“Therewas never anything happened so unluckily!”
This is the ejaculation with which Mrs. Prince opens one of those forenoon visits to Campion Place, discouraged by the recipients, but at least not so common in her case as in that of her unsnubable daughter. The scene of it has, as often, to be transferred to the Rectory, and in this case the object of the visit must be tracked, by a visitor too eager to await her correctly in the drawing-room, to the linen-room, where, in company with all the Darcy family except its head, she has been witnessing a presentation to the cow-man, on his approaching marriage with the schoolroom maid. The function is happily just concluded before the interruption takes place; but the wedding gifts lie displayed upon the linen-room table, and are being examined for the twentieth time with critical interest by the young Darcys, of whom both bride and bridegroom are intimate friends, and who have followed the course of their true love with breathless sympathy since Martinmas. They view the arrival of Mrs. Prince with more pleasure than usual, as giving them a fresh gallery to whom to display andenumerate the nuptial gifts; and, in any case, are far too courteous and kind-hearted not to be willing to share the elation caused by so joyful an occasion with any chance comer.
“What has happened unluckily?” asks Lavinia, starting up from her knees, on which she has been requested to descend to examine the quality of a Japanese rug displaying itself gaudily on the floor. To her own heart the question phrases itself differently, “Is he worse?”
“There is something so perverse in its occurringnowof all times!” pursues Mrs. Prince, with that provoking keeping of his or her audience on tenterhooks and in the dark, by a person whose own curiosity is at rest, which one often observes.
“But what is it? Whathashappened?” asks Mrs. Darcy, coming to the rescue, and holding in her hand the rolling-pin, which has just been submitted to her for special admiration by her second daughter.
“Of course, it is not her fault! We cannot blame, we can only pity her!”
“Blame her! Pity her! What for?”
Once again Susan is mouthpiece; and Lavinia, herself paralyzed by apprehension, blesses her. What has Féodorovna done to him? Poisoned him with the wrong medicine? Set fire to his sheets? Undone his bandages, and let him bleed to death? To one acquainted with Miss Prince, all these suppositions come well within the range of the probable.
“She is nearly mad herself!” continues Féodorovna’s mother. “I have never seen her in such a state!”
Mrs. Darcy lays the rolling-pin quietly down; and, going over to the intruder, puts a resolute slight hand on her arm.
“I think you ought to tell us what you are talking about? You are frightening us all!”
“Didn’t I tell you!” answers the other, with vague surprise. “I thought you knew! How stupid of me! But I have quite lost my head! So have we all!”
She pauses. And there is a silence, only broken by some one—Mrs. Darcy alone knows who it is—catching her breath.
“Tell us!” says the rector’s wife, with low-voiced command, and the enragingly reticent lips obey.
“Féodorovna is ill in bed. She has developed jaundice. It declared itself last night.”
“Jaundice! Féo!” ejaculates Mrs. Darcy, in a tone of such delighted relief as is afterwards commented upon by herself with humorous severity.
“She felt ill when she went to bed last night—overpoweringly sleepy and bilious, and the whites of her eyes looked yellow; and to-day she is the colour of a guinea!”
Lavinia has subsided again upon her knees, which do not feel quite so strong as usual. The attitude may connote thankfulness as well as inspection.
“Poor Féo!” she says, trying to avoid the key of garish joy in which Susan’s utterance waspitched. “What a dreadful bore for her! How did she get it?”
Mrs. Prince lifts her handsomely dressed shoulders and herpince-nez-ed eyes to heaven, as if to refer the question there.
“We had the greatest difficulty in keeping her in bed, until we brought her a looking-glass. She saw then that it was out of the question that he should see her! But she is worrying herself to death over him—oh, not over poor Smethurst: he might die twice a day for all she cared—over Captain Binning, I mean!”
There is another pause, but of a different quality from the scared silence of five minutes ago. In Susan’s case it is filled by a cheerfully cynical wonder at the perfect clearness of vision which the sufferer’s mother can combine with her maternal tenderness; and, in Lavinia’s, with a profound gratitude that, at least, while her hue remains that of the dandelion, Féodorovna’s prey will escape her bovril, declarations, and cap-strings.
The children think that their moment has come, and civilly volunteer to show and explain the wedding gifts: to make it clear that both rolling-pin and bread-trencher emanated from the cook; the dolly-tub from Miss Brine; and clothes-pins from the “Tweeny;” that the framed and laurel-crowned “Bobs” is a joint offering from the three elder children; and the smaller “Kitchener” the outcome of the infant Serena’s worship of Bellona.
“Mother has just given him her teapot,” saysPhillida, in excited explanation. “Doesn’t it look exactly like silver? It is an old Sheffield plate pattern; it was to have been presented two days ago, and Sam had his face washed twice in expectation; but we wanted Lavy to be present, and, both times, she was at the Chestnuts.”
“That is just where I want her to be again!” answers Mrs. Prince, listening with more good nature and better-feigned attention than her daughter would have done, but reverting to her own preoccupation—“the poor child”—turning back appealingly to her two grown-up auditors—“has got it into her head that he will be neglected. She and Nurse Blandy have not quite hit it off of late; that no one can look after him properly but herself; though, to tell the truth”—lowering her voice, and in a key of vexed shrewdness—“between ourselves, I think the poor man was on the high-road to be killed with kindness!”
Both matron and maid listen with sympathetic attention; but to neither of them does anything occur in the way of a response that would be meet for the ear of Miss Prince’s mother.
“I have my victoria here!” continues that lady, casting an imploring look towards Lavinia; “and I thought, if you would return in it with me, you might pacify her; come and go and take messages between them; convince her that he is having his medicine and his food at the proper hours; and so forth. She is not on speaking terms with Nurse Blandy since nurse complained to Dr. Roots of Féo’s taking the case entirely out of herhands, andIalways get upon her nerves if I come near her!”
Miss Carew’s eyes are still fixed upon the Japanese rug, as if appraising its 4s.11½d.merits. To a stranger it would seem as if she did not jump at the proposal.
“It would be a real charity!” urges the maker of the suggestion, humbly and insistently. Mrs. Prince in adversity is a more prepossessing figure than Mrs. Prince full of bounce and metaphorical oats; and, perhaps, it is the perception of this fact that squeezes that reluctant sentence out of Lavinia.
“I should like to help you,” she answers slowly; “but——”
“But what?” cries Mrs. Prince. “If you answer that your gentlemen may want you in the course of the afternoon, you know that it is only a case of sending an order to the stables!”
“Your gentlemen are going to desert you to-day, aren’t they?” puts in Mrs. Darcy, interposing for the first time; and with a very slight accent, so slight as to be perceptible only to Miss Carew, upon Mrs. Prince’s objectionable noun.
“They are obliged to go to London on business—lawyer’s business!” replies Lavinia, unwillingly making the admission of her unusual freedom.
“For the night?” cries Mrs. Prince, jumping at the acknowledgment, as its author had known that she would do. “Then why not come and stay with us?”
For a moment no one answers; only it seems to Lavinia that Mrs. Darcy’s eyes echo “Why!”
A confused sense of indignation at that look makes itself perceptible for a moment in the girl’s mind, followed immediately by a cavilling self-question as to why she should feel it? What reason assignable to any human creature is there for her refusing to perform so natural and easy an act of neighbourliness? Were it poor inglorious little Captain Smethurst to whom she had been requested to minister, would she have hesitated for one moment to comply? With the lifelong record, of which she cannot but be conscious, behind her of matter-of-course obligingnesses and good offices towards her wholeentourage, is it any wonder that her present grudging attitude has spread a layer of surprised disappointment over her petitioner’s countenance?
“Of course I know that he has no claim upon any of you!” she says, with a shrug that seems to give up her cause for lost. “Quite the other way on, in fact! But he is such a lovable sort of fellow, and so disproportionately grateful for any little thing one can do for him; and you all—even Sir George—seemed to wish to make him forget; but I suppose it rankles all the same, and he is the last person not to understand that it should be so.”
She turns to go, unaware that her final words, in which she herself sees no particular virtue, have gained the cause she had abandoned as lost.
“Rankles!” repeats Lavinia, turning quite white, and in a voice of inexpressible horror. “Is it possible that you can think?—that you can imagine——?”
“I really do not know what I think,” repliesMrs. Prince, in a voice pettish from worry of mind and startled puzzledom at the dynamitic effect of her last sentence. “When you see a person, whom you have always found ready to put herself in four for you, suddenly making difficulties when you are in a tight place, and when it really would not cost her much to help you, one does not know what to think, does one, Mrs. Darcy?”
“HasLavinia made a difficulty?” asks the person thus erected into umpire, and looking with quiet directness of inquiry into her friend’s face. “I think you have not given her time for either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ yet!”
“Which is it to be?” cries Mrs. Prince, wheeling round with revived hope upon her victim. “It may as well be yes!”—with all her tone can carry of persuasion. “You will have none of the disagreeables of nursing. What I ask of you is just to sit by his bedside and chat to him; and to keep Féo quiet by persuading her that we are not killing him by neglect in her absence.”
None of the disagreeables of nursing!It is, then, to a selfish shrinking from contact with his pain, that her hesitation is attributed. The stingingness of the injustice, which would be ludicrous in its divergence from fact, if it were not so cruel, drives back the blood to Lavinia’s cheeks, and the words to her lips.
“Thereareno disagreeables in this case, and if there were, I should not be afraid of them!” she says, with a quiet dignity which is felt to carry a rebuke with it, “I will gladly come.”
“Youarea trump!” cries Mrs. Prince, breaking, in the excitement of her relief, into a phrase, the old-fashioned slanginess of which the elegance of her calmer moments would disapprove, and making a snatch, which meets only the empty air, at Miss Carew’s hands. “Let us be off this very instant, or we shall find Féo running about the passages, though her temperature is up at 102, and she is as yellow as a guinea!”
“Imustsee my uncle and Rupert first,” says Lavinia, so resolutely that her visitor recognizes it is useless to contest the point. “Hadn’t you better return without me, and I will follow as soon as I can?”
“You will not go back upon your word?” asks the other suspiciously. Then verifying a look of indignant repudiation in the girl’s eyes, she adds, “No; I am sure you will not! Well, perhaps it had better be as you say. I will send back the victoria at once for you; or would you prefer the brough-am?” Its owner gives the vehicle in question the value of two good syllables. “If it looks the least like rain, I will send the brough-am.”
She bustles off as she speaks, one rustle and jingle of gratitude, relief, and jet; but not before she has seen Lavinia speeding before her through the churchyard back to her home. Did she but know how much the hurry in the girl’s veins towards their common goal exceeds her own, her urgency would die, smothered in stupefaction.
Rupert is in his room, guiding and aiding the footman in the packing of his clothes, and of thefew volumes and knick-knacks without which he never moves. At her call he at once joins her in the passage, leaving, as she notes with relief, the door ajar behind him.
“I have come to say good-bye,” she says brusquely, still breathless from her run.
“Good-bye!” he repeats. “Why, we need not start for an hour yet.”
“No,” she answers with the same short-breathed determination in her voice; “butImust. I am going to the Chestnuts for the night. Mrs. Prince has been here, and has forced me into it.”
The words are strictly and literally true; and yet their utterer feels the immenseness of the falsity their reluctance implies as she speaks them.
His face expresses surprise, but no disapproval.
“They want me to help to amuse Captain Binning,” continues Lavinia, still with that lying disinclination for the proposed occupation in her tone; “and persuade Féo that they are not killing him with neglect in her absence!”
“In her absence!” repeats Rupert, with an accent of the most acute astonishment. “Do you expect me to believe that that angel of mercy has forsaken her post?”
“She has got the jaundice!”
“Thejaundice!” repeats the young man, with more of entertainment than compassion in his low laugh. “Poor Féo! The yellow danger! What on earth has given her over as a prey to it at this cruelly unpropitious moment?”
“I do not know.”
“And you are to nurse dear Binning instead of her? What a blessed, blessed change for him!”
There is not the faintest trace of jealousy in his tone, and the most unaffected friendliness in his mention of the sick man; but she wishes that he had not called him “dear.” It makes her illogically feel more of a traitor than before; and, besides, is it quite manly?
“I am to sit with him this afternoon,” she answers in a tone of caustic discontent, “and convince that idiot Féodorovna that he is not being poisoned or starved. It will only be for to-day,” she adds, more as a satisfaction to her own conscience than as an explanation in the least called for by him. “And to-morrow you will both be back!”
“Even if we are, you must not hurry home!” replies Rupert, with that complete unselfishness which his family has grown so used to as barely to be aware of. “I am so boomed just now, that I can run the show without you for an indefinite time. He actually asked my opinion this morning,” opening his eyes wide and smiling; then, growing grave again, “and I always feel that we none of us can do enough to make that poor chap feel at his ease with us!”
She looks up at him in a dumb appreciation of his delicacy and feeling, that has no pleasure, nay, a leaven of unmistakable pain in it; and looking realizes that he is paler than his never high-coloured wont. Admirably as he disguises it, is it a sacrifice that he is making? Does he divine?
“You look as white as a sheet,” she says, witha sudden impulse to know the worst. “What has happened to you?”
“You will be angry with me if I tell you that I have had a fright!” he answers, smiling again, deprecatingly this time. “But that is about what it comes to. My father made them put the young horse into the cart, when I went to Shipstone this morning. And we met one of those steam-rollers; and he took fright and bolted.”
“And you could not hold him?”
“I was not driving. You know I never do, if I can help it. I do not see the use of keeping a dog and barking one’s self!”
“Well?”
“Oh, you need not be afraid that I did anything unworthy of a man and a gentleman!” noting with slightly ironical comment the apprehension in her face. “I sat tight, and Hodson pulled him up just in time to stop him taking the gates at the level crossing. But you know that nerves are not my strong point; and it gave them a bit of a jar!”
Her face has hardened and stiffened. “A man has no business to have nerves!”
“What is he to do if God has presented him with a large bundle of them at his birth?”
The question is unanswerable, and on this unsatisfactory note they part. It sounds out of tune-ly all through her short drive, and makes a discord of it. White as a table-cloth because a horse shied!
“Féohas given strict orders that you are to be shown up to herfirst.”
Theseare the words with which the patient’s mother receives Miss Carew, and they are wafted on a sigh of relieved gratitude, and accompanied by the admission that she has herself been ejected from the sick-room, and requested not to reappear there until further orders. The occasion is evidently considered to be one of such magnitude as to have summoned from his certificate-hung study Mr. Prince to join his acknowledgments to those of his wife; but the elaborate expression of his thanks, with its inevitable prefix of “I do not wish to be intrusive,” is cut short by a peremptory inquiry, transmitted by Féodorovna’s maid, as to the cause of the delay in showing up the visitor.
“She will give you the most minute directions,” says Mrs. Prince, hurrying Lavinia off upon this mandate, and speaking in a flurried semi-whisper. “You must consent to everything, and”—lowering her voice still further—“of course you can use your own judgment afterwards.”
“There is not a soul in the house I can trust,” says Féodorovna, clutching Miss Carew’s hand ina clasp whose feverishness her own cool palm verifies. “Do not pay the slightest attention to anything Nurse Blandy says. She is absolutely untrustworthy and incapable.”
Lavinia nods, mindful of Mrs. Prince’s directions.
“In this dreadfulcontretempsit is something to have a person on whose honesty at least one can rely,” continues Féodorovna, staring tragically at Lavinia out of her yellowed eyes. “Youhave some sympathy—some comprehension of what it must be to me to be tied down here,nowof all times.”
There is no insincerity in Lavinia’s gesture of assent. Despite the absolute lack of foundation for Miss Prince’s belief in her own indispensability, and the ludicrous effect with which a solemn sentimentality gilds her already gilded features, Miss Carew’s compassion is genuine, and even acute. To be within five doors of him, and yet parted as effectually as if oceans rolled between them! A shocked flash of realization of what such a deprivation would be to herself dries up effectually any of that inclination to mirth which the preposterousness of Féodorovna’s pretensions, coupled with that of her appearance, would naturally produce.
“You must come and go between us,” continues the patient, earnestly. “Tell me how he is from hour to hour, prevent his fretting more than he can help, and ensure him against the neglect which hitherto only my own personal and incessant attention has guarded him from.”
A mechanical mandarin-like movement agitates Lavinia’s head.
“Of course you do not know anything of the technicalities of nursing—how should you?—but you can at least follow my directions.”
“Yes.”
“Do not sit too close to him.”
“No.”
“Do not talk too much.”
“No.”
“Let him choose his own topic.”
A profound sigh follows this last injunction, which somehow implies that there can be little doubt as to what that topic will be.
“Yes.”
“Make as light of my illness as you can.”
“Yes.”
“And come back to me every quarter of an hour to report progress.”
“Every quarter of an hour!” repeats Miss Carew, for once forgetful of and disobedient to her instructions as to unhesitating acquiescence in everything that might be suggested to her. “But you may be asleep!”
“And if I am!” returns Miss Prince, with such an expression of high-flown enthusiasm on her discoloured countenance as makes Lavinia’s pity almost succumb to an unpardonable inclination to laugh.
She escapes at last without having disgraced herself by any overt evidence of amusement, though her departure is delayed by the determination of Miss Prince to invest her messenger in her own cap and apron.
“He has grown used to having them abouthim,” says Féo, with pensive peremptoriness; while a recollection of ill-controlled cap-strings gambolling across patient eyes confirms the statement in the hearer’s mind, and she sets forth reluctantly equipped in an attire which, like David’s, she has not proved.
Admitted by Nurse Blandy with a lofty cordiality which speaks less for her own merit than for the lustre with which she shines by contrast with Féodorovna, Lavinia finds herself once more standing by that bedside whence her spirit has so rarely stirred since the day, which now seems so incomputably distant, when first her lagging feet carried her thither. Their hands lie in each other’s with the large sense of freedom that the absence of any onlooker gives; the consciousness that, as far as any one to note their clasp goes, they may remain in thrilled contact from now till night. As if in malicious acting upon the knowledge that such a course would be the most distasteful possible to her young employer, Nurse Blandy has hastened to leave themtête-à-tête. In their eyes, as they rush to meet, each reads the other’s joyous elation in the thought that not only is there no Féodorovna present to cramp and chill their greeting, but that all through the long wealth of the afternoon to be theirs no opening door need scare them with the swishing announcement of her paralyzing presence.
“So I have a new nurse!” he says, his look wandering with slow delight over the array that had made her feel like a mummer.
“Miss Prince thought that, as you were used to the dress, it would be better that I should wear it.”
“Yes; I am used to the dress.”
The implication that he isnotused to the wearer is so clear to them both, as to draw a little gauzy veil of shyness between them.
“I feel rather like Jacob, having jockeyed Esau out of his occupation,” she says, talking somewhat at random; the more so for the consciousness that his eyes have done with her cap and apron, and now find employment in the string of pearls that, as both of them know, owes no ascription to Féodorovna. Involuntarily one of Lavinia’s hands goes up to her throat, with the impulse to hide the jewels, though a cold instinct tells her that he has already discovered their origin.
“It is very hard upon my predecessor, isn’t it,” she says, beginning to talk much faster than her wont, “to have developed such an enthusiasm for nursing, and then to have her course barred by so odious a form of illness?”
“Jaundice, isn’t it?” returns he, with a very respectable and even remorseful effort at regret.
“Yes; jaundice.”
“Poor soul!”
Both read in each other’s hearts that, as between them, talk of Féodorovna is sheer waste of time; yet one of them clings convulsively to her as a safe topic.
“What aggravates her vexation is that she can’t believe that you will not be starved and ill-used in her absence!”
“Poor soul!”
There is a touch of impatience that to oneinitiated speaks of past endurance in the repeated phrase; and the smile that sends up the corners of both their mouths, when Lavinia adds demurely, “I am to report progress every quarter of an hour,” makes them both feel rather guilty.
It is the man who instinctively breaks away from the subject, and, as one determined to have his will, rushes headforemost into another.
“Tell me how much time you are going to give me! I had rather know at once.”
His eye seeks the travelling-clock standing on the table beside him, and as he turns somewhat to get an exacter view of it, she notes with how much greater ease and freedom he can move.
“I have come to stay the night.”
“The night!”
“Yes; the night. My men have left me and gone to London.”
She answers colourlessly, looking straight before her; but through her drooped eyelids her spirit sees the almost incredulous delight of his.
There is a moment’s pause; next, in a long sigh of relief, come the words—
“Then we shall have time for everything!”
She smiles with slow relish of and acquiescence in his thought, despite the apparent protest in her—
“That is rather comprehensive, isn’t it?”
“I mean,” he continues, eagerly sitting up, and leaning on his elbow, “that after your former visits I have always felt that we—that I had not made the most of them; but that I had egotistically frittered away our time”—neither of them notes thesignificance of the plural pronoun—“talking of myself.”
“Did you talk of yourself?” she asks. “I think your memory plays you false then. If you had, I should,” with embarrassed playfulness, “know more about you than I do.”
“What do you know? What do you care to know?”
“I know that you have had a bullet through your left lung, and one that passed very close to your heart; and that, under these circumstances, it would be wiser not to gesticulate much,” she answers, with a pretty air of admonishment, and of recalling to both their minds her temporary function, which seems to him to sit upon her more exquisitely than any of her former expressions or gestures.
“Did I gesticulate?” he asks. “One gets rather tired of moving nothing but one’s head, and you must not be hard upon me to-day, for I am rather down on my luck. At least Iwas!”
“About Féodorovna?”
“Oh no! At least—of course yes. But that was not what I was alluding to. I have seen”—eyes and hands seeking among the newspapers with which the bed is strewn—“that one of my pals has been badly hit.”
In a moment she is beside him. “Let me help you. Which paper is it in?”
“In them all! It is official from Lord Roberts.” He has found the paragraph, and hands it to her, indicating it with a pale fore finger.
“On February 28th, General —— and his staff narrowly escaped being captured by a party of the enemy, and were only saved by the presence of mind and gallantry of Captain Greene of the —— Hussars. Captain Greene had been sent back by the General to order a company of infantry up to the kopje taken on the previous night by the Australian Bushmen. On his way he saw superior numbers of the enemy creeping up a donga, with the obvious intention of surprising General —— and his staff. With great presence of mind he galloped across ground in full view of the enemy, ordering up reinforcements. Having accomplished his object, Captain Greene recrossed the bullet-swept zone to inform the General of the position, in doing which he was severely wounded in the head and neck, but, though reeling in his saddle, regained the kopje, imparted his discovery, and thereby averted an otherwise inevitable disaster.”
Lavinia’s eyes race through the record, and, having done so, raise themselves to Binning’s. Passionately alive as she is to deeds of daring, at this moment the desire to find something consoling to say to the hero’s friend is even more prominent in her mind and look than admiration of the valiant act.
“It says ‘severely,’ not ‘dangerously’”is her low-voiced comment; “and even ‘dangerously’ does not always meanmortally. You were put in as ‘dangerously.’”
He thanks her with an eye-flash for the recollection; but a moment later his hands, so quiet in their patience generally, are uneasily pulling at the embroidered coverlet, which Féodorovna hascontributed from her treasures to his luxury, and which Nurse Blandywillcall a “bed-spread.”
“I cannot think why they do not let me get up. Roots has promised that I shall be able to return to duty by the end of May; and here we are at the beginning!”
The end of May!It is, then, to the same spot in time that his eyes and heart are directed, as are her own; but with how unimaginable a difference! To him the end of May is to bring release, liberty, return to the “bullet-swept zones,” to the cold veldt, the ambush, and the sniping. Yes, but also to the comradeship after which his soul is lusting. While toher!
“May is young yet,” she says, forcing her lips into a reassuring smile. “Dr. Roots has twenty-five days in which to keep his word.”
His hands cease their restless plucking at the counterpane, and a change passes over his face. Has he divination to read beneath the mask of her smile? she asks herself with a sort of terror.
“Twenty-five days!” he repeats softly. “They are a great many; and yet I can fancy their seeming very few.”
Her self-command does not go so far as to furnish her with a comment upon this thrilling truism; and the air upon which his next words steal out seems to have been stilled to receive them.
“I wonder upon how many of those twenty-five I shall have a sight of you?”
“Let us take short views of life, as Sidney Smith bids us,” she answers, involuntarily moving hershoulders, as if to shake off from them a load which, at the moment, seems to press as heavily as did the bursting wallet of his sins upon good Christian’s bowed back. “I will come as often as I can be spared from home.”
At that they regard one another steadily, each conveying to the other’s consciousness their knowledge of how much more than appears the phrase carries.
“You have naturallya great deal to dojust now?”
“Yes.”
It is not true; but what is the use of explaining that the dull change—dull, except in the one awful main fact of her wifehood—causes little alteration in the outward framework of her life? Again the room seems irksomely still. Is it possible that to two pairs of ears even the swish of Miss Prince’s skirts would be welcome? In one respect Lavinia might meet that lady with a clear conscience, since she has undoubtedly obeyed her behest of allowing the wounded man to choose his own topic; but it can hardly be saidtohave agreed with him, judging by the grey shadows on his face. Yet he will not leave the theme that has brought them there.
“It is to be on the 28th?”
“Yes.”
He has leant back on the pillows, which are propped into a more convalescent slant than on the day when she had first seen him lying flat and bloodless upon them. Yet he has reusurped the privilege granted to thosein extremis; and she grows restless under the insistence of his eyes.
“I should like to give you a present.”
“Oh, why should you?”
There is no mistaking her start, and the pain and dissent in her tone.
“You had rather that I did not?”
“Much rather.”
“Nobad news, I hope?”
“None, thanks.”
It is at the breakfast-table next morning that this question and answer are exchanged. They are the result of the wire which has just been handed to Lavinia, and which she continues looking at, long after she must have mastered its contents—so long that the hostess’s curiosity conquers her good breeding, and makes her take for granted sender and subject.
“Does Mr. Rupert say by what train he and Sir George are returning?”
There is a pause, though slightly perceptible.
“They cannot get back to-day; the papers were not ready for their signature, after all.”
“The law’s delay! We all know something about that,” says Mr. Prince, looking up with a smile of elaborate sympathy from his porridge. “Will legislation ever effect anything towards——?”
“It is an ill wind that blows nobody good,” cries Mrs. Prince, cutting ruthlessly into her husband’s speculation. “Since there is nobody to go back to, what sense is there in your going back?”
* * * * *
“I have onlyonelittle hint to give you, dear,” says Mrs. Prince, escorting her visitor to the wounded man’s door, and in a tone tinged with apology; “but you know what an impracticable patient Féo is, and we must give in to sick people’s whims, as she was always impressing upon us about Captain Binning.”
“Yes?”
“Well, dear, it is too silly and exacting of her; but she complains that there were three quarters of an hour between your first and second visits to her yesterday, and forty-five minutes between your second and third.”
“Were there?” rather blankly.
“If the same thing happens to-day, she threatens to get up and go and see for herself what’s happening. Dr. Roots tells her he will not answer for the consequences if she does; but she snaps her fingers at him. However,” with reassurance, “my one confidence is in hercolour!”
* * * * *
They meet without the elation of yesterday, their eyes shirking each other, and their hands taking for granted that contact is superfluous. Half a score of subjects had yesterday succeeded her refusal of his suggested gift; but the sting of that rebuff still inflames their memories.
“This is an uncovenanted mercy!” he says, with a rather strained smile. “I was afraid that I had seen the last of you.”
“I heard from my people, that they cannot get back to-day.”
“So you stay here?”
“Yes.”
There is a lifelessness in the little dialogue, she expressing no regret, and he no gladness. When the eyes, dropped upon her work—she had no work yesterday—give him an opportunity of covert observation, he sees that her large eyelids look thickened as if with tears or watching.
“The law is a very odd thing, isn’t it?” she says presently in a staccato key.
“I have never had many dealings with it.”
“It is the only vehicle to which civilization has not given C-springs and indiarubber tires. It still jolts and lumbers along as it did three hundred years ago.”
His look asks for an explanation of her forced yet commonplace analogy, and she goes on.
“In the matter of marriage settlements for instance, both sides may be perfectly at one as to the disposition of the money; and yet the law insists on finding flaws and making difficulties.”
“I suppose it does.”
“Some hitch of the kind is detaining my uncle and Rupert.”
She cannot be more uncomfortably conscious that the explanation is superfluous and uncalled for, than is he that her trite reflections and unasked-for introduction of her financial affairs are the stairs by which she is climbing to some aimed-at goal. In her next sentence she attains it.
“Talking of marriages reminds me——” Even when the door to which she has been looking is reached, it seems hard to open.
“Yes?”
“I have been thinking that I owe you an apology.”
“For what?”
“For the spirit in which I received a very kind suggestion you made.”
“What suggestion?”
It is needless to say that he knows as well as she what was the contemned overture; yet—for Love is by no means a kindly god—he cannot deny himself the luxury of seeing her run up the red pennon of shame into her cheeks. But when he notes what uphill work it is to her to give the asked-for explanation, and how conscientiously she does it, his heart smites him with an acuteness that brings its own retribution.
“To give me a wedding present.”
“I was sorry that I had put you to the pain of refusing.” His tone is very gentle, and not in the least rancorous.
“Do you know why I refused?”
“I had a twinge of my old misgivings.”
For a moment—so complete is her innocence of the motive hinted at—she looks at sea. Then his meaning flashes painfully upon her. He supposes that from the causer of Bill’s death no member of Bill’s family can bring him or herself to accept a gift.
“Whatever your misgiving was, it was wrong,” she says, the eager desire to reassure him giving her a momentary glibness in conspicuous contrast to the lameness of her former speech. “You could notpossibly have guessed the real reason; it would have required a more than human intuition.”
“Are you going—are you able to tell it me?”
“Yes, now.” She pauses a moment, as if to collect herself, and set her facts in order. “I must explain to you,” she says, “that my marriage is not like other marriages.”
“I do not understand.”
It would be better taste, as he feels, to allow her to tell her tale to its end, without remark; but she makes a slight halt, and the delay is unendurable.
“I mean that it is no occasion for festivity or present-giving. I intended no slight to you; I only saw that you misunderstood.”
This time he has himself better in hand, for no comment follows; but she, verifying by one snatched look the miserable mystification of his face, hurries out her next words.
“It is the carrying out of a bargain made almost further back than memory can reach.”
“Do you mean——”—whether it be through the weakness of his body or the rebellion of his spirit, the words are spoken almost below his breath—“that you have tied yourself for life by a childish promise to another child?”
She draws up head and neck in a way that he feels to convey a dignified reproof.
“There is no question of tying. I am doing it absolutely of my own free will. All my life I have known that for me there was to be no another man than Rupert; and all his life he has known that for him there was to be no other woman than me!”
If any incredulity born of experience or observation invades the soul of Rupert’s brother man at this large assertion, no sign of it appears. He only waits blankly.
“I am up to my neck in debt to them—to both of them!” goes on the poor girl, losing something of her collectedness, and torn between the knowledge that wisdom bids her leave the picture of her past and future without further touches; and the impossibility of not making it clear to her pale hearer, that love—lover-love—has no part in the scheme of her existence. “I am up to my neck in debt to them, and this is the first instalment I have ever been able to pay!”
“I see.”
She sighs, and throws out her arms as if tossing away something irksome.
“Now let us talk of something else.”
But a topic, thus ordered up, comes with a limp; and they get lamely enough through the next hour; the bulletins to Féodorovna are delivered with a punctuality unknown on happier yesterday. It is only gradually that comfort and fluency return to them, the knowledge of the one subject which has to be skirted round, making all others seem dangerous. The war-map hung at the foot of the bed proves their best ally. In moving its pins and flags, and making out, with the nearest approach to accuracy, the scene of Captain Greene’s exploit, they grow almost easy and almost garrulous.
“What have you been talking about?” is the first question put by Miss Prince on the nextscrupulously paid visit of report made by the amateur nurse.
Féodorovna has managed to fidget her temperature up to a higher point than yesterday’s, and the orange of her face is patched with the flushings of fever.
“About the war.”
“What about the war?”
“I have been moving the pins and flags on the war-map, in accordance with to-day’s news.”
“You ought not to let him mention the war.”
“I think it would be worse harm to forbid him. He would only brood the more over Captain Greene’s wounds.”
“You seem to be much better informed on the subject than I am”—very fretfully. “What else have you talked about?”
“Nothing much.”
“I hope you have not told him that my temperature has gone up.”
“No.”
“Of course he asked?”
“Of course.”
It is with the weight of this falsehood upon her soul that Lavinia returns to her charge. It does not sit very heavily, and is probably not a falsehood at all, since all the inquiries in question have, no doubt, been addressed to Nurse Blandy or Mrs. Prince, before her own appearance on the scene. And whether because a little of the former awkwardness makes him glad of a topic ready to his hand, or that his conscience smites him with an earliernegligence, he really does put the orthodox query this time.
“Well, how is she?”
Lavinia shakes her head. “Poor thing! I am afraid her overhaste to be well will very much retard her cure. You had better take warning by her!”
There is a pretty admonishment in her voice, and in the face, which is gentled beyond its never ungentle wont by a diminution of colour. He rolls his head about on the pillow.
“Am I in such overhaste to be well? Or do I only pretend it?”
“I do not think you are a very good hand at pretending,” she answers, with a flickering smile.
* * * * *
And now the day is done. Has some new Joshua issued a contrary command to that which the first one sent over the wrecked Syrian town, and bid the sun double his speed to the west?
“Sleep well,” Lavinia says.
At his request, and by the condescension of Nurse Blandy, she has gone in to bid him good night at her own bedtime, and long after her services have been dispensed with. The electric light is out, and the moonlight, for whose continued admission during another few minutes he has begged, sleeps in faintly glorious bars and islands on the bed. Long and ghostly he lies there, and ghostly she leans over him. The pallid interrupted light—so interrupted that in a second either of them can withdraw from it under the shield of darkness—gives them aconfidence and expansiveness unknown throughout the day. They feel something of the freedom of two innocently tender spirits freed from the shams and prohibitions of the flesh.
“Sleep well!”
She is stooping over him to enable her to see him, and one hand lies on the turned-over sheet. It looks so unearthly that he must think there is no contravention of rules made for the material and the real in carrying it to his ghostly lips. But the unspiritual contact, novel and most sweet, effectually breaks through the etherial figment.
“Do not wish me ‘sleep:’ wish me a blessed lying dream!”
* * * * *
How deep is Lavinia’s thankfulness that Miss Prince’s ignorance of this irregular interview saves her from the awful necessity of at once accounting for and relating it. She reaches her own room, trembling and unstrung. So complete has been her fidelity to Rupert, unconscious of the unusual in its absoluteness, that no man has ever before kissed even her hand, the hand which is so often a wicket-gate leading to the palace of the lips. By the electric light she looks at her right hand—it was the right—which has been desecrated, is it? or for ever ennobled?—her practical, capable right hand, beautiful in shapely strength; and her first feeling is one of regret that it is not more satin-soft, more smoothly worthy of his lips. Shame that at such a crisis—for to her inexperience it seems one—so unworthy an impulse should predominate, burns hotly. But, allthe same, the regret holds its own, and keeps its original start.
The “dazzled morning moon” and the uprising sun find her still a watcher.
“I have lost a whole night’s sleep because a sick man kissed my hand out of gratitude,” she says to herself, when her eyes at length close upon the already roseing clouds. “That is sensible!”
Waking brings with it a healthier view of the episode that had cost her such a vigil—brings an effort to deride herself for attaching so much importance to what was doubtless a very commonplace form of acknowledgment. Her yesterday’s explanation returns with a certain power of soothing upon her conscience. It showed more than doubtful taste in her to volunteer it; but, at all events, he now knows that her marriage with Rupert is an unalterable certainty, and that lover-love has no part in it. Why it should be unendurable to leave an acquaintance of a fortnight’s standing under the belief that she is influenced by the ordinary motives, she omits to asks herself. But it is with a brave face of open friendliness that she presents herself at his bedside, and he asks himself by what juggle it had seemed to him that last night her spirit had kissed his in the moonlight.
In the afternoon she returns to Campion Place, bidding her patient good-bye with staid kindness, but making no mention of a possible return. She is on the doorstep, with a bright face to welcome back “her men.”
The young horse, which Sir George is driving,shies badly at barking Geist, with a foolish pretence of not recognizing him as his own family dog; and Lavinia would give anything that her eyes had not flown suspiciously to Rupert, to note whether his hand is nervously gripping the side of the dog-cart.
It is fortunate for her that both her travellers are too much occupied with their own misadventures to ask her many questions about the disposition of her time. The trip has been neither satisfactory nor final. An entry in a baptismal registry is not to be found, and a second, if not a third visit to the lawyers will probably be necessary. Two dull evenings have been passed at a hotel, as Sir George, with his usual ingenuity in making life as disagreeable to himself as he can, has morosely refused to spend them at any place of entertainment; and Rupert—as seems a matter of course to them all—has foregone his own friends and pastimes to keep him company.
The only bright spots in their history appear to be that Rupert, who to his other graces adds a connoisseurship in old silver, has picked up a George III. Loving-cup at a shop in the Strand for an old song; and that Sir George has met with some patterns of wall-paper that please him for two rooms which have not been used of late years, and in whose doing-up he takes an interest in striking contrast to his usually absolute indifference to the internal details of his household.
“They would make a nursery look nice and bright,” he says, displaying them to his niece, and speaking with that uncompromising outspeakingof his hopes, which has often before inflamed her cheeks.
It is with an inward convulsion of dismay that she realizes how enormously her repulsion for the topic, thus introduced with Saxon simplicity, has grown since it was last broached to her. Yet she must get used to it. She has never hitherto flinched from the necessary and the actual. Therewillbe, in all human probability, a nursery; therewillbe children; and they will be hers—theirs.
“Yes, very bright and pretty.”
He looks at her with a touch of solicitude, though without a grain of suspicion.
“Have you got a cold? I always tell you that you go too thinly clad.”
“No, thanks; not in the least. Why do you think so?”
“Your voice sounded hoarse, as if your tonsils were relaxed.”
But Lavinia’s tonsils are all right.