Lavinia

“I shall never get over it.”

This is a phrase that has issued from the same lips very often before; and in general Lavinia Carew listens to it silently, in the impatient confidence that at her next visit to Mrs. Prince, that lady will have got over “it” so completely as to have forgotten that “it” ever existed. She is silent now, but from an opposite reason to that which has hitherto tied her tongue. In her opinion neither Mrs. Prince nor any other Mrs. or Miss could ever get over the “it” in question.

“And coming on this joyful day too--a day, I mean, that is so joyful to every one else in England--that would have been so joyful to us, but for this!” The speaker breaks off with a whimper.

“The anniversary of Majuba Hill!” says Lavinia, with a fighting glint in a pair of uncommonly clear eyes, and uttering her ejaculation with none the less gusto for its being absolutely unoriginal, and shared by almost every pair of lips in Great and Greater Britain this triumphal day.

“After the terrible gloom of the winter--never even in the Crimean War do I remember anything comparable to it!--just when the dead weight seemed to be lifting a little from all our hearts,” pursues Mrs. Prince, raising to heaven her bangled wrists with a despairing jangle.

“The village is full of little Union Jacks,” interrupts the girl, with a good-natured effort to keep her afflicted friend on the safe track of the public rejoicing, and also because she cannot quite restrain the expression of her own jubilation. “I cannot think where they all came from.”

But the waving of no bunting before it can hide out the spectacle which is turning the national triumph to eclipse before the elder woman’s vision.

“I suppose that I ought not to have told even you,” she continues, resisting with mild doggedness her young friend’s attempt to distract her thoughts, even momentarily, from her woes--not having, indeed, a mind hospitable enough often to admit two ideas abreast within its narrow portals. “No; I suppose that I certainly ought not to have revealed our disgrace even to you; but what was I to do? I had to tell some one--to seek for sympathy somewhere. I get none at home. I suppose that Mr. Prince feels it; but he says nothing. He is like a stone.”

“I am sure that he feels it.”

Something emphatic in the low-voiced assertion of her husband’s sensibility, by one who has not the advantage of relationship to him, grates on the rasped nerves of the poor wife.

“I never said that he did not feel it!” she cries in tart wretchedness. “Of course he feels it. He would not be human if he did not!”

Lavinia assents with a motion of the head, quite as emphatic as her former asseveration of Mr. Prince’s sufferings.

“And if I had not told you”--answering the accusation of disloyalty brought by herself against herself, with as much defensive exasperation as if it had been proffered by her companion--“Féo would have done so herself! She sees nothing to be ashamed of. She glories in it!”

“_Glories in it!_”

“Yes, glories in it! incredible as it seems. But I wish, dear”--with a fretful relief in finding an object on which to vent her exquisite nerve-irritation--“that you would not repeat my words after me when you hear them perfectly.”

“It is a stupid trick”--speaking with absolute and effortless good temper. “I think I do it without knowing.”

“You are a good creature!” cries the other, seizing her companion’s fingers with one hand, and with the other applying a very expensive pocket-handkerchief to the eyes that are swimming in mortified tears. “To-day I can’t help snapping my best friend’s nose off!”

“Snap away! There will be plenty left when you have done,” replies Lavinia, playfully passing her fore finger down the ridge of a very handsome feature. Then, with an immediate return to gravity, “I know that she came back in a very exalté state from that ‘send off.’ She managed to get an introduction to him--to the General, I mean--didn’t she?”

Miss Prince’s mother shakes her head. “No; she had no introduction. Lady de Jones, with whom we went, did not know him; but we had tickets. We were admitted to the platform. Before I guessed what she--Féo, I mean--was going to do, she pushed her way up to him--to where he was standing with his staff, and gave him a bunch of violets.”

“Yes, I remember she told me”--trying honestly to keep out of her voice the disgusted disapprobation that the action thus recalled had inspired in her.

“He bowed and smiled, and took them. What else could he, could any gentleman, do? And we came away, and she was in the seventh heaven; and we both thought--her father and I both thought--would not you have thought?--that there was an end of it!”

“Yes, I should.”

The bareness of this assent is due to the difficulty experienced by the speaker in refraining from expressing how incredible and “beyond all whooping” it appears to her, that to such a transaction there should have been a beginning.

“She has always been rather a ‘handful,’” goes on the mother, with rueful dispassionateness--“determined to be unconventional and unlike other people, and all that sort of stuff; but it never entered our heads that she would be so lost to all decency, to all self-respect, as to do this!--throwing herself at him like a woman in Regent Street; for that is what it comes to.”

The poor lady has worked herself up into a whirlwind of tears and sobs, which her young friend charitably hopes may relieve her.

“And you neither of you had the least suspicion?”

“Not the very least mite,” replied Mrs. Prince, who, though in everyday life almost quite ladylike, is apt, under the pressure of high emotion, to lapse into homely phrases that smack of her unregenerate state before the world-wide success of “Prince’s Dropless Candle,” the Féodorovna, had lifted her into affluence and the habit of wearing her _h_’s every day. “She has always had a very large correspondence”--with an accent that tells of murdered pride in the fact recorded--“writing to and receiving letters from people that neither her father nor I ever heard of! It was an understood thing that we should ask no questions. I should as soon have thought of flying in the air as saying to her, ‘Whom have you heard from?’”

“Then how--how did you learn about it?”

“She gave me the letter to read. We were at breakfast--her father and I--reading our papers, in such good spirits over the surrender of Kronje; it seems a year ago”--with a transient look of bewilderment--“and in she came, holding an open letter in her hand, and said, with that odd smile she sometimes puts on--I am always uneasy when I see that smile--‘There has sometimes been a little soreness about my keeping my correspondence to myself. Here is a letter that I invite you both to read,’ and she laid it down on the table before me!” The mother pauses, her face working.

“Well?” in a breathless sympathy.

“I just glanced at the signature, and saw it was his. But even then it never struck me--I did not put two and two together. Who could have imagined such a thing about her own child? And she had not mentioned his name for weeks.”

“No?”

“I read it!” pausing to gasp, “and then her father read it!”

“Yes?”

“I--I have nothing to say against it,” speaking with twitching lips. “It was everything that was honourable and gentlemanlike!”

A longer pause. Lavinia has put her elbows on the little Empire table that interposes its fragile elegance between her and her companion, and is digging her knuckles into the cheeks that are blazing with vicarious shame.

“He said that--yes, I had rather tell you--that he was inexpressibly touched; but that in his busy life there was no room for feelings of that sort; that he was old enough to be her father; and that he had thought it right to destroy her letter.”

Probably the dumb sympathy written so redly over Lavinia’s face is a better plaister for poor Mrs. Prince’s gaping wound than would have been any of the words that so absolutely refuse to come at the girl’s invocation. There are many ointments that soften the smart of death, of parting, of estrangement; but what physician or quack alive has ever yet invented a successful unguent for shame?

“Even when I had read it, I did not take it in! I said to her, ‘Why have you shown me this? What does it mean? Where does it come from?’ ‘It came by the South African mail this morning,’ she said, looking me quite straight in the face, ‘and it is General ----’s answer to a letter I wrote him five weeks ago, offering myself to him.’”

It is the measure of Miss Carew’s view of the situation, that the nearest approach to consolation which she can produce is the question, “Don’t you think she is out of her mind?”