“We found them written on a sheet of note-paper just inside the middle drawer of his writing-table,” replies Lavinia, with the gentle ready distinctness of one who, with perfect patience, has given the same explanation many times before.
“Ah, yes! that was it, of course. He was always fond of scribbling, poor fellow!”—with a look of relief at the recovered explanation. A moment later, in a low key of compunction, “And I used to get so out of patience with him, and ask whether he was writing a sonnet to his own eyebrow! What right had I to sneer at him because he was not cut on the same pattern as myself?”
“He did not mind, dear,” very softly, with a pressure against her side of the wasted arm leaning on hers. Another silence, while about the steady peace of the church tower the jackdaws fly and call in cheerful harshness, and from behind the bravery of his little orange-tawny breast a robin throws out his living gladness across the Christmas-decked graves.
“Two brave boys!” says Sir George after a pause; but now there is a note of triumphant pride in the father’s voice. “I always knew that I had one! but I little thought the day would come when I should be able to say that there is not a pin to pick between them! not a pin to pick between them!”
CHAPTER XXV
“It is for homely features to keep home,
They have their name thence; coarse complexions
And cheeks of sorry grain have leave to ply
The sampler, and to tease the house-wife’s wool.
What need a vermeil-tinctured lip for that?
Love-darting eyes, and tresses like the morn?”
The August sun is assuring the Rectory garden, as plainly as his beams can speak, that no scurvy trick shall be played with the marquee erected this morning with some trepidation of spirit—since the two previous days have been rainy—on the cricket-ground. In proof of his good faith, the God of Day is dragging their hottest spices out of the petunias and heliotropes, and out of Miss Brine the prudent counsel, addressed to her pupils, to put cabbage leaves in their hats. But how can paltry apprehensions of the off-chance of a sunstroke influence minds occupied by the knowledge that the whole air is full of the sense of approaching festivity? Have not the hen-coops been moved from the banks of the Tugela River, in order that rounders may be played there? Is not there to be a tug-of-war on the grass plot before the front door? Has not a “donkey” been erected in a clear space of the shrubbery? Are not numerous old boxes being chopped up into trays, to be used for tobogganing down the steep slope above the parterre? That the treat to the choir boys of St. Gengulpha’s Church, Martin Street, Soho, London, which in her maiden days Mrs. Darcy used, for the sake of its excellent music, to frequent, is an annual one, does not lessen the excitement with which the arrival of the early afternoon train, and the hired brake and Rectory waggonette that convey the guests from Sutton Rivers station, is expected.
That blissful date is still three hours off, for eleven o’clock has just told its last stroke from the church tower as Mrs. Darcy, calm with the consciousness of made cakes, garnished dishes, and arrived chairs, puts foot across the threshold of the cool drawing-room of Campion Place. There is purpose in her eye, and resolution in her step, as she lightly crosses the carpet, and lays her hands on the shoulders of a black figure, sitting with its back to her, writing at a bureau. The figure puts out an abstracted hand backwards in acknowledgment of what is evidently a very familiar interruption, but her attention remains rivetted upon the “slips” before her.
“Isn’t it astonishing that the corrector of the press can let such mistakes pass?” she asks, indignantly. “Twice they have printed snouts for ‘shouts,’ and liver for ‘lover’! It makes such dreadful gibberish of the lines.”
Mrs. Darcy looks over Lavinia’s shoulder, and verifies the blunders alluded to; but it is clear that the attention given is but a half-hearted one. In the early days of black emptiness which had followed Sir George’s death in the previous January, of occupation gone, and spirits drooping to the very earth that had closed over the last of her “men,” Susan had welcomed for Lavinia the editing of Rupert’s “Remains” as a salutary distraction; but of late she has remorsefully to own to herself that she has grown rather tired of that “volume of posthumous verse,” which takes such a long time in preparing for the press, and the emendating, noting, and prefacing of which, by her friend’s not very practised pen, has robbed the latter of so many of the little out-door joys which stand first in the pharmacy of grief-healing.