WALDON.
The insatiable vanity of Waldon was appeased by the concession of love
that Clara had made. Then worldly reasoning came in to check his ardor
and minister to his selfishness. What did he want beyond that? Was she
capable of filling more than a few weeks of his ambitious life? True,
she was beautiful, bright as a star, capable of intense affection,
richer than most girls of her age in feminine acquirements. Her
appreciation of his works and his genius had been exquisite. In all his
life he could not remember when the summer months had passed more
delightfully with him. To monopolize the whole existence of a creature
like that was a triumph of genius which he had not, till then,
experienced. While he doubted the possibility of his conquest, there was
so much zest and excitement in the pursuit he was in no haste to
terminate it by a calm certainty.
Even in the first triumph of her frank but exquisitely modest
confession, he had been cautious not to commit himself. A hungry craving
for homage was forever upon this man. Even love was not enough to
satisfy his intellectual greed; to meet that, love must be worship, and
new votaries must be forever coming with fresh capacities of adulation.
This outgrowth of vanity, strong enough to be ranked among the passions,
and to work as much evil, was at once his charm and his bane. It
stimulated him to intellectual effort, gave warmth and apparent
frankness to his manner which fascinated while it blinded the object.
I should do the man wrong in saying that his attentions to Clara
originated in a wish to oblige the married daughter of Judge Lane, or
that potentate himself. He was too well satisfied of the slight hold the
young collegian possessed on her affections for the necessity of such
treason, and would not have given an hour of his time to an unpleasant
task for the whole Lane family put together.
Had Clara been less beautiful and bright, less worthy to do reverence to
his genius, he would have wasted no more visits on her. He even laughed
scornfully to himself at the delusion Mrs. Forbes was under. The man
might be treacherous in his own behalf but not to oblige the best friend
on earth. Even in extreme selfishness he was epicurean.
He pursued women for their love, as they gather armfuls of roses in the
Orient for a single drop of ottar. That he was not coarsely vulgar, like
most evil men, arose from the fact that love with him was a poetic
passion of the mind, on which the senses acted like sunshine. He desired
absolute homage, and gave back admiration for the time. Because these
things were not vile and broad like the sins of many other men, he held
himself in high superiority. He would have scorned to rob a man of his
gold, but never hesitated to steal a woman’s soul.
It is not likely that Waldon ever thought of himself in this way, or
premeditated the wrongs with which his path was thorned. It is
something, he would say, “to give a woman the power of loving: she
should at least be grateful for that.” In short this man was an egotist
capable of such subtle sins that even his intellect could not discover
their enormity.
In the solitude of his room, at the Stone Tavern, Waldon began to ask
himself questions, which might have been propounded by other parties had
Clara known the protection of any relative save that infirm old woman.
Remembering all that he had said, the selfish prudence of his nature
came in and rebuked him.
The girl loved him: he had known that from the first hour that her eyes
drooped beneath his gaze; for in a thousand ways, sweeter yet more
convincing than words, she had unconsciously betrayed it. Why then had
he been rash enough to win that confession from her lips? It was blindly
giving her a right to expect something more definite in the future which
he was not prepared to give.
She might even contemplate that an offer of marriage would follow the
concession into which she had been so imprudently surprised.
Here the man smiled with a sort of pitying scorn of the idea. Could even
that inexperienced girl dream that he might be brought to burden his
career with a penniless wife, and that sour-tempered decrepit old woman?
Still the girl was so beautiful.
Thus Waldon reasoned with himself in the solitude of his room where he
was completing some work for the publishers, or he might have left the
place at once.