The Egoist

by George Meredith

  ‘Can my daughter be accused of any shadow of falseness, dishonourable dealing?’

  ‘As little as I.’

  Mr Dale scanned his face. He saw no shadow.

  ‘For I should go to my grave bankrupt if that could be said of her; and I have never yet felt poor, though you know the extent of a pensioner’s income. Then this tale of a refusal…?’

  ‘Is nonsense.’

  ‘She has accepted?’

  ‘There are situations, Mr Dale, too delicate to be clothed in positive definitions.’

  ‘Ah, Sir Willoughby, but it becomes a father to see that his daughter is not forced into delicate situations. I hope all is well. I am confused. It may be my head. She puzzles me. You are not… Can I ask it here? You are quite…? Will you moderate my anxiety? My infirmities must excuse me.’

  Sir Willoughby conveyed by a shake of the head and a pressure of Mr Dale’s hand, that he was not, and that he was quite.

  ‘Dr Middleton?’ said Mr Dale.

  ‘He leaves us to-morrow.’

  ‘Really!’ The invalid wore a look as if wine had been poured into him. He routed his host’s calculations by calling to the Rev. Doctor. ‘We are to lose you, sir?’

  Willoughby attempted an interposition, but Dr Middleton crashed through it like the lordly organ swallowing a flute.

  ‘Not before I score my victory, Mr Dale, and establish my friend upon his rightful throne.’

  ‘You do not leave to-morrow, sir?’

  ‘Have you heard, sir, that I leave to-morrow?’

  Mr Dale turned to Sir Willoughby.

  The latter said: ‘Clara named to-day. To-morrow I thought preferable.’

  ‘Ah!’ Dr Middleton towered on the swelling exclamation, but with no dark light. He radiated splendidly. ‘Yes, then, to-morrow. That is, if we subdue the lady.’

  He advanced to Willoughby, seized his hand, squeezed it, thanked him, praised him. He spoke under his breath, for a wonder; but: ‘We are in your debt lastingly, my friend’, was heard, and he was impressive, he seemed subdued, and saying aloud: ‘Though I should wish to aid in the reduction of that fortress’, he let it be seen that his mind was rid of a load.

  Dr Middleton partly stupefied Willoughby by his way of taking it, but his conduct was too serviceable to allow of speculation on his readiness to break the match. It was the turning-point of the engagement.

  Lady Busshe made a stir.

  ‘I cannot keep my horses waiting any longer,’ she said, and beckoned. Sir Willoughby was beside her immediately. ‘You are admirable! perfect! Don’t ask me to hold my tongue. I retract, I recant. It is a fatality. I have resolved upon that view. You could stand the shot of beauty, not of brains. That is our report. There! And it’s delicious to feel that the county wins you. No tea. I cannot possibly wait. And, oh! here she is. I must have a look at her. My dear Laetitia Dale!’

  Willoughby hurried to Mr Dale!

  ‘You are not to be excited, sir: compose yourself. You will recover and be strong to-morrow: you are at home; you are in your own house; you are in Laetitia’s drawing-room. All will be clear to-morrow. Till to-morrow we talk riddles by consent. Sit, I beg. You stay with us.’

  He met Laetitia and rescued her from Lady Busshe, murmuring, with the air of a lover who says, ‘my love! my sweet!’ that she had done rightly to come and come at once.

  Her father had been thrown into the proper condition of clammy nervousness to create the impression. Laetitia’s anxiety sat prettily on her long eyelashes as she bent over him in his chair.

  Hereupon Dr Corney appeared; and his name had a bracing effect on Mr Dale. ‘Corney has come to drive me to the cottage,’ he said. ‘I am ashamed of this public exhibition of myself my dear. Let us go. My head is a poor one.’

  Dr Corney had been intercepted. He broke from Sir Willoughby with a dozen little nods of accurate understanding of him, even to beyond the mark of the communications. He touched his patient’s pulse lightly, briefly sighed with professional composure, and pronounced: ‘Rest. Must not be moved. No, no, nothing serious,’ he quieted Laetitia’s fears, ‘but rest, rest. A change of residence for a night will tone him. I will bring him a draught in the course of the evening. Yes, yes, I’ll fetch everything wanted from the cottage for you and for him. Repose on Corney’s forethought.’

  ‘You are sure, Dr Corney?’ said Laetitia, frightened on her father’s account and on her own.

  ‘Which aspect will be the best for Mr Dale’s bedroom?’ the hospitable ladies Eleanor and Isabel inquired.

  ‘South east, decidedly: let him have the morning sun: a warm air, a vigorous air, and a bright air, and the patient wakes and sings in his bed.’

  Still doubtful whether she was in a trap, Laetitia whispered to her father of the privacy and comforts of his home.

  He replied to her that he thought he would rather be in his own home.

  Dr Corney positively pronounced No to it.

  Laetitia breathed again of home, but with the sigh of one overborne.

  The ladies Eleanor and Isabel took the word from Willoughby, and said: ‘But you are at home, my dear. This is your home. Your father will be at least as well attended here as at the cottage.’

  She raised her eyelids on them mournfully, and by chance diverted her look to Dr Middleton, quite by chance.

  It spoke eloquently to the assembly of all that Willoughby desired to be imagined.

  ‘But there is Crossjay,’ she cried. ‘My cousin has gone, and the boy is left alone. I cannot have him left alone. If we, if, Dr Corney, you are sure it is unsafe for papa to be moved to-day, Crossjay must… he cannot be left.’

  ‘Bring him with you, Corney,’ said Sir Willoughby; and the little doctor heartily promised that he would, in the event of his finding Crossjay at the cottage, which he thought a distant probability.

  ‘He gave me his word he would not go out till my return,’ said Laetitia.

  ‘And if Crossjay gave you his word,’ the accents of a new voice vibrated close by, ‘be certain that he will not come back with Dr Corney unless he has authority in your handwriting.’

  Clara Middleton stepped gently to Laetitia, and with a manner that was an embrace, as much as kissed her for what she was doing on behalf of Crossjay. She put her lips in a pouting form to simulate saying: ‘Press it.’

  ‘He is to come,’ said Laetitia.

  ‘Then write him his permit.’

  There was a chatter about Crossjay and the sentinel true to his post that he could be, during which Laetitia distressfully scribbled a line for Dr Corney to deliver to him. Clara stood near. She had rebuked herself for want of reserve in the presence of Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer, and she was guilty of a slightly excessive containment when she next addressed Laetitia. It was, like Laetitia’s look at Dr Middleton, opportune: enough to make a man who watched as Willoughby did a fatalist for life: the shadow of a difference in her bearing toward Laetitia sufficed to impute acting either to her present coolness or her previous warmth. Better still, when Dr Middleton said: ‘So we leave to-morrow, my dear, and I hope you have written to the Darletons’, Clara flushed and beamed, and repressed her animation on a sudden, with one grave look, that might be thought regretful, to where Willoughby stood.

  Chance works for us when we are good captains.

  Willoughby’s pride was high, though he knew himself to be keeping it up like a fearfully dexterous juggler, and for an empty reward: but he was in the toils of the world.

  ‘Have you written? The post-bag leaves in half an hour,’ he addressed her.

  ‘We are expected, but I will write,’ she replied: and her not having yet written counted in his favour.

  She went to write the letter. Dr Corney had departed on his mission to fetch Crossjay and medicine. Lady Busshe was impatient to be gone. ‘Corney,’ she said to Lady Culmer, ‘is a deadly gossip.’

  ‘Inveterate,’ was the answer.

  ‘My poor horses!’

  ‘Not the young pair o
f bays?’

  ‘Luckily they are, my dear. And don’t let me hear of dining to-night!’

  Sir Willoughby was leading out Mr Dale to a quiet room, contiguous to the invalid gentleman’s bedchamber. He resigned him to Laetitia in the hall, that he might have the pleasure of conducting the ladies to their carriage.

  ‘As little agitation as possible. Corney will soon be back,’ he said, bitterly admiring the graceful subservience of Laetitia’s figure to her father’s weight on her arm.

  He had won a desperate battle, but what had he won? What had the world given him in return for his efforts to gain it? Just a shirt, it might be said: simple scanty clothing, no warmth. Lady Busshe was unbearable; she gabbled; she was ill-bred, permitted herself to speak of Dr Middleton as ineligible, no loss to the county. And Mrs Mountstuart was hardly much above her, with her inevitable stroke of caricature: – ‘You see Doctor Middleton’s pulpit scampering after him with legs!’ Perhaps the Rev. Doctor did punish the world for his having forsaken his pulpit, and might be conceived as haunted by it at his heels, but Willoughby was in the mood to abhor comic images; he hated the perpetrators of them and the grinners. Contempt of this laughing empty world, for which he had performed a monstrous immolation, led him to associate Dr Middleton in his mind, and Clara too, with the desireable things he had sacrificed – a shape of youth and health; a sparkling companion; a face of innumerable charms; and his own veracity; his inner sense of his dignity; and his temper, and the limpid frankness of his air of scorn, that was to him a visage of candid happiness in the dim retrospect. Haply also he had sacrificed more: he looked scientifically into the future: he might have sacrificed a nameless more. And for what? he asked again. For the favourable looks and tongues of these women whose looks and tongues he detested!

  ‘Dr Middleton says he is indebted to me: I am deeply in his debt,’ he remarked.

  ‘It is we who are in your debt for a lovely romance, my dear Sir Willoughby,’ said Lady Busshe, incapable of taking a correction, so thoroughly had he imbued her with his fiction, or with the belief that she had a good story to circulate.

  Away she drove, rattling her tongue to Lady Culmer.

  ‘A hat and horn, and she would be in the old figure of a post-boy on a hue-and-cry sheet,’ said Mrs Mountstuart.

  Willoughby thanked the great lady for her services, and she complimented the polished gentleman on his noble self-possession. But she complained at the same time of being defrauded of her ‘charmer’, Colonel De Craye, since luncheon. An absence of warmth in her compliment caused Willoughby to shrink and think the wretched shirt he had got from the world no covering after all: a breath flapped it.

  ‘He comes to me to-morrow, I believe,’ she said, reflecting on her superior knowledge of facts in comparison with Lady Busshe, who would presently be hearing of something novel, and exclaiming: ‘So, that is why you patronized the colonel!’ And it was nothing of the sort, for Mrs Mountstuart could honestly say she was not the woman to make a business of her pleasure.

  ‘Horace is an enviable fellow,’ said Willoughby, wise in The Book which bids us ever for an assuagement to fancy our friend’s condition worse than our own, and recommends the deglutition of irony as the most balsamic for wounds in the whole moral pharmacopoeia.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, with a marked accent of deliberation.

  ‘The colonel is to have you to himself to-morrow!’

  ‘I can’t be sure of what I shall have in the colonel!’

  ‘Your perpetual sparkler?’

  Mrs Mountstuart set her head in motion. She left the matter silent.

  ‘I’ll come for him in the morning,’ she said, and her carriage whirled her off.

  Either she had guessed it, or Clara had confided to her the treacherous passion of Horace De Craye.

  However, the world was shut away from Patterne for the night.

  CHAPTER 47

  Sir Willoughby and His Friend Horace De Craye

  WILLOUGHBY shut himself up in his laboratory to brood awhile after the conflict. Sounding through himself, as it was habitual with him to do, for the plan most agreeable to his taste, he came on a strange discovery among the lower circles of that microcosm. He was no longer guided in his choice by liking and appetite: he had to put it on the edge of a sharp discrimination, and try it by his acutest judgement before it was acceptable to his heart: and knowing well the direction of his desire, he was nevertheless unable to run two strides on a wish. He had learned to read the world: his partial capacity for reading persons had fled. The mysteries of his own bosom were bare to him; but he could comprehend them only in their immediate relation to the world outside. This hateful world had caught him and transformed him to a machine. The discovery he made was, that in the gratification of the egoistic instinct we may so beset ourselves as to deal a slaughtering wound upon Self to whatsoever quarter we turn.

  Surely there is nothing stranger in mortal experience. The man was confounded. At the game of Chess it is the dishonour of our adversary when we are stale-mated: but in life, combatting the world, such a winning of the game questions our sentiments.

  Willoughby’s interpretation of his discovery was directed by pity: he had no other strong emotion left in him. He pitied himself, and he reached the conclusion that he suffered because he was active; he could not be quiescent. Had it not been for his devotion to his house and name, never would he have stood twice the victim of womankind. Had he been selfish, he would have been the happiest of men! He said it aloud. He schemed benevolently for his unborn young, and for the persons about him: hence he was in a position forbidding a step under pain of injury to his feelings. He was generous: otherwise would he not in scorn of soul, at the outset, straight off have pitched Clara Middleton to the wanton winds? He was faithful in his affection: Laetitia Dale was beneath his roof to prove it. Both these women were examples of his power of forgiveness, and now a tender word to Clara might fasten shame on him – such was her gratitude! And if he did not marry Laetitia, laughter would be devilish all around him –such was the world’s! Probably Vernon would not long be thankful for the chance which varied the monotony of his days. What of Horace? Willoughby stripped to enter the ring with Horace: he cast away disguise. That man had been the first to divide him in the all but equal slices of his egoistic from his amatory self: murder of his individuality was the crime of Horace De Craye. And further, suspicion fixed on Horace (he knew not how, except that The Book bids us be suspicious of those we hate) as the man who had betrayed his recent dealings with Laetitia.

  Willoughby walked the thoroughfares of the house to meet Clara and make certain of her either for himself, or, if it must be, for Vernon, before he took another step with Laetitia Dale. Clara could reunite him, turn him once more into a whole and an animated man; and she might be willing. Her willingness to listen to Vernon promised it. ‘A gentleman with a tongue would have a chance’, Mrs Mountstuart had said. How much greater the chance of a lover! For he had not yet supplicated her: he had shown pride and temper. He could woo, he was a torrential wooer. And it would be glorious to swing round on Lady Busshe and the world, with Clara nestling under an arm, and protest astonishment at the erroneous and utterly unfounded anticipations of any other development. And it would righteously punish Laetitia.

  Clara came downstairs, bearing her letter to Miss Darleton.

  ‘Must it be posted?’ Willoughby said, meeting her in the hall.

  ‘They expect us any day, but it will be more comfortable for papa,’ was her answer. She looked kindly in her new shyness.

  She did not seem to think he had treated her contemptuously in flinging her to his cousin, which was odd!

  ‘You have seen Vernon?’

  ‘It was your wish.’

  ‘You had a talk?’

  ‘We conversed.’

  ‘A long one?’

  ‘We walked some distance.’

  ‘Clara, I tried to make the best arrangement I could.’

 
‘Your intention was generous.’

  ‘He took no advantage of it?’

  ‘It could not be treated seriously.’

  ‘It was meant seriously.’

  ‘There I see the generosity.’

  Willoughby thought this encomium, and her consent to speak on the subject, and her scarcely embarrassed air and richness of tone in speaking, very strange: and strange was her taking him quite in earnest. Apparently she had no feminine sensation of the unwontedness and the absurdity of the matter!

  ‘But, Clara, am I to understand that he did not speak out?’

  ‘We are excellent friends.’

  ‘To miss it, though his chance were the smallest!’

  ‘You forget that it may not wear that appearance to him.’

  ‘He spoke not one word of himself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah! the poor old fellow was taught to see it was hopeless – chilled. May I plead? Will you step into the laboratory for a minute? We are two sensible persons…’

  ‘Pardon me, I must go to papa.’

  ‘Vernon’s personal history, perhaps…’

  ‘I think it honourable to him.’

  ‘Honourable! – ’hem!’

  ‘By comparison.’

  ‘Comparison with what?’

  ‘With others.’

  He drew up to relieve himself of a critical and condemnatory expiration of a certain length. This young lady knew too much. But how physically exquisite she was!

  ‘Could you, Clara, could you promise me – I hold to it. I must have it, I know his shy tricks – promise me to give him ultimately another chance? Is the idea repulsive to you?’

  ‘It is one not to be thought of.’

  ‘It is not repulsive?’

  ‘Nothing could be repulsive in Mr Whitford.’

  ‘I have no wish to annoy you, Clara.’

  ‘I feel bound to listen to you, Willoughby. Whatever I can do to please you, I will. It is my life-long duty.’

  ‘Could you, Clara, could you conceive it, could you simply conceive it – give him your hand?’

  ‘As a friend. Oh, yes.’