L?titia tried another neutral theme.
'The weather to-day suits our country,' she said.
'England, or Patterne 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 by-paths.'
'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's honest. However young you are, you cannot be deceived by it. These parks of rich people are a 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 companionable but that the haze of distance improves the view.'
'Then you do know that you are the wisest?'
L?titia 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 sombre preconception that her «jealousy» had been hinted to Miss Dale.
'You knew 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 L?titia 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 felled, 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 can not obtain the grant.'
It was lightly said, but Clara's face was more significant, and 'What?' leaped from L?titia's lips.
Before she could excuse herself, Clara had answered: 'My liberty.'
In another and higher tone L?titia said, 'What?' and she looked round on her companion; she looked in the doubt that is open to conviction by a narrow aperture, and slowly and painfully yields access. 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 your meaning.'
'You do not suspect me of trifling? You know I would not. I am as much in 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, despise us.'
'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 judgements even of the gentleman I have injured.'
'So noble a gentleman!' L?titia sighed.
'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 L?titia 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 L?titia. '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.'
L?titia pondered on an obscurity in these words which would 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 were his 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 sung a sky-lark.
'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.
L?titia 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… since this… 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 he were to give me my freedom? if he 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.'
L?titia'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 health. I am what the doctors call anaemic; 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
