Chapter VII

Spring has come; even according to the Almanack, which is later in its sober estimate of the seasons, and also truer than the sanguine poets. But as to April 23 there can be no difference of opinion between prose and verse. To the curious observer of the English spring it may seem every year harder to decide whether the frank brutality of March, the crocodile tears of April, or the infinite treacheries of May, are the more trying to the strained planks of the British constitution? Through this course of tests, unescapable, except by flight, the village of Campion is passing like its neighbours. But in the Egypt of the east wind, there has been revealed, on this 23rd of April, the existence of a Goshen.

“‘Don’t cast a clout till May is out!’” says Lavinia, taking off her jacket and giving it to Rupert to carry. “It is impossible to act up to that axiom to-day!”

The action, in its matter-of-factness, might be taken to prove that Lavinia is still in that brief and tantalizing portion of a woman’s existence, when tyrant man is a willing packhorse; though, in Rupert’s case, the indication is worth nothing. In point of fact, they are still unwed. This is due to no jibbing on the part of Miss Carew. The engagement-ring has not crawled back to London by a South-Eastern express, the yellowed Mechlin has not returned to its camphored privacy, the cousins are still “going to be married.” The delay has come from the person whose feverish eagerness had at first seemed to brook no moment of waiting.

“Of course, I can’t expect any one else to share the feeling,” Sir George has said to the bridegroom-elect, when he has innocently alluded to the marriage as an event in the near future; “but I cannot help thinking there is some indecency in feasting and merry-making when the eldest son of the house is scarcely cold in his grave!”

Rupert is used to the sharp turnings and breakneck hills of his father’s utterances, but at this he cannot help looking a little blank.

“I thought it was your wish, sir,” he answers.

“If it is only because I wish it that you are marrying Lavinia, as I have already told you, I think the whole thing had better be off!” retorts Sir George, with another surprising caper of the temper; adding, in a voice of wounded protest that thinks it is temperate and patient, “I ask for a decent delay between an open grave and a carouse, and you fly off at once into a passion!”

“Bid the Rectory light its bonfire--the bonfire it is getting ready against the Relief of Mafeking!” says Rupert, returning to the drawing-room, where Lavinia is sitting arduously working out a new patience--it is after dinner. “Tell Susan to deck her countenance in its brightest smiles. The wedding is indefinitely postponed!”

“Is it?” she answers, looking up from her cards. “You do not say so!” Then, afraid that the colourless ejaculation is not quite up to the mark, she adds, in a tone where his too-sharp ear detects rather the wish to cheer him than any personal annoyance. “But it will be on again to-morrow. He is quite as keen about it as you--or I.”

Once again that too officious ear tells him of the almost imperceptible hiatus that parts the pronouns.

“Come and help me!” she adds, divining in him some little jarred sensitiveness; and, resting the tranquil friendliness of her eyes upon him, while her hand pulls him down to a seat beside her. “I can’t recollect whether this is red upon black, or if one follows suit.”

That was weeks ago, and Lavinia’s prophecy is fulfilled. On this 23rd of April she has the knowledge that only five weeks of maidenhood remain to her. No sooner had Sir George paid his ill-tempered tribute to his dead son, and frightened and snubbed the survivor into a hurt and passive silence upon the subject nearest to both their hearts, than the increased irritability of his temper and the misery of his look tells his two _souffre-douleurs_ that he has repented of that delay in carrying out his passionately desired project, for which he has to thank himself.

“One more such evening, and I shall think that there is a good deal to be said in praise of parricide!” says Rupert, in groaning relief after the strain of an evening of more than ordinary gibing insult on the one side, and hardly maintained self-restraint on the other. “Of course I know what it means. Poor old chap! He would give the world to climb down; and he would die sooner than do it!”

The young man’s face is pale, and the tears of intolerably wounded feeling glisten in his eyes.

Lavinia listens in parted-lipped compassion, as so often before, for both the sinner and the sinned against.

“I will be his ladder,” she says, in a key of quiet resolve, and so leaves the room.

Half an hour later she returns. Her large eyelids are reddened, and her mouth twitching, but she is determinedly composed.

“It is all right,” she says cheerfully. “We are to be married on May the 28th; and he cried and begged our pardon.”

Thus it comes to pass that on this 23rd of April Lavinia is pacing in almost imminent bridehood--for what are five short weeks?--beside her future husband along a rustic road. They are taking a sweethearts’ ramble, like any other lad and lass. About them the charming garden of England swells and dips in gentle hills and long valleys and seaward-stretching plain. They have mounted the rise behind their house, and looked from the plough-land at the top towards the distant Sussex range. The cherry orchards still hold back their snowy secret, but the plum-blossom is whitening the brown trees; and he would be over-greedy for colour whom the dazzling grass and the generous larches and the sketchily greening thicket did not satisfy.

Their path, leading down from the hill-crest, has brought them to an old-world farm, where with its team of four strong horses, that to a London eye, used to overloading and strain, would look so pleasantly up to their work, a waggon stands by a stack, from whose top men are pitching straw into it. On the grass in front of the house sheep crop and stare with their stupid wide-apart eyes, and hen-coops stand--lambs and chickens in friendliest relation. A lamb has two little yellow balls of fluff perched confidently, one on its woolly back, one on its forehead.

Lavinia has seen it all a thousand times before; but to-day a new sense of turtle-winged content and thankful acquiescence in her destiny seems settling down upon her heart. The feeling translates itself into words.

“It is very nice to have you back.”

“It is very nice to be back,” replies her companion, with less than his usual point.

Rupert has been in London, and returned only last night. His visits to the metropolis have to be conducted with caution and veiled in mystery, despite the innocency of his objects, owing to the profound contempt felt and--it need scarcely be added--expressed by his father for his tastes and occupation. Rupert has half a dozen graceful talents, which, if the roof of the house is not to be blown off, must be hidden under a pile of bushels. Sir George must be kept in ignorance that his last surviving son stoops to singing in a Madrigal Society, draws clever caricatures of Tory statesmen for a weekly, and writes brilliant little leaders for a new Liberal daily paper.

When he has been away Lavinia has always missed her cousin. This last time has seemed more irksome than any previous one; partly because more has happened than is usually the case in the week of his absence; partly, as she tells herself with heartfelt congratulation, because she must have grown much fonder of him. There can be no question now as to its being “to please herself” that she is marrying Rupert, since she plainly cannot do without him.

They have left the farm behind them, and, dipping down into a valley-let, are passing through a hop-garden, where the eye travels through the long vista of bare poles to little blue air-pictures at the end. From a chestnut-brake near by, a nightingale, mimicked by a throstle, is whit-whitting and glug-glugging. They pause to listen.

“I wish it was over,” says Lavinia, presently, continuing a theme which Philomel had interrupted. “I dread it unaccountably; no, not unaccountably! I suppose ’twould be odd if I did not?”

“I can’t help grudging him to Féodorovna!” answers Rupert, rather sadly. “We have so much more right to him.”

“But we could not have made him a quarter as comfortable,” rejoins Lavinia. “You know how elaborate her arrangements were; and since Mr. Prince put his foot down about allowing her to have only two at a time, Captain Binning has had the benefit of almost all her attentions.”

“A doubtful good that!”

“She does not think much of the other one!” pursues Lavinia, half-laughing. “He has had a bit of his nose and half his upper lip shot away, poor fellow! but, unfortunately, it was not in action, but while he was sitting at luncheon on the veldt.”

“And Binning! Was my father much upset by the interview?”

Lavinia sighs. “At first I thought he was going to have one of those dreadful _dry_ agonies such as he used to have at first; but, thank God, that passed off, and then he could talk a little--tell me a little about him.” With an afterthought, “He was quite nice in what he said.”

“You mean that he did not institute any comparisons!” says the young man, reading between the lines, and with that unfortunate plate-glass view into his companion’s thoughts which she often inwardly deplores.

“None. I had much rather have put off _my_ visit a little later,” continues Miss Carew--they are strolling on again--“until the poor man had recovered his strength a little. His wound is not half healed yet, and he was much exhausted by his journey; but Féodorovna insists on my going to-day; she says that he has expressed a great wish to see me, and that, as far as her power to gratify him goes, he shall not be balked in his slightest whim.”

Rupert lifts his eyebrows. “Already, my Féo?” he says, in sarcastic apostrophe of the absent fair one.

Lavinia has indulged herself in a light mimicry of Miss Prince’s tones, which always amuses them both; and they walk on mutually pleased.

“I shall just have time to run into the Rectory before I go!” says Lavinia, an hour later, when their pleasantly sauntering steps have brought them home again.

A very slight cloud passes over the young man’s face.

“I have never yet known an action of yours which was not prefaced by that run,” he says. “If you were to be told that the last trump was to sound in ten minutes, you would answer, ‘I shall just have time to run into the Rectory first.’”

“Perhaps I should!” answers she, aggravatingly, walking off and kissing her hand.

It is in compliance with an offer from the younger Darcys to exhibit the newly hatched turkeys, that Lavinia is running counter to her lover’s prejudice. She finds them on the banks of the “Tugela River,” a somewhat duck-muddied ditch which runs under the hedge by the henhouse, and is at once led to the pen where Daphne is feeding the turkey-chicks with a mess in which chopped onion--of which, in its bulb state, she mostly carries a specimen in her pocket as a precautionary measure--predominates.

“Clergyman has brought out three more than he did last year,” says the child, triumphantly, looking up from the pipkin in her lap.

“Clergyman!” repeats Miss Carew, with a cavilling glance at the large and motherly Brahma hen under the coop. “I thought all your hens were soldiers.”

“So they are,” answers Phillida, matter-of-factly. “Clergyman is an Army chaplain.”

“Do you perceive that Daphne has become a walking onion?” asks Mrs. Darcy, joining the party, and holding her pocket-handkerchief to her nose. “The smell goes all through the house! It wakes us at night.”

She says it with humorous resignation, and they both laugh. The situation between the friends is no longer strained. Susan is _almost_ quite silent; and Lavinia is _almost_ quite confident on the subject upon which they know that they differ so widely. Like a generous opponent, Mrs. Darcy has thrown herself heart and soul into the clothes--not many--and the rearrangements of the house--not many either--which the approaching wedding entails.

“There never could be a marriage which made so little change in anybody’s life.”

Lavinia has said, in a tone of self-congratulation, “The thing that hath been shall be!” and Susan has answered inoffensively in appearance, “Yes?”

But the “Yes” is interrogative, and its monosyllable brings to the girl the flashed realization that what she has said is absolutely false; that though she will _live_ within the same walls, take the same walks, look on the same windmills and oast-houses, yet the change to herself will be enormous, irrevocable, unescapable. But that it will be wholly for the better, she has so nearly convinced herself, that it is with a very stout look and high courage, that she now says--

“Rupert came back last night. I was so thankful. We had so much to talk about.”

“You have been telling him of the event of the neighbourhood, I suppose?” answers Mrs. Darcy; her eye fixed rather intentionally upon her two elder daughters, who between them are lugging a large turkey-hen, who is not intended to sit, from a primrosy nest improvised in the Tugela bank--“the opening of Féodorovna Prince’s hospital?”

“I am on my way to visit one of the patients,” replies Lavinia. “That reminds me I must be off! I wish it was over! I wonder why I dread it so much?”

“It is never pleasant to have one’s old cuts torn open,” answers Mrs. Darcy.

The explanation is rational, even to obviousness; but it is not satisfactory. Painful and tear-producing as the scene between herself and the man who was the innocent cause of poor Bill’s death must naturally be, the feeling that had existed between herself and her cousin, though warm and true, had not been of a nature to account for the state of trepidating dread with which she approaches the interview. And yet is it all dread? Is not there, too, a strong element of excited anticipation, that has no kinship with pain? Is it the spring, that incorrigible merry-maker, that is answerable for her elation? Is it the determined budding of everything about her, that makes her feel as if she were budding too? Is it because Rupert has returned? For a quarter of a mile she tries to persuade herself that this is the reason; but the negative that is given in her _for intérieur_ is so emphatic and persistent that she has to accept it.

Passing the edge of the King’s Wood, she steps aside to pick one or two of the myriad wood anemones that, vanquishing the piled dead leaves more successfully than the primroses, floor it with their pensive poetic heads and graceful green collars. Rupert is always pleased when she presents him with a posy. They would be fresher if she waited to gather them on her way back; but some obscure instinct, which she does not in the least recognize, hints darkly to her that on her way back she will perhaps not remember to pay the little attention. As she looks at the drooped heads blushing pinkily in her hand, she tries idly to picture what her impression of Rupert would be were it he whom she were about to see for the first time. She tries to picture _his_ head lying in patient pain upon a pillow--yes; so far imagination obeys easily: Rupert would be patient enough; he has had a good apprenticeship, poor fellow!--his cheeks hollowed with suffering--yes; fancy runs along docilely enough still: they are not too plump already; no one can accuse Rupert of superfluous flesh--his chest swathed in bandages, where the Mauser bullet took its clean course through his body, so closely shaving his heart. No!

She has gone too far! Imagination strikes work; confessing its utter inability to represent her future husband as prostrated by a wound received in battle! She walks on, quickening her pace, and vaguely irritated with herself. It was a senseless and mischievous exercise of fancy, and she had no business to indulge in it.