“But it is swollen still,” she urges, quietly but firmly. “Dr. Wilson thought it was more swollen this morning than it was at his last visit.”
“Fiddlesticks! He says it to oblige Rupert! That boy has got round you all!” and he flings away in a pet.
He has resumed his complacence in the afternoon, not from having conquered his ill humour—a victory which, save for the period of his son’s imminent peril, he has, as far as his family are aware, never attempted; but because he has got his wish. Rupert, at his own express desire, has been taken out in a superb Bath chair borrowed from the Chestnuts; a Bath chair consecrated to Mr. Prince’s gout; and to make the offer of which to Lavinia that great inventor has himself driven over to Campion Place, prefacing his proposal with his usual prefix, “I do not wish to be intrusive!”
Rupert has been out for an hour; gently pushed along under the shade of the lime trees, of which one or two belated ones still throw down a remnant of the ineffable sweetness of their yellow-green blossoms upon him. His father and his betrothed are on either hand. Sir George’s jokes are never very good; and it is to-day harder than usual to Lavinia to laugh at his stupid pleasantry as to their being like the lion and the unicorn that support the Royal Arms. Rupert does not attempt to laugh; but he smiles with kind serenity. At even a better jest Lavinia would be too busy to laugh—too busy stamping down the outrageous thoughts, regrets, revolts, that keep swarming up in her heart, vipers warmed into life by the very sun of her cousin’s restoration. Oh if he were only her cousin! only dear Rupert, her brother-friend! Oh if he were a woman—the woman he has always sighed to be! Oh if he were always in a Bath chair! The monstrosity of this last aspiration conducts her to the hall-door; and it and its brother evil spirits are but ill laid as she pours out tea for Rupert, as he lies sighing with satisfaction at having regained it, upon the sofa at his bed-foot.
“I may now hope for twenty-four hours of blessed supineness,” he says, throwing his head back on the piled cushions with an epicurean air.
“I believe that you would like to be always supine!” Lavinia answers, in a tone of wonder, and thinking at the same time, “What a charming head it is! how delicately modelled! what a finish in the moulding of the features! what a spirituel expression, with something of the light malice of the classic Mercury!”
Spirituel! It is an adjective more often used in the feminine than the masculine gender. Oh, tricky gods! Why is not he feminine? What a delightful woman he would have made!
“And you would like it too!” he rejoins, breaking into her reflections, with what sounds more like a statement than an inquiry; then, seeing her start apprehensively with the old fear of his gift of thought-reading, he adds, “I mean that you—that most ‘neat excellences’ like you, would wish to keep me always in a position to be fussed over, always prone; no, that is not the right word—“prone” means that one has fallen forwards on one’s face, like poor Dagon, doesn’t it?”
He talks on with so evident an intention of removing any uncomfortable impression that his former speech may have made, that Lavinia, having by this time risen to give him his second cup of tea, lays her hand, with some dim sense of compunctious gratitude, upon his.
“You are very glib to-night!” she says playfully. “Aren’t you chattering too much? You must be tired.”