“Why, he but sleeps!
If he be dead, we’ll make his grave his bed;
With female fairies shall thy tomb be haunted.”
Mrs. Darcy has always set her face strongly against forenoon visitors.
The claims of the parish upon her time have never--thorough-going,
though not enthusiastic, clergywoman as she is--preferred at whatever
hour of the day or night, found her wanting. Always the dispensary
ticket, the medicine-chest, the patient ear, the sensible counsel, the
wisely sharp rebuke, the warm fellow-feeling in trouble, are ready. But
that idle country neighbours should drive the ploughshare of their
vacuity through the furrows of her already overfilled forenoon, when
they might just as easily bestow their tediousness upon her
comparatively free afternoon, is beyond the limits of her patience. Her
soul, though taking up its task from the beginning, with the same
handsome willingness as her slender body, has from the first revolted
against being nothing but a clergywoman.
“When I married,” she has said to her one intimate, Lavinia Carew, “I
told myself that, however much I might live in a kailyard, I would _not_
be a cabbage. I would have all the new books, the reviews, and the
_heavy_ magazines, and would be quite up to date; but, my dear, I
reckoned without my host. I did not forecast the frequency with which
Sam Smith would come in with a broken head, and that ass Féodorovna with
a broken heart.”
Yet it is that very Féodorovna who, accompanied by her mother--a mode of
expression which fits their mutual relations--now sits at 11.30 on the
morning of the day that follows Rupert’s first outing in the Chestnuts
Bath chair, in the Rectory drawing-room, without exciting any symptoms
of protest on her hostess’s part. All three women are crying, but, since
there are as many modes of weeping as of laughter, each in a distinctly
different way. Two perfectly silent tears--evidently escaped convicts,
with protesting warders behind them--are making their forbidden way down
Susan Darcy’s pallid cheeks; Féodorovna has buried her face in the sofa
cushion, with much appropriate flourish of White-Rose scented cambric;
and Mrs. Prince is sobbing in that bang-out-loud perfectly unbridled way
which betrays her plebeian origin.
“Oh, Cara!” Miss Prince has just sighed out, “if you would try to
control yourself! if you would not make _quite_ so much noise!”
Mrs. Prince knows that when her daughter addresses her as “Cara,” she
has about touched the nadir of that young lady’s good opinion, and she
makes an honest effort to check her sniffs and gulps.
“It is enough to make any one break down!” she weeps in deprecation--“to
think that only last evening Sir George took the trouble to ride over
to thank us for the loan of the Bath chair, and to tell us what a world
of good it had done the poor fellow! I told him we were only too glad!
After all, what is the use of wealth if it isn’t----” Mrs. Darcy makes a
restless movement. Its owner’s exposition of the philanthropic aspect of
the Candle’s functions is more than she can quite stand at the moment.
“And to think that it was not from the injury to the brain after all!”
resumes the only momentarily interrupted lamenter; “that it should have
been that scratch on the leg that none of us thought anything of! A
_clot!_--that seems the last word of everything now! A _clot_, or
suppressed gout--or cancer! To one of the three we must all come at
last, it seems!”
They remain heavily silent for a minute or two, the great master of joy
and sorrow’s lines ringing in Mrs. Darcy’s head--
“Golden lads and lasses must,
Like chimney-sweepers, turn to dust.”
“I suppose that there is no doubt about it _this_ time?” Féodorovna asks
in a tone of refined affliction, intended to contrast in the highest
degree with her parent’s vulgar grief. “Once already he seems to have
actually come back from the dead! But this time I suppose there is
absolutely no----”
“Absolutely none.”
“Would you mind telling us exactly how it all happened?” inquires Mrs.
Prince, with a sort of diffidence born of the recollection of how very
much the rector’s wife had appeared to shrink from the narration of the
original accident. “It seems a shame to trouble you; but really,
trifling as the distance is from here to the Chestnuts, it is
astonishing how things manage to get garbled in the mouths of the
domestics.” Mrs. Prince always calls servants “domestics.”
“Yes, I will tell you,” replies Mrs. Darcy, dabbing her eyes hastily
with a pocket-handkerchief, which at once returns to her pocket, nor
remains _en évidence_ like the other two. The sense of that former
relation is strong on her memory also; but it is coupled with the
feeling of how much less painful and difficult the present one is than
its predecessor. Here there is nothing to wince at or glide over; no
opening for implication or suspicion. “He had been talking to Lavinia
while she gave him his tea; she had left him, thinking him a little
tired, but quite naturally and healthily so after the unusual exertion
of going out of doors for the first time; and about half an hour later
he rang for the footman--you know that since the nurse went he has been
waited on by the ordinary staff, and wonderfully little trouble he
gave--and said he should like to go to bed. He undressed without any
help, and was just going to get into bed when the servant, who had gone
to the other side of the room to fetch something, heard him call out,
‘Quick! the brandy!’ He ran to him as fast as he could, but by the time
he got to him he was----”
“Dead?”
Mrs. Darcy bends her head, as if in reverence as well as acquiescence.
“A clot?”
“Yes.”
“And there was no one but the footman in the room? Which one was it? Oh,
but I forget, since poor Bill went they only keep one!” After a moment’s
pause, “I should not like to die with only a footman in the room.”
Mrs. Darcy is too profoundly sad to see the ludicrousness of the
sentiment expressed; nor even to point out that, in the good
gentlewoman’s case, such a contingency is not likely to occur. She goes
to the open French window, and stands leaning her hot head against the
jamb. Susan had always grumbled that mignonette would not grow with her;
had rejoiced that this year the seed which she had imported from France
had given her an abundance of that chancey fragrance; but now she feels
in angry pain that the perfume from the bed at her foot is too violent
in its sweetness. She will never get seed from Paris again.
“‘Quick! the brandy’!” she hears Féodorovna’s voice repeating from the
sofa with a species of shocked reluctance. “One could have wished that
his last words had not been quite those!”
“Oh, what does it matter what his last words were? What does it matter
what any one’s last words are? We may all be thankful if we get off at
the last, saying nothing worse than that!” cries Mrs. Darcy, turning
round upon the speaker in a frenzy of nervous exasperation.
It is not often that the rector’s wife allows herself the dear
indulgence of lashing out at Féodorovna; probably because she knows with
what a right good will her heels, if given free scope, would flourish
figuratively in Miss Prince’s silly face. The unaccustomed rebuff sends
its object toque forwards again into the sofa cushion, from which,
however, she emerges rather hurriedly, expelled by a toy rabbit hidden
beneath it by Serena on her last visit to the drawing-room, and which
squeaks when pressed.
“It seems so dreadful to have it all to do over again, as you may say,”
ejaculates the elder visitor, presently. “How do they take it _this_
time?”
“The old man is completely broken down,” comes the response in a key of
quivering pity. “But Lavinia is very brave.” The moment that the phrase
is out of her mouth, Susan dislikes and regrets it. How redolent it is
of mock-grief! What a decent euphemism for the exultation that dares not
yet awhile show its face! How often has she heard it applied to a widow
for whom the lover--kept in comparative obscurity during many impatient
years--is waiting round the corner to pounce upon when the grudged
twelvemonth is out! Fortunately, the expression seems to have no such
association for her auditors.
“Poor girl! she will break down later!” is Mrs. Prince’s compassionate
comment, uttered with a sort of satisfaction at the certainty of
Lavinia’s ultimate collapse.
“Perhaps.”
“It is so impossible to realize that only this time yesterday they sent
us back the leg-rest. I believe they had never used it.”
“There had been no need for it.”
“‘In the midst of life we are in death!’ Oh how true that is!”
“But oh, mother, how _banal_!” cries Féodorovna, disgustedly. “And you
have said it three times already!”
It is the one solitary instance in their two existences in which Mrs.
Darcy is “with” Miss Prince. But the insult to her “parts of speech”
brings the parent up to one of her rare revolts against the tyranny of
her offspring.
“Well,” she retorts tartly, “I suppose we cannot always, all of us, be
original. After all, there is nothing very original in death and
sorrow--and--and judgment!”
“Oh, but that poor text _is_ worn so threadbare; it has hardly a rag of
clothes left on its back! Well, good-bye, Mrs. Darcy,” taking the
initiative in departure, as she always does when visiting in her
mother’s company. “Tell Lavinia that though she will not see me, I am
with her incessantly in spirit. _She_ knows that _I_ know what sorrow
is.”
Mrs. Prince follows with her blunter adieux. “Well, good-bye. Give the
poor things any message from me you can make up that you think will
comfort them. And if there is any difficulty about catering--in these
cases there is always a good deal of coming and going, and consequent
eating and drinking--just tell Lavinia to send everybody straight up to
the Chestnuts. In an establishment of the size of ours, half a dozen
more or less make no sort of difference. Well, good-bye, again. I am
terribly upset. I think it is a hundred times worse than last time!”
But from this assertion of the superior tragedy of the present drama to
that enacted on the same stage seven weeks ago, Mrs. Darcy’s whole soul
dissents. In the relief of recovered solitude she goes once again to the
French window, once again leans her hot head against the jamb, but this
time, in the intensity of her thinking, the over-sweetness of the
mignonette in the bed at her feet goes unnoticed. The shows of things
pass before her in their utter falsity, shouldered away by the
underlying realities. To outward seeming how incomparably sadder it
appears that Rupert should be rent away from life just when--as if in
brutal practical jest--he had been restored to her warm mother’s arms;
just when hope was wheeling round him on her strong pinions, and love--
“With turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,”
than that he should be transferred from bed to grave, for ever
unconscious of the change!
Yet to her whom his going or staying most concerns, how beyond all words
less terrible is this real death of the young man than the counterfeit
one of seven weeks ago! Seven weeks ago he would have departed in
relentless silence, unpursuable through the infinities of eternity by
any agony of prayer or pleading, leaving behind him a wretched woman
with her debt for ever uncancelled, with the hounds of remorse for ever
on her track. Whereas now, as Susan has already learnt from her to whom
by his graceful dying he has renounced all claim, he has departed in
magnanimous reconcilement, and selfless forethought for that future of
hers in which he will have no share. Yes; it has been well done of him
thus to die, tactful, like himself! She articulates the word under her
breath, and, hearing them, catches herself up, aghast at the drift of
her own musings.
Is it possible that she can have allowed a little satisfaction in such a
calamity to creep into her mind? a little furtive thankfulness at her
friend’s release from the meshes of that terrible net which the fowler
Fate had spread for her? Has she--she herself--no pity for the old man,
who, as all the parish now knows, has the hand of Death--though a
temporarily suspended hand--upon him? The old man out of whose weak
grasp the staff has been ruthlessly knocked, before the few more steps
during which he would have asked its support, have been paced? Has she
no pity for the young man himself, mulcted of five and forty of his
seventy due years, juggled out of bride and hearth, pitchforked into the
unknown? Rupert had always gone to the wall. What a willing hand she
herself had until lately--once again she thanks God that there is a
“till lately”--lent to thrust and keep him there! Rupert has once more
gone to the wall! Rupert is “out of the way!” Never in his lifetime
would he have willingly been in it; but now he is finally “out of the
way!”