Chapter IV

Lavinia tries to frown, but the whimsical way in which her cousin utters his disgraceful aspiration, coupled with her conviction that, if put to the test, he would prove how little his claim to consummate cowardice was worth, sends her into the dining-room with a smile on her face. The tone in which Sir George asks her what the joke is at once extinguishes it.

“Nothing worth repeating,” she answers, grave, though suddenly.

“That means that I am not worth repeating it to!” he rejoins, with an injured look, and pushing away the dish that is being offered him.

“Won’t you try it?” she asks persuasively. “They are eggs dressed according to the recipe Lang got from the _chef_ at the Carlton.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t understand any one having an appetite when they have been penned up in the house all the morning.”

Each of the three persons present, and probably the servants too, know that the remark is aimed at Rupert, whose sedentary habits are one of his father’s chiefest grievances against him. It is a besetting sin of the outdoor members of a family to look upon the indoorness of the indoor as a crime against themselves. But for once Rupert’s conscience is clear.

“Were not you out, sir?” he asks pleasantly. “How did that come about? In spite of the sting in the air, one could quite realize that spring is only just round the corner.”

“I was occupied,” replies Sir George, briefly, not lifting the eyes overhung by lowering brows to his son’s face from his own empty plate.

Both young people know what his occupation has been--the inditing, by a slow penman, of an infinitely difficult letter of thanks to the unknown soldier who had written to tell him of his dead first-born’s last moments, and the tearing wider of his own yawning wound in the process. There is a respectful silence; Lavinia regretting her smile, and Rupert his question.

An almost imperceptibly exchanged eye-query between the two juniors asks what subject it would be safest to start next; and the thought flashes across Miss Carew of how perfectly Rupert always understands. How could she have had that odd shock of misgiving half an hour ago as to a union, however immediate--even if it were to-day or to-morrow--with one who always understands? And while luncheon proceeds this reassuring confidence deepens as she notes the tact and temper with which her betrothed steers among the rocks and quicksands that beset his path. How skilfully, yet without outraging truth, he conceals the fact that he had thought the wind cold enough to justify wearing a great-coat--a garment which is always as a red rag waved before his father’s hardy eyes! With what smiling self-control he listens to that father’s side-hits at the Molly Coddle and the Little Englander, though he knows that he is expected to answer to both names! With what delicate intuition he follows each faintest hint of a dangerous trend in the talk; and, lastly, with what a masterly air of naturalness he leads up to that poaching affray in Yorkshire which he had discovered and which his father had not, lurking in the small type of the morning paper! How much more thoroughly and subtily he knows Sir George than poor Bill did!--poor Bill, who could never resist the temptation to buck and rear under the whip of his father’s jibes! In sanguine forecast she prophesies to herself that her bufferdom will soon become a sinecure. If he could but be persuaded to give up that infuriating habit of jestingly--it must be, and is jestingly--belittling physical courage, and claiming for himself an absolute lack of it, Lavinia really does not see in what respect Rupert could be improved. This stout and happy mood lasts without a break until the repast ends; and upholds her even when her uncle, with something that seems meaning in his manner, invites her to walk with him to the keeper’s cottage. Let him broach the subject at once! Thanks to Susan Darcy, she is prepared; but, even without preparation, there would be nothing to cause her fear or hesitation. She will be ready with her answer as soon as he with his question.

“Dear Rupert! That speech about ‘yelping curs’ must have made him wince; but with what admirable temper and fortitude he bore it! Sir George himself must have felt a twinge of remorse for it, since, at starting, he had put his hand kindly on the young fellow’s shoulder, and had said, ‘Do not be out of the way, my boy, when we come back, as I may want to have a talk with you.’ And poor Rupert had coloured up with pleasure. Living with him every day, it is only now and then that one realizes what charming sort of looks his are.”

For the first half-hour of that walk, to which Miss Carew has thus valiantly braced herself, it seems as if her resolution were to be wasted, since her companion’s thoughts are plainly running in a groove other than that for which Mrs. Darcy has prepared her. He stumps along, digging his stick into the muddy ground, in that perfect silence which is possible only to complete intimacy. Not till the high-road is left, and the King’s Wood entered, does the little business of putting the quivering, tantalized Dachs Geist on the chain produce a word from him, and then it is only a “Steady, old man!” to the dog, who with moist nose working and upbraiding eyes, is testifying against the inhumanity of shackling him just when the sound of the rabbit begins to be loud in the land.

“Poor Geist!” says Lavinia, stooping to pat the satin of the long, low, red back. “Wait till we get to Madeley’s, and you shall run the hens!”

This is a promise always made and never fulfilled at the entrance to the forbidden paradise; but it sends them all on in better spirits. Sir George half smiles, too, though he says disdainfully--

“_Geist!_”

The name has been bestowed by Rupert, in memory of Mat Arnold’s immortal favourite; but as his father is equally unacquainted with the author and the poem, he can seldom forbear some ejaculation of contempt for so senseless an appellation; and again the silence is unbroken, as they step along the ride between the undergrowth of Spanish chestnuts, through whose still adhering dead leaves the wind blows cracklingly. They are for use and beauty too, these chestnut growths. To-day they are a covert, warm and colourful; to-morrow they will be hop-poles, round which the vine of England will wind the tenderness of her green embrace.

“We must try and get him here!” says Sir George, suddenly, arriving, as often happens, at a point in his ruminations when utterance to his one confidant is a relief, and without the slightest doubt that she will have followed the wordless course of his meditations, and be able to pick up his thought, whatever it may be, at the moment when he wishes it to become oral. She is mostly equal to the occasion; and to-day divines at once that the allusion is to the young officer whom Bill had died to save.

“I am sure that he will wish to come,” she answers, in instantly ready response.

“You know, of course, to whom I am alluding?” her uncle inquires, with one of those sharp turns of suspicion, even of her, to which he is liable.

“Surely to Captain Binning,” she replies very softly.

“We have nothing to offer him when he does come,” pursues her companion, gloomily--“no sport--nothing that a fine manly chap like that would care for. Twenty years ago it would have been a different thing!”

The sigh on which this speech is wafted tells the girl that her uncle’s thoughts have gone back to the theme which had made him a sad and bitter man, even before the loss of his son--that passing of his ancestral acres into other hands, for which he has to thank his own early excesses.

“If Bobs hurries up the Union Jack over Bloemfontein and Pretoria as quickly as I expect of him!” cries she, sanguinely, with a kindling eye, “they may all be back before the summer is over!”

“_All!_” he repeats, with a reproachful laugh; and she shrinks back into a remorseful silence. It may be a dim regret at having choked the life out of her little effort to cheer him that makes Sir George say presently--

“If it were summer-time, he might put up with us for a day or two; and, I confess, I should like to make his acquaintance. From his letter, I should gather that he is just my sort--just what I should have liked----”

He breaks off, and her fatal facility in reading his thoughts makes her hear the unsaid half of the speech quite as plainly as the uttered one. “What I should have liked Rupert to be!” is the aspiration which he uselessly forbears to finish. As on many former occasions, her spirit rises in defence.

“Don’t you think,” she asks gently, but with an intonation in which he recognizes a familiar protest, “that it would be rather dull if we were all made on precisely the same pattern? built on exactly the same lines?”

“There you go!” retorts he, laughing not quite naturally, yet with less than his former acridness; “up in arms at once, the moment you think your precious pet lamb is going to be attacked!”

“It is well that there should be somebody to speak up for him!” she says, carrying her head rather high, and looking very handsome and plucky.

“He has a bottle-holder whom he can always count upon in you!” replies Sir George, glowering sideways at her out of an eye in which displeasure at being opposed, and admiring fondness for the opposer, are at open war.

“Always!” she answers firmly; but, at the same moment, the dignity of her attitude is compromised by Geist, who, with crooked legs madly straddling, and choking bark out of a strained-at collar, forces his conductor into a run in pursuit of some small live thing which has set the dead leaves astir not a yard from his wildly working nose. Lavinia is a strong girl, but Geist is also a strong dog, and it takes her a minute or two to re-establish her supremacy.

“Though Rupert is such a favourite of yours,” says Sir George, with a deliberation which shows that the remark is not an impromptu, “it does not strike me that you are in any violent hurry to marry him.”

The expected has come--the fully prepared and waited for, yet it must take her at an undefended angle. Possibly it is something jibing in the shape of the question that chills away her carefully pre-constructed response.

“Does whatever in the shape of an engagement once existed between you still hold good? or have you put an end to it?”

The something of hurry and apprehension that she detects in his voice, and in which she recognizes his last bid for possible happiness, affects her so strongly that she can only give a nod, which is apparently of so doubtful an interpretation that he misunderstands it.

“Do not be afraid to tell me if you have,” he goes on with what she knows to be an unusual effort at self-control and temper. “I shall be the last person to blame you. I never could quite understand what you----”

“We belong to each other still: we always shall,” she interrupts, in a low firm voice, hastening to stop the mouth that is about to utter a too familiar formula.

A sort of relief spreads over the lined face beside her; yet there is a cavilling discontent in his repetition of her phrase.

“_Belong_ to each other! Well, you have done that, I suppose, according to your ideas, since you were both in long clothes.”

She pauses, and a cloud seems to pass before her clear strong eyes; pauses with the feeling--an unaccountably heavy one--of being about to do something absolutely irrevocable, then speaks.

“Do you wish us to marry soon?”

He shoots a look at her to make sure that she is in earnest.

“I wish for a grandson!” he answers crudely.

Again she pauses, chiding herself as squeamish for a return of that sensation of repulsion which had assailed her when first the practical aspect of her relation to Rupert had been suggested to her by Mrs. Darcy. She has not conquered it when her uncle repeats and enlarges his phrase.

“I wish before I die to see a grandson growing up, with as much of you and as little of Rupert in him as you can make him!”

She listens with a half-shivering docility. Is it the strangeness, the something of coarse and homely in the wording of her uncle’s wish, that gives her this prudish and unreasonable sense of disrelish?

“No doubt you are laughing at the idea of wanting an heir when there is so preciously little left to be heir to,” continues Sir George, in a key half angry at her delay in acquiescence, half appealing to her mercy. “But when you have got one spot of earth into your very bones, you do not like the idea of being quite wiped off from it.”

Their steps have led them to a clearing in the low wood, and over the ground bared by the woodman’s axe the old man’s eye, mournful and yearning, wanders, embracing the pleasant swelling hills, the strawberry gardens, and cherry orchards, upon which his sire’s eyes, nay, his own boyish ones, had rested possessively. A Jew broker’s improved ploughs are furrowing yon hillside; a Half-penny Comic Journal sends the strawberries to Covent Garden; but to his own sad heart, pasture and copse and red roof-tree, are Campion’s still. Lavinia’s eye follows the direction her uncle’s has taken. The Kentish landscape, with its rustic smile is nearly as dear, though not as melancholy, to her as to him. The idea of living in any other surroundings is as unfamiliar to her as the wish. “The thing that hath been shall be.” To go on living and doing for her men--since there are now only two left, she must make the most of them--what other fate has ever occurred to her as possible? For as long as she can remember the thought of what she herself would like has been always subordinated to the wishes, divined or expressed, of her menkind. In so small a thing as the ordering of dinner, has her own palate ever in half a score of years, been asked to give an assent or a veto?

To marry Rupert! To bear and bring up his children--a transient wonder crosses her mind as to whether there is any likelihood of their being as amusing and original as the young Darcys!--for what other end was she created? There is no sting or thrill in her feeling for him; but is it the worse for that? There are women incapable of thrilling for any man--a large, cool, comfortable class, to which she does and must belong. Has her pulse ever paid any man the tribute of one quickened beat? Proudly to herself she can answer No. She is not of that kind. With Féodorovna Prince as an object-lesson, there is not much fear of her erring in the direction of passion or sentimentality. She involuntarily lifts her head a little above its usual level--though it is always handsomely carried--and, since the thought-current that has run through her brain has done so with lightning’s own speed, there is to her hearer’s ear scarcely any delay in her answer.

“I am ready to marry Rupert whenever you and he wish me to.”

Her voice is steady and serene; at least so she intends and believes it to be. Yet Sir George looks at her askance.

“_Ready!_” he repeats distrustfully. “A man, if he has any pluck, may be _ready_ to go to the gallows!”

Lavinia makes a face between a laugh and a frown.

“Choose your own words,” she says, the habit of a lifetime controlling and smoothing away any outward expression of impatience.

But he will not let her off. “Are you _glad_ to marry him? Do you feel that it is essential to your happiness?” he asks, pressing home his inquiries with a persistency that he imagines to be conscientious, but which she feels to be cruel and perverse.

“_Glad!_” she repeats, dragging out the word a little, to give herself time to find the right phrase of tactful truth. “Haven’t I always been glad that I was to be part and parcel of you both? My gladness is no shoddy new thing.”

He looks at her captiously, the unhappy bent of his disposition causing him to feel a half-distrust of the candid eyes and the honest voice that yet always bring a warmth about his heart.

“If Rupert does not marry you, he will probably marry some one else,” he growls. “And between you and me, I cannot quite depend on his taste!”

It is said with no wounding intention. Never would it have occurred to the father that any one could take exception against him for making disparaging comments on his own son of his body begotten; but used as she is to them, never does Lavinia fail to protest.

“I like his taste,” she answers pleasantly and gallantly. “He thinks me very good-looking.”

But her companion’s thought stumps undistracted by her playfulness along its own track, as doggedly as his feet along the bridle-path.

“I am not difficult to get on with,” he says, in a _naïf_ unconsciousness of his own corners which makes his niece throttle a smile. “No one can deny that I am easy to live with; but I could not answer for myself if he sprang upon me some demi-rep from a music-hall or some screeching platform woman. I declare to goodness”--lashing himself up into unreasonable anger--“it seems an odd thing for a father to say, but I know so little of the fellow--of what goes on inside him--that I could not say, if I were to be shot for it, which alternative is the more likely one.”

It would be perfectly useless to tell him that it is he himself who has crushed the power of confidence out of his son; and the desire to impart the information to him is at once stamped upon by Lavinia. All that is left of it escapes in a patient sigh, and the little dry sentence--

“I should say that they were about equally probable.”

“I have a still better reason for wishing to see you coupled together,” continues Sir George, a little appeased, though not in the least, suspecting the exercise of self-control that has tightened Lavinia’s lips, and strengthened her grip upon Geist’s lead. “If you do not marry _my_ boy, of course you will never rest till you marry some one else’s.”

“Never rest till I marry some one else’s!” repeats she, indignantly, all her virgin pride up in arms; but in a second her wrath falls, vanquished by native sweetness, and by a long and sore acquaintance with the properties of Uncle George’s jokes. To-day it is not quite a joke. It is the vehicle for a real apprehension. She is paid for her self-government in a ready money which does not often distinguish the discharge of debts to virtue.

“And then I should lose my little mosquito,” he says, employing a phrase of no visible aptness to the tall and gracious creature beside him, which she yet welcomes as a proof of peculiar favour. “No doubt my loss would be your gain, as people say when other people’s relatives die”--laughing uncontagiously. “But I do not think I could carry creditably anything more just yet. You see I have lost a good deal one way and another.”

There is pathos in his growling voice, and appeal in his shagged eyes, and Lavinia at once feels that she would gladly die for him.

“It is settled, then!” she cries with a cheerfulness concerning which she is not quite sure whether she feels it or not. “Rupert marries Lavinia to prevent _her_ marrying any one else, and Lavinia marries Rupert to prevent his marrying any one else, and the bells ring, and we are all happy for ever after!”

Her one motive in drawing up this gay programme is to give him pleasure, to chase the hopelessness out of his gaunt face; and perhaps she overdoes the content of her tone, for he stops in his walk to send the gimlet of his suspicious eyes through her.

“It is not to please me that you are doing it,” he says with sharp contrariety: “mind that! I would be shot before I would influence you a hair-breadth one way or the other in such a matter. And between you and me”--it is the phrase which usually precedes some unflattering observation upon his son--“if I were a young woman, and Rupert were the last man in the world----”

But what Sir George’s course as a young woman would be his niece is determined for once not to hear.

“Stop!” she says, laying her firm hand in prohibition upon his arm, and speaking with an authority that for the moment seems to reverse their relative positions. “You must not run down my husband to me!”