The Egoist

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In addition, Sir Willoughby abhorred the loss of a familiar face
in his domestic circle. He thought ill of servants who could
accept their dismissal without petitioning to stay with him. A
servant that gave warning partook of a certain fiendishness.
Vernon's project of leaving the Hall offended and alarmed the
sensitive gentleman. "I shall have to hand Letty Dale to him at
last!" he thought, yielding in bitter generosity to the conditions
imposed on him by the ungenerousness of another. For, since his
engagement to Miss Middleton, his electrically forethoughtful mind
had seen in Miss Dale, if she stayed in the neighbourhood, and
remained unmarried, the governess of his infant children, often
consulting with him. But here was a prospect dashed out. The two,
then, may marry, and live in a cottage on the borders of his park;
and Vernon can retain his post, and Laetitia her devotion. The
risk of her casting it of had to be faced. Marriage has been known
to have such an effect on the most faithful of women that a
great passion fades to naught in their volatile bosoms when they
have taken a husband. We see in women especially the triumph.of
the animal over the spiritual. Nevertheless, risks must be run
for a purpose in view.

Having no taste for a discussion with Vernon, whom it was his
habit to confound by breaking away from him abruptly when he had
delivered his opinion, he left it to both the persons interesting
themselves in young Crossjay to imagine that he was meditating on
the question of the lad, and to imagine that it would be wise to
leave him to meditate; for he could be preternaturally acute in
reading any of his fellow-creatures if they crossed the current of
his feelings. And, meanwhile, he instructed the ladies Eleanor and
Isabel to bring Laetitia Dale on a visit to the Hall, where
dinner-parties were soon to be given and a pleasing talker would
be wanted, where also a woman of intellect, steeped in a splendid
sentiment, hitherto a miracle of female constancy, might stir a
younger woman to some emulation. Definitely to resolve to bestow
Laetitia upon Vernon was more than he could do; enough that he
held the card.

Regarding Clara, his genius for perusing the heart which was not
in perfect harmony with him through the series of responsive
movements to his own, informed him of a something in her character
that might have suggested to Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson her
indefensible, absurd "rogue in porcelain". Idea there was none in
that phrase; yet, if you looked on Clara as a delicately
inimitable porcelain beauty, the suspicion of a delicately
inimitable ripple over her features touched a thought of innocent
roguery, wildwood roguery; the likeness to the costly and lovely
substance appeared to admit a fitness in the dubious epithet. He
detested but was haunted by the phrase.

She certainly had at times the look of the nymph that has gazed
too long on the faun, and has unwittingly copied his lurking lip
and long sliding eye. Her play with young Crossjay resembled a
return of the lady to the cat; she flung herself into it as if her
real vitality had been in suspense till she saw the boy. Sir
Willoughby by no means disapproved of a physical liveliness that
promised him health in his mate; but he began to feel in their
conversations that she did not sufficiently think of making
herself a nest for him. Steely points were opposed to him when he,
figuratively, bared his bosom to be taken to the softest and
fairest. She reasoned: in other words, armed her ignorance. She
reasoned against him publicly, and lured Vernon to support her.
Influence is to be counted for power, and her influence over
Vernon was displayed in her persuading him to dance one evening at
Lady Culmer's, after his melancholy exhibitions of himself in the
art; and not only did she persuade him to stand up fronting her,
she manoeuvred him through the dance like a clever boy cajoling a
top to come to him without reeling, both to Vernon's contentment
and to Sir Willoughby's; for he was the last man to object to a
manifestation of power in his bride. Considering her influence
with Vernon, he renewed the discourse upon young Crossjay; and, as
he was addicted to system, he took her into his confidence, that
she might be taught to look to him and act for him.

"Old Vernon has not spoken to you again of that lad?" he said.

"Yes, Mr. Whitford has asked me."

"He does not ask me, my dear!"

"He may fancy me of greater aid than I am."

"You see, my love, if he puts Crossjay on me, he will be off. He
has this craze for 'enlisting' his pen in London, as he calls it;
and I am accustomed to him; I don't like to think of him as a
hack scribe, writing nonsense from dictation to earn a pitiful
subsistence; I want him here; and, supposing he goes, he offends
me; he loses a friend; and it will not he the first time that a
friend has tried me too far; but if he offends me, he is extinct."

"Is what?" cried Clara, with a look of fright.

"He becomes to me at once as if he had never been. He is extinct."

"In spite of your affection?"

"On account of it, I might say. Our nature is mysterious, and mine
as much so as any. Whatever my regrets, he goes out. This is not a
language I talk to the world. I do the man no harm; I am not to be
named unchristian. But ... !"

Sir Willoughby mildly shrugged, and indicated a spreading out of
the arms.

"But do, do talk to me as you talk to the world, Willoughby; give
me some relief!"

"My own Clara, we are one. You should know me at my worst, we will
say, if you like, as well as at my best."

"Should I speak too?"

"What could you have to confess?"

She hung silent; the wave of an insane resolution swelled in her
bosom and subsided before she said, "Cowardice, incapacity to
speak."

"Women!" said he.

We do not expect so much of women; the heroic virtues as little as
the vices. They have not to unfold the scroll of character.

He resumed, and by his tone she understood that she was now in the
inner temple of him: "I tell you these things; I quite acknowledge
they do not elevate me. They help to constitute my character. I
tell you most humbly that I have in me much--too much of the
fallen archangel's pride."

Clara bowed her head over a sustained in-drawn breath.

"It must be pride," he said, in a reverie superinduced by her
thoughtfulness over the revelation, and glorying in the black
flames demoniacal wherewith he crowned himself.

"Can you not correct it?" said she.

He replied, profoundly vexed by disappointment: "I am what I am.
It might be demonstrated to you mathematically that it is
corrected by equivalents or substitutions in my character. If it
be a failing--assuming that."

"It seems one to me: so cruelly to punish Mr. Whitford for seeking
to improve his fortunes."

"He reflects on my share in his fortunes. He has had but to apply
to me for his honorarium to be doubled."

"He wishes for independence."

"Independence of me!"

"Liberty!"

"At my expense!"

"Oh, Willoughby!"

"Ay, but this is the world, and I know it, my love; and beautiful
as your incredulity may be, you will find it more comforting to
confide in my knowledge of the selfishness of the world. My
sweetest, you will?--you do! For a breath of difference between
us is intolerable. Do you not feel how it breaks our magic ring?
One small fissure, and we have the world with its muddy deluge!--
But my subject was old Vernon. Yes, I pay for Crossjay, if Vernon
consents to stay. I waive my own scheme for the lad, though I
think it the better one. Now, then, to induce Vernon to stay. He
has his ideas about staying under a mistress of the household; and
therefore, not to contest it--he is a man of no argument; a sort
of lunatic determination takes the place of it with old Vernon!
--let him settle close by me, in one of my cottages; very well,
and to settle him we must marry him."

"Who is there?" said Clara, beating for the lady in her mind.

"Women," said Willoughby, "are born match-makers, and the most
persuasive is a young bride. With a man--and a man like old Vernon!--
she is irresistible. It is my wish, and that arms you. It is your
wish, that subjugates him. If he goes, he goes for good. If he
stays, he is my friend. I deal simply with him, as with every one.
It is the secret of authority. Now Miss Dale will soon lose her
father. He exists on a pension; she has the prospect of having to
leave the neighbourhood of the Hall, unless she is established
near us. Her whole heart is in this region; it is the poor soul's
passion. Count on her agreeing. But she will require a little
wooing: and old Vernon wooing! Picture the scene to yourself, my
love. His notion of wooing. I suspect, will be to treat the lady
like a lexicon, and turn over the leaves for the word, and fly
through the leaves for another word, and so get a sentence. Don't
frown at the poor old fellow, my Clara; some have the language on
their tongues, and some have not. Some are very dry sticks; manly
men, honest fellows, but so cut away, so polished away from the
sex, that they are in absolute want of outsiders to supply the
silken filaments to attach them. Actually!" Sir Willoughby laughed
in Clara's face to relax the dreamy stoniness of her look. "But I
can assure you, my dearest, I have seen it. Vernon does not know
how to speak--as we speak. He has, or he had, what is called a
sneaking affection for Miss Dale. It was the most amusing thing
possible; his courtship!--the air of a dog with an uneasy
conscience, trying to reconcile himself with his master! We were
all in fits of laughter. Of course it came to nothing."

"Will Mr. Whitford," said Clara, "offend you to extinction if he
declines?"

Willoughby breathed an affectionate "Tush!" to her silliness.

"We bring them together, as we best can. You see, Clara, I desire,
and I will make some sacrifices to detain him."

"But what do you sacrifice?--a cottage?" said Clara, combative at
all points.

"An ideal, perhaps. I lay no stress on sacrifice. I strongly
object to separations. And therefore, you will say, I prepare the
ground for unions? Put your influence to good service, my love. I
believe you could persuade him to give us the Highland fling on
the drawing-room table."

"There is nothing to say to him of Crossjay?"

"We hold Crossjay in reserve."

"It is urgent."

"Trust me. I have my ideas. I am not idle. That boy bids fair for
a capital horseman. Eventualities might . . ." Sir Willoughby
murmured to himself, and addressing his bride, "The cavalry? If we
put him into the cavalry, we might make a gentleman of him--not
be ashamed of him. Or, under certain eventualities, the Guards.
Think it over, my love. De Craye, who will, I suppose, act best
man for me, supposing old Vernon to pull at the collar, is a
Lieutenant-Colonel in the Guards, a thorough gentleman--of the
brainless class, if you like, but an elegant fellow; an Irishman;
you will see him, and I should like to set a naval lieutenant
beside him in a drawingroom, for you to compare them and consider
the model you would choose for a boy you are interested in. Horace
is grace and gallantry incarnate; fatuous, probably: I have always
been too friendly with him to examine closely. He made himself
one of my dogs, though my elder, and seemed to like to be at my
heels. One of the few men's faces I can call admirably handsome;--
with nothing behind it, perhaps. As Vernon says, 'a nothing
picked by the vultures and bleached by the desert'. Not a bad
talker, if you are satisfied with keeping up the ball. He will
amuse you. Old Horace does not know how amusing he is!"

"Did Mr. Whitford say that of Colonel De Craye?"

"I forget the person of whom he said it. So you have noticed old
Vernon's foible? Quote him one of his epigrams, and he is in
motion head and heels! It is an infallible receipt for tuning him.
If I want to have him in good temper, I have only to remark, 'as
you said'. I straighten his back instantly."

"I," said Clara, "have noticed chiefly his anxiety concerning the
boy; for which I admire him."

"Creditable, if not particularly far-sighted and sagacious. well,
then, my dear, attack him at once; lead him to the subject of our
fair neighbour. She is to be our guest for a week or so, and the
whole affair might be concluded far enough to fix him before she
leaves. She is at present awaiting the arrival of a cousin to
attend on her father. A little gentle pushing will precipitate old
Vernon on his knees as far as he ever can unbend them; but when a
lady is made ready to expect a declaration, you know, why, she
does not--does she?--demand the entire formula?--though some
beautiful fortresses . . ."

He enfolded her. Clara was growing hardened to it. To this she was
fated; and not seeing any way to escape, she invoked a friendly
frost to strike her blood, and passed through the minute
unfeelingly. Having passed it, she reproached herself for making
so much of it, thinking it a lesser endurance than to listen to
him. What could she do?--she was caged; by her word of honour, as
she at one time thought; by her cowardice, at another; and dimly
sensible that the latter was a stronger lock than the former, she
mused on the abstract question whether a woman's cowardice can be
so absolute as to cast her into the jaws of her aversion. Is it to
be conceived? Is there not a moment when it stands at bay? But
haggard-visaged Honour then starts up claiming to be dealt with in
turn; for having courage restored to her, she must have the
courage to break with honour, she must dare to be faithless, and
not merely say, I will be brave, but be brave enough to be
dishonourable. The cage of a plighted woman hungering for her
disengagement has two keepers, a noble and a vile; where on earth
is creature so dreadfully enclosed? It lies with her to overcome
what degrades her, that she may win to liberty by overcoming what
exalts.

Contemplating her situation, this idea (or vapour of youth taking
the god-like semblance of an idea) sprang, born of her present
sickness, in Clara's mind; that it must be an ill-constructed
tumbling world where the hour of ignorance is made the creator of
our destiny by being forced to the decisive elections upon which
life's main issues hang. Her teacher had brought her to
contemplate his view of the world.

She thought likewise: how must a man despise women, who can expose
himself as he does to me!

Miss Middleton owed it to Sir Willoughby Patterne that she ceased
to think like a girl. When had the great change begun? Glancing
back, she could imagine that it was near the period we call in
love the first--almost from the first. And she was led to imagine
it through having become barred from imagining her own emotions of
that season. They were so dead as not to arise even under the form
of shadows in fancy. Without imputing blame to him, for she was
reasonable so far, she deemed herself a person entrapped. In a
dream somehow she had committed herself to a life-long
imprisonment; and, oh terror! not in a quiet dungeon; the barren
walls closed round her, talked, called for ardour, expected
admiration.

She was unable to say why she could not give it; why she retreated
more and more inwardly; why she invoked the frost to kill her
tenderest feelings. She was in revolt, until a whisper of the day
of bells reduced her to blank submission; out of which a breath of
peace drew her to revolt again in gradual rapid stages, and once
more the aspect of that singular day of merry blackness felled her
to earth. It was alive, it advanced, it had a mouth, it had a
song. She received letters of bridesmaids writing of it, and felt
them as waves that hurl a log of wreck to shore. Following which
afflicting sense of antagonism to the whole circle sweeping on
with her, she considered the possibility of her being in a
commencement of madness. Otherwise might she not be accused of a
capriciousness quite as deplorable to consider? She had written to
certain of these young ladies not very long since of this
gentleman--how?--in what tone? And was it her madness then?--
her recovery now? It seemed to her that to have written of him
enthusiastically resembled madness more than to shudder away from
the union; but standing alone, opposing all she has consented to
set in motion, is too strange to a girl for perfect justification
to be found in reason when she seeks it.

Sir Willoughby was destined himself to supply her with that key of
special insight which revealed and stamped him in a title to
fortify her spirit of revolt, consecrate it almost.

The popular physician of the county and famous anecdotal wit, Dr.
Corney, had been a guest at dinner overnight, and the next day
there was talk of him, and of the resources of his art displayed
by Armand Dehors on his hearing that he was to minister to the
tastes of a gathering of hommes d'esprit. Sir Willoughby glanced at
Dehors with his customary benevolent irony in speaking of the
persons, great in their way, who served him. "Why he cannot give
us daily so good a dinner, one must, I suppose, go to French
nature to learn. The French are in the habit of making up for all
their deficiencies with enthusiasm. They have no reverence; if I
had said to him, 'I want something particularly excellent,
Dehors', I should have had a commonplace dinner. But they have
enthusiasm on draught, and that is what we must pull at. Know one
Frenchman and you know France. I have had Dehors under my eye two
years, and I can mount his enthusiasm at a word. He took hommes
d'esprit to denote men of letters. Frenchmen have destroyed their
nobility, so, for the sake of excitement, they put up the literary
man--not to worship him; that they can't do; it's to put
themselves in a state of effervescence. They will not have real
greatness above them, so they have sham. That they may justly call
it equality, perhaps! Ay, for all your shake of the head, my good
Vernon! You see, human nature comes round again, try as we may to
upset it, and the French only differ from us in wading through
blood to discover that they are at their old trick once more; "I
am your equal, sir, your born equal. Oh! you are a man of letters?
Allow me to be in a bubble about you!" Yes, Vernon, and I believe
the fellow looks up to you as the head of the establishment. I am
not jealous. Provided he attends to his functions! There's a
French philosopher who's for naming the days of the year after
the birthdays of French men of letters. Voltaire-day, Rousseau-day,
Racine-day, so on. Perhaps Vernon will inform us who takes April
1st."

"A few trifling errors are of no consequence when you are in the
vein of satire," said Vernon. "Be satisfied with knowing a nation
in the person of a cook."

"They may be reading us English off in a jockey!" said Dr.
Middleton. "I believe that jockeys are the exchange we make for
cooks; and our neighbours do not get the best of the bargain."

"No; but, my dear good Vernon, it's nonsensical," said Sir
Willoughby; "why be bawling every day the name of men of
letters?"

"Philosophers."

"Well, philosophers."

"Of all countries and times. And they are the benefactors of
humanity."

"Bene--!" Sir Willoughby's derisive laugh broke the word.
"There's a pretension in all that, irreconcilable with English
sound sense. Surely you see it?"

"We might," said Vernon, "if you like, give alternative titles to
the days, or have alternating days, devoted to our great families
that performed meritorious deeds upon such a day."

The rebel Clara, delighting in his banter, was heard: "Can we
furnish sufficient?"

"A poet or two could help us."

"Perhaps a statesman," she suggested.

"A pugilist, if wanted."

"For blowy days," observed Dr. Middleton, and hastily in penitence
picked up the conversation he had unintentionally prostrated, with
a general remark on new-fangled notions, and a word aside to
Vernon; which created the blissful suspicion in Clara that her
father was indisposed to second Sir Willoughby's opinions even
when sharing them.

Sir Willoughby had led the conversation. Displeased that the lead
should be withdrawn from him, he turned to Clara and related one
of the after-dinner anecdotes of Dr. Corney; and another, with a
vast deal of human nature in it, concerning a valetudinarian
gentleman, whose wife chanced to be desperately ill, and he went
to the physicians assembled in consultation outside the sick-room,
imploring them by all he valued, and in tears, to save the poor
patient for him, saying: "She is everything to me, everything; and
if she dies I am compelled to run the risks of marrying again; I
must marry again; for she has accustomed me so to the little
attentions of a wife, that in truth I can't. I can't lose her! She
must be saved!" And the loving husband of any devoted wife wrung
his hands.

"Now, there, Clara, there you have the Egoist," added Sir
Willoughby. "That is the perfect Egoist. You see what he comes to
--and his wife! The man was utterly unconscious of giving vent to
the grossest selfishness."

"An Egoist!" said Clara.

"Beware of marrying an Egoist, my dear!" He bowed gallantly; and
so blindly fatuous did he appear to her, that she could hardly
believe him guilty of uttering the words she had heard from him,
and kept her eyes on him vacantly till she came to a sudden full
stop in the thoughts directing her gaze. She looked at Vernon,
she looked at her father, and at the ladies Eleanor and Isabel.
None of them saw the man in the word, none noticed the word; yet
this word was her medical herb, her illuminating lamp, the key of
him (and, alas, but she thought it by feeling her need of one),
the advocate pleading in apology for her. Egoist! She beheld him--
unfortunate, selfdesignated man that he was!--in his good
qualities as well as bad under the implacable lamp, and his good
were drenched in his first person singular. His generosity roared
of I louder than the rest. Conceive him at the age of Dr. Corney's
hero: "Pray, save my wife for me. I shall positively have to get
another if I lose her, and one who may not love me half so well,
or understand the peculiarities of my character and appreciate my
attitudes." He was in his thirty-second year, therefore a young
man, strong and healthy, yet his garrulous return to his principal
theme, his emphasis on I and me, lent him the seeming of an old
man spotted with decaying youth.

"Beware of marrying an Egoist."

Would he help her to escape? The idea of the scene ensuing upon
her petition for release, and the being dragged round the walls of
his egoism, and having her head knocked against the corners,
alarmed her with sensations of sickness.

There was the example of Constantia. But that desperate young lady
had been assisted by a gallant, loving gentleman; she had met a
Captain Oxford.

Clara brooded on those two until they seemed heroic. She
questioned herself. Could she . . .? were one to come? She shut
her eyes in languor, leaning the wrong way of her wishes, yet
unable to say No.

Sir Willoughby had positively said beware! Marrying him would be a
deed committed in spite of his express warning. She went so far
as to conceive him subsequently saying: "I warned you." She
conceived the state of marriage with him as that of a woman tied
not to a man of heart, but to an obelisk lettered all over with
hieroglyphics, and everlastingly hearing him expound them,
relishing renewing his lectures on them.

Full surely this immovable stone-man would not release her. This
petrifaction of egoism would from amazedly to austerely refuse the
petition. His pride would debar him from understanding her desire
to be released. And if she resolved on it, without doing it
straightway in Constantia's manner, the miserable bewilderment of
her father, for whom such a complication would be a tragic
dilemma, had to be thought of. Her father, with all his tenderness
for his child, would make a stand on the point of honour; though
certain to yield to her, he would be distressed in a tempest of
worry; and Dr. Middleton thus afflicted threw up his arms, he
shunned books, shunned speech, and resembled a castaway on the
ocean, with nothing between himself and his calamity. As for the
world, it would be barking at her heels. She might call the man
she wrenched her hand from, Egoist; jilt, the world would call
her. She dwelt bitterly on her agreement with Sir Willoughby
regarding the world, laying it to his charge that her garden had
become a place of nettles, her horizon an unlighted fourth side of
a square.

Clara passed from person to person visiting the Hall. There was
universal, and as she was compelled to see, honest admiration of
the host. Not a soul had a suspicion of his cloaked nature. Her
agony of hypocrisy in accepting their compliments as the bride of
Sir Willoughby Patterne was poorly moderated by contempt of them
for their infatuation. She tried to cheat herself with the thought
that they were right and that she was the foolish and wicked
inconstant. In her anxiety to strangle the rebelliousness which
had been communicated from her mind to her blood, and was present
with her whether her mind was in action or not, she encouraged the
ladies Eleanor and Isabel to magnify the fictitious man of their
idolatry, hoping that she might enter into them imaginatively,
that she might to some degree subdue herself to the necessity of
her position. If she partly succeeded in stupefying her
antagonism, five minutes of him undid the work.