Doctor Cupid: A Novel
'Do you mean to say,' he inquires, almost with incredulity, 'that you
have never given back one small grain of love to any one of the many men
who must have showered it upon you?'
'But they have not,' returns she, a slight humorous smile pushing its
way through her blushes. 'You are determined that I have had so many
lovers, and I have had scarcely any. Two or three people have wanted to
marry me--not many. Oh, not at all many! You could count them on one
hand, with several fingers to spare; and I do not think that they loved
me. They did not give me that impression. They thought I should be a
useful wife, strong and active; but love--love--love,' repeating the
word dreamily--'no,' shaking her head. 'There are not many women of
twenty-three who can say so, I suppose; and I see that you have a
difficulty in believing me; but love has never come near me.'
'And are you resolved that it never shall?' he asks, under his breath.
She pauses a moment before answering, while her eyes escape from the
tyranny of his, and fix themselves on a row of tulips, rearing their
striped and colour-splashed cups upon their strong, straight stalks, in
the border before her. With the potent light smiting through them, they
look as if they were cut out of some hard precious stone--sardonyx, or
beryl, or bdellium--goblets to be filled with fairy wine at the feast of
some mage-king.
'I do not know,' she says, with her lips trembling; 'I am not sure. When
I see Prue--when I know that it has brought all the pain she has
suffered--and she has suffered a good deal--more than you would think,
to look at her, that she could bear--into her life--my one prayer is to
keep clear of it; and yet--and yet'--with a yearning in her voice--'one
would not like to die having quite missed it. Oh, tell me'--with a
change in her tone to one of compelling entreaty, bringing back the eyes
but now so sedulously averted from him, and plunging them into his under
the shade of the hawthorn bough--'were you really speaking truth when
you said you had come down from London only to see me? Are you quite
sure--quite--that that was your real motive?'
'Quite.'
'Nobody would believe it,' she says, with a sort of wonder in her voice;
'nobody thinks so. They all'--faltering a little--'they all think
something quite different.'
'What does it matter what they think?' he cries hotly, the colour which
unluckily is equally the livery of brazen guilt and oppressed innocence
again mantling his face. 'What have we to do with their blatant
suppositions? Are you going to let _them_ come between us?'
'You will think me very suspicious,' she says tremulously--'very hard to
be convinced of what most women would find it easy enough to
believe--but--but--I care for very few people,' she goes on, beginning a
fresh sentence without finishing the former one; 'but when I do care, I
care very badly. Do not be angry with me if I say that I have a sort of
dread of caring very badly about you.' If he had had his will, the
conclusion of that sentence would have found her in his arms; but she
holds herself gently aloof. 'If I once let myself love you,' she says,
the tears stealing afresh into her eyes, 'I know that I could never
unlove you again--never while I lived, try as I might; and if afterwards
I found out----'
'Found out what?' breathlessly.
'You know,' she goes on, trying to speak firmly--'I am sure you must
know--that when first I saw you, I had heard nothing but what was bad of
you. That was my only excuse for the way in which I behaved to you. I
had heard things about you--no; do not be afraid,' a writhing motion on
his part conveying to her what her words are making him suffer. 'I am
not going to ask you whether they were true. I have no business with
your past; but what I _must_ ask you--what I shall never have any peace
until I _have_ asked you,' her agitation deepening--'is whether if
people said them now they would still be true?'
There is a moment's stillness before he answers--a moment long enough
for the hawthorn's perfume to be for ever after wedded in her memory to
that pregnant pause. It is almost in a whisper that she has put her
question, and it is quite in a whisper that his answer comes:
'If they would be true, should I be here now, Peggy?'
She heaves a deep, long sigh, as one off whose heart a great stone's
weight had rolled; and the over-brimming drops roll soft and hot over
her cheeks.
'And will they never be true again?' she asks, still under her breath;
'are you sure--quite sure of it? I will believe you if you tell me so.
Oh, I _want_ to believe you! Dog with a bad name as you are,' breaking
into an unsteady laugh--'angry as I was at being sent in to dinner with
you--I _want_ to believe you.'
The south wind brings a jangle of far church bells to their ears;
outside their arbour a starling sits on a tree with its nose in the air,
saying odd, short, harsh things; and upon this homely music the souls of
Talbot and Peggy on Whit-Sunday float together into love's heaven.
CHAPTER XXVII
'We'll lose ourselves in Venus' Groves of Mirtle,
When every little bird shall be a Cupid,
And sing of Love and Youth; each wind that blows
And curls the velvet leaves shall breathe Delights,
The wanton springs shall call us to their Banks,
And on the perfum'd Flowers we'll feast our Senses;
Yet we'll walk by, untainted of their Pleasures,
And, as they were pure Temples, we'll talk in them.'
The shadows have put on their evening length. Even Minky, as he stands
with his little face pushed through the bars of his gate, barking at the
servants as they return from church--a mere civility on his part, an
asking them, as it were, how they enjoyed the sermon--boasts one that
would not disgrace a greyhound or a giraffe.
'Are you there, Prue?' softly asks a voice, coming out of the darkening
green world outside; coming with an atmosphere of freshness, of dew, of
hawthorn, into the little hall, and peering toward the fireside-settle,
which, both from the waning light and its own position, hints but dimly
that it has an occupant. 'Are you asleep?'
'I do not know,' replies a disconsolate small treble. 'I tried to go to
sleep, to get over some of the time. Oh dear, what a long Sunday it has
been! Is he gone?' struggling up into a sitting posture out of her
enveloping shawls.
'Yes.'
'And you did not sit under our tree?'
'No.'
'How laconic you are!' cries Prue fretfully; 'and I have not exchanged
words with a creature since luncheon. Do come here; turn your face to
the light. What have you and Mr. Talbot been talking of for the last
four hours? John Talbot, as those horrid children call him. I think it
is so impertinent of them; but I suppose their mother taught them.'
A slight contraction passes over the radiant, dewy face, so docilely
turned towards the western shining.
'Peggy!' cries the younger girl in an altered tone, forgetting her
invalidhood, and springing off the settle; 'how odd you look! You do not
mean to say--is it possible? You do not suppose that I do not see--that
you can hide anything from me!'
'There is nothing that I want to hide,' replies Peggy with dignity,
though the blood careers under the pure skin to cheek, and brow, and
lily throat; then, with a sudden change of tone to utmost tender
deprecation, 'Oh, Prue, you do not mind? You are not vexed? It will not
make any difference to you!'
Prue is silent.
'It will make no difference to you,' repeats Peggy, rather faltering at
the total dumbness in which her tidings are received. 'Of course you
will go on living with me just as you have always done.'
For all answer, Prue bursts into a passion of tears.
'Oh, do not say so!' she cries vehemently. 'You talk as if I never were
going to have a home of my own! Oh, it would be too cruel, too cruel!'
Her sobs arrest her utterance. She has collapsed upon the settle, and
sits there a disconsolate heap, with its hands over its face. Peggy
stands beside her; a sudden coldness slackening the pulsations of her
leaping heart.
'You will not care any longer about him and me,' pursues Prue
weepingly. 'You will have your own affairs to think of. Oh, I never
thought that I should have to give up _you_. It was the last thing that
ever would have entered my head. Whatever happened, I always counted
upon having _you_ to fall back upon!'
The dusk is deepening. Peggy still stands motionless and rigid.
'I know that I am not taking it well,' pursues Prue a minute later,
dropping the fingers wetted with her trickling tears, and wiping her
eyes; while her breath still comes unevenly, interrupted by sobs. 'I
know that I ought to pretend to be glad; but it is so sudden, such a
surprise--he is such a stranger!'
The cold hand at Peggy's heart seems to intensify its chill. Is there
not some truth in her sister's words? Is not he indeed a stranger? Has
not she been too hasty in snatching at the great boon of love that has
been suddenly held out to her--she, whose life has not hitherto been
furnished with over-much of love's sweetness?
'I know that you must think me very selfish,' continues the younger
girl, still with that running commentary of sobs. 'I _am_ selfish,
though he says that I am not--that he never knew any one who had such an
instinct of self-abnegation; but then he always sees the best side of
people. Yes, I _am_ selfish; but I will try to be glad by and by--only,'
with a redoublement of weeping, 'do not expect it of me to-night.'
And, with this not excessive measure of congratulation, poor Peggy has
to be content, on the night of her betrothal. She goes to bed with the
cold hand still at her heart; but in the morning it has gone. Who can
have a cold hand still at her heart when she wakes at early morning at
lilac-tide, to find a little round wren, with tiny tail set on perfectly
upright, singing to her from a swaying bough outside her casement, with
a voice big enough for an ostrich, and to know that a lover is only
waiting for the sun to be well above the meadows to lift the latch of
her garden-gate.
Before the dew is off the grass they have met. It is presumable that
familiarity with her new position will come in time to Peggy; but for
the present she cannot get over the extraordinariness of being--instead
of anxiously watching for some one else's tardy lover--going to meet her
own. And when they have met and greeted, the incredulity, instead of
lessening, deepens. Is it conceivable that it can be _her_ whom any one
is so extravagantly glad to see? All through the day--all through
several after-days--the misty feeling lingers that there must be some
mistake; that it must be some one else; that it cannot be the workaday
Peggy, whom she has always known, who is being thus unbelievably set on
high and done obeisance to.
'Have you told Prue?' asks Talbot, when he has enough got over the
ecstasy of that new morning meeting, to speak connectedly.
'Yes.'
'And what did she say?'
Margaret hesitates a moment.
'She--she was very much upset.'
'Upset!' repeats Talbot, his tone evidencing the revulsion of feeling of
one who had imagined that all Creation must be rejoicing with him. 'What
was there in it to upset her?'
'She said it was such a surprise; she was not at all prepared for it. In
that,' blushing, 'she was like me.'
He is silent. It is a mere speck in his heaven; but he would have liked
Prue to have been glad too.
'She said that you are such a stranger,' continues Peggy, looking
half-shyly up at him, with a sort of light veil of trouble over her
limpid eyes. 'When I come to think of it, so you are; if it were not,'
laughing a little, 'that I am always hearing the children call you by
it, I should not even know what your Christian name was.'