Colonel De Craye concluded with an asseveration of the truth of the story.
‘A most provident, far-sighted old sea-captain!’ exclaimed Mrs Mountstuart, laughing at Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer.
These ladies chimed in with her gingerly.
‘And have you many more clever stories, Colonel De Craye?’ said Lady Busshe.
‘Ah! my lady, when the tree begins to count its gold ’tis nigh upon bankruptcy.’
‘Poetic!’ ejaculated Lady Culmer, spying at Miss Middleton’s rippled countenance, and noting that she and Sir Willoughby had not interchanged word or look.
‘But that in the case of your Patterne Port a bottle of it would outvalue the catalogue of nuptial presents, Willoughby, I would recommend your stationing some such constabulary to keep watch and ward,’ said Dr Middleton, as he filled his glass, taking Bordeaux in the middle of the day, under a consciousness of virtue and its reward to come at half-past seven in the evening.
‘The rascals would require a dozen of that, sir,’ said De Craye.
‘Then it is not to be thought of. Indeed one!’ Dr Middleton negatived the idea.
‘We are no further advanced than when we began,’ observed Lady Busshe.
‘If we are marked to go by stages,’ Mrs Mountstuart assented.
‘Why, then, we shall be called old coaches,’ remarked the colonel.
‘You,’ said Lady Culmer, ‘have the advantage of us in a closer acquaintance with Miss Middleton. You know her tastes, and how far they have been consulted in the little souvenirs already grouped somewhere, although not yet for inspection. I am at sea. And here is Lady Busshe in deadly alarm. There is plenty of time to effect a change – though we are drawing on rapidly to the fatal day, Miss Middleton. We are, we are very near it. Oh! yes. I am one who thinks that these little affairs should be spoken of openly, without that ridiculous bourgeois affectation, so that we may be sure of giving satisfaction. It is a transaction like everything else in life. I, for my part, wish to be remembered favourably. I put it as a test of breeding to speak of these things as plain matter-of-fact. You marry; I wish you to have something by you to remind you of me. What shall it be? – useful or ornamental. For an ordinary household the choice is not difficult. But where wealth abounds we are in a dilemma.’
‘And with persons of decided tastes,’ added Lady Busshe. ‘I am really very unhappy,’ she protested to Clara.
Sir Willoughby dropped Laetitia; Clara’s look of a sedate resolution to preserve silence on the topic of the nuptial gifts made a diversion imperative.
‘Your porcelain was exquisitely chosen, and I profess to be a connoisseur,’ he said. ‘I am poor in Old Saxony, as you know; I can match the country in Sèvres, and my inheritance of China will not easily be matched in the country.’
‘You may consider your Dragon vases a present from young Crossjay,’ said De Craye.
‘How?’
‘Hasn’t he abstained from breaking them? the capital boy! Porcelain and a boy in the house together is a case of prospective disaster fully equal to Flitch and a fly.’
‘You thould understand that my friend Horace – whose wit is in this instance founded on another tale of a boy – brought us a magnificent piece of porcelain, destroyed by the capsizing of his conveyance from the station,’ said Sir Willoughby to Lady Busshe.
She and Lady Culmer gave out lamentable Ohs, while Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel Patterne sketched the incident. Then the lady visitors fixed their eyes in united sympathy upon Clara: recovering from which, after a contemplation of marble, Lady Busshe emphasized, ‘No, you do not love porcelain, it is evident, Miss Middleton.’
‘I am glad to be assured of it,’ said Lady Culmer.
‘Oh, I know that face: I know that look,’ Lady Busshe affected to remark rallyingly: ‘it is not the first time I have seen it.’
Sir Willoughby smarted to his marrow. ‘We will rout these fancies of an overscrupulous generosity, my dear Lady Busshe.’
Her unwonted breach of delicacy in speaking publicly of her present, and the vulgar persistency of her sticking to the theme, very much perplexed him. And if he mistook her not, she had just alluded to the demoniacal Constantia Durham. It might be that he had mistaken her: he was on guard against his terrible sensitiveness. Nevertheless it was hard to account for this behaviour of a lady greatly his friend and admirer, a lady of birth. And Lady Culmer as well! – likewise a lady of birth. Were they in collusion? had they a suspicion? He turned to Laetitia’s face for the antidote to his pain.
‘Oh, but you are not one yet, and I shall require two voices to convince me,’ Lady Busshe rejoined, after another stare at the marble.
‘Lady Busshe, I beg you not to think me ungrateful,’ said Clara.
‘Fiddle! – gratitude! it is to please your taste, to satisfy you. I care for gratitude as little as for flattery.’
‘But gratitude is flattering,’ said Vernon.
‘Now, no metaphysics, Mr Whitford.’
‘But do care a bit for flattery, my lady,’ said De Craye. ‘ ’Tis the finest of the Arts; we might call it moral sculpture. Adepts in it can cut their friends to any shape they like by practising it with the requisite skill. I myself, poor hand as I am, have made a man act Solomon by constantly praising his wisdom. He took a sagacious turn at an early period of the dose. He weighed the smallest question of his daily occasions with a deliberation truly oriental. Had I pushed it, he’d have hired a baby and a couple of mothers to squabble over the undivided morsel.’
‘I shall hope for a day in London with you,’ said Lady Culmer to Clara.
‘You did not forget the Queen of Sheba?’ said Mrs Mountstuart to De Craye.
‘With her appearance, the game has to be resigned to her entirely,’ he rejoined.
‘That is,’ Lady Culmer continued, ‘if you do not despise an old woman for your comrade on a shopping excursion.’
‘Despise whom we fleece!’ exclaimed Dr Middleton. ‘Oh, no, Lady Culmer, the sheep is sacred.’
‘I am not so sure,’ said Vernon.
‘In what way, and to what extent, are you not so sure?’ said Dr Middleton.
‘The natural tendency is to scorn the fleeced.’
‘I stand for the contrary. Pity, if you like: particularly when they bleat.’
‘This is to assume that makers of gifts are a fleeced people: I demur,’ said Mrs Mountstuart.
‘Madam, we are expected to give; we are incited to give; you have dubbed it the fashion to give; and the person refusing to give, or incapable of giving, may anticipate that he will be regarded as benignly as a sheep of a drooping and flaccid wool by the farmer, who is reminded by the poor beast’s appearance of a strange dog that worried the flock. Even Captain Benjamin, as you have seen, was unable to withstand the demand on him. The hymeneal pair are licensed freebooters levying blackmail on us; survivors of an uncivilized period. But in taking without mercy, I venture to trust that the manners of a happier era instruct them not to scorn us. I apprehend that Mr Whitford has a lower order of latrons in his mind.’
‘Permit me to say, sir, that you have not considered the ignoble aspect of the fleeced,’ said Vernon. ‘I appeal to the ladies: would they not, if they beheld an ostrich walking down a Queen’s Drawing Room, clean-plucked, despise him though they were wearing his plumes?’
‘An extreme supposition, indeed,’ said Dr Middleton, frowning over it; ‘scarcely legitimately to be suggested.’
‘I think it fair, sir, as an instance.’
‘Has the circumstance occurred, I would ask?’
‘In life? a thousand times.’
‘I fear so,’ said Mrs Mountstuart.
Lady Busshe showed symptoms of a desire to leave a profitless table.
Vernon started up, glancing at the window.
‘Did you see Crossjay?’ he said to Clara.
‘No; I must, if he is there,’ said she.
She made her way out, Vernon after her. They both had the
excuse.
‘Which way did the poor boy go?’ she asked him.
‘I have not the slightest idea,’ he replied. ‘But put on your bonnet, if ou would escape that pair of inquisitors.’
‘Mr Whitford, what humiliation!’
‘I suspect you do not feel it the most, and the end of it can’t be remote,’ said he.
Thus it happened that when Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer quitted the dining-room, Miss Middleton had spirited herself away from summoning voice and messenger.
Sir Willoughby apologized for her absence. ‘If I could be jealous, it would be of that boy Crossjay.’
‘You are an excellent man, and the best of cousins,’ was Lady Busshe’s enigmatical answer.
The exceedingly lively conversation at his table was lauded by Lady Culmer.
‘Though,’ said she, ‘what it all meant, and what was the drift of it, I couldn’t tell to save my life. Is it every day the same with you here?’
‘Very much.’
‘How you must enjoy a spell of dulness!’
‘If you said simplicity and not talking for effect! I generally cast anchor by Laetitia Dale.’
‘Ah!’ Lady Busshe coughed. ‘But the fact is, Mrs Mountstuart is made for cleverness!’
‘I think, my lady, Laetitia Dale is to the full as clever as any of the stars Mrs Mountstuart assembles, or I.’
‘Talkative cleverness, I mean.’
‘In conversation as well. Perhaps you have not yet given her a chance.’
‘Yes, yes, she is clever, of course, poor dear. She is looking better too.’
‘Handsome, I thought,’ said Lady Culmer.
‘She varies,’ observed Sir Willoughby.
The ladies took seat in their carriage and fell at once into a close-bonnet colloquy. Not a single allusion had they made to the wedding-presents after leaving the luncheon-table. The cause of their visit was obvious.
CHAPTER 37
Contains Clever Fencing and Intimations of the Need for It
THAT woman, Lady Busshe, had predicted, after the event, Constantia Durham’s defection. She had also, subsequent to Willoughby’s departure on his travels, uttered sceptical things concerning his rooted attachment to Laetitia Dale. In her bitter vulgarity, that beaten rival of Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson for the leadership of the county had taken his nose for a melancholy prognostic of his fortunes; she had recently played on his name: she had spoken the hideous English of his fate. Little as she knew, she was alive to the worst interpretation of appearances. No other eulogy occurred to her now than to call him the best of cousins, because Vernon Whitford was housed and clothed and fed by him. She had nothing else to say for a man she thought luckless! She was a woman barren of wit, stripped of style, but she was wealthy and a gossip – a forge of showering sparks – and she carried Lady Culmer with her. The two had driven from his house to spread the malignant rumour abroad; already they blew the biting world on his raw wound. Neither of them was like Mrs Mountstuart, a witty woman, who could be hoodwinked; they were dull women, who steadily kept on their own scent of the fact, and the only way to confound such inveterate forces was to be ahead of them, and seize and transform the expected fact, and astonish them, when they came up to him, with a totally unanticipated fact.
‘You see, you were in error, ladies.’
‘And so we were, Sir Willoughby, and we acknowledge it. We never could have guessed that!’
Thus the phantom couple in the future delivered themselves, as well they might at the revelation. He could run far ahead.
Ay, but to combat these dolts, facts had to be encountered, deeds done, in groaning earnest. These representatives of the pig-sconces of the population judged by circumstances: airy shows and seems had no effect on them. Dexterity of fence was thrown away.
A flying peep at the remorseless might of dulness in compelling us to a concrete performance counter to our inclinations, if we would deceive its terrible instinct, gave Willoughby for a moment the survey of a sage. His intensity of personal feeling struck so vivid an illumination of mankind at intervals that he would have been individually wise, had he not been moved by the source of his accurate perceptions to a personal feeling of opposition to his own sagacity. He loathed and he despised the vision, so his mind had no benefit of it, though he himself was whipped along. He chose rather (and the choice is open to us all) to be flattered by the distinction it revealed between himself and mankind.
But if he was not as others were, why was he discomfited, solicitous, miserable? To think that it should be so, ran dead against his conqueror’s theories wherein he had been trained, which, so long as he gained success awarded success to native merit, grandeur to the grand in soul, as light kindles light: nature presents the example. His early training, his bright beginning of life, had taught him to look to earth’s principal fruits as his natural portion, and it was owing to a girl that he stood a mark for tongues, naked, wincing at the possible malignity of a pair of harridans. Why not whistle the girl away?
Why, then he would be free to enjoy, careless, younger than his youth in the rebound to happiness!
And then would his nostrils begin to lift and sniff at the creeping up of a thick pestiferous vapour. Then in that volume of stench would he discern the sullen yellow eye of malice. A malarious earth would hunt him all over it. The breath of the world, the world’s view of him, was partly his vital breath, his view of himself. The ancestry of the tortured man had bequeathed him this condition of high civilization among their other bequests. Your withered contracted Egoists of the hut and the grot reck not of public opinion; they crave but for liberty and leisure to scratch themselves and soothe an excessive scratch. Willoughby was expansive, a blooming one, born to look down upon a tributary world, and to exult in being looked to. Do we wonder at his consternation in the prospect of that world’s blowing foul on him? Princes have their obligations to teach them they are mortal, and the brilliant heir of a tributary world is equally enchained by the homage it brings him; – more, inasmuch as it is immaterial, elusive, not gathered by the tax, and he cannot capitally punish the treasonable recusants. Still must he be brilliant; he must court his people. He must ever, both in his reputation and his person, aching though he be, show them a face and a leg.
The wounded gentleman shut himself up in his laboratory, where he could stride to and fro, and stretch out his arms for physical relief, secure from observation of his fantastical shapes, under the idea that he was meditating. There was perhaps enough to make him fancy it in the heavy fire of shots exchanged between his nerves and the situation; there were notable flashes. He would not avow that he was in an agony: it was merely a desire for exercise.
Quintessence of worldliness, Mrs Mountstuart appeared through his farthest window, swinging her skirts on a turn at the end of the lawn, with Horace De Craye smirking beside her. And the woman’s vaunted penetration was unable to detect the histrionic Irishism of the fellow. Or she liked him for his acting and nonsense; nor she only. The voluble beast was created to snare women. Willoughby became smitten with an adoration of stedfastness in women. The incarnation of that divine quality crossed his eyes. She was clad in beauty.
A horrible nondescript convulsion composed of yawn and groan drove him to his instruments, to avert a renewal of the shock; and while arranging and fixing them for their unwonted task, he compared himself advantageously with men like Vernon and De Craye, and others of the county, his fellows in the hunting-field and on the Magistrate’s bench, who neither understood nor cared for solid work, beneficial practical work, the work of Science.
He was obliged to relinquish it: his hand shook.
‘Experiments will not advance much at this rate,’ he said, casting the noxious retardation on his enemies.
It was not to be contested that he must speak with Mrs Mountstuart, however he might shrink from the trial of his facial muscles. Her not coming to him seemed ominous: nor was her behaviour at the luncheon-table quite obscure. She had eviden
tly instigated the gentlemen to cross and counter-chatter Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer. For what purpose?
Clara’s features gave the answer.
They were implacable. And he could be the same.
In the solitude of his room he cried right out: ‘I swear it, I will never yield her to Horace De Craye! She shall feel some of my torments, and try to get the better of them by knowing she deserves them.’ He had spoken it, and it was an oath upon the record.
Desire to do her intolerable hurt became an ecstasy in his veins, and produced another stretching fit that terminated in a violent shake of the body and limbs; during which he was a spectacle for Mrs Mountstuart at one of the windows. He laughed as he went to her, saying: ‘No, no work to-day; it won’t be done, positively refuses.’
‘I am taking the Professor away,’ said she; ‘he is fidgety about the cold he caught.’
Sir Willoughby stepped out to her. ‘I was trying at a bit of work for an hour, not to be idle all day.’
‘You work in that den of yours every day?’
‘Never less than an hour, if I can snatch it.’
‘It is a wonderful resource!’
The remark set him throbbing and thinking that a pro longation of his crisis exposed him to the approaches of some organic malady, possibly heart-disease.
‘A habit,’ he said. ‘In there I throw off the world.’
‘We shall see some results in due time.’
‘I promise none: I like to be abreast of the real knowledge of my day, that is all.’
‘And a pearl among country gentlemen!’
‘In your gracious consideration, my dear lady. Generally speaking, it would be more advisable to become a chatterer and keep an anecdotal note-book. I could not do it, simply because I could not live with my own emptiness for the sake of making an occasional display of fireworks. I aim at solidity. It is a narrow aim, no doubt; not much appreciated.’
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