That great couchant dragon of the devouring jaws and the withering
breath, known as our London world, was in expectation of an excitement
above yawns on the subject of a beautiful Lady Doubtful proposing
herself, through a group of infatuated influential friends, to a
decorous Court, as one among the ladies acceptable. The popular version
of it sharpened the sauce by mingling romance and cynicism very happily;
for the numerous cooks, when out of the kitchen, will furnish a piquant
dish. Thus, a jewel-eyed girl of half English origin (a wounded
British officer is amiably nursed in a castle near the famous Peninsula
battlefield, etc.), running wild down the streets of Seville, is picked
up by Lord Ormont, made to discard her tambourine, brought over to our
shores, and allowed the decoration of his name, without the legitimate
adornment of his title. Discontented with her position after a time,
she now pushes boldly to claim the place which will be most effective
in serving her as a bath. She has, by general consent, beauty; she must,
seeing that she counts influential friends, have witchery. Those who
have seen her riding and driving beside her lord, speak of Andalusian
grace, Oriental lustre, fit qualification for the fair slave of a
notoriously susceptible old warrior.
She won a party in the widening gossip world; and enough of a party in
the regent world to make a stream. Pretending to be the actual Countess
of Ormont, though not publicly acknowledged as his countess by the earl,
she had on her side the strenuous few who knew and liked her, some
who were pleased compassionately to patronize, all idle admirers of a
shadowed beautiful woman at bay, the devotees of any beauty in distress,
and such as had seen, such as imagined they had seen, such as could
paint a mental picture of a lady of imposing stature, persuasive
appearance, pathetic history, and pronounce her to be unjustly treated,
with a general belief that she was visible and breathing. She had the
ready enthusiasts, the responsive sentimentalists, and an honest
active minor number, of whom not every one could be declared perfectly
unspotted in public estimation, however innocent under verdict of the
courts of law.
Against her was the livid cloud-bank over a flowery field, that has
not yet spoken audible thunder: the terrible aggregate social woman,
of man's creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and
nevertheless, upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on
to which our human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner.
She exhibits virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert
beast, and blood of victims on it. Her fold is a genial climate and
the material pleasures for the world's sheepy: worshipping herself, she
claims the sanctification of a performed religion. She is gentle when
unassailed, going her way serenely, with her malady in the blood. When
the skin bears witness to it, she swallows an apothecary, and there is
a short convulsion. She is refreshed by cutting off diseased inferior
members: the superior betraying foul symptoms, she covers up and
retains; rationally, too, for they minister to her present existence,
and she lives all in the present. Her subjects are the mixed
Subservient; among her rebellious are earth's advanced, who have cold a
morning on their foreheads, and these would not dethrone her, they
would but shame and purify by other methods than the druggist. She
loves nothing. Undoubtedly, she dislikes the vicious. On that merit she
subsists.
The vexatious thing in speaking of her is, that she compels to the
use of the rhetorician's brass instrument. As she is one of the Powers
giving life and death, one may be excused. This tremendous queen of the
congregation has brought discredit on her sex for the scourge laid
on quivering female flesh, and for the flippant indifference shown to
misery and to fine distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad;
and particularly for the undiscriminating hardness upon the starved of
women. We forget her having been conceived in the fear of men, shaped to
gratify them. She is their fiction of the state they would fain beguile
themselves to suppose her sex has reached, for their benefit; where she
may be queen of it in a corner, certain of a loyal support, if she
will only give men her half-the-world's assistance to uplift the fabric
comfortable to them; together with assurance of paternity, case of mind
in absence, exclusive possession, enormous and minutest, etc.; not
by any means omitting a regimental orderliness, from which men are
privately exempt, because they are men, or because they are grown
boys--the brisker at lessons after a vacation or a truancy, says the
fiction.
In those days the world had oscillated, under higher leading than its
royal laxity, to rigidity. Tiny peccadilloes were no longer matter
of jest, and the sinner exposed stood 'sola' to receive the brand. A
beautiful Lady Doubtful needed her husband's countenance if she was
to take one of the permanent steps in public places. The party of Lady
Charlotte Eglett called on the livid cloud-bank aforesaid to discharge
celestial bolts and sulphur oil on the head of an impudent, underbred,
ambitious young slut, whose arts had bewitched a distinguished nobleman
not young in years at least, and ensnared the remainder wits of some
principal ancient ladies of the land. Professional Puritans, born
conservatives, malicious tattlers, made up a goodly tail to Lady
Charlotte's party. The epithet 'unbred' was accredited upon the quoted
sayings and doings of the pretentious young person's aunt, repeated
abroad by noblemen and gentlemen present when she committed herself;
and the same were absurd. They carried a laugh, and so they lived and
circulated. Lord Ormont submitted to the infliction of that horrid
female in his household! It was no wonder he stopped short of allying
himself with the family.
Nor was it a wonder that the naturally enamoured old warrior or
invalided Mars (for she had the gift of beauty) should deem it prudent
to be out of England when she and her crazy friends determined on the
audacious move. Or put it the other way--for it is just as confounding
right side or left--she and her friends take advantage of his absence
to make the clever push for an establishment, and socially force him to
legalize their union on his return. The deeds of the preceding reign
had bequeathed a sort of legendary credence to the wildest tales gossip
could invent under a demurrer.
But there was the fact, the earl was away. Lady Charlotte's party buzzed
everywhere. Her ladyship had come to town to head it. Her ladyship laid
trains of powder from dinner-parties, balls, routs, park-processions,
into the Lord Chamberlain's ear, and fired and exploded them, deafening
the grand official. Do you consider that virulent Pagan Goddesses
and the flying torch-furies are extinct? Error of Christians! We have
relinquished the old names and have no new ones for them; but they are
here, inextinguishable, threading the day and night air with their dire
squib-trail, if we would but see. Hissing they go, and we do not hear.
We feel the effects.
Upon the counsel of Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta sent a letter to Lord Ormont
at his hotel in Paris, informing him of the position of affairs. He had
delayed his return, and there had been none of his brief communications.
She wrote, as she knew, as she felt, coldly. She was guided by others,
and her name was up before the world, owing to some half-remembered
impulsion of past wishes, but her heart was numbed; she was not a woman
to have a wish without a beat of the heart in it. For her name she had a
feeling, to be likened rather to the losing gambler's contemplation of a
big stake he has flung, and sees it gone while fortune is undecided; and
he catches at a philosophy nothing other than his hug of a modest little
background pleasure, that he has always preferred to this accursed bad
habit of gambling with the luck against him. Reckless in the cast, she
was reckless of success.
Her letter was unanswered.
Then, and day by day more strongly, she felt for her name. She put a
false heart into it. She called herself to her hearing the Countess of
Ormont, and deigned to consult the most foolish friend she could have
chosen--her aunt; and even listened to her advice, that she should run
about knocking at all the doors open to her, and state her case against
the earl. It seemed the course to take, the moment for taking it. Was
she not asked if she could now at last show she had pride? Her pride ran
stinging through her veins, like a band of freed prisoners who head the
rout to fire a city. She charged her lord with having designedly--oh!
cunningly indeed left her to be the prey of her enemies at the hour
when he knew it behoved him to be her great defender. There had been no
disguise of the things in progress: they had been spoken of allusively,
quite comprehensibly, after the fashion common with two entertaining
a secret semi-hostility on a particular subject; one of them being the
creature that blushes and is educated to be delicate, reserved, and
timorous. He was not ignorant, and he had left her, and he would not
reply to her letter!
So fell was her mood, that an endeavour to conjure up the scene of her
sitting beside the death-bed of Matthew Weyburn's mother, failed to
sober and smooth it, holy though that time was. The false heart she had
put into the pride of her name was powerfuller than the heart in her
bosom. But to what end had the true heart counselled her of late? It had
been a home of humours and languors, an impotent insurgent, the sapper
of her character; and as we see in certain disorderly States a curative
incendiarism usurp the functions of the sluggish citizen, and the work
of re-establishment done by destruction, in peril of a total extinction,
Aminta's feverish anger on behalf of her name went a stretch to vivify
and give her dulled character a novel edge. She said good-bye to
cowardice. 'I have no husband to defend me--I must do it for myself.'
The peril of a too complete exercise of independence was just intimated
to her perceptions. On whom the blame? And let the motively guilty go
mourn over consequences! That Institution of Marriage was eyed. Is it
not a halting step to happiness? It is the step of a cripple,--and one
leg or the other poses for the feebler sex,--small is the matter
which! And is happiness our cry? Our cry is rather for circumstance and
occasion to use our functions, and the conditions are denied to women
by Marriage--denied to the luckless of women, who are many, very many:
denied to Aminta, calling herself Countess of Ormont, for one, denied
to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley for another, and in a base bad manner. She had
defended her good name triumphantly, only to enslave herself for life or
snatch at the liberty which besmirches.
Reviewing Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta's real heart pressed forward at the
beat, in tender pity of the woman for whom a yielding to love was to
sin; and unwomanly is the woman who does not love: men will say
it. Aminta found herself phrasing. 'Why was she unable to love her
husband?--he is not old.' She hurried in flight from the remark to
confidences imparted by other ladies, showing strange veins in an earthy
world; after which, her mind was bent to rebuke Mrs. Pagnell for the
silly soul's perpetual allusions to Lord Ormont's age. She did not think
of his age. But she was vividly thinking that she was young. Young,
married, loveless, cramped in her energies, publicly dishonoured--a Lady
Doubtful, courting one friend whom she liked among women, one friend
whom she respected among men; that was the sketch of her.
That was in truth the outline, as much as Aminta dared sketch of herself
without dragging her down lower than her trained instinct would bear
to look. Our civilization shuns nature; and most shuns it in the most
artificially civilized, to suit the market. They, however, are always
close to their mother nature, beneath their second nature's mask of
custom; and Aminta's unconscious concluding touch to the sketch: 'My
husband might have helped me to a footing in Society,' would complete it
as a coloured picture, if writ in tones.
She said it, and for the footing in Society she had lost her taste.
Mrs. Lawrence brought the final word from high quarters: that the
application must be deferred until Lord Ormont returned to town. It
was known before, that such would be the decision. She had it from the
eminent official himself, and she kicked about the room, setting her
pretty mouth and nose to pout and sniff, exactly like a boy whose chum
has been mishandled by a bully.
'Your dear good man is too much for us. I thought we should drive him.
'C'est un ruse homme de guerre.' I like him, but I could slap him.
He stops the way. Upon my word, he seems tolerably careless of his
treasure. Does he suppose Mrs. Paggy is a protection? Do you know she's
devoted to that man Morsfield? He listens to her stories. To judge by
what he shouts aloud, he intends carrying you off the first opportunity,
divorcing, and installing you in Cobeck Hall. All he fears is, that your
lord won't divorce. You should have seen him the other day; he marched
up and down the room, smacking his head and crying out: “Legal measures
or any weapons her husband pleases!” For he has come to believe that the
lady would have been off with him long before, if her lord had no
claim to the marital title. “It 's that husband I can't get over! that
husband!” He reminded me, to the life, of Lawrence Finchley with a
headache the morning after a supper, striding, with his hand on the
shining middle of his head: “It's that Welsh rabbit! that Welsh rabbit!”
He has a poor digestion, and he will eat cheese. The Welsh rabbit chased
him into his bed. But listen to me, dear, about your Morsfield. I told
you he was dangerous.'
'He is not my Morsfield,' said Aminta.
'Beware of his having a tool in Paggy. He boasts of letters.'
'Mine? Two: and written to request him to cease writing to me.'
'He stops at nothing. And, oh, my Simplicity! don't you see you gave him
a step in begging him to retire? Morsfield has lived a good deal among
our neighbours, who expound the physiology of women. He anatomizes us;
pulls us to pieces, puts us together, and then animates us with a breath
of his “passion”--sincere upon every occasion, I don't doubt. He spared
me, although he saw I was engaged. Perhaps it was because I 'm of no
definite colour. Or he thought I was not a receptacle for “passion.” And
quite true,--Adder, the dear good fellow, has none. Or where should
we be? On a Swiss Alp, in a chalet, he shooting chamois, and I milking
cows, with 'ah-ahio, ah-ahio,' all day long, and a quarrel at night over
curds and whey. Well, and that 's a better old pensioner's limp to his
end for “passion” than the foreign hotel bell rung mightily, and one
of the two discovered with a dagger in the breast, and the other a
don't-look lying on the pavement under the window. Yes, and that's
better than “passion” splitting and dispersing upon new adventures, from
habit, with two sparks remaining of the fire.'
Aminta took Mrs. Lawrence's hands. 'Is it a lecture?'
She was kissed. 'Frothy gabble. I'm really near to “passion” when I
embrace you. You're the only one I could run away with; live with all
alone, I believe. I wonder men can see you while that silly lord of
yours is absent, and not begin Morsfielding. They're virtuous if they
resist. Paggy tells the world... well?' Aminta had reddened.
'What does my aunt tell the world?'
Mrs. Lawrence laid her smoothing hand absently on a frill of lace fichu
above a sternly disciplined bosom at half-heave. 'I think I can
judge now that you're not much hurt by this wretched business of the
presentation. The little service I could do was a moral lesson to me
on the subject of deuce-may-care antecedents. My brother Tom, too, was
always playing truant, as a boy. It 's in the blood.'
She seemed to be teasing, and Aminta cried: 'My aunt! Let me hear. She
tells the world--?'
'Paggy? ah, yes. Only that she says the countess has an exalted opinion
of Mr. Secretary's handwriting--as witnessed by his fair copy of the
Memoirs, of course.'
'Poor woman! How can she talk such foolishness! I guessed it.'
'You wear a dark red rose when you're guessing, 'ma mie,'--French for,
my Aminta.'
'But consider, Isabella, Mr. Weyburn has just had the heaviest of
losses. My aunt should spare mention of him.'
'Matthew Weyburn! we both like the name.' Mrs. Lawrence touched at her
friend and gazed. 'I've seen it on certain evenings--crimson over an
olive sky. What it forebodes, I can't imagine; but it's the end of
a lovely day. They say it threatens rain, if it begins one. It 's an
ominous herald.'
'You make me,' said Aminta. 'I must redden if you keep looking at me so
closely.'
'Now frown one little bit, please. I love to see you. I love to see a
secret disclose itself ingenuously.'
'But what secret, my dear?' cried Aminta's defence of her innocence; and
she gave a short frown.
'Have no fear. Mr. Secretary is not the man to be Morsfielding. And he
can enjoy his repast; a very good sign. But is he remaining long?'
'He is going soon, I hear.'
'He's a good boy. I could have taken to him myself, and not dreaded
a worrying. There 's this difference between you and me,
though, my Aminta; one of us has the fireplace prepared for
what's-his-name--“passion.” Kiss me. How could you fancy you were going
to have a woman for your friend and keep hidden from her any one of
the secrets that blush! and with Paggy to aid! I am sure it means
very little. Admiration for good handwriting is--' a smile broke the
sentence.
'You're astray, Isabella.'
'Not I, dear, I'm too fond of you.'
'You read what is not.'
'What is not yet written, you mean.'
'What never could be written.'
'I read what is in the blood, and comes out to me when I look. That lord
of yours should take to study you as I have done ever since I fell in
love with you. He 's not counselling himself well in keeping away.'
'Now you speak wisely,' said Aminta.
'Not a particle more wisely. And the reason is close at hand--see.
You are young, you attract--how could it be otherwise?--and you have
“passion” sleeping, and likely to wake with a spring whether roused or
not. In my observation good-man t'other fellow--the poet's friend--is
never long absent when the time is ripe--at least, not in places where
we gather together. Well, one is a buckler against the other: I don't
say with lovely Amy May,--with an honourable woman. But Aminta can smell
powder and grow more mettlesome. Who can look at you and be blind to
passion sleeping! The sight of you makes me dream of it--me, a woman,
cool as a wine-cellar or a well. So there's to help you to know yourself
and be on your guard. I know I'm not deceived, because I've fallen in
love with you, and no love can be without jealousy, so I have the needle
in my breast, that points at any one who holds a bit of you. Kind of
sympathetic needle to the magnet behind anything. You'll know it, if you
don't now. I should have felt the thing without the aid of Paggy. So,
then, imagine all my nonsense unsaid, and squeeze a drop or two
of 'sirop de bon conseil' out of it, as if it were your own wise
meditations.' The rest of Mrs. Lawrence's discourse was a swallow's wing
skimming the city stream. She departed, and Aminta was left to beat at
her heart and ask whether it had a secret.
But if there was one, the secret was out, and must have another name.
It had been a secret for her until she heard her friend speak those
pin-points that pricked her heart, and sent the blood coursing over her
face, like a betrayal, so like as to resemble a burning confession.
But if this confessed the truth, she was the insanest of women. No
woman could be surer that she had her wits. She had come to see things,
previously mysteries, with surprising clearness. As, for example, that
passion was part of her nature; therefore her very life, lying tranced.
She certainly could not love without passion such an abandonment was the
sole justification of love in a woman standing where she stood. And now
for the first time she saw her exact position before the world; and she
saw some way into her lord: saw that he nursed a wound, extracted balm
from anything enabling him to show the world how he despised it, and
undesigningly immolated her for the petty gratification.
It could not, in consequence, be the truth. To bear what she had borne
she must be a passionless woman; and she was glad of her present safety
in thinking it. Once it was absolutely true. She swam away to the
golden-circled Island of Once; landed, and dwelt there solitarily and
blissfully, looking forward to Sunday's walk round the park, looking
back on it. Proudly she could tell herself that her dreams of the Prince
of the island had not been illusions as far as he was concerned; for he
had a great soul. He did not aim at a tawdry glory. He was a loss to
our army--no loss to his country or the world. A woman might clasp her
feeling of pride in having foreseen distinction for him; and a little,
too, in distinguishing now the true individual distinction from the
feathered uniform vulgar. Where the girl's dreams had proved illusions,
she beheld in a title and luxuries, in a loveless marriage.
That was perilous ground. Still it taught her to see that the
substantial is the dust; and passion not being active, she could
reflect. After a series of penetrative flashes, flattering to her
intelligence the more startling they were, reflection was exhausted.
She sank on her nature's desire to join or witness agonistic incidents,
shocks, wrestlings, the adventures which are brilliant air to sanguine
energies. Imagination shot tap, and whirled the circle of a succession
of them; and she had a companion and leader, unfeatured, reverently
obeyed, accepted as not to be known, not to be guessed at, in the
deepest hooded inmost of her being speechlessly divined.
The sudden result of Aminta's turmoil was a determination that she must
look on Steignton. And what was to be gained by that? She had no idea.
And how had she stopped her imaginative flight with the thought of
looking on Steignton? All she could tell was, that it would close a
volume. She could not say why the volume must be closed.
Her orders for the journey down to Steignton were prompt. Mrs. Pagnell
had an engagement at the house of Lady Staines for the next day to
meet titles and celebrities, and it precluded her comprehension of the
project. She begged to have the journey postponed. She had pledged her
word, she said.
'To Mr. Morsfield?' said Aminta.
Her aunt was astounded.
'I did tell him we should be there, my dear.' 'He appears to have a
pleasure in meeting you.' 'He is one of the real gentlemen of the land.'
'You correspond with him?'
'I may not be the only one.'
'Foolish aunty! How can you speak to me in that senseless way?' cried
Aminta. 'You know the schemer he is, and that I have no protection from
his advances unless I run the risk of bloodshed.'
'My dear Aminta, whenever I go into society, and he is present, I know
I shall not be laughed at, or fall into that pit of one of their dead
silences, worse for me to bear than titters and faces. It is their way
of letting one feel they are of birth above us. Mr. Morsfield--purer
blood than many of their highest titles--is always polite, always
deferential; he helps me to feel I am not quite out of my element in the
sphere I prefer. We shall be travelling alone?'
'Have you any fear?'
'Not if nothing happens. Might we not ask that Mr. Weyburn?'
'He has much work to do. He will not long be here. He is absent to-day.'
Mrs. Pagnell remarked: 'I must say he earns his money easily.'
Aminta had softened herself with the allusion to the shortness of his
time with them. Her aunt's coarse hint, and the thought of his loss, and
the banishment it would be to her all the way to Steignton, checked a
sharp retort she could have uttered, but made it necessary to hide her
eyes from sight. She went to her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed.
Even so little as an unspoken defence of him shook her to floods of
tears.