Chapter VI

“I love nothing so well as you!
Is not that strange?”

Rupert _is_ “all right.” Of that there can be no question. It turns out now that he has been “all right” for as long as he can remember. The discovery that it is only his delicacy and self-command that have hitherto hindered his manifesting his “all-rightness” practically, fills Lavinia with such admiring gratitude as makes her almost certain that she is “all right” too. She has no female friend with whom to compare notes, nor would she do so if she had, her one intimate, Mrs. Darcy, being very far from belonging to that not innumerous band of matrons who enjoy revealing the secrets of their own prison-house to a selected few. Lavinia has to work out her problem for herself. Not betrothed only now, but going to be married, with a tray of engagement-rings crawling down from London by the South-Eastern for approval, with a disinterring by Sir George, from his dead wife’s presses, of wedding laces----

Lavinia wishes that Rupert did not take quite so great an interest in the latter, and did not know quite so much about Point de Venise, Point de Flanders, and Point d’Angleterre--; with interesting and illumining comparison of past feelings, and with a respectable modicum of kisses. If the candour of her nature, and the knowledge of how perfectly useless it is to lie to a person who knows her so through and throughly as Rupert, compel her to acknowledge that these latter do not cause her any particular elation, she is able truly to answer him that she does not dislike them so much as to forbid a frugal repetition. Once or twice, touched and stung to generosity by his unselfish refraining from even the dole of allowed endearments, she takes the initiative; and at other times consoles him for her want of fervour by assuring him, with emphatic words, and the crystal clearness of her kind, cold eyes, that she is “not that sort.”

She is wondering to-day whether, when she left him five minutes ago at the lych-gate, he did not look as if he were getting a little tired of the explanation. It ought to be thoroughly satisfactory to him, for, after all, you can’t give more than you have; but she has never been in the habit of crossing or discontenting her men, and to be found not up to the expected mark in the matter of endearment vexes her as much as to be convicted of neglecting their buttons or slurring their dinner.

It is a week since Miss Carew has paid the visit, usually a daily or bi-daily one, to the Rectory. The unwonted absence for three days from her monopolizing husband and boisterous brood of Mrs. Darcy, partly accounts for this omission; and not even to herself does Lavinia own that she is in a less hurry than usual to greet her returned ally. Rupert is never in any great hurry to see Susan, and has gracefully declined to accompany his _fiancée_ on her present errand of announcement.

“You shall tell me about it when you come back. I shall like to hear how her face lights up when she hears the good news,” he says with a half-sarcastic smile; then, seeing the girl wince a little at this hitting of a nail all too soundly on the head, he laughs it off pleasantly. “Tell her, as you told me, that it was ‘bound to come.’”

“Mine was certainly a very original way of accepting an offer,” replies Lavinia, slightly flushing. Never since the decisive day has she felt quite at her ease with Rupert, and so goes off laughing too; but the laugh disappears as soon as she is out of sight.

The day is full of hard spring light, which shows up, among other revelations, the emptiness of the Rectory drawing-room, with its usual refined litter of needlework and open books, and the figures of the children in the chicken-yard, whither a spirit of search and inquiry leads Lavinia’s feet. From her friend’s young family she hears that their mother has gone up the village to bandage a cut hand; but it is with difficulty that this information is extracted from them, so vociferously preoccupied are they with their own affairs. Gloriously happy, covered with mud, hatless, dishevelled, blissful, speaking all at once, they reveal to her, in shouting unison, the solid grounds for their elation--nurse gone off at a moment’s notice, governess’s return indefinitely postponed, mother busy, father absent!

“Oh, Lavy, we _are_ having such a good time, particularly at tea! Serena has tea with us.”

Serena’s age is two years, and detractors say that her Christian name must have been bestowed with an ironical intention.

“And no doubt you spoil her very much?”

“No,” thoughtfully; “we do not spoil her. We only try to make her as naughty as we can.”

Their visitor smiles at the nice distinction, and weakly shrinking from pointing out the immorality of the course of conduct described, judiciously changes the topic by asking why the flag on the henhouse is flying half-mast high.

She is at once informed by grave voices that there has been a court-martial, and that General Forestier Walker is to have his neck wrung for breaking his eggs.

“General ---- was the presiding judge,” says Phillida, pointing to a peaceable-looking white Dorking matron, making the gravel fly behind her with the backward sweep of her scratching feet. “He is Féo Prince’s general. She told me, last time she was here, that she had asked him to marry her.”

“As if he would be thinking of such tommy-rot as marriage now!” cries Chris, more struck, apparently, by the ill-timing of the overture than its indelicacy.

“Miss Brine was shocked,” says Phillida, thoughtfully. “She said that it was putting the cart before the horse, and that Féo ought to have waited for him to speak first.”

“But if he wouldn’t?” cries little Daphne, swinging Lavinia’s hand, which she has annexed, to and fro, and staring up with the puzzled violet of her round eyes.

They all laugh.

“That is unanswerable,” says Lavinia, blushing even before the children at this new instance of Féodorovna’s monstrous candour; adding, in a not particularly elate key, as her glance takes in a _recherché_ object nearing their little group across the white grass of the still wintry glebe, “Why, here _is_ Féo!”

“They told me your mother was out,” says the visitor, as if this were a sufficient explanation for her appearance.

The children greet her with the hospitable warmth which nature and training dictate towards _any_ guest, _qua_ guest, but without the exuberant, confident joy with which they always receive Lavinia. However, they repeat the tale of General Forestier Walker’s crime and fate, and add, as peculiarly interesting to their hearer, the name of the presiding judge.

Féodorovna listens with an absence of mind and eye which she does not attempt to disguise.

“I was coming on to you,” she says, addressing Lavinia, and turning away with an expression of boredom from her polite little hosts. “I should have asked you to give me luncheon, but since I find you here, it does as well.”

Neither in voice nor manner is there any trace of the resentment that Miss Carew is guiltily feeling. Féodorovna never resents. Too well with herself often to perceive a slight, and too self-centred to remember it, Lavinia realizes with relief that all recollection of the peril Miss Prince’s shoulders had run at Sir George’s all-but ejecting hands has slidden from that fair creature’s memory.

“I went to London yesterday,” she says, turning her back upon the cocks and hens, and their young patrons, as unworthy to be her audience.

“We saw you drive past,” says Phillida, innocently; “you went by the 11.30 train. We were not looking out for you; we were watching Lavy and Rupert. From mother’s bedroom we can see right into their garden.”

“Can you, indeed?” interposes the voice of Mrs. Darcy, who has come upon the little group unperceived by the short cut from the village. “I am glad you told me, as I shall try for the future to find some better employment for your eyes.”

Her voice is quite quiet, and not in the least raised; but the children know that she is annoyed, and so does Lavinia, who, with a flushed cheek and an inward spasm of misgiving, is trying to reconstruct her own and her _fiancé’s_ reciprocal attitudes at eleven o’clock of yesterday’s forenoon. To them all for once Féodorovna’s unconscious and preoccupied egotism brings relief.

“I was telling Lavinia that I went to London yesterday.”

“For the day? to buy chiffons? I suppose I shall have to reclothe this ragged regiment soon,” looking round ruefully at her still somewhat abashed offspring, and avoiding her friend’s eye.

“Chiffons! oh no!” a little contemptuously. “I went up to see the Director-General of the Army Medical Department.”

“Indeed! Is he a friend of yours?”

“Oh dear no; I went on business.”

“To offer your services as a nurse, I suppose?” replies Mrs. Darcy, as if suggesting an amusing absurdity, and unable to refrain from stealing a look at Lavinia, while her own face sparkles with mischievous mirth.

“Exactly,” replies Féodorovna, with her baffling literalness. “I sent up my name, and he saw me almost at once.” She pauses.

“And you made your proposal?”

“Yes.”

“He accepted it?”

Féodorovna’s pale eyes have been meeting those of her interlocutor. They continue to do so, without any shade of confusion or mortification.

“No; he refused it point-blank.”

As any possible comment must take the form of an admiring ejaculation addressed to the medical officer in question, Susan bites her lips to ensure her own silence.

“He put me through a perfect catechism of questions,” continues Miss Prince, with perfect equanimity. “Had I had any professional training?”

“You haven’t, have you?”

“I answered that I hadn’t, but that I could very easily acquire some.”

“And he?”

“Oh, he smiled, and asked me if I had any natural aptitude.”

“Yes?”

“I answered, ‘None, but that no doubt it would come.’”

The corners of Mrs. Darcy’s mouth have got so entirely beyond her control that she can only turn one imploring appeal for help to Lavinia, who advances to the rescue.

“And then?” she asks, with praiseworthy gravity.

“Oh, then he shrugged his shoulders and answered drily, ‘I have had three thousand applications from ladies, from duchesses to washerwomen, which I have been obliged to refuse. I am afraid that I must make yours the three thousand and first;’ and so he bowed me out.”

She ends, her pink self-complacency unimpaired, and both the other women look at her in a wonder not untouched with admiration. Neither of them succeeds in making vocal any expression of regret.

“It is one more instance of the red tapeism that reigns in every department of our military administration,” says Miss Prince, not missing the lacking sympathy, and with an accent of melancholy superiority. “Next time I shall know better than to ask for any official recognition.” After a slight pause, “It is a bitter disappointment, of course; more acute to me naturally than it could be to any one else.”

With this not obscure intimation of the end she had had in view in tendering her services to the troops in South Africa, Féodorovna departs. The two depositaries of her confidence look at each other with faces of unbridled mirth as soon as her long back is turned; but there is more of humorous geniality and less of impartial disgust in the matron’s than the maid’s.

“Poor thing! I wonder what it feels like to be so great a fool as that!” said Mrs. Darcy, with a sort of lenient curiosity. “I declare that I should like to try for the hundredth part of a minute!”

“She meant to nurse him!” ejaculates Lavinia, with a pregnant smile. “Poor man! If he knew what he had escaped!”

“And now, what next?” asks Susan, spreading out her delicate, hardworking hands, and shaking her head.

“‘What next?’ as the tadpole said when his tail dropped off!” cries Daphne, pertly--a remark which, calling their parent’s attention to the edified and cock-eared interest of her innocents, leads to their instant dispersal and flight over the place towards the pre-luncheon wash-pot, which they hoped to have indefinitely postponed. When they are out of sight and earshot.

“You came to tell me something?” Mrs. Darcy says, with an entire change of tone. “Though I am not in the habit of watching Rupert and Lavy from an upper chamber, like those graceless brats, I know what it is.”

“Then I may spare myself the trouble of telling you,” answers the girl, in a key of constrained and artificial playfulness.

Her friend’s kind eyes, worn, yet with the look of a deep, serene contentment underlying their surface fatigue, look at her with a compassionate interrogation.

“Are you doing it to please yourself?” she asks in a low voice, yet not hesitatingly.

“Whom else?”

“It is a motive that has so very seldom guided you,” replies the elder woman, with an enveloping look of motherly solicitude. “And in this kind of case it is the only one that is of the least value; it is the one occasion in life in which it is one’s bounden duty to be absolutely selfish!”

“Were you absolutely selfish when you married Mr. Darcy?” asks Lavinia, carrying the war into the enemy’s quarters, and with an apposite recalling of all the sacrifices that her friend--once a very smart London girl--is rumoured by the neighbourhood to have been called upon to make by her choice.

“Absolutely,” replies Susan, with the stoutness of the most unmistakable truth. “Everybody belonging to me cried, and said they could not see what I saw in Richard; but _I_ saw what I saw in him, and I knew that that was all that mattered.”

“Perhaps _I_ see what I see in Rupert,” replies Lavinia, plucking up her spirit, and detecting a joint in her companion’s harness, though her own voice is not assured.

“If you do, of course it is all right,” rejoins the other, unelastically.

Lavinia’s head would like to droop, so oppressive is the sense of the cold doubt infiltrated into her own acquiescent serenity; but she forces it to hold itself up against its will.

“He is quite aware that we have your disapproval,” she says with a dignity that is native to her; “so much so that he advised me to tell you it was ‘bound to come.’”

Mrs. Darcy looks at her sadly; but without either apology or contradiction.

“That is just what I do not feel.”

“You have always done him scant justice!” cries the girl, stung into hotter partisanship by the chill whisper of a traitor within her own camp. “After all, it is I, not you, that am to marry him.”

“Yes, it is you;” in downcast assent.

“When you have praised him it has always been in some damning way,” pursues Lavinia, breaking more and more into flame--“saying what a good judge of lace he is, and how well he mended your Bow teapot!”

“So he did.”

“How would you like it, if, when some one asked my opinion of Mr. Darcy as a parish priest, I answered that he did not make bad cabbage-nets?”

Susan smiles reluctantly. “Do not let us quarrel,” she says. “As long as I supply you with eggs, it would be inconvenient to you; and, as for me, why, I might break another teapot!”

* * * * *

“Well, how did she take it?” asks Rupert, who has apparently been waiting the whole time of his betrothed’s absence in contented smoking and musing under the immemorial yews of the churchyard.

“She asked me whether I am marrying you to please myself?” replies Lavinia, lifting eyes in which he notes a trouble that had not clouded them when he parted from her, in an almost doglike wistfulness of appeal to his, “Am I, Rupert?”

“Our friends ask us very indelicate questions,” he answers, turning away.

* * * * *

A day or two later Lavinia has a casual meeting with Mrs. Prince in the road.

“Whom do you think she has been writing to now?” asks Féodorovna’s parent, leaning over the side of the victoria, and whispering loudly. “The Officer Commanding Cavalry Depôt, Canterbury! What can she have to say to him?”