The rules in Lord Ormont's household assisted to shelter him for some
hours of the day from the lady who was like a blast of sirocco under his
roof. He had his breakfast alone, as Lady Charlotte had it at Olmer; a
dislike of a common table in the morning was a family trait with both.
At ten o'clock the secretary arrived, and they were shut up together. At
the luncheon table Aminta usually presided. If my lord dined at home,
he had by that time established an equanimity rendering, his constant
civility to Mrs. Pagnell less arduous. The presence of a woman of
tongue, perpetually on the spring to gratify him and win him, was among
the burdens he bore for his Aminta.
Mrs. Pagnell soon perceived that the secretary was in favour. My lord
and this Mr. Weyburn had their pet themes of conversation, upon which
the wary aunt of her niece did not gaze like the wintry sun with the
distant smile her niece displayed over discussions concerning military
biographies, Hannibal's use of his elephants and his Numidian horse,
the Little St. Bernard, modern artillery, ancient slingers, English and
Genoese bowmen, Napoleon's tactics, his command to the troopers to “give
point,” and English officers' neglect of sword exercise, and the “devil
of a day” Old England is to have on a day to come. My lord connected
our day of trial with India. Mrs. Pagnell assumed an air of studious
interest; she struck in to give her niece a lead, that Lord Ormont might
know his countess capable of joining the driest of subjects occupying
exalted minds. Aminta did not follow her; and she was extricated
gallantly by the gentlemen in turn.
The secretary behaved with a pretty civility. Aminta shook herself to
think tolerantly of him when he, after listening to the suggestion, put
interrogatively, that we should profit by Hannibal's example and train
elephants to serve as a special army corps for the perfect security of
our priceless Indian Empire, instanced the danger likely to result from
their panic fear of cannon, and forbore to consult Lord Ormont's eye.
Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her foot into it; but women advised
of being fools in what they say, are generally sustained by their sense
of the excellent motive which impelled them. Even to the Countess of
Ormont, she could have replied, “We might have given them a higher idea
of us”--if, that meant, the Countess of Ormont had entered the field
beside her, to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta. She hinted as much
subsequently, and Aminta's consciousness of the troth was touched.
The young schoolmaster's company sat on her spirits, deadened her
vocabulary. Her aunt spoke of passing the library door and hearing the
two gentlemen loudly laughing. It seemed subserviency on the fallen
young hero's part. His tastes were low. He frequented the haunts of
boxing men; her lord informed her of his having made, or of his making,
matches to run or swim or walk certain distances against competitors or
within a given time. He had also half a dozen boys or more in tow, whom
he raced out of town on Sundays; a nucleus of the school he intended to
form.
But will not Achilles become by comparison a common rushlight where
was a blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown's cap on the head whose
golden helm was fired by Pallas?
Nay, and let him look the hero still: all the more does he point finger
on his meanness of nature.
Turning to another, it is another kind of shame that a woman feels, if
she consents to an exchange of letters--shameful indeed, but not such
a feeling of deadly sickness as comes with the humiliating view of an
object of admiration degraded. Bad she may be; and she may be deceived,
vilely treated, in either case. And what is a woman's pride but the
staff and banner of her soul, beyond all gifts? He who wounds it cannot
be forgiven--never!--he has killed the best of her. Aminta found herself
sliding along into the sentiment, that the splendid idol of a
girl's worship is, if she discover him in the lapse of years as an
infinitesimally small one, responsible for the woman's possible reckless
fit of giddiness. And she could see her nonsense; she could not correct
it. Lines of the letters under signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent
about her: they would recur; and she charged their doing so on the
discovered meanness of the girl's idol. Her wicked memory was caused by
his having plunged her low.
Mrs. Pagnell performed the offices of attention to Mr. Weyburn in lieu
of the countess, who seemed to find it a task to sit at the luncheon
table with him, when Lady Ormont was absent. “Just peeped in,” she said
as she entered the library, “to see if all was comfortable;” and gossip
ensued, not devoid of object. She extracted an astonishingly smooth
description of Lady Charlotte. Weyburn was brightness in speaking of the
much-misunderstood lady. “She's one of the living women of the world.”
“You are sure you don't mean one of the worldly women?” Mrs. Pagnell
rejoiced.
“She has to be known to be liked,” he owned.
“And you were, one hears, among the favoured?”
“I can scarcely pretend to that, ma'am.”
“You were recommended.”
“Lady Charlotte is devoted to her brother.”
Mrs. Pagnell's bosom heaved. “How strange Lord Ormont is! One would
suppose, with his indignation at the country for its treatment of him,
admirers would be welcome. Oh dear, no! that is not the way. On board
the packet, on our voyage to Spain, my niece in her cabin, imploring
mercy of Neptune, as they say, I heard of Lord Ormont among the
passengers. I could hardly credit my ears. For I had been hearing of him
from my niece ever since her return from a select establishment for the
education of young ladies, not much more than a morning's drive out of
London, though Dover was my residence. She had got a hero! It was Lord
Ormont! Lord Ormont! all day: and when the behaviour of the country to
him became notorious, Aminta--my niece the countess--she could hardly
contain herself. A secret:--I promised her--it's not known to Lord
Ormont himself:--a printed letter in a metropolitan paper, copied into
the provincial papers, upholding him for one of the greatest of our
patriot soldiers and the saviour of India, was the work of her hands.
You would, I am sure, think it really well written. Meeting him on
deck--the outline of the coast of Portugal for an introductory subject,
our Peninsular battles and so forth--I spoke of her enthusiasm. The
effect was, to cut off all communication between us. I had only to
appear, Lord Ormont vanished. I said to myself, this is a character.
However, the very mention of him to my niece, as one of the passengers
on board--medicine, miraculous! She was up in half an hour, out pacing
the deck before evening, hardly leaning on my arm, and the colour
positively beginning to show on her cheeks again. He fled, of coarse.
I had prepared her for his eccentricities. Next morning she was out
by herself. In the afternoon Lord Ormont strode up to us his--military
step--and most courteously requested the honour of an introduction. I
had broken the ice at last; from that moment he was cordiality itself,
until--I will not say, until he had called her his own--a few little
misunderstandings!--not with his countess. You see, a resident aunt
is translated mother-in-law by husbands; though I spare them pretty
frequently; I go to friends, they travel. Here in London she must have a
duenna. The marriage at Madrid, at the Embassy:--well, perhaps it was a
step for us, for commoners, though we rank with the independent. Has
her own little pin-money--an inheritance. Perhaps Lady Eglett gives the
world her version. She may say, there was aiming at station. I reply,
never was there a more whole-hearted love-match! Absolutely the girl's
heart has been his from the period of her school-days. Oh! a little
affair--she was persecuted by a boy at a neighbouring school. Her
mistress wrote me word--a very determined Romeo young gentleman
indeed--quite alarmed about him. In the bud! I carried her off on the
spot, and snapped it effectually. Warned he meant to be desperate, I
kept her away from my house at Dover four months, place to place; and
I did well. I heard on my return, that a youth, answering to the
schoolmistress's description of him, had been calling several times,
the first two months and longer. You have me alluding to these little
nonsensical nothings, because she seemed born to create violent
attachments, even at that early day; and Lady Eglett--Lady Charlotte
Eglett may hear; for there is no end to them, and impute them to her,
when really!--can she be made responsible for eyes innocent of the
mischief they appear destined to do? But I am disturbing you in your
work.”
“You are very good, ma'am,” said the ghost of the determined young
gentleman.
“A slight cold, have you?” Mrs. Pagnell asked solicitously.
“Dear me, no!” he gave answer with a cleared throat.
In charging him with more than he wanted to carry, she supplied him with
particulars he had wanted to know; and now he asked himself what could
be the gain of any amount of satisfied curiosity regarding a married
Aminta. She slew my lord on board a packet-boat; she bears the arrows
that slay. My lord married her where the first English chaplain was to
be found; that is not wonderful either. British Embassy, Madrid! Weyburn
believed the ceremony to have been performed there: at the same time, he
could hear Lady Charlotte's voice repeating with her varied intonation
Mrs. Pagnell's impressive utterances; and he could imagine how the
somewhat silly duenna aunt, so penetrable in her transparent artifices,
struck emphasis on the incredulity of people inclined to judge of the
reported ceremony by Lord Ormont's behaviour to his captive.
How explain that strange matter? But can there be a gain in trying to
sound it? Weyburn shuffled it away. Before the fit of passion seized
him, he could turn his eager mind from anything which had not a
perceptible point of gain, either for bodily strength or mental
acquisition, or for money, too, now that the school was growing palpable
as an infant in arms and agape for the breast. Thought of gain, and the
bent to pursue it, is the shield of Athene over young men in the press
of the seductions. He had to confess his having lost some bits of
himself by reason of his meditations latterly; and that loss, if we let
it continue a space, will show in cramp at the wrist, logs on the legs,
a wheezy wind, for any fellow vowed to physical trials of strength
and skill. It will show likewise in the brain beating broken
wings--inability to shoot a thought up out of the body for half a
minute. And, good Lord! how quickly the tight-strong fellow crumbles,
when once the fragmentary disintegration has begun! Weyburn cried out on
a heart that bounded off at prodigal gallops, and had to be nipped with
reminders of the place of good leader he was for taking among the young.
Hang superexcellence! but we know those moanings over the troubles of
a married woman; we know their sources, know their goal, or else we are
the fiction-puppet or the Bedlamite; and she is a married woman, married
at the British Embassy, Madrid, if you please! after a few weeks'
acquaintance with her husband, who doubtless wrote his name intelligibly
in the registrar's book, but does not prove himself much the hero when
he drives a pen, even for so little as the signing of his name! He
signed his name, apparently not more than partly pledging himself to
the bond. Lord Ormont's autobiographical scraps combined with Lady
Charlotte's hints and Mrs. Pagnell's communications, to provoke the
secretary's literary contempt of his behaviour to his wife. However, the
former might be mended, and he resumed the task.
It had the restorative effect of touching him to see his old hero in
action; whereby he was brought about to a proper modesty, so that he
really craved no more than for the mistress of this house to breathe the
liberal air of a public acknowledgment of her rightful position.
Things constituted by their buoyancy to float are remarkable for lively
bobbings when they are cast upon the waters; and such was the case with
Weyburn, until the agitation produced by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to
sail away in the society of the steadiest.
He decided that by not observing, not thinking, not feeling, about the
circumstances of the household into which Fate had thrown him, he would
best be able--probably it was the one way--to keep himself together; and
his resolution being honest all round, he succeeded in it as long as he
abstained from a very wakeful vigilance over simple eyesight. For if
one is nervously on guard to not-see, the matter starts up winged, and
enters us, and kindles the mind, and tingles through the blood; it has
us as a foe. The art of blind vision requires not only practice, but an
intimate knowledge of the arts of the traitor we carry within. Safest
for him, after all, was to lay fast hold of the particularly unimportant
person he was, both there and anywhere else. The Countess of Ormont's
manner toward him was to be read as a standing index of the course he
should follow; and he thanked her. He could not quite so sincerely thank
her aunt. His ingratitude for the sickly dose she had administered to
him sprang a doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked her aunt on account
of services performed at the British Embassy, Madrid.
Certain looks of those eyes recently, when in colloquy with my lord,
removed the towering nobleman to a shadowed landscape.
Was it solely an effect of eyes commanding light, and having every
shaft of the quiver of the rays at her disposal? Or was it a shot from a
powerful individuality issuing out of bondage to some physical oppressor
no longer master of the soul, in peril of the slipping away of the body?
Her look on him was not hate: it was larger, more terribly divine. Those
eyes had elsewhere once looked love: they had planted their object in
a throbbing Eden. The man on whom they had looked shivered over the
thought of it after years of blank division.
Rather than have those eyes to look on him their displacing
unintentness, the man on whom they had once looked love would have
chosen looks of wrath, the darts that kill--blest darts of the celestial
Huntress, giving sweet sudden cessation of pain, in the one everlasting
last flash of life with thought that the shot was hers. Oh for the
'ayava behea' of the Merciful in splendour!
These were the outcries of the man deciding simultaneously not to
observe, not to think, not to feel, and husbanding calculations upon
storage of gain for the future. Softness held the song below. It came of
the fact that his enforced resolution, for the sake of sanity, drove his
whole reflective mind backward upon his younger days, when an Evening
and a Morning star in him greeted the bright Goddess Browny or sang
adieu, and adored beyond all golden beams the underworld whither she had
sunk, where she was hidden.
Meanwhile, the worthy dame who had dosed him was out in her carriage,
busy paying visits to distinguished ladies of the great world, with the
best of excuses for an early call, which was gossip to impart, such as
the Countess of Ormont had not yet thought of mentioning; and two or
three of them were rather amusedly interested to hear that Lord Ormont
had engaged a handsome young secretary, “under the patronage of Lady
Charlotte Eglett, devoted to sports of all kinds, immensely favoured by
both.” Gossip must often have been likened to the winged insect bearing
pollen to the flowers; it fertilizes many a vacuous reverie. Those
flowers of the upper garden are not, indeed, stationary and in need of
the missionary buzzer, but if they have been in one place unmoved for
one hour, they are open to take animation from their visitors. Aminta
was pleasantly surprised next day by the receipt of a note from Mrs.
Lawrence Finchley, begging to be invited to lunch if she came, as she
had a purpose in the wish to meet my lord.
[NOTE: The remainder of 'Lord Ormont and His Aminta' is taken from an
older edition which uses single rather than double quotation marks.
D.W.]