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.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
As well ask (women) how a battle-field concerns them!
Boys who can appreciate brave deeds are capable of doing them
Careful not to smell of his office
Chose to conceive that he thought abstractedly
Consign discussion to silence with the cynical closure
Convictions we store--wherewith to shape our destinies
Death is only the other side of the ditch
Didn't say a word No use in talking about feelings
Enthusiast, when not lyrical, is perilously near to boring
He took small account of the operations of the feelings
Her duel with Time
Hopeless task of defending a woman from a woman
I hate old age It changes you so
Ignorance roaring behind a mask of sarcasm
Men bore the blame, though the women were rightly punished
Never nurse an injury, great or small
No love can be without jealousy
Old age is a prison wall between us and young people
Orderliness, from which men are privately exempt
People were virtuous in past days: they counted their sinners
Professional Puritans
Regularity of the grin of dentistry
That pit of one of their dead silences
The beat of a heart with a dread like a shot in it
The good life gone lives on in the mind
The shots hit us behind you
The spending, never harvesting, world
The terrible aggregate social woman
Venus of nature was melting into a Venus of art
[The End]