Lord Ormont and His Aminta. Complete

The question was meant for an answer.

Weyburn replied: ‘Lady Ormont had no sight of it.’

‘Ah! she’s Lady Ormont to the servants, I know. She has an aunt living in the house. If my brother’s a sinner, and there’s punishment for him, he has it from that aunt. Pag… something. He bears with her. He ‘s a Spartan. She ‘s his pack on his back, for what she covers and the game he plays. It looks just tolerably decent with her in the house. She goes gabbling a story about our Embassy at Madrid. To preserve propriety, as they call it. Her niece doesn’t stoop to any of those tricks, I ‘m told. I like her for that.’

Weyburn was roused: ‘I think you would like Lady Ormont, if you knew her, my lady.’

‘The chances of my liking the young woman are not in the dice-box. You call her Lady Ormont: you are not one of the servants. Don’t call her Lady Ormont to me.’

‘It is her title, Lady Charlotte.’ She let fly a broadside at him.

‘You are one of the woman’s dupes. I thought you had brains. How can you be the donkey not to see that my brother Rowsley, Lord Ormont, would never let a woman, lawfully bearing his name, go running the quadrille over London in couples with a Lady Staines and a Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, Lord Adderwood, and that man Morsfield, who boasts of your Lady Ormont, and does it unwhipped—tell me why? Pooh, you must be the poorest fool born to suppose it possible my brother would allow a man like that man Morsfield to take his wife’s name in his mouth a second time. Have you talked much with this young person?’

‘With Lady Ormont? I have had the honour occasionally.’

‘Stick to the title and write yourself plush-breech. Can’t you be more than a footman? Try to be a man of the world; you’re old enough for that by now. I know she ‘s good-looking; the whole tale hangs on that. You needn’t be singing me mooncalf hymn tunes of “Lady Ormont, Lady Ormont,” solemn as a parson’s clerk; the young woman brought good looks to market; and she got the exchange she had a right to expect. But it ‘s not my brother Rowsley’s title she has got—except for footmen and tradesmen. When there’s a true Countess of Ormont!… Unless my brother has cut himself from his family. Not he. He’s not mad.’

They passed through Olmer park-gates. Lady Charlotte preceded him, and she turned, waiting for him to rejoin her. He had taken his flagellation in the right style, neither abashed nor at sham crow: he was easy, ready to converse on any topic; he kept the line between supple courtier and sturdy independent; and he was a pleasant figure of a young fellow. Thinking which, a reminder that she liked him drew her by the road of personal feeling, as usual with her, to reflect upon another, and a younger, woman’s observing and necessarily liking him too.

‘You say you fancy I should like the person you call Lady Ormont?’

‘I believe you would, my lady.’

‘Are her manners agreeable?’

‘Perfect; no pretension.’

‘Ah! she sings, plays—all that?

‘She plays the harp and sings.’

‘You have heard her?’

‘Twice.’

‘She didn’t set you mewing?’

‘I don’t remember the impulse; at all events, it was restrained.’

‘She would me; but I’m an old woman. I detest their squalling and strumming. I can stand it with Italians on the boards: they don’t, stop conversation. She was present at that fencing match where you plucked a laurel? I had an account of it. I can’t see the use of fencing in this country. Younger women can, I dare say. Now, look. If we’re to speak of her, I can’t call her Lady Ormont, and I don’t want to hear you. Give me her Christian name.’

‘It is’—Weyburn found himself on a slope without a stay—‘Aminta.’

Lady Charlotte’s eye was on him. He felt intolerably hot; his vexation at the betrayal of the senseless feeling made it worse, a conscious crimson.

‘Aminta,’ said she, rather in the style of Cuper’s boys, when the name was a strange one to them. ‘I remember my Italian master reading out a poem when I was a girl. I read poetry then. You wouldn’t have imagined that. I did, and liked it. I hate old age. It changes you so. None of my children know me as I was when I had life in me and was myself, and my brother Rowsley called me Cooey. They think me a hard old woman. I was Cooey through the woods and over the meadows and down stream to Rowsley. Old age is a prison wall between us and young people. They see a miniature head and bust, and think it a flattery—won’t believe it. After I married I came to understand that the world we are in is a world to fight in, or under we go. But I pity the young who have to cast themselves off and take up arms. Young women above all.’

Why had she no pity for Aminta? Weyburn asked it of his feelings, and he had the customary insurgent reply from them.

‘You haven’t seen Steignton yet,’ she continued. ‘No place on earth is equal to Steignton for me. It ‘s got the charm. Here at Olmer I’m a mother and a grandmother—the “devil of an old-woman” my neighbours take me to be. She hasn’t been to Steignton, either. No, and won’t go there, though she’s working her way round, she supposes. He’ll do everything for his “Aminta,” but he won’t take her to Steignton. I’m told now she’s won Lady de Culme. That Mrs. Lawrence Finchley has dropped the curtsey to her great-aunt and sworn to be a good girl, for a change, if Lady de Culme will do the chaperon, and force Lord Ormont’s hand. My brother shrugs. There’ll be a nice explosion one day soon. Presented? The Court won’t have her. That I know for positive. If she’s pushed forward, she ‘ll be bitterly snubbed. It ‘s on the heads of those women—silly women! I can’t see the game Mrs. Lawrence Finchley’s playing. She’d play for fun. If they’d come to me, I ‘d tell them I ‘ve proof she ‘s not the Countess of Ormont: positive proof. You look? I have it. I hold something; and not before,—(he may take his Aminta to Steignton, he may let her be presented, she may wear his name publicly, I say he’s laughing at them, snapping his fingers at them louder and louder the more they seem to be pushing him into a corner, until—I know my brother Rowsley!—and, poor dear fellow! a man like that, the best cavalry general England ever had:—they’ll remember it when there comes a cry for a general from India: that’s the way with the English; only their necessities teach them to be just!)—he to be reduced to be out-manoeuvring a swarm of women,—I tell them, not before my brother Rowsley comes to me for what he handed to my care and I keep safe for him, will I believe he has made or means to make his Aminta Countess of Ormont.’

They were at the steps of the house. Turning to Weyburn there, the inexhaustible Lady Charlotte remarked that their conversation had given her pleasure. Leo was hanging on to one of his hands the next minute. A small girl took the other. Philippa and Beatrice were banished damsels.

Lady Charlotte’s breath had withered the aspect of Aminta’s fortunes. Weyburn could forgive her, for he was beginning to understand her. He could not pardon ‘her brother Rowsley,’ who loomed in his mind incomprehensible, and therefore black. Once he had thought the great General a great man. He now regarded him as a mere soldier, a soured veteran; socially as a masker and a trifler, virtually a callous angler playing his cleverly-hooked fish for pastime.

What could be the meaning of Lady Charlotte’s ‘that, man Morsfield, who boasts of your Lady Ormont, and does it unwhipped’?

Weyburn stopped his questioning, with the reflection that he had no right to recollect her words thus accurately. The words, however, stamped Morsfield’s doings and sayings and postures in the presence of Aminta with significance. When the ladies were looking on at the fencers, Morsfield’s perfect coxcombry had been noticeable. He knew the art of airing a fine figure. Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had spoken of it, and Aminta had acquiesced; in the gravely simple manner of women who may be thinking of it much more intently than the vivacious prattler. Aminta confessed to an admiration of masculine physical beauty; the picador, matador, of the Spanish ring called up an undisguised glow that English ladies show coldly when they condescend to let it be seen; as it were, a line or two of colour on the wintriest of skies. She might, after all, at heart be one of the leisured, jewelled, pretty-winged; the spending, never harvesting, world she claimed and sought to enter. And what a primitive world it was!—world of the glittering beast and the not too swiftly flying prey, the savage passions clothed in silk. Surely desire to belong to it writes us poor creatures. Mentally, she could hardly be maturer than the hero-worshipping girl in the procession of Miss Vincent’s young seminarists. Probably so, but she carried magic. She was of the order of women who walk as the goddesses of old, bearing the gift divine. And, by the way, she had the step of the goddess. Weyburn repeated to himself the favourite familiar line expressive of the glorious walk, and accused Lord Ormont of being in cacophonous accordance with the perpetual wrong of circumstance, he her possessor, the sole person of her sphere insensible to the magic she bore! So ran his thought.

The young man chose to conceive that he thought abstractedly. He was, in truth, often casting about for the chances of his meeting on some fortunate day the predestined schoolmaster’s wife: a lady altogether praiseworthy for carrying principles of sound government instead of magic. Consequently, susceptible to woman’s graces though he knew himself to be, Lady Ormont’s share of them hung in the abstract for him. His hopes were bent on an early escape to Switzerland and his life’s work.

Lady Charlotte mounted to ride to the battle daily. She talked of her brother Rowsley, and of ‘Aminta,’ and provoked an advocacy of the Countess of Ormont, and trampled the pleas and defences to dust, much in the same tone as on the first day; sometimes showing a peep of sweet humaneness, like the ripe berry of a bramble, and at others rattling thunder at the wretch of a woman audacious enough to pretend to a part in her brother’s title.

Not that she had veneration for titles. She considered them a tinsel, and the devotee on his knee-caps to them a lump for a kick. Adding: ‘Of course I stand for my class; and if we can’t have a manlier people—and it ‘s not likely in a country treating my brother so badly—well, then, let things go on as they are.’ But it was the pretension to a part in the name of Ormont which so violently offended the democratic aristocrat, and caused her to resent it as an assault on the family honour, by ‘a woman springing up out of nothing’—a woman of no distinctive birth.

She was rational in her fashion; or Weyburn could at least see where and how the reason in her took a twist. The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey would not see it; he was, in charity to her ladyship, of a totally contrary opinion, he informed Weyburn. The laborious pastor and much-enduring Churchman met my lady’s apologist as he was having a swing of the legs down the lanes before breakfast, and he fell upon a series of complaints, which were introduced by a declaration that ‘he much feared’ her ladyship would have a heavy legal bill to pay for taking the law into her hands up at Addicotes.

Her ladyship might, if she pleased, he said, encourage her domestics and her husband’s tenants and farm-labourers to abandon the church for the chapel, and go, as she had done and threatened to do habitually, to the chapel herself; but to denounce the ritual of the Orthodox Church under the denomination of ‘barbarous,’ to say of the invoking supplications of the service, that they were—she had been heard to state it more or less publicly and repeatedly—suitable to abject ministers and throngs at the court of an Indian rajah, that he did not hesitate to term highly unbecoming in a lady of her station, subversive and unchristian. The personal burdens inflicted on him by her ladyship he prayed for patience to endure. He surprised Weyburn in speaking of Lady Charlotte as ‘educated and accomplished.’ She was rather more so than Weyburn knew, and more so than was common among the great ladies of her time.

Weyburn strongly advised the reverend gentleman on having it out with Lady Charlotte in a personal interview. He sketched the great lady’s combative character on a foundation of benevolence, and stressed her tolerance for open dealing, and the advantage gained by personal dealings with her—after a mauling or two. His language and his illustrations touched an old-school chord in the Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey, who hummed over the project, profoundly disrelishing the introductory portion.

‘Do me the honour to call and see me to-morrow, after breakfast, before her ladyship starts for the fray on Addicote heights,’ Weyburn said; ‘and I will ask your permission to stand by you. Her bark is terrific, we know; and she can bite, but there’s no venom.’

Finally, on a heave of his chest, Mr. Hampton-Evey consented to call, in the interests of peace.

Weyburn had said it must be ‘man to man with her, facing her and taking steps’; and, although the prospect was unpleasant to repulsiveness, it was a cheerful alternative beside Mr. Hampton-Evey’s experiences and anticipations of the malignant black power her ladyship could be when she was not faced.

‘Let the man come,’ said Lady Charlotte. Her shoulders intimated readiness for him.

She told Weyburn he might be present—insisted to have him present. During the day Weyburn managed to slide in observations on the favourable reports of Mr. Hampton-Evey’s work among the poor—emollient doses that irritated her to fret and paw, as at a checking of her onset.

In the afternoon the last disputed tree on the Addicotes’ ridge was felled and laid on Olmer ground. Riding with Weyburn and the joyful Leo, she encountered Mr. Eglett and called out the news. He remarked, in the tone of philosophy proper to a placable country gentleman obedient to government on foreign affairs: ‘Now for the next act. But no more horseback now, mind!’

She muttered of not recollecting a promise. He repeated the interdict. Weyburn could fancy seeing her lips form words of how she hated old age.

He had been four days at Olmer, always facing her, ‘man to man,’ in the matter of Lady Ormont, not making way at all, but holding firm, and winning respectful treatment. They sat alone in her private room, where, without prelude, she discharged a fiery squib at impudent hussies caught up to the saddle-bow of a hero for just a canter, and pretending to a permanent seat beside him.

‘You have only to see Lady Ormont; you will admit the justice of her claim, my lady,’ said he; and as evidently he wanted a fight, she let him have it.

‘You try to provoke me; you take liberties. You may call the woman Aminta, I’ve told you; you insult me when you call the woman by my family name.’

‘Pardon me, my lady: I have no right to call Lady Ormont Aminta.’

‘You’ve never done so, eh? Say!’

She had him at the edge of the precipice. He escaped by saying, ‘Her Christian name was asked the other day, and I mentioned it. She is addressed by me as Lady Ormont.’

‘And by her groom and her footman. They all do; it ‘s the indemnity to that class of young woman. Her linendraper is Lady-Ormonting as you do. I took you for a gentleman. Let me hear you give her that title again, you shall hear her true one, that the world fits her with, from me.’

The time was near the half-hour bell before dinner, the situation between them that of the fall of the breath to fetch words electrical. She left it to him to begin the fight, and was not sorry that she had pricked him for it.

A footman entered the room, bearer of a missive for Mr. Weyburn. Lord Ormont’s groom had brought it from London.

‘Send in the man,’ said Lady Charlotte.

Weyburn read

‘The Countess of Ormont begs Mr. Weyburn to return instantly. There has been an accident in his home. It may not be very serious. An arm—a shock to the system from a fall. Messenger informs her, fear of internal hemorrhage. Best doctors in attendance.’

He handed Lady Charlotte the letter. She humped at the first line, flashed across the remainder, and in a lowered voice asked—

‘Sister in the house?’

‘My mother,’ Weyburn said.

The groom appeared. He knew nothing. The Countess had given him orders to spare no expense on the road to Olmer, without a minute’s delay. He had ridden and driven.

He looked worn. Lady Charlotte rang the bell for her butler. To him she said—

‘See that this man has a good feed of meat, any pastry you have, and a bottle of port wine. He has earned a pipe of tobacco; make up a bed for him. Despatch at once any one of the stable-boys to Loughton—the Dolphin. Mr. Leeman there will have a chariot, fly, gig, anything, ready-horsed in three hours from now. See Empson yourself; he will put my stepper Mab to the light trap; no delay. Have his feed at Loughton. Tell Mrs. Maples to send up now, here, a tray, whatever she has, within five minutes—not later. A bottle of the Peace of Amiens Chambertin—Mr. Eglett’s. You understand. Mrs. Maples will pack a basket for the journey; she will judge. Add a bottle of the Waterloo Bordeaux. Wait: a dozen of Mr. Eglett’s cigars. Brisk with all the orders. Go.’

She turned to Weyburn. ‘You pack your portmanteau faster than a servant will do it.’

He ran up-stairs.

She was beside the tray to welcome and inspirit his eating, and she performed the busy butler’s duty in pouring out wine for him. It was a toned old Burgundy, happy in the year of its birth, the grandest of instruments to roll the gambol-march of the Dionysiaca through the blood of this frame and sound it to the spirit. She spoke no word of his cause for departure. He drank, and he felt what earth can do to cheer one of her stricken children and strengthen the beat of a heart with a dread like a shot in it.

She, while he flew supporting the body of his most beloved to the sun of Life in brighter hope, reckoned the stages of his journey.

‘Leeman at Loughton will post you through the night to Mersley. Wherever you bait, it is made known that you come from Olmer, and are one of us. That passes you on up to London. Where can Lord Ormont be now?’

‘In Paris.’

‘Still in Paris? He leaves her. She did well to send as she did. You will not pay for the posting along the road.’

‘I will pay for myself—I have a ‘purse,’ Weyburn said; and continued, ‘Oh, my lady; there is Mr. Hampton-Evey to-morrow morning: I promised to stand by him.’

‘I’ll explain,’ said Lady Charlotte. ‘He shall not miss you. If he strips the parson and comes as a man and a servant of the poor, he has nothing to fear. You’ve done? The night before my brother Rowsley’s first duel I sat with him at supper and poured his wine out, and knew what was going to happen, didn’t say a word. No use in talking about feelings. Besides, death is only the other side of the ditch, and one or other of us must go foremost. Now then, good-bye. Empson’s waiting by this time. Mr. Eglett and Leo shall hear the excuses from me. Think of anything you may want, while I count ten.’

She held his hand. He wanted her to be friendly to Lady Ormont, but could not vex her at the last moment, touched as he was by her practical kindness.

She pressed his hand and let it go.

CHAPTER XIV. OLD LOVERS NEW FRIENDS

The cottage inhabited by Weyburn’s mother was on the southern hills over London. He reached it late in the afternoon. His mother’s old servant, Martha, spied the roadway at the gate of the small square of garden. Her steady look without welcome told him the scene he would meet beyond the door, and was the dead in her eyes. He dropped from no height; he stood on a level with the blow. His apprehensions on the road had lowered him to meet it.

‘Too late, Martha?’

‘She’s in heaven, my dear.’

‘She is lying alone?’

‘The London doctor left half an hour back. She’s gone. Slipped, and fell, coming from her room, all the way down. She prayed for grace to see her son. She ‘ll watch over him, be sure. You ‘ll not find it lone and cold. A lady sits with it—Lady Ormont, they call her—a very kind lady. My mistress liked her voice. Ever since news of the accident, up to ten at night; and never eats or drinks more than a poor tiny bit of bread-and-butter, with a teacup.’

‘Weyburn went up-stairs.

Aminta sat close to the bedside in a darkened room. They greeted silently. He saw the white shell of the life that had flown; he took his mother’s hand and kissed it, and knelt, clasping it.

Fear of disturbing his prayer kept Aminta seated. Death was a stranger to him. The still warm, half-cold, nerveless hand smote the fact of things as they were through the prayer for things as we would have them. The vitality of his prayer was the sole light he had. It drew sustainment from the dead hand in his grasp, and cowered down to the earth claiming all we touch. He tried to summon vision of a soaring spirituality; he could not; his understanding and senses were too stricken. He prayed on. His prayer was as a little fountain, not rising high out of earth, and in the clutch of death; but its being it had from death, his love gave it food.

Prayer is power within us to communicate with the desired beyond our thirsts. The goodness of the dear good mother gone was in him for assurance of a breast of goodness to receive her, whatever the nature of the eternal secret may be. The good life gone lives on in the mind; the bad has but a life in the body, and that not lasting,—it extends, dispreads, it worms away, it perishes. Need we more to bid the mind perceive through obstructive flesh the God who reigns, a devil vanquished? Be certain that it is the pure mind we set to perceive. The God discerned in thought is another than he of the senses. And let the prayer be as a little fountain. Rising on a spout, from dread of the hollow below, the prayer may be prolonged in words begetting words, and have a pulse of fervour: the spirit of it has fallen after the first jet. That is the delirious energy of our craving, which has no life in our souls. We do not get to any heaven by renouncing the Mother we spring from; and when there is an eternal secret for us, it is befit to believe that Earth knows, to keep near her, even in our utmost aspirations.

Weyburn still knelt. He was warned to quit the formal posture of an exhausted act by the thought, that he had come to reflect upon how he might be useful to his boys in a like calamity.

Having risen, he became aware, that for some time of his kneeling Aminta’s hand had been on his head, and they had raised their souls in unison. It was a soul’s link. They gazed together on the calm, rapt features. They passed from the room.

‘I cannot thank you,’ he said.

‘Oh no; I have the reason for gratitude,’ said she. ‘I have learnt to know and love her, and hope I may imitate when my time is near.’

“She.... at the last?’

‘Peacefully; no pain. The breath had not left her very long before you came.’

‘I said I cannot; but I must—

‘Do not.’

‘Not in speech, then.’

They went into the tasteful little sitting-room below, where the stillness closed upon them as a consciousness of loss.

‘You have comforted her each day,’ he said.

‘It has been my one happiness.’

‘I could not wish for better than for her to have known you.’

‘Say that for me. I have gained. She left her last words for you with me. They were love, love… pride in her son: thanks to God for having been thought worthy to give him birth.’

‘She was one of the noble women of earth.’

‘She was your mother. Let me not speak any more. I think I will now go. I am rarely given to these—’

The big drops were falling.

‘You have not ordered your carriage?’

‘It brings me here. I find my way home.’

‘Alone?’

‘I like the independence.’

‘At night, too!’

‘Nothing harmed me. Now it is daylight. A letter arrived for you from High Brent this morning. I forgot to bring it. Yesterday two of your pupils called here. Martha saw them.’

Her naming of the old servant familiarly melted him. ‘You will not bear to hear praise or thanks.’

‘If I deserved them. I should like you to call on Dr. Buxton; he will tell you more than we can. He drove with me the first day, after I had sent you the local doctor’s report. I had it from the messenger, his assistant.’

Weyburn knew Dr. Buxton’s address. He begged her to stay and take some nourishment; ventured a remark on her wasted look.