Doctor Cupid: A Novel
Betty! He undoubtedly does not grudge her her present; but how very much
it would simplify matters if she could be induced to choose it for
herself. So reflecting he takes his hat, and repairing to the great
jewellers', turns over Hunt and Roskell's newest trinkets in dubious
half-hearted efforts at selection.
Betty is not altogether of the mind of those present-receivers who hold
that the cost of the gift is as nothing; the giver's intention
everything. Betty likes both; she likes something rather valuable, but
that yet has a sentiment attached to it--something that tells of love,
and thought, and love's cunning.
To Talbot, a year, still more two years ago, nothing had seemed easier
than this combination. To-day, more than two hours elapse before he can
cudgel out of his dull heart and fagged brain something that may, if not
too closely scanned, bear the semblance of a fond invention. Christmas
is now but a week off; but a week, as eager schoolboys, and pale clerks,
and worn seamstresses tell themselves. Perhaps it may be because she
knows that they will soon meet, that Betty's daily letter to Talbot has
now for two whole days been intermitted. It is a lapse that has never
before occurred, so far as he can recall, in the whole five years of
their connection; her billets appearing as regularly as the milkman. Is
it possible that she may have conceived some occult offence against him?
That he may have unwittingly committed some mysterious sin against
love's code? This thought darts across his mind, presenting itself first
as a hope, and then as a dread. When it comes as a hope, it suggests
that in the case of her having taken umbrage at any of his doings, or
non-doings, she may show her resentment by excluding him from her
Christmas gaieties; but this idea does not live beyond a moment. It is
not much sooner conceived than it is transmogrified into a fear.
If they have quarrelled they will have to make it up again. Perhaps even
his laboriously chosen love-gift will not be held a sufficient
peacemaker. Perhaps he will have to expend himself in those expletives
and asseverations that used once to come so trippingly, nay burningly,
from his tongue, but that now have to be driven by main force from his
lips, slow and cold and clogged.
A third morning has dawned. Again no letter. It is certainly very
strange.
Talbot walks to Downing Street, pondering gravely what can be the cause
of this unprecedented silence. Can it be that she is ill? She must be
ill indeed not to write to him! A flash of distorted remorse--distorted,
since it is for being unable better to return the tenderness of another
man's wife--crosses his mind at the thought of her great love for him.
No, if she had been ill, too ill to write, Harborough would certainly
have sent him word of it, since no one is ever half so anxious to give
him tidings of Betty, to further their meetings and impede their
partings, as Betty's worthy, blockhead husband. It is most unlikely
that the post, which indeed strangely seldom misbehaves itself, should
have erred three times running.
He has reached Downing Street before any solution of the problem has
occurred to him. In the course of the day he goes very nigh to
forgetting it in the absorption of his work. That work is, on this
particular day, specially pressing--specially monopolising. From morning
to night he has not a moment that he can call his own. He does not even
return home to dress for dinner, but snatches a hasty mouthful of food
at the House of Commons, whither he has to accompany his chief, who is
to speak on a subject at that moment engaging both House and nation's
most passionate attention. The House is thronged to hear the great man.
He is for three hours on his legs; and his speech is followed by a hot
debate, adorned by the usual accompaniments of senseless obstruction,
indecent clamour, and Irish Billingsgate.
It is half-past two in the morning before Talbot finds himself turning
the key in his Bury Street door. The whole household has apparently gone
to bed; but in his sitting-room the fire has been made up. A touch of
the poker upon the coals makes them leap into a blaze, and he sits down
in an arm-chair to finish his cigar, and cast an eye over the notes and
telegrams that have come for him during his absence. Of the former there
are several; of the latter only one. He looks at the addresses of the
letters first, to see whether any one of them may be in Lady Betty's
handwriting; but such not being the case, he lays them down, and tears
open the telegram. He does it without any special excitement. In all our
lives telegrams are daily, in his they are half-hourly, occurrences. But
not such telegrams as this one. He has been too lazy to light his
candles; and now reads it by the firelight that frolics redly over the
thin pink paper and the clerkly writing:
'_From_ | '_To_
|
LADY BETTY HARBOROUGH, | JOHN TALBOT,
Harborough Castle, | Bury Street,
----shire. | St. James's,
London, W.
'Come at once, and without a moment's delay, on receipt of this.'
When the contents of a missive that we receive, or of a speech addressed
to us, diverge very widely from anything that we have been at all
expecting, it is some time before the meaning of the words, however
simple, succeeds in reaching our brain. Such is Talbot's case. He reads
the telegram three times before he fully grasps its signification; and
it is quite two minutes before it occurs to him to look at its date.
'Sent out at 11.10 A.M. Received at 11.35.' It has been lying waiting
for him for fourteen hours and more. He reads it a fourth time. 'Come at
once, and without a moment's delay, on receipt of this.' What does
it--what can it mean? To obey it now, in the sense in which it meant to
be obeyed, is as impossible as to 'call back yesterday out of the
treasures of God.' It is true that he can set off, without a moment's
delay, on the receipt of it. But as that receipt has been delayed
fourteen hours longer than its sender calculated upon, his obedience
will be a virtual disobedience. Why has she sent for him? In any case
she would have seen him in five days. What can she have to say to him of
such surpassing urgency as cannot brook that short delay? His eye rests
doubtfully on the vague yet pressing words. In the mouth and from the
hand of any one save Betty, they would certainly imply some grave
crisis--some imminent or already fallen catastrophe. In Betty's they
_may_ mean nothing. More than once before, during the past five years,
has she telegraphed for him with the same indefinite peremptoriness; and
when--always at great personal inconvenience, once gravely offending his
chief, and seriously imperilling his future prospects--he has made
shift to obey her summonses, he has discovered that it had been prompted
merely by some foolish whim. Once the broken-haired terrier, which he
had given her, had had a fit; once Mr. Harborough had spoken sharply to
her before the servants; once she had felt so low that she could not get
through the day without seeing him. These recollections combine together
to form his resolution.
He lays down the paper. He will not go. Accident has made him
disobedient; intention shall make him further so. Had she known at what
an hour her message would reach him, even she could not have expected
compliance with it.
So thinking, his cigar being by this time finished, he rises, and
lighting his bedroom candle, turns to go to bed. Only, just as he is
leaving the room, some impulse prompts him to read the telegram yet a
fifth time. The words have certainly not changed since he last glanced
at them; and yet they seem to him to have a more compelling look. Why
can't he force them to be more explicit? He pauses; telegram in one hand
and candle in the other. What can she want with him? It is just within
the bounds of possibility that she may really need his presence; how or
why, he is unable to hazard the faintest conjecture. But it is just
within the limits of the possible that she may. Various suggestions of
what shape that possible may take flit across his puzzled brain. Can it
be that her husband has at length made the discovery of what for five
years has been the open secret of all his acquaintance? In that case, as
he, Talbot, has long known--known at first with leaping pulses, latterly
with the cold sweat of an unspeakable dread, she would not have waited
for him to come to her--she would have fled to him. It cannot, then, be
that. Various other conjectures suggest themselves, but are dismissed as
impracticable; but though they are dismissed, the fact remains that the
woman to whom he once swore--_once_, nay, millions of times swore a love
eternal, unalterable, exclusive--has sent him an imperative summons to
her side; and he is preparing entirely to neglect it.
He sets down the candlestick, and takes up an 'A B C' lying on the
table, as if officiously close at hand. He will just look to see if
there is a train that would take him to her. If there is not, that will
settle the matter. He turns to the name of the small station at which
travellers to Harborough get out. Of course not. Nothing stops at that
little wayside place before eleven o'clock. By that time he will be
installed in Downing Street for the day, with his chief's correspondence
before him.
He heaves a sigh of relief; and once more turns bedward. But before he
has reached the door another thought has arrested him. Though there is
no train which could take him to the little station close to her gate,
yet there may easily be one which would carry him to Oxford, only five
miles away from her.
Again he picks up the 'A B C,' and runs his finger and his eye down the
page from the Paddington that heads it. Paddington 5.30; arrives at
Oxford 7.40. Yes, there is one. It is, for the last ten miles of its
course, a slow crawler; but, if up to its time, reaches Oxford at 7.40.
A good hansom would convey him to Harborough in half an hour. He would
have twenty minutes in which to learn her will; a second half-hour's
drive would take him back to Oxford, to catch the nine o'clock up-train,
which would land him in London in time for his day's work. It is
possible, then--quite possible. The question is, shall he embrace that
bare possibility? Shall he pick out the one chance for, out of the
ninety-nine against, there being any real meaning in her message, to
build upon it this fool's errand. At all events, he has plenty of time
in which to think it over. It is only three o'clock. There are two good
hours before he need set off.
He sits down again in his arm-chair, replenishes the fire, and lights
another cigar. A year ago he would have gone without hesitation. Two
years ago he would have stood on his head with joy at having the chance
of going; but _this_ year---- Well, it is true that it is no longer the
voice of the passionately loved woman calling to him--a voice before
whose sound obstacles vanish, space shrivels, time contracts; but it may
be the voice of a fellow-creature in distress. _A fellow-creature in
distress!_ He laughs to himself at the flat pomposity of the phrase.
What kind of distress the fellow-creature's can be--a fellow-creature so
lapped in cotton-wool, so apparently beyond the reach of most of life's
ennuis--he is absolutely at a loss to conjecture! He spends two hours,
and smokes three cigars in conjecturing; and at the end, being as wise
as he was at the beginning, knocks up his servant, puts on his fur coat,
arms himself with as many wraps as he can muster, jumps into a hansom,