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

“You like this place, don’t you?” he asked. “You don’t think it is the place?”

“Pineland and Carbies? I am not sure. If I had not taken it for three months I believe I’d go back today or tomorrow. I ran away from you … and social guns. I’m armed now.” He thanked her for that mutely. “Do you really love this ill-fixed house?”

“How should I not? But what does that matter? Leave it empty if it doesn’t suit you. There is Queen Anne’s Gate.”

“I know, but we should never be alone.”

“Nothing matters but that you should be well, happy. I’d take my vacation now, stay down, only I want at least six weeks in June. I could not do with less than six weeks.” And this time the interlude was longer, more silent. Margaret recovered herself first.

“About Peter Kennedy. He really suits me better than any of the other doctors here. Lansdowne is a soft-soapy grinning pessimist, with an all-conquering air. He tells you how ill you are as if it doesn’t matter since he has warned you, and will come constantly to remind you. There is a Dr. Lushington who, I believe, knows more than all of them put together, but he is a delicate man himself, overburdened with children, and cramped with small means. He gives me fresh heartache, I am so sorry for him all the time he is with me. Lansdowne and Lushington have each young partners or assistants, straight from London hospitals, smelling of iodoform, talking in abstruse medical or surgical terms, nosing for operations, as dogs for truffles. You don’t want me to have any of these, do you?”

“I want you to do what you please, now and always.”

“Even if it pleases me that Peter Kennedy should medicine and make love to me?”

“Even that. Does he make love to you?”

“What did he tell you?”

“That he adored you that you treated him like a dog.”

“He gives me amyl, bromide. He was only a country practitioner when I first knew him, with a gift for music, but not for diagnosis.”

“And now?”

“He has done more reading, medical reading, since I have been here than in all his life before. Treatises on the heart; all that have ever been written. He is really studying, he intends to take a higher degree. In music s too, I have given him an impetus.”

Gabriel was obviously, nevertheless, not quite satisfied, started a tentative “but,” and would perhaps have enquired whether ultimately it would he for Peter Kennedy’s good that she had done so much for him. Anne, however, intervened, coming down dressed for the journey, very agitated at finding the two together. She gave him no opportunity for further conversation, monopolising the attention of the whole household, in searching for something she had mislaid, which it was eventually decided had possibly been left in Hampstead! Her conscience reproached her for her behaviour over lunch, and she found the cup of tea which Margaret pressed upon her before she left “delicious.”

“I do so much like this Chinese tea, ever so much better than the Indian. You remember, Gabriel, don’t you, that rough tea we used to have from Pounds?…” And she told a wholly irrelevant anecdote of rival grocers and their wares.

She betrayed altogether in the last ten minutes an uneasy semiconsciousness that her visit had not been a great success and talked quickly in belated apology.

“You’ve been so kind to me. I am afraid I have not responded as I ought. My silly headache, which of course I never exactly had… you know what I mean, don’t you? And I did no credit to your beautiful lunch.”

Margaret succeeded in assuring her that she had behaved exactly as a guest should, whilst Gabriel stood by silently.

“I hope you will come again,” she said, and Anne replied nervously, noncommittal.

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it? But I am always so busy, and now that I have my treatment it is so much more difficult to get away…”

A kiss was avoided. Margaret went to the hall door with them, but not to the station. Gabriel had asked her not to do so.

“You ought to rest after yesterday.”

“Yes, of course she ought to rest,” Anne chorussed. There was a certain awkwardness in the farewells, somewhat mitigated by the luggage that occupied, so to speak, the foreground of the picture. As they drove away Anne nodded her head, threw a kiss. But neither Margaret nor Gabriel was conscious of her condescension, only of how long it was from now until next Friday.

“I am glad that is over,” Anne said complacently, as the carriage turned through the gates. “It was very trying, very trying indeed. In many ways she is quite a nice person. But not suited to us, in our quiet lives. Divorced too! I thought there was something last night. So… so overdressed and peculiar. I am glad I came down before things had gone any further…”

“Further than what?” Gabriel asked her, waking up, if a little slowly, to the position. “Margaret and I are to be married in about a month’s time. You shall stay on in the flat if you wish. I think I shall be able to arrange… Have you thought about any one you would like to share it with you?”

“Any one I should like! Share it with me?” She was very shrill and he hushed her, although there was no one to hear but the flyman, who flicked at the trotting horse and wheezed indifferently. They got to the station long before Anne had taken in the fact that Gabriel was telling her his intention, not asking her advice. In the train; after they got home; and for many weary days she showed her unreasoning and ineffective opposition. It was not worth recording, or would not be but for the sympathetic interest taken by the Roopes, when Anne, reluctantly and under pressure, gave her brother’s approaching marriage as a reason for her own impaired health, and the failure of their ministrations. Anne felt it her duty to tell them this, and Mrs. Roope no less hers to make further enquiries; the results being more far-reaching than either of them could have anticipated. James Capel was a relation of the Roopes and it was natural they should be interested in the wife who had so flagrantly divorced him.

Ten days after Anne’s unlucky visit to Carbies, Gabriel received a bewildering telegram. He had been down once in the interval, but had found it unnecessary to speak of Anne, her vagaries c? vapours. He stayed at Carbies because once having done so it seemed absurd that his room should remain empty. The very contrast between this visit and the last accentuated its intimate charm. Anne was not there, and Peter Kennedy’s services not being required, he had the good sense or taste to keep away. Margaret, closely questioned, admitted to having stayed a couple of days in bed, after the last weekend, admitted to weakness, but not illness.

“I have always been like that ever since I was a child. What is called, I believe, ‘ a little delicate.’ I get very easily overtired. Then if I don’t pull up and recuperate with bed and Benger, I get an attack of pain…”

“Of pain! My poor darling!”

“Unbearable. I mean I can’t bear it. Gabriel, don’t you think you are doing a very foolish thing, taking this half -broken life of mine?”

“If only the time were here!”

“Sometimes I think it will never come,” she sighed. “I am clairvoyante in a way. I don’t see myself in harbour.”

“Only three weeks more, then you shall be as clairvoyante as you like.” He laughed happily, holding her to him.

On this visit she seemed glad of his love, to depend upon and need him. He always had that for which to be glad. In truth that weakness of which she spoke, and which was the cause, or perhaps the effect, of two unmistakable heart attacks, had left her in the mood for Gabriel Stanton, his serious tenderness, and deep, almost overwhelming devotion. She was a whimsical, strange little creature, genius as she called herself, and for the moment had ceased to act.

The weather changed, it rained almost continuously from Saturday night until Monday morning. They spent the time between the music room and the uncongenial dining-room where they had their meals. On the sofa, she lay practically in his arms, she sheltered there. She had been frightened by her own agitation and uncertainty; the attacks that followed. And now believed that all she needed was calm; happy certainty; Gabriel Stanton.

“Don’t make me care for you too much,” she said on one of these days. “I want you to rest me, not to get excited over you, to keep calm.”

“I am here only for you to use. Think of me as refuge, sanctuary, what you will.”

“A sort of cathedral?”

“You may laugh at me. I like you to laugh at me. Why not as a cathedral, cool and restful?”

“Cool and restful,” she repeated. “Yes, you are like that. But suppose I want to wander outside, restless creature that I am; suppose nothing you do satisfies me?”

“I’ll do more.”

“And after that?”

“Always more.”

There were no scenes between them; Gabriel was not the man for scenes, he was deeply happy, humbly happy, not knowing his own worth, much more careful of her than any woman could have been, and gentle beyond speech. Even in those days she wondered how it would be with her if she were well, robust, whether all these little cares would not irritate her, whether this was indeed the lover for her. There was something donnish and Oxonian about him.

“I’m not sure I look upon you as a cathedral, whether it isn’t more as a college.”

When he could not follow her he remained silent.

“Think of me any way you want so long as you do think of me,” he said, after a pause.

“I thought you would say that.”

“Was it what you wanted me to say?”

“I only want to hear you say you adore me. You say it so nicely too.”

“Do I? I don’t know what I have done to deserve you.”

“Just loved me,” she said dreamily.

“Any man would do that.”

“Not in the same way.”

“As long as my way pleases you I am the most fortunate of men.”

“Even if I never wrote another line?”

“As if it mattered which way you express yourself, by writing or simply living.”

“Such love is enervating. Are you not ambitious forme?”

“You’ve done enough.”

“I am capable of doing much better work.”

“You are capable of anything.”

“Except of that book on Staffordshire Pottery.”

“That was only to have been a stop-gap. You replaced that with me, darling that you are!”

“What will Sir George say when he knows?”

“He will say ‘ Lucky fellow ‘ and envy me. Margaret, about how we shall live, and where?”

He told her again he was not rich. There was Anne, a certain portion of his income must be put aside for Anne.

“You are quite rich enough. For the matter of that I have still my marriage settlement. Father would give me more if we needed it. James had thousands from him.”

Then they both coloured, she in shame that this ineffable James had ever called her wife. He, because the idea that any of her comforts or luxuries should emanate from her father or from any one but himself was repellent to him. He would have talked ways and means, considered the advantages of house or flat, spoken of furniture, but that at first she was wayward and said it was unlucky to “count chickens before they were boiled,