[CHAPTER LII]
OF JUDITH'S STATE OF MIND, AND HOW SHE TOLD HER FATHER, BUT DID NOT IMPRESS HIM AS HE WOULD HAVE WISHED. WHO KNOWS WHAT JUDITH WAS? OF A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR TO THE HALL. HOW NO ONE RECOGNIZED MARIANNE. IS MY HUSBAND DYING? A SCENE ON THE BIG STAIRCASE, AND HOW TWO TOFFS WERE FAR FROM ODIOUS. HOW THE NURSE RECOGNIZED ATHELSTAN TAYLOR. HOW JUDITH SAID GOOD-BYE TO CHALLIS. HOW IT CAME OUT WHO MR. KEITH HORNE'S FRIEND WAS
A sleepless night had preceded that interview between Judith and Challis, and she was not at her best when his wandering speech and cold unrecognition struck a chill to her soul. When a like event occurs—and it does chance, now and again—between folk who have been linked together for a lifetime, and the uninjured survivor, awaiting with the return of consciousness the accents and the look of the affection of a few hours ago, is repelled by the insensate stare of eyes that only see a stranger, the unimpassioned sound of a voice from which all tenderness has vanished, even then the trial is a hard one. But the memory of the past years is too strong to allow belief that the thing will last—it is dismissed as a passing nightmare, as the nurse by the bedside of fever dismisses the wanderings of delirium. It will last its time, and pass away and be forgotten.
A cool judgment and more experience might have told the girl to bear her soul in patience; to treat the wanderings of a brain shaken as Challis's had been as mere sleep-waking. But even had her self-possession been at its best, she had no long-past years of love to look back to, to give her confidence in its return with a returning calm of health. And not only this, but these same wandering words of his had shown how full his soul still was of the past in which she had no share. She had been allowed a peep into her lover's heart, and had felt the force of another love's preoccupation of it. If only his utterances had been stark rambling, mere Tom-of-Bedlam incoherence! But the worst of it was, their outward form was clothed in such a terrible sanity.
There was one thing in it that hit very hard—had a special sting of its own. Judith knew perfectly well about Challis's bygones. He had taken her into his confidence about the humble home of the days of his obscurity. His half-humorous reviews of his past had shown her plainly how little hold his first wife Kate—the "Ziz" of his novel—had ever had upon him. He had evidently wedded the wrong sister first. He spoke of Bob's mother with affection, certainly, but it was an affection that was artificial and perfunctory, whereas, even if he had never been passionately in love with Polly Anne—if no volcanic eruption had ever raged on account of this young person, whom Judith would have classed as an insignificant puss—still, that Deceased Wife's Sister seemed to have generated something that was at least a very good working substitute for a grande passion. What was the worth of all his protestations to her, Judith, if this memory of the days of Great Coram Street was to be the first resurrection of his mind from its temporary death?
But where was the use of answering the question now? Or any question at all, for that matter? Was not the last chance gone of passing the barrier that held them apart? Well—she had kept her share of the compact. "I am ready, if it can be arranged," she had said. And she had complied with every arrangement, stipulating only that the wedding was to be a mere legal precaution—a formal bar to the creation of a new obstacle by a retrospective mood of the Lords and Commons. It would keep the position unaltered; and that was only fair-play, surely! But now all was changed. She had always been alive to the fact that Marianne in esse, legally warranted in the appropriation of her husband's children, and canonically warranted in her paroxysm of sensitiveness to consanguinity, was a very different force to reckon with from Marianne in posse, sained and assoilzied by an Act of Parliament.
Did she, we may wonder, ask herself the question: If it were possible, even at this eleventh hour, to get that knot officially tied, and be ready to laugh at the "retrospective action" of the measure that would be the Law of the Land in forty-eight hours, would she be ready to jump at the opportunity? Or, was she not rather relieved at the turn things had taken? However, there was this to be considered:—if the motor accident had not happened, and the wedding had come off, she would never have had to face that blank stare of oblivion, and Great Coram Street! Some women won't marry a widower lest too many tender memories should still be treasured in some secret corner of his heart. That is unreasonable; because the source of them is supposed to be underground, or in Heaven, or in Purgatory, according to the façon-de-parler of the moment. But ... Great Coram Street! And the Deceased Wife's Sister still undeceased, and to be legalized retrospectively on Wednesday! Be it noted, though, that this is only conjecture! The story has no warrant for saying that any such thought crossed Judith's mind.
She made a clean breast of the whole matter to her father. She told him all about that last interview of hers with Challis at Trout Bend three or four weeks since; and of the arrangement they had made, and confirmed by subsequent correspondence. Challis was to reside for fifteen days at some place far enough from his or her ordinary residence to insure practical secrecy, where there was a parish-priest qualified to receive his affidavit and issue an ordinary marriage-licence. "I forget what he called him," said Judith. "Something like Harrogate." No doubt it was "surrogate." If in Challis's judgment the passing of the Bill should be put beyond reasonable doubt, he was at once to procure this licence, and make every necessary arrangement, keeping her fully informed. He had at first intended to procure a special licence, but had been deterred by someone telling him that such a licence might be refused, or at least delayed. He preferred the idea of dealing with a country parson with whom he could make acquaintance, and to whose local charities he could subscribe liberally. Besides, he could mesmerize that parson. You can't mesmerize Doctor's Commons.