Chapter XXI

The day that was to have been that of Rupert Campion and Lavinia Carew’s wedding has come.

“I am always afraid of some ill luck when the bride does not change her initials,” Miss Brine has said in the Rectory school-room, in answer to the children’s lamenting comment upon the fact.

A thoughtful silence follows the governess’s utterance, broken by Phillida, who says meditatively--

“Then if Lavy had married Captain Binning, she would have been all right.”

But the wily Brine is not to be trapped into any such admission.

“Miss Carew would undoubtedly have changed her initials in that case,” she replies cautiously.

Lavinia had hoped that her uncle would--in the general upsetting consequent upon the catastrophe, the removal of all the landmarks of ordinary life--have forgotten to note the date of a day so outwardly identical with its gloomy fellows that it would have passed unnoticed in its obscurity and disgrace; but luncheon-time undeceives her.

“This is not quite the way in which we expected to pass this day!” he says, after sending away the servants. “It is rather rough on you; but there is a French saying, I believe, that what is deferred is not therefore lost. There may be a good time coming.”

The cheerfulness valiantly forced into the old voice for her sake, in his new selflessness, must, at whatever cost to herself, be met in the same spirit, and she compels herself to repeat in French the saying he has alluded to, with what--since intention is everything--must do duty for a smile, “Ce qui est différe n’est point perdu.”

“Though it may not be to-morrow or the day after, we shall perhaps still hear Darcy exhorting you and him to increase and multiply!” continues Sir George, with a distressing attempt at pleasantry, and a painful harking back to his old theme. “In any case, it will do no harm to drink to your wedding day. Come, let me fill your glass.”

She holds it out with an unshaking hand, and commands her throat to swallow, to drink a toast, the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of the wish contained in which are alternatives equally horrible. And then they return hand-in-hand--the old man has added a new caressingness to his other tendernesses--and resume their places, one on each side of the silent, motionless form stretched between them with bound, ice-covered head, in the darkness; and Lavinia takes up again her day-long, night-long employment of repeating over and over and over again to herself the question which she is beginning to see written in red whenever she turns her eyes in the obscurity--

“_Did_ he lose his head? _Was_ it suicide? And if so, was it something he saw in her face that drove him to it?”

She is going through them in the usual sequence at about four o’clock in the afternoon of her wedding day, when she happens to be for a few moments alone with the still living rigidity beside her, when in the almost complete darkness, her eyes and ears--or have they gone mad too?--detect, or seem to detect, a slight movement in the bed. She darts noiselessly to the window, and, pulling aside a bit of the curtain, casts a glance backwards towards the bed--a glance that can hardly travel, for the weight of the hope it carries. Whatever _she_ may be, her senses are not mad; nor have they told her a lie. Rupert is feebly stirring, and his eyes are open. In a second she is at his side, and stooping over him; the word is coming--the priceless word on which her reason hangs! It is spoken so low that she has to bend very close down to catch it. It is only an almost inaudible--

“Well, dear!”

In the reeling immensity of her joy, she can but stupidly echo, almost as inaudibly, the greeting that seems to have come to her from the speechless other side. “Well, dear!” There is a long pause. Into Rupert’s eyes, as they turn slowly round, the watcher sees consciousness, recollection, gradually returning. When those long-absent inhabitants have reoccupied their seats, will he take back his greeting? While the answer to that inquiry is in suspense, the functions of life seem suspended in her. The slowly wandering eyes return to their point of departure--her face; regained knowledge is in them; but neither anger nor pain.

“I muffed it, as usual,” he says, with a ghost of his old self-ridicule, and, wearied with the exertion of speech, falls back into unconsciousness.

* * * * *

Sir George has never been what is called a “professing Christian,” which indeed is a title that seems to promise a paucity of performance; but ever since Rupert’s accident, he has daily asked Lavinia--possibly only with some dim feeling of a propitiatory sacrifice to a fetish--to read him a portion of Scripture, and on the evening of that wedding day he finds with some difficulty--for he does not know his way about very well--the chapter that tells of him who, even while being carried out to burial, was recalled to life and to the widowed arms that had thought to have for ever loosed him. He listens, leaning back comfortably in his chair with a sort of smile of triumph on his face; and on the open page Lavinia’s tears drop hot and blessed as she reads.

During the night that follows Rupert speaks again, and though it is only to ask for water, the two or three languid words keep the flame of hope alive and steady in the watchers’ hearts. On the next day he has a slightly longer interval of consciousness; on the day after that a longer one again; and on the day after that for a whole hour his eyes are open, and faint speech rises to his lips. If he were allowed, he would by-and-by even ask questions; but rigorous quiet is enjoined upon him, and since it is Lavinia with whom he makes most efforts to converse, she is banished from the room. Such exile is of comparatively little moment to her now, now that it will be possible to her to wait, and wait sanely, even for weeks and months, for the answer to that question which she feels she must yet put.

Since she last looked at them, the horse-chestnuts in the Rectory garden are quite over. They were in fullest bloom the day she pasted them going to Rumsey Brake. Was it B.C. or A.D. that she was last in Rumsey Brake? The former date seems far the more probable. The door into the churchyard opens cautiously. Lavinia is standing under the verandah, and through it appear, as they have appeared many times a day during the late crisis, the Darcy children. Almost always they have borne gifts, and to-day is no exception.

“Could not he fancy one of his own eggs?” asks Daphne, lifting the lid of a basket on her arm, and displaying the creamy ovals of three beautiful specimens of the product of the clerical poultry-yard.

“I am sure that he will in a day or two; but why his _own_?”

“We have re-christened Gatacre, and called him Rupert,” explains Daphne. “He is always the one who begins laying first.”

“If we had known that Rupert was a hero, we should have christened a hen after him long ago,” says Phillida, coming to her sister’s aid. “But one can’t always tell by people’s _looks_, can one? I think that heroes ought to have some mark to know them by; but Miss Brine says it would be invidious.”

“There could be no mistake about beloved Captain Binning!” says Daphne, with the delightful liberty to express its preference of sweet and wholesome childhood. “One saw at a glance what _he_ was.”

“The _Nubia_ has got to Las Palmas; it was in the paper this morning,” says Phillida. “But of course you saw it.”

Until the mention of Binning’s name, Lavinia had been enjoying the company of her young friends; now the one desire concerning them that occupies her mind is, that they should go.

“You must remember that for the last ten days I have seen and heard nothing. I am as behindhand in my information as a convict,” she answers, laughing uneasily.

The days pass, each one with a trifling gain to distinguish it--perhaps only a curtain allowed to be a little more drawn back; an atom more colour in the pale lips; a fuller sound in the thready voice. Every day some small stretched privilege is accorded, each dealt out with a frugal hand, that feels its way tentatively, lest the bruised brain should avenge itself for any temerity in hurrying it to be well. Whether thanks to these precautions or to a natural wiriness, Rupert is apparently returning to life and vigour, without a throw-back, and with an even steadiness that--considering the nature of the accident that has laid him low--seems nothing short of miraculous.

“Humanly speaking, we are out of the wood,” the doctor says.

It is needless to state that he is an old doctor. A young one would have scorned the possibility of there being any other way. Since he is “humanly speaking, out of the wood,” Rupert is allowed to receive one visitor a day for half an hour at a time; and since Sir George and Lavinia do not count, it is a party of three that gathers round his bed, on the occasion of Mrs. Darcy’s being for the first time admitted. In the midst of the gentle heartiness of her greeting to the explorer so lately returned from the dim limits of life, the rector’s wife catches herself wondering whether Lavinia is recalling the last time on which they had met by a sick man’s bed; or whether the preceding weeks have wiped it off her memory, as they have wiped the youth off her face.

“Tell the rector we shall require his services sooner than he thinks,” Sir George says, his face, scored with time and sorrow, beaming at Susan from the other side of the bed. “If only this lazy chap will hurry up. I believe he enjoys lying here and being pampered.”

“I am sure he does,” Rupert answers, with a white smile.

“We are thinking of August or September at latest,” continues the old man, looking round half suspiciously at the three faces about him, as if defying contradiction of his optimism.

Rupert has never contradicted his father. He does not now.

“If we make it September, we shall have the hop-pickers to grace it,” he answers, with another little smile.

“Can you never look at life except from the ridiculous point of view?” cries his father, in quite his old manner. Then, riddled with remorse, he falls to scolding Lavinia for having--as she has not, nor is ever likely to do--forgotten the moment for administering some potion or extract.

The girl smilingly rebuts the accusation, appealing quietly to the clock to defend her; but the curtain at the bed-head--it is an old-fashioned tester--which her hand is desperately clutching, could tell a less placid tale. She does not quite hear what next passes, and is aroused only by the sound of Sir George’s voice uttering a strident fiat.

“Time’s up!” he cries, with his watch in his hand, in slight to the clock which has proved him wrong; “and we do not allow a minute’s law.”

He marshals Mrs. Darcy relentlessly out of the room as he speaks, and the cousins are left _tête-à-tête_. Rupert’s fingers play a meditative tune on the bedclothes; and Lavinia, watching him, and vaguely trying to make out what is the air which they are intending to convey, is surprised by a criminal thought of what a much less virile hand it is than that which she had seen lying in the gauntness of its departed strength on the other man’s coverlet. The air continues, set to a slight sigh.

“It is odd to hear him beginning to harp on the old string,” says the man’s weak voice.

Lavinia gives a slight shiver. Is the theme to be taken up again, just where the striking of Rivers Sutton Church clock had broken it off five weeks ago?

“I do not think you ought to talk of anything agitating yet.”

“But it does not agitate me. A knock on the head is not supposed to be a sedative, but in my case it seems to have been one.”

The voice and look are as calm as the words, but he has stopped his drumming on the sheet; and she waits in silent apprehension, praying that the subject may drop, since she knows that the time is not yet ripe for her to put her one question. Rupert, however, as is soon clear, has no intention of dropping the subject.

“Poor old gentleman! He is not quite up to date, is he?”

Lavinia is trembling all over. Has not the moment now come for her to fulfil the vow so solemnly taken, so intertwined with her frantic prayers for his restoration as to be inseparable from them?--the vow to cleave to him through life and death and eternity, without one backward glance, if he be but given back to her extremity of asking? And now that the Invisible Awfulness, whom she had wearied with her insistence, has accomplished His part of the bargain, how dare she tarry with hers? If she does, may not He take back His boon, and leave her to endure an existence made unendurable by a for-ever unanswered question?

“If he is not up to date, neither am I,” she replies.

Rupert’s eyebrows go up in the old familiar way. “Is that a riddle, dear?”

“No,” she answers, purpose and voice strengthening as she proceeds, “it is not a riddle; it is good plain truth. If you mean that your father is not ‘up to date’ because he still believes that we are engaged to be married, _I_ am in the same boat, for _I_ still believe it.”

Perhaps from the feebleness of his body, perhaps from an inability to frame an answer that can nicely hit a case so difficult, the young man is silent; but there is no hostility, nor even much melancholy, in the glance that first rests on and then delicately averts itself in compassion from her convulsed face.

“I have been disloyal to you,” she goes on, fighting down her distress lest it should gag her before she has time to get her full confession out. “I offer again to tell you to what extent----”

He stops her with a prohibitive movement, full of dignity, of his pale hand.

“No,” he says; “I have no wish to know the tale of kisses. Many or few, we will take them for granted.”

Her head sinks on her breast in an agony of shame.

“Many or few, they are past and done with,” she cries out. “And now I _beg_ you to forgive me! on my knees I beg you to forgive me!” As she speaks, she suits the action to the word, and drops on her knees beside the bed.

He looks at her, disturbed at the humiliation expressed by her whole being, yet with an underlying calm that dominates her.

“The only thing that I can’t forgive you is your present attitude,” he answers; and, as he speaks, there is just enough of gentle disgust in his voice to bring back before her, in prosaic strength, his æsthetic detestation of all scenes, rows, uglinesses.

“I _must_ keep it till you answer me,” she returns, chilled, yet persistent. “Will you forgive me? and will you prove it by marrying me?--by marrying me as soon as you get well? I will stay here until my knees grow to the carpet, if you do not say ‘Yes.’”

He lies silent for a moment or two, considering her with a sort of high, detached pity.

“I have no alternative,” he answers, with a grave smile. “Since you wish it, I will marry you--when I get well; and now, would you oblige me by standing up?”