The Egoist

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He requested her to wear the Patterne pearls for a dinner-party of
grand ladies, telling her that he would commission Miss Isabel to
take them to her. Clara begged leave to decline them, on the plea
of having no right to wear them. He laughed at her modish modesty.
"But really it might almost be classed with affectation," said he.
"I give you the right. Virtually you are my wife."

"No."

"Before heaven?"

"No. We are not married."

"As my betrothed, will you wear them, to please me?"

"I would rather not. I cannot wear borrowed jewels. These I cannot
wear. Forgive me, I cannot. And, Willoughby," she said, scorning
herself for want of fortitude in not keeping to the simply blunt
provocative refusal, "does one not look like a victim decked for
the sacrifice?--the garlanded heifer you see on Greek vases, in
that array of jewellery?"

"My dear Clara!" exclaimed the astonished lover, "how can you term
them borrowed, when they are the Patterne jewels, our family
heirloom pearls, unmatched, I venture to affirm, decidedly in my
county and many others, and passing to the use of the mistress of
the house in the natural course of things?"

"They are yours, they are not mine."

"Prospectively they are yours."

"It would be to anticipate the fact to wear them."

"With my consent, my approval? at my request?"

"I am not yet . . . I never may be . . ."

"My wife?" He laughed triumphantly, and silenced her by manly
smothering.

Her scruple was perhaps an honourable one, he said. Perhaps the
jewels were safer in their iron box. He had merely intended a
surprise and gratification to her.

Courage was coming to enable her to speak more plainly, when his
discontinuing to insist on her wearing the jewels, under an
appearance of deference of her wishes, disarmed her by touching
her sympathies.

She said, however, "I fear we do not often agree, Willoughby."

"When you are a little older!" was the irritating answer.

"It would then be too late to make the discovery."

"The discovery, I apprehend, is not imperative, my love."

"It seems to me that our minds are opposed."

"I should," said he, "have been awake to it at a single
indication, be sure."

"But I know," she pursued, "I have learned that the ideal of
conduct for women is to subject their minds to the part of an
accompaniment."

"For women, my love? my wife will be in natural harmony with me."

"Ah!" She compressed her lips. The yawn would come. "I am sleepier
here than anywhere."

"Ours, my Clara, is the finest air of the kingdom. It has the
effect of sea-air."

"But if I am always asleep here?"

"We shall have to make a public exhibition of the Beauty."

This dash of his liveliness defeated her.

She left him, feeling the contempt of the brain feverishly
quickened and fine-pointed, for the brain chewing the cud in the
happy pastures of unawakedness. So violent was the fever, so keen
her introspection, that she spared few, and Vernon was not among
them. Young Crossjay, whom she considered the least able of all to
act as an ally, was the only one she courted with a real desire to
please him, he was the one she affectionately envied; he was the
youngest, the freest, he had the world before him, and he did not
know how horrible the world was, or could be made to look. She
loved the boy from expecting nothing of him. Others, Vernon
Whitford, for instance, could help, and moved no hand. He read her
case. A scrutiny so penetrating under its air of abstract
thoughtfulness, though his eyes did but rest on her a second or
two, signified that he read her line by line, and to the end--
excepting what she thought of him for probing her with that sharp
steel of insight without a purpose.

She knew her mind's injustice. It was her case, her lamentable
case--the impatient panic-stricken nerves of a captured wild
creature which cried for help. She exaggerated her sufferings to
get strength to throw them off, and lost it in the recognition
that they were exaggerated: and out of the conflict issued
recklessness, with a cry as wild as any coming of madness; for she
did not blush in saying to herself. "If some one loved me!" Before
hearing of Constantia, she had mused upon liberty as a virgin
Goddess--men were out of her thoughts; even the figure of a
rescuer, if one dawned in her mind, was more angel than hero. That
fair childish maidenliness had ceased. With her body straining in
her dragon's grasp, with the savour of loathing, unable to
contend, unable to speak aloud, she began to speak to herself, and
all the health of her nature made her outcry womanly: "If I were
loved!"--not for the sake of love, but for free breathing; and
her utterance of it was to insure life and enduringness to the
wish, as the yearning of a mother on a drowning ship is to get her
infant to shore. "If some noble gentleman could see me as I am and
not disdain to aid me! Oh! to be caught up out of this prison of
thorns and brambles. I cannot tear my own way out. I am a coward.
My cry for help confesses that. A beckoning of a finger would
change me, I believe. I could fly bleeding and through hootings to
a comrade. Oh! a comrade! I do not want a lover. I should find
another Egoist, not so bad, but enough to make me take a breath
like death. I could follow a soldier, like poor Sally or Molly. He
stakes his life for his country, and a woman may be proud of the
worst of men who do that. Constantia met a soldier. Perhaps she
prayed and her prayer was answered. She did ill. But, oh, how I
love her for it! His name was Harry Oxford. Papa would call him
her Perseus. She must have felt that there was no explaining what
she suffered. She had only to act, to plunge. First she fixed her
mind on Harry Oxford. To be able to speak his name and see him
awaiting her, must have been relief, a reprieve. She did not
waver, she cut the links, she signed herself over. Oh, brave girl!
what do you think of me? But I have no Harry Whitford, I am alone.
Let anything be said against women; we must be very bad to have
such bad things written of us: only, say this, that to ask them to
sign themselves over by oath and ceremony, because of an ignorant
promise, to the man they have been mistaken in, is . . . it is--"
the sudden consciousness that she had put another name for Oxford,
struck her a buffet, drowning her in crimson.

CHAPTER XI

The Double-Blossom Wild Cherry-Tree

Sir Willoughby chose a moment when Clara was with him and he had a
good retreat through folding-windows to the lawn, in case of
cogency on the enemy's part, to attack his cousin regarding the
preposterous plot to upset the family by a scamper to London: "By
the way, Vernon, what is this you've been mumbling to everybody
save me, about leaving us to pitch yourself into the stew-pot and
be made broth of? London is no better, and you are fit for
considerably better. Don't, I beg you, continue to annoy me. Take
a run abroad, if you are restless. Take two or three months, and
join us as we are travelling home; and then think of settling,
pray. Follow my example, if you like. You can have one of my
cottages, or a place built for you. Anything to keep a man from
destroying the sense of stability about one. In London, my dear
old fellow, you lose your identity. What are you there? I ask you,
what? One has the feeling of the house crumbling when a man is
perpetually for shifting and cannot fix himself. Here you are
known, you can study at your ease; up in London you are nobody; I
tell you honestly, I feel it myself., a week of London literally
drives me home to discover the individual where I left him. Be
advised. You don't mean to go."

"I have the intention," said Vernon.

"Why?"

"I've mentioned it to you."

"To my face?"

"Over your shoulder is generally the only chance you give me."

"You have not mentioned it to me, to my knowledge. As to the
reason, I might hear a dozen of your reasons, and I should not
understand one. It's against your interests and against my wishes.
Come, friend, I am not the only one you distress. Why, Vernon, you
yourself have said that the English would be very perfect Jews if
they could manage to live on the patriarchal system. You said it,
yes, you said it!--but I recollect it clearly. Oh, as for your
double-meanings, you said the thing, and you jeered at the
incapacity of English families to live together, on account of bad
temper; and now you are the first to break up our union! I
decidedly do not profess to be a perfect Jew, but I do . . ."

Sir Willoughby caught signs of a probably smiling commerce between
his bride and his cousin. He raised his face, appeared to be
consulting his eyelids, and resolved to laugh: "Well, I own it. I
do like the idea of living patriarchally." He turned to Clara.
"The Rev. Doctor one of us!"

"My father?" she said.

"Why not?"

"Papa's habits are those of a scholar."

"That you might not be separated from him, my dear!"

Clara thanked Sir Willoughby for the kindness of thinking of her
father, mentally analysing the kindness, in which at least she
found no unkindness, scarcely egoism, though she knew it to be
there.

"We might propose it," said he..

"As a compliment?"

"If he would condescend to accept it as a compliment. These great
scholars! ... And if Vernon goes, our inducement for Dr. Middleton
to stay ... But it is too absurd for discussion.. Oh, Vernon,
about Master Crossjay; I will see to it."

He was about to give Vernon his shoulder and step into the
garden, when Clara said, "You will have Crossjay trained for the
navy, Willoughby? There is not a day to lose."

"Yes, yes; I will see to it. Depend on me for holding the young
rascal in view."

He presented his hand to her to lead her over the step to the
gravel, surprised to behold how flushed she was.

She responded to the invitation by putting her hand forth from a
bent elbow, with hesitating fingers. "It should not be postponed,
Willoughby."

Her attitude suggested a stipulation before she touched him.

"It's an affair of money, as you know, Willoughby," said Vernon.
"If I'm in London, I can't well provide for the boy for some time
to come, or it's not certain that I can."

"Why on earth should you go?"

"That's another matter. I want you to take my place with him."

"In which case the circumstances are changed. I am responsible for
him, and I have a right to bring him up according to my own
prescription."

"We are likely to have one idle lout the more."

"I guarantee to make a gentleman of him."

"We have too many of your gentlemen already."

"You can't have enough, my good Vernon."

"They're the national apology for indolence. Training a penniless
boy to be one of them is nearly as bad as an education in a
thieves" den; he will be just as much at war with society, if not
game for the police."

"Vernon, have you seen Crossjay's father, the now Captain of
Marines? I think you have."

"He's a good man and a very gallant officer."

"And in spite of his qualities he's a cub, and an old cub. He is a
captain now, but he takes that rank very late, you will own. There
you have what you call a good man, undoubtedly a gallant officer,
neutralized by the fact that he is not a gentleman. Holding
intercourse with him is out of the question. No wonder Government
declines to advance him rapidly. Young Crossjay does not bear your
name. He bears mine, and on that point alone I should have a voice
in the settlement of his career. And I say emphatically that a
drawing-room approval of a young man is the best certificate for
his general chances in life. I know of a City of London merchant
of some sort, and I know a firm of lawyers, who will have none but
University men at their office; at least, they have the
preference."

"Crossjay has a bullet head, fit neither for the University nor
the drawing-room," said Vernon; "equal to fighting and dying for
you, and that's all."

Sir Willoughby contented himself with replying, "The lad is a
favourite of mine."

His anxiety to escape a rejoinder caused him to step into the
garden, leaving Clara behind him. "My love!" said he, in apology,
as he turned to her. She could not look stern, but she had a look
without a dimple to soften it, and her eyes shone. For she had
wagered in her heart that the dialogue she provoked upon Crossjay
would expose the Egoist. And there were other motives, wrapped up
and intertwisted, unrecognizable, sufficient to strike her with
worse than the flush of her self-knowledge of wickedness when she
detained him to speak of Crossjay before Vernon.

At last it had been seen that she was conscious of suffering in
her association with this Egoist! Vernon stood for the world taken
into her confidence. The world, then, would not think so ill of
her, she thought hopefully, at the same time that she thought most
evilly of herself. But self-accusations were for the day of
reckoning; she would and must have the world with her, or the
belief that it was coming to her, in the terrible struggle she
foresaw within her horizon of self, now her utter boundary. She
needed it for the inevitable conflict. Little sacrifices of her
honesty might be made. Considering how weak she was, how solitary,
how dismally entangled, daily disgraced beyond the power of any
veiling to conceal from her fiery sensations, a little hypocrisy
was a poor girl's natural weapon. She crushed her conscientious
mind with the assurance that it was magnifying trifles: not
entirely unaware that she was thereby preparing it for a
convenient blindness in the presence of dread alternatives; but
the pride of laying such stress on small sins gave her purity a
blush of pleasure and overcame the inner warning. In truth she
dared not think evilly of herself for long, sailing into battle as
she was. Nuns and anchorites may; they have leisure. She regretted
the forfeits she had to pay for self-assistance, and, if it might
be won, the world's; regretted, felt the peril of the loss, and
took them up and flung them.

"You see, old Vernon has no argument," Willoughby said to her.

He drew her hand more securely on his arm to make her sensible that
she leaned on a pillar of strength.

"Whenever the little brain is in doubt, perplexed, undecided which
course to adopt, she will come to me, will she not? I shall always
listen," he resumed, soothingly. "My own! and I to you when the
world vexes me. So we round our completeness. You will know me;
you will know me in good time. I am not a mystery to those to whom
I unfold myself. I do not pretend to mystery: yet, I will confess,
your home--your heart's--Willoughby is not exactly identical with
the Willoughby before the world. One must be armed against that
rough beast."

Certain is the vengeance of the young upon monotony; nothing more
certain. They do not scheme it, but sameness is a poison to their
systems; and vengeance is their heartier breathing, their stretch
of the limbs, run in the fields; nature avenges them.

"When does Colonel De Craye arrive?" said Clara.

"Horace? In two or three days. You wish him to be on the spot to
learn his part, my love?"

She had not flown forward to the thought of Colonel De Craye's
arrival; she knew not why she had mentioned him; but now she flew
back, shocked, first into shadowy subterfuge, and then into the
criminal's dock.

"I do not wish him to be here. I do not know that he has a part to
learn. I have no wish. Willoughby, did you not say I should come
to you and you would listen?--will you listen? I am so
commonplace that I shall not be understood by you unless you take
my words for the very meaning of the words. I am unworthy. I am
volatile. I love my liberty. I want to be free . . ."

"Flitch!" he called.

It sounded necromantic.

"Pardon me, my love," he said. "The man you see yonder violates my
express injunction that he is not to come on my grounds, and here
I find him on the borders of my garden!"

Sir Willoughby waved his hand to the abject figure of a man
standing to intercept him.

"Volatile, unworthy, liberty--my dearest!" he bent to her when
the man had appeased him by departing, "you are at liberty within
the law, like all good women; I shall control and direct your
volatility; and your sense of worthiness must be re-established
when we are more intimate; it is timidity. The sense of
unworthiness is a guarantee of worthiness ensuing. I believe I am
in the vein of a sermon! Whose the fault? The sight of that man
was annoying. Flitch was a stable-boy, groom, and coachman, like
his father before him, at the Hall thirty years; his father died
in our service. Mr. Flitch had not a single grievance here; only
one day the demon seizes him with the notion of bettering himself
he wants his independence, and he presents himself to me with a
story of a shop in our county town.--Flitch! remember, if you go
you go for good.--Oh, he quite comprehended.--Very well;
good-bye, Flitch;--the man was respectful: he looked the fool he
was very soon to turn out to be. Since then, within a period of
several years, I have had him, against my express injunctions, ten
times on my grounds. It's curious to calculate. Of course the shop
failed, and Flitch's independence consists in walking about with
his hands in his empty pockets, and looking at the Hall from some
elevation near."

"Is he married? Has he children?" said Clara.

"Nine; and a wife that cannot cook or sew or wash linen."

"You could not give him employment?"

"After his having dismissed himself?"

"It might be overlooked."

"Here he was happy. He decided to go elsewhere, to be free--of
course, of my yoke. He quitted my service against my warning.
Flitch, we will say, emigrated with his wife and children, and the
ship foundered. He returns, but his place is filled; he is a ghost
here, and I object to ghosts."

"Some work might be found for him."

"It will be the same with old Vernon, my dear. If he goes, he goes
for good. It is the vital principle of my authority to insist on
that. A dead leaf might as reasonably demand to return to the
tree. Once off, off for all eternity! I am sorry. but such was
your decision, my friend. I have, you see, Clara, elements in
me--"

"Dreadful!"

"Exert your persuasive powers with Vernon. You can do well-nigh
what you will with the old fellow. We have Miss Dale this evening
for a week or two. Lead him to some ideas of her.--Elements in
me, I was remarking, which will no more bear to be handled
carelessly than gunpowder. At the same time, there is no reason
why they should not be respected, managed with some degree of
regard for me and attention to consequences. Those who have not
done so have repented."

"You do not speak to others of the elements in you," said Clara.

"I certainly do not: I have but one bride," was his handsome
reply.

"Is it fair to me that you should show me the worst of you?"

"All myself, my own?"

His ingratiating droop and familiar smile rendered "All myself" so
affectionately meaningful in its happy reliance upon her excess of
love, that at last she understood she was expected to worship him
and uphold him for whatsoever he might be, without any estimation
of qualities: as indeed love does, or young love does: as she
perhaps did once, before he chilled her senses. That was before
her "little brain" had become active and had turned her senses to
revolt.

It was on the full river of love that Sir Willoughby supposed the
whole floating bulk of his personality to be securely sustained;
and therefore it was that, believing himself swimming at his ease,
he discoursed of himself.

She went straight away from that idea with her mental exclamation:
"Why does he not paint himself in brighter colours to me!" and the
question: "Has he no ideal of generosity and chivalry?"

But the unfortunate gentleman imagined himself to be loved, on
Love's very bosom. He fancied that everything relating to himself
excited maidenly curiosity, womanly reverence, ardours to know
more of him, which he was ever willing to satisfy by repeating the
same things. His notion of women was the primitive black and
white: there are good women, bad women; and he possessed a good
one. His high opinion of himself fortified the belief that
Providence, as a matter of justice and fitness, must necessarily
select a good one for him--or what are we to think of Providence?
And this female, shaped by that informing hand, would naturally be
in harmony with him, from the centre of his profound identity to
the raying circle of his variations. Know the centre, you know the
circle, and you discover that the variations are simply
characteristics, but you must travel on the rays from the circle
to get to the centre. Consequently Sir Willoughby put Miss
Middleton on one or other of these converging lines from time to
time. Us, too, he drags into the deeps, but when we have harpooned
a whale and are attached to the rope, down we must go; the miracle
is to see us rise again.

Women of mixed essences shading off the divine to the considerably
lower were outside his vision of woman. His mind could as little
admit an angel in pottery as a rogue in porcelain. For him they
were what they were when fashioned at the beginning; many cracked,
many stained, here and there a perfect specimen designed for the
elect of men. At a whisper of the world he shut the prude's door
on them with a slam; himself would have branded them with the
letters in the hue of fire. Privately he did so; and he was
constituted by his extreme sensitiveness and taste for
ultra-feminine refinement to be a severe critic of them during the
carnival of egoism, the love-season. Constantia ... can it he
told? She had been, be it said, a fair and frank young merchant
with him in that season; she was of a nature to be a mother of
heroes; she met the salute, almost half-way, ingenuously unlike
the coming mothers of the regiments of marionettes, who retire in
vapours, downcast, as by convention; ladies most flattering to the
egoistical gentleman, for they proclaim him the "first".
Constantia's offence had been no greater, but it was not that
dramatic performance of purity which he desired of an affianced
lady, and so the offence was great.

The love-season is the carnival of egoism, and it brings the
touchstone to our natures. I speak of love, not the mask, and not
of the flutings upon the theme of love, but of the passion; a
flame having, like our mortality, death in it as well as life,
that may or may not be lasting. Applied to Sir Willoughby, as to
thousands of civilized males, the touchstone found him requiring
to be dealt with by his betrothed as an original savage. She was
required to play incessantly on the first reclaiming chord which
led our ancestral satyr to the measures of the dance, the
threading of the maze, and the setting conformably to his partner
before it was accorded to him to spin her with both hands and a
chirrup of his frisky heels. To keep him in awe and hold him
enchained, there are things she must never do, dare never say,
must not think. She must be cloistral. Now, strange and awful
though it be to hear, women perceive this requirement of them in
the spirit of the man; they perceive, too, and it may be
gratefully, that they address their performances less to the
taming of the green and prankish monsieur of the forest than to the
pacification of a voracious aesthetic gluttony, craving them
insatiably, through all the tenses, with shrieks of the lamentable
letter "I" for their purity. Whether they see that it has its
foundation in the sensual, and distinguish the ultra-refined but
lineally great-grandson of the Hoof in this vast and dainty
exacting appetite is uncertain. They probably do not; the more the
damage; for in the appeasement of the glutton they have to
practise much simulation; they are in their way losers like their
ancient mothers. It is the palpable and material of them still
which they are tempted to flourish, wherewith to invite and allay
pursuit: a condition under which the spiritual, wherein their hope
lies, languishes. The capaciously strong in soul among women will
ultimately detect an infinite grossness in the demand for purity
infinite, spotless bloom. Earlier or later they see they have been
victims of the singular Egoist, have worn a mask of ignorance to be
named innocent, have turned themselves into market produce for
his delight, and have really abandoned the commodity in
ministering to the lust for it, suffered themselves to be dragged
ages back in playing upon the fleshly innocence of happy accident
to gratify his jealous greed of possession, when it should have
been their task to set the soul above the fairest fortune and the
gift of strength in women beyond ornamental whiteness. Are they
not of nature warriors, like men?--men's mates to bear them
heroes instead of puppets? But the devouring male Egoist prefers
them as inanimate overwrought polished pure metal precious
vessels, fresh from the hands of the artificer, for him to walk
away with hugging, call all his own, drink of, and fill and drink
of, and forget that he stole them.

This running off on a by-road is no deviation from Sir Willoughby
Patterne and Miss Clara Middleton. He, a fairly intelligent man,
and very sensitive, was blinded to what was going on within her
visibly enough, by her production of the article he demanded of
her sex. He had to leave the fair young lady to ride to his
county-town, and his design was to conduct her through the covert
of a group of laurels, there to revel in her soft confusion. She
resisted; nay, resolutely returned to the lawn-sward. He
contrasted her with Constantia in the amorous time, and rejoiced
in his disappointment. He saw the goddess Modesty guarding Purity;
and one would be bold to say that he did not hear the Precepts,
Purity's aged grannams maternal and paternal, cawing approval of
her over their munching gums. And if you ask whether a man,
sensitive and a lover, can be so blinded, you are condemned to
re-peruse the foregoing paragraph.