Doctor Cupid: A Novel
'A stranger!' repeats Talbot, in a rather dashed voice.
'Never mind; you will not be a stranger long,' returns Peggy, laughing.
'She will soon grow used to you; and so' (again with that flitting
blush)--'and so shall I. You must tell me all about yourself,' she goes
on, a few moments later, when, in order to escape from the aggressive
din that Jacob is making with the mowing-machine, as if to assert his
exclusive right to that engine, they have passed beyond the garden
bounds into the green sea of the adjoining park. 'You must begin at the
very beginning; you must tell me _all_.'
Is it his fancy that she lays a slight but perceptible emphasis on that
concluding word, which insists on the entirety of his confession?
Whether it be so, or that the stress exists only in his own imagination,
he winces. They have sat down under a horse-chestnut tree, whose
hundreds of blossom-pyramids point like altar tapers to the fleckless
sky; at their feet the bracken, so tardy to come, so in haste to go, is
beginning to spring and straighten its creases. Far as the eye can
reach, the park's green dips and rises are flushed with the rose and
cream of flowering thorn-bushes.
'Will you?' with a soft persistency.
'Of course I will,' replies Talbot; 'only,' with a laugh that does not
ring quite naturally, 'you do not know what you are bringing upon
yourself. Well, where am I to begin? At the very beginning?'
'At the very beginning,' repeats she, with a sigh of satisfaction,
settling herself more comfortably with her back against the tree-trunk
to listen. 'Tell me where you were born, and,' laughing, 'what sort of a
baby you were.'
And so he begins at the very beginning; and for a while goes on glibly
enough.
There are worse occupations for a summer's morning than to sit on juicy
May grass, with the woman you love beside you; and to read in the
variations of her rapt blue eyes her divine compassion for you. For the
you, the innocent distant you of six, who had the whooping-cough so
badly; her elate pride in the scarcely less distant you of sixteen,
carrying home your school-prizes to your mother; her tearful sympathy
with the nearer you--the you who still ache at the memory of the loss
you sustained when full manhood had given you your utmost capacity for
feeling it. Up to the date of his sister's death he goes on swimmingly;
but with that date there coincides, or almost coincides, another. It was
during the physical collapse that followed that crushing blow that
Betty, with her basket of red roses, had first come tripping into his
life. He stops abruptly.
'Well?' she says expectantly, looking towards him, and wiping the
sympathetic tears from her soft eyes.
'Well!' he repeats, with an uneasy laugh. 'Have not I dosed you with
myself enough for one morning? I--I think that is about all.'
'But that was more than five--nearly six years ago,' objects she.
'Nearly six years ago,' he echoes, in a tone of almost astonishment; 'so
it was. But--but, as I need not tell you, the importance of time is not
measured by its length; there are moments that bring an empire, and
there are years that bring nothing, or less than nothing.'
'They cannot have brought _nothing_,' replies she, her luminous eyes, in
whose pupils he can see himself mirrored in little, still interrogating
his; 'they must have brought _something_, good or bad; they must have
brought something.'
'You know that there has been no change of Ministry since then,' he goes
on, speaking rather fast, and wincing under the steadiness of her look.
'I have been ----'s secretary ever since--a mere machine, a scribbling
machine; and you know that machines have no history.'
She is silent, and her eyes leave his face, as if it were useless any
longer to explore it. She presses him no further. It would be both
ungenerous and bootless to urge him to a confession which he would never
make, and in the effort to evade which he would writhe, as he is doing
now. Her breast heaves in a long slow sigh. There is nothing for it. She
must submit to the fact of the existence for ever, for as long as her
own and his being last, of that five years' abyss between them; an abyss
which, though she may skirt it round, or lightly overskim it, will none
the less ever, _ever_ be there.
There is one subject that, in their moments of closest confidence, must
ever be tabooed to them; one tract of time across which, indeed, they
may stretch their hands, but which their feet can never together tread;
one five years out of the life of him who should be wholly hers, locked
away from her to all eternity. Her hand has fallen absently to fondling
Minky's poor little gray head, no bigger than a rabbit's. Minky, who has
followed them to their love-retreat, and has now come simperingly to
offer them his little cut-and-dried remarks upon the fine day.
Talbot's eye jealously follows that long hand in its stroking movement.
He would like to take it, and lay its palm across his hot lips. Why
should not he? It is his. But that five years' gulf prevents him. A
little milky blossom with its tiny stain of red, wind-loosened, has
floated down from the horse-chestnut tree, and now rests upon her hair.
He would like to brush it off with a kiss. Why should not he? Whose but
his is now all that blonde hair? But again the gulf stretches between
them.
The sun, steadily soaring zenithwards, sends a warm dart through their
tree, which, thick-roofed as it is, is not proof against the vigour of
his May strength. The deer gather for shade under the young-leaved oaks.
The whole earth simmers in the vivifying heat, and yet they both lightly
shiver. Upon Talbot there lies a horrible fancy, as of Betty sitting
between them. It seems to him as though, if he stretched out his arm to
enfold his new love, it would instead enwrap his old one. Is there no
spell by which he can exorcise this persistent vision? Will it always be
between them? He is still putting this bitter question to himself, when
Peggy speaks:
'Well,' she says, stifling the end of a sigh, and without any trace of
resentment in her tone, 'I am very much obliged to you for having told
me all that you have. I know that you are not fond of talking of
yourself, and if--if'--the carnation mounting even to her
forehead--'there is anything in your life that you had rather not tell
me, why we--we will let it alone; we--we will not think of it any more.'
Perhaps her words may contain the spell he has been praying for; since,
in a moment, the Betty phantom has vanished, and his new sweetheart
lies, live and real, in his arms.
'At all events,' she whispers, 'I can contradict Prue, next time that
she says you are such a perfect stranger.'
She smiles as she speaks. How lovely her smile is, when he sees it as
close as he is doing now! It is not perhaps quite so radiant as the one
with which she met him at the gate--but her eyes! He lets himself
drown--drown in those heavenly blue lakes. Why should he ever come to
the surface again?
'There they are, Franky!' cries a piercing little voice, cutting the
summer air from a few hundred yards' distance, 'under that
horse-chestnut tree; how close together they are sitting!'
Another minute has brought the owner of the voice, and of another voice
more lisping and less shrill, up to their eagerly sought, if not quite
so eagerly seeking, friends.
'You are not sitting so close together as you were,' chirps Franky
innocently. 'Mammy used----'
'What do you want? What have you come for?' asks Talbot, in a voice a
good deal rougher than his little _proteges_ are apt to hear from him,
and breaking into the middle of a sentence, whose close he can only
horrifiedly conjecture, before more than its two initial words have had
time to leave its small speaker's lips.
At the extreme and unusual want of welcome in his tone, both children
stand for a moment silenced. Then Lily, with an offended hoist of her
shoulders, turns pointedly to Margaret.
'Nanny says that my tongue is white,' cries she; 'she is always telling
me so. I came to ask you; I thought that you would not mind telling me,'
with an insinuating air, 'if it really is.'
'And is not mine white too?' inquires Franky eagerly, and in a minute
both red tongues are protruded for inspection; and Talbot bursts,
against his will, into a vexed laugh.
It is not always, indeed, to have their tongues looked at; but during
the ensuing days of his courtship Talbot finds that he must hold himself
in continual readiness against onslaughts in unexpected directions from
Miss and Master Harborough, who, finding the little Red House more
amusing than the empty Manor, and being troubled with no doubts as to
their acceptableness, arrive from every point of the compass at each
likeliest and unlikeliest hour of the summer day. The only thing for
which he has to be thankful is that their arrival is generally heralded
by their eager treble voices; so that he has just time to step down out
of his seventh heaven before they are upon him. Perhaps if it were not
for this, and for one or two other slight abatements from its complete
felicity, the tuliped garden, with its lilac breath, its come pansies,
and its coming pinks, would be too like that one when the first he and
she felt the heavenly surprise of their new kisses.
For the children's intrusions are not quite the only cloud in Talbot's
Whitsun sky. It is oftener than once or twice that the phantom of the
past has seated itself between them. It is oftener than once or twice
that he has found Peggy looking at him in a pained astonishment, at his
having suddenly broken off in the middle of some fond phrase. She cannot
know, and he can never tell her, that it is because there has suddenly
flashed upon him the recollection, vivid as reality, of some occasion on
which he had showered the same words of fire upon her who has had
precedence over Peggy in his heart. He would fain cut all such words out
of his vocabulary; employ in this new worship nothing that had been
desecrated by having been offered on the altars of the old. But it is
impossible. He had poured out all his heart's best before the first
love. How then can he have anything fresh for the second? The thought
cuts him like a knife; but none the less, all the more rather--since it
is our knife-thoughts that cling most pertinaciously to us--does it come
back and back again. In return for all the wealth of her fresh
firstfruits, he has nothing to give her but what is stale, threadbare,
sullied. This is a reflection that would sit easily upon most men. If it
were not so, there would be but few unembittered love-makings. But upon
Talbot's palate it is wormwood. And lest there should be any chance of
his escaping from his past, there is always some innocent reminiscence,
allusion, or appeal on the part of Lily or Franky to bring it back to
him.
Prue, too! On the blue of his heaven, Prue forms another little cloud.
Prue makes no pretence of pleasure in the prospect of his brotherhood;
and to Prue he is sacrificed oftener than he thinks just. It is, thanks
to Prue, that he has so often been sent back prematurely to his
pot-house; that he has had prematurely to break off his trance of wonder
at the eyes, the only blackness under which springs from some slight and
fugitive fatigue; at the cheek, which his doubting finger may rub as
hard as it chooses without any other result than that of intensifying
its damask; at the hair, from which he has been allowed once to withdraw
the pins in order to convince himself by ocular demonstration that
though it may come _down_, it can never come _off_.
'I think you had better go now. She has been alone all day,' is a
formula whose recurrence he has now learnt to dread.
He shrugs his shoulders.