Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v2
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George Meredith >> Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v2
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!'
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.