Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

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

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So Mr. Eglett opined. But he had been impressed.

He relieved his mind on the subject in a communication to Lord Adderwood;
who habitually shook out the contents of his to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley,
and she, deeming it good for Aminta to have information of the war waging
for her behoof, obtained her country address, with the resolve to drive
down, a bearer of good news to the dear woman she liked to think of, look
at, and occasionally caress; besides rather tenderly pitying her, now
that a change of fortune rendered her former trials conspicuous.

An incident, considered grave even in the days of the duel and the kicks
against a swelling public reprehension of the practice, occurred to
postpone her drive for four-and-twenty hours. London was shaken by
rumours of a tragic mishap to a socially well-known gentleman at the
Chiallo fencing rooms. The rumours passing from mouth to mouth acquired,
in the nature of them, sinister colours as they circulated. Lord Ormont
sent Aminta word of what he called 'a bad sort of accident at Chiallo's,'
without mentioning names or alluding to suspicions.

He treated it lightly. He could not have written of it with such
unconcern if it involved the secretary! Yet Aminta did seriously ask
herself whether he could; and she flew rapidly over the field of his
character, seizing points adverse, points favourably advocative,
balancing dubiously--most unjustly: she felt she was unjust. But in her
condition, the heart of a woman is instantly planted in jungle when the
spirits of the two men closest to her are made to stand opposed by a
sudden excitement of her fears for the beloved one. She cannot see
widely, and is one of the wild while the fit lasts; and, after it, that
savage narrow vision she had of the unbeloved retains its vivid print in
permanence. Was she unjust? Aminta cited corroboration of her being
accurate: such was Lord Ormont! and although his qualities of gallantry,
courtesy, integrity, honourable gentleman, presented a fair low-level
account on the other side, she had so stamped his massive selfishness and
icy inaccessibility to emotion on her conception of him that the
repulsive figure formed by it continued towering when her mood was
kinder.

Love played on love in the woman's breast. Her love had taken a fever
from her lord's communication of the accident at Chiallo's, and she
pushed her alarm to imagine the deadliest, and plead for the right of
confession to herself of her unrepented regrets. She and Matey Weyburn
had parted without any pressure of hands, without a touch. They were,
then, unplighted if now the grave divided them! No touch: mere glances!
And she sighed not, as she pleaded, for the touch, but for the plighting
it would have been. If now she had lost him, he could never tell herself
that since the dear old buried and night-walking schooldays she had said
once Matey to him, named him once to his face Matey Weyburn. A sigh like
the roll of a great wave breaking against a wall of rock came from her
for the possibly lost chance of naming him to his face Matey,--oh, and
seeing his look as she said it!

The boldness might be fancied: it could not be done. Agreeing with the
remote inner voice of her reason so far, she toned her exclamatory
foolishness to question, in Reason's plain, deep, basso-profundo
accompaniment tone, how much the most blessed of mortal women could do to
be of acceptable service to a young schoolmaster?

There was no reply to the question. But it became a nestling centre for
the skiey flock of dreams, and for really temperate soundings of her
capacities, tending to the depreciatory. She could do little. She
entertained the wish to work, not only 'for the sake of Somebody,' as her
favourite poet sang, but for the sake of working and serving--proving
that she was helpfuller than a Countess of Ormont, ranged with all the
other countesses in china and Dresden on a drawing-room mantelpiece for
show. She could organize, manage a household, manage people too, she
thought: manage a husband? The word offends. Perhaps invigorate him, here
and there perhaps inspire him, if he would let her breathe. Husbands
exist who refuse the right of breathing to their puppet wives. Above all,
as it struck her, she could assist, and be more than an echo of one
nobler, in breathing manliness, high spirit, into boys. With that idea
she grazed the shallows of reality, and her dreams whirred from the nest
and left it hungrily empty.

Selina Collett was writing under the verandah letters to her people in
Suffolk, performing the task with marvellous ease. Aminta noted it as a
mark of superior ability, and she had the envy of the complex nature
observing the simple. It accused her of some guiltiness, uncommitted and
indefensible. She had pushed her anxiety about 'the accident at
Chiallo's' to an extreme that made her the creature of her sensibilities.
In the midst of this quiet country life and landscape; these motionless
garden flowers headed by the smooth white river, and her gentle little
friend so homely here, the contemplation of herself was like a shriek in
music. Worse than discordant, she pronounced herself inferior, unfit
mentally as well as bodily for the dreams of companionship with any noble
soul who might have the dream of turning her into something better. There
are couples in the world, not coupled by priestly circumstance, who are
close to the true; union, by reason of generosity on the one part,
grateful devotion, as for the gift of life, on the other. For instance,
Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord Adderwood, which was an instance without
resemblance; but Aminta's heart beat thick for what it wanted, and they
were the instance of two that did not have to snap false bonds of a
marriage-tie in order to walk together composedly outside it--in honour?
Oh yes, yes! She insisted on believing it was in honour.

She saw the couple issue from the boathouse. She had stepped into the
garden full of a presentiment; so she fancied, the moment they were seen.
She had, in fact, heard a noise in the boathouse while thinking of them,
and the effect on her was to spring an idea of mysterious interventions
at the sight.

Mrs. Lawrence rushed to her, and was embraced. 'You 're not astonished to
see me? Adder drove me down, and stopped his coach at the inn, and rowed
me the half-mile up. We will lunch, if you propose; but presently. My
dear, I have to tell you things. You have heard?'

'The accident?'

Aminta tried to read in Mrs. Lawrence's eyes whether it closely concerned
her.

Those pretty eyes, their cut of lids hinting at delicate affinities with
the rice-paper lady of the court of China, were trying to peer seriously.

'Poor man! One must be sorry for him: he--'

'Who?'

'You 've not heard, then?' Mrs. Lawrence dropped her voice: 'Morsfield.'

Aminta shivered. 'All I have heard-half a line from my lord this morning:
no name. It was at the fencing-rooms, he said.'

'Yes, he wouldn't write more;' said Mrs. Lawrence, nodding. 'You know, he
would have had to do it himself if it had not been done for him. Adder
saw him some days back in a brown consultation near his club with Captain
May. Oh, but of course it was accident! Did he call it so in his letter
to you?'

'One word of Mr. Morsfield: he is wounded?'

'Past cure: he has the thing he cried for, spoilt boy as he was from his
birth. I tell you truth, m' Aminta, I grieve to lose him. What with his
airs of the foreign-tinted, punctilious courtly gentleman covering a
survival of the ancient British forest boar or bear, he was a picture in
our modern set, and piquant. And he was devoted to our sex, we must
admit, after the style of the bears. They are for honey, and they have a
hug. If he hadn't been so much of a madman, I should have liked him for
his courage. He had plenty of that, nothing to steer it. A second cousin
comes in for his estates.'

'He is dead?' Aminta cried.

'Yes, dear, he is gone. What the women think of it I can't say. The
general feeling among the men is that some one of them would have had to
send him sooner or later. The curious point, Adder says, is his letting
it be done by steel. He was a dead shot, dangerous with the small sword,
as your Mr. Weyburn said, only soon off his head. But I used to be
anxious about the earl's meeting him with pistols. He did his best to
provoke it. Here, Adder,'--she spoke over her shoulder,--'tell Lady
Ormont all you know of the Morsfield-May affair.'

Lord Adderwood bowed compliance. His coolness was the masculine of Mrs.
Lawrence's hardly feminine in treating of a terrible matter, so that the
dull red facts had to be disengaged from his manner of speech before they
sank into Aminta's acceptance; of them as credible.

'They fought with foils, buttons off, preliminary ceremonies perfect;
salute in due order; guard, and at it.

Odd thing was, nobody at Chiallo's had a notion of the business till
Morsfield was pinked. He wouldn't be denied; went to work like a fellow
meaning to be skewered, if he couldn't do the trick: and he tried it. May
had been practising some weeks. He's well on the Continent by this time.
It'll blow over. Button off sheer accident. I wasn't lucky enough to see
the encounter: came in just when Chiallo was lashing his poll over
Morsfield flat on the ground. He had it up to the hilt. We put a buttoned
foil by the side of Morsfield, and all swore to secrecy. As it is, it 'll
go badly against poor Chiallo. Taste for fencing won't be much improved
by the affair. They quarrelled in the dressing room, and fetched the
foils and knocked off the buttons there. A big rascal toady squire of
Morsfield's did it for him. Morsfield was just up from Yorkshire. He said
he was expecting a summons elsewhere, bound to await it, declined
provocation for the present. May filliped him on the cheek.'

'Adder conveyed the information of her husband's flight to the consolable
Amy,' said Mrs. Lawrence.

'He had to catch the coach for Dover,' Adderwood explained. 'His wife was
at a dinner-party. I saw her at midnight.'

'Fair Amy was not so very greatly surprised?'

'Quite the soldier's wife!'

'She said she was used to these little catastrophes. But, Adder, what did
she say of her husband?'

'Said she was never anxious about him, for nothing would kill him.'

Mrs. Lawrence shook a doleful head at Aminta.

'You see, my dear Aminta, here's another, and probably her last, chance
of sharing the marquisate gone. Who can fail to pity her, except old
Time! And I 'm sure she likes her husband well enough. She ought: no
woman ever had such a servant. But the captain has not been known to
fight without her sanction, and the inference is--'Alas! woe! Fair Amy is
doomed to be the fighting captain's bride to the end of the chapter.
Adder says she looked handsome. A dinner-party suits her cosmetic
complexion better than a ball. The account of the inquest is in the day's
papers, and we were tolerably rejoiced we could drive out of London
without having to reply to coroner's questions.'

'He died-soon?' Aminta's voice was shaken.

Mrs. Lawrence touched at her breast, it might be for heart or lungs.
Judging by Aminta's voice and face, one could suppose she was harking
back, in woman's way, to her original sentiment for the man, now that he
lay prostrate.

Aminta read the unreproachful irony in the smile addressed to her. She
was too convulsed by her many emotions and shouting thoughts to think of
defending herself.

Selina, in the drawing-room, diligently fingered and classed brown-black
pressed weeds of her neophyte's botany-folios. The sight of her and her
occupation struck Aminta as that of a person in another world beyond this
world of blood, strangely substantial to view; and one heard her speak.

Guilty?--no. But she had wished to pique her lord. After the term of a
length of months, could it be that the unhappy man and she were punished
for the half-minute's acting of some interest in him? And Lord Ormont had
been seen consulting Captain May; or was it giving him directions?

Her head burned. All the barren interrogations were up, running and
knocking for hollow responses; and, saving a paleness of face, she
cloaked any small show of the riot. She was an amiable hostess. She had
ceased to comprehend Mrs. Lawrence, even to the degree of thinking her
unfeminine. She should have known that the 'angelical chimpanzee,' as a
friend, once told of his being a favourite with the lady, had called her,
could not simulate a feeling, and had not the slightest power of pretence
to compassion for an ill-fated person who failed to quicken her
enthusiasm. In that, too, she was a downright boy. Morsfield was a kind
of Bedlamite to her; amusing in his antics, and requiring to be
manoeuvred and eluded while he lived: once dead, just a tombstone, of
interest only to his family.

She beckoned Aminta to follow her; and, with a smirk of indulgent fun,
commended Lord Adderwood to a study of Selina Collett's botany-folios,
which the urbanest of indifferent gentlemen had slid his eyes over his
nose to inspect before the lunch.

'You ought to know what is going on in town, my dear Aminta. You have won
the earl to a sense of his duty, and he 's at work on the harder task of
winning Lady Charlotte Eglett to a sense of hers. It 's tremendous. Has
been forward some days, and no sign of yielding on either side. Mr.
Eglett, good man, is between them, catching it right and left; and he
deserves his luck for marrying her. Vows she makes him the best of wives.
If he 's content, I 've nothing to complain of. You must be ready to
receive her; my lord is sure to carry the day. You gulp. You won't be
seeing much of her. I 'm glad to say he is condescending to terms of
peace with the Horse Guards. We hear so. You may be throning it
officially somewhere next year. And all 's well that ends well! Say that
to me!'

'It is, when the end comes,' Aminta replied.

Mrs. Lawrence's cool lips were pressed to her cheek. The couple and their
waterman rowed away to the party they had left with the four-in-hand at
their inn.

A wind was rising. The trees gave their swish of leaves, the river
darkened the patch of wrinkles, the bordering flags amid the reed-blades
dipped and streamed.

Surcharged with unassimilated news of events, that made a thunder in her
head, Aminta walked down the garden path, meeting Selina and bearing her
on. She had a witch's will to rouse gales. Hers was not the woman's
nature to be driven cowering by stories of men's bloody deeds. She took
the field, revolted, dissevering herself from the class which tolerated
them--actuated by a reflective moralty, she believed; and loathed herself
for having aspired, schemed, to be a member of the class. But it was not
the class, it was against her lord as representative of the class, that
she was now the rebel, neither naming him nor imaging him. Her enveloping
mind was black on him. Such as one of those hard slaughtering men could
call her his own? She breathed short and breathed deep. Her bitter reason
had but the common pity for a madman despatched to his rest. Yet she knew
hatred of her lord in his being suspected as instigator or accomplice of
the hand that dealt the blow. He became to her thought a python whose
coils were about her person, insufferable to the gaze backward.

Moments like these are the mothers in travail of a resolve joylessly
conceived, undesired to clasp, Necessity's offspring. Thunderclouds have
as little love of the lightnings they fling.

Aminta was aware only of her torment. The trees were bending, the water
hissing, the grasses all this way and that, like hands of a delirious
people in surges of wreck. She scorned the meaningless shake of the
garments of earth, and exclaimed: 'If we were by the sea to-night!'

'I shall be to-morrow night,' said Selina. 'I shall think of you. Oh!
would you come with me?'

'Would you have me?'

'My mother will indeed be honoured by your consenting to come.'

'Write to her before the post is out.'

'We shall travel down together?'

Aminta nodded and smiled, and Selina kissed her hand in joy, saying, that
down home she would not be so shy of calling her Aminta. She was bidden
to haste.

CHAPTER XXVI

VISITS OF FAREWELL

The noise in London over Adolphus Morsfield's tragical end disturbed Lord
Ormont much less than the cessation of letters from his Aminta; and that
likewise, considering his present business on her behalf, he patiently
shrugged at and pardoned, foreseeing her penitent air. He could do it
lightly after going some way to pardon his offending country. For Aminta
had not offended, his robust observation of her was moved to the kindly
humorous by a reflective view here and there of the downright woman her
clever little shuffles exposed her to be, not worse. It was her sex that
made her one of the gliders in grasses, some of whom are venomous; but
she belonged to the order only as an innocuous blindworm. He could
pronounce her small by-play with Morsfield innocent, her efforts to climb
the stairs into Society quite innocent; judging her, of course, by her
title of woman. A woman's innocence has a rainbow skin. Set this one
beside other women, she comes out well, fairly well, well enough.

Now that the engagement with Charlotte assumed proportions of a series of
battle, properly to be entitled a campaign, he had, in his loneliness,
fallen into the habit of reflecting at the close of his day's work; and
the rubbing of that unused opaque mirror hanging inside a man of action
had helped him piecemeal to perceive bits of his conduct, entirely
approved by him, which were intimately connected, nevertheless, with a
train of circumstances that he disliked and could not charge justly upon
any other shoulders than his own. What was to be thought of it? He would
not be undergoing this botheration of the prolonged attempt to bring a
stubborn woman to a sense of her duty, if he had declared his marriage in
the ordinary style, and given his young countess her legitimate place
before the world. What impeded it? The shameful ingratitude of his
countrymen to the soldier who did it eminent service at a crisis of the
destinies of our Indian Empire! He could not condone the injury done to
him by entering among them again. Too like the kicked cur, that! He
retired--call it 'sulked in his tent,' if you like. His wife had to share
his fortunes. He being slighted, she necessarily was shadowed. For a
while she bore it contentedly enough; then began her mousy scratches to
get into the room off the wainscot, without blame from him; she behaved
according to her female nature.

Yes, but the battles with Charlotte forced on his recognition once more,
and violently, the singular consequences of his retirement and Coriolanus
quarrel with his countrymen. He had doomed himself ever since to a
contest with women. First it was his Queen of Amazons, who, if
vanquished, was not so easily vanquished, and, in fact, doubtfully,--for
now, to propitiate her, he had challenged, and must overcome or be
disgraced, the toughest Amazonian warrior man could stand against at cast
of dart or lock of arms. No day scored an advantage; and she did not
apparently suffer fatigue. He did: that is to say, he was worried and
hurried to have the wrangle settled and Charlotte at Aminta's feet. He
gained not an inch of ground. His principle in a contention of the sort
was to leave the woman to the practice of her obvious artifices, and
himself simply hammer, incessantly hammer. But Charlotte hammered as
well. The modest position of the defensive negative was not to her taste.
The moment he presented himself she flew out upon some yesterday's part
of the argument and carried the war across the borders, in attacks on his
character and qualities--his weakness regarding women, his incapacity to
forgive, and the rest. She hammered on that head. As for any prospect of
a termination of the strife, he could see none in her joyful welcome to
him and regretful parting and pleased appointment of the next meeting day
after day.

The absurdest of her devices for winding him off his aim was to harp on
some new word she had got hold of as, for example, to point out to him
his aptitudes, compliment him on his aptitudes, recommend him to study
and learn the limitations of his aptitudes! She revelled in something the
word unfolded to her.

However, here was the point: she had to be beaten. So, if she, too,
persisted in hammering, he must employ her female weapon of artifice with
her. One would gladly avoid the stooping to it in a civil dispute, in
which one is not so gloriously absolved for lying and entrapping as in
splendid war.

Weyburn's name was announced to him at an early hour on Thursday morning.
My lord nodded to the footman; he nodded to himself over a suggestion
started in a tactical intelligence by the name.

'Ah! you 're off?' he accosted the young man.

'I have come to take my leave, my lord.'

'Nothing new in the morning papers?'

'A report that Captain May intends to return and surrender.'

'Not before a month has passed, if he follows my counsel.'

'To defend his character.'

'He has none.'

'His reputation.'

'He has too much.'

'These charges against him must be intolerable.'

'Was he not a bit of a pupil of yours?'

'We practised two or three times-nothing more.'

'Morsfield was a wasp at a feast. Somebody had to crush him. I 've seen
the kind of man twice in my life and exactly the kind of man. If their
law puts down duelling, he rules the kingdom!'

'My lord, I should venture to say the kind of man can be a common
annoyance because the breach of the law is countenanced.'

'Bad laws are best broken. A society that can't get a scouring now and
then will be a dirty set.'

With a bend of the head, in apology for speaking of himself, Weyburn
said: 'I have acted on my view. I declined a challenge from a sort of
henchman of his.'

'Oh! a poacher's lurcher? You did right. Fight such fellows with
constables. You have seen Lady Charlotte?'

'I am on my way to her ladyship.'

'Do me this favour. Fourteen doors up the street of her residence, my
physician lives. I have to consult him at once. Dr. Rewkes.'

Weyburn bowed. Lady Charlotte could not receive him later than half-past
ten of the morning, he said. 'This morning she can,' said my lord. 'You
will tell Dr. Rewkes that it is immediate. I rather regret your going. I
shall be in a controversy with the Horse Guards about our cavalry
saddles. It would be regiments of raw backs the first fortnight of a
campaign.'

The earl discoursed on saddles; and passed to high eulogy of our
Hanoverian auxiliary troopers in the Peninsula; 'good husbands,' he named
them quaintly, speaking of their management of their beasts. Thence he
diverged to Frederic's cavalry, rarely matched for shrewdness and
endurance; to the deeds of the Liechtenstein Hussars; to the great things
Blucher did with his horsemen.

The subject was interesting; but Weyburn saw the clock at past the half
after ten. He gave a slight sign of restiveness, and was allowed to go
when the earl had finished his pro and con upon Arab horses and Mameluke
saddles. Lord Ormont nicked his head, just as at their first interview:
he was known to have an objection to the English shaking of hands.
'Good-morning,' he said; adding a remark or two, of which et cetera may
stand for an explicit rendering. It concerned the young man's prosperity:
my lord's conservative plain sense was in doubt of the prospering of a
giddy pate, however good a worker. His last look at the young man, who
had not served him badly, held an anticipation of possibly some day
seeing a tatterdemalion of shipwreck, a rueful exhibition of ideas put to
the business of life.

Weyburn left the message with Dr. Rewkes in person. It had not seemed to
him that Lord Ormont was one requiring the immediate attendance of a
physician. By way of accounting to Lady Charlotte for the lateness of his
call, he mentioned the summons he had delivered.

'Oh, that's why he hasn't come yet,' said she. 'We'll sit and talk till
he does come. I don't wonder if his bile has been stirred. He can't oil
me to credit what he pumps into others. His Lady Ormont! I believe in it
less than ever I did. Morsfield or no Morsfield--and now the poor wretch
has got himself pinned to the plank, like my grandson Bobby's
dragonflies, I don't want to say anything further of him--she doesn't
have much of a welcome at Steignton! If I were a woman to wager as men
do, I 'd stake a thousand pounds to five on her never stepping across the
threshold of Steignton. All very well in London, and that place he hires
up at Marlow. He respects our home. That 's how I know my brother Rowsley
still keeps a sane man. A fortune on it!--and so says Mr. Eglett. Any
reasonable person must think it. He made a fool of some Hampton-Evey at
Madrid, if he went through any ceremony--and that I doubt. But she and
old (what do they call her?) may have insisted upon the title, as much as
they could. He sixty; she under twenty, I'm told. Pagnell 's the name.
That aunt of a good-looking young woman sees a noble man of sixty
admiring her five feet seven or so--she's tall--of marketable
merchandise, and she doesn't need telling that at sixty he'll give the
world to possess the girl. But not his family honour! He stops at that.
Why? Lord Ormont 's made of pride! He'll be kind to her, he'll be
generous, he won't forsake her; she'll have her portion in his will, and
by the course of things in nature, she'll outlive him and marry, and be
happy, I hope. Only she won't enter Steignton. You remember what I say.
You 'll live when I 'm gone. It 's the thirst of her life to be mistress
of Steignton. Not she!--though Lord Ormont would have us all open our
doors to her; mine too, now he 's about it. He sets his mind on his plan,
and he forgets rights and dues--everything; he must have it as his will
dictates. That 's how he made such a capital soldier. You know the
cavalry leader he was. If they'd given him a field in Europe! His enemies
admit that. Twelve! and my clock's five minutes or more slow. What can
Rowsley be doing?'

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