Doctor Cupid: A Novel
'I was sorry that you went without your lavender!'
'I am coming back for it,' he cries passionately, the joy-tide sweeping
up over his heart to his lips, and almost drowning his words. 'Coming
back for it--for it and for all else that I left behind me!'
The smile spreads, red and wavering.
'You left nothing else; I sent all your books after you.'
'Yes,' he says reproachfully, 'you were very conscientious. It would
have been kinder to be a little dishonest. You might have kept back the
one that we had been reading out of. I had a faint hope that you might
have kept it back.'
'I did think of it,' she answers, under her breath.
'The mark is in it still!' he cries joyfully. 'Shall we take it up again
where we left off? Where shall we sit? Under the Judas-tree?'
Her flickering smile dies into gravity.
'You are getting on very fast,' she says tremulously. 'Are you sure that
it is not too fast?'
They have passed St. Mary's; noble porch and soaring spire lie behind
them.
'Is it worth while your coming,' she continues, with evident difficulty,
and with a quiver she cannot master in her low voice, 'when at any
moment you may be obliged to go away again?'
'Why should I be obliged to go away again?'
Her voice has sunk to a key that is almost inaudible.
'I am only judging of the future by the past.'
He groans. The past! Is he never to escape from the past? never to hear
the last of it? Is it always to dog him to his dying day?
'Are you sure?' she pursues, lifting--though, as he sees, with untold
pain--the searching honesty of her eyes to his, while a fierce red spot
burns on each of her cheeks, 'that you are not promising more than you
can perform when you talk of coming? Are you sure that--you--are
free--to come? You know--you were--not free to stay.'
His face has caught a reflection of the crimson dyeing hers, but his
look shows no sign of blenching.
'I _am_ free,' he answers slowly and emphatically. 'Why do you look as
if you did not believe me? Cannot you trust me?'
At his words a shadow passes over her face. Is not Freddy Ducane always
inviting her to trust him? She has grown to hate the phrase.
'I am not good at trusting people,' she says plaintively, with a slight
shiver. 'I do not like it.'
They have reached the door of the Mitre.
'Over already!' cries Talbot, in a voice of passionate revolt and
discontent; 'my own good hour gone before I had well laid hold of it?
Who could believe it? Then at least,' speaking very rapidly, 'say
something to me--something else--something better! Whether you trust me
or not--God knows why you should not--do not let me go away with that
for----'
'Peggy dear,' interrupts a soft and rather melancholy voice from an
upper window above the door--and yet not very much higher than they, so
low and unpretending is the old and famous inn in comparison with its
staring towering competitors--'we would not for worlds begin breakfast
without you; but I am afraid that Prue is growing rather faint.'
CHAPTER XXV
Whitsun is here. Again the tired workers are let loose. Again the great
cities pour out their grimy multitudes over the fair green country, upon
which, year by year, day by day almost, their sooty feet further and
further encroach. Among the multitudes there are, of course, a good many
who are not grimy. Cabinet ministers are, as a rule, not grimy--nor
fashionable beauties--nor famous lawyers; but yet they all volley out,
too, with the rest, to drink the country air, and smell the cowslips.
All over the country the churches are being pranked for Whit-Sunday. It
is that festival for which there is least need for devout souls to strip
their hothouses and conservatories. In each parish the meadows need only
be asked to give a few never-missed armfuls out of their perfumed
plenty, and the church is a bower. The brunt of the labour of decorating
her church, as of most other parish festivities, falls upon the
shoulders--happily vigorous ones--of Peggy Lambton. The Whitsuns,
Easters, Christmases, on which Mrs. Evans is not hovering on the verge
of a new baby or two, and consequently handicapped for standing poised
on ladders, are so few as not to be worth taking into consideration.
Prue is willing; but her flesh is weak, and she tires easily. With the
aid, therefore--an interchangeable term, as she sometimes thinks, for
hindrance--of half a dozen of the best among the young Evanses, Peggy
endures the toil, and reaps the glory alone. She has been standing most
of the day, and for the greater part of the time with her arms
uplifted, so that she is sufficiently weary; but as the work is not yet
done, and there is no one to take her place, she treats her own fatigue
with the contempt it deserves.
It is tolerably late in the afternoon, and Mrs. Evans has just looked
in. Being in her normal condition, she has at once sunk down upon a
seat. Mr. Evans has sauntered in after her. He has not much that is
beautiful in his life; and the sight of the garlanded church gives him a
sort of pale pleasure, something akin to that produced by the luscious
flow of his favourite poem. He could not stir a finger to produce the
effect himself; but he likes it when it is done for him.
'What a size these gardenias are!' says Mrs. Evans, fingering the
blossoms in a box of hothouse flowers reserved for the altar. 'From the
Hartleys of course? They are double as big as milady's. I wonder how her
gardener likes having all the prizes carried off from under his nose!
Dear me! what a thing money is! Burton, the butcher, told me the other
day that five and twenty prime joints go into that house every week,
beside soup-meat and poultry; and of course they have their own game and
rabbits. Five and twenty prime joints, and a yacht that they can go
round the world in! Not, I am sure, that I envy them _that_; for I am
such a wretched sailor.'
Peggy makes no answer. Perhaps her attention is sufficiently occupied by
the management of her long garland of cowslips, catchfly, and harebell;
perhaps she has already heard, though not from Mrs. Evans, more about
that world-girdling yacht than she cares to hear. She sighs, and her
sigh is taken up and echoed in a deeper key by the Vicar; though whether
his sigh is caused by regret at the sinful profuseness of a parishioner,
or by a reflection upon the inequality of human destiny, that sends five
and twenty prime joints into one man's kitchen, and sets a solitary leg
of mutton spinning on another man's spit, may be best decided by those
most acquainted with Mr. Evans's habitual turn of thought.
'It is a great disadvantage to a neighbourhood having a millionnaire in
it,' pursues Mrs. Evans, going on contentedly with her trickle of talk;
'it sends up the price of everything--even eggs. I was saying so just
now to Mrs. Bates at the Roupell Arms. I wanted to know whether she
could let me have a dozen fresh ones. My hens are all sitting; and you
would not believe the number of eggs we get through at the
Vicarage--egg-puddings, and so on. Oh, by the bye,' with a change to an
alerter key, 'from what she told me, I suppose that Lady Betty
Harborough is expected at the Manor.'
The garland, whose dexterous disposition has cost Peggy ten minutes'
labour, drops suddenly loose and wavering--a long rope of flowers--in
the air.
'Lady Betty Harborough!' she repeats slowly--'with milady away?--most
unlikely. Oh, now I see!' with a sudden dawn of relief breaking over her
face; 'now I understand how the report has arisen! The children are to
arrive to-day, and so it was supposed that she must be coming with
them--of course, of course!'
'No; it has nothing to say to the children,' rejoins the Vicar's wife
cheerfully; 'and I cannot say that I have heard in so many words that
she is coming. It was only' (looking cautiously down the aisle, and
lowering her voice)--'I suppose one ought not to talk scandal in a
church, but it really is such an open secret--that I concluded it must
be so, because a friend of hers is expected.'
'A friend of hers!' repeats Peggy slowly, the blood rushing to her cheek
and brow, as she stands poised in space, with the unfinished wreath
still dangling forgotten before her.
'Rather more than a friend, I am afraid,' returns Mrs. Evans, with a
significance by no means devoid of enjoyment. 'Dear me! I do not half
like talking of it here; but, after all, the truth is the truth. To the
Roupell Arms of all places, too! and there can be no mistake about it,
for I have just seen his portmanteau with "John Talbot, Esq.," in large
letters upon it; his man arrived in charge of it this afternoon, and he
is to follow by a later train. It really is too barefaced, is not it? I
could see that Mrs. Bates herself thought so though of course I did not
breathe a word to her.'
Peggy has put out a hand to steady herself on the ladder, since, for a
moment, church and heaped flower-baskets, guelder roses and lilac
branches, whirl round with her. His portmanteau come, and he coming! It
would be a pity then if to-day, of all days, she were to break her neck.
It is nearly three weeks since she had parted from him at the door of
the Mitre, in the middle of a sentence which Freddy Ducane never gave
him the chance to finish, or her to answer; and since then she has heard
neither tale nor tidings of him. Why should she? Of course his octopus
has him again. Poor fellow! no doubt from those hundred straggling
polypus arms it is harder than she, with her life ignorance, can
estimate to tear himself free. And yet he had said he was free; said
so--yes. But men's words and their actions are not apt to tally very
nicely; at least, the words and the actions of the only man with whom
she has any intimacy are not. 'They are all alike,' she has said to
herself, and so has gone heavily--a little more heavily perhaps for that
bootless, barren morning meeting on the tower-top--about her daily work.
And now he is here--as good as here, at least--for does not his herald
portmanteau make sure his approach?
'I wonder how he will like his quarters,' continues Mrs. Evans, with a
rather malicious laugh. 'The beds are clean, I will say that for Mrs.
Bates; but how a man accustomed to a French _chef_ will enjoy her chops
and rashers, is another question. She is very nervous about it herself,
good woman!'
Peggy laughs; a little low laugh.
'Of course Lady Betty will make a pretence of coming to see her
children,' pursues Mrs. Evans, warming with her theme; 'and indeed,
after the escape that boy had, I cannot think how she can ever bear him
out of her sight. And as milady and Freddy are both away, they will have
the park all to themselves to philander in. It really is too barefaced.'
'Too barefaced, is it?' repeats Peggy, softly smiling, and staring at a
great sheaf of sweet nancies that she has absently picked up.
'_Is it?_' echoes Mrs. Evans in astonishment; 'why, _is not it_? What
other motive could bring him to such a dull village as this?'
'What indeed?' replies Peggy with emphasis, while the thought crosses
her mind that she ought to feel mortified at its evidently never having
come within the range of the Vicaress's possibilities that any one could
visit a dull village in search of her. 'It cannot surprise her more than
it does me,' she says to herself.
'One can only hope that he will be too uncomfortable to stay long,' says
Mrs. Evans, slowly rising, and preparing to depart. 'Well, I wish I
could help you' (this is a formula that recurs as often as do the
festivals of the Church); 'but you are getting on capitally. Do you
think that the font is quite as pretty as it was last year? I am so glad
I sent the children to help you; do not overtire yourself.'
She strolls away, with the contented feeling of having done her part in