Chapter V

The hall-door reveals an unwelcome sight, though no one can deny that it is a showy one, nor that the February sunlight is snobbish enough to treble itself against the brazen glories of the crests on blinker and harness and panel of the Princes’ carriage. It is a fact of disagreeable familiarity to both uncle and niece that Féodorovna Prince will never allow any of her acquaintance to be “not at home;” and that to be pursued to study, toilet-table, and bed is the penalty exacted from those upon whom she chooses to inflict her friendship. The two exchange a look.

“Do not let her come near me,” says the man, in accents of peremptory disgust, and so flings off to his den; while Lavinia, with the matter-of-fact unselfishness of the well-broken human female, goes smiling into the drawing-room.

After all, it is not Féodorovna, but her mother, who comes forward alone, and with jet-clinking apology.

“You do not mind? It is not a thing that one has any right to do? But Féodorovna would insist on getting out, so I got out too.”

At another moment this exegesis, pregnant in its unconscious brevity of the relations between mother and daughter, would have made Lavinia laugh; but at the present moment a horrible suspicion freezes all tendency to mirth.

“Féodorovna!”--looking round in bewildered apprehension. “Why, where is she?”

The visitor is so obviously in no hurry to answer, that Miss Carew’s question repeats itself with an imperativeness that drags out the reluctant and frightened response.

“Well, my dear, you must not scold me, as I see you are inclined; or, if you do, it will be grossly unjust. You know what she is when she takes a thing into her head, and I am bound to say she does feel, and has felt, very keen sympathy for him in his trouble; indeed, we all have.”

She pauses, weakly hoping for some expression of thanks or reassurance; but Lavinia only stares at her with confusing sternness in her aghast blue eyes.

“And when she heard that the things had come back--poor Bill’s things--I believe the news came through the servants--nothing would serve her but that she must see Sir George, to tell him how much she felt for him. You know that she has that curious _personal_ feeling about the whole of our Army in South Africa, as if it belonged to her in a way, and she always rated Bill very highly.”

Again the mother pauses, with a hope--but a fainter one than its predecessor--that this tribute to the dead may have a mollifying effect upon her inconveniently silent and staring young hostess.

“And where is she now?” asks Lavinia, with an accent that makes Mrs. Prince regret her silence.

“She said she would go to Sir George’s room to wait for him; that she was sure he would prefer that there should be no witnesses to their meeting. Oh, do not go after her!”--with a despairing clutch at Lavinia’s raiment as the latter makes a precipitate movement doorwards. “It is too late now; and, after all, Sir George, poor man, is very well able to take care of himself. And if he gives her a real good snub, why, so much the better.”

Lavinia pauses, arrested by the something of sound sense that leavens her companion’s flurried speech, and with a dawning pity in her relenting eyes.

“And there is something I want so much to say to you,” goes on the poor woman, hanging on to the skirt of her advantage, though wisely relinquishing her material grasp. “You know that I always bring my troubles to you, and I am in a fresh one now.”

“About her, of course?”

“Oh yes; about her, of course. I suppose that but for her things would have gone almost too smoothly with Mr. Prince and me. I suppose that the Almighty sees we need her to prevent us getting too--too uppish.”

The adjective is scarcely on the level of refinement held before her own eyes by the poor lady, but the tear that moistens condones it.

“What is it now?” asks the girl, with a resolute banishing to the back of her mind of the intense annoyance and apprehension caused by the odious intrusion of Féodorovna, and sitting down beside her guest with resolute and patient sympathy.

“I never look at her letters,” says Mrs. Prince, lowering her voice, which has taken on a tone of eager relief. “You know I do not; but she had left it with her others for the butler to stamp. He had it in his hand; it was at the top. I could not help seeing the address.”

“Not _again_? She has not been writing to General ---- _again_?”

The expression of tragic repulsion in her young companion’s face seems to get upon Mrs. Prince’s nerves.

“How you do jump down one’s throat!” she cries peevishly. “No, of course she has not!”

“It was stupid of me to suggest it! To whom, then?”

“I really could not help seeing,” continues the elder woman, mollified and apologetic for her own action. “It was no case of prying, but I could not help reading, ‘Surgeon-General Jameson, Army Medical Department, Victoria Street, Westminster.’”

There is a pregnant pause.

“Surgeon-General Jameson!” repeats Lavinia. “He is Director-General of the R.A.M.C., isn’t he?”

The plumed toque that crowns Mrs. Prince’s expensive toupet gives a dejected dip of assent.

“Does she know him?”

“Not from Adam. But that would never stop her writing to any one; no, nor speaking to them either!”

Another pause.

“She wants to go out to South Africa as a nurse, I suppose?”

Again the tall ostrich feathers wave acquiescence. This time a spoken elucidation follows.

“That is it, as far as we--her father and I--can make out.”

Lavinia draws a little nearer, and lays her hand upon the arm of her visitor’s chair, while her chin lifts itself, and then falls again in a movement of hopeless pity.

“I am very sorry indeed for you both! How does Mr. Prince take it? What does he say?”

“You can never get much out of Mr. Prince,” replies his wife, in a tone whose complaint is streaked with admiration for a verbal continence of which she feels herself quite incapable. “But he did say, in his dry way, that he should be sorry to be one of Féo’s patients.”

Lavinia smiles, but cautiously; and then, illuminated by a sudden suggestion of valid consolation, speaks.

“You may make your mind easy, they will never accept her! She has none of the qualifications.”

A slightly soothed expression comes over the visitor’s perturbed features.

“It seems an odd thing to say of one’s own child, but I must say that there is no one that I would not rather have about me than Féo when I am at all poorly; and Mr. Prince is just the same.”

“Then do not waste time in worrying!” says Lavinia, with bracing cheerfulness; herself encouraged by the success of her mode of reassurance. “She will infallibly get a polite No for her answer, and you will never hear anything more about it.”

“You are wrong there,” replies Féodorovna’s mother with rueful shrewdness. “She is sure to tell us about it. Féo has an odd way of boasting about things that other people would be ashamed of!”

“It is impossible to contradict this assertion, and with a passing wonder and pity for a love cursed with such good eyes,” Lavinia repeats, in despair of finding anything better, her already-tried-and-found-wanting anodyne.

“Well, at all events, nothing will come of it.”

“And what will her next move be? I ask you that! What will her next move be?” inquires Mrs. Prince, in dreary triumph.

The pride of having proposed an insoluble riddle kindles a funeral torch in each eye. The question, as the too clear-sighted parent had expected, _stumps_ Miss Carew, nor can any of the hysterical indelicacies which pass through her mind as likely to illustrate Féodorovna’s future course be decently dressed enough to be presented as hypotheses to Féodorovna’s mother.

It is the occasion of her dilemma who cuts it short by an entrance a good deal less aspen-like and deliberate than is usual in her case. It is, of course, an extravagant trick of fancy, but the impression is at once conveyed to at least one of the occupants of the drawing-room that Féodorovna has been kicked into the room. The pink umbrage in her silly face confirms the idea of some propelling force behind her, as does the excessive civility of the attendant Rupert. That the deferential _empressement_ of his manner is the cover for an inclination towards ungovernable, vexed laughter is suspected only by Lavinia. That some catastrophe has attended the visit of the young paraclete is obvious to the meanest observer; but it is not until after the Princes’ carriage has crunched and flashed away with Féodorovna reclining in swelling silence upon the cushion, and her mother casting glances of frightened curiosity at her infuriated profile that the details of the disaster reach Lavinia’s ears. Not immediately even then, since before she can besiege her cousin with terrified questions, he is summoned to his father; and it is fully half an hour before he rejoins her in the schoolroom. She has to wait again even then; since at her first allusion to the subject, he is seized with such _fou rire_ that he has to roll on his face on the old sofa before he can master the shoulder-shaking convulsions of his uncomfortable mirth.

“What happened?” cries the girl, standing over her _fiancé’s_ prostrate figure in a fever of apprehension. “Oh, do get up, and stop laughing! What is there to laugh at? You are too stupid to live!”

“I shall not live much longer!” replies the young man, rearing himself up into a sitting posture, and presenting a subdued but suddenly grave surface to his censor; “not if we are often to have such treats as this. I do not know why I laugh, for I never felt less hilarious in my life.”

“You are as hysterical as a woman!” says Lavinia, with a frown.

“It is not my fault, though it is my eternal regret that I am not one!” he retorts.

It is lucky for him that the fever of her preoccupation prevents Lavinia from hearing this monstrous aspiration.

“Did he do anything _violent_?” she asks in a voice made low by dread.

“He kept his hands off her, if you mean that!” replies Rupert, showing symptoms of a tendency to relapse into his convulsion of laughter; “but only _just_! If I had not appeared in the nick of time, I would not have answered for her life!” Then, as Lavinia keeps looking at him in smileless tragedy, he goes on, “I was hanging about, waiting for him, as you know he had told me that he should have something to say to me--by-the-by, he has just been saying it, but that is another story--when I heard raised voices, or rather a raised voice. You know that long, dull roar of his that always makes me call on the hills to cover me!”

“Well?”

“I felt that there was no time to be lost, so I hurried in--only just in time! I saw in his eye that the next moment he would have her by the shoulders, and be thrusting her through the door!”

“But he did not! you stopped him?”--breathlessly.

“Yes, thank the Lord!” He pauses, and his lips begin to twitch with nervous mirth. “I know what you thought: she was shot into the dining-room like a projectile; but it was not as bad as that. Only _moral_ force propelled her.”

Lavinia brings her hands together with a sort of clap, but relief mingles with the indignant animosity of her tone.

“What _had_ she said? What _had_ she done?”

Rupert shrugs his shoulders. “What is our little Féo _not_ capable of saying and doing?” he asks sarcastically. “But you must remember I came in only for the bouquet of the fireworks.” After a pause, in a key of real feeling, with no tinge of satire, “Poor old fellow! I would have done a good deal to save him from it. I think the last straw was when she began to finger the things--Bill’s poor little possessions--and to imply, if she did not exactly assert, that his death was quite as great a blow to her as to the old man.”

“And when we remember what Bill’s estimate of her was!” cries Lavinia, reddening with indignation. “Oh, if we could but tell her of his saying that he should have to put barbed wire round himself whenever he went outside the gate to prevent her getting at him!”

They both laugh--the little rueful laugh with which the jests of the departed are recalled.

“After they had gone,” pursues Rupert, “when he sent for me, I found him still in a terrible state. I have never seen him in such an ungovernable fury. Not with me--to me he was like a pet lamb.”

Again they both laugh a little grimly, conscious of the extreme audacity of the comparison.

“You will not believe it,” says Rupert, half humorously, and yet with a quiver of emotion on his sensitive face, “but he actually _thanked_ me for coming to his rescue! _Me_, if you please, _moi qui vous parle_!”

“‘It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’” replies Lavinia, cheerfully, but with conscious effort, and with the feeling, often before experienced, that a good deal of physical fatigue attends living over the crater of Etna.”

“He calmed down after a while. I spent all the bad language I was master of, and wished it had been more, upon the whole Prince clan; and that did him good, so much so that he was able by-and-by to talk of something else.”

“Of what else?” The question is an idle one, and Miss Carew is conscious of it.

So is Rupert. “I expect that you know,” he answers quietly.

Never until to-day has Lavinia felt _gêne_ in the presence of her lifelong playfellow and comrade, and that she should do so now strikes her as so monstrous an anomaly that it must be treated drastically.

“About our marriage, do you mean?” she inquires, taking the bull by the horns, and looking him full in the face.

“Yes.”

“H’m!” Struggle as she may, her lips can produce nothing more forthcoming than the monosyllable.

“He asked me whether the engagement still existed?”

“So he did me.”

“Whether we had any intention of fulfilling it?”

“Ditto!”

“Whether it was essential to our happiness?”

“Essential to our happiness,” repeats she, as if it were a dictation lesson.

“He said that we were all that he had left in the world.”

Lavinia nods, speech seeming difficult. Is Rupert going to recapitulate, in his father’s unsparing Saxon, the reason for that father’s anxiety to see them wed? She waits in rosy dread. It is a moment or two before relief comes.

“He ended by adjuring me not to marry you in order to please him. I think I was able to reassure him as to that not being my primary inducement.”

They know each other far too well for her not to be instantly aware of an alteration in his voice--not to have an instant’s flashed certainty that the playmate, the comrade, the brother-cousin, is gone, and that the lover stands full-fledged in their stead before her. Whether the conviction causes her pain or pleasure, she could not tell you. She only feels as she has done in the morning, but a thousandfold more so, that the situation is overpoweringly _odd_.

“Well!” she says slowly, afraid to look away from him, lest she should never again be able to lift her stupidly rebellious eyes to his.

“I suppose it was bound to come, some time or other?”

It is not an effusive mode of acquiescence.

“Have you nothing more to say about it?”

If she had had any doubt as to the final banishment out of her life of the boy-comrade, the method of this question, and a certain reproachful enterprise divined in the asker’s eye, would have banished it.

“What more is there to say?” she returns in troubled haste. “What more than we have been saying all our lives, in a way?” Then, with a sudden impulsive throwing herself on his judgment and mercy, “I suppose we _do_ feel all right, don’t we?”