“Yes,” returns the mother, with a rather quivering pride in her voice; “it would be difficult to be long in the company of my progeny without hearing the name of Binning”—pronouncing it with a ringing clearness. “They, at least, are faithful to the one hero whom they can call friend!”
At the thus audaciously syllabled name, whose utterance has been tacitly prohibited between them for over a year, Lavinia gives a low cry. But in the over-set face that she suddenly turns upon her friend there is no anger, only an immense mazed joy, fighting its way out of the Bastille of the long remorseful sorrow that has prisoned and gagged it; and her fair head falls forward on the shoulder of Binning’s advocate. Through the thin fabric of her gown Mrs. Darcy feels the glow of the hidden face, and it spurs her to fresh effort.
“Are you not rather tired of being dead?” she whispers. “It is all very well for a time, but it must pall! Come back to life! Put off these hateful weeds, put on a white gown, and come back to life to-day! Believe me”—with an accent of exulting persuasiveness—“you could not choose a better moment!”
* * * * *
The party to the choir boys of St. Gengulpha’s is being put through with the thoroughness which, since Mrs. Darcy’s advent, fifteen years ago, has characterized all the Rectory functions; and, indeed, is drawing towards its close. For four sunshiny hours, twenty happy boys in flannels, with sharp towny faces, have been expatiating about the grounds, and have drunk to the full of the varied entertainments offered them—entertainments shared by half the neighbourhood, annually compelled by Mrs. Darcy to come in to her aid. The Vicar of St. Gengulpha’s and his curates—lean men with intellectual faces, supported by the gamest of their pale choir boys, have stretched muscles that yet remember the playing-fields and the Isis, in the best tug-of-war in the Campion records, against the rector and his inferior songsters. The smartest young ladies of the neighbourhood have not disdained, though hampered by long-tailed swishy gowns, to join in a game of rounders with the visitors, nor do the inelegance of their futile efforts to get their draperies out of the way, nor the potency of the sun’s beams at all reduce the good will and perseverance with which they arduously scamper. The “donkey” has repeatedly conquered and been conquered. The donkey is an apocryphal animal, with a wooden head; and, for body, a revolving barrel, mounted on whose elusive convexity the rider has to snatch a threepenny bit from its distant nose. Many are the ignominious falls given by him, many the glorious victories won over his treacherously turning barrel-stomach. For the lesser boys the threepence is placed further up the nose, within easier reach of the little anxiously grabbing hand; and frequent are the cheaply generous petitions proffered by elder lads in behalf of their small companions.
“Mightn’t ’e ’ave it a bit nearer, sir? ’e’s only a little chap!”
And the rector, in flannels, having laid aside his pompousness with his broadcloth, hot, genial, turning the handle of his wooden steed with right good will, feigning to be inexorable, always accedes. Then, after tea in the tent—tea in whose distribution every one, even to Serena and the poodle, assist; after Orpheus glees sung in the dining-room, comes the crowning final joy of the toboggan.
“One! two! three! Are you ready?”
The eager scramble up the hillock; the emulous turning round the bag which sits at the top on a sort of milestone; the getting on to your tea-tray; the difficulty of keeping your feet on it—an indispensable condition of success; the mad sliding run down to the grass at the foot—once or twice the impetus carrying the boy divorced from his tray, and landing him on the gravel walk, with barked elbows and shins;—who can wonder that, in comparison with such pleasures, the donkey himself grows pale?
The party has been in full swing, before a guest, who, if an oath to appear at it had not been exacted from her, would certainly never have found courage to face it, is seen to be in the midst of associates from whom she has been so long withdrawn. Lavinia is late—a tardiness not to be accounted for by the simplicity of her toilette, since no one knows with what a long delay of backward-looking apology, with what remorseful cryings-out for forgiveness to her “men” for seeming to forget them, she has put off her black gown, and invested herself in the white muslin which feels like a travesty. It is with something of the shamed shyness of one who suddenly finds himself in broad daylight among a party of ordinarily dressed men and women, clad in the extravagance of a fancy garb, that Miss Carew appears among the acquaintances from whom, for over a year, she has held aloof.