Doctor Cupid: A Novel
and fork, and is listening with all her ears to what has the obvious yet
poignant charm of not being intended for them.
'Pooh!' replies milady, following the direction of Margaret's look. 'Ne
faites pas attention a ces marmots! ils ne comprennent pas de quoi il
s'agit!'
At the sound of the French words a look of acute baffled misery has come
into Lily's face, which, later on, deepens on her being assured that she
and her brother have sufficiently feasted, and may efface themselves.
Franky gallops off joyfully with his sword; and his sister follows
reluctantly with hers. As soon as they are really out of earshot--Peggy
has learnt by experience the length of Lily's ears--she answers the
question that had been put to her by another.
'Do you think that I ought to have let her go?'
Milady shrugs her shoulders.
'Everybody goes there. Lady Clanranald, who is the most straitlaced
woman in London, takes her girls there; one must march with one's age.'
The colour has deepened in Margaret's face.
'Then you think that I ought to have let her go?'
Lady Roupell is peeling a peach. She looks up from it for an instant,
with a careless little shrug.
'I daresay that she would have amused herself. If she likes
bear-fighting, and apple-pie beds, and practical jokes, I am sure that
she would.'
'And _songs_?' adds Peggy, with a curling lip; 'you must not forget
_them_.'
'Pooh!' says milady cynically; 'Prue has no ear, she would not pick them
up; and, after all, Betty's bark is worse than her bite.'
'Is it?' very doubtfully.
'Why do not you go too, and look after her?' asks the elder woman,
lifting her shrewd eyes from the peach, off whose naked satin she has
just whipped its rosy blanket, to her companion's troubled face.
'I am not invited.'
'And you would not go if you were--eh?'
'I would sooner go than let her go by herself,' replies poor Peggy with
a groan.
'She is looking very ill,' says Lady Roupell, not unkindly. 'What have
you done to her? I suppose that Freddy has been teasing her!'
'I suppose so,' dejectedly.
'I wish that he would leave her alone,' rejoins milady, with irritation.
'I have tried once or twice to broach the subject to him, but he always
takes such high ground that I never know where to have him.'
'I wish you would send him away somewhere!' cries Peggy passionately.
'Could not you send him on a tour round the world?'
The old lady shakes her head.
'He would not go; he would tell me that though there is nothing in the
world he should enjoy so much, it is his obvious duty to stay by my
side, and guide my tottering footsteps to the grave.'
She laughs robustly, and Peggy joins dismally. There is a pause.
'She _does_ look very ill,' says the younger woman, in a voice of
poignant anxiety; 'and long ago our doctor told us that she was not to
be thwarted in anything. Oh, milady,' with an outburst of appeal for
help and sympathy, 'do you think I am killing her? What _am_ I to do?
oh, do advise me!'
'Let her go!' replies the elder woman half-impatiently, yet not
ill-naturedly either. 'She will fret herself to fiddlestrings if you do
not; and you will have a long doctor's bill to pay. I daresay she will
not come to much harm. I will tell Lady Clanranald to have an eye upon
her; and if she fall ill, I can promise you that nobody will poultice
and bolus her more thoroughly than Betty would; she loves physicking
people.'
Even this last assurance fails very much to exhilarate Margaret. She
draws on her gloves slowly, takes leave sadly, and walks heavily away.
She does not go directly home, but fetches a compass through the lanes,
on whose high hedges the passing harvest-waggons have left their ripe
tribute of reft ears; over a bit of waste land, barrenly beautiful with
thistles, some in full purple flush, some giving their soft down to the
fresh wind. Singing to them, sitting on a mountain-ash tree, is a sleek
robin. Peggy stands still mechanically to listen to him; but his
contented music knocks in vain at her heart's door. There is no one to
let it in. In vain, too, the reaped earth and the pretty white clouds,
voyaging northwards under the south wind's friendly puffs, and the
thistle's imperial stain ask entrance to her eye. Whether standing or
walking, whether abstractedly looking or deafly listening, there is but
one thought in her mind; one question perpetually asking itself, 'Is it
really and solely for Prue's good that I have prevented her going?'
Neither the thistles nor the redbreast supply her with any answer. The
only one that she gets comes ringing and stinging back in Prue's own
words: 'I suppose it is John Talbot who has made you hate her so.' 'Can
there be any truth in them?' she asks again, as she had asked with tears
when they were first spoken.
Her aimless walk has brought her, when the afternoon is already
advanced, to the gate of the Vicarage. It is open, swinging to and fro,
with a bunch of ugly little Evanses clustered upon its bars. This slight
fact of its being open just makes the scale dip towards entering. She
enters. Mrs. Evans is in the nursery, as the nurse is taking her
holiday. She is sitting with a newish baby in a cradle at her side, and
an oldish one alternately voyaging on its stomach across the scoured
boards, and forcing its sketchy nose between the uprights of the tall
nursery fender. A basket of unmended stockings balances the cradle on
Mrs. Evans's other side, and an open Peerage lies upon her lap.
'Why, you are quite a stranger!' she says. 'I have not seen you since
the party at the Manor. I was just looking out some of the people who
were there. I have not had a moment to spare since; and you know I like
to find out who is who.'
Peggy sits down, and the old baby props itself against the leg of a
chair to stare at her.
'How is Prue?' asks Mrs. Evans, discarding the Peerage. 'Mr. Evans met
her yesterday on Wanborough Common, five miles away from home. Do you
think it is wise to let her take such long walks?'
'I did not know that she had been so far,' answers Peggy dispiritedly.
'I do not like her looks,' continues the other, consulting Peggy's face
with a placid eye, full of that comfortable and easy-sitting compassion
with which our neighbours' anxieties are apt to inspire us. 'Do you ever
give her cod-liver oil?'
'She has been taking it for the last two months.'
'Or malt? Malt is an excellent thing; the extract, you know--half a
glass taken after meals. It did wonders for Billy. No one would have
known him for the same boy.'
'I have tried that too.'
'I expect that what she wants is change of air,' says Mrs. Evans,
shaking her head as she thrusts her hand into the foot of a stocking,
running an experienced eye over the area of its injuries. 'Could not you
manage to give her a little?'
For an instant Margaret is silent; then she says abruptly:
'Lady Betty Harborough has invited her to pay her a visit.'
'_Lady Betty Harborough!_' cries Mrs. Evans, dropping stocking and
darning-needle. 'Dear me! what luck some people have! And you, too? No?
I wish she had asked you too.' It is the measure of how low Peggy has
fallen that she goes nigh to echoing this wish. 'Well, she must be a
very kind-hearted woman,' pursues Mrs. Evans, resuming her
darning-needle, 'as well as a very pretty one. And what a charming voice
she has! That was a horrid song she sang; I did not hear the words very
clearly myself. Mr. Evans says it was just as well that I did not; but
how well she sang it! What spirit! When does Prue go?'
'I--I--am not sure that she is going at all.'
'I would not put it off longer than I could help, if I were you,' says
Mrs. Evans. 'Do not you think that she has fallen away a good deal of
late? And such an opportunity may not come again in a hurry. Dear me!'
with a sigh and a glance towards the two babies and the stocking-basket,
'some people are in luck!'
It is evident that Margaret is not destined to draw much consolation
from her visits to-day. At the gate Mr. Evans is waiting to greet her,
having routed that numerous detachment of his offspring which was
ornamenting it on Peggy's arrival. There are day's on which Mr. Evans's
children appear to him intolerably ugly, and his lot unbearably sordid.
On such days he lies under a tree, reading Morris's _Earthly Paradise_,
and his family give him a wide berth.
'How is Miss Prue?' he asks, holding the gate open for her to pass
through. 'I met her yesterday on Wanborough Common, looking like a----'
'Yes, yes, I know,' interrupts Peggy, almost rudely. 'Mrs. Evans told
me.'
'Are you quite happy about her?' inquires he, not perceiving his
companion's shrinking from the subject, glad to escape for a few moments
from the contemplation of his own unpicturesque ills to the more poetic
ones of other people, and walking a few paces down the road at her side.
'Had not you better take care that she does not slip through your
fingers?'
CHAPTER XVII
A fortnight later, and Peggy is alone. Prue has gone after all--gone to
that paradise, in yearning for which she seemed to be stooping towards
the grave; she has gone to empty jugs of water over stairs on
Guardsmen's heads, to put crackers into the coat-tail pockets of
Secretaries of Legation, and set booby-traps for Members of Parliament.
No wonder that even before entering upon these glories their mere
prospect had restored her to more than her pristine vigour. She has
gone, with Peggy's one string of pearls in her trinket-case; with
Peggy's best gown, contracted and modified to her smaller shape, in her
trunk. She has gone, nodding her head, waving her hand, and blowing
kisses, altogether restored apparently to the blithe Prueship of earlier
days. But at what price?
Peggy's repugnance to the plan has been in no degree diminished by the
fact of her having consented to it. She has consented to it, driven
partly by a suspicion that her opposition has been half-due to no
solicitude for her sister's welfare, but to a resentment and an ache of
her own; driven much more, though, by Mr. Evans's few light words, 'Take
care that she does not slip through your fingers!' They pursue her by
day and by night. 'Slip through her fingers!' There seems a dreadful
fitness in the very form of the phrase. Other people may die, may be
killed. Prue would just slip away! Oh, if he had but used another form
of expression! As she lies on her wakeful, anxious bed, one couple of
lines torments her with what she feels to be its prophetic
applicability:
'Like a caged bird escaping suddenly
The little innocent soul flitted away!'
Some day she will wake to find her arms empty of little Prue, whom for
seventeen fond years they have girdled. That Prue has always been sickly
and often forward, has from the moment of her birth caused her far more
pain than pleasure, makes no sort of difference. The sea does not reckon
how many little rills run into it. A great love has no debit and credit
account; it gives vastly, not inquiring for any return. People in weak
health, who can become genuinely moribund upon opposition, possess a
weapon which the sound cannot pretend to emulate.
On the evening of the day of Margaret's visit to the Vicarage Freddy
Ducane had unexpectedly returned to the Manor.
'I believe that that wretched little Prue is going to die on purpose to
spite Peggy for not letting her go to the Harboroughs!' says milady
crossly, vexed at her nephew's serene flower face. 'I cannot think what
possessed you to put such an idea into her stupid little head!'
And Freddy looks mournful, and answers sweetly that he supposes it is
useless his trying to explain that he had no hand in the matter, but
that he is afraid he shall never be able to inflict gratuitous pain upon
any one as long as he lives.