Doctor Cupid: A Novel
have recognised her. She looks fifty years old. Her hair is in damp
disorder; at the top all rough and disturbed, where it has evidently
been desperately buried in a little counterpane. She is not now crying;
but her unnumbered past tears have partially washed the rouge off her
cheeks. A dreadful impression of the ludicrous, inextricably entangled
with his unspeakable compassion--an impression for which he tells
himself that he ought to be flayed alive--conveys itself to Talbot from
her whole appearance. But though he ought to be flayed alive for
receiving it, still it is there. And meanwhile she has spoken to him a
second time. He must say something to her; not stand staring with stupid
cruelty at her in her ruin and abasement.
'I expected you all yesterday,' she says in that same strange, dreadful
voice.
He gives a sort of gasp. Can that indeed be the voice whose pretty
treble has so often run with rippling laughter into his ears? the voice
that sang him comic songs to that very banjo--now lying in its irony
beside him--almost the last time that he heard its tones? His head is in
a grisly whirl between that Betty and this. Which is the true one? Is
this only a hideous nightmare? It seems at least to have the suffocating
force of one; a force through which it is only by the strongest
self-compulsion that he can break to answer her.
'I came as soon as I got your telegram.'
Her eyes, washed away to scarcely more than half their size, are
resting upon him; and yet it seems by her next speech as if she had
either not heard or not heeded his answer.
'You might have come quicker,' she says.
'But indeed I could not,' cries he, genuine distress lending him at last
fluent speech. 'I was at the House till two in the morning; I never
received it until I got home to Bury Street; I came by the very next
train. Oh, Betty, how could you doubt that I should?'
As he speaks an arrow of self-reproach shoots through his heart at the
thought of how near a chance the poor soul's cry for help had run of
being altogether disregarded.
'I wanted to speak to you,' she says, a spark of fever brightening the
chill wretchedness of her look. 'I have something to say to you; that
was why I sent for you.'
'Of course, of course!' he answers soothingly. 'I was delighted to
come.'
'I can't stay more than a minute,' she says restlessly. 'I must go back
to him; I have never left him for eight and forty hours. He is asleep
now--only under opiates--but an opiate sleep is better than none, is it
not?' consulting his face with a piteous appeal.
'Much--much better,' replies Talbot earnestly.
'You have heard--they have told you--how ill he is?'
A sort of hard break makes itself heard in her voice; but she masters it
impatiently.
'Yes, they have told me.'
'What have they told you?' asks she sharply. 'I daresay that they have
told you a great deal more than the truth. If they have told you that
there is no hope, they have told you wrong. They had no right to say so;
there is hope!'
'They never told me that there was not,' replies he, still more
soothingly than before; for it seems to him that no finger can be laid
too gently on that terrible mother-ache.
'It all came so suddenly,' says she, putting her hand up with a
bewildered air to her damp forehead and disordered hair. 'And yet now it
seems _centuries_ since he was running about. _How_ he ran and jumped,
did not he? There never was such an active child. And now it seems
_centuries_ that he has been lying in his little bed.'
For a moment she breaks down entirely, but fights her way on again.
'It was only a cold at first--quite a slight cold! He was not the least
ill with it, and I thought nothing of it; and then on Tuesday there came
an acrobatic company to Darnton'--the little neighbouring
market-town--'and he was so excited about them, and begged so hard to be
allowed to go and see them, that I took him; and he was so delighted
with them--he clapped and applauded more than anybody in the house; and
all the evening afterwards he was trying to do the things he had seen
them do--you know how clever he always is in imitating people--and
telling nurse about them. Nurse and I agreed that we had never seen him
in such spirits. But he did not sleep well; he was always dreaming about
them, and jumping up; and next morning he was in a high fever, and I
sent for the doctor, and he has been getting worse ever since; and
_now_----'
Again she breaks down, but again recovering herself, goes on rapidly:
'But it is not the same as if it were a grown-up person, is it? Children
have such wonderful recovering power, have not they?--down one day and
up the next. They pull through things that would kill you or me, do not
they? He _will_ pull through, won't he? You think that he _will_ pull
through?'
'I am sure that he will,' replies Talbot earnestly.
It is, of course, an answer absolutely senseless, and in the air; but
what other can he give, with those miserable eyes fastened in such
desperate asking upon his?
'Oh, if you knew what it has been,' she says, her arms falling with a
gesture of measureless tired woe to her sides as she speaks, 'to have
been kneeling by him all these two days, hearing him moan, and seeing
him try to get his breath!--he does not understand what it means; he has
never been ill before. He thinks that I can help him. O God! he thinks I
can help him, and that I don't! He turns to me for everything. You know
that he always did when he was well, did not he? He is always asking me
when the pain will go away? Asking me whether he has been naughty, and I
am angry with him? Angry with him! I _angry_ with him! O God! O God!'
Her excitement and her grief have been gaining upon her at each fresh
clause of her speech, and at the end she flings herself down on the
ground and buries her face in the cushion of a low chair, while dry,
hard sobs shake her from head to foot.
What is he to say to her? Nothing. He will not insult such a sorrow by
the futility of his wretched words. He can only stoop over her, and lay
his hand no harshlier than her mother would have done, no harshlier than
she herself would have laid hers upon her little dying boy, on her
heaving shoulder. But she shakes off his light touch, and raising her
distorted face, again tries to address him. But the rending sobs that
still convulse her make her utterance difficult; and her words, when
they come, scarcely intelligible.
'Do not touch me! leave me--leave me--alone! I--I have not yet said
what--what I had to say to you. That--that was not what I had to say to
you! I--I--must say what I--sent for you--to say.'
She pauses, gasping. It seems as if the task she had set herself was
beyond her present strength.
'Do not tell me,' he says most gently; 'if it is anything that hurts
you, do not tell me now; wait and tell me by and by.'
He has withdrawn at her bidding his hand from her shoulder, but has
knelt down in his deep pity beside her, and tried to take in his her
cold and clammy fingers. But she draws them sharply away.
'Did not I tell you to leave me alone!' she cries in a thin voice. 'Let
me--let me say what I have to say to you, and have done with it. I will
say it now! I _must_ say it now! What business have you,' turning with a
pitiful fierceness upon him, 'to try and hinder me?'
'I do not--I do not!' speaking in the tenderest tone. 'Tell it me of
course, whatever it is, if it will give you the least relief.'
'I sent for you to tell you that it is all over--all over between us,'
she says, having now mastered her sobs, and speaking with great rapidity
and distinctness; 'that is what I sent for you to tell you. I wanted you
to come at once, that I might tell you. Why did not you come at once? I
have been a very wicked woman----'
'No, dear, no! indeed you have not!' he interrupts with an accent of
excessive pain and protest.
But she goes on without heeding him:
'Or if I have not, it has been no thanks to me; it has been thanks to
you, who have saved me from myself! But whatever there has been between
us, it is over now. That is what I sent for you to tell you. _Over_! do
you understand? _Gone! done with!_ Do you understand? Why do not you say
something? Do you hear? Do you understand?'
'I hear,' he answers in a mazed voice; 'but I--I do not understand! I do
not understand why, if you want to tell me this, you should tell it me
_now_ of all times.'
'It is _now_ of all times that I want to tell you--that I must tell
you!' cries she wildly. 'Cannot you see that it is on account of _him_?
Oh, cannot you think what it has been kneeling beside him with his
little hot hand in mine! You do not know how fiery hot his hand is! Last
night his pulse was so quick that the doctor could scarcely count the
beats--it was up to 120; and while I was kneeling beside him the thought
came to me that perhaps this had happened to him on--on--account
of--_us_! that it was a judgment on me!'
She pauses for a minute, and he tries to put in some soothing
suggestion, but she goes on without heeding him.
'You may call it superstition if you please, but it came to me--oh, it
seems years ago now!--it must have been the night before last!--and as
the night went on, it kept getting worse and worse, as he got worse and
worse; and in the morning I could not bear it any longer, and I sent for
you! I thought that you would have been here in a couple of hours.'
'So I would! So I would! Heaven knows so I would, if it had been
possible!'
'And all yesterday he went on growing worse--I did not think that he
could have been worse than he was in the night, and live--but he was.
All day and all last night again he was struggling for breath!--think of
having to sit by and see a little child struggling for his breath!'
She stops, convulsed anew by that terrible dry sobbing, that is so much
more full of anguish than any tears.
'Poor little chap! poor Betty!'
'I have been listening all night for you! I could not have believed that
you would have been so long in coming; it is such a little way off! I
knew--I had a feeling that he would never get better until you had
come--until I had told you that it was all over between us; but I have
told you now, have not I? I have done all that I could! One cannot
recall the past; no one can, not even God! He cannot expect that of me;
but I have done what I could--all that is left me to do, have not I?'
There is such a growing wildness in both her eye and voice that he does
not know in what terms to answer her; and can only still kneel beside
her, in silent, pitying distress.
'I see that you think I am out of my wits!' she says, looking
distrustfully at him; 'that I must be out of my wits to talk of sending
you away--you who have been everything to me. Cannot you see that it is
because I love you that I am sending you away? if I did not love you it
would be nothing--no sacrifice!--it would be no use! But perhaps if I
give up everything--everything I have in the world except him'
(stretching out her hands, with a despairing gesture of pushing from
herself every earthly good)--'perhaps then--_then_--God will spare him
to me! perhaps He will not take him from me! It may be no good! He may
take him all the same; but there is just the chance! say that you think
it _is_ a chance!'
But he cannot say so. There are very few words that he would not try to
compel his lips to utter; but he dares not buoy her up with the hope
that she can buy back her child by a frantic compact with the Most High.
Her eyes drop despairingly from his face, not gaining the assent they
have so agonisedly asked for; and she struggles dizzily to her feet.
'That is all--I had--to--tell you!' she says fiercely. 'I have nothing