A	>>	B	>>	C	>>	D	>>	E
F	>>	G	>>	H	>>	I	>>	J
K	>>	L	>>	M	>>	N	>>	O
P	>>	R	>>		S	>>		T
U	>>		V			>>		W

Alexander Maclaren - "Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI"

Henrik Ibsen - "A Doll's House"

George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith - "The Diary of a Nobody"

Albion W. Tourgee - "Bricks Without Straw"

The Entire Short Works of George Meredith

G >> George Meredith >> The Entire Short Works of George Meredith




The lady arrived in time: she received the cards of the neighbourhood,
and signalized her eccentricity by paying no attention to them, excepting
the card of a Mrs. Baerens, who had audience of her at once. By express
arrangement, the card of General Wilson Ople, as her nearest neighbour,
followed the card of the rector, the social head of the district; and the
rector was granted an interview, but Lady Camper was not at home to
General Ople. She is of superior station to me, and may not wish to
associate with me, the General modestly said. Nevertheless he was
wounded: for in spite of himself, and without the slightest wish to
obtrude his own person, as he explained the meaning that he had in him,
his rank in the British army forced him to be the representative of it,
in the absence of any one of a superior rank. So that he was
professionally hurt, and his heart being in his profession, it may be
honestly stated that he was wounded in his feelings, though he said no,
and insisted on the distinction. Once a day his walk for constitutional
exercise compelled him to pass before Lady Camper's windows, which were
not bashfully withdrawn, as he said humorously of Douro Lodge, in the
seclusion of half-pay, but bowed out imperiously, militarily, like a
generalissimo on horseback, and had full command of the road and levels
up to the swelling park-foliage. He went by at a smart stride, with a
delicate depression of his upright bearing, as though hastening to greet
a friend in view, whose hand was getting ready for the shake. This much
would have been observed by a housemaid; and considering his fine figure
and the peculiar shining silveriness of his hair, the acceleration of his
gait was noticeable. When he drove by, the pony's right ear was flicked,
to the extreme indignation of a mettlesome little animal. It ensued in
consequence that the General was borne flying under the eyes of Lady
Camper, and such pace displeasing him, he reduced it invariably at a step
or two beyond the corner of her grounds.

But neither he nor his daughter Elizabeth attached importance to so
trivial a circumstance. The General punctiliously avoided glancing at the
windows during the passage past them, whether in his wild career or on
foot. Elizabeth took a side-shot, as one looks at a wayside tree. Their
speech concerning Lady Camper was an exchange of commonplaces over her
loneliness: and this condition of hers was the more perplexing to General
Ople on his hearing from his daughter that the lady was very
fine-looking, and not so very old, as he had fancied eccentric ladies
must be. The rector's account of her, too, excited the mind. She had
informed him bluntly, that she now and then went to church to save
appearances, but was not a church-goer, finding it impossible to support
the length of the service; might, however, be reckoned in subscriptions
for all the charities, and left her pew open to poor people, and none but
the poor. She had travelled over Europe, and knew the East. Sketches in
watercolours of the scenes she had visited adorned her walls, and a pair
of pistols, that she had found useful, she affirmed, lay on the
writing-desk in her drawing-room. General Ople gathered from the rector
that she had a great contempt for men: yet it was curiously varied with
lamentations over the weakness of women. 'Really she cannot possibly be
an example of that,' said the General, thinking of the pistols.

Now, we learn from those who have studied women on the chess-board, and
know what ebony or ivory will do along particular lines, or hopping, that
men much talked about will take possession of their thoughts; and
certainly the fact may be accepted for one of their moves. But the whole
fabric of our knowledge of them, which we are taught to build on this
originally acute perception, is shattered when we hear, that it is
exactly the same, in the same degree, in proportion to the amount of work
they have to do, exactly the same with men and their thoughts in the case
of women much talked about. So it was with General Ople, and nothing is
left for me to say except, that there is broader ground than the
chessboard. I am earnest in protesting the similarity of the singular
couples on common earth, because otherwise the General is in peril of the
accusation that he is a feminine character; and not simply was he a
gallant officer, and a veteran in gunpowder strife, he was also (and it
is an extraordinary thing that a genuine humility did not prevent it, and
did survive it) a lord and conqueror of the sex. He had done his pretty
bit of mischief, all in the way of honour, of course, but hearts had
knocked. And now, with his bright white hair, his close-brushed white
whiskers on a face burnt brown, his clear-cut features, and a winning
droop of his eyelids, there was powder in him still, if not shot.

There was a lamentable susceptibility to ladies' charms. On the other
hand, for the protection of the sex, a remainder of shyness kept him from
active enterprise and in the state of suffering, so long as indications
of encouragement were wanting. He had killed the soft ones, who came to
him, attracted by the softness in him, to be killed: but clever women
alarmed and paralyzed him. Their aptness to question and require
immediate sparkling answers; their demand for fresh wit, of a kind that
is not furnished by publications which strike it into heads with a
hammer, and supply it wholesale; their various reading; their power of
ridicule too; made them awful in his contemplation.

Supposing (for the inflammable officer was now thinking, and deeply
thinking, of a clever woman), supposing that Lady Camper's pistols were
needed in her defence one night: at the first report proclaiming her
extremity, valour might gain an introduction to her upon easy terms, and
would not be expected to be witty. She would, perhaps, after the
excitement, admit his masculine superiority, in the beautiful old
fashion, by fainting in his arms. Such was the reverie he passingly
indulged, and only so could he venture to hope for an acquaintance with
the formidable lady who was his next neighbour. But the proud society of
the burglarious denied him opportunity.

Meanwhile, he learnt that Lady Camper had a nephew, and the young
gentleman was in a cavalry regiment. General Ople met him outside his
gates, received and returned a polite salute, liked his appearance and
manners and talked of him to Elizabeth, asking her if by chance she had
seen him. She replied that she believed she had, and praised his
horsemanship. The General discovered that he was an excellent sculler.
His daughter was rowing him up the river when the young gentleman shot
by, with a splendid stroke, in an outrigger, backed, and floating
alongside presumed to enter into conversation, during which he managed to
express regrets at his aunt's turn for solitariness. As they belonged to
sister branches of the same Service, the General and Mr. Reginald Roller
had a theme in common, and a passion. Elizabeth told her father that
nothing afforded her so much pleasure as to hear him talk with Mr. Roller
on military matters. General Ople assured her that it pleased him
likewise. He began to spy about for Mr. Roller, and it sometimes occurred
that they conversed across the wall; it could hardly be avoided. A hint
or two, an undefinable flying allusion, gave the General to understand
that Lady Camper had not been happy in her marriage. He was pained to
think of her misfortune; but as she was not over forty, the disaster was,
perhaps, not irremediable; that is to say, if she could be taught to
extend her forgiveness to men, and abandon her solitude. 'If,' he said to
his daughter, 'Lady Camper should by any chance be induced to contract a
second alliance, she would, one might expect, be humanized, and we should
have highly agreeable neighbours.' Elizabeth artlessly hoped for such an
event to take place.

She rarely differed with her father, up to whom, taking example from the
world around him, she looked as the pattern of a man of wise conduct.

And he was one; and though modest, he was in good humour with himself,
approved himself, and could say, that without boasting of success, he was
a satisfied man, until he met his touchstone in Lady Camper.




CHAPTER II

This is the pathetic matter of my story, and it requires pointing out,
because he never could explain what it was that seemed to him so cruel in
it, for he was no brilliant son of fortune, he was no great pretender,
none of those who are logically displaced from the heights they have been
raised to, manifestly created to show the moral in Providence. He was
modest, retiring, humbly contented; a gentlemanly residence appeased his
ambition. Popular, he could own that he was, but not meteorically; rather
by reason of his willingness to receive light than his desire to shed it.
Why, then, was the terrible test brought to bear upon him, of all men? He
was one of us; no worse, and not strikingly or perilously better; and he
could not but feel, in the bitterness of his reflections upon an
inexplicable destiny, that the punishment befalling him, unmerited as it
was, looked like absence of Design in the scheme of things, Above. It
looked as if the blow had been dealt him by reckless chance. And to
believe that, was for the mind of General Ople the having to return to
his alphabet and recommence the ascent of the laborious mountain of
understanding.

To proceed, the General's introduction to Lady Camper was owing to a
message she sent him by her gardener, with a request that he would cut
down a branch of a wychelm, obscuring her view across his grounds toward
the river. The General consulted with his daughter, and came to the
conclusion, that as he could hardly despatch a written reply to a verbal
message, yet greatly wished to subscribe to the wishes of Lady Camper,
the best thing for him to do was to apply for an interview. He sent word
that he would wait on Lady Camper immediately, and betook himself
forthwith to his toilette. She was the niece of an earl.

Elizabeth commended his appearance, 'passed him,' as he would have said;
and well she might, for his hat, surtout, trousers and boots, were worthy
of an introduction to Royalty. A touch of scarlet silk round the neck
gave him bloom, and better than that, the blooming consciousness of it.

'You are not to be nervous, papa,' Elizabeth said.

'Not at all,' replied the General. 'I say, not at all, my dear,' he
repeated, and so betrayed that he had fallen into the nervous mood. 'I
was saying, I have known worse mornings than this.' He turned to her and
smiled brightly, nodded, and set his face to meet the future.

He was absent an hour and a half.

He came back with his radiance a little subdued, by no means eclipsed;
as, when experience has afforded us matter for thought, we cease to shine
dazzlingly, yet are not clouded; the rays have merely grown serener. The
sum of his impressions was conveyed in the reflective utterance--'It only
shows, my dear, how different the reality is from our anticipation of
it!'

Lady Camper had been charming; full of condescension, neighbourly,
friendly, willing to be satisfied with the sacrifice of the smallest
branch of the wych-elm, and only requiring that much for complimentary
reasons.

Elizabeth wished to hear what they were, and she thought the request
rather singular; but the General begged her to bear in mind, that they
were dealing with a very extraordinary woman; 'highly accomplished,
really exceedingly handsome,' he said to himself, aloud.

The reasons were, her liking for air and view, and desire to see into her
neighbour's grounds without having to mount to the attic.

Elizabeth gave a slight exclamation, and blushed.

'So, my dear, we are objects of interest to her ladyship,' said the
General.

He assured her that Lady Camper's manners were delightful. Strange to
tell, she knew a great deal of his antecedent history, things he had not
supposed were known; 'little matters,' he remarked, by which his daughter
faintly conceived a reference to the conquests of his dashing days. Lady
Camper had deigned to impart some of her own, incidentally; that she was
of Welsh blood, and born among the mountains. 'She has a romantic look,'
was the General's comment; and that her husband had been an insatiable
traveller before he became an invalid, and had never cared for Art.
'Quite an extraordinary circumstance, with such a wife!' the General
said.

He fell upon the wych-elm with his own hands, under cover of the leafage,
and the next day he paid his respects to Lady Camper, to inquire if her
ladyship saw any further obstruction to the view.

'None,' she replied. 'And now we shall see what the two birds will do.'

Apparently, then, she entertained an animosity to a pair of birds in the
tree.

'Yes, yes; I say they chirp early in the morning,' said General Ople.

'At all hours.'

'The song of birds . . . ?' he pleaded softly for nature.

'If the nest is provided for them; but I don't like vagabond chirping.'

The General perfectly acquiesced. This, in an engagement with a clever
woman, is what you should do, or else you are likely to find yourself
planted unawares in a high wind, your hat blown off, and your coat-tails
anywhere; in other words, you will stand ridiculous in your bewilderment;
and General Ople ever footed with the utmost caution to avoid that
quagmire of the ridiculous. The extremer quags he had hitherto escaped;
the smaller, into which he fell in his agile evasions of the big, he had
hitherto been blest in finding none to notice.

He requested her ladyship's permission to present his daughter. Lady
Camper sent in her card.

Elizabeth Ople beheld a tall, handsomely-mannered lady, with good
features and penetrating dark eyes, an easy carriage of her person and an
agreeable voice, but (the vision of her age flashed out under the
compelling eyes of youth) fifty if a day. The rich colouring confessed to
it. But she was very pleasing, and Elizabeth's perception dwelt on it
only because her father's manly chivalry had defended the lady against
one year more than forty.

The richness of the colouring, Elizabeth feared, was artificial, and it
caused her ingenuous young blood a shudder. For we are so devoted to
nature when the dame is flattering us with her gifts, that we loathe the
substitute omitting to think how much less it is an imposition than a
form of practical adoration of the genuine.

Our young detective, however, concealed her emotion of childish horror.

Lady Camper remarked of her, 'She seems honest, and that is the most we
can hope of girls.'

'She is a jewel for an honest man,' the General sighed, 'some day!'

'Let us hope it will be a distant day.'

'Yet,' said the General, 'girls expect to marry.'

Lady Camper fixed her black eyes on him, but did not speak.

He told Elizabeth that her ladyship's eyes were exceedingly searching:
'Only,' said he, 'as I have nothing to hide, I am able to submit to
inspection'; and he laughed slightly up to an arresting cough, and made
the mantelpiece ornaments pass muster.

General Ople was the hero to champion a lady whose airs of haughtiness
caused her to be somewhat backbitten. He assured everybody, that Lady
Camper was much misunderstood; she was a most remarkable woman; she was a
most affable and highly intelligent lady. Building up her attributes on a
splendid climax, he declared she was pious, charitable, witty, and really
an extraordinary artist. He laid particular stress on her artistic
qualities, describing her power with the brush, her water-colour
sketches, and also some immensely clever caricatures. As he talked of no
one else, his friends heard enough of Lady Camper, who was anything but a
favourite. The Pollingtons, the Wilders, the Wardens, the Baerens, the
Goslings, and others of his acquaintance, talked of Lady Camper and
General Ople rather maliciously. They were all City people, and they
admired the General, but mourned that he should so abjectly have fallen
at the feet of a lady as red with rouge as a railway bill. His not seeing
it showed the state he was in. The sister of Mrs. Pollington, an amiable
widow, relict of a large City warehouse, named Barcop, was chilled by a
falling off in his attentions. His apology for not appearing at garden
parties was, that he was engaged to wait on Lady Camper.

And at one time, her not condescending to exchange visits with the
obsequious General was a topic fertile in irony. But she did condescend.
Lady Camper came to his gate unexpectedly, rang the bell, and was let in
like an ordinary visitor. It happened that the General was gardening--not
the pretty occupation of pruning--he was digging--and of necessity his
coat was off, and he was hot, dusty, unpresentable. From adoring earth as
the mother of roses, you may pass into a lady's presence without
purification; you cannot (or so the General thought) when you are caught
in the act of adoring the mother of cabbages. And though he himself loved
the cabbage equally with the rose, in his heart respected the vegetable
yet more than he esteemed the flower, for he gloried in his kitchen
garden, this was not a secret for the world to know, and he almost heeled
over on his beam ends when word was brought of the extreme honour Lady
Camper had done him. He worked his arms hurriedly into his fatigue
jacket, trusting to get away to the house and spend a couple of minutes
on his adornment; and with any other visitor it might have been
accomplished, but Lady Camper disliked sitting alone in a room. She was
on the square of lawn as the General stole along the walk. Had she kept
her back to him, he might have rounded her like the shadow of a dial,
undetected. She was frightfully acute of hearing. She turned while he was
in the agony of hesitation, in a queer attitude, one leg on the march,
projected by a frenzied tip-toe of the hinder leg, the very fatallest
moment she could possibly have selected for unveiling him.

Of course there was no choice but to surrender on the spot.

He began to squander his dizzy wits in profuse apologies. Lady Camper
simply spoke of the nice little nest of a garden, smelt the flowers,
accepted a Niel rose and a Rohan, a Cline, a Falcot, and La France.

'A beautiful rose indeed,' she said of the latter, 'only it smells of
macassar oil.'

'Really, it never struck me, I say it never struck me before,' rejoined
the General, smelling it as at a pinch of snuff. 'I was saying, I always
. . . .' And he tacitly, with the absurdest of smiles, begged permission
to leave unterminated a sentence not in itself particularly difficult

'I have a nose,' observed Lady Camper.

Like the nobly-bred person she was, according to General Ople's version
of the interview on his estate, when he stood before her in his gardening
costume, she put him at his ease, or she exerted herself to do so; and if
he underwent considerable anguish, it was the fault of his excessive
scrupulousness regarding dress, propriety, appearance.

He conducted her at her request to the kitchen garden and the handful of
paddock, the stables and coach-house, then back to the lawn.

'It is the home for a young couple,' she said.

'I am no longer young,' the General bowed, with the sigh peculiar to this
confession. 'I say, I am no longer young, but I call the place a
gentlemanly residence. I was saying, I . . .'

'Yes, yes!' Lady Camper tossed her head, half closing her eyes, with a
contraction of the brows, as if in pain.

He perceived a similar expression whenever he spoke of his residence.

Perhaps it recalled happier days to enter such a nest. Perhaps it had
been such a home for a young couple that she had entered on her marriage
with Sir Scrope Camper, before he inherited his title and estates.

The General was at a loss to conceive what it was.

It recurred at another mention of his idea of the nature of the
residence. It was almost a paroxysm. He determined not to vex her
reminiscences again; and as this resolution directed his mind to his
residence, thinking it pre-eminently gentlemanly, his tongue committed
the error of repeating it, with 'gentleman-like' for a variation.

Elizabeth was out--he knew not where. The housemaid informed him, that
Miss Elizabeth was out rowing on the water.

'Is she alone?' Lady Camper inquired of him.

'I fancy so,' the General replied.

'The poor child has no mother.'

'It has been a sad loss to us both, Lady Camper.'

'No doubt. She is too pretty to go out alone.'

'I can trust her.'

'Girls!'

'She has the spirit of a man.'

'That is well. She has a spirit; it will be tried.'

The General modestly furnished an instance or two of her spiritedness.

Lady Camper seemed to like this theme; she looked graciously interested.

'Still, you should not suffer her to go out alone,' she said.

'I place implicit confidence in her,' said the General; and Lady Camper
gave it up.

She proposed to walk down the lanes to the river-side, to meet Elizabeth
returning.

The General manifested alacrity checked by reluctance. Lady Camper had
told him she objected to sit in a strange room by herself; after that, he
could hardly leave her to dash upstairs to change his clothes; yet how,
attired as he was, in a fatigue jacket, that warned him not to imagine
his back view, and held him constantly a little to the rear of Lady
Camper, lest she should be troubled by it;--and he knew the habit of the
second rank to criticise the front--how consent to face the outer world
in such style side by side with the lady he admired?

'Come,' said she; and he shot forward a step, looking as if he had missed
fire.

'Are you not coming, General?'

He advanced mechanically.

Not a soul met them down the lanes, except a little one, to whom Lady
Camper gave a small silver-piece, because she was a picture.

The act of charity sank into the General's heart, as any pretty
performance will do upon a warm waxen bed.

Lady Camper surprised him by answering his thoughts. 'No; it's for my own
pleasure.'

Presently she said, 'Here they are.'

General Ople beheld his daughter by the river-side at the end of the
lane, under escort of Mr. Reginald Rolles.

It was another picture, and a pleasing one. The young lady and the young
gentleman wore boating hats, and were both dressed in white, and standing
by or just turning from the outrigger and light skiff they were about to
leave in charge of a waterman. Elizabeth stretched a finger at
arm's-length, issuing directions, which Mr. Rolles took up and worded
further to the man, for the sake of emphasis; and he, rather than
Elizabeth, was guilty of the half-start at sight of the persons who were
approaching.

'My nephew, you should know, is intended for a working soldier,' said
Lady Camper; 'I like that sort of soldier best.'

General Ople drooped his shoulders at the personal compliment.

She resumed. 'His pay is a matter of importance to him. You are aware of
the smallness of a subaltern's pay.

'I,' said the General, 'I say I feel my poor half-pay, having always been
a working soldier myself, very important, I was saying, very important to
me!'

'Why did you retire?'

Her interest in him seemed promising. He replied conscientiously, 'Beyond
the duties of General of Brigade, I could not, I say I could not, dare to
aspire; I can accept and execute orders; I shrink from responsibility!'

'It is a pity,' said she, 'that you were not, like my nephew Reginald,
entirely dependent on your profession.'

She laid such stress on her remark, that the General, who had just
expressed a very modest estimate of his abilities, was unable to reject
the flattery of her assuming him to be a man of some fortune. He coughed,
and said, 'Very little.' The thought came to him that he might have to
make a statement to her in time, and he emphasized, 'Very little indeed.
Sufficient,' he assured her, 'for a gentlemanly appearance.'

'I have given you your warning,' was her inscrutable rejoinder, uttered
within earshot of the young people, to whom, especially to Elizabeth, she
was gracious. The damsel's boating uniform was praised, and her sunny
flush of exercise and exposure.

Lady Camper regretted that she could not abandon her parasol: 'I freckle
so easily.'

The General, puzzling over her strange words about a warning, gazed at
the red rose of art on her cheek with an air of profound abstraction.

'I freckle so easily,' she repeated, dropping her parasol to defend her
face from the calculating scrutiny.

'I burn brown,' said Elizabeth.

Lady Camper laid the bud of a Falcot rose against the young girl's cheek,
but fetched streams of colour, that overwhelmed the momentary comparison
of the sunswarthed skin with the rich dusky yellow of the rose in its
deepening inward to soft brown.

Reginald stretched his hand for the privileged flower, and she let him
take it; then she looked at the General; but the General was looking,
with his usual air of satisfaction, nowhere.




CHAPTER III

'Lady Camper is no common enigma,' General Ople observed to his daughter.