CHAPTER XXIV
“It was the winter wild,
While the heaven-born child,
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
Nature, in awe to him,
Had doffed her gaudy trim,
With her great Matter so to sympathies:
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the Sun her lusty paramour.”
No one can qualify by the epithet “wild” the Christmas that follows Rupert Campion’s death. It comes simpering in with a faded grey smile, swishy soft gusts, and a mock-April taste; and the Darcy family are conscious of no sting or frost-prick in cheek or finger as they stand silently round the new cross that heads Rupert’s grave, and to whose final erection the workmen gave their last touches only two hours ago. For Rupert has elected to lie in the open, having notified his wish in a small memorandum, placed where it was certain to be found; and which proves that him at least the ambushed enemy had not surprised by his spring.
Sacred to the Memory
of
WILLIAM DEVEREUX,
Elder Son of Sir George Campion, Bart., of Campion Place,
in the County of Kent,
Who nobly lost his life in rescuing
a brother officer from death, while serving his Queen and
Country, on the Field of Battle
in South Africa.
Also of
RUPERT LOVEL,
Younger Son of the above,
Who not less heroically died in saving
the life of a fellow-creature on a less glorious field.
“They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they
were not (long) divided.”
By the time that Susan Darcy’s eyes have reached the last line of leaded letters, they serve her but ill; yet she can see the hackneyed text well enough to feel sure that it is not of Lavinia’s choosing. In her mind’s eye she can see the lonely pair bending together over the drafted inscription; the first mute, and then hesitatingly murmured hint of disapproval on the part of Lavinia, and the determined angry overriding of her gentle objection on that of the poor old man.
“Bill would not have cared,” says Susan to herself, quaintly calling back to life the two dead young men to give a verdict on their own tombstone; “but Rupert would have hated it.”
Her musings are broken into by an objection of another sort, whispered with the accompaniment of eyes shining in distressed partisanship by her eldest daughter.
“Oh, mother, ‘not less heroically’! Surely it was not nearly so grand as carrying off Captain Binning!”
“It was not so showy,” answers Mrs. Darcy, lifting her eyes to the high summit of the cross itself, where, if she has been defeated as to the choice of a memorial text, it is clear that Lavinia’s taste has prevailed.
Once again with sure intuition the rector’s wife sees the contest that has been waged, and in which Lavinia has came off victor, between the Necropolis polished granite or alien white marble shivering under England’s weeping skies, of Sir George’s preference; and the rough stone of the country, soaring up in the fashion of the solemnly beautiful old Saxon crosses, wrought with figures and emblems of a faith yet young, of Lavinia’s predilection.