Twilight, Julia Frankau [100 books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗

of a man than that I’d kick myself!”

“More of a man!”

“You wouldn’t get me to stay at the hotel.” She flushed and said:

“Well, you can go now. I’ve had enough of you, you tire me.”

“You’ll send for me to come back directly you are ill?”

“Very likely. That only means I like your drugs better than you.”

He seized her hand, her waist, not for the first time, swore that he would kill himself if she despised and flouted him. Probably she liked the scenes he made her, for she often provoked them. They were mere rough animal scenes, acutely different from those she was able to bring about with Gabriel. But she did not do the only obvious and correct thing, which was to dismiss him and find another doctor.

In these strange days, waiting for her freedom, seeing Gabriel Stanton from Saturday to Monday and only Peter Kennedy all the long intervening week, she may have liked the excitement of being attended by a doctor who was madly in love with her. She excused herself to me on the ground that she was a novelist and he a strange and primitive creature of whom she was making a study. Also, curiously enough, he was genuinely musical. Something of an executant and an enthralled listener.

He himself suggested more than once that she should have other advice about her heart and he brought his partner to see her. But never repeated the experiment. Dr. Lansdowne purred and prodded her, talking all the time he used his stethoscope, smiling between whiles in a superior way as if he knew everything. Particularly when she tried to tell him her symptoms, or what other doctors had diagnosed.

“You have a nurse?” he asked her. “I had better see her nurse, Kennedy.”

“A nurse, why should I have a nurse? I have a maid.”

“You ought never to be without a nurse. You ought never to be alone,” he told her solemnly. “Now do, my dear child, be guided by me.” He smiled and patted her. “I will tell Dr. Kennedy all about it, give him full instructions. I will see you again in a few days. Come, Kennedy, I can give you a lift; we will decide what is to be done.” He smiled his farewell.

“See me again in a day or two! Not if I know it. Not in a day or two, or a week or two, or a month or two.”

She was furious with him, and with Dr. Kennedy for having brought him. Peter Kennedy had acted well, according to his lights. He did not wish to turn his beloved patient over to his all-conquering partner, but the more infatuated he became about her the less he trusted his own knowledge.

“A bad case of angina, extensive valvular disease. Keep her as quiet as possible, she ought not to be contradicted. Get a nurse or a couple of nurses for her. Daughter of Edgar Rysam, the American millionaire, isn’t she? Seems to have taken quite a fancy to you. Extraordinary creatures these socalled clever women! You ought to make a good thing out of the case.”

Kennedy went back to Carbies after Dr. Lansdowne dropped him, made his way back as quickly as possible. Margaret had bidden him return to tell her what had been said.

“Not that I believe in him or in anything he may have told you. He did not even listen to my heart, he was so busy talking and grinning and reassuring me. What did he tell you? That he heard a murmur? I am so sick of that murmur. I have been hearing of it ever since I was a child.”

Peter slurred over everything Lansdowne had said to him, except that she must be kept quiet; she must not allow herself to get excited. He implored her to keep very quiet. She laughed and asked whether he thought he had a calmative influence? He put his arms about her for all that she resisted him and blubbered over her like the great baby he was.

“I adore you, I want to take care of you, and you won’t look at anybody but him.”

She pushed him away, told him she could not bear to be touched.

“If it hadn’t been for him? Tell me, if it hadn’t been for Gabriel Stanton it would have been me, wouldn’t it? You do like me a little, don’t you?”

It was impossible to keep him at a proper distance.

“Like you! not particularly. Why should I? You are very troublesome and presumptuous.”

She could not deal with him as she did with Gabriel. To this young country doctor, ten years before I knew him and he had acquired wisdom, men and women were just men and women, no more and no less. He had fallen headlong in love with Margaret, and when he saw he had, as he said, no chance, he could not be brought to believe that Gabriel Stanton was not her lover. He was demonstratively primitive, and many of his socalled medical visits she spent in fighting his advances. He knew that what she had to give she was giving to Gabriel Stanton, because she told him so, made no secret of it, but was for ever asking “If it hadn’t been for him? If you’d met me first?” One would have thought that Margaret, Gabriel’s “fair pale Margaret,” would have resented or at least tired of this rough persistent wooing, but if this were so there was nothing in her conduct to show it.

She said or wrote to Gabriel Stanton: “the very thought of physical love is repugnant to me, horrible.” Yet Peter kissed her hands, her feet, attempted her lips, made her fierce wild scenes. She called him a boy, but he was a year older than herself. Gabriel brought her books and the most reverent worship, was mindful of her slightest wish. He hoped that one day she would be his wife, but scarcely dared to say it, since once she put the matter aside, almost imploringly, growing pale, seeming afraid.

“Don’t talk to me of marriage, not yet. How can you? At least, wait!”

She spoke of her sensitiveness. But her sensitiveness was as a mountain to a mist compared with his.

She would tell him her most intimate thoughts, sit with him by dying fire or in gathering twilight, holding herself aloof. If, because he was so different from Peter Kennedy, she did sometimes try her woman’s wiles on him, she never moved him to depart from the programme or the principles she herself had laid down.

Another Sunday evening, it was either the third or fourth of his coming, sitting in the lamplight, after dinner, in the music room, after a long enervating day of mutual confidences and ever-growing intimacy, she tried to break through his defences. They had been talking of Nietzsche, not of his philosophy, but his life. She had been envying Nietzsche’s devoted sister and her opportunities when, suddenly and disingenuously, she startled Gabriel by saying:

“You are not a bit interested in what I am saying, you are thinking of something else all the time.”

“Of you… only of you!”

“Of the intellectual me or the physical me? Do I please you tonight?”

She nearly always wore grey, a ribbon or a flower, material or cut, diversified her wardrobe. Tonight the grey material was the softest crepe de chine; and she wore one pink rose in a blue belt. This treatment gave value to her blonde cendre hair and fair complexion, she gave the impression of a most delicate, slightly faded, yet modern miniature.

“You always please me.”

“Please, or excite you?”

“My dear one!”

He was startled, thought she did not know what it was she was saying. His blood leaped, but he had it under control. What was growing perfectly between them was love. She would soon be a free woman.

“I want to know. Sometimes I wonder if I were more beautiful…”

“You could not be more beautiful.”

“More like other women, or perhaps if you were more like other men…”

“There is no difference between me and other men,” he answered quickly. And then although he thought she did not know what she was implying, or where the conversation might carry them, he went on even more steadily: “I want to carry out your wishes. If I had the privilege of telling you all that is in my heart…”

“I am admiring your self-control.”

It was true she hardly knew what was impelling her to this reckless mood. “My wishes! What are my wishes? Sometimes one thing and sometimes another. Tonight for instance…”

He was in the corner of the sofa, she on the high fender stool in the firelight. There were only oil lamps in the room, and she and the fireside shone more brightly than they.

When she said softly, “Tonight for instance,” she got up; her eyes seemed to challenge him. He rose too, and would have taken her in his arms, but that she resisted.

“No, no, no, you don’t really want to… talking is enough for you.”

“You strange Margaret,” he said tenderly.

“I sometimes wonder if you care for me or only for my talk,” she said with a nervous laugh.

“If you only knew.” His arms remained about her.

“If I only knew!” she exclaimed. “Tell me,” she whispered coaxingly.

“How I long for this waiting time to be at an end. To woo you, win you. You say anything approaching physical love is hateful and abhorrent to you. Yet, if I thought… Margaret!”

She did not repel him, although his arms were around her. And now, reverently, softly, he sought and found her unreluctant lips. One of the lamps flickered and went out. His arms tightened about her; she had not thought to be so happy in any man’s arms. Her heart beat very fast and the blood in her pulses rose.

“How much do you care for me?” she whispered; her voice trembled.

“More than for life itself,” he whispered back.

“And I… I…” He felt her trembling in his arms as if with fear. He loved and hushed her with ineffable tenderness, his control keeping pace with his rising blood. “My love, my love, I will take care of you. Trust yourself to me. I love you perfectly, beloved.”

He had an exquisite sense of honour and a complete ignorance of womanhood. A flash of electricity from him and all would have been aflame. But she had said once that until the decree was made absolute she did not look upon herself as a free woman.

“My little brave one, beloved. It will not be always like this between us. Tell me that it will not. I count the days and hours. You will take me for your husband?”

She could feel the beating of his pulses, her cheek lay against his coat. But her heart slowed down a little. How steadfast he was and reliable, the soul of honour. But she was a woman, difficult to satisfy. She had wanted from him this evening, this moment, something of that she won so easily from Peter Kennedy. The temperament she denied was alight and clamorous.

“Gabriel.”

“Heart of my innermost heart.”

“I am so lonely in this house.”

“Sweetheart.”

“So lonely; it is haunted, I think. I can never sleep, I lie awake… for hours. Don’t go”

Her own words shook and shocked her. She was still and supine in his encompassing arm. There was perhaps a relaxation of his moral fineness, a faint disintegration. But of only a moment’s duration, and no man ever held a woman more reverently or more tenderly.

“My wife that will be… that will be soon. How I adore you.”

Their hands were interlocked, they felt the dear sweetness of each other’s breath; their hearts