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

“ARE you glad to see me?”

“I am not sure,” was an answer she understood.

“Surprised?”

“I know you have been down here since Wednesday.”

“You knew it! Then why didn’t you come and see me? You are very inattentive.”

“I knew you would send if you wanted me.” Now he looked at her with surprised, almost grudging admiration. “Your change has agreed with you; you look thundering well.”

“Thundering! What an absurdly incongruous word. Never mind, I always knew you were no stylist. Yes, I am quite well, although from morning till night I did almost everything you told me not to do. I was in a whirl of excitement, tiring and overtiring myself all the time.”

“I suppose I was wrong then. It seems you need excitement.” He spoke with less interest than he usually gave to her, almost perfunctorily, but she noticed no difference and went on:

“The fact is I have found the elixir of life. There is such a thing, the old necromancers knew more than we. The elixir is happiness.”

“You have been so happy?”

She leaned back in her chair, her eyes sought not him but the horizon. The window was open and the air was scented with the coming summer, with the fecund beauty of growing things.

“So happy,” she repeated. “Incredibly happy. And only on the threshold…” Then she looked away from the sky and toward him, smiled.

“Peter, Peter Kennedy, you are not to be sour nor gloomy, you are to be happy too, to rejoice with me. You say you love me.” He drew a long breath.

“You will never know how much.”

“Then be glad with me. My health has revived, my youth has come back, my wasted devastated youth. I am a girl again with this added glory of womanhood. Am I hurting you? I don’t want to hurt you, I only want you to understand, I can speak freely, for you always knew I was not for you. Would you like me to be uncertain, delicate, despondent? Surely not.”

“I want you to be happy,” he said unevenly.

“Add to it a little.” She held out her hand to him. “Stay and have tea with me. Afterwards we will go up to the music room, I will give you a last lesson. Have you been practising? Peter, are you glad or sorry that we ever met? I don’t think I have harmed you. You admit I roused your ambition, and surely your music has improved, not only in execution, but your musical taste. Do you remember the first time you played and sang to me? ‘Put Me Among the Girls!’ was the name of the masterpiece you rolled out. I put my fingers to my ears, but afterwards you played without singing, and you listened to me without fidgetting. Peter, you won’t play ‘ Put Me Among the Girls ‘ this afternoon, will you? What will you play to me when tea is over and we go upstairs?”

Peter Kennedy, with that strange uneasiness or lambent agony in his eyes, eyes that all the time avoided hers, answered:

“I shall play you Beethoven’s ‘Adieu.’”

“Poor Peter!” she said softly.

She thought he was unhappy because he loved and was losing her, because she was going to be married next week and could not disguise that the crown of life was coming to her. She was very sweet to him all that afternoon, and sorry for him, fed him with little cress sandwiches and pretty speeches, spoke to him of his talents and pressed him to practise assiduously, make himself master of the classical musicians. She really thought she was elevating him and was conscious of how well she talked.

“Then as to your profession, I am sure you have a gift. No one who has ever attended me has done me more good. I want you to take your profession very, very seriously. If it is true that you have the gift of healing and the gift of music, and I think it is, you will not be unhappy, nor lonely long.”

And the poor fellow, who was really thinking all that time of the bad news and how to break it, listened to her, hearing only half she said. He did not know how to break his news, that was the truth, yet dared not leave it unbroken.

“When is Mr. Stanton coming down?” he asked her.

“Why do you dwell upon it? You have this afternoon, make the best of the time. I should like to think you were glad, not sorry we met.”

He broke into crude and confused speech then and told her all she had meant to him, what new views of life she had given to him.

“You have been a perfect revelation to me. I had not dreamed a woman could be so sweet…” And then, stammeringly, he thanked her for everything. He was a little overcome because he was not sure this happiness of hers was going to last, that it would not be almost immediately eclipsed. He really did love her and in the best way, would have secured her happiness at the expense of his own, would have sacrificed everything he held dear to save her from what he feared was inevitable. He was miserably undecided, and could not throw off his depression. Not, as Margaret thought, because of his jealousy of Gabriel and ungratified love, but because he feared the wedding might never take place. He eat a great many hot cakes and sandwiches, drank two cups of tea. Afterwards in the music room he played Beethoven, and listened when she replied with Chopin. Or if he did not listen the pretence he made was good enough to satisfy her. She was secretly flattered, elated, at the effect she had produced, a little sorry for him, a little sentimental. “Why should a heart have been there in the way of a fair woman’s foot?” she quoted to herself.

She sent him away before dinner. She had promised Gabriel she would keep early hours, rest, and rest, and rest until he came down on Saturday, and she meant to keep her promise. She gave Dr. Kennedy both her hands in farewell.

“I wish you did not look so woebegone. Say you are glad I am happy.”

“Oh, my God!” he lost himself then, kissing the hands she gave him, speaking wildly. “If the fellow were not such a prig, if only your happiness would last…”

She drew her hands away, angry or offended.

“Last! of course it will last. Hush! don’t say anything unworthy of you. Don’t make me disappointed. I don’t want to think I have made a mistake.”

With something very like a groan he made a precipitate retreat. He could not tell her what he had come here to say, to consult her about, he would have to write, or wait until Stanton was there. He wanted her to have one more good night. He loved her radiance. She wronged him if she thought he was jealous of her happiness, or of Gabriel Stanton, although he wished so desperately and so ignorantly that her lover had been other than he was.

Margaret had her uninterrupted night, her last happy night. Peter Kennedy turned and tossed, and tossed and turned on his narrow bed, the sheets grew hot and crumpled and the pillow iron-hard, making his head ache. Towards morning he left his bed, abandoning his pursuit of the sleep that had played him false, and went for a long tramp. At six o’clock, the sun barely risen and the sea cold in a retreating tide, he tried a swim. At eight o’clock he was nevertheless no better, and no worse than he had been the day before, and the day before that. He breakfasted on husks; the bacon and eggs tasted little better. Then he read Mrs. Roope’s letter for about the twentieth time and wished he had the doctoring of her!

Dear Dr. Kennedy:

I am sorry to say that since I last saw you additional facts have come to my knowledge which in fairness to the purity which is part of the higher life I cannot ignore. That Mr. Gabriel Stanton had been visiting my cousin’s wife during the six months in which she should have been penitently contemplating the errors and misdemeanours of her past, her failure in true wifeliness, I knew. That you had been passing many hours daily with her, and at unseemly hours, have also slept in her house, has only now come to my knowledge. I am nauseated by this looseness. Marriage should improve the human species, becoming a barrier against vice. This has not been so with the wife of my husband’s cousin. As Mrs. Eddy so truly says “the joy of intercourse becomes the jest of sin.” I return you the cheque you gave me and which becomes due next Wednesday. If neither you nor Mrs. Capel has any argument to advance that would cause me to alter my opinion I am constrained to lay the facts in my possession before the King’s Proctor. Two co-respondents make the case more complicated, but my duty more simple. Yours without any spiritual arrogance but conscious of rectitude,

SARAH ROOPE.

“Damn her!” He had said it often, but it never forwarded matters. Time pressed, and he had done nothing, or almost nothing. He had received the letter Wednesday. On Friday before going up to Carbies he had wired, “Am consulting Mrs. C. wait result.”

The early morning post came late to Pineland. Dr. Kennedy had to wait until nine o’clock for his letters. As he anticipated on Saturday morning there was another letter from the follower of Mrs. Eddy:

Dear Dr. Kennedy:

It is my duty