Doctor Cupid: A Novel
has once again stood all day on her ladder, and decked aisle and chancel
and font and altar with the manifold roses and the May lilies that by
Trinity Sunday are bountifully ready to her hand. Once again has Mrs.
Evans sat in a pew and helped her with moral suasion, and with easy
suggestions of alterations that would entail her undoing half her work.
The scent of the lilies is too much next day for the youngest
church-going Evans, and he has to be carried out, with his boots in the
air, to the great delight of the schoolchildren, and enlivenment of the
congregation generally. Not one of the civil parishioners, dropping in
now and again to observe her progress and offer help, would think that
the Peggy they see smiling down upon them from her ladder had been
lately treading on hot ploughshares. But yet she has. The worst is over
now, she tells herself. Which was the worst hour? Which the worst
moment? she asks, with what she thinks to be a perfectly dispassionate
inquiry. That one when she had found his glove lying quite naturally,
and as if at home, on the hall-table? That one when she had had to tell
Prue that it was all over; when through the obstinacy of the young
girl's disbelief she had had to asseverate and re-asseverate it, until
she had almost screamed out loud in the agony of that reiteration? That
one when scarce two days after the blow had fallen, going on some
necessary business to the Parsonage, Mrs. Evans had met her with the
triumphant announcement that she--Mrs. Evans--had been right after all
in her conjecture as to Lady Betty Harborough? that though it might not
be known to many persons, yet the fact was none the less certain that
she had paid a flying visit to the Manor: Mrs. Evans's nurse having had
the information from the very flyman who had driven her from the
station; adding the circumstance, that so little sense of shame did she
manifest that she insisted upon an open fly.
'Of course the children were the pretext,' pursues the Vicar's wife,
with a shrug; 'it is so shocking to think that they should be made
accomplices, as it were. One always feels,' looking affectionately round
at the various Evans specimens--old and new baby, little girl with a
cold, middle-sized boy with a stomach-ache, kept indoors by reason of
these ailments, and now littering the worn carpet--'one always feels
that one's children are one's best safeguard.'
And Peggy remembers to have smiled. That a hideous knife is cutting her
own heart in two, does not make the fact of Mrs. Evans's virtue
requiring a safeguard at all the less funny. The worst is over, so she
assures herself. The wren that sang at her chamber-window, waking her to
tell her that Talbot was at the gate, that waked her all the same when
it had no such news to tell her, is happily silent.
The pungent hawthorn-blossoms are discoloured and dead. She smiles drily
as she sees them swept up, and rolled away in Jacob's barrow. What a
mercy it would be if she could sweep up the dead brown love they
emblematise, and get Jacob to wheel it away too!
After all she is but where she was before Whitsuntide, where she has
been all her life. She has only a few, such a few steps to retrace. Ah,
but the retracing of those steps! The nights are worst. All the great
nations of the variously woeful on this sorrowful earth's face, know
that the nights are worst. Oh, the agony of that crying out of strong
souls for earth's supreme good just shown them, and then for ever
snatched away! She had thought herself happy before--quite sufficiently
happy, and had walked smiling and content along her path, until suddenly
one had taken her by the hand, and had led her into God's paradise; and
having just given her time to have her astonished eyes for ever dazzled
by the shining of that great light, had pushed her away into the
darkness, where she must stand henceforth with blind hands beating on
the unopened door. She had thought herself happy before. In the darkness
she laughs out loud. She had mistaken that wretched farthing rushlight
for day.
All night she struggles in the deep waters, foothold slipping from under
her. All night she fights with dragons, with noisome, baleful creatures,
like stout Christian in the Valley of the Shadow; wrestles with
temptations unworthy of her; with base longings to have him back, even
though it be to go shares with another in his love; to cry 'Come back,
come back! fool me, cheat me again--only come back!'
She had told him but the truth in saying that when she cared for any
one, she cared very badly. She is caring very badly now, and it goes
hard with her. What wonder that the wakening birds and the uprising wind
of morning find her daily staring dry-eyed, watchful, languid, at the
rose of dawn!
'Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How can she seek the empty world again?'
But through the day no one finds out her languor; no one knows that she
is going about her daily work unfortified by sleep. Happily for her
there is no one to observe her very nicely. If there were any one to
steal anxious glances of sympathy at her to see how she is bearing it,
she must break down; but, as I have said, happily for her, there is no
one.
Prue, indeed, is quite affectionate and sorry; rather remorseful, in
fact, at the consciousness of having but grudgingly given that kindness
which, as it turns out, would have been needed only for one week. Her
method of compensation for former shortcomings, that of repeating many
times how unworthy she had always thought Talbot of her sister, is
perhaps scarcely judicious. The assertion of his unworthiness cuts Peggy
like a lash, but she bears it with set teeth and a sort of smile. It is
true. He is unworthy. And after a while--but a little while--this part
of her ordeal is over; for Prue, swallowed up in the sea of her own
coming troubles, forgets to remember that there is any one else
struggling in the waves.
And so, by and by, Peggy grows to walk her ploughshares with as
unshrinking a foot as if they were velvet turf; grows to thank God again
for her garden, and to be able to thank Him even for that one glimpse of
the supremest good, though given but to be withdrawn; last of all, to
acquiesce in that withdrawal. Since she is so urgently needed by the
poor little life beside her, it is as well, so she tells herself, that
she should have no distracting life of her own to pull her two ways.
Whatever else her Prue loses, she can now never lose her.
And as time goes on, it seems as if Prue, too, were to have her
losses. The first of these is perhaps but a little one, merely the
loss of that promised company of her betrothed through those rich June
days when Oxford is holding her yearly riot of pleasure--the riot from
which he had joyfully engaged to steal away to her quiet side. But,
as has happened not unfrequently before in Freddy's history, as it may
be confidently predicted will happen not unfrequently again, he has
promised more than when pay-day comes he is able to perform. After
all, it seems--and at that poor Prue would be the last to
wonder--Commemoration cannot get on without him.
Strange as it may appear, among the crowd, unusually large this year,
that throngs to the fair city for her saturnalia, and extensive as is
the acquaintance among undergraduates of the Hartley family--two of the
sons, indeed, being at the present time members of the University--there
is no one who is found capable of doing the honours of the festival to
these comparatively new acquaintance with the exception of Mr. Ducane.
He is therefore compelled, in compliance with his own creed of, as he
very nobly says in his letter to Prue, 'making Self march last in the
Pageant of Life,' to forego the simple joys he had planned in his
sweetheart's company, and carry his absent, yearning heart through the
bustle of theatre, ball, and _fete_. It is not until the last moment
that he has announced to Prue his change of project, not until all her
little preparations for his reception had been made, all the flowers
gathered to be laid on the altar of the poor soul's God.
'He might have told you before,' says Peggy indignantly, when one
morning the news of this defalcation is brought her by a
trembling-lipped pale Prue.
'He did not know it himself,' replies the other, in eager defence; 'he
says so somewhere, doesn't he?' (turning over the pages in feverish
search); 'or if he did know, it was out of consideration for me that he
kept me in the dark, that I might have less time to be disappointed in;
and he was right. I have had all these weeks--all this hope and looking
forward--to the good.'
Her under-lip quivers so piteously, as she makes this cheerful
statement of her gains, that she puts up her hand in haste to hide it.
But after all, Commemoration is only a matter of four days; and perhaps
it is worth while to have the pleasure of his company deferred for that
short interval, for the sake of the still higher pleasure she receives
on his return, of hearing him read aloud to her a choice little poem he
has found time to write on the subject of his own distraught wandering
through the gay throng; questioning every maid he meets as to why she
was not Prue. After he is gone, Prue repeats it--she has already learnt
it by heart--with sparkling eyes to her sister. It is not only that it
is so beautiful, as she says, but it is so _true_. Nobody could write
like that, unless he felt it, could he now? Peggy is spared the pain of
a reply by her sister's hurrying off to copy out the lines into that
gold-clasped, vellum-bound volume, in which, written out in his
sweetheart's best hand, the productions of Mr. Ducane's muse find a
splendid shelter, until that surely near moment when rival publishers
will snatch them from each other. She has plenty of time to devote her
best penmanship to them, as it turns out; since after two days at the
Manor, Freddy has to be off again. It is to London this time that a
harsh necessity drives him. Freddy never 'goes,' or 'wishes to go.' He
always 'has to go.'
'Whatever happens, we must not lose touch with the Great World-Heart
beating outside us!' he has said, looking solemnly up at the stars over
his betrothed's head, hidden sobbingly on his breast.
And she, though she knows little, and cares less, about the Great
World-Heart, acquiesces meekly, since _he_ must be right. So the Red
House relapses into its condition of female tranquillity; a tranquillity
of two balked young hearts beating side by side. The one pastures her
sorrow on the name that now appears almost daily among the titled mob
that crowds the summer columns of the _Morning Post_. The other digs
hers into the garden; paints it into pictures for the workhouse; turns
it into smiles for the sorrowful; stitches it into clothes for the
naked.
The stillness of high summer is upon the neighbourhood; all the leafy
homes around emptied of their owners; the roses, ungathered, shedding
their petals, or packed off in wet cotton-wool to London. Milady is in
London. So are the Hartleys. So is everybody; everybody, that is, except
the Evanses. The Evanses are at home. They mostly are. A family of their
dimensions, even in these days of cheap locomotion, does not lend itself
to frequent removals. A couple of years ago, indeed, milady
good-naturedly whisked off the Vicar for a fortnight's Londoning. But he
came back so unaffectedly disgusted with his cure, his offspring, and
his spouse, that the latter cherishes a hope, not always confined to her
own breast, that this act of hospitality may never be repeated. And
hay-harvest comes. The strawberries ripen, and jam-making begins. The
Evans boys are home for the holidays; and one of them breaks his leg.
The threatened baby arrives; and all the little events, habitual in the