“If you are quite resolved not to marry me——”
“I am quite resolved.”
“You have never told me why?” She says it faintly, glancing at him with that new and most uncharacteristic shiftiness which she feels that his all-noticing eye must already have observed.
“If you wish I will tell you.”
“No!” she answers with almost inaudible haste. “It is enough for me that you no longer wish it! I do not doubt that you have good reasons; but”—growing more distinct in a feverish sophistry of desire to put herself in the right—“let it be clearly understood that it is notIwho go back from the bargain! Iwas—Iamwilling to fulfil it.”
“Thank you.”
The courteous irony of his gratitude stings her back into muteness; and again they walk on, unconscious of time or distance.
“I am willing to tell you what I have done, what happened, how it came about!”
“But I am not willing to hear.”
Her offer has been incalculably difficult to make, and its refusal ought to bring her some relief; yet the mournful magnanimity of that refusal crushes her. She struggles weakly to crawl from under its weight.
“Though you will not listen to my explanation, you will take my word that I have not done anything absolutely disgraceful!”
He gives a sort of shiver, the kind of gesture of disgust—only a million times intensified—that she has formerly seen him make at any instance of glaring bad taste in art, literature, or manners.
“Yes, I take your word! Only”—with thatshudder in his voice—“don’t say that you are sorry, and that you won’t do it again!”
She bows her head in profound humiliation, accepting that stinging chastisement as so much less than her due; while at the same moment a contradictory flash of repulsion from him for being able at such a moment to see the æsthetic side of the situation whizzes through her consciousness. Between them they have slain all talk that can be possible at such a moment. Incapable of thought, her brain a caldron of boiling miseries, Lavinia sets one foot before the other, plodding blindly on; while Rupert—she has never possessed the plate-glass window into his soul, which he has always had into hers, so that what memories, projects, torments, occupy his mind during that last half-hour she never knows.
The sound of a church clock rouses both—her from amid her steam of boiling vapours; him from his unread thoughts. They have reached a part of the road where the railway runs parallel to it, and a gate, faced by another on the opposite side, gives entrance to the line. They pause to listen and count, impatient of the interval between the deliberate strokes.
“Seven!Surely it can’t be seven! He will put himself into a fever if we are late.”
Man and girl look at each other in shocked surprise, their own calamities for the moment entirely sponged off their memories.
“And—is it possible?” throwing an astonished glance of apprehension around—“we are close toRivers Sutton! It will take us quite an hour to get home.”
“Not if we run along the line!” The shot-out suggestion is Lavinia’s.
“The line!” Rupert echoes doubtfully.
“Yes, the line!” she repeats in a passion of irritation at his hesitancy. “Are you afraid of being run over, or of the penalty of forty shillings?”
The gate is locked, but they are on its other side in a minute, and racing along the grass edge that borders the metals. For the time every idea is abolished from both their minds, but that of reaching home with the least possible delay. In a perfect unanimity of distressful haste they speed along, scarcely spending words for fear of wasting breath after the first outburst of remorseful ejaculations.
“How could we have forgotten him?”
“The specialist told me that the least friction or worry was above all things to be avoided.”
They run along for a while in perfect silence, their long legs skimming over the abounding spring flowers that always seem to relish the railway bank.
Then Lavinia cries out, “What time is it now?”
Without a break in his run, Rupert pulls out his watch, looks at it, holds it to his ear, and answers in a key of acute annoyance—
“It has stopped!”
“And Rivers Sutton Church clock does not strike the quarters?”
“No.”
“It can’t be more than ten minutes past,” sherejoins, panting a little, though not much, for she is a muscular modern girl, and in good condition; “for I hear the 7.10: it has just left Rivers Sutton station.”
“It is always late.”
Lavinia casts a glance over her shoulder, still flying along, to see whether the train, faintly heard coming up behind them, is yet in sight; and, having done so, pulls herself up to a stop with such sudden violence that her knees rock under her. The horrified cry that accompanies her arrested motion stays Rupert’s flying steps too, though the impetus of his going carries him several paces beyond her before he can stop himself. Astonishment at what can have checked a haste so urgent as hers makes him too look round, gives to his sight also the object that has frozen her flight into a paralysis of still horror. A curve of the line hides the approaching train from their sight, though their ears plainly inform them of its increasing nearness; but at what appears to be about halfway between the point at which they stand and the curve, though in reality it is much nearer to themselves, a little child is clearly seen standing out against the strong yellow light of the May evening—a little child obviously at that most dangerous age which has legs to toddle, but no judgment to guide those legs. Probably it has crept through a gap in the hedge from the pointsman’s cottage, which they had passed close to the locked and climbed gate; but the two spectators of its prowess have no time to speculate as to how it came into its present position of imminent peril.
“It is all right; it is on the up line,” Rupert says, with a sort of hiss.
“No, it isn’t; it is on the down.”
An instantaneous thought leaps from one pair of eyes to the other; and in Rupert’s Lavinia reads a blind terror. That sixtieth part of a second reveals to her that it has been the apprehension of her lifetime to find such a terror in his eyes at some such crisis of his existence—the predominating, all-mastering, terror of an injury to his own skin. If the endangered infant is to be saved, it will not be by him. Without a second glance at her companion—yes, she isalmost—would to God she could bequitesure afterwards that she had not thrown him one glance of contempt or reproach!—she rushes back along the way she has come at the highest speed of which her already strained limbs and labouring lungs are capable, taking instinctively to the metals themselves, so as not to be impeded by grass and flowers. Will she be in time? She tries to shout a warning to the little toddling thing, but not a sound louder than a useless dissonant whisper will issue from her protesting throat.
The train is coming round the curve. The engine, with its rocking train of carriages, is rounding into sight. Thank God, it has not got up its full steam yet; it is not going nearly at its highest speed. If it were, there would not be a chance. As it is, there is just a possibility. It all depends upon whether she can hold out. Yes, shewillhold out, even if she drops down dead the moment afterwards. No, shecan’t; her powers are going to abandon herjust too soon, just when she is within a hundred yards of the object to be rescued. She staggers—recovers herself—runs a couple of yards—staggers again; drops on her knees, and then falls flat—happily half on to the up line. She has just sense enough left to drag herself quite on to it—just sight and hearing enough left to be aware of a hatless figure making the air sing in its mad rush past her to meet the locomotive, before consciousness leaves her.
“Howis he?”
“Just the same.”
“Not conscious?”
“No.”
“Never has been?”
“Not for a moment.”
It is the morning that follows that “serious and it is to be feared fatal accident on the line between Rivers Sutton and Shipston,” to whose occurrence at 7.15 p.m. on the previous evening theShipston Weekly Advertiserwill give a paragraph in its next issue, and the London papers record with greater conciseness, and in smaller type.
The interlocutors are exchanging whispered questions and answers in the verandah, Mrs. Prince having risen at an unprecedented hour, and laden her carriage with a pharmacy of drugs to show her neighbourly sympathy; and Mrs. Darcy having spent the night at Campion Place, a vigil to which her appearance lends no improbability.
“I do not yet understand quite how it happened.”
“Will you mind coming a little farther from the house?”
“But I thought you said he was quite unconscious?”
“So he is; buttheyare not.”
“To be sure! to be sure! Poor things! poor things!”
They tread out stealthily on the sward, where the morning meets them in its still wet splendour of dew and flower. The young sun has flung away the thin rosy scarves that lightly swathed him at his birth, and is magnificently wheeling up the eastern sky. In the shortening shadows the pale green leaves of the late tulips carry little globes of bright moisture upon them, and their gallant deep cups still hold some of the wine of the dawn.
“The servants tell me that they were walking along the line. How came they to be walking along the line?”
“They were late, and afraid of keeping Sir George waiting. It was the shortest way home.” The rector’s wife pauses, her dead-white face and sunken eyes turning towards the glory-promising mist, through which the trees, fields, oast-houses of the weald, dwindled by distance, are beginning to pierce. Her voice sounds like that of one reciting a lesson, which she knows will have to be infinitely repeated.
“And then?”
“They heard the train coming up behind them, and Lavinia looked round to see how near it was, and saw the child on the line.”
“Whose child was it?” asks Mrs. Prince, with an irrelevant curiosity which jars—if anything canstill jar upon nerves so strung and tense—on her hearer.
“It was the pointsman, George Bates’s. The mother had run in next door to speak to a neighbour, and left it alone in the house!”
“It is a scandal that such a thing should be allowed! A child of two left alone in a house!”
Mrs. Darcy acquiesces, faintly conscious that the unescapable worst of her story is still ahead.
“And then?”
“Then they both set off running back as hard as they could to try and reach it in time.”
“Yes, yes?” rather breathlessly.
“Lavinia stumbled and fell.”
“How very unlike her!”
“But Rupert ran on.”
“Yes?”
It is hard to be pulled up so near thedénouement, as Mrs. Prince feels, but yet it is evident to even her not very acute perceptions that, for the moment, whip and spur are useless. Yet, after what is in reality a very short interval, the tale is taken firmly up again.
“He got up just in time, snatched the child, and threw it safely on to the grass.
“Yes, yes? Oh,pleasego on!”
“But then—then”—will she ever be able to get through it? and this is only the first time out of hundreds that she will have to repeat it—“he seemed to lose his head; he stood for half a second right in front of the engine, and one of the buffers knocked him down, and the whole train went over him!” It is done! She has got it over; but of course there will follow a flood of questions and comments.
Mrs. Darcy has not long to wait. After the strong shudder that the dreadful narrative provokes comes a train of horrified curiosities as to detail.
“Was he—they told me not, but yet I can’t understand how it could be otherwise—was he terribly mutilated?”
Mrs. Darcy puts a thin hand up to her mouth to oblige it to cease twitching.
“Not in the least; beyond the injury to his head, from which he has been unconscious ever since, and a slight wound in the right leg, there was not a scratch upon him.”
“How miraculous!”
“The train was going quite slowly.”
“Then his life might have been saved—he might have got off scot-free, if he had not lost his head?”
“Yes; if he had not lost his head.” Oh, is not it nearly ended? how much longer will it continue?
There is a respite of a few moments; but when Mrs. Prince’s next sentence appears it is in the nature of a comment that makes her companion regret the questions that have preceded it.
“In any other case one would have said that it looked almost likesuicide; but, of course, in his, that is absolutely out of the question.”
“Absolutely!”
“How did you hear the details?—not from Lavinia?”
“My husband went down to Rivers SuttonStation last night, after—after Rupert had been brought home, and saw the engine-driver and fireman.”
“Dear me! how shocking!” The ejaculation is not one particularly apposite to the special fact recorded; but at least it needs no answer, nor do the sincere tears that follow it, nor the struggle with apince-nez, which refuses to remain riding upon a nose which is being blown. “And Sir George! Poor man, in his state of health too! I suppose he is quite crushed, stunned?”
The catechism has recommenced; but to this question, at least, the answer is easy and readily given.
“Do you know what he said to me just now, when he came out of Rupert’s room to speak to me?” Mrs. Darcy asks, her wan face lit by a strange shining in the fagged eyes. “He said, ‘No one can say that I have not had two brave sons!’”
“No one can say that I have not had two brave sons!” repeats Mrs. Prince, with an accent of stupefaction. “He took it that way? Well, I am afraid we all have been rather in the habit of taking poor Rupert for somewhat of a muff!”
The other turns away, writhing at having her own thought translated into the brutality of words. Who has held Rupert so cheaply as she? During the enormous hours of the so-called short summer night, how many slighting words and contemptuous thoughts have risen upon her remorseful memory? She has always, always belittled him; always sought to set him lower in the esteem of her forwhose love he has served through so many unobtrusive years. Always, always, except—thank God, that there is an except—on that last day in the kitchen garden—is it possible that it was only the day before yesterday?—she had taken his part, had spoken up for him—had done him some tardy justice! To her over-wrought feelings—unbalanced by sleeplessness and shock—the thought of that one half-hour seems to be all that can make it possible to her to endure herself!
“I shall not attempt to see him—I mean Sir George,” says Mrs. Prince, sobbing with an unchecked frankness of emotion which smacks more of her original class than of the one to which she has attained. “But be sure you say everything that is kind and proper. And tell him from me that if there is anything of any sort that we can do or send, we shall be only too glad. One of the most valuable privileges of wealth is to be able to help its less fortunate friends in their need!”
She goes away still sobbing, but partially comforted by her own bit of bunkum, and the thought of the magic properties of the Dropless Candle. An out-of-place flash of what, under less dreadful circumstances, would have been amusement at the thought of Sir George’s frenzy at being patronized as one of Mrs. Prince’s less fortunate friends, darts incongruously across the rector’s wife, as she turns her steps homeward. Her household has to be arranged for; so as to do without her during the next and perhaps many succeeding days—a deprivation to which they usually so strongly object asquite to prevent it, but in which they now acquiesce with tearful eagerness.
Yet what can she do for the stricken household? Can she lift the lids of Rupert’s shut eyes, and bring consciousness, recognition, forgiveness, into them? One agonized ejaculation from Lavinia has revealed to her that the knowledge of having something to forgive had come to him, before setting off on that last walk—a knowledge that had, perhaps, helped him to “lose his head.” “Tolose his head!” Yes; that is the phrase which she must always employ, never quitting her hold upon it during the hundreds of times that she will have to repeat the tale. As she stands listening outside the shut door, Lavinia steals out, a ghastly noiseless shadow in the morning light.
“They want more ice!” she says, looking at her friend with dead eyes that do not seem to see her.
“I will order it for you. Is there any change?”
“No, none; but”—an angry terror bringing life back into her face—“that does not mean anything bad?”
“Oh no; not necessarily.”
“They do not expect it yet?”
“Of course not, of course not. While I fetch the ice, won’t you change your dress? it would freshen you, and I would call you in a moment if there was any change.”
“No, no; he might speak. Just while you are calling me, he might say some one thing; he may be saying it now.” And she slips back into the darkness.
But the days pass, fall into the ordered routine of habit, and Rupert does not speak, does not say the one thing for which Lavinia listens day and night—the one thing whose utterance can keep her sane. It is not her fault that there is any interruption day or night to her listening; and, while forced away for necessary food, there is but one thought in her mind—the thought that he may speak, and she not be by to hear! Daily she strains her ears to listen through the ordeal of the luncheon or dinner, to whose endurance she compels herself for his father’s sake, and through the worse ordeal of relating to Sir George over and over again—since he is never tired of hearing—how it happened. Oh the torture of that repetition! and the keener torture of that explanation which on the first relation has to be given, and has more than once to be repeated, as not quite clear!
“You say that you were ahead! How did you come to be ahead?”
“I caught sight of it first; that gave me a start.”
“And you were within a hundred yards before he caught you up?”
“About that, I think.”
“And the whole distance was a quarter of a mile?”
“I should think so.”
“How was it that he did not overtake you sooner?”
“He—he had a greater distance to cover; he had run on ahead of me before we saw it.”
“How much ahead of you?”
“I can’t say.”
There is such a helpless anguish in her voice that he stops questioning her for that while; but the doubt and the explanation are sure to crop up again at the next of those dreadful meals, spent in hiding their own food, and compelling each other to swallow his or hers.
“I can’t quite understand how you kept the lead so long!”
Slightly varied, it always comes back as a question, a wonder, a reflection, and she learns to recognize with a terrible sharpness the signs of its approach. Her uncle’s own illness seems to be in abeyance, kept at arm’s length by the force of his will, and through those dreadful days of waiting his spirit maintains a strange level of exaltation.
“We put the saddle on the wrong horse when we called him Milksop!” Lavinia hears him say repeatedly, in a tone of triumph.
He is very tender in his manner towards his niece, going entirely out of his own character to entreat her to eat, and trying humbly to emulate the son he had despised in self-forgetting attentions, and he rives her heart and conscience unknowingly by the sympathy and pity for her in her tragically interrupted nuptials, which every one of his words and actions implies.
Theday that was to have been that of Rupert Campion and Lavinia Carew’s wedding has come.
“I am always afraid of some ill luck when the bride does not change her initials,” Miss Brine has said in the Rectory school-room, in answer to the children’s lamenting comment upon the fact.
A thoughtful silence follows the governess’s utterance, broken by Phillida, who says meditatively—
“Then if Lavy had married Captain Binning, she would have been all right.”
But the wily Brine is not to be trapped into any such admission.
“Miss Carew would undoubtedly have changed her initials in that case,” she replies cautiously.
Lavinia had hoped that her uncle would—in the general upsetting consequent upon the catastrophe, the removal of all the landmarks of ordinary life—have forgotten to note the date of a day so outwardly identical with its gloomy fellows that it would have passed unnoticed in its obscurity and disgrace; but luncheon-time undeceives her.
“This is not quite the way in which we expected to pass this day!” he says, after sending away the servants. “It is rather rough on you; but there is aFrench saying, I believe, that what is deferred is not therefore lost. There may be a good time coming.”
The cheerfulness valiantly forced into the old voice for her sake, in his new selflessness, must, at whatever cost to herself, be met in the same spirit, and she compels herself to repeat in French the saying he has alluded to, with what—since intention is everything—must do duty for a smile, “Ce qui est différe n’est point perdu.”
“Though it may not be to-morrow or the day after, we shall perhaps still hear Darcy exhorting you and him to increase and multiply!” continues Sir George, with a distressing attempt at pleasantry, and a painful harking back to his old theme. “In any case, it will do no harm to drink to your wedding day. Come, let me fill your glass.”
She holds it out with an unshaking hand, and commands her throat to swallow, to drink a toast, the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of the wish contained in which are alternatives equally horrible. And then they return hand-in-hand—the old man has added a new caressingness to his other tendernesses—and resume their places, one on each side of the silent, motionless form stretched between them with bound, ice-covered head, in the darkness; and Lavinia takes up again her day-long, night-long employment of repeating over and over and over again to herself the question which she is beginning to see written in red whenever she turns her eyes in the obscurity—
“Didhe lose his head?Wasit suicide? And if so, was it something he saw in her face that drove him to it?”
She is going through them in the usual sequence at about four o’clock in the afternoon of her wedding day, when she happens to be for a few moments alone with the still living rigidity beside her, when in the almost complete darkness, her eyes and ears—or have they gone mad too?—detect, or seem to detect, a slight movement in the bed. She darts noiselessly to the window, and, pulling aside a bit of the curtain, casts a glance backwards towards the bed—a glance that can hardly travel, for the weight of the hope it carries. Whatevershemay be, her senses are not mad; nor have they told her a lie. Rupert is feebly stirring, and his eyes are open. In a second she is at his side, and stooping over him; the word is coming—the priceless word on which her reason hangs! It is spoken so low that she has to bend very close down to catch it. It is only an almost inaudible—
“Well, dear!”
In the reeling immensity of her joy, she can but stupidly echo, almost as inaudibly, the greeting that seems to have come to her from the speechless other side. “Well, dear!” There is a long pause. Into Rupert’s eyes, as they turn slowly round, the watcher sees consciousness, recollection, gradually returning. When those long-absent inhabitants have reoccupied their seats, will he take back his greeting? While the answer to that inquiry is in suspense, the functions of life seem suspended in her. The slowly wandering eyes return to their point of departure—her face; regained knowledge is in them; but neither anger nor pain.
“I muffed it, as usual,” he says, with a ghost of his old self-ridicule, and, wearied with the exertion of speech, falls back into unconsciousness.
* * * * *
Sir George has never been what is called a “professing Christian,” which indeed is a title that seems to promise a paucity of performance; but ever since Rupert’s accident, he has daily asked Lavinia—possibly only with some dim feeling of a propitiatory sacrifice to a fetish—to read him a portion of Scripture, and on the evening of that wedding day he finds with some difficulty—for he does not know his way about very well—the chapter that tells of him who, even while being carried out to burial, was recalled to life and to the widowed arms that had thought to have for ever loosed him. He listens, leaning back comfortably in his chair with a sort of smile of triumph on his face; and on the open page Lavinia’s tears drop hot and blessed as she reads.
During the night that follows Rupert speaks again, and though it is only to ask for water, the two or three languid words keep the flame of hope alive and steady in the watchers’ hearts. On the next day he has a slightly longer interval of consciousness; on the day after that a longer one again; and on the day after that for a whole hour his eyes are open, and faint speech rises to his lips. If he were allowed, he would by-and-by even ask questions; but rigorous quiet is enjoined upon him, and since it is Lavinia with whom he makes most efforts to converse, she is banished from the room. Such exile is of comparatively littlemoment to her now, now that it will be possible to her to wait, and wait sanely, even for weeks and months, for the answer to that question which she feels she must yet put.
Since she last looked at them, the horse-chestnuts in the Rectory garden are quite over. They were in fullest bloom the day she pasted them going to Rumsey Brake. Was itB.C.orA.D.that she was last in Rumsey Brake? The former date seems far the more probable. The door into the churchyard opens cautiously. Lavinia is standing under the verandah, and through it appear, as they have appeared many times a day during the late crisis, the Darcy children. Almost always they have borne gifts, and to-day is no exception.
“Could not he fancy one of his own eggs?” asks Daphne, lifting the lid of a basket on her arm, and displaying the creamy ovals of three beautiful specimens of the product of the clerical poultry-yard.
“I am sure that he will in a day or two; but why hisown?”
“We have re-christened Gatacre, and called him Rupert,” explains Daphne. “He is always the one who begins laying first.”
“If we had known that Rupert was a hero, we should have christened a hen after him long ago,” says Phillida, coming to her sister’s aid. “But one can’t always tell by people’slooks, can one? I think that heroes ought to have some mark to know them by; but Miss Brine says it would be invidious.”
“There could be no mistake about belovedCaptain Binning!” says Daphne, with the delightful liberty to express its preference of sweet and wholesome childhood. “One saw at a glance whathewas.”
“TheNubiahas got to Las Palmas; it was in the paper this morning,” says Phillida. “But of course you saw it.”
Until the mention of Binning’s name, Lavinia had been enjoying the company of her young friends; now the one desire concerning them that occupies her mind is, that they should go.
“You must remember that for the last ten days I have seen and heard nothing. I am as behindhand in my information as a convict,” she answers, laughing uneasily.
The days pass, each one with a trifling gain to distinguish it—perhaps only a curtain allowed to be a little more drawn back; an atom more colour in the pale lips; a fuller sound in the thready voice. Every day some small stretched privilege is accorded, each dealt out with a frugal hand, that feels its way tentatively, lest the bruised brain should avenge itself for any temerity in hurrying it to be well. Whether thanks to these precautions or to a natural wiriness, Rupert is apparently returning to life and vigour, without a throw-back, and with an even steadiness that—considering the nature of the accident that has laid him low—seems nothing short of miraculous.
“Humanly speaking, we are out of the wood,” the doctor says.
It is needless to state that he is an old doctor. A young one would have scorned the possibility ofthere being any other way. Since he is “humanly speaking, out of the wood,” Rupert is allowed to receive one visitor a day for half an hour at a time; and since Sir George and Lavinia do not count, it is a party of three that gathers round his bed, on the occasion of Mrs. Darcy’s being for the first time admitted. In the midst of the gentle heartiness of her greeting to the explorer so lately returned from the dim limits of life, the rector’s wife catches herself wondering whether Lavinia is recalling the last time on which they had met by a sick man’s bed; or whether the preceding weeks have wiped it off her memory, as they have wiped the youth off her face.
“Tell the rector we shall require his services sooner than he thinks,” Sir George says, his face, scored with time and sorrow, beaming at Susan from the other side of the bed. “If only this lazy chap will hurry up. I believe he enjoys lying here and being pampered.”
“I am sure he does,” Rupert answers, with a white smile.
“We are thinking of August or September at latest,” continues the old man, looking round half suspiciously at the three faces about him, as if defying contradiction of his optimism.
Rupert has never contradicted his father. He does not now.
“If we make it September, we shall have the hop-pickers to grace it,” he answers, with another little smile.
“Can you never look at life except from the ridiculous point of view?” cries his father, in quitehis old manner. Then, riddled with remorse, he falls to scolding Lavinia for having—as she has not, nor is ever likely to do—forgotten the moment for administering some potion or extract.
The girl smilingly rebuts the accusation, appealing quietly to the clock to defend her; but the curtain at the bed-head—it is an old-fashioned tester—which her hand is desperately clutching, could tell a less placid tale. She does not quite hear what next passes, and is aroused only by the sound of Sir George’s voice uttering a strident fiat.
“Time’s up!” he cries, with his watch in his hand, in slight to the clock which has proved him wrong; “and we do not allow a minute’s law.”
He marshals Mrs. Darcy relentlessly out of the room as he speaks, and the cousins are lefttête-à-tête. Rupert’s fingers play a meditative tune on the bedclothes; and Lavinia, watching him, and vaguely trying to make out what is the air which they are intending to convey, is surprised by a criminal thought of what a much less virile hand it is than that which she had seen lying in the gauntness of its departed strength on the other man’s coverlet. The air continues, set to a slight sigh.
“It is odd to hear him beginning to harp on the old string,” says the man’s weak voice.
Lavinia gives a slight shiver. Is the theme to be taken up again, just where the striking of Rivers Sutton Church clock had broken it off five weeks ago?
“I do not think you ought to talk of anything agitating yet.”
“But it does not agitate me. A knock on the head is not supposed to be a sedative, but in my case it seems to have been one.”
The voice and look are as calm as the words, but he has stopped his drumming on the sheet; and she waits in silent apprehension, praying that the subject may drop, since she knows that the time is not yet ripe for her to put her one question. Rupert, however, as is soon clear, has no intention of dropping the subject.
“Poor old gentleman! He is not quite up to date, is he?”
Lavinia is trembling all over. Has not the moment now come for her to fulfil the vow so solemnly taken, so intertwined with her frantic prayers for his restoration as to be inseparable from them?—the vow to cleave to him through life and death and eternity, without one backward glance, if he be but given back to her extremity of asking? And now that the Invisible Awfulness, whom she had wearied with her insistence, has accomplished His part of the bargain, how dare she tarry with hers? If she does, may not He take back His boon, and leave her to endure an existence made unendurable by a for-ever unanswered question?
“If he is not up to date, neither am I,” she replies.
Rupert’s eyebrows go up in the old familiar way. “Is that a riddle, dear?”
“No,” she answers, purpose and voice strengthening as she proceeds, “it is not a riddle; it is good plain truth. If you mean that your father is not ‘upto date’ because he still believes that we are engaged to be married,Iam in the same boat, forIstill believe it.”
Perhaps from the feebleness of his body, perhaps from an inability to frame an answer that can nicely hit a case so difficult, the young man is silent; but there is no hostility, nor even much melancholy, in the glance that first rests on and then delicately averts itself in compassion from her convulsed face.
“I have been disloyal to you,” she goes on, fighting down her distress lest it should gag her before she has time to get her full confession out. “I offer again to tell you to what extent——”
He stops her with a prohibitive movement, full of dignity, of his pale hand.
“No,” he says; “I have no wish to know the tale of kisses. Many or few, we will take them for granted.”
Her head sinks on her breast in an agony of shame.
“Many or few, they are past and done with,” she cries out. “And now Ibegyou to forgive me! on my knees I beg you to forgive me!” As she speaks, she suits the action to the word, and drops on her knees beside the bed.
He looks at her, disturbed at the humiliation expressed by her whole being, yet with an underlying calm that dominates her.
“The only thing that I can’t forgive you is your present attitude,” he answers; and, as he speaks, there is just enough of gentle disgust in his voice tobring back before her, in prosaic strength, his æsthetic detestation of all scenes, rows, uglinesses.
“Imustkeep it till you answer me,” she returns, chilled, yet persistent. “Will you forgive me? and will you prove it by marrying me?—by marrying me as soon as you get well? I will stay here until my knees grow to the carpet, if you do not say ‘Yes.’”
He lies silent for a moment or two, considering her with a sort of high, detached pity.
“I have no alternative,” he answers, with a grave smile. “Since you wish it, I will marry you—when I get well; and now, would you oblige me by standing up?”
Soit is settled. Her prayers are answered; her vows are fulfilled. Everything is, or will be upon Rupert’s recovery, as it was.As it was? When?Before Binning’s coming? Her soul, half-lightened of its burden of remorse, awaking to new pain, cries out in bitter protest, “My God!—no!” And yet to all appearance it will be so. To all appearance she will take up the thread of life where she had dropped it on the day of her uncle’s and Rupert’s return from London. There is no hurry about her question now. She will have countless hours of married intimacy in which to put it.
During these weeks of reprieve—she gives an inward dread start at the reappearance of such a word in her vocabulary in such a connection—besides the new armour that must be forged for her on the anvil of endurance, there is not one of the old pieces which she will not need. Even her lifelongrôleof buffer will have to be reassumed, since, as time passes and confidence strengthens, Sir George’s angelic qualities retire a little into the background. The wearing tempers and frets of sixty-five years, that have been driven to their holes by the scourge of a great affliction, begin to show their ugly headsagain. Once again with pseudo-patient irritability he turns over his food at luncheon, and sends messages of ironical compliment to the cook; once or twice he even snubs Rupert, though, in these cases, repentance follows so hard upon his sin as almost to overrun it. It is always for not being in enough haste to be well, that the father chides his son. Rupert has never been one to hurry, and he does not hurry now.
“One would think that a man with a wife and a parson waiting for him might try to pick up a bit quicker!” Sir George says one day, champing his bit after finding Rupert with writing materials by his bedside. “If he can ask for a pen and ink, one would think he might just as well ask for a hat and stick.”
“The pen and ink would tire you much the most of the two,” Lavinia answers, with a soothing smile, but not thinking it necessary to add that a like idea, in a modified degree, has crossed her own brain.
Rupert isnotin haste to be well. From the doctor’s and nurse’s point of view, he is an ideal patient, never rebelling against the restrictions prescribed him, content with the narrow monotony of sick-room routine, with no restive manliness kicking against limitations cried out against as needless and unendurable. But then Rupert has always been more like a woman than a man. Hasn’t he always regretfully said so?—regretfully, not for being like a woman, but for not being really one. After all, his solitary heroism—wasit heroism? for what else could he have done? and his first impulse wasundoubtedlyunheroic—was a sport, an accident, that did not in the least represent the tree that grew it. The heart is an inn which harbours strange guests, and the landlord can’t be held answerable for their characters. Yet it is with an unspeakable horror of self-condemnation that Lavinia recognizes the quality of the visitors her own has been entertaining. They have been expelled with loathing; but nothing can alter the fact that they have lodged there. What a distance has she travelled from the hell of remorse—the anguish of pleading beside what was supposed to be Rupert’s bed of death!
And, meanwhile, gentle, courteous, and content, Rupert sails, if not fast, yet with a fair wind, upon the pleasant waters of convalescence. Visitors are daily admitted, and the Darcy children have, of course, been prompt to offer their congratulations. But the visit has been vaguely felt by all not to have been a complete success. Rupert has never been quite at his ease with the Rectory’s warlike brood, oppressed by a feeling of his own destitution of the muscular qualities which they set so much store by; and though they are far too honourable not to have admitted him unhesitatingly to their Valhalla, yet one and all have a hazily uncomfortable feeling that he has got there by accident. The introduction of Geist to lighten the situation, though well-meant, does not turn out a success, since the Dachs has a rooted belief that all persons lying flat and white in bed at wrong hours are murderers. Like a reversed Balaam, having been brought to bless Rupert, he curses him instead, and there is such ominous purposein his stiffened and stuck-out four legs, and the free exhibition of the whites of his eyes, that a hasty removal from the bed upon which he has been confidingly lifted is found advisable. Lavinia accompanies her young friends to the door into the churchyard, as a sort of consolation stakes for the flatness of their visit.
“I never saw Rupert in bed before!” says Daphne, with a sort of awed interest.
“Do you think he looksquiteas nice as darling Captain Binning did?” lisps little Serena, stealing an insinuating hand into Lavinia’s palm.
“Do not be silly!” cries Phillida, who of late has shown faint symptoms of a slightly inaccurate knowledge of good and evil. “Nobody looks nice in bed; they are not meant to!”
* * * * *
“He is doing it on purpose—to give you time,” Phillida’s mother says a day or two later to Lavinia, who has made a remark that indicates her wonder at Rupert’s indifference to recovery.
They are pacing the Rectory garden, now on fire with the gaudy flowers of full summer, for July is well advanced. Mrs. Darcy makes her suggestion hesitatingly, since it hints at a subject that must be for ever closed between them, adding, in a lighter key, and with a touch of humour—
“He knows that Sir George can’t hale him to the altar in pyjamas; but that as soon as he has got one arm into a coat-sleeve his father will drag him up the aisle by it.”
Lavinia laughs a little.
“I feel sure,” continues the other, growing quite grave again, “that this is one more instance of that consummate tact of his, which is the outcome of his perfect unselfishness.”
Lavinia looks at her friend with a sort of distrust. “What a special pleader you have become! I never heard such a change of tone!”
Her companion’s thin white cheek grows faintly tinted.
“Did you ever hear of such things as remorse and reparation?” she asks in a low voice; and the tragic force of the response, “Did I?” silences them both.
Miss Carew feels that her occupation of buffer is already resumed, now that she has daily to parry her uncle’s attacks; the attacks which compunction and his late agony of fear prevent him from directing in their full force against his son himself; attacks that take the form of ever more impatient questions and astonishments as to why Rupert does not sit up, come downstairs, go out of doors, if it were even in a Bath chair? He alludes to the latter vehicle in a tone of such contemptuous concession, that his niece cannot help a furtive smile.
“You know, dear, that the doctor says he ought to keep his leg up a while longer,” she answers, pacifically.
“Pooh! What is the matter with his leg? It is as sound as yours or mine. It was a mere scratch to start with, and there is scarcely a cicatrice left now.”
“But it is swollen still,” she urges, quietly but firmly. “Dr. Wilson thought it was more swollen this morning than it was at his last visit.”
“Fiddlesticks! He says it to oblige Rupert! That boy has got round you all!” and he flings away in a pet.
He has resumed his complacence in the afternoon, not from having conquered his ill humour—a victory which, save for the period of his son’s imminent peril, he has, as far as his family are aware, never attempted; but because he has got his wish. Rupert, at his own express desire, has been taken out in a superb Bath chair borrowed from the Chestnuts; a Bath chair consecrated to Mr. Prince’s gout; and to make the offer of which to Lavinia that great inventor has himself driven over to Campion Place, prefacing his proposal with his usual prefix, “I do not wish to be intrusive!”
Rupert has been out for an hour; gently pushed along under the shade of the lime trees, of which one or two belated ones still throw down a remnant of the ineffable sweetness of their yellow-green blossoms upon him. His father and his betrothed are on either hand. Sir George’s jokes are never very good; and it is to-day harder than usual to Lavinia to laugh at his stupid pleasantry as to their being like the lion and the unicorn that support the Royal Arms. Rupert does not attempt to laugh; but he smiles with kind serenity. At even a better jest Lavinia would be too busy to laugh—too busy stamping down the outrageous thoughts, regrets, revolts, that keep swarming up in her heart,vipers warmed into life by the very sun of her cousin’s restoration. Oh if he wereonlyher cousin! only dear Rupert, her brother-friend! Oh if he were a woman—the woman he has always sighed to be! Oh if he were always in a Bath chair! The monstrosity of this last aspiration conducts her to the hall-door; and it and its brother evil spirits are but ill laid as she pours out tea for Rupert, as he lies sighing with satisfaction at having regained it, upon the sofa at his bed-foot.
“I may now hope for twenty-four hours of blessed supineness,” he says, throwing his head back on the piled cushions with an epicurean air.
“I believe that you would like to be always supine!” Lavinia answers, in a tone of wonder, and thinking at the same time, “What a charming head it is! how delicately modelled! what a finish in the moulding of the features! what aspirituelexpression, with something of the light malice of the classic Mercury!”
Spirituel!It is an adjective more often used in the feminine than the masculine gender. Oh, tricky gods! Why is not he feminine? What a delightful woman he would have made!
“And you would like it too!” he rejoins, breaking into her reflections, with what sounds more like a statement than an inquiry; then, seeing her start apprehensively with the old fear of his gift of thought-reading, he adds, “I mean that you—that most ‘neat excellences’ like you, would wish to keep me always in a position to be fussed over, always prone; no, that is not the right word—“prone” means that one has fallen forwards on one’s face, like poor Dagon, doesn’t it?”
He talks on with so evident an intention of removing any uncomfortable impression that his former speech may have made, that Lavinia, having by this time risen to give him his second cup of tea, lays her hand, with some dim sense of compunctious gratitude, upon his.
“You are very glib to-night!” she says playfully. “Aren’t you chattering too much? You must be tired.”
“No!” he answers, “or only a little; just pleasantly.”
His eyes—how blue their whites are!—lift themselves with a sort of yearning, that yet seems to have none of the commotion of passion in it, to hers, and she feels that she ought to kiss him. If she think about it, she will never get herself up to the sticking-point; so, without a second’s delay, with the teapot still encumbering one hand, she takes the plunge and drops a little butterfly kiss somewhere about the roots of his soft curly hair.
“Thank you, dear.” He asks for no repetition of the endearment; and she wonders shamefacedly whether it would have been better taste to omit it.
“I think I’ll leave you now. You look tired!”
“I am not tired; and you must not leave me; for I have something to say to you.”
“Say it to-morrow.”
“With your permission I will say it to-night.”
With a little show of half-playful authority, he pulls her by the hand, which she has laid upon himbefore the doubtful enterprise of her kiss, on to the foot of his sofa, moving and contracting himself to make room for her.
“Well, if you must, you must!” she answers, submitting, while a vertical line shows itself between her well-drawn, thin eyebrows.
“I will not keep you long! All I want to say is, that, supposing Ido notget well——”
“Why suppose anything so senseless?” she interrupts angrily.
“Itissenseless, of course. I was reading a magazine article yesterday, on the subject of longevity, and, as far as I could make out, I have all the signs that indicate it, and several more besides!”
“Then spare us your suppositions!” she interjects, almost roughly.
“I think not. After all, there is no harm in supposing!Supposingbreaks no bones, and I have often noticed that clauses in wills providing for contingencies which seemed almost impossible yet not seldom take effect!” Since Lavinia makes no comment, he goes on with resolute courtesy, “So that, if you do not mind, I will repeat ‘Supposing Ido notget well——’”
“Yes?” she answers, sullenly acquiescent.
“I want it to be clearly understood that I have no wish that you should play at being my widow—that you should offer up your good solid flesh-and-blood happiness” (is there the faintest tinge of sarcasm in this description of her conjectural felicity?) “with some Quixotic idea of expiation, as a sacrifice to my manes!” She cannot speak. Is it the scentof the great old heliotrope that climbs the trellis up to the very window-edge, that makes her feel faint? “It is even a moot point whether I shall have any manes!” Rupert goes on half dreamily; “but even if consciousness survives the grave, which, of course, I am far too advanced to believe——”
He pauses with a slight ironic smile, and she listens in a bewilderment of distress, oppressed by the old thought of how little she really knows of him. She cannot even be sure whether his confession of unbelief is made in jest or earnest. She knows not whether, or with what numb agnosticism, with what grey creed of nothingness, or with what faint flickering cresset of faith, Rupert has met the sorrows of life, will, when his hour strikes, confront the sharpness of death? His voice goes on evenly—
“Even if consciousness does survive, it will not give me the slightest satisfaction to know that you have cut your heart out to throw it as a complimentary tribute on my funeral pyre! I have always liked your bonny locks, dear, and I should fret like the blessed damosel whom I have always wished to be, if I saw them pining and dwining away into skinny unsightliness! You have no talent for hairdressing, and I hope and believe that St. Catherine will gouncoiffedby you!” He pauses a minute, and then resumes, as composedly as before, but with a more entire gravity, “You will be very lonely!”
“Howdareyou saywill?” she interjects, dashing her hand across her smarting eyes.
“Youwouldbe very lonely,” he corrects himself at once. “The old man will not hold out long.This spurt is wonderful, but it will not last!” Then the smarting eyes have their way, and let loose their tears. They are drawn forth from their springs, almost more by the calm aloofness with which the prophecy is uttered, than by the prophecy itself. What a long long way from her—from them all—Rupert seems to have got! Her tears do not appear at all to affect him.
“So let it be clearly understood,” he says, raising himself into a sitting posture, taking cold possession of both her hands, and plunging his clear eyes deep into her watery ones, “that when I die—pooh! what does a preposition matter?—ifI die, then, let it be clearly understood that Iwishyou to marry—to marry and bear children to people that nursery which we have both heard so much of!”
The light inveterate point of irony pierces, as if against his will, through the last sentence. But for a sob or two, she has listened to his harangue in absolute silence; her painful excitement rising by rushes to the highest possible pitch. Is notnow, if ever, the moment to put her question?
“You have said your say,” she begins, her chest heaving as high as it had done during that awful race with Fate along the railway line, seven weeks ago. “And now I have to say mine. I have long had a question to put to you.”
A ripple of uneasiness skims over the exalted calmness of his face.
“Are you sure that it is worth putting?”
“Quite sure.”
“Put it, then.”
“I have long wished to ask you—I must ask you, now, whether on that day——”
“Well?”
“When, after having saved the child, you so unaccountably remained standing, for two or three seconds, right in front of the engine——”
“Yes?”
“Whether”—was there ever a mouth so like a bit of charred stick as hers feels?—“you lost your head? or—whether you did—it—on purpose—with a deliberate intention of—suicide?”
The word clothes its ugliness in a hissing whisper, but there is no doubt as to his having heard it.
“What next?” he asks with—is it half-contempt, or what he means her to think so?—“what maggot will your brain breed next?”
But now that every muscle, nerve, and fibre of her body are strung up to their highest tension, he shall not escape her.
“That is no answer to my question. Did you lose your head? or did you mean to kill yourself?”
If he hesitates for one instant, she will know what to believe. But he does not hesitate.
“I lost my head!” he answers, meeting the thumbscrew and hot pincers of her torture-chamber without a wince. “Not having been brought up to the trade of hero, I did not understand the ropes, and—I lost my head!”
* * * * *
Did Rupert Campion speak truth? or has he added one more to the tale of noble lies?—to Rahab’s and Arria’s and Desdemona’s?