The Egoist

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He had received the domestic education of a prince. Little princes
abound in a land of heaped riches. Where they have not to yield
military service to an Imperial master, they are necessarily here
and there dainty during youth, sometimes unmanageable, and as they
are bound in no personal duty to the State, each is for himself,
with full present, and what is more, luxurious, prospective
leisure for the practice of that allegiance. They are sometimes
enervated by it: that must be in continental countries. Happily
our climate and our brave blood precipitate the greater number
upon the hunting-field, to do the public service of heading the
chase of the fox, with benefit to their constitutions. Hence a
manly as well as useful race of little princes, and Willoughby was
as manly as any. He cultivated himself, he would not be outdone
in popular accomplishments. Had the standard of the public taste
been set in philosophy, and the national enthusiasm centred in
philosophers, he would at least have worked at books. He did work
at science, and had a laboratory. His admirable passion to excel,
however, was chiefly directed in his youth upon sport; and so
great was the passion in him, that it was commonly the presence of
rivals which led him to the declaration of love.

He knew himself, nevertheless, to be the most constant of men in
his attachment to the sex. He had never discouraged Laetitia
Dale's devotion to him, and even when he followed in the sweeping
tide of the beautiful Constantia Durham (whom Mrs. Mountstuart
called "The Racing Cutter"), he thought of Laetitia, and looked at
her. She was a shy violet.

Willoughby's comportment while the showers of adulation drenched
him might be likened to the composure of Indian Gods undergoing
worship, but unlike them he reposed upon no seat of amplitude to
preserve him from a betrayal of intoxication; he had to continue
tripping, dancing, exactly balancing himself, head to right, head
to left, addressing his idolaters in phrases of perfect
choiceness. This is only to say that it is easier to be a wooden
idol than one in the flesh; yet Willoughby was equal to his task.
The little prince's education teaches him that he is other than
you, and by virtue of the instruction he receives, and also
something, we know not what, within, he is enabled to maintain his
posture where you would be tottering.

Urchins upon whose curly pates grave seniors lay their hands with
conventional encomium and speculation, look older than they are
immediately, and Willoughby looked older than his years, not for
want of freshness, but because he felt that he had to stand
eminently and correctly poised.

Hearing of Mrs. Mountstuart's word on him, he smiled and said, "It
is at her service."

The speech was communicated to her, and she proposed to attach a
dedicatory strip of silk. And then they came together, and there
was wit and repartee suitable to the electrical atmosphere of the
dancing-room, on the march to a magical hall of supper.
Willoughby conducted Mrs. Mountstuart to the supper-table.

"Were I," said she, "twenty years younger, I think I would marry
you, to cure my infatuation."

"Then let me tell you in advance, madam," said he, "that I will do
everything to obtain a new lease of it, except divorce you."

They were infinitely wittier. but so much was heard and may he
reported.

"It makes the business of choosing a wife for him superhumanly
difficult!" Mrs. Mountstuart observed, after listening to the
praises she had set going again when the ladies were weeded of us,
in Lady Patterne's Indian room, and could converse unhampered upon
their own ethereal themes.

"Willoughby will choose a wife for himself," said his mother.

CHAPTER III

Constantia Durham

The great question for the county was debated in many households,
daughter-thronged and daughterless, long subsequent to the
memorable day of Willoughby's coming of age. Lady Busshe was for
Constantia Durham. She laughed at Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson's
notion of Laetitia Dale. She was a little older than Mrs.
Mountstuart, and had known Willoughby's father, whose marriage
into the wealthiest branch of the Whitford family had been
strictly sagacious. "Patternes marry money; they are not romantic
people," she said. Miss Durham had money, and she had health and
beauty: three mighty qualifications for a Patterne bride. Her
father, Sir John Durham, was a large landowner in the western
division of the county; a pompous gentleman, the picture of a
father-in-law for Willoughby. The father of Miss Dale was a
battered army surgeon from India, tenant of one of Sir
Willoughby's cottages bordering Patterne Park. His girl was
portionless and a poetess. Her writing of the song in celebration
of the young baronet's birthday was thought a clever venture, bold
as only your timid creatures can be bold. She let the cat out
of her bag of verse before the multitude; she almost proposed to
her hero in her rhymes. She was pretty; her eyelashes were long
and dark, her eyes dark-blue, and her soul was ready to shoot like
a rocket out of them at a look from Willoughby. And he looked, he
certainly looked, though he did not dance with her once that
night, and danced repeatedly with Miss Durham. He gave Laetitia
to Vernon Whitford for the final dance of the night, and he may
have looked at her so much in pity of an elegant girl allied to
such a partner. The "Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar" had
entirely forgotten his musical gifts in motion. He crossed himself
and crossed his bewildered lady, and crossed everybody in the
figure, extorting shouts of cordial laughter from his cousin
Willoughby. Be it said that the hour was four in the morning, when
dancers must laugh at somebody, if only to refresh their feet, and
the wit of the hour administers to the wildest laughter. Vernon
was likened to Theseus in the maze, entirely dependent upon his
Ariadne; to a fly released from a jam-pot; to a "salvage", or
green, man caught in a web of nymphs and made to go the paces.
Willoughby was inexhaustible in the happy similes he poured out to
Miss Durham across the lines of Sir Roger de Coverley, and they
were not forgotten, they procured him a reputation as a convivial
sparkler. Rumour went the round that he intended to give Laetitia
to Vernon for good, when he could decide to take Miss Durham to
himself; his generosity was famous; but that decision, though the
rope was in the form of a knot, seemed reluctant for the
conclusive close haul; it preferred the state of slackness; and if
he courted Laetitia on behalf of his cousin, his cousinly love
must have been greater than his passion, one had to suppose. He
was generous enough for it, or for marrying the portionless girl
himself.

There was a story of a brilliant young widow of our aristocracy
who had very nearly snared him. Why should he object to marry into
our aristocracy? Mrs. Mountstuart asked him, and he replied that
the girls of that class have no money, and he doubted the quality
of their blood. He had his eyes awake. His duty to his House was
a foremost thought with him, and for such a reason he may have
been more anxious to give the slim and not robust Laetitia to
Vernon than accede to his personal inclination. The mention of the
widow singularly offended him, notwithstanding the high rank of
the lady named. "A widow?" he said. "I!" He spoke to a widow; an
oldish one truly; but his wrath at the suggestion of his union
with a widow led him to be for the moment oblivious of the minor
shades of good taste. He desired Mrs. Mountstuart to contradict
the story in positive terms. He repeated his desire; he was urgent
to have it contradicted, and said again, "A widow!" straightening
his whole figure to the erectness of the letter I. She was a widow
unmarried a second time, and it has been known of the stedfast
women who retain the name of their first husband, or do not hamper
his title with a little new squire at their skirts, that they can
partially approve the objections indicated by Sir Willoughby. They
are thinking of themselves when they do so, and they will rarely
say, "I might have married;" rarely within them will they avow
that, with their permission, it might have been. They can catch an
idea of a gentleman's view of the widow's cap. But a niceness that
could feel sharply wounded by the simple rumour of his alliance
with the young relict of an earl was mystifying. Sir Willoughby
unbent. His military letter I took a careless glance at itself
lounging idly and proudly at ease in the glass of his mind, decked
with a wanton wreath, as he dropped a hint, generously vague, just
to show the origin of the rumour, and the excellent basis it had
for not being credited. He was chidden. Mrs. Mountstuart read him
a lecture. She was however able to contradict the tale of the
young countess. "There is no fear of his marrying her, my dears."

Meanwhile there was a fear that he would lose his chance of
marrying the beautiful Miss Durham.

The dilemmas of little princes are often grave. They should be
dwelt on now and then for an example to poor struggling commoners,
of the slings and arrows assailing fortune's most favoured men,
that we may preach contentment to the wretch who cannot muster
wherewithal to marry a wife, or has done it and trots the streets,
pack-laden, to maintain the dame and troops of children painfully
reared to fill subordinate stations. According to our reading, a
moral is always welcome in a moral country, and especially so when
silly envy is to be chastised by it, the restless craving for
change rebuked. Young Sir Willoughby, then, stood in this dilemma:
--a lady was at either hand of him; the only two that had ever,
apart from metropolitan conquests, not to be recited, touched his
emotions. Susceptible to beauty, he had never seen so beautiful a
girl as Constantia Durham. Equally susceptible to admiration of
himself, he considered Laetitia Dale a paragon of cleverness. He
stood between the queenly rose and the modest violet. One he
bowed to; the other bowed to him. He could not have both; it is
the law governing princes and pedestrians alike. But which could
he forfeit? His growing acquaintance with the world taught him to
put an increasing price on the sentimcnts of Miss Dale. Still
Constantia's beauty was of a kind to send away beholders aching.
She had the glory of the racing cutter full sail on a whining
breeze; and she did not court to win him, she flew. In his more
reflective hour the attractiveness of that lady which held the
mirror to his features was paramount. But he had passionate
snatches when the magnetism of the flyer drew him in her wake.
Further to add to the complexity, he loved his liberty; he was
princelier free; he had more subjects, more slaves; he ruled
arrogantly in the world of women; he was more himself. His
metropolitan experiences did not answer to his liking the
particular question, Do we bind the woman down to us idolatrously
by making a wife of her?

In the midst of his deliberations, a report of the hot pursuit of
Miss Durham, casually mentioned to him by Lady Busshe, drew an
immediate proposal from Sir Willoughby. She accepted him, and they
were engaged. She had been nibbled at, all but eaten up, while he
hung dubitative; and though that was the cause of his winning her,
it offended his niceness. She had not come to him out of cloistral
purity, out of perfect radiancy. Spiritually, likewise, was he a
little prince, a despotic prince. He wished for her to have come
to him out of an egg-shell, somewhat more astonished at things
than a chicken, but as completely enclosed before he tapped the
shell, and seeing him with her sex's eyes first of all men. She
talked frankly of her cousins and friends, young males. She could
have replied to his bitter wish: "Had you asked me on the night of
your twenty-first birthday, Willoughby!" Since then she had been
in the dust of the world, and he conceived his peculiar antipathy,
destined to be so fatal to him, from the earlier hours of his
engagement. He was quaintly incapable of a jealousy of
individuals. A young Captain Oxford had been foremost in the swarm
pursuing Constantia. Willoughby thought as little of Captain
Oxford as he did of Vernon Whitford. His enemy was the world, the
mass, which confounds us in a lump, which has breathed on her
whom we have selected, whom we cannot, can never, rub quite clear
of her contact with the abominated crowd. The pleasure of the
world is to bowl down our soldierly letter I; to encroach on our
identity, soil our niceness. To begin to think is the beginning of
disgust of the world.

As soon the engagement was published all the county said that
there had not been a chance for Laetitia, and Mrs. Mountstuart
Jenkinson humbly remarked, in an attitude of penitence, "I'm not a
witch." Lady Busshe could claim to be one; she had foretold the
event. Laetitia was of the same opinion as the county. She had
looked up, but not hopefully. She had only looked up to the
brightest, and, as he was the highest, how could she have hoped?
She was the solitary companion of a sick father, whose inveterate
prognostic of her, that she would live to rule at Patterne Hall,
tortured the poor girl in proportion as he seemed to derive
comfort from it. The noise of the engagement merely silenced him;
recluse invalids cling obstinately to their ideas. He had observed
Sir Willoughby in the society of his daughter, when the young
baronet revived to a sprightly boyishness immediately. Indeed, as
big boy and little girl, they had played together of old.
Willoughby had been a handsome, fair boy. The portrait of him at
the Hall, in a hat, leaning on his pony, with crossed legs, and
long flaxen curls over his shoulders, was the image of her soul's
most present angel; and, as a man, he had--she did not suppose
intentionally--subjected her nature to bow to him; so submissive
was she, that it was fuller happiness for her to think him right
in all his actions than to imagine the circumstances different.
This may appear to resemble the ecstasy of the devotee
of Juggernaut, It is a form of the passion inspired by little
princes, and we need not marvel that a conservative sex should
assist to keep them in their lofty places. What were there
otherwise to look up to? We should have no dazzling beacon-lights
if they were levelled and treated as clod earth; and it is worth
while for here and there a woman to be burned, so long as women's
general adoration of an ideal young man shall be preserved.
Purity is our demand of them. They may justly cry for attraction.
They cannot have it brighter than in the universal bearing of the
eyes of their sisters upon a little prince, one who has the
ostensible virtues in his pay, and can practise them without
injuring himself to make himself unsightly. Let the races of men
be by-and-by astonished at their Gods, if they please. Meantime
they had better continue to worship.

Laetitia did continue. She saw Miss Durham at Patterne on several
occasions. She admired the pair. She had a wish to witness the
bridal ceremony. She was looking forward to the day with that
mixture of eagerness and withholding which we have as we draw nigh
the disenchanting termination of an enchanting romance, when Sir
Willoughby met her on a Sunday morning, as she crossed his park
solitarily to church. They were within ten days of the appointed
ceremony. He should have been away at Miss Durham's end of the
county. He had, Laetitia knew, ridden over to her the day before;
but there he was; and very unwontedly, quite surprisingly, he
presented his arm to conduct Laetitia to the church-door, and
talked and laughed in a way that reminded her of a hunting
gentleman she had seen once rising to his feet, staggering from an
ugly fall across hedge and fence into one of the lanes of her
short winter walks. "All's well, all sound, never better, only a
scratch!" the gentleman had said, as he reeled and pressed a
bleeding head. Sir Willoughby chattered of his felicity in meeting
her. "I am really wonderfully lucky," he said, and he said that
and other things over and over, incessantly talking, and telling
an anecdote of county occurrences, and laughing at it with a mouth
that would not widen. He went on talking in the church porch, and
murmuring softly some steps up the aisle, passing the pews of Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson and Lady Busshe. Of course he was
entertaining, but what a strangeness it was to Laetitia! His face
would have been half under an antique bonnet. It came very close
to hers, and the scrutiny he bent on her was most solicitous.

After the service, he avoided the great ladies by sauntering up to
within a yard or two of where she sat; he craved her hand on his
arm to lead her forth by the park entrance to the church, all the
while bending to her, discoursing rapidly, appearing radiantly
interested in her quiet replies, with fits of intentness that
stared itself out into dim abstraction. She hazarded the briefest
replies for fear of not having understood him.

One question she asked: "Miss Durham is well, I trust?"

And he answered "Durham?" and said, "There is no Miss Durham to my
knowledge."

The impression he left with her was, that he might yesterday
during his ride have had an accident and fallen on his head.

She would have asked that, if she had not known him for so
thorough an Englishman, in his dislike to have it thought that
accidents could hurt even when they happened to him.

He called the next day to claim her for a walk. He assured her she
had promised it, and he appealed to her father, who could not
testify to a promise he had not heard, but begged her to leave him
to have her walk. So once more she was in the park with Sir
Willoughby, listening to his raptures over old days. A word of
assent from her sufficed him. "I am now myself," was one of the
remarks he repeated this day. She dilated on the beauty of the
park and the Hall to gratify him.

He did not speak of Miss Durham, and Laetitia became afraid to
mention her name.

At their parting, Willoughby promised Laetitia that he would call
on the morrow. He did not come; and she could well excuse him,
after her hearing of the tale.

It was a lamentable tale. He had ridden to Sir John Durham's
mansion, a distance of thirty miles, to hear, on his arrival, that
Constantia had quitted her father's house two days previously on a
visit to an aunt in London, and had just sent word that she was
the wife of Captain Oxford, hussar, and messmate of one of her
brothers. A letter from the bride awaited Willoughby at the Hall.
He had ridden back at night, not caring how he used his horse in
order to get swiftly home, so forgetful of himself was he under
the terrible blow. That was the night of Saturday. On the day
following, being Sunday, he met Laetitia in his park, led her to
church, led her out of it, and the day after that, previous to his
disappearance for some weeks, was walking with her in full view of
the carriages along the road.

He had, indeed, you see, been very fortunately, if not
considerately, liberated by Miss Durham. He, as a man of honour,
could not have taken the initiative, but the frenzy of a jealous
girl might urge her to such a course; and how little he suffered
from it had been shown to the world. Miss Durham, the story went,
was his mother's choice for him against his heart's inclinations;
which had finally subdued Lady Patterne. Consequently, there was
no longer an obstacle between Sir Willoughby and Miss Dale. It was
a pleasant and romantic story, and it put most people in good
humour with the county's favourite, as his choice of a portionless
girl of no position would not have done without the shock of
astonishment at the conduct of Miss Durham, and the desire to feel
that so prevailing a gentleman was not in any degree pitiable.
Constantia was called "that mad thing". Laetitia broke forth in
novel and abundant merits; and one of the chief points of
requisition in relation to Patterne--a Lady Willoughby who would
entertain well and animate the deadness of the Hall, became a
certainty when her gentleness and liveliness and exceeding
cleverness were considered. She was often a visitor at the Hall by
Lady Patterne's express invitation, and sometimes on these
occasions Willoughby was there too, superintending the filling up
of his laboratory, though he was not at home to the county; it was
not expected that he should be yet. He had taken heartily to the
pursuit of science, and spoke of little else. Science, he said,
was in our days the sole object worth a devoted pursuit. But the
sweeping remark could hardly apply to Laetitia, of whom he was the
courteous, quiet wooer you behold when a man has broken loose from
an unhappy tangle to return to the lady of his first and strongest
affections.

Some months of homely courtship ensued, and then, the decent
interval prescribed by the situation having elapsed, Sir
Willoughby Patterne left his native land on a tour of the globe.

CHAPTER IV

Laetitia Dale

That was another surprise to the county.

Let us not inquire into the feelings of patiently starving women;
they must obtain some sustenance of their own, since, as you
perceive, they live; evidently they are not in need of a great
amount of nourishment; and we may set them down for creatures with
a rush-light of animal fire to warm them. They cannot have much
vitality who are so little exclamatory. A corresponding sentiment
of patient compassion, akin to scorn, is provoked by persons
having the opportunity for pathos, and declining to use it. The
public bosom was open to Laetitia for several weeks, and had she
run to it to bewail herself she would have been cherished in
thankfulness for a country drama. There would have been a party
against her, cold people, critical of her pretensions to rise from
an unrecognized sphere to be mistress of Patterne Hall, but there
would also have been a party against Sir Willoughby, composed of
the two or three revolutionists, tired of the yoke, which are to
be found in England when there is a stir; a larger number of born
sympathetics, ever ready to yield the tear for the tear; and here
and there a Samaritan soul prompt to succour poor humanity in
distress. The opportunity passed undramatized. Laetitia presented
herself at church with a face mildly devout, according to her
custom, and she accepted invitations to the Hall, she assisted at
the reading of Willoughby's letters to his family, and fed on dry
husks of him wherein her name was not mentioned; never one note of
the summoning call for pathos did this young lady blow.

So, very soon the public bosom closed. She had, under the fresh
interpretation of affairs, too small a spirit to be Lady
Willoughby of Patterne; she could not have entertained becomingly;
he must have seen that the girl was not the match for him in
station, and off he went to conquer the remainder of a troublesome
first attachment, no longer extremely disturbing, to judge from
the tenour of his letters; really incomparable letters! Lady
Busshe and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson enjoyed a perusal of them.
Sir Willoughby appeared as a splendid young representative island
lord in these letters to his family, despatched from the principal
cities of the United States of America. He would give them a
sketch of "our democratic cousins", he said. Such cousins! They
might all have been in the Marines. He carried his English
standard over that continent, and by simply jotting down facts, he
left an idea of the results of the measurement to his family and
friends at home. He was an adept in the irony of incongruously
grouping. The nature of the Equality under the stars and stripes
was presented in this manner. Equality! Reflections came
occasionally: "These cousins of ours are highly amusing. I am
among the descendants of the Roundheads. Now and then an allusion
to old domestic differences, in perfect good temper. We go on in
our way; they theirs, in the apparent belief that Republicanism
operates remarkable changes in human nature. Vernon tries hard to
think it does. The upper ten of our cousins are the Infernal of
Paris. The rest of them is Radical England, as far as I am
acquainted with that section of my country."--Where we compared,
they were absurd; where we contrasted, they were monstrous. The
contrast of Vernon's letters with Willoughby's was just as extreme.
You could hardly have taken them for relatives travelling
together, or Vernon Whitford for a born and bred Englishman. The
same scenes furnished by these two pens might have been sketched
in different hemispheres. Vernon had no irony. He had nothing of
Willoughby's epistolary creative power, which, causing his family
and friends to exclaim: "How like him that is!" conjured them
across the broad Atlantic to behold and clap hands at his
lordliness.

They saw him distinctly, as with the naked eye; a word, a turn of
the pen, or a word unsaid, offered the picture of him in America,
Japan, China, Australia, nay, the continent of Europe, holding an
English review of his Maker's grotesques. Vernon seemed a
sheepish fellow, without stature abroad, glad of a compliment,
grateful for a dinner, endeavouring sadly to digest all he saw and
heard. But one was a Patterne; the other a Whitford. One had
genius; the other pottered after him with the title of student.
One was the English gentleman wherever he went; the other was a
new kind of thing, nondescript, produced in England of late, and
not likely to come to much good himself, or do much good to the
country.