Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

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

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Only pen in hand did he lay himself open to the enemy. In his personal
intercourse he was the last of men to be taken at a disadvantage. Lady
Charlotte was brought round to the distasteful idea of some help coming
from a legitimate adjunct at his elbow: a restraining woman--wife, it had
to be said. And to name the word wife for Thomas Rowsley, Earl of Ormont,
put up the porcupine quills she bristled with at the survey of a sex
thirsting, and likely to continue thirsting, for such honour. What woman
had she known fit to bear the name? She had assumed the judicial seat
upon the pretensions of several, and dismissed them to their limbo, after
testifying against them. Who is to know the fit one in these mines of
deception? Women of the class offering wives decline to be taken on
trial; they are boxes of puzzles--often dire surprises. Her brother knew
them well enough to shy at the box. Her brother Rowsley had a funny
pride, like a boy at a game, at the never having been caught by one among
the many he made captive. She let him have it all to himself.

He boasted it to a sister sharing the pride exultant in the cry of the
hawk, scornful of ambitions poultry, a passed finger-post to the plucked,
and really regretful that no woman had been created fit for him. When she
was not aiding with her brother, women, however contemptible for their
weakness, appeared to her as better than barn-door fowl, or vermin in
their multitudes gnawing to get at the cheese-trap. She could be humane,
even sisterly, with women whose conduct or prattle did not outrage plain
sense, just as the stickler for the privileges of her class was
large-heartedly charitable to the classes flowing in oily orderliness
round about below it--if they did so flow. Unable to read woman's
character, except upon the broadest lines as it were the spider's main
threads of its web, she read men minutely, from the fact that they were
neither mysteries nor terrors to her; but creatures of importunate
appetites, humorous objects; very manageable, if we leave the road to
their muscles, dress their wounds, smoothe their creases, plume their
vanity; and she had an unerring eye for the man to be used when a blow
was needed, methods for setting him in action likewise. She knew how much
stronger than ordinary men the woman who can put them in motion. They can
be set to serve as pieces of cannon, under compliments on their superior
powers, which were not all undervalued by her on their own merits, for
she worshipped strength. But the said, with a certain amount of truth,
that the women unaware of the advantage Society gave them (as to
mastering men) were fools.

Tender, is not a word coming near to Lady Charlotte. Thoughtful on behalf
of the poor foolish victims of men she was. She had saved some, avenged
others. It should be stated, that her notion of saving was the saving of
them from the public: she had thrown up a screen. The saving of them from
themselves was another matter--hopeless, to her thinking. How preach at a
creature on the bend of passion's rapids! One might as well read a
chapter from the Bible to delirious patients. When once a woman is taken
with the love-passion, we must treat her as bitten; hide her antics from
the public: that is the principal business. If she recovers, she resumes
her place, and horrid old Nature, who drove her to the frenzy, is
unlikely to bother or, at least, overthrow her again, unless she is one
of the detestable wantons, past compassion or consideration. In the case
reviewed, the woman has gone through fire, and is none the worse for her
experiences: worth ten times what she was, to an honest man, if men could
be got to see it. Some do. Of those men who do not, Lady Charlotte spoke
with the old family-nurse humour, which is familiar with the tricks and
frailties of the infants; and it is a knife to probe the male, while
seemingly it does the part of the napkin--pities and pats. They expect a
return of much for the little that is next to nothing. They are fall of
expectations: and of what else? They are hard bargainers.

She thought this of men; and she liked men by choice. She had old nurse's
preference for the lustier male child. The others are puling things,
easier to rear, because they bend better; and less esteemed, though they
give less trouble, rouse less care. But when it came to the duel between
the man and the woman, her sense of justice was moved to join her with
the party of her unfairly handled sisters--a strong party, if it were not
so cowardly, she had to think.

Mr. Eglett, her husband, accepted her--accepted the position into which
he naturally fell beside her, and the ideas she imposed on him; for she
never went counter to his principles. These were the fixed principles of
a very wealthy man, who abhorred debt, and was punctilious in veracity,
scrupulous in cleanliness of mind and body, devoted to the honour of his
country, the interests of his class. She respected the high landmark
possessing such principles; and she was therefore enabled to lead without
the wish to rule. As it had been between them at the beginning, so it was
now, when they were grandparents running on three lines of progeny from
two daughters and a son: they were excellent friends. Few couples can say
more. The union was good English grey--that of a prolonged November, to
which we are reconciled by occasions for the hunt and the gun. She was,
nevertheless, an impassioned woman. The feeling for her brother helped to
satisfy her heart's fires, though as little with her brother as with her
husband was she demonstrative. Lord Ormont disrelished the caresses of
relatives.

She, for her part, had so strong a sympathy on behalf of poor gentlemen
reduced to submit to any but a young woman's hug, that when, bronzed from
India, he quitted the carriage and mounted her steps at Olmer, the desire
to fling herself on his neck and breast took form in the words: "Here you
are home again, Rowsley; glad to have you." They shook hands firmly.

He remained three days at Olmer. His temper was mild, his frame of mind
bad as could be. Angry evaporations had left a residuum of solid scorn
for these "English," who rewarded soldierly services as though it were a
question of damaged packages of calico. He threatened to take the first
offer of a foreign State "not in insurrection." But clear sky was
overhead. He was the Rowsley of the old boyish delight in field sports,
reminiscences of prowlings and trappings in the woods, gropings along
water-banks, enjoyment of racy gossip. He spoke wrathfully of "one of
their newspapers" which steadily persisted in withholding from
publication every letter he wrote to it, after printing the first. And if
it printed one, why not the others?

Lady Charlotte put it on the quaintness of editors.

He had found in London, perhaps, reason for saying that he should do well
to be "out of this country" as early as he could; adding, presently, that
he meant to go, though "it broke his heart to keep away from a six
months' rest at Steignton," his Wiltshire estate.

No woman was in the field. Lady Charlotte could have submitted to the
intrusion of one of those at times wholesome victims, for the sake of the
mollification the unhappy proud thing might bring to a hero smarting
under injustice at the hands of chiefs and authorities.

He passed on to Steignton, returned to London, and left England for
Spain, as he wrote word, saying he hoped to settle at Steignton neat
year. He was absent the next year, and longer. Lady Charlotte had the
surprising news that Steignton was let, shooting and all, for five years;
and he had no appointment out of England or at home. When he came to
Olmer again he was under one of his fits of reserve, best undisturbed.
Her sympathy with a great soldier snubbed, an active man rusting, kept
her from remonstrance.

Three years later she was made meditative by the discovery of a woman's
being absolutely in the field, mistress of the field; and having been
there for a considerable period, dating from about the time when he
turned his back on England to visit a comrade-in-arms condemned by the
doctors to pass the winter in Malaga; and it was a young woman, a girl in
her teens, a handsome girl. Handsome was to be expected; Ormont bargained
for beauty. But report said the girl was very handsome, and showed
breeding: she seemed a foreigner, walked like a Goddess, sat her horse
the perfect Amazon. Rumour called her a Spaniard.

"Not if she rides!" Lady Charlotte cut that short.

Rumour had subsequently more to say. The reporter in her ear did not
confirm it, and she was resolutely deaf to a story incredible of her
brother--the man, of all men living, proudest of his name, blood,
station. So proud was he by nature, too, that he disdained to complain of
rank injustice; he maintained a cheerful front against adversity and
obloquy. And this man of complete self-command, who has every form of
noble pride, gets cajoled like a twenty-year-old yahoo at college! Do you
imagine it? To suppose of a man cherishing the name of Ormont, that he
would bestow it legally on a woman, a stranger, and imperil his race by
mixing blood with a creature of unknown lineage, was--why, of course, it
was to suppose him struck mad, and there never had been madness among the
Ormonts: they were too careful of the purity of the strain. Lady
Charlotte talked. She was excited, and ran her sentences to blanks, a
cunning way for ministering consolation to her hearing, where the
sentence intended a question, and the blank ending caught up the query
tone and carried it dwindling away to the most distant of throttled
interrogatives. She had, in this manner, only to ask,--her hearing
received the comforting answer it desired; for she could take that thin
far sound as a travelling laughter of incredulity, triumphant derision.

This meant to her--though she scarcely knew it, though the most wilful of
women declined to know it--a state of alarm. She had said of her brother
in past days that he would have his time of danger after striking sixty.
The dangerous person was to be young.

But, then, Ormont had high principles with regard to the dues to his
family. His principles could always be trusted. The dangerous young
person would have to be a person of lineage, of a certain station at
least: no need for a titled woman, only for warranted good blood. Is that
to be found certificated out of the rolls of Society? It may just
possibly be found, without certificate, however, in those muddled caverns
where the excluded intermingle. Here and there, in a peasant family, or a
small country tradesman's just raised above a peasant, honest
regenerating blood will be found. Nobles wanting refreshment from the
soil might do worse than try a slip of one of those juicy weeds;
ill-fated, sickly Royalties would be set-up striding through another
half-century with such invigoration, if it could be done for them! There
are tales. The tales are honourably discredited by the crazy
constitutions of the heirs to the diadem.

Yes, but we are speculating on the matter seriously, as though it were
one of intimate concern to the family. What is there to make us think
that Ormont would marry? Impossible to imagine him intimidated. Unlikely
that he, a practised reader of women, having so little of the woman in
him, would be melted by a wily girl; as women in the twilight situation
have often played the trick to come into the bright beams. How? They do a
desperate thing, and call it generosity, and then they appeal from it to
my lord's generosity; and so the two generosities drive off in a close
carriage with a friend and a professional landlady for the blessing of
the parson, and are legitimately united. Women have won round fools to
give way in that way. And quite right too! thought Lady Charlotte, siding
with nature and justice, as she reflected that no woman created would win
round her brother to give way in that way. He was too acute. The moment
the woman showed sign of becoming an actress, her doom was written. "Poor
idiot!" was not uncharitably inscribed by the sisterly lady on the
tombstone of hopes aimed with scarce pardonable ambition at her brother.

She blew away the rumour. Ormont, she vowed, had not entitled any woman
to share and bear his title. And this was her interpretation of the
report: he permitted (if he did permit) the woman to take his name, that
he might have a scornful fling at the world maltreating him. Besides, the
name was not published, it was not to be seen in the papers; it passed
merely among male friends, tradesmen, servants: no great harm in that.

Listen further. Here is an unknown girl: why should he marry her? A girl
consenting to the place beside a man of his handsome ripe age, is either
bought, or she is madly enamoured; she does not dictate terms. Ormont is
not of the brute buyers in that market. One sees it is the girl who leads
the dance. A girl is rarely so madly enamoured as when she falls in love
with her grandfather; she pitches herself at his head. This had not
happened for the first time in Ormont's case; and he had never proposed
marriage. Why should he do it now?

But again, if the girl has breeding to some extent, he might think it her
due that she should pass under the safeguard of his name, out of sight.

Then, so far the report is trustworthy. We blow the rumour out of belief.
A young woman there is: she is not a wife. Lady Charlotte allowed her the
fairly respectable post of Hecate of the Shades, as long as the girl was
no pretender to the place and name in the upper sphere. Her deductions
were plausible, convincing to friends shaken by her vehement manner of
coming at them. She convinced herself by means of her multitude of
reasons for not pursuing inquiry. Her brother said nothing. There was no
need for him to speak. He seemed on one or two occasions in the act of
getting himself together for the communication of a secret; and she made
ready to listen hard, with ears, eyebrows, shut month, and a gleam at the
back of her eyes, for a signification of something she would refer him to
after he had spoken. He looked at her and held his peace, or virtually
held it,--that is, he said not one word on the subject she was to have
told him she had anticipated. Lady Charlotte ascribed it to his
recollection of the quick blusher, the pained blusher, she was in her
girlhood at mention or print of the story of men and women. Who, not
having known her, could conceive it! But who could conceive that, behind
the positive, plain-dealing, downright woman of the world, there was at
times, when a nerve was touched or an old blocked path of imagination
thrown open, a sensitive youthfulness; still quick to blush as far as the
skin of a grandmother matron might show it!

CHAPTER III.

THE TUTOR

There was no counting now on Lord Ormont's presence in the British
gathering seasons, when wheatears wing across our fields or swallows
return to their eaves. He forsook the hunt to roam the Continent, one of
the vulgar band of tourists, honouring town only when Mayflies had flown,
and London's indiscriminate people went about without their volatile
heads.

Lady Charlotte put these changed conditions upon the behaviour of the
military authorities to her brother, saying that the wonder was he did
not shake the dust of his country from his feet. In her wise head she
rejoiced to think he was not the donkey she sketched for admiration; and
she was partly consoled, or played at the taking of a comfort needed in
her perpetual struggle with a phantom of a fact, by the reflection that a
young woman on his arm would tense him to feel himself more at home
abroad. Her mind's habit of living warmly beside him in separation was
vexed by the fixed intrusion of a female third person, who checked the
run of intimate chatter, especially damped the fancied talk over early
days--of which the creature was ignorant; and her propinquity to him
arrested or broke the dialogue Lady Charlotte invented and pressed to
renew. But a wife, while letting him be seen, would have insisted on
appropriating the thought of him--all his days, past as well as present.
An impassioned sister's jealousy preferred that it should not be a wife
reigning to dispute her share of her brother in imagination.

Then came a rumour, telling of him as engaged upon the composition of his
Memoirs.

Lady Charlotte's impulsive outcry: "Writing them?" signified her grounds
for alarm.

Happily, Memoirs are not among the silly deeds done in a moment; they
were somewhere ahead and over the hills: a band of brigands rather than a
homely shining mansion, it was true; but distant; and a principal
question shrieked to know whether he was composing them for publication.
She could look forward with a girl's pleasure to the perusal of them in
manuscript, in a woody nook, in a fervour of partizanship, easily
avoiding sight of errors, grammatical or moral. She chafed at the
possible printing and publishing of them. That would be equivalent to an
exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run across London--brilliant in
himself, spotty in the offence. Published Memoirs indicate the end of a
man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end; and at a period of Lord
Ormont's life when the denial of it should thunder. They are his final
chapter, making mummy of the grand figure they wrap in the printed stuff.
They are virtually his apology. Can those knowing Lord Ormont hear him
apologize? But it is a craven apology if we stoop to expound: we are seen
as pleading our case before the public. Call it by any name you please,
and under any attitude, it is that. And set aside the writing: it may be
perfect; the act is the degradation. It is a rousing of swarms. His
friends and the public will see the proudest nobleman of his day,
pleading his case in mangled English, in the headlong of an out-poured,
undrilled, rabble vocabulary, doubling the ridicule by his
imperturbability over the ridicule he excites: he who is no more
ridiculous, cried the partizan sister, conjuring up the scene, not an ace
more ridiculous, than a judge of assize calling himself miserable sinner
on Sunday before the parson, after he has very properly condemned half a
score of weekday miserable sinners to penal servitude or the rope. Nobody
laughs at the judge. Everybody will be laughing at the scornful man down
half-way to his knee-cape with a stutter of an apology for having done
his duty to his country, after stigmatizing numbers for inability or
ill-will to do it. But Ormont's weapon is the sword, not a pen! Lady
Charlotte hunted her simile till the dogs had it or it ran to earth.

She struck at the conclusion, that the young woman had been persuading
him. An adoring young woman is the person to imagine and induce to the
commission of such folly. "What do you think? You have seen her, you
say?" she asked of a man she welcomed for his flavour of the worldling's
fine bile.

Lord Adderwood made answer: "She may be having a hand in it. She
worships, and that is your way of pulling gods to the ground."

"Does she understand good English?"

"Speaks it."

"Can she write?"

"I have never had a letter from her."

"You tell me Morsfield admires the woman--would marry her to-morrow, if
he could get her."

"He would go through the ceremony Ormont has performed, I do not doubt."

"I don't doubt all of you are ready. She doesn't encourage one?"

"On the contrary, all."

"She's clever. This has been going on for now seven years, and, as far as
I know, she has my brother fast."

"She may have done the clever trick of having him fast from the
beginning."

"She'd like people to think it."

"She has an aunt to advertise it."

"Ormont can't swallow the woman, I'm told."

"Trying, if one is bound to get her down!"

"Boasts of the connection everywhere she's admitted, Randeller says."

"Randeller procures the admission to various parti-coloured places."

"She must be a blinking moll-owl! And I ask any sane Christian or
Pagan--proof enough!--would my brother Rowsley let his wife visit those
places, those people? Monstrous to have the suspicion that he would, you
know him! Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, for example. I say nothing to hurt the
poor woman; I back her against her imbecile of a husband. He brings a
charge he can't support; she punishes him by taking three years' lease of
independence and kicks up the grass all over the paddock, and then comes
cuckoo, barking his name abroad to have her home again. You can win the
shyest filly to corn at last. She goes, and he digests ruefully the
hotch-potch of a dish the woman brings him. Only the world spies a
side-head at her, husbanded or not, though the main fault was his, and
she had a right to insist that he should be sure of his charge before he
smacked her in the face with it before the world. In dealing with a
woman, a man commonly prudent--put aside chivalry, justice, and the
rest--should bind himself to disbelieve what he can't prove. Otherwise,
let him expect his whipping, with or without ornament. My opinion is,
Lawrence Finchley had no solid foundation for his charge, except his
being an imbecile. She wasn't one of the adventurous women to jump the
bars,--the gate had to be pushed open, and he did it. There she is; and I
ask you, would my brother Rowsley let his wife be intimate with her? And
there are others. And, sauf votre respect, the men--Morsfield for one,
Randeller another!"

"They have a wholesome dread of the lion."

"If they smell a chance with the lion's bone--it's the sweeter for being
the lion's. These metaphors carry us off our ground. I must let these
Ormont Memoirs run and upset him, if they get to print. I've only to
oppose, printed they'll be. The same if I say a word of this woman, he
marries her to-morrow morning. You speak of my driving men. Why can't I
drive Ormont? Because I'm too fond of him. There you have the secret of
the subjection of women: they can hold their own, and a bit more, when
they've no enemy beating inside."

"Hearts!--ah, well, it's possible. I don't say no; I've not discovered
them," Lord Adderwood observed.

They are rarely discovered in the haunts he frequented.

Her allusion to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley rapped him smartly, and she
admired his impassiveness under the stroke. Such a spectacle was one of
her pleasures.

Lady Charlotte mentioned incidentally her want of a tutor for her
grandson Leo during the winter holidays. He suggested an application to
the clergyman of her parish. She was at feud with the Rev. Stephen
Hampton-Evey, and would not take, she said, a man to be a bootblack in
her backyard or a woman a scullery-wench in her kitchen upon his
recommendation. She described the person of Mr. Hampton-Evey, his manner
of speech, general opinions, professional doctrines; rolled him into a
ball and bowled him, with a shrug for lamentation, over the decay of the
good old order of manly English Protestant clergymen, who drank their
port, bothered nobody about belief, abstained from preaching their
sermon, if requested; were capital fellows in the hunting-field, too; for
if they came, they had the spur to hunt in the devil's despite. Now we
are going to have a kind of bitter, clawed, forked female, in vestments
over breeches. "How do you like that bundling of the sexes?"

Lord Adderwood liked the lines of division to be strictly and invitingly
definite. He was thinking, as he reviewed the frittered appearance of the
Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey in Lady Charlotte's hinds, of the possibility
that Lord Ormont, who was reputed to fear nobody, feared her. In which
case, the handsome young woman passing among his associates as the pseudo
Lady Ormont might be the real one after all, and Isabella Lawrence
Finchley prove right in the warning she gave to dogs of chase.

The tutor required by Lady Charlotte was found for her by Mr. Abner.
Their correspondence on the subject filled the space of a week, and then
the gentleman hired to drive a creaky wheel came down from London to
Olmer, arriving late in the evening.

Lady Charlotte's blunt "Oh!" when he entered her room and bowed upon the
announcement of his name, was caused by an instantaneous perception and
refection that it would be prudent to keep her grand-daughter Philippa,
aged between seventeen and eighteen, out of his way.

"You are friend of Mr. Abner's, are you?"

He was not disconcerted. He replied, in an assured and pleasant voice, "I
have hardly the pretension to be called a friend, madam."

"Are you a Jew?"

Her abruptness knocked something like a laugh almost out of him, but he
restrained the signs of it.

"I am not."

"You wouldn't be ashamed to tell me you were one if you were?"

"Not at all."

"You like the Jews?"

"Those I know I like."

"Not many Christians have the good sense and the good heart of Arthur
Abner. Now go and eat. Come back to me when you've done. I hope you are
hungry. Ask the butler for the wine you prefer."

She had not anticipated the enrolment in her household of a man so young
and good-looking. These were qualifications for Cupid's business, which
his unstrained self-possession accentuated to a note of danger to her
chicks, because she liked the taste of him. Her grand-daughter Philippa
was in the girl's waxen age; another, Beatrice, was coming to it. Both
were under her care; and she was a vigilant woman, with an intuition and
a knowledge of sex. She did not blame Arthur Abner for sending her a
good-looking young man; she had only a general idea that tutors in a
house, and even visiting tutors, should smell of dust and wear a snuffy
appearance. The conditions will not always insure the tutors from
foolishness, as her girl's experience reminded her, but they protect the
girl.

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