The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative

the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. Clara and young Crossjay strayed.

'If I might advise, I would say, do not leave the Hall immediately, not yet,' L?titia said to Vernon.

'You know, then?'

'I cannot understand why it was that I was taken into her confidence.'

'I counselled it.'

'But it was done without an object that I can see.'

'The speaking did her good.'

'But how capricious! how changeful!'

'Better now than later.'

'Surely she has only to ask to be released? — to ask earnestly: if it is her wish.'

'You are mistaken.'

'Why does she not make a confidant of her father?'

'That she will have to do. She wished to spare him.'

'He cannot be spared if she is to break the engagement.'

She thought of sparing him the annoyance. 'Now there's to be a tussle, he must share in it.'

'Or she thought he might not side with her?'

'She has not a single instinct of cunning. You judge her harshly.'

'She moved me on the walk out. Coming home I felt differently.'

Vernon glanced at Colonel De Craye.

'She wants good guidance,' continued L?titia.

'She has not an idea of treachery.'

'You think so? It may be true. But she seems one born devoid of patience, easily made reckless. There is a wildness… I judge by her way of speaking; that at least appeared sincere. She does not practise concealment. He will naturally find it almost incredible. The change in her, so sudden, so wayward, is unintelligible to me. To me it is the conduct of a creature untamed. He may hold her to her word and be justified.'

'Let him look out if he does!'

'Is not that harsher than anything I have said of her?'

'I'm not appointed to praise her. I fancy I read the case; and it's a case of opposition of temperaments. We never can tell the person quite suited to us; it strikes us in a flash.'

'That they are not suited to us? Oh, no; that comes by degrees.'

'Yes, but the accumulation of evidence, or sentience, if you like, is combustible; we don't command the spark; it may be late in falling. And you argue in her favour. Consider her as a generous and impulsive girl, outwearied at last.'

'By what?'

'By anything; by his loftiness, if you like. He flies too high for her, we will say.'

'Sir Willoughby an eagle?'

'She may be tired of his eyrie.'

The sound of the word in Vernon's mouth smote on a consciousness she had of his full grasp of Sir Willoughby and her own timid knowledge, though he was not a man who played on words.

If he had eased his heart in stressing the first syllable, it was only temporary relief. He was heavy-browed enough.

'But I cannot conceive what she expects me to do by confiding her sense of her position to me,' said L?titia.

'We none of us know what will be done. We hang on Willoughby, who hangs on whatever it is that supports him: and there we are in a swarm.'

'You see the wisdom of staying, Mr. Whitford.'

'It must be over in a day or two. Yes, I stay.'

'She inclines to obey you.'

'I should be sorry to stake my authority on her obedience. We must decide something about Crossjay, and get the money for his crammer, if it is to be got. If not, I may get a man to trust me. I mean to drag the boy away. Willoughby has been at him with the tune of gentleman, and has laid hold of him by one ear. When I say 'her obedience, she is not in a situation, nor in a condition to be led blindly by anybody. She must rely on herself, do everything herself. It's a knot that won't bear touching by any hand save hers.'

'I fear…' said L?titia.

'Have no such fear.'

'If it should come to his positively refusing.'

'He faces the consequences.'

'You do not think of her.'

Vernon looked at his companion.

Chapter XIX Colonel De Craye And Clara Middleton

MISS MIDDLETON finished her stroll with Crossjay by winding her trailer of ivy in a wreath round his hat and sticking her bunch of grasses in the wreath. She then commanded him to sit on the ground beside a big rhododendron, there to await her return. Crossjay had informed her of a design he entertained to be off with a horde of boys nesting in high trees, and marking spots where wasps and hornets were to be attacked in Autumn: she thought it a dangerous business, and as the boy's dinner-bell had very little restraint over him when he was in the flush of a scheme of this description, she wished to make tolerably sure of him through the charm she not unreadily believed she could fling on lads of his age. 'Promise me you will not move from here until I come back, and when I come I will give you a kiss.' Crossjay promised. She left him and forgot him.

Seeing by her watch fifteen minutes to the ringing of the bell, a sudden resolve that she would speak to her father without another minute's delay had prompted her like a superstitious impulse to abandon her aimless course and be direct. She knew what was good for her; she knew it now more clearly than in the morning. To be taken away instantly! was her cry. There could be no further doubt. Had there been any before? But she would not in the morning have suspected herself of a capacity for evil, and of a pressing need to be saved from herself. She was not pure of nature: it may be that we breed saintly souls which are: she was pure of will: fire rather than ice. And in beginning to see the elements she was made of she did not shuffle them to a heap with her sweet looks to front her. She put to her account some strength, much weakness; she almost dared to gaze unblinking at a perilous evil tendency. The glimpse of it drove her to her father.

'He must take me away at once; to-morrow!'

She wished to spare her father. So unsparing of herself was she, that, in her hesitation to speak to him of her change of feeling for Sir Willoughby, she would not suffer it to be attributed in her own mind to a daughter's anxious consideration about her father's loneliness; an idea she had indulged formerly. Acknowledging that it was imperative she should speak, she understood that she had refrained, even to the inflicting upon herself of such humiliation as to run dilating on her woes to others, because of the silliest of human desires to preserve her reputation for consistency. She had heard women abused for shallowness and flightiness: she had heard her father denounce them as veering weather-vanes, and his oft-repeated quid femina possit: for her sex's sake, and also to appear an exception to her sex, this reasoning creature desired to be thought consistent.

Just on the instant of her addressing him, saying: 'Father,' a note of seriousness in his ear, it struck her that the occasion for saying all had not yet arrived, and she quickly interposed: «Papa»; and helped him to look lighter. The petition to be taken away was uttered.

'To London?' said Dr. Middleton. 'I don't know who'll take us in.'

'To France, papa?'

'That means hotel-life.'

'Only for two or three weeks.'

'Weeks! I am under an engagement to dine with Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson five days hence: that is, on