Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

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

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Her agitation was untimely. Both Mrs. Pagnell and Mr. Morsfield observed
emotion at work. And who could wonder? A wife denied the admittance to
her husband's house by her husband! The most beautiful woman of her time
relentlessly humiliated, ordered to journey back the way she had come.

They had reached the gate of the park, and had turned.

'A scandal!'

Mr. Morsfield renewed his interjection vehemently, for an apology to his
politeness in breaking from Mrs. Pagnell.

Joining the lady, whose tears were of the nerves, he made offer of his
devotion in any shape; and she was again in the plight to which a
desperado can push a woman of the gentle kind. She had the fear of
provoking a collision if she reminded him, that despite her entreaties,
he had compelled her, seconded by her aunt as he had been, to submit to
his absurd protection on the walk across the park.

He seemed quite regardless of the mischief he had created; and,
reflecting upon how it served his purpose, he might well be. Intemperate
lover, of the ancient pattern, that he was, his aim to win the woman
acknowledged no obstacle in the means. Her pitiable position appealed to
the best of him; his inordinate desire of her aroused the worst. It was,
besides, an element of his coxcombry, that he should, in apeing the
utterly inconsiderate, rush swiftly to impersonate it when his passions
were cast on a die.

Weyburn he ignored as a stranger, an intruder, an inferior.

Aminta's chariot was at the gate.

She had to resign herself to the chances of a clash of men, and, as there
were two to one, she requested help of Weyburn's hand, that he might be
near her.

A mounted gentleman, smelling parasite in his bearing, held the bridle of
Morsfield's horse.

The ladies having entered the chariot, Morsfield sprang to the saddle,
and said: 'You, sir, had better stretch your legs to the inn.'

'There is room for you, Mr. Weyburn,' said Aminta.

Mrs. Pagnell puffed.

'I can't think we've room, my dear. I want that bit of seat in front for
my feet.'

Morsfield kicked at his horse's flanks, and between Weyburn and the
chariot step, cried: 'Back, sir!'

His reins were seized; the horse reared, the unexpected occurred.

Weyburn shouted 'Off!' to the postillion, and jumped in.

Morsfield was left to the shaking of a dusty coat, while the chariot
rolled its gentle course down the leafy lane into the high-road.

His friend had seized the horse's bridle-reins; and he remarked: 'I say,
Dolf, we don't prosper to-day.'

'He pays for it!' said Morsfield, foot in stirrup. 'You'll take him and
trounce him at the inn. I don't fight with servants. Better game. One
thing, Cumnock: the fellow's clever at the foils.'

'Foils to the devil! If I tackle the fellow, it won't be with the
buttons. But how has he pushed in?'

Morsfield reported 'the scandal!' in sharp headings.

'Turned her away. Won't have her enter his house--grandest woman in all
England! Sent his dog to guard. Think of it for an insult! It's insult
upon insult. I 've done my utmost to fire his marrow. I did myself a good
turn by following her up and entering that park with her. I shall
succeed; there 's a look of it. All I have--my life--is that woman's. I
never knew what this devil's torture was before I saw her.'

His friend was concerned for his veracity. 'Amy!'

'A common spotted snake. She caught me young, and she didn't carry me
off, as I mean to carry off this glory of her sex--she is: you've seen
her!--and free her, and devote every minute of the rest of my days to
her. I say I must win the woman if I stop at nothing, or I perish; and if
it 's a failure, exit 's my road. I 've watched every atom she touched in
a room, and would have heaped gold to have the chairs, tables, cups,
carpets, mine. I have two short letters written with her hand. I 'd give
two of my estates for two more. If I were a beggar, and kept them, I
should be rich. Relieve me of that dog, and I toss you a thousand-pound
note, and thank you from my soul, Cumnock. You know what hangs on it.
Spur, you dolt, or she'll be out of sight.'

They cantered upon application of the spur. Captain Cumnock was an
impecunious fearless rascal, therefore a parasite and a bully duellist; a
thick-built north-countryman; a burly ape of the ultra-elegant; hunter,
gamester, hard-drinker, man of pleasure. His known readiness to fight was
his trump-card at a period when the declining custom of the duel taxed
men's courage to brave the law and the Puritan in the interests of a
privileged and menaced aristocracy. An incident like the present was the
passion in the dice-box to Cumnock. Morsfield was of the order of men who
can be generous up to the pitch of their desires. Consequently, the world
accounted him open-handed and devoted when enamoured. Few men liked him;
he was a hero with some women. The women he trampled on; the men he
despised. To the lady of his choice he sincerely offered his fortune and
his life for the enjoyment of her favour. His ostentation and his
offensive daring combined the characteristics of the peacock and the
hawk. Always near upon madness, there were occasions when he could
eclipse the insane. He had a ringing renown in his class.

Chariot and horsemen arrived at the Roebuck Arms, at the centre of the
small town of Ashead, on the line from Steignton through Rowsley. The
pair of cavaliers dismounted and hustled Weyburn in assisting the ladies
to descend.

The ladies entered the inn; they declined refection of any sort. They had
biscuits and sweetmeats, and looked forward to tea at a farther stage.
Captain Cumnock stooped to their verdict on themselves, with marvel at
the quantity of flesh they managed to put on their bones from such
dieting.

'By your courtesy, sir, a word with you in the inn yard, if you please,'
he said to Weyburn in the inn-porch.

Weyburn answered, 'Half a minute,' and was informed that it was exactly
the amount of time the captain could afford to wait.

Weyburn had seen the Steignton phaeton and coachman in the earl's
light-blue livery. It was at his orders, he heard. He told the coachman
to expect hire shortly, and he followed the captain, with a heavy trifle
of suspicion that some brew was at work. He said to Aminta in the
passage--

'You have your settlement with the innkeeper. Don't, I beg, step into the
chariot till you see me.'

'Anything?' said she.

'Only prudence.'

'Our posting horses will be harnessed soon, I hope. I burn to get away.'

Mrs. Pagnell paid the bill at the bar of the inn. Morsfield poured out
for the injured countess or no-countess a dram of the brandy of passion,
under the breath.

'Deny that you singled me once for your esteem. Hardest-hearted of the
women of earth and dearest! deny that you gave me reason to hope--and
now! I have ridden in your track all this way for the sight of you, as
you know, and you kill me with frost. Yes, I rejoice that we were seen
together. Look on me. I swear I perish for one look of kindness. You have
been shamefully used, madam.'

'It seems to me I am being so,' said Aminta, cutting herself loose from
the man of the close eyes that wavered as they shot the dart.

Her action was too decided for him to follow her up under the observation
of the inn windows and a staring street.

Mrs. Pagnell came out. She went boldly to Morsfield and they conferred.
He was led by her to the chariot, where she pointed to a small padded
slab of a seat back to the horses. Turning to the bar, he said:--My
friend will look to my horse. Both want watering and a bucketful.
There!'--he threw silver--'I have to protect the ladies.'

Aminta was at the chariot door talking to her aunt inside.

'But I say I have been insulted--is the word--more than enough by Lord
Ormont to-day!' Mrs. Pagnell exclaimed; 'and I won't, I positively refuse
to ride up to London with any servant of his. It's quite sufficient that
it's his servant. I'm not titled, but I 'in not quite dirt. Mr. Morsfield
kindly offers his protection, and I accept. He is company.'

Nodding and smirking at Morsfield's approach, she entreated Aminta to
step up and in, for the horses were coming out of the yard.

Aminta looked round. Weyburn was perceived; and Morsfield's features
cramped at thought of a hitch in the plot.

'Possession,' Mrs. Pagnell murmured significantly. She patted the seat.
Morsfield sprang to Weyburn's place.

That was witnessed by Aminta and Weyburn. She stepped to consult him. He
said to the earl's coachman--a young fellow with a bright eye for
orders--

'Drive as fast as you can pelt for Dornton. I'm doing my lord's
commands.'

'Trust yourself to me, madam.' His hand stretched for Aminta to mount.
She took it without a word and climbed to the seat. A clatter of hoofs
rang out with the crack of the whip. They were away behind a pair of
steppers that could go the pace.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PURSUERS

For promptitude, the lady, the gentleman, and the coachman were in such
unison as to make it a reasonable deduction that the flight had been
concerted.

Never did any departure from the Roebuck leave so wide-mouthed a body of
spectators. Mrs. Pagnell's shrieks of 'Stop, oh! stop!' to the backs of
the coachman and Aminta were continued until they were far down the
street. She called to the innkeeper, called to the landlady and to
invisible constables for help. But her pangs were childish compared with
Morsfield's, who, with the rage of a conceited schemer tricked and the
fury of a lover beholding the rape of his beautiful, bellowed impotently
at Weyburn and the coachman out of hearing, 'Stop! you!' He was in the
state of men who believe that there is a virtue in imprecations, and he
shot loud oaths after them, shook his fist, cursed his friend Cumnock,
whose name he vociferated as a summons to him,--generally the baffled
plotter misconducted himself to an extreme degree, that might have
apprised Mrs. Pagnell of a more than legitimate disappointment on his
part.

Pursuit was one of the immediate ideas which rush forward to look back
woefully on impediments and fret to fever over the tardiness of
operations. A glance at the thing of wrinkles receiving orders to buckle
at his horses and pursue convinced them of the hopelessness; and
Morsfield was pricked to intensest hatred of the woman by hearing the
dire exclamation, 'One night, and her character's gone!'

'Be quiet, ma'am, if you please, or nothing can be done,' he cried.

'I tell you, Mr. Morsfield--don't you see?--he has thrown them together.
It is Lord Ormont's wicked conspiracy to rid himself of her. A secretary!
He'll beat any one alive in plots. She can't show her face in London
after this, if you don't overtake her. And she might have seen Lord
Ormont's plot to ruin her. He tired of her, and was ashamed of her
inferior birth to his own, after the first year, except on the Continent,
where she had her rights. Me he never forgave for helping make him the
happy man he might have been in spite of his age. For she is lovely! But
it's worse for a lovely woman with a damaged reputation. And that 's his
cunning. How she could be so silly as to play into it! She can't have
demeaned herself to look on that secretary! I said from the first he
seemed as if thrown into her way for a purpose. But she has pride: my
niece Aminta has pride. She might well have listened to flatterers--she
had every temptation--if it hadn't been for her pride. It may save her
yet. However good-looking, she will remember her dignity--unless he's a
villain. Runnings away! drivings together! inns oh! the story over
London! I do believe she has a true friend in you, Mr. Morsfield; and I
say, as I have said before, the sight of a devoted admirer would have
brought any husband of more than sixty to his senses, if he hadn't hoped
a catastrophe and determined on it. Catch them we can't, unless she
repents and relents; and prayers for that are our only resource. Now,
start, man, do!'

The postillion had his foot in position to spring. Morsfield bawled
Cumnock's name, and bestrode his horse. Captain Cumnock emerged from the
inn-yard with a dubitative step, pressing a handkerchief to his nose,
blinking, and scrutinizing the persistent fresh stains on it.

Stable-boys were at the rear. These, ducking and springing, surcharged
and copious exponents of the play they had seen, related, for the benefit
of the town, how that the two gentlemen had exchanged words in the yard,
which were about beastly pistols, which the slim gentleman would have
none of; and then the big one trips up, like dancing, to the other one
and flicks him a soft clap on the check--quite friendly, you may say; and
before he can square to it, the slim one he steps his hind leg half a
foot back, and he drives a straight left like lightning off the shoulder
slick on to t' other one's nob, and over he rolls, like a cart with the
shafts up down a bank; and he' a been washing his 'chops' and threatening
bullets ever since.

The exact account of the captain's framework in the process of the fall
was graphically portrayed in our blunt and racy vernacular, which a
society nourished upon Norman-English and English-Latin banishes from
print, largely to its impoverishment, some think.

By the time the primary narrative of the encounter in the inn yard had
given ground for fancy and ornament to present it in yet more luscious
dress, Lord Ormont's phaeton was a good mile on the road. Morsfield and
Captain Cumnock--the latter inquisitive of the handkerchief pressed
occasionally at his nose--trotted on tired steeds along dusty
wheel-tracks. Mrs. Pagnell was the solitary of the chariot, having a
horrid couple of loaded pistols to intimidate her for her protection, and
the provoking back view of a regularly jogging mannikin under a big white
hat with blue riband, who played the part of Time in dragging her along,
with worse than no countenance for her anxieties.

News of the fugitives was obtained at the rampant Red Lion in Dudsworth,
nine miles on along the London road, to the extent that the Earl of
Ormont's phaeton, containing a lady and a gentleman, had stopped there a
minute to send back word to Steignton of their comfortable progress, and
expectations of crossing the borders into Hampshire before sunset.
Morsfield and Cumnock shrugged at the bumpkin artifice. They left their
line of route to be communicated to the chariot, and chose, with
practised acumen, that very course, which was the main road, and rewarded
them at the end of half an hour with sight of the Steignton phaeton.

But it was returning. A nearer view showed it empty of the couple.

Morsfield bade the coachman pull up, and he was readily obeyed. Answers
came briskly.

Although provincial acting is not of the high class which conceals the
art, this man's look beside him and behind him at vacant seats had
incontestable evidence in support of his declaration, that the lady and
gentleman had gone on by themselves: the phaeton was a box of flown
birds.

'Where did you say they got out, you dog?' said Cumnock.

The coachman stood up to spy a point below. 'Down there at the bottom of
the road, to the right, where there's a stile across the meadows, making
a short cut by way of a bridge over the river to Busley and North
Tothill, on the high-road to Hocklebourne. The lady and gentleman thought
they 'd walk for a bit of exercise the remains of the journey.'

'Can't prove the rascal's a liar,' Cumnock said to Morsfield, who rallied
him savagely on his lucky escape from another knock-down blow, and tossed
silver on the seat, and said--

'We 'll see if there is a stile.'

'You'll see the stile, sir,' rejoined the man, and winked at their backs.

Both cavaliers, being famished besides baffled, were in sour tempers,
expecting to see just the dead wooden stile, and see it as a grin at
them. Cumnock called on Jove to witness that they had been donkeys enough
to forget to ask the driver how far round on the road it was to the other
end of the cross-cut.

Morsfield, entirely objecting to asinine harness with him, mocked at his
invocation and intonation of the name of Jove.

Cumnock was thereupon stung to a keen recollection of the allusion to his
knock-down blow, and he retorted that there were some men whose wit was
the parrot's.

Morsfield complimented him over the exhibition of a vastly superior and
more serviceable wit, in losing sight of his antagonist after one trial
of him.

Cumnock protested that the loss of time was caused by his friend's
dalliance with the Venus in the chariot.

Morsfield's gall seethed at a flying picture of Mrs. Pagnell, coupled
with the retarding reddened handkerchief business, and he recommended
Cumnock to pay court to the old woman, as the only chance he would have
of acquaintanceship with the mother of Love.

Upon that Cumnock confessed in humility to his not being wealthy.
Morsfield looked a willingness to do the deed he might have to pay for in
tenderer places than the pocket, and named the head as a seat of poverty
with him.

Cumnock then yawned a town fop's advice to a hustling street passenger to
apologize for his rudeness before it was too late. Whereat Morsfield,
certain that his parasitic thrasyleon apeing coxcomb would avoid
extremities, mimicked him execrably.

Now this was a second breach of the implied convention existing among the
exquisitely fine-bred silken-slender on the summits of our mundane
sphere, which demands of them all, that they respect one another's
affectations. It is commonly done, and so the costly people of a single
pattern contrive to push forth, flatteringly to themselves, luxuriant
shoots of individuality in their orchidean glass-house. A violation of
the rule is a really deadly personal attack. Captain Cumnock was
particularly sensitive regarding it, inasmuch as he knew himself not the
natural performer he strove to be, and a mimicry affected him as a
haunting check.

He burst out: 'Damned if I don't understand why you're hated by men and
women both!'

Morsfield took a shock. 'Infernal hornet!' he muttered; for his conquests
had their secret history.

'May and his wife have a balance to pay will trip you yet, you 'll find.'

'Reserve your wrath, sir, for the man who stretched you on your back.'

The batteries of the two continued exchangeing redhot shots, with the
effect, that they had to call to mind they were looking at the stile. A
path across a buttercup meadow was beyond it. They were damped to some
coolness by the sight.

'Upon my word, the trick seems neat!' said Cumnock staring at the
pastoral curtain.

'Whose trick?' he was asked sternly.

'Here or there 's not much matter; they 're off, unless they 're under a
hedge laughing.'

An ache of jealousy and spite was driven through the lover, who groaned,
and presently said--

'I ride on. That old woman can follow. I don't want to hear her
gibberish. We've lost the game--there 's no reckoning the luck. If
there's a chance, it's this way. It smells a trick. He and she--by all
the devils! It has been done in my family--might have been done again.
Tell the men on the plain they can drive home. There's a hundred-pound
weight on your tongue for silence.'

Cumnock cried: 'But we needn't be parting, Dolf! Stick together. Bad
luck's not repeated every day. Keep heart for the good.'

'My heart's shattered, Cumnock. I say it's impossible she can love a
husband twice her age, who treats her--you 've seen. Contempt of that
lady!

By heaven! once in my power, I swear she would have been sacred to me.
But she would have been compelled to face the public and take my hand. I
swear she would have been congratulated on the end of her sufferings.
Worship!--that's what I feel. No woman ever alive had eyes in her head
like that lady's. I repeat her name ten times every night before I go to
sleep. If I had her hand, no, not one kiss would I press on it without
her sanction. I could be in love with her cruelty, if only I had her near
me. I 've lost her--by the Lord, I 've lost her!'

'Pro tem.,' said the captain. 'A plate of red beef and a glass of port
wine alters the view. Too much in the breast, too little in the belly,
capsizes lovers. Old story. Horses that ought to be having a mash between
their ribs make riders despond. Say, shall we back to the town behind us,
or on? Back's the safest, if the chase is up.'

Morsfield declared himself incapable of turning and meeting that chariot.
He sighed heavily. Cumnock offered to cheer him with a song of Captain
Chanter's famous collection, if he liked; but Morsfield gesticulated
abhorrence, and set out at a trot. Song in defeat was a hiss of derision
to him.

He had failed. Having failed, he for the first time perceived the
wildness of a plot that had previously appeared to him as one of the
Yorkshire Morsfields' moves to win an object. Traditionally they stopped
at nothing. There would have been a sunburst of notoriety in the capture
and carrying off of the beautiful Countess of Ormont.

She had eluded him during the downward journey to Steignton. He came on
her track at the village at the junction of the roads above Ashead, and
thence, confiding in the half-connivance or utter stupidity of the fair
one's duenna, despatched a mounted man-servant to his coachman and
footmen, stationed ten miles behind, with orders that they should drive
forthwith to the great plain, and be ready at a point there for two
succeeding days. That was the plot, promptly devised upon receipt of Mrs.
Pagnell's communication; for the wealthy man of pleasure was a strategist
fit to be a soldier, in dexterity not far from rivalling the man by whom
he had been outdone.

An ascetic on the road to success, he dedicated himself to a term of hard
drinking under a reverse; and the question addressed to the chief towns
in the sketch counties his head contained was, which one near would be
likely to supply the port wine for floating him through garlanding dreams
of possession most tastily to blest oblivion.

He was a lover, nevertheless, honest in his fashion, and meant not worse
than to pull his lady through a mire, and wash her with Morsfield soap,
and crown her, and worship. She was in his blood, about him, above him;
he had plunged into her image, as into deeps that broke away in
phosphorescent waves on all sides, reflecting every remembered, every
imagined, aspect of the adored beautiful woman piercing him to extinction
with that last look of her at the moment of flight.

Had he been just a trifle more sincere in the respect he professed for
his lady's duenna, he would have turned on the road to Dornton and a
better fortune. Mrs. Pagnell had now become the ridiculous Paggy of Mrs.
Lawrence Finchley and her circle for the hypocritical gentleman; and he
remarked to Captain Cumnock, when their mutual trot was established:
'Paggy enough for me for a month--good Lord! I can't stand another dose
of her by herself.'

'It's a bird that won't roast or boil or stew,' said the captain.

They were observed trotting along below by Lord Ormont's groom of the
stables on promotion, as he surveyed the country from the chalk-hill rise
and brought the phaeton to a stand, Jonathan Boon, a sharp lad, whose
comprehension was a little muddled by 'the rights of it' in this
adventure. He knew, however, that he did well to follow the directions of
one who was in his lordship's pay, and stretched out the fee with the air
of a shake of the hand, and had a look of the winning side, moreover. A
born countryman could see that.

Boon watched the pair of horsemen trotting to confusion, and clicked in
his cheek. The provincial of the period when coaches were beginning to be
threatened by talk of new-fangled rails was proud to boast of his
outwitting Londoners on material points; and Boon had numerous tales of
how it had been done, to have the laugh of fellows thinking themselves
such razors. They compensated him for the slavish abasement of his whole
neighbourhood under the hectoring of the grand new manufacture of wit in
London:--the inimitable Metropolitan PUN, which came down to the country
by four-in-hand, and stopped all other conversation wherever it was
reported, and would have the roar--there was no resisting it. Indeed, to
be able to see the thing smartly was an entry into community with the
elect of the district; and when the roaring ceased and the thing was
examined, astonishment at the cleverness of it, and the wonderful
shallowness of the seeming deep hole, and the unexhausted bang it had to
go off like a patent cracker, fetched it out for telling over again; and
up went the roar, and up it went at home and in stable-yards, and at the
net puffing of churchwardens on a summer's bench, or in a cricket-booth
after a feast, or round the old inn's taproom fine. The pun, the
wonderful bo-peep of double meanings darting out to surprise and smack
one another from behind words of the same sound, sometimes the same
spelling, overwhelmed the provincial mind with awe of London's occult and
prolific genius.

Yet down yonder you may behold a pair of London gentlemen trotting along
on as fine a fool's errand as ever was undertaken by nincompoops bearing
a scaled letter, marked urgent, to a castle, and the request in it that
the steward would immediately upon perusal down with their you-know-what
and hoist them and birch them a jolly two dozen without parley.

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