Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

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

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As you perceive, he was drawing swiftly to the vortex of the fools, and
round and round he went, lucky to float.

His view of the business of the schoolmaster plucked him from the whirl.
She despised it; he upheld it. He stuck to his view, finding their
antagonism on the subject wholesome for him. All that she succeeded in
doing was to rob it of the aurora colour clothing everything on which
Matey Weyburn set his aim. Her contempt of it, whether as a profession in
itself or as one suitable to the former young enthusiast for arms,
dwarfed it to appear like the starved plants under Greenland skies. But
those are of a sturdy genus; they mean to live; they live, perforce, of
the right to live; they will prove their right in a coming season, when
some one steps near and wonders at them, and from more closely observing;
gets to understand, learning that the significance and the charm of earth
will be as well shown by them as by her tropical fair flaunters or the
tenderly-nurtured exotics.

An unopened coffer of things to be said in defence of--no, on behalf
of--no, in honour of the Profession of Schoolmaster, perhaps to the
convincing of Aminta, Lady Ormont, was glanced at; a sentence or two
leapt out and stepped forward, and had to retire. He preferred to the
fathering of tricky, windy phrases, the being undervalued--even by her.
He was taught to see again how Rhetoric haunts, and Rhetoric bedevils,
the vindication of the clouded, especially in the case of a disesteemed
Profession requiring one to raise it and impose it upon the antagonistic
senses for the bewildering of the mind. One has to sound it loudly; there
is no treating it, as in the advocacy of the cases of flesh and blood,
with the masterly pathos of designed simplicity. And Weyburn was Cuper's
Matey Weyburn still in his loathing of artifice to raise emotion,
loathing of the affected, the stilted, the trumpet of speech--always
excepting school-exercises in the tongues, the unmasking of a Catiline,
the address of a General, Athenian or other, to troops.

He kept his coffer shut; and, for a consequence, he saw the contents as
an avenue of blossom leading to vistas of infinite harvest.

She was Lady Ormont: Aminta shared the title of his old hero! He refused
to speculate upon how it had come to pass, and let the curtain hang,
though dramas and romances, with the miracles involved in them, were
agitated by a transient glimpse at the curtain.

Well! and he hoped to be a member of the Profession she despised: hoped
it with all his heart. And one good effect of his giving his heart to the
hope was, that he could hold from speculating and from feeling, even from
pausing to wonder at the most wonderful turn of events. Blessed
antagonism drove him to be braced by thoughts upon the hardest of the
schoolmaster's tasks--bright winter thoughts, prescribing to him
satisfaction with a faith in the sowing, which may be his only reaping.
Away fly the boys in sheaves. After his toil with them, to instruct,
restrain, animate, point their minds, they leave him, they plunge into
the world and are gone. Will he see them again? It is a flickering
perhaps. To sustain his belief that he has done serviceable work, he must
be sore of his having charged them with good matter. How can the man do
it, if, during his term of apprenticeship, he has allowed himself to
dally here and there, down to moony dreamings over inscrutable beautiful
eyes of a married lady; for the sole reason that he meets her
unexpectedly, after an exchange of letters with her in long-past days at
school, when she was an inexperienced girl, who knew not what she vowed,
and he a flighty-headed youngster, crying out to be the arrow of any bow
that was handy? Yea, she was once that girl, named Browny by the boys.

Temptation threw warm light on the memory, and very artfully, by
conjuring up the faces, cries, characters, all the fun of the boys. There
was no possibility of forgetting her image in those days; he had,
therefore, to live with it and to live near the grown woman--Time's
present answer to the old riddle. It seemed to him, that instead of
sorting Lord Ormont's papers, he ought to be at sharp exercise. According
to his prescript, sharp exercise of lungs and limbs is a man's moral aid
against temptation. He knew it as the one trusty antidote for him, who
was otherwise the vessel of a temperament pushing to mutiny. Certainly it
is the best philosophy youth can pretend to practise; and Lord Ormont
kept him from it! Worse than that, the slips and sheets of paper in the
dispatch-box were not an exercise of the mind even; there was nothing to
grapple with--no diversion; criticism passed by them indulgently, if not
benevolently.

Quite apart from the subject inscribed on them, Weyburn had now and again
a blow at the breast, of untraceable origin. For he was well enough aware
that the old days when Browny imagined him a hero, in drinking his
praises of a brighter, were drowned. They were dead; but here was she the
bride of the proved hero. His praises might have helped in causing her
willingness--devotional readiness, he could fancy--to yield her hand.
Perhaps at the moment when the hero was penning some of the Indian slips
here, the boy at school was preparing Aminta; but he could not be
responsible for a sacrifice of the kind suggested by Lady Charlotte. And
no, there had been no such sacrifice, although Lord Ormont's inexplicable
treatment of his young countess, under cover of his notorious reputation
with women, conduced to the suspicion.

While the vagrant in Weyburn was thus engaged, his criticism of the
soldier-lord's field-English on paper let the stuff go tolerantly
unexamined, but with a degree of literary contempt at heart for the
writer who had that woman-scented reputation and expressed himself so
poorly. The sentiment was outside of reason. We do, nevertheless, expect
our Don Juans to deliver their minds a trifle elegantly; if not in
classic English, on paper; and when we find one of them inflicting
cruelty, as it appears, and the victim is a young woman, a beautiful
young woman, she pleads to us poetically against the bearish sentences of
his composition. We acknowledge, however, that a mere sentiment,
entertained possibly by us alone, should not be permitted to condemn him
unheard.

Lady Ormont was not seen again. After luncheon at a solitary table, the
secretary worked till winter's lamps were lit; and then shone freedom,
with assurance to him that he would escape from the miry mental ditch he
had been floundering in since Aminta revealed herself. Sunday was the
glorious day to follow, with a cleansing bath of a walk along the
southern hills; homely English scenery to show to a German friend, one of
his "Company." Half a dozen good lads were pledged to the walk; bearing
which in view, it could be felt that this nonsensical puzzlement over his
relations to the moods and tenses of a married woman would be bounced out
of recollection before nightfall. The landscape given off any of the airy
hills of Surrey would suffice to do it.

A lady stood among her boxes below, as he descended the stairs to cross
the hall. He knew her for the person Lady Charlotte called "the woman's
aunt," whom Lord Ormont could not endure--a forgiven old enemy, Mrs.
Nargett Pagnell.

He saluted. She stared, and corrected her incivility with "Ah, yes," and
a formal smile.

If not accidentally delayed on her journey, she had been needlessly the
cause why Lord Ormont hugged his Club during the morning and afternoon.
Weyburn was pushed to think of the matter by remembrance of his foregone
resentment at her having withdrawn Aminta from Miss Vincent's three days
earlier than the holiday time. The resentment was over; but a germ of it
must have sprang from the dust to prompt the kindling leap his memory
took, out of all due connection; like a lightning among the crags. It
struck Aminta smartly. He called to mind the conversation at table
yesterday. Had she played on Lord Ormont's dislike of the aunt to drive
him forth for some purpose of her own? If so, the little trick had been
done with deplorable spontaneity or adeptness of usage. What was the
purpose?--to converse with an old acquaintance, undisturbed by Lord
Ormont and her aunt? Neatly done, supposing the surmise correct.

But what was there in the purpose? He sifted rapidly for the gist of the
conversation; reviewed the manner of it, the words, the sound they had,
the feelings they touched; then owned that the question could not be
answered. Owning, further, that the recurrence of these idiotic
speculations, feelings, questions, wrote him down as both dull fellow and
impertinent, he was unabled to restore Aminta to the queenly place she
took above the schoolmaster, who was very soon laughing at his fever or
flash of the afternoon. The day had brought a great surprise, nothing
more. Twenty minutes of fencing in the a salle d'armes of an Italian
captain braced him to health, and shifted scenes of other loves, lighter
loves, following the Browny days--not to be called loves; in fact; hardly
beyond inclinations. Nevertheless, inclinations are an infidelity. To
meet a married woman, and be mooning over her because she gave him her
eyes and her handwriting when a girl, was enough to rouse an honest
fellow's laugh at himself, in the contemplation of his intermediate
amorous vagabondage. Had he ever known the veritable passion after Browny
sank from his ken? Let it be confessed, never. His first love was his
only true love, despite one shuddering episode, oddly humiliating to
recollect, though he had not behaved badly. So, then, by right of his
passion, thus did eternal justice rule it: that Browny belonged, to Matey
Weyburn, Aminta to Lord Ormont. Aminta was a lady blooming in the flesh,
Browny was the past's pale phantom; for which reason he could call her
his own, without harm done to any one, and with his usual appetite for
dinner, breakfast, lunch, whatever the meal supplied by the hour.

It would somewhat alarmingly have got to Mr. Weyburn's conscience through
a disturbance of his balance, telling him that he was on a perilous road,
if his relish for food had been blunted. He had his axiom on the subject,
and he was wrong in the general instance, for the appetites of rogues and
ogres are not known to fail. As regarded himself, he was eminently right;
and he could apply it to boys also, to all young people--the unlaunched,
he called them. He counted himself among the launched, no doubt, and had
breasted seas; but the boy was alive, a trencherman lad, in the coming
schoolmaster, and told him profitable facts concerning his condition;
besides throwing a luminous ray on the arcane of our elusive youthful. If
they have no stout zest for eating, put Query against them.

His customary enjoyment of dinner convinced Mr. Weyburn that he had not
brooded morbidly over his phantom Browny, and could meet Aminta, Countess
of Ormont, on the next occasion with the sentiments proper to a common
official. Did she not set him a commendable example? He admired her for
not concealing her disdain of the aspirant schoolmaster, quite
comprehending, by sympathy, why the woman should reproach the girl who
had worshipped heroes, if this was a full-grown specimen; and the reply
of the shamed girl, that in her ignorance she could not know better. He
spared the girl, but he laughed at the woman he commended, laughed at
himself.

Aminta's humour was being stirred about the same time. She and her aunt
were at the dinner-table in the absence of my lord. The dinner had passed
with the stiff dialogue peculiar to couples under supervision of their
inferiors; and, as soon as the room was clear, she had asked her aunt,
touching the secretary: "Have you seen him?"

Mrs. Nargett Pagnell's answer could have been amusing only to one whose
intimate knowledge of her found it characteristically salt; for she was a
lady of speech addressed ever directly or roundabout to the chief point
of business between herself and her hearer, and the more she was brief,
oblique, far-shooting, the more comically intelligible she was to her
niece. She bent her head to signify that she had seen the secretary, and
struck the table with both hands, exclaiming:

"Well, to be sure, Lord Ormont!"

Their discussion, before they descended the stairs to dinner, concerned
his lordship's extraordinary indifference to the thronging of handsome
young men around his young countess.

Here, the implication ran, is one established in the house.

Aminta's thoughts could be phrased: "Yes, that is true, for one part of
it."

As for the other part, the ascent of a Phoebus Apollo, with his golden
bow and quiver off the fairest of Eastern horizon skies, followed
suddenly by the sight of him toppling over in Mr. Cuper's long-skirted
brown coat, with spectacles and cane, is an image that hardly exceeds the
degradation she conceived. It was past ludicrous; yet admitted of no
woefulness, nothing soothingly pathetic. It smothered and barked at the
dreams of her blooming spring of life, to which her mind had latterly
been turning back, for an escape from sour, one may say cynical,
reflections, the present issue of a beautiful young woman's first savour
of battle with the world.

CHAPTER VI.

IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR

Up in Aminta's amber dressing-room; Mrs. Nargett Pagnell alluded sadly to
the long month of separation, and begged her niece to let her have in
plain words an exact statement of the present situation; adding, "Items
will do." Thereupon she slipped into prattle and held the field.

She was the known, worthy, good, intolerable woman whom the burgess turns
out for his world in regiments, that do and look and all but step alike;
and they mean well, and have conventional worships and material
aspirations, and very peculiar occult refinements, with a blind head and
a haphazard gleam of acuteness, impressive to acquaintances, convincing
themselves that they impersonate sagacity. She had said this, done that;
and it was, by proof, Providence consenting, the right thing. A niece,
written down in her girlhood, because of her eyes and her striking air
and excellent deportment, as mate for a nobleman, marries, him before she
is out of her teens. "I said, She shall be a countess." A countess she
is. Providence does not comply with our predictions in order to stultify
us. Admitting the position of affairs for the moment as extraordinary, we
are bound by what has happened to expect they will be conformable in the
end. Temporarily warped, we should say of them.

She could point to the reason: it was Lord Ormont's blunt
misunderstanding of her character. The burgess's daughter was refining to
an appreciation of the exquisite so rapidly that she could criticize
patricians. My lord had never forgiven her for correcting him in his
pronunciation of her name by marriage. Singular indeed; but men, even
great men, men of title, are so, some of them, whom you could least
suspect of their being so. He would speak the "g" in Nargett, and he,
declined--after a remonstrance he declined--to pass Pagnell under the
cedilla. Lord Ormont spoke the name like a man hating it, or an English
rustic: "Nargett Pagnell," instead, of the soft and elegant "Naryett
Pagnell," the only true way of speaking it; and she had always taken that
pronunciation of her name for a test of people's breeding. The expression
of his lordship's countenance under correction was memorable. Naturally,
in those honeymoony days, the young Countess of Ormont sided with her
husband the earl; she declared that her aunt had never dreamed of the
cedilla before the expedition to Spain. When, for example, Alfred Nargett
Pagnell had a laughing remark, which Aminta in her childhood must have
heard: "We rhyme with spaniel!"

That was the secret of Lord Ormont's prepossession against Aminta's aunt;
and who can tell? perhaps of much of his behaviour to the beautiful young
wife he at least admired, sincerely admired, though he caused her to hang
her head--cast a cloud on the head so dear to him!

Otherwise there was no interpreting his lordship. To think of herself as
personally disliked by a nobleman stupefied Mrs. Pagnell, from her just
expectation of reciprocal dealings in high society; for she confessed
herself a fly to a title. Where is the shame, if titles are created to
attract? Elsewhere than in that upper circle, we may anticipate hard
bargains; the widow of a solicitor had not to learn it. But when a
distinguished member and ornament of the chosen seats above blew cold
upon their gesticulatory devotee, and was besides ungrateful; she was
more than commonly assured of his being, as she called him, "a sphinx."
His behaviour to his legally wedded wife confirmed the charge.

She checked her flow to resume the question. "So, then, where are we now?
He allows you liberally for pin-money in addition to your own small
independent income. Satisfaction with that would warrant him to suppose
his whole duty done by you."

"We are where we were, aunty; the month has made no change," said Aminta
in languor.

"And you as patient as ever?"

"I am supposed to have everything a woman can require."

"Can he possibly think it? And I have to warn you, child, that lawyers
are not so absolving as the world is with some of the ladies Lord Ormont
allows you to call your friends. I have been hearing--it is not mere airy
tales one hears from lawyers about cases in Courts of Law. Tighten your
lips as you like; I say nothing to condemn or reflect on Mrs. Lawrence
Finchley. I have had my eyes a little opened, that is all. Oh, I know my
niece Aminta, when it's a friend to stand by; but our position--thanks to
your inscrutable lord and master--demands of us the utmost
scrupulousness, or it soon becomes a whirl and scandal flying about, and
those lawyers picking up and putting together. I have had a difficulty to
persuade them! . . . and my own niece! whom I saw married at the British
Embassy in Madrid, as I take good care to tell everybody; for it was my
doing; I am the responsible person! and by an English Protestant
clergyman, to all appearance able to walk erect in and out of any of
these excellent new Life Assurance offices they are starting for the
benefit of widows and orphans, and deceased within six days of the
ceremony--if ceremony one may call the hasty affair in those foreign
places. My dear, the instant I heard it I had a presentiment, 'All has
gone well up to now.' I remember murmuring the words. Then your letter,
received in that smelly Barcelona: Lord Ormont was carrying you off to
Granada--a dream of my infancy! It may not have been his manoeuvre, but
it was the beginning of his manoeuvres."

Aminta shuddered. "And tra-la-la, and castanets, and my Cid! my Cid! and
the Alhambra, the Sierra Nevada, and ay di me, Alhama; and Boabdil el
Chico and el Zagal and Fray Antonio Agapida!" She flung out the rattle,
yawning, with her arms up and her head back, in the posture of a woman
wounded. One of her aunt's chance shots had traversed her breast,
flashing at her the time, the scene, the husband, intensest sunniness on
sword-edges of shade,--and now the wedded riddle; illusion dropping mask,
romance in its anatomy, cold English mist. Ah, what a background is the
present when we have the past to the fore! That filmy past is diaphanous
on heaving ribs.

She smiled at the wide-eyed little gossip. "Don't speak of manaoeuvres,
dear aunt. And we'll leave Granada to the poets. I'm tired. Talk of our
own people, on your side and my father's, and as much as you please of
the Pagnell-Pagnells, they refresh me. Do they go on marrying?"

"Why, my child, how could they go on without it?"

Aminta pressed her hands at her eyelids. "Oh, me!" she sighed, feeling
the tear come with a sting from checked laughter. "But there are
marriages, aunty, that don't go on, though Protestant clergymen
officiated. Leave them unnoticed, I have really nothing to tell."

"You have not heard anything of Lady Eglett?"

"Lady Charlotte Eglett? No syllable. Or wait--my lord's secretary was
with her at Olmer; approved by her, I have to suppose."

"There, my dear, I say again I do dread that woman, if she can make a man
like Lord Ormont afraid of her. And no doubt she is of our old
aristocracy. And they tell me she is coarse in her conversation--like a
man. Lawyers tell me she is never happy but in litigation. Years back, I
am given to understand, she did not set so particularly good an example.
Lawyers hear next to everything. I am told she lifted her horsewhip on a
gentleman once, and then put her horse at him and rode him down. You will
say, the sister of your husband. No; not to make my niece a countess,
would I, if I had known the kind of family! Then one asks, Is she half as
much afraid of him? In that case, no wonder they have given up meeting.
Was formerly one of the Keepsake Beauties. Well, Lady Eglett, and Aminta,
Countess of Ormont, will be in that Peerage, as they call it, let her
only have her dues. My dear, I would--if I ever did--swear the woman is
jealous."

"Of me, aunty!"

"I say more; I say again, it would be a good thing for somebody if
somebody had his twitch of jealousy. Wives may be too meek. Cases and
cases my poor Alfred read to me, where an ill-behaving man was brought to
his senses by a clever little shuffle of the cards, and by the most
innocent of wives. A kind of poison to him, of course; but there are
poisons that cure. It might come into the courts; and the nearer the
proofs the happier he in withdrawing from his charge and effecting a
reconciliation. Short of guilt, of course. Men are so strange. Imagine
now, if a handsome young woman were known to be admired rather more than
enough by a good-looking gentleman near about her own age. Oh, I've no
patience with, the man for causing us to think and scheme! Only there are
men who won't be set right unless we do. My husband used to say, change
is such a capital thing in life's jogtrot; that men find it refreshing if
we now and then, reverse the order of our pillion-riding for them. A
spiritless woman in a wife is what they bear least of all. Anything
rather. Is Mr. Morsfield haunting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley's house as
usual?"

Aminta's cheeks unrolled their deep damask rose at the abrupt intrusion
of the name. "I meet him there."

"Lord Adderwood, Sir John Randeller; and the rest?"

"Two or three times a week."

"And the lady, wife of the captain, really a Lady Fair--Mrs. . . . month
of May: so I have to get at it."

"She may be seen there."

"Really a contrast, when you two are together! As to reputation, there is
an exchange of colours. Those lawyers hold the keys of the great world,
and a naughty world it is, I fear--with exceptions, who are the salt, but
don't taste so much. I can't help enjoying the people at Mrs. Lawrence
Finchley's. I like to feel I can amuse them, as they do me. One puzzles
for what they say--in somebody's absence, I mean. They must take Lord
Ormont for a perfect sphinx; unless they are so silly as to think they
may despise him, or suppose him indifferent. Oh, that upper class! It's a
garden, and we can't help pushing to enter it; and fair flowers, indeed,
but serpents too, like the tropics. It tries us more than anything else
in the world--well, just as good eating tries the constitution. He ought
to know it and feel it, and give his wife all the protection of his name,
instead of--not that he denies: I have brought him to that point; he
cannot deny it with me. But not to present her--to shun the Court; not to
introduce her to his family, to appear ashamed of her! My darling Aminta,
a month of absence for reflection on your legally-wedded husband's
conduct increases my astonishment. For usually men old enough to be the
grandfathers of their wives--"

"Oh, pray, aunty, pray, pray!" Aminta cried, and her body writhed. "No
more to-night. You mean well, I am sure. Let us wait. I shall sleep,
perhaps, if I go to bed early. I dare say I am spiritless--not worth more
than I get. I gave him the lead altogether; he keeps it. In everything
else he is kind; I have all the luxuries--enough to loathe them. Kiss me
and say good night."

Aminta made it imperative by rising. Her aunt stood up, kissed, and
exclaimed, "I tell you you are a queenly creature, not to be treated as
any puny trollop of a handmaid. And although he is a great nobleman, he
is not to presume to behave any longer, my dear, as if your family had no
claim on his consideration. My husband, Alfred Pagnell, would have laid
that before him pretty quick. You are the child of the Farrells and the
Solers, both old families; on your father's side you are linked with the
oldest nobility in Europe. It flushes one to think of it! Your
grandmother, marrying Captain Algernon Farrell, was the legitimate
daughter of a Grandee of Spain; as I have told Lord Ormont often, and I
defy him to equal that for a romantic marriage in the annals of his
house, or boast of bluer blood. Again, the Solers--"

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