Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

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

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He replied: 'I am honoured.'

'Ah, not to me,' said Aminta. 'We will be the friends we--You will not be
formal with me?--not from this day?'

She put out her hand. He took it gently. The dead who had drawn them
together withheld a pressure. Holding the hand, he said: 'I shall crave
leave of absence for some days.'

'I shall see you on the day,' said she. 'If it is your desire: I will
send word.'

'We both mourn at heart. We should be in company. Adieu.'

Their hands fell apart. They looked. The old school time was in each
mind. They saw it as a shore-bank in grey outline across morning mist.
Years were between; and there was a division of circumstance, more
repelling than an abyss or the rush of deep wild waters.

Neither of them had regrets. Under their cloud, and with the grief they
shared, they were as happy as two could be in recovering one another as
friends.

On the day of the funeral Aminta drove to the spot where they had
parted--she walked to the churchyard.

She followed the coffin to its gravel-heap, wishing neither to see nor be
seen, only that she might be so far attached to the remains of the dead;
and the sense of blessedness she had in her bowed simplicity of feeling
was as if the sainted dead had cleansed and anointed her.

When the sods had been cast on, the last word spoken, she walked her way
back, happy in being alone, unnoticed. She was grateful to the chief
mourner for letting her go as she had come. That helped her to her sense
of purification, the haven out of the passions, hardly less quiet than
the repose into which the dear dead woman, his mother, had entered.

London lay beneath her. The might of the great hive hummed at the verge
of her haven of peace without disturbing. There she had been what none
had known of her: an ambitious girl, modest merely for lack of
intrepidity; paralyzed by her masterful lord; aiming her highest at a
gilt weathercock; and a disappointed creature, her breast a home of
serpents; never herself. She thought and hoped she was herself now. Alarm
lest this might be another of her moods, victim of moods as she had
latterly been, was a shadow armed with a dart playing round her to find
the weak spot. It sprang from her acknowledged weakness of nature; and
she cast about for how to keep it outside her and lean on a true though a
small internal support. She struck at her desires, to sound them.

They were yesterday for love; partly for distinction, for a woman having
beauty to shine in the sphere of beauty; but chiefly to love and be
loved, therefore to live. She had yesterday read letters of a man who
broke a music from the word--about as much music as there is in a
tuning--fork, yet it rang and lingered; and he was not the magical
musician. Now those letters were as dust of the road. The sphere of
beauty was a glass lamp-globe for delirious moths. She had changed.
Belief in the real change gave her full view of the compliant coward she
had been.

Her heart assured her she had natural courage. She felt that it could be
stubborn to resist a softness. Now she cared no more for the hackneyed
musical word; friendship was her desire. If it is not life's poetry, it
is a credible prose; a land of low undulations instead of Alps; beyond
the terrors and the deceptions. And she could trust her friend: he who
was a singular constancy. His mother had told her of his preserving
letters of a girl he loved when at school; and of his journeys to an
empty house at Dover. That was past; but, as the boy, so the man would be
in sincerity of feeling trustworthy to the uttermost.

She mused on the friend. He was brave. She had seen how he took his blow,
and sorrow as a sister, conquering emotion. It was not to be expected of
him by one who knew him when at school. Had he faults? He must have
faults. She, curiously, could see none. After consenting to his career as
a schoolmaster, and seeing nothing ludicrous in it, she endowed him with
the young school-hero's reputation, beheld him with the eyes of the girl
who had loved him--and burnt his old letters!--bitterly regretted that
she burnt his letters!--and who had applauded his contempt of ushers and
master opposing his individual will and the thing he thought it right to
do.

Musing thus, she turned a corner, on a sudden, in her mind, and ran
against a mirror, wherein a small figure running up to meet her, grew
large and nodded, with the laugh and eyes of Browny. So little had she
changed! The stedfast experienced woman rebuked that volatile, and some
might say, faithless girl. But the girl had her answer: she declared they
were one and the same, affirmed that the years between were a bad night's
dream, that her heart had been faithful, that he who conjures visions of
romance in a young girl's bosom must always have her heart, as a crisis
will reveal it to her. She had the volubility of the mettled Browny of
old, and was lectured. When she insisted on shouting 'Matey! Matey!' she
was angrily spurned and silenced.

Aminta ceased to recline in her carriage. An idea that an indolent
posture fostered vapourish meditations, counselled her sitting rigidly
upright and interestedly observing the cottages and merry gutter-children
along the squat straight streets of a London suburb. Her dominant
ultimate thought was, 'I, too, can work!' Like her courage, the plea of a
capacity to work appealed for confirmation to the belief which exists
without demonstrated example; and as she refrained from probing to the
inner sources of that mental outcry, it was allowed to stand and remain
among the convictions we store--wherewith to shape our destinies.

Childishly indeed, quite witlessly, she fell into a trick of repeating
the name of Matthew Weyburn in her breast and on her lips, after the
manner of Isabella Lawrence Finchley, when she had inquired for his
Christian name, and went on murmuring it, as if sucking a new bonbon,
with the remark: 'It sounds nice, it suits the mouth.' Little Selina
Collett had told, Aminta remembered, how those funny boys at Cuper's
could not at first get the name 'Aminta' to suit the mouth, but went
about making hideous faces in uttering it. She smiled at the
recollection, and thought, up to a movement of her lips, one is not
tempted to do that in saying Matthew Weyburn!

CHAPTER XV

SHOWING A SECRET FISHED WITHOUT ANGLING

That great couchant dragon of the devouring jaws and the withering
breath, known as our London world, was in expectation of an excitement
above yawns on the subject of a beautiful Lady Doubtful proposing
herself, through a group of infatuated influential friends, to a decorous
Court, as one among the ladies acceptable. The popular version of it
sharpened the sauce by mingling romance and cynicism very happily; for
the numerous cooks, when out of the kitchen, will furnish a piquant dish.
Thus, a jewel-eyed girl of half English origin (a wounded British officer
is amiably nursed in a castle near the famous Peninsula battlefield,
etc.), running wild down the streets of Seville, is picked up by Lord
Ormont, made to discard her tambourine, brought over to our shores, and
allowed the decoration of his name, without the legitimate adornment of
his title. Discontented with her position after a time, she now pushes
boldly to claim the place which will be most effective in serving her as
a bath. She has, by general consent, beauty; she must, seeing that she
counts influential friends, have witchery. Those who have seen her riding
and driving beside her lord, speak of Andalusian grace, Oriental lustre,
fit qualification for the fair slave of a notoriously susceptible old
warrior.

She won a party in the widening gossip world; and enough of a party in
the regent world to make a stream. Pretending to be the actual Countess
of Ormont, though not publicly acknowledged as his countess by the earl,
she had on her side the strenuous few who knew and liked her, some who
were pleased compassionately to patronize, all idle admirers of a
shadowed beautiful woman at bay, the devotees of any beauty in distress,
and such as had seen, such as imagined they had seen, such as could paint
a mental picture of a lady of imposing stature, persuasive appearance,
pathetic history, and pronounce her to be unjustly treated, with a
general belief that she was visible and breathing. She had the ready
enthusiasts, the responsive sentimentalists, and an honest active minor
number, of whom not every one could be declared perfectly unspotted in
public estimation, however innocent under verdict of the courts of law.

Against her was the livid cloud-bank over a flowery field, that has not
yet spoken audible thunder: the terrible aggregate social woman, of man's
creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless,
upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on to which our
human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner. She exhibits
virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and blood of
victims on it. Her fold is a genial climate and the material pleasures
for the world's sheepy: worshipping herself, she claims the
sanctification of a performed religion. She is gentle when unassailed,
going her way serenely, with her malady in the blood. When the skin bears
witness to it, she swallows an apothecary, and there is a short
convulsion. She is refreshed by cutting off diseased inferior members:
the superior betraying foul symptoms, she covers up and retains;
rationally, too, for they minister to her present existence, and she
lives all in the present. Her subjects are the mixed Subservient; among
her rebellious are earth's advanced, who have cold a morning on their
foreheads, and these would not dethrone her, they would but shame and
purify by other methods than the druggist. She loves nothing.
Undoubtedly, she dislikes the vicious. On that merit she subsists.

The vexatious thing in speaking of her is, that she compels to the use of
the rhetorician's brass instrument. As she is one of the Powers giving
life and death, one may be excused. This tremendous queen of the
congregation has brought discredit on her sex for the scourge laid on
quivering female flesh, and for the flippant indifference shown to misery
and to fine distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad; and
particularly for the undiscriminating hardness upon the starved of women.
We forget her having been conceived in the fear of men, shaped to gratify
them. She is their fiction of the state they would fain beguile
themselves to suppose her sex has reached, for their benefit; where she
may be queen of it in a corner, certain of a loyal support, if she will
only give men her half-the-world's assistance to uplift the fabric
comfortable to them; together with assurance of paternity, case of mind
in absence, exclusive possession, enormous and minutest, etc.; not by any
means omitting a regimental orderliness, from which men are privately
exempt, because they are men, or because they are grown boys--the brisker
at lessons after a vacation or a truancy, says the fiction.

In those days the world had oscillated, under higher leading than its
royal laxity, to rigidity. Tiny peccadilloes were no longer matter of
jest, and the sinner exposed stood 'sola' to receive the brand. A
beautiful Lady Doubtful needed her husband's countenance if she was to
take one of the permanent steps in public places. The party of Lady
Charlotte Eglett called on the livid cloud-bank aforesaid to discharge
celestial bolts and sulphur oil on the head of an impudent, underbred,
ambitious young slut, whose arts had bewitched a distinguished nobleman
not young in years at least, and ensnared the remainder wits of some
principal ancient ladies of the land. Professional Puritans, born
conservatives, malicious tattlers, made up a goodly tail to Lady
Charlotte's party. The epithet 'unbred' was accredited upon the quoted
sayings and doings of the pretentious young person's aunt, repeated
abroad by noblemen and gentlemen present when she committed herself; and
the same were absurd. They carried a laugh, and so they lived and
circulated. Lord Ormont submitted to the infliction of that horrid female
in his household! It was no wonder he stopped short of allying himself
with the family.

Nor was it a wonder that the naturally enamoured old warrior or invalided
Mars (for she had the gift of beauty) should deem it prudent to be out of
England when she and her crazy friends determined on the audacious move.
Or put it the other way--for it is just as confounding right side or
left--she and her friends take advantage of his absence to make the
clever push for an establishment, and socially force him to legalize
their union on his return. The deeds of the preceding reign had
bequeathed a sort of legendary credence to the wildest tales gossip could
invent under a demurrer.

But there was the fact, the earl was away. Lady Charlotte's party buzzed
everywhere. Her ladyship had come to town to head it. Her ladyship laid
trains of powder from dinner-parties, balls, routs, park-processions,
into the Lord Chamberlain's ear, and fired and exploded them, deafening
the grand official. Do you consider that virulent Pagan Goddesses and the
flying torch-furies are extinct? Error of Christians! We have
relinquished the old names and have no new ones for them; but they are
here, inextinguishable, threading the day and night air with their dire
squib-trail, if we would but see. Hissing they go, and we do not hear. We
feel the effects.

Upon the counsel of Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta sent a letter to Lord Ormont at
his hotel in Paris, informing him of the position of affairs. He had
delayed his return, and there had been none of his brief communications.

She wrote, as she knew, as she felt, coldly. She was guided by others,
and her name was up before the world, owing to some half-remembered
impulsion of past wishes, but her heart was numbed; she was not a woman
to have a wish without a beat of the heart in it. For her name she had a
feeling, to be likened rather to the losing gambler's contemplation of a
big stake he has flung, and sees it gone while fortune is undecided; and
he catches at a philosophy nothing other than his hug of a modest little
background pleasure, that he has always preferred to this accursed bad
habit of gambling with the luck against him. Reckless in the cast, she
was reckless of success.

Her letter was unanswered.

Then, and day by day more strongly, she felt for her name. She put a
false heart into it. She called herself to her hearing the Countess of
Ormont, and deigned to consult the most foolish friend she could have
chosen--her aunt; and even listened to her advice, that she should run
about knocking at all the doors open to her, and state her case against
the earl. It seemed the course to take, the moment for taking it. Was she
not asked if she could now at last show she had pride? Her pride ran
stinging through her veins, like a band of freed prisoners who head the
rout to fire a city. She charged her lord with having designedly--oh!
cunningly indeed left her to be the prey of her enemies at the hour when
he knew it behoved him to be her great defender. There had been no
disguise of the things in progress: they had been spoken of allusively,
quite comprehensibly, after the fashion common with two entertaining a
secret semi-hostility on a particular subject; one of them being the
creature that blushes and is educated to be delicate, reserved, and
timorous. He was not ignorant, and he had left her, and he would not
reply to her letter!

So fell was her mood, that an endeavour to conjure up the scene of her
sitting beside the death-bed of Matthew Weyburn's mother, failed to sober
and smooth it, holy though that time was. The false heart she had put
into the pride of her name was powerfuller than the heart in her bosom.
But to what end had the true heart counselled her of late? It had been a
home of humours and languors, an impotent insurgent, the sapper of her
character; and as we see in certain disorderly States a curative
incendiarism usurp the functions of the sluggish citizen, and the work of
re-establishment done by destruction, in peril of a total extinction,
Aminta's feverish anger on behalf of her name went a stretch to vivify
and give her dulled character a novel edge. She said good-bye to
cowardice. 'I have no husband to defend me--I must do it for myself.' The
peril of a too complete exercise of independence was just intimated to
her perceptions. On whom the blame? And let the motively guilty go mourn
over consequences! That Institution of Marriage was eyed. Is it not a
halting step to happiness? It is the step of a cripple,--and one leg or
the other poses for the feebler sex,--small is the matter which! And is
happiness our cry? Our cry is rather for circumstance and occasion to use
our functions, and the conditions are denied to women by Marriage--denied
to the luckless of women, who are many, very many: denied to Aminta,
calling herself Countess of Ormont, for one, denied to Mrs. Lawrence
Finchley for another, and in a base bad manner. She had defended her good
name triumphantly, only to enslave herself for life or snatch at the
liberty which besmirches.

Reviewing Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta's real heart pressed forward at the beat,
in tender pity of the woman for whom a yielding to love was to sin; and
unwomanly is the woman who does not love: men will say it. Aminta found
herself phrasing. 'Why was she unable to love her husband?--he is not
old.' She hurried in flight from the remark to confidences imparted by
other ladies, showing strange veins in an earthy world; after which, her
mind was bent to rebuke Mrs. Pagnell for the silly soul's perpetual
allusions to Lord Ormont's age. She did not think of his age. But she was
vividly thinking that she was young. Young, married, loveless, cramped in
her energies, publicly dishonoured--a Lady Doubtful, courting one friend
whom she liked among women, one friend whom she respected among men; that
was the sketch of her.

That was in truth the outline, as much as Aminta dared sketch of herself
without dragging her down lower than her trained instinct would bear to
look. Our civilization shuns nature; and most shuns it in the most
artificially civilized, to suit the market. They, however, are always
close to their mother nature, beneath their second nature's mask of
custom; and Aminta's unconscious concluding touch to the sketch: 'My
husband might have helped me to a footing in Society,' would complete it
as a coloured picture, if writ in tones.

She said it, and for the footing in Society she had lost her taste.

Mrs. Lawrence brought the final word from high quarters: that the
application must be deferred until Lord Ormont returned to town. It was
known before, that such would be the decision. She had it from the
eminent official himself, and she kicked about the room, setting her
pretty mouth and nose to pout and sniff, exactly like a boy whose chum
has been mishandled by a bully.

'Your dear good man is too much for us. I thought we should drive him.
'C'est un ruse homme de guerre.' I like him, but I could slap him. He
stops the way. Upon my word, he seems tolerably careless of his treasure.
Does he suppose Mrs. Paggy is a protection? Do you know she's devoted to
that man Morsfield? He listens to her stories. To judge by what he shouts
aloud, he intends carrying you off the first opportunity, divorcing, and
installing you in Cobeck Hall. All he fears is, that your lord won't
divorce. You should have seen him the other day; he marched up and down
the room, smacking his head and crying out: "Legal measures or any
weapons her husband pleases!" For he has come to believe that the lady
would have been off with him long before, if her lord had no claim to the
marital title. "It 's that husband I can't get over! that husband!" He
reminded me, to the life, of Lawrence Finchley with a headache the
morning after a supper, striding, with his hand on the shining middle of
his head: "It's that Welsh rabbit! that Welsh rabbit!" He has a poor
digestion, and he will eat cheese. The Welsh rabbit chased him into his
bed. But listen to me, dear, about your Morsfield. I told you he was
dangerous.'

'He is not my Morsfield,' said Aminta.

'Beware of his having a tool in Paggy. He boasts of letters.'

'Mine? Two: and written to request him to cease writing to me.'

'He stops at nothing. And, oh, my Simplicity! don't you see you gave him
a step in begging him to retire? Morsfield has lived a good deal among
our neighbours, who expound the physiology of women. He anatomizes us;
pulls us to pieces, puts us together, and then animates us with a breath
of his "passion"--sincere upon every occasion, I don't doubt. He spared
me, although he saw I was engaged. Perhaps it was because I 'm of no
definite colour. Or he thought I was not a receptacle for "passion." And
quite true,--Adder, the dear good fellow, has none. Or where should we
be? On a Swiss Alp, in a chalet, he shooting chamois, and I milking cows,
with 'ah-ahio, ah-ahio,' all day long, and a quarrel at night over curds
and whey. Well, and that 's a better old pensioner's limp to his end for
"passion" than the foreign hotel bell rung mightily, and one of the two
discovered with a dagger in the breast, and the other a don't-look lying
on the pavement under the window. Yes, and that's better than "passion"
splitting and dispersing upon new adventures, from habit, with two sparks
remaining of the fire.'

Aminta took Mrs. Lawrence's hands. 'Is it a lecture?'

She was kissed. 'Frothy gabble. I'm really near to "passion" when I
embrace you. You're the only one I could run away with; live with all
alone, I believe. I wonder men can see you while that silly lord of yours
is absent, and not begin Morsfielding. They're virtuous if they resist.
Paggy tells the world . . . well?' Aminta had reddened.

'What does my aunt tell the world?'

Mrs. Lawrence laid her smoothing hand absently on a frill of lace fichu
above a sternly disciplined bosom at half-heave. 'I think I can judge now
that you're not much hurt by this wretched business of the presentation.
The little service I could do was a moral lesson to me on the subject of
deuce-may-care antecedents. My brother Tom, too, was always playing
truant, as a boy. It 's in the blood.'

She seemed to be teasing, and Aminta cried: 'My aunt! Let me hear. She
tells the world--?'

'Paggy? ah, yes. Only that she says the countess has an exalted opinion
of Mr. Secretary's handwriting--as witnessed by his fair copy of the
Memoirs, of course.'

'Poor woman! How can she talk such foolishness! I guessed it.'

'You wear a dark red rose when you're guessing, 'ma mie,'--French for, my
Aminta.'

'But consider, Isabella, Mr. Weyburn has just had the heaviest of losses.
My aunt should spare mention of him.'

'Matthew Weyburn! we both like the name.' Mrs. Lawrence touched at her
friend and gazed. 'I've seen it on certain evenings--crimson over an
olive sky. What it forebodes, I can't imagine; but it's the end of a
lovely day. They say it threatens rain, if it begins one. It 's an
ominous herald.'

'You make me,' said Aminta. 'I must redden if you keep looking at me so
closely.'

'Now frown one little bit, please. I love to see you. I love to see a
secret disclose itself ingenuously.'

'But what secret, my dear?' cried Aminta's defence of her innocence; and
she gave a short frown.

'Have no fear. Mr. Secretary is not the man to be Morsfielding. And he
can enjoy his repast; a very good sign. But is he remaining long?'

'He is going soon, I hear.'

'He's a good boy. I could have taken to him myself, and not dreaded a
worrying. There 's this difference between you and me, though, my Aminta;
one of us has the fireplace prepared for what's-his-name--"passion." Kiss
me. How could you fancy you were going to have a woman for your friend
and keep hidden from her any one of the secrets that blush! and with
Paggy to aid! I am sure it means very little. Admiration for good
handwriting is--' a smile broke the sentence.

'You're astray, Isabella.'

'Not I, dear, I'm too fond of you.'

'You read what is not.'

'What is not yet written, you mean.'

'What never could be written.'

'I read what is in the blood, and comes out to me when I look. That lord
of yours should take to study you as I have done ever since I fell in
love with you. He 's not counselling himself well in keeping away.'

'Now you speak wisely,' said Aminta.

'Not a particle more wisely. And the reason is close at hand--see. You
are young, you attract--how could it be otherwise?--and you have
"passion" sleeping, and likely to wake with a spring whether roused or
not. In my observation good-man t'other fellow--the poet's friend--is
never long absent when the time is ripe--at least, not in places where we
gather together. Well, one is a buckler against the other: I don't say
with lovely Amy May,--with an honourable woman. But Aminta can smell
powder and grow more mettlesome. Who can look at you and be blind to
passion sleeping! The sight of you makes me dream of it--me, a woman,
cool as a wine-cellar or a well. So there's to help you to know yourself
and be on your guard. I know I'm not deceived, because I've fallen in
love with you, and no love can be without jealousy, so I have the needle
in my breast, that points at any one who holds a bit of you. Kind of
sympathetic needle to the magnet behind anything. You'll know it, if you
don't now. I should have felt the thing without the aid of Paggy. So,
then, imagine all my nonsense unsaid, and squeeze a drop or two of 'sirop
de bon conseil' out of it, as if it were your own wise meditations.' The
rest of Mrs. Lawrence's discourse was a swallow's wing skimming the city
stream. She departed, and Aminta was left to beat at her heart and ask
whether it had a secret.

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