The Egoist

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"Mr. Whitford, I bear no comparison with you."

"I do and must set you for my example, Miss Dale."

"Indeed, you do wrongly; you do not know me."

"I could say that. For years ...

"Pray, Mr. Whitford!"

"Well, I have admired it. You show us how self can be smothered."

"An echo would be a retort on you!"

"On me? I am never thinking of anything else."

"I could say that."

"You are necessarily conscious of not swerving."

"But I do; I waver dreadfully; I am not the same two days
running."

"You are the same, with 'ravishing divisions' upon the same.

"And you without the 'divisions.' I draw such support as I have
from you."

"From some simulacrum of me, then. And that will show you how
little you require support."

"I do not speak my own opinion only."

"Whose?"

"I am not alone."

"Again let me say, I wish I were like you!"

"Then let me add, I would willingly make the exchange!"

"You would be amazed at your bargain."

"Others would be!"

"Your exchange would give me the qualities I'm in want of, Miss
Dale."

"Negative, passive, at the best, Mr. Whitford. But I should have .
. ."

"Oh!--pardon me. But you inflict the sensations of a boy, with a
dose of honesty in him, called up to receive a prize he has won by
the dexterous use of a crib."

"And how do you suppose she feels who has a crown of Queen o" the
May forced on her head when she is verging on November?"

He rejected her analogy, and she his. They could neither of them
bring to light the circumstances which made one another's
admiration so unbearable. The more he exalted her for constancy,
the more did her mind become bent upon critically examining the
object of that imagined virtue; and the more she praised him for
possessing the spirit of perfect friendliness, the fiercer grew
the passion in him which disdained the imputation, hissing like a
heated iron-bar that flings the waterdrops to steam. He would none
of it; would rather have stood exposed in his profound
foolishness.

Amiable though they were, and mutually affectionate, they came to
a stop in their walk, longing to separate, and not seeing how it
was to be done, they had so knit themselves together with the
pelting of their interlaudation.

"I think it is time for me to run home to my father for an hour,"
said Laetitia.

"I ought to be working," said Vernon.

Good progress was made to the disgarlanding of themselves thus
far; yet, an acutely civilized pair, the abruptness of the
transition from floweriness to commonplace affected them both,
Laetitia chiefly, as she had broken the pause, and she remarked:--
"I am really Constancy in my opinions."

"Another title is customary where stiff opinions are concerned.
Perhaps by and by you will learn your mistake, and then you will
acknowledge the name for it."

"How?" said she. "What shall I learn?"

"If you learn that I am a grisly Egoist?"

"You? And it would not be egoism," added Laetitia, revealing to
him at the same instant as to herself that she swung suspended on
a scarce credible guess.

"--Will nothing pierce your ears, Mr. Whitford?"

He heard the intruding voice, but he was bent on rubbing out the
cloudy letters Laetitia had begun to spell, and he stammered,
in a tone of matter-of-fact: "Just that and no better"; then
turned to Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson.

"--Or are you resolved you will never see Professor Crooklyn when
you look on him?" said the great lady.

Vernon bowed to the Professor and apologized to him shufflingly
and rapidly, incoherently, and with a red face; which induced Mrs.
Mountstuart to scan Laetitia's.

After lecturing Vernon for his abandonment of her yesterday
evening, and flouting his protestations, she returned to the
business of the day. "We walked from the lodge-gates to see the
park and prepare ourselves for Dr. Middleton. We parted last night
in the middle of a controversy and are rageing to resume it. Where
is our redoubtable antagonist?"

Mrs. Mountstuart wheeled Professor Crooklyn round to accompany
Vernon.

"We," she said, "are for modern English scholarship, opposed to
the champion of German."

"The contrary," observed Professor Crooklyn.

"Oh! We," she corrected the error serenely, "are for German
scholarship opposed to English."

"Certain editions."

"We defend certain editions."

"Defend is a term of imperfect application to my position, ma'am."

"My dear Professor, you have in Dr. Middleton a match for you in
conscientious pugnacity, and you will not waste it upon me. There,
there they are; there he is. Mr. Whitford will conduct you. I
stand away from the first shock."

Mrs. Mountstuart fell back to Laetitia, saying: "He pores over a
little inexactitude in phrases, and pecks at it like a domestic
fowl."

Professor Crooklyn's attitude and air were so well described that
Laetitia could have laughed.

"These mighty scholars have their flavour," the great lady
hastened to add, lest her younger companion should be misled to
suppose that they were not valuable to a governing hostess: "their
shadow-fights are ridiculous, but they have their flavour at a
table. Last night, no: I discard all mention of last night. We
failed: as none else in this neighbourhood could fail, but we
failed. If we have among us a cormorant devouring young lady who
drinks up all the--ha!--brandy and water--of our inns and
occupies all our flys, why, our condition is abnormal, and we must
expect to fail: we are deprived of accommodation for accidental
circumstances. How Mr. Whitford could have missed seeing
Professor Crooklyn! And what was he doing at the station, Miss
Dale?"

"Your portrait of Professor Crooklyn was too striking, Mrs
Mountstuart, and deceived him by its excellence. He appears to
have seen only the blank side of the slate."

"Ah! He is a faithful friend of his cousin, do you not think?"

"He is the truest of friends."

"As for Dr. Middleton," Mrs. Mountstuart diverged from her
inquiry, "he will swell the letters of my vocabulary to gigantic
proportions if I see much of him: he is contagious."

"I believe it is a form of his humour."

"I caught it of him yesterday at my dinner-table in my distress,
and must pass it off as a form of mine, while it lasts. I talked
Dr. Middleton half the dreary night through to my pillow. Your
candid opinion, my dear, come! As for me, I don't hesitate. We
seemed to have sat down to a solitary performance on the
bass-viol. We were positively an assembly of insects during
thunder. My very soul thanked Colonel De Craye for his diversions,
but I heard nothing but Dr. Middleton. It struck me that my table
was petrified, and every one sat listening to bowls played
overhead."

"I was amused."

"Really? You delight me. Who knows but that my guests were sincere
in their congratulations on a thoroughly successful evening? I
have fallen to this, you see! And I know, wretched people! that as
often as not it is their way of condoling with one. I do it
myself: but only where there have been amiable efforts. But
imagine my being congratulated for that!--Good-morning, Sir
Willoughby.--The worst offender! and I am in no pleasant mood
with him," Mrs. Mountstuart said aside to Laetitia, who drew back,
retiring.

Sir Willoughby came on a step or two. He stopped to watch
Laetitia's figure swimming to the house.

So, as, for instance, beside a stream, when a flower on the
surface extends its petals drowning to subside in the clear still
water, we exercise our privilege to be absent in the charmed
contemplation of a beautiful natural incident.

A smile of pleased abstraction melted on his features.

CHAPTER XXXIV

Mrs. Mountstuart and Sir Willoughby

"Good morning, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart," Sir Willoughby wakened
himself to address the great lady. "Why has she fled?"

"Has any one fled?"

"Laetitia Dale."

"Letty Dale? Oh, if you call that flying. Possibly to renew a
close conversation with Vernon Whitford, that I cut short. You
frightened me with your 'Shepherds-tell-me' air and tone. Lead me
to one of your garden-seats: out of hearing to Dr. Middleton, I
beg. He mesmerizes me, he makes me talk Latin. I was curiously
susceptible last night. I know I shall everlastingly associate him
with an abortive entertainment and solos on big instruments. We
were flat."

"Horace was in good vein."

"You were not."

"And Laetitia--Miss Dale talked well, I thought."

"She talked with you, and no doubt she talked well. We did not
mix. The yeast was bad. You shot darts at Colonel De Craye: you
tried to sting. You brought Dr. Middleton down on you. Dear me,
that man is a reverberation in my head. Where is your lady and
love?"

"Who?"

"Am I to name her?"

"Clara? I have not seen her for the last hour. Wandering, I
suppose.

"A very pretty summer bower," said Mrs. Mountstuart, seating
herself "Well, my dear Sir Willoughby, preferences, preferences
are not to be accounted for, and one never knows whether to pity
or congratulate, whatever may occur. I want to see Miss
Middleton."

"Your 'dainty rogue in porcelain' will be at your beck--you lunch
with us?--before you leave."

"So now you have taken to quoting me, have you?"

"But 'a romantic tale on her eyelashes' is hardly descriptive any
longer."

"Descriptive of whom? Now you are upon Laetitia Dale!"

"I quote you generally. She has now a graver look."

"And well may have!"

"Not that the romance has entirely disappeared."

"No; it looks as if it were in print."

"You have hit it perfectly, as usual, ma'am."

Sir Willoughby mused.

Like one resuming his instrument to take up the melody in a
concerted piece, he said: "I thought Laetitia Dale had a
singularly animated air last night."

"Why!--" Mrs. Mountstuart mildly gaped.

"I want a new description of her. You know, I collect your mottoes
and sentences."

"It seems to me she is coming three parts out of her shell, and
wearing it as a hood for convenience."

"Ready to issue forth at an invitation? Admirable! exact!"

"Ay, my good Sir Willoughby, but are we so very admirable and
exact? Are we never to know our own minds?"

He produced a polysyllabic sigh, like those many-jointed compounds
of poets in happy languages, which are copious in a single
expression: "Mine is known to me. It always has been. Cleverness
in women is not uncommon. Intellect is the pearl. A woman of
intellect is as good as a Greek statue; she is divinely wrought,
and she is divinely rare."

"Proceed," said the lady, confiding a cough to the air.

"The rarity of it: and it is not mere intellect, it is a
sympathetic intellect; or else it is an intellect in perfect
accord with an intensely sympathetic disposition;--the rarity of
it makes it too precious to be parted with when once we have met
it. I prize it the more the older I grow."

"Are we on the feminine or the neuter?"

"I beg pardon?"

"The universal or the individual?"

He shrugged. "For the rest, psychological affinities may exist
coincident with and entirely independent of material or moral
prepossessions, relations, engagements, ties."

"Well, that is not the raving of passion, certainly," said Mrs
Mountstuart, "and it sounds as if it were a comfortable doctrine
for men. On that plea, you might all of you be having Aspasia and
a wife. We saw your fair Middleton and Colonel de Craye at a
distance as we entered the park. Professor Crooklyn is under some
hallucination."

"What more likely?"

The readiness and the double-bearing of the reply struck her
comic sense with awe.

"The Professor must hear that. He insists on the fly, and the inn,
and the wet boots, and the warming mixture, and the testimony of
the landlady and the railway porter."

"I say, what more likely?"

"Than that he should insist?"

"If he is under the hallucination!"

"He may convince others."

"I have only to repeat. . ."

"'What more likely?' It's extremely philosophical. Coincident
with a pursuit of the psychological affinities."

"Professor Crooklyn will hardly descend, I suppose, from his
classical altitudes to lay his hallucinations before Dr.
Middleton?"

"Sir Willoughby, you are the pink of chivalry!"

By harping on Laetitia, he had emboldened Mrs. Mountstuart to lift
the curtain upon Clara. It was offensive to him, but the injury
done to his pride had to be endured for the sake of his general
plan of self-protection.

"Simply desirous to save my guests from annoyance of any kind", he
said. "Dr Middleton can look 'Olympus and thunder', as Vernon
calls it."

"Don't. I see him. That look! It is Dictionary-bitten! Angry,
homed Dictionary!--an apparition of Dictionary in the night--to
a dunce!"

"One would undergo a good deal to avoid the sight."

"What the man must be in a storm! Speak as you please of yourself:
you are a true and chivalrous knight to dread it for her. But now,
candidly, how is it you cannot condescend to a little management?
Listen to an old friend. You are too lordly. No lover can afford
to be incomprehensible for half an hour. Stoop a little.
Sermonizings are not to be thought of. You can govern unseen. You
are to know that I am one who disbelieves in philosophy in love. I
admire the look of it, I give no credit to the assumption. I
rather like lovers to be out at times: it makes them picturesque,
and it enlivens their monotony. I perceived she had a spot of
wildness. It's proper that she should wear it off before
marriage."

"Clara? The wildness of an infant!" said Willoughby, paternally,
musing over an inward shiver. "You saw her at a distance just now,
or you might have heard her laughing. Horace diverts her
excessively."

"I owe him my eternal gratitude for his behaviour last night. She
was one of my bright faces. Her laughter was delicious; rain in
the desert! It will tell you what the load on me was, when I
assure you those two were merely a spectacle to me--points I
scored in a lost game. And I know they were witty."

"They both have wit; a kind of wit," Willoughby assented.

"They struck together like a pair of cymbals."

"Not the highest description of instrument. However, they amuse
me. I like to hear them when I am in the vein."

"That vein should be more at command with you, my friend. You can
be perfect, if you like."

"Under your tuition."

Willoughby leaned to her, bowing languidly. He was easier in his
pain for having hoodwinked the lady. She was the outer world to
him; she could tune the world's voice; prescribe which of the two
was to be pitied, himself or Clara; and he did not intend it to be
himself, if it came to the worst. They were far away from that at
present, and he continued:

"Probably a man's power of putting on a face is not equal to a
girl's. I detest petty dissensions. Probably I show it when all is
not quite smooth. Little fits of suspicion vex me. It is a
weakness, not to play them off, I know. Men have to learn the arts
which come to women by nature. I don't sympathize with suspicion,
from having none myself,"

His eyebrows shot up. That ill-omened man Flitch had sidled round
by the bushes to within a few feet of him. Flitch primarily
defended himself against the accusation of drunkenness, which was
hurled at him to account for his audacity in trespassing against
the interdict; but he admitted that he had taken "something short"
for a fortification in visiting scenes where he had once been
happy--at Christmastide, when all the servants, and the butler at
head, grey old Mr. Chessington, sat in rows, toasting the young
heir of the old Hall in the old port wine! Happy had he been then,
before ambition for a shop, to be his own master and an
independent gentleman, had led him into his quagmire:--to look
back envying a dog on the old estate, and sigh for the smell of
Patterne stables: sweeter than Arabia, his drooping nose appeared
to say.

He held up close against it something that imposed silence on Sir
Willoughby as effectively as a cunning exordium in oratory will
enchain mobs to swallow what is not complimenting them; and this
he displayed secure in its being his licence to drivel his
abominable pathos. Sir Willoughby recognized Clara's purse. He
understood at once how the must have come by it: he was not so
quick in devising a means of stopping the tale. Flitch foiled him.
"Intact," he replied to the question: "What have you there?" He
repeated this grand word. And then he turned to Mrs. Mountstuart
to speak of Paradise and Adam, in whom he saw the prototype of
himself: also the Hebrew people in the bondage of Egypt,
discoursed of by the clergymen, not without a likeness to him.

"Sorrows have done me one good, to send me attentive to church, my
lady," said Flitch, "when I might have gone to London, the
coachman's home, and been driving some honourable family, with no
great advantage to my morals, according to what I hear of. And a
purse found under the seat of a fly in London would have a poor
chance of returning intact to the young lady losing it."

"Put it down on that chair; inquiries will be made, and you will
see Sir Willoughby," said Mrs. Mountstuart. "Intact, no doubt; it
is not disputed."

With one motion of a finger she set the man rounding.

Flitch halted; he was very regretful of the termination of his
feast of pathos, and he wished to relate the finding of the purse,
but he could not encounter Mrs. Mountstuart's look; he slouched
away in very close resemblance to the ejected Adam of illustrated
books.

"It's my belief that naturalness among the common people has died
out of the kingdom," she said.

Willoughby charitably apologized for him. "He has been fuddling
himself."

Her vigilant considerateness had dealt the sensitive gentleman a
shock, plainly telling him she had her ideas of his actual
posture. Nor was he unhurt by her superior acuteness and her
display of authority on his grounds.

He said, boldly, as he weighed the purse, half tossing it: "It's
not unlike Clara's."

He feared that his lips and cheeks were twitching, and as he grew
aware of a glassiness of aspect that would reflect any suspicion
of a keen-eyed woman, he became bolder still!

"Laetitia's, I know it is not. Hers is an ancient purse."

"A present from you!"

"How do you hit on that, my dear lady?"

"Deductively."

"Well, the purse looks as good as new in quality, like the owner.

"The poor dear has not much occasion for using it."

"You are mistaken: she uses it daily."

"If it were better filled, Sir Willoughby, your old scheme might
be arranged. The parties do not appear so unwilling. Professor
Crooklyn and I came on them just now rather by surprise, and I
assure you their heads were close, faces meeting, eyes musing."

"Impossible."

"Because when they approach the point, you won't allow it!
Selfish!"

"Now," said Willoughby, very animatedly, "question Clara. Now,
do, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart, do speak to Clara on that head; she
will convince you I have striven quite recently against myself, if
you like. I have instructed her to aid me, given her the fullest
instructions, carte blanche. She cannot possibly have a doubt. I
may look to her to remove any you may entertain from your mind on
the subject. I have proposed, seconded, and chorussed it, and it
will not be arranged. If you expect me to deplore that fact, I
can only answer that my actions are under my control, my feelings
are not. I will do everything consistent with the duties of a man
of honour perpetually running into fatal errors because he did not
properly consult the dictates of those feelings at the right
season. I can violate them: but I can no more command them than I
can my destiny. They were crushed of old, and so let them be now.
Sentiments we won't discuss; though you know that sentiments have
a bearing on social life: are factors, as they say in their
later jargon. I never speak of mine. To you I could. It is not
necessary. If old Vernon, instead of flattening his chest at a
desk, had any manly ambition to take part in public affairs, she
would be the woman for him. I have called her my Egeria. She would
be his Cornelia. One could swear of her that she would have noble
offspring!--But old Vernon has had his disappointment, and will
moan over it up to the end. And she? So it appears. I have tried;
yes, personally: without effect. In other matters I may have
influence with her: not in that one. She declines. She will live
and die Laetitia Dale. We are alone: I confess to you, I love the
name. It's an old song in my ears. Do not be too ready with a name
for me. Believe me--I speak from my experience hitherto--there
is a fatality in these things. I cannot conceal from my poor girl
that this fatality exists . . ."

"Which is the poor girl at present?" said Mrs. Mountstuart, cool
in a mystification.

"And though she will tell you that I have authorized and Clara
Middleton--done as much as man can to institute the union you
suggest, she will own that she is conscious of the presence of
this--fatality, I call it for want of a better title between us.
It drives her in one direction, me in another--or would, if I
submitted to the pressure. She is not the first who has been
conscious of it."

"Are we laying hold of a third poor girl?" said Mrs. Mountstuart.
"Ah! I remember. And I remember we used to call it playing fast
and loose in those days, not fatality. It is very strange. It may
be that you were unblushingly courted in those days, and
excusable; and we all supposed ... but away you went for your
tour."

"My mother's medical receipt for me. Partially it succeeded. She
was for grand marriages: not I. I could make, I could not be, a
sacrifice. And then I went in due time to Dr. Cupid on my own
account. She has the kind of attraction. . . But one changes! On
revient toujours. First we begin with a liking; then we give
ourselves up to the passion of beauty: then comes the serious
question of suitableness of the mate to match us; and perhaps we
discover that we were wiser in early youth than somewhat later.
However, she has beauty. Now, Mrs Mountstuart, you do admire her.
Chase the idea of the 'dainty rogue' out of your view of her: you
admire her: she is captivating; she has a particular charm of her
own, nay, she has real beauty."

Mrs. Mountstuart fronted him to say: "Upon my word, my dear Sir
Willoughby, I think she has it to such a degree that I don't know
the man who could hold out against her if she took the field. She
is one of the women who are dead shots with men. Whether it's in
their tongues or their eyes, or it's an effusion and an atmosphere
--whatever it is, it's a spell, another fatality for you!"

"Animal; not spiritual!"

"Oh, she hasn't the head of Letty Dale."

Sir Willoughby allowed Mrs. Mountstuart to pause and follow her
thoughts.

"Dear me!" she exclaimed. "I noticed a change in Letty Dale last
night; and to-day. She looked fresher and younger; extremely
well: which is not what I can say for you, my friend. Fatalizing
is not good for the complexion."

"Don't take away my health, pray," cried Willoughby, with a
snapping laugh.

"Be careful," said Mrs. Mountstuart. "You have got a sentimental
tone. You talk of 'feelings crushed of old'. It is to a woman, not
to a man that you speak, but that sort of talk is a way of making
the ground slippery. I listen in vain for a natural tongue; and
when I don't hear it, I suspect plotting in men. You show your
under-teeth too at times when you draw in a breath, like a
condemned high-caste Hindoo my husband took me to see in a jail in
Calcutta, to give me some excitement when I was pining for
England. The creature did it regularly as he breathed; you did it
last night, and you have been doing it to-day, as if the air cut
you to the quick. You have been spoilt. You have been too much
anointed. What I've just mentioned is a sign with me of a settled
something on the brain of a man."

"The brain?" said Sir Willoughby, frowning.

"Yes, you laugh sourly, to look at," said she. "Mountstuart told
me that the muscles of the mouth betray men sooner than the eyes,
when they have cause to be uneasy in their minds."

"But, ma'am, I shall not break my word; I shall not, not; I
intend, I have resolved to keep it. I do not fatalize, let my
complexion be black or white. Despite my resemblance to a
high-caste malefactor of the Calcutta prison-wards ..."

"Friend! friend! you know how I chatter."

He saluted her finger-ends. "Despite the extraordinary display of
teeth, you will find me go to execution with perfect calmness;
with a resignation as good as happiness."

"Like a Jacobite lord under the Georges."

"You have told me that you wept to read of one: like him, then. My
principles have not changed, if I have. When I was younger, I had
an idea of a wife who would be with me in my thoughts as well as
aims: a woman with a spirit of romance, and a brain of solid
sense. I shall sooner or later dedicate myself to a public life;
and shall, I suppose, want the counsellor or comforter who ought
always to be found at home. It may be unfortunate that I have the
ideal in my head. But I would never make rigorous demands for
specific qualities. The cruellest thing in the world is to set up
a living model before a wife, and compel her to copy it. In any
case, here we are upon the road: the die is cast. I shall not
reprieve myself. I cannot release her. Marriage represents facts,
courtship fancies. She will be cured by-and-by of that coveting of
everything that I do, feel, think, dream, imagine . . .
ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum. Laetitia was invited here to show her
the example of a fixed character--solid as any concrete substance
you would choose to build on, and not a whit the less feminine."