Chapter XIII: “No bad news, I hope?”

“None, thanks.”

It is at the breakfast-table next morning that this question and answer are exchanged. They are the result of the wire which has just been handed to Lavinia, and which she continues looking at, long after she must have mastered its contents--so long that the hostess’s curiosity conquers her good breeding, and makes her take for granted sender and subject.

“Does Mr. Rupert say by what train he and Sir George are returning?”

There is a pause, though slightly perceptible.

“They cannot get back to-day; the papers were not ready for their signature, after all.”

“The law’s delay! We all know something about that,” says Mr. Prince, looking up with a smile of elaborate sympathy from his porridge. “Will legislation ever effect anything towards----?”

“It is an ill wind that blows nobody good,” cries Mrs. Prince, cutting ruthlessly into her husband’s speculation. “Since there is nobody to go back to, what sense is there in your going back?”

* * * * *

“I have only _one_ little hint to give you, dear,” says Mrs. Prince, escorting her visitor to the wounded man’s door, and in a tone tinged with apology; “but you know what an impracticable patient Féo is, and we must give in to sick people’s whims, as she was always impressing upon us about Captain Binning.”

“Yes?”

“Well, dear, it is too silly and exacting of her; but she complains that there were three quarters of an hour between your first and second visits to her yesterday, and forty-five minutes between your second and third.”

“Were there?” rather blankly.

“If the same thing happens to-day, she threatens to get up and go and see for herself what’s happening. Dr. Roots tells her he will not answer for the consequences if she does; but she snaps her fingers at him. However,” with reassurance, “my one confidence is in her _colour_!”

* * * * *

They meet without the elation of yesterday, their eyes shirking each other, and their hands taking for granted that contact is superfluous. Half a score of subjects had yesterday succeeded her refusal of his suggested gift; but the sting of that rebuff still inflames their memories.

“This is an uncovenanted mercy!” he says, with a rather strained smile. “I was afraid that I had seen the last of you.”

“I heard from my people, that they cannot get back to-day.”

“So you stay here?”

“Yes.”

There is a lifelessness in the little dialogue, she expressing no regret, and he no gladness. When the eyes, dropped upon her work--she had no work yesterday--give him an opportunity of covert observation, he sees that her large eyelids look thickened as if with tears or watching.

“The law is a very odd thing, isn’t it?” she says presently in a staccato key.

“I have never had many dealings with it.”

“It is the only vehicle to which civilization has not given C-springs and indiarubber tires. It still jolts and lumbers along as it did three hundred years ago.”

His look asks for an explanation of her forced yet commonplace analogy, and she goes on.

“In the matter of marriage settlements for instance, both sides may be perfectly at one as to the disposition of the money; and yet the law insists on finding flaws and making difficulties.”

“I suppose it does.”

“Some hitch of the kind is detaining my uncle and Rupert.”

She cannot be more uncomfortably conscious that the explanation is superfluous and uncalled for, than is he that her trite reflections and unasked-for introduction of her financial affairs are the stairs by which she is climbing to some aimed-at goal. In her next sentence she attains it.

“Talking of marriages reminds me----” Even when the door to which she has been looking is reached, it seems hard to open.

“Yes?”

“I have been thinking that I owe you an apology.”

“For what?”

“For the spirit in which I received a very kind suggestion you made.”

“What suggestion?”

It is needless to say that he knows as well as she what was the contemned overture; yet--for Love is by no means a kindly god--he cannot deny himself the luxury of seeing her run up the red pennon of shame into her cheeks. But when he notes what uphill work it is to her to give the asked-for explanation, and how conscientiously she does it, his heart smites him with an acuteness that brings its own retribution.

“To give me a wedding present.”

“I was sorry that I had put you to the pain of refusing.” His tone is very gentle, and not in the least rancorous.

“Do you know why I refused?”

“I had a twinge of my old misgivings.”

For a moment--so complete is her innocence of the motive hinted at--she looks at sea. Then his meaning flashes painfully upon her. He supposes that from the causer of Bill’s death no member of Bill’s family can bring him or herself to accept a gift.

“Whatever your misgiving was, it was wrong,” she says, the eager desire to reassure him giving her a momentary glibness in conspicuous contrast to the lameness of her former speech. “You could not possibly have guessed the real reason; it would have required a more than human intuition.”

“Are you going--are you able to tell it me?”

“Yes, now.” She pauses a moment, as if to collect herself, and set her facts in order. “I must explain to you,” she says, “that my marriage is not like other marriages.”

“I do not understand.”

It would be better taste, as he feels, to allow her to tell her tale to its end, without remark; but she makes a slight halt, and the delay is unendurable.

“I mean that it is no occasion for festivity or present-giving. I intended no slight to you; I only saw that you misunderstood.”

This time he has himself better in hand, for no comment follows; but she, verifying by one snatched look the miserable mystification of his face, hurries out her next words.

“It is the carrying out of a bargain made almost further back than memory can reach.”

“Do you mean----”--whether it be through the weakness of his body or the rebellion of his spirit, the words are spoken almost below his breath--“that you have tied yourself for life by a childish promise to another child?”

She draws up head and neck in a way that he feels to convey a dignified reproof.

“There is no question of tying. I am doing it absolutely of my own free will. All my life I have known that for me there was to be no another man than Rupert; and all his life he has known that for him there was to be no other woman than me!”

If any incredulity born of experience or observation invades the soul of Rupert’s brother man at this large assertion, no sign of it appears. He only waits blankly.

“I am up to my neck in debt to them--to both of them!” goes on the poor girl, losing something of her collectedness, and torn between the knowledge that wisdom bids her leave the picture of her past and future without further touches; and the impossibility of not making it clear to her pale hearer, that love--lover-love--has no part in the scheme of her existence. “I am up to my neck in debt to them, and this is the first instalment I have ever been able to pay!”

“I see.”

She sighs, and throws out her arms as if tossing away something irksome.

“Now let us talk of something else.”

But a topic, thus ordered up, comes with a limp; and they get lamely enough through the next hour; the bulletins to Féodorovna are delivered with a punctuality unknown on happier yesterday. It is only gradually that comfort and fluency return to them, the knowledge of the one subject which has to be skirted round, making all others seem dangerous. The war-map hung at the foot of the bed proves their best ally. In moving its pins and flags, and making out, with the nearest approach to accuracy, the scene of Captain Greene’s exploit, they grow almost easy and almost garrulous.

“What have you been talking about?” is the first question put by Miss Prince on the next scrupulously paid visit of report made by the amateur nurse.

Féodorovna has managed to fidget her temperature up to a higher point than yesterday’s, and the orange of her face is patched with the flushings of fever.

“About the war.”

“What about the war?”

“I have been moving the pins and flags on the war-map, in accordance with to-day’s news.”

“You ought not to let him mention the war.”

“I think it would be worse harm to forbid him. He would only brood the more over Captain Greene’s wounds.”

“You seem to be much better informed on the subject than I am”--very fretfully. “What else have you talked about?”

“Nothing much.”

“I hope you have not told him that my temperature has gone up.”

“No.”

“Of course he asked?”

“Of course.”

It is with the weight of this falsehood upon her soul that Lavinia returns to her charge. It does not sit very heavily, and is probably not a falsehood at all, since all the inquiries in question have, no doubt, been addressed to Nurse Blandy or Mrs. Prince, before her own appearance on the scene. And whether because a little of the former awkwardness makes him glad of a topic ready to his hand, or that his conscience smites him with an earlier negligence, he really does put the orthodox query this time.

“Well, how is she?”

Lavinia shakes her head. “Poor thing! I am afraid her overhaste to be well will very much retard her cure. You had better take warning by her!”

There is a pretty admonishment in her voice, and in the face, which is gentled beyond its never ungentle wont by a diminution of colour. He rolls his head about on the pillow.

“Am I in such overhaste to be well? Or do I only pretend it?”

“I do not think you are a very good hand at pretending,” she answers, with a flickering smile.

* * * * *

And now the day is done. Has some new Joshua issued a contrary command to that which the first one sent over the wrecked Syrian town, and bid the sun double his speed to the west?

“Sleep well,” Lavinia says.

At his request, and by the condescension of Nurse Blandy, she has gone in to bid him good night at her own bedtime, and long after her services have been dispensed with. The electric light is out, and the moonlight, for whose continued admission during another few minutes he has begged, sleeps in faintly glorious bars and islands on the bed. Long and ghostly he lies there, and ghostly she leans over him. The pallid interrupted light--so interrupted that in a second either of them can withdraw from it under the shield of darkness--gives them a confidence and expansiveness unknown throughout the day. They feel something of the freedom of two innocently tender spirits freed from the shams and prohibitions of the flesh.

“Sleep well!”

She is stooping over him to enable her to see him, and one hand lies on the turned-over sheet. It looks so unearthly that he must think there is no contravention of rules made for the material and the real in carrying it to his ghostly lips. But the unspiritual contact, novel and most sweet, effectually breaks through the etherial figment.

“Do not wish me ‘sleep:’ wish me a blessed lying dream!”

* * * * *

How deep is Lavinia’s thankfulness that Miss Prince’s ignorance of this irregular interview saves her from the awful necessity of at once accounting for and relating it. She reaches her own room, trembling and unstrung. So complete has been her fidelity to Rupert, unconscious of the unusual in its absoluteness, that no man has ever before kissed even her hand, the hand which is so often a wicket-gate leading to the palace of the lips. By the electric light she looks at her right hand--it was the right--which has been desecrated, is it? or for ever ennobled?--her practical, capable right hand, beautiful in shapely strength; and her first feeling is one of regret that it is not more satin-soft, more smoothly worthy of his lips. Shame that at such a crisis--for to her inexperience it seems one--so unworthy an impulse should predominate, burns hotly. But, all the same, the regret holds its own, and keeps its original start.

The “dazzled morning moon” and the uprising sun find her still a watcher.

“I have lost a whole night’s sleep because a sick man kissed my hand out of gratitude,” she says to herself, when her eyes at length close upon the already roseing clouds. “That is sensible!”

Waking brings with it a healthier view of the episode that had cost her such a vigil--brings an effort to deride herself for attaching so much importance to what was doubtless a very commonplace form of acknowledgment. Her yesterday’s explanation returns with a certain power of soothing upon her conscience. It showed more than doubtful taste in her to volunteer it; but, at all events, he now knows that her marriage with Rupert is an unalterable certainty, and that lover-love has no part in it. Why it should be unendurable to leave an acquaintance of a fortnight’s standing under the belief that she is influenced by the ordinary motives, she omits to asks herself. But it is with a brave face of open friendliness that she presents herself at his bedside, and he asks himself by what juggle it had seemed to him that last night her spirit had kissed his in the moonlight.

In the afternoon she returns to Campion Place, bidding her patient good-bye with staid kindness, but making no mention of a possible return. She is on the doorstep, with a bright face to welcome back “her men.”

The young horse, which Sir George is driving, shies badly at barking Geist, with a foolish pretence of not recognizing him as his own family dog; and Lavinia would give anything that her eyes had not flown suspiciously to Rupert, to note whether his hand is nervously gripping the side of the dog-cart.

It is fortunate for her that both her travellers are too much occupied with their own misadventures to ask her many questions about the disposition of her time. The trip has been neither satisfactory nor final. An entry in a baptismal registry is not to be found, and a second, if not a third visit to the lawyers will probably be necessary. Two dull evenings have been passed at a hotel, as Sir George, with his usual ingenuity in making life as disagreeable to himself as he can, has morosely refused to spend them at any place of entertainment; and Rupert--as seems a matter of course to them all--has foregone his own friends and pastimes to keep him company.

The only bright spots in their history appear to be that Rupert, who to his other graces adds a connoisseurship in old silver, has picked up a George III. Loving-cup at a shop in the Strand for an old song; and that Sir George has met with some patterns of wall-paper that please him for two rooms which have not been used of late years, and in whose doing-up he takes an interest in striking contrast to his usually absolute indifference to the internal details of his household.

“They would make a nursery look nice and bright,” he says, displaying them to his niece, and speaking with that uncompromising outspeaking of his hopes, which has often before inflamed her cheeks.

It is with an inward convulsion of dismay that she realizes how enormously her repulsion for the topic, thus introduced with Saxon simplicity, has grown since it was last broached to her. Yet she must get used to it. She has never hitherto flinched from the necessary and the actual. There _will_ be, in all human probability, a nursery; there _will_ be children; and they will be hers--theirs.

“Yes, very bright and pretty.”

He looks at her with a touch of solicitude, though without a grain of suspicion.

“Have you got a cold? I always tell you that you go too thinly clad.”

“No, thanks; not in the least. Why do you think so?”

“Your voice sounded hoarse, as if your tonsils were relaxed.”

But Lavinia’s tonsils are all right.