Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v2
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George Meredith >> Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v2
CHAPTER VII.
EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER'S DOSES
The rules in Lord Ormont's household assisted to shelter him for some
hours of the day from the lady who was like a blast of sirocco under his
roof. He had his breakfast alone, as Lady Charlotte had it at Olmer;
a dislike of a common table in the morning was a family trait with both.
At ten o'clock the secretary arrived, and they were shut up together.
At the luncheon table Aminta usually presided. If my lord dined at home,
he had by that time established an equanimity rendering, his constant
civility to Mrs. Pagnell less arduous. The presence of a woman of
tongue, perpetually on the spring to gratify him and win him, was among
the burdens he bore for his Aminta.
Mrs. Pagnell soon perceived that the secretary was in favour. My lord
and this Mr. Weyburn had their pet themes of conversation, upon which the
wary aunt of her niece did not gaze like the wintry sun with the distant
smile her niece displayed over discussions concerning military
biographies, Hannibal's use of his elephants and his Numidian horse, the
Little St. Bernard, modern artillery, ancient slingers, English and
Genoese bowmen, Napoleon's tactics, his command to the troopers to "give
point," and English officers' neglect of sword exercise, and the "devil
of a day" Old England is to have on a day to come. My lord connected our
day of trial with India. Mrs. Pagnell assumed an air of studious
interest; she struck in to give her niece a lead, that Lord Ormont might
know his countess capable of joining the driest of subjects occupying
exalted minds. Aminta did not follow her; and she was extricated
gallantly by the gentlemen in turn.
The secretary behaved with a pretty civility. Aminta shook herself to
think tolerantly of him when he, after listening to the suggestion, put
interrogatively, that we should profit by Hannibal's example and train
elephants to serve as a special army corps for the perfect security of
our priceless Indian Empire, instanced the danger likely to result from
their panic fear of cannon, and forbore to consult Lord Ormont's eye.
Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her foot into it; but women advised of
being fools in what they say, are generally sustained by their sense of
the excellent motive which impelled them. Even to the Countess of
Ormont, she could have replied, "We might have given them a higher idea
of us"--if, that meant, the Countess of Ormont had entered the field
beside her, to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta. She hinted as much
subsequently, and Aminta's consciousness of the troth was touched. The
young schoolmaster's company sat on her spirits, deadened her vocabulary.
Her aunt spoke of passing the library door and hearing the two gentlemen
loudly laughing. It seemed subserviency on the fallen young hero's part.
His tastes were low. He frequented the haunts of boxing men; her lord
informed her of his having made, or of his making, matches to run or swim
or walk certain distances against competitors or within a given time.
He had also half a dozen boys or more in tow, whom he raced out of town
on Sundays; a nucleus of the school he intended to form.
But will not Achilles become by comparison a common rushlight where was a
blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown's cap on the head whose golden
helm was fired by Pallas?
Nay, and let him look the hero still: all the more does he point finger
on his meanness of nature.
Turning to another, it is another kind of shame that a woman feels, if
she consents to an exchange of letters--shameful indeed, but not such a
feeling of deadly sickness as comes with the humiliating view of an
object of admiration degraded. Bad she may be; and she may be deceived,
vilely treated, in either case. And what is a woman's pride but the
staff and banner of her soul, beyond all gifts? He who wounds it cannot
be forgiven--never!--he has killed the best of her. Aminta found herself
sliding along into the sentiment, that the splendid idol of a girl's
worship is, if she discover him in the lapse of years as an
infinitesimally small one, responsible for the woman's possible reckless
fit of giddiness. And she could see her nonsense; she could not correct
it. Lines of the letters under signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent
about her: they would recur; and she charged their doing so on the
discovered meanness of the girl's idol. Her wicked memory was caused
by his having plunged her low.
Mrs. Pagnell performed the offices of attention to Mr. Weyburn in lieu of
the countess, who seemed to find it a task to sit at the luncheon table
with him, when Lady Ormont was absent. "Just peeped in," she said as she
entered the library, "to see if all was comfortable;" and gossip ensued,
not devoid of object. She extracted an astonishingly smooth description
of Lady Charlotte. Weyburn was brightness in speaking of the much-
misunderstood lady. "She's one of the living women of the world."
"You are sure you don't mean one of the worldly women?" Mrs. Pagnell
rejoiced.
"She has to be known to be liked," he owned.
"And you were, one hears, among the favoured?"
"I can scarcely pretend to that, ma'am."
"You were recommended."
"Lady Charlotte is devoted to her brother."
Mrs. Pagnell's bosom heaved. "How strange Lord Ormont is! One would
suppose, with his indignation at the country for its treatment of him,
admirers would be welcome. Oh dear, no! that is not the way. On board
the packet, on our voyage to Spain, my niece in her cabin, imploring
mercy of Neptune, as they say, I heard of Lord Ormont among the
passengers. I could hardly credit my ears. For I had been hearing of
him from my niece ever since her return from a select establishment for
the education of young ladies, not much more than a morning's drive out
of London, though Dover was my residence. She had got a hero! It was
Lord Ormont! Lord Ormont! all day: and when the behaviour of the country
to him became notorious, Aminta--my niece the countess--she could hardly
contain herself. A secret:--I promised her--it's not known to Lord
Ormont himself:--a printed letter in a metropolitan paper, copied into
the provincial papers, upholding him for one of the greatest of our
patriot soldiers and the saviour of India, was the work of her hands.
You would, I am sure, think it really well written. Meeting him on deck
--the outline of the coast of Portugal for an introductory subject, our
Peninsular battles and so forth--I spoke of her enthusiasm. The effect
was, to cut off all communication between us. I had only to appear, Lord
Ormont vanished. I said to myself, this is a character. However, the
very mention of him to my niece, as one of the passengers on board--
medicine, miraculous! She was up in half an hour, out pacing the deck
before evening, hardly leaning on my arm, and the colour positively
beginning to show on her cheeks again. He fled, of coarse. I had
prepared her for his eccentricities. Next morning she was out by
herself. In the afternoon Lord Ormont strode up to us his--military
step--and most courteously requested the honour of an introduction. I
had broken the ice at last; from that moment he was cordiality itself,
until--I will not say, until he had called her his own--a few little
misunderstandings!--not with his countess. You see, a resident aunt is
translated mother-in-law by husbands; though I spare them pretty
frequently; I go to friends, they travel. Here in London she must have a
duenna. The marriage at Madrid, at the Embassy:--well, perhaps it was a
step for us, for commoners, though we rank with the independent. Has her
own little pin-money--an inheritance. Perhaps Lady Eglett gives the
world her version. She may say, there was aiming at station. I reply,
never was there a more whole-hearted love-match! Absolutely the girl's
heart has been his from the period of her school-days. Oh! a little
affair--she was persecuted by a boy at a neighbouring school. Her
mistress wrote me word--a very determined Romeo young gentleman indeed--
quite alarmed about him. In the bud! I carried her off on the spot, and
snapped it effectually. Warned he meant to be desperate, I kept her away
from my house at Dover four months, place to place; and I did well. I
heard on my return, that a youth, answering to the schoolmistress's
description of him, had been calling several times, the first two months
and longer. You have me alluding to these little nonsensical nothings,
because she seemed born to create violent attachments, even at that early
day; and Lady Eglett--Lady Charlotte Eglett may hear; for there is no end
to them, and impute them to her, when really!--can she be made
responsible for eyes innocent of the mischief they appear destined to do?
But I am disturbing you in your work."
"You are very good, ma'am," said the ghost of the determined young
gentleman.
"A slight cold, have you?" Mrs. Pagnell asked solicitously.
"Dear me, no!" he gave answer with a cleared throat.
In charging him with more than he wanted to carry, she supplied him with
particulars he had wanted to know; and now he asked himself what could be
the gain of any amount of satisfied curiosity regarding a married Aminta.
She slew my lord on board a packet-boat; she bears the arrows that slay.
My lord married her where the first English chaplain was to be found;
that is not wonderful either. British Embassy, Madrid! Weyburn believed
the ceremony to have been performed there: at the same time, he could
hear Lady Charlotte's voice repeating with her varied intonation Mrs.
Pagnell's impressive utterances; and he could imagine how the somewhat
silly duenna aunt, so penetrable in her transparent artifices, struck
emphasis on the incredulity of people inclined to judge of the reported
ceremony by Lord Ormont's behaviour to his captive.
How explain that strange matter? But can there be a gain in trying to
sound it? Weyburn shuffled it away. Before the fit of passion seized
him, he could turn his eager mind from anything which had not a
perceptible point of gain, either for bodily strength or mental
acquisition, or for money, too, now that the school was growing palpable
as an infant in arms and agape for the breast. Thought of gain, and the
bent to pursue it, is the shield of Athene over young men in the press of
the seductions. He had to confess his having lost some bits of himself
by reason of his meditations latterly; and that loss, if we let it
continue a space, will show in cramp at the wrist, logs on the legs, a
wheezy wind, for any fellow vowed to physical trials of strength and
skill. It will show likewise in the brain beating broken wings--
inability to shoot a thought up out of the body for half a minute. And,
good Lord! how quickly the tight-strong fellow crumbles, when once the
fragmentary disintegration has begun! Weyburn cried out on a heart that
bounded off at prodigal gallops, and had to be nipped with reminders of
the place of good leader he was for taking among the young. Hang
superexcellence! but we know those moanings over the troubles of a
married woman; we know their sources, know their goal, or else we are the
fiction-puppet or the Bedlamite; and she is a married woman, married at
the British Embassy, Madrid, if you please! after a few weeks'
acquaintance with her husband, who doubtless wrote his name intelligibly
in the registrar's book, but does not prove himself much the hero when he
drives a pen, even for so little as the signing of his name! He signed
his name, apparently not more than partly pledging himself to the bond.
Lord Ormont's autobiographical scraps combined with Lady Charlotte's
hints and Mrs. Pagnell's communications, to provoke the secretary's
literary contempt of his behaviour to his wife. However, the former
might be mended, and he resumed the task.
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.