The Egoist

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A deeper student of Science than his rivals, he appreciated
Nature's compliment in the fair ones choice of you. We now
scientifically know that in this department of the universal
struggle, success is awarded to the bettermost. You spread a
handsomer tail than your fellows, you dress a finer top-knot, you
pipe a newer note, have a longer stride; she reviews you in
competition, and selects you. The superlative is magnetic to her.
She may be looking elsewhere, and you will see--the superlative
will simply have to beckon, away she glides. She cannot help
herself; it is her nature, and her nature is the guarantee for the
noblest races of men to come of her. In complimenting you, she is
a promise of superior offspring. Science thus--or it is better to
say--an acquaintance with science facilitates the cultivation of
aristocracy. Consequently a successful pursuit and a wresting of
her from a body of competitors, tells you that you are the best
man. What is more, it tells the world so.

Willoughby aired his amiable superlatives in the eye of Miss
Middleton; he had a leg. He was the heir of successful
competitors. He had a style, a tone, an artist tailor, an
authority of manner; he had in the hopeful ardour of the chase
among a multitude a freshness that gave him advantage; and
together with his undeviating energy when there was a prize to be
won and possessed, these were scarce resistible. He spared no
pains, for he was adust and athirst for the winning-post. He
courted her father, aware that men likewise, and parents
pre-eminently, have their preference for the larger offer, the
deeper pocket, the broader lands, the respectfuller consideration.
Men, after their fashion, as well as women, distinguish the
bettermost, and aid him to succeed, as Dr. Middleton certainly did
in the crisis of the memorable question proposed to his daughter
within a month of Willoughby's reception at Upton Park. The young
lady was astonished at his whirlwind wooing of her, and bent to it
like a sapling. She begged for time; Willoughby could barely wait.
She unhesitatingly owned that she liked no one better, and he
consented. A calm examination of his position told him that it was
unfair so long as he stood engaged, and she did not. She pleaded a
desire to see a little of the world before she plighted herself.
She alarmed him; he assumed the amazing god of love under the
subtlest guise of the divinity. Willingly would he obey her
behests, resignedly languish, were it not for his mother's desire
to see the future lady of Patterne established there before she
died. Love shone cunningly through the mask of filial duty, but
the plea of urgency was reasonable. Dr. Middleton thought it
reasonable, supposing his daughter to have an inclination. She had
no disinclination, though she had a maidenly desire to see a
little of the world--grace for one year, she said. Willoughby
reduced the year to six months, and granted that term, for which,
in gratitude, she submitted to stand engaged; and that was no
light whispering of a word. She was implored to enter the state of
captivity by the pronunciation of vows--a private but a binding
ceremonial. She had health and beauty, and money to gild these
gifts; not that he stipulated for money with his bride, but it
adds a lustre to dazzle the world; and, moreover, the pack of
rival pursuers hung close behind, yelping and raising their
dolorous throats to the moon. Captive she must be.

He made her engagement no light whispering matter. It was a solemn
plighting of a troth. Why not? Having said, I am yours, she could
say, I am wholly yours, I am yours forever, I swear it, I will
never swerve from it, I am your wife in heart, yours utterly; our
engagement is written above. To this she considerately appended,
"as far as I am concerned"; a piece of somewhat chilling
generosity, and he forced her to pass him through love's catechism
in turn, and came out with fervent answers that bound him to her
too indissolubly to let her doubt of her being loved. And I am
loved! she exclaimed to her heart's echoes, in simple faith and
wonderment. Hardly had she begun to think of love ere the
apparition arose in her path. She had not thought of love with any
warmth, and here it was. She had only dreamed of love as one of
the distant blessings of the mighty world, lying somewhere in the
world's forests, across wild seas, veiled, encompassed with
beautiful perils, a throbbing secrecy, but too remote to quicken
her bosom's throbs. Her chief idea of it was, the enrichment of
the world by love.

Thus did Miss Middleton acquiesce in the principle of selection.

And then did the best man of a host blow his triumphant horn, and
loudly.

He looked the fittest; he justified the dictum of Science. The
survival of the Patternes was assured. "I would," he said to his
admirer, Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, "have bargained for health
above everything, but she has everything besides--lineage,
beauty, breeding: is what they call an heiress, and is the most
accomplished of her sex." With a delicate art he conveyed to the
lady's understanding that Miss Middleton had been snatched from a
crowd, without a breath of the crowd having offended his niceness.
He did it through sarcasm at your modern young women, who run about
the world nibbling and nibbled at, until they know one sex as well
as the other, and are not a whit less cognizant of the market than
men; pure, possibly; it is not so easy to say innocent; decidedly
not our feminine ideal. Miss Middleton was different: she was the
true ideal, fresh-gathered morning fruit in a basket, warranted by
her bloom.

Women do not defend their younger sisters for doing what they
perhaps have done--lifting a veil to be seen, and peeping at a
world where innocence is as poor a guarantee as a babe's caul
against shipwreck. Women of the world never think of attacking the
sensual stipulation for perfect bloom, silver purity, which is
redolent of the Oriental origin of the love-passion of their
lords. Mrs. Mountstuart congratulated Sir Willoughby on the
prize he had won in the fair western-eastern.

"Let me see her," she said; and Miss Middleton was introduced
and critically observed.

She had the mouth that smiles in repose. The lips met full on the
centre of the bow and thinned along to a lifting dimple; the
eyelids also lifted slightly at the outer corners, and seemed,
like the lip into the limpid cheek, quickening up the temples, as
with a run of light, or the ascension indicated off a shoot of
colour. Her features were playfellows of one another, none of them
pretending to rigid correctness, nor the nose to the ordinary
dignity of governess among merry girls, despite which the nose was
of a fair design, not acutely interrogative or inviting to
gambols. Aspens imaged in water, waiting for the breeze, would
offer a susceptible lover some suggestion of her face: a pure,
smooth-white face, tenderly flushed in the cheeks, where the
gentle dints, were faintly intermelting even during quietness. Her
eyes were brown, set well between mild lids, often shadowed, not
unwakeful. Her hair of lighter brown, swelling above her temples
on the sweep to the knot, imposed the triangle of the fabulous
wild woodland visage from brow to mouth and chin, evidently in
agreement with her taste; and the triangle suited her; but her
face was not significant of a tameless wildness or of weakness;
her equable shut mouth threw its long curve to guard the small
round chin from that effect; her eyes wavered only in humour, they
were steady when thoughtfulness was awakened; and at such seasons
the build of her winter-beechwood hair lost the touch of nymphlike
and whimsical, and strangely, by mere outline, added to her
appearance of studious concentration. Observe the hawk on
stretched wings over the prey he spies, for an idea of this change
in the look of a young lady whom Vernon Whitford could liken to
the Mountain Echo, and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson pronounced to be
"a dainty rogue in porcelain".

Vernon's fancy of her must have sprung from her prompt and most
musical responsiveness. He preferred the society of her learned
father to that of a girl under twenty engaged to his cousin, but
the charm of her ready tongue and her voice was to his intelligent
understanding wit, natural wit, crystal wit, as opposed to the
paste-sparkle of the wit of the town. In his encomiums he did not
quote Miss Middleton's wit; nevertheless, he ventured to speak of
it to Mrs. Mountstuart, causing that lady to say: "Ah, well, I
have not noticed the wit. You may have the art of drawing it out."

No one had noticed the wit. The corrupted hearing of people
required a collision of sounds, Vernon supposed. For his part, to
prove their excellence, he recollected a great many of Miss
Middleton's remarks; they came flying to him; and so long as he
forbore to speak them aloud, they had a curious wealth of meaning.
It could not be all her manner, however much his own manner might
spoil them. It might be, to a certain degree, her quickness at
catching the hue and shade of evanescent conversation. Possibly by
remembering the whole of a conversation wherein she had her place,
the wit was to be tested; only how could any one retain the heavy
portion? As there was no use in being argumentative on a subject
affording him personally, and apparently solitarily, refreshment
and enjoyment, Vernon resolved to keep it to himself. The eulogies
of her beauty, a possession in which he did not consider her so
very conspicuous, irritated him in consequence. To flatter Sir
Willoughby, it was the fashion to exalt her as one of the types of
beauty; the one providentially selected to set off his masculine
type. She was compared to those delicate flowers, the ladies of
the Court of China, on rice-paper. A little French dressing would
make her at home on the sward by the fountain among the lutes and
whispers of the bewitching silken shepherdesses who live though
they never were. Lady Busshe was reminded of the favourite
lineaments of the women of Leonardo, the angels of Luini. Lady
Culmer had seen crayon sketches of demoiselles of the French
aristocracy resembling her. Some one mentioned an antique statue
of a figure breathing into a flute: and the mouth at the flutestop
might have a distant semblance of the bend of her mouth, but this
comparison was repelled as grotesque.

For once Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson was unsuccessful.

Her "dainty rogue in porcelain" displeased Sir Willoughby. "Why
rogue?" he said. The lady's fame for hitting the mark fretted him,
and the grace of his bride's fine bearing stood to support him in
his objection. Clara was young, healthy, handsome; she was
therefore fitted to be his wife, the mother of his children, his
companion picture. Certainly they looked well side by side. In
walking with her, in drooping to her, the whole man was made
conscious of the female image of himself by her exquisite
unlikeness. She completed him, added the softer lines wanting to
his portrait before the world. He had wooed her rageingly; he
courted her becomingly; with the manly self-possession enlivened
by watchful tact which is pleasing to girls. He never seemed to
undervalue himself in valuing her: a secret priceless in the
courtship of young women that have heads; the lover doubles their
sense of personal worth through not forfeiting his own. Those were
proud and happy days when he rode Black Norman over to Upton Park,
and his lady looked forth for him and knew him coming by the
faster beating of her heart.

Her mind, too, was receptive. She took impressions of his
characteristics, and supplied him a feast. She remembered his
chance phrases; noted his ways, his peculiarities, as no one of
her sex had done. He thanked his cousin Vernon for saying she had
wit. She had it, and of so high a flavour that the more he thought
of the epigram launched at her the more he grew displeased. With
the wit to understand him, and the heart to worship, she had a
dignity rarely seen in young ladies.

"Why rogue?" he insisted with Mrs. Mountstuart.

"I said--in porcelain," she replied.

"Rogue perplexes me."

"Porcelain explains it."

"She has the keenest sense of honour."

"I am sure she is a paragon of rectitude."

"She has a beautiful bearing."

"The carriage of a young princess!"

"I find her perfect."

"And still she may be a dainty rogue in porcelain."

"Are you judging by the mind or the person, ma'am?"

"Both."

"And which is which?"

"There's no distinction."

"Rogue and mistress of Patterne do not go together."

"Why not? She will be a novelty to our neighbourhood and an
animation of the Hall."

"To be frank, rogue does not rightly match with me."

"Take her for a supplement."

"You like her?"

"In love with her! I can imagine life-long amusement in her
company. Attend to my advice: prize the porcelain and play with
the rogue."

Sir Willoughby nodded, unilluminated. There was nothing of rogue
in himself, so there could be nothing of it in his bride.
Elfishness, tricksiness, freakishness, were antipathetic to his
nature; and he argued that it was impossible he should have chosen
for his complement a person deserving the title. It would not have
been sanctioned by his guardian genius. His closer acquaintance
with Miss Middleton squared with his first impressions; you know
that this is convincing; the common jury justifies the
presentation of the case to them by the grand jury; and his
original conclusion that she was essentially feminine, in other
words, a parasite and a chalice, Clara's conduct confirmed from
day to day. He began to instruct her in the knowledge of himself
without reserve, and she, as she grew less timid with him, became
more reflective.

"I judge by character," he said to Mrs. Mountstuart.

"If you have caught the character of a girl," said she.

"I think I am not far off it."

"So it was thought by the man who dived for the moon in a well."

"How women despise their sex!"

"Not a bit. She has no character yet. You are forming it, and pray
be advised and be merry; the solid is your safest guide;
physiognomy and manners will give you more of a girl's character
than all the divings you can do. She is a charming young woman,
only she is one of that sort."

"Of what sort?" Sir Willoughby asked, impatiently.

"Rogues in porcelain."

"I am persuaded I shall never comprehend it."

"I cannot help you one bit further."

"The word rogue!"

"It was dainty rogue."

"Brittle, would you say?"

"I am quite unable to say.?

"An innocent naughtiness?"

"Prettily moulded in a delicate substance."

"You are thinking of some piece of Dresden you suppose her to
resemble."

"I dare say."

"Artificial?"

"You would not have her natural?"

"I am heartily satisfied with her from head to foot, my dear
Mrs. Mountstuart."

"Nothing could be better. And sometimes she will lead, and
generally you will lead, and everything will go well, my dear
Sir Willoughby."

Like all rapid phrasers, Mrs. Mountstuart detested the analysis of
her sentence. It had an outline in vagueness, and was flung out to
be apprehended, not dissected. Her directions for the reading of
Miss Middleton's character were the same that she practised in
reading Sir Willoughby's, whose physiognomy and manners bespoke
him what she presumed him to be, a splendidly proud gentleman,
with good reason.

Mrs. Mountstuart's advice was wiser than her procedure, for she
stopped short where he declined to begin. He dived below the
surface without studying that index-page. He had won Miss
Middleton's hand; he believed he had captured her heart; but he
was not so certain of his possession of her soul, and he went
after it. Our enamoured gentleman had therefore no tally of
Nature's writing above to set beside his discoveries in the deeps.
Now it is a dangerous accompaniment of this habit of driving, that
where we do not light on the discoveries we anticipate, we fall to
work sowing and planting; which becomes a disturbance of the
gentle bosom. Miss Middleton's features were legible as to the
mainspring of her character. He could have seen that she had a
spirit with a natural love of liberty, and required the next thing
to liberty, spaciousness, if she was to own allegiance. Those
features, unhappily, instead of serving for an introduction to the
within, were treated as the mirror of himself. They were indeed of
an amiable sweetness to tempt an accepted lover to angle for the
first person in the second. But he had made the discovery that
their minds differed on one or two points, and a difference of
view in his bride was obnoxious to his repose. He struck at it
recurringly to show her error under various aspects. He desired to
shape her character to the feminine of his own, and betrayed the
surprise of a slight disappointment at her advocacy of her ideas.
She said immediately: "It is not too late, Willoughby," and
wounded him, for he wanted her simply to be material in his hands
for him to mould her; he had no other thought. He lectured her on
the theme of the infinity of love. How was it not too late? They
were plighted; they were one eternally; they could not be parted.
She listened gravely, conceiving the infinity as a narrow dwelling
where a voice droned and ceased not. However, she listened. She
became an attentive listener.

CHAPTER VI

His Courtship

The world was the principal topic of dissension between these
lovers. His opinion of the world affected her like a creature
threatened with a deprivation of air. He explained to his darling
that lovers of necessity do loathe the world. They live in the
world, they accept its benefits, and assist it as well as they
can. In their hearts they must despise it, shut it out, that their
love for one another may pour in a clear channel, and with all the
force they have. They cannot enjoy the sense of security for their
love unless they fence away the world. It is, you will allow,
gross; it is a beast. Formally we thank it for the good we get of
it; only we two have an inner temple where the worship we conduct
is actually, if you would but see it, an excommunication of the
world. We abhor that beast to adore that divinity. This gives us
our oneness, our isolation, our happiness. This is to love with
the soul. Do you see, darling?

She shook her head; she could not see it. She would admit none of
the notorious errors, of the world; its backbiting, selfishness,
coarseness, intrusiveness, infectiousness. She was young. She
might, Willoughby thought, have let herself be led; she was not
docile. She must be up in arms as a champion of the world; and one
saw she was hugging her dream of a romantic world, nothing else.
She spoilt the secret bower-song he delighted to tell over to her.
And how, Powers of Love! is love-making to be pursued if we may
not kick the world out of our bower and wash our hands of it? Love
that does not spurn the world when lovers curtain themselves is a
love--is it not so?--that seems to the unwhipped, scoffing world
to go slinking into basiation's obscurity, instead of on a
glorious march behind the screen. Our hero had a strong sentiment
as to the policy of scorning the world for the sake of defending
his personal pride and (to his honour, be it said) his lady's
delicacy.

The act of seeming put them both above the world, said retro
Sathanas! So much, as a piece of tactics: he was highly civilized:
in the second instance, he knew it to be the world which must
furnish the dry sticks for the bonfire of a woman's worship. He
knew, too, that he was prescribing poetry to his betrothed,
practicable poetry. She had a liking for poetry, and sometimes
quoted the stuff in defiance of his pursed mouth and pained
murmur: "I am no poet;" but his poetry of the enclosed and
fortified bower, without nonsensical rhymes to catch the ears of
women, appeared incomprehensible to her, if not adverse. She would
not burn the world for him; she would not, though a purer poetry
is little imaginable, reduce herself to ashes, or incense, or
essence, in honour of him, and so, by love's transmutation,
literally be the man she was to marry. She preferred to be
herself, with the egoism of women. She said it: she said: I must
be myself to be of any value to you, Willoughby." He was
indefatigable in his lectures on the aesthetics of love.
Frequently, for an indemnification to her (he had no desire that
she should be a loser by ceasing to admire the world), he dwelt on
his own youthful ideas; and his original fancies about the world
were presented to her as a substitute for the theme.

Miss Middleton bore it well, for she was sure that he meant well.
Bearing so well what was distasteful to her, she became less well
able to bear what she had merely noted in observation before; his
view of scholarship; his manner toward Mr. Vernon Whitford, of whom
her father spoke warmly; the rumour concerning his treatment of a
Miss Dale. And the country tale of Constantia Durham sang itself
to her in a new key. He had no contempt for the world's praises.
Mr. Whitford wrote the letters to the county paper which gained him
applause at various great houses, and he accepted it, and betrayed
a tingling fright lest he should be the victim of a sneer of the
world he contemned. Recollecting his remarks, her mind was
afflicted by the "something illogical" in him that we readily
discover when our natures are no longer running free, and then at
once we yearn for a disputation. She resolved that she would one
day, one distant day, provoke it--upon what? The special point
eluded her. The world is too huge a client, and too pervious, too
spotty, for a girl to defend against a man. That "something
illogical" had stirred her feelings more than her intellect to
revolt. She could not constitute herself the advocate of Mr.
Whitford. Still she marked the disputation for an event to come.

Meditating on it, she fell to picturing Sir Willoughby's face at
the first accents of his bride's decided disagreement with him.
The picture once conjured up would not be laid. He was handsome;
so correctly handsome, that a slight unfriendly touch precipitated
him into caricature. His habitual air of happy pride, of indignant
contentment rather, could easily be overdone. Surprise, when he
threw emphasis on it, stretched him with the tall eyebrows of a
mask--limitless under the spell of caricature; and in time,
whenever she was not pleased by her thoughts, she had that, and
not his likeness, for the vision of him. And it was unjust,
contrary to her deeper feelings; she rebuked herself, and as much
as her naughty spirit permitted, she tried to look on him as the
world did; an effort inducing reflections upon the blessings of
ignorance. She seemed to herself beset by a circle of imps, hardly
responsible for her thoughts.

He outshone Mr. Whitford in his behaviour to young Crossjay. She
had seen him with the boy, and he was amused, indulgent, almost
frolicsome, in contradistinction to Mr. Whitford's tutorly
sharpness. He had the English father's tone of a liberal allowance
for boys" tastes and pranks, and he ministered to the partiality
of the genus for pocket-money. He did not play the schoolmaster,
like bookworms who get poor little lads in their grasp.

Mr. Whitford avoided her very much. He came to Upton Park on a
visit to her father, and she was not particularly sorry that she
saw him only at table. He treated her by fits to a level scrutiny
of deep-set eyes unpleasantly penetrating. She had liked his eyes.
They became unbearable; they dwelt in the memory as if they had
left a phosphorescent line. She had been taken by playmate boys in
her infancy to peep into hedge-leaves, where the mother-bird
brooded on the nest; and the eyes of the bird in that marvellous
dark thickset home, had sent her away with worlds of fancy. Mr.
Whitford's gaze revived her susceptibility, but not the old happy
wondering. She was glad of his absence, after a certain hour that
she passed with Willoughby, a wretched hour to remember. Mr.
Whitford had left, and Willoughby came, bringing bad news of his
mother's health. Lady Patterne was fast failing. Her son spoke of
the loss she would be to him; he spoke of the dreadfulness of
death. He alluded to his own death to come carelessly, with a
philosophical air.

"All of us must go! our time is short."

"Very," she assented.

It sounded like want of feeling.

"If you lose me, Clara!"

"But you are strong, Willoughby."

"I may be cut off to-morrow."

"Do not talk in such a manner."

"It is as well that it should be faced."

"I cannot see what purpose it serves."

"Should you lose me, my love!"

"Willoughby!"

"Oh, the bitter pang of leaving you!"

"Dear Willoughby, you are distressed; your mother may recover; let
us hope she will; I will help to nurse her; I have offered, you
know; I am ready, most anxious. I believe I am a good nurse."

"It is this belief--that one does not die with death!"

"That is our comfort."

"When we love?"

"Does it not promise that we meet again?"