There was no counting now on Lord Ormont's presence in the British
gathering seasons, when wheatears wing across our fields or swallows
return to their eaves. He forsook the hunt to roam the Continent, one
of the vulgar band of tourists, honouring town only when Mayflies had
flown, and London's indiscriminate people went about without their
volatile heads.
Lady Charlotte put these changed conditions upon the behaviour of the
military authorities to her brother, saying that the wonder was he did
not shake the dust of his country from his feet. In her wise head she
rejoiced to think he was not the donkey she sketched for admiration; and
she was partly consoled, or played at the taking of a comfort needed in
her perpetual struggle with a phantom of a fact, by the reflection that
a young woman on his arm would tense him to feel himself more at home
abroad. Her mind's habit of living warmly beside him in separation was
vexed by the fixed intrusion of a female third person, who checked the
run of intimate chatter, especially damped the fancied talk over early
days--of which the creature was ignorant; and her propinquity to him
arrested or broke the dialogue Lady Charlotte invented and pressed to
renew. But a wife, while letting him be seen, would have insisted on
appropriating the thought of him--all his days, past as well as present.
An impassioned sister's jealousy preferred that it should not be a wife
reigning to dispute her share of her brother in imagination.
Then came a rumour, telling of him as engaged upon the composition of
his Memoirs.
Lady Charlotte's impulsive outcry: “Writing them?” signified her grounds
for alarm.
Happily, Memoirs are not among the silly deeds done in a moment; they
were somewhere ahead and over the hills: a band of brigands rather than
a homely shining mansion, it was true; but distant; and a principal
question shrieked to know whether he was composing them for publication.
She could look forward with a girl's pleasure to the perusal of them
in manuscript, in a woody nook, in a fervour of partizanship, easily
avoiding sight of errors, grammatical or moral. She chafed at the
possible printing and publishing of them. That would be equivalent to an
exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run across London--brilliant in
himself, spotty in the offence. Published Memoirs indicate the end of
a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end; and at a period of
Lord Ormont's life when the denial of it should thunder. They are his
final chapter, making mummy of the grand figure they wrap in the printed
stuff. They are virtually his apology. Can those knowing Lord Ormont
hear him apologize? But it is a craven apology if we stoop to expound:
we are seen as pleading our case before the public. Call it by any
name you please, and under any attitude, it is that. And set aside the
writing: it may be perfect; the act is the degradation. It is a rousing
of swarms. His friends and the public will see the proudest nobleman
of his day, pleading his case in mangled English, in the headlong of an
out-poured, undrilled, rabble vocabulary, doubling the ridicule by
his imperturbability over the ridicule he excites: he who is no more
ridiculous, cried the partizan sister, conjuring up the scene, not an
ace more ridiculous, than a judge of assize calling himself miserable
sinner on Sunday before the parson, after he has very properly condemned
half a score of weekday miserable sinners to penal servitude or the
rope. Nobody laughs at the judge. Everybody will be laughing at the
scornful man down half-way to his knee-cape with a stutter of an apology
for having done his duty to his country, after stigmatizing numbers for
inability or ill-will to do it. But Ormont's weapon is the sword, not a
pen! Lady Charlotte hunted her simile till the dogs had it or it ran to
earth.
She struck at the conclusion, that the young woman had been persuading
him. An adoring young woman is the person to imagine and induce to the
commission of such folly. “What do you think? You have seen her, you
say?” she asked of a man she welcomed for his flavour of the worldling's
fine bile.
Lord Adderwood made answer: “She may be having a hand in it. She
worships, and that is your way of pulling gods to the ground.”
“Does she understand good English?”
“Speaks it.”
“Can she write?”
“I have never had a letter from her.”
“You tell me Morsfield admires the woman--would marry her to-morrow, if
he could get her.”
“He would go through the ceremony Ormont has performed, I do not doubt.”
“I don't doubt all of you are ready. She doesn't encourage one?”
“On the contrary, all.”
“She's clever. This has been going on for now seven years, and, as far
as I know, she has my brother fast.”
“She may have done the clever trick of having him fast from the
beginning.”
“She'd like people to think it.”
“She has an aunt to advertise it.”
“Ormont can't swallow the woman, I'm told.”
“Trying, if one is bound to get her down!”
“Boasts of the connection everywhere she's admitted, Randeller says.”
“Randeller procures the admission to various parti-coloured places.”
“She must be a blinking moll-owl! And I ask any sane Christian or
Pagan--proof enough!--would my brother Rowsley let his wife visit those
places, those people? Monstrous to have the suspicion that he would, you
know him! Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, for example. I say nothing to hurt the
poor woman; I back her against her imbecile of a husband. He brings a
charge he can't support; she punishes him by taking three years' lease
of independence and kicks up the grass all over the paddock, and then
comes cuckoo, barking his name abroad to have her home again. You can
win the shyest filly to corn at last. She goes, and he digests ruefully
the hotch-potch of a dish the woman brings him. Only the world spies a
side-head at her, husbanded or not, though the main fault was his, and
she had a right to insist that he should be sure of his charge before
he smacked her in the face with it before the world. In dealing with
a woman, a man commonly prudent--put aside chivalry, justice, and the
rest--should bind himself to disbelieve what he can't prove. Otherwise,
let him expect his whipping, with or without ornament. My opinion is,
Lawrence Finchley had no solid foundation for his charge, except his
being an imbecile. She wasn't one of the adventurous women to jump the
bars,--the gate had to be pushed open, and he did it. There she is; and
I ask you, would my brother Rowsley let his wife be intimate with her?
And there are others. And, sauf votre respect, the men--Morsfield for
one, Randeller another!”
“They have a wholesome dread of the lion.”
“If they smell a chance with the lion's bone--it's the sweeter for being
the lion's. These metaphors carry us off our ground. I must let these
Ormont Memoirs run and upset him, if they get to print. I've only to
oppose, printed they'll be. The same if I say a word of this woman, he
marries her to-morrow morning. You speak of my driving men. Why can't I
drive Ormont? Because I'm too fond of him. There you have the secret of
the subjection of women: they can hold their own, and a bit more, when
they've no enemy beating inside.”
“Hearts!--ah, well, it's possible. I don't say no; I've not discovered
them,” Lord Adderwood observed.
They are rarely discovered in the haunts he frequented.
Her allusion to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley rapped him smartly, and she
admired his impassiveness under the stroke. Such a spectacle was one of
her pleasures.
Lady Charlotte mentioned incidentally her want of a tutor for her
grandson Leo during the winter holidays. He suggested an application
to the clergyman of her parish. She was at feud with the Rev. Stephen
Hampton-Evey, and would not take, she said, a man to be a bootblack
in her backyard or a woman a scullery-wench in her kitchen upon his
recommendation. She described the person of Mr. Hampton-Evey, his manner
of speech, general opinions, professional doctrines; rolled him into a
ball and bowled him, with a shrug for lamentation, over the decay of the
good old order of manly English Protestant clergymen, who drank their
port, bothered nobody about belief, abstained from preaching their
sermon, if requested; were capital fellows in the hunting-field, too;
for if they came, they had the spur to hunt in the devil's despite.
Now we are going to have a kind of bitter, clawed, forked female, in
vestments over breeches. “How do you like that bundling of the sexes?”
Lord Adderwood liked the lines of division to be strictly and invitingly
definite. He was thinking, as he reviewed the frittered appearance
of the Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey in Lady Charlotte's hinds, of the
possibility that Lord Ormont, who was reputed to fear nobody, feared
her. In which case, the handsome young woman passing among his
associates as the pseudo Lady Ormont might be the real one after all,
and Isabella Lawrence Finchley prove right in the warning she gave to
dogs of chase.
The tutor required by Lady Charlotte was found for her by Mr. Abner.
Their correspondence on the subject filled the space of a week, and then
the gentleman hired to drive a creaky wheel came down from London to
Olmer, arriving late in the evening.
Lady Charlotte's blunt “Oh!” when he entered her room and bowed upon the
announcement of his name, was caused by an instantaneous perception and
refection that it would be prudent to keep her grand-daughter Philippa,
aged between seventeen and eighteen, out of his way.
“You are friend of Mr. Abner's, are you?”
He was not disconcerted. He replied, in an assured and pleasant voice,
“I have hardly the pretension to be called a friend, madam.”
“Are you a Jew?”
Her abruptness knocked something like a laugh almost out of him, but he
restrained the signs of it.
“I am not.”
“You wouldn't be ashamed to tell me you were one if you were?”
“Not at all.”
“You like the Jews?”
“Those I know I like.”
“Not many Christians have the good sense and the good heart of Arthur
Abner. Now go and eat. Come back to me when you've done. I hope you are
hungry. Ask the butler for the wine you prefer.”
She had not anticipated the enrolment in her household of a man so young
and good-looking. These were qualifications for Cupid's business, which
his unstrained self-possession accentuated to a note of danger to her
chicks, because she liked the taste of him. Her grand-daughter Philippa
was in the girl's waxen age; another, Beatrice, was coming to it. Both
were under her care; and she was a vigilant woman, with an intuition
and a knowledge of sex. She did not blame Arthur Abner for sending her
a good-looking young man; she had only a general idea that tutors in a
house, and even visiting tutors, should smell of dust and wear a snuffy
appearance. The conditions will not always insure the tutors from
foolishness, as her girl's experience reminded her, but they protect the
girl.
“Your name is Weyburn; your father was an officer in the army, killed
on the battle-field, Arthur Abner tells me,” was her somewhat
severely-toned greeting to the young tutor on his presenting himself the
second time.
It had the sound of the preliminary of an indictment read in a Court of
Law.
“My father died of his wounds in hospital,” he said.
“Why did you not enter the service?”
“Want of an income, my lady.”
“Bad look-out. Army or Navy for gentlemen, if they stick to the school
of honour. The sedentary professions corrupt men: bad for the blood.
Those monastery monks found that out. They had to birch the devil out of
them three times a day and half the night, howling like full-moon dogs
all through their lives, till the flesh was off them. That was their
exercise, if they were for holiness. My brother, Lord Ormont, has never
been still in his youth or his manhood. See him now. He counts his years
by scores; and he has about as many wrinkles as you when you're smiling.
His cheeks are as red as yours now you're blushing. You ought to have
left off that trick by this time. It's well enough in a boy.”
Against her will she was drawn to the young man, and her consciousness
of it plucked her back to caution with occasional jerks--quaint
alternations of the familiar and the harshly formal, in the stranger's
experience.
“If I have your permission, Lady Charlotte,” said he, “the reason why I
mount red a little--if I do it--is, you mention Lord Ormont, and I have
followed his career since I was the youngest of boys.”
“Good to begin with the worship of a hero. He can't sham, can't
deceive--not even a woman; and you're old enough to understand the
temptation: they're so silly. All the more, it's a point of honour with
a man of honour to shield her from herself. When it's a girl--”
The young man's eyebrows bent.
“Chapters of stories, if you want to hear them,” she resumed; “and I can
vouch some of them true. Lord Ormont was never one of the wolves in a
hood. Whatever you hear of him; you may be sure he laid no trap. He's
just the opposite to the hypocrite; so hypocrites date him. I've heard
them called high-priests of decency. Then we choose to be indecent
and honest, if there's a God to worship. Fear, they're in the habit of
saying--we are to fear God. A man here, a Rev. Hampton-Evey, you'll hear
him harp on 'fear God.' Hypocrites may: honest sinners have no fear. And
see the cause: they don't deceive themselves--that is why. Do you think
we call love what we fear? They love God, or they disbelieve. And if
they believe in Him, they know they can't conceal anything from Him.
Honesty means piety: we can't be one without the other. And here are
people--parsons--who talk of dying as going into the presence of our
Maker, as if He had been all the while outside the world He created.
Those parsons, I told the Rev. Hampton-Evey here, make infidels--they
make a puzzle of their God. I'm for a rational Deity. They preach up a
supernatural eccentric. I don't say all: I've heard good sermons, and
met sound-headed clergymen--not like that gaping Hampton-Evey, when
a woman tells him she thinks for herself. We have him sitting on our
pariah. A free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon; but a female
free-thinker is one of Satan's concubines. He took it upon himself to
reproach me--flung his glove at my feet, because I sent a cheque to a
poor man punished for blasphemy. The man had the right to his opinions,
and he had the courage of his opinions. I doubt whether the Rev.
Hampton-Evey would go with a willing heart to prison for his. All the
better for him if he comes head-up out of a trial. But now see: all
these parsons and judges and mobcaps insist upon conformity. A man with
common manly courage comes before them, and he's cast in penalties.
Yet we know from history, in England, France, Germany, that the time
of nonconformity brought out the manhood of the nation. Now, I say, a
nation, to be a nation, must have men--I mean brave men. That's what
those hosts of female men combine to try to stifle. They won't succeed,
but we shall want a war to teach the country the value of courage. You
catch what I am driving at? They accuse my brother of immorality because
he makes no pretence to be better than the men of his class.”
Weyburn's eyelids fluttered. Her kite-like ascent into the general, with
the sudden drop on her choice morsel, switched his humour at the moment
when he was respectfully considering that her dartings and gyrations had
motive as mach as the flight of the swallow for food. They had meaning;
and here was one of the great ladies of the land who thought for
herself, and was thoughtful for the country. If she came down like a
bird winged, it was her love of her brother that did it. His look at
Lady Charlotte glistened.
She raised her defences against the basilisk fascinating Philippa;
and with a vow to keep them apart and deprive him of his chance, she
relapsed upon the stiff frigidity which was not natural to her. It
lasted long enough to put him on his guard under the seductions of a
noble dame's condescension to a familiar tone. But, as he was too well
bred to show the change in his mind for her change of manner, and as she
was the sister of his boyhood's hero, and could be full of flavour, his
eyes retained something of their sparkle. They were ready to lighten
again, in the way peculiar to him, when she, quite forgetting her
defence of Philippa, disburdened herself of her antagonisms and
enthusiasms, her hates and her loves all round the neighbourhood and
over the world, won to confidential communication by this young man's
face. She confessed as much, had he been guided to perceive it. She
said, “Arthur Abner's a reader of men: I can trust his word about them.”
Presently, it is true, she added: “No man's to be relied upon where
there's a woman.” She refused her implicit trust to saints--“if ever a
man really was a saint before he was canonized!”
Her penetrative instinct of sex kindled the scepticism. Sex she saw
at play everywhere, dogging the conduct of affairs, directing them at
times; she saw it as the animation of nature, senselessly stigmatized,
hypocritically concealed, active in our thoughts where not in our deeds;
and the declining of the decorous to see it, or admit the sight, got
them abhorred bad names from her, after a touch at the deadly poison
coming of that blindness, or blindfoldedness, and a grimly melancholy
shrug over the cruelties resulting--cruelties chiefly affecting women.
“You're too young to have thought upon such matters,” she said, for a
finish to them.
That was hardly true.
“I have thought,” said Weyburn, and his head fell to reckoning of the
small sum of his thoughts upon them.
He was pulled up instantly for close inspection by the judge. “What is
your age?”
“I am in my twenty-sixth year.”
“You have been among men: have you studied women?”
“Not largely, Lady Charlotte. Opportunity has been wanting at French and
German colleges.”
“It's only a large and a close and a pretty long study of them that can
teach you anything; and you must get rid of the poetry about them, and
be sure you haven't lost it altogether. That's what is called the golden
mean. I'm not for the golden mean in every instance; it's a way of
exhorting to brutal selfishness. I grant it's the right way in those
questions. You'll learn in time.” Her scanning gaze at the young man's
face drove him along an avenue of his very possible chances of learning.
“Certain to. But don't tell me that at your age you have thought about
women. You may say you have felt. A young man's feelings about women are
better reading for him six or a dozen chapters farther on. Then he can
sift and strain. It won't be perfectly clear, but it will do.”
Mr. Eglett hereupon threw the door open, and ushered in Master Leo.
Lady Charlotte noticed that the tutor shook the boy's hand offhandedly,
with not a whit of the usual obtrusive geniality, and merely dropped him
a word. Soon after, he was talking to Mr. Eglett of games at home and
games abroad. Poor fun over there! We head the world in field games, at
all events. He drew a picture of a foreigner of his acquaintance looking
on at football. On the other hand, French boys and German, having passed
a year or two at an English school, get the liking for our games, and
do a lot of good when they go home. The things we learn from them are
to dance, to sing, and to study:--they are more in earnest than we about
study. They teach us at fencing too. The tutor praised fencing as an
exercise and an accomplishment. He had large reserves of eulogy for
boxing. He knew the qualities of the famous bruisers of the time, cited
fisty names, whose owners were then to be seen all over an admiring
land in prints; in the glorious defensive-offensive attitude, England's
own--Touch me, if you dare! with bullish, or bull-dog, or oak-bole
fronts for the blow, handsome to pugilistic eyes.
The young tutor had lighted on a pet theme of Mr. Eglett's--the
excelling virtues of the practice of pugilism in Old England, and the
school of honour that it is to our lower population. “Fifty times better
for them than cock-fighting,” he exclaimed, admitting that he could be
an interested spectator at a ring or the pit cock-fighting or ratting.
“Ratting seems to have more excuse,” the tutor said, and made no sign of
a liking for either of those popular pastimes. As he disapproved without
squeamishness, the impulsive but sharply critical woman close by nodded;
and she gave him his dues for being no courtier.
Leo had to be off to bed. The tutor spared him any struggle over
the shaking of hands, and saying, “Goodnight, Leo,” continued the
conversation. The boy went away, visibly relieved of the cramp that
seizes on a youngster at the formalities pertaining to these chilly and
fateful introductions.
“What do you think of the look of him?” Mr. Eglett asked.
The tutor had not appeared to inspect the boy. “Big head,” he remarked.
“Yes, Leo won't want pushing at books when he's once in harness. He
will have six weeks of me. It's more than the yeomanry get for drill
per annum, and they're expected to know something of a soldier's duties.
There's a chance of putting him on the right road in certain matters.
We'll walk, or ride, or skate, if the frost holds to-morrow: no lessons
the first day.”
“Do as you think fit,” said lady Charlotte.
The one defect she saw in the tutor did not concern his pupil. And a
girl, if hit, would be unable to see that this tutor, judged as a man,
was to some extent despicable for accepting tutorships, and, one might
say, dishonouring the family of a soldier of rank and distinction,
by coming into houses at the back way, with footing enough to air his
graces when once established there. He ought to have knocked at every
door in the kingdom for help, rather than accept tutorships, and disturb
households (or providently-minded mistresses of them) with all sorts of
probably groundless apprehensions, founded naturally enough on the good
looks he intrudes.
This tutor committed the offence next day of showing he had a firm and
easy seat in the saddle, which increased Lady Charlotte's liking for him
and irritated her watchful forecasts. She rode with the young man after
lunch, “to show him the country,” and gave him a taste of what he took
for her variable moods. He misjudged her. Like a swimmer going
through warm and cold springs of certain lake waters, he thought her a
capricious ladyship, dangerous for intimacy, alluring to the deeps and
gripping with cramps.
She pushed him to defend his choice of the tutor's profession.
“Think you understand boys?” she caught up his words; “you can't. You
can humour them, as you humour women. They're just as hard to read. And
don't tell me a young man can read women. Boys and women go on their
instincts. Egyptologists can spell you hieroglyphs; they'd be stumped,
as Leo would say, to read a spider out of an ink-pot over a sheet of
paper.”
“One gets to interpret by degrees, by observing their habits,” the tutor
said, and vexed her with a towering complacency under provocation that
went some way further to melt the woman she was, while her knowledge of
the softness warned her still more of the duty of playing dragon round
such a young man in her house. The despot is alert at every issue, to
every chance; and she was one, the wakefuller for being benevolent; her
mind had no sleep by day.
For a month she subjected Mr. Matthew Weyburn to the microscope of
her observation and the probe of her instinct. He proved that he could
manage without cajoling a boy. The practical fact established, by
agreement between herself and the unobservant gentleman who was her
husband, Lady Charlotte allowed her meditations to drop an indifferent
glance at the speculative views upon education entertained by this young
tutor. To her mind they were flighty; but she liked him, and as her
feelings dictated to her mind when she had not to think for others, she
spoke of his views toleratingly, almost with an implied approval, after
passing them through the form of burlesque to which she customarily
treated things failing to waft her enthusiasm. In regard to Philippa,
he behaved well: he bestowed more of his attention on Beatrice, nearer
Leo's age, in talk about games and story-books and battles; nothing that
he did when the girls were present betrayed the strutting plumed cock,
bent to attract, or the sickly reptile, thirsty for a prize above him
and meaning to have it, like Satan in Eden. Still, of course, he could
not help his being a handsome fellow, having a vivid face and eyes
transparent, whether blue or green, to flame of the brain exciting them;
and that becomes a picture in the dream of girls--a picture creating the
dream often. And Philippa had asked her grandmother, very ingenuously
indeed, with a most natural candour, why “they saw so little of Leo's
hero.” Simple female child!
However, there was no harm done, and Lady Charlotte liked him. She liked
few. Forthwith, in the manner of her particular head, a restless head,
she fell to work at combinations.
Thus:--he is a nice young fellow, well bred, no cringing courtier,
accomplished, good at classics, fairish at mathematics, a scholar in
French, German, Italian, with a shrewd knowledge of the different races,
and with sound English sentiment too, and the capacity for writing good
English, although in those views of his the ideas are unusual, therefore
un-English, profoundly so. But his intentions are patriotic; they would
not displease Lord Ormont. He has a worship of Lord Ormont. All we
can say on behalf of an untried inferior is in that,--only the valiant
admire devotedly. Well, he can write grammatical, readable English. What
if Lord Ormont were to take him as a secretary while the Memoirs are
in hand? He might help to chasten the sentences laughed at by those
newspapers. Or he might, being a terrible critic of writing, and funny
about styles, put it in an absurd light, that would cause the Memoirs
to be tossed into the fire. He was made for the post of secretary! The
young man's good looks would be out of harm's way then. If any sprig of
womankind come across him there, it will, at any rate, not be a girl.
Women must take care of themselves. Only the fools among them run to
mischief in the case of a handsome young fellow.
Supposing a certain woman to be one of the fools? Lady Charlotte merely
suggested it in the dashing current of her meditations--did not strike
it out interrogatively. The woman would be a fine specimen among her
class; that was all. For the favourite of Lord Ormont to stoop from
her place beside him--ay, but women do; heroes have had the woeful
experience of that fact. First we see them aiming themselves at their
hero; next they are shooting an eye at the handsome man. The thirst of
nature comes after that of their fancy, in conventional women. Sick of
the hero tried, tired of their place in the market, no longer ashamed to
acknowledge it, they begin to consult their own taste for beauty--they
have it quite as much as the men have it; and when their worshipped
figure of manliness, in a romantic sombrero, is a threadbare giant,
showing bruises, they sink on their inherent desire for a dance with the
handsome man. And the really handsome man is the most extraordinary of
the rarities. No wonder that when he appears he slays them, walks over
them like a pestilence!
This young Weyburn would touch the fancy of a woman of a romantic turn.
Supposing her enthusiastic in her worship of the hero, after a number
of years--for anything may be imagined where a woman is concerned--why,
another enthusiasm for the same object, and on the part of a stranger,
a stranger with effective eyes, rapidly leads to sympathy. Suppose the
reverse--the enthusiasm gone to dust, or become a wheezy old bellows, as
it does where there's disparity of age, or it frequently does--then the
sympathy with a good-looking stranger comes more rapidly still.
These were Lady Charlotte's glances right and left--idle flights of the
eye of a mounted Amazon across hedges at the canter along the main road
of her scheme; which was to do a service to the young man she liked
and to the brother she loved, for the marked advantage of both equally;
perhaps for the chance of a little gossip to follow about that tenacious
woman by whom her brother was held hard and fast, kept away from friends
and relatives, isolated, insomuch as to have given up living on his
estate--the old home!--because he would not disgrace it or incur odium
by taking her there.
In consequence of Lord Ormont's resistance to pressure from her on two
or three occasions, she chose to nurse and be governed by the maxim for
herself: Never propose a plan to him, if you want it adopted. That was
her way of harmlessly solacing love's vindictiveness for an injury.
She sent Arthur Abner a letter, thanking him for his recommendation of
young Mr. Weyburn, stating her benevolent wishes as regarded the young
man and “those hateful Memoirs,” requesting that her name should not be
mentioned in the affair, because she was anxious on all grounds to have
the proposal accepted by her brother. She could have vowed to herself
that she wrote sincerely.
“He must want a secretary. He would be shy at an offer of one from me.
Do you hint it, if you get a chance. You gave us Mr. Weyburn, and Mr.
Eglett and I like him. Ormont would too, I am certain. You have obliged
him before; this will be better than anything you have done for us. It
will stop the Memoirs, or else give them a polish. Your young friend
has made me laugh over stuff taken for literature until we put on our
spectacles. Leo jogs along in harness now, and may do some work at
school yet.”
Having posted her letter, she left the issue to chance, as we may when
conscience is easy. An answer came the day before Weyburn's departure.
Arthur Abner had met Lord Ormont in the street, had spoken of the rumour
of Memoirs promised to the world, hinted at the possible need for a
secretary; “Lord Ormont would appoint a day to see Mr. Weyburn.”
Lady Charlotte considered that to be as good as the engagement.
“So we keep you in the family,” she said. “And now look here: you ought
to know my brother's ways, if you're going to serve him. You'll have to
guess at half of everything he tells you; he'll expect you to know the
whole. There's no man so secret. Why? He fears nothing; I can't tell
why. And what his mouth shuts on, he exposes as if in his hand. Of
course he's proud, and good reason. You'll see when you mustn't offend.
A lady's in the house--I hear of it. She takes his name, they say. She
may be a respectable woman--I've heard no scandal. We have to hear of a
Lady Ormont out of Society! We have to suppose it means there's not to
be a real one. He can't marry if he has allowed her to go about bearing
his name. She has a fool of an aunt, I'm told; as often in the house
as not. Good proof of his fondness for the woman, if he swallows half
a year of the aunt! Well, you won't, unless you've mere man's eyes, be
able to help seeing him trying to hide what he suffers from that aunt.
He bears it, like the man he is; but woe to another betraying it! She
has a tongue that goes like the reel of a rod, with a pike bolting out
of the shallows to the snag he knows--to wind round it and defy you to
pull. Often my brother Rowsley and I have fished the day long, and in
hard weather, and brought home a basket; and he boasted of it more than
of anything he has ever done since. That woman holds him away from me
now. I say no harm of her. She may be right enough from her point of
view; or it mayn't be owing to her. I wouldn't blame a woman. Well,
but my point with you is, you swallow the woman's aunt--the lady's
aunt--without betraying you suffer at all. Lord Ormont has eyes of an
eagle for a speck above the surface. All the more because the aunt is a
gabbling idiot does he--I say it seeing it--fire up to defend her from
the sneer of the lip or half a sign of it! No, you would be an your
guard; I can trust you. Of course you'd behave like the gentleman you
are where any kind of woman's concerned; but you mustn't let a shadow
be seen, think what you may. The woman--lady--calling herself Lady
Ormont,--poor woman, I should do the same in her place,--she has a hard
game to play; I have to be for my family: she has manners, I'm told;
holds herself properly. She fancies she brings him up to the altar, in
the end, by decent behaviour. That's a delusion. It's creditable to her,
only she can't understand the claims of the family upon a man like
my brother. When you have spare time--'kick-ups,' he need to call it,
writing to me from school--come here; you're welcome, after three days'
notice. I shall be glad to see you again. You've gone some way to make a
man of Leo.”
He liked her well: he promised to come. She was a sinewy bite of the
gentle sex, but she had much flavour, and she gave nourishment.
“Let me have three days' notice,” she repeated.
“Not less, Lady Charlotte,” said he.
Weyburn received intimation from Arthur Abner of the likely day Lord
Ormont would appoint, and he left Olmer for London to hold himself in
readiness. Lady Charlotte and Leo drove him to meet the coach. Philippa,
so strangely baffled in her natural curiosity, begged for a seat; she
begged to be allowed to ride. Petitions were rejected. She stood at
the window seeing “Grandmama's tutor,” as she named him, carried off by
grandmama. Her nature was avenged on her tyrant grandmama: it brought
up almost to her tongue thoughts which would have remained subterranean,
under control of her habit of mind, or the nursery's modesty, if she
had been less tyrannically treated. They were subterranean thoughts,
Nature's original, such as the sense of injustice will rouse in young
women; and they are better unstirred, for they ripen girls over-rapidly
when they are made to revolve near the surface. It flashed on the girl
why she had been treated tyrannically.
“Grandmama has good taste in tutors,” was all that she said while the
thoughts rolled over.