Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

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They passed through Olmer park-gates. Lady Charlotte preceded him, and
she turned, waiting for him to rejoin her. He had taken his flagellation
in the right style, neither abashed nor at sham crow: he was easy, ready
to converse on any topic; he kept the line between supple courtier and
sturdy independent; and he was a pleasant figure of a young fellow.
Thinking which, a reminder that she liked him drew her by the road of
personal feeling, as usual with her, to reflect upon another, and a
younger, woman's observing and necessarily liking him too.

'You say you fancy I should like the person you call Lady Ormont?'

'I believe you would, my lady.'

'Are her manners agreeable?'

'Perfect; no pretension.'

'Ah! she sings, plays--all that?

'She plays the harp and sings.'

'You have heard her?'

'Twice.'

'She didn't set you mewing?'

'I don't remember the impulse; at all events, it was restrained.'

'She would me; but I'm an old woman. I detest their squalling and
strumming. I can stand it with Italians on the boards: they don't, stop
conversation. She was present at that fencing match where you plucked a
laurel? I had an account of it. I can't see the use of fencing in this
country. Younger women can, I dare say. Now, look. If we're to speak of
her, I can't call her Lady Ormont, and I don't want to hear you. Give me
her Christian name.'

'It is'--Weyburn found himself on a slope without a stay--'Aminta.'

Lady Charlotte's eye was on him. He felt intolerably hot; his vexation at
the betrayal of the senseless feeling made it worse, a conscious crimson.

'Aminta,' said she, rather in the style of Cuper's boys, when the name
was a strange one to them. 'I remember my Italian master reading out a
poem when I was a girl. I read poetry then. You wouldn't have imagined
that. I did, and liked it. I hate old age. It changes you so. None of my
children know me as I was when I had life in me and was myself, and my
brother Rowsley called me Cooey. They think me a hard old woman. I was
Cooey through the woods and over the meadows and down stream to Rowsley.
Old age is a prison wall between us and young people. They see a
miniature head and bust, and think it a flattery--won't believe it. After
I married I came to understand that the world we are in is a world to
fight in, or under we go. But I pity the young who have to cast
themselves off and take up arms. Young women above all.'

Why had she no pity for Aminta? Weyburn asked it of his feelings, and he
had the customary insurgent reply from them.

'You haven't seen Steignton yet,' she continued. 'No place on earth is
equal to Steignton for me. It 's got the charm. Here at Olmer I'm a
mother and a grandmother--the "devil of an old-woman" my neighbours take
me to be. She hasn't been to Steignton, either. No, and won't go there,
though she's working her way round, she supposes. He'll do everything for
his "Aminta," but he won't take her to Steignton. I'm told now she's won
Lady de Culme. That Mrs. Lawrence Finchley has dropped the curtsey to
her great-aunt and sworn to be a good girl, for a change, if Lady de
Culme will do the chaperon, and force Lord Ormont's hand. My brother
shrugs. There'll be a nice explosion one day soon. Presented? The Court
won't have her. That I know for positive. If she's pushed forward, she
'll be bitterly snubbed. It 's on the heads of those women--silly women!
I can't see the game Mrs. Lawrence Finchley's playing. She'd play for
fun. If they'd come to me, I 'd tell them I 've proof she 's not the
Countess of Ormont: positive proof. You look? I have it. I hold
something; and not before,--(he may take his Aminta to Steignton, he may
let her be presented, she may wear his name publicly, I say he's laughing
at them, snapping his fingers at them louder and louder the more they
seem to be pushing him into a corner, until--I know my brother
Rowsley!--and, poor dear fellow! a man like that, the best cavalry
general England ever had:--they'll remember it when there comes a cry for
a general from India: that's the way with the English; only their
necessities teach them to be just!)--he to be reduced to be
out-manoeuvring a swarm of women,--I tell them, not before my brother
Rowsley comes to me for what he handed to my care and I keep safe for
him, will I believe he has made or means to make his Aminta Countess of
Ormont.'

They were at the steps of the house. Turning to Weyburn there, the
inexhaustible Lady Charlotte remarked that their conversation had given
her pleasure. Leo was hanging on to one of his hands the next minute. A
small girl took the other. Philippa and Beatrice were banished damsels.

Lady Charlotte's breath had withered the aspect of Aminta's fortunes.
Weyburn could forgive her, for he was beginning to understand her. He
could not pardon 'her brother Rowsley,' who loomed in his mind
incomprehensible, and therefore black. Once he had thought the great
General a great man. He now regarded him as a mere soldier, a soured
veteran; socially as a masker and a trifler, virtually a callous angler
playing his cleverly-hooked fish for pastime.

What could be the meaning of Lady Charlotte's 'that, man Morsfield, who
boasts of your Lady Ormont, and does it unwhipped'?

Weyburn stopped his questioning, with the reflection that he had no right
to recollect her words thus accurately. The words, however, stamped
Morsfield's doings and sayings and postures in the presence of Aminta
with significance. When the ladies were looking on at the fencers,
Morsfield's perfect coxcombry had been noticeable. He knew the art of
airing a fine figure. Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had spoken of it, and Aminta
had acquiesced; in the gravely simple manner of women who may be thinking
of it much more intently than the vivacious prattler. Aminta confessed to
an admiration of masculine physical beauty; the picador, matador, of the
Spanish ring called up an undisguised glow that English ladies show
coldly when they condescend to let it be seen; as it were, a line or two
of colour on the wintriest of skies. She might, after all, at heart be
one of the leisured, jewelled, pretty-winged; the spending, never
harvesting, world she claimed and sought to enter. And what a primitive
world it was!--world of the glittering beast and the not too swiftly
flying prey, the savage passions clothed in silk. Surely desire to belong
to it writes us poor creatures. Mentally, she could hardly be maturer
than the hero-worshipping girl in the procession of Miss Vincent's young
seminarists. Probably so, but she carried magic. She was of the order of
women who walk as the goddesses of old, bearing the gift divine. And, by
the way, she had the step of the goddess. Weyburn repeated to himself the
favourite familiar line expressive of the glorious walk, and accused Lord
Ormont of being in cacophonous accordance with the perpetual wrong of
circumstance, he her possessor, the sole person of her sphere insensible
to the magic she bore! So ran his thought.

The young man chose to conceive that he thought abstractedly. He was, in
truth, often casting about for the chances of his meeting on some
fortunate day the predestined schoolmaster's wife: a lady altogether
praiseworthy for carrying principles of sound government instead of
magic. Consequently, susceptible to woman's graces though he knew himself
to be, Lady Ormont's share of them hung in the abstract for him. His
hopes were bent on an early escape to Switzerland and his life's work.

Lady Charlotte mounted to ride to the battle daily. She talked of her
brother Rowsley, and of 'Aminta,' and provoked an advocacy of the
Countess of Ormont, and trampled the pleas and defences to dust, much in
the same tone as on the first day; sometimes showing a peep of sweet
humaneness, like the ripe berry of a bramble, and at others rattling
thunder at the wretch of a woman audacious enough to pretend to a part in
her brother's title.

Not that she had veneration for titles. She considered them a tinsel, and
the devotee on his knee-caps to them a lump for a kick. Adding: 'Of
course I stand for my class; and if we can't have a manlier people--and
it 's not likely in a country treating my brother so badly--well, then,
let things go on as they are.' But it was the pretension to a part in the
name of Ormont which so violently offended the democratic aristocrat, and
caused her to resent it as an assault on the family honour, by 'a woman
springing up out of nothing'--a woman of no distinctive birth.

She was rational in her fashion; or Weyburn could at least see where and
how the reason in her took a twist. The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey would not
see it; he was, in charity to her ladyship, of a totally contrary
opinion, he informed Weyburn. The laborious pastor and much-enduring
Churchman met my lady's apologist as he was having a swing of the legs
down the lanes before breakfast, and he fell upon a series of complaints,
which were introduced by a declaration that 'he much feared' her ladyship
would have a heavy legal bill to pay for taking the law into her hands up
at Addicotes.

Her ladyship might, if she pleased, he said, encourage her domestics and
her husband's tenants and farm-labourers to abandon the church for the
chapel, and go, as she had done and threatened to do habitually, to the
chapel herself; but to denounce the ritual of the Orthodox Church under
the denomination of 'barbarous,' to say of the invoking supplications of
the service, that they were--she had been heard to state it more or less
publicly and repeatedly--suitable to abject ministers and throngs at the
court of an Indian rajah, that he did not hesitate to term highly
unbecoming in a lady of her station, subversive and unchristian. The
personal burdens inflicted on him by her ladyship he prayed for patience
to endure. He surprised Weyburn in speaking of Lady Charlotte as
'educated and accomplished.' She was rather more so than Weyburn knew,
and more so than was common among the great ladies of her time.

Weyburn strongly advised the reverend gentleman on having it out with
Lady Charlotte in a personal interview. He sketched the great lady's
combative character on a foundation of benevolence, and stressed her
tolerance for open dealing, and the advantage gained by personal dealings
with her--after a mauling or two. His language and his illustrations
touched an old-school chord in the Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey, who hummed over
the project, profoundly disrelishing the introductory portion.

'Do me the honour to call and see me to-morrow, after breakfast, before
her ladyship starts for the fray on Addicote heights,' Weyburn said; 'and
I will ask your permission to stand by you. Her bark is terrific, we
know; and she can bite, but there's no venom.'

Finally, on a heave of his chest, Mr. Hampton-Evey consented to call, in
the interests of peace.

Weyburn had said it must be 'man to man with her, facing her and taking
steps'; and, although the prospect was unpleasant to repulsiveness, it
was a cheerful alternative beside Mr. Hampton-Evey's experiences and
anticipations of the malignant black power her ladyship could be when she
was not faced.

'Let the man come,' said Lady Charlotte. Her shoulders intimated
readiness for him.

She told Weyburn he might be present--insisted to have him present.
During the day Weyburn managed to slide in observations on the favourable
reports of Mr. Hampton-Evey's work among the poor--emollient doses that
irritated her to fret and paw, as at a checking of her onset.

In the afternoon the last disputed tree on the Addicotes' ridge was
felled and laid on Olmer ground. Riding with Weyburn and the joyful Leo,
she encountered Mr. Eglett and called out the news. He remarked, in the
tone of philosophy proper to a placable country gentleman obedient to
government on foreign affairs: 'Now for the next act. But no more
horseback now, mind!'

She muttered of not recollecting a promise. He repeated the interdict.
Weyburn could fancy seeing her lips form words of how she hated old age.

He had been four days at Olmer, always facing her, 'man to man,' in the
matter of Lady Ormont, not making way at all, but holding firm, and
winning respectful treatment. They sat alone in her private room, where,
without prelude, she discharged a fiery squib at impudent hussies caught
up to the saddle-bow of a hero for just a canter, and pretending to a
permanent seat beside him.

'You have only to see Lady Ormont; you will admit the justice of her
claim, my lady,' said he; and as evidently he wanted a fight, she let him
have it.

'You try to provoke me; you take liberties. You may call the woman
Aminta, I've told you; you insult me when you call the woman by my family
name.'

'Pardon me, my lady: I have no right to call Lady Ormont Aminta.'

'You've never done so, eh? Say!'

She had him at the edge of the precipice. He escaped by saying, 'Her
Christian name was asked the other day, and I mentioned it. She is
addressed by me as Lady Ormont.'

'And by her groom and her footman. They all do; it 's the indemnity to
that class of young woman. Her linendraper is Lady-Ormonting as you do. I
took you for a gentleman. Let me hear you give her that title again, you
shall hear her true one, that the world fits her with, from me.'

The time was near the half-hour bell before dinner, the situation between
them that of the fall of the breath to fetch words electrical. She left
it to him to begin the fight, and was not sorry that she had pricked him
for it.

A footman entered the room, bearer of a missive for Mr. Weyburn. Lord
Ormont's groom had brought it from London.

'Send in the man,' said Lady Charlotte.

Weyburn read

'The Countess of Ormont begs Mr. Weyburn to return instantly. There has
been an accident in his home. It may not be very serious. An arm--a shock
to the system from a fall. Messenger informs her, fear of internal
hemorrhage. Best doctors in attendance.'

He handed Lady Charlotte the letter. She humped at the first line,
flashed across the remainder, and in a lowered voice asked--

'Sister in the house?'

'My mother,' Weyburn said.

The groom appeared. He knew nothing. The Countess had given him orders to
spare no expense on the road to Olmer, without a minute's delay. He had
ridden and driven.

He looked worn. Lady Charlotte rang the bell for her butler. To him she
said--

'See that this man has a good feed of meat, any pastry you have, and a
bottle of port wine. He has earned a pipe of tobacco; make up a bed for
him. Despatch at once any one of the stable-boys to Loughton--the
Dolphin. Mr. Leeman there will have a chariot, fly, gig, anything,
ready-horsed in three hours from now. See Empson yourself; he will put my
stepper Mab to the light trap; no delay. Have his feed at Loughton. Tell
Mrs. Maples to send up now, here, a tray, whatever she has, within five
minutes--not later. A bottle of the Peace of Amiens Chambertin--Mr.
Eglett's. You understand. Mrs. Maples will pack a basket for the journey;
she will judge. Add a bottle of the Waterloo Bordeaux. Wait: a dozen of
Mr. Eglett's cigars. Brisk with all the orders. Go.'

She turned to Weyburn. 'You pack your portmanteau faster than a servant
will do it.'

He ran up-stairs.

She was beside the tray to welcome and inspirit his eating, and she
performed the busy butler's duty in pouring out wine for him. It was a
toned old Burgundy, happy in the year of its birth, the grandest of
instruments to roll the gambol-march of the Dionysiaca through the blood
of this frame and sound it to the spirit. She spoke no word of his cause
for departure. He drank, and he felt what earth can do to cheer one of
her stricken children and strengthen the beat of a heart with a dread
like a shot in it.

She, while he flew supporting the body of his most beloved to the sun of
Life in brighter hope, reckoned the stages of his journey.

'Leeman at Loughton will post you through the night to Mersley. Wherever
you bait, it is made known that you come from Olmer, and are one of us.
That passes you on up to London. Where can Lord Ormont be now?'

'In Paris.'

'Still in Paris? He leaves her. She did well to send as she did. You will
not pay for the posting along the road.'

'I will pay for myself--I have a 'purse,' Weyburn said; and continued,
'Oh, my lady; there is Mr. Hampton-Evey to-morrow morning: I promised to
stand by him.'

'I'll explain,' said Lady Charlotte. 'He shall not miss you. If he strips
the parson and comes as a man and a servant of the poor, he has nothing
to fear. You've done? The night before my brother Rowsley's first duel I
sat with him at supper and poured his wine out, and knew what was going
to happen, didn't say a word. No use in talking about feelings. Besides,
death is only the other side of the ditch, and one or other of us must go
foremost. Now then, good-bye. Empson's waiting by this time. Mr. Eglett
and Leo shall hear the excuses from me. Think of anything you may want,
while I count ten.'

She held his hand. He wanted her to be friendly to Lady Ormont, but could
not vex her at the last moment, touched as he was by her practical
kindness.

She pressed his hand and let it go.

CHAPTER XIV

OLD LOVERS NEW FRIENDS

The cottage inhabited by Weyburn's mother was on the southern hills over
London. He reached it late in the afternoon. His mother's old servant,
Martha, spied the roadway at the gate of the small square of garden. Her
steady look without welcome told him the scene he would meet beyond the
door, and was the dead in her eyes. He dropped from no height; he stood
on a level with the blow. His apprehensions on the road had lowered him
to meet it.

'Too late, Martha?'

'She's in heaven, my dear.'

'She is lying alone?'

'The London doctor left half an hour back. She's gone. Slipped, and fell,
coming from her room, all the way down. She prayed for grace to see her
son. She 'll watch over him, be sure. You 'll not find it lone and cold.
A lady sits with it--Lady Ormont, they call her--a very kind lady. My
mistress liked her voice. Ever since news of the accident, up to ten at
night; and never eats or drinks more than a poor tiny bit of
bread-and-butter, with a teacup.'

'Weyburn went up-stairs.

Aminta sat close to the bedside in a darkened room. They greeted
silently. He saw the white shell of the life that had flown; he took his
mother's hand and kissed it, and knelt, clasping it.

Fear of disturbing his prayer kept Aminta seated. Death was a stranger to
him. The still warm, half-cold, nerveless hand smote the fact of things
as they were through the prayer for things as we would have them. The
vitality of his prayer was the sole light he had. It drew sustainment
from the dead hand in his grasp, and cowered down to the earth claiming
all we touch. He tried to summon vision of a soaring spirituality; he
could not; his understanding and senses were too stricken. He prayed on.
His prayer was as a little fountain, not rising high out of earth, and in
the clutch of death; but its being it had from death, his love gave it
food.

Prayer is power within us to communicate with the desired beyond our
thirsts. The goodness of the dear good mother gone was in him for
assurance of a breast of goodness to receive her, whatever the nature of
the eternal secret may be. The good life gone lives on in the mind; the
bad has but a life in the body, and that not lasting,--it extends,
dispreads, it worms away, it perishes. Need we more to bid the mind
perceive through obstructive flesh the God who reigns, a devil
vanquished? Be certain that it is the pure mind we set to perceive. The
God discerned in thought is another than he of the senses. And let the
prayer be as a little fountain. Rising on a spout, from dread of the
hollow below, the prayer may be prolonged in words begetting words, and
have a pulse of fervour: the spirit of it has fallen after the first jet.
That is the delirious energy of our craving, which has no life in our
souls. We do not get to any heaven by renouncing the Mother we spring
from; and when there is an eternal secret for us, it is befit to believe
that Earth knows, to keep near her, even in our utmost aspirations.

Weyburn still knelt. He was warned to quit the formal posture of an
exhausted act by the thought, that he had come to reflect upon how he
might be useful to his boys in a like calamity.

Having risen, he became aware, that for some time of his kneeling
Aminta's hand had been on his head, and they had raised their souls in
unison. It was a soul's link. They gazed together on the calm, rapt
features. They passed from the room.

'I cannot thank you,' he said.

'Oh no; I have the reason for gratitude,' said she. 'I have learnt to
know and love her, and hope I may imitate when my time is near.'

"She . . . . at the last?'

'Peacefully; no pain. The breath had not left her very long before you
came.'

'I said I cannot; but I must--

'Do not.'

'Not in speech, then.'

They went into the tasteful little sitting-room below, where the
stillness closed upon them as a consciousness of loss.

'You have comforted her each day,' he said.

'It has been my one happiness.'

'I could not wish for better than for her to have known you.'

'Say that for me. I have gained. She left her last words for you with me.
They were love, love . . . pride in her son: thanks to God for having
been thought worthy to give him birth.'

'She was one of the noble women of earth.'

'She was your mother. Let me not speak any more. I think I will now go. I
am rarely given to these--'

The big drops were falling.

'You have not ordered your carriage?'

'It brings me here. I find my way home.'

'Alone?'

'I like the independence.'

'At night, too!'

'Nothing harmed me. Now it is daylight. A letter arrived for you from
High Brent this morning. I forgot to bring it. Yesterday two of your
pupils called here. Martha saw them.'

Her naming of the old servant familiarly melted him. 'You will not bear
to hear praise or thanks.'

'If I deserved them. I should like you to call on Dr. Buxton; he will
tell you more than we can. He drove with me the first day, after I had
sent you the local doctor's report. I had it from the messenger, his
assistant.'

Weyburn knew Dr. Buxton's address. He begged her to stay and take some
nourishment; ventured a remark on her wasted look.

'It is poor fare in cottages.'

'I have been feeding on better than bread and meat,' she said.' I should
have eaten if I had felt appetite. My looks will recover, such as they
are. I hope I have grown out of them; they are a large part of the
bondage of women. You would like to see me safe into some conveyance. Go
up-stairs for a few minutes; I will wait here.'

He obeyed her. Passing from the living to the dead, from the dead to the
living, they were united in his heart.

Her brevity of tone, and her speech, so practical upon a point of need,
under a crisis of distress, reminded him of Lady Charlotte at the time of
the groom's arrival with her letter.

Aminta was in no hurry to drive. She liked walking and looking down on
London, she said.

'My friend and schoolmate, Selina Collett, comes to me at Whitsuntide. We
have taken a house on the Upper Thames, above Marlow. You will come and
see us, if you can be persuaded to leave your boys. We have a boathouse,
and a bathing-plank for divers. The stream is quiet there between rich
meadows. It seems to flow as if it thought. I am not poetical; I tell you
only my impression. You shall be a great deal by yourself, as men prefer
to be.'

'As men are forced to be--I beg!' said he. 'Division is against my
theories.'

'We might help, if we understood one another, I have often fancied. I
know something of your theories. I should much like to hear you some day
on the scheme of the school in Switzerland, and also on the
schoolmaster's profession. She whom we have lost was full of it, and
spoke of it to me as much as her weakness would permit. The subject
seemed to give her strength.'

'She has always encouraged me,' said Weyburn.' I have lost her, but I
shall feel that she is not absent. She had ideas of her own about men and
women.'

'Some she mentioned.'

'And about marriage?'

'That too.'

Aminta shook herself out of a sudden stupor.

'Her mind was very clear up to the last hour upon all the subjects
interesting her son. She at one time regretted his not being a soldier,
for the sake of his father's memory. Then she learned to think he could
do more for the world as the schoolmaster. She said you can persuade.'

'We had our talks. She would have the reason, if she was to be won. I
like no other kind of persuasion.'

'I long to talk over the future school with you. That is, to hear your
plans.'

They were at the foot of the hill, in view of an inn announcing livery
stables. She wished to walk the whole distance. He shook his head.

The fly was ready for her soon, and he begged to see her safe home. She
refused, after taking her seat, but said: 'At any other time. We are old
friends. You will really go through the ceremony of consulting me about
the school?'

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