The Egoist

G >> George Meredith >> The Egoist

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Clara tripped over the lawn in the early morning to Laetitia to
greet her. She broke away from a colloquy with Colonel De Craye
under Sir Willoughby's windows. The colonel had been one of the
bathers, and he stood like a circus-driver flicking a wet towel at
Crossjay capering.

"My dear, I am very unhappy!" said Clara.

"My dear, I bring you news," Laetitia replied.

"Tell me. But the poor boy is to be expelled! He burst into
Crossjay's bedroom last night and dragged the sleeping boy out of
bed to question him, and he had the truth. That is one comfort:
only Crossjay is to be driven from the Hall, because he was
untruthful previously--for me; to serve me; really, I feel it was
at my command. Crossjay will be out of the way to-day, and has
promised to come back at night to try to be forgiven. You must
help me, Laetitia."

"You are free, Clara! If you desire it, you have but to ask for
your freedom."

"You mean . . ."

"He will release you."

"You are sure?"

"We had a long conversation last night."

"I owe it to you?"

"Nothing is owing to me. He volunteered it."

Clara made as if to lift her eyes in apostrophe. "Professor
Crooklyn! Professor Crooklyn! I see. I did not guess that."

"Give credit for some generosity, Clara; you are unjust!

"By and by: I will be more than just by and by. I will practise on
the trumpet: I will lecture on the greatness of the souls of men
when we know them thoroughly. At present we do but half know them,
and we are unjust. You are not deceived, Laetitia? There is to be
no speaking to papa? no delusions? You have agitated me. I feel
myself a very small person indeed. I feel I can understand those
who admire him. He gives me back my word simply? clearly? without
--Oh, that long wrangle in scenes and letters? And it will be
arranged for papa and me to go not later than to-morrow? Never
shall I be able to explain to any one how I fell into this! I am
frightened at myself when I think of it. I take the whole blame: I
have been scandalous. And, dear Laetitia! you came out so early in
order to tell me?"

"I wished you to hear it."

"Take my heart."

"Present me with a part--but for good."

"Fie! But you have a right to say it."

"I mean no unkindness; but is not the heart you allude to an
alarmingly searching one?"

"Selfish it is, for I have been forgetting Crossjay. If we are
going to be generous, is not Crossjay to be forgiven? If it were
only that the boy's father is away fighting for his country,
endangering his life day by day, and for a stipend not enough to
support his family, we are bound to think of the boy! Poor dear
silly lad! with his 'I say, Miss Middleton, why wouldn't (some
one) see my father when he came here to call on him, and had to
walk back ten miles in the rain?'--I could almost fancy that did
me mischief... But we have a splendid morning after yesterday's
rain. And we will be generous. Own, Laetitia, that it is possible
to gild the most glorious day of creation."

"Doubtless the spirit may do it and make its hues permanent," said
Laetitia.

"You to me, I to you, he to us. Well, then, if he does, it shall
be one of my heavenly days. Which is for the probation of
experience. We are not yet at sunset."

"Have you seen Mr. Whitford this morning?"

"He passed me."

"Do not imagine him ever ill-tempered."

"I had a governess, a learned lady, who taught me in person the
picturesqueness of grumpiness. Her temper was ever perfect,
because she was never in the wrong, but I being so, she was
grumpy. She carried my iniquity under her brows, and looked out on
me through it. I was a trying child."

Laetitia said, laughing: "I can believe it!"

"Yet I liked her and she liked me: we were a kind of foreground
and background: she threw me into relief and I was an apology for
her existence."

"You picture her to me."

"She says of me now that I am the only creature she has loved. Who
knows that I may not come to say the same of her?"

"You would plague her and puzzle her still."

"Have I plagued and puzzled Mr. Whitford?"

"He reminds you of her?"

"You said you had her picture."

"Ah! do not laugh at him. He is a true friend."

"The man who can be a friend is the man who will presume to be a
censor."

"A mild one."

"As to the sentence he pronounces, I am unable to speak, but his
forehead is Rhadamanthine condemnation."

"Dr Middleton!"

Clara looked round. "Who? I? Did you hear an echo of papa? He
would never have put Rhadamanthus over European souls, because it
appears that Rhadamanthus judged only the Asiatic; so you are
wrong, Miss Dale. My father is infatuated with Mr. Whitford. What
can it be? We women cannot sound the depths of scholars, probably
because their pearls have no value in our market; except when they
deign to chasten an impertinent; and Mr. Whitford stands aloof
from any notice of small fry. He is deep, studious, excellent; and
does it not strike you that if he descended among us he would be
like a Triton ashore?"

Laetitia's habit of wholly subservient sweetness, which was her
ideal of the feminine, not yet conciliated with her acuter
character, owing to the absence of full pleasure from her life--
the unhealed wound she had sustained and the cramp of a bondage of
such old date as to seem iron--induced her to say, as if
consenting: "You think he is not quite at home in society?" But
she wished to defend him strenuously, and as a consequence she had
to quit the self-imposed ideal of her daily acting, whereby--the
case being unwonted, very novel to her--the lady's intelligence
became confused through the process that quickened it; so
sovereign a method of hoodwinking our bright selves is the acting
of a part, however naturally it may come to us! and to this will
each honest autobiographical member of the animated world bear
witness.

She added: "You have not found him sympathetic? He is. You fancy
him brooding, gloomy? He is the reverse, he is cheerful, he is
indifferent to personal misfortune. Dr. Corney says there is no
laugh like Vernon Whitford's, and no humour like his. Latterly he
certainly ... But it has not been your cruel word grumpiness. The
truth is, he is anxious about Crossjay: and about other things;
and he wants to leave. He is at a disadvantage beside very lively
and careless gentlemen at present, but your 'Triton ashore' is
unfair, it is ugly. He is, I can say, the truest man I know."

"I did not question his goodness, Laetitia."

"You threw an accent on it."

"Did I? I must be like Crossjay, who declares he likes fun best."

"Crossjay ought to know him, if anybody should. Mr. Whitford has
defended you against me, Clara, even since I took to calling you
Clara. Perhaps when you supposed him so like your ancient
governess, he was meditating how he could aid you. Last night he
gave me reasons for thinking you would do wisely to confide in
Mrs. Mountstuart. It is no longer necessary. I merely mention it.
He is a devoted friend."

"He is an untiring pedestrian."

"Oh!"

Colonel De Craye, after hovering near the ladies in the hope of
seeing them divide, now adopted the system of making three that
two may come of it.

As he joined them with his glittering chatter, Laetitia looked at
Clara to consult her, and saw the face rosy as a bride's.

The suspicion she had nursed sprung out of her arms a muscular
fact on the spot.

"Where is my dear boy?" Clara said.

"Out for a holiday," the colonel answered in her tone.

"Advise Mr. Whitford not to waste his time in searching for
Crossjay, Laetitia. Crossjay is better out of the way to-day. At
least, I thought so just now. Has he pocket-money, Colonel De
Craye?"

"My lord can command his inn."

"How thoughtful you are!"

Laetitia's bosom swelled upon a mute exclamation, equivalent to:
"Woman! woman! snared ever by the sparkling and frivolous!
undiscerning of the faithful, the modest and beneficent!"

In the secret musings of moralists this dramatic rhetoric
survives.

The comparison was all of her own making, and she was indignant at
the contrast, though to what end she was indignant she could not
have said, for she had no idea of Vernon as a rival of De Craye in
the favour of a plighted lady. But she was jealous on behalf of
her sex: her sex's reputation seemed at stake, and the purity of
it was menaced by Clara's idle preference of the shallower man.
When the young lady spoke so carelessly of being like Crossjay,
she did not perhaps know that a likeness, based on a similarity of
their enthusiasms, loves, and appetites, had been established
between women and boys. Laetitia had formerly chafed at it,
rejecting it utterly, save when now and then in a season of
bitterness she handed here and there a volatile young lady (none
but the young) to be stamped with the degrading brand. Vernon
might be as philosophical as he pleased. To her the gaiety of
these two, Colonel De Craye and Clara Middleton, was distressingly
musical: they harmonized painfully. The representative of her sex
was hurt by it.

She had to stay beside them: Clara held her arm. The colonel's
voice dropped at times to something very like a whisper. He was
answered audibly and smoothly. The quickwitted gentleman accepted
the correction: but in immediately paying assiduous attentions to
Miss Dale, in the approved intriguer's fashion, he showed himself
in need of another amounting to a reproof. Clara said: "We have
been consulting, Laetitia, what is to be done to cure Professor
Crooklyn of his cold." De Craye perceived that he had taken a
wrong step, and he was mightily surprised that a lesson in
intrigue should be read to him of all men. Miss Middleton's
audacity was not so astonishing: he recognized grand capabilities
in the young lady. Fearing lest she should proceed further and cut
away from him his vantage-ground of secrecy with her, he turned
the subject and was adroitly submissive.

Clara's manner of meeting Sir Willoughby expressed a timid
disposition to friendliness upon a veiled inquiry, understood by
none save Laetitia, whose brain was racked to convey assurances to
herself of her not having misinterpreted him. Could there be any
doubt? She resolved that there could not be; and it was upon this
basis of reason that she fancied she had led him to it. Legitimate
or not, the fancy sprang from a solid foundation. Yesterday
morning she could not have conceived it. Now she was endowed to
feel that she had power to influence him, because now, since the
midnight, she felt some emancipation from the spell of his physical
mastery. He did not appear to her as a different man, but she had
grown sensible of being a stronger woman. He was no more the cloud
over her, nor the magnet; the cloud once heaven-suffused, the
magnet fatally compelling her to sway round to him. She admired
him still: his handsome air, his fine proportions, the courtesy
of his bending to Clara and touching of her hand, excused a
fanatical excess of admiration on the part of a woman in her
youth, who is never the anatomist of the hero's lordly graces. But
now she admired him piecemeal. When it came to the putting of him
together, she did it coldly. To compassionate him was her utmost
warmth. Without conceiving in him anything of the strange old
monster of earth which had struck the awakened girl's mind of Miss
Middleton, Laetitia classed him with other men; he was "one of
them". And she did not bring her disenchantment as a charge
against him. She accused herself, acknowledged the secret of the
change to be, and her youthfulness was dead:--otherwise could she
have given him compassion, and not herself have been carried on
the flood of it? The compassion was fervent, and pure too. She
supposed he would supplicate; she saw that Clara Middleton was
pleasant with him only for what she expected of his generosity.
She grieved. Sir Willoughby was fortified by her sorrowful gaze as
he and Clara passed out together to the laboratory arm in arm.

Laetitia had to tell Vernon of the uselessness of his beating the
house and grounds for Crossjay. Dr. Middleton held him fast in
discussion upon an overnight's classical wrangle with Professor
Crooklyn, which was to be renewed that day. The Professor had
appointed to call expressly to renew it. "A fine scholar," said
the Rev. Doctor, "but crotchety, like all men who cannot stand
their Port."

"I hear that he had a cold," Vernon remarked. "I hope the wine was
good, sir."

As when the foreman of a sentimental jury is commissioned to
inform an awful Bench exact in perspicuous English, of a
verdict that must of necessity be pronounced in favour of the
hanging of the culprit, yet would fain attenuate the crime of a
palpable villain by a recommendation to mercy, such foreman,
standing in the attentive eye of a master of grammatical
construction, and feeling the weight of at least three sentences
on his brain, together with a prospect of Judicial interrogation
for the discovery of his precise meaning, is oppressed, himself is
put on trial, in turn, and he hesitates, he recapitulates, the
fear of involution leads him to be involved; as far as a man so
posted may, he on his own behalf appeals for mercy; entreats that
his indistinct statement of preposterous reasons may be taken for
understood, and would gladly, were permission to do it credible,
throw in an imploring word that he may sink back among the crowd
without for the one imperishable moment publicly swinging in his
lordship's estimation:--much so, moved by chivalry toward a lady,
courtesy to the recollection of a hostess, and particularly by the
knowledge that his hearer would expect with a certain frigid
rigour charity of him, Dr. Middleton paused, spoke and paused: he
stammered. Ladies, he said, were famous poisoners in the Middle
Ages. His opinion was, that we had a class of manufacturing wine
merchants on the watch for widows in this country. But he was
bound to state the fact of his waking at his usual hour to the
minute unassailed by headache. On the other hand, this was a
condition of blessedness unanticipated when he went to bed. Mr.
Whitford, however, was not to think that he entertained rancour
toward the wine. It was no doubt dispensed with the honourable
intention of cheering. In point of flavour execrable, judging by
results it was innocuous.

"The test of it shall be the effect of it upon Professor Crooklyn,
and his appearance in the forenoon according to promise," Dr.
Middleton came to an end with his perturbed balancings. "If I
hear more of the eight or twelve winds discharged at once upon a
railway platform, and the young lady who dries herself of a
drenching by drinking brandy and water with a gentleman at a
railway inn, I shall solicit your sanction to my condemnation of
the wine as anti-Bacchic and a counterfeit presentment. Do not
misjudge me. Our hostess is not responsible. But widows should
marry."

"You must contrive to stop the Professor, sir, if he should attack
his hostess in that manner," said Vernon.

"Widows should marry!" Dr. Middleton repeated.

He murmured of objecting to be at the discretion of a butler;
unless, he was careful to add, the aforesaid functionary could
boast of an University education; and even then, said he, it
requires a line of ancestry to train a man's taste.

The Rev. Doctor smothered a yawn. The repression of it caused a
second one, a real monster, to come, big as our old friend of the
sea advancing on the chained-up Beauty.

Disconcerted by this damning evidence of indigestion, his
countenance showed that he considered himself to have been too
lenient to the wine of an unhusbanded hostess. He frowned
terribly.

In the interval Laetitia told Vernon of Crossjay's flight for the
day, hastily bidding the master to excuse him: she had no time to
hint the grounds of excuse. Vernon mentally made a guess.

Dr Middleton took his arm and discharged a volley at the
crotchetty scholarship of Professor Crooklyn, whom to confute by
book, he directed his march to the library. Having persuaded
himself that he was dyspeptic, he had grown irascible. He
denounced all dining out, eulogized Patterne Hall as if it were
his home, and remembered he had dreamed in the night--a most
humiliating sign of physical disturbance. "But let me find a house
in proximity to Patterne, as I am induced to suppose I shall," he
said, "and here only am I to be met when I stir abroad."

Laetitia went to her room. She was complacently anxious enough to
prefer solitude and be willing to read. She was more seriously
anxious about Crossjay than about any of the others. For Clara
would be certain to speak very definitely, and how then could a
gentleman oppose her? He would supplicate, and could she be
brought to yield? It was not to be expected of a young lady who
had turned from Sir Willoughby. His inferiors would have had a
better chance. Whatever his faults, he had that element of
greatness which excludes the intercession of pity. Supplication
would be with him a form of condescension. It would be seen to be
such. His was a monumental pride that could not stoop. She had
preserved this image of the gentleman for a relic in the shipwreck
of her idolatry. So she mused between the lines of her book, and
finishing her reading and marking the page, she glanced down on
the lawn. Dr. Middleton was there, and alone; his hands behind his
back, his head bent. His meditative pace and unwonted perusal of
the turf proclaimed that a non-sentimental jury within had
delivered an unmitigated verdict upon the widow's wine.

Laetitia hurried to find Vernon.

He was in the hall. As she drew near him, the laboratory door
opened and shut.

"It is being decided," said Laetitia.

Vernon was paler than the hue of perfect calmness.

"I want to know whether I ought to take to my heels like Crossjay,
and shun the Professor," he said.

They spoke in under-tones, furtively watching the door.

"I wish what she wishes, I am sure; but it will go badly with the
boy," said Laetitia.

"Oh, well, then I'll take him," said Vernon, "I would rather. I
think I can manage it."

Again the laboratory door opened. This time it shut behind Miss
Middleton. She was highly flushed. Seeing them, she shook the
storm from her brows, with a dead smile; the best piece of
serenity she could put on for public wear.

She took a breath before she moved.

Vernon strode out of the house.

Clara swept up to Laetitia.

"You were deceived!"

The hard sob of anger barred her voice.

Laetitia begged her to come to her room with her.

"I want air: I must be by myself," said Clara, catching at her
garden-hat.

She walked swiftly to the portico steps and turned to the right,
to avoid the laboratory windows.

CHAPTER XXXIII

In Which the Comic Muse Has an Eye on Two Good Souls

Clara met Vernon on the bowling-green among the laurels. She
asked him where her father was.

"Don't speak to him now," said Vernon.

"Mr. Whitford, will you?"

"It is not advisable just now. Wait."

"Wait? Why not now?"

"He is not in the right humour."

She choked. There are times when there is no medicine for us in
sages, we want slaves; we scorn to temporize, we must overbear. On
she sped, as if she had made the mistake of exchanging words with
a post.

The scene between herself and Willoughby was a thick mist in her
head, except the burden and result of it, that he held to her
fast, would neither assist her to depart nor disengage her.

Oh, men! men! They astounded the girl; she could not define them
to her understanding. Their motives, their tastes, their vanity,
their tyranny, and the domino on their vanity, the baldness of
their tyranny, clinched her in feminine antagonism to brute power.
She was not the less disposed to rebellion by a very present sense
of the justice of what could be said to reprove her. She had but
one answer: "Anything but marry him!" It threw her on her nature,
our last and headlong advocate, who is quick as the flood to hurry
us from the heights to our level, and lower, if there be
accidental gaps in the channel. For say we have been guilty
of misconduct: can we redeem it by violating that which we are and
live by? The question sinks us back to the luxuriousness of a
sunny relinquishment of effort in the direction against tide. Our
nature becomes ingenious in devices, penetrative of the enemy,
confidently citing its cause for being frankly elvish or worse.
Clara saw a particular way of forcing herself to be surrendered.
She shut her eyes from it: the sight carried her too violently to
her escape; but her heart caught it up and huzzaed. To press the
points of her fingers at her bosom, looking up to the sky as she
did, and cry: "I am not my own; I am his!" was instigation
sufficient to make her heart leap up with all her body's blush to
urge it to recklessness. A despairing creature then may say she
has addressed the heavens and has had no answer to restrain her.

Happily for Miss Middleton, she had walked some minutes in her
chafing fit before the falcon eye of Colonel De Craye spied her
away on one of the beech-knots.

Vernon stood irresolute. It was decidedly not a moment for
disturbing Dr. Middleton's composure. He meditated upon a
conversation, as friendly as possible, with Willoughby. Round on
the front-lawn, he beheld Willoughby and Dr. Middleton together,
the latter having halted to lend attentive ear to his excellent
host. Unnoticed by them or disregarded, Vernon turned back to
Laetitia, and sauntered, talking with her of things current for as
long as he could endure to listen to praise of his pure
self-abnegation; proof of how well he had disguised himself, but
it smacked unpleasantly to him. His humourous intimacy with men's
minds likened the source of this distaste to the gallant
all-or-nothing of the gambler, who hates the little when he cannot
have the much, and would rather stalk from the tables clean-picked
than suffer ruin to be tickled by driblets of the glorious fortune
he has played for and lost. If we are not to be beloved, spare us
the small coin of compliments on character; especially when they
compliment only our acting. It is partly endurable to win eulogy
for our stately fortitude in losing, but Laetitia was unaware that
he flung away a stake; so she could not praise him for his merits.

"Willoughby makes the pardoning of Crossjay conditional," he said,
"and the person pleading for him has to grant the terms. How could
you imagine Willoughby would give her up! How could he! Who!
... He should, is easily said. I was no witness of the scene
between them just now, but I could have foretold the end of it; I
could almost recount the passages. The consequence is, that
everything depends upon the amount of courage she possesses. Dr.
Middleton won't leave Patterne yet. And it is of no use to speak
to him to-day. And she is by nature impatient, and is rendered
desperate."

"Why is it of no use to speak to Dr. Middleton today?" cried
Laetitia.

"He drank wine yesterday that did not agree with him; he can't
work. To-day he is looking forward to Patterne Port. He is not
likely to listen to any proposals to leave to-day."

"Goodness!"

"I know the depth of that cry!"

"You are excluded, Mr. Whitford."

"Not a bit of it; I am in with the rest. Say that men are to be
exclaimed at. Men have a right to expect you to know your own
minds when you close on a bargain. You don't know the world or
yourselves very well, it's true; still the original error is on
your side, and upon that you should fix your attention. She
brought her father here, and no sooner was he very comfortably
established than she wished to dislocate him."

"I cannot explain it; I cannot comprehend it," said Laetitia.

"You are Constancy."

"No." She coloured. "I am 'in with rest'. I do not say I should
have done the same. But I have the knowledge that I must not sit
in judgement on her. I can waver."

She coloured again. She was anxious that he should know her to be
not that stupid statue of Constancy in a corner doating on the
antic Deception. Reminiscences of the interview overnight made it
oppressive to her to hear herself praised for always pointing like
the needle. Her newly enfranchised individuality pressed to assert
its existence. Vernon, however, not seeing this novelty,
continued, to her excessive discomfort, to baste her old abandoned
image with his praises. They checked hers; and, moreover, he had
suddenly conceived an envy of her life-long, uncomplaining, almost
unaspiring, constancy of sentiment. If you know lovers when they
have not reason to be blissful, you will remember that in this
mood of admiring envy they are given to fits of uncontrollable
maundering. Praise of constancy, moreover, smote shadowily a
certain inconstant, enough to seem to ruffle her smoothness and do
no hurt. He found his consolation in it, and poor Laetitia writhed.
Without designing to retort, she instinctively grasped at a weapon
of defence in further exalting his devotedness; which reduced him
to cast his head to the heavens and implore them to partially
enlighten her. Nevertheless, maunder he must; and he recurred to
it in a way so utterly unlike himself that Laetitia stared in his
face. She wondered whether there could be anything secreted behind
this everlasting theme of constancy. He took her awakened gaze for
a summons to asseverations of sincerity, and out they came. She
would have fled from him, but to think of flying was to think how
little it was that urged her to fly, and yet the thought of
remaining and listening to praises undeserved and no longer
flattering, was a torture.