Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v1

G >> George Meredith >> Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v1

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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.

"Your name is Weyburn; your father was an officer in the army, killed on
the battle-field, Arthur Abner tells me," was her somewhat severely-toned
greeting to the young tutor on his presenting himself the second time.

It had the sound of the preliminary of an indictment read in a Court of
Law.

"My father died of his wounds in hospital," he said.

"Why did you not enter the service?"

"Want of an income, my lady."

"Bad look-out. Army or Navy for gentlemen, if they stick to the school
of honour. The sedentary professions corrupt men: bad for the blood.
Those monastery monks found that out. They had to birch the devil out of
them three times a day and half the night, howling like full-moon dogs
all through their lives, till the flesh was off them. That was their
exercise, if they were for holiness. My brother, Lord Ormont, has never
been still in his youth or his manhood. See him now. He counts his
years by scores; and be has about as many wrinkles as you when you're
smiling. His cheeks are as red as yours now you're blushing. You ought
to have left off that trick by this time. It's well enough in a boy."

Against her will she was drawn to the young man, and her consciousness of
it plucked her back to caution with occasional jerks--quaint alternations
of the familiar and the harshly formal, in the stranger's experience.

"If I have your permission, Lady Charlotte," said he, "the reason why I
mount red a little--if I do it--is, you mention Lord Ormont, and I have
followed his career since I was the youngest of boys."

"Good to begin with the worship of a hero. He can't sham, can't deceive
--not even a woman; and you're old enough to understand the temptation:
they're so silly. All the more, it's a point of honour with a man of
honour to shield her from herself. When it's a girl--"

The young man's eyebrows bent.

"Chapters of stories, if you want to hear them," she resumed; "and I can
vouch some of them true. Lord Ormont was never one of the wolves in a
hood. Whatever you hear of him; you may be sure he laid no trap. He's
just the opposite to the hypocrite; so hypocrites date him. I've heard
them called high-priests of decency. Then we choose to be indecent and
honest, if there's a God to worship. Fear, they're in the habit of
saying--we are to fear God. A man here, a Rev. Hampton-Evey, you'll hear
him harp on 'fear God.' Hypocrites may: honest sinners have no fear.
And see the cause: they don't deceive themselves--that is why. Do you
think we call love what we fear? They love God, or they disbelieve.
And if they believe in Him, they know they can't conceal anything from
Him. Honesty means piety: we can't be one without the other. And here
are people--parsons--who talk of dying as going into the presence of our
Maker, as if He had been all the while outside the world He created.
Those parsons, I told the Rev. Hampton-Evey here, make infidels--they
make a puzzle of their God. I'm for a rational Deity. They preach up
a supernatural eccentric. I don't say all: I've heard good sermons,
and met sound-headed clergymen--not like that gaping Hampton-Evey,
when a woman tells him she thinks for herself. We have him sitting on
our pariah. A free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon; but a female
free-thinker is one of Satan's concubines. He took it upon himself to
reproach me--flung his glove at my feet, because I sent a cheque to a
poor man punished for blasphemy. The man had the right to his opinions,
and he had the courage of his opinions. I doubt whether the Rev.
Hampton-Evey would go with a willing heart to prison for his. All the
better for him if he comes head-up out of a trial. But now see: all
these parsons and judges and mobcaps insist upon conformity. A man with
common manly courage comes before them, and he's cast in penalties. Yet
we know from history, in England, France, Germany, that the time of
nonconformity brought out the manhood of the nation. Now, I say, a
nation, to be a nation, must have men--I mean brave men. That's what
those hosts of female men combine to try to stifle. They won't succeed,
but we shall want a war to teach the country the value of courage. You
catch what I am driving at? They accuse my brother of immorality because
he makes no pretence to be better than the men of his class."

Weyburn's eyelids fluttered. Her kite-like ascent into the general, with
the sudden drop on her choice morsel, switched his humour at the moment
when he was respectfully considering that her dartings and gyrations had
motive as mach as the flight of the swallow for food. They had meaning;
and here was one of the great ladies of the land who thought for herself,
and was thoughtful for the country. If she came down like a bird winged,
it was her love of her brother that did it. His look at Lady Charlotte
glistened.

She raised her defences against the basilisk fascinating Philippa; and
with a vow to keep them apart and deprive him of his chance, she relapsed
upon the stiff frigidity which was not natural to her. It lasted long
enough to put him on his guard under the seductions of a noble dame's
condescension to a familiar tone. But, as he was too well bred to show
the change in his mind for her change of manner, and as she was the
sister of his boyhood's hero, and could be full of flavour, his eyes
retained something of their sparkle. They were ready to lighten again,
in the way peculiar to him, when she, quite forgetting her defence of
Philippa, disburdened herself of her antagonisms and enthusiasms, her
hates and her loves all round the neighbourhood and over the world, won
to confidential communication by this young man's face. She confessed as
much, had he been guided to perceive it. She said, "Arthur Abner's a
reader of men: I can trust his word about them."

Presently, it is true, she added: "No man's to be relied upon where
there's a woman." She refused her implicit trust to saints--"if ever a
man really was a saint before he was canonized!"

Her penetrative instinct of sex kindled the scepticism. Sex she saw at
play everywhere, dogging the conduct of affairs, directing them at times;
she saw it as the animation of nature, senselessly stigmatized,
hypocritically concealed, active in our thoughts where not in our deeds;
and the declining of the decorous to see it, or admit the sight, got them
abhorred bad names from her, after a touch at the deadly poison coming of
that blindness, or blindfoldedness, and a grimly melancholy shrug over
the cruelties resulting--cruelties chiefly affecting women.

"You're too young to have thought upon such matters," she said, for a
finish to them.

That was hardly true.

"I have thought," said Weyburn, and his head fell to reckoning of the
small sum of his thoughts upon them.

He was pulled up instantly for close inspection by the judge. "What is
your age?"

"I am in my twenty-sixth year."

"You have been among men: have you studied women?"

"Not largely, Lady Charlotte. Opportunity has been wanting at French and
German colleges."

"It's only a large and a close and a pretty long study of them that can
teach you anything; and you must get rid of the poetry about them, and be
sure you haven't lost it altogether. That's what is called the golden
mean. I'm not for the golden mean in every instance; it's a way of
exhorting to brutal selfishness. I grant it's the right way in those
questions. You'll learn in time." Her scanning gaze at the young man's
face drove him along an avenue of his very possible chances of learning.
"Certain to. But don't tell me that at your age you have thought about
women. You may say you have felt. A young man's feelings about women
are better reading for him six or a dozen chapters farther on. Then he
can sift and strain. It won't be perfectly clear, but it will do."

Mr. Eglett hereupon threw the door open, and ushered in Master Leo.

Lady Charlotte noticed that the tutor shook the boy's hand offhandedly,
with not a whit of the usual obtrusive geniality, and merely dropped him
a word. Soon after, he was talking to Mr. Eglett of games at home and
games abroad. Poor fun over there! We head the world in field games, at
all events. He drew a picture of a foreigner of his acquaintance looking
on at football. On the other hand, French boys and German, having passed
a year or two at an English school, get the liking for our games, and do
a lot of good when they go home. The things we learn from them are to
dance, to sing, and to study:--they are more in earnest than we about
study. They teach us at fencing too. The tutor praised fencing as an
exercise and an accomplishment. He had large reserves of eulogy for
boxing. He knew the qualities of the famous bruisers of the time, cited
fisty names, whose owners were then to be seen all over an admiring land
in prints; in the glorious defensive-offensive attitude, England's own--
Touch me, if you dare! with bullish, or bull-dog, or oak-bole fronts for
the blow, handsome to pugilistic eyes.

The young tutor had lighted on a pet theme of Mr. Eglett's--the excelling
virtues of the practice of pugilism in Old England, and the school of
honour that it is to our lower population. "Fifty times better for them
than cock-fighting," he exclaimed, admitting that he could be an
interested spectator at a ring or the pit cock-fighting or ratting.

"Ratting seems to have more excuse," the tutor said, and made no sign of
a liking for either of those popular pastimes. As he disapproved without
squeamishness, the impulsive but sharply critical woman close by nodded;
and she gave him his dues for being no courtier.

Leo had to be off to bed. The tutor spared him any struggle over
the shaking of hands, and saying, "Goodnight, Leo," continued the
conversation. The boy went away, visibly relieved of the cramp that
seizes on a youngster at the formalities pertaining to these chilly
and fateful introductions.

"What do you think of the look of him?" Mr. Eglett asked.

The tutor had not appeared to inspect the boy. "Big head," he remarked.
"Yes, Leo won't want pushing at books when he's once in harness. He will
have six weeks of me. It's more than the yeomanry get for drill per
annum, and they're expected to know something of a soldier's duties.
There's a chance of putting him on the right road in certain matters.
We'll walk, or ride, or skate, if the frost holds to-morrow: no lessons
the first day."

"Do as you think fit," said lady Charlotte.

The one defect she saw in the tutor did not concern his pupil. And a
girl, if hit, would be unable to see that this tutor, judged as a man,
was to some extent despicable for accepting tutorships, and, one might
say, dishonouring the family of a soldier of rank and distinction, by
coming into houses at the back way, with footing enough to air his graces
when once established there. He ought to have knocked at every door in
the kingdom for help, rather than accept tutorships, and disturb
households (or providently-minded mistresses of them) with all sorts of
probably groundless apprehensions, founded naturally enough on the good
looks he intrudes.

This tutor committed the offence next day of showing he had a firm and
easy seat in the saddle, which increased Lady Charlotte's liking for him
and irritated her watchful forecasts. She rode with the young man after
lunch, "to show him the country," and gave him a taste of what he took
for her variable moods. He misjudged her. Like a swimmer going through
warm and cold springs of certain lake waters, he thought her a capricious
ladyship, dangerous for intimacy, alluring to the deeps and gripping with
cramps.

She pushed him to defend his choice of the tutor's profession.

"Think you understand boys?" she caught up his words; "you can't. You
can humour them, as you humour women. They're just as hard to read. And
don't tell me a young man can read women. Boys and women go on their
instincts. Egyptologists can spell you hieroglyphs; they'd be stumped,
as Leo would say, to read a spider out of an ink-pot over a sheet of
paper."

"One gets to interpret by degrees, by observing their habits," the tutor
said, and vexed her with a towering complacency under provocation that
went some way further to melt the woman she was, while her knowledge of
the softness warned her still more of the duty of playing dragon round
such a young man in her house. The despot is alert at every issue, to
every chance; and she was one, the wakefuller for being benevolent; her
mind had no sleep by day.

For a month she subjected Mr. Matthew Weyburn to the microscope of her
observation and the probe of her instinct. He proved that he could
manage without cajoling a boy. The practical fact established, by
agreement between herself and the unobservant gentleman who was her
husband, Lady Charlotte allowed her meditations to drop an indifferent
glance at the speculative views upon education entertained by this young
tutor. To her mind they were flighty; but she liked him, and as her
feelings dictated to her mind when she had not to think for others, she
spoke of his views toleratingly, almost with an implied approval, after
passing them through the form of burlesque to which she customarily
treated things failing to waft her enthusiasm. In regard to Philippa, he
behaved well: he bestowed more of his attention on Beatrice, nearer Leo's
age, in talk about games and story-books and battles; nothing that he did
when the girls were present betrayed the strutting plumed cock, bent to
attract, or the sickly reptile, thirsty for a prize above him and meaning
to have it, like Satan in Eden. Still, of course, he could not help his
being a handsome fellow, having a vivid face and eyes transparent,
whether blue or green, to flame of the brain exciting them; and that
becomes a picture in the dream of girls--a picture creating the dream
often. And Philippa had asked her grandmother, very ingenuously indeed,
with a most natural candour, why "they saw so little of Leo's hero."
Simple female child!

However, there was no harm done, and Lady Charlotte liked him. She liked
few. Forthwith, in the manner of her particular head, a restless head,
she fell to work at combinations.

Thus:--he is a nice young fellow, well bred, no cringing courtier,
accomplished, good at classics, fairish at mathematics, a scholar in
French, German, Italian, with a shrewd knowledge of the different races,
and with sound English sentiment too, and the capacity for writing good
English, although in those views of his the ideas are unusual, therefore
un-English, profoundly so. But his intentions are patriotic; they would
not displease Lord Ormont. He has a worship of Lord Ormont. All we can
say on behalf of an untried inferior is in that,--only the valiant admire
devotedly. Well, he can write grammatical, readable English. What if
Lord Ormont were to take him as a secretary while the Memoirs are in
hand? He might help to chasten the sentences laughed at by those
newspapers. Or he might, being a terrible critic of writing, and funny
about styles, put it in an absurd light, that would cause the Memoirs to
be tossed into the fire. He was made for the post of secretary! The
young man's good looks would be out of harm's way then. If any sprig of
womankind come across him there, it will, at any rate, not be a girl.
Women must take care of themselves. Only the fools among them run to
mischief in the case of a handsome young fellow.

Supposing a certain woman to be one of the fools? Lady Charlotte merely
suggested it in the dashing current of her meditations--did not strike it
out interrogatively. The woman would be a fine specimen among her class;
that was all. For the favourite of Lord Ormont to stoop from her place
beside him--ay, but women do; heroes have had the woeful experience of
that fact. First we see them aiming themselves at their hero; next they
are shooting an eye at the handsome man. The thirst of nature comes
after that of their fancy, in conventional women. Sick of the hero
tried, tired of their place in the market, no longer ashamed to
acknowledge it, they begin to consult their own taste for beauty--they
have it quite as much as the men have it; and when their worshipped
figure of manliness, in a romantic sombrero, is a threadbare giant,
showing bruises, they sink on their inherent desire for a dance with the
handsome man. And the really handsome man is the most extraordinary of
the rarities. No wonder that when he appears he slays them, walks over
them like a pestilence!

This young Weyburn would touch the fancy of a woman of a romantic turn.
Supposing her enthusiastic in her worship of the hero, after a number of
years--for anything may be imagined where a woman is concerned--why,
another enthusiasm for the same object, and on the part of a stranger, a
stranger with effective eyes, rapidly leads to sympathy. Suppose the
reverse--the enthusiasm gone to dust, or become a wheezy old bellows, as
it does where there's disparity of age, or it frequently does--then the
sympathy with a good-looking stranger comes more rapidly still.

These were Lady Charlotte's glances right and left--idle flights of the
eye of a mounted Amazon across hedges at the canter along the main road
of her scheme; which was to do a service to the young man she liked and
to the brother she loved, for the marked advantage of both equally;
perhaps for the chance of a little gossip to follow about that tenacious
woman by whom her brother was held hard and fast, kept away from friends
and relatives, isolated, insomuch as to have given up living on his
estate--the old home!--because he would not disgrace it or incur odium by
taking her there.

In consequence of Lord Ormont's resistance to pressure from her on two or
three occasions, she chose to nurse and be governed by the maxim for
herself: Never propose a plan to him, if you want it adopted. That was
her way of harmlessly solacing love's vindictiveness for an injury.

She sent Arthur Abner a letter, thanking him for his recommendation of
young Mr. Weyburn, stating her benevolent wishes as regarded the young
man and "those hateful Memoirs," requesting that her name should not be
mentioned in the affair, because she was anxious on all grounds to have
the proposal accepted by her brother. She could have vowed to herself
that she wrote sincerely.

"He must want a secretary. He would be shy at an offer of one from me.
Do you hint it, if you get a chance. You gave us Mr. Weyburn, and Mr.
Eglett and I like him. Ormont would too, I am certain. You have obliged
him before; this will be better than anything you have done for us. It
will stop the Memoirs, or else give them a polish. Your young friend has
made me laugh over stuff taken for literature until we put on our
spectacles. Leo jogs along in harness now, and may do some work at
school yet."

Having posted her letter, she left the issue to chance, as we may when
conscience is easy. An answer came the day before Weyburn's departure.
Arthur Abner had met Lord Ormont in the street, had spoken of the rumour
of Memoirs promised to the world, hinted at the possible need for a
secretary; "Lord Ormont would appoint a day to see Mr. Weyburn."

Lady Charlotte considered that to be as good as the engagement.

"So we keep you in the family," she said. "And now look here: you ought
to know my brother's ways, if you're going to serve him. You'll have to
guess at half of everything he tells you; he'll expect you to know the
whole. There's no man so secret. Why? He fears nothing; I can't tell
why. And what his mouth shuts on, he exposes as if in his hand. Of
course he's proud, and good reason. You'll see when you mustn't offend.
A lady's in the house--I hear of it. She takes his name, they say. She
may be a respectable woman--I've heard no scandal. We have to hear of a
Lady Ormont out of Society! We have to suppose it means there's not to
be a real one. He can't marry if he has allowed her to go about bearing
his name. She has a fool of an aunt, I'm told; as often in the house as
not. Good proof of his fondness for the woman, if he swallows half a
year of the aunt! Well, you won't, unless you've mere man's eyes, be
able to help seeing him trying to hide what he suffers from that aunt.
He bears it, like the man he is; but woe to another betraying it! She
has a tongue that goes like the reel of a rod, with a pike bolting out of
the shallows to the snag he knows--to wind round it and defy you to pull.
Often my brother Rowsley and I have fished the day long, and in hard
weather, and brought home a basket; and he boasted of it more than of
anything he has ever done since. That woman holds him away from me now.
I say no harm of her. She may be right enough from her point of view; or
it mayn't be owing to her. I wouldn't blame a woman. Well, but my point
with you is, you swallow the woman's aunt--the lady's aunt--without
betraying you suffer at all. Lord Ormont has eyes of an eagle for a
speck above the surface. All the more because the aunt is a gabbling
idiot does he--I say it seeing it--fire up to defend her from the sneer
of the lip or half a sign of it! No, you would be an your guard; I can
trust you. Of course you'd behave like the gentleman you are where any
kind of woman's concerned; but you mustn't let a shadow be seen, think
what you may. The woman--lady--calling herself Lady Ormont,--poor woman,
I should do the same in her place,--she has a hard game to play; I have
to be for my family: she has manners, I'm told; holds herself properly.
She fancies she brings him up to the altar, in the end, by decent
behaviour. That's a delusion. It's creditable to her, only she can't
understand the claims of the family upon a man like my brother. When you
have spare time--'kick-ups,' he need to call it, writing to me from
school--come here; you're welcome, after three days' notice. I shall be
glad to see you again. You've gone some way to make a man of Leo."

He liked her well: he promised to come. She was a sinewy bite of the
gentle sex, but she had much flavour, and she gave nourishment.

"Let me have three days' notice," she repeated.

"Not less, Lady Charlotte," said he.

Weyburn received intimation from Arthur Abner of the likely day Lord
Ormont would appoint, and he left Olmer for London to hold himself in
readiness. Lady Charlotte and Leo drove him to meet the coach.
Philippa, so strangely baffled in her natural curiosity, begged for a
seat; she begged to be allowed to ride. Petitions were rejected. She
stood at the window seeing "Grandmama's tutor," as she named him, carried
off by grandmama. Her nature was avenged on her tyrant grandmama: it
brought up almost to her tongue thoughts which would have remained
subterranean, under control of her habit of mind, or the nursery's
modesty, if she had been less tyrannically treated. They were
subterranean thoughts, Nature's original, such as the sense of injustice
will rouse in young women; and they are better unstirred, for they ripen
girls over-rapidly when they are made to revolve near the surface. It
flashed on the girl why she had been treated tyrannically.

"Grandmama has good taste in tutors," was all that she said while the
thoughts rolled over.

CHAPTER IV.

RECOGNITION

Our applicant for the post of secretary entered the street of Lord
Ormont's London house, to present himself to his boyhood's hero by
appointment.

He was to see, perhaps to serve, the great soldier. Things had come to
this; and he thought it singular. But for the previous introduction to
Lady Charlotte, he would have thought it passing wonderful. He ascribed
it to the whirligig.

The young man was not yet of an age to gather knowledge of himself and of
life from his present experience of the fact, that passionate devotion to
an object strikes a vein through circumstances, as a travelling run of
flame darts the seeming haphazard zigzags to catch at the dry of dead
wood amid the damp; and when passion has become quiescent in the admirer,
there is often the unsubsided first impulsion carrying it on. He will
almost sorely embrace his idol with one or other of the senses.

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