It is the occasion of her dilemma who cuts it short by an entrance a good deal less aspen-like and deliberate than is usual in her case. It is, of course, an extravagant trick of fancy, but the impression is at once conveyed to at least one of the occupants of the drawing-room that Féodorovna has been kicked into the room. The pink umbrage in her silly face confirms the idea of some propelling force behind her, as does the excessive civility of the attendant Rupert. That the deferential empressement of his manner is the cover for an inclination towards ungovernable, vexed laughter is suspected only by Lavinia. That some catastrophe has attended the visit of the young paraclete is obvious to the meanest observer; but it is not until after the Princes’ carriage has crunched and flashed away with Féodorovna reclining in swelling silence upon the cushion, and her mother casting glances of frightened curiosity at her infuriated profile that the details of the disaster reach Lavinia’s ears. Not immediately even then, since before she can besiege her cousin with terrified questions, he is summoned to his father; and it is fully half an hour before he rejoins her in the schoolroom. She has to wait again even then; since at her first allusion to the subject, he is seized with such fou rire that he has to roll on his face on the old sofa before he can master the shoulder-shaking convulsions of his uncomfortable mirth.
“What happened?” cries the girl, standing over her fiancé’s prostrate figure in a fever of apprehension. “Oh, do get up, and stop laughing! What is there to laugh at? You are too stupid to live!”
“I shall not live much longer!” replies the young man, rearing himself up into a sitting posture, and presenting a subdued but suddenly grave surface to his censor; “not if we are often to have such treats as this. I do not know why I laugh, for I never felt less hilarious in my life.”
“You are as hysterical as a woman!” says Lavinia, with a frown.
“It is not my fault, though it is my eternal regret that I am not one!” he retorts.
It is lucky for him that the fever of her preoccupation prevents Lavinia from hearing this monstrous aspiration.
“Did he do anything violent?” she asks in a voice made low by dread.
“He kept his hands off her, if you mean that!” replies Rupert, showing symptoms of a tendency to relapse into his convulsion of laughter; “but only just! If I had not appeared in the nick of time, I would not have answered for her life!” Then, as Lavinia keeps looking at him in smileless tragedy, he goes on, “I was hanging about, waiting for him, as you know he had told me that he should have something to say to me—by-the-by, he has just been saying it, but that is another story—when I heard raised voices, or rather a raised voice. You know that long, dull roar of his that always makes me call on the hills to cover me!”
“Well?”
“I felt that there was no time to be lost, so I hurried in—only just in time! I saw in his eye that the next moment he would have her by the shoulders, and be thrusting her through the door!”