“Les joies ne sont que les afflictions en robe de fête.”
The kitchen-garden spreads itself out to the sun like a dog stretched
basking before the fire. Upward it slopes; its ripe red walls, its
espaliers, and wine-coloured and yellow spring flowers running up the
hill; house and stables, church tower, and promise-making trees, at its
foot, and with an apple-orchard, and a smaller cherry one, as a crown
for its head. The apple-orchard represents, as yet, only promise too;
but the hurrying cherry blossom spells performance.
Lavinia, standing on the sunny mid-path, with a bundle of bass-matting,
with which she has been training a young hop round a pole, lying on the
ground beside her, has just raised herself from her knees to admire the
rich red look that makes the cherry trees blush. She knows it to be due
to the young leaves which to-morrow will have disappeared in the storm
of white. They will be bridal to-morrow. _Bridal!_ She repeats the word
over to herself. This is the 28th of April. On precisely this day month,
she will be bridal too. The thought, apparently, is not one that invites
dwelling upon, for she turns back to her bass-matting and her hop; and,
in so doing, becomes aware of a figure--that of Mrs. Darcy--climbing the
gravel walk towards her.
Mrs. Darcy’s visits to Lavinia are much rarer than Lavinia’s to Mrs.
Darcy; partly because she is a good deal busier, and partly because she
does not like Rupert. The first reason is naturally the only one allowed
to appear in the relations between the friends.
“To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit?” asks the girl,
with playful formality.
Her friend’s answer is not quite so ready as usual; yet her wiry
slimness cannot be breathed by so gentle a hill.
“Miss Brine has come back. She has killed one relation, and cured
another!”
“How do the children bear it?”
“They are inconsolable! The thought of having to be comparatively clean
for an indefinite time has almost broken them down!”
Both laugh.
“It is an ill wind that blows nobody good; so you are able to come and
change the weather with me?”
There is a little surprise and inquiry in the key used; but Mrs. Darcy
accepts it as a statement apparently, for she stands, taking in, with
eyes and ears and nostrils, the universal blossoming and courting in
earth and air.
“Don’t you wish we could paraphrase Joshua’s command, ‘Sun, stand thou
still upon Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon,’ and say,
‘Spring, stand thou still in April’?”
“Do I?” answers the other, uneasily. “I do not think so!”
Her friend looks at her with covert observation, to verify that, despite
the peaceful quality of the most soothing of all occupations, gardening,
peace is not the dominant note in the concert of Miss Carew’s emotions
this gaudy, sweetly clamorous April morning.
“In point of fact, I came to bring you a message.”
“From whom?”
Is it fancy that the question is jerked out with some sort of
difficulty?
“From Mrs. Prince. She wants to persuade you to pay Captain Binning
another visit this afternoon. She tells me”--with a faint tinge of
surprise--“that you refused when she asked you two days ago.”
“I was there on Monday--that is only five days ago!” Lavinia has knelt
down on the gravel again, and is busy with her hop. Her voice sounds a
trifle hard.
“Five days can be pretty long to a sick man, more especially to a sick
man nursed by Féodorovna Prince!”
“But he is not nursed by her!” exclaims the other, almost angrily. “Mrs.
Prince herself told me that Mr. Prince had forbidden it, because he knew
she would kill him!”
Mrs. Darcy shakes her head. “As long as it was a question of his life,
Mr. Prince interfered; now that it is merely a matter of shaking his
reason and indefinitely retarding his recovery, Féo is at liberty to
work her inhuman will upon him. Only yesterday, Nurse Blandy said to me
that if things were not altered, she should tell Dr. Roots that she must
throw up the case.”
“And do you expect me to undertake it?” asks Lavinia, in a voice so
unlike her own, so unfeeling and grating, that Susan starts. “Rupert
went to see him on Tuesday,” continues the girl, not waiting for an
answer to her rather brutal question.
“Rupert and you are not quite one yet, though you soon will be,” rejoins
Mrs. Darcy, drily.
“My uncle has been twice, and you went yesterday. It cannot be good for
a moribund to receive such a shoal of visitors!” Her voice is still
hard, and there is neither compassion nor sympathy detectable in it.
“He catches at any reprieve from Féo’s importunities, poor fellow! I
told him about the children and their martial ardour, and he asked me to
bring them with me next time, if I was good enough to let him hope that
there would be a next time--he looked at me like a lost dog, as he said
it; and then Féo came in with something in a cup, and forced it down his
throat, pouring half of it over the sheet. I fully expected her to hold
his nose, to make him open his mouth, as Mrs. Gamp did with her patient
at the Bull Inn!”
Lavinia is sitting up on her heels, the implements of her infuriated
industry dropped in her lap, and listening in a silent horror that gives
the lie to the callousness of her utterances of a minute ago.
Mrs. Darcy turns to go. “So I must say that you cannot spare time--that
you do not see your way to it? Which sounds best?” she asks with
affected carelessness.
The answer comes in the voice of Daphne, flying dishevelled, torn, and
red-rosy up the walk.
“Oh, Lavy, we have had such a battle! It was between the turkey-cocks
and the _hen_-cocks.”
* * * * *
“I will go and see,” says Féodorovna, whom, to her surprise, Lavinia
finds lying on the sofa in her own luxuriously fantastic den; when, on
the afternoon of the same day, a pair of hesitatingly hurrying feet
carry her past the King’s Wood, through the Princes’ escutcheoned lodge,
to and through their hall-door.
Miss Prince’s voice has its _ex-cathedrâ_ importance, and her
cap-strings their official wave and float, as she adds--
“It is quite likely that I may have to send you away. Half an hour ago,
he said he felt inclined to sleep; I think it was partly a ruse to
induce me to take a little rest; but he looked rather exhausted, and
Nurse Blandy advised me to lie down till he wanted me again.”
Between the self-satisfied lines of this communication the listener
reads how eternal must be the recumbency of Féodorovna, if continued
until the suggested need for her arises; and how dire the sufferings of
the victim.
The interval between Miss Prince’s discouraging exit and her return
seems long to the feverish candidate for an interview, which, as the
moments pass, she begins hotly to feel is not desired by the person with
whom it is asked. Susan has misled her--in her turn deceived by the
well-meaning importunities of Mrs. Prince. To be persecuting him again
after an interval of only five days! Probably he will regard her as a
second Féodorovna! Her uncle’s pet-name recurs ironically to her
mind--his Mosquito! She is going to be some one else’s mosquito, too.
For the first time in her life she merits the name!
“He will see you for a few minutes!” announces Miss Prince, reappearing
at last. “Personally, I do not think it very prudent; but Nurse Blandy
has made up her mind that he will be none the worse for it; and she
always considers herself a Court of Final Appeal.”
There are traces of past skirmish and present ill humour in Féodorovna’s
appearance; but to both Lavinia is absolutely indifferent. With an
immensely relieved, but still doubting, heart--for, after all, there has
been no word of his wish or will--she follows the haughtily undulating
figure of her guide through the same rooms, passages, and stairs as she
had traversed with a deep, but immeasurably less deep, excitement five
days ago. The lowered blinds, the lavished luxury of detail, the bed in
the recess,--how familiar they are! and yet how long ago her first
acquaintance with them seems!
She is nearing him. Will his first glance reveal that she has been
officious? that her visit adds one more nail to his wearisome martyrdom?
The answer comes carried by lightning. He has dragged himself up into
the forbidden attitude--at least it was forbidden five days ago; but
five days is an enormous period of time--an absurdly evident joy in his
caverned eyes. It cannot be more absurd than the blind elation that the
recognition of that joy evokes in her. It is with relief that, when
words come to her, she hears them to be temperate and rational.
“I am afraid that you were asleep, and that I woke you!’
“I never was wider awake in my life.”
His voice is stronger than it was on Monday; and Lavinia realizes that
Nature has been more potent than even Féodorovna; and that he has made a
perceptible step towards recovery since their last meeting.
“Are you sure that you are up to seeing me?”
“As sure as that I see you.”
Miss Prince and the nurse have retired together, but obviously at
variance, towards the window, and no ear but that to which it is
addressed catches the answer. For Lavinia only is the impression of the
inestimable benefit conceived to be conferred by the sight of her. From
one but lately lying at the point of death insincerities and conventions
are apt to flee away, and she knows that straight from that heart, whose
beats the bullet had so nearly stilled, rushes the response to her
question.
“Come, come!” says Féodorovna, swishing up to the bedside, and speaking
in that hybrid whisper with Miss Prince’s own trade-mark, warranted to
en-fever the calmest invalid; “you must not hang over him. There is
nothing so fatal as to exhaust the air in the immediate neighbourhood of
a patient. Sit quietly down here, and do not say too much.”
The precept is easy to obey, and, in fact, compliance with an opposite
one would to Miss Carew, for the first moment, be quite impossible. For
those first moments the forbidden conversation is supplied by the
prohibitor.
“We need not keep you, nurse,” she says, with more of command and less
of grovelling deference than the official in question is accustomed to
hear. “Your tea is waiting for you.”
Nurse Blandy’s answer is to take the pillows which Féodorovna is
beginning, with amateurish wrong-ness, to shake up, out of that
ministering angel’s hand, and with two masterly movements adapt them to
the patient’s back.
“Miss Carew will ring for me before she leaves you,” she says in a
restful, determined voice, and so quietly departs, with one parting
glance at her foe, which explains, with telegraphic brevity and
distinctness, that no attention to Miss Prince’s orders, but simply a
desire for her own refreshment, takes her away.
“I shall stay as watch-dog, to ensure your not being imprudent!” says
Féodorovna, emerging triumphant, and with a false sense of victory, out
of the late contest, and seating herself nearer to and in much better
view of the sick man than she had allowed his visitor to do.
The latter has watched, with a deep, dumb indignation, the one-sided
scuffle over his helpless form; and her eyes now meet his with as
profound and acute a disappointment legible in them as she reads in his
own. Féodorovna, with a truer estimate than before of the side on which
the balance would swing, is to-day not going to give her prey the choice
of escaping her for half an hour. Féodorovna is not going to leave them
for one minute alone.
And yet, did they but know it, no speech could have so quickly driven
them into intimacy, as this dumb meeting on the ground of their “most
mutual” vexation. At first it seems as if silence were to reign
unbroken, and when a subject is at length chosen, it is Féodorovna who
starts it.
“Captain Binning has had so many visitors,” she says, transgressing the
most elementary rule of nursing, by discussing a patient in his own
presence. “Sir George, Mrs. Darcy, Mr. Campion.”
The enumeration sounds like a reproach, and the words of
self-vindication, “I was asked to come,” all but spring to Lavinia’s
lips; all but, not quite. It is better that he should think her pushing
and intrusive, than that his already wearied body and spirit should have
the fatigue and vexation of an explanation, whose only end would be to
salve her own wounded self-esteem.
“And though he enjoys it at the time,” pursues the arbiter of poor
Captain Binning’s destinies, “he feels the ill effects afterwards!”
“You take more trouble about me than I deserve!” says the invalid,
rather faintly, and in a voice under whose admirably patient politeness
Miss Carew divines an intense nervous irritation. “You know I cannot be
kept in cotton wool all my life!”
“It will not be my fault if you are not!” returns Féo, in a tone of
enthusiasm as intense and overt as that with which she had formerly
proclaimed her life-dedication to General ----.
There is a silence, each of the hearers probably feeling that it would
be impossible to “go one better” than the last utterance. Lavinia steals
a shocked glance at the object of it; but the air of civil tired
endurance, untempered by either fear or surprise, with which he receives
it, shows her that it is merely one of many such declarations. He only
throws his head a little further back, and shuts his eyes--to reopen
them, however, hastily. Lavinia follows the track of his thought. If he
shows any sign of weakness, their common overseer will dismiss Miss
Carew, and thrust something down his own throat.
When they reopen they reopen upon Lavinia’s; although, thanks to the
seat assigned to the latter by Féodorovna, it is only by turning his
head at an awkward angle, that he can get a tolerable view of her;
reopen with an appeal so direct and piteous as to be impossible to
misread. Can she--_she_ with the free use of her limbs, her wits, do
nothing for them? _Them!_ She has time for a spear-thrust of conscience
at the plural pronoun, followed by an equally rapid dart of
self-justification. The use of it was _his_, not hers. She only read off
his thought as a message is read off from the tape. He, in turn, must
read off a negative from hers, since the appeal dies out of his eyes
with disappointed revolt. It is only because a knock at the door has for
an instant freed them from supervision, that they are able to exchange
even these mute signals.
“I shall not be away more than a minute or two,” says Miss Prince,
undulating back to the bedside, and speaking in a voice whose
exasperation at the interruption and unnecessarily emphatic reassurance
contend for the upper hand. “My father has chosen this not very happy
moment to send for me; but I shall insist upon his not detaining me
long.”
She is gone! Blessed, blessed author of the Féodorovna Candle! Long may
his dropless tapers enlighten the world! For a moment, though it is
daylight, he has lit up the universe for two persons! One of them
apparently feels that his tether is a short one, and that he must take
time by the forelock. The door has hardly closed before he says--
“You are not sitting in the same place as you did on Monday!”
“No.”
The inference that he thinks the change not one for the better is so
clear that there would be prudery in ignoring it; and, besides, has not
Féodorovna impressed upon her that his lightest whim is to be respected?
So she moves with quiet matter-of-factness to the chair originally
occupied by her. It cannot be good for his wound that he should slew
himself round, as he was doing a moment ago, to get a better prospect of
her.
“Thank you! Thank you also a thousand times more for coming to see me
again.”
“Why shouldn’t I come to see you again?”
The question is addressed more to herself in reality than to him, and is
an answer to her own misgivings rather than to his gratitude. A slight
shade of surprise crosses the eager brightness of his face.
“You did not see your way to it at first, so Mrs. Prince told me.”
“I did not want to stand in the way of other visitors,” she answers--“my
uncle, Rupert,” adding with difficulty, “We all claim our part in Bill’s
friend.”
She looks steadily at him, and sees a sort of chill come into his
eyes--at her lumping of herself and her family in a cold generalization.
“Rupert!” he says, repeating the name lingeringly, and with an
involuntarily reluctant intonation. “Yes; I have heard of Rupert.”
“From Bill?”
“Yes, from Bill--and from others.”
The slight hesitation that intervenes between “Bill” and the “others”
tells her that he knows. How should he not know, indeed? Is it likely
that, in his state of tedious invalidhood, he should not have been told
any bit of local gossip that might give him a moment’s distraction? To
him, her engagement to marry Rupert is just a bit of local gossip,
neither more nor less. No doubt that the news was imparted--why should
it not be?--by Féodorovna.
“So you see,” she says, struggling with the senseless feeling of
resentment and vexation that has invaded her heart, “my time is not
always my own.”
“I see!” He lies quite silent for a minute or two, looking out of the
window at a burgeoning sycamore, then adds, in a would-be cheerful
voice, “It is kind of him to spare you to me for half an hour; but he
seemed such a kind fellow when he came to see me the other day: one of
my bandages got a little out of gear, and he put it right for me, with a
touch as gentle as a woman’s.”
She repeats “as a woman’s,” like a parrot, with the bitter thought that
even this generously meant encomium takes the feminine shape that all
praise of Rupert must do. No one can deny that the bridegroom she has
chosen can hold his own as a judge of lace, mender of china, and shaker
of pillows, with any expert in either of these three branches of
accomplishment in Europe. The cloud on her brow must be a visible one,
for the sick man’s next remark has a note of doubt and trouble in it.
“I have often heard Bill talk of him. Though they were not alike in
externals, nor, I imagine, in tastes, they meant a great deal to each
other.”
The sentence is evidently intended as a statement, but takes a perverse
interrogative twist at the end.
“People may mean a great deal to each other without having a single
taste in common,” she replies; and the answer leaves on both their minds
a painful sense of having incomprehensibly offended on the one side,
and of having bristled in uncalled-for defence on the other.
The sands of their dual solitude are running out, and this is the way in
which they are utilizing Féodorovna’s absence! In both their minds a
feverish reckoning is going on as to how long it will take Miss Prince
to send her stork-legs along the corridors and staircases that separate
her from her impertinent parent, snub him, and return. Ten minutes is an
ample latitude to give her, and of these five must have already fled.
They cannot, cannot part upon that jarring last note. The rebellion
against doing so is equally strong in both minds, but it is the woman
who raises the cry of revolt. It is a cry that has no reference to
anything that has passed before, it is only the unruly human heart
calling out to its fellow from among the conventions.
“I _am_ so glad that you are better!”
“And I _am_ so glad that you altered your mind!”
They laugh a little, like two happy children, relieved and blissful at
the withdrawn cloud that leaves the blue of their tiny patch of heaven
for its one moment undimmed. Both feel that the exchange of those two
snapped sentences has turned Miss Prince’s prospective return from an
unendurable to a quite supportable ill.
“I think that you would find _that_ chair”--directing her by an
imploring look to one in closer proximity to the bedside than that which
she occupies--“a more comfortable one.”
“Should I?”
She makes the change. Are not all his whims to be gratified? They can
see one another admirably now. He verifies a dimple, and she a scar. He
makes no comment on his discovery. She does upon hers.
“You have been wounded before?” she asks, with trembling interest.
He puts his fore finger on a white cicatrice that runs across his lower
cheek and jaw.
“_That_ bit of a cut! Oh, I got that in the Soudan. It is an old story,
and it was nothing worth mentioning. It did not keep me above a week in
hospital.”
It is clear that he has no wish to pursue the subject; and she refrains,
partly in deference to his disinclination, partly from the aboriginal
woman’s awed joy in the fighting man, partly oppressed by a sense of
contrast. When Rupert cut his leg a year ago, over a fallen tree in the
wood, he all but fainted at the sight of his own blood! But to Binning
she leaves it to start a theme more to his liking.
“I suppose,” he says, turning his head sideways on his pillow in a way
that hides his scar, and brings her still more perfectly within his
range of vision, “that lying on the flat of one’s back like a cast sheep
makes one see things at an odd angle. You will be surprised to hear
that, a few minutes ago, I thought I had offended you.”
There is a pause before she answers, “I had offended myself. Don’t you
think that that is a much worse thing to happen?”
“Do you mean that one can’t beg one’s own pardon?” he asks, laughing
slightly, yet with curiosity stimulated by the gravity of her manner,
and awaiting with eager interest the unriddling of her riddle.
But it remains unriddled. The impulse of each is apparently to flee away
from the other’s topic. Lavinia looks out of the window, and says, with
glad hopefulness--
“In another week you will be able to be carried out-of-doors. You will
be too late for the cherry, but the apple blossom will be all ready for
you, and then you will come in for the lilacs, the laburnums, the
thorns--they are really wonderful in the Park here--the Siberian crabs,
the acacias.”
“Anything more?” he asks, in tender derision of her long list.
“Plenty,” she answers, prepared to continue to bait his appetite for
life with more of her joyous enumeration.
“But I shall not be here to see them,” he objects. “In a month I may go
back, for Roots says so.”
The laughter behind her dancing eyes goes out, and the lilt has left the
voice that asks, “Did Dr. Roots say so to you? or did you say so to
him?”
If he were not bandaged in bed, and an Englishman, Binning would shrug
his shoulders. There is a touch of impatience in his--
“Does it matter much which? We said it to each other.” Then, stirred by
an immense gratitude for her downcast look, he adds gently, “How can I
not be in a hurry to go back? Isn’t my regiment out there still, and my
chief, and all my pals?”
At the sound of his voice, with the fighting ring in it vanquishing the
feebleness of sickness, she lifts her head proudly--
“Of course you want to go back,” she says, with an unaccountable sense
of partnership in his courage and comradeship; “and I hope you will get
well quickly, and be able to do it soon!”