第60章

It was near the dinner hour, and when Mr. Carlyle entered, he was startled to see her; her pallid cheeks were burning with a red hectic glow, and her eyes glistened with fever.

"Isabel, you are worse!" he uttered, as he approached her with a quick step.

She partially rose from the sofa, and clasped hold of him in her emotion. "Oh, Archibald! Archibald!" she uttered, "don't marry her! I could not rest in my grave."

Mr. Carlyle, in his puzzled astonishment, believed her to be laboring under some temporary hallucination, the result of weakness. He set himself to soothe her, but it seemed that she could not be soothed.

She burst into a storm of tears and began again--wild words.

"She would ill-treat my child; she would draw your love from it, and from my memory. Archibald, you must not marry her!"

"You must be speaking from the influence of a dream, Isabel," he soothingly said; "you have been asleep and are not yet awake. Be still, and recollection will return to you. There, love; rest upon me."

"To think of her as your wife brings pain enough to kill me," she continued to reiterate. "Promise me that you will not marry her; Archibald, promise it!"

"I will promise you anything in reason," he replied, bewildered with her words, "but I do not know what you mean. There is no possibility of my marrying any one, Isabel; you are my wife."

"But if I die? I may--you know I may; and many think I shall--do not let her usurp my place."

"Indeed she shall not--whoever you may be talking of. What have you been dreaming? Who is it that has been troubling your mind?"

"Archibald, do you need to ask? Did you love no one before you married me? Perhaps you have loved her since--perhaps you love her still?"

Mr. Carlyle began to discern "method in her madness." He changed his cheering tone to one of grave earnestness. "Of whom to you speak, Isabel?"

"Of Barbara Hare."

He knitted his brow; he was both annoyed and vexed. Whatever had put this bygone nonsense into his wife's head? He quitted the sofa where he had been supporting her, and stood upright before her, calm, dignified, almost solemn in his seriousness.

"Isabel, what notion can you possibly have picked up about myself and Barbara Hare; I never entertained the faintest shadow of love for her, either before my marriage or since. You must tell me what has given rise to this idea in your mind."

"But she loved you."

A moment's hesitation; for, of course, Mr. Carlyle was conscious that she had; but, taking all the circumstances into consideration, more especially how he learnt the fact, he could not, in honor, acknowledge it to his wife. "If it was so, Isabel, she was more reprehensibly foolish than I should have given Barbara's good sense could be; for a woman may almost as well lose herself as to suffer herself to love unsought. If she did give her love to me, I can only say, I was entirely unconscious of it. Believe me, you have as much cause to be jealous of Cornelia as you have of Barbara Hare."

An impulse rose within her that she would tell him all; the few words dropped by Susan and Joyce, twelve months before, the conversation she had just overheard; but in that moment of renewed confidence, it did appear to her that she must have been very foolish to attach importance to it--that a sort of humiliation, in listening to the converse of servants, was reflected on her, and she remained silent.

There never was a passion in this world--there never will be one--so fantastic, so delusive, so powerful as jealousy. Mr. Carlyle dismissed the episode from his thoughts; he believed his wife's emotion to have been simply from a feverish dream, and never supposed but that, with the dream, its recollection would pass away from her. Not so.

Implicitly relying upon her husband's words at the moment, feeling quite ashamed at her own suspicion, Lady Isabel afterward suffered the unhappy fear to regain its influence; the ill-starred revelations of Wilson reasserted their power, overmastering the denial of Mr. Carlyle. Shakspeare calls jealousy yellow and green; I think it may be called black and white for it most assuredly views white as black, and black as white. The most fanciful surmises wear the aspect of truth, the greatest improbabilities appear as consistent realities. Not another word said Isabel to her husband; and the feeling--you will understand this if you have ever been foolish enough to sun yourself in its delights--only caused her to grow more attached to him, to be more eager for his love. But certain it is that Barbara Hare dwelt on her heart like an incubus.