CHAPTER XXXVI

Though she has begun so early, Prue is writing nearly all day; writing

sitting up in bed--writing when the eastern sun is pouring in his rays

from the gates of day--writing when he has climbed the zenith--writing

when he is reddening westwards. She has asked to be left alone, so as to

be quite undisturbed; and when, at intervals, unable longer to keep

away, Peggy returns from her sad and aimless rambles about the dahliad

garden, and, pushing the door, looks softly in, the same sight always

greets her eyes. Prue, with a fire-spot on each cheek, writing--writing.

And yet when the postman comes to take the letters, it is only one small

letter that he carries away. She is very loth to let it go, even then.

No sooner is it out of her hands than she would have it back. There is a

phrase in it that she would fain have altered, that he may think unkind.

It vexes her all through the night, that phrase. It keeps sleep away

from her, even if the oppression on her chest, caused by the heavy cold

she has contracted through standing in the draught at the Hartleys'

hall-door, would allow slumber to approach her eyes. In the small hours,

indeed, she wanders a little; and would be up, and walk after the

postman to take her letter from him. At dawn she falls into a broken

doze; and Peggy, who has sat by or hung over her all night, poulticing,

giving her drink, holding her hand, and assuring her with tears that

there is nothing in her poor sentence that could wound Freddy's

feelings, rises, stiff and cold from her vigil, and sends Alfred off on

the pony for the doctor.

He comes, and prescribes, and goes away again, leaving behind him that

little fillip of cheerfulness that the doctor's visit always gives; and

another day wears on. Prue talks a great deal throughout it, though her

laboured breathing makes speech difficult. She is very restless: would

get up; would go down into the hall; out into the garden; would sit

under the Judas-tree. She sheds no tears, gives no sign of depression;

indeed, she laughs many times at recollected absurdities told her by

Freddy. But the fire-spots blaze on her cheeks, and the fever-flame

glitters in her eyes.

Another night follows; sleepless as the previous one, and with stronger

delirium. She is going out riding with her lover. He has lent her the

bay mare, which he has taken from Miss Hartley for her sake! He is

waiting for her!--calling to her! and she cannot find her whip or her

gloves. Oh, where are they? Where can they be? Will not Peggy help her

to look for them? And Peggy, with death in her heart, feigns to search,

through the chill watches of the night, for that whip and those gloves

whose services it seems so unlikely that their young owner will ever

need again. With morning her delusions die; and, as the forenoon

advances, she falls into a heavy sleep. Such as it is, it is induced by

opiates.

Peggy has not been in bed for three nights, and an immense lassitude has

fallen upon her. It is not that she is conscious of feeling sleepy; but

her head is like a lump of lead, and her hands are ice-cold. She would

be all right if she could get into the open air for five minutes. A

greedy longing to drink in great draughts of the fresh wind that she can

hear outside frolicking so gaily, yet gently too, with the tree-tops,

lays hold of her; and, since Prue still sleeps heavily, she gives up her

place by the bedside to Sarah, and walks drearily out into the garden.

It is only two days since she had been last in it; but it seems to her

as if years had rolled by since she had last trodden that sward, seen

Jacob digging, and watched the birds pecking at the sunflower-seeds, and

the wasps pushing their way through the netting into the heart of the

peaches. It appears to her a phantasmal garden, with an atmosphere of

brilliance and joyousness that may have their home in that realm where

Thomas the Rhymer lived; but can have no relationship to her bitter

realities. But when she reaches the seat under the Judas-tree, the

kingdom of Thomas the Rhymer is gone, and reality is here in its stead.

As she looks at it, her hands clench themselves, and a tide of rage and

misery surges up in her heart.

'You have killed her!' she says out loud; 'killed her as much as if you

had cut her poor throat! When she is dead, I will tell you so!'

She walks on quickly; rapid motion may make her burden easier to bear.

But, alas! her domain is small; and no sooner has she left Prue and the

Judas-tree behind, than the hawthorn bower and Talbot face her. The

creamy foam of flowers that had sent its little pungent petals, shaped

like tiny sea-shells, floating down upon their two happy heads, has

changed to lustreless red berries.

'They are not more changed than I!' she says; and so sinks, helplessly

sobbing, upon the rustic bench, her cheek pressed against the gnarled

trunk. 'They are all the same!--all the same!' she moans. If it were not

so, would she be lying with her head achingly propped against this rough

bark? Would not it have been resting on her love's breast? Would not he

have been telling her that Prue will get well? She has no one now to

tell her that Prue will get well; and when she tells herself so, it does

not sound true.

The tears drip from under her tired lids. One moment she is here, with

aching body and smarting soul; the next she is away--how far, who shall

say? Away, at ease; all her sorrows sponged out, for God has sent her

His lovely angel--sleep.

It is two hours later when she wakes with a frightened start, and

springs--half unconscious of her whereabouts at first--to her feet. The

position of the sun in the sky, the altered angle of the shadow cast by

her may-bush, tell her to how much longer a period than she had intended

her five minutes have stretched. She begins to run, with a beating

heart, back towards the house. Prue will have missed her! Prue will have

been crying out for her! How stupid, how selfish of her to fall asleep!

She has entered the hall, when the noise of a closing door--her ear

tells her Prue's--reaches her; and by the time she gets to the foot of

the stairs she is confronted by a person coming quickly down. It is not

Sarah, nor yet the doctor. It is the person to whom, beside the

Judas-tree, she had framed that bitter message. She can give it now if

she chooses. Freddy's hair is all ruffled, and the tears are streaming

down his face--real, genuine salt tears.

'Oh, Peggy!' he cries, in a broken voice, as he catches sight of her,

seizing both her hands; 'is that you? Come and talk to me! Come and say

something nice to me! I am _so_ miserable! Oh, how dreadful these

partings are!'

As he speaks he draws her back into the hall with him; and throwing

himself on the settle, flings his arms down upon the cushions, and his

head upon them.

'Have you seen her?' asks Peggy in a shocked stern voice. 'Do you mean

to say that you have seen her?'

The answer comes, blurred and muffled, from among the pillows.

'Yes, yes.'

'You are not satisfied, apparently, with the way in which you have done

your work,' rejoins Peggy, with an intonation of icy irony, though her

voice trembles; 'you are anxious to put the finishing-stroke to it!'

'I do not know what you are talking about,' says Freddy, lifting his

tossed head and his tear-stained face, and looking at her with his wet

eyes. 'I can see by your look that you mean to be unkind--that you have

some cruel intention in your words; but you may spare yourself the

trouble. I am so wretched that I am past feeling any blow you may aim at

me. I knew nothing of her illness; her letter reached me only an hour

ago. I came to see her; she heard my voice. Oh, Peggy, you do not

realise how keen love's ears are! She asked to see me; she was lying on

the sofa in her dressing-room. My Prue!--my Prue! What have you been

doing to her? Oh, that word "Good-bye"! What long reverberations of

sorrow there are in it!'

At the sight of the young man's emotion, so overpowering and to all

appearance so genuine, Peggy's heart has been softening a little; but at

this last sentence, uttered with something of his old manner of lofty

and pensive reflection, it hardens again. Bitterness, such as had seized

upon her by the Judas-tree, is rising again in her.

'You keep to your plan, then? you are going?' she asks, breathing hard,

and with a sort of catch in her voice.

'And leave her as she now is?' answers Freddy, with an accent of wounded

reproach, which perhaps in his opinion may exempt him from answering the

question directly. 'Oh, my Peg, if I could but teach you to credit your

poor fellow-creatures with at least bare humanity!'

'Then I am to understand that you are _not_ going? that the idea is

given up?'

She is still standing inexorably over him.

'I do not know why we should discuss the subject at all to-day,' returns

Mr. Ducane, again interring his head in the cushions; 'I have not the

heart to discuss anything to-day.'

'Then you did not mention the subject to her?'

'She introduced it herself; she has quite come round to think it a good

plan--if you do not believe me, you may ask her--a year's probation to

make me fitter for my Prue'--in a voice of dreamy tenderness. 'Oh,

Peggy, cannot you understand what a sacred deposit the care of such a

soul as Prue's is? cannot you comprehend that I do not feel yet worthy

of it? You know, dear, I am very young, though you never will own it;

and you cannot put gray heads upon green shoulders. Be merciful to me,

little friend! be merciful to me!'

As he makes this coaxing request, he takes her reluctant hand and

presses his wet cheek against it. But she feels no mercy in her heart,

and promises him none even when she leaves him stretched full-length

upon the settle, shaken with real sobs. For her, he may sob as long as

he pleases; while in one panic-stricken bound upstairs she reaches her

sister. She finds her--the Prue upon whom the doctor had enjoined such a

strict confinement to bed and maintenance at one temperature--sitting,

not even lying upon the dressing-room sofa, breathing labouringly, with

every symptom of imminent bronchitis, with racing pulse and burning

hands, but with heaven in her eyes.

'You have seen him,' she says pantingly, as Margaret comes in. 'You have

heard--oh, do not scold me for getting up! I know that I ought not, but

I will go back to bed as soon as you like; and--and it _is_ real, is not

it? it _is_ true? I am not wandering. I was last night, I know; but I am

not now, am I? Give me something of his, something to hold that I may be

sure that it is true!'

Peggy has sat down upon the sofa beside her, and gathered up the little

quivering figure into her arms.

'I will go back to bed now,' says Prue restlessly; but oh, with how

different a restlessness from that of three hours ago! 'If I do not, I

shall be longer in getting well, and I want to get well quickly. If I

do not get better he will not go, and it would be selfish to hinder him

from doing what is so much the best thing for him; yes, and for me

too--for me too! Take me back to bed, Peggy.'

So Peggy takes her back to bed, and as she lays her down the thin arms

close gratefully round her neck.

'You dear old soul! It is your turn for a bit of luck next.'

And when the night comes--the night dreaded by watchers beside

sick-beds, the night that doubles fever and sharpens pain, and

accentuates grief--Prue, clasping to her feverish breast an old glove,

left behind by careless Freddy on some former occasion, wakes repeatedly

with a jump from her broken slumbers to ask in a terrified tone, 'Is it

true? Is it real?' And Peggy is always there, always awake, always

beside her to answer reassuringly that it is. It would have been too

flagrant a violation of the laws of nature and disease, if poor Prue had

escaped scot-free from her infraction of both; and, in fact, her

escapade is followed, as the meanest observer might have predicted that

it would be, by a very sharp attack of bronchitis.

For a few days her illness is so acute that it seems as if Mr. Ducane

would be placed in the painful dilemma of either leaving his betrothed

fighting hand to hand with death, or of abandoning his cherished

project. He arrives at the Red House in the morning, almost before the

shutters are opened; he strays for hours about the garden with his hands

clasped, his head bent forward, and his charming face as white as a

sheet, till even Jacob's bowels yearn over him; though the style of

observations by which he elects to show his sympathy are not perhaps

precisely of a cheering nature, consisting chiefly of remarks such as

that 'his missis says she never see any one go downhill so quick as Miss

Prue--never.'

One day when Prue is at her worst, Freddy lies on the floor at her

threshold, with his face buried in the mat, to the intense admiring

compassion of Sarah and the nurse; but he really is not thinking of

them. By and by the disease yields to treatment. Perhaps the patient's

determination to get quickly better--her eagerness to return to a life

once more become joyous and valuable to her--counts for much in the

quickness of her rally.

Whatever be the cause, Prue is certainly better--is able once again to

sit up; to shake milady's hearty hand, and eat her excellent jelly. But

by the time that she is able to do so, the Hartleys' monster yacht is

getting up her steam at Southampton; and all her passengers, with the

exception of Mr. Ducane, are off to embark upon her. Within two days the

die must be cast as to whether Freddy is to be of that ship's company or

not.

'It is for you to decide, sweet,' he says, in his south-wind voice with

all the joyousness taken out of it, as he half-lies, half-sits, beside

the dressing-room sofa, upon which she is stretched in her shadowy

convalescence, while his head rests on the pillow beside hers. 'Yes--no!

go--stay! I have no will but yours. You know that the only reason I ever

had for wishing it was that I might come back a little less unworthy of

you--with wider experience and larger horizons. As to _pleasure_'--with

a small disdainful smile--'there can be no question of _that_! I think

that my worst enemy will own that pleasure and I have waved farewell to

each other of late.'

Prue has been lying prostrate and languid; but at his words she draws

herself up into a sitting posture, and into her little face, not much

less white than her dressing-gown, has come a faint pink flush--the

flush of a generous effort.

'And, after all, it is only a year,' she says bravely. 'How absurd to

make a fuss about only a year! When one was a child, one used to think

it endless--an eternity; but now--why, it is gone by like a flash!'

'_Only_ a year!' repeats Freddy, with a moan. 'Oh, Prue, can you say

_only_? How do you do it, dear? Teach me--teach me!'

'And when it is over,' continues Prue, the colour deepening in her thin

cheeks with the pain and labour of her sacrifice, 'and you come back,

perhaps you will find me, too, changed, and not quite for the worse.

Perhaps--perhaps if I do my best--if I try hard to educate myself

between now and then--you will find me better able to understand your

thoughts, and enter into your ideas, and say something besides the

stupid praise--which I know has often vexed you, though you have tried

not to show it--of your poems.'

She stops exhausted, and her faint head droops on his breast. The tears

have sprung again to Freddy's eyes. Before he can make any rejoinder,

she has lifted her face, and is again speaking.

'You say that I am to decide?' she says, in a firm tone. 'Well, then, I

have decided. You are to go. I send you. No one,' her voice breaking a

little, 'can pity me if I send you myself--can they?'

Two days later he goes. Upon the solemnity of his last parting with his

sweetheart no one intrudes; but he prolongs his leave-taking so

unreasonably that he is within an ace of losing his train; and it is not

till after many vigorous rappings at the door, strong remonstrances, and

nervous apostrophes through the keyhole, that he at length issues from

Prue's room, livid and staggering.

'Oh, Peggy!' he says hoarsely, wringing her two hands; 'surely--surely

the bitterness of death is past! Take care of her--in God's name take

care of her for me! Do you hear?--take care of her for me!'

But Peggy answers never a word.