“Then if Lavy had married Captain Binning, she would have been all right.”
But the wily Brine is not to be trapped into any such admission.
“Miss Carew would undoubtedly have changed her initials in that case,” she replies cautiously.
Lavinia had hoped that her uncle would—in the general upsetting consequent upon the catastrophe, the removal of all the landmarks of ordinary life—have forgotten to note the date of a day so outwardly identical with its gloomy fellows that it would have passed unnoticed in its obscurity and disgrace; but luncheon-time undeceives her.
“This is not quite the way in which we expected to pass this day!” he says, after sending away the servants. “It is rather rough on you; but there is a French saying, I believe, that what is deferred is not therefore lost. There may be a good time coming.”
The cheerfulness valiantly forced into the old voice for her sake, in his new selflessness, must, at whatever cost to herself, be met in the same spirit, and she compels herself to repeat in French the saying he has alluded to, with what—since intention is everything—must do duty for a smile, “Ce qui est différe n’est point perdu.”
“Though it may not be to-morrow or the day after, we shall perhaps still hear Darcy exhorting you and him to increase and multiply!” continues Sir George, with a distressing attempt at pleasantry, and a painful harking back to his old theme. “In any case, it will do no harm to drink to your wedding day. Come, let me fill your glass.”
She holds it out with an unshaking hand, and commands her throat to swallow, to drink a toast, the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of the wish contained in which are alternatives equally horrible. And then they return hand-in-hand—the old man has added a new caressingness to his other tendernesses—and resume their places, one on each side of the silent, motionless form stretched between them with bound, ice-covered head, in the darkness; and Lavinia takes up again her day-long, night-long employment of repeating over and over and over again to herself the question which she is beginning to see written in red whenever she turns her eyes in the obscurity—
“Did he lose his head? Was it suicide? And if so, was it something he saw in her face that drove him to it?”
She is going through them in the usual sequence at about four o’clock in the afternoon of her wedding day, when she happens to be for a few moments alone with the still living rigidity beside her, when in the almost complete darkness, her eyes and ears—or have they gone mad too?—detect, or seem to detect, a slight movement in the bed. She darts noiselessly to the window, and, pulling aside a bit of the curtain, casts a glance backwards towards the bed—a glance that can hardly travel, for the weight of the hope it carries. Whatever she may be, her senses are not mad; nor have they told her a lie. Rupert is feebly stirring, and his eyes are open. In a second she is at his side, and stooping over him; the word is coming—the priceless word on which her reason hangs! It is spoken so low that she has to bend very close down to catch it. It is only an almost inaudible—