CHAPTER XIV

SIR WILLOUGHBY AND LAETITIA

"I prepare Miss Dale."

Sir Willoughby thought of his promise to Clara. He trifled awhile with

young Crossjay, and then sent the boy flying, and wrapped himself in

meditation. So shall you see standing many a statue of statesmen who

have died in harness for their country.

In the hundred and fourth chapter of the thirteenth volume of the Book

of Egoism it is written: Possession without obligation to the object

possessed approaches felicity.

It is the rarest condition of ownership. For example: the possession of

land is not without obligation both to the soil and the tax-collector;

the possession of fine clothing is oppressed by obligation; gold,

jewelry, works of art, enviable household furniture, are positive

fetters; the possession of a wife we find surcharged with obligation.

In all these cases possession is a gentle term for enslavement,

bestowing the sort of felicity attained to by the helot drunk. You can

have the joy, the pride, the intoxication of possession; you can have

no free soul.

But there is one instance of possession, and that the most perfect,

which leaves us free, under not a shadow of obligation, receiving ever,

never giving, or if giving, giving only of our waste; as it were (sauf

votre respect), by form of perspiration, radiation, if you like;

unconscious poral bountifulness; and it is a beneficent process for the

system. Our possession of an adoring female's worship is this instance.

The soft cherishable Parsee is hardly at any season other than

prostrate. She craves nothing save that you continue in being--her

sun: which is your firm constitutional endeavour: and thus you have a

most exact alliance; she supplying spirit to your matter, while at the

same time presenting matter to your spirit, verily a comfortable

apposition. The Gods do bless it.

That they do so indeed is evident in the men they select for such a

felicitous crown and aureole. Weak men would be rendered nervous by the

flattery of a woman's worship; or they would be for returning it, at

least partially, as though it could be bandied to and fro without

emulgence of the poetry; or they would be pitiful, and quite spoil the

thing. Some would be for transforming the beautiful solitary vestal

flame by the first effort of the multiplication-table into your

hearth-fire of slippered affection. So these men are not they whom the

Gods have ever selected, but rather men of a pattern with themselves,

very high and very solid men, who maintain the crown by holding

divinely independent of the great emotion they have sown.

Even for them a pass of danger is ahead, as we shall see in our sample

of one among the highest of them.

A clear approach to felicity had long been the portion of Sir

Willoughby Patterne in his relations with Laetitia Dale. She belonged

to him; he was quite unshackled by her. She was everything that is good

in a parasite, nothing that is bad. His dedicated critic she was,

reviewing him with a favour equal to perfect efficiency in her office;

and whatever the world might say of him, to her the happy gentleman

could constantly turn for his refreshing balsamic bath. She flew to the

soul in him, pleasingly arousing sensations of that inhabitant; and he

allowed her the right to fly, in the manner of kings, as we have heard,

consenting to the privileges acted on by cats. These may not address

their Majesties, but they may stare; nor will it be contested that the

attentive circular eyes of the humble domestic creatures are an

embellishment to Royal pomp and grandeur, such truly as should one day

gain for them an inweaving and figurement--in the place of bees, ermine

tufts, and their various present decorations--upon the august great

robes back-flowing and foaming over the gaspy page-boys.

Further to quote from the same volume of The Book: There is pain in the

surrendering of that we are fain to relinquish.

The idea is too exquisitely attenuate, as are those of the whole

body-guard of the heart of Egoism, and will slip through you unless you

shall have made a study of the gross of volumes of the first and second

sections of The Book, and that will take you up to senility; or you

must make a personal entry into the pages, perchance; or an escape out

of them. There was once a venerable gentleman for whom a white hair

grew on the cop of his nose, laughing at removals. He resigned himself

to it in the end, and lastingly contemplated the apparition. It does

not concern us what effect was produced on his countenance and his

mind; enough that he saw a fine thing, but not so fine as the idea

cited above; which has been between the two eyes of humanity ever since

women were sought in marriage. With yonder old gentleman it may have

been a ghostly hair or a disease of the optic nerves; but for us it is

a real growth, and humanity might profitably imitate him in his patient

speculation upon it.

Sir Willoughby Patterne, though ready in the pursuit of duty and policy

(an oft-united couple) to cast Miss Dale away, had to consider that he

was not simply, so to speak, casting her over a hedge, he was casting

her for a man to catch her; and this was a much greater trial than it

had been on the previous occasion, when she went over bump to the

ground. In the arms of a husband, there was no knowing how soon she

might forget her soul's fidelity. It had not hurt him to sketch the

project of the conjunction; benevolence assisted him; but he winced and

smarted on seeing it take shape. It sullied his idea of Laetitia.

Still, if, in spite of so great a change in her fortune, her spirit

could be guaranteed changeless, he, for the sake of pacifying his

bride, and to keep two serviceable persons near him, at command, might

resolve to join them. The vision of his resolution brought with it a

certain pallid contempt of the physically faithless woman; no wonder he

betook himself to The Book, and opened it on the scorching chapters

treating of the sex, and the execrable wiles of that foremost creature

of the chase, who runs for life. She is not spared in the Biggest of

Books. But close it.

The writing in it having been done chiefly by men, men naturally

receive their fortification from its wisdom, and half a dozen of the

popular sentences for the confusion of women (cut in brass worn to a

polish like sombre gold), refreshed Sir Willoughby for his undertaking.

An examination of Laetitia's faded complexion braced him very

cordially.

His Clara, jealous of this poor leaf!

He could have desired the transfusion of a quality or two from Laetitia

to his bride; but you cannot, as in cookery, obtain a mixture of the

essences of these creatures; and if, as it is possible to do, and as he

had been doing recently with the pair of them at the Hall, you stew

them in one pot, you are far likelier to intensify their little

birthmarks of individuality. Had they a tendency to excellence it might

be otherwise; they might then make the exchanges we wish for; or

scientifically concocted in a harem for a sufficient length of time by

a sultan anything but obtuse, they might. It is, however, fruitless to

dwell on what was only a glimpse of a wild regret, like the crossing of

two express trains along the rails in Sir Willoughby's head.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel were sitting with Miss Dale, all three at

work on embroideries. He had merely to look at Miss Eleanor. She rose.

She looked at Miss Isabel, and rattled her chatelaine to account for

her departure. After a decent interval Miss Isabel glided out. Such was

the perfect discipline of the household.

Sir Willoughby played an air on the knee of his crossed leg.

Laetitia grew conscious of a meaning in the silence. She said, "You

have not been vexed by affairs to-day?"

"Affairs," he replied, "must be peculiarly vexatious to trouble me.

Concerning the country or my personal affairs?"

"I fancy I was alluding to the country."

"I trust I am as good a patriot as any man living," said he; "but I am

used to the follies of my countrymen, and we are on board a stout ship.

At the worst it's no worse than a rise in rates and taxes; soup at the

Hall gates, perhaps; license to fell timber in one of the outer copses,

or some dozen loads of coal. You hit my feudalism."

"The knight in armour has gone," said Laetitia, "and the castle with

the draw-bridge. Immunity for our island has gone too since we took to

commerce."

"We bartered independence for commerce. You hit our old controversy.

Ay, but we do not want this overgrown population! However, we will put

politics and sociology and the pack of their modern barbarous words

aside. You read me intuitively. I have been, I will not say annoyed,

but ruffled. I have much to do, and going into Parliament would make me

almost helpless if I lose Vernon. You know of some absurd notion he

has?--literary fame, and bachelor's chambers, and a chop-house, and the

rest of it."

She knew, and thinking differently in the matter of literary fame, she

flushed, and, ashamed of the flush, frowned.

He bent over to her with the perusing earnestness of a gentleman about

to trifle.

"You cannot intend that frown?"

"Did I frown?"

"You do."

"Now?"

"Fiercely."

"Oh!"

"Will you smile to reassure me?"

"Willingly, as well as I can."

A gloom overcame him. With no woman on earth did he shine so as to

recall to himself seigneur and dame of the old French Court as he did

with Laetitia Dale. He did not wish the period revived, but reserved it

as a garden to stray into when he was in the mood for displaying

elegance and brightness in the society of a lady; and in speech

Laetitia helped him to the nice delusion. She was not devoid of grace

of bearing either.

Would she preserve her beautiful responsiveness to his ascendency?

Hitherto she had, and for years, and quite fresh. But how of her as a

married woman? Our souls are hideously subject to the conditions of our

animal nature! A wife, possibly mother, it was within sober calculation

that there would be great changes in her. And the hint of any change

appeared a total change to one of the lofty order who, when they are

called on to relinquish possession instead of aspiring to it, say, All

or nothing!

Well, but if there was danger of the marriage-tie effecting the

slightest alteration of her character or habit of mind, wherefore press

it upon a tolerably hardened spinster!

Besides, though he did once put her hand in Vernon's for the dance, he

remembered acutely that the injury then done by his generosity to his

tender sensitiveness had sickened and tarnished the effulgence of two

or three successive anniversaries of his coming of age. Nor had he

altogether yet got over the passion of greed for the whole group of the

well-favoured of the fair sex, which in his early youth had made it

bitter for him to submit to the fickleness, not to say the modest

fickleness, of any handsome one of them in yielding her hand to a man

and suffering herself to be led away. Ladies whom he had only heard of

as ladies of some beauty incurred his wrath for having lovers or taking

husbands. He was of a vast embrace; and do not exclaim, in

covetousness;--for well he knew that even under Moslem law he could not

have them all--but as the enamoured custodian of the sex's purity,

that blushes at such big spots as lovers and husbands; and it was

unbearable to see it sacrificed for others. Without their purity what

are they!--what are fruiterer's plums?--unsaleable. O for the bloom

on them!

"As I said, I lose my right hand in Vernon," he resumed, "and I am, it

seems, inevitably to lose him, unless we contrive to fasten him down

here. I think, my dear Miss Dale, you have my character. At least, I

should recommend my future biographer to you--with a caution, of

course. You would have to write selfishness with a dash under it. I

cannot endure to lose a member of my household--not under any

circumstances; and a change of feeling toward me on the part of any of

my friends because of marriage, I think hard. I would ask you, how can

it be for Vernon's good to quit an easy pleasant home for the wretched

profession of Literature?--wretchedly paying, I mean," he bowed to the

authoress. "Let him leave the house, if he imagines he will not

harmonize with its young mistress. He is queer, though a good fellow.

But he ought, in that event, to have an establishment. And my scheme

for Vernon--men, Miss Dale, do not change to their old friends when

they marry--my scheme, which would cause the alteration in his system

of life to be barely perceptible, is to build him a poetical little

cottage, large enough for a couple, on the borders of my park. I have

the spot in my eye. The point is, can he live alone there? Men, I say,

do not change. How is it that we cannot say the same of women?"

Laetitia remarked: "The generic woman appears to have an extraordinary

faculty for swallowing the individual."

"As to the individual, as to a particular person, I may be wrong.

Precisely because it is her case I think of, my strong friendship

inspires the fear: unworthy of both, no doubt, but trace it to the

source. Even pure friendship, such is the taint in us, knows a kind of

jealousy; though I would gladly see her established, and near me, happy

and contributing to my happiness with her incomparable social charm.

Her I do not estimate generically, be sure."

"If you do me the honour to allude to me, Sir Willoughby," said

Laetitia, "I am my father's housemate."

"What wooer would take that for a refusal? He would beg to be a third

in the house and sharer of your affectionate burden. Honestly, why

not? And I may be arguing against my own happiness; it may be the end

of me!"

"The end?"

"Old friends are captious, exacting. No, not the end. Yet if my friend

is not the same to me, it is the end to that form of friendship: not to

the degree possibly. But when one is used to the form! And do you, in

its application to friendship, scorn the word 'use'? We are creatures

of custom. I am, I confess, a poltroon in my affections; I dread

changes. The shadow of the tenth of an inch in the customary elevation

of an eyelid!--to give you an idea of my susceptibility. And, my dear

Miss Dale, I throw myself on your charity, with all my weakness bare,

let me add, as I could do to none but you. Consider, then, if I lose

you! The fear is due to my pusillanimity entirely. High-souled women

may be wives, mothers, and still reserve that home for their friend.

They can and will conquer the viler conditions of human life. Our

states, I have always contended, our various phases have to be passed

through, and there is no disgrace in it so long as they do not levy

toll on the quintessential, the spiritual element. You understand me? I

am no adept in these abstract elucidations."

"You explain yourself clearly," said Laetitia.

"I have never pretended that psychology was my forte," said he, feeling

overshadowed by her cold commendation: he was not less acutely

sensitive to the fractional divisions of tones than of eyelids, being,

as it were, a melody with which everything was out of tune that did not

modestly or mutely accord; and to bear about a melody in your person is

incomparably more searching than the best of touchstones and talismans

ever invented. "Your father's health has improved latterly?"

"He did not complain of his health when I saw him this morning. My

cousin Amelia is with him, and she is an excellent nurse."

"He has a liking for Vernon."

"He has a great respect for Mr. Whitford."

"You have?"

"Oh, yes; I have it equally."

"For a foundation, that is the surest. I would have the friends dearest

to me begin on that. The headlong match is--how can we describe it? By

its finale I am afraid. Vernon's abilities are really to be respected.

His shyness is his malady. I suppose he reflected that he was not a

capitalist. He might, one would think, have addressed himself to me; my

purse is not locked."

"No, Sir Willoughby!" Laetitia said, warmly, for his donations in

charity were famous.

Her eyes gave him the food he enjoyed, and basking in them, he

continued:

"Vernon's income would at once have been regulated commensurately with

a new position requiring an increase. This money, money, money! But the

world will have it so. Happily I have inherited habits of business and

personal economy. Vernon is a man who would do fifty times more with a

companion appreciating his abilities and making light of his little

deficiencies. They are palpable, small enough. He has always been aware

of my wishes:--when perhaps the fulfilment might have sent me off on

another tour of the world, homebird though I am. When was it that our

friendship commenced? In my boyhood, I know. Very many years back."

"I am in my thirtieth year," said Laetitia.

Surprised and pained by a baldness resembling the deeds of ladies (they

have been known, either through absence of mind, or mania, to displace

a wig) in the deadly intimacy which slaughters poetic admiration, Sir

Willoughby punished her by deliberately reckoning that she did not look

less.

"Genius," he observed, "is unacquainted with wrinkles"; hardly one of

his prettiest speeches; but he had been wounded, and he never could

recover immediately. Coming on him in a mood of sentiment, the wound

was sharp. He could very well have calculated the lady's age. It was

the jarring clash of her brazen declaration of it upon his low rich

flute-notes that shocked him.

He glanced at the gold cathedral-clock on the mantel-piece, and

proposed a stroll on the lawn before dinner. Laetitia gathered up her

embroidery work.

"As a rule," he said, "authoresses are not needle-women."

"I shall resign the needle or the pen if it stamps me an exception,"

she replied.

He attempted a compliment on her truly exceptional character. As when

the player's finger rests in distraction on the organ, it was without

measure and disgusted his own hearing. Nevertheless, she had been so

good as to diminish his apprehension that the marriage of a lady in her

thirtieth year with his cousin Vernon would be so much of a loss to

him; hence, while parading the lawn, now and then casting an eye at the

window of the room where his Clara and Vernon were in council, the

schemes he indulged for his prospective comfort and his feelings of the

moment were in such striving harmony as that to which we hear

orchestral musicians bringing their instruments under the process

called tuning. It is not perfect, but it promises to be so soon. We are

not angels, which have their dulcimers ever on the choral pitch. We are

mortals attaining the celestial accord with effort, through a stage of

pain. Some degree of pain was necessary to Sir Willoughby, otherwise he

would not have seen his generosity confronting him. He grew,

therefore, tenderly inclined to Laetitia once more, so far as to say

within himself. "For conversation she would be a valuable wife". And

this valuable wife he was presenting to his cousin.

Apparently, considering the duration of the conference of his Clara and

Vernon, his cousin required strong persuasion to accept the present.