Chapter III

The modest, low house on the Kentish hillside, with its pink, rough-cast face, its tall, narrow, eighteenth-century windows, its verandah, the alternate object of summer blessings and winter curses, has been Lavinia Carew’s home ever since her mother had crowned a foolish marriage by a perhaps less foolish death within the year. Being one of those completely unfortunate persons whom Fate seems to delight in belabouring, her husband had predeceased her by a fortnight. Upon the doubly forsaken baby’s nearest blood relation, Sir George Campion, had devolved the choice of two alternatives--that of saddling himself for life with a creature against whose entry into it he had always angrily protested, and that of sending it to the workhouse, and being called an unnatural brute for his pains. He chose the first; though, as everybody said, with a very ill grace. But the people who kindly tried to tell her this in later days could never get Sir George Campion’s niece to believe it.

Yet her life has scarcely been a bed of roses, though love has not been lacking; and her three men have had that immense opinion of her which makes up to most of her sex for any amount of bodily or mental char-ing. Of women in her home, save servants, there have, within her recollection, been none. Marriage is not an institution that seems to thrive in the Campion family, and so early in Lavinia’s history that only the faintest blur of memory of something kind and connected with cakes remains to the girl, her uncle’s wife had slipped inoffensively away to the churchyard, conveniently close to the pink-faced house. Often since she has grown up into sense and thoughtfulness, Lavinia has speculated about that dim lady, of whom no one now ever speaks--all others because they have forgotten her, and one concerning whom no one knows wherefore he is silent--speculated whether in her lifetime she had had as much buffer-work to do as has fallen to Lavinia herself, and whether, not being of so robust a constitution of mind or body, it had ended by killing her. For Lavinia is, and for several years past has been, before all things, a buffer. Has there ever been a day for so long as she can remember, when she has not been called upon to use her characteristic gifts to deaden and smooth and blunt the jars and bumps that her perpetually colliding men are always inflicting upon each other? The fault has nearly always lain with the father, gifted with that most infallible double endowment for ensuring unhappiness in life--a deep heart and an impossible temper.

She is thinking of him with tender ruth next morning as she stands under the verandah, looking across the downward slope of garden, grass, sun-dial, and snowdrop borders, to the spacious view over the Weald of Kent, Hastingswards. On her right, a towering hedge of espaliered elms parts her--it alone and a few unseen green hillocks--from the little red-roofed thirteenth-century church and its emerald God’s acre. From the top of the church tower, it is said that on a clear day you can discern the masts of ships, though not the very sea. To this kind of seeing there goes usually more of imagination than eyesight; but the belief has, since the days of King John, heightened the village’s opinion of itself. To the left the prospect is bounded by the great group of horse-chestnuts, leafless now and purple, in the Rectory garden.

It is to the Rectory that Lavinia is bound--the Rectory, where she gets her fresh eggs, and carries some of her troubles. She is dressed in black for her dead cousin; but the freshness of her cheeks and lips, and the sunshine that lives in her hair, make it always difficult for her to look in mourning. Her spirits are still tender from the emotion of last night, and her thoughts musing pityingly upon her men--the live one who is taking his punishment so deadly hard, and the dead who, though now so deified and enshrined in his father’s broken heart, had not, any more than herself, found his short life a bed of roses. Poor Bill! Never again would she have to insert the pad of her smoothing words between his sensitiveness and the sting of his father’s speech--that father who, though he would joyfully have died ten thousand deaths for him, yet could not resist venting the gibes born of adversity and constitutional ill humour upon the creature whom, “if Heaven had made him such another world of one entire and perfect chrysolite,” he would not have sold for it. Poor Bill!

With a heartfelt sigh she fetches her egg-basket and sets off through the churchyard to her goal. It is a roundabout way, since the Rectory grounds actually touch the wall at the bottom of the Campion garden; and there had once, not so long ago, been a trellised door through which Rectory and Place ran in and out at will, but in an unexplained spurt of resentment or suspicion, Sir George had had it walled up. It has been a cause of great inconvenience to himself, and he has very much repented it ever since the spurt passed; but pride forbids him to undo his deed. The Rectory regrets it too, but with wise and understanding want of resentment. Its own front gate stands hospitably open, and the shortness of its drive soon brings the visitor to the hall-door--wide open too--for the Rectory is nothing if not airy; and, indeed, since the children could never remember to shut it after them, it may as well gape legally as illegally.

“You are quite a stranger,” says the rectoress, turning with an air of relief from her pile of household books; for though she is a good woman and does her accounts, she is not of those who love them. “What became of you all yesterday?”

“I was at the Princes’ most of the afternoon,” replies Lavinia, sitting down with the air of an _habitué_, her egg-basket on her knees. “They were in trouble--bad trouble, of a sort; but you must not ask me what.” Then, seeing a humorous sparkle in her friend’s eye, she adds, half-laughing, “Oh, I see that you are in the secret.”

“Féodorovna has just been here to proclaim her heroic deed,” says Mrs. Darcy, drily.

“Isn’t it inconceivable?” cries Lavinia, starting up with a revival of the passion of shame that had overcome her on first hearing of Miss Prince’s exploit, while the egg-basket, happily not yet laden, rolls on the floor.

“There is no reason why it should turn _you_ into one gigantic blush,” replies her friend, looking at her with a grave smile. “You have not the distinction of having been informed that a very successful General has no immediate use for you!”

“Did you tell her what you thought of her?” asks the other, in a low voice, and giving a start of maidenly ire at the suggested possibility.

“Why should I?” asks the clergyman’s wife, lifting her sensible, tolerant eyes to her companion’s still discoloured countenance. “Would that have undone it?”

“And you let her brag about it? You allowed her to believe----?” Lavinia breaks off.

“I do not think that she left me with the impression that I admired her,” replies the other in an exceedingly quiet key; and Miss Carew is at once appeased and silenced.

“Yesterday was painful from start to finish,” resumes the girl, presently. “Some days _are_ like that, aren’t they? Yesterday”--with that respectful drop of the voice which is our tribute to the departed--“poor Bill’s things came back.”

The news brings a lump into the throat of the person addressed, for, like most of his acquaintances, Mrs. Darcy had been fond of fine, plucky, upstanding Bill Campion. It is a minute or two before she can dress her sympathy in enough composure to say--

“And, of course, that upset _him_ very much?”

“No; he was not upset,” replies Lavinia, a sort of hopeless pity in voice and look. “He is never upset; it would be much better for him if he were--and for _us_.”

“Yes, poor fellow!”

“I was afraid that we should have a dreadful dinner,” continues Lavinia, with the relieved expansiveness of perfect intimacy addressing perfect comprehension. “I was afraid he would have one of his attacks of hating us for being alive!”

“He never hates _you_ for being alive.”

“Well, ‘us’ means Rupert, and Rupert means ‘_us_;’ you know that.”

There is more of loyalty than grammar in the creed expressed; but as to the staunchness of the believer’s faith there can be no two opinions.

“Yes, I know.”

If a faint wonder tempers the acquiescence of the hearer, it does not reach her companion’s ear.

“He had called him ‘Rupert of the Rhine’ in the afternoon; that is always a very bad sign. Nothing makes Rupert wince so much as being called ‘Rupert of the Rhine.’”

Mrs. Darcy’s neck turns a little aside, so as partially to avert a face on which a scarcely sketched smile that has not much real amusement in it is dimly visible.

“But things turned out better than I expected,” pursues the girl, with a lilt of recovering spirits in her not very low but yet agreeable voice. “The dear old fellow put great constraint upon himself, and was quite civil to--_us_”--with a small challenging smile, as she lays an obstinate emphasis upon the plural pronoun--“and ‘we’ tried our best not to be offensive, and even asked one or two quite sporting questions, and did not make any very egregious mistakes.”

The end of her sentence is half drowned in the ringing of a very loud one-o’clock bell. The Rectory lunches half an hour earlier than the Place.

“I must be off!” cries the visitor, starting up; “and I have never got my eggs, after all. Ah, here are the children!”

As she speaks, a burst, rather than opened, door announces the entry of three young creatures between the ages of eight and fourteen, in whose faces and persons dirt and good looks strive in amicable emulation for the mastery.

“Miss Brine had to go off again to her sick sister this morning,” says the mother, in placid explanation. “I do not believe that any one ever had a governess with so many and such diseased relatives as I,” she laughs; but her amusement is not echoed by her husband, who, correct and glossy, at the moment enters the room from his study. On the contrary, he regards with a fidgety distress the vestures which some unknown quest has dyed in mud; not even sparing the rosy countenances above them. He testily orders off his son and daughters at once to change their clothes.

Six protesting eyes turn to the mother, “Need we? It is quite dry,” exhibiting their caked stockings, petticoats, and trousers.

“You might try what a brush will do,” replies she indifferently, overriding the paternal fiat.

The compromise is joyfully accepted, and the children drag off Lavinia with them, partly to aid in their purification, but chiefly to display to her the evidence of that patriotism which the joyful tidings of yesterday have called forth. For though averse from soap and water, the Misses and Master Darcy are avid of military glory, and the walls of the schoolroom, cheerful in its large shabbiness, are thick with South African heroes. Each child possesses and displays on the wall photographs of every general of any distinction; but as there are wide and envenomed differences of estimate as to the respective places occupied by those warriors in the hierarchy of fame, each has his or her special favourite enshrined in a showy frame, the centre of a circle of lesser lights, and the theme of many a wordy battle. To a stranger not acquainted with the fact that to a cult of glory the Darcy family add a taste for breeding poultry, and combine the two by naming their favourites of the farmyard after those of the battle-field, irrespective of differences of sex, it would be somewhat startling to hear that Colonel Baden-Powell has just begun to lay, and that General French is “such a good sitter that he can cover more eggs than any of the others.” But Miss Carew, since the inception of the campaign, had heard too many eye-opening facts in natural history of the kind adduced to turn a hair, and having admired the laurel wreaths beneath which disappears Lord Roberts, who alone of all his officers is allowed to keep his manhood, and is godfather to the Andalusian cock, she departs.

Her friend accompanies her to the gate, hatless, and having got rid of the children by a slight gesture of dismissal, instantly obeyed, despite the bite of February’s still bitter tooth, that makes the winter aconites in the grass sink their round yellow heads chillily into their green capes, she loiters even when the limit of the Rectory demesne is reached; and Lavinia knows that she has something difficult of utterance to say to her.

“Has Sir George spoken to you about your marriage lately?”

“About my marriage?”

“Yes, anything as to the desirability of its coming off sooner on account of--what has happened?”

“On account of poor Bill’s death, do you mean?”--looking blank and mystified. “No; why should he? What difference can that make?”

“You see that Rupert is the only one left now,” replies Mrs. Darcy, gently, but in a rather embarrassed tone; “the only one to keep up the old name--to prevent its dying out.”

Her companion is silent, staring at the humpy winter aconites with a vague feeling that they have grown into unfamiliar blossoms; that the gate-post is strange too, and the mud in the road, and the rectoress’s expressive pale face.

“I think he means to broach the subject to you before long,” continues the latter, looking away from the person whom she is addressing, and speaking with a tentative delicacy; “so I thought it best that you should not be taken unawares when he does. I must be off. There is Richard signalling madly, and saying something quite _lay_ about my unpunctuality.” She runs off nodding; and Lavinia, much more slowly, takes her way home through the churchyard.

She feels as if some one--surely it cannot be the gentle friend made up of sense, sympathy, and _esprit_?--has given her a blow on the head with a cudgel. She has always known that she is to marry Rupert. The idea is perfectly familiar, and not the least unwelcome. To be his wife in the future is as inevitable a part of the scheme of life as to die. Up to five minutes ago, the one has appeared as vague and distant as the other. But to be married to him _soon_! To be married to him soon because the Campion family cannot be allowed to die out! It is by her union with him that it is to be preserved! It is her child, hers and Rupert’s, who is to hand on the honoured name! Her very ears tingle and glow at the unfamiliar realism and animalism of the idea. It is only such a dotting of the _i_’s and crossing of the _t_’s that could make her realize what a nebulous thing, with no foothold in the world of reality, her engagement to her cousin has hitherto been. To be married to Rupert! That she should have a child, and that it should be Rupert’s! Her feelings are as yet much too chaotic for her to know whether the prodigious fact thrown by the magic-lantern of Mrs. Darcy’s simple question upon the sheet of her imagination, belongs to the region of pleasure or pain. She knows only that she feels extraordinarily odd. The sight--normal and familiar as it is--of the person who has just been thrust upon her in so glaringly new a character, the sight of him standing, as he has stood many hundreds of times before, watching for her back-coming from the verandah, matter-of-fact and every-day as he looks, does not in the least lessen the queerness of her sensations.

“The Rectory, of course?” he says, with a sort of whimsical protest in his tone and eyebrows. Then, in an altered key of disturbed curiosity, “Why, what have they been doing to you? You look---- I declare I do not know what you look like.”

“Do not look at me, then,” says she, trying to pass him with a brusque half-laugh; and, for the first time in her life, feeling uncomfortable beneath the scrutiny of his surprised eyes.

But he catches her before she can escape. “What _have_ they been doing to you?”

“They have been telling me that Colonel Baden-Powell has begun to lay,” replies she, deceitfully.

The confusion of sexes prevalent among the Darcy poultry is too familiar to the young man to raise a smile. He looses his detaining hold on his cousin’s sleeve, and there is an accent of resigned distaste in his next words.

“Of course yesterday’s news has brought on a frightful access of khaki? I saw the flames of their bonfire insulting the evening sky last night.”

“We ought to have had one too,” she retorts, with a sudden rush of opposition.

“Have we so much cause to rejoice?” he asks; and there is such unaffected feeling in his voice that her heart smites her.

The recent emotion and the present one mix and produce her next sentence.

“You are the only one left now?”

“Yes.” There is a faint inclination of surprise at her truism.

“If you died unmarried, at Uncle George’s death the Campion family would be extinct?”

The surprise in the next “yes” is emphasized.

“But you are very young still?” she asks, as if in appeal from some maintenance of a contrary contention to him. “No one could expect you to marry _yet_?”

He looks back at her in dumb astonishment. Save in yesterday’s laughing argument as to which of them had originally wooed the other, the question of their engagement has scarcely ever been referred to by her.

“And I am young too!” she goes on, in that puzzlingly pleading voice, as if still answering some invisible objector. “Most sensible people think that a woman should not marry before five and twenty!”

“Is this the Rectory?” he asks, in a tone where wonder seems to strive with a half-distrust.

“Must the Rectory supply _all_ my ideas?” retorts she, half-laughing, yet still with that new sense of constraint. “Mayn’t I be allowed to have any of my own?”

He shakes his curly head--the head which is never shorn quite close enough to suit his father’s taste.

“The voice is the voice of Lavinia; but the words are the words of Susan,” he says, drily.

“She had an idea--built upon, I do not exactly know what”--reddening faintly at her own disingenuousness, and yet unable to break the lifelong habit of taking Rupert into her confidence--“that your father--that the change in--that poor Bill’s death, in short, might make it desirable that we should----” She stops, jibbing at the matter-of-fact word which yet has always closed the vista of her lookings into the future as a thing of course.

Her companion supplies it, “Marry;” and to her ears it seems that an awkwardness like her own has remodulated his familiar voice.

There are more crocuses this year than last, pushing their yolk-yellow goblets through the grass; two or three have even invaded the gravel walk.

“Is the idea disagreeable to you?” asks the young man, in a key to whose agitated diffidence the girl is a stranger.

“Disagreeable! why should it be?” replies she, trying vainly to shake off the oppressive absurdity of that new shyness which has laid hands on them both. “Have not I been looking it in the face all my life? Didn’t we agree yesterday that it was I who originally proposed to you?”

“You have had a good many accesses of hatred to me since then,” he says hesitatingly.

“Yes, I have,” replies she, hotly, both cheeks hanging out flame signals; “but you always know what produces them, and it lies with you to prevent them ever recurring. I hated you when I found that that wretched little pro-Boer poem in the _Shipton Herald_ was by you; and I detested you when you said that if by any extraordinary accident you were killed on a battle-field, your wounds would certainly all be in the back!”

Her loss of self-control seems to give him back his.

“I got seven shillings and sixpence for my poem,” he says good-temperedly. “And as for the battle-field, let us hope that my legs--they are good long ones--will carry me back unpeppered to your arms.”