LAVINIA
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
=Foes in Law.= _Crown 8vo. 6s._
_Crown 8vo. 2s. each._
Goodbye, Sweetheart!
Cometh up as a Flower
Joan
Belinda
Dr. Cupid
Not Wisely, but Too Well
Red as a Rose is She
Alas!
Scylla or Charybdis?
Mrs. Bligh
Second Thoughts
A Beginner
Dear Faustina
Nancy
The Game and the Candle
=Twilight Stories.= _Small Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d._
LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
LAVINIA
BY
RHODA BROUGHTON
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1902
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
LAVINIA
CHAPTER I
“I shall never get over it.”
This is a phrase that has issued from the same lips very often before;
and in general Lavinia Carew listens to it silently, in the impatient
confidence that at her next visit to Mrs. Prince, that lady will have
got over “it” so completely as to have forgotten that “it” ever existed.
She is silent now, but from an opposite reason to that which has
hitherto tied her tongue. In her opinion neither Mrs. Prince nor any
other Mrs. or Miss could ever get over the “it” in question.
“And coming on this joyful day too--a day, I mean, that is so joyful to
every one else in England--that would have been so joyful to us, but for
_this_!” The speaker breaks off with a whimper.
“The anniversary of Majuba Hill!” says Lavinia, with a fighting glint in
a pair of uncommonly clear eyes, and uttering her ejaculation with none
the less gusto for its being absolutely unoriginal, and shared by
almost every pair of lips in Great and Greater Britain this triumphal
day.
“After the terrible gloom of the winter--never even in the Crimean War
do I remember anything comparable to it!--just when the dead weight
seemed to be lifting a little from all our hearts,” pursues Mrs. Prince,
raising to heaven her bangled wrists with a despairing jangle.
“The village is full of little Union Jacks,” interrupts the girl, with a
good-natured effort to keep her afflicted friend on the safe track of
the public rejoicing, and also because she cannot quite restrain the
expression of her own jubilation. “I cannot think where they all came
from.”
But the waving of no bunting before it can hide out the spectacle which
is turning the national triumph to eclipse before the elder woman’s
vision.
“I suppose that I ought not to have told even you,” she continues,
resisting with mild doggedness her young friend’s attempt to distract
her thoughts, even momentarily, from her woes--not having, indeed, a
mind hospitable enough often to admit two ideas abreast within its
narrow portals. “No; I suppose that I certainly ought _not_ to have
revealed our disgrace even to you; but what was I to do? I had to tell
some one--to seek for sympathy somewhere. I get none at home. I suppose
that Mr. Prince feels it; but he says nothing. He is like a _stone_.”
“I am sure that he feels it.”
Something emphatic in the low-voiced assertion of her husband’s
sensibility, by one who has not the advantage of relationship to him,
grates on the rasped nerves of the poor wife.
“I never said that he did not feel it!” she cries in tart wretchedness.
“Of course he feels it. He would not be human if he did not!”
Lavinia assents with a motion of the head, quite as emphatic as her
former asseveration of Mr. Prince’s sufferings.
“And if _I_ had not told you”--answering the accusation of disloyalty
brought by herself against herself, with as much defensive exasperation
as if it had been proffered by her companion--“Féo would have done so
herself! She sees nothing to be ashamed of. She _glories_ in it!”
“_Glories in it!_”
“Yes, glories in it! incredible as it seems. But I wish, dear”--with a
fretful relief in finding an object on which to vent her exquisite
nerve-irritation--“that you would not repeat my words after me when you
hear them perfectly.”
“It _is_ a stupid trick”--speaking with absolute and effortless good
temper. “I think I do it without knowing.”
“You are a good creature!” cries the other, seizing her companion’s
fingers with one hand, and with the other applying a very expensive
pocket-handkerchief to the eyes that are swimming in mortified tears.
“To-day I can’t help snapping my best friend’s nose off!”
“Snap away! There will be plenty left when you have done,” replies
Lavinia, playfully passing her fore finger down the ridge of a very
handsome feature. Then, with an immediate return to gravity, “I know
that she came back in a very _exalté_ state from that ‘send off.’ She
managed to get an introduction to him--to the General, I mean--didn’t
she?”
Miss Prince’s mother shakes her head. “No; she had no introduction. Lady
de Jones, with whom we went, did not know him; but we had tickets. We
were admitted to the platform. Before I guessed what she--Féo, I
mean--was going to do, she pushed her way up to him--to where he was
standing with his staff, and gave him a bunch of violets.”
“Yes, I remember she told me”--trying honestly to keep out of her voice
the disgusted disapprobation that the action thus recalled had inspired
in her.
“He bowed and smiled, and took them. What else could he, could any
gentleman, do? And we came away, and she was in the seventh heaven; and
we both thought--her father and I both thought--would not you have
thought?--that there was an end of it!”
“Yes, I should.”
The bareness of this assent is due to the difficulty experienced by the
speaker in refraining from expressing how incredible and “beyond all
whooping” it appears to her, that to such a transaction there should
have been a beginning.
“She has always been rather a ‘handful,’” goes on the mother, with
rueful dispassionateness--“determined to be unconventional and unlike
other people, and all that sort of stuff; but it never entered our
heads that she would be so lost to all decency, to all self-respect, as
to do this!--throwing herself at him like a woman in Regent Street; for
that is what it comes to.”
The poor lady has worked herself up into a whirlwind of tears and sobs,
which her young friend charitably hopes may relieve her.
“And you neither of you had the least suspicion?”
“Not the very least mite,” replied Mrs. Prince, who, though in everyday
life _almost_ quite ladylike, is apt, under the pressure of high
emotion, to lapse into homely phrases that smack of her unregenerate
state before the world-wide success of “Prince’s Dropless Candle,” the
Féodorovna, had lifted her into affluence and the habit of wearing her
_h_’s every day. “She has always had a very large correspondence”--with
an accent that tells of murdered pride in the fact recorded--“writing to
and receiving letters from people that neither her father nor I ever
heard of! It was an understood thing that we should ask no questions. I
should as soon have thought of flying in the air as saying to her, ‘Whom
have you heard from?’”
“Then how--how did you learn about _it_?”
“She gave me the letter to read. We were at breakfast--her father and
I--reading our papers, in such good spirits over the surrender of
Kronje; it seems a year ago”--with a transient look of
bewilderment--“and in she came, holding an open letter in her hand, and
said, with that odd smile she sometimes puts on--I am always uneasy
when I see that smile--‘There has sometimes been a little soreness
about my keeping my correspondence to myself. Here is a letter that I
invite you both to read,’ and she laid it down on the table before me!”
The mother pauses, her face working.
“Well?” in a breathless sympathy.
“I just glanced at the signature, and saw it was his. But even then it
never struck me--I did not put two and two together. Who could have
imagined such a thing about her own child? And she had not mentioned his
name for weeks.”
“No?”
“I read it!” pausing to gasp, “and then her father read it!”
“Yes?”
“I--I have nothing to say against it,” speaking with twitching lips. “It
was everything that was honourable and gentlemanlike!”
A longer pause. Lavinia has put her elbows on the little Empire table
that interposes its fragile elegance between her and her companion, and
is digging her knuckles into the cheeks that are blazing with vicarious
shame.
“He said that--yes, I had rather tell you--that he was inexpressibly
touched; but that in his busy life there was no room for feelings of
that sort; that he was old enough to be her father; and that he had
thought it right to destroy her letter.”
Probably the dumb sympathy written so redly over Lavinia’s face is a
better plaister for poor Mrs. Prince’s gaping wound than would have been
any of the words that so absolutely refuse to come at the girl’s
invocation. There are many ointments that soften the smart of death, of
parting, of estrangement; but what physician or quack alive has ever yet
invented a successful unguent for shame?
“Even when I had read it, I did not take it in! I said to her, ‘Why have
you shown me this? What does it mean? Where does it come from?’ ‘It came
by the South African mail this morning,’ she said, looking me quite
straight in the face, ‘and it is General ----’s answer to a letter I
wrote him five weeks ago, offering myself to him.’”
It is the measure of Miss Carew’s view of the situation, that the
nearest approach to consolation which she can produce is the question,
“Don’t you think she is out of her mind?”
But the mother rejects even the extremely modest form of comfort thus
offered to her.
“Not more than she has always been!” adding ruefully, “She came too late
in our lives--after twenty childless years! We had wished too much for
her.”
Both are silent, Lavinia throwing her eyes distressfully round the room,
upon which Maple has worked his sumptuous will, in search of some phrase
that may ring not too mockingly. She only succeeds in bringing home to
herself the furious irony of the contrast between her companion’s
upholstery and the wrinkled wretchedness of her face. Yet, after a
moment of hopelessness, one of her propping hands drops down and hurries
across the table to stroke the mourner’s sleeve, while her good eyes
brighten at the thought that she has at last hit upon something really
soothing to suggest.
“It will never go any further! With a man like _him_, the soul of
honour, her secret is certain to be sacred. Nobody but we need ever know
it, and we will let it die as soon as we can.”
“Nobody but we need ever know it!” repeats Mrs. Prince, with a shrill
intonation of scornful woe. “That shows how little you know her! She
herself will proclaim it on the housetops.” Then, with a sudden change
of key, “She is coming this way--singing, if you please! Don’t you hear
her? You must excuse me, I really can’t face her just yet.”
The mother rises hastily, and disappears, rustling, jingling, weeping
through a handsome mahogany door into a Maple boudoir, just as another
handsome mahogany door opens to admit the subject of the late
conversation into the room whence her advent has chased her parent.
“You have been hearing of my crime?” says she, coming in and shaking
hands conceitedly high up in the air.
Féodorovna Prince is a prettyish girl, long and reedy, with a skin,
hair, and hands whose merits make the casual looker forgive the
thumblike shape of her nose and the washiness of her foolish eyes.
“Yes, I have.”
“And what is your opinion of it?”
“I think I had rather not say.”
Miss Prince is standing before the fireplace, a hand on each side of her
phenomenally long eighteen-inch waist.
“You need not be afraid of hurting my feelings,” she says, with a
self-satisfied smile.
“I do not think I am at all afraid of that.”
Féodorovna ceases to smile, but continues to balance herself gracefully.
“I was born quite unlike other people! I have always been keenly
conscious of that. I have a right and wrong of my own; and they are not
the conventional ones.”
Lavinia listens in ireful silence; but no one glancing at the
conflagration in her eyes could mistake her speechlessness for approval.
“You asked General ---- to marry you?” she says, with a point-blankness
that would be pitiless, were there any question of a need for
compassion.
But Féodorovna does not wince. “I did not put it quite so crudely as
that!”--with a slightly superior smile. “I told him that I loved and
reverenced him beyond all created beings, and that I was his to do what
he willed with!”
“And he did not will to do anything?” replies Lavinia, brutally.
Her stinging speech scarcely raises the colour in Miss Prince’s faint
cheeks.
“He treated me with the same perfect loyalty that I had treated him!”
Lavinia’s answer is impatiently to pull open her own fur collar, as if
she were choking, and to repeat, half under her breath with a species of
snort--
“_Loyalty!_”
The other girl sits slowly down upon the Aubusson hearthrug, taking her
small knees into the embrace of her lengthy arms, and looking straight
before her.
“Would you like to see his letter?”--lifting one hand towards the breast
of her gown.
The indication of what delicate lodging has been provided for the
hard-hearted hero’s missive adds vigour to Miss Carew’s emphatic
negative.
“I had far rather not.”
Féodorovna’s thin pale hand drops to her side. “I want every one to see
it!” she says. “I want every one to know that if I have loved unhappily,
I have loved worthily--have loved the noblest object that ever ‘swam
into my ken’!”
The self-satisfied bravado has gone out of her face and manner; and as
she lifts her rather colourless eyes to the ceiling, as if expecting to
see her General sitting enthroned among the planets, Miss Carew realizes
with enhanced consternation that she is in deadly, _deadly_ earnest.
“I always made up my mind,” pursues Féodorovna presently, in an intense
low voice, “that if ever I met a man really worth loving--no matter what
his situation or circumstances in life were--I would offer myself to
him. I have done so!”
“And he has refused you!” rejoins Lavinia in a strangled voice, where
wonder and scorn are halt throttling each other. “And you are _alive_?”
This time the whip-lash does leave a slight weal in its bitter track.
“Why shouldn’t I be alive?” asks Féodorovna, as her throbbing throat
rears itself out of the delicate laces and pearls that surround it.
“More alive than I have ever been before. So far from being ashamed of
my action, I _glory_ in it--yes _glory_!” her voice rising in jubilant
inspiration. “Not one girl in ten thousand would have had the courage to
do as I have done!”
Miss Carew draws in her breath between two rows of excellent white
teeth.
“And what do you propose to do next? To write and ask him to reconsider
his decision?”
The wind is somewhat taken out of the speaker’s sails by the quiet
literalness of the answer.
“No; I shall do nothing further! I bow to his will”--suiting the action
to the word by a stoop of her russet head. Then, raising it again
proudly--“All the rest of my life will be spent in trying not to fall
below the standard to which my love for him has lifted me!”