The Egoist

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"Yes, he's a good lad," remarked the colonel. "The fellow may well
be a faithful soldier and stick to his post, if he receives
promise of such a solde. He is a great favourite with you."

"He is. You will do him a service by persuading Willoughby to send
him to one of those men who get boys through their naval
examination. And, Colonel De Craye, will you be kind enough to ask
at the dinner-table that Crossjay may come in to dessert?"

"Certainly," said he, wondering.

"And will you look after him while you are here? See that no one
spoils him. If you could get him away before you leave, it would
he much to his advantage. He is born for the navy and should be
preparing to enter it now."

"Certainly, certainly," said De Craye, wondering more.

"I thank you in advance."

"Shall I not be usurping ...

"No, we leave to-morrow."

"For a day?"

"For longer."

"Two?"

"It will be longer."

"A week? I shall not see you again?"

"I fear not."

Colonel De Craye controlled his astonishment; he smothered a
sensation of veritable pain, and amiably said: "I feel a blow, but
I am sure you would not willingly strike. We are all involved in
the regrets."

Miss Middleton spoke of having to see Mrs. Montague, the
housekeeper, with reference to the bath for Crossjay, and stepped
off the grass. He bowed, watched her a moment, and for parallel
reasons, running close enough to hit one mark, he commiserated his
friend Willoughby. The winning or the losing of that young lady
struck him as equally lamentable for Willoughby.

CHAPTER XX

An Aged and a Great Wine

THE leisurely promenade up and down the lawn with ladies and
deferential gentlemen, in anticipation of the dinner-bell, was Dr.
Middleton's evening pleasure. He walked as one who had formerly
danced (in Apollo's time and the young god Cupid's), elastic on
the muscles of the calf and foot, bearing his broad iron-grey head
in grand elevation. The hard labour of the day approved the
cooling exercise and the crowning refreshments of French cookery
and wines of known vintages. He was happy at that hour in
dispensing wisdom or nugae to his hearers, like the Western sun
whose habit it is, when he is fairly treated, to break out in
quiet splendours, which by no means exhaust his treasury. Blessed
indeed above his fellows, by the height of the bow-winged bird in
a fair weather sunset sky above the pecking sparrow, is he that
ever in the recurrent evening of his day sees the best of it ahead
and soon to come. He has the rich reward of a youth and manhood of
virtuous living. Dr. Middleton misdoubted the future as well as the
past of the man who did not, in becoming gravity, exult to dine.
That man he deemed unfit for this world and the next.

An example of the good fruit of temperance, he had a comfortable
pride in his digestion, and his political sentiments were attuned
by his veneration of the Powers rewarding virtue. We must have a
stable world where this is to be done.

The Rev. Doctor was a fine old picture; a specimen of art
peculiarly English; combining in himself piety and epicurism,
learning and gentlemanliness, with good room for each and a seat at
one another's table: for the rest, a strong man, an athlete in his
youth, a keen reader of facts and no reader of persons, genial, a
giant at a task, a steady worker besides, but easily discomposed.
He loved his daughter and he feared her. However much he liked
her character, the dread of her sex and age was constantly present
to warn him that he was not tied to perfect sanity while the
damsel Clara remained unmarried. Her mother had been an amiable
woman, of the poetical temperament nevertheless, too enthusiastic,
imaginative, impulsive, for the repose of a sober scholar; an
admirable woman, still, as you see, a woman, a fire-work. The girl
resembled her. Why should she wish to run away from Patterne Hall
for a single hour? Simply because she was of the sex born mutable
and explosive. A husband was her proper custodian, justly
relieving a father. With demagogues abroad and daughters at home,
philosophy is needed for us to keep erect. Let the girl be
Cicero's Tullia: well, she dies! The choicest of them will furnish
us examples of a strange perversity.

Miss Dale was beside Dr. Middleton. Clara came to them and took the
other side.

"I was telling Miss Dale that the signal for your subjection is my
enfranchisement," he said to her, sighing and smiling. "We know
the date. The date of an event to come certifies to it as a fact
to be counted on."

"Are you anxious to lose me?" Clara faltered.

"My dear, you have planted me on a field where I am to expect the
trumpet, and when it blows I shall be quit of my nerves, no more."

Clara found nothing to seize on for a reply in these words. She
thought upon the silence of Laetitia.

Sir Willoughby advanced, appearing in a cordial mood.

"I need not ask you whether you are better," he said to Clara,
sparkled to Laetitia, and raised a key to the level of Dr.
Middleton's breast, remarking, "I am going down to my inner
cellar."

"An inner cellar!" exclaimed the doctor.

"Sacred from the butler. It is interdicted to Stoneman. Shall I
offer myself as guide to you? My cellars are worth a visit."

"Cellars are not catacombs. They are, if rightly constructed,
rightly considered, cloisters, where the bottle meditates on joys
to bestow, not on dust misused! Have you anything great?"

"A wine aged ninety."

"Is it associated with your pedigree that you pronounce the age
with such assurance?"

"My grandfather inherited it."

"Your grandfather, Sir Willoughby, had meritorious offspring, not
to speak of generous progenitors. What would have happened had it
fallen into the female line! I shall be glad to accompany you.
Port? Hermitage?"

"Port."

"Ah! We are in England!"

"There will just be time," said Sir Willoughby, inducing Dr.
Middleton to step out.

A chirrup was in the reverend doctor's tone: "Hocks, too, have
compassed age. I have tasted senior Hocks. Their flavours are as a
brook of many voices; they have depth also. Senatorial Port! we
say. We cannot say that of any other wine. Port is deep-sea deep.
It is in its flavour deep; mark the difference. It is like a
classic tragedy, organic in conception. An ancient Hermitage has
the light of the antique; the merit that it can grow to an extreme
old age; a merit. Neither of Hermitage nor of Hock can you say
that it is the blood of those long years, retaining the strength
of youth with the wisdom of age. To Port for that! Port is our
noblest legacy! Observe, I do not compare the wines; I distinguish
the qualities. Let them live together for our enrichment; they are
not rivals like the Idaean Three. Were they rivals, a fourth
would challenge them. Burgundy has great genius. It does wonders
within its period; it does all except to keep up in the race; it
is short-lived. An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I
cherish the fancy that Port speaks the sentences of wisdom,
Burgundy sings the inspired Ode. Or put it, that Port is the
Homeric hexameter, Burgundy the pindaric dithyramb. What do you
say?"

"The comparison is excellent, sir."

"The distinction, you would remark. Pindar astounds. But his elder
brings us the more sustaining cup. One is a fountain of prodigious
ascent. One is the unsounded purple sea of marching billows."

"A very fine distinction."

"I conceive you to be now commending the similes. They pertain to
the time of the first critics of those poets. Touch the Greeks,
and you can nothing new; all has been said: 'Graiis ... praeter,
laudem nullius avaris.' Genius dedicated to Fame is immortal. We,
sir, dedicate genius to the cloacaline floods. We do not address
the unforgetting gods, but the popular stomach."

Sir Willoughby was patient. He was about as accordantly coupled
with Dr. Middleton in discourse as a drum duetting with a
bass-viol; and when he struck in he received correction from the
paedagogue-instrument. If he thumped affirmative or negative, he
was wrong. However, he knew scholars to be an unmannered species;
and the doctor's learnedness would be a subject to dilate on.

In the cellar, it was the turn for the drum. Dr. Middleton was
tongue-tied there. Sir Willoughby gave the history of his wine in
heads of chapters; whence it came to the family originally, and
how it had come down to him in the quantity to be seen.
"Curiously, my grandfather, who inherited it, was a water-drinker.
My father died early."

"Indeed! Dear me!" the doctor ejaculated in astonishment and
condolence. The former glanced at the contrariety of man, the
latter embraced his melancholy destiny.

He was impressed with respect for the family. This cool vaulted
cellar, and the central square block, or enceinte, where the thick
darkness was not penetrated by the intruding lamp, but rather took
it as an eye, bore witness to forethoughtful practical solidity in
the man who had built the house on such foundations. A house
having a great wine stored below lives in our imaginations as a
joyful house, fast and splendidly rooted in the soil. And
imagination has a place for the heir of the house. His grandfather
a water-drinker, his father dying early, present circumstances to
us arguing predestination to an illustrious heirship and career.
Dr Middleton's musings were coloured by the friendly vision of
glasses of the great wine; his mind was festive; it pleased him,
and he chose to indulge in his whimsical, robustious,
grandiose-airy style of thinking: from which the festive mind will
sometimes take a certain print that we cannot obliterate
immediately. Expectation is grateful, you know; in the mood of
gratitude we are waxen. And he was a self-humouring gentleman.

He liked Sir Willoughby's tone in ordering the servant at his
heels to take up "those two bottles": it prescribed, without
overdoing it, a proper amount of caution, and it named an
agreeable number.

Watching the man's hand keenly, he said:

"But here is the misfortune of a thing super-excellent:--not more
than one in twenty will do it justice."

Sir Willoughby replied: "Very true, sir; and I think we may pass
over the nineteen."

"Women, for example; and most men."

"This wine would be a scaled book to them."

"I believe it would. It would be a grievous waste."

"Vernon is a claret man; and so is Horace De Craye. They are both
below the mark of this wine. They will join the ladies. Perhaps
you and I, sir, might remain together."

"With the utmost good-will on my part."

"I am anxious for your verdict, sir."

"You shall have it, sir, and not out of harmony with the chorus
preceding me, I can predict. Cool, not frigid." Dr. Middleton
summed the attributes of the cellar on quitting it. "North side
and South. No musty damp. A pure air. Everything requisite. One
might lie down one's self and keep sweet here."

Of all our venerable British of the two Isles professing a
suckling attachment to an ancient port-wine, lawyer, doctor,
squire, rosy admiral, city merchant, the classic scholar is he
whose blood is most nuptial to the webbed bottle. The reason must
be, that he is full of the old poets. He has their spirit to sing
with, and the best that Time has done on earth to feed it. He may
also perceive a resemblance in the wine to the studious mind,
which is the obverse of our mortality, and throws off acids and
crusty particles in the piling of the years, until it is fulgent
by clarity. Port hymns to his conservatism. It is magical: at one
sip he is off swimming in the purple flood of the ever-youthful
antique.

By comparison, then, the enjoyment of others is brutish; they have
not the soul for it; but he is worthy of the wine, as are poets
of Beauty. In truth, these should be severally apportioned to
them, scholar and poet, as his own good thing. Let it be so.

Meanwhile Dr. Middleton sipped.

After the departure of the ladies, Sir Willoughby had practised a
studied curtness upon Vernon and Horace.

"You drink claret," he remarked to them, passing it round. "Port,
I think, Doctor Middleton? The wine before you may serve for a
preface. We shall have your wine in five minutes."

The claret jug empty, Sir Willoughby offered to send for more. De
Craye was languid over the question. Vernon rose from the table.

"We have a bottle of Doctor Middleton's port coming in,"
Willoughby said to him.

"Mine, you call it?" cried the doctor.

"It's a royal wine, that won't suffer sharing," said Vernon.

"We'll be with you, if you go into the billiard-room, Vernon."

"I shall hurry my drinking of good wine for no man," said the Rev.
Doctor.

"Horace?"

"I'm beneath it, ephemeral, Willoughby. I am going to the
ladies."

Vernon and De Craye retired upon the arrival of the wine; and Dr.
Middleton sipped. He sipped and looked at the owner of it.

"Some thirty dozen?" he said.

"Fifty."

The doctor nodded humbly.

"I shall remember, sir," his host addressed him. "whenever I have
the honour of entertaining you, I am cellarer of that wine."

The Rev. Doctor set down his glass. "You have, sir, in some sense.
an enviable post. It is a responsible one, if that be a blessing.
On you it devolves to retard the day of the last dozen."

"Your opinion of the wine is favourable, sir?"

"I will say this:--shallow souls run to rhapsody:--I will say,
that I am consoled for not having lived ninety years back, or at
any period but the present, by this one glass of your ancestral
wine."

"I am careful of it," Sir Willoughby said, modestly; "still its
natural destination is to those who can appreciate it. You do,
sir."

"Still my good friend, still! It is a charge; it is a possession,
but part in trusteeship. Though we cannot declare it an entailed
estate, our consciences are in some sort pledged that it shall be
a succession not too considerably diminished."

"You will not object to drink it, sir, to the health of your
grandchildren. And may you live to toast them in it on their
marriage-day!"

"You colour the idea of a prolonged existence in seductive hues.
Ha! It is a wine for Tithonus. This wine would speed him to the
rosy Morning--aha!"

"I will undertake to sit you through it up to morning," said Sir
Willoughby, innocent of the Bacchic nuptiality of the allusion.

Dr Middleton eyed the decanter. There is a grief in gladness, for
a premonition of our mortal state. The amount of wine in the
decanter did not promise to sustain the starry roof of night and
greet the dawn. "Old wine, my friend, denies us the full bottle!"

"Another bottle is to follow."

"No!"

"It is ordered."

"I protest."

"It is uncorked."

"I entreat."

"It is decanted."

"I submit. But, mark, it must be honest partnership. You are my
worthy host, sir, on that stipulation. Note the superiority of
wine over Venus!--I may say, the magnanimity of wine; our
jealousy turns on him that will not share! But the corks,
Willoughby. The corks excite my amazement."

"The corking is examined at regular intervals. I remember the
occurrence in my father's time. I have seen to it once."

"It must be perilous as an operation for tracheotomy; which I
should assume it to resemble in surgical skill and firmness of
hand, not to mention the imminent gasp of the patient."

A fresh decanter was placed before the doctor.

He said: "I have but a girl to give!" He was melted.

Sir Willoughby replied: "I take her for the highest prize this
world affords."

"I have beaten some small stock of Latin into her head, and a note
of Greek. She contains a savour of the classics. I hoped once ...
But she is a girl. The nymph of the woods is in her. Still she
will bring you her flower-cup of Hippocrene. She has that
aristocracy--the noblest. She is fair; a Beauty, some have said,
who judge not by lines. Fair to me, Willoughby! She is my sky.
There were applicants. In Italy she was besought of me. She has no
history. You are the first heading of the chapter. With you she
will have her one tale, as it should be. 'Mulier tum bene olet',
you know. Most fragrant she that smells of naught. She goes to you
from me, from me alone, from her father to her husband. 'Ut flos
in septis secretus nascitur hortis.'" He murmured on the lines to,
"'Sic virgo, dum . . .' I shall feel the parting. She goes to one
who will have my pride in her, and more. I will add, who will be
envied. Mr. Whitford must write you a Carmen Nuptiale."

The heart of the unfortunate gentleman listening to Dr. Middleton
set in for irregular leaps. His offended temper broke away from
the image of Clara, revealing her as he had seen her in the
morning beside Horace De Craye, distressingly sweet; sweet with
the breezy radiance of an English soft-breathing day; sweet with
sharpness of young sap. Her eyes, her lips, her fluttering dress
that played happy mother across her bosom, giving peeps of the
veiled twins; and her laughter, her slim figure, peerless
carriage, all her terrible sweetness touched his wound to the
smarting quick.

Her wish to be free of him was his anguish. In his pain he thought
sincerely. When the pain was easier he muffled himself in the idea
of her jealousy of Laetitia Dale, and deemed the wish a fiction.
But she had expressed it. That was the wound he sought to comfort;
for the double reason, that he could love her better after
punishing her, and that to meditate on doing so masked the fear of
losing her--the dread abyss she had succeeded in forcing his
nature to shudder at as a giddy edge possibly near, in spite of
his arts of self-defence.

"What I shall do to-morrow evening!" he exclaimed. "I do not care
to fling a bottle to Colonel De Craye and Vernon. I cannot open
one for myself. To sit with the ladies will be sitting in the cold
for me. When do you bring me back my bride, sir?"

"My dear Willoughby!" The Rev. Doctor puffed, composed himself,
and sipped. "The expedition is an absurdity. I am unable to see
the aim of it. She had a headache, vapours. They are over, and
she will show a return of good sense. I have ever maintained that
nonsense is not to be encouraged in girls. I can put my foot on
it. My arrangements are for staying here a further ten days, in
the terms of your hospitable invitation. And I stay."

"I applaud your resolution, sir. Will you prove firm?"

"I am never false to my engagement, Willoughby."

"Not under pressure?"

"Under no pressure."

"Persuasion, I should have said."

"Certainly not. The weakness is in the yielding, either to
persuasion or to pressure. The latter brings weight to bear on us;
the former blows at our want of it."

"You gratify me, Doctor Middleton, and relieve me."

"I cordially dislike a breach in good habits, Willoughby. But I
do remember--was I wrong?--informing Clara that you appeared
light-hearted in regard to a departure, or gap in a visit, that
was not, I must confess, to my liking."

"Simply, my dear doctor, your pleasure was my pleasure; but make
my pleasure yours, and you remain to crack many a bottle with your
son-in-law."

"Excellently said. You have a courtly speech, Willoughby. I can
imagine you to conduct a lovers" quarrel with a politeness to read
a lesson to well-bred damsels. Aha?"

"Spare me the futility of the quarrel."

"All's well?"

"Clara, replied Sir Willoughby, in dramatic epigram, "is
perfection."

"I rejoice," the Rev. Doctor responded; taught thus to understand
that the lovers" quarrel between his daughter and his host was at
an end.

He left the table a little after eleven o'clock. A short dialogue
ensued upon the subject of the ladies. They must have gone to bed?
Why, yes; of course they must. It is good that they should go to
bed early to preserve their complexions for us. Ladies are
creation's glory, but they are anti-climax, following a wine of a
century old. They are anti-climax, recoil, cross-current; morally,
they are repentance, penance; imagerially, the frozen North on the
young brown buds bursting to green. What know they of a critic in
the palate, and a frame all revelry! And mark you, revelry in
sobriety, containment in exultation; classic revelry. Can they,
dear though they be to us, light up candelabras in the brain, to
illuminate all history and solve the secret of the destiny of man?
They cannot; they cannot sympathize with them that can. So
therefore this division is between us; yet are we not turbaned
Orientals, nor are they inmates of the harem. We are not Moslem.
Be assured of it in the contemplation of the table's decanter.

Dr Middleton said: "Then I go straight to bed."

"I will conduct you to your door, sir," said his host.

The piano was heard. Dr. Middleton laid his hand on the banisters,
and remarked: "The ladies must have gone to bed?"

Vernon came out of the library and was hailed, "Fellow-student!"

He waved a good-night to the Doctor, and said to Willoughby: "The
ladies are in the drawing-room."

"I am on my way upstairs," was the reply.

"Solitude and sleep, after such a wine as that; and forefend us
human society!" the Doctor shouted. "But, Willoughby!"

"Sir."

"One to-morrow."

"You dispose of the cellar, sir."

"I am fitter to drive the horses of the sun. I would rigidly
counsel, one, and no more. We have made a breach in the fiftieth
dozen. Daily one will preserve us from having to name the fortieth
quite so unseasonably. The couple of bottles per diem
prognosticates disintegration, with its accompanying recklessness.
Constitutionally, let me add, I bear three. I speak for
posterity."

During Dr. Middleton's allocution the ladies issued from the
drawing-room, Clara foremost, for she had heard her father's
voice, and desired to ask him this in reference to their
departure: "Papa, will you tell me the hour to-morrow?"

She ran up the stairs to kiss him, saying again: "When will you be
ready to-morrow morning?"

Dr Middleton announced a stoutly deliberative mind in the
bugle-notes of a repeated ahem. He bethought him of replying in
his doctorial tongue. Clara's eager face admonished him to
brevity: it began to look starved. Intruding on his vision of the
houris couched in the inner cellar to be the reward of valiant
men, it annoyed him. His brows joined. He said: "I shall not be
ready to-morrow morning."

"In the afternoon?"

"Nor in the afternoon."

"When?"

"My dear, I am ready for bed at this moment, and know of no other
readiness. Ladies," he bowed to the group in the hall below him,
"may fair dreams pay court to you this night!"

Sir Willoughby had hastily descended and shaken the hands of the
ladies, directed Horace De Craye to the laboratory for a
smoking-room, and returned to Dr. Middleton. Vexed by the scene,
uncertain of his temper if he stayed with Clara, for whom he had
arranged that her disappointment should take place on the morrow,
in his absence, he said: "Good-night, good-night," to her, with
due fervour, bending over her flaccid finger-tips; then offered
his arm to the Rev. Doctor.

"Ay, son Willoughby, in friendliness, if you will, though I am a
man to bear my load," the father of the stupefied girl addressed
him. "Candles, I believe, are on the first landing. Good-night,
my love. Clara!"

"Papa!"

"Good-night."

"Oh!" she lifted her breast with the interjection, standing in
shame of the curtained conspiracy and herself, "good night".

Her father wound up the stairs. She stepped down.

"There was an understanding that papa and I should go to London
to-morrow early," she said, unconcernedly, to the ladies, and her
voice was clear, but her face too legible. De Craye was heartily
unhappy at the sight.

CHAPTER XXI

Clara's Meditations

Two were sleepless that night: Miss Middleton and Colonel De
Craye.

She was in a fever, lying like stone, with her brain burning.
Quick natures run out to calamity in any little shadow of it flung
before. Terrors of apprehension drive them. They stop not short of
the uttermost when they are on the wings of dread. A frown means
tempest, a wind wreck; to see fire is to be seized by it. When it
is the approach of their loathing that they fear, they are in the
tragedy of the embrace at a breath; and then is the wrestle
between themselves and horror, between themselves and evil, which
promises aid; themselves and weakness, which calls on evil;
themselves and the better part of them, which whispers no
beguilement.

The false course she had taken through sophistical cowardice
appalled the girl; she was lost. The advantage taken of it by
Willoughby put on the form of strength, and made her feel abject,
reptilious; she was lost, carried away on the flood of the
cataract. He had won her father for an ally. Strangely, she knew
not how, he had succeeded in swaying her father, who had
previously not more than tolerated him. "Son Willoughby" on her
father's lips meant something that scenes and scenes would have to
struggle with, to the out-wearying of her father and herself. She
revolved the "Son Willoughby" through moods of stupefaction,
contempt, revolt, subjection. It meant that she was vanquished.
It meant that her father's esteem for her was forfeited. She saw
him a gigantic image of discomposure.