The Egoist

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Now Willoughby had not to be taught that temper is fatal to
policy; he was beginning to see in addition that the temper he
encouraged was particularly obnoxious to the policy he adopted;
and although his purpose in mounting horse after yesterday
frowning on his bride was definite, and might be deemed sagacious,
he bemoaned already the fatality pushing him ever farther from her
in chase of a satisfaction impossible to grasp.

But the bare fact that her behaviour demanded a line of policy
crossed the grain of his temper: it was very offensive.

Considering that she wounded him severely, her reversal of their
proper parts, by taking the part belonging to him, and requiring
his watchfulness, and the careful dealings he was accustomed to
expect from others, and had a right to exact of her, was
injuriously unjust. The feelings of a man hereditarily sensitive
to property accused her of a trespassing imprudence, and knowing
himself, by testimony of his household, his tenants, and the
neighbourhood, and the world as well, amiable when he received
his dues, he contemplated her with an air of stiff-backed
ill-treatment, not devoid of a certain sanctification of
martyrdom.

His bitterest enemy would hardly declare that it was he who was in
the wrong.

Clara herself had never been audacious enough to say that.
Distaste of his person was inconceivable to the favourite of
society. The capricious creature probably wanted a whipping to
bring her to the understanding of the principle called mastery,
which is in man.

But was he administering it? If he retained a hold on her, he
could undoubtedly apply the scourge at leisure; any kind of
scourge; he could shun her, look on her frigidly, unbend to her to
find a warmer place for sarcasm, pityingly smile, ridicule, pay
court elsewhere. He could do these things if he retained a hold on
her; and he could do them well because of the faith he had in his
renowned amiability; for in doing them, he could feel that he was
other than he seemed, and his own cordial nature was there to
comfort him while he bestowed punishment. Cordial indeed, the
chills he endured were flung from the world. His heart was in that
fiction: half the hearts now beating have a mild form of it to
keep them merry: and the chastisement he desired to inflict was
really no more than righteous vengeance for an offended goodness
of heart. Clara figuratively, absolutely perhaps, on her knees, he
would raise her and forgive her. He yearned for the situation. To
let her understand how little she had known him! It would be worth
the pain she had dealt, to pour forth the stream of re-established
confidences, to paint himself to her as he was; as he was in the
spirit, not as he was to the world: though the world had reason to
do him honour.

First, however, she would have to be humbled.

Something whispered that his hold on her was lost.

In such a case, every blow he struck would set her flying farther,
till the breach between them would be past bridging.

Determination not to let her go was the best finish to this
perpetually revolving round which went like the same old
wheel-planks of a water mill in his head at a review of the injury
he sustained. He had come to it before. and he came to it again.
There was his vengeance. It melted him, she was so sweet! She
shone for him like the sunny breeze on water. Thinking of her
caused a catch of his breath.

The dreadful young woman had a keener edge for the senses of men
than sovereign beauty.

It would be madness to let her go.

She affected him like an outlook on the great Patterne estate
after an absence, when his welcoming flag wept for pride above
Patterne Hall!

It would be treason to let her go.

It would be cruelty to her.

He was bound to reflect that she was of tender age, and the
foolishness of the wretch was excusable to extreme youth.

We toss away a flower that we are tired of smelling and do not
wish to carry. But the rose--young woman--is not cast off with
impunity. A fiend in shape of man is always behind us to
appropriate her. He that touches that rejected thing is larcenous.
Willoughby had been sensible of it in the person of Laetitia: and
by all the more that Clara's charms exceeded the faded creature's,
he felt it now. Ten thousand Furies thickened about him at a
thought of her lying by the road-side without his having crushed
all bloom and odour out of her which might tempt even the
curiosity of the fiend, man.

On the other hand, supposing her to be there untouched,
universally declined by the sniffling, sagacious dog-fiend, a
miserable spinster for years, he could conceive notions of his
remorse. A soft remorse may be adopted as an agreeable sensation
within view of the wasted penitent whom we have struck a trifle
too hard. Seeing her penitent, he certainly would be willing to
surround her with little offices of compromising kindness. It
would depend on her age. Supposing her still youngish, there might
be captivating passages between them, as thus, in a style not
unfamiliar:

"And was it my fault, my poor girl? Am I to blame, that you have
passed a lonely, unloved youth?"

"No, Willoughby! The irreparable error was mine, the blame is
mine, mine only. I live to repent it. I do not seek, for I have
not deserved, your pardon. Had I it, I should need my own
self-esteem to presume to clasp it to a bosom ever unworthy of
you."

"I may have been impatient, Clara: we are human!"

"Never be it mine to accuse one on whom I laid so heavy a weight
of forbearance!"

"Still, my old love!--for I am merely quoting history in naming
you so--I cannot have been perfectly blameless."

"To me you were, and are."

"Clara!"

"Willoughby!"

"Must I recognize the bitter truth that we two, once nearly one!
so nearly one! are eternally separated?"

"I have envisaged it. My friend--I may call you friend; you have
ever been my friend, my best friend! oh, that eyes had been mine
to know the friend I had!--Willoughby, in the darkness of night,
and during days that were as night to my soul, I have seen the
inexorable finger pointing my solitary way through the wilderness
from a Paradise forfeited by my most wilful, my wanton, sin. We
have met. It is more than I have merited. We part. In mercy let it
be for ever. Oh, terrible word! Coined by the passions of our
youth, it comes to us for our sole riches when we are bankrupt of
earthly treasures, and is the passport given by Abnegation unto
Woe that prays to quit this probationary sphere. Willoughby, we
part. It is better so."

"Clara! one--one only--one last--one holy kiss!"

"If these poor lips, that once were sweet to you ...

The kiss, to continue the language of the imaginative composition
of his time, favourite readings in which had inspired Sir
Willoughby with a colloquy so pathetic, was imprinted.

Ay, she had the kiss, and no mean one. It was intended to swallow
every vestige of dwindling attractiveness out of her, and there
was a bit of scandal springing of it in the background that
satisfactorily settled her business, and left her 'enshrined in
memory, a divine recollection to him,' as his popular romances
would say, and have said for years.

Unhappily, the fancied salute of her lips encircled him with the
breathing Clara. She rushed up from vacancy like a wind summoned
to wreck a stately vessel.

His reverie had thrown him into severe commotion. The slave of a
passion thinks in a ring, as hares run: he will cease where he
began. Her sweetness had set him off, and he whirled back to her
sweetness: and that being incalculable and he insatiable, you have
the picture of his torments when you consider that her behaviour
made her as a cloud to him

Riding slack, horse and man, in the likeness of those two ajog
homeward from the miry hunt, the horse pricked his cars, and
Willoughby looked down from his road along the bills on the race
headed by young Crossjay with a short start over Aspenwell Common
to the ford. There was no mistaking who they were, though they
were well-nigh a mile distant below. He noticed that they did not
overtake the boy. They drew rein at the ford, talking not simply
face to face, but face in face. Willoughby's novel feeling of he
knew not what drew them up to him, enabling him to fancy them
bathing in one another's eyes. Then she sprang through the ford,
De Craye following, but not close after--and why not close? She
had flicked him with one of her peremptorily saucy speeches when
she was bold with the gallop. They were not unknown to Willoughby.
They signified intimacy.

Last night he had proposed to De Craye to take Miss Middleton for
a ride the next afternoon. It never came to his mind then that he
and his friend had formerly been rivals. He wished Clara to be
amused. Policy dictated that every thread should be used to attach
her to her residence at the Hall until he could command his temper
to talk to her calmly and overwhelm her, as any man in earnest,
with command of temper and a point of vantage, may be sure to
whelm a young woman. Policy, adulterated by temper, yet policy it
was that had sent him on his errand in the early morning to beat
about for a house and garden suitable to Dr. Middleton within a
circuit of five, six, or seven miles of Patterne Hall. If the Rev.
Doctor liked the house and took it (and Willoughby had seen the
place to suit him), the neighbourhood would be a chain upon Clara:
and if the house did not please a gentleman rather hard to please
(except in a venerable wine), an excuse would have been started
for his visiting other houses, and he had that response to his
importunate daughter, that he believed an excellent house was on
view. Dr. Middleton had been prepared by numerous hints to meet
Clara's black misreading of a lovers" quarrel, so that everything
looked full of promise as far as Willoughby's exercise of policy
went.

But the strange pang traversing him now convicted him of a large
adulteration of profitless temper with it. The loyalty of De Craye
to a friend, where a woman walked in the drama, was notorious. It
was there, and a most flexible thing it was: and it soon
resembled reason manipulated by the sophists. Not to have
reckoned on his peculiar loyalty was proof of the blindness cast
on us by temper.

And De Craye had an Irish tongue; and he had it under control, so
that he could talk good sense and airy nonsense at discretion. The
strongest overboiling of English Puritan contempt of a gabbler,
would not stop women from liking it. Evidently Clara did like it,
and Willoughby thundered on her sex. Unto such brainless things as
these do we, under the irony of circumstances, confide our honour!

For he was no gabbler. He remembered having rattled in earlier
days; he had rattled with an object to gain, desiring to be taken
for an easy, careless, vivacious, charming fellow, as any young
gentleman may be who gaily wears the golden dish of Fifty thousand
pounds per annum, nailed to the back of his very saintly young
pate. The growth of the critical spirit in him, however, had
informed him that slang had been a principal component of his
rattling; and as he justly supposed it a betraying art for his
race and for him, he passed through the prim and the yawning
phases of affected indifference, to the pine Puritanism of a
leaden contempt of gabblers.

They snare women, you see--girls! How despicable the host of
girls!--at least, that girl below there!

Married women understood him: widows did. He placed an exceedingly
handsome and flattering young widow of his acquaintance, Lady Mary
Lewison, beside Clara for a comparison, involuntarily; and at
once, in a flash, in despite of him (he would rather it had been
otherwise), and in despite of Lady Mary's high birth and
connections as well, the silver lustre of the maid sicklied the
poor widow.

The effect of the luckless comparison was to produce an image of
surpassingness in the features of Clara that gave him the final,
or mace-blow. Jealousy invaded him.

He had hitherto been free of it, regarding jealousy as a foreign
devil, the accursed familiar of the vulgar. Luckless fellows might
be victims of the disease; he was not; and neither Captain Oxford,
nor Vernon, nor De Craye, nor any of his compeers, had given him
one shrewd pinch: the woman had, not the man; and she in quite a
different fashion from his present wallowing anguish: she had
never pulled him to earth's level, where jealousy gnaws the
grasses. He had boasted himself above the humiliating visitation.

If that had been the case, we should not have needed to trouble
ourselves much about him. A run or two with the pack of imps would
have satisfied us. But he desired Clara Middleton manfully enough
at an intimation of rivalry to be jealous; in a minute the foreign
devil had him, he was flame: flaming verdigris, one might almost
dare to say, for an exact illustration; such was actually the
colour; but accept it as unsaid.

Remember the poets upon jealousy. It is to be haunted in the heaven
of two by a Third; preceded or succeeded, therefore surrounded,
embraced, bugged by this infernal Third: it is Love's bed of
burning marl; to see and taste the withering Third in the bosom of
sweetness; to be dragged through the past and find the fair Eden
of it sulphurous; to be dragged to the gates of the future and
glory to behold them blood: to adore the bitter creature trebly
and with treble power to clutch her by the windpipe: it is to be
cheated, derided, shamed, and abject and supplicating, and
consciously demoniacal in treacherousness, and victoriously
self-justified in revenge.

And still there is no change in what men feel, though in what they
do the modern may be judicious.

You know the many paintings of man transformed to rageing beast by
the curse: and this, the fieriest trial of our egoism, worked in
the Egoist to produce division of himself from himself, a
concentration of his thoughts upon another object, still himself,
but in another breast, which had to be looked at and into for the
discovery of him. By the gaping jaw-chasm of his greed we may
gather comprehension of his insatiate force of jealousy. Let her
go? Not though he were to become a mark of public scorn in
strangling her with the yoke! His concentration was marvellous.
Unused to the exercise of imaginative powers, he nevertheless
conjured her before him visually till his eyeballs ached. He saw
none but Clara, hated none, loved none, save the intolerable
woman. What logic was in him deduced her to be individual and most
distinctive from the circumstance that only she had ever wrought
these pangs. She had made him ready for them, as we know. An idea
of De Craye being no stranger to her when he arrived at the Hall,
dashed him at De Craye for a second: it might be or might not be
that they had a secret;--Clara was the spell. So prodigiously did
he love and hate, that he had no permanent sense except for her.
The soul of him writhed under her eyes at one moment, and the next
it closed on her without mercy. She was his possession escaping;
his own gliding away to the Third.

There would be pangs for him too, that Third! Standing at the
altar to see her fast-bound, soul and body, to another, would be
good roasting fire.

It would be good roasting fire for her too, should she be averse.
To conceive her aversion was to burn her and devour her. She would
then be his!--what say you? Burned and devoured! Rivals would
vanish then. Her reluctance to espouse the man she was plighted to
would cease to be uttered, cease to be felt.

At last he believed in her reluctance. All that had been wanted to
bring him to the belief was the scene on the common; such a mere
spark, or an imagined spark! But the presence of the Third was
necessary; otherwise he would have had to suppose himself
personally distasteful.

Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, or they
shoot us higher than the topmost star. But it is as we please. Let
them tell us what we are to them: for us, they are our back and
front of life: the poet's Lesbia, the poet's Beatrice; ours is the
choice. And were it proved that some of the bright things are in
the pay of Darkness, with the stamp of his coin on their palms,
and that some are the very angels we hear sung of, not the less
might we say that they find us out; they have us by our leanings.
They are to us what we hold of best or worst within. By their
state is our civilization judged: and if it is hugely animal
still, that is because primitive men abound and will have their
pasture. Since the lead is ours, the leaders must bow their heads
to the sentence. Jealousy of a woman is the primitive egoism
seeking to refine in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of
an invasion of rights; it is in action the tiger threatened by a
rifle when his paw is rigid on quick flesh; he tears the flesh for
rage at the intruder. The Egoist, who is our original male in
giant form, had no bleeding victim beneath his paw, but there was
the sex to mangle. Much as he prefers the well-behaved among
women, who can worship and fawn, and in whom terror can be
inspired, in his wrath he would make of Beatrice a Lesbia
Quadrantaria.

Let women tell us of their side of the battle. We are not so much
the test of the Egoist in them as they to us. Movements of
similarity shown in crowned and undiademed ladies of intrepid
independence, suggest their occasional capacity to be like men
when it is given to them to hunt. At present they fly, and there
is the difference. Our manner of the chase informs them of the
creature we are.

Dimly as young women are informed, they have a youthful ardour of
detestation that renders them less tolerant of the Egoist than
their perceptive elder sisters. What they do perceive, however,
they have a redoubtable grasp of, and Clara's behaviour would be
indefensible if her detective feminine vision might not sanction
her acting on its direction. Seeing him as she did, she turned
from him and shunned his house as the antre of an ogre. She had
posted her letter to Lucy Darleton. Otherwise. if it had been open
to her to dismiss Colonel De Craye, she might, with a warm kiss to
Vernon's pupil, have seriously thought of the next shrill
steam-whistle across yonder hills for a travelling companion on
the way to her friend Lucy; so abhorrent was to her the putting of
her horse's head toward the Hall. Oh, the breaking of bread there!
It had to be gone through for another day and more; that is to
say, forty hours, it might be six-and-forty hours; and no prospect
of sleep to speed any of them on wings!

Such were Clara's inward interjections while poor Willoughby burned
himself out with verdigris flame having the savour of bad metal,
till the hollow of his breast was not unlike to a corroded old
cuirass, found, we will assume, by criminal lantern-beams in a
digging beside green-mantled pools of the sullen soil, lumped with
a strange adhesive concrete. How else picture the sad man?--the
cavity felt empty to him, and heavy; sick of an ancient and mortal
combat, and burning; deeply dinted too:

With the starry hole
Whence fled the soul:

very sore; important for aught save sluggish agony; a specimen and
the issue of strife.

Measurelessly to loathe was not sufficient to save him from pain:
he tried it: nor to despise; he went to a depth there also. The
fact that she was a healthy young woman returned to the surface
of his thoughts like the murdered body pitched into the river,
which will not drown, and calls upon the elements of dissolution
to float it. His grand hereditary desire to transmit his estates,
wealth and name to a solid posterity, while it prompted him in his
loathing and contempt of a nature mean and ephemeral compared with
his, attached him desperately to her splendid healthiness. The
council of elders, whose descendant he was, pointed to this young
woman for his mate. He had wooed her with the idea that they
consented. O she was healthy! And he likewise: but, as if it had
been a duel between two clearly designated by quality of blood to
bid a House endure, she was the first who taught him what it was
to have sensations of his mortality.

He could not forgive her. It seemed to him consequently politic to
continue frigid and let her have a further taste of his shadow,
when it was his burning wish to strain her in his arms to a
flatness provoking his compassion.

"You have had your ride?" he addressed her politely in the general
assembly on the lawn.

"I have had my ride, yes," Clara replied.

"Agreeable, I trust?"

"Very agreeable."

So it appeared. Oh, blushless!

The next instant he was in conversation with Laetitia, questioning
her upon a dejected droop of her eyelashes.

"I am, I think," said she, "constitutionally melancholy."

He murmured to her: "I believe in the existence of specifics, and
not far to seek, for all our ailments except those we bear at the
hands of others."

She did not dissent.

De Craye, whose humour for being convinced that Willoughby cared
about as little for Miss Middleton as she for him was nourished by
his immediate observation of them, dilated on the beauty of the
ride and his fair companion's equestrian skill.

"You should start a travelling circus," Willoughby rejoined.
"But the idea's a worthy one!--There's another alternative to the
expedition I proposed, Miss Middleton," said De Craye. "And I be
clown? I haven't a scruple of objection. I must read up books
of jokes."

"Don't," said Willoughby.

"I'd spoil my part! But a natural clown won't keep up an
artificial performance for an entire month, you see; which is the
length of time we propose. He'll exhaust his nature in a day and
be bowled over by the dullest regular donkey-engine with paint on
his cheeks and a nodding topknot."

"What is this expedition 'we' propose?"

De Craye was advised in his heart to spare Miss Middleton any
allusion to honeymoons.

"Merely a game to cure dulness."

"Ah!" Willoughby acquiesced. "A month, you said?"

"One'd like it to last for years."

"Ah! You are driving one of Mr. Merriman's witticisms at me,
Horace; I am dense."

Willoughby bowed to Dr. Middleton, and drew him from Vernon,
filially taking his turn to talk with him closely.

De Craye saw Clara's look as her father and Willoughby went aside
thus linked.

It lifted him over anxieties and casuistries concerning loyalty.
Powder was in the look to make a warhorse breathe high and shiver
for the signal.

CHAPTER XXIV

Contains an Instance of the Generosity of Willoughby

Observers of a gathering complication and a character in action
commonly resemble gleaners who are intent only on picking up the
cars of grain and huddling their store. Disinterestedly or
interestedly they wax over-eager for the little trifles, and make
too much of them. Observers should begin upon the precept, that not
all we see is worth hoarding, and that the things we see are to be
weighed in the scale with what we know of the situation, before we
commit ourselves to a measurement. And they may be accurate
observers without being good judges. They do not think so, and
their bent is to glean hurriedly and form conclusions as hasty,
when their business should be sift at each step, and question.

Miss Dale seconded Vernon Whitford in the occupation of counting
looks and tones, and noting scraps of dialogue. She was quite
disinterested; he quite believed that he was; to this degree they
were competent for their post; and neither of them imagined they
could be personally involved in the dubious result of the scenes
they witnessed. They were but anxious observers, diligently
collecting. She fancied Clara susceptible to his advice: he had
fancied it, and was considering it one of his vanities. Each
mentally compared Clara's abruptness in taking them into her
confidence with her abstention from any secret word since the
arrival of Colonel De Craye. Sir Willoughby requested Laetitia to
give Miss Middleton as much of her company as she could; showing
that he was on the alert. Another Constantia Durham seemed beating
her wings for flight. The suddenness of the evident intimacy
between Clara and Colonel De Craye shocked Laetitia; their
acquaintance could be computed by hours. Yet at their first
interview she had suspected the possibility of worse than she now
supposed to be; and she had begged Vernon not immediately to quit
the Hall, in consequence of that faint suspicion. She had been led
to it by meeting Clara and De Craye at her cottage-gate, and
finding them as fluent and laughter-breathing in conversation as
friends. Unable to realize the rapid advance to a familiarity,
more ostensible than actual, of two lively natures, after such an
introduction as they had undergone: and one of the two pining in a
drought of liveliness: Laetitia listened to their wager of nothing
at all--a no against a yes--in the case of poor Flitch; and
Clara's, "Willoughby will not forgive"; and De Craye's "Oh, he's
human": and the silence of Clara and De Craye's hearty cry,
"Flitch shall be a genteman's coachman in his old seat or I
haven't a tongue!" to which there was a negative of Clara's head:
and it then struck Laetitia that this young betrothed lady, whose
alienated heart acknowledged no lord an hour earlier, had met her
match, and, as the observer would have said, her destiny. She
judged of the alarming possibility by the recent revelation to
herself of Miss Middleton's character, and by Clara's having
spoken to a man as well (to Vernon), and previously. That a young
lady should speak on the subject of the inner holies to a man,
though he were Vernon Whitford, was incredible to Laetitia; but it
had to be accepted as one of the dread facts of our inexplicable
life, which drag our bodies at their wheels and leave our minds
exclaiming. Then, if Clara could speak to Vernon, which Laetitia
would not have done for a mighty bribe, she could speak to De
Craye, Laetitia thought deductively: this being the logic of
untrained heads opposed to the proceeding whereby their
condemnatory deduction hangs.--Clara must have spoken to De Craye!