CHAPTER XXIII
TREATS OF THE UNION OF TEMPER AND POLICY
Sir Willoughby meanwhile was on a line of conduct suiting hisappreciation of his duty to himself. He had deluded himself with thesimple notion that good fruit would come of the union of temper andpolicy.
No delusion is older, none apparently so promising, both parties beingeager for the alliance. Yet, the theorist upon human nature will say,they are obviously of adverse disposition. And this is true, inasmuchas neither of them win submit to the yoke of an established union; assoon as they have done their mischief, they set to work tugging for adivorce. But they have attractions, the one for the other, whichprecipitate them to embrace whenever they meet in a breast; each isearnest with the owner of it to get him to officiate forthwith aswedding-priest. And here is the reason: temper, to warrant itsappearance, desires to be thought as deliberative as policy, andpolicy, the sooner to prove its shrewdness, is impatient for the quickblood of temper.
It will be well for men to resolve at the first approaches of theamorous but fickle pair upon interdicting even an accidental temporaryjunction: for the astonishing sweetness of the couple when no more thanthe ghosts of them have come together in a projecting mind is anintoxication beyond fermented grapejuice or a witch's brewage; andunder the guise of active wits they will lead us to the parentalmeditation of antics compared with which a Pagan Saturnalia were lessimpious in the sight of sanity. This is full-mouthed language; but onour studious way through any human career we are subject to fits ofmoral elevation; the theme inspires it, and the sage residing in everycivilized bosom approves it.
Decide at the outset, that temper is fatal to policy: hold them withboth hands in division. One might add, be doubtful of your policy andrepress your temper: it would be to suppose you wise. You can,however, by incorporating two or three captains of the great army oftruisms bequeathed to us by ancient wisdom, fix in your service thoseveteran old standfasts to check you. They will not be serviceless intheir admonitions to your understanding, and they will so contrive toreconcile with it the natural caperings of the wayward young sprigConduct, that the latter, who commonly learns to walk upright andstraight from nothing softer than raps of a bludgeon on his crown,shall foot soberly, appearing at least wary of dangerous corners.
Now Willoughby had not to be taught that temper is fatal to policy; hewas beginning to see in addition that the temper he encouraged wasparticularly obnoxious to the policy he adopted; and although hispurpose in mounting horse after yesterday frowning on his bride wasdefinite, and might be deemed sagacious, he bemoaned already thefatality pushing him ever farther from her in chase of a satisfactionimpossible to grasp.
But the bare fact that her behaviour demanded a line of policy crossedthe grain of his temper: it was very offensive.
Considering that she wounded him severely, her reversal of their properparts, by taking the part belonging to him, and requiring hiswatchfulness, and the careful dealings he was accustomed to expect fromothers, and had a right to exact of her, was injuriously unjust. Thefeelings of a man hereditarily sensitive to property accused her of atrespassing imprudence, and knowing himself, by testimony of hishousehold, his tenants, and the neighbourhood, and the world as well,amiable when he received his dues, he contemplated her with an air ofstiff-backed ill-treatment, not devoid of a certain sanctification ofmartyrdom.
His bitterest enemy would hardly declare that it was he who was in thewrong.
Clara herself had never been audacious enough to say that. Distaste ofhis person was inconceivable to the favourite of society. Thecapricious creature probably wanted a whipping to bring her to theunderstanding of the principle called mastery, which is in man.
But was he administering it? If he retained a hold on her, he couldundoubtedly apply the scourge at leisure; any kind of scourge; he couldshun her, look on her frigidly, unbend to her to find a warmer placefor sarcasm, pityingly smile, ridicule, pay court elsewhere. He coulddo these things if he retained a hold on her; and he could do them wellbecause of the faith he had in his renowned amiability; for in doingthem, he could feel that he was other than he seemed, and his owncordial nature was there to comfort him while he bestowed punishment.Cordial indeed, the chills he endured were flung from the world. Hisheart was in that fiction: half the hearts now beating have a mild formof it to keep them merry: and the chastisement he desired to inflictwas really no more than righteous vengeance for an offended goodness ofheart. Clara figuratively, absolutely perhaps, on her knees, he wouldraise her and forgive her. He yearned for the situation. To let herunderstand how little she had known him! It would be worth the pain shehad dealt, to pour forth the stream of re-established confidences, topaint himself to her as he was; as he was in the spirit, not as he wasto the world: though the world had reason to do him honour.
First, however, she would have to be humbled.
Something whispered that his hold on her was lost.
In such a case, every blow he struck would set her flying farther, tillthe breach between them would be past bridging.
Determination not to let her go was the best finish to this perpetuallyrevolving round which went like the same old wheel-planks of a watermill in his head at a review of the injury he sustained. He had come toit before, and he came to it again. There was his vengeance. It meltedhim, she was so sweet! She shone for him like the sunny breeze onwater. Thinking of her caused a catch of his breath.
The dreadful young woman had a keener edge for the senses of men thansovereign beauty.
It would be madness to let her go.
She affected him like an outlook on the great Patterne estate after anabsence, when his welcoming flag wept for pride above Patterne Hall!
It would be treason to let her go.
It would be cruelty to her.
He was bound to reflect that she was of tender age, and the foolishnessof the wretch was excusable to extreme youth.
We toss away a flower that we are tired of smelling and do not wish tocarry. But the rose--young woman--is not cast off with impunity. Afiend in shape of man is always behind us to appropriate her. He thattouches that rejected thing is larcenous. Willoughby had been sensibleof it in the person of Laetitia: and by all the more that Clara'scharms exceeded the faded creature's, he felt it now. Ten thousandFuries thickened about him at a thought of her lying by the road-sidewithout his having crushed all bloom and odour out of her which mighttempt even the curiosity of the fiend, man.
On the other hand, supposing her to be there untouched, universallydeclined by the sniffling, sagacious dog-fiend, a miserable spinsterfor years, he could conceive notions of his remorse. A soft remorse maybe adopted as an agreeable sensation within view of the wasted penitentwhom we have struck a trifle too hard. Seeing her penitent, hecertainly would be willing to surround her with little offices ofcompromising kindness. It would depend on her age. Supposing her stillyoungish, there might be captivating passages between them, as thus, ina style not unfamiliar:
"And was it my fault, my poor girl? Am I to blame, that you have passeda lonely, unloved youth?"
"No, Willoughby! The irreparable error was mine, the blame is mine,mine only. I live to repent it. I do not seek, for I have not deserved,your pardon. Had I it, I should need my own self-esteem to presume toclasp it to a bosom ever unworthy of you."
"I may have been impatient, Clara: we are human!"
"Never be it mine to accuse one on whom I laid so heavy a weight offorbearance!"
"Still, my old love!--for I am merely quoting history in naming youso--I cannot have been perfectly blameless."
"To me you were, and are."
"Clara!"
"Willoughby!"
"Must I recognize the bitter truth that we two, once nearly one! sonearly one! are eternally separated?"
"I have envisaged it. My friend--I may call you friend; you have everbeen my friend, my best friend! oh, that eyes had been mine to know thefriend I had!--Willoughby, in the darkness of night, and during daysth
at were as night to my soul, I have seen the inexorable fingerpointing my solitary way through the wilderness from a Paradiseforfeited by my most wilful, my wanton, sin. We have met. It is morethan I have merited. We part. In mercy let it be for ever. Oh, terribleword! Coined by the passions of our youth, it comes to us for our soleriches when we are bankrupt of earthly treasures, and is the passportgiven by Abnegation unto Woe that prays to quit this probationarysphere. Willoughby, we part. It is better so."
"Clara! one--one only--one last--one holy kiss!"
"If these poor lips, that once were sweet to you . . ."
The kiss, to continue the language of the imaginative composition ofhis time, favourite readings in which had inspired Sir Willoughby witha colloquy so pathetic, was imprinted.
Ay, she had the kiss, and no mean one. It was intended to swallow everyvestige of dwindling attractiveness out of her, and there was a bit ofscandal springing of it in the background that satisfactorily settledher business, and left her 'enshrined in memory, a divine recollectionto him,' as his popular romances would say, and have said for years.
Unhappily, the fancied salute of her lips encircled him with thebreathing Clara. She rushed up from vacancy like a wind summoned towreck a stately vessel.
His reverie had thrown him into severe commotion. The slave of apassion thinks in a ring, as hares run: he will cease where he began.Her sweetness had set him off, and he whirled back to her sweetness:and that being incalculable and he insatiable, you have the picture ofhis torments when you consider that her behaviour made her as a cloudto him.
Riding slack, horse and man, in the likeness of those two ajog homewardfrom the miry hunt, the horse pricked his cars, and Willoughby lookeddown from his road along the bills on the race headed by young Crossjaywith a short start over Aspenwell Common to the ford. There was nomistaking who they were, though they were well-nigh a mile distantbelow. He noticed that they did not overtake the boy. They drew rein atthe ford, talking not simply face to face, but face in face.Willoughby's novel feeling of he knew not what drew them up to him,enabling him to fancy them bathing in one another's eyes. Then shesprang through the ford, De Craye following, but not close after--andwhy not close? She had flicked him with one of her peremptorily saucyspeeches when she was bold with the gallop. They were not unknown toWilloughby. They signified intimacy.
Last night he had proposed to De Craye to take Miss Middleton for aride the next afternoon. It never came to his mind then that he and hisfriend had formerly been rivals. He wished Clara to be amused. Policydictated that every thread should be used to attach her to herresidence at the Hall until he could command his temper to talk to hercalmly and overwhelm her, as any man in earnest, with command of temperand a point of vantage, may be sure to whelm a young woman. Policy,adulterated by temper, yet policy it was that had sent him on hiserrand in the early morning to beat about for a house and gardensuitable to Dr. Middleton within a circuit of five, six, or seven milesof Patterne Hall. If the Rev. Doctor liked the house and took it (andWilloughby had seen the place to suit him), the neighbourhood would bea chain upon Clara: and if the house did not please a gentleman ratherhard to please (except in a venerable wine), an excuse would have beenstarted for his visiting other houses, and he had that response to hisimportunate daughter, that he believed an excellent house was on view.Dr. Middleton had been prepared by numerous hints to meet Clara's blackmisreading of a lovers' quarrel, so that everything looked full ofpromise as far as Willoughby's exercise of policy went.
But the strange pang traversing him now convicted him of a largeadulteration of profitless temper with it. The loyalty of De Craye to afriend, where a woman walked in the drama, was notorious. It was there,and a most flexible thing it was: and it soon resembled reasonmanipulated by the sophists. Not to have reckoned on his peculiarloyalty was proof of the blindness cast on us by temper.
And De Craye had an Irish tongue; and he had it under control, so thathe could talk good sense and airy nonsense at discretion. The strongestoverboiling of English Puritan contempt of a gabbler, would not stopwomen from liking it. Evidently Clara did like it, and Willoughbythundered on her sex. Unto such brainless things as these do we, underthe irony of circumstances, confide our honour!
For he was no gabbler. He remembered having rattled in earlier days; hehad rattled with an object to gain, desiring to be taken for an easy,careless, vivacious, charming fellow, as any young gentleman may be whogaily wears the golden dish of Fifty thousand pounds per annum, nailedto the back of his very saintly young pate. The growth of the criticalspirit in him, however, had informed him that slang had been aprincipal component of his rattling; and as he justly supposed it abetraying art for his race and for him, he passed through the prim andthe yawning phases of affected indifference, to the pine Puritanism ofa leaden contempt of gabblers.
They snare women, you see--girls! How despicable the host of girls!--atleast, that girl below there!
Married women understood him: widows did. He placed an exceedinglyhandsome and flattering young widow of his acquaintance, Lady MaryLewison, beside Clara for a comparison, involuntarily; and at once, ina flash, in despite of him (he would rather it had been otherwise), andin despite of Lady Mary's high birth and connections as well, thesilver lustre of the maid sicklied the poor widow.
The effect of the luckless comparison was to produce an image ofsurpassingness in the features of Clara that gave him the final, ormace-blow. Jealousy invaded him.
He had hitherto been free of it, regarding jealousy as a foreign devil,the accursed familiar of the vulgar. Luckless fellows might be victimsof the disease; he was not; and neither Captain Oxford, nor Vernon, norDe Craye, nor any of his compeers, had given him one shrewd pinch: thewoman had, not the man; and she in quite a different fashion from hispresent wallowing anguish: she had never pulled him to earth's level,where jealousy gnaws the grasses. He had boasted himself above thehumiliating visitation.
If that had been the case, we should not have needed to troubleourselves much about him. A run or two with the pack of imps would havesatisfied us. But he desired Clara Middleton manfully enough at anintimation of rivalry to be jealous; in a minute the foreign devil hadhim, he was flame: flaming verdigris, one might almost dare to say, foran exact illustration; such was actually the colour; but accept it asunsaid.
Remember the poets upon jealousy. It is to be haunted in the heaven oftwo by a Third; preceded or succeeded, therefore surrounded, embraced,bugged by this infernal Third: it is Love's bed of burning marl; to seeand taste the withering Third in the bosom of sweetness; to be draggedthrough the past and find the fair Eden of it sulphurous; to be draggedto the gates of the future and glory to behold them blood: to adore thebitter creature trebly and with treble power to clutch her by thewindpipe: it is to be cheated, derided, shamed, and abject andsupplicating, and consciously demoniacal in treacherousness, andvictoriously self-justified in revenge.
And still there is no change in what men feel, though in what they dothe modern may be judicious.
You know the many paintings of man transformed to rageing beast by thecurse: and this, the fieriest trial of our egoism, worked in the Egoistto produce division of himself from himself, a concentration of histhoughts upon another object, still himself, but in another breast,which had to be looked at and into for the discovery of him. By thegaping jaw-chasm of his greed we may gather comprehension of hisinsatiate force of jealousy. Let her go? Not though he were to become amark of public scorn in strangling her with the yoke! His concentrationwas marvellous. Unused to the exercise of imaginative powers, henevertheless conjured her before him visually till his eyeballs ached.He saw none but Clara, hated none, loved none, save the intolerablewoman. What logic was in him deduced her to be individual and mostdistinctive from the circumstance that only she had ever wrought thesepangs. She had made him ready for them, as we know. An idea of De Crayebeing no stranger to her when he arrived at the Hall, dashed him at DeCraye for a second: it might be or might not be that they
had asecret;--Clara was the spell. So prodigiously did he love and hate,that he had no permanent sense except for her. The soul of him writhedunder her eyes at one moment, and the next it closed on her withoutmercy. She was his possession escaping; his own gliding away to theThird.
There would be pangs for him too, that Third! Standing at the altar tosee her fast-bound, soul and body, to another, would be good roastingfire.
It would be good roasting fire for her too, should she be averse. Toconceive her aversion was to burn her and devour her. She would then behis!--what say you? Burned and devoured! Rivals would vanish then. Herreluctance to espouse the man she was plighted to would cease to beuttered, cease to be felt.
At last he believed in her reluctance. All that had been wanted tobring him to the belief was the scene on the common; such a mere spark,or an imagined spark! But the presence of the Third was necessary;otherwise he would have had to suppose himself personally distasteful.
Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, or they shoot ushigher than the topmost star. But it is as we please. Let them tell uswhat we are to them: for us, they are our back and front of life: thepoet's Lesbia, the poet's Beatrice; ours is the choice. And were itproved that some of the bright things are in the pay of Darkness, withthe stamp of his coin on their palms, and that some are the very angelswe hear sung of, not the less might we say that they find us out; theyhave us by our leanings. They are to us what we hold of best or worstwithin. By their state is our civilization judged: and if it is hugelyanimal still, that is because primitive men abound and will have theirpasture. Since the lead is ours, the leaders must bow their heads tothe sentence. Jealousy of a woman is the primitive egoism seeking torefine in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of an invasion ofrights; it is in action the tiger threatened by a rifle when his paw isrigid on quick flesh; he tears the flesh for rage at the intruder. TheEgoist, who is our original male in giant form, had no bleeding victimbeneath his paw, but there was the sex to mangle. Much as he prefersthe well-behaved among women, who can worship and fawn, and in whomterror can be inspired, in his wrath he would make of Beatrice a LesbiaQuadrantaria.
Let women tell us of their side of the battle. We are not so much thetest of the Egoist in them as they to us. Movements of similarity shownin crowned and undiademed ladies of intrepid independence, suggesttheir occasional capacity to be like men when it is given to them tohunt. At present they fly, and there is the difference. Our manner ofthe chase informs them of the creature we are.
Dimly as young women are informed, they have a youthful ardour ofdetestation that renders them less tolerant of the Egoist than theirperceptive elder sisters. What they do perceive, however, they have aredoubtable grasp of, and Clara's behaviour would be indefensible ifher detective feminine vision might not sanction her acting on itsdirection. Seeing him as she did, she turned from him and shunned hishouse as the antre of an ogre. She had posted her letter to LucyDarleton. Otherwise, if it had been open to her to dismiss Colonel DeCraye, she might, with a warm kiss to Vernon's pupil, have seriouslythought of the next shrill steam-whistle across yonder hills for atravelling companion on the way to her friend Lucy; so abhorrent was toher the putting of her horse's head toward the Hall. Oh, the breakingof bread there! It had to be gone through for another day and more;that is to say, forty hours, it might be six-and-forty hours; and noprospect of sleep to speed any of them on wings!
Such were Clara's inward interjections while poor Willoughby burnedhimself out with verdigris flame having the savour of bad metal, tillthe hollow of his breast was not unlike to a corroded old cuirass,found, we will assume, by criminal lantern-beams in a digging besidegreen-mantled pools of the sullen soil, lumped with a strange adhesiveconcrete. How else picture the sad man?--the cavity felt empty to him,and heavy; sick of an ancient and mortal combat, and burning; deeplydinted too:
With the starry hole Whence fled the soul:
very sore; important for aught save sluggish agony; a specimen and theissue of strife.
Measurelessly to loathe was not sufficient to save him from pain: hetried it: nor to despise; he went to a depth there also. The fact thatshe was a healthy young woman returned to the surface of his thoughtslike the murdered body pitched into the river, which will not drown,and calls upon the elements of dissolution to float it. His grandhereditary desire to transmit his estates, wealth and name to a solidposterity, while it prompted him in his loathing and contempt of anature mean and ephemeral compared with his, attached him desperatelyto her splendid healthiness. The council of elders, whose descendant hewas, pointed to this young woman for his mate. He had wooed her withthe idea that they consented. O she was healthy! And he likewise: but,as if it had been a duel between two clearly designated by quality ofblood to bid a House endure, she was the first who taught him what itwas to have sensations of his mortality.
He could not forgive her. It seemed to him consequently politic tocontinue frigid and let her have a further taste of his shadow, when itwas his burning wish to strain her in his arms to a flatness provokinghis compassion.
"You have had your ride?" he addressed her politely in the generalassembly on the lawn.
"I have had my ride, yes," Clara replied.
"Agreeable, I trust?"
"Very agreeable."
So it appeared. Oh, blushless!
The next instant he was in conversation with Laetitia, questioning herupon a dejected droop of her eyelashes.
"I am, I think," said she, "constitutionally melancholy."
He murmured to her: "I believe in the existence of specifics, and notfar to seek, for all our ailments except those we bear at the hands ofothers."
She did not dissent.
De Craye, whose humour for being convinced that Willoughby cared aboutas little for Miss Middleton as she for him was nourished by hisimmediate observation of them, dilated on the beauty of the ride andhis fair companion's equestrian skill.
"You should start a travelling circus," Willoughby rejoined. "But theidea's a worthy one!--There's another alternative to the expedition Iproposed, Miss Middleton," said De Craye. "And I be clown? I haven't ascruple of objection. I must read up books of jokes."
"Don't," said Willoughby.
"I'd spoil my part! But a natural clown won't keep up an artificialperformance for an entire month, you see; which is the length of timewe propose. He'll exhaust his nature in a day and be bowled over by thedullest regular donkey-engine with paint on his cheeks and a noddingtopknot."
"What is this expedition 'we' propose?"
De Craye was advised in his heart to spare Miss Middleton any allusionto honeymoons.
"Merely a game to cure dulness."
"Ah!" Willoughby acquiesced. "A month, you said?"
"One'd like it to last for years."
"Ah! You are driving one of Mr. Merriman's witticisms at me, Horace; Iam dense."
Willoughby bowed to Dr. Middleton, and drew him from Vernon, filiallytaking his turn to talk with him closely.
De Craye saw Clara's look as her father and Willoughby went aside thuslinked.
It lifted him over anxieties and casuistries concerning loyalty.Powder was in the look to make a warhorse breathe high and shiver forthe signal.