CHAPTER VII. EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER’S DOSES
The rules in Lord Ormont’s household assisted to shelter him for some hours of the day from the lady who was like a blast of sirocco under his roof. He had his breakfast alone, as Lady Charlotte had it at Olmer; a dislike of a common table in the morning was a family trait with both. At ten o’clock the secretary arrived, and they were shut up together. At the luncheon table Aminta usually presided. If my lord dined at home, he had by that time established an equanimity rendering, his constant civility to Mrs. Pagnell less arduous. The presence of a woman of tongue, perpetually on the spring to gratify him and win him, was among the burdens he bore for his Aminta.
Mrs. Pagnell soon perceived that the secretary was in favour. My lord and this Mr. Weyburn had their pet themes of conversation, upon which the wary aunt of her niece did not gaze like the wintry sun with the distant smile her niece displayed over discussions concerning military biographies, Hannibal’s use of his elephants and his Numidian horse, the Little St. Bernard, modern artillery, ancient slingers, English and Genoese bowmen, Napoleon’s tactics, his command to the troopers to “give point,” and English officers’ neglect of sword exercise, and the “devil of a day” Old England is to have on a day to come. My lord connected our day of trial with India. Mrs. Pagnell assumed an air of studious interest; she struck in to give her niece a lead, that Lord Ormont might know his countess capable of joining the driest of subjects occupying exalted minds. Aminta did not follow her; and she was extricated gallantly by the gentlemen in turn.
The secretary behaved with a pretty civility. Aminta shook herself to think tolerantly of him when he, after listening to the suggestion, put interrogatively, that we should profit by Hannibal’s example and train elephants to serve as a special army corps for the perfect security of our priceless Indian Empire, instanced the danger likely to result from their panic fear of cannon, and forbore to consult Lord Ormont’s eye.
Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her foot into it; but women advised of being fools in what they say, are generally sustained by their sense of the excellent motive which impelled them. Even to the Countess of Ormont, she could have replied, “We might have given them a higher idea of us”—if, that meant, the Countess of Ormont had entered the field beside her, to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta. She hinted as much subsequently, and Aminta’s consciousness of the troth was touched. The young schoolmaster’s company sat on her spirits, deadened her vocabulary. Her aunt spoke of passing the library door and hearing the two gentlemen loudly laughing. It seemed subserviency on the fallen young hero’s part. His tastes were low. He frequented the haunts of boxing men; her lord informed her of his having made, or of his making, matches to run or swim or walk certain distances against competitors or within a given time. He had also half a dozen boys or more in tow, whom he raced out of town on Sundays; a nucleus of the school he intended to form.
But will not Achilles become by comparison a common rushlight where was a blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown’s cap on the head whose golden helm was fired by Pallas?
Nay, and let him look the hero still: all the more does he point finger on his meanness of nature.
Turning to another, it is another kind of shame that a woman feels, if she consents to an exchange of letters—shameful indeed, but not such a feeling of deadly sickness as comes with the humiliating view of an object of admiration degraded. Bad she may be; and she may be deceived, vilely treated, in either case. And what is a woman’s pride but the staff and banner of her soul, beyond all gifts? He who wounds it cannot be forgiven—never!—he has killed the best of her. Aminta found herself sliding along into the sentiment, that the splendid idol of a girl’s worship is, if she discover him in the lapse of years as an infinitesimally small one, responsible for the woman’s possible reckless fit of giddiness. And she could see her nonsense; she could not correct it. Lines of the letters under signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent about her: they would recur; and she charged their doing so on the discovered meanness of the girl’s idol. Her wicked memory was caused by his having plunged her low.
Mrs. Pagnell performed the offices of attention to Mr. Weyburn in lieu of the countess, who seemed to find it a task to sit at the luncheon table with him, when Lady Ormont was absent. “Just peeped in,” she said as she entered the library, “to see if all was comfortable;” and gossip ensued, not devoid of object. She extracted an astonishingly smooth description of Lady Charlotte. Weyburn was brightness in speaking of the much-misunderstood lady. “She’s one of the living women of the world.”
“You are sure you don’t mean one of the worldly women?” Mrs. Pagnell rejoiced.
“She has to be known to be liked,” he owned.
“And you were, one hears, among the favoured?”
“I can scarcely pretend to that, ma’am.”
“You were recommended.”
“Lady Charlotte is devoted to her brother.”
Mrs. Pagnell’s bosom heaved. “How strange Lord Ormont is! One would suppose, with his indignation at the country for its treatment of him, admirers would be welcome. Oh dear, no! that is not the way. On board the packet, on our voyage to Spain, my niece in her cabin, imploring mercy of Neptune, as they say, I heard of Lord Ormont among the passengers. I could hardly credit my ears. For I had been hearing of him from my niece ever since her return from a select establishment for the education of young ladies, not much more than a morning’s drive out of London, though Dover was my residence. She had got a hero! It was Lord Ormont! Lord Ormont! all day: and when the behaviour of the country to him became notorious, Aminta—my niece the countess—she could hardly contain herself. A secret:—I promised her—it’s not known to Lord Ormont himself:—a printed letter in a metropolitan paper, copied into the provincial papers, upholding him for one of the greatest of our patriot soldiers and the saviour of India, was the work of her hands. You would, I am sure, think it really well written. Meeting him on deck—the outline of the coast of Portugal for an introductory subject, our Peninsular battles and so forth—I spoke of her enthusiasm. The effect was, to cut off all communication between us. I had only to appear, Lord Ormont vanished. I said to myself, this is a character. However, the very mention of him to my niece, as one of the passengers on board—medicine, miraculous! She was up in half an hour, out pacing the deck before evening, hardly leaning on my arm, and the colour positively beginning to show on her cheeks again. He fled, of coarse. I had prepared her for his eccentricities. Next morning she was out by herself. In the afternoon Lord Ormont strode up to us his—military step—and most courteously requested the honour of an introduction. I had broken the ice at last; from that moment he was cordiality itself, until—I will not say, until he had called her his own—a few little misunderstandings!—not with his countess. You see, a resident aunt is translated mother-in-law by husbands; though I spare them pretty frequently; I go to friends, they travel. Here in London she must have a duenna. The marriage at Madrid, at the Embassy:—well, perhaps it was a step for us, for commoners, though we rank with the independent. Has her own little pin-money—an inheritance. Perhaps Lady Eglett gives the world her version. She may say, there was aiming at station. I reply, never was there a more whole-hearted love-match! Absolutely the girl’s heart has been his from the period of her school-days. Oh! a little affair—she was persecuted by a boy at a neighbouring school. Her mistress wrote me word—a very determined Romeo young gentleman indeed—quite alarmed about him. In the bud! I carried her off on the spot, and snapped it effectually. Warned he meant to be desperate, I kept her away from my house at Dover four months, place to place; and I did well. I heard on my return, that a youth, answering to the schoolmistress’s description of him, had been calling several times, the first two months and longer. You have me alluding to these little nonsensical nothings, because she seemed born to create violent attachments, even at that early day; and Lady Eglett—Lady Charlotte Eglett may hear; for there is no end to them, and impute them to her, when really!—can she be made responsible for eyes innocent of the mischief they appear destined to do? But I am disturbing you in your work.”
“You are very good, ma’am,” said the ghost of the determined young gentleman.
“A slight cold, have you?” Mrs. Pagnell asked solicitously.
“Dear me, no!” he gave answer with a cleared throat.
In charging him with more than he wanted to carry, she supplied him with particulars he had wanted to know; and now he asked himself what could be the gain of any amount of satisfied curiosity regarding a married Aminta. She slew my lord on board a packet-boat; she bears the arrows that slay. My lord married her where the first English chaplain was to be found; that is not wonderful either. British Embassy, Madrid! Weyburn believed the ceremony to have been performed there: at the same time, he could hear Lady Charlotte’s voice repeating with her varied intonation Mrs. Pagnell’s impressive utterances; and he could imagine how the somewhat silly duenna aunt, so penetrable in her transparent artifices, struck emphasis on the incredulity of people inclined to judge of the reported ceremony by Lord Ormont’s behaviour to his captive.
How explain that strange matter? But can there be a gain in trying to sound it? Weyburn shuffled it away. Before the fit of passion seized him, he could turn his eager mind from anything which had not a perceptible point of gain, either for bodily strength or mental acquisition, or for money, too, now that the school was growing palpable as an infant in arms and agape for the breast. Thought of gain, and the bent to pursue it, is the shield of Athene over young men in the press of the seductions. He had to confess his having lost some bits of himself by reason of his meditations latterly; and that loss, if we let it continue a space, will show in cramp at the wrist, logs on the legs, a wheezy wind, for any fellow vowed to physical trials of strength and skill. It will show likewise in the brain beating broken wings—inability to shoot a thought up out of the body for half a minute. And, good Lord! how quickly the tight-strong fellow crumbles, when once the fragmentary disintegration has begun! Weyburn cried out on a heart that bounded off at prodigal gallops, and had to be nipped with reminders of the place of good leader he was for taking among the young. Hang superexcellence! but we know those moanings over the troubles of a married woman; we know their sources, know their goal, or else we are the fiction-puppet or the Bedlamite; and she is a married woman, married at the British Embassy, Madrid, if you please! after a few weeks’ acquaintance with her husband, who doubtless wrote his name intelligibly in the registrar’s book, but does not prove himself much the hero when he drives a pen, even for so little as the signing of his name! He signed his name, apparently not more than partly pledging himself to the bond. Lord Ormont’s autobiographical scraps combined with Lady Charlotte’s hints and Mrs. Pagnell’s communications, to provoke the secretary’s literary contempt of his behaviour to his wife. However, the former might be mended, and he resumed the task.
It had the restorative effect of touching him to see his old hero in action; whereby he was brought about to a proper modesty, so that he really craved no more than for the mistress of this house to breathe the liberal air of a public acknowledgment of her rightful position. Things constituted by their buoyancy to float are remarkable for lively bobbings when they are cast upon the waters; and such was the case with Weyburn, until the agitation produced by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to sail away in the society of the steadiest.
He decided that by not observing, not thinking, not feeling, about the circumstances of the household into which Fate had thrown him, he would best be able—probably it was the one way—to keep himself together; and his resolution being honest all round, he succeeded in it as long as he abstained from a very wakeful vigilance over simple eyesight. For if one is nervously on guard to not-see, the matter starts up winged, and enters us, and kindles the mind, and tingles through the blood; it has us as a foe. The art of blind vision requires not only practice, but an intimate knowledge of the arts of the traitor we carry within. Safest for him, after all, was to lay fast hold of the particularly unimportant person he was, both there and anywhere else. The Countess of Ormont’s manner toward him was to be read as a standing index of the course he should follow; and he thanked her. He could not quite so sincerely thank her aunt. His ingratitude for the sickly dose she had administered to him sprang a doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked her aunt on account of services performed at the British Embassy, Madrid.
Certain looks of those eyes recently, when in colloquy with my lord, removed the towering nobleman to a shadowed landscape.
Was it solely an effect of eyes commanding light, and having every shaft of the quiver of the rays at her disposal? Or was it a shot from a powerful individuality issuing out of bondage to some physical oppressor no longer master of the soul, in peril of the slipping away of the body? Her look on him was not hate: it was larger, more terribly divine. Those eyes had elsewhere once looked love: they had planted their object in a throbbing Eden. The man on whom they had looked shivered over the thought of it after years of blank division.
Rather than have those eyes to look on him their displacing unintentness, the man on whom they had once looked love would have chosen looks of wrath, the darts that kill—blest darts of the celestial Huntress, giving sweet sudden cessation of pain, in the one everlasting last flash of life with thought that the shot was hers. Oh for the ‘ayava behea’ of the Merciful in splendour!
These were the outcries of the man deciding simultaneously not to observe, not to think, not to feel, and husbanding calculations upon storage of gain for the future. Softness held the song below. It came of the fact that his enforced resolution, for the sake of sanity, drove his whole reflective mind backward upon his younger days, when an Evening and a Morning star in him greeted the bright Goddess Browny or sang adieu, and adored beyond all golden beams the underworld whither she had sunk, where she was hidden.
Meanwhile, the worthy dame who had dosed him was out in her carriage, busy paying visits to distinguished ladies of the great world, with the best of excuses for an early call, which was gossip to impart, such as the Countess of Ormont had not yet thought of mentioning; and two or three of them were rather amusedly interested to hear that Lord Ormont had engaged a handsome young secretary, “under the patronage of Lady Charlotte Eglett, devoted to sports of all kinds, immensely favoured by both.” Gossip must often have been likened to the winged insect bearing pollen to the flowers; it fertilizes many a vacuous reverie. Those flowers of the upper garden are not, indeed, stationary and in need of the missionary buzzer, but if they have been in one place unmoved for one hour, they are open to take animation from their visitors. Aminta was pleasantly surprised next day by the receipt of a note from Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, begging to be invited to lunch if she came, as she had a purpose in the wish to meet my lord.
[NOTE: The remainder of ‘Lord Ormont and His Aminta’ is taken from an older edition which
uses single rather than double quotation marks. D.W.]
CHAPTER VIII. MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY
My lord had one of his wilful likings for Isabella Lawrence Finchley, and he consented to the torture of an hour of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell in the middle of the day, just to taste the favourite he welcomed at home as he championed her abroad. The reasons were numerous and intimate why she pleased him. He liked the woman, enjoyed the cause for battle that she gave. Weyburn, on coming to the luncheon table, beheld a lady with the head of a comely boy, the manner, softened in delicate feminine, of a capital comrade. Her air of candour was her nature in her face; and it carried a guileless roguery, a placid daring, a supersensual naughtiness, a simplicity of repose amid the smoky reputation she created, that led one to think the vapour calumnious or the creature privileged. That young boy’s look opened him at once; he had not to warm to her,—he flew. Ordinarily the sweetest ladies will make us pass through cold mist and cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before the formalities are cleared away to grant us rights of citizenship. She was like those frank lands where we have not to hand out a passport at the frontier and wait for dubious inspection of it.
She prevailed with cognizant men and with the frivolous. Women were capable of appreciating her, too: as Aminta did, despite some hinted qualifications addressed shyly to her husband. But these were the very matters exciting his particular esteem. He was of Lady Charlotte’s mind, in her hot zeal against injustice done to the creatures she despised; and yet more than she applauded a woman who took up her idiot husband’s challenge to defend her good name, and cleared it, right or wrong, and beat him down on his knees, and then started for her spell of the merry canter over turf: an example to the English of the punishment they get for their stupid Puritanic tyranny—sure to be followed by a national helter-skelter down-hill headlong. And Mrs. Lawrence was not one of the corrupt, he argued; she concealed what it was decent to conceal, without pouting hypocritical pretences; she had merely dispensed with idle legal formalities, in the prettiest curvetting airy wanton way, to divorce the man who tried to divorce her, and ‘whined to be forgiven when he found he couldn’t. Adderwood was ready to marry her to-morrow, if the donkey husband would but go and bray his last. Half a dozen others were heads off on the same course to that goal.’
That was her champion’s perusal of a lady candidly asserting her right to have breeched comrades, and paying for it in the advocacy which compromises. She was taken to be and she was used as a weapon wherewith to strike at our Pharisees. Women pushing out into the world for independence, bleed heavy payments all round.
The earl’s double-edged defence of her was partly a vindication of another husband, who allowed his wife to call her friend; he was nevertheless assured of her not being corrupt, both by his personal knowledge of the lady, and his perception of her image in the bosom of his wife. She did no harm there, he knew well. Although he was not a man to put his trust in faces, as his young secretary inclined to do, Mrs. Lawrence’s look of honest boy did count among the pleadings. And somewhat so might a government cruiser observe the intrusion of a white-sailed yacht in protected sea-waters, where licenced trawlers are at the haul.
Talk over the table coursed as fluently as might be, with Mrs. Pagnell for a boulder in the stream. Uninformed by malice, she led up to Lord Adderwood’s name, and perhaps more designedly spoke of Mr. Morsfield, on whom her profound reading into the female heart of the class above her caused her to harp, as ‘a real Antinous,’ that the ladies might discuss him and Lord Ormont wax meditative.
Mrs. Lawrence pitied the patient gentleman, while asking him in her mind who was the author of the domestic burden he had to bear.
‘It reminds me I have a mission,’ she said. ‘There’s a fencing match down at a hall in the West, near the barracks; private and select: Soldier and Civilian; I forget who challenged—Civilian, one judges; Soldiers are the peaceful party. They want you to act “umpire,” as they call it, on the military side, my dear lord; and you will?—I have given my word you will bring Lady Ormont. You will?—and not let me be confounded! Yes, and we shall make a party. I see consent. Aminta will enjoy the switch of steel. I love to see fencing. It rouses all that is diabolical in me.’
She sent a skimming look at the opposite.
‘And I,’ said he, much freshened.
‘You fence?’
‘Handle the foils.’
‘If you must speak modestly! Are you in practice?’
‘I spend in hour in Captain Chiallo’s fencing rooms generally every evening before dinner. I heard there the first outlines of the match proposed. You are right; it was the civilian.’
‘Mr. Morsfield, as I suspected.’
She smiled to herself, like one saying, Not badly managed, Mr. Morsfield!
‘Italian school?’ Lord Ormont inquired, with a screw of the eyelids.
‘French, my lord.’
‘The only school for teaching.’
‘The simplest—has the most rational method. Italians are apt to be tricky. But they were masters once, and now and then they send out a fencer the French can’t touch.’
‘How would you account for it?’
‘If I had to account for it, I should say, hotter blood, cool nerve, quick brain.’
‘Hum. Where are we, then?’
‘We don’t shine with the small sword.’
‘We had men neatly pinked for their slashings in the Peninsula.’
‘We’ve had clever Irishmen.’
‘Hot enough blood! This man Morsfield—have you crossed the foils with him?’
‘Goes at it like a Spaniard; though Spaniards in Paris have been found wary enough.’
My lord hummed. ‘Fellow looks as if he would easily lose his head over steel.’
‘He can be dangerous.’
The word struck on something, and rang.
Mrs. Lawrence had a further murmur within her lips. Her travelling eye met Aminta’s and passed it.
‘But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded?’ said Mrs. Pagnell.
‘Oh no, oh no; not in that case!’ Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble assent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy’s face was mischief at school under shadow of the master.
She said to Weyburn: ‘Are you one in the list—to give our military a lesson? They want it.’
His answer was unheard by Aminta. She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence’s pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood. Isabella Lawrence’s look at him spirited the bright past out of the wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve that some woman’s hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella Lawrence Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss feathery—wild at his games.
My lord hummed again. ‘I suspect we ‘re going to get a drubbing. This fellow here has had his French maitre d’armes. Show me your hand, sir.’
Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: ‘The wrist wants exercise.’
‘Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails’ ends; you were a bowler at cricket.’
‘Now examine the palms, my lord; I judge by the lines on the palms,’ Mrs. Pagnell remarked.
He nodded to her and rose.
Coffee had not been served, she reminded him; it was coming in, so down he sat a yard from the table; outwardly equable, inwardly cursing coffee; though he refused to finish a meal without his cup.
‘I think the palms do betray something,’ said Mrs. Lawrence; and Aminta said: ‘Everything betrays.’
‘No, my dear,’ Mrs. Pagnell corrected her; ‘the extremities betray, and we cannot read the centre. Is it not so, my lord?’
‘It may be as you say, ma’am.’
She was disappointed in her scheme to induce a general examination of palms, and especially his sphinx lordship’s.
Weyburn controlled the tongue she so frequently tickled to an elvish gavotte, but the humour on his face touched Mrs. Lawrence’s to a subdued good-fellow roguishness, and he felt himself invited to chat with her on the walk for a reposeful ten minutes in Aminta’s drawing-room.
Mrs. Pagnell, ‘quite enjoying the company,’ as she told her niece, was dismayed to hear her niece tell her of a milliner’s appointment, positive for three o’clock; and she had written it in her head ‘p.m., four o’clock,’ and she had mislaid or destroyed the milliner’s note; and she still had designs upon his lordship’s palms, things to read and hint around her off the lines. She departed.
Lord Ormont became genial; and there was no one present who did not marvel that he should continue to decree a state of circumstances more or less necessitating the infliction he groaned under. He was too lofty to be questioned, even by his favourites. Mrs. Lawrence conjured the ghost of Lady Charlotte for an answer: this being Lord Adderwood’s idea. Weyburn let his thoughts go on fermenting. Pride froze a beginning stir in the bosom of Aminta.
Her lord could captivate a reluctant woman’s bosom when he was genial. He melted her and made her call up her bitterest pride to perform its recent office. That might have failed; but it had support in a second letter received from the man accounted both by Mrs. Lawrence and by Mr. Weyburn ‘dangerous’; and the thought of who it was that had precipitated her to ‘play little games’ for the sole sake of rousing him through jealousy to a sense of righteous duty, armed her desperately against him. She could exult in having read the second letter right through on receipt of it, and in remembering certain phrases; and notably in a reflection shot across her bewildered brain by one of the dangerous man’s queer mad sentences: ‘Be as iron as you like, I will strike you to heat’; and her thought: Is there assurance of safety in a perpetual defence?—all while she smiled on her genial lord, and signified agreement, with a smiting of wonderment at her heart, when he alluded to a panic shout of the country for defence, and said: ‘Much crying of that kind weakens the power to defend when the real attack comes.’ Was it true?
‘But say what you propose?’ she asked.
Lord Ormont proposed vigilance and drill; a small degree of self-sacrifice on the part of the population, and a look-out head in the War Department. He proposed to have a nation of stout-braced men laughing at the foreign bully or bandit, instead of being a pack of whimpering women; whom he likened to the randomly protestant geese of our country roadside, heads out a yard in a gabble of defence while they go backing.
So thereupon Aminta’s notion of a resemblance in the mutual thought subsided; she relapsed on the cushioning sentiment that she was a woman. And—only a woman! he might exclaim, if it pleased him; though he would never be able to say she was one of the whimpering. She, too, had the choice to indulge in scorn of the superior man stone blind to proceedings intimately affecting him—if he cared! One might doubt it.
Mrs. Lawrence listened to him with a mind more disengaged, and a flitting disapproval of Aminta’s unsympathetic ear, or reluctance to stimulate the devout attention a bruised warrior should have in his tent. She did not press on him the post of umpire. He consented—at her request, he said—to visit the show; but refused any official position that would, it was clearly enough implied, bring his name in any capacity whatever before the country which had unpardonably maltreated him.
Feminine wits will be set working, when a point has been gained; and as Mrs. Lawrence could now say she had persuaded Lord Ormont to gratify her specially, she warmed to fancy she read him, and that she might have managed the wounded and angry giant. Her minor intelligence, caracoling unhampered by harassing emotions, rebuked Aminta’s for not perceiving that to win him round to whatever a woman may desire, she must be with him, outstrip him even, along the line he chooses for himself; abuse the country, rail at the Government, ridicule the title of English Army, proscribe the name of India in his hearing. Little stings of jealousy are small insect bites, and do not pique a wounded giant hardly sensible of irritation under his huge, and as we assume for our purpose, justifiable wrath. We have to speculate which way does the giant incline to go? and turn him according to the indication.
Mrs. Lawrence was driven by her critic mood to think Aminta relied—erroneously, after woman’s old fashion—on the might of superb dark eyes after having been captured. It seemed to her worse than a beautiful woman’s vanity, a childishness. But her boy’s head held boy’s brains; and Lord Ormont’s praise of the splendid creature’s nerve when she had to smell powder in Spain, and at bull-fights, and once at a wrecking of their carriage down a gully on the road over the Alpujarras, sent her away subdued, envious, happy to have kissed the cheek of the woman who could inspire it.