“Emile is as anglomane as ever, and not a bit less a Frenchman,” Weyburn
said, in a tone of one who muffles a shock at the heart.
“It would be the poorer compliment to us,” she rejoined.
They looked at one another; she dropped her eyelids, he looked away.
She had the grand manner by nature. She was the woman of the girl once
known.
“A soldier, is he?”
“Emile's profession and mine are much alike, or will be.”
“A secretary?”
Her deadness of accent was not designed to carry her opinion of the post
of secretary.
It brought the reply: “We hope to be schoolmasters.”
She drew in a breath; there was a thin short voice, hardly voice, as
when one of the unschooled minor feelings has been bruised. After a
while she said--
“Does he think it a career?”
“Not brilliant.”
“He was formed for a soldier.”
“He had to go as the road led.”
“A young man renouncing ambition!”
“Considering what we can do best.”
“It signifies the taste for what he does.”
“Certainly that.”
Weyburn had senses to read the word “schoolmaster” in repetition behind
her shut mouth. He was sharply sensible of a fall.
The task with his papers occupied him. If he had a wish, it was to
sink so low in her esteem as to be spurned. A kick would have been
a refreshment. Yet he was unashamed of the cause invoking it. We are
instruments to the touch of certain women, and made to play strange
tunes.
“Mr. Cuper flourishes?”
“The school exists. I have not been down there. I met Mr. Shalders
yesterday. He has left the school.”
“You come up from Olmer?”
“I was at Olmer last week, Lady Ormont.”
An involuntary beam from her eyes thanked him for her title at that
juncture of the dialogue. She grew more spirited.
“Mr. Shalders has joined the Dragoons, has he?”
“The worthy man has a happy imagination. He goes through a campaign
daily.”
“It seems to one to dignify his calling.”
“I like his enthusiasm.”
The lady withdrew into her thoughts; Weyburn fell upon his work.
Mention of the military cloak of enthusiasm covering Shalders, brought
the scarce credible old time to smite at his breast, in the presence of
these eyes. A ringing of her title of Lady Ormont rendered the present
time the incredible.
“I can hardly understand a young Frenchman's not entering the army,” she
said.
“The Napoleonic legend is weaker now,” said he.
“The son of an officer!”
“Grandson.”
“It was his choice to be,--he gave it up without reluctance?”
“Emile obeyed the command of his parents,” Weyburn answered; and he was
obedient to the veiled direction of her remark, in speaking of himself:
“I had a reason, too.”
“One wonders!”
“It would have impoverished my mother's income to put aside a small
allowance for me for years. She would not have hesitated. I then set my
mind on the profession of schoolmaster.”
“Emile Grenat was a brave boy. Has he no regrets?”
“Neither of us has a regret.”
“He began ambitiously.”
“It's the way at the beginning.”
“It is not usually abjured.”
“I'm afraid we neither of us 'dignify our calling' by discontent with
it!”
A dusky flash, worth seeing, came on her cheeks. “I respect
enthusiasms,” she said; and it was as good to him to hear as the begging
pardon, though clearly she could not understand enthusiasm for the
schoolmaster's career.
Light of evidence was before him, that she had a friendly curiosity to
know what things had led to their new meeting under these conditions.
He sketched them cursorily; there was little to tell--little, that is;
appealing to a romantic mind for interest. Aware of it, by sympathy,
he degraded the narrative to a flatness about as cheering as a suburban
London Sunday's promenade. Sympathy caused the perverseness. He felt her
disillusionment; felt with it and spread a feast of it. She had to hear
of studies at Caen and at a Paris Lycee; French fairly mastered; German,
the same; Italian, the same; after studies at Heidelberg, Asti, and
Florence; between four and five months at Athens (he was needlessly
precise), in tutorship with a young nobleman: no events, nor a spot of
colour. Thus did he wilfully, with pain to himself, put an extinguisher
on the youth painted brilliant and eminent in a maiden's imagination.
“So there can no longer be thought of the army,” she remarked; and the
remark had a sort of sigh, though her breathing was equable.
“Unless a big war knocks over all rules and the country comes praying us
to serve,” he said.
“You would not refuse then?”
“Not in case of need. One may imagine a crisis when they would give
commissions to men of my age or older for the cavalry--heavy losses of
officers.”
She spoke, as if urged by a sting to revert to the distasteful: “That
profession--must you not take... enter into orders if you aim at any
distinction?”
“And a member of the Anglican Church would not be allowed to exchange
his frock for a cavalry sabre,” said he. “That is true. I do not propose
to settle as a schoolmaster in England.”
“Where?”
“On the Continent.”
“Would not America be better?”
“It would not so well suit the purpose in view for us.”
“There are others besides?”
“Besides Emile, there is a German and an Italian and a Swiss.”
“It is a Company?”
“A Company of schoolmasters! Companies of all kinds are forming.
Colleges are Companies. And they have their collegians. Our aim is
at pupils; we have no ambition for any title higher than School and
Schoolmaster; it is not a Company.”
So, like Nature parading her skeleton to youthful adorers of her face,
he insisted on reducing to hideous material wreck the fair illusion,
which had once arrayed him in alluring promise.
She explained; “I said, America. You would be among Protestants in
America.”
“Catholics and Protestants are both welcome to us, according to our
scheme. And Germans, French, English, Americans, Italians, if they will
come; Spaniards and Portuguese, and Scandinavians, Russians as well. And
Jews; Mahommedans too, if only they will come! The more mixed, the more
it hits our object.”
“You have not stated where on the Continent it is to be.”
“The spot fixed on is in Switzerland.”
“You will have scenery.”
“I hold to that, as an influence.”
A cool vision of the Bernese Alps encircled the young schoolmaster; and
she said, “It would influence girls; I dare say.”
“A harder matter with boys, of course--at first. We think we may make it
serve.”
“And where is the spot? Is that fixed on?”
“Fifteen miles from Berne, on elevated land, neighbouring a water, not
quite to be called a lake, unless in an auctioneer's advertisement.”
“I am glad of the lake. I could not look on a country home where there
was no swimming. You will be head of the school.”
“There must be a head.”
“Is the school likely to be established soon?”
He fell into her dead tone: “Money is required for establishments. I
have a Reversion coming some day; I don't dabble in post obits.”
He waited for farther questions. They were at an end.
“You have your work to do, Mr. Weyburn.”
Saying that, she bowed an implied apology for having kept him from
it, and rose. She bowed again as she passed through the doorway, in
acknowledgment of his politeness.
Here; then, was the end of the story of Browny and Matey. Such was his
thought under the truncheon-stroke of their colloquy. Lines of Browny's
letters were fiery waving ribands about him, while the coldly gracious
bow of the Lady wrote Finis.
The gulf between the two writings remained unsounded. It gave a heave to
the old passion; but stirred no new one; he had himself in hand now,
and he shut himself up when the questions bred of amazement buzzed and
threatened to storm. After all, what is not curious in this world? The
curious thing would be if curious things should fail to happen. Men have
been saying it since they began to count and turn corners. And let
us hold off from speculating when there is or but seems a shadow of
unholiness over that mole-like business. There shall be no questions;
and as to feelings, the same. They, if petted for a moment beneath the
shadow, corrupt our blood. Weyburn was a man to have them by the throat
at the birth.
Still they thronged; heavy work of strangling had to be done. Her tone
of disappointment with the schoolmaster bit him, and it flattered
him. The feelings leapt alive, equally venomous from the wound and the
caress. They pushed to see, had to be repelled from seeing, the girl
Browny in the splendid woman; they had lightning memories: not the pain
of his grip could check their voice on the theme touching her happiness
or the reverse. And this was an infernal cunning. He paused perforce to
inquire, giving them space for the breeding of their multitudes. Was she
happy? Did she not seem too meditative, enclosed, toneless, at her age?
Vainly the persecuted fellow said to himself: “But what is it to me
now?”--The Browny days were over. The passion for the younger Aminta was
over--buried; and a dream of power belonging to those days was not
yet more than visionary. It had moved her once, when it was a young
soldier's. She treated the schoolmaster's dream as vapour, and the old
days as dead and ghostless. She did rightly. How could they or she or he
be other than they were!
With that sage exclamation, he headed into the Browny days and breasted
them; and he had about him the living foamy sparkle of the very time,
until the Countess of Ormont breathed the word “Schoolmaster”; when, at
once, it was dusty land where buoyant waters had been, and the armies
of the facts, in uniform drab, with some feathers and laces, and a
significant surpliced figure, decorously covering the wildest of
Cupids, marched the standard of the winking gold-piece, which is their
nourishing sun and eclipser of all suns that foster dreams.
As you perceive, he was drawing swiftly to the vortex of the fools, and
round and round he went, lucky to float.
His view of the business of the schoolmaster plucked him from the whirl.
She despised it; he upheld it. He stuck to his view, finding their
antagonism on the subject wholesome for him. All that she succeeded in
doing was to rob it of the aurora colour clothing everything on which
Matey Weyburn set his aim. Her contempt of it, whether as a profession
in itself or as one suitable to the former young enthusiast for arms,
dwarfed it to appear like the starved plants under Greenland skies. But
those are of a sturdy genus; they mean to live; they live, perforce, of
the right to live; they will prove their right in a coming season,
when some one steps near and wonders at them, and from more closely
observing; gets to understand, learning that the significance and the
charm of earth will be as well shown by them as by her tropical fair
flaunters or the tenderly-nurtured exotics.
An unopened coffer of things to be said in defence of--no, on behalf
of--no, in honour of the Profession of Schoolmaster, perhaps to the
convincing of Aminta, Lady Ormont, was glanced at; a sentence or two
leapt out and stepped forward, and had to retire. He preferred to the
fathering of tricky, windy phrases, the being undervalued--even by her.
He was taught to see again how Rhetoric haunts, and Rhetoric bedevils,
the vindication of the clouded, especially in the case of a disesteemed
Profession requiring one to raise it and impose it upon the antagonistic
senses for the bewildering of the mind. One has to sound it loudly;
there is no treating it, as in the advocacy of the cases of flesh and
blood, with the masterly pathos of designed simplicity. And Weyburn
was Cuper's Matey Weyburn still in his loathing of artifice to
raise emotion, loathing of the affected, the stilted, the trumpet of
speech--always excepting school-exercises in the tongues, the unmasking
of a Catiline, the address of a General, Athenian or other, to troops.
He kept his coffer shut; and, for a consequence, he saw the contents as
an avenue of blossom leading to vistas of infinite harvest.
She was Lady Ormont: Aminta shared the title of his old hero! He refused
to speculate upon how it had come to pass, and let the curtain hang,
though dramas and romances, with the miracles involved in them, were
agitated by a transient glimpse at the curtain.
Well! and he hoped to be a member of the Profession she despised: hoped
it with all his heart. And one good effect of his giving his heart to
the hope was, that he could hold from speculating and from feeling, even
from pausing to wonder at the most wonderful turn of events. Blessed
antagonism drove him to be braced by thoughts upon the hardest of
the schoolmaster's tasks--bright winter thoughts, prescribing to him
satisfaction with a faith in the sowing, which may be his only reaping.
Away fly the boys in sheaves. After his toil with them, to instruct,
restrain, animate, point their minds, they leave him, they plunge into
the world and are gone. Will he see them again? It is a flickering
perhaps. To sustain his belief that he has done serviceable work, he
must be sore of his having charged them with good matter. How can the
man do it, if, during his term of apprenticeship, he has allowed himself
to dally here and there, down to moony dreamings over inscrutable
beautiful eyes of a married lady; for the sole reason that he meets her
unexpectedly, after an exchange of letters with her in long-past days at
school, when she was an inexperienced girl, who knew not what she vowed,
and he a flighty-headed youngster, crying out to be the arrow of any bow
that was handy? Yea, she was once that girl, named Browny by the boys.
Temptation threw warm light on the memory, and very artfully, by
conjuring up the faces, cries, characters, all the fun of the boys.
There was no possibility of forgetting her image in those days; he had,
therefore, to live with it and to live near the grown woman--Time's
present answer to the old riddle. It seemed to him, that instead
of sorting Lord Ormont's papers, he ought to be at sharp exercise.
According to his prescript, sharp exercise of lungs and limbs is a man's
moral aid against temptation. He knew it as the one trusty antidote for
him, who was otherwise the vessel of a temperament pushing to mutiny.
Certainly it is the best philosophy youth can pretend to practise; and
Lord Ormont kept him from it! Worse than that, the slips and sheets of
paper in the dispatch-box were not an exercise of the mind even; there
was nothing to grapple with--no diversion; criticism passed by them
indulgently, if not benevolently.
Quite apart from the subject inscribed on them, Weyburn had now and
again a blow at the breast, of untraceable origin. For he was well
enough aware that the old days when Browny imagined him a hero, in
drinking his praises of a brighter, were drowned. They were dead; but
here was she the bride of the proved hero. His praises might have helped
in causing her willingness--devotional readiness, he could fancy--to
yield her hand. Perhaps at the moment when the hero was penning some of
the Indian slips here, the boy at school was preparing Aminta; but he
could not be responsible for a sacrifice of the kind suggested by Lady
Charlotte. And no, there had been no such sacrifice, although Lord
Ormont's inexplicable treatment of his young countess, under cover of
his notorious reputation with women, conduced to the suspicion.
While the vagrant in Weyburn was thus engaged, his criticism of the
soldier-lord's field-English on paper let the stuff go tolerantly
unexamined, but with a degree of literary contempt at heart for the
writer who had that woman-scented reputation and expressed himself so
poorly. The sentiment was outside of reason. We do, nevertheless, expect
our Don Juans to deliver their minds a trifle elegantly; if not in
classic English, on paper; and when we find one of them inflicting
cruelty, as it appears, and the victim is a young woman, a beautiful
young woman, she pleads to us poetically against the bearish sentences
of his composition. We acknowledge, however, that a mere sentiment,
entertained possibly by us alone, should not be permitted to condemn him
unheard.
Lady Ormont was not seen again. After luncheon at a solitary table, the
secretary worked till winter's lamps were lit; and then shone freedom,
with assurance to him that he would escape from the miry mental ditch
he had been floundering in since Aminta revealed herself. Sunday was
the glorious day to follow, with a cleansing bath of a walk along the
southern hills; homely English scenery to show to a German friend,
one of his “Company.” Half a dozen good lads were pledged to the walk;
bearing which in view, it could be felt that this nonsensical puzzlement
over his relations to the moods and tenses of a married woman would be
bounced out of recollection before nightfall. The landscape given off
any of the airy hills of Surrey would suffice to do it.
A lady stood among her boxes below, as he descended the stairs to cross
the hall. He knew her for the person Lady Charlotte called “the woman's
aunt,” whom Lord Ormont could not endure--a forgiven old enemy, Mrs.
Nargett Pagnell.
He saluted. She stared, and corrected her incivility with “Ah, yes,” and
a formal smile.
If not accidentally delayed on her journey, she had been needlessly the
cause why Lord Ormont hugged his Club during the morning and afternoon.
Weyburn was pushed to think of the matter by remembrance of his foregone
resentment at her having withdrawn Aminta from Miss Vincent's three days
earlier than the holiday time. The resentment was over; but a germ of
it must have sprang from the dust to prompt the kindling leap his memory
took, out of all due connection; like a lightning among the crags.
It struck Aminta smartly. He called to mind the conversation at table
yesterday. Had she played on Lord Ormont's dislike of the aunt to drive
him forth for some purpose of her own? If so, the little trick had been
done with deplorable spontaneity or adeptness of usage. What was the
purpose?--to converse with an old acquaintance, undisturbed by Lord
Ormont and her aunt? Neatly done, supposing the surmise correct.
But what was there in the purpose? He sifted rapidly for the gist of the
conversation; reviewed the manner of it, the words, the sound they had,
the feelings they touched; then owned that the question could not
be answered. Owning, further, that the recurrence of these idiotic
speculations, feelings, questions, wrote him down as both dull fellow
and impertinent, he was unabled to restore Aminta to the queenly place
she took above the schoolmaster, who was very soon laughing at his fever
or flash of the afternoon. The day had brought a great surprise, nothing
more. Twenty minutes of fencing in the a salle d'armes of an Italian
captain braced him to health, and shifted scenes of other loves, lighter
loves, following the Browny days--not to be called loves; in fact;
hardly beyond inclinations. Nevertheless, inclinations are an
infidelity. To meet a married woman, and be mooning over her because she
gave him her eyes and her handwriting when a girl, was enough to
rouse an honest fellow's laugh at himself, in the contemplation of
his intermediate amorous vagabondage. Had he ever known the veritable
passion after Browny sank from his ken? Let it be confessed, never. His
first love was his only true love, despite one shuddering episode, oddly
humiliating to recollect, though he had not behaved badly. So, then,
by right of his passion, thus did eternal justice rule it: that Browny
belonged, to Matey Weyburn, Aminta to Lord Ormont. Aminta was a lady
blooming in the flesh, Browny was the past's pale phantom; for which
reason he could call her his own, without harm done to any one, and
with his usual appetite for dinner, breakfast, lunch, whatever the meal
supplied by the hour.
It would somewhat alarmingly have got to Mr. Weyburn's conscience
through a disturbance of his balance, telling him that he was on a
perilous road, if his relish for food had been blunted. He had his
axiom on the subject, and he was wrong in the general instance, for
the appetites of rogues and ogres are not known to fail. As regarded
himself, he was eminently right; and he could apply it to boys also,
to all young people--the unlaunched, he called them. He counted himself
among the launched, no doubt, and had breasted seas; but the boy was
alive, a trencherman lad, in the coming schoolmaster, and told him
profitable facts concerning his condition; besides throwing a luminous
ray on the arcane of our elusive youthful. If they have no stout zest
for eating, put Query against them.
His customary enjoyment of dinner convinced Mr. Weyburn that he had
not brooded morbidly over his phantom Browny, and could meet Aminta,
Countess of Ormont, on the next occasion with the sentiments proper to
a common official. Did she not set him a commendable example? He admired
her for not concealing her disdain of the aspirant schoolmaster, quite
comprehending, by sympathy, why the woman should reproach the girl who
had worshipped heroes, if this was a full-grown specimen; and the reply
of the shamed girl, that in her ignorance she could not know better. He
spared the girl, but he laughed at the woman he commended, laughed at
himself.
Aminta's humour was being stirred about the same time. She and her
aunt were at the dinner-table in the absence of my lord. The dinner had
passed with the stiff dialogue peculiar to couples under supervision of
their inferiors; and, as soon as the room was clear, she had asked her
aunt, touching the secretary: “Have you seen him?”
Mrs. Nargett Pagnell's answer could have been amusing only to one whose
intimate knowledge of her found it characteristically salt; for she
was a lady of speech addressed ever directly or roundabout to the chief
point of business between herself and her hearer, and the more she was
brief, oblique, far-shooting, the more comically intelligible she was to
her niece. She bent her head to signify that she had seen the secretary,
and struck the table with both hands, exclaiming:
“Well, to be sure, Lord Ormont!”
Their discussion, before they descended the stairs to dinner, concerned
his lordship's extraordinary indifference to the thronging of handsome
young men around his young countess.
Here, the implication ran, is one established in the house.
Aminta's thoughts could be phrased: “Yes, that is true, for one part of
it.”
As for the other part, the ascent of a Phoebus Apollo, with his golden
bow and quiver off the fairest of Eastern horizon skies, followed
suddenly by the sight of him toppling over in Mr. Cuper's long-skirted
brown coat, with spectacles and cane, is an image that hardly exceeds
the degradation she conceived. It was past ludicrous; yet admitted of no
woefulness, nothing soothingly pathetic. It smothered and barked at the
dreams of her blooming spring of life, to which her mind had latterly
been turning back, for an escape from sour, one may say cynical,
reflections, the present issue of a beautiful young woman's first savour
of battle with the world.