At half-past twelve of the noon next day Lord Ormont was at Lady
Charlotte's house door. She welcomed him affectionately, as if nothing
were in dispute; he nodded an acceptance of her greetings, with a blunt
intimation of the business to be settled; she put on her hump of the
feline defensive; then his batteries opened fire and hers barked back
on him. Each won admiration of the other's tenacity, all the more
determined to sap or split it. They had known one another's character,
but they had never seen it in such strong light. Never had their mutual
and similar, though opposed, resources been drawn out so copiously and
unreservedly. This was the shining scrawl of all that each could do
to gain a fight. They admired one another's contemptibly justifiable
evasions, changes of front, statements bordering the lie, even to
meanness in the withdrawal of admissions and the denial of the same ever
having been made. That was Charlotte! That was Rowsley! Anything to beat
down the adversary.
As to will, the woman's will, of these two, equalled the man's. They
were matched in obstinacy and unscrupulousness.
Her ingenuitics of the defence eluded his attacks, and compelled him
to fall on heavy iteration of his demand for the jewels, an immediate
restitution of the jewels. 'Why immediate?' cried she.
He repeated it without replying to her.
'But, you tell me, Rowsley, why immediate? If you're in want of money
for her, you come to me, tell me, you shall have thousands. I'll drive
down to the City to-morrow and sell out stock. Mr. Eglett won't mind
when he hears the purpose. I shall call five thousand cheap, and don't
ask to see the money again.'
'Ah! double the sum to have your own way!' said he.
She protested that she valued her money. She furnished instances of her
carefulness of her money all along up to the present period of brutal
old age. Yet she would willingly part with five thousand or more to save
the family honour. Mr. Eglett would not only approve, he would probably
advance a good part of the money himself.
'Money! Who wants money?' thundered the earl, and jumped out of her trap
of the further diversion from the plain request. 'To-morrow, when I am
here, I shall expect to have the jewels delivered to me.'
'That you may hand them over to her. Where are they likely to be this
time next year? And what do you know about jewels? You may look at them
when you ask to see them, and not know imitation paste--like the stuff
Lady Beltus showed her old husband. Our mother wore them, and she prized
them. I'm not sure I wouldn't rather hear they were exhibited in a Bond
Street jeweller's shop or a Piccadilly pawnbroker's than have them on
that woman.'
'You speak of my wife.'
'For a season, perhaps; and off they're likely to go, to pay bills, if
her Adderwoods and her Morsfields are out of funds, as they call it.'
'You are aware you are speaking of my wife, Charlotte?'
'You daren't say my sister-in-law.'
He did not choose to say it; and once more she dared him. She could
imagine she scored a point.
They were summoned to lunch by Mr. Eglett; and there was an hour's
armistice; following which the earl demanded the restitution of the
jewels, and heard the singular question, childishly accentuated, 'What
for?'
Patience was his weapon and support, so he named his object with an air
of inveteracy in tranquillity they were for his wife to wear.
Lady Charlotte dared him to say they were for her sister-in-law.
He despised the transparent artifice of the challenge.
'But you have to own the difference,' she said. 'You haven't lost
respect for your family, thank God! No. It 's one thing to say she 's a
wife: you hang fire when it 's to say she 's my sister-in-law.'
'You'll have to admit the fact, Charlotte.'
'How long is it since I should have had to admit the fact?'
'From the date of my marriage.'
'Tell me the date.'
'No, you don't wear a wig, Charlotte; but you are fit to practise in the
Law-courts!' he said, exasperatedly jocular.
She had started a fresh diversion, and she pressed him for the date. 'I
'm supposed to have had a sister-in-law-how many weeks?--months?'
'Years.'
'Married years! And if you've been married years, where were you
married? Not in a church. That woman's no church-bride.'
'There are some clever women made idiots of by their trullish tempers.'
'Abuse away. I've asked you where you were married, Rowsley.'
'Go to Madrid. Go to the Embassy. Apply to the chaplain.'
'Married in Madrid! Who's ever married in Madrid! You flung her a yellow
handkerchief, and she tied it round her neck--that 's your ceremony!
Now you tell me you've been married years; and she's a young woman; you
fetch her over from Madrid, set her in a place where those Morsfields
and other fungi-fellows grow, and she has to think herself lucky to be
received by a Lady Staines and a Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, and she the
talk of the town, refused at Court, for all an honourable-enough old
woman countenanced her in pity; and I 'm asked to believe she was my
brother's wife, sister-in-law of mine, all the while! I won't.'
Lady Charlotte dilated on it for a length of time, merely to show she
declined to believe it; pouring Morsfield over him and the talk of
the town, the gypsy caught in Spain--now to be foisted on her as her
sister-in-law! She could fancy she produced an effect.
She did indeed unveil to him a portion of the sufferings his Aminta
had undergone; as visibly, too, the good argumentative reasons for his
previous avoidance of the deadly, dismal wrangle here forced on him.
A truly dismal, profitless wrangle! But the finish of it would be the
beginning of some solace to his Aminta.
The finish of it must be to-morrow. He refrained from saying so, and
simply appointed to-morrow for the resumption of the wrestle, departing
in his invincible coat of patience: which one has to wear when dealing
with a woman like Charlotte, he informed Mr. Eglett, on his way out at a
later hour than on the foregone day. Mr. Eglett was of his opinion,
that an introduction of lawyers into a family dispute was 'rats in
the pantry'; and he would have joined him in his gloomy laugh, if the
thought of Charlotte in a contention had not been so serious a matter.
She might be beaten; she could not be brought to yield.
She retired to her bedroom, and laid herself flat on her bed,
immoveable, till her maid undressed her for the night. A cup of broth
and strip of toast formed her sole nourishment. As for her doctor's
possible reproaches, the symptoms might crowd and do their worst; she
fought for the honour of her family.
At midday of the third day Lady Charlotte was reduced to the condition
of those fortresses which wave defiantly the flag, but deliver no
further shot, awaiting the assault. Her body, affected by hideous
old age, succumbed. Her will was unshaken. She would not write to her
bankers. Mr. Eglett might go to them, if he thought fit. Rowsley was
to understand that he might call himself married; she would have no
flower-basket bunch of a sister-in-law thrust upon her.
Lord Ormont and Mr. Eglett walked down to her bankers in the afternoon.
As a consequence of express injunctions given by my lady five years
previously, the assistant-manager sought an interview with her.
The jewels were lodged at her house the day ensuing. They were examined,
verified by the list in Lady Charlotte's family record-book, and then
taken away--forcibly, of course--by her brother.
He laughed in his dry manner; but the reminiscent glimpses, helping him
to see the humour of it, stirred sensations of the tug it had been with
that combative Charlotte, and excused him for having shrunk from the
encounter until he conceived it to be necessary.
Settlement of the affair with Morsfield now claimed his attention. The
ironical tolerance he practised in relation to Morsfield when Aminta had
no definite station before the world changed to an angry irritability
at the man's behaviour now that she had stepped forth under his
acknowledgement of her as the Countess of Ormont. He had come round to a
rather healthier mind regarding his country, and his introduction of the
Countess of Ormont to the world was his peace-offering.
As he returned home earlier on the third day, he found his diligent
secretary at work. The calling on Captain May and the writing to the
sort of man were acts obnoxious to his dignity; so he despatched Weyburn
to the captain's house, one in a small street of three narrow tenements
abutting on aristocracy and terminating in mews. Weyburn's mission was
to give the earl's address at Great Marlow for the succeeding days, and
to see Captain May, if the captain was at home. During his absence the
precious family jewel-box was locked in safety. Aminta and her friend,
little Miss Collett, were out driving, by the secretary's report. The
earl considered it a wholesome feature of Aminta's character that she
should have held to her modest schoolmate the fact spoke well for both
of them.
A look at the papers to serve for Memoirs was discomposing, and led him
to think the secretary could be parted with as soon as he pleased to go:
say, a week hence.
The Memoirs were no longer designed for issue. He had the impulse to
treat them on the spot as the Plan for the Defence of the Country had
been treated; and for absolutely obverse reasons. The secretary and the
Memoirs were associated: one had sprung out of the other. Moreover, the
secretary had witnessed a scene at Steignton. The young man had done his
duty, and would be thanked for that, and dismissed, with a touch of his
employer's hand. The young man would have made a good soldier--a better
soldier, good as he might be as a scribe. He ought to have been in his
father's footsteps, and he would then have disciplined or quashed his
fantastical ideas. Perhaps he was right on the point of toning the
Memoirs here and there. Since the scene at Steignton Lord Ormont's
views had changed markedly in relation to everybody about him, and most
things.
Weyburn came back at the end of an hour to say that he had left the
address with Mrs. May, whom he had seen.
'A handsome person,' the earl observed.
'She must have been very handsome,' said Weyburn.
'Ah! we fall into their fictions, or life would be a bald business, upon
my word!'
Lord Ormont had not uttered it before the sentiment of his greater luck
with one of that queer world of the female lottery went through him on a
swell of satisfaction, just a wave.
An old-world eye upon women, it seemed to Weyburn. But the man who could
crown a long term of cruel injustice with the harshness to his wife at
Steignton would naturally behold women with that eye.
However, he was allowed only to generalize; he could not trust himself
to dwell on Lady Ormont and the Aminta inside the shell. Aminta and Lady
Ormont might think as one or diversely of the executioner's blow she
had undergone. She was a married woman, and she probably regarded the
wedding by law as the end a woman has to aim at, and is annihilated by
hitting; one flash of success, and then extinction, like a boy's cracker
on the pavement. Not an elevated image, but closely resembling that
which her alliance with Lord Ormont had been!
At the same time, no true lover of a woman advises her--imploring
is horrible treason--to slip the symbolic circle of the law from her
finger, and have in an instant the world for her enemy. She must consent
to be annihilated, and must have no feelings; particularly no mind. The
mind is the danger for her. If she has a mind alive, she will certainly
push for the position to exercise it, and run the risk of a classing
with Nature's created mates for reptile men.
Besides, Lady Ormont appeared, in the company of her friend Selina
Collett, not worse than rather too thoughtful; not distinctly unhappy.
And she was conversable, smiling. She might have had an explanation
with my lord, accepting excuses--or, who knows? taking the blame, and
offering them. Weakness is pliable. So pliable is it, that it has been
known for a crack of the masterly whip to fling off the victim and put
on the culprit! Ay, but let it be as it may with Lady Ormont, Aminta
is of a different composition. Aminta's eyes of the return journey to
London were haunting lights, and lured him to speculate; and for her
sake he rejected the thought that for him they meant anything warmer
than the passing thankfulness, though they were a novel assurance to him
of her possession beneath her smothering cloud of the power to resolve,
and show forth a brilliant individuality.
The departure of the ladies and my lord in the travelling carriage for
the house on the Upper Thames was passably sweetened to Weyburn by the
command to him to follow in a day or two, and continue his work there
until he left England. Aminta would not hear of an abandonment of the
Memoirs. She spoke on the subject to my lord as to a husband pardoned.
She was not less affable and pleasant with him out of Weyburn's hearing.
My lord earned her gratitude for his behaviour to Selina Collett, to
whom he talked interestedly of her favourite pursuit, as he had done on
the day when, as he was not the man to forget, her arrival relieved him
of anxiety. Aminta, noticed the box on the seat beside him.
They drove up to their country house in time to dress leisurely for
dinner. Nevertheless, the dinner-hour had struck several minutes before
she descended; and the earl, as if not expecting her, was out on the
garden path beside the river bank with Selina. She beckoned from the
step of the open French window.
He came to her at little Selina's shuffling pace, conversing upon
water-plants.
'No jewelry to-day?' he said.
And Aminta replied: 'Carstairs has shown me the box and given the key. I
have not opened it.'
'Time in the evening, or to-morrow. You guess the contents?'
'I presume I do.'
She looked feverish and shadowed.
He murmured kindly: 'Anything?'
'Not now: we will dine.'
She had missed, had lost, she feared, her own jewelbox; a casket of no
great treasure to others, but of a largely estimable importance to her.
After the heavy ceremonial entrance and exit of dishes, she begged the
earl to accompany her for an examination of the contents of the box.
As soon as her chamber-door was shut, she said, in accents of alarm:
'Mine has disappeared. Carstairs, I know, is to be trusted. She
remembers carrying the box out of my room; she believes she can remember
putting it into the fly. She had to confess that it had vanished,
without her knowing how, when my boxes were unpacked.'
'Is she very much upset?' said the earl.
'Carstairs? Why, yes, poor creature! you can imagine. I have no doubt
she feels for me; and her own reputation is concerned. What do you think
is best to be done?'
'To be done! Overhaul the baggage again in all the rooms.'
'We've not failed to do that.'
'Control yourself, my dear. If, by bad luck, they're lost, we can
replace them. The contents of this box, now, we could not replace. Open
it, and judge.'
'I have no curiosity--forgive me, I beg. And the servant's fly has been
visited, ransacked inside and out, footmen questioned; we have not left
anything we can conceive of undone. My lord, will you suggest?'
'The intrinsic value of the gems would not be worth--not worth Aminta's
one beat of the heart. Upon my word--not one!'
An amatory knightly compliment breasting her perturbation roused
an unwonted spite; and a swift reflection on it startled her with a
suspicion. She cast it behind her. He could be angler and fish, he would
not be cat and mouse.
She said, however, more temperately: 'It is not the value of the gems.
We are losing precious minutes!'
'Association of them with the giver? Is it that? If that has a value for
you, he is flattered.'
This betrayed him to the woman waxing as intensely susceptible in all
her being as powder to sparks.
'There is to be no misunderstanding, my lord,' she said. 'I like--I
value my jewels; but--I am alarmed lest the box should fall into
hands--into strange hands.'
'The box!' he exclaimed with an outline of a comic grimace; and, if
proved a voluptuary in torturing, he could instance half a dozen points
for extenuation: her charm of person, withheld from him, and to be
embraced; her innocent naughtiness; compensation coming to her in excess
for a transient infliction of pain. 'Your anxiety is about the box?'
'Yes, the box,' Aminta said firmly. 'It contains--'
'No false jewels? A thief might complain.'
'It contains letters, my lord.' 'Blackmail?'
'You would be at liberty to read them. I would rather they were burnt.'
'Ah!' The earl heaved his chest prodigiously. 'Blackmail letters are
better in a husband's hands, if they can be laid there.'
'If there is a necessity for him to read them--yes.'
'There may be a necessity, there can't be a gratification,--though there
are dogs of thick blood that like to scratch their sores,' he murmured
to himself. 'You used to show me these declaration epistles.'
'Not the names.'
'Not the names--no!'
'When we had left the country, I showed you why it had been my wish to
go.'
'Xarifa was and is female honour. Take the key, open that box; I will
make inquiries. But, my dear, you guess everything. Your little box was
removed for the bigger impression to be produced by this one.'
A flash came out of her dark eyes.
'No, you guess wrong this time, you clever shrew! I wormed nothing from
you,' said he. 'I knew you kept particular letters in that receptacle of
things of price: Aminta can't conceal. The man has worried you. Why not
have come to me?'
'Oblige me, my lord, by restoring me my box.'
'This is your box.'
Her bosom lifted with the words Oh, no! unspoken. He took the key and
opened the box. A dazzling tray of stones was revealed; underneath it
the constellations in cases, very heavens for the worldly Eve; and he
doubted that Eve could have gone completely out of her. But she had, as
observation instructed him, set her woman's mind on something else, and
must have it before letting her eyes fall on objects impossible for any
of her sex to see without coveting them.
He bowed. 'I will fetch it,' he said magnanimously. Her own box was
brought from his room. She then consented to look womanly at the Ormont
jewels, over which the battle; whereof she knew nothing, and nothing
could be told her, had been fought in her interests, for her sovereign
pleasure.
She looked and admired. They were beautiful jewels the great emerald was
wonderful, and there were two rubies to praise. She excused herself
for declining to put the circlet for the pendant round her neck, or a
glittering ring on her finger. Her remarks were encomiums, not quite
so cold as those of a provincial spinster of an ascetic turn at an
exhibition of the world's flycatcher gewgaws. He had divided Aminta from
the Countess of Ormont, and it was the wary Aminta who set a guard on
looks and tones before the spectacle of his noble bounty, lest any,
the smallest, payment of the dues of the countess should be demanded.
Rightly interpreting him to be by nature incapable of asking pardon, or
acknowledging a wrong done by him, however much he might crave exemption
from blame and seek for peace, she kept to her mask of injury, though
she hated unforgivingness; and she felt it little, she did it easily,
because her heart was dead to the man. My lord's hand touched her on her
shoulder, propitiatingly in some degree, in his dumb way.
Offended women can be emotional to a towering pride, that bends while
it assumes unbendingness: it must come to their sensations, as it were
a sign of humanity in the majestic, speechless king of beasts; and they
are pathetically melted, abjectly hypocritical; a nice confusion of
sentiments, traceable to a tender bosom's appreciation of strength and
the perceptive compassion for its mortality.
In a case of the alienated wife, whose blood is running another way, no
foul snake's bite is more poisonous than that indicatory touch, however
simple and slight. My lord's hand, lightly laid on Aminta's shoulder,
became sensible of soft warm flesh stiffening to the skeleton.