“Oh no! Why should she?” he exclaims energetically, with another of those forbidden struggles of his to sit up.
In authoritatively compelling him into recumbence again, Miss Prince’s cap-strings somehow get into her victim’s eyes. Lavinia’s last sight of him is lying back exhausted by the remedies applied, much more than by his own imprudent movement; smiling faintly, with a patience much superior even to that which he had exhibited while lying wounded at the donga-bottom, through the endless hours of the winter night; smiling, while Féodorovna, taking it for granted that he feels faint, fans him with a vigour that makes the end of his pinched nose and his tired eyelids tremble.
CHAPTER IX
Féodorovna has ejected her so early that she need not go home at once. This is Lavinia’s first thought on getting outside the house. It is but rarely that Miss Carew is not wanted in her own little milieu; but to-day she would be superfluous. Her uncle and Rupert are busy with the lawyer, who has come down from London—busy over settlements: a settlement upon herself; provision for the younger children—her younger children, hers and Rupert’s! If she walk very fast, perhaps she may outwalk this last thought. But it is a good walker; it keeps up with her. Possibly she might lose it in the wood. The idea results in a détour, which will involve passing through a portion of it. The word “wood” is perhaps a misnomer, for the grown trees are few and sparse; and yet by what other name can you describe these silvan miles of young chestnut, oak, and birch growths, that every ten years fall beneath the hatchet, to continually renew their tireless upspringing? Where only recently amputated stumps remain, the flowers grow far the lushest.
She pauses on reaching a spot where a quarter-acre of ground is utterly given over to the innocent loveliness of the cuckoo-flower, dog-violet, primrose, “firstborn child of Ver,” and purpling wood anemone. She stands looking down at them, as if she had never seen them before; as if these lowly, lifelong friends were the new-seen blossoms of a nobler planet. What has happened to her senses, that she sees and hears and smells with such three-fold keenness? Why does she feel so startlingly alive? The wonder drives Rupert’s younger children successfully into the background of her mind. Yet this bounding new consciousness of the splendour of life—life actual, this bursting irrepressible life of the field and the woodland—and life possible—cannot answer, when the roll-call of emotions is called, to the name of pleasure.
Life possible!—it is a hooded anonymous thing, that she dare not interrogate. In its presence her thoughts draw in their antennæ, like a sea-creature’s suddenly touched. She starts away from the little woodland garden, and walks hurriedly on, down a rough cart-track, rutty and caked with the winter’s dried mud. Foolish extravagant analogies and comparisons dart through her brain—not only dart, but tarry and pitch tents there. Her life has been like this parched wintry road—a dull track for heavy-wheeled days to grind and plough along; now it has turned suddenly into a blossoming brake. Her eyes lift themselves in a frightened rapture to where the descending sun’s beams thread with evening light the lovely thin green of the birches, exquisitely breaking and shaming the tardier chestnuts.
“It is the spring!” she says to herself. “It has always made me feel drunk!”
But the long vista of branches, all brownly, redly, greenly bursting, with opulent variety of ideas, ahead of her, tells her that she lies.
* * * * *
Sir George is on the look out for her when she reaches home, and the sight of his familiar figure, coupled with a remorseful fear of having been wanted and not been within reach—an almost unparalleled occurrence in her history—pulls her down to fact and earth again, without a moment’s delay. Yet a single glance at her uncle’s face tells her that, despite her truancy, she finds him in the best possible of humours.