Dr Middleton: the Ladies Eleanor and Isabel: and Mr. Dale Clara looked up at the flying clouds. She travelled with them now, and tasted freedom, but she prudently forbore to vex her father; she held herself in reserve.
They were summoned by the midday bell.
Few were speakers at the meal, few were eaters. Clara was impelled to join it by her desire to study Mrs. Mountstuart's face. Willoughby was obliged to preside. It was a meal of an assembly of mutes and plates, that struck the ear like the well-known sound of a collection of offerings in church after an impressive exhortation from the pulpit. A sally of Colonel De Craye's met the reception given to a charity-boy's muffled burst of animal spirits in the silence of the sacred edifice. Willoughby tried politics with Dr. Middleton, whose regular appetite preserved him from uncongenial speculations when the hour for appeasing it had come; and he alone did honour to the dishes, replying to his host:
"Times are bad, you say, and we have a Ministry doing with us what they will. Well, sir, and that being so, and opposition a manner of kicking them into greater stability, it is the time for wise men to retire within themselves, with the steady determination of the seed in the earth to grow. Repose upon nature, sleep in firm faith, and abide the seasons. That is my counsel to the weaker party."
The counsel was excellent, but it killed the topic.
Dr. Middleton's appetite was watched for the signal to rise and breathe freely; and such is the grace accorded to a good man of an untroubled conscience engaged in doing his duty to himself, that he perceived nothing of the general restlessness; he went through the dishes calmly, and as calmly he quoted Milton to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, when the company sprung up all at once upon his closing his repast. Vernon was taken away from him by Willoughby. Mrs Mountstuart beckoned covertly to Clara. Willoughby should have had something to say to him, Dr. Middleton thought: the position was not clear. But the situation was not disagreeable; and he was in no serious hurry, though he wished to be enlightened.
"This," Dr. Middleton said to the spinster aunts, as he accompanied them to the drawing-room, "shall be no lost day for me if I may devote the remainder of it to you."
"The thunder, we fear, is not remote," murmured one.
"We fear it is imminent," sighed the other.
They took to chanting in alternation.
"--We are accustomed to peruse our Willoughby, and we know him by a shadow."
"--From his infancy to his glorious youth and his established manhood."
"--He was ever the soul of chivalry."
"--Duty: duty first. The happiness of his family. The well-being of his dependants."
"--If proud of his name it was not an overweening pride; it was founded in the conscious possession of exalted qualities. He could be humble when occasion called for it."
Dr Middleton bowed to the litany, feeling that occasion called for humbleness from him.
"Let us hope ... !" he said, with unassumed penitence on behalf of his inscrutable daughter.
The ladies resumed:--
"--Vernon Whitford, not of his blood, is his brother!"
"--A thousand instances! Laetitia Dale remembers them better than we."
"--That any blow should strike him!"
"--That another should be in store for him!"
"--It seems impossible he can be quite misunderstood!"
"Let us hope ... !" said Dr. Middleton.
"--One would not deem it too much for the dispenser of goodness to expect to be a little looked up to!"
"--When he was a child he one day mounted a chair, and there he stood in danger, would not let us touch him because he was taller than we, and we were to gaze. Do you remember him, Eleanor? 'I am the sun of the house!' It was inimitable!"
"--Your feelings; he would have your feelings! He was fourteen when his cousin Grace Whitford married, and we lost him. They had been the greatest friends; and it was long before he appeared among us. He has never cared to see her since."
"--But he has befriended her husband. Never has he failed in generosity. His only fault is--"
"--His sensitiveness. And that is--"
"--His secret. And that--"
"--You are not to discover! It is the same with him in manhood. No one will accuse Willoughby Patterne of a deficiency of manlinesss: but what is it?--he suffers, as none suffer, if he is not loved. He himself is inalterably constant in affection."
"--What it is no one can say. We have lived with him all his life, and we know him ready to make any sacrifice; only, he does demand the whole heart in return. And if he doubts, he looks as we have seen him to-day."
"--Shattered: as we have never seen him look before."
"We will hope," said Dr. Middleton, this time hastily. He tingled to say, "what it was": he had it in him to solve perplexity in their inquiry. He did say, adopting familiar speech to suit the theme, "You know, ladies, we English come of a rough stock. A dose of rough dealing in our youth does us no harm, braces us.
Otherwise we are likely to feel chilly: we grow too fine where tenuity of stature is necessarily buffetted by gales, namely, in our self-esteem. We are barbarians, on a forcing soil of wealth, in a conservatory of comfortable security; but still barbarians.
So, you see, we shine at our best when we are plucked out of that, to where hard blows are given, in a state of war. In a state of war we are at home, our men are high-minded fellows, Scipios and good legionaries. In the state of peace we do not live in peace: our native roughness breaks out in unexpected places, under extraordinary aspects--tyrannies, extravagances, domestic exactions: and if we have not had sharp early training ... within and without ... the old-fashioned island-instrument to drill into us the civilization of our masters, the ancients, we show it by running here and there to some excess. Ahem. Yet," added the Rev.
