Doctor Cupid: A Novel
'Oh!' returns she, coldly surprised. 'I thought that probably Lady
Roupell had asked you to leave a message with me about it. It is not
that, then?'
She continues to look expectantly at him. Since it is not that, it must
be on some other errand he has come. She clearly thinks it an impossible
impertinence on his part to have called on her at eleven o'clock in the
morning without an excuse.
And yet such is the case. He has come because he has come; he has no
better reason to give, either to her or to himself. A wild idea of
trumping up the expected message, and another of feigning that he has
come to inquire after the fox, cross his mind; but he dismisses both:
the first because he knows he should be found out, and the second
because Miss Lambton might take it as a fresh demand upon her pity for
the wound got in her service.
'I am afraid I have no message,' he says boldly. 'I was passing your
door, and I--I--rang. By the bye' (smiling nervously as the utter
inadequacy of his explanation falls upon his ears), 'what a loud bell
yours is! I was so frightened at the noise I made that I was half
inclined to run away when I had rung it.'
She does not say that she is glad he did not; she does not say anything
civil. She only asks him to sit down, which, when he has shaken hands
with Prue, and wondered inwardly what she can have been doing to make
herself look so odd, he does.
Again silence, and again it is broken by Margaret. After all, she cannot
be conspicuously rude even to him in her own house. It is, indeed, one
of the problems of life, 'When is it permissible to insult one's
neighbour?' Not in one's own house; not in his. There is, then, only the
open street left.
For the sake of saying something, and also because she knows that she is
giving voice to her sister's unspoken wish, Peggy inquires civilly
whether they are all well at the Manor.
'Yes, I think so,' replies Talbot slowly. 'I have not heard any of them
complain of any disease beyond the long disease of life.'
His tone is so little what one would expect from the happy lover of a
fashionable beauty, that Margaret, with that charity that thinketh no
evil, to which we are all so prone, instantly sets it down to
affectation.
'That is a disease that I daresay does not hinder you all from amusing
yourselves,' returns she sarcastically.
'Amusing ourselves? Oh yes, very well. I do not complain.'
There is such an obviously true ring about the depression with which
this announcement of his contentment with his lot is uttered, that even
she can no longer doubt of its reality. So he is not happy with his
Betty after all! And a very good thing, too! Serve him right! But
perhaps the discovery tends to mollify a little the tone of her next
observation.
'Are you thinking how badly we want mowing?' she asks, her eyes
following the direction of his, which are absently bent upon the sward,
to-day not shorn to quite its usual pitch of velvet nicety. 'So we do,
indeed. But Jacob has unluckily fallen ill, just as milady lent me the
machine, and there it and the pony stand idle, and we'--regretfully
eyeing her domain--'are, as you see, like a hay-meadow.'
Talbot does not speak for a moment. A great idea is labouring its way to
birth in his mind--an idea that may give him a better foothold here than
any casually escaped fox or precarious porterage of messages can ever
do.
'Why should not I mow?' asks he at last.
'_You?_'
'Yes, I; and you lead the pony.'
She looks at him, half inclined to be angry.
'Is that a joke?'
'A joke--no! Will you tell me where the pony is? May I harness it?'
Again she looks at him, waveringly this time, and thence to her turf. It
is already an inch and a half too long; by to-morrow morning it will be
three inches, an offence to her neat eye; and when Jacob falls ill he is
apt to take his time about it. She yields to temptation.
'I will call the boy.'
But the boy is out--_marbleing_, vagranting after his kind about the
near village, no doubt.
They have to harness the pony themselves; and by the time that they have
put the bridle over her head, inserted her feet into her mowing shoes,
and led her out of her dark stall into the sunny day, John has almost
recovered the ground he had lost since that fortunate hour when, with
three drops of his blood, he had bought a square inch of oil-silk and a
heavenly smile.
They set off. Loudly whirs the machine. Up flies the grass in a little
green cloud, which the sun instantly turns into deliciously scented
new-mown hay; sedately steps the pony; gravely paces Margaret beside
her; honourably John stoops to his toil behind. It is not a pursuit that
lends itself much to conversation; but at least he has continuously
before his eyes her flat back, her noble shoulders, the milky nape of
her neck; and can conjecture as to the length of her unbound hair by
counting the number of times that the brown plait winds round the back
of her broad head. Every now and then they pause to empty out the grass,
and each time a few words pass between them.
'Is Jacob very ill?'
'I am afraid that he suffers a good deal.'
'Is he likely to die?'
'Heaven forbid!'
'Because if he is, I wish you would think of me.'
He is half afraid when he has said this; it verges, perhaps, too nearly
upon familiarity.
But she is not offended. Her eye, flattered by her shaven lawn, cannot
rest very severely upon him who has shaven it for her. Her spirits have
risen; exhilarated by the wholesome exercise, by the sunshine, by who
knows what. Only when her look falls now and again upon Prue, still
flung listlessly on the garden-seat, with her nosegay--not more flagging
than she--withering on the ground beside her, does a cloud come over it.
'Should I get a good character from your last place?' returns she
playfully.
'From the Foreign Office?'
'Was it the Foreign Office?' with a momentary impulse of curiosity for
which she instantly pulls herself up. 'You know one always expects to
get a character from the last place.'
'I do not know whether it is a good one. It is a nine-years' one.'
Then they set off again. Next time it is about Prue.
'I hope she is not ill?' his eyes following Margaret's to the little
forlorn figure under the Judas-tree.
'No-o.'
'Nor unhappy?'
'We all have our Black Mondays'--evasively--'only some of us have Black
Tuesdays and Black Wednesdays as well--ah!'
What has happened to her? Her gloomy sentence has ended in a suppressed
cry of joy, and her cheeks have changed from pink to damask. He turns to
seek the cause of this metamorphosis.
'Why, there is Ducane!'
In an instant his eyes have pounced back upon her face. It is settling
again into its pretty normal colours, but the joy is still there.
'Yes, there is Freddy!' she acquiesces softly.
A sharp needle of jealousy pricks his heart. This, then, is why she
received him so frigidly. She was expecting the other.
'We stop now, I suppose?' he says abruptly.
'What! tired already, Jacob's would-be successor?' asks she rallyingly.
'Hardly. But I supposed that you would wish to stop.'
'On account of Freddy?'--with a little shrug. 'Pooh! he is a fly on the
wall; and besides, he--he is not coming this way.'
It is true. Straight as a die young Ducane is making for the Judas-tree;
and from under that Judas-tree a little figure, galvanised back into
youth and bloom, rises, walking on air to meet him.
The eyes of John and Margaret meet, and he understands. As he goes home
he feels that he has made a real step in advance this time. He shares a
secret with her. He knows about Prue!
CHAPTER X
'Our Master hath a garden which fair flowers adorn,
There will I go and gather, both at eve and morn:
Nought's heard therein but Angel Hymns with harp and lute,
Loud trumpets and bright clarions, and the gentle, soothing flute.
'The lily white that bloometh there is Purity,
The fragrant violet is surnamed Humility:
Nought's heard therein but Angel Hymns with harp and lute,
Loud trumpets and bright clarions, and the gentle, soothing flute.'
'Well,' cries Peggy anxiously, as, the young men having taken leave, she
sees her sister come running and jumping, and humming an air, to meet
her, 'is it all right?'
'Of course it is all right,' replies Prue, vaulting over the tennis-net
to let off a little of her steam. 'If it had not been for your long
face, I should never have doubted it.'
'Yes?'
'It was just as I expected; he was too polite to leave them. He says he
never in his life remembers spending two such tedious days; but he is so
unselfish. He says himself that he knows he is full of faults, but that
he cannot understand any one being selfish, even from the point of view
of their own pleasure. He said it so simply.'
'H'm!'
'I was so sorry for you, Peggy--saddled with that tiresome John Talbot
all morning. Of course I ought to have helped you; but you know I had
not a word to throw to a dog. It was very provoking of him, wasting all
your morning for you.'
'My morning was not wasted,' rejoins Margaret calmly. 'He may be a very
bad man, but he mows well.'
'He might as well have finished it while he was about it,' says Prue,
captiously eyeing the lawn. 'It looks almost worse than it did before,
half mown and half unmown.'
For an instant Margaret hesitates; then, with a slight though
perceptible effort over herself, she says:
'I suppose he thought so; for he has offered to come again to-morrow to
finish it. He said one could not leave it half-shaven, like a poodle.'
She looks at her sister a little doubtfully as she speaks--as one not
quite sure of the soundness of the comparison, and that would be glad to
have it confirmed by another judgment. But Prue's wings have already
carried her up again into her empyrean.
'We are to ride quite late this afternoon. He wants me to see the
reapers reaping by moonlight as we come home. He says he always
associates me with moonlight. I am to ride the bay. He says he quite
looks upon her as mine--that it gives him a sort of turn to see any one
else on her;' and so on, and so on.
Margaret smiles rather sadly; but as it is no use going to meet trouble
half-way, she allows herself to be carried away by Prue's infectious
spirits, on however rickety a foundation those spirits may be built. In
her heart she is scarcely more pleased with her own conduct than with
her sister's.
'One cannot touch pitch without being defiled,' she says to herself
severely.
She says it several times--is, indeed in the act of saying it next
morning, when, on the stroke of eleven, punctual to his minute, the poor
pitch reappears. She sets him at once to his mowing, and allows him very
short intervals for rest and conversation. Since he has come to work,
let him work. No doubt as soon as he discovers that it is honest labour
and not play that is expected of him he will trouble her with no more of
his assiduities. And yet, as he bids her good-bye, leaving behind him a
smooth sweep of short velvet for her to remember him by, he seems to
linger.
'How is Jacob?' he asks.
'No better.'
'The garden looks a little straggly,' suggests he insidiously, knowing
her weak side. 'A great many things want tying up. The beds need edging,
and the carnations ought to be layered.'
'You are very learned,' says she, smiling. 'Does the F.O. teach you
gardening?'
'Well, no; that is not included in the curriculum. That is an extra.'
'Who did teach you, then?' asks she, with an inquisitiveness which, as
soon as the words are out of her mouth, shocks and surprises herself.
Can it be Betty? A Betty that loves her children and digs in her garden!
If it is so, Peggy will have to reconstruct her altogether.
'My sister.'