Chapter X: “Les joies ne sont que les afflictions en robe de fête.”

The kitchen-garden spreads itself out to the sun like a dog stretched basking before the fire. Upward it slopes; its ripe red walls, its espaliers, and wine-coloured and yellow spring flowers running up the hill; house and stables, church tower, and promise-making trees, at its foot, and with an apple-orchard, and a smaller cherry one, as a crown for its head. The apple-orchard represents, as yet, only promise too; but the hurrying cherry blossom spells performance.

Lavinia, standing on the sunny mid-path, with a bundle of bass-matting, with which she has been training a young hop round a pole, lying on the ground beside her, has just raised herself from her knees to admire the rich red look that makes the cherry trees blush. She knows it to be due to the young leaves which to-morrow will have disappeared in the storm of white. They will be bridal to-morrow. _Bridal!_ She repeats the word over to herself. This is the 28th of April. On precisely this day month, she will be bridal too. The thought, apparently, is not one that invites dwelling upon, for she turns back to her bass-matting and her hop; and, in so doing, becomes aware of a figure--that of Mrs. Darcy--climbing the gravel walk towards her.

Mrs. Darcy’s visits to Lavinia are much rarer than Lavinia’s to Mrs. Darcy; partly because she is a good deal busier, and partly because she does not like Rupert. The first reason is naturally the only one allowed to appear in the relations between the friends.

“To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit?” asks the girl, with playful formality.

Her friend’s answer is not quite so ready as usual; yet her wiry slimness cannot be breathed by so gentle a hill.

“Miss Brine has come back. She has killed one relation, and cured another!”

“How do the children bear it?”

“They are inconsolable! The thought of having to be comparatively clean for an indefinite time has almost broken them down!”

Both laugh.

“It is an ill wind that blows nobody good; so you are able to come and change the weather with me?”

There is a little surprise and inquiry in the key used; but Mrs. Darcy accepts it as a statement apparently, for she stands, taking in, with eyes and ears and nostrils, the universal blossoming and courting in earth and air.

“Don’t you wish we could paraphrase Joshua’s command, ‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon,’ and say, ‘Spring, stand thou still in April’?”

“Do I?” answers the other, uneasily. “I do not think so!”

Her friend looks at her with covert observation, to verify that, despite the peaceful quality of the most soothing of all occupations, gardening, peace is not the dominant note in the concert of Miss Carew’s emotions this gaudy, sweetly clamorous April morning.

“In point of fact, I came to bring you a message.”

“From whom?”

Is it fancy that the question is jerked out with some sort of difficulty?

“From Mrs. Prince. She wants to persuade you to pay Captain Binning another visit this afternoon. She tells me”--with a faint tinge of surprise--“that you refused when she asked you two days ago.”

“I was there on Monday--that is only five days ago!” Lavinia has knelt down on the gravel again, and is busy with her hop. Her voice sounds a trifle hard.

“Five days can be pretty long to a sick man, more especially to a sick man nursed by Féodorovna Prince!”

“But he is not nursed by her!” exclaims the other, almost angrily. “Mrs. Prince herself told me that Mr. Prince had forbidden it, because he knew she would kill him!”

Mrs. Darcy shakes her head. “As long as it was a question of his life, Mr. Prince interfered; now that it is merely a matter of shaking his reason and indefinitely retarding his recovery, Féo is at liberty to work her inhuman will upon him. Only yesterday, Nurse Blandy said to me that if things were not altered, she should tell Dr. Roots that she must throw up the case.”

“And do you expect me to undertake it?” asks Lavinia, in a voice so unlike her own, so unfeeling and grating, that Susan starts. “Rupert went to see him on Tuesday,” continues the girl, not waiting for an answer to her rather brutal question.

“Rupert and you are not quite one yet, though you soon will be,” rejoins Mrs. Darcy, drily.

“My uncle has been twice, and you went yesterday. It cannot be good for a moribund to receive such a shoal of visitors!” Her voice is still hard, and there is neither compassion nor sympathy detectable in it.

“He catches at any reprieve from Féo’s importunities, poor fellow! I told him about the children and their martial ardour, and he asked me to bring them with me next time, if I was good enough to let him hope that there would be a next time--he looked at me like a lost dog, as he said it; and then Féo came in with something in a cup, and forced it down his throat, pouring half of it over the sheet. I fully expected her to hold his nose, to make him open his mouth, as Mrs. Gamp did with her patient at the Bull Inn!”

Lavinia is sitting up on her heels, the implements of her infuriated industry dropped in her lap, and listening in a silent horror that gives the lie to the callousness of her utterances of a minute ago.

Mrs. Darcy turns to go. “So I must say that you cannot spare time--that you do not see your way to it? Which sounds best?” she asks with affected carelessness.

The answer comes in the voice of Daphne, flying dishevelled, torn, and red-rosy up the walk.

“Oh, Lavy, we have had such a battle! It was between the turkey-cocks and the _hen_-cocks.”

* * * * *

“I will go and see,” says Féodorovna, whom, to her surprise, Lavinia finds lying on the sofa in her own luxuriously fantastic den; when, on the afternoon of the same day, a pair of hesitatingly hurrying feet carry her past the King’s Wood, through the Princes’ escutcheoned lodge, to and through their hall-door.

Miss Prince’s voice has its _ex-cathedrâ_ importance, and her cap-strings their official wave and float, as she adds--

“It is quite likely that I may have to send you away. Half an hour ago, he said he felt inclined to sleep; I think it was partly a ruse to induce me to take a little rest; but he looked rather exhausted, and Nurse Blandy advised me to lie down till he wanted me again.”

Between the self-satisfied lines of this communication the listener reads how eternal must be the recumbency of Féodorovna, if continued until the suggested need for her arises; and how dire the sufferings of the victim.

The interval between Miss Prince’s discouraging exit and her return seems long to the feverish candidate for an interview, which, as the moments pass, she begins hotly to feel is not desired by the person with whom it is asked. Susan has misled her--in her turn deceived by the well-meaning importunities of Mrs. Prince. To be persecuting him again after an interval of only five days! Probably he will regard her as a second Féodorovna! Her uncle’s pet-name recurs ironically to her mind--his Mosquito! She is going to be some one else’s mosquito, too. For the first time in her life she merits the name!

“He will see you for a few minutes!” announces Miss Prince, reappearing at last. “Personally, I do not think it very prudent; but Nurse Blandy has made up her mind that he will be none the worse for it; and she always considers herself a Court of Final Appeal.”

There are traces of past skirmish and present ill humour in Féodorovna’s appearance; but to both Lavinia is absolutely indifferent. With an immensely relieved, but still doubting, heart--for, after all, there has been no word of his wish or will--she follows the haughtily undulating figure of her guide through the same rooms, passages, and stairs as she had traversed with a deep, but immeasurably less deep, excitement five days ago. The lowered blinds, the lavished luxury of detail, the bed in the recess,--how familiar they are! and yet how long ago her first acquaintance with them seems!

She is nearing him. Will his first glance reveal that she has been officious? that her visit adds one more nail to his wearisome martyrdom? The answer comes carried by lightning. He has dragged himself up into the forbidden attitude--at least it was forbidden five days ago; but five days is an enormous period of time--an absurdly evident joy in his caverned eyes. It cannot be more absurd than the blind elation that the recognition of that joy evokes in her. It is with relief that, when words come to her, she hears them to be temperate and rational.

“I am afraid that you were asleep, and that I woke you!’

“I never was wider awake in my life.”

His voice is stronger than it was on Monday; and Lavinia realizes that Nature has been more potent than even Féodorovna; and that he has made a perceptible step towards recovery since their last meeting.

“Are you sure that you are up to seeing me?”

“As sure as that I see you.”

Miss Prince and the nurse have retired together, but obviously at variance, towards the window, and no ear but that to which it is addressed catches the answer. For Lavinia only is the impression of the inestimable benefit conceived to be conferred by the sight of her. From one but lately lying at the point of death insincerities and conventions are apt to flee away, and she knows that straight from that heart, whose beats the bullet had so nearly stilled, rushes the response to her question.

“Come, come!” says Féodorovna, swishing up to the bedside, and speaking in that hybrid whisper with Miss Prince’s own trade-mark, warranted to en-fever the calmest invalid; “you must not hang over him. There is nothing so fatal as to exhaust the air in the immediate neighbourhood of a patient. Sit quietly down here, and do not say too much.”

The precept is easy to obey, and, in fact, compliance with an opposite one would to Miss Carew, for the first moment, be quite impossible. For those first moments the forbidden conversation is supplied by the prohibitor.

“We need not keep you, nurse,” she says, with more of command and less of grovelling deference than the official in question is accustomed to hear. “Your tea is waiting for you.”

Nurse Blandy’s answer is to take the pillows which Féodorovna is beginning, with amateurish wrong-ness, to shake up, out of that ministering angel’s hand, and with two masterly movements adapt them to the patient’s back.

“Miss Carew will ring for me before she leaves you,” she says in a restful, determined voice, and so quietly departs, with one parting glance at her foe, which explains, with telegraphic brevity and distinctness, that no attention to Miss Prince’s orders, but simply a desire for her own refreshment, takes her away.

“I shall stay as watch-dog, to ensure your not being imprudent!” says Féodorovna, emerging triumphant, and with a false sense of victory, out of the late contest, and seating herself nearer to and in much better view of the sick man than she had allowed his visitor to do.

The latter has watched, with a deep, dumb indignation, the one-sided scuffle over his helpless form; and her eyes now meet his with as profound and acute a disappointment legible in them as she reads in his own. Féodorovna, with a truer estimate than before of the side on which the balance would swing, is to-day not going to give her prey the choice of escaping her for half an hour. Féodorovna is not going to leave them for one minute alone.

And yet, did they but know it, no speech could have so quickly driven them into intimacy, as this dumb meeting on the ground of their “most mutual” vexation. At first it seems as if silence were to reign unbroken, and when a subject is at length chosen, it is Féodorovna who starts it.

“Captain Binning has had so many visitors,” she says, transgressing the most elementary rule of nursing, by discussing a patient in his own presence. “Sir George, Mrs. Darcy, Mr. Campion.”

The enumeration sounds like a reproach, and the words of self-vindication, “I was asked to come,” all but spring to Lavinia’s lips; all but, not quite. It is better that he should think her pushing and intrusive, than that his already wearied body and spirit should have the fatigue and vexation of an explanation, whose only end would be to salve her own wounded self-esteem.

“And though he enjoys it at the time,” pursues the arbiter of poor Captain Binning’s destinies, “he feels the ill effects afterwards!”

“You take more trouble about me than I deserve!” says the invalid, rather faintly, and in a voice under whose admirably patient politeness Miss Carew divines an intense nervous irritation. “You know I cannot be kept in cotton wool all my life!”

“It will not be my fault if you are not!” returns Féo, in a tone of enthusiasm as intense and overt as that with which she had formerly proclaimed her life-dedication to General ----.

There is a silence, each of the hearers probably feeling that it would be impossible to “go one better” than the last utterance. Lavinia steals a shocked glance at the object of it; but the air of civil tired endurance, untempered by either fear or surprise, with which he receives it, shows her that it is merely one of many such declarations. He only throws his head a little further back, and shuts his eyes--to reopen them, however, hastily. Lavinia follows the track of his thought. If he shows any sign of weakness, their common overseer will dismiss Miss Carew, and thrust something down his own throat.

When they reopen they reopen upon Lavinia’s; although, thanks to the seat assigned to the latter by Féodorovna, it is only by turning his head at an awkward angle, that he can get a tolerable view of her; reopen with an appeal so direct and piteous as to be impossible to misread. Can she--_she_ with the free use of her limbs, her wits, do nothing for them? _Them!_ She has time for a spear-thrust of conscience at the plural pronoun, followed by an equally rapid dart of self-justification. The use of it was _his_, not hers. She only read off his thought as a message is read off from the tape. He, in turn, must read off a negative from hers, since the appeal dies out of his eyes with disappointed revolt. It is only because a knock at the door has for an instant freed them from supervision, that they are able to exchange even these mute signals.

“I shall not be away more than a minute or two,” says Miss Prince, undulating back to the bedside, and speaking in a voice whose exasperation at the interruption and unnecessarily emphatic reassurance contend for the upper hand. “My father has chosen this not very happy moment to send for me; but I shall insist upon his not detaining me long.”

She is gone! Blessed, blessed author of the Féodorovna Candle! Long may his dropless tapers enlighten the world! For a moment, though it is daylight, he has lit up the universe for two persons! One of them apparently feels that his tether is a short one, and that he must take time by the forelock. The door has hardly closed before he says--

“You are not sitting in the same place as you did on Monday!”

“No.”

The inference that he thinks the change not one for the better is so clear that there would be prudery in ignoring it; and, besides, has not Féodorovna impressed upon her that his lightest whim is to be respected? So she moves with quiet matter-of-factness to the chair originally occupied by her. It cannot be good for his wound that he should slew himself round, as he was doing a moment ago, to get a better prospect of her.

“Thank you! Thank you also a thousand times more for coming to see me again.”

“Why shouldn’t I come to see you again?”

The question is addressed more to herself in reality than to him, and is an answer to her own misgivings rather than to his gratitude. A slight shade of surprise crosses the eager brightness of his face.

“You did not see your way to it at first, so Mrs. Prince told me.”

“I did not want to stand in the way of other visitors,” she answers--“my uncle, Rupert,” adding with difficulty, “We all claim our part in Bill’s friend.”

She looks steadily at him, and sees a sort of chill come into his eyes--at her lumping of herself and her family in a cold generalization.

“Rupert!” he says, repeating the name lingeringly, and with an involuntarily reluctant intonation. “Yes; I have heard of Rupert.”

“From Bill?”

“Yes, from Bill--and from others.”

The slight hesitation that intervenes between “Bill” and the “others” tells her that he knows. How should he not know, indeed? Is it likely that, in his state of tedious invalidhood, he should not have been told any bit of local gossip that might give him a moment’s distraction? To him, her engagement to marry Rupert is just a bit of local gossip, neither more nor less. No doubt that the news was imparted--why should it not be?--by Féodorovna.

“So you see,” she says, struggling with the senseless feeling of resentment and vexation that has invaded her heart, “my time is not always my own.”

“I see!” He lies quite silent for a minute or two, looking out of the window at a burgeoning sycamore, then adds, in a would-be cheerful voice, “It is kind of him to spare you to me for half an hour; but he seemed such a kind fellow when he came to see me the other day: one of my bandages got a little out of gear, and he put it right for me, with a touch as gentle as a woman’s.”

She repeats “as a woman’s,” like a parrot, with the bitter thought that even this generously meant encomium takes the feminine shape that all praise of Rupert must do. No one can deny that the bridegroom she has chosen can hold his own as a judge of lace, mender of china, and shaker of pillows, with any expert in either of these three branches of accomplishment in Europe. The cloud on her brow must be a visible one, for the sick man’s next remark has a note of doubt and trouble in it.

“I have often heard Bill talk of him. Though they were not alike in externals, nor, I imagine, in tastes, they meant a great deal to each other.”

The sentence is evidently intended as a statement, but takes a perverse interrogative twist at the end.

“People may mean a great deal to each other without having a single taste in common,” she replies; and the answer leaves on both their minds a painful sense of having incomprehensibly offended on the one side, and of having bristled in uncalled-for defence on the other.

The sands of their dual solitude are running out, and this is the way in which they are utilizing Féodorovna’s absence! In both their minds a feverish reckoning is going on as to how long it will take Miss Prince to send her stork-legs along the corridors and staircases that separate her from her impertinent parent, snub him, and return. Ten minutes is an ample latitude to give her, and of these five must have already fled. They cannot, cannot part upon that jarring last note. The rebellion against doing so is equally strong in both minds, but it is the woman who raises the cry of revolt. It is a cry that has no reference to anything that has passed before, it is only the unruly human heart calling out to its fellow from among the conventions.

“I _am_ so glad that you are better!”

“And I _am_ so glad that you altered your mind!”

They laugh a little, like two happy children, relieved and blissful at the withdrawn cloud that leaves the blue of their tiny patch of heaven for its one moment undimmed. Both feel that the exchange of those two snapped sentences has turned Miss Prince’s prospective return from an unendurable to a quite supportable ill.

“I think that you would find _that_ chair”--directing her by an imploring look to one in closer proximity to the bedside than that which she occupies--“a more comfortable one.”

“Should I?”

She makes the change. Are not all his whims to be gratified? They can see one another admirably now. He verifies a dimple, and she a scar. He makes no comment on his discovery. She does upon hers.

“You have been wounded before?” she asks, with trembling interest.

He puts his fore finger on a white cicatrice that runs across his lower cheek and jaw.

“_That_ bit of a cut! Oh, I got that in the Soudan. It is an old story, and it was nothing worth mentioning. It did not keep me above a week in hospital.”

It is clear that he has no wish to pursue the subject; and she refrains, partly in deference to his disinclination, partly from the aboriginal woman’s awed joy in the fighting man, partly oppressed by a sense of contrast. When Rupert cut his leg a year ago, over a fallen tree in the wood, he all but fainted at the sight of his own blood! But to Binning she leaves it to start a theme more to his liking.

“I suppose,” he says, turning his head sideways on his pillow in a way that hides his scar, and brings her still more perfectly within his range of vision, “that lying on the flat of one’s back like a cast sheep makes one see things at an odd angle. You will be surprised to hear that, a few minutes ago, I thought I had offended you.”

There is a pause before she answers, “I had offended myself. Don’t you think that that is a much worse thing to happen?”

“Do you mean that one can’t beg one’s own pardon?” he asks, laughing slightly, yet with curiosity stimulated by the gravity of her manner, and awaiting with eager interest the unriddling of her riddle.

But it remains unriddled. The impulse of each is apparently to flee away from the other’s topic. Lavinia looks out of the window, and says, with glad hopefulness--

“In another week you will be able to be carried out-of-doors. You will be too late for the cherry, but the apple blossom will be all ready for you, and then you will come in for the lilacs, the laburnums, the thorns--they are really wonderful in the Park here--the Siberian crabs, the acacias.”

“Anything more?” he asks, in tender derision of her long list.

“Plenty,” she answers, prepared to continue to bait his appetite for life with more of her joyous enumeration.

“But I shall not be here to see them,” he objects. “In a month I may go back, for Roots says so.”

The laughter behind her dancing eyes goes out, and the lilt has left the voice that asks, “Did Dr. Roots say so to you? or did you say so to him?”

If he were not bandaged in bed, and an Englishman, Binning would shrug his shoulders. There is a touch of impatience in his--

“Does it matter much which? We said it to each other.” Then, stirred by an immense gratitude for her downcast look, he adds gently, “How can I not be in a hurry to go back? Isn’t my regiment out there still, and my chief, and all my pals?”

At the sound of his voice, with the fighting ring in it vanquishing the feebleness of sickness, she lifts her head proudly--

“Of course you want to go back,” she says, with an unaccountable sense of partnership in his courage and comradeship; “and I hope you will get well quickly, and be able to do it soon!”