Doctor Cupid: A Novel. Broughton Rhoda
herself up. 'You know one always expects to get a character from the last place.'
'I do not know whether it is a good one. It is a nine-years' one.'
Then they set off again. Next time it is about Prue.
'I hope she is not ill?' his eyes following Margaret's to the little forlorn figure under the Judas-tree.
'No-o.'
'Nor unhappy?'
'We all have our Black Mondays' – evasively – 'only some of us have Black Tuesdays and Black Wednesdays as well – ah!'
What has happened to her? Her gloomy sentence has ended in a suppressed cry of joy, and her cheeks have changed from pink to damask. He turns to seek the cause of this metamorphosis.
'Why, there is Ducane!'
In an instant his eyes have pounced back upon her face. It is settling again into its pretty normal colours, but the joy is still there.
'Yes, there is Freddy!' she acquiesces softly.
A sharp needle of jealousy pricks his heart. This, then, is why she received him so frigidly. She was expecting the other.
'We stop now, I suppose?' he says abruptly.
'What! tired already, Jacob's would-be successor?' asks she rallyingly.
'Hardly. But I supposed that you would wish to stop.'
'On account of Freddy?' – with a little shrug. 'Pooh! he is a fly on the wall; and besides, he – he is not coming this way.'
It is true. Straight as a die young Ducane is making for the Judas-tree; and from under that Judas-tree a little figure, galvanised back into youth and bloom, rises, walking on air to meet him.
The eyes of John and Margaret meet, and he understands. As he goes home he feels that he has made a real step in advance this time. He shares a secret with her. He knows about Prue!
CHAPTER X
'Our Master hath a garden which fair flowers adorn,
There will I go and gather, both at eve and morn:
Nought's heard therein but Angel Hymns with harp and lute,
Loud trumpets and bright clarions, and the gentle, soothing flute.
'The lily white that bloometh there is Purity,
The fragrant violet is surnamed Humility:
Nought's heard therein but Angel Hymns with harp and lute,
Loud trumpets and bright clarions, and the gentle, soothing flute.'
'Well,' cries Peggy anxiously, as, the young men having taken leave, she sees her sister come running and jumping, and humming an air, to meet her, 'is it all right?'
'Of course it is all right,' replies Prue, vaulting over the tennis-net to let off a little of her steam. 'If it had not been for your long face, I should never have doubted it.'
'Yes?'
'It was just as I expected; he was too polite to leave them. He says he never in his life remembers spending two such tedious days; but he is so unselfish. He says himself that he knows he is full of faults, but that he cannot understand any one being selfish, even from the point of view of their own pleasure. He said it so simply.'
'H'm!'
'I was so sorry for you, Peggy – saddled with that tiresome John Talbot all morning. Of course I ought to have helped you; but you know I had not a word to throw to a dog. It was very provoking of him, wasting all your morning for you.'
'My morning was not wasted,' rejoins Margaret calmly. 'He may be a very bad man, but he mows well.'
'He might as well have finished it while he was about it,' says Prue, captiously eyeing the lawn. 'It looks almost worse than it did before, half mown and half unmown.'
For an instant Margaret hesitates; then, with a slight though perceptible effort over herself, she says:
'I suppose he thought so; for he has offered to come again to-morrow to finish it. He said one could not leave it half-shaven, like a poodle.'
She looks at her sister a little doubtfully as she speaks – as one not quite sure of the soundness of the comparison, and that would be glad to have it confirmed by another judgment. But Prue's wings have already carried her up again into her empyrean.
'We are to ride quite late this afternoon. He wants me to see the reapers reaping by moonlight as we come home. He says he always associates me with moonlight. I am to ride the bay. He says he quite looks upon her as mine – that it gives him a sort of turn to see any one else on her;' and so on, and so on.
Margaret smiles rather sadly; but as it is no use going to meet trouble half-way, she allows herself to be carried away by Prue's infectious spirits, on however rickety a foundation those spirits may be built. In her heart she is scarcely more pleased with her own conduct than with her sister's.
'One cannot touch pitch without being defiled,' she says to herself severely.
She says it several times – is, indeed in the act of saying it next morning, when, on the stroke of eleven, punctual to his minute, the poor pitch reappears. She sets him at once to his mowing, and allows him very short intervals for rest and conversation. Since he has come to work, let him work. No doubt as soon as he discovers that it is honest labour and not play that is expected of him he will trouble her with no more of his assiduities. And yet, as he bids her good-bye, leaving behind him a smooth sweep of short velvet for her to remember him by, he seems to linger.
'How is Jacob?' he asks.
'No better.'
'The garden looks a little straggly,' suggests he insidiously, knowing her weak side. 'A great many things want tying up. The beds need edging, and the carnations ought to be layered.'
'You are very learned,' says she, smiling. 'Does the F.O. teach you gardening?'
'Well, no; that is not included in the curriculum. That is an extra.'
'Who did teach you, then?' asks she, with an inquisitiveness which, as soon as the words are out of her mouth, shocks and surprises herself.
Can it be Betty? A Betty that loves her children and digs in her garden! If it is so, Peggy will have to reconstruct her altogether.
'My sister.'
His sister! What a relief! It would have been so humiliating to have had her strongest taste degraded by a community with painted, posturing Betty.
'You have a sister?'
'Had. There is a good deal of difference.'
And with that he leaves her abruptly. But he returns next day at the same hour; and, as there has blown a boisterous wind in the night, which has prostrated top-heavy plants, torn off leaves, and scattered flower-petals, she has not the heart to refuse his aid in a general tidying and sweeping up. Next day he clips the edges of the borders very nicely with a pair of shears; and the next day they gather lavender off the same bush. Gathering lavender, particularly off the same bush, is a good deal more productive of talk than mowing; nor is it possible to her to keep her new servant within the bounds of a silence to which she had never attempted to confine her old one.
But, indeed, by the time that they have come to the lavender day the wish for his silence has ceased. On the second – the general sweeping day – he had told her about his sister – had told her in short dry sentences how he had lost her; and she had cried out of sympathy for him who did not cry, and had said to herself, 'What if it had been my Prue?' On the third day, though assuredly no word or hint of Betty had passed his lips, somehow, by woman's instinct, sharpened by observation, she has sprung to a conclusion, not very erroneous, as to his garish mock-happiness and his shattered life. On the fourth day she asks herself why he never comes except in the forenoon; and herself answers the question, that it is because lazy Betty lies late, and until one o'clock has no knowledge of his comings or goings. On the fifth day she resolves that he shall come in the afternoon. She will be visited openly or not at all. So when, giving