Lord Ormont and His Aminta. Complete

“Ratting seems to have more excuse,” the tutor said, and made no sign of a liking for either of those popular pastimes. As he disapproved without squeamishness, the impulsive but sharply critical woman close by nodded; and she gave him his dues for being no courtier.

Leo had to be off to bed. The tutor spared him any struggle over the shaking of hands, and saying, “Goodnight, Leo,” continued the conversation. The boy went away, visibly relieved of the cramp that seizes on a youngster at the formalities pertaining to these chilly and fateful introductions.

“What do you think of the look of him?” Mr. Eglett asked.

The tutor had not appeared to inspect the boy. “Big head,” he remarked. “Yes, Leo won’t want pushing at books when he’s once in harness. He will have six weeks of me. It’s more than the yeomanry get for drill per annum, and they’re expected to know something of a soldier’s duties. There’s a chance of putting him on the right road in certain matters. We’ll walk, or ride, or skate, if the frost holds to-morrow: no lessons the first day.”

“Do as you think fit,” said lady Charlotte.

The one defect she saw in the tutor did not concern his pupil. And a girl, if hit, would be unable to see that this tutor, judged as a man, was to some extent despicable for accepting tutorships, and, one might say, dishonouring the family of a soldier of rank and distinction, by coming into houses at the back way, with footing enough to air his graces when once established there. He ought to have knocked at every door in the kingdom for help, rather than accept tutorships, and disturb households (or providently-minded mistresses of them) with all sorts of probably groundless apprehensions, founded naturally enough on the good looks he intrudes.

This tutor committed the offence next day of showing he had a firm and easy seat in the saddle, which increased Lady Charlotte’s liking for him and irritated her watchful forecasts. She rode with the young man after lunch, “to show him the country,” and gave him a taste of what he took for her variable moods. He misjudged her. Like a swimmer going through warm and cold springs of certain lake waters, he thought her a capricious ladyship, dangerous for intimacy, alluring to the deeps and gripping with cramps.

She pushed him to defend his choice of the tutor’s profession.

“Think you understand boys?” she caught up his words; “you can’t. You can humour them, as you humour women. They’re just as hard to read. And don’t tell me a young man can read women. Boys and women go on their instincts. Egyptologists can spell you hieroglyphs; they’d be stumped, as Leo would say, to read a spider out of an ink-pot over a sheet of paper.”

“One gets to interpret by degrees, by observing their habits,” the tutor said, and vexed her with a towering complacency under provocation that went some way further to melt the woman she was, while her knowledge of the softness warned her still more of the duty of playing dragon round such a young man in her house. The despot is alert at every issue, to every chance; and she was one, the wakefuller for being benevolent; her mind had no sleep by day.

For a month she subjected Mr. Matthew Weyburn to the microscope of her observation and the probe of her instinct. He proved that he could manage without cajoling a boy. The practical fact established, by agreement between herself and the unobservant gentleman who was her husband, Lady Charlotte allowed her meditations to drop an indifferent glance at the speculative views upon education entertained by this young tutor. To her mind they were flighty; but she liked him, and as her feelings dictated to her mind when she had not to think for others, she spoke of his views toleratingly, almost with an implied approval, after passing them through the form of burlesque to which she customarily treated things failing to waft her enthusiasm. In regard to Philippa, he behaved well: he bestowed more of his attention on Beatrice, nearer Leo’s age, in talk about games and story-books and battles; nothing that he did when the girls were present betrayed the strutting plumed cock, bent to attract, or the sickly reptile, thirsty for a prize above him and meaning to have it, like Satan in Eden. Still, of course, he could not help his being a handsome fellow, having a vivid face and eyes transparent, whether blue or green, to flame of the brain exciting them; and that becomes a picture in the dream of girls—a picture creating the dream often. And Philippa had asked her grandmother, very ingenuously indeed, with a most natural candour, why “they saw so little of Leo’s hero.” Simple female child!

However, there was no harm done, and Lady Charlotte liked him. She liked few. Forthwith, in the manner of her particular head, a restless head, she fell to work at combinations.

Thus:—he is a nice young fellow, well bred, no cringing courtier, accomplished, good at classics, fairish at mathematics, a scholar in French, German, Italian, with a shrewd knowledge of the different races, and with sound English sentiment too, and the capacity for writing good English, although in those views of his the ideas are unusual, therefore un-English, profoundly so. But his intentions are patriotic; they would not displease Lord Ormont. He has a worship of Lord Ormont. All we can say on behalf of an untried inferior is in that,—only the valiant admire devotedly. Well, he can write grammatical, readable English. What if Lord Ormont were to take him as a secretary while the Memoirs are in hand? He might help to chasten the sentences laughed at by those newspapers. Or he might, being a terrible critic of writing, and funny about styles, put it in an absurd light, that would cause the Memoirs to be tossed into the fire. He was made for the post of secretary! The young man’s good looks would be out of harm’s way then. If any sprig of womankind come across him there, it will, at any rate, not be a girl. Women must take care of themselves. Only the fools among them run to mischief in the case of a handsome young fellow.

Supposing a certain woman to be one of the fools? Lady Charlotte merely suggested it in the dashing current of her meditations—did not strike it out interrogatively. The woman would be a fine specimen among her class; that was all. For the favourite of Lord Ormont to stoop from her place beside him—ay, but women do; heroes have had the woeful experience of that fact. First we see them aiming themselves at their hero; next they are shooting an eye at the handsome man. The thirst of nature comes after that of their fancy, in conventional women. Sick of the hero tried, tired of their place in the market, no longer ashamed to acknowledge it, they begin to consult their own taste for beauty—they have it quite as much as the men have it; and when their worshipped figure of manliness, in a romantic sombrero, is a threadbare giant, showing bruises, they sink on their inherent desire for a dance with the handsome man. And the really handsome man is the most extraordinary of the rarities. No wonder that when he appears he slays them, walks over them like a pestilence!

This young Weyburn would touch the fancy of a woman of a romantic turn. Supposing her enthusiastic in her worship of the hero, after a number of years—for anything may be imagined where a woman is concerned—why, another enthusiasm for the same object, and on the part of a stranger, a stranger with effective eyes, rapidly leads to sympathy. Suppose the reverse—the enthusiasm gone to dust, or become a wheezy old bellows, as it does where there’s disparity of age, or it frequently does—then the sympathy with a good-looking stranger comes more rapidly still.

These were Lady Charlotte’s glances right and left—idle flights of the eye of a mounted Amazon across hedges at the canter along the main road of her scheme; which was to do a service to the young man she liked and to the brother she loved, for the marked advantage of both equally; perhaps for the chance of a little gossip to follow about that tenacious woman by whom her brother was held hard and fast, kept away from friends and relatives, isolated, insomuch as to have given up living on his estate—the old home!—because he would not disgrace it or incur odium by taking her there.

In consequence of Lord Ormont’s resistance to pressure from her on two or three occasions, she chose to nurse and be governed by the maxim for herself: Never propose a plan to him, if you want it adopted. That was her way of harmlessly solacing love’s vindictiveness for an injury.

She sent Arthur Abner a letter, thanking him for his recommendation of young Mr. Weyburn, stating her benevolent wishes as regarded the young man and “those hateful Memoirs,” requesting that her name should not be mentioned in the affair, because she was anxious on all grounds to have the proposal accepted by her brother. She could have vowed to herself that she wrote sincerely.

“He must want a secretary. He would be shy at an offer of one from me. Do you hint it, if you get a chance. You gave us Mr. Weyburn, and Mr. Eglett and I like him. Ormont would too, I am certain. You have obliged him before; this will be better than anything you have done for us. It will stop the Memoirs, or else give them a polish. Your young friend has made me laugh over stuff taken for literature until we put on our spectacles. Leo jogs along in harness now, and may do some work at school yet.”

Having posted her letter, she left the issue to chance, as we may when conscience is easy. An answer came the day before Weyburn’s departure. Arthur Abner had met Lord Ormont in the street, had spoken of the rumour of Memoirs promised to the world, hinted at the possible need for a secretary; “Lord Ormont would appoint a day to see Mr. Weyburn.”

Lady Charlotte considered that to be as good as the engagement.

“So we keep you in the family,” she said. “And now look here: you ought to know my brother’s ways, if you’re going to serve him. You’ll have to guess at half of everything he tells you; he’ll expect you to know the whole. There’s no man so secret. Why? He fears nothing; I can’t tell why. And what his mouth shuts on, he exposes as if in his hand. Of course he’s proud, and good reason. You’ll see when you mustn’t offend. A lady’s in the house—I hear of it. She takes his name, they say. She may be a respectable woman—I’ve heard no scandal. We have to hear of a Lady Ormont out of Society! We have to suppose it means there’s not to be a real one. He can’t marry if he has allowed her to go about bearing his name. She has a fool of an aunt, I’m told; as often in the house as not. Good proof of his fondness for the woman, if he swallows half a year of the aunt! Well, you won’t, unless you’ve mere man’s eyes, be able to help seeing him trying to hide what he suffers from that aunt. He bears it, like the man he is; but woe to another betraying it! She has a tongue that goes like the reel of a rod, with a pike bolting out of the shallows to the snag he knows—to wind round it and defy you to pull. Often my brother Rowsley and I have fished the day long, and in hard weather, and brought home a basket; and he boasted of it more than of anything he has ever done since. That woman holds him away from me now. I say no harm of her. She may be right enough from her point of view; or it mayn’t be owing to her. I wouldn’t blame a woman. Well, but my point with you is, you swallow the woman’s aunt—the lady’s aunt—without betraying you suffer at all. Lord Ormont has eyes of an eagle for a speck above the surface. All the more because the aunt is a gabbling idiot does he—I say it seeing it—fire up to defend her from the sneer of the lip or half a sign of it! No, you would be an your guard; I can trust you. Of course you’d behave like the gentleman you are where any kind of woman’s concerned; but you mustn’t let a shadow be seen, think what you may. The woman—lady—calling herself Lady Ormont,—poor woman, I should do the same in her place,—she has a hard game to play; I have to be for my family: she has manners, I’m told; holds herself properly. She fancies she brings him up to the altar, in the end, by decent behaviour. That’s a delusion. It’s creditable to her, only she can’t understand the claims of the family upon a man like my brother. When you have spare time—‘kick-ups,’ he need to call it, writing to me from school—come here; you’re welcome, after three days’ notice. I shall be glad to see you again. You’ve gone some way to make a man of Leo.”

He liked her well: he promised to come. She was a sinewy bite of the gentle sex, but she had much flavour, and she gave nourishment.

“Let me have three days’ notice,” she repeated.

“Not less, Lady Charlotte,” said he.

Weyburn received intimation from Arthur Abner of the likely day Lord Ormont would appoint, and he left Olmer for London to hold himself in readiness. Lady Charlotte and Leo drove him to meet the coach. Philippa, so strangely baffled in her natural curiosity, begged for a seat; she begged to be allowed to ride. Petitions were rejected. She stood at the window seeing “Grandmama’s tutor,” as she named him, carried off by grandmama. Her nature was avenged on her tyrant grandmama: it brought up almost to her tongue thoughts which would have remained subterranean, under control of her habit of mind, or the nursery’s modesty, if she had been less tyrannically treated. They were subterranean thoughts, Nature’s original, such as the sense of injustice will rouse in young women; and they are better unstirred, for they ripen girls over-rapidly when they are made to revolve near the surface. It flashed on the girl why she had been treated tyrannically.

“Grandmama has good taste in tutors,” was all that she said while the thoughts rolled over.

CHAPTER IV. RECOGNITION

Our applicant for the post of secretary entered the street of Lord Ormont’s London house, to present himself to his boyhood’s hero by appointment.

He was to see, perhaps to serve, the great soldier. Things had come to this; and he thought it singular. But for the previous introduction to Lady Charlotte, he would have thought it passing wonderful. He ascribed it to the whirligig.

The young man was not yet of an age to gather knowledge of himself and of life from his present experience of the fact, that passionate devotion to an object strikes a vein through circumstances, as a travelling run of flame darts the seeming haphazard zigzags to catch at the dry of dead wood amid the damp; and when passion has become quiescent in the admirer, there is often the unsubsided first impulsion carrying it on. He will almost sorely embrace his idol with one or other of the senses.

Weyburn still read the world as it came to him, by bite, marvelling at this and that, after the fashion of most of us. He had not deserted his adolescent’s hero, or fallen upon analysis of a past season. But he was now a young man, stoutly and cognizantly on the climb, with a good aim overhead, axed green youth’s enthusiasms a step below his heels: one of the lovers of life, beautiful to behold, when we spy into them; generally their aspect is an enlivenment, whatever may be the carving of their features. For the sake of holy unity, this lover of life, whose gaze was to the front in hungry animation, held fast to his young dreams, perceiving a soul of meaning in them, though the fire might have gone out; and he confessed to a past pursuit of delusions. Young men of this kind will have, for the like reason, a similar rational sentiment on behalf of our world’s historic forward march, while admitting that history has to be taken from far backward if we would gain assurance of man’s advance. It nerves an admonished ambition.

He was ushered into a London house’s library, looking over a niggard enclosure of gravel and dull grass, against a wall where ivy dribbled. An armchair was beside the fireplace. To right and left of it a floreate company of books in high cases paraded shoulder to shoulder, without a gap; grenadiers on the line. Weyburn read the titles on their scarlet-and-blue facings. They were approved English classics; honoured veterans, who have emerged from the conflict with contemporary opinion, stamped excellent, or have been pushed by the roar of contemporaneous applauses to wear the leather-and-gilt uniform of our Immortals, until a more qualmish posterity disgorges them. The books had costly bindings. Lord Ormont’s treatment of Literature appeared to resemble Lady Charlotte’s, in being reverential and uninquiring. The books she bought to read were Memoirs of her time by dead men and women once known to her. These did fatigue duty in cloth or undress. It was high drill with all of Lord Ormont’s books, and there was not a modern or a minor name among the regiments. They smelt strongly of the bookseller’s lump lots by order; but if a show soldiery, they were not a sham, like a certain row of venerably-titled backs, that Lady Charlotte, without scruple, left standing to blow an ecclesiastical trumpet of empty contents; any one might have his battle of brains with them, for the twining of an absent key.

The door opened. Weyburn bowed to his old star in human shape: a grey head on square shoulders, filling the doorway. He had seen at Olmer Lady Charlotte’s treasured miniature portrait of her brother; a perfect likeness, she said—complaining the neat instant of injustice done to the fire of his look.

Fire was low down behind the eyes at present. They were quick to scan and take summary of their object, as the young man felt while observing for himself. Height and build of body were such as might be expected in the brother of Lady Charlotte and from the tales of his prowess. Weyburn had a glance back at Cuper’s boys listening to the tales.

The soldier-lord’s manner was courteously military—that of an established superior indifferent to the deferential attitude he must needs enact. His curt nick of the head, for a response to the visitor’s formal salutation, signified the requisite acknowledgment, like a city creditor’s busy stroke of the type-stamp receipt upon payment.

The ceremony over, he pitched a bugle voice to fit the contracted area: “I hear from Mr. Abner that you have made acquaintance with Olmer. Good hunting country there.”

“Lady Charlotte kindly gave me a mount, my lord.”

“I knew your father by name—Colonel Sidney Weyburn. You lost him at Toulouse. We were in the Peninsula; I was at Talavera with him. Bad day for our cavalry.”

“Our officers were young at their work then.”

“They taught the Emperor’s troops to respect a charge of English horse. It was teaching their fox to set traps for them.”

Lord Ormont indicated a chair. He stood.

“The French had good cavalry leaders,” Weyburn said, for cover to a continued study of the face,

“Montbrun, yes: Murat, Lassalle, Bessieres. Under the Emperor they had.”

“You think them not at home in the saddle, my lord?”

“Frenchmen have nerves; horses are nerves. They pile excitement too high. When cool, they’re among the best. None of them had head for command of all the arms.”

“One might say the same of Seidlitz and Ziethen?”

“Of Ziethen. Seidlitz had a wider grasp, I suppose.” He pursed his month, pondering. “No; and in the Austrian service, too; generals of cavalry are left to whistle for an independent command. There’s a jealousy of our branch!” The injured warrior frowned and hummed. He spoke his thought mildly: “Jealousy of the name of soldier in this country! Out of the service, is the place to recommend. I’d have advised a son of mine to train for a jockey rather than enter it. We deal with that to-morrow, in my papers. You come to me? Mr. Abner has arranged the terms? So I see you at ten in the morning. I am glad to meet a young man—Englishman—who takes an interest in the service.”

Weyburn fancied the hearing of a step; he heard the whispering dress. It passed him; a lady went to the armchair. She took her seat, as she had moved, with sedateness, the exchange of a toneless word with my lord. She was a brune. He saw that when he rose to do homage.

Lord Ormont resumed: “Some are born to it, must be soldiers; and in peace they are snubbed by the heads; in war they are abused by the country. They don’t understand in England how to treat an army; how to make one either!