Doctor Cupid: A Novel
'To go round the world!' repeats Peggy, with a rather blank look; 'but
by that time you will have taken your degree. You will have settled down
to some steady work, will not you?--whatever work you have decided upon.
By the bye, are you any nearer a choice than you were when last I spoke
to you?'
Freddy agitates his curly head in an easy negative.
'I am afraid not the least; but, after all, there is no great hurry. I
think,' with his serious air, 'that one ought to interrogate one's own
nature very deeply before one decides on a question of such moment; and
meanwhile,' becoming gay again, 'I should like to go round the world
with the Hartleys--would not you, Peg? No?--well, I should.'
CHAPTER XXIV
It is May morning, but May morning as yet in early childhood--a radiant
infancy that but few persons comparatively are awake to see. It has not
struck five; and yet on the top of Magdalen Tower, in Oxford, Talbot is
standing. Love has not driven him crazy, as might be the inference drawn
from this fact. But those who know Oxford, know too that, as some say,
since the time of Henry VIII.--though that overshoots the mark--Magdalen
College has observed the rule of sending up her sweet-voiced choir to
the summit of Wolsey's Tower on each new May morning, to greet the sun's
uprising with a monkish hymn. And there are never wanting those who
think it worth while to leave their beds almost before night has
withdrawn, to hear those sweet singers greet the dawn with the ancient
piety of their Latin hymn; and amongst them, as chance has brought him
to Oxford, stands Talbot. He has run down to Oxford for Sunday; and
since some of his fellow-guests have willed to rise and be present at
the keeping of this unique and old-world custom, the fancy has taken him
to come too. Not since the first year of his undergraduate-ship has he
stood, as he now stands, on that stern height, looking for once at the
world as the birds look, having climbed the steep and endless corkscrew
stair. The years that have passed him since then seem to go by him in a
solemn procession--solemn as this ante-dawning hour; solemn as the worn
pinnacles above his head that have cut the blue of day, and pointed to
the planets of night, through three hundred rolling years; solemn as the
great and dying moon that is only waiting for her greater brother's
upspringing to fade away and be not.
In each interval of the ancient balustrades, and through the opening in
the pierced stone, Talbot can see far down a picture differently lovely.
Here the world-famous street, taking its way between its schools and
stately college-fronts; and with its Mary church's noble spire and the
Radcliffe's dome for crown and finish. Here again the low, scarce
swelling hills that so softly girdle the fair town, with the morning
mists, not yet sun-pierced, streaming across their dim flanks. Here the
river stealing; there the bridge, with its black cluster of men and
women, waiting to hear the Hymnus Eucharisticus float down. Here a white
snow of cherry-blossom in some garden; there, close at hand, so that he
can look down, far below, upon their rooks' nests, Magdalen's tenderly
greening trees. Infinite gradations of tender green; infinite gradations
of delicate blue dying into dreamy gray, all woven into a mantle in
which to wrap the yet sleeping city; and above it all, above Talbot, as
he stands, lifted half-way to heaven, as it seems, in the august hush of
the dawn, is the arch, severely beautiful, of a sky that seems made out
of one pale, perfect turquoise.
He has moved away from his companions. He does not want them; does not
want any companion. He leans against the parapet; and his eyes rise to
the great old pinnacles, whose time-painted gray is married in such
marvellous harmony to the cold azure into which they climb. Talbot is
thinking of Peggy. She can never be at any very great distance from his
thoughts, since there is no fair sight that does not, in one instant,
conjure her back to them. There is nothing beautiful whose beauty he
does not gauge by its worthiness to be looked at by her. To that height
of excellence he acknowledges that the spectacle he is now looking upon
attains. He would like her to see it. Where is she now? What is she
doing? Doing? Why, asleep, of course; placidly slumbering; or perhaps
not so placidly dreaming of Prue. But why is it that on this May morning
Talbot is only _thinking_ of Peggy? Why, since it is now more than four
months since he was set free to seek her, is he still seeking her only
in thought? Surely even his busy life may have spared him the necessary
moment to put his fortune
'To the touch,
To win, or lose it all.'
He had meant to have sought her at Easter. To put a lesser interval than
that which stretches from Christmas to Easter between the decent
interment of the old love and the proclamation of the new would have
seemed to him a disrespect--a disloyalty to that now dead but once so
living passion. Why, by showing such an overhaste to take upon himself
another tie than hers, should he cut to the quick her who, not so long
ago, was all earth, and all heaven too to him? But when Easter comes, it
brings with it the news, borne on the breath of common fame, of the
serious illness of that old love; and again his loyalty forbids
him--while she, who for five years made sunshine or storm in his life,
lies on what may perhaps be her death-bed--to go courting another than
she. And before the tidings of her recovery reach him his holiday has
been long over. He will have no other worth the name until Whitsun. But
to Whitsun there are now only twenty-one days. 'Only twenty-one days!'
he says to himself under his breath, still looking up at the pinnacle.
He could of course have written to her; but from that he has shrunk with
unconquerable repugnance. To put a cold proposition in cold black and
white upon cold paper? What could she do but say 'No' to it? He will ask
her by word of mouth; if possible under the Judas-tree, with Minky
lying on her gown, so that she can't rise up hastily and flee from him.
Will ask her by word of mouth, eye to eye; and with such a compelling
urgency of look and speech that she shall say 'Yes' to him--if out of
nothing else, out of sheer pity for his great and utter need of her.
'Twenty-one days and twenty-one nights!' he repeats to himself once
again.
The choristers stand surpliced, looking eastwards to where the sun is
rearing his red shoulder. The crowd on the old lead roof is thickening.
Undergraduates in cap and gown; fat Fellows, thin Fellows; young ladies,
old ladies--every moment a new head, with an expression of relief upon
its features at having come to the end of its corkscrew scramble,
appears at the head of the ladder that closes the climb. Talbot is not
paying much attention to any of them, least of all, perhaps, to his own
party, when a voice that has surely a familiar ring in it brings him
back to the present.
'You see, dear, you need not have been in such a fuss; we are in plenty
of time. The sun has waited for us, as I told you he would.'
Talbot's eyes have sprung to the speaker. Yes, of course it is Freddy
Ducane. But after all there is nothing very wonderful in that; for has
not he already known Freddy to be pursuing his studies in Oxford? But
who is it whom Freddy has addressed as 'dear'? As to that, Talbot is not
long left in doubt. Close behind young Ducane, as though afraid of being
separated from him by the press, two girls are eagerly following. There
are two in reality, but Talbot sees only one. She is not asleep after
all; not dreaming of Prue, or of any one else. She is here, wide awake,
on the top of Magdalen Tower, not three feet from him, and with her
great blue eyes plunged into his. There are some moments in looking back
upon which afterwards one wonders how it came about that they did not
kill one.
Sometimes, in the retrospect of after-days, Talbot marvels what he could
have been made of, not to have fallen dead at her feet on the top of
that giddy tower out of sheer joy. He has but just realised her
presence, when five grave strokes beat the air. The clock is telling
that it is five, the immemorial hour at which the May-Day hymn is wont
to soar heavenwards. In a moment a hush has fallen upon the buzzing
crowd. Off goes every college cap. All eyes look eastward to where the
vanquishing sun has now fairly emerged from night and mist, and sweetly
and softly upsails to heaven the ancient monkish hymn:
'Te Deum Patrem colimus,
Te laudibus prosequimur;
Qui corpus ciborificis,
Coelesti mentem gratia.'
The harmony has swelled up skywards, and again died into silence; and no
sooner has it ceased than the great bells imprisoned in the belfry below
take up the tale. Standing so immediately above them, they do not sound
like bells, rather like some loud vague booming music; and to that loud
booming music the meeting of Talbot and Margaret is set.
'Talbot!' Freddy has cried cordially, on catching sight of him; 'my dear
fellow, I am delighted to see you! Peggy, Prue, are you awake enough to
realise that this is Talbot? Who on earth would have expected to find
you up here?'
And Prue's little voice has echoed, 'Who indeed?' and Peggy has said
nothing; but the touch of her hand in his--the thirsty aching dream of
so many empty months--is a reality; and for him too the day is breaking,
not less genuinely than is the real day so superbly opening--
'Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious sun uprist.'
The first beam has struck one of the lofty pinnacles, and made laughter
and gaiety of its tercentenary gloom. Now it is laying long shadows
about mead and street--shadows of noble buildings, of cropping cows, of
commonplace yet dawn-ennobled houses, and of vernal trees. Far below on
the bridge is the pigmy crowd, with the vulgar din of its May horns,
blown thus early, in ill-survival of some Puritan custom, to drown the
notes of the Latin hymn. But here, high up above the world, is no music
but that august one of the loud bells; no sight but the arch of the
perfect sky, and the solid grandeur of God's first best gift to man--new
light.
In this stately dawning they stand together, he and she, despite the
crowd, virtually alone; for Prue has drawn away Freddy to point out to
him what is indeed startlingly obvious, the rocking of the tower under
the vibration of the bells. Several undergraduates--more indeed than
not--are taking off their college caps, and flinging them down over the
battlements. The wind blows colder with the sunrise, but they pay little
heed to its chill admonishment. With their bare young heads they stand
laughing and leaning down to watch the fate of their mortar-boards. Most
alight on the college roofs; one sticks on a pinnacle, greatly to its
owner's delight. There is a noise of young voices, exclamations, bets,
jolly laughter, on the crisp morning air. And meanwhile Talbot and
Margaret stand staring at each other, silent at first; for how from such
a torrent of words as he has to pour out before her can he choose which
to begin with?
At last, 'I--I--did not expect to meet you here,' he says stupidly.
'Nor I you.'
'Are you staying in Oxford?'
'Yes, at the Mitre. Freddy was very anxious that we should come, and so
Lady Roupell brought us.'
She answers him quietly, in a rather low voice, but she does not on her
side originate any question. Can it be that she is struggling with a
difficulty in any degree akin to his own? Urged by this dazzling
possibility; urged still more by the shortness of the time--since what
security is there that Prue may not be back upon them at any moment with
some fresh discovery about the tower or the bells?--he hazards a speech