“And has sent for you to nurse him?”
“No; he will not hear of it.”
She shuts herself up into her letter, and he gets nothing more out of her for a while. She has even moved quite away from him to a distant window; still with that odd sense of immodesty in reading it while his eyes are upon her.
“I know what your impulse will be,” Rupert writes; “but you must resist it. It is not façon de parler; but he would be seriously annoyed by your coming up. It seems difficult to believe it, knowing as we have done all our lives his absolute carelessness about money; but it is, nevertheless, true that of late his one idea has been to screw and pinch in every possible way for——”
The “for” is carefully erased; and the object of Sir George’s parsimonies left unstated; but had it been printed on a poster in letters six feet high, Lavinia could not have read more clearly that it is for those terrible unescapeable younger children of hers that Sir George is lopping his little luxuries.
“The thought that your presence would swell the bill at this ‘d——d pot-house’ as he calls it, would do more to retard his cure than even your ministrations could counteract; so stay where you are, and look after Binning, to whom please give my love. You know that among the many feminine graces for which you despise me, the gift of nursing is not the least!”
Then follows a postscript: “The poor old fellow caught his chill walking with me through yesterday’s storm, to save the expense of a cab or bus to a jeweller’s in the City, about an enamelled girdle he is having made for you; and which I have been helping him to design. Now that it is too late, he is unnaturally good and obedient—a state of things I hope to maintain by encouraging the terror under which he labours of not being well by the 28th.”
Such was certainly not Rupert Campion’s intention in writing this letter, yet the impression derived from it by his fiancée is that never were so many unpleasant facts and suggestions crowded into four sides of a sheet of note-paper. Her uncle is seriously ill, and she is not to be allowed to go to him because he is saving all his money for her and Rupert’s younger children. He has contracted his illness in the quest of an expensive ornament for her, which will add one more link to the enormous chain of obligations which is tying up her liberty with ever tighter and tighter knots. Rupert has given an added proof of his hopelessly unmanly tastes by designing the jewel. In a dreadful flash of prophetic insight, she sees him, in the terrible matter-of-fact freedom of married life, sitting with his arm round her waist, and quoting Waller—
“That which her slender waist confined
Shall now my joyful temples bind.”
He has sent his “love” with school-girl effusiveness to Binning; and, last and worst offence, he has alluded to the 28th!