Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

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

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It had the restorative effect of touching him to see his old hero in
action; whereby he was brought about to a proper modesty, so that he
really craved no more than for the mistress of this house to breathe the
liberal air of a public acknowledgment of her rightful position. Things
constituted by their buoyancy to float are remarkable for lively bobbings
when they are cast upon the waters; and such was the case with Weyburn,
until the agitation produced by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to sail away
in the society of the steadiest.

He decided that by not observing, not thinking, not feeling, about the
circumstances of the household into which Fate had thrown him, he would
best be able--probably it was the one way--to keep himself together; and
his resolution being honest all round, he succeeded in it as long as he
abstained from a very wakeful vigilance over simple eyesight. For if one
is nervously on guard to not-see, the matter starts up winged, and enters
us, and kindles the mind, and tingles through the blood; it has us as a
foe. The art of blind vision requires not only practice, but an intimate
knowledge of the arts of the traitor we carry within. Safest for him,
after all, was to lay fast hold of the particularly unimportant person he
was, both there and anywhere else. The Countess of Ormont's manner toward
him was to be read as a standing index of the course he should follow;
and he thanked her. He could not quite so sincerely thank her aunt. His
ingratitude for the sickly dose she had administered to him sprang a
doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked her aunt on account of services
performed at the British Embassy, Madrid.

Certain looks of those eyes recently, when in colloquy with my lord,
removed the towering nobleman to a shadowed landscape.

Was it solely an effect of eyes commanding light, and having every shaft
of the quiver of the rays at her disposal? Or was it a shot from a
powerful individuality issuing out of bondage to some physical oppressor
no longer master of the soul, in peril of the slipping away of the body?
Her look on him was not hate: it was larger, more terribly divine. Those
eyes had elsewhere once looked love: they had planted their object in a
throbbing Eden. The man on whom they had looked shivered over the thought
of it after years of blank division.

Rather than have those eyes to look on him their displacing unintentness,
the man on whom they had once looked love would have chosen looks of
wrath, the darts that kill--blest darts of the celestial Huntress, giving
sweet sudden cessation of pain, in the one everlasting last flash of life
with thought that the shot was hers. Oh for the 'ayava behea' of the
Merciful in splendour!

These were the outcries of the man deciding simultaneously not to
observe, not to think, not to feel, and husbanding calculations upon
storage of gain for the future. Softness held the song below. It came of
the fact that his enforced resolution, for the sake of sanity, drove his
whole reflective mind backward upon his younger days, when an Evening and
a Morning star in him greeted the bright Goddess Browny or sang adieu,
and adored beyond all golden beams the underworld whither she had sunk,
where she was hidden.

Meanwhile, the worthy dame who had dosed him was out in her carriage,
busy paying visits to distinguished ladies of the great world, with the
best of excuses for an early call, which was gossip to impart, such as
the Countess of Ormont had not yet thought of mentioning; and two or
three of them were rather amusedly interested to hear that Lord Ormont
had engaged a handsome young secretary, "under the patronage of Lady
Charlotte Eglett, devoted to sports of all kinds, immensely favoured by
both." Gossip must often have been likened to the winged insect bearing
pollen to the flowers; it fertilizes many a vacuous reverie. Those
flowers of the upper garden are not, indeed, stationary and in need of
the missionary buzzer, but if they have been in one place unmoved for one
hour, they are open to take animation from their visitors. Aminta was
pleasantly surprised next day by the receipt of a note from Mrs. Lawrence
Finchley, begging to be invited to lunch if she came, as she had a
purpose in the wish to meet my lord.

[NOTE: The remainder of 'Lord Ormont and His Aminta' is taken from an
older edition which uses single rather than double quotation marks. D.W.]

CHAPTER VIII

MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY

My lord had one of his wilful likings for Isabella Lawrence Finchley, and
he consented to the torture of an hour of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell in the
middle of the day, just to taste the favourite he welcomed at home as he
championed her abroad. The reasons were numerous and intimate why she
pleased him. He liked the woman, enjoyed the cause for battle that she
gave. Weyburn, on coming to the luncheon table, beheld a lady with the
head of a comely boy, the manner, softened in delicate feminine, of a
capital comrade. Her air of candour was her nature in her face; and it
carried a guileless roguery, a placid daring, a supersensual naughtiness,
a simplicity of repose amid the smoky reputation she created, that led
one to think the vapour calumnious or the creature privileged. That young
boy's look opened him at once; he had not to warm to her,--he flew.
Ordinarily the sweetest ladies will make us pass through cold mist and
cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before the formalities are
cleared away to grant us rights of citizenship. She was like those frank
lands where we have not to hand out a passport at the frontier and wait
for dubious inspection of it.

She prevailed with cognizant men and with the frivolous. Women were
capable of appreciating her, too: as Aminta did, despite some hinted
qualifications addressed shyly to her husband. But these were the very
matters exciting his particular esteem. He was of Lady Charlotte's mind,
in her hot zeal against injustice done to the creatures she despised; and
yet more than she applauded a woman who took up her idiot husband's
challenge to defend her good name, and cleared it, right or wrong, and
beat him down on his knees, and then started for her spell of the merry
canter over turf: an example to the English of the punishment they get
for their stupid Puritanic tyranny--sure to be followed by a national
helter-skelter down-hill headlong. And Mrs. Lawrence was not one of the
corrupt, he argued; she concealed what it was decent to conceal, without
pouting hypocritical pretences; she had merely dispensed with idle legal
formalities, in the prettiest curvetting airy wanton way, to divorce the
man who tried to divorce her, and 'whined to be forgiven when he found he
couldn't. Adderwood was ready to marry her to-morrow, if the donkey
husband would but go and bray his last. Half a dozen others were heads
off on the same course to that goal.'

That was her champion's perusal of a lady candidly asserting her right to
have breeched comrades, and paying for it in the advocacy which
compromises. She was taken to be and she was used as a weapon wherewith
to strike at our Pharisees. Women pushing out into the world for
independence, bleed heavy payments all round.

The earl's double-edged defence of her was partly a vindication of
another husband, who allowed his wife to call her friend; he was
nevertheless assured of her not being corrupt, both by his personal
knowledge of the lady, and his perception of her image in the bosom of
his wife. She did no harm there, he knew well. Although he was not a man
to put his trust in faces, as his young secretary inclined to do, Mrs.
Lawrence's look of honest boy did count among the pleadings. And somewhat
so might a government cruiser observe the intrusion of a white-sailed
yacht in protected sea-waters, where licenced trawlers are at the haul.

Talk over the table coursed as fluently as might be, with Mrs. Pagnell
for a boulder in the stream. Uninformed by malice, she led up to Lord
Adderwood's name, and perhaps more designedly spoke of Mr. Morsfield, on
whom her profound reading into the female heart of the class above her
caused her to harp, as 'a real Antinous,' that the ladies might discuss
him and Lord Ormont wax meditative.

Mrs. Lawrence pitied the patient gentleman, while asking him in her mind
who was the author of the domestic burden he had to bear.

'It reminds me I have a mission,' she said. 'There's a fencing match down
at a hall in the West, near the barracks; private and select: Soldier and
Civilian; I forget who challenged--Civilian, one judges; Soldiers are the
peaceful party. They want you to act "umpire," as they call it, on the
military side, my dear lord; and you will?--I have given my word you will
bring Lady Ormont. You will?--and not let me be confounded! Yes, and we
shall make a party. I see consent. Aminta will enjoy the switch of steel.
I love to see fencing. It rouses all that is diabolical in me.'

She sent a skimming look at the opposite.

'And I,' said he, much freshened.

'You fence?'

'Handle the foils.'

'If you must speak modestly! Are you in practice?'

'I spend in hour in Captain Chiallo's fencing rooms generally every
evening before dinner. I heard there the first outlines of the match
proposed. You are right; it was the civilian.'

'Mr. Morsfield, as I suspected.'

She smiled to herself, like one saying, Not badly managed, Mr. Morsfield!

'Italian school?' Lord Ormont inquired, with a screw of the eyelids.

'French, my lord.'

'The only school for teaching.'

'The simplest--has the most rational method. Italians are apt to be
tricky. But they were masters once, and now and then they send out a
fencer the French can't touch.'

'How would you account for it?'

'If I had to account for it, I should say, hotter blood, cool nerve,
quick brain.'

'Hum. Where are we, then?'

'We don't shine with the small sword.'

'We had men neatly pinked for their slashings in the Peninsula.'

'We've had clever Irishmen.'

'Hot enough blood! This man Morsfield--have you crossed the foils with
him?'

'Goes at it like a Spaniard; though Spaniards in Paris have been found
wary enough.'

My lord hummed. 'Fellow looks as if he would easily lose his head over
steel.'

'He can be dangerous.'

The word struck on something, and rang.

Mrs. Lawrence had a further murmur within her lips. Her travelling eye
met Aminta's and passed it.

'But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded?' said Mrs. Pagnell.

'Oh no, oh no; not in that case!' Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble
assent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy's face was mischief at
school under shadow of the master.

She said to Weyburn: 'Are you one in the list--to give our military a
lesson? They want it.'

His answer was unheard by Aminta. She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's
pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the
strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic
attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly
vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the
vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood.
Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the
wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve
that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly
on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella Lawrence
Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss feathery--wild
at his games.

My lord hummed again. 'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing. This
fellow here has had his French maitre d'armes. Show me your hand, sir.'

Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: 'The wrist wants
exercise.'

'Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails' ends; you were a bowler at
cricket.'

'Now examine the palms, my lord; I judge by the lines on the palms,' Mrs.
Pagnell remarked.

He nodded to her and rose.

Coffee had not been served, she reminded him; it was coming in, so down
he sat a yard from the table; outwardly equable, inwardly cursing coffee;
though he refused to finish a meal without his cup.

'I think the palms do betray something,' said Mrs. Lawrence; and Aminta
said: 'Everything betrays.'

'No, my dear,' Mrs. Pagnell corrected her; 'the extremities betray, and
we cannot read the centre. Is it not so, my lord?'

'It may be as you say, ma'am.'

She was disappointed in her scheme to induce a general examination of
palms, and especially his sphinx lordship's.

Weyburn controlled the tongue she so frequently tickled to an elvish
gavotte, but the humour on his face touched Mrs. Lawrence's to a subdued
good-fellow roguishness, and he felt himself invited to chat with her on
the walk for a reposeful ten minutes in Aminta's drawing-room.

Mrs. Pagnell, 'quite enjoying the company,' as she told her niece, was
dismayed to hear her niece tell her of a milliner's appointment, positive
for three o'clock; and she had written it in her head 'p.m., four
o'clock,' and she had mislaid or destroyed the milliner's note; and she
still had designs upon his lordship's palms, things to read and hint
around her off the lines. She departed.

Lord Ormont became genial; and there was no one present who did not
marvel that he should continue to decree a state of circumstances more or
less necessitating the infliction he groaned under. He was too lofty to
be questioned, even by his favourites. Mrs. Lawrence conjured the ghost
of Lady Charlotte for an answer: this being Lord Adderwood's idea.
Weyburn let his thoughts go on fermenting. Pride froze a beginning stir
in the bosom of Aminta.

Her lord could captivate a reluctant woman's bosom when he was genial. He
melted her and made her call up her bitterest pride to perform its recent
office. That might have failed; but it had support in a second letter
received from the man accounted both by Mrs. Lawrence and by Mr. Weyburn
'dangerous'; and the thought of who it was that had precipitated her to
'play little games' for the sole sake of rousing him through jealousy to
a sense of righteous duty, armed her desperately against him. She could
exult in having read the second letter right through on receipt of it,
and in remembering certain phrases; and notably in a reflection shot
across her bewildered brain by one of the dangerous man's queer mad
sentences: 'Be as iron as you like, I will strike you to heat'; and her
thought: Is there assurance of safety in a perpetual defence?--all while
she smiled on her genial lord, and signified agreement, with a smiting of
wonderment at her heart, when he alluded to a panic shout of the country
for defence, and said: 'Much crying of that kind weakens the power to
defend when the real attack comes.' Was it true?

'But say what you propose?' she asked.

Lord Ormont proposed vigilance and drill; a small degree of
self-sacrifice on the part of the population, and a look-out head in the
War Department. He proposed to have a nation of stout-braced men laughing
at the foreign bully or bandit, instead of being a pack of whimpering
women; whom he likened to the randomly protestant geese of our country
roadside, heads out a yard in a gabble of defence while they go backing.

So thereupon Aminta's notion of a resemblance in the mutual thought
subsided; she relapsed on the cushioning sentiment that she was a woman.
And--only a woman! he might exclaim, if it pleased him; though he would
never be able to say she was one of the whimpering. She, too, had the
choice to indulge in scorn of the superior man stone blind to proceedings
intimately affecting him--if he cared! One might doubt it.

Mrs. Lawrence listened to him with a mind more disengaged, and a flitting
disapproval of Aminta's unsympathetic ear, or reluctance to stimulate the
devout attention a bruised warrior should have in his tent. She did not
press on him the post of umpire. He consented--at her request, he
said--to visit the show; but refused any official position that would, it
was clearly enough implied, bring his name in any capacity whatever
before the country which had unpardonably maltreated him.

Feminine wits will be set working, when a point has been gained; and as
Mrs. Lawrence could now say she had persuaded Lord Ormont to gratify her
specially, she warmed to fancy she read him, and that she might have
managed the wounded and angry giant. Her minor intelligence, caracoling
unhampered by harassing emotions, rebuked Aminta's for not perceiving
that to win him round to whatever a woman may desire, she must be with
him, outstrip him even, along the line he chooses for himself; abuse the
country, rail at the Government, ridicule the title of English Army,
proscribe the name of India in his hearing. Little stings of jealousy are
small insect bites, and do not pique a wounded giant hardly sensible of
irritation under his huge, and as we assume for our purpose, justifiable
wrath. We have to speculate which way does the giant incline to go? and
turn him according to the indication.

Mrs. Lawrence was driven by her critic mood to think Aminta
relied--erroneously, after woman's old fashion--on the might of superb
dark eyes after having been captured. It seemed to her worse than a
beautiful woman's vanity, a childishness. But her boy's head held boy's
brains; and Lord Ormont's praise of the splendid creature's nerve when
she had to smell powder in Spain, and at bull-fights, and once at a
wrecking of their carriage down a gully on the road over the Alpujarras,
sent her away subdued, envious, happy to have kissed the cheek of the
woman who could inspire it.

CHAPTER IX.

A FLASH OF THE BRUISED WARRIOR

The winning of Lord Ormont's consent to look on at the little bout of
arms was counted an achievement; for even in his own rarefied upper
circle, where the fervid sentiments are not allowed to be seen plunging,
he had his troop of enthusiasts; and they were anxious that he should
make an appearance in public, to take what consolation a misunderstood
and injured man could get from evidence of the grateful esteem
entertained for him by a party of his countrymen, who might reasonably
expect at the same time to set eyes, at rather close quarters, on the
wonderful dark beauty, supposed a Spaniard, occasionally beheld riding
beside him. If it is possible to connect a woman with the devoutest of
their anticipations, the sons of leisure up there will do it. But, in
truth, an English world was having cause to ransack the dust-heaps for
neglected men of mettle. Our intermittent ague, known as dread of
invasion, was over the land. Twice down the columns of panic newspaper
correspondence Lord Ormont saw his name cited, with the effect on him
that such signs of national repentance approaching lodged a crabbed
sourness in his consulting-room, whether of head or breast.

He was assailed by a gusty appeal from Lady Charlotte, bidding him seize
the moment to proclaim his views while the secretary had a private
missive from her, wherein, between insistency and supplication, she
directed him to bring the subject before my lord every day, and be sure
to write out a fair copy of the epistle previous to the transmission of
it. 'Capua' was mentioned; she brought in 'a siren,' too. Her brother was
to be the soldier again--fling off silken bonds. The world might prate of
his morality; now was the hour for showing his patriotism, casting aside
his just anger, and backing his chief's opinion. 'A good chance to get
their names together.' To her brother she declared that the columns of
the leading journal were open to him--'in large type'; he was to take her
word for it; he had only to 'dictate away,' quite at his ease, just as he
talked at Olmer, and leave the bother of the scribe's business to his
aide. 'Lose no time,' she concluded; 'the country wants your ideas; let
us have your plan.'

The earl raised his shoulders, and kept his aide exclusively at the
Memoirs. Weyburn, however, read out to him, with accentuation, foolish
stuff in the recurrent correspondence of the daily sheets, and a
complacent burgess article, meant to be a summary of the controversy and
a recommendation to the country to bask in the sun of its wealth again.

'Ay, be the porker sow it's getting liker and liker to every year!' Lord
Ormont exclaimed, and sprang on his feet. 'Take a pen. Shut up that box.
We'll give 'em digestive biscuits for their weak stomachs. Invasion can't
be done, they say! I tell the doddered asses Napoleon would have been
over if Villeneuve had obeyed him to the letter. Villeneuve had a fit of
paralysis, owing to the prestige of Nelson--that 's as it happened. And
they swear at prestige, won't believe in it, because it's not fat bacon.
I tell them, after Napoleon's first battles, prestige did half his work
for him. It saved him at Essling from a plunge into the Danube; it saved
him at Moskowa; it would have marched him half over England at his first
jump on our shingle beach. But that squelch of fat citizens should be
told--to the devil with them! will they ever learn? short of a second
William!--there were eight-and-forty hours when the liberty of this
country hung wavering in the balance with those Boulogne boats. Now look
at Ulm and Austerlitz. Essling, Wagram; put the victors in those little
affairs to front our awkward squads. The French could boast a regimental
system, and chiefs who held them as the whist-player his hand of cards.
Had we a better general than the Archduke Charles? or cavalry and
artillery equal to the Hungarian? or drilled infantry numbering within
eighty thousand of the Boulogne-Wimereux camps? We had nothing but the
raw material of courage--pluck, and no science. Ask any boxing man what
he thinks of the chances. The French might have sacrificed a fleet to
land fifty thousand. Our fleet was our one chance. Any foreign General at
the head of fifty thousand trained, picked troops would risk it, and cut
an 'entrechat' for joy of the chance. We should have fought and bled and
been marched over--a field of Anglo-Saxon stubble! and Nelson riding the
Channel, undisputed lord of the waters. Heigh! by the Lord, this country
would have been like a man free to rub his skin with his hand and a
mortal disease in his blood. Are you ready? How anticipate a hostile
march on the capital, is our business.'

Striding up and down the library, Lord Ormont dropped his wrath to
dictate the practical measures for defence--detesting the cat's-cry
'defence,' he said; but the foe would bring his old growlers, and we
should have to season our handful of regulars and mob of levies, turn the
mass into troops. With plenty of food, and blows daily, Englishmen soon
get stomachs for the right way to play the game; bowl as well as bat; and
the sooner they give up the idea of shamming sturdy on a stiff hind leg,
the better for their chances. Only, it's a beastly thing to see that for
their favourite attitude;--like some dog of a fellow weak in the fists,
weaker in the midriff, at a fair, who cries, Come on, and prays his gods
you won't. All for peace, the rascal boasts himself, and he beats his
wife and kicks his curs at home. Is there any one to help him now, he
vomits gold and honours on the man he yesterday treated as a felon. Ha!

Bull the bumpkin disposed of, my lord drew leisurely back from the
foeman's landing-place, at the head of a body of serious Englishmen;
teaching them to be manageable as chess-pieces, ready as bow-strings to
let fly. Weyburn rejoiced to find himself transcribing crisp sentences,
hard on the matter, without garnish of scorn. Kent, Sussex, Surrey, all
the southern heights about London, round away to the south-western of the
Hampshire heathland, were accurately mapped in the old warrior's brain.
He knew his points of vantage by name; there were no references to
gazetteer or atlas. A chain of forts and earthworks enables us to choose
our ground, not for clinging to them, but for choice of time and place to
give battle. If we have not been playing double-dyed traitor to
ourselves, we have a preponderating field artillery; our yeomanry and
volunteer horsemen are becoming a serviceable cavalry arm; our infantry
prove that their heterogeneous composition can be welded to a handy mass,
and can stand fire and return it, and not be beaten by an acknowledged
defeat.

'That's English! yes, that's English! when they're at it,' my lord sang
out.

'To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end,' cried Weyburn; his
former enthusiasm for the hero mounting, enlightened by a reminiscence of
the precept he had hammered on the boys at Cuper's.

'They fall well. Yes, the English fall like men,' said my lord, pardoning
and embracing the cuffed nation. 'Bodies knocked over, hearts upright.
That's example; we breed Ironsides out of a sight like that. If it
weren't for a cursed feeble Government scraping 'conges' to the
taxpayer--well, so many of our good fellows would not have to fall. That
I say; for this thing is going to happen some day, mind you, sir! And I
don't want to have puncheons and hogsheads of our English blood poured
out merely to water the soil of a conquered country because English
Governments are a craven lot, not daring risk of office by offending the
taxpayer. But, on!'

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