Doctor Cupid: A Novel
'I have been alone for thirty-two years.'
'I think if you would not mind going now----'
'I should mind extremely.'
She laughs softly, the happy low laugh of the consciously well-beloved,
rich in the prospect of a whole lifetime of love ahead.
'Whether you mind it or not, I am afraid you _must_ go. She had been
crying this morning.'
'More shame for her. What has she to cry about? Now if _I_ were to
cry--Peggy, you like her much better than you do me' (taking her half
angrily in his arms). 'Pah!' with a change of tone, perceiving, for the
first time, a gardenia pinned upon the breast of her gown; 'why do you
wear that horrid thing?'
'Franky gave it me. He begged it from the gardener at the Manor for me.'
'Throw it away!' cries Talbot, with more energy than the occasion seems
to warrant. 'I detest the smell. It is like a fungus.'
'It will hurt his feelings if I do.'
'It will hurt mine if you do not,' returns Talbot with emphasis; and
suiting the action to the word, he snatches the blossom almost violently
from her breast, and tosses it away.
She looks at him, her eyes tinged with a faint surprise.
'What a thing it is to have rival admirers!' she says, laughing; and
then she sends him reluctantly away.
If it were a scheme of the most deep-laid coquetry, instead of the
result of a lifetime's habit of self-sacrifice, she could not have hit
upon a better method of inflaming his passion. All through the long
light evening, whose yellow at this sweetest season is so late in
changing to night's blue, he prowls about outside her garden-fence,
peering between her lilac-clusters and laburnum-droops for a glint of
her white gown; shaking his fist at Prue's selfish little head, and
counting, through the fevered night, the strokes of the leisurely church
clock as they carry him nearer and nearer to the dewy morning hour, when
he may again hold his red rose of Lancaster in his hungry arms.
And meanwhile his short holiday is racing away. Scarcely has it seemed
to have begun when the end is already at hand. The date of the
reassembling of Parliament, of his chief's return to Downing Street, and
his own consequent reappearance there, looms nearer and nearer.
To return to Downing Street without her! He has been without her all his
life, and until the last six months has never looked upon himself as
particularly an object of commiseration on that score; but _now_ his
whole soul swells with a disgusted self-pity at the idea of his lonely
return to his Bury Street lodgings.
He has extracted from Peggy without much difficulty a promise that his
last evening shall be indeed and wholly his; that for once it shall be
Prue, not he, that goes to the wall; that he shall neither be dismissed
to his public-house, nor left to disconsolate moonings about the
inhospitable roads and fields, until it is time to betake himself to his
truckle-bed; that, on the contrary, he may for once have his fill of her
fair company, that should by rights be always his; may sit, and saunter,
and sweetly stray with her; and at length, when the stars ride high, may
leisurely bid 'God bless her!' at the garden gate, and dismiss her to
dream of him.
But lovers propose, and freakish chance disposes.
Talbot has returned to his inn to dress for dinner, and has jumped into
his dress-clothes, in miserly grudging of the moments stolen from his
final hours. He had left Peggy with eager injunctions to be equally
quick, so that a few more moments may be squeezed out before Sarah, with
her clamorous dinner-bell, breaks, with life's loud prose, into the
whispered poetry of their _tete-a-tete_. And apparently she has been
obedient to his behest, for she is--though he would have thought it
impossible--beforehand with him, and stands awaiting him, with arms
resting on the top of the gate.
But how is this? She has made no change in her dress, but is still in
her morning cotton.
As he draws near to her she stretches out her hand to him deprecatingly.
'I hope you will not be very angry!'
A slight chill of apprehension passes over him.
'But I am sure that I shall,' he answers, with a hasty instinct to ward
off the impending blow. 'What is it? What do you mean? Not,' with an
accent of incredulous indignation, 'Prue again?'
'It is not her fault,' replies Peggy apologetically, and yet defensively
too; 'nobody _enjoys_ being ill. But you know how finely strung she is;
something must have upset her.'
'Something is always upsetting her!' returns Talbot brutally.
'I am afraid she must have taken a chill,' pursues Peggy, wrinkling up
her forehead into anxious lines. 'I am sure I do not know how, but I
think she must; she has had to go to bed.'
The young man's brow clears. If Prue's illness involves only her absence
from the dinner-table, he will not very violently quarrel with it after
all.
'Very wise of her,' he says in a lighter voice; 'the best place for her!
Poor Prue!'
'But----,' begins Peggy, whose brow has not smoothed itself in sympathy
with her lover.
'But what?' inquires he sharply, his apprehensions returning. 'You are
not going to tell me that on my last evening I am to be sacrificed to a
_malade imaginaire_!'
'She is not a _malade imaginaire_,' answers Margaret half indignantly;
'her cheeks are as hot as fire, and her pulse has run up to ninety.'
'I believe she runs it up on purpose. Are you barring the gate for fear
I should force my way in?'
'Oh, no, no!' cries she, hastily dropping her arms from their
resting-place on the top rail, and flinging her portals hospitably wide.
'Come in! come in! how could you dream of such a thing? Do you suppose
that I am going to send you away without your dinner? But after
dinner----'
'After dinner?'
'When she is ill, she likes me to sit beside her, bathing her forehead
and her hands. I have always done it, ever since she was a baby. When
you are ill, I will bathe your forehead and your hands. Oh!' clasping
her fingers soft and fast upon his arm, and looking up with brimful eyes
into his angry face, 'do not look so cross at me! Do not you think that
it is hard enough for me without that?'
CHAPTER XXVIII
The dinner is over--the first _tete-a-tete_ dinner that John and Peggy
have ever shared. To dine _tete-a-tete_ with her in her own still house,
amid her old and homely surroundings, with the summer evening tossing
them in its lavish perfumes through the wide-opened windows, would have
seemed to him, a month ago, the realisation of his fairest and most
hopeless dream. But in their translation into the bald language of
reality--the jejune prose of fact--our dreams have a way of losing their
finer essence. It has escaped, without our being able to tell whither or
by what channel. Over both a sort of wet blanket has fallen. Try as he
may, Talbot's temper cannot recover from the poignant disappointment of
his lost last evening; and try as she may--broken in, as she is, by a
lifetime's habit of self-sacrifice--Peggy cannot hinder the lump from
rising in her throat, and the tears from crowding into her eyes, at the
reflection that her own hand has cut off, and flung away, the blossoms
of these final crowning hours. How many things she had saved to say to
him on this last evening--things too tender for her shamefacedness to
utter, save under the justification of an imminent severance--things
that he would have liked to have heard all through these days, but that
she had laid up in the storehouse of her heart as too close and sacred
for aught but to sweeten their parting! How can she say them now across
a dinner-table, with Sarah coming out and in, Prue sending peevish
messages to her, a score of trivial interruptions forbidding any but
the most banal talk? It was only with her head on her love's breast, in
the dusk of the starshine, that she could ever have found courage to
utter them. When will they be uttered now? The present, the brave solid
present, is our own, to caress or misuse; but who dares say to the
future, that formless form wrapped in uncertain gray, 'Thou art mine'?
And now the dinner is over, and they have separated, with spurious
coldness. Peggy has vanished upstairs to her sister, and Talbot is left
to employ the hours of his last evening as he best may. It is true that
Margaret has eagerly begged him to take possession of house and garden,
and has held out tearful hopes of snatching here and there a moment from
Prue's sick exactions to give him. But his ireful restlessness will not
allow him to accept this concession. It would be worse to be within
apparent reach of her, yet just beyond her eye and touch, than to be
quite outside her domain. He tells her so, half harshly; and opening the
gate into the park, takes himself and his ill-temper to the oaks and the
deer for consolation.
At first he walks along over the dew-freshened sward, under the isolated
oak giants, or between the more gregarious beeches and limes of spinny
and copse, without seeing them. He has no eyes, save those angry inward
ones that are turned upon his own disappointment. His last evening!--his
last evening! If it had been any but the last! Henceforth, in
retrospect, this holiday of his will take all its colour from this
bitter last evening. It is the end that stamps anything as bad or good.
Oh, cruel Peggy! He has had so few really good hours in his life; and
now she has ruthlessly robbed him of his best. And for what?
With the answer which he is compelled to give himself to this question
comes his first dawn of consolation. Certainly to no personal
gratification has she sacrificed him. He can hardly, in his most
aggrieved moments, picture her as better amused than himself as she
stoops--with the tears called up by his ill-tempered words scarcely
dried upon her cheek--over her equally ill-tempered invalid, bathing her
forehead, holding her jealous hands.
Poor Peggy! He will go back at once, and beg her pardon. But no. The
consciousness of his being hanging wrathfully about will only further
complicate her difficulties. He will take a lesson out of her book, and
efface himself wholly for this one evening, even though it is the last.
The last in one sense, but in another----?
He has sat down on a felled trunk, stripped of its branches, but not yet
removed by the wood-cutter's cart. The hawthorn comes in _acre_ whiffs
to him. His heart, though he is alone for the whole evening--though he
will probably have to go back to his alehouse without one more glimpse
of her damask-textured face, gives a great bound. The last? For him and
her there will be no last evening until--for God, who has given him so
much, will surely give him, too, the supreme boon to die first--until,
bending over him as she now bends over Prue, her voice and her hands
smooth his passage to the easy grave.
The revulsion of feeling from his earlier ill-humour, produced by this
thought, brings the moisture to his eyes. What is this parting in
comparison with that six-months-ago one--when he had taken leave of her
with no rational hope of ever having his eyes enriched by her
again--when he had been afraid to trust his tongue to any speech, lest
it should drift into tendernesses he had believed for ever prohibited to
it? That parting in the walled garden! Why should not he go thither now,
so that, surrounded by the mute witnesses of his former despair, he may
the better gauge the extent of his new felicity? The idea, once
conceived, approves itself so instantly to his imagination that he
starts up; and, exchanging his former purposeless saunter for a quick
walk, sets off in the direction of the Manor gardens.
The evening is falling, in late May's best serenity, weighted with the
innocent sweetness of country odours. The deer--their mottled sides