Up in Aminta's amber dressing-room; Mrs. Nargett Pagnell alluded sadly
to the long month of separation, and begged her niece to let her have in
plain words an exact statement of the present situation; adding, “Items
will do.” Thereupon she slipped into prattle and held the field.
She was the known, worthy, good, intolerable woman whom the burgess
turns out for his world in regiments, that do and look and all but step
alike; and they mean well, and have conventional worships and material
aspirations, and very peculiar occult refinements, with a blind head and
a haphazard gleam of acuteness, impressive to acquaintances, convincing
themselves that they impersonate sagacity. She had said this, done that;
and it was, by proof, Providence consenting, the right thing. A niece,
written down in her girlhood, because of her eyes and her striking air
and excellent deportment, as mate for a nobleman, marries, him before
she is out of her teens. “I said, She shall be a countess.” A countess
she is. Providence does not comply with our predictions in order
to stultify us. Admitting the position of affairs for the moment as
extraordinary, we are bound by what has happened to expect they will be
conformable in the end. Temporarily warped, we should say of them.
She could point to the reason: it was Lord Ormont's blunt
misunderstanding of her character. The burgess's daughter was refining
to an appreciation of the exquisite so rapidly that she could criticize
patricians. My lord had never forgiven her for correcting him in his
pronunciation of her name by marriage. Singular indeed; but men, even
great men, men of title, are so, some of them, whom you could least
suspect of their being so. He would speak the “g” in Nargett, and he,
declined--after a remonstrance he declined--to pass Pagnell under the
cedilla. Lord Ormont spoke the name like a man hating it, or an English
rustic: “Nargett Pagnell,” instead, of the soft and elegant “Naryett
Pagnell,” the only true way of speaking it; and she had always taken
that pronunciation of her name for a test of people's breeding. The
expression of his lordship's countenance under correction was memorable.
Naturally, in those honeymoony days, the young Countess of Ormont sided
with her husband the earl; she declared that her aunt had never dreamed
of the cedilla before the expedition to Spain. When, for example, Alfred
Nargett Pagnell had a laughing remark, which Aminta in her childhood
must have heard: “We rhyme with spaniel!”
That was the secret of Lord Ormont's prepossession against Aminta's
aunt; and who can tell? perhaps of much of his behaviour to the
beautiful young wife he at least admired, sincerely admired, though he
caused her to hang her head--cast a cloud on the head so dear to him!
Otherwise there was no interpreting his lordship. To think of herself as
personally disliked by a nobleman stupefied Mrs. Pagnell, from her just
expectation of reciprocal dealings in high society; for she confessed
herself a fly to a title. Where is the shame, if titles are created to
attract? Elsewhere than in that upper circle, we may anticipate hard
bargains; the widow of a solicitor had not to learn it. But when a
distinguished member and ornament of the chosen seats above blew cold
upon their gesticulatory devotee, and was besides ungrateful; she was
more than commonly assured of his being, as she called him, “a sphinx.”
His behaviour to his legally wedded wife confirmed the charge.
She checked her flow to resume the question. “So, then, where are we
now? He allows you liberally for pin-money in addition to your own small
independent income. Satisfaction with that would warrant him to suppose
his whole duty done by you.”
“We are where we were, aunty; the month has made no change,” said Aminta
in languor.
“And you as patient as ever?”
“I am supposed to have everything a woman can require.”
“Can he possibly think it? And I have to warn you, child, that lawyers
are not so absolving as the world is with some of the ladies Lord Ormont
allows you to call your friends. I have been hearing--it is not mere
airy tales one hears from lawyers about cases in Courts of Law. Tighten
your lips as you like; I say nothing to condemn or reflect on Mrs.
Lawrence Finchley. I have had my eyes a little opened, that is all.
Oh, I know my niece Aminta, when it's a friend to stand by; but our
position--thanks to your inscrutable lord and master--demands of us the
utmost scrupulousness, or it soon becomes a whirl and scandal flying
about, and those lawyers picking up and putting together. I have had a
difficulty to persuade them!... and my own niece! whom I saw married at
the British Embassy in Madrid, as I take good care to tell everybody;
for it was my doing; I am the responsible person! and by an English
Protestant clergyman, to all appearance able to walk erect in and out of
any of these excellent new Life Assurance offices they are starting for
the benefit of widows and orphans, and deceased within six days of the
ceremony--if ceremony one may call the hasty affair in those foreign
places. My dear, the instant I heard it I had a presentiment, 'All has
gone well up to now.' I remember murmuring the words. Then your letter,
received in that smelly Barcelona: Lord Ormont was carrying you off to
Granada--a dream of my infancy! It may not have been his manoeuvre, but
it was the beginning of his manoeuvres.”
Aminta shuddered. “And tra-la-la, and castanets, and my Cid! my Cid! and
the Alhambra, the Sierra Nevada, and ay di me, Alhama; and Boabdil el
Chico and el Zagal and Fray Antonio Agapida!” She flung out the rattle,
yawning, with her arms up and her head back, in the posture of a woman
wounded. One of her aunt's chance shots had traversed her breast,
flashing at her the time, the scene, the husband, intensest sunniness
on sword-edges of shade,--and now the wedded riddle; illusion dropping
mask, romance in its anatomy, cold English mist. Ah, what a background
is the present when we have the past to the fore! That filmy past is
diaphanous on heaving ribs.
She smiled at the wide-eyed little gossip. “Don't speak of manaoeuvres,
dear aunt. And we'll leave Granada to the poets. I'm tired. Talk of our
own people, on your side and my father's, and as much as you please of
the Pagnell-Pagnells, they refresh me. Do they go on marrying?”
“Why, my child, how could they go on without it?”
Aminta pressed her hands at her eyelids. “Oh, me!” she sighed, feeling
the tear come with a sting from checked laughter. “But there are
marriages, aunty, that don't go on, though Protestant clergymen
officiated. Leave them unnoticed, I have really nothing to tell.”
“You have not heard anything of Lady Eglett?”
“Lady Charlotte Eglett? No syllable. Or wait--my lord's secretary was
with her at Olmer; approved by her, I have to suppose.”
“There, my dear, I say again I do dread that woman, if she can make
a man like Lord Ormont afraid of her. And no doubt she is of our old
aristocracy. And they tell me she is coarse in her conversation--like a
man. Lawyers tell me she is never happy but in litigation. Years back, I
am given to understand, she did not set so particularly good an example.
Lawyers hear next to everything. I am told she lifted her horsewhip on
a gentleman once, and then put her horse at him and rode him down.
You will say, the sister of your husband. No; not to make my niece a
countess, would I, if I had known the kind of family! Then one asks, Is
she half as much afraid of him? In that case, no wonder they have
given up meeting. Was formerly one of the Keepsake Beauties. Well, Lady
Eglett, and Aminta, Countess of Ormont, will be in that Peerage, as
they call it, let her only have her dues. My dear, I would--if I ever
did--swear the woman is jealous.”
“Of me, aunty!”
“I say more; I say again, it would be a good thing for somebody if
somebody had his twitch of jealousy. Wives may be too meek. Cases and
cases my poor Alfred read to me, where an ill-behaving man was brought
to his senses by a clever little shuffle of the cards, and by the most
innocent of wives. A kind of poison to him, of course; but there are
poisons that cure. It might come into the courts; and the nearer the
proofs the happier he in withdrawing from his charge and effecting a
reconciliation. Short of guilt, of course. Men are so strange. Imagine
now, if a handsome young woman were known to be admired rather more than
enough by a good-looking gentleman near about her own age. Oh, I've no
patience with, the man for causing us to think and scheme! Only there
are men who won't be set right unless we do. My husband used to say,
change is such a capital thing in life's jogtrot; that men find it
refreshing if we now and then, reverse the order of our pillion-riding
for them. A spiritless woman in a wife is what they bear least of all.
Anything rather. Is Mr. Morsfield haunting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley's
house as usual?”
Aminta's cheeks unrolled their deep damask rose at the abrupt intrusion
of the name. “I meet him there.”
“Lord Adderwood, Sir John Randeller; and the rest?”
“Two or three times a week.”
“And the lady, wife of the captain, really a Lady Fair--Mrs.... month of
May: so I have to get at it.”
“She may be seen there.”
“Really a contrast, when you two are together! As to reputation, there
is an exchange of colours. Those lawyers hold the keys of the great
world, and a naughty world it is, I fear--with exceptions, who are the
salt, but don't taste so much. I can't help enjoying the people at Mrs.
Lawrence Finchley's. I like to feel I can amuse them, as they do me. One
puzzles for what they say--in somebody's absence, I mean. They must take
Lord Ormont for a perfect sphinx; unless they are so silly as to think
they may despise him, or suppose him indifferent. Oh, that upper class!
It's a garden, and we can't help pushing to enter it; and fair flowers,
indeed, but serpents too, like the tropics. It tries us more than
anything else in the world--well, just as good eating tries the
constitution. He ought to know it and feel it, and give his wife all the
protection of his name, instead of--not that he denies: I have brought
him to that point; he cannot deny it with me. But not to present her--to
shun the Court; not to introduce her to his family, to appear ashamed
of her! My darling Aminta, a month of absence for reflection on your
legally-wedded husband's conduct increases my astonishment. For usually
men old enough to be the grandfathers of their wives--”
“Oh, pray, aunty, pray, pray!” Aminta cried, and her body writhed. “No
more to-night. You mean well, I am sure. Let us wait. I shall sleep,
perhaps, if I go to bed early. I dare say I am spiritless--not worth
more than I get. I gave him the lead altogether; he keeps it. In
everything else he is kind; I have all the luxuries--enough to loathe
them. Kiss me and say good night.”
Aminta made it imperative by rising. Her aunt stood up, kissed, and
exclaimed, “I tell you you are a queenly creature, not to be treated as
any puny trollop of a handmaid. And although he is a great nobleman, he
is not to presume to behave any longer, my dear, as if your family had
no claim on his consideration. My husband, Alfred Pagnell, would have
laid that before him pretty quick. You are the child of the Farrells and
the Solers, both old families; on your father's side you are linked
with the oldest nobility in Europe. It flushes one to think of it!
Your grandmother, marrying Captain Algernon Farrell, was the legitimate
daughter of a Grandee of Spain; as I have told Lord Ormont often, and
I defy him to equal that for a romantic marriage in the annals of his
house, or boast of bluer blood. Again, the Solers--”
“We take the Solers for granted, aunty, good night.”
“Commoners, if you like; but established since the Conquest. That is, we
trace the pedigree. And to be treated, even by a great nobleman, as if
we were stuff picked up out of the ditch! I declare, there are times
when I sit and think and boil. Is it chivalrous, is it generous--is it,
I say, decent--is it what Alfred would have called a fair fulfilment
of a pact, for your wedded husband--? You may close my mouth! But he
pretends to be chivalrous and generous, and he has won a queen any
wealthy gentleman in England--I know of one, if not two--would be proud
to have beside him in equal state; and what is he to her? He is an
extinguisher. Or is it the very meanest miserliness, that he may keep
you all to himself? There we are again! I say he is an unreadable
sphinx.”
Aminta had rung the bell for her maid. Mrs. Pagnell could be counted on
for drawing in her tongue when the domestics were near.
A languor past delivery in sighs was on the young woman's breast. She
could have heard without a regret that the heart was to cease beating.
Had it been downright misery she would have looked about her with less
of her exanimate glassiness. The unhappy have a form of life: until they
are worn out, they feel keenly. She felt nothing. The blow to her pride
of station and womanhood struck on numbed sensations. She could complain
that the blow was not heavier.
A letter lying in her jewel-box called her to read it, for the chance
of some slight stir. The contents were known. The signature of Adolphus
Morsfield had a new meaning for her eyes, and dashed her at her husband
in a spasm of revolt and wrath against the man exposing her to these
letters, which a motion of her hand could turn to blood, and abstention
from any sign maintained in a Satanic whisper, saying, “Here lies one
way of solving the riddle.” It was her husband who drove her to look
that way.
The look was transient, and the wrath: she could not burn. A small
portion of contempt lodged in her mind to shadow husbands precipitating
women on their armoury for a taste of vengeance. Women can always be
revenged--so speedily, so completely: they have but to dip. Husbands
driving wives to taste their power execrate the creature for her fall
deep downward. They are forgetful of causes.
Does it matter? Aminta's languor asked. The letter had not won a reply.
Thought of the briefest of replies was a mountain of effort, and she
moaned at her nervelessness in body and mind. To reply, to reproach the
man, to be flame--an image of herself under the form she desired--gave
her a momentary false energy, wherein the daring of the man, whose life
was at a loss for the writing of this letter, hung lighted. She had
therewith a sharp vision of his features, repellent in correctness,
Greek in lines, with close eyes, hollow temples, pressed lips--a face
indicating the man who can fling himself on a die. She had heard tales
of women and the man. Some had loved him, report said. Here were words
to say that he loved her. They might, poor man, be true. Otherwise she
had never been loved.
Memory had of late been paying visits to a droopy plant in the golden
summer drought on a gorgeous mid-sea island, and had taken her on board
to refresh her with voyages, always bearing down full sail on a couple
of blissful schools, abodes of bloom and briny vigour, sweet merriment,
innocent longings, dreams the shyest, dreams the mightiest. At night
before sleep, at morn before rising, often during day, and when vexed
or when dispirited, she had issued her command for the voyage. Sheer
refreshment followed, as is ever the case if our vessel carries no
freight of hopes. There could be no hopes. It was forgotten that they
had ever been seriously alive. But it carried an admiration. Now, an
admiration may endure, and this one had been justified all round. The
figure heroical, the splendid, active youth, hallowed Aminta's past. The
past of a bitterly humiliated Aminta was a garden in the coming kiss of
sunset, with that godlike figure of young manhood to hallow it. There he
stayed, perpetually assuring her of his triumphs to come.
She could have no further voyages. Ridicule convulsed her home of
refuge. For the young soldier-hero, to be unhorsed by misfortune, was
one thing; but the meanness of the ambition he had taken in exchange for
the thirst of glory, accused his nature. He so certainly involved her in
the burlesque of the transformation that she had to quench memory.
She was, therefore, having smothered a good part of herself, accountably
languid--a condition alternating with fire in Aminta; and as Mr.
Morsfield's letter supplied the absent element, her needy instinct
pushed her to read his letter through. She had not yet done that with
attention.
Whether a woman loves a man or not, he is her lover if he dare tell her
he loves her, and is heard with attention. Aware that the sentences
were poison, she summoned her constitutional antagonism to the mad step
proposed, so far nullifying the virus as to make her shrink from the
madness. Even then her soul cried out to her husband, Who drives me to
read? or rather, to brood upon what she read. The brooding ensued, was
the thirst of her malady. The best antidote she could hit on was the
writer's face. Yet it expressed him, his fire and his courage--gifts she
respected in him, found wanting in herself. Read by Lord Ormont, this
letter would mean a deadly thing.
Aminta did her lord the justice to feel sure of him, that with her name
bearing the superscription, it might be left on her table, and world not
have him to peruse it. If he manoeuvred, it was never basely. Despite
resentment, her deepest heart denied his being indifferent either to
her honour or his own in relation to it. He would vindicate both at
a stroke, for a sign. Nevertheless, he had been behaving cruelly. She
charged on him the guilt of the small preludes, archeries, anglings,
veilings, evasions, all done with the eyelids and the mute of the lips,
or a skirmisher word or a fan's flourish, and which, intended to pique
the husband rather than incite the lover, had led Mrs. Lawrence Finchley
to murmur at her ear, in close assembly, without a distinct designation
of Mr. Morsfield, “Dangerous man to play little games with!” It had
brought upon her this letter of declaration, proposal, entreaty.
This letter was the man's life in her hands, and safe, of course. But
surely it was a proof that the man loved her?
Aminta was in her five-and-twentieth year; when the woman who is
uncertain of the having been loved, and she reputed beautiful,
desirable, is impelled by a sombre necessity to muse on a declaration,
and nibble at an idea of a test. If “a dangerous man to play little
games with,” he could scarcely be dangerous to a woman having no love
for him at all. It meant merely that he would soon fall to writing
letters like this, and he could not expect an answer to it. But her
heart really thanked him, and wished the poor gentleman to take its dumb
response as his reward, for being the one sole one who had loved her.
Aminta dwelt on “the one sole one.” Lord Ormont's treatment had
detached her from any belief in love on his part; and the schoolboy, now
ambitions to become a schoolmaster, was behind the screen unlikely to
be lifted again by a woman valuing her pride of youth, though he
had--behold our deceptions!--the sympathetic face entirely absent from
that of Mr. Adolphus Morsfield, whom the world would count quite as
handsome--nay, it boasted him. He enjoyed the reputation of a killer
of ladies. Women have odd tastes, Aminta thought, and examined the
gentleman's handwriting. It pleased her better. She studied it till the
conventional phrases took a fiery hue, and came at her with an invasive
rush.
The letter was cast back into the box, locked up; there an end to it, or
no interdiction of sleep.
Sleep was a triumph. Aminta's healthy frame rode her over petty
agitations of a blood uninflamed, as lightly as she swam the troubled
sea-waters her body gloried to cleave. She woke in the morning peaceful
and mildly reflective, like one who walks across green meadows. Only by
degrees, by glimpses, was she drawn to remember the trotting, cantering,
galloping, leaping of an active heart during night. We cannot, men
or woman, control the heart in sleep at night. There had been wild
leapings. Night will lead an unsatisfied heart of a woman, by way of
sleep, to scale black mountains, jump jagged chasms. Sleep is a horse
that laughs at precipices and abysses. We bid women, moreover, be
all heart. They are to cultivate their hearts, pay much heed to their
hearts. The vast realm of feeling is open to these appointed keepers of
the sanctuary household, who may be withering virgins, may be childless
matrons, may be unhusbanded wives. Wandering in the vast realm which
they are exhorted to call their own, for the additional attractiveness
it gives them, an unsatisfied heart of woman will somewhat audaciously
cross the borderland a single step into the public road of the vast
realm of thinking. Once there, and but a single step on the road, she is
a rebel against man's law for her sex. Nor is it urgent on her that she
should think defiantly in order to feel herself the rebel. She may think
submissively; with a heart (the enlarged, the scientifically plumped,
the pasture of epicurean man), with her coveted heart in revolt, and
from the mere act of thinking at all.
Aminta reviewed perforce, dead against her will, certain of the
near-to-happiness ratings over-night. She thinned her lips, and her
cheeks glowed. An arm, on the plea of rescuing, had been round her. The
choice now offered her was, to yield to softness or to think. She took
the latter step, the single step of an unaccustomed foot, which women
educated simply to feet, will, upon extreme impulsion, take; and it held
a candle in a windy darkness. She saw no Justice there. The sensational
immensity touched sublime, short of that spirit of Justice required
for the true sublime. And void of Justice; what a sunless place is any
realm! Infants, the male and the female alike, first begin to know they
feel when it is refused them. When they know they feel, they have begun
to reflect. The void of Justice is a godless region. Women, to whom the
solitary thought has come as a blown candle, illumining the fringes of
their storm, ask themselves whether they are God's creatures or man's.
The question deals a sword-stroke of division between them and their
human masters. Young women, animated by the passions their feeling
bosoms of necessity breed, and under terror discover, do not distinguish
an abstract justice from a concrete. They are of the tribe too long
hereditarily enslaved to conceive an abstract. So it is with them, that
their God is the God of the slave, as it is with all but the bravest of
boys. He is a Thing to cry to, a Punisher, not much of a Supporter--the
Biblical Hebrew's right reading of Nature, favouring man, yet prompt to
confound him, and with woman for the instrument of vengeance. By such
a maze the blindfolded, are brought round to see Justice on earth. If
women can only believe in some soul of justice, they will feel they
belong to God--of the two; and the peril for them then is, that they
will set the one incomprehensible Power in opposition to the other,
urging them unsatisfied natures to make secret appeal away from man and
his laws altogether, at the cost of losing clear sight of the God who
shines in thought. It is a manner whereby the desperately harried
among these creatures of the petted heart arrive upon occasion at an
agreeable, almost reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of God.
There is little pleasure to be on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator
sensible to the pulses of his audience. Justice compels at times. In
truth, there are times when the foggy obscurities of the preacher are by
comparison broad daylight beside the whirling loose tissues of a woman
unexplained. Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the
traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft
brown of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings
overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened
as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her
heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.
Her husband, the man-riddle: she was unable to rede or read him. Her
will could not turn him; nor her tongue combat; nor was it granted her
to pique the mailed veteran. Every poor innocent little bit of an art
had been exhausted. Her title was Lady Ormont her condition actually
slave. A luxuriously established slave, consorting with a singularly
enfranchised set,--as, for instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord
Adderwood; Sir John Randeller and Lady Staines; Mrs. May, Amy May,
notorious wife of a fighting captain, the loneliest of blondes; and
other ladies, other gentlemen, Mr. Morsfield in the list, paired or not
yet paired: gossip raged. Aminta was of a disposition too generously
cordial to let her be the rigorous critic of people with whom she was
in touch. But her mind knew relief when she recollected that her humble
little school-mate, Selina Collect, who had suffered on her behalf in
old days, was coming up to her from the Suffolk coast on a visit for a
week. However much a slave and an unloved woman, she could be a constant
and protecting friend. Besides, Lord Ormont was gracious to little
Selina. She thought of his remarks about the modest-minded girl after
first seeing her. From that she struck upon a notion of reserves of
humaneness being in him, if she might find the path to them: and
thence, fortified by the repose her picture of little Selina's merit had
bestowed, she sprang to the idea of valiancy, that she would woo him
to listen to her, without inflicting a scene. He had been a listening
lover, seeming lover, once, later than the Granada sunsets. The letter
in her jewel-box urged Aminta to clear her conscience by some means, for
leaving it unburnt.