Doctor Cupid: A Novel
more to say!--nothing that need--need detain you here any longer. I must
go back to him; he may be asking for me!--asking for me, and I not
there! But you understand--you are sure that you understand? I have
often sent you away before in joke, but I am not joking now' (poor soul!
that, at least, is a needless assertion); 'I am in real earnest this
time! I am not sending you away to-day only to send for you back again
to-morrow; it is real earnest this time; it is for ever!--do you
understand? _For ever_! say it after me, that I may be sure that you are
making no mistake--_for ever_.'
And he, looking down into the agony of her sunk eyes, not permitted even
to touch in farewell her clammy hand, echoes under his breath, '_For
ever!_'
CHAPTER XXII
'Das Herz wuchs ihm so sehnsuchtsvoll
Wie bei der Lichsten Gruss.'
_For ever!_ All through the wintry day they hammer at his ears--those
two small words that take up such a little space on a page, and yet
cover eternity. There is nothing that does not say them to him. The
hansom horse's four hoofs beat them out upon the iron-bound road; the
locomotive snorts them at him; the dry winter wind sings them in his
ears; Piccadilly's roar, and the tick of the clock on the chimney-piece
of the room where he works in Downing Street, equally take their shape
to him. _For ever!_ They must always be solemn words, even though in the
slackness of our loose vocabulary they are often fitted to periods no
longer than ten minutes, than an hour, than six months. But one never
quite forgets that they can stretch to the dimensions of the great sea
that washes Time's little shores. _For ever!_ At each point of his
return journey there recurs to him the memory of some unkind thought
that he had had of her on his way down. Here he had accused her of some
paltry motive in sending for him! There he had protested against the
dominion of her whims. Here again, he had groaned under the thought of
having, within five days, to pass a second time this way in order to
spend his compulsory Christmas with her.
Well, that Christmas is no longer compulsory--no longer possible even.
He has his will. He may keep for himself that present which he had so
grudged the trouble of choosing for her. _For ever!_ Those two words are
the doors that shut away into the irredeemable past that portion of his
life in which she has shared. Only five years after all! He need not
have grudged her only five years.
An intense and cutting remorse for the bitterness of his late thoughts
of her; for his impatience of her fond yoke; for his weariness of her
company, and passionate eagerness to escape from her, travels every step
of the way with him as he goes. Well, he may be pleased now. He has his
wish. He has escaped from her. But has he escaped? Can that be called
escape, not for one moment of that day, or any succeeding days, to get
the bottomless wretchedness of those poor eyes, the pathos of those sunk
and ghastly cheeks, and of that damp ruffled hair from before his own
vision; never for one instant of the whole noisy day to have his ears
free from the sound of that thin, harsh mother-voice, asking him whether
her boy will live? Between him and the paper on which he writes that
face comes. It rises between him and the speakers in the House. It
closes his eyes at night. It figures with added distortion in his
dreams. It comes with the dull dawn to wake him. He spends his Christmas
alone with it in London. To do so seems to him, in his remorse, some
slight expiation of the unlovingness of his late past thoughts towards
her. He would deem it a crime to join any happy Christmas party while
she is kneeling with that face beside her dying child. Since he cannot
go to her, he will go nowhere.
Once indeed--nay, to tell truth, twice, thrice, the thought has recurred
to him of Freddy Ducane's affectionate invitation to the Manor, and that
there is now nothing--no pre-engagement to hinder him from accepting it.
But each time he dismisses the idea, as if it had been a suggestion of
Satan. Scarcely less ruthlessly does he put to flight a face that, as
the days go by, will come stealing in front of the other; a face
that--albeit modest--is pertinacious too; since, despite his routings,
it comes back and back again. And meanwhile he hears no news from
Harborough. To telegraph inquiries would seem to him a contravention of
her will--hers, who has so passionately decided that their paths are
henceforth to diverge. But he anxiously and daily searches the obituary
for that name he dreads to find; looks anxiously, too, about the streets
and round his clubs in search of some common acquaintance--some country
neighbour--to whom he may apply with probability of success for tidings
of the child. But for some days he looks in vain. London has emptied
itself for the Christmas holidays, and it appears to him as if he were
the only one of his acquaintance left in it. That the boy is still
fighting for his life is proved by the fact of his name not having been
entered in the list of deaths. Still fighting! He still panting, and she
still kneeling beside him! It makes Talbot draw his own breath gaspingly
to think of it.
As the days go on, his anxiety to get news--any news, whether it may be
bad or good--of how that drama being played out on the narrow stage of a
little bed, and the one act of which that he has seen haunts him with
such a persistency of torment, grows more urgent and intense. London has
filled again. The Christmas holiday week is over, and humanity's
innumerable beasts of burden have returned to their yokes. The frost
still continues, and the clubs are nearly as crowded as in June; crowded
with every one whom he does not wish to see; empty of any one that he
seeks. Hitherto, as long as he has had no desire for their company--has
avoided it rather, from the associations it has had with his own
entanglement--he has met acquaintances made at Harborough, people living
in the neighbourhood of Harborough, friends of the Harboroughs, at every
turn. They have claimed his acquaintance; have insisted on greeting
him; on forcing upon him pieces of local information which have no
manner of interest for him. Now, however, that they might do him a
substantial service; now that they might, nay, _must_, give him the
tidings he is craving for, all such persons appear to have been swept
from the face of the earth. Look as he may, in club, and street, and
private house, he can find none.
One Sunday afternoon, a cold and ugly Sunday, he is walking down St.
James's Street, turning over in his mind how best to obtain some
certainty as to that subject, his miserable uncertainty upon which is
desolating his life, when in one of the numberless passing hansoms his
eye suddenly alights upon a surely very well-known profile. If it is not
the profile of Betty's husband, he is deceived by the most extraordinary
accidental likeness that ever beguiled human sight. Harborough is in
London, then? What does that mean? Does it mean that the boy is better?
or does it mean that it is all over? A spasm of pain contracts his
heart. Poor little chap! Perhaps his father's presence here only means
that he is already hidden away in the grave, and that there is nothing
left for father-love, or mother-love either, to do for him.
Talbot's eye has eagerly singled out the hansom, and followed it.
Happily for him, it stops at not a hundred yards' distance from him, at
the St. James's Club, and a figure--indubitably Mr. Harborough's--jumps
out. Talbot hastens after him. It is a club to which he himself belongs,
and he enters it not a minute after the object of his pursuit. Some
irrational fear that that object may even yet evade him--that he may be
even yet balked of that news for which he seems to have been months,
years, thirstily waiting, lends wings to his feet. He is so close upon
his friend's heels that the latter has not had time to get beyond the
hall. One lightning-glance tells Talbot that he looks much as usual;
that there is no crape on his hat; and that his insignificant face is
as innocent of any expression beyond its ordinary banal good humour as
he has ever seen it. Then the child is not dead! That little jolly face
that has been so often pressed against his own is not companioned with
the dust. Thank God for that! But his one minute's look, though
unspeakably reassuring, has not yet so entirely banished his fears that
he can delay for one instant putting the question which has been for ten
weary days on his lips, unable to be asked.
'The boy? How is the boy?'
Mr. Harborough starts.
'Hullo! it is you, is it? delighted to see you!' shaking his hand with
the same prolonged and mistaken warmth under which Talbot has so often
writhed.
He does not writhe now. He repeats his eager question:
'How is the boy?'
'Oh! you have heard of our trouble about him?' returns Harborough
cheerfully. 'Well, to tell truth, the young beggar did give us a fright!
but he is as right as a trivet again now, or at least he is on the high
road to be so; but he had a near shave of it, poor little man! not one
of us thought he would pull through. Andrew Clark himself did not. We
all of us--his mother, I, everybody--thought he was going to give us the
slip; but not a bit of it. I never saw such a boy! There he is, shouting
and kicking up such a row, they can scarcely keep him in bed; and
eat--he would eat an old shoe--he would eat you or me if we gave him the
chance.'
He ends with a jovial, if not very wise, laugh; but Talbot does not echo
it, though Heaven knows that he is glad enough at heart for any
expression of mirth.
'You must run down and see him,' pursues the other hospitably; 'it is a
long time since you have paid us a visit. Come now, fix a day; there is
no time like the present.' 'You forget,' replies Talbot, with an
embarrassment which, however, is not perceived by his interlocutor,
'that I am not one of those lucky fellows like you whose time is their
own. I cannot take a holiday whenever I choose; you must remember that
mine is just over.'
'Stuff and nonsense!' rejoins Betty's husband, with rough good humour.
'Do not tell me that they keep you as tight as that! I know better! I
will take no excuses; only two days ago Betty was saying to me what an
age it was since we had seen anything of you.'
Before he can hinder it, Talbot's jaw drops. Betty had said so? _Betty?_
Has sorrow then robbed her of her wits?
'By the bye,' continues Harborough, correcting himself, and happily
ignorant of the effect produced by his last words, 'it was the other way
up; it was I who said so to her. But it is all the same thing; she will
be delighted to see you. She will never forgive me if I let you escape
us this time; and the boy, you positively must come and help us to keep
that boy in order. I never saw such a boy!' (beginning again to
chuckle).
It is not without very considerable difficulty, not without some
sacrifice of truth, some vague promises, that Talbot at length succeeds
in making his escape without having tied himself down to any special day
for making his appearance at that house from whose doors the wife has
warned him off with as great an eagerness as--it cannot be greater
than--the husband now shows to force him into them. As long as he is in
Harborough's company, the necessity for baffling his friend's stupid
urgencies, the awkwardness of rebutting civilities so well meant,
prevent him from realising the full intensity of his relief. But when he
has reached his own rooms, when he is alone, then indeed he knows the
weight of the burden that has rolled from his shoulders. The boy is
_not_ dead; riotously alive rather. Thank God--thank God for that! And
she is no longer kneeling beside him, no longer out of breath for