“A côté du bonheur”
“A côté du bonheur”
“Allthese things are against me!”
Seven days are gone since Lavinia was called upon to exult over the nursery hangings, and there is no exultation, even feigned, in the tone with which she quotes to herself the words of Jacob, running over in her head what “these things” are. It is “against her” that the search for the missing baptismal entry, now complicated by doubt as to the whereabouts of the register in which it was made, has motived another absence on the part of her bridegroom and uncle. It is against her that this fact has come to Mrs. Prince’s ears, and has brought a hailstorm of invitations, entreaties, and reproaches about Miss Carew’s head. It is against her that Féodorovna, having with a headstrong insanity, even stronger than her vanity, insisted on visiting Binning, has succeeded in improving upon her original malady by an attack of pneumonia, and brought herself to death’s door.
As she unquietly paces the garden at Campion Place, waiting for the Princes’ victoria to convey her to the Chestnuts, Lavinia, dolefully probing her conscience, asks it which of the causes that haveadded their weight to each other till their momentum has grown irresistible, can be, in any common fairness, laid at her door; and she can detect no unjust bias in her own favour in the “not one” that answers her inward inquisition.
On the elms’ little leaves in the giant espaliered hedge that parts her from the churchyard is the glisten of that sunshine that has just been luring them into life; on the dazzling emerald grass “nice-eyed” wagtails are walking with balanced tails at the foot of the old grey wall which, on the left side of the demesne, drops down a matter of ten feet to the croquet lawn below. She, looking absently over, can see the large-flowered periwinkle staring up at her, and the heaven-shaming blue of the forget-me-not fringe. The sight of the latter blossoms causes her a twinge of discomfort. She had worn a little bunch of them in her white coat, and at his leave-taking, a quarter of an hour ago, Rupert had deliberately unpinned and annexed them. Could he have intended any rebuke or admonishment by an action unlike him in its something of cool ownership? Yet there was certainly nothing of overweening confidence or masterdom in the words with which he had answered her at the moment, sincerely meant and felt—
“This is really too bad.”
“Has absence made the heart grow fonder?” he asks, with a light lip-raillery, which the restrained yet legible wistfulness of his eyes contradicts. “When I see a wave of hatred coming on, I shall know what remedy to apply.”
She has taught him to be sparing of endearments. Yet even he must expect some trifling kindness at parting. It weighs upon her conscience after he is gone that she had deftly chosen a moment when the butler was passing through the hall to bid him her final good-bye.
“All these things are against me!”
Yet even while she repeats the Biblical phrase aloud, to give it greater solidity, a sense of her own hypocrisy comes hotly home to her.
All these things are against her. But is there nothing for her too? Isn’t the May month for her? and the temporary freedom assured to her fifteen minutes ago? and her own heart, capering and curvetting, under all its pack-load of scruples and compunctions?
“For” and “against.” In what a double and contradictory sense is she using both prepositions! She pulls herself up muddled and uneasy, yet helped out of her puzzle by the delicious egotistical noise a thrush is making on a bough near by, insisting on telling all passers-by, at the top of his voice, how well his suit has thriven. A phrase out of one of Keats’ Letters recurs to heràproposof a like feathered Anacreon—
“That thrush is a fine fellow. I hope he has made a good choice this year.”
Happy thrush, to be in a position to make a choice! Daily, or almost daily, as have been Lavinia’s visits to the wounded man, she never fails before each one to feel afresh the same almost sick excitement as to the precise method of their meeting.To a not very observant onlooker there would not seem to be much variety in their salutations, but to her now practised eye and ear, there lies an infinite range of gradations between the clouded gladness of his mute, yet how legible, “It is very good of your owner to lend you to me for yet another hour!” and the equally mute uncalculating exultation that knows no to-morrow of “You are here!”
To-day she might have spared herself the daily fever of her speculation, since their meeting is to fall out in quite a new manner, and under safe conditions of large chaperonage. Captain Binning is no longer either in bed or in the room which has been the scene of their whole acquaintance. He has been moved several hours ago into the adjoining room, and now lies on a sofa drawn up to the window. He is still pillow-backed and more than semi-recumbent; but he is “up” and the first step has been taken towards the fulfilment of Dr. Roots’ promise.
Lavinia’s heart first bounds and then drops stone-like at the sight. Thank God, he has reached the first milestone on the high-road to health and vigour. How many more will take him beyond her ken? No man can fight the enemies of his country in bandages and a nightingale, but from grey flannel to khaki is but a step! Captain Binning is, as one glance at themise en scèneinforms her, giving a housewarming in honour of his convalescence. The prudence of the step may be doubted, but that it is being enjoyed by guests and host is indubitable.
In compliance with his request, backed by theirown much urgency, the rector’s wife has brought her young family to be presented to the first live hero they have ever seen, and all have arrived laden with the objects that seem to them most likely to support his spirits. With their usual eager kindheartedness, they have stripped their walls and dressing-tables of the photographs of the adored generals, and disposed them for exhibition within easy reach of Captain Binning’s eye and hand. Phillida has brought the new poodle, who wears the portraits of as many military men as can be induced to stick there, in midget size, in his hair, and Daphne introduces a female dove, in whom the friends of General Pole-Carew would be surprised to recognize that son of Mars. Mrs. Darcy sits by the sofa-side, putting in an observation when she has the chance, but, with her usual wise easy-goingness, not attempting to arrest the flow of enraptured questions which she knows that a word or a sign from her can at once check, and which evokes such amused answers as cannot be produced by the weary or the overdone.
At the moment of Lavinia’s entry two inquiries are shooting from as many eager mouths at her patient, “Have you kept the bullet?” and “How often have you spoken to Bobs?” Half a dozen sparkling eyes await the answer; since, though Christopher has returned to school, little Serena is here, and staring with the rest. Surprise that one who has hitherto been so obligingly ready with his responses should now remain silent and look oddly over the tops of their hats instead of answering, makes them turn their own necks to discover the cause,and in the next moment they are surrounding Miss Carew, and liberally sharing their delightful gains in knowledge with her.
“Oh, Lavy!Didyou know that Captain Binning has the same Christian name as Bobs?”
Lavinia did know it, as well as a good many other facts about the object of the children’s interest, which he is less likely to have imparted to them; but she is spared the necessity of owning it by Captain Binning, who puts in, with a laugh whose altered quality puzzles the keen-eared young people—
“It is so far down in my long string that it scarcely counts.”
“Captain Binning has three Christian names,” explains Daphne, in kind elucidation; and Phillida hastens to strike in glibly, before her sister can anticipate her—
“Edward Carruthers Frederick Binning.”
“Two too many,” says the owner of the names, laughing again. But, as the children remark to their mother in the waggonette on their homeward road, claiming her confirmation of the fact, there is still something odd about him.
She shuts their mouths unexpectedly. “It was his civil way of letting you know that he was tired! You know that with strangers and invalids a little of you goes a long way.”
The explanation is not flattering, but is received without offence.
The Rectory adieux to the newly found hero are made much earlier than his votaries think at all necessary or desirable. But though a few momentsbefore Lavinia’s entry, he had stoutly denied the accusation of fatigue and the offer of departure, a quarter of an hour later he tamely acquiesces in both.
“You will come again soon, and bring the Siege Train,” he says at parting, and with something that might be compunctious in his tone, to the disappointed children; “and I’ll tell you all I know about Bobs. I do not think it is nearly as much as you know yourselves,” he adds laughing.
He shakes hands with Phillida and Daphne, and kisses Serena and the poodle—the latter by request—and they are gone.
Strong emotion is often the unexpected parent of platitude. It is the mind at ease that has leisure to sharpen the epigram and fire thebon-mot, and nothing can be more banal than the short phrases exchanged between the young pair whom the departure of the Darcys has left quivering and tingling with a sense of each other’s proximity.
“What capital children!”
“Yes, aren’t they?”
“And she, the mother, is one of the best, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is.”
A pause.
Lavinia can go no farther than this bald assent in praise of her chosen friend, for the oppression of shyness that crushes and gags her. It is of this metamorphosed, dressed, transformed man, passing so visibly out of the province of the nurse, despite his crutches and his pallor, that she feels a timiditynone the less overmastering for her knowledge of its senselessness. That he sees it, the uncertainty of the tone which utters what sounds like a reproach sufficiently proves.
“Why were you so unwilling to own that you knew my Christian names? It was not a very compromising admission.”
“Not very,” she answers with a wavering laugh; “but to-day I feel as if I must sit up, and ‘make strange’ with you. The personIknew lay meekly flat on his back, and did not dare to call his soul his own; when he sits up and gives a party, I realize that my jurisdiction has ended.”
“Hasit?”
The question is followed by a silence so full of electricity that both feel the necessity of running up a lightning conductor. Both begin a sentence at the same moment, and each breaks it off on realizing the other’s intention. Each begs the other to continue the interrupted phrase, and each asseverates that it was not worth ending. It is Binning who is finally persuaded to reissue from his mint the coin whose valuelessness he has spent so much breath in asserting.
“I was only going to say that if I have already become such a bogey—so unrecognizable—when once I am on my legs again, I shall have to be formally reintroduced to you.”
“It will not be worth while.” Even as she makes it Lavinia realizes the folly of her speech, opening up, as it does, the subject of their fast-approaching separation; but before her forces cancome up to relieve it, the traitor within her has rushed the position, and once again the electric current runs perilously strong.
* * * * *
As the young Darcys have always been taught to say what they mean, and mean what they say, they credit their acquaintance with a like simplicity and veracity; and, having been invited by Captain Binning to come again soon, and bring the Siege Train, see no reason why they should not repeat their visit in compliance with a request, whose sincerity it never occurs to them to doubt, with the least possible delay. Thanks to the drag placed upon their ardour by a discreeter parent, a decent interval of three or four days is allowed to elapse before they reappear in triumph, equipped with all the munitions of war.
“You will find him in the garden,” Mrs. Prince says to her young visitors, waving heren tout casin the direction indicated—“there among those lilacs. He is out for the first time in a wheeled chair—quite an event for him, poor lad!” Then, as they fly off in eager obedience to the direction given, she adds,sotto voce, to Mrs. Darcy, “If you could give them—Binning and Lavinia, I mean—a hint to stay within range of Féo’s windows. She likes to be able to watch them.”
But the rector’s wife must have forgotten to fulfil the delicate commission entrusted to her, since when, an hour later, Mrs. Prince joins the party, ostensibly to see on her own account how they are getting on, but in reality irefully despatchedby her daughter to investigate the causes of their being completely out of sight, she finds them all grouped in a fragrant close of blossoming shrubs round the wheeled chair, whence Binning is conducting the Relief of Ladysmith. That the carrying out of that operation has reduced all the forces engaged—male and female, grown-up people and children—to the same level of excited juvenility, is proved by the fact that, at the moment of Mrs. Prince’s advent, Captain Binning and Miss Carew are contesting, with raised voices and heightened colours, the possession of the one cannon that shoots silverbonbons. For the moment they have entirely lost sight of their own dangerously tender relations to each other, and are disputing in real anger about the possession of a ridiculous toy.
“You have come just in time to prevent manslaughter,” says Mrs. Darcy, rising from her knees with a humorously shamefaced air. “We had to shelter here from the wind,” she adds in rather guilty explanation. “I think we are going to have another cold snap.”
Either the “cold snap” alluded to, or one brought by Mrs. Prince herself, presently disperses the party, and the Darcys retreat with such precipitation as to leave the object of strife behind them on the grass.
Lavinia picks it up and eyes it unseeingly, conscious only that the voluble chaperonage of the last hour is withdrawn, and that in the green privacy of their lilac-scented bower nothing is left to protect them from each other. It will be for only a minuteor two that the delicious awkwardness of their firsttête-à-têteamid the glad May greenness of trees, and the erotic suggestions of wedded blackbirds will last—only till the servant who drew the chair to its present harbour can be recalled and instructed to drag it up and down along the broad terrace walk between the sundial and the fountain, in the bald publicity of all the house’s front windows, and within range of the still bedded Féodorovna’s eye.
“I withdraw my claim,” Binning says magnanimously, with a half-laugh.
“So do I!” rejoins she, relieved.
“Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it!”
“And to think that we should have been within an inch of a serious quarrel oversuchan object!” she cries, tossing the gem of the Rectory Siege Train disdainfully away. “Our first quarrel!”
At that—the phrase seeming ill pitched on and suggestive, both lapse into awkwardness, out of which, and also out of their bird-haunted brake, a footman presently expels them, lugging the one and compelling the other, since she is still on duty, into the stare of the afternoon sun on the shadeless terrace, which, or Mrs. Darcy’s “cold snap,” soon tires the invalid so much that he asks to be taken indoors.
He revives before long, however, when comfortably extended on his sofa, and removed from the heady influences of the lilac perfume and the blackbirds’ song—three amorous cocks apparently courting one hen—he and his companion have settled downinto the at all events surface peacefulness of their normal relation of nurse and patient. She has proposed reading aloud to him, and, though he has not accepted the offer with much eagerness, being no great bookman, and, like most men, disliking having his reading done for him, she persists, contrary to her usual gentle habit of following his every suggestion, and guessing every unuttered wish. After all, the manœuvre has its advantages, and he lies resigned, exploring the chart of her dear face, and making several new and delightful little discoveries.
An interruption soon occurs in the shape of a letter for Lavinia—arrived by the afternoon post, overlooked in passing through the hall, and now brought her by a servant. Her colour changes as she recognizes the handwriting. There must be something very wrong in her “State of Denmark,” as she has time to realize in a flash of compunction, for her to feel as she does, that there is an indecency in her reading a letter from Rupert under Binning’s eyes. Yet she must read it at once, too, since the fact of his writing implies something unusual, as he and his father are to return to-morrow morning, and she has never encouraged nor he permitted himself love-letters written only for love’s sake. Asking leave of her companion, formally yet with hurried uneasiness she opens and reads the missive, seen at the first glance to be unaccountably long. The man, to put her at ease and make her feel free from observation, picks up the dropped volume; but over its top, or through its boards—since suchlittle miracles are of easy performance to that most bogus of blind beggars, god Eros—he sees that, whatever her news may be, it is of an oversetting nature.
“They are not coming home to-morrow.”
This cannot be what has upset her. There must be something more.
“Has the baptismal register not turned up yet?”
“Yes, it was found on Thursday in St. Mary Abbotts.”
He must wait her time.
“My uncle is laid up ill in London.”
“Gout?”
“Yes; but not simple gout. He felt an attack coming on, and dosed himself with the very strong remedies which the doctor has always forbidden him; got a chill on the top of that; and now he has driven it in.”
“And has sent for you to nurse him?”
“No; he will not hear of it.”
She shuts herself up into her letter, and he gets nothing more out of her for a while. She has even moved quite away from him to a distant window; still with that odd sense of immodesty in reading it while his eyes are upon her.
“I know what your impulse will be,” Rupert writes; “but you must resist it. It is notfaçon de parler;but he would be seriously annoyed by your coming up. It seems difficult to believe it, knowing as we have done all our lives his absolute carelessness about money; but it is, nevertheless,true that of late his one idea has been to screw and pinch in every possible way for——”
The “for” is carefully erased; and the object of Sir George’s parsimonies left unstated; but had it been printed on a poster in letters six feet high, Lavinia could not have read more clearly that it is for those terrible unescapeable younger children of hers that Sir George is lopping his little luxuries.
“The thought that your presence would swell the bill at this ‘d——d pot-house’ as he calls it, would do more to retard his cure than even your ministrations could counteract; so stay where you are, and look after Binning, to whom please give my love. You know that among the many feminine graces for which you despise me, the gift of nursing is not the least!”
Then follows a postscript: “The poor old fellow caught his chill walking with me through yesterday’s storm, to save the expense of a cab or bus to a jeweller’s in the City, about an enamelled girdle he is having made for you; and which I have been helping him to design. Now that it is too late, he is unnaturally good and obedient—a state of things I hope to maintain by encouraging the terror under which he labours of not being well by the 28th.”
Such was certainly not Rupert Campion’s intention in writing this letter, yet the impression derived from it by hisfiancéeis that never were so many unpleasant facts and suggestions crowded into four sides of a sheet of note-paper. Her uncle is seriously ill, and she is not to be allowed to go to him because he is saving all his money for her and Rupert’s youngerchildren. He has contracted his illness in the quest of an expensive ornament for her, which will add one more link to the enormous chain of obligations which is tying up her liberty with ever tighter and tighter knots. Rupert has given an added proof of his hopelessly unmanly tastes by designing the jewel. In a dreadful flash of prophetic insight, she sees him, in the terrible matter-of-fact freedom of married life, sitting with his arm round her waist, and quoting Waller—
“That which her slender waist confinedShall now my joyful temples bind.”
“That which her slender waist confinedShall now my joyful temples bind.”
“That which her slender waist confinedShall now my joyful temples bind.”
He has sent his “love” with school-girl effusiveness to Binning; and, last and worst offence, he has alluded to the 28th!
For some moments the girl stands looking vaguely out at the rhododendron belts and azalea beds, the lawns andparterres, with a horrible feeling of hatred and physical nausea towards the man with whom she is to pass her life. Then the horror is transferred to herself, and strong reaction follows. She thrusts the letter into her pocket, goes back to her former seat, and picks up the book. Her action seems to forbid question or intrusion. But in a moment or two she lays down the volume, and makes her expiation. It does not look like one at first.
“Do not you think that complete unselfishness is the highest as well as the rarest quality that a man can possess?”
He is so much taken aback by the triteness andapparent irrelevance of the question, that she is able to enlarge uninterrupted upon her dog’s-eared theme.
“I mean do not you think that it is to be set far above generosity, or endurance, or courage, or any of that sort of showy virtues?”
“Are they showy?”
“They get a great deal morekudos, at any rate!” she retorts, with a heat he does not understand. “Do not you agree with me?”
“I do not think I ever thought about it,” he answers bluntly. “If I had, I should have taken for granted that unselfishness included all the others.”
“How?”
“Well, take pluck for instance. If a man were perfectly unselfish, he would never cast a thought to his own skin.”
“I do not at all agree with you,” rejoins she, almost rudely. “There is no relation whatever between them: the one is the loftiest of moral qualities; the other is purely physical, a mere matter of nerves and muscles, and beef and beer.”
He lies looking at her in puzzled pain, jaded with the effort to follow the windings of her inexplicable mood.
“You will wonder what is the motive of this flat tirade,” she says with a laugh that has neither mirth nor music in it. “I must explain that I have had one more proof that Rupert is the most selfless being God ever created.”
Binning takes the wind out of her sails. “He gave me that impression;” and the only net result of the expiation is to put them both out of spirits and temper for the rest of the evening.
The28th of May has come, and the inevitable has happened. This inevitable is not that Lavinia Carew has become Lavinia Campion. On the contrary, her wedding stands postponed for a week, viz. to the 4th of June. The delay is in no degree attributable to her, but is caused by the illness of that uncle whose over-haste to be well, and determination to treat serious sickness with that high hand which it will never endure, has landed him in the same morass as it had done Féodorovna. With a reluctance proportioned to his extravagant eagerness for the object in view, with many racy expressions, and a refreshing shower of renewed insults, both wholesale and retail, distilling upon his patient son, Sir George has had to acquiesce in the deferring for an additional eight days of the attainment of his heart’s desire.
Perhaps the inevitable might have been avoided if one of several things had happened or not happened. If Sir George had yielded to his niece’s earnest entreaties to be allowed to nurse him, instead of insisting on her confining herself to a couple of runs up to London, each of so few hours’ duration as toinvolve no swelling of the reckoning at the “d——d pot-house;” if Rupert had not been kept or kept himself in such close attendance on his father as to have no time to see how ill his own affairs were faring; if Féodorovna had been permitted to complete her cure, and exercise momently supervision over her captive at home, instead of being despatched to Brighton—metaphorically kicking and screaming, it is true—but still despatched by a determined doctor and a for once unbullyable father; if Binning’s name had not appeared among the list of officers upon whom the Queen was pleased to bestow the Victoria Cross; if Mafeking had not been relieved! If, if! the convenient, curtsying, carneying preposition, which has salved every malefactor’s conscience since the world began! For the malefactor in question it is but a very imperfect unguent, desperate as is the perseverance with which she uses it.
If, if, if!A whole procession of them pass before her in the wakeful silence of the night; and she gives herself the full benefit of them all. But at every morning watch, what a traitor she stands at her own bar! To have taken advantage of “her men’s” absence—the very phrase, lifelong in its employment, seems to reek of hypocrisy—to have taken advantage of their absence, of the heavy sickness of the one, and the selfless devotion of the other, to play them this coward’s trick! Yet her infidelity has only been of the soul, not of the body. Complete as has been and is the unfaithfulness to Rupert of her heart and pulses, up to the 28th of May there has been no physical contact between her and Binning beyond that one grateful touch of a sick man’s lipsupon his nurse’s hand, at which not the most monopolizing of lovers could carp. When her self-contempt grows unendurable, she drags this creditable fact of outward propriety to the front, pushing it before her, and hiding behind it at Conscience’s judgment-seat.
And shehasstruggled! What means has she not used? what cruel, branding, searing remedies has not she tried—even to that extremest one of belittling, in herfor intérieur, him whom her whole aching soul and racing blood call out upon as her only lord and love? Has not she haled to the foreground and set in malicious order his deficiencies? told herself to what a common type he belongs—just the yea and nay, straight, unintellectual Anglo-Saxon fighting man? his character, how inferior in interest and complexity to Rupert’s; his mind, how much less subtle; his apprehension, how much less quick; his understanding of herself, how infinitely inferior? And having quite demolished him, having left him scarcely comely and barely brave, she falls on his neck in the secretest recesses of her inveterately guilty heart, and begs his pardon with tears. It is not because he is a hero or a dunce that she loves him. It is for the reason which was already very old when Montaigne penned it: “Parce que c’était, moi! Parce que c’était, lui!”
By the date of the Relief of Mafeking, Binning is able to get about a little with a stick, and even to assist with his presence and advice at the bonfire which, by “kind permission of Mr. and Mrs. Prince,” has had its site transferred, for his special benefit by its builders, the young Darcys, fromtheir own stable-yard to the ampler area of the Chestnuts. Not that the Rectory does not blaze too with subsidiary flames, and breaks out into a forest of flags that makes the bunting which had celebrated Ladysmith sink into insignificance. It would seem impossible that anything could carry the patriotic elation of the clergyman’s family to a higher pitch than it has already reached, yet it is sensibly heightened by the providential coincidence, of which the poultry-yard is the scene, viz. that it is Baden Powell who brings out thirteen chickens on the very day of the raising of the siege. The fact is the more remarkable as two other generals, who were set upon the same day, but were wanting in the patient assiduity of B. P., produced nothing but addled eggs. It is not the Mafeking news, soul-stirring and spirit-lifting as it is, which has produced the inevitable. There is a safe publicity and generality in the emotion it evokes; and Lavinia, hurling billets of wood on to the bonfire, and being exhorted, directed, and scolded by Binning, leaning on the top of his staff, which he ultimately, in the excitement of the moment, throws in too, is in far less peril than Lavinia chokingly reading aloud to its recipient the little paragraph which announces that he is among those to whom the Victoria Cross is to be awarded. She struggles through the smallnakedrecord of his achievement.
“Captain Binning,—th Hussars, who was in command of a troop, held an important position for some time against heavy odds; and when compelled to retire, saw all his men into safety, andthen, though he had himself been wounded in the left lung, supported Lieutenant Henley, who was unable to walk, until the latter was again hit and apparently killed, Captain Binning being himself again dangerously wounded a short time after.”
At the end, her hand goes out to clasp his as naturally as a man-comrade’s would have done.
“For the first time I know how it happened! You never would tell me!”
During a minute or two he can only answer her by a hand-grip, whose vigour argues a recovered hold upon life and manhood; then—
“It is a great surprise,” he says, not very steadily. “I did not even know that I had been recommended for it.”
“Do not say that you are not glad!” she cries, with a high unnatural laugh, which, in her normal state, she would have repudiated as neurotic. “Do not say that Tom, Dick, and Harry deserved it better!”
As she looks at him in triumphant challenging prohibition, at his face, still that of one stunned by the shock of a so great and honourable joy, a thin image of Rupert seems to pass vapourishly between them—not of Rupert the admirable son, the delicate reticent lover, the perfectly comprehending friend, but of Rupert in white effeminacy, paling at the mere memory of a jibbing horse. Yet the Victoria Cross is no more answerable than Mafeking and her bonfire for the happening of the inevitable. That is ironically reserved for the 28th, the day on which Lavinia was to have been marriedto Rupert. If it could have been staved off for twenty-four hours, it would never have happened; since on the 29th Binning is to depart for Southampton to join the s.s.Nubia, which is taking out to the Cape drafts for half a dozen regiments already depleted by the enteric and the Boer.
The day has dawned with a splendour as ironical as all else belonging to it. Lavinia is no longer at the Chestnuts, where her services have ceased to be required, and whither Féodorovna has returned, fully recovered and wholly hysterical, to see the last of her ex-patient.
The Rectory children are all more or less bunged with tears, against which they bravely contend, and have eluded Miss Brine, and the inadequate consolation offered by her, that after all Captain Binning is no blood relation, and that six weeks ago they had never seen him, to seek the more perfect sympathy of “Lavy.” But “Lavy” is not so nice as usual; and though they find her wandering about her garden with no apparent occupation, she shows so little desire to hear or reciprocate their lamentations that they leave her in puzzled disappointment. Their mother, presently missing them, divining and disapproving their design, hastens after them; and finding them hanging, with only very partially recovered spirits, over that unexpected tit’s nest in the disused watering-can, which their jealous care has watched over since earliest eggdom, gravely dismisses them, and joins her friend.
Without speaking, the rector’s wife directs her own steps and those of a companion who seemsscarcely to know, and not at all to care, where she is or what is being done with her, to the walled seclusion of the kitchen garden, as being less open to observation than the sloping lawn before the house. Yet at first the precaution seems unnecessary. There is nothing for any prying eye to see, nor ear to hear.
“Sir George and Rupert come back to-day?”
“No; to-morrow.”
“Will the workmen be out of the house?”
“Not quite.”
Silence; apparently numb on the one side; certainly self-reproachful on the other.
“What could have possessed me,” Mrs. Darcy asks herself, “to allude to the papering and painting of the nurseries?”
Lavinia remains absolutely dumb. A despair so lifeless and inarticulate frightens the elder woman; and, after a minute or two of anxious cogitation, she tries the effect of a douche of cold water on her companion’s apparently swooned soul.
“I did not think you would have collapsed like this!”
It is partially successful. “I have not collapsed. Since youknow, having dragged it out of me, there is no need to pretend before you; but when it matters, I shall not collapse.”
“He is coming to bid you good-bye to-day?”
“Yes.”
“Is—is that wise?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
There is such a dull doggedness in the tone,such a clutch upon the interview referred to implied in it, that Mrs. Darcy gives a gasp.
“It won’t be good-bye!” she says presently, in a low tone of conviction—“itcannotbe!”
Lavinia does not answer; not in the least, as her friend is distressfully aware, because she is acquiescent; but simply because the statement is not worth contradicting.
“I can’t stand by and see a crime committed!” Susan says, talking low and very quickly, and trying not to let her agitation get the better of her. “If you feel that it is a task beyond your strength,Iwill speak to Rupert for you; at the least hint, the least suggestion—heroically unselfish as he is.”
“You used not to admire him so much!” puts in the other with a bitter dryness.
“It is quite true, and it is perfectly fair that you should remind me of it,” rejoins Mrs. Darcy, humbly and ruefully; far too intent on her object to resent or even notice any blow that her self-esteem may suffer on the way to it. “I was paltry enough to allow myself to be blinded by his silly little foibles to his great qualities; but of late, during Sir George’s illness, realizing, as I have done—as every one must have done—all that he has had to give up, and with what perfect self-effacement he has done it——”
Lavinia breaks in upon her with a terrible jocosity.
“You have forgiven him his old lace and his Elzevirs! Well, better late than never!”
Her friend stares at her with aghast, wide-opengrey eyes, as of one who sees a hideous blighting transformation taking place in a dear and familiar object.
“You are right!” she says, under her breath. “I thought him completely unworthy of you, so unworthy that your loss would cause him very little pain so long as he could keep, as you say, his ‘old lace and his Elzevirs;’ while in another direction I saw, or thought I saw, a possibility——” Her voice dies falteringly away.
Lavinia looks at her stoically. “You need not distress yourself; you have neither made nor marred in the matter.”
Another grim silence.
“Will you empower me to tell Rupert?”
“Tell him what?”
“Will you tell him yourself?”
“Tell him what? There is nothing to tell.”
The rector’s wife pauses, brought up against this wall of senseless brazen denial; her thin sensitive face even whiter than its white wont; but she is not easily baffled, nor apt to abandon a task because it wrings her withers.
“My dear,” she says, taking gently hold of the girl’s coldly pendant hand, and using an endearment uncommon to her, being one sparing of banal caresses, “do you think that you are doing Rupert a kindness in providing him with a wife who avoids his look, winces at his voice, and shudders at his touch?”
“What the eye does not see, the heart does not feel. He will never know!” There is a wretchedcallousness in her voice, whose counterfeitness a slight shiver betrays.
“Not know! Rupert not know!”
The words, and the inflection that accompanies them, bring home to Lavinia the fact, on which she has often laughingly expatiated to her friend, of the extraordinary intuitive knowledge of her possessed by Rupert; of her absolute inability to keep one half-thought or fancy from his ken. That he should so turn over and handle the innocent trivialities of her mind and heart, has formerly been a matter of jest. Now the thought that there will be no secret place in her soul into which she can retire from him with her terrible secret, no gourd under whose shade she can sit hugging her misery undetected, breaks down the fortification of her numbness, and leaves the breach open for active conscious agony to march up and take possession. She draws her cold fingers from Mrs. Darcy’s pitying clasp, and turns upon her.
“I do not know what object you propose to yourself by putting me to this torture!” she says. “I think a person should be fully in possession of the facts of a case before she ventures to give an opinion upon it.”
“That is quite true,” replies the other, gently, too full of deep compassion for the writhing soul before her to resent either the tone or the words used; “but does it apply to me?”
“Yes,” replies Lavinia, her insensibility seeming to give way to a far more distressing and unnatural access of wild discourtesy; “yes, a hundred timesyes! You have undertaken the management of my affairs without in the least understanding them. If I were to take your advice, if I were to jilt Rupert as you so shamefully suggest to me, how much the better should I be? how much the nearer——?” She stops dead short, unable to name that never-to-be-reached goal.
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean?” speaking very slowly. “I should have thought that it did not need a conjurer to discover that! I mean thatIam not the only person you would have to convince!”
“What?”
“Has it never occurred to you that there may be an obstacle onhisside too?” (It is plain that the possessive pronoun here does not refer to Rupert.)
“No,” breathlessly.
“Don’t you think——?”
In the determination to master a tongue restive to such utterance, Lavinia pronounces her words with a clear incisiveness that, even at this crucial moment, makes Mrs. Darcy gauge apprehensively the distance that parts the tragedy in which she is taking part from the tranquil prose of the gardener potting cuttings under a shed.
“Don’t you think it might strike Captain Binning that he has done them almost enough harm already?”
“Don’t speak quite so loud!” in quick-breathing entreaty. “You mean about Bill?”
“Mightn’t it occur to him that, having robbedthem of Bill, it would not be behaving very handsomely to rob them of me too?”
The rector’s wife shakes her head mournfully. “Isn’t it a little late to think of that? He has done that already!”
“What has he done?” asks Lavinia, standing at bay, with a fierce white face of dogged championship. “What do you lay to his charge? Once he kissed my hand,—it wasthisone,” smiting it with the fore finger of the other; “but it was only to thank me for nursing him. That was his one crime! That was all he has ever done—all he ever will do!” In her breaking voice, in her passion-pinched face, there is but little attempt to disguise the poignancy of the smart that the belief in that reticence brings with it.
“Not even if he comes to bid you good-bye?”
Lavinia’s eyes, awhile ago so dead, light up ominously.
“You think that I ought not to let him come?” she asks between two panting breaths.
“I do.”
“That it would be wiser in me not to see him again?”
“Yes.”
Lavinia throws out her hands with a gesture of reckless defiance.
“Then I will beunwise!”