Doctor Cupid: A Novel
She does not suffer much actual pain, only her nights are increasingly
broken, and her cough teases her sadly, which only makes her say that
she is quite glad Freddy is not here, as a cough always fidgets him so.
One morning in early November, after a night of more than usually
wakeful unrest on the part of her sister, Peggy, who has had a bed made
for herself on a sofa at the foot of the sick girl's, and has been up
and down with her all night, is standing at the open hall door, trying
to get a little freshness into eyes and brain. Her eyes are stiff with
watching, and her brain feels thick and woolly, so thick and woolly that
you would have thought it incapable of framing a definite idea. And yet
across it there comes shooting now and again with steely clearness a
torturing question--a question that is dressed sometimes in her own
words, sometimes in Freddy's childish lisp, sometimes in the villagers'
rough Doric; but that, however dressed, is yet always, always the same.
She has mechanically picked up the morning paper, and her languid eye is
wandering carelessly over the daily prosaic list of the born, the wed,
and the departed. As well that as anything else, though even as she
makes the apathetic reflection, the question darts again in a new and
hideous guise before her mind: 'How long will it be before there is
another entry among these?'
With a great dry sob, she is in the act of dashing down the journal,
when her glance is arrested by the letters of a familiar name,
_Harborough_. It seems that there is a Harborough dead. Can it be that
Betty has gone to her account? or that her complaisant husband has
carried his complaisance so far as to take himself out of the world, and
leave the field clear for that other? She has time to taste the full
bitterness of this new thought, in the half second before her eye has
mastered the advertisement:
'On the 3d inst., at Harborough Castle, ----shire, after a few
days' illness, Francis Hugh de Vere Deloraine, only son of Ralph
Harborough, Esq., aged 6 years.'
Even now that she has read it, she does not at once understand who it is
that is dead. The string of high-sounding unfamiliar names sets her at
fault. 'Francis Hugh de Vere Deloraine.' Is it--can it be _Franky_ that
is dead? Can it be that neither father nor mother have trodden the
universal road, but that it is the little blooming child who has led the
way? Why, it is impossible! There must be some mistake. It was only
yesterday, as it were, that he was here; that she saw him passing
through that very gate. In the confusion of her ideas, she has hurried
out along the damp drive to the entrance-gate, and, standing there,
gazes irrationally down the road, as if she expected once again to see
the tiny sturdiness of the sailor figure, the tear-washed roses of the
little face turned back over its shoulder in such fond and pouting
protest at having to leave her; but the mist-bound road is empty--empty,
save of its mire and of its rotting leaves. 'Franky dead! Little Franky
dead!' She says it out loud, as if the idea could gain entrance into her
brain more easily by her ears; and then she leans her forehead against
the damp gate-post, and bursts out crying.
'I wish that I had given him another kiss! I wish that I had gone to the
turn of the road with him, as he asked me! I wish that I had taken his
knife!'
Her tears seem to make her intelligence clearer, to render sharper her
power of suffering.
'Is there _no one_ to be left alive? Is Death to have it all his own
way?'
Her dimmed eyes rest on a drift of leaves blown by the last blusterous
wind against the hedge-bank outside; a discoloured pile--the yellow
poplar leaf, the black-brown pear and the bronzed beech, the ribbed
hazel and the smooth lime--one fate has overtaken them all. Dead--dead!
At her foot is an elm-leaf half-dragged underground by the dark industry
of some blind earthworm. Underground--underground! That is the bourne of
us all; of the young green leaf, aloft two months ago on the tree-top,
visited by the voyaging birds and the gamesome airs, as of the little
bounding joyous child.
The searching vapour has penetrated her clothes, and made her shiver
with cold; but she dares not yet go indoors again, dares not yet face
her sick Prue, with those sudden tidings written on her face.
She retraces her steps along the drive, and turns into the garden--the
empty garden; empty to-day of even Jacob's presence, as he is kept at
home by his rheumatism. It is profoundly silent. The fog has got even
into the robin's throat. It is profoundly silent; and yet to Peggy, the
air is full of voices--the voices of her dead, her lost, and her dying.
Her mother, Talbot, Prue, and now little Franky. He was not much to her,
perhaps you may say; and yet she can ill spare his little drop of love
out of her empty cup. Along the walks they hurry to meet her, and yet,
as they come up to her, they pass her by with averted faces.
'I am certainly very lonely,' she says to herself, with a sort of
astonishment; 'it is a very unusual case. There has happened to me what
happens commonly to people only at eighty: I have outlived everything! I
was given very few people to love, to begin with; but I did love them
well. I gave them my very best. Oh, you cannot say, any of you, that I
did not give you my very best, and yet not one of you will stay with me.
Not one of you. God--God! What have I done to be picked out of all the
world for such a fate? Is it fair? Is it fair?'
Her voice goes wailing out into the mist; but the dying world around her
has no answer to give to her riddle. It is awaiting that to its own. She
has thrown herself down on the seat under her hawthorn bower, and from
its dull berries and sharp thorns, and few still-clinging yellow leaves,
the cold drops drip on her bare head, mix with the scalding drops on her
cheeks; but she feels them not as she lies there, huddled up, collapsed,
and despairing. Not for long, however. By and by her soul, as is the way
with souls habitually brave, puts on its courage again. She raises
herself, and lifts her drowned and weary eyes, as if through the fogs
and exhalations they would pierce to Him who, as all the world once
thought, as many still hold to be a truth far dearer than life, sits in
judgment and mercy beyond them.
'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' she says solemnly.
'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'
CHAPTER XXXVIII
'I am not mad,--I would to heaven I were!
For then 'tis like I should forget myself:
Oh, if I could, what grief should I forget!
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canonised, cardinal;
For, being not mad, but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be deliver'd of these woes,
And teaches me to kill or hang myself:
If I were mad, I should forget my son;
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he.
I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity.'
In the days that follow, the death of Franky Harborough, which at an
ordinary time would have been the sorrowful main occupation of Peggy's
thoughts, has to retire into the background of her mind. In the
foreground there is room for but one absorbing topic. Prue is decidedly
worse. In an illness such as hers--which is less a definite disease than
a decline all round, a bowing to its final ruin of a building whose
foundations have been sapped for more than a year--there is very often,
for a considerable period, but little change to be noted from day to
day; and then suddenly--no, not suddenly--in a progression rather, as
natural as that from seedtime to harvest, on some morning, at some noon
or night, there is a step down to a lower level of vitality; a
travelling along that lower level, until the time for a new and farther
descent. It would seem impossible that any breath of the chilly fog
outside could have thrust its pestilent way into the atmosphere,
regulated with so passionate a nicety, of Prue's room; and, indeed,
there is no sign of any return of that bronchitis which had been the
ostensible beginning of her illness. Nor is there any very perceptible
aggravation of any one of her symptoms.
The signs of her approaching dissolution are rather negative than
positive. It is only that Miss Prue is going downhill rather quicker
than before--that is all. There is now no longer any question of the oak
settle in the hall. Even the sofa in the dressing-room has been
abandoned. Prue no longer stirs from her bed; but she lies there quite
happily, quite as happy as she was before; for Freddy's gifts are within
as easy reach of her hand, spread on the counterpane before her, as they
were on the table in the adjoining room; and her card with its 365 black
strokes hangs quite as full in her eye, on the wall opposite her bed.
However bad her night may have been, there is always something to look
forward to at dawning, in having it brought to her to put her triumphant
pen through another day.
'I shall be glad when we have got up to forty,' she says to Peggy, with
a faint but cheerful laugh. 'I shall feel quite differently when we have
reached forty: there will be all but a ninth of the time gone then.'
It is a day on which the officious dusk of the winter afternoon--always
in such haste to shoulder away its pale brother--has already settled
down. For sixteen long hours there will be no more glint of light. This
dreary thought is passing through Peggy's mind, as she nods drowsily
over the fire. She is roused from it and from her semi-sleep by hearing
the room-door open cautiously and seeing Sarah making signs--evidently
not intended to be seen by Prue--through the aperture.
In obedience to them, Margaret rises languidly, and goes out upon the
landing.
'What is it?'
'If you please, 'm, there's a lady wishes to speak to you.'
'Oh, Sarah, you know that I can't see any one; why did not you tell her
so?'
'I did tell her so, 'm, but she would not take "No"; she says if she
stays all night she must see you.'
'What does she mean?' cries Peggy, in a voice of astonished indignation;
'who can she be? Who is she?'
'Well, 'm, I really did not recognise her until she spoke--dressed in
deep mourning and that; and she asked me not to mention her name. She
said she was sure you would not see her if I did.'
_Dressed in deep mourning!_ Peggy's legs have been somewhat shaky under
her of late, through long standing upon them. Perhaps that is why she
now catches at the banisters. It has flashed upon her who her visitor
is. What has brought her hither? Why has she come? Has she gone mad?
'Go and sit with Miss Prue, while I am away,' she says to the servant;
and so walks slowly downstairs. Outside the door of the hall she pauses
a moment to pull herself together. She is trembling violently, and her
teeth chatter.
What has brought her here? What can they have to say to each other? She
enters. Beside the table is standing Lady Betty Harborough; for it is
she who is Peggy's visitor. The lamp is lit, and burns brightly, though
nowadays there is never any one to read or work by its gentle glow. A
flourishing fire sings on the hearth; but their joint cheerfulness
serves only to throw up into higher relief the inky gloom of the figure
they illuminate. She makes no movement to go to meet Peggy, but awaits
her coming; and for a moment the two women look at each other in
silence.
As they do so, a doubt--a real, serious doubt flashes across Peggy's
mind, as to whether this is Lady Betty. Coupled with the doubt comes a
darted recollection of the two last occasions on which she has seen her;
the very last of all, sitting under a date-palm in the Hartleys'