Sir Willoughby Attempts and Achieves Pathos Both were seated. Apparently he would have preferred to watch her dark downcast eyelashes in silence under sanction of his air of abstract meditation and the melancholy superinducing it.
Blood-colour was in her cheeks; the party had inspirited her features. Might it be that lively company, an absence of economical solicitudes, and a flourishing home were all she required to make her bloom again? The supposition was not hazardous in presence of her heightened complexion.
She raised her eyes. He could not meet her look without speaking.
"Can you forgive deceit?"
"It would be to boast of more charity than I know myself to possess, were I to say that I can, Sir Willoughby. I hope I am able to forgive. I cannot tell. I should like to say yes."
"Could you live with the deceiver?"
"No."
"No. I could have given that answer for you. No semblance of union should be maintained between the deceiver and ourselves.
Laetitia!"
"Sir Willoughby?"
"Have I no right to your name?"
"If it pleases you to . . ."
"I speak as my thoughts run, and they did not know a Miss Dale so well as a dear Laetitia: my truest friend! You have talked with Clara Middleton?"
"We had a conversation."
Her brevity affrighted him. He flew off in a cloud.
"Reverting to that question of deceivers: is it not your opinion that to pardon, to condone, is to corrupt society by passing off as pure what is false? Do we not," he wore the smile of haggard playfulness of a convalescent child the first day back to its toys, "Laetitia, do we not impose a counterfeit on the currency?"
"Supposing it to be really deception."
"Apart from my loathing of deception, of falseness in any shape, upon any grounds, I hold it an imperious duty to expose, punish, off with it. I take it to be one of the forms of noxiousness which a good citizen is bound to extirpate. I am not myself good citizen enough, I confess, for much more than passive abhorrence. I do not forgive: I am at heart serious and I cannot forgive:--there is no possible reconciliation, there can be only an ostensible truce, between the two hostile powers dividing this world."
She glanced at him quickly.
"Good and evil!" he said.
Her face expressed a surprise relapsing on the heart.
He spelt the puckers of her forehead to mean that she feared he might be speaking unchristianly.
"You will find it so in all religions, my dear Laetitia: the Hindoo, the Persian, ours. It is universal; an experience of our humanity. Deceit and sincerity cannot live together. Truth must kill the lie, or the lie will kill truth. I do not forgive. All I say to the person is, go!"
"But that is right! that is generous!" exclaimed Laetitia, glad to approve him for the sake of escaping her critical soul, and relieved by the idea of Clara's difficulty solved.
"Capable of generosity, perhaps," he mused, aloud.
She wounded him by not supplying the expected enthusiastic asseveration of her belief in his general tendency to magnanimity.
He said, after a pause: "But the world is not likely to be impressed by anything not immediately gratifying it. People change, I find: as we increase in years we cease to be the heroes we were. I myself am insensible to change: I do not admit the charge. Except in this we will say: personal ambition. I have it no more. And what is it when we have it? Decidedly a confession of inferiority! That is, the desire to be distinguished is an acknowledgement of insufficiency. But I have still the craving for my dearest friends to think well of me. A weakness? Call it so.
Not a dishonourable weakness!"
Laetitia racked her brain for the connection of his present speech with the preceding dialogue. She was baffled, from not knowing "the heat of the centre in him", as Vernon opaquely phrased it in charity to the object of her worship.
"Well," said he, unappeased, "and besides the passion to excel, I have changed somewhat in the heartiness of my thirst for the amusements incident to my station. I do not care to keep a stud--I was once tempted: nor hounds. And I can remember the day when I determined to have the best kennels and the best breed of horses in the kingdom. Puerile! What is distinction of that sort, or of any acquisition and accomplishment? We ask! one's self is not the greater. To seek it, owns to our smallness, in real fact; and when it is attained, what then? My horses are good, they are admired, I challenge the county to surpass them: well? These are but my horses; the praise is of the animals, not of me. I decline to share in it. Yet I know men content to swallow the praise of their beasts and be semi-equine. The littleness of one's fellows in the mob of life is a very strange experience! One may regret to have lost the simplicity of one's forefathers, which could accept those and other distinctions with a cordial pleasure, not to say pride.
As, for instance, I am, as it is called, a dead shot. 'Give your acclamations, gentlemen, to my ancestors, from whom I inherited a steady hand and quick sight.' They do not touch me. Where I do not find myself--that I am essentially I--no applause can move me. To speak to you as I would speak to none, admiration--you know that in my early youth I swam in flattery--I had to swim to avoid drowning!--admiration of my personal gifts has grown tasteless. Changed, therefore, inasmuch as there has been a growth of spirituality. We are all in submission to mortal laws, and so far I have indeed changed. I may add that it is unusual for country gentlemen to apply themselves to scientific researches.
These are, however, in the spirit of the time. I apprehended that instinctively when at College. I forsook the classics for science.
And thereby escaped the vice of domineering self-sufficiency peculiar to classical men, of which you had an amusing example in the carriage, on the way to Mrs. Mountstuart's this evening.