The Egoist

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His whole attention was given to her.

She had to invent the sequel. "I was going to beg you, Willoughby,
do not seek to spoil me. You compliment me. Compliments are not
suited to me. You think too highly of me. It is nearly as bad as
to be slighted. I am . . . I am a . . ." But she could not follow
his example; even as far as she had gone, her prim little sketch
of herself, set beside her real, ugly, earnest feelings, rang of a
mincing simplicity, and was a step in falseness. How could she
display what she was?

"Do I not know you?" he said.

The melodious bass notes, expressive of conviction on that point,
signified as well as the words that no answer was the right
answer. She could not dissent without turning his music to
discord, his complacency to amazement. She held her tongue,
knowing that he did not know her, and speculating on the
division made bare by their degrees of the knowledge, a deep
cleft.

He alluded to friends in her neighbourhood and his own.
The bridesmaids were mentioned.

"Miss Dale, you will hear from my aunt Eleanor, declines, on the
plea of indifferent health. She is rather a morbid person, with
all her really estimable qualities. It will do no harm to have
none but young ladies of your own age; a bouquet of young buds:
though one blowing flower among them ... However, she has decided.
My principal annoyance has been Vernon's refusal to act as my best
man."

"Mr. Whitford refuses?"

"He half refuses. I do not take no from him. His pretext
is a dislike to the ceremony."

"I share it with him."

"I sympathize with you. If we might say the words and pass from
sight! There is a way of cutting off the world: I have it at times
completely: I lose it again, as if it were a cabalistic phrase one
had to utter. But with you! You give it me for good. It will he
for ever, eternally, my Clara. Nothing can harm, nothing touch us;
we are one another's. Let the world fight it out; we have nothing
to do with it."

"If Mr. Whitford should persist in refusing?"

"So entirely one, that there never can be question of external
influences. I am, we will say, riding home from the hunt: I see
you awaiting me: I read your heart as though you were beside me.
And I know that I am coming to the one who reads mine! You have
me, you have me like an open book, you, and only you!"

"I am to be always at home?" Clara said, unheeded, and
relieved by his not hearing.

"Have you realized it?--that we are invulnerable! The world
cannot hurt us: it cannot touch us. Felicity is ours, and we are
impervious in the enjoyment of it. Something divine! surely
something divine on earth? Clara!--being to one another that
between which the world can never interpose! What I do is right:
what you do is right. Perfect to one another! Each new day we rise
to study and delight in new secrets. Away with the crowd! We have
not even to say it; we are in an atmosphere where the world cannot
breathe."

"Oh, the world!" Clara partly carolled on a sigh that sunk
deep.

Hearing him talk as one exulting on the mountain-top, when she
knew him to be in the abyss, was very strange, provocative of
scorn.

"My letters?" he said, incitingly.

"I read them."

"Circumstances have imposed a long courtship on us, my Clara; and
I, perhaps lamenting the laws of decorum--I have done so!--still
felt the benefit of the gradual initiation. It is not good for
women to be surprised by a sudden revelation of man's character.
We also have things to learn--there is matter for learning
everywhere. Some day you will tell me the difference of what you
think of me now, from what you thought when we first . . . ?"

An impulse of double-minded acquiescence caused Clara to
stammer as on a sob.

"I--I daresay I shall."

She added, "If it is necessary."

Then she cried out: "Why do you attack the world? You
always make me pity it."

He smiled at her youthfulness. "I have passed through that
stage. It leads to my sentiment. Pity it, by all means."

"No," said she, "but pity it, side with it, not consider it so
bad. The world has faults; glaciers have crevices, mountains have
chasms; but is not the effect of the whole sublime? Not to admire
the mountain and the glacier because they can be cruel, seems to
me ... And the world is beautiful."

"The world of nature, yes. The world of men?"

"Yes."

"My love, I suspect you to be thinking of the world of ballrooms.

"I am thinking of the world that contains real and great
generosity, true heroism. We see it round us."

"We read of it. The world of the romance writer!"

"No: the living world. I am sure it is our duty to love it. I am
sure we weaken ourselves if we do not. If I did not, I should be
looking on mist, hearing a perpetual boom instead of music. I
remember hearing Mr. Whitford say that cynicism is intellectual
dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers; and it seems to me that
cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as
they have made it for themselves."

"Old Vernon!" ejaculated Sir Willoughby, with a countenance
rather uneasy, as if it had been flicked with a glove. "He
strings his phrases by the dozen."

"Papa contradicts that, and says he is very clever and very
simple."

"As to cynics, my dear Clara, oh, certainly, certainly: you are
right. They are laughable, contemptible. But understand me. I
mean, we cannot feel, or if we feel we cannot so intensely feel,
our oneness, except by dividing ourselves from the world."

"Is it an art?"

"If you like. It is our poetry! But does not love shun the world?
Two that love must have their sustenance in isolation."

"No: they will be eating themselves up."

"The purer the beauty, the more it will be out of the world."

"But not opposed."

"Put it in this way," Willoughby condescended. "Has experience
the same opinion of the world as ignorance?"

"It should have more charity."

"Does virtue feel at home in the world?"

"Where it should be an example, to my idea."

"Is the world agreeable to holiness?"

"Then, are you in favour of monasteries?"

He poured a little runlet of half laughter over her head, of the
sound assumed by genial compassion.

It is irritating to hear that when we imagine we have spoken to
the point.

"Now in my letters, Clara . . ."

"I have no memory, Willoughby!"

"You will, however, have observed that I am not completely
myself in my letters . . ."

"In your letters to men you may be."

The remark threw a pause across his thoughts. He was of a
sensitiveness terribly tender. A single stroke on it reverberated
swellingly within the man, and most, and infuriately searching, at
the spots where he had been wounded, especially where he feared
the world might have guessed the wound. Did she imply that he had
no hand for love-letters? Was it her meaning that women would not
have much taste for his epistolary correspondence? She had spoken
in the plural, with an accent on "men". Had she heard of
Constantia? Had she formed her own judgement about the creature?
The supernatural sensitiveness of Sir Willoughby shrieked a peal
of affirmatives. He had often meditated on the moral obligation of
his unfolding to Clara the whole truth of his conduct to
Constantia; for whom, as for other suicides, there were excuses.
He at least was bound to supply them. She had behaved badly; but
had he not given her some cause? If so, manliness was bound to
confess it.

Supposing Clara heard the world's version first! Men whose pride
is their backbone suffer convulsions where other men are barely
aware of a shock, and Sir Willoughby was taken with galvanic
jumpings of the spirit within him, at the idea of the world
whispering to Clara that he had been jilted.

"My letters to men, you say, my love?"

"Your letters of business."

"Completely myself in my letters of business?" He stared indeed.

She relaxed the tension of his figure by remarking: "You are able
to express yourself to men as your meaning dictates. In writing
to ... to us it is, I suppose, more difficult."

"True, my love. I will not exactly say difficult. I can
acknowledge no difficulty. Language, I should say, is not fitted
to express emotion. Passion rejects it."

"For dumb-show and pantomime?"

"No; but the writing of it coldly."

"Ah, coldly!"

"My letters disappoint you?"

"I have not implied that they do."

"My feelings, dearest, are too strong for transcription. I feel,
pen in hand, like the mythological Titan at war with Jove, strong
enough to hurl mountains, and finding nothing but pebbles. The
simile is a good one. You must not judge of me by my letters."

"I do not; I like them," said Clara.

She blushed, eyed him hurriedly, and seeing him complacent,
resumed, "I prefer the pebble to the mountain; but if you read
poetry you would not think human speech incapable of. . ."

"My love, I detest artifice. Poetry is a profession."

"Our poets would prove to you . . ."

"As I have often observed, Clara, I am no poet."

"I have not accused you, Willoughby:

"No poet, and with no wish to be a poet. Were I one, my life would
supply material, I can assure you, my love. My conscience is not
entirely at rest. Perhaps the heaviest matter troubling it is that
in which I was least wilfully guilty. You have heard of a Miss
Durham?"

"I have heard--yes--of her."

"She may be happy. I trust she is. If she is not, I cannot escape
some blame. An instance of the difference between myself and the
world, now. The world charges it upon her. I have interceded to
exonerate her."

"That was generous, Willoughby."

"Stay. I fear I was the primary offender. But I, Clara, I, under
a sense of honour, acting under a sense of honour, would have
carried my engagement through."

"What had you done?"

"The story is long, dating from an early day, in the 'downy
antiquity of my youth', as Vernon says."

"Mr. Whitford says that?"

"One of old Vernon's odd sayings. It's a story of an early
fascination."

"Papa tells me Mr. Whitford speaks at times with wise
humour."

"Family considerations--the lady's health among other things; her
position in the calculations of relatives--intervened. Still
there was the fascination. I have to own it. Grounds for feminine
jealousy."

"Is it at an end?"

"Now? with you? my darling Clara! indeed at an end, or could I
have opened my inmost heart to you! Could I have spoken of myself
so unreservedly that in part you know me as I know myself! Oh, but
would it have been possible to enclose you with myself in that
intimate union? so secret, unassailable!"

"You did not speak to her as you speak to me?"

"In no degree."

"What could have! . . ." Clara checked the murmured exclamation.

Sir Willoughby's expoundings on his latest of texts would have
poured forth, had not a footman stepped across the lawn to inform
him that his builder was in the laboratory and requested
permission to consult with him.

Clara's plea of a horror of the talk of bricks and joists excused
her from accompanying him. He had hardly been satisfied by her
manner, he knew not why. He left her, convinced that he must do
and say more to reach down to her female intelligence.

She saw young Crossjay, springing with pots of jam in him, join
his patron at a bound, and taking a lift of arms, fly aloft,
clapping heels. Her reflections were confused. Sir Willoughby was
admirable with the lad. "Is he two men?" she thought; and the
thought ensued, "Am I unjust?" She headed a run with young
Crossjay to divert her mind.

CHAPTER VIII

A Run with the Truant; a Walk with the Master

The sight of Miss Middleton running inflamed young Crossjay with
the passion of the game of hare and hounds. He shouted a
view-halloo, and flung up his legs. She was fleet; she ran as
though a hundred little feet were bearing her onward smooth as
water over the lawn and the sweeps of grass of the park, so
swifily did the hidden pair multiply one another to speed her. So
sweet was she in her flowing pace, that the boy, as became his
age, translated admiration into a dogged frenzy of pursuit, and
continued pounding along, when far outstripped, determined to run
her down or die. Suddenly her flight wound to an end in a dozen
twittering steps, and she sank. Young Crossjay attained her,
with just breath enough to say: "You are a runner!"

"I forgot you had been having your tea, my poor boy," said she.

"And you don't pant a bit!" was his encomium.

"Dear me, no; not more than a bird. You might as well try to catch
a bird."

Young Crossjay gave a knowing nod. "Wait till I get my second
wind."

"Now you must confess that girls run faster than boys."

"They may at the start."

"They do everything better."

"They're flash-in-the-pans."

"They learn their lessons."

"You can't make soldiers or sailors of them, though."

"And that is untrue. Have you never read of Mary Ambree? and
Mistress Hannah Snell of Pondicherry? And there was the bride of
the celebrated William Taylor. And what do you say to Joan of
Arc? What do you say to Boadicea? I suppose you have never heard
of the Amazons."

"They weren't English."

"Then it is your own countrywomen you decry, sir!"

Young Crossjay betrayed anxiety about his false position, and
begged for the stories of Mary Ambree and the others who were
English.

"See, you will not read for yourself, you hide and play truant
with Mr. Whitford, and the consequence is you are ignorant of your
country's history."

Miss Middleton rebuked him, enjoying his wriggle between a
perception of her fun and an acknowledgment of his peccancy. She
commanded him to tell her which was the glorious Valentine's day
of our naval annals; the name of the hero of the day, and the name
of his ship. To these questions his answers were as ready as the
guns of the good ship Captain, for the Spanish four-decker.

"And that you owe to Mr. Whitford," said Miss Middleton.

"He bought me the books," young Crossjay growled, and plucked at
grass blades and bit thern, foreseeing dimly but certainly the
termination of all this.

Miss Middleton lay back on the grass and said: "Are you going to
be fond of me, Crossjay?"

The boy sat blinking. His desire was to prove to her that lie was
immoderately fond of her already; and he might have flown at her
neck had she been sitting up, but her recumbency and eyelids half
closed excited wonder in him and awe. His young heart beat fast.

"Because, my dear boy," she said, leaning on her elbow, "you are a
very nice boy, but an ungrateful boy, and there is no telling
whether you will not punish any one who cares for you. Come along
with me; pluck me some of these cowslips, and the speedwells near
them; I think we both love wild-flowers." She rose and took his
arm. "You shall row me on the lake while I talk to you seriously."

It was she, however, who took the sculls at the boat-house, for
she had been a playfellow with boys, and knew that one of them
engaged in a manly exercise is not likely to listen to a woman.

"Now, Crossjay," she said. Dense gloom overcame him like a cowl.
She bent across her hands to laugh. "As if I were going to lecture
you, you silly boy!" He began to brighten dubiously. "I used to be
as fond of birdsnesting as you are. I like brave boys, and I like
you for wanting to enter the Royal Navy. Only, how can you if you
do not learn? You must get the captains to pass you, you know.
Somebody spoils you: Miss Dale or Mr. Whitford."

"Do they?" sung out young Crossjay.

"Sir Willoughby does?"

"I don't know about spoil. I can come round him."

"I am sure he is very kind to you. I dare say you think Mr.
Whitford rather severe. You should remember he has to teach you,
so that you may pass for the navy. You must not dislike him
because he makes you work. Supposing you had blown yourself up
to-day! You would have thought it better to have been working with
Mr. Whitford."

"Sir Willoughby says, when he's married, you won't let me hide."

"Ah! It is wrong to pet a big boy like you. Does not he what you
call tip you, Crossjay?"

"Generally half-crown pieces. I've had a crown-piece. I've had
sovereigns."

"And for that you do as he bids you? And he indulges you because
you ... Well, but though Mr. Whitford does not give you money, he
gives you his time, he tries to get you into the navy."

"He pays for me."

"What do you say?"

"My keep. And, as for liking him, if he were at the bottom of the
water here, I'd go down after him. I mean to learn. We're both of
us here at six o'clock in the morning, when it's light, and have a
swim. He taught me. Only, I never cared for schoolbooks."

"Are you quite certain that Mr. Whitford pays for you."

"My father told me he did, and I must obey him. He heard my father
was poor, with a family. He went down to see my father. My father
came here once, and Sir Willoughby wouldn't see him. I know Mr.
Whitford does. And Miss Dale told me he did. My mother says she
thinks he does it to make up to us for my father's long walk in
the rain and the cold he caught coming here to Patterne."

"So you see you should not vex him, Crossjay. He is a good friend
to your father and to you. You ought to love him."

"I like him, and I like his face."

"Why his face?"

"It's not like those faces! Miss Dale and I talk about him. She
thinks that Sir Willoughby is the best-looking man ever born."

"Were you not speaking of Mr. Whitford?"

"Yes; old Vernon. That's what Sir Willoughby calls him," young
Crossjay excused himself to her look of surprise. "Do you know
what he makes me think of?--his eyes, I mean. He makes me think
of Robinson Crusoe's old goat in the cavern. I like him because
he's always the same, and you're not positive about some people.
Miss Middleton, if you look on at cricket, in comes a safe man for
ten runs. He may get more, and he never gets less; and you should
hear the old farmers talk of him in the booth. That's just my
feeling."

Miss Middleton understood that some illustration from the
cricketing-field was intended to throw light on the boy's feeling
for Mr. Whitford. Young Crossjay was evidently warming to speak
from his heart. But the sun was low, she had to dress for the
dinner-table, and she landed him with regret, as at a holiday
over. Before they parted, he offered to swim across the lake in
his clothes, or dive to the bed for anything she pleased to throw,
declaring solemnly that it should not he lost.

She walked back at a slow pace, and sung to herself above her
darker-flowing thoughts, like the reed-warbler on the branch
beside the night-stream; a simple song of a lighthearted sound,
independent of the shifting black and grey of the flood
underneath.

A step was at her heels.

"I see you have been petting my scapegrace."

"Mr. Whitford! Yes; not petting, I hope. I tried to give him a
lecture. He's a dear lad, but, I fancy, trying."

She was in fine sunset colour, unable to arrest the mounting tide.
She had been rowing, she said; and, as he directed his eyes,
according to his wont, penetratingly, she defended herself by
fixing her mind on Robinson Crusoe's old goat in the recess of the
cavern.

"I must have him away from here very soon," said Vernon. "Here
he's quite spoiled. Speak of him to Willoughby. I can't guess at
his ideas of the boy's future, but the chance of passing for the
navy won't bear trifling with, and if ever there was a lad made
for the navy, it's Crossjay."

The incident of the explosion in the laboratory was new to Vernon.

"And Willoughby laughed?" he said. "There are sea-port crammers
who stuff young fellows for examination, and we shall have to pack
off the boy at once to the best one of the lot we can find. I
would rather have had him under me up to the last three months,
and have made sure of some roots to what is knocked into his head.
But he's ruined here. And I am going. So I shall not trouble him
for many weeks longer. Dr. Middleton is well?"

"My father is well, yes. He pounced like a falcon on your notes in
the library."

Vernon came out with a chuckle.

"They were left to attract him. I am in for a controversy.

"Papa will not spare you, to judge from his look."

"I know the look."

"Have you walked far to-day?"

"Nine and a half hours. My Flibbertigibbet 8 is too much for me at
times, and I had to walk off my temper."

She cast her eyes on him, thinking of the pleasure of dealing with
a temper honestly coltish, and manfully open to a specific.

"All those hours were required?"

"Not quite so long."

"You are training for your Alpine tour."

"It's doubtful whether I shall get to the Alps this year. I leave
the Hall, and shall probably be in London with a pen to sell."

"Willoughby knows that you leave him?"

"As much as Mont Blanc knows that he is going to be climbed by a
party below. He sees a speck or two in the valley."

"He has not spoken of it."

"He would attribute it to changes . . ."

Vernon did not conclude the sentence.

She became breathless, without emotion, but checked by the barrier
confronting an impulse to ask, what changes? She stooped to pluck
a cowslip.

"I saw daffodils lower down the park," she said. "One or two;
they're nearly over."

"We are well off for wild flowers here," he answered.

"Do not leave him, Mr. Whitford."

"He will not want me."

"You are devoted to him."

"I can't pretend that."

"Then it is the changes you imagine you foresee ... If any occur,
why should they drive you away?"

"Well, I'm two and thirty, and have never been in the fray: a
kind of nondescript, half scholar, and by nature half billman or
bowman or musketeer; if I'm worth anything, London's the field for
me. But that's what I have to try."

"Papa will not like your serving with your pen in London: he will
say you are worth too much for that."

"Good men are at it; I should not care to be ranked above them."

"They are wasted, he says."

"Error! If they have their private ambition, they may suppose they
are wasted. But the value to the world of a private ambition, I do
not clearly understand."

"You have not an evil opinion of the world?" said Miss Middleton,
sick at heart as she spoke, with the sensation of having invited
herself to take a drop of poison.

He replied: "One might as well have an evil opinion of a river:
here it's muddy, there it's clear; one day troubled, another at
rest. We have to treat it with common sense."

"Love it?"

"In the sense of serving it."

"Not think it beautiful?"

"Part of it is, part of it the reverse."

"Papa would quote the 'mulier formosa'".

"Except that 'fish' is too good for the black extremity. 'Woman'
is excellent for the upper."

"How do you say that?--not cynically, I believe. Your view
commends itself to my reason."

She was grateful to him for not stating it in ideal contrast with
Sir Willoughby's view. If he had, so intensely did her youthful
blood desire to be enamoured of the world, that she felt he would
have lifted her off her feet. For a moment a gulf beneath had been
threatening. When she said, "Love it?" a little enthusiasm would
have wafted her into space fierily as wine; but the sober, "In the
sense of serving it", entered her brain, and was matter for
reflection upon it and him.

She could think of him in pleasant liberty, uncorrected by her
woman's instinct of peril. He had neither arts nor graces; nothing
of his cousin's easy social front-face. She had once witnessed the
military precision of his dancing, and had to learn to like him
before she ceased to pray that she might never be the victim of it
as his partner. He walked heroically, his pedestrian vigour being
famous, but that means one who walks away from the sex, not
excelling in the recreations where men and women join hands. He
was not much of a horseman either. Sir Willoughby enjoyed seeing
him on horseback. And he could scarcely be said to shine in a
drawingroom, unless when seated beside a person ready for real
talk. Even more than his merits, his demerits pointed him out as
a man to be a friend to a young woman who wanted one. His way of
life pictured to her troubled spirit an enviable smoothness; and
his having achieved that smooth way she considered a sign of
strength; and she wished to lean in idea upon some friendly
strength. His reputation for indifference to the frivolous charms
of girls clothed him with a noble coldness, and gave him the
distinction of a far-seen solitary iceberg in Southern waters. The
popular notion of hereditary titled aristocracy resembles her
sentiment for a man that would not flatter and could not be
flattered by her sex: he appeared superior almost to awfulness.
She was young, but she had received much flattery in her ears, and
by it she had been snared; and he, disdaining to practise the
fowler's arts or to cast a thought on small fowls, appeared to her
to have a pride founded on natural loftiness.

They had not spoken for awhile, when Vernon said abruptly, "The
boy's future rather depends on you, Miss Middleton. I mean to
leave as soon as possible, and I do not like his being here
without me, though you will look after him, I have no doubt. But
you may not at first see where the spoiling hurts him. He should
be packed off at once to the crammer, before you are Lady
Patterne. Use your influence. Willoughby will support the lad at
your request. The cost cannot be great. There are strong grounds
against my having him in London, even if I could manage it. May I
count on you?"