“And where have you been gadding, miss?” he asks, in a tone that reveals the highest complacency of which one so habitually gloomy is capable.
“I thought you were busy with Mr. Ingram,” she answers, involuntarily shirking the question.
“And so we have been,” returns he, his sombre face breaking into a smile; “both Rupert and I! And very glad you ought to be that we have.”
“Ought I?”
“I was determined that you should have no excuse for wishing to hurry me off,” continues Sir George, with rather acrid pleasantry, that has yet every intention of being agreeable. “After all, what do I want?—a crust and a glass of Marsala, an armchair and a pipe. So I have made over the whole of his mother’s money to Rupert, and he has settled every penny of it on you and your children.”
For a moment or two Lavinia is quite silent. Possibly surprise at her uncle’s flight of imagination in the matter of the exiguity of his own needs; possibly also choking gratitude; and possibly, again, the sudden confrontation with the younger children, whom she had thought to have buried in the wood, keep her dumb.
“You are very good to me,” she answers at last, in a tone which sounds to herself the ne plus ultra of thankless flatness; but in which her hearer happily recognizes only an acknowledgment, faltering from the excess of its obligation.
“Whom else have we got to be good to but our little Mosquito?” he asks, using the perfectly inappropriate pet-name which has always indicated the high-water mark of his favour. “And now that we have her safe for life—I have sometimes had my misgivings as to our doing that—we must do what we can for her; yes, we must do what we can for her!”
There is always something oppressive in the lightness of the habitually heavy, in the jollity of the habitually morose; and Sir George’s elation sits like lead upon his niece’s heart. She reproaches herself bitterly for it. Has not her whole life’s aim been to make him happy? And now that by his manner he is showing a cheerfulness higher than he had ever enjoyed even before the news of Bill’s death reached him, by what odious perversity are her own spirits dropping down to zero? Her one consolation is that he departs complacently, without the dimmest suspicion of her mental attitude. With Rupert—Rupert, who knows her like the palm of his own hand—her task will be incalculably harder. It has to be undertaken almost immediately; for her betrothed at once takes his father’s place.
“Has he told you?” asks the young man, coming up to her, as she stands slowly pulling off her gloves by the needless drawing-room fire. “Isn’t it splendid of him? He would have stripped himself even more entirely if I had let him—to the bone, in fact.”