The Egoist | Page 6

is an earthquake at the foundations of
the House. Better that it should not have consented to motion, and have
held stubbornly to all ancestral ways, than have bred that anachronic
spectre. The sight, however, is one to make our squatting imps in circle
grow restless on their haunches, as they bend eyes instantly, ears at full
cock, for the commencement of the comic drama of the suicide. If this
line of verse be not yet in our literature,
Through very love of self himself he slew,
let it be admitted for his epitaph.

CHAPTER I

A MINOR INCIDENT SHOWING AN HEREDITARY APTITUDE
IN THE USE OF THE KNIFE
There was an ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible
over the infancy of Willoughby, fifth in descent from Simon Patterne,
of Patterne Hall, premier of this family, a lawyer, a man of solid
acquirements and stout ambition, who well understood the
foundation-work of a House, and was endowed with the power of
saying No to those first agents of destruction, besieging relatives. He
said it with the resonant emphasis of death to younger sons. For if the
oak is to become a stately tree, we must provide against the crowding
of timber. Also the tree beset with parasites prospers not. A great
House in its beginning lives, we may truly say, by the knife. Soil is
easily got, and so are bricks, and a wife, and children come of wishing
for them, but the vigorous use of the knife is a natural gift and points to
growth. Pauper Patternes were numerous when the fifth head of the
race was the hope of his county. A Patterne was in the Marines.
The country and the chief of this family were simultaneously informed
of the existence of one Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne, of the corps of the
famous hard fighters, through an act of heroism of the unpretending
cool sort which kindles British blood, on the part of the modest young
officer, in the storming of some eastern riverain stronghold, somewhere
about the coast of China. The officer's youth was assumed on the
strength of his rank, perhaps likewise from the tale of his modesty: "he
had only done his duty". Our Willoughby was then at College, emulous
of the generous enthusiasm of his years, and strangely impressed by the
report, and the printing of his name in the newspapers. He thought over
it for several months, when, coming to his title and heritage, he sent
Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne a cheque for a sum of money amounting
to the gallant fellow's pay per annum, at the same time showing his
acquaintance with the first, or chemical, principles of generosity, in the
remark to friends at home, that "blood is thicker than water". The man
is a Marine, but he is a Patterne. How any Patterne should have drifted
into the Marines, is of the order of questions which are senselessly
asked of the great dispensary. In the complimentary letter
accompanying his cheque, the lieutenant was invited to present himself

at the ancestral Hall, when convenient to him, and he was assured that
he had given his relative and friend a taste for a soldier's life. Young Sir
Willoughby was fond of talking of his "military namesake and distant
cousin, young Patterne--the Marine". It was funny; and not less
laughable was the description of his namesake's deed of valour: with
the rescued British sailor inebriate, and the hauling off to captivity of
the three braves of the black dragon on a yellow ground, and the tying
of them together back to back by their pigtails, and driving of them into
our lines upon a newly devised dying-top style of march that inclined to
the oblique, like the astonished six eyes of the celestial prisoners, for
straight they could not go. The humour of gentlemen at home is always
highly excited by such cool feats. We are a small island, but you see
what we do. The ladies at the Hall, Sir Willoughby's mother, and his
aunts Eleanor and Isabel, were more affected than he by the
circumstance of their having a Patterne in the Marines. But how then!
We English have ducal blood in business: we have, genealogists tell us,
royal blood in common trades. For all our pride we are a queer people;
and you may be ordering butcher's meat of a Tudor, sitting on the
cane-bottom chairs of a Plantagenet. By and by you may . . . but
cherish your reverence. Young Willoughby made a kind of shock-head
or football hero of his gallant distant cousin, and wondered
occasionally that the fellow had been content to dispatch a letter of
effusive thanks without availing himself of the invitation to partake of
the hospitalities of Patterne.
He was one afternoon parading between