The unhappy gentleman ached as he talked: for with men and with hosts of women to whom he was indifferent, never did he converse in this shambling, third-rate, sheepish manner, devoid of all highness of tone and the proper precision of an authority. He was unable to fathom the cause of it, but Clara imposed it on him, and only in anger could he throw it off. The temptation to an outburst that would flatter him with the sound of his authoritative voice had to be resisted on a night when he must be composed if he intended to shine, so he merely mentioned Lady Busshe's present, to gratify spleen by preparing the ground for dissension, and prudently acquiesced in her anticipated slipperiness. She would rather not look at it now, she said.
'Not now; very well,' said he.
His immediate deference made her regretful. 'There is hardly time, Willoughby.'
'My dear, we shall have to express our thanks to her.'
'I cannot.'
His arm contracted sharply. He was obliged to be silent.
Dr Middleton, L?titia, and the ladies Eleanor and Isabel joining them in the hall, found two figures linked together in a shadowy indication of halves that have fallen apart and hang on the last thread of junction. Willoughby retained her hand on his arm; he held to it as the symbol of their alliance, and oppressed the girl's nerves by contact, with a frame labouring for breath. De Craye looked on them from overhead. The carriages were at the door, and Willoughby said, 'Where's Horace? I suppose he's taking a final shot at his Book of Anecdotes and neat collection of Irishisms.'
'No,' replied the colonel, descending. 'That's a spring works of itself and has discovered the secret of continuous motion, more's the pity! — unless you'll be pleased to make it of use to Science.'
He gave a laugh of good-humour.
'Your laughter, Horace, is a capital comment on your wit.'
Willoughby said it with the air of one who has flicked a whip.
''Tis a genial advertisement of a vacancy,' said De Craye.
'Precisely: three parts auctioneer to one for the property.'
'Oh, if you have a musical quack, score it a point in his favour, Willoughby, though you don't swallow his drug.'
'If he means to be musical, let him keep time.'
'Am I late?' said De Craye to the ladies, proving himself an adept in the art of being gracefully vanquished, and so winning tender hearts.
Willoughby had refreshed himself. At the back of his mind there was a suspicion that his adversary would not have yielded so flatly without an assurance of practically triumphing, secretly getting the better of him; and it filled him with venom for a further bout at the next opportunity: but as he had been sarcastic and mordant, he had shown Clara what he could do in a way of speaking different from the lamentable cooing stuff, gasps and feeble protestations to which, he knew not how, she reduced him. Sharing the opinion of his race, that blunt personalities, or the pugilistic form, administered directly on the salient features, are exhibitions of mastery in such encounters, he felt strong and solid, eager for the successes of the evening. De Craye was in the first carriage as escort to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. Willoughby, with Clara, L?titia, and Dr. Middleton, followed, all silent, for the Rev. Doctor was ostensibly pondering; and Willoughby was damped a little when he unlocked his mouth to say:
'And yet I have not observed that Colonel de Craye is anything of a Celtiberian Egnatius meriting fustigation for an untimely display of well-whitened teeth, sir: 'quicquid est, ubicunque est, quodcunque agit, renidet:: — ha? a morbus neither charming nor urbane to the general eye, however consolatory to the actor. But this gentleman does not offend so, or I am so strangely prepossessed in his favour as to be an incompetent witness.'
Dr Middleton's persistent ha? eh? upon an honest frown of inquiry plucked an answer out of Willoughby that was meant to be humourously scornful, and soon became apologetic under the Doctor's interrogatively grasping gaze.
'These Irishmen,' Willoughby said, 'will play the professional jester as if it were an office they were born to. We must play critic now and then, otherwise we should have them deluging us with their Joe Millerisms.'
'With their O'Millerisms you would say, perhaps?'
Willoughby did his duty to the joke, but the Rev. Doctor, though he wore the paternal smile of a man that has begotten hilarity, was not perfectly propitiated, and pursued: 'Nor to my apprehension is 'the man's laugh the comment on his wit' unchallengeably new: instances of cousinship germane to the phrase will recur to you. But it has to be noted that it was a phrase of assault; it was ostentatiously battery; and I would venture to remind you, friend, that among the elect, considering that it is as fatally facile to spring the laugh upon a man as to deprive him of his life, considering that we have only to condescend to the weapon, and that the more popular necessarily the more murderous that weapon is, — among the elect, to which it is your distinction to aspire to belong, the rule holds to abstain from any employment of the obvious, the percoct, and likewise, for your own sake, from the epitonic, the overstrained; for if the former, by readily assimilating with the understandings of your audience, are empowered to commit assassination on your victim, the latter come under the charge of unseemliness, inasmuch as they are a description of public suicide. Assuming, then, manslaughter to be your pastime, and hari-kari not to be your bent, the phrase, to escape criminality, must rise in you as you would have it fall on him, ex improviso. Am I right?'
'I am in the habit of thinking it impossible, sir, that you can be in error,' said Willoughby.
Dr Middleton left it the more emphatic by saying nothing further.
Both his daughter and Miss Dale, who had disapproved the waspish snap at Colonel De Craye, were in wonderment of the art of speech which could so soothingly inform a gentleman that his behaviour had not been gentlemanly.
Willoughby was damped by what he comprehended of it for a few minutes. In proportion as he realized an evening with his ancient admirers he was restored, and he began to marvel greatly at his folly in not giving banquets and Balls, instead of making a solitude about himself and his bride. For solitude, thought he, is good for the man, the man being a creature consumed by passion; woman's love, on the contrary, will only be nourished by the reflex light she catches of you in the eyes of others, she having no passion of her own, but simply an instinct driving her to attach herself to whatsoever is most largely admired, most shining. So thinking, he determined to change his course of conduct, and he was happier. In the first gush of our wisdom drawn directly from experience there is a mental intoxication that cancels the old world and establishes a new one, not allowing us to ask whether it is too late.
Chapter XXX
Treating Of The Dinner-Party At Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson's
Vernon and young Crossjay had tolerably steady work together for a couple of hours, varied by the arrival of a plate of meat on a tray for the master, and some interrogations put to him from time to time by the boy in reference to Miss Middleton. Crossjay made the discovery that if he abstained from alluding to Miss Middleton's beauty he might water his dusty path with her name nearly as much as he liked. Mention of her beauty incurred a reprimand. On the first occasion his master was wistful. 'Isn't she glorious!' Crossjay fancied he had started a sovereign receipt for blessed deviations. He tried it again, but paedagogue-thunder broke over his head.
'Yes, only I can't understand what she means, Mr. Whitford,' he excused himself 'First I was not to tell; I know I wasn't, because she said so; she quite as good as said so. Her last words were: 'Mind, Crossjay, you know nothing about me', when I stuck to that beast of a tramp, who's a 'walking moral, and gets money out of people by snuffling it.'
'Attend to your lesson, or you'll be one,' said Vernon.
'Yes, but, Mr. Whitford, now I am to tell. I'm to answer straight out to every question.'
'Miss Middleton is anxious that you should be truthful.'
'Yes; but in the morning she told me not to tell.'
'She was in a hurry. She has it on her conscience that you may have misunderstood her, and she wishes you never to be guilty of an untruth, least of all on her account.'
Crossjay committed an unspoken resolution to the air in a violent sigh: 'Ah!' and said: 'If I were sure!'
