George Meredith - The Egoist - A Comedy in Narrative

Dr. Corney had been intercepted. He broke from Sir Willoughby with a dozen little nods of accurate understanding of him, even to beyond the mark of the communications. He touched his patient's pulse lightly, briefly sighed with professional composure, and pronounced: "Rest. Must not be moved. No, no, nothing serious," he quieted Lætitia's fears, "but rest, rest. A change of residence for a night will tone him. I will bring him a draught in the course of the evening. Yes, yes, I'll fetch everything wanted from the cottage for you and for him. Repose on Corney's forethought."

"You are sure, Dr. Corney?" said Lætitia, frightened on her father's account and on her own.

"Which aspect will be the best for Mr. Dale's bedroom?" the hospitable ladies Eleanor and Isabel inquired.

"Southeast, decidedly: let him have the morning sun: a warm air, a vigorous air, and a bright air, and the patient wakes and sings in his bed."

Still doubtful whether she was in a trap, Lætitia whispered to her father of the privacy and comforts of his home. He replied to her that he thought he would rather be in his own home.

Dr Corney positively pronounced No to it.

Lætitia breathed again of home, but with the sigh of one overborne.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel took the word from Willoughby, and said: "But you are at home, my dear. This is your home. Your father will be at least as well attended here as at the cottage."

She raised her eyelids on them mournfully, and by chance diverted her look to Dr. Middleton, quite by chance.

It spoke eloquently to the assembly of all that Willoughby desired to be imagined.

"But there is Crossjay," she cried. "My cousin has gone, and the boy is left alone. I cannot have him left alone. If we, if, Dr. Corney, you are sure it is unsafe for papa to be moved to-day, Crossjay must… he cannot be left."

"Bring him with you, Corney," said Sir Willoughby; and the little doctor heartily promised that he would, in the event of his finding Crossjay at the cottage, which he thought a distant probability.

"He gave me his word he would not go out till my return," said Lætitia.

"And if Crossjay gave you his word," the accents of a new voice vibrated close by, "be certain that he will not come back with Dr. Corney unless he has authority in your handwriting."

Clara Middleton stepped gently to Lætitia, and with a manner that was an embrace, as much as kissed her for what she was doing on behalf of Crossjay. She put her lips in a pouting form to simulate saying: "Press it."

"He is to come," said Lætitia.

"Then write him his permit."

There was a chatter about Crossjay and the sentinel true to his post that he could be, during which Lætitia distressfully scribbled a line for Dr. Corney to deliver to him. Clara stood near. She had rebuked herself for want of reserve in the presence of Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer, and she was guilty of a slightly excessive containment when she next addressed Lætitia. It was, like Lætitia's look at Dr. Middleton, opportune: enough to make a man who watched as Willoughby did a fatalist for life: the shadow of a difference in her bearing toward Lætitia sufficed to impute acting either to her present coolness or her previous warmth. Better still, when Dr. Middleton said: "So we leave to-morrow, my dear, and I hope you have written to the Darletons," Clara flushed and beamed, and repressed her animation on a sudden, with one grave look, that might be thought regretful, to where Willoughby stood.

Chance works for us when we are good captains.

Willoughby's pride was high, though he knew himself to be keeping it up like a fearfully dexterous juggler, and for an empty reward: but he was in the toils of the world.

"Have you written? The post-bag leaves in half an hour," he addressed her.

"We are expected, but I will write," she replied: and her not having yet written counted in his favour.

She went to write the letter. Dr. Corney had departed on his mission to fetch Crossjay and medicine. Lady Busshe was impatient to be gone. "Corney," she said to Lady Culmer, "is a deadly gossip."

"Inveterate," was the answer.

"My poor horses!"

"Not the young pair of bays?"

"Luckily they are, my dear. And don't let me hear of dining to-night!"

Sir Willoughby was leading out Mr. Dale to a quiet room, contiguous to the invalid gentleman's bedchamber. He resigned him to Lætitia in the hall, that he might have the pleasure of conducting the ladies to their carriage.

"As little agitation as possible. Corney will soon be back," he said, bitterly admiring the graceful subservience of Lætitia's figure to her father's weight on her arm.

He had won a desperate battle, but what had he won?

What had the world given him in return for his efforts to gain it? Just a shirt, it might be said: simple scanty clothing, no warmth. Lady Busshe was unbearable; she gabbled; she was ill-bred, permitted herself to speak of Dr. Middleton as ineligible, no loss to the county. And Mrs. Mountstuart was hardly much above her, with her inevitable stroke of caricature: — "You see Doctor Middleton's pulpit scampering after him with legs!" Perhaps the Rev. Doctor did punish the world for his having forsaken his pulpit, and might be conceived as haunted by it at his heels, but Willoughby was in the mood to abhor comic images; he hated the perpetrators of them and the grinners. Contempt of this laughing empty world, for which he had performed a monstrous immolation, led him to associate Dr. Middleton in his mind, and Clara too, with the desireable things he had sacrificed — a shape of youth and health; a sparkling companion; a face of innumerable charms; and his own veracity; his inner sense of his dignity; and his temper, and the limpid frankness of his air of scorn, that was to him a visage of candid happiness in the dim retrospect. Haply also he had sacrificed more: he looked scientifically into the future: he might have sacrificed a nameless more. And for what? he asked again. For the favourable looks and tongues of these women whose looks and tongues he detested!

"Dr Middleton says he is indebted to me: I am deeply in his debt," he remarked.

"It is we who are in your debt for a lovely romance, my dear Sir Willoughby," said Lady Busshe, incapable of taking a correction, so thoroughly had he imbued her with his fiction, or with the belief that she had a good story to circulate. Away she drove, rattling her tongue to Lady Culmer.

"A hat and horn, and she would be in the old figure of a post-boy on a hue-and-cry sheet," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

Willoughby thanked the great lady for her services, and she complimented the polished gentleman on his noble self-possession. But she complained at the same time of being defrauded of her «charmer» Colonel De Craye, since luncheon. An absence of warmth in her compliment caused Willoughby to shrink and think the wretched shirt he had got from the world no covering after all: a breath flapped it.

"He comes to me to-morrow, I believe," she said, reflecting on her superior knowledge of facts in comparison with Lady Busshe, who would presently be hearing of something novel, and exclaiming: "So, that is why you patronized the colonel!" And it was nothing of the sort, for Mrs. Mountstuart could honestly say she was not the woman to make a business of her pleasure.

"Horace is an enviable fellow," said Willoughby, wise in The Book, which bids us ever, for an assuagement to fancy our friend's condition worse than our own, and recommends the deglutition of irony as the most balsamic for wounds in the whole moral pharmacopoeia.

"I don't know," she replied, with a marked accent of deliberation.

"The colonel is to have you to himself to-morrow!"

"I can't be sure of what I shall have in the colonel!"

"Your perpetual sparkler?"