The Doctor's Wife Part 39

"Yes," Matilda Jeffson answered, in a hard cruel voice, strangely at variance with her stifled sobs, "yes, Mrs. Gilbert; and you'll be free to take your pleasure, and to meet Mr. Lansdell as often as you like; and go gadding about after dark with strange men. You might have waited a bit, Mrs. Gilbert; you wouldn't have had to wait very long--for they say my poor dear master--and I had him in my arms the day he was born, so I've need to love him dearly, even if others haven't!--I heard the doctor from Wareham tell Mr. Pawlkatt that he will never live to see to-morrow morning's light. So you might have waited, Mrs. Gilbert; but you're a wicked woman and a wicked wife!"

But just at this moment the sick man started suddenly from his sleep, and lifted himself into a sitting position. Mr. Jeffson's arm was about him directly, supporting the wasted figure that had very lately been so strong.

George Gilbert had heard Matilda's last words, for he repeated them in a thick strange voice, but with sufficient distinctness. It was a surprise to those who nursed him to hear him speak reasonably, for it was some time since he had been conscious of pa.s.sing events.

"Wicked! no! no!" he said. "Always a good wife; always a very good wife! Come, Izzie; come here. I'm afraid it has been a dull life, my dear," he said very gently, as she came to him, clinging to him, and looking at him with a white scared face,--"dull--very dull; but it wouldn't have been always so. I thought--by-and-by to--new practice--Helmswell--market-town--seven thousand inhabitants--and you--drive--pony-carriage, like Laura Pawlkatt--but--the Lord's will be done, my dear!--I hope I've done my duty--the poor people--better rooms--ventilation--please G.o.d, by-and-by. I've seen a great deal of suffering--and--my duty----"

He slid heavily back upon William Jeffson's supporting arm; and a rain of tears--pa.s.sionate remorseful tears never to be felt by him--fell on his pallid face. His death was very sudden, though his illness had been, considering the nature of his disease, a long and tedious one. He died supremely peaceful in the consciousness of having done his duty. He died, with Isabel's hand clasped in his own; and never, throughout his simple life, had one pang of doubt or jealousy tortured his breast.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

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 encompa.s.sed 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 a.s.surance that her husband was really dead before she could bring herself to believe that the white swoon, the chill heaviness of the pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sionate 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, s.h.i.+vering 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 ap.r.o.n 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 pa.s.sage 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.

It was quite in vain that Mrs. Jeffson urged her to go up-stairs to the room opposite that in which the surgeon lay; it was quite as vainly that the good woman entreated her to go and look at him, now that he was lying so peacefully in the newly-arranged chamber, to lay her hand on his marble forehead, so that no shadow of him should trouble her in her sleep. The girl only shook her head forlornly.

"I'm afraid," she said, piteously--"I'm afraid of that room. I never thought that he would die. I know that I wasn't good. It was wicked to think of other people always, and not of him; but I never thought that he would die. I knew that he was good to me; and I tried to obey him: but I think I should have been different if I had known that he would die."

She pulled out the little table-drawer where the worsted socks were rolled up in fluffy b.a.l.l.s, with needles sticking out of them here and there. Even these were a kind of evidence of her neglect. She had cobbled them a little during the later period of her married life,--during the time of her endeavour to be good,--but she had not finished this work or any other. Ah, what a poor creature she was, after all!--a creature of feeble resolutions, formed only to be broken; a weak vacillating creature, full of misty yearnings and aspirings--resolving n.o.bly in one moment, to yield sinfully in the next.

She begged to be allowed to spend the night down-stairs on the rickety little sofa; and Mrs. Jeffson, seeing that she was really oppressed by some childish terror of that upper story, brought her some blankets and pillows, and a feeble little light that was to burn until daybreak.

So in that familiar room, whose every sc.r.a.p of shabby furniture had been a part of the monotony of her life, Isabel Gilbert spent the first night of her widowhood, lying on the little sofa, nervously conscious of every sound in the house; feverishly wakeful until long after the morning sun was s.h.i.+ning through the yellow-white blind, when she fell into an uneasy doze, in which she dreamt that her husband was alive and well. She did not arouse herself out of this, and yet she was never thoroughly asleep throughout the time, until after ten o'clock; and then she found Mrs.

Jeffson sitting near the little table, on which the inevitable cup of tea was smoking beside a plate of the clumsy kind of bread-and-b.u.t.ter inseparably identified with George Gilbert in Isabel's mind.

"There's somebody wants to see you, if you're well enough to be spoken to, my dear," Matilda said, very gently; for she had been considerably moved by Mrs. Gilbert's penitent little confession of her shortcomings as a wife; and was inclined to think that perhaps, after all, Graybridge had judged this helpless schoolgirl creature rather harshly. "Take the tea, my dear; I made it strong on purpose for you; and try and cheer up a bit, poor la.s.sie; you're young to wear widow's weeds; but he was fit to go. If all of us had worked as hard for the good of other folks, we could afford to die as peaceful as he did."

Isabel pushed the heavy tangled hair away from her pallid face, and pursed-up her pale lips to kiss the Yorks.h.i.+re-woman.

"You're very kind to me," she said; "you used to think that I was wicked, I know; and then you seemed very unkind. But I always wished to be good. I should like to have been good, and to die young, like George's mother."

It is to be observed that, with Isabel's ideal of goodness there was always the a.s.sociation of early death. She had a vague idea that very religious and self-denying people got through their quota of piety with tolerable speed, and received their appointed reward. As yet her notions of self-sacrifice were very limited; and she could scarcely have conceived a long career of perfection. She thought of nuns as creatures who bade farewell to the world, and had all their back-hair cut off, and retired into a convent, and died soon afterwards, while they were still young and interesting. She could not have imagined an elderly nun, with all a long monotonous life of self-abnegation behind her, getting up at four o'clock every morning, and being as bright and vivacious and cheerful as any happy wife or mother outside the convent-walls. Yet there are such people.

Mrs. Gilbert took a little of the hot tea, and then sat quite still, with her head lying on Matilda Jeffson's shoulder, and her hand clasped in Matilda's rough fingers. That living clasp seemed to impart a kind of comfort, so terribly had death entered into Isabel's narrow world.

"Do you think you shall be well enough to see him presently, poor la.s.sie?" Mrs. Jeffson said, after a long silence. "I shouldn't ask you, only he seems anxious-like, as if there was something particular on his mind; and I know he's been very kind to you."

Isabel stared at her in bewilderment.

"I don't know who you are talking of," she said.

"It's Mr. Raymond, from Coventford! It's early for him to be so far as Graybridge; but he looks as pale and worn-like as if he'd been up and about all night. He was all struck of a heap-like when I told him about our poor master."

Here Mrs. Jeffson had recourse to the cotton ap.r.o.n which had been so frequently applied to her eyes during the last week. Isabel huddled a shabby little shawl about her shoulders; she had made no change in her dress when she had lain down the night before; and she was very pale and wan, and tumbled and woebegone, in the bright summer light.

"Mr. Raymond! Mr. Raymond!" She repeated his name to herself once or twice, and made a faint effort to understand why he should have come to her. He had always been very kind to her, and a.s.sociated with his image there was a sense of sound wisdom and vigorous cheerfulness of spirit.

His presence would bring some comfort to her, she thought. Next to Mr.

Colborne, he was the person whom she would most have desired to see.

"I will go to him, Mrs. Jeffson," she said, rising slowly from the sofa.

"He was always very good to me. But, oh, how the sight of him will bring back the time at Conventford, when George used to come and see me on Sunday afternoons, and we used to walk together in the cold bare meadows!"

That time did come back to her as she spoke: a grey colourless pause in her life, in which she had been--not happy, perhaps, but contented. And since that time what, tropical splendors, what a gorgeous oasis of light and colour had spread itself suddenly about her path! a forest of miraculous flowers and enchanted foliage that had shut out all the every-day world in which other people dragged out their tiresome existences--a wonderful Asiatic wilderness, in which there were hidden dangers lurking, terrible as the cobras that drop down upon the traveller from some flowering palm-tree, or the brindled tigers that prowl in the shadowy jungle. She looked back across that glimpse of an earthly paradise to the old dull days at Conventford; and a hot blast from the tropical oasis seemed to rush in upon her, beyond which the past spread far away like a cool grey sea. Perhaps that quiet neutral-tinted life was the best, after all. She saw herself again as she had been; "engaged" to the man who lay dead up-stairs; and weaving a poor little web of romance for herself even out of that prosaic situation.

Mr. Raymond was waiting in the best parlour,--that sacred chamber, which had been so rarely used during the parish surgeon's brief wedded life,--that primly-arranged little sitting-room, which always had a faint odour of old-fas.h.i.+oned _pot pourri_; the room which Isabel had once yearned to beautify into a bower of chintz and muslin. The blind was down, and the shutters half-closed; and in the dim light Charles Raymond looked very pale.

"My dear Mrs. Gilbert," he said, taking her hand, and leading her to a seat; "my poor child,--so little more than a child,--so little wiser or stronger than a child,--it seems cruel to come to you at such a time; but life is very hard sometimes----"

"It was very kind of you to come," Isabel exclaimed, interrupting him.

"I wanted to see you, or some one like you; for everything seems so dreadful to me. I never thought that he would die."

She began to cry, in a weary helpless way, not like a person moved by some bitter grief; rather like a child that finds itself in a strange place and is frightened.

"My poor child, my poor child!"

Charles Raymond still held Isabel's pa.s.sive hand, and she felt tears dropping on it; the tears of a man, of all others the last to give way to any sentimental weakness. But even then she did not divine that he must have some grief of his own--some sorrow that touched him more nearly than George Gilbert's death could possibly touch him. Her state of feeling just now was a peculiarly selfish state, perhaps; for she could neither understand nor imagine anything outside that darkened house, where death was supreme. The shock had been too terrible and too recent. It was as if an earthquake had taken place, and all the atmosphere round her was thick with clouds of blinding dust produced by the concussion. She felt Mr. Raymond's tears dropping slowly on her hand; and if she thought about them at all, she thought them only the evidence of his sympathy with her childish fears and sorrows.

"I loved him like my own son," murmured Charles Raymond, in a low tender voice. "If he had not been what he was,--if he had been the veriest cub that ever disgraced a good old stock,--I think even then I should have loved him as dearly and as truly, for her sake. Her only son! I've seen him look at me as she looked when I kissed her in the church on her wedding-day. So long as he lived, I should have never felt that she was really lost to me."

Isabel heard nothing of these broken sentences. Mr. Raymond uttered them in low musing tones, that were not intended to reach any mortal ears.

For some little time he sat silently by the girl's side, with her hand still lying in his; then he rose and walked up and down the room with a soft slow step, and with his head drooping.

"You have been very much shocked by your husband's death?" he said at last.

Isabel began to cry again at this question,--weak hysterical tears, that meant very little, perhaps.

"Oh, very, very much," she answered. "I know I was not so good as I ought to have been; and I can never ask him to forgive me now."