It is not an effusive mode of acquiescence.
“Have you nothing more to say about it?”
If she had had any doubt as to the final banishment out of her life of the boy-comrade, the method of this question, and a certain reproachful enterprise divined in the asker’s eye, would have banished it.
“What more is there to say?” she returns in troubled haste. “What more than we have been saying all our lives, in a way?” Then, with a sudden impulsive throwing herself on his judgment and mercy, “I suppose we do feel all right, don’t we?”
CHAPTER VI
“I love nothing so well as you!
Is not that strange?”
Rupert is “all right.” Of that there can be no question. It turns out now that he has been “all right” for as long as he can remember. The discovery that it is only his delicacy and self-command that have hitherto hindered his manifesting his “all-rightness” practically, fills Lavinia with such admiring gratitude as makes her almost certain that she is “all right” too. She has no female friend with whom to compare notes, nor would she do so if she had, her one intimate, Mrs. Darcy, being very far from belonging to that not innumerous band of matrons who enjoy revealing the secrets of their own prison-house to a selected few. Lavinia has to work out her problem for herself. Not betrothed only now, but going to be married, with a tray of engagement-rings crawling down from London by the South-Eastern for approval, with a disinterring by Sir George, from his dead wife’s presses, of wedding laces——
Lavinia wishes that Rupert did not take quite so great an interest in the latter, and did not know quite so much about Point de Venise, Point de Flanders, and Point d’Angleterre—; with interesting and illumining comparison of past feelings, and with a respectable modicum of kisses. If the candour of her nature, and the knowledge of how perfectly useless it is to lie to a person who knows her so through and throughly as Rupert, compel her to acknowledge that these latter do not cause her any particular elation, she is able truly to answer him that she does not dislike them so much as to forbid a frugal repetition. Once or twice, touched and stung to generosity by his unselfish refraining from even the dole of allowed endearments, she takes the initiative; and at other times consoles him for her want of fervour by assuring him, with emphatic words, and the crystal clearness of her kind, cold eyes, that she is “not that sort.”
She is wondering to-day whether, when she left him five minutes ago at the lych-gate, he did not look as if he were getting a little tired of the explanation. It ought to be thoroughly satisfactory to him, for, after all, you can’t give more than you have; but she has never been in the habit of crossing or discontenting her men, and to be found not up to the expected mark in the matter of endearment vexes her as much as to be convicted of neglecting their buttons or slurring their dinner.
It is a week since Miss Carew has paid the visit, usually a daily or bi-daily one, to the Rectory. The unwonted absence for three days from her monopolizing husband and boisterous brood of Mrs. Darcy, partly accounts for this omission; and not even to herself does Lavinia own that she is in a less hurry than usual to greet her returned ally. Rupert is never in any great hurry to see Susan, and has gracefully declined to accompany his fiancée on her present errand of announcement.