Doctor Cupid: A Novel
the bitterness of death is past! Take care of her--in God's name take
care of her for me! Do you hear?--take care of her for me!'
But Peggy answers never a word.
CHAPTER XXXVII
'Weep with me, all you that read
This little story,
And know, for whom a tear you shed,
Death's self is sorry.'
It is Sunday. The _Lapwing_ is ploughing her way through a short
chopping sea in the Bay of Biscay; and here at home, at Roupell, the
people are issuing in a little quiet stream from afternoon church. They
are coming out rather later, and with rather more alacrity than usual,
both which phenomena are to be accounted for by the fact of Mr.
Evans--never churlishly loth to yield his pulpit to a spiritual
brother--having lent it to a very young deacon, who has taken a mean
advantage of this concession to inflict fifty minutes of stammering
extempore upon the congregation.
The Vicar has sat during this visitation in an attitude of hopeless
depression, and has given out, with an intense feeling born of the
excessive appositeness of the words to his own case, the hymn after the
sermon--
'Art thou weary, art thou languid?'
Peggy sits alone in her pew, and her mind straying away from the
fledgeling curate's flounderings, she asks herself sadly for how many
more Sundays will this be so?
Mrs. Evans overtakes her as she walks down the path after service, to
tell her that she and her whole family are to set forth on the
following Tuesday in pursuit of that change for which she has been so
long sighing.
'Mr. Evans is off on his own account!' cries she in cheerful narration.
'He does not like travelling with so large a party; it fidgets him, so
he is off on his own account. The Archdeacon wanted him to go with him
to the Diocesan Conference; but, as he justly says, what he needs to
recruit him is an entire change of ideas as well as scene. So he is
going to run over to Trouville or Deauville, or one of those French
watering-places.'
'Indeed!'
'It seems very unkind of us--I am so sorry that we are leaving you here
alone,' pursues Mrs. Evans, her elated eye and tone giving the lie to
her regretful words. 'And they tell me that you are to lose milady too;
she talks of a month at Brighton. She does not much fancy being at the
Manor at the fall of the leaf.'
'Thank you,' replies Peggy civilly; 'but we never mind being by
ourselves.'
'Oh, I know that you do not in a general way,' returns Mrs. Evans. 'But
of course just now it is different; Prue so far from well. I only
thought--I was only afraid--in case----'
'In case what?' asks Peggy curtly, while a cold hand seems crawling up
towards her heart.
'Oh, nothing! nothing! I was only going to say, in case--in case
she--she had a relapse.'
'And why should she have a relapse?' inquires Margaret sharply, in an
alarmed and angry voice, turning round upon her companion.
'Why indeed!' replies the other, looking aside, and laughing rather
confusedly. 'And at all events, you have Dr. Acton. He is so nice and
attentive, and yet does not go on paying his visits long after there is
any need for them, just to run up a bill as so many of them do.'
She is interrupted in her eulogium of the parish doctor by the
appearance on the scene--both of them running at the top of their speed,
as if they more than suspected pursuers behind them--of Lily and Franky
Harborough. They, too, being on the wing home to-morrow, have come to
bid their friend, Miss Lambton, good-bye; a ceremony which they entirely
disdain to go through either in the churchyard or in the road, or indeed
anywhere but under her own roof.
'Well, then, if you come you must be very quiet; you must make no
noise,' she has said warningly.
She repeats the caution when they have reached the hall of the Red
House, upon the settle of which there is no Prue lying; for though she
is so much better--oh, so much--she has not yet been moved downstairs
from the dressing-room.
'You must be very quiet,' Peggy repeats; 'you must remember that Prue is
ill!'
Franky has climbed upon her knee, and is playing with the clasp of her
Norwegian belt. He pauses from his occupation to ask her gravely, and in
a rather awed voice, 'Is she _very_ ill? Is she going to die?'
'God forbid!' cries Peggy, starting as if she had been stabbed. What!
are they all agreed to run their knives in their different ways into
her? 'My darling, do not say such dreadful things!'
'People do not die because they are ill,' remarks Lily, rather
contemptuously; 'you did not die!'
'No, I did not die,' echoes the little boy thoughtfully.
He sits very quietly on Margaret's lap for a while, and when at length
he climbs down, walks about the room on ostentatious tiptoe, speaking in
stage-whispers.
It is only at the moment of parting, in the eagerness of pressing upon
his friend once more for acceptance his five-bladed knife, and
self-denyingly rebutting her counter offer of the largest ferret, that
he forgets himself and Prue's invalidhood so far as to raise his little
voice above the subdued key which he has imposed upon himself.
Peggy stands leaning against the gate, watching, until it has turned the
corner out of sight, the tiny sailor-dressed figure disappearing down
the road, with its refused love-gift reluctantly restored to the custody
of its white duck trousers-pocket, with its small shoulders shaken with
its sobs, and with its hand dragging back in petulant protest against
the relentless grasp of its nurse.
'Poor little fellow! I almost wish that I had taken his knife,' she says
regretfully.
And now they are all gone, dispersed their different ways: milady in her
brougham, the children and maids in the omnibus, and the Evans family
squeezed into, packed all over, and bulging out of their own one-horse
waggonette and the inn fly. They are all gone--gone a week, a fortnight,
now a month ago.
At first Peggy is glad of their departure, even milady's. What security
has she but that, with all her hearty rough kindness, with her good
sound human heart, and her plentiful kitchen physic, she may not at any
moment stick another knife into her, with some well-intended word, as
Mrs. Evans, as little Franky have already done? She would fain see no
one--no one. The fox, swishing his brush in lazy welcome to her, and
raising his russet head to be scratched through the wires of his house,
poisons their intercourse with no insinuation that Prue is not really
better. Minky does not ask her with the terrible point-blankness of
childhood, 'Is Prue going to die?'
She will confine herself, then, to their kind and painless company.
But as the days go by, each dwindling day with the mark of night's
little theft upon its shorn proportions; as the wind's hand and the
frost's tooth make ravine among dear summer's leaves; as the beautiful
blue and green year swoons in November's damp grasp--a change comes over
her spirit, a famine for the touch of some compassionate hand, for the
sound of some humane brave voice bidding her be of good cheer. It is a
forlorn and rainy autumn. As in the days of St. Paul's shipwreck, so in
those of Peggy's, 'neither sun nor stars in many days appeared.' When
the rain-sheets are not soaking the saturated ground, the thick, dull
blue mists reign everywhere. They have left their legitimate distant
province, and have advanced even to the very walls of the Red House,
swaddling the laurels and the naked lilacs, and the China roses that
offer the delicate pertinacity of their blossoms to the autumn blast.
The garden has not yet been done up for the winter, as Jacob is waiting
until 'they dratted leaves' are all down; and the rows of
frost-blackened dahlias looming through the fog, the tattered garlands
of canariensis, the scentless ragged mignonette, seem to Margaret's
fancy, inflamed and heightened by grief and sleeplessness--for she
seldom now has an unbroken night--to be the grinning skeletons of her
former harmless joys.
The park is a fog-swathed swamp, here and there quite under water. Once
or twice when she has passed by the Manor, its shuttered windows have
appeared to scowl sullenly at her. Even the silence of the Vicarage
seems hostile, as does the shut gate, upon which no pea-shooting boys or
long-legged down-at-heel girls are swinging and shouting.
To the village, usually so often haunted by her charitable feet, she
scarcely ever now goes. She dares not enter the cottages, because she
knows what their inmates will say to her. It is no longer only Jacob's
'missis' to whom the rapidity with which Miss Prue is going downhill is
matter of outspoken compassionate wonder. They mean no unkindness. They
do as they would be done by. How many times has Peggy heard them calmly
discussing in the very presence of their dying, the probability or
improbability of their holding out until Christmas, or Candlemas, or
Whitsun, as the case may be! But the first time that a kind-hearted
cottage wife suggests to her, as in like case she would wish to have it
suggested to herself, 'What a sad thing it is to think that poor Miss
Prue will never see the primroses again, she as was allers so fond of
flowers!' Peggy has stumbled away, half-stunned, as if some great and
crushing weight had fallen on her head. And this Prue, about whom her
village friends are making such sad prophecies, how is it with her? If
you had asked her, she would have said, 'Well, very well, excellently
well!'
Every day for the last month she has been going to be moved down next
day to her settle in the hall; but whenever the new morning has come,
that move has been deferred to the next. 'There is nothing the matter
with her, really nothing; only she does not feel quite up to it; and,
after all, there is plenty of time for her to get well in. Twenty-four
hours will not make much difference, and she is so happy and comfortable
up here.'
Up here, lying on the dressing-room sofa, with the fire flickering on
the hearth beside her, talking to her cheerfully through her bad nights
and her drowsy days; with every little present given her by Freddy
ranged round her, within easy reach of her eye and hand, like a sick
child's toys, and with his letters--they are not very many, for he is
but a poor correspondent, though he says such beautiful things when he
does write--kept delicately blue-ribboned in a little packet under her
pillow, or oftener still held in her hot dry hand.
Their number has lately been swelled by the addition of a bulky one from
Southampton, over which she has rained torrents of blissful tears.
Hanging on the wall opposite to her, so that her look may rest
continually upon it, is a large card, upon which she has had the number
of the days of her lover's intended absence marked in black strokes.
Every morning at her waking she has it brought to her, in order to put a
pen-line through one more day. There are over thirty already thus scored
out, as she shows to Peggy with a radiant smile.
At the beginning of the month, her sofa had been always covered with
books. Freddy's own poems--these indeed stay to the last; the 'Browning'
he has retrieved for her from Miss Hartley; books of criticism, of
history, of verse, over which she pores laboriously, in pursuance of her
promise to him to be more able to enter into his thoughts and understand
his ideas upon his return. But by and by she has to cease from the
attempt.
'I am afraid I cannot quite manage it,' she says to her sister, with an
apologetic intonation; 'my head does not seem very clear. Sometimes I am
afraid'--the wistful tears stealing into her blue eyes--'that it is not
in me; that when he comes back he will find me just where he left me;
that he will have to put up with me as I am.'