LAVINIA

                          BY THE SAME AUTHOR


                    =Foes in Law.= _Crown 8vo. 6s._


                        _Crown 8vo. 2s. each._

                      Goodbye, Sweetheart!
                      Cometh up as a Flower
                      Joan
                      Belinda
                      Dr. Cupid
                      Not Wisely, but Too Well
                      Red as a Rose is She
                      Alas!
                      Scylla or Charybdis?
                      Mrs. Bligh
                      Second Thoughts
                      A Beginner
                      Dear Faustina
                      Nancy
                      The Game and the Candle


            =Twilight Stories.= _Small Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d._


                    LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.




                                LAVINIA

                                  BY

                            RHODA BROUGHTON

                                London

                      MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

                    NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

                                 1902

                         _All rights reserved_


                              PRINTED BY
                   WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
                          LONDON AND BECCLES.




                                LAVINIA




CHAPTER I


“I shall never get over it.”

This is a phrase that has issued from the same lips very often before;
and in general Lavinia Carew listens to it silently, in the impatient
confidence that at her next visit to Mrs. Prince, that lady will have
got over “it” so completely as to have forgotten that “it” ever existed.
She is silent now, but from an opposite reason to that which has
hitherto tied her tongue. In her opinion neither Mrs. Prince nor any
other Mrs. or Miss could ever get over the “it” in question.

“And coming on this joyful day too--a day, I mean, that is so joyful to
every one else in England--that would have been so joyful to us, but for
_this_!” The speaker breaks off with a whimper.

“The anniversary of Majuba Hill!” says Lavinia, with a fighting glint in
a pair of uncommonly clear eyes, and uttering her ejaculation with none
the less gusto for its being absolutely unoriginal, and shared by
almost every pair of lips in Great and Greater Britain this triumphal
day.

“After the terrible gloom of the winter--never even in the Crimean War
do I remember anything comparable to it!--just when the dead weight
seemed to be lifting a little from all our hearts,” pursues Mrs. Prince,
raising to heaven her bangled wrists with a despairing jangle.

“The village is full of little Union Jacks,” interrupts the girl, with a
good-natured effort to keep her afflicted friend on the safe track of
the public rejoicing, and also because she cannot quite restrain the
expression of her own jubilation. “I cannot think where they all came
from.”

But the waving of no bunting before it can hide out the spectacle which
is turning the national triumph to eclipse before the elder woman’s
vision.

“I suppose that I ought not to have told even you,” she continues,
resisting with mild doggedness her young friend’s attempt to distract
her thoughts, even momentarily, from her woes--not having, indeed, a
mind hospitable enough often to admit two ideas abreast within its
narrow portals. “No; I suppose that I certainly ought _not_ to have
revealed our disgrace even to you; but what was I to do? I had to tell
some one--to seek for sympathy somewhere. I get none at home. I suppose
that Mr. Prince feels it; but he says nothing. He is like a _stone_.”

“I am sure that he feels it.”

Something emphatic in the low-voiced assertion of her husband’s
sensibility, by one who has not the advantage of relationship to him,
grates on the rasped nerves of the poor wife.

“I never said that he did not feel it!” she cries in tart wretchedness.
“Of course he feels it. He would not be human if he did not!”

Lavinia assents with a motion of the head, quite as emphatic as her
former asseveration of Mr. Prince’s sufferings.

“And if _I_ had not told you”--answering the accusation of disloyalty
brought by herself against herself, with as much defensive exasperation
as if it had been proffered by her companion--“Féo would have done so
herself! She sees nothing to be ashamed of. She _glories_ in it!”

“_Glories in it!_”

“Yes, glories in it! incredible as it seems. But I wish, dear”--with a
fretful relief in finding an object on which to vent her exquisite
nerve-irritation--“that you would not repeat my words after me when you
hear them perfectly.”

“It _is_ a stupid trick”--speaking with absolute and effortless good
temper. “I think I do it without knowing.”

“You are a good creature!” cries the other, seizing her companion’s
fingers with one hand, and with the other applying a very expensive
pocket-handkerchief to the eyes that are swimming in mortified tears.
“To-day I can’t help snapping my best friend’s nose off!”

“Snap away! There will be plenty left when you have done,” replies
Lavinia, playfully passing her fore finger down the ridge of a very
handsome feature. Then, with an immediate return to gravity, “I know
that she came back in a very _exalté_ state from that ‘send off.’ She
managed to get an introduction to him--to the General, I mean--didn’t
she?”

Miss Prince’s mother shakes her head. “No; she had no introduction. Lady
de Jones, with whom we went, did not know him; but we had tickets. We
were admitted to the platform. Before I guessed what she--Féo, I
mean--was going to do, she pushed her way up to him--to where he was
standing with his staff, and gave him a bunch of violets.”

“Yes, I remember she told me”--trying honestly to keep out of her voice
the disgusted disapprobation that the action thus recalled had inspired
in her.

“He bowed and smiled, and took them. What else could he, could any
gentleman, do? And we came away, and she was in the seventh heaven; and
we both thought--her father and I both thought--would not you have
thought?--that there was an end of it!”

“Yes, I should.”

The bareness of this assent is due to the difficulty experienced by the
speaker in refraining from expressing how incredible and “beyond all
whooping” it appears to her, that to such a transaction there should
have been a beginning.

“She has always been rather a ‘handful,’” goes on the mother, with
rueful dispassionateness--“determined to be unconventional and unlike
other people, and all that sort of stuff; but it never entered our
heads that she would be so lost to all decency, to all self-respect, as
to do this!--throwing herself at him like a woman in Regent Street; for
that is what it comes to.”

The poor lady has worked herself up into a whirlwind of tears and sobs,
which her young friend charitably hopes may relieve her.

“And you neither of you had the least suspicion?”

“Not the very least mite,” replied Mrs. Prince, who, though in everyday
life _almost_ quite ladylike, is apt, under the pressure of high
emotion, to lapse into homely phrases that smack of her unregenerate
state before the world-wide success of “Prince’s Dropless Candle,” the
Féodorovna, had lifted her into affluence and the habit of wearing her
_h_’s every day. “She has always had a very large correspondence”--with
an accent that tells of murdered pride in the fact recorded--“writing to
and receiving letters from people that neither her father nor I ever
heard of! It was an understood thing that we should ask no questions. I
should as soon have thought of flying in the air as saying to her, ‘Whom
have you heard from?’”

“Then how--how did you learn about _it_?”

“She gave me the letter to read. We were at breakfast--her father and
I--reading our papers, in such good spirits over the surrender of
Kronje; it seems a year ago”--with a transient look of
bewilderment--“and in she came, holding an open letter in her hand, and
said, with that odd smile she sometimes puts on--I am always uneasy
when I see that smile--‘There has sometimes been a little soreness
about my keeping my correspondence to myself. Here is a letter that I
invite you both to read,’ and she laid it down on the table before me!”
The mother pauses, her face working.

“Well?” in a breathless sympathy.

“I just glanced at the signature, and saw it was his. But even then it
never struck me--I did not put two and two together. Who could have
imagined such a thing about her own child? And she had not mentioned his
name for weeks.”

“No?”

“I read it!” pausing to gasp, “and then her father read it!”

“Yes?”

“I--I have nothing to say against it,” speaking with twitching lips. “It
was everything that was honourable and gentlemanlike!”

A longer pause. Lavinia has put her elbows on the little Empire table
that interposes its fragile elegance between her and her companion, and
is digging her knuckles into the cheeks that are blazing with vicarious
shame.

“He said that--yes, I had rather tell you--that he was inexpressibly
touched; but that in his busy life there was no room for feelings of
that sort; that he was old enough to be her father; and that he had
thought it right to destroy her letter.”

Probably the dumb sympathy written so redly over Lavinia’s face is a
better plaister for poor Mrs. Prince’s gaping wound than would have been
any of the words that so absolutely refuse to come at the girl’s
invocation. There are many ointments that soften the smart of death, of
parting, of estrangement; but what physician or quack alive has ever yet
invented a successful unguent for shame?

“Even when I had read it, I did not take it in! I said to her, ‘Why have
you shown me this? What does it mean? Where does it come from?’ ‘It came
by the South African mail this morning,’ she said, looking me quite
straight in the face, ‘and it is General ----’s answer to a letter I
wrote him five weeks ago, offering myself to him.’”

It is the measure of Miss Carew’s view of the situation, that the
nearest approach to consolation which she can produce is the question,
“Don’t you think she is out of her mind?”

But the mother rejects even the extremely modest form of comfort thus
offered to her.

“Not more than she has always been!” adding ruefully, “She came too late
in our lives--after twenty childless years! We had wished too much for
her.”

Both are silent, Lavinia throwing her eyes distressfully round the room,
upon which Maple has worked his sumptuous will, in search of some phrase
that may ring not too mockingly. She only succeeds in bringing home to
herself the furious irony of the contrast between her companion’s
upholstery and the wrinkled wretchedness of her face. Yet, after a
moment of hopelessness, one of her propping hands drops down and hurries
across the table to stroke the mourner’s sleeve, while her good eyes
brighten at the thought that she has at last hit upon something really
soothing to suggest.

“It will never go any further! With a man like _him_, the soul of
honour, her secret is certain to be sacred. Nobody but we need ever know
it, and we will let it die as soon as we can.”

“Nobody but we need ever know it!” repeats Mrs. Prince, with a shrill
intonation of scornful woe. “That shows how little you know her! She
herself will proclaim it on the housetops.” Then, with a sudden change
of key, “She is coming this way--singing, if you please! Don’t you hear
her? You must excuse me, I really can’t face her just yet.”

The mother rises hastily, and disappears, rustling, jingling, weeping
through a handsome mahogany door into a Maple boudoir, just as another
handsome mahogany door opens to admit the subject of the late
conversation into the room whence her advent has chased her parent.

“You have been hearing of my crime?” says she, coming in and shaking
hands conceitedly high up in the air.

Féodorovna Prince is a prettyish girl, long and reedy, with a skin,
hair, and hands whose merits make the casual looker forgive the
thumblike shape of her nose and the washiness of her foolish eyes.

“Yes, I have.”

“And what is your opinion of it?”

“I think I had rather not say.”

Miss Prince is standing before the fireplace, a hand on each side of her
phenomenally long eighteen-inch waist.

“You need not be afraid of hurting my feelings,” she says, with a
self-satisfied smile.

“I do not think I am at all afraid of that.”

Féodorovna ceases to smile, but continues to balance herself gracefully.

“I was born quite unlike other people! I have always been keenly
conscious of that. I have a right and wrong of my own; and they are not
the conventional ones.”

Lavinia listens in ireful silence; but no one glancing at the
conflagration in her eyes could mistake her speechlessness for approval.

“You asked General ---- to marry you?” she says, with a point-blankness
that would be pitiless, were there any question of a need for
compassion.

But Féodorovna does not wince. “I did not put it quite so crudely as
that!”--with a slightly superior smile. “I told him that I loved and
reverenced him beyond all created beings, and that I was his to do what
he willed with!”

“And he did not will to do anything?” replies Lavinia, brutally.

Her stinging speech scarcely raises the colour in Miss Prince’s faint
cheeks.

“He treated me with the same perfect loyalty that I had treated him!”

Lavinia’s answer is impatiently to pull open her own fur collar, as if
she were choking, and to repeat, half under her breath with a species of
snort--

“_Loyalty!_”

The other girl sits slowly down upon the Aubusson hearthrug, taking her
small knees into the embrace of her lengthy arms, and looking straight
before her.

“Would you like to see his letter?”--lifting one hand towards the breast
of her gown.

The indication of what delicate lodging has been provided for the
hard-hearted hero’s missive adds vigour to Miss Carew’s emphatic
negative.

“I had far rather not.”

Féodorovna’s thin pale hand drops to her side. “I want every one to see
it!” she says. “I want every one to know that if I have loved unhappily,
I have loved worthily--have loved the noblest object that ever ‘swam
into my ken’!”

The self-satisfied bravado has gone out of her face and manner; and as
she lifts her rather colourless eyes to the ceiling, as if expecting to
see her General sitting enthroned among the planets, Miss Carew realizes
with enhanced consternation that she is in deadly, _deadly_ earnest.

“I always made up my mind,” pursues Féodorovna presently, in an intense
low voice, “that if ever I met a man really worth loving--no matter what
his situation or circumstances in life were--I would offer myself to
him. I have done so!”

“And he has refused you!” rejoins Lavinia in a strangled voice, where
wonder and scorn are halt throttling each other. “And you are _alive_?”

This time the whip-lash does leave a slight weal in its bitter track.

“Why shouldn’t I be alive?” asks Féodorovna, as her throbbing throat
rears itself out of the delicate laces and pearls that surround it.
“More alive than I have ever been before. So far from being ashamed of
my action, I _glory_ in it--yes _glory_!” her voice rising in jubilant
inspiration. “Not one girl in ten thousand would have had the courage to
do as I have done!”

Miss Carew draws in her breath between two rows of excellent white
teeth.

“And what do you propose to do next? To write and ask him to reconsider
his decision?”

The wind is somewhat taken out of the speaker’s sails by the quiet
literalness of the answer.

“No; I shall do nothing further! I bow to his will”--suiting the action
to the word by a stoop of her russet head. Then, raising it again
proudly--“All the rest of my life will be spent in trying not to fall
below the standard to which my love for him has lifted me!”




CHAPTER II


In February light still reigns, though with uncertain sceptre, up to six
o’clock in the evening, and the fact that the cold, aquamarine tinge is
dying out of the west when she turns her back upon the Chestnuts, tells
Miss Carew how much beyond its first scope her call has been prolonged.
In the first place, she has been compelled, after all, to read
General ----’s letter, and give her grudging meed of praise to its tact
and humanity. Secondly--this has been the longest and hardest part of
her task--she has had to reassure Mrs. Prince, who soon reappears, still
tearful and jingling, as to the document having been undoubtedly penned
by the hero himself, and not committed to a chuckling aide-de-camp or
grinning secretary. Thirdly, she has been conducted into Mr. Prince’s
sanctum, for the express purpose of cheering him up by light and general
conversation, his hurt being much too deep and sore to suffer even the
most distant approach to it.

She finds him sitting with his British-merchant bullet-head clutched in
his hands, unable to be cheered even by the sight of the trophies,
medals, and certificates--national and international--to the merits of
his candle, which, to the sad mortification of his ladies, lavishly
decorate the walls. At the sound of her entry--convoyed by his wife--he
looks angrily up, and she realizes, with a warmer feeling of sympathy
and fellow-feeling than he has ever before inspired, how very much he
would have preferred that she had stayed away. His manner to women is
always elaborate, and she sees him now struggling back into it with as
much difficulty as a footman, in haste to answer a bell, fights his way
into a tight livery coat. She longs to beg him to remain metaphorically
in his shirt-sleeves. But no; he is already on his feet.

“I am afraid I am intrusive”--this is his almost invariable opening
phrase where “the sex” is concerned--“but have you left Sir George and
Mr. Campion quite well?”

“Miss Carew is come to have a little chat with you,” says his wife, with
an air of cheerfulness “made in Germany.” “You know you and she always
like a bit of fun together!”

She introduces and retreats hastily, with some misgiving, probably, as
to the quality of the “fun” in question, and with clearly no desire to
share it. Lavinia remains behind, to emerge, half an hour later, sorry
and discouraged, with the consciousness of having been only partially
successful in the attempt to be gamesome, unconcerned, and un-African.
Yet the old man--oddly old to be Féodorovna’s father--has thanked her
when she left him. She has not quite recovered the chokiness engendered
by his gratitude when she is recaptured by Mrs. Prince, feverishly
anxious to be again reassured as to the genuineness of the General’s
autograph, and the certainty that her daughter’s passion for their Chief
has not been given as a prey to the merriment of his staff. The fear is
so preposterous that Lavinia would have had difficulty in reasoning it
down with any show of patience, if pity had not come strongly to her
aid--pity and a lifelong apprenticeship to answering the
not-worth-answering. It takes her three quarters of an hour of solid
argument, lucid exegesis, and persuasive rhetoric to convince Mrs.
Prince that the commander of an Army Corps on active service has other
employment for his time than the publishing to his subordinates the
hysterical folly of a love-sick girl; and, moreover, that such a course
would scarcely be in consonance with the creed and normal habits of an
officer and a gentleman. It takes three quarters of an hour to convince
Mrs. Prince, and, at the end, she is not convinced. With a slight sigh
of waning endurance, Miss Carew realizes her lost labour, and turns back
on another spoor.

“She has promised--indeed, there was no need to exact a promise--she
volunteered it, that she is not going to take any further steps--to do
anything more!”

“_Do anything more!_” echoes the mother, with an accent of the acutest
scorn of this fresh attempt at solace. “Why, what more would you have
her do? What more could she do? Unless----”

She breaks off abruptly, and both know that she has been on the brink of
an utterance more suited, in its crude vernacular, to her former than
to her present estate. Both feel relieved that it has remained in the
domain of the implied; and, with a tactful fear lest the crestfallen
fellow-creature before her may be betrayed into some outburst of which
she may later repent on her return from the regions of primæval emotions
to the upholstered “reception-rooms” of gentility, Miss Carew hurries
over her adieux. Yet that “hurry” is scarcely the word to be applied to
her visit taken as a whole is brought home to her by the look of
beast-and-bird bedtime spread over the evening world as she gets out
into it.

“Are you ready?” she asks, addressing the back of a man-person whom the
first turn in the Park Road reveals kicking pebbles ahead of her in
obvious waiting.

“_Am I ready?_” rejoins he, wheeling round, with good-tempered
upbraiding. “You told me to be here at 5.30. It is now 7.15; and you
ask, _Am I ready?_”

Lavinia wisely attempts no defence. “Well, _are you_?” she asks,
smiling, but not coquettishly.

Of what use is it to be coquettish to a person in the same house, with
whom you have always lived, and your engagement to be married to whom
has had all the gilt taken off its gingerbread by the fact that you
cannot remember the time when you were not engaged to him, and who is,
to boot, your first cousin?

They walk on in silence for a few moments, she expecting and a little
dreading to be questioned, and be confident that she will volunteer an
explanation if he does not ask for one. But she refrains.

“Well, were they as good as usual? Have you no conversational plums to
reward me with?”

Lavinia winces. Is this a moment to remind her of how often she has
served up the pretensions and vulgarities of the family whom she has
just quitted on such affecting terms for the joint amusement of herself
and her _fiancé_?

“Don’t!” she answers hurriedly. “You do not know how you jar!”

He raises his eyebrows. “I know how cold I am,” he rejoins, still with
perfect temper, “and I shall be very glad to know why I _jar_, if you
will only tell me.”

“That is just what I can’t,” says she, wrinkling her forehead; “but you
may take my word for it that you do. You ring dreadfully out of tune.”

“In point of fact, one of your not uncommon waves of hatred for me is
going over you,” replies he, resignedly. “I know that they are never to
be accounted for.”

“No; I do not feel any special hatred for you to-night,” replies she,
dispassionately. “But I can’t tell you what is not my secret. In point
of fact, it is not really a secret at all, as Féodorovna will certainly
proclaim it to you next time you meet her; but _I_ can’t tell it.”

“It _is_ a secret, and it is not a secret; and _you_ may not tell it me,
though Féodorovna may! What dark sayings are these?” cries he, gaily,
perfectly indifferent as to her mystery, though diverted at the pomp
with which she is investing it.

But his lady-love is not to be won to any answering lightness.

“I see nothing to laugh at,” she says; and even in the rooky twilight he
can perceive her frown. “I pity them from the bottom of my heart. One of
the greatest misfortunes possible--yes, I really think I do not
exaggerate--one of the greatest misfortunes possible has fallen upon
them.”

“Has the Candle begun to drop after all these years?” asks he, still
incorrigibly flippant.

She quickens her pace, as if to get away from him.

“I have always known that there was something lacking in you.”

“I have always known that there were a great many things lacking in me,”
interrupts he, mending his pace too.

“Even if I had not promised, nothing would induce me to tell to any one
so unsympathetic----”

“I do not want you to tell me! I do not care a button what has happened
to them!” cries he, rudely, but half laughing.

Bested in the attempt to outstrip her companion, Miss Carew stops short.

“You would be sorry if you knew,” she throws out tantalizingly, unable
to resist the temptation to go as near as possible to the line which she
is resolved not to cross, and unworthily annoyed at the absence of
pressure put upon her.

“I should not,” replies her lover, with quiet conviction. “If it were
anything that would make them less beastly prosperous, I should be
glad.”

“There was nothing ‘beastly prosperous’ about them to-day,” says she
indignantly, as memory reconstructs the bitterly dripping tears of the
one millionaire, and the stubby head clutched in short coarse hands of
the other.

He receives the information in silence, not wishing to make her more
angry than she already is, and being really quite without interest as to
the topic which engages her.

Lavinia is obliged to give up the attempt to stimulate a curiosity
which, after all, she has no right to gratify, and, thrusting her
partisanship into her pocket, reluctantly changes the topic.

“Have you found out why your father was so much put out at luncheon?”

It is growing too dark to see his face, but she catches the instant
change in his tone.

“Yes.”

“I told you that there must be some cause.”

“Because he exceeded even his usual ample measure of incivility to me,
do you mean?”

There is very little bitterness in the voice or words, only a sort of
regret mixed with some not quite ordinary quality of patience.

“I felt sure that he had had something to ruffle him.”

“He has always something to ruffle him. He has always _me_; but to-day,
dear old chap, he had something more.”

“What?”

“Poor Bill’s things came back this morning--his watch and his
cigar-case, and mother’s photograph--and with them, I think, but of
course father did not show that to me, a letter from the fellow whom
Bill picked up on his own horse, and brought out from the Boer fire when
he himself was mortally wounded.”

There is an unresenting pain running through the whole of this
narrative, but Lavinia does not notice it.

“Does the letter give any more details--say whether he suffered much?”
she asks, in white eagerness. “Oh, but I forgot,” half impatiently, “you
did not see it!”

“He will show it to you,” replies the young man, as if stating a
perfectly natural and accountable fact.

After a pause, while they both trudge on in hushed emotion--

“Poor old fellow! if he knew how much I understood what it must be to
him to see me there, who am the embodiment of everything that he
despises and dislikes, eating my luncheon, well and fit, while Bill is
lying in his wretched makeshift of a South African grave, he would
perhaps hate me a little less than he does.”

The girl turns to him now impulsively, her fine lucid eyes shining wetly
in the semi-darkness.

“And if he could but look into your heart--oh, why haven’t we windows in
our breasts? how much fewer mistakes there would be if we had!--he would
see how gladly, _gladly_ you would change places with Bill!”

The appeal is not answered. Campion’s head is sunk on his breast.

“You would, wouldn’t you?” she cries urgently, as if she could not bear
a moment’s delay in the assent to a proposition so obvious.

There is an instant’s pause; then her companion--they have both
stopped--lifts his eyes with obvious difficulty to hers.

“No,” he says, in a low but not uncertain voice, while the moon, which
has just looked over a clump of neighbouring hornbeams, lights the
sincerity of his quivering face, “I would _not_ rather change places
with Bill. I would rather be alive here, walking with you, than lying
cold and bloody under that hideous veldt. I have never had any opinion
of what is conventionally called _honour_. ‘Who hath it? He that died o’
Wednesday.’ Well, I have no wish to have died o’ Wednesday.”

For a moment a look of terror and aversion crosses Lavinia’s face; then
her brow grows clear.

“It is lucky for you that I do not believe you,” she says, with a sort
of laugh--“that I know your ways.”

“Do you?” he answers, half under his breath; and again they walk on.

They are outside the Park gates, have followed the road that leads past
the King’s Woods, and have reached the brow of the hill, half-way down
which the village lights show their yellow points, and the church
steeple tells its jackdaws, now silent in bed, to the tune of “The Last
Rose of Summer,” that it is seven o’clock. Upon the silvering sky the
Kentish oast-houses draw their extinguisher outline.

“I have always wondered,” says Campion, slowly, as they begin to descend
the steep slope side by side, “why, feeling as you do, you did not pitch
upon Bill instead of me.”

“I did not pitch upon you,” replies she, quietly. “I believe that I was
born engaged to you, as I was born Uncle George’s niece. It seems to me
as if the one has been as little a matter of choice as the other!”

There is, if no romance, at least so rock-like a certainty in her way of
stating their relationship, that the young man feels a sudden lightening
of a heart that has been heavy enough.

“That, perhaps, is why we never can decide whether I asked you or you
me?”

“Oh yes, we can!” retorts she, also in a gayer vein. “As soon as I could
speak I suggested our marrying when we grew up. You demurred, and asked
whether we might not live together without marrying? I rejoined that
that would be wicked, and that Nanna said we should go to hell if we
did, whereupon you reluctantly consented.”

Both laugh, and arrive at the tree-hung entrance to their modest house
in better humour with each other than had at one time seemed probable.
But once inside the hall-door, the little spurt of cheerfulness dies
down.

“Is he in his own room?” Lavinia asks under her breath, and the answer,
“He was when I came out,” uttered with equal precaution, sends her
treading lightly towards a shut door, through the old-fashioned
fanlight over which a light is visible. Neither she nor her cousin-lover
suggests that he shall accompany her.

As she enters the idea strikes her with a half-whimsical sadness, for
what different types of sorrow she has within an hour had to provide
consolation. Equally different is the setting to those sorrows. In his
little Spartan room, with its large knee-hole writing-table, and its
sparse decorations of old coloured stage-coach prints, portraits of
departed hunters and famous jockeys, Sir George Campion sits in his
leather chair, reading his _Country Life_ with a resolutely everyday
look. There is only one bit of driftwood to show the shipwreck in which
his old heart went down two months ago; and that is the few little
objects neatly arranged on the small table that carries his
reading-lamp, within reach of that hand and eye, which yet would seem
ostentatiously unaware of them. Lavinia’s action ignores the poor little
pretence. She goes straight up to the sitting figure, and lays her hand
gently but firmly on his shoulder.

“So they have come back!” she says, her frank ringing voice
sympathetically lowered and chastened. “Thank God that the Boers have
not got them!”

“Yes; they arrived this morning!” replies he, still with his disengaged
air.

She touches the little articles with delicate reverence one after
another.

“Yes; here are all our presents--not one missing: the poor rector’s
electric bâton”--with a little half-sobbing laugh--“that we all made
such fun of when it first came; and yet, if you remember, _he_ said, in
one of his first letters, how useful it had turned out.”

The father listens, still striving to maintain the look of being
disturbed by irrelevant trifles in a congenial occupation; but the paper
crackling slightly betrays the trembling of the fingers that hold it.

The girl sits down on the worn arm of her uncle’s chair, while her own
arm passes round his neck.

“You have had a letter too?” she says, in a voice of cautious
tenderness, as one drawing near to an open gash, and adding the caress
of a light kiss dropped upon his grey hair.

“Who told you that I had a letter?”

“Rupert; but he said that you had not shown it to him.”

For the moment Sir George forgets to feign. “I thought it might frighten
him,” he answers, with a disagreeable smile. “There is a good deal about
Mausers and dynamite, and such ugly things in it.”

She does not take up the jeer, though it makes her stingingly hot, as if
she herself were its object.

“Rupert thought that perhaps you might show it to me?” she suggests.

“I have no objection to _your_ seeing it!” returns he, with significant
emphasis; “that is to say, if I can find it.”

With a repetition of that poor parade of carelessness, he feigns to
search in all his pockets, as of one that has mislaid something too
valueless to be hoarded, and ends by bringing out from--where she had
never doubted its resting--the one nearest his heart the narrative of
his son’s death, penned by that dead boy’s comrade. Lavinia unfolds it,
and, with head reverently bowed, begins to read. It is written in
pencil, evidently by one to whom pens and stationery are non-existent,
and in parts it is hard to decipher. There is absolute stillness in the
room. _Country Life_ has fallen upon the carpet, but Sir George forgets
to pick it up. Lavinia pauses at last; for the excellent reason that her
eyes are too thick with tears to do her any service.

“Oh, _what_ a tribute!” she says, in a suffocated whisper. “You must
never--_never_”--catching his hand, and raining salt drops upon
it--“never again be so selfish as to grudge him such a glorious death!
Oh, which of us does not envy him? which of us would not change with
him?”

She breaks off suddenly, memory pouring upon the furnace of her passion
the cold stream of her _fiancé’s_ cynical question, “Who hath it? He
that died o’ Wednesday.” It was only talk, only said to tease her; but
why does it recur to her now, like a blasphemy hissed into a believer’s
ear in a sanctuary? In a groundless terror lest her thought should be
read, she dashes her handkerchief across her eyes, and resumes reading.
But every sentence, unstudied, unliterary, plain and crude in its direct
passage from heart to heart, blurs her voice afresh--

“What a tribute!” she repeats, trying to steady her broken voice so as
to read aloud intelligibly snatches from the letter before her: “‘Never
saw anything to equal his pluck, except his patience--his colonel quite
broke down when he bid him good-bye--so cheerful--and making jokes even
up to----” Again she breaks off, stayed by weeping.

“He was a promising lad!” says the father, in an iron voice. Then
against his will the mask falls for a moment: “And this,” he cries,
striking the table beside him with his clenched fist, in a sort of
rage--“these,” pointing to the little relics tragic in their
insignificance--“these are all that is left of him and his career! These
are all that I have left to live on!”

With what but the awe and pity of her silence can Lavinia answer an
outburst so heart-rending? Several minutes elapse before she dares to
hesitate her small attempt at solace.

“Do we go _quite_ for nothing? You have _us_ left! We may not be much,
but we are _something_!”

No sooner is it uttered than she sees, by the dull rage in his eyes and
the sneer on his lips, how more than useless her effort has been.

“Yes; I have certainly Rupert of the Rhine left! Ha! ha! He has a whole
skin at present, and I expect he will take precious good care that it
keeps whole!”

Lavinia takes her arm away, and rises to her feet, in deeply wounded
discouragement, reddening in her lover’s behalf even more deeply than
she had with vicarious shame at Féodorovna’s immodesty.

“Are you angry with him for not being dead too?” she asks, standing
before her uncle with locked hands and burning eyes. “Well, perhaps he
will oblige you; he has never been very strong!” Then, with a revulsion
of feeling, flinging herself on her knees beside the old man, “Do not be
unkind to him! you know that, though they were so different, Bill liked
him very much! Oh!”--bowing her nut-brown head on his knees--“oughtn’t
we to love each other all the better, now that there are so few of us?”




CHAPTER III


The modest, low house on the Kentish hillside, with its pink, rough-cast
face, its tall, narrow, eighteenth-century windows, its verandah, the
alternate object of summer blessings and winter curses, has been Lavinia
Carew’s home ever since her mother had crowned a foolish marriage by a
perhaps less foolish death within the year. Being one of those
completely unfortunate persons whom Fate seems to delight in
belabouring, her husband had predeceased her by a fortnight. Upon the
doubly forsaken baby’s nearest blood relation, Sir George Campion, had
devolved the choice of two alternatives--that of saddling himself for
life with a creature against whose entry into it he had always angrily
protested, and that of sending it to the workhouse, and being called an
unnatural brute for his pains. He chose the first; though, as everybody
said, with a very ill grace. But the people who kindly tried to tell her
this in later days could never get Sir George Campion’s niece to believe
it.

Yet her life has scarcely been a bed of roses, though love has not been
lacking; and her three men have had that immense opinion of her which
makes up to most of her sex for any amount of bodily or mental
char-ing. Of women in her home, save servants, there have, within her
recollection, been none. Marriage is not an institution that seems to
thrive in the Campion family, and so early in Lavinia’s history that
only the faintest blur of memory of something kind and connected with
cakes remains to the girl, her uncle’s wife had slipped inoffensively
away to the churchyard, conveniently close to the pink-faced house.
Often since she has grown up into sense and thoughtfulness, Lavinia has
speculated about that dim lady, of whom no one now ever speaks--all
others because they have forgotten her, and one concerning whom no one
knows wherefore he is silent--speculated whether in her lifetime she had
had as much buffer-work to do as has fallen to Lavinia herself, and
whether, not being of so robust a constitution of mind or body, it had
ended by killing her. For Lavinia is, and for several years past has
been, before all things, a buffer. Has there ever been a day for so long
as she can remember, when she has not been called upon to use her
characteristic gifts to deaden and smooth and blunt the jars and bumps
that her perpetually colliding men are always inflicting upon each
other? The fault has nearly always lain with the father, gifted with
that most infallible double endowment for ensuring unhappiness in
life--a deep heart and an impossible temper.

She is thinking of him with tender ruth next morning as she stands under
the verandah, looking across the downward slope of garden, grass,
sun-dial, and snowdrop borders, to the spacious view over the Weald of
Kent, Hastingswards. On her right, a towering hedge of espaliered elms
parts her--it alone and a few unseen green hillocks--from the little
red-roofed thirteenth-century church and its emerald God’s acre. From
the top of the church tower, it is said that on a clear day you can
discern the masts of ships, though not the very sea. To this kind of
seeing there goes usually more of imagination than eyesight; but the
belief has, since the days of King John, heightened the village’s
opinion of itself. To the left the prospect is bounded by the great
group of horse-chestnuts, leafless now and purple, in the Rectory
garden.

It is to the Rectory that Lavinia is bound--the Rectory, where she gets
her fresh eggs, and carries some of her troubles. She is dressed in
black for her dead cousin; but the freshness of her cheeks and lips, and
the sunshine that lives in her hair, make it always difficult for her to
look in mourning. Her spirits are still tender from the emotion of last
night, and her thoughts musing pityingly upon her men--the live one who
is taking his punishment so deadly hard, and the dead who, though now so
deified and enshrined in his father’s broken heart, had not, any more
than herself, found his short life a bed of roses. Poor Bill! Never
again would she have to insert the pad of her smoothing words between
his sensitiveness and the sting of his father’s speech--that father who,
though he would joyfully have died ten thousand deaths for him, yet
could not resist venting the gibes born of adversity and constitutional
ill humour upon the creature whom, “if Heaven had made him such another
world of one entire and perfect chrysolite,” he would not have sold for
it. Poor Bill!

With a heartfelt sigh she fetches her egg-basket and sets off through
the churchyard to her goal. It is a roundabout way, since the Rectory
grounds actually touch the wall at the bottom of the Campion garden; and
there had once, not so long ago, been a trellised door through which
Rectory and Place ran in and out at will, but in an unexplained spurt of
resentment or suspicion, Sir George had had it walled up. It has been a
cause of great inconvenience to himself, and he has very much repented
it ever since the spurt passed; but pride forbids him to undo his deed.
The Rectory regrets it too, but with wise and understanding want of
resentment. Its own front gate stands hospitably open, and the shortness
of its drive soon brings the visitor to the hall-door--wide open
too--for the Rectory is nothing if not airy; and, indeed, since the
children could never remember to shut it after them, it may as well gape
legally as illegally.

“You are quite a stranger,” says the rectoress, turning with an air of
relief from her pile of household books; for though she is a good woman
and does her accounts, she is not of those who love them. “What became
of you all yesterday?”

“I was at the Princes’ most of the afternoon,” replies Lavinia, sitting
down with the air of an _habitué_, her egg-basket on her knees. “They
were in trouble--bad trouble, of a sort; but you must not ask me what.”
Then, seeing a humorous sparkle in her friend’s eye, she adds,
half-laughing, “Oh, I see that you are in the secret.”

“Féodorovna has just been here to proclaim her heroic deed,” says Mrs.
Darcy, drily.

“Isn’t it inconceivable?” cries Lavinia, starting up with a revival of
the passion of shame that had overcome her on first hearing of Miss
Prince’s exploit, while the egg-basket, happily not yet laden, rolls on
the floor.

“There is no reason why it should turn _you_ into one gigantic blush,”
replies her friend, looking at her with a grave smile. “You have not the
distinction of having been informed that a very successful General has
no immediate use for you!”

“Did you tell her what you thought of her?” asks the other, in a low
voice, and giving a start of maidenly ire at the suggested possibility.

“Why should I?” asks the clergyman’s wife, lifting her sensible,
tolerant eyes to her companion’s still discoloured countenance. “Would
that have undone it?”

“And you let her brag about it? You allowed her to believe----?” Lavinia
breaks off.

“I do not think that she left me with the impression that I admired
her,” replies the other in an exceedingly quiet key; and Miss Carew is
at once appeased and silenced.

“Yesterday was painful from start to finish,” resumes the girl,
presently. “Some days _are_ like that, aren’t they? Yesterday”--with
that respectful drop of the voice which is our tribute to the
departed--“poor Bill’s things came back.”

The news brings a lump into the throat of the person addressed, for,
like most of his acquaintances, Mrs. Darcy had been fond of fine,
plucky, upstanding Bill Campion. It is a minute or two before she can
dress her sympathy in enough composure to say--

“And, of course, that upset _him_ very much?”

“No; he was not upset,” replies Lavinia, a sort of hopeless pity in
voice and look. “He is never upset; it would be much better for him if
he were--and for _us_.”

“Yes, poor fellow!”

“I was afraid that we should have a dreadful dinner,” continues Lavinia,
with the relieved expansiveness of perfect intimacy addressing perfect
comprehension. “I was afraid he would have one of his attacks of hating
us for being alive!”

“He never hates _you_ for being alive.”

“Well, ‘us’ means Rupert, and Rupert means ‘_us_;’ you know that.”

There is more of loyalty than grammar in the creed expressed; but as to
the staunchness of the believer’s faith there can be no two opinions.

“Yes, I know.”

If a faint wonder tempers the acquiescence of the hearer, it does not
reach her companion’s ear.

“He had called him ‘Rupert of the Rhine’ in the afternoon; that is
always a very bad sign. Nothing makes Rupert wince so much as being
called ‘Rupert of the Rhine.’”

Mrs. Darcy’s neck turns a little aside, so as partially to avert a face
on which a scarcely sketched smile that has not much real amusement in
it is dimly visible.

“But things turned out better than I expected,” pursues the girl, with a
lilt of recovering spirits in her not very low but yet agreeable voice.
“The dear old fellow put great constraint upon himself, and was quite
civil to--_us_”--with a small challenging smile, as she lays an
obstinate emphasis upon the plural pronoun--“and ‘we’ tried our best not
to be offensive, and even asked one or two quite sporting questions, and
did not make any very egregious mistakes.”

The end of her sentence is half drowned in the ringing of a very loud
one-o’clock bell. The Rectory lunches half an hour earlier than the
Place.

“I must be off!” cries the visitor, starting up; “and I have never got
my eggs, after all. Ah, here are the children!”

As she speaks, a burst, rather than opened, door announces the entry of
three young creatures between the ages of eight and fourteen, in whose
faces and persons dirt and good looks strive in amicable emulation for
the mastery.

“Miss Brine had to go off again to her sick sister this morning,” says
the mother, in placid explanation. “I do not believe that any one ever
had a governess with so many and such diseased relatives as I,” she
laughs; but her amusement is not echoed by her husband, who, correct and
glossy, at the moment enters the room from his study. On the contrary,
he regards with a fidgety distress the vestures which some unknown quest
has dyed in mud; not even sparing the rosy countenances above them. He
testily orders off his son and daughters at once to change their
clothes.

Six protesting eyes turn to the mother, “Need we? It is quite dry,”
exhibiting their caked stockings, petticoats, and trousers.

“You might try what a brush will do,” replies she indifferently,
overriding the paternal fiat.

The compromise is joyfully accepted, and the children drag off Lavinia
with them, partly to aid in their purification, but chiefly to display
to her the evidence of that patriotism which the joyful tidings of
yesterday have called forth. For though averse from soap and water, the
Misses and Master Darcy are avid of military glory, and the walls of the
schoolroom, cheerful in its large shabbiness, are thick with South
African heroes. Each child possesses and displays on the wall
photographs of every general of any distinction; but as there are wide
and envenomed differences of estimate as to the respective places
occupied by those warriors in the hierarchy of fame, each has his or her
special favourite enshrined in a showy frame, the centre of a circle of
lesser lights, and the theme of many a wordy battle. To a stranger not
acquainted with the fact that to a cult of glory the Darcy family add a
taste for breeding poultry, and combine the two by naming their
favourites of the farmyard after those of the battle-field, irrespective
of differences of sex, it would be somewhat startling to hear that
Colonel Baden-Powell has just begun to lay, and that General French is
“such a good sitter that he can cover more eggs than any of the
others.” But Miss Carew, since the inception of the campaign, had heard
too many eye-opening facts in natural history of the kind adduced to
turn a hair, and having admired the laurel wreaths beneath which
disappears Lord Roberts, who alone of all his officers is allowed to
keep his manhood, and is godfather to the Andalusian cock, she departs.

Her friend accompanies her to the gate, hatless, and having got rid of
the children by a slight gesture of dismissal, instantly obeyed, despite
the bite of February’s still bitter tooth, that makes the winter
aconites in the grass sink their round yellow heads chillily into their
green capes, she loiters even when the limit of the Rectory demesne is
reached; and Lavinia knows that she has something difficult of utterance
to say to her.

“Has Sir George spoken to you about your marriage lately?”

“About my marriage?”

“Yes, anything as to the desirability of its coming off sooner on
account of--what has happened?”

“On account of poor Bill’s death, do you mean?”--looking blank and
mystified. “No; why should he? What difference can that make?”

“You see that Rupert is the only one left now,” replies Mrs. Darcy,
gently, but in a rather embarrassed tone; “the only one to keep up the
old name--to prevent its dying out.”

Her companion is silent, staring at the humpy winter aconites with a
vague feeling that they have grown into unfamiliar blossoms; that the
gate-post is strange too, and the mud in the road, and the rectoress’s
expressive pale face.

“I think he means to broach the subject to you before long,” continues
the latter, looking away from the person whom she is addressing, and
speaking with a tentative delicacy; “so I thought it best that you
should not be taken unawares when he does. I must be off. There is
Richard signalling madly, and saying something quite _lay_ about my
unpunctuality.” She runs off nodding; and Lavinia, much more slowly,
takes her way home through the churchyard.

She feels as if some one--surely it cannot be the gentle friend made up
of sense, sympathy, and _esprit_?--has given her a blow on the head with
a cudgel. She has always known that she is to marry Rupert. The idea is
perfectly familiar, and not the least unwelcome. To be his wife in the
future is as inevitable a part of the scheme of life as to die. Up to
five minutes ago, the one has appeared as vague and distant as the
other. But to be married to him _soon_! To be married to him soon
because the Campion family cannot be allowed to die out! It is by her
union with him that it is to be preserved! It is her child, hers and
Rupert’s, who is to hand on the honoured name! Her very ears tingle and
glow at the unfamiliar realism and animalism of the idea. It is only
such a dotting of the _i_’s and crossing of the _t_’s that could make
her realize what a nebulous thing, with no foothold in the world of
reality, her engagement to her cousin has hitherto been. To be married
to Rupert! That she should have a child, and that it should be
Rupert’s! Her feelings are as yet much too chaotic for her to know
whether the prodigious fact thrown by the magic-lantern of Mrs. Darcy’s
simple question upon the sheet of her imagination, belongs to the region
of pleasure or pain. She knows only that she feels extraordinarily odd.
The sight--normal and familiar as it is--of the person who has just been
thrust upon her in so glaringly new a character, the sight of him
standing, as he has stood many hundreds of times before, watching for
her back-coming from the verandah, matter-of-fact and every-day as he
looks, does not in the least lessen the queerness of her sensations.

“The Rectory, of course?” he says, with a sort of whimsical protest in
his tone and eyebrows. Then, in an altered key of disturbed curiosity,
“Why, what have they been doing to you? You look---- I declare I do not
know what you look like.”

“Do not look at me, then,” says she, trying to pass him with a brusque
half-laugh; and, for the first time in her life, feeling uncomfortable
beneath the scrutiny of his surprised eyes.

But he catches her before she can escape. “What _have_ they been doing
to you?”

“They have been telling me that Colonel Baden-Powell has begun to lay,”
replies she, deceitfully.

The confusion of sexes prevalent among the Darcy poultry is too familiar
to the young man to raise a smile. He looses his detaining hold on his
cousin’s sleeve, and there is an accent of resigned distaste in his next
words.

“Of course yesterday’s news has brought on a frightful access of khaki?
I saw the flames of their bonfire insulting the evening sky last night.”

“We ought to have had one too,” she retorts, with a sudden rush of
opposition.

“Have we so much cause to rejoice?” he asks; and there is such
unaffected feeling in his voice that her heart smites her.

The recent emotion and the present one mix and produce her next
sentence.

“You are the only one left now?”

“Yes.” There is a faint inclination of surprise at her truism.

“If you died unmarried, at Uncle George’s death the Campion family would
be extinct?”

The surprise in the next “yes” is emphasized.

“But you are very young still?” she asks, as if in appeal from some
maintenance of a contrary contention to him. “No one could expect you to
marry _yet_?”

He looks back at her in dumb astonishment. Save in yesterday’s laughing
argument as to which of them had originally wooed the other, the
question of their engagement has scarcely ever been referred to by her.

“And I am young too!” she goes on, in that puzzlingly pleading voice, as
if still answering some invisible objector. “Most sensible people think
that a woman should not marry before five and twenty!”

“Is this the Rectory?” he asks, in a tone where wonder seems to strive
with a half-distrust.

“Must the Rectory supply _all_ my ideas?” retorts she, half-laughing,
yet still with that new sense of constraint. “Mayn’t I be allowed to
have any of my own?”

He shakes his curly head--the head which is never shorn quite close
enough to suit his father’s taste.

“The voice is the voice of Lavinia; but the words are the words of
Susan,” he says, drily.

“She had an idea--built upon, I do not exactly know what”--reddening
faintly at her own disingenuousness, and yet unable to break the
lifelong habit of taking Rupert into her confidence--“that your
father--that the change in--that poor Bill’s death, in short, might make
it desirable that we should----” She stops, jibbing at the
matter-of-fact word which yet has always closed the vista of her
lookings into the future as a thing of course.

Her companion supplies it, “Marry;” and to her ears it seems that an
awkwardness like her own has remodulated his familiar voice.

There are more crocuses this year than last, pushing their yolk-yellow
goblets through the grass; two or three have even invaded the gravel
walk.

“Is the idea disagreeable to you?” asks the young man, in a key to whose
agitated diffidence the girl is a stranger.

“Disagreeable! why should it be?” replies she, trying vainly to shake
off the oppressive absurdity of that new shyness which has laid hands on
them both. “Have not I been looking it in the face all my life? Didn’t
we agree yesterday that it was I who originally proposed to you?”

“You have had a good many accesses of hatred to me since then,” he says
hesitatingly.

“Yes, I have,” replies she, hotly, both cheeks hanging out flame
signals; “but you always know what produces them, and it lies with you
to prevent them ever recurring. I hated you when I found that that
wretched little pro-Boer poem in the _Shipton Herald_ was by you; and I
detested you when you said that if by any extraordinary accident you
were killed on a battle-field, your wounds would certainly all be in the
back!”

Her loss of self-control seems to give him back his.

“I got seven shillings and sixpence for my poem,” he says
good-temperedly. “And as for the battle-field, let us hope that my
legs--they are good long ones--will carry me back unpeppered to your
arms.”




CHAPTER IV


Lavinia tries to frown, but the whimsical way in which her cousin utters
his disgraceful aspiration, coupled with her conviction that, if put to
the test, he would prove how little his claim to consummate cowardice
was worth, sends her into the dining-room with a smile on her face. The
tone in which Sir George asks her what the joke is at once extinguishes
it.

“Nothing worth repeating,” she answers, grave, though suddenly.

“That means that I am not worth repeating it to!” he rejoins, with an
injured look, and pushing away the dish that is being offered him.

“Won’t you try it?” she asks persuasively. “They are eggs dressed
according to the recipe Lang got from the _chef_ at the Carlton.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t understand any one having an appetite when
they have been penned up in the house all the morning.”

Each of the three persons present, and probably the servants too, know
that the remark is aimed at Rupert, whose sedentary habits are one of
his father’s chiefest grievances against him. It is a besetting sin of
the outdoor members of a family to look upon the indoorness of the
indoor as a crime against themselves. But for once Rupert’s conscience
is clear.

“Were not you out, sir?” he asks pleasantly. “How did that come about?
In spite of the sting in the air, one could quite realize that spring is
only just round the corner.”

“I was occupied,” replies Sir George, briefly, not lifting the eyes
overhung by lowering brows to his son’s face from his own empty plate.

Both young people know what his occupation has been--the inditing, by a
slow penman, of an infinitely difficult letter of thanks to the unknown
soldier who had written to tell him of his dead first-born’s last
moments, and the tearing wider of his own yawning wound in the process.
There is a respectful silence; Lavinia regretting her smile, and Rupert
his question.

An almost imperceptibly exchanged eye-query between the two juniors asks
what subject it would be safest to start next; and the thought flashes
across Miss Carew of how perfectly Rupert always understands. How could
she have had that odd shock of misgiving half an hour ago as to a union,
however immediate--even if it were to-day or to-morrow--with one who
always understands? And while luncheon proceeds this reassuring
confidence deepens as she notes the tact and temper with which her
betrothed steers among the rocks and quicksands that beset his path. How
skilfully, yet without outraging truth, he conceals the fact that he had
thought the wind cold enough to justify wearing a great-coat--a garment
which is always as a red rag waved before his father’s hardy eyes! With
what smiling self-control he listens to that father’s side-hits at the
Molly Coddle and the Little Englander, though he knows that he is
expected to answer to both names! With what delicate intuition he
follows each faintest hint of a dangerous trend in the talk; and,
lastly, with what a masterly air of naturalness he leads up to that
poaching affray in Yorkshire which he had discovered and which his
father had not, lurking in the small type of the morning paper! How much
more thoroughly and subtily he knows Sir George than poor Bill
did!--poor Bill, who could never resist the temptation to buck and rear
under the whip of his father’s jibes! In sanguine forecast she
prophesies to herself that her bufferdom will soon become a sinecure. If
he could but be persuaded to give up that infuriating habit of
jestingly--it must be, and is jestingly--belittling physical courage,
and claiming for himself an absolute lack of it, Lavinia really does not
see in what respect Rupert could be improved. This stout and happy mood
lasts without a break until the repast ends; and upholds her even when
her uncle, with something that seems meaning in his manner, invites her
to walk with him to the keeper’s cottage. Let him broach the subject at
once! Thanks to Susan Darcy, she is prepared; but, even without
preparation, there would be nothing to cause her fear or hesitation. She
will be ready with her answer as soon as he with his question.

“Dear Rupert! That speech about ‘yelping curs’ must have made him
wince; but with what admirable temper and fortitude he bore it! Sir
George himself must have felt a twinge of remorse for it, since, at
starting, he had put his hand kindly on the young fellow’s shoulder, and
had said, ‘Do not be out of the way, my boy, when we come back, as I may
want to have a talk with you.’ And poor Rupert had coloured up with
pleasure. Living with him every day, it is only now and then that one
realizes what charming sort of looks his are.”

For the first half-hour of that walk, to which Miss Carew has thus
valiantly braced herself, it seems as if her resolution were to be
wasted, since her companion’s thoughts are plainly running in a groove
other than that for which Mrs. Darcy has prepared her. He stumps along,
digging his stick into the muddy ground, in that perfect silence which
is possible only to complete intimacy. Not till the high-road is left,
and the King’s Wood entered, does the little business of putting the
quivering, tantalized Dachs Geist on the chain produce a word from him,
and then it is only a “Steady, old man!” to the dog, who with moist nose
working and upbraiding eyes, is testifying against the inhumanity of
shackling him just when the sound of the rabbit begins to be loud in the
land.

“Poor Geist!” says Lavinia, stooping to pat the satin of the long, low,
red back. “Wait till we get to Madeley’s, and you shall run the hens!”

This is a promise always made and never fulfilled at the entrance to the
forbidden paradise; but it sends them all on in better spirits. Sir
George half smiles, too, though he says disdainfully--

“_Geist!_”

The name has been bestowed by Rupert, in memory of Mat Arnold’s immortal
favourite; but as his father is equally unacquainted with the author and
the poem, he can seldom forbear some ejaculation of contempt for so
senseless an appellation; and again the silence is unbroken, as they
step along the ride between the undergrowth of Spanish chestnuts,
through whose still adhering dead leaves the wind blows cracklingly.
They are for use and beauty too, these chestnut growths. To-day they are
a covert, warm and colourful; to-morrow they will be hop-poles, round
which the vine of England will wind the tenderness of her green embrace.

“We must try and get him here!” says Sir George, suddenly, arriving, as
often happens, at a point in his ruminations when utterance to his one
confidant is a relief, and without the slightest doubt that she will
have followed the wordless course of his meditations, and be able to
pick up his thought, whatever it may be, at the moment when he wishes it
to become oral. She is mostly equal to the occasion; and to-day divines
at once that the allusion is to the young officer whom Bill had died to
save.

“I am sure that he will wish to come,” she answers, in instantly ready
response.

“You know, of course, to whom I am alluding?” her uncle inquires, with
one of those sharp turns of suspicion, even of her, to which he is
liable.

“Surely to Captain Binning,” she replies very softly.

“We have nothing to offer him when he does come,” pursues her companion,
gloomily--“no sport--nothing that a fine manly chap like that would care
for. Twenty years ago it would have been a different thing!”

The sigh on which this speech is wafted tells the girl that her uncle’s
thoughts have gone back to the theme which had made him a sad and bitter
man, even before the loss of his son--that passing of his ancestral
acres into other hands, for which he has to thank his own early
excesses.

“If Bobs hurries up the Union Jack over Bloemfontein and Pretoria as
quickly as I expect of him!” cries she, sanguinely, with a kindling eye,
“they may all be back before the summer is over!”

“_All!_” he repeats, with a reproachful laugh; and she shrinks back into
a remorseful silence. It may be a dim regret at having choked the life
out of her little effort to cheer him that makes Sir George say
presently--

“If it were summer-time, he might put up with us for a day or two; and,
I confess, I should like to make his acquaintance. From his letter, I
should gather that he is just my sort--just what I should have
liked----”

He breaks off, and her fatal facility in reading his thoughts makes her
hear the unsaid half of the speech quite as plainly as the uttered one.
“What I should have liked Rupert to be!” is the aspiration which he
uselessly forbears to finish. As on many former occasions, her spirit
rises in defence.

“Don’t you think,” she asks gently, but with an intonation in which he
recognizes a familiar protest, “that it would be rather dull if we were
all made on precisely the same pattern? built on exactly the same
lines?”

“There you go!” retorts he, laughing not quite naturally, yet with less
than his former acridness; “up in arms at once, the moment you think
your precious pet lamb is going to be attacked!”

“It is well that there should be somebody to speak up for him!” she
says, carrying her head rather high, and looking very handsome and
plucky.

“He has a bottle-holder whom he can always count upon in you!” replies
Sir George, glowering sideways at her out of an eye in which displeasure
at being opposed, and admiring fondness for the opposer, are at open
war.

“Always!” she answers firmly; but, at the same moment, the dignity of
her attitude is compromised by Geist, who, with crooked legs madly
straddling, and choking bark out of a strained-at collar, forces his
conductor into a run in pursuit of some small live thing which has set
the dead leaves astir not a yard from his wildly working nose. Lavinia
is a strong girl, but Geist is also a strong dog, and it takes her a
minute or two to re-establish her supremacy.

“Though Rupert is such a favourite of yours,” says Sir George, with a
deliberation which shows that the remark is not an impromptu, “it does
not strike me that you are in any violent hurry to marry him.”

The expected has come--the fully prepared and waited for, yet it must
take her at an undefended angle. Possibly it is something jibing in the
shape of the question that chills away her carefully pre-constructed
response.

“Does whatever in the shape of an engagement once existed between you
still hold good? or have you put an end to it?”

The something of hurry and apprehension that she detects in his voice,
and in which she recognizes his last bid for possible happiness, affects
her so strongly that she can only give a nod, which is apparently of so
doubtful an interpretation that he misunderstands it.

“Do not be afraid to tell me if you have,” he goes on with what she
knows to be an unusual effort at self-control and temper. “I shall be
the last person to blame you. I never could quite understand what
you----”

“We belong to each other still: we always shall,” she interrupts, in a
low firm voice, hastening to stop the mouth that is about to utter a too
familiar formula.

A sort of relief spreads over the lined face beside her; yet there is a
cavilling discontent in his repetition of her phrase.

“_Belong_ to each other! Well, you have done that, I suppose, according
to your ideas, since you were both in long clothes.”

She pauses, and a cloud seems to pass before her clear strong eyes;
pauses with the feeling--an unaccountably heavy one--of being about to
do something absolutely irrevocable, then speaks.

“Do you wish us to marry soon?”

He shoots a look at her to make sure that she is in earnest.

“I wish for a grandson!” he answers crudely.

Again she pauses, chiding herself as squeamish for a return of that
sensation of repulsion which had assailed her when first the practical
aspect of her relation to Rupert had been suggested to her by Mrs.
Darcy. She has not conquered it when her uncle repeats and enlarges his
phrase.

“I wish before I die to see a grandson growing up, with as much of you
and as little of Rupert in him as you can make him!”

She listens with a half-shivering docility. Is it the strangeness, the
something of coarse and homely in the wording of her uncle’s wish, that
gives her this prudish and unreasonable sense of disrelish?

“No doubt you are laughing at the idea of wanting an heir when there is
so preciously little left to be heir to,” continues Sir George, in a key
half angry at her delay in acquiescence, half appealing to her mercy.
“But when you have got one spot of earth into your very bones, you do
not like the idea of being quite wiped off from it.”

Their steps have led them to a clearing in the low wood, and over the
ground bared by the woodman’s axe the old man’s eye, mournful and
yearning, wanders, embracing the pleasant swelling hills, the strawberry
gardens, and cherry orchards, upon which his sire’s eyes, nay, his own
boyish ones, had rested possessively. A Jew broker’s improved ploughs
are furrowing yon hillside; a Half-penny Comic Journal sends the
strawberries to Covent Garden; but to his own sad heart, pasture and
copse and red roof-tree, are Campion’s still. Lavinia’s eye follows the
direction her uncle’s has taken. The Kentish landscape, with its rustic
smile is nearly as dear, though not as melancholy, to her as to him. The
idea of living in any other surroundings is as unfamiliar to her as the
wish. “The thing that hath been shall be.” To go on living and doing for
her men--since there are now only two left, she must make the most of
them--what other fate has ever occurred to her as possible? For as long
as she can remember the thought of what she herself would like has been
always subordinated to the wishes, divined or expressed, of her menkind.
In so small a thing as the ordering of dinner, has her own palate ever
in half a score of years, been asked to give an assent or a veto?

To marry Rupert! To bear and bring up his children--a transient wonder
crosses her mind as to whether there is any likelihood of their being as
amusing and original as the young Darcys!--for what other end was she
created? There is no sting or thrill in her feeling for him; but is it
the worse for that? There are women incapable of thrilling for any
man--a large, cool, comfortable class, to which she does and must
belong. Has her pulse ever paid any man the tribute of one quickened
beat? Proudly to herself she can answer No. She is not of that kind.
With Féodorovna Prince as an object-lesson, there is not much fear of
her erring in the direction of passion or sentimentality. She
involuntarily lifts her head a little above its usual level--though it
is always handsomely carried--and, since the thought-current that has
run through her brain has done so with lightning’s own speed, there is
to her hearer’s ear scarcely any delay in her answer.

“I am ready to marry Rupert whenever you and he wish me to.”

Her voice is steady and serene; at least so she intends and believes it
to be. Yet Sir George looks at her askance.

“_Ready!_” he repeats distrustfully. “A man, if he has any pluck, may be
_ready_ to go to the gallows!”

Lavinia makes a face between a laugh and a frown.

“Choose your own words,” she says, the habit of a lifetime controlling
and smoothing away any outward expression of impatience.

But he will not let her off. “Are you _glad_ to marry him? Do you feel
that it is essential to your happiness?” he asks, pressing home his
inquiries with a persistency that he imagines to be conscientious, but
which she feels to be cruel and perverse.

“_Glad!_” she repeats, dragging out the word a little, to give herself
time to find the right phrase of tactful truth. “Haven’t I always been
glad that I was to be part and parcel of you both? My gladness is no
shoddy new thing.”

He looks at her captiously, the unhappy bent of his disposition causing
him to feel a half-distrust of the candid eyes and the honest voice that
yet always bring a warmth about his heart.

“If Rupert does not marry you, he will probably marry some one else,” he
growls. “And between you and me, I cannot quite depend on his taste!”

It is said with no wounding intention. Never would it have occurred to
the father that any one could take exception against him for making
disparaging comments on his own son of his body begotten; but used as
she is to them, never does Lavinia fail to protest.

“I like his taste,” she answers pleasantly and gallantly. “He thinks me
very good-looking.”

But her companion’s thought stumps undistracted by her playfulness along
its own track, as doggedly as his feet along the bridle-path.

“I am not difficult to get on with,” he says, in a _naïf_
unconsciousness of his own corners which makes his niece throttle a
smile. “No one can deny that I am easy to live with; but I could not
answer for myself if he sprang upon me some demi-rep from a music-hall
or some screeching platform woman. I declare to goodness”--lashing
himself up into unreasonable anger--“it seems an odd thing for a father
to say, but I know so little of the fellow--of what goes on inside
him--that I could not say, if I were to be shot for it, which
alternative is the more likely one.”

It would be perfectly useless to tell him that it is he himself who has
crushed the power of confidence out of his son; and the desire to
impart the information to him is at once stamped upon by Lavinia. All
that is left of it escapes in a patient sigh, and the little dry
sentence--

“I should say that they were about equally probable.”

“I have a still better reason for wishing to see you coupled together,”
continues Sir George, a little appeased, though not in the least,
suspecting the exercise of self-control that has tightened Lavinia’s
lips, and strengthened her grip upon Geist’s lead. “If you do not marry
_my_ boy, of course you will never rest till you marry some one else’s.”

“Never rest till I marry some one else’s!” repeats she, indignantly, all
her virgin pride up in arms; but in a second her wrath falls, vanquished
by native sweetness, and by a long and sore acquaintance with the
properties of Uncle George’s jokes. To-day it is not quite a joke. It is
the vehicle for a real apprehension. She is paid for her self-government
in a ready money which does not often distinguish the discharge of debts
to virtue.

“And then I should lose my little mosquito,” he says, employing a phrase
of no visible aptness to the tall and gracious creature beside him,
which she yet welcomes as a proof of peculiar favour. “No doubt my loss
would be your gain, as people say when other people’s relatives
die”--laughing uncontagiously. “But I do not think I could carry
creditably anything more just yet. You see I have lost a good deal one
way and another.”

There is pathos in his growling voice, and appeal in his shagged eyes,
and Lavinia at once feels that she would gladly die for him.

“It is settled, then!” she cries with a cheerfulness concerning which
she is not quite sure whether she feels it or not. “Rupert marries
Lavinia to prevent _her_ marrying any one else, and Lavinia marries
Rupert to prevent his marrying any one else, and the bells ring, and we
are all happy for ever after!”

Her one motive in drawing up this gay programme is to give him pleasure,
to chase the hopelessness out of his gaunt face; and perhaps she
overdoes the content of her tone, for he stops in his walk to send the
gimlet of his suspicious eyes through her.

“It is not to please me that you are doing it,” he says with sharp
contrariety: “mind that! I would be shot before I would influence you a
hair-breadth one way or the other in such a matter. And between you and
me”--it is the phrase which usually precedes some unflattering
observation upon his son--“if I were a young woman, and Rupert were the
last man in the world----”

But what Sir George’s course as a young woman would be his niece is
determined for once not to hear.

“Stop!” she says, laying her firm hand in prohibition upon his arm, and
speaking with an authority that for the moment seems to reverse their
relative positions. “You must not run down my husband to me!”




CHAPTER V


The hall-door reveals an unwelcome sight, though no one can deny that it
is a showy one, nor that the February sunlight is snobbish enough to
treble itself against the brazen glories of the crests on blinker and
harness and panel of the Princes’ carriage. It is a fact of disagreeable
familiarity to both uncle and niece that Féodorovna Prince will never
allow any of her acquaintance to be “not at home;” and that to be
pursued to study, toilet-table, and bed is the penalty exacted from
those upon whom she chooses to inflict her friendship. The two exchange
a look.

“Do not let her come near me,” says the man, in accents of peremptory
disgust, and so flings off to his den; while Lavinia, with the
matter-of-fact unselfishness of the well-broken human female, goes
smiling into the drawing-room.

After all, it is not Féodorovna, but her mother, who comes forward
alone, and with jet-clinking apology.

“You do not mind? It is not a thing that one has any right to do? But
Féodorovna would insist on getting out, so I got out too.”

At another moment this exegesis, pregnant in its unconscious brevity of
the relations between mother and daughter, would have made Lavinia
laugh; but at the present moment a horrible suspicion freezes all
tendency to mirth.

“Féodorovna!”--looking round in bewildered apprehension. “Why, where is
she?”

The visitor is so obviously in no hurry to answer, that Miss Carew’s
question repeats itself with an imperativeness that drags out the
reluctant and frightened response.

“Well, my dear, you must not scold me, as I see you are inclined; or, if
you do, it will be grossly unjust. You know what she is when she takes a
thing into her head, and I am bound to say she does feel, and has felt,
very keen sympathy for him in his trouble; indeed, we all have.”

She pauses, weakly hoping for some expression of thanks or reassurance;
but Lavinia only stares at her with confusing sternness in her aghast
blue eyes.

“And when she heard that the things had come back--poor Bill’s things--I
believe the news came through the servants--nothing would serve her but
that she must see Sir George, to tell him how much she felt for him. You
know that she has that curious _personal_ feeling about the whole of our
Army in South Africa, as if it belonged to her in a way, and she always
rated Bill very highly.”

Again the mother pauses, with a hope--but a fainter one than its
predecessor--that this tribute to the dead may have a mollifying effect
upon her inconveniently silent and staring young hostess.

“And where is she now?” asks Lavinia, with an accent that makes Mrs.
Prince regret her silence.

“She said she would go to Sir George’s room to wait for him; that she
was sure he would prefer that there should be no witnesses to their
meeting. Oh, do not go after her!”--with a despairing clutch at
Lavinia’s raiment as the latter makes a precipitate movement doorwards.
“It is too late now; and, after all, Sir George, poor man, is very well
able to take care of himself. And if he gives her a real good snub, why,
so much the better.”

Lavinia pauses, arrested by the something of sound sense that leavens
her companion’s flurried speech, and with a dawning pity in her
relenting eyes.

“And there is something I want so much to say to you,” goes on the poor
woman, hanging on to the skirt of her advantage, though wisely
relinquishing her material grasp. “You know that I always bring my
troubles to you, and I am in a fresh one now.”

“About her, of course?”

“Oh yes; about her, of course. I suppose that but for her things would
have gone almost too smoothly with Mr. Prince and me. I suppose that the
Almighty sees we need her to prevent us getting too--too uppish.”

The adjective is scarcely on the level of refinement held before her own
eyes by the poor lady, but the tear that moistens condones it.

“What is it now?” asks the girl, with a resolute banishing to the back
of her mind of the intense annoyance and apprehension caused by the
odious intrusion of Féodorovna, and sitting down beside her guest with
resolute and patient sympathy.

“I never look at her letters,” says Mrs. Prince, lowering her voice,
which has taken on a tone of eager relief. “You know I do not; but she
had left it with her others for the butler to stamp. He had it in his
hand; it was at the top. I could not help seeing the address.”

“Not _again_? She has not been writing to General ---- _again_?”

The expression of tragic repulsion in her young companion’s face seems
to get upon Mrs. Prince’s nerves.

“How you do jump down one’s throat!” she cries peevishly. “No, of course
she has not!”

“It was stupid of me to suggest it! To whom, then?”

“I really could not help seeing,” continues the elder woman, mollified
and apologetic for her own action. “It was no case of prying, but I
could not help reading, ‘Surgeon-General Jameson, Army Medical
Department, Victoria Street, Westminster.’”

There is a pregnant pause.

“Surgeon-General Jameson!” repeats Lavinia. “He is Director-General of
the R.A.M.C., isn’t he?”

The plumed toque that crowns Mrs. Prince’s expensive toupet gives a
dejected dip of assent.

“Does she know him?”

“Not from Adam. But that would never stop her writing to any one; no,
nor speaking to them either!”

Another pause.

“She wants to go out to South Africa as a nurse, I suppose?”

Again the tall ostrich feathers wave acquiescence. This time a spoken
elucidation follows.

“That is it, as far as we--her father and I--can make out.”

Lavinia draws a little nearer, and lays her hand upon the arm of her
visitor’s chair, while her chin lifts itself, and then falls again in a
movement of hopeless pity.

“I am very sorry indeed for you both! How does Mr. Prince take it? What
does he say?”

“You can never get much out of Mr. Prince,” replies his wife, in a tone
whose complaint is streaked with admiration for a verbal continence of
which she feels herself quite incapable. “But he did say, in his dry
way, that he should be sorry to be one of Féo’s patients.”

Lavinia smiles, but cautiously; and then, illuminated by a sudden
suggestion of valid consolation, speaks.

“You may make your mind easy, they will never accept her! She has none
of the qualifications.”

A slightly soothed expression comes over the visitor’s perturbed
features.

“It seems an odd thing to say of one’s own child, but I must say that
there is no one that I would not rather have about me than Féo when I am
at all poorly; and Mr. Prince is just the same.”

“Then do not waste time in worrying!” says Lavinia, with bracing
cheerfulness; herself encouraged by the success of her mode of
reassurance. “She will infallibly get a polite No for her answer, and
you will never hear anything more about it.”

“You are wrong there,” replies Féodorovna’s mother with rueful
shrewdness. “She is sure to tell us about it. Féo has an odd way of
boasting about things that other people would be ashamed of!”

“It is impossible to contradict this assertion, and with a passing
wonder and pity for a love cursed with such good eyes,” Lavinia repeats,
in despair of finding anything better, her already-tried-and-found-wanting
anodyne.

“Well, at all events, nothing will come of it.”

“And what will her next move be? I ask you that! What will her next move
be?” inquires Mrs. Prince, in dreary triumph.

The pride of having proposed an insoluble riddle kindles a funeral torch
in each eye. The question, as the too clear-sighted parent had expected,
_stumps_ Miss Carew, nor can any of the hysterical indelicacies which
pass through her mind as likely to illustrate Féodorovna’s future course
be decently dressed enough to be presented as hypotheses to Féodorovna’s
mother.

It is the occasion of her dilemma who cuts it short by an entrance a
good deal less aspen-like and deliberate than is usual in her case. It
is, of course, an extravagant trick of fancy, but the impression is at
once conveyed to at least one of the occupants of the drawing-room that
Féodorovna has been kicked into the room. The pink umbrage in her silly
face confirms the idea of some propelling force behind her, as does the
excessive civility of the attendant Rupert. That the deferential
_empressement_ of his manner is the cover for an inclination towards
ungovernable, vexed laughter is suspected only by Lavinia. That some
catastrophe has attended the visit of the young paraclete is obvious to
the meanest observer; but it is not until after the Princes’ carriage
has crunched and flashed away with Féodorovna reclining in swelling
silence upon the cushion, and her mother casting glances of frightened
curiosity at her infuriated profile that the details of the disaster
reach Lavinia’s ears. Not immediately even then, since before she can
besiege her cousin with terrified questions, he is summoned to his
father; and it is fully half an hour before he rejoins her in the
schoolroom. She has to wait again even then; since at her first allusion
to the subject, he is seized with such _fou rire_ that he has to roll on
his face on the old sofa before he can master the shoulder-shaking
convulsions of his uncomfortable mirth.

“What happened?” cries the girl, standing over her _fiancé’s_ prostrate
figure in a fever of apprehension. “Oh, do get up, and stop laughing!
What is there to laugh at? You are too stupid to live!”

“I shall not live much longer!” replies the young man, rearing himself
up into a sitting posture, and presenting a subdued but suddenly grave
surface to his censor; “not if we are often to have such treats as this.
I do not know why I laugh, for I never felt less hilarious in my life.”

“You are as hysterical as a woman!” says Lavinia, with a frown.

“It is not my fault, though it is my eternal regret that I am not one!”
he retorts.

It is lucky for him that the fever of her preoccupation prevents Lavinia
from hearing this monstrous aspiration.

“Did he do anything _violent_?” she asks in a voice made low by dread.

“He kept his hands off her, if you mean that!” replies Rupert, showing
symptoms of a tendency to relapse into his convulsion of laughter; “but
only _just_! If I had not appeared in the nick of time, I would not have
answered for her life!” Then, as Lavinia keeps looking at him in
smileless tragedy, he goes on, “I was hanging about, waiting for him, as
you know he had told me that he should have something to say to
me--by-the-by, he has just been saying it, but that is another
story--when I heard raised voices, or rather a raised voice. You know
that long, dull roar of his that always makes me call on the hills to
cover me!”

“Well?”

“I felt that there was no time to be lost, so I hurried in--only just in
time! I saw in his eye that the next moment he would have her by the
shoulders, and be thrusting her through the door!”

“But he did not! you stopped him?”--breathlessly.

“Yes, thank the Lord!” He pauses, and his lips begin to twitch with
nervous mirth. “I know what you thought: she was shot into the
dining-room like a projectile; but it was not as bad as that. Only
_moral_ force propelled her.”

Lavinia brings her hands together with a sort of clap, but relief
mingles with the indignant animosity of her tone.

“What _had_ she said? What _had_ she done?”

Rupert shrugs his shoulders. “What is our little Féo _not_ capable of
saying and doing?” he asks sarcastically. “But you must remember I came
in only for the bouquet of the fireworks.” After a pause, in a key of
real feeling, with no tinge of satire, “Poor old fellow! I would have
done a good deal to save him from it. I think the last straw was when
she began to finger the things--Bill’s poor little possessions--and to
imply, if she did not exactly assert, that his death was quite as great
a blow to her as to the old man.”

“And when we remember what Bill’s estimate of her was!” cries Lavinia,
reddening with indignation. “Oh, if we could but tell her of his saying
that he should have to put barbed wire round himself whenever he went
outside the gate to prevent her getting at him!”

They both laugh--the little rueful laugh with which the jests of the
departed are recalled.

“After they had gone,” pursues Rupert, “when he sent for me, I found him
still in a terrible state. I have never seen him in such an ungovernable
fury. Not with me--to me he was like a pet lamb.”

Again they both laugh a little grimly, conscious of the extreme audacity
of the comparison.

“You will not believe it,” says Rupert, half humorously, and yet with a
quiver of emotion on his sensitive face, “but he actually _thanked_ me
for coming to his rescue! _Me_, if you please, _moi qui vous parle_!”

“‘It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’” replies Lavinia,
cheerfully, but with conscious effort, and with the feeling, often
before experienced, that a good deal of physical fatigue attends living
over the crater of Etna.”

“He calmed down after a while. I spent all the bad language I was master
of, and wished it had been more, upon the whole Prince clan; and that
did him good, so much so that he was able by-and-by to talk of something
else.”

“Of what else?” The question is an idle one, and Miss Carew is conscious
of it.

So is Rupert. “I expect that you know,” he answers quietly.

Never until to-day has Lavinia felt _gêne_ in the presence of her
lifelong playfellow and comrade, and that she should do so now strikes
her as so monstrous an anomaly that it must be treated drastically.

“About our marriage, do you mean?” she inquires, taking the bull by the
horns, and looking him full in the face.

“Yes.”

“H’m!” Struggle as she may, her lips can produce nothing more
forthcoming than the monosyllable.

“He asked me whether the engagement still existed?”

“So he did me.”

“Whether we had any intention of fulfilling it?”

“Ditto!”

“Whether it was essential to our happiness?”

“Essential to our happiness,” repeats she, as if it were a dictation
lesson.

“He said that we were all that he had left in the world.”

Lavinia nods, speech seeming difficult. Is Rupert going to recapitulate,
in his father’s unsparing Saxon, the reason for that father’s anxiety to
see them wed? She waits in rosy dread. It is a moment or two before
relief comes.

“He ended by adjuring me not to marry you in order to please him. I
think I was able to reassure him as to that not being my primary
inducement.”

They know each other far too well for her not to be instantly aware of
an alteration in his voice--not to have an instant’s flashed certainty
that the playmate, the comrade, the brother-cousin, is gone, and that
the lover stands full-fledged in their stead before her. Whether the
conviction causes her pain or pleasure, she could not tell you. She only
feels as she has done in the morning, but a thousandfold more so, that
the situation is overpoweringly _odd_.

“Well!” she says slowly, afraid to look away from him, lest she should
never again be able to lift her stupidly rebellious eyes to his.

“I suppose it was bound to come, some time or other?”

It is not an effusive mode of acquiescence.

“Have you nothing more to say about it?”

If she had had any doubt as to the final banishment out of her life of
the boy-comrade, the method of this question, and a certain reproachful
enterprise divined in the asker’s eye, would have banished it.

“What more is there to say?” she returns in troubled haste. “What more
than we have been saying all our lives, in a way?” Then, with a sudden
impulsive throwing herself on his judgment and mercy, “I suppose we _do_
feel all right, don’t we?”




CHAPTER VI

    “I love nothing so well as you!
     Is not that strange?”


Rupert _is_ “all right.” Of that there can be no question. It turns out
now that he has been “all right” for as long as he can remember. The
discovery that it is only his delicacy and self-command that have
hitherto hindered his manifesting his “all-rightness” practically, fills
Lavinia with such admiring gratitude as makes her almost certain that
she is “all right” too. She has no female friend with whom to compare
notes, nor would she do so if she had, her one intimate, Mrs. Darcy,
being very far from belonging to that not innumerous band of matrons who
enjoy revealing the secrets of their own prison-house to a selected few.
Lavinia has to work out her problem for herself. Not betrothed only now,
but going to be married, with a tray of engagement-rings crawling down
from London by the South-Eastern for approval, with a disinterring by
Sir George, from his dead wife’s presses, of wedding laces----

Lavinia wishes that Rupert did not take quite so great an interest in
the latter, and did not know quite so much about Point de Venise, Point
de Flanders, and Point d’Angleterre--; with interesting and illumining
comparison of past feelings, and with a respectable modicum of kisses.
If the candour of her nature, and the knowledge of how perfectly useless
it is to lie to a person who knows her so through and throughly as
Rupert, compel her to acknowledge that these latter do not cause her any
particular elation, she is able truly to answer him that she does not
dislike them so much as to forbid a frugal repetition. Once or twice,
touched and stung to generosity by his unselfish refraining from even
the dole of allowed endearments, she takes the initiative; and at other
times consoles him for her want of fervour by assuring him, with
emphatic words, and the crystal clearness of her kind, cold eyes, that
she is “not that sort.”

She is wondering to-day whether, when she left him five minutes ago at
the lych-gate, he did not look as if he were getting a little tired of
the explanation. It ought to be thoroughly satisfactory to him, for,
after all, you can’t give more than you have; but she has never been in
the habit of crossing or discontenting her men, and to be found not up
to the expected mark in the matter of endearment vexes her as much as to
be convicted of neglecting their buttons or slurring their dinner.

It is a week since Miss Carew has paid the visit, usually a daily or
bi-daily one, to the Rectory. The unwonted absence for three days from
her monopolizing husband and boisterous brood of Mrs. Darcy, partly
accounts for this omission; and not even to herself does Lavinia own
that she is in a less hurry than usual to greet her returned ally.
Rupert is never in any great hurry to see Susan, and has gracefully
declined to accompany his _fiancée_ on her present errand of
announcement.

“You shall tell me about it when you come back. I shall like to hear how
her face lights up when she hears the good news,” he says with a
half-sarcastic smile; then, seeing the girl wince a little at this
hitting of a nail all too soundly on the head, he laughs it off
pleasantly. “Tell her, as you told me, that it was ‘bound to come.’”

“Mine was certainly a very original way of accepting an offer,” replies
Lavinia, slightly flushing. Never since the decisive day has she felt
quite at her ease with Rupert, and so goes off laughing too; but the
laugh disappears as soon as she is out of sight.

The day is full of hard spring light, which shows up, among other
revelations, the emptiness of the Rectory drawing-room, with its usual
refined litter of needlework and open books, and the figures of the
children in the chicken-yard, whither a spirit of search and inquiry
leads Lavinia’s feet. From her friend’s young family she hears that
their mother has gone up the village to bandage a cut hand; but it is
with difficulty that this information is extracted from them, so
vociferously preoccupied are they with their own affairs. Gloriously
happy, covered with mud, hatless, dishevelled, blissful, speaking all at
once, they reveal to her, in shouting unison, the solid grounds for
their elation--nurse gone off at a moment’s notice, governess’s return
indefinitely postponed, mother busy, father absent!

“Oh, Lavy, we _are_ having such a good time, particularly at tea! Serena
has tea with us.”

Serena’s age is two years, and detractors say that her Christian name
must have been bestowed with an ironical intention.

“And no doubt you spoil her very much?”

“No,” thoughtfully; “we do not spoil her. We only try to make her as
naughty as we can.”

Their visitor smiles at the nice distinction, and weakly shrinking from
pointing out the immorality of the course of conduct described,
judiciously changes the topic by asking why the flag on the henhouse is
flying half-mast high.

She is at once informed by grave voices that there has been a
court-martial, and that General Forestier Walker is to have his neck
wrung for breaking his eggs.

“General ---- was the presiding judge,” says Phillida, pointing to a
peaceable-looking white Dorking matron, making the gravel fly behind her
with the backward sweep of her scratching feet. “He is Féo Prince’s
general. She told me, last time she was here, that she had asked him to
marry her.”

“As if he would be thinking of such tommy-rot as marriage now!” cries
Chris, more struck, apparently, by the ill-timing of the overture than
its indelicacy.

“Miss Brine was shocked,” says Phillida, thoughtfully. “She said that it
was putting the cart before the horse, and that Féo ought to have waited
for him to speak first.”

“But if he wouldn’t?” cries little Daphne, swinging Lavinia’s hand,
which she has annexed, to and fro, and staring up with the puzzled
violet of her round eyes.

They all laugh.

“That is unanswerable,” says Lavinia, blushing even before the children
at this new instance of Féodorovna’s monstrous candour; adding, in a not
particularly elate key, as her glance takes in a _recherché_ object
nearing their little group across the white grass of the still wintry
glebe, “Why, here _is_ Féo!”

“They told me your mother was out,” says the visitor, as if this were a
sufficient explanation for her appearance.

The children greet her with the hospitable warmth which nature and
training dictate towards _any_ guest, _qua_ guest, but without the
exuberant, confident joy with which they always receive Lavinia.
However, they repeat the tale of General Forestier Walker’s crime and
fate, and add, as peculiarly interesting to their hearer, the name of
the presiding judge.

Féodorovna listens with an absence of mind and eye which she does not
attempt to disguise.

“I was coming on to you,” she says, addressing Lavinia, and turning away
with an expression of boredom from her polite little hosts. “I should
have asked you to give me luncheon, but since I find you here, it does
as well.”

Neither in voice nor manner is there any trace of the resentment that
Miss Carew is guiltily feeling. Féodorovna never resents. Too well with
herself often to perceive a slight, and too self-centred to remember
it, Lavinia realizes with relief that all recollection of the peril Miss
Prince’s shoulders had run at Sir George’s all-but ejecting hands has
slidden from that fair creature’s memory.

“I went to London yesterday,” she says, turning her back upon the cocks
and hens, and their young patrons, as unworthy to be her audience.

“We saw you drive past,” says Phillida, innocently; “you went by the
11.30 train. We were not looking out for you; we were watching Lavy and
Rupert. From mother’s bedroom we can see right into their garden.”

“Can you, indeed?” interposes the voice of Mrs. Darcy, who has come upon
the little group unperceived by the short cut from the village. “I am
glad you told me, as I shall try for the future to find some better
employment for your eyes.”

Her voice is quite quiet, and not in the least raised; but the children
know that she is annoyed, and so does Lavinia, who, with a flushed cheek
and an inward spasm of misgiving, is trying to reconstruct her own and
her _fiancé’s_ reciprocal attitudes at eleven o’clock of yesterday’s
forenoon. To them all for once Féodorovna’s unconscious and preoccupied
egotism brings relief.

“I was telling Lavinia that I went to London yesterday.”

“For the day? to buy chiffons? I suppose I shall have to reclothe this
ragged regiment soon,” looking round ruefully at her still somewhat
abashed offspring, and avoiding her friend’s eye.

“Chiffons! oh no!” a little contemptuously. “I went up to see the
Director-General of the Army Medical Department.”

“Indeed! Is he a friend of yours?”

“Oh dear no; I went on business.”

“To offer your services as a nurse, I suppose?” replies Mrs. Darcy, as
if suggesting an amusing absurdity, and unable to refrain from stealing
a look at Lavinia, while her own face sparkles with mischievous mirth.

“Exactly,” replies Féodorovna, with her baffling literalness. “I sent up
my name, and he saw me almost at once.” She pauses.

“And you made your proposal?”

“Yes.”

“He accepted it?”

Féodorovna’s pale eyes have been meeting those of her interlocutor. They
continue to do so, without any shade of confusion or mortification.

“No; he refused it point-blank.”

As any possible comment must take the form of an admiring ejaculation
addressed to the medical officer in question, Susan bites her lips to
ensure her own silence.

“He put me through a perfect catechism of questions,” continues Miss
Prince, with perfect equanimity. “Had I had any professional training?”

“You haven’t, have you?”

“I answered that I hadn’t, but that I could very easily acquire some.”

“And he?”

“Oh, he smiled, and asked me if I had any natural aptitude.”

“Yes?”

“I answered, ‘None, but that no doubt it would come.’”

The corners of Mrs. Darcy’s mouth have got so entirely beyond her
control that she can only turn one imploring appeal for help to Lavinia,
who advances to the rescue.

“And then?” she asks, with praiseworthy gravity.

“Oh, then he shrugged his shoulders and answered drily, ‘I have had
three thousand applications from ladies, from duchesses to washerwomen,
which I have been obliged to refuse. I am afraid that I must make yours
the three thousand and first;’ and so he bowed me out.”

She ends, her pink self-complacency unimpaired, and both the other women
look at her in a wonder not untouched with admiration. Neither of them
succeeds in making vocal any expression of regret.

“It is one more instance of the red tapeism that reigns in every
department of our military administration,” says Miss Prince, not
missing the lacking sympathy, and with an accent of melancholy
superiority. “Next time I shall know better than to ask for any official
recognition.” After a slight pause, “It is a bitter disappointment, of
course; more acute to me naturally than it could be to any one else.”

With this not obscure intimation of the end she had had in view in
tendering her services to the troops in South Africa, Féodorovna
departs. The two depositaries of her confidence look at each other with
faces of unbridled mirth as soon as her long back is turned; but there
is more of humorous geniality and less of impartial disgust in the
matron’s than the maid’s.

“Poor thing! I wonder what it feels like to be so great a fool as that!”
said Mrs. Darcy, with a sort of lenient curiosity. “I declare that I
should like to try for the hundredth part of a minute!”

“She meant to nurse him!” ejaculates Lavinia, with a pregnant smile.
“Poor man! If he knew what he had escaped!”

“And now, what next?” asks Susan, spreading out her delicate,
hardworking hands, and shaking her head.

“‘What next?’ as the tadpole said when his tail dropped off!” cries
Daphne, pertly--a remark which, calling their parent’s attention to the
edified and cock-eared interest of her innocents, leads to their instant
dispersal and flight over the place towards the pre-luncheon wash-pot,
which they hoped to have indefinitely postponed. When they are out of
sight and earshot.

“You came to tell me something?” Mrs. Darcy says, with an entire change
of tone. “Though I am not in the habit of watching Rupert and Lavy from
an upper chamber, like those graceless brats, I know what it is.”

“Then I may spare myself the trouble of telling you,” answers the girl,
in a key of constrained and artificial playfulness.

Her friend’s kind eyes, worn, yet with the look of a deep, serene
contentment underlying their surface fatigue, look at her with a
compassionate interrogation.

“Are you doing it to please yourself?” she asks in a low voice, yet not
hesitatingly.

“Whom else?”

“It is a motive that has so very seldom guided you,” replies the elder
woman, with an enveloping look of motherly solicitude. “And in this kind
of case it is the only one that is of the least value; it is the one
occasion in life in which it is one’s bounden duty to be absolutely
selfish!”

“Were you absolutely selfish when you married Mr. Darcy?” asks Lavinia,
carrying the war into the enemy’s quarters, and with an apposite
recalling of all the sacrifices that her friend--once a very smart
London girl--is rumoured by the neighbourhood to have been called upon
to make by her choice.

“Absolutely,” replies Susan, with the stoutness of the most unmistakable
truth. “Everybody belonging to me cried, and said they could not see
what I saw in Richard; but _I_ saw what I saw in him, and I knew that
that was all that mattered.”

“Perhaps _I_ see what I see in Rupert,” replies Lavinia, plucking up her
spirit, and detecting a joint in her companion’s harness, though her own
voice is not assured.

“If you do, of course it is all right,” rejoins the other,
unelastically.

Lavinia’s head would like to droop, so oppressive is the sense of the
cold doubt infiltrated into her own acquiescent serenity; but she forces
it to hold itself up against its will.

“He is quite aware that we have your disapproval,” she says with a
dignity that is native to her; “so much so that he advised me to tell
you it was ‘bound to come.’”

Mrs. Darcy looks at her sadly; but without either apology or
contradiction.

“That is just what I do not feel.”

“You have always done him scant justice!” cries the girl, stung into
hotter partisanship by the chill whisper of a traitor within her own
camp. “After all, it is I, not you, that am to marry him.”

“Yes, it is you;” in downcast assent.

“When you have praised him it has always been in some damning way,”
pursues Lavinia, breaking more and more into flame--“saying what a good
judge of lace he is, and how well he mended your Bow teapot!”

“So he did.”

“How would you like it, if, when some one asked my opinion of Mr. Darcy
as a parish priest, I answered that he did not make bad cabbage-nets?”

Susan smiles reluctantly. “Do not let us quarrel,” she says. “As long as
I supply you with eggs, it would be inconvenient to you; and, as for me,
why, I might break another teapot!”

       *       *       *       *       *

“Well, how did she take it?” asks Rupert, who has apparently been
waiting the whole time of his betrothed’s absence in contented smoking
and musing under the immemorial yews of the churchyard.

“She asked me whether I am marrying you to please myself?” replies
Lavinia, lifting eyes in which he notes a trouble that had not clouded
them when he parted from her, in an almost doglike wistfulness of appeal
to his, “Am I, Rupert?”

“Our friends ask us very indelicate questions,” he answers, turning
away.

       *       *       *       *       *

A day or two later Lavinia has a casual meeting with Mrs. Prince in the
road.

“Whom do you think she has been writing to now?” asks Féodorovna’s
parent, leaning over the side of the victoria, and whispering loudly.
“The Officer Commanding Cavalry Depôt, Canterbury! What can she have to
say to him?”




CHAPTER VII


Spring has come; even according to the Almanack, which is later in its
sober estimate of the seasons, and also truer than the sanguine poets.
But as to April 23 there can be no difference of opinion between prose
and verse. To the curious observer of the English spring it may seem
every year harder to decide whether the frank brutality of March, the
crocodile tears of April, or the infinite treacheries of May, are the
more trying to the strained planks of the British constitution? Through
this course of tests, unescapable, except by flight, the village of
Campion is passing like its neighbours. But in the Egypt of the east
wind, there has been revealed, on this 23rd of April, the existence of a
Goshen.

“‘Don’t cast a clout till May is out!’” says Lavinia, taking off her
jacket and giving it to Rupert to carry. “It is impossible to act up to
that axiom to-day!”

The action, in its matter-of-factness, might be taken to prove that
Lavinia is still in that brief and tantalizing portion of a woman’s
existence, when tyrant man is a willing packhorse; though, in Rupert’s
case, the indication is worth nothing. In point of fact, they are still
unwed. This is due to no jibbing on the part of Miss Carew. The
engagement-ring has not crawled back to London by a South-Eastern
express, the yellowed Mechlin has not returned to its camphored privacy,
the cousins are still “going to be married.” The delay has come from the
person whose feverish eagerness had at first seemed to brook no moment
of waiting.

“Of course, I can’t expect any one else to share the feeling,” Sir
George has said to the bridegroom-elect, when he has innocently alluded
to the marriage as an event in the near future; “but I cannot help
thinking there is some indecency in feasting and merry-making when the
eldest son of the house is scarcely cold in his grave!”

Rupert is used to the sharp turnings and breakneck hills of his father’s
utterances, but at this he cannot help looking a little blank.

“I thought it was your wish, sir,” he answers.

“If it is only because I wish it that you are marrying Lavinia, as I
have already told you, I think the whole thing had better be off!”
retorts Sir George, with another surprising caper of the temper; adding,
in a voice of wounded protest that thinks it is temperate and patient,
“I ask for a decent delay between an open grave and a carouse, and you
fly off at once into a passion!”

“Bid the Rectory light its bonfire--the bonfire it is getting ready
against the Relief of Mafeking!” says Rupert, returning to the
drawing-room, where Lavinia is sitting arduously working out a new
patience--it is after dinner. “Tell Susan to deck her countenance in
its brightest smiles. The wedding is indefinitely postponed!”

“Is it?” she answers, looking up from her cards. “You do not say so!”
Then, afraid that the colourless ejaculation is not quite up to the
mark, she adds, in a tone where his too-sharp ear detects rather the
wish to cheer him than any personal annoyance. “But it will be on again
to-morrow. He is quite as keen about it as you--or I.”

Once again that too officious ear tells him of the almost imperceptible
hiatus that parts the pronouns.

“Come and help me!” she adds, divining in him some little jarred
sensitiveness; and, resting the tranquil friendliness of her eyes upon
him, while her hand pulls him down to a seat beside her. “I can’t
recollect whether this is red upon black, or if one follows suit.”

That was weeks ago, and Lavinia’s prophecy is fulfilled. On this 23rd of
April she has the knowledge that only five weeks of maidenhood remain to
her. No sooner had Sir George paid his ill-tempered tribute to his dead
son, and frightened and snubbed the survivor into a hurt and passive
silence upon the subject nearest to both their hearts, than the
increased irritability of his temper and the misery of his look tells
his two _souffre-douleurs_ that he has repented of that delay in
carrying out his passionately desired project, for which he has to thank
himself.

“One more such evening, and I shall think that there is a good deal to
be said in praise of parricide!” says Rupert, in groaning relief after
the strain of an evening of more than ordinary gibing insult on the one
side, and hardly maintained self-restraint on the other. “Of course I
know what it means. Poor old chap! He would give the world to climb
down; and he would die sooner than do it!”

The young man’s face is pale, and the tears of intolerably wounded
feeling glisten in his eyes.

Lavinia listens in parted-lipped compassion, as so often before, for
both the sinner and the sinned against.

“I will be his ladder,” she says, in a key of quiet resolve, and so
leaves the room.

Half an hour later she returns. Her large eyelids are reddened, and her
mouth twitching, but she is determinedly composed.

“It is all right,” she says cheerfully. “We are to be married on May the
28th; and he cried and begged our pardon.”

Thus it comes to pass that on this 23rd of April Lavinia is pacing in
almost imminent bridehood--for what are five short weeks?--beside her
future husband along a rustic road. They are taking a sweethearts’
ramble, like any other lad and lass. About them the charming garden of
England swells and dips in gentle hills and long valleys and
seaward-stretching plain. They have mounted the rise behind their house,
and looked from the plough-land at the top towards the distant Sussex
range. The cherry orchards still hold back their snowy secret, but the
plum-blossom is whitening the brown trees; and he would be over-greedy
for colour whom the dazzling grass and the generous larches and the
sketchily greening thicket did not satisfy.

Their path, leading down from the hill-crest, has brought them to an
old-world farm, where with its team of four strong horses, that to a
London eye, used to overloading and strain, would look so pleasantly up
to their work, a waggon stands by a stack, from whose top men are
pitching straw into it. On the grass in front of the house sheep crop
and stare with their stupid wide-apart eyes, and hen-coops stand--lambs
and chickens in friendliest relation. A lamb has two little yellow balls
of fluff perched confidently, one on its woolly back, one on its
forehead.

Lavinia has seen it all a thousand times before; but to-day a new sense
of turtle-winged content and thankful acquiescence in her destiny seems
settling down upon her heart. The feeling translates itself into words.

“It is very nice to have you back.”

“It is very nice to be back,” replies her companion, with less than his
usual point.

Rupert has been in London, and returned only last night. His visits to
the metropolis have to be conducted with caution and veiled in mystery,
despite the innocency of his objects, owing to the profound contempt
felt and--it need scarcely be added--expressed by his father for his
tastes and occupation. Rupert has half a dozen graceful talents, which,
if the roof of the house is not to be blown off, must be hidden under a
pile of bushels. Sir George must be kept in ignorance that his last
surviving son stoops to singing in a Madrigal Society, draws clever
caricatures of Tory statesmen for a weekly, and writes brilliant little
leaders for a new Liberal daily paper.

When he has been away Lavinia has always missed her cousin. This last
time has seemed more irksome than any previous one; partly because more
has happened than is usually the case in the week of his absence;
partly, as she tells herself with heartfelt congratulation, because she
must have grown much fonder of him. There can be no question now as to
its being “to please herself” that she is marrying Rupert, since she
plainly cannot do without him.

They have left the farm behind them, and, dipping down into a
valley-let, are passing through a hop-garden, where the eye travels
through the long vista of bare poles to little blue air-pictures at the
end. From a chestnut-brake near by, a nightingale, mimicked by a
throstle, is whit-whitting and glug-glugging. They pause to listen.

“I wish it was over,” says Lavinia, presently, continuing a theme which
Philomel had interrupted. “I dread it unaccountably; no, not
unaccountably! I suppose ’twould be odd if I did not?”

“I can’t help grudging him to Féodorovna!” answers Rupert, rather sadly.
“We have so much more right to him.”

“But we could not have made him a quarter as comfortable,” rejoins
Lavinia. “You know how elaborate her arrangements were; and since Mr.
Prince put his foot down about allowing her to have only two at a time,
Captain Binning has had the benefit of almost all her attentions.”

“A doubtful good that!”

“She does not think much of the other one!” pursues Lavinia,
half-laughing. “He has had a bit of his nose and half his upper lip shot
away, poor fellow! but, unfortunately, it was not in action, but while
he was sitting at luncheon on the veldt.”

“And Binning! Was my father much upset by the interview?”

Lavinia sighs. “At first I thought he was going to have one of those
dreadful _dry_ agonies such as he used to have at first; but, thank God,
that passed off, and then he could talk a little--tell me a little about
him.” With an afterthought, “He was quite nice in what he said.”

“You mean that he did not institute any comparisons!” says the young
man, reading between the lines, and with that unfortunate plate-glass
view into his companion’s thoughts which she often inwardly deplores.

“None. I had much rather have put off _my_ visit a little later,”
continues Miss Carew--they are strolling on again--“until the poor man
had recovered his strength a little. His wound is not half healed yet,
and he was much exhausted by his journey; but Féodorovna insists on my
going to-day; she says that he has expressed a great wish to see me, and
that, as far as her power to gratify him goes, he shall not be balked in
his slightest whim.”

Rupert lifts his eyebrows. “Already, my Féo?” he says, in sarcastic
apostrophe of the absent fair one.

Lavinia has indulged herself in a light mimicry of Miss Prince’s tones,
which always amuses them both; and they walk on mutually pleased.

“I shall just have time to run into the Rectory before I go!” says
Lavinia, an hour later, when their pleasantly sauntering steps have
brought them home again.

A very slight cloud passes over the young man’s face.

“I have never yet known an action of yours which was not prefaced by
that run,” he says. “If you were to be told that the last trump was to
sound in ten minutes, you would answer, ‘I shall just have time to run
into the Rectory first.’”

“Perhaps I should!” answers she, aggravatingly, walking off and kissing
her hand.

It is in compliance with an offer from the younger Darcys to exhibit the
newly hatched turkeys, that Lavinia is running counter to her lover’s
prejudice. She finds them on the banks of the “Tugela River,” a somewhat
duck-muddied ditch which runs under the hedge by the henhouse, and is at
once led to the pen where Daphne is feeding the turkey-chicks with a
mess in which chopped onion--of which, in its bulb state, she
mostly carries a specimen in her pocket as a precautionary
measure--predominates.

“Clergyman has brought out three more than he did last year,” says the
child, triumphantly, looking up from the pipkin in her lap.

“Clergyman!” repeats Miss Carew, with a cavilling glance at the large
and motherly Brahma hen under the coop. “I thought all your hens were
soldiers.”

“So they are,” answers Phillida, matter-of-factly. “Clergyman is an Army
chaplain.”

“Do you perceive that Daphne has become a walking onion?” asks Mrs.
Darcy, joining the party, and holding her pocket-handkerchief to her
nose. “The smell goes all through the house! It wakes us at night.”

She says it with humorous resignation, and they both laugh. The
situation between the friends is no longer strained. Susan is _almost_
quite silent; and Lavinia is _almost_ quite confident on the subject
upon which they know that they differ so widely. Like a generous
opponent, Mrs. Darcy has thrown herself heart and soul into the
clothes--not many--and the rearrangements of the house--not many
either--which the approaching wedding entails.

“There never could be a marriage which made so little change in
anybody’s life.”

Lavinia has said, in a tone of self-congratulation, “The thing that hath
been shall be!” and Susan has answered inoffensively in appearance,
“Yes?”

But the “Yes” is interrogative, and its monosyllable brings to the girl
the flashed realization that what she has said is absolutely false; that
though she will _live_ within the same walls, take the same walks, look
on the same windmills and oast-houses, yet the change to herself will be
enormous, irrevocable, unescapable. But that it will be wholly for the
better, she has so nearly convinced herself, that it is with a very
stout look and high courage, that she now says--

“Rupert came back last night. I was so thankful. We had so much to talk
about.”

“You have been telling him of the event of the neighbourhood, I
suppose?” answers Mrs. Darcy; her eye fixed rather intentionally upon
her two elder daughters, who between them are lugging a large
turkey-hen, who is not intended to sit, from a primrosy nest improvised
in the Tugela bank--“the opening of Féodorovna Prince’s hospital?”

“I am on my way to visit one of the patients,” replies Lavinia. “That
reminds me I must be off! I wish it was over! I wonder why I dread it so
much?”

“It is never pleasant to have one’s old cuts torn open,” answers Mrs.
Darcy.

The explanation is rational, even to obviousness; but it is not
satisfactory. Painful and tear-producing as the scene between herself
and the man who was the innocent cause of poor Bill’s death must
naturally be, the feeling that had existed between herself and her
cousin, though warm and true, had not been of a nature to account for
the state of trepidating dread with which she approaches the interview.
And yet is it all dread? Is not there, too, a strong element of excited
anticipation, that has no kinship with pain? Is it the spring, that
incorrigible merry-maker, that is answerable for her elation? Is it the
determined budding of everything about her, that makes her feel as if
she were budding too? Is it because Rupert has returned? For a quarter
of a mile she tries to persuade herself that this is the reason; but the
negative that is given in her _for intérieur_ is so emphatic and
persistent that she has to accept it.

Passing the edge of the King’s Wood, she steps aside to pick one or two
of the myriad wood anemones that, vanquishing the piled dead leaves more
successfully than the primroses, floor it with their pensive poetic
heads and graceful green collars. Rupert is always pleased when she
presents him with a posy. They would be fresher if she waited to gather
them on her way back; but some obscure instinct, which she does not in
the least recognize, hints darkly to her that on her way back she will
perhaps not remember to pay the little attention. As she looks at the
drooped heads blushing pinkily in her hand, she tries idly to picture
what her impression of Rupert would be were it he whom she were about to
see for the first time. She tries to picture _his_ head lying in patient
pain upon a pillow--yes; so far imagination obeys easily: Rupert would
be patient enough; he has had a good apprenticeship, poor fellow!--his
cheeks hollowed with suffering--yes; fancy runs along docilely enough
still: they are not too plump already; no one can accuse Rupert of
superfluous flesh--his chest swathed in bandages, where the Mauser
bullet took its clean course through his body, so closely shaving his
heart. No!

She has gone too far! Imagination strikes work; confessing its utter
inability to represent her future husband as prostrated by a wound
received in battle! She walks on, quickening her pace, and vaguely
irritated with herself. It was a senseless and mischievous exercise of
fancy, and she had no business to indulge in it.




CHAPTER VIII


The spring--or is it the spring?--has been playing its genial game with
Mrs. Prince, too, as is evident by the restored importance of her gait,
as she sweeps out of the orchid-house, whither Lavinia has pursued her,
and by the smoothed and satisfied visage--changed, indeed, from that
which she had worn two months ago in announcing her daughter’s
mysterious correspondence with the Cavalry Officer Commanding at
Canterbury--which she turns towards her visitor.

“Did you walk,” she asks, “this warm day? Sir George wanted the horses,
I suppose? It must be awkward having only one pair. If I had known, I
should have been so delighted to send for you!”

There is sincere welcome in words and voice, coupled with that touch of
patronage which--as employed towards a member of the oldest and
somewhile most important family of the countryside, Mrs. Prince and
Lavinia have--before the former’s parental woes had made both forget
it--found respectively so agreeable and so galling.

“Thanks, but I like walking.”

“Féo will be here in a minute. I told them to let her know the moment
you arrived. She is with her patients! She is never anywhere else now!
Thrown up all her engagements; devotes herself wholly to them.”

It is clear that, in pre-Candle days, Mrs. Prince had said “’olly;” but
the victory over the early infirmity is so complete as to be marked only
by an intensity of aspirate unknown to those whose _h_’s have grown up
with them.

“It is certainly the most unobjectionable craze she has ever had!”
replies Lavinia, whose withers are still slightly wrung by the allusion
to her horselessness; and who is reflecting how much less under-bred a
thing adversity is than prosperity.

“When I say ‘patients,’” pursues Mrs. Prince, not in the least offended
by, in fact, not hearing, Miss Carew’s observation, “I ought to put it
in the singular; for I must own she does not take much notice of poor
Smethurst”--pausing to laugh; then, proceeding in a tone of wondering
admiration, “Isn’t it astonishing what they do in the way of surgery
now? Nurse Blandy tells me that they are going--the doctors, I mean--to
make him a new end to his nose, and turn his lip inside out, and I don’t
know what all!”

“Poor creature! How terrible!”--shuddering.

“As for the other one, Binning, there is nothing good enough for him! At
first she was all for nursing him entirely herself, not letting Nurse
Blandy, no, nor Nurse Rice either, go near him; but there her father put
his foot down!--you know Mr. Prince _does_ put his foot down now and
then--and he said to her, ‘No, Féo, my child, you may turn my house
into a shambles’--we thought then there would have to be an
operation--‘and a drug store, but I will not have my daughter lay
herself open to a prosecution for manslaughter; and that is what it
would come to--for as sure as ever you nurse him, he’ll die!”

Lavinia had not felt inclined to laugh before, but she now smiles
broadly in pleased approval.

“She was mad at first,” continues the narrator; “but she had to give in;
and I really do not see that she has much to complain of, for she is
with him all day, and half the night!”

Lavinia hopes that the slight shudder with which she hears this
statement--a shudder born of a compassion sharper and deeper than poor
Mr. Smethurst’s ingloriously shattered features had called forth--is not
visible to the eye of Miss Prince’s mother.

“Of course, at first,” pursues the latter, “the great attraction was
that he had been in General ----’s Brigade--that dreadful
business!”--with a distressful crease of reminiscence on her placid
brow. “It seems like a horrible nightmare now! Yet, for the last day or
two, I can’t help thinking it is for himself that she is so taken up
with him.” After a moment’s reflection, “Well, after all, we know that
he must be a fine fellow, by what he has done; and though all his people
are in India, I fancy he is highly connected.”

The trend of the mother’s thoughts towards future developments is
apparent. But Lavinia is spared the effort to hide how dearly, in her
opinion, the wounded officer would buy his cure under the contingency
glanced at, by the appearance of Féodorovna herself--Féodorovna,
beautified, vivified, animated almost past recognition. It is not only
that Miss Prince wears the most becoming of created garbs, whose
bewitchingness many a mother of succumbing sons has cursed--the dress of
a nurse; but her very features seem to have lost some of their poverty
and paltriness; and gained in meaning and interest.

“Will you come at once, please? Mother, you have no right to delay
Lavinia,” she says, scarcely sparing time for the curtest greeting. “He
expects you, and a sick man should never be kept waiting.”

There is the authority and importance if a certificated official in
voice and manner, and Lavinia would be sarcastically amused, if once
again and more strongly than before, that trepidating dread of the
coming interview had not laid hold of her.

“I am ready,” she answers quietly. “I was only waiting for you.” She is
fighting tooth and nail with her agitation; telling herself what a
Bedlamite thing it is, all the way across the tesselated marble of the
pretentious sitting-hall, up the flights of the profoundly carpeted
stairs, through the hot-water-warmed passages; and in outward appearance
it is conquered by the time they reach and pause at a closed door.

“You must understand that he is not to be agitated in any way; that you
must not approach any painful subject,” says Féodorovna, in an
exasperating whisper of command.

“Wouldn’t it be better to put it off?” asks Miss Carew, in jarred
recoiling from the just-opening portal; but her companion frowns her
down.

The bed is in a recess of the room, and the window-blind, partly drawn
down in defence against the westering blaze, confuses Miss Carew’s
sight; besides which her feet have halted near the threshold to allow
time for her own introduction, so that she hears the voice before she
sees the face of the wounded man.

“Miss Carew has come to see you!” Féodorovna explains, in a tiresome
_carneying_ voice, leaning over the pillows. “But you must send her away
the moment you are tired of her; and you must not let her talk to you
about anything that is not quite pleasant and cheerful.”

Thus agreeably heralded by an implication of her own morose garrulity,
Lavinia approaches the invalid, hearing his answer, “I am exceedingly
grateful to her,” before she sees his face.

Often and often, in after-days, the fact that his first words concerning
her were an expression of gratitude recurs to her with a sense of the
keenest irony.

“Do you wish to be _tête-à-tête_?” asks Féodorovna, when the whole and
the sick have silently touched each other’s hands; “or had you rather I
would stay?” and the answer, courteous in its subtlety--

“I am sure that you ought to rest; I am ashamed to think of how much you
have been doing for me to-day,” is divined by Lavinia to be not what the
asker had expected.

However, without flagrant breach of her own axiom, that a sick man is
not to be thwarted, she cannot avoid compliance, and with an officious
parting question, “Where shall she sit? Would you like her to be beside
you, or where you can see her better?” and a final fussing over phials
and drinks, takes her cap, her apron, and her cuffs away.

A sense of relief at her departure, coupled with a strong, shy impulse
to follow her, and that again with a far stronger one to snatch another
look at the just-glanced-at face of him for whom Bill had died, join to
silence Lavinia for the first moment or two. That the wish to be
acquainted with each other’s features must be reciprocal, is proved by
the sick man’s first words--

“Would you mind sitting in that chair?”

Her eyes first seek, then follow the direction of his, to see which
chair he means; and by the time she sits down obediently in it, they
both know--will know to the end of their lives--what each looks like.

He has been a strong man, will be a strong man again, thank God!

Why should she thank God for it? She flashes herself the inward
question, with an already catching breath. Large-framed, and as he lies
on his back in bed he looks prodigiously long, far longer than he really
is; and, thanks to the falling-in of his cheeks, his eyes, which in
their normal state must be of no greater size than they ought to be--and
saucer-eyes are no beauty in a man--oppress her with the large
intentness of their gaze. In their depths she seems to read an
acquaintance with death that has yet not flinched from him; but she
knows that it is not death which is looking out at her from them.

“Thank you for coming.”

“I liked to come.” She is sitting perfectly quiet; instinct and
experience combining to tell her how many sick-beds have cursed the
rustling gown, the meddling fingers, and the lugubriously watching eye.
Her repose seems to enter like balm into his soul.

“You have been used to nursing?” he asks, though it sounds more like an
assertion than a question.

“Sometimes, when they have been ill, I have nursed”--“my men,” she is
going to say; but checks herself: to a perfect stranger she must not
employ her silly home-phrases--“I have nursed my uncle several times,
and Rupert twice, and--Bill once.” Her voice drops at framing the name
which forms the one sad link between them; and she has time to reproach
herself for having had the maladroitness and bad taste to introduce it
before Binning speaks again.

“Thank you for mentioning him to me,” he says, physical weakness making
him less master of his emotion than she divines that he would normally
be. “I was afraid that you would not be able to bear it.”

A panic of remorse at having done exactly what his improvised nurse had
forbidden her to do, and at once introduced a painful and agitating
theme, chokes for an imperceptible moment Lavinia’s answer. It is only
the reflection that, as a golden rule, whatever Féodorovna says or bids
is sure to have common sense and right as its exact opposite, calms her,
and gives her the power of steady and reassuring response.

“We always talk of him.”

“But to _me_?” he says, struggling in his agitation into what her
nurse-instinct tells her to be a forbidden effort to sit up.

At once her noiseless gown and her noble still figure are beside him.

“You must not get excited!” she says, laying a capable cool hand on his
gaunt shoulder; and at once he lies back, with a sudden sense of intense
well-being.

“I felt that you must all hate me,” he says in almost a whisper; and she
answers slow and stilly--

“I do not think we do.”

At that he lies content a while, drinking her in with the privileged
directness of the sick. What hair! What a beautiful, generous, rather
large mouth! What a divine sorrowful pity! What would have become of
him, if the likely, the almost certain, had happened, and she _had_
hated him?

And Lavinia! He is the first to meet her eyes of the costly wreckage
with which the South African storm has strewn the shores of the
motherland; he is the comrade for whose life dear brave Bill thought it
a small thing to lay down his own; and as she knows that the deed which
has stretched him in suffering and weakness before her was as madly
gallant as the one by whose means he lived to do it, is it any wonder
that she stands in a tranced silence, drinking him in, as he is drinking
her?

“I felt it very strongly when his father came to see me,” says Binning,
presently, still scarcely above his breath, and harking back to the
fears he had expressed of being abhorred by his dead friend’s family.

“It did him good to talk to you!” After a second or two, “He did not
grudge Bill--we none of us did; and it is the very death that Bill
himself would have chosen.”

“Yes; I know it is.”

There is, or she thinks it, a kind of envy in the acquiescent voice.

“And we all felt that you would have changed places with him if you
could, wouldn’t you?”

The surface motive of the speech is the kind and Christian one of
bringing comfort to a spirit that she divines to be as sorely wounded as
the brave body that holds it; but underneath there lurks another,
scarcely known even to herself. It is the question she had put to Rupert
two months ago--to Rupert, the unblushing candour of whose answering
negative had given her one of those accesses of repulsion towards him,
which for the future it will be a crime for her to indulge. A feverish
and senseless curiosity prompts her to repeat it now.

“Yes, I would.”

There is no asseveration to strengthen the assent; yet it carries a
conviction as deep--nay, much deeper, for she had tried not to believe
the latter--than Rupert’s confession that he would much rather not have
died for his brother. Retribution speedily overtakes her, in the sting
of sudden pain caused by the contrast she herself has brought out, into
salience; and conscious of the unworthiness of her double motive, she
finds herself unable to bear the gratitude of his eyes. They are hazel,
and have eagleish yellow lights in them, as one part of herself tells
another part some time after she has left him.

“It was such a strange coincidence that I should be sent here!” he says
presently, moving his languid head so that he may get a better view of
her, for she has sat down again, a little way off; “that _I_, of all
people, should be the first result of Miss Prince’s request to
General ---- at Canterbury to have some of us to nurse. When I realized
what neighbourhood it was that I was to be brought to--when I heard that
you were near neighbours, I had almost given it up at the last moment!”

“We should have been sorry for that.”

There is a measured reassuring kindness in her words; but he feels
suddenly chilled. It must strike her own ears as too measured; for she
adds--

“We should have liked to have had you ourselves; my uncle has said so
repeatedly; but we have no appliances! We could not have made you nearly
so comfortable as you are here!”

His eyes, large with leanness, roll round the spacious airiness of the
apartment.

“I am in the lap of luxury!” he says; but though there is gratitude in
his tone, enthusiasm is absent.

After that they are silent for a little space. He must be talking too
much. She has been enjoined not to tire him, and _if she sends up his
temperature, she will not be allowed to come again_! The first two are
confessed apprehensions walking boldly up the front stairs of her mind.
The third, on shoeless feet, is creeping up the back! To him, it appears
that her last retirement to her chair has left her more distant than at
first, and he marvels at the subtlety of his own ruse to bring her back
to the bedside.

“Would you mind telling me the name of the flowers you are wearing?”

“Wood anemones.”

“Do they smell good?”

“I do not think they have any scent.” There is a moment’s struggle
between the maiden and the nurse in her; and then the nurse prevails.
“Would you like to try?” she asks, with her first smile--first
epoch-making curving into dimples of her grave mouth.

She is beside him once again, and gives the blossoms into his
fever-wasted hand. He holds them gratefully to his nostrils; and it is,
of course, by accident that they touch his lips too.

“Not smell! Why, they have the whole blessed spring crammed into them!”

Again she smiles--her slow, rich smile--not claiming her posy--Rupert’s
posy--back; but just standing by him, enjoying his enjoyment. Not,
however, for long. The door opens with a fidgetingly careful turning of
the handle, and a needlessly cautious foot crosses the carpet.
Féodorovna, a bovril-bearing tray in her hand, stands between them.

“You are quite worn out!” she says, in a voice of mixed condolence and
counsel. “Miss Carew shall not stay a moment longer! She shall go at
once!”

The tone implies that Lavinia has shamelessly outstayed her welcome, and
her cheek burns for a moment, then resumes its cool pink. Féodorovna
means no offence. It is only her way of showing what an adept she is in
her new profession. The speech’s effect upon the patient is a much
stronger one.

“Oh no! Why should she?” he exclaims energetically, with another of
those forbidden struggles of his to sit up.

In authoritatively compelling him into recumbence again, Miss Prince’s
cap-strings somehow get into her victim’s eyes. Lavinia’s last sight of
him is lying back exhausted by the remedies applied, much more than by
his own imprudent movement; smiling faintly, with a patience much
superior even to that which he had exhibited while lying wounded at the
donga-bottom, through the endless hours of the winter night; _smiling_,
while Féodorovna, taking it for granted that he feels faint, fans him
with a vigour that makes the end of his pinched nose and his tired
eyelids tremble.




CHAPTER IX


Féodorovna has ejected her so early that she need not go home at once.
This is Lavinia’s first thought on getting outside the house. It is but
rarely that Miss Carew is not wanted in her own little _milieu_; but
to-day she would be superfluous. Her uncle and Rupert are busy with the
lawyer, who has come down from London--busy over settlements: a
settlement upon herself; provision for the younger children--her younger
children, hers and Rupert’s! If she walk very fast, perhaps she may
outwalk this last thought. But it is a good walker; it keeps up with
her. Possibly she might lose it in the wood. The idea results in a
_détour_, which will involve passing through a portion of it. The word
“wood” is perhaps a misnomer, for the grown trees are few and sparse;
and yet by what other name can you describe these silvan miles of young
chestnut, oak, and birch growths, that every ten years fall beneath the
hatchet, to continually renew their tireless upspringing? Where only
recently amputated stumps remain, the flowers grow far the lushest.

She pauses on reaching a spot where a quarter-acre of ground is utterly
given over to the innocent loveliness of the cuckoo-flower, dog-violet,
primrose, “firstborn child of Ver,” and purpling wood anemone. She
stands looking down at them, as if she had never seen them before; as if
these lowly, lifelong friends were the new-seen blossoms of a nobler
planet. What has happened to her senses, that she sees and hears and
smells with such three-fold keenness? Why does she feel so startlingly
alive? The wonder drives Rupert’s younger children successfully into the
background of her mind. Yet this bounding new consciousness of the
splendour of life--life actual, this bursting irrepressible life of the
field and the woodland--and life possible--cannot answer, when the
roll-call of emotions is called, to the name of pleasure.

Life possible!--it is a hooded anonymous thing, that she dare not
interrogate. In its presence her thoughts draw in their antennæ, like a
sea-creature’s suddenly touched. She starts away from the little
woodland garden, and walks hurriedly on, down a rough cart-track, rutty
and caked with the winter’s dried mud. Foolish extravagant analogies and
comparisons dart through her brain--not only dart, but tarry and pitch
tents there. Her life has been like this parched wintry road--a dull
track for heavy-wheeled days to grind and plough along; now it has
turned suddenly into a blossoming brake. Her eyes lift themselves in a
frightened rapture to where the descending sun’s beams thread with
evening light the lovely thin green of the birches, exquisitely breaking
and shaming the tardier chestnuts.

“It is the spring!” she says to herself. “It has always made me feel
drunk!”

But the long vista of branches, all brownly, redly, greenly bursting,
with opulent variety of ideas, ahead of her, tells her that she lies.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sir George is on the look out for her when she reaches home, and the
sight of his familiar figure, coupled with a remorseful fear of having
been wanted and not been within reach--an almost unparalleled occurrence
in her history--pulls her down to fact and earth again, without a
moment’s delay. Yet a single glance at her uncle’s face tells her that,
despite her truancy, she finds him in the best possible of humours.

“And where have you been gadding, miss?” he asks, in a tone that reveals
the highest complacency of which one so habitually gloomy is capable.

“I thought you were busy with Mr. Ingram,” she answers, involuntarily
shirking the question.

“And so we have been,” returns he, his sombre face breaking into a
smile; “both Rupert and I! And very glad you ought to be that we have.”

“Ought I?”

“I was determined that you should have no excuse for wishing to hurry me
off,” continues Sir George, with rather acrid pleasantry, that has yet
every intention of being agreeable. “After all, what do I want?--a crust
and a glass of Marsala, an armchair and a pipe. So I have made over the
whole of his mother’s money to Rupert, and he has settled every penny of
it on you and your children.”

For a moment or two Lavinia is quite silent. Possibly surprise at her
uncle’s flight of imagination in the matter of the exiguity of his own
needs; possibly also choking gratitude; and possibly, again, the sudden
confrontation with the younger children, whom she had thought to have
buried in the wood, keep her dumb.

“You are very good to me,” she answers at last, in a tone which sounds
to herself the _ne plus ultra_ of thankless flatness; but in which her
hearer happily recognizes only an acknowledgment, faltering from the
excess of its obligation.

“Whom else have we got to be good to but our little Mosquito?” he asks,
using the perfectly inappropriate pet-name which has always indicated
the high-water mark of his favour. “And now that we have her safe for
life--I have sometimes had my misgivings as to our doing that--we must
do what we can for her; yes, we must do what we can for her!”

There is always something oppressive in the lightness of the habitually
heavy, in the jollity of the habitually morose; and Sir George’s elation
sits like lead upon his niece’s heart. She reproaches herself bitterly
for it. Has not her whole life’s aim been to make him happy? And now
that by his manner he is showing a cheerfulness higher than he had ever
enjoyed even before the news of Bill’s death reached him, by what odious
perversity are her own spirits dropping down to zero? Her one
consolation is that he departs complacently, without the dimmest
suspicion of her mental attitude. With Rupert--Rupert, who knows her
like the palm of his own hand--her task will be incalculably harder. It
has to be undertaken almost immediately; for her betrothed at once takes
his father’s place.

“Has he told you?” asks the young man, coming up to her, as she stands
slowly pulling off her gloves by the needless drawing-room fire. “Isn’t
it splendid of him? He would have stripped himself even more entirely if
I had let him--to the bone, in fact.”

The speaker’s eyes, sometimes gently cynical, are alive and shining with
recent emotion, gratitude, and pleasure. In them she also reads the
desire for an embrace. Why she does not meet it with the not
particularly reluctant acquiescence that is usual to her, she could not
tell you, if you had asked her. With tactful self-denial, Rupert at once
resigns his pretensions to a congratulatory kiss.

“He called me ‘my boy’ over and over again!” he says, with a
gratification none the less intense for being quiet. “You know that I
always feel as if I could die a hundred deaths for him, when he calls me
‘my boy.’”

“You are a ‘Boy’ and I am a ‘Mosquito’!” replies she, with what she
feels to be a hateful dry laugh. Hitherto one of the qualities she has
most admired in her cousin has been the gentle forgivingness and
self-restraint which has characterized his attitude towards his
father--the filial piety, which has survived so many buffets. Now she
tells herself that the sentiment which makes his voice quiver is
hysterical, and that a man’s tears should not be so near his eyes. No
one but Rupert, however--and she trusts that not even he--would read
these harsh comments between the lines of the hastily candid “Yes, I
know you would,” with which she supplements her first utterance.

Does his changing the subject mean that he comprehends? Impossible! Yet
he does change it.

“Rather an unlucky thing has happened,” he says, in a voice that has
altered, like his theme. “You have heard me mention Dubary Jones?”

For a moment she looks perfectly vague, then, “Of course I have! He
introduced you to the editor of the _Flail_; and he writes poetry
himself?”

It is the measure of how far her thoughts have strayed from Rupert and
his group of æsthetics, that she should be so painstakingly detailed in
proving that they have come back.

“His translations of Verlaine were very remarkable, if you remember,”
replies Rupert, kindly jogging her memory. It needs the assistance
given, presenting for the time a perfect blank as to what the bard in
question’s bid for immortality consists of. “I have had a wire from him,
asking me to put him up for the night. He is staying with the
Tanquerays. He has been of great use to me in various ways, and I did
not quite like to refuse him.”

Between each sentence the young man makes a slight pause, as if to give
room for an expression of approval or acquiescence, but it is not before
the full stop at the end that Lavinia is ready.

“Of course you accepted him? You were perfectly right. What else could
you do?”

“It is a nuisance that it should have happened at this moment. My father
will not be able to endure him; as I have often told you about him--he
is _like me, only more so_!” Rupert smiles rather humorously, relieved
at her acceptance of his news.

She gives a smile too; but there is a shudder under it--a shudder which
recurs more than once during the dinner and evening that follow, when,
faithful to her lifelong profession of buffer, she draws the
conversation of Mr. Dubary Jones upon herself, to avert the catastrophe
that must ensue if it is directed to Sir George. In a party of four it
is no easy task to prevent the talk becoming general; but ably seconded
by Rupert, and by the exercise of ceaseless vigilance, attention, and
civility, Miss Carew succeeds in securing the couple of _tête-à-têtes_,
by which only a thunderbolt can be warded off. But while kindly and
graciously smiling, listening, and asking, Rupert’s descriptive phrase,
“_like me, only more so_,” drips like melted lead upon her heart. Does
she indeed see before her what Rupert will come to in the ten years by
which his friend is richer than he? Is this his logical
conclusion?--this little decadent, who is trying to fit his conversation
to a hostess whom he suspects of being sporting?

“How delightful hunting must be!”

She assents, “Very.”

“And shooting! That must be so exciting!”

Again she acquiesces with creditable gravity, adding that salmon-fishing
is considered by many people to be the most engrossing of sports.

For a moment he looks nonplussed, and at a loss for a suitable
rejoinder; but quickly recovering himself, says brightly--

“Oh yes, it must be great fun, skipping from rock to rock.”

This evidence of how clearly he has grasped the nature of the amusement
alluded to, finishes her for a while; but she presently recovers, as he
has done, and for the rest of dinner they continue under the almost
insuperable difficulties indicated, the class of conversation which he
supposes suited to her capacity and tastes; nor does she care to
undeceive him.

After all, contemptible and uncongenial as he is, and hideous as is the
thought that the rudiments of him lie in Rupert, Lavinia has reason to
be grateful to the translator of Verlaine. But for him she would have
had to undergo a close interrogatory as to her visit of the afternoon.
She catches herself up in mid-congratulation. Why should it be to
undergo? Why should she mind retailing the little incidents which must
be of equal interest to all three of them? What that is not good and
touching is there to tell--whether it be the man’s affecting fear lest
he should be unendurable in all their eyes, or the heroic patience with
which he bears the cruel kindness of Féodorovna’s terrible
ministrations? Yet she cannot help a feeling of discreditable relief
that the tale which must be told is by the stranger’s presence deferred
till next morning.

And next morning, sure enough, the demand for it comes. An early train
removes Mr. Dubary Jones, and Sir George having dismissed him with the
comparatively Christian observation that he wonders what Rupert can see
in such a despicable little worm, and having added the still more
Christian rider that he supposes all tastes are respectable, gladly
changes the subject for the dreaded one--now better prepared for than it
was last evening.

“So you saw Binning! Come into the study, and tell me all about him.”

She tells him all, repeats almost word for word the little talk--_how_
little!--that had passed between them, keeping back for herself only the
one tiny episode of the wood anemones. Sir George is perfectly
indifferent to flowers, and could not enter into a sick man’s craving
for their grace and perfume. Talk with her uncle has throughout her life
meant judicious suppressions; yet this one small kept-back piece of the
price of her land makes her feel like Ananias.

“He said much the same sort of thing to me,” is her hearer’s
half-disappointed comment. “No doubt he will repeat it to Rupert
to-day.”

“Is Rupert going to see him to-day?”

“I have made a point of it. I confess I rather wonder that the proposal
did not emanate from himself! If the poor fellow has this idea in his
head, that we shrink from him, we must do all we can to drive it out.”

Lavinia nods slightly. Difficulties loom vaguely ahead of her, born of
this utterance, yet her heart feels suddenly light. Can it be because a
vista of possible repetitions of yesterday open before her?

“And though I may not rate our society very highly,” pursues Sir George,
with one of his scarce smiles, “I think it may, perhaps, compare not
unfavourably with Féo’s.”

Lavinia turns to go, thinking her task ended, and relieved that it is
over. But another awaits her.

“Stop!” says Sir George. “Why are you in such a hurry to run away? I
have not half done with you yet.” There is great kindness, and the
unwonted pleasure of being conscious that he is about to give pleasure
in his voice, and in the gesture with which he draws towards him and
opens one after another half a dozen obviously not new jewel-cases.
“They have not seen the light for nearly twenty years,” he says, passing
his hand with a movement that is almost a caress over the faded velvet
of one of them. “I suppose the settings are old-fashioned, but I believe
the stones are good; I know that the pearls are. Garrard took five years
collecting them one by one! The--the person who last wore them was very
proud of them.”

It is the nearest approach Sir George has ever made towards mentioning
his departed wife to Lavinia, and she listens in reverent silence.

He has taken the string of pearls from its long-occupied bed, and,
holding it between his fingers, eyes it pensively. Then, stretching hand
and necklace out to her, he says, in a voice of command, whose harshness
is the cover for an emotion that it angers him should have escaped from
its two decades of prison in his heart--

“Put it on! Wear it always!”

She obeys; but her fingers, usually quick and clever, fumble over the
diamond clasp.

“I would not give it you till I was quite sure we had really got hold of
you!” continues Sir George, regarding with evident satisfaction the
jewels--a little discoloured and damaged by their long incarceration,
but still beautiful, as they circle his niece’s throat. “Until lately I
have had my doubts, but I have been watching. I often notice things,
more than you think”--with a shrewd look--“I saw how out of spirits you
were in Rupert’s absence, and how you brightened up when he returned,
and I said to myself, ‘It is all right.’ So don’t say anything
more”--almost pushing her to the door, in obvious dread and yet
expectation of the tide of her thanks that must wash over him--“but take
them with you, and be off!”

“Am I to say _nothing_?” she stammers.

“Nothing! Actions speak louder than words! Marry Rupert, and give me a
grandson as quick as you can!”




CHAPTER X

     “Les joies ne sont que les afflictions en robe de fête.”


The kitchen-garden spreads itself out to the sun like a dog stretched
basking before the fire. Upward it slopes; its ripe red walls, its
espaliers, and wine-coloured and yellow spring flowers running up the
hill; house and stables, church tower, and promise-making trees, at its
foot, and with an apple-orchard, and a smaller cherry one, as a crown
for its head. The apple-orchard represents, as yet, only promise too;
but the hurrying cherry blossom spells performance.

Lavinia, standing on the sunny mid-path, with a bundle of bass-matting,
with which she has been training a young hop round a pole, lying on the
ground beside her, has just raised herself from her knees to admire the
rich red look that makes the cherry trees blush. She knows it to be due
to the young leaves which to-morrow will have disappeared in the storm
of white. They will be bridal to-morrow. _Bridal!_ She repeats the word
over to herself. This is the 28th of April. On precisely this day month,
she will be bridal too. The thought, apparently, is not one that invites
dwelling upon, for she turns back to her bass-matting and her hop; and,
in so doing, becomes aware of a figure--that of Mrs. Darcy--climbing the
gravel walk towards her.

Mrs. Darcy’s visits to Lavinia are much rarer than Lavinia’s to Mrs.
Darcy; partly because she is a good deal busier, and partly because she
does not like Rupert. The first reason is naturally the only one allowed
to appear in the relations between the friends.

“To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit?” asks the girl,
with playful formality.

Her friend’s answer is not quite so ready as usual; yet her wiry
slimness cannot be breathed by so gentle a hill.

“Miss Brine has come back. She has killed one relation, and cured
another!”

“How do the children bear it?”

“They are inconsolable! The thought of having to be comparatively clean
for an indefinite time has almost broken them down!”

Both laugh.

“It is an ill wind that blows nobody good; so you are able to come and
change the weather with me?”

There is a little surprise and inquiry in the key used; but Mrs. Darcy
accepts it as a statement apparently, for she stands, taking in, with
eyes and ears and nostrils, the universal blossoming and courting in
earth and air.

“Don’t you wish we could paraphrase Joshua’s command, ‘Sun, stand thou
still upon Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon,’ and say,
‘Spring, stand thou still in April’?”

“Do I?” answers the other, uneasily. “I do not think so!”

Her friend looks at her with covert observation, to verify that, despite
the peaceful quality of the most soothing of all occupations, gardening,
peace is not the dominant note in the concert of Miss Carew’s emotions
this gaudy, sweetly clamorous April morning.

“In point of fact, I came to bring you a message.”

“From whom?”

Is it fancy that the question is jerked out with some sort of
difficulty?

“From Mrs. Prince. She wants to persuade you to pay Captain Binning
another visit this afternoon. She tells me”--with a faint tinge of
surprise--“that you refused when she asked you two days ago.”

“I was there on Monday--that is only five days ago!” Lavinia has knelt
down on the gravel again, and is busy with her hop. Her voice sounds a
trifle hard.

“Five days can be pretty long to a sick man, more especially to a sick
man nursed by Féodorovna Prince!”

“But he is not nursed by her!” exclaims the other, almost angrily. “Mrs.
Prince herself told me that Mr. Prince had forbidden it, because he knew
she would kill him!”

Mrs. Darcy shakes her head. “As long as it was a question of his life,
Mr. Prince interfered; now that it is merely a matter of shaking his
reason and indefinitely retarding his recovery, Féo is at liberty to
work her inhuman will upon him. Only yesterday, Nurse Blandy said to me
that if things were not altered, she should tell Dr. Roots that she must
throw up the case.”

“And do you expect me to undertake it?” asks Lavinia, in a voice so
unlike her own, so unfeeling and grating, that Susan starts. “Rupert
went to see him on Tuesday,” continues the girl, not waiting for an
answer to her rather brutal question.

“Rupert and you are not quite one yet, though you soon will be,” rejoins
Mrs. Darcy, drily.

“My uncle has been twice, and you went yesterday. It cannot be good for
a moribund to receive such a shoal of visitors!” Her voice is still
hard, and there is neither compassion nor sympathy detectable in it.

“He catches at any reprieve from Féo’s importunities, poor fellow! I
told him about the children and their martial ardour, and he asked me to
bring them with me next time, if I was good enough to let him hope that
there would be a next time--he looked at me like a lost dog, as he said
it; and then Féo came in with something in a cup, and forced it down his
throat, pouring half of it over the sheet. I fully expected her to hold
his nose, to make him open his mouth, as Mrs. Gamp did with her patient
at the Bull Inn!”

Lavinia is sitting up on her heels, the implements of her infuriated
industry dropped in her lap, and listening in a silent horror that gives
the lie to the callousness of her utterances of a minute ago.

Mrs. Darcy turns to go. “So I must say that you cannot spare time--that
you do not see your way to it? Which sounds best?” she asks with
affected carelessness.

The answer comes in the voice of Daphne, flying dishevelled, torn, and
red-rosy up the walk.

“Oh, Lavy, we have had such a battle! It was between the turkey-cocks
and the _hen_-cocks.”

       *       *       *       *       *

“I will go and see,” says Féodorovna, whom, to her surprise, Lavinia
finds lying on the sofa in her own luxuriously fantastic den; when, on
the afternoon of the same day, a pair of hesitatingly hurrying feet
carry her past the King’s Wood, through the Princes’ escutcheoned lodge,
to and through their hall-door.

Miss Prince’s voice has its _ex-cathedrâ_ importance, and her
cap-strings their official wave and float, as she adds--

“It is quite likely that I may have to send you away. Half an hour ago,
he said he felt inclined to sleep; I think it was partly a ruse to
induce me to take a little rest; but he looked rather exhausted, and
Nurse Blandy advised me to lie down till he wanted me again.”

Between the self-satisfied lines of this communication the listener
reads how eternal must be the recumbency of Féodorovna, if continued
until the suggested need for her arises; and how dire the sufferings of
the victim.

The interval between Miss Prince’s discouraging exit and her return
seems long to the feverish candidate for an interview, which, as the
moments pass, she begins hotly to feel is not desired by the person with
whom it is asked. Susan has misled her--in her turn deceived by the
well-meaning importunities of Mrs. Prince. To be persecuting him again
after an interval of only five days! Probably he will regard her as a
second Féodorovna! Her uncle’s pet-name recurs ironically to her
mind--his Mosquito! She is going to be some one else’s mosquito, too.
For the first time in her life she merits the name!

“He will see you for a few minutes!” announces Miss Prince, reappearing
at last. “Personally, I do not think it very prudent; but Nurse Blandy
has made up her mind that he will be none the worse for it; and she
always considers herself a Court of Final Appeal.”

There are traces of past skirmish and present ill humour in Féodorovna’s
appearance; but to both Lavinia is absolutely indifferent. With an
immensely relieved, but still doubting, heart--for, after all, there has
been no word of his wish or will--she follows the haughtily undulating
figure of her guide through the same rooms, passages, and stairs as she
had traversed with a deep, but immeasurably less deep, excitement five
days ago. The lowered blinds, the lavished luxury of detail, the bed in
the recess,--how familiar they are! and yet how long ago her first
acquaintance with them seems!

She is nearing him. Will his first glance reveal that she has been
officious? that her visit adds one more nail to his wearisome martyrdom?
The answer comes carried by lightning. He has dragged himself up into
the forbidden attitude--at least it was forbidden five days ago; but
five days is an enormous period of time--an absurdly evident joy in his
caverned eyes. It cannot be more absurd than the blind elation that the
recognition of that joy evokes in her. It is with relief that, when
words come to her, she hears them to be temperate and rational.

“I am afraid that you were asleep, and that I woke you!’

“I never was wider awake in my life.”

His voice is stronger than it was on Monday; and Lavinia realizes that
Nature has been more potent than even Féodorovna; and that he has made a
perceptible step towards recovery since their last meeting.

“Are you sure that you are up to seeing me?”

“As sure as that I see you.”

Miss Prince and the nurse have retired together, but obviously at
variance, towards the window, and no ear but that to which it is
addressed catches the answer. For Lavinia only is the impression of the
inestimable benefit conceived to be conferred by the sight of her. From
one but lately lying at the point of death insincerities and conventions
are apt to flee away, and she knows that straight from that heart, whose
beats the bullet had so nearly stilled, rushes the response to her
question.

“Come, come!” says Féodorovna, swishing up to the bedside, and speaking
in that hybrid whisper with Miss Prince’s own trade-mark, warranted to
en-fever the calmest invalid; “you must not hang over him. There is
nothing so fatal as to exhaust the air in the immediate neighbourhood of
a patient. Sit quietly down here, and do not say too much.”

The precept is easy to obey, and, in fact, compliance with an opposite
one would to Miss Carew, for the first moment, be quite impossible. For
those first moments the forbidden conversation is supplied by the
prohibitor.

“We need not keep you, nurse,” she says, with more of command and less
of grovelling deference than the official in question is accustomed to
hear. “Your tea is waiting for you.”

Nurse Blandy’s answer is to take the pillows which Féodorovna is
beginning, with amateurish wrong-ness, to shake up, out of that
ministering angel’s hand, and with two masterly movements adapt them to
the patient’s back.

“Miss Carew will ring for me before she leaves you,” she says in a
restful, determined voice, and so quietly departs, with one parting
glance at her foe, which explains, with telegraphic brevity and
distinctness, that no attention to Miss Prince’s orders, but simply a
desire for her own refreshment, takes her away.

“I shall stay as watch-dog, to ensure your not being imprudent!” says
Féodorovna, emerging triumphant, and with a false sense of victory, out
of the late contest, and seating herself nearer to and in much better
view of the sick man than she had allowed his visitor to do.

The latter has watched, with a deep, dumb indignation, the one-sided
scuffle over his helpless form; and her eyes now meet his with as
profound and acute a disappointment legible in them as she reads in his
own. Féodorovna, with a truer estimate than before of the side on which
the balance would swing, is to-day not going to give her prey the choice
of escaping her for half an hour. Féodorovna is not going to leave them
for one minute alone.

And yet, did they but know it, no speech could have so quickly driven
them into intimacy, as this dumb meeting on the ground of their “most
mutual” vexation. At first it seems as if silence were to reign
unbroken, and when a subject is at length chosen, it is Féodorovna who
starts it.

“Captain Binning has had so many visitors,” she says, transgressing the
most elementary rule of nursing, by discussing a patient in his own
presence. “Sir George, Mrs. Darcy, Mr. Campion.”

The enumeration sounds like a reproach, and the words of
self-vindication, “I was asked to come,” all but spring to Lavinia’s
lips; all but, not quite. It is better that he should think her pushing
and intrusive, than that his already wearied body and spirit should have
the fatigue and vexation of an explanation, whose only end would be to
salve her own wounded self-esteem.

“And though he enjoys it at the time,” pursues the arbiter of poor
Captain Binning’s destinies, “he feels the ill effects afterwards!”

“You take more trouble about me than I deserve!” says the invalid,
rather faintly, and in a voice under whose admirably patient politeness
Miss Carew divines an intense nervous irritation. “You know I cannot be
kept in cotton wool all my life!”

“It will not be my fault if you are not!” returns Féo, in a tone of
enthusiasm as intense and overt as that with which she had formerly
proclaimed her life-dedication to General ----.

There is a silence, each of the hearers probably feeling that it would
be impossible to “go one better” than the last utterance. Lavinia steals
a shocked glance at the object of it; but the air of civil tired
endurance, untempered by either fear or surprise, with which he receives
it, shows her that it is merely one of many such declarations. He only
throws his head a little further back, and shuts his eyes--to reopen
them, however, hastily. Lavinia follows the track of his thought. If he
shows any sign of weakness, their common overseer will dismiss Miss
Carew, and thrust something down his own throat.

When they reopen they reopen upon Lavinia’s; although, thanks to the
seat assigned to the latter by Féodorovna, it is only by turning his
head at an awkward angle, that he can get a tolerable view of her;
reopen with an appeal so direct and piteous as to be impossible to
misread. Can she--_she_ with the free use of her limbs, her wits, do
nothing for them? _Them!_ She has time for a spear-thrust of conscience
at the plural pronoun, followed by an equally rapid dart of
self-justification. The use of it was _his_, not hers. She only read off
his thought as a message is read off from the tape. He, in turn, must
read off a negative from hers, since the appeal dies out of his eyes
with disappointed revolt. It is only because a knock at the door has for
an instant freed them from supervision, that they are able to exchange
even these mute signals.

“I shall not be away more than a minute or two,” says Miss Prince,
undulating back to the bedside, and speaking in a voice whose
exasperation at the interruption and unnecessarily emphatic reassurance
contend for the upper hand. “My father has chosen this not very happy
moment to send for me; but I shall insist upon his not detaining me
long.”

She is gone! Blessed, blessed author of the Féodorovna Candle! Long may
his dropless tapers enlighten the world! For a moment, though it is
daylight, he has lit up the universe for two persons! One of them
apparently feels that his tether is a short one, and that he must take
time by the forelock. The door has hardly closed before he says--

“You are not sitting in the same place as you did on Monday!”

“No.”

The inference that he thinks the change not one for the better is so
clear that there would be prudery in ignoring it; and, besides, has not
Féodorovna impressed upon her that his lightest whim is to be respected?
So she moves with quiet matter-of-factness to the chair originally
occupied by her. It cannot be good for his wound that he should slew
himself round, as he was doing a moment ago, to get a better prospect of
her.

“Thank you! Thank you also a thousand times more for coming to see me
again.”

“Why shouldn’t I come to see you again?”

The question is addressed more to herself in reality than to him, and is
an answer to her own misgivings rather than to his gratitude. A slight
shade of surprise crosses the eager brightness of his face.

“You did not see your way to it at first, so Mrs. Prince told me.”

“I did not want to stand in the way of other visitors,” she answers--“my
uncle, Rupert,” adding with difficulty, “We all claim our part in Bill’s
friend.”

She looks steadily at him, and sees a sort of chill come into his
eyes--at her lumping of herself and her family in a cold generalization.

“Rupert!” he says, repeating the name lingeringly, and with an
involuntarily reluctant intonation. “Yes; I have heard of Rupert.”

“From Bill?”

“Yes, from Bill--and from others.”

The slight hesitation that intervenes between “Bill” and the “others”
tells her that he knows. How should he not know, indeed? Is it likely
that, in his state of tedious invalidhood, he should not have been told
any bit of local gossip that might give him a moment’s distraction? To
him, her engagement to marry Rupert is just a bit of local gossip,
neither more nor less. No doubt that the news was imparted--why should
it not be?--by Féodorovna.

“So you see,” she says, struggling with the senseless feeling of
resentment and vexation that has invaded her heart, “my time is not
always my own.”

“I see!” He lies quite silent for a minute or two, looking out of the
window at a burgeoning sycamore, then adds, in a would-be cheerful
voice, “It is kind of him to spare you to me for half an hour; but he
seemed such a kind fellow when he came to see me the other day: one of
my bandages got a little out of gear, and he put it right for me, with a
touch as gentle as a woman’s.”

She repeats “as a woman’s,” like a parrot, with the bitter thought that
even this generously meant encomium takes the feminine shape that all
praise of Rupert must do. No one can deny that the bridegroom she has
chosen can hold his own as a judge of lace, mender of china, and shaker
of pillows, with any expert in either of these three branches of
accomplishment in Europe. The cloud on her brow must be a visible one,
for the sick man’s next remark has a note of doubt and trouble in it.

“I have often heard Bill talk of him. Though they were not alike in
externals, nor, I imagine, in tastes, they meant a great deal to each
other.”

The sentence is evidently intended as a statement, but takes a perverse
interrogative twist at the end.

“People may mean a great deal to each other without having a single
taste in common,” she replies; and the answer leaves on both their minds
a painful sense of having incomprehensibly offended on the one side,
and of having bristled in uncalled-for defence on the other.

The sands of their dual solitude are running out, and this is the way in
which they are utilizing Féodorovna’s absence! In both their minds a
feverish reckoning is going on as to how long it will take Miss Prince
to send her stork-legs along the corridors and staircases that separate
her from her impertinent parent, snub him, and return. Ten minutes is an
ample latitude to give her, and of these five must have already fled.
They cannot, cannot part upon that jarring last note. The rebellion
against doing so is equally strong in both minds, but it is the woman
who raises the cry of revolt. It is a cry that has no reference to
anything that has passed before, it is only the unruly human heart
calling out to its fellow from among the conventions.

“I _am_ so glad that you are better!”

“And I _am_ so glad that you altered your mind!”

They laugh a little, like two happy children, relieved and blissful at
the withdrawn cloud that leaves the blue of their tiny patch of heaven
for its one moment undimmed. Both feel that the exchange of those two
snapped sentences has turned Miss Prince’s prospective return from an
unendurable to a quite supportable ill.

“I think that you would find _that_ chair”--directing her by an
imploring look to one in closer proximity to the bedside than that which
she occupies--“a more comfortable one.”

“Should I?”

She makes the change. Are not all his whims to be gratified? They can
see one another admirably now. He verifies a dimple, and she a scar. He
makes no comment on his discovery. She does upon hers.

“You have been wounded before?” she asks, with trembling interest.

He puts his fore finger on a white cicatrice that runs across his lower
cheek and jaw.

“_That_ bit of a cut! Oh, I got that in the Soudan. It is an old story,
and it was nothing worth mentioning. It did not keep me above a week in
hospital.”

It is clear that he has no wish to pursue the subject; and she refrains,
partly in deference to his disinclination, partly from the aboriginal
woman’s awed joy in the fighting man, partly oppressed by a sense of
contrast. When Rupert cut his leg a year ago, over a fallen tree in the
wood, he all but fainted at the sight of his own blood! But to Binning
she leaves it to start a theme more to his liking.

“I suppose,” he says, turning his head sideways on his pillow in a way
that hides his scar, and brings her still more perfectly within his
range of vision, “that lying on the flat of one’s back like a cast sheep
makes one see things at an odd angle. You will be surprised to hear
that, a few minutes ago, I thought I had offended you.”

There is a pause before she answers, “I had offended myself. Don’t you
think that that is a much worse thing to happen?”

“Do you mean that one can’t beg one’s own pardon?” he asks, laughing
slightly, yet with curiosity stimulated by the gravity of her manner,
and awaiting with eager interest the unriddling of her riddle.

But it remains unriddled. The impulse of each is apparently to flee away
from the other’s topic. Lavinia looks out of the window, and says, with
glad hopefulness--

“In another week you will be able to be carried out-of-doors. You will
be too late for the cherry, but the apple blossom will be all ready for
you, and then you will come in for the lilacs, the laburnums, the
thorns--they are really wonderful in the Park here--the Siberian crabs,
the acacias.”

“Anything more?” he asks, in tender derision of her long list.

“Plenty,” she answers, prepared to continue to bait his appetite for
life with more of her joyous enumeration.

“But I shall not be here to see them,” he objects. “In a month I may go
back, for Roots says so.”

The laughter behind her dancing eyes goes out, and the lilt has left the
voice that asks, “Did Dr. Roots say so to you? or did you say so to
him?”

If he were not bandaged in bed, and an Englishman, Binning would shrug
his shoulders. There is a touch of impatience in his--

“Does it matter much which? We said it to each other.” Then, stirred by
an immense gratitude for her downcast look, he adds gently, “How can I
not be in a hurry to go back? Isn’t my regiment out there still, and my
chief, and all my pals?”

At the sound of his voice, with the fighting ring in it vanquishing the
feebleness of sickness, she lifts her head proudly--

“Of course you want to go back,” she says, with an unaccountable sense
of partnership in his courage and comradeship; “and I hope you will get
well quickly, and be able to do it soon!”




CHAPTER XI


“There was never anything happened so unluckily!”

This is the ejaculation with which Mrs. Prince opens one of those
forenoon visits to Campion Place, discouraged by the recipients, but at
least not so common in her case as in that of her unsnubable daughter.
The scene of it has, as often, to be transferred to the Rectory, and in
this case the object of the visit must be tracked, by a visitor too
eager to await her correctly in the drawing-room, to the linen-room,
where, in company with all the Darcy family except its head, she has
been witnessing a presentation to the cow-man, on his approaching
marriage with the schoolroom maid. The function is happily just
concluded before the interruption takes place; but the wedding gifts lie
displayed upon the linen-room table, and are being examined for the
twentieth time with critical interest by the young Darcys, of whom both
bride and bridegroom are intimate friends, and who have followed the
course of their true love with breathless sympathy since Martinmas. They
view the arrival of Mrs. Prince with more pleasure than usual, as giving
them a fresh gallery to whom to display and enumerate the nuptial
gifts; and, in any case, are far too courteous and kind-hearted not to
be willing to share the elation caused by so joyful an occasion with any
chance comer.

“What has happened unluckily?” asks Lavinia, starting up from her knees,
on which she has been requested to descend to examine the quality of a
Japanese rug displaying itself gaudily on the floor. To her own heart
the question phrases itself differently, “Is he worse?”

“There is something so perverse in its occurring _now_ of all times!”
pursues Mrs. Prince, with that provoking keeping of his or her audience
on tenterhooks and in the dark, by a person whose own curiosity is at
rest, which one often observes.

“But what is it? What _has_ happened?” asks Mrs. Darcy, coming to the
rescue, and holding in her hand the rolling-pin, which has just been
submitted to her for special admiration by her second daughter.

“Of course, it is not her fault! We cannot blame, we can only pity her!”

“Blame her! Pity her! What for?”

Once again Susan is mouthpiece; and Lavinia, herself paralyzed by
apprehension, blesses her. What has Féodorovna done to him? Poisoned him
with the wrong medicine? Set fire to his sheets? Undone his bandages,
and let him bleed to death? To one acquainted with Miss Prince, all
these suppositions come well within the range of the probable.

“She is nearly mad herself!” continues Féodorovna’s mother. “I have
never seen her in such a state!”

Mrs. Darcy lays the rolling-pin quietly down; and, going over to the
intruder, puts a resolute slight hand on her arm.

“I think you ought to tell us what you are talking about? You are
frightening us all!”

“Didn’t I tell you!” answers the other, with vague surprise. “I thought
you knew! How stupid of me! But I have quite lost my head! So have we
all!”

She pauses. And there is a silence, only broken by some one--Mrs. Darcy
alone knows who it is--catching her breath.

“Tell us!” says the rector’s wife, with low-voiced command, and the
enragingly reticent lips obey.

“Féodorovna is ill in bed. She has developed jaundice. It declared
itself last night.”

“Jaundice! Féo!” ejaculates Mrs. Darcy, in a tone of such delighted
relief as is afterwards commented upon by herself with humorous
severity.

“She felt ill when she went to bed last night--overpoweringly sleepy and
bilious, and the whites of her eyes looked yellow; and to-day she is the
colour of a guinea!”

Lavinia has subsided again upon her knees, which do not feel quite so
strong as usual. The attitude may connote thankfulness as well as
inspection.

“Poor Féo!” she says, trying to avoid the key of garish joy in which
Susan’s utterance was pitched. “What a dreadful bore for her! How did
she get it?”

Mrs. Prince lifts her handsomely dressed shoulders and her
_pince-nez_-ed eyes to heaven, as if to refer the question there.

“We had the greatest difficulty in keeping her in bed, until we brought
her a looking-glass. She saw then that it was out of the question that
he should see her! But she is worrying herself to death over him--oh,
not over poor Smethurst: he might die twice a day for all she
cared--over Captain Binning, I mean!”

There is another pause, but of a different quality from the scared
silence of five minutes ago. In Susan’s case it is filled by a
cheerfully cynical wonder at the perfect clearness of vision which the
sufferer’s mother can combine with her maternal tenderness; and, in
Lavinia’s, with a profound gratitude that, at least, while her hue
remains that of the dandelion, Féodorovna’s prey will escape her bovril,
declarations, and cap-strings.

The children think that their moment has come, and civilly volunteer to
show and explain the wedding gifts: to make it clear that both
rolling-pin and bread-trencher emanated from the cook; the dolly-tub
from Miss Brine; and clothes-pins from the “Tweeny;” that the framed and
laurel-crowned “Bobs” is a joint offering from the three elder children;
and the smaller “Kitchener” the outcome of the infant Serena’s worship
of Bellona.

“Mother has just given him her teapot,” says Phillida, in excited
explanation. “Doesn’t it look exactly like silver? It is an old
Sheffield plate pattern; it was to have been presented two days ago, and
Sam had his face washed twice in expectation; but we wanted Lavy to be
present, and, both times, she was at the Chestnuts.”

“That is just where I want her to be again!” answers Mrs. Prince,
listening with more good nature and better-feigned attention than her
daughter would have done, but reverting to her own preoccupation--“the
poor child”--turning back appealingly to her two grown-up auditors--“has
got it into her head that he will be neglected. She and Nurse Blandy
have not quite hit it off of late; that no one can look after him
properly but herself; though, to tell the truth”--lowering her voice,
and in a key of vexed shrewdness--“between ourselves, I think the poor
man was on the high-road to be killed with kindness!”

Both matron and maid listen with sympathetic attention; but to neither
of them does anything occur in the way of a response that would be meet
for the ear of Miss Prince’s mother.

“I have my victoria here!” continues that lady, casting an imploring
look towards Lavinia; “and I thought, if you would return in it with me,
you might pacify her; come and go and take messages between them;
convince her that he is having his medicine and his food at the proper
hours; and so forth. She is not on speaking terms with Nurse Blandy
since nurse complained to Dr. Roots of Féo’s taking the case entirely
out of her hands, and _I_ always get upon her nerves if I come near
her!”

Miss Carew’s eyes are still fixed upon the Japanese rug, as if
appraising its 4_s._ 11½_d._ merits. To a stranger it would seem as if
she did not jump at the proposal.

“It would be a real charity!” urges the maker of the suggestion, humbly
and insistently. Mrs. Prince in adversity is a more prepossessing figure
than Mrs. Prince full of bounce and metaphorical oats; and, perhaps, it
is the perception of this fact that squeezes that reluctant sentence out
of Lavinia.

“I should like to help you,” she answers slowly; “but----”

“But what?” cries Mrs. Prince. “If you answer that your gentlemen may
want you in the course of the afternoon, you know that it is only a case
of sending an order to the stables!”

“Your gentlemen are going to desert you to-day, aren’t they?” puts in
Mrs. Darcy, interposing for the first time; and with a very slight
accent, so slight as to be perceptible only to Miss Carew, upon Mrs.
Prince’s objectionable noun.

“They are obliged to go to London on business--lawyer’s business!”
replies Lavinia, unwillingly making the admission of her unusual
freedom.

“For the night?” cries Mrs. Prince, jumping at the acknowledgment, as
its author had known that she would do. “Then why not come and stay with
us?”

For a moment no one answers; only it seems to Lavinia that Mrs. Darcy’s
eyes echo “Why!”

A confused sense of indignation at that look makes itself perceptible
for a moment in the girl’s mind, followed immediately by a cavilling
self-question as to why she should feel it? What reason assignable to
any human creature is there for her refusing to perform so natural and
easy an act of neighbourliness? Were it poor inglorious little Captain
Smethurst to whom she had been requested to minister, would she have
hesitated for one moment to comply? With the lifelong record, of which
she cannot but be conscious, behind her of matter-of-course
obligingnesses and good offices towards her whole _entourage_, is it any
wonder that her present grudging attitude has spread a layer of
surprised disappointment over her petitioner’s countenance?

“Of course I know that he has no claim upon any of you!” she says, with
a shrug that seems to give up her cause for lost. “Quite the other way
on, in fact! But he is such a lovable sort of fellow, and so
disproportionately grateful for any little thing one can do for him; and
you all--even Sir George--seemed to wish to make him forget; but I
suppose it rankles all the same, and he is the last person not to
understand that it should be so.”

She turns to go, unaware that her final words, in which she herself sees
no particular virtue, have gained the cause she had abandoned as lost.

“_Rankles!_” repeats Lavinia, turning quite white, and in a voice of
inexpressible horror. “Is it possible that you can think?--that you can
imagine----?”

“I really do not know what I think,” replies Mrs. Prince, in a voice
pettish from worry of mind and startled puzzledom at the dynamitic
effect of her last sentence. “When you see a person, whom you have
always found ready to put herself in four for you, suddenly making
difficulties when you are in a tight place, and when it really would not
cost her much to help you, one does not know what to think, does one,
Mrs. Darcy?”

“_Has_ Lavinia made a difficulty?” asks the person thus erected into
umpire, and looking with quiet directness of inquiry into her friend’s
face. “I think you have not given her time for either ‘yes’ or ‘no’
yet!”

“Which is it to be?” cries Mrs. Prince, wheeling round with revived hope
upon her victim. “It may as well be yes!”--with all her tone can carry
of persuasion. “You will have none of the disagreeables of nursing. What
I ask of you is just to sit by his bedside and chat to him; and to keep
Féo quiet by persuading her that we are not killing him by neglect in
her absence.”

_None of the disagreeables of nursing!_ It is, then, to a selfish
shrinking from contact with his pain, that her hesitation is attributed.
The stingingness of the injustice, which would be ludicrous in its
divergence from fact, if it were not so cruel, drives back the blood to
Lavinia’s cheeks, and the words to her lips.

“There _are_ no disagreeables in this case, and if there were, I should
not be afraid of them!” she says, with a quiet dignity which is felt to
carry a rebuke with it, “I will gladly come.”

“You _are_ a trump!” cries Mrs. Prince, breaking, in the excitement of
her relief, into a phrase, the old-fashioned slanginess of which the
elegance of her calmer moments would disapprove, and making a snatch,
which meets only the empty air, at Miss Carew’s hands. “Let us be off
this very instant, or we shall find Féo running about the passages,
though her temperature is up at 102, and she is as yellow as a guinea!”

“I _must_ see my uncle and Rupert first,” says Lavinia, so resolutely
that her visitor recognizes it is useless to contest the point. “Hadn’t
you better return without me, and I will follow as soon as I can?”

“You will not go back upon your word?” asks the other suspiciously. Then
verifying a look of indignant repudiation in the girl’s eyes, she adds,
“No; I am sure you will not! Well, perhaps it had better be as you say.
I will send back the victoria at once for you; or would you prefer the
brough-am?” Its owner gives the vehicle in question the value of two
good syllables. “If it looks the least like rain, I will send the
brough-am.”

She bustles off as she speaks, one rustle and jingle of gratitude,
relief, and jet; but not before she has seen Lavinia speeding before her
through the churchyard back to her home. Did she but know how much the
hurry in the girl’s veins towards their common goal exceeds her own, her
urgency would die, smothered in stupefaction.

Rupert is in his room, guiding and aiding the footman in the packing of
his clothes, and of the few volumes and knick-knacks without which he
never moves. At her call he at once joins her in the passage, leaving,
as she notes with relief, the door ajar behind him.

“I have come to say good-bye,” she says brusquely, still breathless from
her run.

“_Good-bye!_” he repeats. “Why, we need not start for an hour yet.”

“No,” she answers with the same short-breathed determination in her
voice; “but _I_ must. I am going to the Chestnuts for the night. Mrs.
Prince has been here, and has forced me into it.”

The words are strictly and literally true; and yet their utterer feels
the immenseness of the falsity their reluctance implies as she speaks
them.

His face expresses surprise, but no disapproval.

“They want me to help to amuse Captain Binning,” continues Lavinia,
still with that lying disinclination for the proposed occupation in her
tone; “and persuade Féo that they are not killing him with neglect in
her absence!”

“_In her absence!_” repeats Rupert, with an accent of the most acute
astonishment. “Do you expect me to believe that that angel of mercy has
forsaken her post?”

“She has got the jaundice!”

“The _jaundice_!” repeats the young man, with more of entertainment than
compassion in his low laugh. “Poor Féo! The yellow danger! What on earth
has given her over as a prey to it at this cruelly unpropitious moment?”

“I do not know.”

“And you are to nurse dear Binning instead of her? What a blessed,
blessed change for him!”

There is not the faintest trace of jealousy in his tone, and the most
unaffected friendliness in his mention of the sick man; but she wishes
that he had not called him “dear.” It makes her illogically feel more of
a traitor than before; and, besides, is it quite manly?

“I am to sit with him this afternoon,” she answers in a tone of caustic
discontent, “and convince that idiot Féodorovna that he is not being
poisoned or starved. It will only be for to-day,” she adds, more as a
satisfaction to her own conscience than as an explanation in the least
called for by him. “And to-morrow you will both be back!”

“Even if we are, you must not hurry home!” replies Rupert, with that
complete unselfishness which his family has grown so used to as barely
to be aware of. “I am so boomed just now, that I can run the show
without you for an indefinite time. He actually asked my opinion this
morning,” opening his eyes wide and smiling; then, growing grave again,
“and I always feel that we none of us can do enough to make that poor
chap feel at his ease with us!”

She looks up at him in a dumb appreciation of his delicacy and feeling,
that has no pleasure, nay, a leaven of unmistakable pain in it; and
looking realizes that he is paler than his never high-coloured wont.
Admirably as he disguises it, is it a sacrifice that he is making? Does
he divine?

“You look as white as a sheet,” she says, with a sudden impulse to know
the worst. “What has happened to you?”

“You will be angry with me if I tell you that I have had a fright!” he
answers, smiling again, deprecatingly this time. “But that is about what
it comes to. My father made them put the young horse into the cart, when
I went to Shipstone this morning. And we met one of those steam-rollers;
and he took fright and bolted.”

“And you could not hold him?”

“I was not driving. You know I never do, if I can help it. I do not see
the use of keeping a dog and barking one’s self!”

“Well?”

“Oh, you need not be afraid that I did anything unworthy of a man and a
gentleman!” noting with slightly ironical comment the apprehension in
her face. “I sat tight, and Hodson pulled him up just in time to stop
him taking the gates at the level crossing. But you know that nerves are
not my strong point; and it gave them a bit of a jar!”

Her face has hardened and stiffened. “A man has no business to have
nerves!”

“What is he to do if God has presented him with a large bundle of them
at his birth?”

The question is unanswerable, and on this unsatisfactory note they part.
It sounds out of tune-ly all through her short drive, and makes a
discord of it. White as a table-cloth because a horse shied!




CHAPTER XII


“Féo has given strict orders that you are to be shown up to her
_first_.”

These are the words with which the patient’s mother receives Miss Carew,
and they are wafted on a sigh of relieved gratitude, and accompanied by
the admission that she has herself been ejected from the sick-room, and
requested not to reappear there until further orders. The occasion is
evidently considered to be one of such magnitude as to have summoned
from his certificate-hung study Mr. Prince to join his acknowledgments
to those of his wife; but the elaborate expression of his thanks, with
its inevitable prefix of “I do not wish to be intrusive,” is cut short
by a peremptory inquiry, transmitted by Féodorovna’s maid, as to the
cause of the delay in showing up the visitor.

“She will give you the most minute directions,” says Mrs. Prince,
hurrying Lavinia off upon this mandate, and speaking in a flurried
semi-whisper. “You must consent to everything, and”--lowering her voice
still further--“of course you can use your own judgment afterwards.”

“There is not a soul in the house I can trust,” says Féodorovna,
clutching Miss Carew’s hand in a clasp whose feverishness her own cool
palm verifies. “Do not pay the slightest attention to anything Nurse
Blandy says. She is absolutely untrustworthy and incapable.”

Lavinia nods, mindful of Mrs. Prince’s directions.

“In this dreadful _contretemps_ it is something to have a person on
whose honesty at least one can rely,” continues Féodorovna, staring
tragically at Lavinia out of her yellowed eyes. “_You_ have some
sympathy--some comprehension of what it must be to me to be tied down
here, _now_ of all times.”

There is no insincerity in Lavinia’s gesture of assent. Despite the
absolute lack of foundation for Miss Prince’s belief in her own
indispensability, and the ludicrous effect with which a solemn
sentimentality gilds her already gilded features, Miss Carew’s
compassion is genuine, and even acute. To be within five doors of him,
and yet parted as effectually as if oceans rolled between them! A
shocked flash of realization of what such a deprivation would be to
herself dries up effectually any of that inclination to mirth which the
preposterousness of Féodorovna’s pretensions, coupled with that of her
appearance, would naturally produce.

“You must come and go between us,” continues the patient, earnestly.
“Tell me how he is from hour to hour, prevent his fretting more than he
can help, and ensure him against the neglect which hitherto only my own
personal and incessant attention has guarded him from.”

A mechanical mandarin-like movement agitates Lavinia’s head.

“Of course you do not know anything of the technicalities of
nursing--how should you?--but you can at least follow my directions.”

“Yes.”

“Do not sit too close to him.”

“No.”

“Do not talk too much.”

“No.”

“Let him choose his own topic.”

A profound sigh follows this last injunction, which somehow implies that
there can be little doubt as to what that topic will be.

“Yes.”

“Make as light of my illness as you can.”

“Yes.”

“And come back to me every quarter of an hour to report progress.”

“Every quarter of an hour!” repeats Miss Carew, for once forgetful of
and disobedient to her instructions as to unhesitating acquiescence in
everything that might be suggested to her. “But you may be asleep!”

“And if I am!” returns Miss Prince, with such an expression of
high-flown enthusiasm on her discoloured countenance as makes Lavinia’s
pity almost succumb to an unpardonable inclination to laugh.

She escapes at last without having disgraced herself by any overt
evidence of amusement, though her departure is delayed by the
determination of Miss Prince to invest her messenger in her own cap and
apron.

“He has grown used to having them about him,” says Féo, with pensive
peremptoriness; while a recollection of ill-controlled cap-strings
gambolling across patient eyes confirms the statement in the hearer’s
mind, and she sets forth reluctantly equipped in an attire which, like
David’s, she has not proved.

Admitted by Nurse Blandy with a lofty cordiality which speaks less for
her own merit than for the lustre with which she shines by contrast with
Féodorovna, Lavinia finds herself once more standing by that bedside
whence her spirit has so rarely stirred since the day, which now seems
so incomputably distant, when first her lagging feet carried her
thither. Their hands lie in each other’s with the large sense of freedom
that the absence of any onlooker gives; the consciousness that, as far
as any one to note their clasp goes, they may remain in thrilled contact
from now till night. As if in malicious acting upon the knowledge that
such a course would be the most distasteful possible to her young
employer, Nurse Blandy has hastened to leave them _tête-à-tête_. In
their eyes, as they rush to meet, each reads the other’s joyous elation
in the thought that not only is there no Féodorovna present to cramp and
chill their greeting, but that all through the long wealth of the
afternoon to be theirs no opening door need scare them with the swishing
announcement of her paralyzing presence.

“So I have a new nurse!” he says, his look wandering with slow delight
over the array that had made her feel like a mummer.

“Miss Prince thought that, as you were used to the dress, it would be
better that I should wear it.”

“Yes; I am used to the dress.”

The implication that he is _not_ used to the wearer is so clear to them
both, as to draw a little gauzy veil of shyness between them.

“I feel rather like Jacob, having jockeyed Esau out of his occupation,”
she says, talking somewhat at random; the more so for the consciousness
that his eyes have done with her cap and apron, and now find employment
in the string of pearls that, as both of them know, owes no ascription
to Féodorovna. Involuntarily one of Lavinia’s hands goes up to her
throat, with the impulse to hide the jewels, though a cold instinct
tells her that he has already discovered their origin.

“It is very hard upon my predecessor, isn’t it,” she says, beginning to
talk much faster than her wont, “to have developed such an enthusiasm
for nursing, and then to have her course barred by so odious a form of
illness?”

“Jaundice, isn’t it?” returns he, with a very respectable and even
remorseful effort at regret.

“Yes; jaundice.”

“Poor soul!”

Both read in each other’s hearts that, as between them, talk of
Féodorovna is sheer waste of time; yet one of them clings convulsively
to her as a safe topic.

“What aggravates her vexation is that she can’t believe that you will
not be starved and ill-used in her absence!”

“Poor soul!”

There is a touch of impatience that to one initiated speaks of past
endurance in the repeated phrase; and the smile that sends up the
corners of both their mouths, when Lavinia adds demurely, “I am to
report progress every quarter of an hour,” makes them both feel rather
guilty.

It is the man who instinctively breaks away from the subject, and, as
one determined to have his will, rushes headforemost into another.

“Tell me how much time you are going to give me! I had rather know at
once.”

His eye seeks the travelling-clock standing on the table beside him, and
as he turns somewhat to get an exacter view of it, she notes with how
much greater ease and freedom he can move.

“I have come to stay the night.”

“_The night!_”

“Yes; the night. My men have left me and gone to London.”

She answers colourlessly, looking straight before her; but through her
drooped eyelids her spirit sees the almost incredulous delight of his.

There is a moment’s pause; next, in a long sigh of relief, come the
words--

“Then we shall have time for everything!”

She smiles with slow relish of and acquiescence in his thought, despite
the apparent protest in her--

“That is rather comprehensive, isn’t it?”

“I mean,” he continues, eagerly sitting up, and leaning on his elbow,
“that after your former visits I have always felt that we--that I had
not made the most of them; but that I had egotistically frittered away
our time”--neither of them notes the significance of the plural
pronoun--“talking of myself.”

“Did you talk of yourself?” she asks. “I think your memory plays you
false then. If you had, I should,” with embarrassed playfulness, “know
more about you than I do.”

“What do you know? What do you care to know?”

“I know that you have had a bullet through your left lung, and one that
passed very close to your heart; and that, under these circumstances, it
would be wiser not to gesticulate much,” she answers, with a pretty air
of admonishment, and of recalling to both their minds her temporary
function, which seems to him to sit upon her more exquisitely than any
of her former expressions or gestures.

“Did I gesticulate?” he asks. “One gets rather tired of moving nothing
but one’s head, and you must not be hard upon me to-day, for I am rather
down on my luck. At least I _was_!”

“About Féodorovna?”

“Oh no! At least--of course yes. But that was not what I was alluding
to. I have seen”--eyes and hands seeking among the newspapers with which
the bed is strewn--“that one of my pals has been badly hit.”

In a moment she is beside him. “Let me help you. Which paper is it in?”

“In them all! It is official from Lord Roberts.” He has found the
paragraph, and hands it to her, indicating it with a pale fore finger.

“On February 28th, General ---- and his staff narrowly escaped being
captured by a party of the enemy, and were only saved by the presence of
mind and gallantry of Captain Greene of the ---- Hussars. Captain Greene
had been sent back by the General to order a company of infantry up to
the kopje taken on the previous night by the Australian Bushmen. On his
way he saw superior numbers of the enemy creeping up a donga, with the
obvious intention of surprising General ---- and his staff. With great
presence of mind he galloped across ground in full view of the enemy,
ordering up reinforcements. Having accomplished his object, Captain
Greene recrossed the bullet-swept zone to inform the General of the
position, in doing which he was severely wounded in the head and neck,
but, though reeling in his saddle, regained the kopje, imparted his
discovery, and thereby averted an otherwise inevitable disaster.”

Lavinia’s eyes race through the record, and, having done so, raise
themselves to Binning’s. Passionately alive as she is to deeds of
daring, at this moment the desire to find something consoling to say to
the hero’s friend is even more prominent in her mind and look than
admiration of the valiant act.

“It says ‘severely,’ not ‘dangerously’” is her low-voiced comment; “and
even ‘dangerously’ does not always mean _mortally_. You were put in as
‘dangerously.’”

He thanks her with an eye-flash for the recollection; but a moment later
his hands, so quiet in their patience generally, are uneasily pulling at
the embroidered coverlet, which Féodorovna has contributed from her
treasures to his luxury, and which Nurse Blandy _will_ call a
“bed-spread.”

“I cannot think why they do not let me get up. Roots has promised that I
shall be able to return to duty by the end of May; and here we are at
the beginning!”

_The end of May!_ It is, then, to the same spot in time that his eyes
and heart are directed, as are her own; but with how unimaginable a
difference! To him the end of May is to bring release, liberty, return
to the “bullet-swept zones,” to the cold veldt, the ambush, and the
sniping. Yes, but also to the comradeship after which his soul is
lusting. While to _her_!

“May is young yet,” she says, forcing her lips into a reassuring smile.
“Dr. Roots has twenty-five days in which to keep his word.”

His hands cease their restless plucking at the counterpane, and a change
passes over his face. Has he divination to read beneath the mask of her
smile? she asks herself with a sort of terror.

“Twenty-five days!” he repeats softly. “They are a great many; and yet I
can fancy their seeming very few.”

Her self-command does not go so far as to furnish her with a comment
upon this thrilling truism; and the air upon which his next words steal
out seems to have been stilled to receive them.

“I wonder upon how many of those twenty-five I shall have a sight of
you?”

“Let us take short views of life, as Sidney Smith bids us,” she answers,
involuntarily moving her shoulders, as if to shake off from them a load
which, at the moment, seems to press as heavily as did the bursting
wallet of his sins upon good Christian’s bowed back. “I will come as
often as I can be spared from home.”

At that they regard one another steadily, each conveying to the other’s
consciousness their knowledge of how much more than appears the phrase
carries.

“You have naturally _a great deal to do_ just now?”

“Yes.”

It is not true; but what is the use of explaining that the dull
change--dull, except in the one awful main fact of her wifehood--causes
little alteration in the outward framework of her life? Again the room
seems irksomely still. Is it possible that to two pairs of ears even the
swish of Miss Prince’s skirts would be welcome? In one respect Lavinia
might meet that lady with a clear conscience, since she has undoubtedly
obeyed her behest of allowing the wounded man to choose his own topic;
but it can hardly be said _to_ have agreed with him, judging by the grey
shadows on his face. Yet he will not leave the theme that has brought
them there.

“It is to be on the 28th?”

“Yes.”

He has leant back on the pillows, which are propped into a more
convalescent slant than on the day when she had first seen him lying
flat and bloodless upon them. Yet he has reusurped the privilege granted
to those _in extremis_; and she grows restless under the insistence of
his eyes.

“I should like to give you a present.”

“Oh, why should you?”

There is no mistaking her start, and the pain and dissent in her tone.

“You had rather that I did not?”

“Much rather.”




CHAPTER XIII


“No bad news, I hope?”

“None, thanks.”

It is at the breakfast-table next morning that this question and answer
are exchanged. They are the result of the wire which has just been
handed to Lavinia, and which she continues looking at, long after she
must have mastered its contents--so long that the hostess’s curiosity
conquers her good breeding, and makes her take for granted sender and
subject.

“Does Mr. Rupert say by what train he and Sir George are returning?”

There is a pause, though slightly perceptible.

“They cannot get back to-day; the papers were not ready for their
signature, after all.”

“The law’s delay! We all know something about that,” says Mr. Prince,
looking up with a smile of elaborate sympathy from his porridge. “Will
legislation ever effect anything towards----?”

“It is an ill wind that blows nobody good,” cries Mrs. Prince, cutting
ruthlessly into her husband’s speculation. “Since there is nobody to go
back to, what sense is there in your going back?”

       *       *       *       *       *

“I have only _one_ little hint to give you, dear,” says Mrs. Prince,
escorting her visitor to the wounded man’s door, and in a tone tinged
with apology; “but you know what an impracticable patient Féo is, and we
must give in to sick people’s whims, as she was always impressing upon
us about Captain Binning.”

“Yes?”

“Well, dear, it is too silly and exacting of her; but she complains that
there were three quarters of an hour between your first and second
visits to her yesterday, and forty-five minutes between your second and
third.”

“Were there?” rather blankly.

“If the same thing happens to-day, she threatens to get up and go and
see for herself what’s happening. Dr. Roots tells her he will not answer
for the consequences if she does; but she snaps her fingers at him.
However,” with reassurance, “my one confidence is in her _colour_!”

       *       *       *       *       *

They meet without the elation of yesterday, their eyes shirking each
other, and their hands taking for granted that contact is superfluous.
Half a score of subjects had yesterday succeeded her refusal of his
suggested gift; but the sting of that rebuff still inflames their
memories.

“This is an uncovenanted mercy!” he says, with a rather strained smile.
“I was afraid that I had seen the last of you.”

“I heard from my people, that they cannot get back to-day.”

“So you stay here?”

“Yes.”

There is a lifelessness in the little dialogue, she expressing no
regret, and he no gladness. When the eyes, dropped upon her work--she
had no work yesterday--give him an opportunity of covert observation, he
sees that her large eyelids look thickened as if with tears or watching.

“The law is a very odd thing, isn’t it?” she says presently in a
staccato key.

“I have never had many dealings with it.”

“It is the only vehicle to which civilization has not given C-springs
and indiarubber tires. It still jolts and lumbers along as it did three
hundred years ago.”

His look asks for an explanation of her forced yet commonplace analogy,
and she goes on.

“In the matter of marriage settlements for instance, both sides may be
perfectly at one as to the disposition of the money; and yet the law
insists on finding flaws and making difficulties.”

“I suppose it does.”

“Some hitch of the kind is detaining my uncle and Rupert.”

She cannot be more uncomfortably conscious that the explanation is
superfluous and uncalled for, than is he that her trite reflections and
unasked-for introduction of her financial affairs are the stairs by
which she is climbing to some aimed-at goal. In her next sentence she
attains it.

“Talking of marriages reminds me----” Even when the door to which she
has been looking is reached, it seems hard to open.

“Yes?”

“I have been thinking that I owe you an apology.”

“For what?”

“For the spirit in which I received a very kind suggestion you made.”

“What suggestion?”

It is needless to say that he knows as well as she what was the
contemned overture; yet--for Love is by no means a kindly god--he cannot
deny himself the luxury of seeing her run up the red pennon of shame
into her cheeks. But when he notes what uphill work it is to her to give
the asked-for explanation, and how conscientiously she does it, his
heart smites him with an acuteness that brings its own retribution.

“To give me a wedding present.”

“I was sorry that I had put you to the pain of refusing.” His tone is
very gentle, and not in the least rancorous.

“Do you know why I refused?”

“I had a twinge of my old misgivings.”

For a moment--so complete is her innocence of the motive hinted at--she
looks at sea. Then his meaning flashes painfully upon her. He supposes
that from the causer of Bill’s death no member of Bill’s family can
bring him or herself to accept a gift.

“Whatever your misgiving was, it was wrong,” she says, the eager desire
to reassure him giving her a momentary glibness in conspicuous contrast
to the lameness of her former speech. “You could not possibly have
guessed the real reason; it would have required a more than human
intuition.”

“Are you going--are you able to tell it me?”

“Yes, now.” She pauses a moment, as if to collect herself, and set her
facts in order. “I must explain to you,” she says, “that my marriage is
not like other marriages.”

“I do not understand.”

It would be better taste, as he feels, to allow her to tell her tale to
its end, without remark; but she makes a slight halt, and the delay is
unendurable.

“I mean that it is no occasion for festivity or present-giving. I
intended no slight to you; I only saw that you misunderstood.”

This time he has himself better in hand, for no comment follows; but
she, verifying by one snatched look the miserable mystification of his
face, hurries out her next words.

“It is the carrying out of a bargain made almost further back than
memory can reach.”

“Do you mean----”--whether it be through the weakness of his body or the
rebellion of his spirit, the words are spoken almost below his
breath--“that you have tied yourself for life by a childish promise to
another child?”

She draws up head and neck in a way that he feels to convey a dignified
reproof.

“There is no question of tying. I am doing it absolutely of my own free
will. All my life I have known that for me there was to be no another
man than Rupert; and all his life he has known that for him there was to
be no other woman than me!”

If any incredulity born of experience or observation invades the soul of
Rupert’s brother man at this large assertion, no sign of it appears. He
only waits blankly.

“I am up to my neck in debt to them--to both of them!” goes on the poor
girl, losing something of her collectedness, and torn between the
knowledge that wisdom bids her leave the picture of her past and future
without further touches; and the impossibility of not making it clear to
her pale hearer, that love--lover-love--has no part in the scheme of her
existence. “I am up to my neck in debt to them, and this is the first
instalment I have ever been able to pay!”

“I see.”

She sighs, and throws out her arms as if tossing away something irksome.

“Now let us talk of something else.”

But a topic, thus ordered up, comes with a limp; and they get lamely
enough through the next hour; the bulletins to Féodorovna are delivered
with a punctuality unknown on happier yesterday. It is only gradually
that comfort and fluency return to them, the knowledge of the one
subject which has to be skirted round, making all others seem dangerous.
The war-map hung at the foot of the bed proves their best ally. In
moving its pins and flags, and making out, with the nearest approach to
accuracy, the scene of Captain Greene’s exploit, they grow almost easy
and almost garrulous.

“What have you been talking about?” is the first question put by Miss
Prince on the next scrupulously paid visit of report made by the
amateur nurse.

Féodorovna has managed to fidget her temperature up to a higher point
than yesterday’s, and the orange of her face is patched with the
flushings of fever.

“About the war.”

“What about the war?”

“I have been moving the pins and flags on the war-map, in accordance
with to-day’s news.”

“You ought not to let him mention the war.”

“I think it would be worse harm to forbid him. He would only brood the
more over Captain Greene’s wounds.”

“You seem to be much better informed on the subject than I am”--very
fretfully. “What else have you talked about?”

“Nothing much.”

“I hope you have not told him that my temperature has gone up.”

“No.”

“Of course he asked?”

“Of course.”

It is with the weight of this falsehood upon her soul that Lavinia
returns to her charge. It does not sit very heavily, and is probably not
a falsehood at all, since all the inquiries in question have, no doubt,
been addressed to Nurse Blandy or Mrs. Prince, before her own appearance
on the scene. And whether because a little of the former awkwardness
makes him glad of a topic ready to his hand, or that his conscience
smites him with an earlier negligence, he really does put the orthodox
query this time.

“Well, how is she?”

Lavinia shakes her head. “Poor thing! I am afraid her overhaste to be
well will very much retard her cure. You had better take warning by
her!”

There is a pretty admonishment in her voice, and in the face, which is
gentled beyond its never ungentle wont by a diminution of colour. He
rolls his head about on the pillow.

“Am I in such overhaste to be well? Or do I only pretend it?”

“I do not think you are a very good hand at pretending,” she answers,
with a flickering smile.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now the day is done. Has some new Joshua issued a contrary command
to that which the first one sent over the wrecked Syrian town, and bid
the sun double his speed to the west?

“Sleep well,” Lavinia says.

At his request, and by the condescension of Nurse Blandy, she has gone
in to bid him good night at her own bedtime, and long after her services
have been dispensed with. The electric light is out, and the moonlight,
for whose continued admission during another few minutes he has begged,
sleeps in faintly glorious bars and islands on the bed. Long and ghostly
he lies there, and ghostly she leans over him. The pallid interrupted
light--so interrupted that in a second either of them can withdraw from
it under the shield of darkness--gives them a confidence and
expansiveness unknown throughout the day. They feel something of the
freedom of two innocently tender spirits freed from the shams and
prohibitions of the flesh.

“Sleep well!”

She is stooping over him to enable her to see him, and one hand lies on
the turned-over sheet. It looks so unearthly that he must think there is
no contravention of rules made for the material and the real in carrying
it to his ghostly lips. But the unspiritual contact, novel and most
sweet, effectually breaks through the etherial figment.

“Do not wish me ‘sleep:’ wish me a blessed lying dream!”

       *       *       *       *       *

How deep is Lavinia’s thankfulness that Miss Prince’s ignorance of this
irregular interview saves her from the awful necessity of at once
accounting for and relating it. She reaches her own room, trembling and
unstrung. So complete has been her fidelity to Rupert, unconscious of
the unusual in its absoluteness, that no man has ever before kissed even
her hand, the hand which is so often a wicket-gate leading to the palace
of the lips. By the electric light she looks at her right hand--it was
the right--which has been desecrated, is it? or for ever ennobled?--her
practical, capable right hand, beautiful in shapely strength; and her
first feeling is one of regret that it is not more satin-soft, more
smoothly worthy of his lips. Shame that at such a crisis--for to her
inexperience it seems one--so unworthy an impulse should predominate,
burns hotly. But, all the same, the regret holds its own, and keeps its
original start.

The “dazzled morning moon” and the uprising sun find her still a
watcher.

“I have lost a whole night’s sleep because a sick man kissed my hand out
of gratitude,” she says to herself, when her eyes at length close upon
the already roseing clouds. “That is sensible!”

Waking brings with it a healthier view of the episode that had cost her
such a vigil--brings an effort to deride herself for attaching so much
importance to what was doubtless a very commonplace form of
acknowledgment. Her yesterday’s explanation returns with a certain power
of soothing upon her conscience. It showed more than doubtful taste in
her to volunteer it; but, at all events, he now knows that her marriage
with Rupert is an unalterable certainty, and that lover-love has no part
in it. Why it should be unendurable to leave an acquaintance of a
fortnight’s standing under the belief that she is influenced by the
ordinary motives, she omits to asks herself. But it is with a brave face
of open friendliness that she presents herself at his bedside, and he
asks himself by what juggle it had seemed to him that last night her
spirit had kissed his in the moonlight.

In the afternoon she returns to Campion Place, bidding her patient
good-bye with staid kindness, but making no mention of a possible
return. She is on the doorstep, with a bright face to welcome back “her
men.”

The young horse, which Sir George is driving, shies badly at barking
Geist, with a foolish pretence of not recognizing him as his own family
dog; and Lavinia would give anything that her eyes had not flown
suspiciously to Rupert, to note whether his hand is nervously gripping
the side of the dog-cart.

It is fortunate for her that both her travellers are too much occupied
with their own misadventures to ask her many questions about the
disposition of her time. The trip has been neither satisfactory nor
final. An entry in a baptismal registry is not to be found, and a
second, if not a third visit to the lawyers will probably be necessary.
Two dull evenings have been passed at a hotel, as Sir George, with his
usual ingenuity in making life as disagreeable to himself as he can, has
morosely refused to spend them at any place of entertainment; and
Rupert--as seems a matter of course to them all--has foregone his own
friends and pastimes to keep him company.

The only bright spots in their history appear to be that Rupert, who to
his other graces adds a connoisseurship in old silver, has picked up a
George III. Loving-cup at a shop in the Strand for an old song; and that
Sir George has met with some patterns of wall-paper that please him for
two rooms which have not been used of late years, and in whose doing-up
he takes an interest in striking contrast to his usually absolute
indifference to the internal details of his household.

“They would make a nursery look nice and bright,” he says, displaying
them to his niece, and speaking with that uncompromising outspeaking of
his hopes, which has often before inflamed her cheeks.

It is with an inward convulsion of dismay that she realizes how
enormously her repulsion for the topic, thus introduced with Saxon
simplicity, has grown since it was last broached to her. Yet she must
get used to it. She has never hitherto flinched from the necessary and
the actual. There _will_ be, in all human probability, a nursery; there
_will_ be children; and they will be hers--theirs.

“Yes, very bright and pretty.”

He looks at her with a touch of solicitude, though without a grain of
suspicion.

“Have you got a cold? I always tell you that you go too thinly clad.”

“No, thanks; not in the least. Why do you think so?”

“Your voice sounded hoarse, as if your tonsils were relaxed.”

But Lavinia’s tonsils are all right.




CHAPTER XIV

     “A côté du bonheur”


“All these things are against me!”

Seven days are gone since Lavinia was called upon to exult over the
nursery hangings, and there is no exultation, even feigned, in the tone
with which she quotes to herself the words of Jacob, running over in her
head what “these things” are. It is “against her” that the search for
the missing baptismal entry, now complicated by doubt as to the
whereabouts of the register in which it was made, has motived another
absence on the part of her bridegroom and uncle. It is against her that
this fact has come to Mrs. Prince’s ears, and has brought a hailstorm of
invitations, entreaties, and reproaches about Miss Carew’s head. It is
against her that Féodorovna, having with a headstrong insanity, even
stronger than her vanity, insisted on visiting Binning, has succeeded in
improving upon her original malady by an attack of pneumonia, and
brought herself to death’s door.

As she unquietly paces the garden at Campion Place, waiting for the
Princes’ victoria to convey her to the Chestnuts, Lavinia, dolefully
probing her conscience, asks it which of the causes that have added
their weight to each other till their momentum has grown irresistible,
can be, in any common fairness, laid at her door; and she can detect no
unjust bias in her own favour in the “not one” that answers her inward
inquisition.

On the elms’ little leaves in the giant espaliered hedge that parts her
from the churchyard is the glisten of that sunshine that has just been
luring them into life; on the dazzling emerald grass “nice-eyed”
wagtails are walking with balanced tails at the foot of the old grey
wall which, on the left side of the demesne, drops down a matter of ten
feet to the croquet lawn below. She, looking absently over, can see the
large-flowered periwinkle staring up at her, and the heaven-shaming blue
of the forget-me-not fringe. The sight of the latter blossoms causes her
a twinge of discomfort. She had worn a little bunch of them in her white
coat, and at his leave-taking, a quarter of an hour ago, Rupert had
deliberately unpinned and annexed them. Could he have intended any
rebuke or admonishment by an action unlike him in its something of cool
ownership? Yet there was certainly nothing of overweening confidence or
masterdom in the words with which he had answered her at the moment,
sincerely meant and felt--

“This is really too bad.”

“Has absence made the heart grow fonder?” he asks, with a light
lip-raillery, which the restrained yet legible wistfulness of his eyes
contradicts. “When I see a wave of hatred coming on, I shall know what
remedy to apply.”

She has taught him to be sparing of endearments. Yet even he must expect
some trifling kindness at parting. It weighs upon her conscience after
he is gone that she had deftly chosen a moment when the butler was
passing through the hall to bid him her final good-bye.

“All these things are against me!”

Yet even while she repeats the Biblical phrase aloud, to give it greater
solidity, a sense of her own hypocrisy comes hotly home to her.

All these things are against her. But is there nothing for her too?
Isn’t the May month for her? and the temporary freedom assured to her
fifteen minutes ago? and her own heart, capering and curvetting, under
all its pack-load of scruples and compunctions?

“For” and “against.” In what a double and contradictory sense is she
using both prepositions! She pulls herself up muddled and uneasy, yet
helped out of her puzzle by the delicious egotistical noise a thrush is
making on a bough near by, insisting on telling all passers-by, at the
top of his voice, how well his suit has thriven. A phrase out of one of
Keats’ Letters recurs to her _àpropos_ of a like feathered Anacreon--

“That thrush is a fine fellow. I hope he has made a good choice this
year.”

Happy thrush, to be in a position to make a choice! Daily, or almost
daily, as have been Lavinia’s visits to the wounded man, she never fails
before each one to feel afresh the same almost sick excitement as to the
precise method of their meeting. To a not very observant onlooker there
would not seem to be much variety in their salutations, but to her now
practised eye and ear, there lies an infinite range of gradations
between the clouded gladness of his mute, yet how legible, “It is very
good of your owner to lend you to me for yet another hour!” and the
equally mute uncalculating exultation that knows no to-morrow of “You
are here!”

To-day she might have spared herself the daily fever of her speculation,
since their meeting is to fall out in quite a new manner, and under safe
conditions of large chaperonage. Captain Binning is no longer either in
bed or in the room which has been the scene of their whole acquaintance.
He has been moved several hours ago into the adjoining room, and now
lies on a sofa drawn up to the window. He is still pillow-backed and
more than semi-recumbent; but he is “up” and the first step has been
taken towards the fulfilment of Dr. Roots’ promise.

Lavinia’s heart first bounds and then drops stone-like at the sight.
Thank God, he has reached the first milestone on the high-road to health
and vigour. How many more will take him beyond her ken? No man can fight
the enemies of his country in bandages and a nightingale, but from grey
flannel to khaki is but a step! Captain Binning is, as one glance at the
_mise en scène_ informs her, giving a housewarming in honour of his
convalescence. The prudence of the step may be doubted, but that it is
being enjoyed by guests and host is indubitable.

In compliance with his request, backed by their own much urgency, the
rector’s wife has brought her young family to be presented to the first
live hero they have ever seen, and all have arrived laden with the
objects that seem to them most likely to support his spirits. With their
usual eager kindheartedness, they have stripped their walls and
dressing-tables of the photographs of the adored generals, and disposed
them for exhibition within easy reach of Captain Binning’s eye and hand.
Phillida has brought the new poodle, who wears the portraits of as many
military men as can be induced to stick there, in midget size, in his
hair, and Daphne introduces a female dove, in whom the friends of
General Pole-Carew would be surprised to recognize that son of Mars.
Mrs. Darcy sits by the sofa-side, putting in an observation when she has
the chance, but, with her usual wise easy-goingness, not attempting to
arrest the flow of enraptured questions which she knows that a word or a
sign from her can at once check, and which evokes such amused answers as
cannot be produced by the weary or the overdone.

At the moment of Lavinia’s entry two inquiries are shooting from as many
eager mouths at her patient, “Have you kept the bullet?” and “How often
have you spoken to Bobs?” Half a dozen sparkling eyes await the answer;
since, though Christopher has returned to school, little Serena is here,
and staring with the rest. Surprise that one who has hitherto been so
obligingly ready with his responses should now remain silent and look
oddly over the tops of their hats instead of answering, makes them turn
their own necks to discover the cause, and in the next moment they are
surrounding Miss Carew, and liberally sharing their delightful gains in
knowledge with her.

“Oh, Lavy! _Did_ you know that Captain Binning has the same Christian
name as Bobs?”

Lavinia did know it, as well as a good many other facts about the object
of the children’s interest, which he is less likely to have imparted to
them; but she is spared the necessity of owning it by Captain Binning,
who puts in, with a laugh whose altered quality puzzles the keen-eared
young people--

“It is so far down in my long string that it scarcely counts.”

“Captain Binning has three Christian names,” explains Daphne, in kind
elucidation; and Phillida hastens to strike in glibly, before her sister
can anticipate her--

“Edward Carruthers Frederick Binning.”

“Two too many,” says the owner of the names, laughing again. But, as the
children remark to their mother in the waggonette on their homeward
road, claiming her confirmation of the fact, there is still something
odd about him.

She shuts their mouths unexpectedly. “It was his civil way of letting
you know that he was tired! You know that with strangers and invalids a
little of you goes a long way.”

The explanation is not flattering, but is received without offence.

The Rectory adieux to the newly found hero are made much earlier than
his votaries think at all necessary or desirable. But though a few
moments before Lavinia’s entry, he had stoutly denied the accusation of
fatigue and the offer of departure, a quarter of an hour later he tamely
acquiesces in both.

“You will come again soon, and bring the Siege Train,” he says at
parting, and with something that might be compunctious in his tone, to
the disappointed children; “and I’ll tell you all I know about Bobs. I
do not think it is nearly as much as you know yourselves,” he adds
laughing.

He shakes hands with Phillida and Daphne, and kisses Serena and the
poodle--the latter by request--and they are gone.

Strong emotion is often the unexpected parent of platitude. It is the
mind at ease that has leisure to sharpen the epigram and fire the
_bon-mot_, and nothing can be more banal than the short phrases
exchanged between the young pair whom the departure of the Darcys has
left quivering and tingling with a sense of each other’s proximity.

“What capital children!”

“Yes, aren’t they?”

“And she, the mother, is one of the best, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she is.”

A pause.

Lavinia can go no farther than this bald assent in praise of her chosen
friend, for the oppression of shyness that crushes and gags her. It is
of this metamorphosed, dressed, transformed man, passing so visibly out
of the province of the nurse, despite his crutches and his pallor, that
she feels a timidity none the less overmastering for her knowledge of
its senselessness. That he sees it, the uncertainty of the tone which
utters what sounds like a reproach sufficiently proves.

“Why were you so unwilling to own that you knew my Christian names? It
was not a very compromising admission.”

“Not very,” she answers with a wavering laugh; “but to-day I feel as if
I must sit up, and ‘make strange’ with you. The person _I_ knew lay
meekly flat on his back, and did not dare to call his soul his own; when
he sits up and gives a party, I realize that my jurisdiction has ended.”

“_Has_ it?”

The question is followed by a silence so full of electricity that both
feel the necessity of running up a lightning conductor. Both begin a
sentence at the same moment, and each breaks it off on realizing the
other’s intention. Each begs the other to continue the interrupted
phrase, and each asseverates that it was not worth ending. It is Binning
who is finally persuaded to reissue from his mint the coin whose
valuelessness he has spent so much breath in asserting.

“I was only going to say that if I have already become such a bogey--so
unrecognizable--when once I am on my legs again, I shall have to be
formally reintroduced to you.”

“It will not be worth while.” Even as she makes it Lavinia realizes the
folly of her speech, opening up, as it does, the subject of their
fast-approaching separation; but before her forces can come up to
relieve it, the traitor within her has rushed the position, and once
again the electric current runs perilously strong.

       *       *       *       *       *

As the young Darcys have always been taught to say what they mean, and
mean what they say, they credit their acquaintance with a like
simplicity and veracity; and, having been invited by Captain Binning to
come again soon, and bring the Siege Train, see no reason why they
should not repeat their visit in compliance with a request, whose
sincerity it never occurs to them to doubt, with the least possible
delay. Thanks to the drag placed upon their ardour by a discreeter
parent, a decent interval of three or four days is allowed to elapse
before they reappear in triumph, equipped with all the munitions of war.

“You will find him in the garden,” Mrs. Prince says to her young
visitors, waving her _en tout cas_ in the direction indicated--“there
among those lilacs. He is out for the first time in a wheeled
chair--quite an event for him, poor lad!” Then, as they fly off in eager
obedience to the direction given, she adds, _sotto voce_, to Mrs. Darcy,
“If you could give them--Binning and Lavinia, I mean--a hint to stay
within range of Féo’s windows. She likes to be able to watch them.”

But the rector’s wife must have forgotten to fulfil the delicate
commission entrusted to her, since when, an hour later, Mrs. Prince
joins the party, ostensibly to see on her own account how they are
getting on, but in reality irefully despatched by her daughter to
investigate the causes of their being completely out of sight, she finds
them all grouped in a fragrant close of blossoming shrubs round the
wheeled chair, whence Binning is conducting the Relief of Ladysmith.
That the carrying out of that operation has reduced all the forces
engaged--male and female, grown-up people and children--to the same
level of excited juvenility, is proved by the fact that, at the moment
of Mrs. Prince’s advent, Captain Binning and Miss Carew are contesting,
with raised voices and heightened colours, the possession of the one
cannon that shoots silver _bonbons_. For the moment they have entirely
lost sight of their own dangerously tender relations to each other, and
are disputing in real anger about the possession of a ridiculous toy.

“You have come just in time to prevent manslaughter,” says Mrs. Darcy,
rising from her knees with a humorously shamefaced air. “We had to
shelter here from the wind,” she adds in rather guilty explanation. “I
think we are going to have another cold snap.”

Either the “cold snap” alluded to, or one brought by Mrs. Prince
herself, presently disperses the party, and the Darcys retreat with such
precipitation as to leave the object of strife behind them on the grass.

Lavinia picks it up and eyes it unseeingly, conscious only that the
voluble chaperonage of the last hour is withdrawn, and that in the green
privacy of their lilac-scented bower nothing is left to protect them
from each other. It will be for only a minute or two that the delicious
awkwardness of their first _tête-à-tête_ amid the glad May greenness of
trees, and the erotic suggestions of wedded blackbirds will last--only
till the servant who drew the chair to its present harbour can be
recalled and instructed to drag it up and down along the broad terrace
walk between the sundial and the fountain, in the bald publicity of all
the house’s front windows, and within range of the still bedded
Féodorovna’s eye.

“I withdraw my claim,” Binning says magnanimously, with a half-laugh.

“So do I!” rejoins she, relieved.

“Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it!”

“And to think that we should have been within an inch of a serious
quarrel over _such_ an object!” she cries, tossing the gem of the
Rectory Siege Train disdainfully away. “Our first quarrel!”

At that--the phrase seeming ill pitched on and suggestive, both lapse
into awkwardness, out of which, and also out of their bird-haunted
brake, a footman presently expels them, lugging the one and compelling
the other, since she is still on duty, into the stare of the afternoon
sun on the shadeless terrace, which, or Mrs. Darcy’s “cold snap,” soon
tires the invalid so much that he asks to be taken indoors.

He revives before long, however, when comfortably extended on his sofa,
and removed from the heady influences of the lilac perfume and the
blackbirds’ song--three amorous cocks apparently courting one hen--he
and his companion have settled down into the at all events surface
peacefulness of their normal relation of nurse and patient. She has
proposed reading aloud to him, and, though he has not accepted the offer
with much eagerness, being no great bookman, and, like most men,
disliking having his reading done for him, she persists, contrary to her
usual gentle habit of following his every suggestion, and guessing every
unuttered wish. After all, the manœuvre has its advantages, and he lies
resigned, exploring the chart of her dear face, and making several new
and delightful little discoveries.

An interruption soon occurs in the shape of a letter for
Lavinia--arrived by the afternoon post, overlooked in passing through
the hall, and now brought her by a servant. Her colour changes as she
recognizes the handwriting. There must be something very wrong in her
“State of Denmark,” as she has time to realize in a flash of
compunction, for her to feel as she does, that there is an indecency in
her reading a letter from Rupert under Binning’s eyes. Yet she must read
it at once, too, since the fact of his writing implies something
unusual, as he and his father are to return to-morrow morning, and she
has never encouraged nor he permitted himself love-letters written only
for love’s sake. Asking leave of her companion, formally yet with
hurried uneasiness she opens and reads the missive, seen at the first
glance to be unaccountably long. The man, to put her at ease and make
her feel free from observation, picks up the dropped volume; but over
its top, or through its boards--since such little miracles are of easy
performance to that most bogus of blind beggars, god Eros--he sees that,
whatever her news may be, it is of an oversetting nature.

“They are not coming home to-morrow.”

This cannot be what has upset her. There must be something more.

“Has the baptismal register not turned up yet?”

“Yes, it was found on Thursday in St. Mary Abbotts.”

He must wait her time.

“My uncle is laid up ill in London.”

“Gout?”

“Yes; but not simple gout. He felt an attack coming on, and dosed
himself with the very strong remedies which the doctor has always
forbidden him; got a chill on the top of that; and now he has driven it
in.”

“And has sent for you to nurse him?”

“No; he will not hear of it.”

She shuts herself up into her letter, and he gets nothing more out of
her for a while. She has even moved quite away from him to a distant
window; still with that odd sense of immodesty in reading it while his
eyes are upon her.

“I know what your impulse will be,” Rupert writes; “but you must resist
it. It is not _façon de parler;_ but he would be seriously annoyed by
your coming up. It seems difficult to believe it, knowing as we have
done all our lives his absolute carelessness about money; but it is,
nevertheless, true that of late his one idea has been to screw and
pinch in every possible way for----”

The “for” is carefully erased; and the object of Sir George’s
parsimonies left unstated; but had it been printed on a poster in
letters six feet high, Lavinia could not have read more clearly that it
is for those terrible unescapeable younger children of hers that Sir
George is lopping his little luxuries.

“The thought that your presence would swell the bill at this ‘d----d
pot-house’ as he calls it, would do more to retard his cure than even
your ministrations could counteract; so stay where you are, and look
after Binning, to whom please give my love. You know that among the many
feminine graces for which you despise me, the gift of nursing is not the
least!”

Then follows a postscript: “The poor old fellow caught his chill walking
with me through yesterday’s storm, to save the expense of a cab or bus
to a jeweller’s in the City, about an enamelled girdle he is having made
for you; and which I have been helping him to design. Now that it is too
late, he is unnaturally good and obedient--a state of things I hope to
maintain by encouraging the terror under which he labours of not being
well by the 28th.”

Such was certainly not Rupert Campion’s intention in writing this
letter, yet the impression derived from it by his _fiancée_ is that
never were so many unpleasant facts and suggestions crowded into four
sides of a sheet of note-paper. Her uncle is seriously ill, and she is
not to be allowed to go to him because he is saving all his money for
her and Rupert’s younger children. He has contracted his illness in the
quest of an expensive ornament for her, which will add one more link to
the enormous chain of obligations which is tying up her liberty with
ever tighter and tighter knots. Rupert has given an added proof of his
hopelessly unmanly tastes by designing the jewel. In a dreadful flash of
prophetic insight, she sees him, in the terrible matter-of-fact freedom
of married life, sitting with his arm round her waist, and quoting
Waller--

    “That which her slender waist confined
     Shall now my joyful temples bind.”

He has sent his “love” with school-girl effusiveness to Binning; and,
last and worst offence, he has alluded to the 28th!

For some moments the girl stands looking vaguely out at the rhododendron
belts and azalea beds, the lawns and _parterres_, with a horrible
feeling of hatred and physical nausea towards the man with whom she is
to pass her life. Then the horror is transferred to herself, and strong
reaction follows. She thrusts the letter into her pocket, goes back to
her former seat, and picks up the book. Her action seems to forbid
question or intrusion. But in a moment or two she lays down the volume,
and makes her expiation. It does not look like one at first.

“Do not you think that complete unselfishness is the highest as well as
the rarest quality that a man can possess?”

He is so much taken aback by the triteness and apparent irrelevance of
the question, that she is able to enlarge uninterrupted upon her
dog’s-eared theme.

“I mean do not you think that it is to be set far above generosity, or
endurance, or courage, or any of that sort of showy virtues?”

“Are they showy?”

“They get a great deal more _kudos_, at any rate!” she retorts, with a
heat he does not understand. “Do not you agree with me?”

“I do not think I ever thought about it,” he answers bluntly. “If I had,
I should have taken for granted that unselfishness included all the
others.”

“How?”

“Well, take pluck for instance. If a man were perfectly unselfish, he
would never cast a thought to his own skin.”

“I do not at all agree with you,” rejoins she, almost rudely. “There is
no relation whatever between them: the one is the loftiest of moral
qualities; the other is purely physical, a mere matter of nerves and
muscles, and beef and beer.”

He lies looking at her in puzzled pain, jaded with the effort to follow
the windings of her inexplicable mood.

“You will wonder what is the motive of this flat tirade,” she says with
a laugh that has neither mirth nor music in it. “I must explain that I
have had one more proof that Rupert is the most selfless being God ever
created.”

Binning takes the wind out of her sails. “He gave me that impression;”
and the only net result of the expiation is to put them both out of
spirits and temper for the rest of the evening.




CHAPTER XV


The 28th of May has come, and the inevitable has happened. This
inevitable is not that Lavinia Carew has become Lavinia Campion. On the
contrary, her wedding stands postponed for a week, viz. to the 4th of
June. The delay is in no degree attributable to her, but is caused by
the illness of that uncle whose over-haste to be well, and determination
to treat serious sickness with that high hand which it will never
endure, has landed him in the same morass as it had done Féodorovna.
With a reluctance proportioned to his extravagant eagerness for the
object in view, with many racy expressions, and a refreshing shower of
renewed insults, both wholesale and retail, distilling upon his patient
son, Sir George has had to acquiesce in the deferring for an additional
eight days of the attainment of his heart’s desire.

Perhaps the inevitable might have been avoided if one of several things
had happened or not happened. If Sir George had yielded to his niece’s
earnest entreaties to be allowed to nurse him, instead of insisting on
her confining herself to a couple of runs up to London, each of so few
hours’ duration as to involve no swelling of the reckoning at the
“d----d pot-house;” if Rupert had not been kept or kept himself in such
close attendance on his father as to have no time to see how ill his own
affairs were faring; if Féodorovna had been permitted to complete her
cure, and exercise momently supervision over her captive at home,
instead of being despatched to Brighton--metaphorically kicking and
screaming, it is true--but still despatched by a determined doctor and a
for once unbullyable father; if Binning’s name had not appeared among
the list of officers upon whom the Queen was pleased to bestow the
Victoria Cross; if Mafeking had not been relieved! If, if! the
convenient, curtsying, carneying preposition, which has salved every
malefactor’s conscience since the world began! For the malefactor in
question it is but a very imperfect unguent, desperate as is the
perseverance with which she uses it.

_If, if, if!_ A whole procession of them pass before her in the wakeful
silence of the night; and she gives herself the full benefit of them
all. But at every morning watch, what a traitor she stands at her own
bar! To have taken advantage of “her men’s” absence--the very phrase,
lifelong in its employment, seems to reek of hypocrisy--to have taken
advantage of their absence, of the heavy sickness of the one, and the
selfless devotion of the other, to play them this coward’s trick! Yet
her infidelity has only been of the soul, not of the body. Complete as
has been and is the unfaithfulness to Rupert of her heart and pulses, up
to the 28th of May there has been no physical contact between her and
Binning beyond that one grateful touch of a sick man’s lips upon his
nurse’s hand, at which not the most monopolizing of lovers could carp.
When her self-contempt grows unendurable, she drags this creditable fact
of outward propriety to the front, pushing it before her, and hiding
behind it at Conscience’s judgment-seat.

And she _has_ struggled! What means has she not used? what cruel,
branding, searing remedies has not she tried--even to that extremest one
of belittling, in her _for intérieur_, him whom her whole aching soul
and racing blood call out upon as her only lord and love? Has not she
haled to the foreground and set in malicious order his deficiencies?
told herself to what a common type he belongs--just the yea and nay,
straight, unintellectual Anglo-Saxon fighting man? his character, how
inferior in interest and complexity to Rupert’s; his mind, how much less
subtle; his apprehension, how much less quick; his understanding of
herself, how infinitely inferior? And having quite demolished him,
having left him scarcely comely and barely brave, she falls on his neck
in the secretest recesses of her inveterately guilty heart, and begs his
pardon with tears. It is not because he is a hero or a dunce that she
loves him. It is for the reason which was already very old when
Montaigne penned it: “Parce que c’était, moi! Parce que c’était, lui!”

By the date of the Relief of Mafeking, Binning is able to get about a
little with a stick, and even to assist with his presence and advice at
the bonfire which, by “kind permission of Mr. and Mrs. Prince,” has had
its site transferred, for his special benefit by its builders, the young
Darcys, from their own stable-yard to the ampler area of the Chestnuts.
Not that the Rectory does not blaze too with subsidiary flames, and
breaks out into a forest of flags that makes the bunting which had
celebrated Ladysmith sink into insignificance. It would seem impossible
that anything could carry the patriotic elation of the clergyman’s
family to a higher pitch than it has already reached, yet it is sensibly
heightened by the providential coincidence, of which the poultry-yard is
the scene, viz. that it is Baden Powell who brings out thirteen chickens
on the very day of the raising of the siege. The fact is the more
remarkable as two other generals, who were set upon the same day, but
were wanting in the patient assiduity of B. P., produced nothing but
addled eggs. It is not the Mafeking news, soul-stirring and
spirit-lifting as it is, which has produced the inevitable. There is a
safe publicity and generality in the emotion it evokes; and Lavinia,
hurling billets of wood on to the bonfire, and being exhorted, directed,
and scolded by Binning, leaning on the top of his staff, which he
ultimately, in the excitement of the moment, throws in too, is in far
less peril than Lavinia chokingly reading aloud to its recipient the
little paragraph which announces that he is among those to whom the
Victoria Cross is to be awarded. She struggles through the small _naked_
record of his achievement.

“Captain Binning,--th Hussars, who was in command of a troop, held an
important position for some time against heavy odds; and when compelled
to retire, saw all his men into safety, and then, though he had himself
been wounded in the left lung, supported Lieutenant Henley, who was
unable to walk, until the latter was again hit and apparently killed,
Captain Binning being himself again dangerously wounded a short time
after.”

At the end, her hand goes out to clasp his as naturally as a
man-comrade’s would have done.

“For the first time I know how it happened! You never would tell me!”

During a minute or two he can only answer her by a hand-grip, whose
vigour argues a recovered hold upon life and manhood; then--

“It is a great surprise,” he says, not very steadily. “I did not even
know that I had been recommended for it.”

“Do not say that you are not glad!” she cries, with a high unnatural
laugh, which, in her normal state, she would have repudiated as
neurotic. “Do not say that Tom, Dick, and Harry deserved it better!”

As she looks at him in triumphant challenging prohibition, at his face,
still that of one stunned by the shock of a so great and honourable joy,
a thin image of Rupert seems to pass vapourishly between them--not of
Rupert the admirable son, the delicate reticent lover, the perfectly
comprehending friend, but of Rupert in white effeminacy, paling at the
mere memory of a jibbing horse. Yet the Victoria Cross is no more
answerable than Mafeking and her bonfire for the happening of the
inevitable. That is ironically reserved for the 28th, the day on which
Lavinia was to have been married to Rupert. If it could have been
staved off for twenty-four hours, it would never have happened; since on
the 29th Binning is to depart for Southampton to join the s.s. _Nubia_,
which is taking out to the Cape drafts for half a dozen regiments
already depleted by the enteric and the Boer.

The day has dawned with a splendour as ironical as all else belonging to
it. Lavinia is no longer at the Chestnuts, where her services have
ceased to be required, and whither Féodorovna has returned, fully
recovered and wholly hysterical, to see the last of her ex-patient.

The Rectory children are all more or less bunged with tears, against
which they bravely contend, and have eluded Miss Brine, and the
inadequate consolation offered by her, that after all Captain Binning is
no blood relation, and that six weeks ago they had never seen him, to
seek the more perfect sympathy of “Lavy.” But “Lavy” is not so nice as
usual; and though they find her wandering about her garden with no
apparent occupation, she shows so little desire to hear or reciprocate
their lamentations that they leave her in puzzled disappointment. Their
mother, presently missing them, divining and disapproving their design,
hastens after them; and finding them hanging, with only very partially
recovered spirits, over that unexpected tit’s nest in the disused
watering-can, which their jealous care has watched over since earliest
eggdom, gravely dismisses them, and joins her friend.

Without speaking, the rector’s wife directs her own steps and those of a
companion who seems scarcely to know, and not at all to care, where she
is or what is being done with her, to the walled seclusion of the
kitchen garden, as being less open to observation than the sloping lawn
before the house. Yet at first the precaution seems unnecessary. There
is nothing for any prying eye to see, nor ear to hear.

“Sir George and Rupert come back to-day?”

“No; to-morrow.”

“Will the workmen be out of the house?”

“Not quite.”

Silence; apparently numb on the one side; certainly self-reproachful on
the other.

“What could have possessed me,” Mrs. Darcy asks herself, “to allude to
the papering and painting of the nurseries?”

Lavinia remains absolutely dumb. A despair so lifeless and inarticulate
frightens the elder woman; and, after a minute or two of anxious
cogitation, she tries the effect of a douche of cold water on her
companion’s apparently swooned soul.

“I did not think you would have collapsed like this!”

It is partially successful. “I have not collapsed. Since you _know_,
having dragged it out of me, there is no need to pretend before you; but
when it matters, I shall not collapse.”

“He is coming to bid you good-bye to-day?”

“Yes.”

“Is--is that wise?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

There is such a dull doggedness in the tone, such a clutch upon the
interview referred to implied in it, that Mrs. Darcy gives a gasp.

“It won’t be good-bye!” she says presently, in a low tone of
conviction--“it _cannot_ be!”

Lavinia does not answer; not in the least, as her friend is
distressfully aware, because she is acquiescent; but simply because the
statement is not worth contradicting.

“I can’t stand by and see a crime committed!” Susan says, talking low
and very quickly, and trying not to let her agitation get the better of
her. “If you feel that it is a task beyond your strength, _I_ will speak
to Rupert for you; at the least hint, the least suggestion--heroically
unselfish as he is.”

“You used not to admire him so much!” puts in the other with a bitter
dryness.

“It is quite true, and it is perfectly fair that you should remind me of
it,” rejoins Mrs. Darcy, humbly and ruefully; far too intent on her
object to resent or even notice any blow that her self-esteem may suffer
on the way to it. “I was paltry enough to allow myself to be blinded by
his silly little foibles to his great qualities; but of late, during Sir
George’s illness, realizing, as I have done--as every one must have
done--all that he has had to give up, and with what perfect
self-effacement he has done it----”

Lavinia breaks in upon her with a terrible jocosity.

“You have forgiven him his old lace and his Elzevirs! Well, better late
than never!”

Her friend stares at her with aghast, wide-open grey eyes, as of one
who sees a hideous blighting transformation taking place in a dear and
familiar object.

“You are right!” she says, under her breath. “I thought him completely
unworthy of you, so unworthy that your loss would cause him very little
pain so long as he could keep, as you say, his ‘old lace and his
Elzevirs;’ while in another direction I saw, or thought I saw, a
possibility----” Her voice dies falteringly away.

Lavinia looks at her stoically. “You need not distress yourself; you
have neither made nor marred in the matter.”

Another grim silence.

“Will you empower me to tell Rupert?”

“Tell him what?”

“Will you tell him yourself?”

“Tell him what? There is nothing to tell.”

The rector’s wife pauses, brought up against this wall of senseless
brazen denial; her thin sensitive face even whiter than its white wont;
but she is not easily baffled, nor apt to abandon a task because it
wrings her withers.

“My dear,” she says, taking gently hold of the girl’s coldly pendant
hand, and using an endearment uncommon to her, being one sparing of
banal caresses, “do you think that you are doing Rupert a kindness in
providing him with a wife who avoids his look, winces at his voice, and
shudders at his touch?”

“What the eye does not see, the heart does not feel. He will never
know!” There is a wretched callousness in her voice, whose
counterfeitness a slight shiver betrays.

“_Not know! Rupert not know!_”

The words, and the inflection that accompanies them, bring home to
Lavinia the fact, on which she has often laughingly expatiated to her
friend, of the extraordinary intuitive knowledge of her possessed by
Rupert; of her absolute inability to keep one half-thought or fancy from
his ken. That he should so turn over and handle the innocent
trivialities of her mind and heart, has formerly been a matter of jest.
Now the thought that there will be no secret place in her soul into
which she can retire from him with her terrible secret, no gourd under
whose shade she can sit hugging her misery undetected, breaks down the
fortification of her numbness, and leaves the breach open for active
conscious agony to march up and take possession. She draws her cold
fingers from Mrs. Darcy’s pitying clasp, and turns upon her.

“I do not know what object you propose to yourself by putting me to this
torture!” she says. “I think a person should be fully in possession of
the facts of a case before she ventures to give an opinion upon it.”

“That is quite true,” replies the other, gently, too full of deep
compassion for the writhing soul before her to resent either the tone or
the words used; “but does it apply to me?”

“Yes,” replies Lavinia, her insensibility seeming to give way to a far
more distressing and unnatural access of wild discourtesy; “yes, a
hundred times yes! You have undertaken the management of my affairs
without in the least understanding them. If I were to take your advice,
if I were to jilt Rupert as you so shamefully suggest to me, how much
the better should I be? how much the nearer----?” She stops dead short,
unable to name that never-to-be-reached goal.

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” speaking very slowly. “I should have thought that it
did not need a conjurer to discover that! I mean that _I_ am not the
only person you would have to convince!”

“_What?_”

“Has it never occurred to you that there may be an obstacle on _his_
side too?” (It is plain that the possessive pronoun here does not refer
to Rupert.)

“No,” breathlessly.

“Don’t you think----?”

In the determination to master a tongue restive to such utterance,
Lavinia pronounces her words with a clear incisiveness that, even at
this crucial moment, makes Mrs. Darcy gauge apprehensively the distance
that parts the tragedy in which she is taking part from the tranquil
prose of the gardener potting cuttings under a shed.

“Don’t you think it might strike Captain Binning that he has done them
almost enough harm already?”

“Don’t speak quite so loud!” in quick-breathing entreaty. “You mean
about Bill?”

“Mightn’t it occur to him that, having robbed them of Bill, it would
not be behaving very handsomely to rob them of me too?”

The rector’s wife shakes her head mournfully. “Isn’t it a little late to
think of that? He has done that already!”

“What has he done?” asks Lavinia, standing at bay, with a fierce white
face of dogged championship. “What do you lay to his charge? Once he
kissed my hand,--it was _this_ one,” smiting it with the fore finger of
the other; “but it was only to thank me for nursing him. That was his
one crime! That was all he has ever done--all he ever will do!” In her
breaking voice, in her passion-pinched face, there is but little attempt
to disguise the poignancy of the smart that the belief in that reticence
brings with it.

“Not even if he comes to bid you good-bye?”

Lavinia’s eyes, awhile ago so dead, light up ominously.

“You think that I ought not to let him come?” she asks between two
panting breaths.

“I do.”

“That it would be wiser in me not to see him again?”

“Yes.”

Lavinia throws out her hands with a gesture of reckless defiance.

“Then I will be _un_wise!”




CHAPTER XVI

     “Jesu, defend me; for then I rewarded your father and your brother
     right evil for their great goodness.”


It is not long before Miss Carew has the opportunity either to put into
execution or repent of the intention announced by her; for scarcely has
Mrs. Darcy turned her back upon the scene of her failure, in crestfallen
but quite unresentful sadness, before the successor whose coming she had
deprecated is announced. Lavinia has let her friend go without any
expression of apology or regret, and has watched her depressed slight
back disappearing through the churchyard without one feeling but a vague
sense of relief that she is out of the way.

It takes all the self-control with which the rector’s wife is so
plentifully endowed, to enable her to receive, with the proper amount of
concern, the news, which reaches her when scarcely within the Rectory
gate, that Baden Powell has done to death two of his Mafeking chickens,
by the simple process of putting his large yellow foot upon them, and
keeping it there in serene unconsciousness of their departing squeaks.
Her _rôle_ is rendered easier by the fact that the children’s own grief
at the catastrophe is much less than it would have been on any other
day in the year, being merged in the far acuter one of their
hero-playmate’s departure. There is nothing very heroic in the utterance
with which their idol is answering the mute look which is the only
greeting Lavinia can control herself into offering him.

“Am I a greater scarecrow than you expected in this coat? I was told by
a man I met in Pall Mall on Tuesday that I looked like a clothes-peg!
Well, one might easily look like a worse thing; and, thank God, I never
had much superfluous flesh!”

It is clear that he scarcely knows what he is saying; and that, though
his speech is perfectly rational in its triviality, it is so more by
instinct and habit than by any conscious command over tongue or thought.

“The doctors passed you?” she asks, squeezing out the words with a
parsimony that proves how little trust she, for her part, can place in
her organ of utterance.

“Yes; they said that the voyage would finish setting me up. So it will.”

The last clause is, as the girl feels, a reassurance addressed to the
grudging doubt and negation in her eyes--the eyes that verify how
loosely the clothes hang on a frame that betrays the fact more plainly
than a less largely built one would have done. How easily, how
reasonably, how nothing more than humanly, they--that callous Medical
Board--might have sent him back--so little more than half-cured as he
is--for another fortnight, another week! Another week! yes; that he
might be here to dance at her wedding!

“So this is your home! This is where you have spent your life!” Binning
says, looking round at the room seen for the first and last time, and in
which, in fancy, he will have to set her beside the armchair that he
divines to be Sir George’s.

He pauses, not for the moment quite equal to bear placing, even in
imagination, the _jeune ménage_. Yet he will not spare himself the pain
of knowing what corner of the fragrant homely room, that bears the
imprint of her and her tastes and occupations, will shelter the warm
domestic nearness to each other of husband and wife.

“Tell me where you all sit, that, when I am gone, I may picture you.”

“That is Uncle George’s chair,” she says, pointing to the one that the
young man had rightly assigned to the house’s master; and then stops.

“And Rupert’s?”

“Rupert has no particular chair.” After a moment, “Rupert always chooses
whatever seat he thinks no one else wants; that is Rupert’s theory of
life--and his practice.”

The tribute seems wrung out of her; yet she makes it, and handsomely
too.

He gives a little nod of acquiescence, inwardly shocked at his own want
of generosity in being able to do no more, yet--inwardly also--writhing
at her praise.

“And you have lived here always?”

“Yes, always; that is, ever since Uncle George picked me out of the
gutter.” She gives a forced laugh, and goes on, “You know that when I
was a destitute baby he saved me from the workhouse?”

“Yes, you told me.”

“Your tone says that I have repeated it _ad nauseam_. Well, I have to do
it, lest--though you would hardly think such a thing possible--I may
forget it. I am very near doing it sometimes.”

“I do not believe it.”

There is a grit and manliness in his voice that almost contradicts the
passion in his eyes--eyes in which, for all their passion, there is room
too for a wondering consternation at the metamorphosis wrought in his
sweet, calm nurse and comrade.

“Shall we go out of doors?” he asks, after a moment or two of burdensome
silence. “We have had so few hours out of doors together.”

She reads his thought. They will be safer--safer from themselves and
from each other--out of doors. It had been her own, and she is almost
sure that she had meant to act in accordance with it; yet that it should
come from him causes her a dull surprise, painful through all its
dulness.

“Where would you like to go?” she asks, when they stand together on the
garden sward facing the familiar view, the distance clearly azure-blue
to-day, but over which, as she has so often triumphantly explained to
visitors, a grey mist is apt to lie while her upland is in radiant
sunshine. To-day the cases are reversed. Sunshine bathes the distance;
it is on her heart that the fog lies thick. “Where would you like to
go?” she repeats. “To the Rectory, to bid good-bye to the children?”

It is out-Heroding Herod to suggest that their last hour shall be spent
in company, and her heart stands still until his answer comes. If it is
an assent, all danger will be over, and of that she ought to be glad.
But it is not.

“Show me some pleasant walk where you often go.”

The motive which dictates the request is the same that had made him ask
which chair she is wont to occupy in the drawing-room. He is collecting
frames for the gallery of pictures of her that is to hang in his heart.

She gives a slight assenting nod, and sets off with an undecided step,
turning over in her mind, with a view to choosing it, which of her
familiar paths is the one that is least associated with Rupert’s
companionship. It is safe, at all events, to begin with the churchyard.
Every new-comer is shown the gigantic brother yews, and told how much is
the eight-century girth of the largest one.

“It measures thirty-four feet in circumference,” she says, in a dull
show-woman’s voice, as she has said scores of times before to politely
astonished visitors.

And then they stand silent, staring at the erebus of shade above their
heads, at the enormous branch which, in some former storm--now itself
long ago--has shown symptoms of breaking away from the colossal trunk,
and has taken such a gigantic prop to support it. From under the eternal
night of the tree, day is seen to laugh over the rather neglected green
mounds around--neglected as rural churchyards are discreditably often
apt to be, but over which the kindly wild flowers are waving unbidden.

“If you outlive me, which is unlikely, this is where you may finally
think of me,” says Lavinia, speaking at last. “It is not very
imaginative of one to live and die on the same quarter of an acre, is
it? The entrance to our vault is on the other side of the church.” She
gives her piece of information with a sort of alacrity, in contrast to
the muffled dulness of her last sentences.

“You say it as if you were telling me a piece of good news.”

“You wished to know where I generally sit and walk. I thought you might
carry your interest a step further, and like to know where I am to lie.”

He turns aside, as if to examine one of the chipped truisms on a
lichened headstone; but not before she has seen a glimpse, and divined
the rest, of the disfigurement her cruel and unworthy appeal to his pity
has worked on his still sickness-thinned and hollowed face. A bitter
pang of self-condemnation adds itself to a mocking memory of one, and
the most emphatic, of Féodorovna’s nursing injunctions--to be sure not
to mention any subject in the least painful to her patient. Is this the
way in which she is fulfilling it? He is trying his hardest to behave
like an honourable gentleman; and instead of helping him, she
is--because it gives herself some relief from her intolerable
pain--setting the stumbling-block of her cowardly bid for compassion in
his way. She half puts out her hand to touch the sleeve which still bags
upon his arm; then draws it back.

“I have thought of a walk,” she says, in a better and braver voice.

Up a steep cart-track, skirting a hop-garden, where the soaring poles
and lofty roof of intertwisted network tell of the faith that the now
infant plants, scarcely beginning to clasp their supports, will
presently engreen the whole land; then down one of its naked aisles;
across two cheerful meadows, where strong lambs are capering among the
buttercups; to a gate that gives entrance to a brake, in whose midst an
inconspicuous pool half hides itself and its water-hens. Lavinia pauses,
with her hand on the top bar, and an expression of doubt in her face.
The place looks more solitary than its wont. Will he think that she has
betrayed him into an ambush even more dangerous than that of the
house--he, between whom and herself, all along climbing upland, and
through sunny pasture, the dead Bill and his living kinsmen have seemed
almost visibly to walk?

“It is scarcely a wood,” she says hesitatingly. “There is not a tree of
more than twenty years’ growth, and the nightingales sing so loudly here
that they will save us the trouble of talking.”

His answer is to give the gate an unsuccessful push.

“It is locked.”

“That is very unusual,” she answers, for an instant harbouring and at
once angrily dismissing from her mind a superstitious idea that the
homely obstacle may be Balaam’s winged prohibitory angel in a different
dress. “It is almost always open; but nothing is easier than to climb
it.”

He swings himself obediently over, and stands on the other side to give
her his aid. But she motions him away, crying almost repellantly--

“Go on! go on! I do not need any help.”

If he receives her into his arms, even in the mechanical and prosaic
civility of assisting her to bestride a five-barred gate, she knows that
were ten thousand dead Bills and living Ruperts to interpose their pale
prohibitions, the inevitable must happen.

Lavinia has spoken accurately. The pleasant spot in which their agility
has landed her and her companion is not a wood. It is merely one of
those low green tangles of hazel and maybush, sapling chestnut, and
gnarly willow, whose woof is nowhere too thick to let in a thrifty
shower of temperate sunbeams; and through the woof of whose carpet the
blue hyacinth dye runs dim and rich. A path not wide enough to admit of
any couple save a lover-pair walking abreast, girdles the little sheet
of water at quiet play with its dancing flies and leaping fish and
placidly oaring moorhens. From the heart of one of those brakes, whose
semi-privacy seems to provoke the nightingale to uttermost extremity of
song, one is now turning his whole little brown body, dimly seen sitting
on a hawthorn bough, into a shout of heavenly self-congratulation upon
finding himself in such a beautiful May world, and with a demand for
love too exquisitely worded to be denied.

Arrived at the pool-side, within a few yards of him, the human couple,
of whom he is so much too joyful to be the little spokesman, stand quite
still, in fear of scaring him; but in his happy little heart there is no
room for fear, and from the look of the poor souls he knows that they
are not enemies.

“I told you that he would save us the trouble of talking,” says Lavinia
under her breath.

He has saved the lesser singers of his own genus the same trouble,
apparently; for whether quelled or entranced, or learning those
imitations which they will afterwards practise with clever inferiority,
they are dumbed.

Lavinia listens at first with a sense of relief. The divine organ that
lies in that little parcel of feathers is uttering all the longings, all
the merging of two into one, all the fruition-nearing desires to which
she may never, never give voice. To the deceit of that seeming relief
succeeds an intolerable revolt. Why should she of all creation alone be
silent? Why should not she for once speak out? Why, since this little
island of time upon which they stand is their very own, since they have
no future, since they have been ironically given this one half-hour to
show them what life might have been,--why should not they be wise, and,
pushing aside those dim ghosts which they themselves have quixotically
interposed between the aching reality of their own bruised hearts, slake
their terrible thirst for each other in one first and last draught?

The temptation to throw herself upon his breast is so strong, that to
her dazed senses she almost seems to herself to have already yielded to
it, though in effect she has only stood in pale maidenliness at his
side; but the illusion is so vivid, and the reactionary shock of horror
at herself so potent, that she walks with unsteady haste away from her
companion towards the singer, whom her movement puts to flight.

“You have frightened him away!” says the young man, standing still on
the path.

“Yes; I am glad.”

“_Glad!_ That is not a word that one seems to have much use for just
now!”

His tone tells her that the temptation is strong upon him too, and his
action, in adding two or three more yards to those she has already set
between them, that in deadly struggle he is grappling with it. If she
were his true love, would not she come to his aid? With a prodigious
effort she clears the red mist from before her eyes, and steadies the
trembling in her traitorous hands. Then, rejoining him, and beginning to
resume the walk that their charmed ears had first interrupted, she says,
in a tone to whose cheerfulness she tries with all the force of her
will-power not to give a hysterical ring--

“After all, there is a good deal to be glad of, if one comes to think of
it--your recovery, your Victoria Cross----”

“Yes,” indistinctly; but with an effort, whose suffering manliness she
recognizes, to follow her lead--“yes; I am a sweep to complain!”

It nerves her to new effort. “Was not Féodorovna very much excited at
your getting it?” her terror of herself driving her on into a torrent of
trivial questions. “How is Féodorovna? is she yellow still?”

“No; not at all.”

“Is she quite herself again?--quite recovered?”

“She is supposed to be.”

“But you think that she is not?”

“I think she is--rather--hysterical.”

Lavinia’s feverish trickle of inquiry drops into silence. Between the
lines of his brief words, and in the constraint of his tone, she reads
that the method adopted by Miss Prince to show her hysteria has been to
throw herself into his arms, as she had done by letter into General ----’s,
and has volunteered to follow him round the globe, as she had
generously done in the case of his predecessor. Well, she herself has
been within an ace of a similar action during the last five minutes. She
ought, therefore, to feel a sympathy for the same abandonment on the
part of another. And yet, although Miss Carew knows, as well as if she
had been present at the drama, that Féodorovna has remained in Binning’s
arms not a moment longer than the space of time needed for him to find a
chair in which to deposit her, yet a dizzying jealousy seizes her at the
thought that, though only for a minute, and deeply against the will of
the object of her amorous demonstration, Miss Prince has lain on that
breast whose pulsing against her own Lavinia will never feel.

“_Hysterical!_” she repeats, after a pause, in a low key of suspicion.
“Why was she hysterical? How did she show that she was hysterical?”

A slight flush, or so she fancies, passes over his hollow cheeks.

“Oh, I don’t know. How do people usually show it?”--with impatient
evasion.

“Laughing? Crying?”

“Yes, yes; that sort of thing!” Then, with an upbraiding accent, that
escapes him against his will, “Why should we talk about her, poor soul?”

“Why not?” she answers. “What else is there to talk about? There is
nothing else.”

The words, extravagant as they are, represent to Lavinia the exact
truth. _He!_ _She!_ There is nothing else in God’s universe; and before
both him and her stands the prohibitory angel, the flame of whose waved
sword blinds them to all creation also. She looks straight before her in
dogged despair, and a caught half-sobbing breath beside her tells her
with what a strangling grip the temptation is taking him by the throat.
Yet this time she puts out no finger, utters no wisely trivial
commonplace to help him. The mental picture of Féodorovna clinging
sobbing round his neck, even though she knows with what repellant
grudgingness that embrace had been met, has robbed Lavinia of all
further power of fight than what lies in silence. He does not leave her
even that.

“We shall hear of each other indirectly, I suppose?” he says by-and-by,
in a voice not the clearer for the lump in his throat, which is clearly
past his power to swallow.

Her cup of misery runs over. “No doubt,” she answers with a shuddering
distinctness. “If you ask Féodorovna, she will write you a long account
of my wedding! She is a great letter-writer!”

As if the words possessed some paralyzing spell over their feet, both of
them stop dead short; and, turning round, stare full in each other’s
faces, conversation shrivelling up its thin fabric in that fiery moment;
and then--the inevitable happens. The gasping lips draw nearer, nearer,
nearer; the idly hanging arms stretch themselves out, enfold, embrace,
crush; and, with no apparent initiation on either side, Fate hurls them
upon one another’s forbidden breasts. Their kisses are frantic with the
haste of six wasted weeks, and have their edge given by the knowledge
that, for these sad two, there is only one little dreg at the bottom of
the wine-cup of life and love, and that if they do not make haste to
drain it, it will be poured out on the desert ground that is soaked with
the lost vintages meant to appease the thirst of parched humanity.

They have thrust away the irksome apparition that had officiously
flitted between them. For such a ghost’s thin body there is no room
between his heart and hers. Out of both those hearts all their former
long-established, deep-rooted inhabitants are turned, driven by the
flail of the one supreme scourge. In those hearts Honour had held her
high court, Duty had wielded her sceptre, unselfish Family Affection
been warmly nested. Now, of none of them is there a trace left in either
consciousness. For neither of them does anything exist but the
omnipotent primal instinct--the instinct that drove the first man and
woman into each other’s throbbing arms.

It is not for long--not for more than a few moments--only for one
kiss-length, that that mad, dumb, clinging oblivion endures. Then the
old ejected law-givers begin to gather up their sceptres and return;
boldly ejecting, in their turn, the furious rebel that had ousted them;
and the two that God has not joined together stagger apart. As in the
impulse of embrace neither was earlier or later than the other, so is
the shock of disunion common and simultaneous. They find themselves
standing apart, uncertainly staring at each other in the imperfect
consciousness of an enormous joint crime. It was only a kiss--an utter,
scorching, lover’s kiss, it is true--yet still only a kiss that has so
seared their re-awakening consciences; but had their disloyalty gone to
the extremest pitch of unfaithfulness, it could hardly have branded them
with a deeper sense of guilt. Her white lips frame three scarcely
audible words, which he yet hears--“This--day--week!”--and he whispers,
in horrified ejaculation, “Rupert! _Bill!_”

There is a terrible silence--at least, it seems so to them--though the
nightingale, scarcely scared, and having taken but a short flight to the
branch of a youngling chestnut, is finishing his epithalamium with even
bettered music. The reinstated judges have taken their seats, and are
holding a dread assize.

“It is only I who am to blame!” says Lavinia, by-and-by, in a key a
little above her former one. “_You_ did really struggle. If I had helped
you honestly, you would have pulled through; but I did not. I never
really meant you to hold out! I see now that I meant it all along to
happen! I meant you to kiss me! I thought--God forgive me!--that I
should be able to bear my life better afterwards if you did!”

“If I had been honest,” he says hoarsely, “shouldn’t I have accepted
your offer of taking me to the Rectory? You know you _did_ offer. If I
had meant honestly, should I have come _here_?” casting a glance of
despairing reproach round at the blue and green and silver accessories
to his fall--smiling water and curtsying sedge and sky-coloured
blue-bells.

“But _I_ brought you here!” cries the other culprit, in a heart-rending
eagerness, of which he will not suffer her to have the monopoly--to
assume all the weight of their “most mutual” lapse.

“It was a pity that Bill did not leave the Boers to finish me!”

Then there is silence again. This time it is the man who breaks it,
though his tone is so low as to constitute scarcely an infringement of
the crushing guilty stillness.

“And you will still marry him this day week?”

At that she veils her face with both hands. “What am I?” she says
indistinctly, through the relief of their shield. “What have I become? I
have lived for twenty-three years, and I never suspected that there was
a bad woman inside me!”

“And for twenty-eight years I have imagined that I was a gentleman!”




CHAPTER XVII

    “Even thus two friends condemned
     Embrace and kiss and take a thousand leaves,
     Loather a hundred times to part than die;
     Yet now farewell, and farewell Life with thee.”


They look at each other in a sort of terror, with a renewal and immense
increase of that fear of their own and each others’ possibilities of
frailty, which, looked back upon now, is seen to have been so
inadequately weak and so abundantly justified. Since there is no longer
any barrier of innocence between them, what is there to hinder them from
a repetition--a hundred repetitions--of that tasted, and therefore now
senselessly abstained-from, ecstasy? What more of guilt can there be in
ten or twenty score kisses than in that one which they have drunkenly
given and taken? They see the sophistry dawning in one another’s hungry
eyes; and once again their rebel arms half reach out reciprocally across
a dwindled interval; but this time, to balance her former misleading of
him, salvation--if that bitter abstinence can be called so--comes from
her that at first was weakest. She tears her eyes away from him, and
snatches a look round, as in preparation for flight.

“We must not stay here any longer!” she says with an accent of
ungovernable fear; and he as wildly acquiesces.

“No,” he says; “you are right. I do not know what has come to me; but
you are right not to trust me!”

“It is I, _I_, _I_!” she repeats in distraught self-accusation. “You do
not understand what a monster I am! I am to marry Rupert _next week_! I
have been engaged to him all my life! I am all they possess in the
world! Since I was a week old my uncle has overwhelmed me with his
generous love; every one has said that I was more to him than even the
boys. Now the one hope that is left for him lies----”

Her rapid flow of self-accusation breaks off abruptly, stemmed by the
awful obstacle placed by memory in its torrent course; and her face
turns ghastly under his miserable eyes, as once more for the thousandth
time, but with immeasurably deepened repulsion, she realizes the nature
of the hope which is her uncle’s one remaining tie to life, and by whom
to be fulfilled. It is by bearing children to Rupert that her
intolerably heavy debt to them both is to be paid. For one insane moment
her look flies to the pool. It must be under the little circles that the
dancing flies are making on its surface that she can best cut the knot
that is so far past untying. The broken voice of her fellow-sinner and
fellow-sufferer calls her back.

“And _I_! Do you forget that it was through me they lost poor Bill?”
Possibly it is a relief to each to pile the chief weight of their common
guilt on his and her own head respectively, in unconscious contrast to
the shabby recriminations of our first parents; but of even this little
alleviation they are soon robbed, all other consciousness merged in the
killing sense of instant and eternal parting.

“You had better stay here for a few minutes--till I am well away,” says
Lavinia, speaking very fast, but not incoherently. After a little
gasping pause, with a fresh rush of utter horror and woe, “Must I tell
Rupert?” Then, giving herself that answer of which her lover is quite
incapable, “No! I must not! if I did, it would be in the hope--the
certainty that he would cast me off. No, no; I must not--I must not tell
him, whatever happens: it would never do to tell him.” She rambles on,
half to herself, repeating the phrases, as of one whose hold on her own
intelligence is slipping away; then recovering it with a sudden snatch,
she says brusquely, “Well! it is done, and it can’t be undone, and there
is an end of it. Good-bye! I--I would say ‘God bless you’ if I had any
business to.”

Without giving him time for any answering benediction--as, indeed, why
should he bless her?--she breaks into a stumbling run, which carries her
blindly on, till at the curve which will finally hide him from her
sight, the curve whose distance from him guarantees her safety, the
dully raging passion within her arrests her feet, and turns her head to
see once more in crowning farewell torment the figure, in loosely
hanging clothes, of him whom she has ironically helped back to life only
to make him taste the sharpness of death.

       *       *       *       *       *

“But I told you to say that I was not at home to any one?”

“I did say so, ’m.”

“It is not eleven o’clock yet?”

“No, ’m; it wants five minutes of eleven.”

“I am too busy: I have too much to do. It is impossible that I should
see any one this morning.”

“So I told Miss Prince, ’m; but she said she was sure that you would see
her.”

“Miss Prince always says that.”

“Yes, ’m.”

There is sympathy in the assent of the elderly unsmart butler, who has
reached the third stage in the usual progress of valuable servants to
their goal--that progress marked by the successive milestones of
“servant,” “treasure,” “tyrant,” “pensioner;” for Féodorovna is not
popular with his class.

“Will you go back and tell Miss Prince that I am very sorry, but I am
afraid I must ask her to put off her call till to-morrow, as Sir George
and Mr. Rupert are coming down by the 4.38 train, and I have a good many
arrangements to make before they arrive?”

The old butler regards her with a respectful pity for the weakness of
reasoning power that can imagine the visitor in question to be kept at
bay by the means proposed.

“Yes, ’m; but I do not think it will be any use, for Miss Prince said
she would like to take a turn in the garden until you were disengaged.
And I beg your pardon, ’m--your eyes are better than mine--isn’t that
Miss Prince opening the iron gate?”

Of course it _is_ Miss Prince--Miss Prince come to surprise Lavinia in
her utter dishevelment of soul, though the habit of a lifetime keeps her
unnerved body in its simple raiment neat and dainty--come to verify the
staring facts that sleep has mocked her; that hope has bid her an
eternal good-bye; that her despair is beyond the depth that any leaded
line can plumb; that she is wretched and guilty beyond the
sin-and-sorrow compass of any woful malefactor since the world began;
come to spy and comment, before she has begun to make up spirit and
flesh for that ghastly play-acting which is to last her life. These are
the thoughts--if such mental _orts_ and fragments can be called so--that
knock against each other in a vertigo of fear in Miss Carew’s brain, as
her visitor, with a graceful flitting gait that has yet sufficiently
proved the determination beneath it, floats up the kitchen-garden walk,
that had yesterday witnessed poor Mrs. Darcy’s discomfiture. Féodorovona
is dressed in a delicate Court mourning, and a certain elevation of
expression tells Lavinia that she has come to proclaim some action on
her own part that to most persons it would appear more judicious to
conceal.

“Gathering flowers?” she says, with a chastened smile, and with no
attempted apology for overriding her listener’s efforts to elude her.
“If I had only thought of it, I would have brought you any number from
our Houses.” There is a touch of the comfortable maternal brag in the
words, but it appears only to vanish as she adds with a quiet sigh, “As
you may imagine, I had other things to think of!”

“Had you?”

Lavinia has scarcely interrupted her flower-cutting, since it enables
her to present only a profile to her visitor’s observation, and the
reflection is passing through her mind with a foggy comfort that, since
she has not shed one tear, there can be no swollen eyelids to give her
away, and that, even if there were, Féodorovna’s panoply of perfect
egotism would protect her from the sight of them.

“_Had_ I?” repeats Miss Prince, the suavity of her high sorrow touched
by a ruffle of indignation. “Who can know that better than you?”

The shape of the question gives Lavinia an inward convulsion of new
terror. Is it possible that she can have heard, or learnt, or divined?

“Do you mean that Captain Binning is gone?” she asks, bending over a
long-stalked bronze tulip, which she snips off nearer the bulb than she
would have done in a more rational moment.

“Yes; he is gone!” After a moment of reverent ruminating, “It went off
quite quietly.”

“Did it?”

“Our real farewell was yesterday. We had a very important interview
yesterday morning. I asked for it.”

“Did you?”

“As you know, I have never been tied by the conventions. I have always
overridden them.”

“Yes.”

“In my case such unusual action is a necessary postulate of happiness.
_You_ are in the enviable position of knowing that you can never be
loved for anything but yourself; that no man can be accused of
mercenariness in approaching you, but in _my_ case there is always the
danger that the millions with which I am credited should keep away from
me any man of particularly delicate feeling and high honour.”

It seems incredible to Lavinia that at such a moment she herself should
be able to entertain so sordid a speculation; yet there is no doubt that
the wonder flashes through her mind as to whether the profits of the
Dropless Candle have really amounted to the figure so superbly indicated
by the daughter and goddaughter of that great invention?

“Such being the case,” continues Miss Prince, in a tone of modest pride
at the about-to-be-related exploit, “there was only one course open to
me, and as it was perfectly consonant with my views of life and ethics,
I took it without reluctance. I offered myself to him.”

“As you did to General ---- three months ago?”

The recalled action--recalled by the very white lips of the heroine’s
one hearer--would put most people out of countenance, and even Miss
Prince’s once more admirably white surface shows a pink stain.

“You speak as if you were convicting me of inconsistency--of infidelity
to my ideal,” she says, with a little haste of wronged modesty. “And
superficially it may appear to be so; but it is only in appearance; as
you know it has always been my creed that whenever and wherever I met
what I conceived to be the highest and noblest qualities of humanity
embodied in one man, I ought to offer myself unreservedly to him. If I
have failed, it is a failure more glorious than most successes.”

Lavinia has stopped her flower-cutting, and forgotten her misgivings as
to the tell-tale tragedy of her own face; she looks sullenly and with
what she knows to be a baseless rage of jealousy at her, the manner and
accompaniments of whose declaration of love she is in dull torment
trying to reconstruct, while memory adds its sting by recalling to her
the high, cool apartness of virginal indignation which had been her own
attitude of mind towards Féodorovna’s former achievement.

“Circumstances were against me,” pursues Féodorovna, presently, looking
away in a sort of dreamy protest towards the horizon. “That unlucky
illness! If I had had _your_ opportunities, the opportunities which were
wasted on you, he might have decided differently.”

It is lucky that Miss Prince is still upbraiding the skyline; for
Lavinia gives a sudden wince at the allusion to that safely preoccupied
heart of her own which has rendered her, as a matter of course,
danger-proof. To defend herself against that passionate repudiation of
her own immunity, which seems fighting its mad way to her lips, she
frames a needless question.

“He refused you?”

Féodorovna bends the chastened elegance of her black-and-white toque in
dignified acquiescence.

“Yes.”

A stinging curiosity goads the other on to a second question--

“And you--how did you take it?”

“I told him how greatly I admired his disinterestedness,” replies Miss
Prince, with perfectly regained equanimity, adding, with a touch of the
hereditarily commercial spirit, shrewd even in adversity. “It would, of
course, have been very advantageous for him from a material point of
view.”

“And--and that was all? It ended there?”

To only the sharpened eye of jealous suspicion would the tiny hesitation
that precedes the answer to this question be perceptible.

“Ye--es, it ended there.”

Past the power of even Féodorovna is it to confess to the precise method
in which she had closed the interview; and Lavinia knows that she will
never learn at what stage of the indubitably offered and as indubitably
refused embrace--whether at that of mere intention or ripe
accomplishment it had been arrested by its object. Féodorovna had given
her last response without looking her questioner quite in the face, and
her eye now rests on the church tower and the blossoming horse-chestnuts
with a real, if exasperating, sadness in it.

“I told him if ever he reconsidered his decision, that whatever might be
the lapse of time, whatever else changed, _I_ should not.”

The unassuming fidelity that voice and words claim is clearly felt by
their possessor to be so beautiful that Lavinia asks herself, in a
topsy-turvy whirl of confused wretchedness, whether it is not really
so? but the thought--if it deserves such a name--is chased a few moments
later, as with a whip of small cords, out of her soul by a far more
smarting suggestion.

“Well, good-bye. I am going away this afternoon to a quiet little
fishing village in Suffolk, to be quite alone with myself; so perhaps I
shall not see you again till the wedding. But, after all, that is only
six days off!”




CHAPTER XVIII


Only six days off! And the return of her “men” is only five hours off!
Between these two dates how can any one be expected to keep their
sanity? There would have been a better chance for her if Féodorovna had
not come to stir the furnace of her misery into whitest heat, with the
elegant drawing-room poker of her fatuous confession. Among
preoccupations of such incomparably deeper gravity, it adds one more
pang to Lavinia’s horror of herself to find that the wonder whether or
how nearly Miss Prince accomplished that embrace which Lavinia looks
upon as a dastardly theft upon herself, keeps a foremost place in her
mind. Yet meanwhile she goes machine-like through her preparations,
attending with nice accuracy to every detail that forecasting affection
could plan and execute for the comfort of a dear home-coming invalid.
She even carries out a little surprise--devised a while, how
miraculously little a while ago!--to lighten her uncle’s sombre spirit,
always specially inclined to fault-finding and depression after any
small absence. And when it is finished, she regards it with a feeling of
being a very Judas, inwardly classing it with his kiss, and with Jael’s
draught of milk.

The five hours have dwindled to four, to three, to two, to one. The
time-measure has changed to that of minutes, and of even them how few
are left! For the solitary “once” of its shambling existence, the 4.38
must have been punctual, and the young horse must have flown! With this
last reflection mixes itself another little one, odious in its
spitefulness, that perhaps Rupert is less nervous as to that animal’s
shying properties when they are hidden from him by his being in the
brougham, or that at all events, his superior fear of his father will
hinder him from betraying alarm. Her latest thought of him before
meeting is an uncharitable one; and now they are here! With her
Judas-face dressed in false smiles--this is the position as inwardly
classified by herself--she meets them on the doorstep. It is her
betraying arm that Sir George chooses to lean upon, as he gets, with the
feeble deliberation of ill-shaken-off sickness, out of the carriage.

“No, no; you may be off!” he says, ungratefully pushing away his son’s
gently offered aid. “You never were anything but a makeshift!”

Sir George’s pleasantries have always had a disagreeable flavour, and to
be known as pleasantries only by experts; but that this is meant for one
neither of the young people, intimately acquainted with the hall-mark,
and not for a moment to be taken in by imitations, however close, fails
to recognize; so they all smile. It is on Lavinia’s left arm that her
uncle is leaning--a circumstance to which is due a comment on his part
which she could well have spared.

“Why, your heart is knocking like a hammer! I did not know that a
mosquito had a heart.”

The touched intonation with which he utters the phrase shows her that he
attributes her palpitation entirely to the joyful emotion caused by his
return, and how absolutely unsuspicious he is of any other possible
cause for it; and her impersonation of Judas appears to herself more
lifelike than ever, as she answers with a desperate playfulness--

“You have learnt a new fact in natural history.”

Rupert does not immediately follow the slow little procession to the
study, whither Sir George, with a nostalgia for his own chair, chooses
to be led, occupied, doubtless, with directions to the servants; and
there is time for the “surprise” to be detected and admired, and for
several anthems of thanksgiving, not worded exactly as the rector would
have done them in church, on the part of Sir George on having at last
escaped from the d----d pot-house before his son rejoins them. As he
enters the room, Rupert’s father is in the act of asking how the newly
papered “nurseries” look; and, on Lavinia’s faltering avowal that she
has not seen them since they were finished, starts irritably up,
announcing his intention of immediately visiting them, to see whether
the papers are well hung, or exhibit seams between the strips, as had
been the case with Hodges’ work in the offices last year.

It is in vain that both Rupert and Lavinia entreat him to defer his
survey till after tea. With a reproachful observation, that “if you want
a thing done you must do it yourself,” he sets off, and the young man
and girl follow, offering him attentions which he ignores. The sight of
well-executed work restores him to good humour, and he keeps his young
people dancing attendance on him for some time, to admire at their
leisure, and with what countenances they may, the airy spaces where
their problematical offspring are to sport. Fear of betraying the
loathing that the idea of her own possible motherhood brings with it,
perhaps partially dulls Lavinia’s sense of that repulsion. Tea-time
brings another ordeal with it.

“I cannot say that you do much credit to the Princes’ cuisine,” says Sir
George, taking stock of his niece more closely than he has yet done,
having, in fact, ordered her to move the skilfully interposed
tea-kettle, or her own chair, so as to enable him to do so. “You must
have lost quite a stone in weight since I left home.”

“Don’t you know, sir, that there is nothing that the young woman of
to-day dreads so much as putting on an ounce of superfluous flesh?” asks
Rupert.

Lavinia is thankful to him for his timely interposition; yet it
frightens her. Why should he come to her help? Can he have any intuition
or knowledge of her sore need of it? and by what creepy coincidence has
he used the exact phrase employed by Binning yesterday in connection
with himself: “An ounce of superfluous flesh”? There is in reality
nothing to excite wonder in the employment of so common a turn of
expression; but to a soul so guilty the most ordinary sentence seems
heavy with ominous significance, and she hurries out her own less
tactful repartee with needless treading on the heels of her cousin’s.

“And how many stone have _you_ lost?”

Sir George looks bored. “Thank you, my dear; but we need not bandy
civilities on the subject of our infirmities.” Then with a quick and
determined return to amiability, “Come, let us hear all about poor
Binning? He went yesterday?”

“No; this morning.”

“Poor chap! I should like to have shaken his hand again before he went.
I tried to persuade this slug of a fellow to run down and see the last
of him, but he pretended that he was afraid to leave me. I must tell you
that his filial piety has become a most appalling nuisance, and that he
is like nothing in the world but an old hen with one duckling.”

“I proudly own to the ‘old hen,’ but I fail to see the duckling,”
replies Rupert, with a pleasant slight smile.

Formerly he would have been far too nervous to bandy jokes with his
father, and they would have been stamped upon if he had; but the
answering smile on the elder man’s grim sick face tells Lavinia upon how
much happier terms son and father now are than in any previous period of
their lives. She is the ribbon that ties their hearts together! _She!_

“Was he pretty fit? Did he set off in good spirits?” asks Sir George,
holding on as firmly to the Binning theme as if he knew that he was
passionately desired to loose it.

“Féodorovna did not say.”

“Féodorovna!” repeats he, with that snort of disgust with which he has
never failed to salute Miss Prince’s name ever since the day of her
storming his study.

“Yes; she came here this morning.”

“Whom did she come to console _this_ time?” asks he, jeeringly. “_You?_
Well,” in a changed and softened key, “I dare say she did not make such
a bad shot! I dare say you had grown quite fond of the poor chap from
having nursed him; one _does_ get fond of one’s nurse, with the best
intentions in the world to the contrary,” with a grudgingly affectionate
glance at Rupert.

His son smiles again. (How enviable! how miraculous to have such a
cheerful light heart!)

“You are in a fine flow of conversation!” he says, laying his hand on
the old man’s shoulder. “But you know as well as I do that you will have
to pay dearly for it, if you do not take your usual rest before dinner.
Your room is ready, and _I_ am ready; and _you_ are ready, aren’t you?”

There is authority mixed with the pleasant persuasiveness of the tone,
and with a docility which would have filled Lavinia with amazement in
any other circumstances, Sir George hoists himself out of his chair, and
saying, with an appealing lift of his shaggy eyebrows, “See how I am
bullied!” walks slowly but contentedly off on his son’s arm.

Once again Rupert has come to Lavinia’s rescue. Once again, left behind,
she feels the sense of relief coupled with a great fear. How has he
known the exact moment at which the catechism was becoming unbearable
to her? the exact moment at which to step in? She has a quarter of an
hour in which to supply answers “to taste,” in cookery-book phrase, to
this question, and at the end of that time she has the opportunity of
putting it, if she feels so disposed, to the person to whom it refers;
for he rejoins her.

“I have left him; he will have a better chance of getting to sleep if he
is alone. He is so excited that he will go on talking if he has any one
to listen to him. I could not stop him.”

“And yet you seem to have wonderful power over him! I never saw such a
change!”

She has got behind a cane chair, and is tilting it up, with her hands
clutching the gilt top. She ought not to let him see the sickly
apprehension in her eyes; and yet if she does not, if she allows him to
approach her, if he kisses her, and expects her to kiss him back, by
what hair’s breadth will she be separated from the outcasts in the
street? There is gross exaggeration in the idea, which is weighted by
the offended purity of all her former life; yet there is truth too. But
Rupert’s steps pause far short of her barrier, and there is neither a
claiming of undoubted rights, neither enterprise nor even entreaty in
his eyes.

“Improvement, should you say?” he asks, with cool interest; adding, “How
do you think he looks--better or worse than you expected?”

“Better--worse!” she stammers, contradicting herself, quite put off her
balance by the fraternal ease and matter-of-factness of his tone. It
seems like a return to the blessed brotherly period, before they had
been driven into exchanging the airy chains of their phantom engagement
for the gyves and handcuffs of a real one. After all, he had been driven
into it as much as she! There is balm in the thought. “I mean I cannot
quite make up my mind until he has settled down; he is certainly much
thinner.”

“Yes; his clothes hang a bit loose upon him.”

Lavinia starts; imperceptibly, she hopes. Has Rupert given himself the
word to use no phrase that does not bring Binning in very self before
her? Binning’s clothes, too, hang loose upon him. Lest her start should
_not_ have been imperceptible, she covers it quickly with a remark.

“He seems in excellent spirits.”

“Yes; but we all are that, aren’t we?” He says it simply, and without
any special observation of her to note its effect; and yet once again,
for the third time, that nameless suspicious fear of his having found
her out lays its chilly fingers upon her. “Shall we walk off some of our
exuberant cheerfulness? Do you feel inclined for a stroll?”

Her last “stroll” returns upon her memory with dizzying vividness.

“Isn’t the sun rather hot still?”

“We shall not feel him in the woods, or in Rumsey Brake by the pool.”

Her tilted chair--needless defence--falls on its fore legs with a sharp
noise, dropped from her trembling grasp.

“I do not think I feel woody or poolly.”

“We will go along the high-road, then, the road to Sutton Rivers. There
is always a good deal of traffic along that road--nice carts and
steam-rollers and things!”

A spice of the old light mockery flavours his tone, and she knows that
he has read off like print the misgiving in her mind. If he has read
that, how much more may he not have read too?

The road chosen drops down the hill, and runs through the village. They
pass the beautiful old farm that looks like a manor-house, with its
bronzing walnut trees that wear their spring favours differently from
most others; past schools and open cottage doors, Rupert greeting
shirt-sleeved men with the familiarity born of a lifetime of nods, and
Lavinia saluting matronly women with an intimacy sprung from
maternity-bags. And as she goes, the village tragedies present
themselves for competition with her own. Can that girl who has “gone
wrong,” and is sitting on her parents’ doorstep with her unfathered
child upon her knees, feel a greater weight of remorse and shame than
one kiss has crushed her under? Can the old widow whose last surviving
son was carried off yesterday to the madhouse, feel a deeper, more
irreparable sense of loss than hers?

“Joe Perry was taken away to the asylum yesterday,” she says, imparting
her lugubrious fact, though not the comparison for which she has used
it, to her companion. “He became so violent that it was unavoidable. His
mother, I believe, fought like a tiger to prevent it!”

“Poor soul!”

What fitter ejaculation can he make in answer to such a tale? and yet
her diseased fancy instantly brings to mind that Binning had applied the
same epithet to Féodorovna! As they pass another cottage--

“Carter has gone on the drink again.”

“Has he?”

Yet a third. “Little Harry Brown has got double pneumonia; the doctor
does not think he can save him! He says he has no constitution.”

“Is it to bring down that exuberant cheerfulness of ours that we were
talking of, that you are telling me all these catastrophes?” asks
Rupert, rebelling at last.

“It does seem rather hard to be greeted by such a list of casualties,”
she answers, confused and confounded; “but you see you have been away a
good while--long enough for more than our _usual_ average of disasters
to happen.”

“And is that all? Does little Harry Brown end the catalogue?”

The question is a perfectly natural one, and put as naturally, yet it
sets her trembling again.

“Yes, I think so.”

“If you remember any more, I would rather hear them.”

To that she seems to think no answer needed. They are beyond the village
now, and on that high-road whose sociability he had vaunted to her. For
the time it seems less frequented than he had promised, the workmen
having gone home, and no market-day enlivening it with uncertainly
driving men and gaily-hatted girls, three on a seat, in returning
market-carts. Their only companion is the Spring, in that gaudiest of
her moments when she is about to lose herself in Summer, daring her
elder sister to vie with her sheeted hawthorn, her “golden chains,” her
matchless output of leaf and blossom. And how blessedly different is
each tree and shrub’s idea of spring! How various their method of
expressing it! Some in odorous flower-bunches, some in green tassels,
some in uniformity of colour, some in motley, their varying thoughts are
diversely coloured, bronze and yellow, and dazzling gold-green.

To pause a while seems almost a necessity, yet Lavinia shivers; for
Rupert has stopped and faced her, and there is no one in sight. Has he
lured her hither with an assurance of publicity, only to make his
belated claim upon her? As before, he reads her fear, and answers it.

“No!” he says, stepping back a couple of feet, yet still holding her at
the disadvantage of commanding that full-face view which is so much less
manageable a thing for the purpose of concealment than a profile; “do
not be afraid: there is not the least cause for alarm! I only wanted to
ask you if you are _quite_ sure that little Johnny Brown’s double
pneumonia closes our casualty list?”

Then she knows that he knows.




CHAPTER XIX


But _how_? Have not her inward misgivings warned her all along? Yet it
can be only by intuition. Even had any one seen her in Rumsey Brake--the
very fire of hell seems to scorch her at the suggestion--even had any
one seen her, what opportunity has that unknown talebearer had of
betraying her to Rupert? Rupert returned only half an hour ago, and has
had speech of no one but herself and the servants. Is the porter at the
station likely to have conveyed the news of her unfaithfulness to him,
as an agreeable item of local intelligence, while shouldering his
portmanteau? or the coachman to have shouted it through the front window
of the brougham? Yet to the abject terror of the girl’s guilty
consciousness, either of these absurdities seems more likely than that
the significance of her _fiancé’s_ tone in reiterating his question came
there by accident? He _knows_, if not by the ordinary processes and
channels, yet by right of that terrible plate-glass window into her
soul, of which he has always had the monopoly. All her life he has saved
her the trouble of explanations, by a mastery of her thoughts which
makes utterance of them superfluous. If she allows him, he will save her
trouble to-day.

Athwart the darkness of her terror of discovery flashes an arrow of
light. If he knows already, what use is there in further feigning? If he
knows by intuition, he will know by the same means how she has
struggled; how utterly against her own will has been her disloyalty.
Already an insidious sense of relief and comfort is beginning to steal
over her in the flashed idea of how easy he will make it to her; of how
perfectly his unselfish insight will apprehend by what innocent steps
she has grown guilty towards him; and again he will be the brother from
whom she has no secrets; together they will acknowledge the fatal error
of their late attitude towards each other; together they will admire,
with easy minds and steadfast countenances, the cheerfulness of the
nursery wall papers. And her uncle? And her debt?--the debt whose
colossal obligation the partner and cause of her unfaithfulness has so
fully admitted; has so little blinked the overmastering necessity of
paying? It is all packed into thirty seconds--relief, hope, recurring
terror and despair; the thirty seconds between his question, and the one
with which--how unlike her in its shiftiness--she answers him.

“Why shouldn’t it? Do not you think there are enough already?”

“Quite; but all the same there _is_ another.”

“What do you mean?” A sort of false stoutness of heart is coming to her
aid. It is impossible that he can know except by intuition, and what is
known only by intuition may be safely and successfully denied and given
the lie to, if only it is done with enough brazenness and pertinacity.

He answers her with a collected insistence that shows her of how little
use her unworthy subterfuges have been or ever can be, as between these
two.

“We have not been taken away to a madhouse; we have not gone on the
drink; we have not got double pneumonia; but it is to _us_ that this
last casualty has happened!”

She stands before him disarmed, her poor toy weapons knocked out of her
shaking hand; yet she essays one more feeble parry with her helpless
buttoned foil.

“We don’t seem much the worse for it, whatever it is,” she answers,
trying to laugh.

“Don’t we? I think you can’t have looked in the glass lately.”

She puts up her hand with a gesture of futile anger to her face, as if
to chastise it for its blabbing treachery; but speech has gone from her.

“I do not want you to tell me anything about it,” Rupert says in a
steady voice. “It could not be pleasant for you, and it would do me no
good. I wished to bring you out--not on the high-road; that was your own
precautionary measure”--with a faint stinging touch of sarcasm--“but out
of possible eye and earshot, to consult with you.” She turns her woeful
eyes, in a deep humiliation of asking upon him; but words are still
denied her. “To consult you as to how we are to get ourselves out of
this _impasse_.” Once again her dumb look seeks to penetrate his
meaning. “It would be perfectly simple if it were only we two; we might
settle it between ourselves. It is, of course, my father who
complicates it.”

The voice is still even and quiet, but its matter-of-fact composure
affects her far more than any raving denunciation could do. What does it
take for granted? And why? She must speak, must protest, must find out
how much he knows.

“You are implying that you wish our engagement to end? Have
you--any--any reason for it?”

“_Haven’t_ I?”

The question thus returned upon her would strike her once more dumb, if
she did not wrench a faint retort out of herself.

“You--you know your own feelings best.”

“And _yours_?”

Oh, if he would choose any other weapon of torture--any reviling, any
accusation, any sneer, any reproach, anything but these questions that,
terrible in their brevity, seem to lay her helpless soul even more naked
before him than his lifelong habit of divining her, joined to who knows
what added knowledge have already done.

“I had--I have no intention of breaking it!”

“I am quite”--“in the dark as to what you mean,” she would have added,
but the superfluous lie dies unborn. “You meant to marry me--_still_?”
Then she touches the depth of her degradation; hearing the anguish of an
incredulity that is yet belief in her confession of such an intended
treason against him pierce through his self-control.

“Did I quite deserve _that_?”

Her wretched head drops on her breast, and she stands at his mercy,
attempting no further denial. But, as she has never in her life appealed
to him in vain for help or sympathy, so, even now, the old habit is too
strong for him.

“We must keep our heads clear!” he says, after a moment or two, in a
voice that is no longer anguished or reproachful, but has regained its
level of colourless quiet. “We must think it out. If we could stave off
the marriage for a few weeks or months, I see a way out of the
difficulty.”

Her lips are apart by reason of the shortness of her breath, but she
forces them together to frame the two words--

“What way?”

His face, at whose unfamiliar rigidity her spirit has quailed, softens.

“I would not have told you so suddenly in any other case,” he says, with
all his old gentle considerateness; “but now--at the pass we have
arrived--it may come to you almost as a relief.”

“_What_ may come?”

“Your--your sacrifice would not avail the old man for very long! He--he
is not going to get well.”

She stares at him, not half comprehending. “Gout does not--does
not--_kill_ people!” she stammers.

“No. But in his case the doctors have discovered that it is complicated
by a fatal disease, which has already made great progress; so that, as I
say, if we can only stave it off for a while--not a long while--things
will come all right!”

“_All right!_ Do you call that all _right_?” she cries it out in an
agony, taking in now the full meaning of his words; while, in flood, a
miserable realization of this new calamity pours over her soul.

_Her men!_ who had loved her so well; upon her fond tendance of whom she
had prided herself! One is not; the second is only to be rescued by the
hand of death from a more quickly slaying knowledge of her false
cruelty; and, as to the third, now that the mask so steadily held before
his face as long as there was any need for it has dropped away,--she can
see that she has killed his heart!

“Is it quite certain?” she asks, as soon as her dry mouth allows a husky
whisper to creep through it. “Is there no hope?”

“It may be sooner, it may be later; but it must come!” He pauses a
moment or two, to let her take it in; then, very gently, “So that if we
can only hit upon some plausible reason for postponement----”

She breaks in like a sudden hurricane. “No! _no!_ NO!! If he is going to
die, he _shall_ have his little bit of happiness first! You _must_ marry
me! You cannot be so inhuman as to refuse!” Then, seeing, or fancying, a
start of shocked negation on his part, “I have done nothing bad enough
to make it a disgrace to you, and it need be only nominal!”

“And his hopes?” Like three icy drops the low words fall on the flame of
her passion; and for a minute or two entirely quench it. Then it springs
up again alive and alight.

“He will be dead before he knows that they are not to be realized.”

There is a heavy silence; while, before her mental vision, the dreadful
programme she has drawn up of their future life unrolls itself. What his
thoughts are she cannot tell; nor whether he will accept or reject her
offer. Even when he does speak, she remains still in the dark, for he
only says--

“And then?”

“And then what?”

“When he is dead?”

She gives a dry sob. It has come to this, then! She has brought it to
this--that what ought to be the prime calamity of the death of him to
whom she has owed everything but the bare and dubious gift of life, is
to be regarded only as a subsidiary incident in the drama of ruin which
she has brought upon them all!

“When he is dead!” she repeats automatically; but Rupert treats it as a
question.

“You will be saddled with me for perhaps fifty years, and”--with a
smile, cruel in its gentleness--“I am afraid I am too great a coward to
release you by suicide!”

She starts as if stung by a hornet; and yet taking to herself a sort of
horrible comfort from his words. Yes; that is why she has betrayed him;
that is why she has never been able to love him really! He is a coward.
He has been telling her so for three and twenty years; and there is no
reason for disbelieving him! They have been standing still on the
high-road; but now she breaks away from him, walking so fast that it is
a moment or two before he overtakes her. In wordless wretchedness they
step along side by side, the sweet Babel of evening birds in their ears,
the acrid sweetness of hawthorn in their nostrils, and death in their
hearts.

“Even if I freed you from my presence, as, of course, I should do, there
would still be the legal tie,” Rupert resumes presently, in a
matter-of-fact voice, whose would-be indifference the dead whiteness of
his face and a slight twitching of the lips contradict. “I believe that,
under the circumstances, it might be got rid of; but it would involve a
publicity that would be painful to you.”

She listens dully, so dazed with pain as to feel that he must be talking
of some one else.

“And if it were _not_ got rid of,” she foggily hears him continue, “it
would, of course, shut up any possible avenue to future happiness for
you.”

At that her great anguish breaks through the merciful fog that has begun
to envelop it.

“There is no such avenue!” she answers thickly.

He glances at her with what looks like compassion. “You think so now,
but you will not think so always.”

“Always! always!” she repeats choking.

He shakes his head as one knowing better. “I am afraid your plan will
not hold water,” he rejoins, not irritating her by any _spoken_
contradiction of her asseveration of perpetual woe. “We must think of
something more feasible.”

His voice is so coolly dispassionate that once again, and for the last
time in both their lives, the balm-bringing idea flashes across her that
he does not care much after all--that his finicking womanish nature is
incapable of the pangs of a great thwarted passion. But one glance at
the profile beside her in the lined patience of its self-government,
knocks the unworthy prop from under her self-esteem.

They cover almost a mile in total silence; two miserable blots on the
sweet pageant of evening. They meet a herd of cows returning to their
juicy pasture after milking, straggling over the road, snatching
mouthfuls out of the lush hedge-rows; a few children loiteringly picking
flowers, and wastefully tossing them away, with the prodigal cruelty of
Mother Nature herself; a farm servant tittering over a gate with a
ploughboy. Married birds sing the joys of the nest and the family, and
one blackbird seems to keep pace with them as they go, merely to mock
them with his liquid telling that, as his Creator had done, he finds his
world of the hedge and the pasture and the new green tree very good.
Both Rupert and Lavinia are dully sensible of the jar with the
surrounding happy suavities that Lavinia’s resumption of the
conversation brings with it.

“Can you suggest anything better? You must remember how short a time we
have.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“If you are quite resolved not to marry me----”

“I am quite resolved.”

“You have never told me why?” She says it faintly, glancing at him with
that new and most uncharacteristic shiftiness which she feels that his
all-noticing eye must already have observed.

“If you wish I will tell you.”

“No!” she answers with almost inaudible haste. “It is enough for me that
you no longer wish it! I do not doubt that you have good reasons;
but”--growing more distinct in a feverish sophistry of desire to put
herself in the right--“let it be clearly understood that it is not _I_
who go back from the bargain! I _was_--I _am_ willing to fulfil it.”

“Thank you.”

The courteous irony of his gratitude stings her back into muteness; and
again they walk on, unconscious of time or distance.

“I am willing to tell you what I have done, what happened, how it came
about!”

“But I am not willing to hear.”

Her offer has been incalculably difficult to make, and its refusal ought
to bring her some relief; yet the mournful magnanimity of that refusal
crushes her. She struggles weakly to crawl from under its weight.

“Though you will not listen to my explanation, you will take my word
that I have not done anything absolutely disgraceful!”

He gives a sort of shiver, the kind of gesture of disgust--only a
million times intensified--that she has formerly seen him make at any
instance of glaring bad taste in art, literature, or manners.

“Yes, I take your word! Only”--with that shudder in his voice--“don’t
say that you are sorry, and that you won’t do it again!”

She bows her head in profound humiliation, accepting that stinging
chastisement as so much less than her due; while at the same moment a
contradictory flash of repulsion from him for being able at such a
moment to see the æsthetic side of the situation whizzes through her
consciousness. Between them they have slain all talk that can be
possible at such a moment. Incapable of thought, her brain a caldron of
boiling miseries, Lavinia sets one foot before the other, plodding
blindly on; while Rupert--she has never possessed the plate-glass window
into his soul, which he has always had into hers, so that what memories,
projects, torments, occupy his mind during that last half-hour she never
knows.

The sound of a church clock rouses both--her from amid her steam of
boiling vapours; him from his unread thoughts. They have reached a part
of the road where the railway runs parallel to it, and a gate, faced by
another on the opposite side, gives entrance to the line. They pause to
listen and count, impatient of the interval between the deliberate
strokes.

“_Seven!_ Surely it can’t be seven! He will put himself into a fever if
we are late.”

Man and girl look at each other in shocked surprise, their own
calamities for the moment entirely sponged off their memories.

“And--is it possible?” throwing an astonished glance of apprehension
around--“we are close to Rivers Sutton! It will take us quite an hour
to get home.”

“Not if we run along the line!” The shot-out suggestion is Lavinia’s.

“The line!” Rupert echoes doubtfully.

“Yes, the line!” she repeats in a passion of irritation at his
hesitancy. “Are you afraid of being run over, or of the penalty of forty
shillings?”

The gate is locked, but they are on its other side in a minute, and
racing along the grass edge that borders the metals. For the time every
idea is abolished from both their minds, but that of reaching home with
the least possible delay. In a perfect unanimity of distressful haste
they speed along, scarcely spending words for fear of wasting breath
after the first outburst of remorseful ejaculations.

“How could we have forgotten him?”

“The specialist told me that the least friction or worry was above all
things to be avoided.”

They run along for a while in perfect silence, their long legs skimming
over the abounding spring flowers that always seem to relish the railway
bank.

Then Lavinia cries out, “What time is it now?”

Without a break in his run, Rupert pulls out his watch, looks at it,
holds it to his ear, and answers in a key of acute annoyance--

“It has stopped!”

“And Rivers Sutton Church clock does not strike the quarters?”

“No.”

“It can’t be more than ten minutes past,” she rejoins, panting a
little, though not much, for she is a muscular modern girl, and in good
condition; “for I hear the 7.10: it has just left Rivers Sutton
station.”

“It is always late.”

Lavinia casts a glance over her shoulder, still flying along, to see
whether the train, faintly heard coming up behind them, is yet in sight;
and, having done so, pulls herself up to a stop with such sudden
violence that her knees rock under her. The horrified cry that
accompanies her arrested motion stays Rupert’s flying steps too, though
the impetus of his going carries him several paces beyond her before he
can stop himself. Astonishment at what can have checked a haste so
urgent as hers makes him too look round, gives to his sight also the
object that has frozen her flight into a paralysis of still horror. A
curve of the line hides the approaching train from their sight, though
their ears plainly inform them of its increasing nearness; but at what
appears to be about halfway between the point at which they stand and
the curve, though in reality it is much nearer to themselves, a little
child is clearly seen standing out against the strong yellow light of
the May evening--a little child obviously at that most dangerous age
which has legs to toddle, but no judgment to guide those legs. Probably
it has crept through a gap in the hedge from the pointsman’s cottage,
which they had passed close to the locked and climbed gate; but the two
spectators of its prowess have no time to speculate as to how it came
into its present position of imminent peril.

“It is all right; it is on the up line,” Rupert says, with a sort of
hiss.

“No, it isn’t; it is on the down.”

An instantaneous thought leaps from one pair of eyes to the other; and
in Rupert’s Lavinia reads a blind terror. That sixtieth part of a second
reveals to her that it has been the apprehension of her lifetime to find
such a terror in his eyes at some such crisis of his existence--the
predominating, all-mastering, terror of an injury to his own skin. If
the endangered infant is to be saved, it will not be by him. Without a
second glance at her companion--yes, she is _almost_--would to God she
could be _quite_ sure afterwards that she had not thrown him one glance
of contempt or reproach!--she rushes back along the way she has come at
the highest speed of which her already strained limbs and labouring
lungs are capable, taking instinctively to the metals themselves, so as
not to be impeded by grass and flowers. Will she be in time? She tries
to shout a warning to the little toddling thing, but not a sound louder
than a useless dissonant whisper will issue from her protesting throat.

The train is coming round the curve. The engine, with its rocking train
of carriages, is rounding into sight. Thank God, it has not got up its
full steam yet; it is not going nearly at its highest speed. If it were,
there would not be a chance. As it is, there is just a possibility. It
all depends upon whether she can hold out. Yes, she _will_ hold out,
even if she drops down dead the moment afterwards. No, she _can’t_; her
powers are going to abandon her just too soon, just when she is within
a hundred yards of the object to be rescued. She staggers--recovers
herself--runs a couple of yards--staggers again; drops on her knees, and
then falls flat--happily half on to the up line. She has just sense
enough left to drag herself quite on to it--just sight and hearing
enough left to be aware of a hatless figure making the air sing in its
mad rush past her to meet the locomotive, before consciousness leaves
her.




CHAPTER XX


“How is he?”

“Just the same.”

“Not conscious?”

“No.”

“Never has been?”

“Not for a moment.”

It is the morning that follows that “serious and it is to be feared
fatal accident on the line between Rivers Sutton and Shipston,” to whose
occurrence at 7.15 p.m. on the previous evening the _Shipston Weekly
Advertiser_ will give a paragraph in its next issue, and the London
papers record with greater conciseness, and in smaller type.

The interlocutors are exchanging whispered questions and answers in the
verandah, Mrs. Prince having risen at an unprecedented hour, and laden
her carriage with a pharmacy of drugs to show her neighbourly sympathy;
and Mrs. Darcy having spent the night at Campion Place, a vigil to which
her appearance lends no improbability.

“I do not yet understand quite how it happened.”

“Will you mind coming a little farther from the house?”

“But I thought you said he was quite unconscious?”

“So he is; but _they_ are not.”

“To be sure! to be sure! Poor things! poor things!”

They tread out stealthily on the sward, where the morning meets them in
its still wet splendour of dew and flower. The young sun has flung away
the thin rosy scarves that lightly swathed him at his birth, and is
magnificently wheeling up the eastern sky. In the shortening shadows the
pale green leaves of the late tulips carry little globes of bright
moisture upon them, and their gallant deep cups still hold some of the
wine of the dawn.

“The servants tell me that they were walking along the line. How came
they to be walking along the line?”

“They were late, and afraid of keeping Sir George waiting. It was the
shortest way home.” The rector’s wife pauses, her dead-white face and
sunken eyes turning towards the glory-promising mist, through which the
trees, fields, oast-houses of the weald, dwindled by distance, are
beginning to pierce. Her voice sounds like that of one reciting a
lesson, which she knows will have to be infinitely repeated.

“And then?”

“They heard the train coming up behind them, and Lavinia looked round to
see how near it was, and saw the child on the line.”

“Whose child was it?” asks Mrs. Prince, with an irrelevant curiosity
which jars--if anything can still jar upon nerves so strung and
tense--on her hearer.

“It was the pointsman, George Bates’s. The mother had run in next door
to speak to a neighbour, and left it alone in the house!”

“It is a scandal that such a thing should be allowed! A child of two
left alone in a house!”

Mrs. Darcy acquiesces, faintly conscious that the unescapable worst of
her story is still ahead.

“And then?”

“Then they both set off running back as hard as they could to try and
reach it in time.”

“Yes, yes?” rather breathlessly.

“Lavinia stumbled and fell.”

“How very unlike her!”

“But Rupert ran on.”

“Yes?”

It is hard to be pulled up so near the _dénouement_, as Mrs. Prince
feels, but yet it is evident to even her not very acute perceptions
that, for the moment, whip and spur are useless. Yet, after what is in
reality a very short interval, the tale is taken firmly up again.

“He got up just in time, snatched the child, and threw it safely on to
the grass.

“Yes, yes? Oh, _please_ go on!”

“But then--then”--will she ever be able to get through it? and this is
only the first time out of hundreds that she will have to repeat it--“he
seemed to lose his head; he stood for half a second right in front of
the engine, and one of the buffers knocked him down, and the whole train
went over him!” It is done! She has got it over; but of course there
will follow a flood of questions and comments.

Mrs. Darcy has not long to wait. After the strong shudder that the
dreadful narrative provokes comes a train of horrified curiosities as to
detail.

“Was he--they told me not, but yet I can’t understand how it could be
otherwise--was he terribly mutilated?”

Mrs. Darcy puts a thin hand up to her mouth to oblige it to cease
twitching.

“Not in the least; beyond the injury to his head, from which he has been
unconscious ever since, and a slight wound in the right leg, there was
not a scratch upon him.”

“How miraculous!”

“The train was going quite slowly.”

“Then his life might have been saved--he might have got off scot-free,
if he had not lost his head?”

“Yes; if he had not lost his head.” Oh, is not it nearly ended? how much
longer will it continue?

There is a respite of a few moments; but when Mrs. Prince’s next
sentence appears it is in the nature of a comment that makes her
companion regret the questions that have preceded it.

“In any other case one would have said that it looked almost like
_suicide_; but, of course, in his, that is absolutely out of the
question.”

“Absolutely!”

“How did you hear the details?--not from Lavinia?”

“My husband went down to Rivers Sutton Station last night, after--after
Rupert had been brought home, and saw the engine-driver and fireman.”

“Dear me! how shocking!” The ejaculation is not one particularly
apposite to the special fact recorded; but at least it needs no answer,
nor do the sincere tears that follow it, nor the struggle with a
_pince-nez_, which refuses to remain riding upon a nose which is being
blown. “And Sir George! Poor man, in his state of health too! I suppose
he is quite crushed, stunned?”

The catechism has recommenced; but to this question, at least, the
answer is easy and readily given.

“Do you know what he said to me just now, when he came out of Rupert’s
room to speak to me?” Mrs. Darcy asks, her wan face lit by a strange
shining in the fagged eyes. “He said, ‘No one can say that I have not
had two brave sons!’”

“_No one can say that I have not had two brave sons!_” repeats Mrs.
Prince, with an accent of stupefaction. “He took it that way? Well, I am
afraid we all have been rather in the habit of taking poor Rupert for
somewhat of a muff!”

The other turns away, writhing at having her own thought translated into
the brutality of words. Who has held Rupert so cheaply as she? During
the enormous hours of the so-called short summer night, how many
slighting words and contemptuous thoughts have risen upon her remorseful
memory? She has always, always belittled him; always sought to set him
lower in the esteem of her for whose love he has served through so many
unobtrusive years. Always, always, except--thank God, that there is an
except--on that last day in the kitchen garden--is it possible that it
was only the day before yesterday?--she had taken his part, had spoken
up for him--had done him some tardy justice! To her over-wrought
feelings--unbalanced by sleeplessness and shock--the thought of that one
half-hour seems to be all that can make it possible to her to endure
herself!

“I shall not attempt to see him--I mean Sir George,” says Mrs. Prince,
sobbing with an unchecked frankness of emotion which smacks more of her
original class than of the one to which she has attained. “But be sure
you say everything that is kind and proper. And tell him from me that if
there is anything of any sort that we can do or send, we shall be only
too glad. One of the most valuable privileges of wealth is to be able to
help its less fortunate friends in their need!”

She goes away still sobbing, but partially comforted by her own bit of
bunkum, and the thought of the magic properties of the Dropless Candle.
An out-of-place flash of what, under less dreadful circumstances, would
have been amusement at the thought of Sir George’s frenzy at being
patronized as one of Mrs. Prince’s less fortunate friends, darts
incongruously across the rector’s wife, as she turns her steps homeward.
Her household has to be arranged for; so as to do without her during the
next and perhaps many succeeding days--a deprivation to which they
usually so strongly object as quite to prevent it, but in which they
now acquiesce with tearful eagerness.

Yet what can she do for the stricken household? Can she lift the lids of
Rupert’s shut eyes, and bring consciousness, recognition, forgiveness,
into them? One agonized ejaculation from Lavinia has revealed to her
that the knowledge of having something to forgive had come to him,
before setting off on that last walk--a knowledge that had, perhaps,
helped him to “lose his head.” “To _lose his head_!” Yes; that is the
phrase which she must always employ, never quitting her hold upon it
during the hundreds of times that she will have to repeat the tale. As
she stands listening outside the shut door, Lavinia steals out, a
ghastly noiseless shadow in the morning light.

“They want more ice!” she says, looking at her friend with dead eyes
that do not seem to see her.

“I will order it for you. Is there any change?”

“No, none; but”--an angry terror bringing life back into her face--“that
does not mean anything bad?”

“Oh no; not necessarily.”

“They do not expect it yet?”

“Of course not, of course not. While I fetch the ice, won’t you change
your dress? it would freshen you, and I would call you in a moment if
there was any change.”

“No, no; he might speak. Just while you are calling me, he might say
some one thing; he may be saying it now.” And she slips back into the
darkness.

But the days pass, fall into the ordered routine of habit, and Rupert
does not speak, does not say the one thing for which Lavinia listens day
and night--the one thing whose utterance can keep her sane. It is not
her fault that there is any interruption day or night to her listening;
and, while forced away for necessary food, there is but one thought in
her mind--the thought that he may speak, and she not be by to hear!
Daily she strains her ears to listen through the ordeal of the luncheon
or dinner, to whose endurance she compels herself for his father’s sake,
and through the worse ordeal of relating to Sir George over and over
again--since he is never tired of hearing--how it happened. Oh the
torture of that repetition! and the keener torture of that explanation
which on the first relation has to be given, and has more than once to
be repeated, as not quite clear!

“You say that you were ahead! How did you come to be ahead?”

“I caught sight of it first; that gave me a start.”

“And you were within a hundred yards before he caught you up?”

“About that, I think.”

“And the whole distance was a quarter of a mile?”

“I should think so.”

“How was it that he did not overtake you sooner?”

“He--he had a greater distance to cover; he had run on ahead of me
before we saw it.”

“How much ahead of you?”

“I can’t say.”

There is such a helpless anguish in her voice that he stops questioning
her for that while; but the doubt and the explanation are sure to crop
up again at the next of those dreadful meals, spent in hiding their own
food, and compelling each other to swallow his or hers.

“I can’t quite understand how you kept the lead so long!”

Slightly varied, it always comes back as a question, a wonder, a
reflection, and she learns to recognize with a terrible sharpness the
signs of its approach. Her uncle’s own illness seems to be in abeyance,
kept at arm’s length by the force of his will, and through those
dreadful days of waiting his spirit maintains a strange level of
exaltation.

“We put the saddle on the wrong horse when we called him Milksop!”
Lavinia hears him say repeatedly, in a tone of triumph.

He is very tender in his manner towards his niece, going entirely out of
his own character to entreat her to eat, and trying humbly to emulate
the son he had despised in self-forgetting attentions, and he rives her
heart and conscience unknowingly by the sympathy and pity for her in her
tragically interrupted nuptials, which every one of his words and
actions implies.




CHAPTER XXI


The day that was to have been that of Rupert Campion and Lavinia Carew’s
wedding has come.

“I am always afraid of some ill luck when the bride does not change her
initials,” Miss Brine has said in the Rectory school-room, in answer to
the children’s lamenting comment upon the fact.

A thoughtful silence follows the governess’s utterance, broken by
Phillida, who says meditatively--

“Then if Lavy had married Captain Binning, she would have been all
right.”

But the wily Brine is not to be trapped into any such admission.

“Miss Carew would undoubtedly have changed her initials in that case,”
she replies cautiously.

Lavinia had hoped that her uncle would--in the general upsetting
consequent upon the catastrophe, the removal of all the landmarks of
ordinary life--have forgotten to note the date of a day so outwardly
identical with its gloomy fellows that it would have passed unnoticed in
its obscurity and disgrace; but luncheon-time undeceives her.

“This is not quite the way in which we expected to pass this day!” he
says, after sending away the servants. “It is rather rough on you; but
there is a French saying, I believe, that what is deferred is not
therefore lost. There may be a good time coming.”

The cheerfulness valiantly forced into the old voice for her sake, in
his new selflessness, must, at whatever cost to herself, be met in the
same spirit, and she compels herself to repeat in French the saying he
has alluded to, with what--since intention is everything--must do duty
for a smile, “Ce qui est différe n’est point perdu.”

“Though it may not be to-morrow or the day after, we shall perhaps still
hear Darcy exhorting you and him to increase and multiply!” continues
Sir George, with a distressing attempt at pleasantry, and a painful
harking back to his old theme. “In any case, it will do no harm to drink
to your wedding day. Come, let me fill your glass.”

She holds it out with an unshaking hand, and commands her throat to
swallow, to drink a toast, the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of the wish
contained in which are alternatives equally horrible. And then they
return hand-in-hand--the old man has added a new caressingness to his
other tendernesses--and resume their places, one on each side of the
silent, motionless form stretched between them with bound, ice-covered
head, in the darkness; and Lavinia takes up again her day-long,
night-long employment of repeating over and over and over again to
herself the question which she is beginning to see written in red
whenever she turns her eyes in the obscurity--

“_Did_ he lose his head? _Was_ it suicide? And if so, was it something
he saw in her face that drove him to it?”

She is going through them in the usual sequence at about four o’clock in
the afternoon of her wedding day, when she happens to be for a few
moments alone with the still living rigidity beside her, when in the
almost complete darkness, her eyes and ears--or have they gone mad
too?--detect, or seem to detect, a slight movement in the bed. She darts
noiselessly to the window, and, pulling aside a bit of the curtain,
casts a glance backwards towards the bed--a glance that can hardly
travel, for the weight of the hope it carries. Whatever _she_ may be,
her senses are not mad; nor have they told her a lie. Rupert is feebly
stirring, and his eyes are open. In a second she is at his side, and
stooping over him; the word is coming--the priceless word on which her
reason hangs! It is spoken so low that she has to bend very close down
to catch it. It is only an almost inaudible--

“Well, dear!”

In the reeling immensity of her joy, she can but stupidly echo, almost
as inaudibly, the greeting that seems to have come to her from the
speechless other side. “Well, dear!” There is a long pause. Into
Rupert’s eyes, as they turn slowly round, the watcher sees
consciousness, recollection, gradually returning. When those long-absent
inhabitants have reoccupied their seats, will he take back his greeting?
While the answer to that inquiry is in suspense, the functions of life
seem suspended in her. The slowly wandering eyes return to their point
of departure--her face; regained knowledge is in them; but neither anger
nor pain.

“I muffed it, as usual,” he says, with a ghost of his old self-ridicule,
and, wearied with the exertion of speech, falls back into
unconsciousness.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sir George has never been what is called a “professing Christian,” which
indeed is a title that seems to promise a paucity of performance; but
ever since Rupert’s accident, he has daily asked Lavinia--possibly only
with some dim feeling of a propitiatory sacrifice to a fetish--to read
him a portion of Scripture, and on the evening of that wedding day he
finds with some difficulty--for he does not know his way about very
well--the chapter that tells of him who, even while being carried out to
burial, was recalled to life and to the widowed arms that had thought to
have for ever loosed him. He listens, leaning back comfortably in his
chair with a sort of smile of triumph on his face; and on the open page
Lavinia’s tears drop hot and blessed as she reads.

During the night that follows Rupert speaks again, and though it is only
to ask for water, the two or three languid words keep the flame of hope
alive and steady in the watchers’ hearts. On the next day he has a
slightly longer interval of consciousness; on the day after that a
longer one again; and on the day after that for a whole hour his eyes
are open, and faint speech rises to his lips. If he were allowed, he
would by-and-by even ask questions; but rigorous quiet is enjoined upon
him, and since it is Lavinia with whom he makes most efforts to
converse, she is banished from the room. Such exile is of comparatively
little moment to her now, now that it will be possible to her to wait,
and wait sanely, even for weeks and months, for the answer to that
question which she feels she must yet put.

Since she last looked at them, the horse-chestnuts in the Rectory garden
are quite over. They were in fullest bloom the day she pasted them going
to Rumsey Brake. Was it B.C. or A.D. that she was last in Rumsey Brake?
The former date seems far the more probable. The door into the
churchyard opens cautiously. Lavinia is standing under the verandah, and
through it appear, as they have appeared many times a day during the
late crisis, the Darcy children. Almost always they have borne gifts,
and to-day is no exception.

“Could not he fancy one of his own eggs?” asks Daphne, lifting the lid
of a basket on her arm, and displaying the creamy ovals of three
beautiful specimens of the product of the clerical poultry-yard.

“I am sure that he will in a day or two; but why his _own_?”

“We have re-christened Gatacre, and called him Rupert,” explains Daphne.
“He is always the one who begins laying first.”

“If we had known that Rupert was a hero, we should have christened a hen
after him long ago,” says Phillida, coming to her sister’s aid. “But one
can’t always tell by people’s _looks_, can one? I think that heroes
ought to have some mark to know them by; but Miss Brine says it would be
invidious.”

“There could be no mistake about beloved Captain Binning!” says Daphne,
with the delightful liberty to express its preference of sweet and
wholesome childhood. “One saw at a glance what _he_ was.”

“The _Nubia_ has got to Las Palmas; it was in the paper this morning,”
says Phillida. “But of course you saw it.”

Until the mention of Binning’s name, Lavinia had been enjoying the
company of her young friends; now the one desire concerning them that
occupies her mind is, that they should go.

“You must remember that for the last ten days I have seen and heard
nothing. I am as behindhand in my information as a convict,” she
answers, laughing uneasily.

The days pass, each one with a trifling gain to distinguish it--perhaps
only a curtain allowed to be a little more drawn back; an atom more
colour in the pale lips; a fuller sound in the thready voice. Every day
some small stretched privilege is accorded, each dealt out with a frugal
hand, that feels its way tentatively, lest the bruised brain should
avenge itself for any temerity in hurrying it to be well. Whether thanks
to these precautions or to a natural wiriness, Rupert is apparently
returning to life and vigour, without a throw-back, and with an even
steadiness that--considering the nature of the accident that has laid
him low--seems nothing short of miraculous.

“Humanly speaking, we are out of the wood,” the doctor says.

It is needless to state that he is an old doctor. A young one would have
scorned the possibility of there being any other way. Since he is
“humanly speaking, out of the wood,” Rupert is allowed to receive one
visitor a day for half an hour at a time; and since Sir George and
Lavinia do not count, it is a party of three that gathers round his bed,
on the occasion of Mrs. Darcy’s being for the first time admitted. In
the midst of the gentle heartiness of her greeting to the explorer so
lately returned from the dim limits of life, the rector’s wife catches
herself wondering whether Lavinia is recalling the last time on which
they had met by a sick man’s bed; or whether the preceding weeks have
wiped it off her memory, as they have wiped the youth off her face.

“Tell the rector we shall require his services sooner than he thinks,”
Sir George says, his face, scored with time and sorrow, beaming at Susan
from the other side of the bed. “If only this lazy chap will hurry up. I
believe he enjoys lying here and being pampered.”

“I am sure he does,” Rupert answers, with a white smile.

“We are thinking of August or September at latest,” continues the old
man, looking round half suspiciously at the three faces about him, as if
defying contradiction of his optimism.

Rupert has never contradicted his father. He does not now.

“If we make it September, we shall have the hop-pickers to grace it,” he
answers, with another little smile.

“Can you never look at life except from the ridiculous point of view?”
cries his father, in quite his old manner. Then, riddled with remorse,
he falls to scolding Lavinia for having--as she has not, nor is ever
likely to do--forgotten the moment for administering some potion or
extract.

The girl smilingly rebuts the accusation, appealing quietly to the clock
to defend her; but the curtain at the bed-head--it is an old-fashioned
tester--which her hand is desperately clutching, could tell a less
placid tale. She does not quite hear what next passes, and is aroused
only by the sound of Sir George’s voice uttering a strident fiat.

“Time’s up!” he cries, with his watch in his hand, in slight to the
clock which has proved him wrong; “and we do not allow a minute’s law.”

He marshals Mrs. Darcy relentlessly out of the room as he speaks, and
the cousins are left _tête-à-tête_. Rupert’s fingers play a meditative
tune on the bedclothes; and Lavinia, watching him, and vaguely trying to
make out what is the air which they are intending to convey, is
surprised by a criminal thought of what a much less virile hand it is
than that which she had seen lying in the gauntness of its departed
strength on the other man’s coverlet. The air continues, set to a slight
sigh.

“It is odd to hear him beginning to harp on the old string,” says the
man’s weak voice.

Lavinia gives a slight shiver. Is the theme to be taken up again, just
where the striking of Rivers Sutton Church clock had broken it off five
weeks ago?

“I do not think you ought to talk of anything agitating yet.”

“But it does not agitate me. A knock on the head is not supposed to be a
sedative, but in my case it seems to have been one.”

The voice and look are as calm as the words, but he has stopped his
drumming on the sheet; and she waits in silent apprehension, praying
that the subject may drop, since she knows that the time is not yet ripe
for her to put her one question. Rupert, however, as is soon clear, has
no intention of dropping the subject.

“Poor old gentleman! He is not quite up to date, is he?”

Lavinia is trembling all over. Has not the moment now come for her to
fulfil the vow so solemnly taken, so intertwined with her frantic
prayers for his restoration as to be inseparable from them?--the vow to
cleave to him through life and death and eternity, without one backward
glance, if he be but given back to her extremity of asking? And now that
the Invisible Awfulness, whom she had wearied with her insistence, has
accomplished His part of the bargain, how dare she tarry with hers? If
she does, may not He take back His boon, and leave her to endure an
existence made unendurable by a for-ever unanswered question?

“If he is not up to date, neither am I,” she replies.

Rupert’s eyebrows go up in the old familiar way. “Is that a riddle,
dear?”

“No,” she answers, purpose and voice strengthening as she proceeds, “it
is not a riddle; it is good plain truth. If you mean that your father is
not ‘up to date’ because he still believes that we are engaged to be
married, _I_ am in the same boat, for _I_ still believe it.”

Perhaps from the feebleness of his body, perhaps from an inability to
frame an answer that can nicely hit a case so difficult, the young man
is silent; but there is no hostility, nor even much melancholy, in the
glance that first rests on and then delicately averts itself in
compassion from her convulsed face.

“I have been disloyal to you,” she goes on, fighting down her distress
lest it should gag her before she has time to get her full confession
out. “I offer again to tell you to what extent----”

He stops her with a prohibitive movement, full of dignity, of his pale
hand.

“No,” he says; “I have no wish to know the tale of kisses. Many or few,
we will take them for granted.”

Her head sinks on her breast in an agony of shame.

“Many or few, they are past and done with,” she cries out. “And now I
_beg_ you to forgive me! on my knees I beg you to forgive me!” As she
speaks, she suits the action to the word, and drops on her knees beside
the bed.

He looks at her, disturbed at the humiliation expressed by her whole
being, yet with an underlying calm that dominates her.

“The only thing that I can’t forgive you is your present attitude,” he
answers; and, as he speaks, there is just enough of gentle disgust in
his voice to bring back before her, in prosaic strength, his æsthetic
detestation of all scenes, rows, uglinesses.

“I _must_ keep it till you answer me,” she returns, chilled, yet
persistent. “Will you forgive me? and will you prove it by marrying
me?--by marrying me as soon as you get well? I will stay here until my
knees grow to the carpet, if you do not say ‘Yes.’”

He lies silent for a moment or two, considering her with a sort of high,
detached pity.

“I have no alternative,” he answers, with a grave smile. “Since you wish
it, I will marry you--when I get well; and now, would you oblige me by
standing up?”




CHAPTER XXII


So it is settled. Her prayers are answered; her vows are fulfilled.
Everything is, or will be upon Rupert’s recovery, as it was. _As it was?
When?_ Before Binning’s coming? Her soul, half-lightened of its burden
of remorse, awaking to new pain, cries out in bitter protest, “My
God!--_no!_” And yet to all appearance it will be so. To all appearance
she will take up the thread of life where she had dropped it on the day
of her uncle’s and Rupert’s return from London. There is no hurry about
her question now. She will have countless hours of married intimacy in
which to put it.

During these weeks of reprieve--she gives an inward dread start at the
reappearance of such a word in her vocabulary in such a
connection--besides the new armour that must be forged for her on the
anvil of endurance, there is not one of the old pieces which she will
not need. Even her lifelong _rôle_ of buffer will have to be reassumed,
since, as time passes and confidence strengthens, Sir George’s angelic
qualities retire a little into the background. The wearing tempers and
frets of sixty-five years, that have been driven to their holes by the
scourge of a great affliction, begin to show their ugly heads again.
Once again with pseudo-patient irritability he turns over his food at
luncheon, and sends messages of ironical compliment to the cook; once or
twice he even snubs Rupert, though, in these cases, repentance follows
so hard upon his sin as almost to overrun it. It is always for not being
in enough haste to be well, that the father chides his son. Rupert has
never been one to hurry, and he does not hurry now.

“One would think that a man with a wife and a parson waiting for him
might try to pick up a bit quicker!” Sir George says one day, champing
his bit after finding Rupert with writing materials by his bedside. “If
he can ask for a pen and ink, one would think he might just as well ask
for a hat and stick.”

“The pen and ink would tire you much the most of the two,” Lavinia
answers, with a soothing smile, but not thinking it necessary to add
that a like idea, in a modified degree, has crossed her own brain.

Rupert is _not_ in haste to be well. From the doctor’s and nurse’s point
of view, he is an ideal patient, never rebelling against the
restrictions prescribed him, content with the narrow monotony of
sick-room routine, with no restive manliness kicking against limitations
cried out against as needless and unendurable. But then Rupert has
always been more like a woman than a man. Hasn’t he always regretfully
said so?--regretfully, not for being like a woman, but for not being
really one. After all, his solitary heroism--_was_ it heroism? for what
else could he have done? and his first impulse was undoubtedly
_un_heroic--was a sport, an accident, that did not in the least
represent the tree that grew it. The heart is an inn which harbours
strange guests, and the landlord can’t be held answerable for their
characters. Yet it is with an unspeakable horror of self-condemnation
that Lavinia recognizes the quality of the visitors her own has been
entertaining. They have been expelled with loathing; but nothing can
alter the fact that they have lodged there. What a distance has she
travelled from the hell of remorse--the anguish of pleading beside what
was supposed to be Rupert’s bed of death!

And, meanwhile, gentle, courteous, and content, Rupert sails, if not
fast, yet with a fair wind, upon the pleasant waters of convalescence.
Visitors are daily admitted, and the Darcy children have, of course,
been prompt to offer their congratulations. But the visit has been
vaguely felt by all not to have been a complete success. Rupert has
never been quite at his ease with the Rectory’s warlike brood, oppressed
by a feeling of his own destitution of the muscular qualities which they
set so much store by; and though they are far too honourable not to have
admitted him unhesitatingly to their Valhalla, yet one and all have a
hazily uncomfortable feeling that he has got there by accident. The
introduction of Geist to lighten the situation, though well-meant, does
not turn out a success, since the Dachs has a rooted belief that all
persons lying flat and white in bed at wrong hours are murderers. Like a
reversed Balaam, having been brought to bless Rupert, he curses him
instead, and there is such ominous purpose in his stiffened and
stuck-out four legs, and the free exhibition of the whites of his eyes,
that a hasty removal from the bed upon which he has been confidingly
lifted is found advisable. Lavinia accompanies her young friends to the
door into the churchyard, as a sort of consolation stakes for the
flatness of their visit.

“I never saw Rupert in bed before!” says Daphne, with a sort of awed
interest.

“Do you think he looks _quite_ as nice as darling Captain Binning did?”
lisps little Serena, stealing an insinuating hand into Lavinia’s palm.

“Do not be silly!” cries Phillida, who of late has shown faint symptoms
of a slightly inaccurate knowledge of good and evil. “Nobody looks nice
in bed; they are not meant to!”

       *       *       *       *       *

“He is doing it on purpose--to give you time,” Phillida’s mother says a
day or two later to Lavinia, who has made a remark that indicates her
wonder at Rupert’s indifference to recovery.

They are pacing the Rectory garden, now on fire with the gaudy flowers
of full summer, for July is well advanced. Mrs. Darcy makes her
suggestion hesitatingly, since it hints at a subject that must be for
ever closed between them, adding, in a lighter key, and with a touch of
humour--

“He knows that Sir George can’t hale him to the altar in pyjamas; but
that as soon as he has got one arm into a coat-sleeve his father will
drag him up the aisle by it.”

Lavinia laughs a little.

“I feel sure,” continues the other, growing quite grave again, “that
this is one more instance of that consummate tact of his, which is the
outcome of his perfect unselfishness.”

Lavinia looks at her friend with a sort of distrust. “What a special
pleader you have become! I never heard such a change of tone!”

Her companion’s thin white cheek grows faintly tinted.

“Did you ever hear of such things as remorse and reparation?” she asks
in a low voice; and the tragic force of the response, “_Did I?_”
silences them both.

Miss Carew feels that her occupation of buffer is already resumed, now
that she has daily to parry her uncle’s attacks; the attacks which
compunction and his late agony of fear prevent him from directing in
their full force against his son himself; attacks that take the form of
ever more impatient questions and astonishments as to why Rupert does
not sit up, come downstairs, go out of doors, if it were even in a Bath
chair? He alludes to the latter vehicle in a tone of such contemptuous
concession, that his niece cannot help a furtive smile.

“You know, dear, that the doctor says he ought to keep his leg up a
while longer,” she answers, pacifically.

“Pooh! What is the matter with his leg? It is as sound as yours or mine.
It was a mere scratch to start with, and there is scarcely a cicatrice
left now.”

“But it is swollen still,” she urges, quietly but firmly. “Dr. Wilson
thought it was more swollen this morning than it was at his last visit.”

“Fiddlesticks! He says it to oblige Rupert! That boy has got round you
all!” and he flings away in a pet.

He has resumed his complacence in the afternoon, not from having
conquered his ill humour--a victory which, save for the period of his
son’s imminent peril, he has, as far as his family are aware, never
attempted; but because he has got his wish. Rupert, at his own express
desire, has been taken out in a superb Bath chair borrowed from the
Chestnuts; a Bath chair consecrated to Mr. Prince’s gout; and to make
the offer of which to Lavinia that great inventor has himself driven
over to Campion Place, prefacing his proposal with his usual prefix, “I
do not wish to be intrusive!”

Rupert has been out for an hour; gently pushed along under the shade of
the lime trees, of which one or two belated ones still throw down a
remnant of the ineffable sweetness of their yellow-green blossoms upon
him. His father and his betrothed are on either hand. Sir George’s jokes
are never very good; and it is to-day harder than usual to Lavinia to
laugh at his stupid pleasantry as to their being like the lion and the
unicorn that support the Royal Arms. Rupert does not attempt to laugh;
but he smiles with kind serenity. At even a better jest Lavinia would be
too busy to laugh--too busy stamping down the outrageous thoughts,
regrets, revolts, that keep swarming up in her heart, vipers warmed
into life by the very sun of her cousin’s restoration. Oh if he were
_only_ her cousin! only dear Rupert, her brother-friend! Oh if he were a
woman--the woman he has always sighed to be! Oh if he were always in a
Bath chair! The monstrosity of this last aspiration conducts her to the
hall-door; and it and its brother evil spirits are but ill laid as she
pours out tea for Rupert, as he lies sighing with satisfaction at having
regained it, upon the sofa at his bed-foot.

“I may now hope for twenty-four hours of blessed supineness,” he says,
throwing his head back on the piled cushions with an epicurean air.

“I believe that you would like to be always supine!” Lavinia answers, in
a tone of wonder, and thinking at the same time, “What a charming head
it is! how delicately modelled! what a finish in the moulding of the
features! what a _spirituel_ expression, with something of the light
malice of the classic Mercury!”

_Spirituel!_ It is an adjective more often used in the feminine than the
masculine gender. Oh, tricky gods! Why is not he feminine? What a
delightful woman he would have made!

“And you would like it too!” he rejoins, breaking into her reflections,
with what sounds more like a statement than an inquiry; then, seeing her
start apprehensively with the old fear of his gift of thought-reading,
he adds, “I mean that you--that most ‘neat excellences’ like you, would
wish to keep me always in a position to be fussed over, always prone;
no, that is not the right word--“prone” means that one has fallen
forwards on one’s face, like poor Dagon, doesn’t it?”

He talks on with so evident an intention of removing any uncomfortable
impression that his former speech may have made, that Lavinia, having by
this time risen to give him his second cup of tea, lays her hand, with
some dim sense of compunctious gratitude, upon his.

“You are very glib to-night!” she says playfully. “Aren’t you chattering
too much? You must be tired.”

“No!” he answers, “or only a little; just pleasantly.”

His eyes--how blue their whites are!--lift themselves with a sort of
yearning, that yet seems to have none of the commotion of passion in it,
to hers, and she feels that she ought to kiss him. If she think about
it, she will never get herself up to the sticking-point; so, without a
second’s delay, with the teapot still encumbering one hand, she takes
the plunge and drops a little butterfly kiss somewhere about the roots
of his soft curly hair.

“Thank you, dear.” He asks for no repetition of the endearment; and she
wonders shamefacedly whether it would have been better taste to omit it.

“I think I’ll leave you now. You look tired!”

“I am not tired; and you must not leave me; for I have something to say
to you.”

“Say it to-morrow.”

“With your permission I will say it to-night.”

With a little show of half-playful authority, he pulls her by the hand,
which she has laid upon him before the doubtful enterprise of her kiss,
on to the foot of his sofa, moving and contracting himself to make room
for her.

“Well, if you must, you must!” she answers, submitting, while a vertical
line shows itself between her well-drawn, thin eyebrows.

“I will not keep you long! All I want to say is, that, supposing I _do
not_ get well----”

“Why suppose anything so senseless?” she interrupts angrily.

“It _is_ senseless, of course. I was reading a magazine article
yesterday, on the subject of longevity, and, as far as I could make out,
I have all the signs that indicate it, and several more besides!”

“Then spare us your suppositions!” she interjects, almost roughly.

“I think not. After all, there is no harm in supposing! _Supposing_
breaks no bones, and I have often noticed that clauses in wills
providing for contingencies which seemed almost impossible yet not
seldom take effect!” Since Lavinia makes no comment, he goes on with
resolute courtesy, “So that, if you do not mind, I will repeat
‘Supposing I _do not_ get well----’”

“Yes?” she answers, sullenly acquiescent.

“I want it to be clearly understood that I have no wish that you should
play at being my widow--that you should offer up your good solid
flesh-and-blood happiness” (is there the faintest tinge of sarcasm in
this description of her conjectural felicity?) “with some Quixotic idea
of expiation, as a sacrifice to my manes!” She cannot speak. Is it the
scent of the great old heliotrope that climbs the trellis up to the
very window-edge, that makes her feel faint? “It is even a moot point
whether I shall have any manes!” Rupert goes on half dreamily; “but even
if consciousness survives the grave, which, of course, I am far too
advanced to believe----”

He pauses with a slight ironic smile, and she listens in a bewilderment
of distress, oppressed by the old thought of how little she really knows
of him. She cannot even be sure whether his confession of unbelief is
made in jest or earnest. She knows not whether, or with what numb
agnosticism, with what grey creed of nothingness, or with what faint
flickering cresset of faith, Rupert has met the sorrows of life, will,
when his hour strikes, confront the sharpness of death? His voice goes
on evenly--

“Even if consciousness does survive, it will not give me the slightest
satisfaction to know that you have cut your heart out to throw it as a
complimentary tribute on my funeral pyre! I have always liked your bonny
locks, dear, and I should fret like the blessed damosel whom I have
always wished to be, if I saw them pining and dwining away into skinny
unsightliness! You have no talent for hairdressing, and I hope and
believe that St. Catherine will go _uncoiffed_ by you!” He pauses a
minute, and then resumes, as composedly as before, but with a more
entire gravity, “You will be very lonely!”

“How _dare_ you say _will_?” she interjects, dashing her hand across her
smarting eyes.

“You _would_ be very lonely,” he corrects himself at once. “The old man
will not hold out long. This spurt is wonderful, but it will not last!”
Then the smarting eyes have their way, and let loose their tears. They
are drawn forth from their springs, almost more by the calm aloofness
with which the prophecy is uttered, than by the prophecy itself. What a
long long way from her--from them all--Rupert seems to have got! Her
tears do not appear at all to affect him.

“So let it be clearly understood,” he says, raising himself into a
sitting posture, taking cold possession of both her hands, and plunging
his clear eyes deep into her watery ones, “that when I die--pooh! what
does a preposition matter?--_if_ I die, then, let it be clearly
understood that I _wish_ you to marry--to marry and bear children to
people that nursery which we have both heard so much of!”

The light inveterate point of irony pierces, as if against his will,
through the last sentence. But for a sob or two, she has listened to his
harangue in absolute silence; her painful excitement rising by rushes to
the highest possible pitch. Is not _now_, if ever, the moment to put her
question?

“You have said your say,” she begins, her chest heaving as high as it
had done during that awful race with Fate along the railway line, seven
weeks ago. “And now I have to say mine. I have long had a question to
put to you.”

A ripple of uneasiness skims over the exalted calmness of his face.

“Are you sure that it is worth putting?”

“Quite sure.”

“Put it, then.”

“I have long wished to ask you--I must ask you, now, whether on that
day----”

“Well?”

“When, after having saved the child, you so unaccountably remained
standing, for two or three seconds, right in front of the engine----”

“Yes?”

“Whether”--was there ever a mouth so like a bit of charred stick as hers
feels?--“you lost your head? or--whether you did--it--on purpose--with a
deliberate intention of--suicide?”

The word clothes its ugliness in a hissing whisper, but there is no
doubt as to his having heard it.

“What next?” he asks with--is it half-contempt, or what he means her to
think so?--“what maggot will your brain breed next?”

But now that every muscle, nerve, and fibre of her body are strung up to
their highest tension, he shall not escape her.

“That is no answer to my question. Did you lose your head? or did you
mean to kill yourself?”

If he hesitates for one instant, she will know what to believe. But he
does not hesitate.

“I lost my head!” he answers, meeting the thumbscrew and hot pincers of
her torture-chamber without a wince. “Not having been brought up to the
trade of hero, I did not understand the ropes, and--I lost my head!”

       *       *       *       *       *

Did Rupert Campion speak truth? or has he added one more to the tale of
noble lies?--to Rahab’s and Arria’s and Desdemona’s?




CHAPTER XXIII

                      “Why, he but sleeps!
    If he be dead, we’ll make his grave his bed;
    With female fairies shall thy tomb be haunted.”


Mrs. Darcy has always set her face strongly against forenoon visitors.
The claims of the parish upon her time have never--thorough-going,
though not enthusiastic, clergywoman as she is--preferred at whatever
hour of the day or night, found her wanting. Always the dispensary
ticket, the medicine-chest, the patient ear, the sensible counsel, the
wisely sharp rebuke, the warm fellow-feeling in trouble, are ready. But
that idle country neighbours should drive the ploughshare of their
vacuity through the furrows of her already overfilled forenoon, when
they might just as easily bestow their tediousness upon her
comparatively free afternoon, is beyond the limits of her patience. Her
soul, though taking up its task from the beginning, with the same
handsome willingness as her slender body, has from the first revolted
against being nothing but a clergywoman.

“When I married,” she has said to her one intimate, Lavinia Carew, “I
told myself that, however much I might live in a kailyard, I would _not_
be a cabbage. I would have all the new books, the reviews, and the
_heavy_ magazines, and would be quite up to date; but, my dear, I
reckoned without my host. I did not forecast the frequency with which
Sam Smith would come in with a broken head, and that ass Féodorovna with
a broken heart.”

Yet it is that very Féodorovna who, accompanied by her mother--a mode of
expression which fits their mutual relations--now sits at 11.30 on the
morning of the day that follows Rupert’s first outing in the Chestnuts
Bath chair, in the Rectory drawing-room, without exciting any symptoms
of protest on her hostess’s part. All three women are crying, but, since
there are as many modes of weeping as of laughter, each in a distinctly
different way. Two perfectly silent tears--evidently escaped convicts,
with protesting warders behind them--are making their forbidden way down
Susan Darcy’s pallid cheeks; Féodorovna has buried her face in the sofa
cushion, with much appropriate flourish of White-Rose scented cambric;
and Mrs. Prince is sobbing in that bang-out-loud perfectly unbridled way
which betrays her plebeian origin.

“Oh, Cara!” Miss Prince has just sighed out, “if you would try to
control yourself! if you would not make _quite_ so much noise!”

Mrs. Prince knows that when her daughter addresses her as “Cara,” she
has about touched the nadir of that young lady’s good opinion, and she
makes an honest effort to check her sniffs and gulps.

“It is enough to make any one break down!” she weeps in deprecation--“to
think that only last evening Sir George took the trouble to ride over
to thank us for the loan of the Bath chair, and to tell us what a world
of good it had done the poor fellow! I told him we were only too glad!
After all, what is the use of wealth if it isn’t----” Mrs. Darcy makes a
restless movement. Its owner’s exposition of the philanthropic aspect of
the Candle’s functions is more than she can quite stand at the moment.
“And to think that it was not from the injury to the brain after all!”
resumes the only momentarily interrupted lamenter; “that it should have
been that scratch on the leg that none of us thought anything of! A
_clot!_--that seems the last word of everything now! A _clot_, or
suppressed gout--or cancer! To one of the three we must all come at
last, it seems!”

They remain heavily silent for a minute or two, the great master of joy
and sorrow’s lines ringing in Mrs. Darcy’s head--

    “Golden lads and lasses must,
     Like chimney-sweepers, turn to dust.”

“I suppose that there is no doubt about it _this_ time?” Féodorovna asks
in a tone of refined affliction, intended to contrast in the highest
degree with her parent’s vulgar grief. “Once already he seems to have
actually come back from the dead! But this time I suppose there is
absolutely no----”

“Absolutely none.”

“Would you mind telling us exactly how it all happened?” inquires Mrs.
Prince, with a sort of diffidence born of the recollection of how very
much the rector’s wife had appeared to shrink from the narration of the
original accident. “It seems a shame to trouble you; but really,
trifling as the distance is from here to the Chestnuts, it is
astonishing how things manage to get garbled in the mouths of the
domestics.” Mrs. Prince always calls servants “domestics.”

“Yes, I will tell you,” replies Mrs. Darcy, dabbing her eyes hastily
with a pocket-handkerchief, which at once returns to her pocket, nor
remains _en évidence_ like the other two. The sense of that former
relation is strong on her memory also; but it is coupled with the
feeling of how much less painful and difficult the present one is than
its predecessor. Here there is nothing to wince at or glide over; no
opening for implication or suspicion. “He had been talking to Lavinia
while she gave him his tea; she had left him, thinking him a little
tired, but quite naturally and healthily so after the unusual exertion
of going out of doors for the first time; and about half an hour later
he rang for the footman--you know that since the nurse went he has been
waited on by the ordinary staff, and wonderfully little trouble he
gave--and said he should like to go to bed. He undressed without any
help, and was just going to get into bed when the servant, who had gone
to the other side of the room to fetch something, heard him call out,
‘Quick! the brandy!’ He ran to him as fast as he could, but by the time
he got to him he was----”

“Dead?”

Mrs. Darcy bends her head, as if in reverence as well as acquiescence.

“A clot?”

“Yes.”

“And there was no one but the footman in the room? Which one was it? Oh,
but I forget, since poor Bill went they only keep one!” After a moment’s
pause, “I should not like to die with only a footman in the room.”

Mrs. Darcy is too profoundly sad to see the ludicrousness of the
sentiment expressed; nor even to point out that, in the good
gentlewoman’s case, such a contingency is not likely to occur. She goes
to the open French window, and stands leaning her hot head against the
jamb. Susan had always grumbled that mignonette would not grow with her;
had rejoiced that this year the seed which she had imported from France
had given her an abundance of that chancey fragrance; but now she feels
in angry pain that the perfume from the bed at her foot is too violent
in its sweetness. She will never get seed from Paris again.

“‘Quick! the brandy’!” she hears Féodorovna’s voice repeating from the
sofa with a species of shocked reluctance. “One could have wished that
his last words had not been quite those!”

“Oh, what does it matter what his last words were? What does it matter
what any one’s last words are? We may all be thankful if we get off at
the last, saying nothing worse than that!” cries Mrs. Darcy, turning
round upon the speaker in a frenzy of nervous exasperation.

It is not often that the rector’s wife allows herself the dear
indulgence of lashing out at Féodorovna; probably because she knows with
what a right good will her heels, if given free scope, would flourish
figuratively in Miss Prince’s silly face. The unaccustomed rebuff sends
its object toque forwards again into the sofa cushion, from which,
however, she emerges rather hurriedly, expelled by a toy rabbit hidden
beneath it by Serena on her last visit to the drawing-room, and which
squeaks when pressed.

“It seems so dreadful to have it all to do over again, as you may say,”
ejaculates the elder visitor, presently. “How do they take it _this_
time?”

“The old man is completely broken down,” comes the response in a key of
quivering pity. “But Lavinia is very brave.” The moment that the phrase
is out of her mouth, Susan dislikes and regrets it. How redolent it is
of mock-grief! What a decent euphemism for the exultation that dares not
yet awhile show its face! How often has she heard it applied to a widow
for whom the lover--kept in comparative obscurity during many impatient
years--is waiting round the corner to pounce upon when the grudged
twelvemonth is out! Fortunately, the expression seems to have no such
association for her auditors.

“Poor girl! she will break down later!” is Mrs. Prince’s compassionate
comment, uttered with a sort of satisfaction at the certainty of
Lavinia’s ultimate collapse.

“Perhaps.”

“It is so impossible to realize that only this time yesterday they sent
us back the leg-rest. I believe they had never used it.”

“There had been no need for it.”

“‘In the midst of life we are in death!’ Oh how true that is!”

“But oh, mother, how _banal_!” cries Féodorovna, disgustedly. “And you
have said it three times already!”

It is the one solitary instance in their two existences in which Mrs.
Darcy is “with” Miss Prince. But the insult to her “parts of speech”
brings the parent up to one of her rare revolts against the tyranny of
her offspring.

“Well,” she retorts tartly, “I suppose we cannot always, all of us, be
original. After all, there is nothing very original in death and
sorrow--and--and judgment!”

“Oh, but that poor text _is_ worn so threadbare; it has hardly a rag of
clothes left on its back! Well, good-bye, Mrs. Darcy,” taking the
initiative in departure, as she always does when visiting in her
mother’s company. “Tell Lavinia that though she will not see me, I am
with her incessantly in spirit. _She_ knows that _I_ know what sorrow
is.”

Mrs. Prince follows with her blunter adieux. “Well, good-bye. Give the
poor things any message from me you can make up that you think will
comfort them. And if there is any difficulty about catering--in these
cases there is always a good deal of coming and going, and consequent
eating and drinking--just tell Lavinia to send everybody straight up to
the Chestnuts. In an establishment of the size of ours, half a dozen
more or less make no sort of difference. Well, good-bye, again. I am
terribly upset. I think it is a hundred times worse than last time!”

But from this assertion of the superior tragedy of the present drama to
that enacted on the same stage seven weeks ago, Mrs. Darcy’s whole soul
dissents. In the relief of recovered solitude she goes once again to the
French window, once again leans her hot head against the jamb, but this
time, in the intensity of her thinking, the over-sweetness of the
mignonette in the bed at her feet goes unnoticed. The shows of things
pass before her in their utter falsity, shouldered away by the
underlying realities. To outward seeming how incomparably sadder it
appears that Rupert should be rent away from life just when--as if in
brutal practical jest--he had been restored to her warm mother’s arms;
just when hope was wheeling round him on her strong pinions, and love--

    “With turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,”

than that he should be transferred from bed to grave, for ever
unconscious of the change!

Yet to her whom his going or staying most concerns, how beyond all words
less terrible is this real death of the young man than the counterfeit
one of seven weeks ago! Seven weeks ago he would have departed in
relentless silence, unpursuable through the infinities of eternity by
any agony of prayer or pleading, leaving behind him a wretched woman
with her debt for ever uncancelled, with the hounds of remorse for ever
on her track. Whereas now, as Susan has already learnt from her to whom
by his graceful dying he has renounced all claim, he has departed in
magnanimous reconcilement, and selfless forethought for that future of
hers in which he will have no share. Yes; it has been well done of him
thus to die, tactful, like himself! She articulates the word under her
breath, and, hearing them, catches herself up, aghast at the drift of
her own musings.

Is it possible that she can have allowed a little satisfaction in such a
calamity to creep into her mind? a little furtive thankfulness at her
friend’s release from the meshes of that terrible net which the fowler
Fate had spread for her? Has she--she herself--no pity for the old man,
who, as all the parish now knows, has the hand of Death--though a
temporarily suspended hand--upon him? The old man out of whose weak
grasp the staff has been ruthlessly knocked, before the few more steps
during which he would have asked its support, have been paced? Has she
no pity for the young man himself, mulcted of five and forty of his
seventy due years, juggled out of bride and hearth, pitchforked into the
unknown? Rupert had always gone to the wall. What a willing hand she
herself had until lately--once again she thanks God that there is a
“till lately”--lent to thrust and keep him there! Rupert has once more
gone to the wall! Rupert is “out of the way!” Never in his lifetime
would he have willingly been in it; but now he is finally “out of the
way!”




CHAPTER XXIV

        “It was the winter wild,
        While the heaven-born child,
    All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
        Nature, in awe to him,
        Had doffed her gaudy trim,
    With her great Matter so to sympathies:
      It was no season then for her
    To wanton with the Sun her lusty paramour.”


No one can qualify by the epithet “wild” the Christmas that follows
Rupert Campion’s death. It comes simpering in with a faded grey smile,
swishy soft gusts, and a mock-April taste; and the Darcy family are
conscious of no sting or frost-prick in cheek or finger as they stand
silently round the new cross that heads Rupert’s grave, and to whose
final erection the workmen gave their last touches only two hours ago.
For Rupert has elected to lie in the open, having notified his wish in a
small memorandum, placed where it was certain to be found; and which
proves that him at least the ambushed enemy had not surprised by his
spring.

                         Sacred to the Memory
                                  of
                           WILLIAM DEVEREUX,
       Elder Son of Sir GEORGE CAMPION, Bart., of Campion Place,
                        in the County of Kent,
                  Who nobly lost his life in rescuing
       a brother officer from death, while serving his Queen and
                    Country, on the Field of Battle
                           in South Africa.

                                Also of
                             RUPERT LOVEL,
                       Younger Son of the above,
                Who not less heroically died in saving
        the life of a fellow-creature on a less glorious field.

“They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they
                       were not (long) divided.”

By the time that Susan Darcy’s eyes have reached the last line of leaded
letters, they serve her but ill; yet she can see the hackneyed text well
enough to feel sure that it is not of Lavinia’s choosing. In her mind’s
eye she can see the lonely pair bending together over the drafted
inscription; the first mute, and then hesitatingly murmured hint of
disapproval on the part of Lavinia, and the determined angry overriding
of her gentle objection on that of the poor old man.

“Bill would not have cared,” says Susan to herself, quaintly calling
back to life the two dead young men to give a verdict on their own
tombstone; “but Rupert would have hated it.”

Her musings are broken into by an objection of another sort, whispered
with the accompaniment of eyes shining in distressed partisanship by
her eldest daughter.

“Oh, mother, ‘not less heroically’! Surely it was not nearly so grand as
carrying off Captain Binning!”

“It was not so showy,” answers Mrs. Darcy, lifting her eyes to the high
summit of the cross itself, where, if she has been defeated as to the
choice of a memorial text, it is clear that Lavinia’s taste has
prevailed.

Once again with sure intuition the rector’s wife sees the contest that
has been waged, and in which Lavinia has came off victor, between the
Necropolis polished granite or alien white marble shivering under
England’s weeping skies, of Sir George’s preference; and the rough stone
of the country, soaring up in the fashion of the solemnly beautiful old
Saxon crosses, wrought with figures and emblems of a faith yet young, of
Lavinia’s predilection.

“She must have had a tussle for it!” Susan says, once again addressing
herself, and adding to her inward remark the rider, “How well I know
her!” A second reflection corrects the present tense, “Should I not
rather say, ‘How well I _knew_ her’? Shall I know her as well when I see
her to-morrow after these five months of absence? Five months to-day
since they went! How little she has told me in her letters! Have our
souls grown so far apart, while she has been passing through her burning
fiery furnace, and I have been scolding the children, and ordering
dinner, and emptying my medicine-chest down the parish throats, that
they will not know each other when they meet?” A deeper thought laden
with misgiving follows. Does the Refiner Himself recognize the silver
that He has thrown into the melting-pot when it emerges again?

It is not often that the rector’s busy wife can stand idle, deeply sunk
in meditations, which her children, with their customary nice feeling,
refrain from infringing by any of their usually numberless appeals. With
noiseless reverence they are laying their wreath, made of flowers bought
at the Shipstone florist’s at a cost that has chipped a large paring off
the two next birthdays, which jostle Christmas so expensively close, on
the just replaced turf.

“We heard that it was up!” says a voice beside her, awaking Mrs. Darcy
out of her grave musings, to find herself with two members of the Prince
family, each laden with a magnificent “floral tribute” on either hand.

“Yes; it was finished this afternoon,” she answers, giving a slight
start, and speaking involuntarily half under her breath.

“_What_ a beautiful text!” sighs Mrs. Prince, letting fall the
tortoiseshell eye-glass which has helped her to read the inscription.
“It is the one that, if it were possible, I should choose out of all the
Bible to have placed over me.”

“Unless you die simultaneously with my father, I do not quite see how it
is to be managed!” answers Féodorovna, disagreeably.

Her mother reddens a little. “I do not see that that follows! Six months
and more elapsed between the deaths of these dear fellows; and yet what
can be more suitable and lovely?”

Miss Prince does not waste breath upon a rejoinder, but stoops her long
body to place a superb cross of lilies-of-the-valley, which seems
instantaneously to wipe out of existence the modest Shipstone Roman
hyacinths, with their one frugal arum lily, in a prominent position upon
the grave.

The young donors of the eclipsed offering stand by with swelling hearts.
Their Christmas gift to the dead has pinched them to the extent of
absolutely precluding the purchase of “Bobs’” last photograph,
tantalizingly beaming on them from the stationer’s front window, to the
attainment of which their mother has stony-heartedly refused to help
them with a loan; and about which Miss Brine has benightedly observed
that thirty photographs of one individual must be enough for any private
collection, were he ten times as great a hero as Lord Roberts. The
monstrousness of the supposition that any such hypothetical demi-god can
exist or ever has existed, and the consequent conviction that the
governess is a pro-Boer, produces a warmth of feeling against that lady,
which her departure upon her Christmas holidays only partially cools.

“They are coming home to-night, I hear,” says Mrs. Prince, stopping, in
her turn, to deposit her sumptuous circle of orchids, but laying it
unobtrusively just within the stone coping at the grave-foot, and
somehow not making the children feel as small as Féodorovna had done.

“I believe so.”

“_What_ a home-coming!” raising and straightening herself again.

“Yes.”

“All animals creep to their lairs to die,” pursues Mrs. Prince, shaking
her head, and with a poetic excursion into the regions of natural
history not usual with her. “I suppose that that is his feeling.”

“I suppose so.”

“How dreadfully flat those boys are singing!” says Féodorovna,
affectedly, putting her hands over her ears to exclude the sound of the
choir practice, floating in annual struggle with the Christmas anthem
from the just dim-lit church.

Féodorovna’s ear for music has never been her strong point, and a jarred
surprise at the pretended suffering mixes with Mrs. Darcy’s disgust at
the petulant bad taste of the interjection.

“Shall we see poor Lavinia at church to-morrow, do you think?” asks Mrs.
Prince, real kindliness struggling in her tone with a rather morbid
curiosity. “I declare that I shall hardly dare to look in the direction
of their seat. What a life she must have led during these last five
months, _tête-à-tête_ in cheap lodgings, for I fear their means would
not run to anything very luxurious--with that poor old gentleman going
over the same sad story, day after day, day after day, as he did in the
case of Bill! And I am afraid that sickness is not likely to have
improved his temper. I am sure that I should not be surprised to hear
that her reason had given way.”

The apprehension expressed has certainly no novelty for Mrs. Darcy. It
has rung ominously in her ears many times since her last sight of the
friend whose short letters, dated from so long a succession of dreary
health resorts, as to prove the dying restlessness which is upon the old
man, tell her so little in their uncomplaining brevity. Perhaps it is
the grafting of another’s crude, bald words upon her own scarcely
permitted thought, which makes both seem unendurable. She turns hastily
away, and all follow her from the grave, since, as far as the churchyard
gate, their roads lie together.

Twilight has come upon them as they stand; twilight passing in dim
gallop into darkness--a darkness that will never be relieved by the
little paltry moon, making its poor fight with the dominant vapours.
Silence has fallen upon the two elder women; but the tongues of the
children, following hard behind with Féodorovna, are loosed.

“Mother heard from Captain Binning by last mail,” Susan hears Phillida
say, in the tone of one communicating a piece of news of whose
acceptability to its hearer there can be no doubt; and Miss Prince’s
rather ostentatiously indifferent rejoinder.

“Oh, did she?”

“He told her the details of that fight near Snyman’s Post, which we saw
the account of in the _Times_, when he was mentioned in despatches; not
that he said a word about _that_, trust him,” in a tone of almost
personal pride in the joint valour and reticence of the related fact.

“The Boers had rushed a picket, which gave them good cover to pour in a
heavy fire at close range upon us, but after two hours’ hard fighting
we beat them off with heavy loss.”

“Anyhow, we knocked the stuffing out of Commandant Reitz that time,”
chimes in Christopher, taking up the chant of triumph.

The young Darcys have never been fond of Miss Prince; but at least, upon
the all-important subject of the war, they have imagined her views to be
in absolute harmony with their own. What, then, is their stupefaction at
her comment upon their pieces of intelligence?

“How brutal! and how brutalizing!” she says with a delicate shudder of
disgust.

“They do not know: how should they?” says Mrs. Prince, lowering her
voice. “But Féo has lost all interest in the war. She has got a new
hobby. It is music. You heard what she said about the choir singing
flat. There is a young organist at Shipstone who, according to her, is
something quite out of the way. He won the F.R.C.O., whatever that may
be, last year; and she goes every day to hear him play. Well,” with
resigned appeal, “it is a nice taste, isn’t it? and her mind is so
active, that she must have something to occupy it; but she _used_ not to
know one note from another.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The silence of children gone to bed, and of a rector having his final
wrestle with the difficulty which he must share with many thousand
clerical brothers, of saying something original upon the morrow’s
anniversary, broods upon the Rectory. Half a dozen Christmas sermons of
previous years lie neatly typewritten before Mr. Darcy, so that
recognizable repetitions may be avoided. The double doubt as to whether
he dare repeat a simile, certainly felicitous, but whose very excellence
may make it remembered, and which had occurred in his discourse of ’96,
coupled with the question as to whether he shall insert any allusion to
Rupert Campion’s death, keeps him sitting with suspended pen at his
knee-hole writing-table, though the church clock has struck ten.

Over the drawing-room fire Mrs. Darcy is sitting alone, with hands
stretched out flamewards, telling herself that, in view of the fatigue
of Christmas Day, with its workhouse dinner, its school tea, and many
etceteras of festal labour, she ought to go to bed; but, reconciling
herself to her disobedience to the inward fiat by the fallacy that it
would be extravagant to leave so good a fire to burn itself out alone.
Her tired body is in the Rectory drawing-room, but her intensely awake
soul has travelled across the road, and up the sloping garden of Campion
Place, to where, behind the latched shutters, the returned wanderers sit
in the aloofness lent by their crown of sorrows. They were to arrive at
half-past eight o’clock. Would she have done better if she had been on
the doorstep to receive them? It was a feeling of delicacy that had kept
her away; but would it not have been better to have risked being
indelicate, so that _one_ pair of arms might be opened to enfold the
desolate couple, and put a little warmth into the deadly chill of their
naked home-coming? Sir George has certainly gone to bed by now. The
later accounts of his condition, bare of detail as they have been, have
indicated a declension into completely invalid habits. Lavinia as
certainly is sitting over the fire alone--alone, like herself--but,
unlike herself, with no nursery-ful of kissed children, no dear, pompous
devoted husband so filling the vacant chambers of her heart, that
absence means but a keener sense of their beloved presence. The telling
her own riches strikes the rector’s wife with a generous compunction,
almost a feeling of guilt towards her friend in her cold heart-poverty.

“If I had only hung up a stocking for her!” she cries inwardly; and then
derides herself for the puerility of the thought. “What gift capable of
gladdening Lavinia’s Christmas morning could Santa Claus himself put
into her stocking? If it were not so late!” she says to herself, a
moment afterwards; “if the bell would not wake Sir George----”

Restless with the thought of the other’s forlorn neighbourhood, suddenly
feeling that it is impossible to lay down her own tired limbs until they
have carried her over the way to the mournful house darkening on the
hillside above her, Susan rises, and, pulling aside the window-curtain,
looks out--since the Rectory does not belong to the solid-shuttered
breed of its eighteenth-century neighbour--on the night. It is such as
the afternoon had promised--still, black, and murk; the little absurd
finger-nail-paring of a moon wholly vanished behind the opaque vapours.

“I could find my way blindfold!” is the undeterred looker’s thought; and
so goes out into the hall, snatches a bowler hat and an Inverness cape
from the stand, and, unbarring the hall-door, starts back with a sudden
shiver of alarm; for, before her, stands a tall dark figure, with a
lantern in its hand.

“I was just making up my mind to ring!” says the voice of Lavinia.
“What! Were you going out? Were you coming to me?”

“Great wits jump!” answers Susan, with a tremulous laugh, “Come in! come
in!” and so pulls the girl over the threshold by her cold gloveless
fingers, and into the glowing warmth.

“I must not forget my lantern! I do not know what I should have done
without it! I could not see an inch before my face!”

“It is a pitchy night!”

Each utters her _banalité_ mechanically--the elder in a strange moved
shyness; the younger taking hungry possession, with her drawn eyes, of
each familiar object.

“I had just been reproaching myself for not having hung up a stocking
for you!” Susan says, with another nervous laugh.

“What would you have put into it?”

They are standing opposite each other on the hearthrug, Lavinia’s hand
still lying in Mrs. Darcy’s clasp. Is it possible, the latter asks
herself, in astonished self-chiding, that this stupid new shyness has
mastered her so far as to make her wonder how soon it would be proper to
release it? Lavinia herself solves the problem. Gently disengaging her
fingers, she throws back the hood of her cloak, and, for a heart-beat
or two, they take silent stock of each other. The long thick wrap
conceals the girl’s figure, but face and hands betray that Miss Carew
has dwindled to half her size. Yet did ever saner eyes look out from
under level brows? Whatever else has happened, Mrs. Prince’s lugubrious
prognostic is not fulfilled. Lavinia Carew’s reason has _not_ given way.

“You have grown very thin!”

“Do not you remember that Rupert always used to laugh at me for my dread
of getting fat?” Then, seeing the startled half-frightened look in her
friend’s face, “You wonder that I am able to mention him? Well, I have
had good practice; for five months we have never talked of anything
else! No!”--correcting herself--“I am wrong. Sometimes we have talked of
Bill, but never, _never_, NEVER of anything else!”

“For _five_ months?”

“Every day for five months--sometimes _twice_ a day, for his mind is a
good deal gone--I have given him all, or”--with a slight shiver--“almost
all the details of the--the _accident_! If I had been asked beforehand,
I should have thought that even an allusion to it would drive me mad;
and I have had to describe it twice a day!” She makes her narration in a
perfectly collected level voice, and her friend’s false shyness dies for
ever, overwhelmed by an avalanche of compassion.

“How are you alive?” she asks almost inaudibly.

“You must not pity me!” returns the other, still with the awe-inspiring
calm of one that has reached the limit of possible suffering, and come
out beyond it into the dead waters of numbed endurance. “Other
people--_all_ other people would do that; but I expect _you_ to
understand. I am _glad_ to be punished! glad to be working out my
sentence like a convict. It is the only thing that has given me any
ease! I think that even Rupert, if he can see me--I do not think that he
much believed that he would be able”--with a dragging accent of
sorrowful reluctance--“but if he can, even he will think the expiation
is not out of proportion to the offence!”

“It is an idea that would never have occurred to him!” says Mrs. Darcy,
in a tone of the gentlest chiding. “You are forgetting him!”

“_Forgetting_ him!” repeats Lavinia, slowly. “Yes,” after a slight
pause, “you are right; crediting him with dismal dogmas of retribution,
that he would have abhorred! Yes, I must be forgetting him!”

“My dear,” comes the voice of the rector, opening the door and looking
in, with a brow cleared by having decided to omit the ’96 flower of
speech, and defer the allusion to Rupert till New Year’s Eve, “what has
possessed you to unbar the hall-door? It surely is not a night for
star-gazing! _Miss Carew!_”

       *       *       *       *       *

The Darcy Christmas Day has been worked through with its usual cheerful
thoroughness. The reciprocal presentations; the church services; the
workhouse dinner; the school-children’s tea, with its posthumous
accompaniment of oranges and crackers; the servants’ evening
party;--nothing has been scamped. The family Christmas gift to the
poodle has been a photograph of Binning, which he wears upon his
brow--all other available parts of his person being already occupied by
the effigies of general officers--when he is walked by his beautifully
frilled fore paws between Phillida and Daphne into the mistletoed
kitchen to open the ball.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lavinia’s Christmas Day has been worked through too, though in a
different fashion. Mrs. Prince may cast her eyes upon the Campions’ seat
in church without any fear of a shock to her nerves, for it is as empty
as it has been for the last five months. Sir George is too much tired by
his journey for his niece to leave him; yet in the afternoon--an
afternoon furnished with the apposite Christmas brightness which had
been so lacking yesterday--he insists upon being dressed, and leaning on
Lavinia’s arm walks, with less of tottering in his gait than she had
feared, to the churchyard, to see the new cross, about which he has been
restlessly talking, asking, wondering, through half the night.

“I should personally have preferred granite, but as usual I was
overruled!” he says fretfully; then divining and remorseful for her
distress, adds, “But it is not amiss.”

Both are silent for a little space, reading the inscription, which, by
long debating over, amending, altering, has grown so familiar to both.

“It was his own choice to lie out here!” says Sir George, presently. “It
would have seemed more natural that he should be buried with the rest of
us--with his mother; but he always was rather a sport among us!”

Lavinia assents with a little heart-full nod.

“It is dull of me,” pursues the old man, while a puzzled look comes into
his dim eyes; “but I can’t recall how we learnt his wishes! He could not
have _told_ us.”

“We found them written on a sheet of note-paper just inside the middle
drawer of his writing-table,” replies Lavinia, with the gentle ready
distinctness of one who, with perfect patience, has given the same
explanation many times before.

“Ah, yes! that was it, of course. He was always fond of scribbling, poor
fellow!”--with a look of relief at the recovered explanation. A moment
later, in a low key of compunction, “And I used to get so out of
patience with him, and ask whether he was writing a sonnet to his own
eyebrow! What right had I to sneer at him because he was not cut on the
same pattern as myself?”

“He did not mind, dear,” very softly, with a pressure against her side
of the wasted arm leaning on hers. Another silence, while about the
steady peace of the church tower the jackdaws fly and call in cheerful
harshness, and from behind the bravery of his little orange-tawny breast
a robin throws out his living gladness across the Christmas-decked
graves.

“Two brave boys!” says Sir George after a pause; but now there is a
note of triumphant pride in the father’s voice. “I always knew that I
had _one_! but I little thought the day would come when I should be able
to say that there is not a pin to pick between them! not a pin to pick
between them!”




CHAPTER XXV

    “It is for homely features to keep home,
     They have their name thence; coarse complexions
     And cheeks of sorry grain have leave to ply
     The sampler, and to tease the house-wife’s wool.
     What need a vermeil-tinctured lip for that?
     Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn?”


The August sun is assuring the Rectory garden, as plainly as his beams
can speak, that no scurvy trick shall be played with the marquee erected
this morning with some trepidation of spirit--since the two previous
days have been rainy--on the cricket-ground. In proof of his good faith,
the God of Day is dragging their hottest spices out of the petunias and
heliotropes, and out of Miss Brine the prudent counsel, addressed to her
pupils, to put cabbage leaves in their hats. But how can paltry
apprehensions of the off-chance of a sunstroke influence minds occupied
by the knowledge that the whole air is full of the sense of approaching
festivity? Have not the hen-coops been moved from the banks of the
Tugela River, in order that rounders may be played there? Is not there
to be a tug-of-war on the grass plot before the front door? Has not a
“donkey” been erected in a clear space of the shrubbery? Are not
numerous old boxes being chopped up into trays, to be used for
tobogganing down the steep slope above the parterre? That the treat to
the choir boys of St. Gengulpha’s Church, Martin Street, Soho, London,
which in her maiden days Mrs. Darcy used, for the sake of its excellent
music, to frequent, is an annual one, does not lessen the excitement
with which the arrival of the early afternoon train, and the hired brake
and Rectory waggonette that convey the guests from Sutton Rivers
station, is expected.

That blissful date is still three hours off, for eleven o’clock has just
told its last stroke from the church tower as Mrs. Darcy, calm with the
consciousness of made cakes, garnished dishes, and arrived chairs, puts
foot across the threshold of the cool drawing-room of Campion Place.
There is purpose in her eye, and resolution in her step, as she lightly
crosses the carpet, and lays her hands on the shoulders of a black
figure, sitting with its back to her, writing at a bureau. The figure
puts out an abstracted hand backwards in acknowledgment of what is
evidently a very familiar interruption, but her attention remains
rivetted upon the “slips” before her.

“Isn’t it astonishing that the corrector of the press can let such
mistakes pass?” she asks, indignantly. “Twice they have printed _snouts_
for ‘shouts,’ and _liver_ for ‘lover’! It makes such dreadful gibberish
of the lines.”

Mrs. Darcy looks over Lavinia’s shoulder, and verifies the blunders
alluded to; but it is clear that the attention given is but a
half-hearted one. In the early days of black emptiness which had
followed Sir George’s death in the previous January, of occupation gone,
and spirits drooping to the very earth that had closed over the last of
her “men,” Susan had welcomed for Lavinia the editing of Rupert’s
“Remains” as a salutary distraction; but of late she has remorsefully to
own to herself that she has grown rather tired of that “volume of
posthumous verse,” which takes such a long time in preparing for the
press, and the emendating, noting, and prefacing of which, by her
friend’s not very practised pen, has robbed the latter of so many of the
little out-door joys which stand first in the pharmacy of grief-healing.

Miss Carew apparently divines the faintness of her friend’s sympathy,
for she changes the subject.

“I sent the spoons and forks this morning! Have you enough now?”

“Plenty.”

“Do you want any knives?”

“Bless your heart, no! Mrs. Prince has lent enough to cut the throats of
the whole township.”

“And how about fruit? There are still a good many white currants under
the nets on the north wall.”

“Currants!” repeats Mrs. Darcy, with affected scorn. “If you could see
the size of the grapes that arrived, personally conducted by Féodorovna,
just as we were sitting down to dinner last night, you would blush for
such a suggestion.”

“I withdraw it,” replies the other, with a slight grave smile; adding,
“One laughs at them, but they really are wonderfully kind.”

“This was not a case of undiluted kindness,” says the rector’s wife,
with her light and stingless sarcasm. “The grapes were but incidental;
the real object of her visit--I wish she would not pay morning calls
just as the soup tureen is entering the dining-room--was to ask for an
invitation for to-day for her organist.”

“And you gave it?”

“Of course! Am I ever harsh to true first love?” ironically. “She went
conscientiously through his achievements all the same. How well we know
them, don’t we?”

“As a little boy of ten he won sight-reading prizes at local
competitions, while earning his bread as organist of Sutton Rivers
Church!” replies Lavinia, the long-absent dimple showing itself
cautiously in her left cheek, as she responds promptly to the call upon
her memory.

“He had to go to the College of Music unusually late,” rejoins Susan,
snatching the words out of her friend’s mouth in triumphant patter;
“but, nevertheless, took his A.R.C.M. in theory, the stiffest exam. the
Royal College affords, with ninety-nine marks out of a maximum of a
hundred!”

Lavinia breaks in hurriedly. “He is composing an organ fugue in G minor,
which has something of the strength and purity of design of Bach!”

They both pause to laugh; but Lavinia’s eyes, falling on the MS., grow
suddenly serious again.

“I wonder has she yet offered him marriage?” she says, a remnant of
amusement piercing through the habitual sadness of her face.

“It is time that she did,” replies Mrs. Darcy, in the same key; adding,
after a moment’s reflection, and in a lower tone, “It is quite fifteen
months since she last proposed to any one.”

Lavinia lays down her slips upon the blotting-pad, and sits looking
straight in front of her, while with an awful clearness rise before her
mind’s eye the events so inextricably entangled with Miss Prince’s
declaration to Binning.

“Why did you say that?” she asks, after a pause of quickened breathing,
to which her friend listens with a trepidation which does not hinder a
very valiant resolution to persevere.

“Because you never allow me to mention him; because, as I may not speak
of him naturally and simply, I must drag him in by the head and
shoulders.”

No answer.

“Isn’t it a puerility to banish him from your speech--to go half a mile
out of your way to avoid speaking his poor name--when we both know that
he is never for one moment out of your thoughts? No; don’t interrupt me!
I will have my say out this time! Never for one moment out of your
thoughts--not even when you are laying eucharis lilies on Sir George’s
grave, or editing Rupert’s poems.”

Lavinia’s only answer is to take her hands off the manuscript before
her, as if the indictment made against her rendered her unworthy to
touch it; and her long arms drop to her side.

“Can you deny it?” asks Mrs. Darcy, her _spirituelle_ pale face flushing
with excitement, thinking that she may as well be killed for a sheep as
a lamb, and kneeling down beside her friend to get compelling possession
of one of her hands. “I insist upon your answering me!”

For a moment or two of misgiving it seems to the rector’s wife as if her
audacity of asking were to break against the same obstinacy of morbid
silence as has rebuffed all her previous efforts to speak a forbidden
name; but, after a while, Lavinia answers, a great sigh seeming to tear
the words out of her breast--

“I do not deny it; though why you should have the brutality to force me
to own it to-day, particularly, I do not know!”

“Because he is in England!” replies Susan, speaking very softly, with a
kindly dew of moisture, making tender her usually keen eyes; “because,
this morning, I had a letter from him, with a London postmark!”

The slips of Rupert’s poems blow off the bureau, and on to the floor,
wafted to earth by the irony of a warm gust from the honied garden-beds
outside; but Lavinia is not aware of it. The one hand that she has at
liberty flies up to her forehead, as though she were blinded by a sudden
light.

“You _must_ have seen in the papers that the _Isis_, with his regiment
on board, had reached Southampton; but, perhaps”--with a slight return
of satire lightening the gravity of her eager tones--“perhaps--to be
consistent--you do not allow yourself to glance at the war news.”

“I did not at first,” answers the girl, still looking straight before
her, with eyes that yet feel dazzled; “I thought it ought to be part of
my punishment; but,” faltering, “I had not resolution enough to keep to
it. And, even if I had, it would have been no use. The children----”

“Yes,” returns the mother, with a rather quivering pride in her voice;
“it would be difficult to be long in the company of my progeny without
hearing the name of _Binning_”--pronouncing it with a ringing clearness.
“_They_, at least, are faithful to the one hero whom they can call
friend!”

At the thus audaciously syllabled name, whose utterance has been tacitly
prohibited between them for over a year, Lavinia gives a low cry. But in
the over-set face that she suddenly turns upon her friend there is no
anger, only an immense mazed joy, fighting its way out of the Bastille
of the long remorseful sorrow that has prisoned and gagged it; and her
fair head falls forward on the shoulder of Binning’s advocate. Through
the thin fabric of her gown Mrs. Darcy feels the glow of the hidden
face, and it spurs her to fresh effort.

“Are you not rather tired of being _dead_?” she whispers. “It is all
very well for a time, but it must pall! Come back to life! Put off these
hateful weeds, put on a white gown, and come back to life _to-day_!
Believe me”--with an accent of exulting persuasiveness--“you could not
choose a better moment!”

       *       *       *       *       *

The party to the choir boys of St. Gengulpha’s is being put through with
the thoroughness which, since Mrs. Darcy’s advent, fifteen years ago,
has characterized all the Rectory functions; and, indeed, is drawing
towards its close. For four sunshiny hours, twenty happy boys in
flannels, with sharp towny faces, have been expatiating about the
grounds, and have drunk to the full of the varied entertainments offered
them--entertainments shared by half the neighbourhood, annually
compelled by Mrs. Darcy to come in to her aid. The Vicar of St.
Gengulpha’s and his curates--lean men with intellectual faces, supported
by the gamest of their pale choir boys, have stretched muscles that yet
remember the playing-fields and the Isis, in the best tug-of-war in the
Campion records, against the rector and his inferior songsters. The
smartest young ladies of the neighbourhood have not disdained, though
hampered by long-tailed swishy gowns, to join in a game of rounders with
the visitors, nor do the inelegance of their futile efforts to get their
draperies out of the way, nor the potency of the sun’s beams at all
reduce the good will and perseverance with which they arduously scamper.
The “donkey” has repeatedly conquered and been conquered. The donkey is
an apocryphal animal, with a wooden head; and, for body, a revolving
barrel, mounted on whose elusive convexity the rider has to snatch a
threepenny bit from its distant nose. Many are the ignominious falls
given by him, many the glorious victories won over his treacherously
turning barrel-stomach. For the lesser boys the threepence is placed
further up the nose, within easier reach of the little anxiously
grabbing hand; and frequent are the cheaply generous petitions proffered
by elder lads in behalf of their small companions.

“Mightn’t ’e ’ave it a bit nearer, sir? ’e’s only a little chap!”

And the rector, in flannels, having laid aside his pompousness with his
broadcloth, hot, genial, turning the handle of his wooden steed with
right good will, feigning to be inexorable, always accedes. Then, after
tea in the tent--tea in whose distribution every one, even to Serena and
the poodle, assist; after Orpheus glees sung in the dining-room, comes
the crowning final joy of the toboggan.

“One! two! three! Are you ready?”

The eager scramble up the hillock; the emulous turning round the bag
which sits at the top on a sort of milestone; the getting on to your
tea-tray; the difficulty of keeping your feet on it--an indispensable
condition of success; the mad sliding run down to the grass at the
foot--once or twice the impetus carrying the boy divorced from his tray,
and landing him on the gravel walk, with barked elbows and shins;--who
can wonder that, in comparison with such pleasures, the donkey himself
grows pale?

The party has been in full swing, before a guest, who, if an oath to
appear at it had not been exacted from her, would certainly never have
found courage to face it, is seen to be in the midst of associates from
whom she has been so long withdrawn. Lavinia is late--a tardiness not to
be accounted for by the simplicity of her toilette, since no one knows
with what a long delay of backward-looking apology, with what remorseful
cryings-out for forgiveness to her “men” for seeming to forget them, she
has put off her black gown, and invested herself in the white muslin
which feels like a travesty. It is with something of the shamed shyness
of one who suddenly finds himself in broad daylight among a party of
ordinarily dressed men and women, clad in the extravagance of a fancy
garb, that Miss Carew appears among the acquaintances from whom, for
over a year, she has held aloof.

What has she to do amid all this movement and colour and gaiety? Because
she has been dragged out of her darkness into light, and had her fetters
suddenly knocked off, does that make her a fit member of this happy
company? They look at her or she fancies so, strangely; some to whom she
has been perfectly well known in former days, not even recognizing her.
That she is changed in appearance she has long been indifferently aware;
colour and flesh melted away in the smelting-pot of her great
affliction, branded with the broad arrow of her uneffaceable suffering.
But that she should have become unrecognizable! The unexpected smart of
that discovery blinds her to the fact of how faint a hold upon another’s
identity is possessed by any human being; of how small a change of
costume, _locale_, or circumstance, will confuse the doubtful and
inaccurate knowledge which we can master of even the exterior of our
fellow-creatures! Nor does she realize that in the general centreing of
attention on the objects of the entertainment, the unobtrusive addition
of one more to the already considerable number of tall white maidens on
the grounds may momentarily pass without notice. It is with relief and
gratitude that, as she moves along in humiliated shyness, with that
mazed sense of unreality which has been upon her ever since Mrs. Darcy’s
morning visit, she hears herself interpolated by the familiar voice of
Mrs. Prince.

“Lavinia! Why, I can scarcely believe my eyes!”

“_You_ at least know me!” replies the girl, holding out a hand that
seems scarcely to belong to herself, in the unfamiliarity of its white
glove.

“Know you, my dear? Why should not I know you when I see you almost
every day of my life? Why, in Heaven’s name, shouldn’t I know you?”

“Other people don’t!” replies Lavinia, sombrely. “I passed Lady
Greenhithe just now, and she looked perfectly blankly at me. And even
Féodorovna; but then _she_ was----” Miss Carew apparently alters her
intention of finishing her sentence, for she pauses.

“Féodorovna!” repeats Mrs. Prince, an anxious furrow on her brow
becoming suddenly more pronounced. “By-the-by, where is she? She
disappeared almost as soon as we arrived. Did you say that you had seen
her?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“At the back of the tent.”

“Was she--alone?” with a very apparent apprehension as to what the
answer will be.

“No--o; Mr. Sharp--the Shipstone organist, I mean--was with her.”

Mrs. Prince heaves a mortified sigh that is yet tempered with
philosophy.

“I wish she had stuck to the army!” she says, shrugging her shoulders.
“Neither Mr. Prince nor I would have objected to an army man!”




CHAPTER XXVI

    “If I depart from thee I cannot live;
     And in thy sight to die, what were it else
     But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?”


After all, Lavinia is not unrecognizable. Scarcely has she left Mrs.
Prince, whose brow is still creased by the thought of an imminent
son-in-law, when one and another claim greetings from her, and in half
an hour she has shaken hands with three parts of the gathering; has been
presented to the strange clergy--St. Gengulpha’s has a new vicar since
last year--and been cordially pressed by Christopher to feel the biceps
of one of the East End curate’s arms, which has shown its merits in the
just-ended tug-of-war.

In the eyes of all them to whom she was already known, has been welcome,
a little hesitating surprise, and a not unkindly curiosity. They know
that she has passed through deep waters since last in her bloom and
bonniness they had looked upon her, though they little guess the awful
Dead Sea bitterness of taste of the waters that have gone over her. Is
she recovered enough to be treated like any one else? Will it be better
to allude to her long absence, rejoicing in its having ended; or to
take her reappearance for granted? Some answer the question in one way
and some in the other, as tact or insight diversely guides them; and she
responds quietly to all, with a gravely grateful look from under the
frills of her white muslin hat, and that overpowering sense that the
acquaintances that accost her are no more real than she herself. But she
is not unrecognizable! Through the haze that enwraps her sensations
pierces a throb of joyful reassurance, proportioned to the apprehension
that had forerun it--an apprehension not formulated to herself, that if
she has so changed as to be unknowable by persons, many of whom have
been acquainted with her from childhood, she may, in the dim and distant
possibility of their ever meeting again, be passed unrecognized by one
whose whole knowledge of her had only covered six weeks.

She has come back from the grave! Is it any wonder that at first she
walks in a maze--as one suddenly awakened from a century of sleep,
doubtfully re-entering the kingdom of life? Glad voices are in the air
around her; glad movement on the pleasant earth about her; a misty
gladness, dim and vast, somewhere deep, deep down in her own being; and
through it all a bewildering misgiving that this feast of life cannot be
spread for _her_; that she does but dream, and will presently awake to
the black gown, and the manuscript on the bureau, and the long treadmill
of remorse and expiation.

She is roused from her trembling fantasies by the reality of Mrs.
Darcy’s slender arm commandingly hooked into hers, and whirling her
away to plaister a barked shin and stem a bleeding nose. But it is only
as long as the need for her cobwebs and cold keys lasts that she can
keep a hold upon the solid commonplaces of existence. Even while “God
save the Queen” is melodiously ringing across the evening meads, even
while the gratefully vociferous boys are making their sweet voices
hoarse with prolonged cheering from the vehicles packed for their
return, she falls back into the uncertain domain of the dream.

In the bustle of subsidiary adieux that follow those of the choir, in
reciprocal congratulations upon success and thanks for help, Lavinia
steals away unnoticed. She gives no directions to her feet whither to
carry her, but, though otherwise will-less in the matter, they know that
she shrinks from at once regaining the mournful emptiness of the house
on the hill. Anywhere else--anything but that! It is all one to her!

Only a step to the hop-garden at the foot of Campion Place, only a rough
cart-track running between the old red-brick wall of the latter and the
green battalions of the hop-poles, now clothed with twining verdure from
top to bottom. She strolls, still in a dream, along a green aisle,
looking down a vista of apparently unending length, the bines, that have
been tied round the poles to prevent their straggling, waving defiant
strong tendrils over her head to stretch out and embrace the opposite
rank, and make pointed arches of Early English in the green cathedral.
Showers of pallid green blooms hang above her, so light and fairy-like
in their airy droop, that it seems blasphemy to connect them as
necessary concomitants with that contemptible creature--small beer!
Parallel aisle upon aisle of riotous verdure, making one gigantic green
fane!

At the end of the lofty silence beneath which she is passing burns an
altar fire of evening sunshine; and towards it her feet, still without
any conscious direction on her part, slowly carry her. But when the end
of the vista is reached, and its verdant glow exchanged for the evening
red of the fair pasture outside, the altar fire has moved further away,
and is blazing with ruddy promise for to-morrow behind the trees of
Rumsey Brake. Will she pursue it even thither? where for fifteen months
her steps have never trod, which has been to her a banned place
since----? Yet her feet still bear her onwards. In the sloping meadows
through which she passes, lambs on that day were butting and bounding;
there is neither butt nor bounding in the fleecy adults dully cropping
and waddling to-night. There were buttercups--millions of
buttercups--that day; to-day there are none! To-day the gate that leads
into the Brake is open; on that day it was locked. With a shiver of
retrospective passion, she recalls the roughness with which she had
rebuffed his offer of help, knowing what a conflagration even so casual
a contact must light in them both. After all, it might as well have
happened then as later! She is on the very path now that they had paced
in their burning pain--that woof of pain whose warp was stinging
pleasure.

On that day the moor-hens were leading little dainty broods out of the
sedge; to-day there is no life at all on the sunset-painted mirror of
the pool. Only that hot blaze that has turned it into the semblance of a
cup full of the rosy elixir of life! Here is where they paused to listen
to the nightingale. Intolerable nightingale! forcing them to hear things
forbidden--things that drove them away in terror of him and of each
other; drove them away in the vain hope of averting what must happen,
what _had_ to happen!

_Had_ to happen! Yes, and _did_ happen! A sort of exaltation in what she
has hitherto always shuddered from as the memory of a crime, takes
possession of her. It _was_ a sin! Under the circumstances it was a sin
and a treachery! But she has paid for it. No one can say that she has
not paid for it! and oh, if it could only happen again! The memory of
her fault and her suffering alike grow faint; while with her whole
tingling body and craving soul she feels again the grip of his arms, the
thundering beat of his heart against her breast, the scorching
insistence of his lips. She will go to the very spot where it happened;
will tryst him there in the aching realism of a memory that seems for
once to have been given the never-given privilege of saying to the dead
past, bound hand and foot in grave-clothes, “Stand forth!”

Slowly she paces--her knees trembling a little in the vividness of that
deliberate reconstruction--to the very place of their parting. A bend in
the grass over-flung path hides it from her till she is close upon it.
The intervening curve is rounded, and her goal is reached. Rooted to the
earth she stands; for hasn’t the force of her compelling passion evoked
his spirit to meet hers? Yet had ever spirit such shoulders? such a
sea-tanned face? such a blaze in such eagle eyes? It is no spirit; it is
in very truth, in gallant bodily presence, her own dear upstanding
fighting man, in the glory and vigour of his manhood, such as till now
she has never seen him.

“I can neither live nor die without you, and I have come to tell you
so!”

And the grip of his arms is no dream!


FINIS


PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.