Doctor Cupid: A Novel
expect me to dance at your wedding?'
'There is no reason why you should not,' he answers firmly, looking
steadily back at her. 'I have done you no wrong. Have you forgotten how,
and with what solemnity, you sent me away from you for ever?'
'So I did,' cries she, breaking into a hard laugh. 'Do not tell any of
my friends, or I should never hear the last of it. What an _acces_ of
superstition I had that cold morning! I will do myself the justice to
say, the first and last of its kind. I thought to save Franky by
renouncing you, was not that it? If I had known how little there was to
renounce, I might have spared myself the pains, might not I?--ha! ha!'
Again her merriment rings harshly on the soft air, and he can find no
word of rejoinder.
'How you must have been laughing in your sleeve!' pursues she, still
with that arid, withering mirth. 'Though the joke is against me, I
cannot help laughing at myself when I think of it.'
But at that he breaks in:
'I looked so like laughing in my sleeve, did not I?' he asks, panting,
and in a voice which emotion of the most painful quality he has ever
felt renders indistinct.
'No one would believe it,' she goes on, unheeding, apparently unaware of
his interruption, 'of a woman of my age, and who, as they say, has lived
every minute of her life--I _have_ done that, have not I? But it is
nevertheless Gospel truth that I was such a greenhorn as to be almost as
sorry for you as I was for myself. I suppose,' with a sort of break in
her dry voice, 'one gets into a stupid habit of thinking one's self
indispensable!'
She pauses, and making no further effort to depart, stands silent, with
set teeth and hands that unconsciously twist and tear the slight lace
pocket-handkerchief between her fingers.
What can he say to her? By what words--save words of entreaty to her to
put again the chain about his neck and the fetters upon his limbs--can
he appease or comfort her? And sooner than utter such words, he would
fall dead at her feet.
'Wretched superstition!' she says between her teeth, still rending the
morsel of lawn in her fingers; 'how could _I_, of all people, have been
such a fool as to be conquered by it? What did it matter to the Powers
above--what did they care whether I kept or threw away the one miserable
bit of consolation I had in my hideous life? The child would have got
well all the same, while I--I--but perhaps' (her tone changing to one of
alert suspicion), 'perhaps even then you had come to an understanding,
you and she. Perhaps even then you were hoodwinking me. I was so easy to
hoodwink--I, of all people, who had always thought myself so wide
awake--ha! ha!'
Again that dreadful laugh assails his ear, and makes him shiver as if it
were December's blasts that were biting, not May's breezes kissing his
cheek.
'I never hoodwinked you!' he answers, in an agitation hardly inferior to
her own; 'it was always plain-sailing between us. I went away because
you sent me.'
'And you took me at my word?' cries she wildly. 'Yes, I know that then,
at that moment, I meant you to take me at it; but I was out of my mind.
Hundreds of people less mad than I was then are in Bedlam. You might as
well have listened to the ravings of a lunatic as to mine that day;
and--you--took--me--at--my word!'
Her speech, which in its beginning was shrill and rapid, ends almost in
a whisper.
'I thought you meant it,' he says miserably; 'before God, I thought you
meant it!'
'The wish was father to the thought,' she says, again breaking into that
laugh which jars upon him far more than would any tears or revilings;
'you believed it because you wished it. I showed you a handsome way out
of your dilemma. I played into your hands. Without knowing it--oh, I
think that you will believe it was without knowing it--I played into
your hands. Without hurting my feelings--without quite giving the lie to
all your glib vows--without any disagreeable shuffling--you were free! I
set you free! _I!_ Oh, the humour of it! I wonder how you could have
kept any decent countenance that morning! and I--I--never saw it. Oh, I
must have been blinder than any mole or bat not to have seen it, but I
did not!'
She pauses, as if suffocated; but in a moment or two has recovered
breath and composure enough to resume:
'And I was _sorry_ for you. I do not know why I have a pleasure in
showing up my own folly to you; but, as you say, it has always been
plain-sailing between us, and one does not easily shake off an old
habit. Yes, _sorry_ for you! Not at first. At first I could think of
nothing but _him_; but he took a turn for the better very soon--God
bless him! As long as he was only getting well, it was enough for me to
think that I had him back--oh, quite enough!' some tears stealing, for
the first time, into her scorching eyes; 'but when he was on his legs
again, and everything going on as usual, then I began to see what I had
done.'
Her voice has sunk to a low, lagging key of utter dispiritedness.
'You never sent for me; you never wrote to me,' says Talbot hoarsely.
'Did you expect it?' she cries, a sudden eager light breaking all over
her face. 'Were you waiting for me to write? Did you watch the post for
a letter from me? Oh, if I had only known! Did you--did you?'
She has laid her hand convulsively on his coat-sleeve, and is looking
up, with all her miserable soul in her eyes, into his face. What can he
answer? He had watched the post indeed; but with how different a motive
from that with which her passionate hopes have credited him!
'No! I see that you did not,' she says, dropping her hand from his arm
with a gesture of disgust, as if she had touched a snake, a horrible
revulsion of feeling darkening all her features; 'or, if you did, it was
with dread that I should make some effort to get you back. At every post
that came in, without bringing you a specimen of my handwriting, you
drew a long breath, and said: "It is incredible! I could not have
believed it of her; but she has let me go, really!" Come, now,' with a
spurious air of gaiety, in ghastly contrast with her drawn features and
burning eyes, 'you were always such an advocate for truth; you used to
be so severe upon my little harmless falsehoods. Truth! truth! Let us
have the truth!'
'Have it, then!' he says desperately, stretching out his arms towards
her, as if transferring from his keeping to hers the weight of that
murderous confession. 'I _was_ glad!'
Again, as once before, she reels, as though it were some heavy physical
blow that he had struck her; and again his heart smites him.
'I--I--thought that we had both come to our right minds,' he says,
stammering, and seeking vainly for words that will soften the edge of
that bitter sword-thrust, and yet not incur the deeper cruelty of
bringing again that illusory radiance over her face; 'I--I--thought we
might begin our lives again--different, better! We had been most
unhappy!'
'_Unhappy!_' she repeats, in a voice that, if he did not with his own
eyes see the words issuing from her lips, he could never have believed
to be hers--'_unhappy!_ Are you telling me that you were unhappy all my
five years? Has she made you believe even this?' She stops, and fixes
her glittering look upon him with an expression so withering that he
involuntarily turns his away with a sensation as of one scorched. 'No!'
she continues, her voice rising, and growing in clearness as she goes
on; 'she may persuade _herself_ of that--what do I care what she
persuades _herself_ of?--but she will never really persuade you. No! no!
no!' a ring of triumph mixing with the exceeding bitterness of her
tones. 'There is one superiority that I shall always, to all eternity,
have over her; one that neither she nor you, do what you will, can ever
rob me of: I shall always--always have been _first_! There is nothing
you can give her that will not be second-hand!'
He has clenched his hands in his misery till the finger-nails bite the
palms. Is not this the very reflection that has been mingling its drop
of earth's gall with the honeyed sweetness of his heaven?
'Yes!' he says, panting; 'do I deny it? I can never give any one better
love than I gave you.'
'_Gave!_' she repeats, her voice dropping again to a husky whisper, and
casting her parched eyes up to heaven, as if calling on the stilly
constellations to be witness to her great woe--'_gave_! He himself said
_gave_! And I am alive after hearing it. Oh, poor I!'
Her voice shudders away in a sigh of intense self-pity; and she
hurriedly covers her face with her hands as if to shut out the view of
her own fate, as too hideous to be looked upon with sanity; while long,
dry sobs shake her from head to foot. The sight of her anguish is more
than Talbot can bear. Two steps bring him to her side; and before he can
realise what he is doing, he has taken her two hands and drawn them
forcibly away from her face.
'Betty!'
'Well!' she says dully, leaving them in his, as if it no longer mattered
where, or in whose keeping, they lay; 'what about Betty?'
'Betty!' convulsively pressing her small, burning fingers, 'you break my
heart!'
'I wish I could!' rejoins she fiercely. 'I wish to heavens I could! But
I must leave that to _her_. Tell me about her!' changing her tone to one
of factitious temperate interest. 'She is a good soul, I am told; _bonne
comme du pain_. There is nothing so pleasant as complete change, is
there? How does she show her goodness, by the bye? Does she say her
prayers every night, and make a flannel petticoat for the poor every
day, eh?'
He attempts no answer to her gibes; only, in his intense and mistakenly
shown compassion, he still holds her hands, and looks down, with a pity
beyond speech's plummet-line to sound, into the eyes whose beauty he has
long ceased to see, but whose agony has still power to stab him.
'I suppose,' she goes on, her mood changing--it is never the same for
two minutes together, and her mockery giving way to a tone of condensed
resentful wretchedness--'that if I loved you properly, as people love in
books, I should be glad to see you march off triumphantly, with drums
beating and colours flying, to be happy ever after; but I am not! I
tell you fairly I am not! If I had my will you should be as
miserable--no, _that_ you never could be; I would let you off with less
than that--as I am!'
He looks at her sadly.
'Even if I were so happy as you fear, a couple of hours ago, I think you
have cured me of it.'
'You used to be a kind-hearted man,' she says, scanning, as if in
dispassionate search, his sorrowful features; 'perhaps you are still, if
happiness has not hardened your heart. It does harden the heart
sometimes, they tell me; it is a long time since I have had a chance of
judging by experience. But, if you are, try not to let me hear much of
your happiness--try to keep it as quiet as you can.'
Her last words are almost inaudible through the excess of the emotion
that has dictated them.
'Perhaps you will have your wish,' he says gloomily, for the last
half-hour seems to have shaken all the fabric of his prospective
Elysium; 'perhaps there will not be much to hide.'
'That is a very civil suggestion on your part,' she answers, relapsing
into biting sarcasm; 'so likely, too. Go on. I am cheered already: find
out some more equally probable topics of consolation for me. Why do not
you remind me that I still have my husband--my husband whose society
_you_ have taught me so much to enjoy; my visiting-book; my--my----'
'You have your _boy_,' he interrupts sternly, goaded into anger out of
compassion by her tone.
Her hands drop from his, and a light shiver runs over her shuddering
body.
'_I--have--my--boy_,' she repeats slowly; 'so I have. God forgive me for