Chapter XVI

“Jesu, defend me; for then I rewarded your father and your brother
right evil for their great goodness.”

It is not long before Miss Carew has the opportunity either to put into execution or repent of the intention announced by her; for scarcely has Mrs. Darcy turned her back upon the scene of her failure, in crestfallen but quite unresentful sadness, before the successor whose coming she had deprecated is announced. Lavinia has let her friend go without any expression of apology or regret, and has watched her depressed slight back disappearing through the churchyard without one feeling but a vague sense of relief that she is out of the way.

It takes all the self-control with which the rector’s wife is so plentifully endowed, to enable her to receive, with the proper amount of concern, the news, which reaches her when scarcely within the Rectory gate, that Baden Powell has done to death two of his Mafeking chickens, by the simple process of putting his large yellow foot upon them, and keeping it there in serene unconsciousness of their departing squeaks. Her _rôle_ is rendered easier by the fact that the children’s own grief at the catastrophe is much less than it would have been on any other day in the year, being merged in the far acuter one of their hero-playmate’s departure. There is nothing very heroic in the utterance with which their idol is answering the mute look which is the only greeting Lavinia can control herself into offering him.

“Am I a greater scarecrow than you expected in this coat? I was told by a man I met in Pall Mall on Tuesday that I looked like a clothes-peg! Well, one might easily look like a worse thing; and, thank God, I never had much superfluous flesh!”

It is clear that he scarcely knows what he is saying; and that, though his speech is perfectly rational in its triviality, it is so more by instinct and habit than by any conscious command over tongue or thought.

“The doctors passed you?” she asks, squeezing out the words with a parsimony that proves how little trust she, for her part, can place in her organ of utterance.

“Yes; they said that the voyage would finish setting me up. So it will.”

The last clause is, as the girl feels, a reassurance addressed to the grudging doubt and negation in her eyes--the eyes that verify how loosely the clothes hang on a frame that betrays the fact more plainly than a less largely built one would have done. How easily, how reasonably, how nothing more than humanly, they--that callous Medical Board--might have sent him back--so little more than half-cured as he is--for another fortnight, another week! Another week! yes; that he might be here to dance at her wedding!

“So this is your home! This is where you have spent your life!” Binning says, looking round at the room seen for the first and last time, and in which, in fancy, he will have to set her beside the armchair that he divines to be Sir George’s.

He pauses, not for the moment quite equal to bear placing, even in imagination, the _jeune ménage_. Yet he will not spare himself the pain of knowing what corner of the fragrant homely room, that bears the imprint of her and her tastes and occupations, will shelter the warm domestic nearness to each other of husband and wife.

“Tell me where you all sit, that, when I am gone, I may picture you.”

“That is Uncle George’s chair,” she says, pointing to the one that the young man had rightly assigned to the house’s master; and then stops.

“And Rupert’s?”

“Rupert has no particular chair.” After a moment, “Rupert always chooses whatever seat he thinks no one else wants; that is Rupert’s theory of life--and his practice.”

The tribute seems wrung out of her; yet she makes it, and handsomely too.

He gives a little nod of acquiescence, inwardly shocked at his own want of generosity in being able to do no more, yet--inwardly also--writhing at her praise.

“And you have lived here always?”

“Yes, always; that is, ever since Uncle George picked me out of the gutter.” She gives a forced laugh, and goes on, “You know that when I was a destitute baby he saved me from the workhouse?”

“Yes, you told me.”

“Your tone says that I have repeated it _ad nauseam_. Well, I have to do it, lest--though you would hardly think such a thing possible--I may forget it. I am very near doing it sometimes.”

“I do not believe it.”

There is a grit and manliness in his voice that almost contradicts the passion in his eyes--eyes in which, for all their passion, there is room too for a wondering consternation at the metamorphosis wrought in his sweet, calm nurse and comrade.

“Shall we go out of doors?” he asks, after a moment or two of burdensome silence. “We have had so few hours out of doors together.”

She reads his thought. They will be safer--safer from themselves and from each other--out of doors. It had been her own, and she is almost sure that she had meant to act in accordance with it; yet that it should come from him causes her a dull surprise, painful through all its dulness.

“Where would you like to go?” she asks, when they stand together on the garden sward facing the familiar view, the distance clearly azure-blue to-day, but over which, as she has so often triumphantly explained to visitors, a grey mist is apt to lie while her upland is in radiant sunshine. To-day the cases are reversed. Sunshine bathes the distance; it is on her heart that the fog lies thick. “Where would you like to go?” she repeats. “To the Rectory, to bid good-bye to the children?”

It is out-Heroding Herod to suggest that their last hour shall be spent in company, and her heart stands still until his answer comes. If it is an assent, all danger will be over, and of that she ought to be glad. But it is not.

“Show me some pleasant walk where you often go.”

The motive which dictates the request is the same that had made him ask which chair she is wont to occupy in the drawing-room. He is collecting frames for the gallery of pictures of her that is to hang in his heart.

She gives a slight assenting nod, and sets off with an undecided step, turning over in her mind, with a view to choosing it, which of her familiar paths is the one that is least associated with Rupert’s companionship. It is safe, at all events, to begin with the churchyard. Every new-comer is shown the gigantic brother yews, and told how much is the eight-century girth of the largest one.

“It measures thirty-four feet in circumference,” she says, in a dull show-woman’s voice, as she has said scores of times before to politely astonished visitors.

And then they stand silent, staring at the erebus of shade above their heads, at the enormous branch which, in some former storm--now itself long ago--has shown symptoms of breaking away from the colossal trunk, and has taken such a gigantic prop to support it. From under the eternal night of the tree, day is seen to laugh over the rather neglected green mounds around--neglected as rural churchyards are discreditably often apt to be, but over which the kindly wild flowers are waving unbidden.

“If you outlive me, which is unlikely, this is where you may finally think of me,” says Lavinia, speaking at last. “It is not very imaginative of one to live and die on the same quarter of an acre, is it? The entrance to our vault is on the other side of the church.” She gives her piece of information with a sort of alacrity, in contrast to the muffled dulness of her last sentences.

“You say it as if you were telling me a piece of good news.”

“You wished to know where I generally sit and walk. I thought you might carry your interest a step further, and like to know where I am to lie.”

He turns aside, as if to examine one of the chipped truisms on a lichened headstone; but not before she has seen a glimpse, and divined the rest, of the disfigurement her cruel and unworthy appeal to his pity has worked on his still sickness-thinned and hollowed face. A bitter pang of self-condemnation adds itself to a mocking memory of one, and the most emphatic, of Féodorovna’s nursing injunctions--to be sure not to mention any subject in the least painful to her patient. Is this the way in which she is fulfilling it? He is trying his hardest to behave like an honourable gentleman; and instead of helping him, she is--because it gives herself some relief from her intolerable pain--setting the stumbling-block of her cowardly bid for compassion in his way. She half puts out her hand to touch the sleeve which still bags upon his arm; then draws it back.

“I have thought of a walk,” she says, in a better and braver voice.

Up a steep cart-track, skirting a hop-garden, where the soaring poles and lofty roof of intertwisted network tell of the faith that the now infant plants, scarcely beginning to clasp their supports, will presently engreen the whole land; then down one of its naked aisles; across two cheerful meadows, where strong lambs are capering among the buttercups; to a gate that gives entrance to a brake, in whose midst an inconspicuous pool half hides itself and its water-hens. Lavinia pauses, with her hand on the top bar, and an expression of doubt in her face. The place looks more solitary than its wont. Will he think that she has betrayed him into an ambush even more dangerous than that of the house--he, between whom and herself, all along climbing upland, and through sunny pasture, the dead Bill and his living kinsmen have seemed almost visibly to walk?

“It is scarcely a wood,” she says hesitatingly. “There is not a tree of more than twenty years’ growth, and the nightingales sing so loudly here that they will save us the trouble of talking.”

His answer is to give the gate an unsuccessful push.

“It is locked.”

“That is very unusual,” she answers, for an instant harbouring and at once angrily dismissing from her mind a superstitious idea that the homely obstacle may be Balaam’s winged prohibitory angel in a different dress. “It is almost always open; but nothing is easier than to climb it.”

He swings himself obediently over, and stands on the other side to give her his aid. But she motions him away, crying almost repellantly--

“Go on! go on! I do not need any help.”

If he receives her into his arms, even in the mechanical and prosaic civility of assisting her to bestride a five-barred gate, she knows that were ten thousand dead Bills and living Ruperts to interpose their pale prohibitions, the inevitable must happen.

Lavinia has spoken accurately. The pleasant spot in which their agility has landed her and her companion is not a wood. It is merely one of those low green tangles of hazel and maybush, sapling chestnut, and gnarly willow, whose woof is nowhere too thick to let in a thrifty shower of temperate sunbeams; and through the woof of whose carpet the blue hyacinth dye runs dim and rich. A path not wide enough to admit of any couple save a lover-pair walking abreast, girdles the little sheet of water at quiet play with its dancing flies and leaping fish and placidly oaring moorhens. From the heart of one of those brakes, whose semi-privacy seems to provoke the nightingale to uttermost extremity of song, one is now turning his whole little brown body, dimly seen sitting on a hawthorn bough, into a shout of heavenly self-congratulation upon finding himself in such a beautiful May world, and with a demand for love too exquisitely worded to be denied.

Arrived at the pool-side, within a few yards of him, the human couple, of whom he is so much too joyful to be the little spokesman, stand quite still, in fear of scaring him; but in his happy little heart there is no room for fear, and from the look of the poor souls he knows that they are not enemies.

“I told you that he would save us the trouble of talking,” says Lavinia under her breath.

He has saved the lesser singers of his own genus the same trouble, apparently; for whether quelled or entranced, or learning those imitations which they will afterwards practise with clever inferiority, they are dumbed.

Lavinia listens at first with a sense of relief. The divine organ that lies in that little parcel of feathers is uttering all the longings, all the merging of two into one, all the fruition-nearing desires to which she may never, never give voice. To the deceit of that seeming relief succeeds an intolerable revolt. Why should she of all creation alone be silent? Why should not she for once speak out? Why, since this little island of time upon which they stand is their very own, since they have no future, since they have been ironically given this one half-hour to show them what life might have been,--why should not they be wise, and, pushing aside those dim ghosts which they themselves have quixotically interposed between the aching reality of their own bruised hearts, slake their terrible thirst for each other in one first and last draught?

The temptation to throw herself upon his breast is so strong, that to her dazed senses she almost seems to herself to have already yielded to it, though in effect she has only stood in pale maidenliness at his side; but the illusion is so vivid, and the reactionary shock of horror at herself so potent, that she walks with unsteady haste away from her companion towards the singer, whom her movement puts to flight.

“You have frightened him away!” says the young man, standing still on the path.

“Yes; I am glad.”

“_Glad!_ That is not a word that one seems to have much use for just now!”

His tone tells her that the temptation is strong upon him too, and his action, in adding two or three more yards to those she has already set between them, that in deadly struggle he is grappling with it. If she were his true love, would not she come to his aid? With a prodigious effort she clears the red mist from before her eyes, and steadies the trembling in her traitorous hands. Then, rejoining him, and beginning to resume the walk that their charmed ears had first interrupted, she says, in a tone to whose cheerfulness she tries with all the force of her will-power not to give a hysterical ring--

“After all, there is a good deal to be glad of, if one comes to think of it--your recovery, your Victoria Cross----”

“Yes,” indistinctly; but with an effort, whose suffering manliness she recognizes, to follow her lead--“yes; I am a sweep to complain!”

It nerves her to new effort. “Was not Féodorovna very much excited at your getting it?” her terror of herself driving her on into a torrent of trivial questions. “How is Féodorovna? is she yellow still?”

“No; not at all.”

“Is she quite herself again?--quite recovered?”

“She is supposed to be.”

“But you think that she is not?”

“I think she is--rather--hysterical.”

Lavinia’s feverish trickle of inquiry drops into silence. Between the lines of his brief words, and in the constraint of his tone, she reads that the method adopted by Miss Prince to show her hysteria has been to throw herself into his arms, as she had done by letter into General ----’s, and has volunteered to follow him round the globe, as she had generously done in the case of his predecessor. Well, she herself has been within an ace of a similar action during the last five minutes. She ought, therefore, to feel a sympathy for the same abandonment on the part of another. And yet, although Miss Carew knows, as well as if she had been present at the drama, that Féodorovna has remained in Binning’s arms not a moment longer than the space of time needed for him to find a chair in which to deposit her, yet a dizzying jealousy seizes her at the thought that, though only for a minute, and deeply against the will of the object of her amorous demonstration, Miss Prince has lain on that breast whose pulsing against her own Lavinia will never feel.

“_Hysterical!_” she repeats, after a pause, in a low key of suspicion. “Why was she hysterical? How did she show that she was hysterical?”

A slight flush, or so she fancies, passes over his hollow cheeks.

“Oh, I don’t know. How do people usually show it?”--with impatient evasion.

“Laughing? Crying?”

“Yes, yes; that sort of thing!” Then, with an upbraiding accent, that escapes him against his will, “Why should we talk about her, poor soul?”

“Why not?” she answers. “What else is there to talk about? There is nothing else.”

The words, extravagant as they are, represent to Lavinia the exact truth. _He!_ _She!_ There is nothing else in God’s universe; and before both him and her stands the prohibitory angel, the flame of whose waved sword blinds them to all creation also. She looks straight before her in dogged despair, and a caught half-sobbing breath beside her tells her with what a strangling grip the temptation is taking him by the throat. Yet this time she puts out no finger, utters no wisely trivial commonplace to help him. The mental picture of Féodorovna clinging sobbing round his neck, even though she knows with what repellant grudgingness that embrace had been met, has robbed Lavinia of all further power of fight than what lies in silence. He does not leave her even that.

“We shall hear of each other indirectly, I suppose?” he says by-and-by, in a voice not the clearer for the lump in his throat, which is clearly past his power to swallow.

Her cup of misery runs over. “No doubt,” she answers with a shuddering distinctness. “If you ask Féodorovna, she will write you a long account of my wedding! She is a great letter-writer!”

As if the words possessed some paralyzing spell over their feet, both of them stop dead short; and, turning round, stare full in each other’s faces, conversation shrivelling up its thin fabric in that fiery moment; and then--the inevitable happens. The gasping lips draw nearer, nearer, nearer; the idly hanging arms stretch themselves out, enfold, embrace, crush; and, with no apparent initiation on either side, Fate hurls them upon one another’s forbidden breasts. Their kisses are frantic with the haste of six wasted weeks, and have their edge given by the knowledge that, for these sad two, there is only one little dreg at the bottom of the wine-cup of life and love, and that if they do not make haste to drain it, it will be poured out on the desert ground that is soaked with the lost vintages meant to appease the thirst of parched humanity.

They have thrust away the irksome apparition that had officiously flitted between them. For such a ghost’s thin body there is no room between his heart and hers. Out of both those hearts all their former long-established, deep-rooted inhabitants are turned, driven by the flail of the one supreme scourge. In those hearts Honour had held her high court, Duty had wielded her sceptre, unselfish Family Affection been warmly nested. Now, of none of them is there a trace left in either consciousness. For neither of them does anything exist but the omnipotent primal instinct--the instinct that drove the first man and woman into each other’s throbbing arms.

It is not for long--not for more than a few moments--only for one kiss-length, that that mad, dumb, clinging oblivion endures. Then the old ejected law-givers begin to gather up their sceptres and return; boldly ejecting, in their turn, the furious rebel that had ousted them; and the two that God has not joined together stagger apart. As in the impulse of embrace neither was earlier or later than the other, so is the shock of disunion common and simultaneous. They find themselves standing apart, uncertainly staring at each other in the imperfect consciousness of an enormous joint crime. It was only a kiss--an utter, scorching, lover’s kiss, it is true--yet still only a kiss that has so seared their re-awakening consciences; but had their disloyalty gone to the extremest pitch of unfaithfulness, it could hardly have branded them with a deeper sense of guilt. Her white lips frame three scarcely audible words, which he yet hears--“This--day--week!”--and he whispers, in horrified ejaculation, “Rupert! _Bill!_”

There is a terrible silence--at least, it seems so to them--though the nightingale, scarcely scared, and having taken but a short flight to the branch of a youngling chestnut, is finishing his epithalamium with even bettered music. The reinstated judges have taken their seats, and are holding a dread assize.

“It is only I who am to blame!” says Lavinia, by-and-by, in a key a little above her former one. “_You_ did really struggle. If I had helped you honestly, you would have pulled through; but I did not. I never really meant you to hold out! I see now that I meant it all along to happen! I meant you to kiss me! I thought--God forgive me!--that I should be able to bear my life better afterwards if you did!”

“If I had been honest,” he says hoarsely, “shouldn’t I have accepted your offer of taking me to the Rectory? You know you _did_ offer. If I had meant honestly, should I have come _here_?” casting a glance of despairing reproach round at the blue and green and silver accessories to his fall--smiling water and curtsying sedge and sky-coloured blue-bells.

“But _I_ brought you here!” cries the other culprit, in a heart-rending eagerness, of which he will not suffer her to have the monopoly--to assume all the weight of their “most mutual” lapse.

“It was a pity that Bill did not leave the Boers to finish me!”

Then there is silence again. This time it is the man who breaks it, though his tone is so low as to constitute scarcely an infringement of the crushing guilty stillness.

“And you will still marry him this day week?”

At that she veils her face with both hands. “What am I?” she says indistinctly, through the relief of their shield. “What have I become? I have lived for twenty-three years, and I never suspected that there was a bad woman inside me!”

“And for twenty-eight years I have imagined that I was a gentleman!”