"Then, Crossjay, immediately after breakfast run round behind the pheasantry, and there I'll find you. And if any one comes to you before I come, say you are admiring the plumage of the Himalaya — the beautiful Indian bird; and if we're found together, we run a race, and of course you can catch me, but you mustn't until we're out of sight. Tell Mr. Vernon at night — tell Mr. Whitford at night you had the money from me as part of my allowance to you for pocket-money. I used to like to have pocket-money, Crossjay. And you may tell him I gave you the holiday, and I may write to him for his excuse, if he is not too harsh to grant it. He can be very harsh."
"You look right into his eyes next time, Miss Middleton. I used to think him awful till he made me look at him. He says men ought to look straight at one another, just as we do when he gives me my boxing-lesson, and then we won't have quarrelling half so much. I can't recollect everything he says."
"You are not bound to, Crossjay."
"No, but you like to hear."
"Really, dear boy. I can't accuse myself of having told you that."
"No, but, Miss Middleton, you do. And he's fond of your singing and playing on the piano, and watches you."
"We shall be late if we don't mind," said Clara, starting to a pace close on a run.
They were in time for a circuit in the park to the wild double cherry-blossom, no longer all white. Clara gazed up from under it, where she had imagined a fairer visible heavenliness than any other sight of earth had ever given her. That was when Vernon lay beneath. But she had certainly looked above, not at him. The tree seemed sorrowful in its withering flowers of the colour of trodden snow.
Crossjay resumed the conversation.
"He says ladies don't like him much."
"Who says that?"
"Mr. Whitford."
"Were those his words?"
"I forget the words: but he said they wouldn't be taught by him, like me, ever since you came; and since you came I've liked him ten times more."
"The more you like him the more I shall like you, Crossjay."
The boy raised a shout and scampered away to Sir Willoughby, at the appearance of whom Clara felt herself nipped and curling inward. Crossjay ran up to him with every sign of pleasure. Yet he had not mentioned him during the walk; and Clara took it for a sign that the boy understood the entire satisfaction Willoughby had in mere shows of affection, and acted up to it. Hardly blaming Crossjay, she was a critic of the scene, for the reason that youthful creatures who have ceased to love a person, hunger for evidence against him to confirm their hard animus, which will seem to them sometimes, when he is not immediately irritating them, brutish, because they can not analyze it and reduce it to the multitude of just antagonisms whereof it came. It has passed by large accumulation into a sombre and speechless load upon the senses, and fresh evidence, the smallest item, is a champion to speak for it. Being about to do wrong, she grasped at this eagerly, and brooded on the little of vital and truthful that there was in the man and how he corrupted the boy. Nevertheless, she instinctively imitated Crossjay in an almost sparkling salute to him.
"Good-morning, Willoughby; it was not a morning to lose: have you been out long?"
He retained her hand. "My dear Clara! and you, have you not overfatigued yourself? Where have you been?"
"Round — everywhere! And I am certainly not tired."
"Only you and Crossjay? You should have loosened the dogs."
"Their barking would have annoyed the house."
"Less than I am annoyed to think of you without protection."
He kissed her fingers: it was a loving speech.
"The household…" said Clara, but would not insist to convict him of what he could not have perceived.
"If you outstrip me another morning, Clara, promise me to take the dogs; will you?"
"Yes."
"To-day I am altogether yours."
"Are you?"
"From the first to the last hour of it! — So you fall in with Horace's humour pleasantly?"
"He is very amusing."
"As good as though one had hired him."
"Here comes Colonel De Craye."
"He must think we have hired him!"
She noticed the bitterness of Willoughby's tone. He sang out a good-morning to De Craye, and remarked that he must go to the stables.
"Darleton? Darleton, Miss Middleton?" said the colonel, rising from his bow to her: "a daughter of General Darleton? If so, I have had the honour to dance with her. And have not you? — practised with her, I mean; or gone off in a triumph to dance it out as young ladies do? So you know what a delightful partner she is."
"She is!" cried Clara, enthusiastic for her succouring friend, whose letter was the treasure in her bosom.
"Oddly, the name did not strike me yesterday, Miss Middleton. In the middle of the night it rang a little silver bell in my ear, and I remembered the lady I was half in love with, if only for her dancing. She is dark, of your height, as light on her feet; a sister in another colour. Now that I know her to be your friend…!"
"Why, you may meet her, Colonel De Craye."
"It'll be to offer her a castaway. And one only meets a charming girl to hear that she's engaged! 'Tis not a line of a ballad, Miss Middleton, but out of the heart."
"Lucy Darleton… You were leading me to talk seriously to you, Colonel De Craye."
"Will you one day? — and not think me a perpetual tumbler! You have heard of melancholy clowns. You will find the face not so laughable behind my paint. When I was thirteen years younger I was loved, and my dearest sank to the grave. Since then I have not been quite at home in life; probably because of finding no one so charitable as she. 'Tis easy to win smiles and hands, but not so easy to win a woman whose faith you would trust as your own heart before the enemy. I was poor then. She said. 'The day after my twenty-first birthday'; and that day I went for her, and I wondered they did not refuse me at the door. I was shown upstairs, and I saw her, and saw death. She wished to marry me, to leave me her fortune!"
"Then, never marry," said Clara, in an underbreath.
She glanced behind.
Sir Willoughby was close, walking on turf.
"I must be cunning to escape him after breakfast," she thought.
He had discarded his foolishness of the previous days, and the thought in him could have replied: "I am a dolt if I let you out of my sight."
Vernon appeared, formal as usual of late. Clara begged his excuse for withdrawing Crossjay from his morning swim. He nodded.
De Craye called to Willoughby for a book of the trains.
"There's a card in the smoking-room; eleven, one, and four are the hours, if you must go," said Willoughby.
"You leave the Hall, Colonel De Craye?"
"In two or three days, Miss Middleton."
She did not request him to stay: his announcement produced no effect on her. Consequently, thought he — well, what? nothing: well, then, that she might not be minded to stay herself. Otherwise she would have regretted the loss of an amusing companion: that is the modest way of putting it. There is a modest and a vain for the same sentiment; and both may be simultaneously in the same breast; and each one as honest as the other; so shy is man's vanity in the presence of here and there a lady. She liked him: she did not care a pin for him — how could she? yet she liked him: O, to be able to do her some kindling bit of service! These were his consecutive fancies, resolving naturally to the exclamation, and built on the conviction that she did not love Willoughby, and waited for a spirited lift from circumstances. His call for a book of the trains had been a sheer piece of impromptu, in the mind as well as on the mouth. It sprang, unknown to him, of conjectures he had indulged yesterday and the day before. This morning she would have an answer to her letter to her friend, Miss Lucy Darleton, the pretty dark girl, whom De Craye was astonished not to have noticed more when he danced with her. She, pretty as she was, had come to his recollection through the name and rank of her father, a famous general of cavalry, and tactician in that arm. The colonel despised himself for not having been devoted to Clara Middleton's friend.