Doctor Cupid: A Novel
mid-October, the frost has still spared many flowers. There is still
lingering mignonette; plenty of Japanese anemones, their pure white
faces pearled with the heavy autumn dew; single dahlias also, variously
bright. It would have been easier to walk among them with that farewell
feeling had the mignonette lain sodden and dead, and the dahlias been
frost-shrivelled up into black sticks. But no! they still lift their gay
cheeks to the kiss of the crisp air.
How much longer we lure our flowers into staying with us than we did
twenty years ago! Perhaps by and by we shall wile them into not leaving
us at all.
To distract her thoughts from her sad musings Peggy begins to talk to
Jacob; but even he adds his unconscious stab to those already planted in
her heart. He can talk of nothing but next summer. To escape from him
she leaves the garden, and passes out into the road. She walks
purposelessly about the lanes, careless of the splendour of their
brambles. She meets a detachment of Evanses blackberry-laden, their
plain faces smeared with blackberry juice. They stop her to brag of
their booty, and tell her that she must come blackberrying with them
next year. _Next year_ indeed!
She throws a friendly word of greeting across the hedge to a cottager
digging up his potatoes. He tells her they are very bad, but he hopes
she will see them better next year. She looks in at a farm to 'change
the weather' with a civil farmer's wife, who shows her her chicken-yard,
and volunteers a neighbourly hope that she will be able to give her a
setting of game-fowl's eggs next summer. They seem to have _se donne le
mot_ to tease her with their 'next summer.'
She strays disconsolately home again to the little spoilt house, only
six months ago so innocently gay, so serenely content, before Freddy
came to lay its small joys in ashes. Can it be because she is thinking
of him that she seems to see his wavy-haired head lying back in its old
attitude on the bench under the Judas-tree, with another head in close
proximity to it? She quickens her steps, but long before she can reach
the rustic seat Prue has fled to meet her with a cry of joy.
At this now unfamiliar sign of welcoming poor Peggy's heart leaps for a
moment up. Can it indeed be she that Prue is so glad to see? But is this
indeed Prue? this radiant, transfigured creature, laughing, though her
eyes are brimming with divinely happy tears?
'Oh, Peggy, where have you been?' cries the young girl, throwing her
arms almost hysterically round her sister's neck; 'I thought you were
never coming! I have been longing to tell you! Who was right? Who knew
him best? Did not I say it would be all right? No! do not keep me! He
will tell you!'
And away she speeds into the house, with Mink yapping his
congratulations at her heels, and the parrot rapping out a friendly oath
in Sarah's voice at her from the hall window as she passes him.
In an agitation hardly inferior to Prue's, Margaret advances to meet the
young man, who has risen gracefully from his lounge, and is coming to
meet her.
'What does she mean by saying it is all right?' asks Margaret sternly,
and breathing quickly.
'It is very kind of dear Prue to put it that way,' replies he quietly.
'I suppose she means that I have asked her to be my wife. I have run
over from Oxford on purpose, without leave, and shall probably be sent
down for it. There is something a little comic, is not there, Peg,'
breaking into an ungovernable smile, 'in the idea of my having a wife?
Does it remind you at all of "Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn"? Well, dear!'
lapsing into a pensive and quasi reproachful gravity, 'you see, you
might have trusted me! Be not afraid; only believe!'
CHAPTER XX
The autumn is throwing down its red and amber tributes before other feet
besides Margaret's; before Betty's, before Talbot's. It does not,
however, rain the same shower on both. Betty's famed chestnuts supply no
leaf for Talbot's tread. For the first time for five years Harborough
Castle gets no share in John Talbot's autumn holiday. This is more
through his misfortune than his fault, as Betty, though with angry,
thwarted tears, is compelled to allow. From the visit to which after
leaving the Manor he had betaken himself, he had been recalled to London
with peremptory prematureness by a telegram. A crisis in public
affairs--an unlooked-for and unpleasant turn in foreign politics has
reft his chief--to that great man's unaffected disgust--from his thymy
forest and his amethyst moor back to the barren solitudes of Downing
Street. It has kept, if not the big, at least the lesser man bound hand
and foot there until the opening of the autumn session, which in any
case, even if he had not been defrauded of his legitimate playtime,
would have summoned him back to harness. So that Talbot sees no red
leaves except those which St. James's Park can show him. To a
country-hearted man you would think that this would be a great
privation; but this year John is glad of it. To him the country must
henceforth mean Harborough. If he has no holiday, he need not, he cannot
go to Harborough; and in his heart he says that the loss is well bought
by the gain. It is true that Betty has, on various pretexts, run up
several times to see him; that he has had to take her to the play; to
give his opinion upon her new clothes; to sit on the old low seat beside
the old sofa, in the old obscurity of the boudoir, without the old
heart. She has even, contrary to his advice, and very much against his
wishes, insisted on coming to tea with him in his rooms in Bury Street;
and, as a matter of course, has expected him to see her off at
Paddington. But on the whole he feels, as he speeds back in a
hansom--this last duty punctually done--drawing an unintentional sigh of
relief as he does so, that he has got through it pretty well. He has
provoked not much anger, and, thank God, no tears. Thank God a hundred
times more, too, that he has been miraculously spared any fleers at that
other woman, towards whom, perhaps, the completeness of his lady's
victory may have rendered her magnanimous. And that other woman! Well,
he lets her image tease him as little as he can help it. Whether that is
much or little, he himself scarcely knows. Sometimes again he does know,
knows that it is infinitely much. But that is only now and then, when
some trifling accident has given him a tiny momentary glimpse, such as
outsiders often catch, at some keen happiness _a deux_; some two happy
souls together blent,
'As the rose
Blendeth in odour with the violet;
Solution sweet.'
Then, indeed, he catches his breath with the sharpness of the pain that
runs through his lonely heart, saying to himself, before his will can
arrest and strangle the lovely, useless thought, 'That might have been
Peggy and I.' But this, as I have said, is only now and again. As a
matter of fact, his life is too full of genuine continuous hard work,
too throbbing with great excitements, too full of the large fever of
to-day's hot politics, to have much space for the cherishing of any
merely personal ache. Sometimes for a whole day together he keeps his
heart's door triumphantly barred against her. For a day--yes; but at
night, willy-nilly, she lifts the latch, and cool and tall walks in. In
the night she has her revenge. In the day he may think of nations
clashing, of party invectives, of discordant Cabinets, and Utopian
Reforms; but at night he thinks of Mink, and of the little finches
swinging and twittering on _his_ ladder; of the mowing-machine's whir,
and the pallid sweet lavender bush.
As the winter nears, and such considerable and growing portion of the
world as spend some part at least of the cold season in London, refill
their houses, he goes a good deal into society, and when there he seems
to enjoy himself. How can each woman to whom he offers his pleasant,
easy civilities know that he is saying to his own heart as he looks at
her:
'Your skin is not nearly so fine grained as Peggy's; your ear is double
the size of hers; your smile comes twice as often, but it is not nearly
so worth having when it does come'?
And so he seems to enjoy himself, and to a certain extent really does
so. It is quite possible not only to do a great deal of good and
thorough work, but to have a very tolerable amount of real, if surface
pleasure, with a dull ache going on in the back of your heart all the
time. He has as little nourishment on which to feed his remembrance of
her as she has hers of him; nay, less, for he has about him no
persistent little Harborough voices to ask him whether he would not like
Peggy to come and live with him always. Sometimes it strikes him with an
irrational surprise that no one should ever mention her name to him;
though a moment later reason points out to him that it would be far more
strange if they did, since her very existence is absolutely unknown to
all those who compose his surroundings. Of no one were Wordsworth's
lines ever truer than of her:
'A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.'
One day he meets Freddy at Boodle's, and rushes at him with a warmth of
affectionate delight that surprises that easy-going young gentleman.
However, as Freddy is himself always delighted to see everybody, he is
delighted to see Talbot now; and immediately gives him a perfectly
sincere, even if the next moment utterly forgotten, invitation to spend
Christmas at the Manor. He has forgotten it, as I have said, next
half-hour; he does not in the least perceive the lameness of his
friend's stuttered excuses, and he would be thunderstruck were he to
conjecture the tempest of revolt, misery, and starved longing that his
few careless words, 'Could not you run down to us for Christmas? no
party, only ourselves and the Lambtons,' have awoke in that unhappy
friend's breast.
Christmas! yes, Christmas is drawing near--Christmas, the great feast
that looses every galley-slave from his oar. With how sinking a heart
does one galley-slave watch its approach! How much he prefers pulling at
his oar, with all the labour and sweat it entails, to the far worse
bondage to which his emancipation from it will consign him! There will
be no shirking it this time. To all humanity Christmas brings its three
or four days of liberation; and these three or four days he must--unless
the earth open or the heaven fall between this and then to save
him--spend at Harborough. He will have to decorate Betty's church; light
the candles on Betty's Christmas-tree; have Betty's children hanging
about his neck, and Betty's husband reproaching him for his long
absence.
Betty herself accepting his present, thanking him for it, manoeuvring
to get him alone. Her present! He must be thinking about it. He has not
yet bought it. He will have to make time to go and choose it. He yawns.
When you are in the habit of giving a person a great many presents, it
is extremely difficult to vary them judiciously. If it were a first gift
now, how much simpler it would be! Certainly quite without his consent,
the thought darts across him that he has never given Peggy a present.
How easy, how delightful, how enthralling it would be to make her some
little offering! something slight and comparatively valueless that it
would not hurt her pride to accept, but that yet would be worth thanking
him for. He feels sure that Peggy has not received many presents in her
life. He hears her--his sweetheart--thanking him for that ungiven,
never-to-be-given fairing; and at the same moment his eye, falling
accidentally upon Betty's last letter lying on the table before him,
recalls to his mind that it is not Margaret whom it is now a question of
endowing with a Christmas gift. His yawn is exchanged for a sigh. Poor