Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

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

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Now, a just man, who has overdone the stroke, will indemnify and console
in every way, short of humiliating himself.

He had an unusually clear vision of the scene at Steignton. Surprise and
wrath obscured it at the moment, for reflection to bring it out in sharp
outline; and he was able now to read and translate into inoffensive
English the inherited Spanish of it, which violated nothing of Aminta's
native 'donayre,' though it might look on English soil outlandish or
stagey.

Aminta stood in sunlight on the greensward. She stood hand on hip, gazing
at the house she had so long desired to see, without a notion that she
committed an offence. Implicitly upon all occasions she took her
husband's word for anything he stated, and she did not consequently
imagine him to be at Steignton. So, then, she had no thought of running
down from London to hunt and confound him, as at first it appeared. The
presence of that white-faced Morsfield vindicated her sufficiently so
far. And let that fellow hang till the time for cutting him down! Not
she, but Pagnell, seems to have been the responsible party. And, by the
way, one might prick the affair with Morsfield by telling him publicly
that his visit to inspect Steignton was waste of pains, for he would not
be accepted as a tenant in the kennels, et caetera.

Well, poor girl, she satisfied her curiosity, not aware that a few weeks
farther on would have done it to the full.

As to Morsfield, never once, either in Vienna or in Paris, had she,
warmly admired though she was, all eyes telescoping and sun-glassing on
her, given her husband an hour or half an hour or two minutes of anxiety.
Letters came. The place getting hot, she proposed to leave it.

She had been rather hardly tried. There are flowers we cannot keep
growing in pots. Her fault was, that instead of flinging down her glove
and fighting it out openly, she listened to Pagnell, and began the game
of Pull. If he had a zest for the game, it was to stump the woman
Pagnell. So the veteran fancied in his amended mind.

This intrusive sunlight chased him from the breakfast-table and out of
the house. She would be enjoying it somewhere; but the house empty of a
person it was used to contain had an atmosphere of the vaults, and inside
it the sunlight she loved had an effect of taunting him singularly.

He called on his upholsterer and heard news to please her. The house
hired for a month above Great Marlow was ready; her ladyship could enter
it to-morrow. It pleased my lord to think that she might do so, and not
bother him any more about the presentation at Court during the current
year. In spite of certain overtures from the military authorities, and
roused eulogistic citations of his name in the newspapers and magazines,
he was not on friendly terms with his country yet, having contracted the
fatal habit of irony, which, whether hitting or musing its object, stirs
old venom in our wound, twitches the feelings. Unfortunately for him,
they had not adequate expression unless he raged within; so he had to
shake up wrath over his grievances, that he might be satisfactorily
delivered; and he was judged irreconcilable when he had subsided into the
quietest contempt, from the prospective seat of a country estate, in the
society of a young wife who adored him.

An exile from the sepulchre of that house void of the consecration of
ashes, he walked the streets and became reconciled to street sunlight.
There were no carriage accidents to disturb him with apprehensions.
Besides, the slowness of the postillion Joshua Abnett, which probably
helped to the delay, was warrant of his sureness. And in an accident the
stringy fellow, young Weyburn, could be trusted for giving his attention
to the ladies--especially to the younger of the two, taking him for the
man his elders were at his age. As for Pagnell, a Providence watches over
the Pagnells! Mortals have no business to interfere.

An accident on water would be a frolic to his girl. Swimming was a gift
she had from nature. Pagnell vowed she swam out a mile at Dover when she
was twelve. He had seen her in blue water: he had seen her readiness to
jump to the rescue once when a market-woman, stepping out of a boat to
his yacht on the Tabus, plumped in. She had the two kinds of courage--the
impulsive and the reasoned. What is life to man or woman if we are not to
live it honourably? Men worthy of the name say this. The woman who says
and acts on it is--well, she is fit company for them. But only the woman
of natural courage can say it and act on it.

Would she come by Winchester, or choose the lower road by Salisbury and
Southampton, to smell the sea? perhaps-like her!--dismissing the chariot
and hiring a yacht for a voyage round the coast and up the Thames. She
had an extraordinary love of the sea, yet she preferred soldiers to
sailors. A woman? Never one of them more a woman! But it came of her
quickness to take the colour and share the tastes of the man to whom she
gave herself.

My lord was beginning to distinguish qualities in a character.

He was informed at the mews that Joshua Abnett was on the road still.
Joshua seemed to be a roadster of uncommon unprogressiveness, proper to a
framed picture.

While debating whether to lunch at his loathed club or at a home loathed
more, but open to bright enlivenment any instant, Lord Ormont beheld a
hat lifted and Captain May saluting him. They were near a famous
gambling-house in St. James's Street.

'Good! I am glad to see you,' he said. 'Tell me you know Mr. Morsfield
pretty well. I'm speaking of my affair. He has been trespassing down on
my grounds at Steignton, and I think of taking the prosecution of him
into my own hands. Is he in town?'

'I 've just left his lame devil Cumnock, my lord,' said May, after a
slight grimace. 'They generally run in tandem.'

'Will you let me know?'

'At once, when I hear.'

'You will call on me? Before noon?'

'Any service required?'

'My respects to your wife.'

'Your lordship is very good.'

Captain May bloomed at a civility paid to his wife. He was a smallish,
springy, firm-faced man, devotee of the lady bearing his name and
wielding him. In the days when duelling flourished on our land, frail
women could be powerful.

The earl turned from him to greet Lord Adderwood and a superior officer
of his Profession, on whom he dropped a frigid nod. He held that all but
the rank and file, and a few subalterns, of the service had abandoned him
to do homage to the authorities. The Club he frequented was not his
military Club. Indeed, lunching at any Club in solitariness that day,
with Aminta away from home, was bitter penance. He was rejoiced by Lord
Adderwood's invitation, and hung to him after the lunch; for a horrible
prospect of a bachelor dinner intimated astonishingly that he must have
become unawares a domesticated man.

The solitary later meal of a bachelor was consumed, if the word will suit
a rabbit's form of feeding. He fatigued his body by walking the streets
and the bridge of the Houses of Parliament, and he had some sleep under a
roof where a life like death, or death apeing life, would have seemed to
him the Joshua Abnett, if he had been one to take up images.

Next day he was under the obligation to wait at home till noon. Shortly
before noon a noise of wheels drew him to the window. A young lady, in
whom he recognized Aminta's little school friend, of some name, stepped
out of a fly. He met her in the hall.

She had expected to be welcomed by Aminta, and she was very timid on
finding herself alone with the earl. He, however, treated her as the
harbinger bird, wryneck of the nightingale, sure that Aminta would keep
her appointment unless an accident delayed. He had forgotten her name,
but not her favourite pursuit of botany; and upon that he discoursed, and
he was interested, not quite independently of the sentiment of her being
there as a guarantee of Aminta's return. Still he knew his English earth,
and the counties and soil for particular wild-flowers, grasses, mosses;
and he could instruct her and inspire a receptive pupil on the theme of
birds, beasts, fishes, insects, in England and other lands.

He remained discoursing without much weariness till four of the
afternoon. Then he had his reward. The chariot was at the door, and the
mounted figure of Joshua Abnett, on which he cast not a look or a
thought. Aminta was alone. She embraced Selina Collett warmly, and said,
in friendly tones, 'Ah! my lord, you are in advance of me.'

She had dropped Mrs. Pagnell and Mr. Weyburn at two suburban houses;
working upon her aunt's dread of the earl's interrogations as regarded
Mr. Morsfield. She had, she said, chosen to take the journey easily on
her return, and enjoyed it greatly.

My lord studied her manner more than her speech. He would have
interpreted a man's accurately enough. He read hers to signify that she
had really enjoyed her journey, 'made the best of it,' and did not intend
to be humble about her visit to Steignton without his permission; but
that, if hurt at the time, she had recovered her spirits, and was ready
for a shot or two--to be nothing like a pitched battle. And she might
fire away to her heart's content: wordy retorts would not come from him;
he had material surprises in reserve for her. His question concerning
Morsfield knew its answer, and would only be put under pressure.

Comparison of the friends Aminta and Selina was forced by their standing
together, and the representation in little Selina of the inferiority of
the world of women to his Aminta; he thought of several, and splendid
women, foreign and English. The comparison rose sharply now, with
Aminta's novel, airy, homely, unchallengeing assumption of an equal
footing beside her lord, in looks and in tones that had cast off
constraint of the adoring handmaid, to show the full-blown woman,
rightful queen of her half of the dominion. Between the Aminta of then
and now, the difference was marked as between Northern and Southern
women: the frozen-mouthed Northerner and the pearl and rose-nipped
Southerner; those who smirk in dropping congealed monosyllables, and
those who radiantly laugh out the voluble chatter.

Conceiving this to the full in a mind destitute of imagery, but
indicative of the thing as clearly as the planed, unpolished woodwork of
a cabinet in a carpenter's shop, Lord Ormont liked her the better for the
change, though she was not the woman whose absence from his house had
caused him to go mooning half a night through the streets, and though it
forewarned him of a tougher bit of battle, if battle there was to be.

He was a close reader of surfaces. But in truth, the change so notable
came of the circumstance, that some little way down below the surface he
perused, where heart weds mind, or nature joins intellect, for the two to
beget a resolution, the battle of the man and the woman had been fought,
and the man beaten.

CHAPTER XXII

TREATS OF THE FIRST DAY OF THE CONTENTION OF BROTHER AND SISTER

In the contest rageing at mid-sea still between the man and the woman, it
is the one who is hard to the attractions of the other that will make
choice of the spot and have the advantages. A short time earlier Lord
Ormont could have marked it out at his leisure. He would have been unable
to comprehend why it was denied him to do so now; for he was master of
himself, untroubled by conscience, unaware, since he was assured of his
Aminta's perfect safety and his restored sense of possession, that any
taint of softness in him had reversed the condition of their alliance. He
felt benevolently the much he had to bestow, and was about to bestow.
Meanwhile, without complicity on his part, without his knowledge, yet
absolutely involving his fate, the battle had gone against him in
Aminta's breast.

Like many of his class and kind, he was thoroughly acquainted with the
physical woman, and he took that first and very engrossing volume of the
great Book of Mulier for all the history. A powerful wing of imagination,
strong as the flappers of the great Roc of Arabian story, is needed to
lift the known physical woman even a very little way up into azure
heavens. It is far easier to take a snap-shot at the psychic, and tumble
her down from her fictitious heights to earth. The mixing of the two make
nonsense of her. She was created to attract the man, for an excellent
purpose in the main. We behold her at work incessantly. One is a fish to
her hook; another a moth to her light. By the various arts at her
disposal she will have us, unless early in life we tear away the
creature's coloured gauzes and penetrate to her absurdly simple
mechanism. That done, we may, if we please, dominate her. High priests of
every religion have successively denounced her as the chief enemy. To
subdue and bid her minister to our satisfaction is therefore a right
employment of man's unperverted superior strength. Of course, we keep to
ourselves the woman we prefer; but we have to beware of an uxorious
preference, or we are likely to resemble the Irishman with his wolf, and
dance imprisoned in the hug of our captive.

For it is the creature's characteristic to be lastingly awake, in her
moments of utmost slavishness most keenly awake to the chances of the
snaring of the stronger. Be on guard, then. Lord Ormont had been on guard
then and always: his instinct of commandership kept him on guard. He was
on guard now when his Aminta played, not the indignant and the frozen,
but the genially indifferent. She did it well, he admitted.

Had it been the indignant she played, he might have stooped to cajole the
handsome queen of gypsies she was, without acknowledgement of her right
to complain. Feeling that he was about to be generous, he shrugged. He
meant to speak in deeds.

Lady Charlotte's house was at the distance of a stroller's half-hour
across Hyde Park westward from his own. Thither he walked, a few minutes
after noon, prepared for cattishness. He could fancy that he had hitherto
postponed the visit rather on her account, considering that he would have
to crush her if she humped and spat, and he hoped to be allowed to do it
gently. There would certainly be a scene.

Lady Charlotte was at home.

'Always at home to you, Rowsley, at any hour. Mr. Eglett has driven down
to the City. There 's a doctor in a square there's got a reputation for
treating weak children, and he has taken down your grand-nephew Bobby to
be inspected. Poor boy comes of a poor stock on the father's side. Mr.
Eglett would have that marriage. Now he sees wealth isn't everything.
Those Benlews are rushlights. However, Elizabeth stood with her father to
have Robert Benlew, and this poor child 's the result. I wonder whether
they have consciences!'

My lord prolonged the sibilation of his 'Yes,' in the way of
absent-minded men. He liked little Bobby, but had to class the boy second
for the present.

'You have our family jewels in your keeping, Charlotte?'

'No, I haven't,--and you know I haven't, Rowsley.' She sprang to arms,
the perfect porcupine, at his opening words, as he had anticipated.

'Where are the jewels?'

'They're in the cellars of my bankers, and safe there, you may rely on
it.'

'I want them.'

'I want to have them safe; and there they stop.'

'You must get them and hand them over.'

'To whom?'

'To me.'

'What for?'

'They will be worn by the Countess of Ormont'

'Who 's she?'

'The lady who bears the title.'

'The only Countess of Ormont I know of is your mother and mine, Rowsley;
and she's dead.'

'The Countess of Ormont I speak of is alive.'

Lady Charlotte squared to him. 'Who gives her the title?'

'She bears it by right.'

'Do you mean to say, Rowsley, you have gone and married the woman since
we came up from Steignton?'

'She is my wife.'

'Anyhow, she won't have our family jewels.'

'If you had swallowed them, you'd have to disgorge.'

'I don't give up our family jewels to such people.'

'Do you decline to call on her?'

'I do: I respect our name and blood.'

'You will send the order to your bankers for them to deliver the jewels
over to me at my house this day.'

'Look here, Rowsley; you're gone cracked or senile. You 're in the hands
of one of those clever wenches who catch men of your age. She may catch
you; she shan't lay hold of our family jewels: they stand for the honour
of our name and blood.'

'They are to be at my house-door at four o'clock this afternoon.'

'They'll not stir.'

'Then I go down to order your bankers and give them the order.'

'My bankers won't attend to it without the order from me.'

'You will submit to the summons of my lawyers.'

'You're bent on a public scandal, are you?'

'I am bent on having the jewels.'

'They are not yours; you 've no claim to them; they are heirlooms in our
family. Things most sacred to us are attached to them. They belong to our
history. There 's the tiara worn by the first Countess of Ormont. There
's the big emerald of the necklace-pendant--you know the story of it. Two
rubies not counted second to any in England. All those diamonds! I wore
the cross and the two pins the day I was presented after my marriage.'

'The present Lady Ormont will wear them the day she is presented.'

'She won't wear them at Court.'

'She will.'

'Don't expect the Lady Ormont of tradesmen and footmen to pass the Lord
Chamberlain.'

'That matter will be arranged for next season. Now I 've done.'

'So have I; and you have my answer, Rowsley.' They quitted their chairs.

'You decline to call on my wife?' said the earl.

Lady Charlotte replied: 'Understand me, now. If the woman has won you
round to legitimize the connection, first, I've a proper claim to see her
marriage lines. I must have a certificate of her birth. I must have a
testified account of her life before you met her and got the worst of it.
Then, as the case may be, I 'll call on her.

'You will behave yourself when you call.'

'But she won't have our family jewels.'

'That affair has been settled by me.'

'I should be expecting to hear of them as decorating the person of one of
that man Morsfield's mistresses.'

The earl's brow thickened. 'Charlotte, I smacked your cheek when you were
a girl.'

'I know you did. You might again, and I wouldn't cry out. She travels
with that Morsfield; you 've seen it. He goes boasting of her. Gypsy or
not, she 's got queer ways.'

'I advise you, you had better learn at once to speak of her
respectfully.'

'I shall have enough to go through, if what you say's true, with
questions of the woman's antecedents and her people, and the date of the
day of this marriage. When was the day you did it? I shall have to give
an answer. You know cousins of ours, and the way they 'll be pressing,
and comparing ages and bawling rumours. None of them imagined my brother
such a fool as to be wheedled into marrying her. You say it's done,
Rowsley. Was it done yesterday or the day before?'

Lord Ormont found unexpectedly that she struck on a weak point. Married
from the first? Why not tell me of it? He could hear her voice as if she
had spoken the words. And how communicate the pell-mell of reasons?

'You're running vixen. The demand I make is for the jewels,' he said.

'You won't have them, Rowsley--not for her.'

'You think of compelling me to use force?'

'Try it.'

'You swear the jewels are with your bankers?'

'I left them in charge of my bankers, and they've not been moved by me.'

'Well, it must be force.'

'Nothing short of it when the honour of our family's concerned.'

It was rather worse than the anticipated struggle with this Charlotte,
though he had kept his temper. The error was in supposing that an hour's
sharp conflict would settle it, as he saw. The jewels required a siege.

'When does Eglett return?' he asked.

'Back to lunch. You stay and lunch here, Rowsley we don't often have
you.'

The earl contemplated her, measuring her powers of resistance for a
prolonged engagement. Odd that the pride which had withdrawn him from the
service of an offending country should pitch him into a series of tussles
with women, for its own confusion! He saw that, too, in his dim
reflectiveness, and held the country answerable for it.

Mr. Eglett was taken into confidence by him privately after lunch. Mr.
Eglett's position between the brother and sister was perplexing;
habitually he thought his wife had strong good sense, in spite of the
costliness of certain actions at law not invariably confirming his
opinion; he thought also that the earl's demand must needs be considered
obediently. At the same time, his wife's objections to the new Countess
of Ormont, unmasked upon the world, seemed very legitimate; though it
might be asked why the earl should not marry, marrying the lady who
pleased him. But if, in the words of his wife, the lady had no claim to
be called a lady, the marriage was deplorable. On the other hand, Lord
Ormont spoke of her in terms of esteem, and he was no fondling dotard.

How to compromise the matter for the sake of peace? The man perpetually
plunged into strife by his combative spouse, cried the familiar question
again; and at every suggestion of his on behalf of concord he heard from
Lady Charlotte that he had no principles, or else from Lord Ormont that
his head must be off his shoulders.

The man for peace had the smallest supply of language, and so, unless he
took a side and fought, his active part was football between them.

It went on through the afternoon up to five o'clock. No impression was
betrayed by Lady Charlotte.

She congratulated her brother on the recruit he had enlisted. He smiled
his grimmest of the lips drawn in. A combat, perceptibly of some
extension, would soon give him command of the man of peace; and energy to
continue attacks will break down the energies of any dogged defensive
stand.

He deferred the discussion with his unreasonable sister until the next
day at half-past twelve o'clock. Lady Charlotte nodded to the
appointment. She would have congratulated herself without irony on the
result of the first day's altercation but for her brother Rowsley's
unusual and ominous display of patience. Twice during the wrangle she had
to conceal a difficult breathing. She felt a numbness in one arm now it
was over, and mentally complimented her London physician on the
unerringness of his diagnosis. Her heart, however, complained of the
cruelty of having in the end, perhaps, if the wrangle should be
protracted, to yield, for sheer weakness, without ceasing to beat.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE ORMONT JEWELS

At half-past twelve of the noon next day Lord Ormont was at Lady
Charlotte's house door. She welcomed him affectionately, as if nothing
were in dispute; he nodded an acceptance of her greetings, with a blunt
intimation of the business to be settled; she put on her hump of the
feline defensive; then his batteries opened fire and hers barked back on
him. Each won admiration of the other's tenacity, all the more determined
to sap or split it. They had known one another's character, but they had
never seen it in such strong light. Never had their mutual and similar,
though opposed, resources been drawn out so copiously and unreservedly.
This was the shining scrawl of all that each could do to gain a fight.
They admired one another's contemptibly justifiable evasions, changes of
front, statements bordering the lie, even to meanness in the withdrawal
of admissions and the denial of the same ever having been made. That was
Charlotte! That was Rowsley! Anything to beat down the adversary.

As to will, the woman's will, of these two, equalled the man's. They were
matched in obstinacy and unscrupulousness.

Her ingenuitics of the defence eluded his attacks, and compelled him to
fall on heavy iteration of his demand for the jewels, an immediate
restitution of the jewels. 'Why immediate?' cried she.

He repeated it without replying to her.

'But, you tell me, Rowsley, why immediate? If you're in want of money for
her, you come to me, tell me, you shall have thousands. I'll drive down
to the City to-morrow and sell out stock. Mr. Eglett won't mind when he
hears the purpose. I shall call five thousand cheap, and don't ask to see
the money again.'

'Ah! double the sum to have your own way!' said he.

She protested that she valued her money. She furnished instances of her
carefulness of her money all along up to the present period of brutal old
age. Yet she would willingly part with five thousand or more to save the
family honour. Mr. Eglett would not only approve, he would probably
advance a good part of the money himself.

'Money! Who wants money?' thundered the earl, and jumped out of her trap
of the further diversion from the plain request. 'To-morrow, when I am
here, I shall expect to have the jewels delivered to me.'

'That you may hand them over to her. Where are they likely to be this
time next year? And what do you know about jewels? You may look at them
when you ask to see them, and not know imitation paste--like the stuff
Lady Beltus showed her old husband. Our mother wore them, and she prized
them. I'm not sure I wouldn't rather hear they were exhibited in a Bond
Street jeweller's shop or a Piccadilly pawnbroker's than have them on
that woman.'

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