“You wished to know where I generally sit and walk. I thought you might carry your interest a step further, and like to know where I am to lie.”
He turns aside, as if to examine one of the chipped truisms on a lichened headstone; but not before she has seen a glimpse, and divined the rest, of the disfigurement her cruel and unworthy appeal to his pity has worked on his still sickness-thinned and hollowed face. A bitter pang of self-condemnation adds itself to a mocking memory of one, and the most emphatic, of Féodorovna’s nursing injunctions—to be sure not to mention any subject in the least painful to her patient. Is this the way in which she is fulfilling it? He is trying his hardest to behave like an honourable gentleman; and instead of helping him, she is—because it gives herself some relief from her intolerable pain—setting the stumbling-block of her cowardly bid for compassion in his way. She half puts out her hand to touch the sleeve which still bags upon his arm; then draws it back.
“I have thought of a walk,” she says, in a better and braver voice.
Up a steep cart-track, skirting a hop-garden, where the soaring poles and lofty roof of intertwisted network tell of the faith that the now infant plants, scarcely beginning to clasp their supports, will presently engreen the whole land; then down one of its naked aisles; across two cheerful meadows, where strong lambs are capering among the buttercups; to a gate that gives entrance to a brake, in whose midst an inconspicuous pool half hides itself and its water-hens. Lavinia pauses, with her hand on the top bar, and an expression of doubt in her face. The place looks more solitary than its wont. Will he think that she has betrayed him into an ambush even more dangerous than that of the house—he, between whom and herself, all along climbing upland, and through sunny pasture, the dead Bill and his living kinsmen have seemed almost visibly to walk?
“It is scarcely a wood,” she says hesitatingly. “There is not a tree of more than twenty years’ growth, and the nightingales sing so loudly here that they will save us the trouble of talking.”
His answer is to give the gate an unsuccessful push.
“It is locked.”
“That is very unusual,” she answers, for an instant harbouring and at once angrily dismissing from her mind a superstitious idea that the homely obstacle may be Balaam’s winged prohibitory angel in a different dress. “It is almost always open; but nothing is easier than to climb it.”
He swings himself obediently over, and stands on the other side to give her his aid. But she motions him away, crying almost repellantly—
“Go on! go on! I do not need any help.”