No answer.
“Isn’t it a puerility to banish him from your speech—to go half a mile out of your way to avoid speaking his poor name—when we both know that he is never for one moment out of your thoughts? No; don’t interrupt me! I will have my say out this time! Never for one moment out of your thoughts—not even when you are laying eucharis lilies on Sir George’s grave, or editing Rupert’s poems.”
Lavinia’s only answer is to take her hands off the manuscript before her, as if the indictment made against her rendered her unworthy to touch it; and her long arms drop to her side.
“Can you deny it?” asks Mrs. Darcy, her spirituelle pale face flushing with excitement, thinking that she may as well be killed for a sheep as a lamb, and kneeling down beside her friend to get compelling possession of one of her hands. “I insist upon your answering me!”
For a moment or two of misgiving it seems to the rector’s wife as if her audacity of asking were to break against the same obstinacy of morbid silence as has rebuffed all her previous efforts to speak a forbidden name; but, after a while, Lavinia answers, a great sigh seeming to tear the words out of her breast—
“I do not deny it; though why you should have the brutality to force me to own it to-day, particularly, I do not know!”
“Because he is in England!” replies Susan, speaking very softly, with a kindly dew of moisture, making tender her usually keen eyes; “because, this morning, I had a letter from him, with a London postmark!”
The slips of Rupert’s poems blow off the bureau, and on to the floor, wafted to earth by the irony of a warm gust from the honied garden-beds outside; but Lavinia is not aware of it. The one hand that she has at liberty flies up to her forehead, as though she were blinded by a sudden light.
“You must have seen in the papers that the Isis, with his regiment on board, had reached Southampton; but, perhaps”—with a slight return of satire lightening the gravity of her eager tones—“perhaps—to be consistent—you do not allow yourself to glance at the war news.”
“I did not at first,” answers the girl, still looking straight before her, with eyes that yet feel dazzled; “I thought it ought to be part of my punishment; but,” faltering, “I had not resolution enough to keep to it. And, even if I had, it would have been no use. The children——”