Chapter IX

Féodorovna has ejected her so early that she need not go home at once. This is Lavinia’s first thought on getting outside the house. It is but rarely that Miss Carew is not wanted in her own little _milieu_; but to-day she would be superfluous. Her uncle and Rupert are busy with the lawyer, who has come down from London--busy over settlements: a settlement upon herself; provision for the younger children--her younger children, hers and Rupert’s! If she walk very fast, perhaps she may outwalk this last thought. But it is a good walker; it keeps up with her. Possibly she might lose it in the wood. The idea results in a _détour_, which will involve passing through a portion of it. The word “wood” is perhaps a misnomer, for the grown trees are few and sparse; and yet by what other name can you describe these silvan miles of young chestnut, oak, and birch growths, that every ten years fall beneath the hatchet, to continually renew their tireless upspringing? Where only recently amputated stumps remain, the flowers grow far the lushest.

She pauses on reaching a spot where a quarter-acre of ground is utterly given over to the innocent loveliness of the cuckoo-flower, dog-violet, primrose, “firstborn child of Ver,” and purpling wood anemone. She stands looking down at them, as if she had never seen them before; as if these lowly, lifelong friends were the new-seen blossoms of a nobler planet. What has happened to her senses, that she sees and hears and smells with such three-fold keenness? Why does she feel so startlingly alive? The wonder drives Rupert’s younger children successfully into the background of her mind. Yet this bounding new consciousness of the splendour of life--life actual, this bursting irrepressible life of the field and the woodland--and life possible--cannot answer, when the roll-call of emotions is called, to the name of pleasure.

Life possible!--it is a hooded anonymous thing, that she dare not interrogate. In its presence her thoughts draw in their antennæ, like a sea-creature’s suddenly touched. She starts away from the little woodland garden, and walks hurriedly on, down a rough cart-track, rutty and caked with the winter’s dried mud. Foolish extravagant analogies and comparisons dart through her brain--not only dart, but tarry and pitch tents there. Her life has been like this parched wintry road--a dull track for heavy-wheeled days to grind and plough along; now it has turned suddenly into a blossoming brake. Her eyes lift themselves in a frightened rapture to where the descending sun’s beams thread with evening light the lovely thin green of the birches, exquisitely breaking and shaming the tardier chestnuts.

“It is the spring!” she says to herself. “It has always made me feel drunk!”

But the long vista of branches, all brownly, redly, greenly bursting, with opulent variety of ideas, ahead of her, tells her that she lies.

* * * * *

Sir George is on the look out for her when she reaches home, and the sight of his familiar figure, coupled with a remorseful fear of having been wanted and not been within reach--an almost unparalleled occurrence in her history--pulls her down to fact and earth again, without a moment’s delay. Yet a single glance at her uncle’s face tells her that, despite her truancy, she finds him in the best possible of humours.

“And where have you been gadding, miss?” he asks, in a tone that reveals the highest complacency of which one so habitually gloomy is capable.

“I thought you were busy with Mr. Ingram,” she answers, involuntarily shirking the question.

“And so we have been,” returns he, his sombre face breaking into a smile; “both Rupert and I! And very glad you ought to be that we have.”

“Ought I?”

“I was determined that you should have no excuse for wishing to hurry me off,” continues Sir George, with rather acrid pleasantry, that has yet every intention of being agreeable. “After all, what do I want?--a crust and a glass of Marsala, an armchair and a pipe. So I have made over the whole of his mother’s money to Rupert, and he has settled every penny of it on you and your children.”

For a moment or two Lavinia is quite silent. Possibly surprise at her uncle’s flight of imagination in the matter of the exiguity of his own needs; possibly also choking gratitude; and possibly, again, the sudden confrontation with the younger children, whom she had thought to have buried in the wood, keep her dumb.

“You are very good to me,” she answers at last, in a tone which sounds to herself the _ne plus ultra_ of thankless flatness; but in which her hearer happily recognizes only an acknowledgment, faltering from the excess of its obligation.

“Whom else have we got to be good to but our little Mosquito?” he asks, using the perfectly inappropriate pet-name which has always indicated the high-water mark of his favour. “And now that we have her safe for life--I have sometimes had my misgivings as to our doing that--we must do what we can for her; yes, we must do what we can for her!”

There is always something oppressive in the lightness of the habitually heavy, in the jollity of the habitually morose; and Sir George’s elation sits like lead upon his niece’s heart. She reproaches herself bitterly for it. Has not her whole life’s aim been to make him happy? And now that by his manner he is showing a cheerfulness higher than he had ever enjoyed even before the news of Bill’s death reached him, by what odious perversity are her own spirits dropping down to zero? Her one consolation is that he departs complacently, without the dimmest suspicion of her mental attitude. With Rupert--Rupert, who knows her like the palm of his own hand--her task will be incalculably harder. It has to be undertaken almost immediately; for her betrothed at once takes his father’s place.

“Has he told you?” asks the young man, coming up to her, as she stands slowly pulling off her gloves by the needless drawing-room fire. “Isn’t it splendid of him? He would have stripped himself even more entirely if I had let him--to the bone, in fact.”

The speaker’s eyes, sometimes gently cynical, are alive and shining with recent emotion, gratitude, and pleasure. In them she also reads the desire for an embrace. Why she does not meet it with the not particularly reluctant acquiescence that is usual to her, she could not tell you, if you had asked her. With tactful self-denial, Rupert at once resigns his pretensions to a congratulatory kiss.

“He called me ‘my boy’ over and over again!” he says, with a gratification none the less intense for being quiet. “You know that I always feel as if I could die a hundred deaths for him, when he calls me ‘my boy.’”

“You are a ‘Boy’ and I am a ‘Mosquito’!” replies she, with what she feels to be a hateful dry laugh. Hitherto one of the qualities she has most admired in her cousin has been the gentle forgivingness and self-restraint which has characterized his attitude towards his father--the filial piety, which has survived so many buffets. Now she tells herself that the sentiment which makes his voice quiver is hysterical, and that a man’s tears should not be so near his eyes. No one but Rupert, however--and she trusts that not even he--would read these harsh comments between the lines of the hastily candid “Yes, I know you would,” with which she supplements her first utterance.

Does his changing the subject mean that he comprehends? Impossible! Yet he does change it.

“Rather an unlucky thing has happened,” he says, in a voice that has altered, like his theme. “You have heard me mention Dubary Jones?”

For a moment she looks perfectly vague, then, “Of course I have! He introduced you to the editor of the _Flail_; and he writes poetry himself?”

It is the measure of how far her thoughts have strayed from Rupert and his group of æsthetics, that she should be so painstakingly detailed in proving that they have come back.

“His translations of Verlaine were very remarkable, if you remember,” replies Rupert, kindly jogging her memory. It needs the assistance given, presenting for the time a perfect blank as to what the bard in question’s bid for immortality consists of. “I have had a wire from him, asking me to put him up for the night. He is staying with the Tanquerays. He has been of great use to me in various ways, and I did not quite like to refuse him.”

Between each sentence the young man makes a slight pause, as if to give room for an expression of approval or acquiescence, but it is not before the full stop at the end that Lavinia is ready.

“Of course you accepted him? You were perfectly right. What else could you do?”

“It is a nuisance that it should have happened at this moment. My father will not be able to endure him; as I have often told you about him--he is _like me, only more so_!” Rupert smiles rather humorously, relieved at her acceptance of his news.

She gives a smile too; but there is a shudder under it--a shudder which recurs more than once during the dinner and evening that follow, when, faithful to her lifelong profession of buffer, she draws the conversation of Mr. Dubary Jones upon herself, to avert the catastrophe that must ensue if it is directed to Sir George. In a party of four it is no easy task to prevent the talk becoming general; but ably seconded by Rupert, and by the exercise of ceaseless vigilance, attention, and civility, Miss Carew succeeds in securing the couple of _tête-à-têtes_, by which only a thunderbolt can be warded off. But while kindly and graciously smiling, listening, and asking, Rupert’s descriptive phrase, “_like me, only more so_,” drips like melted lead upon her heart. Does she indeed see before her what Rupert will come to in the ten years by which his friend is richer than he? Is this his logical conclusion?--this little decadent, who is trying to fit his conversation to a hostess whom he suspects of being sporting?

“How delightful hunting must be!”

She assents, “Very.”

“And shooting! That must be so exciting!”

Again she acquiesces with creditable gravity, adding that salmon-fishing is considered by many people to be the most engrossing of sports.

For a moment he looks nonplussed, and at a loss for a suitable rejoinder; but quickly recovering himself, says brightly--

“Oh yes, it must be great fun, skipping from rock to rock.”

This evidence of how clearly he has grasped the nature of the amusement alluded to, finishes her for a while; but she presently recovers, as he has done, and for the rest of dinner they continue under the almost insuperable difficulties indicated, the class of conversation which he supposes suited to her capacity and tastes; nor does she care to undeceive him.

After all, contemptible and uncongenial as he is, and hideous as is the thought that the rudiments of him lie in Rupert, Lavinia has reason to be grateful to the translator of Verlaine. But for him she would have had to undergo a close interrogatory as to her visit of the afternoon. She catches herself up in mid-congratulation. Why should it be to undergo? Why should she mind retailing the little incidents which must be of equal interest to all three of them? What that is not good and touching is there to tell--whether it be the man’s affecting fear lest he should be unendurable in all their eyes, or the heroic patience with which he bears the cruel kindness of Féodorovna’s terrible ministrations? Yet she cannot help a feeling of discreditable relief that the tale which must be told is by the stranger’s presence deferred till next morning.

And next morning, sure enough, the demand for it comes. An early train removes Mr. Dubary Jones, and Sir George having dismissed him with the comparatively Christian observation that he wonders what Rupert can see in such a despicable little worm, and having added the still more Christian rider that he supposes all tastes are respectable, gladly changes the subject for the dreaded one--now better prepared for than it was last evening.

“So you saw Binning! Come into the study, and tell me all about him.”

She tells him all, repeats almost word for word the little talk--_how_ little!--that had passed between them, keeping back for herself only the one tiny episode of the wood anemones. Sir George is perfectly indifferent to flowers, and could not enter into a sick man’s craving for their grace and perfume. Talk with her uncle has throughout her life meant judicious suppressions; yet this one small kept-back piece of the price of her land makes her feel like Ananias.

“He said much the same sort of thing to me,” is her hearer’s half-disappointed comment. “No doubt he will repeat it to Rupert to-day.”

“Is Rupert going to see him to-day?”

“I have made a point of it. I confess I rather wonder that the proposal did not emanate from himself! If the poor fellow has this idea in his head, that we shrink from him, we must do all we can to drive it out.”

Lavinia nods slightly. Difficulties loom vaguely ahead of her, born of this utterance, yet her heart feels suddenly light. Can it be because a vista of possible repetitions of yesterday open before her?

“And though I may not rate our society very highly,” pursues Sir George, with one of his scarce smiles, “I think it may, perhaps, compare not unfavourably with Féo’s.”

Lavinia turns to go, thinking her task ended, and relieved that it is over. But another awaits her.

“Stop!” says Sir George. “Why are you in such a hurry to run away? I have not half done with you yet.” There is great kindness, and the unwonted pleasure of being conscious that he is about to give pleasure in his voice, and in the gesture with which he draws towards him and opens one after another half a dozen obviously not new jewel-cases. “They have not seen the light for nearly twenty years,” he says, passing his hand with a movement that is almost a caress over the faded velvet of one of them. “I suppose the settings are old-fashioned, but I believe the stones are good; I know that the pearls are. Garrard took five years collecting them one by one! The--the person who last wore them was very proud of them.”

It is the nearest approach Sir George has ever made towards mentioning his departed wife to Lavinia, and she listens in reverent silence.

He has taken the string of pearls from its long-occupied bed, and, holding it between his fingers, eyes it pensively. Then, stretching hand and necklace out to her, he says, in a voice of command, whose harshness is the cover for an emotion that it angers him should have escaped from its two decades of prison in his heart--

“Put it on! Wear it always!”

She obeys; but her fingers, usually quick and clever, fumble over the diamond clasp.

“I would not give it you till I was quite sure we had really got hold of you!” continues Sir George, regarding with evident satisfaction the jewels--a little discoloured and damaged by their long incarceration, but still beautiful, as they circle his niece’s throat. “Until lately I have had my doubts, but I have been watching. I often notice things, more than you think”--with a shrewd look--“I saw how out of spirits you were in Rupert’s absence, and how you brightened up when he returned, and I said to myself, ‘It is all right.’ So don’t say anything more”--almost pushing her to the door, in obvious dread and yet expectation of the tide of her thanks that must wash over him--“but take them with you, and be off!”

“Am I to say _nothing_?” she stammers.

“Nothing! Actions speak louder than words! Marry Rupert, and give me a grandson as quick as you can!”