The Egoist

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Vernon's dancing in America was capitally described by Willoughby.
"Adieu to our cousins!" the latter wrote on his voyage to Japan.
"I may possibly have had some vogue in their ball-rooms, and in
showing them an English seat on horseback: I must resign myself if
I have not been popular among them. I could not sing their
national song--if a congery of states be a nation--and I must
confess I listened with frigid politeness to their singing of it.
A great people, no doubt. Adieu to them. I have had to tear old
Vernon away. He had serious thoughts of settling, means to
correspond with some of them." On the whole, forgetting two or
more "traits of insolence" on the part of his hosts, which he
cited, Willoughby escaped pretty comfortably. The President had
been, consciously or not, uncivil, but one knew his origin! Upon
these interjections, placable flicks of the lionly tail addressed
to Britannia the Ruler, who expected him in some mildish way to
lash terga cauda in retiring, Sir Willoughby Patterne passed from
a land of alien manners; and ever after he spoke of America
respectfully and pensively, with a tail tucked in, as it were. His
travels were profitable to himself. The fact is, that there are
cousins who come to greatness and must be pacified, or they will
prove annoying. Heaven forefend a collision between cousins!

Willoughby returned to his England after an absence of three
years. On a fair April morning, the last of the month, he drove
along his park palings, and, by the luck of things, Laetitia was
the first of his friends whom he met. She was crossing from field
to field with a band of school-children, gathering wild flowers
for the morrow May-day. He sprang to the ground and seized her
hand. "Laetitia Dale!" he said. He panted. "Your name is sweet
English music! And you are well?" The anxious question permitted
him to read deeply in her eyes. He found the man he sought there,
squeezed him passionately, and let her go, saying: "I could not
have prayed for a lovelier home-scene to welcome me than you and
these children flower-gathering. I don't believe in chance. It was
decreed that we should meet. Do not you think so?"

Laetitia breathed faintly of her gladness.

He begged her to distribute a gold coin among the little ones;
asked for the names of some of them, and repeated: "Mary, Susan,
Charlotte--only the Christian names, pray! Well, my dears, you
will bring your garlands to the Hall to-morrow morning; and mind,
early! no slugabeds tomorrow; I suppose I am browned, Laetitia?" He
smiled in apology for the foreign sun, and murmured with rapture:
"The green of this English country is unsurpassed. It is wonderful.
Leave England and be baked, if you would appreciate it. You can't,
unless you taste exile as I have done--for how many years? How
many?"

"Three," said Laetitia.

"Thirty!" said he. "It seems to me that length. At least, I am
immensely older. But looking at you, I could think it less than
three. You have not changed. You are absolutely unchanged. I am
bound to hope so. I shall see you soon. I have much to talk of,
much to tell you. I shall hasten to call on your father. I have
specially to speak with him. I--what happiness this is, Laetitia!
But I must not forget I have a mother. Adieu; for some hours--not
for many!"

He pressed her hand again. He was gone.

She dismissed the children to their homes. Plucking primroses was
hard labour now--a dusty business. She could have wished that her
planet had not descended to earth, his presence agitated her so;
but his enthusiastic patriotism was like a shower that, in the
Spring season of the year, sweeps against the hard-binding East
and melts the air and brings out new colours, makes life flow; and
her thoughts recurred in wonderment to the behaviour of Constantia
Durham. That was Laetitia's manner of taking up her weakness once
more. She could almost have reviled the woman who had given this
beneficent magician, this pathetic exile, of the aristocratic
sunburned visage and deeply scrutinizing eyes, cause for grief.
How deeply his eyes could read! The starveling of patience awoke
to the idea of a feast. The sense of hunger came with it, and hope
came, and patience fled. She would have rejected hope to keep
patience nigh her; but surely it can not always be Winter! said
her reasoning blood, and we must excuse her as best we can if she
was assured, by her restored warmth that Willoughby came in the
order of the revolving seasons, marking a long Winter past. He had
specially to speak with her father, he had said. What could that
mean? What, but--She dared not phrase it or view it.

At their next meeting she was "Miss Dale".

A week later he was closeted with her father.

Mr. Dale, in the evening of that pregnant day, eulogized Sir
Willoughby as a landlord. A new lease of the cottage was to be
granted him on the old terms, he said. Except that Sir Willoughby
had congratulated him in the possession of an excellent daughter,
their interview was one of landlord and tenant, it appeared; and
Laetitia said, "So we shall not have to leave the cottage?" in a
tone of satisfaction, while she quietly gave a wrench to the neck
of the young hope in her breast. At night her diary received the
line: "This day I was a fool. To-morrow?"

To-morrow and many days afterwards there were dashes instead of
words.

Patience travelled back to her sullenly. As we must have some kind
of food, and she had nothing else, she took to that and found it
dryer than of yore. It is a composing but a lean dietary. The dead
are patient, and we get a certain likeness to them in feeding on
it unintermittingly overlong. Her hollowed cheeks with the fallen
leaf in them pleaded against herself to justify her idol for not
looking down on one like her. She saw him when he was at the Hall.
He did not notice any change. He was exceedingly gentle and
courteous. More than once she discovered his eyes dwelling on her,
and then he looked hurriedly at his mother, and Laetitia had to
shut her mind from thinking, lest thinking should be a sin and
hope a guilty spectre. But had his mother objected to her? She
could not avoid asking herself. His tour of the globe had been
undertaken at his mother's desire; she was an ambitious lady, in
failing health; and she wished to have him living with her at
Patterne, yet seemed to agree that he did wisely to reside in
London.

One day Sir Willoughby, in the quiet manner which was
his humour, informed her that he had become a country
gentleman; he had abandoned London, he loathed it as the
burial-place of the individual man. He intended to sit down on
his estates and have his cousin Vernon Whitford to assist him
in managing them, he said; and very amusing was his description
of his cousin's shifts to live by literature, and add enough
to a beggarly income to get his usual two months of the year
in the Alps. Previous to his great tour, Willoughby had spoken
of Vernon's judgement with derision; nor was it entirely unknown
that Vernon had offended his family pride by some
extravagant act. But after their return he acknowledged
Vernon's talents, and seemed unable to do without him.

The new arrangement gave Laetitia a companion for her walks.
Pedestrianism was a sour business to Willoughby, whose exclamation
of the word indicated a willingness for any amount of exercise on
horseback; but she had no horse, and so, while he hunted, Laetitia
and Vernon walked, and the neighbourhood speculated on the
circumstances, until the ladies Eleanor and Isabel Patterne
engaged her more frequently for carriage exercise, and Sir
Willoughby was observed riding beside them.

A real and sunny pleasure befell Laetitia in the establishment of
young Crossjay Patterne under her roof; the son of the
lieutenant, now captain, of Marines; a boy of twelve with the
sprights of twelve boys in him, for whose board and lodgement
Vernon provided by arrangement with her father. Vernon was one of
your men that have no occupation for their money, no bills to pay
for repair of their property, and are insane to spend. He had
heard of Captain Patterne's large family, and proposed to have his
eldest boy at the Hall, to teach him; but Willoughby declined to
house the son of such a father, predicting that the boy's hair
would be red, his skin eruptive, and his practices detestable. So
Vernon, having obtained Mr. Dale's consent to accommodate this
youth, stalked off to Devonport, and brought back a rosy-cheeked,
round-bodied rogue of a boy, who fell upon meats and puddings, and
defeated them, with a captivating simplicity in his confession
that he had never had enough to eat in his life. He had gone
through a training for a plentiful table. At first, after a number
of helps, young Crossjay would sit and sigh heavily, in
contemplation of the unfinished dish. Subsequently, he told his
host and hostess that he had two sisters above his own age, and
three brothers and two sisters younger than he: "All hungry!" said
die boy.

His pathos was most comical. It was a good month before he could
see pudding taken away from table without a sigh of regret that he
could not finish it as deputy for the Devonport household. The
pranks of the little fellow, and his revel in a country life, and
muddy wildness in it, amused Laetitia from morning to night. She.
when she had caught him, taught him in the morning; Vernon,
favoured by the chase, in the afternoon. Young Crossjay would have
enlivened any household. He was not only indolent, he was opposed
to the acquisition of knowledge through the medium of books, and
would say: "But I don't want to!" in a tone to make a logician
thoughtful. Nature was very strong in him. He had, on each return
of the hour for instruction, to be plucked out of the earth, rank
of the soil, like a root, for the exercise of his big round
headpiece on those tyrannous puzzles. But the habits of birds, and
the place for their eggs, and the management of rabbits, and the
tickling of fish, and poaching joys with combative boys of the
district, and how to wheedle a cook for a luncheon for a whole day
in the rain, he soon knew of his great nature. His passion for our
naval service was a means of screwing his attention to lessons
after he had begun to understand that the desert had to be
traversed to attain midshipman's rank. He boasted ardently of his
fighting father, and, chancing to be near the Hall as he was
talking to Vernon and Laetitia of his father, he propounded a
question close to his heart, and he put it in these words,
following: "My father's the one to lead an army!" when he paused.
"I say, Mr. Whitford, Sir Willoughby's kind to me, and gives me
crown-pieces, why wouldn't he see my father, and my father came
here ten miles in the rain to see him, and had to walk ten miles
back, and sleep at an inn?"

The only answer to be given was, that Sir Willoughby could not
have been at home. "Oh! my father saw him, and Sir Willoughby said
he was not at home," the boy replied, producing an odd ring in the
ear by his repetition of "not at home" in the same voice as the
apology, plainly innocent of malice. Vernon told Laetitia,
however, that the boy never asked an explanation of Sir
Willoughby.

Unlike the horse of the adage. it was easier to compel young
Crossjay to drink of the waters of instruction than to get him to
the brink. His heart was not so antagonistic as his nature, and by
degrees, owing to a proper mixture of discipline and cajolery, he
imbibed. He was whistling at the cook's windows after a day of
wicked truancy, on an April night, and reported adventures over
the supper supplied to him. Laetitia entered the kitchen with a
reproving forefinger. He jumped to kiss her, and went on
chattering of a place fifteen miles distant, where he had seen Sir
Willoughby riding with a young lady. The impossibility that the
boy should have got so far on foot made Laetitia doubtful of his
veracity, until she heard that a gentleman had taken him up on the
road in a gig, and had driven him to a farm to show him strings of
birds" eggs and stuffed birds of every English kind, kingfishers,
yaffles, black woodpeckers, goat-sucker owls, more mouth than head,
with dusty, dark-spotted wings, like moths; all very
circumstantial. Still, in spite of his tea at the farm, and ride
back by rail at the gentleman's expense, the tale seemed
fictitious to Laetitia until Crossjay related how that he had
stood to salute on the road to the railway, and taken off his cap
to Sir Willoughby, and Sir Willoughby had passed him, not noticing
him, though the young lady did, and looked back and nodded. The
hue of truth was in that picture.

Strange eclipse, when the hue of truth comes shadowing over our
bright ideal planet. It will not seem the planet's fault, but
truth's. Reality is the offender; delusion our treasure that we
are robbed of. Then begins with us the term of wilful delusion, and
its necessary accompaniment of the disgust of reality; exhausting
the heart much more than patient endurance of starvation.

Hints were dropping about the neighbourhood; the hedgeways
twittered, the tree-tops cawed. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson was
loud on the subject: "Patterne is to have a mistress at last, you
say? But there never was a doubt of his marrying--he must marry;
and, so long as he does not marry a foreign woman, we have no
cause to complain. He met her at Cherriton. Both were struck at
the same moment. Her father is, I hear, some sort of learned man;
money; no land. No house either, I believe. People who spend half
their time on the Continent. They are now for a year at Upton
Park. The very girl to settle down and entertain when she does
think of settling. Eighteen, perfect manners; you need not ask if
a beauty. Sir Willoughby will have his dues. We must teach her to
make amends to him--but don't listen to Lady Busshe! He was too
young at twenty-three or twenty-four. No young man is ever jilted;
he is allowed to escape. A young man married is a fire-eater bound
over to keep the peace; if he keeps it he worries it. At
thirty-one or thirty-two he is ripe for his command, because he
knows how to bend. And Sir Willoughby is a splendid creature, only
wanting a wife to complete him. For a man like that to go on
running about would never do. Soberly--no! It would soon be
getting ridiculous. He has been no worse than other men, probably
better--infinitely more excusable; but now we have him, and it
was time we should. I shall see her and study her, sharply, you
may be sure; though I fancy I can rely on his judgement."

In confirmation of the swelling buzz, the Rev. Dr. Middleton and
his daughter paid a flying visit to the Hall, where they were seen
only by the members of the Patterne family. Young Crossjay had a
short conversation with Miss Middleton, and ran to the cottage
full of her--she loved the navy and had a merry face. She had a
smile of very pleasant humour according to Vernon. The young lady
was outlined to Laetitia as tall, elegant, lively; and painted as
carrying youth like a flag. With her smile of "very pleasant
humour", she could not but be winning.

Vernon spoke more of her father, a scholar of high repute;
happily, a scholar of an independent fortune. His maturer
recollection of Miss Middleton grew poetic, or he described her in
an image to suit a poetic end: "She gives you an idea of the
Mountain Echo. Doctor Middleton has one of the grandest heads in
England."

"What is her Christian name?" said Laetitia.

He thought her Christian name was Clara.

Laetitia went to bed and walked through the day conceiving the
Mountain Echo the swift, wild spirit, Clara by name, sent fleeting
on a far half circle by the voice it is roused to subserve;
sweeter than beautiful, high above drawing-room beauties as the
colours of the sky; and if, at the same time, elegant and of
loveable smiling, could a man resist her? To inspire the title of
Mountain Echo in any mind, a young lady must be singularly
spiritualized. Her father doated on her, Vernon said. Who would
not? It seemed an additional cruelty that the grace of a poetical
attractiveness should be round her, for this was robbing Laetitia
of some of her own little fortune, mystical though that might be.
But a man like Sir Willoughby had claims on poetry, possessing as
he did every manly grace; and to think that Miss Middleton had won
him by virtue of something native to her likewise, though
mystically, touched Laetitia with a faint sense of relationship to
the chosen girl. "What is in me, he sees on her." It decked her
pride to think so, as a wreath on the gravestone. She encouraged
her imagination to brood over Clara, and invested her designedly
with romantic charms, in spite of pain; the ascetic zealot hugs
his share of Heaven--most bitter, most blessed--in his
hair-shirt and scourge, and Laetitia's happiness was to glorify
Clara. Through that chosen rival, through her comprehension of
the spirit of Sir Willoughby's choice of one such as Clara, she
was linked to him yet.

Her mood of ecstatic fidelity was a dangerous exaltation; one that
in a desert will distort the brain, and in the world where the
idol dwells will put him, should he come nigh, to its own
furnace-test, and get a clear brain out of a burnt heart. She was
frequently at the Hall, helping to nurse Lady Patterne. Sir
Willoughby had hitherto treated her as a dear insignificant
friend, to whom it was unnecessary that he should mention the
object of his rides to Upton Park.

He had, however, in the contemplation of what he was gaining,
fallen into anxiety about what he might be losing. She belonged
to his brilliant youth; her devotion was the bride of his youth;
he was a man who lived backward almost as intensely as in the
present; and, notwithstanding Laetitia's praiseworthy zeal in
attending on his mother, he suspected some unfaithfulness: hardly
without cause: she had not looked paler of late; her eyes had not
reproached him; the secret of the old days between them had been
as little concealed as it was exposed. She might have buried it,
after the way of woman, whose bosoms can be tombs, if we and the
world allow them to be; absolutely sepulchres, where you lie dead,
ghastly. Even if not dead and horrible to think of, you may be
lying cold, somewhere in a corner. Even if embalmed, you may not
be much visited. And how is the world to know you are embalmed?
You are no better than a rotting wretch to the world that does not
have peeps of you in the woman's breast, and see lights burning
and an occasional exhibition of the services of worship. There are
women--tell us not of her of Ephesus!--that have embalmed you,
and have quitted the world to keep the tapers alight, and a
stranger comes, and they, who have your image before them, will
suddenly blow out the vestal flames and treat you as dust to
fatten the garden of their bosoms for a fresh flower of love. Sir
Willoughby knew it; he had experience of it in the form of the
stranger; and he knew the stranger's feelings toward his
predecessor and the lady.

He waylaid Laetitia, to talk of himself and his plans: the project
of a run to Italy. Enviable? Yes, but in England you live the
higher moral life. Italy boasts of sensual beauty; the spiritual
is yours. "I know Italy well; I have often wished to act as a
cicerone to you there. As it is, I suppose I shall be with those
who know the land as well as I do, and will not be particularly
enthusiastic:--if you are what you were?" He was guilty of this
perplexing twist from one person to another in a sentence more
than once. While he talked exclusively of himself it seemed to her
a condescension. In time he talked principally of her, beginning
with her admirable care of his mother; and he wished to introduce
"a Miss Middleton" to her; he wanted her opinion of Miss
Middleton; he relied on her intuition of character, had never
known it err.

"If I supposed it could err, Miss Dale, I should not be so certain
of myself. I am bound up in my good opinion of you, you see; and
you must continue the same, or where shall I be?" Thus he was led
to dwell upon friendship, and the charm of the friendship of men
and women, "Platonism", as it was called. "I have laughed at it in
the world, but not in the depth of my heart. The world's platonic
attachments are laughable enough. You have taught me that the
ideal of friendship is possible--when we find two who are capable
of a disinterested esteem. The rest of life is duty; duty to
parents, duty to country. But friendship is the holiday of those
who can be friends. Wives are plentiful, friends are rare. I know
how rare!"

Laetitia swallowed her thoughts as they sprang up. Why was he
torturing her?--to give himself a holiday? She could bear to lose
him--she was used to it--and bear his indifference, but not that
he should disfigure himself; it made her poor. It was as if he
required an oath of her when he said: "Italy! But I shall never
see a day in Italy to compare with the day of my return to
England, or know a pleasure so exquisite as your welcome of me.
Will you be true to that? May I look forward to just another such
meeting?"

He pressed her for an answer. She gave the best she could. He was
dissatisfied, and to her hearing it was hardly in the tone of
manliness that he entreated her to reassure him; he womanized his
language. She had to say: "I am afraid I can not undertake to make
it an appointment, Sir Willoughby," before he recovered his
alertness, which he did, for he was anything but obtuse, with the
reply, "You would keep it if you promised, and freeze at your post.
So, as accidents happen, we must leave it to fate. The will's the
thing. You know my detestation of changes. At least I have you for
my tenant, and wherever I am, I see your light at the end of my
park."

"Neither my father nor I would willingly quit Ivy Cottage," said
Laetitia.

"So far, then," he murmured. "You will give me a long notice, and
it must be with my consent if you think of quitting?"

"I could almost engage to do that," she said.

"You love the place?"

"Yes; I am the most contented of cottagers."

"I believe, Miss Dale, it would be well for my happiness were I a
cottager."

"That is the dream of the palace. But to be one, and not to wish
to be other, is quiet sleep in comparison."

"You paint a cottage in colours that tempt one to run from big
houses and households."

"You would run back to them faster, Sir Willoughby."

"You may know me," said he, bowing and passing on contentedly.
He stopped. "But I am not ambitious."

"Perhaps you are too proud for ambition, Sir Willoughby."

"You hit me to the life!"

He passed on regretfully. Clara Middleton did not study and know
him like Laetitia Dale.

Laetitia was left to think it pleased him to play at cat and mouse.
She had not "hit him to the life", or she would have marvelled in
acknowledging how sincere he was.

At her next sitting by the bedside of Lady Patterne she received a
certain measure of insight that might have helped her to fathom
him, if only she could have kept her feelings down.

The old lady was affectionately confidential in talking of her one
subject, her son. "And here is another dashing girl, my dear; she
has money and health and beauty; and so has he; and it appears a
fortunate union; I hope and pray it may be; but we begin to read
the world when our eyes grow dim, because we read the plain lines,
and I ask myself whether money and health and beauty on both sides
have not been the mutual attraction. We tried it before; and that
girl Durham was honest, whatever we may call her. I should have
desired an appreciative thoughtful partner for him, a woman of
mind, with another sort of wealth and beauty. She was honest, she
ran away in time; there was a worse thing possible than that. And
now we have the same chapter, and the same kind of person, who may
not be quite as honest; and I shall not see the end of it.
Promise me you will always be good to him; be my son's friend; his
Egeria, he names you. Be what you were to him when that girl broke
his heart, and no one, not even his mother, was allowed to see
that he suffered anything. Comfort him in his sensitiveness.
Willoughby has the most entire faith in you. Were that destroyed--
I shudder! You are, he says, and he has often said, his image of
the constant woman.

Laetitia's hearing took in no more. She repeated to herself for
days: "His image of the constant woman!" Now, when he was a second
time forsaking her, his praise of her constancy wore the painful
ludicrousness of the look of a whimper on the face.

CHAPTER V

Clara Middleton

The great meeting of Sir Willoughby Patterne and Miss Middleton
had taken place at Cherriton Grange, the seat of a county grandee,
where this young lady of eighteen was first seen rising above the
horizon. She had money and health and beauty, the triune of
perfect starriness, which makes all men astronomers. He looked on
her, expecting her to look at him. But as soon as he looked he
found that he must be in motion to win a look in return. He was
one of a pack; many were ahead of him, the whole of them were
eager. He had to debate within himself how best to communicate to
her that he was Willoughby Patterne, before her gloves were too
much soiled to flatter his niceness, for here and there, all
around, she was yielding her hand to partners--obscurant males
whose touch leaves a stain. Far too generally gracious was Her
Starriness to please him. The effect of it, nevertheless, was to
hurry him with all his might into the heat of the chase, while yet
he knew no more of her than that he was competing for a prize, and
Willoughby Patterne was only one of dozens to the young lady.