Chapter XVII

“Even thus two friends condemned
Embrace and kiss and take a thousand leaves,
Loather a hundred times to part than die;
Yet now farewell, and farewell Life with thee.”

They look at each other in a sort of terror, with a renewal and immense increase of that fear of their own and each others’ possibilities of frailty, which, looked back upon now, is seen to have been so inadequately weak and so abundantly justified. Since there is no longer any barrier of innocence between them, what is there to hinder them from a repetition--a hundred repetitions--of that tasted, and therefore now senselessly abstained-from, ecstasy? What more of guilt can there be in ten or twenty score kisses than in that one which they have drunkenly given and taken? They see the sophistry dawning in one another’s hungry eyes; and once again their rebel arms half reach out reciprocally across a dwindled interval; but this time, to balance her former misleading of him, salvation--if that bitter abstinence can be called so--comes from her that at first was weakest. She tears her eyes away from him, and snatches a look round, as in preparation for flight.

“We must not stay here any longer!” she says with an accent of ungovernable fear; and he as wildly acquiesces.

“No,” he says; “you are right. I do not know what has come to me; but you are right not to trust me!”

“It is I, _I_, _I_!” she repeats in distraught self-accusation. “You do not understand what a monster I am! I am to marry Rupert _next week_! I have been engaged to him all my life! I am all they possess in the world! Since I was a week old my uncle has overwhelmed me with his generous love; every one has said that I was more to him than even the boys. Now the one hope that is left for him lies----”

Her rapid flow of self-accusation breaks off abruptly, stemmed by the awful obstacle placed by memory in its torrent course; and her face turns ghastly under his miserable eyes, as once more for the thousandth time, but with immeasurably deepened repulsion, she realizes the nature of the hope which is her uncle’s one remaining tie to life, and by whom to be fulfilled. It is by bearing children to Rupert that her intolerably heavy debt to them both is to be paid. For one insane moment her look flies to the pool. It must be under the little circles that the dancing flies are making on its surface that she can best cut the knot that is so far past untying. The broken voice of her fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer calls her back.

“And _I_! Do you forget that it was through me they lost poor Bill?” Possibly it is a relief to each to pile the chief weight of their common guilt on his and her own head respectively, in unconscious contrast to the shabby recriminations of our first parents; but of even this little alleviation they are soon robbed, all other consciousness merged in the killing sense of instant and eternal parting.

“You had better stay here for a few minutes--till I am well away,” says Lavinia, speaking very fast, but not incoherently. After a little gasping pause, with a fresh rush of utter horror and woe, “Must I tell Rupert?” Then, giving herself that answer of which her lover is quite incapable, “No! I must not! if I did, it would be in the hope--the certainty that he would cast me off. No, no; I must not--I must not tell him, whatever happens: it would never do to tell him.” She rambles on, half to herself, repeating the phrases, as of one whose hold on her own intelligence is slipping away; then recovering it with a sudden snatch, she says brusquely, “Well! it is done, and it can’t be undone, and there is an end of it. Good-bye! I--I would say ‘God bless you’ if I had any business to.”

Without giving him time for any answering benediction--as, indeed, why should he bless her?--she breaks into a stumbling run, which carries her blindly on, till at the curve which will finally hide him from her sight, the curve whose distance from him guarantees her safety, the dully raging passion within her arrests her feet, and turns her head to see once more in crowning farewell torment the figure, in loosely hanging clothes, of him whom she has ironically helped back to life only to make him taste the sharpness of death.

* * * * *

“But I told you to say that I was not at home to any one?”

“I did say so, ’m.”

“It is not eleven o’clock yet?”

“No, ’m; it wants five minutes of eleven.”

“I am too busy: I have too much to do. It is impossible that I should see any one this morning.”

“So I told Miss Prince, ’m; but she said she was sure that you would see her.”

“Miss Prince always says that.”

“Yes, ’m.”

There is sympathy in the assent of the elderly unsmart butler, who has reached the third stage in the usual progress of valuable servants to their goal--that progress marked by the successive milestones of “servant,” “treasure,” “tyrant,” “pensioner;” for Féodorovna is not popular with his class.

“Will you go back and tell Miss Prince that I am very sorry, but I am afraid I must ask her to put off her call till to-morrow, as Sir George and Mr. Rupert are coming down by the 4.38 train, and I have a good many arrangements to make before they arrive?”

The old butler regards her with a respectful pity for the weakness of reasoning power that can imagine the visitor in question to be kept at bay by the means proposed.

“Yes, ’m; but I do not think it will be any use, for Miss Prince said she would like to take a turn in the garden until you were disengaged. And I beg your pardon, ’m--your eyes are better than mine--isn’t that Miss Prince opening the iron gate?”

Of course it _is_ Miss Prince--Miss Prince come to surprise Lavinia in her utter dishevelment of soul, though the habit of a lifetime keeps her unnerved body in its simple raiment neat and dainty--come to verify the staring facts that sleep has mocked her; that hope has bid her an eternal good-bye; that her despair is beyond the depth that any leaded line can plumb; that she is wretched and guilty beyond the sin-and-sorrow compass of any woful malefactor since the world began; come to spy and comment, before she has begun to make up spirit and flesh for that ghastly play-acting which is to last her life. These are the thoughts--if such mental _orts_ and fragments can be called so--that knock against each other in a vertigo of fear in Miss Carew’s brain, as her visitor, with a graceful flitting gait that has yet sufficiently proved the determination beneath it, floats up the kitchen-garden walk, that had yesterday witnessed poor Mrs. Darcy’s discomfiture. Féodorovona is dressed in a delicate Court mourning, and a certain elevation of expression tells Lavinia that she has come to proclaim some action on her own part that to most persons it would appear more judicious to conceal.

“Gathering flowers?” she says, with a chastened smile, and with no attempted apology for overriding her listener’s efforts to elude her. “If I had only thought of it, I would have brought you any number from our Houses.” There is a touch of the comfortable maternal brag in the words, but it appears only to vanish as she adds with a quiet sigh, “As you may imagine, I had other things to think of!”

“Had you?”

Lavinia has scarcely interrupted her flower-cutting, since it enables her to present only a profile to her visitor’s observation, and the reflection is passing through her mind with a foggy comfort that, since she has not shed one tear, there can be no swollen eyelids to give her away, and that, even if there were, Féodorovna’s panoply of perfect egotism would protect her from the sight of them.

“_Had_ I?” repeats Miss Prince, the suavity of her high sorrow touched by a ruffle of indignation. “Who can know that better than you?”

The shape of the question gives Lavinia an inward convulsion of new terror. Is it possible that she can have heard, or learnt, or divined?

“Do you mean that Captain Binning is gone?” she asks, bending over a long-stalked bronze tulip, which she snips off nearer the bulb than she would have done in a more rational moment.

“Yes; he is gone!” After a moment of reverent ruminating, “It went off quite quietly.”

“Did it?”

“Our real farewell was yesterday. We had a very important interview yesterday morning. I asked for it.”

“Did you?”

“As you know, I have never been tied by the conventions. I have always overridden them.”

“Yes.”

“In my case such unusual action is a necessary postulate of happiness. _You_ are in the enviable position of knowing that you can never be loved for anything but yourself; that no man can be accused of mercenariness in approaching you, but in _my_ case there is always the danger that the millions with which I am credited should keep away from me any man of particularly delicate feeling and high honour.”

It seems incredible to Lavinia that at such a moment she herself should be able to entertain so sordid a speculation; yet there is no doubt that the wonder flashes through her mind as to whether the profits of the Dropless Candle have really amounted to the figure so superbly indicated by the daughter and goddaughter of that great invention?

“Such being the case,” continues Miss Prince, in a tone of modest pride at the about-to-be-related exploit, “there was only one course open to me, and as it was perfectly consonant with my views of life and ethics, I took it without reluctance. I offered myself to him.”

“As you did to General ---- three months ago?”

The recalled action--recalled by the very white lips of the heroine’s one hearer--would put most people out of countenance, and even Miss Prince’s once more admirably white surface shows a pink stain.

“You speak as if you were convicting me of inconsistency--of infidelity to my ideal,” she says, with a little haste of wronged modesty. “And superficially it may appear to be so; but it is only in appearance; as you know it has always been my creed that whenever and wherever I met what I conceived to be the highest and noblest qualities of humanity embodied in one man, I ought to offer myself unreservedly to him. If I have failed, it is a failure more glorious than most successes.”

Lavinia has stopped her flower-cutting, and forgotten her misgivings as to the tell-tale tragedy of her own face; she looks sullenly and with what she knows to be a baseless rage of jealousy at her, the manner and accompaniments of whose declaration of love she is in dull torment trying to reconstruct, while memory adds its sting by recalling to her the high, cool apartness of virginal indignation which had been her own attitude of mind towards Féodorovna’s former achievement.

“Circumstances were against me,” pursues Féodorovna, presently, looking away in a sort of dreamy protest towards the horizon. “That unlucky illness! If I had had _your_ opportunities, the opportunities which were wasted on you, he might have decided differently.”

It is lucky that Miss Prince is still upbraiding the skyline; for Lavinia gives a sudden wince at the allusion to that safely preoccupied heart of her own which has rendered her, as a matter of course, danger-proof. To defend herself against that passionate repudiation of her own immunity, which seems fighting its mad way to her lips, she frames a needless question.

“He refused you?”

Féodorovna bends the chastened elegance of her black-and-white toque in dignified acquiescence.

“Yes.”

A stinging curiosity goads the other on to a second question--

“And you--how did you take it?”

“I told him how greatly I admired his disinterestedness,” replies Miss Prince, with perfectly regained equanimity, adding, with a touch of the hereditarily commercial spirit, shrewd even in adversity. “It would, of course, have been very advantageous for him from a material point of view.”

“And--and that was all? It ended there?”

To only the sharpened eye of jealous suspicion would the tiny hesitation that precedes the answer to this question be perceptible.

“Ye--es, it ended there.”

Past the power of even Féodorovna is it to confess to the precise method in which she had closed the interview; and Lavinia knows that she will never learn at what stage of the indubitably offered and as indubitably refused embrace--whether at that of mere intention or ripe accomplishment it had been arrested by its object. Féodorovna had given her last response without looking her questioner quite in the face, and her eye now rests on the church tower and the blossoming horse-chestnuts with a real, if exasperating, sadness in it.

“I told him if ever he reconsidered his decision, that whatever might be the lapse of time, whatever else changed, _I_ should not.”

The unassuming fidelity that voice and words claim is clearly felt by their possessor to be so beautiful that Lavinia asks herself, in a topsy-turvy whirl of confused wretchedness, whether it is not really so? but the thought--if it deserves such a name--is chased a few moments later, as with a whip of small cords, out of her soul by a far more smarting suggestion.

“Well, good-bye. I am going away this afternoon to a quiet little fishing village in Suffolk, to be quite alone with myself; so perhaps I shall not see you again till the wedding. But, after all, that is only six days off!”