The Egoist

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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.