The Egoist

by George Meredith

She left the breakfast-room at a quarter to ten, after kissing her father. Willoughby was behind her. He had been soothed by thinking of his personal advantages over De Craye, and he felt assured that if he could be solitary with his eccentric bride and fold her in himself, he would, cutting temper adrift, be the man he had been to her not so many days back. Considering how few days back, his temper was roused, but he controlled it.

  They were slightly dissenting as De Craye stepped into the hall.

  ‘A present worth examining,’ Willoughby said to her: ‘and I do not dwell on the costliness. Come presently, then. I am at your disposal all day. I will drive you in the afternoon to call on Lady Busshe to offer your thanks: but you must see it first. It is laid out in the laboratory.’

  ‘There is time before the afternoon,’ said Clara.

  ‘Wedding-presents?’ interposed De Craye.

  ‘A porcelain service from Lady Busshe, Horace.’

  ‘Not in fragments? Let me have a look at it. I’m haunted by an idea that porcelain always goes to pieces. I’ll have a look and take a hint. We’re in the laboratory, Miss Middleton.’

  He put his arm under Willoughby’s. The resistance to him was momentary: Willoughby had the satisfaction of the thought that De Craye being with him was not with Clara; and seeing her giving orders to her maid Barclay, he deferred his claim on her company for some short period.

  De Craye detained him in the laboratory, first over the China cups and saucers, and then with the latest of London – tales of youngest Cupid upon subterranean adventures, having high titles to light him. Willoughby liked the tale thus illuminated, for without the title there was no special savour in such affairs, and it pulled down his betters in rank. He was of a morality to reprobate the erring dame while he enjoyed the incidents. He could not help interrupting De Craye to point at Vernon through the window, striding this way and that, evidently on the hunt for young Crossjay. ‘No one here knows how to manage the boy except myself. But go on, Horace,’ he said, checking his contemptuous laugh; and Vernon did look ridiculous, out there half-drenched already in a white rain, again shuffled off by the little rascal. It seemed that he was determined to have his runaway: he struck up the avenue at full pedestrian racing pace.

  ‘A man looks a fool cutting after a cricket-ball; but putting on steam in a storm of rain to catch a young villain out of sight, beats anything I’ve witnessed,’ Willoughby resumed, in his amusement.

  ‘Aiha!’ said De Craye, waving a hand to accompany the melodious accent, ‘there are things to beat that for fun.’

  He had smoked in the laboratory, so Willoughby directed a servant to transfer the porcelain service to one of the sitting-rooms for Clara’s inspection of it.

  ‘You’re a bold man,’ De Craye remarked. ‘The luck may be with you, though. I wouldn’t handle the fragile treasure for a trifle.’

  ‘I believe in my luck,’ said Willoughby.

  Clara was now sought for. The lord of the house desired her presence impatiently, and had to wait. She was in none of the lower rooms. Barclay, her maid, upon interrogation, declared she was in none of the upper. Willoughby turned sharp on De Craye: he was there.

  The ladies Eleanor and Isabel and Miss Dale were consulted. They had nothing to say about Clara’s movements, more than that they could not understand her exceeding restlessness. The idea of her being out of doors grew serious; heaven was black, hard thunder rolled, and lightning flushed the battering rain. Men bearing umbrellas, shawls, and cloaks were dispatched on a circuit of the park. De Craye said: ‘I’ll be one.’

  ‘No,’ cried Willoughby, starting to interrupt him, ‘I can’t allow it.’

  ‘I’ve the scent of a hound, Willoughby; I’ll soon be on the track.’

  ‘My dear Horace, I won’t let you go.’

  ‘Adieu, dear boy! and if the lady’s discoverable, I’m the one to find her.’

  He stepped to the umbrella-stand. There was then a general question whether Clara had taken her umbrella. Barclay said she had. The fact indicated a wider stroll than round inside the park: Crossjay was likewise absent. De Craye nodded to himself.

  Willoughby struck a rattling blow on the barometer.

  ‘Where’s Pollington?’ he called, and sent word for his man Pollington to bring big fishing-boots and waterproof wrappers.

  An urgent debate within him was in progress.

  Should he go forth alone on his chance of discovering Clara and forgiving her under his umbrella and cloak? or should he prevent De Craye from going forth alone on the chance he vaunted so impudently?

  ‘You will offend me, Horace, if you insist,’ he said.

  ‘Regard me as an instrument of destiny, Willoughby,’ replied De Craye.

  ‘Then we go in company.’

  ‘But that’s an addition of one that cancels the other by conjunction, and’s worse than simple division: for I can’t trust my wits unless I rely on them alone, you see.’

  ‘Upon my word, you talk at times most unintelligible stuff, to be frank with you, Horace. Give it in English.’

  ‘’Tis not suited, perhaps, to the genius of the language, for I thought I talked English.’

  ‘Oh, there’s English gibberish as well as Irish, we know!’

  ‘And a deal foolisher when they do go at it; for it won’t bear squeezing, we think, like Irish.’

  ‘Where,’ exclaimed the ladies, ‘where can she be! The storm is terrible.’

  Laetitia suggested the boathouse.

  ‘For Crossjay hadn’t a swim this morning!’ said De Craye.

  No one reflected on the absurdity that Clara should think of taking Crossjay for a swim in the lake, and immediately after his breakfast: it was accepted as a suggestion, at least that she and Crossjay had gone to the lake for a row.

  In the hopefulness of the idea, Willoughby suffered De Craye to go on his chance unaccompanied. He was near chuckling. He projected a plan for dismissing Crossjay and remaining in the boathouse with Clara, luxuriating in the prestige which would attach to him for seeking and finding her Deadly sentiments intervened. Still he might expect to be alone with her where she could not slip from him.

  The throwing open of the hall-doors for the gentlemen presented a framed picture of a deluge. All the young-leaved trees were steely black, without a gradation of green, drooping and pouring, and the song of rain had become an inveterate hiss.

  The ladies beholding it exclaimed against Clara, even apostrophized her, so dark are trivial errors when circumstances frown. She must be mad to tempt such weather: she was very giddy; she was never at rest. Clara! Clara! how could you be so wild! Ought we not to tell Dr Middleton?

  Laetitia induced them to spare him.

  ‘Which way do you take?’ said Willoughby, rather fearful that his companion was not to be got rid of now.

  ‘Any way,’ said De Craye. ‘I chuck up my head like a halfpenny, and go by the toss.’

  This enrageing nonsense drove off Willoughby. De Craye saw him cast a furtive eye at his heels to make sure he was not followed, and thought, ‘Jove! he may be fond of her. But he’s not on the track. She’s a determined girl, if I’m correct. She’s a girl of a hundred thousand. Girls like that make the right sort of wives for the right men. They’re the girls to make men think of marrying. To-morrow! only give me a chance. They stick to you fast when they do stick.’

  Then a thought of her flower-like drapery and face caused him fervently to hope she had escaped the storm.

  Calling at the West park-lodge he heard that Miss Middleton had been seen passing through the gate with Master Crossjay; but she had not been seen coming back. Mr Vernon Whitford had passed through half an hour later.

  ‘After his young man!’ said the colonel.

  The lodge-keeper’s wife and daughter knew of Master Crossjay’s pranks; Mr Whitford, they said, had made inquiries about him, and must have caught him and sent him home to change his dripping things; for Master Crossjay had come back, and had declined shelter in the lod
ge; he seemed to be crying; he went away soaking over the wet grass, hanging his head. The opinion at the lodge was that Master Crossjay was unhappy.

  ‘He very properly received a wigging from Mr Whitford, I have no doubt,’ said Colonel De Craye.

  Mother and daughter supposed it to be the case, and considered Crossjay very wilful for not going straight home to the Hall to change his wet clothes; he was drenched.

  De Craye drew out his watch. The time was ten minutes past eleven. If the surmise he had distantly spied was correct, Miss Middleton would have been caught in the storm midway to her destination. By his guess at her character (knowledge of it, he would have said), he judged that no storm would daunt her on a predetermined expedition. He deduced in consequence that she was at the present moment flying to her friend, the charming brunette Lucy Darleton.

  Still, as there was a possibility of the rain having been too much for her, and as he had no other speculation concerning the route she had taken, he decided upon keeping along the road to Rendon, with a keen eye at cottage and farmhouse windows.

  CHAPTER 26

  Vernon in Pursuit

  THE lodgekeeper had a son, who was a chum of Master Crossjay’s, and errant-fellow with him upon many adventures; for this boy’s passion was to become a gamekeeper, and accompanied by one of the head-gamekeeper’s youngsters, he and Crossjay were in the habit of rangeing over the country, preparing for a profession delightful to the tastes of all three. Crossjay’s prospective connection with the mysterious ocean bestowed the title of captain on him by common consent; he led them, and when missing for lessons he was generally in the society of Jacob Croom or Jonathan Fernaway. Vernon made sure of Crossjay when he perceived Jacob Croom sitting on a stool in the little lodge-parlour. Jacob’s appearance of a diligent perusal of a book he had presented to the lad, he took for a decent piece of trickery. It was with amazement that he heard from the mother and daughter, as well as Jacob, of Miss Middleton’s going through the gate before ten o’clock with Crossjay beside her, the latter too hurried to spare a nod to Jacob. That she, of all on earth, should be encouraging Crossjay to truancy was incredible. Vernon had to fall back upon Greek and Latin aphoristic shots at the sex to believe it.

  Rain was universal; a thick robe of it swept from hill to hill; thunder rumbled remote, and between the ruffled roars the downpour pressed on the land with a great noise of eager gobbling, much like that of the swine’s trough fresh filled, as though a vast assembly of the hungered had seated themselves clamorously and fallen to on meats and drinks in a silence, save of the chaps. A rapid walker poetically and humourously minded gathers multitudes of images on his way. And rain, the heaviest you can meet, is a lively companion when the resolute pacer scorns discomfort of wet clothes and squealing boots. South-western rain-clouds, too, are never long sullen: they enfold and will have the earth in a good strong glut of the kissing overflow; then, as a hawk with feathers on his beak of the bird in his claw lifts head, they rise and take veiled feature in long climbing watery lines: at any moment they may break the veil and show soft upper cloud, show sun on it, show sky, green near the verge they spring from, of the green of grass in early dew; or, along a travelling sweep that rolls asunder overhead, heaven’s laughter of purest blue among titanic white shoulders: it may mean fair smiling for awhile,

  or be the lightest interlude; but the water lines, and the drifting, the chasing, the upsoaring, all in a shadowy fingering of form, and the animation of the leaves of the trees pointing them on, the bending of the tree-tops, the snapping of branches, and the hurrahings of the stubborn hedge at wrestle with the flaws, yielding but a leaf at most, and that on a fling, make a glory of contest and wildness without aid of colour to inflame the man who is at home in them from old association on road, heath, and mountain. Let him be drenched, his heart will sing. And thou, trim cockney, that jeerest, consider thyself, to whom it may occur to be out in such a scene, and with what steps of a nervous dancing-master it would be thine to play the hunted rat of the elements, for the preservation of the one imagined dry spot about thee, somewhere on thy luckless person! The taking of rain and sun alike befits men of our climate, and he who would have the secret of a strengthening intoxication must court the clouds of the South-west with a lover’s blood.

  Vernon’s happy recklessness was dashed by fears for Miss Middleton. Apart from those fears, he had the pleasure of a gull wheeling among foam-streaks of the wave. He supposed the Swiss and Tyrol Alps to have hidden their heads from him for many a day to come, and the springing and chiming South-west was the next best thing. A milder rain descended; the country expanded darkly defined underneath the moving curtain; the clouds were as he liked to see them, scaling; but their skirts dragged. Torrents were in store, for they coursed streamingly still and had not the higher lift, or eagle ascent, which he knew for one of the signs of fairness, nor had the hills any belt of mist-like vapour.

  On a step of the stile leading to the short-cut to Rendon young Crossjay was espied. A man-tramp sat on the top-bar.

  ‘There you are; what are you doing there? Where’s Miss Middleton?’ said Vernon. ‘Now, take care before you open your mouth.’

  Crossjay shut the mouth he had opened.

  ‘The lady has gone away over to a station, sir,’ said the tramp.

  ‘You fool!’ roared Crossjay, ready to fly at him.

  ‘But ain’t it now, young gentleman? Can you say it ain’t?’

  ‘I gave you a shilling, you ass!’

  ‘You give me that sum, young gentleman, to stop here and take care of you, and here I stopped.’

  ‘Mr Whitford!’ Crossjay appealed to his master, and broke off in disgust. ‘Take care of me! As if anybody who knows me would think I wanted taking care of! Why, what a beast you must be, you fellow!’

  ‘Just as you like, young gentleman. I chaunted you all I know, to keep up your downcast spirits. You did want comforting. You wanted it rarely. You cried like an infant.’

  ‘I let you “chaunt”, as you call it, to keep you from swearing.’

  ‘And why did I swear, young gentleman? because I’ve got an itchy coat in the wet, and no shirt for a lining. And no breakfast to give me a stomach for this kind of weather. That’s what I’ve come to in this world! I’m a walking moral. No wonder I swears, when I don’t strike up a chaunt.’

  ‘But why are you sitting here wet through, Crossjay! Be off home at once, and change, and get ready for me.’

  ‘Mr Whitford, I promised, and I tossed this fellow a shilling not to go bothering Miss Middleton.’

  ‘The lady wouldn’t have none o’ the young gentleman, sir, and I offered to go pioneer for her to the station, behind her, at a respectful distance.’

  ‘As if! – you treacherous cur!’ Crossjay ground his teeth at the betrayer. ‘Well, Mr Whitford, and I didn’t trust him, and I stuck to him, or he’d have been after her whining about his coat and stomach, and talking of his being a moral. He repeats that to everybody.’

  ‘She has gone to the station?’ said Vernon.

  Not a word on that subject was to be won from Crossjay.

  ‘How long since?’ Vernon partly addressed Mr Tramp.

  The latter became seized with shivers as he supplied the information that it might be a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. ‘But what’s time to me, sir? If I had reg’lar meals, I should carry a clock in my inside. I got the rheumatics instead.’

  ‘Way there!’ Vernon cried, and took the stile at a vault.

  ‘That’s what gentlemen can do, who sleeps in their beds warm,’ moaned the tramp. ‘They’ve no joints.’

  Vernon handed him a half-crown piece, for he had been of use for once.

  ‘Mr Whitford, let me come. If you tell me to come I may. Do let me come,’ Crossjay begged with great entreaty. ‘I sha’n’t see her for…’

  ‘Be off, quick!’ Vernon cut him short and pushed on.

  The tramp and Crossjay were audible to him; Crossjay spurning the consolat
ions of the professional sad man.

  Vernon spun across the fields, timing himself by his watch to reach Rendon station ten minutes before eleven, though without clearly questioning the nature of the resolution which precipitated him. Dropping to the road, he had better foothold than on the slippery field-path, and he ran. His principal hope was that Clara would have missed her way. Another pelting of rain agitated him on her behalf. Might she not as well be suffered to go? – and sit three hours and more in a railway-carriage with wet feet!

  He clasped the visionary little feet to warm them on his breast. – But Willoughby’s obstinate fatuity deserved the blow! – But neither she nor her father deserved the scandal. But she was desperate. Could reasoning touch her? If not, what would? He knew of nothing. Yesterday he had spoken strongly to Willoughby, to plead with him to favour her departure and give her leisure to sound her mind, and he had left his cousin, convinced that Clara’s best measure was flight: a man so cunning in a pretended obtuseness backed by senseless pride, and in petty tricks that sprang of a grovelling tyranny, could only be taught by facts.

  Her recent treatment of him, however, was very strange; so strange that he might have known himself better if he had reflected on the bound with which it shot him to a hard suspicion. De Craye had prepared the world to hear that he was leaving the Hall. Were they in concert? The idea struck at his heart colder than if her damp little feet had been there.

  Vernon’s full exoneration of her for making a confidant of himself, did not extend its leniency to the young lady’s character when there was question of her doing the same with a second gentleman. He could suspect much: he could even expect to find De Craye at the station.

  That idea drew him up in his run, to meditate on the part he should play; and by drove little Dr Corney on the way to Rendon, and hailed him, and gave his cheerless figure the nearest approach to an Irish hug in the form of a dry seat under an umbrella and water-proof covering.

  ‘Though it is the worst I can do for you, if you decline to supplement it with a dose of hot brandy and water at the Dolphin,’ said he: ‘and I’ll see you take it, if you please. I’m bound to ease a Rendon patient out of the world. Medicine’s one of their superstitions, which they cling to the harder the more useless it gets. Pill and priest launch him happy between them. – “And what’s on your conscience, Pat?” – “It’s whether your blessing, your Riverence, would disagree with another drop.” “Then put the horse before the cart, my son, and you shall have the two in harmony, and God speed ye!” – Rendon station, did you say, Vernon? You shall have my prescription at the Railway Arms, if you’re hurried. You have the look. What is it? Can I help?’