Her friend accompanies her to the gate, hatless, and having got rid of the children by a slight gesture of dismissal, instantly obeyed, despite the bite of February’s still bitter tooth, that makes the winter aconites in the grass sink their round yellow heads chillily into their green capes, she loiters even when the limit of the Rectory demesne is reached; and Lavinia knows that she has something difficult of utterance to say to her.
“Has Sir George spoken to you about your marriage lately?”
“About my marriage?”
“Yes, anything as to the desirability of its coming off sooner on account of—what has happened?”
“On account of poor Bill’s death, do you mean?”—looking blank and mystified. “No; why should he? What difference can that make?”
“You see that Rupert is the only one left now,” replies Mrs. Darcy, gently, but in a rather embarrassed tone; “the only one to keep up the old name—to prevent its dying out.”
Her companion is silent, staring at the humpy winter aconites with a vague feeling that they have grown into unfamiliar blossoms; that the gate-post is strange too, and the mud in the road, and the rectoress’s expressive pale face.
“I think he means to broach the subject to you before long,” continues the latter, looking away from the person whom she is addressing, and speaking with a tentative delicacy; “so I thought it best that you should not be taken unawares when he does. I must be off. There is Richard signalling madly, and saying something quite lay about my unpunctuality.” She runs off nodding; and Lavinia, much more slowly, takes her way home through the churchyard.
She feels as if some one—surely it cannot be the gentle friend made up of sense, sympathy, and esprit?—has given her a blow on the head with a cudgel. She has always known that she is to marry Rupert. The idea is perfectly familiar, and not the least unwelcome. To be his wife in the future is as inevitable a part of the scheme of life as to die. Up to five minutes ago, the one has appeared as vague and distant as the other. But to be married to him soon! To be married to him soon because the Campion family cannot be allowed to die out! It is by her union with him that it is to be preserved! It is her child, hers and Rupert’s, who is to hand on the honoured name! Her very ears tingle and glow at the unfamiliar realism and animalism of the idea. It is only such a dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s that could make her realize what a nebulous thing, with no foothold in the world of reality, her engagement to her cousin has hitherto been. To be married to Rupert! That she should have a child, and that it should be Rupert’s! Her feelings are as yet much too chaotic for her to know whether the prodigious fact thrown by the magic-lantern of Mrs. Darcy’s simple question upon the sheet of her imagination, belongs to the region of pleasure or pain. She knows only that she feels extraordinarily odd. The sight—normal and familiar as it is—of the person who has just been thrust upon her in so glaringly new a character, the sight of him standing, as he has stood many hundreds of times before, watching for her back-coming from the verandah, matter-of-fact and every-day as he looks, does not in the least lessen the queerness of her sensations.
“The Rectory, of course?” he says, with a sort of whimsical protest in his tone and eyebrows. Then, in an altered key of disturbed curiosity, “Why, what have they been doing to you? You look—— I declare I do not know what you look like.”