“But oh, mother, how banal!” cries Féodorovna, disgustedly. “And you have said it three times already!”
It is the one solitary instance in their two existences in which Mrs. Darcy is “with” Miss Prince. But the insult to her “parts of speech” brings the parent up to one of her rare revolts against the tyranny of her offspring.
“Well,” she retorts tartly, “I suppose we cannot always, all of us, be original. After all, there is nothing very original in death and sorrow—and—and judgment!”
“Oh, but that poor text is worn so threadbare; it has hardly a rag of clothes left on its back! Well, good-bye, Mrs. Darcy,” taking the initiative in departure, as she always does when visiting in her mother’s company. “Tell Lavinia that though she will not see me, I am with her incessantly in spirit. She knows that I know what sorrow is.”
Mrs. Prince follows with her blunter adieux. “Well, good-bye. Give the poor things any message from me you can make up that you think will comfort them. And if there is any difficulty about catering—in these cases there is always a good deal of coming and going, and consequent eating and drinking—just tell Lavinia to send everybody straight up to the Chestnuts. In an establishment of the size of ours, half a dozen more or less make no sort of difference. Well, good-bye, again. I am terribly upset. I think it is a hundred times worse than last time!”
But from this assertion of the superior tragedy of the present drama to that enacted on the same stage seven weeks ago, Mrs. Darcy’s whole soul dissents. In the relief of recovered solitude she goes once again to the French window, once again leans her hot head against the jamb, but this time, in the intensity of her thinking, the over-sweetness of the mignonette in the bed at her feet goes unnoticed. The shows of things pass before her in their utter falsity, shouldered away by the underlying realities. To outward seeming how incomparably sadder it appears that Rupert should be rent away from life just when—as if in brutal practical jest—he had been restored to her warm mother’s arms; just when hope was wheeling round him on her strong pinions, and love—
“With turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,”
than that he should be transferred from bed to grave, for ever unconscious of the change!
Yet to her whom his going or staying most concerns, how beyond all words less terrible is this real death of the young man than the counterfeit one of seven weeks ago! Seven weeks ago he would have departed in relentless silence, unpursuable through the infinities of eternity by any agony of prayer or pleading, leaving behind him a wretched woman with her debt for ever uncancelled, with the hounds of remorse for ever on her track. Whereas now, as Susan has already learnt from her to whom by his graceful dying he has renounced all claim, he has departed in magnanimous reconcilement, and selfless forethought for that future of hers in which he will have no share. Yes; it has been well done of him thus to die, tactful, like himself! She articulates the word under her breath, and, hearing them, catches herself up, aghast at the drift of her own musings.
Is it possible that she can have allowed a little satisfaction in such a calamity to creep into her mind? a little furtive thankfulness at her friend’s release from the meshes of that terrible net which the fowler Fate had spread for her? Has she—she herself—no pity for the old man, who, as all the parish now knows, has the hand of Death—though a temporarily suspended hand—upon him? The old man out of whose weak grasp the staff has been ruthlessly knocked, before the few more steps during which he would have asked its support, have been paced? Has she no pity for the young man himself, mulcted of five and forty of his seventy due years, juggled out of bride and hearth, pitchforked into the unknown? Rupert had always gone to the wall. What a willing hand she herself had until lately—once again she thanks God that there is a “till lately”—lent to thrust and keep him there! Rupert has once more gone to the wall! Rupert is “out of the way!” Never in his lifetime would he have willingly been in it; but now he is finally “out of the way!”