George Meredith
The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative
CHAPTER XVI
CLARA AND LAETITIA
In spite of his honourable caution, Vernon had said things to render Miss Middleton more angrily determined than she had been in the scene with Sir Willoughby. His counting on pitched battles and a defeat for her in all of them, made her previous feelings appear slack in comparison with the energy of combat now animating her. And she could vehemently declare that she had not chosen; she was too young, too ignorant to choose. He had wrongly used that word; it sounded malicious; and to call consenting the same in fact as choosing was wilfully unjust. Mr. Whitford meant well; he was conscientious, very conscientious. But he was not the hero descending from heaven bright-sworded to smite a woman's fetters of her limbs and deliver her from the yawning mouth-abyss.
His logical coolness of expostulation with her when she cast aside the silly mission entrusted to her by Sir Willoughby and wept for herself, was unheroic in proportion to its praiseworthiness. He had left it to her to do everything she wished done, stipulating simply that there should be a pause of four-and-twenty hours for her to consider of it before she proceeded in the attempt to extricate herself. Of consolation there had not been a word. Said he, "I am the last man to give advice in such a case". Yet she had by no means astonished him when her confession came out. It came out, she knew not how. It was led up to by his declining the idea of marriage, and her congratulating him on his exemption from the prospect of the yoke, but memory was too dull to revive the one or two fiery minutes of broken language when she had been guilty of her dire misconduct.
This gentleman was no flatterer, scarcely a friend. He could look on her grief without soothing her. Supposing he had soothed her warmly? All her sentiments collected in her bosom to dash in reprobation of him at the thought. She nevertheless condemned him for his excessive coolness; his transparent anxiety not to be compromised by a syllable; his air of saying, "I guessed as much, but why plead your case to me?" And his recommendation to her to be quite sure she did know what she meant, was a little insulting. She exonerated him from the intention; he treated her as a girl. By what he said of Miss Dale, he proposed that lady for imitation.
"I must be myself or I shall be playing hypocrite to dig my own pitfall," she said to herself, while taking counsel with Laetitia as to the route for their walk, and admiring a becoming curve in her companion's hat.
Sir Willoughby, with many protestations of regret that letters of business debarred him from the pleasure of accompanying them, remarked upon the path proposed by Miss Dale, "In that case you must have a footman."
"Then we adopt the other," said Clara, and they set forth.
"Sir Willoughby," Miss Dale said to her, "is always in alarm about our unprotectedness."
Clara glanced up at the clouds and closed her parasol. She replied, "It inspires timidity."
There was that in the accent and character of the answer which warned Laetitia to expect the reverse of a quiet chatter with Miss Middleton.
"You are fond of walking?" She chose a peaceful topic.
"Walking or riding; yes, of walking," said Clara. "The difficulty is to find companions."
"We shall lose Mr. Whitford next week."
"He goes?"
"He will be a great loss to me, for I do not ride," Laetitia replied to the off-hand inquiry.
"Ah!"
Miss Middleton did not fan conversation when she simply breathed her voice.
Laetitia tried another neutral theme.
"The weather to-day suits our country," she said.
"England, or Patterne Park? I am so devoted to mountains that I have no enthusiasm for flat land."
"Do you call our country flat, Miss Middleton? We have undulations, hills, and we have sufficient diversity, meadows, rivers, copses, brooks, and good roads, and pretty by-paths."
"The prettiness is overwhelming. It is very pretty to see; but to live with, I think I prefer ugliness. I can imagine learning to love ugliness. It's honest. However young you are, you cannot be deceived by it. These parks of rich people are a part of the prettiness. I would rather have fields, commons."
"The parks give us delightful green walks, paths through beautiful woods."
"If there is a right-of-way for the public."
"There should be," said Miss Dale, wondering; and Clara cried: "I chafe at restraint: hedges and palings everywhere! I should have to travel ten years to sit down contented among these fortifications. Of course I can read of this rich kind of English country with pleasure in poetry. But it seems to me to require poetry. What would you say of human beings requiring it?"
"That they are not so companionable but that the haze of distance improves the view."
"Then you do know that you are the wisest?"
Laetitia raised her dark eyelashes; she sought to understand. She could only fancy she did; and if she did, it meant that Miss Middleton thought her wise in remaining single.
Clara was full of a sombre preconception that her "jealousy" had been hinted to Miss Dale.
"You knew Miss Durham?" she said.
"Not intimately."
"As well as you know me?"
"Not so well."
"But you saw more of her?"
"She was more reserved with me."
"Oh! Miss Dale, I would not be reserved with you."
The thrill of the voice caused Laetitia to steal a look. Clara's eyes were bright, and she had the readiness to run to volubility of the fever-stricken; otherwise she did not betray excitement.
"You will never allow any of these noble trees to be felled, Miss Middleton?"
"The axe is better than decay, do you not think?"
"I think your influence will be great and always used to good purpose."
"My influence, Miss Dale? I have begged a favour this morning and can not obtain the grant."
It was lightly said, but Clara's face was more significant, and "What?" leaped from Laetitia's lips.
Before she could excuse herself, Clara had answered: "My liberty."
In another and higher tone Laetitia said, "What?" and she looked round on her companion; she looked in the doubt that is open to conviction by a narrow aperture, and slowly and painfully yields access. Clara saw the vacancy of her expression gradually filling with woefulness.
"I have begged him to release me from my engagement, Miss Dale."
"Sir Willoughby?"
"It is incredible to you. He refuses. You see I have no influence."
"Miss Middleton, it is terrible!"
"To be dragged to the marriage service against one's will? Yes."
"Oh! Miss Middleton!"
"Do you not think so?"
"That cannot be your meaning."
"You do not suspect me of trifling? You know I would not. I am as much in earnest as a mouse in a trap."
"No, you will not misunderstand me! Miss Middleton, such a blow to Sir Willoughby would be shocking, most cruel! He is devoted to you."
"He was devoted to Miss Durham."
"Not so deeply: differently."
"Was he not very much courted at that time? He is now; not so much: he is not so young. But my reason for speaking of Miss Durham was to exclaim at the strangeness of a girl winning her freedom to plunge into wedlock. Is it comprehensible to you? She flies from one dungeon into another. These are the acts which astonish men at our conduct, and cause them to ridicule and, I dare say, despise us."
"But, Miss Middleton, for Sir Willoughby to grant such a request, if it was made . . ."
"It was made, and by me, and will be made again. I throw it all on my unworthiness, Miss Dale. So the county will think of me, and quite justly. I would rather defend him than myself. He requires a different wife from anything I can be. That is my discovery; unhappily a late one. The blame is all mine. The world cannot be too hard on me. But I must be free if I am to be kind in my judgements even of the gentleman I have injured."
"So noble a gentleman!" Laetitia sighed.
"I will subscribe to any eulogy of him," said Clara, with a penetrating thought as to the possibility of a lady experienced in him like Laetitia taking him for noble. "He has a noble air. I say it sincerely, that your appreciation of him proves his nobility." Her feeling of opposition to Sir Willoughby pushed her to this extravagance, gravely perplexing Laetitia. "And it is," added Clara, as if to support what she had said, "a withering rebuke to me; I know him less, at least have not had so long an experience of him."
Laetitia pondered on an obscurity in these words which would have accused her thick intelligence but for a glimmer it threw on another most obscure communication. She feared it might be, strange though it seemed, jealousy, a shade of jealousy affecting Miss Middleton, as had been vaguely intimated by Sir Willoughby when they were waiting in the hall. "A little feminine ailment, a want of comprehension of a perfect friendship;" those were his words to her: and he suggested vaguely that care must be taken in the eulogy of her friend.
She resolved to be explicit.
"I have not said that I think him beyond criticism, Miss Middleton."
"Noble?"
"He has faults. When we have known a person for years the faults come out, but custom makes light of them; and I suppose we feel flattered by seeing what it would be difficult to be blind to! A very little flatters us! Now, do you not admire that view? It is my favourite."
Clara gazed over rolling richness of foliage, wood and water, and a church-spire, a town and horizon hills. There sung a sky-lark.
"Not even the bird that does not fly away!" she said; meaning, she had no heart for the bird satisfied to rise and descend in this place.
Laetitia travelled to some notion, dim and immense, of Miss Middleton's fever of distaste. She shrunk from it in a kind of dread lest it might be contagious and rob her of her one ever-fresh possession of the homely picturesque; but Clara melted her by saying, "For your sake I could love it . . . in time; or some dear old English scene. Since . . . since this . . . this change in me, I find I cannot separate landscape from associations. Now I learn how youth goes. I have grown years older in a week.—Miss Dale, if he were to give me my freedom? if he were to cast me off? if he stood alone?"
"I should pity him."
"Him—not me! Oh! right! I hoped you would; I knew you would."
Laetitia's attempt to shift with Miss Middleton's shiftiness was vain; for now she seemed really listening to the language of Jealousy:—jealous of the ancient Letty Dale—and immediately before the tone was quite void of it.
"Yes," she said, "but you make me feel myself in the dark, and when I do I have the habit of throwing myself for guidance upon such light as I have within. You shall know me, if you will, as well as I know myself. And do not think me far from the point when I say I have a feeble health. I am what the doctors call anaemic; a rather bloodless creature. The blood is life, so I have not much life. Ten years back—eleven, if I must be precise, I thought of conquering the world with a pen! The result is that I am glad of a fireside, and not sure of always having one: and that is my achievement. My days are monotonous, but if I have a dread, it is that there will be an alteration in them. My father has very little money. We subsist on what private income he has, and his pension: he was an army doctor. I may by-and-by have to live in a town for pupils. I could be grateful to any one who would save me from that. I should be astonished at his choosing to have me burden his household as well.—Have I now explained the nature of my pity? It would be the pity of common sympathy, pure lymph of pity, as nearly disembodied as can be. Last year's sheddings from the tree do not form an attractive garland. Their merit is, that they have not the ambition. I am like them. Now, Miss Middleton, I cannot make myself more bare to you. I hope you see my sincerity."
"I do see it," Clara said.
With the second heaving of her heart, she cried: "See it, and envy you that humility! proud if I could ape it! Oh, how proud if I could speak so truthfully true!—You would not have spoken so to me without some good feeling out of which friends are made. That I am sure of. To be very truthful to a person, one must have a liking. So I judge by myself. Do I presume too much?"
Kindness was on Laetitia's face.
"But now," said Clara, swimming on the wave in her bosom, "I tax you with the silliest suspicion ever entertained by one of your rank. Lady, you have deemed me capable of the meanest of our vices!—Hold this hand, Laetitia; my friend, will you? Something is going on in me."
Laetitia took her hand, and saw and felt that something was going on.
Clara said, "You are a woman."
It was her effort to account for the something.
She swam for a brilliant instant on tears, and yielded to the overflow.
When they had fallen, she remarked upon her first long breath quite coolly: "An encouraging picture of a rebel, is it not?"
Her companion murmured to soothe her.
"It's little, it's nothing," said Clara, pained to keep her lips in line.
They walked forward, holding hands, deep-hearted to one another.
"I like this country better now," the shaken girl resumed. "I could lie down in it and ask only for sleep. I should like to think of you here. How nobly self-respecting you must be, to speak as you did! Our dreams of heroes and heroines are cold glitter beside the reality. I have been lately thinking of myself as an outcast of my sex, and to have a good woman liking me a little . . . loving? Oh, Laetitia, my friend, I should have kissed you, and not made this exhibition of myself—and if you call it hysterics, woe to you! for I bit my tongue to keep it off when I had hardly strength to bring my teeth together—if that idea of jealousy had not been in your head. You had it from him."
"I have not alluded to it in any word that I can recollect."
"He can imagine no other cause for my wish to be released. I have noticed, it is his instinct to reckon on women as constant by their nature. They are the needles, and he the magnet. Jealousy of you, Miss Dale! Laetitia, may I speak?"
"Say everything you please."
"I could wish:—Do you know my baptismal name?"
"Clara."
"At last! I could wish . . . that is, if it were your wish. Yes, I could wish that. Next to independence, my wish would be that. I risk offending you. Do not let your delicacy take arms against me. I wish him happy in the only way that he can be made happy. There is my jealousy."
"Was it what you were going to say just now?"
"No."
"I thought not."
"I was going to say—and I believe the rack would not make me truthful like you, Laetitia—well, has it ever struck you: remember, I do see his merits; I speak to his faithfullest friend, and I acknowledge he is attractive, he has manly tastes and habits; but has it never struck you . . . I have no right to ask; I know that men must have faults, I do not expect them to be saints; I am not one; I wish I were."
"Has it never struck me . . . ?" Laetitia prompted her.
"That very few women are able to be straightforwardly sincere in their speech, however much they may desire to be?"
"They are differently educated. Great misfortune brings it to them."
"I am sure your answer is correct. Have you ever known a woman who was entirely an Egoist?"
"Personally known one? We are not better than men."
"I do not pretend that we are. I have latterly become an Egoist, thinking of no one but myself, scheming to make use of every soul I meet. But then, women are in the position of inferiors. They are hardly out of the nursery when a lasso is round their necks; and if they have beauty, no wonder they turn it to a weapon and make as many captives as they can. I do not wonder! My sense of shame at my natural weakness and the arrogance of men would urge me to make hundreds captive, if that is being a coquette. I should not have compassion for those lofty birds, the hawks. To see them with their wings clipped would amuse me. Is there any other way of punishing them?"
"Consider what you lose in punishing them."
"I consider what they gain if we do not."
Laetitia supposed she was listening to discursive observations upon the inequality in the relations of the sexes. A suspicion of a drift to a closer meaning had been lulled, and the colour flooded her swiftly when Clara said: "Here is the difference I see; I see it; I am certain of it: women who are called coquettes make their conquests not of the best of men; but men who are Egoists have good women for their victims; women on whose devoted constancy they feed; they drink it like blood. I am sure I am not taking the merely feminine view. They punish themselves too by passing over the one suitable to them, who could really give them what they crave to have, and they go where they . . ." Clara stopped. "I have not your power to express ideas," she said.
"Miss Middleton, you have a dreadful power," said Laetitia.
Clara smiled affectionately. "I am not aware of any. Whose cottage is this?"
"My father's. Will you not come in? into the garden?"
Clara took note of ivied windows and roses in the porch. She thanked Laetitia and said: "I will call for you in an hour."
"Are you walking on the road alone?" said Laetitia, incredulously, with an eye to Sir Willoughby's dismay.
"I put my trust in the high-road," Clara replied, and turned away, but turned back to Laetitia and offered her face to be kissed.
The "dreadful power" of this young lady had fervently impressed Laetitia, and in kissing her she marvelled at her gentleness and girlishness.
Clara walked on, unconscious of her possession of power of any kind.
CHAPTER XVII
THE PORCELAIN VASE
During the term of Clara's walk with Laetitia, Sir Willoughby's shrunken self-esteem, like a garment hung to the fire after exposure to tempestuous weather, recovered some of the sleekness of its velvet pile in the society of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, who represented to him the world he feared and tried to keep sunny for himself by all the arts he could exercise. She expected him to be the gay Sir Willoughby, and her look being as good as an incantation summons, he produced the accustomed sprite, giving her sally for sally. Queens govern the polite. Popularity with men, serviceable as it is for winning favouritism with women, is of poor value to a sensitive gentleman, anxious even to prognostic apprehension on behalf of his pride, his comfort and his prevalence. And men are grossly purchasable; good wines have them, good cigars, a goodfellow air: they are never quite worth their salt even then; you can make head against their ill looks. But the looks of women will at one blow work on you the downright difference which is between the cock of lordly plume and the moulting. Happily they may be gained: a clever tongue will gain them, a leg. They are with you to a certainty if Nature is with you; if you are elegant and discreet: if the sun is on you, and they see you shining in it; or if they have seen you well-stationed and handsome in the sun. And once gained they are your mirrors for life, and far more constant than the glass. That tale of their caprice is absurd. Hit their imaginations once, they are your slaves, only demanding common courtier service of you. They will deny that you are ageing, they will cover you from scandal, they will refuse to see you ridiculous. Sir Willoughby's instinct, or skin, or outfloating feelers, told him of these mysteries of the influence of the sex; he had as little need to study them as a lady breathed on.
He had some need to know them in fact; and with him the need of a protection for himself called it forth; he was intuitively a conjurer in self-defence, long-sighted, wanting no directions to the herb he was to suck at when fighting a serpent. His dulness of vision into the heart of his enemy was compensated by the agile sensitiveness obscuring but rendering him miraculously active, and, without supposing his need immediate, he deemed it politic to fascinate Mrs. Mountstuart and anticipate ghastly possibilities in the future by dropping a hint; not of Clara's fickleness, you may be sure; of his own, rather; or, more justly, of an altered view of Clara's character. He touched on the rogue in porcelain.
Set gently laughing by his relishing humour. "I get nearer to it," he said.
"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 to the character to fill out the epigram."
"Do. What hurry is there? And don't be misled by your objection to rogue; which would be reasonable if you had not secured her."
The door of a hollow chamber of horrible reverberation was opened within him by this remark.
He tried to say in jest, that it was not always a passionate admiration that held the rogue fast; but he muddled it in the thick of his conscious thunder, and Mrs. Mountstuart smiled to see him shot from the smooth-flowing dialogue into the cataracts by one simple reminder to the lover of his luck. Necessarily, after a fall, the pitch of their conversation 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 you could recommend for her complement? She has now what was missing before, a ripe intelligence in addition to her happy disposition—romantic, you would say. I can't think women the worse for that."
"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 when there is no rogue in ambush. And that's the worst I can say of Laetitia Dale. An exaggerated devotion is the scandal of our sex. They say you're the hardest man of business in the county too, and I can believe it; 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 that conversing with you has much the same exhilarating effect on me as conversing with Miss Dale."
"But, leafage! leafage! You hard bargainers have no compassion for devoted 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 engage Dr. Middleton to dine with her, and Sir Willoughby conducted her to the library-door. "Insist," he said.
Awaiting her reappearance, the refreshment of the talk he had sustained, not without point, assisted him to distinguish in its complete abhorrent orb the offence committed against him by his bride. And this he did through projecting it more and more away from him, so that 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 guilt impudently turning on its axis.
Thus to detach an injury done to us, and plant it in space, for mathematical measurement of its weight and bulk, is an art; it may also be an instinct of self-preservation; otherwise, as when mountains crumble adjacent villages are crushed, men of feeling may at any moment be killed outright by the iniquitous and the callous. But, as an art, it should be known to those who are for practising an art so beneficent, that circumstances must lend their aid. Sir Willoughby's instinct even had sat dull and crushed before his conversation with Mrs. Mountstuart. She lifted him to one of his ideals of himself. Among gentlemen he was the English gentleman; with ladies his aim was the Gallican courtier of any period from Louis Treize to Louis Quinze. He could doat on those who led him to talk in that character—backed by English solidity, you understand. Roast beef stood eminent behind the souffle and champagne. An English squire excelling his fellows at hazardous leaps in public, he was additionally a polished whisperer, a lively dialoguer, one for witty bouts, with something in him—capacity for a drive and dig or two—beyond mere wit, as they soon learned who called up his reserves, and had a bosom for pinking. So much for his ideal of himself. Now, Clara not only never evoked, never responded to it, she repelled it; there was no flourishing of it near her. He considerately overlooked these facts in his ordinary calculations; he was a man of honour and she was a girl of beauty; but the accidental blooming of his ideal, with Mrs. Mountstuart, on the very heels of Clara's offence, restored him to full command of his art of detachment, and he thrust her out, quite apart from himself, to contemplate her disgraceful revolutions.
Deeply read in the Book of Egoism that he was, he knew the wisdom of the sentence: An injured pride that strikes not out will strike home. What was he to strike with? Ten years younger, Laetitia might have been the instrument. To think of her now was preposterous. Beside Clara she had the hue of Winter under the springing bough. He tossed her away, vexed to the very soul by an ostentatious decay that shrank from comparison with the blooming creature he had to scourge in self-defence, by some agency or other.
Mrs. Mountstuart was on the step of her carriage when the silken parasols of the young ladies were descried on a slope of the park, where the yellow green of May-clothed beeches flowed over the brown ground of last year's leaves.
"Who's the cavalier?" she inquired.
A gentleman 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 his dinner. Crossjay spied Miss Middleton and was off to meet her at a bound. 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," replied Willoughby.
"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 the hall-entrance. Flitch was driver. He had no right to be there, he was doing wrong, but he was doing it under cover of an office, to support his wife and young ones, and his deprecating touches of the hat spoke of 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 Sir Willoughby's establishment, and was obliged to look about for work where it was to be got, and though he knew he had no right to be where he was, he hoped to be forgiven because of the mouths he had to feed as a flyman attached to the railway station, where this gentleman, the colonel, hired him, and he believed Sir Willoughby would excuse him for driving a friend, which the colonel was, he recollected well, and the colonel recollected him, and he said, not noticing how he was rigged: "What! Flitch! back in your old place? Am I expected?" and he told the colonel his unfortunate situation. "Not back, colonel; no such luck for me" and Colonel De Craye was a very kind-hearted gentleman, as he always had been, and asked kindly after his family. And it might be that such poor work as he was doing now he might be deprived of, such is misfortune when it once harpoons a man; you may dive, and you may fly, but it sticks in you, once do a foolish thing. "May I humbly beg of you, if you'll be so good, Sir Willoughby," said Flitch, passing to evidence of the sad mishap. He opened the door of the fly, displaying fragments 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 a continuation 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 good and 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 any truth 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, one of Hoppner's wagons, overloaded as usual, was forcing the horses uphill, when Flitch drove down at an easy pace, and saw himself between Hoppner's cart come to a stand and a young lady advancing: and just then the carter smacks his whip, the horses pull half mad. The young lady starts behind the cart, and up jumps the colonel, and, to save the young lady, Flitch dashed ahead and did save her, he thanked Heaven for it, and more when he came to see who the young lady was.
"She was alone?" said Sir Willoughby in tragic amazement, staring at Flitch.
"Very well, you saved her, and you upset the fly," Mountstuart jogged him on.
"Bardett, our old head-keeper, was a witness, my lady, had to drive half up the bank, and it's true—over the fly did go; and the vaws it shoots out against the twelfth mile-stone, just as though there was the chance for it! for nobody else was injured, and knocked against anything else, it never would have flown all to pieces, so that it took Bardett and me ten minutes to collect every one, down to the smallest piece there was; and he said, and I can't help thinking myself, there was a Providence in it, for we all come together so as you might say we was made to do as we did."
