She reads his thought. They will be safer—safer from themselves and from each other—out of doors. It had been her own, and she is almost sure that she had meant to act in accordance with it; yet that it should come from him causes her a dull surprise, painful through all its dulness.
“Where would you like to go?” she asks, when they stand together on the garden sward facing the familiar view, the distance clearly azure-blue to-day, but over which, as she has so often triumphantly explained to visitors, a grey mist is apt to lie while her upland is in radiant sunshine. To-day the cases are reversed. Sunshine bathes the distance; it is on her heart that the fog lies thick. “Where would you like to go?” she repeats. “To the Rectory, to bid good-bye to the children?”
It is out-Heroding Herod to suggest that their last hour shall be spent in company, and her heart stands still until his answer comes. If it is an assent, all danger will be over, and of that she ought to be glad. But it is not.
“Show me some pleasant walk where you often go.”
The motive which dictates the request is the same that had made him ask which chair she is wont to occupy in the drawing-room. He is collecting frames for the gallery of pictures of her that is to hang in his heart.
She gives a slight assenting nod, and sets off with an undecided step, turning over in her mind, with a view to choosing it, which of her familiar paths is the one that is least associated with Rupert’s companionship. It is safe, at all events, to begin with the churchyard. Every new-comer is shown the gigantic brother yews, and told how much is the eight-century girth of the largest one.
“It measures thirty-four feet in circumference,” she says, in a dull show-woman’s voice, as she has said scores of times before to politely astonished visitors.
And then they stand silent, staring at the erebus of shade above their heads, at the enormous branch which, in some former storm—now itself long ago—has shown symptoms of breaking away from the colossal trunk, and has taken such a gigantic prop to support it. From under the eternal night of the tree, day is seen to laugh over the rather neglected green mounds around—neglected as rural churchyards are discreditably often apt to be, but over which the kindly wild flowers are waving unbidden.
“If you outlive me, which is unlikely, this is where you may finally think of me,” says Lavinia, speaking at last. “It is not very imaginative of one to live and die on the same quarter of an acre, is it? The entrance to our vault is on the other side of the church.” She gives her piece of information with a sort of alacrity, in contrast to the muffled dulness of her last sentences.
“You say it as if you were telling me a piece of good news.”