Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v3
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George Meredith >> Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v3
She, while he flew supporting the body of his most beloved to the sun of
Life in brighter hope, reckoned the stages of his journey.
'Leeman at Loughton will post you through the night to Mersley. Wherever
you bait, it is made known that you come from Olmer, and are one of us.
That passes you on up to London. Where can Lord Ormont be now?'
'In Paris.'
'Still in Paris? He leaves her. She did well to send as she did. You
will not pay for the posting along the road.'
'I will pay for myself--I have a 'purse,' Weyburn said; and continued,
'Oh, my lady; there is Mr. Hampton-Evey to-morrow morning: I promised to
stand by him.'
'I'll explain,' said Lady Charlotte. 'He shall not miss you. If he
strips the parson and comes as a man and a servant of the poor, he has
nothing to fear. You've done? The night before my brother Rowsley's
first duel I sat with him at supper and poured his wine out, and knew
what was going to happen, didn't say a word. No use in talking about
feelings. Besides, death is only the other side of the ditch, and one or
other of us must go foremost. Now then, good-bye. Empson's waiting by
this time. Mr. Eglett and Leo shall hear the excuses from me. Think of
anything you may want, while I count ten.'
She held his hand. He wanted her to be friendly to Lady Ormont, but
could not vex her at the last moment, touched as he was by her practical
kindness.
She pressed his hand and let it go.
CHAPTER XIV
OLD LOVERS NEW FRIENDS
The cottage inhabited by Weyburn's mother was on the southern hills over
London. He reached it late in the afternoon. His mother's old servant,
Martha, spied the roadway at the gate of the small square of garden. Her
steady look without welcome told him the scene he would meet beyond the
door, and was the dead in her eyes. He dropped from no height; he stood
on a level with the blow. His apprehensions on the road had lowered him
to meet it.
'Too late, Martha?'
'She's in heaven, my dear.'
'She is lying alone?'
'The London doctor left half an hour back. She's gone. Slipped, and
fell, coming from her room, all the way down. She prayed for grace to
see her son. She 'll watch over him, be sure. You 'll not find it lone
and cold. A lady sits with it--Lady Ormont, they call her--a very kind
lady. My mistress liked her voice. Ever since news of the accident, up
to ten at night; and never eats or drinks more than a poor tiny bit of
bread-and-butter, with a teacup.'
'Weyburn went up-stairs.
Aminta sat close to the bedside in a darkened room. They greeted
silently. He saw the white shell of the life that had flown; he took his
mother's hand and kissed it, and knelt, clasping it.
Fear of disturbing his prayer kept Aminta seated. Death was a stranger
to him. The still warm, half-cold, nerveless hand smote the fact of
things as they were through the prayer for things as we would have them.
The vitality of his prayer was the sole light he had. It drew
sustainment from the dead hand in his grasp, and cowered down to the
earth claiming all we touch. He tried to summon vision of a soaring
spirituality; he could not; his understanding and senses were too
stricken. He prayed on. His prayer was as a little fountain, not rising
high out of earth, and in the clutch of death; but its being it had from
death, his love gave it food.
Prayer is power within us to communicate with the desired beyond our
thirsts. The goodness of the dear good mother gone was in him for
assurance of a breast of goodness to receive her, whatever the nature of
the eternal secret may be. The good life gone lives on in the mind; the
bad has but a life in the body, and that not lasting,--it extends,
dispreads, it worms away, it perishes. Need we more to bid the mind
perceive through obstructive flesh the God who reigns, a devil
vanquished? Be certain that it is the pure mind we set to perceive. The
God discerned in thought is another than he of the senses. And let the
prayer be as a little fountain. Rising on a spout, from dread of the
hollow below, the prayer may be prolonged in words begetting words, and
have a pulse of fervour: the spirit of it has fallen after the first jet.
That is the delirious energy of our craving, which has no life in our
souls. We do not get to any heaven by renouncing the Mother we spring
from; and when there is an eternal secret for us, it is befit to believe
that Earth knows, to keep near her, even in our utmost aspirations.
Weyburn still knelt. He was warned to quit the formal posture of an
exhausted act by the thought, that he had come to reflect upon how he
might be useful to his boys in a like calamity.
Having risen, he became aware, that for some time of his kneeling
Aminta's hand had been on his head, and they had raised their souls in
unison. It was a soul's link. They gazed together on the calm, rapt
features. They passed from the room.
'I cannot thank you,' he said.
'Oh no; I have the reason for gratitude,' said she. 'I have learnt to
know and love her, and hope I may imitate when my time is near.'
"She..... at the last?'
'Peacefully; no pain. The breath had not left her very long before you
came.'
'I said I cannot; but I must--
'Do not.'
'Not in speech, then.'
They went into the tasteful little sitting-room below, where the
stillness closed upon them as a consciousness of loss.
'You have comforted her each day,' he said.
'It has been my one happiness.'
'I could not wish for better than for her to have known you.'
'Say that for me. I have gained. She left her last words for you with
me. They were love, love . . . pride in her son: thanks to God for
having been thought worthy to give him birth.'
'She was one of the noble women of earth.'
'She was your mother. Let me not speak any more. I think I will now go.
I am rarely given to these--'
The big drops were falling.
'You have not ordered your carriage?'
'It brings me here. I find my way home.'
'Alone?'
'I like the independence.'
'At night, too!'
'Nothing harmed me. Now it is daylight. A letter arrived for you from
High Brent this morning. I forgot to bring it. Yesterday two of your
pupils called here. Martha saw them.'
Her naming of the old servant familiarly melted him. 'You will not bear
to hear praise or thanks.'
'If I deserved them. I should like you to call on Dr. Buxton; he will
tell you more than we can. He drove with me the first day, after I had
sent you the local doctor's report. I had it from the messenger, his
assistant.'
Weyburn knew Dr. Buxton's address. He begged her to stay and take some
nourishment; ventured a remark on her wasted look.
'It is poor fare in cottages.'
'I have been feeding on better than bread and meat,' she said.' I should
have eaten if I had felt appetite. My looks will recover, such as they
are. I hope I have grown out of them; they are a large part of the
bondage of women. You would like to see me safe into some conveyance.
Go up-stairs for a few minutes; I will wait here.'
He obeyed her. Passing from the living to the dead, from the dead to the
living, they were united in his heart.
Her brevity of tone, and her speech, so practical upon a point of need,
under a crisis of distress, reminded him of Lady Charlotte at the time
of the groom's arrival with her letter.
Aminta was in no hurry to drive. She liked walking and looking down on
London, she said.
'My friend and schoolmate, Selina Collett, comes to me at Whitsuntide.
We have taken a house on the Upper Thames, above Marlow. You will come
and see us, if you can be persuaded to leave your boys. We have a
boathouse, and a bathing-plank for divers. The stream is quiet there
between rich meadows. It seems to flow as if it thought. I am not
poetical; I tell you only my impression. You shall be a great deal by
yourself, as men prefer to be.'
'As men are forced to be--I beg!' said he. 'Division is against my
theories.'
'We might help, if we understood one another, I have often fancied.
I know something of your theories. I should much like to hear you
some day on the scheme of the school in Switzerland, and also on the
schoolmaster's profession. She whom we have lost was full of it, and
spoke of it to me as much as her weakness would permit. The subject
seemed to give her strength.'
'She has always encouraged me,' said Weyburn.' I have lost her, but I
shall feel that she is not absent. She had ideas of her own about men
and women.'
'Some she mentioned.'
'And about marriage?'
'That too.'
Aminta shook herself out of a sudden stupor.
'Her mind was very clear up to the last hour upon all the subjects
interesting her son. She at one time regretted his not being a soldier,
for the sake of his father's memory. Then she learned to think he could
do more for the world as the schoolmaster. She said you can persuade.'
'We had our talks. She would have the reason, if she was to be won.
I like no other kind of persuasion.'
'I long to talk over the future school with you. That is, to hear your
plans.'
They were at the foot of the hill, in view of an inn announcing livery
stables. She wished to walk the whole distance. He shook his head.
The fly was ready for her soon, and he begged to see her safe home. She
refused, after taking her seat, but said: 'At any other time. We are old
friends. You will really go through the ceremony of consulting me about
the school?'
He replied: 'I am honoured.'
'Ah, not to me,' said Aminta. 'We will be the friends we--You will not
be formal with me?--not from this day?'
She put out her hand. He took it gently. The dead who had drawn them
together withheld a pressure. Holding the hand, he said: 'I shall crave
leave of absence for some days.'
'I shall see you on the day,' said she. 'If it is your desire: I will
send word.'
'We both mourn at heart. We should be in company. Adieu.'
Their hands fell apart. They looked. The old school time was in each
mind. They saw it as a shore-bank in grey outline across morning mist.
Years were between; and there was a division of circumstance, more
repelling than an abyss or the rush of deep wild waters.
Neither of them had regrets. Under their cloud, and with the grief they
shared, they were as happy as two could be in recovering one another as
friends.
On the day of the funeral Aminta drove to the spot where they had parted
--she walked to the churchyard.
She followed the coffin to its gravel-heap, wishing neither to see nor be
seen, only that she might be so far attached to the remains of the dead;
and the sense of blessedness she had in her bowed simplicity of feeling
was as if the sainted dead had cleansed and anointed her.
When the sods had been cast on, the last word spoken, she walked her way
back, happy in being alone, unnoticed. She was grateful to the chief
mourner for letting her go as she had come. That helped her to her sense
of purification, the haven out of the passions, hardly less quiet than
the repose into which the dear dead woman, his mother, had entered.
London lay beneath her. The might of the great hive hummed at the verge
of her haven of peace without disturbing. There she had been what none
had known of her: an ambitious girl, modest merely for lack of
intrepidity; paralyzed by her masterful lord; aiming her highest at a
gilt weathercock; and a disappointed creature, her breast a home of
serpents; never herself. She thought and hoped she was herself now.
Alarm lest this might be another of her moods, victim of moods as she had
latterly been, was a shadow armed with a dart playing round her to find
the weak spot. It sprang from her acknowledged weakness of nature; and
she cast about for how to keep it outside her and lean on a true though a
small internal support. She struck at her desires, to sound them.
They were yesterday for love; partly for distinction, for a woman having
beauty to shine in the sphere of beauty; but chiefly to love and be
loved, therefore to live. She had yesterday read letters of a man who
broke a music from the word--about as much music as there is in a tuning
--fork, yet it rang and lingered; and he was not the magical musician.
Now those letters were as dust of the road. The sphere of beauty was a
glass lamp-globe for delirious moths. She had changed. Belief in the
real change gave her full view of the compliant coward she had been.
Her heart assured her she had natural courage. She felt that it could be
stubborn to resist a softness. Now she cared no more for the hackneyed
musical word; friendship was her desire. If it is not life's poetry, it
is a credible prose; a land of low undulations instead of Alps; beyond
the terrors and the deceptions. And she could trust her friend: he who
was a singular constancy. His mother had told her of his preserving
letters of a girl he loved when at school; and of his journeys to an
empty house at Dover. That was past; but, as the boy, so the man would
be in sincerity of feeling trustworthy to the uttermost.
She mused on the friend. He was brave. She had seen how he took his
blow, and sorrow as a sister, conquering emotion. It was not to be
expected of him by one who knew him when at school. Had he faults? He
must have faults. She, curiously, could see none. After consenting to
his career as a schoolmaster, and seeing nothing ludicrous in it, she
endowed him with the young school-hero's reputation, beheld him with the
eyes of the girl who had loved him--and burnt his old letters!--bitterly
regretted that she burnt his letters!--and who had applauded his contempt
of ushers and master opposing his individual will and the thing he
thought it right to do.
Musing thus, she turned a corner, on a sudden, in her mind, and ran
against a mirror, wherein a small figure running up to meet her, grew
large and nodded, with the laugh and eyes of Browny. So little had she
changed! The stedfast experienced woman rebuked that volatile, and some
might say, faithless girl. But the girl had her answer: she declared
they were one and the same, affirmed that the years between were a bad
night's dream, that her heart had been faithful, that he who conjures
visions of romance in a young girl's bosom must always have her heart,
as a crisis will reveal it to her. She had the volubility of the mettled
Browny of old, and was lectured. When she insisted on shouting 'Matey!
Matey!' she was angrily spurned and silenced.
Aminta ceased to recline in her carriage. An idea that an indolent
posture fostered vapourish meditations, counselled her sitting rigidly
upright and interestedly observing the cottages and merry gutter-children
along the squat straight streets of a London suburb. Her dominant
ultimate thought was, 'I, too, can work!' Like her courage, the plea of
a capacity to work appealed for confirmation to the belief which exists
without demonstrated example; and as she refrained from probing to the
inner sources of that mental outcry, it was allowed to stand and remain
among the convictions we store--wherewith to shape our destinies.
Childishly indeed, quite witlessly, she fell into a trick of repeating
the name of Matthew Weyburn in her breast and on her lips, after the
manner of Isabella Lawrence Finchley, when she had inquired for his
Christian name, and went on murmuring it, as if sucking a new bonbon,
with the remark: 'It sounds nice, it suits the mouth.' Little Selina
Collett had told, Aminta remembered, how those funny boys at Cuper's
could not at first get the name 'Aminta' to suit the mouth, but went
about making hideous faces in uttering it. She smiled at the
recollection, and thought, up to a movement of her lips, one is not
tempted to do that in saying Matthew Weyburn!
CHAPTER XV
SHOWING A SECRET FISHED WITHOUT ANGLING
That great couchant dragon of the devouring jaws and the withering
breath, known as our London world, was in expectation of an excitement
above yawns on the subject of a beautiful Lady Doubtful proposing
herself, through a group of infatuated influential friends, to a decorous
Court, as one among the ladies acceptable. The popular version of it
sharpened the sauce by mingling romance and cynicism very happily; for
the numerous cooks, when out of the kitchen, will furnish a piquant dish.
Thus, a jewel-eyed girl of half English origin (a wounded British officer
is amiably nursed in a castle near the famous Peninsula battlefield,
etc.), running wild down the streets of Seville, is picked up by Lord
Ormont, made to discard her tambourine, brought over to our shores, and
allowed the decoration of his name, without the legitimate adornment of
his title. Discontented with her position after a time, she now pushes
boldly to claim the place which will be most effective in serving her as
a bath. She has, by general consent, beauty; she must, seeing that she
counts influential friends, have witchery. Those who have seen her
riding and driving beside her lord, speak of Andalusian grace, Oriental
lustre, fit qualification for the fair slave of a notoriously susceptible
old warrior.
She won a party in the widening gossip world; and enough of a party in
the regent world to make a stream. Pretending to be the actual Countess
of Ormont, though not publicly acknowledged as his countess by the earl,
she had on her side the strenuous few who knew and liked her, some who
were pleased compassionately to patronize, all idle admirers of a
shadowed beautiful woman at bay, the devotees of any beauty in distress,
and such as had seen, such as imagined they had seen, such as could paint
a mental picture of a lady of imposing stature, persuasive appearance,
pathetic history, and pronounce her to be unjustly treated, with a
general belief that she was visible and breathing. She had the ready
enthusiasts, the responsive sentimentalists, and an honest active minor
number, of whom not every one could be declared perfectly unspotted in
public estimation, however innocent under verdict of the courts of law.
Against her was the livid cloud-bank over a flowery field, that has not
yet spoken audible thunder: the terrible aggregate social woman, of man's
creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless,
upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on to which our
human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner. She exhibits
virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and blood
of victims on it. Her fold is a genial climate and the material
pleasures for the world's sheepy: worshipping herself, she claims the
sanctification of a performed religion. She is gentle when unassailed,
going her way serenely, with her malady in the blood. When the skin
bears witness to it, she swallows an apothecary, and there is a short
convulsion. She is refreshed by cutting off diseased inferior members:
the superior betraying foul symptoms, she covers up and retains;
rationally, too, for they minister to her present existence, and she
lives all in the present. Her subjects are the mixed Subservient; among
her rebellious are earth's advanced, who have cold a morning on their
foreheads, and these would not dethrone her, they would but shame and
purify by other methods than the druggist. She loves nothing.
Undoubtedly, she dislikes the vicious. On that merit she subsists.
The vexatious thing in speaking of her is, that she compels to the use of
the rhetorician's brass instrument. As she is one of the Powers giving
life and death, one may be excused. This tremendous queen of the
congregation has brought discredit on her sex for the scourge laid on
quivering female flesh, and for the flippant indifference shown to misery
and to fine distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad; and
particularly for the undiscriminating hardness upon the starved of women.
We forget her having been conceived in the fear of men, shaped to gratify
them. She is their fiction of the state they would fain beguile
themselves to suppose her sex has reached, for their benefit; where she
may be queen of it in a corner, certain of a loyal support, if she will
only give men her half-the-world's assistance to uplift the fabric
comfortable to them; together with assurance of paternity, case of mind
in absence, exclusive possession, enormous and minutest, etc.; not by any
means omitting a regimental orderliness, from which men are privately
exempt, because they are men, or because they are grown boys--the brisker
at lessons after a vacation or a truancy, says the fiction.
In those days the world had oscillated, under higher leading than its
royal laxity, to rigidity. Tiny peccadilloes were no longer matter of
jest, and the sinner exposed stood 'sola' to receive the brand. A
beautiful Lady Doubtful needed her husband's countenance if she was to
take one of the permanent steps in public places. The party of Lady
Charlotte Eglett called on the livid cloud-bank aforesaid to discharge
celestial bolts and sulphur oil on the head of an impudent, underbred,
ambitious young slut, whose arts had bewitched a distinguished nobleman
not young in years at least, and ensnared the remainder wits of some
principal ancient ladies of the land. Professional Puritans, born
conservatives, malicious tattlers, made up a goodly tail to Lady
Charlotte's party. The epithet 'unbred' was accredited upon the quoted
sayings and doings of the pretentious young person's aunt, repeated
abroad by noblemen and gentlemen present when she committed herself;
and the same were absurd. They carried a laugh, and so they lived and
circulated. Lord Ormont submitted to the infliction of that horrid
female in his household! It was no wonder he stopped short of allying
himself with the family.
Nor was it a wonder that the naturally enamoured old warrior or invalided
Mars (for she had the gift of beauty) should deem it prudent to be out of
England when she and her crazy friends determined on the audacious move.
Or put it the other way--for it is just as confounding right side or
left--she and her friends take advantage of his absence to make the
clever push for an establishment, and socially force him to legalize
their union on his return. The deeds of the preceding reign had
bequeathed a sort of legendary credence to the wildest tales gossip
could invent under a demurrer.
But there was the fact, the earl was away. Lady Charlotte's party buzzed
everywhere. Her ladyship had come to town to head it. Her ladyship laid
trains of powder from dinner-parties, balls, routs, park-processions,
into the Lord Chamberlain's ear, and fired and exploded them, deafening
the grand official. Do you consider that virulent Pagan Goddesses and
the flying torch-furies are extinct? Error of Christians! We have
relinquished the old names and have no new ones for them; but they are
here, inextinguishable, threading the day and night air with their dire
squib-trail, if we would but see. Hissing they go, and we do not hear.
We feel the effects.
Upon the counsel of Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta sent a letter to Lord Ormont
at his hotel in Paris, informing him of the position of affairs. He had
delayed his return, and there had been none of his brief communications.
She wrote, as she knew, as she felt, coldly. She was guided by others,
and her name was up before the world, owing to some half-remembered
impulsion of past wishes, but her heart was numbed; she was not a woman
to have a wish without a beat of the heart in it. For her name she had a
feeling, to be likened rather to the losing gambler's contemplation of a
big stake he has flung, and sees it gone while fortune is undecided; and
he catches at a philosophy nothing other than his hug of a modest little
background pleasure, that he has always preferred to this accursed bad
habit of gambling with the luck against him. Reckless in the cast, she
was reckless of success.
Her letter was unanswered.
Then, and day by day more strongly, she felt for her name. She put a
false heart into it. She called herself to her hearing the Countess of
Ormont, and deigned to consult the most foolish friend she could have
chosen--her aunt; and even listened to her advice, that she should run
about knocking at all the doors open to her, and state her case against
the earl. It seemed the course to take, the moment for taking it. Was
she not asked if she could now at last show she had pride? Her pride ran
stinging through her veins, like a band of freed prisoners who head the
rout to fire a city. She charged her lord with having designedly--oh!
cunningly indeed left her to be the prey of her enemies at the hour when
he knew it behoved him to be her great defender. There had been no
disguise of the things in progress: they had been spoken of allusively,
quite comprehensibly, after the fashion common with two entertaining a
secret semi-hostility on a particular subject; one of them being the
creature that blushes and is educated to be delicate, reserved, and
timorous. He was not ignorant, and he had left her, and he would not
reply to her letter!