At the end, her hand goes out to clasp his as naturally as a man-comrade’s would have done.
“For the first time I know how it happened! You never would tell me!”
During a minute or two he can only answer her by a hand-grip, whose vigour argues a recovered hold upon life and manhood; then—
“It is a great surprise,” he says, not very steadily. “I did not even know that I had been recommended for it.”
“Do not say that you are not glad!” she cries, with a high unnatural laugh, which, in her normal state, she would have repudiated as neurotic. “Do not say that Tom, Dick, and Harry deserved it better!”
As she looks at him in triumphant challenging prohibition, at his face, still that of one stunned by the shock of a so great and honourable joy, a thin image of Rupert seems to pass vapourishly between them—not of Rupert the admirable son, the delicate reticent lover, the perfectly comprehending friend, but of Rupert in white effeminacy, paling at the mere memory of a jibbing horse. Yet the Victoria Cross is no more answerable than Mafeking and her bonfire for the happening of the inevitable. That is ironically reserved for the 28th, the day on which Lavinia was to have been married to Rupert. If it could have been staved off for twenty-four hours, it would never have happened; since on the 29th Binning is to depart for Southampton to join the s.s. Nubia, which is taking out to the Cape drafts for half a dozen regiments already depleted by the enteric and the Boer.
The day has dawned with a splendour as ironical as all else belonging to it. Lavinia is no longer at the Chestnuts, where her services have ceased to be required, and whither Féodorovna has returned, fully recovered and wholly hysterical, to see the last of her ex-patient.
The Rectory children are all more or less bunged with tears, against which they bravely contend, and have eluded Miss Brine, and the inadequate consolation offered by her, that after all Captain Binning is no blood relation, and that six weeks ago they had never seen him, to seek the more perfect sympathy of “Lavy.” But “Lavy” is not so nice as usual; and though they find her wandering about her garden with no apparent occupation, she shows so little desire to hear or reciprocate their lamentations that they leave her in puzzled disappointment. Their mother, presently missing them, divining and disapproving their design, hastens after them; and finding them hanging, with only very partially recovered spirits, over that unexpected tit’s nest in the disused watering-can, which their jealous care has watched over since earliest eggdom, gravely dismisses them, and joins her friend.
Without speaking, the rector’s wife directs her own steps and those of a companion who seems scarcely to know, and not at all to care, where she is or what is being done with her, to the walled seclusion of the kitchen garden, as being less open to observation than the sloping lawn before the house. Yet at first the precaution seems unnecessary. There is nothing for any prying eye to see, nor ear to hear.
“Sir George and Rupert come back to-day?”