“What would you have put into it?”
They are standing opposite each other on the hearthrug, Lavinia’s hand still lying in Mrs. Darcy’s clasp. Is it possible, the latter asks herself, in astonished self-chiding, that this stupid new shyness has mastered her so far as to make her wonder how soon it would be proper to release it? Lavinia herself solves the problem. Gently disengaging her fingers, she throws back the hood of her cloak, and, for a heart-beat or two, they take silent stock of each other. The long thick wrap conceals the girl’s figure, but face and hands betray that Miss Carew has dwindled to half her size. Yet did ever saner eyes look out from under level brows? Whatever else has happened, Mrs. Prince’s lugubrious prognostic is not fulfilled. Lavinia Carew’s reason has not given way.
“You have grown very thin!”
“Do not you remember that Rupert always used to laugh at me for my dread of getting fat?” Then, seeing the startled half-frightened look in her friend’s face, “You wonder that I am able to mention him? Well, I have had good practice; for five months we have never talked of anything else! No!”—correcting herself—“I am wrong. Sometimes we have talked of Bill, but never, never, NEVER of anything else!”
“For five months?”
“Every day for five months—sometimes twice a day, for his mind is a good deal gone—I have given him all, or”—with a slight shiver—“almost all the details of the—the accident! If I had been asked beforehand, I should have thought that even an allusion to it would drive me mad; and I have had to describe it twice a day!” She makes her narration in a perfectly collected level voice, and her friend’s false shyness dies for ever, overwhelmed by an avalanche of compassion.
“How are you alive?” she asks almost inaudibly.
“You must not pity me!” returns the other, still with the awe-inspiring calm of one that has reached the limit of possible suffering, and come out beyond it into the dead waters of numbed endurance. “Other people—all other people would do that; but I expect you to understand. I am glad to be punished! glad to be working out my sentence like a convict. It is the only thing that has given me any ease! I think that even Rupert, if he can see me—I do not think that he much believed that he would be able”—with a dragging accent of sorrowful reluctance—“but if he can, even he will think the expiation is not out of proportion to the offence!”
“It is an idea that would never have occurred to him!” says Mrs. Darcy, in a tone of the gentlest chiding. “You are forgetting him!”
“Forgetting him!” repeats Lavinia, slowly. “Yes,” after a slight pause, “you are right; crediting him with dismal dogmas of retribution, that he would have abhorred! Yes, I must be forgetting him!”