The Egoist

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"To walk the world and see you perhaps--with another!"

"See me?--Where? Here?"

"Wedded ... to another. You! my bride; whom I call mine; and you
are! You would be still--in that horror! But all things are
possible; women are women; they swim in infidelity, from wave to
wave! I know them."

"Willoughby, do not torment yourself and me, I beg you."

He meditated profoundly, and asked her: "Could you be such a saint
among women?"

"I think I am a more than usually childish girl."

"Not to forget me?"

"Oh! no."

"Still to be mine?"

"I am yours."

"To plight yourself?"

"It is done."

"Be mine beyond death?"

"Married is married, I think."

"Clara! to dedicate your life to our love! Never one touch; not
one whisper! not a thought, not a dream! Could you--it agonizes
me to imagine ... be inviolate? mine above?--mine before all men,
though I am gone:--true to my dust? Tell me. Give me that
assurance. True to my name!--Oh, I hear them. 'His relict!'
Buzzings about Lady Patterne. 'The widow.' If you knew their talk
of widows! Shut your ears, my angel! But if she holds them off
and keeps her path, they are forced to respect her. The dead
husband is not the dishonoured wretch they fancied him, because he
was out of their way. He lives in the heart of his wife. Clara! my
Clara! as I live in yours, whether here or away; whether you are a
wife or widow, there is no distinction for love--I am your
husband--say it--eternally. I must have peace; I cannot endure
the pain. Depressed, yes; I have cause to be. But it has haunted
me ever since we joined hands. To have you--to lose you!"

"Is it not possible that I may be the first to die?" said Miss
Middleton.

"And lose you, with the thought that you, lovely as you are, and
the dogs of the world barking round you, might ... Is it any
wonder that I have my feeling for the world? This hand!--the
thought is horrible. You would be surrounded; men are brutes; the
scent of unfaithfulness excites them, overjoys them. And I
helpless! The thought is maddening. I see a ring of monkeys
grinning. There is your beauty, and man's delight in desecrating.
You would be worried night and day to quit my name, to. . . I feel
the blow now. You would have no rest for them, nothing to cling to
without your oath."

"An oath!" said Miss Middleton.

"It is no delusion, my love, when I tell you that with this
thought upon me I see a ring of monkey faces grinning at me; they
haunt me. But you do swear it! Once, and I will never trouble you
on the subject again. My weakness! if you like. You will learn
that it is love, a man's love, stronger than death."

"An oath?" she said, and moved her lips to recall what she
might have said and forgotten. "To what? what oath?"

"That you will be true to me dead as well as living! Whisper
it."

"Willoughby, I shall be true to my vows at the altar."

"To me! me!"

"It will be to you."

"To my soul. No heaven can be for me--I see none, only torture,
unless I have your word, Clara. I trust it. I will trust it
implicitly. My confidence in you is absolute."

"Then you need not be troubled."

"It is for you, my love; that you may be armed and strong
when I am not by to protect you."

"Our views of the world are opposed, Willoughby."

"Consent; gratify me; swear it. Say: 'Beyond death.' Whisper it. I
ask for nothing more. Women think the husband's grave breaks the
bond, cuts the tie, sets them loose. They wed the flesh--pah!
What I call on you for is nobility; the transcendent nobility of
faithfulness beyond death. 'His widow!' let them say; a saint in
widowhood."

"My vows at the altar must suffice."

"You will not? Clara!"

"I am plighted to you."

"Not a word?--a simple promise? But you love me?"

"I have given you the best proof of it that I can."

"Consider how utterly I place confidence in you."

"I hope it is well placed."

"I could kneel to you, to worship you, if you would, Clara!"

"Kneel to Heaven, not to me, Willoughby. I am--I wish I were able
to tell what I am. I may be inconstant; I do not know myself.
Think; question yourself whether I am really the person you should
marry. Your wife should have great qualities of mind and soul. I
will consent to hear that I do not possess them, and abide by
the verdict."

"You do; you do possess them!" Willoughby cried. "When you know
better what the world is, you will understand my anxiety. Alive, I
am strong to shield you from it; dead, helpless--that is all. You
would be clad in mail, steel-proof, inviolable, if you would ...
But try to enter into my mind; think with me, feel with me. When
you have once comprehended the intensity of the love of a man like
me, you will not require asking. It is the difference of the elect
and the vulgar; of the ideal of love from the coupling of the
herds. We will let it drop. At least, I have your hand. As long as
I live I have your hand. Ought I not to be satisfied? I am; only I
see further than most men, and feel more deeply. And now I must
ride to my mother's bedside. She dies Lady Patterne! It might have
been that she . . . But she is a woman of women! With a
father-in-law! Just heaven! Could I have stood by her then with
the same feelings of reverence? A very little, my love, and
everything gained for us by civilization crumbles; we fall back to
the first mortar-bowl we were bruised and stirred in. My thoughts,
when I take my stand to watch by her, come to this conclusion,
that, especially in women, distinction is the thing to be aimed
at. Otherwise we are a weltering human mass. Women must teach us
to venerate them, or we may as well be bleating and barking and
bellowing. So, now enough. You have but to think a little. I must
be off. It may have happened during my absence. I will write. I
shall hear from you? Come and see me mount Black Norman. My
respects to your father. I have no time to pay them in person.
One!"

He took the one--love's mystical number--from which commonly
spring multitudes; but, on the present occasion, it was a single
one, and cold. She watched him riding away on his gallant horse,
as handsome a cavalier as the world could show, and the contrast
of his recent language and his fine figure was a riddle that froze
her blood. Speech so foreign to her ears, unnatural in tone,
unmanlike even for a lover (who is allowed a softer dialect), set
her vainly sounding for the source and drift of it. She was glad
of not having to encounter eyes like Mr. Vernon Whitford's.

On behalf of Sir Willoughby, it is to be said that his mother,
without infringing on the degree of respect for his decisions and
sentiments exacted by him, had talked to him of Miss Middleton,
suggesting a volatility of temperament in the young lady that
struck him as consentaneous with Mrs Mountstuart's "rogue in
porcelain", and alarmed him as the independent observations of two
world-wise women. Nor was it incumbent upon him personally to
credit the volatility in order, as far as he could, to effect the
soul-insurance of his bride, that he might hold the security of
the policy. The desire for it was in him; his mother had merely
tolled a warning bell that he had put in motion before. Clara was
not a Constantia. But she was a woman, and he had been deceived
by women, as a man fostering his high ideal of them will surely
be. The strain he adopted was quite natural to his passion and his
theme. The language of the primitive sentiments of men is of the
same expression at all times, minus the primitive colours when a
modern gentleman addresses his lady.

Lady Patterne died in the winter season of the new year. In April
Dr Middleton had to quit Upton Park, and he had not found a place
of residence, nor did he quite know what to do with himself in the
prospect of his daughter's marriage and desertion of him. Sir
Willoughby proposed to find him a house within a circuit of the
neighbourhood of Patterne. Moreover, he invited the Rev. Doctor
and his daughter to come to Patterne from Upton for a month, and
make acquaintance with his aunts, the ladies Eleanor and Isabel
Patterne, so that it might not be so strange to Clara to have them
as her housemates after her marriage. Dr. Middleton omitted to
consult his daughter before accepting the invitation, and it
appeared, when he did speak to her, that it should have been done.
But she said, mildly, "Very well, papa."

Sir Willoughby had to visit the metropolis and an estate in
another county, whence he wrote to his betrothed daily. He
returned to Patterne in time to arrange for the welcome of his
guests; too late, however, to ride over to them; and, meanwhile,
during his absence, Miss Middleton had bethought herself that she
ought to have given her last days of freedom to her friends. After
the weeks to be passed at Patterne, very few weeks were left to
her, and she had a wish to run to Switzerland or Tyrol and see the
Alps; a quaint idea, her father thought. She repeated it
seriously, and Dr. Middleton perceived a feminine shuttle of
indecision at work in her head, frightful to him, considering that
they signified hesitation between the excellent library and
capital wine-cellar of Patterne Hall, together with the society of
that promising young scholar, Mr. Vernon Whitford, on the one
side, and a career of hotels--equivalent to being rammed into
monster artillery with a crowd every night, and shot off on a
day's journey through space every morning--on the other.

"You will have your travelling and your Alps after the ceremony,"
he said.

"I think I would rather stay at home," said she.

Dr Middleton rejoined: "I would."

"But I am not married yet papa."

"As good, my dear."

"A little change of scene, I thought ..."

"We have accepted Willoughby's invitation. And he helps
me to a house near you."

"You wish to be near me, papa?"

"Proximate--at a remove: communicable."

"Why should we separate?"

"For the reason, my dear, that you exchange a father for a
husband."

"If I do not want to exchange?"

"To purchase, you must pay, my child. Husbands are not
given for nothing."

"No. But I should have you, papa!"

"Should?"

"They have not yet parted us, dear papa."

"What does that mean?" he asked, fussily. He was in a gentle stew
already, apprehensive of a disturbance of the serenity precious to
scholars by postponements of the ceremony and a prolongation of a
father's worries.

"Oh, the common meaning, papa," she said, seeing how it was with
him.

"Ah!" said he, nodding and blinking gradually back to a state of
composure, glad to be appeased on any terms; for mutability is but
another name for the sex, and it is the enemy of the scholar.

She suggested that two weeks of Patterne would offer plenty of
time to inspect the empty houses of the district, and should be
sufficient, considering the claims of friends, and the necessity
of going the round of London shops.

"Two or three weeks," he agreed, hurriedly, by way of compromise
with that fearful prospect.

CHAPTER VII

The Betrothed

During the drive from Upton to Patterne, Miss Middleton hoped, she
partly believed, that there was to be a change in Sir Willoughby's
manner of courtship. He had been so different a wooer. She
remembered with some half-conscious desperation of fervour what
she had thought of him at his first approaches, and in accepting
him. Had she seen him with the eyes of the world, thinking they
were her own? That look of his, the look of "indignant
contentment", had then been a most noble conquering look, splendid
as a general's plume at the gallop. It could not have altered. Was
it that her eyes had altered?

The spirit of those days rose up within her to reproach, her and
whisper of their renewal: she remembered her rosy dreams and the
image she had of him, her throbbing pride in him, her choking
richness of happiness: and also her vain attempting to be very
humble, usually ending in a carol, quaint to think of, not without
charm, but quaint, puzzling.

Now men whose incomes have been restricted to the extent
that they must live on their capital, soon grow relieved of the
forethoughtful anguish wasting them by the hilarious comforts
of the lap upon which they have sunk back, insomuch
that they are apt to solace themselves for their intolerable
anticipations of famine in the household by giving loose to
one fit or more of reckless lavishness. Lovers in like manner
live on their capital from failure of income: they, too, for the
sake of stifling apprehension and piping to the present hour,
are lavish of their stock, so as rapidly to attenuate it: they have
their fits of intoxication in view of coming famine: they force
memory into play, love retrospectively, enter the old house of
the past and ravage the larder, and would gladly, even resolutely,
continue in illusion if it were possible for the broadest
honey-store of reminiscences to hold out for a length of time
against a mortal appetite: which in good sooth stands on the
alternative of a consumption of the hive or of the creature it
is for nourishing. Here do lovers show that they are perishable.
More than the poor clay world they need fresh supplies,
right wholesome juices; as it were, life in the burst of the bud,
fruits yet on the tree, rather than potted provender. The latter
is excellent for by-and-by, when there will be a vast deal
more to remember, and appetite shall have but one tooth
remaining. Should their minds perchance have been saturated
by their first impressions and have retained them, loving by
the accountable light of reason, they may have fair harvests,
as in the early time; but that case is rare. In other words, love
is an affair of two, and is only for two that can be as quick,
as constant in intercommunication as are sun and earth, through
the cloud or face to face. They take their breath of life from
one another in signs of affection, proofs of faithfulness,
incentives to admiration. Thus it is with men and women in
love's good season. But a solitary soul dragging a log must
make the log a God to rejoice in the burden. That is not love.

Clara was the least fitted of all women to drag a log. Few girls
would be so rapid in exhausting capital. She was feminine indeed,
but she wanted comradeship, a living and frank exchange of the
best in both, with the deeper feelings untroubled. To be fixed at
the mouth of a mine, and to have to descend it daily, and not to
discover great opulence below; on the contrary, to be chilled in
subterranean sunlessness, without any substantial quality that she
could grasp, only the mystery of the inefficient tallow-light in
those caverns of the complacent-talking man: this appeared to her
too extreme a probation for two or three weeks. How of a lifetime
of it!

She was compelled by her nature to hope, expect and believe that
Sir Willoughby would again be the man she had known when she
accepted him. Very singularly, to show her simple spirit at the
time, she was unaware of any physical coldness to him; she knew of
nothing but her mind at work, objecting to this and that, desiring
changes. She did not dream of being on the giddy ridge of the
passive or negative sentiment of love, where one step to the wrong
side precipitates us into the state of repulsion.

Her eyes were lively at their meeting--so were his. She liked to
see him on the steps, with young Crossjay under his arm. Sir
Willoughby told her in his pleasantest humour of the boy's having
got into the laboratory that morning to escape his task-master,
and blown out the windows. She administered a chiding to the
delinquent in the same spirit, while Sir Willoughby led her on his
arm across the threshold, whispering: "Soon for good!" In reply
to the whisper, she begged for more of the story of young
Crossjay. "Come into the laboratory: said he, a little less
laughingly than softly; and Clara begged her father to come and
see young Crossjay's latest pranks. Sir Willoughby whispered to
her of the length of their separation, and his joy to welcome her
to the house where she would reign as mistress very won. He
numbered the weeks. He whispered: "Come." In the hurry of the
moment she did not examine a lightning terror that shot through
her. It passed, and was no more than the shadow which bends the
summer grasses, leaving a ruffle of her ideas, in wonder of her
having feared herself for something. Her father was with them.
She and Willoughby were not yet alone.

Young Crossjay had not accomplished so fine a piece of destruction
as Sir Willoughby's humour proclaimed of him. He had connected a
battery with a train of gunpowder, shattering a window-frame and
unsettling some bricks. Dr. Middleton asked if the youth was
excluded from the library, and rejoiced to hear that it was a
sealed door to him. Thither they went. Vernon Whitford was away
on one of his long walks.

"There, papa, you see he is not so very faithful to you," said
Clara.

Dr Middleton stood frowning over MS notes on the table, in
Vernon's handwriting. He flung up the hair from his forehead and
dropped into a seat to inspect them closely. He was now
immoveable. Clara was obliged to leave him there. She was led to
think that Willoughby had drawn them to the library with the
design to be rid of her protector, and she began to fear him. She
proposed to pay her respects to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel.
They were not seen, and a footman reported in the drawing-room
that they were out driving. She grasped young Crossjay's hand. Sir
Willoughby dispatched him to Mrs. Montague, the housekeeper, for a
tea of cakes and jam.

"Off!" he said, and the boy had to run.

Clara saw herself without a shield.

"And the garden!" she cried. "I love the garden; I must go and see
what flowers are up with you. In spring I care most for wild
flowers, and if you will show me daffodils and crocuses and
anemones . . ."

"My dearest Clara! my bride!" said he.

"Because they are vulgar flowers?" she asked him, artlessly,
to account for his detaining her.

Why would he not wait to deserve her!--no, not deserve--to
reconcile her with her real position; not reconcile, but to repair
the image of him in her mind, before he claimed his apparent
right!

He did not wait. He pressed her to his bosom.

"You are mine, my Clara--utterly mine; every thought, every
feeling. We are one: the world may do its worst. I have been
longing for you, looking forward. You save me from a thousand
vexations. One is perpetually crossed. That is all outside us. We
two! With you I am secure! Soon! I could not tell you whether the
world's alive or dead. My dearest!"

She came out of it with the sensations of the frightened child
that has had its dip in sea-water, sharpened to think that after
all it was not so severe a trial. Such was her idea; and she said
to herself immediately: What am I that I should complain? Two
minutes earlier she would not have thought it; but humiliated
pride falls lower than humbleness.

She did not blame him; she fell in her own esteem; less because
she was the betrothed Clara Middleton, which was now palpable as a
shot in the breast of a bird, than that she was a captured woman,
of whom it is absolutely expected that she must submit, and when
she would rather be gazing at flowers. Clara had shame of her
sex. They cannot take a step without becoming bondwomen: into what
a slavery! For herself, her trial was over, she thought. As for
herself, she merely complained of a prematureness and crudity
best unanalyzed. In truth, she could hardly be said to complain.
She did but criticize him and wonder that a man was unable to
perceive, or was not arrested by perceiving, unwillingness,
discordance, dull compliance; the bondwoman's due instead of the
bride's consent. Oh, sharp distinction, as between two spheres!

She meted him justice; she admitted that he had spoken in a
lover-like tone. Had it not been for the iteration of "the world",
she would not have objected critically to his words, though they
were words of downright appropriation. He had the right to use
them, since she was to be married to him. But if he had only
waited before playing the privileged lover!

Sir Willoughby was enraptured with her. Even so purely coldly,
statue-like, Dian-like, would he have prescribed his bride's
reception of his caress. The suffusion of crimson coming over her
subsequently, showing her divinely feminine in reflective
bashfulness, agreed with his highest definitions of female
character.

"Let me conduct you to the garden, my love," he said.

She replied: "I think I would rather go to my room."

"I will send you a wild-flower posy."

"Flowers, no; I do not like them to be gathered."

"I will wait for you on the lawn."

"My head is rather heavy."

His deep concern and tenderness brought him close.

She assured him sparklingly that she was well. She was ready to
accompany him to the garden and stroll over the park.

"Headache it is not," she added.

But she had to pay the fee for inviting a solicitous accepted
gentleman's proximity.

This time she blamed herself and him, and the world he abused, and
destiny into the bargain. And she cared less about the probation;
but she craved for liberty. With a frigidity that astonished her,
she marvelled at the act of kissing, and at the obligation it
forced upon an inanimate person to be an accomplice. Why was she
not free? By what strange right was it that she was treated as a
possession?

"I will try to walk off the heaviness," she said.

"My own girl must not fatigue herself."

"Oh, no; I shall not."

"Sit with me. Your Willoughby is your devoted attendant."

"I have a desire for the air."

"Then we will walk out."

She was horrified to think how far she had drawn away from him,
and now placed her hand on his arm to appease her self-accusations
and propitiate duty. He spoke as she had wished, his manner was
what she had wished; she was his bride, almost his wife; her
conduct was a kind of madness; she could not understand it.

Good sense and duty counselled her to control her wayward
spirit.

He fondled her hand, and to that she grew accustomed; her hand was
at a distance. And what is a hand? Leaving it where it was, she
treated it as a link between herself and dutiful goodness. Two
months hence she was a bondwoman for life! She regretted that she
had not gone to her room to strengthen herself with a review of
her situation, and meet him thoroughly resigned to her fate. She
fancied she would have come down to him amicably. It was his
present respectfulness and easy conversation that tricked her
burning nerves with the fancy. Five weeks of perfect liberty in
the mountains, she thought, would have prepared her for the days
of bells. All that she required was a separation offering new
scenes, where she might reflect undisturbed, feel clear again.

He led her about the flower-beds; too much as if he were giving a
convalescent an airing. She chafed at it, and pricked herself with
remorse. In contrition she expatiated on the beauty of the garden.

"All is yours, my Clara."

An oppressive load it seemed to her! She passively yielded to the
man in his form of attentive courtier; his mansion, estate, and
wealth overwhelmed her. They suggested the price to be paid. Yet
she recollected that on her last departure through the park she
had been proud of the rolling green and spreading trees. Poison of
some sort must be operating in her. She had not come to him
to-day with this feeling of sullen antagonism; she had caught it
here.

"You have been well, my Clara?"

"Quite."

"Not a hint of illness?"

"None."

"My bride must have her health if all the doctors in the
kingdom die for it! My darling!"

"And tell me: the dogs?"

"Dogs and horses are in very good condition."

"I am glad. Do you know, I love those ancient French chateaux and
farms in one, where salon windows look on poultry-yard and
stalls. I like that homeliness with beasts and peasants."

He bowed indulgently.

"I am afraid we can't do it for you in England, my Clara."

"No."

"And I like the farm," said he. "But I think our drawing-rooms
have a better atmosphere off the garden. As to our peasantry, we
cannot, I apprehend, modify our class demarcations without risk of
disintegrating the social structure."

"Perhaps. I proposed nothing."

"My love, I would entreat you to propose if I were convinced
that I could obey."

"You are very good."

"I find my merit nowhere but in your satisfaction."

Although she was not thirsting for dulcet sayings, the peacefulness
of other than invitations to the exposition of his mysteries and
of their isolation in oneness, inspired her with such calm that
she beat about in her brain, as if it were in the brain, for the
specific injury he had committed. Sweeping from sensation to
sensation, the young, whom sensations impel and distract, can
rarely date their disturbance from a particular one; unless it be
some great villain injury that has been done; and Clara had not
felt an individual shame in his caress; the shame of her sex was
but a passing protest, that left no stamp. So she conceived she
had been behaving cruelly, and said, "Willoughby"; because she was
aware of the omission of his name in her previous remarks.