Dusty wayfarers along a white high-road who know of a bubbling little
spring across a stile, on the woodland borders of deep grass, are hailed
to sit aside it awhile: and Aminta's feverishness was cooled by now
and then a quiet conversation with the secretary ambitious to become a
school-master. Lady Charlotte liked him, so did her lord; Mrs. Lawrence
had chatted with him freshly, as it was refreshing to recollect; nobody
thought him a stunted growth.
In Aminta's realized recollections, amid the existing troubles of her
mind, the charge against him grew paler, and she could no longer quite
think that the young hero transformed into a Mr. Cuper had deceived her,
though he had done it--much as if she had assisted at the planting and
watched aforetime the promise of a noble tree, to find it, after an
interval of years, pollarded--a short trunk shooting out a shock of
small, slim, stiff branches; dwarfed and disgraced; serviceable perhaps;
not ludicrous or ugly, certainly, taking it for a pollard. And he was
a cool well-spring to talk with. He, supposed once to be a passionate
nature, scorned passion as a madness; he smiled in his merciful
executioner's way at the high society, of which her aim was to pass for
one among the butterflies or dragonflies; he had lost his patriotism;
he labelled our English classes the skimmers, the gorgers, the grubbers,
and stigmatized them with a friendly air; and uttered words of tolerance
only for farmers and surgeons and schoolmasters. But that was quite
incidental in the humorous run of his talk, diverting to hear while it
lasted. He had, of course, a right to his ideas.
No longer concerned in contesting them, she drank at the water of this
plain earth-well, and hoped she preferred it to fiery draughts, though
it was flattish, or, say, flavourless. In the other there was excess
of flavour--or, no, spice it had to be called. The young schoolmaster's
world seemed a sunless place, the world of traders bargaining for gain,
without a glimmer of the rich generosity to venture life, give it, dare
all for native land--or for the one beloved. Love pressed its claim on
heroical generosity, and instantly it suffused her, as an earth under
flush of sky. The one beloved! She had not known love; she was in her
five-and-twentieth year, and love was not only unknown to her, it was
shut away from her by the lock of a key that opened on no estimable
worldly advantage in exchange, but opened on a dreary, clouded round,
such as she had used to fancy it must be to the beautiful creamy
circus-horse of the tossing mane and flowing tail and superb step. She
was admired; she was just as much doomed to a round of paces, denied the
glorious fling afield, her nature's food. Hitherto she would have been
shamefaced as a boy in forming the word 'love': now, believing it denied
to her for good and all--for ever and ever--her bosom held and uttered
the word. She saw the word, the nothing but the word that it was, and
she envisaged it, for the purpose of saying adieu to it--good-bye even
to the poor empty word.
This condition was attributable to a gentleman's wild rageing with the
word, into which he had not infused the mystic spirit. He poured hot
wine and spiced. If not the spirit of love, it was really the passion of
the man. Her tremors now and again in the reading of his later letters
humiliated her, in the knowledge that they came of no response to
him, but from the temporary base acquiescence; which is, with women, a
terrible perception of the gulf of their unsatisfied nature.
The secretary, cheerful at his work, was found for just the opening of a
door. Sometimes she hesitated--to disturb him, she said to herself,--and
went up-stairs or out visiting. He protested that he could work on and
talk too. She was able to amuse her lord with some of his ideas. He had
a stock of them, all his own.
Ideas, new-born and naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time to
the humanity they visit to help uplift, it from the state of beast. In
the England of that, period original or unknown ideas were a smoking
brimstone to the nose, dread Arabian afrites, invisible in the air,
jumping out of vases, armed for the slaughter of the venerable and
the cherished, the ivy-clad and celestially haloed. They carried
the dishevelled Maenad's torch. A step with them, and we were on the
Phlegethon waters of the French Revolution. For a publication of simple
ideas men were seized, tried at law, mulcted, imprisoned, and not
pardoned after the term of punishment; their names were branded: the
horned elect butted at them; he who alluded to them offered them
up, wittingly or not, to be damned in the nose of the public for an
execrable brimstone stench.
Lord Ormont broke through his shouts or grunts at Aminta's report of the
secretary's ideas on various topics, particularly the proposal that the
lords of the land should head the land in a revolutionary effort to make
law of his crazy, top-heavy notions, with a self-satisfied ejaculation:
'He has not favoured me with any of these puffballs of his.'
The deduction was, that the author sagaciously considered them adapted
for the ear of a woman; they were womanish--i.e. flighty, gossamer. To
the host of males, all ideas are female until they are made facts.
This idea, proposing it to our aristocracy to take up his other ideas,
or reject them on pain of the forfeiture of their caste and headship
with the generations to follow, and a total displacing of them
in history by certain notorious, frowzy, scrubby pamphleteers and
publishers, Lord Ormont thought amazingly comical. English nobles
heading the weavers, cobblers, and barbers of England! He laughed, but
he said, 'Charlotte would listen to that.'
The dread, high-sitting Lady Charlotte was, in his lofty thinking, a
woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense, if it happened to
strike a particular set of bells hanging in her cranium. She patronized
blasphemous and traitorous law-breakers, just to keep up the pluck of
the people, not with a notion of maintaining our English aristocracy
eminent in history.
Lady Charlotte, however, would be the foremost to swoop down on the
secretary's ideas about the education of women.
On that subject, Aminta said she did not know what to think.
Now, if a man states the matter he thinks, and a woman does but listen,
whether inclining to agree or not, a perceptible stamp is left on soft
wax. Lord Ormont told her so, with cavalier kindness.
She confessed 'she did not know what to think,' when the secretary
proposed the education and collocation of boys and girls in one group,
never separated, declaring it the only way for them to learn to know and
to respect one another. They were to learn together, play together, have
matches together, as a scheme for stopping the mischief between them.
'But, my dear girl, don't you see, the devilry was intended by Nature.
Life would be the coldest of dishes without it.' And as for mixing the
breeched and petticoated in those young days--'I can't enter into it,'
my lord considerately said. 'All I can tell you is, I know boys.'
Aminta persisted in looking thoughtful. 'Things are bad, as they are
now,' she said.
'Always were--always will be. They were intended to be, if we are to
call them bad. Botched mendings will only make them worse.'
'Which side suffers?'
'Both; and both like it. One side must be beaten at any game. It's off
and on, pretty equal--except in the sets where one side wears thick
boots. Is this fellow for starting a mixed sexes school? Funny mothers!'
'I suppose--' Aminta said, and checked the supposition. 'The mothers
would not leave their girls unless they were confident...?'
'There's to be a female head of the female department? He reckons
on finding a woman as big a fool as himself? A fair bit of reckoning
enough. He's clever at the pen. He doesn't bother me with his ideas; now
and then I 've caught a sound of his bee buzzing.'
The secretary was left undisturbed at his labours for several days.
He would have been gladdened by a brighter look of her eyes at her next
coming. They were introspective and beamless. She had an odd leaning
to the talk upon Cuper's boys. He was puzzled by what he might have
classed, in any other woman, as a want of delicacy, when she recurred
to incidents which were red patches of the school time, and had clearly
lost their glow for her.
A letter once written by him, in his early days at Cuper's, addressed
to J. Masner, containing a provocation to fight with any weapons, and
signed, 'Your Antagonist,' had been read out to the whole school, under
strong denunciation of the immorality, the unchristian-like conduct of
the writer, by Mr. Cuper; creating a sensation that had travelled to
Miss Vincent's establishment, where some of the naughtiest of the
girls had taken part with the audacious challenger, dreadful though
the contemplation of a possible duel so close to them was. And then
the girls heard that the anonymous 'Your Antagonist,' on being cited
to proclaim himself in public assembly of school-mates and masters, had
jumped on his legs and into the name of--one who was previously thought
by Miss Vincent's good girls incapable of the 'appalling wickedness,'
as Mr. Cuper called it, of signing 'Your Antagonist' to a Christian
school-fellow, having the design to provoke a breach of the law of the
land and shed Christian blood. Mr. Cuper delivered an impressive sermon
from his desk to the standing up boarders and day-scholars alike,
vilifying the infidel Greek word 'antagonist.'
'Do you remember the offender's name?' the Countess of Ormont said; and
Weyburn said--
'Oh yes, I 've not forgotten the incident.'
Her eyes, wherein the dead time hung just above the underlids, lingered,
as with the wish for him to name the name.
She said: 'I am curious to hear how you would treat a case of that sort.
Would you preach to the boys?
'Ten words at most. The right assumption is that both fellows were to
blame. I fancy the proper way would be to appeal to the naughty girls
for their opinion as to how the dispute should be decided.'
'You impose too much on them. And you are not speaking seriously.'
'Pardon me, I am. I should throw myself into the mind of a naughty
girl--supposing none of these at hand--and I should let it be known that
my eyes were shut to proceedings, always provided the weapons were not
such as would cause a shock of alarm in female bosoms.'
'You would at your school allow it to be fought out?'
'Judging by the characters of the boys. If they had heads to understand,
I would try them at their heads. Otherwise they are the better, they
come round quicker to good blood, at their age--I speak of English
boys--for a little hostile exercise of their fists. Well, for one thing,
it teaches them the value of sparring.'
'I must imagine I am not one of the naughty sisterhood,--for I cannot
think I should ever give consent to fighting of any description, unless
for the very best of reasons,' said the countess.
His eyes were at the trick of the quarter-minute's poising. Her lids
fluttered. 'Oh, I don't mean to say I was one of the good,' she added.
At the same time her enlivened memory made her conscious of a warning,
that she might, as any woman might, so talk on of past days as to take,
rather more than was required of the antidote she had come for.
The antidote was excellent; cooling, fortifying; 'quite a chalybeate,'
her aunt would say, and she was thankful. Her heart rose on a quiet wave
of the thanks, and pitched down to a depth of uncounted fathoms. Aminta
was unable to tell herself why.
Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had been announced. On her way to the drawing
room Aminta's brain fell upon a series of dots, that wound along a track
to the point where she accused herself of a repented coquettry--cause of
the burning letters she was doomed to receive and could not stop without
rousing her lion. She dotted backwards; there was no sign that she
had been guilty of any weakness other than the almost--at least, in
design--innocent first move, which had failed to touch Lord Ormont in
the smallest degree. Never failure more absolute!
She was about to inquire of her bosom's oracle whether she greatly
cared now. For an answer, her brain went dotting along from Mr. Cuper's
school, and a boy named Abner there, and a boy named Matey Weyburn, who
protected the little Jew-boy, up to Mr. Abner in London, who recommended
him in due season to various acquaintances; among them to Lady Charlotte
Eglett. Hence the introduction to Lord Ormont. How little extraordinary
circumstances are, if only we trace them to the source!
But if only it had appeared marvellous, the throbbing woman might have
seized on it, as a thing fateful, an intervention distinctly designed
to waken the best in her, which was, after all, the strongest. Yea, she
could hope and pray and believe it was the strongest.
She was listening to Isabella Lawrence Finchley, wishing she might have
followed to some end the above line of her meditations.
Mrs. Lawrence was changed, much warmer, pressing to be more than merely
friendly. Aminta twice gave her cheek for kisses. The secretary had
spoken of Mrs. Lawrence as having the look of a handsome boy; and
Aminta's view of her now underwent a change likewise. Compunction,
together with a sisterly taste for the boyish fair one flying her sail
independently, and gallantly braving the winds, induced her to kiss in
return.
'You do like me a morsel?' said Mrs. Lawrence. 'I fell in love with you
the last time I was here. I came to see Mr. Secretary--it's avowed; and
I have been thinking of you ever since, of no one else. Oh yes, for a
man; but you caught me. I've been hearing of him from Captain May. They
fence at those rooms. And it 's funny, Mr. Morsfield practises there,
you know; and there was a time when the lovely innocent Amy, Queen
of Blondes, held the seat of the Queen of Brunes. Ah, my dear, the
infidelity of men doesn't count. They are affected by the changeing
moons. As long as the captain is civil to him, we may be sure beautiful
Amy has not complained. Her husband is the pistol she carries in her
pocket, and she has fired him twice, with effect. Through love of you I
have learnt the different opinion the world of the good has of her and
of me; I thought we ran under a common brand. There are gradations. I
went to throw myself at the feet of my great-aunt; good old great-aunt
Lady de Culme, who is a power in the land. I let her suppose I came for
myself, and she reproached me with Lord Adder. I confessed to him
and ten others. She is a dear, she's ticklish, and at eighty-four she
laughed! She looked into my eyes and saw a field with never a man in
it--just the shadow of a man. She admitted the ten cancelled the one,
and exactly named to me, by comparison with the erring Amy, the sinner
I am and must be, if I 'm to live. So, dear, the end of it is,' and Mrs.
Lawrence put her fingers to a silken amber bow at Aminta's throat, and
squared it and flattened it with dainty precision, speaking on under
dropped eyelids, intent upon her work, 'Lady de Culme will be happy to
welcome you whenever it shall suit the Countess of Ormont to accompany
her disreputable friend. But what can I do, dear?' She raised her lids
and looked beseechingly. 'I was born with this taste for the ways and
games and style of men. I hope I don't get on badly with women; but if I
'm not allowed to indulge my natural taste, I kick the stable-boards and
bite the manger.'
Aminta threw her arms round her, and they laughed their mutual peal.
Caressing her still, Aminta said: 'I don't know whether I embrace a
boy.'
'That idea comes from a man!' said Mrs. Lawrence. It was admitted. The
secretary was discussed.
Mrs. Lawrence remarked: 'Yes, I like talking with him; he's bright. You
drove him out of me the day I saw him. Doesn't he give you the idea of a
man who insists on capturing you and lets it be seen he doesn't care two
snaps of a finger?'
Aminta petitioned on his behalf indifferently: 'He 's well bred.'
She was inattentive to Mrs. Lawrence's answer. The allusion of the
Queen of Blondes had stung her in the unacknowledged regions where women
discard themselves and are most sensitive.
'Decide on coming soon to Lady de Culme,' said Mrs. Lawrence. 'Now that
her arms are open to you, she would like to have you in them. She is
old--. You won't be rigorous? no standing on small punctilios?
She would call, but she does not--h'm, it is M. le Comte that she does
not choose to--h'm. But her arms are open to the countess. It ought to
be a grand step. You may be assured that Lady Charlotte Eglett would not
be taken into them. My great-aunt has a great-aunt's memory. The Ormonts
are the only explanation--if it 's an apology--she can offer for the
behaviour of the husband of the Countess of Ormont. You know I like him.
I can't help liking a man who likes me. Is that the way with a boy, Mr.
Secretary? I must have another talk with the gentleman, my dear. You are
Aminta to me.'
'Always Aminta to you,' was the reply, tenderly given.
'But as for comprehending him, I'm as far off that as Lady de Culme, who
hasn't the liking for him I have.'
'The earl?' said Aminta, showing by her look that she was in the same
position.
Mrs. Lawrence shrugged: 'I believe men and women marry in order that
they should never be able to understand one another. The riddle's best
read at a moderate distance. It 's what they call the golden mean; too
close, too far, we're strangers. I begin to understand that husband of
mine, now we're on bowing terms. Now, I must meet the earl to-morrow.
You will arrange? His hand wants forcing. Upon my word, I don't believe
it 's more.'
Mrs. Lawrence contrasted him in her mind with the husband she knew, and
was invigorated by the thought that a placable impenetrable giant may
often be more pliable in a woman's hands than an irascible dwarf--until,
perchance, the latter has been soundly cuffed, and then he is docile to
trot like a squire, as near your heels as he can get. She rejoiced to be
working for the woman she had fallen in love with.
Aminta promised herself to show the friend a livelier affection at their
next meeting.
A seventh letter, signed 'Adolphus,' came by post, was read and locked
up in her jewel-box. They were all nigh destruction for a wavering
minute or so. They were placed where they lay because the first of them
had been laid there, the box being a strong one, under a patent key, and
discovery would mean the terrible. They had not been destroyed because
they had, or seemed to her to have, the language of passion. She could
read them unmoved, and appease a wicked craving she owned to having, and
reproached herself with having, for that language.
Was she not colour in the sight of men? Here was one, a mouthpiece of
numbers, who vowed that homage was her due, and devotion, the pouring
forth of the soul to her. What was the reproach if she read the stuff
unmoved?
But peruse and reperuse it, and ask impressions to tell our deepest
instinct of truthfulness whether language of this character can have
been written to two women by one hand! Men are cunning. Can they catch a
tone? Not that tone!
She, too, Mrs. Amy May, was colour in the sight of men. Yet it seemed
that he could not have written so to the Queen of Blondes. And she, by
repute, was as dangerous to slight as he to attract. Her indifference
exonerated him. Besides, a Queen of Blondes would not draw the hearts
out of men in England, as in Italy and in Spain. Aminta had got thus
far when she found 'Queen of Brunes' expunged by a mist: she imagined
hearing the secretary's laugh. She thought he was right to laugh at her.
She retorted simply: 'These are feelings that are poetry.'
A man may know nothing about them, and be an excellent schoolmaster.
Suggestions touching the prudence of taking Mrs. Lawrence into her
confidence, as regarded these troublesome letters of the man with the
dart in his breast, were shuffled aside for various reasons: her modesty
shrank; and a sense of honour toward the man forbade it. She would have
found it easier to do if she had conspired against her heart in doing
it. And yet, cold-bloodedly to expose him and pluck the clothing from a
passion--dear to think of only when it is profoundly secret--struck
her as an extreme baseness, of which not even the woman who perused and
reperused his letters could be guilty.
Her head rang with some of the lines, and she accused her head of the
crime of childishness, seeing that her heart was not an accomplice. At
the same time, her heart cried out violently against the business of
a visit to Lady de Culme, and all the steps it involved. Justly she
accused her heart of treason. Heart and head were severed. This, as
she partly apprehended, is the state of the woman who is already on the
slope of her nature's mine-shaft, dreading the rush downwards, powerless
to break away from the light.
Letters perused and reperused, coming from a man never fervently noticed
in person, conjure features one would wish to put beside the actual,
to make sure that the fiery lines he writes are not practising a
beguilement. Aminta had lost grasp of the semblance of the impassioned
man. She just remembered enough of his eyes to think there might be
healing in a sight of him.
Latterly she had refused to be exhibited to a tattling world as the
great nobleman's conquest:--The 'Beautiful Lady Doubtful' of a report
that had scorched her cars. Theatres, rides, pleasure-drives, even such
houses as she saw standing open to her had been shunned. Now she asked
the earl to ride in the park.
He complied, and sent to the stables immediately, just noted another
of her veerings. The whimsy creatures we are matched to contrast with,
shift as the very winds or feather-grasses in the wind. Possibly a fine
day did it. Possibly, too, her not being requested to do it.
He was proud of her bearing on horseback. She rode well and looked well.
A finer weapon wherewith to strike at a churlish world was never given
into the hands of man. These English may see in her, if they like, that
they and their laws and customs are defied. It does her no hurt, and it
hits them a ringing buffet.
Among the cavaliers they passed was Mr. Morsfield. He rode by slowly.
The earl stiffened his back in returning the salute. Both that and the
gentleman were observed by Aminta.
'He sees to having good blood under him,' said the earl. 'I admired his
mount,' she replied.
Interpreted by the fire of his writing, his features expressed
character: insomuch that a woman could say of another woman, that she
admired him and might reasonably do so. His gaze at her in the presence
of her lord was audacious.
He had the defect of his virtue of courage. Yet a man indisputably
possessing courage cannot but have an interesting face--though one may
continue saying, Pity that the eyes are not a little wider apart! He
dresses tastefully; the best English style. A portrait by a master hand
might hand him down to generations as an ancestor to be proud of. But
with passion and with courage, and a bent for snatching at the lion's
own, does he not look foredoomed to an early close? Her imagination
called up a portrait of Elizabeth's Earl of Essex to set beside him;
and without thinking that the two were fraternally alike, she sent him
riding away with the face of the Earl of Essex and the shadow of the
unhappy nobleman's grievous fortunes over his head.
But it is inexcuseable to let the mind be occupied recurrently by a man
who has not moved the feelings, wicked though it be to have the feelings
moved by him. Aminta rebuked her silly wits, and proceeded to speculate
from an altitude, seeing the man's projects in a singularly definite
minuteness, as if the crisis he invoked, the perils he braved, the mute
participation he implored of her for the short space until their fate
should be decided, were a story sharply cut on metal. Several times she
surprised herself in an interesting pursuit of the story; abominably
cold, abominably interested. She fell upon a review of small duties of
the day, to get relief; and among them a device for spiriting away her
aunt from the table where Mrs. Lawrence wished to meet Lord Ormont.
It sprang up to her call like an imp of the burning pit. She saw it
ingenious and of natural aspect. I must be a born intriguer! she said in
her breast. That was hateful; but it seemed worse when she thought of a
woman commanding the faculty and consenting to be duped and foiled. That
might be termed despicable; but what if she had not any longer the wish
to gain her way with her lord?
Those letters are acting like a kind of poison in me! her heart cried:
and it was only her head that dwelt on the antidote.