The Egoist

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Laetitia remembered how winning and prevailing Miss Middleton
could be in her confidences. A gentleman hearing her might forget
his duty to his friend, she thought, for she had been strangely
swayed by Clara: ideas of Sir Willoughby that she had never before
imagined herself to entertain had been sown in her, she thought;
not asking herself whether the searchingness of the young lady had
struck them and bidden them rise from where they lay imbedded.
Very gentle women take in that manner impressions of persons,
especially of the worshipped person, wounding them; like the new
fortifications with embankments of soft earth, where explosive
missiles bury themselves harmlessly until they are plucked out;
and it may be a reason why those injured ladies outlive a Clara
Middleton similarly battered.

Vernon less than Laetitia took into account that Clara was in a
state of fever, scarcely reasonable. Her confidences to him he had
excused, as a piece of conduct, in sympathy with her position. He
had not been greatly astonished by the circumstances confided;
and, on the whole, as she was excited and unhappy, he excused her
thoroughly; he could have extolled her: it was natural that she
should come to him, brave in her to speak so frankly, a compliment
that she should condescend to treat him as a friend. Her position
excused her widely. But she was not excused for making a
confidential friend of De Craye. There was a difference.

Well, the difference was, that De Craye had not the smarting sense
of honour with women which our meditator had: an impartial
judiciary, it will be seen: and he discriminated between himself
and the other justly: but sensation surging to his brain at the
same instant, he reproached Miss Middleton for not perceiving that
difference as clearly, before she betrayed her position to De
Craye, which Vernon assumed that she had done. Of course he did.
She had been guilty of it once: why, then, in the mind of an
offended friend, she would be guilty of it twice. There was
evidence. Ladies, fatally predestined to appeal to that from which
they have to be guarded, must expect severity when they run off
their railed highroad: justice is out of the question: man's
brains might, his blood cannot administer it to them. By chilling
him to the bone they may get what they cry for. But that is a
method deadening to their point of appeal.

I the evening, Miss Middleton and the colonel sang a duet. She
had of late declined to sing. Her voice was noticeably firm. Sir
Willoughby said to her, "You have recovered your richness of tone,
Clara." She smiled and appeared happy in pleasing him. He named a
French ballad. She went to the music-rack and gave the song
unasked. He should have been satisfied, for she said to him at the
finish, "Is that as you like it?" He broke from a murmur to Miss
Dale, "Admirable." Some one mentioned a Tuscan popular canzone.
She waited for Willoughby's approval, and took his nod for a
mandate.

Traitress! he could have bellowed.

He had read of this characteristic of caressing obedience of the
women about to deceive. He had in his time profited by it.

"Is it intuitively or by their experience that our neighbours
across Channel surpass us in the knowledge of your sex?" he said
to Miss Dale, and talked through Clara's apostrophe to the
'Santissinia Virgine Maria,' still treating temper as a part
of policy, without any effect on Clara; and that was matter for
sickly green reflections. The lover who cannot wound has indeed
lost anchorage; he is woefully adrift: he stabs air, which is to
stab himself. Her complacent proof-armour bids him know himself
supplanted.

During the short conversational period before the ladies retired
for the night, Miss Eleanor alluded to the wedding by chance.
Miss Isabel replied to her, and addressed an interrogation to
Clara. De Craye foiled it adroitly. Clara did not utter a
syllable. Her bosom lifted to a wavering height and sank.
Subsequently she looked at De Craye vacantly, like a person
awakened, but she looked. She was astonished by his readiness, and
thankful for the succour. Her look was cold, wide, unfixed, with
nothing of gratitude or of personal in it. The look, however,
stood too long for Willoughby's endurance.

Ejaculating "Porcelain!" he uncrossed his legs; a signal for the
ladies Eleanor and Isabel to retire. Vernon bowed to Clara as she
was rising. He had not been once in her eyes, and he expected a
partial recognition at the good-night. She said it, turning her
head to Miss Isabel, who was condoling once more with Colonel De
Craye over the ruins of his wedding-present, the porcelain vase,
which she supposed to have been in Willoughby's mind when he
displayed the signal. Vernon walked off to his room, dark as one
smitten blind: bile tumet jecur: her stroke of neglect hit him
there where a blow sends thick obscuration upon eyeballs and brain
alike.

Clara saw that she was paining him and regretted it when they were
separated. That was her real friend! But he prescribed too hard a
task. Besides, she had done everything he demanded of her, except
the consenting to stay where she was and wear out Willoughby,
whose dexterity wearied her small stock of patience. She had
vainly tried remonstrance and supplication with her father
hoodwinked by his host, she refused to consider how; through wine?
--the thought was repulsive.

Nevertheless, she was drawn to the edge of it by the contemplation
of her scheme of release. If Lucy Darleton was at home; if Lucy
invited her to come: if she flew to Lucy: oh! then her father
would have cause for anger. He would not remember that but for
hateful wine! ...

What was there in this wine of great age which expelled
reasonableness, fatherliness? He was her dear father: she was his
beloved child: yet something divided them; something closed her
father's ears to her: and could it be that incomprehensible
seduction of the wine? Her dutifulness cried violently no. She
bowed, stupefied, to his arguments for remaining awhile, and rose
clear-headed and rebellious with the reminiscence of the many
strong reasons she had urged against them.

The strangeness of men, young and old, the little things (she
regarded a grand wine as a little thing) twisting and changing
them, amazed her. And these are they by whom women are abused for
variability! Only the most imperious reasons, never mean trifles,
move women, thought she. Would women do an injury to one they
loved for oceans of that--ah, pah!

And women must respect men. They necessarily respect a father. "My
dear, dear father!" Clara said in the solitude of her chamber,
musing on all his goodness, and she endeavoured to reconcile the
desperate sentiments of the position he forced her to sustain,
with those of a venerating daughter. The blow which was to fall on
him beat on her heavily in advance. "I have not one excuse!" she
said, glancing at numbers and a mighty one. But the idea of her
father suffering at her hands cast her down lower than
self-justification. She sought to imagine herself sparing him. It
was too fictitious.

The sanctuary of her chamber, the pure white room so homely to her
maidenly feelings, whispered peace, only to follow the whisper
with another that went through her swelling to a roar, and leaving
her as a suing of music unkindly smitten. If she stayed in this
house her chamber would no longer be a sanctuary. Dolorous
bondage! Insolent death is not worse. Death's worm we cannot keep
away, but when he has us we are numb to dishonour, happily
senseless.

Youth weighed her eyelids to sleep, though she was quivering, and
quivering she awoke to the sound of her name beneath her window.
"I can love still, for I love him," she said, as she luxuriated in
young Crossjay's boy's voice, again envying him his bath in the
lake waters, which seemed to her to have the power to wash away
grief and chains. Then it was that she resolved to let Crossjay
see the last of her in this place. He should be made gleeful by
doing her a piece of service; he should escort her on her walk to
the railway station next morning, thence be sent flying for a long
day's truancy, with a little note of apology on his behalf that
she would write for him to deliver to Vernon at night.

Crossjay came running to her after his breakfast with Mrs
Montague, the housekeeper, to tell her he had called her up.

"You won't to-morrow: I shall be up far ahead of you," said she;
and musing on her father, while Crossjay vowed to be up the first,
she thought it her duty to plunge into another expostulation.

Willoughby had need of Vernon on private affairs. Dr. Middleton
betook himself as usual to the library, after answering "I will
ruin you yet," to Willoughby's liberal offer to despatch an order
to London for any books he might want.

His fine unruffled air, as of a mountain in still morning beams,
made Clara not indisposed to a preliminary scene with Willoughby
that might save her from distressing him, but she could not stop
Willoughby; as little could she look an invitation. He stood in
the Hall, holding Vernon by the arm. She passed him; he did not
speak, and she entered the library.

"What now, my dear? what is it?" said Dr. Middleton, seeing that
the door was shut on them.

"Nothing, papa," she replied, calmly.

"You've not locked the door, my child? You turned something there:
try the handle."

"I assure you, papa, the door is not locked."

"Mr. Whitford will be here instantly. We are engaged on tough
matter. Women have not, and opinion is universal that they never
will have, a conception of the value of time."

"We are vain and shallow, my dear papa."

"No, no, not you, Clara. But I suspect you to require to learn by
having work in progress how important is ... is a quiet
commencement of the day's task. There is not a scholar who will
not tell you so. We must have a retreat. These invasions!--So you
intend to have another ride to-day? They do you good. To-morrow we
dine with Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, an estimable person indeed,
though I do not perfectly understand our accepting.--You have not
to accuse me of sitting over wine last night, my Clara! I never do
it, unless I am appealed to for my judgement upon a wine."

"I have come to entreat you to take me away, papa."

In the midst of the storm aroused by this renewal of perplexity,
Dr Middleton replaced a book his elbow had knocked over in his
haste to dash the hair off his forehead, crying: "Whither? To what
spot? That reading of guide-books, and idle people's notes of
Travel, and picturesque correspondence in the newspapers,
unsettles man and maid. My objection to the living in hotels is
known. I do not hesitate to say that I do cordially abhor it. I
have had penitentially to submit to it in your dear mother's time,
[Greek], up to the full ten thousand times. But will you not
comprehend that to the older man his miseries are multiplied by
his years? But is it utterly useless to solicit your sympathy with
an old man, Clara?"

"General Darleton will take us in, papa."

"His table is detestable. I say nothing of that; but his wine is
poison. Let that pass--I should rather say, let it not pass!--
but our political views are not in accord. True, we are not under
the obligation to propound them in presence, but we are destitute
of an opinion in common. We have no discourse. Military men have
produced, or diverged in, noteworthy epicures; they are often
devout; they have blossomed in lettered men: they are gentlemen;
the country rightly holds them in honour; but, in fine, I reject
the proposal to go to General Darleton.--Tears?"

"No, papa."

"I do hope not. Here we have everything man can desire; without
contest, an excellent host. You have your transitory tea-cup
tempests, which you magnify to hurricanes, in the approved
historic manner of the book of Cupid. And all the better; I
repeat, it is the better that you should have them over in the
infancy of the alliance. Come in!" Dr. Middleton shouted cheerily
in response to a knock at the door.

He feared the door was locked: he had a fear that his daughter
intended to keep it locked.

"Clara!" he cried.

She reluctantly turned the handle, and the ladies Eleanor and
Isabel came in, apologizing with as much coherence as Dr.
Middleton ever expected from their sex. They wished to speak to
Clara, but they declined to take her away. In vain the Rev.
Doctor assured them she was at their service; they protested that
they had very few words to say, and would not intrude one moment
further than to speak them.

Like a shy deputation of young scholars before the master, these
very words to come were preceded by none at all; a dismal and
trying cause; refreshing however to Dr. Middleton, who joyfully
anticipated that the ladies could be induced to take away Clara
when they had finished.

"We may appear to you a little formal," Miss Isabel began, and
turned to her sister.

"We have no intention to lay undue weight on our mission, if
mission it can be called," said Miss Eleanor.

"Is it entrusted to you by Willoughby?" said Clara.

"Dear child, that you may know it all the more earnest with us,
and our personal desire to contribute to your happiness:
therefore does Willoughby entrust the speaking of it to us."

Hereupon the sisters alternated in addressing Clara, and she gazed
from one to the other, piecing fragments of empty signification
to get the full meaning when she might.

"--And in saying your happiness, dear Clara, we have our
Willoughby's in view, which is dependent on yours."

"--And we never could sanction that our own inclinations should
stand in the way."

"--No. We love the old place; and if it were only our punishment
for loving it too idolatrously, we should deem it ground enough
for our departure."

"--Without, really, an idea of unkindness; none, not any."

"--Young wives naturally prefer to be undisputed queens of their
own establishment."

"--Youth and age!"

"But I," said Clara, "have never mentioned, never had a
thought. . ."

"--You have, dear child, a lover who in his solicitude for your
happiness both sees what you desire and what is due to you."

"--And for us, Clara, to recognize what is due to you is to act on
it."

"--Besides, dear, a sea-side cottage has always been one of our
dreams."

"--We have not to learn that we are a couple of old maids,
incongruous associates for a young wife in the government of a
great house."

"--With our antiquated notions, questions of domestic management
might arise, and with the best will in the world to be
harmonious!"

"--So, dear Clara, consider it settled."

"--From time to time gladly shall we be your guests."

"--Your guests, dear, not censorious critics."

"And you think me such an Egoist!--dear ladies! The suggestion
of so cruel a piece of selfishness wounds me. I would not have had
you leave the Hall. I like your society; I respect you. My
complaint, if I had one, would be, that you do not sufficiently
assert yourselves. I could have wished you to be here for an
example to me. I would not have allowed you to go. What can he
think of me! Did Willoughby speak of it this morning?"

It was hard to distinguish which was the completer dupe of these
two echoes of one another in worship of a family idol.

"Willoughby," Miss Eleanor presented herself to be stamped with
the title hanging ready for the first that should open her lips,
"our Willoughby is observant--he is ever generous--and he is not
less forethoughtful. His arrangement is for our good on all
sides."

"An index is enough," said Miss Isabel, appearing in her turn the
monster dupe.

"You will not have to leave, dear ladies. Were I mistress here I
should oppose it."

"Willoughby blames himself for not reassuring you before."

"Indeed we blame ourselves for not undertaking to go."

"Did he speak of it first this morning?" said Clara; but she could
draw no reply to that from them. They resumed the duet, and she
resigned herself to have her cars boxed with nonsense.

"So, it is understood?" said Miss Eleanor.

"I see your kindness, ladies."

"And I am to be Aunt Eleanor again?"

"And I Aunt Isabel?"

Clara could have wrung her hands at the impediment which
prohibited her delicacy from telling them why she could not name
them so as she had done in the earlier days of Willoughby's
courtship. She kissed them warmly, ashamed of kissing, though the
warmth was real.

They retired with a flow of excuses to Dr. Middleton for
disturbing him. He stood at the door to bow them out, and holding
the door for Clara, to wind up the procession, discovered her at a
far corner of the room.

He was debating upon the advisability of leaving her there, when
Vernon Whitford crossed the hall from the laboratory door, a
mirror of himself in his companion air of discomposure.

That was not important, so long as Vernon was a check on Clara;
but the moment Clara, thus baffled, moved to quit the library, Dr.
Middleton felt the horror of having an uncomfortable face
opposite.

"No botheration, I hope? It's the worst thing possible to work on.
Where have you been? I suspect your weak point is not to arm
yourself in triple brass against bother and worry, and no good
work can you do unless you do. You have come out of that
laboratory."

"I have, sir.--Can I get you any book?" Vernon said to Clara.

She thanked him, promising to depart immediately.

"Now you are at the section of Italian literature, my love," said
Dr Middleton. "Well, Mr. Whitford, the laboratory--ah!--where
the amount of labour done within the space of a year would not
stretch an electric current between this Hall and the railway
station: say, four miles, which I presume the distance to be.
Well, sir, and a dilettantism costly in time and machinery is as
ornamental as foxes' tails and deers' horns to an independent
gentleman whose fellows are contented with the latter decorations
for their civic wreath. Willoughby, let me remark, has recently
shown himself most considerate for my girl. As far as I could
gather--I have been listening to a dialogue of ladies--he is as
generous as he is discreet. There are certain combats in which to
be the one to succumb is to claim the honours;--and that is what
women will not learn. I doubt their seeing the glory of it."

"I have heard of it; I have been with Willoughby," Vernon said,
hastily, to shield Clara from her father's allusive attacks. He
wished to convey to her that his interview with Willoughby had not
been profitable in her interests, and that she had better at once,
having him present to support her, pour out her whole heart to her
father. But how was it to be conveyed? She would not meet his
eyes, and he was too poor an intriguer to be ready on the instant
to deal out the verbal obscurities which are transparencies to
one.

"I shall regret it, if Willoughby has annoyed you, for he stands
high in my favour," said Dr. Middleton.

Clara dropped a book. Her father started higher than the nervous
impulse warranted in his chair. Vernon tried to win a glance, and
she was conscious of his effort, but her angry and guilty
feelings, prompting her resolution to follow her own counsel, kept
her eyelids on the defensive.

"I don't say he annoys me, sir. I am here to give him my advice,
and if he does not accept it I have no right to be annoyed.
Willoughby seems annoyed that Colonel De Craye should talk of
going to-morrow or next day."

"He likes his friends about him. Upon my word, a man of a more
genial heart you might march a day without finding. But you have
it on the forehead, Mr. Whitford."

"Oh! no, sir."

"There," Dr. Middleton drew his finger along his brows.

Vernon felt along his own, and coined an excuse for their
blackness; not aware that the direction of his mind toward Clara
pushed him to a kind of clumsy double meaning, while he satisfied
an inward and craving wrath, as he said: "By the way, I have been
racking my head; I must apply to you, sir. I have a line, and I am
uncertain of the run of the line. Will this pass, do you think?

'In Asination's tongue he asinates';

signifying that he excels any man of us at donkey-dialect."

After a decent interval for the genius of criticism to seem to
have been sitting under his frown, Dr. Middleton rejoined with
sober jocularity: "No, sir, it will not pass; and your uncertainty
in regard to the run of the line would only be extended were the
line centipedal. Our recommendation is, that you erase it before
the arrival of the ferule. This might do:

'In Assignation's name he assignats';

signifying that he pre-eminently flourishes hypothetical promises,
to pay by appointment. That might pass. But you will forbear to
cite me for your authority."

"The line would be acceptable if I could get it to apply," said
Vernon.

"Or this . . ." Dr. Middleton was offering a second suggestion, but
Clara fled, astonished at men as she never yet had been. Why, in a
burning world they would be exercising their minds in absurdities!
And those two were scholars, learned men! And both knew they were
in the presence of a soul in a tragic fever!

A minute after she had closed the door they were deep in their
work. Dr. Middleton forgot his alternative line.

"Nothing serious?" he said in reproof of the want of honourable
clearness on Vernon's brows.

"I trust not, sir; it's a case for common sense."

"And you call that not serious?"

"I take Hermann's praise of the versus dochmiachus to be not only
serious but unexaggerated," said Vernon.

Dr. Middleton assented and entered on the voiceful ground of Greek
metres, shoving your dry dusty world from his elbow.

CHAPTER XXV

The Flight in Wild Weather

The morning of Lucy Darleton's letter of reply to her friend Clara
was fair before sunrise, with luminous colours that are an omen to
the husbandman. Clara had no weather-eye for the rich Eastern
crimson, nor a quiet space within her for the beauty. She looked
on it as her gate of promise, and it set her throbbing with a
revived belief in radiant things which she had once dreamed of to
surround her life, but her accelerated pulses narrowed her
thoughts upon the machinery of her project. She herself was metal,
pointing all to her one aim when in motion. Nothing came amiss to
it, everything was fuel; fibs, evasions, the serene battalions of
white lies parallel on the march with dainty rogue falsehoods. She
had delivered herself of many yesterday in her engagements for
to-day. Pressure was put on her to engage herself, and she did so
liberally, throwing the burden of deceitfulness on the extraordinary
pressure. "I want the early part of the morning; the rest of the
day I shall be at liberty." She said it to Willoughby, Miss Dale,
Colonel De Craye, and only the third time was she aware of the
delicious double meaning. Hence she associated it with the
colonel.

Your loudest outcry against the wretch who breaks your rules is in
asking how a tolerably conscientious person could have done this
and the other besides the main offence, which you vow you could
overlook but for the minor objections pertaining to conscience,
the incomprehensible and abominable lies, for example, or the
brazen coolness of the lying. Yet you know that we live in an
undisciplined world, where in our seasons of activity we are
servants of our design, and that this comes of our passions, and
those of our position. Our design shapes us for the work in hand,
the passions man the ship, the position is their apology: and now
should conscience be a passenger on board, a merely seeming
swiftness of our vessel will keep him dumb as the unwilling guest
of a pirate captain scudding from the cruiser half in cloven brine
through rocks and shoals to save his black flag. Beware the false
position.

That is easy to say: sometimes the tangle descends on us like a
net of blight on a rose-bush. There is then an instant choice for
us between courage to cut loose, and desperation if we do not. But
not many men are trained to courage; young women are trained to
cowardice. For them to front an evil with plain speech is to be
guilty of effrontery and forfeit the waxen polish of purity, and
therewith their commanding place in the market. They are trained
to please man's taste, for which purpose they soon learn to live
out of themselves, and look on themselves as he looks, almost as
little disturbed as he by the undiscovered. Without courage,
conscience is a sorry guest; and if all goes well with the pirate
captain, conscience will be made to walk the plank for being of no
service to either party.

Clara's fibs and evasions disturbed her not in the least that
morning. She had chosen desperation, and she thought herself very
brave because she was just brave enough to fly from her
abhorrence. She was light-hearted, or, more truly,
drunken-hearted. Her quick nature realized the out of prison as
vividly and suddenly as it had sunk suddenly and leadenly under
the sense of imprisonment. Vernon crossed her mind: that was a
friend! Yes, and there was a guide; but he would disapprove, and
even he, thwarting her way to sacred liberty, must be thrust
aside.