“There was never anything happened so unluckily!”
This is the ejaculation with which Mrs. Prince opens one of those
forenoon visits to Campion Place, discouraged by the recipients, but at
least not so common in her case as in that of her unsnubable daughter.
The scene of it has, as often, to be transferred to the Rectory, and in
this case the object of the visit must be tracked, by a visitor too
eager to await her correctly in the drawing-room, to the linen-room,
where, in company with all the Darcy family except its head, she has
been witnessing a presentation to the cow-man, on his approaching
marriage with the schoolroom maid. The function is happily just
concluded before the interruption takes place; but the wedding gifts lie
displayed upon the linen-room table, and are being examined for the
twentieth time with critical interest by the young Darcys, of whom both
bride and bridegroom are intimate friends, and who have followed the
course of their true love with breathless sympathy since Martinmas. They
view the arrival of Mrs. Prince with more pleasure than usual, as giving
them a fresh gallery to whom to display and enumerate the nuptial
gifts; and, in any case, are far too courteous and kind-hearted not to
be willing to share the elation caused by so joyful an occasion with any
chance comer.
“What has happened unluckily?” asks Lavinia, starting up from her knees,
on which she has been requested to descend to examine the quality of a
Japanese rug displaying itself gaudily on the floor. To her own heart
the question phrases itself differently, “Is he worse?”
“There is something so perverse in its occurring _now_ of all times!”
pursues Mrs. Prince, with that provoking keeping of his or her audience
on tenterhooks and in the dark, by a person whose own curiosity is at
rest, which one often observes.
“But what is it? What _has_ happened?” asks Mrs. Darcy, coming to the
rescue, and holding in her hand the rolling-pin, which has just been
submitted to her for special admiration by her second daughter.
“Of course, it is not her fault! We cannot blame, we can only pity her!”
“Blame her! Pity her! What for?”
Once again Susan is mouthpiece; and Lavinia, herself paralyzed by
apprehension, blesses her. What has Féodorovna done to him? Poisoned him
with the wrong medicine? Set fire to his sheets? Undone his bandages,
and let him bleed to death? To one acquainted with Miss Prince, all
these suppositions come well within the range of the probable.
“She is nearly mad herself!” continues Féodorovna’s mother. “I have
never seen her in such a state!”
Mrs. Darcy lays the rolling-pin quietly down; and, going over to the
intruder, puts a resolute slight hand on her arm.
“I think you ought to tell us what you are talking about? You are
frightening us all!”
“Didn’t I tell you!” answers the other, with vague surprise. “I thought
you knew! How stupid of me! But I have quite lost my head! So have we
all!”
She pauses. And there is a silence, only broken by some one--Mrs. Darcy
alone knows who it is--catching her breath.
“Tell us!” says the rector’s wife, with low-voiced command, and the
enragingly reticent lips obey.
“Féodorovna is ill in bed. She has developed jaundice. It declared
itself last night.”
“Jaundice! Féo!” ejaculates Mrs. Darcy, in a tone of such delighted
relief as is afterwards commented upon by herself with humorous
severity.
“She felt ill when she went to bed last night--overpoweringly sleepy and
bilious, and the whites of her eyes looked yellow; and to-day she is the
colour of a guinea!”
Lavinia has subsided again upon her knees, which do not feel quite so
strong as usual. The attitude may connote thankfulness as well as
inspection.
“Poor Féo!” she says, trying to avoid the key of garish joy in which
Susan’s utterance was pitched. “What a dreadful bore for her! How did
she get it?”
Mrs. Prince lifts her handsomely dressed shoulders and her
_pince-nez_-ed eyes to heaven, as if to refer the question there.
“We had the greatest difficulty in keeping her in bed, until we brought
her a looking-glass. She saw then that it was out of the question that
he should see her! But she is worrying herself to death over him--oh,
not over poor Smethurst: he might die twice a day for all she
cared--over Captain Binning, I mean!”
There is another pause, but of a different quality from the scared
silence of five minutes ago. In Susan’s case it is filled by a
cheerfully cynical wonder at the perfect clearness of vision which the
sufferer’s mother can combine with her maternal tenderness; and, in
Lavinia’s, with a profound gratitude that, at least, while her hue
remains that of the dandelion, Féodorovna’s prey will escape her bovril,
declarations, and cap-strings.
The children think that their moment has come, and civilly volunteer to
show and explain the wedding gifts: to make it clear that both
rolling-pin and bread-trencher emanated from the cook; the dolly-tub
from Miss Brine; and clothes-pins from the “Tweeny;” that the framed and
laurel-crowned “Bobs” is a joint offering from the three elder children;
and the smaller “Kitchener” the outcome of the infant Serena’s worship
of Bellona.
“Mother has just given him her teapot,” says Phillida, in excited
explanation. “Doesn’t it look exactly like silver? It is an old
Sheffield plate pattern; it was to have been presented two days ago, and
Sam had his face washed twice in expectation; but we wanted Lavy to be
present, and, both times, she was at the Chestnuts.”
“That is just where I want her to be again!” answers Mrs. Prince,
listening with more good nature and better-feigned attention than her
daughter would have done, but reverting to her own preoccupation--“the
poor child”--turning back appealingly to her two grown-up auditors--“has
got it into her head that he will be neglected. She and Nurse Blandy
have not quite hit it off of late; that no one can look after him
properly but herself; though, to tell the truth”--lowering her voice,
and in a key of vexed shrewdness--“between ourselves, I think the poor
man was on the high-road to be killed with kindness!”
Both matron and maid listen with sympathetic attention; but to neither
of them does anything occur in the way of a response that would be meet
for the ear of Miss Prince’s mother.
“I have my victoria here!” continues that lady, casting an imploring
look towards Lavinia; “and I thought, if you would return in it with me,
you might pacify her; come and go and take messages between them;
convince her that he is having his medicine and his food at the proper
hours; and so forth. She is not on speaking terms with Nurse Blandy
since nurse complained to Dr. Roots of Féo’s taking the case entirely
out of her hands, and _I_ always get upon her nerves if I come near
her!”
Miss Carew’s eyes are still fixed upon the Japanese rug, as if
appraising its 4_s._ 11½_d._ merits. To a stranger it would seem as if
she did not jump at the proposal.
“It would be a real charity!” urges the maker of the suggestion, humbly
and insistently. Mrs. Prince in adversity is a more prepossessing figure
than Mrs. Prince full of bounce and metaphorical oats; and, perhaps, it
is the perception of this fact that squeezes that reluctant sentence out
of Lavinia.
“I should like to help you,” she answers slowly; “but----”
“But what?” cries Mrs. Prince. “If you answer that your gentlemen may
want you in the course of the afternoon, you know that it is only a case
of sending an order to the stables!”
“Your gentlemen are going to desert you to-day, aren’t they?” puts in
Mrs. Darcy, interposing for the first time; and with a very slight
accent, so slight as to be perceptible only to Miss Carew, upon Mrs.
Prince’s objectionable noun.
“They are obliged to go to London on business--lawyer’s business!”
replies Lavinia, unwillingly making the admission of her unusual
freedom.
“For the night?” cries Mrs. Prince, jumping at the acknowledgment, as
its author had known that she would do. “Then why not come and stay with
us?”
For a moment no one answers; only it seems to Lavinia that Mrs. Darcy’s
eyes echo “Why!”
A confused sense of indignation at that look makes itself perceptible
for a moment in the girl’s mind, followed immediately by a cavilling
self-question as to why she should feel it? What reason assignable to
any human creature is there for her refusing to perform so natural and
easy an act of neighbourliness? Were it poor inglorious little Captain
Smethurst to whom she had been requested to minister, would she have
hesitated for one moment to comply? With the lifelong record, of which
she cannot but be conscious, behind her of matter-of-course
obligingnesses and good offices towards her whole _entourage_, is it any
wonder that her present grudging attitude has spread a layer of
surprised disappointment over her petitioner’s countenance?
“Of course I know that he has no claim upon any of you!” she says, with
a shrug that seems to give up her cause for lost. “Quite the other way
on, in fact! But he is such a lovable sort of fellow, and so
disproportionately grateful for any little thing one can do for him; and
you all--even Sir George--seemed to wish to make him forget; but I
suppose it rankles all the same, and he is the last person not to
understand that it should be so.”
She turns to go, unaware that her final words, in which she herself sees
no particular virtue, have gained the cause she had abandoned as lost.
“_Rankles!_” repeats Lavinia, turning quite white, and in a voice of
inexpressible horror. “Is it possible that you can think?--that you can
imagine----?”
“I really do not know what I think,” replies Mrs. Prince, in a voice
pettish from worry of mind and startled puzzledom at the dynamitic
effect of her last sentence. “When you see a person, whom you have
always found ready to put herself in four for you, suddenly making
difficulties when you are in a tight place, and when it really would not
cost her much to help you, one does not know what to think, does one,
Mrs. Darcy?”
“_Has_ Lavinia made a difficulty?” asks the person thus erected into
umpire, and looking with quiet directness of inquiry into her friend’s
face. “I think you have not given her time for either ‘yes’ or ‘no’
yet!”
“Which is it to be?” cries Mrs. Prince, wheeling round with revived hope
upon her victim. “It may as well be yes!”--with all her tone can carry
of persuasion. “You will have none of the disagreeables of nursing. What
I ask of you is just to sit by his bedside and chat to him; and to keep
Féo quiet by persuading her that we are not killing him by neglect in
her absence.”
_None of the disagreeables of nursing!_ It is, then, to a selfish
shrinking from contact with his pain, that her hesitation is attributed.
The stingingness of the injustice, which would be ludicrous in its
divergence from fact, if it were not so cruel, drives back the blood to
Lavinia’s cheeks, and the words to her lips.
“There _are_ no disagreeables in this case, and if there were, I should
not be afraid of them!” she says, with a quiet dignity which is felt to
carry a rebuke with it, “I will gladly come.”
“You _are_ a trump!” cries Mrs. Prince, breaking, in the excitement of
her relief, into a phrase, the old-fashioned slanginess of which the
elegance of her calmer moments would disapprove, and making a snatch,
which meets only the empty air, at Miss Carew’s hands. “Let us be off
this very instant, or we shall find Féo running about the passages,
though her temperature is up at 102, and she is as yellow as a guinea!”
“I _must_ see my uncle and Rupert first,” says Lavinia, so resolutely
that her visitor recognizes it is useless to contest the point. “Hadn’t
you better return without me, and I will follow as soon as I can?”
“You will not go back upon your word?” asks the other suspiciously. Then
verifying a look of indignant repudiation in the girl’s eyes, she adds,
“No; I am sure you will not! Well, perhaps it had better be as you say.
I will send back the victoria at once for you; or would you prefer the
brough-am?” Its owner gives the vehicle in question the value of two
good syllables. “If it looks the least like rain, I will send the
brough-am.”
She bustles off as she speaks, one rustle and jingle of gratitude,
relief, and jet; but not before she has seen Lavinia speeding before her
through the churchyard back to her home. Did she but know how much the
hurry in the girl’s veins towards their common goal exceeds her own, her
urgency would die, smothered in stupefaction.
Rupert is in his room, guiding and aiding the footman in the packing of
his clothes, and of the few volumes and knick-knacks without which he
never moves. At her call he at once joins her in the passage, leaving,
as she notes with relief, the door ajar behind him.
“I have come to say good-bye,” she says brusquely, still breathless from
her run.
“_Good-bye!_” he repeats. “Why, we need not start for an hour yet.”
“No,” she answers with the same short-breathed determination in her
voice; “but _I_ must. I am going to the Chestnuts for the night. Mrs.
Prince has been here, and has forced me into it.”
The words are strictly and literally true; and yet their utterer feels
the immenseness of the falsity their reluctance implies as she speaks
them.
His face expresses surprise, but no disapproval.
“They want me to help to amuse Captain Binning,” continues Lavinia,
still with that lying disinclination for the proposed occupation in her
tone; “and persuade Féo that they are not killing him with neglect in
her absence!”
“_In her absence!_” repeats Rupert, with an accent of the most acute
astonishment. “Do you expect me to believe that that angel of mercy has
forsaken her post?”
“She has got the jaundice!”
“The _jaundice_!” repeats the young man, with more of entertainment than
compassion in his low laugh. “Poor Féo! The yellow danger! What on earth
has given her over as a prey to it at this cruelly unpropitious moment?”
“I do not know.”
“And you are to nurse dear Binning instead of her? What a blessed,
blessed change for him!”
There is not the faintest trace of jealousy in his tone, and the most
unaffected friendliness in his mention of the sick man; but she wishes
that he had not called him “dear.” It makes her illogically feel more of
a traitor than before; and, besides, is it quite manly?
“I am to sit with him this afternoon,” she answers in a tone of caustic
discontent, “and convince that idiot Féodorovna that he is not being
poisoned or starved. It will only be for to-day,” she adds, more as a
satisfaction to her own conscience than as an explanation in the least
called for by him. “And to-morrow you will both be back!”
“Even if we are, you must not hurry home!” replies Rupert, with that
complete unselfishness which his family has grown so used to as barely
to be aware of. “I am so boomed just now, that I can run the show
without you for an indefinite time. He actually asked my opinion this
morning,” opening his eyes wide and smiling; then, growing grave again,
“and I always feel that we none of us can do enough to make that poor
chap feel at his ease with us!”
She looks up at him in a dumb appreciation of his delicacy and feeling,
that has no pleasure, nay, a leaven of unmistakable pain in it; and
looking realizes that he is paler than his never high-coloured wont.
Admirably as he disguises it, is it a sacrifice that he is making? Does
he divine?
“You look as white as a sheet,” she says, with a sudden impulse to know
the worst. “What has happened to you?”
“You will be angry with me if I tell you that I have had a fright!” he
answers, smiling again, deprecatingly this time. “But that is about what
it comes to. My father made them put the young horse into the cart, when
I went to Shipstone this morning. And we met one of those steam-rollers;
and he took fright and bolted.”
“And you could not hold him?”
“I was not driving. You know I never do, if I can help it. I do not see
the use of keeping a dog and barking one’s self!”
“Well?”
“Oh, you need not be afraid that I did anything unworthy of a man and a
gentleman!” noting with slightly ironical comment the apprehension in
her face. “I sat tight, and Hodson pulled him up just in time to stop
him taking the gates at the level crossing. But you know that nerves are
not my strong point; and it gave them a bit of a jar!”
Her face has hardened and stiffened. “A man has no business to have
nerves!”
“What is he to do if God has presented him with a large bundle of them
at his birth?”
The question is unanswerable, and on this unsatisfactory note they part.
It sounds out of tune-ly all through her short drive, and makes a
discord of it. White as a table-cloth because a horse shied!