Explore "Lavinia" by Rhoda Broughton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The 28th of May has come, and the inevitable has happened. This inevitable is not that Lavinia Carew has become Lavinia Campion. On the contrary, her wedding stands postponed for a week, viz. to the 4th of June. The delay is in no degree attributable to her, but is caused by the illness of that uncle whose over-haste to be well, and determination to treat serious sickness with that high hand which it will never endure, has landed him in the same morass as it had done Féodorovna. With a reluctance proportioned to his extravagant eagerness for the object in view, with many racy expressions, and a refreshing shower of renewed insults, both wholesale and retail, distilling upon his patient son, Sir George has had to acquiesce in the deferring for an additional eight days of the attainment of his heart's desire.
Perhaps the inevitable might have been avoided if one of several things had happened or not happened. If Sir George had yielded to his niece's earnest entreaties to be allowed to nurse him, instead of insisting on her confining herself to a couple of runs up to London, each of so few hours' duration as to involve no swelling of the reckoning at the "d -- -- d pot-house; " if Rupert had not been kept or kept himself in such close attendance on his father as to have no time to see how ill his own affairs were faring; if Féodorovna had been permitted to complete her cure, and exercise momently supervision over her captive at home, instead of being despatched to Brighton -- metaphorically kicking and screaming, it is true -- but still despatched by a determined doctor and a for once unbullyable father; if Binning's name had not appeared among the list of officers upon whom the Queen was pleased to bestow the Victoria Cross; if Mafeking had not been relieved! If, if! the convenient, curtsying, carneying preposition, which has salved every malefactor's conscience since the world began! For the malefactor in question it is but a very imperfect unguent, desperate as is the perseverance with which she uses it.