In February light still reigns, though with uncertain sceptre, up to six
o’clock in the evening, and the fact that the cold, aquamarine tinge is
dying out of the west when she turns her back upon the Chestnuts, tells
Miss Carew how much beyond its first scope her call has been prolonged.
In the first place, she has been compelled, after all, to read
General ----’s letter, and give her grudging meed of praise to its tact
and humanity. Secondly--this has been the longest and hardest part of
her task--she has had to reassure Mrs. Prince, who soon reappears, still
tearful and jingling, as to the document having been undoubtedly penned
by the hero himself, and not committed to a chuckling aide-de-camp or
grinning secretary. Thirdly, she has been conducted into Mr. Prince’s
sanctum, for the express purpose of cheering him up by light and general
conversation, his hurt being much too deep and sore to suffer even the
most distant approach to it.
She finds him sitting with his British-merchant bullet-head clutched in
his hands, unable to be cheered even by the sight of the trophies,
medals, and certificates--national and international--to the merits of
his candle, which, to the sad mortification of his ladies, lavishly
decorate the walls. At the sound of her entry--convoyed by his wife--he
looks angrily up, and she realizes, with a warmer feeling of sympathy
and fellow-feeling than he has ever before inspired, how very much he
would have preferred that she had stayed away. His manner to women is
always elaborate, and she sees him now struggling back into it with as
much difficulty as a footman, in haste to answer a bell, fights his way
into a tight livery coat. She longs to beg him to remain metaphorically
in his shirt-sleeves. But no; he is already on his feet.
“I am afraid I am intrusive”--this is his almost invariable opening
phrase where “the sex” is concerned--“but have you left Sir George and
Mr. Campion quite well?”
“Miss Carew is come to have a little chat with you,” says his wife, with
an air of cheerfulness “made in Germany.” “You know you and she always
like a bit of fun together!”
She introduces and retreats hastily, with some misgiving, probably, as
to the quality of the “fun” in question, and with clearly no desire to
share it. Lavinia remains behind, to emerge, half an hour later, sorry
and discouraged, with the consciousness of having been only partially
successful in the attempt to be gamesome, unconcerned, and un-African.
Yet the old man--oddly old to be Féodorovna’s father--has thanked her
when she left him. She has not quite recovered the chokiness engendered
by his gratitude when she is recaptured by Mrs. Prince, feverishly
anxious to be again reassured as to the genuineness of the General’s
autograph, and the certainty that her daughter’s passion for their Chief
has not been given as a prey to the merriment of his staff. The fear is
so preposterous that Lavinia would have had difficulty in reasoning it
down with any show of patience, if pity had not come strongly to her
aid--pity and a lifelong apprenticeship to answering the
not-worth-answering. It takes her three quarters of an hour of solid
argument, lucid exegesis, and persuasive rhetoric to convince Mrs.
Prince that the commander of an Army Corps on active service has other
employment for his time than the publishing to his subordinates the
hysterical folly of a love-sick girl; and, moreover, that such a course
would scarcely be in consonance with the creed and normal habits of an
officer and a gentleman. It takes three quarters of an hour to convince
Mrs. Prince, and, at the end, she is not convinced. With a slight sigh
of waning endurance, Miss Carew realizes her lost labour, and turns back
on another spoor.
“She has promised--indeed, there was no need to exact a promise--she
volunteered it, that she is not going to take any further steps--to do
anything more!”
“_Do anything more!_” echoes the mother, with an accent of the acutest
scorn of this fresh attempt at solace. “Why, what more would you have
her do? What more could she do? Unless----”
She breaks off abruptly, and both know that she has been on the brink of
an utterance more suited, in its crude vernacular, to her former than
to her present estate. Both feel relieved that it has remained in the
domain of the implied; and, with a tactful fear lest the crestfallen
fellow-creature before her may be betrayed into some outburst of which
she may later repent on her return from the regions of primæval emotions
to the upholstered “reception-rooms” of gentility, Miss Carew hurries
over her adieux. Yet that “hurry” is scarcely the word to be applied to
her visit taken as a whole is brought home to her by the look of
beast-and-bird bedtime spread over the evening world as she gets out
into it.
“Are you ready?” she asks, addressing the back of a man-person whom the
first turn in the Park Road reveals kicking pebbles ahead of her in
obvious waiting.
“_Am I ready?_” rejoins he, wheeling round, with good-tempered
upbraiding. “You told me to be here at 5.30. It is now 7.15; and you
ask, _Am I ready?_”
Lavinia wisely attempts no defence. “Well, _are you_?” she asks,
smiling, but not coquettishly.
Of what use is it to be coquettish to a person in the same house, with
whom you have always lived, and your engagement to be married to whom
has had all the gilt taken off its gingerbread by the fact that you
cannot remember the time when you were not engaged to him, and who is,
to boot, your first cousin?
They walk on in silence for a few moments, she expecting and a little
dreading to be questioned, and be confident that she will volunteer an
explanation if he does not ask for one. But she refrains.
“Well, were they as good as usual? Have you no conversational plums to
reward me with?”
Lavinia winces. Is this a moment to remind her of how often she has
served up the pretensions and vulgarities of the family whom she has
just quitted on such affecting terms for the joint amusement of herself
and her _fiancé_?
“Don’t!” she answers hurriedly. “You do not know how you jar!”
He raises his eyebrows. “I know how cold I am,” he rejoins, still with
perfect temper, “and I shall be very glad to know why I _jar_, if you
will only tell me.”
“That is just what I can’t,” says she, wrinkling her forehead; “but you
may take my word for it that you do. You ring dreadfully out of tune.”
“In point of fact, one of your not uncommon waves of hatred for me is
going over you,” replies he, resignedly. “I know that they are never to
be accounted for.”
“No; I do not feel any special hatred for you to-night,” replies she,
dispassionately. “But I can’t tell you what is not my secret. In point
of fact, it is not really a secret at all, as Féodorovna will certainly
proclaim it to you next time you meet her; but _I_ can’t tell it.”
“It _is_ a secret, and it is not a secret; and _you_ may not tell it me,
though Féodorovna may! What dark sayings are these?” cries he, gaily,
perfectly indifferent as to her mystery, though diverted at the pomp
with which she is investing it.
But his lady-love is not to be won to any answering lightness.
“I see nothing to laugh at,” she says; and even in the rooky twilight he
can perceive her frown. “I pity them from the bottom of my heart. One of
the greatest misfortunes possible--yes, I really think I do not
exaggerate--one of the greatest misfortunes possible has fallen upon
them.”
“Has the Candle begun to drop after all these years?” asks he, still
incorrigibly flippant.
She quickens her pace, as if to get away from him.
“I have always known that there was something lacking in you.”
“I have always known that there were a great many things lacking in me,”
interrupts he, mending his pace too.
“Even if I had not promised, nothing would induce me to tell to any one
so unsympathetic----”
“I do not want you to tell me! I do not care a button what has happened
to them!” cries he, rudely, but half laughing.
Bested in the attempt to outstrip her companion, Miss Carew stops short.
“You would be sorry if you knew,” she throws out tantalizingly, unable
to resist the temptation to go as near as possible to the line which she
is resolved not to cross, and unworthily annoyed at the absence of
pressure put upon her.
“I should not,” replies her lover, with quiet conviction. “If it were
anything that would make them less beastly prosperous, I should be
glad.”
“There was nothing ‘beastly prosperous’ about them to-day,” says she
indignantly, as memory reconstructs the bitterly dripping tears of the
one millionaire, and the stubby head clutched in short coarse hands of
the other.
He receives the information in silence, not wishing to make her more
angry than she already is, and being really quite without interest as to
the topic which engages her.
Lavinia is obliged to give up the attempt to stimulate a curiosity
which, after all, she has no right to gratify, and, thrusting her
partisanship into her pocket, reluctantly changes the topic.
“Have you found out why your father was so much put out at luncheon?”
It is growing too dark to see his face, but she catches the instant
change in his tone.
“Yes.”
“I told you that there must be some cause.”
“Because he exceeded even his usual ample measure of incivility to me,
do you mean?”
There is very little bitterness in the voice or words, only a sort of
regret mixed with some not quite ordinary quality of patience.
“I felt sure that he had had something to ruffle him.”
“He has always something to ruffle him. He has always _me_; but to-day,
dear old chap, he had something more.”
“What?”
“Poor Bill’s things came back this morning--his watch and his
cigar-case, and mother’s photograph--and with them, I think, but of
course father did not show that to me, a letter from the fellow whom
Bill picked up on his own horse, and brought out from the Boer fire when
he himself was mortally wounded.”
There is an unresenting pain running through the whole of this
narrative, but Lavinia does not notice it.
“Does the letter give any more details--say whether he suffered much?”
she asks, in white eagerness. “Oh, but I forgot,” half impatiently, “you
did not see it!”
“He will show it to you,” replies the young man, as if stating a
perfectly natural and accountable fact.
After a pause, while they both trudge on in hushed emotion--
“Poor old fellow! if he knew how much I understood what it must be to
him to see me there, who am the embodiment of everything that he
despises and dislikes, eating my luncheon, well and fit, while Bill is
lying in his wretched makeshift of a South African grave, he would
perhaps hate me a little less than he does.”
The girl turns to him now impulsively, her fine lucid eyes shining wetly
in the semi-darkness.
“And if he could but look into your heart--oh, why haven’t we windows in
our breasts? how much fewer mistakes there would be if we had!--he would
see how gladly, _gladly_ you would change places with Bill!”
The appeal is not answered. Campion’s head is sunk on his breast.
“You would, wouldn’t you?” she cries urgently, as if she could not bear
a moment’s delay in the assent to a proposition so obvious.
There is an instant’s pause; then her companion--they have both
stopped--lifts his eyes with obvious difficulty to hers.
“No,” he says, in a low but not uncertain voice, while the moon, which
has just looked over a clump of neighbouring hornbeams, lights the
sincerity of his quivering face, “I would _not_ rather change places
with Bill. I would rather be alive here, walking with you, than lying
cold and bloody under that hideous veldt. I have never had any opinion
of what is conventionally called _honour_. ‘Who hath it? He that died o’
Wednesday.’ Well, I have no wish to have died o’ Wednesday.”
For a moment a look of terror and aversion crosses Lavinia’s face; then
her brow grows clear.
“It is lucky for you that I do not believe you,” she says, with a sort
of laugh--“that I know your ways.”
“Do you?” he answers, half under his breath; and again they walk on.
They are outside the Park gates, have followed the road that leads past
the King’s Woods, and have reached the brow of the hill, half-way down
which the village lights show their yellow points, and the church
steeple tells its jackdaws, now silent in bed, to the tune of “The Last
Rose of Summer,” that it is seven o’clock. Upon the silvering sky the
Kentish oast-houses draw their extinguisher outline.
“I have always wondered,” says Campion, slowly, as they begin to descend
the steep slope side by side, “why, feeling as you do, you did not pitch
upon Bill instead of me.”
“I did not pitch upon you,” replies she, quietly. “I believe that I was
born engaged to you, as I was born Uncle George’s niece. It seems to me
as if the one has been as little a matter of choice as the other!”
There is, if no romance, at least so rock-like a certainty in her way of
stating their relationship, that the young man feels a sudden lightening
of a heart that has been heavy enough.
“That, perhaps, is why we never can decide whether I asked you or you
me?”
“Oh yes, we can!” retorts she, also in a gayer vein. “As soon as I could
speak I suggested our marrying when we grew up. You demurred, and asked
whether we might not live together without marrying? I rejoined that
that would be wicked, and that Nanna said we should go to hell if we
did, whereupon you reluctantly consented.”
Both laugh, and arrive at the tree-hung entrance to their modest house
in better humour with each other than had at one time seemed probable.
But once inside the hall-door, the little spurt of cheerfulness dies
down.
“Is he in his own room?” Lavinia asks under her breath, and the answer,
“He was when I came out,” uttered with equal precaution, sends her
treading lightly towards a shut door, through the old-fashioned
fanlight over which a light is visible. Neither she nor her cousin-lover
suggests that he shall accompany her.
As she enters the idea strikes her with a half-whimsical sadness, for
what different types of sorrow she has within an hour had to provide
consolation. Equally different is the setting to those sorrows. In his
little Spartan room, with its large knee-hole writing-table, and its
sparse decorations of old coloured stage-coach prints, portraits of
departed hunters and famous jockeys, Sir George Campion sits in his
leather chair, reading his _Country Life_ with a resolutely everyday
look. There is only one bit of driftwood to show the shipwreck in which
his old heart went down two months ago; and that is the few little
objects neatly arranged on the small table that carries his
reading-lamp, within reach of that hand and eye, which yet would seem
ostentatiously unaware of them. Lavinia’s action ignores the poor little
pretence. She goes straight up to the sitting figure, and lays her hand
gently but firmly on his shoulder.
“So they have come back!” she says, her frank ringing voice
sympathetically lowered and chastened. “Thank God that the Boers have
not got them!”
“Yes; they arrived this morning!” replies he, still with his disengaged
air.
She touches the little articles with delicate reverence one after
another.
“Yes; here are all our presents--not one missing: the poor rector’s
electric bâton”--with a little half-sobbing laugh--“that we all made
such fun of when it first came; and yet, if you remember, _he_ said, in
one of his first letters, how useful it had turned out.”
The father listens, still striving to maintain the look of being
disturbed by irrelevant trifles in a congenial occupation; but the paper
crackling slightly betrays the trembling of the fingers that hold it.
The girl sits down on the worn arm of her uncle’s chair, while her own
arm passes round his neck.
“You have had a letter too?” she says, in a voice of cautious
tenderness, as one drawing near to an open gash, and adding the caress
of a light kiss dropped upon his grey hair.
“Who told you that I had a letter?”
“Rupert; but he said that you had not shown it to him.”
For the moment Sir George forgets to feign. “I thought it might frighten
him,” he answers, with a disagreeable smile. “There is a good deal about
Mausers and dynamite, and such ugly things in it.”
She does not take up the jeer, though it makes her stingingly hot, as if
she herself were its object.
“Rupert thought that perhaps you might show it to me?” she suggests.
“I have no objection to _your_ seeing it!” returns he, with significant
emphasis; “that is to say, if I can find it.”
With a repetition of that poor parade of carelessness, he feigns to
search in all his pockets, as of one that has mislaid something too
valueless to be hoarded, and ends by bringing out from--where she had
never doubted its resting--the one nearest his heart the narrative of
his son’s death, penned by that dead boy’s comrade. Lavinia unfolds it,
and, with head reverently bowed, begins to read. It is written in
pencil, evidently by one to whom pens and stationery are non-existent,
and in parts it is hard to decipher. There is absolute stillness in the
room. _Country Life_ has fallen upon the carpet, but Sir George forgets
to pick it up. Lavinia pauses at last; for the excellent reason that her
eyes are too thick with tears to do her any service.
“Oh, _what_ a tribute!” she says, in a suffocated whisper. “You must
never--_never_”--catching his hand, and raining salt drops upon
it--“never again be so selfish as to grudge him such a glorious death!
Oh, which of us does not envy him? which of us would not change with
him?”
She breaks off suddenly, memory pouring upon the furnace of her passion
the cold stream of her _fiancé’s_ cynical question, “Who hath it? He
that died o’ Wednesday.” It was only talk, only said to tease her; but
why does it recur to her now, like a blasphemy hissed into a believer’s
ear in a sanctuary? In a groundless terror lest her thought should be
read, she dashes her handkerchief across her eyes, and resumes reading.
But every sentence, unstudied, unliterary, plain and crude in its direct
passage from heart to heart, blurs her voice afresh--
“What a tribute!” she repeats, trying to steady her broken voice so as
to read aloud intelligibly snatches from the letter before her: “‘Never
saw anything to equal his pluck, except his patience--his colonel quite
broke down when he bid him good-bye--so cheerful--and making jokes even
up to----” Again she breaks off, stayed by weeping.
“He was a promising lad!” says the father, in an iron voice. Then
against his will the mask falls for a moment: “And this,” he cries,
striking the table beside him with his clenched fist, in a sort of
rage--“these,” pointing to the little relics tragic in their
insignificance--“these are all that is left of him and his career! These
are all that I have left to live on!”
With what but the awe and pity of her silence can Lavinia answer an
outburst so heart-rending? Several minutes elapse before she dares to
hesitate her small attempt at solace.
“Do we go _quite_ for nothing? You have _us_ left! We may not be much,
but we are _something_!”
No sooner is it uttered than she sees, by the dull rage in his eyes and
the sneer on his lips, how more than useless her effort has been.
“Yes; I have certainly Rupert of the Rhine left! Ha! ha! He has a whole
skin at present, and I expect he will take precious good care that it
keeps whole!”
Lavinia takes her arm away, and rises to her feet, in deeply wounded
discouragement, reddening in her lover’s behalf even more deeply than
she had with vicarious shame at Féodorovna’s immodesty.
“Are you angry with him for not being dead too?” she asks, standing
before her uncle with locked hands and burning eyes. “Well, perhaps he
will oblige you; he has never been very strong!” Then, with a revulsion
of feeling, flinging herself on her knees beside the old man, “Do not be
unkind to him! you know that, though they were so different, Bill liked
him very much! Oh!”--bowing her nut-brown head on his knees--“oughtn’t
we to love each other all the better, now that there are so few of us?”