“But it does not agitate me. A knock on the head is not supposed to be a sedative, but in my case it seems to have been one.”
The voice and look are as calm as the words, but he has stopped his drumming on the sheet; and she waits in silent apprehension, praying that the subject may drop, since she knows that the time is not yet ripe for her to put her one question. Rupert, however, as is soon clear, has no intention of dropping the subject.
“Poor old gentleman! He is not quite up to date, is he?”
Lavinia is trembling all over. Has not the moment now come for her to fulfil the vow so solemnly taken, so intertwined with her frantic prayers for his restoration as to be inseparable from them?—the vow to cleave to him through life and death and eternity, without one backward glance, if he be but given back to her extremity of asking? And now that the Invisible Awfulness, whom she had wearied with her insistence, has accomplished His part of the bargain, how dare she tarry with hers? If she does, may not He take back His boon, and leave her to endure an existence made unendurable by a for-ever unanswered question?
“If he is not up to date, neither am I,” she replies.
Rupert’s eyebrows go up in the old familiar way. “Is that a riddle, dear?”
“No,” she answers, purpose and voice strengthening as she proceeds, “it is not a riddle; it is good plain truth. If you mean that your father is not ‘up to date’ because he still believes that we are engaged to be married, I am in the same boat, for I still believe it.”
Perhaps from the feebleness of his body, perhaps from an inability to frame an answer that can nicely hit a case so difficult, the young man is silent; but there is no hostility, nor even much melancholy, in the glance that first rests on and then delicately averts itself in compassion from her convulsed face.
“I have been disloyal to you,” she goes on, fighting down her distress lest it should gag her before she has time to get her full confession out. “I offer again to tell you to what extent——”
He stops her with a prohibitive movement, full of dignity, of his pale hand.