Doctor Cupid Part 45

'It is true then?' Peggy asks, in a voice of such bitter suffering as if she were realising it for the first time; as if she had not already known it for twelve endless hours.

'What is the use of denying it?' he replies blankly; 'you say that you saw her!'

She has risen to her feet again, risen to her full height (how tall she is!); and once again stands confronting him, not even asking the table-edge for any support.

'And--you--told--me--that--you--were--free!'

The words drop wonderingly from her mouth, barbed with an icy contempt that makes him writhe. But at least he thanks G.o.d that she does not treat him to such mirth as Betty's.

'I told you the truth,' rejoins the poor fellow doggedly--'I _was_ free; I _am_ free!'

But the consciousness of the impossibility of really clearing his character, save at the expense of her whom he must for ever shield, lends a flatness and unreality to his a.s.sertion, which, as he feels through every aching fibre, will only serve the more deeply to convince Peggy of his guilt. It is not long before he sees that he has divined justly.

'You need not make a laughing-stock of me,' she says with dignity, turning towards the door. But at that, the despair which has been paralysing him awakes, and cries out loud, giving him motion and a voice.

'You are not going!' he cries in a tone whose agony stabs her like a knife, flinging himself upon her pa.s.sage.

'What is there to stay for?' she answers, choked. But she pauses. Can he, even yet, have anything to say?

'Do you think that I met her there _on purpose_?' he asks, his words pouring out in a hoa.r.s.e eager flood, as if he had but little hope of commanding her attention for long to them--'by appointment? Ask yourself whether it is possible? Was I so anxious to leave you? Was not it you that drove me away? I tell you I had no more idea of meeting her than I had of meeting----' he hesitates, seeking for a comparison strong enough to emphasise his denial--'as I had of meeting one of the dead. I did not even know that she was in the neighbourhood. I had held no communication with her for months. It was an accident--a mere accident!'

He breaks off suffocated. At the intense sincerity of his tone, a sincerity which it is difficult to believe feigned, a sort of stir has come over her face; but in a moment it has gone again.

'Was it,' she asks with a quietness that makes his hopes sink lower than would any noisy tears or tantrums, 'was it _by accident_ that she was in your arms?'

He is silent. In point of fact, he is as innocent of that embrace as Peggy herself; but from telling her so he is, being a man and an Englishman, for ever debarred. He must stand there, and bear the consequences of that supposed guilt, whatever those consequences may be. There is a little stillness while he waits his sentence--a little stillness broken only by the eight-day clock's tick-tack, and by the distance-mellowed sounds of the village rising to go about its daily work.

'Have you nothing to say for yourself, then?' she asks at last, in a voice which she dares not raise above a whisper for fear of its betraying her by altogether breaking down--'no explanation to give?'

'I tell you that it was all an accident,' he repeats, with a doggedness born of his despair. 'I can give no other explanation.'

'And that is none,' she replies, a wave of indignation sending back the colour to her ashy cheeks, and steadying her shaking limbs as she again turns to leave the room.

He does not, as before, throw himself in her way; he remains standing where he is, and only says in a dull voice:

'Are you going?'

'Why should I stay?'

'Going without saying good-bye?'

'I will say good-bye if you wish.'

'Going for--_for good_?'

'Yes.'

He makes no effort to change her resolution--vents no protest--if that indeed be not one, and the strongest he could utter, that long groan with which he flings himself on a chair beside the table, and covers his face with his hands. She has reached the door. No one hinders her from opening it and leaving him, and yet she hesitates. Her sunk blue eyes look back at him half relentingly.

'Are you sure,' she says quaveringly, while her pale lips tremble piteously--'are you sure that you have nothing to say--nothing extenuating? I--I should be glad to hear it if you had. I--I--I--would try my very best to believe you.'

There is no answer. Only the mute appeal conveyed by that p.r.o.ne figure, with its despairing brown head fallen forwards on its clenched hands. Is it possible that he has not heard her? After a moment's vacillation, she retraces her uncertain steps till she stands beside him. Feeling her proximity, he looks up. At the sight of his face, she gives a start. Can it be she herself--she that had thought to have loved him so kindly--who has scored these new deep lines on brow and cheek? At the relenting evidenced by her back-coming, his dead hopes revive a little.

'Do you know what I did when I reached the walled garden last night?--I am afraid that you will not think the better of my common sense--I knelt down and kissed the place where I thought that your feet might have trod last year.'

'You did?' she says, with a catch in the breath; 'you did? and yet five minutes afterwards you were--oh!' breaking off with a low cry; 'and this is what men are like!'

He sees that his poor plea, instead of, as he had faintly hoped, a little bettering his position with her, has, read by the light of her mistaken knowledge, only served to intensify in her eyes the blackness of his inconstancy. Well, it is only one more added to the heap of earth's unnumbered injustices. It is only that Betty has done her work thoroughly this time. But he cannot bear to meet the reproachful anguish of the face that is bent above him, knowing that never on this side the grave can he set himself right with her. If only it might be for ever, instead of for these few hurrying moments, that he could shut out the light of day! The clock ticks on evenly. It sounds unnaturally loud and brutal in his singing ears; but its tick is not mixed with any light noise of retreating footsteps. She is still lingering near him, and by and by a long sob shudders out on the air.

'If you could persuade me that I was wrong,' she wails; 'if you could persuade me that it was some hideous delusion of my eyes--people have had such before now--that it existed only in my wicked fancy! Oh, if you could--if you could!'

'I cannot,' he replies hoa.r.s.ely; 'you know that I cannot. Why do you torment me?' He has answered without looking up, still maintaining the att.i.tude dictated by his despair; but when a little rustle of drapery tells him that she is really departing, he can no longer contain himself, but falls at her feet, crying out, 'Tell me how bad my punishment is to be!'

For a moment she looks down on him silently, her face all quivering as with some fiery pain; then in a very low voice:

'Punishment!' she says; 'punishment! There is no question of _punishment_. It is only that you have killed my heart.'

'Killed--your--heart!' he repeats blankly, as if too stunned to take in the meaning of the phrase.

'Yes,' she says, breathing fast and heavily; 'yes. I do not think you knew what you were doing. I believe it was a sudden madness that seized you--such a madness as,' with a touch of scorn, 'may be common to men. I know but little of them and their ways; but--but--what security have I against its seizing you a second time?'

He writhes. A second time? Oh, if she did but know how little it had seized him the first!

'If I married you now,' she goes on, her voice gaining a greater firmness, and a new and forlorn stability coming into her white face, 'I should love you, certainly. Yes,' with a melancholy shake of her head, 'I think that I shall never leave off loving you now. But if I married you, I should make you very unhappy; I should not take things easily--I should not be patient. And however happy we might be when we were together, since you have killed my trust in you, you would never be out of sight that I should not be fancying that you were--as--as--as I saw you last night.'

Her voice has dropped to an almost inaudible pitch. He has risen to his feet again, and some instinct of self-respect helping him, stands silently before her, accepting the doom which, as he hopelessly feels, can be averted by no words that he has leave to utter.

To her ears has come the noise of nearing wheels--the wheels of the fly he had ordered over-night to take him to the station, allowing the smallest possible margin of time in which to get there, so that as little as possible might be robbed from the poignant sweetness of his last farewells.

The poignant sweetness! He almost laughs. That sound must have hit her ears too, judging by the long sob that swells her throat, and by the added rush of anguish in her next words:

'I ought to have believed what they told me of you, but I would not; I would believe only you--only _you_; and this is how you have rewarded me!'

He locks his teeth together hard. For how much longer can he bear this?

There comes over him a rushing temptation to try to buy one soft look from her to take with him, by the hypocrisy of asking her forgiveness; he whose whole smitten soul stands up in protest against the need of any forgiveness.

But no. Sooner than descend to such an equivocation he will depart on his lonely way uncomforted.

'I must go,' he says steadily, though his lips are livid. 'Will you--would you mind shaking hands with me?'

He is going. She had known what the wheels meant, and yet there seems a murderous novelty in the idea. She has put her death-cold hand into his; speech is almost beyond her; but she mutters some poor syllables about not wishing him ill.

'Peggy,' he says, with a solemnity such as that of those who are spending their last breath in some sacred utterance; 'Peggy, you are wrong! Any one to whom you told your story--any one who had to judge between you and me, would say that you were right; but you--are--wrong!

If I have killed your heart, you have killed mine, so we are quits.

Good-bye!'

The next moment she is alone in the room.