Chapter II

In February light still reigns, though with uncertain sceptre, up to six o’clock in the evening, and the fact that the cold, aquamarine tinge is dying out of the west when she turns her back upon the Chestnuts, tells Miss Carew how much beyond its first scope her call has been prolonged. In the first place, she has been compelled, after all, to read General ----’s letter, and give her grudging meed of praise to its tact and humanity. Secondly--this has been the longest and hardest part of her task--she has had to reassure Mrs. Prince, who soon reappears, still tearful and jingling, as to the document having been undoubtedly penned by the hero himself, and not committed to a chuckling aide-de-camp or grinning secretary. Thirdly, she has been conducted into Mr. Prince’s sanctum, for the express purpose of cheering him up by light and general conversation, his hurt being much too deep and sore to suffer even the most distant approach to it.

She finds him sitting with his British-merchant bullet-head clutched in his hands, unable to be cheered even by the sight of the trophies, medals, and certificates--national and international--to the merits of his candle, which, to the sad mortification of his ladies, lavishly decorate the walls. At the sound of her entry--convoyed by his wife--he looks angrily up, and she realizes, with a warmer feeling of sympathy and fellow-feeling than he has ever before inspired, how very much he would have preferred that she had stayed away. His manner to women is always elaborate, and she sees him now struggling back into it with as much difficulty as a footman, in haste to answer a bell, fights his way into a tight livery coat. She longs to beg him to remain metaphorically in his shirt-sleeves. But no; he is already on his feet.

“I am afraid I am intrusive”--this is his almost invariable opening phrase where “the sex” is concerned--“but have you left Sir George and Mr. Campion quite well?”

“Miss Carew is come to have a little chat with you,” says his wife, with an air of cheerfulness “made in Germany.” “You know you and she always like a bit of fun together!”

She introduces and retreats hastily, with some misgiving, probably, as to the quality of the “fun” in question, and with clearly no desire to share it. Lavinia remains behind, to emerge, half an hour later, sorry and discouraged, with the consciousness of having been only partially successful in the attempt to be gamesome, unconcerned, and un-African. Yet the old man--oddly old to be Féodorovna’s father--has thanked her when she left him. She has not quite recovered the chokiness engendered by his gratitude when she is recaptured by Mrs. Prince, feverishly anxious to be again reassured as to the genuineness of the General’s autograph, and the certainty that her daughter’s passion for their Chief has not been given as a prey to the merriment of his staff. The fear is so preposterous that Lavinia would have had difficulty in reasoning it down with any show of patience, if pity had not come strongly to her aid--pity and a lifelong apprenticeship to answering the not-worth-answering. It takes her three quarters of an hour of solid argument, lucid exegesis, and persuasive rhetoric to convince Mrs. Prince that the commander of an Army Corps on active service has other employment for his time than the publishing to his subordinates the hysterical folly of a love-sick girl; and, moreover, that such a course would scarcely be in consonance with the creed and normal habits of an officer and a gentleman. It takes three quarters of an hour to convince Mrs. Prince, and, at the end, she is not convinced. With a slight sigh of waning endurance, Miss Carew realizes her lost labour, and turns back on another spoor.

“She has promised--indeed, there was no need to exact a promise--she volunteered it, that she is not going to take any further steps--to do anything more!”

“_Do anything more!_” echoes the mother, with an accent of the acutest scorn of this fresh attempt at solace. “Why, what more would you have her do? What more could she do? Unless----”

She breaks off abruptly, and both know that she has been on the brink of an utterance more suited, in its crude vernacular, to her former than to her present estate. Both feel relieved that it has remained in the domain of the implied; and, with a tactful fear lest the crestfallen fellow-creature before her may be betrayed into some outburst of which she may later repent on her return from the regions of primæval emotions to the upholstered “reception-rooms” of gentility, Miss Carew hurries over her adieux. Yet that “hurry” is scarcely the word to be applied to her visit taken as a whole is brought home to her by the look of beast-and-bird bedtime spread over the evening world as she gets out into it.

“Are you ready?” she asks, addressing the back of a man-person whom the first turn in the Park Road reveals kicking pebbles ahead of her in obvious waiting.

“_Am I ready?_” rejoins he, wheeling round, with good-tempered upbraiding. “You told me to be here at 5.30. It is now 7.15; and you ask, _Am I ready?_”

Lavinia wisely attempts no defence. “Well, _are you_?” she asks, smiling, but not coquettishly.

Of what use is it to be coquettish to a person in the same house, with whom you have always lived, and your engagement to be married to whom has had all the gilt taken off its gingerbread by the fact that you cannot remember the time when you were not engaged to him, and who is, to boot, your first cousin?

They walk on in silence for a few moments, she expecting and a little dreading to be questioned, and be confident that she will volunteer an explanation if he does not ask for one. But she refrains.

“Well, were they as good as usual? Have you no conversational plums to reward me with?”

Lavinia winces. Is this a moment to remind her of how often she has served up the pretensions and vulgarities of the family whom she has just quitted on such affecting terms for the joint amusement of herself and her _fiancé_?

“Don’t!” she answers hurriedly. “You do not know how you jar!”

He raises his eyebrows. “I know how cold I am,” he rejoins, still with perfect temper, “and I shall be very glad to know why I _jar_, if you will only tell me.”

“That is just what I can’t,” says she, wrinkling her forehead; “but you may take my word for it that you do. You ring dreadfully out of tune.”

“In point of fact, one of your not uncommon waves of hatred for me is going over you,” replies he, resignedly. “I know that they are never to be accounted for.”

“No; I do not feel any special hatred for you to-night,” replies she, dispassionately. “But I can’t tell you what is not my secret. In point of fact, it is not really a secret at all, as Féodorovna will certainly proclaim it to you next time you meet her; but _I_ can’t tell it.”

“It _is_ a secret, and it is not a secret; and _you_ may not tell it me, though Féodorovna may! What dark sayings are these?” cries he, gaily, perfectly indifferent as to her mystery, though diverted at the pomp with which she is investing it.

But his lady-love is not to be won to any answering lightness.

“I see nothing to laugh at,” she says; and even in the rooky twilight he can perceive her frown. “I pity them from the bottom of my heart. One of the greatest misfortunes possible--yes, I really think I do not exaggerate--one of the greatest misfortunes possible has fallen upon them.”

“Has the Candle begun to drop after all these years?” asks he, still incorrigibly flippant.

She quickens her pace, as if to get away from him.

“I have always known that there was something lacking in you.”

“I have always known that there were a great many things lacking in me,” interrupts he, mending his pace too.

“Even if I had not promised, nothing would induce me to tell to any one so unsympathetic----”

“I do not want you to tell me! I do not care a button what has happened to them!” cries he, rudely, but half laughing.

Bested in the attempt to outstrip her companion, Miss Carew stops short.

“You would be sorry if you knew,” she throws out tantalizingly, unable to resist the temptation to go as near as possible to the line which she is resolved not to cross, and unworthily annoyed at the absence of pressure put upon her.

“I should not,” replies her lover, with quiet conviction. “If it were anything that would make them less beastly prosperous, I should be glad.”

“There was nothing ‘beastly prosperous’ about them to-day,” says she indignantly, as memory reconstructs the bitterly dripping tears of the one millionaire, and the stubby head clutched in short coarse hands of the other.

He receives the information in silence, not wishing to make her more angry than she already is, and being really quite without interest as to the topic which engages her.

Lavinia is obliged to give up the attempt to stimulate a curiosity which, after all, she has no right to gratify, and, thrusting her partisanship into her pocket, reluctantly changes the topic.

“Have you found out why your father was so much put out at luncheon?”

It is growing too dark to see his face, but she catches the instant change in his tone.

“Yes.”

“I told you that there must be some cause.”

“Because he exceeded even his usual ample measure of incivility to me, do you mean?”

There is very little bitterness in the voice or words, only a sort of regret mixed with some not quite ordinary quality of patience.

“I felt sure that he had had something to ruffle him.”

“He has always something to ruffle him. He has always _me_; but to-day, dear old chap, he had something more.”

“What?”

“Poor Bill’s things came back this morning--his watch and his cigar-case, and mother’s photograph--and with them, I think, but of course father did not show that to me, a letter from the fellow whom Bill picked up on his own horse, and brought out from the Boer fire when he himself was mortally wounded.”

There is an unresenting pain running through the whole of this narrative, but Lavinia does not notice it.

“Does the letter give any more details--say whether he suffered much?” she asks, in white eagerness. “Oh, but I forgot,” half impatiently, “you did not see it!”

“He will show it to you,” replies the young man, as if stating a perfectly natural and accountable fact.

After a pause, while they both trudge on in hushed emotion--

“Poor old fellow! if he knew how much I understood what it must be to him to see me there, who am the embodiment of everything that he despises and dislikes, eating my luncheon, well and fit, while Bill is lying in his wretched makeshift of a South African grave, he would perhaps hate me a little less than he does.”

The girl turns to him now impulsively, her fine lucid eyes shining wetly in the semi-darkness.

“And if he could but look into your heart--oh, why haven’t we windows in our breasts? how much fewer mistakes there would be if we had!--he would see how gladly, _gladly_ you would change places with Bill!”

The appeal is not answered. Campion’s head is sunk on his breast.

“You would, wouldn’t you?” she cries urgently, as if she could not bear a moment’s delay in the assent to a proposition so obvious.

There is an instant’s pause; then her companion--they have both stopped--lifts his eyes with obvious difficulty to hers.

“No,” he says, in a low but not uncertain voice, while the moon, which has just looked over a clump of neighbouring hornbeams, lights the sincerity of his quivering face, “I would _not_ rather change places with Bill. I would rather be alive here, walking with you, than lying cold and bloody under that hideous veldt. I have never had any opinion of what is conventionally called _honour_. ‘Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.’ Well, I have no wish to have died o’ Wednesday.”

For a moment a look of terror and aversion crosses Lavinia’s face; then her brow grows clear.

“It is lucky for you that I do not believe you,” she says, with a sort of laugh--“that I know your ways.”

“Do you?” he answers, half under his breath; and again they walk on.

They are outside the Park gates, have followed the road that leads past the King’s Woods, and have reached the brow of the hill, half-way down which the village lights show their yellow points, and the church steeple tells its jackdaws, now silent in bed, to the tune of “The Last Rose of Summer,” that it is seven o’clock. Upon the silvering sky the Kentish oast-houses draw their extinguisher outline.

“I have always wondered,” says Campion, slowly, as they begin to descend the steep slope side by side, “why, feeling as you do, you did not pitch upon Bill instead of me.”

“I did not pitch upon you,” replies she, quietly. “I believe that I was born engaged to you, as I was born Uncle George’s niece. It seems to me as if the one has been as little a matter of choice as the other!”

There is, if no romance, at least so rock-like a certainty in her way of stating their relationship, that the young man feels a sudden lightening of a heart that has been heavy enough.

“That, perhaps, is why we never can decide whether I asked you or you me?”

“Oh yes, we can!” retorts she, also in a gayer vein. “As soon as I could speak I suggested our marrying when we grew up. You demurred, and asked whether we might not live together without marrying? I rejoined that that would be wicked, and that Nanna said we should go to hell if we did, whereupon you reluctantly consented.”

Both laugh, and arrive at the tree-hung entrance to their modest house in better humour with each other than had at one time seemed probable. But once inside the hall-door, the little spurt of cheerfulness dies down.

“Is he in his own room?” Lavinia asks under her breath, and the answer, “He was when I came out,” uttered with equal precaution, sends her treading lightly towards a shut door, through the old-fashioned fanlight over which a light is visible. Neither she nor her cousin-lover suggests that he shall accompany her.

As she enters the idea strikes her with a half-whimsical sadness, for what different types of sorrow she has within an hour had to provide consolation. Equally different is the setting to those sorrows. In his little Spartan room, with its large knee-hole writing-table, and its sparse decorations of old coloured stage-coach prints, portraits of departed hunters and famous jockeys, Sir George Campion sits in his leather chair, reading his _Country Life_ with a resolutely everyday look. There is only one bit of driftwood to show the shipwreck in which his old heart went down two months ago; and that is the few little objects neatly arranged on the small table that carries his reading-lamp, within reach of that hand and eye, which yet would seem ostentatiously unaware of them. Lavinia’s action ignores the poor little pretence. She goes straight up to the sitting figure, and lays her hand gently but firmly on his shoulder.

“So they have come back!” she says, her frank ringing voice sympathetically lowered and chastened. “Thank God that the Boers have not got them!”

“Yes; they arrived this morning!” replies he, still with his disengaged air.

She touches the little articles with delicate reverence one after another.

“Yes; here are all our presents--not one missing: the poor rector’s electric bâton”--with a little half-sobbing laugh--“that we all made such fun of when it first came; and yet, if you remember, _he_ said, in one of his first letters, how useful it had turned out.”

The father listens, still striving to maintain the look of being disturbed by irrelevant trifles in a congenial occupation; but the paper crackling slightly betrays the trembling of the fingers that hold it.

The girl sits down on the worn arm of her uncle’s chair, while her own arm passes round his neck.

“You have had a letter too?” she says, in a voice of cautious tenderness, as one drawing near to an open gash, and adding the caress of a light kiss dropped upon his grey hair.

“Who told you that I had a letter?”

“Rupert; but he said that you had not shown it to him.”

For the moment Sir George forgets to feign. “I thought it might frighten him,” he answers, with a disagreeable smile. “There is a good deal about Mausers and dynamite, and such ugly things in it.”

She does not take up the jeer, though it makes her stingingly hot, as if she herself were its object.

“Rupert thought that perhaps you might show it to me?” she suggests.

“I have no objection to _your_ seeing it!” returns he, with significant emphasis; “that is to say, if I can find it.”

With a repetition of that poor parade of carelessness, he feigns to search in all his pockets, as of one that has mislaid something too valueless to be hoarded, and ends by bringing out from--where she had never doubted its resting--the one nearest his heart the narrative of his son’s death, penned by that dead boy’s comrade. Lavinia unfolds it, and, with head reverently bowed, begins to read. It is written in pencil, evidently by one to whom pens and stationery are non-existent, and in parts it is hard to decipher. There is absolute stillness in the room. _Country Life_ has fallen upon the carpet, but Sir George forgets to pick it up. Lavinia pauses at last; for the excellent reason that her eyes are too thick with tears to do her any service.

“Oh, _what_ a tribute!” she says, in a suffocated whisper. “You must never--_never_”--catching his hand, and raining salt drops upon it--“never again be so selfish as to grudge him such a glorious death! Oh, which of us does not envy him? which of us would not change with him?”

She breaks off suddenly, memory pouring upon the furnace of her passion the cold stream of her _fiancé’s_ cynical question, “Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.” It was only talk, only said to tease her; but why does it recur to her now, like a blasphemy hissed into a believer’s ear in a sanctuary? In a groundless terror lest her thought should be read, she dashes her handkerchief across her eyes, and resumes reading. But every sentence, unstudied, unliterary, plain and crude in its direct passage from heart to heart, blurs her voice afresh--

“What a tribute!” she repeats, trying to steady her broken voice so as to read aloud intelligibly snatches from the letter before her: “‘Never saw anything to equal his pluck, except his patience--his colonel quite broke down when he bid him good-bye--so cheerful--and making jokes even up to----” Again she breaks off, stayed by weeping.

“He was a promising lad!” says the father, in an iron voice. Then against his will the mask falls for a moment: “And this,” he cries, striking the table beside him with his clenched fist, in a sort of rage--“these,” pointing to the little relics tragic in their insignificance--“these are all that is left of him and his career! These are all that I have left to live on!”

With what but the awe and pity of her silence can Lavinia answer an outburst so heart-rending? Several minutes elapse before she dares to hesitate her small attempt at solace.

“Do we go _quite_ for nothing? You have _us_ left! We may not be much, but we are _something_!”

No sooner is it uttered than she sees, by the dull rage in his eyes and the sneer on his lips, how more than useless her effort has been.

“Yes; I have certainly Rupert of the Rhine left! Ha! ha! He has a whole skin at present, and I expect he will take precious good care that it keeps whole!”

Lavinia takes her arm away, and rises to her feet, in deeply wounded discouragement, reddening in her lover’s behalf even more deeply than she had with vicarious shame at Féodorovna’s immodesty.

“Are you angry with him for not being dead too?” she asks, standing before her uncle with locked hands and burning eyes. “Well, perhaps he will oblige you; he has never been very strong!” Then, with a revulsion of feeling, flinging herself on her knees beside the old man, “Do not be unkind to him! you know that, though they were so different, Bill liked him very much! Oh!”--bowing her nut-brown head on his knees--“oughtn’t we to love each other all the better, now that there are so few of us?”