Doctor Cupid: A Novel
But, alas! her domain is small; and no sooner has she left Prue and the
Judas-tree behind, than the hawthorn bower and Talbot face her. The
creamy foam of flowers that had sent its little pungent petals, shaped
like tiny sea-shells, floating down upon their two happy heads, has
changed to lustreless red berries.
'They are not more changed than I!' she says; and so sinks, helplessly
sobbing, upon the rustic bench, her cheek pressed against the gnarled
trunk. 'They are all the same!--all the same!' she moans. If it were not
so, would she be lying with her head achingly propped against this rough
bark? Would not it have been resting on her love's breast? Would not he
have been telling her that Prue will get well? She has no one now to
tell her that Prue will get well; and when she tells herself so, it does
not sound true.
The tears drip from under her tired lids. One moment she is here, with
aching body and smarting soul; the next she is away--how far, who shall
say? Away, at ease; all her sorrows sponged out, for God has sent her
His lovely angel--sleep.
It is two hours later when she wakes with a frightened start, and
springs--half unconscious of her whereabouts at first--to her feet. The
position of the sun in the sky, the altered angle of the shadow cast by
her may-bush, tell her to how much longer a period than she had intended
her five minutes have stretched. She begins to run, with a beating
heart, back towards the house. Prue will have missed her! Prue will have
been crying out for her! How stupid, how selfish of her to fall asleep!
She has entered the hall, when the noise of a closing door--her ear
tells her Prue's--reaches her; and by the time she gets to the foot of
the stairs she is confronted by a person coming quickly down. It is not
Sarah, nor yet the doctor. It is the person to whom, beside the
Judas-tree, she had framed that bitter message. She can give it now if
she chooses. Freddy's hair is all ruffled, and the tears are streaming
down his face--real, genuine salt tears.
'Oh, Peggy!' he cries, in a broken voice, as he catches sight of her,
seizing both her hands; 'is that you? Come and talk to me! Come and say
something nice to me! I am _so_ miserable! Oh, how dreadful these
partings are!'
As he speaks he draws her back into the hall with him; and throwing
himself on the settle, flings his arms down upon the cushions, and his
head upon them.
'Have you seen her?' asks Peggy in a shocked stern voice. 'Do you mean
to say that you have seen her?'
The answer comes, blurred and muffled, from among the pillows.
'Yes, yes.'
'You are not satisfied, apparently, with the way in which you have done
your work,' rejoins Peggy, with an intonation of icy irony, though her
voice trembles; 'you are anxious to put the finishing-stroke to it!'
'I do not know what you are talking about,' says Freddy, lifting his
tossed head and his tear-stained face, and looking at her with his wet
eyes. 'I can see by your look that you mean to be unkind--that you have
some cruel intention in your words; but you may spare yourself the
trouble. I am so wretched that I am past feeling any blow you may aim at
me. I knew nothing of her illness; her letter reached me only an hour
ago. I came to see her; she heard my voice. Oh, Peggy, you do not
realise how keen love's ears are! She asked to see me; she was lying on
the sofa in her dressing-room. My Prue!--my Prue! What have you been
doing to her? Oh, that word "Good-bye"! What long reverberations of
sorrow there are in it!'
At the sight of the young man's emotion, so overpowering and to all
appearance so genuine, Peggy's heart has been softening a little; but at
this last sentence, uttered with something of his old manner of lofty
and pensive reflection, it hardens again. Bitterness, such as had seized
upon her by the Judas-tree, is rising again in her.
'You keep to your plan, then? you are going?' she asks, breathing hard,
and with a sort of catch in her voice.
'And leave her as she now is?' answers Freddy, with an accent of wounded
reproach, which perhaps in his opinion may exempt him from answering the
question directly. 'Oh, my Peg, if I could but teach you to credit your
poor fellow-creatures with at least bare humanity!'
'Then I am to understand that you are _not_ going? that the idea is
given up?'
She is still standing inexorably over him.
'I do not know why we should discuss the subject at all to-day,' returns
Mr. Ducane, again interring his head in the cushions; 'I have not the
heart to discuss anything to-day.'
'Then you did not mention the subject to her?'
'She introduced it herself; she has quite come round to think it a good
plan--if you do not believe me, you may ask her--a year's probation to
make me fitter for my Prue'--in a voice of dreamy tenderness. 'Oh,
Peggy, cannot you understand what a sacred deposit the care of such a
soul as Prue's is? cannot you comprehend that I do not feel yet worthy
of it? You know, dear, I am very young, though you never will own it;
and you cannot put gray heads upon green shoulders. Be merciful to me,
little friend! be merciful to me!'
As he makes this coaxing request, he takes her reluctant hand and
presses his wet cheek against it. But she feels no mercy in her heart,
and promises him none even when she leaves him stretched full-length
upon the settle, shaken with real sobs. For her, he may sob as long as
he pleases; while in one panic-stricken bound upstairs she reaches her
sister. She finds her--the Prue upon whom the doctor had enjoined such a
strict confinement to bed and maintenance at one temperature--sitting,
not even lying upon the dressing-room sofa, breathing labouringly, with
every symptom of imminent bronchitis, with racing pulse and burning
hands, but with heaven in her eyes.
'You have seen him,' she says pantingly, as Margaret comes in. 'You have
heard--oh, do not scold me for getting up! I know that I ought not, but
I will go back to bed as soon as you like; and--and it _is_ real, is not
it? it _is_ true? I am not wandering. I was last night, I know; but I am
not now, am I? Give me something of his, something to hold that I may be
sure that it is true!'
Peggy has sat down upon the sofa beside her, and gathered up the little
quivering figure into her arms.
'I will go back to bed now,' says Prue restlessly; but oh, with how
different a restlessness from that of three hours ago! 'If I do not, I
shall be longer in getting well, and I want to get well quickly. If I
do not get better he will not go, and it would be selfish to hinder him
from doing what is so much the best thing for him; yes, and for me
too--for me too! Take me back to bed, Peggy.'
So Peggy takes her back to bed, and as she lays her down the thin arms
close gratefully round her neck.
'You dear old soul! It is your turn for a bit of luck next.'
And when the night comes--the night dreaded by watchers beside
sick-beds, the night that doubles fever and sharpens pain, and
accentuates grief--Prue, clasping to her feverish breast an old glove,
left behind by careless Freddy on some former occasion, wakes repeatedly
with a jump from her broken slumbers to ask in a terrified tone, 'Is it
true? Is it real?' And Peggy is always there, always awake, always
beside her to answer reassuringly that it is. It would have been too
flagrant a violation of the laws of nature and disease, if poor Prue had
escaped scot-free from her infraction of both; and, in fact, her
escapade is followed, as the meanest observer might have predicted that
it would be, by a very sharp attack of bronchitis.
For a few days her illness is so acute that it seems as if Mr. Ducane
would be placed in the painful dilemma of either leaving his betrothed
fighting hand to hand with death, or of abandoning his cherished
project. He arrives at the Red House in the morning, almost before the
shutters are opened; he strays for hours about the garden with his hands
clasped, his head bent forward, and his charming face as white as a
sheet, till even Jacob's bowels yearn over him; though the style of
observations by which he elects to show his sympathy are not perhaps
precisely of a cheering nature, consisting chiefly of remarks such as
that 'his missis says she never see any one go downhill so quick as Miss
Prue--never.'
One day when Prue is at her worst, Freddy lies on the floor at her
threshold, with his face buried in the mat, to the intense admiring
compassion of Sarah and the nurse; but he really is not thinking of
them. By and by the disease yields to treatment. Perhaps the patient's
determination to get quickly better--her eagerness to return to a life
once more become joyous and valuable to her--counts for much in the
quickness of her rally.
Whatever be the cause, Prue is certainly better--is able once again to
sit up; to shake milady's hearty hand, and eat her excellent jelly. But
by the time that she is able to do so, the Hartleys' monster yacht is
getting up her steam at Southampton; and all her passengers, with the
exception of Mr. Ducane, are off to embark upon her. Within two days the
die must be cast as to whether Freddy is to be of that ship's company or
not.
'It is for you to decide, sweet,' he says, in his south-wind voice with
all the joyousness taken out of it, as he half-lies, half-sits, beside
the dressing-room sofa, upon which she is stretched in her shadowy
convalescence, while his head rests on the pillow beside hers. 'Yes--no!
go--stay! I have no will but yours. You know that the only reason I ever
had for wishing it was that I might come back a little less unworthy of
you--with wider experience and larger horizons. As to _pleasure_'--with
a small disdainful smile--'there can be no question of _that_! I think
that my worst enemy will own that pleasure and I have waved farewell to
each other of late.'
Prue has been lying prostrate and languid; but at his words she draws
herself up into a sitting posture, and into her little face, not much
less white than her dressing-gown, has come a faint pink flush--the
flush of a generous effort.
'And, after all, it is only a year,' she says bravely. 'How absurd to
make a fuss about only a year! When one was a child, one used to think
it endless--an eternity; but now--why, it is gone by like a flash!'
'_Only_ a year!' repeats Freddy, with a moan. 'Oh, Prue, can you say
_only_? How do you do it, dear? Teach me--teach me!'
'And when it is over,' continues Prue, the colour deepening in her thin
cheeks with the pain and labour of her sacrifice, 'and you come back,
perhaps you will find me, too, changed, and not quite for the worse.
Perhaps--perhaps if I do my best--if I try hard to educate myself
between now and then--you will find me better able to understand your
thoughts, and enter into your ideas, and say something besides the
stupid praise--which I know has often vexed you, though you have tried
not to show it--of your poems.'
She stops exhausted, and her faint head droops on his breast. The tears
have sprung again to Freddy's eyes. Before he can make any rejoinder,
she has lifted her face, and is again speaking.
'You say that I am to decide?' she says, in a firm tone. 'Well, then, I
have decided. You are to go. I send you. No one,' her voice breaking a
little, 'can pity me if I send you myself--can they?'
Two days later he goes. Upon the solemnity of his last parting with his
sweetheart no one intrudes; but he prolongs his leave-taking so
unreasonably that he is within an ace of losing his train; and it is not
till after many vigorous rappings at the door, strong remonstrances, and
nervous apostrophes through the keyhole, that he at length issues from
Prue's room, livid and staggering.
'Oh, Peggy!' he says hoarsely, wringing her two hands; 'surely--surely