The Egoist

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Miss Middleton was not sufficiently instructed in the position of
her sex to know that she had plunged herself in the thick of the
strife of one of their great battles. Her personal position,
however, was instilling knowledge rapidly, as a disease in the
frame teaches us what we are and have to contend with. Could she
marry this man? He was evidently manageable. Could she condescend
to the use of arts in managing him to obtain a placable life?--a
horror of swampy flatness! So vividly did the sight of that dead
heaven over an unvarying level earth swim on her fancy, that she
shut her eyes in angry exclusion of it as if it were outside,
assailing her; and she nearly stumbled upon young Crossjay.

"Oh, have I hurt you?" he cried.

"No," said she, "it was my fault. Lead me somewhere away from
everybody."

The boy took her hand, and she resumed her thoughts; and, pressing
his fingers and feeling warm to him both for his presence and
silence, so does the blood in youth lead the mind, even cool and
innocent blood, even with a touch, that she said to herself, "And
if I marry, and then ... Where will honour be then? I marry him to
be true to my word of honour, and if then ... !" An intolerable
languor caused her to sigh profoundly. It is written as she
thought it; she thought in blanks, as girls do, and some women. A
shadow of the male Egoist is in the chamber of their brains
overawing them.

"Were I to marry, and to run!" There is the thought; she is
offered up to your mercy. We are dealing with a girl feeling
herself desperately situated, and not a fool.

"I'm sure you're dead tired, though," said Crossjay.

"No, I am not; what makes you think so?" said Clara.

"I do think so."

"But why do you think so?"

"You're so hot."

"What makes you think that?"

"You're so red."

"So are you, Crossjay."

"I'm only red in the middle of the cheeks, except when I've been
running. And then you talk to yourself, just as boys do when they
are blown."

"Do they?"

"They say: 'I know I could have kept up longer', or, 'my buckle
broke', all to themselves, when they break down running."

"And you have noticed that?"

"And, Miss Middleton, I don't wish you were a boy, but I should
like to live near you all my life and be a gentleman. I'm coming
with Miss Dale this evening to stay at the Hall and be looked
after, instead of stopping with her cousin who takes care of her
father. Perhaps you and I'll play chess at night."

"At night you will go to bed, Crossjay."

"Not if I have Sir Willoughby to catch hold of. He says I'm an
authority on birds" eggs. I can manage rabbits and poultry. Isn't
a farmer a happy man? But he doesn't marry ladies. A cavalry
officer has the best chance."

"But you are going to be a naval officer."

"I don't know. It's not positive. I shall bring my two dormice, and
make them perform gymnastics on the dinnertable. They're such dear
little things. Naval officers are not like Sir Willoughby."

"No, they are not," said Clara, "they give their lives to their
country.

"And then they're dead," said Crossjay.

Clara wished Sir Willoughby were confronting her: she could have
spoken.

She asked the boy where Mr. Whitford was. Crossjay pointed very
secretly in the direction of the double-blossom wild-cherry.
Coming within gaze of the stem, she beheld Vernon stretched at
length, reading, she supposed; asleep, she discovered: his finger
in the leaves of a book; and what book? She had a curiosity to
know the title of the book he would read beneath these boughs, and
grasping Crossjay's hand fast she craned her neck, as one timorous
of a fall in peeping over chasms, for a glimpse of the page; but
immediately, and still with a bent head, she turned her face to
where the load of virginal blossom, whiter than summer-cloud on
the sky, showered and drooped and clustered so thick as to claim
colour and seem, like higher Alpine snows in noon-sunlight, a
flush of white. From deep to deeper heavens of white, her eyes
perched and soared. Wonder lived in her. Happiness in the beauty
of the tree pressed to supplant it, and was more mortal and
narrower. Reflection came, contracting her vision and weighing her
to earth. Her reflection was: "He must be good who loves to be and
sleep beneath the branches of this tree!" She would rather have
clung to her first impression: wonder so divine, so unbounded, was
like soaring into homes of angel-crowded space, sweeping through
folded and on to folded white fountain-bow of wings, in
innumerable columns; but the thought of it was no recovery of it;
she might as well have striven to be a child. The sensation of
happiness promised to be less short-lived in memory, and would
have been had not her present disease of the longing for happiness
ravaged every corner of it for the secret of its existence. The
reflection took root. "He must be good ... !" That reflection
vowed to endure. Poor by comparison with what it displaced, it
presented itself to her as conferring something on him, and she
would not have had it absent though it robbed her.

She looked down. Vernon was dreamily looking up.

She plucked Crossjay hurriedly away, whispering that he had better
not wake Mr. Whitford, and then she proposed to reverse their
previous chase, and she be the hound and he the hare. Crossjay
fetched a magnificent start. On his glancing behind he saw Miss
Middleton walking listlessly, with a hand at her side.

"There's a regular girl!" said he in some disgust; for his theory
was, that girls always have something the matter with them to
spoil a game.

CHAPTER XII

Miss Middleton and Mr. Vernon Whitford

Looking upward, not quite awakened out of a transient doze,
at a fair head circled in dazzling blossom, one may temporize
awhile with common sense, and take it for a vision after the
eyes have regained direction of the mind. Vernon did so until
the plastic vision interwound with reality alarmingly. This is
the embrace of a Melusine who will soon have the brain if she
is encouraged. Slight dalliance with her makes the very diminutive
seem as big as life. He jumped to his feet, rattled his
throat, planted firmness on his brows and mouth, and attacked
the dream-giving earth with tremendous long strides, that his
blood might be lively at the throne of understanding. Miss
Middleton and young Crossjay were within hail: it was her face he
had seen, and still the idea of a vision, chased from his
reasonable wits, knocked hard and again for readmission.
There was little for a man of humble mind toward the sex to
think of in the fact of a young lady's bending rather low to
peep at him asleep, except that the poise of her slender figure,
between an air of spying and of listening, vividly recalled his
likening of her to the Mountain Echo. Man or maid sleeping in the
open air provokes your tiptoe curiosity. Men, it is
known, have in that state cruelly been kissed; and no rights are
bestowed on them, they are teased by a vapourish rapture; what has
happened to them the poor fellows barely divine:
they have a crazy step from that day. But a vision is not so
distracting; it is our own, we can put it aside and return to it,
play at rich and poor with it, and are not to be summoned before your
laws and rules for secreting it in our treasury. Besides, it
is the golden key of all the possible; new worlds expand beneath
the dawn it brings us. Just outside reality, it illumines,
enriches and softens real things;--and to desire it in
preference to the simple fact is a damning proof of enervation.

Such was Vernon's winding up of his brief drama of fantasy. He was
aware of the fantastical element in him and soon had it under.
Which of us who is of any worth is without it? He had not much
vanity to trouble him, and passion was quiet, so his task was not
gigantic. Especially be it remarked, that he was a man of quick
pace, the sovereign remedy for the dispersing of the mental
fen-mist. He had tried it and knew that nonsense is to be walked
off

Near the end of the park young Crossjay overtook him, and after
acting the pumped one a trifle more than needful, cried: "I say,
Mr. Whitford, there's Miss Middleton with her handkerchief out."

"What for, my lad?" said Vernon.

"I'm sure I don't know. All of a sudden she bumped down. And,
look what fellows girls are!--here she comes as if nothing had
happened, and I saw her feel at her side."

Clara was shaking her head to express a denial. "I am not at all
unwell," she said. when she came near. "I guessed Crossjay's
business in running up to you; he's a good-for-nothing, officious
boy. I was tired, and rested for a moment."

Crossjay peered at her eyelids. Vernon looked away and said: "Are
you too tired for a stroll?"

"Not now."

"Shall it be brisk?"

"You have the lead."

He led at a swing of the legs that accelerated young Crossjay's to
the double, but she with her short, swift, equal steps glided
along easily on a fine by his shoulder, and he groaned to think
that of all the girls of earth this one should have been
chosen for the position of fine lady.

"You won't tire me," said she, in answer to his look.

"You remind me of the little Piedmontese Bersaglieri on the
march."

"I have seen them trotting into Como from Milan."

"They cover a quantity of ground in a day, if the ground's flat.
You want another sort of step for the mountains."

"I should not attempt to dance up."

"They soon tame romantic notions of them."

"The mountains tame luxurious dreams, you mean. I see how they are
conquered. I can plod. Anything to be high up!"

"Well, there you have the secret of good work: to plod on and
still keep the passion fresh."

"Yes, when we have an aim in view."

"We always have one."

"Captives have?"

"More than the rest of us."

Ignorant man! What of wives miserably wedded? What aim in view
have these most woeful captives? Horror shrouds it, and shame
reddens through the folds to tell of innermost horror.

"Take me back to the mountains, if you please, Mr. Whitford," Miss
Middleton said, fallen out of sympathy with him. "Captives have
death in view, but that is not an aim."

"Why may not captives expect a release?"

"Hardly from a tyrant."

"If you are thinking of tyrants, it may be so. Say the tyrant
dies?"

"The prison-gates are unlocked and out comes a skeleton. But why
will you talk of skeletons! The very name of mountain seems life
in comparison with any other subject."

"I assure you," said Vernon, with the fervour of a man lighting on
an actual truth in his conversation with a young lady, "it's not
the first time I have thought you would be at home in the Alps.
You would walk and climb as well as you dance."

She liked to hear Clara Middleton talked of, and of her having
been thought of, and giving him friendly eyes, barely noticing
that he was in a glow. she said: "If you speak so encouragingly I
shall fancy we are near an ascent."

"I wish we were," said he.

"We can realize it by dwelling on it, don't you think?"

"We can begin climbing."

"Oh!" she squeezed herself shadowily.

"Which mountain shall it be?" said Vernon, in the right real
earnest tone.

Miss Middleton suggested a lady's mountain first, for a trial.
"And then, if you think well enough of me--if I have not stumbled
more than twice, or asked more than ten times how far it is from
the top, I should like to be promoted to scale a giant."

They went up to some of the lesser heights of Switzerland and
Styria, and settled in South Tyrol, the young lady preferring this
district for the strenuous exercise of her climbing powers because
she loved Italian colour; and it seemed an exceedingly good reason
to the genial imagination she had awakened in Mr. Whitford.
"Though," said he, abruptly, "you are not so much Italian as
French."

She hoped she was English, she remarked.

"Of course you are English; . . . yes." He moderated his ascent
with the halting affirmative.

She inquired wonderingly why he spoke in apparent hesitation.

"Well, you have French feet, for example: French wits, French
impatience," he lowered his voice, "and charm"

"And love of compliments."

"Possibly. I was not conscious of paying them"

"And a disposition to rebel?"

"To challenge authority, at least."

"That is a dreadful character."

"At all events, it is a character."

"Fit for an Alpine comrade?"

"For the best of comrades anywhere."

"It is not a piece of drawing-room sculpture: that is the most one
can say for it!" she dropped a dramatic sigh.

Had he been willing she would have continued the theme, for the
pleasure a poor creature long gnawing her sensations finds in
seeing herself from the outside. It fell away. After a silence,
she could not renew it; and he was evidently indifferent, having
to his own satisfaction dissected and stamped her a foreigner.
With it passed her holiday. She had forgotten Sir Willoughby: she
remembered him and said. "You knew Miss Durham, Mr. Whitford?"

He answered briefly, "I did."

"Was she? . . ." some hot-faced inquiry peered forth and withdrew.

"Very handsome," said Vernon.

"English?"

"Yes; the dashing style of English."

"Very courageous."

"I dare say she had a kind of courage."

"She did very wrong."

"I won't say no. She discovered a man more of a match with
herself; luckily not too late. We're at the mercy . .

"Was she not unpardonable?"

"I should be sorry to think that of any one."

"But you agree that she did wrong."

"I suppose I do. She made a mistake and she corrected it. if she
had not, she would have made a greater mistake."

"The manner. . ."

"That was bad--as far as we know. The world has not much right to
judge. A false start must now and then be made. It's better not to
take notice of it, I think."

"What is it we are at the mercy of?"

"Currents of feeling, our natures. I am the last man to preach on
the subject: young ladies are enigmas to me; I fancy they must
have a natural perception of the husband suitable to them, and the
reverse; and if they have a certain degree of courage, it follows
that they please themselves."

"They are not to reflect on the harm they do?" said Miss
Middleton.

"By all means let them reflect; they hurt nobody by doing that."

"But a breach of faith!"

"If the faith can be kept through life, all's well."

"And then there is the cruelty, the injury!"

"I really think that if a young lady came to me to inform me she
must break our engagement--I have never been put to the proof,
but to suppose it:--I should not think her cruel."

"Then she would not be much of a loss."

"And I should not think so for this reason, that it is impossible
for a girl to come to such a resolution without previously showing
signs of it to her. . . the man she is engaged to. I think it
unfair to engage a girl for longer than a week or two, just time
enough for her preparations and publications."

"If he is always intent on himself, signs are likely to be unheeded
by him," said Miss Middleton.

He did not answer, and she said, quickly:

"It must always be a cruelty. The world will think so. It is an
act of inconstancy."

"If they knew one another well before they were engaged."

"Are you not singularly tolerant?" said she.

To which Vernon replied with airy cordiality:--

"In some cases it is right to judge by results; we'll leave
severity to the historian, who is bound to be a professional
moralist and put pleas of human nature out of the scales. The lady
in question may have been to blame, but no hearts were broken, and
here we have four happy instead of two miserable."

His persecuting geniality of countenance appealed to her to
confirm this judgement by results, and she nodded and said:
"Four," as the awe-stricken speak.

From that moment until young Crossjay fell into the green-rutted
lane from a tree, and was got on his legs half stunned, with a
hanging lip and a face like the inside of a flayed eel-skin, she
might have been walking in the desert, and alone, for the pleasure
she had in society.

They led the fated lad home between them, singularly drawn
together by their joint ministrations to him, in which her
delicacy had to stand fire, and sweet good-nature made naught of
any trial. They were hand in hand with the little fellow as
physician and professional nurse.

CHAPTER XIII

The First Effort after Freedom

Crossjay's accident was only another proof, as Vernon told
Miss Dale, that the boy was but half monkey.

"Something fresh?" she exclaimed on seeing him brought into the
Hall, where she had just arrived.

"Simply a continuation," said Vernon. "He is not so prehensile as
he should be. He probably in extremity relies on the tail that has
been docked. Are you a man, Crossjay?"

"I should think I was!" Crossjay replied, with an old man's voice,
and a ghastly twitch for a smile overwhelmed the compassionate
ladies.

Miss Dale took possession of him. "You err in the other
direction," she remarked to Vernon.

"But a little bracing roughness is better than spoiling him." said
Miss Middleton.

She did not receive an answer, and she thought: "Whatever
Willoughby does is right, to this lady!"

Clara's impression was renewed when Sir Willoughby sat beside Miss
Dale in the evening; and certainly she had never seen him shine so
picturesquely as in his bearing with Miss Dale. The sprightly
sallies of the two, their rallyings, their laughter, and her fine
eyes, and his handsome gestures, won attention like a fencing
match of a couple keen with the foils to display the mutual skill.
And it was his design that she should admire the display; he was
anything but obtuse; enjoying the match as he did and necessarily
did to act so excellent a part in it, he meant the observer to see
the man he was with a lady not of raw understanding. So it went on
from day to day for three days.

She fancied once that she detected the agreeable stirring of the
brood of jealousy, and found it neither in her heart nor in her
mind, but in the book of wishes, well known to the young where
they write matter which may sometimes be independent of both those
volcanic albums. Jealousy would have been a relief to her, a dear
devil's aid. She studied the complexion of jealousy to delude
herself with the sense of the spirit being in her, and all the
while she laughed, as at a vile theatre whereof the imperfection
of the stage machinery rather than the performance is the wretched
source of amusement.

Vernon had deeply depressed her. She was hunted by the figure 4.
Four happy instead of two miserable. He had said it, involving her
among the four; and so it must be, she considered. and she must
be as happy as she could; for not only was he incapable of
perceiving her state, he was unable to imagine other circumstances
to surround her. How, to be just to him, were they imaginable by
him or any one?

Her horrible isolation of secrecy in a world amiable in
unsuspectingness frightened her. To fling away her secret, to
conform, to be unrebellious, uncritical, submissive, became an
impatient desire; and the task did not appear so difficult since
Miss Dale's arrival. Endearments had been rare, more formal;
living bodily untroubled and unashamed, and, as she phrased it,
having no one to care for her, she turned insensibly in the
direction where she was due; she slightly imitated Miss Dale's
colloquial responsiveness. To tell truth, she felt vivacious in a
moderate way with Willoughby after seeing him with Miss Dale.
Liberty wore the aspect of a towering prison-wall; the desperate
undertaking of climbing one side and dropping to the other was
more than she, unaided, could resolve on; consequently, as no one
cared for her, a worthless creature might as well cease dreaming
and stipulating for the fulfilment of her dreams; she might as
well yield to her fate; nay, make the best of it.

Sir Willoughby was flattered and satisfied. Clara's adopted
vivacity proved his thorough knowledge of feminine nature; nor did
her feebleness in sustaining it displease him. A steady look of
hers had of late perplexed the man, and he was comforted by
signs of her inefficiency where he excelled. The effort and the
failure were both of good omen.

But she could not continue the effort. He had overweighted her too
much for the mimicry of a sentiment to harden and have an
apparently natural place among her impulses; and now an idea came
to her that he might, it might be hoped, possibly see in Miss
Dale, by present contrast, the mate he sought; by contrast with an
unanswering creature like herself, he might perhaps realize in
Miss Dale's greater accomplishments and her devotion to him the
merit of suitability; he might be induced to do her justice. Dim as
the loop-hole was, Clara fixed her mind on it till it gathered
light. And as a prelude to action, she plunged herself into a
state of such profound humility, that to accuse it of being
simulated would he venturesome, though it was not positive. The
tempers of the young are liquid fires in isles of quicksand; the
precious metals not yet cooled in a solid earth. Her compassion
for Laetitia was less forced, but really she was almost as earnest
in her self-abasement, for she had not latterly been brilliant, not
even adequate to the ordinary requirements of conversation. She
had no courage, no wit, no diligence, nothing that she could
distinguish save discontentment like a corroding acid, and she went
so far in sincerity as with a curious shift of feeling to pity the
man plighted to her. If it suited her purpose to pity Sir
Willoughby, she was not moved by policy, be assured; her needs
were her nature, her moods her mind; she had the capacity to make
anything serve her by passing into it with the glance which
discerned its usefulness; and this is how it is that the young,
when they are in trouble, without approaching the elevation of
scientific hypocrites, can teach that able class lessons in
hypocrisy.

"Why should not Willoughby be happy?" she said; and the
exclamation was pushed forth by the second thought: "Then I shall
be free!" Still that thought came second.

The desire for the happiness of Willoughby was fervent on his
behalf and wafted her far from friends and letters to a narrow
Tyrolean valley, where a shallow river ran, with the indentations
of a remotely seen army of winding ranks in column, topaz over the
pebbles to hollows of ravishing emerald. There sat Liberty, after
her fearful leap over the prison-wall, at peace to watch the water
and the falls of sunshine on the mountain above, between
descending pine-stem shadows. Clara's wish for his happiness, as
soon as she had housed herself in the imagination of her freedom,
was of a purity that made it seem exceedingly easy for her to
speak to him.

The opportunity was offered by Sir Willoughby. Every morning after
breakfast Miss Dale walked across the park to see her father, and
on this occasion Sir Willoughby and Miss Middleton went with her
as far as the lake, all three discoursing of the beauty of various
trees, birches, aspens, poplars, beeches, then in their new green.
Miss Dale loved the aspen, Miss Middleton the beech, Sir
Willoughby the birch, and pretty things were said by each in
praise of the favoured object, particularly by Miss Dale. So much
so that when she had gone on he recalled one of her remarks, and
said: "I believe, if the whole place were swept away to-morrow,
Laetitia Dale could reconstruct it and put those aspens on the
north of the lake in number and situation correctly where you have
them now. I would guarantee her description of it in absence
correct."

"Why should she be absent?" said Clara, palpitating.

"Well, why!" returned Sir Willoughby. "As you say, there is no
reason why. The art of life, and mine will be principally a
country life--town is not life, but a tornado whirling atoms
--the art is to associate a group of sympathetic friends in our
neighbourhood; and it is a fact worth noting that if ever I feel
tired of the place, a short talk with Laetitia Dale refreshes it
more than a month or two on the Continent. She has the well of
enthusiasm. And there is a great advantage in having a cultivated
person at command, with whom one can chat of any topic under the
sun. I repeat, you have no need of town if you have friends like
Laetitia Dale within call. My mother esteemed her highly."

"Willoughby, she is not obliged to go."

"I hope not. And, my love, I rejoice that you have taken to her.
Her father's health is poor. She would be a young spinster to live
alone in a country cottage."

"What of your scheme?"

"Old Vernon is a very foolish fellow."

"He has declined?"

"Not a word on the subject! I have only to propose it to be
snubbed, I know."

"You may not be aware how you throw him into the shade with her."

"Nothing seems to teach him the art of dialogue with ladies."

"Are not gentlemen shy when they see themselves outshone?"

"He hasn't it, my love: Vernon is deficient in the lady's tongue."

"I respect him for that."

"Outshone. you say? I do not know of any shining--save to one, who
lights me, path and person!"

The identity of the one was conveyed to her in a bow and a soft
pressure.