Doctor Cupid: A Novel
Red House's calendar, happen punctually; for even the Vicarage fracture
is not more than the usual and expected outcome of the summer holidays.
But neither hay-time, nor hot jam-time, nor holiday-time bring back
Freddy to the Manor, whither his country-loving aunt has hastened back
joyfully to spud and billycock and shorthorns, a round month ago. He
does not even write very often. How should he? as Prue says. How could
any one who knows anything of London expect it of him? But in all his
letters, when they do come, there is invariably an underlying ring of
sadness, that proves to demonstration how cogent though unexplained are
the reasons which alone keep him from that dear and sacred spot, where
alone, as he himself says, his soul reaches its full stature. But at
length, apparently, the occult causes relax their hold of him; and when
August has begun to bind her gold stooks, and the cuckoo has said
good-bye, he comes. In August. It is a month to whose recurrence Peggy
has looked forward with dread: to her a month of anniversaries. Happily
it is only to herself that they are anniversaries. Who but she will
remember that on such a day the fox bit Talbot? Dingo himself has
certainly forgotten it; though he is as certainly quite ready to do it
again, if the chance is afforded him. Who will know, or even suspect,
that such and such days are made bitter to her by the fact that on their
fellows in last year he drove the mowing-machine, or gathered the
lavender, or cut out the new flower-bed? She smiles half sarcastically,
wrapping herself securely in the cloak of her little world's entire
indifference to her epoch-making moments.
'One has no windows in one through which one's friends can look in at
one,' she says philosophically, 'even if they would take the trouble.
Mrs. Evans perhaps would take the trouble; I do not know any one else
that would. As long as one is not foolish outside, it does not matter;
and I am not foolish outside.'
August is here; and the sacred seat under the Judas-tree, the seat that
had been forbidden to Peggy during her one triumph-hour, is again
occupied: save in the dead of the night has, for the last five days,
been scarcely a moment unoccupied; and Prue's little cup--the cup that
had run as low as mountain-springs in a droughty summer--again brims
over.
'It is so much better than if he had never gone away,' she says
rapturously, 'for then I might have thought that he liked me only
because he had never seen anything better; but now that he has had all
the most beautiful ladies in London at his feet----'
'Has he indeed?' rejoins Peggy, smiling; 'does he tell you so?'
But she has not the heart to suggest that the present emptiness of the
Manor of all inmates, except himself and his aunt, may count for even
more in Mr. Ducane's assiduities than his indifference to the London
beauties.
One afternoon she has left the young pair cooing on their rustic seat as
usual, and has betaken herself to the Manor, on one of her mixed errands
of parish business and individual friendliness to its mistress. She
finds the old lady surrounded by all the signs and symptoms of a new
hobby--plans, encaustic tiles, designs for the decorated pans and
skimmers of an ornamental dairy.
'I have a new toy, my dear!--congratulate me!' says she, looking up from
the litter around her, almost as radiant as Prue; 'an ornamental
dairy-house! I cannot think how I have lived without it for sixty-five
years! After all, there is nothing like a new toy; you would not be the
worse for one,' she adds, glancing kindly at the girl's face, a little
oldened and jaded since this time last year, its beauty lending itself
even less than it had then done to Lady Betty's sarcasm about being
improved by being bled. 'And Prue?--how is Prue? She is not in want of a
new toy _par hasard_?--still quite satisfied with the old one, eh? Well,
he is a very ingenious piece of mechanism!'
'Very!' replies Peggy drily.
'And when are the banns to be put up?' inquires the old lady abruptly,
resting her arms upon the heap of her plans and estimates, and pushing
up her spectacles on her forehead, in order to get a directer view of
her young _vis-a-vis_. 'I should like to have a week's notice, in order
to get myself a new gown; Mason was telling me this morning that I have
not one that can be depended upon to hold together.'
'The banns?' repeats Peggy, a flush of pleasure spreading over her face;
'then he has told you! Oh, I am so glad! I was afraid that he would
not!'
'Told me!' repeats the elder woman, with a withering intonation; 'not
he!--trust him for that! No doubt he has some high-falutin' reason for
not doing so; it would wound my feelings!--it would be dangerous at my
age! He had rather efface himself and his own interests for ever than
roughen, by one additional pebble, my path to the grave!' mimicking,
with ludicrous insuccess, Freddy's round young tones. 'Told me?--not
he!' The tinge brought into Peggy's face by that emotion of transient
satisfaction of which milady's words have proved the fallaciousness,
dies out of it again. 'Nobody has told me,' continues the old lady
tranquilly; 'I have only taken the liberty of seeing what was directly
under my nose. No offence to you, Peggy; but I had quite as soon not
have seen it.'
'Of course--of course,' replies Peggy, flushing again.
'I suppose that we have no one but ourselves to thank,' says milady,
with philosophy, her eye returning affectionately to one of the designs
for the front of her hobby. 'I do not care about that one; it is too
florid--it would look like Rosherville. Throw two selfish idle young
fools together, and the result has been the same since Adam's time!'
Peggy's heart swells. Idle and selfish! Never, even in the most secret
depths of her own mind, has she connected such epithets with her Prue;
and here is milady applying them to her as if they were truisms.
'I must send him away somewhere, I suppose,' pursues Lady Roupell, with
a rather impatient sigh. 'He is an expensive luxury, is Master Freddy,
as your poor little Prue would find; but no doubt it will come cheaper
in the end. Give him a couple of hundred pounds, and pack him off on a
voyage round the world! Believe me, dear,' laying her hand--whose tan,
contracted by an inveterate aversion for gloves, contrasts oddly with
its flashing diamonds--compassionately on Peggy's shoulder, 'he would
have clean forgotten her before he had got out of the chops of the
Channel.'
A great lump has sprung into Peggy's throat, constricting the muscles.
'And she?'
The old woman shrugs her shoulders.
'When we are forgotten, child, we do the graceful thing, and forget too.
I suppose we all know a little about that.'
Margaret has picked up one of the Dutch tiles that are to line the walls
of milady's new plaything; but it is but a blurred view that she gets of
its uncouth blue figures.
'She would not forget,' she says in a low voice, that, low as it is, has
yet been won with difficulty from that seeming mountain in her throat;
'she has put all--everything into one boat! Oh! poor Prue, to have put
everything into one boat!'
'And such a boat!' adds milady expressively.
For all rejoinder, Peggy fairly bursts out crying. The accumulated
misery of weeks, so carefully pent and dammed in the channels of her
aching heart, breaks down her poor fortifications. Her own life-venture
hopelessly perished! Prue's foundering on the high seas before her very
eyes! She had not cried for herself; she may, at least, have leave to
cry for Prue.
'God bless my soul, Peggy!' says the elder woman, taking off and laying
down her spectacles, and speaking with an accent of pronounced surprise
and indignation; 'you do not mean to say that you are going to _cry_!
There's an end to all argument while you are sniffing like that.' Then
as the girl rises to go, but imperfectly strangling her sobs, she adds
in a still vexed but rather remorseful voice: 'You make me feel quite
choky too. You have no right to make me feel choky! Run away! run away!
What do I care for any of you? I have got my dairy-house!'
CHAPTER XXXI
'And such a boat!' The words ring in Peggy's ears through her homeward
walk. After all, she had heard no new thing. That Freddy was an
unseaworthy craft to which to commit the precious things of a life, the
gems and spices of a throbbing human soul, has long been a patent fact
to her. But there is a wide difference between a fact that has only been
presented gently to one by one's self, and the same fact rudely thrust
under one's eyes and into one's reluctant hands by some officious
outsider.
'And such a boat!' She is unconsciously repeating milady's simple yet
pregnant commentary on her nephew's character as she re-enters her own
garden. Almost as she does so she is aware of Prue flying past her
without seeing her, a condition of things explained by the fact of her
handkerchief being held to her eyes in obvious passionate weeping.
Prue, too, crying! An idea dazedly flashes across her brain that Prue
must have overheard, and before common-sense can correct it, the girl is
gone.
With a still more uncomfortable feeling at her heart than that which had
been already there, Margaret continues her course to the Judas-tree. One
of the pair she had left smiling beneath its shade is still there, and
still smiling; or, if not actually smiling, at least in a mood that has
no relation to tears.
He is lying all along on the garden-seat--Prue's departure, though no
doubt deplored, has at least given him more room to stretch his
legs--and is murmuring something, apparently of a rhythmic nature, half
under his breath, as he stares up at the clouds.
'What have you been making Prue cry about?' asks Peggy, abruptly
stopping before him.
Freddy starts a little, and reluctantly begins to draw back his legs,
which, being too long for the bench, are elevated upon and protruding
beyond its rustic arm.
'I am sure you are not aware of it, dear,' he says pleasantly, 'but your
question has taken rather an offensive form. Prue _is_ crying, I regret
to say; but why you should instantly conclude that it is I that have
made her cry, I am at a loss to imagine. I think, Peg, I must refer you
to 1 Corinthians xiii.'
'You used to tell me that _I_ always made her cry,' returns Peggy
sternly; 'that _I_ was hard upon her; that she "needed very tender
handling."'
'Did I indeed?' says the young man, with a sort of wondering interest.
'It shows how cautious one ought to be in one's judgment of others.
Thank you for telling me, Peg!'
'What have you been talking about to make her cry?' repeats Peggy, with
a sad pertinacity. 'She was not in the least inclined to cry when I went
away. I never saw her more joyous, poor little soul!'
'I may return the compliment, dear,' retorts Freddy, carrying the war
into the enemy's quarters, and staring up with a brotherly familiarity
into her still flushed and tear-betraying face from under the brim of
Prue's garden-hat, which, as being more comfortable and wider-brimmed
than his own, he has worn all afternoon. 'What have you been talking
about to milady to make _you_ cry?'
She puts up her hand with a hasty gesture. She had not known or thought
about the ravages wrought on her face by her late weeping; but now that
the consciousness of it has been brought home to her, she is for a
moment put out of countenance. But in a second she has recovered
herself.
'We were talking of _you_,' she replies gravely. 'Milady knows; she has
found out about you and Prue.'
Freddy has abandoned his prone posture; he is sitting up, lightly
switching the end of his own boot with a small bamboo; Prue's hat, being
capacious, veils his face almost entirely.