He bent to her gracefully.
The mild subservience flattered Clara's languor. He had not compelled her to be watchful on her guard, and she was unaware that he passed it when she acquiesced to his observation, 'An anticipatory story is a trap to the teller.'
'It is,' she said. She had been thinking as much.
He threw up his head to consult the brain comically with a dozen little blinks.
'No, you are right, Miss Middleton, inventing beforehand never prospers; 't is a way to trip our own cleverness. Truth and mother-wit are the best counsellors: and as you are the former, I'll try to act up to the character you assign me.'
Some tangle, more prospective than present, seemed to be about her as she reflected. But her intention being to speak to Willoughby without subterfuge, she was grateful to her companion for not tempting her to swerve. No one could doubt his talent for elegant fibbing, and she was in the humour both to admire and adopt the art, so she was glad to be rescued from herself. How mother-wit was to second truth she did not inquire, and as she did not happen to be thinking of Crossjay, she was not troubled by having to consider how truth and his tale of the morning would be likely to harmonize.
Driving down the park, she had full occupation in questioning whether her return would be pleasing to Vernon, who was the virtual cause of it, though he had done so little to promote it: so little that she really doubted his pleasure in seeing her return.
Chapter XXIX
In Which The Sensitiveness Of Sir Willoughby Is Explained: And He Receives Much Instructions
THE Hall-dock over the stables was then striking twelve. It was the hour for her flight to be made known, and Clara sat in a turmoil of dim apprehension that prepared her nervous frame for a painful blush on her being asked by Colonel De Craye whether she had set her watch correctly. He must, she understood, have seen through her at the breakfast table: and was she not cruelly indebted to him for her evasion of Willoughby? Such perspicacity of vision distressed and frightened her; at the same time she was obliged to acknowledge that he had not presumed on it. Her dignity was in no way the worse for him. But it had been at a man's mercy, and there was the affliction.
She jumped from the fly as if she were leaving danger behind. She could at the moment have greeted Willoughby with a conventionally friendly smile. The doors were thrown open and young Crossjay flew out to her. He hung and danced on her hand, pressed the hand to his mouth, hardly believing that he saw and touched her, and in a lingo of dashes and asterisks related how Sir Willoughby had found him under the boathouse eaves and pumped him, and had been sent off to Hoppner's farm, where there was a sick child, and on along the road to a labourer's cottage: 'For I said you're so kind to poor people, Miss Middleton; that's true, now that is true. And I said you wouldn't have me with you for fear of contagion!' This was what she had feared.
'Every crack and bang in a boys vocabulary,' remarked the colonel, listening to him after he had paid Flitch.
The latter touched his hat till he had drawn attention to himself, when he exclaimed, with rosy melancholy: 'Ah! my lady, ah! colonel, if ever I lives to drink some of the old port wine in the old Hall at Christmastide!' Their healths would on that occasion be drunk, it was implied. He threw up his eyes at the windows, humped his body and drove away.
'Then Mr. Whitford has not come back?' said Clara to Crossjay.
'No, Miss Middleton. Sir Willoughby has, and he's upstairs in his room dressing.'
'Have you seen Barclay?'
'She has just gone into the laboratory. I told her Sir Willoughby wasn't there.'
'Tell me, Crossjay, had she a letter?'
'She had something.'
'Run: say I am here; I want the letter, it is mine.'
Crossjay sprang away and plunged into the arms of Sir Willoughby.
'One has to catch the fellow like a football,' exclaimed the injured gentleman, doubled across the boy and holding him fast, that he might have an object to trifle with, to give himself countenance: he needed it. 'Clara, you have not been exposed to the weather?'
'Hardly at all.'
'I rejoice. You found shelter?'
'Yes.'
'In one of the cottages?'
'Not in a cottage; but I was perfectly sheltered. Colonel De Craye passed a fly before he met me…'
'Flitch again!' ejaculated the colonel.
'Yes, you have luck, you have luck,' Willoughby addressed him, still clutching Crossjay and treating his tugs to get loose as an invitation to caresses. But the foil barely concealed his livid perturbation.
'Stay by me, sir,' he said at last sharply to Crossjay, and Clara touched the boy's shoulder in admonishment of him.
She turned to the colonel as they stepped into the hall: 'I have not thanked you, Colonel De Craye.' She dropped her voice to its lowest: 'A letter in my handwriting in the laboratory.'
Crossjay cried aloud with pain.
'I have you!' Willoughby rallied him with a laugh not unlike the squeak of his victim.
'You squeeze awfully hard, sir.'
'Why, you milksop!'
'Am I! But I want to get a book.'
'Where is the book?'
'In the laboratory.'
Colonel De Craye, sauntering by the laboratory door, sung out: 'I'll fetch you your book. What is it? EARLY NAVIGATORS? INFANT HYMNS? I think my cigar-case is in here.'
'Barclay speaks of a letter for me,' Willoughby said to Clara, 'marked to be delivered to me at noon!'
'In case of my not being back earlier; it was written to avert anxiety,' she replied.
'You are very good.'
'Oh, good! Call me anything but good. Here are the ladies. Dear ladies!' Clara swam to meet them as they issued from a morning-room into the hall, and interjections reigned for a couple of minutes.
Willoughby relinquished his grasp of Crossjay, who darted instantaneously at an angle to the laboratory, whither he followed, and he encountered De Craye coming out, but passed him in silence.
Crossjay was rangeing and peering all over the room. Willoughby went to his desk and the battery-table and the mantelpiece. He found no letter. Barclay had undoubtedly informed him that she had left a letter for him in the laboratory, by order of her mistress after breakfast.
He hurried out and ran upstairs in time to see De Craye and Barclay breaking a conference.
He beckoned to her. The maid lengthened her upper lip and beat her dress down smooth: signs of the apprehension of a crisis and of the getting ready for action.
'My mistress's bell has just rung, Sir Willoughby.'
'You had a letter for me.'
'I said…'
'You said when I met you at the foot of the stairs that you had left a letter for me in the laboratory.'
'It is lying on my mistress's toilet-table.'
'Get it.'
Barclay swept round with another of her demure grimaces. It was apparently necessary with her that she should talk to herself in this public manner.
Willoughby waited for her; but there was no reappearance of the maid.
Struck by the ridicule of his posture of expectation, and of his whole behaviour, he went to his bedroom suite, shut himself in, and paced the chambers, amazed at the creature he had become. Agitated like the commonest of
