The hall-door reveals an unwelcome sight, though no one can deny that it
is a showy one, nor that the February sunlight is snobbish enough to
treble itself against the brazen glories of the crests on blinker and
harness and panel of the Princes’ carriage. It is a fact of disagreeable
familiarity to both uncle and niece that Féodorovna Prince will never
allow any of her acquaintance to be “not at home;” and that to be
pursued to study, toilet-table, and bed is the penalty exacted from
those upon whom she chooses to inflict her friendship. The two exchange
a look.
“Do not let her come near me,” says the man, in accents of peremptory
disgust, and so flings off to his den; while Lavinia, with the
matter-of-fact unselfishness of the well-broken human female, goes
smiling into the drawing-room.
After all, it is not Féodorovna, but her mother, who comes forward
alone, and with jet-clinking apology.
“You do not mind? It is not a thing that one has any right to do? But
Féodorovna would insist on getting out, so I got out too.”
At another moment this exegesis, pregnant in its unconscious brevity of
the relations between mother and daughter, would have made Lavinia
laugh; but at the present moment a horrible suspicion freezes all
tendency to mirth.
“Féodorovna!”--looking round in bewildered apprehension. “Why, where is
she?”
The visitor is so obviously in no hurry to answer, that Miss Carew’s
question repeats itself with an imperativeness that drags out the
reluctant and frightened response.
“Well, my dear, you must not scold me, as I see you are inclined; or, if
you do, it will be grossly unjust. You know what she is when she takes a
thing into her head, and I am bound to say she does feel, and has felt,
very keen sympathy for him in his trouble; indeed, we all have.”
She pauses, weakly hoping for some expression of thanks or reassurance;
but Lavinia only stares at her with confusing sternness in her aghast
blue eyes.
“And when she heard that the things had come back--poor Bill’s things--I
believe the news came through the servants--nothing would serve her but
that she must see Sir George, to tell him how much she felt for him. You
know that she has that curious _personal_ feeling about the whole of our
Army in South Africa, as if it belonged to her in a way, and she always
rated Bill very highly.”
Again the mother pauses, with a hope--but a fainter one than its
predecessor--that this tribute to the dead may have a mollifying effect
upon her inconveniently silent and staring young hostess.
“And where is she now?” asks Lavinia, with an accent that makes Mrs.
Prince regret her silence.
“She said she would go to Sir George’s room to wait for him; that she
was sure he would prefer that there should be no witnesses to their
meeting. Oh, do not go after her!”--with a despairing clutch at
Lavinia’s raiment as the latter makes a precipitate movement doorwards.
“It is too late now; and, after all, Sir George, poor man, is very well
able to take care of himself. And if he gives her a real good snub, why,
so much the better.”
Lavinia pauses, arrested by the something of sound sense that leavens
her companion’s flurried speech, and with a dawning pity in her
relenting eyes.
“And there is something I want so much to say to you,” goes on the poor
woman, hanging on to the skirt of her advantage, though wisely
relinquishing her material grasp. “You know that I always bring my
troubles to you, and I am in a fresh one now.”
“About her, of course?”
“Oh yes; about her, of course. I suppose that but for her things would
have gone almost too smoothly with Mr. Prince and me. I suppose that the
Almighty sees we need her to prevent us getting too--too uppish.”
The adjective is scarcely on the level of refinement held before her own
eyes by the poor lady, but the tear that moistens condones it.
“What is it now?” asks the girl, with a resolute banishing to the back
of her mind of the intense annoyance and apprehension caused by the
odious intrusion of Féodorovna, and sitting down beside her guest with
resolute and patient sympathy.
“I never look at her letters,” says Mrs. Prince, lowering her voice,
which has taken on a tone of eager relief. “You know I do not; but she
had left it with her others for the butler to stamp. He had it in his
hand; it was at the top. I could not help seeing the address.”
“Not _again_? She has not been writing to General ---- _again_?”
The expression of tragic repulsion in her young companion’s face seems
to get upon Mrs. Prince’s nerves.
“How you do jump down one’s throat!” she cries peevishly. “No, of course
she has not!”
“It was stupid of me to suggest it! To whom, then?”
“I really could not help seeing,” continues the elder woman, mollified
and apologetic for her own action. “It was no case of prying, but I
could not help reading, ‘Surgeon-General Jameson, Army Medical
Department, Victoria Street, Westminster.’”
There is a pregnant pause.
“Surgeon-General Jameson!” repeats Lavinia. “He is Director-General of
the R.A.M.C., isn’t he?”
The plumed toque that crowns Mrs. Prince’s expensive toupet gives a
dejected dip of assent.
“Does she know him?”
“Not from Adam. But that would never stop her writing to any one; no,
nor speaking to them either!”
Another pause.
“She wants to go out to South Africa as a nurse, I suppose?”
Again the tall ostrich feathers wave acquiescence. This time a spoken
elucidation follows.
“That is it, as far as we--her father and I--can make out.”
Lavinia draws a little nearer, and lays her hand upon the arm of her
visitor’s chair, while her chin lifts itself, and then falls again in a
movement of hopeless pity.
“I am very sorry indeed for you both! How does Mr. Prince take it? What
does he say?”
“You can never get much out of Mr. Prince,” replies his wife, in a tone
whose complaint is streaked with admiration for a verbal continence of
which she feels herself quite incapable. “But he did say, in his dry
way, that he should be sorry to be one of Féo’s patients.”
Lavinia smiles, but cautiously; and then, illuminated by a sudden
suggestion of valid consolation, speaks.
“You may make your mind easy, they will never accept her! She has none
of the qualifications.”
A slightly soothed expression comes over the visitor’s perturbed
features.
“It seems an odd thing to say of one’s own child, but I must say that
there is no one that I would not rather have about me than Féo when I am
at all poorly; and Mr. Prince is just the same.”
“Then do not waste time in worrying!” says Lavinia, with bracing
cheerfulness; herself encouraged by the success of her mode of
reassurance. “She will infallibly get a polite No for her answer, and
you will never hear anything more about it.”
“You are wrong there,” replies Féodorovna’s mother with rueful
shrewdness. “She is sure to tell us about it. Féo has an odd way of
boasting about things that other people would be ashamed of!”
“It is impossible to contradict this assertion, and with a passing
wonder and pity for a love cursed with such good eyes,” Lavinia repeats,
in despair of finding anything better, her already-tried-and-found-wanting
anodyne.
“Well, at all events, nothing will come of it.”
“And what will her next move be? I ask you that! What will her next move
be?” inquires Mrs. Prince, in dreary triumph.
The pride of having proposed an insoluble riddle kindles a funeral torch
in each eye. The question, as the too clear-sighted parent had expected,
_stumps_ Miss Carew, nor can any of the hysterical indelicacies which
pass through her mind as likely to illustrate Féodorovna’s future course
be decently dressed enough to be presented as hypotheses to Féodorovna’s
mother.
It is the occasion of her dilemma who cuts it short by an entrance a
good deal less aspen-like and deliberate than is usual in her case. It
is, of course, an extravagant trick of fancy, but the impression is at
once conveyed to at least one of the occupants of the drawing-room that
Féodorovna has been kicked into the room. The pink umbrage in her silly
face confirms the idea of some propelling force behind her, as does the
excessive civility of the attendant Rupert. That the deferential
_empressement_ of his manner is the cover for an inclination towards
ungovernable, vexed laughter is suspected only by Lavinia. That some
catastrophe has attended the visit of the young paraclete is obvious to
the meanest observer; but it is not until after the Princes’ carriage
has crunched and flashed away with Féodorovna reclining in swelling
silence upon the cushion, and her mother casting glances of frightened
curiosity at her infuriated profile that the details of the disaster
reach Lavinia’s ears. Not immediately even then, since before she can
besiege her cousin with terrified questions, he is summoned to his
father; and it is fully half an hour before he rejoins her in the
schoolroom. She has to wait again even then; since at her first allusion
to the subject, he is seized with such _fou rire_ that he has to roll on
his face on the old sofa before he can master the shoulder-shaking
convulsions of his uncomfortable mirth.
“What happened?” cries the girl, standing over her _fiancé’s_ prostrate
figure in a fever of apprehension. “Oh, do get up, and stop laughing!
What is there to laugh at? You are too stupid to live!”
“I shall not live much longer!” replies the young man, rearing himself
up into a sitting posture, and presenting a subdued but suddenly grave
surface to his censor; “not if we are often to have such treats as this.
I do not know why I laugh, for I never felt less hilarious in my life.”
“You are as hysterical as a woman!” says Lavinia, with a frown.
“It is not my fault, though it is my eternal regret that I am not one!”
he retorts.
It is lucky for him that the fever of her preoccupation prevents Lavinia
from hearing this monstrous aspiration.
“Did he do anything _violent_?” she asks in a voice made low by dread.
“He kept his hands off her, if you mean that!” replies Rupert, showing
symptoms of a tendency to relapse into his convulsion of laughter; “but
only _just_! If I had not appeared in the nick of time, I would not have
answered for her life!” Then, as Lavinia keeps looking at him in
smileless tragedy, he goes on, “I was hanging about, waiting for him, as
you know he had told me that he should have something to say to
me--by-the-by, he has just been saying it, but that is another
story--when I heard raised voices, or rather a raised voice. You know
that long, dull roar of his that always makes me call on the hills to
cover me!”
“Well?”
“I felt that there was no time to be lost, so I hurried in--only just in
time! I saw in his eye that the next moment he would have her by the
shoulders, and be thrusting her through the door!”
“But he did not! you stopped him?”--breathlessly.
“Yes, thank the Lord!” He pauses, and his lips begin to twitch with
nervous mirth. “I know what you thought: she was shot into the
dining-room like a projectile; but it was not as bad as that. Only
_moral_ force propelled her.”
Lavinia brings her hands together with a sort of clap, but relief
mingles with the indignant animosity of her tone.
“What _had_ she said? What _had_ she done?”
Rupert shrugs his shoulders. “What is our little Féo _not_ capable of
saying and doing?” he asks sarcastically. “But you must remember I came
in only for the bouquet of the fireworks.” After a pause, in a key of
real feeling, with no tinge of satire, “Poor old fellow! I would have
done a good deal to save him from it. I think the last straw was when
she began to finger the things--Bill’s poor little possessions--and to
imply, if she did not exactly assert, that his death was quite as great
a blow to her as to the old man.”
“And when we remember what Bill’s estimate of her was!” cries Lavinia,
reddening with indignation. “Oh, if we could but tell her of his saying
that he should have to put barbed wire round himself whenever he went
outside the gate to prevent her getting at him!”
They both laugh--the little rueful laugh with which the jests of the
departed are recalled.
“After they had gone,” pursues Rupert, “when he sent for me, I found him
still in a terrible state. I have never seen him in such an ungovernable
fury. Not with me--to me he was like a pet lamb.”
Again they both laugh a little grimly, conscious of the extreme audacity
of the comparison.
“You will not believe it,” says Rupert, half humorously, and yet with a
quiver of emotion on his sensitive face, “but he actually _thanked_ me
for coming to his rescue! _Me_, if you please, _moi qui vous parle_!”
“‘It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’” replies Lavinia,
cheerfully, but with conscious effort, and with the feeling, often
before experienced, that a good deal of physical fatigue attends living
over the crater of Etna.”
“He calmed down after a while. I spent all the bad language I was master
of, and wished it had been more, upon the whole Prince clan; and that
did him good, so much so that he was able by-and-by to talk of something
else.”
“Of what else?” The question is an idle one, and Miss Carew is conscious
of it.
So is Rupert. “I expect that you know,” he answers quietly.
Never until to-day has Lavinia felt _gêne_ in the presence of her
lifelong playfellow and comrade, and that she should do so now strikes
her as so monstrous an anomaly that it must be treated drastically.
“About our marriage, do you mean?” she inquires, taking the bull by the
horns, and looking him full in the face.
“Yes.”
“H’m!” Struggle as she may, her lips can produce nothing more
forthcoming than the monosyllable.
“He asked me whether the engagement still existed?”
“So he did me.”
“Whether we had any intention of fulfilling it?”
“Ditto!”
“Whether it was essential to our happiness?”
“Essential to our happiness,” repeats she, as if it were a dictation
lesson.
“He said that we were all that he had left in the world.”
Lavinia nods, speech seeming difficult. Is Rupert going to recapitulate,
in his father’s unsparing Saxon, the reason for that father’s anxiety to
see them wed? She waits in rosy dread. It is a moment or two before
relief comes.
“He ended by adjuring me not to marry you in order to please him. I
think I was able to reassure him as to that not being my primary
inducement.”
They know each other far too well for her not to be instantly aware of
an alteration in his voice--not to have an instant’s flashed certainty
that the playmate, the comrade, the brother-cousin, is gone, and that
the lover stands full-fledged in their stead before her. Whether the
conviction causes her pain or pleasure, she could not tell you. She only
feels as she has done in the morning, but a thousandfold more so, that
the situation is overpoweringly _odd_.
“Well!” she says slowly, afraid to look away from him, lest she should
never again be able to lift her stupidly rebellious eyes to his.
“I suppose it was bound to come, some time or other?”
It is not an effusive mode of acquiescence.
“Have you nothing more to say about it?”
If she had had any doubt as to the final banishment out of her life of
the boy-comrade, the method of this question, and a certain reproachful
enterprise divined in the asker’s eye, would have banished it.
“What more is there to say?” she returns in troubled haste. “What more
than we have been saying all our lives, in a way?” Then, with a sudden
impulsive throwing herself on his judgment and mercy, “I suppose we _do_
feel all right, don’t we?”