Chapter VIII

The spring--or is it the spring?--has been playing its genial game with Mrs. Prince, too, as is evident by the restored importance of her gait, as she sweeps out of the orchid-house, whither Lavinia has pursued her, and by the smoothed and satisfied visage--changed, indeed, from that which she had worn two months ago in announcing her daughter’s mysterious correspondence with the Cavalry Officer Commanding at Canterbury--which she turns towards her visitor.

“Did you walk,” she asks, “this warm day? Sir George wanted the horses, I suppose? It must be awkward having only one pair. If I had known, I should have been so delighted to send for you!”

There is sincere welcome in words and voice, coupled with that touch of patronage which--as employed towards a member of the oldest and somewhile most important family of the countryside, Mrs. Prince and Lavinia have--before the former’s parental woes had made both forget it--found respectively so agreeable and so galling.

“Thanks, but I like walking.”

“Féo will be here in a minute. I told them to let her know the moment you arrived. She is with her patients! She is never anywhere else now! Thrown up all her engagements; devotes herself wholly to them.”

It is clear that, in pre-Candle days, Mrs. Prince had said “’olly;” but the victory over the early infirmity is so complete as to be marked only by an intensity of aspirate unknown to those whose _h_’s have grown up with them.

“It is certainly the most unobjectionable craze she has ever had!” replies Lavinia, whose withers are still slightly wrung by the allusion to her horselessness; and who is reflecting how much less under-bred a thing adversity is than prosperity.

“When I say ‘patients,’” pursues Mrs. Prince, not in the least offended by, in fact, not hearing, Miss Carew’s observation, “I ought to put it in the singular; for I must own she does not take much notice of poor Smethurst”--pausing to laugh; then, proceeding in a tone of wondering admiration, “Isn’t it astonishing what they do in the way of surgery now? Nurse Blandy tells me that they are going--the doctors, I mean--to make him a new end to his nose, and turn his lip inside out, and I don’t know what all!”

“Poor creature! How terrible!”--shuddering.

“As for the other one, Binning, there is nothing good enough for him! At first she was all for nursing him entirely herself, not letting Nurse Blandy, no, nor Nurse Rice either, go near him; but there her father put his foot down!--you know Mr. Prince _does_ put his foot down now and then--and he said to her, ‘No, Féo, my child, you may turn my house into a shambles’--we thought then there would have to be an operation--‘and a drug store, but I will not have my daughter lay herself open to a prosecution for manslaughter; and that is what it would come to--for as sure as ever you nurse him, he’ll die!”

Lavinia had not felt inclined to laugh before, but she now smiles broadly in pleased approval.

“She was mad at first,” continues the narrator; “but she had to give in; and I really do not see that she has much to complain of, for she is with him all day, and half the night!”

Lavinia hopes that the slight shudder with which she hears this statement--a shudder born of a compassion sharper and deeper than poor Mr. Smethurst’s ingloriously shattered features had called forth--is not visible to the eye of Miss Prince’s mother.

“Of course, at first,” pursues the latter, “the great attraction was that he had been in General ----’s Brigade--that dreadful business!”--with a distressful crease of reminiscence on her placid brow. “It seems like a horrible nightmare now! Yet, for the last day or two, I can’t help thinking it is for himself that she is so taken up with him.” After a moment’s reflection, “Well, after all, we know that he must be a fine fellow, by what he has done; and though all his people are in India, I fancy he is highly connected.”

The trend of the mother’s thoughts towards future developments is apparent. But Lavinia is spared the effort to hide how dearly, in her opinion, the wounded officer would buy his cure under the contingency glanced at, by the appearance of Féodorovna herself--Féodorovna, beautified, vivified, animated almost past recognition. It is not only that Miss Prince wears the most becoming of created garbs, whose bewitchingness many a mother of succumbing sons has cursed--the dress of a nurse; but her very features seem to have lost some of their poverty and paltriness; and gained in meaning and interest.

“Will you come at once, please? Mother, you have no right to delay Lavinia,” she says, scarcely sparing time for the curtest greeting. “He expects you, and a sick man should never be kept waiting.”

There is the authority and importance if a certificated official in voice and manner, and Lavinia would be sarcastically amused, if once again and more strongly than before, that trepidating dread of the coming interview had not laid hold of her.

“I am ready,” she answers quietly. “I was only waiting for you.” She is fighting tooth and nail with her agitation; telling herself what a Bedlamite thing it is, all the way across the tesselated marble of the pretentious sitting-hall, up the flights of the profoundly carpeted stairs, through the hot-water-warmed passages; and in outward appearance it is conquered by the time they reach and pause at a closed door.

“You must understand that he is not to be agitated in any way; that you must not approach any painful subject,” says Féodorovna, in an exasperating whisper of command.

“Wouldn’t it be better to put it off?” asks Miss Carew, in jarred recoiling from the just-opening portal; but her companion frowns her down.

The bed is in a recess of the room, and the window-blind, partly drawn down in defence against the westering blaze, confuses Miss Carew’s sight; besides which her feet have halted near the threshold to allow time for her own introduction, so that she hears the voice before she sees the face of the wounded man.

“Miss Carew has come to see you!” Féodorovna explains, in a tiresome _carneying_ voice, leaning over the pillows. “But you must send her away the moment you are tired of her; and you must not let her talk to you about anything that is not quite pleasant and cheerful.”

Thus agreeably heralded by an implication of her own morose garrulity, Lavinia approaches the invalid, hearing his answer, “I am exceedingly grateful to her,” before she sees his face.

Often and often, in after-days, the fact that his first words concerning her were an expression of gratitude recurs to her with a sense of the keenest irony.

“Do you wish to be _tête-à-tête_?” asks Féodorovna, when the whole and the sick have silently touched each other’s hands; “or had you rather I would stay?” and the answer, courteous in its subtlety--

“I am sure that you ought to rest; I am ashamed to think of how much you have been doing for me to-day,” is divined by Lavinia to be not what the asker had expected.

However, without flagrant breach of her own axiom, that a sick man is not to be thwarted, she cannot avoid compliance, and with an officious parting question, “Where shall she sit? Would you like her to be beside you, or where you can see her better?” and a final fussing over phials and drinks, takes her cap, her apron, and her cuffs away.

A sense of relief at her departure, coupled with a strong, shy impulse to follow her, and that again with a far stronger one to snatch another look at the just-glanced-at face of him for whom Bill had died, join to silence Lavinia for the first moment or two. That the wish to be acquainted with each other’s features must be reciprocal, is proved by the sick man’s first words--

“Would you mind sitting in that chair?”

Her eyes first seek, then follow the direction of his, to see which chair he means; and by the time she sits down obediently in it, they both know--will know to the end of their lives--what each looks like.

He has been a strong man, will be a strong man again, thank God!

Why should she thank God for it? She flashes herself the inward question, with an already catching breath. Large-framed, and as he lies on his back in bed he looks prodigiously long, far longer than he really is; and, thanks to the falling-in of his cheeks, his eyes, which in their normal state must be of no greater size than they ought to be--and saucer-eyes are no beauty in a man--oppress her with the large intentness of their gaze. In their depths she seems to read an acquaintance with death that has yet not flinched from him; but she knows that it is not death which is looking out at her from them.

“Thank you for coming.”

“I liked to come.” She is sitting perfectly quiet; instinct and experience combining to tell her how many sick-beds have cursed the rustling gown, the meddling fingers, and the lugubriously watching eye. Her repose seems to enter like balm into his soul.

“You have been used to nursing?” he asks, though it sounds more like an assertion than a question.

“Sometimes, when they have been ill, I have nursed”--“my men,” she is going to say; but checks herself: to a perfect stranger she must not employ her silly home-phrases--“I have nursed my uncle several times, and Rupert twice, and--Bill once.” Her voice drops at framing the name which forms the one sad link between them; and she has time to reproach herself for having had the maladroitness and bad taste to introduce it before Binning speaks again.

“Thank you for mentioning him to me,” he says, physical weakness making him less master of his emotion than she divines that he would normally be. “I was afraid that you would not be able to bear it.”

A panic of remorse at having done exactly what his improvised nurse had forbidden her to do, and at once introduced a painful and agitating theme, chokes for an imperceptible moment Lavinia’s answer. It is only the reflection that, as a golden rule, whatever Féodorovna says or bids is sure to have common sense and right as its exact opposite, calms her, and gives her the power of steady and reassuring response.

“We always talk of him.”

“But to _me_?” he says, struggling in his agitation into what her nurse-instinct tells her to be a forbidden effort to sit up.

At once her noiseless gown and her noble still figure are beside him.

“You must not get excited!” she says, laying a capable cool hand on his gaunt shoulder; and at once he lies back, with a sudden sense of intense well-being.

“I felt that you must all hate me,” he says in almost a whisper; and she answers slow and stilly--

“I do not think we do.”

At that he lies content a while, drinking her in with the privileged directness of the sick. What hair! What a beautiful, generous, rather large mouth! What a divine sorrowful pity! What would have become of him, if the likely, the almost certain, had happened, and she _had_ hated him?

And Lavinia! He is the first to meet her eyes of the costly wreckage with which the South African storm has strewn the shores of the motherland; he is the comrade for whose life dear brave Bill thought it a small thing to lay down his own; and as she knows that the deed which has stretched him in suffering and weakness before her was as madly gallant as the one by whose means he lived to do it, is it any wonder that she stands in a tranced silence, drinking him in, as he is drinking her?

“I felt it very strongly when his father came to see me,” says Binning, presently, still scarcely above his breath, and harking back to the fears he had expressed of being abhorred by his dead friend’s family.

“It did him good to talk to you!” After a second or two, “He did not grudge Bill--we none of us did; and it is the very death that Bill himself would have chosen.”

“Yes; I know it is.”

There is, or she thinks it, a kind of envy in the acquiescent voice.

“And we all felt that you would have changed places with him if you could, wouldn’t you?”

The surface motive of the speech is the kind and Christian one of bringing comfort to a spirit that she divines to be as sorely wounded as the brave body that holds it; but underneath there lurks another, scarcely known even to herself. It is the question she had put to Rupert two months ago--to Rupert, the unblushing candour of whose answering negative had given her one of those accesses of repulsion towards him, which for the future it will be a crime for her to indulge. A feverish and senseless curiosity prompts her to repeat it now.

“Yes, I would.”

There is no asseveration to strengthen the assent; yet it carries a conviction as deep--nay, much deeper, for she had tried not to believe the latter--than Rupert’s confession that he would much rather not have died for his brother. Retribution speedily overtakes her, in the sting of sudden pain caused by the contrast she herself has brought out, into salience; and conscious of the unworthiness of her double motive, she finds herself unable to bear the gratitude of his eyes. They are hazel, and have eagleish yellow lights in them, as one part of herself tells another part some time after she has left him.

“It was such a strange coincidence that I should be sent here!” he says presently, moving his languid head so that he may get a better view of her, for she has sat down again, a little way off; “that _I_, of all people, should be the first result of Miss Prince’s request to General ---- at Canterbury to have some of us to nurse. When I realized what neighbourhood it was that I was to be brought to--when I heard that you were near neighbours, I had almost given it up at the last moment!”

“We should have been sorry for that.”

There is a measured reassuring kindness in her words; but he feels suddenly chilled. It must strike her own ears as too measured; for she adds--

“We should have liked to have had you ourselves; my uncle has said so repeatedly; but we have no appliances! We could not have made you nearly so comfortable as you are here!”

His eyes, large with leanness, roll round the spacious airiness of the apartment.

“I am in the lap of luxury!” he says; but though there is gratitude in his tone, enthusiasm is absent.

After that they are silent for a little space. He must be talking too much. She has been enjoined not to tire him, and _if she sends up his temperature, she will not be allowed to come again_! The first two are confessed apprehensions walking boldly up the front stairs of her mind. The third, on shoeless feet, is creeping up the back! To him, it appears that her last retirement to her chair has left her more distant than at first, and he marvels at the subtlety of his own ruse to bring her back to the bedside.

“Would you mind telling me the name of the flowers you are wearing?”

“Wood anemones.”

“Do they smell good?”

“I do not think they have any scent.” There is a moment’s struggle between the maiden and the nurse in her; and then the nurse prevails. “Would you like to try?” she asks, with her first smile--first epoch-making curving into dimples of her grave mouth.

She is beside him once again, and gives the blossoms into his fever-wasted hand. He holds them gratefully to his nostrils; and it is, of course, by accident that they touch his lips too.

“Not smell! Why, they have the whole blessed spring crammed into them!”

Again she smiles--her slow, rich smile--not claiming her posy--Rupert’s posy--back; but just standing by him, enjoying his enjoyment. Not, however, for long. The door opens with a fidgetingly careful turning of the handle, and a needlessly cautious foot crosses the carpet. Féodorovna, a bovril-bearing tray in her hand, stands between them.

“You are quite worn out!” she says, in a voice of mixed condolence and counsel. “Miss Carew shall not stay a moment longer! She shall go at once!”

The tone implies that Lavinia has shamelessly outstayed her welcome, and her cheek burns for a moment, then resumes its cool pink. Féodorovna means no offence. It is only her way of showing what an adept she is in her new profession. The speech’s effect upon the patient is a much stronger one.

“Oh no! Why should she?” he exclaims energetically, with another of those forbidden struggles of his to sit up.

In authoritatively compelling him into recumbence again, Miss Prince’s cap-strings somehow get into her victim’s eyes. Lavinia’s last sight of him is lying back exhausted by the remedies applied, much more than by his own imprudent movement; smiling faintly, with a patience much superior even to that which he had exhibited while lying wounded at the donga-bottom, through the endless hours of the winter night; _smiling_, while Féodorovna, taking it for granted that he feels faint, fans him with a vigour that makes the end of his pinched nose and his tired eyelids tremble.