Chapter XXIII

“Why, he but sleeps!
If he be dead, we’ll make his grave his bed;
With female fairies shall thy tomb be haunted.”

Mrs. Darcy has always set her face strongly against forenoon visitors. The claims of the parish upon her time have never--thorough-going, though not enthusiastic, clergywoman as she is--preferred at whatever hour of the day or night, found her wanting. Always the dispensary ticket, the medicine-chest, the patient ear, the sensible counsel, the wisely sharp rebuke, the warm fellow-feeling in trouble, are ready. But that idle country neighbours should drive the ploughshare of their vacuity through the furrows of her already overfilled forenoon, when they might just as easily bestow their tediousness upon her comparatively free afternoon, is beyond the limits of her patience. Her soul, though taking up its task from the beginning, with the same handsome willingness as her slender body, has from the first revolted against being nothing but a clergywoman.

“When I married,” she has said to her one intimate, Lavinia Carew, “I told myself that, however much I might live in a kailyard, I would _not_ be a cabbage. I would have all the new books, the reviews, and the _heavy_ magazines, and would be quite up to date; but, my dear, I reckoned without my host. I did not forecast the frequency with which Sam Smith would come in with a broken head, and that ass Féodorovna with a broken heart.”

Yet it is that very Féodorovna who, accompanied by her mother--a mode of expression which fits their mutual relations--now sits at 11.30 on the morning of the day that follows Rupert’s first outing in the Chestnuts Bath chair, in the Rectory drawing-room, without exciting any symptoms of protest on her hostess’s part. All three women are crying, but, since there are as many modes of weeping as of laughter, each in a distinctly different way. Two perfectly silent tears--evidently escaped convicts, with protesting warders behind them--are making their forbidden way down Susan Darcy’s pallid cheeks; Féodorovna has buried her face in the sofa cushion, with much appropriate flourish of White-Rose scented cambric; and Mrs. Prince is sobbing in that bang-out-loud perfectly unbridled way which betrays her plebeian origin.

“Oh, Cara!” Miss Prince has just sighed out, “if you would try to control yourself! if you would not make _quite_ so much noise!”

Mrs. Prince knows that when her daughter addresses her as “Cara,” she has about touched the nadir of that young lady’s good opinion, and she makes an honest effort to check her sniffs and gulps.

“It is enough to make any one break down!” she weeps in deprecation--“to think that only last evening Sir George took the trouble to ride over to thank us for the loan of the Bath chair, and to tell us what a world of good it had done the poor fellow! I told him we were only too glad! After all, what is the use of wealth if it isn’t----” Mrs. Darcy makes a restless movement. Its owner’s exposition of the philanthropic aspect of the Candle’s functions is more than she can quite stand at the moment. “And to think that it was not from the injury to the brain after all!” resumes the only momentarily interrupted lamenter; “that it should have been that scratch on the leg that none of us thought anything of! A _clot!_--that seems the last word of everything now! A _clot_, or suppressed gout--or cancer! To one of the three we must all come at last, it seems!”

They remain heavily silent for a minute or two, the great master of joy and sorrow’s lines ringing in Mrs. Darcy’s head--

“Golden lads and lasses must,
Like chimney-sweepers, turn to dust.”

“I suppose that there is no doubt about it _this_ time?” Féodorovna asks in a tone of refined affliction, intended to contrast in the highest degree with her parent’s vulgar grief. “Once already he seems to have actually come back from the dead! But this time I suppose there is absolutely no----”

“Absolutely none.”

“Would you mind telling us exactly how it all happened?” inquires Mrs. Prince, with a sort of diffidence born of the recollection of how very much the rector’s wife had appeared to shrink from the narration of the original accident. “It seems a shame to trouble you; but really, trifling as the distance is from here to the Chestnuts, it is astonishing how things manage to get garbled in the mouths of the domestics.” Mrs. Prince always calls servants “domestics.”

“Yes, I will tell you,” replies Mrs. Darcy, dabbing her eyes hastily with a pocket-handkerchief, which at once returns to her pocket, nor remains _en évidence_ like the other two. The sense of that former relation is strong on her memory also; but it is coupled with the feeling of how much less painful and difficult the present one is than its predecessor. Here there is nothing to wince at or glide over; no opening for implication or suspicion. “He had been talking to Lavinia while she gave him his tea; she had left him, thinking him a little tired, but quite naturally and healthily so after the unusual exertion of going out of doors for the first time; and about half an hour later he rang for the footman--you know that since the nurse went he has been waited on by the ordinary staff, and wonderfully little trouble he gave--and said he should like to go to bed. He undressed without any help, and was just going to get into bed when the servant, who had gone to the other side of the room to fetch something, heard him call out, ‘Quick! the brandy!’ He ran to him as fast as he could, but by the time he got to him he was----”

“Dead?”

Mrs. Darcy bends her head, as if in reverence as well as acquiescence.

“A clot?”

“Yes.”

“And there was no one but the footman in the room? Which one was it? Oh, but I forget, since poor Bill went they only keep one!” After a moment’s pause, “I should not like to die with only a footman in the room.”

Mrs. Darcy is too profoundly sad to see the ludicrousness of the sentiment expressed; nor even to point out that, in the good gentlewoman’s case, such a contingency is not likely to occur. She goes to the open French window, and stands leaning her hot head against the jamb. Susan had always grumbled that mignonette would not grow with her; had rejoiced that this year the seed which she had imported from France had given her an abundance of that chancey fragrance; but now she feels in angry pain that the perfume from the bed at her foot is too violent in its sweetness. She will never get seed from Paris again.

“‘Quick! the brandy’!” she hears Féodorovna’s voice repeating from the sofa with a species of shocked reluctance. “One could have wished that his last words had not been quite those!”

“Oh, what does it matter what his last words were? What does it matter what any one’s last words are? We may all be thankful if we get off at the last, saying nothing worse than that!” cries Mrs. Darcy, turning round upon the speaker in a frenzy of nervous exasperation.

It is not often that the rector’s wife allows herself the dear indulgence of lashing out at Féodorovna; probably because she knows with what a right good will her heels, if given free scope, would flourish figuratively in Miss Prince’s silly face. The unaccustomed rebuff sends its object toque forwards again into the sofa cushion, from which, however, she emerges rather hurriedly, expelled by a toy rabbit hidden beneath it by Serena on her last visit to the drawing-room, and which squeaks when pressed.

“It seems so dreadful to have it all to do over again, as you may say,” ejaculates the elder visitor, presently. “How do they take it _this_ time?”

“The old man is completely broken down,” comes the response in a key of quivering pity. “But Lavinia is very brave.” The moment that the phrase is out of her mouth, Susan dislikes and regrets it. How redolent it is of mock-grief! What a decent euphemism for the exultation that dares not yet awhile show its face! How often has she heard it applied to a widow for whom the lover--kept in comparative obscurity during many impatient years--is waiting round the corner to pounce upon when the grudged twelvemonth is out! Fortunately, the expression seems to have no such association for her auditors.

“Poor girl! she will break down later!” is Mrs. Prince’s compassionate comment, uttered with a sort of satisfaction at the certainty of Lavinia’s ultimate collapse.

“Perhaps.”

“It is so impossible to realize that only this time yesterday they sent us back the leg-rest. I believe they had never used it.”

“There had been no need for it.”

“‘In the midst of life we are in death!’ Oh how true that is!”

“But oh, mother, how _banal_!” cries Féodorovna, disgustedly. “And you have said it three times already!”

It is the one solitary instance in their two existences in which Mrs. Darcy is “with” Miss Prince. But the insult to her “parts of speech” brings the parent up to one of her rare revolts against the tyranny of her offspring.

“Well,” she retorts tartly, “I suppose we cannot always, all of us, be original. After all, there is nothing very original in death and sorrow--and--and judgment!”

“Oh, but that poor text _is_ worn so threadbare; it has hardly a rag of clothes left on its back! Well, good-bye, Mrs. Darcy,” taking the initiative in departure, as she always does when visiting in her mother’s company. “Tell Lavinia that though she will not see me, I am with her incessantly in spirit. _She_ knows that _I_ know what sorrow is.”

Mrs. Prince follows with her blunter adieux. “Well, good-bye. Give the poor things any message from me you can make up that you think will comfort them. And if there is any difficulty about catering--in these cases there is always a good deal of coming and going, and consequent eating and drinking--just tell Lavinia to send everybody straight up to the Chestnuts. In an establishment of the size of ours, half a dozen more or less make no sort of difference. Well, good-bye, again. I am terribly upset. I think it is a hundred times worse than last time!”

But from this assertion of the superior tragedy of the present drama to that enacted on the same stage seven weeks ago, Mrs. Darcy’s whole soul dissents. In the relief of recovered solitude she goes once again to the French window, once again leans her hot head against the jamb, but this time, in the intensity of her thinking, the over-sweetness of the mignonette in the bed at her feet goes unnoticed. The shows of things pass before her in their utter falsity, shouldered away by the underlying realities. To outward seeming how incomparably sadder it appears that Rupert should be rent away from life just when--as if in brutal practical jest--he had been restored to her warm mother’s arms; just when hope was wheeling round him on her strong pinions, and love--

“With turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,”

than that he should be transferred from bed to grave, for ever unconscious of the change!

Yet to her whom his going or staying most concerns, how beyond all words less terrible is this real death of the young man than the counterfeit one of seven weeks ago! Seven weeks ago he would have departed in relentless silence, unpursuable through the infinities of eternity by any agony of prayer or pleading, leaving behind him a wretched woman with her debt for ever uncancelled, with the hounds of remorse for ever on her track. Whereas now, as Susan has already learnt from her to whom by his graceful dying he has renounced all claim, he has departed in magnanimous reconcilement, and selfless forethought for that future of hers in which he will have no share. Yes; it has been well done of him thus to die, tactful, like himself! She articulates the word under her breath, and, hearing them, catches herself up, aghast at the drift of her own musings.

Is it possible that she can have allowed a little satisfaction in such a calamity to creep into her mind? a little furtive thankfulness at her friend’s release from the meshes of that terrible net which the fowler Fate had spread for her? Has she--she herself--no pity for the old man, who, as all the parish now knows, has the hand of Death--though a temporarily suspended hand--upon him? The old man out of whose weak grasp the staff has been ruthlessly knocked, before the few more steps during which he would have asked its support, have been paced? Has she no pity for the young man himself, mulcted of five and forty of his seventy due years, juggled out of bride and hearth, pitchforked into the unknown? Rupert had always gone to the wall. What a willing hand she herself had until lately--once again she thanks God that there is a “till lately”--lent to thrust and keep him there! Rupert has once more gone to the wall! Rupert is “out of the way!” Never in his lifetime would he have willingly been in it; but now he is finally “out of the way!”