The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE PORCELAIN VASE

  During the term of Clara's walk with Laetitia, Sir Willoughby'sshrunken self-esteem, like a garment hung to the fire after exposure totempestuous weather, recovered some of the sleekness of its velvet pilein the society of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, who represented to himthe world he feared and tried to keep sunny for himself by all the artshe could exercise. She expected him to be the gay Sir Willoughby, andher look being as good as an incantation summons, he produced theaccustomed sprite, giving her sally for sally. Queens govern thepolite. Popularity with men, serviceable as it is for winningfavouritism with women, is of poor value to a sensitive gentleman,anxious even to prognostic apprehension on behalf of his pride, hiscomfort and his prevalence. And men are grossly purchasable; good wineshave them, good cigars, a goodfellow air: they are never quite worththeir salt even then; you can make head against their ill looks. Butthe looks of women will at one blow work on you the downrightdifference which is between the cock of lordly plume and the moulting.Happily they may be gained: a clever tongue will gain them, a leg. Theyare with you to a certainty if Nature is with you; if you are elegantand discreet: if the sun is on you, and they see you shining in it; orif they have seen you well-stationed and handsome in the sun. And oncegained they are your mirrors for life, and far more constant than theglass. That tale of their caprice is absurd. Hit their imaginationsonce, they are your slaves, only demanding common courtier service ofyou. They will deny that you are ageing, they will cover you fromscandal, they will refuse to see you ridiculous. Sir Willoughby'sinstinct, or skin, or outfloating feelers, told him of these mysteriesof the influence of the sex; he had as little need to study them as alady breathed on.

  He had some need to know them in fact; and with him the need of aprotection for himself called it forth; he was intuitively a conjurerin self-defence, long-sighted, wanting no directions to the herb he wasto suck at when fighting a serpent. His dulness of vision into theheart of his enemy was compensated by the agile sensitiveness obscuringbut rendering him miraculously active, and, without supposing his needimmediate, he deemed it politic to fascinate Mrs. Mountstuart andanticipate ghastly possibilities in the future by dropping a hint; notof Clara's fickleness, you may be sure; of his own, rather; or, morejustly, of an altered view of Clara's character. He touched on therogue in porcelain.

  Set gently laughing by his relishing humour. "I get nearer to it," hesaid.

  "Remember I'm in love with her," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

  "That is our penalty."

  "A pleasant one for you."

  He assented. "Is the 'rogue' to be eliminated?"

  "Ask when she's a mother, my dear Sir Willoughby."

  "This is how I read you:--"

  "I shall accept any interpretation that is complimentary."

  "Not one will satisfy me of being sufficiently so, and so I leave it tothe character to fill out the epigram."

  "Do. What hurry is there? And don't be misled by your objection torogue; which would be reasonable if you had not secured her."

  The door of a hollow chamber of horrible reverberation was openedwithin him by this remark.

  He tried to say in jest, that it was not always a passionate admirationthat held the rogue fast; but he muddled it in the thick of hisconscious thunder, and Mrs. Mountstuart smiled to see him shot from thesmooth-flowing dialogue into the cataracts by one simple reminder tothe lover of his luck. Necessarily, after a fall, the pitch of theirconversation relaxed.

  "Miss Dale is looking well," he said.

  "Fairly: she ought to marry," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

  He shook his head. "Persuade her."

  She nodded. "Example may have some effect."

  He looked extremely abstracted. "Yes, it is time. Where is the man youcould recommend for her complement? She has now what was missingbefore, a ripe intelligence in addition to her happydisposition--romantic, you would say. I can't think women the worse forthat."

  "A dash of it."

  "She calls it 'leafage'."

  "Very pretty. And have you relented about your horse Achmet?"

  "I don't sell him under four hundred."

  "Poor Johnny Busshe! You forget that his wife doles him out his money.You're a hard bargainer, Sir Willoughby."

  "I mean the price to be prohibitive."

  "Very well; and 'leafage' is good for hide-and-seek; especially whenthere is no rogue in ambush. And that's the worst I can say of LaetitiaDale. An exaggerated devotion is the scandal of our sex. They sayyou're the hardest man of business in the county too, and I can believeit; for at home and abroad your aim is to get the best of everybody.You see I've no leafage, I am perfectly matter-of-fact, bald."

  "Nevertheless, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart, I can assure you thatconversing with you has much the same exhilarating effect on me asconversing with Miss Dale."

  "But, leafage! leafage! You hard bargainers have no compassion fordevoted spinsters."

  "I tell you my sentiments absolutely."

  "And you have mine moderately expressed."

  She recollected the purpose of her morning's visit, which was to engageDr. Middleton to dine with her, and Sir Willoughby conducted her to thelibrary-door. "Insist," he said.

  Awaiting her reappearance, the refreshment of the talk he hadsustained, not without point, assisted him to distinguish in itscomplete abhorrent orb the offence committed against him by his bride.And this he did through projecting it more and more away from him, sothat in the outer distance it involved his personal emotions less,while observation was enabled to compass its vastness, and, as it were,perceive the whole spherical mass of the wretched girl's guiltimpudently turning on its axis.

  Thus to detach an injury done to us, and plant it in space, formathematical measurement of its weight and bulk, is an art; it may alsobe an instinct of self-preservation; otherwise, as when mountainscrumble adjacent villages are crushed, men of feeling may at any momentbe killed outright by the iniquitous and the callous. But, as an art,it should be known to those who are for practising an art sobeneficent, that circumstances must lend their aid. Sir Willoughby'sinstinct even had sat dull and crushed before his conversation withMrs. Mountstuart. She lifted him to one of his ideals of himself. Amonggentlemen he was the English gentleman; with ladies his aim was theGallican courtier of any period from Louis Treize to Louis Quinze. Hecould doat on those who led him to talk in that character--backed byEnglish solidity, you understand. Roast beef stood eminent behind thesouffle and champagne. An English squire excelling his fellows athazardous leaps in public, he was additionally a polished whisperer, alively dialoguer, one for witty bouts, with something in him--capacityfor a drive and dig or two--beyond mere wit, as they soon learned whocalled up his reserves, and had a bosom for pinking. So much for hisideal of himself. Now, Clara not only never evoked, never responded toit, she repelled it; there was no flourishing of it near her. Heconsiderately overlooked these facts in his ordinary calculations; hewas a man of honour and she was a girl of beauty; but the accidentalblooming of his ideal, with Mrs. Mountstuart, on the very heels ofClara's offence, restored him to full command of his art of detachment,and he thrust her out, quite apart from himself, to contemplate herdisgraceful revolutions.

  Deeply read in the Book of Egoism that he was, he knew the wisdom ofthe sentence: An injured pride that strikes not out will strike home.What was he to strike with? Ten years younger, Laetitia might have beenthe instrument. To think of her now was preposterous. Beside Clara shehad the hue of Winter under the springing bough. He tossed her away,vexed to the very soul by an ostentatious decay that shrank fromcomparison with the blooming creature he had to scourge inself-defence, by some agency or other.

  Mrs. Mountstuart was on the step of her carriage when the silkenparasols of the young ladies were descried on a slope of the park,where the yellow green of May-clothed beeches flowed over the brownground of last year's leaves.

  "Who's the cavalier?" she inquired.

  A g
entleman escorted them.

  "Vernon? No! he's pegging at Crossjay," quoth Willoughby.

  Vernon and Crossjay came out for the boy's half-hour's run before hisdinner. Crossjay spied Miss Middleton and was off to meet her at abound. Vernon followed him leisurely.

  "The rogue has no cousin, has she?" said Mrs. Mountstuart.

  "It's a family of one son or one daughter for generations," repliedWilloughby.

  "And Letty Dale?"

  "Cousin!" he exclaimed, as if wealth had been imputed to Miss Dale;adding: "No male cousin."

  A railway station fly drove out of the avenue on the circle to thehall-entrance. Flitch was driver. He had no right to be there, he wasdoing wrong, but he was doing it under cover of an office, to supporthis wife and young ones, and his deprecating touches of the hat spokeof these apologies to his former master with dog-like pathos.

  Sir Willoughby beckoned to him to approach.

  "So you are here," he said. "You have luggage."

  Flitch jumped from the box and read one of the labels aloud:"Lieutenant-Colonel H. De Craye."

  "And the colonel met the ladies? Overtook them?"

  Here seemed to come dismal matter for Flitch to relate.

  He began upon the abstract origin of it: he had lost his place in SirWilloughby's establishment, and was obliged to look about for workwhere it was to be got, and though he knew he had no right to be wherehe was, he hoped to be forgiven because of the mouths he had to feed asa flyman attached to the railway station, where this gentleman, thecolonel, hired him, and he believed Sir Willoughby would excuse him fordriving a friend, which the colonel was, he recollected well, and thecolonel recollected him, and he said, not noticing how he was rigged:"What! Flitch! back in your old place? Am I expected?" and he told thecolonel his unfortunate situation. "Not back, colonel; no such luck forme" and Colonel De Craye was a very kind-hearted gentleman, as healways had been, and asked kindly after his family. And it might bethat such poor work as he was doing now he might be deprived of, suchis misfortune when it once harpoons a man; you may dive, and you mayfly, but it sticks in you, once do a foolish thing. "May I humbly begof you, if you'll be so good, Sir Willoughby," said Flitch, passing toevidence of the sad mishap. He opened the door of the fly, displayingfragments of broken porcelain.

  "But, what, what! what's the story of this?" cried Sir Willoughby.

  "What is it?" said Mrs. Mountstuart, pricking up her ears.

  "It was a vaws," Flitch replied in elegy.

  "A porcelain vase!" interpreted Sir Willoughby.

  "China!" Mrs. Mountstuart faintly shrieked.

  One of the pieces was handed to her inspection.

  She held it close, she held it distant. She sighed horribly.

  "The man had better have hanged himself," said she.

  Flitch bestirred his misfortune-sodden features and members for acontinuation of the doleful narrative.

  "How did this occur?" Sir Willoughby peremptorily asked him.

  Flitch appealed to his former master for testimony that he was a goodand a careful driver.

  Sir Willoughby thundered: "I tell you to tell me how this occurred."

  "Not a drop, my lady! not since my supper last night, if there's anytruth in me!" Flitch implored succour of Mrs Mountstuart.

  "Drive straight," she said, and braced him.

  His narrative was then direct.

  Near Piper's mill, where the Wicker brook crossed the Rebdon road, oneof Hoppner's wagons, overloaded as usual, was forcing the horsesuphill, when Flitch drove down at an easy pace, and saw himself betweenHoppner's cart come to a stand and a young lady advancing: and justthen the carter smacks his whip, the horses pull half mad. The younglady starts behind the cart, and up jumps the colonel, and, to save theyoung lady, Flitch dashed ahead and did save her, he thanked Heaven forit, and more when he came to see who the young lady was.

  "She was alone?" said Sir Willoughby in tragic amazement, staring atFlitch.

  "Very well, you saved her, and you upset the fly," Mountstuart joggedhim on.

  "Bardett, our old head-keeper, was a witness, my lady, had to drivehalf up the bank, and it's true--over the fly did go; and the vaws itshoots out against the twelfth mile-stone, just as though there was thechance for it! for nobody else was injured, and knocked againstanything else, it never would have flown all to pieces, so that it tookBardett and me ten minutes to collect every one, down to the smallestpiece there was; and he said, and I can't help thinking myself, therewas a Providence in it, for we all come together so as you might say wewas made to do as we did."

  "So then Horace adopted the prudent course of walking on with theladies instead of trusting his limbs again to this capsizing fly," SirWilloughby said to Mrs. Mountstuart; and she rejoined: "Lucky that noone was hurt."

  Both of them eyed the nose of poor Flitch, and simultaneously theydelivered a verdict in "Humph!"

  Mrs. Mountstuart handed the wretch a half-crown from her purse. SirWilloughby directed the footman in attendance to unload the fly andgather up the fragments of porcelain carefully, bidding Flitch be quickin his departing.

  "The colonel's wedding-present! I shall call to-morrow." Mrs.Mountstuart waved her adieu.

  "Come every day!--Yes, I suppose we may guess the destination of thevase." He bowed her off, and she cried:

  "Well, now, the gift can be shared, if you're either of you for adivision." In the crash of the carriage-wheels he heard, "At any ratethere was a rogue in that porcelain."

  These are the slaps we get from a heedless world.

  As for the vase, it was Horace De Craye's loss. Wedding-present hewould have to produce, and decidedly not in chips. It had the look of acostly vase, but that was no question for the moment:--What was meantby Clara being seen walking on the high-road alone?--What snare,traceable ad inferas, had ever induced Willoughby Patterne to make herthe repository and fortress of his honour!