Chapter XVIII

Only six days off! And the return of her “men” is only five hours off! Between these two dates how can any one be expected to keep their sanity? There would have been a better chance for her if Féodorovna had not come to stir the furnace of her misery into whitest heat, with the elegant drawing-room poker of her fatuous confession. Among preoccupations of such incomparably deeper gravity, it adds one more pang to Lavinia’s horror of herself to find that the wonder whether or how nearly Miss Prince accomplished that embrace which Lavinia looks upon as a dastardly theft upon herself, keeps a foremost place in her mind. Yet meanwhile she goes machine-like through her preparations, attending with nice accuracy to every detail that forecasting affection could plan and execute for the comfort of a dear home-coming invalid. She even carries out a little surprise--devised a while, how miraculously little a while ago!--to lighten her uncle’s sombre spirit, always specially inclined to fault-finding and depression after any small absence. And when it is finished, she regards it with a feeling of being a very Judas, inwardly classing it with his kiss, and with Jael’s draught of milk.

The five hours have dwindled to four, to three, to two, to one. The time-measure has changed to that of minutes, and of even them how few are left! For the solitary “once” of its shambling existence, the 4.38 must have been punctual, and the young horse must have flown! With this last reflection mixes itself another little one, odious in its spitefulness, that perhaps Rupert is less nervous as to that animal’s shying properties when they are hidden from him by his being in the brougham, or that at all events, his superior fear of his father will hinder him from betraying alarm. Her latest thought of him before meeting is an uncharitable one; and now they are here! With her Judas-face dressed in false smiles--this is the position as inwardly classified by herself--she meets them on the doorstep. It is her betraying arm that Sir George chooses to lean upon, as he gets, with the feeble deliberation of ill-shaken-off sickness, out of the carriage.

“No, no; you may be off!” he says, ungratefully pushing away his son’s gently offered aid. “You never were anything but a makeshift!”

Sir George’s pleasantries have always had a disagreeable flavour, and to be known as pleasantries only by experts; but that this is meant for one neither of the young people, intimately acquainted with the hall-mark, and not for a moment to be taken in by imitations, however close, fails to recognize; so they all smile. It is on Lavinia’s left arm that her uncle is leaning--a circumstance to which is due a comment on his part which she could well have spared.

“Why, your heart is knocking like a hammer! I did not know that a mosquito had a heart.”

The touched intonation with which he utters the phrase shows her that he attributes her palpitation entirely to the joyful emotion caused by his return, and how absolutely unsuspicious he is of any other possible cause for it; and her impersonation of Judas appears to herself more lifelike than ever, as she answers with a desperate playfulness--

“You have learnt a new fact in natural history.”

Rupert does not immediately follow the slow little procession to the study, whither Sir George, with a nostalgia for his own chair, chooses to be led, occupied, doubtless, with directions to the servants; and there is time for the “surprise” to be detected and admired, and for several anthems of thanksgiving, not worded exactly as the rector would have done them in church, on the part of Sir George on having at last escaped from the d----d pot-house before his son rejoins them. As he enters the room, Rupert’s father is in the act of asking how the newly papered “nurseries” look; and, on Lavinia’s faltering avowal that she has not seen them since they were finished, starts irritably up, announcing his intention of immediately visiting them, to see whether the papers are well hung, or exhibit seams between the strips, as had been the case with Hodges’ work in the offices last year.

It is in vain that both Rupert and Lavinia entreat him to defer his survey till after tea. With a reproachful observation, that “if you want a thing done you must do it yourself,” he sets off, and the young man and girl follow, offering him attentions which he ignores. The sight of well-executed work restores him to good humour, and he keeps his young people dancing attendance on him for some time, to admire at their leisure, and with what countenances they may, the airy spaces where their problematical offspring are to sport. Fear of betraying the loathing that the idea of her own possible motherhood brings with it, perhaps partially dulls Lavinia’s sense of that repulsion. Tea-time brings another ordeal with it.

“I cannot say that you do much credit to the Princes’ cuisine,” says Sir George, taking stock of his niece more closely than he has yet done, having, in fact, ordered her to move the skilfully interposed tea-kettle, or her own chair, so as to enable him to do so. “You must have lost quite a stone in weight since I left home.”

“Don’t you know, sir, that there is nothing that the young woman of to-day dreads so much as putting on an ounce of superfluous flesh?” asks Rupert.

Lavinia is thankful to him for his timely interposition; yet it frightens her. Why should he come to her help? Can he have any intuition or knowledge of her sore need of it? and by what creepy coincidence has he used the exact phrase employed by Binning yesterday in connection with himself: “An ounce of superfluous flesh”? There is in reality nothing to excite wonder in the employment of so common a turn of expression; but to a soul so guilty the most ordinary sentence seems heavy with ominous significance, and she hurries out her own less tactful repartee with needless treading on the heels of her cousin’s.

“And how many stone have _you_ lost?”

Sir George looks bored. “Thank you, my dear; but we need not bandy civilities on the subject of our infirmities.” Then with a quick and determined return to amiability, “Come, let us hear all about poor Binning? He went yesterday?”

“No; this morning.”

“Poor chap! I should like to have shaken his hand again before he went. I tried to persuade this slug of a fellow to run down and see the last of him, but he pretended that he was afraid to leave me. I must tell you that his filial piety has become a most appalling nuisance, and that he is like nothing in the world but an old hen with one duckling.”

“I proudly own to the ‘old hen,’ but I fail to see the duckling,” replies Rupert, with a pleasant slight smile.

Formerly he would have been far too nervous to bandy jokes with his father, and they would have been stamped upon if he had; but the answering smile on the elder man’s grim sick face tells Lavinia upon how much happier terms son and father now are than in any previous period of their lives. She is the ribbon that ties their hearts together! _She!_

“Was he pretty fit? Did he set off in good spirits?” asks Sir George, holding on as firmly to the Binning theme as if he knew that he was passionately desired to loose it.

“Féodorovna did not say.”

“Féodorovna!” repeats he, with that snort of disgust with which he has never failed to salute Miss Prince’s name ever since the day of her storming his study.

“Yes; she came here this morning.”

“Whom did she come to console _this_ time?” asks he, jeeringly. “_You?_ Well,” in a changed and softened key, “I dare say she did not make such a bad shot! I dare say you had grown quite fond of the poor chap from having nursed him; one _does_ get fond of one’s nurse, with the best intentions in the world to the contrary,” with a grudgingly affectionate glance at Rupert.

His son smiles again. (How enviable! how miraculous to have such a cheerful light heart!)

“You are in a fine flow of conversation!” he says, laying his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “But you know as well as I do that you will have to pay dearly for it, if you do not take your usual rest before dinner. Your room is ready, and _I_ am ready; and _you_ are ready, aren’t you?”

There is authority mixed with the pleasant persuasiveness of the tone, and with a docility which would have filled Lavinia with amazement in any other circumstances, Sir George hoists himself out of his chair, and saying, with an appealing lift of his shaggy eyebrows, “See how I am bullied!” walks slowly but contentedly off on his son’s arm.

Once again Rupert has come to Lavinia’s rescue. Once again, left behind, she feels the sense of relief coupled with a great fear. How has he known the exact moment at which the catechism was becoming unbearable to her? the exact moment at which to step in? She has a quarter of an hour in which to supply answers “to taste,” in cookery-book phrase, to this question, and at the end of that time she has the opportunity of putting it, if she feels so disposed, to the person to whom it refers; for he rejoins her.

“I have left him; he will have a better chance of getting to sleep if he is alone. He is so excited that he will go on talking if he has any one to listen to him. I could not stop him.”

“And yet you seem to have wonderful power over him! I never saw such a change!”

She has got behind a cane chair, and is tilting it up, with her hands clutching the gilt top. She ought not to let him see the sickly apprehension in her eyes; and yet if she does not, if she allows him to approach her, if he kisses her, and expects her to kiss him back, by what hair’s breadth will she be separated from the outcasts in the street? There is gross exaggeration in the idea, which is weighted by the offended purity of all her former life; yet there is truth too. But Rupert’s steps pause far short of her barrier, and there is neither a claiming of undoubted rights, neither enterprise nor even entreaty in his eyes.

“Improvement, should you say?” he asks, with cool interest; adding, “How do you think he looks--better or worse than you expected?”

“Better--worse!” she stammers, contradicting herself, quite put off her balance by the fraternal ease and matter-of-factness of his tone. It seems like a return to the blessed brotherly period, before they had been driven into exchanging the airy chains of their phantom engagement for the gyves and handcuffs of a real one. After all, he had been driven into it as much as she! There is balm in the thought. “I mean I cannot quite make up my mind until he has settled down; he is certainly much thinner.”

“Yes; his clothes hang a bit loose upon him.”

Lavinia starts; imperceptibly, she hopes. Has Rupert given himself the word to use no phrase that does not bring Binning in very self before her? Binning’s clothes, too, hang loose upon him. Lest her start should _not_ have been imperceptible, she covers it quickly with a remark.

“He seems in excellent spirits.”

“Yes; but we all are that, aren’t we?” He says it simply, and without any special observation of her to note its effect; and yet once again, for the third time, that nameless suspicious fear of his having found her out lays its chilly fingers upon her. “Shall we walk off some of our exuberant cheerfulness? Do you feel inclined for a stroll?”

Her last “stroll” returns upon her memory with dizzying vividness.

“Isn’t the sun rather hot still?”

“We shall not feel him in the woods, or in Rumsey Brake by the pool.”

Her tilted chair--needless defence--falls on its fore legs with a sharp noise, dropped from her trembling grasp.

“I do not think I feel woody or poolly.”

“We will go along the high-road, then, the road to Sutton Rivers. There is always a good deal of traffic along that road--nice carts and steam-rollers and things!”

A spice of the old light mockery flavours his tone, and she knows that he has read off like print the misgiving in her mind. If he has read that, how much more may he not have read too?

The road chosen drops down the hill, and runs through the village. They pass the beautiful old farm that looks like a manor-house, with its bronzing walnut trees that wear their spring favours differently from most others; past schools and open cottage doors, Rupert greeting shirt-sleeved men with the familiarity born of a lifetime of nods, and Lavinia saluting matronly women with an intimacy sprung from maternity-bags. And as she goes, the village tragedies present themselves for competition with her own. Can that girl who has “gone wrong,” and is sitting on her parents’ doorstep with her unfathered child upon her knees, feel a greater weight of remorse and shame than one kiss has crushed her under? Can the old widow whose last surviving son was carried off yesterday to the madhouse, feel a deeper, more irreparable sense of loss than hers?

“Joe Perry was taken away to the asylum yesterday,” she says, imparting her lugubrious fact, though not the comparison for which she has used it, to her companion. “He became so violent that it was unavoidable. His mother, I believe, fought like a tiger to prevent it!”

“Poor soul!”

What fitter ejaculation can he make in answer to such a tale? and yet her diseased fancy instantly brings to mind that Binning had applied the same epithet to Féodorovna! As they pass another cottage--

“Carter has gone on the drink again.”

“Has he?”

Yet a third. “Little Harry Brown has got double pneumonia; the doctor does not think he can save him! He says he has no constitution.”

“Is it to bring down that exuberant cheerfulness of ours that we were talking of, that you are telling me all these catastrophes?” asks Rupert, rebelling at last.

“It does seem rather hard to be greeted by such a list of casualties,” she answers, confused and confounded; “but you see you have been away a good while--long enough for more than our _usual_ average of disasters to happen.”

“And is that all? Does little Harry Brown end the catalogue?”

The question is a perfectly natural one, and put as naturally, yet it sets her trembling again.

“Yes, I think so.”

“If you remember any more, I would rather hear them.”

To that she seems to think no answer needed. They are beyond the village now, and on that high-road whose sociability he had vaunted to her. For the time it seems less frequented than he had promised, the workmen having gone home, and no market-day enlivening it with uncertainly driving men and gaily-hatted girls, three on a seat, in returning market-carts. Their only companion is the Spring, in that gaudiest of her moments when she is about to lose herself in Summer, daring her elder sister to vie with her sheeted hawthorn, her “golden chains,” her matchless output of leaf and blossom. And how blessedly different is each tree and shrub’s idea of spring! How various their method of expressing it! Some in odorous flower-bunches, some in green tassels, some in uniformity of colour, some in motley, their varying thoughts are diversely coloured, bronze and yellow, and dazzling gold-green.

To pause a while seems almost a necessity, yet Lavinia shivers; for Rupert has stopped and faced her, and there is no one in sight. Has he lured her hither with an assurance of publicity, only to make his belated claim upon her? As before, he reads her fear, and answers it.

“No!” he says, stepping back a couple of feet, yet still holding her at the disadvantage of commanding that full-face view which is so much less manageable a thing for the purpose of concealment than a profile; “do not be afraid: there is not the least cause for alarm! I only wanted to ask you if you are _quite_ sure that little Johnny Brown’s double pneumonia closes our casualty list?”

Then she knows that he knows.