Willoughby scorned the man who could not conceal a blow, even though he joked over his discomfiture.
‘Gull!’ he muttered.
‘A bird that’s easy to be had, and better for stuffing than for eating,’ said De Craye. ‘You’ll miss your cousin.’
‘I have,’ replied Willoughby, ‘one fully equal to supplying his place.’
There was confusion in the hall for a time, and an assembly of the household to witness the departure of Dr Middleton and his daughter. Vernon had been driven off by Dr Corney, who further recommended rest for Mr Dale, and promised to keep an eye for Crossjay along the road.
‘I think you will find him at the station, and if you do, command him to come straight back here,’ Laetitia said to Clara.
The answer was an affectionate squeeze, and Clara’s hand was extended to Willoughby, who bowed over it with perfect courtesy, bidding her adieu.
So the knot was cut. And the next carriage to Dr Middleton’s was Mrs Mountstuart’s, conveying the great lady and Colonel De Craye.
‘I beg you not to wear that face with me,’ she said to him. ‘I have had to dissemble, which I hate, and I have quite enough to endure, and I must be amused, or I shall run away from you and enlist that little countryman of yours, and him I can count on to be professionally restorative. Who can fathom the heart of a girl! Here is Lady Busshe right once more! And I was wrong. She must be a gambler by nature. I never should have risked such a guess as that. Colonel De Craye, you lengthen your face preternaturally, you distort it purposely.’
‘Ma’am,’ returned De Craye, ‘the boast of our army is never to know when we are beaten, and that tells of a greathearted soldiery. But there’s a field where the Briton must own his defeat, whether smiling or crying, and I’m not so sure that a short howl doesn’t do him honour.’
‘She was, I am certain, in love with Vernon Whitford all along, Colonel De Craye!’
‘Ah!’ the colonel drank it in. ‘I have learnt that it was not the gentleman in whom I am chiefly interested. So it was not so hard for the lady to vow to friend Willoughby she would marry no one else?’
‘Girls are unfathomable! And Lady Busshe – I know she did not go by character – shot one of her random guesses, and she triumphs. We shall never hear the last of it. And I had all the opportunities. I’m bound to confess I had.’
‘Did you by chance, ma’am,’ De Craye said, with a twinkle, ‘drop a hint to Willoughby ofher turn for Vernon Whitford?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Mountstuart, ‘I’m not a mischief-maker; and the policy of the county is to keep him in love with himself, or Patterne will be likely to be as dull as it was without a lady enthroned. When his pride is at ease he is a prince. I can read men. Now, Colonel De Craye, pray, be lively.’
‘I should have been livelier, I’m afraid, if you had dropped a bit of a hint to Willoughby. But you’re the magnanimous person, ma’am, and revenge for a stroke in the game of love shows us unworthy to win.’
Mrs Mountstuart menaced him with her parasol. ‘I forbid sentiments, Colonel De Craye. They are always followed by sighs.’
‘Grant me five minutes of inward retirement, and I’ll come out formed for your commands, ma’am,’ said he.
Before the termination of that space De Craye was enchanting Mrs Mountstuart, and she in consequence was restored to her natural wit.
So, and much so universally, the world of his dread and his unconscious worship wagged over Sir Willoughby Patterne and his change of brides, until the preparations for the festivities of the marriage flushed him in his county’s eyes to something of the splendid glow he had worn on the great day of his majority. That was upon the season when two lovers met between the Swiss and Tyrol Alps over the Lake of Constance. Sitting beside them the Comic Muse is grave and sisterly. But taking a glance at the others of her late company of actors, she compresses her lips.
Notes
1. (p. 43). fresh from a Louis IV perruquier: Though the phrase appears thus in all the editions authorized by Meredith, it seems clear that he means a ‘Louis XIV perruquier’.
2. (p. 53). the devotee of Juggernaut. Here Meredith appears to be confusing Indian customs and, if we relate this to the later reference in the same paragraph to a woman to be burned, to be assuming that the rite of sati or suttee, the self-immolation of widows, was in some way connected with the worship of the deity Jagganath in his temple of Puri. There was no such connexion.
3. (p. 59). lash terga cauda: Lash his tail from side to side.
4. (p. 67). her of Ephesus: A reference to the celebrated tale told by Petronius, in the Satyricon, of the newly widowed Ephesian lady who was consoled by a sentry ordered to guard the crucified bodies of three criminals; during his amatory absence from duty, one of the bodies was taken away, and the widow obligingly gave the corpse of her husband to hang in its place and so save her lover from punishment.
5. (p. 81). retro Sathanas: Get thee behind me, Satan.
6. (p. 87). father-in-law: Stepfather; this usage continued throughout the nineteenth century, and in some districts survives colloquially.
7. (p. 105). the glorious Valentine’s day of our naval annals: 14 February 1797, when Sir John Jarvis, in his flagship the Captain, defeated the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Cape St Vincent.
8. (p. 109). Flibbertigibbet: An attendant fiend.
9. (p. 110). Papa would quote the ‘mulier formosa’: The reference is to the opening passage of the Ars Poetica, where Horace talks of ‘a woman, beautiful to the waist, ending in the black tail of an ugly fish’.
10. (p. 116). Busby: Dr Richard Busby, a seventeenth-century headmaster of Westminster School and a notorious flogger.
11. (p. 124). the wise king: Solomon who, when two women disputed the parenthood of a child, proposed to cut the infant in two, whereupon the real mother revealed herself by pleading for its life at the risk of losing it.
12. (p. 135). a French philosopher: Auguste Comte, the nineteenth-century founder of the philosophy of Positivism; Sir Willoughby is parodying his suggestion that the birthdays of benefactors of the human race (not necessarily French men of letters) should be celebrated in the calendar of his new humanitarian religion. At this time Meredith was closely associated with the English Positivists, including Frederic Harrison and especially Leslie Stephen, who gave some of his characteristics to the shaping of Vernon Whitford.
13. (p. 156). Melusine: A fairy or water-nymph of French legend, in nature half-woman and half-fish. She married Count Raymond de Poitiers who built Lusignan Castle for her; her condition was that Raymond should never visit her on a Saturday, but he broke his promise, Melusine turned into a serpent, and ever since that day her eerie cries are supposed to prelude the deaths of the lords of Lusignan.
14. (p. 225). quid femina possit: What a woman can do. From Virgil’s Aeneid, Book V: ‘Knowledge of what a woman can do in the madness of dishonoured love aroused uneasy forebodings in the Trojans’ hearts.’
15. (p. 226). ‘this the seat, this mournful gloom for that celestial light’: Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 242–5, which Dr Middleton somewhat condenses. The full version runs:
‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’
Said then the lost Archangel, ‘this the seat
That we must change for Heaven? this mournful gloom
For that celestial light?…’
16. (p. 229). ‘Factum est; laetus est; amantium irae, etc.’: ‘It is done; he is happy; the quarrelling of lovers, etc.’ The quotation from Terence which Dr Middleton leaves uncompleted continues ‘amoris integratio est’ – ‘is the renewal of love’, and it is this unsaid passage that of course gives point to his remark.
17. (p. 237). nugae: Trifling jests.
18. (p. 239). the Idaean Three: The goddesses Aphrodite, Hera and Athene, who on Mount Ida submitted to the judgement of the mortal Paris as to who was the most beautiful and hence worthy to receive at his hands the golden apple.
19. (p. 239). Gr
aiis… praeter, laudem nullius avaris: Horace, in the Ars Poetica, tells us that ‘The Greeks… coveted nothing beyond renown.’ It is appropriate to Dr Middleton’s ensuing remarks that Horace goes on to suggest the relative unworthiness of the Romans with their ‘slavish love of money’.
20. (p. 244). ‘Ut flos in septis secretus nascitur hortis… Sic virgo, dum…’: From Song LXII of the Carmina of Catullus: ‘Like a flower springing secretly in an enclosed garden… So a virgin…’ The whole passage, of which Meredith allows Dr Middleton to murmur five lines unreproduced, likens the Virgin to the flower protected and unplucked, and the last line, which the Doctor never completes, clearly mirrors his preoccupations at this time. ‘Sic virgo, dum intacta manet, dum cara suis est…’ ‘So a virgin, while she is whole, while she is the darling of her kinsfolk…’
21. (p. 253). modus agri non ita magnus: A piece of land, not very large. (Horace, Satires, II.vi.1.)
22. (p. 253). Quae virtus et quanta sit rivere parvo: How virtuous and how greatly so it is to live on little. (Horace, Satires, II.ii.1.)
23. (p. 284). Lesbia Quadrantaria: Lesbia was the name under which Catullus wrote his love poems to the profligate Clodia, a Roman lady whom Cicero called Quadrantaria, meaning roughly ‘worth a farthing’; she is said to have sold herself for a quarter of the then much-debased Roman copper coin, the as.
24. (p. 292). bile tumet jecur. [My] liver swells with bile. (Horace, Odes, 1.xiii.4.)
25. (p. 295). καì τρισκακοδαίμων: Triply unfortunate.
26. (p. 361). Celtiberian Egnatius: Catullus dedicates one of his Songs to the baiting of the Roman Egnatius. ‘Egnatius, who has dazzlingly white teeth,’ begins the poem, ‘grins always and everywhere’. Lines 6 and 7, quoted by Dr Middleton, tell us that ‘whatever happens, no matter where, no matter what he is doing, he always grins’. The Celtiberians were a native Spanish people with whom the Romans were often in conflict, and Catullus tells in vivid detail, which Meredith dared not reproduce for his Victorian readers, how they had white teeth and bright pink gums because each morning they vigorously scrubbed their teeth with their own urine.
27. (p. 366). the Stagyrite: Aristotle.
28. (p. 370). Fridolin: Countess Cunigond’s page in Schiller’s Der Gang nach der Eisenhammer; unjustly accused of making love to her, he incurs the enmity of the count, who orders that he be thrown into the furnace in a foundry, but, by a lucky chain of circumstance, his accuser is burnt instead.
29. (p. 467). si brachia forte remisit: If he has by chance relaxed his arms. in pejus: For the worse. The two fragments come from a passage in Virgil’s Georgics (Book 1, lines 199–203), which run as follows:
Sic omnia fatis
In peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri
Non aliter quam qui adverso vix flumine lembum
Remigiis subigit, si bracchia forte remisit,
Atque illum in praeceps prono rapit alveus amni.
Dr Middleton roughly paraphrases the last three lines.
30. (p. 487). Jam ver egelidos renfert repores. The equinoctial fury departs: These are the first lines of the song in which Catullus celebrates his departure from Bithynia (Carmina, xlvi)
Iam ver egelidos renfert repores,
Iam caeli furor aequinoctialis
Iocundis Zephyri silescit aureis.
‘Now the spring brings back to us its mild airs, now the equinoctial fury of the heavens is calmed by the happy Zephyrs.’
31. (p. 495). Lady Vauban: The Seigneur de Vauban was the military engineer to Louis XIV, and one of the great fortification builders of all time; many of his works still stand in France.
32. (p. 518). plangulcula: The wax effigy used by a sorcerer.
33. (p. 518). Optume: Excellent. ad rem: To the point. Firmavit fidem: He has plighted his troth.
34. (p. 572). Sir Cloudesley Shovel: Sir Clowdesley Shovell (1650–1707) was long held up as one of the rare examples of high naval officers rising up from the ranks. A shoemaker’s apprentice, he ran away to sea, took part in many of the great naval battles of the 1690s, assisted in the storming of Gibraltar in 1704, and in 1707 died when his ship foundered and sank with all hands off the Scilly Isles.
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