“Well, dear!”
In the reeling immensity of her joy, she can but stupidly echo, almost as inaudibly, the greeting that seems to have come to her from the speechless other side. “Well, dear!” There is a long pause. Into Rupert’s eyes, as they turn slowly round, the watcher sees consciousness, recollection, gradually returning. When those long-absent inhabitants have reoccupied their seats, will he take back his greeting? While the answer to that inquiry is in suspense, the functions of life seem suspended in her. The slowly wandering eyes return to their point of departure—her face; regained knowledge is in them; but neither anger nor pain.
“I muffed it, as usual,” he says, with a ghost of his old self-ridicule, and, wearied with the exertion of speech, falls back into unconsciousness.
* * * * *
Sir George has never been what is called a “professing Christian,” which indeed is a title that seems to promise a paucity of performance; but ever since Rupert’s accident, he has daily asked Lavinia—possibly only with some dim feeling of a propitiatory sacrifice to a fetish—to read him a portion of Scripture, and on the evening of that wedding day he finds with some difficulty—for he does not know his way about very well—the chapter that tells of him who, even while being carried out to burial, was recalled to life and to the widowed arms that had thought to have for ever loosed him. He listens, leaning back comfortably in his chair with a sort of smile of triumph on his face; and on the open page Lavinia’s tears drop hot and blessed as she reads.
During the night that follows Rupert speaks again, and though it is only to ask for water, the two or three languid words keep the flame of hope alive and steady in the watchers’ hearts. On the next day he has a slightly longer interval of consciousness; on the day after that a longer one again; and on the day after that for a whole hour his eyes are open, and faint speech rises to his lips. If he were allowed, he would by-and-by even ask questions; but rigorous quiet is enjoined upon him, and since it is Lavinia with whom he makes most efforts to converse, she is banished from the room. Such exile is of comparatively little moment to her now, now that it will be possible to her to wait, and wait sanely, even for weeks and months, for the answer to that question which she feels she must yet put.
Since she last looked at them, the horse-chestnuts in the Rectory garden are quite over. They were in fullest bloom the day she pasted them going to Rumsey Brake. Was it B.C. or A.D. that she was last in Rumsey Brake? The former date seems far the more probable. The door into the churchyard opens cautiously. Lavinia is standing under the verandah, and through it appear, as they have appeared many times a day during the late crisis, the Darcy children. Almost always they have borne gifts, and to-day is no exception.
“Could not he fancy one of his own eggs?” asks Daphne, lifting the lid of a basket on her arm, and displaying the creamy ovals of three beautiful specimens of the product of the clerical poultry-yard.
“I am sure that he will in a day or two; but why his own?”
“We have re-christened Gatacre, and called him Rupert,” explains Daphne. “He is always the one who begins laying first.”