LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

to a degree, which no other object could ever compete with. It never occurred to him for a moment that there was any injustice to Mabel in this. He would be an affectionate and faithful husband; but he was a practical man--not an enthusiast, not a dreamer. If he succeeded--and he was determined to succeed--she would share his success, the realisation of his ambition, and would secure all its advantages to herself. A man to do real work in the world, and to do it as a man ought--as alone he could feel the answer of a good conscience in doing anything he should undertake--must put his work above and before every thing. He would do this; he would be an eminent physician, a celebrated and rich man; a good husband too; and his wife should never have reason to find fault with him, or to envy the wives of other men--men who might indeed be more sentimental and demonstrative, but who could not have a stronger sense of duty than he. Thus thought, thus resolved Mabel Darlington's lover; and very good thoughts, very admirable resolves his were. They had only one defect; but he never suspected its existence. It was a rather radical defect too, being this: that they were not those of a lover at all.

      They were married, and all went very well with the modest and exemplary household. At first the Wilmot ménage was not so fashionably located as afterwards; but Mrs. Wilmot's house was always a model of neatness, propriety, and the precise degree of elegance which the rising man's income justified at each level which he attained. Wilmot's mother continued to like her daughter-in-law, and to regard her son's marriage as most propitious, though she had sometimes a doubt whether she really did understand his wife quite so thoroughly as she had understood Mabel Darlington. But Wilmot's mother had now been dead some years. Mrs. Wilmot had no near relatives, and she was a woman of few intimacies; her life was placid, prosperous, conventional. She had, at the period with which this story deals, a handsome house, a good income, an agreeable and eminently respectable social circle; a handsome, irreproachable husband, rapidly rising into distinction; one intimate friend, and--a broken heart.

      Chudleigh Wilmot's wife was young; if not beautiful, at least very attractive, accomplished, ladylike, and "amiable," in the generally accepted interpretation of that unsatisfactory word. What better or what worse description could possibly be given? It describes a thousand women in a breath, and it designates not one in particular. There was only one person in existence who could have given a more clear, intelligible, and distinct description of Mrs. Wilmot than this stereotyped one. This person was her friend Mrs. Prendergast--a lady somewhat older than herself, and whose natural and remarkable quickness and penetration were aided in this instance by close acquaintance and sleepless jealousy. If Mrs. Prendergast had been an ordinary woman, as silly as her sisterhood and no sillier, the fact that she was extremely jealous of Mrs. Wilmot would have so obscured and perverted her judgment, that her opinion would not have been worth having. But Mrs. Prendergast was very unlike her sisterhood. Not only was she negatively less silly, but she was positively clever; and being severe, suspicious, and implacable as well, if not precisely a pleasant, she was at least a remarkable woman. Nothing obscured or perverted Mrs. Prendergast's judgment; neither did anything touch her heart. She had mind, and a good deal of it; she had experience and tact, insight, foresight, and caution. She was a woman who might possibly be a very valuable friend, but who could not fail to be a very dangerous enemy. In such a nature the power of enmity would probably be greater than the power of friendship, and the one would be likely to crush the other if ever they came into collision. Mrs. Prendergast was Mrs. Wilmot's friend. Whether she was the friend of Mrs. Wilmot's husband remains to be seen. If she had been asked to say what manner of woman the rising man's wife was, and had thought proper to satisfy the inquirer, her portraiture might have been relied upon as implicitly for its truthfulness as that of the most impartial observer, which is saying at once that Mrs. Prendergast was a woman of exceptional mental qualities, and of a temperament rare among those charming creatures to whom injustice is easy and natural.

      The two women were habitually much together. Mrs. Prendergast was a childless widow. Mrs. Wilmot was a childless wife. Neither had absorbing domestic occupations to employ her,--each had a good deal of time at the other's disposal; hence it happened that few days passed without their meeting, and enjoying that desultory kind of companionship which is so puzzling to the male observer of the habits and manners of womankind. Their respective abodes were within easy distance of each other. Mrs. Prendergast lived in Cadogan-place, and Mrs. Wilmot lived in Charles-street, St. James's. When they did not see one another, they exchanged notes; and in short they kept up all the ceremonial of warm feminine friendship; and each really did like the other better than any one else in the world, with one exception. In Mrs. Wilmot's case the exception was her husband; in Mrs. Prendergast's, the exception was herself. There was a good deal of sincerity and warmth in their friendship, but on one point there was a decided inequality. Mrs. Prendergast understood Mrs. Wilmot thoroughly; she read her through and through, she knew her off by heart; but Mrs. Wilmot knew very little of her friend--only just as much as her friend chose she should know. Which was a convenient state of things, and tended to preserve their pleasant and salutary relations unbroken. Mrs. Prendergast had played Eleanor Galligaí to Mrs. Wilmot's Marie de' Medicis for a considerable time, and with uninterrupted success, when Chudleigh Wilmot was sent for, in the perplexity and distress at Kilsyth; and as a matter of course she had heard from his wife about his prolonged visit to Sir Saville Rowe, whom she was well aware Mrs. Wilmot disliked with the quiet, rooted, persistent aversion so frequently inspired in the breasts of even the very best and most conscientious of women by their husbands' intimate friends. Wilmot was utterly unconscious that his wife entertained any such feeling; and Sir Saville Rowe himself would have been hardly more astonished than Wilmot, if it had been revealed to him that the confidence and regard which existed between the former master and pupil were counted a grievance, and Wilmot's visit to Burnside resented, silently indeed, in grief rather than in anger, as an injury.

      In this fact may be found the keynote to Mrs. Wilmot's character; a keynote often struck by her friend's hand, and never with an erring, a faltering, or a rough touch.

      There was not much of the tragic element in Henrietta Prendergast's jealousy of Mabel Wilmot, but there was a great deal of the mean. When Mabel was a young girl, Henrietta was a not much older widow. She was Mabel's cousin; had married, when very young, a man who had survived their marriage only one year. She had more money than Mabel; their connections were the same; she had as much education, and even better manners. She met Chudleigh Wilmot on the occasion of his renewing his acquaintance with Mabel Darlington, and she was as much, though differently, fascinated with him as Mabel herself. She compared her qualifications with those of her cousin; and she arrived at the not unnatural conclusion that their charms were equal, supposing him incapable of discerning how much cleverer a woman than Mabel she was,--and hers very superior, should he prove capable of understanding and appreciating her intellectual superiority. She forgot one simple element in the calculation, and it made all the difference--she forgot Mabel's prettiness. Henrietta Prendergast made very few mistakes, but she did constantly make one blunder; she forgot her plain face, she under-estimated the power of beauty. Perhaps no plain woman ever does understand that power, ever does make sufficient allowance for it, when arrayed against her in any kind of combat; it is certain that Henrietta did not in this instance. It is certain that though Chudleigh Wilmot thought of marrying Mabel Darlington without being very much in love with her, he never thought of marrying Henrietta Prendergast at all.

      And now, when she had come to the conclusion that Chudleigh Wilmot had not loved Mabel Darlington, and did not love his wife,--was, in short, a man to whom love was unknown, by whom it was unvalued, undesired,--she was still steadily, sleeplessly jealous of Mabel Wilmot. "I would have made him love me," she would say to herself, as she read the thoughts of her friend; "I would have been as ambitious for him as he is for himself; I would have shown him that his aim was the highest and the worthiest. I would have loved him, and sympathised with him too. She only loves him; she does not understand him. Why did she come in between him and me?" For this very clever woman had actually deluded herself into the belief that, but for Mabel, Chudleigh Wilmot would have loved, or at least have married her. She would have made him love her afterwards, as she said. So for a long time she disliked her cousin, and hankered after her cousin's husband, and believed that she would have been the best, the most suitable, and the happiest of wives to the man who evidently had not a wife of that pattern in Mabel, but who somehow did not seem to perceive the fact. That time had come to an end long before people at Kilsyth asked themselves

Скачать книгу