"It is not that."
"Name it; for you see your power. Would you have me kneel to you, madam?"
"Oh, no; it would complete my grief."
"You feel grief? Then you believe in my affection, and you hurl it away. I have no doubt that as a poetess you would say, love is eternal. And you have loved me. And you tell me you love me no more. You are not very logical, Laetitia Dale."
"Poetesses rarely are: if I am one, which I little pretend to be for writing silly verses. I have passed out of that delusion, with the rest."
"You shall not wrong those dear old days, Laetitia. I see them now; when I rode by your cottage and you were at your window, pen in hand, your hair straying over your forehead. Romantic, yes; not foolish. Why were you foolish in thinking of me? Some day I will commission an artist to paint me that portrait of you from my description. And I remember when we first whispered . . . I remember your trembling. You have forgotten—I remember. I remember our meeting in the park on the path to church. I remember the heavenly morning of my return from my travels, and the same Laetitia meeting me, stedfast and unchangeable. Could I ever forget? Those are ineradicable scenes; pictures of my youth, interwound with me. I may say, that as I recede from them, I dwell on them the more. Tell me, Laetitia, was there not a certain prophecy of your father's concerning us two? I fancy I heard of one. There was one."
"He was an invalid. Elderly people nurse illusions."
"Ask yourself Laetitia, who is the obstacle to the fulfilment of his prediction?—truth, if ever a truth was foreseen on earth. You have not changed so far that you would feel no pleasure in gratifying him? I go to him to-morrow morning with the first light."
"You will compel me to follow, and undeceive him."
"Do so, and I denounce an unworthy affection you are ashamed to avow."
"That would be idle, though it would be base."
"Proof of love, then! For no one but you should it be done, and no one but you dare accuse me of a baseness."
"Sir Willoughby, you will let my father die in peace."
"He and I together will contrive to persuade you."
"You tempt me to imagine that you want a wife at any cost."
"You, Laetitia, you."
"I am tired," she said. "It is late, I would rather not hear more. I am sorry if I have caused you pain. I suppose you to have spoken with candour. I defend neither my sex nor myself. I can only say I am a woman as good as dead: happy to be made happy in my way, but so little alive that I cannot realize any other way. As for love, I am thankful to have broken a spell. You have a younger woman in your mind; I am an old one: I have no ambition and no warmth. My utmost prayer is to float on the stream—a purely physical desire of life: I have no strength to swim. Such a woman is not the wife for you, Sir Willoughby. Good night."
"One final word. Weigh it. Express no conventional regrets. Resolutely you refuse?"
"Resolutely I do."
"You refuse?"
"Yes."
"I have sacrificed my pride for nothing! You refuse?"
"Yes."
"Humbled myself! And this is the answer! You do refuse?"
"I do."
"Good night, Laetitia Dale."
He gave her passage.
"Good night, Sir Willoughby."
"I am in your power," he said, in a voice between supplication and menace that laid a claw on her, and she turned and replied:
"You will not be betrayed."
"I can trust you . . . ?"
"I go home to-morrow before breakfast."
"Permit me to escort you upstairs."
"If you please: but I see no one here either to-night or tomorrow."
"It is for the privilege of seeing the last of you."
They withdrew.
Young Crossjay listened to the drumming of his head. Somewhere in or over the cavity a drummer rattled tremendously.
Sir Willoughby's laboratory door shut with a slam.
Crossjay tumbled himself off the ottoman. He stole up to the unclosed drawing-room door, and peeped. Never was a boy more thoroughly awakened. His object was to get out of the house and go through the night avoiding everything human, for he was big with information of a character that he knew to be of the nature of gunpowder, and he feared to explode. He crossed the hall. In the passage to the scullery he ran against Colonel De Craye.
"So there you are," said the colonel, "I've been hunting you."
Crossjay related that his bedroom door was locked and the key gone, andSir Willoughby sitting up in the laboratory.
Colonel De Craye took the boy to his own room, where Crossjay lay on a sofa, comfortably covered over and snug in a swelling pillow; but he was restless; he wanted to speak, to bellow, to cry; and he bounced round to his left side, and bounced to his right, not knowing what to think, except that there was treason to his adored Miss Middleton.
"Why, my lad, you're not half a campaigner," the colonel called out to him; attributing his uneasiness to the material discomfort of the sofa: and Crossjay had to swallow the taunt, bitter though it was. A dim sentiment of impropriety in unburdening his overcharged mind on the subject of Miss Middleton to Colonel De Craye restrained him from defending himself; and so he heaved and tossed about till daybreak. At an early hour, while his hospitable friend, who looked very handsome in profile half breast and head above the sheets, continued to slumber, Crossjay was on his legs and away. "He says I'm not half a campaigner, and a couple of hours of bed are enough for me," the boy thought proudly, and snuffed the springing air of the young sun on the fields. A glance back at Patterne Hall dismayed him, for he knew not how to act, and he was immoderately combustible, too full of knowledge for self-containment; much too zealously excited on behalf of his dear Miss Middleton to keep silent for many hours of the day.
When Master Crossjay tumbled down the stairs, Laetitia was in Clara's room, speculating on the various mishaps which might have befallen that battered youngster; and Clara listened anxiously after Laetitia had run out, until she heard Sir Willoughby's voice; which in some way satisfied her that the boy was not in the house.
She waited, expecting Miss Dale to return; then undressed, went to bed, tried to sleep. She was tired of strife. Strange thoughts for a young head shot through her: as, that it is possible for the sense of duty to counteract distaste; and that one may live a life apart from one's admirations and dislikes: she owned the singular strength of Sir Willoughby in outwearying: she asked herself how much she had gained by struggling:—every effort seemed to expend her spirit's force, and rendered her less able to get the clear vision of her prospects, as though it had sunk her deeper: the contrary of her intention to make each further step confirm her liberty. Looking back, she marvelled at the things she had done. Looking round, how ineffectual they appeared! She had still the great scene of positive rebellion to go through with her father.
The anticipation of that was the cause of her extreme discouragement. He had not spoken to her since he became aware of her attempted flight: but the scene was coming; and besides the wish not to inflict it on him, as well as to escape it herself, the girl's peculiar unhappiness lay in her knowledge that they were alienated and stood opposed, owing to one among the more perplexing masculine weaknesses, which she could not hint at, dared barely think of, and would not name in her meditations. Diverting to other subjects, she allowed herself to exclaim, "Wine, wine!" in renewed wonder of what there could be in wine to entrap venerable men and obscure their judgements. She was too young to consider that her being very much in the wrong gave all the importance to the cordial glass in a venerable gentleman's appreciation of his dues. Why should he fly from a priceless wine to gratify the caprices of a fantastical child guilty of seeking to commit a breach of faith? He harped on those words. Her fault was grave. No doubt the wine coloured it to him, as a drop or two will do in any cup: still her fault was grave.
She was too young for such considerations. She was ready to expatiate on the gravity of her fault, so long as the humiliation assisted to her disentanglement: her snared nature in the toils would not permit her to reflect on it further. She had never accurately perceived it: for the reason perhaps that Willoughby had not been moving in his appeals: but, admitting the charge of waywardness, she had come to terms with conscience, upon the understanding that she was to perceive it and regret it and do penance for it by-and-by:—by renouncing marriage altogether? How light a penance!
In the morning, she went to Laetitia's room, knocked, and had no answer.
She was informed at the breakfast-table of Miss Dale's departure. The ladies Eleanor and Isabel feared it to be a case of urgency at the cottage. No one had seen Vernon, and Clara requested Colonel De Craye to walk over to the cottage for news of Crossjay. He accepted the commission, simply to obey and be in her service: assuring her, however, that there was no need to be disturbed about the boy. He would have told her more, had not Dr. Middleton led her out.
Sir Willoughby marked a lapse of ten minutes by his watch. His excellent aunts had ventured a comment on his appearance that frightened him lest he himself should be the person to betray his astounding discomfiture. He regarded his conduct as an act of madness, and Laetitia's as no less that of a madwoman—happily mad! Very happily mad indeed! Her rejection of his ridiculously generous proposal seemed to show an intervening hand in his favour, that sent her distraught at the right moment. He entirely trusted her to be discreet; but she was a miserable creature, who had lost the one last chance offered her by Providence, and furnished him with a signal instance of the mediocrity of woman's love.
Time was flying. In a little while Mrs. Mountstuart would arrive. He could not fence her without a design in his head; he was destitute of an armoury if he had no scheme: he racked the brain only to succeed in rousing phantasmal vapours. Her infernal "Twice!" would cease now to apply to Laetitia; it would be an echo of Lady Busshe. Nay, were all in the secret, Thrice jilted! might become the universal roar. And this, he reflected bitterly, of a man whom nothing but duty to his line had arrested from being the most mischievous of his class with women! Such is our reward for uprightness!
At the expiration of fifteen minutes by his watch, he struck a knuckle on the library door. Dr. Middleton held it open to him.
"You are disengaged, sir?"
"The sermon is upon the paragraph which is toned to awaken the clerk," replied the Rev. Doctor.
Clara was weeping.
Sir Willoughby drew near her solicitously.
Dr Middleton's mane of silvery hair was in a state bearing witness to the vehemence of the sermon, and Willoughby said: "I hope, sir, you have not made too much of a trifle."
"I believe, sir, that I have produced an effect, and that was the point in contemplation."
"Clara! my dear Clara!" Willoughby touched her.
"She sincerely repents her conduct, I may inform you," said Dr.Middleton.
"My love!" Willoughby whispered. "We have had a misunderstanding. I am at a loss to discover where I have been guilty, but I take the blame, all the blame. I implore you not to weep. Do me the favour to look at me. I would not have had you subjected to any interrogation whatever."
"You are not to blame," Clara said on a sob.
"Undoubtedly Willoughby is not to blame. It was not he who was bound on a runaway errand in flagrant breach of duty and decorum, nor he who inflicted a catarrh on a brother of my craft and cloth," said her father.
"The clerk, sir, has pronounced Amen," observed Willoughby.
"And no man is happier to hear an ejaculation that he has laboured for with so much sweat of his brow than the parson, I can assure you," Dr. Middleton mildly groaned. "I have notions of the trouble of Abraham. A sermon of that description is an immolation of the parent, however it may go with the child."
Willoughby soothed his Clara.
"I wish I had been here to share it. I might have saved you some tears. I may have been hasty in our little dissensions. I will acknowledge that I have been. My temper is often irascible."
"And so is mine!" exclaimed Dr. Middleton. "And yet I am not aware that I made the worse husband for it. Nor do I rightly comprehend how a probably justly excitable temper can stand for a plea in mitigation of an attempt at an outrageous breach of faith."
"The sermon is over, sir."
"Reverberations!" the Rev. Doctor waved his arm placably. "Take it for thunder heard remote."
"Your hand, my love," Willoughby murmured.
The hand was not put forth.
Dr. Middleton remarked the fact. He walked to the window, and perceiving the pair in the same position when he faced about, he delivered a cough of admonition.
"It is cruel!" said Clara.
"That the owner of your hand should petition you for it?" inquired her father.
She sought refuge in a fit of tears.
Willoughby bent above her, mute.
"Is a scene that is hardly conceivable as a parent's obligation once in a lustrum, to be repeated within the half hour?" shouted her father.
She drew up her shoulders and shook; let them fall and dropped her head.
"My dearest! your hand!" fluted Willoughby.
The hand surrendered; it was much like the icicle of a sudden thaw.
Willoughby squeezed it to his ribs.
Dr. Middleton marched up and down the room with his arms locked behind him. The silence between the young people seemed to denounce his presence.
He said, cordially: "Old Hiems has but to withdraw for buds to burst. 'Jam ver egelidos refert tepores.' The equinoctial fury departs. I will leave you for a term."
Clara and Willoughby simultaneously raised their faces with opposing expressions.
"My girl!" Her father stood by her, laying gentle hand on her.
"Yes, papa, I will come out to you," she replied to his apology for the rather heavy weight of his vocabulary, and smiled.
"No, sir, I beg you will remain," said Willoughby.
"I keep you frost-bound."
Clara did not deny it.
Willoughby emphatically did.
Then which of them was the more lover-like? Dr. Middleton would for the moment have supposed his daughter.
Clara said: "Shall you be on the lawn, papa?"
Willoughby interposed. "Stay, sir; give us your blessing."
"That you have." Dr. Middleton hastily motioned the paternal ceremony in outline.
"A few minutes, papa," said Clara.
"Will she name the day?" came eagerly from Willoughby.
"I cannot!" Clara cried in extremity.
"The day is important on its arrival," said her father; "but I apprehend the decision to be of the chief importance at present. First prime your piece of artillery, my friend."
"The decision is taken, sir."
"Then I will be out of the way of the firing. Hit what day you please."
Clara checked herself on an impetuous exclamation. It was done that her father might not be detained.
Her astute self-compression sharpened Willoughby as much as it mortified and terrified him. He understood how he would stand in an instant were Dr. Middleton absent. Her father was the tribunal she dreaded, and affairs must be settled and made irrevocable while he was with them. To sting the blood of the girl, he called her his darling, and half enwound her, shadowing forth a salute.
She strung her body to submit, seeing her father take it as a signal for his immediate retirement.
Willoughby was upon him before he reached the door.
"Hear us out, sir. Do not go. Stay, at my entreaty. I fear we have not come to a perfect reconcilement."
"If that is your opinion," said Clara, "it is good reason for not distressing my father."
"Dr Middleton, I love your daughter. I wooed her and won her; I had your consent to our union, and I was the happiest of mankind. In some way, since her coming to my house, I know not how—she will not tell me, or cannot—I offended. One may be innocent and offend. I have never pretended to impeccability, which is an admission that I may very naturally offend. My appeal to her is for an explanation or for pardon. I obtain neither. Had our positions been reversed, oh, not for any real offence—not for the worst that can be imagined—I think not—I hope not—could I have been tempted to propose the dissolution of our engagement. To love is to love, with me; an engagement a solemn bond. With all my errors I have that merit of utter fidelity—to the world laughable! I confess to a multitude of errors; I have that single merit, and am not the more estimable in your daughter's eyes on account of it, I fear. In plain words, I am, I do not doubt, one of the fools among men; of the description of human dog commonly known as faithful—whose destiny is that of a tribe. A man who cries out when he is hurt is absurd, and I am not asking for sympathy. Call me luckless. But I abhor a breach of faith. A broken pledge is hateful to me. I should regard it myself as a form of suicide. There are principles which civilized men must contend for. Our social fabric is based on them. As my word stands for me, I hold others to theirs. If that is not done, the world is more or less a carnival of counterfeits. In this instance—Ah! Clara, my love! and you have principles: you have inherited, you have been indoctrinated with them: have I, then, in my ignorance, offended past penitence, that you, of all women? . . . And without being able to name my sin!—Not only for what I lose by it, but in the abstract, judicially—apart from the sentiment of personal interest, grief, pain, and the possibility of my having to endure that which no temptation would induce me to commit:—judicially;—I fear, sir, I am a poor forensic orator . . ."
"The situation, sir, does not demand a Cicero: proceed," said Dr. Middleton, balked in his approving nods at the right true things delivered.
"Judicially, I am bold to say, though it may appear a presumption in one suffering acutely, I abhor a breach of faith."
Dr. Middleton brought his nod down low upon the phrase he had anticipated. "And I," said he, "personally, and presently, abhor a breach of faith. Judicially? Judicially to examine, judicially to condemn: but does the judicial mind detest? I think, sir, we are not on the bench when we say that we abhor: we have unseated ourselves. Yet our abhorrence of bad conduct is very certain. You would signify, impersonally: which suffices for this exposition of your feelings."
He peered at the gentleman under his brows, and resumed:
"She has had it, Willoughby; she has had it in plain Saxon and in uncompromising Olympian. There is, I conceive, no necessity to revert to it."
"Pardon me, sir, but I am still unforgiven."
"You must babble out the rest between you. I am about as much at home as a turkey with a pair of pigeons."
"Leave us, father," said Clara.
"First join our hands, and let me give you that title, sir."
"Reach the good man your hand, my girl; forthright, from the shoulder, like a brave boxer. Humour a lover. He asks for his own."
"It is more than I can do, father."
"How, it is more than you can do? You are engaged to him, a plighted woman."
"I do not wish to marry."
"The apology is inadequate."
"I am unworthy. . ."
"Chatter! chatter!"
"I beg him to release me."
"Lunacy!"
"I have no love to give him."
"Have you gone back to your cradle, Clara Middleton?"
"Oh, leave us, dear father!"
"My offence, Clara, my offence! What is it? Will you only name it?"
"Father, will you leave us? We can better speak together . . ."
"We have spoken, Clara, how often!" Willoughby resumed, "with what result?—that you loved me, that you have ceased to love me: that your heart was mine, that you have withdrawn it, plucked it from me: that you request me to consent to a sacrifice involving my reputation, my life. And what have I done? I am the same, unchangeable. I loved and love you: my heart was yours, and is, and will be yours forever. You are my affianced—that is, my wife. What have I done?"
"It is indeed useless," Clara sighed.
"Not useless, my girl, that you should inform this gentleman, your affianced husband, of the ground of the objection you conceived against him."
"I cannot say."
"Do you know?"
"If I could name it, I could hope to overcome it."
Dr. Middleton addressed Sir Willoughby.
"I verily believe we are directing the girl to dissect a caprice. Such things are seen large by these young people, but as they have neither organs, nor arteries, nor brains, nor membranes, dissection and inspection will be alike profitlessly practised. Your inquiry is natural for a lover, whose passion to enter into relations with the sex is ordinarily in proportion to his ignorance of the stuff composing them. At a particular age they traffic in whims: which are, I presume, the spiritual of hysterics; and are indubitably preferable, so long as they are not pushed too far. Examples are not wanting to prove that a flighty initiative on the part of the male is a handsome corrective. In that case, we should probably have had the roof off the house, and the girl now at your feet. Ha!"
"Despise me, father. I am punished for ever thinking myself the superior of any woman," said Clara.
"Your hand out to him, my dear, since he is for a formal reconciliation; and I can't wonder."
"Father! I have said I do not . . . I have said I cannot . . ."
"By the most merciful! what? what? the name for it, words for it!"
"Do not frown on me, father. I wish him happiness. I cannot marry him.I do not love him."
"You will remember that you informed me aforetime that you did love him."
"I was ignorant . . . I did not know myself. I wish him to be happy."
"You deny him the happiness you wish him!"
"It would not be for his happiness were I to wed him."
"Oh!" burst from Willoughby.
"You hear him. He rejects your prediction, Clara Middleton." She caught her clasped hands up to her throat. "Wretched, wretched, both!"
"And you have not a word against him, miserable girl."
"Miserable! I am."
"It is the cry of an animal!"
"Yes, father."
"You feel like one? Your behaviour is of that shape. You have not a word?"
"Against myself, not against him."
"And I, when you speak so generously, am to yield you? give you up?" cried Willoughby. "Ah! my love, my Clara, impose what you will on me; not that. It is too much for man. It is, I swear it, beyond my strength."
"Pursue, continue the strain; 'tis in the right key," said Dr.Middleton, departing.
Willoughby wheeled and waylaid him with a bound.
"Plead for me, sir; you are all-powerful. Let her be mine, she shall be happy, or I will perish for it. I will call it on my head.—Impossible! I cannot lose her. Lose you, my love? it would be to strip myself of every blessing of body and soul. It would be to deny myself possession of grace, beauty, wit, all the incomparable charms of loveliness of mind and person in woman, and plant myself in a desert. You are my mate, the sum of everything I call mine. Clara, I should be less than man to submit to such a loss. Consent to it? But I love you! I worship you! How can I consent to lose you . . . ?"
He saw the eyes of the desperately wily young woman slink sideways. Dr.Middleton was pacing at ever shorter lengths closer by the door.
"You hate me?" Willoughby sunk his voice.
"If it should turn to hate!" she murmured.
"Hatred of your husband?"
"I could not promise," she murmured, more softly in her wiliness.
"Hatred?" he cried aloud, and Dr. Middleton stopped in his walk and flung up his head: "Hatred of your husband? of the man you have vowed to love and honour? Oh, no! Once mine, it is not to be feared. I trust to my knowledge of your nature; I trust in your blood, I trust in your education. Had I nothing else to inspire confidence, I could trust in your eyes. And, Clara, take the confession: I would rather be hated than lose you. For if I lose you, you are in another world, out of this one holding me in its death-like cold; but if you hate me we are together, we are still together. Any alliance, any, in preference to separation!"
Clara listened with critical ear. His language and tone were new; and comprehending that they were in part addressed to her father, whose phrase: "A breach of faith": he had so cunningly used, disdain of the actor prompted the extreme blunder of her saying—frigidly though she said it:
"You have not talked to me in this way before."
"Finally," remarked her father, summing up the situation to settle it from that little speech, "he talks to you in this way now; and you are under my injunction to stretch your hand out to him for a symbol of union, or to state your objection to that course. He, by your admission, is at the terminus, and there, failing the why not, must you join him."
Her head whirled. She had been severely flagellated and weakened previous to Willoughby's entrance. Language to express her peculiar repulsion eluded her. She formed the words, and perceived that they would not stand to bear a breath from her father. She perceived too that Willoughby was as ready with his agony of supplication as she with hers. If she had tears for a resource, he had gestures quite as eloquent; and a cry of her loathing of the union would fetch a countervailing torrent of the man's love.—What could she say? he is an Egoist? The epithet has no meaning in such a scene. Invent! shrieked the hundred-voiced instinct of dislike within her, and alone with her father, alone with Willoughby, she could have invented some equivalent, to do her heart justice for the injury it sustained in her being unable to name the true and immense objection: but the pair in presence paralyzed her. She dramatized them each springing forward by turns, with crushing rejoinders. The activity of her mind revelled in giving them a tongue, but would not do it for herself. Then ensued the inevitable consequence of an incapacity to speak at the heart's urgent dictate: heart and mind became divided. One throbbed hotly, the other hung aloof, and mentally, while the sick inarticulate heart kept clamouring, she answered it with all that she imagined for those two men to say. And she dropped poison on it to still its reproaches: bidding herself remember her fatal postponements in order to preserve the seeming of consistency before her father; calling it hypocrite; asking herself, what was she! who loved her! And thus beating down her heart, she completed the mischief with a piercing view of the foundation of her father's advocacy of Willoughby, and more lamentably asked herself what her value was, if she stood bereft of respect for her father.
Reason, on the other hand, was animated by her better nature to plead his case against her: she clung to her respect for him, and felt herself drowning with it: and she echoed Willoughby consciously, doubling her horror with the consciousness, in crying out on a world where the most sacred feelings are subject to such lapses. It doubled her horror, that she should echo the man: but it proved that she was no better than be: only some years younger. Those years would soon be outlived: after which, he and she would be of a pattern. She was unloved: she did no harm to any one by keeping her word to this man; she had pledged it, and it would be a breach of faith not to keep it. No one loved her. Behold the quality of her father's love! To give him happiness was now the principal aim for her, her own happiness being decently buried; and here he was happy: why should she be the cause of his going and losing the poor pleasure he so much enjoyed?
The idea of her devotedness flattered her feebleness. She betrayed signs of hesitation; and in hesitating, she looked away from a look at Willoughby, thinking (so much against her nature was it to resign herself to him) that it would not have been so difficult with an ill-favoured man. With one horribly ugly, it would have been a horrible exultation to cast off her youth and take the fiendish leap.
Unfortunately for Sir Willoughby, he had his reasons for pressing impatience; and seeing her deliberate, seeing her hasty look at his fine figure, his opinion of himself combined with his recollection of a particular maxim of the Great Book to assure him that her resistance was over: chiefly owing, as he supposed, to his physical perfections.
Frequently indeed, in the contest between gentlemen and ladies, have the maxims of the Book stimulated the assailant to victory. They are rosy with blood of victims. To bear them is to hear a horn that blows the mort: has blown it a thousand times. It is good to remember how often they have succeeded, when, for the benefit of some future Lady Vauban, who may bestir her wits to gather maxims for the inspiriting of the Defence, the circumstance of a failure has to be recorded.
Willoughby could not wait for the melting of the snows. He saw full surely the dissolving process; and sincerely admiring and coveting her as he did, rashly this ill-fated gentleman attempted to precipitate it, and so doing arrested.
Whence might we draw a note upon yonder maxim, in words akin to these:Make certain ere a breath come from thee that thou be not a frost.
"Mine! She is mine!" he cried: "mine once more! mine utterly! mine eternally!" and he followed up his devouring exclamations in person as she, less decidedly, retreated. She retreated as young ladies should ever do, two or three steps, and he would not notice that she had become an angry Dian, all arrows: her maidenliness in surrendering pleased him. Grasping one fair hand, he just allowed her to edge on the outer circle of his embrace, crying: "Not a syllable of what I have gone through! You shall not have to explain it, my Clara. I will study you more diligently, to be guided by you, my darling. If I offend again, my wife will not find it hard to speak what my bride withheld—I do not ask why: perhaps not able to weigh the effect of her reticence: not at that time, when she was younger and less experienced, estimating the sacredness of a plighted engagement. It is past, we are one, my dear sir and father. You may leave us now."
"I profoundly rejoice to hear that I may," said Dr. Middleton. Clara writhed her captured hand.
"No, papa, stay. It is an error, an error. You must not leave me. Do not think me utterly, eternally, belonging to any one but you. No one shall say I am his but you."
"Are you quicksands, Clara Middleton, that nothing can be built on you?Whither is a flighty head and a shifty will carrying the girl?"
"Clara and I, sir," said Willoughby.
"And so you shall," said the Doctor, turning about.
"Not yet, papa:" Clara sprang to him.
"Why, you, you, you, it was you who craved to be alone with Willoughby!" her father shouted; "and here we are rounded to our starting-point, with the solitary difference that now you do not want to be alone with Willoughby. First I am bidden go; next I am pulled back; and judging by collar and coat-tag, I suspect you to be a young woman to wear an angel's temper threadbare before you determine upon which one of the tides driving him to and fro you intend to launch on yourself, Where is your mind?"
Clara smoothed her forehead.
"I wish to please you, papa."
"I request you to please the gentleman who is your appointed husband."
"I am anxious to perform my duty."
"That should be a satisfactory basis for you, Willoughby; as girls go!"
"Let me, sir, simply entreat to have her hand in mine before you."
"Why not, Clara?"
"Why an empty ceremony, papa?"
"The implication is, that she is prepared for the important one, friendWilloughby."
"Her hand, sir; the reassurance of her hand in mine under your eyes:—after all that I have suffered, I claim it, I think I claim it reasonably, to restore me to confidence."
"Quite reasonably; which is not to say, necessarily; but, I will add, justifiably; and it may be, sagaciously, when dealing with the volatile."
"And here," said Willoughby, "is my hand."
Clara recoiled.
He stepped on. Her father frowned. She lifted both her hands from the shrinking elbows, darted a look of repulsion at her pursuer, and ran to her father, crying: "Call it my mood! I am volatile, capricious, flighty, very foolish. But you see that I attach a real meaning to it, and feel it to be binding: I cannot think it an empty ceremony, if it is before you. Yes, only be a little considerate to your moody girl. She will be in a fitter state in a few hours. Spare me this moment; I must collect myself. I thought I was free; I thought he would not press me. If I give my hand hurriedly now, I shall, I know, immediately repent it. There is the picture of me! But, papa, I mean to try to be above that, and if I go and walk by myself, I shall grow calm to perceive where my duty lies . . ."
"In which direction shall you walk?" said Willoughby.
"Wisdom is not upon a particular road," said Dr. Middleton.
"I have a dread, sir, of that one which leads to the railway-station."
"With some justice!" Dr. Middleton sighed over his daughter.
Clara coloured to deep crimson: but she was beyond anger, and was rather gratified by an offence coming from Willoughby.
"I will promise not to leave his grounds, papa."
"My child, you have threatened to be a breaker of promises."
"Oh!" she wailed. "But I will make it a vow to you."
"Why not make it a vow to me this moment, for this gentleman's contentment, that he shall be your husband within a given period?"
"I will come to you voluntarily. I burn to be alone."
"I shall lose her," exclaimed Willoughby, in heartfelt earnest.
"How so?" said Dr. Middleton. "I have her, sir, if you will favour me by continuing in abeyance.—You will come within an hour voluntarily, Clara; and you will either at once yield your hand to him or you will furnish reasons, and they must be good ones, for withholding it."
"Yes, papa."
"You will?"
"I will."
"Mind, I say reasons."
"Reasons, papa. If I have none . . ."
"If you have none that are to my satisfaction, you implicitly and instantly, and cordially obey my command."
"I will obey."
"What more would you require?" Dr. Middleton bowed to Sir Willoughby in triumph.
"Will she. . ."
"Sir! Sir!"
"She is your daughter, sir. I am satisfied."
"She has perchance wrestled with her engagement, as the aboriginals of a land newly discovered by a crew of adventurous colonists do battle with the garments imposed on them by our considerate civilization;—ultimately to rejoice with excessive dignity in the wearing of a battered cocked-hat and trowsers not extending to the shanks: but she did not break her engagement, sir; and we will anticipate that, moderating a young woman's native wildness, she may, after the manner of my comparison, take a similar pride in her fortune in good season."
Willoughby had not leisure to sound the depth of Dr. Middleton's compliment. He had seen Clara gliding out of the room during the delivery; and his fear returned on him that, not being won, she was lost.
"She has gone." Her father noticed her absence. "She does not waste time in her mission to procure that astonishing product of a shallow soil, her reasons; if such be the object of her search. But no: it signifies that she deems herself to have need of composure—nothing more. No one likes to be turned about; we like to turn ourselves about; and in the question of an act to be committed, we stipulate that it shall be our act—girls and others. After the lapse of an hour, it will appear to her as her act. Happily, Willoughby, we do not dine away from Patterne to-night."
"No, sir."
"It may be attributable to a sense of deserving, but I could plead guilty to a weakness for old Port to-day."
"There shall be an extra bottle, sir."
"All going favourably with you, as I have no cause to doubt," said DrMiddleton, with the motion of wafting his host out of the library.
Starting from the Hall a few minutes before Dr. Middleton and Sir Willoughby had entered the drawing-room overnight, Vernon parted company with Colonel De Craye at the park-gates, and betook himself to the cottage of the Dales, where nothing had been heard of his wanderer; and he received the same disappointing reply from Dr. Corney, out of the bedroom window of the genial physician, whose astonishment at his covering so long a stretch of road at night for news of a boy like Crossjay—gifted with the lives of a cat—became violent and rapped Punch-like blows on the window-sill at Vernon's refusal to take shelter and rest. Vernon's excuse was that he had "no one but that fellow to care for", and he strode off, naming a farm five miles distant. Dr. Corney howled an invitation to early breakfast to him, in the event of his passing on his way back, and retired to bed to think of him. The result of a variety of conjectures caused him to set Vernon down as Miss Middleton's knight, and he felt a strong compassion for his poor friend. "Though," thought he, "a hopeless attachment is as pretty an accompaniment to the tune of life as a gentleman might wish to have, for it's one of those big doses of discord which make all the minor ones fit in like an agreeable harmony, and so he shuffles along as pleasantly as the fortune-favoured, when they come to compute!"
Sir Willoughby was the fortune-favoured in the little doctor's mind; that high-stepping gentleman having wealth, and public consideration, and the most ravishing young lady in the world for a bride. Still, though he reckoned all these advantages enjoyed by Sir Willoughby at their full value, he could imagine the ultimate balance of good fortune to be in favour of Vernon. But to do so, he had to reduce the whole calculation to the extreme abstract, and feed his lean friend, as it were, on dew and roots; and the happy effect for Vernon lay in a distant future, on the borders of old age, where he was to be blessed with his lady's regretful preference, and rejoice in the fruits of good constitutional habits. The reviewing mind was Irish. Sir Willoughby was a character of man profoundly opposed to Dr. Corney's nature; the latter's instincts bristled with antagonism—not to his race, for Vernon was of the same race, partly of the same blood, and Corney loved him: the type of person was the annoyance. And the circumstance of its prevailing successfulness in the country where he was placed, while it held him silent as if under a law, heaped stores of insurgency in the Celtic bosom. Corney contemplating Sir Willoughby, and a trotting kern governed by Strongbow, have a point of likeness between them; with the point of difference, that Corney was enlightened to know of a friend better adapted for eminent station, and especially better adapted to please a lovely lady—could these high-bred Englishwomen but be taught to conceive another idea of manliness than the formal carved-in-wood idol of their national worship!
Dr Corney breakfasted very early, without seeing Vernon. He was off to a patient while the first lark of the morning carolled above, and the business of the day, not yet fallen upon men in the shape of cloud, was happily intermixed with nature's hues and pipings. Turning off the high-road tip a green lane, an hour later, he beheld a youngster prying into a hedge head and arms, by the peculiar strenuous twist of whose hinder parts, indicative of a frame plunged on the pursuit in hand, he clearly distinguished young Crossjay. Out came eggs. The doctor pulled up.
"What bird?" he bellowed.
"Yellowhammer," Crossjay yelled back.
"Now, sir, you'll drop a couple of those eggs in the nest."
"Don't order me," Crossjay was retorting. "Oh, it's you, Doctor Corney. Good morning. I said that, because I always do drop a couple back. I promised Mr. Whitford I would, and Miss Middleton too."
"Had breakfast?"
"Not yet."
"Not hungry?"
"I should be if I thought about it."
"Jump up."
"I think I'd rather not, Doctor Corney."
"And you'll just do what Doctor Corney tells you; and set your mind on rashers of curly fat bacon and sweetly smoking coffee, toast, hot cakes, marmalade, and damson-jam. Wide go the fellow's nostrils, and there's water at the dimples of his mouth! Up, my man."
Crossjay jumped up beside the doctor, who remarked, as he touched his horse: "I don't want a man this morning, though I'll enlist you in my service if I do. You're fond of Miss Middleton?"
Instead of answering, Crossjay heaved the sigh of love that bears a burden.
"And so am I," pursued the doctor: "You'll have to put up with a rival.It's worse than fond: I'm in love with her. How do you like that?"
"I don't mind how many love her," said Crossjay.
"You're worthy of a gratuitous breakfast in the front parlour of the best hotel of the place they call Arcadia. And how about your bed last night?"
"Pretty middling."
"Hard, was it, where the bones haven't cushion?"
"I don't care for bed. A couple of hours, and that's enough for me."
"But you're fond of Miss Middleton anyhow, and that's a virtue."
To his great surprise, Dr. Corney beheld two big round tears force their way out of this tough youngster's eyes, and all the while the boy's face was proud.
Crossjay said, when he could trust himself to disjoin his lips:
"I want to see Mr. Whitford."
"Have you got news for him?"
"I've something to ask him. It's about what I ought to do."
"Then, my boy, you have the right name addressed in the wrong direction: for I found you turning your shoulders on Mr. Whitford. And he has been out of his bed hunting you all the unholy night you've made it for him. That's melancholy. What do you say to asking my advice?"
Crossjay sighed. "I can't speak to anybody but Mr. Whitford."
"And you're hot to speak to him?"
"I want to."
"And I found you running away from him. You're a curiosity, Mr.Crossjay Patterne."
"Ah! so'd anybody be who knew as much as I do," said Crossjay, with a sober sadness that caused the doctor to treat him seriously.
"The fact is," he said, "Mr. Whitford is beating the country for you.My best plan will be to drive you to the Hall."
"I'd rather not go to the Hall," Crossjay spoke resolutely.
"You won't see Miss Middleton anywhere but at the Hall."
"I don't want to see Miss Middleton, if I can't be a bit of use to her."
"No danger threatening the lady, is there?"
Crossjay treated the question as if it had not been put.
"Now, tell me," said Dr. Corney, "would there be a chance for me, supposing Miss Middleton were disengaged?"
The answer was easy. "I'm sure she wouldn't."
"And why, sir, are you so cock sure?"
There was no saying; but the doctor pressed for it, and at lastCrossjay gave his opinion that she would take Mr. Whitford.
The doctor asked why; and Crossjay said it was because Mr. Whitford was the best man in the world. To which, with a lusty "Amen to that," Dr. Corney remarked: "I should have fancied Colonel De Craye would have had the first chance: he's more of a lady's man."
Crossjay surprised him again by petulantly saying: "Don't."
The boy added: "I don't want to talk, except about birds and things. What a jolly morning it is! I saw the sun rise. No rain to-day. You're right about hungry, Doctor Corney!"
The kindly little man swung his whip. Crossjay informed him of his disgrace at the Hall, and of every incident connected with it, from the tramp to the baronet, save Miss Middleton's adventure and the night scene in the drawing-room. A strong smell of something left out struck Dr. Corney, and he said: "You'll not let Miss Middleton know of my affection. After all, it's only a little bit of love. But, as Patrick said to Kathleen, when she owned to such a little bit, 'that's the best bit of all!' and he was as right as I am about hungry."
Crossjay scorned to talk of loving, he declared. "I never tell MissMiddleton what I feel. Why, there's Miss Dale's cottage!"
"It's nearer to your empty inside than my mansion," said the doctor, "and we'll stop just to inquire whether a bed's to be had for you there to-night, and if not, I'll have you with me, and bottle you, and exhibit you, for you're a rare specimen. Breakfast you may count on from Mr. Dale. I spy a gentleman."
"It's Colonel De Craye."
"Come after news of you."
"I wonder!"
"Miss Middleton sends him; of course she does."
Crossjay turned his full face to the doctor. "I haven't seen her for such a long time! But he saw me last night, and he might have told her that, if she's anxious.—Good-morning, colonel. I've had a good walk, and a capital drive, and I'm as hungry as the boat's crew of Captain Bligh."
He jumped down.
The colonel and the doctor saluted, smiling.
"I've rung the bell," said De Craye.
A maid came to the gate, and upon her steps appeared Miss Dale, who flung herself at Crossjay, mingling kisses and reproaches. She scarcely raised her face to the colonel more than to reply to his greeting, and excuse the hungry boy for hurrying indoors to breakfast.
"I'll wait," said De Craye. He had seen that she was paler than usual. So had Dr. Corney; and the doctor called to her concerning her father's health. She reported that he had not yet risen, and took Crossjay to herself.
"That's well," said the doctor, "if the invalid sleeps long. The lady is not looking so well, though. But ladies vary; they show the mind on the countenance, for want of the punching we meet with to conceal it; they're like military flags for a funeral or a gala; one day furled, and next day streaming. Men are ships' figure-heads, about the same for a storm or a calm, and not too handsome, thanks to the ocean. It's an age since we encountered last, colonel: on board the Dublin boat, I recollect, and a night it was."
"I recollect that you set me on my legs, doctor."
"Ah! and you'll please to notify that Corney's no quack at sea, by favour of the monks of the Chartreuse, whose elixir has power to still the waves. And we hear that miracles are done with!"
"Roll a physician and a monk together, doctor!"
"True: it'll be a miracle if they combine. Though the cure of the soul is often the entire and total cure of the body: and it's maliciously said that the body given over to our treatment is a signal to set the soul flying. By the way, colonel, that boy has a trifle on his mind."
"I suppose he has been worrying a farmer or a gamekeeper."
"Try him. You'll find him tight. He's got Miss Middleton on the brain.There's a bit of a secret; and he's not so cheerful about it."
"We'll see," said the colonel.
Dr Corney nodded. "I have to visit my patient here presently. I'm too early for him: so I'll make a call or two on the lame birds that are up," he remarked, and drove away.
De Craye strolled through the garden. He was a gentleman of those actively perceptive wits which, if ever they reflect, do so by hops and jumps: upon some dancing mirror within, we may fancy. He penetrated a plot in a flash; and in a flash he formed one; but in both cases, it was after long hovering and not over-eager deliberation, by the patient exercise of his quick perceptives. The fact that Crossjay was considered to have Miss Middleton on the brain, threw a series of images of everything relating to Crossjay for the last forty hours into relief before him: and as he did not in the slightest degree speculate on any one of them, but merely shifted and surveyed them, the falcon that he was in spirit as well as in his handsome face leisurely allowed his instinct to direct him where to strike. A reflective disposition has this danger in action, that it commonly precipitates conjecture for the purpose of working upon probabilities with the methods and in the tracks to which it is accustomed: and to conjecture rashly is to play into the puzzles of the maze. He who can watch circling above it awhile, quietly viewing, and collecting in his eye, gathers matter that makes the secret thing discourse to the brain by weight and balance; he will get either the right clue or none; more frequently none; but he will escape the entanglement of his own cleverness, he will always be nearer to the enigma than the guesser or the calculator, and he will retain a breadth of vision forfeited by them. He must, however, to have his chance of success, be acutely besides calmly perceptive, a reader of features, audacious at the proper moment.
De Craye wished to look at Miss Dale. She had returned home very suddenly, not, as it appeared, owing to her father's illness; and he remembered a redness of her eyelids when he passed her on the corridor one night. She sent Crossjay out to him as soon as the boy was well filled. He sent Crossjay back with a request. She did not yield to it immediately. She stepped to the front door reluctantly, and seemed disconcerted. De Craye begged for a message to Miss Middleton. There was none to give. He persisted. But there was really none at present, she said.
"You won't entrust me with the smallest word?" said he, and set her visibly thinking whether she could dispatch a word. She could not; she had no heart for messages.
"I shall see her in a day or two, Colonel De Craye."
"She will miss you severely."
"We shall soon meet."
"And poor Willoughby!"
Laetitia coloured and stood silent.
A butterfly of some rarity allured Crossjay.
"I fear he has been doing mischief," she said. "I cannot get him to look at me."
"His appetite is good?"
"Very good indeed."
De Craye nodded. A boy with a noble appetite is never a hopeless lock.
The colonel and Crossjay lounged over the garden.
"And now," said the colonel, "we'll see if we can't arrange a meeting between you and Miss Middleton. You're a lucky fellow, for she's always thinking of you."
"I know I'm always thinking of her," said Crossjay.
"If ever you're in a scrape, she's the person you must go to."
"Yes, if I know where she is!"
"Why, generally she'll be at the Hall."
There was no reply: Crossjay's dreadful secret jumped to his throat. He certainly was a weaker lock for being full of breakfast.
"I want to see Mr. Whitford so much," he said.
"Something to tell him?"
"I don't know what to do: I don't understand it!" The secret wriggled to his mouth. He swallowed it down. "Yes, I want to talk to Mr. Whitford."
"He's another of Miss Middleton's friends."
"I know he is. He's true steel."
"We're all her friends, Crossjay. I flatter myself I'm a Toledo when I'm wanted. How long had you been in the house last night before you ran into me?"
"I don't know, sir; I fell asleep for some time, and then I woke! . . ."
"Where did you find yourself?"
"I was in the drawing-room."
"Come, Crossjay, you're not a fellow to be scared by ghosts? You looked it when you made a dash at my midriff."
"I don't believe there are such things. Do you, colonel? You can't!"
"There's no saying. We'll hope not; for it wouldn't be fair fighting. A man with a ghost to back him'd beat any ten. We couldn't box him or play cards, or stand a chance with him as a rival in love. Did you, now, catch a sight of a ghost?"
"They weren't ghosts!" Crossjay said what he was sure of, and his voice pronounced his conviction.
"I doubt whether Miss Middleton is particularly happy," remarked the colonel. "Why? Why, you upset her, you know, now and then."
The boy swelled. "I'd do . . . I'd go . . . I wouldn't have her unhappy. . . It's that! that's it! And I don't know what I ought to do. I wishI could see Mr. Whitford."
"You get into such headlong scrapes, my lad."
"I wasn't in any scrape yesterday."
"So you made yourself up a comfortable bed in the drawing-room? LuckilySir Willoughby didn't see you."
"He didn't, though!"
"A close shave, was it?"
"I was under a covering of something silk."
"He woke you?"
"I suppose he did. I heard him."
"Talking?"
"He was talking."
"What! talking to himself?"
"No."
The secret threatened Crossjay to be out or suffocate him. De Craye gave him a respite.
"You like Sir Willoughby, don't you?"
Crossjay produced a still-born affirmative.
"He's kind to you," said the colonel; "he'll set you up and look after your interests."
"Yes, I like him," said Crossjay, with his customary rapidity in touching the subject; "I like him; he's kind and all that, and tips and plays with you, and all that; but I never can make out why he wouldn't see my father when my father came here to see him ten miles, and had to walk back ten miles in the rain, to go by rail a long way, down home, as far as Devonport, because Sir Willoughby wouldn't see him, though he was at home, my father saw. We all thought it so odd: and my father wouldn't let us talk much about it. My father's a very brave man."
"Captain Patterne is as brave a man as ever lived," said De Craye.
"I'm positive you'd like him, colonel."
"I know of his deeds, and I admire him, and that's a good step to liking."
He warmed the boy's thoughts of his father.
"Because, what they say at home is, a little bread and cheese, and a glass of ale, and a rest, to a poor man—lots of great houses will give you that, and we wouldn't have asked for more than that. My sisters say they think Sir Willoughby must be selfish. He's awfully proud; and perhaps it was because my father wasn't dressed well enough. But what can we do? We're very poor at home, and lots of us, and all hungry. My father says he isn't paid very well for his services to the Government. He's only a marine."
"He's a hero!" said De Craye.
"He came home very tired, with a cold, and had a doctor. But Sir Willoughby did send him money, and mother wished to send it back, and my father said she was not like a woman—with our big family. He said he thought Sir Willoughby an extraordinary man."
"Not at all; very common; indigenous," said De Craye. "The art of cutting is one of the branches of a polite education in this country, and you'll have to learn it, if you expect to be looked on as a gentleman and a Patterne, my boy. I begin to see how it is Miss Middleton takes to you so. Follow her directions. But I hope you did not listen to a private conversation. Miss Middleton would not approve of that."
"Colonel De Craye, how could I help myself? I heard a lot before I knew what it was. There was poetry!"
"Still, Crossjay, if it was important—was it?"
The boy swelled again, and the colonel asked him, "Does Miss Dale know of your having played listener?"
"She!" said Crossjay. "Oh, I couldn't tell her."
He breathed thick; then came a threat of tears. "She wouldn't do anything to hurt Miss Middleton. I'm sure of that. It wasn't her fault. She—There goes Mr. Whitford!" Crossjay bounded away.
The colonel had no inclination to wait for his return. He walked fast up the road, not perspicuously conscious that his motive was to be well in advance of Vernon Whitford: to whom, after all, the knowledge imparted by Crossjay would be of small advantage. That fellow would probably trot of to Willoughby to row him for breaking his word to Miss Middleton! There are men, thought De Craye, who see nothing, feel nothing.
He crossed a stile into the wood above the lake, where, as he was in the humour to think himself signally lucky, espying her, he took it as a matter of course that the lady who taught his heart to leap should be posted by the Fates. And he wondered little at her power, for rarely had the world seen such union of princess and sylph as in that lady's figure. She stood holding by a beech-branch, gazing down on the water.
She had not heard him. When she looked she flushed at the spectacle of one of her thousand thoughts, but she was not startled; the colour overflowed a grave face.
"And 'tis not quite the first time that Willoughby has played this trick!" De Craye said to her, keenly smiling with a parted mouth.
Clara moved her lips to recall remarks introductory to so abrupt and strange a plunge.
He smiled in that peculiar manner of an illuminated comic perception: for the moment he was all falcon; and he surprised himself more than Clara, who was not in the mood to take surprises. It was the sight of her which had animated him to strike his game; he was down on it.
Another instinct at work (they spring up in twenties oftener than in twos when the heart is the hunter) prompted him to directness and quickness, to carry her on the flood of the discovery.
She regained something of her mental self-possession as soon as she was on a level with a meaning she had not yet inspected; but she had to submit to his lead, distinctly perceiving where its drift divided to the forked currents of what might be in his mind and what was in hers.
"Miss Middleton, I bear a bit of a likeness to the messenger to the glorious despot—my head is off if I speak not true! Everything I have is on the die. Did I guess wrong your wish?—I read it in the dark, by the heart. But here's a certainty: Willoughby sets you free."
"You have come from him?" she could imagine nothing else, and she was unable to preserve a disguise; she trembled.
"From Miss Dale."
"Ah!" Clara drooped. "She told me that once."
"'Tis the fact that tells it now."
"You have not seen him since you left the house?"
"Darkly: clear enough: not unlike the hand of destiny—through a veil. He offered himself to Miss Dale last night, about between the witching hours of twelve and one."
"Miss Dale . . ."
"Would she other? Could she? The poor lady has languished beyond a decade. She's love in the feminine person."
"Are you speaking seriously, Colonel De Craye?"
"Would I dare to trifle with you, Miss Middleton?"
"I have reason to know it cannot be."
"If I have a head, it is a fresh and blooming truth. And more—I stake my vanity on it!"
"Let me go to her." She stepped.
"Consider," said he.
"Miss Dale and I are excellent friends. It would not seem indelicate to her. She has a kind of regard for me, through Crossjay.—Oh, can it be? There must be some delusion. You have seen—you wish to be of service to me; you may too easily be deceived. Last night?—he last night . . .? And this morning!"
"'Tis not the first time our friend has played the trick, MissMiddleton."
"But this is incredible, that last night . . . and this morning, in my father's presence, he presses! . . . You have seen Miss Dale? Everything is possible of him: they were together, I know. Colonel De Craye, I have not the slightest chance of concealment with you. I think I felt that when I first saw you. Will you let me hear why you are so certain?"
"Miss Middleton, when I first had the honour of looking on you, it was in a posture that necessitated my looking up, and morally so it has been since. I conceived that Willoughby had won the greatest prize of earth. And next I was led to the conclusion that he had won it to lose it. Whether he much cares, is the mystery I haven't leisure to fathom. Himself is the principal consideration with himself, and ever was."
"You discovered it!" said Clara.
"He uncovered it," said De Craye. "The miracle was, that the world wouldn't see. But the world is a piggy-wiggy world for the wealthy fellow who fills a trough for it, and that he has always very sagaciously done. Only women besides myself have detected him. I have never exposed him; I have been an observer pure and simple; and because I apprehended another catastrophe—making something like the fourth, to my knowledge, one being public . . ."