CHAPTER XXIV

“Why, he but sleeps!If he be dead, we’ll make his grave his bed;With female fairies shall thy tomb be haunted.”

Mrs. Darcy has always set her face strongly against forenoon visitors. The claims of the parish upon her time have never—thorough-going, though not enthusiastic, clergywoman as she is—preferred at whatever hour of the day or night, found her wanting. Always the dispensary ticket, the medicine-chest, the patient ear, the sensible counsel, the wisely sharp rebuke, the warm fellow-feeling in trouble, are ready. But that idle country neighbours should drive the ploughshare of their vacuity through the furrows of her already overfilled forenoon, when they might just as easily bestow their tediousness upon her comparatively free afternoon, is beyond the limits of her patience. Her soul, though taking up its task from the beginning, with the same handsome willingness as her slender body, has from the first revolted against being nothing but a clergywoman.

“When I married,” she has said to her one intimate, Lavinia Carew, “I told myself that, however much I might live in a kailyard, I wouldnotbea cabbage. I would have all the new books, the reviews, and theheavymagazines, and would be quite up to date; but, my dear, I reckoned without my host. I did not forecast the frequency with which Sam Smith would come in with a broken head, and that ass Féodorovna with a broken heart.”

Yet it is that very Féodorovna who, accompanied by her mother—a mode of expression which fits their mutual relations—now sits at 11.30 on the morning of the day that follows Rupert’s first outing in the Chestnuts Bath chair, in the Rectory drawing-room, without exciting any symptoms of protest on her hostess’s part. All three women are crying, but, since there are as many modes of weeping as of laughter, each in a distinctly different way. Two perfectly silent tears—evidently escaped convicts, with protesting warders behind them—are making their forbidden way down Susan Darcy’s pallid cheeks; Féodorovna has buried her face in the sofa cushion, with much appropriate flourish of White-Rose scented cambric; and Mrs. Prince is sobbing in that bang-out-loud perfectly unbridled way which betrays her plebeian origin.

“Oh, Cara!” Miss Prince has just sighed out, “if you would try to control yourself! if you would not makequiteso much noise!”

Mrs. Prince knows that when her daughter addresses her as “Cara,” she has about touched the nadir of that young lady’s good opinion, and she makes an honest effort to check her sniffs and gulps.

“It is enough to make any one break down!” she weeps in deprecation—“to think that only lastevening Sir George took the trouble to ride over to thank us for the loan of the Bath chair, and to tell us what a world of good it had done the poor fellow! I told him we were only too glad! After all, what is the use of wealth if it isn’t——” Mrs. Darcy makes a restless movement. Its owner’s exposition of the philanthropic aspect of the Candle’s functions is more than she can quite stand at the moment. “And to think that it was not from the injury to the brain after all!” resumes the only momentarily interrupted lamenter; “that it should have been that scratch on the leg that none of us thought anything of! Aclot!—that seems the last word of everything now! Aclot, or suppressed gout—or cancer! To one of the three we must all come at last, it seems!”

They remain heavily silent for a minute or two, the great master of joy and sorrow’s lines ringing in Mrs. Darcy’s head—

“Golden lads and lasses must,Like chimney-sweepers, turn to dust.”

“I suppose that there is no doubt about itthistime?” Féodorovna asks in a tone of refined affliction, intended to contrast in the highest degree with her parent’s vulgar grief. “Once already he seems to have actually come back from the dead! But this time I suppose there is absolutely no——”

“Absolutely none.”

“Would you mind telling us exactly how it all happened?” inquires Mrs. Prince, with a sort of diffidence born of the recollection of how very muchthe rector’s wife had appeared to shrink from the narration of the original accident. “It seems a shame to trouble you; but really, trifling as the distance is from here to the Chestnuts, it is astonishing how things manage to get garbled in the mouths of the domestics.” Mrs. Prince always calls servants “domestics.”

“Yes, I will tell you,” replies Mrs. Darcy, dabbing her eyes hastily with a pocket-handkerchief, which at once returns to her pocket, nor remainsen évidencelike the other two. The sense of that former relation is strong on her memory also; but it is coupled with the feeling of how much less painful and difficult the present one is than its predecessor. Here there is nothing to wince at or glide over; no opening for implication or suspicion. “He had been talking to Lavinia while she gave him his tea; she had left him, thinking him a little tired, but quite naturally and healthily so after the unusual exertion of going out of doors for the first time; and about half an hour later he rang for the footman—you know that since the nurse went he has been waited on by the ordinary staff, and wonderfully little trouble he gave—and said he should like to go to bed. He undressed without any help, and was just going to get into bed when the servant, who had gone to the other side of the room to fetch something, heard him call out, ‘Quick! the brandy!’ He ran to him as fast as he could, but by the time he got to him he was——”

“Dead?”

Mrs. Darcy bends her head, as if in reverence as well as acquiescence.

“A clot?”

“Yes.”

“And there was no one but the footman in the room? Which one was it? Oh, but I forget, since poor Bill went they only keep one!” After a moment’s pause, “I should not like to die with only a footman in the room.”

Mrs. Darcy is too profoundly sad to see the ludicrousness of the sentiment expressed; nor even to point out that, in the good gentlewoman’s case, such a contingency is not likely to occur. She goes to the open French window, and stands leaning her hot head against the jamb. Susan had always grumbled that mignonette would not grow with her; had rejoiced that this year the seed which she had imported from France had given her an abundance of that chancey fragrance; but now she feels in angry pain that the perfume from the bed at her foot is too violent in its sweetness. She will never get seed from Paris again.

“‘Quick! the brandy’!” she hears Féodorovna’s voice repeating from the sofa with a species of shocked reluctance. “One could have wished that his last words had not been quite those!”

“Oh, what does it matter what his last words were? What does it matter what any one’s last words are? We may all be thankful if we get off at the last, saying nothing worse than that!” cries Mrs. Darcy, turning round upon the speaker in a frenzy of nervous exasperation.

It is not often that the rector’s wife allows herself the dear indulgence of lashing out at Féodorovna; probably because she knows with what a right good will her heels, if given free scope, would flourish figuratively in Miss Prince’s silly face. The unaccustomed rebuff sends its object toque forwards again into the sofa cushion, from which, however, she emerges rather hurriedly, expelled by a toy rabbit hidden beneath it by Serena on her last visit to the drawing-room, and which squeaks when pressed.

“It seems so dreadful to have it all to do over again, as you may say,” ejaculates the elder visitor, presently. “How do they take itthistime?”

“The old man is completely broken down,” comes the response in a key of quivering pity. “But Lavinia is very brave.” The moment that the phrase is out of her mouth, Susan dislikes and regrets it. How redolent it is of mock-grief! What a decent euphemism for the exultation that dares not yet awhile show its face! How often has she heard it applied to a widow for whom the lover—kept in comparative obscurity during many impatient years—is waiting round the corner to pounce upon when the grudged twelvemonth is out! Fortunately, the expression seems to have no such association for her auditors.

“Poor girl! she will break down later!” is Mrs. Prince’s compassionate comment, uttered with a sort of satisfaction at the certainty of Lavinia’s ultimate collapse.

“Perhaps.”

“It is so impossible to realize that only this time yesterday they sent us back the leg-rest. I believe they had never used it.”

“There had been no need for it.”

“‘In the midst of life we are in death!’ Oh how true that is!”

“But oh, mother, howbanal!” cries Féodorovna, disgustedly. “And you have said it three times already!”

It is the one solitary instance in their two existences in which Mrs. Darcy is “with” Miss Prince. But the insult to her “parts of speech” brings the parent up to one of her rare revolts against the tyranny of her offspring.

“Well,” she retorts tartly, “I suppose we cannot always, all of us, be original. After all, there is nothing very original in death and sorrow—and—and judgment!”

“Oh, but that poor textisworn so threadbare; it has hardly a rag of clothes left on its back! Well, good-bye, Mrs. Darcy,” taking the initiative in departure, as she always does when visiting in her mother’s company. “Tell Lavinia that though she will not see me, I am with her incessantly in spirit.Sheknows thatIknow what sorrow is.”

Mrs. Prince follows with her blunter adieux. “Well, good-bye. Give the poor things any message from me you can make up that you think will comfort them. And if there is any difficulty about catering—in these cases there is always a good deal of coming and going, and consequent eating and drinking—just tell Lavinia to send everybody straightup to the Chestnuts. In an establishment of the size of ours, half a dozen more or less make no sort of difference. Well, good-bye, again. I am terribly upset. I think it is a hundred times worse than last time!”

But from this assertion of the superior tragedy of the present drama to that enacted on the same stage seven weeks ago, Mrs. Darcy’s whole soul dissents. In the relief of recovered solitude she goes once again to the French window, once again leans her hot head against the jamb, but this time, in the intensity of her thinking, the over-sweetness of the mignonette in the bed at her feet goes unnoticed. The shows of things pass before her in their utter falsity, shouldered away by the underlying realities. To outward seeming how incomparably sadder it appears that Rupert should be rent away from life just when—as if in brutal practical jest—he had been restored to her warm mother’s arms; just when hope was wheeling round him on her strong pinions, and love—

“With turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,”

than that he should be transferred from bed to grave, for ever unconscious of the change!

Yet to her whom his going or staying most concerns, how beyond all words less terrible is this real death of the young man than the counterfeit one of seven weeks ago! Seven weeks ago he would have departed in relentless silence, unpursuable through the infinities of eternity by any agony of prayer or pleading, leaving behind him a wretched womanwith her debt for ever uncancelled, with the hounds of remorse for ever on her track. Whereas now, as Susan has already learnt from her to whom by his graceful dying he has renounced all claim, he has departed in magnanimous reconcilement, and selfless forethought for that future of hers in which he will have no share. Yes; it has been well done of him thus to die, tactful, like himself! She articulates the word under her breath, and, hearing them, catches herself up, aghast at the drift of her own musings.

Is it possible that she can have allowed a little satisfaction in such a calamity to creep into her mind? a little furtive thankfulness at her friend’s release from the meshes of that terrible net which the fowler Fate had spread for her? Has she—she herself—no pity for the old man, who, as all the parish now knows, has the hand of Death—though a temporarily suspended hand—upon him? The old man out of whose weak grasp the staff has been ruthlessly knocked, before the few more steps during which he would have asked its support, have been paced? Has she no pity for the young man himself, mulcted of five and forty of his seventy due years, juggled out of bride and hearth, pitchforked into the unknown? Rupert had always gone to the wall. What a willing hand she herself had until lately—once again she thanks God that there is a “till lately”—lent to thrust and keep him there! Rupert has once more gone to the wall! Rupert is “out of the way!” Never in his lifetime would he have willingly been in it; but now he is finally “out of the way!”

“It was the winter wild,While the heaven-born child,All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;Nature, in awe to him,Had doffed her gaudy trim,With her great Matter so to sympathies:It was no season then for herTo wanton with the Sun her lusty paramour.”

No one can qualify by the epithet “wild” the Christmas that follows Rupert Campion’s death. It comes simpering in with a faded grey smile, swishy soft gusts, and a mock-April taste; and the Darcy family are conscious of no sting or frost-prick in cheek or finger as they stand silently round the new cross that heads Rupert’s grave, and to whose final erection the workmen gave their last touches only two hours ago. For Rupert has elected to lie in the open, having notified his wish in a small memorandum, placed where it was certain to be found; and which proves that him at least the ambushed enemy had not surprised by his spring.

Sacred to the MemoryofWILLIAM DEVEREUX,Elder Son of SirGeorge Campion, Bart., of Campion Place,in the County of Kent,Who nobly lost his life in rescuinga brother officer from death, while serving his Queen andCountry, on the Field of Battlein South Africa.Also ofRUPERT LOVEL,Younger Son of the above,Who not less heroically died in savingthe life of a fellow-creature on a less glorious field.“They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths theywere not (long) divided.”

By the time that Susan Darcy’s eyes have reached the last line of leaded letters, they serve her but ill; yet she can see the hackneyed text well enough to feel sure that it is not of Lavinia’s choosing. In her mind’s eye she can see the lonely pair bending together over the drafted inscription; the first mute, and then hesitatingly murmured hint of disapproval on the part of Lavinia, and the determined angry overriding of her gentle objection on that of the poor old man.

“Bill would not have cared,” says Susan to herself, quaintly calling back to life the two dead young men to give a verdict on their own tombstone; “but Rupert would have hated it.”

Her musings are broken into by an objection of another sort, whispered with the accompaniment ofeyes shining in distressed partisanship by her eldest daughter.

“Oh, mother, ‘not less heroically’! Surely it was not nearly so grand as carrying off Captain Binning!”

“It was not so showy,” answers Mrs. Darcy, lifting her eyes to the high summit of the cross itself, where, if she has been defeated as to the choice of a memorial text, it is clear that Lavinia’s taste has prevailed.

Once again with sure intuition the rector’s wife sees the contest that has been waged, and in which Lavinia has came off victor, between the Necropolis polished granite or alien white marble shivering under England’s weeping skies, of Sir George’s preference; and the rough stone of the country, soaring up in the fashion of the solemnly beautiful old Saxon crosses, wrought with figures and emblems of a faith yet young, of Lavinia’s predilection.

“She must have had a tussle for it!” Susan says, once again addressing herself, and adding to her inward remark the rider, “How well I know her!” A second reflection corrects the present tense, “Should I not rather say, ‘How well Iknewher’? Shall I know her as well when I see her to-morrow after these five months of absence? Five months to-day since they went! How little she has told me in her letters! Have our souls grown so far apart, while she has been passing through her burning fiery furnace, and I have been scolding the children, and ordering dinner, and emptying my medicine-chest down the parish throats, that theywill not know each other when they meet?” A deeper thought laden with misgiving follows. Does the Refiner Himself recognize the silver that He has thrown into the melting-pot when it emerges again?

It is not often that the rector’s busy wife can stand idle, deeply sunk in meditations, which her children, with their customary nice feeling, refrain from infringing by any of their usually numberless appeals. With noiseless reverence they are laying their wreath, made of flowers bought at the Shipstone florist’s at a cost that has chipped a large paring off the two next birthdays, which jostle Christmas so expensively close, on the just replaced turf.

“We heard that it was up!” says a voice beside her, awaking Mrs. Darcy out of her grave musings, to find herself with two members of the Prince family, each laden with a magnificent “floral tribute” on either hand.

“Yes; it was finished this afternoon,” she answers, giving a slight start, and speaking involuntarily half under her breath.

“Whata beautiful text!” sighs Mrs. Prince, letting fall the tortoiseshell eye-glass which has helped her to read the inscription. “It is the one that, if it were possible, I should choose out of all the Bible to have placed over me.”

“Unless you die simultaneously with my father, I do not quite see how it is to be managed!” answers Féodorovna, disagreeably.

Her mother reddens a little. “I do not see that that follows! Six months and more elapsedbetween the deaths of these dear fellows; and yet what can be more suitable and lovely?”

Miss Prince does not waste breath upon a rejoinder, but stoops her long body to place a superb cross of lilies-of-the-valley, which seems instantaneously to wipe out of existence the modest Shipstone Roman hyacinths, with their one frugal arum lily, in a prominent position upon the grave.

The young donors of the eclipsed offering stand by with swelling hearts. Their Christmas gift to the dead has pinched them to the extent of absolutely precluding the purchase of “Bobs’”last photograph, tantalizingly beaming on them from the stationer’s front window, to the attainment of which their mother has stony-heartedly refused to help them with a loan; and about which Miss Brine has benightedly observed that thirty photographs of one individual must be enough for any private collection, were he ten times as great a hero as Lord Roberts. The monstrousness of the supposition that any such hypothetical demi-god can exist or ever has existed, and the consequent conviction that the governess is a pro-Boer, produces a warmth of feeling against that lady, which her departure upon her Christmas holidays only partially cools.

“They are coming home to-night, I hear,” says Mrs. Prince, stopping, in her turn, to deposit her sumptuous circle of orchids, but laying it unobtrusively just within the stone coping at the grave-foot, and somehow not making the children feel as small as Féodorovna had done.

“I believe so.”

“Whata home-coming!” raising and straightening herself again.

“Yes.”

“All animals creep to their lairs to die,” pursues Mrs. Prince, shaking her head, and with a poetic excursion into the regions of natural history not usual with her. “I suppose that that is his feeling.”

“I suppose so.”

“How dreadfully flat those boys are singing!” says Féodorovna, affectedly, putting her hands over her ears to exclude the sound of the choir practice, floating in annual struggle with the Christmas anthem from the just dim-lit church.

Féodorovna’s ear for music has never been her strong point, and a jarred surprise at the pretended suffering mixes with Mrs. Darcy’s disgust at the petulant bad taste of the interjection.

“Shall we see poor Lavinia at church to-morrow, do you think?” asks Mrs. Prince, real kindliness struggling in her tone with a rather morbid curiosity. “I declare that I shall hardly dare to look in the direction of their seat. What a life she must have led during these last five months,tête-à-têtein cheap lodgings, for I fear their means would not run to anything very luxurious—with that poor old gentleman going over the same sad story, day after day, day after day, as he did in the case of Bill! And I am afraid that sickness is not likely to have improved his temper. I am sure that I should not be surprised to hear that her reason had given way.”

The apprehension expressed has certainly nonovelty for Mrs. Darcy. It has rung ominously in her ears many times since her last sight of the friend whose short letters, dated from so long a succession of dreary health resorts, as to prove the dying restlessness which is upon the old man, tell her so little in their uncomplaining brevity. Perhaps it is the grafting of another’s crude, bald words upon her own scarcely permitted thought, which makes both seem unendurable. She turns hastily away, and all follow her from the grave, since, as far as the churchyard gate, their roads lie together.

Twilight has come upon them as they stand; twilight passing in dim gallop into darkness—a darkness that will never be relieved by the little paltry moon, making its poor fight with the dominant vapours. Silence has fallen upon the two elder women; but the tongues of the children, following hard behind with Féodorovna, are loosed.

“Mother heard from Captain Binning by last mail,” Susan hears Phillida say, in the tone of one communicating a piece of news of whose acceptability to its hearer there can be no doubt; and Miss Prince’s rather ostentatiously indifferent rejoinder.

“Oh, did she?”

“He told her the details of that fight near Snyman’s Post, which we saw the account of in theTimes, when he was mentioned in despatches; not that he said a word aboutthat, trust him,” in a tone of almost personal pride in the joint valour and reticence of the related fact.

“The Boers had rushed a picket, which gave them good cover to pour in a heavy fire at closerange upon us, but after two hours’ hard fighting we beat them off with heavy loss.”

“Anyhow, we knocked the stuffing out of Commandant Reitz that time,” chimes in Christopher, taking up the chant of triumph.

The young Darcys have never been fond of Miss Prince; but at least, upon the all-important subject of the war, they have imagined her views to be in absolute harmony with their own. What, then, is their stupefaction at her comment upon their pieces of intelligence?

“How brutal! and how brutalizing!” she says with a delicate shudder of disgust.

“They do not know: how should they?” says Mrs. Prince, lowering her voice. “But Féo has lost all interest in the war. She has got a new hobby. It is music. You heard what she said about the choir singing flat. There is a young organist at Shipstone who, according to her, is something quite out of the way. He won the F.R.C.O., whatever that may be, last year; and she goes every day to hear him play. Well,” with resigned appeal, “it is a nice taste, isn’t it? and her mind is so active, that she must have something to occupy it; but sheusednot to know one note from another.”

* * * * *

The silence of children gone to bed, and of a rector having his final wrestle with the difficulty which he must share with many thousand clerical brothers, of saying something original upon the morrow’s anniversary, broods upon the Rectory. Half a dozenChristmas sermons of previous years lie neatly typewritten before Mr. Darcy, so that recognizable repetitions may be avoided. The double doubt as to whether he dare repeat a simile, certainly felicitous, but whose very excellence may make it remembered, and which had occurred in his discourse of ’96, coupled with the question as to whether he shall insert any allusion to Rupert Campion’s death, keeps him sitting with suspended pen at his knee-hole writing-table, though the church clock has struck ten.

Over the drawing-room fire Mrs. Darcy is sitting alone, with hands stretched out flamewards, telling herself that, in view of the fatigue of Christmas Day, with its workhouse dinner, its school tea, and many etceteras of festal labour, she ought to go to bed; but, reconciling herself to her disobedience to the inward fiat by the fallacy that it would be extravagant to leave so good a fire to burn itself out alone. Her tired body is in the Rectory drawing-room, but her intensely awake soul has travelled across the road, and up the sloping garden of Campion Place, to where, behind the latched shutters, the returned wanderers sit in the aloofness lent by their crown of sorrows. They were to arrive at half-past eight o’clock. Would she have done better if she had been on the doorstep to receive them? It was a feeling of delicacy that had kept her away; but would it not have been better to have risked being indelicate, so thatonepair of arms might be opened to enfold the desolate couple, and put a little warmth into the deadly chill of their naked home-coming? Sir George has certainly gone to bed by now. Thelater accounts of his condition, bare of detail as they have been, have indicated a declension into completely invalid habits. Lavinia as certainly is sitting over the fire alone—alone, like herself—but, unlike herself, with no nursery-ful of kissed children, no dear, pompous devoted husband so filling the vacant chambers of her heart, that absence means but a keener sense of their beloved presence. The telling her own riches strikes the rector’s wife with a generous compunction, almost a feeling of guilt towards her friend in her cold heart-poverty.

“If I had only hung up a stocking for her!” she cries inwardly; and then derides herself for the puerility of the thought. “What gift capable of gladdening Lavinia’s Christmas morning could Santa Claus himself put into her stocking? If it were not so late!” she says to herself, a moment afterwards; “if the bell would not wake Sir George——”

Restless with the thought of the other’s forlorn neighbourhood, suddenly feeling that it is impossible to lay down her own tired limbs until they have carried her over the way to the mournful house darkening on the hillside above her, Susan rises, and, pulling aside the window-curtain, looks out—since the Rectory does not belong to the solid-shuttered breed of its eighteenth-century neighbour—on the night. It is such as the afternoon had promised—still, black, and murk; the little absurd finger-nail-paring of a moon wholly vanished behind the opaque vapours.

“I could find my way blindfold!” is the undeterred looker’s thought; and so goes out into thehall, snatches a bowler hat and an Inverness cape from the stand, and, unbarring the hall-door, starts back with a sudden shiver of alarm; for, before her, stands a tall dark figure, with a lantern in its hand.

“I was just making up my mind to ring!” says the voice of Lavinia. “What! Were you going out? Were you coming to me?”

“Great wits jump!” answers Susan, with a tremulous laugh, “Come in! come in!” and so pulls the girl over the threshold by her cold gloveless fingers, and into the glowing warmth.

“I must not forget my lantern! I do not know what I should have done without it! I could not see an inch before my face!”

“It is a pitchy night!”

Each utters herbanalitémechanically—the elder in a strange moved shyness; the younger taking hungry possession, with her drawn eyes, of each familiar object.

“I had just been reproaching myself for not having hung up a stocking for you!” Susan says, with another nervous laugh.

“What would you have put into it?”

They are standing opposite each other on the hearthrug, Lavinia’s hand still lying in Mrs. Darcy’s clasp. Is it possible, the latter asks herself, in astonished self-chiding, that this stupid new shyness has mastered her so far as to make her wonder how soon it would be proper to release it? Lavinia herself solves the problem. Gently disengaging her fingers, she throws back the hood of her cloak, and,for a heart-beat or two, they take silent stock of each other. The long thick wrap conceals the girl’s figure, but face and hands betray that Miss Carew has dwindled to half her size. Yet did ever saner eyes look out from under level brows? Whatever else has happened, Mrs. Prince’s lugubrious prognostic is not fulfilled. Lavinia Carew’s reason hasnotgiven way.

“You have grown very thin!”

“Do not you remember that Rupert always used to laugh at me for my dread of getting fat?” Then, seeing the startled half-frightened look in her friend’s face, “You wonder that I am able to mention him? Well, I have had good practice; for five months we have never talked of anything else! No!”—correcting herself—“I am wrong. Sometimes we have talked of Bill, but never,never,NEVERof anything else!”

“Forfivemonths?”

“Every day for five months—sometimestwicea day, for his mind is a good deal gone—I have given him all, or”—with a slight shiver—“almost all the details of the—theaccident! If I had been asked beforehand, I should have thought that even an allusion to it would drive me mad; and I have had to describe it twice a day!” She makes her narration in a perfectly collected level voice, and her friend’s false shyness dies for ever, overwhelmed by an avalanche of compassion.

“How are you alive?” she asks almost inaudibly.

“You must not pity me!” returns the other,still with the awe-inspiring calm of one that has reached the limit of possible suffering, and come out beyond it into the dead waters of numbed endurance. “Other people—allother people would do that; but I expectyouto understand. I amgladto be punished! glad to be working out my sentence like a convict. It is the only thing that has given me any ease! I think that even Rupert, if he can see me—I do not think that he much believed that he would be able”—with a dragging accent of sorrowful reluctance—“but if he can, even he will think the expiation is not out of proportion to the offence!”

“It is an idea that would never have occurred to him!” says Mrs. Darcy, in a tone of the gentlest chiding. “You are forgetting him!”

“Forgettinghim!” repeats Lavinia, slowly. “Yes,” after a slight pause, “you are right; crediting him with dismal dogmas of retribution, that he would have abhorred! Yes, I must be forgetting him!”

“My dear,” comes the voice of the rector, opening the door and looking in, with a brow cleared by having decided to omit the ’96 flower of speech, and defer the allusion to Rupert till New Year’s Eve, “what has possessed you to unbar the hall-door? It surely is not a night for star-gazing!Miss Carew!”

* * * * *

The Darcy Christmas Day has been worked through with its usual cheerful thoroughness. The reciprocal presentations; the church services; theworkhouse dinner; the school-children’s tea, with its posthumous accompaniment of oranges and crackers; the servants’ evening party;—nothing has been scamped. The family Christmas gift to the poodle has been a photograph of Binning, which he wears upon his brow—all other available parts of his person being already occupied by the effigies of general officers—when he is walked by his beautifully frilled fore paws between Phillida and Daphne into the mistletoed kitchen to open the ball.

* * * * *

Lavinia’s Christmas Day has been worked through too, though in a different fashion. Mrs. Prince may cast her eyes upon the Campions’ seat in church without any fear of a shock to her nerves, for it is as empty as it has been for the last five months. Sir George is too much tired by his journey for his niece to leave him; yet in the afternoon—an afternoon furnished with the apposite Christmas brightness which had been so lacking yesterday—he insists upon being dressed, and leaning on Lavinia’s arm walks, with less of tottering in his gait than she had feared, to the churchyard, to see the new cross, about which he has been restlessly talking, asking, wondering, through half the night.

“I should personally have preferred granite, but as usual I was overruled!” he says fretfully; then divining and remorseful for her distress, adds, “But it is not amiss.”

Both are silent for a little space, reading the inscription, which, by long debating over, amending, altering, has grown so familiar to both.

“It was his own choice to lie out here!” says Sir George, presently. “It would have seemed more natural that he should be buried with the rest of us—with his mother; but he always was rather a sport among us!”

Lavinia assents with a little heart-full nod.

“It is dull of me,” pursues the old man, while a puzzled look comes into his dim eyes; “but I can’t recall how we learnt his wishes! He could not havetoldus.”

“We found them written on a sheet of note-paper just inside the middle drawer of his writing-table,” replies Lavinia, with the gentle ready distinctness of one who, with perfect patience, has given the same explanation many times before.

“Ah, yes! that was it, of course. He was always fond of scribbling, poor fellow!”—with a look of relief at the recovered explanation. A moment later, in a low key of compunction, “And I used to get so out of patience with him, and ask whether he was writing a sonnet to his own eyebrow! What right had I to sneer at him because he was not cut on the same pattern as myself?”

“He did not mind, dear,” very softly, with a pressure against her side of the wasted arm leaning on hers. Another silence, while about the steady peace of the church tower the jackdaws fly and call in cheerful harshness, and from behind the bravery of his little orange-tawny breast a robin throws out his living gladness across the Christmas-decked graves.

“Two brave boys!” says Sir George after apause; but now there is a note of triumphant pride in the father’s voice. “I always knew that I hadone! but I little thought the day would come when I should be able to say that there is not a pin to pick between them! not a pin to pick between them!”

“It is for homely features to keep home,They have their name thence; coarse complexionsAnd cheeks of sorry grain have leave to plyThe sampler, and to tease the house-wife’s wool.What need a vermeil-tinctured lip for that?Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn?”

TheAugust sun is assuring the Rectory garden, as plainly as his beams can speak, that no scurvy trick shall be played with the marquee erected this morning with some trepidation of spirit—since the two previous days have been rainy—on the cricket-ground. In proof of his good faith, the God of Day is dragging their hottest spices out of the petunias and heliotropes, and out of Miss Brine the prudent counsel, addressed to her pupils, to put cabbage leaves in their hats. But how can paltry apprehensions of the off-chance of a sunstroke influence minds occupied by the knowledge that the whole air is full of the sense of approaching festivity? Have not the hen-coops been moved from the banks of the Tugela River, in order that rounders may be played there? Is not there to be a tug-of-war on the grass plot before the front door? Has not a “donkey” been erected in a clear space of theshrubbery? Are not numerous old boxes being chopped up into trays, to be used for tobogganing down the steep slope above the parterre? That the treat to the choir boys of St. Gengulpha’s Church, Martin Street, Soho, London, which in her maiden days Mrs. Darcy used, for the sake of its excellent music, to frequent, is an annual one, does not lessen the excitement with which the arrival of the early afternoon train, and the hired brake and Rectory waggonette that convey the guests from Sutton Rivers station, is expected.

That blissful date is still three hours off, for eleven o’clock has just told its last stroke from the church tower as Mrs. Darcy, calm with the consciousness of made cakes, garnished dishes, and arrived chairs, puts foot across the threshold of the cool drawing-room of Campion Place. There is purpose in her eye, and resolution in her step, as she lightly crosses the carpet, and lays her hands on the shoulders of a black figure, sitting with its back to her, writing at a bureau. The figure puts out an abstracted hand backwards in acknowledgment of what is evidently a very familiar interruption, but her attention remains rivetted upon the “slips” before her.

“Isn’t it astonishing that the corrector of the press can let such mistakes pass?” she asks, indignantly. “Twice they have printedsnoutsfor ‘shouts,’ andliverfor ‘lover’! It makes such dreadful gibberish of the lines.”

Mrs. Darcy looks over Lavinia’s shoulder, and verifies the blunders alluded to; but it is clear thatthe attention given is but a half-hearted one. In the early days of black emptiness which had followed Sir George’s death in the previous January, of occupation gone, and spirits drooping to the very earth that had closed over the last of her “men,” Susan had welcomed for Lavinia the editing of Rupert’s “Remains” as a salutary distraction; but of late she has remorsefully to own to herself that she has grown rather tired of that “volume of posthumous verse,” which takes such a long time in preparing for the press, and the emendating, noting, and prefacing of which, by her friend’s not very practised pen, has robbed the latter of so many of the little out-door joys which stand first in the pharmacy of grief-healing.

Miss Carew apparently divines the faintness of her friend’s sympathy, for she changes the subject.

“I sent the spoons and forks this morning! Have you enough now?”

“Plenty.”

“Do you want any knives?”

“Bless your heart, no! Mrs. Prince has lent enough to cut the throats of the whole township.”

“And how about fruit? There are still a good many white currants under the nets on the north wall.”

“Currants!” repeats Mrs. Darcy, with affected scorn. “If you could see the size of the grapes that arrived, personally conducted by Féodorovna, just as we were sitting down to dinner last night, you would blush for such a suggestion.”

“I withdraw it,” replies the other, with a slightgrave smile; adding, “One laughs at them, but they really are wonderfully kind.”

“This was not a case of undiluted kindness,” says the rector’s wife, with her light and stingless sarcasm. “The grapes were but incidental; the real object of her visit—I wish she would not pay morning calls just as the soup tureen is entering the dining-room—was to ask for an invitation for to-day for her organist.”

“And you gave it?”

“Of course! Am I ever harsh to true first love?” ironically. “She went conscientiously through his achievements all the same. How well we know them, don’t we?”

“As a little boy of ten he won sight-reading prizes at local competitions, while earning his bread as organist of Sutton Rivers Church!” replies Lavinia, the long-absent dimple showing itself cautiously in her left cheek, as she responds promptly to the call upon her memory.

“He had to go to the College of Music unusually late,” rejoins Susan, snatching the words out of her friend’s mouth in triumphant patter; “but, nevertheless, took his A.R.C.M. in theory, the stiffest exam. the Royal College affords, with ninety-nine marks out of a maximum of a hundred!”

Lavinia breaks in hurriedly. “He is composing an organ fugue in G minor, which has something of the strength and purity of design of Bach!”

They both pause to laugh; but Lavinia’s eyes, falling on the MS., grow suddenly serious again.

“I wonder has she yet offered him marriage?” she says, a remnant of amusement piercing through the habitual sadness of her face.

“It is time that she did,” replies Mrs. Darcy, in the same key; adding, after a moment’s reflection, and in a lower tone, “It is quite fifteen months since she last proposed to any one.”

Lavinia lays down her slips upon the blotting-pad, and sits looking straight in front of her, while with an awful clearness rise before her mind’s eye the events so inextricably entangled with Miss Prince’s declaration to Binning.

“Why did you say that?” she asks, after a pause of quickened breathing, to which her friend listens with a trepidation which does not hinder a very valiant resolution to persevere.

“Because you never allow me to mention him; because, as I may not speak of him naturally and simply, I must drag him in by the head and shoulders.”

No answer.

“Isn’t it a puerility to banish him from your speech—to go half a mile out of your way to avoid speaking his poor name—when we both know that he is never for one moment out of your thoughts? No; don’t interrupt me! I will have my say out this time! Never for one moment out of your thoughts—not even when you are laying eucharis lilies on Sir George’s grave, or editing Rupert’s poems.”

Lavinia’s only answer is to take her hands off the manuscript before her, as if the indictment madeagainst her rendered her unworthy to touch it; and her long arms drop to her side.

“Can you deny it?” asks Mrs. Darcy, herspirituellepale face flushing with excitement, thinking that she may as well be killed for a sheep as a lamb, and kneeling down beside her friend to get compelling possession of one of her hands. “I insist upon your answering me!”

For a moment or two of misgiving it seems to the rector’s wife as if her audacity of asking were to break against the same obstinacy of morbid silence as has rebuffed all her previous efforts to speak a forbidden name; but, after a while, Lavinia answers, a great sigh seeming to tear the words out of her breast—

“I do not deny it; though why you should have the brutality to force me to own it to-day, particularly, I do not know!”

“Because he is in England!” replies Susan, speaking very softly, with a kindly dew of moisture, making tender her usually keen eyes; “because, this morning, I had a letter from him, with a London postmark!”

The slips of Rupert’s poems blow off the bureau, and on to the floor, wafted to earth by the irony of a warm gust from the honied garden-beds outside; but Lavinia is not aware of it. The one hand that she has at liberty flies up to her forehead, as though she were blinded by a sudden light.

“Youmusthave seen in the papers that theIsis, with his regiment on board, had reached Southampton; but, perhaps”—with a slight return of satirelightening the gravity of her eager tones—“perhaps—to be consistent—you do not allow yourself to glance at the war news.”

“I did not at first,” answers the girl, still looking straight before her, with eyes that yet feel dazzled; “I thought it ought to be part of my punishment; but,” faltering, “I had not resolution enough to keep to it. And, even if I had, it would have been no use. The children——”

“Yes,” returns the mother, with a rather quivering pride in her voice; “it would be difficult to be long in the company of my progeny without hearing the name ofBinning”—pronouncing it with a ringing clearness. “They, at least, are faithful to the one hero whom they can call friend!”

At the thus audaciously syllabled name, whose utterance has been tacitly prohibited between them for over a year, Lavinia gives a low cry. But in the over-set face that she suddenly turns upon her friend there is no anger, only an immense mazed joy, fighting its way out of the Bastille of the long remorseful sorrow that has prisoned and gagged it; and her fair head falls forward on the shoulder of Binning’s advocate. Through the thin fabric of her gown Mrs. Darcy feels the glow of the hidden face, and it spurs her to fresh effort.

“Are you not rather tired of beingdead?” she whispers. “It is all very well for a time, but it must pall! Come back to life! Put off these hateful weeds, put on a white gown, and come back to lifeto-day! Believe me”—with an accent of exultingpersuasiveness—“you could not choose a better moment!”

* * * * *

The party to the choir boys of St. Gengulpha’s is being put through with the thoroughness which, since Mrs. Darcy’s advent, fifteen years ago, has characterized all the Rectory functions; and, indeed, is drawing towards its close. For four sunshiny hours, twenty happy boys in flannels, with sharp towny faces, have been expatiating about the grounds, and have drunk to the full of the varied entertainments offered them—entertainments shared by half the neighbourhood, annually compelled by Mrs. Darcy to come in to her aid. The Vicar of St. Gengulpha’s and his curates—lean men with intellectual faces, supported by the gamest of their pale choir boys, have stretched muscles that yet remember the playing-fields and the Isis, in the best tug-of-war in the Campion records, against the rector and his inferior songsters. The smartest young ladies of the neighbourhood have not disdained, though hampered by long-tailed swishy gowns, to join in a game of rounders with the visitors, nor do the inelegance of their futile efforts to get their draperies out of the way, nor the potency of the sun’s beams at all reduce the good will and perseverance with which they arduously scamper. The “donkey” has repeatedly conquered and been conquered. The donkey is an apocryphal animal, with a wooden head; and, for body, a revolving barrel, mounted on whose elusive convexity the rider has to snatch a threepenny bit from its distant nose. Many arethe ignominious falls given by him, many the glorious victories won over his treacherously turning barrel-stomach. For the lesser boys the threepence is placed further up the nose, within easier reach of the little anxiously grabbing hand; and frequent are the cheaply generous petitions proffered by elder lads in behalf of their small companions.

“Mightn’t ’e ’ave it a bit nearer, sir? ’e’s only a little chap!”

And the rector, in flannels, having laid aside his pompousness with his broadcloth, hot, genial, turning the handle of his wooden steed with right good will, feigning to be inexorable, always accedes. Then, after tea in the tent—tea in whose distribution every one, even to Serena and the poodle, assist; after Orpheus glees sung in the dining-room, comes the crowning final joy of the toboggan.

“One! two! three! Are you ready?”

The eager scramble up the hillock; the emulous turning round the bag which sits at the top on a sort of milestone; the getting on to your tea-tray; the difficulty of keeping your feet on it—an indispensable condition of success; the mad sliding run down to the grass at the foot—once or twice the impetus carrying the boy divorced from his tray, and landing him on the gravel walk, with barked elbows and shins;—who can wonder that, in comparison with such pleasures, the donkey himself grows pale?

The party has been in full swing, before a guest, who, if an oath to appear at it had not been exacted from her, would certainly never have found courage to face it, is seen to be in the midst of associatesfrom whom she has been so long withdrawn. Lavinia is late—a tardiness not to be accounted for by the simplicity of her toilette, since no one knows with what a long delay of backward-looking apology, with what remorseful cryings-out for forgiveness to her “men” for seeming to forget them, she has put off her black gown, and invested herself in the white muslin which feels like a travesty. It is with something of the shamed shyness of one who suddenly finds himself in broad daylight among a party of ordinarily dressed men and women, clad in the extravagance of a fancy garb, that Miss Carew appears among the acquaintances from whom, for over a year, she has held aloof.

What has she to do amid all this movement and colour and gaiety? Because she has been dragged out of her darkness into light, and had her fetters suddenly knocked off, does that make her a fit member of this happy company? They look at her or she fancies so, strangely; some to whom she has been perfectly well known in former days, not even recognizing her. That she is changed in appearance she has long been indifferently aware; colour and flesh melted away in the smelting-pot of her great affliction, branded with the broad arrow of her uneffaceable suffering. But that she should have become unrecognizable! The unexpected smart of that discovery blinds her to the fact of how faint a hold upon another’s identity is possessed by any human being; of how small a change of costume,locale, or circumstance, will confuse the doubtful and inaccurate knowledge which we can masterof even the exterior of our fellow-creatures! Nor does she realize that in the general centreing of attention on the objects of the entertainment, the unobtrusive addition of one more to the already considerable number of tall white maidens on the grounds may momentarily pass without notice. It is with relief and gratitude that, as she moves along in humiliated shyness, with that mazed sense of unreality which has been upon her ever since Mrs. Darcy’s morning visit, she hears herself interpolated by the familiar voice of Mrs. Prince.

“Lavinia! Why, I can scarcely believe my eyes!”

“Youat least know me!” replies the girl, holding out a hand that seems scarcely to belong to herself, in the unfamiliarity of its white glove.

“Know you, my dear? Why should not I know you when I see you almost every day of my life? Why, in Heaven’s name, shouldn’t I know you?”

“Other people don’t!” replies Lavinia, sombrely. “I passed Lady Greenhithe just now, and she looked perfectly blankly at me. And even Féodorovna; but thenshewas——” Miss Carew apparently alters her intention of finishing her sentence, for she pauses.

“Féodorovna!” repeats Mrs. Prince, an anxious furrow on her brow becoming suddenly more pronounced. “By-the-by, where is she? She disappeared almost as soon as we arrived. Did you say that you had seen her?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“At the back of the tent.”

“Was she—alone?” with a very apparent apprehension as to what the answer will be.

“No—o; Mr. Sharp—the Shipstone organist, I mean—was with her.”

Mrs. Prince heaves a mortified sigh that is yet tempered with philosophy.

“I wish she had stuck to the army!” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “Neither Mr. Prince nor I would have objected to an army man!”

Back to Index Next