Twilight by Julia Frankau (ready to read books txt) 📕

OF course she let him come. Not only that weekend but many others, until the early spring deepened into the late, the yellow gorse grew more golden, and the birds sang as they mated. It was the same time of year with me now, and I saw Margaret Capel and Gabriel Stanton often together in the house or garden, lying on the stones by the sea, walking toward the hills. My strength was always ebbing and I was glad to be alone, drowsily listening to or dreaming of the lovers, drugging myself with codein, seeing visions. I fancy Benham began to suspect me, counted the little silver pills that held my ease and entertainment. I circumvented her easily. Copied the prescription and sent it to my secretary in London to be made up, replaced each extra one I took. I was not getting better, although I wrote Ella in every letter of returning strength, and told her that I was again at work. My conscience had loosened a little, and I almost believed it to be true. Anyway I had the letters, and knew that when the time came it would be easy to transcribe them. Meanwhile I told myself disingenuously that I hoped to become better acquainted with my hero and heroine. I was wooing their confidence, learning their hearts. Now Gabriel’s was clear, but Margaret’s less distinct. I saw them sometimes as in a magic-lantern show, when the house was quiet, and I in the darkness of my bedroom. On the circle in the white sheet that hung then against the wall, I saw them walk and talk, he pleading, she coquetting. Whilst the slide was being changed Peter Kennedy acted as spokesman:

“Weekend after weekend Gabriel Stanton came down, and all the hours of the day they passed together. Four months of the waiting time had gone by and her freedom was in sight. Her nerves were taut and fretted. She often had fainting attacks. He never questioned me about her but once. I told him the truth, that she had suffered, was suffering more than any woman can endure, any young and delicate woman. And her love for him grew…”

I did not want to stop the show, the moving figures and changing slides, yet I called out from my swaying bed:

“No, no, she never loved him.” And Peter Kennedy turned his eyes upon me, his surprised and questioning eyes.

“Why do you say that? Do you know a better way of loving?”

“Yes, many better ways.”

“You have loved, then?”

“Read my books.”

“The love-making in your novels? Is that all you know?” A coal fell from the fire; I frowned and said something sharply. He did not go on, and I may have slept a little. When I looked up again there was no more sheet nor Peter. Instead Margaret herself sat in the easychair and asked me how I was getting on with her story.

“Not very well. I don’t understand why you took pleasure in making Gabriel miserable by your scenes and vapours. That first day now. What did you mean by telling him of your reaction on seeing him, that it might have been because he had cut himself shaving, or because of the shape of his hat; the hang of his coat disappointed you. Either you loved the man or you did not. Why hurt his feelings, deliberately, unnecessarily? Why did you tell him not to come and then telegraph him? Why should I write your story? I don’t know the end of it, but already I am out of sympathy with you.”

“You were that from the first,” she answered unhappily. “Don’t think I am ignorant of that. In a way, I suppose you are still jealous of me.”

“I! jealous! And of you?”

“Why did you pretend you did not know my books, and send for them to the London Library? You knew them well enough and resented my reputation. The Spectator, the Saturday Review, the Quarterly; you were dismissed in a paragraph where I had a column and a turn.”

“At least you never sold as well as I did.”

“That is where the trouble comes in, as you would say although you are a little better in that way than you used to be. You wanted to ‘ serve God and Mammon,’ to be applauded in the literary reviews whilst working up sentimental situations with which to draw tears from shopgirls…”

“I am conscious of being unfairly treated by the socalled literary papers,” I argued. “I write of human beings, men and women; loving, suffering, living. You wrote of abstractions, making phrases. The sentences of one of your characters could have been put in the mouths of any of the others. Life, it was of life I wrote. Now that I am dying…”

“You are not dying, only drugged. And you are jealous again all the time. Jealous of Gabriel Stanton, who despised your work and could not recall your personality, however often he met you. Jealous of the literary critics who ignored you and praised me. And jealous of Peter, Peter Kennedy, who from the first would have laid down his great awkward body for me to tread upon.”

I half woke up, raised myself on my arm, and drank a little water, looked over to where Margaret sat, but she was no longer there. I did not want to go to sleep again, and lay on my back thinking of what had been told me. “Jealous!” Why should I be jealous of Margaret Capel’s dead fame, of her dying memory? But perhaps it was true. I had a large public, made a large income, but had no recognition, no real reputation, was never in the “Literary Review of the Year,” was not jeered at as other popular writers, but only ignored. Well, I did not overrate my work. I never succeeded in pleasing myself. I began every book with unextinguishable hope, and every one fell short of my expectations. People wrote to me and told me I had made them laugh or cry, helped them through convalescence, cheered their toilsome day.

“I love your ‘Flash of the Footlights.’” To repletion I had had such letters, requests for autographs, praise, and always: “I love your ‘Flash of the Footlights.’ ‘Fifty-eight thousand copies had been sold in the six-shilling edition. I wonder what were the figures of Margaret Capel’s biggest seller. Under four thousand I knew. Little Billie Black told me, cherubic Billie, the publisher, with his girlish complexion and his bald head, who knew everybody and everything and told us even more.

I was getting drowsy again, figures, confused and confusing, passing over the surface of my mind. Billie Black and Sir George Stanton, Gabriel, then Ella, a dim glance of my long-lost husband, Dennis, a smiling flash in the foreground; my eyes were hot with tears because of this short glad sight of him. Then Peter Kennedy again; awkward in his tweed cutaway morning coat. What did she mean by saying I was jealous of Peter Kennedy? I smiled in my deepening somnolence. Then there was an organ and children dancing, a monkey, a policeman, and the end of a string of absurdities in a long narrow vista. Sleep and unconsciousness at the end.

I observed Dr. Kennedy with more interest the next few times he came to see me. A personable man without self -consciousness, some few years younger than myself, the light in his eyes was strange and fitful, and he talked abruptly. He was not well-read, ignorant of many things familiar to me, yet there was nothing of the village idiot about him such as I have found in many country apothecaries. He looked at me too long and too often, but at these times I knew he was thinking of Margaret Capel, comparing me with her. And I did not resent it, she was at least fourteen years younger than I, and I never had any pretensions to beauty. Dr. Kennedy had good hands, long-fingered, muscular; dark hair interspersed with grey covered his big head.

“What are you thinking about me?” he asked.

“What sort of doctor you are!” I answered with a fair amount of candour. “Here have I been without any one else for three or is it five weeks? You don’t write me prescriptions, nor tell me how I shall live, what to eat, drink, or avoid. You call constantly.”

“Not as often as I should like,” he put in promptly. Then he smiled at me. “You don’t mind my coming?”

“Have you found out what is the matter with me?”

“I know what is the matter with you!”

“Do you know I get weaker instead of stronger?”

“I thought you would.”

“Tell me the truth. Is