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The Egoist 

by George Meredith

March, 1999  [Etext #1684]


*The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Egoist, by George Meredith*
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THE EGOIST

A Comedy in Narrative


by GEORGE MEREDITH




PRELUDE

A Chapter of which the Last Page only is of any Importance

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and
it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men
and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no
mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the
representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the
impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small circular
glow of the watchmaker's eye to raise in bright relief minutest
grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The Comic
Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters,
and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and
their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men;
vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought of
persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see. But
there is a question of the value of a run at his heels.

Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book
on earth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose
title is the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world's
wisdom. So full of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in
which the generations have written ever since they took to
writing, that to be profitable to us the Book needs a powerful
compression.

Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this Book, who can
studiously travel through sheets of leaves now capable of a
stretch from the Lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and
shreds of leagues dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell
us, and catching breath by good luck, like dogs at bones about a
table, on the edge of the Pole? Inordinate unvaried length, sheer
longinquity, staggers the heart, ages the very heart of us at a
view. And how if we manage finally to print one of our pages on
the crow-scalp of that solitary majestic outsider? We may get him
into the Book; yet the knowledge we want will not be more present
with us than it was when the chapters hung their end over the
cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our great lord and master
contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of that within!

In other words, as I venture to translate him (humourists are
difficult: it is a piece of their humour to puzzle our wits), the
inward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to
give us those interminable milepost piles of matter (extending
well-nigh to the very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples,
digestibly. I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method
of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a
repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our
present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the
noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady
of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may
be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other
day for an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should
mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Science introduced us
to our o'er-hoary ancestry--them in the Oriental posture;
whereupon we set up a primaeval chattering to rival the Amazon
forest nigh nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before daybreak our
disease was hanging on to us again, with the extension of a tail.
We had it fore and aft. We were the same, and animals into the
bargain. That is all we got from Science.

Art is the specific. We have little to learn of apes, and they may
be left. The chief consideration for us is, what particular
practice of Art in letters is the best for the perusal of the Book
of our common wisdom; so that with clearer minds and livelier
manners we may escape, as it were, into daylight and song from a
land of fog-horns. Shall we read it by the watchmaker's eye in
luminous rings eruptive of the infinitesimal, or pointed with
examples and types under the broad Alpine survey of the spirit
born of our united social intelligence, which is the Comic Spirit?
Wise men say the latter. They tell us that there is a constant
tendency in the Book to accumulate excess of substance, and such
repleteness, obscuring the glass it holds to mankind, renders us
inexact in the recognition of our individual countenances: a
perilous thing for civilization. And these wise men are strong in
their opinion that we should encourage the Comic Spirit, who is
after all our own offspring, to relieve the Book. Comedy, they
say, is the true diversion, as it is likewise the key of the great
Book, the music of the Book. They tell us how it condenses whole
sections of the book in a sentence, volumes in a character; so
that a fair pan of a book outstripping thousands of leagues when
unrolled may he compassed in one comic sitting.

For verily, say they, we must read what we can of it, at least the
page before us, if we would be men. One, with an index on the
Book, cries out, in a style pardonable to his fervency: The remedy
of your frightful affliction is here, through the stillatory of
Comedy, and not in Science, nor yet in Speed, whose name is but
another for voracity. Why, to be alive, to be quick in the soul,
there should be diversity in the companion throbs of your pulses.
Interrogate them. They lump along like the old loblegs of Dobbin
the horse; or do their business like cudgels of carpet-thwackers
expelling dust or the cottage-clock pendulum teaching the infant
hour over midnight simple arithmetic. This too in spite of
Bacchus. And let them gallop; let them gallop with the God
bestriding them; gallop to Hymen, gallop to Hades, they strike the
same note. Monstrous monotonousness has enfolded us as with the
arms of Amphitrite! We hear a shout of war for a diversion.--
Comedy he pronounces to be our means of reading swiftly and
comprehensively. She it is who proposes the correcting of
pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of
rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate
civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. If, he says, she watches
over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is not opposed to
romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest.
Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by one foot's
length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap. In
Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under
the stroke of honourable laughter: an Ariel released by Prospero's
wand from the fetters of the damned witch Sycorax. And this
laughter of reason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical
great gale of the shifty Spring deciding for Summer. You hear it
giving the delicate spirit his liberty. Listen, for comparison,
to an unleavened society: a low as of the udderful cow past
milking hour! O for a titled ecclesiastic to curse to
excommunication that unholy thing!--So far an enthusiast perhaps;
but he should have a hearing.

Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we
are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately
know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent
process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the
cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well
charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:--there is a touch of
pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to
clothe himself at everybody's expense, and is of that desire
condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a
form, might be taken for the actual person. Only he is not allowed
to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze your body for the briny
drops. There is the innovation.

You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time
and country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what
we may with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface
and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps,
whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke
of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of
something comic in him, when they were one and all about to
describe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly (where
brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of family and
property, an idol of a decorous island that admires the concrete.
Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective
vision: malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in
imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch
their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their
lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that
their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their
game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and
antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam which
is their scent of the chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and
imps. They will, it is known of them, dog a great House for
centuries, and be at the birth of all the new heirs in succession,
diligently taking confirmatory notes, to join hands and chime
their chorus in one of their merry rings round the tottering
pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they had
(possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism
in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family.
They dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober,
while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait.

Aforetime a grand old Egoism built the House. It would appear that
ever finer essences of it are demanded to sustain the structure;
but especially would it appear that a reversion to the gross
original, beneath a mask and in a vein of fineness, is an
earthquake at the foundations of the House. Better that it should
not have consented to motion, and have held stubbornly to all
ancestral ways, than have bred that anachronic spectre. The sight,
however, is one to make our squatting imps in circle grow restless
on their haunches, as they bend eyes instantly, ears at full cock,
for the commencement of the comic drama of the suicide. If this
line of verse be not yet in our literature,

          Through very love of self himself he slew,

let it be admitted for his epitaph.


CHAPTER I

A Minor Incident Showing an Hereditary Aptitude in the Use of the
Knife

There was an ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible
over the infancy of Willoughby, fifth in descent from Simon
Patterne, of Patterne Hall, premier of this family, a lawyer, a
man of solid acquirements and stout ambition, who well understood
the foundation-work of a House, and was endowed with the power of
saying No to those first agents of destruction, besieging
relatives. He said it with the resonant emphasis of death to
younger sons. For if the oak is to become a stately tree, we must
provide against the crowding of timber. Also the tree beset with
parasites prospers not. A great House in its beginning lives, we
may truly say, by the knife. Soil is easily got, and so are
bricks, and a wife, and children come of wishing for them, but the
vigorous use of the knife is a natural gift and points to growth.
Pauper Patternes were numerous when the fifth head of the race was
the hope of his county. A Patterne was in the Marines.

The country and the chief of this family were simultaneously 
informed of the existence of one Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne, of
the corps of the famous hard fighters, through an act of heroism
of the unpretending cool sort which kindles British blood, on the
part of the modest young officer, in the storming of some eastern
riverain stronghold, somewhere about the coast of China. The
officer's youth was assumed on the strength of his rank, perhaps
likewise from the tale of his modesty: "he had only done his
duty". Our Willoughby was then at College, emulous of the generous
enthusiasm of his years, and strangely impressed by the report,
and the printing of his name in the newspapers. He thought over it
for several months, when, coming to his title and heritage, he
sent Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne a cheque for a sum of money
amounting to the gallant fellow's pay per annum, at the same time
showing his acquaintance with the first, or chemical, principles
of generosity, in the remark to friends at home, that "blood is
thicker than water". The man is a Marine, but he is a Patterne.
How any Patterne should have drifted into the Marines, is of the
order of questions which are senselessly asked of the great
dispensary. In the complimentary letter accompanying his cheque,
the lieutenant was invited to present himself at the ancestral
Hall, when convenient to him, and he was assured that he had given
his relative and friend a taste for a soldier's life. Young Sir
Willoughby was fond of talking of his "military namesake and
distant cousin, young Patterne--the Marine". It was funny; and
not less laughable was the description of his namesake's deed of
valour: with the rescued British sailor inebriate, and the hauling
off to captivity of the three braves of the black dragon on a
yellow ground, and the tying of them together back to back by
their pigtails, and driving of them into our lines upon a newly
devised dying-top style of march that inclined to the oblique,
like the astonished six eyes of the celestial prisoners, for
straight they could not go. The humour of gentlemen at home is
always highly excited by such cool feats. We are a small island,
but you see what we do. The ladies at the Hall, Sir Willoughby's
mother, and his aunts Eleanor and Isabel, were more affected than
he by the circumstance of their having a Patterne in the Marines.
But how then! We English have ducal blood in business: we have,
genealogists tell us, royal blood in common trades. For all our
pride we are a queer people; and you may be ordering butcher's
meat of a Tudor, sitting on the cane-bottom chairs of a
Plantagenet. By and by you may . . . but cherish your reverence.
Young Willoughby made a kind of shock-head or football hero of his
gallant distant cousin, and wondered occasionally that the fellow
had been content to dispatch a letter of effusive thanks without
availing himself of the invitation to partake of the hospitalities
of Patterne.

He was one afternoon parading between showers on the stately
garden terrace of the Hall, in company with his affianced, the
beautiful and dashing Constantia Durham, followed by knots of
ladies and gentlemen vowed to fresh air before dinner, while it
was to be had. Chancing with his usual happy fortune (we call
these things dealt to us out of the great hidden dispensary,
chance) to glance up the avenue of limes, as he was in the act of
turning on his heel at the end of the terrace, and it should be
added, discoursing with passion's privilege of the passion of love
to Miss Durham, Sir Willoughby, who was anything but obtuse,
experienced a presentiment upon espying a thick-set stumpy man
crossing the gravel space from the avenue to the front steps of
the Hall, decidedly not bearing the stamp of the gentleman "on his
hat, his coat, his feet, or anything that was his," Willoughby
subsequently observed to the ladies of his family in the
Scriptural style of gentlemen who do bear the stamp. His brief
sketch of the creature was repulsive. The visitor carried a bag,
and his coat-collar was up, his hat was melancholy; he had the
appearance of a bankrupt tradesman absconding; no gloves, no
umbrella.

As to the incident we have to note, it was very slight. The card
of Lieutenant Patterne was handed to Sir Willoughby, who laid it
on the salver, saying to the footman, "Not at home."

He had been disappointed in the age, grossly deceived in the
appearance of the man claiming to be his relative in this
unseasonable fashion; and his acute instinct advised him swiftly
of the absurdity of introducing to his friends a heavy
unpresentable senior as the celebrated gallant Lieutenant of
Marines, and the same as a member of his family! He had talked of
the man too much, too enthusiastically, to be able to do so. A
young subaltern, even if passably vulgar in figure, can be
shuffled through by the aid of the heroical story humourously
exaggerated in apology for his aspect. Nothing can be done with a
mature and stumpy Marine of that rank. Considerateness dismisses
him on the spot, without parley. It was performed by a gentleman
supremely advanced at a very early age in the art of cutting.

Young Sir Willoughby spoke a word of the rejected visitor to Miss
Durham, in response to her startled look: "I shall drop him a
cheque," he said, for she seemed personally wounded, and had a
face of crimson.

The young lady did not reply.

Dating from the humble departure of Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne
up the limes-avenue under a gathering rain-cloud, the ring of imps
in attendance on Sir Willoughby maintained their station with
strict observation of his movements at all hours; and were
comparisons in quest, the sympathetic eagerness of the eyes of
caged monkeys for the hand about to feed them, would supply one.
They perceived in him a fresh development and very subtle
manifestation of the very old thing from which he had sprung.


CHAPTER II

The Young Sir Willoughby

These little scoundrel imps, who have attained to some
respectability as the dogs and pets of the Comic Spirit, had been
curiously attentive three years earlier, long before the public
announcement of his engagement to the beautiful Miss Durham, on
the day of Sir Willoughby's majority, when Mrs. Mountstuart
Jenkinson said her word of him. Mrs. Mountstuart was a lady
certain to say the remembered, if not the right, thing. Again and
again was it confirmed on days of high celebration, days of birth
or bridal, how sure she was to hit the mark that rang the bell;
and away her word went over the county: and had she been an
uncharitable woman she could have ruled the county with an iron
rod of caricature, so sharp was her touch. A grain of malice would
have sent county faces and characters awry into the currency. She
was wealthy and kindly, and resembled our mother Nature in her
reasonable antipathies to one or two things which none can defend,
and her decided preference of persons that shone in the sun. Her
word sprang out of her. She looked at you, and forth it came: and
it stuck to you, as nothing laboured or literary could have
adhered. Her saying of Laetitia Dale: "Here she comes with a
romantic tale on her eyelashes," was a portrait of Laetitia. And
that of Vernon Whitford: "He is a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting
friar," painted the sunken brilliancy of the lean long-walker and
scholar at a stroke.

Of the young Sir Willoughby, her word was brief; and there was the
merit of it on a day when he was hearing from sunrise to the
setting of the moon salutes in his honour, songs of praise and
Ciceronian eulogy. Rich, handsome, courteous, generous, lord of
the Hall, the feast and the dance, he excited his guests of both
sexes to a holiday of flattery. And, says Mrs. Mountstuart, while
grand phrases were mouthing round about him, "You see he has a
leg."

That you saw, of course. But after she had spoken you saw much
more. Mrs. Mountstuart said it just as others utter empty
nothings, with never a hint of a stress. Her word was taken up,
and very soon, from the extreme end of the long drawing-room, the
circulation of something of Mrs. Mountstuart's was distinctly
perceptible. Lady Patterne sent a little Hebe down, skirting the
dancers, for an accurate report of it; and even the inappreciative
lips of a very young lady transmitting the word could not damp the
impression of its weighty truthfulness. It was perfect! Adulation
of the young Sir Willoughby's beauty and wit, and aristocratic
bearing and mien, and of his moral virtues, was common; welcome if
you like, as a form of homage; but common, almost vulgar, beside
Mrs. Mountstuart's quiet little touch of nature. In seeming to say
infinitely less than others, as Miss Isabel Patterne pointed out
to Lady Busshe, Mrs. Mountstuart comprised all that the others had
said, by showing the needlessness of allusions to the saliently
evident. She was the aristocrat reproving the provincial. "He is
everything you have had the goodness to remark, ladies and dear
sirs, he talks charmingly, dances divinely, rides with the air of
a commander-in-chief, has the most natural grand pose possible
without ceasing for a moment to be the young English gentleman he
is. Alcibiades, fresh from a Louis IV perruquier, could not
surpass him: whatever you please; I could outdo you in sublime
comparisons, were I minded to pelt him. Have you noticed that he
has a leg?"

So might it be amplified. A simple-seeming word of this import is
the triumph of the spiritual, and where it passes for coin of
value, the society has reached a high refinement: Arcadian by the
aesthetic route. Observation of Willoughby was not, as Miss
Eleanor Patterne pointed out to Lady Culmer, drawn down to the
leg, but directed to estimate him from the leg upward. That,
however, is prosaic. Dwell a short space on Mrs. Mountstuart's
word; and whither, into what fair region, and with how decorously
voluptuous a sensation, do not we fly, who have, through mournful
veneration of the Martyr Charles, a coy attachment to the Court of
his Merrie Son, where the leg was ribanded with love-knots and
reigned. Oh! it was a naughty Court. Yet have we dreamed of it as
the period when an English cavalier was grace incarnate; far from
the boor now hustling us in another sphere; beautifully mannered, 
every gesture dulcet. And if the ladies were ... we will hope they
have been traduced. But if they were, if they were too tender, ah!
gentlemen were gentlemen then--worth perishing for! There is this
dream in the English country; and it must be an aspiration after
some form of melodious gentlemanliness which is imagined to have
inhabited the island at one time; as among our poets the dream of
the period of a circle of chivalry here is encouraged for the
pleasure of the imagination.

Mrs. Mountstuart touched a thrilling chord. "In spite of men's
hateful modern costume, you see he has a leg."

That is, the leg of the born cavalier is before you: and obscure 
it as you will, dress degenerately, there it is for ladies who
have eyes. You see it: or, you see he has it. Miss Isabel and Miss
Eleanor disputed the incidence of the emphasis, but surely, though
a slight difference of meaning may be heard, either will do: many,
with a good show of reason, throw the accent upon leg. And the
ladies knew for a fact that Willoughby's leg was exquisite; he had
a cavalier court-suit in his wardrobe. Mrs. Mountstuart signified
that the leg was to be seen because it was a burning leg. There it
is, and it will shine through! He has the leg of Rochester,
Buckingham, Dorset, Suckling; the leg that smiles, that winks, is
obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self-satisfied; that
twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness and
seductiveness, audacity and discretion; between "You shall worship
me", and "I am devoted to you;" is your lord, your slave,
alternately and in one. It is a leg of ebb and flow and high-tide
ripples. Such a leg, when it has done with pretending to retire,
will walk straight into the hearts of women. Nothing so fatal to
them.

Self-satisfied it must be. Humbleness does not win multitudes or
the sex. It must be vain to have a sheen. Captivating melodies (to
prove to you the unavoidableness of self-satisfaction when you
know that you have hit perfection), listen to them closely, have
an inner pipe of that conceit almost ludicrous when you detect the
chirp.

And you need not be reminded that he has the leg without
the naughtiness. You see eminent in him what we would fain
have brought about in a nation that has lost its leg in gaining
a possibly cleaner morality. And that is often contested; but
there is no doubt of the loss of the leg.

Well, footmen and courtiers and Scottish Highlanders, and the
corps de ballet, draymen too, have legs, and staring legs, shapely
enough. But what are they? not the modulated instrument we mean--
simply legs for leg-work, dumb as the brutes. Our cavalier's is
the poetic leg, a portent, a valiance. He has it as Cicero had a
tongue. It is a lute to scatter songs to his mistress; a rapier,
is she obdurate. In sooth a leg with brains in it, soul.

And its shadows are an ambush, its lights a surprise. It blushes,
it pales, can whisper, exclaim. It is a peep, a part revelation, 
just sufferable, of the Olympian god--Jove playing carpet-knight.

For the young Sir Willoughby's family and his thoughtful admirers,
it is not too much to say that Mrs. Mountstuart's little word
fetched an epoch of our history to colour the evening of his
arrival at man's estate. He was all that Merrie Charles's court
should have been, subtracting not a sparkle from what it was.
Under this light he danced, and you may consider the effect of it
on his company.

He had received the domestic education of a prince. Little princes
abound in a land of heaped riches. Where they have not to yield
military service to an Imperial master, they are necessarily here
and there dainty during youth, sometimes unmanageable, and as they
are bound in no personal duty to the State, each is for himself,
with full present, and what is more, luxurious, prospective
leisure for the practice of that allegiance. They are sometimes
enervated by it: that must be in continental countries. Happily
our climate and our brave blood precipitate the greater number
upon the hunting-field, to do the public service of heading the
chase of the fox, with benefit to their constitutions. Hence a
manly as well as useful race of little princes, and Willoughby was
as manly as any. He cultivated himself, he would not be outdone
in popular accomplishments. Had the standard of the public taste
been set in philosophy, and the national enthusiasm centred in
philosophers, he would at least have worked at books. He did work
at science, and had a laboratory. His admirable passion to excel,
however, was chiefly directed in his youth upon sport; and so
great was the passion in him, that it was commonly the presence of
rivals which led him to the declaration of love.

He knew himself, nevertheless, to be the most constant of men in
his attachment to the sex. He had never discouraged Laetitia
Dale's devotion to him, and even when he followed in the sweeping
tide of the beautiful Constantia Durham (whom Mrs. Mountstuart
called "The Racing Cutter"), he thought of Laetitia, and looked at
her. She was a shy violet.

Willoughby's comportment while the showers of adulation drenched
him might be likened to the composure of Indian Gods undergoing
worship, but unlike them he reposed upon no seat of amplitude to
preserve him from a betrayal of intoxication; he had to continue
tripping, dancing, exactly balancing himself, head to right, head
to left, addressing his idolaters in phrases of perfect
choiceness. This is only to say that it is easier to be a wooden
idol than one in the flesh; yet Willoughby was equal to his task.
The little prince's education teaches him that he is other than
you, and by virtue of the instruction he receives, and also
something, we know not what, within, he is enabled to maintain his
posture where you would be tottering.

Urchins upon whose curly pates grave seniors lay their hands with
conventional encomium and speculation, look older than they are
immediately, and Willoughby looked older than his years, not for
want of freshness, but because he felt that he had to stand
eminently and correctly poised.

Hearing of Mrs. Mountstuart's word on him, he smiled and said, "It
is at her service."

The speech was communicated to her, and she proposed to attach a
dedicatory strip of silk. And then they came together, and there
was wit and repartee suitable to the electrical atmosphere of the
dancing-room, on the march to a magical hall of supper.
Willoughby conducted Mrs. Mountstuart to the supper-table.

"Were I," said she, "twenty years younger, I think I would marry
you, to cure my infatuation."

"Then let me tell you in advance, madam," said he, "that I will do
everything to obtain a new lease of it, except divorce you."

They were infinitely wittier. but so much was heard and may he
reported.

"It makes the business of choosing a wife for him superhumanly 
difficult!" Mrs. Mountstuart observed, after listening to the
praises she had set going again when the ladies were weeded of us,
in Lady Patterne's Indian room, and could converse unhampered upon
their own ethereal themes.

"Willoughby will choose a wife for himself," said his mother.


CHAPTER III

Constantia Durham

The great question for the county was debated in many households,
daughter-thronged and daughterless, long subsequent to the
memorable day of Willoughby's coming of age. Lady Busshe was for
Constantia Durham. She laughed at Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson's
notion of Laetitia Dale. She was a little older than Mrs.
Mountstuart, and had known Willoughby's father, whose marriage
into the wealthiest branch of the Whitford family had been
strictly sagacious. "Patternes marry money; they are not romantic
people," she said. Miss Durham had money, and she had health and
beauty: three mighty qualifications for a Patterne bride. Her
father, Sir John Durham, was a large landowner in the western
division of the county; a pompous gentleman, the picture of a
father-in-law for Willoughby. The father of Miss Dale was a
battered army surgeon from India, tenant of one of Sir
Willoughby's cottages bordering Patterne Park. His girl was
portionless and a poetess. Her writing of the song in celebration
of the young baronet's birthday was thought a clever venture, bold
as only your timid creatures can be bold. She let the cat out
of her bag of verse before the multitude; she almost proposed to
her hero in her rhymes. She was pretty; her eyelashes were long
and dark, her eyes dark-blue, and her soul was ready to shoot like
a rocket out of them at a look from Willoughby. And he looked, he
certainly looked, though he did not dance with her once that
night, and danced repeatedly with Miss Durham. He gave Laetitia
to Vernon Whitford for the final dance of the night, and he may
have looked at her so much in pity of an elegant girl allied to
such a partner. The "Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar" had
entirely forgotten his musical gifts in motion. He crossed himself
and crossed his bewildered lady, and crossed everybody in the
figure, extorting shouts of cordial laughter from his cousin
Willoughby. Be it said that the hour was four in the morning, when
dancers must laugh at somebody, if only to refresh their feet, and
the wit of the hour administers to the wildest laughter. Vernon
was likened to Theseus in the maze, entirely dependent upon his
Ariadne; to a fly released from a jam-pot; to a "salvage", or
green, man caught in a web of nymphs and made to go the paces.
Willoughby was inexhaustible in the happy similes he poured out to
Miss Durham across the lines of Sir Roger de Coverley, and they
were not forgotten, they procured him a reputation as a convivial
sparkler. Rumour went the round that he intended to give Laetitia
to Vernon for good, when he could decide to take Miss Durham to
himself; his generosity was famous; but that decision, though the
rope was in the form of a knot, seemed reluctant for the
conclusive close haul; it preferred the state of slackness; and if
he courted Laetitia on behalf of his cousin, his cousinly love
must have been greater than his passion, one had to suppose. He
was generous enough for it, or for marrying the portionless girl
himself.

There was a story of a brilliant young widow of our aristocracy 
who had very nearly snared him. Why should he object to marry into
our aristocracy? Mrs. Mountstuart asked him, and he replied that
the girls of that class have no money, and he doubted the quality
of their blood. He had his eyes awake. His duty to his House was
a foremost thought with him, and for such a reason he may have
been more anxious to give the slim and not robust Laetitia to
Vernon than accede to his personal inclination. The mention of the
widow singularly offended him, notwithstanding the high rank of
the lady named. "A widow?" he said. "I!" He spoke to a widow; an
oldish one truly; but his wrath at the suggestion of his union
with a widow led him to be for the moment oblivious of the minor
shades of good taste. He desired Mrs. Mountstuart to contradict
the story in positive terms. He repeated his desire; he was urgent
to have it contradicted, and said again, "A widow!" straightening
his whole figure to the erectness of the letter I. She was a widow
unmarried a second time, and it has been known of the stedfast
women who retain the name of their first husband, or do not hamper
his title with a little new squire at their skirts, that they can
partially approve the objections indicated by Sir Willoughby. They
are thinking of themselves when they do so, and they will rarely
say, "I might have married;" rarely within them will they avow
that, with their permission, it might have been. They can catch an
idea of a gentleman's view of the widow's cap. But a niceness that
could feel sharply wounded by the simple rumour of his alliance
with the young relict of an earl was mystifying. Sir Willoughby
unbent. His military letter I took a careless glance at itself
lounging idly and proudly at ease in the glass of his mind, decked
with a wanton wreath, as he dropped a hint, generously vague, just
to show the origin of the rumour, and the excellent basis it had
for not being credited. He was chidden. Mrs. Mountstuart read him
a lecture. She was however able to contradict the tale of the
young countess. "There is no fear of his marrying her, my dears."

Meanwhile there was a fear that he would lose his chance of
marrying the beautiful Miss Durham.

The dilemmas of little princes are often grave. They should be
dwelt on now and then for an example to poor struggling commoners,
of the slings and arrows assailing fortune's most favoured men,
that we may preach contentment to the wretch who cannot muster
wherewithal to marry a wife, or has done it and trots the streets,
pack-laden, to maintain the dame and troops of children painfully
reared to fill subordinate stations. According to our reading, a
moral is always welcome in a moral country, and especially so when
silly envy is to be chastised by it, the restless craving for
change rebuked. Young Sir Willoughby, then, stood in this dilemma:
--a lady was at either hand of him; the only two that had ever,
apart from metropolitan conquests, not to be recited, touched his
emotions. Susceptible to beauty, he had never seen so beautiful a
girl as Constantia Durham. Equally susceptible to admiration of
himself, he considered Laetitia Dale a paragon of cleverness. He
stood between the queenly rose and the modest violet. One he
bowed to; the other bowed to him. He could not have both; it is
the law governing princes and pedestrians alike. But which could
he forfeit? His growing acquaintance with the world taught him to
put an increasing price on the sentimcnts of Miss Dale. Still
Constantia's beauty was of a kind to send away beholders aching.
She had the glory of the racing cutter full sail on a whining
breeze; and she did not court to win him, she flew. In his more
reflective hour the attractiveness of that lady which held the
mirror to his features was paramount. But he had passionate
snatches when the magnetism of the flyer drew him in her wake.
Further to add to the complexity, he loved his liberty; he was
princelier free; he had more subjects, more slaves; he ruled
arrogantly in the world of women; he was more himself. His
metropolitan experiences did not answer to his liking the
particular question, Do we bind the woman down to us idolatrously
by making a wife of her?

In the midst of his deliberations, a report of the hot pursuit of
Miss Durham, casually mentioned to him by Lady Busshe, drew an
immediate proposal from Sir Willoughby. She accepted him, and they
were engaged. She had been nibbled at, all but eaten up, while he
hung dubitative; and though that was the cause of his winning her,
it offended his niceness. She had not come to him out of cloistral
purity, out of perfect radiancy. Spiritually, likewise, was he a
little prince, a despotic prince. He wished for her to have come
to him out of an egg-shell, somewhat more astonished at things
than a chicken, but as completely enclosed before he tapped the
shell, and seeing him with her sex's eyes first of all men. She
talked frankly of her cousins and friends, young males. She could
have replied to his bitter wish: "Had you asked me on the night of
your twenty-first birthday, Willoughby!" Since then she had been
in the dust of the world, and he conceived his peculiar antipathy,
destined to be so fatal to him, from the earlier hours of his
engagement. He was quaintly incapable of a jealousy of
individuals. A young Captain Oxford had been foremost in the swarm
pursuing Constantia. Willoughby thought as little of Captain
Oxford as he did of Vernon Whitford. His enemy was the world, the
mass, which confounds us in a lump, which has breathed on her
whom we have selected, whom we cannot, can never, rub quite clear
of her contact with the abominated crowd. The pleasure of the
world is to bowl down our soldierly letter I; to encroach on our
identity, soil our niceness. To begin to think is the beginning of
disgust of the world.

As soon the engagement was published all the county said that
there had not been a chance for Laetitia, and Mrs. Mountstuart
Jenkinson humbly remarked, in an attitude of penitence, "I'm not a
witch." Lady Busshe could claim to be one; she had foretold the
event. Laetitia was of the same opinion as the county. She had
looked up, but not hopefully. She had only looked up to the
brightest, and, as he was the highest, how could she have hoped?
She was the solitary companion of a sick father, whose inveterate
prognostic of her, that she would live to rule at Patterne Hall,
tortured the poor girl in proportion as he seemed to derive
comfort from it. The noise of the engagement merely silenced him;
recluse invalids cling obstinately to their ideas. He had observed
Sir Willoughby in the society of his daughter, when the young
baronet revived to a sprightly boyishness immediately. Indeed, as
big boy and little girl, they had played together of old.
Willoughby had been a handsome, fair boy. The portrait of him at
the Hall, in a hat, leaning on his pony, with crossed legs, and
long flaxen curls over his shoulders, was the image of her soul's
most present angel; and, as a man, he had--she did not suppose
intentionally--subjected her nature to bow to him; so submissive
was she, that it was fuller happiness for her to think him right
in all his actions than to imagine the circumstances different.
This may appear to resemble the ecstasy of the devotee
of Juggernaut, It is a form of the passion inspired by little
princes, and we need not marvel that a conservative sex should
assist to keep them in their lofty places. What were there
otherwise to look up to? We should have no dazzling beacon-lights
if they were levelled and treated as clod earth; and it is worth
while for here and there a woman to be burned, so long as women's
general adoration of an ideal young man shall be preserved.
Purity is our demand of them. They may justly cry for attraction.
They cannot have it brighter than in the universal bearing of the
eyes of their sisters upon a little prince, one who has the
ostensible virtues in his pay, and can practise them without
injuring himself to make himself unsightly. Let the races of men
be by-and-by astonished at their Gods, if they please. Meantime
they had better continue to worship.

Laetitia did continue. She saw Miss Durham at Patterne on several
occasions. She admired the pair. She had a wish to witness the
bridal ceremony. She was looking forward to the day with that
mixture of eagerness and withholding which we have as we draw nigh
the disenchanting termination of an enchanting romance, when Sir
Willoughby met her on a Sunday morning, as she crossed his park
solitarily to church. They were within ten days of the appointed
ceremony. He should have been away at Miss Durham's end of the
county. He had, Laetitia knew, ridden over to her the day before;
but there he was; and very unwontedly, quite surprisingly, he
presented his arm to conduct Laetitia to the church-door, and
talked and laughed in a way that reminded her of a hunting
gentleman she had seen once rising to his feet, staggering from an
ugly fall across hedge and fence into one of the lanes of her
short winter walks. "All's well, all sound, never better, only a
scratch!" the gentleman had said, as he reeled and pressed a
bleeding head. Sir Willoughby chattered of his felicity in meeting
her. "I am really wonderfully lucky," he said, and he said that
and other things over and over, incessantly talking, and telling
an anecdote of county occurrences, and laughing at it with a mouth
that would not widen. He went on talking in the church porch, and
murmuring softly some steps up the aisle, passing the pews of Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson and Lady Busshe. Of course he was
entertaining, but what a strangeness it was to Laetitia! His face
would have been half under an antique bonnet. It came very close
to hers, and the scrutiny he bent on her was most solicitous.

After the service, he avoided the great ladies by sauntering up to
within a yard or two of where she sat; he craved her hand on his
arm to lead her forth by the park entrance to the church, all the
while bending to her, discoursing rapidly, appearing radiantly
interested in her quiet replies, with fits of intentness that
stared itself out into dim abstraction. She hazarded the briefest
replies for fear of not having understood him.

One question she asked: "Miss Durham is well, I trust?"

And he answered "Durham?" and said, "There is no Miss Durham to my
knowledge."

The impression he left with her was, that he might yesterday
during his ride have had an accident and fallen on his head.

She would have asked that, if she had not known him for so
thorough an Englishman, in his dislike to have it thought that
accidents could hurt even when they happened to him.

He called the next day to claim her for a walk. He assured her she
had promised it, and he appealed to her father, who could not
testify to a promise he had not heard, but begged her to leave him
to have her walk. So once more she was in the park with Sir
Willoughby, listening to his raptures over old days. A word of
assent from her sufficed him. "I am now myself," was one of the
remarks he repeated this day. She dilated on the beauty of the
park and the Hall to gratify him.

He did not speak of Miss Durham, and Laetitia became afraid to
mention her name.

At their parting, Willoughby promised Laetitia that he would call
on the morrow. He did not come; and she could well excuse him,
after her hearing of the tale.

It was a lamentable tale. He had ridden to Sir John Durham's 
mansion, a distance of thirty miles, to hear, on his arrival, that
Constantia had quitted her father's house two days previously on a
visit to an aunt in London, and had just sent word that she was
the wife of Captain Oxford, hussar, and messmate of one of her
brothers. A letter from the bride awaited Willoughby at the Hall.
He had ridden back at night, not caring how he used his horse in
order to get swiftly home, so forgetful of himself was he under
the terrible blow. That was the night of Saturday. On the day
following, being Sunday, he met Laetitia in his park, led her to
church, led her out of it, and the day after that, previous to his
disappearance for some weeks, was walking with her in full view of
the carriages along the road.

He had, indeed, you see, been very fortunately, if not
considerately, liberated by Miss Durham. He, as a man of honour,
could not have taken the initiative, but the frenzy of a jealous
girl might urge her to such a course; and how little he suffered
from it had been shown to the world. Miss Durham, the story went,
was his mother's choice for him against his heart's inclinations;
which had finally subdued Lady Patterne. Consequently, there was
no longer an obstacle between Sir Willoughby and Miss Dale. It was
a pleasant and romantic story, and it put most people in good
humour with the county's favourite, as his choice of a portionless
girl of no position would not have done without the shock of
astonishment at the conduct of Miss Durham, and the desire to feel
that so prevailing a gentleman was not in any degree pitiable.
Constantia was called "that mad thing". Laetitia broke forth in
novel and abundant merits; and one of the chief points of
requisition in relation to Patterne--a Lady Willoughby who would
entertain well and animate the deadness of the Hall, became a
certainty when her gentleness and liveliness and exceeding
cleverness were considered. She was often a visitor at the Hall by
Lady Patterne's express invitation, and sometimes on these
occasions Willoughby was there too, superintending the filling up
of his laboratory, though he was not at home to the county; it was
not expected that he should be yet. He had taken heartily to the
pursuit of science, and spoke of little else. Science, he said,
was in our days the sole object worth a devoted pursuit. But the
sweeping remark could hardly apply to Laetitia, of whom he was the
courteous, quiet wooer you behold when a man has broken loose from
an unhappy tangle to return to the lady of his first and strongest
affections.

Some months of homely courtship ensued, and then, the decent
interval prescribed by the situation having elapsed, Sir
Willoughby Patterne left his native land on a tour of the globe.

CHAPTER IV

Laetitia Dale

That was another surprise to the county.

Let us not inquire into the feelings of patiently starving women;
they must obtain some sustenance of their own, since, as you
perceive, they live; evidently they are not in need of a great
amount of nourishment; and we may set them down for creatures with
a rush-light of animal fire to warm them. They cannot have much
vitality who are so little exclamatory. A corresponding sentiment
of patient compassion, akin to scorn, is provoked by persons
having the opportunity for pathos, and declining to use it. The
public bosom was open to Laetitia for several weeks, and had she
run to it to bewail herself she would have been cherished in
thankfulness for a country drama. There would have been a party
against her, cold people, critical of her pretensions to rise from
an unrecognized sphere to be mistress of Patterne Hall, but there
would also have been a party against Sir Willoughby, composed of
the two or three revolutionists, tired of the yoke, which are to
be found in England when there is a stir; a larger number of born
sympathetics, ever ready to yield the tear for the tear; and here
and there a Samaritan soul prompt to succour poor humanity in
distress. The opportunity passed undramatized. Laetitia presented
herself at church with a face mildly devout, according to her
custom, and she accepted invitations to the Hall, she assisted at
the reading of Willoughby's letters to his family, and fed on dry
husks of him wherein her name was not mentioned; never one note of
the summoning call for pathos did this young lady blow.

So, very soon the public bosom closed. She had, under the fresh
interpretation of affairs, too small a spirit to be Lady
Willoughby of Patterne; she could not have entertained becomingly;
he must have seen that the girl was not the match for him in
station, and off he went to conquer the remainder of a troublesome
first attachment, no longer extremely disturbing, to judge from
the tenour of his letters; really incomparable letters! Lady
Busshe and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson enjoyed a perusal of them.
Sir Willoughby appeared as a splendid young representative island
lord in these letters to his family, despatched from the principal
cities of the United States of America. He would give them a
sketch of "our democratic cousins", he said. Such cousins! They
might all have been in the Marines. He carried his English
standard over that continent, and by simply jotting down facts, he
left an idea of the results of the measurement to his family and
friends at home. He was an adept in the irony of incongruously 
grouping. The nature of the Equality under the stars and stripes
was presented in this manner. Equality! Reflections came
occasionally: "These cousins of ours are highly amusing. I am
among the descendants of the Roundheads. Now and then an allusion
to old domestic differences, in perfect good temper. We go on in
our way; they theirs, in the apparent belief that Republicanism
operates remarkable changes in human nature. Vernon tries hard to
think it does. The upper ten of our cousins are the Infernal of
Paris. The rest of them is Radical England, as far as I am
acquainted with that section of my country."--Where we compared,
they were absurd; where we contrasted, they were monstrous. The
contrast of Vernon's letters with Willoughby's was just as extreme.
You could hardly have taken them for relatives travelling
together, or Vernon Whitford for a born and bred Englishman. The
same scenes furnished by these two pens might have been sketched
in different hemispheres. Vernon had no irony. He had nothing of
Willoughby's epistolary creative power, which, causing his family
and friends to exclaim: "How like him that is!" conjured them
across the broad Atlantic to behold and clap hands at his
lordliness.

They saw him distinctly, as with the naked eye; a word, a turn of
the pen, or a word unsaid, offered the picture of him in America,
Japan, China, Australia, nay, the continent of Europe, holding an
English review of his Maker's grotesques. Vernon seemed a
sheepish fellow, without stature abroad, glad of a compliment,
grateful for a dinner, endeavouring sadly to digest all he saw and
heard. But one was a Patterne; the other a Whitford. One had
genius; the other pottered after him with the title of student.
One was the English gentleman wherever he went; the other was a
new kind of thing, nondescript, produced in England of late, and
not likely to come to much good himself, or do much good to the
country.

Vernon's dancing in America was capitally described by Willoughby.
"Adieu to our cousins!" the latter wrote on his voyage to Japan.
"I may possibly have had some vogue in their ball-rooms, and in
showing them an English seat on horseback: I must resign myself if
I have not been popular among them. I could not sing their
national song--if a congery of states be a nation--and I must
confess I listened with frigid politeness to their singing of it.
A great people, no doubt. Adieu to them. I have had to tear old
Vernon away. He had serious thoughts of settling, means to
correspond with some of them." On the whole, forgetting two or
more "traits of insolence" on the part of his hosts, which he
cited, Willoughby escaped pretty comfortably. The President had
been, consciously or not, uncivil, but one knew his origin! Upon
these interjections, placable flicks of the lionly tail addressed
to Britannia the Ruler, who expected him in some mildish way to
lash terga cauda in retiring, Sir Willoughby Patterne passed from
a land of alien manners; and ever after he spoke of America
respectfully and pensively, with a tail tucked in, as it were. His
travels were profitable to himself. The fact is, that there are
cousins who come to greatness and must be pacified, or they will
prove annoying. Heaven forefend a collision between cousins!

Willoughby returned to his England after an absence of three
years. On a fair April morning, the last of the month, he drove
along his park palings, and, by the luck of things, Laetitia was
the first of his friends whom he met. She was crossing from field
to field with a band of school-children, gathering wild flowers
for the morrow May-day. He sprang to the ground and seized her
hand. "Laetitia Dale!" he said. He panted. "Your name is sweet
English music! And you are well?" The anxious question permitted
him to read deeply in her eyes. He found the man he sought there,
squeezed him passionately, and let her go, saying: "I could not
have prayed for a lovelier home-scene to welcome me than you and
these children flower-gathering. I don't believe in chance. It was
decreed that we should meet. Do not you think so?"

Laetitia breathed faintly of her gladness.

He begged her to distribute a gold coin among the little ones;
asked for the names of some of them, and repeated: "Mary, Susan,
Charlotte--only the Christian names, pray! Well, my dears, you
will bring your garlands to the Hall to-morrow morning; and mind,
early! no slugabeds tomorrow; I suppose I am browned, Laetitia?" He
smiled in apology for the foreign sun, and murmured with rapture:
"The green of this English country is unsurpassed. It is wonderful.
Leave England and be baked, if you would appreciate it. You can't,
unless you taste exile as I have done--for how many years? How
many?"

"Three," said Laetitia.

"Thirty!" said he. "It seems to me that length. At least, I am
immensely older. But looking at you, I could think it less than
three. You have not changed. You are absolutely unchanged. I am
bound to hope so. I shall see you soon. I have much to talk of,
much to tell you. I shall hasten to call on your father. I have
specially to speak with him. I--what happiness this is, Laetitia!
But I must not forget I have a mother. Adieu; for some hours--not
for many!"

He pressed her hand again. He was gone.

She dismissed the children to their homes. Plucking primroses was
hard labour now--a dusty business. She could have wished that her
planet had not descended to earth, his presence agitated her so;
but his enthusiastic patriotism was like a shower that, in the
Spring season of the year, sweeps against the hard-binding East
and melts the air and brings out new colours, makes life flow; and
her thoughts recurred in wonderment to the behaviour of Constantia
Durham. That was Laetitia's manner of taking up her weakness once
more. She could almost have reviled the woman who had given this
beneficent magician, this pathetic exile, of the aristocratic
sunburned visage and deeply scrutinizing eyes, cause for grief.
How deeply his eyes could read! The starveling of patience awoke
to the idea of a feast. The sense of hunger came with it, and hope
came, and patience fled. She would have rejected hope to keep
patience nigh her; but surely it can not always be Winter! said
her reasoning blood, and we must excuse her as best we can if she
was assured, by her restored warmth that Willoughby came in the
order of the revolving seasons, marking a long Winter past. He had
specially to speak with her father, he had said. What could that
mean? What, but--She dared not phrase it or view it.

At their next meeting she was "Miss Dale".

A week later he was closeted with her father.

Mr. Dale, in the evening of that pregnant day, eulogized Sir
Willoughby as a landlord. A new lease of the cottage was to be
granted him on the old terms, he said. Except that Sir Willoughby
had congratulated him in the possession of an excellent daughter,
their interview was one of landlord and tenant, it appeared; and
Laetitia said, "So we shall not have to leave the cottage?" in a
tone of satisfaction, while she quietly gave a wrench to the neck
of the young hope in her breast. At night her diary received the
line: "This day I was a fool. To-morrow?"

To-morrow and many days afterwards there were dashes instead of
words.

Patience travelled back to her sullenly. As we must have some kind
of food, and she had nothing else, she took to that and found it
dryer than of yore. It is a composing but a lean dietary. The dead
are patient, and we get a certain likeness to them in feeding on
it unintermittingly overlong. Her hollowed cheeks with the fallen
leaf in them pleaded against herself to justify her idol for not
looking down on one like her. She saw him when he was at the Hall.
He did not notice any change. He was exceedingly gentle and
courteous. More than once she discovered his eyes dwelling on her,
and then he looked hurriedly at his mother, and Laetitia had to
shut her mind from thinking, lest thinking should be a sin and
hope a guilty spectre. But had his mother objected to her? She
could not avoid asking herself. His tour of the globe had been
undertaken at his mother's desire; she was an ambitious lady, in
failing health; and she wished to have him living with her at
Patterne, yet seemed to agree that he did wisely to reside in
London.

One day Sir Willoughby, in the quiet manner which was
his humour, informed her that he had become a country
gentleman; he had abandoned London, he loathed it as the
burial-place of the individual man. He intended to sit down on
his estates and have his cousin Vernon Whitford to assist him
in managing them, he said; and very amusing was his description 
of his cousin's shifts to live by literature, and add enough
to a beggarly income to get his usual two months of the year
in the Alps. Previous to his great tour, Willoughby had spoken
of Vernon's judgement with derision; nor was it entirely unknown 
that Vernon had offended his family pride by some
extravagant act. But after their return he acknowledged
Vernon's talents, and seemed unable to do without him.

The new arrangement gave Laetitia a companion for her walks.
Pedestrianism was a sour business to Willoughby, whose exclamation
of the word indicated a willingness for any amount of exercise on
horseback; but she had no horse, and so, while he hunted, Laetitia
and Vernon walked, and the neighbourhood speculated on the
circumstances, until the ladies Eleanor and Isabel Patterne
engaged her more frequently for carriage exercise, and Sir
Willoughby was observed riding beside them.

A real and sunny pleasure befell Laetitia in the establishment of
young Crossjay Patterne under her roof; the son of the
lieutenant, now captain, of Marines; a boy of twelve with the
sprights of twelve boys in him, for whose board and lodgement 
Vernon provided by arrangement with her father. Vernon was one of
your men that have no occupation for their money, no bills to pay
for repair of their property, and are insane to spend. He had
heard of Captain Patterne's large family, and proposed to have his
eldest boy at the Hall, to teach him; but Willoughby declined to
house the son of such a father, predicting that the boy's hair
would be red, his skin eruptive, and his practices detestable. So
Vernon, having obtained Mr. Dale's consent to accommodate this
youth, stalked off to Devonport, and brought back a rosy-cheeked,
round-bodied rogue of a boy, who fell upon meats and puddings, and
defeated them, with a captivating simplicity in his confession
that he had never had enough to eat in his life. He had gone
through a training for a plentiful table. At first, after a number
of helps, young Crossjay would sit and sigh heavily, in
contemplation of the unfinished dish. Subsequently, he told his
host and hostess that he had two sisters above his own age, and
three brothers and two sisters younger than he: "All hungry!" said
die boy.

His pathos was most comical. It was a good month before he could
see pudding taken away from table without a sigh of regret that he
could not finish it as deputy for the Devonport household. The
pranks of the little fellow, and his revel in a country life, and
muddy wildness in it, amused Laetitia from morning to night. She.
when she had caught him, taught him in the morning; Vernon,
favoured by the chase, in the afternoon. Young Crossjay would have
enlivened any household. He was not only indolent, he was opposed
to the acquisition of knowledge through the medium of books, and
would say: "But I don't want to!" in a tone to make a logician
thoughtful. Nature was very strong in him. He had, on each return
of the hour for instruction, to be plucked out of the earth, rank
of the soil, like a root, for the exercise of his big round
headpiece on those tyrannous puzzles. But the habits of birds, and
the place for their eggs, and the management of rabbits, and the
tickling of fish, and poaching joys with combative boys of the
district, and how to wheedle a cook for a luncheon for a whole day
in the rain, he soon knew of his great nature. His passion for our
naval service was a means of screwing his attention to lessons
after he had begun to understand that the desert had to be
traversed to attain midshipman's rank. He boasted ardently of his
fighting father, and, chancing to be near the Hall as he was
talking to Vernon and Laetitia of his father, he propounded a
question close to his heart, and he put it in these words,
following: "My father's the one to lead an army!" when he paused.
"I say, Mr. Whitford, Sir Willoughby's kind to me, and gives me
crown-pieces, why wouldn't he see my father, and my father came
here ten miles in the rain to see him, and had to walk ten miles
back, and sleep at an inn?"

The only answer to be given was, that Sir Willoughby could not
have been at home. "Oh! my father saw him, and Sir Willoughby said
he was not at home," the boy replied, producing an odd ring in the
ear by his repetition of "not at home" in the same voice as the
apology, plainly innocent of malice. Vernon told Laetitia,
however, that the boy never asked an explanation of Sir
Willoughby.

Unlike the horse of the adage. it was easier to compel young
Crossjay to drink of the waters of instruction than to get him to
the brink. His heart was not so antagonistic as his nature, and by
degrees, owing to a proper mixture of discipline and cajolery, he
imbibed. He was whistling at the cook's windows after a day of
wicked truancy, on an April night, and reported adventures over
the supper supplied to him. Laetitia entered the kitchen with a
reproving forefinger. He jumped to kiss her, and went on
chattering of a place fifteen miles distant, where he had seen Sir
Willoughby riding with a young lady. The impossibility that the
boy should have got so far on foot made Laetitia doubtful of his
veracity, until she heard that a gentleman had taken him up on the
road in a gig, and had driven him to a farm to show him strings of
birds" eggs and stuffed birds of every English kind, kingfishers,
yaffles, black woodpeckers, goat-sucker owls, more mouth than head,
with dusty, dark-spotted wings, like moths; all very
circumstantial. Still, in spite of his tea at the farm, and ride
back by rail at the gentleman's expense, the tale seemed
fictitious to Laetitia until Crossjay related how that he had
stood to salute on the road to the railway, and taken off his cap
to Sir Willoughby, and Sir Willoughby had passed him, not noticing
him, though the young lady did, and looked back and nodded. The
hue of truth was in that picture.

Strange eclipse, when the hue of truth comes shadowing over our
bright ideal planet. It will not seem the planet's fault, but
truth's. Reality is the offender; delusion our treasure that we
are robbed of. Then begins with us the term of wilful delusion, and
its necessary accompaniment of the disgust of reality; exhausting
the heart much more than patient endurance of starvation.

Hints were dropping about the neighbourhood; the hedgeways 
twittered, the tree-tops cawed. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson was
loud on the subject: "Patterne is to have a mistress at last, you
say? But there never was a doubt of his marrying--he must marry;
and, so long as he does not marry a foreign woman, we have no
cause to complain. He met her at Cherriton. Both were struck at
the same moment. Her father is, I hear, some sort of learned man;
money; no land. No house either, I believe. People who spend half
their time on the Continent. They are now for a year at Upton
Park. The very girl to settle down and entertain when she does
think of settling. Eighteen, perfect manners; you need not ask if
a beauty. Sir Willoughby will have his dues. We must teach her to
make amends to him--but don't listen to Lady Busshe! He was too
young at twenty-three or twenty-four. No young man is ever jilted;
he is allowed to escape. A young man married is a fire-eater bound
over to keep the peace; if he keeps it he worries it. At
thirty-one or thirty-two he is ripe for his command, because he
knows how to bend. And Sir Willoughby is a splendid creature, only
wanting a wife to complete him. For a man like that to go on
running about would never do. Soberly--no! It would soon be
getting ridiculous. He has been no worse than other men, probably
better--infinitely more excusable; but now we have him, and it
was time we should. I shall see her and study her, sharply, you
may be sure; though I fancy I can rely on his judgement."

In confirmation of the swelling buzz, the Rev. Dr. Middleton and
his daughter paid a flying visit to the Hall, where they were seen
only by the members of the Patterne family. Young Crossjay had a
short conversation with Miss Middleton, and ran to the cottage
full of her--she loved the navy and had a merry face. She had a
smile of very pleasant humour according to Vernon. The young lady
was outlined to Laetitia as tall, elegant, lively; and painted as
carrying youth like a flag. With her smile of "very pleasant
humour", she could not but be winning.

Vernon spoke more of her father, a scholar of high repute;
happily, a scholar of an independent fortune. His maturer
recollection of Miss Middleton grew poetic, or he described her in
an image to suit a poetic end: "She gives you an idea of the
Mountain Echo. Doctor Middleton has one of the grandest heads in
England."

"What is her Christian name?" said Laetitia.

He thought her Christian name was Clara.

Laetitia went to bed and walked through the day conceiving the
Mountain Echo the swift, wild spirit, Clara by name, sent fleeting
on a far half circle by the voice it is roused to subserve; 
sweeter than beautiful, high above drawing-room beauties as the
colours of the sky; and if, at the same time, elegant and of
loveable smiling, could a man resist her? To inspire the title of
Mountain Echo in any mind, a young lady must be singularly
spiritualized. Her father doated on her, Vernon said. Who would
not? It seemed an additional cruelty that the grace of a poetical
attractiveness should be round her, for this was robbing Laetitia
of some of her own little fortune, mystical though that might be.
But a man like Sir Willoughby had claims on poetry, possessing as
he did every manly grace; and to think that Miss Middleton had won
him by virtue of something native to her likewise, though
mystically, touched Laetitia with a faint sense of relationship to
the chosen girl. "What is in me, he sees on her." It decked her
pride to think so, as a wreath on the gravestone. She encouraged
her imagination to brood over Clara, and invested her designedly
with romantic charms, in spite of pain; the ascetic zealot hugs
his share of Heaven--most bitter, most blessed--in his
hair-shirt and scourge, and Laetitia's happiness was to glorify
Clara. Through that chosen rival, through her comprehension of
the spirit of Sir Willoughby's choice of one such as Clara, she
was linked to him yet.

Her mood of ecstatic fidelity was a dangerous exaltation; one that
in a desert will distort the brain, and in the world where the
idol dwells will put him, should he come nigh, to its own
furnace-test, and get a clear brain out of a burnt heart. She was
frequently at the Hall, helping to nurse Lady Patterne. Sir
Willoughby had hitherto treated her as a dear insignificant
friend, to whom it was unnecessary that he should mention the
object of his rides to Upton Park.

He had, however, in the contemplation of what he was gaining,
fallen into anxiety about what he might be losing. She belonged
to his brilliant youth; her devotion was the bride of his youth;
he was a man who lived backward almost as intensely as in the
present; and, notwithstanding Laetitia's praiseworthy zeal in
attending on his mother, he suspected some unfaithfulness: hardly
without cause: she had not looked paler of late; her eyes had not
reproached him; the secret of the old days between them had been
as little concealed as it was exposed. She might have buried it,
after the way of woman, whose bosoms can be tombs, if we and the
world allow them to be; absolutely sepulchres, where you lie dead,
ghastly. Even if not dead and horrible to think of, you may be
lying cold, somewhere in a corner. Even if embalmed, you may not
be much visited. And how is the world to know you are embalmed?
You are no better than a rotting wretch to the world that does not
have peeps of you in the woman's breast, and see lights burning
and an occasional exhibition of the services of worship. There are
women--tell us not of her of Ephesus!--that have embalmed you,
and have quitted the world to keep the tapers alight, and a
stranger comes, and they, who have your image before them, will
suddenly blow out the vestal flames and treat you as dust to
fatten the garden of their bosoms for a fresh flower of love. Sir
Willoughby knew it; he had experience of it in the form of the
stranger; and he knew the stranger's feelings toward his
predecessor and the lady.

He waylaid Laetitia, to talk of himself and his plans: the project
of a run to Italy. Enviable? Yes, but in England you live the
higher moral life. Italy boasts of sensual beauty; the spiritual
is yours. "I know Italy well; I have often wished to act as a
cicerone to you there. As it is, I suppose I shall be with those
who know the land as well as I do, and will not be particularly 
enthusiastic:--if you are what you were?" He was guilty of this
perplexing twist from one person to another in a sentence more
than once. While he talked exclusively of himself it seemed to her
a condescension. In time he talked principally of her, beginning
with her admirable care of his mother; and he wished to introduce
"a Miss Middleton" to her; he wanted her opinion of Miss
Middleton; he relied on her intuition of character, had never
known it err.

"If I supposed it could err, Miss Dale, I should not be so certain
of myself. I am bound up in my good opinion of you, you see; and
you must continue the same, or where shall I be?" Thus he was led
to dwell upon friendship, and the charm of the friendship of men
and women, "Platonism", as it was called. "I have laughed at it in
the world, but not in the depth of my heart. The world's platonic
attachments are laughable enough. You have taught me that the
ideal of friendship is possible--when we find two who are capable
of a disinterested esteem. The rest of life is duty; duty to
parents, duty to country. But friendship is the holiday of those
who can be friends. Wives are plentiful, friends are rare. I know
how rare!"

Laetitia swallowed her thoughts as they sprang up. Why was he
torturing her?--to give himself a holiday? She could bear to lose
him--she was used to it--and bear his indifference, but not that
he should disfigure himself; it made her poor. It was as if he
required an oath of her when he said: "Italy! But I shall never
see a day in Italy to compare with the day of my return to
England, or know a pleasure so exquisite as your welcome of me.
Will you be true to that? May I look forward to just another such
meeting?"

He pressed her for an answer. She gave the best she could. He was
dissatisfied, and to her hearing it was hardly in the tone of
manliness that he entreated her to reassure him; he womanized his
language. She had to say: "I am afraid I can not undertake to make
it an appointment, Sir Willoughby," before he recovered his
alertness, which he did, for he was anything but obtuse, with the
reply, "You would keep it if you promised, and freeze at your post.
So, as accidents happen, we must leave it to fate. The will's the
thing. You know my detestation of changes. At least I have you for
my tenant, and wherever I am, I see your light at the end of my
park."

"Neither my father nor I would willingly quit Ivy Cottage," said
Laetitia.

"So far, then," he murmured. "You will give me a long notice, and
it must be with my consent if you think of quitting?"

"I could almost engage to do that," she said.

"You love the place?"

"Yes; I am the most contented of cottagers."

"I believe, Miss Dale, it would be well for my happiness were I a
cottager."

"That is the dream of the palace. But to be one, and not to wish
to be other, is quiet sleep in comparison."

"You paint a cottage in colours that tempt one to run from big
houses and households."

"You would run back to them faster, Sir Willoughby."

"You may know me," said he, bowing and passing on contentedly. 
He stopped. "But I am not ambitious."

"Perhaps you are too proud for ambition, Sir Willoughby."

"You hit me to the life!"

He passed on regretfully. Clara Middleton did not study and know
him like Laetitia Dale.

Laetitia was left to think it pleased him to play at cat and mouse.
She had not "hit him to the life", or she would have marvelled in
acknowledging how sincere he was.

At her next sitting by the bedside of Lady Patterne she received a
certain measure of insight that might have helped her to fathom
him, if only she could have kept her feelings down.

The old lady was affectionately confidential in talking of her one
subject, her son. "And here is another dashing girl, my dear; she
has money and health and beauty; and so has he; and it appears a
fortunate union; I hope and pray it may be; but we begin to read
the world when our eyes grow dim, because we read the plain lines,
and I ask myself whether money and health and beauty on both sides
have not been the mutual attraction. We tried it before; and that
girl Durham was honest, whatever we may call her. I should have
desired an appreciative thoughtful partner for him, a woman of
mind, with another sort of wealth and beauty. She was honest, she
ran away in time; there was a worse thing possible than that. And
now we have the same chapter, and the same kind of person, who may
not be quite as honest; and I shall not see the end of it.
Promise me you will always be good to him; be my son's friend; his
Egeria, he names you. Be what you were to him when that girl broke
his heart, and no one, not even his mother, was allowed to see
that he suffered anything. Comfort him in his sensitiveness.
Willoughby has the most entire faith in you. Were that destroyed--
I shudder! You are, he says, and he has often said, his image of
the constant woman.

Laetitia's hearing took in no more. She repeated to herself for
days: "His image of the constant woman!" Now, when he was a second
time forsaking her, his praise of her constancy wore the painful
ludicrousness of the look of a whimper on the face.


CHAPTER V

Clara Middleton

The great meeting of Sir Willoughby Patterne and Miss Middleton
had taken place at Cherriton Grange, the seat of a county grandee,
where this young lady of eighteen was first seen rising above the
horizon. She had money and health and beauty, the triune of
perfect starriness, which makes all men astronomers. He looked on
her, expecting her to look at him. But as soon as he looked he
found that he must be in motion to win a look in return. He was
one of a pack; many were ahead of him, the whole of them were
eager. He had to debate within himself how best to communicate to
her that he was Willoughby Patterne, before her gloves were too
much soiled to flatter his niceness, for here and there, all
around, she was yielding her hand to partners--obscurant males
whose touch leaves a stain. Far too generally gracious was Her
Starriness to please him. The effect of it, nevertheless, was to
hurry him with all his might into the heat of the chase, while yet
he knew no more of her than that he was competing for a prize, and
Willoughby Patterne was only one of dozens to the young lady.

A deeper student of Science than his rivals, he appreciated
Nature's compliment in the fair ones choice of you. We now
scientifically know that in this department of the universal
struggle, success is awarded to the bettermost. You spread a
handsomer tail than your fellows, you dress a finer top-knot, you
pipe a newer note, have a longer stride; she reviews you in
competition, and selects you. The superlative is magnetic to her.
She may be looking elsewhere, and you will see--the superlative
will simply have to beckon, away she glides. She cannot help
herself; it is her nature, and her nature is the guarantee for the
noblest races of men to come of her. In complimenting you, she is
a promise of superior offspring. Science thus--or it is better to
say--an acquaintance with science facilitates the cultivation of
aristocracy. Consequently a successful pursuit and a wresting of
her from a body of competitors, tells you that you are the best
man. What is more, it tells the world so.

Willoughby aired his amiable superlatives in the eye of Miss
Middleton; he had a leg. He was the heir of successful
competitors. He had a style, a tone, an artist tailor, an
authority of manner; he had in the hopeful ardour of the chase
among a multitude a freshness that gave him advantage; and
together with his undeviating energy when there was a prize to be
won and possessed, these were scarce resistible. He spared no
pains, for he was adust and athirst for the winning-post. He
courted her father, aware that men likewise, and parents
pre-eminently, have their preference for the larger offer, the
deeper pocket, the broader lands, the respectfuller consideration.
Men, after their fashion, as well as women, distinguish the
bettermost, and aid him to succeed, as Dr. Middleton certainly did
in the crisis of the memorable question proposed to his daughter
within a month of Willoughby's reception at Upton Park. The young
lady was astonished at his whirlwind wooing of her, and bent to it
like a sapling. She begged for time; Willoughby could barely wait.
She unhesitatingly owned that she liked no one better, and he
consented. A calm examination of his position told him that it was
unfair so long as he stood engaged, and she did not. She pleaded a
desire to see a little of the world before she plighted herself.
She alarmed him; he assumed the amazing god of love under the
subtlest guise of the divinity. Willingly would he obey her
behests, resignedly languish, were it not for his mother's desire
to see the future lady of Patterne established there before she
died. Love shone cunningly through the mask of filial duty, but
the plea of urgency was reasonable. Dr. Middleton thought it
reasonable, supposing his daughter to have an inclination. She had
no disinclination, though she had a maidenly desire to see a
little of the world--grace for one year, she said. Willoughby
reduced the year to six months, and granted that term, for which,
in gratitude, she submitted to stand engaged; and that was no
light whispering of a word. She was implored to enter the state of
captivity by the pronunciation of vows--a private but a binding
ceremonial. She had health and beauty, and money to gild these
gifts; not that he stipulated for money with his bride, but it
adds a lustre to dazzle the world; and, moreover, the pack of
rival pursuers hung close behind, yelping and raising their
dolorous throats to the moon. Captive she must be.

He made her engagement no light whispering matter. It was a solemn
plighting of a troth. Why not? Having said, I am yours, she could
say, I am wholly yours, I am yours forever, I swear it, I will
never swerve from it, I am your wife in heart, yours utterly; our
engagement is written above. To this she considerately appended,
"as far as I am concerned"; a piece of somewhat chilling
generosity, and he forced her to pass him through love's catechism
in turn, and came out with fervent answers that bound him to her
too indissolubly to let her doubt of her being loved. And I am
loved! she exclaimed to her heart's echoes, in simple faith and
wonderment. Hardly had she begun to think of love ere the
apparition arose in her path. She had not thought of love with any
warmth, and here it was. She had only dreamed of love as one of
the distant blessings of the mighty world, lying somewhere in the
world's forests, across wild seas, veiled, encompassed with
beautiful perils, a throbbing secrecy, but too remote to quicken
her bosom's throbs. Her chief idea of it was, the enrichment of
the world by love.

Thus did Miss Middleton acquiesce in the principle of selection.

And then did the best man of a host blow his triumphant horn, and
loudly.

He looked the fittest; he justified the dictum of Science. The
survival of the Patternes was assured. "I would," he said to his
admirer, Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, "have bargained for health
above everything, but she has everything besides--lineage,
beauty, breeding: is what they call an heiress, and is the most
accomplished of her sex." With a delicate art he conveyed to the
lady's understanding that Miss Middleton had been snatched from a
crowd, without a breath of the crowd having offended his niceness.
He did it through sarcasm at your modern young women, who run about
the world nibbling and nibbled at, until they know one sex as well
as the other, and are not a whit less cognizant of the market than
men; pure, possibly; it is not so easy to say innocent; decidedly
not our feminine ideal. Miss Middleton was different: she was the
true ideal, fresh-gathered morning fruit in a basket, warranted by
her bloom.

Women do not defend their younger sisters for doing what they
perhaps have done--lifting a veil to be seen, and peeping at a
world where innocence is as poor a guarantee as a babe's caul
against shipwreck. Women of the world never think of attacking the
sensual stipulation for perfect bloom, silver purity, which is
redolent of the Oriental origin of the love-passion of their
lords. Mrs. Mountstuart congratulated Sir Willoughby on the 
prize he had won in the fair western-eastern.


"Let me see her," she said; and Miss Middleton was introduced 
and critically observed.

She had the mouth that smiles in repose. The lips met full on the
centre of the bow and thinned along to a lifting dimple; the
eyelids also lifted slightly at the outer corners, and seemed,
like the lip into the limpid cheek, quickening up the temples, as
with a run of light, or the ascension indicated off a shoot of
colour. Her features were playfellows of one another, none of them
pretending to rigid correctness, nor the nose to the ordinary 
dignity of governess among merry girls, despite which the nose was
of a fair design, not acutely interrogative or inviting to
gambols. Aspens imaged in water, waiting for the breeze, would
offer a susceptible lover some suggestion of her face: a pure,
smooth-white face, tenderly flushed in the cheeks, where the
gentle dints, were faintly intermelting even during quietness. Her
eyes were brown, set well between mild lids, often shadowed, not
unwakeful. Her hair of lighter brown, swelling above her temples
on the sweep to the knot, imposed the triangle of the fabulous
wild woodland visage from brow to mouth and chin, evidently in
agreement with her taste; and the triangle suited her; but her
face was not significant of a tameless wildness or of weakness;
her equable shut mouth threw its long curve to guard the small
round chin from that effect; her eyes wavered only in humour, they
were steady when thoughtfulness was awakened; and at such seasons
the build of her winter-beechwood hair lost the touch of nymphlike
and whimsical, and strangely, by mere outline, added to her
appearance of studious concentration. Observe the hawk on
stretched wings over the prey he spies, for an idea of this change
in the look of a young lady whom Vernon Whitford could liken to
the Mountain Echo, and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson pronounced to be
"a dainty rogue in porcelain".

Vernon's fancy of her must have sprung from her prompt and most
musical responsiveness. He preferred the society of her learned
father to that of a girl under twenty engaged to his cousin, but
the charm of her ready tongue and her voice was to his intelligent
understanding wit, natural wit, crystal wit, as opposed to the
paste-sparkle of the wit of the town. In his encomiums he did not
quote Miss Middleton's wit; nevertheless, he ventured to speak of
it to Mrs. Mountstuart, causing that lady to say: "Ah, well, I
have not noticed the wit. You may have the art of drawing it out."

No one had noticed the wit. The corrupted hearing of people
required a collision of sounds, Vernon supposed. For his part, to
prove their excellence, he recollected a great many of Miss
Middleton's remarks; they came flying to him; and so long as he
forbore to speak them aloud, they had a curious wealth of meaning.
It could not be all her manner, however much his own manner might
spoil them. It might be, to a certain degree, her quickness at
catching the hue and shade of evanescent conversation. Possibly by
remembering the whole of a conversation wherein she had her place,
the wit was to be tested; only how could any one retain the heavy
portion? As there was no use in being argumentative on a subject
affording him personally, and apparently solitarily, refreshment 
and enjoyment, Vernon resolved to keep it to himself. The eulogies
of her beauty, a possession in which he did not consider her so
very conspicuous, irritated him in consequence. To flatter Sir
Willoughby, it was the fashion to exalt her as one of the types of
beauty; the one providentially selected to set off his masculine
type. She was compared to those delicate flowers, the ladies of
the Court of China, on rice-paper. A little French dressing would
make her at home on the sward by the fountain among the lutes and
whispers of the bewitching silken shepherdesses who live though
they never were. Lady Busshe was reminded of the favourite
lineaments of the women of Leonardo, the angels of Luini. Lady
Culmer had seen crayon sketches of demoiselles of the French
aristocracy resembling her. Some one mentioned an antique statue
of a figure breathing into a flute: and the mouth at the flutestop
might have a distant semblance of the bend of her mouth, but this
comparison was repelled as grotesque.

For once Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson was unsuccessful.

Her "dainty rogue in porcelain" displeased Sir Willoughby. "Why
rogue?" he said. The lady's fame for hitting the mark fretted him,
and the grace of his bride's fine bearing stood to support him in
his objection. Clara was young, healthy, handsome; she was
therefore fitted to be his wife, the mother of his children, his
companion picture. Certainly they looked well side by side. In
walking with her, in drooping to her, the whole man was made
conscious of the female image of himself by her exquisite
unlikeness. She completed him, added the softer lines wanting to
his portrait before the world. He had wooed her rageingly; he
courted her becomingly; with the manly self-possession enlivened
by watchful tact which is pleasing to girls. He never seemed to
undervalue himself in valuing her: a secret priceless in the
courtship of young women that have heads; the lover doubles their
sense of personal worth through not forfeiting his own. Those were
proud and happy days when he rode Black Norman over to Upton Park,
and his lady looked forth for him and knew him coming by the
faster beating of her heart.

Her mind, too, was receptive. She took impressions of his
characteristics, and supplied him a feast. She remembered his
chance phrases; noted his ways, his peculiarities, as no one of
her sex had done. He thanked his cousin Vernon for saying she had
wit. She had it, and of so high a flavour that the more he thought
of the epigram launched at her the more he grew displeased. With
the wit to understand him, and the heart to worship, she had a
dignity rarely seen in young ladies.

"Why rogue?" he insisted with Mrs. Mountstuart.

"I said--in porcelain," she replied.

"Rogue perplexes me."

"Porcelain explains it."

"She has the keenest sense of honour."

"I am sure she is a paragon of rectitude."

"She has a beautiful bearing."

"The carriage of a young princess!"

"I find her perfect."

"And still she may be a dainty rogue in porcelain."

"Are you judging by the mind or the person, ma'am?"

"Both."

"And which is which?"

"There's no distinction."

"Rogue and mistress of Patterne do not go together."

"Why not? She will be a novelty to our neighbourhood and an
animation of the Hall."

"To be frank, rogue does not rightly match with me."

"Take her for a supplement."

"You like her?"

"In love with her! I can imagine life-long amusement in her
company. Attend to my advice: prize the porcelain and play with
the rogue."

Sir Willoughby nodded, unilluminated. There was nothing of rogue
in himself, so there could be nothing of it in his bride.
Elfishness, tricksiness, freakishness, were antipathetic to his
nature; and he argued that it was impossible he should have chosen
for his complement a person deserving the title. It would not have
been sanctioned by his guardian genius. His closer acquaintance
with Miss Middleton squared with his first impressions; you know
that this is convincing; the common jury justifies the
presentation of the case to them by the grand jury; and his
original conclusion that she was essentially feminine, in other
words, a parasite and a chalice, Clara's conduct confirmed from
day to day. He began to instruct her in the knowledge of himself
without reserve, and she, as she grew less timid with him, became
more reflective.

"I judge by character," he said to Mrs. Mountstuart.

"If you have caught the character of a girl," said she.

"I think I am not far off it."

"So it was thought by the man who dived for the moon in a well."

"How women despise their sex!"

"Not a bit. She has no character yet. You are forming it, and pray
be advised and be merry; the solid is your safest guide;
physiognomy and manners will give you more of a girl's character
than all the divings you can do. She is a charming young woman,
only she is one of that sort."

"Of what sort?" Sir Willoughby asked, impatiently.

"Rogues in porcelain."

"I am persuaded I shall never comprehend it."

"I cannot help you one bit further."

"The word rogue!"

"It was dainty rogue."

"Brittle, would you say?"

"I am quite unable to say.?

"An innocent naughtiness?"

"Prettily moulded in a delicate substance."

"You are thinking of some piece of Dresden you suppose her to
resemble."

"I dare say."

"Artificial?"

"You would not have her natural?"

"I am heartily satisfied with her from head to foot, my dear
Mrs. Mountstuart."

"Nothing could be better. And sometimes she will lead, and
generally you will lead, and everything will go well, my dear 
Sir Willoughby."

Like all rapid phrasers, Mrs. Mountstuart detested the analysis of
her sentence. It had an outline in vagueness, and was flung out to
be apprehended, not dissected. Her directions for the reading of
Miss Middleton's character were the same that she practised in
reading Sir Willoughby's, whose physiognomy and manners bespoke
him what she presumed him to be, a splendidly proud gentleman,
with good reason.

Mrs. Mountstuart's advice was wiser than her procedure, for she
stopped short where he declined to begin. He dived below the
surface without studying that index-page. He had won Miss
Middleton's hand; he believed he had captured her heart; but he
was not so certain of his possession of her soul, and he went
after it. Our enamoured gentleman had therefore no tally of
Nature's writing above to set beside his discoveries in the deeps.
Now it is a dangerous accompaniment of this habit of driving, that
where we do not light on the discoveries we anticipate, we fall to
work sowing and planting; which becomes a disturbance of the
gentle bosom. Miss Middleton's features were legible as to the
mainspring of her character. He could have seen that she had a
spirit with a natural love of liberty, and required the next thing
to liberty, spaciousness, if she was to own allegiance. Those
features, unhappily, instead of serving for an introduction to the
within, were treated as the mirror of himself. They were indeed of
an amiable sweetness to tempt an accepted lover to angle for the
first person in the second. But he had made the discovery that
their minds differed on one or two points, and a difference of
view in his bride was obnoxious to his repose. He struck at it
recurringly to show her error under various aspects. He desired to
shape her character to the feminine of his own, and betrayed the
surprise of a slight disappointment at her advocacy of her ideas.
She said immediately: "It is not too late, Willoughby," and
wounded him, for he wanted her simply to be material in his hands
for him to mould her; he had no other thought. He lectured her on
the theme of the infinity of love. How was it not too late? They
were plighted; they were one eternally; they could not be parted.
She listened gravely, conceiving the infinity as a narrow dwelling
where a voice droned and ceased not. However, she listened. She
became an attentive listener.



CHAPTER VI

His Courtship

The world was the principal topic of dissension between these
lovers. His opinion of the world affected her like a creature
threatened with a deprivation of air. He explained to his darling 
that lovers of necessity do loathe the world. They live in the
world, they accept its benefits, and assist it as well as they
can. In their hearts they must despise it, shut it out, that their
love for one another may pour in a clear channel, and with all the
force they have. They cannot enjoy the sense of security for their
love unless they fence away the world. It is, you will allow,
gross; it is a beast. Formally we thank it for the good we get of
it; only we two have an inner temple where the worship we conduct
is actually, if you would but see it, an excommunication of the
world. We abhor that beast to adore that divinity. This gives us
our oneness, our isolation, our happiness. This is to love with
the soul. Do you see, darling?

She shook her head; she could not see it. She would admit none of
the notorious errors, of the world; its backbiting, selfishness,
coarseness, intrusiveness, infectiousness. She was young. She
might, Willoughby thought, have let herself be led; she was not
docile. She must be up in arms as a champion of the world; and one
saw she was hugging her dream of a romantic world, nothing else.
She spoilt the secret bower-song he delighted to tell over to her.
And how, Powers of Love! is love-making to be pursued if we may
not kick the world out of our bower and wash our hands of it? Love
that does not spurn the world when lovers curtain themselves is a
love--is it not so?--that seems to the unwhipped, scoffing world
to go slinking into basiation's obscurity, instead of on a
glorious march behind the screen. Our hero had a strong sentiment
as to the policy of scorning the world for the sake of defending
his personal pride and (to his honour, be it said) his lady's
delicacy.

The act of seeming put them both above the world, said retro
Sathanas! So much, as a piece of tactics: he was highly civilized:
in the second instance, he knew it to be the world which must
furnish the dry sticks for the bonfire of a woman's worship. He
knew, too, that he was prescribing poetry to his betrothed,
practicable poetry. She had a liking for poetry, and sometimes
quoted the stuff in defiance of his pursed mouth and pained
murmur: "I am no poet;" but his poetry of the enclosed and
fortified bower, without nonsensical rhymes to catch the ears of
women, appeared incomprehensible to her, if not adverse. She would
not burn the world for him; she would not, though a purer poetry
is little imaginable, reduce herself to ashes, or incense, or
essence, in honour of him, and so, by love's transmutation,
literally be the man she was to marry. She preferred to be
herself, with the egoism of women. She said it: she said: I must
be myself to be of any value to you, Willoughby." He was
indefatigable in his lectures on the aesthetics of love.
Frequently, for an indemnification to her (he had no desire that
she should be a loser by ceasing to admire the world), he dwelt on
his own youthful ideas; and his original fancies about the world
were presented to her as a substitute for the theme.

Miss Middleton bore it well, for she was sure that he meant well.
Bearing so well what was distasteful to her, she became less well
able to bear what she had merely noted in observation before; his
view of scholarship; his manner toward Mr. Vernon Whitford, of whom
her father spoke warmly; the rumour concerning his treatment of a
Miss Dale. And the country tale of Constantia Durham sang itself
to her in a new key. He had no contempt for the world's praises.
Mr. Whitford wrote the letters to the county paper which gained him
applause at various great houses, and he accepted it, and betrayed
a tingling fright lest he should be the victim of a sneer of the
world he contemned. Recollecting his remarks, her mind was
afflicted by the "something illogical" in him that we readily
discover when our natures are no longer running free, and then at
once we yearn for a disputation. She resolved that she would one
day, one distant day, provoke it--upon what? The special point
eluded her. The world is too huge a client, and too pervious, too
spotty, for a girl to defend against a man. That "something
illogical" had stirred her feelings more than her intellect to
revolt. She could not constitute herself the advocate of Mr.
Whitford. Still she marked the disputation for an event to come.

Meditating on it, she fell to picturing Sir Willoughby's face at
the first accents of his bride's decided disagreement with him.
The picture once conjured up would not be laid. He was handsome;
so correctly handsome, that a slight unfriendly touch precipitated
him into caricature. His habitual air of happy pride, of indignant
contentment rather, could easily be overdone. Surprise, when he
threw emphasis on it, stretched him with the tall eyebrows of a
mask--limitless under the spell of caricature; and in time,
whenever she was not pleased by her thoughts, she had that, and
not his likeness, for the vision of him. And it was unjust,
contrary to her deeper feelings; she rebuked herself, and as much
as her naughty spirit permitted, she tried to look on him as the
world did; an effort inducing reflections upon the blessings of
ignorance. She seemed to herself beset by a circle of imps, hardly
responsible for her thoughts.

He outshone Mr. Whitford in his behaviour to young Crossjay. She
had seen him with the boy, and he was amused, indulgent, almost
frolicsome, in contradistinction to Mr. Whitford's tutorly
sharpness. He had the English father's tone of a liberal allowance
for boys" tastes and pranks, and he ministered to the partiality
of the genus for pocket-money. He did not play the schoolmaster,
like bookworms who get poor little lads in their grasp.

Mr. Whitford avoided her very much. He came to Upton Park on a
visit to her father, and she was not particularly sorry that she
saw him only at table. He treated her by fits to a level scrutiny
of deep-set eyes unpleasantly penetrating. She had liked his eyes.
They became unbearable; they dwelt in the memory as if they had
left a phosphorescent line. She had been taken by playmate boys in
her infancy to peep into hedge-leaves, where the mother-bird
brooded on the nest; and the eyes of the bird in that marvellous
dark thickset home, had sent her away with worlds of fancy. Mr.
Whitford's gaze revived her susceptibility, but not the old happy
wondering. She was glad of his absence, after a certain hour that
she passed with Willoughby, a wretched hour to remember. Mr.
Whitford had left, and Willoughby came, bringing bad news of his
mother's health. Lady Patterne was fast failing. Her son spoke of
the loss she would be to him; he spoke of the dreadfulness of
death. He alluded to his own death to come carelessly, with a
philosophical air.

"All of us must go! our time is short."

"Very," she assented.

It sounded like want of feeling.

"If you lose me, Clara!"

"But you are strong, Willoughby."

"I may be cut off to-morrow."

"Do not talk in such a manner."

"It is as well that it should be faced."

"I cannot see what purpose it serves."

"Should you lose me, my love!"

"Willoughby!"

"Oh, the bitter pang of leaving you!"

"Dear Willoughby, you are distressed; your mother may recover; let
us hope she will; I will help to nurse her; I have offered, you
know; I am ready, most anxious. I believe I am a good nurse."

"It is this belief--that one does not die with death!"

"That is our comfort."

"When we love?"

"Does it not promise that we meet again?"

"To walk the world and see you perhaps--with another!"

"See me?--Where? Here?"

"Wedded ... to another. You! my bride; whom I call mine; and you
are! You would be still--in that horror! But all things are
possible; women are women; they swim in infidelity, from wave to
wave! I know them."

"Willoughby, do not torment yourself and me, I beg you." 

He meditated profoundly, and asked her: "Could you be such a saint
among women?"

"I think I am a more than usually childish girl."

"Not to forget me?"

"Oh! no."

"Still to be mine?"

"I am yours."

"To plight yourself?"

"It is done."

"Be mine beyond death?"

"Married is married, I think."

"Clara! to dedicate your life to our love! Never one touch; not
one whisper! not a thought, not a dream! Could you--it agonizes
me to imagine ... be inviolate? mine above?--mine before all men,
though I am gone:--true to my dust? Tell me. Give me that
assurance. True to my name!--Oh, I hear them. 'His relict!'
Buzzings about Lady Patterne. 'The widow.' If you knew their talk
of widows! Shut your ears, my angel! But if she holds them off
and keeps her path, they are forced to respect her. The dead
husband is not the dishonoured wretch they fancied him, because he
was out of their way. He lives in the heart of his wife. Clara! my
Clara! as I live in yours, whether here or away; whether you are a
wife or widow, there is no distinction for love--I am your
husband--say it--eternally. I must have peace; I cannot endure
the pain. Depressed, yes; I have cause to be. But it has haunted
me ever since we joined hands. To have you--to lose you!"

"Is it not possible that I may be the first to die?" said Miss
Middleton.

"And lose you, with the thought that you, lovely as you are, and
the dogs of the world barking round you, might ... Is it any
wonder that I have my feeling for the world? This hand!--the
thought is horrible. You would be surrounded; men are brutes; the
scent of unfaithfulness excites them, overjoys them. And I
helpless! The thought is maddening. I see a ring of monkeys
grinning. There is your beauty, and man's delight in desecrating.
You would be worried night and day to quit my name, to. . . I feel
the blow now. You would have no rest for them, nothing to cling to
without your oath."

"An oath!" said Miss Middleton.

"It is no delusion, my love, when I tell you that with this
thought upon me I see a ring of monkey faces grinning at me; they
haunt me. But you do swear it! Once, and I will never trouble you
on the subject again. My weakness! if you like. You will learn
that it is love, a man's love, stronger than death."

"An oath?" she said, and moved her lips to recall what she
might have said and forgotten. "To what? what oath?"

"That you will be true to me dead as well as living! Whisper
it."

"Willoughby, I shall be true to my vows at the altar."

"To me! me!"

"It will be to you."

"To my soul. No heaven can be for me--I see none, only torture,
unless I have your word, Clara. I trust it. I will trust it
implicitly. My confidence in you is absolute."

"Then you need not be troubled."

"It is for you, my love; that you may be armed and strong
when I am not by to protect you."

"Our views of the world are opposed, Willoughby."

"Consent; gratify me; swear it. Say: 'Beyond death.' Whisper it. I
ask for nothing more. Women think the husband's grave breaks the
bond, cuts the tie, sets them loose. They wed the flesh--pah!
What I call on you for is nobility; the transcendent nobility of
faithfulness beyond death. 'His widow!' let them say; a saint in
widowhood."

"My vows at the altar must suffice."

"You will not? Clara!"

"I am plighted to you."

"Not a word?--a simple promise? But you love me?"

"I have given you the best proof of it that I can."

"Consider how utterly I place confidence in you."

"I hope it is well placed."

"I could kneel to you, to worship you, if you would, Clara!"

"Kneel to Heaven, not to me, Willoughby. I am--I wish I were able
to tell what I am. I may be inconstant; I do not know myself.
Think; question yourself whether I am really the person you should
marry. Your wife should have great qualities of mind and soul. I
will consent to hear that I do not possess them, and abide by
the verdict."

"You do; you do possess them!" Willoughby cried. "When you know
better what the world is, you will understand my anxiety. Alive, I
am strong to shield you from it; dead, helpless--that is all. You
would be clad in mail, steel-proof, inviolable, if you would ...
But try to enter into my mind; think with me, feel with me. When
you have once comprehended the intensity of the love of a man like
me, you will not require asking. It is the difference of the elect
and the vulgar; of the ideal of love from the coupling of the
herds. We will let it drop. At least, I have your hand. As long as
I live I have your hand. Ought I not to be satisfied? I am; only I
see further than most men, and feel more deeply. And now I must
ride to my mother's bedside. She dies Lady Patterne! It might have
been that she . . . But she is a woman of women! With a
father-in-law! Just heaven! Could I have stood by her then with
the same feelings of reverence? A very little, my love, and
everything gained for us by civilization crumbles; we fall back to
the first mortar-bowl we were bruised and stirred in. My thoughts,
when I take my stand to watch by her, come to this conclusion,
that, especially in women, distinction is the thing to be aimed
at. Otherwise we are a weltering human mass. Women must teach us
to venerate them, or we may as well be bleating and barking and
bellowing. So, now enough. You have but to think a little. I must
be off. It may have happened during my absence. I will write. I
shall hear from you? Come and see me mount Black Norman. My
respects to your father. I have no time to pay them in person.
One!"

He took the one--love's mystical number--from which commonly
spring multitudes; but, on the present occasion, it was a single
one, and cold. She watched him riding away on his gallant horse,
as handsome a cavalier as the world could show, and the contrast
of his recent language and his fine figure was a riddle that froze
her blood. Speech so foreign to her ears, unnatural in tone,
unmanlike even for a lover (who is allowed a softer dialect), set
her vainly sounding for the source and drift of it. She was glad
of not having to encounter eyes like Mr. Vernon Whitford's.

On behalf of Sir Willoughby, it is to be said that his mother,
without infringing on the degree of respect for his decisions and
sentiments exacted by him, had talked to him of Miss Middleton,
suggesting a volatility of temperament in the young lady that
struck him as consentaneous with Mrs Mountstuart's "rogue in
porcelain", and alarmed him as the independent observations of two
world-wise women. Nor was it incumbent upon him personally to
credit the volatility in order, as far as he could, to effect the
soul-insurance of his bride, that he might hold the security of
the policy. The desire for it was in him; his mother had merely
tolled a warning bell that he had put in motion before. Clara was
not a Constantia. But she was a woman, and he had been deceived
by women, as a man fostering his high ideal of them will surely
be. The strain he adopted was quite natural to his passion and his
theme. The language of the primitive sentiments of men is of the
same expression at all times, minus the primitive colours when a
modern gentleman addresses his lady.

Lady Patterne died in the winter season of the new year. In April
Dr Middleton had to quit Upton Park, and he had not found a place
of residence, nor did he quite know what to do with himself in the
prospect of his daughter's marriage and desertion of him. Sir
Willoughby proposed to find him a house within a circuit of the
neighbourhood of Patterne. Moreover, he invited the Rev. Doctor
and his daughter to come to Patterne from Upton for a month, and
make acquaintance with his aunts, the ladies Eleanor and Isabel
Patterne, so that it might not be so strange to Clara to have them
as her housemates after her marriage. Dr. Middleton omitted to
consult his daughter before accepting the invitation, and it
appeared, when he did speak to her, that it should have been done.
But she said, mildly, "Very well, papa."

Sir Willoughby had to visit the metropolis and an estate in
another county, whence he wrote to his betrothed daily. He
returned to Patterne in time to arrange for the welcome of his
guests; too late, however, to ride over to them; and, meanwhile, 
during his absence, Miss Middleton had bethought herself that she
ought to have given her last days of freedom to her friends. After
the weeks to be passed at Patterne, very few weeks were left to
her, and she had a wish to run to Switzerland or Tyrol and see the
Alps; a quaint idea, her father thought. She repeated it
seriously, and Dr. Middleton perceived a feminine shuttle of
indecision at work in her head, frightful to him, considering that
they signified hesitation between the excellent library and
capital wine-cellar of Patterne Hall, together with the society of
that promising young scholar, Mr. Vernon Whitford, on the one
side, and a career of hotels--equivalent to being rammed into
monster artillery with a crowd every night, and shot off on a
day's journey through space every morning--on the other.

"You will have your travelling and your Alps after the ceremony," 
he said.

"I think I would rather stay at home," said she.

Dr Middleton rejoined: "I would."

"But I am not married yet papa."

"As good, my dear."

"A little change of scene, I thought ..."

"We have accepted Willoughby's invitation. And he helps
me to a house near you."

"You wish to be near me, papa?"

"Proximate--at a remove: communicable."

"Why should we separate?"

"For the reason, my dear, that you exchange a father for a
husband."

"If I do not want to exchange?"

"To purchase, you must pay, my child. Husbands are not
given for nothing."

"No. But I should have you, papa!"

"Should?"

"They have not yet parted us, dear papa."

"What does that mean?" he asked, fussily. He was in a gentle stew
already, apprehensive of a disturbance of the serenity precious to
scholars by postponements of the ceremony and a prolongation of a
father's worries.

"Oh, the common meaning, papa," she said, seeing how it was with
him.

"Ah!" said he, nodding and blinking gradually back to a state of
composure, glad to be appeased on any terms; for mutability is but
another name for the sex, and it is the enemy of the scholar.

She suggested that two weeks of Patterne would offer plenty of
time to inspect the empty houses of the district, and should be
sufficient, considering the claims of friends, and the necessity
of going the round of London shops.

"Two or three weeks," he agreed, hurriedly, by way of compromise 
with that fearful prospect.


CHAPTER VII

The Betrothed

During the drive from Upton to Patterne, Miss Middleton hoped, she
partly believed, that there was to be a change in Sir Willoughby's
manner of courtship. He had been so different a wooer. She
remembered with some half-conscious desperation of fervour what
she had thought of him at his first approaches, and in accepting
him. Had she seen him with the eyes of the world, thinking they
were her own? That look of his, the look of "indignant
contentment", had then been a most noble conquering look, splendid
as a general's plume at the gallop. It could not have altered. Was
it that her eyes had altered?

The spirit of those days rose up within her to reproach, her and
whisper of their renewal: she remembered her rosy dreams and the
image she had of him, her throbbing pride in him, her choking
richness of happiness: and also her vain attempting to be very
humble, usually ending in a carol, quaint to think of, not without
charm, but quaint, puzzling.

Now men whose incomes have been restricted to the extent
that they must live on their capital, soon grow relieved of the
forethoughtful anguish wasting them by the hilarious comforts 
of the lap upon which they have sunk back, insomuch
that they are apt to solace themselves for their intolerable
anticipations of famine in the household by giving loose to
one fit or more of reckless lavishness. Lovers in like manner
live on their capital from failure of income: they, too, for the
sake of stifling apprehension and piping to the present hour,
are lavish of their stock, so as rapidly to attenuate it: they have
their fits of intoxication in view of coming famine: they force
memory into play, love retrospectively, enter the old house of
the past and ravage the larder, and would gladly, even resolutely, 
continue in illusion if it were possible for the broadest
honey-store of reminiscences to hold out for a length of time
against a mortal appetite: which in good sooth stands on the
alternative of a consumption of the hive or of the creature it
is for nourishing. Here do lovers show that they are perishable. 
More than the poor clay world they need fresh supplies,
right wholesome juices; as it were, life in the burst of the bud,
fruits yet on the tree, rather than potted provender. The latter
is excellent for by-and-by, when there will be a vast deal
more to remember, and appetite shall have but one tooth
remaining. Should their minds perchance have been saturated
by their first impressions and have retained them, loving by
the accountable light of reason, they may have fair harvests,
as in the early time; but that case is rare. In other words, love
is an affair of two, and is only for two that can be as quick,
as constant in intercommunication as are sun and earth, through
the cloud or face to face. They take their breath of life from
one another in signs of affection, proofs of faithfulness,
incentives to admiration. Thus it is with men and women in
love's good season. But a solitary soul dragging a log must
make the log a God to rejoice in the burden. That is not love.

Clara was the least fitted of all women to drag a log. Few girls
would be so rapid in exhausting capital. She was feminine indeed,
but she wanted comradeship, a living and frank exchange of the
best in both, with the deeper feelings untroubled. To be fixed at
the mouth of a mine, and to have to descend it daily, and not to
discover great opulence below; on the contrary, to be chilled in
subterranean sunlessness, without any substantial quality that she
could grasp, only the mystery of the inefficient tallow-light in
those caverns of the complacent-talking man: this appeared to her
too extreme a probation for two or three weeks. How of a lifetime
of it!

She was compelled by her nature to hope, expect and believe that
Sir Willoughby would again be the man she had known when she
accepted him. Very singularly, to show her simple spirit at the
time, she was unaware of any physical coldness to him; she knew of
nothing but her mind at work, objecting to this and that, desiring
changes. She did not dream of being on the giddy ridge of the
passive or negative sentiment of love, where one step to the wrong
side precipitates us into the state of repulsion.

Her eyes were lively at their meeting--so were his. She liked to
see him on the steps, with young Crossjay under his arm. Sir
Willoughby told her in his pleasantest humour of the boy's having
got into the laboratory that morning to escape his task-master,
and blown out the windows. She administered a chiding to the
delinquent in the same spirit, while Sir Willoughby led her on his
arm across the threshold, whispering: "Soon for good!" In reply
to the whisper, she begged for more of the story of young
Crossjay. "Come into the laboratory: said he, a little less
laughingly than softly; and Clara begged her father to come and
see young Crossjay's latest pranks. Sir Willoughby whispered to
her of the length of their separation, and his joy to welcome her
to the house where she would reign as mistress very won. He
numbered the weeks. He whispered: "Come." In the hurry of the
moment she did not examine a lightning terror that shot through
her. It passed, and was no more than the shadow which bends the
summer grasses, leaving a ruffle of her ideas, in wonder of her
having feared herself for something. Her father was with them.
She and Willoughby were not yet alone.

Young Crossjay had not accomplished so fine a piece of destruction
as Sir Willoughby's humour proclaimed of him. He had connected a
battery with a train of gunpowder, shattering a window-frame and
unsettling some bricks. Dr. Middleton asked if the youth was
excluded from the library, and rejoiced to hear that it was a
sealed door to him. Thither they went. Vernon Whitford was away
on one of his long walks.

"There, papa, you see he is not so very faithful to you," said
Clara.

Dr Middleton stood frowning over MS notes on the table, in
Vernon's handwriting. He flung up the hair from his forehead and
dropped into a seat to inspect them closely. He was now
immoveable. Clara was obliged to leave him there. She was led to
think that Willoughby had drawn them to the library with the
design to be rid of her protector, and she began to fear him. She
proposed to pay her respects to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel.
They were not seen, and a footman reported in the drawing-room
that they were out driving. She grasped young Crossjay's hand. Sir
Willoughby dispatched him to Mrs. Montague, the housekeeper, for a
tea of cakes and jam.

"Off!" he said, and the boy had to run.

Clara saw herself without a shield.

"And the garden!" she cried. "I love the garden; I must go and see
what flowers are up with you. In spring I care most for wild
flowers, and if you will show me daffodils and crocuses and
anemones . . ."

"My dearest Clara! my bride!" said he.

"Because they are vulgar flowers?" she asked him, artlessly,
to account for his detaining her.

Why would he not wait to deserve her!--no, not deserve--to
reconcile her with her real position; not reconcile, but to repair
the image of him in her mind, before he claimed his apparent
right!

He did not wait. He pressed her to his bosom.

"You are mine, my Clara--utterly mine; every thought, every
feeling. We are one: the world may do its worst. I have been
longing for you, looking forward. You save me from a thousand
vexations. One is perpetually crossed. That is all outside us. We
two! With you I am secure! Soon! I could not tell you whether the
world's alive or dead. My dearest!"

She came out of it with the sensations of the frightened child
that has had its dip in sea-water, sharpened to think that after
all it was not so severe a trial. Such was her idea; and she said
to herself immediately: What am I that I should complain? Two
minutes earlier she would not have thought it; but humiliated
pride falls lower than humbleness.

She did not blame him; she fell in her own esteem; less because 
she was the betrothed Clara Middleton, which was now palpable as a
shot in the breast of a bird, than that she was a captured woman,
of whom it is absolutely expected that she must submit, and when
she would rather be gazing at flowers. Clara had shame of her
sex. They cannot take a step without becoming bondwomen: into what
a slavery! For herself, her trial was over, she thought. As for
herself, she merely complained of a prematureness and crudity
best unanalyzed. In truth, she could hardly be said to complain.
She did but criticize him and wonder that a man was unable to
perceive, or was not arrested by perceiving, unwillingness,
discordance, dull compliance; the bondwoman's due instead of the
bride's consent. Oh, sharp distinction, as between two spheres!

She meted him justice; she admitted that he had spoken in a
lover-like tone. Had it not been for the iteration of "the world",
she would not have objected critically to his words, though they
were words of downright appropriation. He had the right to use
them, since she was to be married to him. But if he had only
waited before playing the privileged lover!

Sir Willoughby was enraptured with her. Even so purely coldly,
statue-like, Dian-like, would he have prescribed his bride's
reception of his caress. The suffusion of crimson coming over her
subsequently, showing her divinely feminine in reflective
bashfulness, agreed with his highest definitions of female
character.

"Let me conduct you to the garden, my love," he said.

She replied: "I think I would rather go to my room."

"I will send you a wild-flower posy."

"Flowers, no; I do not like them to be gathered."

"I will wait for you on the lawn."

"My head is rather heavy."

His deep concern and tenderness brought him close.

She assured him sparklingly that she was well. She was ready to
accompany him to the garden and stroll over the park.

"Headache it is not," she added.

But she had to pay the fee for inviting a solicitous accepted
gentleman's proximity.

This time she blamed herself and him, and the world he abused, and
destiny into the bargain. And she cared less about the probation;
but she craved for liberty. With a frigidity that astonished her,
she marvelled at the act of kissing, and at the obligation it
forced upon an inanimate person to be an accomplice. Why was she
not free? By what strange right was it that she was treated as a
possession?

"I will try to walk off the heaviness," she said.

"My own girl must not fatigue herself."

"Oh, no; I shall not."

"Sit with me. Your Willoughby is your devoted attendant."

"I have a desire for the air."

"Then we will walk out."

She was horrified to think how far she had drawn away from him,
and now placed her hand on his arm to appease her self-accusations
and propitiate duty. He spoke as she had wished, his manner was
what she had wished; she was his bride, almost his wife; her
conduct was a kind of madness; she could not understand it.

Good sense and duty counselled her to control her wayward
spirit.

He fondled her hand, and to that she grew accustomed; her hand was
at a distance. And what is a hand? Leaving it where it was, she
treated it as a link between herself and dutiful goodness. Two
months hence she was a bondwoman for life! She regretted that she
had not gone to her room to strengthen herself with a review of
her situation, and meet him thoroughly resigned to her fate. She
fancied she would have come down to him amicably. It was his
present respectfulness and easy conversation that tricked her
burning nerves with the fancy. Five weeks of perfect liberty in
the mountains, she thought, would have prepared her for the days
of bells. All that she required was a separation offering new
scenes, where she might reflect undisturbed, feel clear again.

He led her about the flower-beds; too much as if he were giving a
convalescent an airing. She chafed at it, and pricked herself with
remorse. In contrition she expatiated on the beauty of the garden.

"All is yours, my Clara."

An oppressive load it seemed to her! She passively yielded to the
man in his form of attentive courtier; his mansion, estate, and
wealth overwhelmed her. They suggested the price to be paid. Yet
she recollected that on her last departure through the park she
had been proud of the rolling green and spreading trees. Poison of
some sort must be operating in her. She had not come to him
to-day with this feeling of sullen antagonism; she had caught it
here.

"You have been well, my Clara?"

"Quite."

"Not a hint of illness?"

"None."

"My bride must have her health if all the doctors in the
kingdom die for it! My darling!"

"And tell me: the dogs?"

"Dogs and horses are in very good condition."

"I am glad. Do you know, I love those ancient French chateaux and
farms in one, where salon windows look on poultry-yard and
stalls. I like that homeliness with beasts and peasants."

He bowed indulgently.

"I am afraid we can't do it for you in England, my Clara."

"No."

"And I like the farm," said he. "But I think our drawing-rooms
have a better atmosphere off the garden. As to our peasantry, we
cannot, I apprehend, modify our class demarcations without risk of
disintegrating the social structure."

"Perhaps. I proposed nothing."

"My love, I would entreat you to propose if I were convinced 
that I could obey."

"You are very good."

"I find my merit nowhere but in your satisfaction."

Although she was not thirsting for dulcet sayings, the peacefulness
of other than invitations to the exposition of his mysteries and
of their isolation in oneness, inspired her with such calm that
she beat about in her brain, as if it were in the brain, for the
specific injury he had committed. Sweeping from sensation to
sensation, the young, whom sensations impel and distract, can
rarely date their disturbance from a particular one; unless it be
some great villain injury that has been done; and Clara had not
felt an individual shame in his caress; the shame of her sex was
but a passing protest, that left no stamp. So she conceived she
had been behaving cruelly, and said, "Willoughby"; because she was
aware of the omission of his name in her previous remarks.

His whole attention was given to her.

She had to invent the sequel. "I was going to beg you, Willoughby,
do not seek to spoil me. You compliment me. Compliments are not
suited to me. You think too highly of me. It is nearly as bad as
to be slighted. I am . . . I am a . . ." But she could not follow
his example; even as far as she had gone, her prim little sketch
of herself, set beside her real, ugly, earnest feelings, rang of a
mincing simplicity, and was a step in falseness. How could she
display what she was?

"Do I not know you?" he said.

The melodious bass notes, expressive of conviction on that point,
signified as well as the words that no answer was the right
answer. She could not dissent without turning his music to
discord, his complacency to amazement. She held her tongue,
knowing that he did not know her, and speculating on the 
division made bare by their degrees of the knowledge, a deep
cleft.

He alluded to friends in her neighbourhood and his own.
The bridesmaids were mentioned.

"Miss Dale, you will hear from my aunt Eleanor, declines, on the
plea of indifferent health. She is rather a morbid person, with
all her really estimable qualities. It will do no harm to have
none but young ladies of your own age; a bouquet of young buds:
though one blowing flower among them ... However, she has decided.
My principal annoyance has been Vernon's refusal to act as my best
man."

"Mr. Whitford refuses?"

"He half refuses. I do not take no from him. His pretext
is a dislike to the ceremony."

"I share it with him."

"I sympathize with you. If we might say the words and pass from
sight! There is a way of cutting off the world: I have it at times
completely: I lose it again, as if it were a cabalistic phrase one
had to utter. But with you! You give it me for good. It will he
for ever, eternally, my Clara. Nothing can harm, nothing touch us;
we are one another's. Let the world fight it out; we have nothing
to do with it."

"If Mr. Whitford should persist in refusing?"

"So entirely one, that there never can be question of external
influences. I am, we will say, riding home from the hunt: I see
you awaiting me: I read your heart as though you were beside me.
And I know that I am coming to the one who reads mine! You have
me, you have me like an open book, you, and only you!"

"I am to be always at home?" Clara said, unheeded, and
relieved by his not hearing.

"Have you realized it?--that we are invulnerable! The world
cannot hurt us: it cannot touch us. Felicity is ours, and we are
impervious in the enjoyment of it. Something divine! surely
something divine on earth? Clara!--being to one another that
between which the world can never interpose! What I do is right:
what you do is right. Perfect to one another! Each new day we rise
to study and delight in new secrets. Away with the crowd! We have
not even to say it; we are in an atmosphere where the world cannot
breathe."

"Oh, the world!" Clara partly carolled on a sigh that sunk
deep.

Hearing him talk as one exulting on the mountain-top, when she
knew him to be in the abyss, was very strange, provocative of
scorn.

"My letters?" he said, incitingly.

"I read them."

"Circumstances have imposed a long courtship on us, my Clara; and
I, perhaps lamenting the laws of decorum--I have done so!--still
felt the benefit of the gradual initiation. It is not good for
women to be surprised by a sudden revelation of man's character.
We also have things to learn--there is matter for learning
everywhere. Some day you will tell me the difference of what you
think of me now, from what you thought when we first . . . ?"

An impulse of double-minded acquiescence caused Clara to
stammer as on a sob.

"I--I daresay I shall."

She added, "If it is necessary."

Then she cried out: "Why do you attack the world? You
always make me pity it."

He smiled at her youthfulness. "I have passed through that
stage. It leads to my sentiment. Pity it, by all means."

"No," said she, "but pity it, side with it, not consider it so
bad. The world has faults; glaciers have crevices, mountains have
chasms; but is not the effect of the whole sublime? Not to admire
the mountain and the glacier because they can be cruel, seems to
me ... And the world is beautiful."

"The world of nature, yes. The world of men?"

"Yes."

"My love, I suspect you to be thinking of the world of ballrooms.

"I am thinking of the world that contains real and great
generosity, true heroism. We see it round us."

"We read of it. The world of the romance writer!"

"No: the living world. I am sure it is our duty to love it. I am
sure we weaken ourselves if we do not. If I did not, I should be
looking on mist, hearing a perpetual boom instead of music. I
remember hearing Mr. Whitford say that cynicism is intellectual
dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers; and it seems to me that
cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as
they have made it for themselves."

"Old Vernon!" ejaculated Sir Willoughby, with a countenance 
rather uneasy, as if it had been flicked with a glove. "He
strings his phrases by the dozen."

"Papa contradicts that, and says he is very clever and very
simple."

"As to cynics, my dear Clara, oh, certainly, certainly: you are
right. They are laughable, contemptible. But understand me. I
mean, we cannot feel, or if we feel we cannot so intensely feel,
our oneness, except by dividing ourselves from the world."

"Is it an art?"

"If you like. It is our poetry! But does not love shun the world?
Two that love must have their sustenance in isolation."

"No: they will be eating themselves up."

"The purer the beauty, the more it will be out of the world."

"But not opposed."

"Put it in this way," Willoughby condescended. "Has experience 
the same opinion of the world as ignorance?"

"It should have more charity."

"Does virtue feel at home in the world?"

"Where it should be an example, to my idea."

"Is the world agreeable to holiness?"

"Then, are you in favour of monasteries?"

He poured a little runlet of half laughter over her head, of the
sound assumed by genial compassion.

It is irritating to hear that when we imagine we have spoken to
the point.

"Now in my letters, Clara . . ."

"I have no memory, Willoughby!"

"You will, however, have observed that I am not completely 
myself in my letters . . ."

"In your letters to men you may be."

The remark threw a pause across his thoughts. He was of a
sensitiveness terribly tender. A single stroke on it reverberated 
swellingly within the man, and most, and infuriately searching, at
the spots where he had been wounded, especially where he feared
the world might have guessed the wound. Did she imply that he had
no hand for love-letters? Was it her meaning that women would not
have much taste for his epistolary correspondence? She had spoken
in the plural, with an accent on "men". Had she heard of
Constantia? Had she formed her own judgement about the creature?
The supernatural sensitiveness of Sir Willoughby shrieked a peal
of affirmatives. He had often meditated on the moral obligation of
his unfolding to Clara the whole truth of his conduct to
Constantia; for whom, as for other suicides, there were excuses.
He at least was bound to supply them. She had behaved badly; but
had he not given her some cause? If so, manliness was bound to
confess it.

Supposing Clara heard the world's version first! Men whose pride
is their backbone suffer convulsions where other men are barely
aware of a shock, and Sir Willoughby was taken with galvanic
jumpings of the spirit within him, at the idea of the world
whispering to Clara that he had been jilted.

"My letters to men, you say, my love?"

"Your letters of business."

"Completely myself in my letters of business?" He stared indeed.

She relaxed the tension of his figure by remarking: "You are able
to express yourself to men as your meaning dictates. In writing
to ... to us it is, I suppose, more difficult."

"True, my love. I will not exactly say difficult. I can
acknowledge no difficulty. Language, I should say, is not fitted
to express emotion. Passion rejects it."

"For dumb-show and pantomime?"

"No; but the writing of it coldly."

"Ah, coldly!"

"My letters disappoint you?"

"I have not implied that they do."

"My feelings, dearest, are too strong for transcription. I feel,
pen in hand, like the mythological Titan at war with Jove, strong
enough to hurl mountains, and finding nothing but pebbles. The
simile is a good one. You must not judge of me by my letters."

"I do not; I like them," said Clara.

She blushed, eyed him hurriedly, and seeing him complacent, 
resumed, "I prefer the pebble to the mountain; but if you read
poetry you would not think human speech incapable of. . ."

"My love, I detest artifice. Poetry is a profession."

"Our poets would prove to you . . ."

"As I have often observed, Clara, I am no poet."

"I have not accused you, Willoughby:

"No poet, and with no wish to be a poet. Were I one, my life would
supply material, I can assure you, my love. My conscience is not
entirely at rest. Perhaps the heaviest matter troubling it is that
in which I was least wilfully guilty. You have heard of a Miss
Durham?"

"I have heard--yes--of her."

"She may be happy. I trust she is. If she is not, I cannot escape
some blame. An instance of the difference between myself and the
world, now. The world charges it upon her. I have interceded to
exonerate her."

"That was generous, Willoughby."

"Stay. I fear I was the primary offender. But I, Clara, I, under
a sense of honour, acting under a sense of honour, would have
carried my engagement through."

"What had you done?"

"The story is long, dating from an early day, in the 'downy
antiquity of my youth', as Vernon says."

"Mr. Whitford says that?"

"One of old Vernon's odd sayings. It's a story of an early
fascination."

"Papa tells me Mr. Whitford speaks at times with wise
humour."

"Family considerations--the lady's health among other things; her
position in the calculations of relatives--intervened. Still
there was the fascination. I have to own it. Grounds for feminine
jealousy."

"Is it at an end?"

"Now? with you? my darling Clara! indeed at an end, or could I
have opened my inmost heart to you! Could I have spoken of myself
so unreservedly that in part you know me as I know myself! Oh, but
would it have been possible to enclose you with myself in that
intimate union? so secret, unassailable!"

"You did not speak to her as you speak to me?"

"In no degree."

"What could have! . . ." Clara checked the murmured exclamation.

Sir Willoughby's expoundings on his latest of texts would have
poured forth, had not a footman stepped across the lawn to inform
him that his builder was in the laboratory and requested 
permission to consult with him.

Clara's plea of a horror of the talk of bricks and joists excused 
her from accompanying him. He had hardly been satisfied by her
manner, he knew not why. He left her, convinced that he must do
and say more to reach down to her female intelligence.

She saw young Crossjay, springing with pots of jam in him, join
his patron at a bound, and taking a lift of arms, fly aloft,
clapping heels. Her reflections were confused. Sir Willoughby was
admirable with the lad. "Is he two men?" she thought; and the
thought ensued, "Am I unjust?" She headed a run with young
Crossjay to divert her mind.



CHAPTER VIII

A Run with the Truant; a Walk with the Master

The sight of Miss Middleton running inflamed young Crossjay with
the passion of the game of hare and hounds. He shouted a
view-halloo, and flung up his legs. She was fleet; she ran as
though a hundred little feet were bearing her onward smooth as
water over the lawn and the sweeps of grass of the park, so
swifily did the hidden pair multiply one another to speed her. So
sweet was she in her flowing pace, that the boy, as became his
age, translated admiration into a dogged frenzy of pursuit, and
continued pounding along, when far outstripped, determined to run
her down or die. Suddenly her flight wound to an end in a dozen
twittering steps, and she sank. Young Crossjay attained her,
with just breath enough to say: "You are a runner!"

"I forgot you had been having your tea, my poor boy," said she.

"And you don't pant a bit!" was his encomium.

"Dear me, no; not more than a bird. You might as well try to catch
a bird."

Young Crossjay gave a knowing nod. "Wait till I get my second
wind."

"Now you must confess that girls run faster than boys."

"They may at the start."

"They do everything better."

"They're flash-in-the-pans."

"They learn their lessons."

"You can't make soldiers or sailors of them, though."

"And that is untrue. Have you never read of Mary Ambree? and
Mistress Hannah Snell of Pondicherry? And there was the bride of
the celebrated William Taylor. And what do you say to Joan of
Arc? What do you say to Boadicea? I suppose you have never heard
of the Amazons."

"They weren't English."

"Then it is your own countrywomen you decry, sir!"

Young Crossjay betrayed anxiety about his false position, and
begged for the stories of Mary Ambree and the others who were
English.

"See, you will not read for yourself, you hide and play truant
with Mr. Whitford, and the consequence is you are ignorant of your
country's history." 

Miss Middleton rebuked him, enjoying his wriggle between a
perception of her fun and an acknowledgment of his peccancy. She
commanded him to tell her which was the glorious Valentine's day
of our naval annals; the name of the hero of the day, and the name
of his ship. To these questions his answers were as ready as the
guns of the good ship Captain, for the Spanish four-decker.

"And that you owe to Mr. Whitford," said Miss Middleton.

"He bought me the books," young Crossjay growled, and plucked at
grass blades and bit thern, foreseeing dimly but certainly the
termination of all this.

Miss Middleton lay back on the grass and said: "Are you going to
be fond of me, Crossjay?"

The boy sat blinking. His desire was to prove to her that lie was
immoderately fond of her already; and he might have flown at her
neck had she been sitting up, but her recumbency and eyelids half
closed excited wonder in him and awe. His young heart beat fast.

"Because, my dear boy," she said, leaning on her elbow, "you are a
very nice boy, but an ungrateful boy, and there is no telling
whether you will not punish any one who cares for you. Come along
with me; pluck me some of these cowslips, and the speedwells near
them; I think we both love wild-flowers." She rose and took his
arm. "You shall row me on the lake while I talk to you seriously."

It was she, however, who took the sculls at the boat-house, for
she had been a playfellow with boys, and knew that one of them
engaged in a manly exercise is not likely to listen to a woman.

"Now, Crossjay," she said. Dense gloom overcame him like a cowl.
She bent across her hands to laugh. "As if I were going to lecture
you, you silly boy!" He began to brighten dubiously. "I used to be
as fond of birdsnesting as you are. I like brave boys, and I like
you for wanting to enter the Royal Navy. Only, how can you if you
do not learn? You must get the captains to pass you, you know.
Somebody spoils you: Miss Dale or Mr. Whitford."

"Do they?" sung out young Crossjay.

"Sir Willoughby does?"

"I don't know about spoil. I can come round him."

"I am sure he is very kind to you. I dare say you think Mr.
Whitford rather severe. You should remember he has to teach you,
so that you may pass for the navy. You must not dislike him
because he makes you work. Supposing you had blown yourself up
to-day! You would have thought it better to have been working with
Mr. Whitford."

"Sir Willoughby says, when he's married, you won't let me hide."

"Ah! It is wrong to pet a big boy like you. Does not he what you
call tip you, Crossjay?"

"Generally half-crown pieces. I've had a crown-piece. I've had
sovereigns."

"And for that you do as he bids you? And he indulges you because
you ... Well, but though Mr. Whitford does not give you money, he
gives you his time, he tries to get you into the navy."

"He pays for me."

"What do you say?"

"My keep. And, as for liking him, if he were at the bottom of the
water here, I'd go down after him. I mean to learn. We're both of
us here at six o'clock in the morning, when it's light, and have a
swim. He taught me. Only, I never cared for schoolbooks."

"Are you quite certain that Mr. Whitford pays for you."

"My father told me he did, and I must obey him. He heard my father
was poor, with a family. He went down to see my father. My father
came here once, and Sir Willoughby wouldn't see him. I know Mr.
Whitford does. And Miss Dale told me he did. My mother says she
thinks he does it to make up to us for my father's long walk in
the rain and the cold he caught coming here to Patterne."

"So you see you should not vex him, Crossjay. He is a good friend
to your father and to you. You ought to love him."

"I like him, and I like his face."

"Why his face?"

"It's not like those faces! Miss Dale and I talk about him. She
thinks that Sir Willoughby is the best-looking man ever born."

"Were you not speaking of Mr. Whitford?"

"Yes; old Vernon. That's what Sir Willoughby calls him," young
Crossjay excused himself to her look of surprise. "Do you know
what he makes me think of?--his eyes, I mean. He makes me think
of Robinson Crusoe's old goat in the cavern. I like him because
he's always the same, and you're not positive about some people.
Miss Middleton, if you look on at cricket, in comes a safe man for
ten runs. He may get more, and he never gets less; and you should
hear the old farmers talk of him in the booth. That's just my
feeling."

Miss Middleton understood that some illustration from the
cricketing-field was intended to throw light on the boy's feeling 
for Mr. Whitford. Young Crossjay was evidently warming to speak
from his heart. But the sun was low, she had to dress for the
dinner-table, and she landed him with regret, as at a holiday
over. Before they parted, he offered to swim across the lake in
his clothes, or dive to the bed for anything she pleased to throw,
declaring solemnly that it should not he lost.

She walked back at a slow pace, and sung to herself above her
darker-flowing thoughts, like the reed-warbler on the branch
beside the night-stream; a simple song of a lighthearted sound,
independent of the shifting black and grey of the flood
underneath.

A step was at her heels.

"I see you have been petting my scapegrace."

"Mr. Whitford! Yes; not petting, I hope. I tried to give him a
lecture. He's a dear lad, but, I fancy, trying."

She was in fine sunset colour, unable to arrest the mounting tide.
She had been rowing, she said; and, as he directed his eyes,
according to his wont, penetratingly, she defended herself by
fixing her mind on Robinson Crusoe's old goat in the recess of the
cavern.

"I must have him away from here very soon," said Vernon. "Here
he's quite spoiled. Speak of him to Willoughby. I can't guess at
his ideas of the boy's future, but the chance of passing for the
navy won't bear trifling with, and if ever there was a lad made
for the navy, it's Crossjay."

The incident of the explosion in the laboratory was new to Vernon.

"And Willoughby laughed?" he said. "There are sea-port crammers
who stuff young fellows for examination, and we shall have to pack
off the boy at once to the best one of the lot we can find. I
would rather have had him under me up to the last three months,
and have made sure of some roots to what is knocked into his head.
But he's ruined here. And I am going. So I shall not trouble him
for many weeks longer. Dr. Middleton is well?"

"My father is well, yes. He pounced like a falcon on your notes in
the library."

Vernon came out with a chuckle.

"They were left to attract him. I am in for a controversy.

"Papa will not spare you, to judge from his look."

"I know the look."

"Have you walked far to-day?"

"Nine and a half hours. My Flibbertigibbet 8 is too much for me at
times, and I had to walk off my temper."

She cast her eyes on him, thinking of the pleasure of dealing with
a temper honestly coltish, and manfully open to a specific.

"All those hours were required?"

"Not quite so long."

"You are training for your Alpine tour."

"It's doubtful whether I shall get to the Alps this year. I leave
the Hall, and shall probably be in London with a pen to sell."

"Willoughby knows that you leave him?"

"As much as Mont Blanc knows that he is going to be climbed by a
party below. He sees a speck or two in the valley."

"He has not spoken of it."

"He would attribute it to changes . . ."

Vernon did not conclude the sentence.

She became breathless, without emotion, but checked by the barrier
confronting an impulse to ask, what changes? She stooped to pluck
a cowslip.

"I saw daffodils lower down the park," she said. "One or two;
they're nearly over."

"We are well off for wild flowers here," he answered.

"Do not leave him, Mr. Whitford."

"He will not want me."

"You are devoted to him."

"I can't pretend that."

"Then it is the changes you imagine you foresee ... If any occur,
why should they drive you away?"

"Well, I'm two and thirty, and have never been in the fray: a
kind of nondescript, half scholar, and by nature half billman or
bowman or musketeer; if I'm worth anything, London's the field for
me. But that's what I have to try."

"Papa will not like your serving with your pen in London: he will
say you are worth too much for that."

"Good men are at it; I should not care to be ranked above them."

"They are wasted, he says."

"Error! If they have their private ambition, they may suppose they
are wasted. But the value to the world of a private ambition, I do
not clearly understand."

"You have not an evil opinion of the world?" said Miss Middleton,
sick at heart as she spoke, with the sensation of having invited
herself to take a drop of poison.

He replied: "One might as well have an evil opinion of a river:
here it's muddy, there it's clear; one day troubled, another at
rest. We have to treat it with common sense."

"Love it?"

"In the sense of serving it."

"Not think it beautiful?"

"Part of it is, part of it the reverse."

"Papa would quote the 'mulier formosa'".

"Except that 'fish' is too good for the black extremity. 'Woman'
is excellent for the upper."

"How do you say that?--not cynically, I believe. Your view
commends itself to my reason."

She was grateful to him for not stating it in ideal contrast with
Sir Willoughby's view. If he had, so intensely did her youthful
blood desire to be enamoured of the world, that she felt he would
have lifted her off her feet. For a moment a gulf beneath had been
threatening. When she said, "Love it?" a little enthusiasm would
have wafted her into space fierily as wine; but the sober, "In the
sense of serving it", entered her brain, and was matter for
reflection upon it and him.

She could think of him in pleasant liberty, uncorrected by her
woman's instinct of peril. He had neither arts nor graces; nothing
of his cousin's easy social front-face. She had once witnessed the
military precision of his dancing, and had to learn to like him
before she ceased to pray that she might never be the victim of it
as his partner. He walked heroically, his pedestrian vigour being
famous, but that means one who walks away from the sex, not
excelling in the recreations where men and women join hands. He
was not much of a horseman either. Sir Willoughby enjoyed seeing
him on horseback. And he could scarcely be said to shine in a
drawingroom, unless when seated beside a person ready for real
talk. Even more than his merits, his demerits pointed him out as
a man to be a friend to a young woman who wanted one. His way of
life pictured to her troubled spirit an enviable smoothness; and
his having achieved that smooth way she considered a sign of
strength; and she wished to lean in idea upon some friendly
strength. His reputation for indifference to the frivolous charms
of girls clothed him with a noble coldness, and gave him the
distinction of a far-seen solitary iceberg in Southern waters. The
popular notion of hereditary titled aristocracy resembles her
sentiment for a man that would not flatter and could not be
flattered by her sex: he appeared superior almost to awfulness.
She was young, but she had received much flattery in her ears, and
by it she had been snared; and he, disdaining to practise the
fowler's arts or to cast a thought on small fowls, appeared to her
to have a pride founded on natural loftiness.

They had not spoken for awhile, when Vernon said abruptly, "The
boy's future rather depends on you, Miss Middleton. I mean to
leave as soon as possible, and I do not like his being here
without me, though you will look after him, I have no doubt. But
you may not at first see where the spoiling hurts him. He should
be packed off at once to the crammer, before you are Lady
Patterne. Use your influence. Willoughby will support the lad at
your request. The cost cannot be great. There are strong grounds
against my having him in London, even if I could manage it. May I
count on you?"

"I will mention it: I will do my best," said Miss Middleton,
strangely dejected.

They were now on the lawn, where Sir Willoughby was walking with
the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, his maiden aunts.

"You seem to have coursed the hare and captured the hart." he said
to his bride.

"Started the truant and run down the paedagogue," said Vernon.

"Ay, you won't listen to me about the management of that boy," Sir
Willoughby retorted.

The ladies embraced Miss Middleton. One offered up an ejaculation
in eulogy of her looks, the other of her healthfulness: then both
remarked that with indulgence young Crossjay could be induced to
do anything. Clara wondered whether inclination or Sir Willoughby
had disciplined their individuality out of them and made them his
shadows, his echoes. She gazed from them to him, and feared him.
But as yet she had not experienced the power in him which could
threaten and wrestle to subject the members of his household to
the state of satellites. Though she had in fact been giving battle
to it for several months, she had held her own too well to
perceive definitely the character of the spirit opposing her.

She said to the ladies, "Ah, no! Mr. Whitford has chosen the only
method for teaching a boy like Crossjay."

"I propose to make a man of him," said Sir Willoughby.

"What is to become of him if he learns nothing?"

"If he pleases me, he will be provided for. I have never abandoned
a dependent."

Clara let her eyes rest on his and, without turning or dropping, 
shut them.

The effect was discomforting to him. He was very sensitive to the
intentions of eyes and tones; which was one secret of his rigid
grasp of the dwellers in his household. They were taught that they
had to render agreement under sharp scrutiny. Studious eyes,
devoid of warmth, devoid of the shyness of sex, that suddenly
closed on their look, signified a want of comprehension of some
kind, it might be hostility of understanding. Was it possible he
did not possess her utterly? He frowned up.

Clara saw the lift of his brows, and thought, "My mind is my own,
married or not."

It was the point in dispute.


CHAPTER IX

Clara and Laetitia Meet: They Are Compared

An hour before the time for lessons next morning young Crossjay
was on the lawn with a big bunch of wild flowers. He left them at
the hall door for Miss Middleton, and vanished into bushes.

These vulgar weeds were about to be dismissed to the dustheap by
the great officials of the household; but as it happened that Miss
Middleton had seen them from the window in Crossjay's hands, the
discovery was made that they were indeed his presentation-bouquet,
and a footman received orders to place them before her. She was
very pleased. The arrangement of the flowers bore witness to
fairer fingers than the boy's own in the disposition of the rings
of colour, red campion and anemone, cowslip and speedwell,
primroses and wood-hyacinths; and rising out of the blue was a
branch bearing thick white blossom, so thick, and of so pure a
whiteness, that Miss Middleton, while praising Crossjay for
soliciting the aid of Miss Dale, was at a loss to name the tree.

"It is a gardener's improvement on the Vestal of the forest, the
wild cherry," said Dr. Middleton, "and in this case we may admit
the gardener's claim to be valid, though I believe that, with his
gift of double blossom, he has improved away the fruit. Call this
the Vestal of civilization, then; he has at least done something
to vindicate the beauty of the office as well as the justness of
the title."

"It is Vernon's Holy Tree the young rascal has been despoiling," 
said Sir Willoughby merrily.

Miss Middleton was informed that this double-blossom wild
cherry-tree was worshipped by Mr. Whitford.

Sir Willoughby promised he would conduct her to it.

"You," he said to her, "can bear the trial; few complexions can;
it is to most ladies a crueller test than snow. Miss Dale, for
example, becomes old lace within a dozen yards of it. I should
like to place her under the tree beside you."

"Dear me, though; but that is investing the hamadryad with novel
and terrible functions," exclaimed Dr. Middleton.

Clara said: "Miss Dale could drag me into a superior Court to show
me fading beside her in gifts more valuable than a complexion."

"She has a fine ability," said Vernon.

All the world knew, so Clara knew of Miss Dales romantic admiration
of Sir Willoughby; she was curious to see Miss Dale and study the
nature of a devotion that might be, within reason, imitable--for
a man who could speak with such steely coldness of the poor lady
he had fascinated? Well, perhaps it was good for the hearts of
women to be beneath a frost; to be schooled, restrained, turned
inward on their dreams. Yes, then, his coldness was desireable; it
encouraged an ideal of him. It suggested and seemed to propose to
Clara's mind the divineness of separation instead of the deadly
accuracy of an intimate perusal. She tried to look on him as Miss
Dale might look, and while partly despising her for the dupery she
envied, and more than criticizing him for the inhuman numbness of
sentiment which offered up his worshipper to point a complimentary
comparison, she was able to imagine a distance whence it would be
possible to observe him uncritically, kindly, admiringly; as the
moon a handsome mortal, for example.

In the midst of her thoughts, she surprised herself by saying: "I
certainly was difficult to instruct. I might see things clearer if
I had a fine ability. I never remember to have been perfectly
pleased with my immediate lesson . . ."

She stopped, wondering whither her tongue was leading her; then
added, to save herself, "And that may be why I feel for poor
Crossjay."

Mr. Whitford apparently did not think it remarkable that she
should have been set off gabbling of "a fine ability", though the
eulogistic phrase had been pronounced by him with an
impressiveness to make his ear aware of an echo.

Sir Willoughby dispersed her vapourish confusion. "Exactly," he
said. "I have insisted with Vernon, I don't know how often, that
you must have the lad by his affections. He won't bear driving. It
had no effect on me. Boys of spirit kick at it. I think I know
boys, Clara."

He found himself addressing eyes that regarded him as though he
were a small speck, a pin's head, in the circle of their remote
contemplation. They were wide; they closed.

She opened them to gaze elsewhere.

He was very sensitive.

Even then, when knowingly wounding him, or because of it, she was
trying to climb back to that altitude of the thin division of
neutral ground, from which we see a lover's faults and are above
them, pure surveyors. She climbed unsuccessfully, it is true; soon
despairing and using the effort as a pretext to fall back lower.

Dr. Middleton withdrew Sir Willoughby's attention from the
imperceptible annoyance. "No, sir, no: the birch! the birch! Boys
of spirit commonly turn into solid men, and the solider the men
the more surely do they vote for Busby. For me, I pray he may be
immortal in Great Britain. Sea-air nor mountain-air is half so
bracing. I venture to say that the power to take a licking is
better worth having than the power to administer one. Horse him
and birch him if Crossjay runs from his books."

"It is your opinion, sir?" his host bowed to him affably, shocked
on behalf of the ladies.

"So positively so, sir, that I will undertake, without knowledge 
of their antecedents, to lay my finger on the men in public life
who have not had early Busby. They are ill-balanced men. Their seat
of reason is not a concrete. They won't take rough and smooth as
they come. They make bad blood, can't forgive, sniff right and
left for approbation, and are excited to anger if an East wind
does not flatter them. Why, sir, when they have grown to be
seniors, you find these men mixed up with the nonsense of their
youth; you see they are unthrashed. We English beat the world
because we take a licking well. I hold it for a surety of a proper
sweetness of blood."

The smile of Sir Willoughby waxed ever softer as the shakes of his
head increased in contradictoriness. "And yet," said he, with the
air of conceding a little after having answered the Rev. Doctor
and convicted him of error, "Jack requires it to keep him in
order. On board ship your argument may apply. Not, I suspect,
among gentlemen. No."

"Good-night to you, gentlemen!" said Dr. Middleton.

Clara heard Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel interchange remarks:

"Willoughby would not have suffered it!"

"It would entirely have altered him!"

She sighed and put a tooth on her under-lip. The gift of humourous
fancy is in women fenced round with forbidding placards; they have
to choke it; if they perceive a piece of humour, for instance, the
young Willoughby grasped by his master,--and his horrified
relatives rigid at the sight of preparations for the seed of
sacrilege, they have to blindfold the mind's eye. They are
society's hard-drilled soldiery. Prussians that must both march
and think in step. It is for the advantage of the civilized world,
if you like, since men have decreed it, or matrons have so read
the decree; but here and there a younger woman, haply an
uncorrected insurgent of the sex matured here and there, feels
that her lot was cast with her head in a narrower pit than her
limbs.

Clara speculated as to whether Miss Dale might be perchance a
person of a certain liberty of mind. She asked for some little,
only some little, free play of mind in a house that seemed to
wear, as it were, a cap of iron. Sir Willoughby not merely ruled,
he throned, he inspired: and how? She had noticed an irascible
sensitiveness in him alert against a shadow of disagreement; and
as he was kind when perfectly appeased, the sop was offered by him
for submission. She noticed that even Mr. Whitford forbore to
alarm the sentiment of authority in his cousin. If he did not
breathe Sir Willoughby, like the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, he
would either acquiesce in a syllable or he silent. He never
strongly dissented. The habit of the house, with its iron cap, was
on him, as it was on the servants. and would be, oh, shudders of
the shipwrecked that see their end in drowning! on the wife.

"When do I meet Miss Dale?" she inquired.

"This very evening, at dinner," replied Sir Willoughby.

Then, thought she, there is that to look forward to.

She indulged her morbid fit, and shut up her senses that she
might live in the anticipation of meeting Miss Dale; and, long
before the approach of the hour, her hope of encountering any
other than another dull adherent of Sir Willoughby had fled. So
she was languid for two of the three minutes when she sat alone
with Laetitia in the drawing-room before the rest had assembled.

"It is Miss Middleton?" Laetitia said, advancing to her. "My
jealousy tells me; for you have won my boy Crossjay's heart, and
done more to bring him to obedience in a few minutes than we have
been able to do in months."

"His wild flowers were so welcome to me," said Clara.

"He was very modest over them. And I mention it because boys of
his age usually thrust their gifts in our faces fresh as they
pluck them, and you were to be treated quite differently."

"We saw his good fairy's hand."

"She resigns her office; but I pray you not to love him too well in
return; for he ought to be away reading with one of those men who
get boys through their examinations. He is, we all think, a born
sailor, and his place is in the navy."

"But, Miss Dale, I love him so well that I shall consult his
interests and not my own selfishness. And, if I have influence, he
will not be a week with you longer. It should have been spoke of
to-day; I must have been in some dream; I thought of it, I know. I
will not forget to do what may be in my power."

Clara's heart sank at the renewed engagement and plighting of
herself involved in her asking a favour, urging any sort of
petition. The cause was good. Besides, she was plighted already.

"Sir Willoughby is really fond of the boy," she said.

"He is fond of exciting fondness in the boy," said Miss Dale. "He
has not dealt much with children. I am sure he likes Crossjay; he
could not otherwise be so forbearing; it is wonderful what he
endures and laughs at."

Sir Willoughby entered. The presence of Miss Dale illuminated him
as the burning taper lights up consecrated plate. Deeply
respecting her for her constancy, esteeming her for a model of
taste, he was never in her society without that happy
consciousness of shining which calls forth the treasures of the
man; and these it is no exaggeration to term unbounded, when all
that comes from him is taken for gold.

The effect of the evening on Clara was to render her distrustful 
of her later antagonism. She had unknowingly passed into the
spirit of Miss Dale, Sir Willoughby aiding; for she could
sympathize with the view of his constant admirer on seeing him so
cordially and smoothly gay; as one may say, domestically witty,
the most agreeable form of wit. Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson discerned
that he had a leg of physical perfection; Miss Dale distinguished
it in him in the vital essence; and before either of these ladies
he was not simply a radiant, he was a productive creature, so true
it is that praise is our fructifying sun. He had even a touch of
the romantic air which Clara remembered as her first impression of
the favourite of the county; and strange she found it to observe
this resuscitated idea confronting her experience. What if she had
been captious, inconsiderate? Oh, blissful revival of the sense of
peace! The happiness of pain departing was all that she looked
for, and her conception of liberty was to learn to love her
chains, provided that he would spare her the caress. In this mood
she sternly condemned Constantia. "We must try to do good; we must
not be thinking of ourselves; we must make the best of our path in
life." She revolved these infantile precepts with humble
earnestness; and not to be tardy in her striving to do good, with
a remote but pleasurable glimpse of Mr. Whitford hearing of it,
she took the opportunity to speak to Sir Willoughby on the subject
of young Crossjay, at a moment when, alighting from horseback, he
had shown himself to advantage among a gallant cantering company.
He showed to great advantage on horseback among men, being
invariably the best mounted, and he had a cavalierly style,
possibly cultivated, but effective. On foot his raised head and
half-dropped eyelids too palpably assumed superiority.
"Willoughby, I want to speak," she said, and shrank as she spoke,
lest he should immediately grant everything in the mood of
courtship, and invade her respite; "I want to speak of that dear
boy Crossjay. You are fond of him. He is rather an idle boy here,
and wasting time . . ."

"Now you are here, and when you are here for good, my love for
good . . ." he fluttered away in loverliness, forgetful of
Crossjay, whom he presently took up. "The boy recognizes his most
sovereign lady, and will do your bidding, though you should order
him to learn his lessons! Who would not obey? Your beauty alone
commands. But what is there beyond?--a grace, a hue divine, that
sets you not so much above as apart, severed from the world."

Clara produced an active smile in duty, and pursued: "If Crossjay
were sent at once to some house where men prepare boys to pass for
the navy, he would have his chance, and the navy is distinctly his
profession. His father is a brave man, and he inherits bravery,
and he has a passion for a sailor's life; only he must be able to
pass his examination, and he has not much time."

Sir Willoughby gave a slight laugh in sad amusement.

"My dear Clara, you adore the world; and I suppose you have to
learn that there is not a question in this wrangling world about
which we have not disputes and contests ad nauseam. I have my
notions concerning Crossjay, Vernon has his. I should wish to
make a gentleman of him. Vernon marks him for a sailor. But Vernon
is the lad's protector, I am not. Vernon took him from his father
to instruct him, and he has a right to say what shall be done with
him. I do not interfere. Only I can't prevent the lad from liking
me. Old Vernon seems to feel it. I assure you I hold entirely
aloof. If I am asked, in spite of my disapproval of Vernon's plans
for the boy, to subscribe to his departure, I can but shrug,
because, as you see, I have never opposed. Old Vernon pays for
him, he is the master, he decides, and if Crossjay is blown from
the masthead in a gale, the blame does not fall on me. These, my
dear, are matters of reason."

"I would not venture to intrude on them," said Clara, "if I had
not suspected that money ... 

"Yes," cried Willoughby; "and it is a part. And let old Vernon 
surrender the boy to me, I will immediately relieve him of the
burden on his purse. Can I do that, my dear, for the furtherance
of a scheme I condemn? The point is thus: latterly I have invited
Captain Patterne to visit me: just previous to his departure for
the African Coast, where Government despatches Marines when there
is no other way of killing them, I sent him a special invitation.
He thanked me and curtly declined. The man, I may almost say, is
my pensioner. Well, he calls himself a Patterne, he is
undoubtedly a man of courage, he has elements of our blood, and
the name. I think I am to be approved for desiring to make a
better gentleman of the son than I behold in the father: and
seeing that life from an early age on board ship has anything but
made a gentleman of the father, I hold that I am right in shaping
another course for the son."

"Naval officers . . ." Clara suggested.

"Some," said Willoughby. "But they must be men of birth, coming
out of homes of good breeding. Strip them of the halo of the title
of naval officers, and I fear you would not often say gentlemen
when they step into a drawing-room. I went so far as to fancy I
had some claim to make young Crossjay something different. It can
be done: the Patterne comes out in his behaviour to you, my love;
it can be done. But if I take him, I claim undisputed sway over
him. I cannot make a gentleman of the fellow if I am to compete
with this person and that. In fine, he must look up to me, he must
have one model."

"Would you, then, provide for him subsequently?"

"According to his behaviour."

"Would not that be precarious for him?"

"More so than the profession you appear inclined to choose for
him?"

"But there he would be under clear regulations."

"With me he would have to respond to affection."

"Would you secure to him a settled income? For an idle gentleman
is bad enough; a penniless gentleman . . ."

"He has only to please me, my dear, and he will be launched and
protected."

"But if he does not succeed in pleasing you?"

"Is it so difficult?"

"Oh!" Clara fretted.

"You see, my love, I answer you," said Sir Willoughby.

He resumed: "But let old Vernon have his trial with the lad. He
has his own ideas. Let him carry them out. I shall watch the
experiment."

Clara was for abandoning her task in sheer faintness.

"Is not the question one of money?" she said, shyly, knowing Mr.
Whitford to be poor.

"Old Vernon chooses to spend his money that way." replied Sir
Willoughby. "If it saves him from breaking his shins and risking
his neck on his Alps, we may consider it well employed."

"Yes," Clara's voice occupied a pause.

She seized her languor as it were a curling snake and cast it off.
"But I understand that Mr. Whitford wants your assistance. Is he
not--not rich? When he leaves the Hall to try his fortune in
literature in London, he may not be so well able to support
Crossjay and obtain the instruction necessary for the boy: and it
would be generous to help him."

"Leaves the Hall!" exclaimed Willoughby. "I have not heard a word
of it. He made a bad start at the beginning, and I should have
thought that would have tamed him: had to throw over his
Fellowship; ahem. Then he received a small legacy some time back,
and wanted to be off to push his luck in Literature: rank
gambling, as I told him. Londonizing can do him no good. I thought
that nonsense of his was over years ago. What is it he has from
me?--about a hundred and fifty a year: and it might be doubled
for the asking: and all the books he requires: and these writers
and scholars no sooner think of a book than they must have it. And
do not suppose me to complain. I am a man who will not have a
single shilling expended by those who serve immediately about my
person. I confess to exacting that kind of dependency. Feudalism
is not an objectionable thing if you can be sure of the lord. You
know, Clara, and you should know me in my weakness too, I do not
claim servitude, I stipulate for affection. I claim to be
surrounded by persons loving me. And with one? ... dearest! So
that we two can shut out the world; we live what is the dream of
others. Nothing imaginable can be sweeter. It is a veritable
heaven on earth. To be the possessor of the whole of you! Your
thoughts, hopes, all."

Sir Willoughby intensified his imagination to conceive more: he
could not, or could not express it, and pursued: "But what is
this talk of Vernon's leaving me? He cannot leave. He has barely a
hundred a year of his own. You see, I consider him. I do not speak
of the ingratitude of the wish to leave. You know, my dear, I have
a deadly abhorrence of partings and such like. As far as I can, I
surround myself with healthy people specially to guard myself from
having my feelings wrung; and excepting Miss Dale, whom you like
--my darling does like her?"--the answer satisfied him; "with
that one exception, I am not aware of a case that threatens to
torment me. And here is a man, under no compulsion, talking of
leaving the Hall! In the name of goodness, why? But why? Am I to
imagine that the sight of perfect felicity distresses him? We are
told that the world is 'desperately wicked'. I do not like to
think it of my friends; yet otherwise their conduct is often hard
to account for."

"If it were true, you would not punish Crossjay?" Clara feebly
interposed.

"I should certainly take Crossjay and make a man of him after my
own model, my dear. But who spoke to you of this?"

"Mr. Whitford himself. And let me give you my opinion, Willoughby,
that he will take Crossjay with him rather than leave him, if
there is a fear of the boy's missing his chance of the navy."

"Marines appear to be in the ascendant," said Sir Willoughby, 
astonished at the locution and pleading in the interests of a son
of one. "Then Crossjay he must take. I cannot accept half the boy.
I am," he laughed, "the legitimate claimant in the application for
judgement before the wise king. Besides, the boy has a dose of my
blood in him; he has none of Vernon's, not one drop."

"Ah!"

"You see, my love?"

"Oh, I do see; yes."

"I put forth no pretensions to perfection," Sir Willoughby
continued. "I can bear a considerable amount of provocation; still
I can be offended, and I am unforgiving when I have been
offended. Speak to Vernon, if a natural occasion should spring
up. I shall, of course, have to speak to him. You may, Clara, have
observed a man who passed me on the road as we were cantering
home, without a hint of a touch to his hat. That man is a tenant of
mine, farming six hundred acres, Hoppner by name: a man bound to
remember that I have, independently of my position, obliged him
frequently. His lease of my ground has five years to run. I must
say I detest the churlishness of our country population, and where
it comes across me I chastise it. Vernon is a different matter: he
will only require to be spoken to. One would fancy the old fellow
laboured now and then under a magnetic attraction to beggary. My
love," he bent to her and checked their pacing up and down, "you
are tired?"

"I am very tired to-day," said Clara.

His arm was offered. She laid two fingers on it, and they dropped
when he attempted to press them to his rib.

He did not insist. To walk beside her was to share in the
stateliness of her walking.

He placed himself at a corner of the door-way for her to pass him
into the house, and doated on her cheek, her ear, and the softly
dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little
lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and
the knot--curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, 
wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps--waved
or fell, waved over or up or involutedly, or strayed, loose and
downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much
thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long round locks of
gold to trick the heart.

Laetitia had nothing to show resembling such beauty.


CHAPTER X

In Which Sir Willoughby Chances to Supply the Title for Himself

Now Vernon was useful to his cousin; he was the accomplished secretary
of a man who governed his estate shrewdly and diligently, but had
been once or twice unlucky in his judgements pronounced from the
magisterial bench as a justice of the Peace, on which occasions a
half column of trenchant English supported by an apposite classical
quotation impressed Sir Willoughby with the value of such a secretary
in a controversy. He had no fear of that fiery dragon of scorching
breath--the newspaper press--while Vernon was his right hand man;
and as he intended to enter Parliament, he foresaw the greater need
of him. Furthermore, he liked his cousin to date his own
controversial writings, on classical subjects, from Patterne Hall. It
caused his house to shine in a foreign field; proved the service of
scholarship by giving it a flavour of a bookish aristocracy that,
though not so well worth having, and indeed in itself contemptible,
is above the material and titular; one cannot quite say how. There,
however, is the flavour. Dainty sauces are the life, the nobility, of
famous dishes; taken alone, the former would be nauseating, the
latter plebeian. It is thus, or somewhat so, when you have a poet,
still better a scholar, attached to your household. Sir Willoughby
deserved to have him, for he was above his county friends in his
apprehension of the flavour bestowed by the man; and having him, he
had made them conscious of their deficiency. His cook, M. Dehors,
pupil of the great Godefroy, was not the only French cook in the
county; but his cousin and secretary, the rising scholar, the
elegant essayist, was an unparalleled decoration; of his kind, of
course. Personally. we laugh at him; you had better not, unless you
are fain to show that the higher world of polite literature is
unknown to you. Sir Willoughby could create an abject silence at a
county dinner-table by an allusion to Vernon "at work at home upon his
Etruscans or his Dorians"; and he paused a moment to let the allusion
sink, laughed audibly to himself over his eccentric cousin, and let
him rest.

In addition, Sir Willoughby abhorred the loss of a familiar face
in his domestic circle. He thought ill of servants who could
accept their dismissal without petitioning to stay with him. A
servant that gave warning partook of a certain fiendishness. 
Vernon's project of leaving the Hall offended and alarmed the
sensitive gentleman. "I shall have to hand Letty Dale to him at
last!" he thought, yielding in bitter generosity to the conditions
imposed on him by the ungenerousness of another. For, since his
engagement to Miss Middleton, his electrically forethoughtful mind
had seen in Miss Dale, if she stayed in the neighbourhood, and
remained unmarried, the governess of his infant children, often
consulting with him. But here was a prospect dashed out. The two,
then, may marry, and live in a cottage on the borders of his park;
and Vernon can retain his post, and Laetitia her devotion. The
risk of her casting it of had to be faced. Marriage has been known
to have such an effect on the most faithful of women that a
great passion fades to naught in their volatile bosoms when they
have taken a husband. We see in women especially the triumph.of
the animal over the spiritual. Nevertheless, risks must be run
for a purpose in view.

Having no taste for a discussion with Vernon, whom it was his
habit to confound by breaking away from him abruptly when he had
delivered his opinion, he left it to both the persons interesting
themselves in young Crossjay to imagine that he was meditating on
the question of the lad, and to imagine that it would be wise to
leave him to meditate; for he could be preternaturally acute in
reading any of his fellow-creatures if they crossed the current of
his feelings. And, meanwhile, he instructed the ladies Eleanor and
Isabel to bring Laetitia Dale on a visit to the Hall, where
dinner-parties were soon to be given and a pleasing talker would
be wanted, where also a woman of intellect, steeped in a splendid
sentiment, hitherto a miracle of female constancy, might stir a
younger woman to some emulation. Definitely to resolve to bestow
Laetitia upon Vernon was more than he could do; enough that he
held the card.

Regarding Clara, his genius for perusing the heart which was not
in perfect harmony with him through the series of responsive
movements to his own, informed him of a something in her character
that might have suggested to Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson her
indefensible, absurd "rogue in porcelain". Idea there was none in
that phrase; yet, if you looked on Clara as a delicately
inimitable porcelain beauty, the suspicion of a delicately
inimitable ripple over her features touched a thought of innocent
roguery, wildwood roguery; the likeness to the costly and lovely
substance appeared to admit a fitness in the dubious epithet. He
detested but was haunted by the phrase.

She certainly had at times the look of the nymph that has gazed
too long on the faun, and has unwittingly copied his lurking lip
and long sliding eye. Her play with young Crossjay resembled a
return of the lady to the cat; she flung herself into it as if her
real vitality had been in suspense till she saw the boy. Sir
Willoughby by no means disapproved of a physical liveliness that
promised him health in his mate; but he began to feel in their
conversations that she did not sufficiently think of making
herself a nest for him. Steely points were opposed to him when he,
figuratively, bared his bosom to be taken to the softest and
fairest. She reasoned: in other words, armed her ignorance. She
reasoned against him publicly, and lured Vernon to support her.
Influence is to be counted for power, and her influence over
Vernon was displayed in her persuading him to dance one evening at
Lady Culmer's, after his melancholy exhibitions of himself in the
art; and not only did she persuade him to stand up fronting her,
she manoeuvred him through the dance like a clever boy cajoling a
top to come to him without reeling, both to Vernon's contentment
and to Sir Willoughby's; for he was the last man to object to a
manifestation of power in his bride. Considering her influence
with Vernon, he renewed the discourse upon young Crossjay; and, as
he was addicted to system, he took her into his confidence, that
she might be taught to look to him and act for him.

"Old Vernon has not spoken to you again of that lad?" he said.

"Yes, Mr. Whitford has asked me."

"He does not ask me, my dear!"

"He may fancy me of greater aid than I am."

"You see, my love, if he puts Crossjay on me, he will be off. He
has this craze for 'enlisting' his pen in London, as he calls it;
and I am accustomed to him; I don't like to think of him as a
hack scribe, writing nonsense from dictation to earn a pitiful
subsistence; I want him here; and, supposing he goes, he offends
me; he loses a friend; and it will not he the first time that a
friend has tried me too far; but if he offends me, he is extinct."

"Is what?" cried Clara, with a look of fright.

"He becomes to me at once as if he had never been. He is extinct."

"In spite of your affection?"

"On account of it, I might say. Our nature is mysterious, and mine
as much so as any. Whatever my regrets, he goes out. This is not a
language I talk to the world. I do the man no harm; I am not to be
named unchristian. But ... !"

Sir Willoughby mildly shrugged, and indicated a spreading out of
the arms.

"But do, do talk to me as you talk to the world, Willoughby; give
me some relief!"

"My own Clara, we are one. You should know me at my worst, we will
say, if you like, as well as at my best."

"Should I speak too?"

"What could you have to confess?"

She hung silent; the wave of an insane resolution swelled in her
bosom and subsided before she said, "Cowardice, incapacity to
speak."

"Women!" said he.

We do not expect so much of women; the heroic virtues as little as
the vices. They have not to unfold the scroll of character.

He resumed, and by his tone she understood that she was now in the
inner temple of him: "I tell you these things; I quite acknowledge
they do not elevate me. They help to constitute my character. I
tell you most humbly that I have in me much--too much of the
fallen archangel's pride."

Clara bowed her head over a sustained in-drawn breath.

"It must be pride," he said, in a reverie superinduced by her
thoughtfulness over the revelation, and glorying in the black
flames demoniacal wherewith he crowned himself.

"Can you not correct it?" said she.

He replied, profoundly vexed by disappointment: "I am what I am.
It might be demonstrated to you mathematically that it is
corrected by equivalents or substitutions in my character. If it
be a failing--assuming that."

"It seems one to me: so cruelly to punish Mr. Whitford for seeking
to improve his fortunes."

"He reflects on my share in his fortunes. He has had but to apply
to me for his honorarium to be doubled."

"He wishes for independence."

"Independence of me!"

"Liberty!"

"At my expense!"

"Oh, Willoughby!"

"Ay, but this is the world, and I know it, my love; and beautiful
as your incredulity may be, you will find it more comforting to
confide in my knowledge of the selfishness of the world. My
sweetest, you will?--you do! For a breath of difference between
us is intolerable. Do you not feel how it breaks our magic ring?
One small fissure, and we have the world with its muddy deluge!--
But my subject was old Vernon. Yes, I pay for Crossjay, if Vernon
consents to stay. I waive my own scheme for the lad, though I
think it the better one. Now, then, to induce Vernon to stay. He
has his ideas about staying under a mistress of the household; and
therefore, not to contest it--he is a man of no argument; a sort
of lunatic determination takes the place of it with old Vernon!
--let him settle close by me, in one of my cottages; very well,
and to settle him we must marry him."

"Who is there?" said Clara, beating for the lady in her mind. 

"Women," said Willoughby, "are born match-makers, and the most
persuasive is a young bride. With a man--and a man like old Vernon!--
she is irresistible. It is my wish, and that arms you. It is your
wish, that subjugates him. If he goes, he goes for good. If he
stays, he is my friend. I deal simply with him, as with every one.
It is the secret of authority. Now Miss Dale will soon lose her
father. He exists on a pension; she has the prospect of having to
leave the neighbourhood of the Hall, unless she is established
near us. Her whole heart is in this region; it is the poor soul's
passion. Count on her agreeing. But she will require a little
wooing: and old Vernon wooing! Picture the scene to yourself, my
love. His notion of wooing. I suspect, will be to treat the lady
like a lexicon, and turn over the leaves for the word, and fly
through the leaves for another word, and so get a sentence. Don't
frown at the poor old fellow, my Clara; some have the language on
their tongues, and some have not. Some are very dry sticks; manly
men, honest fellows, but so cut away, so polished away from the
sex, that they are in absolute want of outsiders to supply the
silken filaments to attach them. Actually!" Sir Willoughby laughed
in Clara's face to relax the dreamy stoniness of her look. "But I
can assure you, my dearest, I have seen it. Vernon does not know
how to speak--as we speak. He has, or he had, what is called a
sneaking affection for Miss Dale. It was the most amusing thing
possible; his courtship!--the air of a dog with an uneasy
conscience, trying to reconcile himself with his master! We were
all in fits of laughter. Of course it came to nothing."

"Will Mr. Whitford," said Clara, "offend you to extinction if he
declines?"

Willoughby breathed an affectionate "Tush!" to her silliness.

"We bring them together, as we best can. You see, Clara, I desire,
and I will make some sacrifices to detain him."

"But what do you sacrifice?--a cottage?" said Clara, combative at
all points.

"An ideal, perhaps. I lay no stress on sacrifice. I strongly
object to separations. And therefore, you will say, I prepare the
ground for unions? Put your influence to good service, my love. I
believe you could persuade him to give us the Highland fling on
the drawing-room table."

"There is nothing to say to him of Crossjay?"

"We hold Crossjay in reserve."

"It is urgent."

"Trust me. I have my ideas. I am not idle. That boy bids fair for
a capital horseman. Eventualities might . . ." Sir Willoughby 
murmured to himself, and addressing his bride, "The cavalry? If we
put him into the cavalry, we might make a gentleman of him--not
be ashamed of him. Or, under certain eventualities, the Guards.
Think it over, my love. De Craye, who will, I suppose, act best
man for me, supposing old Vernon to pull at the collar, is a
Lieutenant-Colonel in the Guards, a thorough gentleman--of the
brainless class, if you like, but an elegant fellow; an Irishman;
you will see him, and I should like to set a naval lieutenant
beside him in a drawingroom, for you to compare them and consider
the model you would choose for a boy you are interested in. Horace
is grace and gallantry incarnate; fatuous, probably: I have always
been too friendly with him to examine closely. He made himself 
one of my dogs, though my elder, and seemed to like to be at my
heels. One of the few men's faces I can call admirably handsome;--
with nothing behind it, perhaps. As Vernon says, 'a nothing
picked by the vultures and bleached by the desert'. Not a bad
talker, if you are satisfied with keeping up the ball. He will
amuse you. Old Horace does not know how amusing he is!"

"Did Mr. Whitford say that of Colonel De Craye?"

"I forget the person of whom he said it. So you have noticed old
Vernon's foible? Quote him one of his epigrams, and he is in
motion head and heels! It is an infallible receipt for tuning him.
If I want to have him in good temper, I have only to remark, 'as
you said'. I straighten his back instantly."

"I," said Clara, "have noticed chiefly his anxiety concerning the
boy; for which I admire him."

"Creditable, if not particularly far-sighted and sagacious. well,
then, my dear, attack him at once; lead him to the subject of our
fair neighbour. She is to be our guest for a week or so, and the
whole affair might be concluded far enough to fix him before she
leaves. She is at present awaiting the arrival of a cousin to
attend on her father. A little gentle pushing will precipitate old
Vernon on his knees as far as he ever can unbend them; but when a
lady is made ready to expect a declaration, you know, why, she
does not--does she?--demand the entire formula?--though some
beautiful fortresses . . ."

He enfolded her. Clara was growing hardened to it. To this she was
fated; and not seeing any way to escape, she invoked a friendly
frost to strike her blood, and passed through the minute
unfeelingly. Having passed it, she reproached herself for making
so much of it, thinking it a lesser endurance than to listen to
him. What could she do?--she was caged; by her word of honour, as
she at one time thought; by her cowardice, at another; and dimly
sensible that the latter was a stronger lock than the former, she
mused on the abstract question whether a woman's cowardice can be
so absolute as to cast her into the jaws of her aversion. Is it to
be conceived? Is there not a moment when it stands at bay? But
haggard-visaged Honour then starts up claiming to be dealt with in
turn; for having courage restored to her, she must have the
courage to break with honour, she must dare to be faithless, and
not merely say, I will be brave, but be brave enough to be
dishonourable. The cage of a plighted woman hungering for her
disengagement has two keepers, a noble and a vile; where on earth
is creature so dreadfully enclosed? It lies with her to overcome
what degrades her, that she may win to liberty by overcoming what
exalts.

Contemplating her situation, this idea (or vapour of youth taking
the god-like semblance of an idea) sprang, born of her present
sickness, in Clara's mind; that it must be an ill-constructed 
tumbling world where the hour of ignorance is made the creator of
our destiny by being forced to the decisive elections upon which
life's main issues hang. Her teacher had brought her to
contemplate his view of the world.

She thought likewise: how must a man despise women, who can expose
himself as he does to me!

Miss Middleton owed it to Sir Willoughby Patterne that she ceased
to think like a girl. When had the great change begun? Glancing
back, she could imagine that it was near the period we call in
love the first--almost from the first. And she was led to imagine
it through having become barred from imagining her own emotions of
that season. They were so dead as not to arise even under the form
of shadows in fancy. Without imputing blame to him, for she was
reasonable so far, she deemed herself a person entrapped. In a
dream somehow she had committed herself to a life-long
imprisonment; and, oh terror! not in a quiet dungeon; the barren
walls closed round her, talked, called for ardour, expected
admiration.

She was unable to say why she could not give it; why she retreated
more and more inwardly; why she invoked the frost to kill her
tenderest feelings. She was in revolt, until a whisper of the day
of bells reduced her to blank submission; out of which a breath of
peace drew her to revolt again in gradual rapid stages, and once
more the aspect of that singular day of merry blackness felled her
to earth. It was alive, it advanced, it had a mouth, it had a
song. She received letters of bridesmaids writing of it, and felt
them as waves that hurl a log of wreck to shore. Following which
afflicting sense of antagonism to the whole circle sweeping on
with her, she considered the possibility of her being in a
commencement of madness. Otherwise might she not be accused of a
capriciousness quite as deplorable to consider? She had written to
certain of these young ladies not very long since of this
gentleman--how?--in what tone? And was it her madness then?--
her recovery now? It seemed to her that to have written of him
enthusiastically resembled madness more than to shudder away from
the union; but standing alone, opposing all she has consented to
set in motion, is too strange to a girl for perfect justification 
to be found in reason when she seeks it.

Sir Willoughby was destined himself to supply her with that key of
special insight which revealed and stamped him in a title to
fortify her spirit of revolt, consecrate it almost.

The popular physician of the county and famous anecdotal wit, Dr.
Corney, had been a guest at dinner overnight, and the next day
there was talk of him, and of the resources of his art displayed
by Armand Dehors on his hearing that he was to minister to the
tastes of a gathering of hommes d'esprit. Sir Willoughby glanced at
Dehors with his customary benevolent irony in speaking of the
persons, great in their way, who served him. "Why he cannot give
us daily so good a dinner, one must, I suppose, go to French
nature to learn. The French are in the habit of making up for all
their deficiencies with enthusiasm. They have no reverence; if I
had said to him, 'I want something particularly excellent,
Dehors', I should have had a commonplace dinner. But they have
enthusiasm on draught, and that is what we must pull at. Know one
Frenchman and you know France. I have had Dehors under my eye two
years, and I can mount his enthusiasm at a word. He took hommes
d'esprit to denote men of letters. Frenchmen have destroyed their
nobility, so, for the sake of excitement, they put up the literary
man--not to worship him; that they can't do; it's to put
themselves in a state of effervescence. They will not have real
greatness above them, so they have sham. That they may justly call
it equality, perhaps! Ay, for all your shake of the head, my good
Vernon! You see, human nature comes round again, try as we may to
upset it, and the French only differ from us in wading through
blood to discover that they are at their old trick once more; "I
am your equal, sir, your born equal. Oh! you are a man of letters?
Allow me to be in a bubble about you!" Yes, Vernon, and I believe
the fellow looks up to you as the head of the establishment. I am
not jealous. Provided he attends to his functions! There's a
French philosopher who's for naming the days of the year after
the birthdays of French men of letters. Voltaire-day, Rousseau-day,
Racine-day, so on. Perhaps Vernon will inform us who takes April
1st."

"A few trifling errors are of no consequence when you are in the
vein of satire," said Vernon. "Be satisfied with knowing a nation
in the person of a cook."

"They may be reading us English off in a jockey!" said Dr.
Middleton. "I believe that jockeys are the exchange we make for
cooks; and our neighbours do not get the best of the bargain."

"No; but, my dear good Vernon, it's nonsensical," said Sir
Willoughby; "why be bawling every day the name of men of
letters?"

"Philosophers."

"Well, philosophers."

"Of all countries and times. And they are the benefactors of
humanity."

"Bene--!" Sir Willoughby's derisive laugh broke the word.
"There's a pretension in all that, irreconcilable with English
sound sense. Surely you see it?"

"We might," said Vernon, "if you like, give alternative titles to
the days, or have alternating days, devoted to our great families
that performed meritorious deeds upon such a day."

The rebel Clara, delighting in his banter, was heard: "Can we
furnish sufficient?"

"A poet or two could help us."

"Perhaps a statesman," she suggested.

"A pugilist, if wanted."

"For blowy days," observed Dr. Middleton, and hastily in penitence
picked up the conversation he had unintentionally prostrated, with
a general remark on new-fangled notions, and a word aside to
Vernon; which created the blissful suspicion in Clara that her
father was indisposed to second Sir Willoughby's opinions even
when sharing them.

Sir Willoughby had led the conversation. Displeased that the lead
should be withdrawn from him, he turned to Clara and related one
of the after-dinner anecdotes of Dr. Corney; and another, with a
vast deal of human nature in it, concerning a valetudinarian
gentleman, whose wife chanced to be desperately ill, and he went
to the physicians assembled in consultation outside the sick-room,
imploring them by all he valued, and in tears, to save the poor
patient for him, saying: "She is everything to me, everything; and
if she dies I am compelled to run the risks of marrying again; I
must marry again; for she has accustomed me so to the little
attentions of a wife, that in truth I can't. I can't lose her! She
must be saved!" And the loving husband of any devoted wife wrung
his hands.

"Now, there, Clara, there you have the Egoist," added Sir
Willoughby. "That is the perfect Egoist. You see what he comes to
--and his wife! The man was utterly unconscious of giving vent to
the grossest selfishness."

"An Egoist!" said Clara.

"Beware of marrying an Egoist, my dear!" He bowed gallantly; and
so blindly fatuous did he appear to her, that she could hardly
believe him guilty of uttering the words she had heard from him,
and kept her eyes on him vacantly till she came to a sudden full
stop in the thoughts directing her gaze. She looked at Vernon,
she looked at her father, and at the ladies Eleanor and Isabel.
None of them saw the man in the word, none noticed the word; yet
this word was her medical herb, her illuminating lamp, the key of
him (and, alas, but she thought it by feeling her need of one),
the advocate pleading in apology for her. Egoist! She beheld him--
unfortunate, selfdesignated man that he was!--in his good
qualities as well as bad under the implacable lamp, and his good
were drenched in his first person singular. His generosity roared
of I louder than the rest. Conceive him at the age of Dr. Corney's
hero: "Pray, save my wife for me. I shall positively have to get
another if I lose her, and one who may not love me half so well,
or understand the peculiarities of my character and appreciate my
attitudes." He was in his thirty-second year, therefore a young
man, strong and healthy, yet his garrulous return to his principal
theme, his emphasis on I and me, lent him the seeming of an old
man spotted with decaying youth.

"Beware of marrying an Egoist."

Would he help her to escape? The idea of the scene ensuing upon
her petition for release, and the being dragged round the walls of
his egoism, and having her head knocked against the corners,
alarmed her with sensations of sickness.

There was the example of Constantia. But that desperate young lady
had been assisted by a gallant, loving gentleman; she had met a
Captain Oxford.

Clara brooded on those two until they seemed heroic. She
questioned herself. Could she . . .? were one to come? She shut
her eyes in languor, leaning the wrong way of her wishes, yet
unable to say No.

Sir Willoughby had positively said beware! Marrying him would be a
deed committed in spite of his express warning. She went so far
as to conceive him subsequently saying: "I warned you." She
conceived the state of marriage with him as that of a woman tied
not to a man of heart, but to an obelisk lettered all over with
hieroglyphics, and everlastingly hearing him expound them,
relishing renewing his lectures on them.

Full surely this immovable stone-man would not release her. This
petrifaction of egoism would from amazedly to austerely refuse the
petition. His pride would debar him from understanding her desire
to be released. And if she resolved on it, without doing it
straightway in Constantia's manner, the miserable bewilderment of
her father, for whom such a complication would be a tragic
dilemma, had to be thought of. Her father, with all his tenderness
for his child, would make a stand on the point of honour; though
certain to yield to her, he would be distressed in a tempest of
worry; and Dr. Middleton thus afflicted threw up his arms, he
shunned books, shunned speech, and resembled a castaway on the
ocean, with nothing between himself and his calamity. As for the
world, it would be barking at her heels. She might call the man
she wrenched her hand from, Egoist; jilt, the world would call
her. She dwelt bitterly on her agreement with Sir Willoughby
regarding the world, laying it to his charge that her garden had
become a place of nettles, her horizon an unlighted fourth side of
a square.

Clara passed from person to person visiting the Hall. There was
universal, and as she was compelled to see, honest admiration of
the host. Not a soul had a suspicion of his cloaked nature. Her
agony of hypocrisy in accepting their compliments as the bride of
Sir Willoughby Patterne was poorly moderated by contempt of them
for their infatuation. She tried to cheat herself with the thought
that they were right and that she was the foolish and wicked
inconstant. In her anxiety to strangle the rebelliousness which
had been communicated from her mind to her blood, and was present
with her whether her mind was in action or not, she encouraged the
ladies Eleanor and Isabel to magnify the fictitious man of their
idolatry, hoping that she might enter into them imaginatively, 
that she might to some degree subdue herself to the necessity of
her position. If she partly succeeded in stupefying her
antagonism, five minutes of him undid the work.

He requested her to wear the Patterne pearls for a dinner-party of
grand ladies, telling her that he would commission Miss Isabel to
take them to her. Clara begged leave to decline them, on the plea
of having no right to wear them. He laughed at her modish modesty.
"But really it might almost be classed with affectation," said he.
"I give you the right. Virtually you are my wife."

"No."

"Before heaven?"

"No. We are not married."

"As my betrothed, will you wear them, to please me?"

"I would rather not. I cannot wear borrowed jewels. These I cannot
wear. Forgive me, I cannot. And, Willoughby," she said, scorning
herself for want of fortitude in not keeping to the simply blunt
provocative refusal, "does one not look like a victim decked for
the sacrifice?--the garlanded heifer you see on Greek vases, in
that array of jewellery?"

"My dear Clara!" exclaimed the astonished lover, "how can you term
them borrowed, when they are the Patterne jewels, our family
heirloom pearls, unmatched, I venture to affirm, decidedly in my
county and many others, and passing to the use of the mistress of
the house in the natural course of things?"

"They are yours, they are not mine."

"Prospectively they are yours."

"It would be to anticipate the fact to wear them."

"With my consent, my approval? at my request?"

"I am not yet . . . I never may be . . ."

"My wife?" He laughed triumphantly, and silenced her by manly
smothering.

Her scruple was perhaps an honourable one, he said. Perhaps the
jewels were safer in their iron box. He had merely intended a
surprise and gratification to her.

Courage was coming to enable her to speak more plainly, when his
discontinuing to insist on her wearing the jewels, under an
appearance of deference of her wishes, disarmed her by touching
her sympathies.

She said, however, "I fear we do not often agree, Willoughby."

"When you are a little older!" was the irritating answer.

"It would then be too late to make the discovery."

"The discovery, I apprehend, is not imperative, my love."

"It seems to me that our minds are opposed."

"I should," said he, "have been awake to it at a single
indication, be sure."

"But I know," she pursued, "I have learned that the ideal of
conduct for women is to subject their minds to the part of an
accompaniment."

"For women, my love? my wife will be in natural harmony with me."

"Ah!" She compressed her lips. The yawn would come. "I am sleepier
here than anywhere."

"Ours, my Clara, is the finest air of the kingdom. It has the
effect of sea-air."

"But if I am always asleep here?"

"We shall have to make a public exhibition of the Beauty."

This dash of his liveliness defeated her.

She left him, feeling the contempt of the brain feverishly
quickened and fine-pointed, for the brain chewing the cud in the
happy pastures of unawakedness. So violent was the fever, so keen
her introspection, that she spared few, and Vernon was not among
them. Young Crossjay, whom she considered the least able of all to
act as an ally, was the only one she courted with a real desire to
please him, he was the one she affectionately envied; he was the
youngest, the freest, he had the world before him, and he did not
know how horrible the world was, or could be made to look. She
loved the boy from expecting nothing of him. Others, Vernon
Whitford, for instance, could help, and moved no hand. He read her
case. A scrutiny so penetrating under its air of abstract
thoughtfulness, though his eyes did but rest on her a second or
two, signified that he read her line by line, and to the end--
excepting what she thought of him for probing her with that sharp
steel of insight without a purpose.

She knew her mind's injustice. It was her case, her lamentable
case--the impatient panic-stricken nerves of a captured wild
creature which cried for help. She exaggerated her sufferings to
get strength to throw them off, and lost it in the recognition
that they were exaggerated: and out of the conflict issued
recklessness, with a cry as wild as any coming of madness; for she
did not blush in saying to herself. "If some one loved me!" Before
hearing of Constantia, she had mused upon liberty as a virgin
Goddess--men were out of her thoughts; even the figure of a
rescuer, if one dawned in her mind, was more angel than hero. That
fair childish maidenliness had ceased. With her body straining in
her dragon's grasp, with the savour of loathing, unable to
contend, unable to speak aloud, she began to speak to herself, and
all the health of her nature made her outcry womanly: "If I were
loved!"--not for the sake of love, but for free breathing; and
her utterance of it was to insure life and enduringness to the
wish, as the yearning of a mother on a drowning ship is to get her
infant to shore. "If some noble gentleman could see me as I am and
not disdain to aid me! Oh! to be caught up out of this prison of
thorns and brambles. I cannot tear my own way out. I am a coward.
My cry for help confesses that. A beckoning of a finger would
change me, I believe. I could fly bleeding and through hootings to
a comrade. Oh! a comrade! I do not want a lover. I should find
another Egoist, not so bad, but enough to make me take a breath
like death. I could follow a soldier, like poor Sally or Molly. He
stakes his life for his country, and a woman may be proud of the
worst of men who do that. Constantia met a soldier. Perhaps she
prayed and her prayer was answered. She did ill. But, oh, how I
love her for it! His name was Harry Oxford. Papa would call him
her Perseus. She must have felt that there was no explaining what
she suffered. She had only to act, to plunge. First she fixed her
mind on Harry Oxford. To be able to speak his name and see him
awaiting her, must have been relief, a reprieve. She did not
waver, she cut the links, she signed herself over. Oh, brave girl!
what do you think of me? But I have no Harry Whitford, I am alone.
Let anything be said against women; we must be very bad to have
such bad things written of us: only, say this, that to ask them to
sign themselves over by oath and ceremony, because of an ignorant
promise, to the man they have been mistaken in, is . . . it is--"
the sudden consciousness that she had put another name for Oxford,
struck her a buffet, drowning her in crimson.


CHAPTER XI

The Double-Blossom Wild Cherry-Tree

Sir Willoughby chose a moment when Clara was with him and he had a
good retreat through folding-windows to the lawn, in case of
cogency on the enemy's part, to attack his cousin regarding the
preposterous plot to upset the family by a scamper to London: "By
the way, Vernon, what is this you've been mumbling to everybody
save me, about leaving us to pitch yourself into the stew-pot and
be made broth of? London is no better, and you are fit for
considerably better. Don't, I beg you, continue to annoy me. Take
a run abroad, if you are restless. Take two or three months, and
join us as we are travelling home; and then think of settling,
pray. Follow my example, if you like. You can have one of my
cottages, or a place built for you. Anything to keep a man from
destroying the sense of stability about one. In London, my dear
old fellow, you lose your identity. What are you there? I ask you,
what? One has the feeling of the house crumbling when a man is
perpetually for shifting and cannot fix himself. Here you are
known, you can study at your ease; up in London you are nobody; I
tell you honestly, I feel it myself., a week of London literally
drives me home to discover the individual where I left him. Be
advised. You don't mean to go."

"I have the intention," said Vernon.

"Why?"

"I've mentioned it to you."

"To my face?"

"Over your shoulder is generally the only chance you give me."

"You have not mentioned it to me, to my knowledge. As to the
reason, I might hear a dozen of your reasons, and I should not
understand one. It's against your interests and against my wishes.
Come, friend, I am not the only one you distress. Why, Vernon, you
yourself have said that the English would be very perfect Jews if
they could manage to live on the patriarchal system. You said it,
yes, you said it!--but I recollect it clearly. Oh, as for your
double-meanings, you said the thing, and you jeered at the
incapacity of English families to live together, on account of bad
temper; and now you are the first to break up our union! I
decidedly do not profess to be a perfect Jew, but I do . . ."

Sir Willoughby caught signs of a probably smiling commerce between
his bride and his cousin. He raised his face, appeared to be
consulting his eyelids, and resolved to laugh: "Well, I own it. I
do like the idea of living patriarchally." He turned to Clara.
"The Rev. Doctor one of us!"

"My father?" she said.

"Why not?"

"Papa's habits are those of a scholar."

"That you might not be separated from him, my dear!"

Clara thanked Sir Willoughby for the kindness of thinking of her
father, mentally analysing the kindness, in which at least she
found no unkindness, scarcely egoism, though she knew it to be
there.

"We might propose it," said he..

"As a compliment?"

"If he would condescend to accept it as a compliment. These great
scholars! ... And if Vernon goes, our inducement for Dr. Middleton
to stay ... But it is too absurd for discussion.. Oh, Vernon,
about Master Crossjay; I will see to it."

He was about to give Vernon his shoulder and step into the
garden, when Clara said, "You will have Crossjay trained for the
navy, Willoughby? There is not a day to lose."

"Yes, yes; I will see to it. Depend on me for holding the young
rascal in view."

He presented his hand to her to lead her over the step to the
gravel, surprised to behold how flushed she was.

She responded to the invitation by putting her hand forth from a
bent elbow, with hesitating fingers. "It should not be postponed,
Willoughby."

Her attitude suggested a stipulation before she touched him.

"It's an affair of money, as you know, Willoughby," said Vernon.
"If I'm in London, I can't well provide for the boy for some time
to come, or it's not certain that I can."

"Why on earth should you go?"

"That's another matter. I want you to take my place with him."

"In which case the circumstances are changed. I am responsible for
him, and I have a right to bring him up according to my own
prescription."

"We are likely to have one idle lout the more."

"I guarantee to make a gentleman of him."

"We have too many of your gentlemen already."

"You can't have enough, my good Vernon."

"They're the national apology for indolence. Training a penniless
boy to be one of them is nearly as bad as an education in a
thieves" den; he will be just as much at war with society, if not
game for the police."

"Vernon, have you seen Crossjay's father, the now Captain of
Marines? I think you have."

"He's a good man and a very gallant officer."

"And in spite of his qualities he's a cub, and an old cub. He is a
captain now, but he takes that rank very late, you will own. There
you have what you call a good man, undoubtedly a gallant officer,
neutralized by the fact that he is not a gentleman. Holding
intercourse with him is out of the question. No wonder Government
declines to advance him rapidly. Young Crossjay does not bear your
name. He bears mine, and on that point alone I should have a voice
in the settlement of his career. And I say emphatically that a
drawing-room approval of a young man is the best certificate for
his general chances in life. I know of a City of London merchant
of some sort, and I know a firm of lawyers, who will have none but
University men at their office; at least, they have the
preference."

"Crossjay has a bullet head, fit neither for the University nor
the drawing-room," said Vernon; "equal to fighting and dying for
you, and that's all."

Sir Willoughby contented himself with replying, "The lad is a
favourite of mine."

His anxiety to escape a rejoinder caused him to step into the
garden, leaving Clara behind him. "My love!" said he, in apology,
as he turned to her. She could not look stern, but she had a look
without a dimple to soften it, and her eyes shone. For she had
wagered in her heart that the dialogue she provoked upon Crossjay
would expose the Egoist. And there were other motives, wrapped up
and intertwisted, unrecognizable, sufficient to strike her with
worse than the flush of her self-knowledge of wickedness when she
detained him to speak of Crossjay before Vernon.

At last it had been seen that she was conscious of suffering in
her association with this Egoist! Vernon stood for the world taken
into her confidence. The world, then, would not think so ill of
her, she thought hopefully, at the same time that she thought most
evilly of herself. But self-accusations were for the day of
reckoning; she would and must have the world with her, or the
belief that it was coming to her, in the terrible struggle she
foresaw within her horizon of self, now her utter boundary. She
needed it for the inevitable conflict. Little sacrifices of her
honesty might be made. Considering how weak she was, how solitary,
how dismally entangled, daily disgraced beyond the power of any
veiling to conceal from her fiery sensations, a little hypocrisy
was a poor girl's natural weapon. She crushed her conscientious
mind with the assurance that it was magnifying trifles: not
entirely unaware that she was thereby preparing it for a
convenient blindness in the presence of dread alternatives; but
the pride of laying such stress on small sins gave her purity a
blush of pleasure and overcame the inner warning. In truth she
dared not think evilly of herself for long, sailing into battle as
she was. Nuns and anchorites may; they have leisure. She regretted
the forfeits she had to pay for self-assistance, and, if it might
be won, the world's; regretted, felt the peril of the loss, and
took them up and flung them.

"You see, old Vernon has no argument," Willoughby said to her.

He drew her hand more securely on his arm to make her sensible that
she leaned on a pillar of strength.

"Whenever the little brain is in doubt, perplexed, undecided which
course to adopt, she will come to me, will she not? I shall always
listen," he resumed, soothingly. "My own! and I to you when the
world vexes me. So we round our completeness. You will know me;
you will know me in good time. I am not a mystery to those to whom
I unfold myself. I do not pretend to mystery: yet, I will confess,
your home--your heart's--Willoughby is not exactly identical with
the Willoughby before the world. One must be armed against that
rough beast."

Certain is the vengeance of the young upon monotony; nothing more
certain. They do not scheme it, but sameness is a poison to their
systems; and vengeance is their heartier breathing, their stretch
of the limbs, run in the fields; nature avenges them.

"When does Colonel De Craye arrive?" said Clara.

"Horace? In two or three days. You wish him to be on the spot to
learn his part, my love?"

She had not flown forward to the thought of Colonel De Craye's
arrival; she knew not why she had mentioned him; but now she flew
back, shocked, first into shadowy subterfuge, and then into the
criminal's dock.

"I do not wish him to be here. I do not know that he has a part to
learn. I have no wish. Willoughby, did you not say I should come
to you and you would listen?--will you listen? I am so
commonplace that I shall not be understood by you unless you take
my words for the very meaning of the words. I am unworthy. I am
volatile. I love my liberty. I want to be free . . ."

"Flitch!" he called.

It sounded necromantic.

"Pardon me, my love," he said. "The man you see yonder violates my
express injunction that he is not to come on my grounds, and here
I find him on the borders of my garden!"

Sir Willoughby waved his hand to the abject figure of a man
standing to intercept him.

"Volatile, unworthy, liberty--my dearest!" he bent to her when
the man had appeased him by departing, "you are at liberty within
the law, like all good women; I shall control and direct your
volatility; and your sense of worthiness must be re-established
when we are more intimate; it is timidity. The sense of
unworthiness is a guarantee of worthiness ensuing. I believe I am
in the vein of a sermon! Whose the fault? The sight of that man
was annoying. Flitch was a stable-boy, groom, and coachman, like
his father before him, at the Hall thirty years; his father died
in our service. Mr. Flitch had not a single grievance here; only
one day the demon seizes him with the notion of bettering himself
he wants his independence, and he presents himself to me with a
story of a shop in our county town.--Flitch! remember, if you go
you go for good.--Oh, he quite comprehended.--Very well;
good-bye, Flitch;--the man was respectful: he looked the fool he
was very soon to turn out to be. Since then, within a period of
several years, I have had him, against my express injunctions, ten
times on my grounds. It's curious to calculate. Of course the shop
failed, and Flitch's independence consists in walking about with
his hands in his empty pockets, and looking at the Hall from some
elevation near."

"Is he married? Has he children?" said Clara.

"Nine; and a wife that cannot cook or sew or wash linen."

"You could not give him employment?"

"After his having dismissed himself?"

"It might be overlooked."

"Here he was happy. He decided to go elsewhere, to be free--of
course, of my yoke. He quitted my service against my warning.
Flitch, we will say, emigrated with his wife and children, and the
ship foundered. He returns, but his place is filled; he is a ghost
here, and I object to ghosts."

"Some work might be found for him."

"It will be the same with old Vernon, my dear. If he goes, he goes
for good. It is the vital principle of my authority to insist on
that. A dead leaf might as reasonably demand to return to the
tree. Once off, off for all eternity! I am sorry. but such was
your decision, my friend. I have, you see, Clara, elements in
me--"

"Dreadful!"

"Exert your persuasive powers with Vernon. You can do well-nigh
what you will with the old fellow. We have Miss Dale this evening
for a week or two. Lead him to some ideas of her.--Elements in
me, I was remarking, which will no more bear to be handled
carelessly than gunpowder. At the same time, there is no reason
why they should not be respected, managed with some degree of
regard for me and attention to consequences. Those who have not
done so have repented."

"You do not speak to others of the elements in you," said Clara.

"I certainly do not: I have but one bride," was his handsome
reply.

"Is it fair to me that you should show me the worst of you?"

"All myself, my own?"

His ingratiating droop and familiar smile rendered "All myself" so
affectionately meaningful in its happy reliance upon her excess of
love, that at last she understood she was expected to worship him
and uphold him for whatsoever he might be, without any estimation
of qualities: as indeed love does, or young love does: as she
perhaps did once, before he chilled her senses. That was before
her "little brain" had become active and had turned her senses to
revolt.

It was on the full river of love that Sir Willoughby supposed the
whole floating bulk of his personality to be securely sustained;
and therefore it was that, believing himself swimming at his ease,
he discoursed of himself.

She went straight away from that idea with her mental exclamation:
"Why does he not paint himself in brighter colours to me!" and the
question: "Has he no ideal of generosity and chivalry?"

But the unfortunate gentleman imagined himself to be loved, on
Love's very bosom. He fancied that everything relating to himself
excited maidenly curiosity, womanly reverence, ardours to know
more of him, which he was ever willing to satisfy by repeating the
same things. His notion of women was the primitive black and
white: there are good women, bad women; and he possessed a good
one. His high opinion of himself fortified the belief that
Providence, as a matter of justice and fitness, must necessarily
select a good one for him--or what are we to think of Providence?
And this female, shaped by that informing hand, would naturally be
in harmony with him, from the centre of his profound identity to
the raying circle of his variations. Know the centre, you know the
circle, and you discover that the variations are simply
characteristics, but you must travel on the rays from the circle
to get to the centre. Consequently Sir Willoughby put Miss
Middleton on one or other of these converging lines from time to
time. Us, too, he drags into the deeps, but when we have harpooned
a whale and are attached to the rope, down we must go; the miracle
is to see us rise again.

Women of mixed essences shading off the divine to the considerably
lower were outside his vision of woman. His mind could as little
admit an angel in pottery as a rogue in porcelain. For him they
were what they were when fashioned at the beginning; many cracked,
many stained, here and there a perfect specimen designed for the
elect of men. At a whisper of the world he shut the prude's door
on them with a slam; himself would have branded them with the
letters in the hue of fire. Privately he did so; and he was
constituted by his extreme sensitiveness and taste for
ultra-feminine refinement to be a severe critic of them during the
carnival of egoism, the love-season. Constantia ... can it he
told?  She had been, be it said, a fair and frank young merchant
with him in that season; she was of a nature to be a mother of
heroes; she met the salute, almost half-way, ingenuously unlike
the coming mothers of the regiments of marionettes, who retire in
vapours, downcast, as by convention; ladies most flattering to the
egoistical gentleman, for they proclaim him the "first".
Constantia's offence had been no greater, but it was not that
dramatic performance of purity which he desired of an affianced
lady, and so the offence was great.

The love-season is the carnival of egoism, and it brings the
touchstone to our natures. I speak of love, not the mask, and not
of the flutings upon the theme of love, but of the passion; a
flame having, like our mortality, death in it as well as life,
that may or may not be lasting. Applied to Sir Willoughby, as to
thousands of civilized males, the touchstone found him requiring
to be dealt with by his betrothed as an original savage. She was
required to play incessantly on the first reclaiming chord which
led our ancestral satyr to the measures of the dance, the
threading of the maze, and the setting conformably to his partner
before it was accorded to him to spin her with both hands and a
chirrup of his frisky heels. To keep him in awe and hold him
enchained, there are things she must never do, dare never say,
must not think. She must be cloistral. Now, strange and awful
though it be to hear, women perceive this requirement of them in
the spirit of the man; they perceive, too, and it may be
gratefully, that they address their performances less to the
taming of the green and prankish monsieur of the forest than to the
pacification of a voracious aesthetic gluttony, craving them
insatiably, through all the tenses, with shrieks of the lamentable
letter "I" for their purity. Whether they see that it has its
foundation in the sensual, and distinguish the ultra-refined but
lineally great-grandson of the Hoof in this vast and dainty
exacting appetite is uncertain. They probably do not; the more the
damage; for in the appeasement of the glutton they have to
practise much simulation; they are in their way losers like their
ancient mothers. It is the palpable and material of them still
which they are tempted to flourish, wherewith to invite and allay
pursuit: a condition under which the spiritual, wherein their hope
lies, languishes. The capaciously strong in soul among women will
ultimately detect an infinite grossness in the demand for purity
infinite, spotless bloom. Earlier or later they see they have been
victims of the singular Egoist, have worn a mask of ignorance to be
named innocent, have turned themselves into market produce for
his delight, and have really abandoned the commodity in
ministering to the lust for it, suffered themselves to be dragged
ages back in playing upon the fleshly innocence of happy accident
to gratify his jealous greed of possession, when it should have
been their task to set the soul above the fairest fortune and the
gift of strength in women beyond ornamental whiteness. Are they
not of nature warriors, like men?--men's mates to bear them
heroes instead of puppets? But the devouring male Egoist prefers
them as inanimate overwrought polished pure metal precious
vessels, fresh from the hands of the artificer, for him to walk
away with hugging, call all his own, drink of, and fill and drink
of, and forget that he stole them.

This running off on a by-road is no deviation from Sir Willoughby
Patterne and Miss Clara Middleton. He, a fairly intelligent man,
and very sensitive, was blinded to what was going on within her
visibly enough, by her production of the article he demanded of
her sex. He had to leave the fair young lady to ride to his
county-town, and his design was to conduct her through the covert
of a group of laurels, there to revel in her soft confusion. She
resisted; nay, resolutely returned to the lawn-sward. He
contrasted her with Constantia in the amorous time, and rejoiced
in his disappointment. He saw the goddess Modesty guarding Purity;
and one would be bold to say that he did not hear the Precepts,
Purity's aged grannams maternal and paternal, cawing approval of
her over their munching gums. And if you ask whether a man,
sensitive and a lover, can be so blinded, you are condemned to
re-peruse the foregoing paragraph.

Miss Middleton was not sufficiently instructed in the position of
her sex to know that she had plunged herself in the thick of the
strife of one of their great battles. Her personal position,
however, was instilling knowledge rapidly, as a disease in the
frame teaches us what we are and have to contend with. Could she
marry this man? He was evidently manageable. Could she condescend
to the use of arts in managing him to obtain a placable life?--a
horror of swampy flatness! So vividly did the sight of that dead
heaven over an unvarying level earth swim on her fancy, that she
shut her eyes in angry exclusion of it as if it were outside,
assailing her; and she nearly stumbled upon young Crossjay.

"Oh, have I hurt you?" he cried.

"No," said she, "it was my fault. Lead me somewhere away from
everybody."

The boy took her hand, and she resumed her thoughts; and, pressing
his fingers and feeling warm to him both for his presence and
silence, so does the blood in youth lead the mind, even cool and
innocent blood, even with a touch, that she said to herself, "And
if I marry, and then ... Where will honour be then? I marry him to
be true to my word of honour, and if then ... !" An intolerable
languor caused her to sigh profoundly. It is written as she
thought it; she thought in blanks, as girls do, and some women. A
shadow of the male Egoist is in the chamber of their brains
overawing them.

"Were I to marry, and to run!" There is the thought; she is
offered up to your mercy. We are dealing with a girl feeling
herself desperately situated, and not a fool.

"I'm sure you're dead tired, though," said Crossjay.

"No, I am not; what makes you think so?" said Clara.

"I do think so."

"But why do you think so?"

"You're so hot."

"What makes you think that?"

"You're so red."

"So are you, Crossjay."

"I'm only red in the middle of the cheeks, except when I've been
running. And then you talk to yourself, just as boys do when they
are blown."

"Do they?"

"They say: 'I know I could have kept up longer', or, 'my buckle
broke', all to themselves, when they break down running."

"And you have noticed that?"

"And, Miss Middleton, I don't wish you were a boy, but I should
like to live near you all my life and be a gentleman. I'm coming
with Miss Dale this evening to stay at the Hall and be looked
after, instead of stopping with her cousin who takes care of her
father. Perhaps you and I'll play chess at night."

"At night you will go to bed, Crossjay."

"Not if I have Sir Willoughby to catch hold of. He says I'm an
authority on birds" eggs. I can manage rabbits and poultry. Isn't
a farmer a happy man? But he doesn't marry ladies. A cavalry
officer has the best chance."

"But you are going to be a naval officer."

"I don't know. It's not positive. I shall bring my two dormice, and
make them perform gymnastics on the dinnertable. They're such dear
little things. Naval officers are not like Sir Willoughby."

"No, they are not," said Clara, "they give their lives to their
country.

"And then they're dead," said Crossjay.

Clara wished Sir Willoughby were confronting her: she could have
spoken.

She asked the boy where Mr. Whitford was. Crossjay pointed very
secretly in the direction of the double-blossom wild-cherry.
Coming within gaze of the stem, she beheld Vernon stretched at
length, reading, she supposed; asleep, she discovered: his finger
in the leaves of a book; and what book? She had a curiosity to
know the title of the book he would read beneath these boughs, and
grasping Crossjay's hand fast she craned her neck, as one timorous
of a fall in peeping over chasms, for a glimpse of the page; but
immediately, and still with a bent head, she turned her face to
where the load of virginal blossom, whiter than summer-cloud on
the sky, showered and drooped and clustered so thick as to claim
colour and seem, like higher Alpine snows in noon-sunlight, a
flush of white. From deep to deeper heavens of white, her eyes
perched and soared. Wonder lived in her. Happiness in the beauty
of the tree pressed to supplant it, and was more mortal and
narrower. Reflection came, contracting her vision and weighing her
to earth. Her reflection was: "He must be good who loves to be and
sleep beneath the branches of this tree!" She would rather have
clung to her first impression: wonder so divine, so unbounded, was
like soaring into homes of angel-crowded space, sweeping through
folded and on to folded white fountain-bow of wings, in
innumerable columns; but the thought of it was no recovery of it;
she might as well have striven to be a child. The sensation of
happiness promised to be less short-lived in memory, and would
have been had not her present disease of the longing for happiness
ravaged every corner of it for the secret of its existence. The
reflection took root. "He must be good ... !" That reflection
vowed to endure. Poor by comparison with what it displaced, it
presented itself to her as conferring something on him, and she
would not have had it absent though it robbed her.

She looked down. Vernon was dreamily looking up.

She plucked Crossjay hurriedly away, whispering that he had better
not wake Mr. Whitford, and then she proposed to reverse their
previous chase, and she be the hound and he the hare. Crossjay
fetched a magnificent start. On his glancing behind he saw Miss
Middleton walking listlessly, with a hand at her side.

"There's a regular girl!" said he in some disgust; for his theory
was, that girls always have something the matter with them to
spoil a game.


CHAPTER XII

Miss Middleton and Mr. Vernon Whitford

Looking upward, not quite awakened out of a transient doze,
at a fair head circled in dazzling blossom, one may temporize
awhile with common sense, and take it for a vision after the
eyes have regained direction of the mind. Vernon did so until
the plastic vision interwound with reality alarmingly. This is
the embrace of a Melusine who will soon have the brain if she
is encouraged. Slight dalliance with her makes the very diminutive
seem as big as life. He jumped to his feet, rattled his
throat, planted firmness on his brows and mouth, and attacked
the dream-giving earth with tremendous long strides, that his
blood might be lively at the throne of understanding. Miss
Middleton and young Crossjay were within hail: it was her face he
had seen, and still the idea of a vision, chased from his
reasonable wits, knocked hard and again for readmission.
There was little for a man of humble mind toward the sex to
think of in the fact of a young lady's bending rather low to
peep at him asleep, except that the poise of her slender figure,
between an air of spying and of listening, vividly recalled his
likening of her to the Mountain Echo. Man or maid sleeping in the
open air provokes your tiptoe curiosity. Men, it is
known, have in that state cruelly been kissed; and no rights are
bestowed on them, they are teased by a vapourish rapture; what has
happened to them the poor fellows barely divine:
they have a crazy step from that day. But a vision is not so 
distracting; it is our own, we can put it aside and return to it,
play at rich and poor with it, and are not to be summoned before your
laws and rules for secreting it in our treasury. Besides, it
is the golden key of all the possible; new worlds expand beneath 
the dawn it brings us. Just outside reality, it illumines,
enriches and softens real things;--and to desire it in
preference to the simple fact is a damning proof of enervation.

Such was Vernon's winding up of his brief drama of fantasy. He was
aware of the fantastical element in him and soon had it under.
Which of us who is of any worth is without it? He had not much
vanity to trouble him, and passion was quiet, so his task was not
gigantic. Especially be it remarked, that he was a man of quick
pace, the sovereign remedy for the dispersing of the mental
fen-mist. He had tried it and knew that nonsense is to be walked
off

Near the end of the park young Crossjay overtook him, and after
acting the pumped one a trifle more than needful, cried: "I say,
Mr. Whitford, there's Miss Middleton with her handkerchief out."

"What for, my lad?" said Vernon.

"I'm sure I don't know. All of a sudden she bumped down. And,
look what fellows girls are!--here she comes as if nothing had
happened, and I saw her feel at her side."

Clara was shaking her head to express a denial. "I am not at all
unwell," she said. when she came near. "I guessed Crossjay's
business in running up to you; he's a good-for-nothing, officious 
boy. I was tired, and rested for a moment."

Crossjay peered at her eyelids. Vernon looked away and said: "Are
you too tired for a stroll?"

"Not now."

"Shall it be brisk?"

"You have the lead."

He led at a swing of the legs that accelerated young Crossjay's to
the double, but she with her short, swift, equal steps glided
along easily on a fine by his shoulder, and he groaned to think
that of all the girls of earth this one should have been
chosen for the position of fine lady.

"You won't tire me," said she, in answer to his look.

"You remind me of the little Piedmontese Bersaglieri on the
march."

"I have seen them trotting into Como from Milan."

"They cover a quantity of ground in a day, if the ground's flat.
You want another sort of step for the mountains."

"I should not attempt to dance up."

"They soon tame romantic notions of them."

"The mountains tame luxurious dreams, you mean. I see how they are
conquered. I can plod. Anything to be high up!"

"Well, there you have the secret of good work: to plod on and
still keep the passion fresh."

"Yes, when we have an aim in view."

"We always have one."

"Captives have?"

"More than the rest of us."

Ignorant man! What of wives miserably wedded? What aim in view
have these most woeful captives? Horror shrouds it, and shame
reddens through the folds to tell of innermost horror.

"Take me back to the mountains, if you please, Mr. Whitford," Miss
Middleton said, fallen out of sympathy with him. "Captives have
death in view, but that is not an aim."

"Why may not captives expect a release?"

"Hardly from a tyrant."

"If you are thinking of tyrants, it may be so. Say the tyrant
dies?"

"The prison-gates are unlocked and out comes a skeleton. But why
will you talk of skeletons! The very name of mountain seems life
in comparison with any other subject."

"I assure you," said Vernon, with the fervour of a man lighting on
an actual truth in his conversation with a young lady, "it's not
the first time I have thought you would be at home in the Alps.
You would walk and climb as well as you dance."

She liked to hear Clara Middleton talked of, and of her having
been thought of, and giving him friendly eyes, barely noticing
that he was in a glow. she said: "If you speak so encouragingly I
shall fancy we are near an ascent."

"I wish we were," said he.

"We can realize it by dwelling on it, don't you think?"

"We can begin climbing."

"Oh!" she squeezed herself shadowily.

"Which mountain shall it be?" said Vernon, in the right real
earnest tone.

Miss Middleton suggested a lady's mountain first, for a trial.
"And then, if you think well enough of me--if I have not stumbled
more than twice, or asked more than ten times how far it is from
the top, I should like to be promoted to scale a giant."

They went up to some of the lesser heights of Switzerland and
Styria, and settled in South Tyrol, the young lady preferring this
district for the strenuous exercise of her climbing powers because
she loved Italian colour; and it seemed an exceedingly good reason
to the genial imagination she had awakened in Mr. Whitford.
"Though," said he, abruptly, "you are not so much Italian as
French."

She hoped she was English, she remarked.

"Of course you are English; . . . yes." He moderated his ascent
with the halting affirmative.

She inquired wonderingly why he spoke in apparent hesitation.

"Well, you have French feet, for example: French wits, French
impatience," he lowered his voice, "and charm"

"And love of compliments."

"Possibly. I was not conscious of paying them"

"And a disposition to rebel?"

"To challenge authority, at least."

"That is a dreadful character."

"At all events, it is a character."

"Fit for an Alpine comrade?"

"For the best of comrades anywhere."

"It is not a piece of drawing-room sculpture: that is the most one
can say for it!" she dropped a dramatic sigh.

Had he been willing she would have continued the theme, for the
pleasure a poor creature long gnawing her sensations finds in
seeing herself from the outside. It fell away. After a silence,
she could not renew it; and he was evidently indifferent, having
to his own satisfaction dissected and stamped her a foreigner.
With it passed her holiday. She had forgotten Sir Willoughby: she
remembered him and said. "You knew Miss Durham, Mr. Whitford?"

He answered briefly, "I did."

"Was she? . . ." some hot-faced inquiry peered forth and withdrew.

"Very handsome," said Vernon.

"English?"

"Yes; the dashing style of English."

"Very courageous."

"I dare say she had a kind of courage."

"She did very wrong."

"I won't say no. She discovered a man more of a match with
herself; luckily not too late. We're at the mercy . .

"Was she not unpardonable?"

"I should be sorry to think that of any one."

"But you agree that she did wrong."

"I suppose I do. She made a mistake and she corrected it. if she
had not, she would have made a greater mistake."

"The manner. . ."

"That was bad--as far as we know. The world has not much right to
judge. A false start must now and then be made. It's better not to
take notice of it, I think."

"What is it we are at the mercy of?"

"Currents of feeling, our natures. I am the last man to preach on
the subject: young ladies are enigmas to me; I fancy they must
have a natural perception of the husband suitable to them, and the
reverse; and if they have a certain degree of courage, it follows
that they please themselves."

"They are not to reflect on the harm they do?" said Miss
Middleton.

"By all means let them reflect; they hurt nobody by doing that."

"But a breach of faith!"

"If the faith can be kept through life, all's well."

"And then there is the cruelty, the injury!"

"I really think that if a young lady came to me to inform me she
must break our engagement--I have never been put to the proof,
but to suppose it:--I should not think her cruel."

"Then she would not be much of a loss."

"And I should not think so for this reason, that it is impossible
for a girl to come to such a resolution without previously showing
signs of it to her. . . the man she is engaged to. I think it
unfair to engage a girl for longer than a week or two, just time
enough for her preparations and publications."

"If he is always intent on himself, signs are likely to be unheeded
by him," said Miss Middleton.

He did not answer, and she said, quickly:

"It must always be a cruelty. The world will think so. It is an
act of inconstancy."

"If they knew one another well before they were engaged."

"Are you not singularly tolerant?" said she.

To which Vernon replied with airy cordiality:--

"In some cases it is right to judge by results; we'll leave
severity to the historian, who is bound to be a professional
moralist and put pleas of human nature out of the scales. The lady
in question may have been to blame, but no hearts were broken, and
here we have four happy instead of two miserable."

His persecuting geniality of countenance appealed to her to
confirm this judgement by results, and she nodded and said:
"Four," as the awe-stricken speak.

From that moment until young Crossjay fell into the green-rutted 
lane from a tree, and was got on his legs half stunned, with a
hanging lip and a face like the inside of a flayed eel-skin, she
might have been walking in the desert, and alone, for the pleasure
she had in society.

They led the fated lad home between them, singularly drawn
together by their joint ministrations to him, in which her
delicacy had to stand fire, and sweet good-nature made naught of
any trial. They were hand in hand with the little fellow as
physician and professional nurse.


CHAPTER XIII

The First Effort after Freedom

Crossjay's accident was only another proof, as Vernon told
Miss Dale, that the boy was but half monkey.

"Something fresh?" she exclaimed on seeing him brought into the
Hall, where she had just arrived.

"Simply a continuation," said Vernon. "He is not so prehensile as
he should be. He probably in extremity relies on the tail that has
been docked. Are you a man, Crossjay?"

"I should think I was!" Crossjay replied, with an old man's voice,
and a ghastly twitch for a smile overwhelmed the compassionate 
ladies.

Miss Dale took possession of him. "You err in the other
direction," she remarked to Vernon.

"But a little bracing roughness is better than spoiling him." said
Miss Middleton.

She did not receive an answer, and she thought: "Whatever
Willoughby does is right, to this lady!"

Clara's impression was renewed when Sir Willoughby sat beside Miss
Dale in the evening; and certainly she had never seen him shine so
picturesquely as in his bearing with Miss Dale. The sprightly
sallies of the two, their rallyings, their laughter, and her fine
eyes, and his handsome gestures, won attention like a fencing
match of a couple keen with the foils to display the mutual skill.
And it was his design that she should admire the display; he was
anything but obtuse; enjoying the match as he did and necessarily
did to act so excellent a part in it, he meant the observer to see
the man he was with a lady not of raw understanding. So it went on
from day to day for three days.

She fancied once that she detected the agreeable stirring of the
brood of jealousy, and found it neither in her heart nor in her
mind, but in the book of wishes, well known to the young where
they write matter which may sometimes be independent of both those
volcanic albums. Jealousy would have been a relief to her, a dear
devil's aid. She studied the complexion of jealousy to delude
herself with the sense of the spirit being in her, and all the
while she laughed, as at a vile theatre whereof the imperfection
of the stage machinery rather than the performance is the wretched
source of amusement.

Vernon had deeply depressed her. She was hunted by the figure 4.
Four happy instead of two miserable. He had said it, involving her
among the four; and so it must be, she considered. and she must
be as happy as she could; for not only was he incapable of
perceiving her state, he was unable to imagine other circumstances
to surround her. How, to be just to him, were they imaginable by
him or any one?

Her horrible isolation of secrecy in a world amiable in 
unsuspectingness frightened her. To fling away her secret, to
conform, to be unrebellious, uncritical, submissive, became an
impatient desire; and the task did not appear so difficult since
Miss Dale's arrival. Endearments had been rare, more formal;
living bodily untroubled and unashamed, and, as she phrased it,
having no one to care for her, she turned insensibly in the
direction where she was due; she slightly imitated Miss Dale's
colloquial responsiveness. To tell truth, she felt vivacious in a
moderate way with Willoughby after seeing him with Miss Dale.
Liberty wore the aspect of a towering prison-wall; the desperate
undertaking of climbing one side and dropping to the other was
more than she, unaided, could resolve on; consequently, as no one
cared for her, a worthless creature might as well cease dreaming
and stipulating for the fulfilment of her dreams; she might as
well yield to her fate; nay, make the best of it.

Sir Willoughby was flattered and satisfied. Clara's adopted
vivacity proved his thorough knowledge of feminine nature; nor did
her feebleness in sustaining it displease him. A steady look of
hers had of late perplexed the man, and he was comforted by
signs of her inefficiency where he excelled. The effort and the
failure were both of good omen.

But she could not continue the effort. He had overweighted her too
much for the mimicry of a sentiment to harden and have an
apparently natural place among her impulses; and now an idea came
to her that he might, it might be hoped, possibly see in Miss
Dale, by present contrast, the mate he sought; by contrast with an
unanswering creature like herself, he might perhaps realize in
Miss Dale's greater accomplishments and her devotion to him the
merit of suitability; he might be induced to do her justice. Dim as
the loop-hole was, Clara fixed her mind on it till it gathered
light. And as a prelude to action, she plunged herself into a
state of such profound humility, that to accuse it of being
simulated would he venturesome, though it was not positive. The
tempers of the young are liquid fires in isles of quicksand; the
precious metals not yet cooled in a solid earth. Her compassion
for Laetitia was less forced, but really she was almost as earnest
in her self-abasement, for she had not latterly been brilliant, not
even adequate to the ordinary requirements of conversation. She
had no courage, no wit, no diligence, nothing that she could
distinguish save discontentment like a corroding acid, and she went
so far in sincerity as with a curious shift of feeling to pity the
man plighted to her. If it suited her purpose to pity Sir
Willoughby, she was not moved by policy, be assured; her needs
were her nature, her moods her mind; she had the capacity to make
anything serve her by passing into it with the glance which
discerned its usefulness; and this is how it is that the young,
when they are in trouble, without approaching the elevation of
scientific hypocrites, can teach that able class lessons in
hypocrisy.

"Why should not Willoughby be happy?" she said; and the
exclamation was pushed forth by the second thought: "Then I shall
be free!" Still that thought came second.

The desire for the happiness of Willoughby was fervent on his
behalf and wafted her far from friends and letters to a narrow
Tyrolean valley, where a shallow river ran, with the indentations
of a remotely seen army of winding ranks in column, topaz over the
pebbles to hollows of ravishing emerald. There sat Liberty, after
her fearful leap over the prison-wall, at peace to watch the water
and the falls of sunshine on the mountain above, between
descending pine-stem shadows. Clara's wish for his happiness, as
soon as she had housed herself in the imagination of her freedom,
was of a purity that made it seem exceedingly easy for her to
speak to him.

The opportunity was offered by Sir Willoughby. Every morning after
breakfast Miss Dale walked across the park to see her father, and
on this occasion Sir Willoughby and Miss Middleton went with her
as far as the lake, all three discoursing of the beauty of various
trees, birches, aspens, poplars, beeches, then in their new green.
Miss Dale loved the aspen, Miss Middleton the beech, Sir
Willoughby the birch, and pretty things were said by each in
praise of the favoured object, particularly by Miss Dale. So much
so that when she had gone on he recalled one of her remarks, and
said: "I believe, if the whole place were swept away to-morrow,
Laetitia Dale could reconstruct it and put those aspens on the
north of the lake in number and situation correctly where you have
them now. I would guarantee her description of it in absence
correct."

"Why should she be absent?" said Clara, palpitating.

"Well, why!" returned Sir Willoughby. "As you say, there is no
reason why. The art of life, and mine will be principally a
country life--town is not life, but a tornado whirling atoms
--the art is to associate a group of sympathetic friends in our
neighbourhood; and it is a fact worth noting that if ever I feel
tired of the place, a short talk with Laetitia Dale refreshes it
more than a month or two on the Continent. She has the well of
enthusiasm. And there is a great advantage in having a cultivated 
person at command, with whom one can chat of any topic under the
sun. I repeat, you have no need of town if you have friends like
Laetitia Dale within call. My mother esteemed her highly."

"Willoughby, she is not obliged to go."

"I hope not. And, my love, I rejoice that you have taken to her.
Her father's health is poor. She would be a young spinster to live
alone in a country cottage."

"What of your scheme?"

"Old Vernon is a very foolish fellow."

"He has declined?"

"Not a word on the subject! I have only to propose it to be
snubbed, I know."

"You may not be aware how you throw him into the shade with her."

"Nothing seems to teach him the art of dialogue with ladies."

"Are not gentlemen shy when they see themselves outshone?"

"He hasn't it, my love: Vernon is deficient in the lady's tongue."

"I respect him for that."

"Outshone. you say? I do not know of any shining--save to one, who
lights me, path and person!"

The identity of the one was conveyed to her in a bow and a soft
pressure.

"Not only has he not the lady's tongue, which I hold to be a man's
proper accomplishment," continued Sir Willoughby, "he cannot turn
his advantages to account. Here has Miss Dale been with him now
four days in the house. They are exactly on the same footing as
when she entered it. You ask? I will tell you. It is this: it is
want of warmth. Old Vernon is a scholar--and a fish. Well,
perhaps he has cause to be shy of matrimony; but he is a fish."

"You are reconciled to his leaving you?"

"False alarm! The resolution to do anything unaccustomed is quite
beyond old Vernon."

"But if Mr. Oxford--Whitford ... your swans coming sailing up the
lake, how beautiful they look when they are indignant! I was going
to ask you, surely men witnessing a marked admiration for some one
else will naturally be discouraged?"

Sir Willoughby stiffened with sudden enlightenment.

Though the word jealousy had not been spoken, the drift of her
observations was clear. Smiling inwardly, he said, and the
sentences were not enigmas to her: "Surely, too, young ladies ...
a little?--Too far? But an old friendship! About the same as the
fitting of an old glove to a hand. Hand and glove have only to
meet. Where there is natural harmony you would not have discord.
Ay, but you have it if you check the harmony. My dear girl! You
child!"

He had actually, in this parabolic, and commendable, obscureness, 
for which she thanked him in her soul, struck the very point she
had not named and did not wish to hear named, but wished him to
strike; he was anything but obtuse. His exultation, of the
compressed sort, was extreme, on hearing her cry out:

"Young ladies may be. Oh! not I, not I. I can convince you. Not
that. Believe me, Willoughby. I do not know what it is to feel
that, or anything like it. I cannot conceive a claim on any one's
life--as a claim: or the continuation of an engagement not
founded on perfect, perfect sympathy. How should I feel it, then?
It is, as you say of Mr. Ox--Whitford, beyond me."

Sir Willoughby caught up the Ox--Whitford.

Bursting with laughter in his joyful pride, he called it a
portrait of old Vernon in society. For she thought a trifle too
highly of Vernon, as here and there a raw young lady does think of
the friends of her plighted man. which is waste of substance
properly belonging to him, as it were, in the loftier sense, an
expenditure in genuflexions to wayside idols of the reverence
she should bring intact to the temple. Derision instructs her.

Of the other subject--her jealousy--he had no desire to hear
more. She had winced: the woman had been touched to smarting in
the girl: enough. She attempted the subject once, but faintly, and
his careless parrying threw her out. Clara could have bitten her
tongue for that reiterated stupid slip on the name of Whitford;
and because she was innocent at heart she persisted in asking
herself how she could be guilty of it.

"You both know the botanic titles of these wild flowers," she
said.

"Who?" he inquired.

"You and Miss Dale."

Sir Willoughby shrugged. He was amused.

"No woman on earth will grace a barouche so exquisitely as my
Clara."

"Where?" said she.

"During our annual two months in London. I drive a barouche there,
and venture to prophesy that my equipage will create the greatest
excitement of any in London. I see old Horace De Craye gazing!"

She sighed. She could not drag him to the word, or a hint of it
necessary to her subject.

But there it was; she saw it. She had nearly let it go, and
blushed at being obliged to name it.

"Jealousy, do you mean. Willoughby? the people in London would be
jealous?--Colonel De Craye? How strange! That is a sentiment I
cannot understand."

Sir Willoughby gesticulated the "Of course not" of an established 
assurance to the contrary.

"Indeed, Willoughby, I do not."

"Certainly not."

He was now in her trap. And he was imagining himself to he
anatomizing her feminine nature.

"Can I give you a proof, Willoughby? I am so utterly incapable of
it that--listen to me--were you to come to me to tell me, as you
might, how much better suited to you Miss Dale has appeared than I
am--and I fear I am not; it should be spoken plainly; unsuited
altogether, perhaps--I would, I beseech you to believe--you must
believe me--give you ... give you your freedom instantly; most
truly; and engage to speak of you as I should think of you.
Willoughby, you would have no one to praise you in public and in
private as I should, for you would be to me the most honest,
truthful, chivalrous gentleman alive. And in that case I would
undertake to declare that she would not admire you more than I;
Miss Dale would not; she would not admire you more than I; not
even Miss Dale."

This, her first direct leap for liberty, set Clara panting, and so
much had she to say that the nervous and the intellectual halves
of her dashed like cymbals, dazing and stunning her with the
appositeness of things to be said, and dividing her in indecision
as to the cunningest to move him of the many pressing.

The condition of feminine jealousy stood revealed.

He had driven her farther than he intended.

"Come, let me allay these . . ." he soothed her with hand and
voice, while seeking for his phrase; "these magnified pinpoints. 
Now, my Clara! on my honour! and when I put it forward in
attestation, my honour has the most serious meaning speech can
have; ordinarily my word has to suffice for bonds, promises, or
asseverations; on my honour! not merely is there, my poor child!
no ground of suspicion, I assure you, I declare to you, the fact
of the case is the very reverse. Now, mark me; of her sentiments I
cannot pretend to speak; I did not, to my knowledge, originate, I
am not responsible for them, and I am, before the law, as we will
say, ignorant of them; that is, I have never heard a declaration
of them, and I, am, therefore, under pain of the stigma of
excessive fatuity, bound to be non-cognizant. But as to myself I
can speak for myself and, on my honour! Clara--to be as direct as
possible.  even to baldness, and you know I loathe it--I could
not, I repeat, I could not marry Laetitia Dale! Let me impress it
on you.  No flatteries--we are all susceptible more or less--no
conceivable condition could bring it about; no amount of
admiration. She and I are excellent friends; we cannot be more.
When you see us together, the natural concord of our minds is of
course misleading. She is a woman of genius. I do not conceal, I
profess my admiration of her. There are times when, I confess, I
require a Laetitia Dale to bring me out, give and take. I am
indebted to her for the enjoyment of the duet few know, few can
accord with, fewer still are allowed the privilege of playing with
a human being. I am indebted, I own. and I feel deep gratitude; I
own to a lively friendship for Miss Dale, but if she is
displeasing in the sight of my bride by ... by the breadth of an
eyelash, then . . ."

Sir Willoughby's arm waved Miss Dale off away into outer darkness
in the wilderness.

Clara shut her eyes and rolled her eyeballs in a frenzy of
unuttered revolt from the Egoist.

But she was not engaged in the colloquy to be an advocate of Miss
Dale or of common humanity.

"Ah!" she said, simply determining that the subject should not
drop.

"And, ah!" he mocked her tenderly. "True, though! And who knows
better than my Clara that I require youth, health, beauty, and the
other undefinable attributes fitting with mine and beseeming the
station of the lady called to preside over my household and
represent me? What says my other self? my fairer? But you are! my
love, you are! Understand my nature rightly, and you . . "

"I do! I do!" interposed Clara; "if I did not by this time I
should be idiotic. Let me assure you, I understand it. Oh! listen
to me: one moment. Miss Dale regards me as the happiest woman on
earth. Willoughby, if I possessed her good qualities, her heart
and mind, no doubt I should be. It is my wish--you must hear me,
hear me out--my wish, my earnest wish, my burning prayer, my wish
to make way for her. She appreciates you: I do not--to my shame,
I do not. She worships you: I do not, I cannot. You are the rising
sun to her. It has been so for years. No one can account for love;
I daresay not for the impossibility of loving ... loving where we
should; all love bewilders me. I was not created to understand it.
But she loves you, she has pined. I believe it has destroyed the
health you demand as one item in your list. But you, Willoughby,
can restore that. Travelling, and ... and your society, the
pleasure of your society would certainly restore it. You look so
handsome together! She has unbounded devotion! as for me, I cannot
idolize. I see faults: I see them daily. They astonish and wound
me. Your pride would not bear to hear them spoken of, least of all
by your wife. You warned me to beware--that is, you said, you
said something."

Her busy brain missed the subterfuge to cover her slip of the
tongue.

Sir Willoughby struck in: "And when I say that the entire
concatenation is based on an erroneous observation of facts, and
an erroneous deduction from that erroneous observation!--? No,
no. Have confidence in me. I propose it to you in this instance,
purely to save you from deception. You are cold, my love? you
shivered."

"I am not cold," said Clara. "Some one, I suppose, was walking 
over my grave."

The gulf of a caress hove in view like an enormous billow
hollowing under the curled ridge.

She stooped to a buttercup; the monster swept by.

"Your grave!" he exclaimed over her head; "my own girl!"

"Is not the orchid naturally a stranger in ground so far away from
the chalk, Willoughby?"

"I am incompetent to pronounce an opinion on such important
matters. My mother had a passion for every description of flower.
I fancy I have some recollection of her scattering the flower you
mention over the park."

"If she were living now!"

"We should be happy in the blessing of the most estimable of
women, my Clara."

"She would have listened to me. She would have realized what I
mean."

"Indeed, Clara--poor soul!" he murmured to himself, aloud;
"indeed you are absolutely in error. If I have seemed--but I
repeat, you are deceived. The idea of 'fitness' is a total
hallucination. Supposing you--I do it even in play painfully--
entirely out of the way, unthought of. . ."

"Extinct," Clara said low.

"Non-existent for me," he selected a preferable term. "Suppose it;
I should still, in spite of an admiration I have never thought it
incumbent on me to conceal, still be--I speak emphatically--
utterly incapable of the offer of my hand to Miss Dale. It may be
that she is embedded in my mind as a friend, and nothing but a
friend. I received the stamp in early youth. People have noticed
it--we do, it seems, bring one another out, reflecting,
counter-reflecting."

She glanced up at him with a shrewd satisfaction to see that her
wicked shaft had stuck.

"You do; it is a common remark," she said. "The instantaneous 
difference when she comes near, any one might notice."

"My love," he opened the iron gate into the garden, "you encourage
the naughty little suspicion."

"But it is a beautiful sight, Willoughby. I like to see you
together. I like it as I like to see colours match."

"Very well. There is no harm then. We shall often be together. I
like my fair friend. But the instant!--you have only to express a
sentiment of disapprobation."

"And you dismiss her."

"I dismiss her. That is, as to the word, I constitute myself your
echo, to clear any vestige of suspicion. She goes."

"That is a case of a person doomed to extinction without
offending."

"Not without: for whoever offends my bride, my wife, my sovereign
lady, offends me: very deeply offends me."

"Then the caprices of your wife . . ." Clara stamped her foot
imperceptibly on the lawn-sward, which was irresponsively soft to
her fretfulness. She broke from the inconsequent meaningless mild
tone of irony, and said: "Willoughby, women have their honour to
swear by equally with men:--girls have: they have to swear an
oath at the altar; may I to you now? Take it for uttered when I
tell you that nothing would make me happier than your union with
Miss Dale. I have spoken as much as I can. Tell me you release
me."

With the well-known screw-smile of duty upholding weariness worn
to inanition, he rejoined: "Allow me once more to reiterate, that
it is repulsive, inconceivable, that I should ever, under any
mortal conditions, bring myself to the point of taking Miss Dale
for my wife. You reduce me to this perfectly childish protestation
--pitiably childish! But, my love, have I to remind you that you
and I are plighted, and that I am an honourable man?"

"I know it, I feel it--release me!" cried Clara.

Sir Willoughby severely reprehended his short-sightedness for
seeing but the one proximate object in the particular attention he
had bestowed on Miss Dale. He could not disavow that they had been
marked, and with an object, and he was distressed by the unwonted
want of wisdom through which he had been drawn to overshoot his
object. His design to excite a touch of the insane emotion in
Clara's bosom was too successful, and, "I was not thinking of
her," he said to himself in his candour, contrite.

She cried again: "Will you not, Willoughby--release me?"

He begged her to take his arm.

To consent to touch him while petitioning for a detachment, 
appeared discordant to Clara, but, if she expected him to accede,
it was right that she should do as much as she could, and she
surrendered her hand at arm's length, disdaining the imprisoned
fingers. He pressed them and said: "Dr Middleton is in the
library. I see Vernon is at work with Crossjay in the West-room--
the boy has had sufficient for the day. Now, is it not like old
Vernon to drive his books at a cracked head before it's half
mended?"

He signalled to young Crossjay, who was up and out through the
folding windows in a twinkling.

"And you will go in, and talk to Vernon of the lady in question," 
Sir Willoughby whispered to Clara. "Use your best persuasions in
our joint names. You have my warrant for saying that money is no
consideration; house and income are assured. You can hardly have
taken me seriously when I requested you to undertake Vernon
before. I was quite in earnest then as now. I prepare Miss Dale. I
will not have a wedding on our wedding-day; but either before or
after it, I gladly speed their alliance. I think now I give you
the best proof possible, and though I know that with women a
delusion may be seen to be groundless and still be cherished, I
rely on your good sense."

Vernon was at the window and stood aside for her to enter. Sir
Willoughby used a gentle insistence with her. She bent her head as
if she were stepping into a cave. So frigid was she, that a
ridiculous dread of calling Mr. Whitford Mr. Oxford was her only
present anxiety when Sir Willoughby had closed the window on them.


CHAPTER XIV

Sir Willoughby and Laetitia

"I prepare Miss Dale."

Sir Willoughby thought of his promise to Clara. He trifled awhile
with young Crossjay, and then sent the boy flying, and wrapped
himself in meditation. So shall you see standing many a statue of
statesmen who have died in harness for their country.

In the hundred and fourth chapter of the thirteenth volume of the
Book of Egoism it is written: Possession without obligation to the
object possessed approaches felicity.

It is the rarest condition of ownership. For example: the
possession of land is not without obligation both to the soil and
the tax-collector; the possession of fine clothing is oppressed by
obligation; gold, jewelry, works of art, enviable household
furniture, are positive fetters; the possession of a wife we find
surcharged with obligation. In all these cases possession is a
gentle term for enslavement, bestowing the sort of felicity
attained to by the helot drunk. You can have the joy, the pride,
the intoxication of possession; you can have no free soul.

But there is one instance of possession, and that the most perfect,
which leaves us free, under not a shadow of obligation, receiving
ever, never giving. or if giving, giving only of our waste; as it
were (sauf votre respect), by form of perspiration, radiation, if
you like; unconscious poral bountifulness; and it is a beneficent
process for the system. Our possession of an adoring female's
worship is this instance.

The soft cherishable Parsee is hardly at any season other than
prostrate. She craves nothing save that you continue in being--
her sun: which is your firm constitutional endeavour: and thus
you have a most exact alliance; she supplying spirit to your
matter, while at the same time presenting matter to your
spirit, verily a comfortable apposition. The Gods do bless it.

That they do so indeed is evident in the men they select for such
a felicitous crown and aureole. Weak men would be rendered nervous
by the flattery of a woman's worship; or they would be for
returning it, at least partially, as though it could be bandied to
and fro without emulgence of the poetry; or they would be
pitiful, and quite spoil the thing. Some would be for
transforming the beautiful solitary vestal flame by the first
effort of the multiplication-table into your hearth-fire of
slippered affection. So these men are not they whom the Gods have
ever selected, but rather men of a pattern with themselves, very
high and very solid men, who maintain the crown by holding
divinely independent of the great emotion they have sown.

Even for them a pass of danger is ahead, as we shall see in our
sample of one among the highest of them.

A clear approach to felicity had long been the portion of Sir
Willoughby Patterne in his relations with Laetitia Dale. She
belonged to him; he was quite unshackled by her. She was
everything that is good in a parasite, nothing that is bad. His
dedicated critic she was, reviewing him with a favour equal to
perfect efficiency in her office; and whatever the world might say
of him, to her the happy gentleman could constantly turn for his
refreshing balsamic bath. She flew to the soul in him, pleasingly
arousing sensations of that inhabitant; and he allowed her the
right to fly, in the manner of kings, as we have heard, consenting
to the privileges acted on by cats. These may not address their
Majesties, but they may stare; nor will it be contested that the
attentive circular eyes of the humble domestic creatures are an
embellishment to Royal pomp and grandeur, such truly as should one
day gain for them an inweaving and figurement--in the place of
bees, ermine tufts, and their various present decorations--upon
the august great robes back-flowing and foaming over the gaspy
page-boys.

Further to quote from the same volume of The Book: There is pain
in the surrendering of that we are fain to relinquish.

The idea is too exquisitely attenuate, as are those of the whole
body-guard of the heart of Egoism, and will slip through you
unless you shall have made a study of the gross of volumes of the
first and second sections of The Book, and that will take you up
to senility; or you must make a personal entry into the pages,
perchance; or an escape out of them. There was once a venerable
gentleman for whom a white hair grew on the cop of his nose,
laughing at removals. He resigned himself to it in the end, and
lastingly contemplated the apparition. It does not concern us what
effect was produced on his countenance and his mind; enough that
he saw a fine thing, but not so fine as the idea cited above;
which has been between the two eyes of humanity ever since women
were sought in marriage. With yonder old gentleman it may have
been a ghostly hair or a disease of the optic nerves; but for us
it is a real growth, and humanity might profitably imitate him in
his patient speculation upon it.

Sir Willoughby Patterne, though ready in the pursuit of duty and
policy (an oft-united couple) to cast Miss Dale away, had to
consider that he was not simply, so to speak, casting her over a
hedge, he was casting her for a man to catch her; and this was a
much greater trial than it had been on the previous occasion, when
she went over bump to the ground. In the arms of a husband, there
was no knowing how soon she might forget her soul's fidelity. It
had not hurt him to sketch the project of the conjunction;
benevolence assisted him; but he winced and smarted on seeing it
take shape. It sullied his idea of Laetitia.

Still, if, in spite of so great a change in her fortune, her
spirit could be guaranteed changeless, he, for the sake of
pacifying his bride, and to keep two serviceable persons near him.
at command, might resolve to join them. The vision of his
resolution brought with it a certain pallid contempt of the
physically faithless woman; no wonder he betook himself to The
Book, and opened it on the scorching chapters treating of the sex,
and the execrable wiles of that foremost creature of the chase,
who runs for life. She is not spared in the Biggest of Books. But
close it.

The writing in it having been done chiefly by men, men naturally
receive their fortification from its wisdom, and half a dozen of
the popular sentences for the confusion of women (cut in brass
worn to a polish like sombre gold), refreshed Sir Willoughby for
his undertaking.

An examination of Laetitia's faded complexion braced him very
cordially.

His Clara, jealous of this poor leaf!

He could have desired the transfusion of a quality or two from
Laetitia to his bride; but you cannot, as in cookery, obtain a
mixture of the essences of these creatures; and if, as it is
possible to do, and as he had been doing recently with the pair of
them at the Hall, you stew them in one pot, you are far likelier
to intensify their little birthmarks of individuality. Had they
a tendency to excellence it might be otherwise; they might then
make the exchanges we wish for; or scientifically concocted in a
harem for a sufficient length of time by a sultan anything but
obtuse, they might. It is, however, fruitless to dwell on what was
only a glimpse of a wild regret, like the crossing of two express
trains along the rails in Sir Willoughby's head.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel were sitting with Miss Dale, all
three at work on embroideries. He had merely to look at Miss
Eleanor. She rose. She looked at Miss Isabel, and rattled her
chatelaine to account for her departure. After a decent interval 
Miss Isabel glided out. Such was the perfect discipline of the
household.

Sir Willoughby played an air on the knee of his crossed leg.

Laetitia grew conscious of a meaning in the silence. She said,
"You have not been vexed by affairs to-day?"

"Affairs," he replied, "must be peculiarly vexatious to trouble
me. Concerning the country or my personal affairs?"

"I fancy I was alluding to the country."

"I trust I am as good a patriot as any man living," said he; "but
I am used to the follies of my countrymen, and we are on board a
stout ship. At the worst it's no worse than a rise in rates and
taxes; soup at the Hall gates, perhaps; license to fell timber in
one of the outer copses, or some dozen loads of coal. You hit my
feudalism."

"The knight in armour has gone," said Laetitia, "and the castle
with the draw-bridge. Immunity for our island has gone too since
we took to commerce."

"We bartered independence for commerce. You hit our old
controversy. Ay, but we do not want this overgrown population! 
However, we will put politics and sociology and the pack of their
modern barbarous words aside. You read me intuitively. I have
been, I will not say annoyed, but ruffled. I have much to do, and
going into Parliament would make me almost helpless if I lose
Vernon. You know of some absurd notion he has?--literary fame,
and bachelor's chambers, and a chop-house, and the rest of it."

She knew, and thinking differently in the matter of literary fame,
she flushed, and, ashamed of the flush, frowned.

He bent over to her with the perusing earnestness of a gentleman
about to trifle.

"You cannot intend that frown?"

"Did I frown?"

"You do."

"Now?"

"Fiercely."

"Oh!"

"Will you smile to reassure me?"

"Willingly, as well as I can."

A gloom overcame him. With no woman on earth did he shine so as to
recall to himself seigneur and dame of the old French Court as he
did with Laetitia Dale. He did not wish the period revived, but
reserved it as a garden to stray into when he was in the mood for
displaying elegance and brightness in the society of a lady; and
in speech Laetitia helped him to the nice delusion. She was not
devoid of grace of bearing either.

Would she preserve her beautiful responsiveness to his ascendency?
Hitherto she had, and for years, and quite fresh. But how of her
as a married woman? Our souls are hideously subject to the
conditions of our animal nature! A wife, possibly mother, it was
within sober calculation that there would be great changes in her.
And the hint of any change appeared a total change to one of the
lofty order who, when they are called on to relinquish possession
instead of aspiring to it, say, All or nothing!

Well, but if there was danger of the marriage-tie effecting the
slightest alteration of her character or habit of mind, wherefore
press it upon a tolerably hardened spinster!

Besides, though he did once put her hand in Vernon's for the
dance, he remembered acutely that the injury then done by his
generosity to his tender sensitiveness had sickened and tarnished
the effulgence of two or three successive anniversaries of his
coming of age. Nor had he altogether yet got over the passion of
greed for the whole group of the well-favoured of the fair sex,
which in his early youth had made it bitter for him to submit to
the fickleness, not to say the modest fickleness, of any handsome
one of them in yielding her hand to a man and suffering herself
to be led away. Ladies whom he had only heard of as ladies of some
beauty incurred his wrath for having lovers or taking husbands. He
was of a vast embrace; and do not exclaim, in covetousness;--for
well he knew that even under Moslem law he could not have them all
--but as the enamoured custodian of the sex's purity, that blushes
at such big spots as lovers and husbands; and it was unbearable to
see it sacrificed for others. Without their purity what are they!
--what are fruiterer's plums?--unsaleable. O for the bloom on
them!

"As I said, I lose my right hand in Vernon," he resumed, "and I
am, it seems, inevitably to lose him, unless we contrive to fasten
him down here. I think, my dear Miss Dale, you have my character.
At least, I should recommend my future biographer to you--with a
caution, of course. You would have to write selfishness with a
dash under it. I cannot endure to lose a member of my household--
not under any circumstances; and a change of feeling toward me on
the part of any of my friends because of marriage, I think hard. I
would ask you, how can it be for Vernon's good to quit an easy
pleasant home for the wretched profession of Literature?--
wretchedly paying, I mean," he bowed to the authoress. "Let him
leave the house, if he imagines he will not harmonize with its
young mistress. He is queer, though a good fellow. But he ought,
in that event, to have an establishment. And my scheme for Vernon
--men, Miss Dale, do not change to their old friends when they
marry--my scheme, which would cause the alteration in his system
of life to be barely perceptible, is to build him a poetical
little cottage, large enough for a couple, on the borders of my
park. I have the spot in my eye. The point is, can he live alone
there? Men, I say, do not change. How is it that we cannot say the
same of women?"

Laetitia remarked: "The generic woman appears to have an
extraordinary faculty for swallowing the individual."

"As to the individual, as to a particular person, I may be wrong.
Precisely because it is her case I think of, my strong friendship
inspires the fear: unworthy of both, no doubt, but trace it to the
source. Even pure friendship, such is the taint in us, knows a
kind of jealousy; though I would gladly see her established, and
near me, happy and contributing to my happiness with her
incomparable social charm. Her I do not estimate generically, be
sure."

If you do me the honour to allude to me, Sir Willoughby," said
Laetitia, "I am my father's housemate."

"What wooer would take that for a refusal? He would beg to be a
third in the house and sharer of your affectionate burden.
Honestly, why not? And I may be arguing against my own happiness;
it may be the end of me!"

"The end?"

"Old friends are captious, exacting. No, not the end. Yet if my
friend is not the same to me, it is the end to that form of
friendship: not to the degree possibly. But when one is used to
the form! And do you, in its application to friendship, scorn the
word 'use'? We are creatures of custom. I am, I confess, a
poltroon in my affections; I dread changes. The shadow of the
tenth of an inch in the customary elevation of an eyelid!--to
give you an idea of my susceptibility. And, my dear Miss Dale, I
throw myself on your charity, with all my weakness bare, let me
add, as I could do to none but you. Consider, then, if I lose you!
The fear is due to my pusillanimity entirely. High-souled women
may be wives, mothers, and still reserve that home for their
friend. They can and will conquer the viler conditions of human
life. Our states, I have always contended, our various phases have
to be passed through, and there is no disgrace in it so long as
they do not levy toll on the quintessential, the spiritual
element. You understand me? I am no adept in these abstract
elucidations."

"You explain yourself clearly," said Laetitia.

"I have never pretended that psychology was my forte," said he,
feeling overshadowed by her cold commendation: he was not less
acutely sensitive to the fractional divisions of tones than of
eyelids, being, as it were, a melody with which everything was
out of tune that did not modestly or mutely accord; and to bear
about a melody in your person is incomparably more searching than
the best of touchstones and talismans ever invented. "Your
father's health has improved latterly?"

"He did not complain of his health when I saw him this morning. My
cousin Amelia is with him, and she is an excellent nurse.

"He has a liking for Vernon."

"He has a great respect for Mr. Whitford."

"You have?"

"Oh, yes; I have it equally."

"For a foundation, that is the surest. I would have the friends
dearest to me begin on that. The headlong match is--how can we
describe it? By its finale I am afraid. Vernon's abilities are
really to be respected. His shyness is his malady. I suppose he
reflected that he was not a capitalist. He might, one would think,
have addressed himself to me; my purse is not locked."

"No, Sir Willoughby!" Laetitia said, warmly, for his donations in
charity were famous.

Her eyes gave him the food he enjoyed, and basking in them, he
continued:

"Vernon's income would at once have been regulated commensurately 
with a new position requiring an increase. This money, money,
money! But the world will have it so. Happily I have inherited
habits of business and personal economy. Vernon is a man who
would do fifty times more with a companion appreciating his
abilities and making light of his little deficiencies. They are
palpable, small enough. He has always been aware of my wishes:--
when perhaps the fulfilment might have sent me off on another tour
of the world, homebird though I am. When was it that our
friendship commenced? In my boyhood, I know. Very many years
back."

"I am in my thirtieth year," said Laetitia.

Surprised and pained by a baldness resembling the deeds of ladies
(they have been known, either through absence of mind, or mania,
to displace a wig) in the deadly intimacy which slaughters poetic
admiration, Sir Willoughby punished her by deliberately reckoning
that she did not look less.

"Genius," he observed, "is unacquainted with wrinkles"; hardly one
of his prettiest speeches; but he had been wounded, and he never
could recover immediately. Coming on him in a mood of sentiment,
the wound was sharp. He could very well have calculated the lady's
age. It was the jarring clash of her brazen declaration of it upon
his low rich flute-notes that shocked him.

He glanced at the gold cathedral-clock on the mantel-piece, and
proposed a stroll on the lawn before dinner. Laetitia gathered up
her embroidery work.

"As a rule," he said, "authoresses are not needle-women."

"I shall resign the needle or the pen if it stamps me an
exception," she replied.

He attempted a compliment on her truly exceptional character. As
when the player's finger rests in distraction on the organ, it was
without measure and disgusted his own hearing. Nevertheless, she
had been so good as to diminish his apprehension that the marriage
of a lady in her thirtieth year with his cousin Vernon would be so
much of a loss to him; hence, while parading the lawn, now and
then casting an eye at the window of the room where his Clara and
Vernon were in council, the schemes he indulged for his prospective
comfort and his feelings of the moment were in such striving
harmony as that to which we hear orchestral musicians bringing
their instruments under the process called tuning. It is not
perfect, but it promises to be so soon. We are not angels, which
have their dulcimers ever on the choral pitch. We are mortals
attaining the celestial accord with effort, through a stage of
pain. Some degree of pain was necessary to Sir Willoughby, 
otherwise he would not have seen his generosity confronting him.
He grew, therefore, tenderly inclined to Laetitia once more, so
far as to say within himself. "For conversation she would be a
valuable wife". And this valuable wife he was presenting to his
cousin.

Apparently, considering the duration of the conference of his
Clara and Vernon, his cousin required strong persuasion to accept
the present.


CHAPTER XV

The Petition for a Release

Neither Clara nor Vernon appeared at the mid-day table. Dr.
Middleton talked with Miss Dale on classical matters, like a
good-natured giant giving a child the jump from stone to stone
across a brawling mountain ford, so that an unedified audience
might really suppose, upon seeing her over the difficulty, she had
done something for herself. Sir Willoughby was proud of her, and
therefore anxious to settle her business while he was in the
humour to lose her. He hoped to finish it by shooting a word or
two at Vernon before dinner. Clara's petition to be set free,
released from him, had vaguely frightened even more than it
offended his pride.

Miss Isabel quitted the room.

She came back, saying: "They decline to lunch."

"Then we may rise," remarked Sir Willoughby.

"She was weeping," Miss Isabel murmured to him.

"Girlish enough," he said.

The two elderly ladies went away together. Miss Dale, pursuing her
theme with the Rev. Doctor, was invited by him to a course in the
library. Sir Willoughby walked up and down the lawn, taking a
glance at the West-room as he swung round on the turn of his leg.
Growing impatient, he looked in at the window and found the room
vacant.

Nothing was to be seen of Clara and Vernon during the afternoon.
Near the dinner-hour the ladies were informed by Miss Middleton's
maid that her mistress was lying down on her bed, too unwell with
headache to be present. Young Crossjay brought a message from
Vernon (delayed by birds" eggs in the delivery), to say that he
was off over the hills, and thought of dining with Dr. Corney.

Sir Willoughby despatched condolences to his bride. He was not
well able to employ his mind on its customary topic, being, like
the dome of a bell, a man of so pervading a ring within himself
concerning himself, that the recollection of a doubtful speech or
unpleasant circumstance touching him closely deranged his inward
peace; and as dubious and unpleasant things will often occur, be
had great need of a worshipper, and was often compelled to appeal
to her for signs of antidotal idolatry. In this instance, when
the need of a worshipper was sharply felt, he obtained no signs at
all. The Rev. Doctor had fascinated Miss Dale; so that, both
within and without, Sir Willoughby was uncomforted. His themes in
public were those of an English gentleman; horses, dogs, game,
sport, intrigue, scandal, politics, wines, the manly themes; with
a condescension to ladies" tattle, and approbation of a racy
anecdote. What interest could he possibly take in the Athenian
Theatre and the girl whose flute-playing behind the scenes,
imitating the nightingale, enraptured a Greek audience! He would
have suspected a motive in Miss Dale's eager attentiveness, if the
motive could have been conceived. Besides, the ancients were not
decorous; they did not, as we make our moderns do, write for
ladies. He ventured at the dinner-table to interrupt Dr. Middleton
once:--

"Miss Dale will do wisely, I think, sir, by confining herself to
your present edition of the classics."

"That," replied Dr. Middleton, "is the observation of a student of
the dictionary of classical mythology in the English tongue."

"The Theatre is a matter of climate, sir. You will grant me that."

"If quick wits come of climate, it is as you say, sir."

"With us it seems a matter of painful fostering, or the need of
it," said Miss Dale, with a question to Dr. Middleton, excluding 
Sir Willoughby, as though he had been a temporary disturbance of
the flow of their dialogue.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel, previously excellent listeners to
the learned talk, saw the necessity of coming to his rescue; but
you cannot converse with your aunts, inmates of your house, on
general subjects at table; the attempt increased his discomposure;
he considered that he had ill-chosen his father-in-law; that
scholars are an impolite race; that young or youngish women are
devotees of power in any form, and will be absorbed by a scholar
for a variation of a man; concluding that he must have a round of
dinner-parties to friends, especially ladies, appreciating him,
during the Doctor's visit. Clara's headache above, and Dr.
Middleton's unmannerliness below, affected his instincts in a way
to make him apprehend that a stroke of misfortune was impending;
thunder was in the air. Still he learned something, by which he
was to profit subsequently. The topic of wine withdrew the doctor
from his classics; it was magical on him. A strong fraternity of
taste was discovered in the sentiments of host and guest upon
particular wines and vintages; they kindled one another by naming
great years of the grape, and if Sir Willoughby had to sacrifice
the ladies to the topic, he much regretted a condition of things
that compelled him to sin against his habit, for the sake of being
in the conversation and probing an elderly gentleman's foible.

Late at night he heard the house-bell, and meeting Vernon in the
hall, invited him to enter the laboratory and tell him Dr. Corney's
last. Vernon was brief, Corney had not let fly a single anecdote,
he said, and lighted his candle.

"By the way, Vernon, you had a talk with Miss Middleton?"

"She will speak to you to-morrow at twelve."

"To-morrow at twelve?"

"It gives her four-and-twenty hours."

Sir Willoughby determined that his perplexity should be seen; but
Vernon said good-night to him, and was shooting up the stairs
before the dramatic exhibition of surprise had yielded to speech.

Thunder was in the air and a blow coming. Sir Willoughby's
instincts were awake to the many signs, nor, though silenced, were
they hushed by his harping on the frantic excesses to which women
are driven by the passion of jealousy. He believed in
Clara's jealousy because he really had intended to rouse it; under
the form of emulation, feebly. He could not suppose she had spoken
of it to Vernon. And as for the seriousness of her desire to be
released from her engagement, that was little credible. Still the
fixing of an hour for her to speak to him after an interval of
four-and-twenty hours, left an opening for the incredible to add
its weight to the suspicious mass; and who would have fancied
Clara Middleton so wild a victim of the intemperate passion! He
muttered to himself several assuaging observations to excuse a
young lady half demented, and rejected them in a lump for their
nonsensical inapplicability to Clara. In order to obtain some
sleep, he consented to blame himself slightly, in the style of the
enamoured historian of erring beauties alluding to their
peccadilloes. He had done it to edify her. Sleep, however, failed
him. That an inordinate jealousy argued an overpowering love,
solved his problem until he tried to fit the proposition to
Clara's character. He had discerned nothing southern in her.
Latterly, with the blushing Day in prospect, she had contracted
and frozen. There was no reading either of her or of the mystery.

In the morning, at the breakfast-table, a confession of
sleeplessness was general. Excepting Miss Dale and Dr. Middleton,
none had slept a wink. "I, sir," the Doctor replied to Sir
Willoughby, "slept like a lexicon in your library when Mr.
Whitford and I are out of it."

Vernon incidentally mentioned that he had been writing through the
night.

"You fellows kill yourselves," Sir Willoughby reproved him. "For
my part, I make it a principle to get through my work without
self-slaughter."

Clara watched her father for a symptom of ridicule. He gazed
mildly on the systematic worker. She was unable to guess whether
she would have in him an ally or a judge. The latter, she feared.
Now that she had embraced the strife, she saw the division of the
line where she stood from that one where the world places girls
who are affianced wives; her father could hardly be with her; it
had gone too far. He loved her, but he would certainly take her to
be moved by a maddish whim; he would not try to understand her
case. The scholar's detestation of a disarrangement of human
affairs that had been by miracle contrived to run smoothly, would
of itself rank him against her; and with the world to back his
view of her, he might behave like a despotic father. How could she
defend herself before him? At one thought of Sir Willoughby, her
tongue made ready, and feminine craft was alert to prompt it; but
to her father she could imagine herself opposing only dumbness and
obstinacy.

"It is not exactly the same kind of work," she said.

Dr Middleton rewarded her with a bushy eyebrow's beam of his
revolting humour at the baronet's notion of work.

So little was needed to quicken her that she sunned herself in the
beam, coaxing her father's eyes to stay with hers as long as she
could, and beginning to hope he might be won to her side, if she
confessed she had been more in the wrong than she felt; owned to
him, that is, her error in not earlier disturbing his peace.

"I do not say it is the same," observed Sir Willoughby, bowing to
their alliance of opinion. "My poor work is for the day, and
Vernon's, no doubt, for the day to come. I contend, nevertheless,
for the preservation of health as the chief implement of work."

"Of continued work; there I agree with you," said Dr. Middleton,
cordially.

Clara's heart sunk; so little was needed to deaden her.

Accuse her of an overweening antagonism to her betrothed; yet
remember that though the words had not been uttered to give her
good reason for it, nature reads nature; captives may be stript of
everything save that power to read their tyrant; remember also
that she was not, as she well knew, blameless; her rage at him was
partly against herself

The rising from table left her to Sir Willoughby. She swam away
after Miss Dale, exclaiming: "The laboratory! Will you have me
for a companion on your walk to see your father? One breathes
earth and heaven to-day out of doors. Isn't it Summer with a
Spring Breeze? I will wander about your garden and not hurry your
visit, I promise."

"I shall be very happy indeed. But I am going immediately," said
Laetitia, seeing Sir Willoughby hovering to snap up his bride.

"Yes; and a garden-hat and I am on the march."

"I will wait for you on the terrace."

"You will not have to wait."

"Five minutes at the most," Sir Willoughby said to Laetitia, and
she passed out, leaving them alone together.

"Well, and my love!" he addressed his bride almost huggingly; "and
what is the story? and how did you succeed with old Vernon
yesterday? He will and he won't? He's a very woman in these
affairs. I can't forgive him for giving you a headache. You were
found weeping."

"Yes, I cried," said Clara.

"And now tell me about it. You know, my dear girl, whether he does
or doesn't, our keeping him somewhere in the neighbourhood--
perhaps not in the house--that is the material point. It can
hardly be necessary in these days to urge marriages on. I'm sure
the country is over ... Most marriages ought to be celebrated with
the funeral knell!"

"I think so," said Clara.

"It will come to this, that marriages of consequence, and none but
those, will be hailed with joyful peals."

"Do not say such things in public, Willoughby."

"Only to you, to you! Don't think me likely to expose myself to
the world. Well, and I sounded Miss Dale, and there will be no
violent obstacle. And now about Vernon?"

"I will speak to you, Willoughby, when I return from my walk with
Miss Dale, soon after twelve."

"Twelve!" said he

"I name an hour. It seems childish. I can explain it. But it is
named, I cannot deny, because I am a rather childish person
perhaps, and have it prescribed to me to delay my speaking for a
certain length of time. I may tell you at once that Mr. Whitford
is not to be persuaded by me, and the breaking of our engagement
would not induce him to remain."

"Vernon used those words?"

"It was I."

"'The breaking of our engagement!' Come into the laboratory, my
love."

"I shall not have time."

"Time shall stop rather than interfere with our conversation! 'The
breaking ...'! But it's a sort of sacrilege to speak of it."

"That I feel; yet it has to be spoken of"

"Sometimes? Why? I can't conceive the occasion. You know, to me,
Clara, plighted faith, the affiancing of two lovers, is a piece of
religion. I rank it as holy as marriage; nay, to me it is holier;
I really cannot tell you how; I can only appeal to you in your
bosom to understand me. We read of divorces with comparative
indifference. They occur between couples who have rubbed off all
romance."

She could have asked him in her fit of ironic iciness, on hearing
him thus blindly challenge her to speak out, whether the romance
might be his piece of religion.

He propitiated the more unwarlike sentiments in her by
ejaculating, "Poor souls! let them go their several ways. Married 
people no longer lovers are in the category of the unnameable. But
the hint of the breaking of an engagement--our engagement!--
between us? Oh!"

"Oh!" Clara came out with a swan's note swelling over mechanical
imitation of him to dolorousness illimitable. "Oh!" she breathed
short, "let it be now. Do not speak till you have heard me. My
head may not be clear by-and-by. And two scenes--twice will be
beyond my endurance. I am penitent for the wrong I have done you.
I grieve for you. All the blame is mine. Willoughby, you must
release me. Do not let me hear a word of that word; jealousy is
unknown to me ... Happy if I could call you friend and see you
with a worthier than I, who might by-and-by call me friend! You
have my plighted troth ... given in ignorance of my feelings.
Reprobate a weak and foolish girl's ignorance. I have thought of
it, and I cannot see wickedness, though the blame is great,
shameful. You have none. You are without any blame. You will not
suffer as I do. You will be generous to me? I have no respect
for myself when I beg you to be generous and release me."

"But was this the . . ." Willoughby preserved his calmness,
"this, then, the subject of your interview with Vernon?"

"I have spoken to him. I did my commission, and I spoke to him."

"Of me?"

"Of myself. I see how I hurt you; I could not avoid it. Yes, of
you, as far as we are related. I said I believed you would release
me.  I said I could he true to my plighted word, but that you
would not insist. Could a gentleman insist? But not a step beyond;
not love; I have none. And, Willoughby, treat me as one perfectly
worthless; I am. I should have known it a year back. I was
deceived in myself. There should be love."

"Should be!" Willoughby's tone was a pungent comment on her.

"Love, then, I find I have not. I think I am antagonistic to it.
What people say of it I have not experienced. I find I was
mistaken. It is lightly said, but very painful. You understand me,
that my prayer is for liberty, that I may not be tied. If you can
release and pardon me, or promise ultimately to pardon me, or say
some kind word, I shall know it is because I am beneath you
utterly that I have been unable to give you the love you should
have with a wife. Only say to me, go! It is you who break the
match, discovering my want of a heart. What people think of me
matters little. My anxiety will be to save you annoyance."

She waited for him; he seemed on the verge of speaking.

He perceived her expectation; he had nothing but clownish tumult
within, and his dignity counselled him to disappoint her.

Swaying his head, like the oriental palm whose shade is a blessing
to the perfervid wanderer below, smiling gravely, he was
indirectly asking his dignity what he could say to maintain it and
deal this mad young woman a bitterly compassionate rebuke. What to
think, hung remoter. The thing to do struck him first.

He squeezed both her hands, threw the door wide open, and said,
with countless blinkings: "In the laboratory we are uninterrupted.
I was at a loss to guess where that most unpleasant effect on the
senses came from. They are always 'guessing' through the nose. I
mean, the remainder of breakfast here. Perhaps I satirized them
too smartly--if you know the letters. When they are not
'calculating'. More offensive than debris of a midnight banquet!
An American tour is instructive, though not so romantic. Not so
romantic as Italy, I mean. Let us escape."

She held back from his arm. She had scattered his brains; it was
pitiable: but she was in the torrent and could not suffer a pause
or a change of place.

"It must be here; one minute more--I cannot go elsewhere to begin
again. Speak to me here; answer my request. Once; one word. If you
forgive me, it will be superhuman. But, release me."

"Seriously," he rejoined, "tea-cups and coffee-cups, breadcrumbs. 
egg-shells, caviare, butter, beef, bacon! Can we? The room reeks."

"Then I will go for my walk with Miss Dale. And you will speak to
me when I return?"

"At all seasons. You shall go with Miss Dale. But, my dear! my
love! Seriously, where are we? One hears of lover's quarrels. Now
I never quarrel. It is a characteristic of mine.  And you speak of
me to my cousin Vernon! Seriously, plighted faith signifies
plighted faith, as much as an iron-cable is iron to hold by. Some
little twist of the mind? To Vernon, of all men! Tush!  she has
been dreaming of a hero of perfection, and the comparison is
unfavourable to her Willoughby. But, my Clara, when I say to you,
that bride is bride, and you are mine, mine!"

"Willoughby, you mentioned them,--those separations of two
married. You said, if they do not love . . . Oh! say, is it not
better--instead of later?"

He took advantage of her modesty in speaking to exclaim. "Where
are we now? Bride is bride, and wife is wife, and affianced is, in
honour, wedded. You cannot be released. We are united. Recognize
it; united. There is no possibility of releasing a wife!"

"Not if she ran ... ?"

This was too direct to be histrionically misunderstood. He had
driven her to the extremity of more distinctly imagining the
circumstance she had cited, and with that cleared view the
desperate creature gloried in launching such a bolt at the man's
real or assumed insensibility as must, by shivering it, waken him.

But in a moment she stood in burning rose, with dimmed eyesight.
She saw his horror, and, seeing, shared it; shared just then only
by seeing it; which led her to rejoice with the deepest of sighs
that some shame was left in her.

"Ran? ran? ran?" he said as rapidly as he blinked. "How? where?
what idea ... ?"

Close was he upon an explosion that would have sullied his
conception of the purity of the younger members of the sex
hauntingly.

That she, a young lady, maiden, of strictest education, should,
and without his teaching, know that wives ran!--know that by
running they compelled their husbands to abandon pursuit, surrender
possession!--and that she should suggest it of herself as a wife!--
that she should speak of running!

His ideal, the common male Egoist ideal of a waxwork sex, would
have been shocked to fragments had she spoken further to fill in
the outlines of these awful interjections.

She was tempted: for during the last few minutes the fire of her
situation had enlightened her understanding upon a subject far
from her as the ice-fields of the North a short while before; and
the prospect offered to her courage if she would only outstare
shame and seem at home in the doings of wickedness, was his
loathing and dreading so vile a young woman. She restrained
herself; chiefly, after the first bridling of maidenly timidity,
because she could not bear to lower the idea of her sex even in
his esteem.

The door was open. She had thoughts of flying out to breathe in an
interval of truce.

She reflected on her situation hurriedly askance:

"If one must go through this, to be disentangled from an
engagement, what must it be to poor women seeking to be free of a
marriage?"

Had she spoken it, Sir Willoughby might have learned that she was
not so iniquitously wise of the things of this world as her mere
sex's instinct, roused to the intemperateness of a creature
struggling with fetters, had made her appear in her dash to seize
a weapon, indicated moreover by him.

Clara took up the old broken vow of women to vow it afresh: "Never
to any man will I give my hand."

She replied to Sir Willoughby, "I have said all. I cannot explain
what I have said."

She had heard a step in the passage. Vernon entered.

Perceiving them, he stated his mission in apology: "Doctor
Middleton left a book in this room. I see it; it's a Heinsius."

"Ha! by the way, a book; books would not be left here if they
were not brought here, with my compliments to Doctor Middleton,
who may do as he pleases, though, seriously, order is order," said
Sir Willoughby. "Come away to the laboratory, Clara. It's a
comment on human beings that wherever they have been there's a
mess, and you admirers of them," he divided a sickly nod between
Vernon and the stale breakfast-table, "must make what you can of
it. Come, Clara."

Clara protested that she was engaged to walk with Miss Dale.

"Miss Dale is waiting in the hall," said Vernon.

"Miss Dale is waiting?" said Clara.

"Walk with Miss Dale; walk with Miss Dale," Sir Willoughby 
remarked, pressingly. "I will beg her to wait another two minutes.
You shall find her in the hall when you come down."

He rang the bell and went out.

"Take Miss Dale into your confidence; she is quite trustworthy," 
Vernon said to Clara.

"I have not advanced one step," she replied.

"Recollect that you are in a position of your own choosing; and
if, after thinking over it, you mean to escape, you must make up
your mind to pitched battles, and not be dejected if you are
beaten in all of them; there is your only chance."

"Not my choosing; do not say choosing, Mr. Whitford. I did not
choose. I was incapable of really choosing. I consented."

"It's the same in fact. But be sure of what you wish."

"Yes," she assented, taking it for her just punishment that she
should be supposed not quite to know her wishes. "Your advice has
helped me to-day."

"Did I advise?"

"Do you regret advising?"

"I should certainly regret a word that intruded between you and
him."

"But you will not leave the Hall yet? You will not leave me
without a friend? If papa and I were to leave to-morrow, I foresee
endless correspondence. I have to stay at least some days, and
wear through it, and then, if I have to speak to my poor father,
you can imagine the effect on him."

Sir Willoughby came striding in, to correct the error of his going
out.

"Miss Dale awaits you, my dear. You have bonnet, hat?--No? Have
you forgotten your appointment to walk with her?"

"I am ready," said Clara, departing.

The two gentlemen behind her separated in the passage. They had
not spoken.

She had read of the reproach upon women, that they divide the
friendships of men. She reproached herself but she was in action,
driven by necessity, between sea and rock. Dreadful to think of!
she was one of the creatures who are written about.


CHAPTER XVI

Clara and Laetitia

In spite of his honourable caution, Vernon had said things to
render Miss Middleton more angrily determined than she had been in
the scene with Sir Willoughby. His counting on pitched battles and
a defeat for her in all of them, made her previous feelings
appear slack in comparison with the energy of combat now animating
her. And she could vehemently declare that she had not chosen; she
was too young, too ignorant to choose. He had wrongly used that
word; it sounded malicious; and to call consenting the same in
fact as choosing was wilfully unjust. Mr. Whitford meant well; he
was conscientious, very conscientious. But he was not the hero
descending from heaven bright-sworded to smite a woman's fetters
of her limbs and deliver her from the yawning mouth-abyss.

His logical coolness of expostulation with her when she cast aside
the silly mission entrusted to her by Sir Willoughby and wept for
herself, was unheroic in proportion to its praiseworthiness. He
had left it to her to do everything she wished done, stipulating
simply that there should be a pause of four-and-twenty hours for
her to consider of it before she proceeded in the attempt to
extricate herself. Of consolation there had not been a word. Said
he, "I am the last man to give advice in such a case". Yet she had
by no means astonished him when her confession came out. It came
out, she knew not how. It was led up to by his declining the idea
of marriage, and her congratulating him on his exemption from the
prospect of the yoke, but memory was too dull to revive the one or
two fiery minutes of broken language when she had been guilty of
her dire misconduct.

This gentleman was no flatterer, scarcely a friend. He could look
on her grief without soothing her. Supposing he had soothed her
warmly? All her sentiments collected in her bosom to dash in
reprobation of him at the thought. She nevertheless condemned him
for his excessive coolness; his transparent anxiety not to be
compromised by a syllable; his air of saying, "I guessed as much,
but why plead your case to me?" And his recommendation to her to
be quite sure she did know what she meant, was a little insulting.
She exonerated him from the intention; he treated her as a girl.
By what he said of Miss Dale, he proposed that lady for imitation.

"I must be myself or I shall be playing hypocrite to dig my own
pitfall," she said to herself, while taking counsel with Laetitia
as to the route for their walk, and admiring a becoming curve in
her companion's hat.

Sir Willoughby, with many protestations of regret that letters of
business debarred him from the pleasure of accompanying them,
remarked upon the path proposed by Miss Dale, "In that case you
must have a footman."

"Then we adopt the other," said Clara, and they set forth.

"Sir Willoughby," Miss Dale said to her, "is always in alarm about
our unprotectedness."

Clara glanced up at the clouds and closed her parasol. She
replied, "It inspires timidity."

There was that in the accent and character of the answer which
warned Laetitia to expect the reverse of a quiet chatter with Miss
Middleton.

"You are fond of walking?" She chose a peaceful topic.

"Walking or riding; yes, of walking," said Clara. "The difficulty 
is to find companions."

"We shall lose Mr. Whitford next week."

"He goes?"

"He will be a great loss to me, for I do not ride," Laetitia
replied to the off-hand inquiry.

"Ah!"

Miss Middleton did not fan conversation when she simply breathed
her voice.

Laetitia tried another neutral theme.

"The weather to-day suits our country," she said.

"England, or Patterne Park? I am so devoted to mountains that I
have no enthusiasm for flat land."

"Do you call our country flat, Miss Middleton? We have
undulations, hills, and we have sufficient diversity, meadows,
rivers, copses, brooks, and good roads, and pretty by-paths."

"The prettiness is overwhelming. It is very pretty to see; but to
live with, I think I prefer ugliness. I can imagine learning to
love ugliness. It's honest. However young you are, you cannot he
deceived by it. These parks of rich people are a part of the
prettiness. I would rather have fields, commons."

"The parks give us delightful green walks, paths through
beautiful woods."

"If there is a right-of-way for the public."

"There should be," said Miss Dale, wondering; and Clara cried: "I
chafe at restraint: hedges and palings everywhere! I should have
to travel ten years to sit down contented among these
fortifications. Of course I can read of this rich kind of English
country with pleasure in poetry. But it seems to me to require
poetry. What would you say of human beings requiring it?"

"That they are not so companionable but that the haze of distance
improves the view."

"Then you do know that you are the wisest?"

Laetitia raised her dark eyelashes; she sought to understand. She
could only fancy she did; and if she did, it meant that Miss
Middleton thought her wise in remaining single.

Clara was full of a sombre preconception that her "jealousy" had
been hinted to Miss Dale.

"You knew Miss Durham?" she said.

"Not intimately."

"As well as you know me?"

"Not so well."

"But you saw more of her?"

"She was more reserved with me."

"Oh! Miss Dale, I would not be reserved with you."

The thrill of the voice caused Laetitia to steal a look. Clara's
eyes were bright, and she had the readiness to run to volubility
of the fever-stricken; otherwise she did not betray excitement.

"You will never allow any of these noble trees to be felled, Miss
Middleton?"

"The axe is better than decay, do you not think?"

"I think your influence will be great and always used to good
purpose.

"My influence, Miss Dale? I have begged a favour this morning and
can not obtain the grant."

It was lightly said, but Clara's face was more significant, and
"What?" leaped from Laetitia's lips.

Before she could excuse herself, Clara had answered: "My liberty."

In another and higher tone Laetitia said, "What?" and she looked
round on her companion; she looked in the doubt that is open to
conviction by a narrow aperture, and slowly and painfully yields
access. Clara saw the vacancy of her expression gradually filling
with woefulness.

"I have begged him to release me from my engagement, Miss Dale."

"Sir Willoughby?"

"It is incredible to you. He refuses. You see I have no
influence."

"Miss Middleton, it is terrible!"

"To be dragged to the marriage service against one's will? Yes."

"Oh! Miss Middleton!"

"Do you not think so?"

"That cannot be your meaning."

"You do not suspect me of trifling? You know I would not. I am as
much in earnest as a mouse in a trap."

"No, you will not misunderstand me! Miss Middleton, such a blow to
Sir Willoughby would be shocking, most cruel! He is devoted to
you."

"He was devoted to Miss Durham."

"Not so deeply: differently."

"Was he not very much courted at that time? He is now; not so
much: he is not so young. But my reason for speaking of Miss
Durham was to exclaim at the strangeness of a girl winning her
freedom to plunge into wedlock. Is it comprehensible to you? She
flies from one dungeon into another. These are the acts which
astonish men at our conduct, and cause them to ridicule and, I
dare say, despise us."

"But, Miss Middleton, for Sir Willoughby to grant such a request,
if it was made . . ."

"It was made, and by me, and will be made again. I throw it all on
my unworthiness, Miss Dale. So the county will think of me, and
quite justly. I would rather defend him than myself. He requires a
different wife from anything I can be. That is my discovery;
unhappily a late one. The blame is all mine. The world cannot be
too hard on me. But I must be free if I am to be kind in
my judgements even of the gentleman I have injured."

"So noble a gentleman!" Laetitia sighed.

"I will subscribe to any eulogy of him," said Clara, with a
penetrating thought as to the possibility of a lady experienced in
him like Laetitia taking him for noble. "He has a noble air. I
say it sincerely, that your appreciation of him proves his
nobility." Her feeling of opposition to Sir Willoughby pushed her
to this extravagance, gravely perplexing Laetitia. "And it is,"
added Clara, as if to support what she had said, "a withering
rebuke to me; I know him less, at least have not had so long an
experience of him."

Laetitia pondered on an obscurity in these words which would have
accused her thick intelligence but for a glimmer it threw on
another most obscure communication. She feared it might be,
strange though it seemed, jealousy, a shade of jealousy affecting
Miss Middleton, as had been vaguely intimated by Sir Willoughby
when they were waiting in the hall. "A little feminine ailment,
a want of comprehension of a perfect friendship;" those were his
words to her: and he suggested vaguely that care must be taken in
the eulogy of her friend.

She resolved to be explicit.

"I have not said that I think him beyond criticism, Miss
Middleton."

"Noble?"

"He has faults. When we have known a person for years the faults
come out, but custom makes light of them; and I suppose we feel
flattered by seeing what it would be difficult to be blind to!
A very little flatters us! Now, do you not admire that view? It is
my favourite."

Clara gazed over rolling richness of foliage, wood and water, and
a church-spire, a town and horizon hills. There sung a sky-lark.

"Not even the bird that does not fly away!" she said; meaning, she
had no heart for the bird satisfied to rise and descend in this
place.

Laetitia travelled to some notion, dim and immense, of Miss
Middleton's fever of distaste. She shrunk from it in a kind of
dread lest it might be contagious and rob her of her one ever-fresh
possession of the homely picturesque; but Clara melted her by
saying, "For your sake I could love it ... in time; or some dear
old English scene. Since ... since this ... this change in me, I
find I cannot separate landscape from associations. Now I learn
how youth goes. I have grown years older in a week.--Miss Dale,
if he were to give me my freedom? if he were to cast me off? if he
stood alone?"

"I should pity him."

"Him--not me! Oh! right! I hoped you would; I knew you would."

Laetitia's attempt to shift with Miss Middleton's shiftiness was
vain; for now she seemed really listening to the language
of Jealousy:--jealous of the ancient Letty Dale--and immediately 
before the tone was quite void of it.

"Yes," she said, "but you make me feel myself in the dark, and
when I do I have the habit of throwing myself for guidance upon
such light as I have within. You shall know me, if you will, as
well as I know myself. And do not think me far from the point when
I say I have a feeble health. I am what the doctors call anaemic;
a rather bloodless creature. The blood is life, so I have not much
life. Ten years back--eleven, if I must be precise, I thought of
conquering the world with a pen! The result is that I am glad of a
fireside, and not sure of always having one: and that is my
achievement. My days are monotonous, but if I have a dread, it is
that there will be an alteration in them. My father has very
little money. We subsist on what private income he has, and his
pension: he was an army doctor. I may by-and-by have to live in
a town for pupils. I could be grateful to any one who would save
me from that. I should be astonished at his choosing to have me
burden his household as well.--Have I now explained the nature of
my pity? It would be the pity of common sympathy, pure lymph of
pity, as nearly disembodied as can be. Last year's sheddings from
the tree do not form an attractive garland. Their merit is, that
they have not the ambition. I am like them. Now, Miss Middleton, I
cannot make myself more bare to you. I hope you see my sincerity."

"I do see it," Clara said.

With the second heaving of her heart, she cried: "See it, and envy
you that humility! proud if I could ape it! Oh, how proud if I
could speak so truthfully true!--You would not have spoken so to
me without some good feeling out of which friends are made. That I
am sure of. To be very truthful to a person, one must have a
liking. So I judge by myself. Do I presume too much?"

Kindness was on Laetitia's face.

"But now," said Clara, swimming on the wave in her bosom, "I tax
you with the silliest suspicion ever entertained by one of your
rank. Lady, you have deemed me capable of the meanest of our
vices!--Hold this hand, Laetitia; my friend, will you? Something
is going on in me."

Laetitia took her hand, and saw and felt that something was going
on.

Clara said, "You are a woman."

It was her effort to account for the something.

She swam for a brilliant instant on tears, and yielded to the
overflow.

When they had fallen, she remarked upon her first long breath
quite coolly: "An encouraging picture of a rebel, is it not?"

Her companion murmured to soothe her.

"It's little, it's nothing," said Clara, pained to keep her lips
in line.

They walked forward, holding hands, deep-hearted to one another.

"I like this country better now," the shaken girl resumed. "I
could lie down in it and ask only for sleep. I should like to
think of you here. How nobly self-respecting you must be, to speak
as you did! Our dreams of heroes and heroines are cold glitter
beside the reality. I have been lately thinking of myself as an
outcast of my sex, and to have a good woman liking me a little ...
loving? Oh, Laetitia, my friend, I should have kissed you, and not
made this exhibition of myself--and if you call it hysterics, woe
to you! for I bit my tongue to keep it off when I had hardly
strength to bring my teeth together--if that idea of jealousy had
not been in your head. You had it from him."

"I have not alluded to it in any word that I can recollect."

"He can imagine no other cause for my wish to be released. I have
noticed, it is his instinct to reckon on women as constant by
their nature. They are the needles, and he the magnet. Jealousy
of you, Miss Dale! Laetitia, may I speak?"

"Say everything you please."

"I could wish:--Do you know my baptismal name?"

"Clara."

"At last! I could wish ... that is, if it were your wish. Yes, I
could wish that. Next to independence, my wish would be that. I
risk offending you. Do not let your delicacy take arms against
me. I wish him happy in the only way that he can be made happy.
There is my jealousy."

"Was it what you were going to say just now?"

"No."

"I thought not."

"I was going to say--and I believe the rack would not make me
truthful like you, Laetitia--well, has it ever struck you:
remember, I do see his merits; I speak to his faithfullest friend,
and I acknowledge he is attractive, he has manly tastes and
habits; but has it never struck you ... I have no right to ask; I
know that men must have faults, I do not expect them to be saints;
I am not one; I wish I were."

"Has it never struck me ... ?" Laetitia prompted her.

"That very few women are able to be straightforwardly sincere in
their speech, however much they may desire to be?"

"They are differently educated. Great misfortune brings it to
them."

"I am sure your answer is correct. Have you ever known a woman who
was entirely an Egoist?"

"Personally known one? We are not better than men."

"I do not pretend that we are. I have latterly become an Egoist,
thinking of no one but myself, scheming to make use of every soul
I meet. But then, women are in the position of inferiors. They are
hardly out of the nursery when a lasso is round their necks; and
if they have beauty, no wonder they turn it to a weapon and make
as many captives as they can. I do not wonder! My sense of shame
at my natural weakness and the arrogance of men would urge me to
make hundreds captive, if that is being a coquette. I should not
have compassion for those lofty birds, the hawks. To see them with
their wings clipped would amuse me. Is there any other way of
punishing them?"

"Consider what you lose in punishing them."

"I consider what they gain if we do not."

Laetitia supposed she was listening to discursive observations 
upon the inequality in the relations of the sexes. A suspicion of
a drift to a closer meaning had been lulled, and the colour
flooded her swiftly when Clara said: "Here is the difference I
see; I see it; I am certain of it: women who are called coquettes
make their conquests not of the best of men; but men who are
Egoists have good women for their victims; women on whose devoted
constancy they feed; they drink it like blood. I am sure I am not
taking the merely feminine view. They punish themselves too by
passing over the one suitable to them, who could really give them
what they crave to have, and they go where they . . ." Clara
stopped. "I have not your power to express ideas," she said.

"Miss Middleton, you have a dreadful power," said Laetitia.

Clara smiled affectionately. "I am not aware of any. Whose cottage
is this?"

"My father's. Will you not come in? into the garden?"

Clara took note of ivied windows and roses in the porch. She
thanked Laetitia and said: "I will call for you in an hour."

"Are you walking on the road alone?" said Laetitia, incredulously,
with an eye to Sir Willoughby's dismay.

"I put my trust in the high-road," Clara replied, and turned
away, but turned back to Laetitia and offered her face to be
kissed.

The "dreadful power" of this young lady had fervently impressed 
Laetitia, and in kissing her she marvelled at her gentleness and
girlishness.

Clara walked on, unconscious of her possession of power of any
kind.


CHAPTER XVII

The Porcelain Vase

During the term of Clara's walk with Laetitia, Sir Willoughby's 
shrunken self-esteem, like a garment hung to the fire after
exposure to tempestuous weather, recovered some of the sleekness
of its velvet pile in the society of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson,
who represented to him the world he feared and tried to keep sunny
for himself by all the arts he could exercise. She expected him
to be the gay Sir Willoughby, and her look being as good as an
incantation summons, he produced the accustomed sprite, giving her
sally for sally. Queens govern the polite. Popularity with men,
serviceable as it is for winning favouritism with women, is of
poor value to a sensitive gentleman, anxious even to prognostic
apprehension on behalf of his pride, his comfort and his
prevalence. And men are grossly purchasable; good wines have them,
good cigars, a goodfellow air: they are never quite worth their
salt even then; you can make head against their ill looks. But the
looks of women will at one blow work on you the downright
difference which is between the cock of lordly plume and the
moulting. Happily they may be gained: a clever tongue will gain
them, a leg. They are with you to a certainty if Nature is with
you; if you are elegant and discreet: if the sun is on you, and
they see you shining in it; or if they have seen you well-stationed
and handsome in the sun. And once gained they are your mirrors
for life, and far more constant than the glass. That tale of
their caprice is absurd. Hit their imaginations once, they are
your slaves, only demanding common courtier service of you. They
will deny that you are ageing, they will cover you from scandal,
they will refuse to see you ridiculous. Sir Willoughby's
instinct, or skin, or outfloating feelers, told him of these
mysteries of the influence of the sex; he had as little need to
study them as a lady breathed on.

He had some need to know them in fact; and with him the need of a
protection for himself called it forth; he was intuitively a
conjurer in self-defence, long-sighted, wanting no directions to
the herb he was to suck at when fighting a serpent. His dulness of
vision into the heart of his enemy was compensated by the agile
sensitiveness obscuring but rendering him miraculously active,
and, without supposing his need immediate, he deemed it politic to
fascinate Mrs. Mountstuart and anticipate ghastly possibilities in
the future by dropping a hint; not of Clara's fickleness, you may
he sure; of his own, rather; or, more justly, of an altered view of
Clara's character. He touched on the rogue in porcelain.

Set gently laughing by his relishing humour. "I get nearer to it,"
he said.

"Remember I'm in love with her," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

"That is our penalty."

"A pleasant one for you."

He assented. "Is the 'rogue' to be eliminated?"

"Ask when she's a mother, my dear Sir Willoughby."

"This is how I read you:--"

"I shall accept any interpretation that is complimentary."

"Not one will satisfy me of being sufficiently so. and so I leave
it to the character to fill out the epigram."

"Do. what hurry is there? And don't be misled by your objection to
rogue; which would be reasonable if you had not secured her."

The door of a hollow chamber of horrible reverberation was opened
within him by this remark.

He tried to say in jest, that it was not always a passionate
admiration that held the rogue fast; but he muddled it in the
thick of his conscious thunder, and Mrs. Mountstuart smiled to see
him shot from the smooth-flowing dialogue into the cataracts by
one simple reminder to the lover of his luck. Necessarily, after
a fall, the pitch of their conversation relaxed.

"Miss Dale is looking well," he said.

"Fairly: she ought to marry," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

He shook his head. "Persuade her."

She nodded. "Example may have some effect."

He looked extremely abstracted. "Yes, it is time. Where is the man
you could recommend for her complement? She has now what was
missing before, a ripe intelligence in addition to her happy
disposition--romantic, you would say. I can't think women the
worse for that."

"A dash of it."

"She calls it 'leafage'."

"Very pretty. And have you relented about your horse Achmet?"

"I don't sell him under four hundred."

"Poor Johnny Busshe! You forget that his wife doles him out his
money. You're a hard bargainer, Sir Willoughby."

"I mean the price to be prohibitive."

"Very well; and 'leafage' is good for hide-and-seek; especially 
when there is no rogue in ambush. And that's the worst I can say of
Laetitia Dale. An exaggerated devotion is the scandal of our sex.
They say you're the hardest man of business in the county too,
and I can believe it; for at home and abroad your aim is to get
the best of everybody. You see I've no leafage, I am perfectly
matter-of-fact, bald."

"Nevertheless, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart, I can assure you
that conversing with you has much the same exhilarating effect on
me as conversing with Miss Dale."

"But, leafage! leafage! You hard bargainers have no compassion for
devoted spinsters."

"I tell you my sentiments absolutely."

"And you have mine moderately expressed."

She recollected the purpose of her morning's visit, which was to
engage Dr. Middleton to dine with her, and Sir Willoughby conducted
her to the library-door. "Insist," he said.

Awaiting her reappearance, the refreshment of the talk he had
sustained, not without point, assisted him to distinguish in its
complete abhorrent orb the offence committed against him by his
bride. And this he did through projecting it more and more away
from him, so that in the outer distance it involved his personal
emotions less, while observation was enabled to compass its
vastness, and, as it were, perceive the whole spherical mass of
the wretched girl's guilt impudently turning on its axis.

Thus to detach an injury done to us, and plant it in space, for
mathematical measurement of its weight and bulk, is an art; it may
also be an instinct of self-preservation; otherwise, as when
mountains crumble adjacent villages are crushed, men of feeling
may at any moment be killed outright by the iniquitous and the
callous.  But, as an art, it should be known to those who are for
practising an art so beneficent, that circumstances must lend
their aid. Sir Willoughby's instinct even had sat dull and crushed
before his conversation with Mrs. Mountstuart. She lifted him to
one of his ideals of himself. Among gentlemen he was the English
gentleman; with ladies his aim was the Gallican courtier of any
period from Louis Treize to Louis Quinze. He could doat on those
who led him to talk in that character--backed by English
solidity, you understand. Roast beef stood eminent behind the
souffle and champagne. An English squire excelling his fellows at
hazardous leaps in public, he was additionally a polished
whisperer, a lively dialoguer, one for witty bouts, with something
in him--capacity for a drive and dig or two--beyond mere wit, as
they soon learned who called up his reserves, and had a bosom for
pinking. So much for his ideal of himself. Now, Clara not only
never evoked, never responded to it, she repelled it; there was no
flourishing of it near her. He considerately overlooked these
facts in his ordinary calculations; he was a man of honour and she
was a girl of beauty; but the accidental blooming of his ideal,
with Mrs. Mountstuart, on the very heels of Clara's offence,
restored him to full command of his art of detachment, and he
thrust her out, quite apart from himself, to contemplate her
disgraceful revolutions.

Deeply read in the Book of Egoism that he was, he knew the wisdom
of the sentence: An injured pride that strikes not out will strike
home. What was he to strike with? Ten years younger, Laetitia
might have been the instrument. To think of her now was
preposterous. Beside Clara she had the hue of Winter under the
springing bough. He tossed her away, vexed to the very soul by an
ostentatious decay that shrank from comparison with the blooming
creature he had to scourge in self-defence, by some agency or
other.

Mrs. Mountstuart was on the step of her carriage when the silken
parasols of the young ladies were descried on a slope of the park,
where the yellow green of May-clothed beeches flowed over the
brown ground of last year's leaves.

"Who's the cavalier?" she inquired.

A gentleman escorted them.

"Vernon? No! he's pegging at Crossjay," quoth Willoughby.

Vernon and Crossjay came out for the boy's half-hour's run before
his dinner. Crossjay spied Miss Middleton and was off to meet her
at a bound. Vernon followed him leisurely.

"The rogue has no cousin, has she?" said Mrs. Mountstuart.

"It's a family of one son or one daughter for generations,"
replied Willoughby.

"And Letty Dale?"

"Cousin!" he exclaimed, as if wealth had been imputed to Miss
Dale; adding: "No male cousin."

A railway station fly drove out of the avenue on the circle to the
hall-entrance. Flitch was driver. He had no right to be there, he
was doing wrong, but he was doing it under cover of an office, to
support his wife and young ones, and his deprecating touches of
the hat spoke of these apologies to his former master with
dog-like pathos.

Sir Willoughby beckoned to him to approach.

"So you are here," he said. "You have luggage."

Flitch jumped from the box and read one of the labels aloud:
"Lieutenant-Colonel H. De Craye."

"And the colonel met the ladies? Overtook them?"

Here seemed to come dismal matter for Flitch to relate.

He began upon the abstract origin of it: he had lost his place in
Sir Willoughby's establishment, and was obliged to look about for
work where it was to be got, and though he knew he had no right to
be where he was, he hoped to be forgiven because of the mouths he
had to feed as a flyman attached to the railway station, where
this gentleman, the colonel, hired him, and he believed Sir
Willoughby would excuse him for driving a friend, which the
colonel was, he recollected well, and the colonel recollected him,
and he said, not noticing how he was rigged: "What! Flitch! back
in your old place? Am I expected?" and he told the colonel his
unfortunate situation. "Not back, colonel; no such luck for me"
and Colonel De Craye was a very kind-hearted gentleman, as he
always had been, and asked kindly after his family. And it might
be that such poor work as he was doing now he might be deprived
of, such is misfortune when it once harpoons a man; you may dive,
and you may fly, but it sticks in you, once do a foolish thing.
"May I humbly beg of you, if you'll be so good, Sir Willoughby,"
said Flitch, passing to evidence of the sad mishap. He opened the
door of the fly, displaying fragments of broken porcelain.

"But, what, what! what's the story of this?" cried Sir Willoughby.

"What is it?" said Mrs. Mountstuart, pricking up her ears.

"It was a vaws," Flitch replied in elegy.

"A porcelain vase!" interpreted Sir Willoughby.

"China!" Mrs. Mountstuart faintly shrieked.

One of the pieces was handed to her inspection.

She held it close, she held it distant. She sighed horribly.

"The man had better have hanged himself," said she.

Flitch bestirred his misfortune-sodden features and members for a
continuation of the doleful narrative.

"How did this occur?" Sir Willoughby peremptorily asked him.

Flitch appealed to his former master for testimony that he was a
good and a careful driver.

Sir Willoughby thundered: "I tell you to tell me how this
occurred."

"Not a drop, my lady! not since my supper last night, if there's
any truth in me!" Flitch implored succour of Mrs Mountstuart.

"Drive straight," she said, and braced him.

His narrative was then direct.

Near Piper's mill, where the Wicker brook crossed the Rebdon 
road, one of Hoppner's wagons, overloaded as usual, was forcing
the horses uphill, when Flitch drove down at an easy pace, and saw
himself between Hoppner's cart come to a stand and a young lady
advancing: and just then the carter smacks his whip, the horses
pull half mad. The young lady starts behind the cart, and up jumps
the colonel, and, to save the young lady, Flitch dashed ahead and
did save her, he thanked Heaven for it, and more when he came to
see who the young lady was.

"She was alone?" said Sir Willoughby in tragic amazement, staring
at Flitch.

"Very well, you saved her, and you upset the fly," Mountstuart
jogged him on.

"Bardett, our old head-keeper, was a witness, my lady, had to
drive half up the bank, and it's true--over the fly did go; and
the vaws it shoots out against the twelfth mile-stone, just as
though there was the chance for it! for nobody else was injured,
and knocked against anything else, it never would have flown all
to pieces, so that it took Bardett and me ten minutes to collect
every one, down to the smallest piece there was; and he said, and
I can't help thinking myself, there was a Providence in it, for we
all come together so as you might say we was made to do as we
did."

"So then Horace adopted the prudent course of walking on with the
ladies instead of trusting his limbs again to this capsizing fly,"
Sir Willoughby said to Mrs. Mountstuart; and she rejoined: "Lucky
that no one was hurt."

Both of them eyed the nose of poor Flitch, and simultaneously they
delivered a verdict in "Humph!"

Mrs. Mountstuart handed the wretch a half-crown from her purse.
Sir Willoughby directed the footman in attendance to unload the
fly and gather up the fragments of porcelain carefully, bidding
Flitch be quick in his departing.

"The colonel's wedding-present! I shall call to-morrow." Mrs.
Mountstuart waved her adieu.

"Come every day!--Yes, I suppose we may guess the destination of
the vase." He bowed her off, and she cried:

"Well, now, the gift can he shared, if you're either of you for a
division." In the crash of the carriage-wheels he heard, "At any
rate there was a rogue in that porcelain."

These are the slaps we get from a heedless world.

As for the vase, it was Horace De Craye's loss. Wedding-present he
would have to produce, and decidedly not in chips. It had the look
of a costly vase, but that was no question for the moment:--What
was meant by Clara being seen walking on the high-road alone?--
What snare, traceable ad inferas, had ever induced Willoughby
Patterne to make her the repository and fortress of his honour!



CHAPTER XVIII

Colonel De Craye

Clara came along chatting and laughing with Colonel De Craye,
young Crossjay's hand under one of her arms, and her parasol
flashing; a dazzling offender; as if she wished to compel the
spectator to recognize the dainty rogue in porcelain; really
insufferably fair: perfect in height and grace of movement; 
exquisitely tressed; red-lipped, the colour striking out to a
distance from her ivory skin; a sight to set the woodland dancing,
and turn the heads of the town; though beautiful, a jury of art
critics might pronounce her not to be. Irregular features are
condemned in beauty. Beautiful figure, they could say. A
description of her figure and her walking would have won her any
praises: and she wore a dress cunning to embrace the shape and
flutter loose about it, in the spirit of a Summer's day.
Calypso-clad, Dr. Middleton would have called her. See the silver
birch in a breeze: here it swells, there it scatters, and it is
puffed to a round and it streams like a pennon, and now gives the
glimpse and shine of the white stem's line within, now hurries
over it, denying that it was visible, with a chatter along the
sweeping folds, while still the white peeps through. She had the
wonderful art of dressing to suit the season and the sky. To-day
the art was ravishingly companionable with her sweet-lighted face:
too sweet, too vividly meaningful for pretty, if not of the strict
severity for beautiful. Millinery would tell us that she wore a
fichu of thin white muslin crossed in front on a dress of the same
light stuff, trimmed with deep rose. She carried a grey-silk
parasol, traced at the borders with green creepers, and across the
arm devoted to Crossjay a length of trailing ivy, and in that hand
a bunch of the first long grasses. These hues of red rose and pale
green ruffled and pouted in the billowy white of the dress
ballooning and valleying softly, like a yacht before the sail
bends low; but she walked not like one blown against; resembling
rather the day of the South-west driving the clouds, gallantly
firm in commotion; interfusing colour and varying in her features
from laugh to smile and look of settled pleasure, like the heavens
above the breeze.

Sir Willoughby, as he frequently had occasion to protest to Clara,
was no poet: he was a more than commonly candid English gentleman
in his avowed dislike of the poet's nonsense, verbiage, verse; not
one of those latterly terrorized by the noise made about the
fellow into silent contempt; a sentiment that may sleep, and has
not to be defended. He loathed the fellow, fought the fellow. But
he was one with the poet upon that prevailing theme of verse, the
charms of women. He was, to his ill-luck, intensely susceptible,
and where he led men after him to admire, his admiration became a
fury. He could see at a glance that Horace De Craye admired Miss
Middleton. Horace was a man of taste, could hardly, could not,
do other than admire; but how curious that in the setting forth of
Clara and Miss Dale, to his own contemplation and comparison of
them, Sir Willoughby had given but a nodding approbation of his
bride's appearance! He had not attached weight to it recently.

Her conduct, and foremost, if not chiefly, her having been
discovered, positively met by his friend Horace, walking on the
high-road without companion or attendant, increased a sense of
pain so very unusual with him that he had cause to be indignant.
Coming on this condition, his admiration of the girl who wounded
him was as bitter a thing as a man could feel. Resentment, fed
from the main springs of his nature, turned it to wormwood, and
not a whit the less was it admiration when he resolved to chastise
her with a formal indication of his disdain. Her present gaiety
sounded to him like laughter heard in the shadow of the pulpit.

"You have escaped!" he said to her, while shaking the hand of his
friend Horace and cordially welcoming him. "My dear fellow! and,
by the way, you had a squeak for it, I hear from Flitch."

"I, Willoughby? not a bit," said the colonel; "we get into a fly
to get, out of it; and Flitch helped me out as well as in, good
fellow; just dusting my coat as he did it. The only bit of bad
management was that Miss Middleton had to step aside a trifle
hurriedly."

"You knew Miss Middleton at once?"

"Flitch did me the favour to introduce me. He first precipitated 
me at Miss Middleton's feet, and then he introduced me, in old
oriental fashion, to my sovereign."

Sir Willoughby's countenance was enough for his friend Horace.
Quarter-wheeling to Clara, he said: " 'Tis the place I'm to occupy
for life, Miss Middleton, though one is not always fortunate to
have a bright excuse for taking it at the commencement."

Clara said: "Happily you were not hurt, Colonel De Craye."

"I was in the hands of the Loves. Not the Graces, I'm afraid; I've
an image of myself. Dear, no! My dear Willoughby, you never made
such a headlong declaration as that. It would have looked like a
magnificent impulse, if the posture had only been choicer. And
Miss Middleton didn't laugh. At least I saw nothing but pity."

"You did not write," said Willoughby.

"Because it was a toss-up of a run to Ireland or here, and I came
here not to go there; and, by the way, fetched a jug with me to
offer up to the gods of ill-luck; and they accepted the
propitiation."

"Wasn't it packed in a box?"

"No, it was wrapped in paper, to show its elegant form. I caught
sight of it in the shop yesterday and carried it off this morning,
and presented it to Miss Middleton at noon, without any form at
all."

Willoughby knew his friend Horace's mood when the Irish tongue in
him threatened to wag.

"You see what may happen," he said to Clara.

"As far as I am in fault I regret it," she answered.

"Flitch says the accident occurred through his driving up the bank
to save you from the wheels."

"Flitch may go and whisper that down the neck of his empty
whisky-flask," said Horace De Craye. "And then let him cork it."

"The consequence is that we have a porcelain vase broken. You
should not walk on the road alone, Clara. You ought to have a
companion, always. It is the rule here."

"I had left Miss Dale at the cottage."

"You ought to have had the dogs."

"Would they have been any protection to the vase?"

Horace De Craye crowed cordially.

"I'm afraid not, Miss Middleton. One must go to the witches for
protection to vases; and they're all in the air now, having their
own way with us. which accounts for the confusion in politics and
society, and the rise in the price of broomsticks, to prove it
true, as they tell us, that every nook and corner wants a mighty
sweeping. Miss Dale looks beaming," said De Craye, wishing to
divert Willoughby from his anger with sense as well as nonsense.

"You have not been visiting Ireland recently?" said Sir
Willoughby.

"No, nor making acquaintance with an actor in an Irish part in a
drama cast in the Green Island. "'Tis Flitch, my dear Willoughby, 
has been and stirred the native in me, and we'll present him to
you for the like good office when we hear after a number of years
that you've not wrinkled your forehead once at your liege lady.
Take the poor old dog back home, will you? He's crazed to be at
the Hall. I say, Willoughby, it would be a good bit of work to
take him back. Think of it; you'll do the popular thing, I'm sure.
I've a superstition that Flitch ought to drive you from the
church-door. If I were in luck, I'd have him drive me."

"The man's a drunkard, Horace."

"He fuddles his poor nose. "'Tis merely unction to the exile.
Sober struggles below. He drinks to rock his heart, because he has
one. Now let me intercede for poor Flitch."

"Not a word of him. He threw up his place."

"To try his fortune in the world, as the best of us do, though
livery runs after us to tell us there's no being an independent
gentleman, and comes a cold day we haul on the metal-button coat
again, with a good ha! of satisfaction. You'll do the popular
thing. Miss Middleton joins in the pleading."

"No pleading!"

"When I've vowed upon my eloquence, Willoughby, I'd bring you to
pardon the poor dog?"

"Not a word of him!"

"Just one!"

Sir Willoughby battled with himself to repress a state of temper
that put him to marked disadvantage beside his friend Horace in
high spirits. Ordinarily he enjoyed these fits of Irish of him,
which were Horace's fun and play, at times involuntary, and then
they indicated a recklessness that might embrace mischief. De
Craye, as Willoughby had often reminded him, was properly Norman.
The blood of two or three Irish mothers in his line, however, was
enough to dance him, and if his fine profile spoke of the stiffer
race, his eyes and the quick run of the lip in the cheek, and a
number of his qualities, were evidence of the maternal legacy.

"My word has been said about the man," Willoughby replied.

"But I've wagered on your heart against your word, and
cant afford to lose; and there's a double reason for revoking
for you!"

"I don't see either of them. Here are the ladies."

"You'll think of the poor beast, Willoughby."

"I hope for better occupation."

"If he drives a wheelbarrow at the Hall he'll be happier than on
board a chariot at large. He's broken-hearted."

"He's too much in the way of breakages, my dear Horace."

"Oh, the vase! the bit of porcelain!" sung De Craye. "Well, we'll
talk him over by and by."

"If it pleases you; but my rules are never amended."

"Inalterable, are they?--like those of an ancient people, who
might as well have worn a jacket of lead for the comfort they had
of their boast. The beauty of laws for human creatures is their
adaptability to new stitchings."

Colonel De Craye walked at the heels of his leader to make his bow
to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel.

Sir Willoughby had guessed the person who inspired his friend
Horace to plead so pertinaciously and inopportunely for the man
Flitch: and it had not improved his temper or the pose of his
rejoinders; he had winced under the contrast of his friend
Horace's easy, laughing, sparkling, musical air and manner with
his own stiffness; and he had seen Clara's face, too, scanning the
contrast--he was fatally driven to exaggerate his discontentment,
which did not restore him to serenity. He would have learned more
from what his abrupt swing round of the shoulder precluded his
beholding. There was an interchange between Colonel De Craye and
Miss Middleton; spontaneous on both sides. His was a look that
said: "You were right"; hers: "I knew it". Her look was calmer,
and after the first instant clouded as by wearifulness of
sameness; his was brilliant, astonished, speculative, and
admiring, pitiful: a look that poised over a revelation, called 
up the hosts of wonder to question strange fact.

It had passed unseen by Sir Willoughby. The observer was the one
who could also supply the key of the secret. Miss Dale had found
Colonel De Craye in company with Miss Middleton at her gateway.
They were laughing and talking together like friends of old
standing, De Craye as Irish as he could be: and the Irish tongue
and gentlemanly manner are an irresistible challenge to the
opening steps of familiarity when accident has broken the ice.
Flitch was their theme; and: "Oh, but if we go tip to Willoughby
hand in hand; and bob a courtesy to "m and beg his pardon for
Mister Flitch, won't he melt to such a pair of suppliants? of
course he will!" Miss Middleton said he would not. Colonel De
Craye wagered he would; he knew Willoughby best.  Miss Middleton
looked simply grave; a way of asserting the contrary opinion that
tells of rueful experience. "We'll see," said the colonel. They
chatted like a couple unexpectedly discovering in one another a
common dialect among strangers. Can there be an end to it when
those two meet? They prattle, they fill the minutes, as though
they were violently to be torn asunder at a coming signal, and
must have it out while they can; it is a meeting of mountain
brooks; not a colloquy, but a chasing, impossible to say which
flies, which follows, or what the topic, so interlinguistic are
they and rapidly counterchanging. After their conversation of an
hour before, Laetitia watched Miss Middleton in surprise at her
lightness of mind. Clara bathed in mirth. A boy in a summer stream
shows not heartier refreshment of his whole being. Laetitia could
now understand Vernon's idea of her wit. And it seemed that she
also had Irish blood. Speaking of Ireland, Miss Middleton said she
had cousins there, her only relatives.

"The laugh told me that," said Colonel De Craye.

Laetitia and Vernon paced up and down the lawn. Colonel De Craye
was talking with English sedateness to the ladies Eleanor and
Isabel. Clara and young Crossjay strayed.

"If I might advise, I would say, do not leave the Hall
immediately, not yet," Laetitia said to Vernon.

"You know, then?"

"I cannot understand why it was that I was taken into her
confidence."

"I counselled it."

"But it was done without an object that I can see."

"The speaking did her good."

"But how capricious! how changeful!"

"Better now than later."

"Surely she has only to ask to be released?--to ask earnestly:
if it is her wish."

"You are mistaken."

"Why does she not make a confidant of her father?"

"That she will have to do. She wished to spare him."

"He cannot be spared if she is to break the engagement."

She thought of sparing him the annoyance. "Now there's to be a
tussle, he must share in it."

"Or she thought he might not side with her?"

"She has not a single instinct of cunning. You judge her
harshly."

"She moved me on the walk out. Coming home I felt differently."

Vernon glanced at Colonel De Craye.

"She wants good guidance," continued Laetitia.

"She has not an idea of treachery."

"You think so? It may be true. But she seems one born devoid of
patience, easily made reckless. There is a wildness ... I judge
by her way of speaking; that at least appeared sincere. She does
not practise concealment. He will naturally find it almost
incredible. The change in her, so sudden, so wayward, is
unintelligible to me. To me it is the conduct of a creature
untamed. He may hold her to her word and be justified."

"Let him look out if he does!"

Is not that harsher than anything I have said of her?"

"I'm not appointed to praise her. I fancy I read the case; and it's
a case of opposition of temperaments. We never can tell the person
quite suited to us; it strikes us in a flash."

"That they are not suited to us? Oh, no; that comes by degrees."

"Yes, but the accumulation of evidence, or sentience, if you like,
is combustible; we don't command the spark; it may be late in
falling. And you argue in her favour. Consider her as a generous
and impulsive girl, outwearied at last."

"By what?"

By anything; by his loftiness, if you like. He flies too high for
her, we will say."

"Sir Willoughby an eagle?"

"She may be tired of his eyrie."

The sound of the word in Vernon's mouth smote on a consciousness 
she had of his full grasp of Sir Willoughby and her own timid
knowledge, though he was not a man who played on words.

If he had eased his heart in stressing the first syllable, it was
only temporary relief. He was heavy-browed enough.

"But I cannot conceive what she expects me to do by confiding her
sense of her position to me," said Laetitia.

"We none of us know what will be done. We hang on Willoughby, who
hangs on whatever it is that supports him: and there we are in a
swarm."

"You see the wisdom of staying, Mr. Whitford."

"It must be over in a day or two. Yes, I stay."

"She inclines to obey you."

"I should be sorry to stake my authority on her obedience. We
must decide something about Crossjay, and get the money for his
crammer, if it is to be got. If not, I may get a man to trust me.
I mean to drag the boy away. Willoughby has been at him with the
tune of gentleman, and has laid hold of him by one ear. When I say
'her obedience,' she is not in a situation, nor in a condition to
be led blindly by anybody. She must rely on herself, do everything
herself. It's a knot that won't bear touching by any hand save
hers."

"I fear . . ." said Laetitia.

"Have no such fear."

"If it should come to his positively refusing."

"He faces the consequences."

"You do not think of her."

Vernon looked at his companion.




CHAPTER XIX

Colonel De Craye and Clara Middleton

MISS MIDDLETON finished her stroll with Crossjay by winding her
trailer of ivy in a wreath round his hat and sticking her bunch of
grasses in the wreath. She then commanded him to sit on the ground
beside a big rhododendron, there to await her return. Crossjay had
informed her of a design he entertained to be off with a horde of
boys nesting in high trees, and marking spots where wasps and
hornets were to be attacked in Autumn: she thought it a dangerous
business, and as the boy's dinner-bell had very little restraint
over him when he was in the flush of a scheme of this description,
she wished to make tolerably sure of him through the charm she not
unreadily believed she could fling on lads of his age. "Promise me
you will not move from here until I come back, and when I come I
will give you a kiss." Crossjay promised. She left him and forgot
him.

Seeing by her watch fifteen minutes to the ringing of the bell, a
sudden resolve that she would speak to her father without another
minute's delay had prompted her like a superstitious impulse to
abandon her aimless course and be direct. She knew what was good
for her; she knew it now more clearly than in the morning. To be
taken away instantly! was her cry. There could be no further
doubt. Had there been any before? But she would not in the morning
have suspected herself of a capacity for evil, and of a pressing
need to be saved from herself. She was not pure of nature: it may
be that we breed saintly souls which are: she was pure of will:
fire rather than ice. And in beginning to see the elements she
was made of she did not shuffle them to a heap with her sweet
looks to front her. She put to her account some strength, much
weakness; she almost dared to gaze unblinking at a perilous evil
tendency. The glimpse of it drove her to her father.

"He must take me away at once; to-morrow!"

She wished to spare her father. So unsparing of herself was she,
that, in her hesitation to speak to him of her change of feeling
for Sir Willoughby, she would not suffer it to be attributed in
her own mind to a daughter's anxious consideration about her
father's loneliness; an idea she had indulged formerly.
Acknowledging that it was imperative she should speak, she
understood that she had refrained, even to the inflicting upon
herself of such humiliation as to run dilating on her woes to
others. because of the silliest of human desires to preserve her
reputation for consistency. She had heard women abused for
shallowness and flightiness: she had heard her father denounce
them as veering weather-vanes, and his oft-repeated quid femina
possit: for her sex's sake, and also to appear an exception to
her sex, this reasoning creature desired to be thought consistent.

Just on the instant of her addressing him, saying: "Father," a note
of seriousness in his ear. it struck her that the occasion for
saying all had not yet arrived, and she quickly interposed:
"Papa"; and helped him to look lighter. The petition to be taken
away was uttered.

"To London?" said Dr. Middleton. "I don't know who'll take us in."

"To France, papa?"

"That means hotel-life."

"Only for two or three weeks."

"Weeks! I am under an engagement to dine with Mrs
Mountstuart Jenkinson five days hence: that is, on Thursday."

"Could we not find an excuse?"

"Break an engagement? No, my dear, not even to escape drinking a
widow's wine."

"Does a word bind us?"

"Why, what else should?"

"I think I am not very well."

"We'll call in that man we met at dinner here: Corney: a capital
doctor; an old-fashioned anecdotal doctor. How is it you are not
well, my love? You look well. I cannot conceive your not being
well."

"It is only that I want change of air, papa."

"There we are--a change! semper eadem! Women will be wanting a
change of air in Paradise; a change of angels too, I might surmise.
A change from quarters like these to a French hotel would be a
descent!--'this the seat, this mournful gloom for that celestial
light.?' I am perfectly at home in the library here. That
excellent fellow Whitford and I have real days: and I like him for
showing fight to his elder and better."

"He is going to leave."

"I know nothing of it, and I shall append no credit to the tale
until I do know. He is headstrong, but he answers to a rap."

Clara's bosom heaved. The speechless insurrection threatened her
eyes.

A South-west shower lashed the window-panes and suggested to Dr.
Middleton shuddering visions of the Channel passage on board a
steamer.

"Corney shall see you: he is a sparkling draught in person;
probably illiterate, if I may judge from one interruption of my
discourse when he sat opposite me, but lettered enough to respect
Learning and write out his prescription: I do not ask more of men
or of physicians." Dr. Middleton said this rising, glancing at the
clock and at the back of his hands. "'Quod autem secundum litteras
difficillimum esse artificium?' But what after letters is the more
difficult practice? 'Ego puto medicum.' The medicus next to the
scholar: though I have not to my recollection required him next
me, nor ever expected child of mine to be crying for that milk.
Daughter she is--of the unexplained sex: we will send a messenger
for Corney. Change, my dear, you will speedily have, to satisfy
the most craving of women, if Willoughby, as I suppose, is in the
neoteric fashion of spending a honeymoon on a railway: apt image,
exposition and perpetuation of the state of mania conducting to
the institution! In my time we lay by to brood on happiness; we
had no thought of chasing it over a continent, mistaking
hurly-burly clothed in dust for the divinity we sought. A smaller
generation sacrifices to excitement. Dust and hurly-burly must
perforce be the issue. And that is your modern world. Now, my
dear, let us go and wash our hands. Midday-bells expect immediate
attention. They know of no anteroom of assembly."

Clara stood gathered up, despairing at opportunity lost. He had
noticed her contracted shape and her eyes, and had talked
magisterially to smother and overbear the something disagreeable 
prefigured in her appearance.

"You do not despise your girl, father?"

I do not; I could not; I love her; I love my girl. But you need
not sing to me like a gnat to propound that question, my dear."

"Then, father, tell Willoughby to-day we have to leave tomorrow. 
You shall return in time for Mrs. Mountstuart's dinner. Friends
will take us in, the Darletons, the Erpinghams. We can go to
Oxford, where you are sure of welcome. A little will recover me.
Do not mention doctors. But you see I am nervous. I am quite
ashamed of it; I am well enough to laugh at it, only I cannot
overcome it; and I feel that a day or two will restore me. Say you
will. Say it in First-Lesson-Book language; anything above a
primer splits my foolish head to-day."

Dr Middleton shrugged, spreading out his arms.

"The office of ambassador from you to Willoughby, Clara? You
decree me to the part of ball between two bats. The Play being
assured, the prologue is a bladder of wind. I seem to be
instructed in one of the mysteries of erotic esotery, yet on my
word I am no wiser. If Willoughby is to hear anything from you, he
will hear it from your lips."

"Yes, father, yes. We have differences. I am not fit for contests
at present; my head is giddy. I wish to avoid an illness. He and
I ... I accuse myself."

"There is the bell!" ejaculated Dr. Middleton. "I'll debate on it
with Willoughby."

"This afternoon?"

"Somewhen, before the dinner-bell. I cannot tie myself to the
minute-hand of the clock, my dear child. And let me direct you,
for the next occasion when you shall bring the vowels I and A, in
verbally detached letters, into collision, that you do not fill
the hiatus with so pronounced a Y. It is the vulgarization of our
tongue of which I accuse you. I do not like my girl to be guilty
of it."

He smiled to moderate the severity of the correction, and kissed
her forehead.

She declared her inability to sit and eat; she went to her room,
after begging him very earnestly to send her the assurance that he
had spoken. She had not shed a tear, and she rejoiced in her
self-control; it whispered to her of true courage when she had
given herself such evidence of the reverse.

Shower and sunshine alternated through the half-hours of the
afternoon, like a procession of dark and fair holding hands and
passing. The shadow came, and she was chill; the light yellow in
moisture, and she buried her face not to be caught up by
cheerfulness. Believing that her head ached, she afflicted herself
with all the heavy symptoms, and oppressed her mind so thoroughly
that its occupation was to speculate on Laetitia Dale's modest
enthusiasm for rural pleasures, for this place especially, with
its rich foliage and peeps of scenic peace. The prospect of an
escape from it inspired thoughts of a loveable round of life where
the sun was not a naked ball of fire, but a friend clothed in
woodland; where park and meadow swept to well-known features East
and West; and distantly circling hills, and the hearts of poor
cottagers too--sympathy with whom assured her of goodness--were
familiar, homely to the dweller in the place, morning and night.
And she had the love of wild flowers, the watchful happiness in
the seasons; poets thrilled her, books absorbed. She dwelt
strongly on that sincerity of feeling; it gave her root in our
earth; she needed it as she pressed a hand on her eyeballs,
conscious of acting the invalid, though the reasons she had for
languishing under headache were so convincing that her brain
refused to disbelieve in it and went some way to produce positive
throbs. Otherwise she had no excuse for shutting herself in her
room. Vernon Whitford would be sceptical. Headache or none,
Colonel De Craye must be thinking strangely of her; she had not
shown him any sign of illness. His laughter and his talk sung
about her and dispersed the fiction; he was the very sea-wind for
bracing unstrung nerves. Her ideas reverted to Sir Willoughby, and
at once they had no more cohesion than the foam on a
torrent-water.

But soon she was undergoing a variation of sentiment.
Her maid Barclay brought her this pencilled line from her father:

"Factum est; laetus est; amantium irae, etc."

That it was done, that Willoughby had put on an air of glad
acquiescence, and that her father assumed the existence of a
lovers" quarrel, was wonderful to her at first sight, simple the
succeeding minute. Willoughby indeed must be tired of her, glad of
her going. He would know that it was not to return. She was
grateful to him for perhaps hinting at the amantium irae, though
she rejected the folly of the verse. And she gazed over dear
homely country through her windows now. Happy the lady of the
place, if happy she can be in her choice! Clara Middleton envied
her the double-blossom wild cherry-tree, nothing else. One sprig
of it, if it had not faded and gone to dust-colour like crusty
Alpine snow in the lower hollows, and then she could depart,
bearing away a memory of the best here! Her fiction of the
headache pained her no longer. She changed her muslin dress for
silk; she was contented with the first bonnet Barclay presented.
Amicable toward every one in the house, Willoughby included, she
threw up her window, breathed. blessed mankind; and she thought:
"If Willoughby would open his heart to nature, he would be
relieved of his wretched opinion of the world." Nature was then
sparkling refreshed in the last drops of a sweeping rain-curtain,
favourably disposed for a background to her joyful optimism. A
little nibble of hunger within, real hunger, unknown to her of
late, added to this healthy view, without precipitating her to
appease it; she was more inclined to foster it, for the sake of
the sinewy activity of mind and limb it gave her; and in the style
of young ladies very light of heart, she went downstairs like a
cascade, and like the meteor observed in its vanishing trace she
alighted close to Colonel De Craye and entered one of the rooms
off the hall.

He cocked an eye at the half-shut door.

Now you have only to be reminded that it is the habit of the
sportive gentleman of easy life, bewildered as he would otherwise
be by the tricks, twists, and windings of the hunted sex, to
parcel out fair women into classes; and some are flyers and some
are runners; these birds are wild on the wing, those exposed their
bosoms to the shot. For him there is no individual woman. He
grants her a characteristic only to enroll her in a class. He is
our immortal dunce at learning to distinguish her as a personal
variety, of a separate growth.

Colonel De Craye's cock of the eye at the door said that he had
seen a rageing coquette go behind it. He had his excuse for
forming the judgement. She had spoken strangely of the fall of his
wedding-present, strangely of Willoughby; or there was a sound of
strangeness in an allusion to her appointed husband: and she had
treated Willoughby strangely when they met. Above all, her word
about Flitch was curious. And then that look of hers! And
subsequently she transferred her polite attentions to Willoughby's
friend. After a charming colloquy, the sweetest give and take
rattle he had ever enjoyed with a girl, she developed headache to
avoid him; and next she developed blindness, for the same purpose.

He was feeling hurt, but considered it preferable to feel
challenged.

Miss Middleton came out of another door. She had seen him when
she had passed him and when it was too late to convey her
recognition; and now she addressed him with an air of having bowed
as she went by.

"No one?" she said. "Am I alone in the house?"

"There is a figure naught," said he, "but it's as good as
annihilated, and no figure at all, if you put yourself on the
wrong side of it, and wish to be alone in the house."

"Where is Willoughby?"

"Away on business."

"Riding?"

"Achmet is the horse, and pray don't let him be sold, Miss
Middleton. I am deputed to attend on you."

"I should like a stroll."

"Are you perfectly restored?"

"Perfectly."

"Strong?"

"I was never better."

"It was the answer of the ghost of the wicked old man's wife when
she came to persuade him he had one chance remaining. Then, says
he, I'll believe in heaven if ye'll stop that bottle, and hurls
it; and the bottle broke and he committed suicide, not without
suspicion of her laying a trap for him. These showers curling away
and leaving sweet scents are divine, Miss Middleton. I have the
privilege of the Christian name on the nuptial-day. This park of
Willoughby's is one of the best things in England. There's a
glimpse over the lake that smokes of a corner of Killarney; tempts
the eye to dream, I mean." De Craye wound his finger spirally
upward, like a smoke-wreath. "Are you for Irish scenery?"

"Irish, English, Scottish."

"All's one so long as it's beautiful: yes, you speak for me.
Cosmopolitanism of races is a different affair. I beg leave to
doubt the true union of some; Irish and Saxon, for example, let
Cupid be master of the ceremonies and the dwelling-place of the
happy couple at the mouth of a Cornucopia. Yet I have seen a
flower of Erin worn by a Saxon gentleman proudly; and the Hibernian
courting a Rowena! So we'll undo what I said, and consider it
cancelled."

"Are you of the rebel party, Colonel De Craye?"

"I am Protestant and Conservative, Miss Middleton."

"I have not a head for politics."

"The political heads I have seen would tempt me to that opinion."

"Did Willoughby say when he would be back?"

"He named no particular time. Doctor Middleton and Mr. Whitford
are in the library upon a battle of the books."

"Happy battle!"

"You are accustomed to scholars. They are rather intolerant of us
poor fellows."

"Of ignorance perhaps; not of persons."

"Your father educated you himself, I presume?"

"He gave me as much Latin as I could take. The fault is mine that
it is little."

"Greek?"

"A little Greek."

"Ah! And you carry it like a feather."

"Because it is so light."

"Miss Middleton, I could sit down to be instructed, old as I am.
When women beat us, I verily believe we are the most beaten dogs
in existence. You like the theatre?"

"Ours?"

"Acting, then."

"Good acting, of course."

"May I venture to say you would act admirably?"

"The venture is bold, for I have never tried."

"Let me see; there is Miss Dale and Mr. Whitford; you and I;
sufficient for a two-act piece. THE IRISHMAN IN SPAIN would do."
He bent to touch the grass as she stepped on it. "The lawn is
wet."

She signified that she had no dread of wet, and said: "English 
women afraid of the weather might as well be shut up."

De Craye proceeded: "Patrick O'Neill passes over from Hibernia to
Iberia, a disinherited son of a father in the claws of the
lawyers, with a letter of introduction to Don Beltran d'Arragon, a
Grandee of the First Class, who has a daughter Dona Seraphina
(Miss Middleton), the proudest beauty of her day, in the custody
of a duenna (Miss Dale), and plighted to Don Fernan, of the Guzman
family (Mr. Whitford). There you have our dramatis personae."

"You are Patrick?"

"Patrick himself. And I lose my letter, and I stand on the Prado of
Madrid with the last portrait of Britannia in the palm of my hand,
and crying in the purest brogue of my native land: 'It's all
through dropping a letter I'm here in Iberia instead of Hibernia,
worse luck to the spelling!'"

"But Patrick will be sure to aspirate the initial letter of
Hibernia."

"That is clever criticism, upon my word, Miss Middleton! So he
would. And there we have two letters dropped. But he'd do it in a
groan, so that it wouldn't count for more than a ghost of one; and
everything goes on the stage, since it's only the laugh we want on
the brink of the action. Besides you are to suppose the
performance before a London audience, who have a native opposite
to the aspirate and wouldn't bear to hear him spoil a joke, as if
he were a lord or a constable. It's an instinct of the English
democracy. So with my bit of coin turning over and over in an
undecided way, whether it shall commit suicide to supply me a
supper, I behold a pair of Spanish eyes like violet lightning in
the black heavens of that favoured clime. Won't you have violet?"

"Violet forbids my impersonation."

"But the lustre on black is dark violet blue."

"You remind me that I have no pretension to black."

Colonel De Craye permitted himself to take a flitting gaze at Miss
Middleton's eyes. "Chestnut," he said. "Well, and Spain is the
land of chestnuts."

"Then it follows that I am a daughter of Spain."

"Clearly."

"Logically?"

"By positive deduction."

"And do I behold Patrick?"

"As one looks upon a beast of burden."

"Oh!"

Miss Middleton's exclamation was louder than the matter of the
dialogue seemed to require. She caught her hands up.

In the line of the outer extremity of the rhododendron, screened
from the house windows, young Crossjay lay at his length, with his
head resting on a doubled arm, and his ivy-wreathed hat on his
cheek, just where she had left him, commanding him to stay.
Half-way toward him up the lawn, she saw the poor boy, and the
spur of that pitiful sight set her gliding swiftly. Colonel De
Craye followed, pulling an end of his moustache.

Crossjay jumped to his feet.

"My dear, dear Crossjay!" she addressed him and reproached him.
"And how hungry you must be! And you must be drenched! This is
really too had."

"You told me to wait here," said Crossjay, in shy self-defence.

"I did, and you should not have done it, foolish boy! I told him
to wait for me here before luncheon, Colonel De Craye, and the
foolish, foolish boy!--he has had nothing to eat, and he must
have been wet through two or three times:--because I did not come
to him!"

"Quite right. And the lava might overflow him and take the mould
of him. like the sentinel at Pompeii, if he's of the true stuff."

"He may have caught cold, he may have a fever."

"He was under your orders to stay."

"I know. and I cannot forgive myself. Run in, Crossjay, and change
your clothes. Oh, run, run to Mrs. Montague, and get her to give
you a warm bath, and tell her from me to prepare some dinner for
you. And change every garment you have. This is unpardonable of
me. I said--'not for politics!'--I begin to think I have not a
head for anything. But could it be imagined that Crossjay would
not move for the dinner-bell! through all that rain! I forgot
you, Crossjay. I am so sorry; so sorry! You shall make me pay any
forfeit you like. Remember, I am deep, deep in your debt. And now
let me see you run fast. You shall come in to dessert this
evening."

Crossjay did not run. He touched her hand.

"You said something?"

"What did I say, Crossjay?"

"You promised."

"What did I promise?"

"Something."

"Name it, my dear boy."

He mumbled, ". . . kiss me."

Clara plumped down on him, enveloped him and kissed him.

The affectionately remorseful impulse was too quick for a
conventional note of admonition to arrest her from paying that
portion of her debt. When she had sped him off to Mrs Montague,
she was in a blush.

"Dear, dear Crossjay!" she said, sighing.

"Yes, he's a good lad," remarked the colonel. "The fellow may well
be a faithful soldier and stick to his post, if he receives 
promise of such a solde. He is a great favourite with you."

"He is. You will do him a service by persuading Willoughby to send
him to one of those men who get boys through their naval
examination. And, Colonel De Craye, will you be kind enough to ask
at the dinner-table that Crossjay may come in to dessert?"

"Certainly," said he, wondering.

"And will you look after him while you are here? See that no one
spoils him. If you could get him away before you leave, it would
he much to his advantage. He is born for the navy and should be
preparing to enter it now."

"Certainly, certainly," said De Craye, wondering more.

"I thank you in advance."

"Shall I not be usurping ...

"No, we leave to-morrow."

"For a day?"

"For longer."

"Two?"

"It will be longer."

"A week? I shall not see you again?"

"I fear not."

Colonel De Craye controlled his astonishment; he smothered a
sensation of veritable pain, and amiably said: "I feel a blow, but
I am sure you would not willingly strike. We are all involved in
the regrets."

Miss Middleton spoke of having to see Mrs. Montague, the
housekeeper, with reference to the bath for Crossjay, and stepped
off the grass. He bowed, watched her a moment, and for parallel
reasons, running close enough to hit one mark, he commiserated his
friend Willoughby. The winning or the losing of that young lady
struck him as equally lamentable for Willoughby.



CHAPTER XX

An Aged and a Great Wine

THE leisurely promenade up and down the lawn with ladies and
deferential gentlemen, in anticipation of the dinner-bell, was Dr.
Middleton's evening pleasure. He walked as one who had formerly
danced (in Apollo's time and the young god Cupid's), elastic on
the muscles of the calf and foot, bearing his broad iron-grey head
in grand elevation. The hard labour of the day approved the
cooling exercise and the crowning refreshments of French cookery
and wines of known vintages. He was happy at that hour in
dispensing wisdom or nugae to his hearers, like the Western sun
whose habit it is, when he is fairly treated, to break out in
quiet splendours, which by no means exhaust his treasury. Blessed
indeed above his fellows, by the height of the bow-winged bird in
a fair weather sunset sky above the pecking sparrow, is he that
ever in the recurrent evening of his day sees the best of it ahead
and soon to come. He has the rich reward of a youth and manhood of
virtuous living. Dr. Middleton misdoubted the future as well as the
past of the man who did not, in becoming gravity, exult to dine.
That man he deemed unfit for this world and the next.

An example of the good fruit of temperance, he had a comfortable 
pride in his digestion, and his political sentiments were attuned
by his veneration of the Powers rewarding virtue. We must have a
stable world where this is to be done.

The Rev. Doctor was a fine old picture; a specimen of art
peculiarly English; combining in himself piety and epicurism,
learning and gentlemanliness, with good room for each and a seat at
one another's table: for the rest, a strong man, an athlete in his
youth, a keen reader of facts and no reader of persons, genial, a
giant at a task, a steady worker besides, but easily discomposed.
He loved his daughter and he feared her. However much he liked
her character, the dread of her sex and age was constantly present
to warn him that he was not tied to perfect sanity while the
damsel Clara remained unmarried. Her mother had been an amiable
woman, of the poetical temperament nevertheless, too enthusiastic,
imaginative, impulsive, for the repose of a sober scholar; an
admirable woman, still, as you see, a woman, a fire-work. The girl
resembled her. Why should she wish to run away from Patterne Hall
for a single hour? Simply because she was of the sex born mutable
and explosive. A husband was her proper custodian, justly
relieving a father. With demagogues abroad and daughters at home,
philosophy is needed for us to keep erect. Let the girl be
Cicero's Tullia: well, she dies! The choicest of them will furnish
us examples of a strange perversity.

Miss Dale was beside Dr. Middleton. Clara came to them and took the
other side.

"I was telling Miss Dale that the signal for your subjection is my
enfranchisement," he said to her, sighing and smiling. "We know
the date. The date of an event to come certifies to it as a fact
to be counted on."

"Are you anxious to lose me?" Clara faltered.

"My dear, you have planted me on a field where I am to expect the
trumpet, and when it blows I shall be quit of my nerves, no more."

Clara found nothing to seize on for a reply in these words. She
thought upon the silence of Laetitia.

Sir Willoughby advanced, appearing in a cordial mood.

"I need not ask you whether you are better," he said to Clara,
sparkled to Laetitia, and raised a key to the level of Dr.
Middleton's breast, remarking, "I am going down to my inner
cellar."

"An inner cellar!" exclaimed the doctor.

"Sacred from the butler. It is interdicted to Stoneman. Shall I
offer myself as guide to you? My cellars are worth a visit."

"Cellars are not catacombs. They are, if rightly constructed,
rightly considered, cloisters, where the bottle meditates on joys
to bestow, not on dust misused! Have you anything great?"

"A wine aged ninety."

"Is it associated with your pedigree that you pronounce the age
with such assurance?"

"My grandfather inherited it."

"Your grandfather, Sir Willoughby, had meritorious offspring, not
to speak of generous progenitors. What would have happened had it
fallen into the female line! I shall be glad to accompany you.
Port? Hermitage?"

"Port."

"Ah! We are in England!"

"There will just be time," said Sir Willoughby, inducing Dr.
Middleton to step out.

A chirrup was in the reverend doctor's tone: "Hocks, too, have
compassed age. I have tasted senior Hocks. Their flavours are as a
brook of many voices; they have depth also. Senatorial Port! we
say. We cannot say that of any other wine. Port is deep-sea deep.
It is in its flavour deep; mark the difference. It is like a
classic tragedy, organic in conception. An ancient Hermitage has
the light of the antique; the merit that it can grow to an extreme
old age; a merit. Neither of Hermitage nor of Hock can you say
that it is the blood of those long years, retaining the strength
of youth with the wisdom of age. To Port for that! Port is our
noblest legacy! Observe, I do not compare the wines; I distinguish
the qualities. Let them live together for our enrichment; they are
not rivals like the Idaean Three. Were they rivals, a fourth
would challenge them. Burgundy has great genius. It does wonders
within its period; it does all except to keep up in the race; it
is short-lived. An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I
cherish the fancy that Port speaks the sentences of wisdom,
Burgundy sings the inspired Ode. Or put it, that Port is the
Homeric hexameter, Burgundy the pindaric dithyramb. What do you
say?"

"The comparison is excellent, sir."

"The distinction, you would remark. Pindar astounds. But his elder
brings us the more sustaining cup. One is a fountain of prodigious
ascent. One is the unsounded purple sea of marching billows."

"A very fine distinction."

"I conceive you to be now commending the similes. They pertain to
the time of the first critics of those poets. Touch the Greeks,
and you can nothing new; all has been said: 'Graiis ... praeter,
laudem nullius avaris.' Genius dedicated to Fame is immortal. We,
sir, dedicate genius to the cloacaline floods. We do not address
the unforgetting gods, but the popular stomach."

Sir Willoughby was patient. He was about as accordantly coupled
with Dr. Middleton in discourse as a drum duetting with a
bass-viol; and when he struck in he received correction from the
paedagogue-instrument. If he thumped affirmative or negative, he
was wrong. However, he knew scholars to be an unmannered species;
and the doctor's learnedness would be a subject to dilate on.

In the cellar, it was the turn for the drum. Dr. Middleton was
tongue-tied there. Sir Willoughby gave the history of his wine in
heads of chapters; whence it came to the family originally, and
how it had come down to him in the quantity to be seen.
"Curiously, my grandfather, who inherited it, was a water-drinker.
My father died early."

"Indeed! Dear me!" the doctor ejaculated in astonishment and
condolence. The former glanced at the contrariety of man, the
latter embraced his melancholy destiny.

He was impressed with respect for the family. This cool vaulted
cellar, and the central square block, or enceinte, where the thick
darkness was not penetrated by the intruding lamp, but rather took
it as an eye, bore witness to forethoughtful practical solidity in
the man who had built the house on such foundations. A house
having a great wine stored below lives in our imaginations as a
joyful house, fast and splendidly rooted in the soil. And
imagination has a place for the heir of the house. His grandfather
a water-drinker, his father dying early, present circumstances to
us arguing predestination to an illustrious heirship and career.
Dr Middleton's musings were coloured by the friendly vision of
glasses of the great wine; his mind was festive; it pleased him,
and he chose to indulge in his whimsical, robustious,
grandiose-airy style of thinking: from which the festive mind will
sometimes take a certain print that we cannot obliterate
immediately. Expectation is grateful, you know; in the mood of
gratitude we are waxen. And he was a self-humouring gentleman.

He liked Sir Willoughby's tone in ordering the servant at his
heels to take up "those two bottles": it prescribed, without
overdoing it, a proper amount of caution, and it named an
agreeable number.

Watching the man's hand keenly, he said:

"But here is the misfortune of a thing super-excellent:--not more
than one in twenty will do it justice."

Sir Willoughby replied: "Very true, sir; and I think we may pass
over the nineteen."

"Women, for example; and most men."

"This wine would be a scaled book to them."

"I believe it would. It would be a grievous waste."

"Vernon is a claret man; and so is Horace De Craye. They are both
below the mark of this wine. They will join the ladies. Perhaps
you and I, sir, might remain together."

"With the utmost good-will on my part."

"I am anxious for your verdict, sir."

"You shall have it, sir, and not out of harmony with the chorus
preceding me, I can predict. Cool, not frigid." Dr. Middleton
summed the attributes of the cellar on quitting it. "North side
and South. No musty damp. A pure air. Everything requisite. One
might lie down one's self and keep sweet here."

Of all our venerable British of the two Isles professing a
suckling attachment to an ancient port-wine, lawyer, doctor,
squire, rosy admiral, city merchant, the classic scholar is he
whose blood is most nuptial to the webbed bottle. The reason must
be, that he is full of the old poets. He has their spirit to sing
with, and the best that Time has done on earth to feed it. He may
also perceive a resemblance in the wine to the studious mind,
which is the obverse of our mortality, and throws off acids and
crusty particles in the piling of the years, until it is fulgent
by clarity. Port hymns to his conservatism. It is magical: at one
sip he is off swimming in the purple flood of the ever-youthful
antique.

By comparison, then, the enjoyment of others is brutish; they have
not the soul for it; but he is worthy of the wine, as are poets
of Beauty. In truth, these should be severally apportioned to
them, scholar and poet, as his own good thing. Let it be so.

Meanwhile Dr. Middleton sipped.

After the departure of the ladies, Sir Willoughby had practised a
studied curtness upon Vernon and Horace.

"You drink claret," he remarked to them, passing it round. "Port,
I think, Doctor Middleton? The wine before you may serve for a
preface. We shall have your wine in five minutes."

The claret jug empty, Sir Willoughby offered to send for more. De
Craye was languid over the question. Vernon rose from the table.

"We have a bottle of Doctor Middleton's port coming in,"
Willoughby said to him.

"Mine, you call it?" cried the doctor.

"It's a royal wine, that won't suffer sharing," said Vernon.

"We'll be with you, if you go into the billiard-room, Vernon."

"I shall hurry my drinking of good wine for no man," said the Rev.
Doctor.

"Horace?"

"I'm beneath it, ephemeral, Willoughby. I am going to the
ladies."

Vernon and De Craye retired upon the arrival of the wine; and Dr.
Middleton sipped. He sipped and looked at the owner of it.

"Some thirty dozen?" he said.

"Fifty."

The doctor nodded humbly.

"I shall remember, sir," his host addressed him. "whenever I have
the honour of entertaining you, I am cellarer of that wine."

The Rev. Doctor set down his glass. "You have, sir, in some sense.
an enviable post. It is a responsible one, if that be a blessing.
On you it devolves to retard the day of the last dozen."

"Your opinion of the wine is favourable, sir?"

"I will say this:--shallow souls run to rhapsody:--I will say,
that I am consoled for not having lived ninety years back, or at
any period but the present, by this one glass of your ancestral 
wine."

"I am careful of it," Sir Willoughby said, modestly; "still its
natural destination is to those who can appreciate it. You do,
sir."

"Still my good friend, still! It is a charge; it is a possession,
but part in trusteeship. Though we cannot declare it an entailed 
estate, our consciences are in some sort pledged that it shall be
a succession not too considerably diminished."

"You will not object to drink it, sir, to the health of your
grandchildren. And may you live to toast them in it on their
marriage-day!"

"You colour the idea of a prolonged existence in seductive hues.
Ha! It is a wine for Tithonus. This wine would speed him to the
rosy Morning--aha!"

"I will undertake to sit you through it up to morning," said Sir
Willoughby, innocent of the Bacchic nuptiality of the allusion.

Dr Middleton eyed the decanter. There is a grief in gladness, for
a premonition of our mortal state. The amount of wine in the
decanter did not promise to sustain the starry roof of night and
greet the dawn. "Old wine, my friend, denies us the full bottle!"

"Another bottle is to follow."

"No!"

"It is ordered."

"I protest."

"It is uncorked."

"I entreat."

"It is decanted."

"I submit. But, mark, it must be honest partnership. You are my
worthy host, sir, on that stipulation. Note the superiority of
wine over Venus!--I may say, the magnanimity of wine; our
jealousy turns on him that will not share! But the corks,
Willoughby. The corks excite my amazement."

"The corking is examined at regular intervals. I remember the
occurrence in my father's time. I have seen to it once."

"It must be perilous as an operation for tracheotomy; which I
should assume it to resemble in surgical skill and firmness of
hand, not to mention the imminent gasp of the patient."

A fresh decanter was placed before the doctor.

He said: "I have but a girl to give!" He was melted.

Sir Willoughby replied: "I take her for the highest prize this
world affords."

"I have beaten some small stock of Latin into her head, and a note
of Greek. She contains a savour of the classics. I hoped once ...
But she is a girl. The nymph of the woods is in her. Still she
will bring you her flower-cup of Hippocrene. She has that
aristocracy--the noblest. She is fair; a Beauty, some have said,
who judge not by lines. Fair to me, Willoughby! She is my sky.
There were applicants. In Italy she was besought of me. She has no
history. You are the first heading of the chapter. With you she
will have her one tale, as it should be. 'Mulier tum bene olet',
you know. Most fragrant she that smells of naught. She goes to you
from me, from me alone, from her father to her husband. 'Ut flos
in septis secretus nascitur hortis.'" He murmured on the lines to,
"'Sic virgo, dum . . .'  I shall feel the parting. She goes to one
who will have my pride in her, and more. I will add, who will be
envied. Mr. Whitford must write you a Carmen Nuptiale."

The heart of the unfortunate gentleman listening to Dr. Middleton
set in for irregular leaps. His offended temper broke away from
the image of Clara, revealing her as he had seen her in the
morning beside Horace De Craye, distressingly sweet; sweet with
the breezy radiance of an English soft-breathing day; sweet with
sharpness of young sap. Her eyes, her lips, her fluttering dress
that played happy mother across her bosom, giving peeps of the
veiled twins; and her laughter, her slim figure, peerless
carriage, all her terrible sweetness touched his wound to the
smarting quick.

Her wish to be free of him was his anguish. In his pain he thought
sincerely. When the pain was easier he muffled himself in the idea
of her jealousy of Laetitia Dale, and deemed the wish a fiction.
But she had expressed it. That was the wound he sought to comfort;
for the double reason, that he could love her better after
punishing her, and that to meditate on doing so masked the fear of
losing her--the dread abyss she had succeeded in forcing his
nature to shudder at as a giddy edge possibly near, in spite of
his arts of self-defence.

"What I shall do to-morrow evening!" he exclaimed. "I do not care
to fling a bottle to Colonel De Craye and Vernon. I cannot open
one for myself. To sit with the ladies will be sitting in the cold
for me. When do you bring me back my bride, sir?"

"My dear Willoughby!" The Rev. Doctor puffed, composed himself,
and sipped. "The expedition is an absurdity. I am unable to see
the aim of it. She had a headache, vapours. They are over, and
she will show a return of good sense. I have ever maintained that
nonsense is not to be encouraged in girls. I can put my foot on
it. My arrangements are for staying here a further ten days, in
the terms of your hospitable invitation. And I stay."

"I applaud your resolution, sir. Will you prove firm?"

"I am never false to my engagement, Willoughby."

"Not under pressure?"

"Under no pressure."

"Persuasion, I should have said."

"Certainly not. The weakness is in the yielding, either to
persuasion or to pressure. The latter brings weight to bear on us;
the former blows at our want of it."

"You gratify me, Doctor Middleton, and relieve me."

"I cordially dislike a breach in good habits, Willoughby. But I
do remember--was I wrong?--informing Clara that you appeared
light-hearted in regard to a departure, or gap in a visit, that
was not, I must confess, to my liking."

"Simply, my dear doctor, your pleasure was my pleasure; but make
my pleasure yours, and you remain to crack many a bottle with your
son-in-law."

"Excellently said. You have a courtly speech, Willoughby. I can
imagine you to conduct a lovers" quarrel with a politeness to read
a lesson to well-bred damsels. Aha?"

"Spare me the futility of the quarrel."

"All's well?"

"Clara, replied Sir Willoughby, in dramatic epigram, "is
perfection."

"I rejoice," the Rev. Doctor responded; taught thus to understand
that the lovers" quarrel between his daughter and his host was at
an end.

He left the table a little after eleven o'clock. A short dialogue
ensued upon the subject of the ladies. They must have gone to bed?
Why, yes; of course they must. It is good that they should go to
bed early to preserve their complexions for us. Ladies are
creation's glory, but they are anti-climax, following a wine of a
century old. They are anti-climax, recoil, cross-current; morally,
they are repentance, penance; imagerially, the frozen North on the
young brown buds bursting to green. What know they of a critic in
the palate, and a frame all revelry! And mark you, revelry in
sobriety, containment in exultation; classic revelry. Can they,
dear though they be to us, light up candelabras in the brain, to
illuminate all history and solve the secret of the destiny of man?
They cannot; they cannot sympathize with them that can. So
therefore this division is between us; yet are we not turbaned
Orientals, nor are they inmates of the harem. We are not Moslem.
Be assured of it in the contemplation of the table's decanter.

Dr Middleton said: "Then I go straight to bed."

"I will conduct you to your door, sir," said his host.

The piano was heard. Dr. Middleton laid his hand on the banisters,
and remarked: "The ladies must have gone to bed?"

Vernon came out of the library and was hailed, "Fellow-student!"

He waved a good-night to the Doctor, and said to Willoughby: "The
ladies are in the drawing-room."

"I am on my way upstairs," was the reply.

"Solitude and sleep, after such a wine as that; and forefend us
human society!" the Doctor shouted. "But, Willoughby!"

"Sir."

"One to-morrow."

"You dispose of the cellar, sir."

"I am fitter to drive the horses of the sun. I would rigidly
counsel, one, and no more. We have made a breach in the fiftieth
dozen. Daily one will preserve us from having to name the fortieth
quite so unseasonably. The couple of bottles per diem
prognosticates disintegration, with its accompanying recklessness.
Constitutionally, let me add, I bear three. I speak for
posterity."

During Dr. Middleton's allocution the ladies issued from the
drawing-room, Clara foremost, for she had heard her father's
voice, and desired to ask him this in reference to their
departure: "Papa, will you tell me the hour to-morrow?"

She ran up the stairs to kiss him, saying again: "When will you be
ready to-morrow morning?"

Dr Middleton announced a stoutly deliberative mind in the
bugle-notes of a repeated ahem. He bethought him of replying in
his doctorial tongue. Clara's eager face admonished him to
brevity: it began to look starved. Intruding on his vision of the
houris couched in the inner cellar to be the reward of valiant
men, it annoyed him. His brows joined. He said: "I shall not be
ready to-morrow morning."

"In the afternoon?"

"Nor in the afternoon."

"When?"

"My dear, I am ready for bed at this moment, and know of no other
readiness. Ladies," he bowed to the group in the hall below him,
"may fair dreams pay court to you this night!"

Sir Willoughby had hastily descended and shaken the hands of the
ladies, directed Horace De Craye to the laboratory for a
smoking-room, and returned to Dr. Middleton. Vexed by the scene,
uncertain of his temper if he stayed with Clara, for whom he had
arranged that her disappointment should take place on the morrow,
in his absence, he said: "Good-night, good-night," to her, with
due fervour, bending over her flaccid finger-tips; then offered
his arm to the Rev. Doctor.

"Ay, son Willoughby, in friendliness, if you will, though I am a
man to bear my load," the father of the stupefied girl addressed
him. "Candles, I believe, are on the first landing. Good-night,
my love. Clara!"

"Papa!"

"Good-night."

"Oh!" she lifted her breast with the interjection, standing in
shame of the curtained conspiracy and herself, "good night".

Her father wound up the stairs. She stepped down.

"There was an understanding that papa and I should go to London
to-morrow early," she said, unconcernedly, to the ladies, and her
voice was clear, but her face too legible. De Craye was heartily
unhappy at the sight.



CHAPTER XXI

Clara's Meditations

Two were sleepless that night: Miss Middleton and Colonel De
Craye.

She was in a fever, lying like stone, with her brain burning.
Quick natures run out to calamity in any little shadow of it flung
before. Terrors of apprehension drive them. They stop not short of
the uttermost when they are on the wings of dread. A frown means
tempest, a wind wreck; to see fire is to be seized by it. When it
is the approach of their loathing that they fear, they are in the
tragedy of the embrace at a breath; and then is the wrestle
between themselves and horror, between themselves and evil, which
promises aid; themselves and weakness, which calls on evil;
themselves and the better part of them, which whispers no
beguilement.

The false course she had taken through sophistical cowardice
appalled the girl; she was lost. The advantage taken of it by
Willoughby put on the form of strength, and made her feel abject,
reptilious; she was lost, carried away on the flood of the
cataract. He had won her father for an ally. Strangely, she knew
not how, he had succeeded in swaying her father, who had
previously not more than tolerated him. "Son Willoughby" on her
father's lips meant something that scenes and scenes would have to
struggle with, to the out-wearying of her father and herself. She
revolved the "Son Willoughby" through moods of stupefaction,
contempt, revolt, subjection. It meant that she was vanquished.
It meant that her father's esteem for her was forfeited. She saw
him a gigantic image of discomposure.

Her recognition of her cowardly feebleness brought the brood of
fatalism. What was the right of so miserable a creature as she to
excite disturbance, let her fortunes be good or ill? It would be
quieter to float, kinder to everybody. Thank heaven for the
chances of a short life! Once in a net, desperation is graceless.
We may be brutes in our earthly destinies: in our endurance of
them we need not be brutish.

She was now in the luxury of passivity, when we throw our burden
on the Powers above, and do not love them. The need to love them
drew her out of it, that she might strive with the unbearable, and
by sheer striving, even though she were graceless, come to love
them humbly. It is here that the seed of good teaching supports a
soul, for the condition might be mapped, and where kismet whispers
us to shut eyes, and instruction bids us look up, is at a
well-marked cross-road of the contest.

Quick of sensation, but not courageously resolved, she perceived 
how blunderingly she had acted. For a punishment, it seemed to her
that she who had not known her mind must learn to conquer her
nature, and submit. She had accepted Willoughby; therefore she
accepted him. The fact became a matter of the past, past debating.

In the abstract this contemplation of circumstances went well. A
plain duty lay in her way. And then a disembodied thought flew
round her, comparing her with Vernon to her discredit. He had for
years borne much that was distasteful to him, for the purpose of
studying, and with his poor income helping the poorer than
himself. She dwelt on him in pity and envy; he had lived in this
place, and so must she; and he had not been dishonoured by his
modesty: he had not failed of self-control, because he had a life
within. She was almost imagining she might imitate him when the
clash of a sharp physical thought, "The difference! the
difference!" told her she was woman and never could submit. Can a
woman have an inner life apart from him she is yoked to? She tried
to nestle deep away in herself: in some corner where the abstract
view had comforted her, to flee from thinking as her feminine
blood directed. It was a vain effort. The difference, the cruel
fate, the defencelessness of women, pursued her, strung her to
wild horses" backs, tossed her on savage wastes. In her case duty
was shame: hence, it could not be broadly duty. That intolerable
difference proscribed the word.

But the fire of a brain burning high and kindling everything
lighted up herself against herself.--Was one so volatile as she a
person with a will?--Were they not a multitude of flitting wishes
that she took for a will? Was she, feather-headed that she was, a
person to make a stand on physical pride?--If she could yield her
hand without reflection (as she conceived she had done, from
incapacity to conceive herself doing it reflectively) was she much
better than purchaseable stuff that has nothing to say to the
bargain?

Furthermore, said her incandescent reason, she had not suspected 
such art of cunning in Willoughby. Then might she not be deceived
altogether--might she not have misread him? Stronger than she
had fancied, might he not be likewise more estimable? The world
was favourable to him; he was prized by his friends.

She reviewed him. It was all in one flash. It was not much less
intentionally favourable than the world's review and that of his
friends, but, beginning with the idea of them, she recollected--
heard Willoughby's voice pronouncing his opinion of his friends
and the world; of Vernon Whitford and Colonel De Craye for
example, and of men and women. An undefined agreement to have the
same regard for him as his friends and the world had, provided
that he kept at the same distance from her, was the termination of
this phase, occupying about a minute in time, and reached through
a series of intensely vivid pictures:--his face, at her petition
to be released, lowering behind them for a background and a
comment.

"I cannot! I cannot!" she cried, aloud; and it struck her that her
repulsion was a holy warning. Better be graceless than a loathing
wife: better appear inconsistent. Why should she not appear such
as she was?

Why? We answer that question usually in angry reliance on certain
superb qualities, injured fine qualities of ours undiscovered by
the world, not much more than suspected by ourselves, which are
still our fortress, where pride sits at home, solitary and
impervious as an octogenarian conservative. But it is not possible
to answer it so when the brain is rageing like a pine-torch and
the devouring illumination leaves not a spot of our nature covert.
The aspect of her weakness was unrelieved, and frightened her back
to her loathing. From her loathing, as soon as her sensations had
quickened to realize it, she was hurled on her weakness. She was
graceless, she was inconsistent, she was volatile, she was
unprincipled, she was worse than a prey to wickedness--capable
of it; she was only waiting to be misled. Nay, the idea of being
misled suffused her with languor; for then the battle would be
over and she a happy weed of the sea no longer suffering those
tugs at the roots, but leaving it to the sea to heave and contend.
She would he like Constantia then: like her in her fortunes: never
so brave, she feared.

Perhaps very like Constantia in her fortunes!

Poor troubled bodies waking up in the night to behold visually the
spectre cast forth from the perplexed machinery inside them, stare
at it for a space, till touching consciousness they dive down
under the sheets with fish-like alacrity. Clara looked at her
thought, and suddenly headed downward in a crimson gulf.

She must have obtained absolution, or else it was oblivion, below.
Soon after the plunge her first object of meditation was Colonel
De Craye. She thought of him calmly: he seemed a refuge. He was
very nice, he was a holiday character. His lithe figure, neat firm
footing of the stag, swift intelligent expression, and his ready
frolicsomeness, pleasant humour, cordial temper, and his Irishry,
whereon he was at liberty to play, as on the emblem harp of the
Isle, were soothing to think of. The suspicion that she tricked
herself with this calm observation of him was dismissed. Issuing
out of torture, her young nature eluded the irradiating brain in
search of refreshment, and she luxuriated at a feast in
considering him--shower on a parched land that he was! He spread
new air abroad. She had no reason to suppose he was not a good
man: she could securely think of him. Besides he was bound by his
prospective office in support of his friend Willoughby to be quite
harmless. And besides (you are not to expect logical sequences)
the showery refreshment in thinking of him lay in the sort of
assurance it conveyed, that the more she thought, the less would
he be likely to figure as an obnoxious official--that is, as the
man to do by Willoughby at the altar what her father would, under
the supposition, be doing by her. Her mind reposed on Colonel De
Craye.

His name was Horace. Her father had worked with her at Horace. She
knew most of the Odes and some of the Satires and Epistles of the
poet. They reflected benevolent beams on the gentleman of the
poet's name. He too was vivacious, had fun, common sense,
elegance; loved rusticity, he said, sighed for a country life,
fancied retiring to Canada to cultivate his own domain; "modus
agri non ita magnus:" a delight. And he, too, when in the
country, sighed for town. There were strong features of
resemblance. He had hinted in fun at not being rich. "Quae virtus
et quanta sit vivere parvo." But that quotation applied to and
belonged to Vernon Whitford. Even so little disarranged her
meditations.

She would have thought of Vernon, as her instinct of safety
prompted, had not his exactions been excessive. He proposed to
help her with advice only. She was to do everything for herself,
do and dare everything, decide upon everything. He told her flatly
that so would she learn to know her own mind; and flatly, that it
was her penance. She had gained nothing by breaking down and
pouring herself out to him. He would have her bring Willoughby and
her father face to face, and be witness of their interview--
herself the theme. What alternative was there?--obedience to the
word she had pledged. He talked of patience, of self-examination
and patience. But all of her--she was all marked urgent. This
house was a cage, and the world--her brain was a cage, until she
could obtain her prospect of freedom.

As for the house, she might leave it; yonder was the dawn.

She went to her window to gaze at the first colour along the grey.
Small satisfaction came of gazing at that or at herself. She
shunned glass and sky. One and the other stamped her as a slave in
a frame. It seemed to her she had been so long in this place that
she was fixed here: it was her world, and to imagine an Alp was
like seeking to get back to childhood. Unless a miracle intervened
here she would have to pass her days. Men are so little chivalrous
now that no miracle ever intervenes. Consequently she was doomed.

She took a pen and began a letter to a dear friend, Lucy Darleton,
a promised bridesmaid, bidding her countermand orders for her
bridal dress, and purposing a tour in Switzerland. She wrote of
the mountain country with real abandonment to imagination. It
became a visioned loophole of escape. She rose and clasped a
shawl over her night-dress to ward off chillness, and sitting to
the table again, could not produce a word. The lines she had
written were condemned: they were ludicrously inefficient. The
letter was torn to pieces. She stood very clearly doomed.

After a fall of tears, upon looking at the scraps, she dressed
herself, and sat by the window and watched the blackbird on the
lawn as he hopped from shafts of dewy sunlight to the
long-stretched dewy tree-shadows, considering in her mind that
dark dews are more meaningful than bright, the beauty of the dews
of woods more sweet than meadow-dews. It signified only that she
was quieter. She had gone through her crisis in the anticipation
of it. That is how quick natures will often be cold and hard, or
not much moved, when the positive crisis arrives, and why it is
that they are prepared for astonishing leaps over the gradations
which should render their conduct comprehensible to us, if not
excuseable. She watched the blackbird throw up his head stiffly,
and peck to right and left, dangling the worm on each side his
orange beak. Specklebreasted thrushes were at work. and a wagtail
that ran as with Clara's own rapid little steps. Thrush and
blackbird flew to the nest. They had wings. The lovely morning
breathed of sweet earth into her open window, and made it painful,
in the dense twitter, chirp, cheep, and song of the air, to resist
the innocent intoxication. O to love! was not said by her, but if
she had sung, as her nature prompted, it would have been. Her war
with Willoughby sprang of a desire to love repelled by distaste. 
Her cry for freedom was a cry to be free to love: she discovered
it, half shuddering: to love, oh! no--no shape of man, nor
impalpable nature either: but to love unselfishness, and
helpfulness, and planted strength in something. Then, loving and
being loved a little, what strength would be hers! She could utter
all the words needed to Willoughby and to her father, locked in
her love: walking in this world, living in that.

Previously she had cried, despairing: If I were loved! Jealousy of
Constantia's happiness, envy of her escape, ruled her then: and
she remembered the cry, though not perfectly her plain-speaking to
herself: she chose to think she had meant: If Willoughby were
capable of truly loving! For now the fire of her brain had sunk,
and refuges and subterfuges were round about it. The thought of
personal love was encouraged, she chose to think, for the sake of
the strength it lent her to carve her way to freedom. She had just
before felt rather the reverse, but she could not exist with that
feeling; and it was true that freedom was not so indistinct in her
fancy as the idea of love.

Were men, when they were known, like him she knew too well?

The arch-tempter's question to her was there.

She put it away. Wherever she turned it stood observing her. She
knew so much of one man, nothing of the rest: naturally she was
curious. Vernon might be sworn to be unlike. But he was
exceptional. What of the other in the house?

Maidens are commonly reduced to read the masters of their
destinies by their instincts; and when these have been edged by
over-activity they must hoodwink their maidenliness to suffer
themselves to read; and then they must dupe their minds, else men
would soon see they were gifted to discern. Total ignorance being
their pledge of purity to men, they have to expunge the writing of
their perceptives on the tablets of the brain: they have to know
not when they do know. The instinct of seeking to know, crossed by
the task of blotting knowledge out, creates that conflict of the
natural with the artificial creature to which their ultimately
revealed double-face, complained of by ever-dissatisfied men, is
owing. Wonder in no degree that they indulge a craving to be
fools, or that many of them act the character. Jeer at them as
little for not showing growth. You have reared them to this pitch,
and at this pitch they have partly civilized you. Supposing you to
want it done wholly, you must yield just as many points in your
requisitions as are needed to let the wits of young women reap
their due harvest and be of good use to their souls. You will then
have a fair battle, a braver, with better results.

Clara's inner eye traversed Colonel De Craye at a shot.

She had immediately to blot out the vision of Captain Oxford in
him, the revelation of his laughing contempt for Willoughby, the
view of mercurial principles, the scribbled histories of light
love-passages.

She blotted it out, kept it from her mind: so she knew him, knew
him to be a sweeter and a variable Willoughby, a generous kind of
Willoughby, a Willoughby-butterfly, without having the free mind
to summarize him and picture him for a warning. Scattered features
of him, such as the instincts call up, were not sufficiently
impressive. Besides, the clouded mind was opposed to her receiving
impressions.

Young Crossjay's voice in the still morning air came to her cars.
The dear guileless chatter of the boy's voice. Why, assuredly it
was young Crossjay who was the man she loved. And he loved her.
And he was going to be an unselfish, sustaining, true, strong man,
the man she longed for, for anchorage. Oh, the dear voice!
woodpecker and thrush in one. He never ceased to chatter to Vernon
Whitford walking beside him with a swinging stride off to the lake
for their morning swim. Happy couple! The morning gave them both a
freshness and innocence above human. They seemed to Clara made of
morning air and clear lake water. Crossjay's voice ran up and down
a diatonic scale with here and there a query in semitone and a
laugh on a ringing note. She wondered what he could have to talk
of so incessantly, and imagined all the dialogue. He prattled
of his yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, which did not imply past
and future, but his vivid present. She felt like one vainly trying
to fly in hearing him; she felt old. The consolation she arrived
at was to feel maternal. She wished to hug the boy.

Trot and stride, Crossjay and Vernon entered the park, careless
about wet grass, not once looking at the house. Crossjay ranged
ahead and picked flowers, bounding back to show them. Clara's
heart beat at a fancy that her name was mentioned. If those
flowers were for her she would prize them.

The two bathers dipped over an undulation.

Her loss of them rattled her chains.

Deeply dwelling on their troubles has the effect upon the young of
helping to forgetfulness; for they cannot think without imagining,
their imaginations are saturated with their Pleasures, and the
collision, though they are unable to exchange sad for sweet,
distills an opiate.

"Am I solemnly engaged?" she asked herself. She seemed to be
awakening.

She glanced at her bed, where she had passed the night of
ineffectual moaning, and out on the high wave of grass, where
Crossjay and his good friend had vanished.

Was the struggle all to be gone over again?

Little by little her intelligence of her actual position crept up
to submerge her heart.

"I am in his house!" she said. It resembled a discovery, so
strangely had her opiate and power of dreaming wrought through her
tortures. She said it gasping. She was in his house, his guest,
his betrothed, sworn to him. The fact stood out cut in steel on
the pitiless daylight.

That consideration drove her to be an early wanderer in the wake
of Crossjay.

Her station was among the beeches on the flank of the boy's
return; and while waiting there the novelty of her waiting to
waylay anyone--she who had played the contrary part!--told her
more than it pleased her to think. Yet she could admit that she
did desire to speak with Vernon, as with a counsellor, harsh and
curt, but wholesome.

The bathers reappeared on the grass-ridge, racing and flapping wet
towels.

Some one hailed them. A sound of the galloping hoof drew her
attention to the avenue. She saw Willoughby dash across the park
level, and dropping a word to Vernon, ride away. Then she allowed
herself to be seen.

Crossjay shouted. Willoughby turned his head, but not his horse's
head. The boy sprang up to Clara. He had swum across the lake and
back; he had raced Mr. Whitford--and beaten him! How he wished
Miss Middleton had been able to be one of them!

Clara listened to him enviously. Her thought was: We women are
nailed to our sex!

She said: "And you have just been talking to Sir Willoughby."

Crossjay drew himself up to give an imitation of the baronet's 
hand-moving in adieu.

He would not have done that had he not smelled sympathy with the
performance.

She declined to smile. Crossjay repeated it, and laughed. He made
a broader exhibition of it to Vernon approaching: "I say. Mr.
Whitford, who's this?"

Vernon doubled to catch him. Crossjay fled and resumed his 
magnificent air in the distance.

"Good-morning, Miss Middleton; you are out early," said Vernon,
rather pale and stringy from his cold swim, and rather hard-eyed
with the sharp exercise following it.

She had expected some of the kindness she wanted to reject, for he
could speak very kindly, and she regarded him as her doctor of
medicine, who would at least present the futile drug.

"Good morning," she replied.

"Willoughby will not be home till the evening."

"You could not have had a finer morning for your bath."

"No."

"I will walk as fast as you like."

"I'm perfectly warm."

"But you prefer fast walking."

"Out."

"Ah! yes, that I understand. The walk back! Why is Willoughby away
to-day?"

"He has business."

After several steps she said: "He makes very sure of papa."

"Not without reason, you will find," said Vernon.

"Can it be? I am bewildered. I had papa's promise."

"To leave the Hall for a day or two."

"It would have been. . ."

"Possibly. But other heads are at work as well as yours. If you
had been in earnest about it you would have taken your father into
your confidence at once. That was the course I ventured to
propose, on the supposition."

"In earnest! I cannot imagine that you doubt it. I wished to spare
him."

"This is a case in which he can't be spared."

"If I had been bound to any other! I did not know then who held me
a prisoner. I thought I had only to speak to him sincerely."

"Not many men would give up their prize for a word, Willoughby the
last of any."

"Prize" rang through her thrillingly from Vernon's mouth, and
soothed her degradation.

She would have liked to protest that she was very little of a
prize; a poor prize; not one at all in general estimation; only
one to a man reckoning his property; no prize in the true sense.

The importunity of pain saved her.

"Does he think I can change again? Am I treated as something won
in a lottery? To stay here is indeed more than I can bear. And if
he is calculating--Mr. Whitford, if he calculates on another
change, his plotting to keep me here is inconsiderate, not very
wise. Changes may occur in absence."

"Wise or not, he has the right to scheme his best to keep you."

She looked on Vernon with a shade of wondering reproach.

"Why? What right?"

"The right you admit when you ask him to release you. He has the
right to think you deluded; and to think you may come to a better
mood if you remain--a mood more agreeable to him, I mean. He has
that right absolutely. You are bound to remember also that you
stand in the wrong. You confess it when you appeal to his
generosity. And every man has the right to retain a treasure in
his hand if he can. Look straight at these facts."

"You expect me to be all reason!"

"Try to be. It's the way to learn whether you are really in
earnest."

"I will try. It will drive me to worse!"

"Try honestly. What is wisest now is, in my opinion, for you to
resolve to stay. I speak in the character of the person you
sketched for yourself as requiring. Well, then, a friend repeats 
the same advice. You might have gone with your father: now you
will only disturb him and annoy him. The chances are he will
refuse to go."

"Are women ever so changeable as men, then? Papa consented; he
agreed; he had some of my feeling; I saw it. That was yesterday.
And at night! He spoke to each of us at night in a different tone
from usual. With me he was hardly affectionate. But when you
advise me to stay, Mr. Whitford, you do not perhaps reflect that
it would be at the sacrifice of all candour."

"Regard it as a probational term."

"It has gone too far with me."

"Take the matter into the head: try the case there."

"Are you not counselling me as if I were a woman of intellect?"

The crystal ring in her voice told him that tears were near to
flowing.

He shuddered slightly. "You have intellect," he said, nodded. and
crossed the lawn, leaving her. He had to dress.

She was not permitted to feel lonely, for she was immediately 
joined by Colonel De Craye.


CHAPTER XXII

The Ride

Crossjay darted up to her a nose ahead of the colonel.

"I say, Miss Middleton, we're to have the whole day to ourselves,
after morning lessons. Will you come and fish with me and see me
bird's-nest?"

"Not for the satisfaction of beholding another cracked crown, my
son," the colonel interposed: and bowing to Clara: "Miss
Middleton is handed over to my exclusive charge for the day, with
her consent?"

"I scarcely know," said she, consulting a sensation of languor
that seemed to contain some reminiscence. "If I am here. My
father's plans are uncertain. I will speak to him. If I am here,
perhaps Crossjay would like a ride in the afternoon."

"Oh, yes," cried the boy; "out over Bournden, through Mewsey up to
Closharn Beacon, and down on Aspenwell, where there's a common for
racing. And ford the stream!"

"An inducement for you," De Craye said to her.

She smiled and squeezed the boy's hand.

"We won't go without you, Crossjay."

"You don't carry a comb, my man, when you bathe?"

At this remark of the colonel's young Crossjay conceived the
appearance of his matted locks in the eyes of his adorable lady.
He gave her one dear look through his redness, and fled.

"I like that boy," said De Craye.

"I love him," said Clara.

Crossjay's troubled eyelids in his honest young face became a
picture for her.

"After all, Miss Middleton, Willoughby's notions about him are
not so bad, if we consider that you will be in the place of a
mother to him."

"I think them bad."

"You are disinclined to calculate the good fortune of the boy in
having more of you on land than he would have in crown and anchor
buttons!"

"You have talked of him with Willoughby,"

"We had a talk last night."

Of how much? thought she.

"Willoughby returns?" she said.

"He dines here, I know; for he holds the key of the inner cellar,
and Doctor Middleton does him the honour to applaud his wine.
Willoughby was good enough to tell me that he thought I might
contribute to amuse you."

She was brooding in stupefaction on her father and the wine as she
requested Colonel De Craye to persuade Willoughby to take the
general view of Crossjay's future and act on it.

"He seems fond of the boy, too," said De Craye, musingly.

"You speak in doubt?"

"Not at all. But is he not--men are queer fish!--make allowance 
for us--a trifle tyrannical, pleasantly, with those he is fond
of?"

"If they look right and left?"

It was meant for an interrogation; it was not with the sound of
one that the words dropped. "My dear Crossjay!" she sighed. "I
would willingly pay for him out of my own purse, and I will do so
rather than have him miss his chance. I have not mustered
resolution to propose it."

"I may be mistaken, Miss Middleton. He talked of the boy's
fondness of him."

"He would."

"I suppose he is hardly peculiar in liking to play Pole-star."

"He may not be."

"For the rest, your influence should be all-powerful."

"it is not."

De Craye looked with a wandering eye at the heavens.

"We are having a spell of weather perfectly superb. And the odd
thing is, that whenever we have splendid weather at home we're all
for rushing abroad. I'm booked for a Mediterranean cruise--
postponed to give place to your ceremony."

"That?" she could not control her accent.

"What worthier?"

She was guilty of a pause.

De Craye saved it from an awkward length. "I have written half an
essay on Honeymoons, Miss Middleton."

"Is that the same as a half-written essay, Colonel De Craye?"

"Just the same, with the difference that it's a whole essay written
all on one side."

"On which side?"

"The bachelor's."

"Why does he trouble himself with such topics?"

"To warm himself for being left out in the cold."

"Does he feel envy?"

"He has to confess it."

"He has liberty."

"A commodity he can't tell the value of if there's no one to buy."

"Why should he wish to sell?"

"He's bent on completing his essay."

"To make the reading dull."

"There we touch the key of the subject. For what is to rescue the
pair from a monotony multiplied by two? And so a bachelor's 
recommendation, when each has discovered the right sort of person
to be dull with, pushes them from the churchdoor on a round of
adventures containing a spice of peril, if 'tis to be had. Let
them be in danger of their lives the first or second day. A
bachelor's loneliness is a private affair of his own; he hasn't to
look into a face to be ashamed of feeling it and inflicting it at
the same time; 'tis his pillow; he can punch it an he pleases, and
turn it over t'other side, if he's for a mighty variation; there's
a dream in it. But our poor couple are staring wide awake. All
their dreaming's done. They've emptied their bottle of elixir, or
broken it; and she has a thirst for the use of the tongue, and he
to yawn with a crony; and they may converse, they're not aware of
it, more than the desert that has drunk a shower. So as soon as
possible she's away to the ladies, and he puts on his Club. That's
what your bachelor sees and would like to spare them; and if he
didn't see something of the sort he'd be off with a noose round
his neck, on his knees in the dew to the morning milkmaid."

"The bachelor is happily warned and on his guard," said Clara,
diverted, as he wished her to be. "Sketch me a few of the
adventures you propose."

"I have a friend who rowed his bride from the Houses of Parliament
up the Thames to the Severn on into North Wales. They shot some
pretty weirs and rapids."

"That was nice."

"They had an infinity of adventures, and the best proof of the
benefit they derived is, that they forgot everything about them
except that the adventures occurred."

"Those two must have returned bright enough to please you.

"They returned, and shone like a wrecker's beacon to the mariner.
You see, Miss Middleton, there was the landscape, and the
exercise, and the occasional bit of danger. I think it's to be
recommended. The scene is always changing, and not too fast; and
'tis not too sublime, like big mountains, to tire them of their
everlasting big Ohs. There's the difference between going into a
howling wind and launching among zephyrs. They have fresh air and
movement, and not in a railway carriage; they can take in what
they look on. And she has the steering ropes, and that's a wise
commencement. And my lord is all day making an exhibition of his
manly strength, bowing before her some sixty to the minute; and
she, to help him, just inclines when she's in the mood. And
they're face to face in the nature of things, and are not under
the obligation of looking the unutterable, because, you see,
there's business in hand; and the boat's just the right sort of
third party, who never interferes, but must be attended to. And
they feel they re labouring together to get along, all in the
proper proportion; and whether he has to labour in life or not, he
proves his ability. What do you think of it, Miss Middleton?"

"I think you have only to propose it, Colonel De Craye."

"And if they capsize, why, 'tis a natural ducking!"

"You forgot the lady's dressing-bag."

"The stain on the metal for a constant reminder of his prowess in
saving it! Well, and there's an alternative to that scheme, and a
finer:--This, then: they read dramatic pieces during courtship,
to stop the saying of things over again till the drum of the car
becomes nothing but a drum to the poor head, and a little before
they affix their signatures to the fatal Registry-book of the
vestry, they enter into an engagement with a body of provincial
actors to join the troop on the day of their nuptials, and away
they go in their coach and four, and she is Lady Kitty Caper for a
month, and he Sir Harry Highflyer. See the honeymoon spinning!
The marvel to me is that none of the young couples do it. They
could enjoy the world, see life, amuse the company, and come back
fresh to their own characters, instead of giving themselves a dose
of Africa without a savage to diversify it: an impression they
never get over, I'm told. Many a character of the happiest
auspices has irreparable mischief done it by the ordinary
honeymoon. For my part, I rather lean to the second plan of
campaign."

Clara was expected to reply, and she said: "Probably because you
are fond of acting. It would require capacity on both sides."

"Miss Middleton, I would undertake to breathe the enthusiasm for
the stage and the adventure."

"You are recommending it generally."

"Let my gentleman only have a fund of enthusiasm. The lady will
kindle. She always does at a spark."

"If he has not any?"

"Then I'm afraid they must be mortally dull."

She allowed her silence to speak; she knew that it did so too
eloquently, and could not control the personal adumbration she
gave to the one point of light revealed in, "if he has not any".
Her figure seemed immediately to wear a cap and cloak of dulness.

She was full of revolt and anger, she was burning with her
situation; if sensible of shame now at anything that she did, it
turned to wrath and threw the burden on the author of her
desperate distress. The hour for blaming herself had gone by, to
be renewed ultimately perhaps in a season of freedom. She was
bereft of her insight within at present, so blind to herself that,
while conscious of an accurate reading of Willoughby's friend, she
thanked him in her heart for seeking simply to amuse her and
slightly succeeding. The afternoon's ride with him and Crossjay
was an agreeable beguilement to her in prospect.

Laetitia came to divide her from Colonel De Craye. Dr. Middleton
was not seen before his appearance at the breakfast-table, where a
certain air of anxiety in his daughter's presence produced the
semblance of a raised map at intervals on his forehead. Few sights
on earth are more deserving of our sympathy than a good man who
has a troubled conscience thrust on him.

The Rev. Doctor's perturbation was observed. The ladies Eleanor
and Isabel, seeing his daughter to be the cause of it, blamed her,
and would have assisted him to escape, but Miss Dale, whom he
courted with that object, was of the opposite faction. She made
way for Clara to lead her father out. He called to Vernon, who
merely nodded while leaving the room by the window with Crossjay.

Half an eye on Dr. Middleton's pathetic exit in captivity sufficed
to tell Colonel De Craye that parties divided the house. At first
he thought how deplorable it would be to lose Miss Middleton for
two days or three: and it struck him that Vernon Whitford and
Laetitia Dale were acting oddly in seconding her, their aim not
being discernible. For he was of the order of gentlemen of the
obscurely-clear in mind who have a predetermined acuteness in
their watch upon the human play, and mark men and women as pieces
of a bad game of chess, each pursuing an interested course. His 
experience of a section of the world had educated him--as gallant,
frank, and manly a comrade as one could wish for--up to this
point. But he soon abandoned speculations, which may be compared
to a shaking anemometer that will not let the troubled indicator
take station. Reposing on his perceptions and his instincts, he
fixed his attention on the chief persons, only glancing at the
others to establish a postulate, that where there are parties in a
house the most bewitching person present is the origin of them. It
is ever Helen's achievement. Miss Middleton appeared to him
bewitching beyond mortal; sunny in her laughter, shadowy in her
smiling; a young lady shaped for perfect music with a lover.

She was that, and no less, to every man's eye on earth. High
breeding did not freeze her lovely girlishness.--But Willoughby 
did. This reflection intervened to blot luxurious picturings of
her, and made itself acceptable by leading him back to several
instances of an evident want of harmony of the pair.

And now (for purely undirected impulse all within us is not,
though we may be eye-bandaged agents under direction) it became
necessary for an honourable gentleman to cast vehement rebukes at
the fellow who did not comprehend the jewel he had won. How could
Willoughby behave like so complete a donkey! De Craye knew him to
be in his interior stiff, strange, exacting: women had talked of
him; he had been too much for one woman--the dashing Constantia:
he had worn one woman, sacrificing far more for him than
Constantia, to death. Still, with such a prize as Clara
Middleton, Willoughby's behaviour was past calculating in its
contemptible absurdity. And during courtship! And courtship of
that girl! It was the way of a man ten years after marriage.

The idea drew him to picture her doatingly in her young matronly
bloom ten years after marriage: without a touch of age, matronly
wise, womanly sweet: perhaps with a couple of little ones to love,
never having known the love of a man.

To think of a girl like Clara Middleton never having at
nine-and-twenty, and with two fair children! known the love of a
man or the loving of a man, possibly, became torture to the
Colonel.

For a pacification he had to reconsider that she was as yet only
nineteen and unmarried.

But she was engaged, and she was unloved. One might swear to it,
that she was unloved. And she was not a girl to be satisfied with
a big house and a high-nosed husband.

There was a rapid alteration of the sad history of Clara the
unloved matron solaced by two little ones. A childless Clara
tragically loving and beloved flashed across the dark glass of the
future.

Either way her fate was cruel.

Some astonishment moved De Craye in the contemplation of the
distance he had stepped in this morass of fancy. He distinguished 
the choice open to him of forward or back, and he selected
forward. But fancy was dead: the poetry hovering about her grew
invisible to him: he stood in the morass; that was all he knew;
and momently he plunged deeper; and he was aware of an intense
desire to see her face, that he might study her features again: he
understood no more.

It was the clouding of the brain by the man's heart, which had
come to the knowledge that it was caught.

A certain measure of astonishment moved him still. It had hitherto
been his portion to do mischief to women and avoid the vengeance
of the sex. What was there in Miss Middleton's face and air to
ensnare a veteran handsome man of society numbering six-and-thirty
years, nearly as many conquests? "Each bullet has got its
commission." He was hit at last. That accident effected by Mr.
Flitch had fired the shot. Clean through the heart. does not tell
us of our misfortune, till the heart is asked to renew its natural
beating. It fell into the condition of the porcelain vase over a
thought of Miss Middleton standing above his prostrate form on the
road, and walking beside him to the Hall. Her words? What have
they been? She had not uttered words, she had shed meanings. He
did not for an instant conceive that he had charmed her: the charm
she had cast on him was too thrilling for coxcombry to lift a
head; still she had enjoyed his prattle. In return for her touch
upon the Irish fountain in him, he had manifestly given her relief
And could not one see that so sprightly a girl would soon be
deadened by a man like Willoughby? Deadened she was: she had not
responded to a compliment on her approaching marriage. An allusion
to it killed her smiling. The case of Mr. Flitch, with the half
wager about his reinstation in the service of the Hall, was
conclusive evidence of her opinion of Willoughby.

It became again necessary that he should abuse Willoughby for his
folly. Why was the man worrying her? In some way he was worrying
her.

What if Willoughby as well as Miss Middleton wished to be quit of
the engagement? ...

For just a second, the handsome, woman-flattered officer proved
his man's heart more whole than he supposed it. That great organ,
instead of leaping at the thought, suffered a check.

Bear in mind that his heart was not merely man's, it was a
conqueror's. He was of the race of amorous heroes who glory in
pursuing, overtaking, subduing: wresting the prize from a rival,
having her ripe from exquisitely feminine inward conflicts, 
plucking her out of resistance in good old primitive fashion. You
win the creature in her delicious flutterings. He liked her thus,
in cooler blood, because of society's admiration of the capturer,
and somewhat because of the strife, which always enhances the
value of a prize, and refreshes our vanity in recollection.

Moreover, he had been matched against Willoughby: the circumstance
had occurred two or three times. He could name a lady he had won,
a lady he had lost. Willoughby's large fortune and grandeur of
style had given him advantages at the start. But the start often
means the race--with women, and a bit of luck.

The gentle check upon the galloping heart of Colonel De Craye
endured no longer than a second--a simple side-glance in a
headlong pace. Clara's enchantingness for a temperament like his,
which is to say, for him specially, in part through the testimony
her conquest of himself presented as to her power of sway over the
universal heart known as man's, assured him she was worth winning
even from a hand that dropped her.

He had now a double reason for exclaiming at the folly of
Willoughby. Willoughby's treatment of her showed either temper or
weariness. Vanity and judgement led De Craye to guess the former.
Regarding her sentiments for Willoughby, he had come to his own
conclusion. The certainty of it caused him to assume that he
possessed an absolute knowledge of her character: she was an
angel, born supple; she was a heavenly soul, with half a dozen of
the tricks of earth. Skittish filly was among his phrases; but she
had a bearing and a gaze that forbade the dip in the common gutter
for wherewithal to paint the creature she was.

Now, then, to see whether he was wrong for the first time in his
life! If not wrong, he had a chance.

There could be nothing dishonourable in rescuing a girl from an
engagement she detested. An attempt to think it a service to
Willoughby faded midway. De Craye dismissed that chicanery. It
would be a service to Willoughby in the end, without question.
There was that to soothe his manly honour. Meanwhile he had to
face the thought of Willoughby as an antagonist, and the world
looking heavy on his honour as a friend.

Such considerations drew him tenderly close to Miss Middleton. It
must, however, be confessed that the mental ardour of Colonel De
Craye had been a little sobered by his glance at the possibility
of both of the couple being of one mind on the subject of their
betrothal. Desirable as it was that they should be united in
disagreeing, it reduced the romance to platitude, and the third
person in the drama to the appearance of a stick. No man likes to
play that part. Memoirs of the favourites of Goddesses, if we had
them, would confirm it of men's tastes in this respect, though the
divinest be the prize. We behold what part they played.

De Craye chanced to be crossing the hall from the laboratory to
the stables when Clara shut the library-door behind her. He said
something whimsical, and did not stop, nor did he look twice at
the face he had been longing for.

What he had seen made him fear there would be no ride out with her
that day. Their next meeting reassured him; she was dressed in her
riding-habit, and wore a countenance resolutely cheerful. He
gave himself the word of command to take his tone from her.

He was of a nature as quick as Clara's. Experience pushed him
farther than she could go in fancy; but experience laid a sobering
finger on his practical steps, and bade them hang upon her
initiative. She talked little. Young Crossjay cantering ahead was
her favourite subject. She was very much changed since the early
morning: his liveliness, essayed by him at a hazard, was
unsuccessful; grave English pleased her best. The descent from
that was naturally to melancholy. She mentioned a regret she had
that the Veil was interdicted to women in Protestant countries. De
Craye was fortunately silent; he could think of no other veil than
the Moslem, and when her meaning struck his witless head, he
admitted to himself that devout attendance on a young lady's mind
stupefies man's intelligence. Half an hour later, he was as
foolish in supposing it a confidence. He was again saved by
silence.

In Aspenwell village she drew a letter from her bosom and called
to Crossjay to post it. The boy sang out, "Miss Lucy Darleton!
What a nice name!"

Clara did not show that the name betrayed anything.

She said to De Craye. "It proves he should not be here thinking of
nice names. "

Her companion replied, "You may be right." He added, to avoid
feeling too subservient: "Boys will."

"Not if they have stern masters to teach them their daily lessons,
and some of the lessons of existence."

"Vernon Whitford is not stern enough?"

"Mr. Whitford has to contend with other influences here."

"With Willoughby?"

"Not with Willoughby."

He understood her. She touched the delicate indication firmly.
The man's, heart respected her for it; not many girls could be so
thoughtful or dare to be so direct; he saw that she had become
deeply serious, and he felt her love of the boy to be maternal,
past maiden sentiment.

By this light of her seriousness, the posting of her letter in a
distant village, not entrusting it to the Hall post-box, might
have import; not that she would apprehend the violation of her
private correspondence, but we like to see our letter of weighty
meaning pass into the mouth of the public box.

Consequently this letter was important. It was to suppose a
sequency in the conduct of a variable damsel. Coupled with her
remark about the Veil, and with other things, not words, breathing
from her (which were the breath of her condition), it was not
unreasonably to be supposed. She might even be a very consistent
person. If one only had the key of her!

She spoke once of an immediate visit to London, supposing that she
could induce her father to go. De Craye remembered the occurrence
in the Hall at night, and her aspect of distress.

They raced along Aspenwell Common to the ford; shallow, to the
chagrin of young Crossjay, between whom and themselves they left a
fitting space for his rapture in leading his pony to splash up and
down, lord of the stream.

Swiftness of motion so strikes the blood on the brain that our
thoughts are lightnings, the heart is master of them.

De Craye was heated by his gallop to venture on the angling
question: "Am I to hear the names of the bridesmaids?"

The pace had nerved Clara to speak to it sharply: "There is no
need."

"Have I no claim?"

She was mute.

"Miss Lucy Darleton, for instance; whose name I am almost as much
in love with as Crossjay."

"She will not be bridesmaid to me."

"She declines? Add my petition, I beg."

"To all? or to her?"

"Do all the bridesmaids decline?"

"The scene is too ghastly."

"A marriage?"

"Girls have grown sick of it."

"Of weddings? We'll overcome the sickness."

"With some."

"Not with Miss Darleton? You tempt my eloquence.

"You wish it?"

"To win her consent? Certainly."

"The scene?"

"Do I wish that?"

"Marriage!" exclaimed Clara. dashing into the ford, fearful of her
ungovernable wildness and of what it might have kindled.--You,
father! you have driven me to unmaidenliness!--She forgot
Willoughby, in her father, who would not quit a comfortable house
for her all but prostrate beseeching; would not bend his mind to
her explanations, answered her with the horrid iteration of such
deaf misunderstanding as may be associated with a tolling bell.

Dc Craye allowed her to catch Crossjay by herself They
entered a narrow lane, mysterious with possible birds" eggs in the
May-green hedges. As there was not room for three abreast, the
colonel made up the rear-guard, and was consoled by having Miss
Middleton's figure to contemplate; but the readiness of her
joining in Crossjay's pastime of the nest-hunt was not so pleasing
to a man that she had wound to a pitch of excitement. Her scornful
accent on "Marriage" rang through him. Apparently she was
beginning to do with him just as she liked, herself entirely
unconcerned.

She kept Crossjay beside her till she dismounted, and the colonel
was left to the procession of elephantine ideas in his head, whose
ponderousness he took for natural weight. We do not with impunity
abandon the initiative. Men who have yielded it are like cavalry
put on the defensive; a very small force with an ictus will
scatter them.

Anxiety to recover lost ground reduced the dimensions of his ideas
to a practical standard.

Two ideas were opposed like duellists bent on the slaughter of one
another. Either she amazed him by confirming the suspicions he had
gathered of her sentiments for Willoughby in the moments of his
introduction to her; or she amazed him as a model for coquettes--
the married and the widow might apply to her for lessons.

These combatants exchanged shots, but remained standing; the
encounter was undecided. Whatever the result, no person so
seductive as Clara Middleton had he ever met. Her cry of loathing,
"Marriage!" coming from a girl, rang faintly clear of an ancient
virginal aspiration of the sex to escape from their coil, and
bespoke a pure, cold, savage pride that transplanted his thirst
for her to higher fields.


CHAPTER XXIII

Treats of the Union of Temper and Policy

Sir Willoughby meanwhile was on a line of conduct suiting his
appreciation of his duty to himself. He had deluded himself with
the simple notion that good fruit would come of the union of
temper and policy.

No delusion is older, none apparently so promising, both parties
being eager for the alliance. Yet, the theorist upon human nature
will say, they are obviously of adverse disposition. And this is
true, inasmuch as neither of them win submit to the yoke of an
established union; as soon as they have done their mischief, they
set to work tugging for a divorce. But they have attractions, the
one for the other, which precipitate them to embrace whenever they
meet in a breast; each is earnest with the owner of it to get him
to officiate forthwith as wedding-priest. And here is the reason:
temper, to warrant its appearance, desires to be thought as
deliberative as policy, and policy, the sooner to prove its
shrewdness, is impatient for the quick blood of temper.

It will be well for men to resolve at the first approaches of the
amorous but fickle pair upon interdicting even an accidental 
temporary junction: for the astonishing sweetness of the couple
when no more than the ghosts of them have come together in a
projecting mind is an intoxication beyond fermented grapejuice or
a witch's brewage; and under the guise of active wits they will
lead us to the parental meditation of antics compared with which
a Pagan Saturnalia were less impious in the sight of sanity. This
is full-mouthed language; but on our studious way through any
human career we are subject to fits of moral elevation; the theme
inspires it, and the sage residing in every civilized bosom
approves it.

Decide at the outset, that temper is fatal to policy: hold them
with both hands in division. One might add, be doubtful of your
policy and repress your temper: it would be to suppose you wise.
You can, however, by incorporating two or three captains of the
great army of truisms bequeathed to us by ancient wisdom, fix in
your service those veteran old standfasts to check you. They will
not be serviceless in their admonitions to your understanding, and
they will so contrive to reconcile with it the natural caperings
of the wayward young sprig Conduct, that the latter, who commonly
learns to walk upright and straight from nothing softer than raps
of a bludgeon on his crown, shall foot soberly, appearing at least
wary of dangerous corners.

Now Willoughby had not to be taught that temper is fatal to
policy; he was beginning to see in addition that the temper he
encouraged was particularly obnoxious to the policy he adopted;
and although his purpose in mounting horse after yesterday
frowning on his bride was definite, and might be deemed sagacious,
he bemoaned already the fatality pushing him ever farther from her
in chase of a satisfaction impossible to grasp.

But the bare fact that her behaviour demanded a line of policy
crossed the grain of his temper: it was very offensive.

Considering that she wounded him severely, her reversal of their
proper parts, by taking the part belonging to him, and requiring
his watchfulness, and the careful dealings he was accustomed to
expect from others, and had a right to exact of her, was
injuriously unjust. The feelings of a man hereditarily sensitive
to property accused her of a trespassing imprudence, and knowing
himself, by testimony of his household, his tenants, and the
neighbourhood, and the world as well, amiable when he received
his dues, he contemplated her with an air of stiff-backed
ill-treatment, not devoid of a certain sanctification of
martyrdom.

His bitterest enemy would hardly declare that it was he who was in
the wrong.

Clara herself had never been audacious enough to say that.
Distaste of his person was inconceivable to the favourite of
society. The capricious creature probably wanted a whipping to
bring her to the understanding of the principle called mastery,
which is in man.

But was he administering it? If he retained a hold on her, he
could undoubtedly apply the scourge at leisure; any kind of
scourge; he could shun her, look on her frigidly, unbend to her to
find a warmer place for sarcasm, pityingly smile, ridicule, pay
court elsewhere. He could do these things if he retained a hold on
her; and he could do them well because of the faith he had in his
renowned amiability; for in doing them, he could feel that he was
other than he seemed, and his own cordial nature was there to
comfort him while he bestowed punishment. Cordial indeed, the
chills he endured were flung from the world. His heart was in that
fiction: half the hearts now beating have a mild form of it to
keep them merry: and the chastisement he desired to inflict was
really no more than righteous vengeance for an offended goodness
of heart. Clara figuratively, absolutely perhaps, on her knees, he
would raise her and forgive her. He yearned for the situation. To
let her understand how little she had known him! It would be worth
the pain she had dealt, to pour forth the stream of re-established
confidences, to paint himself to her as he was; as he was in the
spirit, not as he was to the world: though the world had reason to
do him honour.

First, however, she would have to be humbled.

Something whispered that his hold on her was lost.

In such a case, every blow he struck would set her flying farther,
till the breach between them would be past bridging.

Determination not to let her go was the best finish to this
perpetually revolving round which went like the same old
wheel-planks of a water mill in his head at a review of the injury
he sustained. He had come to it before. and he came to it again.
There was his vengeance. It melted him, she was so sweet! She
shone for him like the sunny breeze on water. Thinking of her
caused a catch of his breath.

The dreadful young woman had a keener edge for the senses of men
than sovereign beauty.

It would be madness to let her go.

She affected him like an outlook on the great Patterne estate
after an absence, when his welcoming flag wept for pride above
Patterne Hall!

It would be treason to let her go.

It would be cruelty to her.

He was bound to reflect that she was of tender age, and the
foolishness of the wretch was excusable to extreme youth.

We toss away a flower that we are tired of smelling and do not
wish to carry. But the rose--young woman--is not cast off with
impunity. A fiend in shape of man is always behind us to
appropriate her. He that touches that rejected thing is larcenous.
Willoughby had been sensible of it in the person of Laetitia: and
by all the more that Clara's charms exceeded the faded creature's,
he felt it now. Ten thousand Furies thickened about him at a
thought of her lying by the road-side without his having crushed
all bloom and odour out of her which might tempt even the
curiosity of the fiend, man.

On the other hand, supposing her to be there untouched,
universally declined by the sniffling, sagacious dog-fiend, a
miserable spinster for years, he could conceive notions of his
remorse. A soft remorse may be adopted as an agreeable sensation 
within view of the wasted penitent whom we have struck a trifle
too hard. Seeing her penitent, he certainly would be willing to
surround her with little offices of compromising kindness. It
would depend on her age. Supposing her still youngish, there might
be captivating passages between them, as thus, in a style not
unfamiliar:

"And was it my fault, my poor girl? Am I to blame, that you have
passed a lonely, unloved youth?"

"No, Willoughby! The irreparable error was mine, the blame is
mine, mine only. I live to repent it. I do not seek, for I have
not deserved, your pardon. Had I it, I should need my own
self-esteem to presume to clasp it to a bosom ever unworthy of
you."

"I may have been impatient, Clara: we are human!"

"Never be it mine to accuse one on whom I laid so heavy a weight
of forbearance!"

"Still, my old love!--for I am merely quoting history in naming
you so--I cannot have been perfectly blameless."

"To me you were, and are."

"Clara!"

"Willoughby!"

"Must I recognize the bitter truth that we two, once nearly one!
so nearly one! are eternally separated?"

"I have envisaged it. My friend--I may call you friend; you have
ever been my friend, my best friend! oh, that eyes had been mine
to know the friend I had!--Willoughby, in the darkness of night,
and during days that were as night to my soul, I have seen the
inexorable finger pointing my solitary way through the wilderness
from a Paradise forfeited by my most wilful, my wanton, sin. We
have met. It is more than I have merited. We part. In mercy let it
be for ever. Oh, terrible word! Coined by the passions of our
youth, it comes to us for our sole riches when we are bankrupt of
earthly treasures, and is the passport given by Abnegation unto
Woe that prays to quit this probationary sphere. Willoughby, we
part. It is better so."

"Clara! one--one only--one last--one holy kiss!"

"If these poor lips, that once were sweet to you ...

The kiss, to continue the language of the imaginative composition
of his time, favourite readings in which had inspired Sir
Willoughby with a colloquy so pathetic, was imprinted.

Ay, she had the kiss, and no mean one. It was intended to swallow
every vestige of dwindling attractiveness out of her, and there
was a bit of scandal springing of it in the background that
satisfactorily settled her business, and left her 'enshrined in
memory, a divine recollection to him,' as his popular romances
would say, and have said for years.

Unhappily, the fancied salute of her lips encircled him with the
breathing Clara. She rushed up from vacancy like a wind summoned
to wreck a stately vessel.

His reverie had thrown him into severe commotion. The slave of a
passion thinks in a ring, as hares run: he will cease where he
began. Her sweetness had set him off, and he whirled back to her
sweetness: and that being incalculable and he insatiable, you have
the picture of his torments when you consider that her behaviour
made her as a cloud to him

Riding slack, horse and man, in the likeness of those two ajog
homeward from the miry hunt, the horse pricked his cars, and
Willoughby looked down from his road along the bills on the race
headed by young Crossjay with a short start over Aspenwell Common
to the ford. There was no mistaking who they were, though they
were well-nigh a mile distant below. He noticed that they did not
overtake the boy. They drew rein at the ford, talking not simply
face to face, but face in face. Willoughby's novel feeling of he
knew not what drew them up to him, enabling him to fancy them
bathing in one another's eyes. Then she sprang through the ford,
De Craye following, but not close after--and why not close? She
had flicked him with one of her peremptorily saucy speeches when
she was bold with the gallop. They were not unknown to Willoughby.
They signified intimacy.

Last night he had proposed to De Craye to take Miss Middleton for
a ride the next afternoon. It never came to his mind then that he
and his friend had formerly been rivals. He wished Clara to be
amused. Policy dictated that every thread should be used to attach
her to her residence at the Hall until he could command his temper
to talk to her calmly and overwhelm her, as any man in earnest,
with command of temper and a point of vantage, may be sure to
whelm a young woman. Policy, adulterated by temper, yet policy it
was that had sent him on his errand in the early morning to beat
about for a house and garden suitable to Dr. Middleton within a
circuit of five, six, or seven miles of Patterne Hall. If the Rev.
Doctor liked the house and took it (and Willoughby had seen the
place to suit him), the neighbourhood would be a chain upon Clara:
and if the house did not please a gentleman rather hard to please
(except in a venerable wine), an excuse would have been started
for his visiting other houses, and he had that response to his
importunate daughter, that he believed an excellent house was on
view. Dr. Middleton had been prepared by numerous hints to meet
Clara's black misreading of a lovers" quarrel, so that everything
looked full of promise as far as Willoughby's exercise of policy
went.

But the strange pang traversing him now convicted him of a large
adulteration of profitless temper with it. The loyalty of De Craye
to a friend, where a woman walked in the drama, was notorious. It
was there, and a most flexible thing it was: and it soon
resembled reason manipulated by the sophists. Not to have
reckoned on his peculiar loyalty was proof of the blindness cast
on us by temper.

And De Craye had an Irish tongue; and he had it under control, so
that he could talk good sense and airy nonsense at discretion. The
strongest overboiling of English Puritan contempt of a gabbler,
would not stop women from liking it. Evidently Clara did like it,
and Willoughby thundered on her sex. Unto such brainless things as
these do we, under the irony of circumstances, confide our honour!

For he was no gabbler. He remembered having rattled in earlier
days; he had rattled with an object to gain, desiring to be taken
for an easy, careless, vivacious, charming fellow, as any young
gentleman may be who gaily wears the golden dish of Fifty thousand
pounds per annum, nailed to the back of his very saintly young
pate. The growth of the critical spirit in him, however, had
informed him that slang had been a principal component of his
rattling; and as he justly supposed it a betraying art for his
race and for him, he passed through the prim and the yawning
phases of affected indifference, to the pine Puritanism of a
leaden contempt of gabblers.

They snare women, you see--girls! How despicable the host of
girls!--at least, that girl below there!

Married women understood him: widows did. He placed an exceedingly
handsome and flattering young widow of his acquaintance, Lady Mary
Lewison, beside Clara for a comparison, involuntarily; and at
once, in a flash, in despite of him (he would rather it had been
otherwise), and in despite of Lady Mary's high birth and
connections as well, the silver lustre of the maid sicklied the
poor widow.

The effect of the luckless comparison was to produce an image of
surpassingness in the features of Clara that gave him the final,
or mace-blow. Jealousy invaded him.

He had hitherto been free of it, regarding jealousy as a foreign
devil, the accursed familiar of the vulgar. Luckless fellows might
be victims of the disease; he was not; and neither Captain Oxford,
nor Vernon, nor De Craye, nor any of his compeers, had given him
one shrewd pinch: the woman had, not the man; and she in quite a
different fashion from his present wallowing anguish: she had
never pulled him to earth's level, where jealousy gnaws the
grasses. He had boasted himself above the humiliating visitation.

If that had been the case, we should not have needed to trouble
ourselves much about him. A run or two with the pack of imps would
have satisfied us. But he desired Clara Middleton manfully enough
at an intimation of rivalry to be jealous; in a minute the foreign
devil had him, he was flame: flaming verdigris, one might almost
dare to say, for an exact illustration; such was actually the
colour; but accept it as unsaid.

Remember the poets upon jealousy. It is to be haunted in the heaven
of two by a Third; preceded or succeeded, therefore surrounded,
embraced, bugged by this infernal Third: it is Love's bed of
burning marl; to see and taste the withering Third in the bosom of
sweetness; to be dragged through the past and find the fair Eden
of it sulphurous; to be dragged to the gates of the future and
glory to behold them blood: to adore the bitter creature trebly
and with treble power to clutch her by the windpipe: it is to be
cheated, derided, shamed, and abject and supplicating, and
consciously demoniacal in treacherousness, and victoriously
self-justified in revenge.

And still there is no change in what men feel, though in what they
do the modern may be judicious.

You know the many paintings of man transformed to rageing beast by
the curse: and this, the fieriest trial of our egoism, worked in
the Egoist to produce division of himself from himself, a
concentration of his thoughts upon another object, still himself,
but in another breast, which had to be looked at and into for the
discovery of him. By the gaping jaw-chasm of his greed we may
gather comprehension of his insatiate force of jealousy. Let her
go? Not though he were to become a mark of public scorn in
strangling her with the yoke! His concentration was marvellous.
Unused to the exercise of imaginative powers, he nevertheless
conjured her before him visually till his eyeballs ached. He saw
none but Clara, hated none, loved none, save the intolerable
woman. What logic was in him deduced her to be individual and most
distinctive from the circumstance that only she had ever wrought
these pangs. She had made him ready for them, as we know. An idea
of De Craye being no stranger to her when he arrived at the Hall,
dashed him at De Craye for a second: it might be or might not be
that they had a secret;--Clara was the spell. So prodigiously did
he love and hate, that he had no permanent sense except for her.
The soul of him writhed under her eyes at one moment, and the next
it closed on her without mercy. She was his possession escaping;
his own gliding away to the Third.

There would be pangs for him too, that Third! Standing at the
altar to see her fast-bound, soul and body, to another, would be
good roasting fire.

It would be good roasting fire for her too, should she be averse.
To conceive her aversion was to burn her and devour her. She would
then be his!--what say you? Burned and devoured! Rivals would
vanish then. Her reluctance to espouse the man she was plighted to
would cease to be uttered, cease to be felt.

At last he believed in her reluctance. All that had been wanted to
bring him to the belief was the scene on the common; such a mere
spark, or an imagined spark! But the presence of the Third was
necessary; otherwise he would have had to suppose himself
personally distasteful.

Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, or they
shoot us higher than the topmost star. But it is as we please. Let
them tell us what we are to them: for us, they are our back and
front of life: the poet's Lesbia, the poet's Beatrice; ours is the
choice. And were it proved that some of the bright things are in
the pay of Darkness, with the stamp of his coin on their palms,
and that some are the very angels we hear sung of, not the less
might we say that they find us out; they have us by our leanings.
They are to us what we hold of best or worst within. By their
state is our civilization judged: and if it is hugely animal
still, that is because primitive men abound and will have their
pasture. Since the lead is ours, the leaders must bow their heads
to the sentence. Jealousy of a woman is the primitive egoism
seeking to refine in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of
an invasion of rights; it is in action the tiger threatened by a
rifle when his paw is rigid on quick flesh; he tears the flesh for
rage at the intruder. The Egoist, who is our original male in
giant form, had no bleeding victim beneath his paw, but there was
the sex to mangle. Much as he prefers the well-behaved among
women, who can worship and fawn, and in whom terror can be
inspired, in his wrath he would make of Beatrice a Lesbia
Quadrantaria.

Let women tell us of their side of the battle. We are not so much
the test of the Egoist in them as they to us. Movements of
similarity shown in crowned and undiademed ladies of intrepid
independence, suggest their occasional capacity to be like men
when it is given to them to hunt. At present they fly, and there
is the difference. Our manner of the chase informs them of the
creature we are.

Dimly as young women are informed, they have a youthful ardour of
detestation that renders them less tolerant of the Egoist than
their perceptive elder sisters. What they do perceive, however,
they have a redoubtable grasp of, and Clara's behaviour would be
indefensible if her detective feminine vision might not sanction
her acting on its direction. Seeing him as she did, she turned
from him and shunned his house as the antre of an ogre. She had
posted her letter to Lucy Darleton. Otherwise. if it had been open
to her to dismiss Colonel De Craye, she might, with a warm kiss to
Vernon's pupil, have seriously thought of the next shrill
steam-whistle across yonder hills for a travelling companion on
the way to her friend Lucy; so abhorrent was to her the putting of
her horse's head toward the Hall. Oh, the breaking of bread there!
It had to be gone through for another day and more; that is to
say, forty hours, it might be six-and-forty hours; and no prospect
of sleep to speed any of them on wings!

Such were Clara's inward interjections while poor Willoughby burned
himself out with verdigris flame having the savour of bad metal,
till the hollow of his breast was not unlike to a corroded old
cuirass, found, we will assume, by criminal lantern-beams in a
digging beside green-mantled pools of the sullen soil, lumped with
a strange adhesive concrete. How else picture the sad man?--the
cavity felt empty to him, and heavy; sick of an ancient and mortal
combat, and burning; deeply dinted too:

    With the starry hole
    Whence fled the soul:

very sore; important for aught save sluggish agony; a specimen and
the issue of strife.

Measurelessly to loathe was not sufficient to save him from pain:
he tried it: nor to despise; he went to a depth there also. The
fact that she was a healthy young woman returned to the surface
of his thoughts like the murdered body pitched into the river,
which will not drown, and calls upon the elements of dissolution
to float it. His grand hereditary desire to transmit his estates,
wealth and name to a solid posterity, while it prompted him in his
loathing and contempt of a nature mean and ephemeral compared with
his, attached him desperately to her splendid healthiness. The
council of elders, whose descendant he was, pointed to this young
woman for his mate. He had wooed her with the idea that they
consented. O she was healthy! And he likewise: but, as if it had
been a duel between two clearly designated by quality of blood to
bid a House endure, she was the first who taught him what it was
to have sensations of his mortality.

He could not forgive her. It seemed to him consequently politic to
continue frigid and let her have a further taste of his shadow,
when it was his burning wish to strain her in his arms to a
flatness provoking his compassion.

"You have had your ride?" he addressed her politely in the general
assembly on the lawn.

"I have had my ride, yes," Clara replied.

"Agreeable, I trust?"

"Very agreeable."

So it appeared. Oh, blushless!

The next instant he was in conversation with Laetitia, questioning
her upon a dejected droop of her eyelashes.

"I am, I think," said she, "constitutionally melancholy."

He murmured to her: "I believe in the existence of specifics, and
not far to seek, for all our ailments except those we bear at the
hands of others."

She did not dissent.

De Craye, whose humour for being convinced that Willoughby cared
about as little for Miss Middleton as she for him was nourished by
his immediate observation of them, dilated on the beauty of the
ride and his fair companion's equestrian skill.

"You should start a travelling circus," Willoughby rejoined.
"But the idea's a worthy one!--There's another alternative to the
expedition I proposed, Miss Middleton," said De Craye. "And I be
clown? I haven't a scruple of objection. I must read up books
of jokes."

"Don't," said Willoughby.

"I'd spoil my part! But a natural clown won't keep up an
artificial performance for an entire month, you see; which is the
length of time we propose. He'll exhaust his nature in a day and
be bowled over by the dullest regular donkey-engine with paint on
his cheeks and a nodding topknot."

"What is this expedition 'we' propose?"

De Craye was advised in his heart to spare Miss Middleton any
allusion to honeymoons.

"Merely a game to cure dulness."

"Ah!" Willoughby acquiesced. "A month, you said?"

"One'd like it to last for years."

"Ah! You are driving one of Mr. Merriman's witticisms at me,
Horace; I am dense."

Willoughby bowed to Dr. Middleton, and drew him from Vernon,
filially taking his turn to talk with him closely.

De Craye saw Clara's look as her father and Willoughby went aside
thus linked.

It lifted him over anxieties and casuistries concerning loyalty.
Powder was in the look to make a warhorse breathe high and shiver
for the signal.


CHAPTER XXIV

Contains an Instance of the Generosity of Willoughby

Observers of a gathering complication and a character in action
commonly resemble gleaners who are intent only on picking up the
cars of grain and huddling their store. Disinterestedly or
interestedly they wax over-eager for the little trifles, and make
too much of them. Observers should begin upon the precept, that not
all we see is worth hoarding, and that the things we see are to be
weighed in the scale with what we know of the situation, before we
commit ourselves to a measurement. And they may be accurate
observers without being good judges. They do not think so, and
their bent is to glean hurriedly and form conclusions as hasty,
when their business should be sift at each step, and question.

Miss Dale seconded Vernon Whitford in the occupation of counting
looks and tones, and noting scraps of dialogue. She was quite
disinterested; he quite believed that he was; to this degree they
were competent for their post; and neither of them imagined they
could be personally involved in the dubious result of the scenes
they witnessed. They were but anxious observers, diligently
collecting. She fancied Clara susceptible to his advice: he had
fancied it, and was considering it one of his vanities. Each
mentally compared Clara's abruptness in taking them into her
confidence with her abstention from any secret word since the
arrival of Colonel De Craye. Sir Willoughby requested Laetitia to
give Miss Middleton as much of her company as she could; showing
that he was on the alert. Another Constantia Durham seemed beating
her wings for flight. The suddenness of the evident intimacy
between Clara and Colonel De Craye shocked Laetitia; their
acquaintance could be computed by hours. Yet at their first
interview she had suspected the possibility of worse than she now
supposed to be; and she had begged Vernon not immediately to quit
the Hall, in consequence of that faint suspicion. She had been led
to it by meeting Clara and De Craye at her cottage-gate, and
finding them as fluent and laughter-breathing in conversation as
friends. Unable to realize the rapid advance to a familiarity,
more ostensible than actual, of two lively natures, after such an
introduction as they had undergone: and one of the two pining in a
drought of liveliness: Laetitia listened to their wager of nothing
at all--a no against a yes--in the case of poor Flitch; and
Clara's, "Willoughby will not forgive"; and De Craye's "Oh, he's
human": and the silence of Clara and De Craye's hearty cry,
"Flitch shall be a genteman's coachman in his old seat or I
haven't a tongue!" to which there was a negative of Clara's head:
and it then struck Laetitia that this young betrothed lady, whose
alienated heart acknowledged no lord an hour earlier, had met her
match, and, as the observer would have said, her destiny.  She
judged of the alarming possibility by the recent revelation to
herself of Miss Middleton's character, and by Clara's having
spoken to a man as well (to Vernon), and previously. That a young
lady should speak on the subject of the inner holies to a man,
though he were Vernon Whitford, was incredible to Laetitia; but it
had to be accepted as one of the dread facts of our inexplicable
life, which drag our bodies at their wheels and leave our minds
exclaiming. Then, if Clara could speak to Vernon, which Laetitia
would not have done for a mighty bribe, she could speak to De
Craye, Laetitia thought deductively: this being the logic of
untrained heads opposed to the proceeding whereby their
condemnatory deduction hangs.--Clara must have spoken to De Craye!

Laetitia remembered how winning and prevailing Miss Middleton
could be in her confidences. A gentleman hearing her might forget
his duty to his friend, she thought, for she had been strangely
swayed by Clara: ideas of Sir Willoughby that she had never before
imagined herself to entertain had been sown in her, she thought;
not asking herself whether the searchingness of the young lady had
struck them and bidden them rise from where they lay imbedded.
Very gentle women take in that manner impressions of persons,
especially of the worshipped person, wounding them; like the new
fortifications with embankments of soft earth, where explosive
missiles bury themselves harmlessly until they are plucked out;
and it may be a reason why those injured ladies outlive a Clara
Middleton similarly battered.

Vernon less than Laetitia took into account that Clara was in a
state of fever, scarcely reasonable. Her confidences to him he had
excused, as a piece of conduct, in sympathy with her position. He
had not been greatly astonished by the circumstances confided;
and, on the whole, as she was excited and unhappy, he excused her
thoroughly; he could have extolled her: it was natural that she
should come to him, brave in her to speak so frankly, a compliment
that she should condescend to treat him as a friend. Her position
excused her widely. But she was not excused for making a
confidential friend of De Craye. There was a difference.

Well, the difference was, that De Craye had not the smarting sense
of honour with women which our meditator had: an impartial
judiciary, it will be seen: and he discriminated between himself
and the other justly: but sensation surging to his brain at the
same instant, he reproached Miss Middleton for not perceiving that
difference as clearly, before she betrayed her position to De
Craye, which Vernon assumed that she had done. Of course he did.
She had been guilty of it once: why, then, in the mind of an
offended friend, she would be guilty of it twice. There was
evidence. Ladies, fatally predestined to appeal to that from which
they have to be guarded, must expect severity when they run off
their railed highroad: justice is out of the question: man's
brains might, his blood cannot administer it to them. By chilling
him to the bone they may get what they cry for. But that is a
method deadening to their point of appeal.

I the evening, Miss Middleton and the colonel sang a duet. She
had of late declined to sing. Her voice was noticeably firm. Sir
Willoughby said to her, "You have recovered your richness of tone,
Clara." She smiled and appeared happy in pleasing him. He named a
French ballad. She went to the music-rack and gave the song
unasked. He should have been satisfied, for she said to him at the
finish, "Is that as you like it?" He broke from a murmur to Miss
Dale, "Admirable." Some one mentioned a Tuscan popular canzone.
She waited for Willoughby's approval, and took his nod for a
mandate.

Traitress! he could have bellowed.

He had read of this characteristic of caressing obedience of the
women about to deceive. He had in his time profited by it.

"Is it intuitively or by their experience that our neighbours
across Channel surpass us in the knowledge of your sex?" he said
to Miss Dale, and talked through Clara's apostrophe to the
'Santissinia Virgine Maria,' still treating temper as a part
of policy, without any effect on Clara; and that was matter for
sickly green reflections. The lover who cannot wound has indeed
lost anchorage; he is woefully adrift: he stabs air, which is to
stab himself. Her complacent proof-armour bids him know himself
supplanted.

During the short conversational period before the ladies retired 
for the night, Miss Eleanor alluded to the wedding by chance.
Miss Isabel replied to her, and addressed an interrogation to
Clara. De Craye foiled it adroitly. Clara did not utter a
syllable. Her bosom lifted to a wavering height and sank.
Subsequently she looked at De Craye vacantly, like a person
awakened, but she looked. She was astonished by his readiness, and
thankful for the succour. Her look was cold, wide, unfixed, with
nothing of gratitude or of personal in it. The look, however,
stood too long for Willoughby's endurance.

Ejaculating "Porcelain!" he uncrossed his legs; a signal for the
ladies Eleanor and Isabel to retire. Vernon bowed to Clara as she
was rising. He had not been once in her eyes, and he expected a
partial recognition at the good-night. She said it, turning her
head to Miss Isabel, who was condoling once more with Colonel De
Craye over the ruins of his wedding-present, the porcelain vase,
which she supposed to have been in Willoughby's mind when he
displayed the signal. Vernon walked off to his room, dark as one
smitten blind: bile tumet jecur: her stroke of neglect hit him
there where a blow sends thick obscuration upon eyeballs and brain
alike.

Clara saw that she was paining him and regretted it when they were
separated. That was her real friend! But he prescribed too hard a
task. Besides, she had done everything he demanded of her, except
the consenting to stay where she was and wear out Willoughby,
whose dexterity wearied her small stock of patience. She had
vainly tried remonstrance and supplication with her father
hoodwinked by his host, she refused to consider how; through wine?
--the thought was repulsive.

Nevertheless, she was drawn to the edge of it by the contemplation
of her scheme of release. If Lucy Darleton was at home; if Lucy
invited her to come: if she flew to Lucy: oh! then her father
would have cause for anger. He would not remember that but for
hateful wine! ...

What was there in this wine of great age which expelled
reasonableness, fatherliness? He was her dear father: she was his
beloved child: yet something divided them; something closed her
father's ears to her: and could it be that incomprehensible 
seduction of the wine? Her dutifulness cried violently no. She
bowed, stupefied, to his arguments for remaining awhile, and rose
clear-headed and rebellious with the reminiscence of the many
strong reasons she had urged against them.

The strangeness of men, young and old, the little things (she
regarded a grand wine as a little thing) twisting and changing
them, amazed her. And these are they by whom women are abused for
variability! Only the most imperious reasons, never mean trifles,
move women, thought she. Would women do an injury to one they
loved for oceans of that--ah, pah!

And women must respect men. They necessarily respect a father. "My
dear, dear father!" Clara said in the solitude of her chamber,
musing on all his goodness, and she endeavoured to reconcile the
desperate sentiments of the position he forced her to sustain,
with those of a venerating daughter. The blow which was to fall on
him beat on her heavily in advance. "I have not one excuse!" she
said, glancing at numbers and a mighty one. But the idea of her
father suffering at her hands cast her down lower than
self-justification. She sought to imagine herself sparing him. It
was too fictitious.

The sanctuary of her chamber, the pure white room so homely to her
maidenly feelings, whispered peace, only to follow the whisper
with another that went through her swelling to a roar, and leaving
her as a suing of music unkindly smitten. If she stayed in this
house her chamber would no longer be a sanctuary. Dolorous
bondage! Insolent death is not worse. Death's worm we cannot keep
away, but when he has us we are numb to dishonour, happily
senseless.

Youth weighed her eyelids to sleep, though she was quivering, and
quivering she awoke to the sound of her name beneath her window.
"I can love still, for I love him," she said, as she luxuriated in
young Crossjay's boy's voice, again envying him his bath in the
lake waters, which seemed to her to have the power to wash away
grief and chains. Then it was that she resolved to let Crossjay
see the last of her in this place. He should be made gleeful by
doing her a piece of service; he should escort her on her walk to
the railway station next morning, thence be sent flying for a long
day's truancy, with a little note of apology on his behalf that
she would write for him to deliver to Vernon at night.

Crossjay came running to her after his breakfast with Mrs
Montague, the housekeeper, to tell her he had called her up.

"You won't to-morrow: I shall be up far ahead of you," said she;
and musing on her father, while Crossjay vowed to be up the first,
she thought it her duty to plunge into another expostulation.

Willoughby had need of Vernon on private affairs. Dr. Middleton
betook himself as usual to the library, after answering "I will
ruin you yet," to Willoughby's liberal offer to despatch an order
to London for any books he might want.

His fine unruffled air, as of a mountain in still morning beams,
made Clara not indisposed to a preliminary scene with Willoughby
that might save her from distressing him, but she could not stop
Willoughby; as little could she look an invitation. He stood in
the Hall, holding Vernon by the arm. She passed him; he did not
speak, and she entered the library.

"What now, my dear? what is it?" said Dr. Middleton, seeing that
the door was shut on them.

"Nothing, papa," she replied, calmly.

"You've not locked the door, my child? You turned something there:
try the handle."

"I assure you, papa, the door is not locked."

"Mr. Whitford will be here instantly. We are engaged on tough
matter. Women have not, and opinion is universal that they never
will have, a conception of the value of time."

"We are vain and shallow, my dear papa."

"No, no, not you, Clara. But I suspect you to require to learn by
having work in progress how important is ... is a quiet
commencement of the day's task. There is not a scholar who will
not tell you so. We must have a retreat. These invasions!--So you
intend to have another ride to-day? They do you good. To-morrow we
dine with Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, an estimable person indeed,
though I do not perfectly understand our accepting.--You have not
to accuse me of sitting over wine last night, my Clara! I never do
it, unless I am appealed to for my judgement upon a wine."

"I have come to entreat you to take me away, papa."

In the midst of the storm aroused by this renewal of perplexity, 
Dr Middleton replaced a book his elbow had knocked over in his
haste to dash the hair off his forehead, crying: "Whither? To what
spot? That reading of guide-books, and idle people's notes of
Travel, and picturesque correspondence in the newspapers,
unsettles man and maid. My objection to the living in hotels is
known. I do not hesitate to say that I do cordially abhor it. I
have had penitentially to submit to it in your dear mother's time,
[Greek], up to the full ten thousand times. But will you not
comprehend that to the older man his miseries are multiplied by
his years? But is it utterly useless to solicit your sympathy with
an old man, Clara?"

"General Darleton will take us in, papa."

"His table is detestable. I say nothing of that; but his wine is
poison. Let that pass--I should rather say, let it not pass!--
but our political views are not in accord. True, we are not under
the obligation to propound them in presence, but we are destitute
of an opinion in common. We have no discourse. Military men have
produced, or diverged in, noteworthy epicures; they are often
devout; they have blossomed in lettered men: they are gentlemen;
the country rightly holds them in honour; but, in fine, I reject
the proposal to go to General Darleton.--Tears?"

"No, papa."

"I do hope not. Here we have everything man can desire; without
contest, an excellent host. You have your transitory tea-cup
tempests, which you magnify to hurricanes, in the approved 
historic manner of the book of Cupid. And all the better; I
repeat, it is the better that you should have them over in the
infancy of the alliance. Come in!" Dr. Middleton shouted cheerily
in response to a knock at the door.

He feared the door was locked: he had a fear that his daughter
intended to keep it locked.

"Clara!" he cried.

She reluctantly turned the handle, and the ladies Eleanor and
Isabel came in, apologizing with as much coherence as Dr.
Middleton ever expected from their sex. They wished to speak to
Clara, but they declined to take her away. In vain the Rev.
Doctor assured them she was at their service; they protested that
they had very few words to say, and would not intrude one moment
further than to speak them.

Like a shy deputation of young scholars before the master, these
very words to come were preceded by none at all; a dismal and
trying cause; refreshing however to Dr. Middleton, who joyfully
anticipated that the ladies could be induced to take away Clara
when they had finished.

"We may appear to you a little formal," Miss Isabel began, and
turned to her sister.

"We have no intention to lay undue weight on our mission, if
mission it can be called," said Miss Eleanor.

"Is it entrusted to you by Willoughby?" said Clara.

"Dear child, that you may know it all the more earnest with us,
and our personal desire to contribute to your happiness:
therefore does Willoughby entrust the speaking of it to us."

Hereupon the sisters alternated in addressing Clara, and she gazed
from one to the other, piecing fragments of empty signification
to get the full meaning when she might.

"--And in saying your happiness, dear Clara, we have our
Willoughby's in view, which is dependent on yours."

"--And we never could sanction that our own inclinations should
stand in the way."

"--No. We love the old place; and if it were only our punishment
for loving it too idolatrously, we should deem it ground enough
for our departure."

"--Without, really, an idea of unkindness; none, not any."

"--Young wives naturally prefer to be undisputed queens of their
own establishment."

"--Youth and age!"

"But I," said Clara, "have never mentioned, never had a 
thought. . ."

"--You have, dear child, a lover who in his solicitude for your
happiness both sees what you desire and what is due to you."

"--And for us, Clara, to recognize what is due to you is to act on
it."

"--Besides, dear, a sea-side cottage has always been one of our
dreams."

"--We have not to learn that we are a couple of old maids,
incongruous associates for a young wife in the government of a
great house."

"--With our antiquated notions, questions of domestic management 
might arise, and with the best will in the world to be
harmonious!"

"--So, dear Clara, consider it settled."

"--From time to time gladly shall we be your guests."

"--Your guests, dear, not censorious critics."

"And you think me such an Egoist!--dear ladies! The suggestion 
of so cruel a piece of selfishness wounds me. I would not have had
you leave the Hall. I like your society; I respect you. My
complaint, if I had one, would be, that you do not sufficiently
assert yourselves. I could have wished you to be here for an
example to me. I would not have allowed you to go. What can he
think of me! Did Willoughby speak of it this morning?"

It was hard to distinguish which was the completer dupe of these
two echoes of one another in worship of a family idol.

"Willoughby," Miss Eleanor presented herself to be stamped with
the title hanging ready for the first that should open her lips,
"our Willoughby is observant--he is ever generous--and he is not
less forethoughtful. His arrangement is for our good on all
sides."

"An index is enough," said Miss Isabel, appearing in her turn the
monster dupe.

"You will not have to leave, dear ladies. Were I mistress here I
should oppose it."

"Willoughby blames himself for not reassuring you before."

"Indeed we blame ourselves for not undertaking to go."

"Did he speak of it first this morning?" said Clara; but she could
draw no reply to that from them. They resumed the duet, and she
resigned herself to have her cars boxed with nonsense.

"So, it is understood?" said Miss Eleanor.

"I see your kindness, ladies."

"And I am to be Aunt Eleanor again?"

"And I Aunt Isabel?"

Clara could have wrung her hands at the impediment which
prohibited her delicacy from telling them why she could not name
them so as she had done in the earlier days of Willoughby's 
courtship. She kissed them warmly, ashamed of kissing, though the
warmth was real.

They retired with a flow of excuses to Dr. Middleton for
disturbing him. He stood at the door to bow them out, and holding
the door for Clara, to wind up the procession, discovered her at a
far corner of the room.

He was debating upon the advisability of leaving her there, when
Vernon Whitford crossed the hall from the laboratory door, a
mirror of himself in his companion air of discomposure.

That was not important, so long as Vernon was a check on Clara;
but the moment Clara, thus baffled, moved to quit the library, Dr.
Middleton felt the horror of having an uncomfortable face
opposite.

"No botheration, I hope? It's the worst thing possible to work on.
Where have you been? I suspect your weak point is not to arm
yourself in triple brass against bother and worry, and no good
work can you do unless you do. You have come out of that
laboratory."

"I have, sir.--Can I get you any book?" Vernon said to Clara.

She thanked him, promising to depart immediately.

"Now you are at the section of Italian literature, my love," said
Dr Middleton. "Well, Mr. Whitford, the laboratory--ah!--where
the amount of labour done within the space of a year would not
stretch an electric current between this Hall and the railway
station: say, four miles, which I presume the distance to be.
Well, sir, and a dilettantism costly in time and machinery is as
ornamental as foxes' tails and deers' horns to an independent
gentleman whose fellows are contented with the latter decorations
for their civic wreath. Willoughby, let me remark, has recently
shown himself most considerate for my girl. As far as I could
gather--I have been listening to a dialogue of ladies--he is as
generous as he is discreet. There are certain combats in which to
be the one to succumb is to claim the honours;--and that is what
women will not learn. I doubt their seeing the glory of it."

"I have heard of it; I have been with Willoughby," Vernon said,
hastily, to shield Clara from her father's allusive attacks. He
wished to convey to her that his interview with Willoughby had not
been profitable in her interests, and that she had better at once,
having him present to support her, pour out her whole heart to her
father. But how was it to be conveyed? She would not meet his
eyes, and he was too poor an intriguer to be ready on the instant
to deal out the verbal obscurities which are transparencies to
one.

"I shall regret it, if Willoughby has annoyed you, for he stands
high in my favour," said Dr. Middleton.

Clara dropped a book. Her father started higher than the nervous
impulse warranted in his chair. Vernon tried to win a glance, and
she was conscious of his effort, but her angry and guilty
feelings, prompting her resolution to follow her own counsel, kept
her eyelids on the defensive.

"I don't say he annoys me, sir. I am here to give him my advice,
and if he does not accept it I have no right to be annoyed.
Willoughby seems annoyed that Colonel De Craye should talk of
going to-morrow or next day."

"He likes his friends about him. Upon my word, a man of a more
genial heart you might march a day without finding. But you have
it on the forehead, Mr. Whitford."

"Oh! no, sir."

"There," Dr. Middleton drew his finger along his brows.

Vernon felt along his own, and coined an excuse for their
blackness; not aware that the direction of his mind toward Clara
pushed him to a kind of clumsy double meaning, while he satisfied
an inward and craving wrath, as he said: "By the way, I have been
racking my head; I must apply to you, sir. I have a line, and I am
uncertain of the run of the line. Will this pass, do you think?

     'In Asination's tongue he asinates';

signifying that he excels any man of us at donkey-dialect."

After a decent interval for the genius of criticism to seem to
have been sitting under his frown, Dr. Middleton rejoined with
sober jocularity: "No, sir, it will not pass; and your uncertainty
in regard to the run of the line would only be extended were the
line centipedal. Our recommendation is, that you erase it before
the arrival of the ferule. This might do:

     'In Assignation's name he assignats';

signifying that he pre-eminently flourishes hypothetical promises,
to pay by appointment. That might pass. But you will forbear to
cite me for your authority."

"The line would be acceptable if I could get it to apply," said
Vernon.

"Or this . . ." Dr. Middleton was offering a second suggestion, but
Clara fled, astonished at men as she never yet had been. Why, in a
burning world they would be exercising their minds in absurdities!
And those two were scholars, learned men! And both knew they were
in the presence of a soul in a tragic fever!

A minute after she had closed the door they were deep in their
work. Dr. Middleton forgot his alternative line.

"Nothing serious?" he said in reproof of the want of honourable 
clearness on Vernon's brows.

"I trust not, sir; it's a case for common sense."

"And you call that not serious?"

"I take Hermann's praise of the versus dochmiachus to be not only
serious but unexaggerated," said Vernon.

Dr. Middleton assented and entered on the voiceful ground of Greek
metres, shoving your dry dusty world from his elbow.


CHAPTER XXV

The Flight in Wild Weather

The morning of Lucy Darleton's letter of reply to her friend Clara
was fair before sunrise, with luminous colours that are an omen to
the husbandman. Clara had no weather-eye for the rich Eastern
crimson, nor a quiet space within her for the beauty. She looked
on it as her gate of promise, and it set her throbbing with a
revived belief in radiant things which she had once dreamed of to
surround her life, but her accelerated pulses narrowed her
thoughts upon the machinery of her project. She herself was metal,
pointing all to her one aim when in motion. Nothing came amiss to
it, everything was fuel; fibs, evasions, the serene battalions of
white lies parallel on the march with dainty rogue falsehoods. She
had delivered herself of many yesterday in her engagements for
to-day. Pressure was put on her to engage herself, and she did so
liberally, throwing the burden of deceitfulness on the extraordinary
pressure. "I want the early part of the morning; the rest of the
day I shall be at liberty." She said it to Willoughby, Miss Dale,
Colonel De Craye, and only the third time was she aware of the
delicious double meaning. Hence she associated it with the
colonel.

Your loudest outcry against the wretch who breaks your rules is in
asking how a tolerably conscientious person could have done this
and the other besides the main offence, which you vow you could
overlook but for the minor objections pertaining to conscience,
the incomprehensible and abominable lies, for example, or the
brazen coolness of the lying. Yet you know that we live in an
undisciplined world, where in our seasons of activity we are
servants of our design, and that this comes of our passions, and
those of our position. Our design shapes us for the work in hand,
the passions man the ship, the position is their apology: and now
should conscience be a passenger on board, a merely seeming
swiftness of our vessel will keep him dumb as the unwilling guest
of a pirate captain scudding from the cruiser half in cloven brine
through rocks and shoals to save his black flag. Beware the false
position.

That is easy to say: sometimes the tangle descends on us like a
net of blight on a rose-bush. There is then an instant choice for
us between courage to cut loose, and desperation if we do not. But
not many men are trained to courage; young women are trained to
cowardice. For them to front an evil with plain speech is to be
guilty of effrontery and forfeit the waxen polish of purity, and
therewith their commanding place in the market. They are trained
to please man's taste, for which purpose they soon learn to live
out of themselves, and look on themselves as he looks, almost as
little disturbed as he by the undiscovered. Without courage,
conscience is a sorry guest; and if all goes well with the pirate
captain, conscience will be made to walk the plank for being of no
service to either party.

Clara's fibs and evasions disturbed her not in the least that
morning. She had chosen desperation, and she thought herself very
brave because she was just brave enough to fly from her
abhorrence. She was light-hearted, or, more truly,
drunken-hearted.  Her quick nature realized the out of prison as
vividly and suddenly as it had sunk suddenly and leadenly under
the sense of imprisonment. Vernon crossed her mind: that was a
friend! Yes, and there was a guide; but he would disapprove, and
even he, thwarting her way to sacred liberty, must be thrust
aside.

What would he think? They might never meet, for her to know. Or
one day in the Alps they might meet, a middleaged couple, he
famous, she regretful only to have fallen below his lofty
standard. "For, Mr. Whitford," says she, very earnestly, "I did
wish at that time, believe me or not, to merit your approbation."
The brows of the phantom Vernon whom she conjured up were stern,
as she had seen them yesterday in the library.

She gave herself a chiding for thinking of him when her mind
should be intent on that which he was opposed to.

It was a livelier relaxation to think of young Crossjay's
shame-faced confession presently, that he had been a laggard in
bed while she swept the dews. She laughed at him, and immediately 
Crossjay popped out on her from behind a tree, causing her to clap
hand to heart and stand fast. A conspirator is not of the stuff to
bear surprises. He feared he had hurt her, and was manly in his
efforts to soothe: he had been up "hours", he said, and had watched
her coming along the avenue, and did not mean to startle her: it
was the kind of fun he played with fellows, and if he had hurt
her, she might do anything to him she liked, and she would see if
he could not stand to be punished. He was urgent with her to
inflict corporal punishment on him.

"I shall leave it to the boatswain to do that when you're in the
navy," said Clara.

"The boatswain daren't strike an officer! so now you see what you
know of the navy," said Crossjay.

"But you could not have been out before me, you naughty boy, for I
found all the locks and bolts when I went to the door."

"But you didn't go to the back door, and Sir Willoughby's private
door: you came out by the hall door; and I know what you want,
Miss Middleton, you want not to pay what you've lost."

"What have I lost, Crossjay?"

"Your wager."

"What was that?"

"You know."

"Speak."

"A kiss."

"Nothing of the sort. But, dear boy, I don't love you less for not
kissing you. All that is nonsense: you have to think only of
learning, and to be truthful. Never tell a story: suffer anything
rather than be dishonest." She was particularly impressive upon
the silliness and wickedness of falsehood, and added: "Do you
hear?"

"Yes: but you kissed me when I had been out in the rain that day."

"Because I promised."

"And, Miss Middleton, you betted a kiss yesterday."

"I am sure, Crossjay--no, I will not say I am sure: but can you
say you are sure you were out first this morning? Well, will you
say you are sure that when you left the house you did not see me
in the avenue? You can't: ah!"

"Miss Middleton, I do really believe I was dressed first."

"Always be truthful, my dear boy, and then you may feel that Clara
Middleton will always love you."

"But, Miss Middleton, when you're married you won't be Clara
Middleton."

"I certainly shall, Crossjay."

"No, you won't, because I'm so fond of your name!"

She considered, and said: "You have warned me, Crossjay, and I
shall not marry. I shall wait," she was going to say, "for you,"
but turned the hesitation to a period. "Is the village where I
posted my letter the day before yesterday too far for you?"

Crossjay howled in contempt. "Next to Clara, my favourite's Lucy,"
he said.

"I thought Clara came next to Nelson," said she; "and a long way
off too, if you're not going to be a landlubber."

"I'm not going to be a landlubber. Miss Middleton, you may be
absolutely positive on your solemn word."

"You're getting to talk like one a little now and then, Crossjay."

"Then I won't talk at all."

He stuck to his resolution for one whole minute.

Clara hoped that on this morning of a doubtful though imperative 
venture she had done some good.

They walked fast to cover the distance to the village post-office,
and back before the breakfast hour: and they had plenty of time,
arriving too early for the opening of the door, so that Crossjay
began to dance with an appetite, and was despatched to besiege a
bakery. Clara felt lonely without him: apprehensively timid in
the shuttered, unmoving village street. She was glad of his
return. When at last her letter was handed to her, on the
testimony of the postman that she was the lawful applicant, 
Crossjay and she put out on a sharp trot to be back at the Hall in
good time. She took a swallowing glance of the first page of
Lucy's writing:

"Telegraph, and I will meet you. I will supply you with everything
you can want for the two nights, if you cannot stop longer."

That was the gist of the letter. A second. less voracious, glance
at it along the road brought sweetness:--Lucy wrote:

"Do I love you as I did? my best friend, you must fall into
unhappiness to have the answer to that."

Clara broke a silence.

"Yes, dear Crossjay, and if you like you shall have another walk
with me after breakfast. But, remember, you must not say where you
have gone with me. I shall give you twenty shillings to go and buy
those bird's eggs and the butterflies you want for your
collection; and mind, promise me, to-day is your last day of
truancy. Tell Mr. Whitford how ungrateful you know you have been,
that he may have some hope of you. You know the way across the
fields to the railway station?"

"You save a mile; you drop on the road by Combline's mill, and
then there's another five-minutes" cut, and the rest's road."

"Then, Crossjay, immediately after breakfast run round behind the
pheasantry, and there I'll find you. And if any one comes to you
before I come, say you are admiring the plumage of the Himalaya--
the beautiful Indian bird; and if we're found together, we run a
race, and of course you can catch me, but you mustn't until we're
out of sight. Tell Mr. Vernon at night--tell Mr. Whitford at
night you had the money from me as part of my allowance to you for
pocket-money. I used to like to have pocket-money, Crossjay. And
you may tell him I gave you the holiday, and I may write to him
for his excuse, if he is not too harsh to grant it. He can be
very harsh."

"You look right into his eyes next time, Miss Middleton. I used
to think him awful till he made me look at him. He says men ought
to look straight at one another, just as we do when he gives me my
boxing-lesson, and then we won't have quarrelling half so much. I
can't recollect everything he says."

"You are not bound to, Crossjay."

"No, but you like to hear."

"Really, dear boy. I can't accuse myself of having told you that."

"No, but, Miss Middleton, you do. And he's fond of your singing
and playing on the piano, and watches you."

"We shall be late if we don't mind," said Clara, starting to a
pace close on a run.

"They were in time for a circuit in the park to the wild double
cherry-blossom, no longer all white. Clara gazed up from under it,
where she had imagined a fairer visible heavenliness than any other
sight of earth had ever given her. That was when Vernon lay
beneath. But she had certainly looked above, not at him. The tree
seemed sorrowful in its withering flowers of the colour of trodden
snow.

Crossjay resumed the conversation.

"He says ladies don't like him much."

"Who says that?"

"Mr. Whitford."

"Were those his words?"

"I forget the words: but he said they wouldn't be taught by him,
like me, ever since you came; and since you came I've liked him
ten times more."

"The more you like him the more I shall like you, Crossjay."

The boy raised a shout and scampered away to Sir Willoughby, at
the appearance of whom Clara felt herself nipped and curling
inward. Crossjay ran up to him with every sign of pleasure. Yet he
had not mentioned him during the walk; and Clara took it for a
sign that the boy understood the entire satisfaction Willoughby
had in mere shows of affection, and acted up to it. Hardly blaming
Crossjay, she was a critic of the scene, for the reason that
youthful creatures who have ceased to love a person, hunger for
evidence against him to confirm their hard animus, which will seem
to them sometimes, when he is not immediately irritating them,
brutish, because they can not analyze it and reduce it to the
multitude of just antagonisms whereof it came. It has passed by
large accumulation into a sombre and speechless load upon the
senses, and fresh evidence, the smallest item, is a champion to
speak for it. Being about to do wrong, she grasped at this
eagerly, and brooded on the little of vital and truthful that
there was in the man and how he corrupted the boy. Nevertheless, 
she instinctively imitated Crossjay in an almost sparkling salute
to him.

"Good-morning, Willoughby; it was not a morning to lose: have you
been out long?"

He retained her hand. "My dear Clara! and you, have you not
overfatigued yourself? Where have you been?"

"Round--everywhere! And I am certainly not tired."

"Only you and Crossjay? You should have loosened the dogs."

"Their barking would have annoyed the house."

"Less than I am annoyed to think of you without protection."

He kissed her fingers: it was a loving speech.

"The household . . ." said Clara, but would not insist to convict
him of what he could not have perceived.

"If you outstrip me another morning, Clara, promise me to take the
dogs; will you?"

"Yes."

"To-day I am altogether yours."

"Are you?"

"From the first to the last hour of it!--So you fall in with
Horace's humour pleasantly?"

"He is very amusing."

"As good as though one had hired him."

"Here comes Colonel De Craye."

"He must think we have hired him!"

She noticed the bitterness of Willoughby's tone. He sang out a
good-morning to De Craye, and remarked that he must go to the
stables.

"Darleton? Darleton, Miss Middleton?" said the colonel, rising
from his bow to her: "a daughter of General Darleton? If so, I
have had the honour to dance with her. And have not you?--
practised with her, I mean; or gone off in a triumph to dance it
out as young ladies do? So you know what a delightful partner she
is."

"She is!" cried Clara, enthusiastic for her succouring friend,
whose letter was the treasure in her bosom.

"Oddly, the name did not strike me yesterday, Miss Middleton. In
the middle of the night it rang a little silver bell in my ear,
and I remembered the lady I was half in love with, if only for her
dancing. She is dark, of your height, as light on her feet; a
sister in another colour. Now that I know her to be your friend
... !"

"Why, you may meet her, Colonel De Craye."

"It'll be to offer her a castaway. And one only meets a charming
girl to hear that she's engaged! "'Tis not a line of a ballad, Miss
Middleton, but out of the heart."

"Lucy Darleton . . . You were leading me to talk seriously to you,
Colonel De Craye."

"Will you one day?--and not think me a perpetual tumbler! You
have heard of melancholy clowns. You will find the face not so
laughable behind my paint. When I was thirteen years younger I was
loved, and my dearest sank to the grave. Since then I have not
been quite at home in life; probably because of finding no one so
charitable as she. "'Tis easy to win smiles and hands, but not so
easy to win a woman whose faith you would trust as your own heart
before the enemy. I was poor then. She said. 'The day after my
twenty-first birthday'; and that day I went for her, and I wondered
they did not refuse me at the door. I was shown upstairs, and I
saw her, and saw death. She wished to marry me, to leave me her
fortune!"

"Then, never marry," said Clara, in an underbreath.

She glanced behind.

Sir Willoughby was close, walking on turf.

"I must be cunning to escape him after breakfast," she thought.

He had discarded his foolishness of the previous days, and the
thought in him could have replied: "I am a dolt if I let you out
of my sight."

Vernon appeared, formal as usual of late. Clara begged his excuse
for withdrawing Crossjay from his morning swim. He nodded.

De Craye called to Willoughby for a book of the trains.

"There's a card in the smoking-room; eleven, one, and four are the
hours, if you must go," said Willoughby.

"You leave the Hall, Colonel De Craye?"

"In two or three days, Miss Middleton."

She did not request him to stay: his announcement produced no
effect on her. Consequently, thought he--well, what? nothing:
well, then, that she might not be minded to stay herself.
Otherwise she would have regretted the loss of an amusing
companion: that is the modest way of putting it. There is a modest
and a vain for the same sentiment; and both may be simultaneously
in the same breast; and each one as honest as the other; so shy is
man's vanity in the presence of here and there a lady. She liked
him: she did not care a pin for him--how could she? yet she liked
him: O, to be able to do her some kindling bit of service! These
were his consecutive fancies, resolving naturally to the
exclamation, and built on the conviction that she did not love
Willoughby, and waited for a spirited lift from circumstances. His
call for a book of the trains had been a sheer piece of impromptu,
in the mind as well as on the mouth. It sprang, unknown to him, of
conjectures he had indulged yesterday and the day before. This
morning she would have an answer to her letter to her friend, Miss
Lucy Darleton, the pretty dark girl, whom De Craye was astonished
not to have noticed more when he danced with her. She, pretty as
she was, had come to his recollection through the name and rank of
her father, a famous general of cavalry, and tactician in that
arm. The colonel despised himself for not having been devoted to
Clara Middleton's friend.

The morning's letters were on the bronze plate in the hall.
Clara passed on her way to her room without inspecting them. De
Craye opened an envelope and went upstairs to scribble a line. Sir
Willoughby observed their absence at the solemn reading to the
domestic servants in advance of breakfast. Three chairs were
unoccupied. Vernon had his own notions of a mechanical service--
and a precious profit he derived from them! but the other two
seats returned the stare Willoughby cast at their backs with an
impudence that reminded him of his friend Horace's calling for
a book of the trains, when a minute afterward he admitted he was
going to stay at the Hall another two days, or three. The man
possessed by jealousy is never in need of matter for it: he
magnifies; grass is jungle, hillocks are mountains. Willoughby's
legs crossing and uncrossing audibly, and his tight-folded arms
and clearing of the throat, were faint indications of his condition.

"Are you in fair health this morning, Willoughby?" Dr. Middleton
said to him after he had closed his volumes.

"The thing is not much questioned by those who know me
intimately," he replied.

"Willoughby unwell!" and, "He is health incarnate!" exclaimed the
ladies Eleanor and Isabel.

Laetitia grieved for him. Sun-rays on a pest-stricken city, she
thought, were like the smile of his face. She believed that he
deeply loved Clara, and had learned more of her alienation.

He went into the ball to look into the well for the pair of
malefactors; on fire with what he could not reveal to a soul.

De Craye was in the housekeeper's room, talking to young Crossjay,
and Mrs. Montague just come up to breakfast. He had heard the boy
chattering, and as the door was ajar he peeped in, and was invited
to enter. Mrs. Montague was very fond of hearing him talk: he paid
her the familiar respect which a lady of fallen fortunes, at a
certain period after the fall, enjoys as a befittingly sad
souvenir, and the respectfulness of the lord of the house was more
chilling.

She bewailed the boy's trying his constitution with long walks
before he had anything in him to walk on.

"And where did you go this morning, my lad?" said De Craye.

"Ah, you know the ground, colonel," said Crossjay. "I am hungry! I
shall eat three eggs and some bacon, and buttered cakes, and jam,
then begin again, on my second cup of coffee."

"It's not braggadocio," remarked Mrs. Montague. "He waits empty
from five in the morning till nine, and then he comes famished to
my table, and cats too much."

"Oh! Mrs. Montague, that is what the country people call
roemancing. For, Colonel De Craye, I had a bun at seven o'clock.
Miss Middleton forced me to go and buy it"

"A stale bun, my boy?"

"Yesterday's: there wasn't much of a stopper to you in it, like a
new bun."

"And where did you leave Miss Middleton when you went to buy the
bun? You should never leave a lady; and the street of a country
town is lonely at that early hour. Crossjay, you surprise me."

"She forced me to go, colonel. Indeed she did. What do I care for
a bun! And she was quite safe. We could hear the people stirring in
the post-office, and I met our postman going for his letter-bag. I
didn't want to go: bother the bun!--but you can't disobey Miss
Middleton. I never want to, and wouldn't."

"There we're of the same mind," said the colonel, and Crossjay
shouted, for the lady whom they exalted was at the door.

"You will be too tired for a ride this morning," De Craye said to
her, descending the stairs.

She swung a bonnet by the ribands. "I don't think of riding
to-day."

"Why did you not depute your mission to me?"

"I like to bear my own burdens, as far as I can."

"Miss Darleton is well?"

"I presume so."

"Will you try her recollection for me?"

"It will probably be quite as lively as yours was."

"Shall you see her soon?"

"I hope so."

Sir Willoughby met her at the foot of the stairs, but refrained 
from giving her a hand that shook.

"We shall have the day together," he said.

Clara bowed.

At the breakfast-table she faced a clock.

De Craye took out his watch. "You are five and a half minutes too
slow by that clock, Willoughby."

"The man omitted to come from Rendon to set it last week, Horace.
He will find the hour too late here for him when he does come."

One of the ladies compared the time of her watch with De Craye's,
and Clara looked at hers and gratefully noted that she was four
minutes in arrear.

She left the breakfast-room at a quarter to ten, after kissing her
father. Willoughby was behind her. He had been soothed by thinking
of his personal advantages over De Craye, and he felt assured that
if he could be solitary with his eccentric bride and fold her in
himself, he would, cutting temper adrift, be the man he had been
to her not so many days back. Considering how few days back, his
temper was roused, but he controlled it.

They were slightly dissenting as De Craye stepped into the hall.

"A present worth examining," Willoughby said to her: "and I do not
dwell on the costliness. Come presently, then. I am at your
disposal all day. I will drive you in the afternoon to call on
Lady Busshe to offer your thanks: but you must see it first. It is
laid out in the laboratory."

"There is time before the afternoon," said Clara.

"Wedding presents?" interposed De Craye.

"A porcelain service from Lady Busshe, Horace."

"Not in fragments? Let me have a look at it. I'm haunted by an
idea that porcelain always goes to pieces. I'll have a look and
take a hint. We're in the laboratory, Miss Middleton."

He put his arm under Willoughby's. The resistance to him was
momentary: Willoughby had the satisfaction of the thought that De
Craye being with him was not with Clara; and seeing her giving
orders to her maid Barclay, he deferred his claim on her company
for some short period.

De Craye detained him in the laboratory, first over the China cups
and saucers, and then with the latest of London--tales of
youngest Cupid upon subterranean adventures, having high titles to
light him. Willoughby liked the tale thus illuminated, for without
the title there was no special savour in such affairs, and it
pulled down his betters in rank. He was of a morality to reprobate
the erring dame while he enjoyed the incidents. He could not help
interrupting De Craye to point at Vernon through the window,
striding this way and that, evidently on the hunt for young
Crossjay. "No one here knows how to manage the boy except myself
But go on, Horace," he said, checking his contemptuous laugh; and
Vernon did look ridiculous, out there half-drenched already in a
white rain, again shuffled off by the little rascal. It seemed
that he was determined to have his runaway: he struck up the
avenue at full pedestrian racing pace.

"A man looks a fool cutting after a cricket-ball; but, putting on
steam in a storm of rain to catch a young villain out of sight,
beats anything I've witnessed," Willoughby resumed, in his
amusement.

"Aiha!" said De Craye, waving a hand to accompany the melodious
accent, "there are things to beat that for fun."

He had smoked in the laboratory, so Willoughby directed a servant
to transfer the porcelain service to one of the sitting-rooms for
Clara's inspection of it.

"You're a bold man," De Craye remarked. "The luck may be with you,
though. I wouldn't handle the fragile treasure for a trifle."

"I believe in my luck," said Willoughby.

Clara was now sought for. The lord of the house desired her
presence impatiently, and had to wait. She was in none of the
lower rooms. Barclay, her maid, upon interrogation, declared she
was in none of the upper. Willoughby turned sharp on De Craye: he
was there.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel and Miss Dale were consulted. They
had nothing to say about Clara's movements, more than that they
could not understand her exceeding restlessness. The idea of her
being out of doors grew serious; heaven was black, hard thunder
rolled, and lightning flushed the battering rain. Men bearing
umbrellas, shawls, and cloaks were dispatched on a circuit of the
park. De Craye said: "I'll be one."

"No," cried Willoughby, starting to interrupt him, "I can't allow
it."

"I've the scent of a hound, Willoughby; I'll soon be on the
track."

"My dear Horace, I won't let you go."

"Adieu, dear boy! and if the lady's discoverable, I'm the one to
find her."

He stepped to the umbrella-stand. There was then a general
question whether Clara had taken her umbrella. Barclay said she
had. The fact indicated a wider stroll than round inside the park:
Crossjay was likewise absent. De Craye nodded to himself.

Willoughby struck a rattling blow on the barometer.

"Where's Pollington?" he called, and sent word for his man
Pollington to bring big fishing-boots and waterproof wrappers.

An urgent debate within him was in progress.

Should he go forth alone on his chance of discovering Clara and
forgiving her under his umbrella and cloak? or should he prevent
De Craye from going forth alone on the chance he vaunted so
impudently?

"You will offend me, Horace, if you insist," he said.

"Regard me as an instrument of destiny, Willoughby," replied De
Craye.

"Then we go in company."

"But that's an addition of one that cancels the other by
conjunction, and's worse than simple division: for I can't trust
my wits unless I rely on them alone, you see."

"Upon my word, you talk at times most unintelligible stuff, to be
frank with you, Horace. Give it in English."

"'Tis not suited, perhaps, to the genius of the language, for I
thought I talked English."

"Oh, there's English gibberish as well as Irish, we know!"

"And a deal foolisher when they do go at it; for it won't bear
squeezing, we think, like Irish."

"Where!" exclaimed the ladies, "where can she be! The storm is
terrible."

Laetitia suggested the boathouse.

"For Crossjay hadn't a swim this morning!" said De Craye.

No one reflected on the absurdity that Clara should think of
taking Crossjay for a swim in the lake, and immediately after his
breakfast: it was accepted as a suggestion at least that she and
Crossjay had gone to the lake for a row.

In the hopefulness of the idea, Willoughby suffered De Craye to go
on his chance unaccompanied. He was near chuckling. He projected a
plan for dismissing Crossjay and remaining in the boathouse with
Clara, luxuriating in the prestige which would attach to him for
seeking and finding her. Deadly sentiments intervened. Still he
might expect to be alone with her where she could not slip from
him.

The throwing open of the hall-doors for the gentlemen presented a
framed picture of a deluge. All the young-leaved trees were steely
black, without a gradation of green, drooping and pouring, and the
song of rain had become an inveterate hiss.

The ladies beholding it exclaimed against Clara, even
apostrophized her, so dark are trivial errors when circumstances 
frown. She must be mad to tempt such weather: she was very giddy;
she was never at rest. Clara! Clara! how could you be so wild!
Ought we not to tell Dr. Middleton?

Laetitia induced them to spare him.

"Which way do you take?" said Willoughby, rather fearful that his
companion was not to be got rid of now.

"Any way," said De Craye. "I chuck up my head like a halfpenny, 
and go by the toss."

This enraging nonsense drove off Willoughby. De Craye saw him
cast a furtive eye at his heels to make sure he was not followed,
and thought, "Jove! he may be fond of her. But he's not on the
track. She's a determined girl, if I'm correct. She's a girl of a
hundred thousand. Girls like that make the right sort of wives for
the right men. They're the girls to make men think of marrying.
To-morrow! only give me a chance. They stick to you fast when they
do stick."

Then a thought of her flower-like drapery and face caused him
fervently to hope she had escaped the storm.

Calling at the West park-lodge he heard that Miss Middleton had
been seen passing through the gate with Master Crossjay; but she
had not been seen coming back. Mr. Vernon Whitford had passed
through half an hour later.

"After his young man!" said the colonel.

The lodge-keeper's wife and daughter knew of Master Crossjay's
pranks; Mr. Whitford, they said, had made inquiries about him and
must have caught him and sent him home to change his dripping
things; for Master Crossjay had come back, and had declined
shelter in the lodge; he seemed to be crying; he went away soaking
over the wet grass, hanging his head. The opinion at the lodge was
that Master Crossjay was unhappy.

"He very properly received a wigging from Mr. Whitford, I have no
doubt," said Colonel Do Craye.

Mother and daughter supposed it to be the case, and considered 
Crossjay very wilful for not going straight home to the Hall to
change his wet clothes; he was drenched.

Do Craye drew out his watch. The time was ten minutes past eleven.
If the surmise he had distantly spied was correct, Miss Middleton
would have been caught in the storm midway to her destination. By
his guess at her character (knowledge of it, he would have said),
he judged that no storm would daunt her on a predetermined
expedition. He deduced in consequence that she was at the present
moment flying to her friend, the charming brunette Lucy Darleton.

Still, as there was a possibility of the rain having been too much
for her, and as he had no other speculation concerning the route
she had taken, he decided upon keeping along the road to Rendon,
with a keen eye at cottage and farmhouse windows.



CHAPTER XXVI

Vernon in Pursuit

The lodge-keeper had a son, who was a chum of Master Crossjay's,
and errant-fellow with him upon many adventures; for this boy's
passion was to become a gamekeeper, and accompanied by one of the
head-gamekeeper's youngsters, he and Crossjay were in the habit of
rangeing over the country, preparing for a profession delightful
to the tastes of all three. Crossjay's prospective connection with
the mysterious ocean bestowed the title of captain on him by
common consent; he led them, and when missing for lessons he was
generally in the society of Jacob Croom or Jonathan Fernaway.
Vernon made sure of Crossjay when he perceived Jacob Croom sitting
on a stool in the little lodge-parlour. Jacob's appearance of a
diligent perusal of a book he had presented to the lad, he took
for a decent piece of trickery. It was with amazement that he
heard from the mother and daughter, as well as Jacob, of Miss
Middleton's going through the gate before ten o'clock with
Crossjay beside her, the latter too hurried to spare a nod to
Jacob. That she, of all on earth, should be encouraging Crossjay 
to truancy was incredible. Vernon had to fall back upon Greek and
Latin aphoristic shots at the sex to believe it.

Rain was universal; a thick robe of it swept from hill to hill;
thunder rumbled remote, and between the ruffled roars the downpour
pressed on the land with a great noise of eager gobbling, much
like that of the swine's trough fresh filled, as though a vast
assembly of the hungered had seated themselves clamorously and
fallen to on meats and drinks in a silence, save of the chaps. A
rapid walker poetically and humourously minded gathers multitudes
of images on his way. And rain, the heaviest you can meet, is a
lively companion when the resolute pacer scorns discomfort of wet
clothes and squealing boots. South-western rain-clouds, too, are
never long sullen: they enfold and will have the earth in a good
strong glut of the kissing overflow; then, as a hawk with feathers
on his beak of the bird in his claw lifts head, they rise and take
veiled feature in long climbing watery lines: at any moment they
may break the veil and show soft upper cloud, show sun on it, show
sky, green near the verge they spring from, of the green of grass
in early dew; or, along a travelling sweep that rolls asunder
overhead, heaven's laughter of purest blue among titanic white
shoulders: it may mean fair smiling for awhile, or be the lightest
interlude; but the watery lines, and the drifting, the chasing,
the upsoaring, all in a shadowy fingering of form, and the
animation of the leaves of the trees pointing them on, the bending
of the tree-tops, the snapping of branches, and the hurrahings of
the stubborn hedge at wrestle with the flaws, yielding but a leaf
at most, and that on a fling, make a glory of contest and wildness
without aid of colour to inflame the man who is at home in them from
old association on road, heath, and mountain. Let him be drenched,
his heart will sing. And thou, trim cockney, that jeerest,
consider thyself, to whom it may occur to be out in such a scene,
and with what steps of a nervous dancing-master it would be thine
to play the hunted rat of the elements, for the preservation of
the one imagined dryspot about thee, somewhere on thy luckless
person! The taking of rain and sun alike befits men of our
climate, and he who would have the secret of a strengthening
intoxication must court the clouds of the South-west with a
lover's blood.

Vernon's happy recklessness was dashed by fears for Miss
Middleton. Apart from those fears, he had the pleasure of a gull
wheeling among foam-streaks of the wave. He supposed the Swiss and
Tyrol Alps to have hidden their heads from him for many a day to
come, and the springing and chiming South-west was the next best
thing. A milder rain descended; the country expanded darkly
defined underneath the moving curtain; the clouds were as he liked
to see them, scaling; but their skirts dragged. Torrents were in
store, for they coursed streamingly still and had not the higher
lift, or eagle ascent, which he knew for one of the signs of
fairness, nor had the hills any belt of mist-like vapour.

On a step of the stile leading to the short-cut to Rendon young
Crossjay was espied. A man-tramp sat on the top-bar.

"There you are; what are you doing there? Where's Miss Middleton?"
said Vernon. "Now, take care before you open your mouth."

Crossjay shut the mouth he had opened.

"The lady has gone away over to a station, sir," said the tramp.

"You fool!" roared Crossjay, ready to fly at him.

"But ain't it now, young gentleman? Can you say it ain't?"

"I gave you a shilling, you ass!"

"You give me that sum, young gentleman, to stop here and take care
of you, and here I stopped."

"Mr. Whitford!" Crossjay appealed to his master, and broke of in
disgust. "Take care of me! As if anybody who knows me would think
I wanted taking care of! Why, what a beast you must be. you
fellow!"

"Just as you like, young gentleman. I chaunted you all I know, to
keep up your downcast spirits. You did want comforting. You wanted
it rarely. You cried like an infant."

"I let you 'chaunt', as you call it, to keep you from swearing."

"And why did I swear. young gentleman? because I've got an itchy
coat in the wet, and no shirt for a lining. And no breakfast to
give me a stomach for this kind of weather. That's what I've come
to in this world! I'm a walking moral. No wonder I swears, when I
don't strike up a chaunt."

"But why are you sitting here wet through, Crossjay! Be off home at
once, and change, and get ready for me."

"Mr. Whitford, I promised, and I tossed this fellow a shilling
not to go bothering Miss Middleton."

"The lady wouldn't have none o" the young gentleman, sir, and I
offered to go pioneer for her to the station, behind her, at a
respectful distance."

"As if!--you treacherous cur!" Crossjay ground his teeth at the
betrayer. "Well, Mr. Whitford, and I didn't trust him, and I stuck
to him, or he'd have been after her whining about his coat and
stomach, and talking of his being a moral. He repeats that to
everybody."

"She has gone to the station?" said Vernon.

Not a word on that subject was to be won from Crossjay.

"How long since?" Vernon partly addressed Mr. Tramp.

The latter became seized with shivers as he supplied the
information that it might be a quarter of an hour or twenty
minutes. "But what's time to me, sir? If I had reglar meals, I
should carry a clock in my inside. I got the rheumatics instead."

"Way there!" Vernon cried, and took the stile at a vault.

"That's what gentlemen can do, who sleeps in their beds warm,"
moaned the tramp. "They've no joints."

Vernon handed him a half-crown piece, for he had been of use for
once.

"Mr. Whitford, let me come. If you tell me to come I may. Do let
me come," Crossjay begged with great entreaty. "I sha'n't see her
for . . ."

"Be off, quick!" Vernon cut him short and pushed on.

The tramp and Crossjay were audible to him; Crossjay spurning the
consolations of the professional sad man.

Vernon spun across the fields, timing himself by his watch to
reach Rendon station ten minutes before eleven, though without
clearly questioning the nature of the resolution which
precipitated him. Dropping to the road, he had better foothold 
than on the slippery field-path, and he ran. His principal hope
was that Clara would have missed her way. Another pelting of rain
agitated him on her behalf. Might she not as well be suffered to
go?--and sit three hours and more in a railway-carriage with wet
feet!

He clasped the visionary little feet to warm them on his breast.--
But Willoughby's obstinate fatuity deserved the blow!--But
neither she nor her father deserved the scandal. But she was
desperate. Could reasoning touch her? if not, what would? He knew
of nothing. Yesterday he had spoken strongly to Willoughby, to
plead with him to favour her departure and give her leisure to
sound her mind, and he had left his cousin, convinced that Clara's
best measure was flight: a man so cunning in a pretended
obtuseness backed by senseless pride, and in petty tricks that
sprang of a grovelling tyranny, could only be taught by facts.

Her recent treatment of him, however, was very strange; so strange
that he might have known himself better if he had reflected on the
bound with which it shot him to a hard suspicion. De Craye had
prepared the world to hear that he was leaving the Hall. Were they
in concert? The idea struck at his heart colder than if her damp
little feet had been there.

Vernon's full exoneration of her for making a confidant of
himself, did not extend its leniency to the young lady's character
when there was question of her doing the same with a second
gentleman. He could suspect much: he could even expect to find De
Craye at the station.

That idea drew him up in his run, to meditate on the part he
should play; and by drove little Dr. Corney on the way to Rendon
and hailed him, and gave his cheerless figure the nearest approach
to an Irish bug in the form of a dry seat under an umbrella and
water-proof covering.

"Though it is the worst I can do for you, if you decline to
supplement it with a dose of hot brandy and water at the Dolphin,"
said he: "and I'll see you take it, if you please. I'm bound to
ease a Rendon patient out of the world. Medicine's one of their
superstitions, which they cling to the harder the more useless it
gets. Pill and priest launch him happy between them.--'And what's
on your conscience, Pat?--It's whether your blessing, your
Riverence, would disagree with another drop. Then put the horse
before the cart, my son, and you shall have the two in harmony,
and God speed ye!'--Rendon station, did you say, Vernon? You
shall have my prescription at the Railway Arms, if you're hurried.
You have the look. What is it? Can I help?"

"No. And don't ask."

"You're like the Irish Grenadier who had a bullet in a humiliating
situation. Here's Rendon, and through it we go with a spanking
clatter. Here's Doctor Corney's dog-cart post-haste again. For
there's no dying without him now, and Repentance is on the
death-bed for not calling him in before. Half a charge of humbug
hurts no son of a gun, friend Vernon, if he'd have his firing take
effect. Be tender to't in man or woman, particularly woman. So, by
goes the meteoric doctor, and I'll bring noses to window-panes,
you'll see, which reminds me of the sweetest young lady I ever saw,
and the luckiest man. When is she off for her bridal trousseau?
And when are they spliced? I'll not call her perfection, for
that's a post, afraid to move. But she's a dancing sprig of the
tree next it. Poetry's wanted to speak of her. I'm Irish and
inflammable, I suppose, but I never looked on a girl to make a man
comprehend the entire holy meaning of the word rapturous, like
that one. And away she goes! We'll not say another word. But
you're a Grecian, friend Vernon. Now, couldn't you think her just
a whiff of an idea of a daughter of a peccadillo-Goddess?"

"Deuce take you, Corney, drop me here; I shall be late for the
train," said Vernon, laying hand on the doctor's arm to check him
on the way to the station in view.

Dr Corney had a Celtic intelligence for a meaning behind an
illogical tongue. He drew up, observing. "Two minutes run won't
hurt you."

He slightly fancied he might have given offence, though he was
well acquainted with Vernon and had a cordial grasp at the
parting.

The truth must be told that Vernon could not at the moment bear
any more talk from an Irishman. Dr. Corney had succeeded in
persuading him not to wonder at Clara Middleton's liking for
Colonel de Craye.



CHAPTER XXVII

At the Railway Station

Clara stood in the waiting-room contemplating the white rails of
the rain-swept line. Her lips parted at the sight of Vernon.

"You have your ticket?" said he.

She nodded, and breathed more freely; the matter-of-fact question
was reassuring.

"You are wet," he resumed; and it could not be denied.

"A little. I do not feel it."

"I must beg you to come to the inn hard by--half a dozen steps.
We shall see your train signalled. Come."

She thought him startlingly authoritative, but he had good sense
to back him; and depressed as she was by the dampness, she was
disposed to yield to reason if he continued to respect her
independence. So she submitted outwardly, resisted inwardly, on
the watch to stop him from taking any decisive lead.

"Shall we be sure to see the signal, Mr. Whitford?"

"I'll provide for that."

He spoke to the station-clerk, and conducted her across the road.

"You are quite alone, Miss Middleton?"

"I am: I have not brought my maid."

"You must take off boots and stockings at once, and have them
dried. I'll put you in the hands of the landlady."

"But my train!"

"You have full fifteen minutes, besides fair chances of delay. "

He seemed reasonable, the reverse of hostile, in spite of his
commanding air, and that was not unpleasant in one friendly to her
adventure. She controlled her alert distrustfulness, and passed
from him to the landlady, for her feet were wet and cold, the
skirts of her dress were soiled; generally inspecting herself, she
was an object to be shuddered at, and she was grateful to Vernon
for his inattention to her appearance.

Vernon ordered Dr. Corney's dose, and was ushered upstairs to a
room of portraits, where the publican's ancestors and family sat
against the walls, flat on their canvas as weeds of the botanist's
portfolio, although corpulency was pretty generally insisted on,
and there were formidable battalions of bust among the females.
All of them had the aspect of the national energy which has
vanquished obstacles to subside on its ideal. They all gazed
straight at the guest. "Drink, and come to this!" they might have
been labelled to say to him. He was in the private Walhalla of a
large class of his countrymen. The existing host had taken
forethought to be of the party in his prime, and in the central
place, looking fresh-fattened there and sanguine from the
performance. By and by a son would shove him aside; meanwhile he
shelved his parent, according to the manners of energy.

One should not be a critic of our works of Art in uncomfortable 
garments. Vernon turned from the portraits to a stuffed pike in a
glass case, and plunged into sympathy with the fish for a refuge.

Clara soon rejoined him, saying: "But you, you must be very wet.
You were without an umbrella. You must be wet through, Mr.
Whitford."

"We're all wet through, to-day," said Vernon. "Crossjay's wet
through, and a tramp he met."

"The horrid man! But Crossjay should have turned back when I told
him. Cannot the landlord assist you? You are not tied to time. I
begged Crossjay to turn back when it began to rain: when it became
heavy I compelled him. So you met my poor Crossjay?"

"You have not to blame him for betraying you. The tramp did that.
I was thrown on your track quite by accident. Now pardon me for
using authority, and don't be alarmed, Miss Middleton; you are
perfectly free for me; but you must not run a risk to your health.
I met Doctor Corney coming along, and he prescribed hot brandy and
water for a wet skin, especially for sitting in it. There's the
stuff on the table; I see you have been aware of a singular odour;
you must consent to sip some, as medicine; merely to give you
warmth."

"Impossible, Mr. Whitford: I could not taste it. But pray, obey Dr.
Corney, if he ordered it for you."

"I can't. unless you do."

"I will, then: I will try."

She held the glass, attempted, and was baffled by the reek of
it.

"Try: you can do anything," said Vernon.

"Now that you find me here, Mr. Whitford! Anything for myself it
would seem, and nothing to save a friend. But I will really try."

"It must be a good mouthful."

"I will try. And you will finish the glass?"

"With your permission, if you do not leave too much."

They were to drink out of the same glass; and she was to drink
some of this infamous mixture: and she was in a kind of hotel
alone with him: and he was drenched in running after her:--all
this came of breaking loose for an hour!

"Oh! what a misfortune that it should be such a day, Mr.
Whitford!"

"Did you not choose the day?"

"Not the weather."

"And the worst of it is, that Willoughby will come upon Crossjay
wet to the bone, and pump him and get nothing but shufflings,
blank lies, and then find him out and chase him from the house."

Clara drank immediately, and more than she intended. She held the
glass as an enemy to be delivered from, gasping, uncertain of her
breath.

"Never let me be asked to endure such a thing again!"

"You are unlikely to be running away from father and friends
again."

She panted still with the fiery liquid she had gulped: and she
wondered that it should belie its reputation in not fortifying 
her, but rendering her painfully susceptible to his remarks.

"Mr. Whitford, I need not seek to know what you think of me."

"What I think? I don't think at all; I wish to serve you if I
can."

"Am I right in supposing you a little afraid of me? You should not
be. I have deceived no one. I have opened my heart to you, and am
not ashamed of having done so."

"It is an excellent habit, they say."

"It is not a habit with me."

He was touched, and for that reason, in his dissatisfaction with
himself, not unwilling to hurt. "We take our turn, Miss Middleton.
I'm no hero, and a bad conspirator, so I am not of much avail."

"You have been reserved--but I am going, and I leave my character
behind. You condemned me to the poison-bowl; you have not touched
it yourself"

"In vino veritas: if I do I shall be speaking my mind."

"Then do, for the sake of mind and body."

"It won't be complimentary."

"You can be harsh. Only say everything."

"Have we time?"

They looked at their watches.

"Six minutes," Clara said.

Vernon's had stopped, penetrated by his total drenching.

She reproached herself. He laughed to quiet her. "My dies solemnes
are sure to give me duckings; I'm used to them. As for the watch,
it will remind me that it stopped when you went."

She raised the glass to him. She was happier and hoped for some
little harshness and kindness mixed that she might carry away to
travel with and think over.

He turned the glass as she had given it, turned it round in
putting it to his lips: a scarce perceptible manoeuvre, but that
she had given it expressly on one side.

It may be hoped that it was not done by design. Done even
accidentally, without a taint of contrivance, it was an affliction
to see, and coiled through her, causing her to shrink and redden.

Fugitives are subject to strange incidents; they are not vessels 
lying safe in harbour. She shut her lips tight, as if they had
stung. The realizing sensitiveness of her quick nature accused
them of a loss of bloom. And the man who made her smart like this
was formal as a railway official on a platform.

"Now we are both pledged in the poison-bowl," said he. "And it
has the taste of rank poison, I confess. But the doctor prescribed
it, and at sea we must be sailors. Now, Miss Middleton, time
presses: will you return with me?"

"No! no!"

"Where do you propose to go?"

"To London; to a friend--Miss Darleton."

"What message is there for your father?"

"Say I have left a letter for him in a letter to be delivered to
you.

"To me! And what message for Willoughby?"

"My maid Barclay will hand him a letter at noon."

"You have sealed Crossjay's fate."

"How?"

"He is probably at this instant undergoing an interrogation. You
may guess at his replies. The letter will expose him, and
Willoughby does not pardon."

"I regret it. I cannot avoid it. Poor boy! My dear Crossjay! I
did not think of how Willoughby might punish him. I was very
thoughtless. Mr. Whitford, my pin-money shall go for his
education. Later, when I am a little older, I shall be able to
support him."

"That's an encumbrance; you should not tie yourself to drag it
about. You are unalterable, of course, but circumstances are not,
and as it happens, women are more subject to them than we are."

"But I will not be!"

"Your command of them is shown at the present moment."

"Because I determine to be free?"

"No: because you do the contrary; you don't determine: you run
away from the difficulty, and leave it to your father and friends
to bear. As for Crossjay, you see you destroy one of his chances.
I should have carried him off before this, if I had not thought it
prudent to keep him on terms with Willoughby. We'll let Crossjay
stand aside. He'll behave like a man of honour, imitating others
who have had to do the same for ladies."

"Have spoken falsely to shelter cowards, you mean, Mr. Whitford.
Oh, I know.--I have but two minutes. The die is cast. I cannot go
back. I must get ready. Will you see me to the station? I would
rather you should hurry home."

"I will see the last of you. I will wait for you here. An express
runs ahead of your train, and I have arranged with the clerk for a
signal; I have an eye on the window."

"You are still my best friend, Mr. Whitford."

"Though?"

"Well, though you do not perfectly understand what torments have
driven me to this."

"Carried on tides and blown by winds?"

"Ah! you do not understand."

"Mysteries?"

"Sufferings are not mysteries, they are very simple facts."

"Well, then, I don't understand. But decide at once. I wish you to
have your free will."

She left the room.

Dry stockings and boots are better for travelling in than wet
ones, but in spite of her direct resolve, she felt when drawing 
them on like one that has been tripped. The goal was desirable, 
the ardour was damped. Vernon's wish that she should have her free
will compelled her to sound it: and it was of course to go, to be
liberated, to cast off incubus and hurt her father? injure
Crossjay? distress her friends? No, and ten times no!

She returned to Vernon in haste, to shun the reflex of her mind.

He was looking at a closed carriage drawn up at the station door.

"Shall we run over now, Mr. Whitford?"

"There's no signal. Here it's not so chilly."

I ventured to enclose my letter to papa in yours, trusting you
would attend to my request to you to break the news to him gently
and plead for me."

"We will all do the utmost we can."

"I am doomed to vex those who care for me. I tried to follow your
counsel."

"First you spoke to me, and then you spoke to Miss Dale; and at
least you have a clear conscience."

"No."

"What burdens it?"

"I have done nothing to burden it."

"Then it's a clear conscience."

"No."

Vernon's shoulders jerked. Our patience with an innocent duplicity
in women is measured by the place it assigns to us and another. If
he had liked he could have thought: "You have not done but
meditated something to trouble conscience." That was evident, and
her speaking of it was proof too of the willingness to be dear. He
would not help her. Man's blood, which is the link with women and
responsive to them on the instant for or against, obscured him. He
shrugged anew when she said: "My character would have been
degraded utterly by my staying there. Could you advise it?"

"Certainly not the degradation of your character," he said, black
on the subject of De Craye, and not lightened by feelings which
made him sharply sensible of the beggarly dependant that he was,
or poor adventuring scribbler that he was to become.

"Why did you pursue me and wish to stop me, Mr. Whitford?" said
Clara, on the spur of a wound from his tone.

He replied: "I suppose I'm a busybody; I was never aware of it
till now."

"You are my friend. Only you speak in irony so much.  That was
irony, about my clear conscience. I spoke to you and to Miss Dale:
and then I rested and drifted. Can you not feel for me, that to
mention it is like a scorching furnace? Willoughby has entangled
papa. He schemes incessantly to keep me entangled. I fly from his
cunning as much as from anything. I dread it. I have told you
that I am more to blame than he, but I must accuse him.  And
wedding-presents! and congratulations! And to be his guest!"

"All that makes up a plea in mitigation," said Vernon.

"Is it not sufficient for you?" she asked him timidly.

"You have a masculine good sense that tells you you won't be
respected if you run. Three more days there might cover a retreat
with your father."

"He will not listen to me. He confuses me; Willoughby has
bewitched him."

"Commission me: I will see that he listens."

"And go back? Oh, no! To London! Besides, there is the dining with
Mrs. Mountstuart this evening; and I like her very well, but I
must avoid her. She has a kind of idolatry ... And what answers
can I give? I supplicate her with looks. She observes them, my
efforts to divert them from being painful produce a comic
expression to her, and I am a charming 'rogue', and I am
entertained on the topic she assumes to be principally interesting
me. I must avoid her. The thought of her leaves me no choice. She
is clever. She could tattoo me with epigrams."

"Stay.. there you can hold your own."

"She has told me you give me credit for a spice of wit. I have not
discovered my possession. We have spoken of it; we call it your
delusion. She grants me some beauty; that must be hers."

"There's no delusion in one case or the other, Miss Middleton. You
have beauty and wit; public opinion will say, wildness: 
indifference to your reputation will be charged on you, and your
friends will have to admit it. But you will be out of this
difficulty."

"Ah--to weave a second?"

"Impossible to judge until we see how you escape the first. And I
have no more to say. I love your father. His humour of
sententiousness and doctorial stilts is a mask he delights in, but
you ought to know him and not be frightened by it. If you sat with
him an hour at a Latin task, and if you took his hand and told
him you could not leave him, and no tears!--he would answer you
at once. It would involve a day or two further; disagreeable to
you, no doubt: preferable to the present mode of escape, as I
think. But I have no power whatever to persuade. I have not the
'lady's tongue'. My appeal is always to reason."

"It is a compliment. I loathe the 'lady's tongue'."

"It's a distinctly good gift, and I wish I had it. I might have
succeeded instead of failing, and appearing to pay a compliment."

"Surely the express train is very late, Mr. Whitford?"

"The express has gone by."

"Then we will cross over."

"You would rather not be seen by Mrs. Mountstuart. That is her
carriage drawn up at the station, and she is in it."

Clara looked, and with the sinking of her heart said: "I must
brave her!"

"In that case I will take my leave of you here, Miss Middleton."

She gave him her hand. "Why is Mrs. Mountstuart at the station
to-day?"

"I suppose she has driven to meet one of the guests for her
dinner-party. Professor Crooklyn was promised to your father, and
he may be coming by the down-train."

"Go back to the Hall!" exclaimed Clara. "How can I? I have no more
endurance left in me. If I had some support!--if it were the
sense of secretly doing wrong, it might help me through. I am in a
web. I cannot do right, whatever I do. There is only the thought
of saving Crossjay. Yes, and sparing papa.--Good-bye, Mr.
Whitford. I shall remember your kindness gratefully. I cannot go
back."

"You will not?" said he, tempting her to hesitate.

"No."

"But if you are seen by Mrs. Mountstuart, you must go back. I'll
do my best to take her away. Should she see you, you must patch up
a story and apply to her for a lift. That, I think, is
imperative."

"Not to my mind," said Clara.

He bowed hurriedly, and withdrew. After her confession, peculiar
to her, of possibly finding sustainment in secretly doing wrong,
her flying or remaining seemed to him a choice of evils: and
whilst she stood in bewildered speculation on his reason for
pursuing her--which was not evident--he remembered the special
fear inciting him, and so far did her justice as to have at
himself on that subject. He had done something perhaps to save her
from a cold: such was his only consolatory thought. He had also
behaved like a man of honour, taking no personal advantage of her
situation; but to reflect on it recalled his astonishing dryness.
The strict man of honour plays a part that he should not reflect
on till about the fall of the curtain, otherwise he will be likely
sometimes to feel the shiver of foolishness at his good conduct.


CHAPTER XXVIII

The Return

Posted in observation at a corner of the window Clara saw Vernon
cross the road to Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson's carriage, 
transformed to the leanest pattern of himself by narrowed 
shoulders and raised coat-collar. He had such an air of saying,
"Tom's a-cold", that her skin crept in sympathy.

Presently he left the carriage and went into the station: a bell
had rung. Was it her train? He approved her going, for he was
employed in assisting her to go: a proceeding at variance with
many things he had said, but he was as full of contradiction
to-day as women are accused of being. The train came up. She
trembled: no signal had appeared, and Vernon must have deceived
her.

He returned; he entered the carriage, and the wheels were soon in
motion. Immediately thereupon, Flitch's fly drove past, containing
Colonel De Craye.

Vernon could not but have perceived him!

But what was it that had brought the colonel to this place? The
pressure of Vernon's mind was on her and foiled her efforts to
assert her perfect innocence, though she knew she had done nothing
to allure the colonel hither. Excepting Willoughby, Colonel De
Craye was the last person she would have wished to encounter.

She had now a dread of hearing the bell which would tell her that
Vernon had not deceived her, and that she was out of his hands, in
the hands of some one else.

She bit at her glove; she glanced at the concentrated eyes of the
publican's family portraits, all looking as one; she noticed the
empty tumbler, and went round to it and touched it, and the silly
spoon in it.

A little yielding to desperation shoots us to strange distances!

Vernon had asked her whether she was alone. Connecting that
inquiry, singular in itself, and singular in his manner of putting
it, with the glass of burning liquid, she repeated: "He must
have seen Colonel De Craye!" and she stared at the empty glass, as
at something that witnessed to something: for Vernon was not your
supple cavalier assiduously on the smirk to pin a gallantry to
commonplaces. But all the doors are not open in a young lady's
consciousness, quick of nature though she may be: some are locked
and keyless, some will not open to the key, some are defended by
ghosts inside. She could not have said what the something
witnessed to. If we by chance know more, we have still no right
to make it more prominent than it was with her. And the smell of
the glass was odious; it disgraced her. She had an impulse to
pocket the spoon for a memento, to show it to grandchildren for a
warning. Even the prelude to the morality to be uttered on the
occasion sprang to her lips: "Here, my dears, is a spoon you would
he ashamed to use in your teacups, yet it was of more value to me
at one period of my life than silver and gold in pointing out,
etc.": the conclusion was hazy, like the conception; she had her
idea.

And in this mood she ran down-stairs and met Colonel De Craye on
the station steps.

The bright illumination of his face was that of the confident man
confirmed in a risky guess in the crisis of doubt and dispute.

"Miss Middleton!" his joyful surprise predominated; the pride of
an accurate forecast, adding: "I am not too late to be of
service?"

She thanked him for the offer.

"Have you dismissed the fly, Colonel De Craye?"

"I have just been getting change to pay Mr. Flitch. He passed me
on the road. He is interwound with our fates to a certainty. I had
only to jump in; I knew it, and rolled along like a magician
commanding a genie."

"Have I been . . ."

"Not seriously, nobody doubts you being under shelter. You will
allow me to protect you? My time is yours."

"I was thinking of a running visit to my friend Miss Darleton."

"May I venture? I had the fancy that you wished to see Miss
Darleton to-day. You cannot make the journey unescorted."

"Please retain the fly. Where is Willoughby?"

"He is in jack-boots. But may I not, Miss Middleton?
I shall never be forgiven if you refuse me."

"There has been searching for me?"

"Some hallooing. But why am I rejected? Besides, I don't require
the fly; I shall walk if I am banished. Flitch is a wonderful
conjurer, but the virtue is out of him for the next
four-and-twenty hours. And it will be an opportunity to me to make
my bow to Miss Darleton!"

"She is rigorous on the conventionalities, Colonel De Craye."

"I'll appear before her as an ignoramus or a rebel, whichever she
likes best to take in leading-strings. I remember her. I was
greatly struck by her."

"Upon recollection!"

"Memory didn't happen to be handy at the first mention of the
lady's name. As the general said of his ammunition and transport,
there's the army!--but it was leagues in the rear. Like the
footman who went to sleep after smelling fire in the house, I was
thinking of other things. It will serve me right to be forgotten--
if I am. I've a curiosity to know: a remainder of my coxcombry.
Not that exactly: a wish to see the impression I made on your
friend.--None at all? But any pebble casts a ripple."

"That is hardly an impression," said Clara, pacifying her
irresoluteness with this light talk.

"The utmost to be hoped for by men like me! I have your
permission?--one minute--I will get my ticket."

"Do not," said Clara.

"Your man-servant entreats you!"

She signified a decided negative with the head, but her eyes were
dreamy. She breathed deep: this thing done would cut the cord. Her
sensation of languor swept over her.

De Craye took a stride. He was accosted by one of the
railway-porters. Flitch's fly was in request for a gentleman. A
portly old gentleman bothered about luggage appeared on the
landing.

"The gentleman can have it," said De Craye, handing Flitch his
money.

"Open the door." Clara said to Flitch.

He tugged at the handle with enthusiasm. The door was open: she
stepped in.

"Then mount the box and I'll jump up beside you," De Craye called
out, after the passion of regretful astonishment had melted from
his features.

Clara directed him to the seat fronting her; he protested
indifference to the wet; she kept the door unshut. His temper
would have preferred to buffet the angry weather. The invitation
was too sweet.

She heard now the bell of her own train. Driving beside the
railway embankment she met the train: it was eighteen minutes
late, by her watch. And why, when it flung up its whale-spouts of
steam, she was not journeying in it, she could not tell. She had
acted of her free will: that she could say. Vernon had not induced
her to remain; assuredly her present companion had not; and her
whole heart was for flight: yet she was driving back to the Hall,
not devoid of calmness. She speculated on the circumstance enough
to think herself incomprehensible, and there left it, intent on
the scene to come with Willoughby.

"I must choose a better day for London," she remarked.

De Craye bowed, but did not remove his eyes from her.

"Miss Middleton, you do not trust me."

She answered: "Say in what way. It seems to me that I do."

"I may speak?"

"If it depends on my authority."

"Fully?"

"Whatever you have to say. Let me stipulate, be not very grave. I
want cheering in wet weather."

"Miss Middleton, Flitch is charioteer once more. Think of it.
There's a tide that carries him perpetually to the place where he
was cast forth, and a thread that ties us to him in continuity. I
have not the honour to be a friend of long standing: one ventures
on one's devotion: it dates from the first moment of my seeing
you. Flitch is to blame, if any one. Perhaps the spell would be
broken, were he reinstated in his ancient office."

"Perhaps it would," said Clara, not with her best of smiles.
Willoughby's pride of relentlessness appeared to her to be
receiving a blow by rebound, and that seemed high justice.

"I am afraid you were right; the poor fellow has no chance," De
Craye pursued. He paused, as for decorum in the presence of
misfortune, and laughed sparklingly: "Unless I engage him, or
pretend to! I verily believe that Flitch's melancholy person on
the skirts of the Hall completes the picture of the Eden within.--
Why will you not put some trust in me, Miss Middleton?"

"But why should you not pretend to engage him then, Colonel De
Craye?"

"We'll plot it, if you like. Can you trust me for that?"

"For any act of disinterested kindness, I am sure."

"You mean it?"

"Without reserve. You could talk publicly of taking him to
London."

"Miss Middleton, just now you were going. My arrival changed your
mind. You distrust me: and ought I to wonder? The wonder would be
all the other way. You have not had the sort of report of me which
would persuade you to confide, even in a case of extremity. I
guessed you were going. Do you ask me how? I cannot say. Through
what they call sympathy, and that's inexplicable. There's natural
sympathy, natural antipathy. People have to live together to
discover how deep it is!"

Clara breathed her dumb admission of his truth.

The fly jolted and threatened to lurch.

"Flitch, my dear man!" the colonel gave a murmuring remonstrance; 
"for," said he to Clara, whom his apostrophe to Flitch had set
smiling, "we're not safe with him, however we make believe, and
he'll be jerking the heart out of me before he has done.--But if
two of us have not the misfortune to be united when they come to
the discovery, there's hope. That is, if one has courage and the
other has wisdom. Otherwise they may go to the yoke in spite of
themselves. The great enemy is Pride, who has them both in a coach
and drives them to the fatal door, and the only thing to do is to
knock him off his box while there's a minute to spare. And as
there's no pride like the pride of possession, the deadliest wound
to him is to make that doubtful. Pride won't be taught wisdom in
any other fashion. But one must have the courage to do it!"

De Craye trifled with the window-sash, to give his words time to
sink in solution.

Who but Willoughby stood for Pride? And who, swayed by languor,
had dreamed of a method that would be surest and swiftest to teach
him the wisdom of surrendering her?

"You know, Miss Middleton, I study character," said the colonel.

"I see that you do," she answered.

"You intend to return?"

"Oh, decidedly."

"The day is unfavourable for travelling, I must say."

"It is."

"You may count on my discretion in the fullest degree. I throw
myself on your generosity when I assure you that it was not my
design to surprise a secret. I guessed the station, and went
there, to put myself at your disposal."

"Did you," said Clara, reddening slightly, "chance to see Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson's carriage pass you when you drove up to the
station?"

De Craye had passed a carriage. "I did not see the lady. She was
in it?"

"Yes. And therefore it is better to put discretion on one side:
we may be certain she saw you."

"But not you, Miss Middleton."

"I prefer to think that I am seen. I have a description of
courage, Colonel De Craye, when it is forced on me."

"I have not suspected the reverse. Courage wants training, as well
as other fine capacities. Mine is often rusty and rheumatic."

"I cannot hear of concealment or plotting."

"Except, pray, to advance the cause of poor Flitch!"

"He shall be excepted."

The colonel screwed his head round for a glance at his coachman's
back.

"Perfectly guaranteed to-day!" he said of Flitch's look of
solidity. "The convulsion of the elements appears to sober our
friend; he is only dangerous in calms. Five minutes will bring us
to the park-gates."

Clara leaned forward to gaze at the hedgeways in the neighbourhood
of the Hall strangely renewing their familiarity with her. Both in
thought and sensation she was like a flower beaten to earth, and
she thanked her feminine mask for not showing how nerveless and
languid she was. She could have accused Vernon of a treacherous
cunning for imposing it on her free will to decide her fate.

Involuntarily she sighed.

"There is a train at three," said De Craye, with splendid
promptitude.

"Yes, and one at five. We dine with Mrs. Mountstuart tonight. And
I have a passion for solitude! I think I was never intended for
obligations. The moment I am bound I begin to brood on freedom."

"Ladies who say that, Miss Middleton!..."

"What of them?"

"They're feeling too much alone."

She could not combat the remark: by her self-assurance that she
had the principle of faithfulness, she acknowledged to herself the
truth of it:--there is no freedom for the weak. Vernon had said
that once. She tried to resist the weight of it, and her sheer
inability precipitated her into a sense of pitiful dependence.

Half an hour earlier it would have been a perilous condition to be
traversing in the society of a closely scanning reader of fair
faces. Circumstances had changed. They were at the gates of the
park.

"Shall I leave you?" said De Craye.

"Why should you?" she replied.

He bent to her gracefully.

The mild subservience flattered Clara's languor. He had not
compelled her to be watchful on her guard, and she was unaware
that he passed it when she acquiesced to his observation, "An
anticipatory story is a trap to the teller."

"It is," she said. She had been thinking as much.

He threw up his head to consult the brain comically with a dozen
little blinks.

"No, you are right, Miss Middleton, inventing beforehand never
prospers; "t is a way to trip our own cleverness. Truth and
mother-wit are the best counsellors: and as you are the former,
I'll try to act up to the character you assign me."

Some tangle, more prospective than present, seemed to be about her
as she reflected. But her intention being to speak to Willoughby
without subterfuge, she was grateful to her companion for not
tempting her to swerve. No one could doubt his talent for elegant
fibbing, and she was in the humour both to admire and adopt the
art, so she was glad to be rescued from herself. How mother-wit
was to second truth she did not inquire, and as she did not happen
to be thinking of Crossjay, she was not troubled by having to
consider how truth and his tale of the morning would be likely to
harmonize.

Driving down the park, she had full occupation in questioning 
whether her return would be pleasing to Vernon, who was the
virtual cause of it, though he had done so little to promote it:
so little that she really doubted his pleasure in seeing her
return.


CHAPTER XXIX

In Which the Sensitiveness of Sir Willoughby Is
Explained: and He Receives Much Instruction

THE Hall-dock over the stables was then striking twelve. It was
the hour for her flight to be made known, and Clara sat in a
turmoil of dim apprehension that prepared her nervous frame for a
painful blush on her being asked by Colonel De Craye whether she
had set her watch correctly. He must, she understood, have seen
through her at the breakfast table: and was she not cruelly
indebted to him for her evasion of Willoughby? Such perspicacity
of vision distressed and frightened her; at the same time she was
obliged to acknowledge that he had not presumed on it. Her dignity
was in no way the worse for him. But it had been at a man's mercy,
and there was the affliction.

She jumped from the fly as if she were leaving danger behind. She
could at the moment have greeted Willoughby with a conventionally
friendly smile. The doors were thrown open and young Crossjay flew
out to her. He hung and danced on her hand, pressed the hand to
his mouth, hardly believing that he saw and touched her, and in a
lingo of dashes and asterisks related how Sir Willoughby had found
him under the boathouse eaves and pumped him, and had been sent
off to Hoppner's farm, where there was a sick child, and on
along the road to a labourer's cottage: "For I said you're so kind
to poor people, Miss Middleton; that's true, now that is true.
And I said you wouldn't have me with you for fear of contagion!" 
This was what she had feared.

"Every crack and bang in a boys vocabulary," remarked the colonel,
listening to him after he had paid Flitch.

The latter touched his hat till he had drawn attention to himself,
when he exclaimed, with rosy melancholy: "Ah! my lady, ah!
colonel, if ever I lives to drink some of the old port wine in the
old Hall at Christmastide!" Their healths would on that occasion
be drunk, it was implied. He threw up his eyes at the windows,
humped his body and drove away.

"Then Mr. Whitford has not come back?" said Clara to Crossjay.

"No, Miss Middleton. Sir Willoughby has, and he's upstairs in
his room dressing."

"Have you seen Barclay?"

"She has just gone into the laboratory. I told her Sir Willoughby
wasn't there."

"Tell me, Crossjay, had she a letter?"

"She had something."

"Run: say I am here; I want the letter, it is mine."

Crossjay sprang away and plunged into the arms of Sir Willoughby.

"One has to catch the fellow like a football," exclaimed the
injured gentleman, doubled across the boy and holding him fast,
that he might have an object to trifle with, to give himself 
countenance: he needed it. "Clara, you have not been exposed to
the weather?"

"Hardly at all."

"I rejoice. You found shelter?"

"Yes."

"In one of the cottages?"

"Not in a cottage; but I was perfectly sheltered. Colonel De Craye
passed a fly before he met me . .

"Flitch again!" ejaculated the colonel.

"Yes, you have luck, you have luck," Willoughby addressed him,
still clutching Crossjay and treating his tugs to get loose as an
invitation to caresses. But the foil barely concealed his livid
perturbation.

"Stay by me, sir," he said at last sharply to Crossjay, and Clara
touched the boy's shoulder in admonishment of him.

She turned to the colonel as they stepped into the hall: "I have
not thanked you, Colonel De Craye." She dropped her voice to its
lowest: "A letter in my handwriting in the laboratory."

Crossjay cried aloud with pain.

"I have you!" Willoughby rallied him with a laugh not unlike the
squeak of his victim.

"You squeeze awfully hard, sir."

"Why, you milksop!"

"Am I! But I want to get a book."

"Where is the book?"

"In the laboratory."

Colonel De Craye, sauntering by the laboratory door, sung out:
"I'll fetch you your book. What is it? EARLY NAVIGATORS? INFANT
HYMNS? I think my cigar-case is in here."

"Barclay speaks of a letter for me," Willoughby said to Clara,
"marked to be delivered to me at noon!"

"In case of my not being back earlier; it was written to avert
anxiety," she replied.

"You are very good."

"Oh, good! Call me anything but good. Here are the ladies. Dear
ladies!" Clara swam to meet them as they issued from a
morning-room into the hall, and interjections reigned for a couple
of minutes.

Willoughby relinquished his grasp of Crossjay, who darted
instantaneously at an angle to the laboratory, whither he followed,
and he encountered De Craye coming out, but passed him in silence.

Crossjay was rangeing and peering all over the room.  Willoughby
went to his desk and the battery-table and the mantelpiece. He
found no letter. Barclay had undoubtedly informed him that she had
left a letter for him in the laboratory, by order of her mistress
after breakfast.

He hurried out and ran upstairs in time to see De Craye and
Barclay breaking a conference.

He beckoned to her. The maid lengthened her upper lip and beat her
dress down smooth: signs of the apprehension of a crisis and of
the getting ready for action.

"My mistress's bell has just rung, Sir Willoughby."

"You had a letter for me."

"I said . . ."

"You said when I met you at the foot of the stairs that you had
left a letter for me in the laboratory."

"It is lying on my mistress's toilet-table."

"Get it."

Barclay swept round with another of her demure grimaces. It was
apparently necessary with her that she should talk to herself in
this public manner.

Willoughby waited for her; but there was no reappearance of the
maid.

Struck by the ridicule of his posture of expectation, and of his
whole behaviour, he went to his bedroom suite, shut himself in,
and paced the chambers, amazed at the creature he had become.
Agitated like the commonest of wretches, destitute of
self-control, not able to preserve a decent mask, be, accustomed
to inflict these emotions and tremours upon others, was at once
the puppet and dupe of an intriguing girl. His very stature seemed
lessened. The glass did not say so, but the shrunken heart within
him did, and wailfully too. Her compunction--'Call me anything
but good'--coming after her return to the Hall beside De Craye,
and after the visible passage of a secret between them in his
presence, was a confession: it blew at him with the fury of a
furnace-blast in his face. Egoist agony wrung the outcry from him
that dupery is a more blessed condition. He desired to be
deceived.

He could desire such a thing only in a temporary transport; for
above all he desired that no one should know of his being
deceived; and were he a dupe the deceiver would know it, and her
accomplice would know it, and the world would soon know of it:
that world against whose tongue he stood defenceless. Within the
shadow of his presence he compressed opinion, as a strong frost
binds the springs of earth, but beyond it his shivering
sensitiveness ran about in dread of a stripping in a wintry
atmosphere. This was the ground of his hatred of the world: it was
an appalling fear on behalf of his naked eidolon, the tender
infant Self swaddled in his name before the world, for which he
felt as the most highly civilized of men alone can feel, and which
it was impossible for him to stretch out hands to protect. There
the poor little loveable creature ran for any mouth to blow on;
and frostnipped and bruised, it cried to him, and he was of no
avail! Must we not detest a world that so treats us? We loathe it
the more, by the measure of our contempt for them, when we have
made the people within the shadow-circle of our person slavish.

And he had been once a young prince in popularity: the world had
been his possession. Clara's treatment of him was a robbery of
land and subjects. His grander dream had been a marriage with a
lady of so glowing a fame for beauty and attachment to her lord
that the world perforce must take her for witness to merits which
would silence detraction and almost, not quite (it was
undesireable), extinguish envy. But for the nature of women his
dream would have been realized. He could not bring himself to
denounce Fortune. It had cost him a grievous pang to tell Horace
De Craye he was lucky; he had been educated in the belief that
Fortune specially prized and cherished little Willoughby: hence of
necessity his maledictions fell upon women, or he would have
forfeited the last blanket of a dream warm as poets revel in.

But if Clara deceived him, he inspired her with timidity. There
was matter in that to make him wish to be deceived. She had not
looked him much in the face: she had not crossed his eyes: she had
looked deliberately downward, keeping her head up, to preserve an
exterior pride. The attitude had its bewitchingness: the girl's
physical pride of stature scorning to bend under a load of
conscious guilt, had a certain black-angel beauty for which he
felt a hugging hatred: and according to his policy when these fits
of amorous meditation seized him, he burst from the present one
in the mood of his more favourable conception of Clara, and sought
her out.

The quality of the mood of hugging hatred is, that if you are
disallowed the hug, you do not hate the fiercer.

Contrariwise the prescription of a decorous distance of two feet
ten inches, which is by measurement the delimitation exacted of a
rightly respectful deportment, has this miraculous effect on the
great creature man, or often it has: that his peculiar hatred
returns to the reluctant admiration begetting it, and his passion
for the hug falls prostrate as one of the Faithful before the
shrine; he is reduced to worship by fasting.

(For these mysteries, consult the sublime chapter in the GREAT
BOOK, tile Seventy-first on LOVE, wherein nothing is written, but
the Reader receives a Lanthorn, a Powder-cask and a Pick-axe, and
therewith pursues his yellow-dusking path across the rubble of
preceding excavators in the solitary quarry: a yet more
instructive passage than the overscrawled Seventieth, or French
Section, whence the chapter opens, and where hitherto the polite
world has halted.)

The hurry of the hero is on us, we have no time to spare for
mining works: he hurried to catch her alone, to wreak his tortures
on her in a bitter semblance of bodily worship, and satiated, then
comfortably to spurn. He found her protected by Barclay on the
stairs.

"That letter for me?" he said.

"I think I told you, Willoughby, there was a letter I left with
Barclay to reassure you in case of my not returning early," said
Clara. "It was unnecessary for her to deliver it."

"Indeed? But any letter, any writing of yours, and from you to me!
You have it still?"

No, I have destroyed it."

"That was wrong."

"It could not have given you pleasure."

"My dear Clara, one line from you!"

"There were but three."

Barclay stood sucking her lips. A maid in the secrets of her
mistress is a purchaseable maid, for if she will take a bribe with
her right hand she will with her left; all that has to be
calculated is the nature and amount of the bribe: such was the
speculation indulged by Sir Willoughby, and he shrank from the
thought and declined to know more than that he was on a volcanic
hillside where a thin crust quaked over lava. This was a new
condition with him, representing Clara's gain in their combat.
Clara did not fear his questioning so much as he feared her
candour.

Mutually timid, they were of course formally polite, and no plain
speaking could have told one another more distinctly that each was
defensive. Clara stood pledged to the fib; packed, scaled and
posted; and he had only to ask to have it, supposing that he asked
with a voice not exactly peremptory.

She said in her heart, "It is your fault: you are relentless and
you would ruin Crossjay to punish him for devoting himself to me,
like the poor thoughtless boy he is! and so I am bound in honour
to do my utmost for him."

The reciprocal devotedness, moreover, served two purposes: it
preserved her from brooding on the humiliation of her lame flight,
and flutter back, and it quieted her mind in regard to the
precipitate intimacy of her relations with Colonel De Craye.
Willoughby's boast of his implacable character was to blame. She
was at war with him, and she was compelled to put the case in that
light. Crossjay must be shielded from one who could not spare an
offender, so Colonel De Craye quite naturally was called on for
his help, and the colonel's dexterous aid appeared to her more
admirable than alarming.

Nevertheless, she would not have answered a direct question
falsely. She was for the fib, but not the lie; at a word she could
be disdainful of subterfuges. Her look said that. Willoughby
perceived it. She had written him a letter of three lines: "There
were but three": and she had destroyed the letter. Something
perchance was repented by her? Then she had done him an injury!
Between his wrath at the suspicion of an injury, and the prudence
enjoined by his abject coveting of her, he consented to be fooled
for the sake of vengeance, and something besides.

"Well! here you are, safe; I have you!" said he, with courtly
exultation: "and that is better than your handwriting. I have been
all over the country after you."

"Why did you? We are not in a barbarous land," said Clara.

"Crossjay talks of your visiting a sick child, my love:--you have
changed your dress?"

"You see."

"The boy declared you were going to that farm of Hoppner's, and
some cottage. I met at my gates a tramping vagabond who swore to
seeing you and the boy in a totally contrary direction."

"Did you give him money?"

"I fancy so."

"Then he was paid for having seen me."

Willoughby tossed his head: it might be as she suggested; beggars
are liars.

"But who sheltered you, my dear Clara? You had not been heard of
at Hoppner's."

"The people have been indemnified for their pains. To pay them
more would be to spoil them. You disperse money too liberally.
There was no fever in the place. Who could have anticipated such a
downpour! I want to consult Miss Dale on the important theme of a
dress I think of wearing at Mrs Mountstuart's to-night."

"Do. She is unerring."

"She has excellent taste."

"She dresses very simply herself."

"But it becomes her. She is one of the few women whom I feel I
could not improve with a touch."

"She has judgement."

He reflected and repeated his encomium.

The shadow of a dimple in Clara's cheek awakened him to the idea
that she had struck him somewhere: and certainly he would never
again be able to put up the fiction of her jealousy of Laetitia.
What, then, could be this girl's motive for praying to be
released? The interrogation humbled him: he fled from the answer.

Willoughby went in search of De Craye. That sprightly intriguer
had no intention to let himself be caught solus. He was
undiscoverable until the assembly sounded, when Clara dropped a
public word or two, and he spoke in perfect harmony with her.
After that, he gave his company to Willoughby for an hour at
billiards, and was well beaten.

The announcement of a visit of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson took the
gentlemen to the drawing-room, rather suspecting that something
stood in the way of her dinner-party. As it happened, she was
lamenting only the loss of one of the jewels of the party: to wit,
the great Professor Crooklyn, invited to meet Dr. Middleton at her
table; and she related how she had driven to the station by
appointment, the professor being notoriously a bother-headed
traveller: as was shown by the fact that he had missed his train
in town, for he had not arrived; nothing had been seen of him. She
cited Vernon Whitford for her authority that the train had been
inspected, and the platform scoured to find the professor.

"And so," said she, "I drove home your Green Man to dry him; he
was wet through and chattering; the man was exactly like a
skeleton wrapped in a sponge, and if he escapes a cold he must be
as invulnerable as he boasts himself. These athletes are terrible
boasters."

"They climb their Alps to crow," said Clara, excited by her
apprehension that Mrs. Mountstuart would speak of having seen the
colonel near the station.

There was a laugh, and Colonel De Craye laughed loudly as it
flashed through him that a quick-witted impressionable girl like
Miss Middleton must, before his arrival at the Hall, have
speculated on such obdurate clay as Vernon Whitford was, with
humourous despair at his uselessness to her. Glancing round, he
saw Vernon standing fixed in a stare at the young lady.

"You heard that, Whitford?" he said, and Clara's face betokening 
an extremer contrition than he thought was demanded, the colonel
rallied the Alpine climber for striving to be the tallest of them
--Signor Excelsior!--and described these conquerors of mountains
pancaked on the rocks in desperate embraces, bleached here, burned
there, barked all over, all to be able to say they had been up "so
high"--had conquered another mountain! He was extravagantly funny
and self-satisfied: a conqueror of the sex having such different
rewards of enterprise.

Vernon recovered in time to accept the absurdities heaped on him.

"Climbing peaks won't compare with hunting a wriggler," said he.

His allusion to the incessant pursuit of young Crossjay to pin him
to lessons was appreciated.

Clara felt the thread of the look he cast from herself to Colonel
De Craye. She was helpless, if he chose to misjudge her. Colonel
De Craye did not!

Crossjay had the misfortune to enter the drawing-room while Mrs.
Mountstuart was compassionating Vernon for his ducking in pursuit
of the wriggler; which De Craye likened to "going through the
river after his eel:" and immediately there was a
cross-questioning of the boy between De Craye and Willoughby on
the subject of his latest truancy, each gentleman trying to run
him down in a palpable fib. They were succeeding brilliantly when
Vernon put a stop to it by marching him off to hard labour. Mrs.
Mountstuart was led away to inspect the beautiful porcelain
service, the present of Lady Busshe. "Porcelain again!" she said
to Willoughby, and would have signalled to the "dainty rogue" to
come with them, had not Clara been leaning over to Laetitia,
talking to her in an attitude too graceful to be disturbed. She
called his attention to it, slightly wondering at his impatience.
She departed to meet an afternoon train on the chance that it
would land the professor. "But tell Dr. Middleton," said she, "I
fear I shall have no one worthy of him! And," she added to
Willoughby, as she walked out to her carriage, "I shall expect you
to do the great-gunnery talk at table."

"Miss Dale keeps it up with him best," said Willoughby.

"She does everything best! But my dinner-table is involved, and I
cannot count on a young woman to talk across it. I would hire a
lion of a menagerie, if one were handy, rather than have a famous
scholar at my table, unsupported by another famous scholar. Doctor
Middleton would ride down a duke when the wine is in him. He will
terrify my poor flock. The truth is, we can't leaven him: I
foresee undigested lumps of conversation, unless you devote
yourself."

"I will devote myself," said Willoughby.

"I can calculate on Colonel De Craye and our porcelain beauty for
any quantity of sparkles, if you promise that. They play well
together. You are not to be one of the gods to-night, but a kind
of Jupiter's cup-bearer;--Juno's, if you like; and Lady Busshe
and Lady Culmer, and all your admirers shall know subsequently
what you have done. You see my alarm. I certainly did not rank
Professor Crooklyn among the possibly faithless, or I never would
have ventured on Doctor Middleton at my table. My dinner-parties
have hitherto been all successes. Naturally I feel the greater
anxiety about this one. For a single failure is all the more
conspicuous. The exception is everlastingly cited! It is not so
much what people say, but my own sentiments. I hate to fail.
However, if you are true, we may do."

"Whenever the great gun goes off I will fall on my face, madam!"

"Something of that sort," said the dame, smiling, and leaving him
to reflect on the egoism of women. For the sake of her
dinner-party he was to be a cipher in attendance on Dr. Middleton,
and Clara and De Craye were to be encouraged in sparkling
together! And it happened that he particularly wished to shine.
The admiration of his county made him believe he had a flavour in
general society that was not yet distinguished by his bride, and
he was to relinquish his opportunity in order to please Mrs.
Mountstuart! Had she been in the pay of his rival, she could not
have stipulated for more.

He remembered young Crossjay's instant quietude, after struggling
in his grasp, when Clara laid her hand on the boy: and from that
infinitesimal circumstance he deduced the boy's perception of a
differing between himself and his bride, and a transfer of
Crossjay's allegiance from him to her. She shone; she had the
gift of female beauty; the boy was attracted to it. That boy must
be made to feel his treason. But the point of the cogitation was,
that similarly were Clara to see her affianced shining, as shine
he could when lighted up by admirers, there was the probability
that the sensation of her littleness would animate her to take aim
at him once more. And then was the time for her chastisement.

A visit to Dr. Middleton in the library satisfied him that she had
not been renewing her entreaties to leave Patterne. No, the
miserable coquette had now her pastime, and was content to stay.
Deceit was in the air: he heard the sound of the shuttle of deceit
without seeing it; but, on the whole, mindful of what he had
dreaded during the hours of her absence, he was rather flattered,
witheringly flattered. What was it that he had dreaded? Nothing
less than news of her running away. Indeed a silly fancy, a
lover's fancy! yet it had led him so far as to suspect, after
parting with De Craye in the rain, that his friend and his bride
were in collusion, and that he should not see them again. He had
actually shouted on the rainy road the theatric call "Fooled!" one
of the stage-cries which are cries of nature! particularly the cry
of nature with men who have driven other men to the cry.

Constantia Durham had taught him to believe women capable of
explosions of treason at half a minute's notice. And strangely,
to prove that women are all of a pack, she had worn exactly the
same placidity of countenance just before she fled, as Clara
yesterday and to-day; no nervousness, no flushes, no twitches of
the brows, but smoothness, ease of manner--an elegant
sisterliness, one might almost say: as if the creature had found a
midway and borderline to walk on between cruelty and kindness, and
between repulsion and attraction; so that up to the verge of her
breath she did forcefully attract, repelling at one foot's length
with her armour of chill serenity. Not with any disdain, with no
passion: such a line as she herself pursued she indicated to him
on a neighbouring parallel. The passion in her was like a place of
waves evaporated to a crust of salt. Clara's resemblance to
Constantia in this instance was ominous. For him whose tragic
privilege it had been to fold each of them in his arms, and weigh
on their eyelids, and see the dissolving mist-deeps in their eyes,
it was horrible. Once more the comparison overcame him. Constantia
he could condemn for revealing too much to his manly sight: she
had met him almost half-way: well, that was complimentary and
sanguine: but her frankness was a baldness often rendering it
doubtful which of the two, lady or gentleman, was the object of
the chase--an extreme perplexity to his manly soul. Now Clara's
inner spirit was shyer, shy as a doe down those rose-tinged
abysses; she allured both the lover and the hunter; forests of
heavenliness were in her flitting eyes. Here the difference of
these fair women made his present fate an intolerable anguish. For
if Constantia was like certain of the ladies whom he had rendered
unhappy, triumphed over, as it is queerly called, Clara was not.
Her individuality as a woman was a thing he had to bow to. It was
impossible to roll her up in the sex and bestow a kick on the
travelling bundle. Hence he loved her, though she hurt him. Hence
his wretchedness, and but for the hearty sincerity of his faith in
the Self he loved likewise and more, he would have been hangdog
abject.

As for De Craye, Willoughby recollected his own exploits too
proudly to put his trust in a man. That fatal conjunction of
temper and policy had utterly thrown him off his guard, or he
would not have trusted the fellow even in the first hour of his
acquaintance with Clara. But he had wished her to be amused while
he wove his plans to retain her at the Hall:--partly imagining
that she would weary of his neglect: vile delusion! In truth he
should have given festivities, he should have been the sun of a
circle, and have revealed himself to her in his more dazzling
form. He went near to calling himself foolish after the tremendous
reverberation of "Fooled!" had ceased to shake him.

How behave? It slapped the poor gentleman's pride in the face to
ask. A private talk with her would rouse her to renew her
supplications. He saw them flickering behind the girl's
transparent calmness. That calmness really drew its dead ivory hue
from the suppression of them: something as much he guessed; and he
was not sure either of his temper or his policy if he should hear
her repeat her profane request.

An impulse to address himself to Vernon and discourse with him
jocularly on the childish whim of a young lady, moved perhaps by
some whiff of jealousy, to shun the yoke, was checked. He had
always taken so superior a pose with Vernon that he could not
abandon it for a moment: on such a subject too! Besides, Vernon
was one of your men who entertain the ideas about women of fellows
that have never conquered one: or only one, we will say in his
case, knowing his secret history; and that one no flag to boast
of. Densely ignorant of the sex, his nincompoopish idealizations,
at other times preposterous, would now be annoying. He would
probably presume on Clara's inconceivable lapse of dignity to read
his master a lecture: he was quite equal to a philippic upon
woman's rights. This man had not been afraid to say that he talked
common sense to women. He was an example of the consequence!

Another result was that Vernon did not talk sense to men.
Willoughby's wrath at Clara's exposure of him to his cousin
dismissed the proposal of a colloquy so likely to sting his
temper, and so certain to diminish his loftiness. Unwilling to
speak to anybody, he was isolated, yet consciously begirt by the
mysterious action going on all over the house. from Clara and De
Craye to Laetitia and young Crossjay, down to Barclay the maid.
His blind sensitiveness felt as we may suppose a spider to feel
when plucked from his own web and set in the centre of another's.
Laetitia looked her share in the mystery. A burden was on her
eyelashes. How she could have come to any suspicion of the
circumstances, he was unable to imagine. Her intense personal
sympathy, it might be; he thought so with some gentle pity for her
--of the paternal pat-back order of pity. She adored him, by
decree of Venus; and the Goddess had not decreed that he should
find consolation in adoring her. Nor could the temptings of
prudent counsel in his head induce him to run the risk of such a
total turnover as the incurring of Laetitia's pity of himself by
confiding in her. He checked that impulse also, and more
sovereignly. For him to be pitied by Laetitia seemed an upsetting
of the scheme of Providence. Providence, otherwise the
discriminating dispensation of the good things of life, had made
him the beacon, her the bird: she was really the last person to
whom he could unbosom. The idea of his being in a position that
suggested his doing so, thrilled him with fits of rage; and it
appalled him. There appeared to be another Power. The same which
had humiliated him once was menacing him anew. For it could not be
Providence, whose favourite he had ever been. We must have a
couple of Powers to account for discomfort when Egoism is the
kernel of our religion. Benevolence had singled him for uncommon
benefits: malignancy was at work to rob him of them. And you think
well of the world, do you!

Of necessity he associated Clara with the darker Power pointing
the knife at the quick of his pride. Still, he would have raised
her weeping: he would have stanched her wounds bleeding: he had an
infinite thirst for her misery, that he might ease his heart of
its charitable love. Or let her commit herself, and be cast off
Only she must commit herself glaringly, and be cast off by the
world as well. Contemplating her in the form of a discarded weed.
he had a catch of the breath: she was fair. He implored his Power
that Horace De Craye might not be the man! Why any man? An
illness, fever, fire, runaway horses, personal disfigurement, a
laming, were sufficient. And then a formal and noble offer on his
part to keep to the engagement with the unhappy wreck: yes, and to
lead the limping thing to the altar, if she insisted. His
imagination conceived it, and the world's applause besides.

Nausea, together with a sense of duty to his line, extinguished 
that loathsome prospect of a mate, though without obscuring his
chivalrous devotion to his gentleman's word of honour, which
remained in his mind to compliment him permanently.

On the whole, he could reasonably hope to subdue her to
admiration. He drank a glass of champagne at his dressing; an
unaccustomed act, but, as he remarked casually to his man
Pollington, for whom the rest of the bottle was left, he had taken
no horse-exercise that day.

Having to speak to Vernon on business, he went to the schoolroom,
where he discovered Clara, beautiful in full evening attire, with
her arm on young Crossjay's shoulder, and heard that the hard
task-master had abjured Mrs. Mountstuart's party, and had already
excused himself, intending to keep Crossjay to the grindstone.
Willoughby was for the boy, as usual, and more sparklingly than
usual. Clara looked at him in some surprise. He rallied Vernon
with great zest, quite silencing him when he said: "I bear witness
that the fellow was here at his regular hour for lessons, and were
you?" He laid his hand on Crossjay, touching Clara's.

"You will remember what I told you, Crossjay," said she, rising
from the seat gracefully to escape the touch. "It is my command."

Crossjay frowned and puffed.

"But only if I'm questioned," he said.

"Certainly," she replied.

"Then I question the rascal," said Willoughby, causing a start.
"What, sir, is your opinion of Miss Middleton in her robe of state
this evening?"

"Now, the truth, Crossjay!" Clara held up a finger; and the boy
could see she was playing at archness, but for Willoughby it was
earnest. "The truth is not likely to offend you or me either," he
murmured to her.

"I wish him never, never, on any excuse, to speak anything else."

"I always did think her a Beauty," Crossjay growled. He hated the
having to say it.

"There!" exclaimed Sir Willoughby, and bent, extending an arm to
her. "You have not suffered from the truth, my Clara!"

Her answer was: "I was thinking how he might suffer if he were
taught to tell the reverse."

"Oh! for a fair lady!"

"That is the worst of teaching, Willoughby."

"We'll leave it to the fellow's instinct; he has our blood in him.
I could convince you, though, if I might cite circumstances. Yes!
But yes! And yes again! The entire truth cannot invariably be
told. I venture to say it should not."

"You would pardon it for the 'fair lady'?"

"Applaud, my love."

He squeezed the hand within his arm, contemplating her.

She was arrayed in a voluminous robe of pale blue silk vapourous
with trimmings of light gauze of the same hue, gaze de Chambery,
matching her fair hair and dear skin for the complete overthrow of
less inflammable men than Willoughby.

"Clara!" sighed be.

"If so, it would really be generous," she said, "though the
teaching h bad."

"I fancy I can be generous."

"Do we ever know?"

He turned his head to Vernon, issuing brief succinct instructions 
for letters to be written, and drew her into the hall, saying:
"Know? There are people who do not know themselves and as they are
the majority they manufacture the axioms. And it is assumed that
we have to swallow them. I may observe that I think I know. I
decline to be engulphed in those majorities. 'Among them, but not
of them.' I know this, that my aim in life is to be generous."

"Is it not an impulse or disposition rather than an aim?"

"So much I know," pursued Willoughby, refusing to be tripped. But
she rang discordantly in his ear. His "fancy that he could be
generous" and his "aim at being generous" had met with no
response. "I have given proofs," he said, briefly, to drop a
subject upon which he was not permitted to dilate; and he
murmured, "People acquainted with me ... !" She was asked if she
expected him to boast of generous deeds. "From childhood!" she
heard him mutter; and she said to herself, "Release me, and you
shall be everything!"

The unhappy gentleman ached as he talked: for with men and with
hosts of women to whom he was indifferent, never did he converse
in this shambling, third-rate, sheepish manner, devoid of all
highness of tone and the proper precision of an authority. He was
unable to fathom the cause of it, but Clara imposed it on him, and
only in anger could he throw it off. The temptation to an outburst
that would flatter him with the sound of his authoritative voice
had to be resisted on a night when he must be composed if he
intended to shine, so he merely mentioned Lady Busshe's present,
to gratify spleen by preparing the ground for dissension, and
prudently acquiesced in her anticipated slipperiness. She would
rather not look at it now, she said.

"Not now; very well," said he.

His immediate deference made her regretful. "There is hardly
time, Willoughby."

"My dear, we shall have to express our thanks to her."

"I cannot."

His arm contracted sharply. He was obliged to be silent.

Dr Middleton, Laetitia, and the ladies Eleanor and Isabel joining
them in the hall, found two figures linked together in a shadowy
indication of halves that have fallen apart and hang on the last
thread of junction. Willoughby retained her hand on his arm; he
held to it as the symbol of their alliance, and oppressed the
girl's nerves by contact, with a frame labouring for breath. De
Craye looked on them from overhead. The carriages were at the
door, and Willoughby said, "Where's Horace? I suppose he's taking
a final shot at his Book of Anecdotes and neat collection of
Irishisms."

"No," replied the colonel, descending. "That's a spring works of
itself and has discovered the secret of continuous motion, more's
the pity!--unless you'll be pleased to make it of use to
Science."

He gave a laugh of good-humour.

"Your laughter, Horace, is a capital comment on your wit."

Willoughby said it with the air of one who has flicked a whip.

"'Tis a genial advertisement of a vacancy," said De Craye.

Precisely: three parts auctioneer to one for the property."

"Oh, if you have a musical quack, score it a point in his favour,
Willoughby, though you don't swallow his drug."

"If he means to be musical, let him keep time."

"Am I late?" said De Craye to the ladies, proving himself an adept
in the art of being gracefully vanquished, and so winning tender
hearts.

Willoughby had refreshed himself. At the back of his mind there was
a suspicion that his adversary would not have yielded so flatly
without an assurance of practically triumphing, secretly getting
the better of him; and it filled him with venom for a further bout
at the next opportunity: but as he had been sarcastic and mordant,
he had shown Clara what he could do in a way of speaking different
from the lamentable cooing stuff, gasps and feeble protestations
to which, he knew not how, she reduced him. Sharing the opinion of
his race, that blunt personalities, or the pugilistic form,
administered directly on the salient features, are exhibitions of
mastery in such encounters, he felt strong and solid, eager for
the successes of the evening. De Craye was in the first carriage
as escort to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. Willoughby, with
Clara, Laetitia, and Dr. Middleton, followed, all silent, for the
Rev. Doctor was ostensibly pondering; and Willoughby was damped a
little when he unlocked his mouth to say:

"And yet I have not observed that Colonel de Craye is anything of
a Celtiberian Egnatius meriting fustigation for an untimely
display of well-whitened teeth, sir: 'quicquid est, ubicunque est,
quodcunque agit, renidet:':--ha? a morbus neither charming nor
urbane to the general eye, however consolatory to the actor. But
this gentleman does not offend so, or I am so strangely
prepossessed in his favour as to be an incompetent witness."

Dr Middleton's persistent ha? eh? upon an honest frown of inquiry
plucked an answer out of Willoughby that was meant to be
humourously scornful, and soon became apologetic under the Doctor's
interrogatively grasping gaze.

"These Irishmen," Willoughby said, "will play the professional
jester as if it were an office they were born to. We must play
critic now and then, otherwise we should have them deluging us
with their Joe Millerisms."

"With their O'Millerisms you would say, perhaps?"

Willoughby did his duty to the joke, but the Rev. Doctor, though
he wore the paternal smile of a man that has begotten hilarity,
was not perfectly propitiated, and pursued: "Nor to my
apprehension is 'the man's laugh the comment on his wit'
unchallengeably new: instances of cousinship germane to the phrase
will recur to you. But it has to be noted that it was a phrase of
assault; it was ostentatiously battery; and I would venture to
remind you, friend, that among the elect, considering that it is
as fatally facile to spring the laugh upon a man as to deprive him
of his life, considering that we have only to condescend to the
weapon, and that the more popular necessarily the more murderous
that weapon is,--among the elect, to which it is your distinction
to aspire to belong, the rule holds to abstain from any employment
of the obvious, the percoct, and likewise, for your own sake, from
the epitonic, the overstrained; for if the former, by readily
assimilating with the understandings of your audience, are
empowered to commit assassination on your victim, the latter come
under the charge of unseemliness, inasmuch as they are a
description of public suicide. Assuming, then, manslaughter to be
your pastime, and hari-kari not to be your bent, the phrase, to
escape criminality, must rise in you as you would have it fall on
him, ex improviso. Am I right?"

"I am in the habit of thinking it impossible, sir, that you can be
in error," said Willoughby.

Dr Middleton left it the more emphatic by saying nothing further.

Both his daughter and Miss Dale, who had disapproved the waspish
snap at Colonel De Craye, were in wonderment of the art of speech
which could so soothingly inform a gentleman that his behaviour
had not been gentlemanly.

Willoughby was damped by what he comprehended of it for a few
minutes. In proportion as he realized an evening with his ancient
admirers he was restored, and he began to marvel greatly at his
folly in not giving banquets and Balls, instead of making a
solitude about himself and his bride. For solitude, thought he, is
good for the man, the man being a creature consumed by passion;
woman's love, on the contrary, will only be nourished by the
reflex light she catches of you in the eyes of others, she having
no passion of her own, but simply an instinct driving her to
attach herself to whatsoever is most largely admired, most
shining. So thinking, he determined to change his course of
conduct, and he was happier. In the first gush of our wisdom drawn
directly from experience there is a mental intoxication that
cancels the old world and establishes a new one, not allowing us
to ask whether it is too late.


CHAPTER XXX

Treating of the Dinner-Party at Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson's

Vernon and young Crossjay had tolerably steady work together for a
couple of hours, varied by the arrival of a plate of meat on a
tray for the master, and some interrogations put to him from time
to time by the boy in reference to Miss Middleton. Crossjay made
the discovery that if he abstained from alluding to Miss
Middleton's beauty he might water his dusty path with her name
nearly as much as he liked. Mention of her beauty incurred a
reprimand. On the first occasion his master was wistful. "Isn't
she glorious!" Crossjay fancied he had started a sovereign receipt
for blessed deviations. He tried it again, but paedagogue-thunder
broke over his head.

"Yes, only I can't understand what she means, Mr. Whitford," he
excused himself "First I was not to tell; I know I wasn't, because
she said so; she quite as good as said so. Her last words were:
'Mind, Crossjay, you know nothing about me', when I stuck to that
beast of a tramp, who's a 'walking moral,' and gets money out of
people by snuffling it."

"Attend to your lesson, or you'll be one," said Vernon.

"Yes, but, Mr. Whitford, now I am to tell. I'm to answer straight
out to every question."

"Miss Middleton is anxious that you should be truthful."

"Yes; but in the morning she told me not to tell."

"She was in a hurry. She has it on her conscience that you may
have misunderstood her, and she wishes you never to be guilty of
an untruth, least of all on her account."

Crossjay committed an unspoken resolution to the air in a violent
sigh: "Ah!" and said: "If I were sure!"

"Do as she bids you, my boy."

"But I don't know what it is she wants."

"Hold to her last words to you."

"So I do. If she told me to run till I dropped, on I'd go."

"She told you to study your lessons; do that."

Crossjay buckled to his book, invigorated by an imagination of his
liege lady on the page.

After a studious interval, until the impression of his lady had
subsided. he resumed: "She's so funny. She's just like a girl, and
then she's a lady, too. She's my idea of a princess. And Colonel
De Craye! Wasn't he taught dancing! When he says something funny
he ducks and seems to be setting to his partner. I should like to
be as clever as her father. That is a clever man. I dare say
Colonel De Craye will dance with her tonight. I wish I was there."

"It's a dinner-party, not a dance," Vernon forced himself to say,
to dispel that ugly vision.

"Isn't it, sir? I thought they danced after dinner-parties, Mr.
Whitford, have you ever seen her run?"

Vernon pointed him to his task.

They were silent for a lengthened period.

"But does Miss Middleton mean me to speak out if Sir Willoughby
asks me?" said Crossjay.

"Certainly. You needn't make much of it. All's plain and simple."

"But I'm positive, Mr. Whitford, he wasn't to hear of her going to
the post-office with me before breakfast. And how did Colonel De
Craye find her and bring her back, with that old Flitch? He's a
man and can go where he pleases, and I'd have found her, too. give
me the chance. You know. I'm fond of Miss Dale, but she--I'm very
fond of her--but you can't think she's a girl as well. And about
Miss Dale, when she says a thing, there it is, clear. But Miss
Middleton has a lot of meanings. Never mind; I go by what's
inside, and I'm pretty sure to please her."

"Take your chin off your hand and your elbow off the book, and fix
yourself," said Vernon, wrestling with the seduction of Crossjay's
idolatry, for Miss Middleton's appearance had been preternaturally
sweet on her departure, and the next pleasure to seeing her was
hearing of her from the lips of this passionate young poet.

"Remember that you please her by speaking truth," Vernon added,
and laid himself open to questions upon the truth, by which he
learnt, with a perplexed sense of envy and sympathy, that the
boy's idea of truth strongly approximated to his conception of
what should be agreeable to Miss Middleton.

He was lonely, bereft of the bard, when he had tucked Crossjay up
in his bed and left him. Books he could not read; thoughts were
disturbing. A seat in the library and a stupid stare helped to
pass the hours, and but for the spot of sadness moving meditation
in spite of his effort to stun himself, he would have borne a
happy resemblance to an idiot in the sun. He had verily no
command of his reason. She was too beautiful! Whatever she did was
best. That was the refrain of the fountain-song in him; the burden
being her whims, variations, inconsistencies, wiles; her
tremblings between good and naughty, that might be stamped to
noble or to terrible; her sincereness, her duplicity, her courage,
cowardice, possibilities for heroism and for treachery. By dint of
dwelling on the theme, he magnified the young lady to
extraordinary stature. And he had sense enough to own that her
character was yet liquid in the mould, and that she was a creature
of only naturally youthful wildness provoked to freakishness by
the ordeal of a situation shrewd as any that can happen to her sex
in civilized life. But he was compelled to think of her
extravagantly, and he leaned a little to the discrediting of her,
because her actual image ummanned him and was unbearable; and to
say at the end of it: "She is too beautiful! whatever she does is
best," smoothed away the wrong he did her. Had it been in his
power he would have thought of her in the abstract--the stage
contiguous to that which he adopted: but the attempt was luckless;
the Stagyrite would have faded in it. What philosopher could
have set down that face of sun and breeze and nymph in shadow as a
point in a problem?

The library door was opened at midnight by Miss Dale. She dosed it
quietly. "You are not working, Mr. Whitford? I fancied you would
wish to hear of the evening. Professor Crooklyn arrived after all!
Mrs. Mountstuart is bewildered: she says she expected you, and
that you did not excuse yourself to her, and she cannot
comprehend, et caetera. That is to say, she chooses bewilderment
to indulge in the exclamatory. She must be very much annoyed. The
professor did come by the train she drove to meet!"

"I thought it probable," said Vernon.

"He had to remain a couple of hours at the Railway Inn; no
conveyance was to be found for him. He thinks he has caught a
cold, and cannot stifle his fretfulness about it. He may be as
learned as Doctor Middleton; he has not the same happy
constitution. Nothing more unfortunate could have occurred; he
spoilt the party. Mrs. Mountstuart tried petting him, which drew
attention to him, and put us all in his key for several awkward
minutes, more than once. She lost her head; she was unlike
herself I may be presumptuous in criticizing her, but should not
the president of a dinner-table treat it like a battlefield, and
let the guest that sinks descend, and not allow the voice of a
discordant, however illustrious, to rule it? Of course, it is when
I see failures that I fancy I could manage so well: comparison is
prudently reserved in the other cases. I am a daring critic, no
doubt, because I know I shall never be tried by experiment. I have
no ambition to be tried."

She did not notice a smile of Vernon's, and continued: "Mrs
Mountstuart gave him the lead upon any subject he chose. I thought
the professor never would have ceased talking of a young lady who
had been at the inn before him drinking hot brandy and water with
a gentleman!"

"How did he hear of that?" cried Vernon, roused by the malignity
of the Fates.

"From the landlady, trying to comfort him. And a story of her
lending shoes and stockings while those of the young lady were
drying. He has the dreadful snappish humourous way of recounting
which impresses it; the table took up the subject of this
remarkable young lady, and whether she was a lady of the
neighbourhood, and who she could be that went abroad on foot in
heavy rain. It was painful to me; I knew enough to be sure of who
she was."

"Did she betray it?"

"No."

"Did Willoughby look at her?"

"Without suspicion then."

"Then?"

"Colonel De Craye was diverting us, and he was very amusing.
Mrs. Mountstuart told him afterward that he ought to be paid
salvage for saving the wreck of her party. Sir Willoughby was a
little too cynical; he talked well; what he said was good, but it
was not good-humoured; he has not the reckless indifference of
Colonel De Craye to uttering nonsense that amusement may come of
it. And in the drawing-room he lost such gaiety as he had. I was
close to Mrs. Mountstuart when Professor Crooklyn approached her
and spoke in my hearing of that gentleman and that young lady.
They were, you could see by his nods, Colonel De Craye and Miss
Middleton."

"And she at once mentioned it to Willoughby?"

"Colonel De Craye gave her no chance, if she sought it. He courted
her profusely. Behind his rattle he must have brains. It ran in
all directions to entertain her and her circle."

"Willoughby knows nothing?"

"I cannot judge. He stood with Mrs. Mountstuart a minute as we
were taking leave. She looked strange. I heard her say: 'The
rogue!' He laughed. She lifted her shoulders. He scarcely opened
his mouth on the way home."

"The thing must run its course," Vernon said, with the
philosophical air which is desperation rendered decorous.
"Willoughby deserves it. A man of full growth ought to know that
nothing on earth tempts Providence so much as the binding of a
young woman against her will. Those two are mutually attracted:
they're both ... They meet, and the mischief's done: both are
bright. He can persuade with a word. Another might discourse like
an angel and it would be useless. I said everything I could think
of, to no purpose. And so it is: there are those attractions!
-just as, with her, Willoughby is the reverse, he repels. I'm in
about the same predicament--or should be if she were plighted to
me. That is, for the length of five minutes; about the space of
time I should require for the formality of handing her back her
freedom. How a sane man can imagine a girl like that ... ! But if
she has changed, she has changed! You can't conciliate a withered
affection. This detaining her, and tricking, and not listening,
only increases her aversion; she learns the art in turn. Here she
is, detained by fresh plots to keep Dr. Middleton at the Hall.
That's true, is it not?" He saw that it was. "No, she's not to
blame! She has told him her mind; he won't listen. The question
then is, whether she keeps to her word, or breaks it. It's a
dispute between a conventional idea of obligation and an injury to
her nature.  Which is the more dishonourable thing to do? Why, you
and I see in a moment that her feelings guide her best. It's one
of the few cases in which nature may be consulted like an oracle."

"Is she so sure of her nature?" said Miss Dale.

"You may doubt it; I do not. I am surprised at her coming back. De
Craye is a man of the world, and advised it, I suppose. He--well,
I never had the persuasive tongue, and my failing doesn't count
for much."

"But the suddenness of the intimacy!"

"The disaster is rather famous 'at first sight'. He came in a
fortunate hour... for him. A pigmy's a giant if he can manage to
arrive in season. Did you not notice that there was danger, at
their second or third glance? You counselled me to hang on here,
where the amount of good I do in proportion to what I have to
endure is microscopic."

"It was against your wishes, I know," said Laetitia, and when the
words were out she feared that they were tentative. Her delicacy
shrank from even seeming to sound him in relation to a situation
so delicate as Miss Middleton's.

The same sentiment guarded him from betraying himself, and he
said: "Partly against. We both foresaw the possible--because,
like most prophets, we knew a little more of circumstances 
enabling us to see the fatal. A pigmy would have served, but De
Craye is a handsome, intelligent, pleasant fellow."

"Sir Willoughby's friend!"

"Well, in these affairs! A great deal must be charged on the
goddess."

"That is really Pagan fatalism!"

"Our modern word for it is Nature. Science condescends to speak of
natural selection. Look at these! They are both graceful and
winning and witty, bright to mind and eye, made for one another,
as country people say. I can't blame him. Besides, we don't know
that he's guilty. We're quite in the dark, except that we're
certain how it must end. If the chance should occur to you of
giving Willoughby a word of counsel--it may--you might, without
irritating him as my knowledge of his plight does, hint at your
eyes being open. His insane dread of a detective world makes him
artificially blind. As soon as he fancies himself seen, he sets to
work spinning a web, and he discerns nothing else. It's generally
a clever kind of web; but if it's a tangle to others it's the same
to him, and a veil as well. He is preparing the catastrophe, he
forces the issue. Tell him of her extreme desire to depart. Treat
her as mad, to soothe him. Otherwise one morning he will wake a
second time ... ! It is perfectly certain. And the second time it
will be entirely his own fault. Inspire him with some philosophy."

"I have none."

"I if I thought so, I would say you have better. There are two
kinds of philosophy, mine and yours. Mine comes of coldness, yours
of devotion."

"He is unlikely to choose me for his confidante."

Vernon meditated. "One can never quite guess what he will do, from
never knowing the heat of the centre in him which precipitates his
actions: he has a great art of concealment. As to me, as you
perceive, my views are too philosophical to let me be of use to
any of them. I blame only the one who holds to the bond. The
sooner I am gone!--in fact, I cannot stay on. So Dr. Middleton and
the Professor did not strike fire together?"

"Doctor Middleton was ready, and pursued him, but Professor 
Crooklyn insisted on shivering. His line of blank verse, 'A
Railway platform and a Railway inn!' became pathetic in
repetition. He must have suffered."

"Somebody has to!"

"Why the innocent?"

"He arrives a propos. But remember that Fridolin sometimes 
contrives to escape and have the guilty scorched. The Professor
would not have suffered if he had missed his train, as he appears
to be in the habit of doing. Thus his unaccustomed good-fortune
was the cause of his bad."

"You saw him on the platform?"

"I am unacquainted with the professor. I had to get Mrs
Mountstuart out of the way."

"She says she described him to you. 'Complexion of a sweetbread,
consistency of a quenelle, grey, and like a Saint without his
dish behind the head.'"

"Her descriptions are strikingly accurate, but she forgot to
sketch his back, and all that I saw was a narrow sloping back and
a broad hat resting the brim on it. My report to her spoke of an
old gentleman of dark complexion, as the only traveller on the
platform. She has faith in the efficiency of her descriptive 
powers, and so she was willing to drive off immediately. The
intention was a start to London. Colonel De Craye came up and
effected in five minutes what I could not compass in thirty."

"But you saw Colonel De Craye pass you?"

"My work was done; I should have been an intruder. Besides I was
acting wet jacket with Mrs. Mountstuart to get her to drive off
fast, or she might have jumped out in search of her Professor
herself."

"She says you were lean as a fork, with the wind whistling through
the prongs."

"You see how easy it is to deceive one who is an artist in
phrases. Avoid them, Miss Dale; they dazzle the penetration of the
composer. That is why people of ability like Mrs Mountstuart see
so little; they are so bent on describing brilliantly. However,
she is kind and charitable at heart. I have been considering
to-night that, to cut this knot as it is now, Miss Middleton
might do worse than speak straight out to Mrs. Mountstuart. No one
else would have such influence with Willoughby. The simple fact of
Mrs. Mountstuart's knowing of it would be almost enough. But
courage would he required for that. Good-night, Miss Dale."

"Good-night, Mr. Whitford. You pardon me for disturbing you?"

Vernon pressed her hand reassuringly. He had but to look at her
and review her history to think his cousin Willoughby punished by
just retribution. Indeed, for any maltreatment of the dear boy
Love by man or by woman, coming under your cognizance, you, if you
be of common soundness, shall behold the retributive blow struck
in your time.

Miss Dale retired thinking how like she and Vernon were to one
another in the toneless condition they had achieved through
sorrow. He succeeded in masking himself from her, owing to her awe
of the circumstances. She reproached herself for not having the
same devotion to the cold idea of duty as he had; and though it
provoked inquiry, she would not stop to ask why he had left Miss
Middleton a prey to the sparkling colonel. It seemed a proof of
the philosophy he preached.

As she was passing by young Crossjay's bedroom door a face
appeared. Sir Willoughby slowly emerged and presented himself in
his full length, beseeching her to banish alarm.

He said it in a hushed voice, with a face qualified to create
sentiment.

"Are you tired? sleepy?" said he.

She protested that she was not: she intended to read for an hour.

He begged to have the hour dedicated to him. "I shall be relieved
by conversing with a friend."

No subterfuge crossed her mind; she thought his midnight visit to
the boy's bedside a pretty feature in him; she was full of pity,
too; she yielded to the strange request, feeling that it did not
become "an old woman" to attach importance even to the public
discovery of midnight interviews involving herself as one, and
feeling also that she was being treated as an old friend in the
form of a very old woman. Her mind was bent on arresting any
recurrence to the project she had so frequently outlined in the
tongue of innuendo, of which, because of her repeated tremblings
under it, she thought him a master.

He conducted her along the corridor to the private sitting-room of
the ladies Eleanor and Isabel.

"Deceit!" he said, while lighting the candles on the mantelpiece.

She was earnestly compassionate, and a word that could not relate
to her personal destinies refreshed her by displacing her
apprehensive antagonism and giving pity free play.



CHAPTER XXXI

Sir Willoughby Attempts and Achieves Pathos

Both were seated. Apparently he would have preferred to watch her
dark downcast eyelashes in silence under sanction of his air of
abstract meditation and the melancholy superinducing it.
Blood-colour was in her cheeks; the party had inspirited her
features. Might it be that lively company, an absence of economical
solicitudes, and a flourishing home were all she required to make
her bloom again? The supposition was not hazardous in presence of
her heightened complexion.

She raised her eyes. He could not meet her look without speaking.

"Can you forgive deceit?"

"It would be to boast of more charity than I know myself to
possess, were I to say that I can, Sir Willoughby. I hope I am
able to forgive. I cannot tell. I should like to say yes."

"Could you live with the deceiver?"

"No."

"No. I could have given that answer for you. No semblance of union
should be maintained between the deceiver and ourselves. 
Laetitia!"

"Sir Willoughby?"

"Have I no right to your name?"

"If it pleases you to . . ."

"I speak as my thoughts run, and they did not know a Miss Dale so
well as a dear Laetitia: my truest friend! You have talked with
Clara Middleton?"

"We had a conversation."

Her brevity affrighted him. He flew off in a cloud.

"Reverting to that question of deceivers: is it not your opinion
that to pardon, to condone, is to corrupt society by passing off
as pure what is false? Do we not," he wore the smile of haggard
playfulness of a convalescent child the first day back to its
toys, "Laetitia, do we not impose a counterfeit on the currency?"

"Supposing it to be really deception."

"Apart from my loathing of deception, of falseness in any shape,
upon any grounds, I hold it an imperious duty to expose, punish,
off with it. I take it to be one of the forms of noxiousness which
a good citizen is bound to extirpate. I am not myself good citizen
enough, I confess, for much more than passive abhorrence. I do not
forgive: I am at heart serious and I cannot forgive:--there is no
possible reconciliation, there can be only an ostensible truce,
between the two hostile powers dividing this world."

She glanced at him quickly.

"Good and evil!" he said.

Her face expressed a surprise relapsing on the heart.

He spelt the puckers of her forehead to mean that she feared he
might be speaking unchristianly.

"You will find it so in all religions, my dear Laetitia: the
Hindoo, the Persian, ours. It is universal; an experience of our
humanity. Deceit and sincerity cannot live together. Truth must
kill the lie, or the lie will kill truth. I do not forgive. All I
say to the person is, go!"

"But that is right! that is generous!" exclaimed Laetitia, glad to
approve him for the sake of escaping her critical soul, and
relieved by the idea of Clara's difficulty solved.

"Capable of generosity, perhaps," he mused, aloud.

She wounded him by not supplying the expected enthusiastic 
asseveration of her belief in his general tendency to magnanimity.

He said, after a pause: "But the world is not likely to be
impressed by anything not immediately gratifying it. People
change, I find: as we increase in years we cease to be the heroes
we were. I myself am insensible to change: I do not admit the
charge. Except in this we will say: personal ambition. I have it
no more. And what is it when we have it? Decidedly a confession of
inferiority! That is, the desire to be distinguished is an
acknowledgement of insufficiency. But I have still the craving for
my dearest friends to think well of me. A weakness? Call it so.
Not a dishonourable weakness!"

Laetitia racked her brain for the connection of his present speech
with the preceding dialogue. She was baffled, from not knowing
"the heat of the centre in him", as Vernon opaquely phrased it in
charity to the object of her worship.

"Well," said he, unappeased, "and besides the passion to excel, I
have changed somewhat in the heartiness of my thirst for the
amusements incident to my station. I do not care to keep a stud--
I was once tempted: nor hounds. And I can remember the day when I
determined to have the best kennels and the best breed of horses
in the kingdom. Puerile! What is distinction of that sort, or of
any acquisition and accomplishment? We ask! one's self is not the
greater. To seek it, owns to our smallness, in real fact; and when
it is attained, what then? My horses are good, they are admired, I
challenge the county to surpass them: well? These are but my
horses; the praise is of the animals, not of me. I decline to
share in it. Yet I know men content to swallow the praise of their
beasts and be semi-equine. The littleness of one's fellows in the
mob of life is a very strange experience! One may regret to have
lost the simplicity of one's forefathers, which could accept those
and other distinctions with a cordial pleasure, not to say pride.
As, for instance, I am, as it is called, a dead shot. 'Give your
acclamations, gentlemen, to my ancestors, from whom I inherited a
steady hand and quick sight.' They do not touch me. Where I do
not find myself--that I am essentially I--no applause can move
me. To speak to you as I would speak to none, admiration--you
know that in my early youth I swam in flattery--I had to swim to
avoid drowning!--admiration of my personal gifts has grown
tasteless. Changed, therefore, inasmuch as there has been a growth
of spirituality. We are all in submission to mortal laws, and so
far I have indeed changed. I may add that it is unusual for
country gentlemen to apply themselves to scientific researches.
These are, however, in the spirit of the time. I apprehended that
instinctively when at College. I forsook the classics for science.
And thereby escaped the vice of domineering self-sufficiency
peculiar to classical men, of which you had an amusing example in
the carriage, on the way to Mrs. Mountstuart's this evening.
Science is modest; slow, if you like; it deals with facts, and
having mastered them, it masters men; of necessity, not with a
stupid, loud-mouthed arrogance: words big and oddly garbed as the
Pope's body-guard. Of course, one bows to the Infallible; we must,
when his giant-mercenaries level bayonets."

Sir Willoughby offered Miss Dale half a minute that she might in
gentle feminine fashion acquiesce in the implied reproof of Dr.
Middleton's behaviour to him during the drive to Mrs.
Mountstuart's. She did not.

Her heart was accusing Clara of having done it a wrong and a hurt.
For while he talked he seemed to her to justify Clara's feelings
and her conduct: and her own reawakened sensations of injury came
to the surface a moment to look at him, affirming that they
pardoned him, and pitied, but hardly wondered.

The heat of the centre in him had administered the comfort he
wanted, though the conclusive accordant notes he loved on woman's
lips, that subservient harmony of another instrument desired of
musicians when they have done their solo-playing, came not to wind
up the performance: not a single bar. She did not speak. Probably
his Laetitia was overcome, as he had long known her to be when
they conversed; nerve-subdued, unable to deploy her mental
resources or her musical. Yet ordinarily she had command of the
latter.--Was she too condoling? Did a reason exist for it? Had
the impulsive and desperate girl spoken out to Laetitia to the
fullest?--shameless daughter of a domineering sire that she was!
Ghastlier inquiry (it struck the centre of him with a sounding
ring), was Laetitia pitying him overmuch for worse than the pain
of a little difference between lovers--for treason on the part of
his bride? Did she know of a rival? know more than he?

When the centre of him was violently struck he was a genius in
penetration. He guessed that she did know: and by this was he
presently helped to achieve pathos.

"So my election was for Science," he continued; "and if it makes
me, as I fear, a rara avis among country gentlemen, it unites me,
puts me in the main, I may say, in the only current of progress--
a word sufficiently despicable in their political jargon.--You
enjoyed your evening at Mrs. Mountstuart's?"

"Very greatly."

"She brings her Professor to dine here the day after tomorrow. 
Does it astonish you? You started."

"I did not hear the invitation."

"It was arranged at the table: you and I were separated--cruelly,
I told her: she declared that we see enough of one another, and
that it was good for me that we should be separated; neither of
which is true. I may not have known what is the best for me: I do
know what is good. If in my younger days I egregiously erred,
that, taken of itself alone, is, assuming me to have sense and
feeling, the surer proof of present wisdom. I can testify in
person that wisdom is pain. If pain is to add to wisdom, let me
suffer! Do you approve of that, Laetitia?"

"It is well said."

"It is felt. Those who themselves have suffered should know the
benefit of the resolution."

"One may have suffered so much as to wish only for peace."

"True: but you! have you?"

"It would be for peace, if I prayed for any earthly gift."

Sir Willoughby dropped a smile on her. "I mentioned the Pope's
parti-coloured body-guard just now. In my youth their singular
attire impressed me. People tell me they have been re-uniformed: I
am sorry. They remain one of my liveliest recollections of the
Eternal City. They affected my sense of humour, always alert in
me, as you are aware. We English have humour. It is the first
thing struck in us when we land on the Continent: our risible
faculties are generally active all through the tour. Humour, or
the clash of sense with novel examples of the absurd, is our
characteristic. I do not condescend to boisterous displays of it.
I observe, and note the people's comicalities for my
correspondence. But you have read my letters--most of them, if
not all?"

"Many of them."

I was with you then!--I was about to say--that Swiss-guard 
reminded me--you have not been in Italy. I have constantly 
regretted it. You are the very woman, you have the soul for Italy.
I know no other of whom I could say it, with whom I should not
feel that she was out of place, discordant with me. Italy and
Laetitia! often have I joined you together. We shall see. I begin
to have hopes. Here you have literally stagnated. Why, a
dinner-party refreshes you! What would not travel do, and that
heavenly climate! You are a reader of history and poetry. Well,
poetry! I never yet saw the poetry that expressed the tenth part
of what I feel in the presence of beauty and magnificence, and
when I really meditate--profoundly. Call me a positive mind. I
feel: only I feel too intensely for poetry. By the nature of it,
poetry cannot be sincere. I will have sincerity. Whatever touches
our emotions should be spontaneous, not a craft. I know you are in
favour of poetry. You would win me, if any one could. But history!
there I am with you. Walking over ruins: at night: the arches of
the solemn black amphitheatre pouring moonlight on us--the
moonlight of Italy!"

"You would not laugh there, Sir Willoughby?" said Laetitia,
rousing herself from a stupor of apprehensive amazement, to utter
something and realize actual circumstances.

"Besides, you, I think, or I am mistaken in you"--he deviated 
from his projected speech--"you are not a victim of the sense of
association and the ludicrous."

"I can understand the influence of it: I have at least a conception
of the humourous, but ridicule would not strike me in the Coliseum
of Rome. I could not bear it, no, Sir Willoughby!"

She appeared to be taking him in very strong earnest, by thus
petitioning him not to laugh in the Coliseum, and now he said:
"Besides, you are one who could accommodate yourself to the
society of the ladies, my aunts. Good women, Laetitia! I cannot
imagine them de trop in Italy, or in a household. I have of course
reason to be partial in my judgement."

"They are excellent and most amiable ladies; I love them," said
Laetitia, fervently; the more strongly excited to fervour by her
enlightenment as to his drift.

She read it that he designed to take her to Italy with the ladies:
--after giving Miss Middleton her liberty; that was necessarily
implied. And that was truly generous. In his boyhood he had
been famous for his bountifulness in scattering silver and gold.
Might he not have caused himself to be misperused in later life?

Clara had spoken to her of the visit and mission of the ladies to
the library: and Laetitia daringly conceived herself to be on the
certain track of his meaning, she being able to enjoy their
society as she supposed him to consider that Miss Middleton did
not, and would not either abroad or at home.

Sir Willoughby asked her: "You could travel with them?"

"Indeed I could!"

"Honestly?"

"As affirmatively as one may protest. Delightedly."

"Agreed. It is an undertaking." He put his hand out.

"Whether I be of the party or not! To Italy, Laetitia! It would
give me pleasure to be with you, and it will, if I must be
excluded, to think of you in Italy."

His hand was out. She had to feign inattention or yield her own.
She had not the effrontery to pretend not to see, and she yielded
it. He pressed it, and whenever it shrunk a quarter inch to
withdraw, he shook it up and down, as an instrument that had been
lent him for due emphasis to his remarks. And very emphatic an
amorous orator can make it upon a captive lady.

"I am unable to speak decisively on that or any subject. I am, I
think you once quoted, 'tossed like a weed on the ocean.' Of
myself I can speak: I cannot speak for a second person. I am
infinitely harassed. If I could cry, 'To Italy tomorrow!' Ah! ...
Do not set me down for complaining. I know the lot of man. But,
Laetitia, deceit! deceit! It is a bad taste in the mouth. It
sickens us of humanity. I compare it to an earthquake: we lose all
our reliance on the solidity of the world. It is a betrayal not
simply of the person; it is a betrayal of humankind. My friend!
Constant friend! No, I will not despair. Yes, I have faults; I
will remember them. Only, forgiveness is another question. Yes,
the injury I can forgive; the falseness never. In the interests of
humanity, no. So young, and such deceit!"

Laetitia's bosom rose: her hand was detained: a lady who has
yielded it cannot wrestle to have it back; those outworks which
protect her treacherously shelter the enemy aiming at the citadel
when he has taken them. In return for the silken armour bestowed
on her by our civilization, it is exacted that she be soft and
civil nigh up to perishing-point. She breathed tremulously high,
saying on her top-breath: "If it--it may not be so; it can
scarcely. . ." A deep sigh intervened. It saddened her that she
knew so much.

"For when I love I love," said Sir Willoughby; "my friends and my
servants know that. There can be no medium: not with me. I give
all, I claim all. As I am absorbed, so must I absorb. We both
cancel and create, we extinguish and we illumine one another. The
error may be in the choice of an object: it is not in the passion.
Perfect confidence, perfect abandonment. I repeat, I claim it
because I give it. The selfishness of love may be denounced: it is
a part of us. My answer would be, it is an element only of the
noblest of us! Love, Laetitia! I speak of love. But one who breaks
faith to drag us through the mire, who betrays, betrays and hands
us over to the world, whose prey we become identically because of
virtues we were educated to think it a blessing to possess: tell
me the name for that!--Again, it has ever been a principle with
me to respect the sex. But if we see women false, treacherous ...
Why indulge in these abstract views, you would ask! The world
presses them on us, full as it is of the vilest specimens. They
seek to pluck up every rooted principle: they sneer at our
worship: they rob us of our religion. This bitter experience of
the world drives us back to the antidote of what we knew before we
plunged into it: of one ... of something we esteemed and still
esteem. Is that antidote strong enough to expel the poison? I hope
so! I believe so! To lose faith in womankind is terrible."

He studied her. She looked distressed: she was not moved.

She was thinking that, with the exception of a strain of
haughtiness, he talked excellently to men, at least in the tone of
the things he meant to say; but that his manner of talking to
women went to an excess in the artificial tongue--the tutored
tongue of sentimental deference of the towering male: he fluted
exceedingly; and she wondered whether it was this which had
wrecked him with Miss Middleton.

His intuitive sagacity counselled him to strive for pathos to
move her. It was a task; for while he perceived her to be not
ignorant of his plight, he doubted her knowing the extent of it,
and as his desire was merely to move her without an exposure of
himself, he had to compass being pathetic as it were under the
impediments of a mailed and gauntletted knight, who cannot easily
heave the bosom, or show it heaving.

Moreover, pathos is a tide: often it carries the awakener of it
off his feet, and whirls him over and over armour and all in
ignominious attitudes of helpless prostration, whereof he may well
be ashamed in the retrospect. We cannot quite preserve our dignity
when we stoop to the work of calling forth tears. Moses had
probably to take a nimble jump away from the rock after that
venerable Law-giver had knocked the water out of it.

However, it was imperative in his mind that he should be sure he
had the power to move her.

He began; clumsily at first, as yonder gauntletted knight attempting
the briny handkerchief.

"What are we! We last but a very short time. Why not live to
gratify our appetites? I might really ask myself why. All the
means of satiating them are at my disposal. But no: I must aim at
the highest:--at that which in my blindness I took for the
highest. You know the sportsman's instinct, Laetitia; he is not
tempted by the stationary object. Such are we in youth, toying
with happiness, leaving it, to aim at the dazzling and
attractive."

"We gain knowledge," said Laetitia.

"At what a cost!"

The exclamation summoned self-pity to his aid, and pathos was
handy.

"By paying half our lives for it and all our hopes! Yes, we gain
knowledge, we are the wiser; very probably my value surpasses now
what it was when I was happier. But the loss! That youthful bloom
of the soul is like health to the body; once gone, it leaves
cripples behind. Nay, my friend and precious friend, these four
fingers I must retain. They seem to me the residue of a wreck: you
shall be released shortly: absolutely, Laetitia, I have nothing
else remaining--We have spoken of deception; what of being
undeceived?--when one whom we adored is laid bare, and the
wretched consolation of a worthy object is denied to us. No
misfortune can be like that. Were it death, we could worship
still. Death would be preferable. But may you be spared to know a
situation in which the comparison with your inferior is forced on
you to your disadvantage and your loss because of your generously
giving up your whole heart to the custody of some shallow,
light-minded, self--! ... We will not deal in epithets. If I were
to find as many bad names for the serpent as there are spots on
his body, it would be serpent still, neither better nor worse. The
loneliness! And the darkness! Our luminary is extinguished.
Self-respect refuses to continue worshipping, but the affection
will not be turned aside. We are literally in the dust, we grovel,
we would fling away self-respect if we could; we would adopt for a
model the creature preferred to us; we would humiliate, degrade
ourselves; we cry for justice as if it were for pardon . . ."

"For pardon! when we are straining to grant it!" Laetitia
murmured, and it was as much as she could do. She remembered how
in her old misery her efforts after charity had twisted her round
to feel herself the sinner, and beg forgiveness in prayer: a noble
sentiment, that filled her with pity of the bosom in which it had
sprung. There was no similarity between his idea and hers, but her
idea had certainly been roused by his word "pardon", and he had
the benefit of it in the moisture of her eyes. Her lips trembled,
tears fell.

He had heard something; he had not caught the words, but they were
manifestly favourable; her sign of emotion assured him of it and
of the success he had sought. There was one woman who bowed to him
to all eternity! He had inspired one woman with the mysterious,
man-desired passion of self-abandonment, self-immolation! The
evidence was before him. At any instant he could, if he pleased,
fly to her and command her enthusiasm.

He had, in fact, perhaps by sympathetic action, succeeded in
striking the same springs of pathos in her which animated his
lively endeavour to produce it in himself

He kissed her hand; then released it, quitting his chair to bend
above her soothingly.

"Do not weep, Laetitia, you see that I do not; I can smile. Help
me to bear it; you must not unman me."

She tried to stop her crying, but self-pity threatened to rain all
her long years of grief on her head, and she said: "I must go ...
I am unfit ... good-night, Sir Willoughby."

Fearing seriously that he had sunk his pride too low in her
consideration, and had been carried farther than he intended on
the tide of pathos, he remarked: "We will speak about Crossjay
to-morrow. His deceitfulness has been gross. As I said, I am
grievously offended by deception. But you are tired. Good-night,
my dear friend."

"Good-night, Sir Willoughby."

She was allowed to go forth.

Colonel De Craye coming up from the smoking-room, met her and
noticed the state of her eyelids, as he wished her goodnight. He
saw Willoughby in the room she had quitted, but considerately
passed without speaking, and without reflecting why he was
considerate.

Our hero's review of the scene made him, on the whole, satisfied
with his part in it. Of his power upon one woman he was now
perfectly sure:--Clara had agonized him with a doubt of his
personal mastery of any. One was a poor feast, but the pangs of
his flesh during the last few days and the latest hours caused him
to snatch at it, hungrily if contemptuously. A poor feast, she was
yet a fortress, a point of succour, both shield and lance; a cover
and an impetus. He could now encounter Clara boldly. Should she
resist and defy him, he would not be naked and alone; he foresaw
that he might win honour in the world's eye from his position--a
matter to be thought of only in most urgent need. The effect on
him of his recent exercise in pathos was to compose him to
slumber. He was for the period well satisfied.

His attendant imps were well satisfied likewise, and danced around
about his bed after the vigilant gentleman had ceased to debate on
the question of his unveiling of himself past forgiveness of her
to Laetitia, and had surrendered to sleep the present direction of
his affairs.



CHAPTER XXXII

Laetitia Dale Discovers a Spiritual Change and Dr Middleton a
Physical

Clara tripped over the lawn in the early morning to Laetitia to
greet her. She broke away from a colloquy with Colonel De Craye
under Sir Willoughby's windows. The colonel had been one of the
bathers, and he stood like a circus-driver flicking a wet towel at
Crossjay capering.

"My dear, I am very unhappy!" said Clara.

"My dear, I bring you news," Laetitia replied.

"Tell me. But the poor boy is to be expelled! He burst into
Crossjay's bedroom last night and dragged the sleeping boy out of
bed to question him, and he had the truth. That is one comfort:
only Crossjay is to be driven from the Hall, because he was
untruthful previously--for me; to serve me; really, I feel it was
at my command. Crossjay will be out of the way to-day, and has
promised to come back at night to try to be forgiven. You must
help me, Laetitia."

"You are free, Clara! If you desire it, you have but to ask for
your freedom."

"You mean . . ."

"He will release you."

"You are sure?"

"We had a long conversation last night."

"I owe it to you?"

"Nothing is owing to me. He volunteered it."

Clara made as if to lift her eyes in apostrophe. "Professor
Crooklyn! Professor Crooklyn! I see. I did not guess that."

"Give credit for some generosity, Clara; you are unjust!

"By and by: I will be more than just by and by. I will practise on
the trumpet: I will lecture on the greatness of the souls of men
when we know them thoroughly. At present we do but half know them,
and we are unjust. You are not deceived, Laetitia? There is to be
no speaking to papa? no delusions? You have agitated me. I feel
myself a very small person indeed. I feel I can understand those
who admire him. He gives me back my word simply? clearly? without
--Oh, that long wrangle in scenes and letters? And it will be
arranged for papa and me to go not later than to-morrow? Never
shall I be able to explain to any one how I fell into this! I am
frightened at myself when I think of it. I take the whole blame: I
have been scandalous. And, dear Laetitia! you came out so early in
order to tell me?"

"I wished you to hear it."

"Take my heart."

"Present me with a part--but for good."

"Fie! But you have a right to say it."

"I mean no unkindness; but is not the heart you allude to an
alarmingly searching one?"

"Selfish it is, for I have been forgetting Crossjay. If we are
going to be generous, is not Crossjay to be forgiven? If it were
only that the boy's father is away fighting for his country,
endangering his life day by day, and for a stipend not enough to
support his family, we are bound to think of the boy! Poor dear
silly lad! with his 'I say, Miss Middleton, why wouldn't (some
one) see my father when he came here to call on him, and had to
walk back ten miles in the rain?'--I could almost fancy that did
me mischief... But we have a splendid morning after yesterday's
rain. And we will be generous. Own, Laetitia, that it is possible
to gild the most glorious day of creation."

"Doubtless the spirit may do it and make its hues permanent," said
Laetitia.

"You to me, I to you, he to us. Well, then, if he does, it shall
be one of my heavenly days. Which is for the probation of
experience. We are not yet at sunset."

"Have you seen Mr. Whitford this morning?"

"He passed me."

"Do not imagine him ever ill-tempered."

"I had a governess, a learned lady, who taught me in person the
picturesqueness of grumpiness. Her temper was ever perfect, 
because she was never in the wrong, but I being so, she was
grumpy. She carried my iniquity under her brows, and looked out on
me through it. I was a trying child."

Laetitia said, laughing: "I can believe it!"

"Yet I liked her and she liked me: we were a kind of foreground 
and background: she threw me into relief and I was an apology for
her existence."

"You picture her to me."

"She says of me now that I am the only creature she has loved. Who
knows that I may not come to say the same of her?"

"You would plague her and puzzle her still."

"Have I plagued and puzzled Mr. Whitford?"

"He reminds you of her?"

"You said you had her picture."

"Ah! do not laugh at him. He is a true friend."

"The man who can be a friend is the man who will presume to be a
censor."

"A mild one."

"As to the sentence he pronounces, I am unable to speak, but his
forehead is Rhadamanthine condemnation."

"Dr Middleton!"

Clara looked round. "Who? I? Did you hear an echo of papa? He
would never have put Rhadamanthus over European souls, because it
appears that Rhadamanthus judged only the Asiatic; so you are
wrong, Miss Dale. My father is infatuated with Mr. Whitford. What
can it be? We women cannot sound the depths of scholars, probably
because their pearls have no value in our market; except when they
deign to chasten an impertinent; and Mr. Whitford stands aloof
from any notice of small fry. He is deep, studious, excellent; and
does it not strike you that if he descended among us he would be
like a Triton ashore?"

Laetitia's habit of wholly subservient sweetness, which was her
ideal of the feminine, not yet conciliated with her acuter
character, owing to the absence of full pleasure from her life--
the unhealed wound she had sustained and the cramp of a bondage of
such old date as to seem iron--induced her to say, as if
consenting: "You think he is not quite at home in society?" But
she wished to defend him strenuously, and as a consequence she had
to quit the self-imposed ideal of her daily acting, whereby--the
case being unwonted, very novel to her--the lady's intelligence
became confused through the process that quickened it; so
sovereign a method of hoodwinking our bright selves is the acting
of a part, however naturally it may come to us! and to this will
each honest autobiographical member of the animated world bear
witness.

She added: "You have not found him sympathetic? He is. You fancy
him brooding, gloomy? He is the reverse, he is cheerful, he is
indifferent to personal misfortune. Dr. Corney says there is no
laugh like Vernon Whitford's, and no humour like his. Latterly he
certainly ... But it has not been your cruel word grumpiness. The
truth is, he is anxious about Crossjay: and about other things;
and he wants to leave. He is at a disadvantage beside very lively
and careless gentlemen at present, but your 'Triton ashore' is
unfair, it is ugly. He is, I can say, the truest man I know."

"I did not question his goodness, Laetitia."

"You threw an accent on it."

"Did I? I must be like Crossjay, who declares he likes fun best." 

"Crossjay ought to know him, if anybody should. Mr. Whitford has
defended you against me, Clara, even since I took to calling you
Clara. Perhaps when you supposed him so like your ancient
governess, he was meditating how he could aid you. Last night he
gave me reasons for thinking you would do wisely to confide in
Mrs.  Mountstuart. It is no longer necessary. I merely mention it.
He is a devoted friend."

"He is an untiring pedestrian."

"Oh!"

Colonel De Craye, after hovering near the ladies in the hope of
seeing them divide, now adopted the system of making three that
two may come of it.

As he joined them with his glittering chatter, Laetitia looked at
Clara to consult her, and saw the face rosy as a bride's.

The suspicion she had nursed sprung out of her arms a muscular
fact on the spot.

"Where is my dear boy?" Clara said.

"Out for a holiday," the colonel answered in her tone.

"Advise Mr. Whitford not to waste his time in searching for
Crossjay, Laetitia. Crossjay is better out of the way to-day. At
least, I thought so just now. Has he pocket-money, Colonel De
Craye?"

"My lord can command his inn."

"How thoughtful you are!"

Laetitia's bosom swelled upon a mute exclamation, equivalent to:
"Woman! woman! snared ever by the sparkling and frivolous!
undiscerning of the faithful, the modest and beneficent!"

In the secret musings of moralists this dramatic rhetoric
survives.

The comparison was all of her own making, and she was indignant at
the contrast, though to what end she was indignant she could not
have said, for she had no idea of Vernon as a rival of De Craye in
the favour of a plighted lady. But she was jealous on behalf of
her sex: her sex's reputation seemed at stake, and the purity of
it was menaced by Clara's idle preference of the shallower man.
When the young lady spoke so carelessly of being like Crossjay,
she did not perhaps know that a likeness, based on a similarity of
their enthusiasms, loves, and appetites, had been established
between women and boys. Laetitia had formerly chafed at it,
rejecting it utterly, save when now and then in a season of
bitterness she handed here and there a volatile young lady (none
but the young) to be stamped with the degrading brand. Vernon
might be as philosophical as he pleased. To her the gaiety of
these two, Colonel De Craye and Clara Middleton, was distressingly
musical: they harmonized painfully. The representative of her sex
was hurt by it.

She had to stay beside them: Clara held her arm. The colonel's
voice dropped at times to something very like a whisper. He was
answered audibly and smoothly. The quickwitted gentleman accepted
the correction: but in immediately paying assiduous attentions to
Miss Dale, in the approved intriguer's fashion, he showed himself
in need of another amounting to a reproof. Clara said: "We have
been consulting, Laetitia, what is to be done to cure Professor
Crooklyn of his cold." De Craye perceived that he had taken a
wrong step, and he was mightily surprised that a lesson in
intrigue should be read to him of all men. Miss Middleton's
audacity was not so astonishing: he recognized grand capabilities
in the young lady. Fearing lest she should proceed further and cut
away from him his vantage-ground of secrecy with her, he turned
the subject and was adroitly submissive.

Clara's manner of meeting Sir Willoughby expressed a timid
disposition to friendliness upon a veiled inquiry, understood by
none save Laetitia, whose brain was racked to convey assurances to
herself of her not having misinterpreted him. Could there be any
doubt? She resolved that there could not be; and it was upon this
basis of reason that she fancied she had led him to it. Legitimate
or not, the fancy sprang from a solid foundation. Yesterday
morning she could not have conceived it. Now she was endowed to
feel that she had power to influence him, because now, since the
midnight, she felt some emancipation from the spell of his physical
mastery. He did not appear to her as a different man, but she had
grown sensible of being a stronger woman. He was no more the cloud
over her, nor the magnet; the cloud once heaven-suffused, the
magnet fatally compelling her to sway round to him. She admired
him still: his handsome air, his fine proportions, the courtesy
of his bending to Clara and touching of her hand, excused a
fanatical excess of admiration on the part of a woman in her
youth, who is never the anatomist of the hero's lordly graces. But
now she admired him piecemeal. When it came to the putting of him
together, she did it coldly. To compassionate him was her utmost
warmth. Without conceiving in him anything of the strange old
monster of earth which had struck the awakened girl's mind of Miss
Middleton, Laetitia classed him with other men; he was "one of
them". And she did not bring her disenchantment as a charge
against him. She accused herself, acknowledged the secret of the
change to be, and her youthfulness was dead:--otherwise could she
have given him compassion, and not herself have been carried on
the flood of it? The compassion was fervent, and pure too. She
supposed he would supplicate; she saw that Clara Middleton was
pleasant with him only for what she expected of his generosity.
She grieved. Sir Willoughby was fortified by her sorrowful gaze as
he and Clara passed out together to the laboratory arm in arm.

Laetitia had to tell Vernon of the uselessness of his beating the
house and grounds for Crossjay. Dr. Middleton held him fast in
discussion upon an overnight's classical wrangle with Professor
Crooklyn, which was to be renewed that day. The Professor had
appointed to call expressly to renew it. "A fine scholar," said
the Rev. Doctor, "but crotchety, like all men who cannot stand
their Port."

"I hear that he had a cold," Vernon remarked. "I hope the wine was
good, sir."

As when the foreman of a sentimental jury is commissioned to
inform an awful Bench exact in perspicuous English, of a
verdict that must of necessity be pronounced in favour of the
hanging of the culprit, yet would fain attenuate the crime of a
palpable villain by a recommendation to mercy, such foreman,
standing in the attentive eye of a master of grammatical
construction, and feeling the weight of at least three sentences
on his brain, together with a prospect of Judicial interrogation
for the discovery of his precise meaning, is oppressed, himself is
put on trial, in turn, and he hesitates, he recapitulates, the
fear of involution leads him to be involved; as far as a man so
posted may, he on his own behalf appeals for mercy; entreats that
his indistinct statement of preposterous reasons may be taken for
understood, and would gladly, were permission to do it credible,
throw in an imploring word that he may sink back among the crowd
without for the one imperishable moment publicly swinging in his
lordship's estimation:--much so, moved by chivalry toward a lady,
courtesy to the recollection of a hostess, and particularly by the
knowledge that his hearer would expect with a certain frigid
rigour charity of him, Dr. Middleton paused, spoke and paused: he
stammered. Ladies, he said, were famous poisoners in the Middle
Ages. His opinion was, that we had a class of manufacturing wine
merchants on the watch for widows in this country. But he was
bound to state the fact of his waking at his usual hour to the
minute unassailed by headache. On the other hand, this was a
condition of blessedness unanticipated when he went to bed. Mr.
Whitford, however, was not to think that he entertained rancour
toward the wine. It was no doubt dispensed with the honourable
intention of cheering. In point of flavour execrable, judging by
results it was innocuous.


"The test of it shall be the effect of it upon Professor Crooklyn,
and his appearance in the forenoon according to promise," Dr.
Middleton came to an end with his perturbed balancings. "If I
hear more of the eight or twelve winds discharged at once upon a
railway platform, and the young lady who dries herself of a
drenching by drinking brandy and water with a gentleman at a
railway inn, I shall solicit your sanction to my condemnation of
the wine as anti-Bacchic and a counterfeit presentment. Do not
misjudge me. Our hostess is not responsible. But widows should
marry."

"You must contrive to stop the Professor, sir, if he should attack
his hostess in that manner," said Vernon.

"Widows should marry!" Dr. Middleton repeated.

He murmured of objecting to be at the discretion of a butler;
unless, he was careful to add, the aforesaid functionary could
boast of an University education; and even then, said he, it
requires a line of ancestry to train a man's taste.

The Rev. Doctor smothered a yawn. The repression of it caused a
second one, a real monster, to come, big as our old friend of the
sea advancing on the chained-up Beauty.

Disconcerted by this damning evidence of indigestion, his
countenance showed that he considered himself to have been too
lenient to the wine of an unhusbanded hostess. He frowned
terribly.

In the interval Laetitia told Vernon of Crossjay's flight for the
day, hastily bidding the master to excuse him: she had no time to
hint the grounds of excuse. Vernon mentally made a guess.

Dr Middleton took his arm and discharged a volley at the
crotchetty scholarship of Professor Crooklyn, whom to confute by
book, he directed his march to the library. Having persuaded 
himself that he was dyspeptic, he had grown irascible. He
denounced all dining out, eulogized Patterne Hall as if it were
his home, and remembered he had dreamed in the night--a most
humiliating sign of physical disturbance. "But let me find a house
in proximity to Patterne, as I am induced to suppose I shall," he
said, "and here only am I to be met when I stir abroad."

Laetitia went to her room. She was complacently anxious enough to
prefer solitude and be willing to read. She was more seriously
anxious about Crossjay than about any of the others. For Clara
would be certain to speak very definitely, and how then could a
gentleman oppose her? He would supplicate, and could she be
brought to yield? It was not to be expected of a young lady who
had turned from Sir Willoughby. His inferiors would have had a
better chance. Whatever his faults, he had that element of
greatness which excludes the intercession of pity. Supplication
would be with him a form of condescension. It would be seen to be
such. His was a monumental pride that could not stoop. She had
preserved this image of the gentleman for a relic in the shipwreck
of her idolatry. So she mused between the lines of her book, and
finishing her reading and marking the page, she glanced down on
the lawn. Dr. Middleton was there, and alone; his hands behind his
back, his head bent. His meditative pace and unwonted perusal of
the turf proclaimed that a non-sentimental jury within had
delivered an unmitigated verdict upon the widow's wine.

Laetitia hurried to find Vernon.

He was in the hall. As she drew near him, the laboratory door
opened and shut.

"It is being decided," said Laetitia.

Vernon was paler than the hue of perfect calmness.

"I want to know whether I ought to take to my heels like Crossjay,
and shun the Professor," he said.

They spoke in under-tones, furtively watching the door.

"I wish what she wishes, I am sure; but it will go badly with the
boy," said Laetitia.

"Oh, well, then I'll take him," said Vernon, "I would rather. I
think I can manage it."

Again the laboratory door opened. This time it shut behind Miss
Middleton. She was highly flushed. Seeing them, she shook the
storm from her brows, with a dead smile; the best piece of
serenity she could put on for public wear.

She took a breath before she moved.

Vernon strode out of the house.

Clara swept up to Laetitia.

"You were deceived!"

The hard sob of anger barred her voice.

Laetitia begged her to come to her room with her.

"I want air: I must be by myself," said Clara, catching at her
garden-hat.

She walked swiftly to the portico steps and turned to the right,
to avoid the laboratory windows.



CHAPTER XXXIII

In Which the Comic Muse Has an Eye on Two Good Souls

Clara met Vernon on the bowling-green among the laurels. She
asked him where her father was.

"Don't speak to him now," said Vernon.

"Mr. Whitford, will you?"

"It is not advisable just now. Wait."

"Wait? Why not now?"

"He is not in the right humour."

She choked. There are times when there is no medicine for us in
sages, we want slaves; we scorn to temporize, we must overbear. On
she sped, as if she had made the mistake of exchanging words with
a post.

The scene between herself and Willoughby was a thick mist in her
head, except the burden and result of it, that he held to her
fast, would neither assist her to depart nor disengage her.

Oh, men! men! They astounded the girl; she could not define them
to her understanding. Their motives, their tastes, their vanity,
their tyranny, and the domino on their vanity, the baldness of
their tyranny, clinched her in feminine antagonism to brute power.
She was not the less disposed to rebellion by a very present sense
of the justice of what could be said to reprove her. She had but
one answer: "Anything but marry him!" It threw her on her nature,
our last and headlong advocate, who is quick as the flood to hurry
us from the heights to our level, and lower, if there be
accidental gaps in the channel. For say we have been guilty
of misconduct: can we redeem it by violating that which we are and
live by? The question sinks us back to the luxuriousness of a
sunny relinquishment of effort in the direction against tide. Our
nature becomes ingenious in devices, penetrative of the enemy,
confidently citing its cause for being frankly elvish or worse.
Clara saw a particular way of forcing herself to be surrendered.
She shut her eyes from it: the sight carried her too violently to
her escape; but her heart caught it up and huzzaed. To press the
points of her fingers at her bosom, looking up to the sky as she
did, and cry: "I am not my own; I am his!" was instigation
sufficient to make her heart leap up with all her body's blush to
urge it to recklessness. A despairing creature then may say she
has addressed the heavens and has had no answer to restrain her.

Happily for Miss Middleton, she had walked some minutes in her
chafing fit before the falcon eye of Colonel De Craye spied her
away on one of the beech-knots.

Vernon stood irresolute. It was decidedly not a moment for
disturbing Dr. Middleton's composure. He meditated upon a
conversation, as friendly as possible, with Willoughby. Round on
the front-lawn, he beheld Willoughby and Dr. Middleton together,
the latter having halted to lend attentive ear to his excellent
host. Unnoticed by them or disregarded, Vernon turned back to
Laetitia, and sauntered, talking with her of things current for as
long as he could endure to listen to praise of his pure
self-abnegation; proof of how well he had disguised himself, but
it smacked unpleasantly to him. His humourous intimacy with men's
minds likened the source of this distaste to the gallant
all-or-nothing of the gambler, who hates the little when he cannot
have the much, and would rather stalk from the tables clean-picked
than suffer ruin to be tickled by driblets of the glorious fortune
he has played for and lost. If we are not to be beloved, spare us
the small coin of compliments on character; especially when they
compliment only our acting. It is partly endurable to win eulogy
for our stately fortitude in losing, but Laetitia was unaware that
he flung away a stake; so she could not praise him for his merits.

"Willoughby makes the pardoning of Crossjay conditional," he said,
"and the person pleading for him has to grant the terms. How could
you imagine Willoughby would give her up! How could he! Who!
... He should, is easily said. I was no witness of the scene
between them just now, but I could have foretold the end of it; I
could almost recount the passages. The consequence is, that
everything depends upon the amount of courage she possesses. Dr.
Middleton won't leave Patterne yet. And it is of no use to speak
to him to-day. And she is by nature impatient, and is rendered
desperate."

"Why is it of no use to speak to Dr. Middleton today?" cried
Laetitia.

"He drank wine yesterday that did not agree with him; he can't
work. To-day he is looking forward to Patterne Port. He is not
likely to listen to any proposals to leave to-day."

"Goodness!"

"I know the depth of that cry!"

"You are excluded, Mr. Whitford."

"Not a bit of it; I am in with the rest. Say that men are to be
exclaimed at. Men have a right to expect you to know your own
minds when you close on a bargain. You don't know the world or
yourselves very well, it's true; still the original error is on
your side, and upon that you should fix your attention. She
brought her father here, and no sooner was he very comfortably
established than she wished to dislocate him."

"I cannot explain it; I cannot comprehend it," said Laetitia.

"You are Constancy."

"No." She coloured. "I am 'in with rest'. I do not say I should
have done the same. But I have the knowledge that I must not sit
in judgement on her. I can waver."

She coloured again. She was anxious that he should know her to be
not that stupid statue of Constancy in a corner doating on the
antic Deception. Reminiscences of the interview overnight made it
oppressive to her to hear herself praised for always pointing like
the needle. Her newly enfranchised individuality pressed to assert
its existence. Vernon, however, not seeing this novelty,
continued, to her excessive discomfort, to baste her old abandoned
image with his praises. They checked hers; and, moreover, he had
suddenly conceived an envy of her life-long, uncomplaining, almost
unaspiring, constancy of sentiment. If you know lovers when they
have not reason to be blissful, you will remember that in this
mood of admiring envy they are given to fits of uncontrollable
maundering. Praise of constancy, moreover, smote shadowily a
certain inconstant, enough to seem to ruffle her smoothness and do
no hurt. He found his consolation in it, and poor Laetitia writhed.
Without designing to retort, she instinctively grasped at a weapon
of defence in further exalting his devotedness; which reduced him
to cast his head to the heavens and implore them to partially
enlighten her. Nevertheless, maunder he must; and he recurred to
it in a way so utterly unlike himself that Laetitia stared in his
face. She wondered whether there could be anything secreted behind
this everlasting theme of constancy. He took her awakened gaze for
a summons to asseverations of sincerity, and out they came. She
would have fled from him, but to think of flying was to think how
little it was that urged her to fly, and yet the thought of
remaining and listening to praises undeserved and no longer
flattering, was a torture.

"Mr. Whitford, I bear no comparison with you."

"I do and must set you for my example, Miss Dale."

"Indeed, you do wrongly; you do not know me."

"I could say that. For years ...

"Pray, Mr. Whitford!"

"Well, I have admired it. You show us how self can be smothered."

"An echo would be a retort on you!"

"On me? I am never thinking of anything else."

"I could say that."

"You are necessarily conscious of not swerving."

"But I do; I waver dreadfully; I am not the same two days
running."

"You are the same, with 'ravishing divisions' upon the same.

"And you without the 'divisions.' I draw such support as I have
from you."

"From some simulacrum of me, then. And that will show you how
little you require support."

"I do not speak my own opinion only."

"Whose?"

"I am not alone."

"Again let me say, I wish I were like you!"

"Then let me add, I would willingly make the exchange!"

"You would be amazed at your bargain."

"Others would be!"

"Your exchange would give me the qualities I'm in want of, Miss
Dale."

"Negative, passive, at the best, Mr. Whitford. But I should have .
. ."

"Oh!--pardon me. But you inflict the sensations of a boy, with a
dose of honesty in him, called up to receive a prize he has won by
the dexterous use of a crib."

"And how do you suppose she feels who has a crown of Queen o" the
May forced on her head when she is verging on November?"

He rejected her analogy, and she his. They could neither of them
bring to light the circumstances which made one another's 
admiration so unbearable. The more he exalted her for constancy,
the more did her mind become bent upon critically examining the
object of that imagined virtue; and the more she praised him for
possessing the spirit of perfect friendliness, the fiercer grew
the passion in him which disdained the imputation, hissing like a
heated iron-bar that flings the waterdrops to steam. He would none
of it; would rather have stood exposed in his profound
foolishness.

Amiable though they were, and mutually affectionate, they came to
a stop in their walk, longing to separate, and not seeing how it
was to be done, they had so knit themselves together with the
pelting of their interlaudation.

"I think it is time for me to run home to my father for an hour,"
said Laetitia.

"I ought to be working," said Vernon.

Good progress was made to the disgarlanding of themselves thus
far; yet, an acutely civilized pair, the abruptness of the
transition from floweriness to commonplace affected them both,
Laetitia chiefly, as she had broken the pause, and she remarked:--
"I am really Constancy in my opinions."

"Another title is customary where stiff opinions are concerned. 
Perhaps by and by you will learn your mistake, and then you will
acknowledge the name for it."

"How?" said she. "What shall I learn?"

"If you learn that I am a grisly Egoist?"

"You? And it would not be egoism," added Laetitia, revealing to
him at the same instant as to herself that she swung suspended on
a scarce credible guess.

"--Will nothing pierce your ears, Mr. Whitford?"

He heard the intruding voice, but he was bent on rubbing out the
cloudy letters Laetitia had begun to spell, and he stammered,
in a tone of matter-of-fact: "Just that and no better"; then
turned to Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson.

"--Or are you resolved you will never see Professor Crooklyn when
you look on him?" said the great lady.

Vernon bowed to the Professor and apologized to him shufflingly
and rapidly, incoherently, and with a red face; which induced Mrs.
Mountstuart to scan Laetitia's.

After lecturing Vernon for his abandonment of her yesterday 
evening, and flouting his protestations, she returned to the
business of the day. "We walked from the lodge-gates to see the
park and prepare ourselves for Dr. Middleton. We parted last night
in the middle of a controversy and are rageing to resume it. Where
is our redoubtable antagonist?"

Mrs. Mountstuart wheeled Professor Crooklyn round to accompany
Vernon.

"We," she said, "are for modern English scholarship, opposed to
the champion of German."

"The contrary," observed Professor Crooklyn.

"Oh! We," she corrected the error serenely, "are for German 
scholarship opposed to English."

"Certain editions."

"We defend certain editions."

"Defend is a term of imperfect application to my position, ma'am."

"My dear Professor, you have in Dr. Middleton a match for you in
conscientious pugnacity, and you will not waste it upon me. There,
there they are; there he is. Mr. Whitford will conduct you. I
stand away from the first shock."

Mrs. Mountstuart fell back to Laetitia, saying: "He pores over a
little inexactitude in phrases, and pecks at it like a domestic
fowl."

Professor Crooklyn's attitude and air were so well described that
Laetitia could have laughed.

"These mighty scholars have their flavour," the great lady
hastened to add, lest her younger companion should be misled to
suppose that they were not valuable to a governing hostess: "their
shadow-fights are ridiculous, but they have their flavour at a
table. Last night, no: I discard all mention of last night. We
failed: as none else in this neighbourhood could fail, but we
failed. If we have among us a cormorant devouring young lady who
drinks up all the--ha!--brandy and water--of our inns and
occupies all our flys, why, our condition is abnormal, and we must
expect to fail: we are deprived of accommodation for accidental
circumstances. How Mr. Whitford could have missed seeing
Professor Crooklyn! And what was he doing at the station, Miss
Dale?"

"Your portrait of Professor Crooklyn was too striking, Mrs
Mountstuart, and deceived him by its excellence. He appears to
have seen only the blank side of the slate."

"Ah! He is a faithful friend of his cousin, do you not think?"

"He is the truest of friends."

"As for Dr. Middleton," Mrs. Mountstuart diverged from her
inquiry, "he will swell the letters of my vocabulary to gigantic
proportions if I see much of him: he is contagious."

"I believe it is a form of his humour."

"I caught it of him yesterday at my dinner-table in my distress, 
and must pass it off as a form of mine, while it lasts. I talked
Dr. Middleton half the dreary night through to my pillow. Your
candid opinion, my dear, come! As for me, I don't hesitate. We
seemed to have sat down to a solitary performance on the
bass-viol. We were positively an assembly of insects during
thunder. My very soul thanked Colonel De Craye for his diversions,
but I heard nothing but Dr. Middleton. It struck me that my table
was petrified, and every one sat listening to bowls played
overhead."

"I was amused."

"Really? You delight me. Who knows but that my guests were sincere
in their congratulations on a thoroughly successful evening? I
have fallen to this, you see! And I know, wretched people! that as
often as not it is their way of condoling with one. I do it
myself: but only where there have been amiable efforts. But
imagine my being congratulated for that!--Good-morning, Sir
Willoughby.--The worst offender! and I am in no pleasant mood
with him," Mrs. Mountstuart said aside to Laetitia, who drew back,
retiring.

Sir Willoughby came on a step or two. He stopped to watch
Laetitia's figure swimming to the house.

So, as, for instance, beside a stream, when a flower on the
surface extends its petals drowning to subside in the clear still
water, we exercise our privilege to be absent in the charmed
contemplation of a beautiful natural incident.

A smile of pleased abstraction melted on his features.



CHAPTER XXXIV

Mrs. Mountstuart and Sir Willoughby

"Good morning, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart," Sir Willoughby wakened
himself to address the great lady. "Why has she fled?"

"Has any one fled?"

"Laetitia Dale."

"Letty Dale? Oh, if you call that flying. Possibly to renew a
close conversation with Vernon Whitford, that I cut short. You
frightened me with your 'Shepherds-tell-me' air and tone. Lead me
to one of your garden-seats: out of hearing to Dr. Middleton, I
beg. He mesmerizes me, he makes me talk Latin. I was curiously
susceptible last night. I know I shall everlastingly associate him
with an abortive entertainment and solos on big instruments. We
were flat."

"Horace was in good vein."

"You were not."

"And Laetitia--Miss Dale talked well, I thought."

"She talked with you, and no doubt she talked well. We did not
mix. The yeast was bad. You shot darts at Colonel De Craye: you
tried to sting. You brought Dr. Middleton down on you. Dear me,
that man is a reverberation in my head. Where is your lady and
love?"

"Who?"

"Am I to name her?"

"Clara? I have not seen her for the last hour. Wandering, I
suppose.

"A very pretty summer bower," said Mrs. Mountstuart, seating
herself "Well, my dear Sir Willoughby, preferences, preferences
are not to be accounted for, and one never knows whether to pity
or congratulate, whatever may occur. I want to see Miss
Middleton."

"Your 'dainty rogue in porcelain' will be at your beck--you lunch
with us?--before you leave."

"So now you have taken to quoting me, have you?"

"But 'a romantic tale on her eyelashes' is hardly descriptive any
longer."

"Descriptive of whom? Now you are upon Laetitia Dale!"

"I quote you generally. She has now a graver look."

"And well may have!"

"Not that the romance has entirely disappeared."

"No; it looks as if it were in print."

"You have hit it perfectly, as usual, ma'am."

Sir Willoughby mused.

Like one resuming his instrument to take up the melody in a
concerted piece, he said: "I thought Laetitia Dale had a
singularly animated air last night."

"Why!--" Mrs. Mountstuart mildly gaped.

"I want a new description of her. You know, I collect your mottoes
and sentences."

"It seems to me she is coming three parts out of her shell, and
wearing it as a hood for convenience."

"Ready to issue forth at an invitation? Admirable! exact!"

"Ay, my good Sir Willoughby, but are we so very admirable and
exact? Are we never to know our own minds?"

He produced a polysyllabic sigh, like those many-jointed compounds
of poets in happy languages, which are copious in a single
expression: "Mine is known to me. It always has been. Cleverness
in women is not uncommon. Intellect is the pearl. A woman of
intellect is as good as a Greek statue; she is divinely wrought,
and she is divinely rare."

"Proceed," said the lady, confiding a cough to the air.

"The rarity of it: and it is not mere intellect, it is a
sympathetic intellect; or else it is an intellect in perfect
accord with an intensely sympathetic disposition;--the rarity of
it makes it too precious to be parted with when once we have met
it. I prize it the more the older I grow."

"Are we on the feminine or the neuter?"

"I beg pardon?"

"The universal or the individual?"

He shrugged. "For the rest, psychological affinities may exist
coincident with and entirely independent of material or moral
prepossessions, relations, engagements, ties."

"Well, that is not the raving of passion, certainly," said Mrs
Mountstuart, "and it sounds as if it were a comfortable doctrine
for men. On that plea, you might all of you be having Aspasia and
a wife. We saw your fair Middleton and Colonel de Craye at a
distance as we entered the park. Professor Crooklyn is under some
hallucination."

"What more likely?"

The readiness and the double-bearing of the reply struck her
comic sense with awe.

"The Professor must hear that. He insists on the fly, and the inn,
and the wet boots, and the warming mixture, and the testimony of
the landlady and the railway porter."

"I say, what more likely?"

"Than that he should insist?"

"If he is under the hallucination!"

"He may convince others."

"I have only to repeat. . ."

"'What more likely?' It's extremely philosophical. Coincident 
with a pursuit of the psychological affinities."

"Professor Crooklyn will hardly descend, I suppose, from his
classical altitudes to lay his hallucinations before Dr.
Middleton?"

"Sir Willoughby, you are the pink of chivalry!"

By harping on Laetitia, he had emboldened Mrs. Mountstuart to lift
the curtain upon Clara. It was offensive to him, but the injury
done to his pride had to be endured for the sake of his general
plan of self-protection.

"Simply desirous to save my guests from annoyance of any kind", he
said. "Dr Middleton can look 'Olympus and thunder', as Vernon
calls it."

"Don't. I see him. That look! It is Dictionary-bitten! Angry,
homed Dictionary!--an apparition of Dictionary in the night--to
a dunce!"

"One would undergo a good deal to avoid the sight."

"What the man must be in a storm! Speak as you please of yourself:
you are a true and chivalrous knight to dread it for her. But now,
candidly, how is it you cannot condescend to a little management?
Listen to an old friend. You are too lordly. No lover can afford
to be incomprehensible for half an hour. Stoop a little.
Sermonizings are not to be thought of. You can govern unseen. You
are to know that I am one who disbelieves in philosophy in love. I
admire the look of it, I give no credit to the assumption. I
rather like lovers to be out at times: it makes them picturesque,
and it enlivens their monotony. I perceived she had a spot of
wildness. It's proper that she should wear it off before
marriage."

"Clara? The wildness of an infant!" said Willoughby, paternally, 
musing over an inward shiver. "You saw her at a distance just now,
or you might have heard her laughing. Horace diverts her
excessively."

"I owe him my eternal gratitude for his behaviour last night. She
was one of my bright faces. Her laughter was delicious; rain in
the desert! It will tell you what the load on me was, when I
assure you those two were merely a spectacle to me--points I
scored in a lost game. And I know they were witty."

"They both have wit; a kind of wit," Willoughby assented.

"They struck together like a pair of cymbals."

"Not the highest description of instrument. However, they amuse
me. I like to hear them when I am in the vein."

"That vein should be more at command with you, my friend. You can
be perfect, if you like."

"Under your tuition."

Willoughby leaned to her, bowing languidly. He was easier in his
pain for having hoodwinked the lady. She was the outer world to
him; she could tune the world's voice; prescribe which of the two
was to be pitied, himself or Clara; and he did not intend it to be
himself, if it came to the worst. They were far away from that at
present, and he continued:

"Probably a man's power of putting on a face is not equal to a
girl's. I detest petty dissensions. Probably I show it when all is
not quite smooth. Little fits of suspicion vex me. It is a
weakness, not to play them off, I know. Men have to learn the arts
which come to women by nature. I don't sympathize with suspicion,
from having none myself,"

His eyebrows shot up. That ill-omened man Flitch had sidled round
by the bushes to within a few feet of him. Flitch primarily
defended himself against the accusation of drunkenness, which was
hurled at him to account for his audacity in trespassing against
the interdict; but he admitted that he had taken "something short"
for a fortification in visiting scenes where he had once been
happy--at Christmastide, when all the servants, and the butler at
head, grey old Mr. Chessington, sat in rows, toasting the young
heir of the old Hall in the old port wine! Happy had he been then,
before ambition for a shop, to be his own master and an
independent gentleman, had led him into his quagmire:--to look
back envying a dog on the old estate, and sigh for the smell of
Patterne stables: sweeter than Arabia, his drooping nose appeared
to say.

He held up close against it something that imposed silence on Sir
Willoughby as effectively as a cunning exordium in oratory will
enchain mobs to swallow what is not complimenting them; and this
he displayed secure in its being his licence to drivel his
abominable pathos. Sir Willoughby recognized Clara's purse. He
understood at once how the must have come by it: he was not so
quick in devising a means of stopping the tale. Flitch foiled him.
"Intact," he replied to the question: "What have you there?" He
repeated this grand word. And then he turned to Mrs. Mountstuart
to speak of Paradise and Adam, in whom he saw the prototype of
himself: also the Hebrew people in the bondage of Egypt,
discoursed of by the clergymen, not without a likeness to him.

"Sorrows have done me one good, to send me attentive to church, my
lady," said Flitch, "when I might have gone to London, the
coachman's home, and been driving some honourable family, with no
great advantage to my morals, according to what I hear of. And a
purse found under the seat of a fly in London would have a poor
chance of returning intact to the young lady losing it."

"Put it down on that chair; inquiries will be made, and you will
see Sir Willoughby," said Mrs. Mountstuart. "Intact, no doubt; it
is not disputed."

With one motion of a finger she set the man rounding.

Flitch halted; he was very regretful of the termination of his
feast of pathos, and he wished to relate the finding of the purse,
but he could not encounter Mrs. Mountstuart's look; he slouched
away in very close resemblance to the ejected Adam of illustrated
books.

"It's my belief that naturalness among the common people has died
out of the kingdom," she said.

Willoughby charitably apologized for him. "He has been fuddling
himself."

Her vigilant considerateness had dealt the sensitive gentleman a
shock, plainly telling him she had her ideas of his actual
posture. Nor was he unhurt by her superior acuteness and her
display of authority on his grounds.

He said, boldly, as he weighed the purse, half tossing it: "It's
not unlike Clara's."

He feared that his lips and cheeks were twitching, and as he grew
aware of a glassiness of aspect that would reflect any suspicion
of a keen-eyed woman, he became bolder still!

"Laetitia's, I know it is not. Hers is an ancient purse."

"A present from you!"

"How do you hit on that, my dear lady?"

"Deductively."

"Well, the purse looks as good as new in quality, like the owner.

"The poor dear has not much occasion for using it."

"You are mistaken: she uses it daily."

"If it were better filled, Sir Willoughby, your old scheme might
be arranged. The parties do not appear so unwilling. Professor
Crooklyn and I came on them just now rather by surprise, and I
assure you their heads were close, faces meeting, eyes musing."

"Impossible."

"Because when they approach the point, you won't allow it!
Selfish!"

"Now," said Willoughby, very animatedly, "question Clara. Now,
do, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart, do speak to Clara on that head; she
will convince you I have striven quite recently against myself, if
you like. I have instructed her to aid me, given her the fullest
instructions, carte blanche. She cannot possibly have a doubt. I
may look to her to remove any you may entertain from your mind on
the subject. I have proposed, seconded, and chorussed it, and it
will not be arranged. If you expect me to deplore that fact, I
can only answer that my actions are under my control, my feelings
are not. I will do everything consistent with the duties of a man
of honour perpetually running into fatal errors because he did not
properly consult the dictates of those feelings at the right
season. I can violate them: but I can no more command them than I
can my destiny. They were crushed of old, and so let them be now.
Sentiments we won't discuss; though you know that sentiments have
a bearing on social life: are factors, as they say in their
later jargon. I never speak of mine. To you I could. It is not
necessary. If old Vernon, instead of flattening his chest at a
desk, had any manly ambition to take part in public affairs, she
would be the woman for him. I have called her my Egeria. She would
be his Cornelia. One could swear of her that she would have noble
offspring!--But old Vernon has had his disappointment, and will
moan over it up to the end. And she? So it appears. I have tried;
yes, personally: without effect. In other matters I may have
influence with her: not in that one. She declines. She will live
and die Laetitia Dale. We are alone: I confess to you, I love the
name. It's an old song in my ears. Do not be too ready with a name
for me. Believe me--I speak from my experience hitherto--there
is a fatality in these things. I cannot conceal from my poor girl
that this fatality exists . . ."

"Which is the poor girl at present?" said Mrs. Mountstuart, cool
in a mystification.

"And though she will tell you that I have authorized and Clara 
Middleton--done as much as man can to institute the union you
suggest, she will own that she is conscious of the presence of
this--fatality, I call it for want of a better title between us.
It drives her in one direction, me in another--or would, if I
submitted to the pressure. She is not the first who has been
conscious of it."

"Are we laying hold of a third poor girl?" said Mrs. Mountstuart. 
"Ah! I remember. And I remember we used to call it playing fast
and loose in those days, not fatality. It is very strange. It may
be that you were unblushingly courted in those days, and
excusable; and we all supposed ... but away you went for your
tour."

"My mother's medical receipt for me. Partially it succeeded. She
was for grand marriages: not I. I could make, I could not be, a
sacrifice. And then I went in due time to Dr. Cupid on my own
account. She has the kind of attraction. . . But one changes! On
revient toujours. First we begin with a liking; then we give
ourselves up to the passion of beauty: then comes the serious
question of suitableness of the mate to match us; and perhaps we
discover that we were wiser in early youth than somewhat later.
However, she has beauty. Now, Mrs Mountstuart, you do admire her.
Chase the idea of the 'dainty rogue' out of your view of her: you
admire her: she is captivating; she has a particular charm of her
own, nay, she has real beauty."

Mrs. Mountstuart fronted him to say: "Upon my word, my dear Sir
Willoughby, I think she has it to such a degree that I don't know
the man who could hold out against her if she took the field. She
is one of the women who are dead shots with men. Whether it's in
their tongues or their eyes, or it's an effusion and an atmosphere
--whatever it is, it's a spell, another fatality for you!"

"Animal; not spiritual!"

"Oh, she hasn't the head of Letty Dale."

Sir Willoughby allowed Mrs. Mountstuart to pause and follow her
thoughts.

"Dear me!" she exclaimed. "I noticed a change in Letty Dale last
night; and to-day. She looked fresher and younger; extremely
well: which is not what I can say for you, my friend. Fatalizing
is not good for the complexion."

"Don't take away my health, pray," cried Willoughby, with a
snapping laugh.

"Be careful," said Mrs. Mountstuart. "You have got a sentimental 
tone. You talk of 'feelings crushed of old'. It is to a woman, not
to a man that you speak, but that sort of talk is a way of making
the ground slippery. I listen in vain for a natural tongue; and
when I don't hear it, I suspect plotting in men. You show your
under-teeth too at times when you draw in a breath, like a
condemned high-caste Hindoo my husband took me to see in a jail in
Calcutta, to give me some excitement when I was pining for
England. The creature did it regularly as he breathed; you did it
last night, and you have been doing it to-day, as if the air cut
you to the quick. You have been spoilt. You have been too much
anointed. What I've just mentioned is a sign with me of a settled
something on the brain of a man."

"The brain?" said Sir Willoughby, frowning.

"Yes, you laugh sourly, to look at," said she. "Mountstuart told
me that the muscles of the mouth betray men sooner than the eyes,
when they have cause to be uneasy in their minds."

"But, ma'am, I shall not break my word; I shall not, not; I
intend, I have resolved to keep it. I do not fatalize, let my
complexion be black or white. Despite my resemblance to a
high-caste malefactor of the Calcutta prison-wards ..."

"Friend! friend! you know how I chatter."

He saluted her finger-ends. "Despite the extraordinary display of
teeth, you will find me go to execution with perfect calmness;
with a resignation as good as happiness."

"Like a Jacobite lord under the Georges."

"You have told me that you wept to read of one: like him, then. My
principles have not changed, if I have. When I was younger, I had
an idea of a wife who would be with me in my thoughts as well as
aims: a woman with a spirit of romance, and a brain of solid
sense. I shall sooner or later dedicate myself to a public life;
and shall, I suppose, want the counsellor or comforter who ought
always to be found at home. It may be unfortunate that I have the
ideal in my head. But I would never make rigorous demands for
specific qualities. The cruellest thing in the world is to set up
a living model before a wife, and compel her to copy it. In any
case, here we are upon the road: the die is cast. I shall not
reprieve myself. I cannot release her. Marriage represents facts,
courtship fancies. She will be cured by-and-by of that coveting of
everything that I do, feel, think, dream, imagine . . .
ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum. Laetitia was invited here to show her
the example of a fixed character--solid as any concrete substance
you would choose to build on, and not a whit the less feminine."

"Ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum. You need not tell me you have a design
in all that you do, Willoughby Patterne."

"You smell the autocrat? Yes, he can mould and govern the
creatures about him. His toughest rebel is himself! If you see
Clara ... You wish to see her, I think you said?"

"Her behaviour to Lady Busshe last night was queer."

"If you will. She makes a mouth at porcelain. Toujours la
porcelaine! For me, her pettishness is one of her charms, I
confess it. Ten years younger, I could not have compared them."

"Whom?"

"Laetitia and Clara."

"Sir Willoughby, in any case, to quote you, here we are all upon
the road, and we must act as if events were going to happen; and I
must ask her to help me on the subject of my wedding-present, for
I don't want to have her making mouths at mine, however pretty--
and she does it prettily."

"'Another dedicatory offering to the rogue in me!' she says of
porcelain."

"Then porcelain it shall not be. I mean to consult her; I have
come determined upon a chat with her. I think I understand. But
she produces false impressions on those who don't know you both.
'I shall have that porcelain back,' says Lady Busshe to me, when
we were shaking hands last night: 'I think,' says she, 'it should
have been the Willow Pattern.' And she really said: 'He's in for
being jilted a second time!'"

Sir Willoughby restrained a bound of his body that would have sent
him up some feet into the air. He felt his skull thundered at
within.

"Rather than that it should fan upon her!" ejaculated he,
correcting his resemblance to the high-caste culprit as soon as it
recurred to him.

"But you know Lady Busshe," said Mrs. Mountstuart, genuinely 
solicitous to ease the proud man of his pain. She could see
through him to the depth of the skin, which his fencing
sensitiveness vainly attempted to cover as it did the heart of
him. "Lady Busshe is nothing without her flights, fads, and
fancies. She has always insisted that you have an unfortunate
nose. I remember her saying on the day of your majority, it was
the nose of a monarch destined to lose a throne."

"Have I ever offended Lady Busshe?"

"She trumpets you. She carries Lady Culmer with her too, and you
may expect a visit of nods and hints and pots of alabaster. They
worship you: you are the hope of England in their eyes, and no
woman is worthy of you: but they are a pair of fatalists, and if
you begin upon Letty Dale with them, you might as well forbid your
banns. They will be all over the country exclaiming on
predestination and marriages made in heaven."

"Clara and her father!" cried Sir Willoughby.

Dr Middleton and his daughter appeared in the circle of shrubs and
flowers.

"Bring her to me, and save me from the polyglot," said Mrs
Mountstuart, in afright at Dr. Middleton's manner of pouring forth
into the ears of the downcast girl.

The leisure he loved that he might debate with his genius upon any
next step was denied to Willoughby: he had to place his trust in
the skill with which he had sown and prepared Mrs Mountstuart's
understanding to meet the girl--beautiful abhorred that she was!
detested darling! thing to squeeze to death and throw to the dust,
and mourn over!

He had to risk it; and at an hour when Lady Busshe's prognostic 
grievously impressed his intense apprehensiveness of nature.

As it happened that Dr. Middleton's notion of a disagreeable duty
in colloquy was to deliver all that he contained, and escape the
listening to a syllable of reply, Willoughby withdrew his daughter
from him opportunely.

"Mrs. Mountstuart wants you, Clara."

"I shall be very happy," Clara replied, and put on a new face. An
imperceptible nervous shrinking was met by another force in her
bosom, that pushed her to advance without a sign of reluctance.
She seemed to glitter.

She was handed to Mrs. Mountstuart.

Dr Middleton laid his hand over Willoughby's shoulder, retiring on
a bow before the great lady of the district. He blew and said: "An
opposition of female instincts to masculine intellect necessarily
creates a corresponding antagonism of intellect to instinct."

"Her answer, sir? Her reasons? Has she named any?"

"The cat," said Dr. Middleton, taking breath for a sentence, "that
humps her back in the figure of the letter H, or a Chinese bridge
has given the dog her answer and her reasons, we may presume: but
he that undertakes to translate them into human speech might
likewise venture to propose an addition to the alphabet and a
continuation of Homer. The one performance would be not more
wonderful than the other. Daughters, Willoughby, daughters! Above
most human peccancies, I do abhor a breach of faith. She will not
be guilty of that. I demand a cheerful fulfilment of a pledge:
and I sigh to think that I cannot count on it without
administering a lecture."

"She will soon be my care, sir."

"She shall be. Why, she is as good as married. She is at the
altar. She is in her house. She is--why, where is she not? She
has entered the sanctuary. She is out of the market. This maenad
shriek for freedom would happily entitle her to the Republican cap
--the Phrygian--in a revolutionary Parisian procession. To me it
has no meaning; and but that I cannot credit child of mine with
mania, I should be in trepidation of her wits."

Sir Willoughby's livelier fears were pacified by the information 
that Clara had simply emitted a cry. Clara had once or twice given
him cause for starting and considering whether to think of her sex
differently or condemningly of her, yet he could not deem her
capable of fully unbosoming herself even to him, and under
excitement. His idea of the cowardice of girls combined with his
ideal of a waxwork sex to persuade him that though they are often
(he had experienced it) wantonly desperate in their acts, their
tongues are curbed by rosy prudency. And this was in his favour.
For if she proved speechless and stupid with Mrs. Mountstuart, the
lady would turn her over, and beat her flat, beat her angular, in
fine, turn her to any shape, despising her, and cordially believe
him to be the model gentleman of Christendom. She would fill in
the outlines he had sketched to her of a picture that he had small
pride in by comparison with his early vision of a fortune-favoured,
triumphing squire, whose career is like the sun's, intelligibly
lordly to all comprehensions. Not like your model gentleman, that
has to be expounded--a thing for abstract esteem!  However, it
was the choice left to him. And an alternative was enfolded in
that. Mrs. Mountstuart's model gentleman could marry either one of
two women, throwing the other overboard. He was bound to marry: he
was bound to take to himself one of them: and whichever one he
selected would cast a lustre on his reputation.  At least she
would rescue him from the claws of Lady Busshe, and her owl's
hoot of "Willow Pattern", and her hag's shriek of "twice jilted".
That flying infant Willoughby--his unprotected little incorporeal
omnipresent Self (not thought of so much as passionately felt for)
--would not be scoffed at as the luckless with women. A fall
indeed from his original conception of his name of fame abroad!
But Willoughby had the high consolation of knowing that others
have fallen lower. There is the fate of the devils to comfort us,
if we are driven hard. "For one of your pangs another bosom is
racked by ten", we read in the solacing Book.

With all these nice calculations at work, Willoughby stood above
himself, contemplating his active machinery, which he could partly
criticize but could not stop, in a singular wonderment at the aims
and schemes and tremours of one who was handsome, manly,
acceptable in the world's eyes: and had he not loved himself most
heartily he would have been divided to the extent of repudiating
that urgent and excited half of his being, whose motions appeared
as those of a body of insects perpetually erecting and repairing a
structure of extraordinary pettiness. He loved himself too
seriously to dwell on the division for more than a minute or so.
But having seen it, and for the first time, as he believed, his
passion for the woman causing it became surcharged with
bitterness, atrabiliar.

A glance behind him, as he walked away with Dr. Middleton, showed
Clara, cunning creature that she was, airily executing her
malicious graces in the preliminary courtesies with Mrs.
Mountstuart.



CHAPTER XXXV

Miss Middleton and Mrs. Mountstuart

"Sit beside me, fair Middleton," said the great lady.

"Gladly," said Clara, bowing to her title.

"I want to sound you, my dear."

Clara presented an open countenance with a dim interrogation on
the forehead. "Yes?" she said, submissively.

"You were one of my bright faces last night. I was in love with
you. Delicate vessels ring sweetly to a finger-nail, and if the
wit is true, you answer to it; that I can see, and that is what I
like. Most of the people one has at a table are drums. A
ruba-dub-dub on them is the only way to get a sound. When they can
be persuaded to do it upon one another, they call it
conversation."

"Colonel De Craye was very funny."

"Funny, and witty too."

"But never spiteful."

"These Irish or half Irishmen are my taste. If they're not
politicians, mind; I mean Irish gentlemen. I will never have
another dinner-party without one. Our men's tempers are uncertain.
You can't get them to forget themselves. And when the wine is in
them the nature comes out, and they must be buffetting, and
up start politics, and good-bye to harmony! My husband, I am sorry
to say, was one of those who have a long account of ruined dinners
against them. I have seen him and his friends red as the roast and
white as the boiled with wrath on a popular topic they had excited
themselves over, intrinsically not worth a snap of the fingers. In
London!" exclaimed Mrs. Mountstuart, to aggravate the charge
against her lord in the Shades. "But town or country, the table
should be sacred. I have heard women say it is a plot on the side
of the men to teach us our littleness. I don't believe they have a
plot. It would be to compliment them on a talent. I believe they
fall upon one another blindly, simply because they are full;
which is, we are told, the preparation for the fighting Englishman.
They cannot eat and keep a truce. Did you notice that dreadful Mr.
Capes?"

"The gentleman who frequently contradicted papa? But Colonel De
Craye was good enough to relieve us."

"How, my dear?"

"You did not hear him? He took advantage of an interval when Mr.
Capes was breathing after a paean to his friend, the Governor--I
think--of one of the presidencies, to say to the lady beside him:
'He was a wonderful administrator and great logician; he married
an Anglo-Indian widow, and soon after published a pamphlet in
favour of Suttee.'"

"And what did the lady say?"

"She said: 'Oh.'"

"Hark at her! And was it heard?"

"Mr. Capes granted the widow, but declared he had never seen the
pamphlet in favour of Suttee, and disbelieved in it. He insisted
that it was to be named Sati. He was vehement."

"Now I do remember:--which must have delighted the colonel. And
Mr. Capes retired from the front upon a repetition of 'in toto, in
toto'. As if 'in toto' were the language of a dinner-table! But
what will ever teach these men? Must we import Frenchmen to give
them an example in the art of conversation, as their grandfathers
brought over marquises to instruct them in salads? And our young
men too! Women have to take to the hunting-field to be able to
talk with them, and be on a par with their grooms. Now, there was
Willoughby Patterne, a prince among them formerly. Now, did you
observe him last night? did you notice how, instead of conversing,
instead of assisting me--as he was bound to do doubly owing to
the defection of Vernon Whitford: a thing I don't yet comprehend--
there he sat sharpening his lower lip for cutting remarks. And at
my best man! at Colonel De Craye! If he had attacked Mr. Capes,
with his Governor of Bomby, as the man pronounces it, or Colonel
Wildjohn and his Protestant Church in Danger, or Sir Wilson
Pettifer harping on his Monarchical Republic, or any other! No, he
preferred to be sarcastic upon friend Horace, and he had the worst
of it. Sarcasm is so silly! What is the gain if he has been smart?
People forget the epigram and remember the other's good temper. On
that field, my dear, you must make up your mind to be beaten by
'friend Horace'. I have my prejudices and I have my
prepossessions, but I love good temper, and I love wit, and when I
see a man possessed of both, I set my cap at him, and there's my
flat confession, and highly unfeminine it is."

"Not at all!" cried Clara.

"We are one, then."

Clara put up a mouth empty of words: she was quite one with her.
Mrs. Mountstuart pressed her hand. "When one does get intimate
with a dainty rogue!" she said. "You forgive me all that, for I
could vow that Willoughby has betrayed me."

Clara looked soft, kind, bright, in turns, and clouded instantly 
when the lady resumed: "A friend of my own sex, and young, and a
close neighbour, is just what I would have prayed for. And I'll
excuse you, my dear, for not being so anxious about the friendship
of an old woman. But I shall be of use to you, you will find. In
the first place, I never tap for secrets. In the second, I keep
them. Thirdly, I have some power. And fourth, every young married
woman has need of a friend like me. Yes, and Lady Patterne heading
all the county will be the stronger for my backing. You don't look
so mighty well pleased, my dear. Speak out."

"Dear Mrs. Mountstuart!"

"I tell you, I am very fond of Willoughby, but I saw the faults of
the boy and see the man's. He has the pride of a king, and it's a
pity if you offend it. He is prodigal in generosity, but he can't
forgive. As to his own errors, you must be blind to them as a
Saint. The secret of him is, that he is one of those excessively
civilized creatures who aim at perfection: and I think he ought to
be supported in his conceit of having attained it; for the more
men of that class, the greater our influence. He excels in manly
sports, because he won't be excelled in anything, but as men don't
comprehend his fineness, he comes to us; and his wife must manage
him by that key. You look down at the idea of managing. It has to
be done. One thing you may be assured of, he will be proud of
you. His wife won't be very much enamoured of herself if she is
not the happiest woman in the world. You will have the best
horses, the best dresses, the finest jewels in England; and an
incomparable cook. The house will be changed the moment you enter
it as Lady Patterne. And, my dear, just where he is, with all his
graces, deficient of attraction, yours will tell. The sort of
Othello he would make, or Leontes, I don't know, and none of us
ever needs to know. My impression is, that if even a shadow of a
suspicion flitted across him, he is a sort of man to double-dye
himself in guilt by way of vengeance in anticipation of an
imagined offence. Not uncommon with men. I have heard strange
stories of them: and so will you in your time to come, but not
from me. No young woman shall ever be the sourer for having been
my friend. One word of advice now we are on the topic: never play
at counter-strokes with him. He will be certain to out-stroke you,
and you will be driven further than you meant to go. They say we
beat men at that game; and so we do, at the cost of beating
ourselves. And if once we are started, it is a race-course ending
on a precipice--over goes the winner. We must be moderately 
slavish to keep our place; which is given us in appearance; but
appearances make up a remarkably large part of life, and far the
most comfortable, so long as we are discreet at the right moment.
He is a man whose pride, when hurt, would run his wife to
perdition to solace it. If he married a troublesome widow, his
pamphlet on Suttee would be out within the year. Vernon Whitford
would receive instructions about it the first frosty moon. You
like Miss Dale?"

"I think I like her better than she likes me," said Clara.

"Have you never warmed together?"

"I have tried it. She is not one bit to blame. I can see how it is
that she misunderstands me: or justly condemns me, perhaps I
should say."

"The hero of two women must die and be wept over in common before
they can appreciate one another. You are not cold?"

"No."

"You shuddered, my dear."

"Did l?"

"I do sometimes. Feet will be walking over ones grave, wherever it
lies. Be sure of this: Willoughby Patterne is a man of
unimpeachable honour."

"I do not doubt it."

"He means to be devoted to you. He has been accustomed to have
women hanging around him like votive offerings."

"I ...!"

"You cannot: of course not: any one could see that at a glance.
You are all the sweeter to me for not being tame. Marriage cures
a multitude of indispositions."

"Oh! Mrs. Mountstuart, will you listen to me?"

"Presently. Don't threaten me with confidences. Eloquence is a
terrible thing in woman. I suspect, my dear, that we both know as
much as could be spoken."

"You hardly suspect the truth, I fear."

"Let me tell you one thing about jealous men--when they are not
blackamoors married to disobedient daughters. I speak of our civil
creature of the drawing-rooms: and lovers, mind, not husbands: two
distinct species, married or not:--they're rarely given to
jealousy unless they are flighty themselves. The jealousy fixes
them. They have only to imagine that we are for some fun likewise
and they grow as deferential as my footman, as harmless as the
sportsman whose gun has burst. Ah! my fair Middleton, am I
pretending to teach you? You have read him his lesson, and my
table suffered for it last night, but I bear no rancour."

"You bewilder me, Mrs. Mountstuart."

"Not if I tell you that you have driven the poor man to try
whether it would be possible for him to give you up."

"I have?"

"Well, and you are successful."

"I am?"

"Jump, my dear!"

"He will?"

"When men love stale instead of fresh, withered better than
blooming, excellence in the abstract rather than the palpable.
With their idle prate of feminine intellect, and a grotto nymph,
and a mother of Gracchi! Why, he must think me dazed with
admiration of him to talk to me! One listens, you know. And he is
one of the men who cast a kind of physical spell on you while he
has you by the ear, until you begin to think of it by talking to
somebody else. I suppose there are clever people who do see deep
into the breast while dialogue is in progress. One reads of them.
No, my dear, you have very cleverly managed to show him that it
isn't at all possible: he can't. And the real cause for alarm, in
my humble opinion, is lest your amiable foil should have been a
trifle, as he would say, deceived, too much in earnest, led too
far. One may reprove him for not being wiser, but men won't learn
without groaning that they are simply weapons taken up to be put
down when done with. Leave it to me to compose him.--Willoughby 
can't give you up. I'm certain he has tried; his pride has been
horridly wounded. You were shrewd, and he has had his lesson. If
these little rufflings don't come before marriage they come after;
so it's not time lost; and it's good to be able to look back on
them. You are very white, my child."

"Can you, Mrs. Mountstuart, can you think I would be so
heartlessly treacherous?"

"Be honest, fair Middleton, and answer me: Can you say you had not
a corner of an idea of producing an effect on Willoughby?"

Clara checked the instinct of her tongue to defend her reddening 
cheeks, with a sense that she was disintegrating and crumbling,
but she wanted this lady for a friend, and she had to submit to
the conditions, and be red and silent.

Mrs. Mountstuart examined her leisurely.

"That will do. Conscience blushes. One knows it by the
conflagration. Don't be hard on yourself.. there you are in the
other extreme. That blush of yours would count with me against any
quantity of evidence--all the Crooklyns in the kingdom. You lost
your purse."

"I discovered that it was lost this morning."

"Flitch has been here with it. Willoughby has it. You will ask him
for it; he will demand payment: you will be a couple of yards"
length or so of cramoisy: and there ends the episode, nobody
killed, only a poor man melancholy-wounded, and I must offer him
my hand to mend him, vowing to prove to him that Suttee was
properly abolished. Well, and now to business. I said I wanted to
sound you. You have been overdone with porcelain. Poor Lady Busshe
is in despair at your disappointment. Now, I mean my
wedding-present to be to your taste."

"Madam!"

"Who is the madam you are imploring?"

"Dear Mrs. Mountstuart!"

"Well?"

"I shall fall in your esteem. Perhaps you will help me. No one
else can. I am a prisoner: I am compelled to continue this
imposture. Oh, I shun speaking much: you object to it and I
dislike it: but I must endeavour to explain to you that I am
unworthy of the position you think a proud one."

"Tut-tut; we are all unworthy, cross our arms, bow our heads; and
accept the honours. Are you playing humble handmaid? What an old
organ-tune that is! Well? Give me reasons."

"I do not wish to marry."

"He's the great match of the county!"

"I cannot marry him."

"Why, you are at the church door with him! Cannot marry him?"

"It does not bind me."

"The church door is as binding as the altar to an honourable girl.
What have you been about? Since I am in for confidences, half ones
won't do. We must have honourable young women as well as men of
honour. You can't imagine he is to be thrown over now, at this
hour? What have you against him? come!"

"I have found that I do not . .

"What?"

"Love him."

Mrs. Mountstuart grimaced transiently. "That is no answer. The
cause!" she said. "What has he done?

"Nothing."

"And when did you discover this nothing?"

"By degrees: unknown to myself; suddenly."

"Suddenly and by degrees? I suppose it's useless to ask for a
head.  But if all this is true, you ought not to be here."

"I wish to go; I am unable."

"Have you had a scene together?"

"I have expressed my wish."

"In roundabout?--girl's English?"

"Quite clearly. oh, very clearly."

"Have you spoken to your father?"

"I have."

"And what does Dr. Middleton say?"

"It is incredible to him."

"To me too! I can understand little differences, little whims,
caprices: we don't settle into harness for a tap on the shoulder
as a man becomes a knight: but to break and bounce away from an
unhappy gentleman at the church door is either madness or it's one
of the things without a name. You think you are quite sure of
yourself?"

"I am so sure. that I look back with regret on the time when I
was not."

"But you were in love with him."

"I was mistaken."

"No love?"

"I have none to give.

"Dear me!--Yes, yes, but that tone of sorrowful conviction is
often a trick, it's not new: and I know that assumption of plain
sense to pass off a monstrosity." Mrs. Mountstuart struck her lap.
"Soh! but I've had to rack my brain for it: feminine disgust? You
have been hearing imputations of his past life? moral character?
No? Circumstances might make him behave unkindly, not
unhandsomely: and we have no claim over a man's past, or it's too
late to assert it. What is the case?"

"We are quite divided."

"Nothing in the way of ... nothing green-eyed?"

"Far from that!"

"Then name it."

"We disagree."

"Many a very good agreement is founded on disagreeing. It's to be
regretted that you are not portionless. If you had been, you would
have made very little of disagreeing. You are just as much bound
in honour as if you had the ring on your finger."

"In honour! But I appeal to his, I am no wife for him."

"But if he insists, you consent?"

"I appeal to reason. Is it, madam . . ."

"But, I say, if he insists, you consent?"

"He will insist upon his own misery as well as mine."

Mrs. Mountstuart rocked herself "My poor Sir Willoughby! What a
fate!--And I took you for a clever girl!  Why, I have been
admiring your management of him! And here am I bound to take a
lesson from Lady Busshe. My dear good Middleton, don't let it be
said that Lady Busshe saw deeper than I! I put some little vanity
in it, I own: I won't conceal it. She declares that when she sent
her present--I don't believe her--she had a premonition that it
would come back. Surely you won't justify the extravagances of a
woman without common reverence:--for anatomize him as we please
to ourselves, he is a splendid man (and I did it chiefly to
encourage and come at you). We don't often behold such a
lordly-looking man: so conversable too when he feels at home; a
picture of an English gentleman! The very man we want married for
our neighbourhood! A woman who can openly talk of expecting him to
be twice jilted! You shrink. It is repulsive. It would be
incomprehensible: except, of course, to Lady Busshe, who rushed to
one of her violent conclusions, and became a prophetess. Conceive
a woman's imagining it could happen twice to the same man! I am
not sure she did not send the identical present that arrived and
returned once before: you know, the Durham engagement.  She told
me last night she had it back. I watched her listening very
suspiciously to Professor Crooklyn. My dear, it is her passion to
foretell disasters--her passion! And when they are confirmed, she
triumphs, of course. We shall have her domineering over us with
sapient nods at every trifle occurring.  The county will be
unendurable. Unsay it, my Middleton! And don't answer like an
oracle because I do all the talking. Pour out to me. You'll soon
come to a stop and find the want of reason in the want of words. I
assure you that's true. Let me have a good gaze at you.  No," said
Mrs. Mountstuart, after posturing herself to peruse Clara's
features, "brains you have; one can see it by the nose and the
mouth. I could vow you are the girl I thought you; you have your
wits on tiptoe. How of the heart?"

"None," Clara sighed.

The sigh was partly voluntary, though unforced; as one may with
ready sincerity act a character that is our own only through
sympathy.

Mrs. Mountstuart felt the extra weight in the young lady's falling
breath. There was no necessity for a deep sigh over an absence of
heart or confession of it. If Clara did not love the man to whom
she was betrothed, sighing about it signified what? some pretence;
and a pretence is the cloak of a secret. Girls do not sigh in that
way with compassion for the man they have no heart for, unless at
the same time they should be oppressed by the knowledge or dread
of having a heart for some one else. As a rule, they have no
compassion to bestow on him: you might as reasonably expect a
soldier to bewail the enemy he strikes in action: they must be
very disengaged to have it. And supposing a show of the thing to
be exhibited, when it has not been worried out of them, there is a
reserve in the background: they are pitying themselves under a
mask of decent pity of their wretch.

So ran Mrs. Mountstuart's calculations, which were like her
suspicion, coarse and broad, not absolutely incorrect, but not of
an exact measure with the truth. That pin's head of the truth is
rarely hit by design. The search after it of the professionally 
penetrative in the dark of a bosom may bring it forth by the heavy
knocking all about the neighbourhood that we call good guessing,
but it does not come out clean; other matter adheres to it; and
being more it is less than truth. The unadulterate is to be had
only by faith in it or by waiting for it.

A lover! thought the sagacious dame. There was no lover: some
love there was: or, rather, there was a preparation of the
chamber, with no lamp yet lighted.

"Do you positively tell me you have no heart for the position of
first lady of the county?" said Mrs. Mountstuart.

Clara's reply was firm: "None whatever."

"My dear, I will believe you on one condition. Look at me. You
have eyes. If you are for mischief, you are armed for it. But how
much better, when you have won a prize, to settle down and wear
it! Lady Patterne will have entire occupation for her flights and
whimsies in leading the county. And the man, surely the man--he
behaved badly last night: but a beauty like this," she pushed a
finger at Clara's cheek, and doated a half instant, "you have the
very beauty to break in an ogre's temper. And the man is as
governable as he is presentable. You have the beauty the French
call--no, it's the beauty of a queen of elves: one sees them
lurking about you, one here, one there. Smile--they dance: be
doleful--they hang themselves. No, there's not a trace of
satanic; at least, not yet. And come, come, my Middleton, the man
is a man to be proud of. You can send him into Parliament to wear
off his humours. To my thinking, he has a fine style: conscious? I
never thought so before last night. I can't guess what has happened
to him recently. He was once a young Grand Monarque. He was really
a superb young English gentleman. Have you been wounding him?"

"It is my misfortune to be obliged to wound him," said Clara.

"Quite needlessly, my child, for marry him you must."

Clara's bosom rose: her shoulders rose too, narrowing, and her
head fell slight back.

Mrs. Mountstuart exclaimed: "But the scandal! You would never,
never think of following the example of that Durham girl?--whether
she was provoked to it by jealousy or not. It seems to have gone
so astonishingly far with you in a very short time, that one is
alarmed as to where you will stop. Your look just now was
downright revulsion."

"I fear it is. It is. I am past my own control. Dear madam, you
have my assurance that I will not behave scandalously or
dishonourably. What I would entreat of you is to help me. I know
this of myself.. I am not the best of women. I am impatient, 
wickedly. I should be no good wife. Feelings like mine teach me
unhappy things of myself."

"Rich, handsome, lordly, influential, brilliant health, fine
estates," Mrs. Mountstuart enumerated in petulant accents as there
started across her mind some of Sir Willoughby's attributes for
the attraction of the soul of woman. "I suppose you wish me to
take you in earnest?"

"I appeal to you for help."

"What help?"

"Persuade him of the folly of pressing me to keep my word."

"I will believe you, my dear Middleton, on one condition: your 
talk of no heart is nonsense. A change like this, if one is to
believe in the change, occurs through the heart, not because there
is none. Don't you see that? But if you want me for a friend, you
must not sham stupid. It's bad enough in itself: the imitation's
horrid. You have to be honest with me, and answer me right out.
You came here on this visit intending to marry Willoughby
Patterne."

"Yes."

"And gradually you suddenly discovered, since you came here, that
you did not intend it, if you could find a means of avoiding it."

"Oh, madam, yes, it is true."

"Now comes the test. And, my lovely Middleton, your flaming cheeks
won't suffice for me this time. The old serpent can blush like an
innocent maid on occasion. You are to speak, and you are to tell
me in six words why that was: and don't waste one on 'madam', or
'Oh! Mrs. Mountstuart" Why did you change?"

"I came--When I came I was in some doubt. Indeed I speak the
truth. I found I could not give him the admiration he has, I dare
say, a right to expect. I turned--it surprised me; it surprises 
me now. But so completely! So that to think of marrying him is . .
."

"Defer the simile," Mrs. Mountstuart interposed. "If you hit on a
clever one, you will never get the better of it. Now, by just as
much as you have outstripped my limitation of words to you, you
show me you are dishonest."

"I could make a vow."

"You would forswear yourself."

"Will you help me?"

"If you are perfectly ingenuous, I may try."

"Dear lady, what more can I say?"

"It may be difficult. You can reply to a catechism."

"I shall have your help?"

"Well, yes; though I don't like stipulations between friends.
There is no man living to whom you could willingly give your hand?
That is my question. I cannot possibly take a step unless I know.
Reply briefly: there is or there is not." Clara sat back with
bated breath, mentally taking the leap into the abyss, realizing
it, and the cold prudence of abstention, and the delirium of the
confession. Was there such a man? It resembled freedom to think
there was: to avow it promised freedom.

"Oh, Mrs. Mountstuart!"

"Well?"

"You will help me?"

"Upon my word, I shall begin to doubt your desire for it."

"Willingly give my hand, madam?"

"For shame! And with wits like yours, can't you perceive where
hesitation in answering such a question lands you?"

"Dearest lady, will you give me your hand? may I whisper?"

"You need not whisper; I won't look."

Clara's voice trembled on a tense chord.

"There is one ... compared with him I feel my insignificance. If I
could aid him."

"What necessity have you to tell me more than that there is one?"

"Ah, madam, it is different: not as you imagine. You bid me be
scrupulously truthful: I am: I wish you to know the different
kind of feeling it is from what might be suspected from ... a
confession. To give my hand, is beyond any thought I have ever
encouraged. If you had asked me whether there is one whom I admire
--yes, I do. I cannot help admiring a beautiful and brave
self-denying nature. It is one whom you must pity, and to pity
casts you beneath him: for you pity him because it is his
nobleness that has been the enemy of his fortunes. He lives for
others."

Her voice was musically thrilling in that low muted tone of the
very heart, impossible to deride or disbelieve.

Mrs. Mountstuart set her head nodding on springs.

"Is he clever?"

"Very."

"He talks well?"

"Yes."

"Handsome?"

"He might be thought so."

"Witty?"

"I think he is."

"Gay, cheerful?"

"In his manner."

"Why, the man would be a mountebank if he adopted any other. And
poor?"

"He is not wealthy."

Mrs. Mountstuart preserved a lengthened silence, but nipped
Clara's fingers once or twice to reassure her without approving. 
"Of course he's poor," she said at last; "directly the reverse of
what you could have, it must be. Well, my fair Middleton, I can't
say you have been dishonest. I'll help you as far as I'm able.
How, it is quite impossible to tell. We're in the mire. The best
way seems to me to get this pitiable angel to cut some ridiculous
capers and present you another view of him. I don't believe in his
innocence. He knew you to be a plighted woman."

"He has not once by word or sign hinted a disloyalty."

"Then how do you know."

"I do not know."

"He is not the cause of your wish to break your engagement?"

"No."

"Then you have succeeded in just telling me nothing.  What is?"

"Ah! madam!"

"You would break your engagement purely because the admirable
creature is in existence?"

Clara shook her head: she could not say she was dizzy. She had
spoken out more than she had ever spoken to herself. and in doing
so she had cast herself a step beyond the line she dared to
contemplate.

"I won't detain you any longer," said Mrs. Mountstuart.  "The more
we learn, the more we are taught that we are not so wise as we
thought we were. I have to go to school to Lady Busshe! I really
took you for a very clever girl. If you change again, you will
notify the important circumstance to me, I trust."

"I will," said Clara, and no violent declaration of the
impossibility of her changeing again would have had such an effect
on her hearer.

Mrs. Mountstuart scanned her face for a new reading of it to match
with her later impressions.

"I am to do as I please with the knowledge I have gained?"

"I am utterly in your hands, madam."

"I have not meant to be unkind."

"You have not been unkind; I could embrace you."

"I am rather too shattered, and kissing won't put me together. I
laughed at Lady Busshe! No wonder you went off like a rocket with
a disappointing bouquet when I told you you had been successful
with poor Sir Willoughby and he could not give you up. I noticed
that. A woman like Lady Busshe, always prying for the lamentable,
would have required no further enlightenment. Has he a temper?"

Clara did not ask her to signalize the person thus abruptly
obtruded.

"He has faults," she said.

"There's an end to Sir Willoughby, then! Though I don't say he
will give you up even when he hears the worst, if he must hear it,
as for his own sake he should. And I won't say he ought to give
you up. He'll be the pitiable angel if he does. For you--but you
don't deserve compliments; they would be immoral. You have behaved
badly, badly, badly. I have never had such a right-about-face in
my life. You will deserve the stigma: you will he notorious: you
will be called Number Two. Think of that! Not even original! We
will break the conference, or I shall twaddle to extinction. I
think I heard the luncheon bell."

"It rang."

"You don't look fit for company, but you had better come.

"Oh, yes; every day it's the same."

"Whether you're in my hands or I'm in yours, we're a couple of
arch-conspirators against the peace of the family whose table
we're sitting at, and the more we rattle the viler we are, but we
must do it to ease our minds."

Mrs. Mountstuart spread the skirts of her voluminous dress,
remarking further: "At a certain age our teachers are young
people: we learn by looking backward. It speaks highly for me that
I have not called you mad.--Full of faults, goodish-looking, not
a bad talker, cheerful, poorish;--and she prefers that to this!"
the great lady exclaimed in her reverie while emerging from the
circle of shrubs upon a view of the Hall. Colonel De Craye
advanced to her; certainly good-looking, certainly cheerful, by no
means a bad talker, nothing of a Croesus, and variegated with
faults.

His laughing smile attacked the irresolute hostility of her mien,
confident as the sparkle of sunlight in a breeze. The effect of it
on herself angered her on behalf of Sir Willoughby's bride.

"Good-morning, Mrs. Mountstuart; I believe I am the last to greet
you."

And how long do you remain here, Colonel De Craye?"

"I kissed earth when I arrived, like the Norman William, and
consequently I've an attachment to the soil, ma'am."

"You're not going to take possession of it, I suppose?" 

"A handful would satisfy me."

"You play the Conqueror pretty much, I have heard. But property is
held more sacred than in the times of the Norman William."

"And speaking of property, Miss Middleton, your purse is found." he
said.

"I know it is," she replied as unaffectedly as Mrs. Mountstuart 
could have desired, though the ingenuous air of the girl incensed
her somewhat.

Clara passed on.

"You restore purses," observed Mrs. Mountstuart.

Her stress on the word and her look thrilled De Craye; for there
had been a long conversation between the young lady and the dame.

"It was an article that dropped and was not stolen," said he.

"Barely sweet enough to keep, then!"

"I think I could have felt to it like poor Flitch, the flyman, who
was the finder."

"If you are conscious of these temptations to appropriate what is
not your own, you should quit the neighbourhood."

"And do it elsewhere? But that's not virtuous counsel."

"And I'm not counselling in the interests of your virtue, Colonel
De Craye."

"And I dared for a moment to hope that you were, ma'am," he said,
ruefully drooping.

They were close to the dining-room window, and Mrs Mountstuart
preferred the terminating of a dialogue that did not promise to
leave her features the austerely iron cast with which she had
commenced it. She was under the spell of gratitude for his
behaviour yesterday evening at her dinner-table; she could not be
very severe.



CHAPTER XXXVI

Animated Conversation at a Luncheon-Table

Vernon was crossing the hall to the dining-room as Mrs Mountstuart
stepped in. She called to him: "Are the champions reconciled?"

He replied: "Hardly that, but they have consented to meet at an
altar to offer up a victim to the gods in the shape of modern
poetic imitations of the classical."

"That seems innocent enough. The Professor has not been anxious
about his chest?"

"He recollects his cough now and then."

"You must help him to forget it."

"Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer are here," said Vernon, not supposing
it to be a grave announcement until the effect of it on Mrs.
Mountstuart admonished him.

She dropped her voice: "Engage my fair friend for one of your
walks the moment we rise from table. You may have to rescue her;
but do. I mean it."

"She's a capital walker." Vernon remarked in simpleton style.

"There's no necessity for any of your pedestrian feats," Mrs
Mountstuart said, and let him go, turning to Colonel De Craye to
pronounce an encomium on him: "The most open-minded man I know!
Warranted to do perpetual service, and no mischief. If you were all
... instead of catching at every prize you covet! Yes, you would
have your reward for unselfishness, I assure you. Yes, and where
you seek it! That is what none of you men will believe."

"When you behold me in your own livery!" cried the colonel.

"Do I?" said she, dallying with a half-formed design to he
confidential. "How is it one is always tempted to address you in
the language of innuendo? I can't guess."

"Except that as a dog doesn't comprehend good English we naturally
talk bad to him."

The great lady was tickled. Who could help being amused by this
man? And after all, if her fair Middleton chose to be a fool there
could be no gainsaying her, sorry though poor Sir Willoughby's
friends must feel for him.

She tried not to smile.

"You are too absurd. Or a baby, you might have added."

"I hadn't the daring."

"I'll tell you what, Colonel De Craye, I shall end by falling in
love with you; and without esteeming you, I fear."

"The second follows as surely as the flavour upon a draught of
Bacchus, if you'll but toss off the glass, ma'am."

"We women, sir, think it should be first."

"'Tis to transpose the seasons, and give October the blossom and
April the apple, and no sweet one! Esteem's a mellow thing that
comes after bloom and fire, like an evening at home; because if
it went before it would have no father and couldn't hope for
progeny; for there'd be no nature in the business. So please,
ma'am, keep to the original order, and you'll be nature's child,
and I the most blessed of mankind."

"Really, were I fifteen years younger. I am not so certain ... I
might try and make you harmless."

"Draw the teeth of the lamb so long as you pet him!"

"I challenged you, colonel, and I won't complain of your pitch.
But now lay your wit down beside your candour, and descend to an
every-day level with me for a minute."

"Is it innuendo?"

"No; though I daresay it would be easier for you to respond to if
it were."

"I'm the straightforwardest of men at a word of command."

"This is a whisper. Be alert, as you were last night. Shuffle the
table well. A little liveliness will do it. I don't imagine
malice, but there's curiosity, which is often as bad, and not so
lightly foiled. We have Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer here."

"To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky!"

"Well, then, can you fence with broomsticks?"

"I have had a bout with them in my time."

"They are terribly direct."

"They 'give point', as Napoleon commanded his cavalry to do."

"You must help me to ward it."

"They will require variety in the conversation."

"Constant. You are an angel of intelligence, and if I have the
judgeing of you, I'm afraid you'll be allowed to pass, in spite of
the scandal above. Open the door; I don't unbonnet."

De Craye threw the door open.

Lady Busshe was at that moment saying, "And are we indeed to have
you for a neighbour, Dr. Middleton?"

The Rev. Doctor's reply was drowned by the new arrivals.

"I thought you had forsaken us," observed Sir Willoughby to Mrs.
Mountstuart.

"And run away with Colonel De Craye? I'm too weighty, my dear
friend. Besides, I have not looked at the wedding-presents yet."

"The very object of our call!" exclaimed Lady Culmer.

"I have to confess I am in dire alarm about mine," Lady Busshe
nodded across the table at Clara. "Oh! you may shake your head,
but I would rather hear a rough truth than the most complimentary
evasion."

"How would you define a rough truth, Dr. Middleton?"
said Mrs. Mountstuart.

Like the trained warrior who is ready at all hours for the trumpet
to arms, Dr. Middleton waked up for judicial allocution in a trice.

"A rough truth, madam, I should define to be that description of
truth which is not imparted to mankind without a powerful
impregnation of the roughness of the teller."

"It is a rough truth, ma'am, that the world is composed of
fools, and that the exceptions are knaves," Professor Crooklyn
furnished that example avoided by the Rev. Doctor.

"Not to precipitate myself into the jaws of the foregone
definition, which strikes me as being as happy as Jonah's whale,
that could carry probably the most learned man of his time inside
without the necessity of digesting him," said De Craye, "a rough
truth is a rather strong charge of universal nature for the firing
off of a modicum of personal fact."

"It is a rough truth that Plato is Moses atticizing," said Vernon
to Dr. Middleton, to keep the diversion alive.

"And that Aristotle had the globe under his cranium," rejoined the
Rev. Doctor.

"And that the Moderns live on the Ancients."

"And that not one in ten thousand can refer to the particular
treasury he filches."

"The Art of our days is a revel of rough truth," remarked
Professor Crooklyn.

"And the literature has laboriously mastered the adjective,
wherever it may be in relation to the noun, Dr. Middleton added.

"Orson's first appearance at court was in the figure of a rough
truth, causing the Maids of Honour, accustomed to Tapestry Adams,
astonishment and terror," said De Craye. That he might not be left
out of the sprightly play, Sir Willoughby levelled a lance at the
quintain, smiling on Laetitia: "In fine, caricature is rough
truth."

She said, "Is one end of it, and realistic directness is the
other."

He bowed. "The palm is yours."

Mrs. Mountstuart admired herself as each one trotted forth in turn
characteristically, with one exception unaware of the aid which
was being rendered to a distressed damsel wretchedly incapable of
decent hypocrisy. Her intrepid lead had shown her hand to the
colonel and drawn the enemy at a blow.

Sir Willoughby's "in fine", however, did not please her: still
less did his lackadaisical Lothario-like bowing and smiling to
Miss Dale: and he perceived it and was hurt. For how, carrying
his tremendous load, was he to compete with these unhandicapped
men in the game of nonsense she had such a fondness for starting
at a table? He was further annoyed to hear Miss Eleanor and Miss
Isabel Patterne agree together that "caricature" was the final
word of the definition. Relatives should know better than to
deliver these awards to us in public.

"Well?" quoth Lady Busshe, expressive of stupefaction at the
strange dust she had raised.

"Are they on view, Miss Middleton?" inquired Lady Culmer.

"There's a regiment of us on view and ready for inspection."
Colonel De Craye bowed to her, but she would not be foiled.

"Miss Middleton's admirers are always on view." said he.

"Are they to be seen?" said Lady Busshe.

Clara made her face a question, with a laudable smoothness.

"The wedding-presents," Lady Culmer explained.

"No."

"Otherwise, my dear, we are in danger of duplicating and
triplicating and quadruplicating, not at all to the satisfaction
of the bride."

"But there's a worse danger to encounter in the 'on view', my
lady," said De Craye; "and that's the magnetic attraction a
display of wedding-presents is sure to have for the ineffable
burglar, who must have a nuptial soul in him, for wherever there's
that collection on view, he's never a league off. And 'tis said he
knows a lady's dressing-case presented to her on the occasion
fifteen years after the event."

"As many as fifteen?" said Mrs. Mountstuart.

"By computation of the police. And if the presents are on view,
dogs are of no use, nor bolts, nor bars:--he's worse than Cupid.
The only protection to be found, singular as it may be thought, is
in a couple of bottles of the oldest Jamaica rum in the British
isles."

"Rum?" cried Lady Busshe.

"The liquor of the Royal Navy, my lady. And with your permission,
I'll relate the tale in proof of it. I had a friend engaged to a
young lady, niece of an old sea-captain of the old school, the
Benbow school, the wooden leg and pigtail school; a perfectly salt
old gentleman with a pickled tongue, and a dash of brine in every
deed he committed. He looked rolled over to you by the last wave
on the shore, sparkling: he was Neptune's own for humour. And when
his present to the bride was opened, sure enough there lay a
couple of bottles of the oldest Jamaica rum in the British Isles,
born before himself, and his father to boot. 'Tis a fabulous
spirit I beg you to believe in, my lady, the sole merit of the
story being its portentous veracity. The bottles were tied to make
them appear twins, as they both had the same claim to seniority.
And there was a label on them, telling their great age, to
maintain their identity. They were in truth a pair of patriarchal
bottles rivalling many of the biggest houses in the kingdom for
antiquity. They would have made the donkey that stood between the
two bundles of hay look at them with obliquity: supposing him to
have, for an animal, a rum taste, and a turn for hilarity.
Wonderful old bottles! So, on the label, just over the date, was
written large: UNCLE BENJAMIN'S WEDDING PRESENT TO HIS NIECE 
BESSY. Poor Bessy shed tears of disappointment and indignation
enough to float the old gentleman on his native element, ship and
all. She vowed it was done curmudgeonly to vex her, because her
uncle hated wedding-presents and had grunted at the exhibition of
cups and saucers, and this and that beautiful service, and
epergnes and inkstands, mirrors, knives and forks, dressing-cases,
and the whole mighty category. She protested, she flung herself
about, she declared those two ugly bottles should not join the
exhibition in the dining-room, where it was laid out for days, and
the family ate their meals where they could, on the walls, like
flies. But there was also Uncle Benjamin's legacy on view, in the
distance, so it was ruled against her that the bottles should have
their place. And one fine morning down came the family after a
fearful row of the domestics; shouting, screaming, cries for the
police, and murder topping all. What did they see? They saw two
prodigious burglars extended along the floor, each with one of the
twin bottles in his hand, and a remainder of the horror of the
midnight hanging about his person like a blown fog, sufficient to
frighten them whilst they kicked the rascals entirely intoxicated.
Never was wilder disorder of wedding-presents, and not one lost!--
owing, you'll own, to Uncle Benjy's two bottles of ancient Jamaica
rum."

Colonel De Craye concluded with an asseveration of the truth of
the story.

"A most provident, far-sighted old sea-captain!" exclaimed Mrs.
Mountstuart, laughing at Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer. These
ladies chimed in with her gingerly.

"And have you many more clever stories, Colonel De Craye?" said
Lady Busshe.

"Ah! my lady, when the tree begins to count its gold 'tis nigh
upon bankruptcy."

"Poetic!" ejaculated Lady Culmer, spying at Miss Middleton's 
rippled countenance, and noting that she and Sir Willoughby had
not interchanged word or look.

"But that in the case of your Patterne Port a bottle of it would
outvalue the catalogue of nuptial presents, Willoughby, I would
recommend your stationing some such constabulary to keep watch and
ward." said Dr. Middleton, as he filled his glass, taking Bordeaux
in the middle of the day, under a consciousness of virtue and its
reward to come at half-past seven in the evening.

"The rascals would require a dozen of that, sir," said De Craye.

"Then it is not to be thought of. Indeed one!" Dr. Middleton 
negatived the idea.

"We are no further advanced than when we began," observed Lady
Busshe.

"If we are marked to go by stages," Mrs. Mountstuart assented.

"Why, then, we shall be called old coaches," remarked the colonel.

"You," said Lady Culmer, "have the advantage of us in a closer
acquaintance with Miss Middleton. You know her tastes, and how far
they have been consulted in the little souvenirs already grouped
somewhere, although not yet for inspection. I am at sea.  And here
is Lady Busshe in deadly alarm.  There is plenty of time to effect
a change--though we are drawing on rapidly to the fatal day, Miss
Middleton. We are, we are very near it. Oh! yes. I am one who
thinks that these little affairs should be spoken of openly,
without that ridiculous bourgeois affectation, so that we may be
sure of giving satisfaction. It is a transaction like everything
else in life. I, for my part, wish to be remembered favourably. I
put it as a test of breeding to speak of these things as plain
matter-of-fact. You marry; I wish you to have something by you to
remind you of me. What shall it be?--useful or ornamental. For an
ordinary household the choice is not difficult. But where wealth
abounds we are in a dilemma."

"And with persons of decided tastes," added Lady Busshe.

"I am really very unhappy," she protested to Clara.

Sir Willoughby dropped Laetitia; Clara's look of a sedate
resolution to preserve silence on the topic of the nuptial gifts
made a diversion imperative.

"Your porcelain was exquisitely chosen, and I profess to be a
connoisseur," he said. "I am poor in Old Saxony, as you know; I
can match the country in Savres, and my inheritance of China will
not easily be matched in the country."

"You may consider your Dragon vases a present from young
Crossjay," said De Craye.

"How?"

"Hasn't he abstained from breaking them? the capital boy!
Porcelain and a boy in the house together is a case of prospective
disaster fully equal to Flitch and a fly."

"You should understand that my friend Horace--whose wit is in
this instance founded on another tale of a boy--brought us a
magnificent piece of porcelain, destroyed by the capsizing of his
conveyance from the station," said Sir Willoughby to Lady Busshe.

She and Lady Culmer gave out lamentable Ohs, while Miss Eleanor
and Miss Isabel Patterne sketched the incident. Then the lady
visitors fixed their eyes in united sympathy upon Clara:
recovering from which, after a contemplation of marble, Lady
Busshe emphasized, "No, you do not love porcelain, it is evident,
Miss Middleton."

"I am glad to be assured of it," said Lady Culmer.

"Oh, I know that face: I know that look," Lady Busshe affected to
remark rallyingly: "it is not the first time I have seen it."

Sir Willoughby smarted to his marrow. "We will rout these fancies
of an overscrupulous generosity, my dear Lady Busshe."

Her unwonted breach of delicacy in speaking publicly of her
present, and the vulgar persistency of her sticking to the theme,
very much perplexed him. And if he mistook her not, she had just
alluded to the demoniacal Constantia Durham.

It might be that he had mistaken her: he was on guard against his
terrible sensitiveness. Nevertheless it was hard to account for
this behaviour of a lady greatly his friend and admirer, a lady of
birth. And Lady Culmer as well!--likewise a lady of birth. Were
they in collusion? had they a suspicion? He turned to Laetitia's
face for the antidote to his pain.

"Oh, but you are not one yet, and I shall require two voices to
convince me," Lady Busshe rejoined, after another stare at the
marble.

"Lady Busshe, I beg you not to think me ungrateful," said Clara.

"Fiddle!--gratitude! it is to please your taste, to satisfy you.
I care for gratitude as little as for flattery."

"But gratitude is flattering," said Vernon.

" Now, no metaphysics, Mr. Whitford."

"But do care a bit for flattery, my lady," said De Craye. "'Tis
the finest of the Arts; we might call it moral sculpture. Adepts
in it can cut their friends to any shape they like by practising
it with the requisite skill. I myself, poor hand as I am, have
made a man act Solomon by constantly praising his wisdom. He took
a sagacious turn at an early period of the dose. He weighed the
smallest question of his daily occasions with a deliberation truly
oriental. Had I pushed it, he'd have hired a baby and a couple of
mothers to squabble over the undivided morsel."

"I shall hope for a day in London with you," said Lady Culmer to
Clara.

"You did not forget the Queen of Sheba?" said Mrs. Mountstuart to
De Craye.

"With her appearance, the game has to be resigned to her
entirely," he rejoined.

"That is," Lady Culmer continued, "if you do not despise an old
woman for your comrade on a shopping excursion."

"Despise whom we fleece!" exclaimed Dr. Middleton. "Oh, no, Lady
Culmer, the sheep is sacred."

"I am not so sure," said Vernon.

"In what way, and to what extent, are you not so sure?" said Dr.
Middleton.

"The natural tendency is to scorn the fleeced."

"I stand for the contrary. Pity, if you like: particularly when
they bleat."

"This is to assume that makers of gifts are a fleeced people: I
demur," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

"Madam, we are expected to give; we are incited to give; you have
dubbed it the fashion to give; and the person refusing to give, or
incapable of giving, may anticipate that he will be regarded as
benignly as a sheep of a drooping and flaccid wool by the farmer,
who is reminded by the poor beast's appearance of a strange dog
that worried the flock. Even Captain Benjamin, as you have seen,
was unable to withstand the demand on him. The hymeneal pair are
licensed freebooters levying blackmail on us; survivors of an
uncivilized period. But in taking without mercy, I venture to
trust that the manners of a happier era instruct them not to scorn
us.  I apprehend that Mr. Whitford has a lower order of latrons in
his mind."

"Permit me to say, sir, that you have not considered the ignoble
aspect of the fleeced," said Vernon. "I appeal to the ladies:
would they not, if they beheld an ostrich walking down a Queen's
Drawing Room, clean-plucked, despise him though they were wearing
his plumes?"

"An extreme supposition, indeed," said Dr. Middleton, frowning over
it; "scarcely legitimately to be suggested."

"I think it fair, sir, as an instance."

"Has the circumstance occurred, I would ask?"

"In life? a thousand times."

"I fear so," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

Lady Busshe showed symptoms of a desire to leave a profitless 
table.

Vernon started up, glancing at the window.

"Did you see Crossjay?" he said to Clara.

"No; I must, if he is there," said she.

She made her way out, Vernon after her. They both had the excuse.

"Which way did the poor boy go?" she asked him.

"I have not the slightest idea," he replied. "But put on your
bonnet, if you would escape that pair of inquisitors."

"Mr. Whitford, what humiliation!"

"I suspect you do not feel it the most, and the end of it can't be
remote, said he.

Thus it happened that when Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer quitted the
dining-room, Miss Middleton had spirited herself away from
summoning voice and messenger.

Sir Willoughby apologized for her absence. "If I could be jealous,
it would be of that boy Crossjay."

"You are an excellent man, and the best of cousins," was Lady
Busshe's enigmatical answer.

The exceedingly lively conversation at his table was lauded by
Lady Culmer.

"Though," said she, "what it all meant, and what was the drift of
it, I couldn't tell to save my life. Is it every day the same with
you here?"

"Very much."

"How you must enjoy a spell of dulness!"

"If you said simplicity and not talking for effect! I generally
cast anchor by Laetitia Dale."

"Ah!" Lady Busshe coughed. "But the fact is, Mrs. Mountstuart is
made for cleverness!"

"I think, my lady, Laetitia Dale is to the full as clever as any
of the stars Mrs. Mountstuart assembles, or I."

"Talkative cleverness, I mean."

"In conversation as well. Perhaps you have not yet given her a
chance."

"Yes, yes, she is clever, of course, poor dear. She is looking
better too."

"Handsome, I thought," said Lady Culmer.

"She varies," observed Sir Willoughby.

The ladies took seat in their carriage and fell at once into a
close-bonnet colloquy. Not a single allusion had they made to the
wedding-presents after leaving the luncheon-table. The cause of
their visit was obvious.


CHAPTER XXXVII

Contains Clever Fencing and Intimations of the Need for It

That woman, Lady Busshe, had predicted, after the event,
Constantia Durham's defection. She had also, subsequent to
Willoughby's departure on his travels, uttered sceptical things
concerning his rooted attachment to Laetitia Dale. In her bitter
vulgarity, that beaten rival of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson for the
leadership of the county had taken his nose for a melancholy
prognostic of his fortunes; she had recently played on his name:
she had spoken the hideous English of his fate. Little as she
knew, she was alive to the worst interpretation of appearances. No
other eulogy occurred to her now than to call him the best of
cousins, because Vernon Whitford was housed and clothed and fed by
him. She had nothing else to say for a man she thought luckless!
She was a woman barren of wit, stripped of style, but she was
wealthy and a gossip--a forge of showering sparks--and she
carried Lady Culmer with her. The two had driven from his house to
spread the malignant rumour abroad; already they blew the biting
world on his raw wound. Neither of them was like Mrs. Mountstuart,
a witty woman, who could be hoodwinked; they were dull women, who
steadily kept on their own scent of the fact, and the only way to
confound such inveterate forces was to be ahead of them, and seize
and transform the expected fact, and astonish them, when they came
up to him, with a totally unanticipated fact.

"You see, you were in error, ladies."

"And so we were, Sir Willoughby, and we acknowledge it. We never
could have guessed that!"

Thus the phantom couple in the future delivered themselves, as
well they might at the revelation. He could run far ahead.

Ay, but to combat these dolts, facts had to be encountered, deeds
done, in groaning earnest. These representatives of the
pig-sconces of the population judged by circumstances: airy shows
and seems had no effect on them. Dexterity of fence was thrown
away.

A flying peep at the remorseless might of dulness in compelling us
to a concrete performance counter to our inclinations, if we would
deceive its terrible instinct, gave Willoughby for a moment the
survey of a sage. His intensity of personal feeling struck so
vivid an illumination of mankind at intervals that he would have
been individually wise, had he not been moved by the source of his
accurate perceptions to a personal feeling of opposition to his
own sagacity. He loathed and he despised the vision, so his mind
had no benefit of it, though he himself was whipped along. He
chose rather (and the choice is open to us all) to be flattered by
the distinction it revealed between himself and mankind.

But if he was not as others were, why was he discomfited,
solicitous, miserable? To think that it should be so, ran dead
against his conqueror's theories wherein he had been trained,
which, so long as he gained success awarded success to native
merit, grandeur to the grand in soul, as light kindles light:
nature presents the example. His early training, his bright
beginning of life, had taught him to look to earth's principal
fruits as his natural portion, and it was owing to a girl that he
stood a mark for tongues, naked, wincing at the possible malignity
of a pair of harridans. Why not whistle the girl away?

Why, then he would he free to enjoy, careless, younger than his
youth in the rebound to happiness!

And then would his nostrils begin to lift and sniff at the
creeping up of a thick pestiferous vapour. Then in that volume of
stench would he discern the sullen yellow eye of malice. A
malarious earth would hunt him all over it. The breath of the
world, the world's view of him, was partly his vital breath, his
view of himself. The ancestry of the tortured man had bequeathed 
him this condition of high civilization among their other
bequests. Your withered contracted Egoists of the hut and the grot
reck not of public opinion; they crave but for liberty and leisure
to scratch themselves and soothe an excessive scratch. Willoughby
was expansive, a blooming one, born to look down upon a tributary
world, and to exult in being looked to. Do we wonder at his
consternation in the prospect of that world's blowing foul on
him? Princes have their obligations to teach them they are mortal,
and the brilliant heir of a tributary world is equally enchained
by the homage it brings him;--more, inasmuch as it is immaterial,
elusive, not gathered by the tax, and he cannot capitally punish
the treasonable recusants. Still must he be brilliant; he must
court his people. He must ever, both in his reputation and his
person, aching though he be, show them a face and a leg.

The wounded gentleman shut himself up in his laboratory, where he
could stride to and fro, and stretch out his arms for physical
relief, secure from observation of his fantastical shapes, under
the idea that he was meditating. There was perhaps enough to make
him fancy it in the heavy fire of shots exchanged between his
nerves and the situation; there were notable flashes. He would not
avow that he was in an agony: it was merely a desire for
exercise.

Quintessence of worldliness, Mrs. Mountstuart appeared through his
farthest window, swinging her skirts on a turn at the end of the
lawn, with Horace De Craye smirking beside her. And the woman's
vaunted penetration was unable to detect the histrionic Irishism
of the fellow. Or she liked him for his acting and nonsense; nor
she only. The voluble beast was created to snare women. Willoughby
became smitten with an adoration of stedfastness in women. The
incarnation of that divine quality crossed his eyes. She was clad
in beauty. A horrible nondescript convulsion composed of yawn and
groan drove him to his instruments, to avert a renewal of the
shock; and while arranging and fixing them for their unwonted 
task, he compared himself advantageously with men like Vernon and
De Craye, and others of the county, his fellows in the
hunting-field and on the Magistrate's bench, who neither
understood nor cared for solid work, beneficial practical work,
the work of Science.

He was obliged to relinquish it: his hand shook.

"Experiments will not advance much at this rate," he said, casting
the noxious retardation on his enemies.

It was not to be contested that he must speak with Mrs
Mountstuart, however he might shrink from the trial of his facial
muscles. Her not coming to him seemed ominous: nor was her
behaviour at the luncheon-table quite obscure. She had evidently
instigated the gentlemen to cross and counterchatter Lady Busshe
and Lady Culmer. For what purpose?

Clara's features gave the answer.

They were implacable. And he could be the same.

In the solitude of his room he cried right out: "I swear it, I
will never yield her to Horace De Craye! She shall feel some of my
torments, and try to get the better of them by knowing she
deserves them." He had spoken it, and it was an oath upon the
record.

Desire to do her intolerable hurt became an ecstasy in his veins,
and produced another stretching fit that terminated in a violent
shake of the body and limbs; during which he was a spectacle for
Mrs. Mountstuart at one of the windows. He laughed as he went to
her, saying: "No, no work to-day; it won't be done, positively
refuses."

"I am taking the Professor away," said she; "he is fidgety about
the cold he caught."

Sir Willoughby stepped out to her. "I was trying at a bit of work
for an hour, not to be idle all day."

"You work in that den of yours every clay?

"Never less than an hour, if I can snatch it."

"It is a wonderful resource!"

The remark set him throbbing and thinking that a prolongation of
his crisis exposed him to the approaches of some organic malady,
possibly heart-disease.

"A habit," he said. "In there I throw off the world."

"We shall see some results in due time."

"I promise none: I like to be abreast of the real knowledge of my
day, that is all."

"And a pearl among country gentlemen!"

"In your gracious consideration, my dear lady. Generally speaking,
it would be more advisable to become a chatterer and keep an
anecdotal note-book. I could not do it, simply because I could not
live with my own emptiness for the sake of making an occasional
display of fireworks. I aim at solidity. It is a narrow aim, no
doubt; not much appreciated."

"Laetitia Dale appreciates it."

A smile of enforced ruefulness, like a leaf curling in heat,
wrinkled his mouth.

Why did she not speak of her conversation with Clara?

"Have they caught Crossjay?" he said.

"Apparently they are giving chase to him."

The likelihood was, that Clara had been overcome by timidity.

"Must you leave us?"

"I think it prudent to take Professor Crooklyn away."

"He still . . .?"

"The extraordinary resemblance!"

"A word aside to Dr. Middleton will dispel that."

"You are thoroughly good."

This hateful encomium of commiseration transfixed him. Then she
knew of his calamity!

"Philosophical," he said, "would be the proper term, I think."

"Colonel De Craye, by the way, promises me a visit when he leaves
you."

"To-morrow?"

"The earlier the better. He is too captivating; he is delightful.
He won me in five minutes. I don't accuse him. Nature gifted him to
cast the spell. We are weak women, Sir Willoughby."

She knew!

"Like to like: the witty to the witty, ma'am."

"You won't compliment me with a little bit of jealousy?" 

"I forbear from complimenting him."

"Be philosophical, of course, if you have the philosophy."

"I pretend to it. Probably I suppose myself to succeed because I
have no great requirement of it; I cannot say. We are riddles to
ourselves."

Mrs. Mountstuart pricked the turf with the point of her parasol.
She looked down and she looked up.

"Well?" said he to her eyes.

"Well, and where is Laetitia Dale?"

He turned about to show his face elsewhere.

When he fronted her again, she looked very fixedly, and set her
head shaking.

"It will not do, my dear Sir Willoughby!"

"What?"

I never could solve enigmas."

"Playing ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum, then. Things have gone far. All
parties would be happier for an excursion. Send her home."

"Laetitia? I can't part with her."

Mrs. Mountstuart put a tooth on her under lip as her head renewed
its brushing negative.

"In what way can it be hurtful that she should be here, ma'am?" he
ventured to persist.

"Think."

"She is proof."

"Twice!"

The word was big artillery. He tried the affectation of a staring
stupidity. She might have seen his heart thump, and he quitted
the mask for an agreeable grimace.

"She is inaccessible. She is my friend. I guarantee her, on my
honour. Have no fear for her. I beg you to have confidence in me.
I would perish rather. No soul on earth is to be compared with
her."

Mrs. Mountstuart repeated "Twice!"

The low monosyllable, musically spoken in the same tone of warning
of a gentle ghost, rolled a thunder that maddened him, but he
dared not take it up to fight against it on plain terms.

"Is it for my sake?" he said.

"It will not do, Sir Willoughby."

She spurred him to a frenzy.

"My dear Mrs. Mountstuart, you have been listening to tales. I am
not a tyrant. I am one of the most easy-going of men. Let us
preserve the forms due to society: I say no more. As for poor old
Vernon, people call me a good sort of cousin; I should like to see
him comfortably married; decently married this time. I have
proposed to contribute to his establishment. I mention it to show
that the case has been practically considered. He has had a
tolerably souring experience of the state; he might be inclined
if, say, you took him in hand, for another venture. It's a
demoralizing lottery. However, Government sanctions it."

"But, Sir Willoughby, what is the use of my taking him in hand
when, as you tell me, Laetitia Dale holds back?"

"She certainly does."

"Then we are talking to no purpose, unless you undertake to melt
her."

He suffered a lurking smile to kindle to some strength of meaning.

"You are not over-considerate in committing me to such an office."

"You are afraid of the danger?" she all but sneered.

Sharpened by her tone, he said, "I have such a love of stedfastness
of character, that I should be a poor advocate in the endeavour to
break it. And frankly, I know the danger. I saved my honour when
I made the attempt: that is all I can say."

"Upon my word," Mrs. Mountstuart threw back her head to let her
eyes behold him summarily over their fine aquiline bridge, "you
have the art of mystification, my good friend."

"Abandon the idea of Laetitia Dale."

"And marry your cousin Vernon to whom? Where are we?"

"As I said, ma'am, I am an easy-going man. I really have not a
spice of the tyrant in me. An intemperate creature held by the
collar may have that notion of me, while pulling to be released as
promptly as it entered the noose. But I do strictly and sternly
object to the scandal of violent separations, open breaches of
solemn engagements, a public rupture. Put it that I am the cause,
I will not consent to a violation of decorum. Is that clear? It is
just possible for things to be arranged so that all parties may be
happy in their way without much hubbub. Mind, it is not I who
have willed it so. I am, and I am forced to be, passive. But I
will not be obstructive."

He paused, waving his hand to signify the vanity of the more that
might be said.

Some conception of him, dashed by incredulity, excited the lady's
intelligence.

"Well!" she exclaimed, "you have planted me in the land of
conjecture. As my husband used to say, I don't see light, but I
think I see the lynx that does. We won't discuss it at present. I
certainly must be a younger woman than I supposed, for I am
learning hard.--Here comes the Professor, buttoned up to the
ears, and Dr. Middleton flapping in the breeze. There will be a
cough, and a footnote referring to the young lady at the station,
if we stand together, so please order my carriage."

"You found Clara complacent? roguish?"

"I will call to-morrow. You have simplified my task, Sir
Willoughby, very much; that is, assuming that I have not entirely 
mistaken you. I am so far in the dark that I have to help myself
by recollecting how Lady Busshe opposed my view of a certain matter
formerly. Scepticism is her forte. It will be the very oddest
thing if after all ...! No, I shall own, romance has not departed.
Are you fond of dupes?"

"I detest the race."

"An excellent answer. I could pardon you for it." She refrained
from adding, "If you are making one of me."

Sir Willoughby went to ring for her carriage.

She knew. That was palpable: Clara had betrayed him.

"The earlier Colonel De Craye leaves Patterne Hall the better:"
she had said that: and, "all parties would be happier for an
excursion." She knew the position of things and she guessed the
remainder. But what she did not know, and could not divine, was
the man who fenced her. He speculated further on the witty and the
dull. These latter are the redoubtable body. They will have facts
to convince them: they had, he confessed it to himself,
precipitated him into the novel sphere of his dark hints to Mrs.
Mountstuart; from which the utter darkness might allow him to
escape, yet it embraced him singularly, and even pleasantly, with
the sense of a fact established.

It embraced him even very pleasantly. There was an end to his
tortures. He sailed on a tranquil sea, the husband of a stedfast
woman--no rogue. The exceeding beauty of stedfastness in women
clothed Laetitia in graces Clara could not match. A tried stedfast
woman is the one jewel of the sex. She points to her husband like
the sunflower; her love illuminates him; she lives in him, for
him; she testifies to his worth; she drags the world to his feet;
she leads the chorus of his praises; she justifies him in his own
esteem. Surely there is not on earth such beauty!

If we have to pass through anguish to discover it and cherish the
peace it gives to clasp it, calling it ours, is a full reward.
Deep in his reverie, he said his adieus to Mrs. Mountstuart, and
strolled up the avenue behind the carriage-wheels, unwilling to
meet Laetitia till he had exhausted the fresh savour of the cud
of fancy.

Supposing it done!--

It would be generous on his part. It would redound to his credit.

His home would be a fortress, impregnable to tongues. He would
have divine security in his home.

One who read and knew and worshipped him would be sitting there
star-like: sitting there, awaiting him, his fixed star.

It would be marriage with a mirror, with an echo; marriage with a
shining mirror, a choric echo.

It would be marriage with an intellect, with a fine understanding;
to make his home a fountain of repeatable wit: to make his dear
old Patterne Hall the luminary of the county. 

He revolved it as a chant: with anon and anon involuntarily a
discordant animadversion on Lady Busshe. Its attendant imps heard
the angry inward cry.

Forthwith he set about painting Laetitia in delectable human
colours, like a miniature of the past century, reserving her ideal
figure for his private satisfaction. The world was to bow to her
visible beauty, and he gave her enamel and glow, a taller stature,
a swimming air, a transcendency that exorcized the image of the
old witch who had driven him to this. 

The result in him was, that Laetitia became humanly and avowedly
beautiful. Her dark eyelashes on the pallor of her cheeks lent
their aid to the transformation, which was a necessity to him, so
it was performed. He received the waxen impression.

His retinue of imps had a revel. We hear wonders of men, and we
see a lifting up of hands in the world. The wonders would be
explained, and never a hand need to interject, if the mystifying
man were but accompanied by that monkey-eyed confraternity. They
spy the heart and its twists.

The heart is the magical gentleman. None of them would follow
where there was no heart. The twists of the heart are the comedy.

"The secret of the heart is its pressing love of self ", says the
Book.

By that secret the mystery of the organ is legible: and a
comparison of the heart to the mountain rillet is taken up to show
us the unbaffled force of the little channel in seeking to swell
its volume, strenuously, sinuously, ever in pursuit of self; the
busiest as it is the most single-aiming of forces on our earth.
And we are directed to the sinuosities for posts of observation
chiefly instructive.

Few maintain a stand there. People see, and they rush away to
interchange liftings of hands at the sight, instead of patiently
studying the phenomenon of energy.

Consequently a man in love with one woman, and in all but absolute
consciousness, behind the thinnest of veils, preparing his mind to
love another, will be barely credible. The particular hunger of
the forceful but adaptable heart is the key of him. Behold the
mountain rillet, become a brook, become a torrent, how it inarms a
handsome boulder: yet if the stone will not go with it, on it
hurries, pursuing self in extension, down to where perchance a dam
has been raised of a sufficient depth to enfold and keep it from
inordinate restlessness. Laetitia represented this peaceful
restraining space in prospect. 

But she was a faded young woman.  He was aware of it; and
systematically looking at himself with her upturned orbs, he
accepted her benevolently as a God grateful for worship, and used
the divinity she imparted to paint and renovate her. His heart
required her so. The heart works the springs of imagination;
imagination received its commission from the heart, and was a
cunning artist.

Cunning to such a degree of seductive genius that the masterpiece
it offered to his contemplation enabled him simultareously to
gaze on Clara and think of Laetitia. Clara came through the
park-gates with Vernon, a brilliant girl indeed, and a shallow
one: a healthy creature, and an animal; attractive, but
capricious, impatient, treacherous, foul; a woman to drag men
through the mud. She approached.


CHAPTER XXXVIII

In Which We Take a Step to the Centre of Egoism

They met; Vernon soon left them.

"You have not seen Crossjay?" Willoughby inquired.

"No," said Clara. "Once more I beg you to pardon him. He spoke
falsely, owing to his poor boy's idea of chivalry."

"The chivalry to the sex which commences in lies ends by creating
the woman's hero, whom we see about the world and in certain
courts of law."

His ability to silence her was great: she could not reply to
speech like that.

"You have," said he, " made a confidante of Mrs. Mountstuart."

"Yes."

"This is your purse."

"I thank you."

"Professor Crooklyn has managed to make your father acquainted
with your project. That, I suppose, is the railway ticket in the
fold of the purse. He was assured at the station that you had
taken a ticket to London, and would not want the fly."

"It is true. I was foolish."

"You have had a pleasant walk with Vernon--turning me in and
out?"

"We did not speak of you. You allude to what he would never
consent to."

"He's an honest fellow, in his old-fashioned way. He's a secret
old fellow. Does he ever talk about his wife to you?"

Clara dropped her purse, and stooped and picked it up.

"I know nothing of Mr. Whitford's affairs," she said, and she
opened the purse and tore to pieces the railway ticket.

"The story's a proof that romantic spirits do not furnish the
most romantic history. You have the word 'chivalry' frequently on
your lips. He chivalrously married the daughter of the
lodging-house where he resided before I took him. We obtained
information of the auspicious union in a newspaper report of Mrs.
Whitford's drunkenness and rioting at a London railway terminus--
probably the one whither your ticket would have taken you
yesterday, for I heard the lady was on her way to us for supplies,
the connubial larder being empty."

"I am sorry; I am ignorant; I have heard nothing; I know nothing,"
said Clara.

"You are disgusted. But half the students and authors you hear of
marry in that way. And very few have Vernon's luck."

"She had good qualities?" asked Clara.

Her under lip hung.

It looked like disgust; he begged her not indulge the feeling.

"Literary men, it is notorious, even with the entry to society,
have no taste in women. The housewife is their object. Ladies
frighten and would, no doubt, be an annoyance and hindrance to
them at home."

"You said he was fortunate."

"You have a kindness for him."

"I respect him."

"He is a friendly old fellow in his awkward fashion; honourable,
and so forth. But a disreputable alliance of that sort sticks to a
man. The world will talk. Yes, he was fortunate so far; he fell
into the mire and got out of it. Were he to marry again . .

"She ..."

"Died. Do not be startled; it was a natural death. She responded 
to the sole wishes left to his family. He buried the woman, and I
received him. I took him on my tour. A second marriage might cover
the first: there would be a buzz about the old business: the
woman's relatives write to him still, try to bleed him, I dare
say. However, now you understand his gloominess. I don't imagine
he regrets his loss. He probably sentimentalizes, like most men
when they are well rid of a burden. You must not think the worse
of him."

"I do not," said Clara.

"I defend him whenever the matter's discussed."

"I hope you do."

"Without approving his folly. I can't wash him clean."

They were at the Hall-doors. She waited for any personal
communications he might be pleased to make, and as there was none,
she ran upstairs to her room.

He had tossed her to Vernon in his mind, not only painlessly, but
with a keen acid of satisfaction. The heart is the wizard.

Next he bent his deliberate steps to Laetitia.

The mind was guilty of some hesitation; the feet went forward.

She was working at an embroidery by an open window.  Colonel De
Craye leaned outside, and Willoughby pardoned her air of demure
amusement, on hearing him say: "No, I have had one of the
pleasantest half-hours of my life, and would rather idle here, if
idle you will have it, than employ my faculties on horse-back,"

"Time is not lost in conversing with Miss Dale," said
Willoughby.

The light was tender to her complexion where she sat in partial
shadow.

De Craye asked whether Crossjay had been caught.

Laetitia murmured a kind word for the boy. Willoughby examined her
embroidery.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel appeared.

They invited her to take carriage exercise with them.

Laetitia did not immediately answer, and Willoughby remarked:
"Miss Dale has been reproving Horace for idleness and I recommend
you to enlist him to do duty, while I relieve him here."

The ladies had but to look at the colonel. He was at their
disposal, if they would have him. He was marched to the carriage.

Laetitia plied her threads.

"Colonel De Craye spoke of Crossjay," she said. "May I hope you
have forgiven the poor boy, Sir Willoughby?"

He replied: "Plead for him."

"I wish I had eloquence."

"In my opinion you have it."

"If he offends, it is never from meanness. At school, among
comrades, he would shine. He is in too strong a light; his
feelings and his moral nature are over-excited."

"That was not the case when he was at home with you.

"I am severe; I am stern."

"A Spartan mother!"

"My system of managing a boy would be after that model: except in
this: he should always feet that he could obtain forgiveness."

"Not at the expense of justice?"

"Ah! young creatures are not to be arraigned before the higher
Courts. It seems to me perilous to terrify their imaginations.
If we do so, are we not likely to produce the very evil we are
combating? The alternations for the young should be school and
home: and it should be in their hearts to have confidence that
forgiveness alternates with discipline. They are of too tender an
age for the rigours of the world; we are in danger of hardening
them. I prove to you that I am not possessed of eloquence. You
encouraged me to speak, Sir Willoughby."

"You speak wisely, Laetitia."

"I think it true. Will not you reflect on it? You have only to do
so to forgive him. I am growing bold indeed, and shall have to beg
forgiveness for myself."

"You still write? you continue to work with your pen?" said
Willoughby.

"A little; a very little."

"I do not like you to squander yourself, waste yourself, on the
public. You are too precious to feed the beast. Giving out
incessantly must end by attenuating. Reserve yourself for your
friends. Why should they be robbed of so much of you? Is it not
reasonable to assume that by lying fallow you would be more
enriched for domestic life? Candidly, had I authority I would
confiscate your pen: I would 'away with that bauble'. You will not
often find me quoting Cromwell, but his words apply in this
instance. I would say rather, that lancet. Perhaps it is the more
correct term. It bleeds you, it wastes you. For what? For a breath
of fame!"

"I write for money."

"And there--I would say of another--you subject yourself to the
risk of mental degradation. Who knows?--moral! Trafficking the
brains for money must bring them to the level of the purchasers in
time. I confiscate your pen, Laetitia."

"It will be to confiscate your own gift, Sir Willoughby."

"Then that proves--will you tell me the date?"

"You sent me a gold pen-holder on my sixteenth birthday."

"It proves my utter thoughtlessness then, and later. And later!"

He rested an elbow on his knee, and covered his eyes, murmuring in
that profound hollow which is haunted by the voice of a contrite
past: "And later!"

The deed could be done. He had come to the conclusion that it
could be done, though the effort to harmonize the figure sitting
near him, with the artistic figure of his purest pigments, had
cost him labour and a blinking of the eyelids. That also could be
done. Her pleasant tone, sensible talk, and the light favouring
her complexion, helped him in his effort. She was a sober cup;
sober and wholesome. Deliriousness is for adolescence. The men who
seek intoxicating cups are men who invite their fates.

Curiously, yet as positively as things can be affirmed, the
husband of this woman would be able to boast of her virtues and
treasures abroad, as he could not--impossible to say why not--
boast of a beautiful wife or a blue-stocking wife. One of her
merits as a wife would be this extraordinary neutral merit of a
character that demanded colour from the marital hand, and would
take it.

Laetitia had not to learn that he had much to distress him. Her
wonder at his exposure of his grief counteracted a fluttering of
vague alarm. She was nervous; she sat in expectation of some burst
of regrets or of passion.

"I may hope that you have pardoned Crossjay?" she said.

"My friend," said he, uncovering his face, "I am governed by
principles. Convince me of an error, I shall not obstinately
pursue a premeditated course. But you know me. Men who have not
principles to rule their conduct are--well, they are unworthy of
a half hour of companionship with you. I will speak to you
to-night. I have letters to dispatch. To-night: at twelve: in the
room where we spoke last. Or await me in the drawing-room. I have
to attend to my guests till late."

He bowed; he was in a hurry to go.

The deed could he done. It must be done; it was his destiny.



CHAPTER XXXIX

In the Heart of the Egoist

But already he had begun to regard the deed as his executioner. He
dreaded meeting Clara. The folly of having retained her stood
before him. How now to look on her and keep a sane resolution
unwavering? She tempted to the insane. Had she been away, he could
have walked through the performance composed by the sense of doing
a duty to himself; perhaps faintly hating the poor wretch he made
happy at last, kind to her in a manner, polite. Clara's presence
in the house previous to the deed, and, oh, heaven! after it,
threatened his wits. Pride? He had none; he cast it down for her
to trample it; he caught it back ere it was trodden on. Yes; he
had pride: he had it as a dagger in his breast: his pride was his
misery. But he was too proud to submit to misery. "What I do is
right." He said the words, and rectitude smoothed his path, till
the question clamoured for answer: Would the world countenance and
endorse his pride in Laetitia? At one time, yes. And now? Clara's
beauty ascended, laid a beam on him. We are on board the labouring
vessel of humanity in a storm, when cries and countercries ring
out, disorderliness mixes the crew, and the fury of
self-preservation divides: this one is for the ship, that one for
his life. Clara was the former to him, Laetitia the latter.  But
what if there might not be greater safety in holding tenaciously
to Clara than in casting her off for Laetitia? No, she had done
things to set his pride throbbing in the quick. She had gone
bleeding about first to one, then to another; she had betrayed him
to Vernon, and to Mrs. Mountstuart; a look in the eyes of Horace
De Craye said, to him as well: to whom not? He might hold to her
for vengeance; but that appetite was short-lived in him if it
ministered nothing to his purposes. "I discard all idea of
vengeance," he said, and thrilled burningly to a smart in his
admiration of the man who could be so magnanimous under mortal
injury; for the more admirable he, the more pitiable. He drank a
drop or two of self-pity like a poison, repelling the assaults of
public pity. Clara must be given up. It must be seen by the world
that, as he felt, the thing he did was right. Laocoon of his own
serpents, he struggled to a certain magnificence of attitude in
the muscular net of constrictions he flung around himself. Clara
must be given up. Oh, bright Abominable! She must be given up: but
not to one whose touch of her would be darts in the blood of the
yielder, snakes in his bed: she must be given up to an
extinguisher; to be the second wife of an old-fashioned
semi-recluse, disgraced in his first. And were it publicly known
that she had been cast off, and had fallen on old Vernon for a
refuge, and part in spite, part in shame, part in desperation,
part in a fit of good sense under the circumstances, espoused him,
her beauty would not influence the world in its judgement. The
world would know what to think. As the instinct of
self-preservation whispered to Willoughby, the world, were it
requisite, might be taught to think what it assuredly would not
think if she should be seen tripping to the altar with Horace De
Craye. Self-preservation, not vengeance, breathed that whisper. He
glanced at her iniquity for a justification of it, without any
desire to do her a permanent hurt: he was highly civilized: but
with a strong intention to give her all the benefit of a scandal,
supposing a scandal, or ordinary tattle.

"And so he handed her to his cousin and secretary, Vernon
Whitford, who opened his mouth and shut his eyes."

You hear the world? How are we to stop it from chattering? Enough
that he had no desire to harm her. Some gentle anticipations of
her being tarnished were imperative; they came spontaneously to
him; otherwise the radiance of that bright Abominable in loss
would have been insufferable; he could not have borne it; he could
never have surrendered her. Moreover, a happy present effect was
the result. He conjured up the anticipated chatter and shrug of
the world so vividly that her beauty grew hectic with the stain,
bereft of its formidable magnetism. He could meet her calmly; he
had steeled himself. Purity in women was his principal stipulation.
and a woman puffed at, was not the person to cause him tremours.

Consider him indulgently: the Egoist is the Son of Himself. He is
likewise the Father. And the son loves the father, the father the
son; they reciprocate affection through the closest of ties; and
shall they view behaviour unkindly wounding either of them, not
for each other's dear sake abhorring the criminal? They would not
injure you, but they cannot consent to see one another suffer or
crave in vain. The two rub together in sympathy besides
relationship to an intenser one. Are you, without much offending,
sacrificed by them, it is on the altar of their mutual love, to
filial piety or paternal tenderness: the younger has offered a
dainty morsel to the elder, or the elder to the younger. Absorbed
in their great example of devotion do they not think of you. They
are beautiful.

Yet is it most true that the younger has the passions of youth:
whereof will come division between them; and this is a tragic
state. They are then pathetic. This was the state of Sir
Willoughby lending ear to his elder, until he submitted to bite at
the fruit proposed to him--with how wry a mouth the venerable
senior chose not to mark. At least, as we perceive, a half of him
was ripe of wisdom in his own interests. The cruder half had but
to be obedient to the leadership of sagacity for his interests to
be secured, and a filial disposition assisted him; painfully
indeed; but the same rare quality directed the good gentleman to
swallow his pain. That the son should bewail his fate were a
dishonour to the sire. He reverenced, and submitted. Thus, to say,
consider him indulgently, is too much an appeal for charity on
behalf of one requiring but initial anatomy--a slicing in halves
--to exonerate, perchance exalt him. The Egoist is our
fountain-head, primeval man: the primitive is born again, the
elemental reconstituted. Born again, into new conditions, the
primitive may be highly polished of men, and forfeit nothing save
the roughness of his original nature. He is not only his own
father, he is ours; and he is also our son. We have produced him.
he us. Such were we, to such are we returning: not other, sings
the poet, than one who toilfully works his shallop against the
tide, "si brachia forte remisit":--let him haply relax the
labour of his arms, however high up the stream, and back he goes,
"in pejus", to the early principle of our being, with seeds and
plants, that are as carelessly weighed in the hand and as
indiscriminately husbanded as our humanity.

Poets on the other side may be cited for an assurance that the
primitive is not the degenerate: rather is he a sign of the
indestructibility of the race, of the ancient energy in removing
obstacles to individual growth; a sample of what we would be, had
we his concentrated power. He is the original innocent, the pure
simple. It is we who have fallen; we have melted into Society,
diluted our essence, dissolved. He stands in the midst
monumentally, a land-mark of the tough and honest old Ages, with
the symbolic alphabet of striking arms and running legs, our early
language, scrawled over his person, and the glorious first flint
and arrow-head for his crest: at once the spectre of the
Kitchen-midden and our ripest issue. 

But Society is about him. The occasional spectacle of the
primitive dangling on a rope has impressed his mind with the
strength of his natural enemy: from which uncongenial sight he has
turned shuddering hardly less to behold the blast that is blown
upon a reputation where one has been disrespectful of the many. By
these means, through meditation on the contrast of circumstances
in life, a pulse of imagination has begun to stir, and he has
entered the upper sphere or circle of spiritual Egoism: he has
become the civilized Egoist; primitive still, as sure as man has
teeth, but developed in his manner of using them.

Degenerate or not (and there is no just reason to suppose it) Sir
Willoughby was a social Egoist, fiercely imaginative in whatsoever
concerned him. He had discovered a greater realm than that of the
sensual appetites, and he rushed across and around it in his
conquering period with an Alexander's pride. On these wind-like
journeys he had carried Constantia, subsequently Clara; and
however it may have been in the case of Miss Durham, in that of
Miss Middleton it is almost certain she caught a glimpse of his
interior from sheer fatigue in hearing him discourse of it. What
he revealed was not the cause of her sickness: women can bear
revelations--they are exciting: but the monotonousness. He slew
imagination. There is no direr disaster in love than the death of
imagination. He dragged her through the labyrinths of his
penetralia, in his hungry coveting to be loved more and still
more, more still, until imagination gave up the ghost, and he
talked to her plain hearing like a monster. It must have been
that; for the spell of the primitive upon women is masterful up to
the time of contact.

"And so he handed her to his cousin and secretary, Vernon
Whitford, who opened his mouth and shut his eyes."

The urgent question was, how it was to be accomplished.
Willoughby worked at the subject with all his power of
concentration: a power that had often led him to feel and say,
that as a barrister, a diplomatist, or a general, he would have
won his grades: and granting him a personal interest in the
business, he might have achieved eminence: he schemed and fenced
remarkably well.

He projected a scene, following expressions of anxiety on account
of old Vernon and his future settlement: and then Clara 
maintaining her doggedness, to which he was now so accustomed that
he could not conceive a change in it--says he: "If you determine
on breaking I give you back your word on one condition." Whereupon
she starts: he insists on her promise: she declines: affairs
resume their former footing; she frets: she begs for the
disclosure: he flatters her by telling her his desire to keep her
in the family: she is unilluminated, but strongly moved by
curiosity: he philosophizes on marriage "What are we? poor
creatures! we must get through life as we can, doing as much good
as we can to those we love; and think as you please, I love old
Vernon. Am I not giving you the greatest possible proof of it?"
She will not see. Then flatly out comes the one condition. That
and no other. "Take Vernon and I release you." She refuses. Now
ensues the debate, all the oratory being with him. "Is it because
of his unfortunate first marriage? You assured me you thought no
worse of him," etc. She declares the proposal revolting. He can
distinguish nothing that should offend her in a proposal to make
his cousin happy if she will not him. Irony and sarcasm relieve
his emotions, but he convinces her he is dealing plainly and
intends generosity. She is confused; she speaks in maiden fashion.
He touches again on Vernon's early escapade. She does not enjoy
it. The scene closes with his bidding her reflect on it, and 
remember the one condition of her release. Mrs. Mountstuart
Jenkinson, now reduced to believe that he burns to be free, is then
called in for an interview with Clara. His aunts Eleanor and
Isabel besiege her. Laetitia in passionate earnest besieges her.
Her father is wrought on to besiege her. Finally Vernon is
attacked by Willoughby and Mrs. Mountstuart:--and here,
Willoughby chose to think, was the main difficulty. But the girl
has money; she is agreeable; Vernon likes her; she is fond of his
"Alps", they have tastes in common, he likes her father, and in
the end he besieges her. Will she yield? De Craye is absent. There
is no other way of shunning a marriage she is incomprehensibly but
frantically averse to. She is in the toils. Her father will stay
at Patterne Hall as long as his host desires it. She hesitates,
she is overcome; in spite of a certain nausea due to Vernon's
preceding alliance, she yields.

Willoughby revolved the entire drama in Clara's presence. It
helped him to look on her coolly. Conducting her to the
dinner-table, he spoke of Crossjay, not unkindly; and at table, he
revolved the set of scenes with a heated animation that took fire
from the wine and the face of his friend Horace, while he
encouraged Horace to be flowingly Irish. He nipped the fellow
good-humouredly once or twice, having never felt so friendly to
him since the day of his arrival; but the position of critic is
instinctively taken by men who do not flow: and Patterne Port kept
Dr Middleton in a benevolent reserve when Willoughby decided that
something said by De Craye was not new, and laughingly accused him
of failing to consult his anecdotal notebook for the double-cross
to his last sprightly sally. "Your sallies are excellent, Horace,
but spare us your Aunt Sallies!" De Craye had no repartee, nor did
Dr. Middleton challenge a pun. We have only to sharpen our wits
to trip your seductive rattler whenever we may choose to think
proper; and evidently, if we condescended to it, we could do
better than he.  The critic who has hatched a witticism is
impelled to this opinion. Judging by the smiles of the ladies,
they thought so, too.

Shortly before eleven o'clock Dr. Middleton made a Spartan stand
against the offer of another bottle of Port. The regulation couple
of bottles had been consumed in equal partnership, and the Rev.
Doctor and his host were free to pay a ceremonial visit to the
drawing-room, where they were not expected. A piece of work of the
elder ladies, a silken boudoir sofa-rug, was being examined, with
high approval of the two younger. Vernon and Colonel De Craye had
gone out in search of Crossjay, one to Mr. Dale's cottage, the
other to call at the head and under-gamekeeper's. They were said
to be strolling and smoking, for the night was fine. Willoughby
left the room and came back with the key of Crossjay's door in his
pocket. He foresaw that the delinquent might be of service to
him.

Laetitia and Clara sang together. Laetitia was flushed, Clara
pale. At eleven they saluted the ladies Eleanor and Isabel.
Willoughby said "Good-night" to each of them, contrasting as he
did so the downcast look of Laetitia with Clara's frigid
directness. He divined that they were off to talk over their one
object of common interest, Crossjay. Saluting his aunts, he took
up the rug, to celebrate their diligence and taste; and that he
might make Dr. Middleton impatient for bed, he provoked him to
admire it, held it out and laid it out, and caused the courteous
old gentleman some confusion in hitting on fresh terms of
commendation.

Before midnight the room was empty. Ten minutes later Willoughby
paid it a visit, and found it untenanted by the person he had
engaged to be there. Vexed by his disappointment, he paced up and
down, and chanced abstractedly to catch the rug in his hand; for
what purpose, he might well ask himself; admiration of ladies"
work, in their absence, was unlikely to occur to him.
Nevertheless. the touch of the warm, soft silk was meltingly
feminine. A glance at the mantel-piece clock told him Laetitia was
twenty minutes behind the hour. Her remissness might endanger all
his plans, alter the whole course of his life. The colours in
which he painted her were too lively to last; the madness in his
head threatened to subside. Certain it was that he could not be
ready a second night for the sacrifice he had been about to
perform.

The clock was at the half hour after twelve. He flung the silken
thing on the central ottoman, extinguished the lamps, and walked
out of the room, charging the absent Laetitia to bear her
misfortune with a consciousness of deserving it.



CHAPTER XL

Midnight: Sir Willoughby and Laetitia: with Young Crossjay under a
Coverlet

Young Crossjay was a glutton at holidays and never thought of home
till it was dark. The close of the day saw him several miles away
from the Hall, dubious whether he would not round his numerous
adventures by sleeping at an inn; for he had lots of money, and
the idea of jumping up in the morning in a strange place was
thrilling. Besides, when he was shaken out of sleep by Sir
Willoughby, he had been told that he was to go, and not to show
his face at Patterne again. On the other hand, Miss Middleton had
bidden him come back. There was little question with him which
person he should obey: he followed his heart.

Supper at an inn, where he found a company to listen to his
adventures, delayed him, and a short cut, intended to make up for
it, lost him his road. He reached the Hall very late, ready to be
in love with the horrible pleasure of a night's rest under the
stars, if necessary. But a candle burned at one of the back
windows. He knocked, and a kitchen-maid let him in. She had a bowl
of hot soup prepared for him. Crossjay tried a mouthful to please
her. His head dropped over it. She roused him to his feet, and he
pitched against her shoulder. The dry air of the kitchen
department had proved too much for the tired youngster. Mary, the
maid, got him to step as firmly as he was able, and led him by the
back-way to the hall, bidding him creep noiselessly to bed. He
understood his position in the house, and though he could have
gone fast to sleep on the stairs, he took a steady aim at his room
and gained the door cat-like. The door resisted. He was appalled
and unstrung in a minute. The door was locked. Crossjay felt as if
he were in the presence of Sir Willoughby. He fled on ricketty
legs, and had a fall and bumps down half a dozen stairs. A door
opened above. He rushed across the hall to the drawing-room,
invitingly open, and there staggered in darkness to the ottoman
and rolled himself in something sleek and warm, soft as hands of
ladies, and redolent of them; so delicious that he hugged the
folds about his head and heels. While he was endeavouring to think
where he was, his legs curled, his eyelids shut, and he was in the
thick of the day's adventures, doing yet more wonderful things.

He heard his own name: that was quite certain. He knew that he
heard it with his ears, as he pursued the fleetest dreams ever
accorded to mortal. It did not mix: it was outside him, and like
the danger-pole in the ice, which the skater shooting hither and
yonder comes on again, it recurred; and now it marked a point in
his career, how it caused him to relax his pace; he began to
circle, and whirled closer round it, until, as at a blow, his
heart knocked, he tightened himself, thought of bolting, and lay
dead-still to throb and hearken.

"Oh! Sir Willoughby," a voice had said.

The accents were sharp with alarm.

"My friend! my dearest!" was the answer.

"I came to speak of Crossjay."

"Will you sit here on the ottoman?"

"No, I cannot wait. I hoped I had heard Crossjay return. I would
rather not sit down. May I entreat you to pardon him when he comes
home?"

"You, and you only, may do so. I permit none else. Of Crossjay
to-morrow."

"He may be lying in the fields. We are anxious."

"The rascal can take pretty good care of himself."

"Crossjay is perpetually meeting accidents."

"He shall be indemnified if he has had excess of punishment."

"I think I will say good-night, Sir Willoughby."

"When freely and unreservedly you have given me your hand."

There was hesitation.

"To say good-night?"

"I ask you for your hand."

"Good-night, Sir Willoughby."

"You do not give it. You are in doubt? Still? What language must I
use to convince you? And yet you know me. Who knows me but you?
You have always known me. You are my home and my temple. Have you
forgotten your verses of the day of my majority?

       'The dawn-star has arisen 
         In plenitude of light.. .'"

"Do not repeat them, pray!" cried Laetitia, with a gasp.

"I have repeated them to myself a thousand times: in India,
America, Japan: they were like our English skylark, carolling to
me.

       'My heart, now burst thy prison 
         With proud aerial flight!'"

"Oh, I beg you will not force me to listen to nonsense that I
wrote when I was a child. No more of those most foolish lines! If
you knew what it is to write and despise one's writing, you would
not distress me. And since you will not speak of Crossjay
to-night, allow me to retire."

"You know me, and therefore you know my contempt for verses, as a
rule, Laetitia. But not for yours to me. Why should you call them
foolish? They expressed your feelings--hold them sacred. They are
something religious to me, not mere poetry. Perhaps the third
verse is my favourite . . ."

"It will be more than I can bear!"

"You were in earnest when you wrote them?"

"I was very young, very enthusiastic, very silly."

"You were and are my image of constancy!"

"It is an error, Sir Willoughby; I am far from being the same."

"We are all older, I trust wiser. I am, I will own; much wiser.
Wise at last! I offer you my hand."

She did not reply. "I offer you my hand and name, Laetitia."

No response.

"You think me bound in honour to another?"

She was mute.

"I am free. Thank Heaven! I am free to choose my mate--the woman I
have always loved! Freely and unreservedly, as I ask you to give
your hand, I offer mine. You are the mistress of Patterne Hall; my
wife."

She had not a word.

"My dearest! do you not rightly understand? The hand I am offering
you is disengaged. It is offered to the lady I respect above all
others. I have made the discovery that I cannot love without
respecting; and as I will not marry without loving, it ensues that
I am free--I am yours. At last?--your lips move: tell me the
words. Have always loved, I said. You carry in your bosom the
magnet of constancy, and I, in spite of apparent deviations,
declare to you that I have never ceased to be sensible of the
attraction. And now there is not an impediment. We two against
the world! we are one. Let me confess to an old foible--perfectly
youthful, and you will ascribe it to youth: once I desired to
absorb. I mistrusted; that was the reason: I perceive it. You
teach me the difference of an alliance with a lady of intellect.
The pride I have in you, Laetitia, definitely cures me of that
insane passion--call it an insatiable hunger. I recognize it as
a folly of youth. I have, as it were, gone the tour, to come home
to you--at last?--and live our manly life of comparative equals.
At last, then! But remember that in the younger man you would have
had a despot--perhaps a jealous despot. Young men, I assure you,
are orientally inclined in their ideas of love. Love gets a bad
name from them. We, my Laetitia, do not regard love as a
selfishness. If it is, it is the essence of life. At least it is
our selfishness rendered beautiful. I talk to you like a man who
has found a compatriot in a foreign land. It seems to me that I
have not opened my mouth for an age. I certainly have not unlocked
my heart. Those who sing for joy are not unintelligible to me. If
I had not something in me worth saying I think I should sing. In
every sense you reconcile me to men and the world, Laetitia. Why
press you to speak? I will be the speaker. As surely as you know
me, I know you: and ..."

Laetitia burst forth with: "No!"

"I do not know you?" said he, searchingly mellifluous.

"Hardly."

"How not?"

"I am changed."

"In what way?"

"Deeply."

"Sedater?"

"Materially."

"Colour will come back: have no fear; I promise it. If you imagine
you want renewing, I have the specific, I, my love, I!"

"Forgive me--will you tell me, Sir Willoughby, whether you have
broken with Miss Middleton?"

"Rest satisfied, my dear Laetitia. She is as free as I am. I can
do no more than a man of honour should do. She releases me.
To-morrow or next day she departs. We, Laetitia, you and I, my
love, are home birds. It does not do for the home bird to couple
with the migratory. The little imperceptible change you allude to,
is nothing. Italy will restore you. I am ready to stake my own
health--never yet shaken by a doctor of medicine:--I say
medicine advisedly, for there are doctors of divinity who would
shake giants:--that an Italian trip will send you back--that I
shall bring you home from Italy a blooming bride. You shake your
head--despondently? My love, I guarantee it. Cannot I give you
colour? Behold! Come to the light, look in the glass."

"I may redden," said Laetitia. "I suppose that is due to the
action of the heart. I am changed. Heart, for any other purpose, I
have not. I am like you, Sir Willoughby, in this: I could not
marry without loving, and I do not know what love is, except that
it is an empty dream."

"Marriage, my dearest..."

"You are mistaken."

"I will cure you, my Laetitia. Look to me, I am the tonic. It is
not common confidence, but conviction. I, my love, I!"

"There is no cure for what I feel, Sir Willoughby."

"Spare me the formal prefix, I beg. You place your hand in mine,
relying on me. I am pledge for the remainder. We end as we began:
my request is for your hand--your hand in marriage."

"I cannot give it."

"To be my wife!"

"It is an honour; I must decline it."

"Are you quite well, Laetitia? I propose in the plainest terms I
can employ, to make you Lady Patterne--mine."

"I am compelled to refuse."

"Why? Refuse? Your reason!"

"The reason has been named."

He took a stride to inspirit his wits.

"There's a madness comes over women at times, I know.  Answer me,
Laetitia:--by all the evidence a man can have, I could swear it:
--but answer me; you loved me once?"

"I was an exceedingly foolish, romantic girl."

"You evade my question: I am serious. Oh!" he walked away from her
booming a sound of utter repudiation of her present imbecility,
and hurrying to her side, said: "But it was manifest to the whole
world! It was a legend. To love like Laetitia Dale, was a current
phrase. You were an example, a light to women: no one was your
match for devotion. You were a precious cameo, still gazing! And I
was the object. You loved me. You loved me, you belonged to me,
you were mine, my possession, my jewel; I was prouder of your
constancy than of anything else that I had on earth. It was a part
of the order of the universe to me. A doubt of it would have
disturbed my creed. Why, good heaven! where are we? Is nothing
solid on earth? You loved me!"

"I was childish, indeed."

"You loved me passionately!"

"Do you insist on shaming me through and through, Sir Willoughby?
I have been exposed enough."

"You cannot blot out the past: it is written, it is recorded. You
loved me devotedly, silence is no escape. You loved me."

"I did."

"You never loved me, you shallow woman! 'I did!' As if there could
be a cessation of a love! What are we to reckon on as ours? We
prize a woman's love; we guard it jealously, we trust to it, dream
of it; there is our wealth; there is our talisman! And when we
open the casket it has flown!--barren vacuity!--we are poorer
than dogs. As well think of keeping a costly wine in potter's clay
as love in the heart of a woman! There are women--women! Oh,
they are all of a stamp coin! Coin for any hand! It's a fiction,
an imposture--they cannot love. They are the shadows of men.
Compared with men, they have as much heart in them as the shadow
beside the body. Laetitia!"

"Sir Willoughby."

"You refuse my offer?"

"I must."

"You refuse to take me for your husband?"

"I cannot be your wife."

"You have changed? ... you have set your heart? ... you could
marry? ... there is a man? ... you could marry one! I will have
an answer, I am sick of evasions. What was in the mind of Heaven
when women were created, will be the riddle to the end of the
world! Every good man in turn has made the inquiry. I have a right
to know who robs me--We may try as we like to solve it.--Satan
is painted laughing!--I say I have a right to know who robs me.
Answer me."

"I shall not marry."

"That is not an answer."

"I love no one."

"You loved me.--You are silent?--but you confessed it. Then you
confess it was a love that could die! Are you unable to perceive
how that redounds to my discredit? You loved me, you have ceased
to love me. In other words you charge me with incapacity to
sustain a woman's love. You accuse me of inspiring a miserable
passion that cannot last a lifetime! You let the world see that I
am a man to be aimed at for a temporary mark! And simply because I
happen to be in your neighbourhood at an age when a young woman is
impressionable! You make a public example of me as a for whom
women may have a caprice, but that is all; he cannot enchain them;
he fascinates passingly; they fall off. Is it just, for me to be
taken up and cast down at your will? Reflect on that scandal!
Shadows? Why, a man's shadow is faithful to him at least. What are
women? There is not a comparison in nature that does not tower
above them! not one that does not hoot at them! I, throughout my
life, guided by absolute deference to their weakness--paying them
politeness, courtesy--whatever I touch I am happy in, except when
I touch women! How is it? What is the mystery? Some monstrous 
explanation must exist. What can it be? I am favoured by fortune
from my birth until I enter into relations with women. But will
you be so good as to account for it in your defence of them? Oh!
were the relations dishonourable, it would be quite another
matter. Then they ... I could recount ... I disdain to chronicle
such victories. Quite another matter. But they are flies, and I am
something more stable. They are flies. I look beyond the day; I
owe a duty to my line. They are flies. I foresee it, I shall be
crossed in my fate so long as I fail to shun them--flies! Not
merely born for the day, I maintain that they are spiritually
ephemeral--Well, my opinion of your sex is directly traceable to
you. You may alter it, or fling another of us men out on the world
with the old bitter experience. Consider this, that it is on your
head if my ideal of women is wrecked. It rests with you to restore
it. I love you. I discover that you are the one woman I have
always loved. I come to you, I sue you, and suddenly--you have
changed! 'I have changed: I am not the same.' What can it mean? 'I
cannot marry: I love no one.' And you say you do not know what
love is--avowing in the same breath that you did love me! Am I
the empty dream? My hand, heart, fortune, name, are yours, at your
feet; you kick them hence. I am here--you reject me. But why, for
what mortal reason am I here other than my faith in your love? You
drew me to you, to repel me, and have a wretched revenge."

"You know it is not that, Sir Willoughby."

"Have you any possible suspicion that I am still entangled, not,
as I assure you I am, perfectly free in fact and in honour?"

"It is not that."

"Name it; for you see your power. Would you have me kneel to you,
madam?"

"Oh, no; it would complete my grief."

"You feel grief? Then you believe in my affection, and you hurl it
away. I have no doubt that as a poetess you would say, love is
eternal. And you have loved me. And you tell me you love me no
more. You are not very logical, Laetitia Dale."

"Poetesses rarely are: if I am one, which I little pretend to be
for writing silly verses. I have passed out of that delusion, with
the rest."

"You shall not wrong those dear old days, Laetitia. I see them
now; when I rode by your cottage and you were at your window, pen
in hand, your hair straying over your forehead. Romantic, yes;
not foolish. Why were you foolish in thinking of me? Some day I
will commission an artist to paint me that portrait of you from my
description. And I remember when we first whispered ... I remember
your trembling. You have forgotten--I remember. I remember our
meeting in the park on the path to church. I remember the heavenly
morning of my return from my travels, and the same Laetitia
meeting me, stedfast and unchangeable. Could I ever forget? Those
are ineradicable scenes; pictures of my youth, interwound with me.
I may say, that as I recede from them, I dwell on them the more.
Tell me, Laetitia, was there not a certain prophecy of your
father's concerning us two? I fancy I heard of one. There was
one."

"He was an invalid. Elderly people nurse illusions."

"Ask yourself Laetitia, who is the obstacle to the fulfilment of
his prediction?--truth, if ever a truth was foreseen on earth.
You have not changed so far that you would feel no pleasure in
gratifying him? I go to him to-morrow morning with the first
light."

"You will compel me to follow, and undeceive him."

"Do so, and I denounce an unworthy affection you are ashamed to
avow."

"That would be idle, though it would be base."

"Proof of love, then! For no one but you should it be done, and
no one but you dare accuse me of a baseness."

"Sir Willoughby, you will let my father die in peace."

"He and I together will contrive to persuade you."

"You tempt me to imagine that you want a wife at any cost."

"You, Laetitia, you."

"I am tired," she said. "It is late, I would rather not hear more.
I am sorry if I have caused you pain. I suppose you to have spoken
with candour. I defend neither my sex nor myself. I can only say I
am a woman as good as dead: happy to be made happy in my way, but
so little alive that I cannot realize any other way. As for love,
I am thankful to have broken a spell. You have a younger woman in
your mind; I am an old one: I have no ambition and no warmth. My
utmost prayer is to float on the stream--a purely physical desire
of life: I have no strength to swim. Such a woman is not the wife
for you, Sir Willoughby. Good night."

"One final word. Weigh it. Express no conventional regrets.
Resolutely you refuse?"

"Resolutely I do."

"You refuse?"

"Yes."

"I have sacrificed my pride for nothing! You refuse?"

"Yes."

"Humbled myself! And this is the answer! You do refuse?"

"I do."

"Good night, Laetitia Dale."

He gave her passage.

"Good night, Sir Willoughby."

"I am in your power," he said, in a voice between supplication and
menace that laid a claw on her, and she turned and replied:

"You will not be betrayed."

"I can trust you ... ?"

"I go home to-morrow before breakfast."

"Permit me to escort you upstairs."

"If you please: but I see no one here either to-night or
tomorrow."

"It is for the privilege of seeing the last of you."

They withdrew.

Young Crossjay listened to the drumming of his head.  Somewhere in
or over the cavity a drummer rattled tremendously.

Sir Willoughby's laboratory door shut with a slam.

Crossjay tumbled himself off the ottoman. He stole up to the
unclosed drawing-room door, and peeped. Never was a boy more
thoroughly awakened. His object was to get out of the house and go
through the night avoiding everything human, for he was big with
information of a character that he knew to be of the nature of
gunpowder, and he feared to explode. He crossed the hall. In the
passage to the scullery he ran against Colonel De Craye.

"So there you are," said the colonel, "I've been hunting you."

Crossjay related that his bedroom door was locked and the key
gone, and Sir Willoughby sitting up in the laboratory. 

Colonel De Craye took the boy to his own room, where Crossjay lay
on a sofa, comfortably covered over and snug in a swelling
pillow; but he was restless; he wanted to speak, to bellow, to
cry; and he bounced round to his left side, and bounced to his
right, not knowing what to think, except that there was treason to
his adored Miss Middleton.

"Why, my lad, you're not half a campaigner," the colonel called
out to him; attributing his uneasiness to the material discomfort
of the sofa: and Crossjay had to swallow the taunt, bitter though
it was. A dim sentiment of impropriety in unburdening his
overcharged mind on the subject of Miss Middleton to Colonel De
Craye restrained him from defending himself; and so he heaved and
tossed about till daybreak. At an early hour, while his
hospitable friend, who looked very handsome in profile half breast
and head above the sheets, continued to slumber, Crossjay was on
his legs and away. "He says I'm not half a campaigner, and a
couple of hours of bed are enough for me," the boy thought
proudly, and snuffed the springing air of the young sun on the
fields. A glance back at Patterne Hall dismayed him, for he knew
not how to act, and he was immoderately combustible, too full of
knowledge for self-containment; much too zealously excited on
behalf of his dear Miss Middleton to keep silent for many hours of
the day.


CHAPTER XLI

The Rev. Dr. Middleton, Clara, and Sir Willoughby

When Master Crossjay tumbled down the stairs, Laetitia was in
Clara's room, speculating on the various mishaps which might have
befallen that battered youngster; and Clara listened anxiously
after Laetitia had run out, until she heard Sir Willoughby's
voice; which in some way satisfied her that the boy was not in the
house.

She waited, expecting Miss Dale to return; then undressed, went to
bed, tried to sleep. She was tired of strife. Strange thoughts for
a young head shot through her: as, that it is possible for the
sense of duty to counteract distaste; and that one may live a life
apart from one's admirations and dislikes: she owned the singular
strength of Sir Willoughby in outwearying: she asked herself how
much she had gained by struggling:--every effort seemed to
expend her spirit's force, and rendered her less able to get the
clear vision of her prospects, as though it had sunk her deeper:
the contrary of her intention to make each further step confirm
her liberty. Looking back, she marvelled at the things she had
done. Looking round, how ineffectual they appeared! She had still
the great scene of positive rebellion to go through with her
father.

The anticipation of that was the cause of her extreme
discouragement. He had not spoken to her since he became aware of
her attempted flight: but the scene was coming; and besides the
wish not to inflict it on him, as well as to escape it herself,
the girl's peculiar unhappiness lay in her knowledge that they
were alienated and stood opposed, owing to one among the more
perplexing masculine weaknesses, which she could not hint at,
dared barely think of, and would not name in her meditations.
Diverting to other subjects, she allowed herself to exclaim,
"Wine, wine!" in renewed wonder of what there could be in wine to
entrap venerable men and obscure their judgements. She was too
young to consider that her being very much in the wrong gave all
the importance to the cordial glass in a venerable gentleman's
appreciation of his dues. Why should he fly from a priceless wine
to gratify the caprices of a fantastical child guilty of seeking
to commit a breach of faith? He harped on those words. Her fault
was grave. No doubt the wine coloured it to him, as a drop or two
will do in any cup: still her fault was grave.

She was too young for such considerations. She was ready to
expatiate on the gravity of her fault, so long as the humiliation
assisted to her disentanglement: her snared nature in the toils
would not permit her to reflect on it further. She had never
accurately perceived it: for the reason perhaps that Willoughby
had not been moving in his appeals: but, admitting the charge of
waywardness, she had come to terms with conscience, upon the
understanding that she was to perceive it and regret it and do
penance for it by-and-by:--by renouncing marriage altogether? How
light a penance!

In the morning, she went to Laetitia's room, knocked, and had no
answer.

She was informed at the breakfast-table of Miss Dale's departure. 
The ladies Eleanor and Isabel feared it to be a case of urgency at
the cottage. No one had seen Vernon, and Clara requested Colonel
De Craye to walk over to the cottage for news of Crossjay. He
accepted the commission, simply to obey and be in her service:
assuring her, however, that there was no need to be disturbed
about the boy. He would have told her more. had not Dr. Middleton
led her out.

Sir Willoughby marked a lapse of ten minutes by his watch. His
excellent aunts had ventured a comment on his appearance that
frightened him lest he himself should be the person to betray his
astounding discomfiture. He regarded his conduct as an act of
madness, and Laetitia's as no less that of a madwoman--happily
mad! Very happily mad indeed! Her rejection of his ridiculously
generous proposal seemed to show an intervening hand in his
favour, that sent her distraught at the right moment. He entirely
trusted her to be discreet; but she was a miserable creature, who
had lost the one last chance offered her by Providence, and
furnished him with a signal instance of the mediocrity of woman's
love.

Time was flying. In a little while Mrs. Mountstuart would arrive.
He could not fence her without a design in his head; he was
destitute of an armoury if he had no scheme: he racked the brain
only to succeed in rousing phantasmal vapours. Her infernal 
"Twice!" would cease now to apply to Laetitia; it would be an echo
of Lady Busshe. Nay, were all in the secret, Thrice jilted! might
become the universal roar. And this, he reflected bitterly, of a
man whom nothing but duty to his line had arrested from being the
most mischievous of his class with women! Such is our reward for
uprightness!

At the expiration of fifteen minutes by his watch, he struck a
knuckle on the library door. Dr. Middleton held it open to him.

"You are disengaged, sir?"

"The sermon is upon the paragraph which is toned to awaken the
clerk," replied the Rev. Doctor.

Clara was weeping.

Sir Willoughby drew near her solicitously.

Dr Middleton's mane of silvery hair was in a state bearing witness
to the vehemence of the sermon, and Willoughby said: "I hope, sir,
you have not made too much of a trifle." 

"I believe, sir, that I have produced an effect, and that was the
point in contemplation."

"Clara! my dear Clara!" Willoughby touched her.

"She sincerely repents her conduct, I may inform you," said Dr.
Middleton.

"My love!" Willoughby whispered. "We have had a misunderstanding. 
I am at a loss to discover where I have been guilty, but I take
the blame, all the blame. I implore you not to weep. Do me the
favour to look at me. I would not have had you subjected to any
interrogation whatever."

"You are not to blame," Clara said on a sob.

"Undoubtedly Willoughby is not to blame. It was not he who was
bound on a runaway errand in flagrant breach of duty and decorum,
nor he who inflicted a catarrh on a brother of my craft and
cloth," said her father.

"The clerk, sir, has pronounced Amen," observed Willoughby.

"And no man is happier to hear an ejaculation that he has laboured
for with so much sweat of his brow than the parson, I can assure
you," Dr. Middleton mildly groaned. "I have notions of the trouble
of Abraham. A sermon of that description is an immolation of the
parent, however it may go with the child."

Willoughby soothed his Clara.

"I wish I had been here to share it. I might have saved you some
tears. I may have been hasty in our little dissensions. I will
acknowledge that I have been. My temper is often irascible."

"And so is mine!" exclaimed Dr. Middleton. "And yet I am not aware
that I made the worse husband for it. Nor do I rightly comprehend
how a probably justly excitable temper can stand for a plea in
mitigation of an attempt at an outrageous breach of faith."

"The sermon is over, sir."

"Reverberations!" the Rev. Doctor waved his arm placably.
"Take it for thunder heard remote."

"Your hand, my love," Willoughby murmured.

The hand was not put forth.

Dr. Middleton remarked the fact. He walked to the window. and
perceiving the pair in the same position when he faced about, he
delivered a cough of admonition.

"It is cruel!" said Clara.

"That the owner of your hand should petition you for it?" inquired
her father.

She sought refuge in a fit of tears.

Willoughby bent above her, mute.

"Is a scene that is hardly conceivable as a parent's obligation
once in a lustrum, to be repeated within the half hour?" shouted
her father.

She drew up her shoulders and shook; let them fall and dropped her
head.

"My dearest! your hand!" fluted Willoughby.

The hand surrendered; it was much like the icicle of a sudden
thaw.

Willoughby squeezed it to his ribs.

Dr. Middleton marched up and down the room with his arms locked
behind him. The silence between the young people seemed to
denounce his presence.

He said, cordially: "Old Hiems has but to withdraw for buds to
burst. 'Jam ver egelidos refert tepores." The equinoctial fury
departs. I will leave you for a term."

Clara and Willoughby simultaneously raised their faces with
opposing expressions.

"My girl!" Her father stood by her, laying gentle hand on her.

"Yes, papa, I will come out to you," she replied to his apology
for the rather heavy weight of his vocabulary, and smiled.

"No, sir, I beg you will remain," said Willoughby.

"I keep you frost-bound."

Clara did not deny it.

Willoughby emphatically did.

Then which of them was the more lover-like? Dr. Middleton would for
the moment have supposed his daughter.

Clara said: "Shall you be on the lawn, papa?"

Willoughby interposed. "Stay, sir; give us your blessing."

"That you have." Dr. Middleton hastily motioned the paternal 
ceremony in outline.

"A few minutes, papa," said Clara.

"Will she name the day?" came eagerly from Willoughby.

"I cannot!" Clara cried in extremity.

"The day is important on its arrival," said her father; "but I
apprehend the decision to be of the chief importance at present. 
First prime your piece of artillery, my friend."

"The decision is taken, sir."

"Then I will be out of the way of the firing. Hit what day you
please."

Clara checked herself on an impetuous exclamation. It was done
that her father might not be detained.

Her astute self-compression sharpened Willoughby as much as it
mortified and terrified him. He understood how he would stand in
an instant were Dr. Middleton absent. Her father was the tribunal
she dreaded, and affairs must be settled and made irrevocable
while he was with them. To sting the blood of the girl, he called
her his darling, and half enwound her, shadowing forth a salute.

She strung her body to submit, seeing her father take it as a
signal for his immediate retirement.

Willoughby was upon him before he reached the door.

"Hear us out, sir. Do not go. Stay, at my entreaty. I fear we have
not come to a perfect reconcilement."

"If that is your opinion," said Clara, "it is good reason for not
distressing my father."

"Dr Middleton, I love your daughter. I wooed her and won her; I
had your consent to our union, and I was the happiest of mankind.
In some way, since her coming to my house, I know not how--she
will not tell me, or cannot--I offended. One may be innocent and
offend. I have never pretended to impeccability, which is an
admission that I may very naturally offend. My appeal to her is
for an explanation or for pardon. I obtain neither. Had our
positions been reversed, oh, not for any real offence--not for
the worst that can be imagined--I think not--I hope not--could
I have been tempted to propose the dissolution of our engagement.
To love is to love, with me; an engagement a solemn bond. With all
my errors I have that merit of utter fidelity--to the world
laughable! I confess to a multitude of errors; I have that single
merit, and am not the more estimable in your daughter's eyes on
account of it, I fear. In plain words, I am, I do not doubt, one
of the fools among men; of the description of human dog commonly
known as faithful--whose destiny is that of a tribe. A man who
cries out when he is hurt is absurd, and I am not asking for
sympathy. Call me luckless. But I abhor a breach of faith. A
broken pledge is hateful to me. I should regard it myself as a
form of suicide. There are principles which civilized men must
contend for. Our social fabric is based on them. As my word stands
for me, I hold others to theirs. If that is not done, the world is
more or less a carnival of counterfeits. In this instance--Ah!
Clara, my love! and you have principles: you have inherited, you
have been indoctrinated with them: have I, then, in my ignorance,
offended past penitence, that you, of all women? ... And without
being able to name my sin!--Not only for what I lose by it, but
in the abstract, judicially--apart from the sentiment of personal
interest, grief, pain, and the possibility of my having to endure
that which no temptation would induce me to commit:--judicially;--
I fear, sir, I am a poor forensic orator . . ."

"The situation, sir, does not demand a Cicero: proceed," said Dr.
Middleton, balked in his approving nods at the right true things
delivered.

"Judicially, I am bold to say, though it may appear a presumption 
in one suffering acutely, I abhor a breach of faith."

Dr. Middleton brought his nod down low upon the phrase he had
anticipated. "And I," said he, "personally, and presently, abhor a
breach of faith. Judicially? Judicially to examine, judicially to
condemn: but does the judicial mind detest? I think, sir, we are
not on the bench when we say that we abhor: we have unseated
ourselves. Yet our abhorrence of bad conduct is very certain. You
would signify, impersonally: which suffices for this exposition of
your feelings."

He peered at the gentleman under his brows, and resumed:

"She has had it, Willoughby; she has had it in plain Saxon and in
uncompromising Olympian. There is, I conceive, no necessity to
revert to it."

"Pardon me, sir, but I am still unforgiven."

"You must babble out the rest between you. I am about as much at
home as a turkey with a pair of pigeons."

"Leave us, father," said Clara.

"First join our hands, and let me give you that title, sir."

"Reach the good man your hand, my girl; forthright, from the
shoulder, like a brave boxer. Humour a lover. He asks for his
own."

"It is more than I can do, father."

"How, it is more than you can do? You are engaged to him, a
plighted woman."

"I do not wish to marry."

"The apology is inadequate."

"I am unworthy..."

"Chatter! chatter!"

"I beg him to release me."

"Lunacy!"

"I have no love to give him."

"Have you gone back to your cradle, Clara Middleton?"

"Oh, leave us, dear father!"

"My offence, Clara, my offence! What is it? Will you only name
it?"

"Father, will you leave us? We can better speak together . .

"We have spoken, Clara, how often!" Willoughby resumed, 
"with what result?--that you loved me, that you have ceased to
love me: that your heart was mine, that you have withdrawn it,
plucked it from me: that you request me to consent to a sacrifice
involving my reputation, my life. And what have I done? I am the
same, unchangeable. I loved and love you: my heart was yours, and
is, and will be yours forever. You are my affianced--that is, my
wife. What have I done?"

"It is indeed useless," Clara sighed.

"Not useless, my girl, that you should inform this gentleman, your
affianced husband, of the ground of the objection you conceived
against him."

"I cannot say."

"Do you know?"

"If I could name it, I could hope to overcome it."

Dr. Middleton addressed Sir Willoughby.

"I verily believe we are directing the girl to dissect a caprice.
Such things are seen large by these young people, but as they have
neither organs, nor arteries, nor brains, nor membranes,
dissection and inspection will he alike profitlessly practised.
Your inquiry is natural for a lover, whose passion to enter into
relations with the sex is ordinarily in proportion to his ignorance
of the stuff composing them. At a particular age they traffic in
whims: which are, I presume, the spiritual of hysterics; and are
indubitably preferable, so long as they are not pushed too far.
Examples are not wanting to prove that a flighty initiative on the
part of the male is a handsome corrective. In that case, we should
probably have had the roof off the house, and the girl now at your
feet. Ha!"

"Despise me, father. I am punished for ever thinking myself the
superior of any woman," said Clara.

"Your hand out to him, my dear, since he is for a formal
reconciliation; and I can't wonder."

"Father! I have said I do not ... I have said I cannot ...

"By the most merciful! what? what? the name for it, words for it!"

"Do not frown on me, father. I wish him happiness. I cannot marry
him. I do not love him."

"You will remember that you informed me aforetime that you did
love him."

"I was ignorant ... I did not know myself. I wish him to be
happy."

"You deny him the happiness you wish him!"

"It would not be for his happiness were I to wed him."

"Oh!" burst from Willoughby.

"You hear him. He rejects your prediction, Clara Middleton." She
caught her clasped hands up to her throat. "Wretched, wretched,
both!"

"And you have not a word against him, miserable girl."

"Miserable! I am."

"It is the cry of an animal!"

"Yes, father."

"You feel like one? Your behaviour is of that shape. You have not
a word?"

"Against myself, not against him."

"And I, when you speak so generously, am to yield you? give you
up?" cried Willoughby. "Ah! my love, my Clara, impose what you
will on me; not that. It is too much for man. It is, I swear it,
beyond my strength."

"Pursue, continue the strain; 'tis in the right key," said Dr.
Middleton, departing.

Willoughby wheeled and waylaid him with a bound.

"Plead for me, sir; you are all-powerful. Let her be mine, she
shall be happy, or I will perish for it. I will call it on my
head.--Impossible! I cannot lose her. Lose you, my love? it would
be to strip myself of every blessing of body and soul. It would
be to deny myself possession of grace, beauty, wit, all the
incomparable charms of loveliness of mind and person in woman, and
plant myself in a desert. You are my mate, the sum of everything I
call mine. Clara, I should be less than man to submit to such a
loss. Consent to it? But I love you! I worship you! How can I
consent to lose you ... ?"

He saw the eyes of the desperately wily young woman slink
sideways. Dr. Middleton was pacing at ever shorter lengths closer
by the door.

"You hate me?" Willoughby sunk his voice.

"If it should turn to hate!" she murmured.

"Hatred of your husband?"

"I could not promise," she murmured, more softly in her wiliness.

"Hatred?" he cried aloud, and Dr. Middleton stopped in his walk and
flung up his head: "Hatred of your husband? of the man you have
vowed to love and honour? Oh, no! Once mine, it is not to he
feared. I trust to my knowledge of your nature; I trust in your
blood, I trust in your education. Had I nothing else to inspire
confidence, I could trust in your eyes. And, Clara, take the
confession: I would rather be hated than lose you. For if I lose
you, you are in another world, out of this one holding me in its
death-like cold; but if you hate me we are together, we are still
together. Any alliance, any, in preference to separation!"

Clara listened with critical ear. His language and tone were new;
and comprehending that they were in part addressed to her father,
whose phrase: "A breach of faith": he had so cunningly used,
disdain of the actor prompted the extreme blunder of her saying--
frigidly though she said it:

"You have not talked to me in this way before."

"Finally," remarked her father, summing up the situation to settle
it from that little speech, "he talks to you in this way now; and
you are under my injunction to stretch your hand out to him for a
symbol of union, or to state your objection to that course. He, by
your admission, is at the terminus, and there, failing the why
not, must you join him."

Her head whirled. She had been severely flagellated and weakened
previous to Willoughby's entrance. Language to express her
peculiar repulsion eluded her. She formed the words, and perceived
that they would not stand to bear a breath from her father. She
perceived too that Willoughby was as ready with his agony of
supplication as she with hers. If she had tears for a resource, he
had gestures quite as eloquent; and a cry of her loathing of the
union would fetch a countervailing torrent of the man's love.--
What could she say? he is an Egoist? The epithet has no meaning in
such a scene. Invent! shrieked the hundred-voiced instinct of
dislike within her, and alone with her father, alone with
Willoughby, she could have invented some equivalent, to do her
heart justice for the injury it sustained in her being unable to
name the true and immense objection: but the pair in presence
paralyzed her. She dramatized them each springing forward by
turns, with crushing rejoinders. The activity of her mind revelled
in giving them a tongue, but would not do it for herself. Then
ensued the inevitable consequence of an incapacity to speak at the
heart's urgent dictate: heart and mind became divided. One
throbbed hotly, the other hung aloof, and mentally, while the sick
inarticulate heart kept clamouring, she answered it with all that
she imagined for those two men to say. And she dropped poison on
it to still its reproaches: bidding herself remember her fatal
postponements in order to preserve the seeming of consistency
before her father; calling it hypocrite; asking herself, what was
she! who loved her! And thus beating down her heart, she completed
the mischief with a piercing view of the foundation of her
father's advocacy of Willoughby, and more lamentably asked herself
what her value was, if she stood bereft of respect for her father.

Reason, on the other hand, was animated by her better nature to
plead his case against her: she clung to her respect for him, and
felt herself drowning with it: and she echoed Willoughby 
consciously, doubling her horror with the consciousness, in crying
out on a world where the most sacred feelings are subject to such
lapses. It doubled her horror, that she should echo the man: but
it proved that she was no better than be: only some years younger.
Those years would soon be outlived: after which, he and she would
be of a pattern. She was unloved: she did no harm to any one by
keeping her word to this man; she had pledged it, and it would be
a breach of faith not to keep it. No one loved her. Behold the
quality of her father's love! To give him happiness was now the
principal aim for her, her own happiness being decently buried;
and here he was happy: why should she be the cause of his going
and losing the poor pleasure he so much enjoyed?

The idea of her devotedness flattered her feebleness. She betrayed
signs of hesitation; and in hesitating, she looked away from a
look at Willoughby, thinking (so much against her nature was it to
resign herself to him) that it would not have been so difficult
with an ill-favoured man. With one horribly ugly, it would have
been a horrible exultation to cast off her youth and take the
fiendish leap.

Unfortunately for Sir Willoughby, he had his reasons for pressing
impatience; and seeing her deliberate, seeing her hasty look at
his fine figure, his opinion of himself combined with his
recollection of a particular maxim of the Great Book to assure him
that her resistance was over: chiefly owing, as he supposed, to
his physical perfections.

Frequently indeed, in the contest between gentlemen and ladies,
have the maxims of the Book stimulated the assailant to victory.
They are rosy with blood of victims. To bear them is to hear a
horn that blows the mort: has blown it a thousand times. It is
good to remember how often they have succeeded, when, for the
benefit of some future Lady Vauban, who may bestir her wits to
gather maxims for the inspiriting of the Defence, the circumstance
of a failure has to be recorded. 

Willoughby could not wait for the melting of the snows. He saw
full surely the dissolving process; and sincerely admiring and
coveting her as he did, rashly this ill-fated gentleman attempted
to precipitate it, and so doing arrested.

Whence might we draw a note upon yonder maxim, in words akin to
these: Make certain ere a breath come from thee that thou be not a
frost.

"Mine! She is mine!" he cried: "mine once more! mine utterly! mine
eternally!" and he followed up his devouring exclamations in
person as she, less decidedly, retreated. She retreated as young
ladies should ever do, two or three steps, and he would not notice
that she had become an angry Dian, all arrows: her maidenliness in
surrendering pleased him. Grasping one fair hand, he just allowed
her to edge on the outer circle of his embrace, crying: "Not a
syllable of what I have gone through! You shall not have to
explain it, my Clara. I will study you more diligently, to be
guided by you, my darling. If I offend again, my wife will not
find it hard to speak what my bride withheld--I do not ask why:
perhaps not able to weigh the effect of her reticence: not at that
time, when she was younger and less experienced, estimating the
sacredness of a plighted engagement. It is past, we are one, my
dear sir and father. You may leave us now."

"I profoundly rejoice to hear that I may," said Dr. Middleton.
Clara writhed her captured hand.

"No, papa, stay. It is an error, an error. You must not leave me.
Do not think me utterly, eternally, belonging to any one but you.
No one shall say I am his but you."

"Are you quicksands, Clara Middleton, that nothing can be built on
you? Whither is a flighty head and a shifty will carrying the
girl?"

"Clara and I, sir," said Willoughby.

"And so you shall," said the Doctor, turning about.

"Not yet, papa:" Clara sprang to him.

"Why, you, you, you, it was you who craved to be alone with
Willoughby!" her father shouted; "and here we are rounded to our
starting-point, with the solitary difference that now you do not
want to be alone with Willoughby. First I am bidden go; next I am
pulled back; and judging by collar and coat-tag, I suspect you to
be a young woman to wear an angel's temper threadbare before you
determine upon which one of the tides driving him to and fro you
intend to launch on yourself, Where is your mind?"

Clara smoothed her forehead.

"I wish to please you, papa."

"I request you to please the gentleman who is your appointed 
husband."

"I am anxious to perform my duty."

"That should be a satisfactory basis for you, Willoughby; as 
girls go!"

"Let me, sir, simply entreat to have her hand in mine before you."

"Why not, Clara?"

"Why an empty ceremony, papa?"

"The implication is, that she is prepared for the important one,
friend Willoughby."

"Her hand, sir; the reassurance of her hand in mine under your
eyes:--after all that I have suffered, I claim it, I think I
claim it reasonably, to restore me to confidence."

"Quite reasonably; which is not to say, necessarily; but, I will
add, justifiably; and it may be, sagaciously, when dealing with
the volatile."

"And here," said Willoughby, "is my hand."

Clara recoiled.

He stepped on. Her father frowned. She lifted both her hands from
the shrinking elbows, darted a look of repulsion at her pursuer,
and ran to her father, crying: "Call it my mood! I am volatile,
capricious, flighty, very foolish. But you see that I attach a
real meaning to it, and feel it to be binding: I cannot think it
an empty ceremony, if it is before you. Yes, only be a little
considerate to your moody girl. She will be in a fitter state in a
few hours. Spare me this moment; I must collect myself. I thought
I was free; I thought he would not press me. If I give my hand
hurriedly now, I shall, I know, immediately repent it. There is
the picture of me! But, papa, I mean to try to be above that, and
if I go and walk by myself, I shall grow calm to perceive where my
duty lies . . ."

"In which direction shall you walk?" said Willoughby.

"Wisdom is not upon a particular road," said Dr. Middleton.

"I have a dread, sir, of that one which leads to the
railway-station."

"With some justice!" Dr. Middleton sighed over his daughter.

Clara coloured to deep crimson: but she was beyond anger, and was
rather gratified by an offence coming from Willoughby.

"I will promise not to leave his grounds, papa."

"My child, you have threatened to be a breaker of promises."

"Oh!" she wailed. "But I will make it a vow to you."

"Why not make it a vow to me this moment, for this gentleman's 
contentment, that he shall be your husband within a given period?"

"I will come to you voluntarily. I burn to be alone."

"I shall lose her," exclaimed Willoughby, in heartfelt earnest.

"How so?" said Dr. Middleton. "I have her, sir, if you will favour
me by continuing in abeyance.--You will come within an hour
voluntarily, Clara; and you will either at once yield your hand to
him or you will furnish reasons, and they must be good ones, for
withholding it."

"Yes, papa."

"You will?"

"I will."

"Mind, I say reasons."

"Reasons, papa. If I have none ..."

"If you have none that are to my satisfaction, you implicitly and
instantly, and cordially obey my command."

"I will obey."

"What more would you require?" Dr. Middleton bowed to Sir
Willoughby in triumph.

"Will she..."

"Sir! Sir!"

"She is your daughter, sir. I am satisfied."

"She has perchance wrestled with her engagement, as the
aboriginals of a land newly discovered by a crew of adventurous 
colonists do battle with the garments imposed on them by our
considerate civilization;--ultimately to rejoice with excessive 
dignity in the wearing of a battered cocked-hat and trowsers not
extending to the shanks: but she did not break her engagement,
sir; and we will anticipate that, moderating a young woman's
native wildness, she may, after the manner of my comparison, take
a similar pride in her fortune in good season."

Willoughby had not leisure to sound the depth of Dr. Middleton's
compliment. He had seen Clara gliding out of the room during the
delivery; and his fear returned on him that, not being won, she
was lost.

"She has gone." Her father noticed her absence. "She does not
waste time in her mission to procure that astonishing product of a
shallow soil, her reasons; if such be the object of her search.
But no: it signifies that she deems herself to have need of
composure--nothing more. No one likes to be turned about; we like
to turn ourselves about; and in the question of an act to be
committed, we stipulate that it shall be our act--girls and
others.  After the lapse of an hour, it will appear to her as her
act.  Happily, Willoughby, we do not dine away from Patterne
to-night."

"No, sir."

"It may be attributable to a sense of deserving, but I could plead
guilty to a weakness for old Port to-day."

"There shall be an extra bottle, sir."

"All going favourably with you, as I have no cause to doubt," said
Dr Middleton, with the motion of wafting his host out of the
library.



CHAPTER XLII

Shows the Divining Arts of a Perceptive Mind

Starting from the Hall a few minutes before Dr. Middleton and Sir
Willoughby had entered the drawing-room overnight, Vernon parted
company with Colonel De Craye at the park-gates, and betook himself
to the cottage of the Dales, where nothing had been heard of his
wanderer; and he received the same disappointing reply from Dr.
Corney, out of the bedroom window of the genial physician, whose
astonishment at his covering so long a stretch of road at night
for news of a boy like Crossjay--gifted with the lives of a cat--
became violent and rapped Punch-like blows on the window-sill at
Vernon's refusal to take shelter and rest. Vernon's excuse was
that he had "no one but that fellow to care for", and he strode
off, naming a farm five miles distant. Dr. Corney howled an
invitation to early breakfast to him, in the event of his passing
on his way back, and retired to bed to think of him. The result of
a variety of conjectures caused him to set Vernon down as Miss
Middleton's knight, and he felt a strong compassion for his poor
friend. "Though," thought he, "a hopeless attachment is as pretty
an accompaniment to the tune of life as a gentleman might wish to
have, for it's one of those big doses of discord which make all
the minor ones fit in like an agreeable harmony, and so he
shuffles along as pleasantly as the fortune-favoured, when they
come to compute!"

Sir Willoughby was the fortune-favoured in the little doctor's
mind; that high-stepping gentleman having wealth, and public
consideration, and the most ravishing young lady in the world for
a bride. Still, though he reckoned all these advantages enjoyed by
Sir Willoughby at their full value, he could imagine the ultimate
balance of good fortune to be in favour of Vernon. But to do so,
he had to reduce the whole calculation to the extreme abstract,
and feed his lean friend, as it were, on dew and roots; and the
happy effect for Vernon lay in a distant future, on the borders of
old age, where he was to be blessed with his lady's regretful
preference, and rejoice in the fruits of good constitutional
habits. The reviewing mind was Irish. Sir Willoughby was a
character of man profoundly opposed to Dr. Corney's nature; the
latter's instincts bristled with antagonism--not to his race, for
Vernon was of the same race, partly of the same blood, and Corney
loved him: the type of person was the annoyance. And the
circumstance of its prevailing successfulness in the country where
he was placed, while it held him silent as if under a law, heaped
stores of insurgency in the Celtic bosom. Corney contemplating Sir
Willoughby, and a trotting kern governed by Strongbow, have a
point of likeness between them; with the point of difference, that
Corney was enlightened to know of a friend better adapted for
eminent station, and especially better adapted to please a lovely
lady--could these high-bred Englishwomen but be taught to
conceive another idea of manliness than the formal carved-in-wood
idol of their national worship!

Dr Corney breakfasted very early, without seeing Vernon. He was
off to a patient while the first lark of the morning carolled
above, and the business of the day, not yet fallen upon men in the
shape of cloud, was happily intermixed with nature's hues and
pipings. Turning off the high-road tip a green lane, an hour
later, he beheld a youngster prying into a hedge head and arms, by
the peculiar strenuous twist of whose hinder parts, indicative of
a frame plunged on the pursuit in hand, he clearly distinguished
young Crossjay. Out came eggs. The doctor pulled up.

"What bird?" he bellowed.

"Yellowhammer," Crossjay yelled back.

"Now, sir, you'll drop a couple of those eggs in the nest."

"Don't order me," Crossjay was retorting. "Oh, it's you, Doctor
Corney. Good morning. I said that, because I always do drop a
couple back. I promised Mr. Whitford I would, and Miss Middleton
too."

"Had breakfast?"

"Not yet."

"Not hungry?"

"I should be if I thought about it."

"Jump up."

"I think I'd rather not, Doctor Corney."

"And you'll just do what Doctor Corney tells you; and set your
mind on rashers of curly fat bacon and sweetly smoking coffee,
toast, hot cakes, marmalade, and damson-jam. Wide go the fellow's
nostrils, and there's water at the dimples of his mouth! Up, my
man."

Crossjay jumped up beside the doctor, who remarked, as he touched
his horse: "I don't want a man this morning, though I'll enlist
you in my service if I do. You're fond of Miss Middleton?"

Instead of answering, Crossjay heaved the sigh of love that bears
a burden.

"And so am I," pursued the doctor: "You'll have to put up with a
rival. It's worse than fond: I'm in love with her. How do you like
that?"

"I don't mind how many love her," said Crossjay.

"You're worthy of a gratuitous breakfast in the front parlour of
the best hotel of the place they call Arcadia. And how about your
bed last night?"

"Pretty middling."

"Hard, was it, where the bones haven't cushion?"

"I don't care for bed. A couple of hours, and that's enough for
me."

"But you're fond of Miss Middleton anyhow, and that's a virtue."

To his great surprise, Dr. Corney beheld two big round tears force
their way out of this tough youngster's eyes, and all the while
the boy's face was proud.

Crossjay said, when he could trust himself to disjoin his lips:

"I want to see Mr. Whitford."

"Have you got news for him?"

"I've something to ask him. It's about what I ought to do."

"Then, my boy, you have the right name addressed in the wrong
direction: for I found you turning your shoulders on Mr. Whitford.
And he has been out of his bed hunting you all the unholy night
you've made it for him. That's melancholy. What do you say to
asking my advice?"

Crossjay sighed. "I can't speak to anybody but Mr. Whitford."

"And you're hot to speak to him?"

"I want to."

"And I found you running away from him. You're a curiosity, Mr.
Crossjay Patterne."

"Ah! so'd anybody be who knew as much as I do," said Crossjay.
with a sober sadness that caused the doctor to treat him
seriously.

"The fact is," he said, "Mr. Whitford is beating the country for
you. My best plan will be to drive you to the Hall."

"I'd rather not go to the Hall," Crossjay spoke resolutely.

"You won't see Miss Middleton anywhere but at the Hall."

"I don't want to see Miss Middleton, if I can't be a bit of use to
her."

"No danger threatening the lady, is there?"

Crossjay treated the question as if it had not been put.

"Now, tell me," said Dr. Corney, "would there be a chance for me,
supposing Miss Middleton were disengaged?"

The answer was easy. "I'm sure she wouldn't."

"And why, sir, are you so cock sure?"

There was no saying; but the doctor pressed for it, and at last
Crossjay gave his opinion that she would take Mr. Whitford.

The doctor asked why; and Crossjay said it was because Mr.
Whitford was the best man in the world. To which, with a lusty
"Amen to that," Dr. Corney remarked: "I should have fancied Colonel
De Craye would have had the first chance: he's more of a lady's
man."

Crossjay surprised him again by petulantly saying: "Don't." 

The boy added: "I don't want to talk, except about birds and
things.  What a jolly morning it is! I saw the sun rise. No rain
to-day.  You're right about hungry, Doctor Corney!" 

The kindly little man swung his whip. Crossjay informed him of his
disgrace at the Hall, and of every incident connected with it,
from the tramp to the baronet, save Miss Middleton's adventure and
the night scene in the drawing-room. A strong smell of something
left out struck Dr. Corney, and he said:  "You'll not let Miss
Middleton know of my affection. After all, it's only a little bit
of love. But, as Patrick said to Kathleen, when she owned to such
a little bit, 'that's the best bit of all!'  and he was as right
as I am about hungry."

Crossjay scorned to talk of loving, he declared. "I never tell
Miss Middleton what I feel. Why, there's Miss Dale's cottage!"

"It's nearer to your empty inside than my mansion," said the
doctor, "and we'll stop just to inquire whether a bed's to be had
for you there to-night, and if not, I'll have you with me, and
bottle you, and exhibit you, for you're a rare specimen.
Breakfast you may count on from Mr. Dale. I spy a gentleman."

"It's Colonel De Craye."

"Come after news of you."

"I wonder!"

"Miss Middleton sends him; of course she does."

Crossjay turned his full face to the doctor. "I haven't seen her
for such a long time! But he saw me last night, and he might have
told her that, if she's anxious.--Good-morning, colonel. I've had
a good walk, and a capital drive, and I'm as hungry as the boat's
crew of Captain Bligh."

He jumped down.

The colonel and the doctor saluted, smiling.

"I've rung the bell," said De Craye.

A maid came to the gate, and upon her steps appeared Miss Dale,
who flung herself at Crossjay, mingling kisses and reproaches. She
scarcely raised her face to the colonel more than to reply to his
greeting, and excuse the hungry boy for hurrying indoors to
breakfast.

"I'll wait," said De Craye. He had seen that she was paler than
usual. So had Dr. Corney; and the doctor called to her concerning
her father's health. She reported that he had not yet risen, and
took Crossjay to herself.

"That's well," said the doctor, "if the invalid sleeps long. The
lady is not looking so well, though. But ladies vary; they show
the mind on the countenance, for want of the punching we meet with
to conceal it; they're like military flags for a funeral or a
gala; one day furled, and next day streaming. Men are ships"
figure-heads, about the same for a storm or a calm, and not too
handsome, thanks to the ocean. It's an age since we encountered
last, colonel: on board the Dublin boat, I recollect, and a night
it was."

"I recollect that you set me on my legs, doctor."

"Ah! and you'll please to notify that Corney's no quack at sea, by
favour of the monks of the Chartreuse, whose elixir has power to
still the waves. And we hear that miracles are done with!"

"Roll a physician and a monk together, doctor!"

"True: it'll be a miracle if they combine. Though the cure of the
soul is often the entire and total cure of the body: and it's
maliciously said that the body given over to our treatment is a
signal to set the soul flying. By the way, colonel, that boy has a
trifle on his mind."

"I suppose he has been worrying a farmer or a gamekeeper."

"Try him. You'll find him tight. He's got Miss Middleton on the
brain. There's a bit of a secret; and he's not so cheerful about
it."

"We'll see," said the colonel.

Dr Corney nodded. "I have to visit my patient here presently. I'm
too early for him: so I'll make a call or two on the lame birds
that are up," he remarked, and drove away.

De Craye strolled through the garden. He was a gentleman of those
actively perceptive wits which, if ever they reflect, do so by
hops and jumps: upon some dancing mirror within, we may fancy. He
penetrated a plot in a flash; and in a flash he formed one; but in
both cases, it was after long hovering and not over-eager
deliberation, by the patient exercise of his quick perceptives.
The fact that Crossjay was considered to have Miss Middleton on
the brain, threw a series of images of everything relating to
Crossjay for the last forty hours into relief before him: and as
he did not in the slightest degree speculate on any one of them,
but merely shifted and surveyed them, the falcon that he was in
spirit as well as in his handsome face leisurely allowed his
instinct to direct him where to strike. A reflective disposition
has this danger in action, that it commonly precipitates
conjecture for the purpose of working upon probabilities with the
methods and in the tracks to which it is accustomed: and to
conjecture rashly is to play into the puzzles of the maze. He who
can watch circling above it awhile, quietly viewing, and
collecting in his eye, gathers matter that makes the secret thing
discourse to the brain by weight and balance; he will get either
the right clue or none; more frequently none; but he will escape
the entanglement of his own cleverness, he will always be nearer
to the enigma than the guesser or the calculator, and he will
retain a breadth of vision forfeited by them. He must, however, to
have his chance of success, be acutely besides calmly perceptive,
a reader of features, audacious at the proper moment.

De Craye wished to look at Miss Dale. She had returned home very
suddenly, not, as it appeared, owing to her father's illness; and
he remembered a redness of her eyelids when he passed her on the
corridor one night. She sent Crossjay out to him as soon as the
boy was well filled. He sent Crossjay back with a request. She did
not yield to it immediately. She stepped to the front door
reluctantly, and seemed disconcerted. De Craye begged for a
message to Miss Middleton. There was none to give. He persisted.
But there was really none at present, she said.

"You won't entrust me with the smallest word?" said he, and set
her visibly thinking whether she could dispatch a word. She could
not; she had no heart for messages.

"I shall see her in a day or two, Colonel De Craye."

"She will miss you severely."

"We shall soon meet."

"And poor Willoughby!"

Laetitia coloured and stood silent.

A butterfly of some rarity allured Crossjay.

"I fear he has been doing mischief," she said. "I cannot get him
to look at me."

"His appetite is good?"

"Very good indeed."

De Craye nodded. A boy with a noble appetite is never a hopeless
lock.

The colonel and Crossjay lounged over the garden.

"And now," said the colonel, "we'll see if we can't arrange a
meeting between you and Miss Middleton. You're a lucky fellow, for
she's always thinking of you."

"I know I'm always thinking of her," said Crossjay.

"If ever you're in a scrape, she's the person you must go to."

"Yes, if I know where she is!"

"Why, generally she'll be at the Hall."

There was no reply: Crossjay's dreadful secret jumped to his
throat. He certainly was a weaker lock for being full of
breakfast.

"I want to see Mr. Whitford so much," he said.

"Something to tell him?"

"I don't know what to do: I don't understand it!" The secret
wriggled to his mouth. He swallowed it down. "Yes, I want to talk
to Mr. Whitford."

"He's another of Miss Middleton's friends."

"I know he is. He's true steel."

"We're all her friends, Crossjay. I flatter myself I'm a Toledo when
I'm wanted. How long had you been in the house last night before
you ran into me?"

"I don't know, sir; I fell asleep for some time, and then I woke! .
. ."

"Where did you find yourself?"

"I was in the drawing-room."

"Come, Crossjay, you're not a fellow to be scared by ghosts? You
looked it when you made a dash at my midriff."

"I don't believe there are such things. Do you, colonel? You
can't!"

"There's no saying. We'll hope not; for it wouldn't be fair
fighting. A man with a ghost to back him'd beat any ten. We
couldn't box him or play cards, or stand a chance with him as a
rival in love. Did you, now, catch a sight of a ghost?"

"They weren't ghosts!" Crossjay said what he was sure of, and his
voice pronounced his conviction.

"I doubt whether Miss Middleton is particularly happy," remarked
the colonel. "Why? Why, you upset her, you know, now and then."

The boy swelled. "I'd do ... I'd go ... I wouldn't have her
unhappy ... It's that! that's it! And I don't know what I ought to
do. I wish I could see Mr. Whitford."

"You get into such headlong scrapes, my lad."

"I wasn't in any scrape yesterday."

"So you made yourself up a comfortable bed in the drawing-room? 
Luckily Sir Willoughby didn't see you."

"He didn't, though!"

"A close shave, was it?"

"I was under a covering of something silk."

"He woke you?"

"I suppose he did. I heard him."

"Talking?"

"He was talking."

"What! talking to himself?"

"No."

The secret threatened Crossjay to be out or suffocate him. De
Craye gave him a respite.

"You like Sir Willoughby, don't you?"

Crossjay produced a still-born affirmative.

"He's kind to you," said the colonel; "he'll set you up and look
after your interests."

"Yes, I like him," said Crossjay, with his customary rapidity in
touching the subject; "I like him; he's kind and all that, and
tips and plays with you, and all that; but I never can make out
why he wouldn't see my father when my father came here to see him
ten miles, and had to walk back ten miles in the rain, to go by
rail a long way, down home, as far as Devonport, because Sir
Willoughby wouldn't see him, though he was at home, my father saw.
We all thought it so odd: and my father wouldn't let us talk much
about it. My father's a very brave man."

"Captain Patterne is as brave a man as ever lived," said De Craye.

"I'm positive you'd like him, colonel."

"I know of his deeds, and I admire him, and that's a good step to
liking."

He warmed the boy's thoughts of his father.

"Because, what they say at home is, a little bread and cheese, and
a glass of ale, and a rest, to a poor man--lots of great houses
will give you that, and we wouldn't have asked for more than that.
My sisters say they think Sir Willoughby must be selfish. He's
awfully proud; and perhaps it was because my father wasn't dressed
well enough. But what can we do? We're very poor at home, and lots
of us, and all hungry. My father says he isn't paid very well for
his services to the Government. He's only a marine."

"He's a hero!" said De Craye.

"He came home very tired, with a cold, and had a doctor. But Sir
Willoughby did send him money, and mother wished to send it back,
and my father said she was not like a woman--with our big family.
He said he thought Sir Willoughby an extraordinary man."

"Not at all; very common; indigenous," said De Craye.  "The art of
cutting is one of the branches of a polite education in this
country, and you'll have to learn it, if you expect to be looked
on as a gentleman and a Patterne, my boy. I begin to see how it is
Miss Middleton takes to you so. Follow her directions.  But I hope
you did not listen to a private conversation. Miss Middleton would
not approve of that."

"Colonel De Craye, how could I help myself? I heard a lot before I
knew what it was. There was poetry!"

"Still, Crossjay, if it was important--was it?"

The boy swelled again, and the colonel asked him, "Does Miss Dale
know of your having played listener?"

"She!" said Crossjay. "Oh, I couldn't tell her."

He breathed thick; then came a threat of tears. "She wouldn't do
anything to hurt Miss Middleton. I'm sure of that. It wasn't her
fault. She--There goes Mr. Whitford!" Crossjay bounded away.

The colonel had no inclination to wait for his return. He walked
fast up the road, not perspicuously conscious that his motive was
to be well in advance of Vernon Whitford: to whom, after all, the
knowledge imparted by Crossjay would be of small advantage. That
fellow would probably trot of to Willoughby to row him for breaking
his word to Miss Middleton! There are men, thought De Craye, who
see nothing, feel nothing.

He crossed a stile into the wood above the lake, where, as he was
in the humour to think himself signally lucky, espying her, he
took it as a matter of course that the lady who taught his heart
to leap should be posted by the Fates. And he wondered little at
her power, for rarely had the world seen such union of princess
and sylph as in that lady's figure. She stood holding by a
beech-branch, gazing down on the water.

She had not heard him. When she looked she flushed at the
spectacle of one of her thousand thoughts, but she was not
startled; the colour overflowed a grave face.

"And 'tis not quite the first time that Willoughby has played this
trick!" De Craye said to her, keenly smiling with a parted mouth.

Clara moved her lips to recall remarks introductory to so abrupt
and strange a plunge.

He smiled in that peculiar manner of an illuminated comic
perception: for the moment he was all falcon; and he surprised
himself more than Clara, who was not in the mood to take
surprises. It was the sight of her which had animated him to
strike his game; he was down on it.

Another instinct at work (they spring up in twenties oftener than
in twos when the heart is the hunter) prompted him to directness
and quickness, to carry her on the flood of the discovery.

She regained something of her mental self-possession as soon as
she was on a level with a meaning she had not yet inspected; but
she had to submit to his lead, distinctly perceiving where its
drift divided to the forked currents of what might be in his mind
and what was in hers.

"Miss Middleton, I bear a bit of a likeness to the messenger to
the glorious despot--my head is off if I speak not true!
Everything I have is on the die. Did I guess wrong your wish?--I
read it in the dark, by the heart. But here's a certainty:
Willoughby sets you free."

"You have come from him?" she could imagine nothing else, and she
was unable to preserve a disguise; she trembled.

"From Miss Dale."

"Ah!" Clara drooped. "She told me that once."

"'Tis the fact that tells it now."

"You have not seen him since you left the house?"

"Darkly: clear enough: not unlike the hand of destiny--through a
veil. He offered himself to Miss Dale last night, about between the
witching hours of twelve and one."

"Miss Dale . . ."

"Would she other? Could she? The poor lady has languished beyond a
decade. She's love in the feminine person."

"Are you speaking seriously, Colonel De Craye?"

"Would I dare to trifle with you, Miss Middleton?"

"I have reason to know it cannot be."

"If I have a head, it is a fresh and blooming truth. And more--I
stake my vanity on it!"

"Let me go to her." She stepped.

"Consider," said he.

"Miss Dale and I are excellent friends. It would not seem
indelicate to her. She has a kind of regard for me, through
Crossjay.--Oh, can it be? There must be some delusion. You have
seen--you wish to be of service to me; you may too easily be
deceived. Last night?--he last night ... ? And this morning!"

"'Tis not the first time our friend has played the trick, Miss
Middleton."

"But this is incredible, that last night ... and this morning, in
my father's presence, he presses! ... You have seen Miss Dale?
Everything is possible of him: they were together, I know.
Colonel De Craye, I have not the slightest chance of concealment
with you. I think I felt that when I first saw you. Will you let
me hear why you are so certain?"

"Miss Middleton, when I first had the honour of looking on you, it
was in a posture that necessitated my looking up, and morally so
it has been since. I conceived that Willoughby had won the
greatest prize of earth. And next I was led to the conclusion that
he had won it to lose it. Whether he much cares, is the mystery I
haven't leisure to fathom. Himself is the principal consideration
with himself, and ever was."

"You discovered it!" said Clara.

"He uncovered it," said De Craye. "The miracle was, that the world
wouldn't see. But the world is a piggy-wiggy world for the
wealthy fellow who fills a trough for it, and that he has always
very sagaciously done. Only women besides myself have detected
him. I have never exposed him; I have been an observer pure and
simple; and because I apprehended another catastrophe--making
something like the fourth, to my knowledge, one being public . .
."

"You knew Miss Durham?"

"And Harry Oxford too. And they're a pair as happy as blackbirds
in a cherry-tree, in a summer sunrise, with the owner of the
garden asleep. Because of that apprehension of mine, I refused the
office of best man till Willoughby had sent me a third letter. He
insisted on my coming. I came, saw, and was conquered. I trust
with all my soul I did not betray myself, I owed that duty to my
position of concealing it. As for entirely hiding that I had used
my eyes, I can't say: they must answer for it."

The colonel was using his eyes with an increasing suavity that
threatened more than sweetness.

"I believe you have been sincerely kind," said Clara. "We will
descend to the path round the lake."

She did not refuse her hand on the descent, and he let it escape
the moment the service was done. As he was performing the
admirable character of the man of honour, he had to attend to the
observance of details; and sure of her though he was beginning to
feel, there was a touch of the unknown in Clara Middleton which
made him fear to stamp assurance; despite a barely resistible
impulse, coming of his emotions and approved by his maxims. He
looked at the hand, now a free lady's hand. Willoughby settled,
his chance was great. Who else was in the way? No one. He
counselled himself to wait for her; she might have ideas of
delicacy. Her face was troubled, speculative; the brows clouded,
the lips compressed.

"You have not heard this from Miss Dale?" she said.

"Last night they were together: this morning she fled. I saw her
this morning distressed. She is unwilling to send you a message:
she talks vaguely of meeting you some days hence. And it is not
the first time he has gone to her for his consolation."

"That is not a proposal," Clara reflected. "He is too prudent. He
did not propose to her at the time you mention. Have you not been
hasty, Colonel De Craye?"

Shadows crossed her forehead. She glanced in the direction of the
house and stopped her walk.

"Last night, Miss Middleton, there was a listener."

"Who?"

"Crossjay was under that pretty silk coverlet worked by the Miss
Patternes. He came home late, found his door locked, and dashed
downstairs into the drawing-room, where he snuggled up and dropped
asleep. The two speakers woke him; they frightened the poor dear
lad in his love for you, and after they had gone, he wanted to run
out of the house, and I met him just after I had come back from my
search, bursting, and took him to my room, and laid him on the
sofa, and abused him for not lying quiet. He was restless as a
fish on a bank. When I woke in the morning he was off. Doctor
Corney came across him somewhere on the road and drove him to the
cottage. I was ringing the bell. Corney told me the boy had you on
his brain, and was miserable, so Crossjay and I had a talk."

"Crossjay did not repeat to you the conversation he had heard?"
said Clara.

"No."

She smiled rejoicingly, proud of the boy. as she walked on.

"But you'll pardon me, Miss Middleton--and I'm for him as much as
you are--if I was guilty of a little angling."

"My sympathies are with the fish."

"The poor fellow had a secret that hurt him. It rose to the
surface crying to be hooked, and I spared him twice or thrice,
because he had a sort of holy sentiment I respected, that none but
Mr. Whitford ought to be his father confessor."

"Crossjay!" she cried, hugging her love of the boy.

"The secret was one not to be communicated to Miss Dale of all
people."

"He said that?"

"As good as the very words. She informed me, too, that she
couldn't induce him to face her straight."

"Oh, that looks like it. And Crossjay was unhappy? Very unhappy?"

"He was just where tears are on the brim, and would have been
over, if he were not such a manly youngster."

"It looks..." She reverted in thought to Willoughby, and doubted,
and blindly stretched hands to her recollection of the strange old
monster she had discovered in him. Such a man could do anything.

That conclusion fortified her to pursue her walk to the house and
give battle for freedom. Willoughby appeared to her scarce human,
unreadable, save by the key that she could supply. She determined
to put faith in Colonel De Craye's marvellous divination of
circumstances in the dark. Marvels are solid weapons when we are
attacked by real prodigies of nature. Her countenance cleared. She
conversed with De Craye of the polite and the political world,
throwing off her personal burden completely, and charming him.

At the edge of the garden, on the bridge that crossed the haha 
from the park, he had a second impulse, almost a warning within,
to seize his heavenly opportunity to ask for thanks and move her
tender lowered eyelids to hint at his reward. He repressed it,
doubtful of the wisdom.

Something like "heaven forgive me" was in Clara's mind, though she
would have declared herself innocent before the scrutator.



CHAPTER XLIII

In Which Sir Willoughby Is Led to Think That the Elements Have
Conspired Against Him

Clara had not taken many steps in the garden before she learned
how great was her debt of gratitude to Colonel De Craye.
Willoughby and her father were awaiting her. De Craye, with his
ready comprehension of circumstances, turned aside unseen among
the shrubs. She advanced slowly.

"The vapours, we may trust, have dispersed?" her father hailed
her.

"One word, and these discussions are over, we dislike them
equally," said Willoughby.

"No scenes," Dr. Middleton added. "Speak your decision, my girl,
pro forma, seeing that he who has the right demands it, and pray
release me."

Clara looked at Willoughby.

"I have decided to go to Miss Dale for her advice."

There was no appearance in him of a man that has been shot.

"To Miss Dale?--for advice?"

Dr Middleton invoked the Furies. "What is the signification of
this new freak?"

"Miss Dale must be consulted, papa."

"Consulted with reference to the disposal of your hand in
marriage?"

"She must be."

"Miss Dale, do you say?"

"I do, Papa."

Dr Middleton regained his natural elevation from the bend of body
habitual with men of an established sanity, paedagogues and
others, who are called on at odd intervals to inspect the
magnitude of the infinitesimally absurd in human nature: small,
that is, under the light of reason, immense in the realms of
madness.

His daughter profoundly confused him. He swelled out his chest,
remarking to Willoughby: "I do not wonder at your scared
expression of countenance, my friend. To discover yourself engaged
to a girl mad as Cassandra, without a boast of the distinction of
her being sun-struck, can be no specially comfortable 
enlightenment. I am opposed to delays, and I will not have a
breach of faith committed by daughter of mine."

"Do not repeat those words," Clara said to Willoughby. He started.
She had evidently come armed. But how, within so short a space?
What could have instructed her? And in his bewilderment he gazed
hurriedly above, gulped air, and cried: "Scared, sir? I am not
aware that my countenance can show a scare. I am not accustomed to
sue for long: I am unable to sustain the part of humble
supplicant. She puts me out of harmony with creation--We are
plighted, Clara. It is pure waste of time to speak of soliciting
advice on the subject."

"Would it be a breach of faith for me to break my engagement?" she
said.

"You ask?"

"It is a breach of sanity to propound the interrogation," said her
father.

She looked at Willoughby. "Now?"

He shrugged haughtily.

"Since last night?" she said.

"Last night?"

"Am I not released?"

"Not by me."

"By your act."

"My dear Clara!"

"Have you not virtually disengaged me?"

"I who claim you as mine?"

"Can you?"

"I do and must."

"After last night?"

"Tricks! shufflings! jabber of a barbarian woman upon the
evolutions of a serpent!" exclaimed Dr. Middleton. "You were to
capitulate, or to furnish reasons for your refusal. You have none.
Give him your hand, girl, according to the compact. I praised you
to him for returning within the allotted term, and now forbear to
disgrace yourself and me."

"Is he perfectly free to offer his? Ask him, papa."

"Perform your duty. Do let us have peace!"

"Perfectly free! as on the day when I offered it first."
Willoughby frankly waved his honourable hand.

His face was blanched: enemies in the air seemed to have whispered
things to her: he doubted the fidelity of the Powers above.

"Since last night?" said she.

"Oh! if you insist, I reply, since last night."

"You know what I mean, Sir Willoughby."

"Oh! certainly."

"You speak the truth?"

"'Sir Willoughby!'" her father ejaculated in wrath. "But will you
explain what you mean, epitome that you are of all the
contradictions and mutabilities ascribed to women from the
beginning! 'Certainly', he says, and knows no more than I. She
begs grace for an hour, and returns with a fresh store of
evasions, to insult the man she has injured. It is my humiliation
to confess that our share in this contract is rescued from public
ignominy by his generosity. Nor can I congratulate him on his
fortune, should he condescend to bear with you to the utmost; for
instead of the young woman I supposed myself to be bestowing on
him, I see a fantastical planguncula enlivened by the wanton
tempers of a nursery chit. If one may conceive a meaning in her,
in miserable apology for such behaviour, some spirit of jealousy
informs the girl."

"I can only remark that there is no foundation for it," said
Willoughby. "I am willing to satisfy you, Clara. Name the person
who discomposes you. I can scarcely imagine one to exist: but who
can tell?"

She could name no person. The detestable imputation of jealousy
would be confirmed if she mentioned a name: and indeed Laetitia
was not to be named.

He pursued his advantage: "Jealousy is one of the fits I am a
stranger to,--I fancy, sir, that gentlemen have dismissed it. I
speak for myself.--But I can make allowances. In some cases, it
is considered a compliment; and often a word will soothe it. The
whole affair is so senseless! However, I will enter the
witness-box, or stand at the prisoner's bar! Anything to quiet a
distempered mind."

"Of you, sir," said Dr. Middleton, "might a parent be justly
proud."

"It is not jealousy; I could not be jealous!" Clara cried, stung by
the very passion; and she ran through her brain for a suggestion 
to win a sign of meltingness if not esteem from her father. She
was not an iron maiden, but one among the nervous natures which
live largely in the moment, though she was then sacrificing it to
her nature's deep dislike. "You may be proud of me again, papa."

She could hardly have uttered anything more impolitic.

"Optume; but deliver yourself ad rem," he rejoined, alarmingly 
pacified. "Firmavit fidem. Do you likewise, and double on us no
more like puss in the field."

"I wish to see Miss Dale," she said.

Up flew the Rev. Doctor's arms in wrathful despair resembling an
imprecation.

"She is at the cottage. You could have seen her," said Willoughby.

Evidently she had not.

"Is it untrue that last night, between twelve o'clock and one, in
the drawing-room, you proposed marriage to Miss Dale?" He became
convinced that she must have stolen down-stairs during his
colloquy with Laetitia, and listened at the door.

"On behalf of old Vernon?" he said, lightly laughing. "The idea is
not novel, as you know. They are suited, if they could see it.--
Laetitia Dale and my cousin Vernon Whitford, sir."

"Fairly schemed, my friend, and I will say for you, you have the
patience, Willoughby, of a husband!"

Willoughby bowed to the encomium, and allowed some fatigue to be
visible. He half yawned: "I claim no happier title, sir," and made
light of the weariful discussion. 

Clara was shaken: she feared that Crossjay had heard incorrectly,
or that Colonel De Craye had guessed erroneously. It was too
likely that Willoughby should have proposed Vernon to Laetitia.

There was nothing to reassure her save the vision of the panic
amazement of his face at her persistency in speaking of Miss Dale.
She could have declared on oath that she was right, while
admitting all the suppositions to be against her. And unhappily 
all the Delicacies (a doughty battalion for the defence of ladies
until they enter into difficulties and are shorn of them at a
blow, bare as dairymaids), all the body-guard of a young
gentlewoman, the drawing-room sylphides, which bear her train,
which wreathe her hair, which modulate her voice and tone her
complexion, which are arrows and shield to awe the creature man,
forbade her utterance of what she felt, on pain of instant
fulfilment of their oft-repeated threat of late to leave her to
the last remnant of a protecting sprite. She could not, as in a
dear melodrama, from the aim of a pointed finger denounce him, on
the testimony of her instincts, false of speech, false in deed.
She could not even declare that she doubted his truthfulness. The
refuge of a sullen fit, the refuge of tears, the pretext of a
mood, were denied her now by the rigour of those laws of decency
which are a garment to ladies of pure breeding.

"One more respite, papa," she implored him, bitterly conscious of
the closer tangle her petition involved, and, if it must be
betrayed of her, perceiving in an illumination how the knot might
become so woefully Gordian that haply in a cloud of wild events
the intervention of a gallant gentleman out of heaven, albeit in
the likeness of one of earth, would have to cut it: her cry
within, as she succumbed to weakness, being fervider, "Anything
but marry this one!" She was faint with strife and dejected, a
condition in the young when their imaginative energies hold revel
uncontrolled and are projectively desperate.

"No respite!" said Willoughby, genially.

"And I say, no respite!" observed her father. "You have assumed a
position that has not been granted you, Clara Middleton."

"I cannot bear to offend you, father."

"Him! Your duty is not to offend him. Address your excuses to
him. I refuse to be dragged over the same ground, to reiterate the
same command perpetually."

"If authority is deputed to me, I claim you," said Willoughby.

"You have not broken faith with me?"

"Assuredly not, or would it be possible for me to press my claim?"

"And join the right hand to the right," said Dr. Middleton; no, it
would not be possible. What insane root she has been nibbling, I
know not, but she must consign herself to the guidance of those
whom the gods have not abandoned, until her intellect is
liberated. She was once ... there: I look not back--if she it
was, and no simulacrum of a reasonable daughter. I welcome the
appearance of my friend Mr. Whitford. He is my sea-bath and supper
on the beach of Troy, after the day's battle and dust."

Vernon walked straight up to them: an act unusual with him,
for he was shy of committing an intrusion.

Clara guessed by that, and more by the dancing frown of
speculative humour he turned on Willoughby, that he had come
charged in support of her. His forehead was curiously lively, as
of one who has got a surprise well under, to feed on its amusing
contents.

"Have you seen Crossjay, Mr. Whitford?" she said.

"I've pounced on Crossjay; his bones are sound."

"Where did he sleep?"

"On a sofa, it seems."

She smiled, with good hope--Vernon had the story.

Willoughby thought it just to himself that he should defend his
measure of severity.

"The boy lied; he played a double game."

"For which he should have been reasoned with at the Grecian
portico of a boy," said the Rev. Doctor.

"My system is different, sir. I could not inflict what I would
not endure myself"

"So is Greek excluded from the later generations; and you leave a
field, the most fertile in the moralities in youth, unplowed and
unsown. Ah! well. This growing too fine is our way of relapsing
upon barbarism. Beware of over-sensitiveness, where nature has
plainly indicated her alternative gateway of knowledge. And now, I
presume, I am at liberty."

"Vernon will excuse us for a minute or two."

"I hold by Mr. Whitford now I have him."

"I'll join you in the laboratory, Vernon," Willoughby nodded
bluntly.

"We will leave them, Mr. Whitford. They are at the time-honoured 
dissension upon a particular day, that, for the sake of dignity,
blushes to be named."

"What day?" said Vernon, like a rustic.

"THE day, these people call it."

Vernon sent one of his vivid eyeshots from one to the other. His
eyes fixed on Willoughby's with a quivering glow, beyond
amazement, as if his humour stood at furnace-heat, and absorbed
all that came.

Willoughby motioned to him to go.

"Have you seen Miss Dale, Mr. Whitford?" said Clara.

He answered, "No. Something has shocked her."

"Is it her feeling for Crossjay?"

"Ah!" Vernon said to Willoughby, "your pocketing of the key of
Crossjay's bedroom door was a master-stroke!"

The celestial irony suffused her, and she bathed and swam in it,
on hearing its dupe reply: "My methods of discipline are short. I
was not aware that she had been to his door."

"But I may hope that Miss Dale will see me," said Clara. "We are
in sympathy about the boy."

"Mr. Dale might be seen. He seems to be of a divided mind with his
daughter," Vernon rejoined. "She has locked herself up in her
room."

"He is not the only father in that unwholesome predicament," said
Dr Middleton.

"He talks of coming to you, Willoughby."

"Why to me?" Willoughby chastened his irritation: "He will be
welcome, of course. It would be better that the boy should come."

"If there is a chance of your forgiving him," said Clara. "Let
the Dales know I am prepared to listen to the boy, Vernon. There
can be no necessity for Mr. Dale to drag himself here."

"How are Mr. Dale and his daughter of a divided mind, Mr.
Whitford?" said Clara.

Vernon simulated an uneasiness. With a vacant gaze that enlarged
around Willoughby and was more discomforting than intentness, he
replied: "Perhaps she is unwilling to give him her entire
confidence, Miss Middleton."

"In which respect, then, our situations present their solitary
point of unlikeness in resemblance, for I have it in excess,"
observed Dr. Middleton.

Clara dropped her eyelids for the wave to pass over. "It struck me
that Miss Dale was a person of the extremest candour."

"Why should we be prying into the domestic affairs of the Dales?"
Willoughby interjected, and drew out his watch, merely for a
diversion; he was on tiptoe to learn whether Vernon was as well
instructed as Clara, and hung to the view that he could not be,
while drenching in the sensation that he was:--and if so, what
were the Powers above but a body of conspirators? He paid Laetitia
that compliment. He could not conceive the human betrayal of the
secret. Clara's discovery of it had set his common sense adrift.

"The domestic affairs of the Dales do not concern me," said
Vernon.

"And yet, my friend," Dr. Middleton balanced himself, and with an
air of benevolent slyness the import of which did not awaken
Willoughby, until too late, remarked: "They might concern you. I
will even add, that there is a probability of your being not less
than the fount and origin of this division of father and daughter,
though Willoughby in the drawingroom last night stands accusably
the agent."

"Favour me, sir, with an explanation," said Vernon, seeking to
gather it from Clara.

Dr Middleton threw the explanation upon Willoughby.

Clara, communicated as much as she was able in one of those looks
of still depth which say, Think! and without causing a thought to
stir, takes us into the pellucid mind.

Vernon was enlightened before Willoughby had spoken.
His mouth shut rigidly, and there was a springing increase of the
luminous wavering of his eyes. Some star that Clara had watched
at night was like them in the vivid wink and overflow of its
light. Yet, as he was perfectly sedate, none could have suspected
his blood to be chasing wild with laughter, and his frame strung
to the utmost to keep it from volleying. So happy was she in his
aspect, that her chief anxiety was to recover the name of the star
whose shining beckons and speaks, and is in the quick of
spirit-fire. It is the sole star which on a
night of frost and strong moonlight preserves an indomitable
fervency: that she remembered, and the picture of a hoar earth and
a lean Orion in flooded heavens, and the star beneath Eastward of
him: but the name! the name!--She heard Willoughby indistinctly.

"Oh, the old story; another effort; you know my wish; a failure,
of course, and no thanks on either side, I suppose I must ask your
excuse.--They neither of them see what's good for them, sir."

"Manifestly, however," said Dr. Middleton, "if one may opine from
the division we have heard of, the father is disposed to back your
nominee."

"I can't say; as far as I am concerned, I made a mess of it."
Vernon withstood the incitement to acquiesce, but he sparkled with
his recognition of the fact.

"You meant well, Willoughby."

"I hope so, Vernon."

"Only you have driven her away."

"We must resign ourselves."

"It won't affect me, for I'm off to-morrow."

"You see, sir, the thanks I get."

"Mr. Whitford," said Dr. Middleton, "You have a tower of strength
in the lady's father."

"Would you have me bring it to bear upon the lady, sir?"

"Wherefore not?"

"To make her marriage a matter of obedience to her father?"

"Ay, my friend, a lusty lover would have her gladly on those
terms, well knowing it to be for the lady's good. What do you say,
Willoughby?"

"Sir! Say? What can I say? Miss Dale has not plighted her faith.
Had she done so, she is a lady who would never dishonour it."

"She is an ideal of constancy, who would keep to it though it had
been broken on the other side," said Vernon, and Clara thrilled.

"I take that, sir, to be a statue of constancy, modelled upon
which a lady of our flesh may be proclaimed as graduating for the
condition of idiocy," said Dr. Middleton.

"But faith is faith, sir."

"But the broken is the broken, sir, whether in porcelain or in
human engagements; and all that one of the two continuing 
faithful, I should rather say, regretful, can do, is to devote the
remainder of life to the picking up of the fragments; an
occupation properly to be pursued, for the comfort of mankind, 
within the enclosure of an appointed asylum."

"You destroy the poetry of sentiment, Dr. Middleton."

"To invigorate the poetry of nature, Mr. Whitford."

"Then you maintain, sir, that when faith is broken by one, the
engagement ceases, and the other is absolutely free?"

"I do; I am the champion of that platitude, and sound that knell
to the sentimental world; and since you have chosen to defend it,
I will appeal to Willoughby, and ask him if he would not side with
the world of good sense in applauding the nuptials of man or maid
married within a month of a jilting?" Clara slipped her arm under
her father's.

"Poetry, sir," said Willoughby, "I never have been hypocrite 
enough to pretend to understand or care for."

Dr. Middleton laughed. Vernon too seemed to admire his cousin for a
reply that rung in Clara's ears as the dullest ever spoken. Her
arm grew cold on her father's. She began to fear Willoughby again.

He depended entirely on his agility to elude the thrusts that
assailed him. Had he been able to believe in the treachery of the
Powers above, he would at once have seen design in these deadly
strokes, for his feelings had rarely been more acute than at the
present crisis; and he would then have led away Clara, to wrangle
it out with her, relying on Vernon's friendliness not to betray
him to her father: but a wrangle with Clara promised no immediate
fruits, nothing agreeable; and the lifelong trust he had reposed in
his protecting genii obscured his intelligence to evidence he
would otherwise have accepted on the spot, on the faith of his
delicate susceptibility to the mildest impressions which wounded
him. Clara might have stooped to listen at the door: she might
have heard sufficient to create a suspicion. But Vernon was not in
the house last night; she could not have communicated it to him,
and he had not seen Laetitia, who was, besides trustworthy, an
admirable if a foolish and ill-fated woman.

Preferring to consider Vernon a pragmatical moralist played upon
by a sententious drone, he thought it politic to detach them, and
vanquish Clara while she was in the beaten mood, as she had
appeared before Vernon's vexatious arrival.

"I'm afraid, my dear fellow, you are rather too dainty and fussy
for a very successful wooer," he said. "It's beautiful on paper,
and absurd in life. We have a bit of private business to discuss.
We will go inside, sir, I think. I will soon release you." Clara
pressed her father's arm.

"More?" said he.

"Five minutes. There's a slight delusion to clear, sir. My dear
Clara, you will see with different eyes."

"Papa wishes to work with Mr. Whitford."

Her heart sunk to hear her father say: "No, 'tis a lost morning. I
must consent to pay tax of it for giving another young woman to
the world. I have a daughter! You will, I hope, compensate me, Mr.
Whitford, in the afternoon. Be not downcast. I have observed you
meditative of late. You will have no clear brain so long as that
stuff is on the mind. I could venture to propose to do some
pleading for you, should it be needed for the prompter expedition
of the affair."

Vernon briefly thanked him, and said:

"Willoughby has exerted all his eloquence, and you see the result:
you have lost Miss Dale and I have not won her. He did everything
that one man can do for another in so delicate a case: even to the
repeating of her famous birthday verses to him, to flatter the
poetess. His best efforts were foiled by the lady's indisposition
for me."

"Behold," said Dr. Middleton, as Willoughby, electrified by the
mention of the verses, took a sharp stride or two, "you have in
him an advocate who will not be rebuffed by one refusal, and I
can affirm that he is tenacious, pertinacious as are few. Justly
so. Not to believe in a lady's No is the approved method of
carrying that fortress built to yield. Although unquestionably to
have a young man pleading in our interests with a lady, counts its
objections. Yet Willoughby being notoriously engaged, may be held
to enjoy the privileges of his elders."

"As an engaged man, sir, he was on a level with his elders in
pleading on my behalf with Miss Dale," said Vernon. Willoughby
strode and muttered. Providence had grown mythical in his
thoughts, if not malicious: and it is the peril of this worship
that the object will wear such an alternative aspect when it
appears no longer subservient.

"Are we coming, sir?" he said, and was unheeded. The Rev. Doctor
would not be defrauded of rolling his billow.

"As an honourable gentleman faithful to his own engagement and
desirous of establishing his relatives, he deserves, in my
judgement, the lady's esteem as well as your cordial thanks; nor
should a temporary failure dishearten either of you,
notwithstanding the precipitate retreat of the lady from Patterne,
and her seclusion in her sanctum on the occasion of your recent
visit."

"Supposing he had succeeded," said Vernon, driving Willoughby to
frenzy, "should I have been bound to marry?" Matter for cogitation
was offered to Dr. Middleton.

"The proposal was without your sanction?"

"Entirely."

"You admire the lady?"

"Respectfully."

"You do not incline to the state?"

"An inch of an angle would exaggerate my inclination."

"How long are we to stand and hear this insufferable nonsense you
talk?" cried Willoughby.

"But if Mr. Whitford was not consulted. . ." Dr. Middleton said,
and was overborne by Willoughby's hurried, "Oblige me, sir.--
Oblige me, my good fellow!" He swept his arm to Vernon, and
gestured a conducting hand to Clara.

"Here is Mrs. Mountstuart!" she exclaimed.

Willoughby stared. Was it an irruption of a friend or a foe? He
doubted, and stood petrified between the double question. Clara
had seen Mrs. Mountstuart and Colonel De Craye separating: and now
the great lady sailed along the sward like a royal barge in
festival trim.

She looked friendly, but friendly to everybody, which was always a
frost on Willoughby, and terribly friendly to Clara. 

Coming up to her she whispered: "News, indeed! Wonderful! I could
not credit his hint of it yesterday. Are you satisfied?"

"Pray, Mrs. Mountstuart, take an opportunity to speak to papa,"
Clara whispered in return.

Mrs. Mountstuart bowed to Dr. Middleton, nodded to Vernon, and swam
upon Willoughby, with, "Is it? But is it? Am I really to believe?
You have? My dear Sir Willoughby? Really? The confounded
gentleman heaved on a bare plank of wreck in mid sea.

He could oppose only a paralyzed smile to the assault. 

His intuitive discretion taught him to fall back a step while she
said, "So!" the plummet word of our mysterious deep fathoms; and
he fell back further saying, "Madam?" in a tone advising her to
speak low.

She recovered her volubility, followed his partial retreat, and
dropped her voice,--

"Impossible to have imagined it as an actual fact! You were always
full of surprises, but this! this! Nothing manlier, nothing more
gentlemanly has ever been done: nothing: nothing that so
completely changes an untenable situation into a comfortable and
proper footing for everybody. It is what I like: it is what I
love:--sound sense! Men are so selfish: one cannot persuade them
to be reasonable in such positions. But you, Sir Willoughby, have
shown wisdom and sentiment: the rarest of all combinations in
men."

"Where have you? . . ." Willoughby contrived to say.

"Heard? The hedges, the housetops, everywhere. All the
neighbourhood will have it before nightfall. Lady Busshe and Lady
Culmer will soon be rushing here, and declaring they never
expected anything else, I do not doubt. I am not so pretentious. I
beg your excuse for that 'twice' of mine yesterday. Even if it
hurt my vanity, I should be happy to confess my error: I was
utterly out. But then I did not reckon on a fatal attachment, I
thought men were incapable of it. I thought we women were the only
poor creatures persecuted by a fatality. It is a fatality! You
tried hard to escape, indeed you did. And she will do honour to
your final surrender, my dear friend. She is gentle, and very
clever, very: she is devoted to you: she will entertain
excellently. I see her like a flower in sunshine. She will expand
to a perfect hostess. Patterne will shine under her reign; you
have my warrant for that. And so will you. Yes, you flourish best
when adored. It must be adoration. You have been under a cloud of
late. Years ago I said it was a match, when no one supposed you
could stoop. Lady Busshe would have it was a screen, and she was
deemed high wisdom. The world will be with you. All the women
will be: excepting, of course, Lady Busshe, whose pride is in
prophecy; and she will soon be too glad to swell the host. There,
my friend, your sincerest and oldest admirer congratulates you. I
could not contain myself; I was compelled to pour forth. And now
I must go and be talked to by Dr. Middleton. How does he take it?
They leave?"

"He is perfectly well," said Willoughby, aloud, quite distraught.

She acknowledged his just correction of her for running on to an
extreme in low-toned converse, though they stood sufficiently 
isolated from the others. These had by this time been joined by
Colonel De Craye, and were all chatting in a group--of himself,
Willoughby horribly suspected.

Clara was gone from him! Gone! but he remembered his oath and
vowed it again: not to Horace de Craye! She was gone, lost, sunk
into the world of waters of rival men, and he determined that his
whole force should be used to keep her from that man, the false
friend who had supplanted him in her shallow heart, and might, if
he succeeded, boast of having done it by simply appearing on the
scene.

Willoughby intercepted Mrs. Mountstuart as she was passing over to
Dr Middleton. "My dear lady! spare me a minute."

De Craye sauntered up, with a face of the friendliest humour:

"Never was man like you, Willoughby, for shaking new patterns in a
kaleidoscope."

"Have you turned punster, Horace?" Willoughby replied, smarting to
find yet another in the demon secret, and he draw Dr. Middleton two
or three steps aside, and hurriedly begged him to abstain from
prosecuting the subject with Clara.

"We must try to make her happy as we best can, sir. She may have
her reasons--a young lady's reasons!" He laughed, and left the
Rev. Doctor considering within himself under the arch of his lofty
frown of stupefaction.

De Craye smiled slyly and winningly as he shadowed a deep droop on
the bend of his head before Clara, signifying his absolute 
devotion to her service, and this present good fruit for witness
of his merits.

She smiled sweetly though vaguely. There was no concealment of
their intimacy.

"The battle is over," Vernon said quietly, when Willoughby had
walked some paces beside Mrs. Mountstuart, adding: "You may expect
to see Mr. Dale here. He knows."

Vernon and Clara exchanged one look, hard on his part, in contrast
with her softness, and he proceeded to the house. De Craye waited
for a word or a promising look. He was patient, being
self-assured, and passed on.

Clara linked her arm with her father's once more, and said, on a
sudden brightness: "Sirius, papa!" " He repeated it in the
profoundest manner: "Sirius! And is there," he asked, "a feminine
scintilla of sense in that?"

"It is the name of the star I was thinking of, dear papa."

"It was the star observed by King Agamemnon before the sacrifice in
Aulis.  You were thinking of that? But, my love, my Iphigenia, you
have not a father who will insist on sacrificing you."

"Did I hear him tell you to humour me, papa?"

Dr Middleton humphed.

"Verily the dog-star rages in many heads," he responded.




CHAPTER XLIV

Dr Middleton: the Ladies Eleanor and Isabel: and Mr. Dale

Clara looked up at the flying clouds. She travelled with them now,
and tasted freedom, but she prudently forbore to vex her father;
she held herself in reserve.

They were summoned by the midday bell.

Few were speakers at the meal, few were eaters. Clara was
impelled to join it by her desire to study Mrs. Mountstuart's
face. Willoughby was obliged to preside. It was a meal of an
assembly of mutes and plates, that struck the ear like the
well-known sound of a collection of offerings in church after an
impressive exhortation from the pulpit. A sally of Colonel De
Craye's met the reception given to a charity-boy's muffled burst
of animal spirits in the silence of the sacred edifice. Willoughby
tried politics with Dr. Middleton, whose regular appetite preserved
him from uncongenial speculations when the hour for appeasing it
had come; and he alone did honour to the dishes, replying to his
host:

"Times are bad, you say, and we have a Ministry doing with us what
they will. Well, sir, and that being so, and opposition a manner
of kicking them into greater stability, it is the time for wise
men to retire within themselves, with the steady determination of
the seed in the earth to grow. Repose upon nature, sleep in firm
faith, and abide the seasons. That is my counsel to the weaker
party."

The counsel was excellent, but it killed the topic.

Dr. Middleton's appetite was watched for the signal to rise and
breathe freely; and such is the grace accorded to a good man of an
untroubled conscience engaged in doing his duty to himself, that
he perceived nothing of the general restlessness; he went through
the dishes calmly, and as calmly he quoted Milton to the ladies
Eleanor and Isabel, when the company sprung up all at once upon
his closing his repast. Vernon was taken away from him by
Willoughby. Mrs Mountstuart beckoned covertly to Clara. Willoughby
should have had something to say to him, Dr. Middleton thought: the
position was not clear. But the situation was not disagreeable;
and he was in no serious hurry, though he wished to be
enlightened.

"This," Dr. Middleton said to the spinster aunts, as he accompanied
them to the drawing-room, "shall be no lost day for me if I may
devote the remainder of it to you."

"The thunder, we fear, is not remote," murmured one.

"We fear it is imminent," sighed the other.

They took to chanting in alternation.

"--We are accustomed to peruse our Willoughby, and we know him
by a shadow."

"--From his infancy to his glorious youth and his established
manhood."

"--He was ever the soul of chivalry."

"--Duty: duty first. The happiness of his family. The well-being
of his dependants."

"--If proud of his name it was not an overweening pride; it was
founded in the conscious possession of exalted qualities. He could
be humble when occasion called for it."

Dr Middleton bowed to the litany, feeling that occasion called
for humbleness from him.

"Let us hope ... !" he said, with unassumed penitence on behalf of
his inscrutable daughter.

The ladies resumed:--

"--Vernon Whitford, not of his blood, is his brother!"

"--A thousand instances! Laetitia Dale remembers them better than
we."

"--That any blow should strike him!"

"--That another should be in store for him!"

"--It seems impossible he can be quite misunderstood!"

"Let us hope ... !" said Dr. Middleton.

"--One would not deem it too much for the dispenser of goodness to
expect to be a little looked up to!"

"--When he was a child he one day mounted a chair, and there he
stood in danger, would not let us touch him because he was taller
than we, and we were to gaze. Do you remember him, Eleanor? 'I am
the sun of the house!' It was inimitable!"

"--Your feelings; he would have your feelings! He was fourteen 
when his cousin Grace Whitford married, and we lost him. They had
been the greatest friends; and it was long before he appeared
among us. He has never cared to see her since."

"--But he has
befriended her husband. Never has he failed in generosity. His
only fault is--"

"--His sensitiveness. And that is--"

"--His secret. And that--"

"--You are not to discover! It is the same with him in
manhood. No one will accuse Willoughby Patterne of a deficiency of
manlinesss: but what is it?--he suffers, as none suffer, if he is
not loved. He himself is inalterably constant in affection."

"--What it is no one can say. We have lived with him all his life,
and we know him ready to make any sacrifice; only, he does demand
the whole heart in return. And if he doubts, he looks as we have
seen him to-day."

"--Shattered: as we have never seen him look before."

"We will hope," said Dr. Middleton, this time hastily. He tingled
to say, "what it was": he had it in him to solve perplexity in
their inquiry. He did say, adopting familiar speech to suit the
theme, "You know, ladies, we English come of a rough stock. A dose
of rough dealing in our youth does us no harm, braces us.
Otherwise we are likely to feel chilly: we grow too fine where
tenuity of stature is necessarily buffetted by gales, namely, in
our self-esteem. We are barbarians, on a forcing soil of wealth,
in a conservatory of comfortable security; but still barbarians.
So, you see, we shine at our best when we are plucked out of that,
to where hard blows are given, in a state of war. In a state of
war we are at home, our men are high-minded fellows, Scipios and
good legionaries. In the state of peace we do not live in peace:
our native roughness breaks out in unexpected places, under
extraordinary aspects--tyrannies, extravagances, domestic
exactions: and if we have not had sharp early training ... within
and without ... the old-fashioned island-instrument to drill into
us the civilization of our masters, the ancients, we show it by
running here and there to some excess. Ahem. Yet," added the Rev.
Doctor, abandoning his effort to deliver a weighty truth obscurely
for the comprehension of dainty spinster ladies, the
superabundance of whom in England was in his opinion largely the
cause of our decay as a people, "Yet I have not observed this
ultra-sensitiveness in Willoughby. He has borne to hear more than
I, certainly no example of the frailty, could have endured."

"He concealed it," said the ladies. "It is intense."

"Then is it a disease?"

"It bears no explanation; it is mystic."

"It is a cultus, then, a form of self-worship."

"Self!" they ejaculated. "But is not Self indifferent to others?
Is it Self that craves for sympathy, love, and devotion?"

"He is an admirable host, ladies."

"He is admirable in all respects."

"Admirable must he be who can impress discerning women,
his life-long housemates, so favourably. He is, I repeat, a
perfect host."

"He will be a perfect husband."

"In all probability."

"It is a certainty. Let him be loved and obeyed, he will be
guided. That is the secret for her whom he so fatally loves.
That, if we had dared, we would have hinted to her. She will rule
him through her love of him, and through him all about her. And it
will not be a rule he submits to, but a love he accepts. If she
could see it!"

"If she were a metaphysician!" sighed Dr. Middleton.

"--But a sensitiveness so keen as his might--"

"--Fretted by an unsympathizing mate--"

"--In the end become, for the best of us is mortal--"

"--Callous!"

"--He would feel perhaps as much--"

"--Or more!--"

"--He would still be tender--"

"--But he might grow outwardly hard!"

Both ladies looked up at Dr. Middleton, as they revealed the
dreadful prospect.

"It is the story told of corns!" he said, sad as they.

The three stood drooping: the ladies with an attempt to digest his
remark; the Rev. Doctor in dejection lest his gallantry should no
longer continue to wrestle with his good sense. 

He was rescued.

The door opened and a footman announced:--

"Mr. Dale."

Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel made a sign to one another of
raising their hands.

They advanced to him, and welcomed him.

"Pray be seated, Mr. Dale. You have not brought us bad news of our
Laetitia?"

"So rare is the pleasure of welcoming you here, Mr. Dale, that we
are in some alarm, when, as we trust, it should be matter for
unmixed congratulation."

"Has Doctor Corney been doing wonders?"

"I am indebted to him for the drive to your house, ladies," said
Mr. Dale, a spare, close-buttoned gentleman, with an Indian
complexion deadened in the sick-chamber. "It is unusual for me to
stir from my precincts."

"The Rev. Dr. Middleton."

Mr. Dale bowed. He seemed surprised.

"You live in a splendid air, sir," observed the Rev. Doctor. 

"I can profit little by it, sir," replied Mr. Dale. He asked the
ladies: "Will Sir Willoughby be disengaged?"

They consulted. "He is with Vernon. We will send to him."

The bell was rung.

"I have had the gratification of making the acquaintance of your
daughter, Mr. Dale, a most estimable lady," said Dr. Middleton.

Mr. Dale bowed. "She is honoured by your praises, sir. To the best
of my belief--I speak as a father--she merits them. Hitherto I
have had no doubts."

"Of Laetitia?" exclaimed the ladies; and spoke of her as
gentleness and goodness incarnate.

"Hitherto I have devoutly thought so," said Mr. Dale.

"Surely she is the very sweetest nurse, the most devoted of
daughters."

"As far as concerns her duty to her father, I can say she is that,
ladies."

"In all her relations, Mr. Dale!"

"It is my prayer," he said.

The footman appeared. He announced that Sir Willoughby was in the
laboratory with Mr. Whitford, and the door locked.

"Domestic business," the ladies remarked. "You know Willoughby's 
diligent attention to affairs, Mr. Dale."

"He is well?" Mr. Dale inquired.

"In excellent health."

"Body and mind?"

"But, dear Mr. Dale, he is never ill."

"Ah! for one to hear that who is never well! And Mr. Whitford is
quite sound?"

"Sound? The question alarms me for myself," said Dr. Middleton.
"Sound as our Constitution, the Credit of the country, the
reputation of our Prince of poets. I pray you to have no fears for
him."

Mr. Dale gave the mild little sniff of a man thrown deeper into
perplexity.

He said: "Mr. Whitford works his head; he is a hard student; he
may not be always, if I may so put it, at home on worldly
affairs."

"Dismiss that defamatory legend of the student, Mr. Dale; and take
my word for it, that he who persistently works his head has the
strongest for all affairs."

"Ah! Your daughter, sir, is here?"

"My daughter is here, sir, and will be most happy to present her
respects to the father of her friend, Miss Dale."

"They are friends?"

"Very cordial friends."

Mr. Dale administered another feebly pacifying sniff to himself.

"Laetitia!" he sighed, in apostrophe, and swept his forehead with
a hand seen to shake.

The ladies asked him anxiously whether he felt the heat of the
room; and one offered him a smelling-bottle.

He thanked them. "I can hold out until Sir Willoughby comes."

"We fear to disturb him when his door is locked, Mr. Dale; but, if
you wish it, we will venture on a message. You have really no bad
news of our Laetitia? She left us hurriedly this morning, without
any leave-taking, except a word to one of the maids, that your
condition required her immediate presence."

"My condition! And now her door is locked to me! We have spoken
through the door, and that is all. I stand sick and stupefied
between two locked doors, neither of which will open, it appears,
to give me the enlightenment I need more than medicine."

"Dear me!" cried Dr. Middleton, "I am struck by your description 
of your position, Mr. Dale. It would aptly apply to our humanity
of the present generation; and were these the days when I
sermonized, I could propose that it should afford me an
illustration for the pulpit. For my part, when doors are closed I
try not their locks; and I attribute my perfect equanimity, health
even, to an uninquiring acceptation of the fact that they are
closed to me. I read my page by the light I have. On the contrary,
the world of this day, if I may presume to quote you for my
purpose, is heard knocking at those two locked doors of the secret
of things on each side of us, and is beheld standing sick and
stupefied because it has got no response to its knocking. Why,
sir, let the world compare the diverse fortunes of the beggar and
the postman: knock to give, and it is opened unto you: knock to
crave, and it continues shut. I say, carry a letter to your locked
door, and you shall have a good reception: but there is none that
is handed out. For which reason . . ."

Mr. Dale swept a perspiring forehead, and extended his hand in
supplication. "I am an invalid, Dr. Middleton," he said. "I am
unable to cope with analogies. I have but strength for the slow
digestion of facts."

"For facts, we are bradypeptics to a man, sir. We know not yet if
nature be a fact or an effort to master one. The world has not yet
assimilated the first fact it stepped on. We are still in the
endeavour to make good blood of the fact of our being." Pressing
his hands at his temples, Mr. Dale moaned: "My head twirls; I did
unwisely to come out. I came on an impulse; I trust, honourable. I
am unfit--I cannot follow you, Dr. Middleton. Pardon me."

"Nay, sir, let me say, from my experience of my countrymen, that
if you do not follow me and can abstain from abusing me in
consequence, you are magnanimous," the Rev.  Doctor replied,
hardly consenting to let go the man he had found to indemnify him
for his gallant service of acquiescing as a mute to the ladies,
though he knew his breathing robustfulness to be as an East wind
to weak nerves, and himself an engine of punishment when he had
been torn for a day from his books.

Miss Eleanor said: "The enlightenment you need, Mr. Dale? Can we
enlighten you?"

"I think not," he answered, faintly. "I think I will wait for Sir
Willoughby ... or Mr. Whitford. If I can keep my strength. Or
could I exchange--I fear to break down--two words with the young
lady who is, was . . . "

"Miss Middleton, my daughter, sir? She shall be at your
disposition; I will bring her to you." Dr. Middleton stopped at the
window. "She, it is true, may better know the mind of Miss Dale
than I. But I flatter myself I know the gentleman better. I
think, Mr. Dale, addressing you as the lady's father, you will
find me a persuasive, I could be an impassioned, advocate in his
interests."

Mr. Dale was confounded; the weakly sapling caught in a gust falls
back as he did.

"Advocate?" he said. He had little breath.

"His impassioned advocate, I repeat; for I have the highest
opinion of him. You see, sir, I am acquainted with the
circumstances. I believe," Dr. Middleton half turned to the ladies,
"we must, until your potent inducements, Mr. Dale, have been
joined to my instances, and we overcome what feminine scruples
there may be, treat the circumstances as not generally public. Our
Strephon may be chargeable with shyness. But if for the present it
is incumbent on us, in proper consideration for the parties, not
to be nominally precise, it is hardly requisite in this household
that we should be. He is now for protesting indifference to the
state. I fancy we understand that phase of amatory frigidity.
Frankly, Mr. Dale, I was once in my life myself refused by a lady,
and I was not indignant, merely indifferent to the marriage-tie."

"My daughter has refused him, sir?"

"Temporarily it would appear that she has declined the proposal."

"He was at liberty? . . . he could honourably?. . ."

"His best friend and nearest relative is your guarantee."

"I know it; I hear so; I am informed of that: I have heard of the
proposal, and that he could honourably make it. Still, I am
helpless, I cannot move, until I am assured that my daughter's
reasons are such as a father need not underline."

"Does the lady, perchance, equivocate?"

"I have not seen her this morning; I rise late. I hear an
astounding account of the cause for her departure from Patterne, 
and I find her door locked to me--no answer."

"It is that she had no reasons to give, and she feared the demand
for them."

"Ladies!" dolorously exclaimed Mr. Dale.

"We guess the secret, we guess it!" they exclaimed in reply; and
they looked smilingly. as Dr. Middleton looked.

"She had no reasons to give?" Mr. Dale spelled these words to his
understanding. "Then, sir, she knew you not adverse?"

"Undoubtedly, by my high esteem for the gentleman, she must have
known me not adverse. But she would not consider me a principal.
She could hardly have conceived me an obstacle. I am simply the
gentleman's friend. A zealous friend, let me add."

Mr. Dale put out an imploring hand; it was too much for him.

"Pardon me; I have a poor head. And your daughter the same, sir?"

"We will not measure it too closely, but I may say, my daughter
the same, sir. And likewise--may I not add--these ladies."

Mr. Dale made sign that he was overfilled. "Where am I! And
Laetitia refused him?"

"Temporarily, let us assume. Will it not partly depend on you, Mr.
Dale?"

"But what strange things have been happening during my daughter's
absence from the cottage!" cried Mr. Dale, betraying an elixir in
his veins. "I feel that I could laugh if I did not dread to be
thought insane. She refused his hand, and he was at liberty to
offer it? My girl! We are all on our heads. The fairy-tales were
right and the lesson-books were wrong. But it is really, it is
really very demoralizing. An invalid--and I am one, and no
momentary exhilaration will be taken for the contrary--clings to
the idea of stability, order. The slightest disturbance of the
wonted course of things unsettles him. Why, for years I have been
prophesying it! and for years I have had everything against me,
and now when it is confirmed, I am wondering that I must not call
myself a fool!"

"And for years, dear Mr. Dale, this union, in spite of
counter-currents and human arrangements, has been our Willoughby's
constant preoccupation," said Miss Eleanor.

"His most cherished aim," said Miss Isabel.

"The name was not spoken by me," said Dr. Middleton.

"But it is out, and perhaps better out, if we would avoid the
chance of mystifications. I do not suppose we are seriously
committing a breach of confidence, though he might have wished to
mention it to you first himself. I have it from Willoughby that
last night he appealed to your daughter, Mr. Dale--not for the
first time, if I apprehend him correctly; and unsuccessfully. He
despairs. I do not: supposing, that is, your assistance vouchsafed
to us. And I do not despair, because the gentleman is a gentleman
of worth, of acknowledged worth. You know him well enough to
grant me that. I will bring you my daughter to help me in sounding
his praises."

Dr Middleton stepped through the window to the lawn on an elastic
foot, beaming with the happiness he felt charged to confer on his
friend Mr. Whitford.

"Ladies! it passes all wonders," Mr. Dale gasped.

"Willoughby's generosity does pass all wonders," they said in
chorus.

The door opened; Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer were announced.


CHAPTER XLV

The Patterne Ladies: Mr. Dale: Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer: with
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson

Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer entered spying to right and left. At
the sight of Mr. Dale in the room Lady Busshe murmured to her
friend: "Confirmation!"

Lady Culmer murmured: "Corney is quite reliable."

"The man is his own best tonic."

"He is invaluable for the country."

Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel greeted them.

The amiability of the Patterne ladies combined with their total
eclipse behind their illustrious nephew invited enterprising women
of the world to take liberties, and they were not backward.

Lady Busshe said: "Well? the news! we have the outlines. Don't be
astonished: we know the points: we have heard the gun. I could
have told you as much yesterday. I saw it. And I guessed it the
day before. Oh, I do believe in fatalities now. Lady Culmer and I
agree to take that view: it is the simplest. Well, and are you
satisfied, my dears?"

The ladies grimaced interrogatively: "With what?"

"With it? with all! with her! with him!"

"Our Willoughby?"

"Can it be possible that they require a dose of Corney?" Lady
Busshe remarked to Lady Culmer.

"They play discretion to perfection," said Lady Culmer. "But, my
dears, we are in the secret."

"How did she behave?" whispered Lady Busshe. "No high flights and
flutters, I do hope. She was well-connected, they say; though I
don't comprehend what they mean by a line of scholars--one thinks
of a row of pinafores: and she was pretty.

"That is well enough at the start. It never will stand against
brains. He had the two in the house to contrast them, and ... the
result! A young woman with brains--in a house--beats all your
beauties. Lady Culmer and I have determined on that view. He
thought her a delightful partner for a dance, and found her rather
tiresome at the end of the gallopade. I saw it yesterday, clear as
daylight. She did not understand him, and he did understand her.
That will be our report."

"She is young: she will learn," said the ladies uneasily, but in
total ignorance of her meaning.

"And you are charitable, and always were. I remember you had a
good word for that girl Durham."

Lady Busshe crossed the room to Mr. Dale, who was turning over
leaves of a grand book of the heraldic devices of our great
Families.

"Study it," she said, "study it, my dear Mr. Dale; you are in it,
by right of possessing a clever and accomplished daughter.
At page 300 you will find the Patterne crest. And mark me, she
will drag you into the peerage before she has done--relatively, 
you know. Sir Willoughby and wife will not be contented to sit
down and manage the estates. Has not Laetitia immense ambition?
And very creditable, I say."

Mr. Dale tried to protest something. He shut the book, examining
the binding, flapped the cover with a finger, hoped her ladyship
was in good health, alluded to his own and the strangeness of the
bird out of the cage.

"You will probably take up your residence here, in a larger and
handsomer cage. Mr. Dale."

He shook his head. "Do I apprehend . . ." he said.

"I know," said she.

"Dear me, can it be?"

Mr. Dale gazed upward, with the feelings of one awakened late to
see a world alive in broad daylight.

Lady Busshe dropped her voice. She took the liberty permitted to
her with an inferior in station, while treating him to a tone of
familiarity in acknowledgment of his expected rise; which is high
breeding, or the exact measurement of social dues.

"Laetitia will be happy, you may be sure. I love to see a long and
faithful attachment rewarded--love it! Her tale is the triumph of
patience. Far above Grizzel! No woman will be ashamed of pointing
to Lady Patterne. You are uncertain? You are in doubt? Let me
hear--as low as you like. But there is no doubt of the new
shifting of the scene?--no doubt of the proposal? Dear Mr. Dale!
a very little louder. You are here because--? of course you wish
to see Sir Willoughby. She? I did not catch you quite. She? ... it
seems, you say.. ? 

Lady Culmer said to the Patterne ladies:--

"You must have had a distressing time. These affairs always mount
up to a climax, unless people are very well bred. We saw it coming.
Naturally we did not expect such a transformation of brides: who
could? If I had laid myself down on my back to think, I should
have had it. I am unerring when I set to speculating on my back.
One is cooler: ideas come; they have not to be forced. That is why
I am brighter on a dull winter afternoon, on the sofa, beside my
tea-service, than at any other season. However, your trouble is
over. When did the Middletons leave?"

"The Middletons leave?" said the ladies.

"Dr. Middleton and his daughter."

"They have not left us."

"The Middletons are here?"

"They are here, yes. Why should they have left Patterne?" 

"Why?"

"Yes. They are likely to stay some days longer."

"Goodness!"

"There is no ground for any report to the contrary, Lady Culmer."

"No ground!"

Lady Culmer called out to Lady Busshe.

A cry came back from that startled dame.

"She has refused him!"

"Who?"

"She has."

"She?--Sir Willoughby?"

"Refused!--declines the honour."

"Oh, never! No, that carries the incredible beyond romance. But is
he perfectly at . . ."

"Quite, it seems. And she was asked in due form and refused."

"No, and no again!"

"My dear, I have it from Mr. Dale."

"Mr. Dale, what can be the signification of her conduct?" 

"Indeed, Lady Culmer," said Mr. Dale, not unpleasantly agitated by
the interest he excited, in spite of his astonishment at a public
discussion of the matter in this house, "I am in the dark. Her
father should know, but I do not. Her door is locked to me; I have
not seen her. I am absolutely in the dark. I am a recluse. I have
forgotten the ways of the world. I should have supposed her father
would first have been addressed."

"Tut-tut. Modern gentlemen are not so formal; they are creatures
of impulse and take a pride in it. He spoke. We settle that. But
where did you get this tale of a refusal?"

"I have it from Dr. Middleton."

"From Dr. Middleton?" shouted Lady Busshe.

"The Middletons are here," said Lady Culmer.

"What whirl are we in?" Lady Busshe got up, ran two or three steps
and seated herself in another chair. "Oh! do let us proceed upon
system. If not we shall presently be rageing; we shall be
dangerous. The Middletons are here, and Dr. Middleton himself
communicates to Mr. Dale that Laetitia Dale has refused the hand
of Sir Willoughby, who is ostensibly engaged to his own daughter!
And pray, Mr. Dale, how did Dr. Middleton speak of it? Compose
yourself; there is no violent hurry, though our sympathy with you
and our interest in all the parties does perhaps agitate us a
little. Quite at your leisure--speak!"

"Madam ... Lady Busshe." Mr. Dale gulped a ball in his throat. "I
see no reason why I should not speak. I do not see how I can have
been deluded. The Miss Patternes heard him. Dr. Middleton began
upon it, not I. I was unaware, when I came, that it was a refusal.
I had been informed that there was a proposal. My authority for
the tale was positive. The object of my visit was to assure myself
of the integrity of my daughter's conduct. She had always the
highest sense of honour. But passion is known to mislead, and
there was this most strange report. I feared that our humblest
apologies were due to Dr. Middleton and his daughter. I know the
charm Laetitia can exercise. Madam, in the plainest language,
without a possibility of my misapprehending him, Dr. Middleton
spoke of himself as the advocate of the suitor for my daughter's
hand. I have a poor head. I supposed at once an amicable rupture
between Sir Willoughby and Miss Middleton, or that the version
which had reached me of their engagement was not strictly
accurate. My head is weak. Dr. Middleton's language is trying to a
head like mine; but I can speak positively on the essential 
points: he spoke of himself as ready to be the impassioned
advocate of the suitor for my daughter's hand. Those were his
words. I understood him to entreat me to intercede with her. Nay,
the name was mentioned. There was no concealment. I am certain
there could not be a misapprehension. And my feelings were touched
by his anxiety for Sir Willoughby's happiness. I attributed it to
a sentiment upon which I need not dwell. Impassioned advocate, he
said."

"We are in a perfect maelstrom!" cried Lady Busshe, turning to
everybody.

"It is a complete hurricane!" cried Lady Culmer.

A light broke over the faces of the Patterne ladies. They exchanged
it with one another.

They had been so shocked as to be almost offended by Lady Busshe,
but their natural gentleness and habitual submission rendered them
unequal to the task of checking her.

"Is it not," said Miss Eleanor, "a misunderstanding that a change
of names will rectify?"

"This is by no means the first occasion," said Miss Isabel, "that
Willoughby has pleaded for his cousin Vernon."

"We deplore extremely the painful error into which Mr. Dale has
fallen."

"It springs, we now perceive, from an entire misapprehension of Dr.
Middleton."

"Vernon was in his mind. It was clear to us."

"Impossible that it could have been Willoughby!"

"You see the impossibility, the error!"

"And the Middletons here!" said Lady Busshe. "Oh! if we leave
unilluminated we shall be the laughing-stock of the county. Mr.
Dale, please, wake up. Do you see? You may have been mistaken."

"Lady Busshe," he woke up; "I may have mistaken Dr. Middleton; he
has a language that I can compare only to a review-day of the field
forces. But I have the story on authority that I cannot question:
it is confirmed by my daughter's unexampled behaviour. And if I
live through this day I shall look about me as a ghost
to-morrow."

"Dear Mr. Dale!" said the Patterne ladies, compassionately. Lady
Busshe murmured to them: "You know the two did not agree; they did
not get on: I saw it; I predicted it."

"She will understand him in time," said they.

"Never. And my belief is, they have parted by consent, and Letty
Dale wins the day at last. Yes, now I do believe it." 

The ladies maintained a decided negative, but they knew too much
not to feel perplexed, and they betrayed it, though they said:
"Dear Lady Busshe! is it credible, in decency?"

"Dear Mrs. Mountstuart!" Lady Busshe invoked her great rival
appearing among them: "You come most opportunely; we are in a
state of inextricable confusion: we are bordering on frenzy. You,
and none but you, can help us. You know, you always know; we hang
on you. Is there any truth in it? a particle?"

Mrs. Mountstuart seated herself regally "Ah, Mr. Dale!" she said,
inclining to him. "Yes, dear Lady Busshe, there is a particle."

"Now, do not roast us. You can; you have the art. I have the whole
story. That is, I have a part. I mean, I have the outlines, I
cannot be deceived, but you can fill thern in, I know you can. I
saw it yesterday. Now, tell us, tell us. It must be quite true or
utterly false. Which is it?"

"Be precise."

"His fatality! you called her. Yes, I was sceptical. But here we
have it all come round again, and if the tale is true, I shall own
you infallible. Has he?--and she?"

"Both."

"And the Middletons here? They have not gone; they keep the field.
And more astounding, she refuses him. And to add to it, Dr.
Middleton intercedes with Mr. Dale for Sir Willoughby."

"Dr. Middleton intercedes!" This was rather astonishing to Mrs.
Mountstuart.

"For Vernon," Miss Eleanor emphasized.

"For Vernon Whitford, his cousin." said Miss Isabel, still more
emphatically.

"Who," said Mrs. Mountstuart, with a sovereign lift and turn of
her head, "speaks of a refusal?"

"I have it from Mr. Dale," said Lady Busshe.

"I had it, I thought, distinctly from Dr. Middleton," said Mr.
Dale.

"That Willoughby proposed to Laetitia for his cousin Vernon,
Doctor Middleton meant," said Miss Eleanor.

Her sister followed: "Hence this really ridiculous misconception! 
--sad, indeed," she added, for balm to Mr. Dale.

"Willoughby was Vernon's proxy. His cousin, if not his first, is
ever the second thought with him."

"But can we continue ... ?

"Such a discussion!"

Mrs. Mountstuart gave them a judicial hearing. They were regarded
in the county as the most indulgent of nonentities, and she as
little as Lady Busshe was restrained from the burning topic in
their presence. She pronounced:

"Each party is right, and each is wrong."

A dry: "I shall shriek!" came from Lady Busshe.

"Cruel!" groaned Lady Culmer.

"Mixed, you are all wrong. Disentangled, you are each of you
right. Sir Willoughby does think of his cousin Vernon; he is
anxious to establish him; he is the author of a proposal to that
effect."

"We know it!" the Patterne ladies exclaimed. "And Laetitia
rejected poor Vernon once more!"

"Who spoke of Miss Dale's rejection of Mr. Whitford?"

"Is he not rejected?" Lady Culmer inquired.

"It is in debate, and at this moment being decided." 

"Oh! do he seated, Mr. Dale," Lady Busshe implored him, rising to
thrust him back to his chair if necessary. "Any dislocation, and
we are thrown out again! We must hold together if this riddle is
ever to be read. Then, dear Mrs. Mountstuart, we are to say that
there is-no truth in the other story?"

"You are to say nothing of the sort, dear Lady Busshe." 

"Be merciful! And what of the fatality?"

"As positive as the Pole to the needle."

"She has not refused him?"

"Ask your own sagacity."

"Accepted?"

"Wait."

"And all the world's ahead of me! Now, Mrs. Mountstuart, you are
oracle. Riddles, if you like, only speak. If we can't have corn,
why, give us husks."

"Is any one of us able to anticipate events, Lady Busshe?" 

"Yes, I believe that you are. I bow to you. I do sincerely. So
it's another person for Mr. Whitford? You nod. And it is our
Laetitia for Sir Willoughby? You smile. You would not deceive me?
A very little, and I run about crazed and howl at your doors. And
Dr.  Middleton is made to play blind man in the midst? And the
other person is--now I see day! An amicable rupture, and a smooth
new arrangement. She has money; she was never the match for our
hero; never; I saw it yesterday, and before, often; and so he
hands her over--tuthe-rum-tum-tum, tuthe-rum-tum-tum," Lady
Busshe struck a quick march on her knee. "Now isn't that clever
guessing? The shadow of a clue for me. And because I know human
nature. One peep, and I see the combination in a minute. So he
keeps the money in the family, becomes a benefactor to his cousin
by getting rid of the girl, and succumbs to his fatality. Rather a
pity he let it ebb and flow so long. Time counts the tides, you
know. But it improves the story. I defy any other county in the
kingdom to produce one fresh and living to equal it. Let me tell
you I suspected Mr. Whitford, and I hinted it yesterday."

"Did you indeed!" said Mrs. Mountstuart, humouring her excessive
acuteness.

"I really did. There is that dear good man on his feet again. And
looks agitated again."

Mr. Dale had been compelled both by the lady's voice and his
interest in the subject to listen. He had listened more than
enough; he was exceedingly nervous. He held on by his chair,
afraid to quit his moorings, and "Manners!" he said to himself
unconsciously aloud, as he cogitated on the libertine way with
which these chartered great ladies of the district discussed his
daughter. He was heard and unnoticed. The supposition, if any,
would have been that he was admonishing himself. At this juncture
Sir Willoughby entered the drawing-room by the garden window, and
simultaneously Dr. Middleton by the door.



CHAPTER XLVI

The Scene of Sir Willoughby's Generalship

History, we may fear, will never know the qualities of leadership
inherent in Sir Willoughby Patterne to fit him for the post of
Commander of an army, seeing that he avoided the fatigues of the
service and preferred the honours bestowed in his country upon the
quiet administrators of their own estates: but his possession of
particular gifts, which are military, and especially of the
proleptic mind, which is the stamp and sign-warrant of the
heaven-sent General, was displayed on every urgent occasion when,
in the midst of difficulties likely to have extinguished one less
alert than he to the threatening aspect of disaster, he had to
manoeuvre himself.

He had received no intimation of Mr. Dale's presence in his house,
nor of the arrival of the dreaded women Lady Busshe and Lady
Culmer: his locked door was too great a terror to his domestics.
Having finished with Vernon, after a tedious endeavour to bring
the fellow to a sense of the policy of the step urged on him, he
walked out on the lawn with the desire to behold the opening of an
interview not promising to lead to much, and possibly to profit by
its failure. Clara had been prepared, according to his directions,
by Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, as Vernon had been prepared by him.
His wishes, candidly and kindly expressed both to Vernon and Mrs
Mountstuart, were, that since the girl appeared disinclined to
make him a happy man, she would make one of his cousin.
Intimating to Mrs. Mountstuart that he would be happier without
her, he alluded to the benefit of the girl's money to poor old
Vernon, the general escape from a scandal if old Vernon could
manage to catch her as she dropped, the harmonious arrangement it
would be for all parties. And only on the condition of her taking
Vernon would he consent to give her up. This he said imperatively,
adding that such was the meaning of the news she had received
relating to Laetitia Dale. From what quarter had she received it?
he asked.  She shuffled in her reply, made a gesture to signify
that it was in the air, universal, and fell upon the proposed
arrangement. He would listen to none of Mrs. Mountstuart's
woman-of-the-world instances of the folly of pressing it upon a
girl who had shown herself a girl of spirit. She foretold the
failure. He would not be advised; he said: "It is my scheme"; and
perhaps the look of mad benevolence about it induced the lady to
try whether there was a chance that it would hit the madness in
our nature, and somehow succeed or lead to a pacification. Sir
Willoughby condescended to arrange things thus for Clara's good;
he would then proceed to realize his own. Such was the face he put
upon it. We can wear what appearance we please before the world
until we are found out, nor is the world's praise knocking upon
hollowness always hollow music; but Mrs Mountstuart's laudation of
his kindness and simplicity disturbed him; for though he had
recovered from his rebuff enough to imagine that Laetitia could
not refuse him under reiterated pressure, he had let it be
supposed that she was a submissive handmaiden throbbing for her
elevation; and Mrs Mountstuart's belief in it afflicted his recent
bitter experience; his footing was not perfectly secure. Besides,
assuming it to be so, he considered the sort of prize he had won;
and a spasm of downright hatred of a world for which we make
mighty sacrifices to be repaid in a worn, thin, comparatively
valueless coin, troubled his counting of his gains. Laetitia, it
was true, had not passed through other hands in coming to him, as
Vernon would know it to be Clara's case: time only had worn her:
but the comfort of the reflection was annoyed by the physical
contrast of the two. Hence an unusual melancholy in his tone that
Mrs. Mountstuart thought touching. It had the scenic effect on her
which greatly contributes to delude the wits. She talked of him to
Clara as being a man who had revealed an unsuspected depth.

Vernon took the communication curiously. He seemed readier to be
in love with his benevolent relative than with the lady. He was
confused, undisguisedly moved, said the plan was impossible, out
of the question, but thanked Willoughby for the best of
intentions, thanked him warmly. After saying that the plan was
impossible, the comical fellow allowed himself to be pushed forth
on the lawn to see how Miss Middleton might have come out of
her interview with Mrs. Mountstuart. Willoughby observed Mrs.
Mountstuart meet him, usher him to the place she had quitted among
the shrubs, and return to the open turf-spaces. He sprang to her.

"She will listen." Mrs. Mountstuart said: "She likes him, respects
him, thinks he is a very sincere friend, clever, a scholar, and a
good mountaineer; and thinks you mean very kindly. So much I have
impressed on her, but I have not done much for Mr. Whitford."

"She consents to listen," said Willoughby, snatching at that as the
death-blow to his friend Horace.

"She consents to listen, because you have arranged it so that if
she declined she would be rather a savage."

"You think it will have no result?"

"None at all."

"Her listening will do."

"And you must be satisfied with it."

"We shall see."

"'Anything for peace', she says: and I don't say that a gentleman
with a tongue would not have a chance. She wishes to please you."

"Old Vernon has no tongue for women, poor fellow! You will have us
be spider or fly, and if a man can't spin a web all he can hope is
not to be caught in one. She knows his history, too, and that
won't be in his favour. How did she look when you left them?"

"Not so bright: like a bit of china that wants dusting. She looked
a trifle gauche, it struck me; more like a country girl with the
hoyden taming in her than the well-bred creature she is. I did not
suspect her to have feeling. You must remember, Sir Willoughby,
that she has obeyed your wishes, done her utmost: I do think we
may say she has made some amends; and if she is to blame she
repents, and you will not insist too far."

"I do insist," said he.

"Beneficent, but a tyrant!"

"Well, well." He did not dislike the character.

They perceived Dr. Middleton wandering over the lawn, and
Willoughby went to him to put him on the wrong track: Mrs.
Mountstuart swept into the drawing-room. Willoughby quitted the
Rev. Doctor, and hung about the bower where he supposed his pair
of dupes had by this time ceased to stutter mutually:--or what if
they had found the word of harmony? He could bear that, just bear
it. He rounded the shrubs, and, behold, both had vanished. The
trellis decorated emptiness. His idea was, that they had soon
discovered their inability to be turtles: and desiring not to lose
a moment while Clara was fretted by the scene, he rushed to the
drawing-room with the hope of lighting on her there, getting her
to himself, and finally, urgently, passionately offering her the
sole alternative of what she had immediately rejected. Why had he
not used passion before, instead of limping crippled between
temper and policy? He was capable of it: as soon as imagination in
him conceived his personal feelings unwounded and unimperiled, the
might of it inspired him with heroical confidence, and Clara
grateful, Clara softly moved, led him to think of Clara melted.
Thus anticipating her he burst into the room.

One step there warned him that he was in the jaws of the world. We
have the phrase, that a man is himself under certain trying
circumstances. There is no need to say it of Sir Willoughby: he
was thrice himself when danger menaced, himself inspired him. He
could read at a single glance the Polyphemus eye in the general
head of a company. Lady Busshe, Lady Culmer, Mrs. Mountstuart, Mr.
Dale, had a similarity in the variety of their expressions that
made up one giant eye for him perfectly, if awfully, legible. He
discerned the fact that his demon secret was abroad, universal. He
ascribed it to fate. He was in the jaws of the world, on the
world's teeth. This time he thought Laetitia must have betrayed
him, and bowing to Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer, gallantly pressing
their fingers and responding to their becks and archnesses, he
ruminated on his defences before he should accost her father. He
did not want to be alone with the man, and he considered how his
presence might be made useful.

"I am glad to see you, Mr. Dale. Pray, be seated. Is it nature
asserting her strength? or the efficacy of medicine? I fancy it
can't be both. You have brought us back your daughter?"

Mr. Dale sank into a chair, unable to resist the hand forcing him.

"No, Sir Willoughby, no. I have not; I have not seen her since she
came home this morning from Patterne."

"Indeed? She is unwell?"

"I cannot say. She secludes herself." 

"Has locked herself in," said Lady Busshe.

Willoughby threw her a smile. It made them intimate.

This was an advantage against the world, but an exposure of
himself to the abominable woman.

Dr. Middleton came up to Mr. Dale to apologize for not presenting
his daughter Clara, whom he could find neither in nor out of the
house.

"We have in Mr. Dale, as I suspected," he said to Willoughby, "a
stout ally."

"If I may beg two minutes with you, Sir Willoughby," said Mr.
Dale.

"Your visits are too rare for me to allow of your numbering the
minutes," Willoughby replied. "We cannot let Mr. Dale escape us
now that we have him, I think, Dr. Middleton."

"Not without ransom," said the Rev. Doctor.

Mr. Dale shook his head. "My strength, Sir Willoughby, will not
sustain me long."

"You are at home, Mr. Dale."

"Not far from home, in truth, but too far for an invalid beginning
to grow sensible of weakness."

"You will regard Patterne as your home, Mr. Dale," Willoughby 
repeated for the world to hear.

"Unconditionally?" Dr. Middleton inquired, with a humourous air of
dissenting.

Willoughby gave him a look that was coldly courteous, and then he
looked at Lady Busshe. She nodded imperceptibly. Her eyebrows
rose, and Willoughby returned a similar nod. 

Translated, the signs ran thus:

"--Pestered by the Rev. gentleman:--I see you are. Is the story I
have heard correct?--Possibly it may err in a few details." 

This was fettering himself in loose manacles.

But Lady Busshe would not be satisfied with the compliment of the
intimate looks and nods. She thought she might still be behind
Mrs. Mountstuart; and she was a bold woman, and anxious about him,
half-crazed by the riddle of the pot she was boiling in, and
having very few minutes to spare. Not extremely reticent by
nature, privileged by station, and made intimate with him by his
covert looks, she stood up to him. "One word to an old friend.
Which is the father of the fortunate creature? I don't know how to
behave to them." No time was afforded him to be disgusted with her
vulgarity and audacity.

He replied, feeling her rivet his gyves: "The house will be empty
to-morrow."

"I see. A decent withdrawal, and very well cloaked. We had a tale
here of her running off to decline the honour, afraid, or on her
dignity or something."

How was it that the woman was ready to accept the altered posture
of affairs in his house--if she had received a hint of them? He
forgot that he had prepared her in self-defence.

"From whom did you have that?" he asked.

"Her father. And the lady aunts declare it was the cousin she
refused!" Willoughby's brain turned over. He righted it for
action, and crossed the room to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. His
ears tingled. He and his whole story discussed in public! Himself 
unroofed! And the marvel that he of all men should be in such a
tangle, naked and blown on, condemned to use his cunningest arts
to unwind and cover himself, struck him as though the lord of his
kind were running the gauntlet of a legion of imps. He felt their
lashes.

The ladies were talking to Mrs. Mountstuart and Lady Culmer of
Vernon and the suitableness of Laetitia to a scholar. He made sign
to them, and both rose.

"It is the hour for your drive. To the cottage! Mr. Dale is in.
She must come. Her sick father! No delay, going or returning.
Bring her here at once."

"Poor man!" they sighed; and "Willoughby," said one, and the other
said: "There is a strange misconception you will do well to
correct."

They were about to murmur what it was. He swept his hand round,
and excusing themselves to their guests, obediently they retired.

Lady Busshe at his entreaty remained, and took a seat beside Lady
Culmer and Mrs. Mountstuart.

She said to the latter: "You have tried scholars. What do you
think?"

"Excellent, but hard to mix," was the reply.

"I never make experiments," said Lady Culmer.

"Some one must!" Mrs. Mountstuart groaned over her dull dinner-party.

Lady Busshe consoled her. "At any rate, the loss of a scholar is
no loss to the county."

"They are well enough in towns," Lady Culmer said.

"And then I am sure you must have them by themselves."

"We have nothing to regret."

"My opinion."

The voice of Dr. Middleton in colloquy with Mr. Dale swelled on a
melodious thunder: "For whom else should I plead as the passionate
advocate I proclaimed myself to you, sir? There is but one man
known to me who would move me to back him upon such an adventure.
Willoughby, join me. I am informing Mr. Dale . . ."

Willoughby stretched his hands out to Mr. Dale to support him on
his legs, though he had shown no sign of a wish to rise.

"You are feeling unwell, Mr. Dale."

"Do I look very ill, Sir Willoughby?"

"It will pass. Laetitia will be with us in twenty minutes." Mr.
Dale struck his hands in a clasp. He looked alarmingly ill, and
satisfactorily revealed to his host how he could be made to look
so.

"I was informing Mr. Dale that the petitioner enjoys our
concurrent good wishes: and mine in no degree less than yours,
Willoughby," observed Dr. Middleton, whose billows grew the bigger
for a check. He supposed himself speaking confidentially. "Ladies
have the trick, they have, I may say, the natural disposition for
playing enigma now and again. Pressure is often a sovereign
specific. Let it be tried upon her all round from every radiating
line of the circle. You she refuses. Then I venture to propose
myself to appeal to her. My daughter has assuredly an esteem for
the applicant that will animate a woman's tongue in such a case.
The ladies of the house will not be backward. Lastly, if
necessary, we trust the lady's father to add his instances. My
prescription is, to fatigue her negatives; and where no rooted
objection exists, I maintain it to be the unfailing receipt for
the conduct of the siege. No woman can say No forever. The
defence has not such resources against even a single assailant,
and we shall have solved the problem of continuous motion before
she will have learned to deny in perpetuity. That I stand on."

Willoughby glanced at Mrs. Mountstuart.

"What is that?" she said. "Treason to our sex, Dr. Middleton?"

"I think I heard that no woman can say No forever!" remarked Lady
Busshe.

"To a loyal gentleman, ma'am: assuming the field of the recurring
request to be not unholy ground; consecrated to affirmatives
rather."

Dr Middleton was attacked by three angry bees. They made him say
yes and no alternately so many times that he had to admit in men a
shiftier yieldingness than women were charged with.

Willoughby gesticulated as mute chorus on the side of the ladies;
and a little show of party spirit like that, coming upon their
excitement under the topic, inclined them to him genially. He
drew Mr. Dale away while the conflict subsided in sharp snaps of
rifles and an interval rejoinder of a cannon. Mr. Dale had shown
by signs that he was growing fretfully restive under his burden
of doubt.

"Sir Willoughby, I have a question. I beg you to lead me where I
may ask it. I know my head is weak."

"Mr. Dale, it is answered when I say that my house is your home,
and that Laetitia will soon be with us."

"Then this report is true?"

"I know nothing of reports. You are answered."

"Can my daughter be accused of any shadow of falseness,
dishonourable dealing?"

"As little as I."

Mr. Dale scanned his face. He saw no shadow.

"For I should go to my grave bankrupt if that could be said of
her; and I have never yet felt poor, though you know the extent of
a pensioner's income. Then this tale of a refusal ... ?"

"Is nonsense."

"She has accepted?"

"There are situations, Mr. Dale, too delicate to be clothed in
positive definitions."

"Ah, Sir Willoughby, but it becomes a father to see that his
daughter is not forced into delicate situations. I hope all is
well. I am confused. It may be my head. She puzzles me. You are
not ... Can I ask it here? You are quite ... ? Will you moderate
my anxiety? My infirmities must excuse me."

Sir Willoughby conveyed by a shake of the head and a pressure of
Mr. Dale's hand, that he was not, and that he was quite.

"Dr Middleton?" said Mr. Dale.

"He leaves us to-morrow."

"Really!" The invalid wore a look as if wine had been poured into
him. He routed his host's calculations by calling to the Rev.
Doctor. "We are to lose you, sir?"

Willoughby attempted an interposition, but Dr. Middleton crashed
through it like the lordly organ swallowing a flute.

"Not before I score my victory, Mr. Dale, and establish my friend
upon his rightful throne."

"You do not leave to-morrow, sir?"

"Have you heard, sir, that I leave to-morrow?"

Mr. Dale turned to Sir Willoughby.

The latter said: "Clara named to-day. To-morrow I thought
preferable."

"Ah!" Dr. Middleton towered on the swelling exclamation, but with
no dark light. He radiated splendidly. "Yes, then, to-morrow. That
is, if we subdue the lady."

He advanced to Willoughby, seized his hand, squeezed it, thanked
him, praised him. He spoke under his breath, for a wonder; but:
"We are in your debt lastingly, my friend", was heard, and he was
impressive, he seemed subdued, and saying aloud: "Though I should
wish to aid in the reduction of that fortress", he let it be seen
that his mind was rid of a load. 

Dr. Middleton partly stupefied Willoughby by his way of taking it,
but his conduct was too serviceable to allow of speculation on his
readiness to break the match. It was the turning-point of the
engagement.

Lady Busshe made a stir.

"I cannot keep my horses waiting any longer," she said, and
beckoned. Sir Willoughby was beside her immediately.

"You are admirable! perfect! Don't ask me to hold my tongue. I
retract, I recant. It is a fatality. I have resolved upon that
view. You could stand the shot of beauty, not of brains. That is
our report. There! And it's delicious to feel that the county wins
you. No tea. I cannot possibly wait. And, oh! here she is. I must
have a look at her. My dear Laetitia Dale!"

Willoughby hurried to Mr. Dale.

"You are not to be excited, sir: compose yourself. You will
recover and be strong to-morrow: you are at home; you are in your
own house; you are in Laetitia's drawing-room. All will be clear
to-morrow. Till to-morrow we talk riddles by consent. Sit, I beg.
You stay with us."

He met Laetitia and rescued her from Lady Busshe, murmuring, with
the air of a lover who says, "my love! my sweet!" that she had
done rightly to come and come at once. Her father had been thrown
into the proper condition of clammy nervousness to create the
impression. Laetitia's anxiety sat prettily on her long eyelashes
as she bent over him in his chair.

Hereupon Dr. Corney appeared; and his name had a bracing effect on
Mr. Dale. "Corney has come to drive me to the cottage," he said.
"I am ashamed of this public exhibition of myself, my dear. Let
us go. My head is a poor one."

Dr. Corney had been intercepted. He broke from Sir Willoughby with
a dozen little nods of accurate understanding of him, even to
beyond the mark of the communications. He touched his patient's
pulse lightly, briefly sighed with professional composure, and
pronounced: "Rest. Must not be moved. No, no, nothing serious," he
quieted Laetitia's fears, "but rest, rest. A change of residence
for a night will tone him.  I will bring him a draught in the
course of the evening. Yes, yes, I'll fetch everything wanted from
the cottage for you and for him.  Repose on Corney's forethought."

"You are sure, Dr. Corney?" said Laetitia, frightened on her
father's account and on her own.

"Which aspect will be the best for Mr. Dale's bedroom?"
the hospitable ladies Eleanor and Isabel inquired.

"Southeast, decidedly: let him have the morning sun: a warm air,
a vigorous air, and a bright air, and the patient wakes and sings
in his bed."

Still doubtful whether she was in a trap, Laetitia whispered to
her father of the privacy and comforts of his home. He replied to
her that he thought he would rather be in his own home.

Dr Corney positively pronounced No to it.

Laetitia breathed again of home, but with the sigh of one
overborne.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel took the word from Willoughby, and
said: "But you are at home, my dear. This is your home. Your
father will be at least as well attended here as at the cottage."

She raised her eyelids on them mournfully, and by chance diverted
her look to Dr. Middleton, quite by chance.

It spoke eloquently to the assembly of all that Willoughby desired
to be imagined.

"But there is Crossjay," she cried. "My cousin has gone, and the
boy is left alone. I cannot have him left alone. If we, if, Dr.
Corney, you are sure it is unsafe for papa to be moved to-day,
Crossjay must ... he cannot be left."

"Bring him with you, Corney," said Sir Willoughby; and the little
doctor heartily promised that he would, in the event of his
finding Crossjay at the cottage, which he thought a distant 
probability.

"He gave me his word he would not go out till my return," said
Laetitia.

"And if Crossjay gave you his word," the accents of a new voice
vibrated close by, "be certain that he will not come back with Dr.
Corney unless he has authority in your handwriting."

Clara Middleton stepped gently to Laetitia, and with a manner 
that was an embrace, as much as kissed her for what she was doing
on behalf of Crossjay. She put her lips in a pouting form to
simulate saying: "Press it."

"He is to come," said Laetitia.

"Then write him his permit."

There was a chatter about Crossjay and the sentinel true to his
post that he could be, during which Laetitia distressfully
scribbled a line for Dr. Corney to deliver to him. Clara stood
near. She had rebuked herself for want of reserve in the presence 
of Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer, and she was guilty of a slightly
excessive containment when she next addressed Laetitia. It was,
like Laetitia's look at Dr. Middleton, opportune: enough to make a
man who watched as Willoughby did a fatalist for life: the shadow
of a difference in her bearing toward Laetitia sufficed to impute
acting either to her present coolness or her previous warmth.
Better still, when Dr. Middleton said: "So we leave to-morrow, my
dear, and I hope you have written to the Darletons," Clara flushed
and beamed, and repressed her animation on a sudden, with one
grave look, that might be thought regretful, to where Willoughby
stood.

Chance works for us when we are good captains.

Willoughby's pride was high, though he knew himself to be keeping
it up like a fearfully dexterous juggler, and for an empty reward:
but he was in the toils of the world.

"Have you written? The post-bag leaves in half an hour," he
addressed her.

"We are expected, but I will write," she replied: and her not
having yet written counted in his favour.

She went to write the letter. Dr. Corney had departed on his
mission to fetch Crossjay and medicine. Lady Busshe was impatient
to be gone. "Corney," she said to Lady Culmer, "is a deadly
gossip."

"Inveterate," was the answer.

"My poor horses!"

"Not the young pair of bays?"

"Luckily they are, my dear. And don't let me hear of dining
to-night!" 

Sir Willoughby was leading out Mr. Dale to a quiet room,
contiguous to the invalid gentleman's bedchamber. He resigned 
him to Laetitia in the hall, that he might have the pleasure 
of conducting the ladies to their carriage.

"As little agitation as possible. Corney will soon be back," he
said, bitterly admiring the graceful subservience of Laetitia's
figure to her father's weight on her arm.

He had won a desperate battle, but what had he won?

What had the world given him in return for his efforts to gain it?
Just a shirt, it might be said: simple scanty clothing, no warmth.
Lady Busshe was unbearable; she gabbled; she was ill-bred,
permitted herself to speak of Dr. Middleton as ineligible, no loss
to the county. And Mrs. Mountstuart was hardly much above her, with
her inevitable stroke of caricature:--"You see Doctor
Middleton's pulpit scampering after him with legs!" Perhaps the
Rev. Doctor did punish the world for his having forsaken his
pulpit, and might be conceived as haunted by it at his heels, but
Willoughby was in the mood to abhor comic images; he hated the
perpetrators of them and the grinners. Contempt of this laughing
empty world, for which he had performed a monstrous immolation,
led him to associate Dr. Middleton in his mind, and Clara too, with
the desireable things he had sacrificed--a shape of youth and
health; a sparkling companion; a face of innumerable charms; and
his own veracity; his inner sense of his dignity; and his temper,
and the limpid frankness of his air of scorn, that was to him a
visage of candid happiness in the dim retrospect. Haply also he
had sacrificed more: he looked scientifically into the future: he
might have sacrificed a nameless more. And for what? he asked
again. For the favourable looks and tongues of these women whose
looks and tongues he detested!

"Dr Middleton says he is indebted to me: I am deeply in his
debt," he remarked.

"It is we who are in your debt for a lovely romance, my dear Sir
Willoughby," said Lady Busshe, incapable of taking a correction, 
so thoroughly had he imbued her with his fiction, or with the
belief that she had a good story to circulate. Away she drove,
rattling her tongue to Lady Culmer.

"A hat and horn, and she would be in the old figure of a post-boy
on a hue-and-cry sheet," said Mrs. Mountstuart. 

Willoughby thanked the great lady for her services, and she
complimented the polished gentleman on his noble self-possession.
But she complained at the same time of being defrauded of her
"charmer" Colonel De Craye, since luncheon. An absence of warmth
in her compliment caused Willoughby to shrink and think the
wretched shirt he had got from the world no covering after all: a
breath flapped it.

"He comes to me to-morrow, I believe," she said, reflecting on her
superior knowledge of facts in comparison with Lady Busshe, who
would presently be hearing of something novel, and exclaiming:
"So, that is why you patronized the colonel!" And it was nothing
of the sort, for Mrs. Mountstuart could honestly say she was not
the woman to make a business of her pleasure.

"Horace is an enviable fellow," said Willoughby, wise in The Book,
which bids us ever, for an assuagement to fancy our friend's
condition worse than our own, and recommends the deglutition of
irony as the most balsamic for wounds in the whole moral
pharmacopoeia.

"I don't know," she replied, with a marked accent of deliberation.

"The colonel is to have you to himself to-morrow!"

"I can't be sure of what I shall have in the colonel!"

"Your perpetual sparkler?"

Mrs. Mountstuart set her head in motion. She left the matter
silent.

"I'll come for him in the morning," she said, and her carriage
whirled her off. Either she had guessed it, or Clara had confided
to her the treacherous passion of Horace De Craye.

However, the world was shut away from Patterne for the night.



CHAPTER XLVII

Sir Willoughby and His Friend Horace De Craye

Willoughby shut himself up in his laboratory to brood awhile after
the conflict. Sounding through himself, as it was habitual with
him to do, for the plan most agreeable to his taste, he came on a
strange discovery among the lower circles of that microcosm. He
was no longer guided in his choice by liking and appetite: he had
to put it on the edge of a sharp discrimination, and try it by his
acutest judgement before it was acceptable to his heart: and
knowing well the direction of his desire, he was nevertheless
unable to run two strides on a wish. He had learned to read the
world: his partial capacity for reading persons had fled. The
mysteries of his own bosom were bare to him; but he could
comprehend them only in their immediate relation to the world
outside. This hateful world had caught him and transformed him to
a machine. The discovery he made was, that in the gratification
of the egoistic instinct we may so beset ourselves as to deal a
slaughtering wound upon Self to whatsoever quarter we turn.

Surely there is nothing stranger in mortal experience. The man was
confounded. At the game of Chess it is the dishonour of our
adversary when we are stale-mated: but in life, cornbatting the
world, such a winning of the game questions our sentiments.

Willoughby's interpretation of his discovery was directed by pity:
he had no other strong emotion left in him. He pitied himself, and
he reached the conclusion that he suffered because he was active;
he could not be quiescent. Had it not been for his devotion to his
house and name, never would he have stood twice the victim of
womankind. Had he been selfish, he would have been the happiest of
men! He said it aloud. He schemed benevolently for his unborn
young, and for the persons about him: hence he was in a position
forbidding a step under pain of injury to his feelings. He was
generous: otherwise would he not in scorn of soul, at the outset,
straight off have pitched Clara Middleton to the wanton winds? He
was faithful in his affection: Laetitia Dale was beneath his roof
to prove it. Both these women were examples of his power of
forgiveness, and now a tender word to Clara might fasten shame on
him--such was her gratitude! And if he did not marry Laetitia,
laughter would be devilish all around him--such was the world's!
Probably Vernon would not long be thankful for the chance which
varied the monotony of his days. What of Horace? Willoughby
stripped to enter the ring with Horace: he cast away disguise.
That man had been the first to divide him in the all but equal
slices of his egoistic from his amatory self: murder of his
individuality was the crime of Horace De Craye. And further,
suspicion fixed on Horace (he knew not how, except that The Book
bids us be suspicious of those we hate) as the man who had
betrayed his recent dealings with Laetitia.

Willoughby walked the thoroughfares of the house to meet Clara and
make certain of her either for himself, or, if it must be, for
Vernon, before he took another step with Laetitia Dale. Clara
could reunite him, turn him once more into a whole and an animated
man; and she might be willing. Her willingness to listen to Vernon
promised it. "A gentleman with a tongue would have a chance", Mrs.
Mountstuart had said. How much greater the chance of a lover! For
he had not yet supplicated her: he had shown pride and temper. He
could woo, he was a torrential wooer. And it would be glorious to
swing round on Lady Busshe and the world, with Clara nestling
under an arm, and protest astonishment at the erroneous and
utterly unfounded anticipations of any other development. And it
would righteously punish Laetitia.

Clara came downstairs, bearing her letter to Miss Darleton.

"Must it be posted?" Willoughby said, meeting her in the hall.

"They expect us any day, but it will be more comfortable for
papa," was her answer. She looked kindly in her new shyness.

She did not seem to think he had treated her contemptuously in
flinging her to his cousin, which was odd.

"You have seen Vernon?"

"It was your wish."

"You had a talk?"

"We conversed."

"A long one?"

"We walked some distance."

"Clara, I tried to make the best arrangement I could." 

"Your intention was generous."

"He took no advantage of it?"

"It could not be treated seriously."

"It was meant seriously."

"There I see the generosity."

Willoughby thought this encomium, and her consent to speak on the
subject, and her scarcely embarrassed air and richness of tone in
speaking, very strange: and strange was her taking him quite in
earnest. Apparently she had no feminine sensation of the
unwontedness and the absurdity of the matter!

"But, Clara, am I to understand that he did not speak out?" 

"We are excellent friends."

"To miss it, though his chance were the smallest!"

"You forget that it may not wear that appearance to him."

"He spoke not one word of himself?"

"No."

"Ah! the poor old fellow was taught to see it was hopeless--
chilled. May I plead? Will you step into the laboratory for a
minute? We are two sensible persons . . ."

"Pardon me, I must go to papa."

"Vernon's personal history, perhaps ..."

"I think it honourable to him."

"Honourable!--'hem!"

"By comparison."

"Comparison with what?"

"With others."

He drew up to relieve himself of a critical and condemnatory 
expiration of a certain length. This young lady knew too much. 
But how physically exquisite she was!

"Could you, Clara, could you promise me--I hold to it. I must
have it, I know his shy tricks--promise me to give him
ultimately another chance? Is the idea repulsive to you?"

"It is one not to be thought of."

"It is not repulsive?"

"Nothing could be repulsive in Mr. Whitford."

"I have no wish to annoy you, Clara."

"I feel bound to listen to you, Willoughby. Whatever I can do to
please you, I will. It is my life-long duty."

"Could you, Clara, could you conceive it, could you simply
conceive it--give him your hand?"

"As a friend. Oh, yes."

"In marriage."

She paused. She, so penetrative of him when he opposed her, was
hoodwinked when he softened her feelings: for the heart, though
the clearest, is not the most constant instructor of the head; the
heart, unlike the often obtuser head, works for itself and not for
the commonwealth.

"You are so kind ... I would do much . . ." she said.

"Would you accept him--marry him? He is poor."

"I am not ambitious of wealth."

"Would you marry him?"

"Marriage is not in my thoughts."

"But could you marry him?"

Willoughby expected no. In his expectation of it he hung inflated.

She said these words: "I could engage to marry no one else." His
amazement breathed without a syllable.

He flapped his arms, resembling for the moment those birds of
enormous body which attempt a rise upon their wings and achieve a
hop.

"Would you engage it?" he said, content to see himself stepped on
as an insect if he could but feel the agony of his false friend
Horace--their common pretensions to win her were now of that
comparative size.

"Oh! there can be no necessity. And an oath--no!" said Clara,
inwardly shivering at a recollection.

"But you could?"

"My wish is to please you."

"You could?"

"I said so."

It has been known to the patriotic mountaineer of a hoary pile of
winters, with little life remaining in him, but that little on
fire for his country, that by the brink of the precipice he has
flung himself on a young and lusty invader, dedicating himself
exultingly to death if only he may score a point for his country
by extinguishing in his country's enemy the stronger man. So
likewise did Willoughby, in the blow that deprived him of hope,
exult in the toppling over of Horace De Craye. They perished
together, but which one sublimely relished the headlong descent?
And Vernon taken by Clara would be Vernon simply tolerated. And
Clara taken by Vernon would be Clara previously touched, smirched.
Altogether he could enjoy his fall.

It was at least upon a comfortable bed, where his pride would be
dressed daily and would never be disagreeably treated.

He was henceforth Laetitia's own. The bell telling of Dr. Corney's
return was a welcome sound to Willoughby, and he said
good-humouredly: "Wait, Clara, you will see your hero Crossjay."

Crossjay and Dr. Corney tumbled into the hall. Willoughby caught
Crossjay under the arms to give him a lift in the old fashion
pleasing to Clara to see. The boy was heavy as lead. 

"I had work to hook him and worse to net him," said Dr. Corney. "I
had to make him believe he was to nurse every soul in the house,
you among them, Miss Middleton."

Willoughby pulled the boy aside.

Crossjay came back to Clara heavier in looks than his limbs had
been. She dropped her letter in the hall-box, and took his hand to
have a private hug of him. When they were alone, she said:
"Crossjay, my dear, my dear! you look unhappy."

"Yes, and who wouldn't be, and you're not to marry Sir
Willoughby!" his voice threatened a cry. "I know you're not, for
Dr. Corney says you are going to leave."

"Did you so very much wish it, Crossjay?"

"I should have seen a lot of you, and I sha'n't see you at all,
and I'm sure if I'd known I wouldn't have--And he has been and
tipped me this."

Crossjay opened his fist in which lay three gold pieces.

"That was very kind of him," said Clara.

"Yes, but how can I keep it?"

"By handing it to Mr. Whitford to keep for you."

"Yes, but, Miss Middleton, oughtn't I to tell him? I mean Sir
Willoughby."

"What?"

"Why, that I"--Crossjay got close to her--"why, that I, that I--
you know what you used to say. I wouldn't tell a lie, but oughtn't
I, without his asking ... and this money! I don't mind being
turned out again."

"Consult Mr. Whitford," said Clara.

"I know what you think, though."

"Perhaps you had better not say anything at present, dear boy."

"But what am I to do with this money?"

Crossjay held the gold pieces out as things that had not yet
mingled with his ideas of possession.

"I listened, and I told of him," he said. "I couldn't help
listening, but I went and told; and I don't like being here, and
his money, and he not knowing what I did. Haven't you heard? I'm
certain I know what you think, and so do I, and I must take my
luck. I'm always in mischief, getting into a mess or getting out
of it. I don't mind, I really don't, Miss Middleton, I can sleep
in a tree quite comfortably. If you're not going to be here, I'd
just as soon be anywhere. I must try to earn my living some day.
And why not a cabin-boy? Sir Cloudesley Shovel was no better. And
I don't mind his being wrecked at last, if you're drowned an
admiral. So I shall go and ask him to take his money back, and if
he asks me I shall tell him, and there.  You know what it is: I
guessed that from what Dr. Corney said. I'm sure I know you're
thinking what's manly. Fancy me keeping his money, and you not
marrying him! I wouldn't mind driving a plough. I shouldn't make a
bad gamekeeper. Of course I love boats best, but you can't have
everything."

"Speak to Mr. Whitford first," said Clara, too proud of the boy
for growing as she had trained him, to advise a course of conduct
opposed to his notions of manliness, though now that her battle
was over she would gladly have acquiesced in little casuistic
compromises for the sake of the general peace.

Some time later Vernon and Dr. Corney were arguing upon the
question. Corney was dead against the sentimental view of the
morality of the case propounded by Vernon as coming from Miss
Middleton and partly shared by him. "If it's on the boy's mind,"
Vernon said, "I can't prohibit his going to Willoughby and making
a clean breast of it, especially as it involves me, and sooner or
later I should have to tell him myself."

Dr. Corney said no at all points. "Now hear me," he said, finally.
"This is between ourselves, and no breach of confidence, which I'd
not be guilty of for forty friends, though I'd give my hand from
the wrist-joint for one--my left, that's to say. Sir Willoughby
puts me one or two searching interrogations on a point of interest
to him, his house and name. Very well, and good night to that, and
I wish Miss Dale had been ten years younger, or had passed the
ten with no heartrisings and sinkings wearing to the tissues of
the frame and the moral fibre to boot. She'll have a fairish
health, with a little occasional doctoring; taking her rank and
wealth in right earnest, and shying her pen back to Mother Goose.
She'll do. And, by the way, I think it's to the credit of my
sagacity that I fetched Mr. Dale here fully primed, and roused the
neighbourhood, which I did, and so fixed our gentleman, neat as a
prodded eel on a pair of prongs--namely, the positive fact and the
general knowledge of it. But, mark me, my friend. We understand
one another at a nod. This boy, young Squire Crossjay, is a good
stiff hearty kind of a Saxon boy, out of whom you may cut as
gallant a fellow as ever wore epaulettes. I like him, you like
him, Miss Dale and Miss Middleton like him; and Sir Willoughby
Patterne, of Patterne Hall and other places, won't be indisposed
to like him mightily in the event of the sun being seen to shine
upon him with a particular determination to make him appear a
prominent object, because a solitary, and a Patterne." Dr. Corney
lifted his chest and his finger: "Now mark me, and verbum sap:
Crossjay must not offend Sir Willoughby. I say no more. Look
ahead. Miracles happen, but it's best to reckon that they won't.
Well, now, and Miss Dale. She'll not be cruel."

"It appears as if she would," said Vernon, meditating on the
cloudy sketch Dr. Corney had drawn.

"She can't, my friend. Her position's precarious; her father has
little besides a pension. And her writing damages her health. She
can't. And she likes the baronet. Oh, it's only a little fit of
proud blood. She's the woman for him. She'll manage him--give him
an idea he's got a lot of ideas. It'd kill her father if she were
obstinate. He talked to me, when I told him of the business, about
his dream fulfilled, and if the dream turns to vapour, he'll be
another example that we hang more upon dreams than realities for
nourishment, and medicine too. Last week I couldn't have got him
out of his house with all my art and science. Oh, she'll come round.
Her father prophesied this, and I'll prophesy that. She's fond of
him."

"She was."

"She sees through him?"

"Without quite doing justice to him now," said Vernon. "He can
be generous--in his way."

"How?" Corney inquired, and was informed that he should hear in
time to come.

Meanwhile Colonel De Craye, after hovering over the park and about
the cottage for the opportunity of pouncing on Miss Middleton
alone, had returned crest-fallen for once, and plumped into
Willoughby's hands.

"My dear Horace," Willoughby said, "I've been looking for you all
the afternoon. The fact is--I fancy you'll think yourself lured
down here on false pretences: but the truth is, I am not so much
to blame as the world will suppose. In point of fact, to be brief,
Miss Dale and I ... I never consult other men how they would have
acted. The fact of the matter is, Miss Middleton ... I fancy you
have partly guessed it."

"Partly," said De Craye.

"Well, she has a liking that way, and if it should turn out strong
enough, it's the best arrangement I can think of," The lively play
of the colonel's features fixed in a blank inquiry.

"One can back a good friend for making a good husband," said
Willoughby. "I could not break with her in the present stage of
affairs without seeing to that. And I can speak of her highly,
though she and I have seen in time that we do not suit one
another. My wife must have brains."

"I have always thought it," said Colonel De Craye, glistening, and
looking hungry as a wolf through his wonderment.

"There will not be a word against her, you understand. You know my
dislike of tattle and gossip. However, let it fall on me; my
shoulders are broad. I have done my utmost to persuade her, and
there seems a likelihood of her consenting. She tells me her wish
is to please me, and this will please me."

"Certainly. Who's the gentleman?"

"My best friend, I tell you. I could hardly have proposed another.
Allow this business to go on smoothly just now." There was an
uproar within the colonel to blind his wits, and Willoughby looked
so friendly that it was possible to suppose the man of projects
had mentioned his best friend to Miss Middleton.

And who was the best friend?

Not having accused himself of treachery, the quick-eyed colonel
was duped.

"Have you his name handy, Willoughby?"

"That would be unfair to him at present, Horace--ask yourself--
and to her. Things are in a ticklish posture at present. Don't be
hasty."

"Certainly. I don't ask. Initials'll do."

"You have a remarkable aptitude for guessing, Horace, and this
case offers you no tough problem--if ever you acknowledged 
toughness. I have a regard for her and for him--for both pretty
equally; you know I have, and I should be thoroughly thankful to
bring the matter about."

"Lordly!" said De Craye.

"I don't see it. I call it sensible."

"Oh, undoubtedly. The style, I mean. Tolerably antique?" 

"Novel, I should say, and not the worse for that. We want plain
practical dealings between men and women. Usually we go the wrong
way to work. And I loathe sentimental rubbish."

De Craye hummed an air. "But the lady?" said he.

"I told you, there seems a likelihood of her consenting."

Willoughby's fish gave a perceptible little leap now that he had
been taught to exercise his aptitude for guessing.

"Without any of the customary preliminaries on the side of the
gentleman?" he said.

"We must put him through his paces, friend Horace. He's a
notorious blunderer with women; hasn't a word for them, never
marked a conquest."

De Craye crested his plumes under the agreeable banter. He
presented a face humourously sceptical.

"The lady is positively not indisposed to give the poor fellow a
hearing?"

"I have cause to think she is not," said Willoughby, glad of
acting the indifference to her which could talk of her
inclinations.

"Cause?"

"Good cause."

"Bless us!"

"As good as one can have with a woman."

"Ah?"

"I assure you."

"Ah! Does it seem like her, though?"

"Well, she wouldn't engage herself to accept him."

"Well, that seems more like her."

"But she said she could engage to marry no one else."

The colonel sprang up, crying: "Clara Middleton said it?" He
curbed himself "That's a bit of wonderful compliancy."

"She wishes to please me. We separate on those terms. And I wish
her happiness. I've developed a heart lately and taken to think of
others."

"Nothing better. You appear to make cock sure of the other party--
our friend?"

"You know him too well, Horace, to doubt his readiness." 

"Do you, Willoughby?"

"She has money and good looks. Yes, I can say I do."

"It wouldn't be much of a man who'd want hard pulling to that
lighted altar!"

"And if he requires persuasion, you and I, Horace, might bring him
to his senses."

"Kicking, "t would be!"

"I like to see everybody happy about me," said Willoughby, naming
the hour as time to dress for dinner.

The sentiment he had delivered was De Craye's excuse for grasping
his hand and complimenting him; but the colonel betrayed himself
by doing it with an extreme fervour almost tremulous.

"When shall we hear more?" he said.

"Oh, probably to-morrow," said Willoughby. "Don't he in such a
hurry."

"I'm an infant asleep!" the colonel replied, departing. 

He resembled one, to Willoughby's mind: or a traitor drugged.

"There is a fellow I thought had some brains!"

Who are not fools to beset spinning if we choose to whip them with
their vanity! it is the consolation of the great to watch them
spin. But the pleasure is loftier, and may comfort our unmerited
misfortune for a while, in making a false friend drunk.

Willoughby, among his many preoccupations, had the satisfaction of
seeing the effect of drunkenness on Horace De Craye when the
latter was in Clara's presence. He could have laughed. Cut in keen
epigram were the marginal notes added by him to that chapter of
The Book which treats of friends and a woman; and had he not been
profoundly preoccupied, troubled by recent intelligence
communicated by the ladies, his aunts, he would have played the
two together for the royal amusement afforded him by his friend
Horace.



CHAPTER XLVIII

The Lovers

The hour was close upon eleven at night. Laetitia sat in the room
adjoining her father's bedchamber. Her elbow was on the table
beside her chair, and two fingers pressed her temples. The state
between thinking and feeling, when both are molten and flow by us,
is one of our natures coming after thought has quieted the fiery
nerves, and can do no more. She seemed to be meditating. She was
conscious only of a struggle past.

She answered a tap at the door, and raised her eyes on Clara.
Clara stepped softly. "Mr. Dale is asleep?"

"I hope so."

"Ah! dear friend."

Laetitia let her hand be pressed.

"Have you had a pleasant evening?"

"Mr. Whitford and papa have gone to the library."

"Colonel De Craye has been singing?"

"Yes--with a voice! I thought of you upstairs, but could not ask
him to sing piano."

"He is probably exhilarated."

"One would suppose it: he sang well."

"You are not aware of any reason?"

"It cannot concern me."

Clara was in rosy colour, but could meet a steady gaze.

"And Crossjay has gone to bed?"

"Long since. He was at dessert. He would not touch anything."

"He is a strange boy."

"Not very strange, Laetitia."

"He did not come to me to wish me good-night."

"That is not strange."

"It is his habit at the cottage and here; and he professes to like
me."

"Oh, he does. I may have wakened his enthusiasm, but you he
loves."

"Why do you say it is not strange, Clara?"

"He fears you a little."

"And why should Crossjay fear me?"

"Dear, I will tell you. Last night--You will forgive him, for it
was by accident: his own bed-room door was locked and he ran down
to the drawing-room and curled himself up on the ottoman, and fell
asleep, under that padded silken coverlet of the ladies--boots
and all, I am afraid!"

Laetitia profited by this absurd allusion, thanking Clara in her
heart for the refuge.

"He should have taken off his boots," she said.

"He slept there, and woke up. Dear, he meant no harm.  Next day he
repeated what he had heard. You will blame him. He meant well in
his poor boy's head. And now it is over the county.  Ah! do not
frown."

"That explains Lady Busshe!" exclaimed Laetitia.

"Dear, dear friend," said Clara. "Why--I presume on your
tenderness for me; but let me: to-morrow I go--why will you
reject your happiness? Those kind good ladies are deeply troubled.
They say your resolution is inflexible; you resist their
entreaties and your father's. Can it be that you have any doubt of
the strength of this attachment? I have none. I have never had a
doubt that it was the strongest of his feelings. If before I go I
could see you ... both happy, I should be relieved, I should
rejoice."

Laetitia said, quietly: "Do you remember a walk we had one day
together to the cottage?"

Clara put up her hands with the motion of intending to stop her
ears.

"Before I go!" said she. "If I might know this was to be, which
all desire, before I leave, I should not feel as I do now. I long
to see you happy ... him, yes, him too. Is it like asking you to
pay my debt? Then, please! But, no; I am not more than partly
selfish on this occasion. He has won my gratitude. He can be
really generous."

"An Egoist?"

"Who is?"

"You have forgotten our conversation on the day of our walk to the
cottage?"

"Help me to forget it--that day, and those days, and all those
days! I should be glad to think I passed a time beneath the earth,
and have risen again. I was the Egoist. I am sure, if I had been
buried, I should not have stood up seeing myself more vilely
stained, soiled, disfigured--oh! Help me to forget my conduct,
Laetitia. He and I were unsuited--and I remember I blamed myself
then. You and he are not: and now I can perceive the pride that
can be felt in him. The worst that can be said is that he schemes
too much."

"Is there any fresh scheme?" said Laetitia.

The rose came over Clara's face.

"You have not heard? It was impossible, but it was kindly
intended. Judging by my own feeling at this moment, I can
understand his. We love to see our friends established." 

Laetitia bowed. "My curiosity is piqued, of course."

"Dear friend, to-morrow we shall be parted. I trust to be thought
of by you as a little better in grain than I have appeared, and my
reason for trusting it is that I know I have been always honest--
a boorish young woman in my stupid mad impatience: but not
insincere. It is no lofty ambition to desire to be remembered in
that character, but such is your Clara, she discovers. I will tell
you. It is his wish ... his wish that I should promise to give my
hand to Mr. Whitford. You see the kindness."

Laetitia's eyes widened and fixed:

"You think it kindness?"

"The intention. He sent Mr. Whitford to me, and I was taught to
expect him."

"Was that quite kind to Mr. Whitford?"

"What an impression I must have made on you during that walk to
the cottage, Laetitia! I do not wonder; I was in a fever."

"You consented to listen?"

"I really did. It astonishes me now, but I thought I could not
refuse."

"My poor friend Vernon Whitford tried a love speech?"

"He? no: Oh! no."

"You discouraged him?"

"I? No."

"Gently, I mean."

"No."

"Surely you did not dream of trifling? He has a deep heart."

"Has he?"

"You ask that: and you know something of him.

"He did not expose it to me, dear; not even the surface of the
mighty deep."

Laetitia knitted her brows.

"No," said Clara, "not a coquette: she is not a coquette, I assure
you.

With a laugh, Laetitia replied: "You have still the 'dreadful
power' you made me feel that day."

"I wish I could use it to good purpose!"

"He did not speak?"

"Of Switzerland, Tyrol, the Iliad, Antigone."

"That was all?"

"No, Political Economy. Our situation, you will own, was
unexampled: or mine was. Are you interested in me?"

"I should be if I knew your sentiments."

"I was grateful to Sir Willoughby: grieved for Mr. Whitford."

"Real grief?"

"Because the task unposed on him of showing me politely that he
did not enter into his cousin's ideas was evidently very great,
extremely burdensome."

"You, so quick-eyed in some things, Clara!"

"He felt for me. I saw that in his avoidance of... And he was, as
he always is, pleasant. We rambled over the park for I know not
how long, though it did not seem long."

"Never touching that subject?"

"Not ever neighbouring it, dear. A gentleman should esteem the girl
he would ask ... certain questions. I fancy he has a liking for me
as a volatile friend."

"If he had offered himself?"

"Despising me?"

"You can be childish, Clara. Probably you delight to tease. He
had his time of it, and it is now my turn."

"But he must despise me a little."

"Are you blind?"

"Perhaps, dear, we both are, a little."

The ladies looked deeper into one another.

"Will you answer me?" said Laetitia.

"Your if? If he had, it would have been an act of condescension."

"You are too slippery."

"Stay, dear Laetitia. He was considerate in forbearing to pain
me."

"That is an answer. You allowed him to perceive that it would have
pained you."

"Dearest, if I may convey to you what I was, in a simile for
comparison: I think I was like a fisherman's float on the water,
perfectly still, and ready to go down at any instant, or up. So
much for my behaviour."

"Similes have the merit of satisfying the finder of them, and
cheating the hearer," said Laetitia. "You admit that your feelings
would have been painful."

"I was a fisherman's float: please admire my simile; any way you
like, this way or that, or so quiet as to tempt the eyes to go to
sleep. And suddenly I might have disappeared in the depths, or
flown in the air. But no fish bit."

"Well, then, to follow you, supposing the fish or the fisherman, 
for I don't know which is which . . . Oh! no, no: this is too
serious for imagery. I am to understand that you thanked him at
least for his reserve."

"Yes."

"Without the slightest encouragement to him to break it?"

"A fisherman's float, Laetitia!" 

Baffled and sighing, Laetitia kept silence for a space. The simile
chafed her wits with a suspicion of a meaning hidden in it.

"If he had spoken?" she said.

"He is too truthful a man."

"And the railings of men at pussy women who wind about and will
not be brought to a mark, become intelligible to me."

"Then Laetitia, if he had spoken, if, and one could have imagined
him sincere . . "

"So truthful a man?"

"I am looking at myself If!--why, then, I should have burnt to
death with shame. Where have I read?--some story--of an
inextinguishable spark. That would have been shot into my heart."

"Shame, Clara? You are free."

"As much as remains of me."

"I could imagine a certain shame, in such a position, where there
was no feeling but pride."

"I could not imagine it where there was no feeling but pride."

Laetitia mused. "And you dwell on the kindness of a proposition so
extraordinary!" Gaining some light, impatiently she cried: "Vernon
loves you."

"Do not say it!"

"I have seen it."

"I have never had a sign of it."

"There is the proof."

"When it might have been shown again and again!"

"The greater proof!"

"Why did he not speak when he was privileged?--strangely, but
privileged."

"He feared."

"Me?"

"Feared to wound you--and himself as well, possibly. Men may be
pardoned for thinking of themselves in these cases."

"But why should he fear?"

"That another was dearer to you?"

"What cause had I given ... Ah I see! He could fear that; suspect
it! See his opinion of me! Can he care for such a girl? Abuse
me, Laetitia. I should like a good round of abuse. I need
purification by fire. What have I been in this house? I have a
sense of whirling through it like a madwoman. And to be loved,
after it all!--No! we must be hearing a tale of an antiquary 
prizing a battered relic of the battle-field that no one else
would look at. To be loved, I see, is to feel our littleness,
hollowness--feel shame. We come out in all our spots. Never to
have given me one sign, when a lover would have been so tempted!
Let me be incredulous, my own dear Laetitia. Because he is a man
of honour, you would say! But are you unconscious of the torture
you inflict? For if I am--you say it--loved by this gentleman,
what an object it is he loves--that has gone clamouring about
more immodestly than women will bear to hear of, and she herself
to think of! Oh, I have seen my own heart. It is a frightful
spectre. I have seen a weakness in me that would have carried me
anywhere. And truly I shall be charitable to women--I have gained
that. But loved! by Vernon Whitford! The miserable little me to be
taken up and loved after tearing myself to pieces! Have you been
simply speculating? You have no positive knowledge of it! Why do
you kiss me?"

"Why do you tremble and blush so?"

Clara looked at her as clearly as she could. She bowed her head.
"It makes my conduct worse!"

She received a tenderer kiss for that. It was her avowal, and it
was understood: to know that she had loved or had been ready to
love him, shadowed her in the retrospect.

"Ah! you read me through and through," said Clara, sliding to her
for a whole embrace.

"Then there never was cause for him to fear?" Laetitia whispered.

Clara slid her head more out of sight. "Not that my heart ... But
I said I have seen it; and it is unworthy of him. And if, as I
think now, I could have been so rash, so weak, wicked, unpardonable
--such thoughts were in me!--then to hear him speak would make
it necessary for me to uncover myself and tell him--incredible to
you, yes!--that while ... yes, Laetitia, all this is true: and
thinking of him as the noblest of men, I could have welcomed any
help to cut my knot. So there," said Clara, issuing from her nest
with winking eyelids, "you see the pain I mentioned."

"Why did you not explain it to me at once?"

"Dearest, I wanted a century to pass."

"And you feel that it has passed?"

"Yes; in Purgatory--with an angel by me. My report of the place
will be favourable. Good angel, I have yet to say something."

"Say it, and expiate."

"I think I did fancy once or twice, very dimly, and especially 
to-day ... properly I ought not to have had any idea: but his
coming to me, and his not doing as another would have done, seemed
... A gentleman of real nobleness does not carry the common light
for us to read him by. I wanted his voice; but silence, I think,
did tell me more: if a nature like mine could only have had faith
without bearing the rattle of a tongue.

A knock at the door caused the ladies to exchange looks. Laetitia
rose as Vernon entered.

"I am just going to my father for a few minutes," she said.

"And I have just come from yours." Vernon said to Clara. She
observed a very threatening expression in him. The sprite
of contrariety mounted to her brain to indemnify her for her recent
self-abasement. Seeing the bedroom door shut on Laetitia, she
said: "And of course papa has gone to bed"; implying, "otherwise .
. ."

"Yes, he has gone. He wished me well."

"His formula of good-night would embrace that wish."

"And failing, it will be good-night for good to me!"

Clara's breathing gave a little leap. "We leave early tomorrow.

"I know. I have an appointment at Bregenz for June."

"So soon? With papa?"

"And from there we break into Tyrol, and round away to the right,
Southward."

"To the Italian Alps! And was it assumed that I should be of this
expedition?"

"Your father speaks dubiously."

"You have spoken of me, then?"

"I ventured to speak of you. I am not over-bold, as you know."

Her lovely eyes troubled the lids to hide their softness.

"Papa should not think of my presence with him dubiously."

"He leaves it to you to decide."

"Yes, then: many times: all that can be uttered."

"Do you consider what you are saying?"

"Mr. Whitford, I shut my eyes and say Yes."

"Beware. I give you one warning. If you shut your eyes . . ."

"Of course," she flew from him, "big mountains must be satisfied
with my admiration at their feet."

"That will do for a beginning."

"They speak encouragingly."

"One of them." Vernon's breast heaved high.

"To be at your feet makes a mountain of you?" said she.

"With the heart of a mouse if that satisfies me!"

"You tower too high; you are inaccessible."

"I give you a second warning. You may he seized and lifted."

"Some one would stoop, then."

"To plant you like the flag on the conquered peak!"

"You have indeed been talking to papa, Mr. Whitford."

Vernon changed his tone.

"Shall I tell you what he said?"

"I know his language so well."

"He said--"

"But you have acted on it?"

"Only partly. He said--"

"You will teach me nothing."

"He said . . ."

"Vernon, no! oh! not in this house!"

That supplication coupled with his name confessed the end to which
her quick vision perceived she was being led, where she would
succumb.

She revived the same shrinking in him from a breath of their great
word yet: not here; somewhere in the shadow of the mountains.

But he was sure of her. And their hands might join. The two hands
thought so, or did not think, behaved like innocents. 

The spirit of Dr. Middleton, as Clara felt, had been blown into
Vernon, rewarding him for forthright outspeaking. Over their
books, Vernon had abruptly shut up a volume and related the tale
of the house. "Has this man a spice of religion in him?" the Rev.
Doctor asked midway. Vernon made out a fair general case for his
cousin in that respect. "The complemental dot on his i of a
commonly civilized human creature!" said Dr. Middleton, looking at
his watch and finding it too late to leave the house before
morning. The risky communication was to come. Vernon was
proceeding with the narrative of Willoughby's generous plan when
Dr. Middleton electrified him by calling out: "He whom of all men
living I should desire my daughter to espouse!" and Willoughby
rose in the Rev. Doctor's esteem: he praised that sensibly minded
gentleman, who could acquiesce in the turn of mood of a little
maid, albeit Fortune had withheld from him a taste of the switch
at school. The father of the little maid's appreciation of her
volatility was exhibited in his exhortation to Vernon to be off to
her at once with his authority to finish her moods and assure him
of peace in the morning. Vernon hesitated. Dr. Middleton remarked
upon being not so sure that it was not he who had done the
mischief. Thereupon Vernon, to prove his honesty, made his own
story bare. "Go to her," said Dr. Middleton. Vernon proposed a
meeting in Switzerland, to which Dr. Middleton assented, adding:
"Go to her": and as he appeared a total stranger to the decorum of
the situation, Vernon put his delicacy aside, and taking his heart
up, obeyed. He too had pondered on Clara's consent to meet him
after she knew of Willoughby's terms, and her grave sweet manner
during the ramble over the park. Her father's breath had been
blown into him; so now, with nothing but the faith lying in
sensation to convince him of his happy fortune (and how
unconvincing that may be until the mind has grasped and stamped
it, we experience even then when we acknowledge that we are most
blessed), he held her hand. And if it was hard for him, for both,
but harder for the man, to restrain their particular word from a
flight to heaven when the cage stood open and nature beckoned, he
was practised in self-mastery, and she loved him the more.

Laetitia was a witness of their union of hands on her coming back
to the room.

They promised to visit her very early in the morning, neither of
them conceiving that they left her to a night of storm and tears.

She sat meditating on Clara's present appreciation of Sir
Willoughby's generosity.




CHAPTER XLIX

Laetitia and Sir Willoughby

We cannot be abettors of the tribes of imps whose revelry is in
the frailties of our poor human constitution. They have their
place and their service, and so long as we continue to be what we
are now, they will hang on to us, restlessly plucking at the
garments which cover our nakedness, nor ever ceasing to twitch
them and strain at them until they have stripped us for one of
their horrible Walpurgis nights: when the laughter heard is of a
character to render laughter frightful to the ears of men
throughout the remainder of their days. But if in these festival
hours under the beam of Hecate they are uncontrollable by the
Comic Muse, she will not flatter them with her presence during the
course of their insane and impious hilarities, whereof a
description would out-Brocken Brockens and make Graymalkin and
Paddock too intimately our familiars.

It shall suffice to say that from hour to hour of the midnight to
the grey-eyed morn, assisted at intervals by the ladies Eleanor
and Isabel, and by Mr. Dale awakened and re-awakened--hearing the
vehemence of his petitioning outcry to soften her obduracy--Sir
Willoughby pursued Laetitia with solicitations to espouse him,
until the inveteracy of his wooing wore the aspect of the
life-long love he raved of aroused to a state of mania. He
appeared, he departed, he returned; and all the while his imps
were about him and upon him, riding him, prompting, driving,
inspiring him with outrageous pathos, an eloquence to move any one
but the dead, which its object seemed to be in her torpid
attention. He heard them, he talked to them, caressed them; he
flung them off, and ran from them, and stood vanquished for them
to mount him again and swarm on him. There are men thus
imp-haunted. Men who, setting their minds upon an object, must
have it, breed imps. They are noted for their singularities, as
their converse with the invisible and amazing distractions are
called. Willoughby became aware of them that night. He said to
himself, upon one of his dashes into solitude: I believe I am
possessed! And if he did not actually believe it, but only
suspected it, or framed speech to account for the transformation
he had undergone into a desperately beseeching creature, having
lost acquaintance with his habitual personality, the operations of
an impish host had undoubtedly smitten his consciousness.

He had them in his brain: for while burning with an ardour for
Laetitia, that incited him to frantic excesses of language and
comportment, he was aware of shouts of the names of Lady Busshe
and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, the which, freezing him as they
did, were directly the cause of his hurrying to a wilder
extravagance and more headlong determination to subdue before
break of day the woman he almost dreaded to behold by daylight,
though he had now passionately persuaded himself of his love of
her. He could not, he felt, stand in the daylight without her. She
was his morning. She was, he raved, his predestinated wife. He
cried, "Darling!" both to her and to solitude. Every prescription
of his ideal of demeanour as an example to his class and country,
was abandoned by the enamoured gentleman. He had lost command of
his countenance. He stooped so far as to kneel, and not gracefully.
Nay, it is in the chronicles of the invisible host around him,
that in a fit of supplication, upon a cry of "Laetitia!" twice
repeated, he whimpered.

Let so much suffice. And indeed not without reason do the
multitudes of the servants of the Muse in this land of social
policy avoid scenes of an inordinate wantonness, which detract 
from the dignity of our leaders and menace human nature with
confusion. Sagacious are they who conduct the individual on broad
lines, over familiar tracks, under well-known characteristics.
What men will do, and amorously minded men will do, is less the
question than what it is politic they should be shown to do.

The night wore through. Laetitia was bent, but had not yielded.
She had been obliged to say--and how many times she could not
bear to recollect: "I do not love you; I have no love to give";
and issuing from such a night to look again upon the face of day,
she scarcely felt that she was alive.

The contest was renewed by her father with the singing of the
birds. Mr. Dale then produced the first serious impression she had
received. He spoke of their circumstances, of his being taken from
her and leaving her to poverty, in weak health; of the injury done
to her health by writing for bread; and of the oppressive weight
he would be relieved of by her consenting.

He no longer implored her; he put the case on common ground.

And he wound up: "Pray do not be ruthless, my girl."

The practical statement, and this adjuration incongruously to
conclude it, harmonized with her disordered understanding, her
loss of all sentiment and her desire to be kind. She sighed to
herself. "Happily, it is over!"

Her father was too weak to rise. He fell asleep. She was bound
down to the house for hours; and she walked through her suite,
here at the doors, there at the windows, thinking of Clara's
remark "of a century passing". She had not wished it, but a light
had come on her to show her what she would have supposed a century
could not have effected: she saw the impossible of overnight a
possible thing: not desireable, yet possible, wearing the features
of the possible. Happily, she had resisted too firmly to be again
besought.

Those features of the possible once beheld allured the mind to
reconsider them. Wealth gives us the power to do good on earth.
Wealth enables us to see the world, the beautiful scenes of the
earth. Laetitia had long thirsted both for a dowering money-bag
at her girdle, and the wings to fly abroad over lands which had
begun to seem fabulous in her starved imagination. Then, moreover,
if her sentiment for this gentleman was gone, it was only a
delusion gone; accurate sight and knowledge of him would not make
a woman the less helpful mate. That was the mate he required: and
he could be led. A sentimental attachment would have been
serviceless to him. Not so the woman allied by a purely rational
bond: and he wanted guiding. Happily, she had told him too much of
her feeble health and her lovelessness to be reduced to submit to
another attack.

She busied herself in her room, arranging for her departure, so
that no minutes might be lost after her father had breakfasted and
dressed.

Clara was her earliest visitor, and each asked the other whether
she had slept, and took the answer from the face presented to her.
The rings of Laetitia's eyes were very dark. Clara was her mirror,
and she said: "A singular object to be persecuted through a night
for her hand! I know these two damp dead leaves I wear on my
cheeks to remind me of midnight vigils.  But you have slept well,
Clara."

"I have slept well, and yet I could say I have not slept at all,
Laetitia. I was with you, dear, part in dream and part in thought:
hoping to find you sensible before I go."

"Sensible. That is the word for me."

Laetitia briefly sketched the history of the night; and Clara
said, with a manifest sincerity that testified of her gratitude to
Sir Willoughby: "Could you resist him, so earnest as he is?"
Laetitia saw the human nature, without sourness: and replied, "I
hope, Clara, you will not begin with a large stock of sentiment,
for there is nothing like it for making you hard, matter-of-fact,
worldly, calculating."

The next visitor was Vernon, exceedingly anxious for news of Mr.
Dale. Laetitia went into her father's room to obtain it for him.
Returning, she found them both with sad visages, and she ventured,
in alarm for them, to ask the cause.

"It's this," Vernon said: "Willoughby will everlastingly tease
that boy to be loved by him. Perhaps. poor fellow, he had an excuse
last night. Anyhow, he went into Crossjay's room this morning,
woke him up and talked to him, and set the lad crying, and what
with one thing and another Crossjay got a berry in his throat, as
he calls it, and poured out everything he knew and all he had
done. I needn't tell you the consequence. He has ruined himself
here for good, so I must take him."

Vernon glanced at Clara. "You must indeed," said she. "He is my
boy as well as yours. No chance of pardon?"

"It's not likely."

"Laetitia!"

"What can I do?"

"Oh! what can you not do?"

"I do not know."

"Teach him to forgive!"

Laetitia's brows were heavy and Clara forbore to torment her.

She would not descend to the family breakfast-table. Clara would
fain have stayed to drink tea with her in her own room, but a last
act of conformity was demanded of the liberated young lady. She
promised to run up the moment breakfast was over. Not unnaturally,
therefore, Laetitia supposed it to be she to whom she gave
admission, half an hour later, with a glad cry of, "Come in,
dear."

The knock had sounded like Clara's.

Sir Willoughby entered.

He stepped forward. He seized her hands. "Dear!" he said.

"You cannot withdraw that. You call me dear. I am, I must be dear
to you. The word is out, by accident or not, but, by heaven, I
have it and I give it up to no one. And love me or not--marry me,
and my love will bring it back to you. You have taught me I am not
so strong. I must have you by my side. You have powers I did not
credit you with."

"You are mistaken in me, Sir Willoughby." Laetitia said feebly,
outworn as she was.

"A woman who can resist me by declining to be my wife, through a
whole night of entreaty, has the quality I need for my house, and
I will batter at her ears for months, with as little rest as I had
last night, before I surrender my chance of her. But I told you
last night I want you within the twelve hours. I have staked my
pride on it. By noon you are mine: you are introduced to Mrs.
Mountstuart as mine, as the lady of my life and house. And to the
world! I shall not let you go.

"You will not detain me here, Sir Willoughby?"

"I will detain you. I will use force and guile. I will spare
nothing."

He raved for a term, as he had done overnight.

On his growing rather breathless, Laetitia said: "You do not ask
me for love?"

"I do not. I pay you the higher compliment of asking for you, love
or no love. My love shall be enough. Reward me or not. I am not
used to be denied."

"But do you know what you ask for? Do you remember what I told you
of myself? I am hard, materialistic; I have lost faith in romance,
the skeleton is present with me all over life. And my health is
not good. I crave for money. I should marry to be rich. I should
not worship you. I should be a burden, barely a living one,
irresponsive and cold. Conceive such a wife, Sir Willoughby!"

"It will be you!"

She tried to recall how this would have sung in her cars long
back. Her bosom rose and fell in absolute dejection. Her
ammunition of arguments against him had been expended overnight.

"You are so unforgiving," she said.

"Is it I who am?"

"You do not know me."

"But you are the woman of all the world who knows me, Laetitia."

"Can you think it better for you to be known?"

He was about to say other words: he checked them. "I believe I do
not know myself. Anything you will, only give me your hand; give
it; trust to me; you shall direct me. If I have faults, help me to
obliterate them."

"Will you not expect me to regard them as the virtues of meaner
men?"

"You will be my wife!"

Laetitia broke from him, crying: "Your wife, your critic! Oh, I
cannot think it possible. Send for the ladies. Let them hear me."

"They are at hand," said Willoughby, opening the door.

They were in one of the upper rooms anxiously on the watch.

"Dear ladies," Laetitia said to them, as they entered. "I am going
to wound you, and I grieve to do it: but rather now than later, if
I am to be your housemate. He asks me for a hand that cannot
carry a heart, because mine is dead. I repeat it. I used to think
the heart a woman's marriage portion for her husband. I see now
that she may consent, and he accept her, without one. But it is
right that you should know what I am when I consent. I was once a
foolish, romantic girl; now I am a sickly woman, all illusions
vanished. Privation has made me what an abounding fortune usually
makes of others--I am an Egoist. I am not deceiving you. That is
my real character. My girl's view of him has entirely changed; and
I am almost indifferent to the change. I can endeavour to respect
him, I cannot venerate."

"Dear child!" the ladies gently remonstrated.

Willoughby motioned to them.

"If we are to live together, and I could very happily live with
you," Laetitia continued to address them, "you must not be
ignorant of me. And if you, as I imagine, worship him blindly, I
do not know how we are to live together. And never shall you quit
this house to make way for me. I have a hard detective eye. I see
many faults."

"Have we not all of us faults, dear child?"

"Not such as he has; though the excuses of a gentleman nurtured in
idolatry may be pleaded. But he should know that they are seen,
and seen by her he asks to be his wife, that no misunderstanding
may exist, and while it is yet time he may consult his feelings.
He worships himself."

"Willoughby?"

"He is vindictive!"

"Our Willoughby?"

"That is not your opinion, ladies. It is firmly mine. Time has
taught it me. So, if you and I are at such variance, how can we
live together? It is an impossibility."

They looked at Willoughby. He nodded imperiously.

"We have never affirmed that our dear nephew is devoid of faults.
if he is offended ... And supposing he claims to be foremost, is
it not his rightful claim, made good by much generosity? Reflect,
dear Laetitia. We are your friends too."

She could not chastise the kind ladies any further.

"You have always been my good friends."

"And you have no other charge against him?"

Laetitia was milder in saying, "He is unpardoning."

"Name one instance, Laetitia."

"He has turned Crossjay out of his house, interdicting the poor
boy ever to enter it again."

"Crossjay," said Willoughby, "was guilty of a piece of infamous 
treachery."

"Which is the cause of your persecuting me to become your wife!"

There was a cry of "Persecuting!"

"No young fellow behaving so basely can come to good," said
Willoughby, stained about the face with flecks of redness at the
lashings he received.

"Honestly," she retorted. "He told of himself: and he must have
anticipated the punishment he would meet. He should have been
studying with a master for his profession. He has been kept here
in comparative idleness to be alternately petted and discarded: no
one but Vernon Whitford, a poor gentleman doomed to struggle for a
livelihood by literature--I know something of that struggle--too
much for me!--no one but Mr. Whitford for his friend."

"Crossjay is forgiven," said Willoughby.

"You promise me that?"

"He shall be packed off to a crammer at once."

"But my home must be Crossjay's home."

"You are mistress of my house, Laetitia."

She hesitated. Her eyelashes grew moist. "You can be generous."

"He is, dear child!" the ladies cried. "He is. Forget his errors,
in his generosity, as we do."

"There is that wretched man Flitch."

"That sot has gone about the county for years to get me a bad
character," said Willoughby.

"It would have been generous in you to have offered him another
chance. He has children."

"Nine. And I am responsible for them?"

"I speak of being generous."

"Dictate." Willoughby spread out his arms.

"Surely now you should be satisfied, Laetitia?" said the ladies.

"Is he?"

Willoughby perceived Mrs. Mountstuart's carriage coming down the
avenue.

"To the full." He presented his hand.

She raised hers with the fingers catching back before she ceased
to speak and dropped it:--

"Ladies. You are witnesses that there is no concealment, there has
been no reserve, on my part. May Heaven grant me kinder eyes than
I have now. I would not have you change your opinion of him; only
that you should see how I read him. For the rest, I vow to do my
duty by him. Whatever is of worth in me is at his service. I am
very tired. I feel I must yield or break. This is his wish, and I
submit."

"And I salute my wife," said Willoughby, making her hand his own,
and warming to his possession as he performed the act.

Mrs. Mountstuart's indecent hurry to be at the Hall before the
departure of Dr. Middleton and his daughter, afflicted him with
visions of the physical contrast which would be sharply
perceptible to her this morning of his Laetitia beside Clara. 

But he had the lady with brains! He had: and he was to learn the
nature of that possession in the woman who is our wife.



CHAPTER L

Upon Which the Curtain Falls

"Plain sense upon the marriage question is my demand upon man and
woman, for the stopping of many a tragedy."

These were Dr. Middleton's words in reply to Willoughby's brief
explanation.

He did not say that he had shown it parentally while the tragedy
was threatening, or at least there was danger of a precipitate
descent from the levels of comedy. The parents of hymeneal men and
women he was indisposed to consider as dramatis personae. Nor did
he mention certain sympathetic regrets he entertained in
contemplation of the health of Mr. Dale, for whom, poor
gentleman, the proffer of a bottle of the Patterne Port would be
an egregious mockery. He paced about, anxious for his departure,
and seeming better pleased with the society of Colonel De Craye
than with that of any of the others. Colonel De Craye assiduously
courted him, was anecdotal, deferential, charmingly vivacious, the
very man the Rev. Doctor liked for company when plunged in the
bustle of the preliminaries to a journey.

"You would be a cheerful travelling comrade. sir," he remarked, and
spoke of his doom to lead his daughter over the Alps and Alpine
lakes for the Summer months.

Strange to tell, the Alps, for the Summer months, was a settled
project of the colonel's.

And thence Dr. Middleton was to be hauled along to the habitable
quarters of North Italy in high Summer-tide. 

That also had been traced for a route on the map of Colonel De
Craye.

"We are started in June, I am informed," said Dr. Middleton.

June, by miracle, was the month the colonel had fixed upon.

"I trust we shall meet, sir," said he.

"I would gladly reckon it in my catalogue of pleasures," the Rev.
Doctor responded; "for in good sooth it is conjecturable that I
shall he left very much alone."

"Paris, Strasburg, Basle?" the colonel inquired.

"The Lake of Constance, I am told," said Dr. Middleton. Colonel
De Craye spied eagerly for an opportunity of exchanging a pair of
syllables with the third and fairest party of this glorious
expedition to come.

Willoughby met him, and rewarded the colonel's frankness in
stating that he was on the look-out for Miss Middleton to take his
leave of her, by furnishing him the occasion. He conducted his
friend Horace to the Blue Room, where Clara and Laetitia were
seated circling a half embrace with a brook of chatter, and
contrived an excuse for leading Laetitia forth. Some minutes
later Mrs. Mountstuart called aloud for the colonel, to drive him
away. Willoughby, whose good offices were unabated by the services
he performed to each in rotation, ushered her into the Blue Room,
hearing her say, as she stood at the entrance: "Is the man coming
to spend a day with me with a face like that?"

She was met and detained by Clara.

De Craye came out.

"What are you thinking of?" said Willoughby.

"I was thinking," said the colonel, "of developing a heart, like
you, and taking to think of others."

"At last!"

"Ay, you're a true friend, Willoughby, a true friend. And a cousin
to boot!"

"What! has Clara been communicative?"

"The itinerary of a voyage Miss Middleton is going to make."

"Do you join them?"

"Why, it would be delightful, Willoughby, but it happens I've got
a lot of powder I want to let off, and so I've an idea of
shouldering my gun along the sea-coast and shooting gulls:
which'll be a harmless form of committing patricide and matricide
and fratricide--for there's my family, and I come of it!--the
gull! And I've to talk lively to Mrs. Mountstuart for something
like a matter of twelve hours, calculating that she goes to bed at
midnight: and I wouldn't bet on it; such is the energy of ladies
of that age!"

Willoughby scorned the man who could not conceal a blow, even
though be joked over his discomfiture.

"Gull!" he muttered.

"A bird that's easy to be had, and better for stuffing than for
eating," said De Craye. "You'll miss your cousin."

"I have," replied Willoughby, "one fully equal to supplying his
place."

There was confusion in the hall for a time, and an assembly of the
household to witness the departure of Dr. Middleton and his
daughter. Vernon had been driven off by Dr. Corney, who further
recommended rest for Mr. Dale, and promised to keep an eye for
Crossjay along the road.

"I think you will find him at the station, and if you do, command 
him to come straight back here," Laetitia said to Clara. The
answer was an affectionate squeeze, and Clara's hand was extended
to Willoughby, who bowed over it with perfect courtesy, bidding
her adieu.

So the knot was cut. And the next carriage to Dr. Middleton's was
Mrs. Mountstuart's, conveying the great lady and Colonel De Craye.

"I beg you not to wear that face with me," she said to him.

"I have had to dissemble, which I hate, and I have quite enough to
endure, and I must be amused, or I shall run away from you and
enlist that little countryman of yours, and him I can count on to
be professionally restorative. Who can fathom the heart of a girl!
Here is Lady Busshe right once more! And I was wrong. She must be
a gambler by nature. I never should have risked such a guess as
that. Colonel De Craye, you lengthen your face preternaturally, 
you distort it purposely."

"Ma'am," returned De Craye, "the boast of our army is never to
know when we are beaten, and that tells of a great-hearted 
soldiery. But there's a field where the Briton must own his
defeat, whether smiling or crying, and I'm not so sure that a
short howl doesn't do him honour."

"She was, I am certain, in love with Vernon Whitford all along.
Colonel De Craye!"

"Ah!" the colonel drank it in. "I have learnt that it was not the
gentleman in whom I am chiefly interested. So it was not so hard
for the lady to vow to friend Willoughby she would marry no one
else?"

"Girls are unfathomable! And Lady Busshe--I know she did not go
by character--shot one of her random guesses, and she triumphs.
We shall never hear the last of it. And I had all the
opportunities. I'm bound to confess I had."

"Did you by chance, ma'am," De Craye said, with a twinkle, "drop a
hint to Willoughby of her turn for Vernon Whitford?"

"No," said Mrs. Mountstuart, "I'm not a mischief-maker; and the
policy of the county is to keep him in love with himself, or
Patterne will be likely to be as dull as it was without a lady
enthroned. When his pride is at ease he is a prince. I can read
men. Now, Colonel De Craye, pray, be lively."

"I should have been livelier, I'm afraid, if you had dropped a bit
of a hint to Willoughby. But you're the magnanimous person, ma'am,
and revenge for a stroke in the game of love shows us unworthy to
win."

Mrs. Mountstuart menaced him with her parasol. "I forbid
sentiments, Colonel De Craye. They are always followed by sighs."

"Grant me five minutes of inward retirement, and I'll come out
formed for your commands, ma'am," said he.

Before the termination of that space De Craye was enchanting Mrs.
Mountstuart, and she in consequence was restored to her natural
wit.

So, and much so universally, the world of his dread and his
unconscious worship wagged over Sir Willoughby Patterne and his
change of brides, until the preparations for the festivities of the
marriage flushed him in his county's eyes to something of the
splendid glow he had worn on the great day of his majority. That was
upon the season when two lovers met between the Swiss and Tyrol Alps
over the Lake of Constance. Sitting beside them the Comic Muse is
grave and sisterly. But taking a glance at the others of her late
company of actors, she compresses her lips.





End of Project Gutenberg Etext of The Egoist, by George Meredith

