Chapter XV

The 28th of May has come, and the inevitable has happened. This inevitable is not that Lavinia Carew has become Lavinia Campion. On the contrary, her wedding stands postponed for a week, viz. to the 4th of June. The delay is in no degree attributable to her, but is caused by the illness of that uncle whose over-haste to be well, and determination to treat serious sickness with that high hand which it will never endure, has landed him in the same morass as it had done Féodorovna. With a reluctance proportioned to his extravagant eagerness for the object in view, with many racy expressions, and a refreshing shower of renewed insults, both wholesale and retail, distilling upon his patient son, Sir George has had to acquiesce in the deferring for an additional eight days of the attainment of his heart’s desire.

Perhaps the inevitable might have been avoided if one of several things had happened or not happened. If Sir George had yielded to his niece’s earnest entreaties to be allowed to nurse him, instead of insisting on her confining herself to a couple of runs up to London, each of so few hours’ duration as to involve no swelling of the reckoning at the “d----d pot-house;” if Rupert had not been kept or kept himself in such close attendance on his father as to have no time to see how ill his own affairs were faring; if Féodorovna had been permitted to complete her cure, and exercise momently supervision over her captive at home, instead of being despatched to Brighton--metaphorically kicking and screaming, it is true--but still despatched by a determined doctor and a for once unbullyable father; if Binning’s name had not appeared among the list of officers upon whom the Queen was pleased to bestow the Victoria Cross; if Mafeking had not been relieved! If, if! the convenient, curtsying, carneying preposition, which has salved every malefactor’s conscience since the world began! For the malefactor in question it is but a very imperfect unguent, desperate as is the perseverance with which she uses it.

_If, if, if!_ A whole procession of them pass before her in the wakeful silence of the night; and she gives herself the full benefit of them all. But at every morning watch, what a traitor she stands at her own bar! To have taken advantage of “her men’s” absence--the very phrase, lifelong in its employment, seems to reek of hypocrisy--to have taken advantage of their absence, of the heavy sickness of the one, and the selfless devotion of the other, to play them this coward’s trick! Yet her infidelity has only been of the soul, not of the body. Complete as has been and is the unfaithfulness to Rupert of her heart and pulses, up to the 28th of May there has been no physical contact between her and Binning beyond that one grateful touch of a sick man’s lips upon his nurse’s hand, at which not the most monopolizing of lovers could carp. When her self-contempt grows unendurable, she drags this creditable fact of outward propriety to the front, pushing it before her, and hiding behind it at Conscience’s judgment-seat.

And she _has_ struggled! What means has she not used? what cruel, branding, searing remedies has not she tried--even to that extremest one of belittling, in her _for intérieur_, him whom her whole aching soul and racing blood call out upon as her only lord and love? Has not she haled to the foreground and set in malicious order his deficiencies? told herself to what a common type he belongs--just the yea and nay, straight, unintellectual Anglo-Saxon fighting man? his character, how inferior in interest and complexity to Rupert’s; his mind, how much less subtle; his apprehension, how much less quick; his understanding of herself, how infinitely inferior? And having quite demolished him, having left him scarcely comely and barely brave, she falls on his neck in the secretest recesses of her inveterately guilty heart, and begs his pardon with tears. It is not because he is a hero or a dunce that she loves him. It is for the reason which was already very old when Montaigne penned it: “Parce que c’était, moi! Parce que c’était, lui!”

By the date of the Relief of Mafeking, Binning is able to get about a little with a stick, and even to assist with his presence and advice at the bonfire which, by “kind permission of Mr. and Mrs. Prince,” has had its site transferred, for his special benefit by its builders, the young Darcys, from their own stable-yard to the ampler area of the Chestnuts. Not that the Rectory does not blaze too with subsidiary flames, and breaks out into a forest of flags that makes the bunting which had celebrated Ladysmith sink into insignificance. It would seem impossible that anything could carry the patriotic elation of the clergyman’s family to a higher pitch than it has already reached, yet it is sensibly heightened by the providential coincidence, of which the poultry-yard is the scene, viz. that it is Baden Powell who brings out thirteen chickens on the very day of the raising of the siege. The fact is the more remarkable as two other generals, who were set upon the same day, but were wanting in the patient assiduity of B. P., produced nothing but addled eggs. It is not the Mafeking news, soul-stirring and spirit-lifting as it is, which has produced the inevitable. There is a safe publicity and generality in the emotion it evokes; and Lavinia, hurling billets of wood on to the bonfire, and being exhorted, directed, and scolded by Binning, leaning on the top of his staff, which he ultimately, in the excitement of the moment, throws in too, is in far less peril than Lavinia chokingly reading aloud to its recipient the little paragraph which announces that he is among those to whom the Victoria Cross is to be awarded. She struggles through the small _naked_ record of his achievement.

“Captain Binning,--th Hussars, who was in command of a troop, held an important position for some time against heavy odds; and when compelled to retire, saw all his men into safety, and then, though he had himself been wounded in the left lung, supported Lieutenant Henley, who was unable to walk, until the latter was again hit and apparently killed, Captain Binning being himself again dangerously wounded a short time after.”

At the end, her hand goes out to clasp his as naturally as a man-comrade’s would have done.

“For the first time I know how it happened! You never would tell me!”

During a minute or two he can only answer her by a hand-grip, whose vigour argues a recovered hold upon life and manhood; then--

“It is a great surprise,” he says, not very steadily. “I did not even know that I had been recommended for it.”

“Do not say that you are not glad!” she cries, with a high unnatural laugh, which, in her normal state, she would have repudiated as neurotic. “Do not say that Tom, Dick, and Harry deserved it better!”

As she looks at him in triumphant challenging prohibition, at his face, still that of one stunned by the shock of a so great and honourable joy, a thin image of Rupert seems to pass vapourishly between them--not of Rupert the admirable son, the delicate reticent lover, the perfectly comprehending friend, but of Rupert in white effeminacy, paling at the mere memory of a jibbing horse. Yet the Victoria Cross is no more answerable than Mafeking and her bonfire for the happening of the inevitable. That is ironically reserved for the 28th, the day on which Lavinia was to have been married to Rupert. If it could have been staved off for twenty-four hours, it would never have happened; since on the 29th Binning is to depart for Southampton to join the s.s. _Nubia_, which is taking out to the Cape drafts for half a dozen regiments already depleted by the enteric and the Boer.

The day has dawned with a splendour as ironical as all else belonging to it. Lavinia is no longer at the Chestnuts, where her services have ceased to be required, and whither Féodorovna has returned, fully recovered and wholly hysterical, to see the last of her ex-patient.

The Rectory children are all more or less bunged with tears, against which they bravely contend, and have eluded Miss Brine, and the inadequate consolation offered by her, that after all Captain Binning is no blood relation, and that six weeks ago they had never seen him, to seek the more perfect sympathy of “Lavy.” But “Lavy” is not so nice as usual; and though they find her wandering about her garden with no apparent occupation, she shows so little desire to hear or reciprocate their lamentations that they leave her in puzzled disappointment. Their mother, presently missing them, divining and disapproving their design, hastens after them; and finding them hanging, with only very partially recovered spirits, over that unexpected tit’s nest in the disused watering-can, which their jealous care has watched over since earliest eggdom, gravely dismisses them, and joins her friend.

Without speaking, the rector’s wife directs her own steps and those of a companion who seems scarcely to know, and not at all to care, where she is or what is being done with her, to the walled seclusion of the kitchen garden, as being less open to observation than the sloping lawn before the house. Yet at first the precaution seems unnecessary. There is nothing for any prying eye to see, nor ear to hear.

“Sir George and Rupert come back to-day?”

“No; to-morrow.”

“Will the workmen be out of the house?”

“Not quite.”

Silence; apparently numb on the one side; certainly self-reproachful on the other.

“What could have possessed me,” Mrs. Darcy asks herself, “to allude to the papering and painting of the nurseries?”

Lavinia remains absolutely dumb. A despair so lifeless and inarticulate frightens the elder woman; and, after a minute or two of anxious cogitation, she tries the effect of a douche of cold water on her companion’s apparently swooned soul.

“I did not think you would have collapsed like this!”

It is partially successful. “I have not collapsed. Since you _know_, having dragged it out of me, there is no need to pretend before you; but when it matters, I shall not collapse.”

“He is coming to bid you good-bye to-day?”

“Yes.”

“Is--is that wise?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

There is such a dull doggedness in the tone, such a clutch upon the interview referred to implied in it, that Mrs. Darcy gives a gasp.

“It won’t be good-bye!” she says presently, in a low tone of conviction--“it _cannot_ be!”

Lavinia does not answer; not in the least, as her friend is distressfully aware, because she is acquiescent; but simply because the statement is not worth contradicting.

“I can’t stand by and see a crime committed!” Susan says, talking low and very quickly, and trying not to let her agitation get the better of her. “If you feel that it is a task beyond your strength, _I_ will speak to Rupert for you; at the least hint, the least suggestion--heroically unselfish as he is.”

“You used not to admire him so much!” puts in the other with a bitter dryness.

“It is quite true, and it is perfectly fair that you should remind me of it,” rejoins Mrs. Darcy, humbly and ruefully; far too intent on her object to resent or even notice any blow that her self-esteem may suffer on the way to it. “I was paltry enough to allow myself to be blinded by his silly little foibles to his great qualities; but of late, during Sir George’s illness, realizing, as I have done--as every one must have done--all that he has had to give up, and with what perfect self-effacement he has done it----”

Lavinia breaks in upon her with a terrible jocosity.

“You have forgiven him his old lace and his Elzevirs! Well, better late than never!”

Her friend stares at her with aghast, wide-open grey eyes, as of one who sees a hideous blighting transformation taking place in a dear and familiar object.

“You are right!” she says, under her breath. “I thought him completely unworthy of you, so unworthy that your loss would cause him very little pain so long as he could keep, as you say, his ‘old lace and his Elzevirs;’ while in another direction I saw, or thought I saw, a possibility----” Her voice dies falteringly away.

Lavinia looks at her stoically. “You need not distress yourself; you have neither made nor marred in the matter.”

Another grim silence.

“Will you empower me to tell Rupert?”

“Tell him what?”

“Will you tell him yourself?”

“Tell him what? There is nothing to tell.”

The rector’s wife pauses, brought up against this wall of senseless brazen denial; her thin sensitive face even whiter than its white wont; but she is not easily baffled, nor apt to abandon a task because it wrings her withers.

“My dear,” she says, taking gently hold of the girl’s coldly pendant hand, and using an endearment uncommon to her, being one sparing of banal caresses, “do you think that you are doing Rupert a kindness in providing him with a wife who avoids his look, winces at his voice, and shudders at his touch?”

“What the eye does not see, the heart does not feel. He will never know!” There is a wretched callousness in her voice, whose counterfeitness a slight shiver betrays.

“_Not know! Rupert not know!_”

The words, and the inflection that accompanies them, bring home to Lavinia the fact, on which she has often laughingly expatiated to her friend, of the extraordinary intuitive knowledge of her possessed by Rupert; of her absolute inability to keep one half-thought or fancy from his ken. That he should so turn over and handle the innocent trivialities of her mind and heart, has formerly been a matter of jest. Now the thought that there will be no secret place in her soul into which she can retire from him with her terrible secret, no gourd under whose shade she can sit hugging her misery undetected, breaks down the fortification of her numbness, and leaves the breach open for active conscious agony to march up and take possession. She draws her cold fingers from Mrs. Darcy’s pitying clasp, and turns upon her.

“I do not know what object you propose to yourself by putting me to this torture!” she says. “I think a person should be fully in possession of the facts of a case before she ventures to give an opinion upon it.”

“That is quite true,” replies the other, gently, too full of deep compassion for the writhing soul before her to resent either the tone or the words used; “but does it apply to me?”

“Yes,” replies Lavinia, her insensibility seeming to give way to a far more distressing and unnatural access of wild discourtesy; “yes, a hundred times yes! You have undertaken the management of my affairs without in the least understanding them. If I were to take your advice, if I were to jilt Rupert as you so shamefully suggest to me, how much the better should I be? how much the nearer----?” She stops dead short, unable to name that never-to-be-reached goal.

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” speaking very slowly. “I should have thought that it did not need a conjurer to discover that! I mean that _I_ am not the only person you would have to convince!”

“_What?_”

“Has it never occurred to you that there may be an obstacle on _his_ side too?” (It is plain that the possessive pronoun here does not refer to Rupert.)

“No,” breathlessly.

“Don’t you think----?”

In the determination to master a tongue restive to such utterance, Lavinia pronounces her words with a clear incisiveness that, even at this crucial moment, makes Mrs. Darcy gauge apprehensively the distance that parts the tragedy in which she is taking part from the tranquil prose of the gardener potting cuttings under a shed.

“Don’t you think it might strike Captain Binning that he has done them almost enough harm already?”

“Don’t speak quite so loud!” in quick-breathing entreaty. “You mean about Bill?”

“Mightn’t it occur to him that, having robbed them of Bill, it would not be behaving very handsomely to rob them of me too?”

The rector’s wife shakes her head mournfully. “Isn’t it a little late to think of that? He has done that already!”

“What has he done?” asks Lavinia, standing at bay, with a fierce white face of dogged championship. “What do you lay to his charge? Once he kissed my hand,--it was _this_ one,” smiting it with the fore finger of the other; “but it was only to thank me for nursing him. That was his one crime! That was all he has ever done--all he ever will do!” In her breaking voice, in her passion-pinched face, there is but little attempt to disguise the poignancy of the smart that the belief in that reticence brings with it.

“Not even if he comes to bid you good-bye?”

Lavinia’s eyes, awhile ago so dead, light up ominously.

“You think that I ought not to let him come?” she asks between two panting breaths.

“I do.”

“That it would be wiser in me not to see him again?”

“Yes.”

Lavinia throws out her hands with a gesture of reckless defiance.

“Then I will be _un_wise!”