No sooner is it uttered than she sees, by the dull rage in his eyes and the sneer on his lips, how more than useless her effort has been.
“Yes; I have certainly Rupert of the Rhine left! Ha! ha! He has a whole skin at present, and I expect he will take precious good care that it keeps whole!”
Lavinia takes her arm away, and rises to her feet, in deeply wounded discouragement, reddening in her lover’s behalf even more deeply than she had with vicarious shame at Féodorovna’s immodesty.
“Are you angry with him for not being dead too?” she asks, standing before her uncle with locked hands and burning eyes. “Well, perhaps he will oblige you; he has never been very strong!” Then, with a revulsion of feeling, flinging herself on her knees beside the old man, “Do not be unkind to him! you know that, though they were so different, Bill liked him very much! Oh!”—bowing her nut-brown head on his knees—“oughtn’t we to love each other all the better, now that there are so few of us?”
CHAPTER III
The modest, low house on the Kentish hillside, with its pink, rough-cast face, its tall, narrow, eighteenth-century windows, its verandah, the alternate object of summer blessings and winter curses, has been Lavinia Carew’s home ever since her mother had crowned a foolish marriage by a perhaps less foolish death within the year. Being one of those completely unfortunate persons whom Fate seems to delight in belabouring, her husband had predeceased her by a fortnight. Upon the doubly forsaken baby’s nearest blood relation, Sir George Campion, had devolved the choice of two alternatives—that of saddling himself for life with a creature against whose entry into it he had always angrily protested, and that of sending it to the workhouse, and being called an unnatural brute for his pains. He chose the first; though, as everybody said, with a very ill grace. But the people who kindly tried to tell her this in later days could never get Sir George Campion’s niece to believe it.
Yet her life has scarcely been a bed of roses, though love has not been lacking; and her three men have had that immense opinion of her which makes up to most of her sex for any amount of bodily or mental char-ing. Of women in her home, save servants, there have, within her recollection, been none. Marriage is not an institution that seems to thrive in the Campion family, and so early in Lavinia’s history that only the faintest blur of memory of something kind and connected with cakes remains to the girl, her uncle’s wife had slipped inoffensively away to the churchyard, conveniently close to the pink-faced house. Often since she has grown up into sense and thoughtfulness, Lavinia has speculated about that dim lady, of whom no one now ever speaks—all others because they have forgotten her, and one concerning whom no one knows wherefore he is silent—speculated whether in her lifetime she had had as much buffer-work to do as has fallen to Lavinia herself, and whether, not being of so robust a constitution of mind or body, it had ended by killing her. For Lavinia is, and for several years past has been, before all things, a buffer. Has there ever been a day for so long as she can remember, when she has not been called upon to use her characteristic gifts to deaden and smooth and blunt the jars and bumps that her perpetually colliding men are always inflicting upon each other? The fault has nearly always lain with the father, gifted with that most infallible double endowment for ensuring unhappiness in life—a deep heart and an impossible temper.
She is thinking of him with tender ruth next morning as she stands under the verandah, looking across the downward slope of garden, grass, sun-dial, and snowdrop borders, to the spacious view over the Weald of Kent, Hastingswards. On her right, a towering hedge of espaliered elms parts her—it alone and a few unseen green hillocks—from the little red-roofed thirteenth-century church and its emerald God’s acre. From the top of the church tower, it is said that on a clear day you can discern the masts of ships, though not the very sea. To this kind of seeing there goes usually more of imagination than eyesight; but the belief has, since the days of King John, heightened the village’s opinion of itself. To the left the prospect is bounded by the great group of horse-chestnuts, leafless now and purple, in the Rectory garden.
It is to the Rectory that Lavinia is bound—the Rectory, where she gets her fresh eggs, and carries some of her troubles. She is dressed in black for her dead cousin; but the freshness of her cheeks and lips, and the sunshine that lives in her hair, make it always difficult for her to look in mourning. Her spirits are still tender from the emotion of last night, and her thoughts musing pityingly upon her men—the live one who is taking his punishment so deadly hard, and the dead who, though now so deified and enshrined in his father’s broken heart, had not, any more than herself, found his short life a bed of roses. Poor Bill! Never again would she have to insert the pad of her smoothing words between his sensitiveness and the sting of his father’s speech—that father who, though he would joyfully have died ten thousand deaths for him, yet could not resist venting the gibes born of adversity and constitutional ill humour upon the creature whom, “if Heaven had made him such another world of one entire and perfect chrysolite,” he would not have sold for it. Poor Bill!
With a heartfelt sigh she fetches her egg-basket and sets off through the churchyard to her goal. It is a roundabout way, since the Rectory grounds actually touch the wall at the bottom of the Campion garden; and there had once, not so long ago, been a trellised door through which Rectory and Place ran in and out at will, but in an unexplained spurt of resentment or suspicion, Sir George had had it walled up. It has been a cause of great inconvenience to himself, and he has very much repented it ever since the spurt passed; but pride forbids him to undo his deed. The Rectory regrets it too, but with wise and understanding want of resentment. Its own front gate stands hospitably open, and the shortness of its drive soon brings the visitor to the hall-door—wide open too—for the Rectory is nothing if not airy; and, indeed, since the children could never remember to shut it after them, it may as well gape legally as illegally.