time of affliction is darkest.
But Isabel was not a religious woman. She was a child again, weak and frivolous, frightened by the awful visitant who had so newly entered that house. All through the evening of her husband's death she sat in the little parlour, sometimes trying to read a little, sometimes idly staring at the tall wick of the tallow-candle, which was only snuffed once in a way—when Mrs. Jeffson came into the room "to keep the scared creature company for a bit," she said to her husband, who sat by the kitchen fire with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in his hands, brooding over those bygone days when he had been wont to fetch his master's son from that commercial academy in the Wareham Road.
There was a good deal of going in and out, a perpetual tramp of hushed footsteps moving to and fro, as it seemed to Isabel; and Mrs. Jeffson, even in the midst of her grief, appeared full of some kind of business that kept her astir all the evening. The Doctor's Wife had imagined that all voice and motion must come to an end—that life itself must make a pause—in a house where death was. Others might feel a far keener grief for the man that was gone; but no one felt so deep an awe of death as she did. Mrs. Jeffson brought her some supper on a little tray late in the evening; but she pushed it away from her and burst into tears. There seemed a kind of sacrilege in this carrying in and out of food and drink while he lay up-stairs; he whose hat still hung in the passage without, whose papers and ink-bottles and medical books were all primly arranged on one of the little vulgar cupboards by the fireplace. Ah, how often she had hated those medical books for being what they were, instead of editions of "Zanoni" and "Ernest Maltravers!" and it seemed wicked even to have thought unkindly of them, now that he to whom they belonged was dead.