The Egoist

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He could desire such a thing only in a temporary transport; for
above all he desired that no one should know of his being
deceived; and were he a dupe the deceiver would know it, and her
accomplice would know it, and the world would soon know of it:
that world against whose tongue he stood defenceless. Within the
shadow of his presence he compressed opinion, as a strong frost
binds the springs of earth, but beyond it his shivering
sensitiveness ran about in dread of a stripping in a wintry
atmosphere. This was the ground of his hatred of the world: it was
an appalling fear on behalf of his naked eidolon, the tender
infant Self swaddled in his name before the world, for which he
felt as the most highly civilized of men alone can feel, and which
it was impossible for him to stretch out hands to protect. There
the poor little loveable creature ran for any mouth to blow on;
and frostnipped and bruised, it cried to him, and he was of no
avail! Must we not detest a world that so treats us? We loathe it
the more, by the measure of our contempt for them, when we have
made the people within the shadow-circle of our person slavish.

And he had been once a young prince in popularity: the world had
been his possession. Clara's treatment of him was a robbery of
land and subjects. His grander dream had been a marriage with a
lady of so glowing a fame for beauty and attachment to her lord
that the world perforce must take her for witness to merits which
would silence detraction and almost, not quite (it was
undesireable), extinguish envy. But for the nature of women his
dream would have been realized. He could not bring himself to
denounce Fortune. It had cost him a grievous pang to tell Horace
De Craye he was lucky; he had been educated in the belief that
Fortune specially prized and cherished little Willoughby: hence of
necessity his maledictions fell upon women, or he would have
forfeited the last blanket of a dream warm as poets revel in.

But if Clara deceived him, he inspired her with timidity. There
was matter in that to make him wish to be deceived. She had not
looked him much in the face: she had not crossed his eyes: she had
looked deliberately downward, keeping her head up, to preserve an
exterior pride. The attitude had its bewitchingness: the girl's
physical pride of stature scorning to bend under a load of
conscious guilt, had a certain black-angel beauty for which he
felt a hugging hatred: and according to his policy when these fits
of amorous meditation seized him, he burst from the present one
in the mood of his more favourable conception of Clara, and sought
her out.

The quality of the mood of hugging hatred is, that if you are
disallowed the hug, you do not hate the fiercer.

Contrariwise the prescription of a decorous distance of two feet
ten inches, which is by measurement the delimitation exacted of a
rightly respectful deportment, has this miraculous effect on the
great creature man, or often it has: that his peculiar hatred
returns to the reluctant admiration begetting it, and his passion
for the hug falls prostrate as one of the Faithful before the
shrine; he is reduced to worship by fasting.

(For these mysteries, consult the sublime chapter in the GREAT
BOOK, tile Seventy-first on LOVE, wherein nothing is written, but
the Reader receives a Lanthorn, a Powder-cask and a Pick-axe, and
therewith pursues his yellow-dusking path across the rubble of
preceding excavators in the solitary quarry: a yet more
instructive passage than the overscrawled Seventieth, or French
Section, whence the chapter opens, and where hitherto the polite
world has halted.)

The hurry of the hero is on us, we have no time to spare for
mining works: he hurried to catch her alone, to wreak his tortures
on her in a bitter semblance of bodily worship, and satiated, then
comfortably to spurn. He found her protected by Barclay on the
stairs.

"That letter for me?" he said.

"I think I told you, Willoughby, there was a letter I left with
Barclay to reassure you in case of my not returning early," said
Clara. "It was unnecessary for her to deliver it."

"Indeed? But any letter, any writing of yours, and from you to me!
You have it still?"

No, I have destroyed it."

"That was wrong."

"It could not have given you pleasure."

"My dear Clara, one line from you!"

"There were but three."

Barclay stood sucking her lips. A maid in the secrets of her
mistress is a purchaseable maid, for if she will take a bribe with
her right hand she will with her left; all that has to be
calculated is the nature and amount of the bribe: such was the
speculation indulged by Sir Willoughby, and he shrank from the
thought and declined to know more than that he was on a volcanic
hillside where a thin crust quaked over lava. This was a new
condition with him, representing Clara's gain in their combat.
Clara did not fear his questioning so much as he feared her
candour.

Mutually timid, they were of course formally polite, and no plain
speaking could have told one another more distinctly that each was
defensive. Clara stood pledged to the fib; packed, scaled and
posted; and he had only to ask to have it, supposing that he asked
with a voice not exactly peremptory.

She said in her heart, "It is your fault: you are relentless and
you would ruin Crossjay to punish him for devoting himself to me,
like the poor thoughtless boy he is! and so I am bound in honour
to do my utmost for him."

The reciprocal devotedness, moreover, served two purposes: it
preserved her from brooding on the humiliation of her lame flight,
and flutter back, and it quieted her mind in regard to the
precipitate intimacy of her relations with Colonel De Craye.
Willoughby's boast of his implacable character was to blame. She
was at war with him, and she was compelled to put the case in that
light. Crossjay must be shielded from one who could not spare an
offender, so Colonel De Craye quite naturally was called on for
his help, and the colonel's dexterous aid appeared to her more
admirable than alarming.

Nevertheless, she would not have answered a direct question
falsely. She was for the fib, but not the lie; at a word she could
be disdainful of subterfuges. Her look said that. Willoughby
perceived it. She had written him a letter of three lines: "There
were but three": and she had destroyed the letter. Something
perchance was repented by her? Then she had done him an injury!
Between his wrath at the suspicion of an injury, and the prudence
enjoined by his abject coveting of her, he consented to be fooled
for the sake of vengeance, and something besides.

"Well! here you are, safe; I have you!" said he, with courtly
exultation: "and that is better than your handwriting. I have been
all over the country after you."

"Why did you? We are not in a barbarous land," said Clara.

"Crossjay talks of your visiting a sick child, my love:--you have
changed your dress?"

"You see."

"The boy declared you were going to that farm of Hoppner's, and
some cottage. I met at my gates a tramping vagabond who swore to
seeing you and the boy in a totally contrary direction."

"Did you give him money?"

"I fancy so."

"Then he was paid for having seen me."

Willoughby tossed his head: it might be as she suggested; beggars
are liars.

"But who sheltered you, my dear Clara? You had not been heard of
at Hoppner's."

"The people have been indemnified for their pains. To pay them
more would be to spoil them. You disperse money too liberally.
There was no fever in the place. Who could have anticipated such a
downpour! I want to consult Miss Dale on the important theme of a
dress I think of wearing at Mrs Mountstuart's to-night."

"Do. She is unerring."

"She has excellent taste."

"She dresses very simply herself."

"But it becomes her. She is one of the few women whom I feel I
could not improve with a touch."

"She has judgement."

He reflected and repeated his encomium.

The shadow of a dimple in Clara's cheek awakened him to the idea
that she had struck him somewhere: and certainly he would never
again be able to put up the fiction of her jealousy of Laetitia.
What, then, could be this girl's motive for praying to be
released? The interrogation humbled him: he fled from the answer.

Willoughby went in search of De Craye. That sprightly intriguer
had no intention to let himself be caught solus. He was
undiscoverable until the assembly sounded, when Clara dropped a
public word or two, and he spoke in perfect harmony with her.
After that, he gave his company to Willoughby for an hour at
billiards, and was well beaten.

The announcement of a visit of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson took the
gentlemen to the drawing-room, rather suspecting that something
stood in the way of her dinner-party. As it happened, she was
lamenting only the loss of one of the jewels of the party: to wit,
the great Professor Crooklyn, invited to meet Dr. Middleton at her
table; and she related how she had driven to the station by
appointment, the professor being notoriously a bother-headed
traveller: as was shown by the fact that he had missed his train
in town, for he had not arrived; nothing had been seen of him. She
cited Vernon Whitford for her authority that the train had been
inspected, and the platform scoured to find the professor.

"And so," said she, "I drove home your Green Man to dry him; he
was wet through and chattering; the man was exactly like a
skeleton wrapped in a sponge, and if he escapes a cold he must be
as invulnerable as he boasts himself. These athletes are terrible
boasters."

"They climb their Alps to crow," said Clara, excited by her
apprehension that Mrs. Mountstuart would speak of having seen the
colonel near the station.

There was a laugh, and Colonel De Craye laughed loudly as it
flashed through him that a quick-witted impressionable girl like
Miss Middleton must, before his arrival at the Hall, have
speculated on such obdurate clay as Vernon Whitford was, with
humourous despair at his uselessness to her. Glancing round, he
saw Vernon standing fixed in a stare at the young lady.

"You heard that, Whitford?" he said, and Clara's face betokening
an extremer contrition than he thought was demanded, the colonel
rallied the Alpine climber for striving to be the tallest of them
--Signor Excelsior!--and described these conquerors of mountains
pancaked on the rocks in desperate embraces, bleached here, burned
there, barked all over, all to be able to say they had been up "so
high"--had conquered another mountain! He was extravagantly funny
and self-satisfied: a conqueror of the sex having such different
rewards of enterprise.

Vernon recovered in time to accept the absurdities heaped on him.

"Climbing peaks won't compare with hunting a wriggler," said he.

His allusion to the incessant pursuit of young Crossjay to pin him
to lessons was appreciated.

Clara felt the thread of the look he cast from herself to Colonel
De Craye. She was helpless, if he chose to misjudge her. Colonel
De Craye did not!

Crossjay had the misfortune to enter the drawing-room while Mrs.
Mountstuart was compassionating Vernon for his ducking in pursuit
of the wriggler; which De Craye likened to "going through the
river after his eel:" and immediately there was a
cross-questioning of the boy between De Craye and Willoughby on
the subject of his latest truancy, each gentleman trying to run
him down in a palpable fib. They were succeeding brilliantly when
Vernon put a stop to it by marching him off to hard labour. Mrs.
Mountstuart was led away to inspect the beautiful porcelain
service, the present of Lady Busshe. "Porcelain again!" she said
to Willoughby, and would have signalled to the "dainty rogue" to
come with them, had not Clara been leaning over to Laetitia,
talking to her in an attitude too graceful to be disturbed. She
called his attention to it, slightly wondering at his impatience.
She departed to meet an afternoon train on the chance that it
would land the professor. "But tell Dr. Middleton," said she, "I
fear I shall have no one worthy of him! And," she added to
Willoughby, as she walked out to her carriage, "I shall expect you
to do the great-gunnery talk at table."

"Miss Dale keeps it up with him best," said Willoughby.

"She does everything best! But my dinner-table is involved, and I
cannot count on a young woman to talk across it. I would hire a
lion of a menagerie, if one were handy, rather than have a famous
scholar at my table, unsupported by another famous scholar. Doctor
Middleton would ride down a duke when the wine is in him. He will
terrify my poor flock. The truth is, we can't leaven him: I
foresee undigested lumps of conversation, unless you devote
yourself."

"I will devote myself," said Willoughby.

"I can calculate on Colonel De Craye and our porcelain beauty for
any quantity of sparkles, if you promise that. They play well
together. You are not to be one of the gods to-night, but a kind
of Jupiter's cup-bearer;--Juno's, if you like; and Lady Busshe
and Lady Culmer, and all your admirers shall know subsequently
what you have done. You see my alarm. I certainly did not rank
Professor Crooklyn among the possibly faithless, or I never would
have ventured on Doctor Middleton at my table. My dinner-parties
have hitherto been all successes. Naturally I feel the greater
anxiety about this one. For a single failure is all the more
conspicuous. The exception is everlastingly cited! It is not so
much what people say, but my own sentiments. I hate to fail.
However, if you are true, we may do."

"Whenever the great gun goes off I will fall on my face, madam!"

"Something of that sort," said the dame, smiling, and leaving him
to reflect on the egoism of women. For the sake of her
dinner-party he was to be a cipher in attendance on Dr. Middleton,
and Clara and De Craye were to be encouraged in sparkling
together! And it happened that he particularly wished to shine.
The admiration of his county made him believe he had a flavour in
general society that was not yet distinguished by his bride, and
he was to relinquish his opportunity in order to please Mrs.
Mountstuart! Had she been in the pay of his rival, she could not
have stipulated for more.

He remembered young Crossjay's instant quietude, after struggling
in his grasp, when Clara laid her hand on the boy: and from that
infinitesimal circumstance he deduced the boy's perception of a
differing between himself and his bride, and a transfer of
Crossjay's allegiance from him to her. She shone; she had the
gift of female beauty; the boy was attracted to it. That boy must
be made to feel his treason. But the point of the cogitation was,
that similarly were Clara to see her affianced shining, as shine
he could when lighted up by admirers, there was the probability
that the sensation of her littleness would animate her to take aim
at him once more. And then was the time for her chastisement.

A visit to Dr. Middleton in the library satisfied him that she had
not been renewing her entreaties to leave Patterne. No, the
miserable coquette had now her pastime, and was content to stay.
Deceit was in the air: he heard the sound of the shuttle of deceit
without seeing it; but, on the whole, mindful of what he had
dreaded during the hours of her absence, he was rather flattered,
witheringly flattered. What was it that he had dreaded? Nothing
less than news of her running away. Indeed a silly fancy, a
lover's fancy! yet it had led him so far as to suspect, after
parting with De Craye in the rain, that his friend and his bride
were in collusion, and that he should not see them again. He had
actually shouted on the rainy road the theatric call "Fooled!" one
of the stage-cries which are cries of nature! particularly the cry
of nature with men who have driven other men to the cry.

Constantia Durham had taught him to believe women capable of
explosions of treason at half a minute's notice. And strangely,
to prove that women are all of a pack, she had worn exactly the
same placidity of countenance just before she fled, as Clara
yesterday and to-day; no nervousness, no flushes, no twitches of
the brows, but smoothness, ease of manner--an elegant
sisterliness, one might almost say: as if the creature had found a
midway and borderline to walk on between cruelty and kindness, and
between repulsion and attraction; so that up to the verge of her
breath she did forcefully attract, repelling at one foot's length
with her armour of chill serenity. Not with any disdain, with no
passion: such a line as she herself pursued she indicated to him
on a neighbouring parallel. The passion in her was like a place of
waves evaporated to a crust of salt. Clara's resemblance to
Constantia in this instance was ominous. For him whose tragic
privilege it had been to fold each of them in his arms, and weigh
on their eyelids, and see the dissolving mist-deeps in their eyes,
it was horrible. Once more the comparison overcame him. Constantia
he could condemn for revealing too much to his manly sight: she
had met him almost half-way: well, that was complimentary and
sanguine: but her frankness was a baldness often rendering it
doubtful which of the two, lady or gentleman, was the object of
the chase--an extreme perplexity to his manly soul. Now Clara's
inner spirit was shyer, shy as a doe down those rose-tinged
abysses; she allured both the lover and the hunter; forests of
heavenliness were in her flitting eyes. Here the difference of
these fair women made his present fate an intolerable anguish. For
if Constantia was like certain of the ladies whom he had rendered
unhappy, triumphed over, as it is queerly called, Clara was not.
Her individuality as a woman was a thing he had to bow to. It was
impossible to roll her up in the sex and bestow a kick on the
travelling bundle. Hence he loved her, though she hurt him. Hence
his wretchedness, and but for the hearty sincerity of his faith in
the Self he loved likewise and more, he would have been hangdog
abject.

As for De Craye, Willoughby recollected his own exploits too
proudly to put his trust in a man. That fatal conjunction of
temper and policy had utterly thrown him off his guard, or he
would not have trusted the fellow even in the first hour of his
acquaintance with Clara. But he had wished her to be amused while
he wove his plans to retain her at the Hall:--partly imagining
that she would weary of his neglect: vile delusion! In truth he
should have given festivities, he should have been the sun of a
circle, and have revealed himself to her in his more dazzling
form. He went near to calling himself foolish after the tremendous
reverberation of "Fooled!" had ceased to shake him.

How behave? It slapped the poor gentleman's pride in the face to
ask. A private talk with her would rouse her to renew her
supplications. He saw them flickering behind the girl's
transparent calmness. That calmness really drew its dead ivory hue
from the suppression of them: something as much he guessed; and he
was not sure either of his temper or his policy if he should hear
her repeat her profane request.

An impulse to address himself to Vernon and discourse with him
jocularly on the childish whim of a young lady, moved perhaps by
some whiff of jealousy, to shun the yoke, was checked. He had
always taken so superior a pose with Vernon that he could not
abandon it for a moment: on such a subject too! Besides, Vernon
was one of your men who entertain the ideas about women of fellows
that have never conquered one: or only one, we will say in his
case, knowing his secret history; and that one no flag to boast
of. Densely ignorant of the sex, his nincompoopish idealizations,
at other times preposterous, would now be annoying. He would
probably presume on Clara's inconceivable lapse of dignity to read
his master a lecture: he was quite equal to a philippic upon
woman's rights. This man had not been afraid to say that he talked
common sense to women. He was an example of the consequence!

Another result was that Vernon did not talk sense to men.
Willoughby's wrath at Clara's exposure of him to his cousin
dismissed the proposal of a colloquy so likely to sting his
temper, and so certain to diminish his loftiness. Unwilling to
speak to anybody, he was isolated, yet consciously begirt by the
mysterious action going on all over the house. from Clara and De
Craye to Laetitia and young Crossjay, down to Barclay the maid.
His blind sensitiveness felt as we may suppose a spider to feel
when plucked from his own web and set in the centre of another's.
Laetitia looked her share in the mystery. A burden was on her
eyelashes. How she could have come to any suspicion of the
circumstances, he was unable to imagine. Her intense personal
sympathy, it might be; he thought so with some gentle pity for her
--of the paternal pat-back order of pity. She adored him, by
decree of Venus; and the Goddess had not decreed that he should
find consolation in adoring her. Nor could the temptings of
prudent counsel in his head induce him to run the risk of such a
total turnover as the incurring of Laetitia's pity of himself by
confiding in her. He checked that impulse also, and more
sovereignly. For him to be pitied by Laetitia seemed an upsetting
of the scheme of Providence. Providence, otherwise the
discriminating dispensation of the good things of life, had made
him the beacon, her the bird: she was really the last person to
whom he could unbosom. The idea of his being in a position that
suggested his doing so, thrilled him with fits of rage; and it
appalled him. There appeared to be another Power. The same which
had humiliated him once was menacing him anew. For it could not be
Providence, whose favourite he had ever been. We must have a
couple of Powers to account for discomfort when Egoism is the
kernel of our religion. Benevolence had singled him for uncommon
benefits: malignancy was at work to rob him of them. And you think
well of the world, do you!

Of necessity he associated Clara with the darker Power pointing
the knife at the quick of his pride. Still, he would have raised
her weeping: he would have stanched her wounds bleeding: he had an
infinite thirst for her misery, that he might ease his heart of
its charitable love. Or let her commit herself, and be cast off
Only she must commit herself glaringly, and be cast off by the
world as well. Contemplating her in the form of a discarded weed.
he had a catch of the breath: she was fair. He implored his Power
that Horace De Craye might not be the man! Why any man? An
illness, fever, fire, runaway horses, personal disfigurement, a
laming, were sufficient. And then a formal and noble offer on his
part to keep to the engagement with the unhappy wreck: yes, and to
lead the limping thing to the altar, if she insisted. His
imagination conceived it, and the world's applause besides.

Nausea, together with a sense of duty to his line, extinguished
that loathsome prospect of a mate, though without obscuring his
chivalrous devotion to his gentleman's word of honour, which
remained in his mind to compliment him permanently.

On the whole, he could reasonably hope to subdue her to
admiration. He drank a glass of champagne at his dressing; an
unaccustomed act, but, as he remarked casually to his man
Pollington, for whom the rest of the bottle was left, he had taken
no horse-exercise that day.

Having to speak to Vernon on business, he went to the schoolroom,
where he discovered Clara, beautiful in full evening attire, with
her arm on young Crossjay's shoulder, and heard that the hard
task-master had abjured Mrs. Mountstuart's party, and had already
excused himself, intending to keep Crossjay to the grindstone.
Willoughby was for the boy, as usual, and more sparklingly than
usual. Clara looked at him in some surprise. He rallied Vernon
with great zest, quite silencing him when he said: "I bear witness
that the fellow was here at his regular hour for lessons, and were
you?" He laid his hand on Crossjay, touching Clara's.

"You will remember what I told you, Crossjay," said she, rising
from the seat gracefully to escape the touch. "It is my command."

Crossjay frowned and puffed.

"But only if I'm questioned," he said.

"Certainly," she replied.

"Then I question the rascal," said Willoughby, causing a start.
"What, sir, is your opinion of Miss Middleton in her robe of state
this evening?"

"Now, the truth, Crossjay!" Clara held up a finger; and the boy
could see she was playing at archness, but for Willoughby it was
earnest. "The truth is not likely to offend you or me either," he
murmured to her.

"I wish him never, never, on any excuse, to speak anything else."

"I always did think her a Beauty," Crossjay growled. He hated the
having to say it.

"There!" exclaimed Sir Willoughby, and bent, extending an arm to
her. "You have not suffered from the truth, my Clara!"

Her answer was: "I was thinking how he might suffer if he were
taught to tell the reverse."

"Oh! for a fair lady!"

"That is the worst of teaching, Willoughby."