Chapter XXV

“It is for homely features to keep home,
They have their name thence; coarse complexions
And cheeks of sorry grain have leave to ply
The sampler, and to tease the house-wife’s wool.
What need a vermeil-tinctured lip for that?
Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn?”

The August sun is assuring the Rectory garden, as plainly as his beams can speak, that no scurvy trick shall be played with the marquee erected this morning with some trepidation of spirit--since the two previous days have been rainy--on the cricket-ground. In proof of his good faith, the God of Day is dragging their hottest spices out of the petunias and heliotropes, and out of Miss Brine the prudent counsel, addressed to her pupils, to put cabbage leaves in their hats. But how can paltry apprehensions of the off-chance of a sunstroke influence minds occupied by the knowledge that the whole air is full of the sense of approaching festivity? Have not the hen-coops been moved from the banks of the Tugela River, in order that rounders may be played there? Is not there to be a tug-of-war on the grass plot before the front door? Has not a “donkey” been erected in a clear space of the shrubbery? Are not numerous old boxes being chopped up into trays, to be used for tobogganing down the steep slope above the parterre? That the treat to the choir boys of St. Gengulpha’s Church, Martin Street, Soho, London, which in her maiden days Mrs. Darcy used, for the sake of its excellent music, to frequent, is an annual one, does not lessen the excitement with which the arrival of the early afternoon train, and the hired brake and Rectory waggonette that convey the guests from Sutton Rivers station, is expected.

That blissful date is still three hours off, for eleven o’clock has just told its last stroke from the church tower as Mrs. Darcy, calm with the consciousness of made cakes, garnished dishes, and arrived chairs, puts foot across the threshold of the cool drawing-room of Campion Place. There is purpose in her eye, and resolution in her step, as she lightly crosses the carpet, and lays her hands on the shoulders of a black figure, sitting with its back to her, writing at a bureau. The figure puts out an abstracted hand backwards in acknowledgment of what is evidently a very familiar interruption, but her attention remains rivetted upon the “slips” before her.

“Isn’t it astonishing that the corrector of the press can let such mistakes pass?” she asks, indignantly. “Twice they have printed _snouts_ for ‘shouts,’ and _liver_ for ‘lover’! It makes such dreadful gibberish of the lines.”

Mrs. Darcy looks over Lavinia’s shoulder, and verifies the blunders alluded to; but it is clear that the attention given is but a half-hearted one. In the early days of black emptiness which had followed Sir George’s death in the previous January, of occupation gone, and spirits drooping to the very earth that had closed over the last of her “men,” Susan had welcomed for Lavinia the editing of Rupert’s “Remains” as a salutary distraction; but of late she has remorsefully to own to herself that she has grown rather tired of that “volume of posthumous verse,” which takes such a long time in preparing for the press, and the emendating, noting, and prefacing of which, by her friend’s not very practised pen, has robbed the latter of so many of the little out-door joys which stand first in the pharmacy of grief-healing.

Miss Carew apparently divines the faintness of her friend’s sympathy, for she changes the subject.

“I sent the spoons and forks this morning! Have you enough now?”

“Plenty.”

“Do you want any knives?”

“Bless your heart, no! Mrs. Prince has lent enough to cut the throats of the whole township.”

“And how about fruit? There are still a good many white currants under the nets on the north wall.”

“Currants!” repeats Mrs. Darcy, with affected scorn. “If you could see the size of the grapes that arrived, personally conducted by Féodorovna, just as we were sitting down to dinner last night, you would blush for such a suggestion.”

“I withdraw it,” replies the other, with a slight grave smile; adding, “One laughs at them, but they really are wonderfully kind.”

“This was not a case of undiluted kindness,” says the rector’s wife, with her light and stingless sarcasm. “The grapes were but incidental; the real object of her visit--I wish she would not pay morning calls just as the soup tureen is entering the dining-room--was to ask for an invitation for to-day for her organist.”

“And you gave it?”

“Of course! Am I ever harsh to true first love?” ironically. “She went conscientiously through his achievements all the same. How well we know them, don’t we?”

“As a little boy of ten he won sight-reading prizes at local competitions, while earning his bread as organist of Sutton Rivers Church!” replies Lavinia, the long-absent dimple showing itself cautiously in her left cheek, as she responds promptly to the call upon her memory.

“He had to go to the College of Music unusually late,” rejoins Susan, snatching the words out of her friend’s mouth in triumphant patter; “but, nevertheless, took his A.R.C.M. in theory, the stiffest exam. the Royal College affords, with ninety-nine marks out of a maximum of a hundred!”

Lavinia breaks in hurriedly. “He is composing an organ fugue in G minor, which has something of the strength and purity of design of Bach!”

They both pause to laugh; but Lavinia’s eyes, falling on the MS., grow suddenly serious again.

“I wonder has she yet offered him marriage?” she says, a remnant of amusement piercing through the habitual sadness of her face.

“It is time that she did,” replies Mrs. Darcy, in the same key; adding, after a moment’s reflection, and in a lower tone, “It is quite fifteen months since she last proposed to any one.”

Lavinia lays down her slips upon the blotting-pad, and sits looking straight in front of her, while with an awful clearness rise before her mind’s eye the events so inextricably entangled with Miss Prince’s declaration to Binning.

“Why did you say that?” she asks, after a pause of quickened breathing, to which her friend listens with a trepidation which does not hinder a very valiant resolution to persevere.

“Because you never allow me to mention him; because, as I may not speak of him naturally and simply, I must drag him in by the head and shoulders.”

No answer.

“Isn’t it a puerility to banish him from your speech--to go half a mile out of your way to avoid speaking his poor name--when we both know that he is never for one moment out of your thoughts? No; don’t interrupt me! I will have my say out this time! Never for one moment out of your thoughts--not even when you are laying eucharis lilies on Sir George’s grave, or editing Rupert’s poems.”

Lavinia’s only answer is to take her hands off the manuscript before her, as if the indictment made against her rendered her unworthy to touch it; and her long arms drop to her side.

“Can you deny it?” asks Mrs. Darcy, her _spirituelle_ pale face flushing with excitement, thinking that she may as well be killed for a sheep as a lamb, and kneeling down beside her friend to get compelling possession of one of her hands. “I insist upon your answering me!”

For a moment or two of misgiving it seems to the rector’s wife as if her audacity of asking were to break against the same obstinacy of morbid silence as has rebuffed all her previous efforts to speak a forbidden name; but, after a while, Lavinia answers, a great sigh seeming to tear the words out of her breast--

“I do not deny it; though why you should have the brutality to force me to own it to-day, particularly, I do not know!”

“Because he is in England!” replies Susan, speaking very softly, with a kindly dew of moisture, making tender her usually keen eyes; “because, this morning, I had a letter from him, with a London postmark!”

The slips of Rupert’s poems blow off the bureau, and on to the floor, wafted to earth by the irony of a warm gust from the honied garden-beds outside; but Lavinia is not aware of it. The one hand that she has at liberty flies up to her forehead, as though she were blinded by a sudden light.

“You _must_ have seen in the papers that the _Isis_, with his regiment on board, had reached Southampton; but, perhaps”--with a slight return of satire lightening the gravity of her eager tones--“perhaps--to be consistent--you do not allow yourself to glance at the war news.”

“I did not at first,” answers the girl, still looking straight before her, with eyes that yet feel dazzled; “I thought it ought to be part of my punishment; but,” faltering, “I had not resolution enough to keep to it. And, even if I had, it would have been no use. The children----”

“Yes,” returns the mother, with a rather quivering pride in her voice; “it would be difficult to be long in the company of my progeny without hearing the name of _Binning_”--pronouncing it with a ringing clearness. “_They_, at least, are faithful to the one hero whom they can call friend!”

At the thus audaciously syllabled name, whose utterance has been tacitly prohibited between them for over a year, Lavinia gives a low cry. But in the over-set face that she suddenly turns upon her friend there is no anger, only an immense mazed joy, fighting its way out of the Bastille of the long remorseful sorrow that has prisoned and gagged it; and her fair head falls forward on the shoulder of Binning’s advocate. Through the thin fabric of her gown Mrs. Darcy feels the glow of the hidden face, and it spurs her to fresh effort.

“Are you not rather tired of being _dead_?” she whispers. “It is all very well for a time, but it must pall! Come back to life! Put off these hateful weeds, put on a white gown, and come back to life _to-day_! Believe me”--with an accent of exulting persuasiveness--“you could not choose a better moment!”

* * * * *

The party to the choir boys of St. Gengulpha’s is being put through with the thoroughness which, since Mrs. Darcy’s advent, fifteen years ago, has characterized all the Rectory functions; and, indeed, is drawing towards its close. For four sunshiny hours, twenty happy boys in flannels, with sharp towny faces, have been expatiating about the grounds, and have drunk to the full of the varied entertainments offered them--entertainments shared by half the neighbourhood, annually compelled by Mrs. Darcy to come in to her aid. The Vicar of St. Gengulpha’s and his curates--lean men with intellectual faces, supported by the gamest of their pale choir boys, have stretched muscles that yet remember the playing-fields and the Isis, in the best tug-of-war in the Campion records, against the rector and his inferior songsters. The smartest young ladies of the neighbourhood have not disdained, though hampered by long-tailed swishy gowns, to join in a game of rounders with the visitors, nor do the inelegance of their futile efforts to get their draperies out of the way, nor the potency of the sun’s beams at all reduce the good will and perseverance with which they arduously scamper. The “donkey” has repeatedly conquered and been conquered. The donkey is an apocryphal animal, with a wooden head; and, for body, a revolving barrel, mounted on whose elusive convexity the rider has to snatch a threepenny bit from its distant nose. Many are the ignominious falls given by him, many the glorious victories won over his treacherously turning barrel-stomach. For the lesser boys the threepence is placed further up the nose, within easier reach of the little anxiously grabbing hand; and frequent are the cheaply generous petitions proffered by elder lads in behalf of their small companions.

“Mightn’t ’e ’ave it a bit nearer, sir? ’e’s only a little chap!”

And the rector, in flannels, having laid aside his pompousness with his broadcloth, hot, genial, turning the handle of his wooden steed with right good will, feigning to be inexorable, always accedes. Then, after tea in the tent--tea in whose distribution every one, even to Serena and the poodle, assist; after Orpheus glees sung in the dining-room, comes the crowning final joy of the toboggan.

“One! two! three! Are you ready?”

The eager scramble up the hillock; the emulous turning round the bag which sits at the top on a sort of milestone; the getting on to your tea-tray; the difficulty of keeping your feet on it--an indispensable condition of success; the mad sliding run down to the grass at the foot--once or twice the impetus carrying the boy divorced from his tray, and landing him on the gravel walk, with barked elbows and shins;--who can wonder that, in comparison with such pleasures, the donkey himself grows pale?

The party has been in full swing, before a guest, who, if an oath to appear at it had not been exacted from her, would certainly never have found courage to face it, is seen to be in the midst of associates from whom she has been so long withdrawn. Lavinia is late--a tardiness not to be accounted for by the simplicity of her toilette, since no one knows with what a long delay of backward-looking apology, with what remorseful cryings-out for forgiveness to her “men” for seeming to forget them, she has put off her black gown, and invested herself in the white muslin which feels like a travesty. It is with something of the shamed shyness of one who suddenly finds himself in broad daylight among a party of ordinarily dressed men and women, clad in the extravagance of a fancy garb, that Miss Carew appears among the acquaintances from whom, for over a year, she has held aloof.

What has she to do amid all this movement and colour and gaiety? Because she has been dragged out of her darkness into light, and had her fetters suddenly knocked off, does that make her a fit member of this happy company? They look at her or she fancies so, strangely; some to whom she has been perfectly well known in former days, not even recognizing her. That she is changed in appearance she has long been indifferently aware; colour and flesh melted away in the smelting-pot of her great affliction, branded with the broad arrow of her uneffaceable suffering. But that she should have become unrecognizable! The unexpected smart of that discovery blinds her to the fact of how faint a hold upon another’s identity is possessed by any human being; of how small a change of costume, _locale_, or circumstance, will confuse the doubtful and inaccurate knowledge which we can master of even the exterior of our fellow-creatures! Nor does she realize that in the general centreing of attention on the objects of the entertainment, the unobtrusive addition of one more to the already considerable number of tall white maidens on the grounds may momentarily pass without notice. It is with relief and gratitude that, as she moves along in humiliated shyness, with that mazed sense of unreality which has been upon her ever since Mrs. Darcy’s morning visit, she hears herself interpolated by the familiar voice of Mrs. Prince.

“Lavinia! Why, I can scarcely believe my eyes!”

“_You_ at least know me!” replies the girl, holding out a hand that seems scarcely to belong to herself, in the unfamiliarity of its white glove.

“Know you, my dear? Why should not I know you when I see you almost every day of my life? Why, in Heaven’s name, shouldn’t I know you?”

“Other people don’t!” replies Lavinia, sombrely. “I passed Lady Greenhithe just now, and she looked perfectly blankly at me. And even Féodorovna; but then _she_ was----” Miss Carew apparently alters her intention of finishing her sentence, for she pauses.

“Féodorovna!” repeats Mrs. Prince, an anxious furrow on her brow becoming suddenly more pronounced. “By-the-by, where is she? She disappeared almost as soon as we arrived. Did you say that you had seen her?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“At the back of the tent.”

“Was she--alone?” with a very apparent apprehension as to what the answer will be.

“No--o; Mr. Sharp--the Shipstone organist, I mean--was with her.”

Mrs. Prince heaves a mortified sigh that is yet tempered with philosophy.

“I wish she had stuck to the army!” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “Neither Mr. Prince nor I would have objected to an army man!”