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.