Laviniatries 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 thechefat 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 familyto 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 wearinga 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 ‘yelpingcurs’ 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; butit 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 aspirationwhich 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 notstrike 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.
“Belongto 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 beforeher 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 whichhis 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. Sheis 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 bereadyto 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 yougladto 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 bentof 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 anaïfunconsciousness 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 impartthe 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 marrymyboy, 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 appealin 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 preventhermarrying 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!”
Thehall-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 inits 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 curiouspersonalfeeling 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 intenseannoyance 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.”
“Notagain? 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!” saysLavinia, 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,stumpsMiss 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 kickedinto 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 deferentialempressementof 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 suchfou rirethat 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 herfiancé’sprostrate 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 anythingviolent?” 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 onlyjust! 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-roomlike a projectile; but it was not as bad as that. Onlymoralforce propelled her.”
Lavinia brings her hands together with a sort of clap, but relief mingles with the indignant animosity of her tone.
“Whathadshe said? Whathadshe done?”
Rupert shrugs his shoulders. “What is our little Féonotcapable 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, halfhumorously, and yet with a quiver of emotion on his sensitive face, “but he actuallythankedme 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 feltgênein 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 overpoweringlyodd.
“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 wedofeel all right, don’t we?”
“I love nothing so well as you!Is not that strange?”
“I love nothing so well as you!Is not that strange?”
“I love nothing so well as you!Is not that strange?”
Rupertis“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 deFlanders, 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 hurrythan usual to greet her returned ally. Rupert is never in any great hurry to see Susan, and has gracefully declined to accompany hisfiancéeon 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, wearehaving 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 arecherchéobject nearing their little group across the white grass of the still wintry glebe, “Why, hereisFéo!”
“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 towardsanyguest,quaguest, 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 herfiancé’sreciprocal 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 otherwith 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 theirsurface 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; butIsaw what I saw in him, and I knew that that was all that mattered.”
“PerhapsIsee 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?”
Springhas 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 tono 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 hercountenance 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 twosouffre-douleursthat 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 ofparricide!” 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 browntrees; 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. SirGeorge 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 haveonly 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 dreadfuldryagonies 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 offmyvisit 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.