During these weeks of reprieve—she gives an inward dread start at the reappearance of such a word in her vocabulary in such a connection—besides the new armour that must be forged for her on the anvil of endurance, there is not one of the old pieces which she will not need. Even her lifelong rôle of buffer will have to be reassumed, since, as time passes and confidence strengthens, Sir George’s angelic qualities retire a little into the background. The wearing tempers and frets of sixty-five years, that have been driven to their holes by the scourge of a great affliction, begin to show their ugly heads again. Once again with pseudo-patient irritability he turns over his food at luncheon, and sends messages of ironical compliment to the cook; once or twice he even snubs Rupert, though, in these cases, repentance follows so hard upon his sin as almost to overrun it. It is always for not being in enough haste to be well, that the father chides his son. Rupert has never been one to hurry, and he does not hurry now.
“One would think that a man with a wife and a parson waiting for him might try to pick up a bit quicker!” Sir George says one day, champing his bit after finding Rupert with writing materials by his bedside. “If he can ask for a pen and ink, one would think he might just as well ask for a hat and stick.”
“The pen and ink would tire you much the most of the two,” Lavinia answers, with a soothing smile, but not thinking it necessary to add that a like idea, in a modified degree, has crossed her own brain.
Rupert is not in haste to be well. From the doctor’s and nurse’s point of view, he is an ideal patient, never rebelling against the restrictions prescribed him, content with the narrow monotony of sick-room routine, with no restive manliness kicking against limitations cried out against as needless and unendurable. But then Rupert has always been more like a woman than a man. Hasn’t he always regretfully said so?—regretfully, not for being like a woman, but for not being really one. After all, his solitary heroism—was it heroism? for what else could he have done? and his first impulse was undoubtedly unheroic—was a sport, an accident, that did not in the least represent the tree that grew it. The heart is an inn which harbours strange guests, and the landlord can’t be held answerable for their characters. Yet it is with an unspeakable horror of self-condemnation that Lavinia recognizes the quality of the visitors her own has been entertaining. They have been expelled with loathing; but nothing can alter the fact that they have lodged there. What a distance has she travelled from the hell of remorse—the anguish of pleading beside what was supposed to be Rupert’s bed of death!
And, meanwhile, gentle, courteous, and content, Rupert sails, if not fast, yet with a fair wind, upon the pleasant waters of convalescence. Visitors are daily admitted, and the Darcy children have, of course, been prompt to offer their congratulations. But the visit has been vaguely felt by all not to have been a complete success. Rupert has never been quite at his ease with the Rectory’s warlike brood, oppressed by a feeling of his own destitution of the muscular qualities which they set so much store by; and though they are far too honourable not to have admitted him unhesitatingly to their Valhalla, yet one and all have a hazily uncomfortable feeling that he has got there by accident. The introduction of Geist to lighten the situation, though well-meant, does not turn out a success, since the Dachs has a rooted belief that all persons lying flat and white in bed at wrong hours are murderers. Like a reversed Balaam, having been brought to bless Rupert, he curses him instead, and there is such ominous purpose in his stiffened and stuck-out four legs, and the free exhibition of the whites of his eyes, that a hasty removal from the bed upon which he has been confidingly lifted is found advisable. Lavinia accompanies her young friends to the door into the churchyard, as a sort of consolation stakes for the flatness of their visit.
“I never saw Rupert in bed before!” says Daphne, with a sort of awed interest.
“Do you think he looks quite as nice as darling Captain Binning did?” lisps little Serena, stealing an insinuating hand into Lavinia’s palm.
“Do not be silly!” cries Phillida, who of late has shown faint symptoms of a slightly inaccurate knowledge of good and evil. “Nobody looks nice in bed; they are not meant to!”
* * * * *
“He is doing it on purpose—to give you time,” Phillida’s mother says a day or two later to Lavinia, who has made a remark that indicates her wonder at Rupert’s indifference to recovery.