Doctor Cupid Part 36

Prue's callings have ceased; the small laughters, exclamations, appeals, have died into silence. Her and Freddy's pretty heads have both disappeared. Talbot and Peggy are left the last upon the tower-top. Her lip trembles.

'You did not want me last autumn, and you have not seen me since.'

'No, worse luck!' cries he pa.s.sionately; 'but you need not throw that in my teeth. You might pity me for it, I think. Eight whole months gone, Peggy--wasted, lost out of our short lives! But how dare you stand there and say that I have not wanted you, do not want you, autumn, winter, summer, spring? You are confusing, perhaps, between yourself and me.

_You_ do not want _me_, that is likely enough. You could not even pretend to have been giving me one poor thought when I asked you. You would have been glad--I saw by your face that your kind heart would have been glad--if you could have told me, with any semblance of truth, that you had been thinking of me; but you had not. I was _miles_ away from you.'

Her lip is trembling again, and her chest heaving. She has not had many love-tales told her; not many more perhaps, or of much better quality, than those with which Lady Betty had spitefully credited her. She has let her eyes fall, because she feels them to be filling up with foolish drops; but now lifts them again, and they look with their old directness, though each has a tear in it, into his.

'Why did you go away?'

_Why did he go away?_ That is a question to which, in one sense, the answer is easy enough. 'Because Lady Betty Harborough sent him.' In another--the only one, unfortunately, in which he can employ it--it is absolutely unanswerable.

'Why did you go away?' She has asked the question, and, with her eyes on his, awaits the answer.

And he? He but now so fluent, with such a stream of eager words to pour straight and hot from his heart into hers, he stands dumb before her.

She does not repeat the question; but she does what is far worse, she moves away to the stairhead and disappears, as all the other votaries of the ceremony, as Freddy and Prue have disappeared, down the ladder.

He follows her, baffled and miserable, gnashing his teeth. Is it possible that the gyves he had thought to have cast off for ever are here, manacling him again as soon as he tries to make one free step? Is the old love to throttle him now with the same strangling clasp, dead, that it had done living? Before G.o.d, no! Not if he can hinder it. She has not waited for him at the tower-foot; but he overtakes her before she has reached the High Street, and without asking her leave.

The crowd on the bridge has dispersed. The city clocks, with their variously-toned voices, are striking six; to their daily toil the workmen, with tools on back, are swinging along. To them there is certainly nothing unfamiliar, probably nothing lovely, in the morning's marvellous clean novelty, that novelty renewed each dawning, as if G.o.d had said not once only but day by day, 'Lo, I make all things new!'

'You asked me a question just now,' says Talbot abruptly.

'Yes.'

'And I did not answer it; I could not. I cannot answer it now. As long as you and I shall live, I can never answer it!'

He stops, pale and panting, and looks at her with a pa.s.sionate anxiety.

O G.o.d! Is Betty's shadow to come between them still? Betty renouncing and renounced; Betty gone, swept away, vanished. Is she still to thrust herself between him and his new heaven? Still to be his bane, his evil demon? Still to lay waste that life, five of whose prime years she has already burnt and withered? If it be so, then verily and indeed his sin has found him out.

In pa.s.sionate anxiety he looks at his companion; but she is holding her head low, and he cannot get a good view of her face.

'Why do you walk so fast?' he asks irritably, his eyes taking in the rapidly diminishing s.p.a.ce that lies before him. 'Is not the distance short enough in all conscience without your lessening it? Walk slower.'

She slackens her pace; but still she does not speak.

'You asked me why I went away?' he continues almost in a whisper, and with his heart beating like a steam-ram. 'Does that mean that it made any difference to you? May I make it mean that it did? Stay--do not speak--I will not let it mean anything else. If you say that it did not, I will not believe you. I cannot afford to believe you!'

He has forbidden her to speak, and yet now he pauses, hanging in a suspense that is almost ungovernable--for they have pa.s.sed Queen's cla.s.sic front, are pa.s.sing 'All Souls'--upon her slow-coming words.

There is a little stir upon her face; a tiny hovering smile.

'I was sorry that you went without your lavender!'

'I am coming back for it,' he cries pa.s.sionately, the joy-tide sweeping up over his heart to his lips, and almost drowning his words. 'Coming back for it--for it and for all else that I left behind me!'

The smile spreads, red and wavering.

'You left nothing else; I sent all your books after you.'

'Yes,' he says reproachfully, 'you were very conscientious. It would have been kinder to be a little dishonest. You might have kept back the one that we had been reading out of. I had a faint hope that you might have kept it back.'

'I did think of it,' she answers, under her breath.

'The mark is in it still!' he cries joyfully. 'Shall we take it up again where we left off? Where shall we sit? Under the Judas-tree?'

Her flickering smile dies into gravity.

'You are getting on very fast,' she says tremulously. 'Are you sure that it is not too fast?'

They have pa.s.sed St. Mary's; n.o.ble porch and soaring spire lie behind them.

'Is it worth while your coming,' she continues, with evident difficulty, and with a quiver she cannot master in her low voice, 'when at any moment you may be obliged to go away again?'

'Why should I be obliged to go away again?'

Her voice has sunk to a key that is almost inaudible.

'I am only judging of the future by the past.'

He groans. The past! Is he never to escape from the past? never to hear the last of it? Is it always to dog him to his dying day?

'Are you sure?' she pursues, lifting--though, as he sees, with untold pain--the searching honesty of her eyes to his, while a fierce red spot burns on each of her cheeks, 'that you are not promising more than you can perform when you talk of coming? Are you sure that--you--are free--to come? You know--you were--not free to stay.'

His face has caught a reflection of the crimson dyeing hers, but his look shows no sign of blenching.

'I _am_ free,' he answers slowly and emphatically. 'Why do you look as if you did not believe me? Cannot you trust me?'

At his words a shadow pa.s.ses over her face. Is not Freddy Ducane always inviting her to trust him? She has grown to hate the phrase.

'I am not good at trusting people,' she says plaintively, with a slight shiver. 'I do not like it.'

They have reached the door of the Mitre.

'Over already!' cries Talbot, in a voice of pa.s.sionate revolt and discontent; 'my own good hour gone before I had well laid hold of it?

Who could believe it? Then at least,' speaking very rapidly, 'say something to me--something else--something better! Whether you trust me or not--G.o.d knows why you should not--do not let me go away with that for----'

'Peggy dear,' interrupts a soft and rather melancholy voice from an upper window above the door--and yet not very much higher than they, so low and unpretending is the old and famous inn in comparison with its staring towering compet.i.tors--'we would not for worlds begin breakfast without you; but I am afraid that Prue is growing rather faint.'

CHAPTER XXV

Whitsun is here. Again the tired workers are let loose. Again the great cities pour out their grimy mult.i.tudes over the fair green country, upon which, year by year, day by day almost, their sooty feet further and further encroach. Among the mult.i.tudes there are, of course, a good many who are not grimy. Cabinet ministers are, as a rule, not grimy--nor fashionable beauties--nor famous lawyers; but yet they all volley out, too, with the rest, to drink the country air, and smell the cowslips.

All over the country the churches are being pranked for Whit-Sunday. It is that festival for which there is least need for devout souls to strip their hothouses and conservatories. In each parish the meadows need only be asked to give a few never-missed armfuls out of their perfumed plenty, and the church is a bower. The brunt of the labour of decorating her church, as of most other parish festivities, falls upon the shoulders--happily vigorous ones--of Peggy Lambton. The Whitsuns, Easters, Christmases, on which Mrs. Evans is not hovering on the verge of a new baby or two, and consequently handicapped for standing poised on ladders, are so few as not to be worth taking into consideration.

Prue is willing; but her flesh is weak, and she tires easily. With the aid, therefore--an interchangeable term, as she sometimes thinks, for hindrance--of half a dozen of the best among the young Evanses, Peggy endures the toil, and reaps the glory alone. She has been standing most of the day, and for the greater part of the time with her arms uplifted, so that she is sufficiently weary; but as the work is not yet done, and there is no one to take her place, she treats her own fatigue with the contempt it deserves.