Lord Ormont and his Aminta, Complete

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

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Weyburn sent Lady Charlotte glowing words of the composition in progress.

They worked through a day, and a second day--talked of nothing else in
the intervals. Explanatory answers were vouchsafed to Aminta's modest
inquiries at Finch, as she pictured scenes of smoke, dust and blood from
the overpowering plain masculine lines they drew, terrible in bluntness.
The third morning Lord Ormont had map and book to verify distances and
attempt a scale of heights, take names of estates, farms, parishes,
commons, patches of woodland. Weyburn wrote his fair copy on folio paper,
seven-and-thirty pages. He read it aloud to the author on the afternoon
of the fourth day, with the satisfaction in his voice that he felt. My
lord listened and nodded. The plan for the defence of England's heart was
a good plan.

He signed to have the manuscript handed to him. A fortified London secure
of the Thames for abundant supplies, well able to breathe within
earthworks extending along the southern hills, was clearly shown to stand
the loss of two big battles on the Sussex weald or more East to
North-east, if fortune willed it.

He rose from his chair, paced some steps, with bent head, came back
thoughtfully, lifted the manuscript sheets for another examination. Then
he stooped to the fire, spreading the edges unevenly, so that they caught
flame. Weyburn spied at him. It was to all appearance the doing of a man
who had intended it and brought it to the predetermined conclusion.

'About time for you to be off for your turn at Chiallo's,' our country's
defender remarked, after tossing the last half-burnt lump under the grate
and shovelling at it.

'I will go, my lord,' said Weyburn--and he was glad to go.

He went, calculated his term of service under Lord Ormont. He was young,
not a philosopher. Waste of anything was abhorrent to a nature pointed at
store of daily gain, if it were only the gain in a new or a freshened
idea; and time lost, work lost, good counsel to the nation lost,
represented horrid vacuity to him, and called up the counter
demonstration of a dance down the halls of madness, for proof that we
should, at least, have jolly motion of limbs there before Perdition
struck the great gong. Ay, and we should be twirling with a fair form on
the arm: woman and man; as it ought to be; twirling downward, true, but
together. Such a companionship has a wisdom to raise it above the title
of madness. Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist
burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a
curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won't forgive an injury, nurses
rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can't--to use the old
schoolboy words--take a licking!

These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by
Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of
which they were the sign. He criticized impulsively, and fancied he did
no more, and was not doing much though, in fact, criticism is the end of
worship; the Brutus blow at that Imperial but mortal bosom.

The person criticized was manifest. Who was the woman he twirled with?
She was unfeatured, undistinguished, one of the sex, or all the sex: the
sex to be shunned as our deadly sapper of gain, unless we find the chosen
one to super-terrestrialize it and us, and trebly outdo our gift of our
whole self for her.

She was indistinguishable, absolutely unknown; yet she murmured, or
seemed to murmur--for there was no sound--a complaint of Lord Ormont. And
she, or some soundless mouth of woman, said he was a splendid military
hero, a chivalrous man, a man of inflexible honour; but had no
understanding of how to treat a woman, or belief in her having equal life
with him on earth.

She was put aside rather petulantly, and she took her seat out of the
whirl with submission. Thinking she certainly was not Browny, whom he
would have known among a million, he tried to quit the hall, and he
twirled afresh, necessarily not alone; it is the unpardonable offence
both to the Graces and the Great Mother for man to valse alone. She
twirled on his arm, uninvited; accepted, as in the course of nature;
hugged, under dictate of the nature of the man steeled against her by the
counting of gain, and going now at desperation's pace, by very means of
those defensive locked steam-valves meant to preserve him from this
madness,--for the words of the red-lipped mate, where there were no
words, went through him like a music when the bow is over the viol,
sweeping imagination, and they said her life was wasting.

Was not she a priceless manuscript cast to the flames? Her lord had been
at some trouble to win her. Or his great fame and his shadowed fortunes
had won her. He took her for his own, and he would not call her his own.
He comported himself with absolute, with kindly deference to the lady
whose more than vital spark he let the gossips puff at and blur. He
praised her courage, visibly admired her person, admitted her in private
to be his equal, degraded her in public. Could anything account for the
behaviour of so manly and noble a gentleman?--Rhetoric made the attempt,
and Weyburn gave up the windy business.

Discovering that his fair partner of the wasting life was--he struggled
to quench the revelation--Aminta, he stopped the dance. If there was no
gain in whirling fancifully with one of the sex, a spin of a minute with
her was downright bankruptcy.

He was young, full of blood; his heart led him away from the door Lord
Ormont had exposed; at which a little patient unemotional watchfulness
might have intimated to him something besides the simple source of the
old hero's complex chapter of conduct. As it was, Weyburn did see the
rancour of a raw wound in operation. But he moralized and disapproved;
telling himself, truly enough, that so it would not have been with him;
instead of sounding at my lord's character, and his condition of the
unjustly neglected great soldier, for the purpose of asking how that raw
wound would affect an injured veteran, who compressed, almost repressed,
the roar of Achilles, though his military bright name was to him his
Briseis.

CHAPTER X

A SHORT PASSAGE IN THE GAME PLAYED BY TWO

Politest of men in the domestic circle and everywhere among women, Lord
Ormont was annoyed to find himself often gruffish behind the tie of his
cravat. Indeed, the temper of our eminently serene will feel the strain
of a doldrum-dulness that is goaded to activity by a nettle. The
forbearance he carried farther than most could do was tempted to kick,
under pressure of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell. Without much blaming Aminta, on
whose behalf he submitted to it, and whose resolution to fix in England
had brought it to this crisis, he magnanimously proposed to the Fair
Enemy he forced her to be, and liked to picture her as being, a month in
Paris.

Aminta declined it for herself; after six or more years of travelling,
she wished to settle, and know her country, she said: a repetition
remark, wide of the point, and indicatory to the game of Pull she was
again playing beneath her smooth visage, unaware that she had the wariest
of partners at the game.

'But go you--do, I beg,' she entreated. 'It will give you new
impressions; and I cannot bear to tie you down here.'

'How you can consent to be tied down here, is the wonder to me!' said he.
'When we travelled through the year, just visited England and were off
again, we were driving on our own road. Vienna in April and May--what do
you say? You like the reviews there, and the dances, concerts, Zigeuner
bands, military Bohemian bands. Or Egypt to-morrow, if you like--though
you can't be permitted to swim in the Nile, as you wanted. Come, Xarifa,
speak it. I go to exile without you. Say you come.'

She smiled firmly. The name of her honeymoon days was not a cajolery to
her.

His name had been that of the Christian Romancero Knight Durandarte, and
she gave it to him, to be on the proper level with him, while she still
declined.

'Well, but just a month in Paris! There's nothing doing here. And we both
like the French theatre.'

'London will soon be filling.'

'Well, but--' He stopped; for the filling of London did really concern
her, in the game of Pull she was covertly playing with him. 'You seem to
have caught the fever of this London; . . . no bands . . . . no reviews
. . . . Low comedy acting.' He muttered his objections to London.

'The society of people speaking one's own tongue, add that,' she ventured
to say.

'You know you are ten times more Spanish than English. Moorish, if you
like.'

'The slave of the gallant Christian Knight, converted, baptized, and
blissful. Oh, I know. But now we are settled in England, I have a wish to
study English society.'

'Disappointing, I assure you;--dinners heavy, dancing boorish, intrigue a
blind-man's-buff. We've been over it all before!'

'We have.'

'Admired, I dare say. You won't be understood.'

'I like my countrymen.'

'The women have good looks--of the ungarnished kind. The men are louts.'

'They are brave.'

'You're to see their fencing. You'll own a little goes a long way.'

'I think it will amuse me.'

'So I thought when I gave the nod to Isabella your friend.'

'You like her?'

'You, too.'

'One fancies she would make an encouraging second in a duel.'

'I will remember . . . when I call you out.'

'Oh, my dear lord, you have dozens to choose from leave me my one if we
are to enter the lists.'

'We are, it seems; unless you consent to take the run to Paris. You are
to say Tom or Rowsley.'

'The former, I can never feel at home in saying; Rowsley is Lady
Charlotte's name for you.'

The name of Lady Charlotte was an invitation to the conflict between
them. He passed it, and said 'Durandarte runs a mile on the mouth, and
the Coriolanus of their newspapers helps a stage-player to make lantern
jaws. Neither of them comes well from the lips of my girl. After seven
years she should have hit on a nickname, of none of the Christian suit. I
am not "at home" either with "my lord." However, you send me off to Paris
alone; and you'll be alone and dull here in this London. Incomprehensible
to me why!'

'We are both wondering?' said Aminta.

'You 're handsomer than when I met you first--by heaven you are!'

She flushed her dark brown-red late-sunset. 'Brunes are exceptional in
England.'

'Thousands admiring you, of course! I know, my love, I have a jewel.'

She asked him: 'What are jewels for?' and he replied, 'To excite
cupidity.'

'When they 're shut in a box?'

'Ware burglars! But this one is not shut up. She shuts herself up. And up
go her shoulders! Decide to be out of it, and come to Paris for some life
for a month. No? It's positive? When do you expect your little school
friend?'

'After Easter. Aunt will be away.'

'Your little friend likes the country. I'll go to my house agents. If
there 's a country house open on the upper Thames, you can have swimming,
boating, botanizing . . .'

He saw her throat swallow. But as he was offering agreeable things he
chose to not understand how he was to be compassionate.

'Steignton?' she said, and did her cause no good by saying it feebly.

His look of a bygone awake-in-sleep old look, drearily known to her, was
like a strip of sunlight on a fortress wall. It signified, Is the poor
soul pushing me back to that again?

She compelled herself to say: 'Your tenant there?'

'Matter of business . . . me and my tenant,' he remarked. 'The man pays
punctually.'

'The lease has expired.'

'Not quite. You are misinformed.'

'At Easter.'

'Ah! Question of renewing.'

'You were fond of the place.'

'I was fond of the place? Thank Blazes, I'm not what I was!' He paced
about. 'There's not a corner of the place that doesn't screw an eye at
me, because I had a dream there. La gloire!'

The rest he muttered. 'These English!' was heard. Aminta said: 'Am I
never to see Steignton?'

Lord Ormont invoked the Powers. He could not really give answer to this
female talk of the eternities.

'Beaten I can never be,' he said, with instinctive indulgence to the
greater creature. 'But down there at Steignton, I should be haunted by a
young donkey swearing himself the fellow I grew up out of. No doubt of
that. I don't like him the better for it. Steignton grimaces at a cavalry
officer fool enough at his own risks and penalties to help save India for
the English. Maunderers! You can't tell--they don't know themselves--what
they mean. Except that they 're ready to take anything you hand 'em, and
then pipe to your swinging. I served them well--and at my age, in full
activity, they condemn me to sit and gape!'

He stopped his pacing and gazed on the glass of the window.

'Would you wish me not to be present at this fencing?' said Aminta.

'Dear me! by all means, go, my love,' he replied.

Any step his Fair Enemy won in the secret game Pull between them, she was
undisputedly to keep.

She suggested: 'It might lead to unpleasantness.'

'Of what sort?'

'You ask?'

He emphasized: 'Have you forgotten? Something happened after that last
ball at Challis's Rooms. Their women as well as their men must be careful
not to cross me.'

Aminta had confused notions of her being planted in hostile territory,
and torn and knitted, trumpeted to the world as mended, but not
honourably mended in a way to stop corridor scandal. The ball at
Challis's Rooms had been one of her steps won: it had necessitated a
requirement for the lion in her lord to exhibit himself, and she had
gained nothing with Society by the step, owing to her poor performance of
the lion's mate. She had, in other words, shunned the countenance of some
scattered people pityingly ready to support her against the deadly
passive party known to be Lady Charlotte's.

She let her lord go; thinking that once more had she striven and gained
nothing: which was true of all their direct engagements. And she had
failed because of her being only a woman! Mr. Morsfield was foolishly
wrong in declaring that she, as a woman, had reserves of strength. He was
perhaps of Lady Charlotte's mind with regard to the existence of a
Countess of Ormont, or he would know her to be incredibly cowardly.
Cowardly under the boast of pride, too; well, then, say, if you like, a
woman!

Yet this mere shallow woman would not hesitate to meet the terrible Lady
Charlotte at any instant, on any terms: and what are we to think of a
soldier, hero, lion, dreading to tell her to her face that the persecuted
woman is his wife!

'Am I a woman they can be ashamed of?' she asked, and did not seek the
answer at her mirror. She was in her bedroom, and she put out a hand to
her jewel-box, fingered it, found it locked, and abandoned her idle
project. A gentleman was 'dangerous.' She had not found him so. He had
the reputation, perhaps, because he was earnest. Not so very many men are
earnest. She called to recollection how ludicrously practical he was in
the thick of his passion. His third letter (addressed to the Countess of
Ormont--whom he manifestly did not or would not take to be the veritable
Countess--and there was much to plead for his error), or was it his
fourth?--the letters were a tropical hail-storm: third or fourth, he
broke off a streaked thunderpeal, to capitulate his worldly possessions,
give the names and degrees of kinship of his relatives, the exact amount
of the rent-roll of his Yorkshire estates, of his funded property.

Silly man! but not contemptible. He proposed everything in honour, from
his view of it.

Whether in his third, fourth, or fifth letter. . . . How many had come?
She drew the key from her purse, and opened a drawer. The key of the
jewel-box was applied to the lock.

Mr. Morsfield had sent her six flaming letters. He not only took no
precautions, he boasted that he hailed the consequences of discovery.
Six!

She lifted a pen: it had to be done.

He was briefly informed that he disturbed her peace. She begged he would
abstain from any further writing to her.

The severity was in the brevity. The contrast of her style and his
appeared harsh. But it belonged to the position.

Having with one dash of the pen scribbled her three lines, she slipped
the letter into her pocket. That was done, and it had to be done; it
ought to have been done before. How simple it was when one contemplated
it as actually done! Aminta made the motion of a hand along the paper,
just a flourish. Soon after, her head dropped back on the chair, and her
eyes shut, she took in breath through parted lips. The brief lines of
writing had cut away a lump of her vitality.

CHAPTER XI

THE SECRETARY TAKEN AS AN ANTIDOTE

Dusty wayfarers along a white high-road who know of a bubbling little
spring across a stile, on the woodland borders of deep grass, are hailed
to sit aside it awhile: and Aminta's feverishness was cooled by now and
then a quiet conversation with the secretary ambitious to become a
school-master. Lady Charlotte liked him, so did her lord; Mrs. Lawrence
had chatted with him freshly, as it was refreshing to recollect; nobody
thought him a stunted growth.

In Aminta's realized recollections, amid the existing troubles of her
mind, the charge against him grew paler, and she could no longer quite
think that the young hero transformed into a Mr. Cuper had deceived her,
though he had done it--much as if she had assisted at the planting and
watched aforetime the promise of a noble tree, to find it, after an
interval of years, pollarded--a short trunk shooting out a shock of
small, slim, stiff branches; dwarfed and disgraced; serviceable perhaps;
not ludicrous or ugly, certainly, taking it for a pollard. And he was a
cool well-spring to talk with. He, supposed once to be a passionate
nature, scorned passion as a madness; he smiled in his merciful
executioner's way at the high society, of which her aim was to pass for
one among the butterflies or dragonflies; he had lost his patriotism; he
labelled our English classes the skimmers, the gorgers, the grubbers, and
stigmatized them with a friendly air; and uttered words of tolerance only
for farmers and surgeons and schoolmasters. But that was quite incidental
in the humorous run of his talk, diverting to hear while it lasted. He
had, of course, a right to his ideas.

No longer concerned in contesting them, she drank at the water of this
plain earth-well, and hoped she preferred it to fiery draughts, though it
was flattish, or, say, flavourless. In the other there was excess of
flavour--or, no, spice it had to be called. The young schoolmaster's
world seemed a sunless place, the world of traders bargaining for gain,
without a glimmer of the rich generosity to venture life, give it, dare
all for native land--or for the one beloved. Love pressed its claim on
heroical generosity, and instantly it suffused her, as an earth under
flush of sky. The one beloved! She had not known love; she was in her
five-and-twentieth year, and love was not only unknown to her, it was
shut away from her by the lock of a key that opened on no estimable
worldly advantage in exchange, but opened on a dreary, clouded round,
such as she had used to fancy it must be to the beautiful creamy
circus-horse of the tossing mane and flowing tail and superb step. She
was admired; she was just as much doomed to a round of paces, denied the
glorious fling afield, her nature's food. Hitherto she would have been
shamefaced as a boy in forming the word 'love': now, believing it denied
to her for good and all--for ever and ever--her bosom held and uttered
the word. She saw the word, the nothing but the word that it was, and she
envisaged it, for the purpose of saying adieu to it--good-bye even to the
poor empty word.

This condition was attributable to a gentleman's wild rageing with the
word, into which he had not infused the mystic spirit. He poured hot wine
and spiced. If not the spirit of love, it was really the passion of the
man. Her tremors now and again in the reading of his later letters
humiliated her, in the knowledge that they came of no response to him,
but from the temporary base acquiescence; which is, with women, a
terrible perception of the gulf of their unsatisfied nature.

The secretary, cheerful at his work, was found for just the opening of a
door. Sometimes she hesitated--to disturb him, she said to herself,--and
went up-stairs or out visiting. He protested that he could work on and
talk too. She was able to amuse her lord with some of his ideas. He had a
stock of them, all his own.

Ideas, new-born and naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time to
the humanity they visit to help uplift, it from the state of beast. In
the England of that, period original or unknown ideas were a smoking
brimstone to the nose, dread Arabian afrites, invisible in the air,
jumping out of vases, armed for the slaughter of the venerable and the
cherished, the ivy-clad and celestially haloed. They carried the
dishevelled Maenad's torch. A step with them, and we were on the
Phlegethon waters of the French Revolution. For a publication of simple
ideas men were seized, tried at law, mulcted, imprisoned, and not
pardoned after the term of punishment; their names were branded: the
horned elect butted at them; he who alluded to them offered them up,
wittingly or not, to be damned in the nose of the public for an execrable
brimstone stench.

Lord Ormont broke through his shouts or grunts at Aminta's report of the
secretary's ideas on various topics, particularly the proposal that the
lords of the land should head the land in a revolutionary effort to make
law of his crazy, top-heavy notions, with a self-satisfied ejaculation:
'He has not favoured me with any of these puffballs of his.'

The deduction was, that the author sagaciously considered them adapted
for the ear of a woman; they were womanish--i.e. flighty, gossamer. To
the host of males, all ideas are female until they are made facts.

This idea, proposing it to our aristocracy to take up his other ideas, or
reject them on pain of the forfeiture of their caste and headship with
the generations to follow, and a total displacing of them in history by
certain notorious, frowzy, scrubby pamphleteers and publishers, Lord
Ormont thought amazingly comical. English nobles heading the weavers,
cobblers, and barbers of England! He laughed, but he said, 'Charlotte
would listen to that.'

The dread, high-sitting Lady Charlotte was, in his lofty thinking, a
woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense, if it happened to strike a
particular set of bells hanging in her cranium. She patronized
blasphemous and traitorous law-breakers, just to keep up the pluck of the
people, not with a notion of maintaining our English aristocracy eminent
in history.

Lady Charlotte, however, would be the foremost to swoop down on the
secretary's ideas about the education of women.

On that subject, Aminta said she did not know what to think.

Now, if a man states the matter he thinks, and a woman does but listen,
whether inclining to agree or not, a perceptible stamp is left on soft
wax. Lord Ormont told her so, with cavalier kindness.

She confessed 'she did not know what to think,' when the secretary
proposed the education and collocation of boys and girls in one group,
never separated, declaring it the only way for them to learn to know and
to respect one another. They were to learn together, play together, have
matches together, as a scheme for stopping the mischief between them.

'But, my dear girl, don't you see, the devilry was intended by Nature.
Life would be the coldest of dishes without it.' And as for mixing the
breeched and petticoated in those young days--'I can't enter into it,' my
lord considerately said. 'All I can tell you is, I know boys.'

Aminta persisted in looking thoughtful. 'Things are bad, as they are
now,' she said.

'Always were--always will be. They were intended to be, if we are to call
them bad. Botched mendings will only make them worse.'

'Which side suffers?'

'Both; and both like it. One side must be beaten at any game. It's off
and on, pretty equal--except in the sets where one side wears thick
boots. Is this fellow for starting a mixed sexes school? Funny mothers!'

'I suppose--' Aminta said, and checked the supposition. 'The mothers
would not leave their girls unless they were confident . . . ?'

'There's to be a female head of the female department? He reckons on
finding a woman as big a fool as himself? A fair bit of reckoning enough.
He's clever at the pen. He doesn't bother me with his ideas; now and then
I 've caught a sound of his bee buzzing.'

The secretary was left undisturbed at his labours for several days.

He would have been gladdened by a brighter look of her eyes at her next
coming. They were introspective and beamless. She had an odd leaning to
the talk upon Cuper's boys. He was puzzled by what he might have classed,
in any other woman, as a want of delicacy, when she recurred to incidents
which were red patches of the school time, and had clearly lost their
glow for her.

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