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.”