The passing by of the pair of horsemen, who so little suspected the
treasure existing behind the small inn's narrow window did homage in
Aminta's mind to her protector's adroitness. Their eyes met without a
smile, though they perceived the grisly comic of the incident. Their
thoughts were on the chariot to follow.
Aminta had barely uttered a syllable since the start of the flight from
Ashead. She had rocked in a swing between sensation and imagination,
exultant, rich with the broad valley of the plain and the high green
waves of the downs at their giant's bound in the flow of curves and
sunny creases to the final fling-off of the dip on sky. Here was a
twisted hawthorn carved clean to the way of the wind; a sheltered
clump of chestnuts holding their blossoms up, as with a thousand
cresset-clasping hands; here were grasses that nodded swept from green
to grey; flowers yellow, white, and blue, significant of a marvellous
unknown through the gates of colour; and gorse-covers giving out the
bird, squares of young wheat, a single fallow threaded by a hare, and
cottage gardens, shadowy garths, wayside flint-heap, woods of the mounds
and the dells, fluttering leaves, clouds: all were swallowed, all were
the one unworried significance. Scenery flew, shifted, returned; again
the line of the downs raced and the hollows reposed simultaneously. They
were the same in change to an eye grown older; they promised, as at
the first, happiness for recklessness. The whole woman was urged to
delirious recklessness in happiness, and she drank the flying scenery as
an indication, a likeness, an encouragement.
When her wild music of the blood had fallen to stillness with the
stopped wheels, she was in the musky, small, low room of the diamond
window-panes, at her companion's disposal for what he might deem the
best: he was her fate. But the more she leaned on a man of self-control,
the more she admired; and an admiration that may not speak itself to
the object present drops inward, stirs the founts; and if these are
repressed, the tenderness which is not allowed to weep will drown
self-pity, hardening the woman to summon scruples in relation to her
unworthiness. He might choose to forget, but the more she admired,
the less could her feminine conscience permit of an utter or of
any forgetfulness that she was not the girl Browny, whom he once
loved--perhaps loved now, under some illusion of his old passion for
her--does love now, ill-omened as he is in that! She read him by her
startled reading of her own heart, and she constrained her will to keep
from doing, saying, looking aught that would burden without gracing
his fortunes. For, as she felt, a look, a word, a touch would do the
mischief; she had no resistance behind her cold face, only the physical
scruple, which would become the moral unworthiness if in any way she
induced him to break his guard and blow hers to shreds. An honourable
conscience before the world has not the same certificate in love's pure
realm. They are different kingdoms. A girl may be of both; a married
woman, peering outside the narrow circle of her wedding-ring, should let
her eyelids fall and the unseen fires consume her.
Their common thought was now, Will the chariot follow?
What will he do if it comes? was an unformed question with Aminta.
He had formed and not answered it, holding himself, sincerely at the
moment, bound to her wishes. Near the end of Ashead main street she had
turned to him in her seat beside the driver, and conveyed silently, with
the dental play of her tongue and pouted lips, 'No title.'
Upon that sign, waxen to those lips, he had said to the driver, 'You
took your orders from Lady Charlotte?
And the reply, 'Her ladyship directed me sir, exonerated Lord Ormont so
far.
Weyburn remembered then a passage of one of her steady looks, wherein
an oracle was mute. He tried several of the diviner's shots to interpret
it: she was beyond his reach. She was in her blissful delirium of
the flight, and reproached him with giving her the little bit less to
resent--she who had no sense of resentment, except the claim on it to
excuse.
Their landlady entered the room to lay the cloth for tea and eggs. She
made offer of bacon as well, homecured. She was a Hampshire woman, and
understood the rearing of pigs. Her husband had been a cricketer, and
played for his county. He didn't often beat Hampshire! They had a good
garden of vegetables, and grass-land enough for two cows. They made
their own bread, their own butter, but did not brew.
Weyburn pronounced for a plate of her home-cured. She had children, the
woman told him--two boys and a girl. Her husband wished for a girl. Her
eldest boy wished to be a sailor, and would walk miles to a pond to sail
bits of wood on it, though there had never been a sea-faring man in her
husband's family or her own. She agreed with the lady and gentleman that
it might be unwise to go contrary to the boy's bent. Going to school or
coming home, a trickle of water would stop him.
Aminta said to her companion in French, 'Have you money?'
She chased his blood. 'Some: sufficient. I think.' It stamped their
partnership.
'I have but a small amount. Aunt was our paymaster. We will buy the
little boy a boat to sail. You are pale.'
'I 've no notion of it.'
'Something happened it Ashead.'
'It would not have damaged my complexion.'
He counted his money. Aminta covertly handed him her purse. Their
fingers touched. The very minor circumstance of their landlady being in
the room dammed a flood.
Her money and his amounted to seventeen pounds. The sum-total was a
symbol of days that were a fiery wheel.
Honour and blest adventure might travel together two days or three, he
thought. If the chariot did not pass:--Lord Ormont had willed it. A
man could not be said to swerve in his duty when acting to fulfil the
master's orders, and Mrs. Pagnell was proved a hoodwinked duenna, and
Morsfield was in the air. The breathing Aminta had now a common purse
with her first lover. For three days or more they were, it would seem,
to journey together, alone together: the prosecution of his duty imposed
it on him. Sooth to say, Weyburn knew that a spice of passion added to
a bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess; but he fancied an absolute
reliance on Aminta's dignity, and his respect for her was another
barrier. He begged the landlady's acceptance of two shillings for her
boy's purchase of a boat, advising her to have him taught early to swim.
Both he and Aminta had a feeling that they could be helpful in some
little things on the road if the chariot did not pass.
Justification began to speak loudly against the stopping of the chariot
if it did pass. The fact that sweet wishes come second, and not so
loudly, assured him they were quite secondary; for the lover sunk to
sophist may be self-beguiled by the arts which render him the potent
beguiler.
'We are safe here,' he said, and thrilled her with the 'we' behind the
curtaining leaded window-panes.
'What is it you propose?' Her voice was lower than she intended. To that
she ascribed his vivid flush. It kindled the deeper of her dark hue.
He mentioned her want of luggage, and the purchase of a kit.
She said, 'Have we the means?'
'We can adjust the means to the ends.'
'We must be sparing of expenses.'
'Will you walk part of the way?'
'I should like it.'
'We shall be longer on the journey.'
'We shall not find it tiresome, I hope.'
'We can say so, if we do.'
'We are not strangers.'
The recurrence of the 'we' had an effect of wedding: it was fatalistic,
it would come; but, in truth, there was pleasure in it, and the pleasure
was close to consciousness of some guilt when vowing itself innocent.
And, no, they were not strangers; hardly a word could they utter without
cutting memory to the quick; their present breath was out of the far
past.
Love told them both that they were trembling into one another's arms,
not voluntarily, against the will with each of them; they knew it
would be for life; and Aminta's shamed reserves were matched to make an
obstacle by his consideration for her good name and her station, for his
own claim to honest citizenship also.
Weyburn acted on his instinct at sight of the postillion and the
chariot; he flung the window wide and shouted. Then he said, 'It is
decided,' and he felt the rightness of the decision, like a man who has
given a condemned limb to the surgeon.
Aminta was passive as a water-weed in the sway of the tide. Hearing it
to be decided, she was relieved. What her secret heart desired, she kept
secret, almost a secret from herself. He was not to leave her; so she
had her permitted wish, she had her companion plus her exclamatory
aunt, who was a protection, and she had learnt her need of the smallest
protection.
'I can scarcely believe I see you, my dear, dear child!' Mrs. Pagnell
cried, upon entering the small inn parlour; and so genuine was her
satisfaction that for a time she paid no heed to the stuffiness of the
room, the meanness of the place, the unfitness of such a hostelry to
entertain ladies--the Countess of Ormont!
'Eat here?' Mrs. Pagnell asked, observing the preparations for the meal.
Her pride quailed, her stomach abjured appetite. But she forbore from
asking how it was that the Countess of Ormont had come to the place.
At a symptom of her intention to indulge in disgust; Aminta brought up
Mr. Morsfield by name; whereupon Mrs. Pagnell showed she had reflected
on her conduct in relation to the gentleman, and with the fear of the
earl if she were questioned.
Home-made bread and butter, fresh eggs and sparkling fat of bacon
invited her to satisfy her hunger. Aminta let her sniff at the teapot
unpunished; the tea had a rustic aroma of ground-ivy, reminding Weyburn
of his mother's curiosity to know the object of an old man's plucking of
hedgeside leaves in the environs of Bruges one day, and the simple reply
to her French, 'Tea for the English.' A hint of an anecdote interested
and enriched the stores of Mrs. Pagnell, so she capped it and partook of
the infusion ruefully.
'But the bread is really good,' she said, 'and we are unlikely to be
seen leaving the place by any person of importance.'
'Unless Mr. Morsfield should be advised to return this way,' said
Aminta.
Her aunt proposed for a second cup. She was a manageable woman; the same
scourge had its instant wholesome effect on her when she snubbed the
secretary.
So she complimented his trencherman's knife, of which the remarkably
fine edge was proof enough that he had come heart-whole out of the trial
of an hour or so's intimate companionship with a beautiful woman, who
had never been loved, never could be loved by man, as poor Mr. Morsfield
loved her! He had sworn to having fasted three whole days and nights
after his first sight of Aminta. Once, he said, her eyes pierced him so
that he dreamed of a dagger in his bosom, and woke himself plucking at
it. That was love, as a born gentleman connected with a baronetcy and
richer than many lords took the dreadful passion. A secretary would have
no conception of such devoted extravagance. At the most he might have
attempted to insinuate a few absurd, sheepish soft nothings, and the
Countess of Ormont would know right well how to shrivel him with one
of her looks. No lady of the land could convey so much either way, to
attract or to repel, as Aminta, Countess of Ormont! And the man, the
only man, insensible to her charm or her scorn, was her own wedded lord
and husband. Old, to be sure, and haughty, his pride might not allow him
to overlook poor Mr. Morsfield's unintentional offence. But the presence
of the countess's aunt was a reply to any charge he might seek to
establish. Unhappily, the case is one between men on their touchiest
point, when women are pushed aside, and justice and religion as well. We
might be living in a heathen land, for aught that morality has to say.
Mrs. Pagnell fussed about being seen on her emergence from the Jolly
Cricketers. Aminta sent Weyburn to spy for the possible reappearance
of Mr. Morsfield. He reported a horseman; a butcher-boy clattered by.
Aminta took the landlady's hand, under her aunt's astonished gaze, and
said: 'I shall not forget your house and your attention to us.' She
spoke with a shake of her voice. The landlady curtseyed and smiled,
curtseyed and almost whimpered. The house was a poor one, she begged to
say; they didn't often have such guests, but whoever came to it they did
their best to give good food and drink.
Hearing from Weyburn that the chariot was bound to go through
Winchester, she spoke of a brother, a baker there, the last surviving
member of her family and, after some talk, Weyburn offered to deliver a
message of health and greeting at the baker's shop. There was a waving
of hands, much nodding and curtseying, as the postillion resumed his
demi-volts--all to the stupefaction of Mrs. Pagnell; but she dared not
speak, she had Morsfield on the mouth. Nor could she deny the excellent
quality of the bread and butter, and milk, too, at the sign of the Jolly
Cricketers. She admitted, moreover, that the food and service of the
little inn belonged in their unpretentious honesty to the kind we
call old English: the dear old simple country English of the brotherly
interchange in sight of heaven--good stuff for good money, a matter with
a blessing on it.
'But,' said she, 'my dear Aminta, I do not and I cannot understand looks
of grateful affection at a small innkeeper's wife paid, and I don't
doubt handsomely paid, for her entertainment of you.'
'I feel it,' said Aminta; tears rushed to her eyelids, overflowing, and
her features were steady.
'Ah, poor dear! that I do understand,' her aunt observed. 'Any little
kindness moves you to-day; and well it may.'
'Yes, aunty,' said Aminta, and in relation to the cause of her tears she
was the less candid of the two.
So far did she carry her thanks for a kindness as to glance back through
her dropping tears at the sign-board of the Jolly Cricketers; where two
brave batsmen cross for the second of a certain three runs, if only the
fellow wheeling legs, face up after the ball in the clouds, does but
miss his catch: a grand suspensory moment of the game, admirably chosen
by the artist to arrest the wayfarer and promote speculation. For will
he let her slip through his fingers when she comes down? or will he have
her fast and tight? And in the former case, the bats are tearing their
legs off for just number nought. And in the latter, there 's a wicket
down, and what you may call a widower walking it bat on shoulder, parted
from his mate for that mortal innings, and likely to get more chaff than
consolation when he joins the booth.