‘Good! I am glad to see you,’ he said. ‘Tell me you know Mr. Morsfield pretty well. I’m speaking of my affair. He has been trespassing down on my grounds at Steignton, and I think of taking the prosecution of him into my own hands. Is he in town?’
‘I ‘ve just left his lame devil Cumnock, my lord,’ said May, after a slight grimace. ‘They generally run in tandem.’
‘Will you let me know?’
‘At once, when I hear.’
‘You will call on me? Before noon?’
‘Any service required?’
‘My respects to your wife.’
‘Your lordship is very good.’
Captain May bloomed at a civility paid to his wife. He was a smallish, springy, firm-faced man, devotee of the lady bearing his name and wielding him. In the days when duelling flourished on our land, frail women could be powerful.
The earl turned from him to greet Lord Adderwood and a superior officer of his Profession, on whom he dropped a frigid nod. He held that all but the rank and file, and a few subalterns, of the service had abandoned him to do homage to the authorities. The Club he frequented was not his military Club. Indeed, lunching at any Club in solitariness that day, with Aminta away from home, was bitter penance. He was rejoiced by Lord Adderwood’s invitation, and hung to him after the lunch; for a horrible prospect of a bachelor dinner intimated astonishingly that he must have become unawares a domesticated man.
The solitary later meal of a bachelor was consumed, if the word will suit a rabbit’s form of feeding. He fatigued his body by walking the streets and the bridge of the Houses of Parliament, and he had some sleep under a roof where a life like death, or death apeing life, would have seemed to him the Joshua Abnett, if he had been one to take up images.
Next day he was under the obligation to wait at home till noon. Shortly before noon a noise of wheels drew him to the window. A young lady, in whom he recognized Aminta’s little school friend, of some name, stepped out of a fly. He met her in the hall.
She had expected to be welcomed by Aminta, and she was very timid on finding herself alone with the earl. He, however, treated her as the harbinger bird, wryneck of the nightingale, sure that Aminta would keep her appointment unless an accident delayed. He had forgotten her name, but not her favourite pursuit of botany; and upon that he discoursed, and he was interested, not quite independently of the sentiment of her being there as a guarantee of Aminta’s return. Still he knew his English earth, and the counties and soil for particular wild-flowers, grasses, mosses; and he could instruct her and inspire a receptive pupil on the theme of birds, beasts, fishes, insects, in England and other lands.
He remained discoursing without much weariness till four of the afternoon. Then he had his reward. The chariot was at the door, and the mounted figure of Joshua Abnett, on which he cast not a look or a thought. Aminta was alone. She embraced Selina Collett warmly, and said, in friendly tones, ‘Ah! my lord, you are in advance of me.’
She had dropped Mrs. Pagnell and Mr. Weyburn at two suburban houses; working upon her aunt’s dread of the earl’s interrogations as regarded Mr. Morsfield. She had, she said, chosen to take the journey easily on her return, and enjoyed it greatly.
My lord studied her manner more than her speech. He would have interpreted a man’s accurately enough. He read hers to signify that she had really enjoyed her journey, ‘made the best of it,’ and did not intend to be humble about her visit to Steignton without his permission; but that, if hurt at the time, she had recovered her spirits, and was ready for a shot or two—to be nothing like a pitched battle. And she might fire away to her heart’s content: wordy retorts would not come from him; he had material surprises in reserve for her. His question concerning Morsfield knew its answer, and would only be put under pressure.
Comparison of the friends Aminta and Selina was forced by their standing together, and the representation in little Selina of the inferiority of the world of women to his Aminta; he thought of several, and splendid women, foreign and English. The comparison rose sharply now, with Aminta’s novel, airy, homely, unchallengeing assumption of an equal footing beside her lord, in looks and in tones that had cast off constraint of the adoring handmaid, to show the full-blown woman, rightful queen of her half of the dominion. Between the Aminta of then and now, the difference was marked as between Northern and Southern women: the frozen-mouthed Northerner and the pearl and rose-nipped Southerner; those who smirk in dropping congealed monosyllables, and those who radiantly laugh out the voluble chatter.
Conceiving this to the full in a mind destitute of imagery, but indicative of the thing as clearly as the planed, unpolished woodwork of a cabinet in a carpenter’s shop, Lord Ormont liked her the better for the change, though she was not the woman whose absence from his house had caused him to go mooning half a night through the streets, and though it forewarned him of a tougher bit of battle, if battle there was to be.
He was a close reader of surfaces. But in truth, the change so notable came of the circumstance, that some little way down below the surface he perused, where heart weds mind, or nature joins intellect, for the two to beget a resolution, the battle of the man and the woman had been fought, and the man beaten.
CHAPTER XXII. TREATS OF THE FIRST DAY OF THE CONTENTION OF BROTHER AND SISTER
In the contest rageing at mid-sea still between the man and the woman, it is the one who is hard to the attractions of the other that will make choice of the spot and have the advantages. A short time earlier Lord Ormont could have marked it out at his leisure. He would have been unable to comprehend why it was denied him to do so now; for he was master of himself, untroubled by conscience, unaware, since he was assured of his Aminta’s perfect safety and his restored sense of possession, that any taint of softness in him had reversed the condition of their alliance. He felt benevolently the much he had to bestow, and was about to bestow. Meanwhile, without complicity on his part, without his knowledge, yet absolutely involving his fate, the battle had gone against him in Aminta’s breast.
Like many of his class and kind, he was thoroughly acquainted with the physical woman, and he took that first and very engrossing volume of the great Book of Mulier for all the history. A powerful wing of imagination, strong as the flappers of the great Roc of Arabian story, is needed to lift the known physical woman even a very little way up into azure heavens. It is far easier to take a snap-shot at the psychic, and tumble her down from her fictitious heights to earth. The mixing of the two make nonsense of her. She was created to attract the man, for an excellent purpose in the main. We behold her at work incessantly. One is a fish to her hook; another a moth to her light. By the various arts at her disposal she will have us, unless early in life we tear away the creature’s coloured gauzes and penetrate to her absurdly simple mechanism. That done, we may, if we please, dominate her. High priests of every religion have successively denounced her as the chief enemy. To subdue and bid her minister to our satisfaction is therefore a right employment of man’s unperverted superior strength. Of course, we keep to ourselves the woman we prefer; but we have to beware of an uxorious preference, or we are likely to resemble the Irishman with his wolf, and dance imprisoned in the hug of our captive.
For it is the creature’s characteristic to be lastingly awake, in her moments of utmost slavishness most keenly awake to the chances of the snaring of the stronger. Be on guard, then. Lord Ormont had been on guard then and always: his instinct of commandership kept him on guard. He was on guard now when his Aminta played, not the indignant and the frozen, but the genially indifferent. She did it well, he admitted.
Had it been the indignant she played, he might have stooped to cajole the handsome queen of gypsies she was, without acknowledgement of her right to complain. Feeling that he was about to be generous, he shrugged. He meant to speak in deeds.
Lady Charlotte’s house was at the distance of a stroller’s half-hour across Hyde Park westward from his own. Thither he walked, a few minutes after noon, prepared for cattishness. He could fancy that he had hitherto postponed the visit rather on her account, considering that he would have to crush her if she humped and spat, and he hoped to be allowed to do it gently. There would certainly be a scene.
Lady Charlotte was at home.
‘Always at home to you, Rowsley, at any hour. Mr. Eglett has driven down to the City. There ‘s a doctor in a square there’s got a reputation for treating weak children, and he has taken down your grand-nephew Bobby to be inspected. Poor boy comes of a poor stock on the father’s side. Mr. Eglett would have that marriage. Now he sees wealth isn’t everything. Those Benlews are rushlights. However, Elizabeth stood with her father to have Robert Benlew, and this poor child ‘s the result. I wonder whether they have consciences!’
My lord prolonged the sibilation of his ‘Yes,’ in the way of absent-minded men. He liked little Bobby, but had to class the boy second for the present.
‘You have our family jewels in your keeping, Charlotte?’
‘No, I haven’t,—and you know I haven’t, Rowsley.’ She sprang to arms, the perfect porcupine, at his opening words, as he had anticipated.
‘Where are the jewels?’
‘They’re in the cellars of my bankers, and safe there, you may rely on it.’
‘I want them.’
‘I want to have them safe; and there they stop.’
‘You must get them and hand them over.’
‘To whom?’
‘To me.’
‘What for?’
‘They will be worn by the Countess of Ormont’
‘Who ‘s she?’
‘The lady who bears the title.’
‘The only Countess of Ormont I know of is your mother and mine, Rowsley; and she’s dead.’
‘The Countess of Ormont I speak of is alive.’
Lady Charlotte squared to him. ‘Who gives her the title?’
‘She bears it by right.’
‘Do you mean to say, Rowsley, you have gone and married the woman since we came up from Steignton?’
‘She is my wife.’
‘Anyhow, she won’t have our family jewels.’
‘If you had swallowed them, you’d have to disgorge.’
‘I don’t give up our family jewels to such people.’
‘Do you decline to call on her?’
‘I do: I respect our name and blood.’
‘You will send the order to your bankers for them to deliver the jewels over to me at my house this day.’
‘Look here, Rowsley; you’re gone cracked or senile. You ‘re in the hands of one of those clever wenches who catch men of your age. She may catch you; she shan’t lay hold of our family jewels: they stand for the honour of our name and blood.’
‘They are to be at my house-door at four o’clock this afternoon.’
‘They’ll not stir.’
‘Then I go down to order your bankers and give them the order.’
‘My bankers won’t attend to it without the order from me.’
‘You will submit to the summons of my lawyers.’
‘You’re bent on a public scandal, are you?’
‘I am bent on having the jewels.’
‘They are not yours; you ‘ve no claim to them; they are heirlooms in our family. Things most sacred to us are attached to them. They belong to our history. There ‘s the tiara worn by the first Countess of Ormont. There ‘s the big emerald of the necklace-pendant—you know the story of it. Two rubies not counted second to any in England. All those diamonds! I wore the cross and the two pins the day I was presented after my marriage.’
‘The present Lady Ormont will wear them the day she is presented.’
‘She won’t wear them at Court.’
‘She will.’
‘Don’t expect the Lady Ormont of tradesmen and footmen to pass the Lord Chamberlain.’
‘That matter will be arranged for next season. Now I ‘ve done.’
‘So have I; and you have my answer, Rowsley.’ They quitted their chairs.
‘You decline to call on my wife?’ said the earl.
Lady Charlotte replied: ‘Understand me, now. If the woman has won you round to legitimize the connection, first, I’ve a proper claim to see her marriage lines. I must have a certificate of her birth. I must have a testified account of her life before you met her and got the worst of it. Then, as the case may be, I ‘ll call on her.
‘You will behave yourself when you call.’
‘But she won’t have our family jewels.’
‘That affair has been settled by me.’
‘I should be expecting to hear of them as decorating the person of one of that man Morsfield’s mistresses.’
The earl’s brow thickened. ‘Charlotte, I smacked your cheek when you were a girl.’
‘I know you did. You might again, and I wouldn’t cry out. She travels with that Morsfield; you ‘ve seen it. He goes boasting of her. Gypsy or not, she ‘s got queer ways.’
‘I advise you, you had better learn at once to speak of her respectfully.’
‘I shall have enough to go through, if what you say’s true, with questions of the woman’s antecedents and her people, and the date of the day of this marriage. When was the day you did it? I shall have to give an answer. You know cousins of ours, and the way they ‘ll be pressing, and comparing ages and bawling rumours. None of them imagined my brother such a fool as to be wheedled into marrying her. You say it’s done, Rowsley. Was it done yesterday or the day before?’
Lord Ormont found unexpectedly that she struck on a weak point. Married from the first? Why not tell me of it? He could hear her voice as if she had spoken the words. And how communicate the pell-mell of reasons?
‘You’re running vixen. The demand I make is for the jewels,’ he said.
‘You won’t have them, Rowsley—not for her.’
‘You think of compelling me to use force?’
‘Try it.’
‘You swear the jewels are with your bankers?’
‘I left them in charge of my bankers, and they’ve not been moved by me.’
‘Well, it must be force.’
‘Nothing short of it when the honour of our family’s concerned.’
It was rather worse than the anticipated struggle with this Charlotte, though he had kept his temper. The error was in supposing that an hour’s sharp conflict would settle it, as he saw. The jewels required a siege.
‘When does Eglett return?’ he asked.
‘Back to lunch. You stay and lunch here, Rowsley we don’t often have you.’
The earl contemplated her, measuring her powers of resistance for a prolonged engagement. Odd that the pride which had withdrawn him from the service of an offending country should pitch him into a series of tussles with women, for its own confusion! He saw that, too, in his dim reflectiveness, and held the country answerable for it.
Mr. Eglett was taken into confidence by him privately after lunch. Mr. Eglett’s position between the brother and sister was perplexing; habitually he thought his wife had strong good sense, in spite of the costliness of certain actions at law not invariably confirming his opinion; he thought also that the earl’s demand must needs be considered obediently. At the same time, his wife’s objections to the new Countess of Ormont, unmasked upon the world, seemed very legitimate; though it might be asked why the earl should not marry, marrying the lady who pleased him. But if, in the words of his wife, the lady had no claim to be called a lady, the marriage was deplorable. On the other hand, Lord Ormont spoke of her in terms of esteem, and he was no fondling dotard.
How to compromise the matter for the sake of peace? The man perpetually plunged into strife by his combative spouse, cried the familiar question again; and at every suggestion of his on behalf of concord he heard from Lady Charlotte that he had no principles, or else from Lord Ormont that his head must be off his shoulders.
The man for peace had the smallest supply of language, and so, unless he took a side and fought, his active part was football between them.
It went on through the afternoon up to five o’clock. No impression was betrayed by Lady Charlotte.
She congratulated her brother on the recruit he had enlisted. He smiled his grimmest of the lips drawn in. A combat, perceptibly of some extension, would soon give him command of the man of peace; and energy to continue attacks will break down the energies of any dogged defensive stand.
He deferred the discussion with his unreasonable sister until the next day at half-past twelve o’clock. Lady Charlotte nodded to the appointment. She would have congratulated herself without irony on the result of the first day’s altercation but for her brother Rowsley’s unusual and ominous display of patience. Twice during the wrangle she had to conceal a difficult breathing. She felt a numbness in one arm now it was over, and mentally complimented her London physician on the unerringness of his diagnosis. Her heart, however, complained of the cruelty of having in the end, perhaps, if the wrangle should be protracted, to yield, for sheer weakness, without ceasing to beat.
CHAPTER XXIII. THE ORMONT JEWELS
At half-past twelve of the noon next day Lord Ormont was at Lady Charlotte’s house door. She welcomed him affectionately, as if nothing were in dispute; he nodded an acceptance of her greetings, with a blunt intimation of the business to be settled; she put on her hump of the feline defensive; then his batteries opened fire and hers barked back on him. Each won admiration of the other’s tenacity, all the more determined to sap or split it. They had known one another’s character, but they had never seen it in such strong light. Never had their mutual and similar, though opposed, resources been drawn out so copiously and unreservedly. This was the shining scrawl of all that each could do to gain a fight. They admired one another’s contemptibly justifiable evasions, changes of front, statements bordering the lie, even to meanness in the withdrawal of admissions and the denial of the same ever having been made. That was Charlotte! That was Rowsley! Anything to beat down the adversary.
As to will, the woman’s will, of these two, equalled the man’s. They were matched in obstinacy and unscrupulousness.
Her ingenuitics of the defence eluded his attacks, and compelled him to fall on heavy iteration of his demand for the jewels, an immediate restitution of the jewels. ‘Why immediate?’ cried she.
He repeated it without replying to her.
‘But, you tell me, Rowsley, why immediate? If you’re in want of money for her, you come to me, tell me, you shall have thousands. I’ll drive down to the City to-morrow and sell out stock. Mr. Eglett won’t mind when he hears the purpose. I shall call five thousand cheap, and don’t ask to see the money again.’
‘Ah! double the sum to have your own way!’ said he.
She protested that she valued her money. She furnished instances of her carefulness of her money all along up to the present period of brutal old age. Yet she would willingly part with five thousand or more to save the family honour. Mr. Eglett would not only approve, he would probably advance a good part of the money himself.
‘Money! Who wants money?’ thundered the earl, and jumped out of her trap of the further diversion from the plain request. ‘To-morrow, when I am here, I shall expect to have the jewels delivered to me.’
‘That you may hand them over to her. Where are they likely to be this time next year? And what do you know about jewels? You may look at them when you ask to see them, and not know imitation paste—like the stuff Lady Beltus showed her old husband. Our mother wore them, and she prized them. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather hear they were exhibited in a Bond Street jeweller’s shop or a Piccadilly pawnbroker’s than have them on that woman.’
‘You speak of my wife.’
‘For a season, perhaps; and off they’re likely to go, to pay bills, if her Adderwoods and her Morsfields are out of funds, as they call it.’
‘You are aware you are speaking of my wife, Charlotte?’
‘You daren’t say my sister-in-law.’
He did not choose to say it; and once more she dared him. She could imagine she scored a point.
They were summoned to lunch by Mr. Eglett; and there was an hour’s armistice; following which the earl demanded the restitution of the jewels, and heard the singular question, childishly accentuated, ‘What for?’
Patience was his weapon and support, so he named his object with an air of inveteracy in tranquillity they were for his wife to wear.
Lady Charlotte dared him to say they were for her sister-in-law.
He despised the transparent artifice of the challenge.
‘But you have to own the difference,’ she said. ‘You haven’t lost respect for your family, thank God! No. It ‘s one thing to say she ‘s a wife: you hang fire when it ‘s to say she ‘s my sister-in-law.’
‘You’ll have to admit the fact, Charlotte.’
‘How long is it since I should have had to admit the fact?’
‘From the date of my marriage.’
‘Tell me the date.’
‘No, you don’t wear a wig, Charlotte; but you are fit to practise in the Law-courts!’ he said, exasperatedly jocular.
She had started a fresh diversion, and she pressed him for the date. ‘I ‘m supposed to have had a sister-in-law-how many weeks?—months?’
‘Years.’
‘Married years! And if you’ve been married years, where were you married? Not in a church. That woman’s no church-bride.’
‘There are some clever women made idiots of by their trullish tempers.’
‘Abuse away. I’ve asked you where you were married, Rowsley.’
‘Go to Madrid. Go to the Embassy. Apply to the chaplain.’
‘Married in Madrid! Who’s ever married in Madrid! You flung her a yellow handkerchief, and she tied it round her neck—that ‘s your ceremony! Now you tell me you’ve been married years; and she’s a young woman; you fetch her over from Madrid, set her in a place where those Morsfields and other fungi-fellows grow, and she has to think herself lucky to be received by a Lady Staines and a Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, and she the talk of the town, refused at Court, for all an honourable-enough old woman countenanced her in pity; and I ‘m asked to believe she was my brother’s wife, sister-in-law of mine, all the while! I won’t.’
Lady Charlotte dilated on it for a length of time, merely to show she declined to believe it; pouring Morsfield over him and the talk of the town, the gypsy caught in Spain—now to be foisted on her as her sister-in-law! She could fancy she produced an effect.
She did indeed unveil to him a portion of the sufferings his Aminta had undergone; as visibly, too, the good argumentative reasons for his previous avoidance of the deadly, dismal wrangle here forced on him. A truly dismal, profitless wrangle! But the finish of it would be the beginning of some solace to his Aminta.
The finish of it must be to-morrow. He refrained from saying so, and simply appointed to-morrow for the resumption of the wrestle, departing in his invincible coat of patience: which one has to wear when dealing with a woman like Charlotte, he informed Mr. Eglett, on his way out at a later hour than on the foregone day. Mr. Eglett was of his opinion, that an introduction of lawyers into a family dispute was ‘rats in the pantry’; and he would have joined him in his gloomy laugh, if the thought of Charlotte in a contention had not been so serious a matter. She might be beaten; she could not be brought to yield.
She retired to her bedroom, and laid herself flat on her bed, immoveable, till her maid undressed her for the night. A cup of broth and strip of toast formed her sole nourishment. As for her doctor’s possible reproaches, the symptoms might crowd and do their worst; she fought for the honour of her family.
At midday of the third day Lady Charlotte was reduced to the condition of those fortresses which wave defiantly the flag, but deliver no further shot, awaiting the assault. Her body, affected by hideous old age, succumbed. Her will was unshaken. She would not write to her bankers. Mr. Eglett might go to them, if he thought fit. Rowsley was to understand that he might call himself married; she would have no flower-basket bunch of a sister-in-law thrust upon her.
Lord Ormont and Mr. Eglett walked down to her bankers in the afternoon. As a consequence of express injunctions given by my lady five years previously, the assistant-manager sought an interview with her.
The jewels were lodged at her house the day ensuing. They were examined, verified by the list in Lady Charlotte’s family record-book, and then taken away—forcibly, of course—by her brother.
He laughed in his dry manner; but the reminiscent glimpses, helping him to see the humour of it, stirred sensations of the tug it had been with that combative Charlotte, and excused him for having shrunk from the encounter until he conceived it to be necessary.
Settlement of the affair with Morsfield now claimed his attention. The ironical tolerance he practised in relation to Morsfield when Aminta had no definite station before the world changed to an angry irritability at the man’s behaviour now that she had stepped forth under his acknowledgement of her as the Countess of Ormont. He had come round to a rather healthier mind regarding his country, and his introduction of the Countess of Ormont to the world was his peace-offering.
As he returned home earlier on the third day, he found his diligent secretary at work. The calling on Captain May and the writing to the sort of man were acts obnoxious to his dignity; so he despatched Weyburn to the captain’s house, one in a small street of three narrow tenements abutting on aristocracy and terminating in mews. Weyburn’s mission was to give the earl’s address at Great Marlow for the succeeding days, and to see Captain May, if the captain was at home. During his absence the precious family jewel-box was locked in safety. Aminta and her friend, little Miss Collett, were out driving, by the secretary’s report. The earl considered it a wholesome feature of Aminta’s character that she should have held to her modest schoolmate the fact spoke well for both of them.
A look at the papers to serve for Memoirs was discomposing, and led him to think the secretary could be parted with as soon as he pleased to go: say, a week hence.
The Memoirs were no longer designed for issue. He had the impulse to treat them on the spot as the Plan for the Defence of the Country had been treated; and for absolutely obverse reasons. The secretary and the Memoirs were associated: one had sprung out of the other. Moreover, the secretary had witnessed a scene at Steignton. The young man had done his duty, and would be thanked for that, and dismissed, with a touch of his employer’s hand. The young man would have made a good soldier—a better soldier, good as he might be as a scribe. He ought to have been in his father’s footsteps, and he would then have disciplined or quashed his fantastical ideas. Perhaps he was right on the point of toning the Memoirs here and there. Since the scene at Steignton Lord Ormont’s views had changed markedly in relation to everybody about him, and most things.
Weyburn came back at the end of an hour to say that he had left the address with Mrs. May, whom he had seen.
‘A handsome person,’ the earl observed.
‘She must have been very handsome,’ said Weyburn.
‘Ah! we fall into their fictions, or life would be a bald business, upon my word!’
Lord Ormont had not uttered it before the sentiment of his greater luck with one of that queer world of the female lottery went through him on a swell of satisfaction, just a wave.
An old-world eye upon women, it seemed to Weyburn. But the man who could crown a long term of cruel injustice with the harshness to his wife at Steignton would naturally behold women with that eye.
However, he was allowed only to generalize; he could not trust himself to dwell on Lady Ormont and the Aminta inside the shell. Aminta and Lady Ormont might think as one or diversely of the executioner’s blow she had undergone. She was a married woman, and she probably regarded the wedding by law as the end a woman has to aim at, and is annihilated by hitting; one flash of success, and then extinction, like a boy’s cracker on the pavement. Not an elevated image, but closely resembling that which her alliance with Lord Ormont had been!
At the same time, no true lover of a woman advises her—imploring is horrible treason—to slip the symbolic circle of the law from her finger, and have in an instant the world for her enemy. She must consent to be annihilated, and must have no feelings; particularly no mind. The mind is the danger for her. If she has a mind alive, she will certainly push for the position to exercise it, and run the risk of a classing with Nature’s created mates for reptile men.
Besides, Lady Ormont appeared, in the company of her friend Selina Collett, not worse than rather too thoughtful; not distinctly unhappy. And she was conversable, smiling. She might have had an explanation with my lord, accepting excuses—or, who knows? taking the blame, and offering them. Weakness is pliable. So pliable is it, that it has been known for a crack of the masterly whip to fling off the victim and put on the culprit! Ay, but let it be as it may with Lady Ormont, Aminta is of a different composition. Aminta’s eyes of the return journey to London were haunting lights, and lured him to speculate; and for her sake he rejected the thought that for him they meant anything warmer than the passing thankfulness, though they were a novel assurance to him of her possession beneath her smothering cloud of the power to resolve, and show forth a brilliant individuality.
The departure of the ladies and my lord in the travelling carriage for the house on the Upper Thames was passably sweetened to Weyburn by the command to him to follow in a day or two, and continue his work there until he left England. Aminta would not hear of an abandonment of the Memoirs. She spoke on the subject to my lord as to a husband pardoned.
She was not less affable and pleasant with him out of Weyburn’s hearing. My lord earned her gratitude for his behaviour to Selina Collett, to whom he talked interestedly of her favourite pursuit, as he had done on the day when, as he was not the man to forget, her arrival relieved him of anxiety. Aminta, noticed the box on the seat beside him.