“Jesu, defend me; for then I rewarded your father and your brother right evil for their great goodness.”
“Jesu, defend me; for then I rewarded your father and your brother right evil for their great goodness.”
Itis not long before Miss Carew has the opportunity either to put into execution or repent of the intention announced by her; for scarcely has Mrs. Darcy turned her back upon the scene of her failure, in crestfallen but quite unresentful sadness, before the successor whose coming she had deprecated is announced. Lavinia has let her friend go without any expression of apology or regret, and has watched her depressed slight back disappearing through the churchyard without one feeling but a vague sense of relief that she is out of the way.
It takes all the self-control with which the rector’s wife is so plentifully endowed, to enable her to receive, with the proper amount of concern, the news, which reaches her when scarcely within the Rectory gate, that Baden Powell has done to death two of his Mafeking chickens, by the simple process of putting his large yellow foot upon them, and keeping it there in serene unconsciousness of their departing squeaks. Herrôleis rendered easier by the fact that the children’s own grief at the catastrophe is much less than it would have beenon any other day in the year, being merged in the far acuter one of their hero-playmate’s departure. There is nothing very heroic in the utterance with which their idol is answering the mute look which is the only greeting Lavinia can control herself into offering him.
“Am I a greater scarecrow than you expected in this coat? I was told by a man I met in Pall Mall on Tuesday that I looked like a clothes-peg! Well, one might easily look like a worse thing; and, thank God, I never had much superfluous flesh!”
It is clear that he scarcely knows what he is saying; and that, though his speech is perfectly rational in its triviality, it is so more by instinct and habit than by any conscious command over tongue or thought.
“The doctors passed you?” she asks, squeezing out the words with a parsimony that proves how little trust she, for her part, can place in her organ of utterance.
“Yes; they said that the voyage would finish setting me up. So it will.”
The last clause is, as the girl feels, a reassurance addressed to the grudging doubt and negation in her eyes—the eyes that verify how loosely the clothes hang on a frame that betrays the fact more plainly than a less largely built one would have done. How easily, how reasonably, how nothing more than humanly, they—that callous Medical Board—might have sent him back—so little more than half-cured as he is—for another fortnight, another week!Another week! yes; that he might be here to dance at her wedding!
“So this is your home! This is where you have spent your life!” Binning says, looking round at the room seen for the first and last time, and in which, in fancy, he will have to set her beside the armchair that he divines to be Sir George’s.
He pauses, not for the moment quite equal to bear placing, even in imagination, thejeune ménage. Yet he will not spare himself the pain of knowing what corner of the fragrant homely room, that bears the imprint of her and her tastes and occupations, will shelter the warm domestic nearness to each other of husband and wife.
“Tell me where you all sit, that, when I am gone, I may picture you.”
“That is Uncle George’s chair,” she says, pointing to the one that the young man had rightly assigned to the house’s master; and then stops.
“And Rupert’s?”
“Rupert has no particular chair.” After a moment, “Rupert always chooses whatever seat he thinks no one else wants; that is Rupert’s theory of life—and his practice.”
The tribute seems wrung out of her; yet she makes it, and handsomely too.
He gives a little nod of acquiescence, inwardly shocked at his own want of generosity in being able to do no more, yet—inwardly also—writhing at her praise.
“And you have lived here always?”
“Yes, always; that is, ever since Uncle Georgepicked me out of the gutter.” She gives a forced laugh, and goes on, “You know that when I was a destitute baby he saved me from the workhouse?”
“Yes, you told me.”
“Your tone says that I have repeated itad nauseam. Well, I have to do it, lest—though you would hardly think such a thing possible—I may forget it. I am very near doing it sometimes.”
“I do not believe it.”
There is a grit and manliness in his voice that almost contradicts the passion in his eyes—eyes in which, for all their passion, there is room too for a wondering consternation at the metamorphosis wrought in his sweet, calm nurse and comrade.
“Shall we go out of doors?” he asks, after a moment or two of burdensome silence. “We have had so few hours out of doors together.”
She reads his thought. They will be safer—safer from themselves and from each other—out of doors. It had been her own, and she is almost sure that she had meant to act in accordance with it; yet that it should come from him causes her a dull surprise, painful through all its dulness.
“Where would you like to go?” she asks, when they stand together on the garden sward facing the familiar view, the distance clearly azure-blue to-day, but over which, as she has so often triumphantly explained to visitors, a grey mist is apt to lie while her upland is in radiant sunshine. To-day the cases are reversed. Sunshine bathes the distance; it is on her heart that the fog lies thick. “Where wouldyou like to go?” she repeats. “To the Rectory, to bid good-bye to the children?”
It is out-Heroding Herod to suggest that their last hour shall be spent in company, and her heart stands still until his answer comes. If it is an assent, all danger will be over, and of that she ought to be glad. But it is not.
“Show me some pleasant walk where you often go.”
The motive which dictates the request is the same that had made him ask which chair she is wont to occupy in the drawing-room. He is collecting frames for the gallery of pictures of her that is to hang in his heart.
She gives a slight assenting nod, and sets off with an undecided step, turning over in her mind, with a view to choosing it, which of her familiar paths is the one that is least associated with Rupert’s companionship. It is safe, at all events, to begin with the churchyard. Every new-comer is shown the gigantic brother yews, and told how much is the eight-century girth of the largest one.
“It measures thirty-four feet in circumference,” she says, in a dull show-woman’s voice, as she has said scores of times before to politely astonished visitors.
And then they stand silent, staring at the erebus of shade above their heads, at the enormous branch which, in some former storm—now itself long ago—has shown symptoms of breaking away from the colossal trunk, and has taken such a gigantic prop to support it. From under the eternal night of thetree, day is seen to laugh over the rather neglected green mounds around—neglected as rural churchyards are discreditably often apt to be, but over which the kindly wild flowers are waving unbidden.
“If you outlive me, which is unlikely, this is where you may finally think of me,” says Lavinia, speaking at last. “It is not very imaginative of one to live and die on the same quarter of an acre, is it? The entrance to our vault is on the other side of the church.” She gives her piece of information with a sort of alacrity, in contrast to the muffled dulness of her last sentences.
“You say it as if you were telling me a piece of good news.”
“You wished to know where I generally sit and walk. I thought you might carry your interest a step further, and like to know where I am to lie.”
He turns aside, as if to examine one of the chipped truisms on a lichened headstone; but not before she has seen a glimpse, and divined the rest, of the disfigurement her cruel and unworthy appeal to his pity has worked on his still sickness-thinned and hollowed face. A bitter pang of self-condemnation adds itself to a mocking memory of one, and the most emphatic, of Féodorovna’s nursing injunctions—to be sure not to mention any subject in the least painful to her patient. Is this the way in which she is fulfilling it? He is trying his hardest to behave like an honourable gentleman; and instead of helping him, she is—because it gives herself some relief from her intolerable pain—setting the stumbling-block of her cowardly bid forcompassion in his way. She half puts out her hand to touch the sleeve which still bags upon his arm; then draws it back.
“I have thought of a walk,” she says, in a better and braver voice.
Up a steep cart-track, skirting a hop-garden, where the soaring poles and lofty roof of intertwisted network tell of the faith that the now infant plants, scarcely beginning to clasp their supports, will presently engreen the whole land; then down one of its naked aisles; across two cheerful meadows, where strong lambs are capering among the buttercups; to a gate that gives entrance to a brake, in whose midst an inconspicuous pool half hides itself and its water-hens. Lavinia pauses, with her hand on the top bar, and an expression of doubt in her face. The place looks more solitary than its wont. Will he think that she has betrayed him into an ambush even more dangerous than that of the house—he, between whom and herself, all along climbing upland, and through sunny pasture, the dead Bill and his living kinsmen have seemed almost visibly to walk?
“It is scarcely a wood,” she says hesitatingly. “There is not a tree of more than twenty years’ growth, and the nightingales sing so loudly here that they will save us the trouble of talking.”
His answer is to give the gate an unsuccessful push.
“It is locked.”
“That is very unusual,” she answers, for an instant harbouring and at once angrily dismissingfrom her mind a superstitious idea that the homely obstacle may be Balaam’s winged prohibitory angel in a different dress. “It is almost always open; but nothing is easier than to climb it.”
He swings himself obediently over, and stands on the other side to give her his aid. But she motions him away, crying almost repellantly—
“Go on! go on! I do not need any help.”
If he receives her into his arms, even in the mechanical and prosaic civility of assisting her to bestride a five-barred gate, she knows that were ten thousand dead Bills and living Ruperts to interpose their pale prohibitions, the inevitable must happen.
Lavinia has spoken accurately. The pleasant spot in which their agility has landed her and her companion is not a wood. It is merely one of those low green tangles of hazel and maybush, sapling chestnut, and gnarly willow, whose woof is nowhere too thick to let in a thrifty shower of temperate sunbeams; and through the woof of whose carpet the blue hyacinth dye runs dim and rich. A path not wide enough to admit of any couple save a lover-pair walking abreast, girdles the little sheet of water at quiet play with its dancing flies and leaping fish and placidly oaring moorhens. From the heart of one of those brakes, whose semi-privacy seems to provoke the nightingale to uttermost extremity of song, one is now turning his whole little brown body, dimly seen sitting on a hawthorn bough, into a shout of heavenly self-congratulation upon finding himself in such a beautiful May world,and with a demand for love too exquisitely worded to be denied.
Arrived at the pool-side, within a few yards of him, the human couple, of whom he is so much too joyful to be the little spokesman, stand quite still, in fear of scaring him; but in his happy little heart there is no room for fear, and from the look of the poor souls he knows that they are not enemies.
“I told you that he would save us the trouble of talking,” says Lavinia under her breath.
He has saved the lesser singers of his own genus the same trouble, apparently; for whether quelled or entranced, or learning those imitations which they will afterwards practise with clever inferiority, they are dumbed.
Lavinia listens at first with a sense of relief. The divine organ that lies in that little parcel of feathers is uttering all the longings, all the merging of two into one, all the fruition-nearing desires to which she may never, never give voice. To the deceit of that seeming relief succeeds an intolerable revolt. Why should she of all creation alone be silent? Why should not she for once speak out? Why, since this little island of time upon which they stand is their very own, since they have no future, since they have been ironically given this one half-hour to show them what life might have been,—why should not they be wise, and, pushing aside those dim ghosts which they themselves have quixotically interposed between the aching reality of their own bruised hearts, slake their terrible thirst for each other in one first and last draught?
The temptation to throw herself upon his breast is so strong, that to her dazed senses she almost seems to herself to have already yielded to it, though in effect she has only stood in pale maidenliness at his side; but the illusion is so vivid, and the reactionary shock of horror at herself so potent, that she walks with unsteady haste away from her companion towards the singer, whom her movement puts to flight.
“You have frightened him away!” says the young man, standing still on the path.
“Yes; I am glad.”
“Glad!That is not a word that one seems to have much use for just now!”
His tone tells her that the temptation is strong upon him too, and his action, in adding two or three more yards to those she has already set between them, that in deadly struggle he is grappling with it. If she were his true love, would not she come to his aid? With a prodigious effort she clears the red mist from before her eyes, and steadies the trembling in her traitorous hands. Then, rejoining him, and beginning to resume the walk that their charmed ears had first interrupted, she says, in a tone to whose cheerfulness she tries with all the force of her will-power not to give a hysterical ring—
“After all, there is a good deal to be glad of, if one comes to think of it—your recovery, your Victoria Cross——”
“Yes,” indistinctly; but with an effort, whose suffering manliness she recognizes, to follow her lead—“yes; I am a sweep to complain!”
It nerves her to new effort. “Was not Féodorovna very much excited at your getting it?” her terror of herself driving her on into a torrent of trivial questions. “How is Féodorovna? is she yellow still?”
“No; not at all.”
“Is she quite herself again?—quite recovered?”
“She is supposed to be.”
“But you think that she is not?”
“I think she is—rather—hysterical.”
Lavinia’s feverish trickle of inquiry drops into silence. Between the lines of his brief words, and in the constraint of his tone, she reads that the method adopted by Miss Prince to show her hysteria has been to throw herself into his arms, as she had done by letter into General ——’s, and has volunteered to follow him round the globe, as she had generously done in the case of his predecessor. Well, she herself has been within an ace of a similar action during the last five minutes. She ought, therefore, to feel a sympathy for the same abandonment on the part of another. And yet, although Miss Carew knows, as well as if she had been present at the drama, that Féodorovna has remained in Binning’s arms not a moment longer than the space of time needed for him to find a chair in which to deposit her, yet a dizzying jealousy seizes her at the thought that, though only for a minute, and deeply against the will of the object of her amorous demonstration, Miss Prince has lain on that breast whose pulsing against her own Lavinia will never feel.
“Hysterical!” she repeats, after a pause, in a low key of suspicion. “Why was she hysterical? How did she show that she was hysterical?”
A slight flush, or so she fancies, passes over his hollow cheeks.
“Oh, I don’t know. How do people usually show it?”—with impatient evasion.
“Laughing? Crying?”
“Yes, yes; that sort of thing!” Then, with an upbraiding accent, that escapes him against his will, “Why should we talk about her, poor soul?”
“Why not?” she answers. “What else is there to talk about? There is nothing else.”
The words, extravagant as they are, represent to Lavinia the exact truth.He!She!There is nothing else in God’s universe; and before both him and her stands the prohibitory angel, the flame of whose waved sword blinds them to all creation also. She looks straight before her in dogged despair, and a caught half-sobbing breath beside her tells her with what a strangling grip the temptation is taking him by the throat. Yet this time she puts out no finger, utters no wisely trivial commonplace to help him. The mental picture of Féodorovna clinging sobbing round his neck, even though she knows with what repellant grudgingness that embrace had been met, has robbed Lavinia of all further power of fight than what lies in silence. He does not leave her even that.
“We shall hear of each other indirectly, I suppose?” he says by-and-by, in a voice not theclearer for the lump in his throat, which is clearly past his power to swallow.
Her cup of misery runs over. “No doubt,” she answers with a shuddering distinctness. “If you ask Féodorovna, she will write you a long account of my wedding! She is a great letter-writer!”
As if the words possessed some paralyzing spell over their feet, both of them stop dead short; and, turning round, stare full in each other’s faces, conversation shrivelling up its thin fabric in that fiery moment; and then—the inevitable happens. The gasping lips draw nearer, nearer, nearer; the idly hanging arms stretch themselves out, enfold, embrace, crush; and, with no apparent initiation on either side, Fate hurls them upon one another’s forbidden breasts. Their kisses are frantic with the haste of six wasted weeks, and have their edge given by the knowledge that, for these sad two, there is only one little dreg at the bottom of the wine-cup of life and love, and that if they do not make haste to drain it, it will be poured out on the desert ground that is soaked with the lost vintages meant to appease the thirst of parched humanity.
They have thrust away the irksome apparition that had officiously flitted between them. For such a ghost’s thin body there is no room between his heart and hers. Out of both those hearts all their former long-established, deep-rooted inhabitants are turned, driven by the flail of the one supreme scourge. In those hearts Honour had held her high court, Duty had wielded her sceptre, unselfishFamily Affection been warmly nested. Now, of none of them is there a trace left in either consciousness. For neither of them does anything exist but the omnipotent primal instinct—the instinct that drove the first man and woman into each other’s throbbing arms.
It is not for long—not for more than a few moments—only for one kiss-length, that that mad, dumb, clinging oblivion endures. Then the old ejected law-givers begin to gather up their sceptres and return; boldly ejecting, in their turn, the furious rebel that had ousted them; and the two that God has not joined together stagger apart. As in the impulse of embrace neither was earlier or later than the other, so is the shock of disunion common and simultaneous. They find themselves standing apart, uncertainly staring at each other in the imperfect consciousness of an enormous joint crime. It was only a kiss—an utter, scorching, lover’s kiss, it is true—yet still only a kiss that has so seared their re-awakening consciences; but had their disloyalty gone to the extremest pitch of unfaithfulness, it could hardly have branded them with a deeper sense of guilt. Her white lips frame three scarcely audible words, which he yet hears—“This—day—week!”—and he whispers, in horrified ejaculation, “Rupert!Bill!”
There is a terrible silence—at least, it seems so to them—though the nightingale, scarcely scared, and having taken but a short flight to the branch of a youngling chestnut, is finishing his epithalamium with even bettered music. The reinstated judgeshave taken their seats, and are holding a dread assize.
“It is only I who am to blame!” says Lavinia, by-and-by, in a key a little above her former one. “Youdid really struggle. If I had helped you honestly, you would have pulled through; but I did not. I never really meant you to hold out! I see now that I meant it all along to happen! I meant you to kiss me! I thought—God forgive me!—that I should be able to bear my life better afterwards if you did!”
“If I had been honest,” he says hoarsely, “shouldn’t I have accepted your offer of taking me to the Rectory? You know youdidoffer. If I had meant honestly, should I have comehere?” casting a glance of despairing reproach round at the blue and green and silver accessories to his fall—smiling water and curtsying sedge and sky-coloured blue-bells.
“ButIbrought you here!” cries the other culprit, in a heart-rending eagerness, of which he will not suffer her to have the monopoly—to assume all the weight of their “most mutual” lapse.
“It was a pity that Bill did not leave the Boers to finish me!”
Then there is silence again. This time it is the man who breaks it, though his tone is so low as to constitute scarcely an infringement of the crushing guilty stillness.
“And you will still marry him this day week?”
At that she veils her face with both hands.“What am I?” she says indistinctly, through the relief of their shield. “What have I become? I have lived for twenty-three years, and I never suspected that there was a bad woman inside me!”
“And for twenty-eight years I have imagined that I was a gentleman!”
“Even thus two friends condemnedEmbrace and kiss and take a thousand leaves,Loather a hundred times to part than die;Yet now farewell, and farewell Life with thee.”
“Even thus two friends condemnedEmbrace and kiss and take a thousand leaves,Loather a hundred times to part than die;Yet now farewell, and farewell Life with thee.”
“Even thus two friends condemnedEmbrace and kiss and take a thousand leaves,Loather a hundred times to part than die;Yet now farewell, and farewell Life with thee.”
Theylook at each other in a sort of terror, with a renewal and immense increase of that fear of their own and each others’ possibilities of frailty, which, looked back upon now, is seen to have been so inadequately weak and so abundantly justified. Since there is no longer any barrier of innocence between them, what is there to hinder them from a repetition—a hundred repetitions—of that tasted, and therefore now senselessly abstained-from, ecstasy? What more of guilt can there be in ten or twenty score kisses than in that one which they have drunkenly given and taken? They see the sophistry dawning in one another’s hungry eyes; and once again their rebel arms half reach out reciprocally across a dwindled interval; but this time, to balance her former misleading of him, salvation—if that bitter abstinence can be called so—comes from her that at first was weakest. She tears her eyes away from him, and snatches a look round, as in preparation for flight.
“We must not stay here any longer!” she sayswith an accent of ungovernable fear; and he as wildly acquiesces.
“No,” he says; “you are right. I do not know what has come to me; but you are right not to trust me!”
“It is I,I,I!” she repeats in distraught self-accusation. “You do not understand what a monster I am! I am to marry Rupertnext week! I have been engaged to him all my life! I am all they possess in the world! Since I was a week old my uncle has overwhelmed me with his generous love; every one has said that I was more to him than even the boys. Now the one hope that is left for him lies——”
Her rapid flow of self-accusation breaks off abruptly, stemmed by the awful obstacle placed by memory in its torrent course; and her face turns ghastly under his miserable eyes, as once more for the thousandth time, but with immeasurably deepened repulsion, she realizes the nature of the hope which is her uncle’s one remaining tie to life, and by whom to be fulfilled. It is by bearing children to Rupert that her intolerably heavy debt to them both is to be paid. For one insane moment her look flies to the pool. It must be under the little circles that the dancing flies are making on its surface that she can best cut the knot that is so far past untying. The broken voice of her fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer calls her back.
“AndI! Do you forget that it was through me they lost poor Bill?” Possibly it is a relief to each to pile the chief weight of their common guilt on his and her own head respectively, in unconsciouscontrast to the shabby recriminations of our first parents; but of even this little alleviation they are soon robbed, all other consciousness merged in the killing sense of instant and eternal parting.
“You had better stay here for a few minutes—till I am well away,” says Lavinia, speaking very fast, but not incoherently. After a little gasping pause, with a fresh rush of utter horror and woe, “Must I tell Rupert?” Then, giving herself that answer of which her lover is quite incapable, “No! I must not! if I did, it would be in the hope—the certainty that he would cast me off. No, no; I must not—I must not tell him, whatever happens: it would never do to tell him.” She rambles on, half to herself, repeating the phrases, as of one whose hold on her own intelligence is slipping away; then recovering it with a sudden snatch, she says brusquely, “Well! it is done, and it can’t be undone, and there is an end of it. Good-bye! I—I would say ‘God bless you’ if I had any business to.”
Without giving him time for any answering benediction—as, indeed, why should he bless her?—she breaks into a stumbling run, which carries her blindly on, till at the curve which will finally hide him from her sight, the curve whose distance from him guarantees her safety, the dully raging passion within her arrests her feet, and turns her head to see once more in crowning farewell torment the figure, in loosely hanging clothes, of him whom she has ironically helped back to life only to make him taste the sharpness of death.
* * * * *
“But I told you to say that I was not at home to any one?”
“I did say so, ’m.”
“It is not eleven o’clock yet?”
“No, ’m; it wants five minutes of eleven.”
“I am too busy: I have too much to do. It is impossible that I should see any one this morning.”
“So I told Miss Prince, ’m; but she said she was sure that you would see her.”
“Miss Prince always says that.”
“Yes, ’m.”
There is sympathy in the assent of the elderly unsmart butler, who has reached the third stage in the usual progress of valuable servants to their goal—that progress marked by the successive milestones of “servant,” “treasure,” “tyrant,” “pensioner;” for Féodorovna is not popular with his class.
“Will you go back and tell Miss Prince that I am very sorry, but I am afraid I must ask her to put off her call till to-morrow, as Sir George and Mr. Rupert are coming down by the 4.38 train, and I have a good many arrangements to make before they arrive?”
The old butler regards her with a respectful pity for the weakness of reasoning power that can imagine the visitor in question to be kept at bay by the means proposed.
“Yes, ’m; but I do not think it will be any use, for Miss Prince said she would like to take a turn in the garden until you were disengaged. And I beg your pardon, ’m—your eyes are better than mine—isn’t that Miss Prince opening the iron gate?”
Of course itisMiss Prince—Miss Prince come to surprise Lavinia in her utter dishevelment of soul, though the habit of a lifetime keeps her unnerved body in its simple raiment neat and dainty—come to verify the staring facts that sleep has mocked her; that hope has bid her an eternal good-bye; that her despair is beyond the depth that any leaded line can plumb; that she is wretched and guilty beyond the sin-and-sorrow compass of any woful malefactor since the world began; come to spy and comment, before she has begun to make up spirit and flesh for that ghastly play-acting which is to last her life. These are the thoughts—if such mentalortsand fragments can be called so—that knock against each other in a vertigo of fear in Miss Carew’s brain, as her visitor, with a graceful flitting gait that has yet sufficiently proved the determination beneath it, floats up the kitchen-garden walk, that had yesterday witnessed poor Mrs. Darcy’s discomfiture. Féodorovona is dressed in a delicate Court mourning, and a certain elevation of expression tells Lavinia that she has come to proclaim some action on her own part that to most persons it would appear more judicious to conceal.
“Gathering flowers?” she says, with a chastened smile, and with no attempted apology for overriding her listener’s efforts to elude her. “If I had only thought of it, I would have brought you any number from our Houses.” There is a touch of the comfortable maternal brag in the words, but it appears only to vanish as she adds with a quiet sigh, “As you may imagine, I had other things to think of!”
“Had you?”
Lavinia has scarcely interrupted her flower-cutting, since it enables her to present only a profile to her visitor’s observation, and the reflection is passing through her mind with a foggy comfort that, since she has not shed one tear, there can be no swollen eyelids to give her away, and that, even if there were, Féodorovna’s panoply of perfect egotism would protect her from the sight of them.
“HadI?” repeats Miss Prince, the suavity of her high sorrow touched by a ruffle of indignation. “Who can know that better than you?”
The shape of the question gives Lavinia an inward convulsion of new terror. Is it possible that she can have heard, or learnt, or divined?
“Do you mean that Captain Binning is gone?” she asks, bending over a long-stalked bronze tulip, which she snips off nearer the bulb than she would have done in a more rational moment.
“Yes; he is gone!” After a moment of reverent ruminating, “It went off quite quietly.”
“Did it?”
“Our real farewell was yesterday. We had a very important interview yesterday morning. I asked for it.”
“Did you?”
“As you know, I have never been tied by the conventions. I have always overridden them.”
“Yes.”
“In my case such unusual action is a necessary postulate of happiness.Youare in the enviable position of knowing that you can never be loved foranything but yourself; that no man can be accused of mercenariness in approaching you, but inmycase there is always the danger that the millions with which I am credited should keep away from me any man of particularly delicate feeling and high honour.”
It seems incredible to Lavinia that at such a moment she herself should be able to entertain so sordid a speculation; yet there is no doubt that the wonder flashes through her mind as to whether the profits of the Dropless Candle have really amounted to the figure so superbly indicated by the daughter and goddaughter of that great invention?
“Such being the case,” continues Miss Prince, in a tone of modest pride at the about-to-be-related exploit, “there was only one course open to me, and as it was perfectly consonant with my views of life and ethics, I took it without reluctance. I offered myself to him.”
“As you did to General —— three months ago?”
The recalled action—recalled by the very white lips of the heroine’s one hearer—would put most people out of countenance, and even Miss Prince’s once more admirably white surface shows a pink stain.
“You speak as if you were convicting me of inconsistency—of infidelity to my ideal,” she says, with a little haste of wronged modesty. “And superficially it may appear to be so; but it is only in appearance; as you know it has always been my creed that whenever and wherever I met what Iconceived to be the highest and noblest qualities of humanity embodied in one man, I ought to offer myself unreservedly to him. If I have failed, it is a failure more glorious than most successes.”
Lavinia has stopped her flower-cutting, and forgotten her misgivings as to the tell-tale tragedy of her own face; she looks sullenly and with what she knows to be a baseless rage of jealousy at her, the manner and accompaniments of whose declaration of love she is in dull torment trying to reconstruct, while memory adds its sting by recalling to her the high, cool apartness of virginal indignation which had been her own attitude of mind towards Féodorovna’s former achievement.
“Circumstances were against me,” pursues Féodorovna, presently, looking away in a sort of dreamy protest towards the horizon. “That unlucky illness! If I had hadyouropportunities, the opportunities which were wasted on you, he might have decided differently.”
It is lucky that Miss Prince is still upbraiding the skyline; for Lavinia gives a sudden wince at the allusion to that safely preoccupied heart of her own which has rendered her, as a matter of course, danger-proof. To defend herself against that passionate repudiation of her own immunity, which seems fighting its mad way to her lips, she frames a needless question.
“He refused you?”
Féodorovna bends the chastened elegance of her black-and-white toque in dignified acquiescence.
“Yes.”
A stinging curiosity goads the other on to a second question—
“And you—how did you take it?”
“I told him how greatly I admired his disinterestedness,” replies Miss Prince, with perfectly regained equanimity, adding, with a touch of the hereditarily commercial spirit, shrewd even in adversity. “It would, of course, have been very advantageous for him from a material point of view.”
“And—and that was all? It ended there?”
To only the sharpened eye of jealous suspicion would the tiny hesitation that precedes the answer to this question be perceptible.
“Ye—es, it ended there.”
Past the power of even Féodorovna is it to confess to the precise method in which she had closed the interview; and Lavinia knows that she will never learn at what stage of the indubitably offered and as indubitably refused embrace—whether at that of mere intention or ripe accomplishment it had been arrested by its object. Féodorovna had given her last response without looking her questioner quite in the face, and her eye now rests on the church tower and the blossoming horse-chestnuts with a real, if exasperating, sadness in it.
“I told him if ever he reconsidered his decision, that whatever might be the lapse of time, whatever else changed,Ishould not.”
The unassuming fidelity that voice and words claim is clearly felt by their possessor to be so beautiful that Lavinia asks herself, in a topsy-turvywhirl of confused wretchedness, whether it is not really so? but the thought—if it deserves such a name—is chased a few moments later, as with a whip of small cords, out of her soul by a far more smarting suggestion.
“Well, good-bye. I am going away this afternoon to a quiet little fishing village in Suffolk, to be quite alone with myself; so perhaps I shall not see you again till the wedding. But, after all, that is only six days off!”
Onlysix days off! And the return of her “men” is only five hours off! Between these two dates how can any one be expected to keep their sanity? There would have been a better chance for her if Féodorovna had not come to stir the furnace of her misery into whitest heat, with the elegant drawing-room poker of her fatuous confession. Among preoccupations of such incomparably deeper gravity, it adds one more pang to Lavinia’s horror of herself to find that the wonder whether or how nearly Miss Prince accomplished that embrace which Lavinia looks upon as a dastardly theft upon herself, keeps a foremost place in her mind. Yet meanwhile she goes machine-like through her preparations, attending with nice accuracy to every detail that forecasting affection could plan and execute for the comfort of a dear home-coming invalid. She even carries out a little surprise—devised a while, how miraculously little a while ago!—to lighten her uncle’s sombre spirit, always specially inclined to fault-finding and depression after any small absence. And when it is finished, she regards it with a feeling of being a very Judas, inwardly classing it with his kiss, and with Jael’s draught of milk.
The five hours have dwindled to four, to three, to two, to one. The time-measure has changed to that of minutes, and of even them how few are left! For the solitary “once” of its shambling existence, the 4.38 must have been punctual, and the young horse must have flown! With this last reflection mixes itself another little one, odious in its spitefulness, that perhaps Rupert is less nervous as to that animal’s shying properties when they are hidden from him by his being in the brougham, or that at all events, his superior fear of his father will hinder him from betraying alarm. Her latest thought of him before meeting is an uncharitable one; and now they are here! With her Judas-face dressed in false smiles—this is the position as inwardly classified by herself—she meets them on the doorstep. It is her betraying arm that Sir George chooses to lean upon, as he gets, with the feeble deliberation of ill-shaken-off sickness, out of the carriage.
“No, no; you may be off!” he says, ungratefully pushing away his son’s gently offered aid. “You never were anything but a makeshift!”
Sir George’s pleasantries have always had a disagreeable flavour, and to be known as pleasantries only by experts; but that this is meant for one neither of the young people, intimately acquainted with the hall-mark, and not for a moment to be taken in by imitations, however close, fails to recognize; so they all smile. It is on Lavinia’s left arm that her uncle is leaning—a circumstance to which is due a comment on his part which she could well have spared.
“Why, your heart is knocking like a hammer! I did not know that a mosquito had a heart.”
The touched intonation with which he utters the phrase shows her that he attributes her palpitation entirely to the joyful emotion caused by his return, and how absolutely unsuspicious he is of any other possible cause for it; and her impersonation of Judas appears to herself more lifelike than ever, as she answers with a desperate playfulness—
“You have learnt a new fact in natural history.”
Rupert does not immediately follow the slow little procession to the study, whither Sir George, with a nostalgia for his own chair, chooses to be led, occupied, doubtless, with directions to the servants; and there is time for the “surprise” to be detected and admired, and for several anthems of thanksgiving, not worded exactly as the rector would have done them in church, on the part of Sir George on having at last escaped from the d——d pot-house before his son rejoins them. As he enters the room, Rupert’s father is in the act of asking how the newly papered “nurseries” look; and, on Lavinia’s faltering avowal that she has not seen them since they were finished, starts irritably up, announcing his intention of immediately visiting them, to see whether the papers are well hung, or exhibit seams between the strips, as had been the case with Hodges’ work in the offices last year.
It is in vain that both Rupert and Lavinia entreat him to defer his survey till after tea. With a reproachful observation, that “if you want a thing done you must do it yourself,” he sets off, and theyoung man and girl follow, offering him attentions which he ignores. The sight of well-executed work restores him to good humour, and he keeps his young people dancing attendance on him for some time, to admire at their leisure, and with what countenances they may, the airy spaces where their problematical offspring are to sport. Fear of betraying the loathing that the idea of her own possible motherhood brings with it, perhaps partially dulls Lavinia’s sense of that repulsion. Tea-time brings another ordeal with it.
“I cannot say that you do much credit to the Princes’ cuisine,” says Sir George, taking stock of his niece more closely than he has yet done, having, in fact, ordered her to move the skilfully interposed tea-kettle, or her own chair, so as to enable him to do so. “You must have lost quite a stone in weight since I left home.”
“Don’t you know, sir, that there is nothing that the young woman of to-day dreads so much as putting on an ounce of superfluous flesh?” asks Rupert.
Lavinia is thankful to him for his timely interposition; yet it frightens her. Why should he come to her help? Can he have any intuition or knowledge of her sore need of it? and by what creepy coincidence has he used the exact phrase employed by Binning yesterday in connection with himself: “An ounce of superfluous flesh”? There is in reality nothing to excite wonder in the employment of so common a turn of expression; but to a soul so guilty the most ordinary sentence seemsheavy with ominous significance, and she hurries out her own less tactful repartee with needless treading on the heels of her cousin’s.
“And how many stone haveyoulost?”
Sir George looks bored. “Thank you, my dear; but we need not bandy civilities on the subject of our infirmities.” Then with a quick and determined return to amiability, “Come, let us hear all about poor Binning? He went yesterday?”
“No; this morning.”
“Poor chap! I should like to have shaken his hand again before he went. I tried to persuade this slug of a fellow to run down and see the last of him, but he pretended that he was afraid to leave me. I must tell you that his filial piety has become a most appalling nuisance, and that he is like nothing in the world but an old hen with one duckling.”
“I proudly own to the ‘old hen,’ but I fail to see the duckling,” replies Rupert, with a pleasant slight smile.
Formerly he would have been far too nervous to bandy jokes with his father, and they would have been stamped upon if he had; but the answering smile on the elder man’s grim sick face tells Lavinia upon how much happier terms son and father now are than in any previous period of their lives. She is the ribbon that ties their hearts together!She!
“Was he pretty fit? Did he set off in good spirits?” asks Sir George, holding on as firmly to the Binning theme as if he knew that he was passionately desired to loose it.
“Féodorovna did not say.”
“Féodorovna!” repeats he, with that snort of disgust with which he has never failed to salute Miss Prince’s name ever since the day of her storming his study.
“Yes; she came here this morning.”
“Whom did she come to consolethistime?” asks he, jeeringly. “You?Well,” in a changed and softened key, “I dare say she did not make such a bad shot! I dare say you had grown quite fond of the poor chap from having nursed him; onedoesget fond of one’s nurse, with the best intentions in the world to the contrary,” with a grudgingly affectionate glance at Rupert.
His son smiles again. (How enviable! how miraculous to have such a cheerful light heart!)
“You are in a fine flow of conversation!” he says, laying his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “But you know as well as I do that you will have to pay dearly for it, if you do not take your usual rest before dinner. Your room is ready, andIam ready; andyouare ready, aren’t you?”
There is authority mixed with the pleasant persuasiveness of the tone, and with a docility which would have filled Lavinia with amazement in any other circumstances, Sir George hoists himself out of his chair, and saying, with an appealing lift of his shaggy eyebrows, “See how I am bullied!” walks slowly but contentedly off on his son’s arm.
Once again Rupert has come to Lavinia’s rescue. Once again, left behind, she feels the sense of relief coupled with a great fear. How has he known theexact moment at which the catechism was becoming unbearable to her? the exact moment at which to step in? She has a quarter of an hour in which to supply answers “to taste,” in cookery-book phrase, to this question, and at the end of that time she has the opportunity of putting it, if she feels so disposed, to the person to whom it refers; for he rejoins her.
“I have left him; he will have a better chance of getting to sleep if he is alone. He is so excited that he will go on talking if he has any one to listen to him. I could not stop him.”
“And yet you seem to have wonderful power over him! I never saw such a change!”
She has got behind a cane chair, and is tilting it up, with her hands clutching the gilt top. She ought not to let him see the sickly apprehension in her eyes; and yet if she does not, if she allows him to approach her, if he kisses her, and expects her to kiss him back, by what hair’s breadth will she be separated from the outcasts in the street? There is gross exaggeration in the idea, which is weighted by the offended purity of all her former life; yet there is truth too. But Rupert’s steps pause far short of her barrier, and there is neither a claiming of undoubted rights, neither enterprise nor even entreaty in his eyes.
“Improvement, should you say?” he asks, with cool interest; adding, “How do you think he looks—better or worse than you expected?”
“Better—worse!” she stammers, contradicting herself, quite put off her balance by the fraternalease and matter-of-factness of his tone. It seems like a return to the blessed brotherly period, before they had been driven into exchanging the airy chains of their phantom engagement for the gyves and handcuffs of a real one. After all, he had been driven into it as much as she! There is balm in the thought. “I mean I cannot quite make up my mind until he has settled down; he is certainly much thinner.”
“Yes; his clothes hang a bit loose upon him.”
Lavinia starts; imperceptibly, she hopes. Has Rupert given himself the word to use no phrase that does not bring Binning in very self before her? Binning’s clothes, too, hang loose upon him. Lest her start shouldnothave been imperceptible, she covers it quickly with a remark.
“He seems in excellent spirits.”
“Yes; but we all are that, aren’t we?” He says it simply, and without any special observation of her to note its effect; and yet once again, for the third time, that nameless suspicious fear of his having found her out lays its chilly fingers upon her. “Shall we walk off some of our exuberant cheerfulness? Do you feel inclined for a stroll?”
Her last “stroll” returns upon her memory with dizzying vividness.
“Isn’t the sun rather hot still?”
“We shall not feel him in the woods, or in Rumsey Brake by the pool.”
Her tilted chair—needless defence—falls on its fore legs with a sharp noise, dropped from her trembling grasp.
“I do not think I feel woody or poolly.”
“We will go along the high-road, then, the road to Sutton Rivers. There is always a good deal of traffic along that road—nice carts and steam-rollers and things!”
A spice of the old light mockery flavours his tone, and she knows that he has read off like print the misgiving in her mind. If he has read that, how much more may he not have read too?
The road chosen drops down the hill, and runs through the village. They pass the beautiful old farm that looks like a manor-house, with its bronzing walnut trees that wear their spring favours differently from most others; past schools and open cottage doors, Rupert greeting shirt-sleeved men with the familiarity born of a lifetime of nods, and Lavinia saluting matronly women with an intimacy sprung from maternity-bags. And as she goes, the village tragedies present themselves for competition with her own. Can that girl who has “gone wrong,” and is sitting on her parents’ doorstep with her unfathered child upon her knees, feel a greater weight of remorse and shame than one kiss has crushed her under? Can the old widow whose last surviving son was carried off yesterday to the madhouse, feel a deeper, more irreparable sense of loss than hers?
“Joe Perry was taken away to the asylum yesterday,” she says, imparting her lugubrious fact, though not the comparison for which she has used it, to her companion. “He became so violent that it was unavoidable. His mother, I believe, fought like a tiger to prevent it!”
“Poor soul!”
What fitter ejaculation can he make in answer to such a tale? and yet her diseased fancy instantly brings to mind that Binning had applied the same epithet to Féodorovna! As they pass another cottage—
“Carter has gone on the drink again.”
“Has he?”
Yet a third. “Little Harry Brown has got double pneumonia; the doctor does not think he can save him! He says he has no constitution.”
“Is it to bring down that exuberant cheerfulness of ours that we were talking of, that you are telling me all these catastrophes?” asks Rupert, rebelling at last.
“It does seem rather hard to be greeted by such a list of casualties,” she answers, confused and confounded; “but you see you have been away a good while—long enough for more than ourusualaverage of disasters to happen.”
“And is that all? Does little Harry Brown end the catalogue?”
The question is a perfectly natural one, and put as naturally, yet it sets her trembling again.
“Yes, I think so.”
“If you remember any more, I would rather hear them.”
To that she seems to think no answer needed. They are beyond the village now, and on that high-road whose sociability he had vaunted to her. For the time it seems less frequented than he had promised, the workmen having gone home, and nomarket-day enlivening it with uncertainly driving men and gaily-hatted girls, three on a seat, in returning market-carts. Their only companion is the Spring, in that gaudiest of her moments when she is about to lose herself in Summer, daring her elder sister to vie with her sheeted hawthorn, her “golden chains,” her matchless output of leaf and blossom. And how blessedly different is each tree and shrub’s idea of spring! How various their method of expressing it! Some in odorous flower-bunches, some in green tassels, some in uniformity of colour, some in motley, their varying thoughts are diversely coloured, bronze and yellow, and dazzling gold-green.
To pause a while seems almost a necessity, yet Lavinia shivers; for Rupert has stopped and faced her, and there is no one in sight. Has he lured her hither with an assurance of publicity, only to make his belated claim upon her? As before, he reads her fear, and answers it.
“No!” he says, stepping back a couple of feet, yet still holding her at the disadvantage of commanding that full-face view which is so much less manageable a thing for the purpose of concealment than a profile; “do not be afraid: there is not the least cause for alarm! I only wanted to ask you if you arequitesure that little Johnny Brown’s double pneumonia closes our casualty list?”
Then she knows that he knows.
Buthow? Have not her inward misgivings warned her all along? Yet it can be only by intuition. Even had any one seen her in Rumsey Brake—the very fire of hell seems to scorch her at the suggestion—even had any one seen her, what opportunity has that unknown talebearer had of betraying her to Rupert? Rupert returned only half an hour ago, and has had speech of no one but herself and the servants. Is the porter at the station likely to have conveyed the news of her unfaithfulness to him, as an agreeable item of local intelligence, while shouldering his portmanteau? or the coachman to have shouted it through the front window of the brougham? Yet to the abject terror of the girl’s guilty consciousness, either of these absurdities seems more likely than that the significance of herfiancé’stone in reiterating his question came there by accident? Heknows, if not by the ordinary processes and channels, yet by right of that terrible plate-glass window into her soul, of which he has always had the monopoly. All her life he has saved her the trouble of explanations, by a mastery of her thoughts which makes utterance of them superfluous. If she allows him, he will save her trouble to-day.
Athwart the darkness of her terror of discoveryflashes an arrow of light. If he knows already, what use is there in further feigning? If he knows by intuition, he will know by the same means how she has struggled; how utterly against her own will has been her disloyalty. Already an insidious sense of relief and comfort is beginning to steal over her in the flashed idea of how easy he will make it to her; of how perfectly his unselfish insight will apprehend by what innocent steps she has grown guilty towards him; and again he will be the brother from whom she has no secrets; together they will acknowledge the fatal error of their late attitude towards each other; together they will admire, with easy minds and steadfast countenances, the cheerfulness of the nursery wall papers. And her uncle? And her debt?—the debt whose colossal obligation the partner and cause of her unfaithfulness has so fully admitted; has so little blinked the overmastering necessity of paying? It is all packed into thirty seconds—relief, hope, recurring terror and despair; the thirty seconds between his question, and the one with which—how unlike her in its shiftiness—she answers him.
“Why shouldn’t it? Do not you think there are enough already?”
“Quite; but all the same thereisanother.”
“What do you mean?” A sort of false stoutness of heart is coming to her aid. It is impossible that he can know except by intuition, and what is known only by intuition may be safely and successfully denied and given the lie to, if only it is done with enough brazenness and pertinacity.
He answers her with a collected insistence that shows her of how little use her unworthy subterfuges have been or ever can be, as between these two.
“We have not been taken away to a madhouse; we have not gone on the drink; we have not got double pneumonia; but it is tousthat this last casualty has happened!”
She stands before him disarmed, her poor toy weapons knocked out of her shaking hand; yet she essays one more feeble parry with her helpless buttoned foil.
“We don’t seem much the worse for it, whatever it is,” she answers, trying to laugh.
“Don’t we? I think you can’t have looked in the glass lately.”
She puts up her hand with a gesture of futile anger to her face, as if to chastise it for its blabbing treachery; but speech has gone from her.
“I do not want you to tell me anything about it,” Rupert says in a steady voice. “It could not be pleasant for you, and it would do me no good. I wished to bring you out—not on the high-road; that was your own precautionary measure”—with a faint stinging touch of sarcasm—“but out of possible eye and earshot, to consult with you.” She turns her woeful eyes, in a deep humiliation of asking upon him; but words are still denied her. “To consult you as to how we are to get ourselves out of thisimpasse.” Once again her dumb look seeks to penetrate his meaning. “It would be perfectly simple if it were only we two; we might settle itbetween ourselves. It is, of course, my father who complicates it.”
The voice is still even and quiet, but its matter-of-fact composure affects her far more than any raving denunciation could do. What does it take for granted? And why? She must speak, must protest, must find out how much he knows.
“You are implying that you wish our engagement to end? Have you—any—any reason for it?”
“Haven’tI?”
The question thus returned upon her would strike her once more dumb, if she did not wrench a faint retort out of herself.
“You—you know your own feelings best.”
“Andyours?”
Oh, if he would choose any other weapon of torture—any reviling, any accusation, any sneer, any reproach, anything but these questions that, terrible in their brevity, seem to lay her helpless soul even more naked before him than his lifelong habit of divining her, joined to who knows what added knowledge have already done.
“I had—I have no intention of breaking it!”
“I am quite”—“in the dark as to what you mean,” she would have added, but the superfluous lie dies unborn. “You meant to marry me—still?” Then she touches the depth of her degradation; hearing the anguish of an incredulity that is yet belief in her confession of such an intended treason against him pierce through his self-control.
“Did I quite deservethat?”
Her wretched head drops on her breast, and shestands at his mercy, attempting no further denial. But, as she has never in her life appealed to him in vain for help or sympathy, so, even now, the old habit is too strong for him.
“We must keep our heads clear!” he says, after a moment or two, in a voice that is no longer anguished or reproachful, but has regained its level of colourless quiet. “We must think it out. If we could stave off the marriage for a few weeks or months, I see a way out of the difficulty.”
Her lips are apart by reason of the shortness of her breath, but she forces them together to frame the two words—
“What way?”
His face, at whose unfamiliar rigidity her spirit has quailed, softens.
“I would not have told you so suddenly in any other case,” he says, with all his old gentle considerateness; “but now—at the pass we have arrived—it may come to you almost as a relief.”
“Whatmay come?”
“Your—your sacrifice would not avail the old man for very long! He—he is not going to get well.”
She stares at him, not half comprehending. “Gout does not—does not—killpeople!” she stammers.
“No. But in his case the doctors have discovered that it is complicated by a fatal disease, which has already made great progress; so that, as I say, if we can only stave it off for a while—not a long while—things will come all right!”
“All right!Do you call that allright?” she cries it out in an agony, taking in now the full meaning of his words; while, in flood, a miserable realization of this new calamity pours over her soul.
Her men!who had loved her so well; upon her fond tendance of whom she had prided herself! One is not; the second is only to be rescued by the hand of death from a more quickly slaying knowledge of her false cruelty; and, as to the third, now that the mask so steadily held before his face as long as there was any need for it has dropped away,—she can see that she has killed his heart!
“Is it quite certain?” she asks, as soon as her dry mouth allows a husky whisper to creep through it. “Is there no hope?”
“It may be sooner, it may be later; but it must come!” He pauses a moment or two, to let her take it in; then, very gently, “So that if we can only hit upon some plausible reason for postponement——”
She breaks in like a sudden hurricane. “No!no!NO!!If he is going to die, heshallhave his little bit of happiness first! Youmustmarry me! You cannot be so inhuman as to refuse!” Then, seeing, or fancying, a start of shocked negation on his part, “I have done nothing bad enough to make it a disgrace to you, and it need be only nominal!”
“And his hopes?” Like three icy drops the low words fall on the flame of her passion; and for a minute or two entirely quench it. Then it springs up again alive and alight.
“He will be dead before he knows that they are not to be realized.”
There is a heavy silence; while, before her mental vision, the dreadful programme she has drawn up of their future life unrolls itself. What his thoughts are she cannot tell; nor whether he will accept or reject her offer. Even when he does speak, she remains still in the dark, for he only says—
“And then?”
“And then what?”
“When he is dead?”
She gives a dry sob. It has come to this, then! She has brought it to this—that what ought to be the prime calamity of the death of him to whom she has owed everything but the bare and dubious gift of life, is to be regarded only as a subsidiary incident in the drama of ruin which she has brought upon them all!
“When he is dead!” she repeats automatically; but Rupert treats it as a question.
“You will be saddled with me for perhaps fifty years, and”—with a smile, cruel in its gentleness—“I am afraid I am too great a coward to release you by suicide!”
She starts as if stung by a hornet; and yet taking to herself a sort of horrible comfort from his words. Yes; that is why she has betrayed him; that is why she has never been able to love him really! He is a coward. He has been telling her so for three and twenty years; and there is no reason for disbelieving him! They have been standing stillon the high-road; but now she breaks away from him, walking so fast that it is a moment or two before he overtakes her. In wordless wretchedness they step along side by side, the sweet Babel of evening birds in their ears, the acrid sweetness of hawthorn in their nostrils, and death in their hearts.
“Even if I freed you from my presence, as, of course, I should do, there would still be the legal tie,” Rupert resumes presently, in a matter-of-fact voice, whose would-be indifference the dead whiteness of his face and a slight twitching of the lips contradict. “I believe that, under the circumstances, it might be got rid of; but it would involve a publicity that would be painful to you.”
She listens dully, so dazed with pain as to feel that he must be talking of some one else.
“And if it werenotgot rid of,” she foggily hears him continue, “it would, of course, shut up any possible avenue to future happiness for you.”
At that her great anguish breaks through the merciful fog that has begun to envelop it.
“There is no such avenue!” she answers thickly.
He glances at her with what looks like compassion. “You think so now, but you will not think so always.”
“Always! always!” she repeats choking.
He shakes his head as one knowing better. “I am afraid your plan will not hold water,” he rejoins, not irritating her by anyspokencontradiction of her asseveration of perpetual woe. “We must think of something more feasible.”
His voice is so coolly dispassionate that once again, and for the last time in both their lives, the balm-bringing idea flashes across her that he does not care much after all—that his finicking womanish nature is incapable of the pangs of a great thwarted passion. But one glance at the profile beside her in the lined patience of its self-government, knocks the unworthy prop from under her self-esteem.
They cover almost a mile in total silence; two miserable blots on the sweet pageant of evening. They meet a herd of cows returning to their juicy pasture after milking, straggling over the road, snatching mouthfuls out of the lush hedge-rows; a few children loiteringly picking flowers, and wastefully tossing them away, with the prodigal cruelty of Mother Nature herself; a farm servant tittering over a gate with a ploughboy. Married birds sing the joys of the nest and the family, and one blackbird seems to keep pace with them as they go, merely to mock them with his liquid telling that, as his Creator had done, he finds his world of the hedge and the pasture and the new green tree very good. Both Rupert and Lavinia are dully sensible of the jar with the surrounding happy suavities that Lavinia’s resumption of the conversation brings with it.
“Can you suggest anything better? You must remember how short a time we have.”
“Yes, I remember.”