A confused sense of indignation at that look makes itself perceptible for a moment in the girl’s mind, followed immediately by a cavilling self-question as to why she should feel it? What reason assignable to any human creature is there for her refusing to perform so natural and easy an act of neighbourliness? Were it poor inglorious little Captain Smethurst to whom she had been requested to minister, would she have hesitated for one moment to comply? With the lifelong record, of which she cannot but be conscious, behind her of matter-of-course obligingnesses and good offices towards her whole entourage, is it any wonder that her present grudging attitude has spread a layer of surprised disappointment over her petitioner’s countenance?
“Of course I know that he has no claim upon any of you!” she says, with a shrug that seems to give up her cause for lost. “Quite the other way on, in fact! But he is such a lovable sort of fellow, and so disproportionately grateful for any little thing one can do for him; and you all—even Sir George—seemed to wish to make him forget; but I suppose it rankles all the same, and he is the last person not to understand that it should be so.”
She turns to go, unaware that her final words, in which she herself sees no particular virtue, have gained the cause she had abandoned as lost.
“Rankles!” repeats Lavinia, turning quite white, and in a voice of inexpressible horror. “Is it possible that you can think?—that you can imagine——?”
“I really do not know what I think,” replies Mrs. Prince, in a voice pettish from worry of mind and startled puzzledom at the dynamitic effect of her last sentence. “When you see a person, whom you have always found ready to put herself in four for you, suddenly making difficulties when you are in a tight place, and when it really would not cost her much to help you, one does not know what to think, does one, Mrs. Darcy?”
“Has Lavinia made a difficulty?” asks the person thus erected into umpire, and looking with quiet directness of inquiry into her friend’s face. “I think you have not given her time for either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ yet!”
“Which is it to be?” cries Mrs. Prince, wheeling round with revived hope upon her victim. “It may as well be yes!”—with all her tone can carry of persuasion. “You will have none of the disagreeables of nursing. What I ask of you is just to sit by his bedside and chat to him; and to keep Féo quiet by persuading her that we are not killing him by neglect in her absence.”
None of the disagreeables of nursing! It is, then, to a selfish shrinking from contact with his pain, that her hesitation is attributed. The stingingness of the injustice, which would be ludicrous in its divergence from fact, if it were not so cruel, drives back the blood to Lavinia’s cheeks, and the words to her lips.
“There are no disagreeables in this case, and if there were, I should not be afraid of them!” she says, with a quiet dignity which is felt to carry a rebuke with it, “I will gladly come.”
“You are a trump!” cries Mrs. Prince, breaking, in the excitement of her relief, into a phrase, the old-fashioned slanginess of which the elegance of her calmer moments would disapprove, and making a snatch, which meets only the empty air, at Miss Carew’s hands. “Let us be off this very instant, or we shall find Féo running about the passages, though her temperature is up at 102, and she is as yellow as a guinea!”