Over the drawing-room fire Mrs. Darcy is sitting alone, with hands stretched out flamewards, telling herself that, in view of the fatigue of Christmas Day, with its workhouse dinner, its school tea, and many etceteras of festal labour, she ought to go to bed; but, reconciling herself to her disobedience to the inward fiat by the fallacy that it would be extravagant to leave so good a fire to burn itself out alone. Her tired body is in the Rectory drawing-room, but her intensely awake soul has travelled across the road, and up the sloping garden of Campion Place, to where, behind the latched shutters, the returned wanderers sit in the aloofness lent by their crown of sorrows. They were to arrive at half-past eight o’clock. Would she have done better if she had been on the doorstep to receive them? It was a feeling of delicacy that had kept her away; but would it not have been better to have risked being indelicate, so that one pair of arms might be opened to enfold the desolate couple, and put a little warmth into the deadly chill of their naked home-coming? Sir George has certainly gone to bed by now. The later accounts of his condition, bare of detail as they have been, have indicated a declension into completely invalid habits. Lavinia as certainly is sitting over the fire alone—alone, like herself—but, unlike herself, with no nursery-ful of kissed children, no dear, pompous devoted husband so filling the vacant chambers of her heart, that absence means but a keener sense of their beloved presence. The telling her own riches strikes the rector’s wife with a generous compunction, almost a feeling of guilt towards her friend in her cold heart-poverty.
“If I had only hung up a stocking for her!” she cries inwardly; and then derides herself for the puerility of the thought. “What gift capable of gladdening Lavinia’s Christmas morning could Santa Claus himself put into her stocking? If it were not so late!” she says to herself, a moment afterwards; “if the bell would not wake Sir George——”
Restless with the thought of the other’s forlorn neighbourhood, suddenly feeling that it is impossible to lay down her own tired limbs until they have carried her over the way to the mournful house darkening on the hillside above her, Susan rises, and, pulling aside the window-curtain, looks out—since the Rectory does not belong to the solid-shuttered breed of its eighteenth-century neighbour—on the night. It is such as the afternoon had promised—still, black, and murk; the little absurd finger-nail-paring of a moon wholly vanished behind the opaque vapours.
“I could find my way blindfold!” is the undeterred looker’s thought; and so goes out into the hall, snatches a bowler hat and an Inverness cape from the stand, and, unbarring the hall-door, starts back with a sudden shiver of alarm; for, before her, stands a tall dark figure, with a lantern in its hand.
“I was just making up my mind to ring!” says the voice of Lavinia. “What! Were you going out? Were you coming to me?”
“Great wits jump!” answers Susan, with a tremulous laugh, “Come in! come in!” and so pulls the girl over the threshold by her cold gloveless fingers, and into the glowing warmth.
“I must not forget my lantern! I do not know what I should have done without it! I could not see an inch before my face!”
“It is a pitchy night!”
Each utters her banalité mechanically—the elder in a strange moved shyness; the younger taking hungry possession, with her drawn eyes, of each familiar object.
“I had just been reproaching myself for not having hung up a stocking for you!” Susan says, with another nervous laugh.