“It is for homely features to keep home,
They have their name thence; coarse complexions
And cheeks of sorry grain have leave to ply
The sampler, and to tease the house-wife’s wool.
What need a vermeil-tinctured lip for that?
Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn?”
The August sun is assuring the Rectory garden, as plainly as his beams
can speak, that no scurvy trick shall be played with the marquee erected
this morning with some trepidation of spirit--since the two previous
days have been rainy--on the cricket-ground. In proof of his good faith,
the God of Day is dragging their hottest spices out of the petunias and
heliotropes, and out of Miss Brine the prudent counsel, addressed to her
pupils, to put cabbage leaves in their hats. But how can paltry
apprehensions of the off-chance of a sunstroke influence minds occupied
by the knowledge that the whole air is full of the sense of approaching
festivity? Have not the hen-coops been moved from the banks of the
Tugela River, in order that rounders may be played there? Is not there
to be a tug-of-war on the grass plot before the front door? Has not a
“donkey” been erected in a clear space of the shrubbery? Are not
numerous old boxes being chopped up into trays, to be used for
tobogganing down the steep slope above the parterre? That the treat to
the choir boys of St. Gengulpha’s Church, Martin Street, Soho, London,
which in her maiden days Mrs. Darcy used, for the sake of its excellent
music, to frequent, is an annual one, does not lessen the excitement
with which the arrival of the early afternoon train, and the hired brake
and Rectory waggonette that convey the guests from Sutton Rivers
station, is expected.
That blissful date is still three hours off, for eleven o’clock has just
told its last stroke from the church tower as Mrs. Darcy, calm with the
consciousness of made cakes, garnished dishes, and arrived chairs, puts
foot across the threshold of the cool drawing-room of Campion Place.
There is purpose in her eye, and resolution in her step, as she lightly
crosses the carpet, and lays her hands on the shoulders of a black
figure, sitting with its back to her, writing at a bureau. The figure
puts out an abstracted hand backwards in acknowledgment of what is
evidently a very familiar interruption, but her attention remains
rivetted upon the “slips” before her.
“Isn’t it astonishing that the corrector of the press can let such
mistakes pass?” she asks, indignantly. “Twice they have printed _snouts_
for ‘shouts,’ and _liver_ for ‘lover’! It makes such dreadful gibberish
of the lines.”
Mrs. Darcy looks over Lavinia’s shoulder, and verifies the blunders
alluded to; but it is clear that the attention given is but a
half-hearted one. In the early days of black emptiness which had
followed Sir George’s death in the previous January, of occupation gone,
and spirits drooping to the very earth that had closed over the last of
her “men,” Susan had welcomed for Lavinia the editing of Rupert’s
“Remains” as a salutary distraction; but of late she has remorsefully to
own to herself that she has grown rather tired of that “volume of
posthumous verse,” which takes such a long time in preparing for the
press, and the emendating, noting, and prefacing of which, by her
friend’s not very practised pen, has robbed the latter of so many of the
little out-door joys which stand first in the pharmacy of grief-healing.
Miss Carew apparently divines the faintness of her friend’s sympathy,
for she changes the subject.
“I sent the spoons and forks this morning! Have you enough now?”
“Plenty.”
“Do you want any knives?”
“Bless your heart, no! Mrs. Prince has lent enough to cut the throats of
the whole township.”
“And how about fruit? There are still a good many white currants under
the nets on the north wall.”
“Currants!” repeats Mrs. Darcy, with affected scorn. “If you could see
the size of the grapes that arrived, personally conducted by Féodorovna,
just as we were sitting down to dinner last night, you would blush for
such a suggestion.”
“I withdraw it,” replies the other, with a slight grave smile; adding,
“One laughs at them, but they really are wonderfully kind.”
“This was not a case of undiluted kindness,” says the rector’s wife,
with her light and stingless sarcasm. “The grapes were but incidental;
the real object of her visit--I wish she would not pay morning calls
just as the soup tureen is entering the dining-room--was to ask for an
invitation for to-day for her organist.”
“And you gave it?”
“Of course! Am I ever harsh to true first love?” ironically. “She went
conscientiously through his achievements all the same. How well we know
them, don’t we?”
“As a little boy of ten he won sight-reading prizes at local
competitions, while earning his bread as organist of Sutton Rivers
Church!” replies Lavinia, the long-absent dimple showing itself
cautiously in her left cheek, as she responds promptly to the call upon
her memory.
“He had to go to the College of Music unusually late,” rejoins Susan,
snatching the words out of her friend’s mouth in triumphant patter;
“but, nevertheless, took his A.R.C.M. in theory, the stiffest exam. the
Royal College affords, with ninety-nine marks out of a maximum of a
hundred!”
Lavinia breaks in hurriedly. “He is composing an organ fugue in G minor,
which has something of the strength and purity of design of Bach!”
They both pause to laugh; but Lavinia’s eyes, falling on the MS., grow
suddenly serious again.
“I wonder has she yet offered him marriage?” she says, a remnant of
amusement piercing through the habitual sadness of her face.
“It is time that she did,” replies Mrs. Darcy, in the same key; adding,
after a moment’s reflection, and in a lower tone, “It is quite fifteen
months since she last proposed to any one.”
Lavinia lays down her slips upon the blotting-pad, and sits looking
straight in front of her, while with an awful clearness rise before her
mind’s eye the events so inextricably entangled with Miss Prince’s
declaration to Binning.
“Why did you say that?” she asks, after a pause of quickened breathing,
to which her friend listens with a trepidation which does not hinder a
very valiant resolution to persevere.
“Because you never allow me to mention him; because, as I may not speak
of him naturally and simply, I must drag him in by the head and
shoulders.”
No answer.
“Isn’t it a puerility to banish him from your speech--to go half a mile
out of your way to avoid speaking his poor name--when we both know that
he is never for one moment out of your thoughts? No; don’t interrupt me!
I will have my say out this time! Never for one moment out of your
thoughts--not even when you are laying eucharis lilies on Sir George’s
grave, or editing Rupert’s poems.”
Lavinia’s only answer is to take her hands off the manuscript before
her, as if the indictment made against her rendered her unworthy to
touch it; and her long arms drop to her side.
“Can you deny it?” asks Mrs. Darcy, her _spirituelle_ pale face flushing
with excitement, thinking that she may as well be killed for a sheep as
a lamb, and kneeling down beside her friend to get compelling possession
of one of her hands. “I insist upon your answering me!”
For a moment or two of misgiving it seems to the rector’s wife as if her
audacity of asking were to break against the same obstinacy of morbid
silence as has rebuffed all her previous efforts to speak a forbidden
name; but, after a while, Lavinia answers, a great sigh seeming to tear
the words out of her breast--
“I do not deny it; though why you should have the brutality to force me
to own it to-day, particularly, I do not know!”
“Because he is in England!” replies Susan, speaking very softly, with a
kindly dew of moisture, making tender her usually keen eyes; “because,
this morning, I had a letter from him, with a London postmark!”
The slips of Rupert’s poems blow off the bureau, and on to the floor,
wafted to earth by the irony of a warm gust from the honied garden-beds
outside; but Lavinia is not aware of it. The one hand that she has at
liberty flies up to her forehead, as though she were blinded by a sudden
light.
“You _must_ have seen in the papers that the _Isis_, with his regiment
on board, had reached Southampton; but, perhaps”--with a slight return
of satire lightening the gravity of her eager tones--“perhaps--to be
consistent--you do not allow yourself to glance at the war news.”
“I did not at first,” answers the girl, still looking straight before
her, with eyes that yet feel dazzled; “I thought it ought to be part of
my punishment; but,” faltering, “I had not resolution enough to keep to
it. And, even if I had, it would have been no use. The children----”
“Yes,” returns the mother, with a rather quivering pride in her voice;
“it would be difficult to be long in the company of my progeny without
hearing the name of _Binning_”--pronouncing it with a ringing clearness.
“_They_, at least, are faithful to the one hero whom they can call
friend!”
At the thus audaciously syllabled name, whose utterance has been tacitly
prohibited between them for over a year, Lavinia gives a low cry. But in
the over-set face that she suddenly turns upon her friend there is no
anger, only an immense mazed joy, fighting its way out of the Bastille
of the long remorseful sorrow that has prisoned and gagged it; and her
fair head falls forward on the shoulder of Binning’s advocate. Through
the thin fabric of her gown Mrs. Darcy feels the glow of the hidden
face, and it spurs her to fresh effort.
“Are you not rather tired of being _dead_?” she whispers. “It is all
very well for a time, but it must pall! Come back to life! Put off these
hateful weeds, put on a white gown, and come back to life _to-day_!
Believe me”--with an accent of exulting persuasiveness--“you could not
choose a better moment!”
* * * * *
The party to the choir boys of St. Gengulpha’s is being put through with
the thoroughness which, since Mrs. Darcy’s advent, fifteen years ago,
has characterized all the Rectory functions; and, indeed, is drawing
towards its close. For four sunshiny hours, twenty happy boys in
flannels, with sharp towny faces, have been expatiating about the
grounds, and have drunk to the full of the varied entertainments offered
them--entertainments shared by half the neighbourhood, annually
compelled by Mrs. Darcy to come in to her aid. The Vicar of St.
Gengulpha’s and his curates--lean men with intellectual faces, supported
by the gamest of their pale choir boys, have stretched muscles that yet
remember the playing-fields and the Isis, in the best tug-of-war in the
Campion records, against the rector and his inferior songsters. The
smartest young ladies of the neighbourhood have not disdained, though
hampered by long-tailed swishy gowns, to join in a game of rounders with
the visitors, nor do the inelegance of their futile efforts to get their
draperies out of the way, nor the potency of the sun’s beams at all
reduce the good will and perseverance with which they arduously scamper.
The “donkey” has repeatedly conquered and been conquered. The donkey is
an apocryphal animal, with a wooden head; and, for body, a revolving
barrel, mounted on whose elusive convexity the rider has to snatch a
threepenny bit from its distant nose. Many are the ignominious falls
given by him, many the glorious victories won over his treacherously
turning barrel-stomach. For the lesser boys the threepence is placed
further up the nose, within easier reach of the little anxiously
grabbing hand; and frequent are the cheaply generous petitions proffered
by elder lads in behalf of their small companions.
“Mightn’t ’e ’ave it a bit nearer, sir? ’e’s only a little chap!”
And the rector, in flannels, having laid aside his pompousness with his
broadcloth, hot, genial, turning the handle of his wooden steed with
right good will, feigning to be inexorable, always accedes. Then, after
tea in the tent--tea in whose distribution every one, even to Serena and
the poodle, assist; after Orpheus glees sung in the dining-room, comes
the crowning final joy of the toboggan.
“One! two! three! Are you ready?”
The eager scramble up the hillock; the emulous turning round the bag
which sits at the top on a sort of milestone; the getting on to your
tea-tray; the difficulty of keeping your feet on it--an indispensable
condition of success; the mad sliding run down to the grass at the
foot--once or twice the impetus carrying the boy divorced from his tray,
and landing him on the gravel walk, with barked elbows and shins;--who
can wonder that, in comparison with such pleasures, the donkey himself
grows pale?
The party has been in full swing, before a guest, who, if an oath to
appear at it had not been exacted from her, would certainly never have
found courage to face it, is seen to be in the midst of associates from
whom she has been so long withdrawn. Lavinia is late--a tardiness not to
be accounted for by the simplicity of her toilette, since no one knows
with what a long delay of backward-looking apology, with what remorseful
cryings-out for forgiveness to her “men” for seeming to forget them, she
has put off her black gown, and invested herself in the white muslin
which feels like a travesty. It is with something of the shamed shyness
of one who suddenly finds himself in broad daylight among a party of
ordinarily dressed men and women, clad in the extravagance of a fancy
garb, that Miss Carew appears among the acquaintances from whom, for
over a year, she has held aloof.
What has she to do amid all this movement and colour and gaiety? Because
she has been dragged out of her darkness into light, and had her fetters
suddenly knocked off, does that make her a fit member of this happy
company? They look at her or she fancies so, strangely; some to whom she
has been perfectly well known in former days, not even recognizing her.
That she is changed in appearance she has long been indifferently aware;
colour and flesh melted away in the smelting-pot of her great
affliction, branded with the broad arrow of her uneffaceable suffering.
But that she should have become unrecognizable! The unexpected smart of
that discovery blinds her to the fact of how faint a hold upon another’s
identity is possessed by any human being; of how small a change of
costume, _locale_, or circumstance, will confuse the doubtful and
inaccurate knowledge which we can master of even the exterior of our
fellow-creatures! Nor does she realize that in the general centreing of
attention on the objects of the entertainment, the unobtrusive addition
of one more to the already considerable number of tall white maidens on
the grounds may momentarily pass without notice. It is with relief and
gratitude that, as she moves along in humiliated shyness, with that
mazed sense of unreality which has been upon her ever since Mrs. Darcy’s
morning visit, she hears herself interpolated by the familiar voice of
Mrs. Prince.
“Lavinia! Why, I can scarcely believe my eyes!”
“_You_ at least know me!” replies the girl, holding out a hand that
seems scarcely to belong to herself, in the unfamiliarity of its white
glove.
“Know you, my dear? Why should not I know you when I see you almost
every day of my life? Why, in Heaven’s name, shouldn’t I know you?”
“Other people don’t!” replies Lavinia, sombrely. “I passed Lady
Greenhithe just now, and she looked perfectly blankly at me. And even
Féodorovna; but then _she_ was----” Miss Carew apparently alters her
intention of finishing her sentence, for she pauses.
“Féodorovna!” repeats Mrs. Prince, an anxious furrow on her brow
becoming suddenly more pronounced. “By-the-by, where is she? She
disappeared almost as soon as we arrived. Did you say that you had seen
her?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“At the back of the tent.”
“Was she--alone?” with a very apparent apprehension as to what the
answer will be.
“No--o; Mr. Sharp--the Shipstone organist, I mean--was with her.”
Mrs. Prince heaves a mortified sigh that is yet tempered with
philosophy.
“I wish she had stuck to the army!” she says, shrugging her shoulders.
“Neither Mr. Prince nor I would have objected to an army man!”