 16. Clara and Letitia 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 willfully unjust. Mr. Wittford meant well. He was conscientious, very conscientious, but he was not the hero descending from heaven, brideswarded 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 to 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 spoken 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 Letitia as to the root 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 an alarm about her 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 Letitia 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. Wittford next week. He goes. He will be a great loss to me, for I do not write, Letitia replied to the offhand inquiry. Ha! Miss Middleton did not fan conversation when she simply breathed her voice. Letitia tried another neutral theme. The weather today suits our country, she said. England or pattern 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 bipods. 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 is honest. However young you are, you cannot be deceived by it. These parks of rich people are 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 companiable, but that the haze of distance improves the view. Then you do know that you are the wisest? Leticia 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 somber preconception that her jealousy had been hinted to Miss Dale. You know 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 Leticia 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 felt, 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 cannot obtain the grant. It was likely said, but Clara's face was more significant. And what leaped from Leticia's lips? Before she could excuse herself, Clara had answered, my liberty. In another and higher tone, Leticia said, What? And she looked around on our companion. She looked in the doubt that is open to conviction by a narrow aperture, and slowly and painfully yields axes. 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 a meaning. You do not suspect me of trifling. You know I would not. I am as much an 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 despises. 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 judgments, even of the gentlemen I have endured. So noble a gentleman, let dish aside. 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 Leticia, 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 Leticia, 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. Leticia pondered on an obscurity in these words, which could 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 various 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 sunk a skylark. 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. Leticia 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 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 you were to give me my freedom, if you 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. Leticia'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 help. I am what the doctors call anemic. 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 buy and buy have to live in a town for pupils. I could be grateful to anyone who would save me from that. I should be astonished at his choosing to have me burred in 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 judged by myself. Do I presume too much? Kindness was on Ladisha's face. But now, said Clara, swimming on the wave on her bosom, I tax you with that silliest suspicion ever entertained by one of your rank. Lady, you have deemed me capable of the meanest of our vices. Hold this hand, Ladisha, my friend, will you? Something is going on in me. Ladisha 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 murmur to soothe her. It's little, it's nothing, said Clara, paint to keep her lips in line. They walked forward, holding hands, departed 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 gold glitter beside the reality. I may have been lately thinking of myself as an outcast of my sex, and to have a good woman liking me a little loving. Oh Leticia, 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? Leticia, 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 are 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, Leticia. Well, has it ever struck you? Remember, I do see his merits. I speak to his faithfulest friend, and I acknowledge he is attractive. He has manly tastes and habits. But has it ever 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 ever struck me? Leticia 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. Weight 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 laterally 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 a 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 cockat. 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 that you lose in punishing them. I consider what they gain if we do not. Leticia 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 cockets 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 ones 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 dreadful power. Said Leticia. 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 Iveed windows and roses in the porch. She thanked Leticia and said, I will call for you in an hour. Are you walking on the road alone? Said Leticia incredulously, with an eye to serve Willoughby's dismay. I put my trust in the high road, Clara replied, and turned away, but turned back to Leticia and offered her face to be kissed. The dreadful power of this young lady had fervently impressed Leticia, and in kissing her she marveled at her gentleness and girlishness. Clara walked on, unconscious of her possession of power of any kind. End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 of The Egoist This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Egoist by George Meredith Chapter 17 The Porcelain Vos Chapter 18 During the term of Clara's walk with Leticia, 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. Mount Stewart Jinkinson, who represented to him the world he feared and tried to keep sending 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. Popularity with men, serviceable as it is for winning favoritism 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 good fellow heir. 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 molting. 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 courteous service of you. They will deny that you are aging, 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 his little need to study them as the 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-defense, long-sighted, wanting no directions to the herb he was to suck at when fighting a serpent. His dullness of vision into the heart of his enemy was compensated by the agile sensitiveness of scurrying but rendering him miraculously active, and without supposing his need immediate. He deemed it politic to fascinate Mrs. Mount Stewart and anticipate ghastly possibilities in the future by dropping a hint. Not of Clara's fickleness, you may be 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 humor, I get nearer to it, he said. Remember, I'm in love with her, said Mrs. Mount Stewart. That is our penalty. A pleasant one for you. He assented. Is the rogue to be eliminated? Ask when she is 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. Two. 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 cautious thunder, and Mrs. Mount Stewart 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 Stale is looking well, he said. Fairly, she ought to marry, said Mrs. Mount Stewart. 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 compliment? 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, Ahmed. I don't sell him under four hundred. Poor Johnny Busce, 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 Letitia 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't believe it. For at home and abroad, your aim is to get the best of everybody. You see, I have no leafage. I am perfectly, matter of fact, bald. Nevertheless, my dear Mrs. Mount Stewart, I can assure you that conversing with you has much to 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 offense 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 unable to compass its fastness and, as it were, perceived the whole spherical mass of the wretched girl's guilt impudently turning on its axis. Thus to detach an injury done to us and planted 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 practicing 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. Mount Stewart. She lifted him to one of his ideals of himself. Among gentlemen he was the English gentleman. With ladies his aim was the Galician courtier, of any period from Louis Trezay to Louis Quincey. He could do it on those who leaven to talk in that character, backed by English solidity, you understand. Roast beef stood imminent 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 a 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 considerably overlooked these facts in his ordinary calculations. He was a man of honor and she was a girl of beauty, but the accidental blooming of his ideal with Mrs. Mount Stewart on the very heels of Clara's offense 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, Letitia, might have been the instrument to think of her now was preposterous. Beside Clara, she had the hue of winter under the springing bow. 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-defense by some agency or other. Mrs. Mount Stewart was on the step of her carriage when the silken parasols of the young ladies were described on the slope of the park, where the yellow-green of Maycloth beaches 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 Cross Jay, quote Willoughby. Vernon and Cross Jay came out for the boy's half-hours run before his dinner. Cross Jay 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. Mount Stewart. 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. Fletch 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 hut 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. Fletch jumped from the box and read one of the labels aloud. Lieutenant Colonel H. Decre and the Colonel met the ladies, overtook them. Here seemed to come dismal matter for Fletch 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, Fletch, 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 Decre was a very kindhearted 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 Fletch. 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. Mount Stewart, pricking up her ears. It was a vase. Fletch replied in elegy. A porcelain vase, interpreted Sir Willoughby. China, Mrs. Mount Stewart, 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, she said. Fletch disturbed his misfortune-sodden features and members for a continuation of the doleful narrative. How did this occur? Sir Willoughby peremptorily asked him. Fletch 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. Fletch implored sucker of Mrs. Mount Stewart. Drive straight, she said, and braced him. His narrative was then direct. Near Piper's Mill, where the Wickerbrook crossed the Rebden Road, one of Hopner's wagons, overloaded as usual, was forcing the horses uphill. When Fletch drove down, at an easy pace, and saw himself between Hopner's cart, come to a stand, and a young lady advancing. And just then, the carter smacks his whip. The horses pool half-mad. The young lady starts behind the cart, and up jumps the kernel, and, to save the young lady, Fletch 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 Fletch. Very well you saved her, and you upset the fly. Mount Stewart jogged him on. Bardot, our old headkeeper, was a witness, my lady, had to drive half up the bank, and it's true, over the fly did go, and the boss, it shoots out against the 12th milestone, just as though there was the chance for it. For nobody else was injured, and not against anything else. It never would have flown all to pieces, so that it took Bardot and me ten minutes to collect everyone, down to the smallest piece there was. And he said, and I can't help thinking myself, there was a provenance 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 cap-sizing fly. Sir Willoughby said to Mrs. Mount Stewart, 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, Mrs. Mount Stewart 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 tomorrow. Mrs. Mount Stewart waved her adieu. Come every day. Yes, I suppose we may guess the destination of the boss. He bowed her off, and she cried. Well, no. The gift can be 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 the porcelain. These are the slaps we get from a heedless world. As for the boss, it was Horace Decray'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, odd and ferrous, had ever induced Willoughby Patern to make her the repository and fortress of his honour. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Clara came along chatting and laughing with Colonel Decray, young Cross J's hand under one of her arms, and her parasol flashing. A dazzling offender, as if she wished to compel the spectator to recognise the dainty rogue in porcelain. Really insuffably fair, perfect in height and grace of movement, exquisitely dressed, 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 penne. 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. Today the art was ravishingly incompagnionable with her sweet-lighted face. Too sweet, too vividly meaningful for pretty, if none 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 gray silk parasol traced at the borders with green creepers, and across the arm devoted to cross-jay, 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 valiant softly, like a yacht before the sail bends low. But she walked not like one blown against, resembling rather the day of the southwest driving the clouds, gallantly firm in commotion, interfusing color 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 loved 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 Decray 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 in 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 caused 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 mainsprings of his nature, turned it to wormwood, and not a wit the less was an admiration when he resolved to chastise her with the 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 of it, 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 Decray. I was in the hands of the loves, not the graces, I'm afraid. I have an image of myself. Dear Noe, 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-Luk, 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 whiskey flask, said Horace Decray, and then left him corket. 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 Stale at the cottage. You ought to have had the dogs. Would they have been any protection to the vase? Horace Decray crowed cordially. I am afraid not, Miss Middleton. One must go to the witches for protection to bosses, and they are 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 Stale looks beaming, said Decray, 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. To switch, my dear Willoughby, has been and stirred the native in me, and will present him to you for the like good office, when we hear after a number of years that you have 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 have a superstition that Fletch ought to drive you from the church door. If I were in luck, I'd have him drive me. The man's a drunkard whores. He fiddles his poor nose, to his merely unction to the exile, so were struggles below. He drinks to rock his heart, because he has one. Now let me intercede for poor Fletch. 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 haw of satisfaction. You'll do the popular thing, Miss Middleton joins in the pleading. No pleading. When I vowed upon my eloquence, Willoughby, I'd bring you to pardon the poor dog. Not a word of him, just one. So Willoughby battled with himself to repress a state of temper that put him to mark 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. Ducray, 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 can't 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 will-bearer out 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 Ducray. Well, we'll talk him over a by-and-by. If it pleases you, but my rules are never amended. In all trouble 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 Ducray walked at the heels of his leader to make his bow to the ladies Eleanor and Isabelle. 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 Ducray 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 wearfulness 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 Ducray in company with Miss Middleton at her gateway. They were laughing and talking together, like friends of old standing. Ducray 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. Fletch was their theme, and, oh, but if we go tip to Willoughby hand in hand, and bob a courtesy to him, and beg his pardon for Mr. Fletch, won't he melt to such a pair of suppliance? Of course he will. Miss Middleton said he would not. Colonel Ducray wagered he would. He knew Willoughby best. Miss Middleton looked simply grave, a way of asserting the contrary opinion that tells a 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, Fletch watched Miss Middleton, in surprise at her lightness of mind. Clara bathed in mirth. A boy in a summer stream shows not hardy a refreshment of his whole being. Leticia 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 Ducray. Leticia and Vernon paced up and down the lawn. Colonel Ducray was talking with English sedateness to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. Clara and young Cross J. strayed. If I might advise, I would say, do not leave the hall immediately, not yet. Leticia said to Vernon, You know, then. I cannot understand why it was that I was taken into her confidence. I counseled 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 is only to ask to be released, to ask earnestly, if it is her wish. You are mistaken. Why does she not make a confident 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 despairing 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 known 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 Ducray. She wants good guidance, continued Leticia. 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 appears sincere. She does not practice 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. It's not that harsher than anything I've 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, outweary 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 airy. 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 herd 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 Letitia. 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 the 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 Cross Jay 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 gentlemen 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 to do everything herself. It's a knot that won't bear touching by any hand save hers. I fear, said Letitia, 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. End of Chapter 18. Chapter 19 Of The Egoist This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Martin Geeson. The Egoist by George Meredith. Chapter 19 Colonel Decret and Clara Middleton Miss Middleton finished her stroll with Cross J. 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. Cross J. 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 will not move from here until I come back, and when I come I will give you a kiss. Cross J. 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, tomorrow. 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 formally. Acknowledging that it was imperative she should speak, she understood that she had refrained, even to the inflicting upon herself of such humiliations 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 veins, 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 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. Mount Stuart Jenkins and 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, Corny, 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 a change of air, Papa. There we are, a change, Semper et Ardem. Women will be wanting a change of air in paradise. The change of angels, too, I might surmise. A change from quarters like these to a French hotel would be a dissent. 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's shuddering visions of the channel passage on board a steamer. Cornish, I'll 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. But what after letters is the more difficult practice? 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 corny. Change, my dear, you will speedily have to satisfy the most craving of women, if will it be, 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 anti-room 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 nat to propound that question, my dear. Then, father, tell Willoughby today we have to leave to-morrow. You shall return in time for Mrs. Mount Stewart's dinner. Friends will take us in. The Dalton's, the Erpingham's. 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 today. 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 esoteric. Yet on my word I am no wiser. If Willoughby has 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 will debate on it with Willoughby. This afternoon, somewhere 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 why. 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 Letitia 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 lovable 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 Decray must be thinking strangely of her. She had not shown him any signs 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 penciled line from her father. That it was done that Willoughby had put on an air of glad acquiescence, and that her father assumed the existence of a lover's 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 irai, 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-color 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 paint her no longer. She changed her muslin dress for silk. She was contented with the first bonnet Barkley presented. Amicable towards everyone 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, favorably 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 lady's very light of heart, she went downstairs like a cascade, and like the meteor observed in its vanishing trace, she alighted close to Colonel Decret, and entered one of the rooms off the hall. He cocked an eye at the half-shut door. Now you only have 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 Decret's cock of the eye at the door said that he had seen a raging cocket go behind it. He had his excuse for forming the judgment. 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 not, 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. Ahmed 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 you'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. Decray 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 the 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 Hebernian courting a Rowena. So we'll undo what I said and consider it cancelled. Are you of the rebel party, Colonel Decray? 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. Dr. 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 fellas. 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. Decre proceeded. Patrick O'Neill passes over from Hebernia to Iberia, a disinherited son of a father in the claws of the lawyers, with a letter of introduction to Don Beltran Daragon, a grandee of the first class, who has a daughter Donia Seraphina, Miss Middleton, the proudest beauty of her day, in the custody of a duena, Miss Dale, and plighted to Don Fernan of the Guzman family, Mr. Whitford. There you have our dramatist persona. 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 draping a letter. I'm here in Iberia, instead of Ibernia, worst lock to the spelling. But Patrick will be sure to aspirate the initial letter of Hebernia. 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 ought 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 climb. Won't you have violet? Violet forbids my impersonation. But the luster on black is dark violet blue. You remind me that I have no pretension to black. Colonel Decret 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 roaded engine, screened from the house windows, young Cross J. lay at his length, with his head resting on a doubled arm and his ivy-readed hat on his cheek, just where she had left him commanding him to stay. Halfway toward him up the lawn, she saw the poor boy, and the spur of that pitiful sight set her gliding swiftly. Colonel Decret followed, pulling an end of his moustache. Cross J jumped to his feet. My dear, dear Cross J! she addressed him and reproached him. And how hungry you must be! And you must be trenched! This is really too bad! You told me to wait here! said Cross J in shy self-defense. I did, and you should not have done it, foolish boy! I told him to wait for me here before luncheon, Colonel Decret, 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 off 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, Cross J, 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 Cross J would not move for the dinner bell, through all that rain? I forgot you, Cross J. 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 into dessert this evening. Cross J did not run. He touched her hand. You said something. What did I say, Cross J? 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 Cross J, 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 sold. 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 Decray, will you be kind enough to ask at the dinner table that Cross J may come into dessert? Certainly, said he, wondering. And will you look after him while you are here? See that no one spoils him. If he could get him away before you leave, it would be much to his advantage. He is born for the navy, and should be preparing to enter it now. Certainly, certainly, said Decray, wondering more. I thank you in advance. Shall I not be usurping? No, we leave tomorrow, for a day, for longer. Two. It will be longer. A week, I shall not see you again. I fear not. Colonel Decray 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 Cross J, 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.