Doctor Cupid: A Novel
fancied that it might have been to the walled garden, because--because
we had--had--said good-bye there last year.' Her voice wavers so
distressingly that he thinks she is about to lose all control over it;
but no!--in a moment she has recovered her self-mastery, and taken up
her thread again. 'As I drew near the garden, I saw that the gate was a
little open, so I knew that I had guessed right. I--looked--in;
I--saw--oh!' with a burst of indignant agony, 'are you going to make me
tell you what I saw?'
'Yes,' he says breathlessly, 'tell me!--what?' A hope, faint, and yet
tenacious, lingers in his mind that it may have been any one moment of
his last night's interview except that of the supreme embrace which she
had witnessed. He has not long to wait before this last prop is knocked
from under him.
'I--I--saw--you holding--a woman in your arms, and, a moment after, she
ran past me--and I saw--who she was!'
The answer he has insisted upon reaches him in a broken whisper; and her
strained eyes are fastened upon him, as if, in the teeth of a certainty
as absolute as that of her own identity, she were nourishing the
hopeless hope of his uttering some impossible, yet convincing, denial.
But he attempts none such. He stands before her silent, with his arms
still folded and the tide of a shoreless despair washing over his heart.
Betty has put the crowning touch to her work.
'It is true then?' Peggy asks, in a voice of such bitter suffering as if
she were realising it for the first time; as if she had not already
known it for twelve endless hours.
'What is the use of denying it?' he replies blankly; 'you say that you
saw her!'
She has risen to her feet again, risen to her full height (how tall she
is!); and once again stands confronting him, not even asking the
table-edge for any support.
'And--you--told--me--that--you--were--free!'
The words drop wonderingly from her mouth, barbed with an icy contempt
that makes him writhe. But at least he thanks God that she does not
treat him to such mirth as Betty's.
'I told you the truth,' rejoins the poor fellow doggedly--'I _was_ free;
I _am_ free!'
But the consciousness of the impossibility of really clearing his
character, save at the expense of her whom he must for ever shield,
lends a flatness and unreality to his assertion, which, as he feels
through every aching fibre, will only serve the more deeply to convince
Peggy of his guilt. It is not long before he sees that he has divined
justly.
'You need not make a laughing-stock of me,' she says with dignity,
turning towards the door. But at that, the despair which has been
paralysing him awakes, and cries out loud, giving him motion and a
voice.
'You are not going!' he cries in a tone whose agony stabs her like a
knife, flinging himself upon her passage.
'What is there to stay for?' she answers, choked. But she pauses. Can
he, even yet, have anything to say?
'Do you think that I met her there _on purpose_?' he asks, his words
pouring out in a hoarse eager flood, as if he had but little hope of
commanding her attention for long to them--'by appointment? Ask yourself
whether it is possible? Was I so anxious to leave you? Was not it you
that drove me away? I tell you I had no more idea of meeting her than I
had of meeting----' he hesitates, seeking for a comparison strong enough
to emphasise his denial--'as I had of meeting one of the dead. I did not
even know that she was in the neighbourhood. I had held no communication
with her for months. It was an accident--a mere accident!'
He breaks off suffocated. At the intense sincerity of his tone, a
sincerity which it is difficult to believe feigned, a sort of stir has
come over her face; but in a moment it has gone again.
'Was it,' she asks with a quietness that makes his hopes sink lower than
would any noisy tears or tantrums, 'was it _by accident_ that she was in
your arms?'
He is silent. In point of fact, he is as innocent of that embrace as
Peggy herself; but from telling her so he is, being a man and an
Englishman, for ever debarred. He must stand there, and bear the
consequences of that supposed guilt, whatever those consequences may
be. There is a little stillness while he waits his sentence--a little
stillness broken only by the eight-day clock's tick-tack, and by the
distance-mellowed sounds of the village rising to go about its daily
work.
'Have you nothing to say for yourself, then?' she asks at last, in a
voice which she dares not raise above a whisper for fear of its
betraying her by altogether breaking down--'no explanation to give?'
'I tell you that it was all an accident,' he repeats, with a doggedness
born of his despair. 'I can give no other explanation.'
'And that is none,' she replies, a wave of indignation sending back the
colour to her ashy cheeks, and steadying her shaking limbs as she again
turns to leave the room.
He does not, as before, throw himself in her way; he remains standing
where he is, and only says in a dull voice:
'Are you going?'
'Why should I stay?'
'Going without saying good-bye?'
'I will say good-bye if you wish.'
'Going for--_for good_?'
'Yes.'
He makes no effort to change her resolution--vents no protest--if that
indeed be not one, and the strongest he could utter, that long groan
with which he flings himself on a chair beside the table, and covers his
face with his hands. She has reached the door. No one hinders her from
opening it and leaving him, and yet she hesitates. Her sunk blue eyes
look back at him half relentingly.
'Are you sure,' she says quaveringly, while her pale lips tremble
piteously--'are you sure that you have nothing to say--nothing
extenuating? I--I should be glad to hear it if you had. I--I--I--would
try my very best to believe you.'
There is no answer. Only the mute appeal conveyed by that prone figure,
with its despairing brown head fallen forwards on its clenched hands. Is
it possible that he has not heard her? After a moment's vacillation, she
retraces her uncertain steps till she stands beside him. Feeling her
proximity, he looks up. At the sight of his face, she gives a start. Can
it be she herself--she that had thought to have loved him so kindly--who
has scored these new deep lines on brow and cheek? At the relenting
evidenced by her back-coming, his dead hopes revive a little.
'Do you know what I did when I reached the walled garden last night?--I
am afraid that you will not think the better of my common sense--I knelt
down and kissed the place where I thought that your feet might have trod
last year.'
'You did?' she says, with a catch in the breath; 'you did? and yet five
minutes afterwards you were--oh!' breaking off with a low cry; 'and this
is what men are like!'
He sees that his poor plea, instead of, as he had faintly hoped, a
little bettering his position with her, has, read by the light of her
mistaken knowledge, only served to intensify in her eyes the blackness
of his inconstancy. Well, it is only one more added to the heap of
earth's unnumbered injustices. It is only that Betty has done her work
thoroughly this time. But he cannot bear to meet the reproachful anguish
of the face that is bent above him, knowing that never on this side the
grave can he set himself right with her. If only it might be for ever,
instead of for these few hurrying moments, that he could shut out the
light of day! The clock ticks on evenly. It sounds unnaturally loud and
brutal in his singing ears; but its tick is not mixed with any light
noise of retreating footsteps. She is still lingering near him, and by
and by a long sob shudders out on the air.
'If you could persuade me that I was wrong,' she wails; 'if you could
persuade me that it was some hideous delusion of my eyes--people have
had such before now--that it existed only in my wicked fancy! Oh, if you
could--if you could!'
'I cannot,' he replies hoarsely; 'you know that I cannot. Why do you
torment me?' He has answered without looking up, still maintaining the
attitude dictated by his despair; but when a little rustle of drapery
tells him that she is really departing, he can no longer contain
himself, but falls at her feet, crying out, 'Tell me how bad my
punishment is to be!'
For a moment she looks down on him silently, her face all quivering as
with some fiery pain; then in a very low voice:
'Punishment!' she says; 'punishment! There is no question of
_punishment_. It is only that you have killed my heart.'
'Killed--your--heart!' he repeats blankly, as if too stunned to take in
the meaning of the phrase.
'Yes,' she says, breathing fast and heavily; 'yes. I do not think you
knew what you were doing. I believe it was a sudden madness that seized
you--such a madness as,' with a touch of scorn, 'may be common to men. I
know but little of them and their ways; but--but--what security have I
against its seizing you a second time?'
He writhes. A second time? Oh, if she did but know how little it had
seized him the first!
'If I married you now,' she goes on, her voice gaining a greater
firmness, and a new and forlorn stability coming into her white face, 'I
should love you, certainly. Yes,' with a melancholy shake of her head,
'I think that I shall never leave off loving you now. But if I married
you, I should make you very unhappy; I should not take things easily--I
should not be patient. And however happy we might be when we were
together, since you have killed my trust in you, you would never be out
of sight that I should not be fancying that you were--as--as--as I saw
you last night.'
Her voice has dropped to an almost inaudible pitch. He has risen to his
feet again, and some instinct of self-respect helping him, stands
silently before her, accepting the doom which, as he hopelessly feels,
can be averted by no words that he has leave to utter.
To her ears has come the noise of nearing wheels--the wheels of the fly
he had ordered over-night to take him to the station, allowing the
smallest possible margin of time in which to get there, so that as
little as possible might be robbed from the poignant sweetness of his
last farewells.
The poignant sweetness! He almost laughs. That sound must have hit her
ears too, judging by the long sob that swells her throat, and by the
added rush of anguish in her next words:
'I ought to have believed what they told me of you, but I would not; I
would believe only you--only _you_; and this is how you have rewarded
me!'
He locks his teeth together hard. For how much longer can he bear this?
There comes over him a rushing temptation to try to buy one soft look
from her to take with him, by the hypocrisy of asking her forgiveness;
he whose whole smitten soul stands up in protest against the need of any
forgiveness.
But no. Sooner than descend to such an equivocation he will depart on
his lonely way uncomforted.
'I must go,' he says steadily, though his lips are livid. 'Will
you--would you mind shaking hands with me?'
He is going. She had known what the wheels meant, and yet there seems a
murderous novelty in the idea. She has put her death-cold hand into his;
speech is almost beyond her; but she mutters some poor syllables about
not wishing him ill.
'Peggy,' he says, with a solemnity such as that of those who are
spending their last breath in some sacred utterance; 'Peggy, you are
wrong! Any one to whom you told your story--any one who had to judge
between you and me, would say that you were right; but you--are--wrong!
If I have killed your heart, you have killed mine, so we are quits.
Good-bye!'
The next moment she is alone in the room.
CHAPTER XXX
The Whitsun garlands that had so gaily wound about the pillars of
Roupell Church have long ago been taken down, dead and faded. Poor Peggy