That day receded like a spent billow, and lapsed among the others
advancing, but it left a print deeper than events would have stamped.
Aminta's pen declined to run to her lord; and the dipping it in ink
was no acceleration of the process. A sentence, bearing likeness to an
artless infant's trot of the half-dozen steps to mother's lap, stumbled
upon the full stop midway. Desperate determination pushed it along, and
there was in consequence a dead stop at the head of the next sentence.
A woman whose nature is insurgent against the majesty of the man to whom
she must, among the singular injunctions binding her, regularly write,
sees no way between hypocrisy and rebellion. For rebellion, she, with
the pen in her hand, is avowedly not yet ripe, hypocrisy is abominable.
If she abstained from writing, he might travel down to learn the cause;
a similar danger, or worse, haunted the writing frigidly. She had to be
the hypocrite or else--leap.
But an honest woman who is a feeling woman, when she consents to play
hypocrite, cannot do it by halves. From writing a short cold letter,
Aminta wrote a short warm one, or very friendly. Length she could avoid,
because she was unable to fill a page. It seemed that she could not
compose a friendly few lines without letting her sex be felt in them.
What she had put away from her, so as not to feel it herself, the
simulation of ever so small a bit of feeling brought prominently back;
and where she had made a cast for flowing independent simplicity, she
was feminine, ultra-feminine to her reading of it.
Better take the leap than be guilty of double-dealing even on paper! The
nature of the leap she did not examine.
Her keen apprehension of the price payable for his benevolent intentions
caught scent of them in the air. Those Ormont jewels shone as emblems of
a detested subjection, the penalty for being the beautiful woman rageing
men proclaimed. Was there no scheme of some other sort, and far less
agreeable, to make amends for Steignton? She was shrewd at divination;
she guessed her lord's design. Rather than meet Lady Charlotte, she
proposed to herself the 'leap' immediately; knowing it must be a leap
in the dark, hoping it might be into a swimmer's water. She had her own
pin-money income, and she loathed the chain of her title. So the leap
would at least be honourable, as it assuredly would be unregretted,
whatever ensued.
While Aminta's heart held on to this debate, and in her bed, in her
boat, across the golden valley meadows beside her peaceful little
friend, she gathered a gradual resolution without sight of agencies or
consequences, Lord Ormont was kept from her by the struggle to
master his Charlotte a second time--compared with which the first was
insignificant. And this time it was curious: he could not subdue her
physique, as he did before; she was ready for him each day, and she was
animated, much more voluble, she was ready to jest. The reason being,
that she fought now on plausibly good grounds: on behalf of her
independent action.
Previously, her intelligence of the ultimate defeat hanging over the
more stubborn defence of a weak position had harassed her to death's
door. She had no right to retain the family jewels; she had the most
perfect of established rights to refuse doing an ignominious thing. She
refused to visit the so-called Countess of Ormont, or leave her card,
or take one step to warrant the woman in speaking of her as her
sister-in-law. And no,--it did not signify that her brother Rowsley was
prohibited by her from marrying whom he pleased. It meant, that to judge
of his acts as those of a reasoning man, he would have introduced
his wife to his relatives--the relatives he had not quarrelled
with--immediately upon his marriage unless he was ashamed of the woman;
and a wife he was ashamed of was no sister-in-law for her nor aunt for
her daughters. Nor should she come playing the Black Venus among
her daughters' husbands, Lady Charlotte had it in her bosom to say
additionally.
Lord Ormont was disconcerted by her manifest pleasure in receiving him
every day. Evidently she consented to the recurrence of a vexatious
dissension for the enjoyment of having him with her hourly. Her
dialectic, too, was cunning. Impetuous with meaning, she forced her
way to get her meaning out, in a manner effective to strike her blow.
Anything for a diversion or a triumph of the moment! He made no way. She
was the better fencer at the tongue.
Yet there was not any abatement of her deference to her brother; and
this little misunderstanding put aside, he was the Rowsley esteemed by
her as the chief of men. She foiled him, it might seem, to exalt him
the more. After he had left the house, visibly annoyed and somewhat
stupefied, she talked of him to her husband, of the soul of chivalry
Rowsley was, the loss to his country. Mr. Eglett was a witness to one of
the altercations, when she, having as usual the dialectical advantage,
praised her brother, to his face, for his magnanimous nature; regretting
only that it could be said he was weak on the woman side of him--which
was, she affirmed, a side proper to every man worth the name; but in his
case his country might complain. Of what?--Well, of a woman.--What
had she done, for the country to complain of her?--Why, then, arts
or graces, she had bewitched and weaned him from his public duty, his
military service, his patriotic ambition.
Lord Ormont's interrogations, heightening the effect of Charlotte's
charge, appeared to Mr. Eglett as a giving of himself over into her
hands; but the earl, after a minute of silence, proved he was a tricky
combatant. It was he who had drawn on Charlotte, that he might have
his opportunity to eulogize--'this lady, whom you continue to call the
woman, after I have told you she is my wife.' According to him, her
appeals, her entreaties, that he should not abandon his profession or
let his ambition rust, had been at one period constant.
He spoke fervently, for him eloquently; and he gained his point; he
silenced Lady Charlotte's tongue, and impressed Mr. Eglett.
When the latter and his wife were alone, he let her see that the
Countess of Ormont was becoming a personage in his consideration.
Lady Charlotte cried out: 'Hear these men where it's a good-looking
woman between the winds! Do you take anything Rowsley says for earnest?
You ought to know he stops at no trifle to get his advantage over you in
a dispute. That 's the soldier in him. It 's victory at any cost!--and I
like him for it. Do you tell me you think it possible my brother Rowsley
would keep smothered years under a bushel the woman he can sit here
magnifying because he wants to lime you and me: you to take his part,
and me to go and call the noble creature decked out in his fine fiction
my sister-in-law. Nothing 'll tempt me to believe my brother could
behave in such a way to the woman he respected!'
So Mr. Eglett opined. But he had been impressed.
He relieved his mind on the subject in a communication to Lord
Adderwood; who habitually shook out the contents of his to Mrs. Lawrence
Finchley, and she, deeming it good for Aminta to have information of
the war waging for her behoof, obtained her country address, with the
resolve to drive down, a bearer of good news to the dear woman she liked
to think of, look at, and occasionally caress; besides rather tenderly
pitying her, now that a change of fortune rendered her former trials
conspicuous.
An incident, considered grave even in the days of the duel and the kicks
against a swelling public reprehension of the practice, occurred to
postpone her drive for four-and-twenty hours. London was shaken by
rumours of a tragic mishap to a socially well-known gentleman at the
Chiallo fencing rooms. The rumours passing from mouth to mouth acquired,
in the nature of them, sinister colours as they circulated. Lord
Ormont sent Aminta word of what he called 'a bad sort of accident at
Chiallo's,' without mentioning names or alluding to suspicions.
He treated it lightly. He could not have written of it with such
unconcern if it involved the secretary! Yet Aminta did seriously ask
herself whether he could; and she flew rapidly over the field of
his character, seizing points adverse, points favourably advocative,
balancing dubiously--most unjustly: she felt she was unjust. But in her
condition, the heart of a woman is instantly planted in jungle when the
spirits of the two men closest to her are made to stand opposed by
a sudden excitement of her fears for the beloved one. She cannot see
widely, and is one of the wild while the fit lasts; and, after it, that
savage narrow vision she had of the unbeloved retains its vivid print
in permanence. Was she unjust? Aminta cited corroboration of her being
accurate: such was Lord Ormont! and although his qualities of gallantry,
courtesy, integrity, honourable gentleman, presented a fair low-level
account on the other side, she had so stamped his massive selfishness
and icy inaccessibility to emotion on her conception of him that the
repulsive figure formed by it continued towering when her mood was
kinder.
Love played on love in the woman's breast. Her love had taken a fever
from her lord's communication of the accident at Chiallo's, and she
pushed her alarm to imagine the deadliest, and plead for the right of
confession to herself of her unrepented regrets. She and Matey Weyburn
had parted without any pressure of hands, without a touch. They were,
then, unplighted if now the grave divided them! No touch: mere glances!
And she sighed not, as she pleaded, for the touch, but for the plighting
it would have been. If now she had lost him, he could never tell herself
that since the dear old buried and night-walking schooldays she had said
once Matey to him, named him once to his face Matey Weyburn. A sigh like
the roll of a great wave breaking against a wall of rock came from her
for the possibly lost chance of naming him to his face Matey,--oh, and
seeing his look as she said it!
The boldness might be fancied: it could not be done. Agreeing with
the remote inner voice of her reason so far, she toned her exclamatory
foolishness to question, in Reason's plain, deep, basso-profundo
accompaniment tone, how much the most blessed of mortal women could do
to be of acceptable service to a young schoolmaster?
There was no reply to the question. But it became a nestling centre for
the skiey flock of dreams, and for really temperate soundings of her
capacities, tending to the depreciatory. She could do little. She
entertained the wish to work, not only 'for the sake of Somebody,'
as her favourite poet sang, but for the sake of working and
serving--proving that she was helpfuller than a Countess of Ormont,
ranged with all the other countesses in china and Dresden on a
drawing-room mantelpiece for show. She could organize, manage a
household, manage people too, she thought: manage a husband? The word
offends. Perhaps invigorate him, here and there perhaps inspire him,
if he would let her breathe. Husbands exist who refuse the right of
breathing to their puppet wives. Above all, as it struck her, she could
assist, and be more than an echo of one nobler, in breathing manliness,
high spirit, into boys. With that idea she grazed the shallows of
reality, and her dreams whirred from the nest and left it hungrily
empty.
Selina Collett was writing under the verandah letters to her people in
Suffolk, performing the task with marvellous ease. Aminta noted it as
a mark of superior ability, and she had the envy of the complex nature
observing the simple. It accused her of some guiltiness, uncommitted
and indefensible. She had pushed her anxiety about 'the accident
at Chiallo's' to an extreme that made her the creature of her
sensibilities. In the midst of this quiet country life and landscape;
these motionless garden flowers headed by the smooth white river, and
her gentle little friend so homely here, the contemplation of herself
was like a shriek in music. Worse than discordant, she pronounced
herself inferior, unfit mentally as well as bodily for the dreams of
companionship with any noble soul who might have the dream of turning
her into something better. There are couples in the world, not coupled
by priestly circumstance, who are close to the true; union, by reason of
generosity on the one part, grateful devotion, as for the gift of life,
on the other. For instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord Adderwood,
which was an instance without resemblance; but Aminta's heart beat thick
for what it wanted, and they were the instance of two that did not
have to snap false bonds of a marriage-tie in order to walk together
composedly outside it--in honour? Oh yes, yes! She insisted on believing
it was in honour.
She saw the couple issue from the boathouse. She had stepped into the
garden full of a presentiment; so she fancied, the moment they were
seen. She had, in fact, heard a noise in the boathouse while thinking
of them, and the effect on her was to spring an idea of mysterious
interventions at the sight.
Mrs. Lawrence rushed to her, and was embraced. 'You 're not astonished
to see me? Adder drove me down, and stopped his coach at the inn, and
rowed me the half-mile up. We will lunch, if you propose; but presently.
My dear, I have to tell you things. You have heard?'
'The accident?'
Aminta tried to read in Mrs. Lawrence's eyes whether it closely
concerned her.
Those pretty eyes, their cut of lids hinting at delicate affinities
with the rice-paper lady of the court of China, were trying to peer
seriously.
'Poor man! One must be sorry for him: he--'
'Who?'
'You 've not heard, then?' Mrs. Lawrence dropped her voice: 'Morsfield.'
Aminta shivered. 'All I have heard-half a line from my lord this
morning: no name. It was at the fencing-rooms, he said.'
'Yes, he wouldn't write more;' said Mrs. Lawrence, nodding. 'You know,
he would have had to do it himself if it had not been done for him.
Adder saw him some days back in a brown consultation near his club with
Captain May. Oh, but of course it was accident! Did he call it so in his
letter to you?'
'One word of Mr. Morsfield: he is wounded?'
'Past cure: he has the thing he cried for, spoilt boy as he was from his
birth. I tell you truth, m' Aminta, I grieve to lose him. What with his
airs of the foreign-tinted, punctilious courtly gentleman covering a
survival of the ancient British forest boar or bear, he was a picture
in our modern set, and piquant. And he was devoted to our sex, we must
admit, after the style of the bears. They are for honey, and they have a
hug. If he hadn't been so much of a madman, I should have liked him for
his courage. He had plenty of that, nothing to steer it. A second cousin
comes in for his estates.'
'He is dead?' Aminta cried.
'Yes, dear, he is gone. What the women think of it I can't say. The
general feeling among the men is that some one of them would have had to
send him sooner or later. The curious point, Adder says, is his letting
it be done by steel. He was a dead shot, dangerous with the small sword,
as your Mr. Weyburn said, only soon off his head. But I used to be
anxious about the earl's meeting him with pistols. He did his best to
provoke it. Here, Adder,'--she spoke over her shoulder,--'tell Lady
Ormont all you know of the Morsfield-May affair.'
Lord Adderwood bowed compliance. His coolness was the masculine of Mrs.
Lawrence's hardly feminine in treating of a terrible matter, so that
the dull red facts had to be disengaged from his manner of speech before
they sank into Aminta's acceptance; of them as credible.
'They fought with foils, buttons off, preliminary ceremonies perfect;
salute in due order; guard, and at it.
Odd thing was, nobody at Chiallo's had a notion of the business till
Morsfield was pinked. He wouldn't be denied; went to work like a fellow
meaning to be skewered, if he couldn't do the trick: and he tried it.
May had been practising some weeks. He's well on the Continent by this
time. It'll blow over. Button off sheer accident. I wasn't lucky enough
to see the encounter: came in just when Chiallo was lashing his poll
over Morsfield flat on the ground. He had it up to the hilt. We put a
buttoned foil by the side of Morsfield, and all swore to secrecy. As
it is, it 'll go badly against poor Chiallo. Taste for fencing won't be
much improved by the affair. They quarrelled in the dressing room, and
fetched the foils and knocked off the buttons there. A big rascal
toady squire of Morsfield's did it for him. Morsfield was just up from
Yorkshire. He said he was expecting a summons elsewhere, bound to
await it, declined provocation for the present. May filliped him on the
cheek.'
'Adder conveyed the information of her husband's flight to the
consolable Amy,' said Mrs. Lawrence.
'He had to catch the coach for Dover,' Adderwood explained. 'His wife
was at a dinner-party. I saw her at midnight.'
'Fair Amy was not so very greatly surprised?'
'Quite the soldier's wife!'
'She said she was used to these little catastrophes. But, Adder, what
did she say of her husband?'
'Said she was never anxious about him, for nothing would kill him.'
Mrs. Lawrence shook a doleful head at Aminta.
'You see, my dear Aminta, here's another, and probably her last, chance
of sharing the marquisate gone. Who can fail to pity her, except old
Time! And I 'm sure she likes her husband well enough. She ought: no
woman ever had such a servant. But the captain has not been known to
fight without her sanction, and the inference is--'Alas! woe! Fair Amy
is doomed to be the fighting captain's bride to the end of the chapter.
Adder says she looked handsome. A dinner-party suits her cosmetic
complexion better than a ball. The account of the inquest is in the
day's papers, and we were tolerably rejoiced we could drive out of
London without having to reply to coroner's questions.'
'He died-soon?' Aminta's voice was shaken.
Mrs. Lawrence touched at her breast, it might be for heart or lungs.
Judging by Aminta's voice and face, one could suppose she was harking
back, in woman's way, to her original sentiment for the man, now that he
lay prostrate.
Aminta read the unreproachful irony in the smile addressed to her. She
was too convulsed by her many emotions and shouting thoughts to think of
defending herself.
Selina, in the drawing-room, diligently fingered and classed brown-black
pressed weeds of her neophyte's botany-folios. The sight of her and her
occupation struck Aminta as that of a person in another world beyond
this world of blood, strangely substantial to view; and one heard her
speak.
Guilty?--no. But she had wished to pique her lord. After the term of a
length of months, could it be that the unhappy man and she were punished
for the half-minute's acting of some interest in him? And Lord Ormont
had been seen consulting Captain May; or was it giving him directions?
Her head burned. All the barren interrogations were up, running and
knocking for hollow responses; and, saving a paleness of face, she
cloaked any small show of the riot. She was an amiable hostess. She had
ceased to comprehend Mrs. Lawrence, even to the degree of thinking her
unfeminine. She should have known that the 'angelical chimpanzee,' as
a friend, once told of his being a favourite with the lady, had called
her, could not simulate a feeling, and had not the slightest power of
pretence to compassion for an ill-fated person who failed to quicken her
enthusiasm. In that, too, she was a downright boy. Morsfield was a
kind of Bedlamite to her; amusing in his antics, and requiring to be
manoeuvred and eluded while he lived: once dead, just a tombstone, of
interest only to his family.
She beckoned Aminta to follow her; and, with a smirk of indulgent fun,
commended Lord Adderwood to a study of Selina Collett's botany-folios,
which the urbanest of indifferent gentlemen had slid his eyes over his
nose to inspect before the lunch.
'You ought to know what is going on in town, my dear Aminta. You have
won the earl to a sense of his duty, and he 's at work on the harder
task of winning Lady Charlotte Eglett to a sense of hers. It 's
tremendous. Has been forward some days, and no sign of yielding on
either side. Mr. Eglett, good man, is between them, catching it right
and left; and he deserves his luck for marrying her. Vows she makes him
the best of wives. If he 's content, I 've nothing to complain of. You
must be ready to receive her; my lord is sure to carry the day.
You gulp. You won't be seeing much of her. I 'm glad to say he is
condescending to terms of peace with the Horse Guards. We hear so. You
may be throning it officially somewhere next year. And all 's well that
ends well! Say that to me!'
'It is, when the end comes,' Aminta replied.
Mrs. Lawrence's cool lips were pressed to her cheek. The couple
and their waterman rowed away to the party they had left with the
four-in-hand at their inn.
A wind was rising. The trees gave their swish of leaves, the river
darkened the patch of wrinkles, the bordering flags amid the reed-blades
dipped and streamed.
Surcharged with unassimilated news of events, that made a thunder in her
head, Aminta walked down the garden path, meeting Selina and bearing
her on. She had a witch's will to rouse gales. Hers was not the woman's
nature to be driven cowering by stories of men's bloody deeds. She took
the field, revolted, dissevering herself from the class which tolerated
them--actuated by a reflective moralty, she believed; and loathed
herself for having aspired, schemed, to be a member of the class. But
it was not the class, it was against her lord as representative of the
class, that she was now the rebel, neither naming him nor imaging
him. Her enveloping mind was black on him. Such as one of those hard
slaughtering men could call her his own? She breathed short and breathed
deep. Her bitter reason had but the common pity for a madman despatched
to his rest. Yet she knew hatred of her lord in his being suspected as
instigator or accomplice of the hand that dealt the blow. He became to
her thought a python whose coils were about her person, insufferable to
the gaze backward.
Moments like these are the mothers in travail of a resolve joylessly
conceived, undesired to clasp, Necessity's offspring. Thunderclouds have
as little love of the lightnings they fling.
Aminta was aware only of her torment. The trees were bending, the water
hissing, the grasses all this way and that, like hands of a delirious
people in surges of wreck. She scorned the meaningless shake of the
garments of earth, and exclaimed: 'If we were by the sea to-night!'
'I shall be to-morrow night,' said Selina. 'I shall think of you. Oh!
would you come with me?'
'Would you have me?'
'My mother will indeed be honoured by your consenting to come.'
'Write to her before the post is out.'
'We shall travel down together?'
Aminta nodded and smiled, and Selina kissed her hand in joy, saying,
that down home she would not be so shy of calling her Aminta. She was
bidden to haste.