The Egoist
George Meredith
CHAPTER XXIX Page 3
Nausea, together with a sense of duty to his line, extinguished that loathsome prospect of a mate, though without obscuring his chivalrous devotion to his gentleman's word of honour, which remained in his mind to compliment him permanently.
Having to speak to Vernon on business, he went to the schoolroom, where he discovered Clara, beautiful in full evening attire, with her arm on young Crossjay's shoulder, and heard that the hard task-master had abjured Mrs. Mountstuart's party, and had already excused himself, intending to keep Crossjay to the grindstone. Willoughby was for the boy, as usual, and more sparklingly than usual. Clara looked at him in some surprise. He rallied Vernon with great zest, quite silencing him when he said: "I bear witness that the fellow was here at his regular hour for lessons, and were you?" He laid his hand on Crossjay, touching Clara's.
"You will remember what I told you, Crossjay," said she, rising from the seat gracefully to escape the touch. "It is my command."
"But only if I'm questioned," he said.
"Certainly," she replied.
"Then I question the rascal," said Willoughby, causing a start. "What, sir, is your opinion of Miss Middleton in her robe of state this evening?"
"Now, the truth, Crossjay!" Clara held up a finger; and the boy could see she was playing at archness, but for Willoughby it was earnest. "The truth is not likely to offend you or me either," he murmured to her.
"I wish him never, never, on any excuse, to speak anything else."
"I always did think her a Beauty," Crossjay growled. He hated the having to say it.
"There!" exclaimed Sir Willoughby, and bent, extending an arm to her. "You have not suffered from the truth, my Clara!"
Her answer was: "I was thinking how he might suffer if he were taught to tell the reverse."
"Oh! for a fair lady!"
"That is the worst of teaching, Willoughby."
"We'll leave it to the fellow's instinct; he has our blood in him. I could convince you, though, if I might cite circumstances. Yes! But yes! And yes again! The entire truth cannot invariably be told. I venture to say it should not."
"You would pardon it for the 'fair lady'?"
"Applaud, my love."
He squeezed the hand within his arm, contemplating her.
She was arrayed in a voluminous robe of pale blue silk vapourous with trimmings of light gauze of the same hue, gaze de Chambery, matching her fair hair and dear skin for the complete overthrow of less inflammable men than Willoughby.
"Clara!" sighed be.
"If so, it would really be generous," she said, "though the teaching h bad."
"I fancy I can be generous."
"Do we ever know?"
"Is it not an impulse or disposition rather than an aim?"
"So much I know," pursued Willoughby, refusing to be tripped. But she rang discordantly in his ear. His "fancy that he could be generous" and his "aim at being generous" had met with no response. "I have given proofs," he said, briefly, to drop a subject upon which he was not permitted to dilate; and he murmured, "People acquainted with me . . . !" She was asked if she expected him to boast of generous deeds. "From childhood!" she heard him mutter; and she said to herself, "Release me, and you shall be everything!"
"Not now; very well," said he.
His immediate deference made her regretful. "There is hardly time, Willoughby."
"My dear, we shall have to express our thanks to her."
"I cannot."
His arm contracted sharply. He was obliged to be silent.
Dr Middleton, Laetitia, and the ladies Eleanor and Isabel joining them in the hall, found two figures linked together in a shadowy indication of halves that have fallen apart and hang on the last thread of junction. Willoughby retained her hand on his arm; he held to it as the symbol of their alliance, and oppressed the girl's nerves by contact, with a frame labouring for breath. De Craye looked on them from overhead. The carriages were at the door, and Willoughby said, "Where's Horace? I suppose he's taking a final shot at his Book of Anecdotes and neat collection of Irishisms."
"No," replied the colonel, descending. "That's a spring works of itself and has discovered the secret of continuous motion, more's the pity!--unless you'll be pleased to make it of use to Science."
"Your laughter, Horace, is a capital comment on your wit."
Willoughby said it with the air of one who has flicked a whip.
"'Tis a genial advertisement of a vacancy," said De Craye.
"Precisely: three parts auctioneer to one for the property."
"Oh, if you have a musical quack, score it a point in his favour, Willoughby, though you don't swallow his drug."
"If he means to be musical, let him keep time."
"Am I late?" said De Craye to the ladies, proving himself an adept in the art of being gracefully vanquished, and so winning tender hearts.
Willoughby had refreshed himself. At the back of his mind there was a suspicion his adversary would not have yielded so flatly without an assurance of practically triumphing, secretly getting the better of him; and it filled him with venom for a further bout at the next opportunity: but as he had been sarcastic and mordant, he had shown Clara what he could do in a way of speaking different from the lamentable cooing stuff, gasps and feeble protestations to which, he knew not how, she reduced him. Sharing the opinion of his race, that blunt personalities, or the pugilistic form, administered directly on the salient features, are exhibitions of mastery in such encounters, he felt strong and solid, eager for the successes of the evening. De Craye was in the first carriage as escort to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. Willoughby, with Clara, Laetitia, and Dr. Middleton, followed, all silent, for the Rev. Doctor was ostensibly pondering; and Willoughby was damped a little when he unlocked his mouth to say:
"And yet I have not observed that Colonel de Craye is anything of a Celtiberian Egnatius meriting fustigation for an untimely display of well-whitened teeth, sir: 'quicquid est, ubicunque est, quodcunque agit, renidet:':--ha? a morbus neither charming nor urbane to the general eye, however consolatory to the actor. But this gentleman does not offend so, or I am so strangely prepossessed in his favour as to be an incompetent witness."
Dr Middleton's persistent ha? eh? upon an honest frown of inquiry plucked an answer out of Willoughby that was meant to be humourously scornful, and soon became apologetic under the Doctor's interrogatively grasping gaze.
"These Irishmen," Willoughby said, "will play the professional jester as if it were an office they were born to. We must play critic now and then, otherwise we should have them deluging us with their Joe Millerisms."
"With their O'Millerisms you would say, perhaps?"
Willoughby did his duty to the joke, but the Rev. Doctor, though he wore the paternal smile of a man that has begotten hilarity, was not perfectly propitiated, and pursued: "Nor to my apprehension is 'the man's laugh the comment on his wit' unchallengeably new: instances of cousinship germane to the phrase will recur to you. But it has to be noted that it was a phrase of assault; it was ostentatiously battery; and I would venture to remind you, friend, that among the elect, considering that it is as fatally facile to spring the laugh upon a man as to deprive him of his life, considering that we have only to condescend to the weapon, and that the more popular necessarily the more murderous that weapon is,--among the elect, to which it is your distinction to aspire to belong, the rule holds to abstain from any employment of the obvious, the percoct, and likewise, for your own sake, from the epitonic, the overstrained; for if the former, by readily assimilating with the understandings of your audience, are empowered to commit assassination on your victim, the latter come under the charge of unseemliness, inasmuch as they are a description of public suicide. Assuming, then, manslaughter to be your pastime, and hari-kari not to be your bent, the phrase, to escape criminality, must rise in you as you would have it fall on him, ex improviso. Am I right?"
"I am in the habit of thinking it impossible, sir, that you can be in error," said Willoughby.
Dr Middleton left it the more emphatic by saying nothing further.
Both his daughter and Miss Dale, who had disapproved the waspish snap at Colonel De Craye, were in wonderment of the art of speech which could so soothingly inform a gentleman that his behaviour had not been gentlemanly.
Willoughby was damped by what he comprehended of it for a few minutes. In proportion as he realized an evening with his ancient admirers he was restored, and he began to marvel greatly at his folly in not giving banquets and Balls, instead of making a solitude about himself and his bride. For solitude, thought he, is good for the man, the man being a creature consumed by passion; woman's love, on the contrary, will only be nourished by the reflex light she catches of you in the eyes of others, she having no passion of own, but simply an instinct driving her to attach herself to whatsoever is most largely admired, most shining. So thinking, he determined to change his course of conduct, and he was happier. In the first gush of our wisdom drawn directly from experience there is a mental intoxication that cancels the old world and establishes a new one, not allowing us to ask whether it is too late.