The Egoist

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"I will mention it: I will do my best," said Miss Middleton,
strangely dejected.

They were now on the lawn, where Sir Willoughby was walking with
the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, his maiden aunts.

"You seem to have coursed the hare and captured the hart." he said
to his bride.

"Started the truant and run down the paedagogue," said Vernon.

"Ay, you won't listen to me about the management of that boy," Sir
Willoughby retorted.

The ladies embraced Miss Middleton. One offered up an ejaculation
in eulogy of her looks, the other of her healthfulness: then both
remarked that with indulgence young Crossjay could be induced to
do anything. Clara wondered whether inclination or Sir Willoughby
had disciplined their individuality out of them and made them his
shadows, his echoes. She gazed from them to him, and feared him.
But as yet she had not experienced the power in him which could
threaten and wrestle to subject the members of his household to
the state of satellites. Though she had in fact been giving battle
to it for several months, she had held her own too well to
perceive definitely the character of the spirit opposing her.

She said to the ladies, "Ah, no! Mr. Whitford has chosen the only
method for teaching a boy like Crossjay."

"I propose to make a man of him," said Sir Willoughby.

"What is to become of him if he learns nothing?"

"If he pleases me, he will be provided for. I have never abandoned
a dependent."

Clara let her eyes rest on his and, without turning or dropping,
shut them.

The effect was discomforting to him. He was very sensitive to the
intentions of eyes and tones; which was one secret of his rigid
grasp of the dwellers in his household. They were taught that they
had to render agreement under sharp scrutiny. Studious eyes,
devoid of warmth, devoid of the shyness of sex, that suddenly
closed on their look, signified a want of comprehension of some
kind, it might be hostility of understanding. Was it possible he
did not possess her utterly? He frowned up.

Clara saw the lift of his brows, and thought, "My mind is my own,
married or not."

It was the point in dispute.

CHAPTER IX

Clara and Laetitia Meet: They Are Compared

An hour before the time for lessons next morning young Crossjay
was on the lawn with a big bunch of wild flowers. He left them at
the hall door for Miss Middleton, and vanished into bushes.

These vulgar weeds were about to be dismissed to the dustheap by
the great officials of the household; but as it happened that Miss
Middleton had seen them from the window in Crossjay's hands, the
discovery was made that they were indeed his presentation-bouquet,
and a footman received orders to place them before her. She was
very pleased. The arrangement of the flowers bore witness to
fairer fingers than the boy's own in the disposition of the rings
of colour, red campion and anemone, cowslip and speedwell,
primroses and wood-hyacinths; and rising out of the blue was a
branch bearing thick white blossom, so thick, and of so pure a
whiteness, that Miss Middleton, while praising Crossjay for
soliciting the aid of Miss Dale, was at a loss to name the tree.

"It is a gardener's improvement on the Vestal of the forest, the
wild cherry," said Dr. Middleton, "and in this case we may admit
the gardener's claim to be valid, though I believe that, with his
gift of double blossom, he has improved away the fruit. Call this
the Vestal of civilization, then; he has at least done something
to vindicate the beauty of the office as well as the justness of
the title."

"It is Vernon's Holy Tree the young rascal has been despoiling,"
said Sir Willoughby merrily.

Miss Middleton was informed that this double-blossom wild
cherry-tree was worshipped by Mr. Whitford.

Sir Willoughby promised he would conduct her to it.

"You," he said to her, "can bear the trial; few complexions can;
it is to most ladies a crueller test than snow. Miss Dale, for
example, becomes old lace within a dozen yards of it. I should
like to place her under the tree beside you."

"Dear me, though; but that is investing the hamadryad with novel
and terrible functions," exclaimed Dr. Middleton.

Clara said: "Miss Dale could drag me into a superior Court to show
me fading beside her in gifts more valuable than a complexion."

"She has a fine ability," said Vernon.

All the world knew, so Clara knew of Miss Dales romantic admiration
of Sir Willoughby; she was curious to see Miss Dale and study the
nature of a devotion that might be, within reason, imitable--for
a man who could speak with such steely coldness of the poor lady
he had fascinated? Well, perhaps it was good for the hearts of
women to be beneath a frost; to be schooled, restrained, turned
inward on their dreams. Yes, then, his coldness was desireable; it
encouraged an ideal of him. It suggested and seemed to propose to
Clara's mind the divineness of separation instead of the deadly
accuracy of an intimate perusal. She tried to look on him as Miss
Dale might look, and while partly despising her for the dupery she
envied, and more than criticizing him for the inhuman numbness of
sentiment which offered up his worshipper to point a complimentary
comparison, she was able to imagine a distance whence it would be
possible to observe him uncritically, kindly, admiringly; as the
moon a handsome mortal, for example.

In the midst of her thoughts, she surprised herself by saying: "I
certainly was difficult to instruct. I might see things clearer if
I had a fine ability. I never remember to have been perfectly
pleased with my immediate lesson . . ."

She stopped, wondering whither her tongue was leading her; then
added, to save herself, "And that may be why I feel for poor
Crossjay."

Mr. Whitford apparently did not think it remarkable that she
should have been set off gabbling of "a fine ability", though the
eulogistic phrase had been pronounced by him with an
impressiveness to make his ear aware of an echo.

Sir Willoughby dispersed her vapourish confusion. "Exactly," he
said. "I have insisted with Vernon, I don't know how often, that
you must have the lad by his affections. He won't bear driving. It
had no effect on me. Boys of spirit kick at it. I think I know
boys, Clara."

He found himself addressing eyes that regarded him as though he
were a small speck, a pin's head, in the circle of their remote
contemplation. They were wide; they closed.

She opened them to gaze elsewhere.

He was very sensitive.

Even then, when knowingly wounding him, or because of it, she was
trying to climb back to that altitude of the thin division of
neutral ground, from which we see a lover's faults and are above
them, pure surveyors. She climbed unsuccessfully, it is true; soon
despairing and using the effort as a pretext to fall back lower.

Dr. Middleton withdrew Sir Willoughby's attention from the
imperceptible annoyance. "No, sir, no: the birch! the birch! Boys
of spirit commonly turn into solid men, and the solider the men
the more surely do they vote for Busby. For me, I pray he may be
immortal in Great Britain. Sea-air nor mountain-air is half so
bracing. I venture to say that the power to take a licking is
better worth having than the power to administer one. Horse him
and birch him if Crossjay runs from his books."

"It is your opinion, sir?" his host bowed to him affably, shocked
on behalf of the ladies.

"So positively so, sir, that I will undertake, without knowledge
of their antecedents, to lay my finger on the men in public life
who have not had early Busby. They are ill-balanced men. Their seat
of reason is not a concrete. They won't take rough and smooth as
they come. They make bad blood, can't forgive, sniff right and
left for approbation, and are excited to anger if an East wind
does not flatter them. Why, sir, when they have grown to be
seniors, you find these men mixed up with the nonsense of their
youth; you see they are unthrashed. We English beat the world
because we take a licking well. I hold it for a surety of a proper
sweetness of blood."

The smile of Sir Willoughby waxed ever softer as the shakes of his
head increased in contradictoriness. "And yet," said he, with the
air of conceding a little after having answered the Rev. Doctor
and convicted him of error, "Jack requires it to keep him in
order. On board ship your argument may apply. Not, I suspect,
among gentlemen. No."

"Good-night to you, gentlemen!" said Dr. Middleton.

Clara heard Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel interchange remarks:

"Willoughby would not have suffered it!"

"It would entirely have altered him!"

She sighed and put a tooth on her under-lip. The gift of humourous
fancy is in women fenced round with forbidding placards; they have
to choke it; if they perceive a piece of humour, for instance, the
young Willoughby grasped by his master,--and his horrified
relatives rigid at the sight of preparations for the seed of
sacrilege, they have to blindfold the mind's eye. They are
society's hard-drilled soldiery. Prussians that must both march
and think in step. It is for the advantage of the civilized world,
if you like, since men have decreed it, or matrons have so read
the decree; but here and there a younger woman, haply an
uncorrected insurgent of the sex matured here and there, feels
that her lot was cast with her head in a narrower pit than her
limbs.

Clara speculated as to whether Miss Dale might be perchance a
person of a certain liberty of mind. She asked for some little,
only some little, free play of mind in a house that seemed to
wear, as it were, a cap of iron. Sir Willoughby not merely ruled,
he throned, he inspired: and how? She had noticed an irascible
sensitiveness in him alert against a shadow of disagreement; and
as he was kind when perfectly appeased, the sop was offered by him
for submission. She noticed that even Mr. Whitford forbore to
alarm the sentiment of authority in his cousin. If he did not
breathe Sir Willoughby, like the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, he
would either acquiesce in a syllable or he silent. He never
strongly dissented. The habit of the house, with its iron cap, was
on him, as it was on the servants. and would be, oh, shudders of
the shipwrecked that see their end in drowning! on the wife.

"When do I meet Miss Dale?" she inquired.

"This very evening, at dinner," replied Sir Willoughby.

Then, thought she, there is that to look forward to.

She indulged her morbid fit, and shut up her senses that she
might live in the anticipation of meeting Miss Dale; and, long
before the approach of the hour, her hope of encountering any
other than another dull adherent of Sir Willoughby had fled. So
she was languid for two of the three minutes when she sat alone
with Laetitia in the drawing-room before the rest had assembled.

"It is Miss Middleton?" Laetitia said, advancing to her. "My
jealousy tells me; for you have won my boy Crossjay's heart, and
done more to bring him to obedience in a few minutes than we have
been able to do in months."

"His wild flowers were so welcome to me," said Clara.

"He was very modest over them. And I mention it because boys of
his age usually thrust their gifts in our faces fresh as they
pluck them, and you were to be treated quite differently."

"We saw his good fairy's hand."

"She resigns her office; but I pray you not to love him too well in
return; for he ought to be away reading with one of those men who
get boys through their examinations. He is, we all think, a born
sailor, and his place is in the navy."

"But, Miss Dale, I love him so well that I shall consult his
interests and not my own selfishness. And, if I have influence, he
will not be a week with you longer. It should have been spoke of
to-day; I must have been in some dream; I thought of it, I know. I
will not forget to do what may be in my power."

Clara's heart sank at the renewed engagement and plighting of
herself involved in her asking a favour, urging any sort of
petition. The cause was good. Besides, she was plighted already.

"Sir Willoughby is really fond of the boy," she said.

"He is fond of exciting fondness in the boy," said Miss Dale. "He
has not dealt much with children. I am sure he likes Crossjay; he
could not otherwise be so forbearing; it is wonderful what he
endures and laughs at."

Sir Willoughby entered. The presence of Miss Dale illuminated him
as the burning taper lights up consecrated plate. Deeply
respecting her for her constancy, esteeming her for a model of
taste, he was never in her society without that happy
consciousness of shining which calls forth the treasures of the
man; and these it is no exaggeration to term unbounded, when all
that comes from him is taken for gold.

The effect of the evening on Clara was to render her distrustful
of her later antagonism. She had unknowingly passed into the
spirit of Miss Dale, Sir Willoughby aiding; for she could
sympathize with the view of his constant admirer on seeing him so
cordially and smoothly gay; as one may say, domestically witty,
the most agreeable form of wit. Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson discerned
that he had a leg of physical perfection; Miss Dale distinguished
it in him in the vital essence; and before either of these ladies
he was not simply a radiant, he was a productive creature, so true
it is that praise is our fructifying sun. He had even a touch of
the romantic air which Clara remembered as her first impression of
the favourite of the county; and strange she found it to observe
this resuscitated idea confronting her experience. What if she had
been captious, inconsiderate? Oh, blissful revival of the sense of
peace! The happiness of pain departing was all that she looked
for, and her conception of liberty was to learn to love her
chains, provided that he would spare her the caress. In this mood
she sternly condemned Constantia. "We must try to do good; we must
not be thinking of ourselves; we must make the best of our path in
life." She revolved these infantile precepts with humble
earnestness; and not to be tardy in her striving to do good, with
a remote but pleasurable glimpse of Mr. Whitford hearing of it,
she took the opportunity to speak to Sir Willoughby on the subject
of young Crossjay, at a moment when, alighting from horseback, he
had shown himself to advantage among a gallant cantering company.
He showed to great advantage on horseback among men, being
invariably the best mounted, and he had a cavalierly style,
possibly cultivated, but effective. On foot his raised head and
half-dropped eyelids too palpably assumed superiority.
"Willoughby, I want to speak," she said, and shrank as she spoke,
lest he should immediately grant everything in the mood of
courtship, and invade her respite; "I want to speak of that dear
boy Crossjay. You are fond of him. He is rather an idle boy here,
and wasting time . . ."

"Now you are here, and when you are here for good, my love for
good . . ." he fluttered away in loverliness, forgetful of
Crossjay, whom he presently took up. "The boy recognizes his most
sovereign lady, and will do your bidding, though you should order
him to learn his lessons! Who would not obey? Your beauty alone
commands. But what is there beyond?--a grace, a hue divine, that
sets you not so much above as apart, severed from the world."

Clara produced an active smile in duty, and pursued: "If Crossjay
were sent at once to some house where men prepare boys to pass for
the navy, he would have his chance, and the navy is distinctly his
profession. His father is a brave man, and he inherits bravery,
and he has a passion for a sailor's life; only he must be able to
pass his examination, and he has not much time."

Sir Willoughby gave a slight laugh in sad amusement.

"My dear Clara, you adore the world; and I suppose you have to
learn that there is not a question in this wrangling world about
which we have not disputes and contests ad nauseam. I have my
notions concerning Crossjay, Vernon has his. I should wish to
make a gentleman of him. Vernon marks him for a sailor. But Vernon
is the lad's protector, I am not. Vernon took him from his father
to instruct him, and he has a right to say what shall be done with
him. I do not interfere. Only I can't prevent the lad from liking
me. Old Vernon seems to feel it. I assure you I hold entirely
aloof. If I am asked, in spite of my disapproval of Vernon's plans
for the boy, to subscribe to his departure, I can but shrug,
because, as you see, I have never opposed. Old Vernon pays for
him, he is the master, he decides, and if Crossjay is blown from
the masthead in a gale, the blame does not fall on me. These, my
dear, are matters of reason."

"I would not venture to intrude on them," said Clara, "if I had
not suspected that money ...

"Yes," cried Willoughby; "and it is a part. And let old Vernon
surrender the boy to me, I will immediately relieve him of the
burden on his purse. Can I do that, my dear, for the furtherance
of a scheme I condemn? The point is thus: latterly I have invited
Captain Patterne to visit me: just previous to his departure for
the African Coast, where Government despatches Marines when there
is no other way of killing them, I sent him a special invitation.
He thanked me and curtly declined. The man, I may almost say, is
my pensioner. Well, he calls himself a Patterne, he is
undoubtedly a man of courage, he has elements of our blood, and
the name. I think I am to be approved for desiring to make a
better gentleman of the son than I behold in the father: and
seeing that life from an early age on board ship has anything but
made a gentleman of the father, I hold that I am right in shaping
another course for the son."

"Naval officers . . ." Clara suggested.

"Some," said Willoughby. "But they must be men of birth, coming
out of homes of good breeding. Strip them of the halo of the title
of naval officers, and I fear you would not often say gentlemen
when they step into a drawing-room. I went so far as to fancy I
had some claim to make young Crossjay something different. It can
be done: the Patterne comes out in his behaviour to you, my love;
it can be done. But if I take him, I claim undisputed sway over
him. I cannot make a gentleman of the fellow if I am to compete
with this person and that. In fine, he must look up to me, he must
have one model."

"Would you, then, provide for him subsequently?"

"According to his behaviour."

"Would not that be precarious for him?"

"More so than the profession you appear inclined to choose for
him?"

"But there he would be under clear regulations."

"With me he would have to respond to affection."

"Would you secure to him a settled income? For an idle gentleman
is bad enough; a penniless gentleman . . ."

"He has only to please me, my dear, and he will be launched and
protected."

"But if he does not succeed in pleasing you?"

"Is it so difficult?"

"Oh!" Clara fretted.

"You see, my love, I answer you," said Sir Willoughby.

He resumed: "But let old Vernon have his trial with the lad. He
has his own ideas. Let him carry them out. I shall watch the
experiment."

Clara was for abandoning her task in sheer faintness.

"Is not the question one of money?" she said, shyly, knowing Mr.
Whitford to be poor.

"Old Vernon chooses to spend his money that way." replied Sir
Willoughby. "If it saves him from breaking his shins and risking
his neck on his Alps, we may consider it well employed."

"Yes," Clara's voice occupied a pause.

She seized her languor as it were a curling snake and cast it off.
"But I understand that Mr. Whitford wants your assistance. Is he
not--not rich? When he leaves the Hall to try his fortune in
literature in London, he may not be so well able to support
Crossjay and obtain the instruction necessary for the boy: and it
would be generous to help him."

"Leaves the Hall!" exclaimed Willoughby. "I have not heard a word
of it. He made a bad start at the beginning, and I should have
thought that would have tamed him: had to throw over his
Fellowship; ahem. Then he received a small legacy some time back,
and wanted to be off to push his luck in Literature: rank
gambling, as I told him. Londonizing can do him no good. I thought
that nonsense of his was over years ago. What is it he has from
me?--about a hundred and fifty a year: and it might be doubled
for the asking: and all the books he requires: and these writers
and scholars no sooner think of a book than they must have it. And
do not suppose me to complain. I am a man who will not have a
single shilling expended by those who serve immediately about my
person. I confess to exacting that kind of dependency. Feudalism
is not an objectionable thing if you can be sure of the lord. You
know, Clara, and you should know me in my weakness too, I do not
claim servitude, I stipulate for affection. I claim to be
surrounded by persons loving me. And with one? ... dearest! So
that we two can shut out the world; we live what is the dream of
others. Nothing imaginable can be sweeter. It is a veritable
heaven on earth. To be the possessor of the whole of you! Your
thoughts, hopes, all."

Sir Willoughby intensified his imagination to conceive more: he
could not, or could not express it, and pursued: "But what is
this talk of Vernon's leaving me? He cannot leave. He has barely a
hundred a year of his own. You see, I consider him. I do not speak
of the ingratitude of the wish to leave. You know, my dear, I have
a deadly abhorrence of partings and such like. As far as I can, I
surround myself with healthy people specially to guard myself from
having my feelings wrung; and excepting Miss Dale, whom you like
--my darling does like her?"--the answer satisfied him; "with
that one exception, I am not aware of a case that threatens to
torment me. And here is a man, under no compulsion, talking of
leaving the Hall! In the name of goodness, why? But why? Am I to
imagine that the sight of perfect felicity distresses him? We are
told that the world is 'desperately wicked'. I do not like to
think it of my friends; yet otherwise their conduct is often hard
to account for."

"If it were true, you would not punish Crossjay?" Clara feebly
interposed.

"I should certainly take Crossjay and make a man of him after my
own model, my dear. But who spoke to you of this?"

"Mr. Whitford himself. And let me give you my opinion, Willoughby,
that he will take Crossjay with him rather than leave him, if
there is a fear of the boy's missing his chance of the navy."

"Marines appear to be in the ascendant," said Sir Willoughby,
astonished at the locution and pleading in the interests of a son
of one. "Then Crossjay he must take. I cannot accept half the boy.
I am," he laughed, "the legitimate claimant in the application for
judgement before the wise king. Besides, the boy has a dose of my
blood in him; he has none of Vernon's, not one drop."

"Ah!"

"You see, my love?"

"Oh, I do see; yes."

"I put forth no pretensions to perfection," Sir Willoughby
continued. "I can bear a considerable amount of provocation; still
I can be offended, and I am unforgiving when I have been
offended. Speak to Vernon, if a natural occasion should spring
up. I shall, of course, have to speak to him. You may, Clara, have
observed a man who passed me on the road as we were cantering
home, without a hint of a touch to his hat. That man is a tenant of
mine, farming six hundred acres, Hoppner by name: a man bound to
remember that I have, independently of my position, obliged him
frequently. His lease of my ground has five years to run. I must
say I detest the churlishness of our country population, and where
it comes across me I chastise it. Vernon is a different matter: he
will only require to be spoken to. One would fancy the old fellow
laboured now and then under a magnetic attraction to beggary. My
love," he bent to her and checked their pacing up and down, "you
are tired?"

"I am very tired to-day," said Clara.

His arm was offered. She laid two fingers on it, and they dropped
when he attempted to press them to his rib.

He did not insist. To walk beside her was to share in the
stateliness of her walking.

He placed himself at a corner of the door-way for her to pass him
into the house, and doated on her cheek, her ear, and the softly
dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little
lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and
the knot--curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets,
wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps--waved
or fell, waved over or up or involutedly, or strayed, loose and
downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much
thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long round locks of
gold to trick the heart.

Laetitia had nothing to show resembling such beauty.

CHAPTER X

In Which Sir Willoughby Chances to Supply the Title for Himself

Now Vernon was useful to his cousin; he was the accomplished secretary
of a man who governed his estate shrewdly and diligently, but had
been once or twice unlucky in his judgements pronounced from the
magisterial bench as a justice of the Peace, on which occasions a
half column of trenchant English supported by an apposite classical
quotation impressed Sir Willoughby with the value of such a secretary
in a controversy. He had no fear of that fiery dragon of scorching
breath--the newspaper press--while Vernon was his right hand man;
and as he intended to enter Parliament, he foresaw the greater need
of him. Furthermore, he liked his cousin to date his own
controversial writings, on classical subjects, from Patterne Hall. It
caused his house to shine in a foreign field; proved the service of
scholarship by giving it a flavour of a bookish aristocracy that,
though not so well worth having, and indeed in itself contemptible,
is above the material and titular; one cannot quite say how. There,
however, is the flavour. Dainty sauces are the life, the nobility, of
famous dishes; taken alone, the former would be nauseating, the
latter plebeian. It is thus, or somewhat so, when you have a poet,
still better a scholar, attached to your household. Sir Willoughby
deserved to have him, for he was above his county friends in his
apprehension of the flavour bestowed by the man; and having him, he
had made them conscious of their deficiency. His cook, M. Dehors,
pupil of the great Godefroy, was not the only French cook in the
county; but his cousin and secretary, the rising scholar, the
elegant essayist, was an unparalleled decoration; of his kind, of
course. Personally. we laugh at him; you had better not, unless you
are fain to show that the higher world of polite literature is
unknown to you. Sir Willoughby could create an abject silence at a
county dinner-table by an allusion to Vernon "at work at home upon his
Etruscans or his Dorians"; and he paused a moment to let the allusion
sink, laughed audibly to himself over his eccentric cousin, and let
him rest.