Chapter XVIII: 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.