The winning of Lord Ormont's consent to look on at the little bout of
arms was counted an achievement; for even in his own rarefied upper
circle, where the fervid sentiments are not allowed to be seen plunging,
he had his troop of enthusiasts; and they were anxious that he should
make an appearance in public, to take what consolation a misunderstood
and injured man could get from evidence of the grateful esteem
entertained for him by a party of his countrymen, who might reasonably
expect at the same time to set eyes, at rather close quarters, on the
wonderful dark beauty, supposed a Spaniard, occasionally beheld riding
beside him. If it is possible to connect a woman with the devoutest of
their anticipations, the sons of leisure up there will do it. But, in
truth, an English world was having cause to ransack the dust-heaps
for neglected men of mettle. Our intermittent ague, known as dread of
invasion, was over the land. Twice down the columns of panic newspaper
correspondence Lord Ormont saw his name cited, with the effect on him
that such signs of national repentance approaching lodged a crabbed
sourness in his consulting-room, whether of head or breast.
He was assailed by a gusty appeal from Lady Charlotte, bidding him
seize the moment to proclaim his views while the secretary had a private
missive from her, wherein, between insistency and supplication, she
directed him to bring the subject before my lord every day, and be sure
to write out a fair copy of the epistle previous to the transmission of
it. 'Capua' was mentioned; she brought in 'a siren,' too. Her brother
was to be the soldier again--fling off silken bonds. The world might
prate of his morality; now was the hour for showing his patriotism,
casting aside his just anger, and backing his chief's opinion. 'A good
chance to get their names together.' To her brother she declared that
the columns of the leading journal were open to him--'in large type'; he
was to take her word for it; he had only to 'dictate away,' quite at his
ease, just as he talked at Olmer, and leave the bother of the scribe's
business to his aide. 'Lose no time,' she concluded; 'the country wants
your ideas; let us have your plan.'
The earl raised his shoulders, and kept his aide exclusively at the
Memoirs. Weyburn, however, read out to him, with accentuation, foolish
stuff in the recurrent correspondence of the daily sheets, and a
complacent burgess article, meant to be a summary of the controversy and
a recommendation to the country to bask in the sun of its wealth again.
'Ay, be the porker sow it's getting liker and liker to every year!' Lord
Ormont exclaimed, and sprang on his feet. 'Take a pen. Shut up that
box. We'll give 'em digestive biscuits for their weak stomachs. Invasion
can't be done, they say! I tell the doddered asses Napoleon would have
been over if Villeneuve had obeyed him to the letter. Villeneuve had
a fit of paralysis, owing to the prestige of Nelson--that 's as it
happened. And they swear at prestige, won't believe in it, because it's
not fat bacon. I tell them, after Napoleon's first battles, prestige did
half his work for him. It saved him at Essling from a plunge into the
Danube; it saved him at Moskowa; it would have marched him half over
England at his first jump on our shingle beach. But that squelch of fat
citizens should be told--to the devil with them! will they ever learn?
short of a second William!--there were eight-and-forty hours when the
liberty of this country hung wavering in the balance with those Boulogne
boats. Now look at Ulm and Austerlitz. Essling, Wagram; put the victors
in those little affairs to front our awkward squads. The French could
boast a regimental system, and chiefs who held them as the whist-player
his hand of cards. Had we a better general than the Archduke Charles?
or cavalry and artillery equal to the Hungarian? or drilled infantry
numbering within eighty thousand of the Boulogne-Wimereux camps? We had
nothing but the raw material of courage--pluck, and no science. Ask
any boxing man what he thinks of the chances. The French might have
sacrificed a fleet to land fifty thousand. Our fleet was our one chance.
Any foreign General at the head of fifty thousand trained, picked troops
would risk it, and cut an 'entrechat' for joy of the chance. We should
have fought and bled and been marched over--a field of Anglo-Saxon
stubble! and Nelson riding the Channel, undisputed lord of the waters.
Heigh! by the Lord, this country would have been like a man free to rub
his skin with his hand and a mortal disease in his blood. Are you ready?
How anticipate a hostile march on the capital, is our business.'
Striding up and down the library, Lord Ormont dropped his wrath to
dictate the practical measures for defence--detesting the cat's-cry
'defence,' he said; but the foe would bring his old growlers, and we
should have to season our handful of regulars and mob of levies, turn
the mass into troops. With plenty of food, and blows daily, Englishmen
soon get stomachs for the right way to play the game; bowl as well as
bat; and the sooner they give up the idea of shamming sturdy on a stiff
hind leg, the better for their chances. Only, it's a beastly thing to
see that for their favourite attitude;--like some dog of a fellow weak
in the fists, weaker in the midriff, at a fair, who cries, Come on, and
prays his gods you won't. All for peace, the rascal boasts himself, and
he beats his wife and kicks his curs at home. Is there any one to help
him now, he vomits gold and honours on the man he yesterday treated as a
felon. Ha!
Bull the bumpkin disposed of, my lord drew leisurely back from the
foeman's landing-place, at the head of a body of serious Englishmen;
teaching them to be manageable as chess-pieces, ready as bow-strings to
let fly. Weyburn rejoiced to find himself transcribing crisp sentences,
hard on the matter, without garnish of scorn. Kent, Sussex, Surrey, all
the southern heights about London, round away to the south-western of
the Hampshire heathland, were accurately mapped in the old warrior's
brain. He knew his points of vantage by name; there were no references
to gazetteer or atlas. A chain of forts and earthworks enables us to
choose our ground, not for clinging to them, but for choice of time and
place to give battle. If we have not been playing double-dyed traitor
to ourselves, we have a preponderating field artillery; our yeomanry and
volunteer horsemen are becoming a serviceable cavalry arm; our infantry
prove that their heterogeneous composition can be welded to a handy
mass, and can stand fire and return it, and not be beaten by an
acknowledged defeat.
'That's English! yes, that's English! when they're at it,' my lord sang
out.
'To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end,' cried Weyburn;
his former enthusiasm for the hero mounting, enlightened by a
reminiscence of the precept he had hammered on the boys at Cuper's.
'They fall well. Yes, the English fall like men,' said my lord,
pardoning and embracing the cuffed nation. 'Bodies knocked over, hearts
upright. That's example; we breed Ironsides out of a sight like that.
If it weren't for a cursed feeble Government scraping 'conges' to the
taxpayer--well, so many of our good fellows would not have to fall. That
I say; for this thing is going to happen some day, mind you, sir! And I
don't want to have puncheons and hogsheads of our English blood poured
out merely to water the soil of a conquered country because English
Governments are a craven lot, not daring risk of office by offending the
taxpayer. But, on!'
Weyburn sent Lady Charlotte glowing words of the composition in
progress.
They worked through a day, and a second day--talked of nothing else in
the intervals. Explanatory answers were vouchsafed to Aminta's modest
inquiries at Finch, as she pictured scenes of smoke, dust and blood from
the overpowering plain masculine lines they drew, terrible in bluntness.
The third morning Lord Ormont had map and book to verify distances and
attempt a scale of heights, take names of estates, farms, parishes,
commons, patches of woodland. Weyburn wrote his fair copy on folio
paper, seven-and-thirty pages. He read it aloud to the author on the
afternoon of the fourth day, with the satisfaction in his voice that he
felt. My lord listened and nodded. The plan for the defence of England's
heart was a good plan.
He signed to have the manuscript handed to him. A fortified London
secure of the Thames for abundant supplies, well able to breathe within
earthworks extending along the southern hills, was clearly shown to
stand the loss of two big battles on the Sussex weald or more East to
North-east, if fortune willed it.
He rose from his chair, paced some steps, with bent head, came back
thoughtfully, lifted the manuscript sheets for another examination.
Then he stooped to the fire, spreading the edges unevenly, so that they
caught flame. Weyburn spied at him. It was to all appearance the
doing of a man who had intended it and brought it to the predetermined
conclusion.
'About time for you to be off for your turn at Chiallo's,' our country's
defender remarked, after tossing the last half-burnt lump under the
grate and shovelling at it.
'I will go, my lord,' said Weyburn--and he was glad to go.
He went, calculated his term of service under Lord Ormont. He was young,
not a philosopher. Waste of anything was abhorrent to a nature pointed
at store of daily gain, if it were only the gain in a new or a freshened
idea; and time lost, work lost, good counsel to the nation lost,
represented horrid vacuity to him, and called up the counter
demonstration of a dance down the halls of madness, for proof that we
should, at least, have jolly motion of limbs there before Perdition
struck the great gong. Ay, and we should be twirling with a fair form on
the arm: woman and man; as it ought to be; twirling downward, true, but
together. Such a companionship has a wisdom to raise it above the title
of madness. Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist
burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a
curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won't forgive an injury, nurses
rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can't--to use the old
schoolboy words--take a licking!
These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by
Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of
which they were the sign. He criticized impulsively, and fancied he did
no more, and was not doing much though, in fact, criticism is the end of
worship; the Brutus blow at that Imperial but mortal bosom.
The person criticized was manifest. Who was the woman he twirled with?
She was unfeatured, undistinguished, one of the sex, or all the sex:
the sex to be shunned as our deadly sapper of gain, unless we find the
chosen one to super-terrestrialize it and us, and trebly outdo our gift
of our whole self for her.
She was indistinguishable, absolutely unknown; yet she murmured, or
seemed to murmur--for there was no sound--a complaint of Lord Ormont.
And she, or some soundless mouth of woman, said he was a splendid
military hero, a chivalrous man, a man of inflexible honour; but had
no understanding of how to treat a woman, or belief in her having equal
life with him on earth.
She was put aside rather petulantly, and she took her seat out of the
whirl with submission. Thinking she certainly was not Browny, whom he
would have known among a million, he tried to quit the hall, and he
twirled afresh, necessarily not alone; it is the unpardonable offence
both to the Graces and the Great Mother for man to valse alone. She
twirled on his arm, uninvited; accepted, as in the course of nature;
hugged, under dictate of the nature of the man steeled against her by
the counting of gain, and going now at desperation's pace, by very means
of those defensive locked steam-valves meant to preserve him from this
madness,--for the words of the red-lipped mate, where there were no
words, went through him like a music when the bow is over the viol,
sweeping imagination, and they said her life was wasting.
Was not she a priceless manuscript cast to the flames? Her lord had been
at some trouble to win her. Or his great fame and his shadowed fortunes
had won her. He took her for his own, and he would not call her his own.
He comported himself with absolute, with kindly deference to the lady
whose more than vital spark he let the gossips puff at and blur. He
praised her courage, visibly admired her person, admitted her in private
to be his equal, degraded her in public. Could anything account for the
behaviour of so manly and noble a gentleman?--Rhetoric made the attempt,
and Weyburn gave up the windy business.
Discovering that his fair partner of the wasting life was--he struggled
to quench the revelation--Aminta, he stopped the dance. If there was no
gain in whirling fancifully with one of the sex, a spin of a minute with
her was downright bankruptcy.
He was young, full of blood; his heart led him away from the door Lord
Ormont had exposed; at which a little patient unemotional watchfulness
might have intimated to him something besides the simple source of the
old hero's complex chapter of conduct. As it was, Weyburn did see the
rancour of a raw wound in operation. But he moralized and disapproved;
telling himself, truly enough, that so it would not have been with him;
instead of sounding at my lord's character, and his condition of the
unjustly neglected great soldier, for the purpose of asking how that raw
wound would affect an injured veteran, who compressed, almost repressed,
the roar of Achilles, though his military bright name was to him his
Briseis.