Twilight, Julia Frankau [100 books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗
- Author: Julia Frankau
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“A thousand pounds!” They were both startled, but Peter spoke first.
“That be damned for a tale.” A most unedifying dialogue ensued. Then Peter said, after a short whispered colloquy with Margaret:
“She will give you a hundred pounds, no more and no less. Come, close, or leave it alone. A hundred pounds! Take it or leave it.”
Margaret would have interrupted. “I said double,” she whispered. He translated it quickly:
“Not a farthing more, she says. She has made up her mind. Either that or clear out and do your damnedest.”
Sarah Roope stood out for her price until she nearly exhausted his patience, would have exhausted it but that Margaret, terrified, kept urging and soothing him. Before the end Mrs. Roope said a word that justified him and he put his two hands on her shoulders. He made no point now of her being a woman. There are times when a man’s brutality stands him in good stead, and this was one of such occasions.
“Get out of that chair,” he jerked it away from her. “Out of her presence. You’ll deal with me, or not at all.”
He slid his hands from her shoulders to under her elbows: the noises she made in her throat were indescribable, but her actual resistance was small.
“You are not to sit down in her presence.”
“I prefer to stand.”
“Nor stand either. Outside…” he bundled her towards the door, she tried to hold her ground, but he forced her along. “We’ve had nearly enough of you, very nearly enough. You wait outside that door. I’ll have a word with Mrs. Capel and give you your last chance.” She bup ped out her remonstrance.
“I came here to do her a service. As Mrs. Eddy writes: ‘ Light and darkness cannot mingle.’ I must do as I am guided, and I said from the first we should go to James Capel. Husband and wife should never separate if there is no Christian demand for it.”
“Oh! goto hell!”
He shut the door in her face and came back to Margaret.
“You’d better let me get rid of her for you. I shouldn’t pay her a brass farthing.”
“I’d pay her anything, anything, rather than go through again what I went through before.” She burst into tears.
“Oh! if that’s the case…” he said indecisively.
“Pay her what she wants.”
“I can get her down a good bit.” He had no definite idea but to stop her ‘tears, carry out her wishes. In a measure he acted cleverly, going backward and forward between dining and drawingroom negotiating terms. Mrs. Roope said she had no wish to expose Mrs. Capel, and repeated, “I came here to do her a kindness.”
In the end two hundred and fifty pounds was agreed upon, a hundred down and a hundred and fifty when the decree was made absolute, this latter represented by a post-dated cheque. Peter had to write the cheques himself, it was as much as Margaret could do to sign them. Her hands were shaking and her eyelids red, the sight swept away all his conventions.
“You’ve got to go to bed and stay there,” he told her when he came back to her finally. He forgot everything but that she looked terribly ill and exhausted, and that he was her physician. “You need not have a minute’s more anxiety. I know the type. She has gone. She won’t bother you again. She’s taken her hundred pounds. That’s a lot to the woman who makes her money by shillings. That absent treatment business is a pound a week at the outside. There’s a limited number of fools who pay for isolated visits. Did you see her boots? They didn’t look like affluence! and her cotton gloves! She will have another hundred and fifty if nothing comes out, if she keeps her mouth shut until the 3Oth of May. You are quite safe. Don’t look so woebegone. I… I can’t bear it.”
He turned his back to her.
“What will Gabriel say?”
“The most priggish thing he can think of,” he answered roughly.
“He doesn’t look at things in the same way you do.”
“Do you think I don’t know his superiority?”
“Now you are angry, offended.”
“You’ve done the right thing. You are not in the health for any big annoyance.”
She was holding her side with both hands.
“I believe the pain is coming on again.”
“Oh; no, it isn’t.” But he moved nearer to her. No contradiction or denial warded off the attack. She bore it badly too, pulse and colour evidencing her collapse. Hurriedly and perhaps without sufficient thought he rang for Stevens, called for hot water, gave her her first injection of morphia.
Stevens knew or guessed what had been going on, and took a gloomy view. Every one in the house knew of Mrs. Roope’s visit.
“It will be the death of her.”
“No, it won’t,” he said savagely. “You do what you are told.”
“I ‘ope I know my duty,” she replied primly.
“I’m sure you do, but not the effect of a morphia injection,” he retorted.
He said Stevens knew nothing of the effect of a morphia injection, but he was not quite sure of it himself in those days and with such a patient. The immediate effect was instantaneous. Margaret grew easier, she smiled at him with her pale lips:
“How wonderful,” she said. He made her stay as she was for half an hour, then helped to carry her to bed. Stevens said she required no help in undressing her.
“You are not to let her do a thing for herself, not to let her move. Give her iced milk, or milk and soda….”
The afternoon was not so satisfactory, there were disquieting symptoms, and not the sleep for which he hoped. He suggested Dr. Lansdowne, but she would not hear of him being sent for. When night fell he found it impossible to leave her.
He walked up and down outside the house for a long time, only desisting when Margaret herself sent down a message that she heard his footsteps on the gravel and they disturbed her. The rest of the night he spent on the drawingroom sofa, running upstairs to listen outside her bedroom door, now and then, to reassure himself. Tomorrow he knew Gabriel would be there and he would not be needed. But tonight she had no one but himself. Wild thoughts came to him in the dawn. What if Gabriel Stanton were not such a good fellow after all? What if he were put off by the thought of a scandal and figuring as a co-respondent? He, Peter, would stick to her through thick and thin. She might turn to him, get to care.
But he had not an ounce of real hope. He was as humble as Gabriel by now, and the nearer to being a true lover.
MARGARET was not a very good subject for morphia. True it relieved her pain, set her mind at rest, or deadened her nerve centres for the time. But when the immediate effect wore off she was intolerably restless, and although the bromide tided her over the night, she drowsed through an exhausted morning and woke to sickness and misery, to depression and a tendency towards tears. She was utterly unable to see her lover, she felt she could not face him, meet him, conceal or reveal what had happened. Dr. Kennedy came up and she told him exactly how she felt. She told him also that he must go to the station in her stead. She said she was too broken, too ill.
This unnerved and weakened Margaret distracted Peter, and he thought of every drug in the pharmacopoeia in the way of a pick-me-up. He said that of course he would go to the station, go anywhere, do anything she asked him. But, he added gloomily, that he would probably blunder and make things worse.
“He would ever so much rather hear it from you if it must be told him,” he urged. “He’ll guess you are ill when you are not at the station. He’ll rush up here and see you and everything will be all right. He has only got to see you.”
Dr. Kennedy then begged her to go back to bed, but without effect. Fortunately the only drug to which he could ultimately persuade her was carbonate of soda! That and a strong cup of coffee helped to revive her. Stevens had the qualities of her defects and insisted later upon beef tea. Margaret, although still looking ill, was really almost normal when four o’clock came bringing Gabriel. Her plan of Peter Kennedy meeting him miscarried, and she need not have feared his anxiety when she was not at the station. Gabriel had caught an earlier train than usual. Ever since Tuesday his anxiety had been growing, notwithstanding her letters and reassurances.
He was dismayed at seeing Dr. Kennedy’s hat in the hall. Little more so than Margaret was when she heard the wheels of the car on the gravel and learnt from Peter, at the window, that Gabriel was in it. They were unprepared for each other when he walked in. Yet if Peter had not been there all might still have been well. It was Dr. Kennedy’s instinct to stand between her and trouble, and his misfortune to stand between her and Gabriel Stanton.
“You are ill?” and “You are early?” came from each of them simultaneously. If the doctor had slipped out of the room they would perhaps have found more to say. But he stayed and joined in that short dialogue, thinking he was meeting her wishes.
“She has had an attack of angina, a pretty hot one at that. I gave her a morphia injection and it did not suit her. She is simply not fit for any emotion or excitement. As a matter of fact she ought not to be out of bed today.”
“Has my coming by an earlier train distressed you?” Gabriel asked Margaret, perhaps a little coldly. Certainly not as he would have asked her had they been ‘alone. Nor were matters improved when she answered faintly:
“Tell him, Peter.”
Her lover wanted to hear nothing that Peter Kennedy might tell him. He was startled when she used his Christian name. He had a distaste at hearing his fiancee’s health discussed, a sensitiveness not unnatural. From an older or more impersonal physician he might have minded it less; or from one who had not admitted to him, and gloried in the admission, that he was in love with his patient.
“I don’t want to hear anything that Dr. Kennedy can tell me,” was what he said, but it misrepresented his mind. It sounded sullen or illtempered, but was neither, only an inarticulate evidence of distress of mind.
“Surely, Margaret, your news can wait…” This was added in a lower tone. But Margaret was beyond, and Peter Kennedy impervious to hint. The only thing that softened the situation to Gabriel was that she made room for him on the sofa, by a gesture inviting him to seat himself there. Almost he pretended not to see it, he felt rigid and uncompromising. Nevertheless, after a moment’s hesitation, he found himself beside her, listening to Dr. Kennedy’s unwelcome voice.
“You knew, didn’t you, that there had been a man hanging about the place, trying to get information from the servants? Margaret first heard of this last Tuesday….” Gabriel missed the next sentence. That the fellow should speak of her as “Margaret “made him see red. When his vision cleared Peter was still talking. There had been some allusion to or description of cook’s weakness, and the discursiveness was a fresh offence.
“What she told him in her amorous moments we
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