So it is settled. Her prayers are answered; her vows are fulfilled.
Everything is, or will be upon Rupert’s recovery, as it was. _As it was?
When?_ Before Binning’s coming? Her soul, half-lightened of its burden
of remorse, awaking to new pain, cries out in bitter protest, “My
God!--_no!_” And yet to all appearance it will be so. To all appearance
she will take up the thread of life where she had dropped it on the day
of her uncle’s and Rupert’s return from London. There is no hurry about
her question now. She will have countless hours of married intimacy in
which to put it.
During these weeks of reprieve--she gives an inward dread start at the
reappearance of such a word in her vocabulary in such a
connection--besides the new armour that must be forged for her on the
anvil of endurance, there is not one of the old pieces which she will
not need. Even her lifelong _rôle_ of buffer will have to be reassumed,
since, as time passes and confidence strengthens, Sir George’s angelic
qualities retire a little into the background. The wearing tempers and
frets of sixty-five years, that have been driven to their holes by the
scourge of a great affliction, begin to show their ugly heads again.
Once again with pseudo-patient irritability he turns over his food at
luncheon, and sends messages of ironical compliment to the cook; once or
twice he even snubs Rupert, though, in these cases, repentance follows
so hard upon his sin as almost to overrun it. It is always for not being
in enough haste to be well, that the father chides his son. Rupert has
never been one to hurry, and he does not hurry now.
“One would think that a man with a wife and a parson waiting for him
might try to pick up a bit quicker!” Sir George says one day, champing
his bit after finding Rupert with writing materials by his bedside. “If
he can ask for a pen and ink, one would think he might just as well ask
for a hat and stick.”
“The pen and ink would tire you much the most of the two,” Lavinia
answers, with a soothing smile, but not thinking it necessary to add
that a like idea, in a modified degree, has crossed her own brain.
Rupert is _not_ in haste to be well. From the doctor’s and nurse’s point
of view, he is an ideal patient, never rebelling against the
restrictions prescribed him, content with the narrow monotony of
sick-room routine, with no restive manliness kicking against limitations
cried out against as needless and unendurable. But then Rupert has
always been more like a woman than a man. Hasn’t he always regretfully
said so?--regretfully, not for being like a woman, but for not being
really one. After all, his solitary heroism--_was_ it heroism? for what
else could he have done? and his first impulse was undoubtedly
_un_heroic--was a sport, an accident, that did not in the least
represent the tree that grew it. The heart is an inn which harbours
strange guests, and the landlord can’t be held answerable for their
characters. Yet it is with an unspeakable horror of self-condemnation
that Lavinia recognizes the quality of the visitors her own has been
entertaining. They have been expelled with loathing; but nothing can
alter the fact that they have lodged there. What a distance has she
travelled from the hell of remorse--the anguish of pleading beside what
was supposed to be Rupert’s bed of death!
And, meanwhile, gentle, courteous, and content, Rupert sails, if not
fast, yet with a fair wind, upon the pleasant waters of convalescence.
Visitors are daily admitted, and the Darcy children have, of course,
been prompt to offer their congratulations. But the visit has been
vaguely felt by all not to have been a complete success. Rupert has
never been quite at his ease with the Rectory’s warlike brood, oppressed
by a feeling of his own destitution of the muscular qualities which they
set so much store by; and though they are far too honourable not to have
admitted him unhesitatingly to their Valhalla, yet one and all have a
hazily uncomfortable feeling that he has got there by accident. The
introduction of Geist to lighten the situation, though well-meant, does
not turn out a success, since the Dachs has a rooted belief that all
persons lying flat and white in bed at wrong hours are murderers. Like a
reversed Balaam, having been brought to bless Rupert, he curses him
instead, and there is such ominous purpose in his stiffened and
stuck-out four legs, and the free exhibition of the whites of his eyes,
that a hasty removal from the bed upon which he has been confidingly
lifted is found advisable. Lavinia accompanies her young friends to the
door into the churchyard, as a sort of consolation stakes for the
flatness of their visit.
“I never saw Rupert in bed before!” says Daphne, with a sort of awed
interest.
“Do you think he looks _quite_ as nice as darling Captain Binning did?”
lisps little Serena, stealing an insinuating hand into Lavinia’s palm.
“Do not be silly!” cries Phillida, who of late has shown faint symptoms
of a slightly inaccurate knowledge of good and evil. “Nobody looks nice
in bed; they are not meant to!”
* * * * *
“He is doing it on purpose--to give you time,” Phillida’s mother says a
day or two later to Lavinia, who has made a remark that indicates her
wonder at Rupert’s indifference to recovery.
They are pacing the Rectory garden, now on fire with the gaudy flowers
of full summer, for July is well advanced. Mrs. Darcy makes her
suggestion hesitatingly, since it hints at a subject that must be for
ever closed between them, adding, in a lighter key, and with a touch of
humour--
“He knows that Sir George can’t hale him to the altar in pyjamas; but
that as soon as he has got one arm into a coat-sleeve his father will
drag him up the aisle by it.”
Lavinia laughs a little.
“I feel sure,” continues the other, growing quite grave again, “that
this is one more instance of that consummate tact of his, which is the
outcome of his perfect unselfishness.”
Lavinia looks at her friend with a sort of distrust. “What a special
pleader you have become! I never heard such a change of tone!”
Her companion’s thin white cheek grows faintly tinted.
“Did you ever hear of such things as remorse and reparation?” she asks
in a low voice; and the tragic force of the response, “_Did I?_”
silences them both.
Miss Carew feels that her occupation of buffer is already resumed, now
that she has daily to parry her uncle’s attacks; the attacks which
compunction and his late agony of fear prevent him from directing in
their full force against his son himself; attacks that take the form of
ever more impatient questions and astonishments as to why Rupert does
not sit up, come downstairs, go out of doors, if it were even in a Bath
chair? He alludes to the latter vehicle in a tone of such contemptuous
concession, that his niece cannot help a furtive smile.
“You know, dear, that the doctor says he ought to keep his leg up a
while longer,” she answers, pacifically.
“Pooh! What is the matter with his leg? It is as sound as yours or mine.
It was a mere scratch to start with, and there is scarcely a cicatrice
left now.”
“But it is swollen still,” she urges, quietly but firmly. “Dr. Wilson
thought it was more swollen this morning than it was at his last visit.”
“Fiddlesticks! He says it to oblige Rupert! That boy has got round you
all!” and he flings away in a pet.
He has resumed his complacence in the afternoon, not from having
conquered his ill humour--a victory which, save for the period of his
son’s imminent peril, he has, as far as his family are aware, never
attempted; but because he has got his wish. Rupert, at his own express
desire, has been taken out in a superb Bath chair borrowed from the
Chestnuts; a Bath chair consecrated to Mr. Prince’s gout; and to make
the offer of which to Lavinia that great inventor has himself driven
over to Campion Place, prefacing his proposal with his usual prefix, “I
do not wish to be intrusive!”
Rupert has been out for an hour; gently pushed along under the shade of
the lime trees, of which one or two belated ones still throw down a
remnant of the ineffable sweetness of their yellow-green blossoms upon
him. His father and his betrothed are on either hand. Sir George’s jokes
are never very good; and it is to-day harder than usual to Lavinia to
laugh at his stupid pleasantry as to their being like the lion and the
unicorn that support the Royal Arms. Rupert does not attempt to laugh;
but he smiles with kind serenity. At even a better jest Lavinia would be
too busy to laugh--too busy stamping down the outrageous thoughts,
regrets, revolts, that keep swarming up in her heart, vipers warmed
into life by the very sun of her cousin’s restoration. Oh if he were
_only_ her cousin! only dear Rupert, her brother-friend! Oh if he were a
woman--the woman he has always sighed to be! Oh if he were always in a
Bath chair! The monstrosity of this last aspiration conducts her to the
hall-door; and it and its brother evil spirits are but ill laid as she
pours out tea for Rupert, as he lies sighing with satisfaction at having
regained it, upon the sofa at his bed-foot.
“I may now hope for twenty-four hours of blessed supineness,” he says,
throwing his head back on the piled cushions with an epicurean air.
“I believe that you would like to be always supine!” Lavinia answers, in
a tone of wonder, and thinking at the same time, “What a charming head
it is! how delicately modelled! what a finish in the moulding of the
features! what a _spirituel_ expression, with something of the light
malice of the classic Mercury!”
_Spirituel!_ It is an adjective more often used in the feminine than the
masculine gender. Oh, tricky gods! Why is not he feminine? What a
delightful woman he would have made!
“And you would like it too!” he rejoins, breaking into her reflections,
with what sounds more like a statement than an inquiry; then, seeing her
start apprehensively with the old fear of his gift of thought-reading,
he adds, “I mean that you--that most ‘neat excellences’ like you, would
wish to keep me always in a position to be fussed over, always prone;
no, that is not the right word--“prone” means that one has fallen
forwards on one’s face, like poor Dagon, doesn’t it?”
He talks on with so evident an intention of removing any uncomfortable
impression that his former speech may have made, that Lavinia, having by
this time risen to give him his second cup of tea, lays her hand, with
some dim sense of compunctious gratitude, upon his.
“You are very glib to-night!” she says playfully. “Aren’t you chattering
too much? You must be tired.”
“No!” he answers, “or only a little; just pleasantly.”
His eyes--how blue their whites are!--lift themselves with a sort of
yearning, that yet seems to have none of the commotion of passion in it,
to hers, and she feels that she ought to kiss him. If she think about
it, she will never get herself up to the sticking-point; so, without a
second’s delay, with the teapot still encumbering one hand, she takes
the plunge and drops a little butterfly kiss somewhere about the roots
of his soft curly hair.
“Thank you, dear.” He asks for no repetition of the endearment; and she
wonders shamefacedly whether it would have been better taste to omit it.
“I think I’ll leave you now. You look tired!”
“I am not tired; and you must not leave me; for I have something to say
to you.”
“Say it to-morrow.”
“With your permission I will say it to-night.”
With a little show of half-playful authority, he pulls her by the hand,
which she has laid upon him before the doubtful enterprise of her kiss,
on to the foot of his sofa, moving and contracting himself to make room
for her.
“Well, if you must, you must!” she answers, submitting, while a vertical
line shows itself between her well-drawn, thin eyebrows.
“I will not keep you long! All I want to say is, that, supposing I _do
not_ get well----”
“Why suppose anything so senseless?” she interrupts angrily.
“It _is_ senseless, of course. I was reading a magazine article
yesterday, on the subject of longevity, and, as far as I could make out,
I have all the signs that indicate it, and several more besides!”
“Then spare us your suppositions!” she interjects, almost roughly.
“I think not. After all, there is no harm in supposing! _Supposing_
breaks no bones, and I have often noticed that clauses in wills
providing for contingencies which seemed almost impossible yet not
seldom take effect!” Since Lavinia makes no comment, he goes on with
resolute courtesy, “So that, if you do not mind, I will repeat
‘Supposing I _do not_ get well----’”
“Yes?” she answers, sullenly acquiescent.
“I want it to be clearly understood that I have no wish that you should
play at being my widow--that you should offer up your good solid
flesh-and-blood happiness” (is there the faintest tinge of sarcasm in
this description of her conjectural felicity?) “with some Quixotic idea
of expiation, as a sacrifice to my manes!” She cannot speak. Is it the
scent of the great old heliotrope that climbs the trellis up to the
very window-edge, that makes her feel faint? “It is even a moot point
whether I shall have any manes!” Rupert goes on half dreamily; “but even
if consciousness survives the grave, which, of course, I am far too
advanced to believe----”
He pauses with a slight ironic smile, and she listens in a bewilderment
of distress, oppressed by the old thought of how little she really knows
of him. She cannot even be sure whether his confession of unbelief is
made in jest or earnest. She knows not whether, or with what numb
agnosticism, with what grey creed of nothingness, or with what faint
flickering cresset of faith, Rupert has met the sorrows of life, will,
when his hour strikes, confront the sharpness of death? His voice goes
on evenly--
“Even if consciousness does survive, it will not give me the slightest
satisfaction to know that you have cut your heart out to throw it as a
complimentary tribute on my funeral pyre! I have always liked your bonny
locks, dear, and I should fret like the blessed damosel whom I have
always wished to be, if I saw them pining and dwining away into skinny
unsightliness! You have no talent for hairdressing, and I hope and
believe that St. Catherine will go _uncoiffed_ by you!” He pauses a
minute, and then resumes, as composedly as before, but with a more
entire gravity, “You will be very lonely!”
“How _dare_ you say _will_?” she interjects, dashing her hand across her
smarting eyes.
“You _would_ be very lonely,” he corrects himself at once. “The old man
will not hold out long. This spurt is wonderful, but it will not last!”
Then the smarting eyes have their way, and let loose their tears. They
are drawn forth from their springs, almost more by the calm aloofness
with which the prophecy is uttered, than by the prophecy itself. What a
long long way from her--from them all--Rupert seems to have got! Her
tears do not appear at all to affect him.
“So let it be clearly understood,” he says, raising himself into a
sitting posture, taking cold possession of both her hands, and plunging
his clear eyes deep into her watery ones, “that when I die--pooh! what
does a preposition matter?--_if_ I die, then, let it be clearly
understood that I _wish_ you to marry--to marry and bear children to
people that nursery which we have both heard so much of!”
The light inveterate point of irony pierces, as if against his will,
through the last sentence. But for a sob or two, she has listened to his
harangue in absolute silence; her painful excitement rising by rushes to
the highest possible pitch. Is not _now_, if ever, the moment to put her
question?
“You have said your say,” she begins, her chest heaving as high as it
had done during that awful race with Fate along the railway line, seven
weeks ago. “And now I have to say mine. I have long had a question to
put to you.”
A ripple of uneasiness skims over the exalted calmness of his face.
“Are you sure that it is worth putting?”
“Quite sure.”
“Put it, then.”
“I have long wished to ask you--I must ask you, now, whether on that
day----”
“Well?”
“When, after having saved the child, you so unaccountably remained
standing, for two or three seconds, right in front of the engine----”
“Yes?”
“Whether”--was there ever a mouth so like a bit of charred stick as hers
feels?--“you lost your head? or--whether you did--it--on purpose--with a
deliberate intention of--suicide?”
The word clothes its ugliness in a hissing whisper, but there is no
doubt as to his having heard it.
“What next?” he asks with--is it half-contempt, or what he means her to
think so?--“what maggot will your brain breed next?”
But now that every muscle, nerve, and fibre of her body are strung up to
their highest tension, he shall not escape her.
“That is no answer to my question. Did you lose your head? or did you
mean to kill yourself?”
If he hesitates for one instant, she will know what to believe. But he
does not hesitate.
“I lost my head!” he answers, meeting the thumbscrew and hot pincers of
her torture-chamber without a wince. “Not having been brought up to the
trade of hero, I did not understand the ropes, and--I lost my head!”
* * * * *
Did Rupert Campion speak truth? or has he added one more to the tale of
noble lies?--to Rahab’s and Arria’s and Desdemona’s?