“My dear,” comes the voice of the rector, opening the door and looking in, with a brow cleared by having decided to omit the ’96 flower of speech, and defer the allusion to Rupert till New Year’s Eve, “what has possessed you to unbar the hall-door? It surely is not a night for star-gazing! Miss Carew!”
* * * * *
The Darcy Christmas Day has been worked through with its usual cheerful thoroughness. The reciprocal presentations; the church services; the workhouse dinner; the school-children’s tea, with its posthumous accompaniment of oranges and crackers; the servants’ evening party;—nothing has been scamped. The family Christmas gift to the poodle has been a photograph of Binning, which he wears upon his brow—all other available parts of his person being already occupied by the effigies of general officers—when he is walked by his beautifully frilled fore paws between Phillida and Daphne into the mistletoed kitchen to open the ball.
* * * * *
Lavinia’s Christmas Day has been worked through too, though in a different fashion. Mrs. Prince may cast her eyes upon the Campions’ seat in church without any fear of a shock to her nerves, for it is as empty as it has been for the last five months. Sir George is too much tired by his journey for his niece to leave him; yet in the afternoon—an afternoon furnished with the apposite Christmas brightness which had been so lacking yesterday—he insists upon being dressed, and leaning on Lavinia’s arm walks, with less of tottering in his gait than she had feared, to the churchyard, to see the new cross, about which he has been restlessly talking, asking, wondering, through half the night.
“I should personally have preferred granite, but as usual I was overruled!” he says fretfully; then divining and remorseful for her distress, adds, “But it is not amiss.”
Both are silent for a little space, reading the inscription, which, by long debating over, amending, altering, has grown so familiar to both.
“It was his own choice to lie out here!” says Sir George, presently. “It would have seemed more natural that he should be buried with the rest of us—with his mother; but he always was rather a sport among us!”
Lavinia assents with a little heart-full nod.
“It is dull of me,” pursues the old man, while a puzzled look comes into his dim eyes; “but I can’t recall how we learnt his wishes! He could not have told us.”