“Jaundice! Féo!” ejaculates Mrs. Darcy, in a tone of such delighted relief as is afterwards commented upon by herself with humorous severity.
“She felt ill when she went to bed last night—overpoweringly sleepy and bilious, and the whites of her eyes looked yellow; and to-day she is the colour of a guinea!”
Lavinia has subsided again upon her knees, which do not feel quite so strong as usual. The attitude may connote thankfulness as well as inspection.
“Poor Féo!” she says, trying to avoid the key of garish joy in which Susan’s utterance was pitched. “What a dreadful bore for her! How did she get it?”
Mrs. Prince lifts her handsomely dressed shoulders and her pince-nez-ed eyes to heaven, as if to refer the question there.
“We had the greatest difficulty in keeping her in bed, until we brought her a looking-glass. She saw then that it was out of the question that he should see her! But she is worrying herself to death over him—oh, not over poor Smethurst: he might die twice a day for all she cared—over Captain Binning, I mean!”
There is another pause, but of a different quality from the scared silence of five minutes ago. In Susan’s case it is filled by a cheerfully cynical wonder at the perfect clearness of vision which the sufferer’s mother can combine with her maternal tenderness; and, in Lavinia’s, with a profound gratitude that, at least, while her hue remains that of the dandelion, Féodorovna’s prey will escape her bovril, declarations, and cap-strings.
The children think that their moment has come, and civilly volunteer to show and explain the wedding gifts: to make it clear that both rolling-pin and bread-trencher emanated from the cook; the dolly-tub from Miss Brine; and clothes-pins from the “Tweeny;” that the framed and laurel-crowned “Bobs” is a joint offering from the three elder children; and the smaller “Kitchener” the outcome of the infant Serena’s worship of Bellona.
“Mother has just given him her teapot,” says Phillida, in excited explanation. “Doesn’t it look exactly like silver? It is an old Sheffield plate pattern; it was to have been presented two days ago, and Sam had his face washed twice in expectation; but we wanted Lavy to be present, and, both times, she was at the Chestnuts.”
“That is just where I want her to be again!” answers Mrs. Prince, listening with more good nature and better-feigned attention than her daughter would have done, but reverting to her own preoccupation—“the poor child”—turning back appealingly to her two grown-up auditors—“has got it into her head that he will be neglected. She and Nurse Blandy have not quite hit it off of late; that no one can look after him properly but herself; though, to tell the truth”—lowering her voice, and in a key of vexed shrewdness—“between ourselves, I think the poor man was on the high-road to be killed with kindness!”