family idol.
'Willoughby,' Miss Eleanor presented herself to be stamped with the title hanging ready for the first that should open her lips, 'our Willoughby is observant — he is ever generous — and he is not less forethoughtful. His arrangement is for our good on all sides.'
'An index is enough,' said Miss Isabel, appearing in her turn the monster dupe.
'You will not have to leave, dear ladies. Were I mistress here I should oppose it.'
'Willoughby blames himself for not reassuring you before.'
'Indeed we blame ourselves for not undertaking to go.'
'Did he speak of it first this morning?' said Clara; but she could draw no reply to that from them. They resumed the duet, and she resigned herself to have her cars boxed with nonsense.
'So, it is understood?' said Miss Eleanor.
'I see your kindness, ladies.'
'And I am to be Aunt Eleanor again?'
'And I Aunt Isabel?'
Clara could have wrung her hands at the impediment which prohibited her delicacy from telling them why she could not name them so as she had done in the earlier days of Willoughby's courtship. She kissed them warmly, ashamed of kissing, though the warmth was real.
They retired with a flow of excuses to Dr. Middleton for disturbing him. He stood at the door to bow them out, and holding the door for Clara, to wind up the procession, discovered her at a far corner of the room.
He was debating upon the advisability of leaving her there, when Vernon Whitford crossed the hall from the laboratory door, a mirror of himself in his companion air of discomposure.
That was not important, so long as Vernon was a check on Clara; but the moment Clara, thus baffled, moved to quit the library, Dr. Middleton felt the horror of having an uncomfortable face opposite.
'No botheration, I hope? It's the worst thing possible to work on. Where have you been? I suspect your weak point is not to arm yourself in triple brass against bother and worry, and no good work can you do unless you do. You have come out of that laboratory.'
'I have, sir. — Can I get you any book?' Vernon said to Clara.
She thanked him, promising to depart immediately.
'Now you are at the section of Italian literature, my love,' said Dr Middleton. 'Well, Mr. Whitford, the laboratory — ah! — where the amount of labour done within the space of a year would not stretch an electric current between this Hall and the railway station: say, four miles, which I presume the distance to be. Well, sir, and a dilettantism costly in time and machinery is as ornamental as foxes' tails and deers' horns to an independent gentleman whose fellows are contented with the latter decorations for their civic wreath. Willoughby, let me remark, has recently shown himself most considerate for my girl. As far as I could gather — I have been listening to a dialogue of ladies — he is as generous as he is discreet. There are certain combats in which to be the one to succumb is to claim the honours; — and that is what women will not learn. I doubt their seeing the glory of it.'
'I have heard of it; I have been with Willoughby,' Vernon said, hastily, to shield Clara from her father's allusive attacks. He wished to convey to her that his interview with Willoughby had not been profitable in her interests, and that she had better at once, having him present to support her, pour out her whole heart to her father. But how was it to be conveyed? She would not meet his eyes, and he was too poor an intriguer to be ready on the instant to deal out the verbal obscurities which are transparencies to one.
'I shall regret it, if Willoughby has annoyed you, for he stands high in my favour,' said Dr. Middleton.
Clara dropped a book. Her father started higher than the nervous impulse warranted in his chair. Vernon tried to win a glance, and she was conscious of his effort, but her angry and guilty feelings, prompting her resolution to follow her own counsel, kept her eyelids on the defensive.
'I don't say he annoys me, sir. I am here to give him my advice, and if he does not accept it I have no right to be annoyed. Willoughby seems annoyed that Colonel De Craye should talk of going to-morrow or next day.'
'He likes his friends about him. Upon my word, a man of a more genial heart you might march a day without finding. But you have it on the forehead, Mr. Whitford.'
'Oh! no, sir.'
'There,' Dr. Middleton drew his finger along his brows.
Vernon felt along his own, and coined an excuse for their blackness; not aware that the direction of his mind toward Clara pushed him to a kind of clumsy double meaning, while he satisfied an inward and craving wrath, as he said: 'By the way, I have been racking my head; I must apply to you, sir. I have a line, and I am uncertain of the run of the line. Will this pass, do you think?
'In Asination's tongue he asinates';
signifying that he excels any man of us at donkey-dialect.'
After a decent interval for the genius of criticism to seem to have been sitting under his frown, Dr. Middleton rejoined with sober jocularity: 'No, sir, it will not pass; and your uncertainty in regard to the run of the line would only be extended were the line centipedal. Our recommendation is, that you erase it before the arrival of the ferule. This might do:
'In Assignation's name he assignats';
signifying that he pre-eminently flourishes hypothetical promises, to pay by appointment. That might pass. But you will forbear to cite me for your authority.'
'The line would be acceptable if I could get it to apply,' said Vernon.
'Or this…' Dr. Middleton was offering a second suggestion, but Clara fled, astonished at men as she never yet had been. Why, in a burning world they would be exercising their minds in absurdities! And those two were scholars, learned men! And both knew they were in the presence of a soul in a tragic fever!
A minute after she had closed the door they were deep in their work.
Dr. Middleton forgot his alternative line.
'Nothing serious?' he said in reproof of the want of honourable clearness on Vernon's brows.
'I trust not, sir; it's a case for common sense.'
'And you call that not serious?'
'I take Hermann's praise of the versus dochmiachus to be not only serious but unexaggerated,' said Vernon.
Dr. Middleton assented and entered on the voiceful ground of Greek metres, shoving your dry dusty world from his elbow.
Chapter XXV
The Flight In Wild Weather
The morning of Lucy Darleton's letter of reply to her friend Clara was fair before sunrise, with luminous colours that are an omen to the husbandman. Clara had no weather-eye for the rich Eastern crimson, nor a quiet space within her for the beauty. She looked on it as her gate of promise, and it set her throbbing with a revived belief in radiant things which she had once dreamed of to surround her life, but her accelerated pulses narrowed her thoughts upon the machinery of her project. She herself was metal, pointing all to her one aim when in motion. Nothing came amiss to it, everything was fuel; fibs, evasions, the serene battalions of white lies parallel on the march with dainty rogue falsehoods. She had delivered herself of many yesterday in her engagements for to-day. Pressure was put on her to engage herself, and she did so liberally, throwing the burden of deceitfulness on the extraordinary pressure. 'I want the early part of the morning; the rest of the day I shall be at liberty.' She said it to Willoughby, Miss Dale, Colonel De Craye, and only the third time was she aware of the delicious double meaning. Hence she associated it with the colonel.
Your loudest outcry against the wretch who breaks your rules is in asking how a tolerably conscientious person could have done this and the other besides the main offence, which you vow you could overlook but for the minor objections pertaining to conscience, the incomprehensible and abominable lies, for example, or the brazen coolness of the lying. Yet you know that we live in an undisciplined world, where in our seasons of activity we are servants of our design, and that this comes of our passions, and those of our position. Our design shapes us for the
