Doctor Cupid: A Novel
and bought all the penny tarts at the confectioner's, and pelted one
another with them in the open street.'
Peggy has at length recovered her speech.
'It was very, _very_ stupid,' she says, in a voice of acute annoyance;
'senseless. But after all there was no great harm in it.'
'Of course one does not know what they did indoors,' rejoins Mrs. Evans,
as if, though a good-natured woman, unavoidably anxious to knock even
this prop from under our poor Peggy. 'People said--did not they?'
turning to her cousin--'that they sat up smoking till all hours of the
night, and ran in and out of each other's rooms; and the ladies put
things in the men's beds----'
'I am afraid I must be going on,' interrupts Margaret, starting up as if
she had been stung; 'I have to see Lady Roupell.'
She takes leave abruptly. It seems to her as if she should not be able
to draw her breath properly until she is alone. She pants still as she
walks on over the stubble fields, across the park, under the September
trees, whose green seems all the heavier and deeper for their
nigh-coming change of raiment. She pants at the recollection of the
picture just drawn for her of her Prue--_her Prue_--shouting, smoking,
making apple-pie beds!
Her worry of mind must have written itself upon her face, for no sooner
has she joined milady, whom she finds out in the shrubberies leaning on
her spade, like Hercules upon his club, than the old lady asks sharply
what she has been doing to herself.
'Nothing that I know of,' replies Peggy, 'except that I have been rather
bothered.'
'Prue, eh?'
'Yes.'
'What about her now?' with a slight accent of impatience.
'She wants to stay away another week.'
'And have you given her leave?'
'I came to ask your advice.'
Milady is neatly squirting a plantain or two out of the turf. She waits
until she has finished before answering. Then she says with decision:
'Have her back.'
'You think so? But if,' very anxiously, 'she falls ill again as soon as
she gets home?'
'Pish!' rejoins the other in a fury; 'give her a dose of jalap and a
whipping.'
But Peggy does not even smile.
'Have you--have you heard anything of the party?' she asks hesitatingly;
'of whom it consists, I mean? Prue is not very communicative. Is Lady
Clanranald there still?'
'No, she is gone,' replies milady shortly, digging her weapon into a
dandelion. 'She could not stand it. Betty is an ass!'
_Could not stand it!_
In a dismayed silence Margaret awaits further explanation, but none
comes. Milady, whatever she may know, is evidently determined not to be
diffuse on the subject.
'Have her home!' repeats she briefly, lifting her shrewd old eyes to
Peggy's, and replacing her billycock hat on the top of the cap from
which her stooping attitude has nearly dismounted it; 'have her home,
and do it as quickly as possible.'
Beyond this piece of short but very definite advice, nothing is to be
got out of her. She will explain neither why Lady Clanranald took flight
nor why Betty is an ass.
In an uneasiness all the deeper for the vagueness of milady's
implications, Peggy takes her way home to her little solitary Red House,
and writes the letter which is to summon Prue back.
But with how many tears is that letter penned! How many fond and anxious
apologies! Wrapped in what a mantle of loving phrases does the
unpalatable fiat go forth! However, it has gone now, and there is
nothing for her but to await its result. Between the day on which it was
sent and that appointed for Prue's homecoming there is ample time for an
answer to be returned; but none comes. The day arrives; the servant who
is to be Prue's escort sets off in the early morning, and through the
long hours, forenoon, noon, afternoon, Peggy waits. Not in idleness
though. She is hard at work from dawn till sunset, cooking, gardening,
rearranging, planning surprises that are her fatted calves for the
prodigal. As she works her spirits rise. The small house looks so
bright; perhaps, after all, Prue will not be very sorry to find herself
back in it; and how pleasant it will be to hear her little voice singing
about the garden, and to see her jumping over the tennis-net with Mink
again! Mink has not jumped over the tennis-net once since she left. With
a lightened heart Peggy stoops to ask him why he has not, but he answers
only by a foolish smirk.
The expected moment has come. For half an hour beforehand Peggy has been
standing at the garden-end straining her eyes down the road, and making
up her mind that there must have been an accident. But at length the
slow station fly with its dusty nimbus heaves in sight, rolls in at the
gate, stops at the door.
Before Prue can well emerge her sister has her in her arms.
'Oh, Prue! how nice it is to have you back! How are you? Have you
enjoyed yourself? Are you a little glad to see me?'
Prue's first remark can hardly be said to be an answer to any of these
questions. She has disengaged herself from her sister, and stands
staring round, as if half-bewildered.
Prue does not look like herself. She has an oddly-shaped hat; there is
something unfamiliar about the dressing of her hair; and can it be
fatigue or dust that has made her so extremely black under the eyes.
'What a squeezy little place!' she says slowly, with an accent half of
wonder, half of disgust. 'Surely it must have shrunk since I went away!'
And Peggy's arms drop to her sides, and her hopes go out.
CHAPTER XVIII
A wretched month follows--a month of miserable misery--misery, that is,
that springs from no God-sent misfortune; that has none of that fateful
greatness to which we bow our heads, stooping meekly before the storm of
the inevitable; but a misery that is paltry and reasonless--one of those
miseries that we ourselves spin out of the web of our own spoilt lives.
It seems such a folly and a shame to be miserable in the face of these
yellow October days that by and by steal in, pranked out in the cheerful
glory of their short-lived wealth, with such a steadfast sun throwing
down his warmth upon you from his unchanging blue home; with a park full
of such bronze bracken to push through at your very door; and with such
an army of dahlias, ragged chrysanthemums, and 'Good-bye-Summers,' with
their delicate broad disks, to greet you morning after morning as you
pass in your pleasant ownership along their gossamered ranks.
So Peggy feels; but that does not hinder her from being wretched to her
very heart's core. The inside world may throw a sunshine on the outside
one, as we all know--may make June day out of January night--'the winter
of our discontent' into glorious summer; but the outside can throw no
sunshine on the inside unless some is there already. So Peggy's
'Good-bye-Summers,' though they never in their lives have flowered for
her so beautifully before, smile at her in vain. She has no answering
gladness to give them back. It has not taken twenty-four hours from the
time of her return to prove that it has become absolutely impossible to
please Prue. It is nothing that, on the first evening of her arrival,
she has, as it were, walked over all poor Peggy's little planned
surprises without even perceiving them; that she has turned her dinner
over disdainfully, and remarked how much worse Sarah cooks than when she
went away. These may be but the childish fretfulnesses engendered of
fatigue, and that a good night's rest will sweep away. But when
twenty-four hours have passed, when a week, when a fortnight have gone
by, and find her still cavilling at the smallness of the rooms, the
garden's confined space, and the monotony of their lives, then, indeed,
Margaret's spirits sink as they have never sunk before.
The one definite property that Prue seems to have brought back from her
Harborough visit is a sickly and contemptuous disgust for whatever had
formerly given her pleasure; a standard by which to measure all the
conditions of her own life, and find them grossly wanting. About the
visit itself she is singularly reticent. Not a word does she breathe of
her own prowess in donkey tandem-driving; not a hint does she let drop
of any midnight gambols.
Once and again Margaret sadly fancies that she sees faint signs of the
old lifelong habit of telling her everything trying to reassert its
sway; but in a moment it is checked. Often Prue seems to her sister like
a child who, engaged in some naughtiness, has been charged by its
confederates not to tell. And Prue does not tell. Yet, from indications
which she cannot help letting fall, Peggy gathers that the visit has not
been all pleasure; that fits of bitter disappointment, sharp jealousy,
grisly disillusion, freaked the surface of its feverish joy. And yet
Freddy had been a co-guest with her through the whole fortnight! This
fact Margaret has elicited by direct inquiry; it would never have been
volunteered.
'Come, Prue,' she says coaxingly, on the morning after the young girl's
return, as they stroll about the garden, whose flowers Prue notices only
to disparage, 'I let you off last night because you were so sleepy, but
you must tell me something about your visit now. Was Freddy there?'
'Yes.'
'All the time?'
'Yes.'
'Did you see much of him?'
A slight hesitation, and then an accent of impatience:
'Of course. Were not we staying in the same house?'
'And--and--did Mr. Harborough mount you? You know, don't you--I told
you, I think,' a beam of pleasure shining in her anxious blue
eyes--'that milady has lent you the little gray mare for the whole
winter?'
'I do not think that I care for riding as much as I did,' replies Prue
listlessly, plucking the seed-vessel from an overblown dahlia in the
border beside her, and idly scattering the seeds over the walk. 'We did
not ride much; there were so many more amusing things to do.'
'What sort of things?'
'Oh, they would not have amused you!'
'How do you know that, until you tell me what they were?'
'Oh, they would not have amused you; you are not easily amused. _He_
always says so; and besides,' sinking down with a sigh on the bench
under the Judas-tree, 'of what use to talk of them now they are over?'
For a second Peggy shrinks into herself in baffled discouragement, but
immediately recovers. She will not be so easily disheartened.
'If they are so amusing,' she says cheerfully, 'perhaps we might adopt
some of them here. We are not above learning, are we?'
Prue smiles disdainfully, curling her childish nose.
'In these extensive grounds?'
Nor as time goes on does she grow more communicative about her visit,
though it is clear that its incidents occupy her thoughts to the
exclusion of all other subjects, and though its influence may be traced
in each fragment of her sparse talk. It is one of Peggy's severest daily
penalties to recognise in her sister's languid speech continually
recurring phrases of Betty's; thin echoes of her flippancies. Prue is
even growing to have a dreadful likeness to her model. Possibly this may
arise only from Betty's old hat, which she persistently wears; or from
the mode of hair-dressing, slavishly copied from her original. That the
now fixed bloom in her cheek may be derived from the same source as Lady
Betty's, and cause the undeniable resemblance that exists between them,
is a supposition too bad to be faced, and that Peggy drives away from
her mind as soon as it presents itself. But it recurs. How many
disagreeable things do not recur nightly as she lays her head on that
pillow which is oftener than not wetted with her tears?
'Oh, why did I let her go?' she sobs. 'Why did I take any one's advice?
What has happened to her? What shall I do? It is not my Prue at all that
has come back to me!'
Now and again, indeed, there is a tantalising glimpse of the old Prue,