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 acavilling 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 isalmostquite silent; and Lavinia isalmostquite 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 willlivewithin 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 forthe 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 itbecause 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 herfor intérieuris 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 picturehishead 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 futurehusband 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.
Thespring—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 iswith 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 whoseh’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. Princedoesput his foot down now and then—and he said to her, ‘No, Féo, my child, you mayturn 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 heropinion, 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 MissCarew, 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 tiresomecarneyingvoice, 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 betête-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 theirdepths 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. Itis 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 tome?” 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 shehadhated 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; “thatI, 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, andif she sends up his temperature, she will not be allowed to come again! Thefirst 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 avoice 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.
Féodorovnahas 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 littlemilieu; 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 adétour, 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 imaginationin 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 thene plus ultraof 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 theseharsh 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 theFlail; 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 toendure him; as I have often told you about him—he islike 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 oftête-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—howlittle!—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 scarcesmiles, “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 saynothing?” she stammers.
“Nothing! Actions speak louder than words! Marry Rupert, and give me a grandson as quick as you can!”
“Les joies ne sont que les afflictions en robe de fête.”
“Les joies ne sont que les afflictions en robe de fête.”
Thekitchen-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 reasonand 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 thehen-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 itsex-cathedrâimportance, 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 feverishcandidate 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 himselfup 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 hangover 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. “Youknow 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—shewith 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 washis, 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 hiseyes 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 offendedon 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.
“Iamso glad that you are better!”
“And Iamso 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 findthatchair”—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.
“Thatbit 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 ownpardon?” 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!”