Doctor Cupid: A Novel
of greater significance, of such significance in his own eyes that he
trembles almost as much as the bell-rocked tower in making it.
'At the moment I first caught sight of you, and before that, I was
thinking of you.'
'Were you?'
'I suppose that there are few things in the world more unlikely than
that _you_ were thinking of _me_?'
She hesitates a second. He sees by a sort of distress in her sweet,
candid eyes, that she would like to be able to tell him that she had
been thinking of him. But she evidently had not, and is too honest to be
able to feign that she had.
'I was not thinking of you at that moment,' she answers reluctantly; 'I
was too much out of breath with my climb,' she adds, with a rather
embarrassed laugh, 'to be thinking of anything.'
'Oh, Peggy,' cries Prue, breaking in upon them, in realisation of
Talbot's fear, 'he has thrown his cap over too! Is not it foolish of
him? Is not he sure to catch cold? And I do not see how he is ever to
get it again.'
'As to that, dear,' replies Freddy philosophically, gracefully winding
his gown about his neck and over his head, 'I am not at all anxious, as
it was not mine.' So saying, he again draws away his little sweetheart,
or she him, and the other pair are a second time alone. But for how
long?
'Are they--are they--_all right_?' inquires John, recalling what strides
to intimacy he had formerly made by the agency of Prue's love affairs.
'I think so,' she answers doubtfully; 'it is hard to say; pretty right.'
'_She_ looks as if it were all right.'
'Yes, does not she?' returns Peggy eagerly. 'Is not she improved? Is not
she wonderfully prettier than when last you saw her?'
Talbot hesitates a second. He knows, of course, that Prue has a face;
but whether it is a pretty or an ugly one, a bettered or a worsened one
since last he looked upon it, he knows no more than if it had never been
presented to his vision.
'Whether you see it or not,' says Peggy, a little piqued at his
unreadiness to acquiesce, 'it is so; everybody sees it.'
'But she always was pretty, was not she?' asks he eagerly, trying to
retrieve his blunder. 'Could she be prettier than she always was? and
happiness is mostly becoming.'
He looks wistfully at her face as he speaks, as if he would not mind
trying the effect of that recipe upon his own beauty--so wistfully that
she turns away with a sort of confusion; and, resting her hand on the
battlement that is still swaying almost like a ship on a sea under the
bells' loud joyaunce, looks down. The sun has risen higher. Opposite him
his pale sister is swooning away in the west. Before his proud step the
spring green grows vivider. The smoke from the morning fires new lit,
curls, beautiful as a mist, above the ennobled dwelling-houses,
swallowing what is vulgar from sight, as unworthy of the new King's
eyes.
The two young people stand tranced for a moment or two side by side
without speaking; then Peggy says in a low voice, and with an apparently
complete irrelevance to anything that had gone before:
'The lavender-bush is dead.'
'_Dead?_'
'And the mowing-machine is broken,' adds she, beginning to laugh, though
a little tremulously. 'Jacob says it has never been the same since you
meddled with it.'
'Jacob and I were always rivals. Then he is not dead too?'
'No.'
'Nor the fox?'
'No.'
'Nor Mink?'
'No.'
'Nor the parrot?'
'No.'
How delightful it seems to him to be standing there in the dawning,
asking her after them all! He would like to inquire by name after every
one of the eleven finches in the big cage. The crowd has very much
thinned. There has been for a quarter of an hour a continual
disappearance down the ladder of successive anxious human heads.
'Oh, Peggy!' cries Prue, again running up; 'are you ready? We are going
down; which way shall you go--backwards or forwards? He says forwards;
but I think I had rather go backwards, because I shall not see what is
coming. Which way shall you?'
'I shall go forwards,' replies Peggy, with a sort of start. 'I had
always rather see the worst coming, whatever it is.'
As she speaks she turns, with what he recognises as a good-bye look, to
Talbot. Is it over already, then? Is this to be all? Can it be his fancy
that there has come upon her face a sort of reflection of the blankness
of his own--that her eyes, lifted in farewell to his, ask his eyes back
again, as his are asking hers, 'Is this to be all?' What! let her slip
now that God has sent her to his arms on this strange high place in this
blessed vernal morning? The thought fills him with a sort of rage that,
in its turn, lends him a boldness he had never before known with her.
'Are you going to say "Good-bye" to me?' he asks, with a kind of scorn.
'Then you may save yourself the trouble; for I have not the remotest
intention of saying "Good-bye" to you.'
Prue has fled away again to the stairhead, and from it her little voice
now sounds in peremptory imploring:
'Peggy! Peggy! come quick! I want you to go down first. I shall not be
frightened if you will go down first. I want you to show me which way
you mean to go--backwards or forwards. Peggy! Peggy!'
And Peggy, obedient to the tones which, whether querulous or coaxing,
have constituted her law for seventeen years, turns to obey. She will
slip from him after all! The thought frenzies him. Before he knows what
he is doing he has laid his hand in determined detention on her wrist.
'You shall not go!' he says, with an authority which has come to him in
his extremity he does not know whence. 'She does not need you a
thousandth part as much as I do. Has not she her Ducane? She is greedy!
Must she have everything? Let her call!'
Peggy's course is arrested. She stands quite still, with her blue eyes,
bluer than he has ever seen them, looking straight at him, in a sort of
waking trance.
'But--she--wants me!' she falters.
'And do not I want you?' asks he, unconsciously emphasising his pressure
on her wrist. 'Dare you look me in the face, and tell me that I do not
want you? You are a truthful woman--too truthful by half, I thought, the
first time I met you. Look me in the eyes if you dare, and tell me that
you believe I do not want you.'
She does what he tells her--at least half of it. She looks him
penetratingly full in the eyes. If the least grain of falsity lurk in
either of his, that clear and solemn gaze of hers must seek it out.
'If you do want me,' she says slowly, and with a trembling lip, 'it has
come lately to you.'
'Lately!' echoes he, his voice growing lower as the tide of his passion
sweeps higher. 'What do you call lately? I wanted you the first moment I
saw you; was not that soon enough? How much sooner would you have had
it? The first moment I saw you--do you recollect it? when you were so
angry at being sent in to dinner with me that you would not be commonly
civil to me; that you turned your back upon me, and insulted me as well
as you knew how--I wanted you then. I have wanted you ever since--every
hour of every day and every night; and I want you--God knows whether I
want you--now!'
Prue's callings have ceased; the small laughters, exclamations, appeals,
have died into silence. Her and Freddy's pretty heads have both
disappeared. Talbot and Peggy are left the last upon the tower-top. Her
lip trembles.
'You did not want me last autumn, and you have not seen me since.'
'No, worse luck!' cries he passionately; 'but you need not throw that in
my teeth. You might pity me for it, I think. Eight whole months gone,
Peggy--wasted, lost out of our short lives! But how dare you stand there
and say that I have not wanted you, do not want you, autumn, winter,
summer, spring? You are confusing, perhaps, between yourself and me.
_You_ do not want _me_, that is likely enough. You could not even
pretend to have been giving me one poor thought when I asked you. You
would have been glad--I saw by your face that your kind heart would have
been glad--if you could have told me, with any semblance of truth, that
you had been thinking of me; but you had not. I was _miles_ away from
you.'
Her lip is trembling again, and her chest heaving. She has not had many
love-tales told her; not many more perhaps, or of much better quality,
than those with which Lady Betty had spitefully credited her. She has
let her eyes fall, because she feels them to be filling up with foolish
drops; but now lifts them again, and they look with their old
directness, though each has a tear in it, into his.
'Why did you go away?'
_Why did he go away?_ That is a question to which, in one sense, the
answer is easy enough. 'Because Lady Betty Harborough sent him.' In
another--the only one, unfortunately, in which he can employ it--it is
absolutely unanswerable.
'Why did you go away?' She has asked the question, and, with her eyes on
his, awaits the answer.
And he? He but now so fluent, with such a stream of eager words to pour
straight and hot from his heart into hers, he stands dumb before her.
She does not repeat the question; but she does what is far worse, she
moves away to the stairhead and disappears, as all the other votaries of
the ceremony, as Freddy and Prue have disappeared, down the ladder.
He follows her, baffled and miserable, gnashing his teeth. Is it
possible that the gyves he had thought to have cast off for ever are
here, manacling him again as soon as he tries to make one free step? Is
the old love to throttle him now with the same strangling clasp, dead,
that it had done living? Before God, no! Not if he can hinder it. She
has not waited for him at the tower-foot; but he overtakes her before
she has reached the High Street, and without asking her leave.
The crowd on the bridge has dispersed. The city clocks, with their
variously-toned voices, are striking six; to their daily toil the
workmen, with tools on back, are swinging along. To them there is
certainly nothing unfamiliar, probably nothing lovely, in the morning's
marvellous clean novelty, that novelty renewed each dawning, as if God
had said not once only but day by day, 'Lo, I make all things new!'
'You asked me a question just now,' says Talbot abruptly.
'Yes.'
'And I did not answer it; I could not. I cannot answer it now. As long
as you and I shall live, I can never answer it!'
He stops, pale and panting, and looks at her with a passionate anxiety.
O God! Is Betty's shadow to come between them still? Betty renouncing
and renounced; Betty gone, swept away, vanished. Is she still to thrust
herself between him and his new heaven? Still to be his bane, his evil
demon? Still to lay waste that life, five of whose prime years she has
already burnt and withered? If it be so, then verily and indeed his sin
has found him out.
In passionate anxiety he looks at his companion; but she is holding her
head low, and he cannot get a good view of her face.
'Why do you walk so fast?' he asks irritably, his eyes taking in the
rapidly diminishing space that lies before him. 'Is not the distance
short enough in all conscience without your lessening it? Walk slower.'
She slackens her pace; but still she does not speak.
'You asked me why I went away?' he continues almost in a whisper, and
with his heart beating like a steam-ram. 'Does that mean that it made
any difference to you? May I make it mean that it did? Stay--do not
speak--I will not let it mean anything else. If you say that it did not,
I will not believe you. I cannot afford to believe you!'
He has forbidden her to speak, and yet now he pauses, hanging in a
suspense that is almost ungovernable--for they have passed Queen's
classic front, are passing 'All Souls'--upon her slow-coming words.
There is a little stir upon her face; a tiny hovering smile.