Doctor Cupid: A Novel
growing indistinct--are browsing wakefully among the bracken. The
throstles have reached their song's last verse.
He has gained the pleasure-grounds, just as the vanguard of the stars
take possession of the emptied sky. He hastens along, almost as
hurriedly as if it were to a rendezvous with the real Peggy, instead of
with the six-months-old memory of her, that he were speeding; between
the burnished laurels; past the fresh-blown splendours of the great
rhododendron-beds, on fire with red, and pale with cream and blush and
lilac; narcissus and may taking his nostrils by storm as he brushes past
them to his goal, the still walled garden.
As he nears it, a misgiving seizes him that he may perhaps find himself
locked out--that he may perhaps have to content himself with the
mutilated satisfaction of peering in at it, between the wrought iron of
its gate; and it is with a trepidating hand that, standing at last
before it, he tries the handle with fingers not very confident of
success. But for the first time to-night Fate is kind to him. The gate
yields to his touch; and pushing it, he walks in. He has not been inside
the enclosure's quiet precincts since the night of that parting, whose
bitterness he has now come, in the wantonness of his new joy, purposely
to revive. He must indeed be happy that goes, of his own accord,
courting a dead misery. He draws a long luxurious breath, as he looks
round in search of the landmarks of that past woe. They are here, but
they wear a changed aspect. Through the wrought-iron railing, indeed,
the church tower and the yews, its brothers in age and gentle gravity,
still rise in the friendly dusk; but another race of flowers has sprung
in the place of those that witnessed his despair. The ghostly white
gladioli are gone, and the autumn-faced asters. The winter winds have
dispersed the down of the traveller's joy; and the penetrating breath of
the mignonette has long ago died off the air. But in their place another
nation has arisen; a better, he says to himself, as he stands with all
spring's scented hopefulness crowded about his feet.
He walks slowly along, seeking to recover the exact spot where that
parting had taken place; seeking to recover it by the aid of the small
landmarks that bear upon it. There had been a moon, a section of a moon,
to light it. There is none now.
He is glad. She has been the accomplice of half the world's crimes. He
wishes that the outward conditions should be as altogether changed as
the inward ones. He is glad that the trees, then wrapped in the heavy
uniformity of late summer, are now showing the juicy variety of their
early leafage. He is glad that the creepers are in bud, instead of in
lavish flower; glad of the fresher quality of the light air; glad of
anything that marks the fact that that bad old night has gone, and this
good young new one come. For so changed is his mood since the time that
he set off from the Red House gate, that his evening, though spent in
solitude, does seem eminently good to him, and his heart bounds with
almost as high an elation as if she were pacing beside him in the
starlight, with her head on his shoulder, as she will do in the future,
many hundred happy times.
He has paused in his walk. It was here that she stood--just here. He
knows the exact spot, by a comparison of the distance from the long bed
of violets, which, alone unchanged of all the flowers, still stretches
beneath the south wall, and mingles its odours with that of the new-come
flowers, as it had done with the departed ones. Just here! And he
himself had stood here. She had been facing the gate, and he with his
back to it. Thus, thus. The little crafty half-moon had shone into her
eyes, as she made him her last wistful speech:
'Since you are so determined to go downhill, I suppose that I dare not
say I hope our roads will ever cross again.'
Six months ago, only six months between the moment when he had in dumb
hopelessness acquiesced in the fact that their paths must for ever
diverge, and this in which they are, for all eternity, merged in one.
His eyes have dropped to the gravel, as if seeking the print of her dear
feet, that he may stoop and kiss it. His back is, as on that former
occasion that his imagination has so potently summoned from its grave,
turned towards the gate. He is alone. There are no witnesses to make him
ridiculous. Why may not he be as foolish as he pleases? He has actually
dropped on his knees, and is stooping his lips towards the pebbles,
which may or may not be the very ones her light step pressed half a year
ago, when the sound of the click of a latch behind him makes him raise
his head and spring to his feet. Who, at this late hour of the evening,
can be turning the handle of the gate? Who but one? She has forsaken
Prue for him after all. Love's instinct has told her the path he took;
and here, on the spot where he had for ever renounced her, she has come
to him under the stars. What welcome can he give her that will be
thankful and joyful enough for such an unlooked-for grace? He turns--his
whole face alight with ecstasy--towards her, but his feet do not move to
meet her.
By a refinement of love's cunning he will await her here; and, on the
very foot of ground that witnessed their separation, he will receive her
into his arms again. She has pushed the gate now, and, like himself, she
is within the enclosure; her white gown (he has often praised her in
white, and she must have put it on since he left her) flitting like a
snow-winged dove, along the dusky walk towards him.
'What an odd place you have chosen to say your prayers in!' cries a
high-pitched voice.
'BETTY!' For, by one of Fate's juggles, it is the old and not the new
love to whom his radiant greeting is addressed. It is the old and not
the new love whom, if his arms clasp any woman under the stars to-night,
they must enfold. They do not, indeed, show much readiness to do so.
They hang as if palsy-struck at his sides, while his voice repeats in a
horrified whisper that he would fain, if he could, make one of
incredulity, '_Betty!_'
'Do not trouble yourself to repeat it a third time,' says she, with a
flighty laugh that has yet no tinge of mirth in it. 'I do not need
convincing that _I_ am _I_, nor need you.'
'_You_ here?'
'I may return the compliment--_you_ here?'
He is staring at her with wide, shocked eyes that are also full of an
astonishment he is powerless to master. Is _this_ the Betty he had
parted from on that awful Christmas morning? _this_ the wretched woman,
clammy-handed, dishevelled, reckless of all save her own mastering
agony, who--her haggard mother-eyes unable to attain the boon of any
tears--had hoarsely forbidden him her presence for ever? Can this be
she--this hovering vision of lace and gauze--that has floated towards
him on the wings of the night, and now lifts to his, eyes that in this
light look as clear as Peggy's--cheeks whose carnations seem no less
lovely and real? Before his confused consciousness, the two visions--of
_that_ Betty and of _this_--inextricably entangled, and yet irrevocably
separated, pass and repass; and he continues standing, wordlessly,
stupidly staring, in a horror and a wonder that are beyond the weight of
his volition to conquer, at the woman before him.
After her last sentence she is wordless too, and also stands looking at
him, mute and full, as if she had forgotten his face, and were learning
it off by heart again, her factitious gaiety for the moment died down
and gone in the silent starlight. It is he who first speaks.
'You--you came here to see your children?'
'To see my children?' repeats she. 'Ha! ha! Yes, that was the reason I
gave at home; and a very pretty and laudable one too, was not it? To see
my children! But, as it happens, a woman has often more than one reason.
I had more than one.'
She has lapsed into her flippant gaiety again, and now pauses as if
expecting him to inquire into the nature of the other reason to which
she alludes; but if so, he does not gratify her. He is still fighting
with the horror of that double consciousness. Can this be the woman to
whom in that icy winter dawning his whole soul had gone out in such an
overpowering passion of pity? And if it be indeed she, has she clean
forgotten the sacred agony of their last farewell? Her laugh is still
dissonantly jarring on his stunned ear, when, finding it hopeless any
longer to wait for questioning on his part, she resumes:
'It is always well to kill two birds with one stone--is not it?' says
she, looking hardily into his eyes. 'Pardon the homeliness of the
expression! You know that reports reach even quiet places--Harborough,
for instance. Well, such a report--a _canard_ probably, but still there
was something oddly circumstantial about it--was spreading there
yesterday about a--person--I--used--to know--rather well--have some
interest in--in fact----'
She pauses again; her words have, for the last half of her speech, come
draggingly, with a little break between each, and not for one instant
does her eye release him. But again he makes no comment. Her breath is
coming perceptibly quicker when she next takes up her theme.
'You do not ask what the report was? No? I fear my little tale does not
interest you. It would perhaps be civiller on your part if you could
pretend that it did; perhaps you will think that it improves as it goes
on. Well, the subject of the report is a man; and the report itself--do
not you think that it was the simplest plan on my part to come and
verify it in person?--is that he is going to take to his bosom a--ha!
ha! I never can help laughing when I think of it--a--guess! No; you
would never guess--_a sack of pota_----'
'Do not call her names,' says Talbot, for the first time finding his
voice, and stretching out his hands, but now hanging so nervelessly at
his sides, in authoritative wrathful prohibition; 'do not dare to call
her names!'
'Then it _is_ true?'
Her laugh, little kin as it had ever had with real merriment, is
dead--strangled in her throbbing throat; and she puts up her hand as if
she were choking.
'Until you can speak of her with the respect that is her due, I will
answer no questions,' he replies sternly.
The next moment he sees her stagger in the starlight, and his heart
smites him for his cruelty. He makes a hasty movement towards her,
thinking that she is going to fall; but before he can reach her she has
steadied herself, and faces him, livid, it is true, under her paint, but
firm and collected beneath the stars. She has even recovered her laugh.
'Thank you,' she says, in a low but distinct voice, 'for the information
that you have incidentally given me, even though you refused to let me
have it direct. I have no further occasion to trouble you, and need only
offer you my congratulations and my hopes that you and your bride will
meet with some one to sweeten your married lives as you have sweetened
mine.'
So saying, she turns to leave him. If he were wise he would let her
go--would set no hindrance in her way; but which of us, in the crucial
moment of our lives, is wise? Before his reason can arrest him,
following only the impulse that forbids him to let the woman who for
five years had sat crowned and sceptred in his heart thus leave him, he
makes two hasty steps after her.
'Betty!'
At the sound of his voice, there comes a sort of wavering; but she does
not stop or turn her head.
'Betty!' he repeats, overtaking her, and preventing her egress by
setting his back against the wrought-iron gate; 'after all that has come
and gone, are we to part like this?'
'How else do you wish us to part?' she inquires in a steely voice of the
bitterest irony, while her eyes glitter, but not with tears; 'do you