Twilight - Julia Frankau (free novels to read .txt) 📗

I had forgotten it for years, but remembered it then. I too had passed in one moment from exquisite agony to a most wonderful calm. Dear love, how can I thank you! I am not going to try. Anne and I will come by the train arriving at Pineland at 4.52. I will not ask your kindness for her; I see you diffusing it. She will be grateful, and the form her gratitude will take will be the endeavour to convert you to Christian Science. My sweet darling, you will listen gravely, patiently. And I shall know it will be for me. I have done nothing to deserve you, am nothing, only your worshipper. Some day perhaps you will let me do something for you. Dear heart, I love you, love you, love you, however I write.”

G. S.

Friday, Margaret decided it was better that she should entertain her guests alone. She had to learn the idiosyncrasies of this poor sister of her lover’s, to acclimatise herself to a new atmosphere between herself and Gabriel. She invited Peter Kennedy to dine with them on Saturday, but bade him not to speak lightly of Christian Science.

“What’s the game?” he asked her.

“I think it is probably some form of mesmerism; I don’t quite know. Anyway Mr. Stanton’s sister is an invalid and thinks Christian Science has relieved her. You are not to laugh at or argue with her.”

“I am to dine here and talk to her, I suppose, whilst you and that fellow ogle and make love to each other.” She turned a cold shoulder to him.

“I withdraw my invitation, you need not come at all.”

“Of course I shall come. And what is the name of the thing? Christian Science? I’ll get it up. You know I’d do anything on earth you asked me, though you treat me like a dog.”

“At least you snatch an occasional bone,” she smiled as he mumbled her hand.

Margaret sent for Mary Baker Eddy’s “Science and Health; with a Key to the Scriptures,” and spent the emptiest two hours she could remember in trying to master the viewpoint of the book, the essential dogma. Failing completely she flung it to Peter Kennedy, who read aloud to her sentence after sentence as illuminative as these: r ‘ Destructive electricity is not the offspring of infinite good.’ Who the devil said it was?”

“Hush, go on. There must be something more in it than that.” He turned to the title-page, “‘Printed and published at Earlswood’? No, my mistake at Boston. ‘Christian Science rationally explains that all other pathological methods are the fruits of human faith in matter, in the working, not of spirit, but of the fleshly mind, which must yield to Science.’ Don’t knit your brows. What’s the good of swotting at it? Let’s say Abracadabra to her and see what happens.”

“What an indolent man you are. Is that the way you worked at your examination?”

“I qualified.”

“I suppose that was the height of your ambition?”

“You don’t give a man much encouragement to be ambitious.”

“But this was before I knew you.”

“Don’t you believe it. I never lived at all before you knew me.”

“Absurd boy!”

“I’m getting on for thirty.”

“You can’t expect me to remember it whilst you behave as if you were seventeen. Take the book up again, let us give it an honest trial.”

He read on obediently, and she listened with a real desire for instruction. Then all at once she put her fingers in her ears and called a halt.

“That will do. Ring for tea, I can’t listen to any more…”

He went on nevertheless: “‘Mind is not the author of Matter,’ I say, this is jolly good. You can read it the other way too. ‘Matter is not the author of mind. There is no matter… put matter under the foot of mind.’ Put Mrs. Eddy under the foot of a militant suffragette. Oh! I say … listen to this…”

“No, I won’t, not to another word. Poor Gabriel…” He threw the book away.

“Always that damned fellow!” he said.

When Friday came and the house had been swept and garnished Margaret drove to the station to receive her guests. The room prepared for Anne was on the same corridor as her own, facing south, and with a balcony. Margaret herself had seen to all the little details for her comfort. A big sofa and easychair, pen and ink and paper, the latest novel: flowers on the mantelpiece and dressing-table, a filled biscuit box, and small spirit stand. Then, more slowly, she had gone into the little suite prepared for Gabriel, bedroom and bathroom, no balcony, but a wide window. She only stayed a moment, she did not give a thought to his little comforts. She was out of the room again quickly.

She arrived late at the station, and Gabriel was already on the platform; he never had the same happy certainty as the first time, nor knew how she would greet him. The first impression she had of Anne was of a little old woman, bent-backed, fussing about the luggage, about some bag after which she enquired repeatedly and excitedly, of whose safety she could not be assured until Gabriel produced it to her from among the others already on the platform.

“Shall we go on and leave him to follow with the luggage?” Margaret asked.

“Oh, no, no, I couldn’t think of moving until it is found. So tiresome…”

“I am sure you are tired after your journey.”

“I don’t know what it is to be tired since I have taken up Christian Science. You know we are never tired unless we think we are,” Anne said, when they were in the carriage, bowling along the good road toward the reddening glow of the sunset. Margaret and Gabriel, sitting opposite, but not facing each other embarrassed, shy with the memory of their last parting, were glad of this intervening person who chattered of her non-fatigue, the essential bag, and the number of things she had had to see to before she left home. All the way from Pineland station to the crunching gravel path at Carbies Anne talked and they made a feint of listening to her. The feeling between them was a great height. They were almost glad of her presence, of her fretting small talk. Margaret said afterwards she felt damp and deluged with it, properly subdued. “I felt as if I had come all out of curl,” she told him. No wonder you speak so little, are reserved.”

“I am not reserved with you,” he answered.

“I think sometimes that you are.”

“There is not a corner or cranny of my mind I should not wish you to explore if it interested you,” he replied passionately.

All that evening Anne’s volubility never failed. She was of the type of woman, domestic and frequent, who can talk for hours without succeeding in saying anything. Most of it seemed simultaneous! Anne Stanton, who was ten years older than Gabriel and had an idea that she “managed “him, prided herself also on her good social quality and capacity for carrying off a situation. She thought of this invitation and introduction to the young lady with whom her brother had evidently fallen in love as “a situation “and she felt herself of immense importance in it. Gabriel must have kept his secret better than he knew. She believed that he was seeking her opinion of his choice, that the decision, if there was to be a decision, rested with her. One must do her the justice to admit that she did not give a thought to any possible alteration in her own position. She had always lived with Gabriel, she knew he would not cast her off. Conscious of her adaptability she had already said to him on the way down:

“I could live with anybody, any nice person, and, of course, since I have been so well everything is even easier. I do hope I shall like her….”

She did like her, very much, Margaret saw to that, behaving exquisitely under the stimulus of Gabriel’s worshipping eyes; listening as if she were absorbedly interested in a description of the particular Healer who had Anne’s case in hand.

“At first you see I was quite strange to it, I didn’t understand completely. Mr. Roope is a little deaf, but he says he hears as much as he wants to … so beautifully content and devout.”

“Has Mrs. Roope any defect?” Margaret got a word or two in edgeways before the end of the evening, her sense of humour helping her.

“She has a sort of hysterical affection. She goes ‘Bupp, bupp,’ like a turkey-cock and swells at the throat. At least that is what I thought, but I am very backward at present. Some one asked her the cause once, when I was there, and she said she had no such habit, the mistake was ours. It is all very bewildering.”

“Are there any other members of the family?”

“Her dear mother! Such a nice creature, and quite a believer; she has gall-stones.”

“Gall-stones!”

“Not really, you know, they pass with prayer. She looks ill, very ill sometimes, but of course that is another of my mistakes. I am having absent treatment now.”

“They know where you are?” Gabriel asked, perhaps a little anxiously.

“Oh! dear, yes. I am never out of touch with them.”

After she had retired for the night, for notwithstanding her immunity from fatigue and pain, she retired early, explaining that she wanted to put her things in order, Gabriel lingered to tell Margaret again what an angel she was, and of his gratitude to her for the way she was receiving and making much of his sister.

“I like doing it, she interests me. I suppose she really believes in it all.”

“I think so. You see her illness is partly nervous, partly her spine, but still to a certain extent, nervous. She is undoubtedly better since she had this hobby. The only thing that worries me is this family of whom she speaks, these Roopes. Of course they will get everything she has out of her, every penny. If it only stops at that…”

“You have seen them?”

“Not yet. I hear the man is an emaciated idler, not over-clean, his wife has evidently a bad form of St. Vitus’s dance. The woman leads them all, the old mother, all of them. I expect they live upon what she makes. I’ve heard a story or two… I had not realized about this absent treatment, that Anne tells them where she goes. You don’t mind?”

“Why should I mind?”

“She may have told them I come here…”

“Oh! that! I had forgotten.”

It was true, she had forgotten that she must walk circumspectly. She had spoken of and forgotten it. Now she remembered, because he reminded her; reddened and wished she had not invited Anne. Anne, with her undesirable acquaintances and meandering talk, who would keep her and Gabriel company on their walks and drives for the next two days.

But Providence, or a broken chain in the sequence of the Roope Christian Science treatment, came to her aid. On Saturday Anne was prostrated with headache.

“She has never been able to bear a railway journey.”

“Does she explain?”

“I went in to see her. ‘ If only I had faith enough,’ she moaned, and asked me to send Mrs. Roope a telegram. I persuaded her to five grains of aspirin, but I could see she felt very guilty about it. She will sleep until the afternoon.”

“We can leave her?”

“Oh, yes! I doubt if she will be well awake by dinner, certainly not before.”

“Let us get away from here, from Carbies and Pineland…”

“Right to the other side of the island. We could lunch at Ryde. I’ll get