The Case of General Opel
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George Meredith >> The Case of General Opel
General Ople understood her last remark. He pressed the lady's hand in
silence, very nervously.
'But do not shrug your head into your shoulders as if there were any
possibility of concealing the thunderingly evident,' said Lady Camper,
electrifying him, what with her cordial squeeze, her kind eyes, and her
singular language. 'You have omitted the collar. Well? The collar is
the fatal finishing touch in men's dress; it would make Apollo look
bourgeois.'
Her hand was in his: and watching the play of her features, a spark
entered General Ople's brain, causing him, in forgetfulness of collar and
caricatures, to ejaculate, 'Seventy? Did your ladyship say seventy?
Utterly impossible! You trifle with me.'
'We will talk when we are free of this accompaniment of carriage-wheels,
General,' said Lady Camper.
'I will beg permission to go and fetch Elizabeth, madam.'
'Rightly thought of. Fetch her in my carriage. And, by the way, Mrs.
Baerens was my old music-mistress, and is, I think, one year older than
I. She can tell you on which side of seventy I am.'
'I shall not require to ask, my lady,' he said, sighing.
'Then we will send the carriage for Elizabeth, and have it out together
at once. I am impatient; yes, General, impatient: for what?--
forgiveness.'
'Of me, my lady?' The General breathed profoundly.
'Of whom else? Do you know what it is?-I don't think you do. You
English have the smallest experience of humanity. I mean this: to strike
so hard that, in the end, you soften your heart to the victim. Well,
that is my weakness. And we of our blood put no restraint on the blows
we strike when we think them wanted, so we are always overdoing it.'
General Ople assisted Lady Camper to alight from the carriage, which was
forthwith despatched for Elizabeth.
He prepared to listen to her with a disconnected smile of acute
attentiveness.
She had changed. She spoke of money. Ten thousand pounds must be
settled on his daughter. 'And now,' said she, 'you will remember that
you are wanting a collar.'
He acquiesced. He craved permission to retire for ten minutes.
'Simplest of men! what will cover you?' she exclaimed, and peremptorily
bidding him sit down in the drawing-room, she took one of the famous pair
of pistols in her hand, and said, 'If I put myself in a similar position,
and make myself decodletee too, will that satisfy you? You see these
murderous weapons. Well, I am a coward. I dread fire-arms. They are
laid there to impose on the world, and I believe they do. They have
imposed on you. Now, you would never think of pretending to a moral
quality you do not possess. But, silly, simple man that you are! You
can give yourself the airs of wealth, buy horses to conceal your
nakedness, and when you are taken upon the standard of your apparent
income, you would rather seem to be beating a miserly retreat than behave
frankly and honestly. I have a little overstated it, but I am near the
mark.'
'Your ladyship wanting courage!' cried the General.
'Refresh yourself by meditating on it,' said she. 'And to prove it to
you, I was glad to take this house when I knew I was to have a gallant
gentleman for a neighbour. No visitors will be admitted, General Ople,
so you are bare-throated only to me: sit quietly. One day you speculated
on the paint in my cheeks for the space of a minute and a half:--I had
said that I freckled easily. Your look signified that you really could
not detect a single freckle for the paint. I forgave you, or I did not.
But when I found you, on closer acquaintance, as indifferent to your
daughter's happiness as you had been to her reputation . . .'
'My daughter! her reputation! her happiness !'
General Ople raised his eyes under a wave, half uttering the outcries.
'So indifferent to her reputation, that you allowed a young man to talk
with her over the wall, and meet her by appointment: so reckless of the
girl's happiness, that when I tried to bring you to a treaty, on her
behalf, you could not be dragged from thinking of yourself and your own
affair. When I found that, perhaps I was predisposed to give you some of
what my sisters used to call my spice. You would not honestly state the
proportions of your income, and you affected to be faithful to the woman
of seventy. Most preposterous! Could any caricature of mine exceed in
grotesqueness your sketch of yourself? You are a brave and a generous
man all the same: and I suspect it is more hoodwinking than egotism--or
extreme egotism--that blinds you. A certain amount you must have to be a
man. You did not like my paint, still less did you like my sincerity;
you were annoyed by my corrections of your habits of speech; you were
horrified by the age of seventy, and you were credulous--General Ople,
listen to me, and remember that you have no collar on--you were credulous
of my statement of my great age, or you chose to be so, or chose to seem
so, because I had brushed your cat's coat against the fur. And then,
full of yourself, not thinking of Elizabeth, but to withdraw in the
chivalrous attitude of the man true to his word to the old woman, only
stickling to bring a certain independence to the common stock, because--
I quote you! and you have no collar on, mind--"you could not be at your
wife's mercy," you broke from your proposal on the money question. Where
was your consideration for Elizabeth then?
'Well, General, you were fond of thinking of yourself, and I thought I
would assist you. I gave you plenty of subject matter. I will not say
I meant to work a homoeopathic cure. But if I drive you to forget your
collar, is it or is it not a triumph?
'No,' added Lady Camper, 'it is no triumph for me, but it is one for you,
if you like to make the most of it. Your fault has been to quit active
service, General, and love your ease too well. It is the fault of your
countrymen. You must get a militia regiment, or inspectorship of
militia. You are ten times the man in exercise. Why, do you mean to
tell me that you would have cared for those drawings of mine when
marching?'
'I think so, I say I think so,' remarked the General seriously.
'I doubt it,' said she. 'But to the point; here comes Elizabeth. If you
have not much money to spare for her, according to your prudent
calculation, reflect how this money has enfeebled you and reduced you to
the level of the people round about us here--who are, what? Inhabitants
of gentlemanly residences, yes! But what kind of creature? They have no
mental standard, no moral aim, no native chivalry. You were rapidly
becoming one of them, only, fortunately for you, you were sensitive to
ridicule.'
'Elizabeth shall have half my money settled on her,' said the General;
'though I fear it is not much. And if I can find occupation, my lady...'
'Something worthier than that,' said Lady Camper, pencilling outlines
rapidly on the margin of a book, and he saw himself lashing a pony; 'or
that,' and he was plucking at a cabbage; 'or that,' and he was bowing to
three petticoated posts.
'The likeness is exact,' General Ople groaned.
'So you may suppose I have studied you,' said she. 'But there is no real
likeness. Slight exaggerations do more harm to truth than reckless
violations of it.
You would not have cared one bit for a caricature, if you had not nursed
the absurd idea of being one of our conquerors. It is the very tragedy
of modesty for a man like you to have such notions, my poor dear good
friend. The modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at
vanity. And reflect whether you have not been intoxicated, for these
young people have been wretched, and you have not observed it, though one
of them was living with you, and is the child you love. There, I have
done. Pray show a good face to Elizabeth.'
The General obeyed as well as he could. He felt very like a sheep that
has come from a shearing, and when released he wished to run away. But
hardly had he escaped before he had a desire for the renewal of the
operation. 'She sees me through, she sees me through,' he was heard
saying to himself, and in the end he taught himself, to say it with a
secret exultation, for as it was on her part an extraordinary piece of
insight to see him through, it struck him that in acknowledging the truth
of it, he made a discovery of new powers in human nature.
General Ople studied Lady Camper diligently for fresh proofs of her
penetration of the mysteries in his bosom; by which means, as it happened
that she was diligently observing the two betrothed young ones, he began
to watch them likewise, and took a pleasure in the sight. Their
meetings, their partings, their rides out and home furnished him themes
of converse. He soon had enough to talk of, and previously, as he
remembered, he had never sustained a conversation of any length with
composure and the beneficent sense of fulness. Five thousand pounds, to
which sum Lady Camper reduced her stipulation for Elizabeth's dowry, he
signed over to his dear girl gladly, and came out with the confession to
her ladyship that a well-invested twelve thousand comprised his fortune.
She shrugged she had left off pulling him this way and that, so his
chains were enjoyable, and he said to himself: 'If ever she should in the
dead of night want a man to defend her!' He mentioned it to Reginald,
who had been the repository of Elizabeth's lamentations about her father
being left alone, forsaken, and the young man conceived a scheme for
causing his aunt's great bell to be rung at midnight, which would
certainly have led to a dramatic issue and the happy re-establishment of
our masculine ascendancy at the close of this history. But he forgot it
in his bridegroom's delight, until he was making his miserable official
speech at the wedding-breakfast, and set Elizabeth winking over a tear.
As she stood in the hall ready to depart, a great van was observed in the
road at the gates of Douro Lodge; and this, the men in custody declared
to contain the goods and knick-knacks of the people who had taken the
house furnished for a year, and were coming in that very afternoon.
'I remember, I say now I remember, I had a notice,' the General said
cheerily to his troubled daughter.
'But where are you to go, papa?' the poor girl cried, close on sobbing.
'I shall get employment of some sort,' said he. 'I was saying I want it,
I need it, I require it.'
'You are saying three times what once would have sufficed for,' said Lady
Camper, and she asked him a few questions, frowned with a smile, and
offered him a lodgement in his neighbour's house.
'Really, dearest Aunt Angela?' said Elizabeth.
'What else can I do, child? I have, it seems, driven him out of a
gentlemanly residence, and I must give him a ladylike one. True, I would
rather have had him at call, but as I have always wished for a policeman
in the house, I may as well be satisfied with a soldier.'
'But if you lose your character, my lady?' said Reginald.
'Then I must look to the General to restore it.'
General Ople immediately bowed his head over Lady Camper's fingers.
'An odd thing to happen to a woman of forty-one!' she said to her great
people, and they submitted with the best grace in the world, while the
General's ears tingled till he felt younger than Reginald. This, his
reflections ran, or it would be more correct to say waltzed, this is the
result of painting!--that you can believe a woman to be any age when her
cheeks are tinted!
As for Lady Camper, she had been floated accidentally over the ridicule
of the bruit of a marriage at a time of life as terrible to her as her
fiction of seventy had been to General Ople; she resigned herself to let
things go with the tide. She had not been blissful in her first
marriage, she had abandoned the chase of an ideal man, and she had found
one who was tunable so as not to offend her ears, likely ever to be a
fund of amusement for her humour, good, impressible, and above all, very
picturesque. There is the secret of her, and of how it came to pass that
a simple man and a complex woman fell to union after the strangest
division.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Can believe a woman to be any age when her cheeks are tinted
Modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at vanity
Nature is not of necessity always roaring
Only to be described in the tongue of auctioneers
Respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower
She seems honest, and that is the most we can hope of girls
Spare me that word "female" as long as you live
The mildness of assured dictatorship
When we see our veterans tottering to their fall
[The End]
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