The Egoist

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"Why did you pursue me and wish to stop me, Mr. Whitford?" said
Clara, on the spur of a wound from his tone.

He replied: "I suppose I'm a busybody; I was never aware of it
till now."

"You are my friend. Only you speak in irony so much. That was
irony, about my clear conscience. I spoke to you and to Miss Dale:
and then I rested and drifted. Can you not feel for me, that to
mention it is like a scorching furnace? Willoughby has entangled
papa. He schemes incessantly to keep me entangled. I fly from his
cunning as much as from anything. I dread it. I have told you
that I am more to blame than he, but I must accuse him. And
wedding-presents! and congratulations! And to be his guest!"

"All that makes up a plea in mitigation," said Vernon.

"Is it not sufficient for you?" she asked him timidly.

"You have a masculine good sense that tells you you won't be
respected if you run. Three more days there might cover a retreat
with your father."

"He will not listen to me. He confuses me; Willoughby has
bewitched him."

"Commission me: I will see that he listens."

"And go back? Oh, no! To London! Besides, there is the dining with
Mrs. Mountstuart this evening; and I like her very well, but I
must avoid her. She has a kind of idolatry ... And what answers
can I give? I supplicate her with looks. She observes them, my
efforts to divert them from being painful produce a comic
expression to her, and I am a charming 'rogue', and I am
entertained on the topic she assumes to be principally interesting
me. I must avoid her. The thought of her leaves me no choice. She
is clever. She could tattoo me with epigrams."

"Stay.. there you can hold your own."

"She has told me you give me credit for a spice of wit. I have not
discovered my possession. We have spoken of it; we call it your
delusion. She grants me some beauty; that must be hers."

"There's no delusion in one case or the other, Miss Middleton. You
have beauty and wit; public opinion will say, wildness:
indifference to your reputation will be charged on you, and your
friends will have to admit it. But you will be out of this
difficulty."

"Ah--to weave a second?"

"Impossible to judge until we see how you escape the first. And I
have no more to say. I love your father. His humour of
sententiousness and doctorial stilts is a mask he delights in, but
you ought to know him and not be frightened by it. If you sat with
him an hour at a Latin task, and if you took his hand and told
him you could not leave him, and no tears!--he would answer you
at once. It would involve a day or two further; disagreeable to
you, no doubt: preferable to the present mode of escape, as I
think. But I have no power whatever to persuade. I have not the
'lady's tongue'. My appeal is always to reason."

"It is a compliment. I loathe the 'lady's tongue'."

"It's a distinctly good gift, and I wish I had it. I might have
succeeded instead of failing, and appearing to pay a compliment."

"Surely the express train is very late, Mr. Whitford?"

"The express has gone by."

"Then we will cross over."

"You would rather not be seen by Mrs. Mountstuart. That is her
carriage drawn up at the station, and she is in it."

Clara looked, and with the sinking of her heart said: "I must
brave her!"

"In that case I will take my leave of you here, Miss Middleton."

She gave him her hand. "Why is Mrs. Mountstuart at the station
to-day?"

"I suppose she has driven to meet one of the guests for her
dinner-party. Professor Crooklyn was promised to your father, and
he may be coming by the down-train."

"Go back to the Hall!" exclaimed Clara. "How can I? I have no more
endurance left in me. If I had some support!--if it were the
sense of secretly doing wrong, it might help me through. I am in a
web. I cannot do right, whatever I do. There is only the thought
of saving Crossjay. Yes, and sparing papa.--Good-bye, Mr.
Whitford. I shall remember your kindness gratefully. I cannot go
back."

"You will not?" said he, tempting her to hesitate.

"No."

"But if you are seen by Mrs. Mountstuart, you must go back. I'll
do my best to take her away. Should she see you, you must patch up
a story and apply to her for a lift. That, I think, is
imperative."

"Not to my mind," said Clara.

He bowed hurriedly, and withdrew. After her confession, peculiar
to her, of possibly finding sustainment in secretly doing wrong,
her flying or remaining seemed to him a choice of evils: and
whilst she stood in bewildered speculation on his reason for
pursuing her--which was not evident--he remembered the special
fear inciting him, and so far did her justice as to have at
himself on that subject. He had done something perhaps to save her
from a cold: such was his only consolatory thought. He had also
behaved like a man of honour, taking no personal advantage of her
situation; but to reflect on it recalled his astonishing dryness.
The strict man of honour plays a part that he should not reflect
on till about the fall of the curtain, otherwise he will be likely
sometimes to feel the shiver of foolishness at his good conduct.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The Return

Posted in observation at a corner of the window Clara saw Vernon
cross the road to Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson's carriage,
transformed to the leanest pattern of himself by narrowed
shoulders and raised coat-collar. He had such an air of saying,
"Tom's a-cold", that her skin crept in sympathy.

Presently he left the carriage and went into the station: a bell
had rung. Was it her train? He approved her going, for he was
employed in assisting her to go: a proceeding at variance with
many things he had said, but he was as full of contradiction
to-day as women are accused of being. The train came up. She
trembled: no signal had appeared, and Vernon must have deceived
her.

He returned; he entered the carriage, and the wheels were soon in
motion. Immediately thereupon, Flitch's fly drove past, containing
Colonel De Craye.

Vernon could not but have perceived him!

But what was it that had brought the colonel to this place? The
pressure of Vernon's mind was on her and foiled her efforts to
assert her perfect innocence, though she knew she had done nothing
to allure the colonel hither. Excepting Willoughby, Colonel De
Craye was the last person she would have wished to encounter.

She had now a dread of hearing the bell which would tell her that
Vernon had not deceived her, and that she was out of his hands, in
the hands of some one else.

She bit at her glove; she glanced at the concentrated eyes of the
publican's family portraits, all looking as one; she noticed the
empty tumbler, and went round to it and touched it, and the silly
spoon in it.

A little yielding to desperation shoots us to strange distances!

Vernon had asked her whether she was alone. Connecting that
inquiry, singular in itself, and singular in his manner of putting
it, with the glass of burning liquid, she repeated: "He must
have seen Colonel De Craye!" and she stared at the empty glass, as
at something that witnessed to something: for Vernon was not your
supple cavalier assiduously on the smirk to pin a gallantry to
commonplaces. But all the doors are not open in a young lady's
consciousness, quick of nature though she may be: some are locked
and keyless, some will not open to the key, some are defended by
ghosts inside. She could not have said what the something
witnessed to. If we by chance know more, we have still no right
to make it more prominent than it was with her. And the smell of
the glass was odious; it disgraced her. She had an impulse to
pocket the spoon for a memento, to show it to grandchildren for a
warning. Even the prelude to the morality to be uttered on the
occasion sprang to her lips: "Here, my dears, is a spoon you would
he ashamed to use in your teacups, yet it was of more value to me
at one period of my life than silver and gold in pointing out,
etc.": the conclusion was hazy, like the conception; she had her
idea.

And in this mood she ran down-stairs and met Colonel De Craye on
the station steps.

The bright illumination of his face was that of the confident man
confirmed in a risky guess in the crisis of doubt and dispute.

"Miss Middleton!" his joyful surprise predominated; the pride of
an accurate forecast, adding: "I am not too late to be of
service?"

She thanked him for the offer.

"Have you dismissed the fly, Colonel De Craye?"

"I have just been getting change to pay Mr. Flitch. He passed me
on the road. He is interwound with our fates to a certainty. I had
only to jump in; I knew it, and rolled along like a magician
commanding a genie."

"Have I been . . ."

"Not seriously, nobody doubts you being under shelter. You will
allow me to protect you? My time is yours."

"I was thinking of a running visit to my friend Miss Darleton."

"May I venture? I had the fancy that you wished to see Miss
Darleton to-day. You cannot make the journey unescorted."

"Please retain the fly. Where is Willoughby?"

"He is in jack-boots. But may I not, Miss Middleton?
I shall never be forgiven if you refuse me."

"There has been searching for me?"

"Some hallooing. But why am I rejected? Besides, I don't require
the fly; I shall walk if I am banished. Flitch is a wonderful
conjurer, but the virtue is out of him for the next
four-and-twenty hours. And it will be an opportunity to me to make
my bow to Miss Darleton!"

"She is rigorous on the conventionalities, Colonel De Craye."

"I'll appear before her as an ignoramus or a rebel, whichever she
likes best to take in leading-strings. I remember her. I was
greatly struck by her."

"Upon recollection!"

"Memory didn't happen to be handy at the first mention of the
lady's name. As the general said of his ammunition and transport,
there's the army!--but it was leagues in the rear. Like the
footman who went to sleep after smelling fire in the house, I was
thinking of other things. It will serve me right to be forgotten--
if I am. I've a curiosity to know: a remainder of my coxcombry.
Not that exactly: a wish to see the impression I made on your
friend.--None at all? But any pebble casts a ripple."

"That is hardly an impression," said Clara, pacifying her
irresoluteness with this light talk.

"The utmost to be hoped for by men like me! I have your
permission?--one minute--I will get my ticket."

"Do not," said Clara.

"Your man-servant entreats you!"

She signified a decided negative with the head, but her eyes were
dreamy. She breathed deep: this thing done would cut the cord. Her
sensation of languor swept over her.

De Craye took a stride. He was accosted by one of the
railway-porters. Flitch's fly was in request for a gentleman. A
portly old gentleman bothered about luggage appeared on the
landing.

"The gentleman can have it," said De Craye, handing Flitch his
money.

"Open the door." Clara said to Flitch.

He tugged at the handle with enthusiasm. The door was open: she
stepped in.

"Then mount the box and I'll jump up beside you," De Craye called
out, after the passion of regretful astonishment had melted from
his features.

Clara directed him to the seat fronting her; he protested
indifference to the wet; she kept the door unshut. His temper
would have preferred to buffet the angry weather. The invitation
was too sweet.

She heard now the bell of her own train. Driving beside the
railway embankment she met the train: it was eighteen minutes
late, by her watch. And why, when it flung up its whale-spouts of
steam, she was not journeying in it, she could not tell. She had
acted of her free will: that she could say. Vernon had not induced
her to remain; assuredly her present companion had not; and her
whole heart was for flight: yet she was driving back to the Hall,
not devoid of calmness. She speculated on the circumstance enough
to think herself incomprehensible, and there left it, intent on
the scene to come with Willoughby.

"I must choose a better day for London," she remarked.

De Craye bowed, but did not remove his eyes from her.

"Miss Middleton, you do not trust me."

She answered: "Say in what way. It seems to me that I do."

"I may speak?"

"If it depends on my authority."

"Fully?"

"Whatever you have to say. Let me stipulate, be not very grave. I
want cheering in wet weather."

"Miss Middleton, Flitch is charioteer once more. Think of it.
There's a tide that carries him perpetually to the place where he
was cast forth, and a thread that ties us to him in continuity. I
have not the honour to be a friend of long standing: one ventures
on one's devotion: it dates from the first moment of my seeing
you. Flitch is to blame, if any one. Perhaps the spell would be
broken, were he reinstated in his ancient office."

"Perhaps it would," said Clara, not with her best of smiles.
Willoughby's pride of relentlessness appeared to her to be
receiving a blow by rebound, and that seemed high justice.

"I am afraid you were right; the poor fellow has no chance," De
Craye pursued. He paused, as for decorum in the presence of
misfortune, and laughed sparklingly: "Unless I engage him, or
pretend to! I verily believe that Flitch's melancholy person on
the skirts of the Hall completes the picture of the Eden within.--
Why will you not put some trust in me, Miss Middleton?"

"But why should you not pretend to engage him then, Colonel De
Craye?"

"We'll plot it, if you like. Can you trust me for that?"

"For any act of disinterested kindness, I am sure."

"You mean it?"

"Without reserve. You could talk publicly of taking him to
London."

"Miss Middleton, just now you were going. My arrival changed your
mind. You distrust me: and ought I to wonder? The wonder would be
all the other way. You have not had the sort of report of me which
would persuade you to confide, even in a case of extremity. I
guessed you were going. Do you ask me how? I cannot say. Through
what they call sympathy, and that's inexplicable. There's natural
sympathy, natural antipathy. People have to live together to
discover how deep it is!"

Clara breathed her dumb admission of his truth.

The fly jolted and threatened to lurch.

"Flitch, my dear man!" the colonel gave a murmuring remonstrance;
"for," said he to Clara, whom his apostrophe to Flitch had set
smiling, "we're not safe with him, however we make believe, and
he'll be jerking the heart out of me before he has done.--But if
two of us have not the misfortune to be united when they come to
the discovery, there's hope. That is, if one has courage and the
other has wisdom. Otherwise they may go to the yoke in spite of
themselves. The great enemy is Pride, who has them both in a coach
and drives them to the fatal door, and the only thing to do is to
knock him off his box while there's a minute to spare. And as
there's no pride like the pride of possession, the deadliest wound
to him is to make that doubtful. Pride won't be taught wisdom in
any other fashion. But one must have the courage to do it!"

De Craye trifled with the window-sash, to give his words time to
sink in solution.

Who but Willoughby stood for Pride? And who, swayed by languor,
had dreamed of a method that would be surest and swiftest to teach
him the wisdom of surrendering her?

"You know, Miss Middleton, I study character," said the colonel.

"I see that you do," she answered.

"You intend to return?"

"Oh, decidedly."

"The day is unfavourable for travelling, I must say."

"It is."

"You may count on my discretion in the fullest degree. I throw
myself on your generosity when I assure you that it was not my
design to surprise a secret. I guessed the station, and went
there, to put myself at your disposal."

"Did you," said Clara, reddening slightly, "chance to see Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson's carriage pass you when you drove up to the
station?"

De Craye had passed a carriage. "I did not see the lady. She was
in it?"

"Yes. And therefore it is better to put discretion on one side:
we may be certain she saw you."

"But not you, Miss Middleton."

"I prefer to think that I am seen. I have a description of
courage, Colonel De Craye, when it is forced on me."

"I have not suspected the reverse. Courage wants training, as well
as other fine capacities. Mine is often rusty and rheumatic."

"I cannot hear of concealment or plotting."

"Except, pray, to advance the cause of poor Flitch!"

"He shall be excepted."

The colonel screwed his head round for a glance at his coachman's
back.

"Perfectly guaranteed to-day!" he said of Flitch's look of
solidity. "The convulsion of the elements appears to sober our
friend; he is only dangerous in calms. Five minutes will bring us
to the park-gates."

Clara leaned forward to gaze at the hedgeways in the neighbourhood
of the Hall strangely renewing their familiarity with her. Both in
thought and sensation she was like a flower beaten to earth, and
she thanked her feminine mask for not showing how nerveless and
languid she was. She could have accused Vernon of a treacherous
cunning for imposing it on her free will to decide her fate.

Involuntarily she sighed.

"There is a train at three," said De Craye, with splendid
promptitude.

"Yes, and one at five. We dine with Mrs. Mountstuart tonight. And
I have a passion for solitude! I think I was never intended for
obligations. The moment I am bound I begin to brood on freedom."

"Ladies who say that, Miss Middleton!..."

"What of them?"

"They're feeling too much alone."

She could not combat the remark: by her self-assurance that she
had the principle of faithfulness, she acknowledged to herself the
truth of it:--there is no freedom for the weak. Vernon had said
that once. She tried to resist the weight of it, and her sheer
inability precipitated her into a sense of pitiful dependence.

Half an hour earlier it would have been a perilous condition to be
traversing in the society of a closely scanning reader of fair
faces. Circumstances had changed. They were at the gates of the
park.

"Shall I leave you?" said De Craye.

"Why should you?" she replied.

He bent to her gracefully.

The mild subservience flattered Clara's languor. He had not
compelled her to be watchful on her guard, and she was unaware
that he passed it when she acquiesced to his observation, "An
anticipatory story is a trap to the teller."

"It is," she said. She had been thinking as much.

He threw up his head to consult the brain comically with a dozen
little blinks.

"No, you are right, Miss Middleton, inventing beforehand never
prospers; "t is a way to trip our own cleverness. Truth and
mother-wit are the best counsellors: and as you are the former,
I'll try to act up to the character you assign me."

Some tangle, more prospective than present, seemed to be about her
as she reflected. But her intention being to speak to Willoughby
without subterfuge, she was grateful to her companion for not
tempting her to swerve. No one could doubt his talent for elegant
fibbing, and she was in the humour both to admire and adopt the
art, so she was glad to be rescued from herself. How mother-wit
was to second truth she did not inquire, and as she did not happen
to be thinking of Crossjay, she was not troubled by having to
consider how truth and his tale of the morning would be likely to
harmonize.

Driving down the park, she had full occupation in questioning
whether her return would be pleasing to Vernon, who was the
virtual cause of it, though he had done so little to promote it:
so little that she really doubted his pleasure in seeing her
return.

CHAPTER XXIX

In Which the Sensitiveness of Sir Willoughby Is
Explained: and He Receives Much Instruction

THE Hall-dock over the stables was then striking twelve. It was
the hour for her flight to be made known, and Clara sat in a
turmoil of dim apprehension that prepared her nervous frame for a
painful blush on her being asked by Colonel De Craye whether she
had set her watch correctly. He must, she understood, have seen
through her at the breakfast table: and was she not cruelly
indebted to him for her evasion of Willoughby? Such perspicacity
of vision distressed and frightened her; at the same time she was
obliged to acknowledge that he had not presumed on it. Her dignity
was in no way the worse for him. But it had been at a man's mercy,
and there was the affliction.

She jumped from the fly as if she were leaving danger behind. She
could at the moment have greeted Willoughby with a conventionally
friendly smile. The doors were thrown open and young Crossjay flew
out to her. He hung and danced on her hand, pressed the hand to
his mouth, hardly believing that he saw and touched her, and in a
lingo of dashes and asterisks related how Sir Willoughby had found
him under the boathouse eaves and pumped him, and had been sent
off to Hoppner's farm, where there was a sick child, and on
along the road to a labourer's cottage: "For I said you're so kind
to poor people, Miss Middleton; that's true, now that is true.
And I said you wouldn't have me with you for fear of contagion!"
This was what she had feared.

"Every crack and bang in a boys vocabulary," remarked the colonel,
listening to him after he had paid Flitch.

The latter touched his hat till he had drawn attention to himself,
when he exclaimed, with rosy melancholy: "Ah! my lady, ah!
colonel, if ever I lives to drink some of the old port wine in the
old Hall at Christmastide!" Their healths would on that occasion
be drunk, it was implied. He threw up his eyes at the windows,
humped his body and drove away.

"Then Mr. Whitford has not come back?" said Clara to Crossjay.

"No, Miss Middleton. Sir Willoughby has, and he's upstairs in
his room dressing."

"Have you seen Barclay?"

"She has just gone into the laboratory. I told her Sir Willoughby
wasn't there."

"Tell me, Crossjay, had she a letter?"

"She had something."

"Run: say I am here; I want the letter, it is mine."

Crossjay sprang away and plunged into the arms of Sir Willoughby.

"One has to catch the fellow like a football," exclaimed the
injured gentleman, doubled across the boy and holding him fast,
that he might have an object to trifle with, to give himself
countenance: he needed it. "Clara, you have not been exposed to
the weather?"

"Hardly at all."

"I rejoice. You found shelter?"

"Yes."

"In one of the cottages?"

"Not in a cottage; but I was perfectly sheltered. Colonel De Craye
passed a fly before he met me . .

"Flitch again!" ejaculated the colonel.

"Yes, you have luck, you have luck," Willoughby addressed him,
still clutching Crossjay and treating his tugs to get loose as an
invitation to caresses. But the foil barely concealed his livid
perturbation.

"Stay by me, sir," he said at last sharply to Crossjay, and Clara
touched the boy's shoulder in admonishment of him.

She turned to the colonel as they stepped into the hall: "I have
not thanked you, Colonel De Craye." She dropped her voice to its
lowest: "A letter in my handwriting in the laboratory."

Crossjay cried aloud with pain.

"I have you!" Willoughby rallied him with a laugh not unlike the
squeak of his victim.

"You squeeze awfully hard, sir."

"Why, you milksop!"

"Am I! But I want to get a book."

"Where is the book?"

"In the laboratory."

Colonel De Craye, sauntering by the laboratory door, sung out:
"I'll fetch you your book. What is it? EARLY NAVIGATORS? INFANT
HYMNS? I think my cigar-case is in here."

"Barclay speaks of a letter for me," Willoughby said to Clara,
"marked to be delivered to me at noon!"

"In case of my not being back earlier; it was written to avert
anxiety," she replied.

"You are very good."

"Oh, good! Call me anything but good. Here are the ladies. Dear
ladies!" Clara swam to meet them as they issued from a
morning-room into the hall, and interjections reigned for a couple
of minutes.

Willoughby relinquished his grasp of Crossjay, who darted
instantaneously at an angle to the laboratory, whither he followed,
and he encountered De Craye coming out, but passed him in silence.

Crossjay was rangeing and peering all over the room. Willoughby
went to his desk and the battery-table and the mantelpiece. He
found no letter. Barclay had undoubtedly informed him that she had
left a letter for him in the laboratory, by order of her mistress
after breakfast.

He hurried out and ran upstairs in time to see De Craye and
Barclay breaking a conference.

He beckoned to her. The maid lengthened her upper lip and beat her
dress down smooth: signs of the apprehension of a crisis and of
the getting ready for action.

"My mistress's bell has just rung, Sir Willoughby."

"You had a letter for me."

"I said . . ."

"You said when I met you at the foot of the stairs that you had
left a letter for me in the laboratory."

"It is lying on my mistress's toilet-table."

"Get it."

Barclay swept round with another of her demure grimaces. It was
apparently necessary with her that she should talk to herself in
this public manner.

Willoughby waited for her; but there was no reappearance of the
maid.

Struck by the ridicule of his posture of expectation, and of his
whole behaviour, he went to his bedroom suite, shut himself in,
and paced the chambers, amazed at the creature he had become.
Agitated like the commonest of wretches, destitute of
self-control, not able to preserve a decent mask, be, accustomed
to inflict these emotions and tremours upon others, was at once
the puppet and dupe of an intriguing girl. His very stature seemed
lessened. The glass did not say so, but the shrunken heart within
him did, and wailfully too. Her compunction--'Call me anything
but good'--coming after her return to the Hall beside De Craye,
and after the visible passage of a secret between them in his
presence, was a confession: it blew at him with the fury of a
furnace-blast in his face. Egoist agony wrung the outcry from him
that dupery is a more blessed condition. He desired to be
deceived.