Treating of the Dinner-Party at Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson's Vernon and young Crossjay had tolerably steady work together for a couple of hours, varied by the arrival of a plate of meat on a tray for the master, and some interrogations put to him from time to time by the boy in reference to Miss Middleton. Crossjay made the discovery that if he abstained from alluding to Miss Middleton's beauty he might water his dusty path with her name nearly as much as he liked. Mention of her beauty incurred a reprimand. On the first occasion his master was wistful. "Isn't she glorious!" Crossjay fancied he had started a sovereign receipt for blessed deviations. He tried it again, but paedagogue-thunder broke over his head.
"Yes, only I can't understand what she means, Mr. Whitford," he excused himself "First I was not to tell; I know I wasn't, because she said so; she quite as good as said so. Her last words were:
'Mind, Crossjay, you know nothing about me', when I stuck to that beast of a tramp, who's a 'walking moral,' and gets money out of people by snuffling it."
"Attend to your lesson, or you'll be one," said Vernon.
"Yes, but, Mr. Whitford, now I am to tell. I'm to answer straight out to every question."
"Miss Middleton is anxious that you should be truthful."
"Yes; but in the morning she told me not to tell."
"She was in a hurry. She has it on her conscience that you may have misunderstood her, and she wishes you never to be guilty of an untruth, least of all on her account."
Crossjay committed an unspoken resolution to the air in a violent sigh: "Ah!" and said: "If I were sure!"
"Do as she bids you, my boy."
"But I don't know what it is she wants."
"Hold to her last words to you."
"So I do. If she told me to run till I dropped, on I'd go."
"She told you to study your lessons; do that."
Crossjay buckled to his book, invigorated by an imagination of his liege lady on the page.
After a studious interval, until the impression of his lady had subsided. he resumed: "She's so funny. She's just like a girl, and then she's a lady, too. She's my idea of a princess. And Colonel De Craye! Wasn't he taught dancing! When he says something funny he ducks and seems to be setting to his partner. I should like to be as clever as her father. That is a clever man. I dare say Colonel De Craye will dance with her tonight. I wish I was there."
"It's a dinner-party, not a dance," Vernon forced himself to say, to dispel that ugly vision.
"Isn't it, sir? I thought they danced after dinner-parties, Mr. Whitford, have you ever seen her run?"
Vernon pointed him to his task.
They were silent for a lengthened period.
"But does Miss Middleton mean me to speak out if Sir Willoughby asks me?" said Crossjay.
"Certainly. You needn't make much of it. All's plain and simple."
"But I'm positive, Mr. Whitford, he wasn't to hear of her going to the post-office with me before breakfast. And how did Colonel De Craye find her and bring her back, with that old Flitch? He's a man and can go where he pleases, and I'd have found her, too. give me the chance. You know. I'm fond of Miss Dale, but she--I'm very fond of her--but you can't think she's a girl as well. And about Miss Dale, when she says a thing, there it is, clear. But Miss Middleton has a lot of meanings. Never mind; I go by what's inside, and I'm pretty sure to please her."
"Take your chin off your hand and your elbow off the book, and fix yourself," said Vernon, wrestling with the seduction of Crossjay's idolatry, for Miss Middleton's appearance had been preternaturally sweet on her departure, and the next pleasure to seeing her was hearing of her from the lips of this passionate young poet.
"Remember that you please her by speaking truth," Vernon added, and laid himself open to questions upon the truth, by which he learnt, with a perplexed sense of envy and sympathy, that the boy's idea of truth strongly approximated to his conception of what should be agreeable to Miss Middleton.
He was lonely, bereft of the bard, when he had tucked Crossjay up in his bed and left him. Books he could not read; thoughts were disturbing. A seat in the library and a stupid stare helped to pass the hours, and but for the spot of sadness moving meditation in spite of his effort to stun himself, he would have borne a happy resemblance to an idiot in the sun. He had verily no command of his reason. She was too beautiful! Whatever she did was best. That was the refrain of the fountain-song in him; the burden being her whims, variations, inconsistencies, wiles; her tremblings between good and naughty, that might be stamped to noble or to terrible; her sincereness, her duplicity, her courage, cowardice, possibilities for heroism and for treachery. By dint of dwelling on the theme, he magnified the young lady to extraordinary stature. And he had sense enough to own that her character was yet liquid in the mould, and that she was a creature of only naturally youthful wildness provoked to freakishness by the ordeal of a situation shrewd as any that can happen to her sex in civilized life. But he was compelled to think of her extravagantly, and he leaned a little to the discrediting of her, because her actual image ummanned him and was unbearable; and to say at the end of it: "She is too beautiful! whatever she does is best," smoothed away the wrong he did her. Had it been in his power he would have thought of her in the abstract--the stage contiguous to that which he adopted: but the attempt was luckless; the Stagyrite would have faded in it. What philosopher could have set down that face of sun and breeze and nymph in shadow as a point in a problem?
The library door was opened at midnight by Miss Dale. She dosed it quietly. "You are not working, Mr. Whitford? I fancied you would wish to hear of the evening. Professor Crooklyn arrived after all!