“You will find him in the garden,” Mrs. Prince says to her young visitors, waving her en tout cas in the direction indicated—“there among those lilacs. He is out for the first time in a wheeled chair—quite an event for him, poor lad!” Then, as they fly off in eager obedience to the direction given, she adds, sotto voce, to Mrs. Darcy, “If you could give them—Binning and Lavinia, I mean—a hint to stay within range of Féo’s windows. She likes to be able to watch them.”
But the rector’s wife must have forgotten to fulfil the delicate commission entrusted to her, since when, an hour later, Mrs. Prince joins the party, ostensibly to see on her own account how they are getting on, but in reality irefully despatched by her daughter to investigate the causes of their being completely out of sight, she finds them all grouped in a fragrant close of blossoming shrubs round the wheeled chair, whence Binning is conducting the Relief of Ladysmith. That the carrying out of that operation has reduced all the forces engaged—male and female, grown-up people and children—to the same level of excited juvenility, is proved by the fact that, at the moment of Mrs. Prince’s advent, Captain Binning and Miss Carew are contesting, with raised voices and heightened colours, the possession of the one cannon that shoots silver bonbons. For the moment they have entirely lost sight of their own dangerously tender relations to each other, and are disputing in real anger about the possession of a ridiculous toy.
“You have come just in time to prevent manslaughter,” says Mrs. Darcy, rising from her knees with a humorously shamefaced air. “We had to shelter here from the wind,” she adds in rather guilty explanation. “I think we are going to have another cold snap.”
Either the “cold snap” alluded to, or one brought by Mrs. Prince herself, presently disperses the party, and the Darcys retreat with such precipitation as to leave the object of strife behind them on the grass.
Lavinia picks it up and eyes it unseeingly, conscious only that the voluble chaperonage of the last hour is withdrawn, and that in the green privacy of their lilac-scented bower nothing is left to protect them from each other. It will be for only a minute or two that the delicious awkwardness of their first tête-à-tête amid the glad May greenness of trees, and the erotic suggestions of wedded blackbirds will last—only till the servant who drew the chair to its present harbour can be recalled and instructed to drag it up and down along the broad terrace walk between the sundial and the fountain, in the bald publicity of all the house’s front windows, and within range of the still bedded Féodorovna’s eye.
“I withdraw my claim,” Binning says magnanimously, with a half-laugh.
“So do I!” rejoins she, relieved.
“Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it!”
“And to think that we should have been within an inch of a serious quarrel over such an object!” she cries, tossing the gem of the Rectory Siege Train disdainfully away. “Our first quarrel!”
At that—the phrase seeming ill pitched on and suggestive, both lapse into awkwardness, out of which, and also out of their bird-haunted brake, a footman presently expels them, lugging the one and compelling the other, since she is still on duty, into the stare of the afternoon sun on the shadeless terrace, which, or Mrs. Darcy’s “cold snap,” soon tires the invalid so much that he asks to be taken indoors.