Chapter XXIV

“It was the winter wild,
While the heaven-born child,
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
Nature, in awe to him,
Had doffed her gaudy trim,
With her great Matter so to sympathies:
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the Sun her lusty paramour.”

No one can qualify by the epithet “wild” the Christmas that follows Rupert Campion’s death. It comes simpering in with a faded grey smile, swishy soft gusts, and a mock-April taste; and the Darcy family are conscious of no sting or frost-prick in cheek or finger as they stand silently round the new cross that heads Rupert’s grave, and to whose final erection the workmen gave their last touches only two hours ago. For Rupert has elected to lie in the open, having notified his wish in a small memorandum, placed where it was certain to be found; and which proves that him at least the ambushed enemy had not surprised by his spring.

Sacred to the Memory
of
WILLIAM DEVEREUX,
Elder Son of Sir GEORGE CAMPION, Bart., of Campion Place,
in the County of Kent,
Who nobly lost his life in rescuing
a brother officer from death, while serving his Queen and
Country, on the Field of Battle
in South Africa.

Also of
RUPERT LOVEL,
Younger Son of the above,
Who not less heroically died in saving
the life of a fellow-creature on a less glorious field.

“They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they
were not (long) divided.”

By the time that Susan Darcy’s eyes have reached the last line of leaded letters, they serve her but ill; yet she can see the hackneyed text well enough to feel sure that it is not of Lavinia’s choosing. In her mind’s eye she can see the lonely pair bending together over the drafted inscription; the first mute, and then hesitatingly murmured hint of disapproval on the part of Lavinia, and the determined angry overriding of her gentle objection on that of the poor old man.

“Bill would not have cared,” says Susan to herself, quaintly calling back to life the two dead young men to give a verdict on their own tombstone; “but Rupert would have hated it.”

Her musings are broken into by an objection of another sort, whispered with the accompaniment of eyes shining in distressed partisanship by her eldest daughter.

“Oh, mother, ‘not less heroically’! Surely it was not nearly so grand as carrying off Captain Binning!”

“It was not so showy,” answers Mrs. Darcy, lifting her eyes to the high summit of the cross itself, where, if she has been defeated as to the choice of a memorial text, it is clear that Lavinia’s taste has prevailed.

Once again with sure intuition the rector’s wife sees the contest that has been waged, and in which Lavinia has came off victor, between the Necropolis polished granite or alien white marble shivering under England’s weeping skies, of Sir George’s preference; and the rough stone of the country, soaring up in the fashion of the solemnly beautiful old Saxon crosses, wrought with figures and emblems of a faith yet young, of Lavinia’s predilection.

“She must have had a tussle for it!” Susan says, once again addressing herself, and adding to her inward remark the rider, “How well I know her!” A second reflection corrects the present tense, “Should I not rather say, ‘How well I _knew_ her’? Shall I know her as well when I see her to-morrow after these five months of absence? Five months to-day since they went! How little she has told me in her letters! Have our souls grown so far apart, while she has been passing through her burning fiery furnace, and I have been scolding the children, and ordering dinner, and emptying my medicine-chest down the parish throats, that they will not know each other when they meet?” A deeper thought laden with misgiving follows. Does the Refiner Himself recognize the silver that He has thrown into the melting-pot when it emerges again?

It is not often that the rector’s busy wife can stand idle, deeply sunk in meditations, which her children, with their customary nice feeling, refrain from infringing by any of their usually numberless appeals. With noiseless reverence they are laying their wreath, made of flowers bought at the Shipstone florist’s at a cost that has chipped a large paring off the two next birthdays, which jostle Christmas so expensively close, on the just replaced turf.

“We heard that it was up!” says a voice beside her, awaking Mrs. Darcy out of her grave musings, to find herself with two members of the Prince family, each laden with a magnificent “floral tribute” on either hand.

“Yes; it was finished this afternoon,” she answers, giving a slight start, and speaking involuntarily half under her breath.

“_What_ a beautiful text!” sighs Mrs. Prince, letting fall the tortoiseshell eye-glass which has helped her to read the inscription. “It is the one that, if it were possible, I should choose out of all the Bible to have placed over me.”

“Unless you die simultaneously with my father, I do not quite see how it is to be managed!” answers Féodorovna, disagreeably.

Her mother reddens a little. “I do not see that that follows! Six months and more elapsed between the deaths of these dear fellows; and yet what can be more suitable and lovely?”

Miss Prince does not waste breath upon a rejoinder, but stoops her long body to place a superb cross of lilies-of-the-valley, which seems instantaneously to wipe out of existence the modest Shipstone Roman hyacinths, with their one frugal arum lily, in a prominent position upon the grave.

The young donors of the eclipsed offering stand by with swelling hearts. Their Christmas gift to the dead has pinched them to the extent of absolutely precluding the purchase of “Bobs’” last photograph, tantalizingly beaming on them from the stationer’s front window, to the attainment of which their mother has stony-heartedly refused to help them with a loan; and about which Miss Brine has benightedly observed that thirty photographs of one individual must be enough for any private collection, were he ten times as great a hero as Lord Roberts. The monstrousness of the supposition that any such hypothetical demi-god can exist or ever has existed, and the consequent conviction that the governess is a pro-Boer, produces a warmth of feeling against that lady, which her departure upon her Christmas holidays only partially cools.

“They are coming home to-night, I hear,” says Mrs. Prince, stopping, in her turn, to deposit her sumptuous circle of orchids, but laying it unobtrusively just within the stone coping at the grave-foot, and somehow not making the children feel as small as Féodorovna had done.

“I believe so.”

“_What_ a home-coming!” raising and straightening herself again.

“Yes.”

“All animals creep to their lairs to die,” pursues Mrs. Prince, shaking her head, and with a poetic excursion into the regions of natural history not usual with her. “I suppose that that is his feeling.”

“I suppose so.”

“How dreadfully flat those boys are singing!” says Féodorovna, affectedly, putting her hands over her ears to exclude the sound of the choir practice, floating in annual struggle with the Christmas anthem from the just dim-lit church.

Féodorovna’s ear for music has never been her strong point, and a jarred surprise at the pretended suffering mixes with Mrs. Darcy’s disgust at the petulant bad taste of the interjection.

“Shall we see poor Lavinia at church to-morrow, do you think?” asks Mrs. Prince, real kindliness struggling in her tone with a rather morbid curiosity. “I declare that I shall hardly dare to look in the direction of their seat. What a life she must have led during these last five months, _tête-à-tête_ in cheap lodgings, for I fear their means would not run to anything very luxurious--with that poor old gentleman going over the same sad story, day after day, day after day, as he did in the case of Bill! And I am afraid that sickness is not likely to have improved his temper. I am sure that I should not be surprised to hear that her reason had given way.”

The apprehension expressed has certainly no novelty for Mrs. Darcy. It has rung ominously in her ears many times since her last sight of the friend whose short letters, dated from so long a succession of dreary health resorts, as to prove the dying restlessness which is upon the old man, tell her so little in their uncomplaining brevity. Perhaps it is the grafting of another’s crude, bald words upon her own scarcely permitted thought, which makes both seem unendurable. She turns hastily away, and all follow her from the grave, since, as far as the churchyard gate, their roads lie together.

Twilight has come upon them as they stand; twilight passing in dim gallop into darkness--a darkness that will never be relieved by the little paltry moon, making its poor fight with the dominant vapours. Silence has fallen upon the two elder women; but the tongues of the children, following hard behind with Féodorovna, are loosed.

“Mother heard from Captain Binning by last mail,” Susan hears Phillida say, in the tone of one communicating a piece of news of whose acceptability to its hearer there can be no doubt; and Miss Prince’s rather ostentatiously indifferent rejoinder.

“Oh, did she?”

“He told her the details of that fight near Snyman’s Post, which we saw the account of in the _Times_, when he was mentioned in despatches; not that he said a word about _that_, trust him,” in a tone of almost personal pride in the joint valour and reticence of the related fact.

“The Boers had rushed a picket, which gave them good cover to pour in a heavy fire at close range upon us, but after two hours’ hard fighting we beat them off with heavy loss.”

“Anyhow, we knocked the stuffing out of Commandant Reitz that time,” chimes in Christopher, taking up the chant of triumph.

The young Darcys have never been fond of Miss Prince; but at least, upon the all-important subject of the war, they have imagined her views to be in absolute harmony with their own. What, then, is their stupefaction at her comment upon their pieces of intelligence?

“How brutal! and how brutalizing!” she says with a delicate shudder of disgust.

“They do not know: how should they?” says Mrs. Prince, lowering her voice. “But Féo has lost all interest in the war. She has got a new hobby. It is music. You heard what she said about the choir singing flat. There is a young organist at Shipstone who, according to her, is something quite out of the way. He won the F.R.C.O., whatever that may be, last year; and she goes every day to hear him play. Well,” with resigned appeal, “it is a nice taste, isn’t it? and her mind is so active, that she must have something to occupy it; but she _used_ not to know one note from another.”

* * * * *

The silence of children gone to bed, and of a rector having his final wrestle with the difficulty which he must share with many thousand clerical brothers, of saying something original upon the morrow’s anniversary, broods upon the Rectory. Half a dozen Christmas sermons of previous years lie neatly typewritten before Mr. Darcy, so that recognizable repetitions may be avoided. The double doubt as to whether he dare repeat a simile, certainly felicitous, but whose very excellence may make it remembered, and which had occurred in his discourse of ’96, coupled with the question as to whether he shall insert any allusion to Rupert Campion’s death, keeps him sitting with suspended pen at his knee-hole writing-table, though the church clock has struck ten.

Over the drawing-room fire Mrs. Darcy is sitting alone, with hands stretched out flamewards, telling herself that, in view of the fatigue of Christmas Day, with its workhouse dinner, its school tea, and many etceteras of festal labour, she ought to go to bed; but, reconciling herself to her disobedience to the inward fiat by the fallacy that it would be extravagant to leave so good a fire to burn itself out alone. Her tired body is in the Rectory drawing-room, but her intensely awake soul has travelled across the road, and up the sloping garden of Campion Place, to where, behind the latched shutters, the returned wanderers sit in the aloofness lent by their crown of sorrows. They were to arrive at half-past eight o’clock. Would she have done better if she had been on the doorstep to receive them? It was a feeling of delicacy that had kept her away; but would it not have been better to have risked being indelicate, so that _one_ pair of arms might be opened to enfold the desolate couple, and put a little warmth into the deadly chill of their naked home-coming? Sir George has certainly gone to bed by now. The later accounts of his condition, bare of detail as they have been, have indicated a declension into completely invalid habits. Lavinia as certainly is sitting over the fire alone--alone, like herself--but, unlike herself, with no nursery-ful of kissed children, no dear, pompous devoted husband so filling the vacant chambers of her heart, that absence means but a keener sense of their beloved presence. The telling her own riches strikes the rector’s wife with a generous compunction, almost a feeling of guilt towards her friend in her cold heart-poverty.

“If I had only hung up a stocking for her!” she cries inwardly; and then derides herself for the puerility of the thought. “What gift capable of gladdening Lavinia’s Christmas morning could Santa Claus himself put into her stocking? If it were not so late!” she says to herself, a moment afterwards; “if the bell would not wake Sir George----”

Restless with the thought of the other’s forlorn neighbourhood, suddenly feeling that it is impossible to lay down her own tired limbs until they have carried her over the way to the mournful house darkening on the hillside above her, Susan rises, and, pulling aside the window-curtain, looks out--since the Rectory does not belong to the solid-shuttered breed of its eighteenth-century neighbour--on the night. It is such as the afternoon had promised--still, black, and murk; the little absurd finger-nail-paring of a moon wholly vanished behind the opaque vapours.

“I could find my way blindfold!” is the undeterred looker’s thought; and so goes out into the hall, snatches a bowler hat and an Inverness cape from the stand, and, unbarring the hall-door, starts back with a sudden shiver of alarm; for, before her, stands a tall dark figure, with a lantern in its hand.

“I was just making up my mind to ring!” says the voice of Lavinia. “What! Were you going out? Were you coming to me?”

“Great wits jump!” answers Susan, with a tremulous laugh, “Come in! come in!” and so pulls the girl over the threshold by her cold gloveless fingers, and into the glowing warmth.

“I must not forget my lantern! I do not know what I should have done without it! I could not see an inch before my face!”

“It is a pitchy night!”

Each utters her _banalité_ mechanically--the elder in a strange moved shyness; the younger taking hungry possession, with her drawn eyes, of each familiar object.

“I had just been reproaching myself for not having hung up a stocking for you!” Susan says, with another nervous laugh.

“What would you have put into it?”

They are standing opposite each other on the hearthrug, Lavinia’s hand still lying in Mrs. Darcy’s clasp. Is it possible, the latter asks herself, in astonished self-chiding, that this stupid new shyness has mastered her so far as to make her wonder how soon it would be proper to release it? Lavinia herself solves the problem. Gently disengaging her fingers, she throws back the hood of her cloak, and, for a heart-beat or two, they take silent stock of each other. The long thick wrap conceals the girl’s figure, but face and hands betray that Miss Carew has dwindled to half her size. Yet did ever saner eyes look out from under level brows? Whatever else has happened, Mrs. Prince’s lugubrious prognostic is not fulfilled. Lavinia Carew’s reason has _not_ given way.

“You have grown very thin!”

“Do not you remember that Rupert always used to laugh at me for my dread of getting fat?” Then, seeing the startled half-frightened look in her friend’s face, “You wonder that I am able to mention him? Well, I have had good practice; for five months we have never talked of anything else! No!”--correcting herself--“I am wrong. Sometimes we have talked of Bill, but never, _never_, NEVER of anything else!”

“For _five_ months?”

“Every day for five months--sometimes _twice_ a day, for his mind is a good deal gone--I have given him all, or”--with a slight shiver--“almost all the details of the--the _accident_! If I had been asked beforehand, I should have thought that even an allusion to it would drive me mad; and I have had to describe it twice a day!” She makes her narration in a perfectly collected level voice, and her friend’s false shyness dies for ever, overwhelmed by an avalanche of compassion.

“How are you alive?” she asks almost inaudibly.

“You must not pity me!” returns the other, still with the awe-inspiring calm of one that has reached the limit of possible suffering, and come out beyond it into the dead waters of numbed endurance. “Other people--_all_ other people would do that; but I expect _you_ to understand. I am _glad_ to be punished! glad to be working out my sentence like a convict. It is the only thing that has given me any ease! I think that even Rupert, if he can see me--I do not think that he much believed that he would be able”--with a dragging accent of sorrowful reluctance--“but if he can, even he will think the expiation is not out of proportion to the offence!”

“It is an idea that would never have occurred to him!” says Mrs. Darcy, in a tone of the gentlest chiding. “You are forgetting him!”

“_Forgetting_ him!” repeats Lavinia, slowly. “Yes,” after a slight pause, “you are right; crediting him with dismal dogmas of retribution, that he would have abhorred! Yes, I must be forgetting him!”

“My dear,” comes the voice of the rector, opening the door and looking in, with a brow cleared by having decided to omit the ’96 flower of speech, and defer the allusion to Rupert till New Year’s Eve, “what has possessed you to unbar the hall-door? It surely is not a night for star-gazing! _Miss Carew!_”

* * * * *

The Darcy Christmas Day has been worked through with its usual cheerful thoroughness. The reciprocal presentations; the church services; the workhouse dinner; the school-children’s tea, with its posthumous accompaniment of oranges and crackers; the servants’ evening party;--nothing has been scamped. The family Christmas gift to the poodle has been a photograph of Binning, which he wears upon his brow--all other available parts of his person being already occupied by the effigies of general officers--when he is walked by his beautifully frilled fore paws between Phillida and Daphne into the mistletoed kitchen to open the ball.

* * * * *

Lavinia’s Christmas Day has been worked through too, though in a different fashion. Mrs. Prince may cast her eyes upon the Campions’ seat in church without any fear of a shock to her nerves, for it is as empty as it has been for the last five months. Sir George is too much tired by his journey for his niece to leave him; yet in the afternoon--an afternoon furnished with the apposite Christmas brightness which had been so lacking yesterday--he insists upon being dressed, and leaning on Lavinia’s arm walks, with less of tottering in his gait than she had feared, to the churchyard, to see the new cross, about which he has been restlessly talking, asking, wondering, through half the night.

“I should personally have preferred granite, but as usual I was overruled!” he says fretfully; then divining and remorseful for her distress, adds, “But it is not amiss.”

Both are silent for a little space, reading the inscription, which, by long debating over, amending, altering, has grown so familiar to both.

“It was his own choice to lie out here!” says Sir George, presently. “It would have seemed more natural that he should be buried with the rest of us--with his mother; but he always was rather a sport among us!”

Lavinia assents with a little heart-full nod.

“It is dull of me,” pursues the old man, while a puzzled look comes into his dim eyes; “but I can’t recall how we learnt his wishes! He could not have _told_ us.”

“We found them written on a sheet of note-paper just inside the middle drawer of his writing-table,” replies Lavinia, with the gentle ready distinctness of one who, with perfect patience, has given the same explanation many times before.

“Ah, yes! that was it, of course. He was always fond of scribbling, poor fellow!”--with a look of relief at the recovered explanation. A moment later, in a low key of compunction, “And I used to get so out of patience with him, and ask whether he was writing a sonnet to his own eyebrow! What right had I to sneer at him because he was not cut on the same pattern as myself?”

“He did not mind, dear,” very softly, with a pressure against her side of the wasted arm leaning on hers. Another silence, while about the steady peace of the church tower the jackdaws fly and call in cheerful harshness, and from behind the bravery of his little orange-tawny breast a robin throws out his living gladness across the Christmas-decked graves.

“Two brave boys!” says Sir George after a pause; but now there is a note of triumphant pride in the father’s voice. “I always knew that I had _one_! but I little thought the day would come when I should be able to say that there is not a pin to pick between them! not a pin to pick between them!”