Chapter XX: “How is he?”

“Just the same.”

“Not conscious?”

“No.”

“Never has been?”

“Not for a moment.”

It is the morning that follows that “serious and it is to be feared fatal accident on the line between Rivers Sutton and Shipston,” to whose occurrence at 7.15 p.m. on the previous evening the _Shipston Weekly Advertiser_ will give a paragraph in its next issue, and the London papers record with greater conciseness, and in smaller type.

The interlocutors are exchanging whispered questions and answers in the verandah, Mrs. Prince having risen at an unprecedented hour, and laden her carriage with a pharmacy of drugs to show her neighbourly sympathy; and Mrs. Darcy having spent the night at Campion Place, a vigil to which her appearance lends no improbability.

“I do not yet understand quite how it happened.”

“Will you mind coming a little farther from the house?”

“But I thought you said he was quite unconscious?”

“So he is; but _they_ are not.”

“To be sure! to be sure! Poor things! poor things!”

They tread out stealthily on the sward, where the morning meets them in its still wet splendour of dew and flower. The young sun has flung away the thin rosy scarves that lightly swathed him at his birth, and is magnificently wheeling up the eastern sky. In the shortening shadows the pale green leaves of the late tulips carry little globes of bright moisture upon them, and their gallant deep cups still hold some of the wine of the dawn.

“The servants tell me that they were walking along the line. How came they to be walking along the line?”

“They were late, and afraid of keeping Sir George waiting. It was the shortest way home.” The rector’s wife pauses, her dead-white face and sunken eyes turning towards the glory-promising mist, through which the trees, fields, oast-houses of the weald, dwindled by distance, are beginning to pierce. Her voice sounds like that of one reciting a lesson, which she knows will have to be infinitely repeated.

“And then?”

“They heard the train coming up behind them, and Lavinia looked round to see how near it was, and saw the child on the line.”

“Whose child was it?” asks Mrs. Prince, with an irrelevant curiosity which jars--if anything can still jar upon nerves so strung and tense--on her hearer.

“It was the pointsman, George Bates’s. The mother had run in next door to speak to a neighbour, and left it alone in the house!”

“It is a scandal that such a thing should be allowed! A child of two left alone in a house!”

Mrs. Darcy acquiesces, faintly conscious that the unescapable worst of her story is still ahead.

“And then?”

“Then they both set off running back as hard as they could to try and reach it in time.”

“Yes, yes?” rather breathlessly.

“Lavinia stumbled and fell.”

“How very unlike her!”

“But Rupert ran on.”

“Yes?”

It is hard to be pulled up so near the _dénouement_, as Mrs. Prince feels, but yet it is evident to even her not very acute perceptions that, for the moment, whip and spur are useless. Yet, after what is in reality a very short interval, the tale is taken firmly up again.

“He got up just in time, snatched the child, and threw it safely on to the grass.

“Yes, yes? Oh, _please_ go on!”

“But then--then”--will she ever be able to get through it? and this is only the first time out of hundreds that she will have to repeat it--“he seemed to lose his head; he stood for half a second right in front of the engine, and one of the buffers knocked him down, and the whole train went over him!” It is done! She has got it over; but of course there will follow a flood of questions and comments.

Mrs. Darcy has not long to wait. After the strong shudder that the dreadful narrative provokes comes a train of horrified curiosities as to detail.

“Was he--they told me not, but yet I can’t understand how it could be otherwise--was he terribly mutilated?”

Mrs. Darcy puts a thin hand up to her mouth to oblige it to cease twitching.

“Not in the least; beyond the injury to his head, from which he has been unconscious ever since, and a slight wound in the right leg, there was not a scratch upon him.”

“How miraculous!”

“The train was going quite slowly.”

“Then his life might have been saved--he might have got off scot-free, if he had not lost his head?”

“Yes; if he had not lost his head.” Oh, is not it nearly ended? how much longer will it continue?

There is a respite of a few moments; but when Mrs. Prince’s next sentence appears it is in the nature of a comment that makes her companion regret the questions that have preceded it.

“In any other case one would have said that it looked almost like _suicide_; but, of course, in his, that is absolutely out of the question.”

“Absolutely!”

“How did you hear the details?--not from Lavinia?”

“My husband went down to Rivers Sutton Station last night, after--after Rupert had been brought home, and saw the engine-driver and fireman.”

“Dear me! how shocking!” The ejaculation is not one particularly apposite to the special fact recorded; but at least it needs no answer, nor do the sincere tears that follow it, nor the struggle with a _pince-nez_, which refuses to remain riding upon a nose which is being blown. “And Sir George! Poor man, in his state of health too! I suppose he is quite crushed, stunned?”

The catechism has recommenced; but to this question, at least, the answer is easy and readily given.

“Do you know what he said to me just now, when he came out of Rupert’s room to speak to me?” Mrs. Darcy asks, her wan face lit by a strange shining in the fagged eyes. “He said, ‘No one can say that I have not had two brave sons!’”

“_No one can say that I have not had two brave sons!_” repeats Mrs. Prince, with an accent of stupefaction. “He took it that way? Well, I am afraid we all have been rather in the habit of taking poor Rupert for somewhat of a muff!”

The other turns away, writhing at having her own thought translated into the brutality of words. Who has held Rupert so cheaply as she? During the enormous hours of the so-called short summer night, how many slighting words and contemptuous thoughts have risen upon her remorseful memory? She has always, always belittled him; always sought to set him lower in the esteem of her for whose love he has served through so many unobtrusive years. Always, always, except--thank God, that there is an except--on that last day in the kitchen garden--is it possible that it was only the day before yesterday?--she had taken his part, had spoken up for him--had done him some tardy justice! To her over-wrought feelings--unbalanced by sleeplessness and shock--the thought of that one half-hour seems to be all that can make it possible to her to endure herself!

“I shall not attempt to see him--I mean Sir George,” says Mrs. Prince, sobbing with an unchecked frankness of emotion which smacks more of her original class than of the one to which she has attained. “But be sure you say everything that is kind and proper. And tell him from me that if there is anything of any sort that we can do or send, we shall be only too glad. One of the most valuable privileges of wealth is to be able to help its less fortunate friends in their need!”

She goes away still sobbing, but partially comforted by her own bit of bunkum, and the thought of the magic properties of the Dropless Candle. An out-of-place flash of what, under less dreadful circumstances, would have been amusement at the thought of Sir George’s frenzy at being patronized as one of Mrs. Prince’s less fortunate friends, darts incongruously across the rector’s wife, as she turns her steps homeward. Her household has to be arranged for; so as to do without her during the next and perhaps many succeeding days--a deprivation to which they usually so strongly object as quite to prevent it, but in which they now acquiesce with tearful eagerness.

Yet what can she do for the stricken household? Can she lift the lids of Rupert’s shut eyes, and bring consciousness, recognition, forgiveness, into them? One agonized ejaculation from Lavinia has revealed to her that the knowledge of having something to forgive had come to him, before setting off on that last walk--a knowledge that had, perhaps, helped him to “lose his head.” “To _lose his head_!” Yes; that is the phrase which she must always employ, never quitting her hold upon it during the hundreds of times that she will have to repeat the tale. As she stands listening outside the shut door, Lavinia steals out, a ghastly noiseless shadow in the morning light.

“They want more ice!” she says, looking at her friend with dead eyes that do not seem to see her.

“I will order it for you. Is there any change?”

“No, none; but”--an angry terror bringing life back into her face--“that does not mean anything bad?”

“Oh no; not necessarily.”

“They do not expect it yet?”

“Of course not, of course not. While I fetch the ice, won’t you change your dress? it would freshen you, and I would call you in a moment if there was any change.”

“No, no; he might speak. Just while you are calling me, he might say some one thing; he may be saying it now.” And she slips back into the darkness.

But the days pass, fall into the ordered routine of habit, and Rupert does not speak, does not say the one thing for which Lavinia listens day and night--the one thing whose utterance can keep her sane. It is not her fault that there is any interruption day or night to her listening; and, while forced away for necessary food, there is but one thought in her mind--the thought that he may speak, and she not be by to hear! Daily she strains her ears to listen through the ordeal of the luncheon or dinner, to whose endurance she compels herself for his father’s sake, and through the worse ordeal of relating to Sir George over and over again--since he is never tired of hearing--how it happened. Oh the torture of that repetition! and the keener torture of that explanation which on the first relation has to be given, and has more than once to be repeated, as not quite clear!

“You say that you were ahead! How did you come to be ahead?”

“I caught sight of it first; that gave me a start.”

“And you were within a hundred yards before he caught you up?”

“About that, I think.”

“And the whole distance was a quarter of a mile?”

“I should think so.”

“How was it that he did not overtake you sooner?”

“He--he had a greater distance to cover; he had run on ahead of me before we saw it.”

“How much ahead of you?”

“I can’t say.”

There is such a helpless anguish in her voice that he stops questioning her for that while; but the doubt and the explanation are sure to crop up again at the next of those dreadful meals, spent in hiding their own food, and compelling each other to swallow his or hers.

“I can’t quite understand how you kept the lead so long!”

Slightly varied, it always comes back as a question, a wonder, a reflection, and she learns to recognize with a terrible sharpness the signs of its approach. Her uncle’s own illness seems to be in abeyance, kept at arm’s length by the force of his will, and through those dreadful days of waiting his spirit maintains a strange level of exaltation.

“We put the saddle on the wrong horse when we called him Milksop!” Lavinia hears him say repeatedly, in a tone of triumph.

He is very tender in his manner towards his niece, going entirely out of his own character to entreat her to eat, and trying humbly to emulate the son he had despised in self-forgetting attentions, and he rives her heart and conscience unknowingly by the sympathy and pity for her in her tragically interrupted nuptials, which every one of his words and actions implies.