Doctor Cupid: A Novel
and through the murkiness--black as midnight--of a hideous December
morning, has himself driven to the Paddington Departure Platform; where,
for three minutes, he stamps about, telling himself that no such fool as
he walks, has ever walked, or, as far as he knows, will ever walk upon
God's earth; and is then whirled away.
CHAPTER XXI
There are not so many passengers by the 5.30 train as to hinder its
being punctual. It is almost faithful to its minute. So far--it can't be
said to be very far--fortune favours the one of its occupants with whom
we have any concern. He rolls out, cross and furry, still repeating to
himself with an even greater intensity of inward emphasis than he had
employed at Paddington, that unflattering opinion of his own wisdom with
which he had embarked on his present venture. If it had appeared a
fool's errand when looked forward to dispassionately from the warmth and
ease of his own fireside, what does it appear now? Now that, having
picked out the most promising-looking of the few sleepy hansoms awaiting
unlikely passengers, and bidden the mufflered purple-nosed driver take
him as fast as his horse can lay legs to the ground to Harborough
Castle, he finds himself spinning through the Oxford suburbs out into
the flat country beyond--ugly as original ugliness, further augmented by
a December dawning and a black and iron frost, can make it. At each mile
that carries him nearer and nearer his goal, his own unreason looms ever
immenser and yet immenser before him. By such a gigantic folly as this
even Betty herself may be satisfied. At every echoing step the horse
takes on the frozen ground it seems to him less and less likely that
Betty has had any real reason for sending for him, any reason that may
at all account for or palliate his appearance at this unheard-of hour.
Even Betty herself has asked no such insanity of him as this. She had
reckoned upon her telegram reaching him at mid-day, and upon his
arriving in obedience to it sometime in the afternoon, an hour at which
any one may arrive at a friend's house without provoking special
comment. But now? At the spanking pace at which, in accordance with his
own directions, he is getting over the ground, he will reach the Castle
by eight o'clock, just as the housemaids are beginning to open the
shutters and clean the grates. When the door is unbarred to him by an
astonished footman struggling into his coat, whom shall he ask for? What
shall he say? Lady Betty? Impossible! At eight o'clock in the morning!
Mr. Harborough? Neither is he, any more than his wife, an early riser;
and if, in answer to his, Talbot's, astounding summons, he should drag
himself from his couch, and come in sleepy _deshabille_ to meet him,
what has he, Talbot, to say to him? What does he want with him? How can
he explain his own appearance? Had he better ask for no one, then?--say
nothing, but just slip in, trusting to the thoroughness of the
Harborough servants' acquaintance with his appearance to save him from
any inconvenient questions? Shall he wait in some cold sitting-room in
process of dusting, with its chairs standing on their heads, and the
early besom making play on its carpet until his half-hour is up, and he
can return whence he came, having at least done what he was bidden to
do? He laughs derisively at himself. And meanwhile _how_ cold he is! He
has been up all night, in itself a chilly thing; a hansom is by no means
a warm vehicle, at least to one to whom any nipping air is preferable to
having the glass let chokily down within a half-inch of his nose. The
dawn is being blown in by a small wind--small, but full of
knife-blades--and the griding frost that holds all earth and water in
the rigidity of death's ugly sleep, has pierced into his very bones. In
his life he has seldom taken a colder drive, and yet he dreads its
being over. What shall he say to Harborough? The chance of his seeing
him is indeed remote; but remote chances do sometimes become facts. If
this becomes fact, what is he to say to him? Even through Harborough's
hippopotamus-hide there must be some arrow that will penetrate. If
anything can open the stupid eyes, so miraculously sealed through five
years, surely this insane apparition of his will do it.
They have reached the park gates. The lodge-keeper at least is up and
dressed, and runs out with alacrity. She need not have been in such a
hurry. He would have been much more obliged to her if she had crawled,
and bungled, and delayed him a little. Now he is rolling through the
park, by the dead white grass and the pinched brown bracken; under the
black arms of the famous chestnuts, beneath which he and Betty have so
often strayed; through half a dozen more gates; through a last gate, on
leaving which behind them, turf more carefully trimmed, flower-beds now
hard and empty, clumps of laurustinus and rhododendron tell of his
neighbourhood to the house, which a turn in the approach now gives to
his view. His eye flies anxiously, though with little hope, to the
front. Does it look at all awake? Are there any blinds up? It would be
ludicrous to hope that Betty's could be; Betty who is never seen a
moment before eleven o'clock, and very often not for many moments after.
He looks mechanically, though quite hopelessly, up at her windows--the
three immediately above the portico--and so looking, starts, and gives
utterance to an involuntary ejaculation. In the case of all three,
shutters are open and blinds up. What can have happened? What can so
flagrant a departure from the habits of a lifetime imply? He has reached
the door by now, and, jumping out, rings the bell. He will probably have
long to wait before it is answered, the servants, expecting no such
summons, being probably dispersed to other quarters of the house. But,
as in the case of the lodge-keeper, he is mistaken.
With scarce any delay the great folding-doors roll back; nor is there in
the faces of the couple of footmen who appear any of that blank
astonishment which he had been schooling himself to meet. There is no
surprise that he can detect upon their civil features, any more than
there would have been had he and his portmanteau walked in at five
o'clock in the afternoon.
'Of--of course no one is up yet?' he says, with an air that he, as he
feels, in vain tries to make easy and disengaged.
'Oh yes, sir; her ladyship is up! Her ladyship has been up all night.'
_Up all night!_ Then some one must be ill! Is it Harborough? Harborough
ill? Will he die? In one thought-flash these questions, with all that
for him and his future life an answer in the affirmative would imply,
dart through his mind--dart with such a sickening dread that he can
scarcely frame his next and most obvious question.
'Is any one ill, then?'
For the first time the servant looks a little surprised. If it is not on
account of the illness in the house why has Mr. Talbot presented himself
at this extraordinary hour?
'Yes, sir; Master Harborough has been very ill for two days. Sir Andrew
Clark and Dr. Ridge Jones came down yesterday to see him, and he was
hardly expected to live through the night.'
Master Harborough! Not expected to live through the night! At this news,
so entirely unlooked for--since, amongst all the possibilities whose
faces he has been scanning, that of something having happened to the
children has never once presented itself--Talbot stands stock-still,
rooted to the spot, in sad amazement. Poor little Master Harborough! In
a moment he is seeing him again as he had last seen him--seen the little
sturdy figure that, in its rosy vigour, seemed to be shaking its small
fist in defiance at age, or decay, or death. Yes; he sees him
again--sees, too, his mother, laughing at his naughtiness, bragging of
his strength, smothering him with her kisses. Poor, poor Betty! A great
rush of compassionate tenderness floods his heart towards the woman
against whom he had just been harshly shutting that heart's doors;
discrediting her truth; grudging the service she has asked of him;
crediting her even in his thoughts with the indecency of summoning him
to her husband's death-bed. Oh, poor Betty! On his heart's knees he begs
her pardon.
His agitation is so great and so overcoming that, for the moment, he can
ask no more questions, but only follows the butler, who by this time has
appeared on the scene, in silent compliance with his request to him to
come upstairs--a request accompanied by the remark that he will let her
ladyship know that he is here. Having led him to Betty's boudoir, the
servant leaves him to look round, with what heart he may, on all the
objects of that most familiar scene. How familiar they are--all her toys
and gewgaws! Many he himself has given her; some they had chosen
together; over others they had quarrelled; over others, again, they had
made up--but how well he knows them, one and all! He looks round on them
with a triple sorrow--the sorrow of his past love and present pity for
her joining hands, in melancholy triad, with his deep and abiding
self-contempt. He looks round on the countless fans--fans
everywhere--open, half-open; on the great Japanese umbrella, stuck up,
in compliance with one of the most senseless fashions ever introduced,
in the middle of the room, with Liberty silk handkerchiefs meaninglessly
draped about its stem; on the jumping frogs and mechanical mice; on the
banjo she has often thrummed to him; on the mandoline she has tried to
wheedle him into learning to play, that he may sing her Creole
love-songs to it.
He turns away from them all with a sick impatient sigh. How hideously
out of tune they and all the fooleries they recall seem with this
soul-and-body-biting December dawning--with 'Master Harborough not
expected to live through the night!'
He has never seen Betty in the grasp of a great grief. He is as much at
a loss to picture how she will bear it as he would be to fancy a
butterfly drawing a load of coals. How will she take it? How will she
look? What shall he say? How shall he comfort her? That she has had any
other motive in sending for him than the child's impulse to show the cut
finger or the barked shin to a friend never occurs to him. His poor
Betty! No selfish regret enters his mind at having been summoned through
the midwinter night helplessly to see a little child die. He can think
of nothing but how best to console her. He is very far from being ready
with any consolations that even to himself appear at all consoling, when
the door opens, and she enters.
At the sound of the turning handle he has gone to meet her, with both
hands out as if to draw her and her misery to that breast whose doors
are thrown wider to her than they have been for many months; but no
answering hands come to meet them. Some gesture of hers tells him that
she does not wish him to approach her.
'How late you are!' she says.
If he were not looking at her, and did not see with his own eyes that
the words proceeded out of her mouth, he would never have recognised her
voice. By that voice, and by her whole appearance, he is so shocked,
that for a moment he cannot answer. Even upon the face of a girl in the
first flush of youth, and whose only ornamentings come from the Hand of
God, two long nights' vigils, extravagant weeping, the careless
dishevelment of heart-rending anguish, write themselves in terrible
characters. What, then, must they do to a woman like Betty, whose whole
beauty is a carefully built-up fabric, on which no sun must look, and no
zephyr blow too inquisitively?
For the first time in his life Talbot fully realises what a built-up
fabric it is. Through his mind flashes the doubt, whether, if without
expecting to meet her, he had come across her in the street, he should