The Doctor's Wife: A Novel
Isabel improved the occasion by asking, Mr. Augustus Pawlkatt if many people died of consumption. She wanted to know what her own chances were. She wanted so much to die, now that she was good. The unhappy Augustus was quite relieved by this sudden opening for a professional discourse, and he and his sister became scientific, and neglected Sophronia, while they gave Isabel a good deal of useful information respecting tubercular disease, phthisis, &c. &c.; whereon Miss Burdock, taking offence, lapsed into a state of sullen gloom highly approved by Graybridge as peculiarly befitting an engaged, young lady who wished to sustain the dignity of her position.
At last they came out of a great corn-field into the very lane in which George Gilbert's house was situated; and Isabel's friends left her at the gate. She had done something to redeem her character in Graybridge by her frequent attendance at Hurstonleigh church, which was as patent to the gossips as ever her visits to Lord Thurston's oak had been. She had been cured of running after Mr. Lansdell, people said. No doubt George Gilbert had discovered her goings-on, and had found a means of clipping her wings. It was not likely that Graybridge would credit her with any such virtue as repentance, or a wish to be a better woman than she had been. Graybridge regarded her as an artful and presuming creature, whose shameful goings-on had been stopped by marital authority.
She went into the parlour, and found the tea-things laid on the little table, and Mr. Gilbert lying on the sofa, which was too short for him by a couple of feet, and was eked out by a chair, on which his clumsy boots rested. Isabel had never seen him give way to any such self-indulgence before; but as she bent over him, gently enough, if not tenderly, he told her that his head ached and he was tired, very tired; he had been in the lanes all the afternoon, – the people about there were very bad, – and he had been at work in the surgery since coming in. He put his hand in Isabel's, and pressed hers affectionately. A very little attention from his pretty young wife gratified him and made him happy.
"Why, George," cried Mrs. Gilbert, "your hand is as hot as a burning coal!"
Yes, he was very warm, he told her; the weather was hot and oppressive; at least, he had found it so that afternoon. Perhaps he had been hurrying too much, walking too fast; he had upset himself somehow or other.
"If you'll pour out the tea. Izzie, I'll take a cup, and then go to bed," he said; "I'm regularly knocked up."
He took not one cup only, but four cups of tea, pouring the mild beverage down his throat at a draught; and then he went up to the room overhead, walking heavily, as if he were very tired.
"I'm sure you're ill, George," Isabel said, as he left the parlour; "do take something – some of that horrid medicine you give me sometimes."
"No, my dear, there's nothing the matter with me. What should there be amiss with me, who never had a day's illness in my life? I must have an assistant, Izzie; my work's too hard – that's what is the matter."
Mrs. Gilbert sat in the dusk for a little while after her husband had left her, thinking of that last look which Roland Lansdell had given her in the church.
Heaven knows how long she might have sat thinking of him, if Mrs. Jeffson had not come in with those two miserable mould-candles, which were wont to make feeble patches of yellow haze, not light, in the doctor's parlour. After the candles had been brought Isabel took a book from the top of the little chiffonier by the fireplace. It was a religious book. Was she not trying to be good now, and was not goodness incompatible with the perusal of Shelley's poetry on a Sunday? It was a very dry religious book, being in fact a volume of Tillotson's sermons, with more hard logic, and firstly, secondly, and thirdly, than ordinary human nature could support. Isabel sat with the volume open before her, staring hopelessly at the pale, old-fashioned type, and going back a little way every now and then when she caught her thoughts far away from the Reverend Tillotson. She sat thus till after the clock had struck ten. She was all alone in the lower part of the house at that hour, for the Jeffsons had gone clumping up-stairs to bed at half-past eight. She sat alone, a poor childish, untaught, unguided creature, staring at Tillotson, and thinking of Roland Lansdell; yet trying to be good all the time in her own feeble way. She sat thus, until she was startled by a cautious single knock at the door. She started from her seat at the sound; but she went boldly enough, with the candle in her hand, to answer the summons.
There was nothing uncommon in a late knocking at the doctor's door, – some one from the lanes wanted medicine, no doubt; the people in the lanes were always wanting medicine. Mrs. Gilbert opened the door, and looked out into the darkness. A man was standing there, a well-clad, rather handsome-looking man, with broad shoulders, bold black eyes, and a black beard that covered all the lower part of his face. He did not wait to be invited to enter, but walked across the threshold like a man who had a right to come into that house, and almost pushed Isabel on one side as he did so. At first she only stared at him with a blank look of wonder, but all at once her face grew as white as the plaster on the wall behind her.
"You!" she gasped, in a whisper; "you here!"
"Yes, me! You needn't stare as if you saw a ghost. There's nothing so very queer about me, is there? You're a nice young lady, I don't think, to stand there shivering and staring. Where's your husband?"
"Up-stairs. Oh, why, why did you come here?" cried the Doctor's Wife, piteously, clasping her hands like a creature in some extremity of fear and trouble; "how could you be so cruel as to come here; how could you be so cruel as to come?"
"How could I be so – fiddlesticks!" muttered the stranger, with supreme contempt. "I came here because I had nowhere else to go, my lassie. You needn't whimper; for I shan't trouble you very long – this is not exactly the sort of place I should care to hang-out in: if you can give me a bed in this house for to-night, well and good; if not, you can give me a sovereign, and I'll find one elsewhere. While I am here, remember my name's Captain Morgan, and I'm in the merchant service, – just home from the Mauritius."
CHAPTER XXX.
THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CHANGE
George Gilbert was something more than "knocked up." There had been a great deal of typhoid fever amongst the poorer inhabitants of Graybridge and the neighbouring villages lately – a bad infectious fever, which hung over the narrow lanes and little clusters of cottages like a black cloud; and the parish surgeon, working early and late, subject to sudden chills when his work was hottest, exposed to every variety of temperature at all times, fasting for long hours, and altogether setting at naught those very first principles of health, wherein it was his duty to instruct other people, had paid the common penalty to which all of his profession are, more or less, subject. George Gilbert had caught a touch of the fever. Mr. Pawlkatt senior called early on Monday morning, – summoned by poor terrified Isabel, who was a stranger to sickness, and was frightened at the first appearance of the malady, – and spoke of his rival's illness very lightly, as a "touch of the fever."
"I always said it was infectious," he remarked; "but your husband would have it that it wasn't. It was all the effect of dirty habits, and low living, he said, and not any special and periodical influence in the air. Well, poor fellow, he knows now who is right. You must keep him very quiet. Give him a little toast-and-water, and the lime-draughts I shall send you," and Mr. Pawlkatt went on to give all necessary directions about the invalid.
Unhappily for the patient, it was not the easiest matter in the world to keep him quiet. There was not so much in George Gilbert, according to any poetic or sentimental standard; but there was a great deal in him, when you came to measure him by the far nobler standard of duty. He was essentially "thorough;" and in his own quiet way he was very fond of his profession. He was attached to those rough Midlandshire peasants, whom it had been his duty to attend from his earliest manhood until now. Never before had he known what it was to have a day's illness; and he could not lie tranquilly watching Isabel sitting at work near the window, with the sunlight creeping in at the edges of the dark curtain that had been hastily nailed up to shut out the glaring day; – he could not lie quietly there, while there were mothers of sick children, and wives of sick husbands, waiting for hope and comfort from his lips. True, Mr. Pawlkatt had promised to attend to George's patients; but then, unhappily, George did not believe in Mr. Pawlkatt. – the two surgeons' views were in every way opposed, – and the idea of Mr. Pawlkatt attending the sick people in the lanes, and seizing with delight on the opportunity of reversing his rival's treatment, was almost harder to bear than the thought of the same sufferers being altogether unattended. And, beyond this, Mr. Gilbert, so clever while other people were concerned, was not the best possible judge of his own case; and he would not consent to believe that he had the fever.
"I dare say Pawlkatt likes to see me laid by the heels here, Izzie," he said to his wife, "while he goes interfering with my patients, and bringing his old-fashioned theories to bear. He'll shut up the poor wretched little windows of all those cottages in the lanes, I dare say; and make the rooms even more stifling than they have been made by the builder. He'll frighten the poor women into shutting out every breath of fresh air, and then take every atom of strength away from those poor wasted creatures by his drastic treatment. Dr. Robert James Graves said he only wanted three words for his epitaph, and those words were, 'HE FED FEVERS.' Pawlkatt will be for starving these poor feeble creatures in the lanes. It's no use talking, my dear; I'm a little knocked up, but I've no more fever about me than you have, and I shall go out this evening. I shall go round and see those people. There's a woman in the lane behind the church, a widow, with three children lying ill; and she seems to believe in me, poor creature, as if I was Providence itself. I can't forget the look she gave me yesterday, when she stood on the threshold of her wretched hovel, asking me to save her children, as if she thought it rested with me to save them. I can't forget her look, Izzie. It haunted me all last night, when I lay tossing about; for I was too tired to sleep, somehow or other. And when I think of Pawlkatt pouring his drugs down those children's throats, I – I tell you it's no use, my dear; I'll take a cup of tea, and then get up and dress."
It was in vain that Isabel pleaded; in vain that she brought to her aid Mrs. Jeffson, the vigorous and outspoken, who declared that it would be nothing short of self-murder if Mr. Gilbert insisted on going out that evening; equally in vain the threat of summoning Mr. Pawlkatt. George was resolute; these quiet people always are resolute, not to say obstinate. It is your animated, impetuous, impulsive creatures who can be turned by a breath from the pursuit or purpose they have most vehemently sworn to accomplish. Mr. Gilbert put aside all arguments in the quietest possible manner. He was a medical man, and he was surely the best judge of his own health. He was wanted yonder among his patients, and he must go. Isabel and Mrs. Jeffson retired in melancholy resignation to prepare the tea, which was to fortify the surgeon for his evening's work. George came down-stairs half an hour afterwards, looking, not ill, or even weak; but at once flushed and haggard.
"There's nothing whatever the matter with me, my dear Izzie," he said, as his wife followed him to the door; "I'm only done up by very hard work. I feel tired and cramped in my limbs, as if I'd caught cold somehow or other. I was out all day in the wet, last week, you know; but there's nothing in that. I shall just look in at those people at Briargate, and come back by the lanes; and then an hour or so in the surgery will finish my work, and I shall be able to get a good night's rest. I must have an assistant, my dear. The agricultural population gets very thick about Graybridge; and unless some one takes pity on the poor people, and brings about some improvement in the places they live in, we may look for plenty of fever."
He went out at the little gate, and Isabel watched him going along the lane. He walked a little slower than usual, and that was all. She watched him with a quiet affection on her face. There was no possible phase of circumstance by which she could ever have been brought to love him; but she knew that he was good, she knew that there was something praiseworthy in what he was doing to-night, – this resolute visiting of wretched sick people. It was not the knightly sort of goodness she had adored in the heroes of her choice; but it was good; and she admired her husband a little, in a calm unenthusiastic manner, – as she might have admired a very estimable grandfather, had she happened to possess such a relative. She was trying to be good, remember; and all the sentimental tenderness of her nature had been aroused by George's illness. He was a much more agreeable person lying faint and languid in a shaded room, and requiring his head constantly bathed with vinegar-and-water, than when in the full vigour of health and clumsiness.
Mr. Pawlkatt came in for his second visit half an hour after George had left the house. He was very angry when he was told what had happened, and inveighed solemnly upon his patient's imprudence.
"I sent my son round amongst your husband's patients," he said, "and I must say, I am a little hurt by the want of confidence in me which Mr. Gilbert's conduct exhibits."
Isabel was too much occupied by all manner of contending thoughts to be able to do much towards the soothing of Mr. Pawlkatt's indignation. That gentleman went away with his heart full of bitterness against the younger practitioner.
"If your husband's well enough to go about amongst his patients, he can't want me, Mrs. Gilbert," he said, as Isabel opened the gate for him; "but if you find him much worse, as you are very likely to do after his most imprudent conduct, you know where to send for me. I shall not come again till I'm sent for. Good night."
Isabel sighed as she shut the gate upon the offended surgeon. The world seemed to her quite full of trouble just now. Roland Lansdell was angry with her. Ah! what bitter anger and contempt had been exhibited in his face in the church yesterday! George was ill, and bent on making himself worse, as it seemed; a Person – the person whom of all others the Doctor's Wife most feared – had dropped as it were from the clouds into Midlandshire; and here, added to all this trouble, was Mr. Pawlkatt indignant and offended. She did not go indoors at once; the house seemed gloomy and hot in the summer dusk. She lingered by the gate, looking over the top of the rails at the dusty lane, – the monotonous uninteresting lane, of whose changeless aspect she was so very tired. She was sorry for her husband now that he was ill. It was her nature to love and pity every weak thing in creation. The same kind of tenderness that she had felt long ago for a sick kitten, or a wounded bird, or a forlorn street wanderer of the canine species looking pleadingly at her with great hungry eyes, filled her heart now, as she thought of George Gilbert. Out of the blank emptiness into which he had melted long ago at Roland Lansdell's advent, he emerged now, distinct and palpable, as a creature who wanted pity and affection.
"Is he very ill?" she wondered. "He says himself that he is not: and he is much cleverer than Mr. Pawlkatt."
She looked out into the lane, watching for her husband's coming. Two or three people went slowly by at considerable intervals; and at last, when it was growing quite dark, the figure of a boy, a slouching country-built lad, loomed out of the obscurity.
"Be this Muster Gilbert's the doctor's?" he asked of Isabel. "Yes; do you want him?"
"I doan't want him; but I've got a letter for his wife, from a man that's staying up at our place. Be you she?"
"Yes; give me the letter," answered Isabel, putting her hand over the gate.
She took the missive from the hand of the boy, who resigned it in a slow unwilling manner, and then slouched away. Mrs. Gilbert put the letter in her pocket, and went into the house. The candles had just been taken into the parlour. The Doctor's Wife seated herself at the little table, and took the letter from her pocket and tore it open. It was a very brief and unceremonious kind of epistle, containing only these words:
"I've found comfortable quarters, for the nonce, in a little crib called the Leicester Arms, down in Nessborough Hollow, to the left of the Briargate Road. I suppose you know the place; and I shall expect to see you in the course of to-morrow. Don't forget the sinews of war; and be sure you ask for Captain Morgan.
Yours truly."
There was no signature. The letter was written in a big dashing hand, which had sprawled recklessly over a sheet of old-fashioned letter-paper; it seemed a riotous, improvident kind of writing, that gloried in the wasted space and squandered ink.
"How cruel of him to come here!" muttered Isabel, as she tore the letter into a little heap of fragments; "how cruel of him to come! As if I had not suffered enough already; as if the misery and disgrace had not been bitter enough and hard enough to bear."
She rested her elbows on the table, and sat quite still for some time with her face hidden in her hands. Her thoughts were very painful; but, for once in a way, they were not entirely devoted to Roland Lansdell; and yet the master of Mordred Priory did figure in that long reverie. George came in by-and-by, and found her sitting in the attitude into which she had fallen after destroying the letter. She had been very anxious about her husband some time ago; but for the last half-hour her thoughts had been entirely removed from him; and she looked up at him confusedly, almost startled by his coming, as if he had been the last person in the world whom she expected to see. Mr. Gilbert did not notice that look of confusion, but dropped heavily into the nearest chair, like a man who feels himself powerless to go one step farther.
"I'm very ill, Izzie," he said; "it's no use mincing the matter; I am ill. I suppose Pawlkatt is right after all, and I've got a touch of the fever."
"Shall I send for him?" asked Isabel, starting up; "he said I was to send for him if you were worse."
"Not on any account. I know what to do as well as he does. If I should happen to get delirious by-and-by, you can send for him, because I dare say you'd be frightened, poor girl, and would feel more comfortable with a doctor pottering about me. And now listen to me, my dear, while I give you a few directions; for my head feels like a ton weight, and I don't think I shall be able to sit upright much longer."
The doctor proceeded to give his wife all necessary instructions for the prevention of infection. She was to have a separate room prepared for herself immediately; and she was to fumigate the room in which he was to lie, in such and such a manner. As for any attendance upon himself, that would be Mrs. Jeffson's task.
"I don't believe the fever is infectious," Mr. Gilbert said; "I've caught it from the same causes that give it to the poor people: hard work, exposure to bad weather, and the foul air of the places I have to visit. Still we can't be too careful. You'd better keep away from my room as much as possible, Izzie; and let Mrs. Jeffson look after me. She's a strong-minded sort of a woman, who wouldn't be likely to catch a fever, because she'd be the last in the world to trouble her head about the risk of catching it."
But Isabel declared that she herself would wait upon her sick husband. Was she not trying to be good; and did not all Mr. Colborne's sermons inculcate self-sacrifice and compassion, tenderness and pity? The popular curate of Hurstonleigh was perhaps the kind of teacher that some people would have designated a sentimentalist; but his tender, loving exhortations had a fascination which could surely never belong to the tenable threats and awful warnings of a sterner preacher. In spite of Austin Colborne's deep faith in an infinitely grand and beautiful region beyond this lower earth, he did not look upon the world as a howling wilderness, in which Providence intended people to be miserable. He might certainly behold in it a place of probation, a kind of preparatory school, in which very small virtues were expected of ignorant and helpless scholars, wandering dimly towards a starry future: but he did not consider it a universal Dotheboys Hall, presided over by a Providence after the model of Mr. Squeers. He looked into the simple narratives of four historians who flourished some eighteen centuries ago; and in those solemn pages he saw no possible justification for the gloomy view of life entertained by many of his clerical compeers. He found in those sacred histories a story that opened like an idyl; he found bright glimpses of a life in which there were marriage festivals and pleasant gatherings, social feasts and happy Sabbath wanderings through rustic paths betwixt the standing corn; he found pure earthly friendship counted no sin against the claims of Heaven, and passionate parental love not reproved as an unholy idolatry of the creature, but hallowed for ever, by two separate miracles, that stand eternal records of a love so entirely divine as to be omnipotent, so tenderly human as to change the sternest laws of the universe in pity for weak human sorrow.
Mr. Pawlkatt was summoned to his rival's bedside early on the following morning. George's case was quite out of his own hands by this time; for he had grown much worse in the night, and was fain to submit to whatever people pleased to do to him. He was very ill. Isabel sat in the half-darkened room, sometimes reading, sometimes working in the dim light that crept through the curtain, sometimes sitting very quietly wrapt in thought – painful and perplexing thought. Mr. Gilbert was wakeful all through the day, as he had been all through the night, tossing uneasily from side to side, and now and then uttering half-suppressed groans that wrung his wife's heart. She was very foolish – she had been very wicked – but there was a deep fount of tenderness in that sentimental and essentially feminine breast; and I doubt if George Gilbert was not more lovingly watched by his weak erring young wife than ever he could have been by a strong-minded helpmate, who would have frozen any lurking sentiment in Mr. Lansdell's breast by one glance from her pitiless eyes. The Doctor's Wife felt a remorseful compassion for the man who, after his own matter-of-fact fashion, had been very good to her.
"He has never, never been cross to me, as my step-mother used to be," she thought; "he married me without even knowing who I was, and never asked any cruel questions; and even now, if he knew, I think he would have pity upon me and forgive me."
She sat looking at her husband with an earnest yearning expression in her eyes. It seemed as if she wanted to say something to him, but lacked the courage to approach the subject. He was very ill; it was no time to make any unpleasant communication to him. He had been delirious in the night, and had fancied that Mr. Pawlkatt was present, at an hour when that gentleman was snoring comfortably in his own bed. Isabel had been specially enjoined to keep her husband as quiet as it was possible for an active industrious man, newly stricken down by some unlooked-for malady, to be kept. No; whatever she might have to say to him must be left unspoken for the present. Whatever help he might, under ordinary circumstances, have given her, he was utterly powerless to give her now.
The day in that sick chamber seemed terribly long. Not because Isabel felt any selfish weariness of her task; she was only too anxious to be of use to the man she had so deeply wronged; she was only too eager to do something, – something that Mr. Colborne himself might approve, – as an atonement for her sin. But she was quite unused to sickness; and, being of a hyper-sensitive nature, suffered keenly at the sight of any suffering whatever. If the invalid was restless, she fancied directly that he was worse – much worse – in imminent danger, perhaps: if he rambled a little in his talk betwixt sleeping and waking, she sat with his burning hands clasped in hers, trembling from head to foot: if he fell into a profound slumber, she was seized with a sudden terror, fancying him unnaturally quiet, and was fain to disturb him, in her fear lest he should be sinking into some ominous lethargy.
