He lies looking at her in puzzled pain, jaded with the effort to follow the windings of her inexplicable mood.
“You will wonder what is the motive of this flat tirade,” she says with a laugh that has neither mirth nor music in it. “I must explain that I have had one more proof that Rupert is the most selfless being God ever created.”
Binning takes the wind out of her sails. “He gave me that impression;” and the only net result of the expiation is to put them both out of spirits and temper for the rest of the evening.
CHAPTER XV
The 28th of May has come, and the inevitable has happened. This inevitable is not that Lavinia Carew has become Lavinia Campion. On the contrary, her wedding stands postponed for a week, viz. to the 4th of June. The delay is in no degree attributable to her, but is caused by the illness of that uncle whose over-haste to be well, and determination to treat serious sickness with that high hand which it will never endure, has landed him in the same morass as it had done Féodorovna. With a reluctance proportioned to his extravagant eagerness for the object in view, with many racy expressions, and a refreshing shower of renewed insults, both wholesale and retail, distilling upon his patient son, Sir George has had to acquiesce in the deferring for an additional eight days of the attainment of his heart’s desire.
Perhaps the inevitable might have been avoided if one of several things had happened or not happened. If Sir George had yielded to his niece’s earnest entreaties to be allowed to nurse him, instead of insisting on her confining herself to a couple of runs up to London, each of so few hours’ duration as to involve no swelling of the reckoning at the “d——d pot-house;” if Rupert had not been kept or kept himself in such close attendance on his father as to have no time to see how ill his own affairs were faring; if Féodorovna had been permitted to complete her cure, and exercise momently supervision over her captive at home, instead of being despatched to Brighton—metaphorically kicking and screaming, it is true—but still despatched by a determined doctor and a for once unbullyable father; if Binning’s name had not appeared among the list of officers upon whom the Queen was pleased to bestow the Victoria Cross; if Mafeking had not been relieved! If, if! the convenient, curtsying, carneying preposition, which has salved every malefactor’s conscience since the world began! For the malefactor in question it is but a very imperfect unguent, desperate as is the perseverance with which she uses it.
If, if, if! A whole procession of them pass before her in the wakeful silence of the night; and she gives herself the full benefit of them all. But at every morning watch, what a traitor she stands at her own bar! To have taken advantage of “her men’s” absence—the very phrase, lifelong in its employment, seems to reek of hypocrisy—to have taken advantage of their absence, of the heavy sickness of the one, and the selfless devotion of the other, to play them this coward’s trick! Yet her infidelity has only been of the soul, not of the body. Complete as has been and is the unfaithfulness to Rupert of her heart and pulses, up to the 28th of May there has been no physical contact between her and Binning beyond that one grateful touch of a sick man’s lips upon his nurse’s hand, at which not the most monopolizing of lovers could carp. When her self-contempt grows unendurable, she drags this creditable fact of outward propriety to the front, pushing it before her, and hiding behind it at Conscience’s judgment-seat.
And she has struggled! What means has she not used? what cruel, branding, searing remedies has not she tried—even to that extremest one of belittling, in her for intérieur, him whom her whole aching soul and racing blood call out upon as her only lord and love? Has not she haled to the foreground and set in malicious order his deficiencies? told herself to what a common type he belongs—just the yea and nay, straight, unintellectual Anglo-Saxon fighting man? his character, how inferior in interest and complexity to Rupert’s; his mind, how much less subtle; his apprehension, how much less quick; his understanding of herself, how infinitely inferior? And having quite demolished him, having left him scarcely comely and barely brave, she falls on his neck in the secretest recesses of her inveterately guilty heart, and begs his pardon with tears. It is not because he is a hero or a dunce that she loves him. It is for the reason which was already very old when Montaigne penned it: “Parce que c’était, moi! Parce que c’était, lui!”
By the date of the Relief of Mafeking, Binning is able to get about a little with a stick, and even to assist with his presence and advice at the bonfire which, by “kind permission of Mr. and Mrs. Prince,” has had its site transferred, for his special benefit by its builders, the young Darcys, from their own stable-yard to the ampler area of the Chestnuts. Not that the Rectory does not blaze too with subsidiary flames, and breaks out into a forest of flags that makes the bunting which had celebrated Ladysmith sink into insignificance. It would seem impossible that anything could carry the patriotic elation of the clergyman’s family to a higher pitch than it has already reached, yet it is sensibly heightened by the providential coincidence, of which the poultry-yard is the scene, viz. that it is Baden Powell who brings out thirteen chickens on the very day of the raising of the siege. The fact is the more remarkable as two other generals, who were set upon the same day, but were wanting in the patient assiduity of B. P., produced nothing but addled eggs. It is not the Mafeking news, soul-stirring and spirit-lifting as it is, which has produced the inevitable. There is a safe publicity and generality in the emotion it evokes; and Lavinia, hurling billets of wood on to the bonfire, and being exhorted, directed, and scolded by Binning, leaning on the top of his staff, which he ultimately, in the excitement of the moment, throws in too, is in far less peril than Lavinia chokingly reading aloud to its recipient the little paragraph which announces that he is among those to whom the Victoria Cross is to be awarded. She struggles through the small naked record of his achievement.
“Captain Binning,—th Hussars, who was in command of a troop, held an important position for some time against heavy odds; and when compelled to retire, saw all his men into safety, and then, though he had himself been wounded in the left lung, supported Lieutenant Henley, who was unable to walk, until the latter was again hit and apparently killed, Captain Binning being himself again dangerously wounded a short time after.”