Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v3
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George Meredith >> Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v3
So fell was her mood, that an endeavour to conjure up the scene of her
sitting beside the death-bed of Matthew Weyburn's mother, failed to sober
and smooth it, holy though that time was. The false heart she had put
into the pride of her name was powerfuller than the heart in her bosom.
But to what end had the true heart counselled her of late? It had been
a home of humours and languors, an impotent insurgent, the sapper of her
character; and as we see in certain disorderly States a curative
incendiarism usurp the functions of the sluggish citizen, and the work
of re-establishment done by destruction, in peril of a total extinction,
Aminta's feverish anger on behalf of her name went a stretch to vivify
and give her dulled character a novel edge. She said good-bye to
cowardice. 'I have no husband to defend me--I must do it for myself.'
The peril of a too complete exercise of independence was just intimated
to her perceptions. On whom the blame? And let the motively guilty go
mourn over consequences! That Institution of Marriage was eyed. Is it
not a halting step to happiness? It is the step of a cripple,--and one
leg or the other poses for the feebler sex,--small is the matter which!
And is happiness our cry? Our cry is rather for circumstance and
occasion to use our functions, and the conditions are denied to women by
Marriage--denied to the luckless of women, who are many, very many:
denied to Aminta, calling herself Countess of Ormont, for one, denied to
Mrs. Lawrence Finchley for another, and in a base bad manner. She had
defended her good name triumphantly, only to enslave herself for life or
snatch at the liberty which besmirches.
Reviewing Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta's real heart pressed forward at the beat,
in tender pity of the woman for whom a yielding to love was to sin; and
unwomanly is the woman who does not love: men will say it. Aminta found
herself phrasing. 'Why was she unable to love her husband?--he is not
old.' She hurried in flight from the remark to confidences imparted by
other ladies, showing strange veins in an earthy world; after which, her
mind was bent to rebuke Mrs. Pagnell for the silly soul's perpetual
allusions to Lord Ormont's age. She did not think of his age. But she
was vividly thinking that she was young. Young, married, loveless,
cramped in her energies, publicly dishonoured--a Lady Doubtful, courting
one friend whom she liked among women, one friend whom she respected
among men; that was the sketch of her.
That was in truth the outline, as much as Aminta dared sketch of herself
without dragging her down lower than her trained instinct would bear to
look. Our civilization shuns nature; and most shuns it in the most
artificially civilized, to suit the market. They, however, are always
close to their mother nature, beneath their second nature's mask of
custom; and Aminta's unconscious concluding touch to the sketch: 'My
husband might have helped me to a footing in Society,' would complete
it as a coloured picture, if writ in tones.
She said it, and for the footing in Society she had lost her taste.
Mrs. Lawrence brought the final word from high quarters: that the
application must be deferred until Lord Ormont returned to town. It was
known before, that such would be the decision. She had it from the
eminent official himself, and she kicked about the room, setting her
pretty mouth and nose to pout and sniff, exactly like a boy whose chum
has been mishandled by a bully.
'Your dear good man is too much for us. I thought we should drive him.
'C'est un ruse homme de guerre.' I like him, but I could slap him. He
stops the way. Upon my word, he seems tolerably careless of his
treasure. Does he suppose Mrs. Paggy is a protection? Do you know she's
devoted to that man Morsfield? He listens to her stories. To judge by
what he shouts aloud, he intends carrying you off the first opportunity,
divorcing, and installing you in Cobeck Hall. All he fears is, that your
lord won't divorce. You should have seen him the other day; he marched
up and down the room, smacking his head and crying out: "Legal measures
or any weapons her husband pleases!" For he has come to believe that the
lady would have been off with him long before, if her lord had no claim
to the marital title. "It 's that husband I can't get over! that
husband!" He reminded me, to the life, of Lawrence Finchley with a
headache the morning after a supper, striding, with his hand on the
shining middle of his head: "It's that Welsh rabbit! that Welsh rabbit!"
He has a poor digestion, and he will eat cheese. The Welsh rabbit chased
him into his bed. But listen to me, dear, about your Morsfield. I told
you he was dangerous.'
'He is not my Morsfield,' said Aminta.
'Beware of his having a tool in Paggy. He boasts of letters.'
'Mine? Two: and written to request him to cease writing to me.'
'He stops at nothing. And, oh, my Simplicity! don't you see you gave
him a step in begging him to retire? Morsfield has lived a good deal
among our neighbours, who expound the physiology of women. He anatomizes
us; pulls us to pieces, puts us together, and then animates us with a
breath of his "passion"--sincere upon every occasion, I don't doubt. He
spared me, although he saw I was engaged. Perhaps it was because I 'm of
no definite colour. Or he thought I was not a receptacle for "passion."
And quite true,--Adder, the dear good fellow, has none. Or where should
we be? On a Swiss Alp, in a chalet, he shooting chamois, and I milking
cows, with 'ah-ahio, ah-ahio,' all day long, and a quarrel at night over
curds and whey. Well, and that 's a better old pensioner's limp to his
end for "passion" than the foreign hotel bell rung mightily, and one of
the two discovered with a dagger in the breast, and the other a don't-
look lying on the pavement under the window. Yes, and that's better than
"passion" splitting and dispersing upon new adventures, from habit, with
two sparks remaining of the fire.'
Aminta took Mrs. Lawrence's hands. 'Is it a lecture?'
She was kissed. 'Frothy gabble. I'm really near to "passion" when I
embrace you. You're the only one I could run away with; live with all
alone, I believe. I wonder men can see you while that silly lord of
yours is absent, and not begin Morsfielding. They're virtuous if they
resist. Paggy tells the world . . . well?' Aminta had reddened.
'What does my aunt tell the world?'
Mrs. Lawrence laid her smoothing hand absently on a frill of lace fichu
above a sternly disciplined bosom at half-heave. 'I think I can
judge now that you're not much hurt by this wretched business of the
presentation. The little service I could do was a moral lesson to me on
the subject of deuce-may-care antecedents. My brother Tom, too, was
always playing truant, as a boy. It 's in the blood.'
She seemed to be teasing, and Aminta cried: 'My aunt! Let me hear.
She tells the world--?'
'Paggy? ah, yes. Only that she says the countess has an exalted opinion
of Mr. Secretary's handwriting--as witnessed by his fair copy of the
Memoirs, of course.'
'Poor woman! How can she talk such foolishness! I guessed it.'
'You wear a dark red rose when you're guessing, 'ma mie,'--French for, my
Aminta.'
'But consider, Isabella, Mr. Weyburn has just had the heaviest of losses.
My aunt should spare mention of him.'
'Matthew Weyburn! we both like the name.' Mrs. Lawrence touched at her
friend and gazed. 'I've seen it on certain evenings--crimson over an
olive sky. What it forebodes, I can't imagine; but it's the end of a
lovely day. They say it threatens rain, if it begins one. It 's an
ominous herald.'
'You make me,' said Aminta. 'I must redden if you keep looking at me so
closely.'
'Now frown one little bit, please. I love to see you. I love to see a
secret disclose itself ingenuously.'
'But what secret, my dear?' cried Aminta's defence of her innocence; and
she gave a short frown.
'Have no fear. Mr. Secretary is not the man to be Morsfielding. And he
can enjoy his repast; a very good sign. But is he remaining long?'
'He is going soon, I hear.'
'He's a good boy. I could have taken to him myself, and not dreaded a
worrying. There 's this difference between you and me, though, my
Aminta; one of us has the fireplace prepared for what's-his-name--
"passion." Kiss me. How could you fancy you were going to have a woman
for your friend and keep hidden from her any one of the secrets that
blush! and with Paggy to aid! I am sure it means very little.
Admiration for good handwriting is--' a smile broke the sentence.
'You're astray, Isabella.'
'Not I, dear, I'm too fond of you.'
'You read what is not.'
'What is not yet written, you mean.'
'What never could be written.'
'I read what is in the blood, and comes out to me when I look. That lord
of yours should take to study you as I have done ever since I fell in
love with you. He 's not counselling himself well in keeping away.'
'Now you speak wisely,' said Aminta.
'Not a particle more wisely. And the reason is close at hand--see.
You are young, you attract--how could it be otherwise?--and you have
"passion" sleeping, and likely to wake with a spring whether roused or
not. In my observation good-man t'other fellow--the poet's friend--is
never long absent when the time is ripe--at least, not in places where we
gather together. Well, one is a buckler against the other: I don't say
with lovely Amy May,--with an honourable woman. But Aminta can smell
powder and grow more mettlesome. Who can look at you and be blind to
passion sleeping! The sight of you makes me dream of it--me, a woman,
cool as a wine-cellar or a well. So there's to help you to know yourself
and be on your guard. I know I'm not deceived, because I've fallen in
love with you, and no love can be without jealousy, so I have the needle
in my breast, that points at any one who holds a bit of you. Kind of
sympathetic needle to the magnet behind anything. You'll know it, if you
don't now. I should have felt the thing without the aid of Paggy. So,
then, imagine all my nonsense unsaid, and squeeze a drop or two of 'sirop
de bon conseil' out of it, as if it were your own wise meditations.' The
rest of Mrs. Lawrence's discourse was a swallow's wing skimming the city
stream. She departed, and Aminta was left to beat at her heart and ask
whether it had a secret.
But if there was one, the secret was out, and must have another name.
It had been a secret for her until she heard her friend speak those pin-
points that pricked her heart, and sent the blood coursing over her face,
like a betrayal, so like as to resemble a burning confession.
But if this confessed the truth, she was the insanest of women.
No woman could be surer that she had her wits. She had come to see
things, previously mysteries, with surprising clearness. As, for example,
that passion was part of her nature; therefore her very life, lying
tranced. She certainly could not love without passion such an
abandonment was the sole justification of love in a woman standing where
she stood. And now for the first time she saw her exact position before
the world; and she saw some way into her lord: saw that he nursed a
wound, extracted balm from anything enabling him to show the world how he
despised it, and undesigningly immolated her for the petty gratification.
It could not, in consequence, be the truth. To bear what she had borne
she must be a passionless woman; and she was glad of her present safety
in thinking it. Once it was absolutely true. She swam away to the
golden-circled Island of Once; landed, and dwelt there solitarily and
blissfully, looking forward to Sunday's walk round the park, looking back
on it. Proudly she could tell herself that her dreams of the Prince of
the island had not been illusions as far as he was concerned; for he had
a great soul. He did not aim at a tawdry glory. He was a loss to our
army--no loss to his country or the world. A woman might clasp her
feeling of pride in having foreseen distinction for him; and a little,
too, in distinguishing now the true individual distinction from the
feathered uniform vulgar. Where the girl's dreams had proved illusions,
she beheld in a title and luxuries, in a loveless marriage.
That was perilous ground. Still it taught her to see that the
substantial is the dust; and passion not being active, she could reflect.
After a series of penetrative flashes, flattering to her intelligence the
more startling they were, reflection was exhausted. She sank on her
nature's desire to join or witness agonistic incidents, shocks,
wrestlings, the adventures which are brilliant air to sanguine energies.
Imagination shot tap, and whirled the circle of a succession of them; and
she had a companion and leader, unfeatured, reverently obeyed, accepted
as not to be known, not to be guessed at, in the deepest hooded inmost of
her being speechlessly divined.
The sudden result of Aminta's turmoil was a determination that she must
look on Steignton. And what was to be gained by that? She had no idea.
And how had she stopped her imaginative flight with the thought of
looking on Steignton? All she could tell was, that it would close a
volume. She could not say why the volume must be closed.
Her orders for the journey down to Steignton were prompt. Mrs. Pagnell
had an engagement at the house of Lady Staines for the next day to meet
titles and celebrities, and it precluded her comprehension of the
project. She begged to have the journey postponed. She had pledged her
word, she said.
'To Mr. Morsfield?' said Aminta.
Her aunt was astounded.
'I did tell him we should be there, my dear.' 'He appears to have a
pleasure in meeting you.' 'He is one of the real gentlemen of the land.'
'You correspond with him?'
'I may not be the only one.'
'Foolish aunty! How can you speak to me in that senseless way?' cried
Aminta. 'You know the schemer he is, and that I have no protection from
his advances unless I run the risk of bloodshed.'
'My dear Aminta, whenever I go into society, and he is present, I know I
shall not be laughed at, or fall into that pit of one of their dead
silences, worse for me to bear than titters and faces. It is their way
of letting one feel they are of birth above us. Mr. Morsfield--purer
blood than many of their highest titles--is always polite, always
deferential; he helps me to feel I am not quite out of my element in the
sphere I prefer. We shall be travelling alone?'
'Have you any fear?'
'Not if nothing happens. Might we not ask that Mr. Weyburn?'
'He has much work to do. He will not long be here. He is absent
to-day.'
Mrs. Pagnell remarked: 'I must say he earns his money easily.'
Aminta had softened herself with the allusion to the shortness of his
time with them. Her aunt's coarse hint, and the thought of his loss,
and the banishment it would be to her all the way to Steignton, checked
a sharp retort she could have uttered, but made it necessary to hide her
eyes from sight. She went to her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed.
Even so little as an unspoken defence of him shook her to floods of
tears.
CHAPTER XVI
ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON
Unaccountable resolutions, if impromptu and springing from the female
breast, are popularly taken for caprices; and even when they divert the
current of a history, and all the more when they are very small matters
producing a memorable crisis. In this way does a lazy world consign
discussion to silence with the cynical closure. Man's hoary shrug at a
whimsy sex is the reading of his enigma still.
But ask if she has the ordinary pumping heart in that riddle of a breast:
and then, as the organ cannot avoid pursuit, we may get hold of it, and
succeed in spelling out that she is consequent, in her fashion. She is a
creature of the apparent moods and shifts and tempers only because she is
kept in narrow confines, resembling, if you like, a wild cat caged.
Aminta's journey down to Steignton turned the course of other fortunes
besides her own; and she disdained the minor adventure it was, while
dreaming it important; and she determined eagerly on going, without
wanting to go; and it was neither from a sense of duty nor in a spirit
of contrariety that she went. Nevertheless, with her heart in hand,
her movements are traceably as rational as a soldier's before the enemy
or a trader's matching his customer.
The wish to look on Steignton had been spoken or sighed for during long
years between Aminta and her aunt, until finally shame and anger clinched
the subject. To look on Steignton for once was now Aminta's phrasing of
her sudden resolve; it appeared as a holiday relief from recent worries,
and it was an expedition with an aim, though she had but the coldest
curiosity to see the place, and felt alien to it. Yet the thought,
never to have seen Steignton! roused phantoms of dead wishes to drive
the strange engine she was, faster than the living would have done. Her
reason for haste was rationally founded on the suddenness of her resolve,
which, seeing that she could not say she desired to go, seemed to come of
an external admonition; and it counselled quick movements, lest her
inspired obedience to the prompting should as abruptly breathe itself
out. 'And in that case I shall never have seen Steignton at all,' she
said, with perfect calmness, and did not attempt to sound her meaning.
She did know that she was a magazine of a great storage of powder. It
banked inoffensively dry. She had forgiven her lord, owning the real
nobleman he was in courtesy to women, whom his inherited ideas of them so
quaintly minimized and reduced to pretty insect or tricky reptile. They,
too, had the choice of being ultimately the one or the other in fact; the
latter most likely.
If, however, she had forgiven her lord, the shattering of their union was
the cost of forgiveness. In letting him stand high, as the lofty man she
had originally worshipped, she separated herself from him, to feel that
the humble she was of a different element, as a running water at a
mountain's base. They are one in the landscape; they are far from one
in reality. Aminta's pride of being chafed at the yoke of marriage.
Her aunt was directed to prepare for a start at an early hour the next
morning. Mrs. Pagnell wrote at her desk, and fussed, and ordered the
posting chariot, and bewailed herself submissively; for it was the
Countess of Ormont speaking when Aminta delivered commands, and the only
grievance she dared to mutter was 'the unexpectedness.' Her letters
having been despatched, she was amazed in the late evening to hear Aminta
give the footman orders for the chariot to be ready at the door an hour
earlier than the hour previously appointed. She remonstrated. Aminta
simply observed that it would cause less inconvenience to all parties.
A suspicion of her aunt's proceedings was confirmed by the good woman's
flustered state. She refrained from smiling.
She would have mustered courage to invite Matthew Weyburn as her escort,
if he had been at hand. He was attending to his affairs with lawyers--
mainly with his friend Mr. Abner. She studied map and gazetteer till
late into the night. Giving her orders to the postillion on the pavement
in the morning, she named a South-westerly direction out of London, and
after entering the chariot, she received a case from one of the footmen.
'What is that, my dear?' said Mrs. Pagnell.
Aminta unlocked and laid it open. A pair of pistols met Mrs. Pagnell's
gaze.
'We shan't be in need of those things?' the lady said anxiously.
'One never knows, on the road, aunt.'
'Loaded? You wouldn't hesitate to fire; I'm sure.'
'At Mr. Morsfield himself, if he attempted to stop me.'
Mrs. Pagnell withdrew into her astonishment, and presently asked, in a
tone of some indignation: 'Why did you mention Mr. Morsfield, Aminta?'
'Did you not write to him yesterday afternoon, aunt?'
'You read the addresses on my letters!'
'Did you not supply him with our proposed route and the time for
starting?'
'Pistols!' exclaimed Mrs. Pagnell. 'One would fancy you think we are in
the middle of the last century. Mr. Morsfield is a gentleman, not a
highwayman.'
'He gives the impression of his being a madman.'
'The real madman is your wedded husband, Aminta, if wedding it was!'
It was too surely so, in Aminta's mind. She tried, by looking out of the
window, to forget her companion. The dullness of the roads and streets
opening away to flat fields combined with the postillion's unvarying jog
to sicken her thoughts over the exile from London she was undergoing, and
the chance that Matthew Weyburn might call at a vacant house next day, to
announce his term of service to the earl, whom he had said he much wanted
to see. He said it in his sharp manner when there was decision behind
it. Several times after contemplating the end of her journey, and not
perceiving any spot of pleasure ahead, an emotion urged her to turn back;
for the young are acutely reasoning when their breasts advise them to
quit a road where no pleasure beckons.
Unlike Matthew Weyburn, the tiptoe sparkle of a happy mind did not leap
from her at wayside scenes, a sweep of grass, distant hills, clouds in
flight. She required, since she suffered, the positive of events or
blessings to kindle her glow.
Matthew Weyburn might call at the house. Would he be disappointed? He
had preserved her letters of the old school-days. She had burnt his.
But she had not burnt the letters of Mr. Morsfield; and she cared nothing
for that man. Assuredly she merited the stigma branding women as crack-
brained. Yet she was not one of the fools; she could govern a household,
and she liked work, she had the capacity for devotedness. So, therefore,
she was a woman perverted by her position, and she shook her bonds in
revolt from marriage. Imagining a fall down some suddenly spied chasm
of her nature, she had a sisterly feeling for the women named sinful.
At the same time, reflecting that they are sinful only with the sinful,
she knelt thankfully at the feet of the man who had saved her from such
danger. Tears threatened. They were a poor atonement for the burning of
his younger letters. But not he--she was the sufferer, and she whipped
up a sensation of wincing at the flames they fell to, and at their void
of existence, committing sentimental idiocies worthy of a lovesick girl,
consciously to escape the ominous thought, which her woman's perception
had sown in her, that he too chafed at a marriage no marriage: was true
in fidelity, not true through infidelity, as she had come to be. The
thought implied misery for both. She entered a black desolation, with
the prayer that he might not be involved, for his own sake: partly also
on behalf of the sustaining picture the young schoolmaster at his task,
merry among his dear boys, to trim and point them body and mind for their
business in the world, painted for her a weariful prospect of the life
she must henceforth drag along.
Is a woman of the plain wits common to numbers ever deceived in her
perception of a man's feelings for her? Let her first question herself
whether she respects him. If she does not, her judgement will go easily
astray, intuition and observation are equally at fault, she has no key;
he has charmed her blood, that is all. But if she respects him, she
cannot be deceived; respect is her embrace of a man's character.
Aminta's vision was clear. She had therefore to juggle with the fact
revealed, that she might keep her heart from rushing out; and the process
was a disintegration of her feminine principle of docility under the
world's decrees. At each pause of her mental activity she was hurled
against the state of marriage. Compassion for her blameless fellow in
misery brought a deluge to sweep away institutions and landmarks.
But supposing the blest worst to happen, what exchange had she to bestow?
Her beauty? She was reputed beautiful. It had made a madman of one man;
and in her poverty of endowments to be generous with, she hovered over
Mr. Morsfield like a cruel vampire, for the certification that she had a
much-prized gift to bestow upon his rival.
But supposing it: she would then be no longer in the shiny garden of the
flowers of wealth; and how little does beauty weigh as all aid to an
active worker in the serious fighting world! She would be a kind of
potted rose-tree under his arm, of which he must eventually tire.
A very cold moment came, when it seemed that even the above supposition,
in the case of a woman who has been married, is shameful to her, a sin
against her lover, and should be obliterated under floods of scarlet.
For, if she has pride, she withers to think of pushing the most noble of
men upon his generosity. And, further, if he is not delicately
scrupulous, is there not something wanting in him? The very cold wave
passed, leaving the sentence: better dream of being plain friends.