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Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Complete

by George Meredith · English · Gutenberg #4482 · 630,316 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Complete

Author: George Meredith


        
Release date: November 5, 2004 [eBook #4482]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4482

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA — COMPLETE ***



Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger





LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA, COMPLETE


By George Meredith




CONTENTS.

  BOOK 1.
  I.        LOVE AT A SCHOOL
  II.       LADY CHARLOTTE
  III.      THE TUTOR
  IV.       RECOGNITION
  V.        IN WHICH THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY ADVANCE AND RETIRE

  BOOK 2.
  VI.       IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR
  VII.      EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER'S DOSES
  VIII.     MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY
  IX.       A FLASH OF THE BRUISED WARRIOR
  X.        A SHORT PASSAGE IN THE GAME PLAYED BY TWO
  XI.       THE SECRETARY TAKEN AS AN ANTIDOTE

  BOOK 3.
  XII.      MORE OF CUPER'S BOYS
  XIII.     WAR AT OLMER
  XIV.      OLD LOVERS NEW FRIENDS
  XV.       SHOWING A SECRET FISHED WITHOUT ANGLING
  XVI.      ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON

  BOOK 4.
  XVII.     LADY CHARLOTTE'S TRIUMPH
  XVIII.    A SCENE ON THE ROAD BACK
  XIX.      THE PURSUERS
  XX.       AT THE SIGN OF THE JOLLY CRICKETERS
  XXI.      UNDER-CURRENTS IN THE MINDS OF LADY CHARLOTTE AND LORD ORMONT
  XXII.     TREATS OF THE FIRST DAY OF THE CONTENTION OF BROTHER AND SISTER
  XXIII.    THE ORMONT JEWELS

  BOOK 5.
  XXIV.     LOVERS MATED
  XXXV.     PREPARATIONS FOR A RESOLVE
  XXVI.     VISITS OF FAREWELL
  XXVII.    A MARINE DUET
  XXVIII.   THE PLIGHTING
  XXIX.     AMINTA TO HER LORD
  XXX.      CONCLUSION




CHAPTER I. LOVE AT A SCHOOL

A procession of schoolboys having to meet a procession of schoolgirls on
the Sunday's dead march, called a walk, round the park, could hardly go
by without dropping to a hum in its chatter, and the shot of incurious
half-eyes the petticoated creatures--all so much of a swarm unless you
stare at them like lanterns. The boys cast glance because it relieved
their heaviness; things were lumpish and gloomy that day of the week.
The girls, who sped their peep of inquisition before the moment of
transit, let it be seen that they had minds occupied with thoughts of
their own.

Our gallant fellows forgot the intrusion of the foreign as soon as it
had passed. A sarcastic discharge was jerked by chance at the usher and
the governess--at the old game, it seemed; or why did they keep
steering columns to meet? There was no fun in meeting; it would never be
happening every other Sunday, and oftener, by sheer toss-penny accident.
They were moved like pieces for the pleasure of these two.

Sometimes the meeting occurred twice during the stupid march-out, when
it became so nearly vexatious to boys almost biliously oppressed by the
tedium of a day merely allowing them to shove the legs along, ironically
naming it animal excise, that some among them pronounced the sham
variation of monotony to be a bothering nuisance if it was going to
happen every Sunday, though Sunday required diversions. They hated
the absurdity in this meeting and meeting; for they were obliged to
anticipate it, as a part of their ignominious weekly performance; and
they could not avoid reflecting on it, as a thing done over again: it
had them in front and in rear; and it was a kind of broadside mirror,
flashing at them the exact opposite of themselves in an identically
similar situation, that forced a resemblance.

Touching the old game, Cuper's fold was a healthy school, owing to the
good lead of the head boy, Matey Weyburn, a lad with a heart for games
to bring renown, and no thought about girls. His emulation, the fellows
fancied, was for getting the school into a journal of the Sports. He
used to read one sent him by a sporting officer of his name, and talk
enviously of public schools, printed whatever they did--a privilege and
dignity of which, they had unrivalled enjoyment in the past, days, when
wealth was more jealously exclusive; and he was always prompting for
challenges and saving up to pay expenses; and the fellows were to laugh
at kicks and learn the art of self-defence--train to rejoice in whipcord
muscles. The son of a tradesman, if a boy fell under the imputation, was
worthy of honour with him, let the fellow but show grip and toughness.
He loathed a skulker, and his face was known for any boy who would
own to fatigue or confess himself beaten. “Go to bed,” was one of his
terrible stings. Matey was good at lessons, too--liked them; liked Latin
and Greek; would help a poor stumbler.

Where he did such good work was in sharpening the fellows to excel.
He kept them to the grindstone, so that they had no time for rusty
brooding; and it was fit done by exhortations off a pedestal, like St.
Paul at the Athenians, it breathed out of him every day of the week. He
carried a light for followers. Whatever he demanded of them, he himself
did it easily. He would say to boys, “You're going to be men,” meaning
something better than women. There was a notion that Matey despised
girls. Consequently, never much esteemed, they were in disfavour. The
old game was mentioned only because of a tradition of an usher and
governess leering sick eyes until they slunk away round a corner and
married, and set up a school for themselves--an emasculate ending.
Comment on it came of a design to show that the whole game had been
examined dismissed as uninteresting and profitless.

One of the boys alluded in Matey's presence to their general view upon
the part played by womankind on the stage, confident of a backing; and
he had it, in a way: their noble chief whisked the subject, as not worth
a discussion; but he turned to a younger chap, who said he detested
girls, and asked him how about a sister at home; and the youngster
coloured, and Matey took him and spun him round, with a friendly tap on
the shoulder.

Odd remarks at intervals caused it to be suspected that he had ideas
concerning girls. They were high as his head above the school; and there
they were left, with Algebra and Homer, for they were not of a sort to
inflame; until the boys noticed how he gave up speaking, and fell to
hard looking, though she was dark enough to get herself named Browny.
In the absence of a fair girl of equal height to set beside her, Browny
shone.

She had a nice mouth, ready for a smile at the corners, or so it was
before Matey let her see that she was his mark. Now she kept her mouth
asleep and her eyes half down, up to the moment of her nearing to pass,
when the girl opened on him, as if lifting her eyelids from sleep to the
window, a full side--look, like a throb, and no disguise--no slyness
or boldness either, not a bit of languishing. You might think her heart
came quietly out.

The look was like the fall of light on the hills from the first
of morning. It lasted half a minute, and left a ruffle for a good
half-hour. Even the younger fellows, without knowing what affected
them, were moved by the new picture of a girl, as if it had been
a frontispiece of a romantic story some day to be read. She looked
compelled to look, but consenting and unashamed; at home in submission;
just the look that wins observant boys, shrewd as dogs to read by signs,
if they are interested in the persons. They read Browny's meaning: that
Matey had only to come and snatch her; he was her master, and she was a
brave girl, ready to go all over the world with him; had taken to him
as he to her, shot for shot. Her taking to the pick of the school was a
capital proof that she was of the right sort. To be sure, she could not
much help herself.

Some of the boys regretted her not being fair. But, as they felt, and
sought to explain, in the manner of the wag of a tail, with elbows and
eyebrows to one another's understanding, fair girls could never have let
fly such look; fair girls are softer, woollier, and when they mean to
look serious, overdo it by craping solemn; or they pinafore a jigging
eagerness, or hoist propriety on a chubby flaxen grin; or else they
dart an eye, or they mince and prim and pout, and are sigh-away and
dying-ducky, given to girls' tricks. Browny, after all, was the girl for
Matey.

She won a victory right away and out of hand, on behalf of her
cloud-and-moon sisters, as against the sunny-meadowy; for slanting
intermediates are not espied of boys in anything: conquered by Browny;
they went over to her colour, equal to arguing, that Venus at her
mightiest must have been dark, or she would not have stood a comparison
with the forest Goddess of the Crescent, swanning it through a lake--on
the leap for run of the chase--watching the dart, with her humming
bow at breast. The fair are simple sugary thing's, prone to fat,
like broad-sops in milk; but the others are milky nuts, good to bite,
Lacedaemonian virgins, hard to beat, putting us on our mettle; and they
are for heroes, and they can be brave. So these boys felt, conquered
by Browny. A sneaking native taste for the forsaken side, known to
renegades, hauled at them if her image waned during the week; and it
waned a little, but Sunday restored and stamped it.

By a sudden turn the whole upper-school had fallen to thinking of girls,
and the meeting on the Sunday was a prospect. One of the day-boarders
had a sister in the seminary of Miss Vincent. He was plied to obtain
information concerning Browny's name and her parents. He had it pat to
hand in answer. No parents came to see her; an aunt came now and then.
Her aunt's name was not wanted. Browny's name was Aminta Farrell.

Farrell might pass; Aminta was debated. This female Christian name had
a foreign twang; it gave dissatisfaction. Boy after boy had a try at it,
with the same effect: you could not speak the name without a pursing
of the month and a puckering of the nose, beastly to see, as one little
fellow reminded them on a day when Matey was in more than common favour,
topping a pitch of rapture, for clean bowling, first ball, middle stump
on the kick, the best bat of the other eleven in a match; and, says this
youngster, drawling, soon after the cheers and claps had subsided to
business, “Aminta.”

He made it funny by saying it as if to himself and the ground, in a
subdued way, while he swung his leg on a half-circle, like a skater,
hands in pockets. He was a sly young rascal, innocently precocious
enough, and he meant no disrespect either to Browny or to Matey; but he
had to run for it, his delivery of the name being so like what was in
the breasts of the senior fellows, as to the inferiority of any Aminta
to old Matey, that he set them laughing; and Browny was on the field, to
reprove them, left of the tea-booth, with her school-mates, part of her
head under a scarlet parasol.

A girl with such a name as Aminta might not be exactly up to the
standard of old Matey, still, if he thought her so and she had spirit,
the school was bound to subscribe; and that look of hers warranted her
for taking her share in the story, like the brigand's wife loading
gnus for him while he knocks over the foremost carabineer on the
mountain-ledge below, who drops on his back with a hellish expression.

Browny was then clearly seen all round, instead of only front-face, as
on the Sunday in the park, when fellows could not spy backward after
passing. The pleasure they had in seeing her all round involved no fresh
stores of observation, for none could tell how she tied her back-hair,
which was the question put to them by a cynic of a boy, said to be
queasy with excess of sisters. They could tell that she was tall for a
girl, or tallish--not a maypole. She drank a cup of tea, and ate a slice
of bread-and-butter; no cake.

She appeared undisturbed when Matey, wearing his holiday white ducks,
and all aglow, entered the booth. She was not expected to faint, only
she stood for the foreign Aminta more than for their familiar Browny in
his presence. Not a sign of the look which had fired the school did she
throw at him. Change the colour and you might compare her to a lobster
fixed on end, with a chin and no eyes. Matey talked to Miss Vincent up
to the instant of his running to bat. She would have liked to guess how
he knew she had a brother on the medical staff of one of the regiments
in India: she asked him twice, and his cheeks were redder than cricket
in the sun. He said he read all the reports from India, and asked her
whether she did not admire Lord Ormont, our general of cavalry, whose
charge at the head of fifteen hundred horse in the last great battle
shattered the enemy's right wing, and gave us the victory--rolled him up
and stretched him out like a carpet for dusting. Miss Vincent exclaimed
that it was really strange, now, he should speak of Lord Ormont, for she
had been speaking of him herself in morning to one of her young ladies,
whose mind was bent on his heroic deeds. Matey turned his face to the
group of young ladies, quite pleased that one of them loved his hero;
and he met a smile here and there--not from Miss Aminta Farrell. She was
a complete disappointment to the boys that day. “Aminta” was mouthed at
any allusions to her.

So, she not being a match for Matey, they let her drop. The flush that
had swept across the school withered to a dry recollection, except when
on one of their Sunday afternoons she fanned the desert. Lord Ormont
became the subject of inquiry and conversation; and for his own
sake--not altogether to gratify Matey. The Saturday autumn evening's
walk home, after the race out to tea at a distant village, too late
in the year for cricket, too early for regular football, suited Matey,
going at long strides, for the story of his hero's adventures; and it
was nicer than talk about girls, and puzzling. Here lay a clear field;
for he had the right to speak of a cavalry officer: his father died
of wounds in the service, and Matey naturally intended to join the
Dragoons; if he could get enough money to pay for mess, he said,
laughing. Lord Ormont was his pattern of a warrior. We had in him a
lord who cast off luxury to live like a Spartan when under arms, with
a passion to serve his country and sustain the glory of our military
annals. He revived respect for the noble class in the hearts of
Englishmen. He was as good an authority on horseflesh as any Englishman
alive; the best for the management of cavalry: there never was a better
cavalry leader. The boys had come to know that Browny admired Lord
Ormont, so they saw a double reason why Matey should; and walking home
at his grand swing in the October dusk, their school hero drew their
national hero closer to them.

Every fellow present was dead against the usher, Mr. Shalders, when he
took advantage of a pause to strike in with his “Murat!”

He harped on Murat whenever he had a chance. Now he did it for the
purpose of casting eclipse upon Major-General Lord Ormont, the son and
grandson of English earls; for he was an earl by his title, and Murat
was the son of an innkeeper. Shalders had to admit that Murat might
have served in the stables when a boy. Honour to Murat, of course,
for climbing the peaks! Shalders, too, might interest him in military
affairs and Murat; he did no harm, and could be amusing. It rather added
to his amount of dignity. It was rather absurd, at the same time, for an
English usher to be spouting and glowing about a French general, who had
been a stable-boy and became a king, with his Murat this, Murat that,
and hurrah Murat in red and white and green uniform, tunic and breeches,
and a chimney-afire of feathers; and how the giant he was charged at the
head of ten thousand horse, all going like a cataract under a rainbow
over the rocks, right into the middle of the enemy and through; and he a
spark ahead, and the enemy streaming on all sides flat away, as you see
puffed smoke and flame of a bonfire. That was fun to set boys jigging.
No wonder how in Russia the Cossacks feared him, and scampered from the
shadow of his plumes--were clouds flying off his breath! That was a
fine warm picture for the boys on late autumn or early winter evenings,
Shalders warming his back at the grate, describing bivouacs in the snow.
They liked well enough to hear him when he was not opposing Matey and
Lord Ormont. He perked on his toes, and fetched his hand from behind him
to flourish it when his Murat came out. The speaking of his name clapped
him on horseback--the only horseback he ever knew. He was as fond of
giving out the name Murat as you see in old engravings of tobacco-shops
men enjoying the emission of their whiff of smoke.

Matey was not inclined to class Lord Ormont alongside Murat, a
first-rate horseman and an eagle-eye, as Shalders rightly said; and
Matey agreed that forty thousand cavalry under your orders is a toss
above fifteen hundred; but the claim for a Frenchman of a superlative
merit to swallow and make nothing of the mention of our best cavalry
generals irritated him to call Murat a mountebank.

Shalders retorted, that Lord Ormont was a reprobate.

Matey hoped he would some day write us an essay on the morale of
illustrious generals of cavalry; and Shalders told him he did not
advance his case by talking nonsense.

Each then repeated to the boys a famous exploit of his hero. Their
verdict was favourable to Lord Ormont. Our English General learnt riding
before he was ten years old, on the Pampas, where you ride all day, and
cook your steak for your dinner between your seat and your saddle. He
rode with his father and his uncle, Muncastle, the famous traveller,
into Paraguay. He saw fighting before he was twelve. Before he was
twenty he was learning outpost duty in the Austrian frontier cavalry. He
served in the Peninsula, served in Canada, served in India, volunteered
for any chance of distinction. No need to say much of his mastering the
picked Indian swordsmen in single combat: he knew their trick, and
was quick to save his reins when they made a dash threatening the
headstroke--about the same as disabling sails in old naval engagements.

That was the part for the officer; we are speaking of the General. For
that matter, he had as keen an eye for the field and the moment for his
arm to strike as any Murat. One world have liked to see Murat matched
against the sabre of a wily Rajpoot! As to campaigns and strategy, Lord
Ormont's head was a map. What of Murat and Lord Ormont horse to horse
and sword to sword? Come, imagine that, if you are for comparisons. And
if Lord Ormont never headed a lot of thousands, it does not prove he was
unable. Lord Ormont was as big as Murat. More, he was a Christian to his
horses. How about Murat in that respect? Lord Ormont cared for his men:
did Murat so particularly much? And he was as cunning fronting odds,
and a thunderbolt at the charge. Why speak of him in the past? He is an
English lord, a lord by birth, and he is alive; things may be expected
of him to-morrow or next day.

Shalders here cut Matey short by meanly objecting to that.

“Men are mortal,” he said, with a lot of pretended stuff, deploring
our human condition in the elegy strain; and he fell to reckoning the
English hero's age--as that he, Lord Ormont, had been a name in the
world for the last twenty-five years or more. The noble lord could be no
chicken. We are justified in calculating, by the course of nature, that
his term of activity is approaching, or has approached, or, in fact, has
drawn to its close.

“If your estimate, sir, approaches to correctness,” rejoined
Matey--tellingly, his comrades thought.

“Sixty, as you may learn some day, is a serious age, Matthew Weyburn.”

Matey said he should be happy to reach it with half the honours Lord
Ormont had won.

“Excepting the duels,” Shalders had the impudence to say.

“If the cause is a good one!” cried Matey.

“The cause, or Lord Ormont has been maligned, was reprehensible in the
extremest degree.” Shalders cockhorsed on his heels to his toes and back
with a bang.

“What was the cause, if you please, sir?” a boy, probably naughty,
inquired; and as Shalders did not vouchsafe a reply, the bigger boys
knew.

They revelled in the devilish halo of skirts on the whirl encircling
Lord Ormont's laurelled head.

That was a spark in their blood struck from a dislike of the tone
assumed by Mr. Shalders to sustain his argument; with his “men are
mortal,” and talk of a true living champion as “no chicken,” and the
wordy drawl over “justification for calculating the approach of a close
to a term of activity”--in the case of a proved hero!

Guardians of boys should make sure that the boys are on their side
before they raise the standard of virtue. Nor ought they to summon
morality for support of a polemic. Matey Weyburn's object of worship
rode superior to a morality puffing its phrasy trumpet. And, somehow,
the sacrifice of an enormous number of women to Lord Ormont's glory
seemed natural; the very thing that should be, in the case of a
first-rate military hero and commander--Scipio notwithstanding. It
brightens his flame, and it is agreeable to them. That is how they come
to distinction: they have no other chance; they are only women; they
are mad to be singed, and they rush pelf-mall, all for the honour of the
candle.

Shortly after this discussion Matey was heard informing some of the
bigger fellows he could tell them positively that Lord Ormont's age was
under fifty-four--the prime of manhood, and a jolly long way off death!
The greater credit to him, therefore, if he had been a name in the world
for anything like the period Shalders insinuated, “to get himself out of
a sad quandary.” Matey sounded the queer word so as to fix it sticking
to the usher, calling him Mr. Peter Bell Shalders, at which the boys
roared, and there was a question or two about names, which belonged to
verses, for people caring to read poems.

To the joy of the school he displayed a greater knowledge of Murat than
Shalders had: named the different places in Europe where Lord Ormont and
Murat were both springing to the saddle at the same time--one a Marshal,
the other a lieutenant; one a king, to be off his throne any day, the
other a born English nobleman, seated firm as fate. And he accused Murat
of carelessness of his horses, ingratitude to his benefactor, circussy
style. Shalders went so far as to defend Murat for attending to the
affairs of his kingdom, instead of galloping over hedges and ditches
to swell Napoleon's ranks in distress. Matey listened to him there; he
became grave; he nodded like a man saying, “I suppose we must examine
it in earnest.” The school was damped to hear him calling it a nice
question. Still, he said he thought he should have gone; and that
settled it.

The boys inclined to speak contemptuously of Shalders. Matey world
not let them; he contrasted Shalders with the other ushers, who had
no enthusiasms. He said enthusiasms were salt to a man; and he liked
Shalders for spelling at his battles and thinking he understood them,
and admiring Murat, and leading Virgil and parts of Lucan for his
recreation. He said he liked the French because they could be splendidly
enthusiastic. He almost lost his English flavour when he spoke in
downright approval of a small French fellow, coming from Orthez, near
the Pyrenees, for senselessly dashing and kicking at a couple of English
who jeered to hear Orthez named--a place trampled under Wellington's
heels, on his march across conquered France. The foreign little cockerel
was a clever lad, learning English fast, and anxious to show he had got
hold of the English trick of not knowing when he was beaten. His French
vanity insisted on his engaging the two, though one of them stood aside,
and the other let him drive his nose all the compass round at a poker
fist. What was worse, Matey examined these two, in the interests of fair
play, as if he doubted.

Little Emile Grenat set matters right with his boast to vindicate his
country against double the number, and Matey praised him, though he knew
Emile had been floored without effort by the extension of a single fist.
He would not hear the French abused; he said they were chivalrous, they
were fine fellows, topping the world in some things; his father had
fought them and learnt to respect them. Perhaps his father had learnt to
respect Jews, for there was a boy named Abner, he protected, who smelt
Jewish; he said they ran us Gentiles hard, and carried big guns.

Only a reputation like Matey's could have kept his leadership from
a challenge. Joseph Masner, formerly a rival, went about hinting and
shrugging; all to no purpose, you find boys born to be chiefs. On the
day of the snow-fight Matey won the toss, and chose J. Masner first
pick; and Masner, aged seventeen and some months, big as a navvy,
lumbered across to him and took his directions, proud to stand in the
front centre, at the head of the attack, and bear the brunt--just what
he was fit for, Matey gave no offence by choosing, half-way down the
list, his little French friend, whom he stationed beside himself, rather
off his battle-front, as at point at cricket, not quite so far removed.
Two boys at his heels piled ammunition. The sides met midway of a marshy
ground, where a couple of flat and shelving banks, formed for a broad
new road, good for ten abreast--counting a step of the slopes--ran
transverse; and the order of the game was to clear the bank and drive
the enemy on to the frozen ditch-water. Miss Vincent heard in the
morning from the sister of little Collett of the great engagement
coming off; she was moved by curiosity, and so the young ladies of
her establishment beheld the young gentlemen of Mr. Cuper's in furious
division, and Matey's sore aim and hard fling, equal to a slinger's,
relieving J. Masner of a foremost assailant with a spanker on the
nob. They may have fancied him clever for selecting a position rather
comfortable, as things went, until they had sight of him with his little
French ally and two others, ammunition boys to rear, descending one
bank and scaling another right into the flank of the enemy, when his
old tower of a Masner was being heavily pressed by numbers. Then came a
fight hand to hand, but the enemy stood in a clamp; not to split like
a nut between crackers, they gave way and rolled, backing in lumps from
bank to ditch.

The battle was over before the young ladies knew. They wondered to see
Matey shuffling on his coat and hopping along at easy bounds to pay his
respects to Miss Vincent, near whom was Browny; and this time he and
Browny talked together. He then introduced little Emile to her. She
spoke of Napoleon at Brienne, and complimented Matey. He said he was
cavalry, not artillery, that day. They talked to hear one another's
voices. By constantly appealing to Miss Vincent he made their
conversation together seem as under her conduct; and she took a slide on
some French phrases with little Emile. Her young ladies looked shrinking
and envious to see the fellows wet to the skin, laughing, wrestling,
linking arms; and some, who were clown-faced with a wipe of scarlet,
getting friends to rub their cheeks with snow, all of them happy as
larks in air, a big tea steaming for them at the school. Those girls
had a leap and a fail of the heart, glad to hug themselves in their dry
clothes, and not so warm as the dripping boys were, nor so madly fond of
their dress-circle seats to look on at a play they were not allowed
even to desire to share. They looked on at blows given and taken in
good temper, hardship sharpening jollity. The thought of the difference
between themselves and the boys must have been something like the tight
band--call it corset--over the chest, trying to lift and stretch for
draughts of air. But Browny's feeling naturally was, that all this
advantage for the boys came of Matey Weyburn's lead.

Miss Vincent with her young ladies walked off in couples, orderly
chicks, the usual Sunday march of their every day. The school was
coolish to them; one of the fellows hummed bars of some hymn tune,
rather faster than church. And next day there was a murmur of letters
passing between Matey and Browny regularly, little Collett for postman.
Anybody might have guessed it, but the report spread a feeling that
girls are not the entirely artificial beings or flat targets we suppose.
The school began to brood, like air deadening on oven-heat. Winter
is hen-mother to the idea of love in schools, if the idea has fairly
entered. Various girls of different colours were selected by boys
for animated correspondence, that never existed and was vigorously
prosecuted, with efforts to repress contempt of them in courtship for
their affections. They found their part of it by no means difficult when
they imagined the lines without the words, or, better still, the letter
without the lines. A holy satisfaction belonged to the sealed thing; the
breaking of the seal and inspection of the contents imposed perplexity
on that sentiment. They thought of certain possible sentences Matey
and Browny would exchange; but the plain, conceivable, almost visible,
outside of the letter had a stronger spell for them than the visionary
inside. This fancied contemplation of the love-letter was reversed
in them at once by the startling news of Miss Vincent's discovery
and seizure of the sealed thing, and her examination of the burden
it contained. Then their thirst was for drama--to see, to drink every
wonderful syllable those lovers had written.

Miss Vincent's hand was upon one of Matey's letters. She had come across
the sister of little Collett, Selina her name was, carrying it. She saw
nothing of the others. Aminta was not the girl to let her. Nor did Mr.
Cuper dare demand from Matey a sight or restitution of the young lady's
half of the correspondence. He preached heavily at Matey; deplored that
the boy he most trusted, etc.--the school could have repeated it without
hearing. We know the master's lecture in tones--it sings up to sing
down, and touches nobody. As soon as he dropped to natural talk, and
spoke of his responsibility and Miss Vincent's, Matey gave the word of
a man of honour that he would not seek to communicate farther with Miss
Farrell at the school.

Now there was a regular thunder-hash among the boys on the rare
occasions when they met the girls. All that Matey and Browny were
forbidden to write they looked--much like what it had been before the
discovery; and they dragged the boys back from promised instant events.
It was, nevertheless, a heaving picture, like the sea in the background
of a marine piece at the theatre, which rouses anticipations of storm,
and shows readiness. Browny's full eyebrow sat on her dark eye like a
cloud of winter noons over the vanishing sun. Matey was the prisoner
gazing at light of a barred window and measuring the strength of the
bars. She looked unhappy, but looked unbeaten more. Her look at him fed
the school on thoughts of what love really is, when it is not fished
out of books and poetry. For though she was pale, starved and pale, they
could see she was never the one to be sighing; and as for him, he looked
ground dower all to edge. However much they puzzled over things, she
made them feel they were sure, as to her, that she drove straight and
meant blood, the life or death of it: all her own, if need be, and
confidence in the captain she had chosen. She could have been imagined
saying, There is a storm, but I am ready to embark with you this minute.

That sign of courage in real danger ennobled her among girls. The name
Browny was put aside for a respectful Aminta. Big and bright events to
come out in the world were hinted, from the love of such a couple. The
boys were not ashamed to speak the very word love. How he does love
that girl! Well, and how she loves him! She did, but the boys had to be
seeing her look at Matey if they were to put the girl on some balanced
equality with a fellow she was compelled to love. It seemed to them
that he gave, and that she was a creature carried to him, like driftwood
along the current of the flood, given, in spite of herself. When they
saw those eyes of hers they were impressed with an idea of her as
a voluntary giver too; pretty well the half to the bargain; and it
confused their notion of feminine inferiority. They resolved to think
her an exceptional girl, which, in truth, they could easily do, for none
but an exceptional girl could win Matey to love her.

Since nothing appeared likely to happen at the school, they speculated
upon what would occur out in the world, and were assisted to conjecture,
by a rumour, telling of Aminta Farrell's aunt as a resident at Dover.
Those were days when the benevolently international M. de Porquet had
begun to act as interpreter to English schools in the portico of the
French language; and under his guidance it was asked, in contempt of the
answer, Combien de postes d'ici a Douvres? But, accepting the rumour
as a piece of information, the answer became important. Ici was twenty
miles to the north-west of London. How long would it take Matey to reach
Donvres? Or at which of the combien did he intend to waylay and away
with Aminta? The boys went about pounding at the interrogative French
phrase in due sincerity, behind the burlesque of traveller bothering
coachman. Matey's designs could be finessed only by a knowledge of his
character: that he was not the fellow to give up the girl he had taken
to; and impediments might multiply, but he would bear them down. Three
days before the break-up of the school another rumour came tearing
through it: Aminta's aunt had withdrawn her from Miss Vincent's. And
now rose the question, two-dozen-mouthed, Did Matey know her address at
Douvres? His face grew stringy and his voice harder, and his eyes ready
to burst from a smother of fire. All the same, he did his work: he was
the good old fellow at games, considerate in school affairs, kind to
the youngsters; he was heard to laugh. He liked best the company of his
little French friend from Orthez, over whose shoulder his hand was laid
sometimes as they strolled and chatted in two languages. He really went
a long way to make French fellows popular, and the boys were sorry that
little Emile was off to finish his foreign education in Germany. His
English was pretty good, thanks to Matey. He went away, promising to
remember Old England, saying he was French first, and a Briton next. He
had lots of plunk; which accounted for Matey's choice of him as a friend
among the juniors.




CHAPTER II. LADY CHARLOTTE

Love-passages at a school must produce a ringing crisis if they are to
leave the rosy impression which spans the gap of holidays. Neither Matey
nor Browny returned to their yoke, and Cuper's boys recollected the
couple chiefly on Sundays. They remembered several of Matey's doings and
sayings: his running and high leaping, his bowling, a maxim or two of
his, and the tight strong fellow he was; also that the damsel's colour
distinctly counted for dark. She became nearly black in their minds.
Well, and Englishmen have been known to marry Indian princesses:
some have a liking for negresses. There are Nubians rather pretty in
pictures, if you can stand thick lips. Her colour does not matter,
provided the girl is of the right sort. The exchange of letters between
the lovers was mentioned. The discovery by Miss Vincent of their cool
habit of corresponding passed for an incident; and there it remained,
stiff as a poet, not being heated by a story to run. So the foregone
excitement lost warmth, and went out like a winter sun at noon or a
match lighted before the candle is handy.

Lord Ormont continued to be a subject of discussion from time to time,
for he was a name in the newspapers; and Mr. Shalders had been worked
by Matey Weyburn into a state of raw antagonism at the mention of the
gallant General; he could not avoid sitting in judgement on him.

According to Mr. Shalders, the opinion of all thoughtful people in
England was with John Company and the better part of the Press to
condemn Lord Ormont in his quarrel with the Commissioner of one of the
Indian provinces, who had the support of the Governor of his Presidency
and of the Viceroy; the latter not unreservedly, yet ostensibly inclined
to condemn a too prompt military hand. The Gordian knot of a difficulty
cut is agreeable in the contemplation of an official chief hesitating
to use the sword and benefiting by having it done for him. Lord Ormont
certainly cut the knot.

Mr. Shalders was cornered by the boys, coming at him one after another
without a stop, vowing it was the exercise of a military judgement upon
a military question at a period of urgency, which had brought about
the quarrel with the Commissioner and the reproof of the Governor. He
betrayed the man completely cornered by generalizing. He said--

“We are a civilian people; we pride ourselves on having civilian
methods.”

“How can that be if we have won India with guns and swords?”

“But that splendid jewel for England's tiara won,” said he (and he might
as well have said crown), “we are bound to sheathe the sword and govern
by the Book of the Law.”

“But if they won't have the Book of the Law!”

“They knew the power behind it.”

“Not if we knock nothing harder than the Book of the Law upon their
skulls.”

“Happily for the country, England's councils are not directed by boys!”

“Ah, but we're speaking of India, Mr. Shalders.”

“You are presuming to speak of an act of insubordination committed by a
military officer under civilian command.”

“What if we find an influential prince engaged in conspiracy?”

“We look for proof.”

“Suppose we have good proof?”

“We summon him to exonerate himself.”

“No; we mount and ride straight away into his territory, spot the
treason, deport him, and rule in his place!”

It was all very well for Mr. Shalders to say he talked to boys; he was
cornered again, as his shrug confessed.

The boys asked among themselves whether he would have taken the same
view if his Murat had done it!

These illogical boys fought for Matey Weyburn in their defence of Lord
Ormont. Somewhere, they wee sure, old Matey was hammering to the same
end--they could hear him. Thought of him inspired them to unwonted
argumentative energy, that they might support his cause; and scatter
the gloomy prediction of the school, as going to the dogs now Matey had
left.

The subject provoked everywhere in Great Britain a division similar to
that between master and boys at Cuper's establishment: one party for
our modern English magisterial methods with Indians, the other for the
decisive Oriental at the early time, to suit their native tastes;
and the Book of the Law is to be conciliatingly addressed to their
sentiments by a benign civilizing Power, or the sword is out smartly at
the hint of a warning to protect the sword's conquests. Under one aspect
we appear potteringly European; under another, drunk of the East.

Lord Ormont's ride at the head of two hundred horsemen across a stretch
of country including hill and forest, to fall like a bolt from the blue
on the suspected Prince in the midst of his gathering warriors, was a
handsome piece of daring, and the high-handed treatment of the Prince
was held by his advocates to be justified by the provocation, and the
result. He scattered an unprepared body of many hundreds, who might have
enveloped him, and who would presumptively have stood their ground, had
they not taken his handful to be the advance of regiments. These are the
deeds that win empires! the argument in his favour ran. Are they of a
character to maintain empires? the counter-question was urged. Men of
a deliberative aspect were not wanting in approval of the sharp and
summary of the sword in air when we have to deal with Indians. They
chose to regard it as a matter of the dealing with Indians, and put
aside the question of the contempt of civil authority.

Counting the cries, Lord Ormont won his case. Festival aldermen, smoking
clubmen, buckskin squires, obsequious yet privately excitable tradesmen,
sedentary coachmen and cabmen, of Viking descent, were set to think like
boys about him: and the boys, the women, and the poets formed a tipsy
chorea. Journalists, on the whole, were fairly halved, as regarded
numbers. In relation to weight, they were with the burgess and the
presbyter; they preponderated heavily in the direction of England's
burgess view of all cases disputed between civilian and soldier. But
that was when the peril was over.

Admirers of Lord Ormont enjoyed a perusal of a letter addressed by him
to the burgess's journal; and so did his detractors. The printing of it
was an act of editorial ruthlessness. The noble soldier had no mould in
his intellectual or educational foundry for the casting of sentences;
and the editor's leading type to the letter, without further notice
of the writer--who was given a prominent place or scaffolding for
the execution of himself publicly, if it pleased him to do that
thing--tickled the critical mind. Lord Ormont wrote intemperately.

His Titanic hurling of blocks against critics did no harm to an enemy
skilled in the use of trimmer weapons, notably the fine one of letting
big missiles rebound. He wrote from India, with Indian heat--“curry and
capsicums,” it was remarked. He dared to claim the countenance of the
Commander-in-chief of the Army of India for an act disapproved by the
India House. Other letters might be on their way, curryer than the
preceding, his friends feared; and might also be malevolently printed,
similarly commissioning the reverberation of them to belabour his name
before the public. Admirers were still prepared to admire; but aldermen
not at the feast, squire-archs not in the saddle or at the bottle, some
few of the juvenile and female fervent, were becoming susceptible to a
frosty critical tone in the public pronunciation of Lord Ormont's name
since the printing of his letter and the letters it called forth. None
of them doubted that his case was good. The doubt concerned the effect
on it of his manner of pleading it. And if he damaged his case, he
compromised his admirers. Why, the case of a man who has cleverly won
a bold stroke for his country must be good, as long as he holds his
tongue. A grateful country will right him in the end: he has only to
wait, and not so very long. “This I did: now examine it.” Nothing more
needed to be said by him, if that.

True, he has a temper. It is owned that he is a hero. We take him with
his qualities, impetuosity being one, and not unsuited to his arm of the
service, as he has shown. If his temper is high, it is an element of a
character proved heroical. So has the sun his blotches, and we believe
that they go to nourish the luminary, rather than that they are a
disease of the photosphere.

Lord Ormont's apologists had to contend with anecdotes and dicta now
pouring in from offended Britons, for illustration of an impetuosity
fit to make another Charley XII. of Sweden--a gratuitous Coriolanus
haughtiness as well, new among a people accustomed socially to bow
the head to their nobles, and not, of late, expecting a kick for their
pains. Newspapers wrote of him that, “a martinet to subordinates, he
was known for the most unruly of lieutenants.” They alluded to current
sayings, as that he “habitually took counsel of his horse on the field
when a movement was entrusted to his discretion.” Numerous were the
journalistic sentences running under an air of eulogy of the lordly
warrior purposely to be tripped, and producing their damnable effect,
despite the obvious artifice. The writer of the letter from Bombay,
signed Ormont, was a born subject for the antithetical craftsmen's
tricky springes.

He was, additionally, of infamous repute for morale in burgess
estimation, from his having a keen appreciation of female beauty and
a prickly sense of masculine honour. The stir to his name roused
pestilential domestic stories. In those days the aristocrat still
claimed licence, and eminent soldier-nobles, comporting themselves as
imitative servants of their god Mars, on the fields of love and war,
stood necessarily prepared to vindicate their conduct as the field of
the measured paces, without deeming themselves bounden to defend the
course they took. Our burgess, who bowed head to his aristocrat,
and hired the soldier to fight for him, could not see that such
mis-behaviour necessarily ensued. Lord Ormont had fought duels at home
and abroad. His readiness to fight again, and against odds, and with a
totally unused weapon, was exhibited by his attack on the Press in the
columns of the Press. It wore the comical face to the friends deploring
it, which belongs to things we do that are so very like us. They agreed
with his devoted sister, Lady Charlotte Eglett, as to the prudence of
keeping him out of England for a time, if possible.

At the first perusal of the letter, Lady Charlotte quitted her place
in Leicestershire, husband, horses, guests, the hunt, to scour across a
vacant London and pick up acquaintances under stress to be spots there
in the hunting season, with them to gossip for counsel on the subject
of “Ormont's hand-grenade,” and how to stop and extinguish a second.
She was a person given to plain speech. “Stinkpot” she called it, when
acknowledging foul elements in the composition and the harm it did to
the unskilful balist. Her view of the burgess English imaged a mighty
monster behind bars, to whom we offer anything but our hand. As soon as
he gets held of that he has you; he won't let it loose with flesh on the
bones. We must offend him--we can't be man or woman without offending
his tastes and his worships; but while we keep from contact (i.e.
intercommunication) he may growl, he is harmless. Witness the many
occasions when her brother offended worse, and had been unworried, only
growled at, and distantly, not in a way to rouse concern; and at the
neat review, or procession into the City, or public display of any
sort, Ormont had but to show himself, he was the popular favourite
immediately. He had not committed the folly of writing a letter to a
newspaper then.

Lady Charlotte paid an early visit to the office of the great London
solicitor, Arthur Abner, who wielded the law as an instrument of
protection for countless illustrious people afflicted by what they stir
or attract in a wealthy metropolis. She went simply to gossip of her
brother's affairs with a refreshing man of the world, not given to
circumlocutions, and not afraid of her: she had no deeper object; but
fancying she heard the clerk, on his jump from the stool, inform
her that Mr. Abner was out, “Out?” she cried, and rattled the room,
thumping, under knitted brows. “Out of town?” For a man of business
taking holidays, when a lady craves for gossip, disappointed her faith
in him as cruelly as the shut-up, empty inn the broken hunter knocking
at a hollow door miles off home.

Mr. Abner, hatted and gloved and smiling, came forth. “Going out, the
man meant, Lady Charlotte. At your service for five minutes.”

She complimented his acuteness, in the remark, “You see I've only come
to chat,” and entered his room.

He led her to her theme: “The excitement is pretty well over.”

“My brother's my chief care--always was. I'm afraid he'll be
pitchforking at it again, and we shall have another blast. That letter
ought never to have been printed. That editor deserves the horsewhip
for letting it appear. If he prints a second one I shall treat him as a
personal enemy.”

“Better make a friend of him.”

“How?”

“Meet him at my table.”

She jumped an illumined half-about on her chair. “So I will, then. What
are the creature's tastes?”

“Hunts, does he?” The editor rose in her mind from the state of neuter
to something of a man. “I recollect an article in that paper on the
Ormont duel. I hate duelling, but I side with my brother. I had to
laugh, though. Luckily, there's no woman on hand at present, as far as
I know. Ormont's not likely to be hooked by garrison women or blacks.
Those coloured women--some of ours too--send the nose to the clouds;
not a bad sign for health. And there are men like that old Cardinal
Guicciardini tells of... hum! Ormont's not one of them. I hope
he'll stay in India till this blows over, or I shall be hearing of
provocations.”

“You have seen the Duke?”

She nodded. Her reserve was a summary of the interview. “Kind, as he
always is,” she said. “Ormont has no chance of employment unless there's
a European war. They can't overlook him in case of war. He'll have to
pray for that.”

“Let us hope we shan't get it.”

“My wish; but I have to think of my brother. If he's in England with
no employment, he's in a mess with women and men both. He kicks if he's
laid aside to rust. He has a big heart. That's what I said: all he wants
is to serve his country. If you won't have war, give him Gibraltar or
Malta, or command of one of our military districts. The South-eastern
'll be vacant soon. He'd like to be Constable of the Castle, and have an
eye on France.”

“I think he's fond of the French?”

“Loves the French. Expects to have to fight them all the same. He loves
his country best. Here's the man everybody's abusing!”

“I demur, my lady. I was dining the other day with a client of mine, and
a youngster was present who spoke of Lord Ormont in a way I should like
you to have heard. He seemed to know the whole of Lord Ormont's career,
from the time of the ride to Paraguay up to the capture of the plotting
Rajah. He carried the table.”

“Good boy! We must turn to the boys for justice, then. Name your day for
this man, this editor.”

“I will see him. You shall have the day to-night.”

Lady Charlotte and the editor met. She was racy, he anecdotal. Stag,
fox, and hare ran before them, over fields and through drawing-rooms:
the scent was rich. They found that they could talk to one another
as they thought; that he was not the Isle-bound burgess, nor she the
postured English great lady; and they exchanged salt, without which your
current scandal is of exhausted savour. They enjoyed the peculiar novel
relish of it, coming from a social pressman and a dame of high society.
The different hemispheres became known as one sphere to these birds of
broad wing convening in the upper blue above a quartered carcase earth.

A week later a letter, the envelope of a bulky letter in Lord Ormont's
handwriting, reached Lady Charlotte. There was a line from the editor:

   “Would it please your ladyship to have this printed?”

She read the letter, and replied:

   “Come to me for six days; you shall have the best mount in the
   county.”

An editor devoid of malice might probably have forborne to print a
letter that appealed to Lady Charlotte, or touched her sensations, as
if a glimpse of the moon, on the homeward ride in winter on a nodding
horse, had suddenly bared to view a precipitous quarry within two steps.
There is no knowing: few men can forbear to tell a spicy story of
their friends; and an editor, to whom an exhibition of the immensely
preposterous on the part of one writing arrogantly must be provocative,
would feel the interests of his Journal, not to speak of the claims
of readers, pluck at him when he meditated the consignment of such a
precious composition to extinction. Lady Charlotte withheld a sight of
the letter from Mr. Eglett. She laid it in her desk, understanding well
that it was a laugh lost to the world. Poets could reasonably feign it
to shake the desk inclosing it. She had a strong sense of humour; her
mind reverted to the desk in a way to make her lips shut grimly. She
sided with her brother.

Only pen in hand did he lay himself open to the enemy. In his personal
intercourse he was the last of men to be taken at a disadvantage. Lady
Charlotte was brought round to the distasteful idea of some help coming
from a legitimate adjunct at his elbow: a restraining woman--wife, it
had to be said. And to name the word wife for Thomas Rowsley, Earl of
Ormont, put up the porcupine quills she bristled with at the survey of
a sex thirsting, and likely to continue thirsting, for such honour. What
woman had she known fit to bear the name? She had assumed the judicial
seat upon the pretensions of several, and dismissed them to their limbo,
after testifying against them. Who is to know the fit one in these mines
of deception? Women of the class offering wives decline to be taken on
trial; they are boxes of puzzles--often dire surprises. Her brother
knew them well enough to shy at the box. Her brother Rowsley had a funny
pride, like a boy at a game, at the never having been caught by one
among the many he made captive. She let him have it all to himself.

He boasted it to a sister sharing the pride exultant in the cry of
the hawk, scornful of ambitions poultry, a passed finger-post to the
plucked, and really regretful that no woman had been created fit
for him. When she was not aiding with her brother, women, however
contemptible for their weakness, appeared to her as better than
barn-door fowl, or vermin in their multitudes gnawing to get at the
cheese-trap. She could be humane, even sisterly, with women whose
conduct or prattle did not outrage plain sense, just as the stickler
for the privileges of her class was large-heartedly charitable to the
classes flowing in oily orderliness round about below it--if they did so
flow. Unable to read woman's character, except upon the broadest lines
as it were the spider's main threads of its web, she read men minutely,
from the fact that they were neither mysteries nor terrors to her; but
creatures of importunate appetites, humorous objects; very manageable,
if we leave the road to their muscles, dress their wounds, smoothe their
creases, plume their vanity; and she had an unerring eye for the man
to be used when a blow was needed, methods for setting him in action
likewise. She knew how much stronger than ordinary men the woman who can
put them in motion. They can be set to serve as pieces of cannon, under
compliments on their superior powers, which were not all undervalued by
her on their own merits, for she worshipped strength. But the said,
with a certain amount of truth, that the women unaware of the advantage
Society gave them (as to mastering men) were fools.

Tender, is not a word coming near to Lady Charlotte. Thoughtful on
behalf of the poor foolish victims of men she was. She had saved some,
avenged others. It should be stated, that her notion of saving was the
saving of them from the public: she had thrown up a screen. The saving
of them from themselves was another matter--hopeless, to her thinking.
How preach at a creature on the bend of passion's rapids! One might as
well read a chapter from the Bible to delirious patients. When once a
woman is taken with the love-passion, we must treat her as bitten;
hide her antics from the public: that is the principal business. If she
recovers, she resumes her place, and horrid old Nature, who drove her
to the frenzy, is unlikely to bother or, at least, overthrow her
again, unless she is one of the detestable wantons, past compassion or
consideration. In the case reviewed, the woman has gone through fire,
and is none the worse for her experiences: worth ten times what she was,
to an honest man, if men could be got to see it. Some do. Of those men
who do not, Lady Charlotte spoke with the old family-nurse humour, which
is familiar with the tricks and frailties of the infants; and it is
a knife to probe the male, while seemingly it does the part of the
napkin--pities and pats. They expect a return of much for the little
that is next to nothing. They are fall of expectations: and of what
else? They are hard bargainers.

She thought this of men; and she liked men by choice. She had old
nurse's preference for the lustier male child. The others are puling
things, easier to rear, because they bend better; and less esteemed,
though they give less trouble, rouse less care. But when it came to the
duel between the man and the woman, her sense of justice was moved to
join her with the party of her unfairly handled sisters--a strong party,
if it were not so cowardly, she had to think.

Mr. Eglett, her husband, accepted her--accepted the position into which
he naturally fell beside her, and the ideas she imposed on him; for she
never went counter to his principles. These were the fixed principles of
a very wealthy man, who abhorred debt, and was punctilious in veracity,
scrupulous in cleanliness of mind and body, devoted to the honour of
his country, the interests of his class. She respected the high landmark
possessing such principles; and she was therefore enabled to lead
without the wish to rule. As it had been between them at the beginning,
so it was now, when they were grandparents running on three lines of
progeny from two daughters and a son: they were excellent friends.
Few couples can say more. The union was good English grey--that of a
prolonged November, to which we are reconciled by occasions for the hunt
and the gun. She was, nevertheless, an impassioned woman. The feeling
for her brother helped to satisfy her heart's fires, though as little
with her brother as with her husband was she demonstrative. Lord Ormont
disrelished the caresses of relatives.

She, for her part, had so strong a sympathy on behalf of poor gentlemen
reduced to submit to any but a young woman's hug, that when, bronzed
from India, he quitted the carriage and mounted her steps at Olmer, the
desire to fling herself on his neck and breast took form in the words:
“Here you are home again, Rowsley; glad to have you.” They shook hands
firmly.

He remained three days at Olmer. His temper was mild, his frame of mind
bad as could be. Angry evaporations had left a residuum of solid scorn
for these “English,” who rewarded soldierly services as though it were a
question of damaged packages of calico. He threatened to take the
first offer of a foreign State “not in insurrection.” But clear sky was
overhead. He was the Rowsley of the old boyish delight in field sports,
reminiscences of prowlings and trappings in the woods, gropings along
water-banks, enjoyment of racy gossip. He spoke wrathfully of “one
of their newspapers” which steadily persisted in withholding from
publication every letter he wrote to it, after printing the first. And
if it printed one, why not the others?

Lady Charlotte put it on the quaintness of editors.

He had found in London, perhaps, reason for saying that he should
do well to be “out of this country” as early as he could; adding,
presently, that he meant to go, though “it broke his heart to keep away
from a six months' rest at Steignton,” his Wiltshire estate.

No woman was in the field. Lady Charlotte could have submitted to the
intrusion of one of those at times wholesome victims, for the sake of
the mollification the unhappy proud thing might bring to a hero smarting
under injustice at the hands of chiefs and authorities.

He passed on to Steignton, returned to London, and left England for
Spain, as he wrote word, saying he hoped to settle at Steignton neat
year. He was absent the next year, and longer. Lady Charlotte had the
surprising news that Steignton was let, shooting and all, for five
years; and he had no appointment out of England or at home. When he
came to Olmer again he was under one of his fits of reserve, best
undisturbed. Her sympathy with a great soldier snubbed, an active man
rusting, kept her from remonstrance.

Three years later she was made meditative by the discovery of a woman's
being absolutely in the field, mistress of the field; and having been
there for a considerable period, dating from about the time when he
turned his back on England to visit a comrade-in-arms condemned by the
doctors to pass the winter in Malaga; and it was a young woman, a girl
in her teens, a handsome girl. Handsome was to be expected; Ormont
bargained for beauty. But report said the girl was very handsome, and
showed breeding: she seemed a foreigner, walked like a Goddess, sat her
horse the perfect Amazon. Rumour called her a Spaniard.

“Not if she rides!” Lady Charlotte cut that short.

Rumour had subsequently more to say. The reporter in her ear did not
confirm it, and she was resolutely deaf to a story incredible of her
brother--the man, of all men living, proudest of his name, blood,
station. So proud was he by nature, too, that he disdained to complain
of rank injustice; he maintained a cheerful front against adversity and
obloquy. And this man of complete self-command, who has every form of
noble pride, gets cajoled like a twenty-year-old yahoo at college! Do
you imagine it? To suppose of a man cherishing the name of Ormont, that
he would bestow it legally on a woman, a stranger, and imperil his race
by mixing blood with a creature of unknown lineage, was--why, of course,
it was to suppose him struck mad, and there never had been madness among
the Ormonts: they were too careful of the purity of the strain. Lady
Charlotte talked. She was excited, and ran her sentences to blanks,
a cunning way for ministering consolation to her hearing, where the
sentence intended a question, and the blank ending caught up the query
tone and carried it dwindling away to the most distant of throttled
interrogatives. She had, in this manner, only to ask,--her hearing
received the comforting answer it desired; for she could take that thin
far sound as a travelling laughter of incredulity, triumphant derision.

This meant to her--though she scarcely knew it, though the most wilful
of women declined to know it--a state of alarm. She had said of her
brother in past days that he would have his time of danger after
striking sixty. The dangerous person was to be young.

But, then, Ormont had high principles with regard to the dues to his
family. His principles could always be trusted. The dangerous young
person would have to be a person of lineage, of a certain station at
least: no need for a titled woman, only for warranted good blood. Is
that to be found certificated out of the rolls of Society? It may
just possibly be found, without certificate, however, in those muddled
caverns where the excluded intermingle. Here and there, in a peasant
family, or a small country tradesman's just raised above a peasant,
honest regenerating blood will be found. Nobles wanting refreshment from
the soil might do worse than try a slip of one of those juicy weeds;
ill-fated, sickly Royalties would be set-up striding through another
half-century with such invigoration, if it could be done for them!
There are tales. The tales are honourably discredited by the crazy
constitutions of the heirs to the diadem.

Yes, but we are speculating on the matter seriously, as though it were
one of intimate concern to the family. What is there to make us think
that Ormont would marry? Impossible to imagine him intimidated. Unlikely
that he, a practised reader of women, having so little of the woman in
him, would be melted by a wily girl; as women in the twilight situation
have often played the trick to come into the bright beams. How? They do
a desperate thing, and call it generosity, and then they appeal from
it to my lord's generosity; and so the two generosities drive off in
a close carriage with a friend and a professional landlady for the
blessing of the parson, and are legitimately united. Women have won
round fools to give way in that way. And quite right too! thought Lady
Charlotte, siding with nature and justice, as she reflected that no
woman created would win round her brother to give way in that way. He
was too acute. The moment the woman showed sign of becoming an actress,
her doom was written. “Poor idiot!” was not uncharitably inscribed by
the sisterly lady on the tombstone of hopes aimed with scarce pardonable
ambition at her brother.

She blew away the rumour. Ormont, she vowed, had not entitled any woman
to share and bear his title. And this was her interpretation of the
report: he permitted (if he did permit) the woman to take his name, that
he might have a scornful fling at the world maltreating him. Besides,
the name was not published, it was not to be seen in the papers; it
passed merely among male friends, tradesmen, servants: no great harm in
that.

Listen further. Here is an unknown girl: why should he marry her? A girl
consenting to the place beside a man of his handsome ripe age, is either
bought, or she is madly enamoured; she does not dictate terms. Ormont
is not of the brute buyers in that market. One sees it is the girl who
leads the dance. A girl is rarely so madly enamoured as when she falls
in love with her grandfather; she pitches herself at his head. This
had not happened for the first time in Ormont's case; and he had never
proposed marriage. Why should he do it now?

But again, if the girl has breeding to some extent, he might think it
her due that she should pass under the safeguard of his name, out of
sight.

Then, so far the report is trustworthy. We blow the rumour out of
belief. A young woman there is: she is not a wife. Lady Charlotte
allowed her the fairly respectable post of Hecate of the Shades, as long
as the girl was no pretender to the place and name in the upper sphere.
Her deductions were plausible, convincing to friends shaken by her
vehement manner of coming at them. She convinced herself by means of her
multitude of reasons for not pursuing inquiry. Her brother said nothing.
There was no need for him to speak. He seemed on one or two occasions in
the act of getting himself together for the communication of a secret;
and she made ready to listen hard, with ears, eyebrows, shut month, and
a gleam at the back of her eyes, for a signification of something she
would refer him to after he had spoken. He looked at her and held his
peace, or virtually held it,--that is, he said not one word on the
subject she was to have told him she had anticipated. Lady Charlotte
ascribed it to his recollection of the quick blusher, the pained
blusher, she was in her girlhood at mention or print of the story of men
and women. Who, not having known her, could conceive it! But who could
conceive that, behind the positive, plain-dealing, downright woman
of the world, there was at times, when a nerve was touched or an old
blocked path of imagination thrown open, a sensitive youthfulness; still
quick to blush as far as the skin of a grandmother matron might show it!




CHAPTER III. THE TUTOR

There was no counting now on Lord Ormont's presence in the British
gathering seasons, when wheatears wing across our fields or swallows
return to their eaves. He forsook the hunt to roam the Continent, one
of the vulgar band of tourists, honouring town only when Mayflies had
flown, and London's indiscriminate people went about without their
volatile heads.

Lady Charlotte put these changed conditions upon the behaviour of the
military authorities to her brother, saying that the wonder was he did
not shake the dust of his country from his feet. In her wise head she
rejoiced to think he was not the donkey she sketched for admiration; and
she was partly consoled, or played at the taking of a comfort needed in
her perpetual struggle with a phantom of a fact, by the reflection that
a young woman on his arm would tense him to feel himself more at home
abroad. Her mind's habit of living warmly beside him in separation was
vexed by the fixed intrusion of a female third person, who checked the
run of intimate chatter, especially damped the fancied talk over early
days--of which the creature was ignorant; and her propinquity to him
arrested or broke the dialogue Lady Charlotte invented and pressed to
renew. But a wife, while letting him be seen, would have insisted on
appropriating the thought of him--all his days, past as well as present.
An impassioned sister's jealousy preferred that it should not be a wife
reigning to dispute her share of her brother in imagination.

Then came a rumour, telling of him as engaged upon the composition of
his Memoirs.

Lady Charlotte's impulsive outcry: “Writing them?” signified her grounds
for alarm.

Happily, Memoirs are not among the silly deeds done in a moment; they
were somewhere ahead and over the hills: a band of brigands rather than
a homely shining mansion, it was true; but distant; and a principal
question shrieked to know whether he was composing them for publication.
She could look forward with a girl's pleasure to the perusal of them
in manuscript, in a woody nook, in a fervour of partizanship, easily
avoiding sight of errors, grammatical or moral. She chafed at the
possible printing and publishing of them. That would be equivalent to an
exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run across London--brilliant in
himself, spotty in the offence. Published Memoirs indicate the end of
a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end; and at a period of
Lord Ormont's life when the denial of it should thunder. They are his
final chapter, making mummy of the grand figure they wrap in the printed
stuff. They are virtually his apology. Can those knowing Lord Ormont
hear him apologize? But it is a craven apology if we stoop to expound:
we are seen as pleading our case before the public. Call it by any
name you please, and under any attitude, it is that. And set aside the
writing: it may be perfect; the act is the degradation. It is a rousing
of swarms. His friends and the public will see the proudest nobleman
of his day, pleading his case in mangled English, in the headlong of an
out-poured, undrilled, rabble vocabulary, doubling the ridicule by
his imperturbability over the ridicule he excites: he who is no more
ridiculous, cried the partizan sister, conjuring up the scene, not an
ace more ridiculous, than a judge of assize calling himself miserable
sinner on Sunday before the parson, after he has very properly condemned
half a score of weekday miserable sinners to penal servitude or the
rope. Nobody laughs at the judge. Everybody will be laughing at the
scornful man down half-way to his knee-cape with a stutter of an apology
for having done his duty to his country, after stigmatizing numbers for
inability or ill-will to do it. But Ormont's weapon is the sword, not a
pen! Lady Charlotte hunted her simile till the dogs had it or it ran to
earth.

She struck at the conclusion, that the young woman had been persuading
him. An adoring young woman is the person to imagine and induce to the
commission of such folly. “What do you think? You have seen her, you
say?” she asked of a man she welcomed for his flavour of the worldling's
fine bile.

Lord Adderwood made answer: “She may be having a hand in it. She
worships, and that is your way of pulling gods to the ground.”

“Does she understand good English?”

“Speaks it.”

“Can she write?”

“I have never had a letter from her.”

“You tell me Morsfield admires the woman--would marry her to-morrow, if
he could get her.”

“He would go through the ceremony Ormont has performed, I do not doubt.”

“I don't doubt all of you are ready. She doesn't encourage one?”

“On the contrary, all.”

“She's clever. This has been going on for now seven years, and, as far
as I know, she has my brother fast.”

“She may have done the clever trick of having him fast from the
beginning.”

“She'd like people to think it.”

“She has an aunt to advertise it.”

“Ormont can't swallow the woman, I'm told.”

“Trying, if one is bound to get her down!”

“Boasts of the connection everywhere she's admitted, Randeller says.”

“Randeller procures the admission to various parti-coloured places.”

“She must be a blinking moll-owl! And I ask any sane Christian or
Pagan--proof enough!--would my brother Rowsley let his wife visit those
places, those people? Monstrous to have the suspicion that he would, you
know him! Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, for example. I say nothing to hurt the
poor woman; I back her against her imbecile of a husband. He brings a
charge he can't support; she punishes him by taking three years' lease
of independence and kicks up the grass all over the paddock, and then
comes cuckoo, barking his name abroad to have her home again. You can
win the shyest filly to corn at last. She goes, and he digests ruefully
the hotch-potch of a dish the woman brings him. Only the world spies a
side-head at her, husbanded or not, though the main fault was his, and
she had a right to insist that he should be sure of his charge before
he smacked her in the face with it before the world. In dealing with
a woman, a man commonly prudent--put aside chivalry, justice, and the
rest--should bind himself to disbelieve what he can't prove. Otherwise,
let him expect his whipping, with or without ornament. My opinion is,
Lawrence Finchley had no solid foundation for his charge, except his
being an imbecile. She wasn't one of the adventurous women to jump the
bars,--the gate had to be pushed open, and he did it. There she is; and
I ask you, would my brother Rowsley let his wife be intimate with her?
And there are others. And, sauf votre respect, the men--Morsfield for
one, Randeller another!”

“They have a wholesome dread of the lion.”

“If they smell a chance with the lion's bone--it's the sweeter for being
the lion's. These metaphors carry us off our ground. I must let these
Ormont Memoirs run and upset him, if they get to print. I've only to
oppose, printed they'll be. The same if I say a word of this woman, he
marries her to-morrow morning. You speak of my driving men. Why can't I
drive Ormont? Because I'm too fond of him. There you have the secret of
the subjection of women: they can hold their own, and a bit more, when
they've no enemy beating inside.”

“Hearts!--ah, well, it's possible. I don't say no; I've not discovered
them,” Lord Adderwood observed.

They are rarely discovered in the haunts he frequented.

Her allusion to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley rapped him smartly, and she
admired his impassiveness under the stroke. Such a spectacle was one of
her pleasures.

Lady Charlotte mentioned incidentally her want of a tutor for her
grandson Leo during the winter holidays. He suggested an application
to the clergyman of her parish. She was at feud with the Rev. Stephen
Hampton-Evey, and would not take, she said, a man to be a bootblack
in her backyard or a woman a scullery-wench in her kitchen upon his
recommendation. She described the person of Mr. Hampton-Evey, his manner
of speech, general opinions, professional doctrines; rolled him into a
ball and bowled him, with a shrug for lamentation, over the decay of the
good old order of manly English Protestant clergymen, who drank their
port, bothered nobody about belief, abstained from preaching their
sermon, if requested; were capital fellows in the hunting-field, too;
for if they came, they had the spur to hunt in the devil's despite.
Now we are going to have a kind of bitter, clawed, forked female, in
vestments over breeches. “How do you like that bundling of the sexes?”

Lord Adderwood liked the lines of division to be strictly and invitingly
definite. He was thinking, as he reviewed the frittered appearance
of the Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey in Lady Charlotte's hinds, of the
possibility that Lord Ormont, who was reputed to fear nobody, feared
her. In which case, the handsome young woman passing among his
associates as the pseudo Lady Ormont might be the real one after all,
and Isabella Lawrence Finchley prove right in the warning she gave to
dogs of chase.

The tutor required by Lady Charlotte was found for her by Mr. Abner.
Their correspondence on the subject filled the space of a week, and then
the gentleman hired to drive a creaky wheel came down from London to
Olmer, arriving late in the evening.

Lady Charlotte's blunt “Oh!” when he entered her room and bowed upon the
announcement of his name, was caused by an instantaneous perception and
refection that it would be prudent to keep her grand-daughter Philippa,
aged between seventeen and eighteen, out of his way.

“You are friend of Mr. Abner's, are you?”

He was not disconcerted. He replied, in an assured and pleasant voice,
“I have hardly the pretension to be called a friend, madam.”

“Are you a Jew?”

Her abruptness knocked something like a laugh almost out of him, but he
restrained the signs of it.

“I am not.”

“You wouldn't be ashamed to tell me you were one if you were?”

“Not at all.”

“You like the Jews?”

“Those I know I like.”

“Not many Christians have the good sense and the good heart of Arthur
Abner. Now go and eat. Come back to me when you've done. I hope you are
hungry. Ask the butler for the wine you prefer.”

She had not anticipated the enrolment in her household of a man so young
and good-looking. These were qualifications for Cupid's business, which
his unstrained self-possession accentuated to a note of danger to her
chicks, because she liked the taste of him. Her grand-daughter Philippa
was in the girl's waxen age; another, Beatrice, was coming to it. Both
were under her care; and she was a vigilant woman, with an intuition
and a knowledge of sex. She did not blame Arthur Abner for sending her
a good-looking young man; she had only a general idea that tutors in a
house, and even visiting tutors, should smell of dust and wear a snuffy
appearance. The conditions will not always insure the tutors from
foolishness, as her girl's experience reminded her, but they protect the
girl.

“Your name is Weyburn; your father was an officer in the army, killed
on the battle-field, Arthur Abner tells me,” was her somewhat
severely-toned greeting to the young tutor on his presenting himself the
second time.

It had the sound of the preliminary of an indictment read in a Court of
Law.

“My father died of his wounds in hospital,” he said.

“Why did you not enter the service?”

“Want of an income, my lady.”

“Bad look-out. Army or Navy for gentlemen, if they stick to the school
of honour. The sedentary professions corrupt men: bad for the blood.
Those monastery monks found that out. They had to birch the devil out of
them three times a day and half the night, howling like full-moon dogs
all through their lives, till the flesh was off them. That was their
exercise, if they were for holiness. My brother, Lord Ormont, has never
been still in his youth or his manhood. See him now. He counts his years
by scores; and he has about as many wrinkles as you when you're smiling.
His cheeks are as red as yours now you're blushing. You ought to have
left off that trick by this time. It's well enough in a boy.”

Against her will she was drawn to the young man, and her consciousness
of it plucked her back to caution with occasional jerks--quaint
alternations of the familiar and the harshly formal, in the stranger's
experience.

“If I have your permission, Lady Charlotte,” said he, “the reason why I
mount red a little--if I do it--is, you mention Lord Ormont, and I have
followed his career since I was the youngest of boys.”

“Good to begin with the worship of a hero. He can't sham, can't
deceive--not even a woman; and you're old enough to understand the
temptation: they're so silly. All the more, it's a point of honour with
a man of honour to shield her from herself. When it's a girl--”

The young man's eyebrows bent.

“Chapters of stories, if you want to hear them,” she resumed; “and I can
vouch some of them true. Lord Ormont was never one of the wolves in a
hood. Whatever you hear of him; you may be sure he laid no trap. He's
just the opposite to the hypocrite; so hypocrites date him. I've heard
them called high-priests of decency. Then we choose to be indecent
and honest, if there's a God to worship. Fear, they're in the habit of
saying--we are to fear God. A man here, a Rev. Hampton-Evey, you'll hear
him harp on 'fear God.' Hypocrites may: honest sinners have no fear. And
see the cause: they don't deceive themselves--that is why. Do you think
we call love what we fear? They love God, or they disbelieve. And if
they believe in Him, they know they can't conceal anything from Him.
Honesty means piety: we can't be one without the other. And here are
people--parsons--who talk of dying as going into the presence of our
Maker, as if He had been all the while outside the world He created.
Those parsons, I told the Rev. Hampton-Evey here, make infidels--they
make a puzzle of their God. I'm for a rational Deity. They preach up a
supernatural eccentric. I don't say all: I've heard good sermons, and
met sound-headed clergymen--not like that gaping Hampton-Evey, when
a woman tells him she thinks for herself. We have him sitting on our
pariah. A free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon; but a female
free-thinker is one of Satan's concubines. He took it upon himself to
reproach me--flung his glove at my feet, because I sent a cheque to a
poor man punished for blasphemy. The man had the right to his opinions,
and he had the courage of his opinions. I doubt whether the Rev.
Hampton-Evey would go with a willing heart to prison for his. All the
better for him if he comes head-up out of a trial. But now see: all
these parsons and judges and mobcaps insist upon conformity. A man with
common manly courage comes before them, and he's cast in penalties.
Yet we know from history, in England, France, Germany, that the time
of nonconformity brought out the manhood of the nation. Now, I say, a
nation, to be a nation, must have men--I mean brave men. That's what
those hosts of female men combine to try to stifle. They won't succeed,
but we shall want a war to teach the country the value of courage. You
catch what I am driving at? They accuse my brother of immorality because
he makes no pretence to be better than the men of his class.”

Weyburn's eyelids fluttered. Her kite-like ascent into the general, with
the sudden drop on her choice morsel, switched his humour at the moment
when he was respectfully considering that her dartings and gyrations had
motive as mach as the flight of the swallow for food. They had meaning;
and here was one of the great ladies of the land who thought for
herself, and was thoughtful for the country. If she came down like a
bird winged, it was her love of her brother that did it. His look at
Lady Charlotte glistened.

She raised her defences against the basilisk fascinating Philippa;
and with a vow to keep them apart and deprive him of his chance, she
relapsed upon the stiff frigidity which was not natural to her. It
lasted long enough to put him on his guard under the seductions of a
noble dame's condescension to a familiar tone. But, as he was too well
bred to show the change in his mind for her change of manner, and as she
was the sister of his boyhood's hero, and could be full of flavour, his
eyes retained something of their sparkle. They were ready to lighten
again, in the way peculiar to him, when she, quite forgetting her
defence of Philippa, disburdened herself of her antagonisms and
enthusiasms, her hates and her loves all round the neighbourhood and
over the world, won to confidential communication by this young man's
face. She confessed as much, had he been guided to perceive it. She
said, “Arthur Abner's a reader of men: I can trust his word about them.”

Presently, it is true, she added: “No man's to be relied upon where
there's a woman.” She refused her implicit trust to saints--“if ever a
man really was a saint before he was canonized!”

Her penetrative instinct of sex kindled the scepticism. Sex she saw
at play everywhere, dogging the conduct of affairs, directing them at
times; she saw it as the animation of nature, senselessly stigmatized,
hypocritically concealed, active in our thoughts where not in our deeds;
and the declining of the decorous to see it, or admit the sight, got
them abhorred bad names from her, after a touch at the deadly poison
coming of that blindness, or blindfoldedness, and a grimly melancholy
shrug over the cruelties resulting--cruelties chiefly affecting women.

“You're too young to have thought upon such matters,” she said, for a
finish to them.

That was hardly true.

“I have thought,” said Weyburn, and his head fell to reckoning of the
small sum of his thoughts upon them.

He was pulled up instantly for close inspection by the judge. “What is
your age?”

“I am in my twenty-sixth year.”

“You have been among men: have you studied women?”

“Not largely, Lady Charlotte. Opportunity has been wanting at French and
German colleges.”

“It's only a large and a close and a pretty long study of them that can
teach you anything; and you must get rid of the poetry about them, and
be sure you haven't lost it altogether. That's what is called the golden
mean. I'm not for the golden mean in every instance; it's a way of
exhorting to brutal selfishness. I grant it's the right way in those
questions. You'll learn in time.” Her scanning gaze at the young man's
face drove him along an avenue of his very possible chances of learning.
“Certain to. But don't tell me that at your age you have thought about
women. You may say you have felt. A young man's feelings about women are
better reading for him six or a dozen chapters farther on. Then he can
sift and strain. It won't be perfectly clear, but it will do.”

Mr. Eglett hereupon threw the door open, and ushered in Master Leo.

Lady Charlotte noticed that the tutor shook the boy's hand offhandedly,
with not a whit of the usual obtrusive geniality, and merely dropped him
a word. Soon after, he was talking to Mr. Eglett of games at home and
games abroad. Poor fun over there! We head the world in field games, at
all events. He drew a picture of a foreigner of his acquaintance looking
on at football. On the other hand, French boys and German, having passed
a year or two at an English school, get the liking for our games, and
do a lot of good when they go home. The things we learn from them are
to dance, to sing, and to study:--they are more in earnest than we about
study. They teach us at fencing too. The tutor praised fencing as an
exercise and an accomplishment. He had large reserves of eulogy for
boxing. He knew the qualities of the famous bruisers of the time, cited
fisty names, whose owners were then to be seen all over an admiring
land in prints; in the glorious defensive-offensive attitude, England's
own--Touch me, if you dare! with bullish, or bull-dog, or oak-bole
fronts for the blow, handsome to pugilistic eyes.

The young tutor had lighted on a pet theme of Mr. Eglett's--the
excelling virtues of the practice of pugilism in Old England, and the
school of honour that it is to our lower population. “Fifty times better
for them than cock-fighting,” he exclaimed, admitting that he could be
an interested spectator at a ring or the pit cock-fighting or ratting.

“Ratting seems to have more excuse,” the tutor said, and made no sign of
a liking for either of those popular pastimes. As he disapproved without
squeamishness, the impulsive but sharply critical woman close by nodded;
and she gave him his dues for being no courtier.

Leo had to be off to bed. The tutor spared him any struggle over
the shaking of hands, and saying, “Goodnight, Leo,” continued the
conversation. The boy went away, visibly relieved of the cramp that
seizes on a youngster at the formalities pertaining to these chilly and
fateful introductions.

“What do you think of the look of him?” Mr. Eglett asked.

The tutor had not appeared to inspect the boy. “Big head,” he remarked.
“Yes, Leo won't want pushing at books when he's once in harness. He
will have six weeks of me. It's more than the yeomanry get for drill
per annum, and they're expected to know something of a soldier's duties.
There's a chance of putting him on the right road in certain matters.
We'll walk, or ride, or skate, if the frost holds to-morrow: no lessons
the first day.”

“Do as you think fit,” said lady Charlotte.

The one defect she saw in the tutor did not concern his pupil. And a
girl, if hit, would be unable to see that this tutor, judged as a man,
was to some extent despicable for accepting tutorships, and, one might
say, dishonouring the family of a soldier of rank and distinction,
by coming into houses at the back way, with footing enough to air his
graces when once established there. He ought to have knocked at every
door in the kingdom for help, rather than accept tutorships, and disturb
households (or providently-minded mistresses of them) with all sorts of
probably groundless apprehensions, founded naturally enough on the good
looks he intrudes.

This tutor committed the offence next day of showing he had a firm and
easy seat in the saddle, which increased Lady Charlotte's liking for him
and irritated her watchful forecasts. She rode with the young man after
lunch, “to show him the country,” and gave him a taste of what he took
for her variable moods. He misjudged her. Like a swimmer going
through warm and cold springs of certain lake waters, he thought her a
capricious ladyship, dangerous for intimacy, alluring to the deeps and
gripping with cramps.

She pushed him to defend his choice of the tutor's profession.

“Think you understand boys?” she caught up his words; “you can't. You
can humour them, as you humour women. They're just as hard to read. And
don't tell me a young man can read women. Boys and women go on their
instincts. Egyptologists can spell you hieroglyphs; they'd be stumped,
as Leo would say, to read a spider out of an ink-pot over a sheet of
paper.”

“One gets to interpret by degrees, by observing their habits,” the tutor
said, and vexed her with a towering complacency under provocation that
went some way further to melt the woman she was, while her knowledge of
the softness warned her still more of the duty of playing dragon round
such a young man in her house. The despot is alert at every issue, to
every chance; and she was one, the wakefuller for being benevolent; her
mind had no sleep by day.

For a month she subjected Mr. Matthew Weyburn to the microscope of
her observation and the probe of her instinct. He proved that he could
manage without cajoling a boy. The practical fact established, by
agreement between herself and the unobservant gentleman who was her
husband, Lady Charlotte allowed her meditations to drop an indifferent
glance at the speculative views upon education entertained by this young
tutor. To her mind they were flighty; but she liked him, and as her
feelings dictated to her mind when she had not to think for others, she
spoke of his views toleratingly, almost with an implied approval, after
passing them through the form of burlesque to which she customarily
treated things failing to waft her enthusiasm. In regard to Philippa,
he behaved well: he bestowed more of his attention on Beatrice, nearer
Leo's age, in talk about games and story-books and battles; nothing that
he did when the girls were present betrayed the strutting plumed cock,
bent to attract, or the sickly reptile, thirsty for a prize above him
and meaning to have it, like Satan in Eden. Still, of course, he could
not help his being a handsome fellow, having a vivid face and eyes
transparent, whether blue or green, to flame of the brain exciting them;
and that becomes a picture in the dream of girls--a picture creating the
dream often. And Philippa had asked her grandmother, very ingenuously
indeed, with a most natural candour, why “they saw so little of Leo's
hero.” Simple female child!

However, there was no harm done, and Lady Charlotte liked him. She liked
few. Forthwith, in the manner of her particular head, a restless head,
she fell to work at combinations.

Thus:--he is a nice young fellow, well bred, no cringing courtier,
accomplished, good at classics, fairish at mathematics, a scholar in
French, German, Italian, with a shrewd knowledge of the different races,
and with sound English sentiment too, and the capacity for writing good
English, although in those views of his the ideas are unusual, therefore
un-English, profoundly so. But his intentions are patriotic; they would
not displease Lord Ormont. He has a worship of Lord Ormont. All we
can say on behalf of an untried inferior is in that,--only the valiant
admire devotedly. Well, he can write grammatical, readable English. What
if Lord Ormont were to take him as a secretary while the Memoirs are
in hand? He might help to chasten the sentences laughed at by those
newspapers. Or he might, being a terrible critic of writing, and funny
about styles, put it in an absurd light, that would cause the Memoirs
to be tossed into the fire. He was made for the post of secretary! The
young man's good looks would be out of harm's way then. If any sprig of
womankind come across him there, it will, at any rate, not be a girl.
Women must take care of themselves. Only the fools among them run to
mischief in the case of a handsome young fellow.

Supposing a certain woman to be one of the fools? Lady Charlotte merely
suggested it in the dashing current of her meditations--did not strike
it out interrogatively. The woman would be a fine specimen among her
class; that was all. For the favourite of Lord Ormont to stoop from
her place beside him--ay, but women do; heroes have had the woeful
experience of that fact. First we see them aiming themselves at their
hero; next they are shooting an eye at the handsome man. The thirst of
nature comes after that of their fancy, in conventional women. Sick of
the hero tried, tired of their place in the market, no longer ashamed to
acknowledge it, they begin to consult their own taste for beauty--they
have it quite as much as the men have it; and when their worshipped
figure of manliness, in a romantic sombrero, is a threadbare giant,
showing bruises, they sink on their inherent desire for a dance with the
handsome man. And the really handsome man is the most extraordinary of
the rarities. No wonder that when he appears he slays them, walks over
them like a pestilence!

This young Weyburn would touch the fancy of a woman of a romantic turn.
Supposing her enthusiastic in her worship of the hero, after a number
of years--for anything may be imagined where a woman is concerned--why,
another enthusiasm for the same object, and on the part of a stranger,
a stranger with effective eyes, rapidly leads to sympathy. Suppose the
reverse--the enthusiasm gone to dust, or become a wheezy old bellows, as
it does where there's disparity of age, or it frequently does--then the
sympathy with a good-looking stranger comes more rapidly still.

These were Lady Charlotte's glances right and left--idle flights of the
eye of a mounted Amazon across hedges at the canter along the main road
of her scheme; which was to do a service to the young man she liked
and to the brother she loved, for the marked advantage of both equally;
perhaps for the chance of a little gossip to follow about that tenacious
woman by whom her brother was held hard and fast, kept away from friends
and relatives, isolated, insomuch as to have given up living on his
estate--the old home!--because he would not disgrace it or incur odium
by taking her there.

In consequence of Lord Ormont's resistance to pressure from her on two
or three occasions, she chose to nurse and be governed by the maxim for
herself: Never propose a plan to him, if you want it adopted. That was
her way of harmlessly solacing love's vindictiveness for an injury.

She sent Arthur Abner a letter, thanking him for his recommendation of
young Mr. Weyburn, stating her benevolent wishes as regarded the young
man and “those hateful Memoirs,” requesting that her name should not be
mentioned in the affair, because she was anxious on all grounds to have
the proposal accepted by her brother. She could have vowed to herself
that she wrote sincerely.

“He must want a secretary. He would be shy at an offer of one from me.
Do you hint it, if you get a chance. You gave us Mr. Weyburn, and Mr.
Eglett and I like him. Ormont would too, I am certain. You have obliged
him before; this will be better than anything you have done for us. It
will stop the Memoirs, or else give them a polish. Your young friend
has made me laugh over stuff taken for literature until we put on our
spectacles. Leo jogs along in harness now, and may do some work at
school yet.”

Having posted her letter, she left the issue to chance, as we may when
conscience is easy. An answer came the day before Weyburn's departure.
Arthur Abner had met Lord Ormont in the street, had spoken of the rumour
of Memoirs promised to the world, hinted at the possible need for a
secretary; “Lord Ormont would appoint a day to see Mr. Weyburn.”

Lady Charlotte considered that to be as good as the engagement.

“So we keep you in the family,” she said. “And now look here: you ought
to know my brother's ways, if you're going to serve him. You'll have to
guess at half of everything he tells you; he'll expect you to know the
whole. There's no man so secret. Why? He fears nothing; I can't tell
why. And what his mouth shuts on, he exposes as if in his hand. Of
course he's proud, and good reason. You'll see when you mustn't offend.
A lady's in the house--I hear of it. She takes his name, they say. She
may be a respectable woman--I've heard no scandal. We have to hear of a
Lady Ormont out of Society! We have to suppose it means there's not to
be a real one. He can't marry if he has allowed her to go about bearing
his name. She has a fool of an aunt, I'm told; as often in the house
as not. Good proof of his fondness for the woman, if he swallows half
a year of the aunt! Well, you won't, unless you've mere man's eyes, be
able to help seeing him trying to hide what he suffers from that aunt.
He bears it, like the man he is; but woe to another betraying it! She
has a tongue that goes like the reel of a rod, with a pike bolting out
of the shallows to the snag he knows--to wind round it and defy you to
pull. Often my brother Rowsley and I have fished the day long, and in
hard weather, and brought home a basket; and he boasted of it more than
of anything he has ever done since. That woman holds him away from me
now. I say no harm of her. She may be right enough from her point of
view; or it mayn't be owing to her. I wouldn't blame a woman. Well,
but my point with you is, you swallow the woman's aunt--the lady's
aunt--without betraying you suffer at all. Lord Ormont has eyes of an
eagle for a speck above the surface. All the more because the aunt is a
gabbling idiot does he--I say it seeing it--fire up to defend her from
the sneer of the lip or half a sign of it! No, you would be an your
guard; I can trust you. Of course you'd behave like the gentleman you
are where any kind of woman's concerned; but you mustn't let a shadow
be seen, think what you may. The woman--lady--calling herself Lady
Ormont,--poor woman, I should do the same in her place,--she has a hard
game to play; I have to be for my family: she has manners, I'm told;
holds herself properly. She fancies she brings him up to the altar, in
the end, by decent behaviour. That's a delusion. It's creditable to her,
only she can't understand the claims of the family upon a man like
my brother. When you have spare time--'kick-ups,' he need to call it,
writing to me from school--come here; you're welcome, after three days'
notice. I shall be glad to see you again. You've gone some way to make a
man of Leo.”

He liked her well: he promised to come. She was a sinewy bite of the
gentle sex, but she had much flavour, and she gave nourishment.

“Let me have three days' notice,” she repeated.

“Not less, Lady Charlotte,” said he.

Weyburn received intimation from Arthur Abner of the likely day Lord
Ormont would appoint, and he left Olmer for London to hold himself in
readiness. Lady Charlotte and Leo drove him to meet the coach. Philippa,
so strangely baffled in her natural curiosity, begged for a seat; she
begged to be allowed to ride. Petitions were rejected. She stood at
the window seeing “Grandmama's tutor,” as she named him, carried off by
grandmama. Her nature was avenged on her tyrant grandmama: it brought
up almost to her tongue thoughts which would have remained subterranean,
under control of her habit of mind, or the nursery's modesty, if she
had been less tyrannically treated. They were subterranean thoughts,
Nature's original, such as the sense of injustice will rouse in young
women; and they are better unstirred, for they ripen girls over-rapidly
when they are made to revolve near the surface. It flashed on the girl
why she had been treated tyrannically.

“Grandmama has good taste in tutors,” was all that she said while the
thoughts rolled over.




CHAPTER IV. RECOGNITION

Our applicant for the post of secretary entered the street of Lord
Ormont's London house, to present himself to his boyhood's hero by
appointment.

He was to see, perhaps to serve, the great soldier. Things had come to
this; and he thought it singular. But for the previous introduction to
Lady Charlotte, he would have thought it passing wonderful. He ascribed
it to the whirligig.

The young man was not yet of an age to gather knowledge of himself
and of life from his present experience of the fact, that passionate
devotion to an object strikes a vein through circumstances, as a
travelling run of flame darts the seeming haphazard zigzags to catch
at the dry of dead wood amid the damp; and when passion has become
quiescent in the admirer, there is often the unsubsided first impulsion
carrying it on. He will almost sorely embrace his idol with one or other
of the senses.

Weyburn still read the world as it came to him, by bite, marvelling at
this and that, after the fashion of most of us. He had not deserted his
adolescent's hero, or fallen upon analysis of a past season. But he was
now a young man, stoutly and cognizantly on the climb, with a good aim
overhead, axed green youth's enthusiasms a step below his heels: one
of the lovers of life, beautiful to behold, when we spy into them;
generally their aspect is an enlivenment, whatever may be the carving
of their features. For the sake of holy unity, this lover of life,
whose gaze was to the front in hungry animation, held fast to his young
dreams, perceiving a soul of meaning in them, though the fire might have
gone out; and he confessed to a past pursuit of delusions. Young men of
this kind will have, for the like reason, a similar rational sentiment
on behalf of our world's historic forward march, while admitting that
history has to be taken from far backward if we would gain assurance of
man's advance. It nerves an admonished ambition.

He was ushered into a London house's library, looking over a niggard
enclosure of gravel and dull grass, against a wall where ivy dribbled.
An armchair was beside the fireplace. To right and left of it a floreate
company of books in high cases paraded shoulder to shoulder, without
a gap; grenadiers on the line. Weyburn read the titles on their
scarlet-and-blue facings. They were approved English classics; honoured
veterans, who have emerged from the conflict with contemporary opinion,
stamped excellent, or have been pushed by the roar of contemporaneous
applauses to wear the leather-and-gilt uniform of our Immortals, until
a more qualmish posterity disgorges them. The books had costly bindings.
Lord Ormont's treatment of Literature appeared to resemble Lady
Charlotte's, in being reverential and uninquiring. The books she bought
to read were Memoirs of her time by dead men and women once known to
her. These did fatigue duty in cloth or undress. It was high drill with
all of Lord Ormont's books, and there was not a modern or a minor name
among the regiments. They smelt strongly of the bookseller's lump lots
by order; but if a show soldiery, they were not a sham, like a certain
row of venerably-titled backs, that Lady Charlotte, without scruple,
left standing to blow an ecclesiastical trumpet of empty contents; any
one might have his battle of brains with them, for the twining of an
absent key.

The door opened. Weyburn bowed to his old star in human shape: a grey
head on square shoulders, filling the doorway. He had seen at Olmer
Lady Charlotte's treasured miniature portrait of her brother; a perfect
likeness, she said--complaining the neat instant of injustice done to
the fire of his look.

Fire was low down behind the eyes at present. They were quick to scan
and take summary of their object, as the young man felt while observing
for himself. Height and build of body were such as might be expected in
the brother of Lady Charlotte and from the tales of his prowess. Weyburn
had a glance back at Cuper's boys listening to the tales.

The soldier-lord's manner was courteously military--that of an
established superior indifferent to the deferential attitude he must
needs enact. His curt nick of the head, for a response to the visitor's
formal salutation, signified the requisite acknowledgment, like a city
creditor's busy stroke of the type-stamp receipt upon payment.

The ceremony over, he pitched a bugle voice to fit the contracted area:
“I hear from Mr. Abner that you have made acquaintance with Olmer. Good
hunting country there.”

“Lady Charlotte kindly gave me a mount, my lord.”

“I knew your father by name--Colonel Sidney Weyburn. You lost him at
Toulouse. We were in the Peninsula; I was at Talavera with him. Bad day
for our cavalry.”

“Our officers were young at their work then.”

“They taught the Emperor's troops to respect a charge of English horse.
It was teaching their fox to set traps for them.”

Lord Ormont indicated a chair. He stood.

“The French had good cavalry leaders,” Weyburn said, for cover to a
continued study of the face,

“Montbrun, yes: Murat, Lassalle, Bessieres. Under the Emperor they had.”

“You think them not at home in the saddle, my lord?”

“Frenchmen have nerves; horses are nerves. They pile excitement too
high. When cool, they're among the best. None of them had head for
command of all the arms.”

“One might say the same of Seidlitz and Ziethen?”

“Of Ziethen. Seidlitz had a wider grasp, I suppose.” He pursed his
month, pondering. “No; and in the Austrian service, too; generals
of cavalry are left to whistle for an independent command. There's a
jealousy of our branch!” The injured warrior frowned and hummed. He
spoke his thought mildly: “Jealousy of the name of soldier in this
country! Out of the service, is the place to recommend. I'd have advised
a son of mine to train for a jockey rather than enter it. We deal with
that to-morrow, in my papers. You come to me? Mr. Abner has arranged
the terms? So I see you at ten in the morning. I am glad to meet a young
man--Englishman--who takes an interest in the service.”

Weyburn fancied the hearing of a step; he heard the whispering dress. It
passed him; a lady went to the armchair. She took her seat, as she had
moved, with sedateness, the exchange of a toneless word with my lord.
She was a brune. He saw that when he rose to do homage.

Lord Ormont resumed: “Some are born to it, must be soldiers; and in
peace they are snubbed by the heads; in war they are abused by the
country. They don't understand in England how to treat an army; how to
make one either!

“The gentleman--Mr. Weyburn: Mr. Arthur Abner's recommendation,” he
added hurriedly, with a light wave of his hand and a murmur, that might
be the lady's title; continuing: “A young man of military tastes should
take service abroad. They're in earnest about it over there. Here
they play at it; and an army's shipped to land without commissariat,
ambulances, medical stores, and march against the odds, as usual--if it
can march!

“Albuera, my lord?”

“Our men can spurt, for a flick o' the whip. They're expected to be
constantly ready for doing prodigies--to repair the country's omissions.
All the country cares for is to hope Dick Turpin may get to York. Our
men are good beasts; they give the best in 'em, and drop. More's the
scandal to a country that has grand material and overtasks it. A blazing
disaster ends the chapter!”

This was talk of an injured veteran. It did not deepen the hue of his
ruddied skin. He spoke in the tone of matter of fact. Weyburn had been
prepared for something of the sort by his friend, Arthur Abner. He noted
the speaker's heightened likeness under excitement to Lady Charlotte.
Excitement came at an early call of their voices to both; and both
had handsome, open features, bluntly cut, nothing of aquiline or the
supercilious; eyes bluish-grey, in arched recesses, horny between
the thick lids, lively to shoot their meaning when the trap-mouth was
active; effectively expressing promptitute for combat, pleasure in
attack, wrestle, tag, whatever pertained to strife; an absolute sense of
their right.

As there was a third person present at this dissuasion of military
topics, the silence of the lady drew Weyburn to consult her opinion in
her look.

It was on him. Strange are the woman's eyes which can unoffendingly
assume the privilege to dwell on such a living object as a man without
become gateways for his return look, and can seem in pursuit of thoughts
while they enfold. They were large dark eyes, eyes of southern night.
They sped no shot; they rolled forth an envelopment. A child among toys,
caught to think of other toys, may gaze in that way. But these were a
woman's eyes.

He gave Lord Ormont his whole face, as an auditor should. He was
interested besides, as he told a ruffled conscience. He fell upon the
study of his old hero determinedly.

The pain of a memory waking under pillows, unable to do more than strain
for breath, distracted his attention. There was a memory: that was
all he knew. Or else he would have lashed himself for hanging on the
beautiful eyes of a woman. To be seeing and hearing his old hero was
wonder enough.

Recollections of Lady Charlotte's plain hints regarding the lady present
resolved to the gross retort, that her eyes were beautiful. And he knew
them--there lay the strangeness. They were known beautiful eyes, in a
foreign land of night and mist.

Lord Ormont was discoursing with racy eloquence of our hold on India:
his views in which respect were those of Cuper's boys. Weyburn ventured
a dot-running description of the famous ride, and out flew an English
soldier's grievance. But was not the unjustly-treated great soldier well
rewarded, whatever the snubs and the bitterness, with these large dark
eyes in his house, for his own? Eyes like these are the beginning of
a young man's world; they nerve, inspire, arm him, colour his life; he
would labour, fight, die for them. It seemed to Weyburn a blessedness
even to behold them. So it had been with him at the early stage; and his
heart went swifter, memory fetched a breath. Memory quivered eyelids,
when the thought returned--of his having known eyes as lustrous.
First lights of his world, they had more volume, warmth, mystery--were
sweeter. Still, these in the room were sisters to them. They quickened
throbs; they seemed a throb of the heart made visible.

That was their endowment of light and lustre simply, and the mystical
curve of the lids. For so they could look only because the heart was
disengaged from them. They were but heavenly orbs.

The lady's elbow was on an arm of her chair, her forefinger at her
left temple. Her mind was away, one might guess; she could hardly be
interested in talk of soldiering and of foreign army systems, jealous
English authorities and officials, games, field-sports. She had personal
matters to think of.

Adieu until to-morrow to the homes she inhabited! The street was a
banishment and a relief when Weyburn's first interview with Lord Ormont
was over.

He rejoiced to tell his previous anticipations that he had not been
disappointed; and he bade hero-worshippers expect no gilded figure. We
gather heroes as we go, if we are among the growing: our constancy is
shown in the not discarding of our old ones. He held to his earlier
hero, though he had seen him, and though he could fancy he saw round
him.

Another, too, had been a hero-lover. How did that lady of night's eyes
come to fall into her subjection?

He put no question as to the name she bore; it hung in a black
suspense--vividly at its blackest illuminated her possessor. A man is
a hero to some effect who wins a woman like this; and, if his glory
bespells her, so that she flings all to the winds for him, burns the
world; if, for solely the desperate rapture of belonging to him, she
consents of her free will to be one of the nameless and discoloured, he
shines in a way to make the marrow of men thrill with a burning envy.
For that must be the idolatrous devotion desired by them all.

Weyburn struck down upon his man's nature--the bad in us, when beauty
of woman is viewed; or say, the old original revolutionary, best kept
untouched; for a touch or a meditative pause above him, fetches him up
to roam the civilized world devouringly and lawlessly. It is the special
peril of the young lover of life, that an inflammability to beauty in
women is in a breath intense with him. He is, in truth, a thinly-sealed
volcano of our imperishable ancient father; and has it in him to be the
multitudinously-amorous of the mythologic Jove. Give him head, he can be
civilization's devil. Is she fair and under a shade?--then is she doubly
fair. The shadow about her secretes mystery, just as the forest breeds
romance: and mystery is a measureless realm. If we conceive it, we have
a mysterious claim on her who is the heart of it.

He marched on that road to the music of sonorous brass for some drunken
minutes.

The question came, What of the man who takes advantage of her
self-sacrifice?

It soon righted him, and he did Lord Ormont justice, and argued the case
against Lady Charlotte's naked hints.

This dark-eyed heroine's bearing was assured, beyond an air of
dependency. Her deliberate short nod to him at his leave-taking, and the
toneless few words she threw to my lord, signified sufficiently that she
did not stand defying the world or dreading it.

She had by miracle the eyes which had once charmed him--could
again--would always charm. She reminded him of Aminta Farrell's very
eyes under the couchant-dove brows--something of her mouth, the dimple
running from a corner. She had, as Aminta had, the self-collected and
self-cancelled look, a realm in a look, that was neither depth nor
fervour, nor a bestowal, nor an allurement; nor was it an exposure,
though there seemed no reserve. One would be near the meaning in
declaring it to bewilder men with the riddle of openhandedness. We read
it--all may read it--as we read inexplicable plain life; in which let
us have a confiding mind, despite the blows at our heart, and some
understanding will enter us.

He shut the door upon picture and speculations, returning to them by
another door. The lady had not Aminta's freshness: she might be taken
for an elder sister of Aminta. But Weyburn wanted to have her position
defined before he set her beside Aminta. He writhed under Lady
Charlotte's tolerating scorn of “the young woman.” It roused an uneasy
sentiment of semi-hostility in the direction of my lord; and he had no
personal complaint to make.

Lord Ormont was cordial on the day of the secretary's installation; as
if--if one might dare to guess it--some one had helped him to a friendly
judgement.

The lady of Aminta's eyes was absent at the luncheon table. She came
into the room a step, to speak to Lord Ormont, dressed for a drive to
pay a visit.

The secretary was unnoticed.

Lord Ormont put inquiries to him at table, for the why of his having
avoided the profession of arms; and apparently considered that the
secretary had made a mistake, and that he would have committed a greater
error in becoming a soldier--“in this country.” A man with a grievance
is illogical under his burden. He mentioned the name “Lady Ormont”
 distinctly during some remarks on travel. Lady Ormont preferred the
Continent.

Two days later she came to the armchair, as before, met Weyburn's eyes
when he raised them; gave him no home in hers--not a temporary shelter
from the pelting of interrogations. She hardly spoke. Why did she come?

But how was it that he was drawn to think of her? Absent or present,
she was round him, like the hills of a valley. She was round his
thoughts--caged them; however high, however far they flew, they were
conscious of her.

She took her place at the midday meal. She had Aminta's voice in some
tones; a mellower than Aminta's--the voice of one of Aminta's family.
She had the trick of Aminta's upper lip in speaking. Her look on him was
foreign; a civil smile as they conversed. She was very much at home with
my lord, whom she rallied for his addiction to his Club at a particular
hour of the afternoon. She conversed readily. She reminded him,
incidentally that her aunt would arrive early next day. He informed her,
some time after, of an engagement “to tiffin with a brother officer,”
 and she nodded.

They drove away together while the secretary was at his labour of
sorting the heap of autobiographical scraps in a worn dispatch-box, pen
and pencil jottings tossed to swell the mess when they had relieved
an angry reminiscence. He noticed, heedlessly at the moment, feminine
handwriting on some few clear sheets among them.

Next day he was alone in the library. He sat before the box, opened it
and searched, merely to quiet his annoyance for having left those sheets
of the fair amanuensis unexamined. They were not discoverable. They had
gone.

He stood up at the stir of the door. It was she, and she acknowledged
his bow; she took her steps to her chair.

He was informed that Lord Ormont had an engagement, and he remarked, “I
can do the work very well.” She sat quite silent.

He read first lines of the scraps, laid them in various places, as in
a preparation for conjurer's tricks at cards; refraining from a glance,
lest he should disconcert the eyes he felt to be on him fitfully.

At last she spoke, and he knew Aminta in his hearing and sight.

“Is Emile Grenat still anglomane?”

An instant before her voice was heard he had been persuading himself
that the points of unlikeness between his young Aminta and this tall
and stately lady of the proud reserve in her bearing flouted the
resemblance.




CHAPTER V. IN WHICH THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY ADVANCE AND RETIRE

“Emile is as anglomane as ever, and not a bit less a Frenchman,” Weyburn
said, in a tone of one who muffles a shock at the heart.

“It would be the poorer compliment to us,” she rejoined.

They looked at one another; she dropped her eyelids, he looked away.

She had the grand manner by nature. She was the woman of the girl once
known.

“A soldier, is he?”

“Emile's profession and mine are much alike, or will be.”

“A secretary?”

Her deadness of accent was not designed to carry her opinion of the post
of secretary.

It brought the reply: “We hope to be schoolmasters.”

She drew in a breath; there was a thin short voice, hardly voice, as
when one of the unschooled minor feelings has been bruised. After a
while she said--

“Does he think it a career?”

“Not brilliant.”

“He was formed for a soldier.”

“He had to go as the road led.”

“A young man renouncing ambition!”

“Considering what we can do best.”

“It signifies the taste for what he does.”

“Certainly that.”

Weyburn had senses to read the word “schoolmaster” in repetition behind
her shut mouth. He was sharply sensible of a fall.

The task with his papers occupied him. If he had a wish, it was to
sink so low in her esteem as to be spurned. A kick would have been
a refreshment. Yet he was unashamed of the cause invoking it. We are
instruments to the touch of certain women, and made to play strange
tunes.

“Mr. Cuper flourishes?”

“The school exists. I have not been down there. I met Mr. Shalders
yesterday. He has left the school.”

“You come up from Olmer?”

“I was at Olmer last week, Lady Ormont.”

An involuntary beam from her eyes thanked him for her title at that
juncture of the dialogue. She grew more spirited.

“Mr. Shalders has joined the Dragoons, has he?”

“The worthy man has a happy imagination. He goes through a campaign
daily.”

“It seems to one to dignify his calling.”

“I like his enthusiasm.”

The lady withdrew into her thoughts; Weyburn fell upon his work.

Mention of the military cloak of enthusiasm covering Shalders, brought
the scarce credible old time to smite at his breast, in the presence of
these eyes. A ringing of her title of Lady Ormont rendered the present
time the incredible.

“I can hardly understand a young Frenchman's not entering the army,” she
said.

“The Napoleonic legend is weaker now,” said he.

“The son of an officer!”

“Grandson.”

“It was his choice to be,--he gave it up without reluctance?”

“Emile obeyed the command of his parents,” Weyburn answered; and he was
obedient to the veiled direction of her remark, in speaking of himself:
“I had a reason, too.”

“One wonders!”

“It would have impoverished my mother's income to put aside a small
allowance for me for years. She would not have hesitated. I then set my
mind on the profession of schoolmaster.”

“Emile Grenat was a brave boy. Has he no regrets?”

“Neither of us has a regret.”

“He began ambitiously.”

“It's the way at the beginning.”

“It is not usually abjured.”

“I'm afraid we neither of us 'dignify our calling' by discontent with
it!”

A dusky flash, worth seeing, came on her cheeks. “I respect
enthusiasms,” she said; and it was as good to him to hear as the begging
pardon, though clearly she could not understand enthusiasm for the
schoolmaster's career.

Light of evidence was before him, that she had a friendly curiosity to
know what things had led to their new meeting under these conditions.
He sketched them cursorily; there was little to tell--little, that is;
appealing to a romantic mind for interest. Aware of it, by sympathy,
he degraded the narrative to a flatness about as cheering as a suburban
London Sunday's promenade. Sympathy caused the perverseness. He felt her
disillusionment; felt with it and spread a feast of it. She had to hear
of studies at Caen and at a Paris Lycee; French fairly mastered; German,
the same; Italian, the same; after studies at Heidelberg, Asti, and
Florence; between four and five months at Athens (he was needlessly
precise), in tutorship with a young nobleman: no events, nor a spot of
colour. Thus did he wilfully, with pain to himself, put an extinguisher
on the youth painted brilliant and eminent in a maiden's imagination.

“So there can no longer be thought of the army,” she remarked; and the
remark had a sort of sigh, though her breathing was equable.

“Unless a big war knocks over all rules and the country comes praying us
to serve,” he said.

“You would not refuse then?”

“Not in case of need. One may imagine a crisis when they would give
commissions to men of my age or older for the cavalry--heavy losses of
officers.”

She spoke, as if urged by a sting to revert to the distasteful: “That
profession--must you not take... enter into orders if you aim at any
distinction?”

“And a member of the Anglican Church would not be allowed to exchange
his frock for a cavalry sabre,” said he. “That is true. I do not propose
to settle as a schoolmaster in England.”

“Where?”

“On the Continent.”

“Would not America be better?”

“It would not so well suit the purpose in view for us.”

“There are others besides?”

“Besides Emile, there is a German and an Italian and a Swiss.”

“It is a Company?”

“A Company of schoolmasters! Companies of all kinds are forming.
Colleges are Companies. And they have their collegians. Our aim is
at pupils; we have no ambition for any title higher than School and
Schoolmaster; it is not a Company.”

So, like Nature parading her skeleton to youthful adorers of her face,
he insisted on reducing to hideous material wreck the fair illusion,
which had once arrayed him in alluring promise.

She explained; “I said, America. You would be among Protestants in
America.”

“Catholics and Protestants are both welcome to us, according to our
scheme. And Germans, French, English, Americans, Italians, if they will
come; Spaniards and Portuguese, and Scandinavians, Russians as well. And
Jews; Mahommedans too, if only they will come! The more mixed, the more
it hits our object.”

“You have not stated where on the Continent it is to be.”

“The spot fixed on is in Switzerland.”

“You will have scenery.”

“I hold to that, as an influence.”

A cool vision of the Bernese Alps encircled the young schoolmaster; and
she said, “It would influence girls; I dare say.”

“A harder matter with boys, of course--at first. We think we may make it
serve.”

“And where is the spot? Is that fixed on?”

“Fifteen miles from Berne, on elevated land, neighbouring a water, not
quite to be called a lake, unless in an auctioneer's advertisement.”

“I am glad of the lake. I could not look on a country home where there
was no swimming. You will be head of the school.”

“There must be a head.”

“Is the school likely to be established soon?”

He fell into her dead tone: “Money is required for establishments. I
have a Reversion coming some day; I don't dabble in post obits.”

He waited for farther questions. They were at an end.

“You have your work to do, Mr. Weyburn.”

Saying that, she bowed an implied apology for having kept him from
it, and rose. She bowed again as she passed through the doorway, in
acknowledgment of his politeness.

Here; then, was the end of the story of Browny and Matey. Such was his
thought under the truncheon-stroke of their colloquy. Lines of Browny's
letters were fiery waving ribands about him, while the coldly gracious
bow of the Lady wrote Finis.

The gulf between the two writings remained unsounded. It gave a heave to
the old passion; but stirred no new one; he had himself in hand now,
and he shut himself up when the questions bred of amazement buzzed and
threatened to storm. After all, what is not curious in this world? The
curious thing would be if curious things should fail to happen. Men have
been saying it since they began to count and turn corners. And let
us hold off from speculating when there is or but seems a shadow of
unholiness over that mole-like business. There shall be no questions;
and as to feelings, the same. They, if petted for a moment beneath the
shadow, corrupt our blood. Weyburn was a man to have them by the throat
at the birth.

Still they thronged; heavy work of strangling had to be done. Her tone
of disappointment with the schoolmaster bit him, and it flattered
him. The feelings leapt alive, equally venomous from the wound and the
caress. They pushed to see, had to be repelled from seeing, the girl
Browny in the splendid woman; they had lightning memories: not the pain
of his grip could check their voice on the theme touching her happiness
or the reverse. And this was an infernal cunning. He paused perforce to
inquire, giving them space for the breeding of their multitudes. Was she
happy? Did she not seem too meditative, enclosed, toneless, at her age?
Vainly the persecuted fellow said to himself: “But what is it to me
now?”--The Browny days were over. The passion for the younger Aminta was
over--buried; and a dream of power belonging to those days was not
yet more than visionary. It had moved her once, when it was a young
soldier's. She treated the schoolmaster's dream as vapour, and the old
days as dead and ghostless. She did rightly. How could they or she or he
be other than they were!

With that sage exclamation, he headed into the Browny days and breasted
them; and he had about him the living foamy sparkle of the very time,
until the Countess of Ormont breathed the word “Schoolmaster”; when, at
once, it was dusty land where buoyant waters had been, and the armies
of the facts, in uniform drab, with some feathers and laces, and a
significant surpliced figure, decorously covering the wildest of
Cupids, marched the standard of the winking gold-piece, which is their
nourishing sun and eclipser of all suns that foster dreams.

As you perceive, he was drawing swiftly to the vortex of the fools, and
round and round he went, lucky to float.

His view of the business of the schoolmaster plucked him from the whirl.
She despised it; he upheld it. He stuck to his view, finding their
antagonism on the subject wholesome for him. All that she succeeded in
doing was to rob it of the aurora colour clothing everything on which
Matey Weyburn set his aim. Her contempt of it, whether as a profession
in itself or as one suitable to the former young enthusiast for arms,
dwarfed it to appear like the starved plants under Greenland skies. But
those are of a sturdy genus; they mean to live; they live, perforce, of
the right to live; they will prove their right in a coming season,
when some one steps near and wonders at them, and from more closely
observing; gets to understand, learning that the significance and the
charm of earth will be as well shown by them as by her tropical fair
flaunters or the tenderly-nurtured exotics.

An unopened coffer of things to be said in defence of--no, on behalf
of--no, in honour of the Profession of Schoolmaster, perhaps to the
convincing of Aminta, Lady Ormont, was glanced at; a sentence or two
leapt out and stepped forward, and had to retire. He preferred to the
fathering of tricky, windy phrases, the being undervalued--even by her.
He was taught to see again how Rhetoric haunts, and Rhetoric bedevils,
the vindication of the clouded, especially in the case of a disesteemed
Profession requiring one to raise it and impose it upon the antagonistic
senses for the bewildering of the mind. One has to sound it loudly;
there is no treating it, as in the advocacy of the cases of flesh and
blood, with the masterly pathos of designed simplicity. And Weyburn
was Cuper's Matey Weyburn still in his loathing of artifice to
raise emotion, loathing of the affected, the stilted, the trumpet of
speech--always excepting school-exercises in the tongues, the unmasking
of a Catiline, the address of a General, Athenian or other, to troops.

He kept his coffer shut; and, for a consequence, he saw the contents as
an avenue of blossom leading to vistas of infinite harvest.

She was Lady Ormont: Aminta shared the title of his old hero! He refused
to speculate upon how it had come to pass, and let the curtain hang,
though dramas and romances, with the miracles involved in them, were
agitated by a transient glimpse at the curtain.

Well! and he hoped to be a member of the Profession she despised: hoped
it with all his heart. And one good effect of his giving his heart to
the hope was, that he could hold from speculating and from feeling, even
from pausing to wonder at the most wonderful turn of events. Blessed
antagonism drove him to be braced by thoughts upon the hardest of
the schoolmaster's tasks--bright winter thoughts, prescribing to him
satisfaction with a faith in the sowing, which may be his only reaping.
Away fly the boys in sheaves. After his toil with them, to instruct,
restrain, animate, point their minds, they leave him, they plunge into
the world and are gone. Will he see them again? It is a flickering
perhaps. To sustain his belief that he has done serviceable work, he
must be sore of his having charged them with good matter. How can the
man do it, if, during his term of apprenticeship, he has allowed himself
to dally here and there, down to moony dreamings over inscrutable
beautiful eyes of a married lady; for the sole reason that he meets her
unexpectedly, after an exchange of letters with her in long-past days at
school, when she was an inexperienced girl, who knew not what she vowed,
and he a flighty-headed youngster, crying out to be the arrow of any bow
that was handy? Yea, she was once that girl, named Browny by the boys.

Temptation threw warm light on the memory, and very artfully, by
conjuring up the faces, cries, characters, all the fun of the boys.
There was no possibility of forgetting her image in those days; he had,
therefore, to live with it and to live near the grown woman--Time's
present answer to the old riddle. It seemed to him, that instead
of sorting Lord Ormont's papers, he ought to be at sharp exercise.
According to his prescript, sharp exercise of lungs and limbs is a man's
moral aid against temptation. He knew it as the one trusty antidote for
him, who was otherwise the vessel of a temperament pushing to mutiny.
Certainly it is the best philosophy youth can pretend to practise; and
Lord Ormont kept him from it! Worse than that, the slips and sheets of
paper in the dispatch-box were not an exercise of the mind even; there
was nothing to grapple with--no diversion; criticism passed by them
indulgently, if not benevolently.

Quite apart from the subject inscribed on them, Weyburn had now and
again a blow at the breast, of untraceable origin. For he was well
enough aware that the old days when Browny imagined him a hero, in
drinking his praises of a brighter, were drowned. They were dead; but
here was she the bride of the proved hero. His praises might have helped
in causing her willingness--devotional readiness, he could fancy--to
yield her hand. Perhaps at the moment when the hero was penning some of
the Indian slips here, the boy at school was preparing Aminta; but he
could not be responsible for a sacrifice of the kind suggested by Lady
Charlotte. And no, there had been no such sacrifice, although Lord
Ormont's inexplicable treatment of his young countess, under cover of
his notorious reputation with women, conduced to the suspicion.

While the vagrant in Weyburn was thus engaged, his criticism of the
soldier-lord's field-English on paper let the stuff go tolerantly
unexamined, but with a degree of literary contempt at heart for the
writer who had that woman-scented reputation and expressed himself so
poorly. The sentiment was outside of reason. We do, nevertheless, expect
our Don Juans to deliver their minds a trifle elegantly; if not in
classic English, on paper; and when we find one of them inflicting
cruelty, as it appears, and the victim is a young woman, a beautiful
young woman, she pleads to us poetically against the bearish sentences
of his composition. We acknowledge, however, that a mere sentiment,
entertained possibly by us alone, should not be permitted to condemn him
unheard.

Lady Ormont was not seen again. After luncheon at a solitary table, the
secretary worked till winter's lamps were lit; and then shone freedom,
with assurance to him that he would escape from the miry mental ditch
he had been floundering in since Aminta revealed herself. Sunday was
the glorious day to follow, with a cleansing bath of a walk along the
southern hills; homely English scenery to show to a German friend,
one of his “Company.” Half a dozen good lads were pledged to the walk;
bearing which in view, it could be felt that this nonsensical puzzlement
over his relations to the moods and tenses of a married woman would be
bounced out of recollection before nightfall. The landscape given off
any of the airy hills of Surrey would suffice to do it.

A lady stood among her boxes below, as he descended the stairs to cross
the hall. He knew her for the person Lady Charlotte called “the woman's
aunt,” whom Lord Ormont could not endure--a forgiven old enemy, Mrs.
Nargett Pagnell.

He saluted. She stared, and corrected her incivility with “Ah, yes,” and
a formal smile.

If not accidentally delayed on her journey, she had been needlessly the
cause why Lord Ormont hugged his Club during the morning and afternoon.
Weyburn was pushed to think of the matter by remembrance of his foregone
resentment at her having withdrawn Aminta from Miss Vincent's three days
earlier than the holiday time. The resentment was over; but a germ of
it must have sprang from the dust to prompt the kindling leap his memory
took, out of all due connection; like a lightning among the crags.
It struck Aminta smartly. He called to mind the conversation at table
yesterday. Had she played on Lord Ormont's dislike of the aunt to drive
him forth for some purpose of her own? If so, the little trick had been
done with deplorable spontaneity or adeptness of usage. What was the
purpose?--to converse with an old acquaintance, undisturbed by Lord
Ormont and her aunt? Neatly done, supposing the surmise correct.

But what was there in the purpose? He sifted rapidly for the gist of the
conversation; reviewed the manner of it, the words, the sound they had,
the feelings they touched; then owned that the question could not
be answered. Owning, further, that the recurrence of these idiotic
speculations, feelings, questions, wrote him down as both dull fellow
and impertinent, he was unabled to restore Aminta to the queenly place
she took above the schoolmaster, who was very soon laughing at his fever
or flash of the afternoon. The day had brought a great surprise, nothing
more. Twenty minutes of fencing in the a salle d'armes of an Italian
captain braced him to health, and shifted scenes of other loves, lighter
loves, following the Browny days--not to be called loves; in fact;
hardly beyond inclinations. Nevertheless, inclinations are an
infidelity. To meet a married woman, and be mooning over her because she
gave him her eyes and her handwriting when a girl, was enough to
rouse an honest fellow's laugh at himself, in the contemplation of
his intermediate amorous vagabondage. Had he ever known the veritable
passion after Browny sank from his ken? Let it be confessed, never. His
first love was his only true love, despite one shuddering episode, oddly
humiliating to recollect, though he had not behaved badly. So, then,
by right of his passion, thus did eternal justice rule it: that Browny
belonged, to Matey Weyburn, Aminta to Lord Ormont. Aminta was a lady
blooming in the flesh, Browny was the past's pale phantom; for which
reason he could call her his own, without harm done to any one, and
with his usual appetite for dinner, breakfast, lunch, whatever the meal
supplied by the hour.

It would somewhat alarmingly have got to Mr. Weyburn's conscience
through a disturbance of his balance, telling him that he was on a
perilous road, if his relish for food had been blunted. He had his
axiom on the subject, and he was wrong in the general instance, for
the appetites of rogues and ogres are not known to fail. As regarded
himself, he was eminently right; and he could apply it to boys also,
to all young people--the unlaunched, he called them. He counted himself
among the launched, no doubt, and had breasted seas; but the boy was
alive, a trencherman lad, in the coming schoolmaster, and told him
profitable facts concerning his condition; besides throwing a luminous
ray on the arcane of our elusive youthful. If they have no stout zest
for eating, put Query against them.

His customary enjoyment of dinner convinced Mr. Weyburn that he had
not brooded morbidly over his phantom Browny, and could meet Aminta,
Countess of Ormont, on the next occasion with the sentiments proper to
a common official. Did she not set him a commendable example? He admired
her for not concealing her disdain of the aspirant schoolmaster, quite
comprehending, by sympathy, why the woman should reproach the girl who
had worshipped heroes, if this was a full-grown specimen; and the reply
of the shamed girl, that in her ignorance she could not know better. He
spared the girl, but he laughed at the woman he commended, laughed at
himself.

Aminta's humour was being stirred about the same time. She and her
aunt were at the dinner-table in the absence of my lord. The dinner had
passed with the stiff dialogue peculiar to couples under supervision of
their inferiors; and, as soon as the room was clear, she had asked her
aunt, touching the secretary: “Have you seen him?”

Mrs. Nargett Pagnell's answer could have been amusing only to one whose
intimate knowledge of her found it characteristically salt; for she
was a lady of speech addressed ever directly or roundabout to the chief
point of business between herself and her hearer, and the more she was
brief, oblique, far-shooting, the more comically intelligible she was to
her niece. She bent her head to signify that she had seen the secretary,
and struck the table with both hands, exclaiming:

“Well, to be sure, Lord Ormont!”

Their discussion, before they descended the stairs to dinner, concerned
his lordship's extraordinary indifference to the thronging of handsome
young men around his young countess.

Here, the implication ran, is one established in the house.

Aminta's thoughts could be phrased: “Yes, that is true, for one part of
it.”

As for the other part, the ascent of a Phoebus Apollo, with his golden
bow and quiver off the fairest of Eastern horizon skies, followed
suddenly by the sight of him toppling over in Mr. Cuper's long-skirted
brown coat, with spectacles and cane, is an image that hardly exceeds
the degradation she conceived. It was past ludicrous; yet admitted of no
woefulness, nothing soothingly pathetic. It smothered and barked at the
dreams of her blooming spring of life, to which her mind had latterly
been turning back, for an escape from sour, one may say cynical,
reflections, the present issue of a beautiful young woman's first savour
of battle with the world.




CHAPTER VI. IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR

Up in Aminta's amber dressing-room; Mrs. Nargett Pagnell alluded sadly
to the long month of separation, and begged her niece to let her have in
plain words an exact statement of the present situation; adding, “Items
will do.” Thereupon she slipped into prattle and held the field.

She was the known, worthy, good, intolerable woman whom the burgess
turns out for his world in regiments, that do and look and all but step
alike; and they mean well, and have conventional worships and material
aspirations, and very peculiar occult refinements, with a blind head and
a haphazard gleam of acuteness, impressive to acquaintances, convincing
themselves that they impersonate sagacity. She had said this, done that;
and it was, by proof, Providence consenting, the right thing. A niece,
written down in her girlhood, because of her eyes and her striking air
and excellent deportment, as mate for a nobleman, marries, him before
she is out of her teens. “I said, She shall be a countess.” A countess
she is. Providence does not comply with our predictions in order
to stultify us. Admitting the position of affairs for the moment as
extraordinary, we are bound by what has happened to expect they will be
conformable in the end. Temporarily warped, we should say of them.

She could point to the reason: it was Lord Ormont's blunt
misunderstanding of her character. The burgess's daughter was refining
to an appreciation of the exquisite so rapidly that she could criticize
patricians. My lord had never forgiven her for correcting him in his
pronunciation of her name by marriage. Singular indeed; but men, even
great men, men of title, are so, some of them, whom you could least
suspect of their being so. He would speak the “g” in Nargett, and he,
declined--after a remonstrance he declined--to pass Pagnell under the
cedilla. Lord Ormont spoke the name like a man hating it, or an English
rustic: “Nargett Pagnell,” instead, of the soft and elegant “Naryett
Pagnell,” the only true way of speaking it; and she had always taken
that pronunciation of her name for a test of people's breeding. The
expression of his lordship's countenance under correction was memorable.
Naturally, in those honeymoony days, the young Countess of Ormont sided
with her husband the earl; she declared that her aunt had never dreamed
of the cedilla before the expedition to Spain. When, for example, Alfred
Nargett Pagnell had a laughing remark, which Aminta in her childhood
must have heard: “We rhyme with spaniel!”

That was the secret of Lord Ormont's prepossession against Aminta's
aunt; and who can tell? perhaps of much of his behaviour to the
beautiful young wife he at least admired, sincerely admired, though he
caused her to hang her head--cast a cloud on the head so dear to him!

Otherwise there was no interpreting his lordship. To think of herself as
personally disliked by a nobleman stupefied Mrs. Pagnell, from her just
expectation of reciprocal dealings in high society; for she confessed
herself a fly to a title. Where is the shame, if titles are created to
attract? Elsewhere than in that upper circle, we may anticipate hard
bargains; the widow of a solicitor had not to learn it. But when a
distinguished member and ornament of the chosen seats above blew cold
upon their gesticulatory devotee, and was besides ungrateful; she was
more than commonly assured of his being, as she called him, “a sphinx.”
 His behaviour to his legally wedded wife confirmed the charge.

She checked her flow to resume the question. “So, then, where are we
now? He allows you liberally for pin-money in addition to your own small
independent income. Satisfaction with that would warrant him to suppose
his whole duty done by you.”

“We are where we were, aunty; the month has made no change,” said Aminta
in languor.

“And you as patient as ever?”

“I am supposed to have everything a woman can require.”

“Can he possibly think it? And I have to warn you, child, that lawyers
are not so absolving as the world is with some of the ladies Lord Ormont
allows you to call your friends. I have been hearing--it is not mere
airy tales one hears from lawyers about cases in Courts of Law. Tighten
your lips as you like; I say nothing to condemn or reflect on Mrs.
Lawrence Finchley. I have had my eyes a little opened, that is all.
Oh, I know my niece Aminta, when it's a friend to stand by; but our
position--thanks to your inscrutable lord and master--demands of us the
utmost scrupulousness, or it soon becomes a whirl and scandal flying
about, and those lawyers picking up and putting together. I have had a
difficulty to persuade them!... and my own niece! whom I saw married at
the British Embassy in Madrid, as I take good care to tell everybody;
for it was my doing; I am the responsible person! and by an English
Protestant clergyman, to all appearance able to walk erect in and out of
any of these excellent new Life Assurance offices they are starting for
the benefit of widows and orphans, and deceased within six days of the
ceremony--if ceremony one may call the hasty affair in those foreign
places. My dear, the instant I heard it I had a presentiment, 'All has
gone well up to now.' I remember murmuring the words. Then your letter,
received in that smelly Barcelona: Lord Ormont was carrying you off to
Granada--a dream of my infancy! It may not have been his manoeuvre, but
it was the beginning of his manoeuvres.”

Aminta shuddered. “And tra-la-la, and castanets, and my Cid! my Cid! and
the Alhambra, the Sierra Nevada, and ay di me, Alhama; and Boabdil el
Chico and el Zagal and Fray Antonio Agapida!” She flung out the rattle,
yawning, with her arms up and her head back, in the posture of a woman
wounded. One of her aunt's chance shots had traversed her breast,
flashing at her the time, the scene, the husband, intensest sunniness
on sword-edges of shade,--and now the wedded riddle; illusion dropping
mask, romance in its anatomy, cold English mist. Ah, what a background
is the present when we have the past to the fore! That filmy past is
diaphanous on heaving ribs.

She smiled at the wide-eyed little gossip. “Don't speak of manaoeuvres,
dear aunt. And we'll leave Granada to the poets. I'm tired. Talk of our
own people, on your side and my father's, and as much as you please of
the Pagnell-Pagnells, they refresh me. Do they go on marrying?”

“Why, my child, how could they go on without it?”

Aminta pressed her hands at her eyelids. “Oh, me!” she sighed, feeling
the tear come with a sting from checked laughter. “But there are
marriages, aunty, that don't go on, though Protestant clergymen
officiated. Leave them unnoticed, I have really nothing to tell.”

“You have not heard anything of Lady Eglett?”

“Lady Charlotte Eglett? No syllable. Or wait--my lord's secretary was
with her at Olmer; approved by her, I have to suppose.”

“There, my dear, I say again I do dread that woman, if she can make
a man like Lord Ormont afraid of her. And no doubt she is of our old
aristocracy. And they tell me she is coarse in her conversation--like a
man. Lawyers tell me she is never happy but in litigation. Years back, I
am given to understand, she did not set so particularly good an example.
Lawyers hear next to everything. I am told she lifted her horsewhip on
a gentleman once, and then put her horse at him and rode him down.
You will say, the sister of your husband. No; not to make my niece a
countess, would I, if I had known the kind of family! Then one asks, Is
she half as much afraid of him? In that case, no wonder they have
given up meeting. Was formerly one of the Keepsake Beauties. Well, Lady
Eglett, and Aminta, Countess of Ormont, will be in that Peerage, as
they call it, let her only have her dues. My dear, I would--if I ever
did--swear the woman is jealous.”

“Of me, aunty!”

“I say more; I say again, it would be a good thing for somebody if
somebody had his twitch of jealousy. Wives may be too meek. Cases and
cases my poor Alfred read to me, where an ill-behaving man was brought
to his senses by a clever little shuffle of the cards, and by the most
innocent of wives. A kind of poison to him, of course; but there are
poisons that cure. It might come into the courts; and the nearer the
proofs the happier he in withdrawing from his charge and effecting a
reconciliation. Short of guilt, of course. Men are so strange. Imagine
now, if a handsome young woman were known to be admired rather more than
enough by a good-looking gentleman near about her own age. Oh, I've no
patience with, the man for causing us to think and scheme! Only there
are men who won't be set right unless we do. My husband used to say,
change is such a capital thing in life's jogtrot; that men find it
refreshing if we now and then, reverse the order of our pillion-riding
for them. A spiritless woman in a wife is what they bear least of all.
Anything rather. Is Mr. Morsfield haunting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley's
house as usual?”

Aminta's cheeks unrolled their deep damask rose at the abrupt intrusion
of the name. “I meet him there.”

“Lord Adderwood, Sir John Randeller; and the rest?”

“Two or three times a week.”

“And the lady, wife of the captain, really a Lady Fair--Mrs.... month of
May: so I have to get at it.”

“She may be seen there.”

“Really a contrast, when you two are together! As to reputation, there
is an exchange of colours. Those lawyers hold the keys of the great
world, and a naughty world it is, I fear--with exceptions, who are the
salt, but don't taste so much. I can't help enjoying the people at Mrs.
Lawrence Finchley's. I like to feel I can amuse them, as they do me. One
puzzles for what they say--in somebody's absence, I mean. They must take
Lord Ormont for a perfect sphinx; unless they are so silly as to think
they may despise him, or suppose him indifferent. Oh, that upper class!
It's a garden, and we can't help pushing to enter it; and fair flowers,
indeed, but serpents too, like the tropics. It tries us more than
anything else in the world--well, just as good eating tries the
constitution. He ought to know it and feel it, and give his wife all the
protection of his name, instead of--not that he denies: I have brought
him to that point; he cannot deny it with me. But not to present her--to
shun the Court; not to introduce her to his family, to appear ashamed
of her! My darling Aminta, a month of absence for reflection on your
legally-wedded husband's conduct increases my astonishment. For usually
men old enough to be the grandfathers of their wives--”

“Oh, pray, aunty, pray, pray!” Aminta cried, and her body writhed. “No
more to-night. You mean well, I am sure. Let us wait. I shall sleep,
perhaps, if I go to bed early. I dare say I am spiritless--not worth
more than I get. I gave him the lead altogether; he keeps it. In
everything else he is kind; I have all the luxuries--enough to loathe
them. Kiss me and say good night.”

Aminta made it imperative by rising. Her aunt stood up, kissed, and
exclaimed, “I tell you you are a queenly creature, not to be treated as
any puny trollop of a handmaid. And although he is a great nobleman, he
is not to presume to behave any longer, my dear, as if your family had
no claim on his consideration. My husband, Alfred Pagnell, would have
laid that before him pretty quick. You are the child of the Farrells and
the Solers, both old families; on your father's side you are linked
with the oldest nobility in Europe. It flushes one to think of it!
Your grandmother, marrying Captain Algernon Farrell, was the legitimate
daughter of a Grandee of Spain; as I have told Lord Ormont often, and
I defy him to equal that for a romantic marriage in the annals of his
house, or boast of bluer blood. Again, the Solers--”

“We take the Solers for granted, aunty, good night.”

“Commoners, if you like; but established since the Conquest. That is, we
trace the pedigree. And to be treated, even by a great nobleman, as if
we were stuff picked up out of the ditch! I declare, there are times
when I sit and think and boil. Is it chivalrous, is it generous--is it,
I say, decent--is it what Alfred would have called a fair fulfilment
of a pact, for your wedded husband--? You may close my mouth! But he
pretends to be chivalrous and generous, and he has won a queen any
wealthy gentleman in England--I know of one, if not two--would be proud
to have beside him in equal state; and what is he to her? He is an
extinguisher. Or is it the very meanest miserliness, that he may keep
you all to himself? There we are again! I say he is an unreadable
sphinx.”

Aminta had rung the bell for her maid. Mrs. Pagnell could be counted on
for drawing in her tongue when the domestics were near.

A languor past delivery in sighs was on the young woman's breast. She
could have heard without a regret that the heart was to cease beating.
Had it been downright misery she would have looked about her with less
of her exanimate glassiness. The unhappy have a form of life: until they
are worn out, they feel keenly. She felt nothing. The blow to her pride
of station and womanhood struck on numbed sensations. She could complain
that the blow was not heavier.

A letter lying in her jewel-box called her to read it, for the chance
of some slight stir. The contents were known. The signature of Adolphus
Morsfield had a new meaning for her eyes, and dashed her at her husband
in a spasm of revolt and wrath against the man exposing her to these
letters, which a motion of her hand could turn to blood, and abstention
from any sign maintained in a Satanic whisper, saying, “Here lies one
way of solving the riddle.” It was her husband who drove her to look
that way.

The look was transient, and the wrath: she could not burn. A small
portion of contempt lodged in her mind to shadow husbands precipitating
women on their armoury for a taste of vengeance. Women can always be
revenged--so speedily, so completely: they have but to dip. Husbands
driving wives to taste their power execrate the creature for her fall
deep downward. They are forgetful of causes.

Does it matter? Aminta's languor asked. The letter had not won a reply.
Thought of the briefest of replies was a mountain of effort, and she
moaned at her nervelessness in body and mind. To reply, to reproach the
man, to be flame--an image of herself under the form she desired--gave
her a momentary false energy, wherein the daring of the man, whose life
was at a loss for the writing of this letter, hung lighted. She had
therewith a sharp vision of his features, repellent in correctness,
Greek in lines, with close eyes, hollow temples, pressed lips--a face
indicating the man who can fling himself on a die. She had heard tales
of women and the man. Some had loved him, report said. Here were words
to say that he loved her. They might, poor man, be true. Otherwise she
had never been loved.

Memory had of late been paying visits to a droopy plant in the golden
summer drought on a gorgeous mid-sea island, and had taken her on board
to refresh her with voyages, always bearing down full sail on a couple
of blissful schools, abodes of bloom and briny vigour, sweet merriment,
innocent longings, dreams the shyest, dreams the mightiest. At night
before sleep, at morn before rising, often during day, and when vexed
or when dispirited, she had issued her command for the voyage. Sheer
refreshment followed, as is ever the case if our vessel carries no
freight of hopes. There could be no hopes. It was forgotten that they
had ever been seriously alive. But it carried an admiration. Now, an
admiration may endure, and this one had been justified all round. The
figure heroical, the splendid, active youth, hallowed Aminta's past. The
past of a bitterly humiliated Aminta was a garden in the coming kiss of
sunset, with that godlike figure of young manhood to hallow it. There he
stayed, perpetually assuring her of his triumphs to come.

She could have no further voyages. Ridicule convulsed her home of
refuge. For the young soldier-hero, to be unhorsed by misfortune, was
one thing; but the meanness of the ambition he had taken in exchange for
the thirst of glory, accused his nature. He so certainly involved her in
the burlesque of the transformation that she had to quench memory.

She was, therefore, having smothered a good part of herself, accountably
languid--a condition alternating with fire in Aminta; and as Mr.
Morsfield's letter supplied the absent element, her needy instinct
pushed her to read his letter through. She had not yet done that with
attention.

Whether a woman loves a man or not, he is her lover if he dare tell her
he loves her, and is heard with attention. Aware that the sentences
were poison, she summoned her constitutional antagonism to the mad step
proposed, so far nullifying the virus as to make her shrink from the
madness. Even then her soul cried out to her husband, Who drives me to
read? or rather, to brood upon what she read. The brooding ensued, was
the thirst of her malady. The best antidote she could hit on was the
writer's face. Yet it expressed him, his fire and his courage--gifts she
respected in him, found wanting in herself. Read by Lord Ormont, this
letter would mean a deadly thing.

Aminta did her lord the justice to feel sure of him, that with her name
bearing the superscription, it might be left on her table, and world not
have him to peruse it. If he manoeuvred, it was never basely. Despite
resentment, her deepest heart denied his being indifferent either to
her honour or his own in relation to it. He would vindicate both at
a stroke, for a sign. Nevertheless, he had been behaving cruelly. She
charged on him the guilt of the small preludes, archeries, anglings,
veilings, evasions, all done with the eyelids and the mute of the lips,
or a skirmisher word or a fan's flourish, and which, intended to pique
the husband rather than incite the lover, had led Mrs. Lawrence Finchley
to murmur at her ear, in close assembly, without a distinct designation
of Mr. Morsfield, “Dangerous man to play little games with!” It had
brought upon her this letter of declaration, proposal, entreaty.

This letter was the man's life in her hands, and safe, of course. But
surely it was a proof that the man loved her?

Aminta was in her five-and-twentieth year; when the woman who is
uncertain of the having been loved, and she reputed beautiful,
desirable, is impelled by a sombre necessity to muse on a declaration,
and nibble at an idea of a test. If “a dangerous man to play little
games with,” he could scarcely be dangerous to a woman having no love
for him at all. It meant merely that he would soon fall to writing
letters like this, and he could not expect an answer to it. But her
heart really thanked him, and wished the poor gentleman to take its dumb
response as his reward, for being the one sole one who had loved her.

Aminta dwelt on “the one sole one.” Lord Ormont's treatment had
detached her from any belief in love on his part; and the schoolboy, now
ambitions to become a schoolmaster, was behind the screen unlikely to
be lifted again by a woman valuing her pride of youth, though he
had--behold our deceptions!--the sympathetic face entirely absent from
that of Mr. Adolphus Morsfield, whom the world would count quite as
handsome--nay, it boasted him. He enjoyed the reputation of a killer
of ladies. Women have odd tastes, Aminta thought, and examined the
gentleman's handwriting. It pleased her better. She studied it till the
conventional phrases took a fiery hue, and came at her with an invasive
rush.

The letter was cast back into the box, locked up; there an end to it, or
no interdiction of sleep.

Sleep was a triumph. Aminta's healthy frame rode her over petty
agitations of a blood uninflamed, as lightly as she swam the troubled
sea-waters her body gloried to cleave. She woke in the morning peaceful
and mildly reflective, like one who walks across green meadows. Only by
degrees, by glimpses, was she drawn to remember the trotting, cantering,
galloping, leaping of an active heart during night. We cannot, men
or woman, control the heart in sleep at night. There had been wild
leapings. Night will lead an unsatisfied heart of a woman, by way of
sleep, to scale black mountains, jump jagged chasms. Sleep is a horse
that laughs at precipices and abysses. We bid women, moreover, be
all heart. They are to cultivate their hearts, pay much heed to their
hearts. The vast realm of feeling is open to these appointed keepers of
the sanctuary household, who may be withering virgins, may be childless
matrons, may be unhusbanded wives. Wandering in the vast realm which
they are exhorted to call their own, for the additional attractiveness
it gives them, an unsatisfied heart of woman will somewhat audaciously
cross the borderland a single step into the public road of the vast
realm of thinking. Once there, and but a single step on the road, she is
a rebel against man's law for her sex. Nor is it urgent on her that she
should think defiantly in order to feel herself the rebel. She may think
submissively; with a heart (the enlarged, the scientifically plumped,
the pasture of epicurean man), with her coveted heart in revolt, and
from the mere act of thinking at all.

Aminta reviewed perforce, dead against her will, certain of the
near-to-happiness ratings over-night. She thinned her lips, and her
cheeks glowed. An arm, on the plea of rescuing, had been round her. The
choice now offered her was, to yield to softness or to think. She took
the latter step, the single step of an unaccustomed foot, which women
educated simply to feet, will, upon extreme impulsion, take; and it held
a candle in a windy darkness. She saw no Justice there. The sensational
immensity touched sublime, short of that spirit of Justice required
for the true sublime. And void of Justice; what a sunless place is any
realm! Infants, the male and the female alike, first begin to know they
feel when it is refused them. When they know they feel, they have begun
to reflect. The void of Justice is a godless region. Women, to whom the
solitary thought has come as a blown candle, illumining the fringes of
their storm, ask themselves whether they are God's creatures or man's.
The question deals a sword-stroke of division between them and their
human masters. Young women, animated by the passions their feeling
bosoms of necessity breed, and under terror discover, do not distinguish
an abstract justice from a concrete. They are of the tribe too long
hereditarily enslaved to conceive an abstract. So it is with them, that
their God is the God of the slave, as it is with all but the bravest of
boys. He is a Thing to cry to, a Punisher, not much of a Supporter--the
Biblical Hebrew's right reading of Nature, favouring man, yet prompt to
confound him, and with woman for the instrument of vengeance. By such
a maze the blindfolded, are brought round to see Justice on earth. If
women can only believe in some soul of justice, they will feel they
belong to God--of the two; and the peril for them then is, that they
will set the one incomprehensible Power in opposition to the other,
urging them unsatisfied natures to make secret appeal away from man and
his laws altogether, at the cost of losing clear sight of the God who
shines in thought. It is a manner whereby the desperately harried
among these creatures of the petted heart arrive upon occasion at an
agreeable, almost reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of God.

There is little pleasure to be on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator
sensible to the pulses of his audience. Justice compels at times. In
truth, there are times when the foggy obscurities of the preacher are by
comparison broad daylight beside the whirling loose tissues of a woman
unexplained. Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the
traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft
brown of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings
overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened
as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her
heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.

Her husband, the man-riddle: she was unable to rede or read him. Her
will could not turn him; nor her tongue combat; nor was it granted her
to pique the mailed veteran. Every poor innocent little bit of an art
had been exhausted. Her title was Lady Ormont her condition actually
slave. A luxuriously established slave, consorting with a singularly
enfranchised set,--as, for instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord
Adderwood; Sir John Randeller and Lady Staines; Mrs. May, Amy May,
notorious wife of a fighting captain, the loneliest of blondes; and
other ladies, other gentlemen, Mr. Morsfield in the list, paired or not
yet paired: gossip raged. Aminta was of a disposition too generously
cordial to let her be the rigorous critic of people with whom she was
in touch. But her mind knew relief when she recollected that her humble
little school-mate, Selina Collect, who had suffered on her behalf in
old days, was coming up to her from the Suffolk coast on a visit for a
week. However much a slave and an unloved woman, she could be a constant
and protecting friend. Besides, Lord Ormont was gracious to little
Selina. She thought of his remarks about the modest-minded girl after
first seeing her. From that she struck upon a notion of reserves of
humaneness being in him, if she might find the path to them: and
thence, fortified by the repose her picture of little Selina's merit had
bestowed, she sprang to the idea of valiancy, that she would woo him
to listen to her, without inflicting a scene. He had been a listening
lover, seeming lover, once, later than the Granada sunsets. The letter
in her jewel-box urged Aminta to clear her conscience by some means, for
leaving it unburnt.




CHAPTER VII. EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER'S DOSES

The rules in Lord Ormont's household assisted to shelter him for some
hours of the day from the lady who was like a blast of sirocco under his
roof. He had his breakfast alone, as Lady Charlotte had it at Olmer; a
dislike of a common table in the morning was a family trait with both.
At ten o'clock the secretary arrived, and they were shut up together. At
the luncheon table Aminta usually presided. If my lord dined at home,
he had by that time established an equanimity rendering, his constant
civility to Mrs. Pagnell less arduous. The presence of a woman of
tongue, perpetually on the spring to gratify him and win him, was among
the burdens he bore for his Aminta.

Mrs. Pagnell soon perceived that the secretary was in favour. My lord
and this Mr. Weyburn had their pet themes of conversation, upon which
the wary aunt of her niece did not gaze like the wintry sun with the
distant smile her niece displayed over discussions concerning military
biographies, Hannibal's use of his elephants and his Numidian horse,
the Little St. Bernard, modern artillery, ancient slingers, English and
Genoese bowmen, Napoleon's tactics, his command to the troopers to “give
point,” and English officers' neglect of sword exercise, and the “devil
of a day” Old England is to have on a day to come. My lord connected
our day of trial with India. Mrs. Pagnell assumed an air of studious
interest; she struck in to give her niece a lead, that Lord Ormont might
know his countess capable of joining the driest of subjects occupying
exalted minds. Aminta did not follow her; and she was extricated
gallantly by the gentlemen in turn.

The secretary behaved with a pretty civility. Aminta shook herself to
think tolerantly of him when he, after listening to the suggestion, put
interrogatively, that we should profit by Hannibal's example and train
elephants to serve as a special army corps for the perfect security of
our priceless Indian Empire, instanced the danger likely to result from
their panic fear of cannon, and forbore to consult Lord Ormont's eye.

Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her foot into it; but women advised
of being fools in what they say, are generally sustained by their sense
of the excellent motive which impelled them. Even to the Countess of
Ormont, she could have replied, “We might have given them a higher idea
of us”--if, that meant, the Countess of Ormont had entered the field
beside her, to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta. She hinted as much
subsequently, and Aminta's consciousness of the troth was touched.
The young schoolmaster's company sat on her spirits, deadened her
vocabulary. Her aunt spoke of passing the library door and hearing the
two gentlemen loudly laughing. It seemed subserviency on the fallen
young hero's part. His tastes were low. He frequented the haunts of
boxing men; her lord informed her of his having made, or of his making,
matches to run or swim or walk certain distances against competitors or
within a given time. He had also half a dozen boys or more in tow, whom
he raced out of town on Sundays; a nucleus of the school he intended to
form.

But will not Achilles become by comparison a common rushlight where
was a blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown's cap on the head whose
golden helm was fired by Pallas?

Nay, and let him look the hero still: all the more does he point finger
on his meanness of nature.

Turning to another, it is another kind of shame that a woman feels, if
she consents to an exchange of letters--shameful indeed, but not such
a feeling of deadly sickness as comes with the humiliating view of an
object of admiration degraded. Bad she may be; and she may be deceived,
vilely treated, in either case. And what is a woman's pride but the
staff and banner of her soul, beyond all gifts? He who wounds it cannot
be forgiven--never!--he has killed the best of her. Aminta found herself
sliding along into the sentiment, that the splendid idol of a
girl's worship is, if she discover him in the lapse of years as an
infinitesimally small one, responsible for the woman's possible reckless
fit of giddiness. And she could see her nonsense; she could not correct
it. Lines of the letters under signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent
about her: they would recur; and she charged their doing so on the
discovered meanness of the girl's idol. Her wicked memory was caused by
his having plunged her low.

Mrs. Pagnell performed the offices of attention to Mr. Weyburn in lieu
of the countess, who seemed to find it a task to sit at the luncheon
table with him, when Lady Ormont was absent. “Just peeped in,” she said
as she entered the library, “to see if all was comfortable;” and gossip
ensued, not devoid of object. She extracted an astonishingly smooth
description of Lady Charlotte. Weyburn was brightness in speaking of the
much-misunderstood lady. “She's one of the living women of the world.”

“You are sure you don't mean one of the worldly women?” Mrs. Pagnell
rejoiced.

“She has to be known to be liked,” he owned.

“And you were, one hears, among the favoured?”

“I can scarcely pretend to that, ma'am.”

“You were recommended.”

“Lady Charlotte is devoted to her brother.”

Mrs. Pagnell's bosom heaved. “How strange Lord Ormont is! One would
suppose, with his indignation at the country for its treatment of him,
admirers would be welcome. Oh dear, no! that is not the way. On board
the packet, on our voyage to Spain, my niece in her cabin, imploring
mercy of Neptune, as they say, I heard of Lord Ormont among the
passengers. I could hardly credit my ears. For I had been hearing of him
from my niece ever since her return from a select establishment for the
education of young ladies, not much more than a morning's drive out of
London, though Dover was my residence. She had got a hero! It was Lord
Ormont! Lord Ormont! all day: and when the behaviour of the country to
him became notorious, Aminta--my niece the countess--she could hardly
contain herself. A secret:--I promised her--it's not known to Lord
Ormont himself:--a printed letter in a metropolitan paper, copied into
the provincial papers, upholding him for one of the greatest of our
patriot soldiers and the saviour of India, was the work of her hands.
You would, I am sure, think it really well written. Meeting him on
deck--the outline of the coast of Portugal for an introductory subject,
our Peninsular battles and so forth--I spoke of her enthusiasm. The
effect was, to cut off all communication between us. I had only to
appear, Lord Ormont vanished. I said to myself, this is a character.
However, the very mention of him to my niece, as one of the passengers
on board--medicine, miraculous! She was up in half an hour, out pacing
the deck before evening, hardly leaning on my arm, and the colour
positively beginning to show on her cheeks again. He fled, of coarse.
I had prepared her for his eccentricities. Next morning she was out
by herself. In the afternoon Lord Ormont strode up to us his--military
step--and most courteously requested the honour of an introduction. I
had broken the ice at last; from that moment he was cordiality itself,
until--I will not say, until he had called her his own--a few little
misunderstandings!--not with his countess. You see, a resident aunt
is translated mother-in-law by husbands; though I spare them pretty
frequently; I go to friends, they travel. Here in London she must have a
duenna. The marriage at Madrid, at the Embassy:--well, perhaps it was a
step for us, for commoners, though we rank with the independent. Has
her own little pin-money--an inheritance. Perhaps Lady Eglett gives the
world her version. She may say, there was aiming at station. I reply,
never was there a more whole-hearted love-match! Absolutely the girl's
heart has been his from the period of her school-days. Oh! a little
affair--she was persecuted by a boy at a neighbouring school. Her
mistress wrote me word--a very determined Romeo young gentleman
indeed--quite alarmed about him. In the bud! I carried her off on the
spot, and snapped it effectually. Warned he meant to be desperate, I
kept her away from my house at Dover four months, place to place; and
I did well. I heard on my return, that a youth, answering to the
schoolmistress's description of him, had been calling several times,
the first two months and longer. You have me alluding to these little
nonsensical nothings, because she seemed born to create violent
attachments, even at that early day; and Lady Eglett--Lady Charlotte
Eglett may hear; for there is no end to them, and impute them to her,
when really!--can she be made responsible for eyes innocent of the
mischief they appear destined to do? But I am disturbing you in your
work.”

“You are very good, ma'am,” said the ghost of the determined young
gentleman.

“A slight cold, have you?” Mrs. Pagnell asked solicitously.

“Dear me, no!” he gave answer with a cleared throat.

In charging him with more than he wanted to carry, she supplied him with
particulars he had wanted to know; and now he asked himself what could
be the gain of any amount of satisfied curiosity regarding a married
Aminta. She slew my lord on board a packet-boat; she bears the arrows
that slay. My lord married her where the first English chaplain was to
be found; that is not wonderful either. British Embassy, Madrid! Weyburn
believed the ceremony to have been performed there: at the same time, he
could hear Lady Charlotte's voice repeating with her varied intonation
Mrs. Pagnell's impressive utterances; and he could imagine how the
somewhat silly duenna aunt, so penetrable in her transparent artifices,
struck emphasis on the incredulity of people inclined to judge of the
reported ceremony by Lord Ormont's behaviour to his captive.

How explain that strange matter? But can there be a gain in trying to
sound it? Weyburn shuffled it away. Before the fit of passion seized
him, he could turn his eager mind from anything which had not a
perceptible point of gain, either for bodily strength or mental
acquisition, or for money, too, now that the school was growing palpable
as an infant in arms and agape for the breast. Thought of gain, and the
bent to pursue it, is the shield of Athene over young men in the press
of the seductions. He had to confess his having lost some bits of
himself by reason of his meditations latterly; and that loss, if we let
it continue a space, will show in cramp at the wrist, logs on the legs,
a wheezy wind, for any fellow vowed to physical trials of strength
and skill. It will show likewise in the brain beating broken
wings--inability to shoot a thought up out of the body for half a
minute. And, good Lord! how quickly the tight-strong fellow crumbles,
when once the fragmentary disintegration has begun! Weyburn cried out on
a heart that bounded off at prodigal gallops, and had to be nipped with
reminders of the place of good leader he was for taking among the young.
Hang superexcellence! but we know those moanings over the troubles of
a married woman; we know their sources, know their goal, or else we are
the fiction-puppet or the Bedlamite; and she is a married woman, married
at the British Embassy, Madrid, if you please! after a few weeks'
acquaintance with her husband, who doubtless wrote his name intelligibly
in the registrar's book, but does not prove himself much the hero when
he drives a pen, even for so little as the signing of his name! He
signed his name, apparently not more than partly pledging himself to
the bond. Lord Ormont's autobiographical scraps combined with Lady
Charlotte's hints and Mrs. Pagnell's communications, to provoke the
secretary's literary contempt of his behaviour to his wife. However, the
former might be mended, and he resumed the task.

It had the restorative effect of touching him to see his old hero in
action; whereby he was brought about to a proper modesty, so that he
really craved no more than for the mistress of this house to breathe the
liberal air of a public acknowledgment of her rightful position.
Things constituted by their buoyancy to float are remarkable for lively
bobbings when they are cast upon the waters; and such was the case with
Weyburn, until the agitation produced by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to
sail away in the society of the steadiest.

He decided that by not observing, not thinking, not feeling, about the
circumstances of the household into which Fate had thrown him, he would
best be able--probably it was the one way--to keep himself together; and
his resolution being honest all round, he succeeded in it as long as he
abstained from a very wakeful vigilance over simple eyesight. For if
one is nervously on guard to not-see, the matter starts up winged, and
enters us, and kindles the mind, and tingles through the blood; it has
us as a foe. The art of blind vision requires not only practice, but an
intimate knowledge of the arts of the traitor we carry within. Safest
for him, after all, was to lay fast hold of the particularly unimportant
person he was, both there and anywhere else. The Countess of Ormont's
manner toward him was to be read as a standing index of the course he
should follow; and he thanked her. He could not quite so sincerely thank
her aunt. His ingratitude for the sickly dose she had administered to
him sprang a doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked her aunt on account
of services performed at the British Embassy, Madrid.

Certain looks of those eyes recently, when in colloquy with my lord,
removed the towering nobleman to a shadowed landscape.

Was it solely an effect of eyes commanding light, and having every
shaft of the quiver of the rays at her disposal? Or was it a shot from a
powerful individuality issuing out of bondage to some physical oppressor
no longer master of the soul, in peril of the slipping away of the body?
Her look on him was not hate: it was larger, more terribly divine. Those
eyes had elsewhere once looked love: they had planted their object in
a throbbing Eden. The man on whom they had looked shivered over the
thought of it after years of blank division.

Rather than have those eyes to look on him their displacing
unintentness, the man on whom they had once looked love would have
chosen looks of wrath, the darts that kill--blest darts of the celestial
Huntress, giving sweet sudden cessation of pain, in the one everlasting
last flash of life with thought that the shot was hers. Oh for the
'ayava behea' of the Merciful in splendour!

These were the outcries of the man deciding simultaneously not to
observe, not to think, not to feel, and husbanding calculations upon
storage of gain for the future. Softness held the song below. It came of
the fact that his enforced resolution, for the sake of sanity, drove his
whole reflective mind backward upon his younger days, when an Evening
and a Morning star in him greeted the bright Goddess Browny or sang
adieu, and adored beyond all golden beams the underworld whither she had
sunk, where she was hidden.

Meanwhile, the worthy dame who had dosed him was out in her carriage,
busy paying visits to distinguished ladies of the great world, with the
best of excuses for an early call, which was gossip to impart, such as
the Countess of Ormont had not yet thought of mentioning; and two or
three of them were rather amusedly interested to hear that Lord Ormont
had engaged a handsome young secretary, “under the patronage of Lady
Charlotte Eglett, devoted to sports of all kinds, immensely favoured by
both.” Gossip must often have been likened to the winged insect bearing
pollen to the flowers; it fertilizes many a vacuous reverie. Those
flowers of the upper garden are not, indeed, stationary and in need of
the missionary buzzer, but if they have been in one place unmoved for
one hour, they are open to take animation from their visitors. Aminta
was pleasantly surprised next day by the receipt of a note from Mrs.
Lawrence Finchley, begging to be invited to lunch if she came, as she
had a purpose in the wish to meet my lord.




[NOTE: The remainder of 'Lord Ormont and His Aminta' is taken from an
older edition which uses single rather than double quotation marks.
D.W.]


CHAPTER VIII. MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY

My lord had one of his wilful likings for Isabella Lawrence Finchley,
and he consented to the torture of an hour of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell in
the middle of the day, just to taste the favourite he welcomed at home
as he championed her abroad. The reasons were numerous and intimate why
she pleased him. He liked the woman, enjoyed the cause for battle that
she gave. Weyburn, on coming to the luncheon table, beheld a lady with
the head of a comely boy, the manner, softened in delicate feminine, of
a capital comrade. Her air of candour was her nature in her face; and
it carried a guileless roguery, a placid daring, a supersensual
naughtiness, a simplicity of repose amid the smoky reputation she
created, that led one to think the vapour calumnious or the creature
privileged. That young boy's look opened him at once; he had not to
warm to her,--he flew. Ordinarily the sweetest ladies will make us pass
through cold mist and cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before
the formalities are cleared away to grant us rights of citizenship. She
was like those frank lands where we have not to hand out a passport at
the frontier and wait for dubious inspection of it.

She prevailed with cognizant men and with the frivolous. Women were
capable of appreciating her, too: as Aminta did, despite some hinted
qualifications addressed shyly to her husband. But these were the very
matters exciting his particular esteem. He was of Lady Charlotte's mind,
in her hot zeal against injustice done to the creatures she despised;
and yet more than she applauded a woman who took up her idiot husband's
challenge to defend her good name, and cleared it, right or wrong, and
beat him down on his knees, and then started for her spell of the merry
canter over turf: an example to the English of the punishment they get
for their stupid Puritanic tyranny--sure to be followed by a national
helter-skelter down-hill headlong. And Mrs. Lawrence was not one of the
corrupt, he argued; she concealed what it was decent to conceal, without
pouting hypocritical pretences; she had merely dispensed with idle legal
formalities, in the prettiest curvetting airy wanton way, to divorce the
man who tried to divorce her, and 'whined to be forgiven when he found
he couldn't. Adderwood was ready to marry her to-morrow, if the donkey
husband would but go and bray his last. Half a dozen others were heads
off on the same course to that goal.'

That was her champion's perusal of a lady candidly asserting her right
to have breeched comrades, and paying for it in the advocacy which
compromises. She was taken to be and she was used as a weapon wherewith
to strike at our Pharisees. Women pushing out into the world for
independence, bleed heavy payments all round.

The earl's double-edged defence of her was partly a vindication of
another husband, who allowed his wife to call her friend; he was
nevertheless assured of her not being corrupt, both by his personal
knowledge of the lady, and his perception of her image in the bosom of
his wife. She did no harm there, he knew well. Although he was not a man
to put his trust in faces, as his young secretary inclined to do,
Mrs. Lawrence's look of honest boy did count among the pleadings.
And somewhat so might a government cruiser observe the intrusion of a
white-sailed yacht in protected sea-waters, where licenced trawlers are
at the haul.

Talk over the table coursed as fluently as might be, with Mrs. Pagnell
for a boulder in the stream. Uninformed by malice, she led up to Lord
Adderwood's name, and perhaps more designedly spoke of Mr. Morsfield, on
whom her profound reading into the female heart of the class above her
caused her to harp, as 'a real Antinous,' that the ladies might discuss
him and Lord Ormont wax meditative.

Mrs. Lawrence pitied the patient gentleman, while asking him in her mind
who was the author of the domestic burden he had to bear.

'It reminds me I have a mission,' she said. 'There's a fencing match
down at a hall in the West, near the barracks; private and select:
Soldier and Civilian; I forget who challenged--Civilian, one judges;
Soldiers are the peaceful party. They want you to act “umpire,” as they
call it, on the military side, my dear lord; and you will?--I have
given my word you will bring Lady Ormont. You will?--and not let me be
confounded! Yes, and we shall make a party. I see consent. Aminta will
enjoy the switch of steel. I love to see fencing. It rouses all that is
diabolical in me.'

She sent a skimming look at the opposite.

'And I,' said he, much freshened.

'You fence?'

'Handle the foils.'

'If you must speak modestly! Are you in practice?'

'I spend in hour in Captain Chiallo's fencing rooms generally every
evening before dinner. I heard there the first outlines of the match
proposed. You are right; it was the civilian.'

'Mr. Morsfield, as I suspected.'

She smiled to herself, like one saying, Not badly managed, Mr.
Morsfield!

'Italian school?' Lord Ormont inquired, with a screw of the eyelids.

'French, my lord.'

'The only school for teaching.'

'The simplest--has the most rational method. Italians are apt to be
tricky. But they were masters once, and now and then they send out a
fencer the French can't touch.'

'How would you account for it?'

'If I had to account for it, I should say, hotter blood, cool nerve,
quick brain.'

'Hum. Where are we, then?'

'We don't shine with the small sword.'

'We had men neatly pinked for their slashings in the Peninsula.'

'We've had clever Irishmen.'

'Hot enough blood! This man Morsfield--have you crossed the foils with
him?'

'Goes at it like a Spaniard; though Spaniards in Paris have been found
wary enough.'

My lord hummed. 'Fellow looks as if he would easily lose his head over
steel.'

'He can be dangerous.'

The word struck on something, and rang.

Mrs. Lawrence had a further murmur within her lips. Her travelling eye
met Aminta's and passed it.

'But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded?' said Mrs. Pagnell.

'Oh no, oh no; not in that case!' Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble
assent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy's face was mischief at
school under shadow of the master.

She said to Weyburn: 'Are you one in the list--to give our military a
lesson? They want it.'

His answer was unheard by Aminta. She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's
pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the
strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic
attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly
vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the
vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood.
Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the
wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve
that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly
on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella
Lawrence Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss
feathery--wild at his games.

My lord hummed again. 'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing. This
fellow here has had his French maitre d'armes. Show me your hand, sir.'

Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: 'The wrist wants
exercise.'

'Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails' ends; you were a bowler at
cricket.'

'Now examine the palms, my lord; I judge by the lines on the palms,'
Mrs. Pagnell remarked.

He nodded to her and rose.

Coffee had not been served, she reminded him; it was coming in, so
down he sat a yard from the table; outwardly equable, inwardly cursing
coffee; though he refused to finish a meal without his cup.

'I think the palms do betray something,' said Mrs. Lawrence; and Aminta
said: 'Everything betrays.'

'No, my dear,' Mrs. Pagnell corrected her; 'the extremities betray, and
we cannot read the centre. Is it not so, my lord?'

'It may be as you say, ma'am.'

She was disappointed in her scheme to induce a general examination of
palms, and especially his sphinx lordship's.

Weyburn controlled the tongue she so frequently tickled to an elvish
gavotte, but the humour on his face touched Mrs. Lawrence's to a subdued
good-fellow roguishness, and he felt himself invited to chat with her on
the walk for a reposeful ten minutes in Aminta's drawing-room.

Mrs. Pagnell, 'quite enjoying the company,' as she told her niece,
was dismayed to hear her niece tell her of a milliner's appointment,
positive for three o'clock; and she had written it in her head 'p.m.,
four o'clock,' and she had mislaid or destroyed the milliner's note; and
she still had designs upon his lordship's palms, things to read and hint
around her off the lines. She departed.

Lord Ormont became genial; and there was no one present who did not
marvel that he should continue to decree a state of circumstances more
or less necessitating the infliction he groaned under. He was too lofty
to be questioned, even by his favourites. Mrs. Lawrence conjured the
ghost of Lady Charlotte for an answer: this being Lord Adderwood's idea.
Weyburn let his thoughts go on fermenting. Pride froze a beginning stir
in the bosom of Aminta.

Her lord could captivate a reluctant woman's bosom when he was genial.
He melted her and made her call up her bitterest pride to perform its
recent office. That might have failed; but it had support in a second
letter received from the man accounted both by Mrs. Lawrence and by Mr.
Weyburn 'dangerous'; and the thought of who it was that had precipitated
her to 'play little games' for the sole sake of rousing him through
jealousy to a sense of righteous duty, armed her desperately against
him. She could exult in having read the second letter right through
on receipt of it, and in remembering certain phrases; and notably in
a reflection shot across her bewildered brain by one of the dangerous
man's queer mad sentences: 'Be as iron as you like, I will strike you
to heat'; and her thought: Is there assurance of safety in a perpetual
defence?--all while she smiled on her genial lord, and signified
agreement, with a smiting of wonderment at her heart, when he alluded to
a panic shout of the country for defence, and said: 'Much crying of that
kind weakens the power to defend when the real attack comes.' Was it
true?

'But say what you propose?' she asked.

Lord Ormont proposed vigilance and drill; a small degree of
self-sacrifice on the part of the population, and a look-out head in
the War Department. He proposed to have a nation of stout-braced men
laughing at the foreign bully or bandit, instead of being a pack of
whimpering women; whom he likened to the randomly protestant geese of
our country roadside, heads out a yard in a gabble of defence while they
go backing.

So thereupon Aminta's notion of a resemblance in the mutual thought
subsided; she relapsed on the cushioning sentiment that she was a woman.
And--only a woman! he might exclaim, if it pleased him; though he would
never be able to say she was one of the whimpering. She, too, had
the choice to indulge in scorn of the superior man stone blind to
proceedings intimately affecting him--if he cared! One might doubt it.

Mrs. Lawrence listened to him with a mind more disengaged, and a
flitting disapproval of Aminta's unsympathetic ear, or reluctance to
stimulate the devout attention a bruised warrior should have in his
tent. She did not press on him the post of umpire. He consented--at her
request, he said--to visit the show; but refused any official position
that would, it was clearly enough implied, bring his name in any
capacity whatever before the country which had unpardonably maltreated
him.

Feminine wits will be set working, when a point has been gained; and as
Mrs. Lawrence could now say she had persuaded Lord Ormont to gratify
her specially, she warmed to fancy she read him, and that she might have
managed the wounded and angry giant. Her minor intelligence, caracoling
unhampered by harassing emotions, rebuked Aminta's for not perceiving
that to win him round to whatever a woman may desire, she must be with
him, outstrip him even, along the line he chooses for himself; abuse
the country, rail at the Government, ridicule the title of English Army,
proscribe the name of India in his hearing. Little stings of jealousy
are small insect bites, and do not pique a wounded giant hardly
sensible of irritation under his huge, and as we assume for our purpose,
justifiable wrath. We have to speculate which way does the giant incline
to go? and turn him according to the indication.

Mrs. Lawrence was driven by her critic mood to think Aminta
relied--erroneously, after woman's old fashion--on the might of superb
dark eyes after having been captured. It seemed to her worse than a
beautiful woman's vanity, a childishness. But her boy's head held boy's
brains; and Lord Ormont's praise of the splendid creature's nerve when
she had to smell powder in Spain, and at bull-fights, and once at a
wrecking of their carriage down a gully on the road over the Alpujarras,
sent her away subdued, envious, happy to have kissed the cheek of the
woman who could inspire it.




CHAPTER IX. A FLASH OF THE BRUISED WARRIOR

The winning of Lord Ormont's consent to look on at the little bout of
arms was counted an achievement; for even in his own rarefied upper
circle, where the fervid sentiments are not allowed to be seen plunging,
he had his troop of enthusiasts; and they were anxious that he should
make an appearance in public, to take what consolation a misunderstood
and injured man could get from evidence of the grateful esteem
entertained for him by a party of his countrymen, who might reasonably
expect at the same time to set eyes, at rather close quarters, on the
wonderful dark beauty, supposed a Spaniard, occasionally beheld riding
beside him. If it is possible to connect a woman with the devoutest of
their anticipations, the sons of leisure up there will do it. But, in
truth, an English world was having cause to ransack the dust-heaps
for neglected men of mettle. Our intermittent ague, known as dread of
invasion, was over the land. Twice down the columns of panic newspaper
correspondence Lord Ormont saw his name cited, with the effect on him
that such signs of national repentance approaching lodged a crabbed
sourness in his consulting-room, whether of head or breast.

He was assailed by a gusty appeal from Lady Charlotte, bidding him
seize the moment to proclaim his views while the secretary had a private
missive from her, wherein, between insistency and supplication, she
directed him to bring the subject before my lord every day, and be sure
to write out a fair copy of the epistle previous to the transmission of
it. 'Capua' was mentioned; she brought in 'a siren,' too. Her brother
was to be the soldier again--fling off silken bonds. The world might
prate of his morality; now was the hour for showing his patriotism,
casting aside his just anger, and backing his chief's opinion. 'A good
chance to get their names together.' To her brother she declared that
the columns of the leading journal were open to him--'in large type'; he
was to take her word for it; he had only to 'dictate away,' quite at his
ease, just as he talked at Olmer, and leave the bother of the scribe's
business to his aide. 'Lose no time,' she concluded; 'the country wants
your ideas; let us have your plan.'

The earl raised his shoulders, and kept his aide exclusively at the
Memoirs. Weyburn, however, read out to him, with accentuation, foolish
stuff in the recurrent correspondence of the daily sheets, and a
complacent burgess article, meant to be a summary of the controversy and
a recommendation to the country to bask in the sun of its wealth again.

'Ay, be the porker sow it's getting liker and liker to every year!' Lord
Ormont exclaimed, and sprang on his feet. 'Take a pen. Shut up that
box. We'll give 'em digestive biscuits for their weak stomachs. Invasion
can't be done, they say! I tell the doddered asses Napoleon would have
been over if Villeneuve 

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