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.
Mrs. Pagnell had been quietly chewing her cud of the sullens, as was the way with her after a snub. She now resumed her gossip of the naughty world she knelt to and expected to see some day stricken by a bolt from overhead; containing, as it did, such wicked members as that really indefensible brazen Mrs. Amy May, who was only the daughter of a half-pay naval captain, and that Marquis of Collestou, who would, they say, decorate her with his title to-morrow, if her husband were but somewhere else. She spread all sorts of report, about Mr. Morsfield, and he was honour itself in his reserve about her. ‘Depend upon it, Aminta—he was not more than a boy then, and they say she aimed at her enfranchisement by plotting the collision, for his Yorkshire revenues are immense, and he is, you know, skilful in the use of arms, and Captain May has no resources whatever: penury! no one cares to speculate how they contrive!—but while that dreadful duelling—and my lord as bad as any in his day-exists, depend upon it, an unscrupulous good-looking woman has as many lives for her look of an eye or lift of a finger as a throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.’
Aminta wished to dream. She gave her aunt a second dose, and the lady relapsed again.
Power to dream had gone. She set herself to look at roadside things, cottage gardens, old housewives in doorways, gaffer goodman meeting his crony on the path, groups of boys and girls. She would take the girls, Matthew Weyburn the boys. She had lessons to give to girls, she had sympathy, pity, anticipation. That would be a life of happy service. It might be a fruitful trial of the system he proposed, to keep the boys and girls in company as much as possible, both at lessons and at games. His was the larger view. Her lord’s view appeared similar to that of her aunt’s ‘throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.’ Matthew Weyburn believed in the bettering of the world; Lord Ormont had no belief like it.
Presently Mrs. Pagnell returned to the charge, and once more she was nipped, and irritated to declare she had never known her niece’s temper so provoking. Aminta was launching a dream of a lass she had seen in a field, near a white hawthorn, standing upright, her left arm aloft round the pole of a rake, the rim of her bonnet tipped on her forehead; an attitude of a rustic.
Britannia with helmet heeling at dignity. The girl’s eyes hung to the passing chariot, without movement of her head. It was Aminta who looked back, and she saw the girl looking away. Among the superior dames and damsels she had seen, there was not one to match that figure for stately air, gallant ease, and splendour of pose. Matthew Weyburn would have admired the girl. Aminta did better than envy, she cast off the last vestiges of her bitter ambition to be a fine lady, and winged into the bosom of the girl, and not shyly said ‘yes’ to Matthew Weyburn, and to herself, deep in herself: ‘A maid has no need to be shy.’ Hardly blushing, she walks on into the new life beside him, and hears him say: ‘I in my way, you in yours; we are equals, the stronger for being equals,’ and she quite agrees, and she gives him the fuller heart for his not requiring her to be absorbed—she is the braver mate for him. Does not that read his meaning? Happiest of the girls of earth, she has divined it at once, from never having had the bitter ambition to be a slave, that she might wear rich tissues; and let herself be fettered, that she might loll in idleness; lose a soul to win a title; escape commonplace to discover it ghastlier under cloth of gold, and the animal crowned, adored, fattened, utterly served, in the class called by consent of human society the Upper.
Reason whispered a reminder of facts to her.
‘But I am not the Countess of Ormont!’ she said. She felt herself the girl, her sensations were so intensely simple.
Proceeding to an argument, that the earl did not regard her as the Countess of Ormont, or the ceremony at the British Embassy as one serious and binding, she pushed her reason too far: sweet delusion waned. She waited for some fresh scene to revive it.
Aminta sat unwittingly weaving her destiny.
While she was thus engaged, a carriage was rolling on the more westerly road down to Steignton. Seated in it were Lady Charlotte Eglett and Matthew Weyburn. They had met at Arthur Abner’s office the previous day. She went there straight from Lord Ormont’s house-agent and upholsterer, to have a queer bit of thunderous news confirmed, that her brother was down at Steignton, refurnishing the house, and not for letting. She was excited: she treated Arthur Abner’s closed-volume reticence as a corroboration of the house-agent’s report, and hearing Weyburn speak of his anxiety to see the earl immediately, in order to get release from his duties, proposed a seat in her carriage; for down Steignton way she meant to go, if only as excuse for a view of the old place. She kept asking what Lord Ormont wanted down at Steignton refurnishing the house, and not to let it! Her evasions of answers that, plain speculation would supply were quaint. ‘He hasn’t my feeling for Steignton. He could let it—I couldn’t. Sacrilege to me to have a tenant in my old home where I was born. He’s furnishing to raise his rent. His country won’t give him anything to do, so he turns miser. That’s my brother Rowsley’s way of taking on old age.’
Her brother Rowsley might also be showing another sign of his calamitous condition. She said to Weyburn, in the carriage, that her brother Rowsley might like having his hair clipped by the Philistine woman; which is one of the ways of strong men to confess themselves ageing. ‘Not,’ said she, with her usual keen justness ‘not that I’ve, a word against Delilah. I look upon her as a patriot; she dallied and she used the scissors on behalf of her people. She wasn’t bound to Samson in honour,—liked a strong man, probably enough. She proved she liked her country better. The Jews wrote the story of it, so there she stands for posterity to pelt her, poor wretch.’
‘A tolerably good analogy for the story of men and women generally,’ said Weyburn.
‘Ah, well, you’ve a right to talk; you don’t run miauling about women. It ‘s easy to be squashy on that subject. As for the Jews, I don’t go by their history, but now they ‘re down I don’t side with the Philistines, or Christians. They ‘re good citizens, and they ‘ve got Samson in the brain, too. That comes of persecution, a hard education. They beat the world by counting in the head. That ‘s because they ‘ve learnt the value of fractions. Napoleon knew it in war, when he looked to the boots and great-coats of his men; those were his fractions. Lord Ormont thinks he had too hard-and-fast a system for the battle-field.’
‘A greater strategist than tactician, my lady? It may be,’ said Weyburn, smiling at her skips.
‘Massing his cannon to make a big hole for his cavalry, my brother says; and weeding his infantry for the Imperial Guard he postponed the moment to use.’
‘At Moskowa?’
‘Waterloo. I believe Lord Ormont would—there! his country ‘s lost him, and chose it. They ‘ll have their day for repentance yet. What a rapture to have a thousand horsemen following you! I suppose there never was a man worthy of the name who roared to be a woman. I know I could have shrieked half my life through to have been born male. It ‘s no matter now. When we come to this hateful old age, we meet: no, we ‘re no sex then—we ‘re dry sticks. I ‘ll tell you: my Olmer doctor—that ‘s an impudent fellow who rode by staring into my carriage. The window’s down. He could see without pushing his hat in.’
Weyburn looked out after a man cantering on.
‘A Mr. Morsfield,’ he said. ‘I thought it was he when I saw him go by. I’ve met him at the fencing-rooms. He ‘s one of the violent fencers, good for making his point, if one funks an attack.’
‘That man Morsfield, is it? I wonder what he’s doing on the road here. He goes over London boasting—hum, nothing to me. But he ‘ll find Lord Ormont’s arm can protect a poor woman, whatever she is. He’d have had it before, only Lord Ormont shuns a scandal. I was telling you, my Olmer doctor forbade horse-riding, and my husband raised a noise like one of my turkeycocks on the wing; so I ‘ve given up the saddle, to quiet him. I guessed. I went yesterday morning to my London physician. He sounded me, pushed out his mouth and pulled down his nose, recommended avoidance of excitement. “Is it heart?” I said. He said it was heart. That was the best thing an old woman could hear. He said, when he saw I wasn’t afraid, it was likely to be quick; no doctors, no nurses and daily bulletins for inquirers, but just the whites of the eyes, the laying-out, the undertaker, and the family-vault. That’s one reason why I want to see Steignton before the blow that may fall any day, whether my brother Rowsley’s there or no. But that Olmer doctor of mine, Causitt, Peter Causitt, shall pay me for being a liar or else an ignoramus when I told him he was to tell me bluntly the nature of my disease.’
A horseman, in whom they recognized Mr. Morsfield, passed, clattering on the road behind them.
‘Some woman here about,’ Lady Charlotte muttered. Weyburn saw him joined by a cavalier, and the two consulted and pointed whips right and left.