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 be 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
