Chapter XI: “There was never anything happened so unluckily!”

This is the ejaculation with which Mrs. Prince opens one of those forenoon visits to Campion Place, discouraged by the recipients, but at least not so common in her case as in that of her unsnubable daughter. The scene of it has, as often, to be transferred to the Rectory, and in this case the object of the visit must be tracked, by a visitor too eager to await her correctly in the drawing-room, to the linen-room, where, in company with all the Darcy family except its head, she has been witnessing a presentation to the cow-man, on his approaching marriage with the schoolroom maid. The function is happily just concluded before the interruption takes place; but the wedding gifts lie displayed upon the linen-room table, and are being examined for the twentieth time with critical interest by the young Darcys, of whom both bride and bridegroom are intimate friends, and who have followed the course of their true love with breathless sympathy since Martinmas. They view the arrival of Mrs. Prince with more pleasure than usual, as giving them a fresh gallery to whom to display and enumerate the nuptial gifts; and, in any case, are far too courteous and kind-hearted not to be willing to share the elation caused by so joyful an occasion with any chance comer.

“What has happened unluckily?” asks Lavinia, starting up from her knees, on which she has been requested to descend to examine the quality of a Japanese rug displaying itself gaudily on the floor. To her own heart the question phrases itself differently, “Is he worse?”

“There is something so perverse in its occurring _now_ of all times!” pursues Mrs. Prince, with that provoking keeping of his or her audience on tenterhooks and in the dark, by a person whose own curiosity is at rest, which one often observes.

“But what is it? What _has_ happened?” asks Mrs. Darcy, coming to the rescue, and holding in her hand the rolling-pin, which has just been submitted to her for special admiration by her second daughter.

“Of course, it is not her fault! We cannot blame, we can only pity her!”

“Blame her! Pity her! What for?”

Once again Susan is mouthpiece; and Lavinia, herself paralyzed by apprehension, blesses her. What has Féodorovna done to him? Poisoned him with the wrong medicine? Set fire to his sheets? Undone his bandages, and let him bleed to death? To one acquainted with Miss Prince, all these suppositions come well within the range of the probable.

“She is nearly mad herself!” continues Féodorovna’s mother. “I have never seen her in such a state!”

Mrs. Darcy lays the rolling-pin quietly down; and, going over to the intruder, puts a resolute slight hand on her arm.

“I think you ought to tell us what you are talking about? You are frightening us all!”

“Didn’t I tell you!” answers the other, with vague surprise. “I thought you knew! How stupid of me! But I have quite lost my head! So have we all!”

She pauses. And there is a silence, only broken by some one--Mrs. Darcy alone knows who it is--catching her breath.

“Tell us!” says the rector’s wife, with low-voiced command, and the enragingly reticent lips obey.

“Féodorovna is ill in bed. She has developed jaundice. It declared itself last night.”

“Jaundice! Féo!” ejaculates Mrs. Darcy, in a tone of such delighted relief as is afterwards commented upon by herself with humorous severity.

“She felt ill when she went to bed last night--overpoweringly sleepy and bilious, and the whites of her eyes looked yellow; and to-day she is the colour of a guinea!”

Lavinia has subsided again upon her knees, which do not feel quite so strong as usual. The attitude may connote thankfulness as well as inspection.

“Poor Féo!” she says, trying to avoid the key of garish joy in which Susan’s utterance was pitched. “What a dreadful bore for her! How did she get it?”

Mrs. Prince lifts her handsomely dressed shoulders and her _pince-nez_-ed eyes to heaven, as if to refer the question there.

“We had the greatest difficulty in keeping her in bed, until we brought her a looking-glass. She saw then that it was out of the question that he should see her! But she is worrying herself to death over him--oh, not over poor Smethurst: he might die twice a day for all she cared--over Captain Binning, I mean!”

There is another pause, but of a different quality from the scared silence of five minutes ago. In Susan’s case it is filled by a cheerfully cynical wonder at the perfect clearness of vision which the sufferer’s mother can combine with her maternal tenderness; and, in Lavinia’s, with a profound gratitude that, at least, while her hue remains that of the dandelion, Féodorovna’s prey will escape her bovril, declarations, and cap-strings.

The children think that their moment has come, and civilly volunteer to show and explain the wedding gifts: to make it clear that both rolling-pin and bread-trencher emanated from the cook; the dolly-tub from Miss Brine; and clothes-pins from the “Tweeny;” that the framed and laurel-crowned “Bobs” is a joint offering from the three elder children; and the smaller “Kitchener” the outcome of the infant Serena’s worship of Bellona.

“Mother has just given him her teapot,” says Phillida, in excited explanation. “Doesn’t it look exactly like silver? It is an old Sheffield plate pattern; it was to have been presented two days ago, and Sam had his face washed twice in expectation; but we wanted Lavy to be present, and, both times, she was at the Chestnuts.”

“That is just where I want her to be again!” answers Mrs. Prince, listening with more good nature and better-feigned attention than her daughter would have done, but reverting to her own preoccupation--“the poor child”--turning back appealingly to her two grown-up auditors--“has got it into her head that he will be neglected. She and Nurse Blandy have not quite hit it off of late; that no one can look after him properly but herself; though, to tell the truth”--lowering her voice, and in a key of vexed shrewdness--“between ourselves, I think the poor man was on the high-road to be killed with kindness!”

Both matron and maid listen with sympathetic attention; but to neither of them does anything occur in the way of a response that would be meet for the ear of Miss Prince’s mother.

“I have my victoria here!” continues that lady, casting an imploring look towards Lavinia; “and I thought, if you would return in it with me, you might pacify her; come and go and take messages between them; convince her that he is having his medicine and his food at the proper hours; and so forth. She is not on speaking terms with Nurse Blandy since nurse complained to Dr. Roots of Féo’s taking the case entirely out of her hands, and _I_ always get upon her nerves if I come near her!”

Miss Carew’s eyes are still fixed upon the Japanese rug, as if appraising its 4_s._ 11½_d._ merits. To a stranger it would seem as if she did not jump at the proposal.

“It would be a real charity!” urges the maker of the suggestion, humbly and insistently. Mrs. Prince in adversity is a more prepossessing figure than Mrs. Prince full of bounce and metaphorical oats; and, perhaps, it is the perception of this fact that squeezes that reluctant sentence out of Lavinia.

“I should like to help you,” she answers slowly; “but----”

“But what?” cries Mrs. Prince. “If you answer that your gentlemen may want you in the course of the afternoon, you know that it is only a case of sending an order to the stables!”

“Your gentlemen are going to desert you to-day, aren’t they?” puts in Mrs. Darcy, interposing for the first time; and with a very slight accent, so slight as to be perceptible only to Miss Carew, upon Mrs. Prince’s objectionable noun.

“They are obliged to go to London on business--lawyer’s business!” replies Lavinia, unwillingly making the admission of her unusual freedom.

“For the night?” cries Mrs. Prince, jumping at the acknowledgment, as its author had known that she would do. “Then why not come and stay with us?”

For a moment no one answers; only it seems to Lavinia that Mrs. Darcy’s eyes echo “Why!”

A confused sense of indignation at that look makes itself perceptible for a moment in the girl’s mind, followed immediately by a cavilling self-question as to why she should feel it? What reason assignable to any human creature is there for her refusing to perform so natural and easy an act of neighbourliness? Were it poor inglorious little Captain Smethurst to whom she had been requested to minister, would she have hesitated for one moment to comply? With the lifelong record, of which she cannot but be conscious, behind her of matter-of-course obligingnesses and good offices towards her whole _entourage_, is it any wonder that her present grudging attitude has spread a layer of surprised disappointment over her petitioner’s countenance?

“Of course I know that he has no claim upon any of you!” she says, with a shrug that seems to give up her cause for lost. “Quite the other way on, in fact! But he is such a lovable sort of fellow, and so disproportionately grateful for any little thing one can do for him; and you all--even Sir George--seemed to wish to make him forget; but I suppose it rankles all the same, and he is the last person not to understand that it should be so.”

She turns to go, unaware that her final words, in which she herself sees no particular virtue, have gained the cause she had abandoned as lost.

“_Rankles!_” repeats Lavinia, turning quite white, and in a voice of inexpressible horror. “Is it possible that you can think?--that you can imagine----?”

“I really do not know what I think,” replies Mrs. Prince, in a voice pettish from worry of mind and startled puzzledom at the dynamitic effect of her last sentence. “When you see a person, whom you have always found ready to put herself in four for you, suddenly making difficulties when you are in a tight place, and when it really would not cost her much to help you, one does not know what to think, does one, Mrs. Darcy?”

“_Has_ Lavinia made a difficulty?” asks the person thus erected into umpire, and looking with quiet directness of inquiry into her friend’s face. “I think you have not given her time for either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ yet!”

“Which is it to be?” cries Mrs. Prince, wheeling round with revived hope upon her victim. “It may as well be yes!”--with all her tone can carry of persuasion. “You will have none of the disagreeables of nursing. What I ask of you is just to sit by his bedside and chat to him; and to keep Féo quiet by persuading her that we are not killing him by neglect in her absence.”

_None of the disagreeables of nursing!_ It is, then, to a selfish shrinking from contact with his pain, that her hesitation is attributed. The stingingness of the injustice, which would be ludicrous in its divergence from fact, if it were not so cruel, drives back the blood to Lavinia’s cheeks, and the words to her lips.

“There _are_ no disagreeables in this case, and if there were, I should not be afraid of them!” she says, with a quiet dignity which is felt to carry a rebuke with it, “I will gladly come.”

“You _are_ a trump!” cries Mrs. Prince, breaking, in the excitement of her relief, into a phrase, the old-fashioned slanginess of which the elegance of her calmer moments would disapprove, and making a snatch, which meets only the empty air, at Miss Carew’s hands. “Let us be off this very instant, or we shall find Féo running about the passages, though her temperature is up at 102, and she is as yellow as a guinea!”

“I _must_ see my uncle and Rupert first,” says Lavinia, so resolutely that her visitor recognizes it is useless to contest the point. “Hadn’t you better return without me, and I will follow as soon as I can?”

“You will not go back upon your word?” asks the other suspiciously. Then verifying a look of indignant repudiation in the girl’s eyes, she adds, “No; I am sure you will not! Well, perhaps it had better be as you say. I will send back the victoria at once for you; or would you prefer the brough-am?” Its owner gives the vehicle in question the value of two good syllables. “If it looks the least like rain, I will send the brough-am.”

She bustles off as she speaks, one rustle and jingle of gratitude, relief, and jet; but not before she has seen Lavinia speeding before her through the churchyard back to her home. Did she but know how much the hurry in the girl’s veins towards their common goal exceeds her own, her urgency would die, smothered in stupefaction.

Rupert is in his room, guiding and aiding the footman in the packing of his clothes, and of the few volumes and knick-knacks without which he never moves. At her call he at once joins her in the passage, leaving, as she notes with relief, the door ajar behind him.

“I have come to say good-bye,” she says brusquely, still breathless from her run.

“_Good-bye!_” he repeats. “Why, we need not start for an hour yet.”

“No,” she answers with the same short-breathed determination in her voice; “but _I_ must. I am going to the Chestnuts for the night. Mrs. Prince has been here, and has forced me into it.”

The words are strictly and literally true; and yet their utterer feels the immenseness of the falsity their reluctance implies as she speaks them.

His face expresses surprise, but no disapproval.

“They want me to help to amuse Captain Binning,” continues Lavinia, still with that lying disinclination for the proposed occupation in her tone; “and persuade Féo that they are not killing him with neglect in her absence!”

“_In her absence!_” repeats Rupert, with an accent of the most acute astonishment. “Do you expect me to believe that that angel of mercy has forsaken her post?”

“She has got the jaundice!”

“The _jaundice_!” repeats the young man, with more of entertainment than compassion in his low laugh. “Poor Féo! The yellow danger! What on earth has given her over as a prey to it at this cruelly unpropitious moment?”

“I do not know.”

“And you are to nurse dear Binning instead of her? What a blessed, blessed change for him!”

There is not the faintest trace of jealousy in his tone, and the most unaffected friendliness in his mention of the sick man; but she wishes that he had not called him “dear.” It makes her illogically feel more of a traitor than before; and, besides, is it quite manly?

“I am to sit with him this afternoon,” she answers in a tone of caustic discontent, “and convince that idiot Féodorovna that he is not being poisoned or starved. It will only be for to-day,” she adds, more as a satisfaction to her own conscience than as an explanation in the least called for by him. “And to-morrow you will both be back!”

“Even if we are, you must not hurry home!” replies Rupert, with that complete unselfishness which his family has grown so used to as barely to be aware of. “I am so boomed just now, that I can run the show without you for an indefinite time. He actually asked my opinion this morning,” opening his eyes wide and smiling; then, growing grave again, “and I always feel that we none of us can do enough to make that poor chap feel at his ease with us!”

She looks up at him in a dumb appreciation of his delicacy and feeling, that has no pleasure, nay, a leaven of unmistakable pain in it; and looking realizes that he is paler than his never high-coloured wont. Admirably as he disguises it, is it a sacrifice that he is making? Does he divine?

“You look as white as a sheet,” she says, with a sudden impulse to know the worst. “What has happened to you?”

“You will be angry with me if I tell you that I have had a fright!” he answers, smiling again, deprecatingly this time. “But that is about what it comes to. My father made them put the young horse into the cart, when I went to Shipstone this morning. And we met one of those steam-rollers; and he took fright and bolted.”

“And you could not hold him?”

“I was not driving. You know I never do, if I can help it. I do not see the use of keeping a dog and barking one’s self!”

“Well?”

“Oh, you need not be afraid that I did anything unworthy of a man and a gentleman!” noting with slightly ironical comment the apprehension in her face. “I sat tight, and Hodson pulled him up just in time to stop him taking the gates at the level crossing. But you know that nerves are not my strong point; and it gave them a bit of a jar!”

Her face has hardened and stiffened. “A man has no business to have nerves!”

“What is he to do if God has presented him with a large bundle of them at his birth?”

The question is unanswerable, and on this unsatisfactory note they part. It sounds out of tune-ly all through her short drive, and makes a discord of it. White as a table-cloth because a horse shied!