Twilight - Julia Frankau (free novels to read .txt) 📗
- Author: Julia Frankau
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“Open the window, pull the blind up, let us have as much air as possible. Ring for her maid, ring like blazes… she has only fainted. Within a minute she was sitting up, radiantly white, but with shadows round her pale mouth and deep under her eyes.
“It is nothing, it is only a touch of faintness. Not an attack. Gabriel, you were not frightened?” she asked, and put out her hand to him.
Peter said something inarticulate and got up from where he had been kneeling beside her.
“I’ll get you some brandy.”
“Shall I go?” Gabriel asked, but was holding her hand.
“No, no. You stay. Dr. Kennedy knows where it is.”
Gabriel knelt beside her now.
“Were you frightened?” she asked, still a little faintly.
“Love, lover, sweet, my heart was shaken with terror.”
“It is really nothing. We have had such a wonderful day I was trying to play it all to you. Then the glory spread, brightened, overwhelmed me…”
“Beloved!”
“Hush! he is coming back. You won’t believe anything he tells you?”
“Not if you tell me you are not really ill? Oh! my darling! I could not bear it if you were to suffer. Let me get some one else…”
Peter was back with the brandy, a measured dose, he brushed Gabriel aside as if now at least he had the mastery of the position. For all Gabriel’s preoccupation with Margaret, Dr. Kennedy managed to attract from him a wondering moment of attention. Need he have knelt to administer the draught? What was it he was murmuring? Whatever it was Margaret was unwilling to hear. She leaned back, closing her eyes. When the maid came, torn reluctantly from her supper, she was able, nevertheless, to reassure her.
“Nothing of consequence, Stevens, not an attack. I am going across to my bedroom. One of you will lend me an arm,” they were both in readiness, “or both.” She took an arm of one and an arm of the other, smiled in both their faces. “What a way to wind up our little evening! You will have to forgive me, entertain each other.”
“I’ll come in again and see you when you are comfortable,” the doctor said, a little defiantly, Gabriel thought.
“No, don’t wait. Not on any account. Stevens knows everything to do for me. Show Mr. Stanton where the cigars are.”
They were not in good humour when they left her.
“I don’t smoke cigars,” Gabriel said abruptly when Dr. Kennedy made a feint of carrying out her wishes. Peter shrugged his shoulders.
“She told me to find them for you.”
“Has she had attacks like this before?” Gabriel asked, after a pause. Peter answered gloomily:
“And will again if she is allowed to overtire herself by driving for hours in the sun, and then encouraged to sit through a long dinner, talking all the time.”
“She ought not to have played?” Peter Kennedy threw himself on to the sofa, desecrating it, bringing an angry flush to Gabriel’s brow. But when he groaned and said:
“If one could only do anything for her!” Gabriel forgave him in that instant. Gabriel had lived all his life with an invalid. Attacks of hysteria and faintness had been his daily menu for years.
“But surely an attack of faintness is not very unusual or alarming? My sister often faints…” “She isn’t Margaret Capel, is she?” “You… you knew Mrs. Capel before she came to Carbies?”
“No, I didn’t. But I know her now, don’t I?” Gabriel was silent. He had seen a great many doctors too, before the Christian Scientists had broken their influence, but such a one as this was new to him. Margaret was so sacred and special to him that he did not know what to think. But Peter gave him little time for thinking. He fixed a gloomy eye upon him and said:
“A man’s a man, you know, although he’s nothing but a country practitioner.” Gabriel was acutely annoyed, a little shocked, most supremely uncomfortable.
“But ought you to go on attending her?” he got out.
“I shan’t do her any harm, shall I, because I am madly in love with her, because I could kiss the ground she walks on, because I’d give my life for hers and day?” Gabriel’s face might have been carved. “She treats me like a dog….”
Gabriel made a gesture of dissent, Margaret could not treat any one like a dog.
“Oh, yes, she does, she says I’m not fit to wipe the mud off your shoes….”
Then Margaret knew. He was a little stunned and taken by surprise to think Margaret knew her doctor was in love with her, knew and had kept him in attendance. But of course she was right, everything she did was right. She had not taken the matter seriously.
“I suppose I’d better go.” Peter dropped his feet to the ground, rose slowly. “She won’t see me again if she says she won’t. She’s got her bromide. You might ring me up in the morning and tell me how she is, if she wants me to come round. That’s not too much to ask, is it?” he said savagely.
“Not at all,” Gabriel answered coldly. “I should of course do anything she wished.” Peter paused a moment at the door.
“I say, you’re not going to try and put her off me, are you? Just because I’ve let myself go to you?”
“I am not authorised to interfere in Mrs. Capel’s affairs.” Gabriel was quite himself again and very stiff.
“But I understand you will be.”
“I would rather not discuss the future with you.”
“Then you do intend to try and out me?”
Gabriel was suddenly a little sorry for him, he looked so desperately miserable and anxious, and after all he, Peter Kennedy, was leaving the house. Gabriel was remaining, sleeping under the same roof.
“I will see her maid if possible. You shall be called up if you are needed. Nothing but her wellbeing, her own wish will be thought of… Anyway you shall have a report.”
“As her doctor she trusts me. I can ease her symptoms.” It was almost a plea. “She need not suffer.”
“Of course you will be sent for. They have your telephone number?”
Peter held out his hand.
“Good-night. You’re a good fellow. She is quite right. I suppose I ought not to have told you how it is with me…?”
“It is of no consequence,” Gabriel answered, intending to be courteous.
SUNDAY morning the church bells were chiming against the blue sky in the clear air. Both invalids were better. The reports Gabriel received whilst he sat over his solitary breakfast were to the effect that Miss Stanton had slept well and was without headache, she sent word also of her intention to go to church if it were possible. Stevens herself told him that Mrs. Capel would be coming down at eleven o’clock or half -past, having had an excellent night. He was not to stay in for her.
“Can you tell me how far off is the nearest church?”
Stevens was fully informed on the matter. There were two almost within equal distance.
“Not more than a quarter of an hour to twenty minutes away. The nearest is the ‘ighest….” Stevens was a typical English maid, secretly devoted to her mistress, well up in her duties but with a perpetual grievance or list of grievances. “Not that I get there myself, not on Sunday mornings, since I’ve been here.”
Gabriel was sympathetic. Contempt, however, was thrown upon his suggestion of the afternoon.
“Children’s services and such-like, no thank you!”
As for the evenings Stevens said “they was mostly hymns.” He detained her for a few minutes, for was she not Margaret’s confidential maid, compensating her, too, for her lack of religious privileges. He told her to tell her mistress he would walk to church with his sister and then return, that he looked forward to seeing her if she were really better. Otherwise she was not to think of rising.
“She’ll get up right enough. I’m to have her bath ready at ‘alf-past ten.”
When Anne came down he walked with her over the commonland, bright with gorse and broom that lay between Carbies and the higher of the two churches, heard how Anne had lain awake and then how she had slept, sure of the intervention of Mrs. Roope. Her headache had completely disappeared.
“You did send that telegram, didn’t you?”
Gabriel assured her that the telegram had been duly despatched.
“She must have started on me at once. She is a good creature. I wish you were more sympathetic to it. You’ve never once been with me to a meeting.”
“But I have not put anything in the way of your going.”
“Oh, yes! I know how good you are. Which reminds me, Gabriel, about Mrs. Capel. We must talk things over when we get home. You must not do anything in a hurry. I heard about her fainting away last night. It is not only that she is a widow, and terribly delicate, her maid tells me, but she takes no care of herself, none at all. … What a rate you are walking at; I’m sure we have plenty of time, the bells are still going. I can’t keep up with you.” He slowed down. “As I was saying, I shouldn’t like you to be more particular with her until we have talked things over together. Of course as far as her delicacy is concerned, we might persuade her to see Mrs. Roope.”
“I have already asked Mrs. Capel if she will do me the honour of becoming my wife,” her brother said in a tone she found curious, peculiar, not at all like himself.
“Oh, dear! how tiresome! You really are so impulsive. Of course I like her very much, very much indeed, but there are so many things to be thought of. How long has her husband been dead? You know she is more than half an American, she told me so herself, and such strange things do happen with American husbands.”
“Mrs. Capel divorced her husband!” He spoke quickly, abruptly, hurrying her on toward the church, through the gate and up the path where a little stream of people was already before them, people carrying prayer-books, or holding by the hand a stiffly dressed unwilling child; one or two women with elderly husbands.
Anne gave a little subdued scream when Gabriel told her that Mrs. Capel had divorced her husband, a little gasp.
“Oh dear, oh dear!” It was impossible to say more under the circumstances, she could not make a scene here.
“You will be able to find your way back all right?” he asked her. The bells were clashing now almost above their heads, clashing slowly to the finish.
“I’m sure I don’t know whether I am standing on my head or my heels.”
“You will be all right when you are inside.”
“I haven’t even got my smelling-salts with me, I promised to leave off carrying them.” She was almost crying with agitation.
“You will be all right,” he said again. He waited until she had gone through the door, the little bent figure in its new coat and skirt and Victorian hat tied under the chin. Then he was free to return on swift feet to Carbies to await Margaret’s coming. He walked so
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