Lord Ormont and His Aminta. Complete

“Trying, if one is bound to get her down!”

“Boasts of the connection everywhere she’s admitted, Randeller says.”

“Randeller procures the admission to various parti-coloured places.”

“She must be a blinking moll-owl! And I ask any sane Christian or Pagan—proof enough!—would my brother Rowsley let his wife visit those places, those people? Monstrous to have the suspicion that he would, you know him! Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, for example. I say nothing to hurt the poor woman; I back her against her imbecile of a husband. He brings a charge he can’t support; she punishes him by taking three years’ lease of independence and kicks up the grass all over the paddock, and then comes cuckoo, barking his name abroad to have her home again. You can win the shyest filly to corn at last. She goes, and he digests ruefully the hotch-potch of a dish the woman brings him. Only the world spies a side-head at her, husbanded or not, though the main fault was his, and she had a right to insist that he should be sure of his charge before he smacked her in the face with it before the world. In dealing with a woman, a man commonly prudent—put aside chivalry, justice, and the rest—should bind himself to disbelieve what he can’t prove. Otherwise, let him expect his whipping, with or without ornament. My opinion is, Lawrence Finchley had no solid foundation for his charge, except his being an imbecile. She wasn’t one of the adventurous women to jump the bars,—the gate had to be pushed open, and he did it. There she is; and I ask you, would my brother Rowsley let his wife be intimate with her? And there are others. And, sauf votre respect, the men—Morsfield for one, Randeller another!”

“They have a wholesome dread of the lion.”

“If they smell a chance with the lion’s bone—it’s the sweeter for being the lion’s. These metaphors carry us off our ground. I must let these Ormont Memoirs run and upset him, if they get to print. I’ve only to oppose, printed they’ll be. The same if I say a word of this woman, he marries her to-morrow morning. You speak of my driving men. Why can’t I drive Ormont? Because I’m too fond of him. There you have the secret of the subjection of women: they can hold their own, and a bit more, when they’ve no enemy beating inside.”

“Hearts!—ah, well, it’s possible. I don’t say no; I’ve not discovered them,” Lord Adderwood observed.

They are rarely discovered in the haunts he frequented.

Her allusion to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley rapped him smartly, and she admired his impassiveness under the stroke. Such a spectacle was one of her pleasures.

Lady Charlotte mentioned incidentally her want of a tutor for her grandson Leo during the winter holidays. He suggested an application to the clergyman of her parish. She was at feud with the Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey, and would not take, she said, a man to be a bootblack in her backyard or a woman a scullery-wench in her kitchen upon his recommendation. She described the person of Mr. Hampton-Evey, his manner of speech, general opinions, professional doctrines; rolled him into a ball and bowled him, with a shrug for lamentation, over the decay of the good old order of manly English Protestant clergymen, who drank their port, bothered nobody about belief, abstained from preaching their sermon, if requested; were capital fellows in the hunting-field, too; for if they came, they had the spur to hunt in the devil’s despite. Now we are going to have a kind of bitter, clawed, forked female, in vestments over breeches. “How do you like that bundling of the sexes?”

Lord Adderwood liked the lines of division to be strictly and invitingly definite. He was thinking, as he reviewed the frittered appearance of the Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey in Lady Charlotte’s hinds, of the possibility that Lord Ormont, who was reputed to fear nobody, feared her. In which case, the handsome young woman passing among his associates as the pseudo Lady Ormont might be the real one after all, and Isabella Lawrence Finchley prove right in the warning she gave to dogs of chase.

The tutor required by Lady Charlotte was found for her by Mr. Abner. Their correspondence on the subject filled the space of a week, and then the gentleman hired to drive a creaky wheel came down from London to Olmer, arriving late in the evening.

Lady Charlotte’s blunt “Oh!” when he entered her room and bowed upon the announcement of his name, was caused by an instantaneous perception and refection that it would be prudent to keep her grand-daughter Philippa, aged between seventeen and eighteen, out of his way.

“You are friend of Mr. Abner’s, are you?”

He was not disconcerted. He replied, in an assured and pleasant voice, “I have hardly the pretension to be called a friend, madam.”

“Are you a Jew?”

Her abruptness knocked something like a laugh almost out of him, but he restrained the signs of it.

“I am not.”

“You wouldn’t be ashamed to tell me you were one if you were?”

“Not at all.”

“You like the Jews?”

“Those I know I like.”

“Not many Christians have the good sense and the good heart of Arthur Abner. Now go and eat. Come back to me when you’ve done. I hope you are hungry. Ask the butler for the wine you prefer.”

She had not anticipated the enrolment in her household of a man so young and good-looking. These were qualifications for Cupid’s business, which his unstrained self-possession accentuated to a note of danger to her chicks, because she liked the taste of him. Her grand-daughter Philippa was in the girl’s waxen age; another, Beatrice, was coming to it. Both were under her care; and she was a vigilant woman, with an intuition and a knowledge of sex. She did not blame Arthur Abner for sending her a good-looking young man; she had only a general idea that tutors in a house, and even visiting tutors, should smell of dust and wear a snuffy appearance. The conditions will not always insure the tutors from foolishness, as her girl’s experience reminded her, but they protect the girl.

“Your name is Weyburn; your father was an officer in the army, killed on the battle-field, Arthur Abner tells me,” was her somewhat severely-toned greeting to the young tutor on his presenting himself the second time.

It had the sound of the preliminary of an indictment read in a Court of Law.

“My father died of his wounds in hospital,” he said.

“Why did you not enter the service?”

“Want of an income, my lady.”

“Bad look-out. Army or Navy for gentlemen, if they stick to the school of honour. The sedentary professions corrupt men: bad for the blood. Those monastery monks found that out. They had to birch the devil out of them three times a day and half the night, howling like full-moon dogs all through their lives, till the flesh was off them. That was their exercise, if they were for holiness. My brother, Lord Ormont, has never been still in his youth or his manhood. See him now. He counts his years by scores; and he has about as many wrinkles as you when you’re smiling. His cheeks are as red as yours now you’re blushing. You ought to have left off that trick by this time. It’s well enough in a boy.”

Against her will she was drawn to the young man, and her consciousness of it plucked her back to caution with occasional jerks—quaint alternations of the familiar and the harshly formal, in the stranger’s experience.

“If I have your permission, Lady Charlotte,” said he, “the reason why I mount red a little—if I do it—is, you mention Lord Ormont, and I have followed his career since I was the youngest of boys.”

“Good to begin with the worship of a hero. He can’t sham, can’t deceive—not even a woman; and you’re old enough to understand the temptation: they’re so silly. All the more, it’s a point of honour with a man of honour to shield her from herself. When it’s a girl—”

The young man’s eyebrows bent.

“Chapters of stories, if you want to hear them,” she resumed; “and I can vouch some of them true. Lord Ormont was never one of the wolves in a hood. Whatever you hear of him; you may be sure he laid no trap. He’s just the opposite to the hypocrite; so hypocrites date him. I’ve heard them called high-priests of decency. Then we choose to be indecent and honest, if there’s a God to worship. Fear, they’re in the habit of saying—we are to fear God. A man here, a Rev. Hampton-Evey, you’ll hear him harp on ‘fear God.’ Hypocrites may: honest sinners have no fear. And see the cause: they don’t deceive themselves—that is why. Do you think we call love what we fear? They love God, or they disbelieve. And if they believe in Him, they know they can’t conceal anything from Him. Honesty means piety: we can’t be one without the other. And here are people—parsons—who talk of dying as going into the presence of our Maker, as if He had been all the while outside the world He created. Those parsons, I told the Rev. Hampton-Evey here, make infidels—they make a puzzle of their God. I’m for a rational Deity. They preach up a supernatural eccentric. I don’t say all: I’ve heard good sermons, and met sound-headed clergymen—not like that gaping Hampton-Evey, when a woman tells him she thinks for herself. We have him sitting on our pariah. A free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon; but a female free-thinker is one of Satan’s concubines. He took it upon himself to reproach me—flung his glove at my feet, because I sent a cheque to a poor man punished for blasphemy. The man had the right to his opinions, and he had the courage of his opinions. I doubt whether the Rev. Hampton-Evey would go with a willing heart to prison for his. All the better for him if he comes head-up out of a trial. But now see: all these parsons and judges and mobcaps insist upon conformity. A man with common manly courage comes before them, and he’s cast in penalties. Yet we know from history, in England, France, Germany, that the time of nonconformity brought out the manhood of the nation. Now, I say, a nation, to be a nation, must have men—I mean brave men. That’s what those hosts of female men combine to try to stifle. They won’t succeed, but we shall want a war to teach the country the value of courage. You catch what I am driving at? They accuse my brother of immorality because he makes no pretence to be better than the men of his class.”

Weyburn’s eyelids fluttered. Her kite-like ascent into the general, with the sudden drop on her choice morsel, switched his humour at the moment when he was respectfully considering that her dartings and gyrations had motive as mach as the flight of the swallow for food. They had meaning; and here was one of the great ladies of the land who thought for herself, and was thoughtful for the country. If she came down like a bird winged, it was her love of her brother that did it. His look at Lady Charlotte glistened.

She raised her defences against the basilisk fascinating Philippa; and with a vow to keep them apart and deprive him of his chance, she relapsed upon the stiff frigidity which was not natural to her. It lasted long enough to put him on his guard under the seductions of a noble dame’s condescension to a familiar tone. But, as he was too well bred to show the change in his mind for her change of manner, and as she was the sister of his boyhood’s hero, and could be full of flavour, his eyes retained something of their sparkle. They were ready to lighten again, in the way peculiar to him, when she, quite forgetting her defence of Philippa, disburdened herself of her antagonisms and enthusiasms, her hates and her loves all round the neighbourhood and over the world, won to confidential communication by this young man’s face. She confessed as much, had he been guided to perceive it. She said, “Arthur Abner’s a reader of men: I can trust his word about them.”

Presently, it is true, she added: “No man’s to be relied upon where there’s a woman.” She refused her implicit trust to saints—“if ever a man really was a saint before he was canonized!”

Her penetrative instinct of sex kindled the scepticism. Sex she saw at play everywhere, dogging the conduct of affairs, directing them at times; she saw it as the animation of nature, senselessly stigmatized, hypocritically concealed, active in our thoughts where not in our deeds; and the declining of the decorous to see it, or admit the sight, got them abhorred bad names from her, after a touch at the deadly poison coming of that blindness, or blindfoldedness, and a grimly melancholy shrug over the cruelties resulting—cruelties chiefly affecting women.

“You’re too young to have thought upon such matters,” she said, for a finish to them.

That was hardly true.

“I have thought,” said Weyburn, and his head fell to reckoning of the small sum of his thoughts upon them.

He was pulled up instantly for close inspection by the judge. “What is your age?”

“I am in my twenty-sixth year.”

“You have been among men: have you studied women?”

“Not largely, Lady Charlotte. Opportunity has been wanting at French and German colleges.”

“It’s only a large and a close and a pretty long study of them that can teach you anything; and you must get rid of the poetry about them, and be sure you haven’t lost it altogether. That’s what is called the golden mean. I’m not for the golden mean in every instance; it’s a way of exhorting to brutal selfishness. I grant it’s the right way in those questions. You’ll learn in time.” Her scanning gaze at the young man’s face drove him along an avenue of his very possible chances of learning. “Certain to. But don’t tell me that at your age you have thought about women. You may say you have felt. A young man’s feelings about women are better reading for him six or a dozen chapters farther on. Then he can sift and strain. It won’t be perfectly clear, but it will do.”

Mr. Eglett hereupon threw the door open, and ushered in Master Leo.

Lady Charlotte noticed that the tutor shook the boy’s hand offhandedly, with not a whit of the usual obtrusive geniality, and merely dropped him a word. Soon after, he was talking to Mr. Eglett of games at home and games abroad. Poor fun over there! We head the world in field games, at all events. He drew a picture of a foreigner of his acquaintance looking on at football. On the other hand, French boys and German, having passed a year or two at an English school, get the liking for our games, and do a lot of good when they go home. The things we learn from them are to dance, to sing, and to study:—they are more in earnest than we about study. They teach us at fencing too. The tutor praised fencing as an exercise and an accomplishment. He had large reserves of eulogy for boxing. He knew the qualities of the famous bruisers of the time, cited fisty names, whose owners were then to be seen all over an admiring land in prints; in the glorious defensive-offensive attitude, England’s own—Touch me, if you dare! with bullish, or bull-dog, or oak-bole fronts for the blow, handsome to pugilistic eyes.

The young tutor had lighted on a pet theme of Mr. Eglett’s—the excelling virtues of the practice of pugilism in Old England, and the school of honour that it is to our lower population. “Fifty times better for them than cock-fighting,” he exclaimed, admitting that he could be an interested spectator at a ring or the pit cock-fighting or ratting.