to the theme, very much perplexed him. And if he mistook her not, she had just alluded to the demoniacal Constantia Durham.
It might be that he had mistaken her: he was on guard against his terrible sensitiveness. Nevertheless it was hard to account for this behaviour of a lady greatly his friend and admirer, a lady of birth. And Lady Culmer as well! — likewise a lady of birth. Were they in collusion? had they a suspicion? He turned to L?titia's face for the antidote to his pain.
'Oh, but you are not one yet, and I shall require two voices to convince me,' Lady Busshe rejoined, after another stare at the marble.
'Lady Busshe, I beg you not to think me ungrateful,' said Clara.
'Fiddle! — gratitude! it is to please your taste, to satisfy you. I care for gratitude as little as for flattery.'
'But gratitude is flattering,' said Vernon.
'Now, no metaphysics, Mr. Whitford.'
'But do care a bit for flattery, my lady,' said De Craye. ''Tis the finest of the Arts; we might call it moral sculpture. Adepts in it can cut their friends to any shape they like by practising it with the requisite skill. I myself, poor hand as I am, have made a man act Solomon by constantly praising his wisdom. He took a sagacious turn at an early period of the dose. He weighed the smallest question of his daily occasions with a deliberation truly oriental. Had I pushed it, he'd have hired a baby and a couple of mothers to squabble over the undivided morsel.'
'I shall hope for a day in London with you,' said Lady Culmer to Clara.
'You did not forget the Queen of Sheba?' said Mrs. Mountstuart to De Craye.
'With her appearance, the game has to be resigned to her entirely,' he rejoined.
'That is,' Lady Culmer continued, 'if you do not despise an old woman for your comrade on a shopping excursion.'
'Despise whom we fleece!' exclaimed Dr. Middleton. 'Oh, no, Lady Culmer, the sheep is sacred.'
'I am not so sure,' said Vernon.
'In what way, and to what extent, are you not so sure?' said Dr. Middleton.
'The natural tendency is to scorn the fleeced.'
'I stand for the contrary. Pity, if you like: particularly when they bleat.'
'This is to assume that makers of gifts are a fleeced people: I demur,' said Mrs. Mountstuart.
'Madam, we are expected to give; we are incited to give; you have dubbed it the fashion to give; and the person refusing to give, or incapable of giving, may anticipate that he will be regarded as benignly as a sheep of a drooping and flaccid wool by the farmer, who is reminded by the poor beast's appearance of a strange dog that worried the flock. Even Captain Benjamin, as you have seen, was unable to withstand the demand on him. The hymeneal pair are licensed freebooters levying blackmail on us; survivors of an uncivilized period. But in taking without mercy, I venture to trust that the manners of a happier era instruct them not to scorn us. I apprehend that Mr. Whitford has a lower order of latrons in his mind.'
'Permit me to say, sir, that you have not considered the ignoble aspect of the fleeced,' said Vernon. 'I appeal to the ladies: would they not, if they beheld an ostrich walking down a Queen's Drawing Room, clean-plucked, despise him though they were wearing his plumes?'
'An extreme supposition, indeed,' said Dr. Middleton, frowning over it; 'scarcely legitimately to be suggested.'
'I think it fair, sir, as an instance.'
'Has the circumstance occurred, I would ask?'
'In life? a thousand times.'
'I fear so,' said Mrs. Mountstuart.
Lady Busshe showed symptoms of a desire to leave a profitless table.
Vernon started up, glancing at the window.
'Did you see Crossjay?' he said to Clara.
'No; I must, if he is there,' said she.
She made her way out, Vernon after her. They both had the excuse.
'Which way did the poor boy go?' she asked him.
'I have not the slightest idea,' he replied. 'But put on your bonnet, if you would escape that pair of inquisitors.'
'Mr. Whitford, what humiliation!'
'I suspect you do not feel it the most, and the end of it can't be remote,' said he.
Thus it happened that when Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer quitted the dining-room, Miss Middleton had spirited herself away from summoning voice and messenger.
Sir Willoughby apologized for her absence. 'If I could be jealous, it would be of that boy Crossjay.'
'You are an excellent man, and the best of cousins,' was Lady Busshe's enigmatical answer.
The exceedingly lively conversation at his table was lauded by Lady Culmer.
'Though,' said she, 'what it all meant, and what was the drift of it, I couldn't tell to save my life. Is it every day the same with you here?'
'Very much.'
'How you must enjoy a spell of dulness!'
'If you said simplicity and not talking for effect! I generally cast anchor by L?titia Dale.'
'Ah!' Lady Busshe coughed. 'But the fact is, Mrs. Mountstuart is made for cleverness!'
'I think, my lady, L?titia Dale is to the full as clever as any of the stars Mrs. Mountstuart assembles, or I.'
'Talkative cleverness, I mean.'
'In conversation as well. Perhaps you have not yet given her a chance.'
'Yes, yes, she is clever, of course, poor dear. She is looking better too.'
'Handsome, I thought,' said Lady Culmer.
'She varies,' observed Sir Willoughby.
The ladies took seat in their carriage and fell at once into a close-bonnet colloquy. Not a single allusion had they made to the wedding-presents after leaving the luncheon-table. The cause of their visit was obvious.
Chapter XXXVII
Contains Clever Fencing And Intimations Of The Need For It
That woman, Lady Busshe, had predicted, after the event, Constantia Durham's defection. She had also, subsequent to Willoughby's departure on his travels, uttered sceptical things concerning his rooted attachment to L?titia Dale. In her bitter vulgarity, that beaten rival of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson for the leadership of the county had taken his nose for a melancholy prognostic of his fortunes; she had recently played on his name: she had spoken the hideous English of his fate. Little as she knew, she was alive to the worst interpretation of appearances. No other eulogy occurred to her now than to call him the best of cousins, because Vernon Whitford was housed and clothed and fed by him. She had nothing else to say for a man she thought luckless! She was a woman barren of wit, stripped of style, but she was wealthy and a gossip — a forge of showering sparks — and she carried Lady Culmer with her. The two had driven from his house to spread the malignant rumour abroad; already they blew the biting world on his raw wound. Neither of them was like Mrs. Mountstuart, a witty woman, who could be hoodwinked; they were dull women, who steadily kept on their own scent of the fact, and the only way to confound such inveterate forces was to be ahead of them, and seize and transform the expected fact, and astonish them, when they came up to him, with a totally unanticipated fact.
'You see, you were in error, ladies.'
'And so we were, Sir Willoughby, and we acknowledge it. We never could have guessed that!'
Thus the phantom couple in the future delivered themselves, as well they might at the revelation. He could run far ahead.
Ay, but to combat these dolts, facts had to be encountered, deeds done, in groaning earnest. These
