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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4479 ***
+
+LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA.
+
+By George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+XII.      MORE OF CUPER'S BOYS
+XIII.     WAR AT OLMER
+XIV.      OLD LOVERS NEW FRIENDS
+XV.       SHOWING A SECRET FISHED WITHOUT ANGLING
+XVI.      ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MORE OF CUPER'S BOYS
+
+Entering the dining-room at the appointed minute in a punctual household,
+Mrs. Lawrence informed the company that she had seen a Horse Guards
+orderly at the trot up the street.  Weyburn said he was directing a boy
+to ring the bell of the house for him.  Lord Ormont went to the window.
+
+'Amends and honours?'  Mrs. Lawrence hummed and added an operatic
+flourish of an arm.  Something like it might really be imagined.  A large
+square missive was handed to the footman.  Thereupon the orderly trotted
+off.
+
+My lord took seat at table, telling the footman to lay 'that parcel'
+beside the clock on the mantelpiece.  Aminta and Mrs. Lawrence gave out a
+little cry of bird or mouse, pitiable to hear: they could not wait, they
+must know, they pished at sight of plates.  His look deferred to their
+good pleasure, like the dead hand of a clock under key; and Weyburn
+placed the missive before him, seeing by the superscription that it was
+not official.
+
+It was addressed, in the Roman hand of a boy's copybook writing, to
+
+          General the Earl of Ormont, I.C.B., etc.,
+                                   Horse Guards,
+                                             London.'
+
+The earl's eyebrows creased up over the address; they came down low on
+the contents.
+
+He resumed his daily countenance.  'Nothing of importance,' he said to
+the ladies.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence knocked the table with her knuckles.  Aminta put out a
+hand, in sign of her wish.
+
+'Pray let me see it.'
+
+'After lunch will do.'
+
+'No, no, no!  We are women--we are women,' cried Mrs. Lawrence.
+
+'How can it concern women?'
+
+'As well ask how a battle-field concerns them!'
+
+'Yes, the shots hit us behind you,' said Aminta; and she, too, struck the
+table.
+
+He did not prolong their torture.  Weyburn received the folio sheet and
+passed it on.  Aminta read.  Mrs. Lawrence jumped from her chair and ran
+to the countess's shoulder; her red lips formed the petitioning word to
+the earl for the liberty she was bent to take.
+
+'Peep?  if you like,' my lord said, jesting at the blank she would find,
+and soft to the pretty play of her mouth.
+
+When the ladies had run to the end of it, he asked them: 'Well; now
+then?'
+
+'But it's capital--the dear laddies!' Mrs. Lawrence exclaimed.
+
+Aminta's eyes met Weyburn's.
+
+She handed him the sheet of paper; upon the transmission of which empty
+thing from the Horse Guards my lord commented: 'An orderly!'
+
+Weyburn scanned it rapidly, for the table had been served.
+
+The contents were these:
+
+
+
+                    'HIGH BRENT NEAR ARTSWELL.
+                                             'April 7th.
+
+     'To GENERAL THE EARL OF ORMONT
+                         'Cavalry.
+
+     'May it please your Lordship, we, the boys of Mr. Cuper's school,
+     are desirous to bring to the notice of the bravest officer England
+     possesses now living, a Deed of Heroism by a little boy and girl,
+     children of our school laundress, aged respectively eight and six,
+     who, seeing a little fellow in the water out of depth, and sinking
+     twice, before the third time jumped in to save him, though unable to
+     swim themselves; the girl aged six first, we are sorry to say; but
+     the brother, Robert Coop, followed her example, and together they
+     made a line, and she caught hold of the drowning boy, and he held
+     her petycoats, and so they pulled.  We have seen the place: it is
+     not a nice one.  They got him ashore at last.  The park-keeper here
+     going along found them dripping, rubbing his hands, and blowing into
+     his nostrils.  Name, T. Shellen, son of a small cobbler here, and
+     recovered.
+
+     'May it please your Lordship, we make bold to apply, because you
+     have been for a number of years, as far as the oldest can recollect,
+     the Hero of our school, and we are so bold as to ask the favour of
+     General Lord Ormont's name to head a subscription we are making to
+     circulate for the support of their sick mother, who has fallen ill.
+     We think her a good woman.  Gentlemen and ladies of the
+     neighbourhood are willing to subscribe.  If we have a great name to
+     head the list, we think we shall make a good subscription.  Names:--
+
+               'Martha Mary Coop, mother.
+               'Robert Coop.
+               'Jane Coop, the girl, aged six.
+
+     'If we are not taking too great a liberty, a subscription paper will
+     follow.  We are sure General the Earl of Ormont's name will help to
+     make them comfortable.
+               'We are obediently and respectfully,
+                              'DAVID GOWEN,
+                              'WALTER BENCH,
+                              'JAMES PANNERS PARSONS,
+                              'And seven others.'
+
+Weyburn spared Aminta an answering look, that would have been a begging
+of Browny to remember Matey.
+
+'It 's genuine,' he said to Mrs. Lawrence, as he attacked his plate with
+the gusto for the repast previously and benignly observed by her.  'It
+ought to be the work of some of the younger fellows.'
+
+'They spell correctly, on the whole.'
+
+'Excepting,' said my lord, 'an article they don't know much about yet.'
+
+Weyburn had noticed the word, and he smiled.  'Said to be the happy
+state!  The three signing their names are probably what we called bellman
+and beemen, collector, and heads of the swarm-enthusiasts.  If it is not
+the work of some of the younger hands, the school has levelled on minors.
+In any case it shows the school is healthy.'
+
+'I subscribe,' said Mrs. Lawrence.
+
+'The little girl aged six shall have something done for her,' said
+Aminta, and turned her eyes on the earl.
+
+He was familiar with her thrilled voice at a story of bravery.  He said--
+
+'The boys don't say the girl's brother turned tail.'
+
+'Only that the girl's brother aged eight followed the lead of the little
+girl aged six,' Mrs. Lawrence remarked.  'Well, I like the schoolboys,
+too--"we are sorry to say!"  But they 're good lads.  Boys who can
+appreciate brave deeds are capable of doing them.'
+
+'Speak to me about it on Monday,' the earl said to Weyburn.
+
+He bowed, and replied--
+
+'I shall have the day to-morrow.  I 'll walk it and call on Messrs.' (he
+glanced at the paper) 'Gowen, Bench, and Parsons.  I have a German friend
+in London anxious to wear his legs down stumpier.'
+
+'The name of the school?'
+
+'It is called Cuper's.'
+
+Aminta, on hearing the name of Cuper a second time, congratulated herself
+on the happy invention of her pretext to keep Mrs. Pagnell from the table
+at midday.  Her aunt had a memory for names: what might she not have
+exclaimed!  There would have been little in it, but it was as well that
+the 'boy of the name of Weyburn' at Cuper's should be unmentioned.  By an
+exaggeration peculiar to a disgust in fancy, she could hear her aunt
+vociferating 'Weyburn!' and then staring at Mr. Weyburn opposite--perhaps
+not satisfied with staring.
+
+He withdrew after his usual hearty meal, during which his talk of boys
+and their monkey tricks, and what we can train them to, had been pleasant
+generally, especially to Mrs. Lawrence.  Aminta was carried back to the
+minute early years at High Brent.  A line or two of a smile touched her
+cheek.
+
+'Yes, my dear countess, that is the face I want for Lady de Culme
+to-day,' said Mrs. Lawrence.'  She likes a smiling face.  Aunty--aunty
+has always been good; she has never been prim.  I was too much for her,
+until I reflected that she was very old, and deserved to know the truth
+before she left us; and so I went to her; and then she said she wished to
+see the Countess of Ormont, because of her being my dearest friend.  I
+fancy she entertains an 'arriere' idea of proposing her flawless niece
+Gracey, Marchioness of Fencaster, to present you.  She 's quite equal to
+the fatigue herself.  You 'll rejoice in her anecdotes.  People were
+virtuous in past days: they counted their sinners.  In those days, too,
+as I have to understand, the men chivalrously bore the blame, though the
+women were rightly punished.  Now, alas!  the initiative is with the
+women, and men are not asked for chivalry.  Hence it languishes.  Lady
+de Culme won't hear of the Queen of Blondes; has forbidden her these many
+years!'
+
+Lord Ormont, to whom the lady's prattle was addressed, kept his visage
+moveless, except in slight jerks of the brows.
+
+'What queen?'
+
+'You insist upon renewing my old, old pangs of jealousy, my dear lord!
+The Queen of Cyprus, they called her, in the last generation; she fights
+our great duellist handsomely.'
+
+'My dear Mrs. Lawrence!'
+
+'He triumphs finally, we know, but she beats him every round.'
+
+'It 's only tattle that says the duel has begun.'
+
+'May is the month of everlasting beauty!  There 's a widower marquis now
+who claims the right to cast the glove to any who dispute it.'
+
+'Mrs. May is too good-looking to escape from scandal.'
+
+'Amy May has the good looks of the Immortals.'
+
+'She can't be thirty.'
+
+'In the calendar of women she counts thirty-four.'
+
+'Malignity!  Her husband's a lucky man.'
+
+'The shots have proved it.'
+
+Lord Ormont nodded his head over the hopeless task of defending a woman
+from a woman, and their sharp interchange ceased.  But the sight of his
+complacency in defeat told Aminta that he did not respect his fair
+client: it drew a sketch of the position he allotted his wife before the
+world side by side with this Mrs. Amy May, though a Lady de Culme was
+persuaded to draw distinctions.
+
+He had, however, quite complacently taken the dose intended for him by
+Mrs. Lawrence, who believed that the system of gently forcing him was the
+good one.
+
+The ladies drove away in the afternoon.  The earl turned his back on
+manuscript.  He sent for a couple of walking sticks, and commanded
+Weyburn to go through his parades.  He was no tyro, merely out of
+practice, and unacquainted with the later, simpler form of the great
+master of the French school, by which, at serious issues, the guarding of
+the line can be more quickly done: as, for instance, the 'parade de
+septime' supplanting the slower 'parade de prime;' the 'parade de quarte'
+having advantage over the 'parade de quince;' the 'parade de tierce'
+being readier and stronger than the 'parade de sixte;' the same said for
+the 'parade de seconde' instead of the weak 'parade d'octave.'
+
+These were then new points of instruction.  Weyburn demonstrated them as
+neatly as he could do with his weapon.
+
+'Yes, the French think,' Lord Ormont said, grasping the stick to get
+conviction of thumb-strength and finger-strength from the parades
+advocated; 'their steel would thread the ribs of our louts before: they
+could raise a cry of parry; so here they 're pleased to sneer at fencing,
+as if it served no purpose but the duel.  Fencing, for one thing, means,
+that with a good stick in his hand, a clever fencer can double up a giant
+or two, grant him choice of ground.  Some of our men box; but the sword's
+the weapon for an officer, and precious few of 'em are fit for more than
+to kick the scabbard.  Slashing comes easier to them: a plaguey cut, if
+it does cut--say, one in six.  Navy too.  Their cutlass-drill is like a
+woman's fling of the arm to fetch a slap from behind her shoulder.
+Pinking beats chopping.  These English 'll have their lesson.  It 's like
+what you call good writing: the simple way does the business, and that's
+the most difficult to learn, because you must give your head to it, as
+those French fellows do.  'Trop de finesse' is rather their fault.
+Anything's better than loutishness.  Well! the lesson 'll come.'
+
+He continued.  He spoke as he thought: he was not speaking what he was
+thinking.  His mind was directed on the visit of Aminta to Lady de Culme,
+and the tolerably wonderful twist whereby Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had
+vowed herself to his girl's interests.  And he blamed neither of them;
+only he could not understand how it had been effected, for Aminta and
+Mrs. Lawrence had not been on such particularly intimate terms last week
+or yesterday.  His ejaculation, 'Women!' was, as he knew, merely
+ignorance roaring behind a mask of sarcasm.  But it allied him with all
+previous generations on the male side, and that was its virtue.  His view
+of the shifty turns of women got no further, for the reason that he took
+small account of the operations of the feelings, to the sole exercise of
+which he by system condemned the sex.
+
+He was also insensibly half a grain more soured by the homage of those
+poor schoolboys, who called to him to take it for his reward in a country
+whose authorities had snubbed, whose Parliament had ignored, whose Press
+had abused him.  The ridiculous balance made him wilfully oblivious that
+he had seen his name of late eulogized in articles and in books for the
+right martial qualities.  Can a country treating a good soldier--not
+serving it for pay--in so scurvy a fashion, be struck too hard with our
+disdain?  One cannot tell it in too plain a language how one despises its
+laws, its moralities, its sham of society.  The Club, some choice
+anecdotists, two or three listeners to his dolences clothed as diatribes;
+a rubber, and the sight of his girl at home, composed, with a week's
+shooting now and then, his round of life now that she refused to travel.
+What a life for a soldier in his vigour.  Weyburn was honoured by the
+earl's company on the walk to Chiallo's.  In the street of elegant shops
+they met Lord Adderwood, and he, as usual, appeared in the act of
+strangling one of his flock of yawns, with gentlemanly consideration for
+the public.  Exercise was ever his temporary specific for these
+incurables.  Flinging off his coat, he cast away the cynic style
+engendering or engendered by them.  He and Weyburn were for a bout.  Sir
+John Randeller and Mr. Morsfield were at it, like Bull in training and
+desperado foiled.  A French 'maitre d'armes,' famed in 'escrime,'
+standing near Captain Chiallo, looked amused in the eyes, behind a mask
+of professional correctness.  He had come on an excursion for the display
+of his art.  Sir John's very sturdy defence was pierced.  Weyburn saluted
+the Frenchman as an acquaintance, and they shook hands, chatted,
+criticized, nodded.  Presently he and his adversary engaged, vizored and
+in their buckram, and he soon proved to be too strong for Adderwood, as
+the latter expected and had notified to Lord Ormont before they crossed
+the steel.  My lord had a pleasant pricking excitement in the sound.
+There was a pretty display between Weyburn and the 'escrimeur,' who
+neatly and kindly trifled, took a point and returned one, and at the
+finish complimented him.  The earl could see that he had to be
+sufficiently alert.
+
+Age mouthed an ugly word to the veteran insensible of it in his body,
+when a desire to be one with these pairs of nimble wrists and legs was
+like an old gamecock shown the pit and put back into the basket.  He left
+the place, carrying away an image of the coxcombical attitudinizing of
+the man Morsfield at the salut, upon which he brought down his powers of
+burlesque.
+
+My lord sketched the scene he had just quitted to a lady who had stopped
+her carriage.  She was the still beautiful Mrs. Amy May, wife of the
+famous fighting captain.  Her hair was radiant in a shady street; her
+eyelids tenderly toned round the almond enclosure of blue pebbles, bright
+as if shining from the seawash.  The lips of the fair woman could be seen
+to say that they were sweet when, laughing or discoursing, they gave
+sight of teeth proudly her own, rivalling the regularity of the grin of
+dentistry.  A Venus of nature was melting into a Venus of art, and there
+was a decorous concealment of the contest and the anguish in the process,
+for which Lord Ormont liked her well enough to wink benevolently at her
+efforts to cheat the world at various issues, and maintain her duel with
+Time.  The world deserved that she should beat it, even if she had been
+all deception.
+
+She let the subject of Mr. Morsfield pass without remark from her, until
+the exhaustion of open-air topics hinted an end of their conversation,
+and she said--
+
+'We shall learn next week what to think if the civilians.  I have heard
+Mr. Morsfield tell that he is 'de premiere force.'  Be on your guard.
+You are to know that I never forget a service, and you did me one once.'
+'You have reason .  .  . ?' said the earl.
+
+'If anybody is the dragon to the treasure he covets he is a spadassin who
+won't hesitate at provocations.  Adieu.'
+
+Lord Ormont's eye had been on Mr. Morsfield.  He had seen what Mrs.
+Pagnell counselled her niece to let, him see.  He thanked Mr. Morsfield
+for a tonic that made him young with anticipations of bracing; and he set
+his head to work upon an advance half-way to meet the gentleman, and
+safely exclude his wife's name.
+
+Monday brought an account of Cuper's boys.  Aminta received it while the
+earl was at his papers for the morning's news of the weightier deeds of
+men.
+
+They were the right boys, Weyburn said; his interview with Gowen, Bench,
+Parsons, and the others assured him that the school was breathing big
+lungs.  Mr. Cuper, too, had spoken well of them.
+
+'You walked the twenty miles?'  Aminta interrupted him.
+
+'With my German friend: out and home: plenty of time in the day.  He has
+taken to English boys, but asks why enthusiasm and worship of great deeds
+don't grow upward from them to their elders.  And I, in turn, ask why
+Germans insist on that point more even than the French do.'
+
+'Germans are sentimental.  But the English boys he saw belonged to a
+school with traditions of enthusiasm sown by some one.  The school
+remembered?'
+
+'Curiously, Mr. Cuper tells me, the hero of the school has dropped and
+sprung up, stout as ever, twice--it tells me what I wish to believe--
+since Lord Ormont led their young heads to glory.  He can't say how it
+comes. The tradition's there, and it 's kindled by some flying spark.'
+
+'They remember who taught the school to think of Lord Ormont?'
+
+'I 'm a minor personage.  I certainly did some good, and that 's a push
+forward.'
+
+'They speak of you?'
+
+It was Aminta more than the Countess of Ormont speaking to him.
+
+'You take an interest in the boys,' he said, glowing.  'Yes, well, they
+have their talks.  I happened to be a cricketer, counting wickets and
+scores.  I don't fancy it's remembered that it was I preached my lord.
+A day of nine wickets and one catch doesn't die out of a school.  The
+boy Gowen was the prime spirit in getting up the subscription for the
+laundress.  But Bench and Parsons are good boys, too.'
+
+He described them, dwelt on them.  The enthusiast, when not lyrical, is
+perilously near to boring.  Aminta was glad of Mrs. Lawrence's absence.
+She had that feeling because Matthew Weyburn would shun talk of himself
+to her, not from a personal sense of tedium in hearing of the boys; and
+she was quaintly reminded by suggestions, coming she knew not whence, of
+a dim likeness between her and these boys of the school when their hero
+dropped to nothing and sprang up again brilliantly--a kind of distant
+cousinship, in her susceptibility to be kindled by so small a flying
+spark as this one on its travels out of High Brent.  Moreover, the dear
+boys tied her to her girlhood, and netted her fleeting youth for the
+moth-box.  She pressed to hear more and more of them, and of the school-
+laundress Weyburn had called to see, and particularly of the child,
+little Jane, aged six.  Weyburn went to look at the sheet of water to
+which little Jane had given celebrity over the county.  The girl stood
+up to her shoulders when she slid off the bank and made the line for her
+brother to hold, he in the water as well.  Altogether, Cuper's boys were
+justified in promoting a subscription, the mother being helpless.
+
+'Modest little woman,' he said of Jane.  'We'll hope people won't spoil
+her.  Don't forget, Lady Ormont, that the brother did his part; he had
+more knowledge of the danger than she.'
+
+'You will undertake to convey our subscriptions?  Lord Ormont spoke of
+the little ones and the schoolboys yesterday.'
+
+'I'll be down again among them next Sunday, Lady Ormont.  On the Monday
+I go to Olmer.'
+
+'The girls of High Brent subscribe?'
+
+There was a ripple under Weyburn's gravity.
+
+'Messrs. Gowen, Bench, and Parsons thought proper to stop Miss Vincent at
+the head of her detachment in the park.'
+
+'On the Sunday?'
+
+'And one of them handed her a paper containing a report of their
+interview with Mrs. Coop and a neat eulogy of little Jane.  But don't
+suspect them, I beg.  I believe them to be good, honest fellows.  Bench,
+they say, is religious; Gowen has written verses; Parsons generally
+harum-scarum.  They're boyish in one way or another, and that'll do.
+The cricket of the school has been low: seems to be reviving.'
+
+'Mr. Weyburn,' said the countess, after a short delay--and Aminta broke
+through--'it pleases me to hear of them, and think they have not
+forgotten you, or, at least, they follow the lead you gave.  I should
+like to know whether an idea I have is true: Is much, I mean constant,
+looking down on young people likely to pull one's mind down to their
+level?'
+
+'Likely enough to betray our level, if there 's danger,' he murmured.
+'Society offers an example that your conjecture is not unfounded, Lady
+Ormont.  But if we have great literature and an interest in the world's
+affairs, can there be any fear of it?  The schoolmaster ploughs to make a
+richer world, I hope.  He must live with them, join with them in their
+games, accustom them to have their heads knocked with what he wants to
+get into them, leading them all the while, as the bigger schoolfellow
+does, if he is a good fellow.  He has to be careful not to smell of his
+office.  Doing positive good is the business of his every day--on a small
+scale, but it 's positive, if he likes his boys.  'Avaunt favouritism!'
+he must like all boys.  And it 's human nature not so far removed from
+the dog; only it's a supple human nature: there 's the beauty of it.  We
+train it.  Nothing is more certain than that it will grow upward.  I have
+the belief that I shall succeed, because I like boys, and they like me.
+It always was the case.'
+
+'I know,' said Aminta.
+
+Their eyes met.  She looked moved at heart behind that deep forest of her
+chestnut eyes.
+
+'And I think I can inspire confidence in fathers and mothers,' he
+resumed.'  I have my boys already waiting for me to found the school.
+I was pleased the other day: an English friend brought an Italian
+gentleman to see me and discuss my system, up at Norwood, at my mother's
+--a Signor Calliani.  He has a nephew; the parents dote on him.  The
+uncle confesses that the boy wants--he has got hold of our word--"pluck."
+We had a talk.  He has promised to send me the lad when I am established
+in Switzerland.'
+
+'When?' said Aminta.
+
+'A relative from whom a Reversion comes is near the end.  It won't be
+later than September that I shall go.  My Swiss friend has the school,
+and would take me at once before he retires.'
+
+'You make friends wherever you go,' said Aminta.
+
+'Why shouldn't everybody?  I'm convinced it's because I show people I
+mean well, and I never nurse an injury, great or small.  And besides,
+they see I look forward.  I do hope good for the world.  If at my school
+we have all nationalities--French boys and German, Italian, Russian,
+Spaniard--without distinction of race and religion and station, and with
+English intermixing--English games, English sense of honour and
+conception of gentleman--we shall help to nationalize Europe.  Emile
+Grenat, Adolf Fleischer, and an Italian, Vincentino Chiuse, are prepared
+to start with me: and they are men of attainments; they will throw up
+their positions; they will do me the honour to trust to my leadership.
+It's not scaling Alps or commanding armies, true.'
+
+'It may be better,' said Aminta, and thought as she spoke.
+
+'Slow work, if we have a taste for the work, doesn't dispirit.
+Otherwise, one may say that an African or South American traveller has a
+more exciting time.  I shall manage to keep my head on its travels.'
+
+'You have ideas about the education of girls?'
+
+'They can't be carried out unaided.'
+
+'Aid will come.'
+
+Weyburn's confidence, high though it was, had not mounted to that pitch.
+
+'One may find a mate,' he said.  The woman to share and practically to
+aid in developing such ideas is not easily found: that he left as
+implied.
+
+Aminta was in need of poetry; but the young schoolmaster's plain, well-
+directed prose of the view of a business in life was welcome to her.
+
+Lord Ormont entered the room.  She reminded him of the boys of High Brent
+and the heroine Jane.  He was ready to subscribe his five-and-twenty
+guineas, he said.  The amount of the sum gratified Weyburn, she could
+see.  She was proud of her lord, and of the boys and the little girl;
+and she would have been happy to make the ardent young schoolmaster aware
+of her growing interest in the young.
+
+The night before the earl's departure on the solitary expedition to which
+she condemned him, he surprised her with a visit of farewell, so that he
+need not disturb her in the early morning, he said.  She was reading
+beside her open jewel-box, and she closed it with the delicate touch of a
+hand turned backward while listening to him, with no sign of nervousness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+WAR AT OLMER
+
+Lively doings were on the leap to animate Weyburn at Olmer during Easter
+week.  The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey, rector of Barborough, on hearing that
+Lady Charlotte Eglett was engaged in knocking at the doors of litigation
+with certain acts that constituted distinct breaches of the law and the
+peace, and were a violation of the rights of her neighbour, Mr. Gilbert
+Addicote, might hope that the troublesome parishioner whom he did not
+often number among his congregation would grant him a term of repose.
+Therein he was deceived.  Alterations and enlargements of the church,
+much required, had necessitated the bricking up of a door regarded by the
+lady as the private entrance to the Olmer pew.  She sent him notice of
+her intention to batter at the new brickwork; so there was the prospect
+of a pew-fight before him.  But now she came to sit under him every
+Sunday; and he could have wished her absent; for she diverted his
+thoughts from piety to the selections of texts applicable in the case of
+a woman who sat with arms knotted, and the frown of an intemperate
+schoolgirl forbidden speech; while her pew's firelight startlingly at
+intervals danced her sinister person into view, as from below.  The
+lady's inaccessible and unconquerable obtuseness to exhortation informed
+the picture with an evil spirit that cried for wrestlings.
+
+Regularly every week-day she headed the war now rageing between Olmer and
+Addicotes, on the borders of the estates.  It was open war, and herself
+to head the cavalry.  Weyburn, driving up a lane in the gig she had sent
+to meet the coach, beheld a thicket of countrymen and boys along a ridge;
+and it swayed and broke, and through it burst the figure of a mounted
+warrior woman at the gallop, followed by what bore an appearance of horse
+and gun, minus carriage, drivers at the flanks cracking whips on foot.
+Off went the train, across a small gorse common, through a gate.
+
+'That's another down,' said his whip.  'Sound good wood it is, not made
+to fall.  Her ladyship's at it hard to-day.  She 'll teach Mr. Addicote
+a thing or two about things females can do.  That is, when they stand
+for their rights.'
+
+He explained to Weyburn that Mr. Addicote, a yeoman farmer and a good
+hunting man, but a rare obstinate one, now learning his lesson from her
+ladyship, was in dispute with her over rights of property on a stretch of
+fir-trees lining the ridge where the estates of Olmer and Addicotes met.
+Her ladyship had sworn that if he did not yield to her claim she would
+cut down every tree of the ridge and sell the lot for timber under his
+nose.  She acted according to her oath, in the teeth of his men two feet
+across the border.  All the world knew the roots of those trees were for
+the most part in Olmer soil, though Addicote shared the shade.  All the
+people about mourned for the felling of those trees.  All blamed Mr.
+Gilbert Addicote for provoking her ladyship, good hunting man though he
+was.  But as to the merits of the question, under the magnifier of the
+gentlemen of the law, there were as many different opinions as wigs in
+the land.
+
+'And your opinion?' said Weyburn.
+
+To which the young groom answered: 'Oh, I don't form an opinion, sir.
+I 'm of my mistress's opinion; and if she says, Do it, think as we like,
+done it has to be.'
+
+Lady Charlotte came at a trot through the gate, to supervise the
+limbering-up of another felled tree.  She headed it as before.  The log
+dragged bounding and twirling, rattling its chains; the crowd along the
+ridge, forbidden to cheer, watching it with intense repression of the
+roar.  We have not often in England sight of a great lady challengeing an
+unpopular man to battle and smacking him in the face like this to provoke
+him.  Weyburn was driven on a half-circle of the lane to the gate, where
+he jumped out to greet Lady Charlotte trotting back for another smack in
+the face of her enemy,--a third rounding of her Troy with the vanquished
+dead at her heels, as Weyburn let a flimsy suggestion beguile his fancy,
+until the Homeric was overwhelming even to a playful mind, and he put
+her in a mediaeval frame.  She really had the heroical aspect in a
+grandiose-grotesque, fitted to some lines of Ariosto.  Her head wore
+a close hood, disclosing a fringe of grey locks, owlish to see about
+features hooked for action.
+
+'Ah, you!  there you are: good--I'll join you in three minutes,' she sang
+out to him, and cantered to the ridge.
+
+Hardly beyond the stated number she was beside him again, ranging her
+steed for the victim log to dance a gyration on its branches across the
+lane and enter a field among the fallen compeers.  One of her men had run
+behind her.  She slid from her saddle and tossed him the reins, catching
+up her skirts.
+
+'That means war, as much as they'll have it in England,' she said, seeing
+his glance at the logs.  'My husband's wise enough to leave it to me, so
+I save him trouble with neighbours.  An ass of a Mr. Gilbert Addicote
+dares us to make good our claim on our property, our timber, because half
+a score of fir-tree roots go stretching on to his ground.'
+
+She swished her whip.  Mr. Gilbert Addicote received the stroke and
+retired, a buried subject.  They walked on at an even pace.  'You 'll see
+Leo to-morrow.  He worships you.  You may as well give him a couple of
+hours' coaching a day for the week.  He'll be hanging about you, and you
+won't escape him.  Well, and my brother Rowsley: how is Lord Ormont?
+He never comes to me now, since--Well, it 's nothing to me; but I like
+to see my brother.  She can't make any change here.  Olmer and Lady
+Charlotte 's bosom were both implied.  'What do you think?--you 've
+noticed: is he in good health?  It 's the last thing he 'll be got to
+speak of.'
+
+Weyburn gave the proper assurances.
+
+'Not he!' said she.  'He's never ill.  Men beat women in the long race,
+if they haven't overdone it when young.  My doctor wants me to renounce
+the saddle.  He says it 's time.  Not if I 've got work for horseback!'
+she nicked her head emphatically: 'I hate old age.  They sha'nt dismount
+me till a blow comes.  Hate it!  But I should despise myself if I showed
+signs, like a worm under heel.  Let Nature do her worst; she can't
+conquer us as long as we keep up heart.  You won't have to think of that
+for a good time yet.  Now tell me why Lord Ormont didn't publish the
+"Plan for the Defence" you said he was writing; and he was, I know.  He
+wrote it and he finished it; you made the fair copy.  Well, and he read
+it,--there! see!'  She took the invisible sheets in her hands and tore
+them.  'That's my brother.  He's so proud.  It would have looked like
+asking the country, that injured him, to forgive him.  I wish it had been
+printed.  But whatever he does I admire.  That--she might have advised,
+if she 'd been a woman of public spirit or cared for his reputation.  He
+never comes near me.  Did she read your copy?'
+
+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 Finclhley 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.
+
+'It is poor fare in cottages.'
+
+'I have been feeding on better than bread and meat,' she said.' I should
+have eaten if I had felt appetite.  My looks will recover, such as they
+are.  I hope I have grown out of them; they are a large part of the
+bondage of women.  You would like to see me safe into some conveyance.
+Go up-stairs for a few minutes; I will wait here.'
+
+He obeyed her.  Passing from the living to the dead, from the dead to the
+living, they were united in his heart.
+
+Her brevity of tone, and her speech, so practical upon a point of need,
+under a crisis of distress, reminded him of Lady Charlotte at the time
+of the groom's arrival with her letter.
+
+Aminta was in no hurry to drive.  She liked walking and looking down on
+London, she said.
+
+'My friend and schoolmate, Selina Collett, comes to me at Whitsuntide.
+We have taken a house on the Upper Thames, above Marlow.  You will come
+and see us, if you can be persuaded to leave your boys.  We have a
+boathouse, and a bathing-plank for divers.  The stream is quiet there
+between rich meadows.  It seems to flow as if it thought.  I am not
+poetical; I tell you only my impression. You shall be a great deal by
+yourself, as men prefer to be.'
+
+'As men are forced to be--I beg!' said he.  'Division is against my
+theories.'
+
+'We might help, if we understood one another, I have often fancied.
+I know something of your theories.  I should much like to hear you
+some day on the scheme of the school in Switzerland, and also on the
+schoolmaster's profession.  She whom we have lost was full of it, and
+spoke of it to me as much as her weakness would permit.  The subject
+seemed to give her strength.'
+
+'She has always encouraged me,' said Weyburn.' I have lost her, but I
+shall feel that she is not absent.  She had ideas of her own about men
+and women.'
+
+'Some she mentioned.'
+
+'And about marriage?'
+
+'That too.'
+
+Aminta shook herself out of a sudden stupor.
+
+'Her mind was very clear up to the last hour upon all the subjects
+interesting her son.  She at one time regretted his not being a soldier,
+for the sake of his father's memory.  Then she learned to think he could
+do more for the world as the schoolmaster.  She said you can persuade.'
+
+'We had our talks.  She would have the reason, if she was to be won.
+I like no other kind of persuasion.'
+
+'I long to talk over the future school with you.  That is, to hear your
+plans.'
+
+They were at the foot of the hill, in view of an inn announcing livery
+stables.  She wished to walk the whole distance.  He shook his head.
+
+The fly was ready for her soon, and he begged to see her safe home.  She
+refused, after taking her seat, but said: 'At any other time.  We are old
+friends.  You will really go through the ceremony of consulting me about
+the school?'
+
+He replied: 'I am honoured.'
+
+'Ah, not to me,' said Aminta.  'We will be the friends we--You will not
+be formal with me?--not from this day?'
+
+She put out her hand.  He took it gently.  The dead who had drawn them
+together withheld a pressure.  Holding the hand, he said: 'I shall crave
+leave of absence for some days.'
+
+'I shall see you on the day,' said she.  'If it is your desire: I will
+send word.'
+
+'We both mourn at heart.  We should be in company.  Adieu.'
+
+Their hands fell apart.  They looked.  The old school time was in each
+mind.  They saw it as a shore-bank in grey outline across morning mist.
+Years were between; and there was a division of circumstance, more
+repelling than an abyss or the rush of deep wild waters.
+
+Neither of them had regrets.  Under their cloud, and with the grief they
+shared, they were as happy as two could be in recovering one another as
+friends.
+
+On the day of the funeral Aminta drove to the spot where they had parted
+--she walked to the churchyard.
+
+She followed the coffin to its gravel-heap, wishing neither to see nor be
+seen, only that she might be so far attached to the remains of the dead;
+and the sense of blessedness she had in her bowed simplicity of feeling
+was as if the sainted dead had cleansed and anointed her.
+
+When the sods had been cast on, the last word spoken, she walked her way
+back, happy in being alone, unnoticed.  She was grateful to the chief
+mourner for letting her go as she had come.  That helped her to her sense
+of purification, the haven out of the passions, hardly less quiet than
+the repose into which the dear dead woman, his mother, had entered.
+
+London lay beneath her.  The might of the great hive hummed at the verge
+of her haven of peace without disturbing.  There she had been what none
+had known of her: an ambitious girl, modest merely for lack of
+intrepidity; paralyzed by her masterful lord; aiming her highest at a
+gilt weathercock; and a disappointed creature, her breast a home of
+serpents; never herself.  She thought and hoped she was herself now.
+Alarm lest this might be another of her moods, victim of moods as she had
+latterly been, was a shadow armed with a dart playing round her to find
+the weak spot.  It sprang from her acknowledged weakness of nature; and
+she cast about for how to keep it outside her and lean on a true though a
+small internal support.  She struck at her desires, to sound them.
+
+They were yesterday for love; partly for distinction, for a woman having
+beauty to shine in the sphere of beauty; but chiefly to love and be
+loved, therefore to live.  She had yesterday read letters of a man who
+broke a music from the word--about as much music as there is in a tuning
+--fork, yet it rang and lingered; and he was not the magical musician.
+Now those letters were as dust of the road.  The sphere of beauty was a
+glass lamp-globe for delirious moths.  She had changed.  Belief in the
+real change gave her full view of the compliant coward she had been.
+
+Her heart assured her she had natural courage.  She felt that it could be
+stubborn to resist a softness.  Now she cared no more for the hackneyed
+musical word; friendship was her desire.  If it is not life's poetry, it
+is a credible prose; a land of low undulations instead of Alps; beyond
+the terrors and the deceptions.  And she could trust her friend: he who
+was a singular constancy.  His mother had told her of his preserving
+letters of a girl he loved when at school; and of his journeys to an
+empty house at Dover.  That was past; but, as the boy, so the man would
+be in sincerity of feeling trustworthy to the uttermost.
+
+She mused on the friend.  He was brave.  She had seen how he took his
+blow, and sorrow as a sister, conquering emotion.  It was not to be
+expected of him by one who knew him when at school.  Had he faults?  He
+must have faults.  She, curiously, could see none.  After consenting to
+his career as a schoolmaster, and seeing nothing ludicrous in it, she
+endowed him with the young school-hero's reputation, beheld him with the
+eyes of the girl who had loved him--and burnt his old letters!--bitterly
+regretted that she burnt his letters!--and who had applauded his contempt
+of ushers and master opposing his individual will and the thing he
+thought it right to do.
+
+Musing thus, she turned a corner, on a sudden, in her mind, and ran
+against a mirror, wherein a small figure running up to meet her, grew
+large and nodded, with the laugh and eyes of Browny.  So little had she
+changed!  The stedfast experienced woman rebuked that volatile, and some
+might say, faithless girl.  But the girl had her answer: she declared
+they were one and the same, affirmed that the years between were a bad
+night's dream, that her heart had been faithful, that he who conjures
+visions of romance in a young girl's bosom must always have her heart,
+as a crisis will reveal it to her.  She had the volubility of the mettled
+Browny of old, and was lectured.  When she insisted on shouting 'Matey!
+Matey!' she was angrily spurned and silenced.
+
+Aminta ceased to recline in her carriage.  An idea that an indolent
+posture fostered vapourish meditations, counselled her sitting rigidly
+upright and interestedly observing the cottages and merry gutter-children
+along the squat straight streets of a London suburb.  Her dominant
+ultimate thought was, 'I, too, can work!'  Like her courage, the plea of
+a capacity to work appealed for confirmation to the belief which exists
+without demonstrated example; and as she refrained from probing to the
+inner sources of that mental outcry, it was allowed to stand and remain
+among the convictions we store--wherewith to shape our destinies.
+
+Childishly indeed, quite witlessly, she fell into a trick of repeating
+the name of Matthew Weyburn in her breast and on her lips, after the
+manner of Isabella Lawrence Finchley, when she had inquired for his
+Christian name, and went on murmuring it, as if sucking a new bonbon,
+with the remark: 'It sounds nice, it suits the mouth.'  Little Selina
+Collett had told, Aminta remembered, how those funny boys at Cuper's
+could not at first get the name 'Aminta' to suit the mouth, but went
+about making hideous faces in uttering it.  She smiled at the
+recollection, and thought, up to a movement of her lips, one is not
+tempted to do that in saying Matthew Weyburn!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+SHOWING A SECRET FISHED WITHOUT ANGLING
+
+That great couchant dragon of the devouring jaws and the withering
+breath, known as our London world, was in expectation of an excitement
+above yawns on the subject of a beautiful Lady Doubtful proposing
+herself, through a group of infatuated influential friends, to a decorous
+Court, as one among the ladies acceptable.  The popular version of it
+sharpened the sauce by mingling romance and cynicism very happily; for
+the numerous cooks, when out of the kitchen, will furnish a piquant dish.
+Thus, a jewel-eyed girl of half English origin (a wounded British officer
+is amiably nursed in a castle near the famous Peninsula battlefield,
+etc.), running wild down the streets of Seville, is picked up by Lord
+Ormont, made to discard her tambourine, brought over to our shores, and
+allowed the decoration of his name, without the legitimate adornment of
+his title.  Discontented with her position after a time, she now pushes
+boldly to claim the place which will be most effective in serving her as
+a bath.  She has, by general consent, beauty; she must, seeing that she
+counts influential friends, have witchery.  Those who have seen her
+riding and driving beside her lord, speak of Andalusian grace, Oriental
+lustre, fit qualification for the fair slave of a notoriously susceptible
+old warrior.
+
+She won a party in the widening gossip world; and enough of a party in
+the regent world to make a stream.  Pretending to be the actual Countess
+of Ormont, though not publicly acknowledged as his countess by the earl,
+she had on her side the strenuous few who knew and liked her, some who
+were pleased compassionately to patronize, all idle admirers of a
+shadowed beautiful woman at bay, the devotees of any beauty in distress,
+and such as had seen, such as imagined they had seen, such as could paint
+a mental picture of a lady of imposing stature, persuasive appearance,
+pathetic history, and pronounce her to be unjustly treated, with a
+general belief that she was visible and breathing.  She had the ready
+enthusiasts, the responsive sentimentalists, and an honest active minor
+number, of whom not every one could be declared perfectly unspotted in
+public estimation, however innocent under verdict of the courts of law.
+
+Against her was the livid cloud-bank over a flowery field, that has not
+yet spoken audible thunder: the terrible aggregate social woman, of man's
+creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless,
+upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on to which our
+human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner.  She exhibits
+virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and blood
+of victims on it.  Her fold is a genial climate and the material
+pleasures for the world's sheepy: worshipping herself, she claims the
+sanctification of a performed religion.  She is gentle when unassailed,
+going her way serenely, with her malady in the blood.  When the skin
+bears witness to it, she swallows an apothecary, and there is a short
+convulsion.  She is refreshed by cutting off diseased inferior members:
+the superior betraying foul symptoms, she covers up and retains;
+rationally, too, for they minister to her present existence, and she
+lives all in the present.  Her subjects are the mixed Subservient; among
+her rebellious are earth's advanced, who have cold a morning on their
+foreheads, and these would not dethrone her, they would but shame and
+purify by other methods than the druggist.  She loves nothing.
+Undoubtedly, she dislikes the vicious.  On that merit she subsists.
+
+The vexatious thing in speaking of her is, that she compels to the use of
+the rhetorician's brass instrument.  As she is one of the Powers giving
+life and death, one may be excused.  This tremendous queen of the
+congregation has brought discredit on her sex for the scourge laid on
+quivering female flesh, and for the flippant indifference shown to misery
+and to fine distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad; and
+particularly for the undiscriminating hardness upon the starved of women.
+We forget her having been conceived in the fear of men, shaped to gratify
+them.  She is their fiction of the state they would fain beguile
+themselves to suppose her sex has reached, for their benefit; where she
+may be queen of it in a corner, certain of a loyal support, if she will
+only give men her half-the-world's assistance to uplift the fabric
+comfortable to them; together with assurance of paternity, case of mind
+in absence, exclusive possession, enormous and minutest, etc.; not by any
+means omitting a regimental orderliness, from which men are privately
+exempt, because they are men, or because they are grown boys--the brisker
+at lessons after a vacation or a truancy, says the fiction.
+
+In those days the world had oscillated, under higher leading than its
+royal laxity, to rigidity.  Tiny peccadilloes were no longer matter of
+jest, and the sinner exposed stood 'sola' to receive the brand.  A
+beautiful Lady Doubtful needed her husband's countenance if she was to
+take one of the permanent steps in public places.  The party of Lady
+Charlotte Eglett called on the livid cloud-bank aforesaid to discharge
+celestial bolts and sulphur oil on the head of an impudent, underbred,
+ambitious young slut, whose arts had bewitched a distinguished nobleman
+not young in years at least, and ensnared the remainder wits of some
+principal ancient ladies of the land.  Professional Puritans, born
+conservatives, malicious tattlers, made up a goodly tail to Lady
+Charlotte's party.  The epithet 'unbred' was accredited upon the quoted
+sayings and doings of the pretentious young person's aunt, repeated
+abroad by noblemen and gentlemen present when she committed herself;
+and the same were absurd.  They carried a laugh, and so they lived and
+circulated.  Lord Ormont submitted to the infliction of that horrid
+female in his household!  It was no wonder he stopped short of allying
+himself with the family.
+
+Nor was it a wonder that the naturally enamoured old warrior or invalided
+Mars (for she had the gift of beauty) should deem it prudent to be out of
+England when she and her crazy friends determined on the audacious move.
+Or put it the other way--for it is just as confounding right side or
+left--she and her friends take advantage of his absence to make the
+clever push for an establishment, and socially force him to legalize
+their union on his return.  The deeds of the preceding reign had
+bequeathed a sort of legendary credence to the wildest tales gossip
+could invent under a demurrer.
+
+But there was the fact, the earl was away.  Lady Charlotte's party buzzed
+everywhere.  Her ladyship had come to town to head it.  Her ladyship laid
+trains of powder from dinner-parties, balls, routs, park-processions,
+into the Lord Chamberlain's ear, and fired and exploded them, deafening
+the grand official.  Do you consider that virulent Pagan Goddesses and
+the flying torch-furies are extinct?  Error of Christians!  We have
+relinquished the old names and have no new ones for them; but they are
+here, inextinguishable, threading the day and night air with their dire
+squib-trail, if we would but see.  Hissing they go, and we do not hear.
+We feel the effects.
+
+Upon the counsel of Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta sent a letter to Lord Ormont
+at his hotel in Paris, informing him of the position of affairs.  He had
+delayed his return, and there had been none of his brief communications.
+
+She wrote, as she knew, as she felt, coldly.  She was guided by others,
+and her name was up before the world, owing to some half-remembered
+impulsion of past wishes, but her heart was numbed; she was not a woman
+to have a wish without a beat of the heart in it.  For her name she had a
+feeling, to be likened rather to the losing gambler's contemplation of a
+big stake he has flung, and sees it gone while fortune is undecided; and
+he catches at a philosophy nothing other than his hug of a modest little
+background pleasure, that he has always preferred to this accursed bad
+habit of gambling with the luck against him.  Reckless in the cast, she
+was reckless of success.
+
+Her letter was unanswered.
+
+Then, and day by day more strongly, she felt for her name.  She put a
+false heart into it.  She called herself to her hearing the Countess of
+Ormont, and deigned to consult the most foolish friend she could have
+chosen--her aunt; and even listened to her advice, that she should run
+about knocking at all the doors open to her, and state her case against
+the earl.  It seemed the course to take, the moment for taking it.  Was
+she not asked if she could now at last show she had pride?  Her pride ran
+stinging through her veins, like a band of freed prisoners who head the
+rout to fire a city.  She charged her lord with having designedly--oh!
+cunningly indeed left her to be the prey of her enemies at the hour when
+he knew it behoved him to be her great defender.  There had been no
+disguise of the things in progress: they had been spoken of allusively,
+quite comprehensibly, after the fashion common with two entertaining a
+secret semi-hostility on a particular subject; one of them being the
+creature that blushes and is educated to be delicate, reserved, and
+timorous.  He was not ignorant, and he had left her, and he would not
+reply to her letter!
+
+So fell was her mood, that an endeavour to conjure up the scene of her
+sitting beside the death-bed of Matthew Weyburn's mother, failed to sober
+and smooth it, holy though that time was.  The false heart she had put
+into the pride of her name was powerfuller than the heart in her bosom.
+But to what end had the true heart counselled her of late?  It had been
+a home of humours and languors, an impotent insurgent, the sapper of her
+character; and as we see in certain disorderly States a curative
+incendiarism usurp the functions of the sluggish citizen, and the work
+of re-establishment done by destruction, in peril of a total extinction,
+Aminta's feverish anger on behalf of her name went a stretch to vivify
+and give her dulled character a novel edge.  She said good-bye to
+cowardice.  'I have no husband to defend me--I must do it for myself.'
+The peril of a too complete exercise of independence was just intimated
+to her perceptions.  On whom the blame?  And let the motively guilty go
+mourn over consequences!  That Institution of Marriage was eyed.  Is it
+not a halting step to happiness?  It is the step of a cripple,--and one
+leg or the other poses for the feebler sex,--small is the matter which!
+And is happiness our cry?  Our cry is rather for circumstance and
+occasion to use our functions, and the conditions are denied to women by
+Marriage--denied to the luckless of women, who are many, very many:
+denied to Aminta, calling herself Countess of Ormont, for one, denied to
+Mrs. Lawrence Finchley for another, and in a base bad manner.  She had
+defended her good name triumphantly, only to enslave herself for life or
+snatch at the liberty which besmirches.
+
+Reviewing Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta's real heart pressed forward at the beat,
+in tender pity of the woman for whom a yielding to love was to sin; and
+unwomanly is the woman who does not love: men will say it.  Aminta found
+herself phrasing.  'Why was she unable to love her husband?--he is not
+old.'  She hurried in flight from the remark to confidences imparted by
+other ladies, showing strange veins in an earthy world; after which, her
+mind was bent to rebuke Mrs. Pagnell for the silly soul's perpetual
+allusions to Lord Ormont's age.  She did not think of his age.  But she
+was vividly thinking that she was young.  Young, married, loveless,
+cramped in her energies, publicly dishonoured--a Lady Doubtful, courting
+one friend whom she liked among women, one friend whom she respected
+among men; that was the sketch of her.
+
+That was in truth the outline, as much as Aminta dared sketch of herself
+without dragging her down lower than her trained instinct would bear to
+look.  Our civilization shuns nature; and most shuns it in the most
+artificially civilized, to suit the market.  They, however, are always
+close to their mother nature, beneath their second nature's mask of
+custom; and Aminta's unconscious concluding touch to the sketch: 'My
+husband might have helped me to a footing in Society,' would complete
+it as a coloured picture, if writ in tones.
+
+She said it, and for the footing in Society she had lost her taste.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence brought the final word from high quarters: that the
+application must be deferred until Lord Ormont returned to town.  It was
+known before, that such would be the decision.  She had it from the
+eminent official himself, and she kicked about the room, setting her
+pretty mouth and nose to pout and sniff, exactly like a boy whose chum
+has been mishandled by a bully.
+
+'Your dear good man is too much for us.  I thought we should drive him.
+'C'est un ruse homme de guerre.'  I like him, but I could slap him.  He
+stops the way.  Upon my word, he seems tolerably careless of his
+treasure.  Does he suppose Mrs. Paggy is a protection?  Do you know she's
+devoted to that man Morsfield?  He listens to her stories.  To judge by
+what he shouts aloud, he intends carrying you off the first opportunity,
+divorcing, and installing you in Cobeck Hall.  All he fears is, that your
+lord won't divorce.  You should have seen him the other day; he marched
+up and down the room, smacking his head and crying out: "Legal measures
+or any weapons her husband pleases!"  For he has come to believe that the
+lady would have been off with him long before, if her lord had no claim
+to the marital title.  "It 's that husband I can't get over! that
+husband!"  He reminded me, to the life, of Lawrence Finchley with a
+headache the morning after a supper, striding, with his hand on the
+shining middle of his head: "It's that Welsh rabbit! that Welsh rabbit!"
+He has a poor digestion, and he will eat cheese.  The Welsh rabbit chased
+him into his bed.  But listen to me, dear, about your Morsfield.  I told
+you he was dangerous.'
+
+'He is not my Morsfield,' said Aminta.
+
+'Beware of his having a tool in Paggy.  He boasts of letters.'
+
+'Mine? Two: and written to request him to cease writing to me.'
+
+'He stops at nothing.  And, oh, my Simplicity!  don't you see you gave
+him a step in begging him to retire?  Morsfield has lived a good deal
+among our neighbours, who expound the physiology of women.  He anatomizes
+us; pulls us to pieces, puts us together, and then animates us with a
+breath of his "passion"--sincere upon every occasion, I don't doubt.  He
+spared me, although he saw I was engaged.  Perhaps it was because I 'm of
+no definite colour.  Or he thought I was not a receptacle for "passion."
+And quite true,--Adder, the dear good fellow, has none.  Or where should
+we be?  On a Swiss Alp, in a chalet, he shooting chamois, and I milking
+cows, with 'ah-ahio, ah-ahio,' all day long, and a quarrel at night over
+curds and whey.  Well, and that 's a better old pensioner's limp to his
+end for "passion" than the foreign hotel bell rung mightily, and one of
+the two discovered with a dagger in the breast, and the other a don't-
+look lying on the pavement under the window.  Yes, and that's better than
+"passion" splitting and dispersing upon new adventures, from habit, with
+two sparks remaining of the fire.'
+
+Aminta took Mrs. Lawrence's hands.  'Is it a lecture?'
+
+She was kissed.  'Frothy gabble.  I'm really near to "passion" when I
+embrace you.  You're the only one I could run away with; live with all
+alone, I believe.  I wonder men can see you while that silly lord of
+yours is absent, and not begin Morsfielding.  They're virtuous if they
+resist.  Paggy tells the world .  .  .  well?'  Aminta had reddened.
+
+'What does my aunt tell the world?'
+
+Mrs. Lawrence laid her smoothing hand absently on a frill of lace fichu
+above a sternly disciplined bosom at half-heave.  'I think I can
+judge now that you're not much hurt by this wretched business of the
+presentation.  The little service I could do was a moral lesson to me on
+the subject of deuce-may-care antecedents.  My brother Tom, too, was
+always playing truant, as a boy.  It 's in the blood.'
+
+She seemed to be teasing, and Aminta cried: 'My aunt!  Let me hear.
+She tells the world--?'
+
+'Paggy?  ah, yes.  Only that she says the countess has an exalted opinion
+of Mr. Secretary's handwriting--as witnessed by his fair copy of the
+Memoirs, of course.'
+
+'Poor woman!  How can she talk such foolishness!  I guessed it.'
+
+'You wear a dark red rose when you're guessing, 'ma mie,'--French for, my
+Aminta.'
+
+'But consider, Isabella, Mr. Weyburn has just had the heaviest of losses.
+My aunt should spare mention of him.'
+
+'Matthew Weyburn! we both like the name.'  Mrs. Lawrence touched at her
+friend and gazed.  'I've seen it on certain evenings--crimson over an
+olive sky.  What it forebodes, I can't imagine; but it's the end of a
+lovely day.  They say it threatens rain, if it begins one.  It 's an
+ominous herald.'
+
+'You make me,' said Aminta.  'I must redden if you keep looking at me so
+closely.'
+
+'Now frown one little bit, please.  I love to see you.  I love to see a
+secret disclose itself ingenuously.'
+
+'But what secret, my dear?' cried Aminta's defence of her innocence; and
+she gave a short frown.
+
+'Have no fear.  Mr. Secretary is not the man to be Morsfielding.  And he
+can enjoy his repast; a very good sign.  But is he remaining long?'
+
+'He is going soon, I hear.'
+
+'He's a good boy.  I could have taken to him myself, and not dreaded a
+worrying.  There 's this difference between you and me, though, my
+Aminta; one of us has the fireplace prepared for what's-his-name--
+"passion."  Kiss me.  How could you fancy you were going to have a woman
+for your friend and keep hidden from her any one of the secrets that
+blush! and with Paggy to aid!  I am sure it means very little.
+Admiration for good handwriting is--' a smile broke the sentence.
+
+'You're astray, Isabella.'
+
+'Not I, dear, I'm too fond of you.'
+
+'You read what is not.'
+
+'What is not yet written, you mean.'
+
+'What never could be written.'
+
+'I read what is in the blood, and comes out to me when I look.  That lord
+of yours should take to study you as I have done ever since I fell in
+love with you.  He 's not counselling himself well in keeping away.'
+
+'Now you speak wisely,' said Aminta.
+
+'Not a particle more wisely.  And the reason is close at hand--see.
+You are young, you attract--how could it be otherwise?--and you have
+"passion" sleeping, and likely to wake with a spring whether roused or
+not.  In my observation good-man t'other fellow--the poet's friend--is
+never long absent when the time is ripe--at least, not in places where we
+gather together.  Well, one is a buckler against the other: I don't say
+with lovely Amy May,--with an honourable woman.  But Aminta can smell
+powder and grow more mettlesome.  Who can look at you and be blind to
+passion sleeping!  The sight of you makes me dream of it--me, a woman,
+cool as a wine-cellar or a well.  So there's to help you to know yourself
+and be on your guard.  I know I'm not deceived, because I've fallen in
+love with you, and no love can be without jealousy, so I have the needle
+in my breast, that points at any one who holds a bit of you.  Kind of
+sympathetic needle to the magnet behind anything.  You'll know it, if you
+don't now.  I should have felt the thing without the aid of Paggy.  So,
+then, imagine all my nonsense unsaid, and squeeze a drop or two of 'sirop
+de bon conseil' out of it, as if it were your own wise meditations.'  The
+rest of Mrs. Lawrence's discourse was a swallow's wing skimming the city
+stream.  She departed, and Aminta was left to beat at her heart and ask
+whether it had a secret.
+
+But if there was one, the secret was out, and must have another name.
+It had been a secret for her until she heard her friend speak those pin-
+points that pricked her heart, and sent the blood coursing over her face,
+like a betrayal, so like as to resemble a burning confession.
+
+But if this confessed the truth, she was the insanest of women.
+No woman could be surer that she had her wits.  She had come to see
+things, previously mysteries, with surprising clearness. As, for example,
+that passion was part of her nature; therefore her very life, lying
+tranced.  She certainly could not love without passion such an
+abandonment was the sole justification of love in a woman standing where
+she stood.  And now for the first time she saw her exact position before
+the world; and she saw some way into her lord: saw that he nursed a
+wound, extracted balm from anything enabling him to show the world how he
+despised it, and undesigningly immolated her for the petty gratification.
+
+It could not, in consequence, be the truth.  To bear what she had borne
+she must be a passionless woman; and she was glad of her present safety
+in thinking it.  Once it was absolutely true.  She swam away to the
+golden-circled Island of Once; landed, and dwelt there solitarily and
+blissfully, looking forward to Sunday's walk round the park, looking back
+on it.  Proudly she could tell herself that her dreams of the Prince of
+the island had not been illusions as far as he was concerned; for he had
+a great soul.  He did not aim at a tawdry glory.  He was a loss to our
+army--no loss to his country or the world.  A woman might clasp her
+feeling of pride in having foreseen distinction for him; and a little,
+too, in distinguishing now the true individual distinction from the
+feathered uniform vulgar.  Where the girl's dreams had proved illusions,
+she beheld in a title and luxuries, in a loveless marriage.
+
+That was perilous ground.  Still it taught her to see that the
+substantial is the dust; and passion not being active, she could reflect.
+After a series of penetrative flashes, flattering to her intelligence the
+more startling they were, reflection was exhausted.  She sank on her
+nature's desire to join or witness agonistic incidents, shocks,
+wrestlings, the adventures which are brilliant air to sanguine energies.
+Imagination shot tap, and whirled the circle of a succession of them; and
+she had a companion and leader, unfeatured, reverently obeyed, accepted
+as not to be known, not to be guessed at, in the deepest hooded inmost of
+her being speechlessly divined.
+
+The sudden result of Aminta's turmoil was a determination that she must
+look on Steignton.  And what was to be gained by that?  She had no idea.
+And how had she stopped her imaginative flight with the thought of
+looking on Steignton?  All she could tell was, that it would close a
+volume.  She could not say why the volume must be closed.
+
+Her orders for the journey down to Steignton were prompt.  Mrs. Pagnell
+had an engagement at the house of Lady Staines for the next day to meet
+titles and celebrities, and it precluded her comprehension of the
+project.  She begged to have the journey postponed.  She had pledged her
+word, she said.
+
+'To Mr. Morsfield?' said Aminta.
+
+Her aunt was astounded.
+
+'I did tell him we should be there, my dear.'  'He appears to have a
+pleasure in meeting you.'  'He is one of the real gentlemen of the land.'
+
+'You correspond with him?'
+
+'I may not be the only one.'
+
+'Foolish aunty!  How can you speak to me in that senseless way?' cried
+Aminta.  'You know the schemer he is, and that I have no protection from
+his advances unless I run the risk of bloodshed.'
+
+'My dear Aminta, whenever I go into society, and he is present, I know I
+shall not be laughed at, or fall into that pit of one of their dead
+silences, worse for me to bear than titters and faces.  It is their way
+of letting one feel they are of birth above us.  Mr. Morsfield--purer
+blood than many of their highest titles--is always polite, always
+deferential; he helps me to feel I am not quite out of my element in the
+sphere I prefer.  We shall be travelling alone?'
+
+'Have you any fear?'
+
+'Not if nothing happens.  Might we not ask that Mr. Weyburn?'
+
+'He has much work to do.  He will not long be here.  He is absent
+to-day.'
+
+Mrs. Pagnell remarked: 'I must say he earns his money easily.'
+
+Aminta had softened herself with the allusion to the shortness of his
+time with them.  Her aunt's coarse hint, and the thought of his loss,
+and the banishment it would be to her all the way to Steignton, checked
+a sharp retort she could have uttered, but made it necessary to hide her
+eyes from sight.  She went to her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed.
+Even so little as an unspoken defence of him shook her to floods of
+tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON
+
+Unaccountable resolutions, if impromptu and springing from the female
+breast, are popularly taken for caprices; and even when they divert the
+current of a history, and all the more when they are very small matters
+producing a memorable crisis.  In this way does a lazy world consign
+discussion to silence with the cynical closure.  Man's hoary shrug at a
+whimsy sex is the reading of his enigma still.
+
+But ask if she has the ordinary pumping heart in that riddle of a breast:
+and then, as the organ cannot avoid pursuit, we may get hold of it, and
+succeed in spelling out that she is consequent, in her fashion.  She is a
+creature of the apparent moods and shifts and tempers only because she is
+kept in narrow confines, resembling, if you like, a wild cat caged.
+Aminta's journey down to Steignton turned the course of other fortunes
+besides her own; and she disdained the minor adventure it was, while
+dreaming it important; and she determined eagerly on going, without
+wanting to go; and it was neither from a sense of duty nor in a spirit
+of contrariety that she went.  Nevertheless, with her heart in hand,
+her movements are traceably as rational as a soldier's before the enemy
+or a trader's matching his customer.
+
+The wish to look on Steignton had been spoken or sighed for during long
+years between Aminta and her aunt, until finally shame and anger clinched
+the subject.  To look on Steignton for once was now Aminta's phrasing of
+her sudden resolve; it appeared as a holiday relief from recent worries,
+and it was an expedition with an aim, though she had but the coldest
+curiosity to see the place, and felt alien to it.  Yet the thought,
+never to have seen Steignton!  roused phantoms of dead wishes to drive
+the strange engine she was, faster than the living would have done.  Her
+reason for haste was rationally founded on the suddenness of her resolve,
+which, seeing that she could not say she desired to go, seemed to come of
+an external admonition; and it counselled quick movements, lest her
+inspired obedience to the prompting should as abruptly breathe itself
+out.  'And in that case I shall never have seen Steignton at all,' she
+said, with perfect calmness, and did not attempt to sound her meaning.
+
+She did know that she was a magazine of a great storage of powder.  It
+banked inoffensively dry.  She had forgiven her lord, owning the real
+nobleman he was in courtesy to women, whom his inherited ideas of them so
+quaintly minimized and reduced to pretty insect or tricky reptile.  They,
+too, had the choice of being ultimately the one or the other in fact; the
+latter most likely.
+
+If, however, she had forgiven her lord, the shattering of their union was
+the cost of forgiveness.  In letting him stand high, as the lofty man she
+had originally worshipped, she separated herself from him, to feel that
+the humble she was of a different element, as a running water at a
+mountain's base.  They are one in the landscape; they are far from one
+in reality.  Aminta's pride of being chafed at the yoke of marriage.
+
+Her aunt was directed to prepare for a start at an early hour the next
+morning.  Mrs. Pagnell wrote at her desk, and fussed, and ordered the
+posting chariot, and bewailed herself submissively; for it was the
+Countess of Ormont speaking when Aminta delivered commands, and the only
+grievance she dared to mutter was 'the unexpectedness.'  Her letters
+having been despatched, she was amazed in the late evening to hear Aminta
+give the footman orders for the chariot to be ready at the door an hour
+earlier than the hour previously appointed.  She remonstrated.  Aminta
+simply observed that it would cause less inconvenience to all parties.
+A suspicion of her aunt's proceedings was confirmed by the good woman's
+flustered state.  She refrained from smiling.
+
+She would have mustered courage to invite Matthew Weyburn as her escort,
+if he had been at hand.  He was attending to his affairs with lawyers--
+mainly with his friend Mr. Abner.  She studied map and gazetteer till
+late into the night.  Giving her orders to the postillion on the pavement
+in the morning, she named a South-westerly direction out of London, and
+after entering the chariot, she received a case from one of the footmen.
+
+'What is that, my dear?' said Mrs. Pagnell.
+
+Aminta unlocked and laid it open.  A pair of pistols met Mrs. Pagnell's
+gaze.
+
+'We shan't be in need of those things?' the lady said anxiously.
+
+'One never knows, on the road, aunt.'
+
+'Loaded?  You wouldn't hesitate to fire; I'm sure.'
+
+'At Mr. Morsfield himself, if he attempted to stop me.'
+
+Mrs. Pagnell withdrew into her astonishment, and presently asked, in a
+tone of some indignation: 'Why did you mention Mr. Morsfield, Aminta?'
+
+'Did you not write to him yesterday afternoon, aunt?'
+
+'You read the addresses on my letters!'
+
+'Did you not supply him with our proposed route and the time for
+starting?'
+
+'Pistols!' exclaimed Mrs. Pagnell.  'One would fancy you think we are in
+the middle of the last century.  Mr. Morsfield is a gentleman, not a
+highwayman.'
+
+'He gives the impression of his being a madman.'
+
+'The real madman is your wedded husband, Aminta, if wedding it was!'
+
+It was too surely so, in Aminta's mind.  She tried, by looking out of the
+window, to forget her companion.  The dullness of the roads and streets
+opening away to flat fields combined with the postillion's unvarying jog
+to sicken her thoughts over the exile from London she was undergoing, and
+the chance that Matthew Weyburn might call at a vacant house next day, to
+announce his term of service to the earl, whom he had said he much wanted
+to see.  He said it in his sharp manner when there was decision behind
+it.  Several times after contemplating the end of her journey, and not
+perceiving any spot of pleasure ahead, an emotion urged her to turn back;
+for the young are acutely reasoning when their breasts advise them to
+quit a road where no pleasure beckons.
+
+Unlike Matthew Weyburn, the tiptoe sparkle of a happy mind did not leap
+from her at wayside scenes, a sweep of grass, distant hills, clouds in
+flight.  She required, since she suffered, the positive of events or
+blessings to kindle her glow.
+
+Matthew Weyburn might call at the house.  Would he be disappointed?  He
+had preserved her letters of the old school-days.  She had burnt his.
+But she had not burnt the letters of Mr. Morsfield; and she cared nothing
+for that man.  Assuredly she merited the stigma branding women as crack-
+brained.  Yet she was not one of the fools; she could govern a household,
+and she liked work, she had the capacity for devotedness.  So, therefore,
+she was a woman perverted by her position, and she shook her bonds in
+revolt from marriage.  Imagining a fall down some suddenly spied chasm
+of her nature, she had a sisterly feeling for the women named sinful.
+At the same time, reflecting that they are sinful only with the sinful,
+she knelt thankfully at the feet of the man who had saved her from such
+danger.  Tears threatened.  They were a poor atonement for the burning of
+his younger letters.  But not he--she was the sufferer, and she whipped
+up a sensation of wincing at the flames they fell to, and at their void
+of existence, committing sentimental idiocies worthy of a lovesick girl,
+consciously to escape the ominous thought, which her woman's perception
+had sown in her, that he too chafed at a marriage no marriage: was true
+in fidelity, not true through infidelity, as she had come to be.  The
+thought implied misery for both.  She entered a black desolation, with
+the prayer that he might not be involved, for his own sake: partly also
+on behalf of the sustaining picture the young schoolmaster at his task,
+merry among his dear boys, to trim and point them body and mind for their
+business in the world, painted for her a weariful prospect of the life
+she must henceforth drag along.
+
+Is a woman of the plain wits common to numbers ever deceived in her
+perception of a man's feelings for her?  Let her first question herself
+whether she respects him.  If she does not, her judgement will go easily
+astray, intuition and observation are equally at fault, she has no key;
+he has charmed her blood, that is all.  But if she respects him, she
+cannot be deceived; respect is her embrace of a man's character.
+Aminta's vision was clear.  She had therefore to juggle with the fact
+revealed, that she might keep her heart from rushing out; and the process
+was a disintegration of her feminine principle of docility under the
+world's decrees.  At each pause of her mental activity she was hurled
+against the state of marriage.  Compassion for her blameless fellow in
+misery brought a deluge to sweep away institutions and landmarks.
+
+But supposing the blest worst to happen, what exchange had she to bestow?
+Her beauty?  She was reputed beautiful.  It had made a madman of one man;
+and in her poverty of endowments to be generous with, she hovered over
+Mr. Morsfield like a cruel vampire, for the certification that she had a
+much-prized gift to bestow upon his rival.
+
+But supposing it: she would then be no longer in the shiny garden of the
+flowers of wealth; and how little does beauty weigh as all aid to an
+active worker in the serious fighting world!  She would be a kind of
+potted rose-tree under his arm, of which he must eventually tire.
+
+A very cold moment came, when it seemed that even the above supposition,
+in the case of a woman who has been married, is shameful to her, a sin
+against her lover, and should be obliterated under floods of scarlet.
+For, if she has pride, she withers to think of pushing the most noble of
+men upon his generosity.  And, further, if he is not delicately
+scrupulous, is there not something wanting in him?  The very cold wave
+passed, leaving the sentence: better dream of being plain friends.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell had been quietly chewing her cud of the sullens, as was the
+way with her after a snub.  She now resumed her gossip of the naughty
+world she knelt to and expected to see some day stricken by a bolt from
+overhead; containing, as it did, such wicked members as that really
+indefensible brazen Mrs. Amy May, who was only the daughter of a half-pay
+naval captain, and that Marquis of Collestou, who would, they say,
+decorate her with his title to-morrow, if her husband were but somewhere
+else.  She spread all sorts of report, about Mr. Morsfield, and he was
+honour itself in his reserve about her.  'Depend upon it, Aminta--he was
+not more than a boy then, and they say she aimed at her enfranchisement
+by plotting the collision, for his Yorkshire revenues are immense,
+and he is, you know, skilful in the use of arms, and Captain May has no
+resources whatever: penury! no one cares to speculate how they contrive!
+---but while that dreadful duelling--and my lord as bad as any in his
+day-exists, depend upon it, an unscrupulous good-looking woman has as
+many lives for her look of an eye or lift of a finger as a throned
+Ottoman Turk on his divan.'
+
+Aminta wished to dream.  She gave her aunt a second dose, and the lady
+relapsed again.
+
+Power to dream had gone.  She set herself to look at roadside things,
+cottage gardens, old housewives in doorways, gaffer goodman meeting his
+crony on the path, groups of boys and girls.  She would take the girls,
+Matthew Weyburn the boys.  She had lessons to give to girls, she had
+sympathy, pity, anticipation.  That would be a life of happy service.
+It might be a fruitful trial of the system he proposed, to keep the boys
+and girls in company as much as possible, both at lessons and at games.
+His was the larger view.  Her lord's view appeared similar to that of her
+aunt's 'throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.'  Matthew Weyburn believed in
+the bettering of the world; Lord Ormont had no belief like it.
+
+Presently Mrs. Pagnell returned to the charge, and once more she was
+nipped, and irritated to declare she had never known her niece's temper
+so provoking.  Aminta was launching a dream of a lass she had seen in a
+field, near a white hawthorn, standing upright, her left arm aloft round
+the pole of a rake, the rim of her bonnet tipped on her forehead; an
+attitude of a rustic.
+
+Britannia with helmet heeling at dignity.  The girl's eyes hung to the
+passing chariot, without movement of her head.  It was Aminta who looked
+back, and she saw the girl looking away.  Among the superior dames and
+damsels she had seen, there was not one to match that figure for stately
+air, gallant ease, and splendour of pose.  Matthew Weyburn would have
+admired the girl.  Aminta did better than envy, she cast off the last
+vestiges of her bitter ambition to be a fine lady, and winged into the
+bosom of the girl, and not shyly said 'yes' to Matthew Weyburn, and to
+herself, deep in herself: 'A maid has no need to be shy.'  Hardly
+blushing, she walks on into the new life beside him, and hears him say:
+'I in my way, you in yours; we are equals, the stronger for being
+equals,' and she quite agrees, and she gives him the fuller heart for
+his not requiring her to be absorbed--she is the braver mate for him.
+Does not that read his meaning?  Happiest of the girls of earth, she has
+divined it at once, from never having had the bitter ambition to be a
+slave, that she might wear rich tissues; and let herself be fettered,
+that she might loll in idleness; lose a soul to win a title; escape
+commonplace to discover it ghastlier under cloth of gold, and the animal
+crowned, adored, fattened, utterly served, in the class called by consent
+of human society the Upper.
+
+Reason whispered a reminder of facts to her.
+
+'But I am not the Countess of Ormont!' she said.  She felt herself the
+girl, her sensations were so intensely simple.
+
+Proceeding to an argument, that the earl did not regard her as the
+Countess of Ormont, or the ceremony at the British Embassy as one serious
+and binding, she pushed her reason too far: sweet delusion waned.  She
+waited for some fresh scene to revive it.
+
+Aminta sat unwittingly weaving her destiny.
+
+While she was thus engaged, a carriage was rolling on the more westerly
+road down to Steignton.  Seated in it were Lady Charlotte Eglett and
+Matthew Weyburn.  They had met at Arthur Abner's office the previous day.
+She went there straight from Lord Ormont's house-agent and upholsterer,
+to have a queer bit of thunderous news confirmed, that her brother was
+down at Steignton, refurnishing the house, and not for letting.  She
+was excited: she treated Arthur Abner's closed-volume reticence as a
+corroboration of the house-agent's report, and hearing Weyburn speak of
+his anxiety to see the earl immediately, in order to get release from his
+duties, proposed a seat in her carriage; for down Steignton way she meant
+to go, if only as excuse for a view of the old place.  She kept asking
+what Lord Ormont wanted down at Steignton refurnishing the house, and not
+to let it!  Her evasions of answers that, plain speculation would supply
+were quaint.  'He hasn't my feeling for Steignton.  He could let it--
+I couldn't.  Sacrilege to me to have a tenant in my old home where I was
+born.  He's furnishing to raise his rent.  His country won't give him
+anything to do, so he turns miser.  That's my brother Rowsley's way of
+taking on old age.'
+
+Her brother Rowsley might also be showing another sign of his calamitous
+condition.  She said to Weyburn, in the carriage, that her brother
+Rowsley might like having his hair clipped by the Philistine woman; which
+is one of the ways of strong men to confess themselves ageing.  'Not,'
+said she, with her usual keen justness 'not that I've, a word against
+Delilah.  I look upon her as a patriot; she dallied and she used the
+scissors on behalf of her people.  She wasn't bound to Samson in honour,
+--liked a strong man, probably enough.  She proved she liked her country
+better.  The Jews wrote the story of it, so there she stands for
+posterity to pelt her, poor wretch.'
+
+'A tolerably good analogy for the story of men and women generally,' said
+Weyburn.
+
+'Ah, well, you've a right to talk; you don't run miauling about women.
+It 's easy to be squashy on that subject.  As for the Jews, I don't go by
+their history, but now they 're down I don't side with the Philistines,
+or Christians.  They 're good citizens, and they 've got Samson in the
+brain, too.  That comes of persecution, a hard education.  They beat the
+world by counting in the head.  That 's because they 've learnt the value
+of fractions.  Napoleon knew it in war, when he looked to the boots and
+great-coats of his men;  those were his fractions.  Lord Ormont thinks he
+had too hard-and-fast a system for the battle-field.'
+
+'A greater strategist than tactician, my lady?  It may be,' said Weyburn,
+smiling at her skips.
+
+'Massing his cannon to make a big hole for his cavalry, my brother says;
+and weeding his infantry for the Imperial Guard he postponed the moment
+to use.'
+
+'At Moskowa?'
+
+'Waterloo.  I believe Lord Ormont would--there! his country 's lost him,
+and chose it.  They 'll have their day for repentance yet.  What a
+rapture to have a thousand horsemen following you!  I suppose there never
+was a man worthy of the name who roared to be a woman.  I know I could
+have shrieked half my life through to have been born male.  It 's no
+matter now.  When we come to this hateful old age, we meet: no, we 're no
+sex then--we 're dry sticks.  I 'll tell you: my Olmer doctor--that 's an
+impudent fellow who rode by staring into my carriage.  The window's down.
+He could see without pushing his hat in.'
+
+Weyburn looked out after a man cantering on.
+
+'A Mr. Morsfield,' he said.  'I thought it was he when I saw him go by.
+I've met him at the fencing-rooms.  He 's one of the violent fencers,
+good for making his point, if one funks an attack.'
+
+'That man Morsfield, is it?  I wonder what he's doing on the road here.
+He goes over London boasting--hum, nothing to me.  But he 'll find Lord
+Ormont's arm can protect a poor woman, whatever she is.  He'd have had it
+before, only Lord Ormont shuns a scandal.  I was telling you, my Olmer
+doctor forbade horse-riding, and my husband raised a noise like one of my
+turkeycocks on the wing; so I 've given up the saddle, to quiet him.  I
+guessed.  I went yesterday morning to my London physician.  He sounded
+me, pushed out his mouth and pulled down his nose, recommended avoidance
+of excitement.  "Is it heart?"  I said.  He said it was heart.  That was
+the best thing an old woman could hear.  He said, when he saw I wasn't
+afraid, it was likely to be quick; no doctors, no nurses and daily
+bulletins for inquirers, but just the whites of the eyes, the laying-out,
+the undertaker, and the family-vault.  That's one reason why I want to
+see Steignton before the blow that may fall any day, whether my brother
+Rowsley's there or no.  But that Olmer doctor of mine, Causitt, Peter
+Causitt, shall pay me for being a liar or else an ignoramus when I told
+him he was to tell me bluntly the nature of my disease.'
+
+A horseman, in whom they recognized Mr. Morsfield, passed, clattering on
+the road behind them.
+
+'Some woman here about,' Lady Charlotte muttered.  Weyburn saw him joined
+by a cavalier, and the two consulted and pointed whips right and left.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+As well ask (women) how a battle-field concerns them!
+Boys who can appreciate brave deeds are capable of doing them
+Careful not to smell of his office
+Chose to conceive that he thought abstractedly
+Consign discussion to silence with the cynical closure
+Convictions we store--wherewith to shape our destinies
+Death is only the other side of the ditch
+Didn't say a word  No use in talking about feelings
+Enthusiast, when not lyrical, is perilously near to boring
+He took small account of the operations of the feelings
+Her duel with Time
+Hopeless task of defending a woman from a woman
+I hate old age  It changes you so
+Ignorance roaring behind a mask of sarcasm
+Men bore the blame, though the women were rightly punished
+Never nurse an injury, great or small
+No love can be without jealousy
+Old age is a prison wall between us and young people
+Orderliness, from which men are privately exempt
+People were virtuous in past days: they counted their sinners
+Professional Puritans
+Regularity of the grin of dentistry
+That pit of one of their dead silences
+The beat of a heart with a dread like a shot in it
+The good life gone lives on in the mind
+The shots hit us behind you
+The spending, never harvesting, world
+The terrible aggregate social woman
+Venus of nature was melting into a Venus of art
+
+
+[The End]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4479 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+{
+  "DATA": {
+    "CREDIT": "This etext was produced by David Widger",
+    "EBOOK_NUMBER": "4479"
+  }
+}
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v3
+by George Meredith
+#85 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
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+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
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+
+
+Title: Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v3
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4479]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 25, 2002]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v3, by Meredith
+*********This file should be named 4479.txt or 4479.zip**********
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep etexts in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+The "legal small print" and other information about this book
+may now be found at the end of this file.  Please read this
+important information, as it gives you specific rights and
+tells you about restrictions in how the file may be used.
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+XII.      MORE OF CUPER'S BOYS
+XIII.     WAR AT OLMER
+XIV.      OLD LOVERS NEW FRIENDS
+XV.       SHOWING A SECRET FISHED WITHOUT ANGLING
+XVI.      ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+MORE OF CUPER'S BOYS
+
+Entering the dining-room at the appointed minute in a punctual household,
+Mrs. Lawrence informed the company that she had seen a Horse Guards
+orderly at the trot up the street.  Weyburn said he was directing a boy
+to ring the bell of the house for him.  Lord Ormont went to the window.
+
+'Amends and honours?'  Mrs. Lawrence hummed and added an operatic
+flourish of an arm.  Something like it might really be imagined.  A large
+square missive was handed to the footman.  Thereupon the orderly trotted
+off.
+
+My lord took seat at table, telling the footman to lay 'that parcel'
+beside the clock on the mantelpiece.  Aminta and Mrs. Lawrence gave out a
+little cry of bird or mouse, pitiable to hear: they could not wait, they
+must know, they pished at sight of plates.  His look deferred to their
+good pleasure, like the dead hand of a clock under key; and Weyburn
+placed the missive before him, seeing by the superscription that it was
+not official.
+
+It was addressed, in the Roman hand of a boy's copybook writing, to
+
+          General the Earl of Ormont, I.C.B., etc.,
+                                   Horse Guards,
+                                             London.'
+
+The earl's eyebrows creased up over the address; they came down low on
+the contents.
+
+He resumed his daily countenance.  'Nothing of importance,' he said to
+the ladies.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence knocked the table with her knuckles.  Aminta put out a
+hand, in sign of her wish.
+
+'Pray let me see it.'
+
+'After lunch will do.'
+
+'No, no, no!  We are women--we are women,' cried Mrs. Lawrence.
+
+'How can it concern women?'
+
+'As well ask how a battle-field concerns them!'
+
+'Yes, the shots hit us behind you,' said Aminta; and she, too, struck the
+table.
+
+He did not prolong their torture.  Weyburn received the folio sheet and
+passed it on.  Aminta read.  Mrs. Lawrence jumped from her chair and ran
+to the countess's shoulder; her red lips formed the petitioning word to
+the earl for the liberty she was bent to take.
+
+'Peep?  if you like,' my lord said, jesting at the blank she would find,
+and soft to the pretty play of her mouth.
+
+When the ladies had run to the end of it, he asked them: 'Well; now
+then?'
+
+'But it's capital--the dear laddies!' Mrs. Lawrence exclaimed.
+
+Aminta's eyes met Weyburn's.
+
+She handed him the sheet of paper; upon the transmission of which empty
+thing from the Horse Guards my lord commented: 'An orderly!'
+
+Weyburn scanned it rapidly, for the table had been served.
+
+The contents were these:
+
+
+
+                    'HIGH BRENT NEAR ARTSWELL.
+                                             'April 7th.
+
+     'To GENERAL THE EARL OF ORMONT
+                         'Cavalry.
+
+     'May it please your Lordship, we, the boys of Mr. Cuper's school,
+     are desirous to bring to the notice of the bravest officer England
+     possesses now living, a Deed of Heroism by a little boy and girl,
+     children of our school laundress, aged respectively eight and six,
+     who, seeing a little fellow in the water out of depth, and sinking
+     twice, before the third time jumped in to save him, though unable to
+     swim themselves; the girl aged six first, we are sorry to say; but
+     the brother, Robert Coop, followed her example, and together they
+     made a line, and she caught hold of the drowning boy, and he held
+     her petycoats, and so they pulled.  We have seen the place: it is
+     not a nice one.  They got him ashore at last.  The park-keeper here
+     going along found them dripping, rubbing his hands, and blowing into
+     his nostrils.  Name, T. Shellen, son of a small cobbler here, and
+     recovered.
+
+     'May it please your Lordship, we make bold to apply, because you
+     have been for a number of years, as far as the oldest can recollect,
+     the Hero of our school, and we are so bold as to ask the favour of
+     General Lord Ormont's name to head a subscription we are making to
+     circulate for the support of their sick mother, who has fallen ill.
+     We think her a good woman.  Gentlemen and ladies of the
+     neighbourhood are willing to subscribe.  If we have a great name to
+     head the list, we think we shall make a good subscription.  Names:--
+
+               'Martha Mary Coop, mother.
+               'Robert Coop.
+               'Jane Coop, the girl, aged six.
+
+     'If we are not taking too great a liberty, a subscription paper will
+     follow.  We are sure General the Earl of Ormont's name will help to
+     make them comfortable.
+               'We are obediently and respectfully,
+                              'DAVID GOWEN,
+                              'WALTER BENCH,
+                              'JAMES PANNERS PARSONS,
+                              'And seven others.'
+
+Weyburn spared Aminta an answering look, that would have been a begging
+of Browny to remember Matey.
+
+'It 's genuine,' he said to Mrs. Lawrence, as he attacked his plate with
+the gusto for the repast previously and benignly observed by her.  'It
+ought to be the work of some of the younger fellows.'
+
+'They spell correctly, on the whole.'
+
+'Excepting,' said my lord, 'an article they don't know much about yet.'
+
+Weyburn had noticed the word, and he smiled.  'Said to be the happy
+state!  The three signing their names are probably what we called bellman
+and beemen, collector, and heads of the swarm-enthusiasts.  If it is not
+the work of some of the younger hands, the school has levelled on minors.
+In any case it shows the school is healthy.'
+
+'I subscribe,' said Mrs. Lawrence.
+
+'The little girl aged six shall have something done for her,' said
+Aminta, and turned her eyes on the earl.
+
+He was familiar with her thrilled voice at a story of bravery.  He said--
+
+'The boys don't say the girl's brother turned tail.'
+
+'Only that the girl's brother aged eight followed the lead of the little
+girl aged six,' Mrs. Lawrence remarked.  'Well, I like the schoolboys,
+too--"we are sorry to say!"  But they 're good lads.  Boys who can
+appreciate brave deeds are capable of doing them.'
+
+'Speak to me about it on Monday,' the earl said to Weyburn.
+
+He bowed, and replied--
+
+'I shall have the day to-morrow.  I 'll walk it and call on Messrs.' (he
+glanced at the paper) 'Gowen, Bench, and Parsons.  I have a German friend
+in London anxious to wear his legs down stumpier.'
+
+'The name of the school?'
+
+'It is called Cuper's.'
+
+Aminta, on hearing the name of Cuper a second time, congratulated herself
+on the happy invention of her pretext to keep Mrs. Pagnell from the table
+at midday.  Her aunt had a memory for names: what might she not have
+exclaimed!  There would have been little in it, but it was as well that
+the 'boy of the name of Weyburn' at Cuper's should be unmentioned.  By an
+exaggeration peculiar to a disgust in fancy, she could hear her aunt
+vociferating 'Weyburn!' and then staring at Mr. Weyburn opposite--perhaps
+not satisfied with staring.
+
+He withdrew after his usual hearty meal, during which his talk of boys
+and their monkey tricks, and what we can train them to, had been pleasant
+generally, especially to Mrs. Lawrence.  Aminta was carried back to the
+minute early years at High Brent.  A line or two of a smile touched her
+cheek.
+
+'Yes, my dear countess, that is the face I want for Lady de Culme
+to-day,' said Mrs. Lawrence.'  She likes a smiling face.  Aunty--aunty
+has always been good; she has never been prim.  I was too much for her,
+until I reflected that she was very old, and deserved to know the truth
+before she left us; and so I went to her; and then she said she wished to
+see the Countess of Ormont, because of her being my dearest friend.  I
+fancy she entertains an 'arriere' idea of proposing her flawless niece
+Gracey, Marchioness of Fencaster, to present you.  She 's quite equal to
+the fatigue herself.  You 'll rejoice in her anecdotes.  People were
+virtuous in past days: they counted their sinners.  In those days, too,
+as I have to understand, the men chivalrously bore the blame, though the
+women were rightly punished.  Now, alas!  the initiative is with the
+women, and men are not asked for chivalry.  Hence it languishes.  Lady
+de Culme won't hear of the Queen of Blondes; has forbidden her these many
+years!'
+
+Lord Ormont, to whom the lady's prattle was addressed, kept his visage
+moveless, except in slight jerks of the brows.
+
+'What queen?'
+
+'You insist upon renewing my old, old pangs of jealousy, my dear lord!
+The Queen of Cyprus, they called her, in the last generation; she fights
+our great duellist handsomely.'
+
+'My dear Mrs. Lawrence!'
+
+'He triumphs finally, we know, but she beats him every round.'
+
+'It 's only tattle that says the duel has begun.'
+
+'May is the month of everlasting beauty!  There 's a widower marquis now
+who claims the right to cast the glove to any who dispute it.'
+
+'Mrs. May is too good-looking to escape from scandal.'
+
+'Amy May has the good looks of the Immortals.'
+
+'She can't be thirty.'
+
+'In the calendar of women she counts thirty-four.'
+
+'Malignity!  Her husband's a lucky man.'
+
+'The shots have proved it.'
+
+Lord Ormont nodded his head over the hopeless task of defending a woman
+from a woman, and their sharp interchange ceased.  But the sight of his
+complacency in defeat told Aminta that he did not respect his fair
+client: it drew a sketch of the position he allotted his wife before the
+world side by side with this Mrs. Amy May, though a Lady de Culme was
+persuaded to draw distinctions.
+
+He had, however, quite complacently taken the dose intended for him by
+Mrs. Lawrence, who believed that the system of gently forcing him was the
+good one.
+
+The ladies drove away in the afternoon.  The earl turned his back on
+manuscript.  He sent for a couple of walking sticks, and commanded
+Weyburn to go through his parades.  He was no tyro, merely out of
+practice, and unacquainted with the later, simpler form of the great
+master of the French school, by which, at serious issues, the guarding of
+the line can be more quickly done: as, for instance, the 'parade de
+septime' supplanting the slower 'parade de prime;' the 'parade de quarte'
+having advantage over the 'parade de quince;' the 'parade de tierce'
+being readier and stronger than the 'parade de sixte;' the same said for
+the 'parade de seconde' instead of the weak 'parade d'octave.'
+
+These were then new points of instruction.  Weyburn demonstrated them as
+neatly as he could do with his weapon.
+
+'Yes, the French think,' Lord Ormont said, grasping the stick to get
+conviction of thumb-strength and finger-strength from the parades
+advocated; 'their steel would thread the ribs of our louts before: they
+could raise a cry of parry; so here they 're pleased to sneer at fencing,
+as if it served no purpose but the duel.  Fencing, for one thing, means,
+that with a good stick in his hand, a clever fencer can double up a giant
+or two, grant him choice of ground.  Some of our men box; but the sword's
+the weapon for an officer, and precious few of 'em are fit for more than
+to kick the scabbard.  Slashing comes easier to them: a plaguey cut, if
+it does cut--say, one in six.  Navy too.  Their cutlass-drill is like a
+woman's fling of the arm to fetch a slap from behind her shoulder.
+Pinking beats chopping.  These English 'll have their lesson.  It 's like
+what you call good writing: the simple way does the business, and that's
+the most difficult to learn, because you must give your head to it, as
+those French fellows do.  'Trop de finesse' is rather their fault.
+Anything's better than loutishness.  Well! the lesson 'll come.'
+
+He continued.  He spoke as he thought: he was not speaking what he was
+thinking.  His mind was directed on the visit of Aminta to Lady de Culme,
+and the tolerably wonderful twist whereby Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had
+vowed herself to his girl's interests.  And he blamed neither of them;
+only he could not understand how it had been effected, for Aminta and
+Mrs. Lawrence had not been on such particularly intimate terms last week
+or yesterday.  His ejaculation, 'Women!' was, as he knew, merely
+ignorance roaring behind a mask of sarcasm.  But it allied him with all
+previous generations on the male side, and that was its virtue.  His view
+of the shifty turns of women got no further, for the reason that he took
+small account of the operations of the feelings, to the sole exercise of
+which he by system condemned the sex.
+
+He was also insensibly half a grain more soured by the homage of those
+poor schoolboys, who called to him to take it for his reward in a country
+whose authorities had snubbed, whose Parliament had ignored, whose Press
+had abused him.  The ridiculous balance made him wilfully oblivious that
+he had seen his name of late eulogized in articles and in books for the
+right martial qualities.  Can a country treating a good soldier--not
+serving it for pay--in so scurvy a fashion, be struck too hard with our
+disdain?  One cannot tell it in too plain a language how one despises its
+laws, its moralities, its sham of society.  The Club, some choice
+anecdotists, two or three listeners to his dolences clothed as diatribes;
+a rubber, and the sight of his girl at home, composed, with a week's
+shooting now and then, his round of life now that she refused to travel.
+What a life for a soldier in his vigour.  Weyburn was honoured by the
+earl's company on the walk to Chiallo's.  In the street of elegant shops
+they met Lord Adderwood, and he, as usual, appeared in the act of
+strangling one of his flock of yawns, with gentlemanly consideration for
+the public.  Exercise was ever his temporary specific for these
+incurables.  Flinging off his coat, he cast away the cynic style
+engendering or engendered by them.  He and Weyburn were for a bout.  Sir
+John Randeller and Mr. Morsfield were at it, like Bull in training and
+desperado foiled.  A French 'maitre d'armes,' famed in 'escrime,'
+standing near Captain Chiallo, looked amused in the eyes, behind a mask
+of professional correctness.  He had come on an excursion for the display
+of his art.  Sir John's very sturdy defence was pierced.  Weyburn saluted
+the Frenchman as an acquaintance, and they shook hands, chatted,
+criticized, nodded.  Presently he and his adversary engaged, vizored and
+in their buckram, and he soon proved to be too strong for Adderwood, as
+the latter expected and had notified to Lord Ormont before they crossed
+the steel.  My lord had a pleasant pricking excitement in the sound.
+There was a pretty display between Weyburn and the 'escrimeur,' who
+neatly and kindly trifled, took a point and returned one, and at the
+finish complimented him.  The earl could see that he had to be
+sufficiently alert.
+
+Age mouthed an ugly word to the veteran insensible of it in his body,
+when a desire to be one with these pairs of nimble wrists and legs was
+like an old gamecock shown the pit and put back into the basket.  He left
+the place, carrying away an image of the coxcombical attitudinizing of
+the man Morsfield at the salut, upon which he brought down his powers of
+burlesque.
+
+My lord sketched the scene he had just quitted to a lady who had stopped
+her carriage.  She was the still beautiful Mrs. Amy May, wife of the
+famous fighting captain.  Her hair was radiant in a shady street; her
+eyelids tenderly toned round the almond enclosure of blue pebbles, bright
+as if shining from the seawash.  The lips of the fair woman could be seen
+to say that they were sweet when, laughing or discoursing, they gave
+sight of teeth proudly her own, rivalling the regularity of the grin of
+dentistry.  A Venus of nature was melting into a Venus of art, and there
+was a decorous concealment of the contest and the anguish in the process,
+for which Lord Ormont liked her well enough to wink benevolently at her
+efforts to cheat the world at various issues, and maintain her duel with
+Time.  The world deserved that she should beat it, even if she had been
+all deception.
+
+She let the subject of Mr. Morsfield pass without remark from her, until
+the exhaustion of open-air topics hinted an end of their conversation,
+and she said--
+
+'We shall learn next week what to think if the civilians.  I have heard
+Mr. Morsfield tell that he is 'de premiere force.'  Be on your guard.
+You are to know that I never forget a service, and you did me one once.'
+'You have reason .  .  . ?' said the earl.
+
+'If anybody is the dragon to the treasure he covets he is a spadassin who
+won't hesitate at provocations.  Adieu.'
+
+Lord Ormont's eye had been on Mr. Morsfield.  He had seen what Mrs.
+Pagnell counselled her niece to let, him see.  He thanked Mr. Morsfield
+for a tonic that made him young with anticipations of bracing; and he set
+his head to work upon an advance half-way to meet the gentleman, and
+safely exclude his wife's name.
+
+Monday brought an account of Cuper's boys.  Aminta received it while the
+earl was at his papers for the morning's news of the weightier deeds of
+men.
+
+They were the right boys, Weyburn said; his interview with Gowen, Bench,
+Parsons, and the others assured him that the school was breathing big
+lungs.  Mr. Cuper, too, had spoken well of them.
+
+'You walked the twenty miles?'  Aminta interrupted him.
+
+'With my German friend: out and home: plenty of time in the day.  He has
+taken to English boys, but asks why enthusiasm and worship of great deeds
+don't grow upward from them to their elders.  And I, in turn, ask why
+Germans insist on that point more even than the French do.'
+
+'Germans are sentimental.  But the English boys he saw belonged to a
+school with traditions of enthusiasm sown by some one.  The school
+remembered?'
+
+'Curiously, Mr. Cuper tells me, the hero of the school has dropped and
+sprung up, stout as ever, twice--it tells me what I wish to believe--
+since Lord Ormont led their young heads to glory.  He can't say how it
+comes. The tradition's there, and it 's kindled by some flying spark.'
+
+'They remember who taught the school to think of Lord Ormont?'
+
+'I 'm a minor personage.  I certainly did some good, and that 's a push
+forward.'
+
+'They speak of you?'
+
+It was Aminta more than the Countess of Ormont speaking to him.
+
+'You take an interest in the boys,' he said, glowing.  'Yes, well, they
+have their talks.  I happened to be a cricketer, counting wickets and
+scores.  I don't fancy it's remembered that it was I preached my lord.
+A day of nine wickets and one catch doesn't die out of a school.  The
+boy Gowen was the prime spirit in getting up the subscription for the
+laundress.  But Bench and Parsons are good boys, too.'
+
+He described them, dwelt on them.  The enthusiast, when not lyrical, is
+perilously near to boring.  Aminta was glad of Mrs. Lawrence's absence.
+She had that feeling because Matthew Weyburn would shun talk of himself
+to her, not from a personal sense of tedium in hearing of the boys; and
+she was quaintly reminded by suggestions, coming she knew not whence, of
+a dim likeness between her and these boys of the school when their hero
+dropped to nothing and sprang up again brilliantly--a kind of distant
+cousinship, in her susceptibility to be kindled by so small a flying
+spark as this one on its travels out of High Brent.  Moreover, the dear
+boys tied her to her girlhood, and netted her fleeting youth for the
+moth-box.  She pressed to hear more and more of them, and of the school-
+laundress Weyburn had called to see, and particularly of the child,
+little Jane, aged six.  Weyburn went to look at the sheet of water to
+which little Jane had given celebrity over the county.  The girl stood
+up to her shoulders when she slid off the bank and made the line for her
+brother to hold, he in the water as well.  Altogether, Cuper's boys were
+justified in promoting a subscription, the mother being helpless.
+
+'Modest little woman,' he said of Jane.  'We'll hope people won't spoil
+her.  Don't forget, Lady Ormont, that the brother did his part; he had
+more knowledge of the danger than she.'
+
+'You will undertake to convey our subscriptions?  Lord Ormont spoke of
+the little ones and the schoolboys yesterday.'
+
+'I'll be down again among them next Sunday, Lady Ormont.  On the Monday
+I go to Olmer.'
+
+'The girls of High Brent subscribe?'
+
+There was a ripple under Weyburn's gravity.
+
+'Messrs. Gowen, Bench, and Parsons thought proper to stop Miss Vincent at
+the head of her detachment in the park.'
+
+'On the Sunday?'
+
+'And one of them handed her a paper containing a report of their
+interview with Mrs. Coop and a neat eulogy of little Jane.  But don't
+suspect them, I beg.  I believe them to be good, honest fellows.  Bench,
+they say, is religious; Gowen has written verses; Parsons generally
+harum-scarum.  They're boyish in one way or another, and that'll do.
+The cricket of the school has been low: seems to be reviving.'
+
+'Mr. Weyburn,' said the countess, after a short delay--and Aminta broke
+through--'it pleases me to hear of them, and think they have not
+forgotten you, or, at least, they follow the lead you gave.  I should
+like to know whether an idea I have is true: Is much, I mean constant,
+looking down on young people likely to pull one's mind down to their
+level?'
+
+'Likely enough to betray our level, if there 's danger,' he murmured.
+'Society offers an example that your conjecture is not unfounded, Lady
+Ormont.  But if we have great literature and an interest in the world's
+affairs, can there be any fear of it?  The schoolmaster ploughs to make a
+richer world, I hope.  He must live with them, join with them in their
+games, accustom them to have their heads knocked with what he wants to
+get into them, leading them all the while, as the bigger schoolfellow
+does, if he is a good fellow.  He has to be careful not to smell of his
+office.  Doing positive good is the business of his every day--on a small
+scale, but it 's positive, if he likes his boys.  'Avaunt favouritism!'
+he must like all boys.  And it 's human nature not so far removed from
+the dog; only it's a supple human nature: there 's the beauty of it.  We
+train it.  Nothing is more certain than that it will grow upward.  I have
+the belief that I shall succeed, because I like boys, and they like me.
+It always was the case.'
+
+'I know,' said Aminta.
+
+Their eyes met.  She looked moved at heart behind that deep forest of her
+chestnut eyes.
+
+'And I think I can inspire confidence in fathers and mothers,' he
+resumed.'  I have my boys already waiting for me to found the school.
+I was pleased the other day: an English friend brought an Italian
+gentleman to see me and discuss my system, up at Norwood, at my mother's
+--a Signor Calliani.  He has a nephew; the parents dote on him.  The
+uncle confesses that the boy wants--he has got hold of our word--"pluck."
+We had a talk.  He has promised to send me the lad when I am established
+in Switzerland.'
+
+'When?' said Aminta.
+
+'A relative from whom a Reversion comes is near the end.  It won't be
+later than September that I shall go.  My Swiss friend has the school,
+and would take me at once before he retires.'
+
+'You make friends wherever you go,' said Aminta.
+
+'Why shouldn't everybody?  I'm convinced it's because I show people I
+mean well, and I never nurse an injury, great or small.  And besides,
+they see I look forward.  I do hope good for the world.  If at my school
+we have all nationalities--French boys and German, Italian, Russian,
+Spaniard--without distinction of race and religion and station, and with
+English intermixing--English games, English sense of honour and
+conception of gentleman--we shall help to nationalize Europe.  Emile
+Grenat, Adolf Fleischer, and an Italian, Vincentino Chiuse, are prepared
+to start with me: and they are men of attainments; they will throw up
+their positions; they will do me the honour to trust to my leadership.
+It's not scaling Alps or commanding armies, true.'
+
+'It may be better,' said Aminta, and thought as she spoke.
+
+'Slow work, if we have a taste for the work, doesn't dispirit.
+Otherwise, one may say that an African or South American traveller has a
+more exciting time.  I shall manage to keep my head on its travels.'
+
+'You have ideas about the education of girls?'
+
+'They can't be carried out unaided.'
+
+'Aid will come.'
+
+Weyburn's confidence, high though it was, had not mounted to that pitch.
+
+'One may find a mate,' he said.  The woman to share and practically to
+aid in developing such ideas is not easily found: that he left as
+implied.
+
+Aminta was in need of poetry; but the young schoolmaster's plain, well-
+directed prose of the view of a business in life was welcome to her.
+
+Lord Ormont entered the room.  She reminded him of the boys of High Brent
+and the heroine Jane.  He was ready to subscribe his five-and-twenty
+guineas, he said.  The amount of the sum gratified Weyburn, she could
+see.  She was proud of her lord, and of the boys and the little girl;
+and she would have been happy to make the ardent young schoolmaster aware
+of her growing interest in the young.
+
+The night before the earl's departure on the solitary expedition to which
+she condemned him, he surprised her with a visit of farewell, so that he
+need not disturb her in the early morning, he said.  She was reading
+beside her open jewel-box, and she closed it with the delicate touch of a
+hand turned backward while listening to him, with no sign of nervousness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+WAR AT OLMER
+
+Lively doings were on the leap to animate Weyburn at Olmer during Easter
+week.  The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey, rector of Barborough, on hearing that
+Lady Charlotte Eglett was engaged in knocking at the doors of litigation
+with certain acts that constituted distinct breaches of the law and the
+peace, and were a violation of the rights of her neighbour, Mr. Gilbert
+Addicote, might hope that the troublesome parishioner whom he did not
+often number among his congregation would grant him a term of repose.
+Therein he was deceived.  Alterations and enlargements of the church,
+much required, had necessitated the bricking up of a door regarded by the
+lady as the private entrance to the Olmer pew.  She sent him notice of
+her intention to batter at the new brickwork; so there was the prospect
+of a pew-fight before him.  But now she came to sit under him every
+Sunday; and he could have wished her absent; for she diverted his
+thoughts from piety to the selections of texts applicable in the case of
+a woman who sat with arms knotted, and the frown of an intemperate
+schoolgirl forbidden speech; while her pew's firelight startlingly at
+intervals danced her sinister person into view, as from below.  The
+lady's inaccessible and unconquerable obtuseness to exhortation informed
+the picture with an evil spirit that cried for wrestlings.
+
+Regularly every week-day she headed the war now rageing between Olmer and
+Addicotes, on the borders of the estates.  It was open war, and herself
+to head the cavalry.  Weyburn, driving up a lane in the gig she had sent
+to meet the coach, beheld a thicket of countrymen and boys along a ridge;
+and it swayed and broke, and through it burst the figure of a mounted
+warrior woman at the gallop, followed by what bore an appearance of horse
+and gun, minus carriage, drivers at the flanks cracking whips on foot.
+Off went the train, across a small gorse common, through a gate.
+
+'That's another down,' said his whip.  'Sound good wood it is, not made
+to fall.  Her ladyship's at it hard to-day.  She 'll teach Mr. Addicote
+a thing or two about things females can do.  That is, when they stand
+for their rights.'
+
+He explained to Weyburn that Mr. Addicote, a yeoman farmer and a good
+hunting man, but a rare obstinate one, now learning his lesson from her
+ladyship, was in dispute with her over rights of property on a stretch of
+fir-trees lining the ridge where the estates of Olmer and Addicotes met.
+Her ladyship had sworn that if he did not yield to her claim she would
+cut down every tree of the ridge and sell the lot for timber under his
+nose.  She acted according to her oath, in the teeth of his men two feet
+across the border.  All the world knew the roots of those trees were for
+the most part in Olmer soil, though Addicote shared the shade.  All the
+people about mourned for the felling of those trees.  All blamed Mr.
+Gilbert Addicote for provoking her ladyship, good hunting man though he
+was.  But as to the merits of the question, under the magnifier of the
+gentlemen of the law, there were as many different opinions as wigs in
+the land.
+
+'And your opinion?' said Weyburn.
+
+To which the young groom answered: 'Oh, I don't form an opinion, sir.
+I 'm of my mistress's opinion; and if she says, Do it, think as we like,
+done it has to be.'
+
+Lady Charlotte came at a trot through the gate, to supervise the
+limbering-up of another felled tree.  She headed it as before.  The log
+dragged bounding and twirling, rattling its chains; the crowd along the
+ridge, forbidden to cheer, watching it with intense repression of the
+roar.  We have not often in England sight of a great lady challengeing an
+unpopular man to battle and smacking him in the face like this to provoke
+him.  Weyburn was driven on a half-circle of the lane to the gate, where
+he jumped out to greet Lady Charlotte trotting back for another smack in
+the face of her enemy,--a third rounding of her Troy with the vanquished
+dead at her heels, as Weyburn let a flimsy suggestion beguile his fancy,
+until the Homeric was overwhelming even to a playful mind, and he put
+her in a mediaeval frame.  She really had the heroical aspect in a
+grandiose-grotesque, fitted to some lines of Ariosto.  Her head wore
+a close hood, disclosing a fringe of grey locks, owlish to see about
+features hooked for action.
+
+'Ah, you!  there you are: good--I'll join you in three minutes,' she sang
+out to him, and cantered to the ridge.
+
+Hardly beyond the stated number she was beside him again, ranging her
+steed for the victim log to dance a gyration on its branches across the
+lane and enter a field among the fallen compeers.  One of her men had run
+behind her.  She slid from her saddle and tossed him the reins, catching
+up her skirts.
+
+'That means war, as much as they'll have it in England,' she said, seeing
+his glance at the logs.  'My husband's wise enough to leave it to me, so
+I save him trouble with neighbours.  An ass of a Mr. Gilbert Addicote
+dares us to make good our claim on our property, our timber, because half
+a score of fir-tree roots go stretching on to his ground.'
+
+She swished her whip.  Mr. Gilbert Addicote received the stroke and
+retired, a buried subject.  They walked on at an even pace.  'You 'll see
+Leo to-morrow.  He worships you.  You may as well give him a couple of
+hours' coaching a day for the week.  He'll be hanging about you, and you
+won't escape him.  Well, and my brother Rowsley: how is Lord Ormont?
+He never comes to me now, since--Well, it 's nothing to me; but I like
+to see my brother.  She can't make any change here.  Olmer and Lady
+Charlotte 's bosom were both implied.  'What do you think?--you 've
+noticed: is he in good health?  It 's the last thing he 'll be got to
+speak of.'
+
+Weyburn gave the proper assurances.
+
+'Not he!' said she.  'He's never ill.  Men beat women in the long race,
+if they haven't overdone it when young.  My doctor wants me to renounce
+the saddle.  He says it 's time.  Not if I 've got work for horseback!'
+she nicked her head emphatically: 'I hate old age.  They sha'nt dismount
+me till a blow comes.  Hate it!  But I should despise myself if I showed
+signs, like a worm under heel.  Let Nature do her worst; she can't
+conquer us as long as we keep up heart.  You won't have to think of that
+for a good time yet.  Now tell me why Lord Ormont didn't publish the
+"Plan for the Defence" you said he was writing; and he was, I know.  He
+wrote it and he finished it; you made the fair copy.  Well, and he read
+it,--there! see!'  She took the invisible sheets in her hands and tore
+them.  'That's my brother.  He's so proud.  It would have looked like
+asking the country, that injured him, to forgive him.  I wish it had been
+printed.  But whatever he does I admire.  That--she might have advised,
+if she 'd been a woman of public spirit or cared for his reputation.  He
+never comes near me.  Did she read your copy?'
+
+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 Finclhley 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.
+
+'It is poor fare in cottages.'
+
+'I have been feeding on better than bread and meat,' she said.' I should
+have eaten if I had felt appetite.  My looks will recover, such as they
+are.  I hope I have grown out of them; they are a large part of the
+bondage of women.  You would like to see me safe into some conveyance.
+Go up-stairs for a few minutes; I will wait here.'
+
+He obeyed her.  Passing from the living to the dead, from the dead to the
+living, they were united in his heart.
+
+Her brevity of tone, and her speech, so practical upon a point of need,
+under a crisis of distress, reminded him of Lady Charlotte at the time
+of the groom's arrival with her letter.
+
+Aminta was in no hurry to drive.  She liked walking and looking down on
+London, she said.
+
+'My friend and schoolmate, Selina Collett, comes to me at Whitsuntide.
+We have taken a house on the Upper Thames, above Marlow.  You will come
+and see us, if you can be persuaded to leave your boys.  We have a
+boathouse, and a bathing-plank for divers.  The stream is quiet there
+between rich meadows.  It seems to flow as if it thought.  I am not
+poetical; I tell you only my impression. You shall be a great deal by
+yourself, as men prefer to be.'
+
+'As men are forced to be--I beg!' said he.  'Division is against my
+theories.'
+
+'We might help, if we understood one another, I have often fancied.
+I know something of your theories.  I should much like to hear you
+some day on the scheme of the school in Switzerland, and also on the
+schoolmaster's profession.  She whom we have lost was full of it, and
+spoke of it to me as much as her weakness would permit.  The subject
+seemed to give her strength.'
+
+'She has always encouraged me,' said Weyburn.' I have lost her, but I
+shall feel that she is not absent.  She had ideas of her own about men
+and women.'
+
+'Some she mentioned.'
+
+'And about marriage?'
+
+'That too.'
+
+Aminta shook herself out of a sudden stupor.
+
+'Her mind was very clear up to the last hour upon all the subjects
+interesting her son.  She at one time regretted his not being a soldier,
+for the sake of his father's memory.  Then she learned to think he could
+do more for the world as the schoolmaster.  She said you can persuade.'
+
+'We had our talks.  She would have the reason, if she was to be won.
+I like no other kind of persuasion.'
+
+'I long to talk over the future school with you.  That is, to hear your
+plans.'
+
+They were at the foot of the hill, in view of an inn announcing livery
+stables.  She wished to walk the whole distance.  He shook his head.
+
+The fly was ready for her soon, and he begged to see her safe home.  She
+refused, after taking her seat, but said: 'At any other time.  We are old
+friends.  You will really go through the ceremony of consulting me about
+the school?'
+
+He replied: 'I am honoured.'
+
+'Ah, not to me,' said Aminta.  'We will be the friends we--You will not
+be formal with me?--not from this day?'
+
+She put out her hand.  He took it gently.  The dead who had drawn them
+together withheld a pressure.  Holding the hand, he said: 'I shall crave
+leave of absence for some days.'
+
+'I shall see you on the day,' said she.  'If it is your desire: I will
+send word.'
+
+'We both mourn at heart.  We should be in company.  Adieu.'
+
+Their hands fell apart.  They looked.  The old school time was in each
+mind.  They saw it as a shore-bank in grey outline across morning mist.
+Years were between; and there was a division of circumstance, more
+repelling than an abyss or the rush of deep wild waters.
+
+Neither of them had regrets.  Under their cloud, and with the grief they
+shared, they were as happy as two could be in recovering one another as
+friends.
+
+On the day of the funeral Aminta drove to the spot where they had parted
+--she walked to the churchyard.
+
+She followed the coffin to its gravel-heap, wishing neither to see nor be
+seen, only that she might be so far attached to the remains of the dead;
+and the sense of blessedness she had in her bowed simplicity of feeling
+was as if the sainted dead had cleansed and anointed her.
+
+When the sods had been cast on, the last word spoken, she walked her way
+back, happy in being alone, unnoticed.  She was grateful to the chief
+mourner for letting her go as she had come.  That helped her to her sense
+of purification, the haven out of the passions, hardly less quiet than
+the repose into which the dear dead woman, his mother, had entered.
+
+London lay beneath her.  The might of the great hive hummed at the verge
+of her haven of peace without disturbing.  There she had been what none
+had known of her: an ambitious girl, modest merely for lack of
+intrepidity; paralyzed by her masterful lord; aiming her highest at a
+gilt weathercock; and a disappointed creature, her breast a home of
+serpents; never herself.  She thought and hoped she was herself now.
+Alarm lest this might be another of her moods, victim of moods as she had
+latterly been, was a shadow armed with a dart playing round her to find
+the weak spot.  It sprang from her acknowledged weakness of nature; and
+she cast about for how to keep it outside her and lean on a true though a
+small internal support.  She struck at her desires, to sound them.
+
+They were yesterday for love; partly for distinction, for a woman having
+beauty to shine in the sphere of beauty; but chiefly to love and be
+loved, therefore to live.  She had yesterday read letters of a man who
+broke a music from the word--about as much music as there is in a tuning
+--fork, yet it rang and lingered; and he was not the magical musician.
+Now those letters were as dust of the road.  The sphere of beauty was a
+glass lamp-globe for delirious moths.  She had changed.  Belief in the
+real change gave her full view of the compliant coward she had been.
+
+Her heart assured her she had natural courage.  She felt that it could be
+stubborn to resist a softness.  Now she cared no more for the hackneyed
+musical word; friendship was her desire.  If it is not life's poetry, it
+is a credible prose; a land of low undulations instead of Alps; beyond
+the terrors and the deceptions.  And she could trust her friend: he who
+was a singular constancy.  His mother had told her of his preserving
+letters of a girl he loved when at school; and of his journeys to an
+empty house at Dover.  That was past; but, as the boy, so the man would
+be in sincerity of feeling trustworthy to the uttermost.
+
+She mused on the friend.  He was brave.  She had seen how he took his
+blow, and sorrow as a sister, conquering emotion.  It was not to be
+expected of him by one who knew him when at school.  Had he faults?  He
+must have faults.  She, curiously, could see none.  After consenting to
+his career as a schoolmaster, and seeing nothing ludicrous in it, she
+endowed him with the young school-hero's reputation, beheld him with the
+eyes of the girl who had loved him--and burnt his old letters!--bitterly
+regretted that she burnt his letters!--and who had applauded his contempt
+of ushers and master opposing his individual will and the thing he
+thought it right to do.
+
+Musing thus, she turned a corner, on a sudden, in her mind, and ran
+against a mirror, wherein a small figure running up to meet her, grew
+large and nodded, with the laugh and eyes of Browny.  So little had she
+changed!  The stedfast experienced woman rebuked that volatile, and some
+might say, faithless girl.  But the girl had her answer: she declared
+they were one and the same, affirmed that the years between were a bad
+night's dream, that her heart had been faithful, that he who conjures
+visions of romance in a young girl's bosom must always have her heart,
+as a crisis will reveal it to her.  She had the volubility of the mettled
+Browny of old, and was lectured.  When she insisted on shouting 'Matey!
+Matey!' she was angrily spurned and silenced.
+
+Aminta ceased to recline in her carriage.  An idea that an indolent
+posture fostered vapourish meditations, counselled her sitting rigidly
+upright and interestedly observing the cottages and merry gutter-children
+along the squat straight streets of a London suburb.  Her dominant
+ultimate thought was, 'I, too, can work!'  Like her courage, the plea of
+a capacity to work appealed for confirmation to the belief which exists
+without demonstrated example; and as she refrained from probing to the
+inner sources of that mental outcry, it was allowed to stand and remain
+among the convictions we store--wherewith to shape our destinies.
+
+Childishly indeed, quite witlessly, she fell into a trick of repeating
+the name of Matthew Weyburn in her breast and on her lips, after the
+manner of Isabella Lawrence Finchley, when she had inquired for his
+Christian name, and went on murmuring it, as if sucking a new bonbon,
+with the remark: 'It sounds nice, it suits the mouth.'  Little Selina
+Collett had told, Aminta remembered, how those funny boys at Cuper's
+could not at first get the name 'Aminta' to suit the mouth, but went
+about making hideous faces in uttering it.  She smiled at the
+recollection, and thought, up to a movement of her lips, one is not
+tempted to do that in saying Matthew Weyburn!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+SHOWING A SECRET FISHED WITHOUT ANGLING
+
+That great couchant dragon of the devouring jaws and the withering
+breath, known as our London world, was in expectation of an excitement
+above yawns on the subject of a beautiful Lady Doubtful proposing
+herself, through a group of infatuated influential friends, to a decorous
+Court, as one among the ladies acceptable.  The popular version of it
+sharpened the sauce by mingling romance and cynicism very happily; for
+the numerous cooks, when out of the kitchen, will furnish a piquant dish.
+Thus, a jewel-eyed girl of half English origin (a wounded British officer
+is amiably nursed in a castle near the famous Peninsula battlefield,
+etc.), running wild down the streets of Seville, is picked up by Lord
+Ormont, made to discard her tambourine, brought over to our shores, and
+allowed the decoration of his name, without the legitimate adornment of
+his title.  Discontented with her position after a time, she now pushes
+boldly to claim the place which will be most effective in serving her as
+a bath.  She has, by general consent, beauty; she must, seeing that she
+counts influential friends, have witchery.  Those who have seen her
+riding and driving beside her lord, speak of Andalusian grace, Oriental
+lustre, fit qualification for the fair slave of a notoriously susceptible
+old warrior.
+
+She won a party in the widening gossip world; and enough of a party in
+the regent world to make a stream.  Pretending to be the actual Countess
+of Ormont, though not publicly acknowledged as his countess by the earl,
+she had on her side the strenuous few who knew and liked her, some who
+were pleased compassionately to patronize, all idle admirers of a
+shadowed beautiful woman at bay, the devotees of any beauty in distress,
+and such as had seen, such as imagined they had seen, such as could paint
+a mental picture of a lady of imposing stature, persuasive appearance,
+pathetic history, and pronounce her to be unjustly treated, with a
+general belief that she was visible and breathing.  She had the ready
+enthusiasts, the responsive sentimentalists, and an honest active minor
+number, of whom not every one could be declared perfectly unspotted in
+public estimation, however innocent under verdict of the courts of law.
+
+Against her was the livid cloud-bank over a flowery field, that has not
+yet spoken audible thunder: the terrible aggregate social woman, of man's
+creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless,
+upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on to which our
+human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner.  She exhibits
+virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and blood
+of victims on it.  Her fold is a genial climate and the material
+pleasures for the world's sheepy: worshipping herself, she claims the
+sanctification of a performed religion.  She is gentle when unassailed,
+going her way serenely, with her malady in the blood.  When the skin
+bears witness to it, she swallows an apothecary, and there is a short
+convulsion.  She is refreshed by cutting off diseased inferior members:
+the superior betraying foul symptoms, she covers up and retains;
+rationally, too, for they minister to her present existence, and she
+lives all in the present.  Her subjects are the mixed Subservient; among
+her rebellious are earth's advanced, who have cold a morning on their
+foreheads, and these would not dethrone her, they would but shame and
+purify by other methods than the druggist.  She loves nothing.
+Undoubtedly, she dislikes the vicious.  On that merit she subsists.
+
+The vexatious thing in speaking of her is, that she compels to the use of
+the rhetorician's brass instrument.  As she is one of the Powers giving
+life and death, one may be excused.  This tremendous queen of the
+congregation has brought discredit on her sex for the scourge laid on
+quivering female flesh, and for the flippant indifference shown to misery
+and to fine distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad; and
+particularly for the undiscriminating hardness upon the starved of women.
+We forget her having been conceived in the fear of men, shaped to gratify
+them.  She is their fiction of the state they would fain beguile
+themselves to suppose her sex has reached, for their benefit; where she
+may be queen of it in a corner, certain of a loyal support, if she will
+only give men her half-the-world's assistance to uplift the fabric
+comfortable to them; together with assurance of paternity, case of mind
+in absence, exclusive possession, enormous and minutest, etc.; not by any
+means omitting a regimental orderliness, from which men are privately
+exempt, because they are men, or because they are grown boys--the brisker
+at lessons after a vacation or a truancy, says the fiction.
+
+In those days the world had oscillated, under higher leading than its
+royal laxity, to rigidity.  Tiny peccadilloes were no longer matter of
+jest, and the sinner exposed stood 'sola' to receive the brand.  A
+beautiful Lady Doubtful needed her husband's countenance if she was to
+take one of the permanent steps in public places.  The party of Lady
+Charlotte Eglett called on the livid cloud-bank aforesaid to discharge
+celestial bolts and sulphur oil on the head of an impudent, underbred,
+ambitious young slut, whose arts had bewitched a distinguished nobleman
+not young in years at least, and ensnared the remainder wits of some
+principal ancient ladies of the land.  Professional Puritans, born
+conservatives, malicious tattlers, made up a goodly tail to Lady
+Charlotte's party.  The epithet 'unbred' was accredited upon the quoted
+sayings and doings of the pretentious young person's aunt, repeated
+abroad by noblemen and gentlemen present when she committed herself;
+and the same were absurd.  They carried a laugh, and so they lived and
+circulated.  Lord Ormont submitted to the infliction of that horrid
+female in his household!  It was no wonder he stopped short of allying
+himself with the family.
+
+Nor was it a wonder that the naturally enamoured old warrior or invalided
+Mars (for she had the gift of beauty) should deem it prudent to be out of
+England when she and her crazy friends determined on the audacious move.
+Or put it the other way--for it is just as confounding right side or
+left--she and her friends take advantage of his absence to make the
+clever push for an establishment, and socially force him to legalize
+their union on his return.  The deeds of the preceding reign had
+bequeathed a sort of legendary credence to the wildest tales gossip
+could invent under a demurrer.
+
+But there was the fact, the earl was away.  Lady Charlotte's party buzzed
+everywhere.  Her ladyship had come to town to head it.  Her ladyship laid
+trains of powder from dinner-parties, balls, routs, park-processions,
+into the Lord Chamberlain's ear, and fired and exploded them, deafening
+the grand official.  Do you consider that virulent Pagan Goddesses and
+the flying torch-furies are extinct?  Error of Christians!  We have
+relinquished the old names and have no new ones for them; but they are
+here, inextinguishable, threading the day and night air with their dire
+squib-trail, if we would but see.  Hissing they go, and we do not hear.
+We feel the effects.
+
+Upon the counsel of Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta sent a letter to Lord Ormont
+at his hotel in Paris, informing him of the position of affairs.  He had
+delayed his return, and there had been none of his brief communications.
+
+She wrote, as she knew, as she felt, coldly.  She was guided by others,
+and her name was up before the world, owing to some half-remembered
+impulsion of past wishes, but her heart was numbed; she was not a woman
+to have a wish without a beat of the heart in it.  For her name she had a
+feeling, to be likened rather to the losing gambler's contemplation of a
+big stake he has flung, and sees it gone while fortune is undecided; and
+he catches at a philosophy nothing other than his hug of a modest little
+background pleasure, that he has always preferred to this accursed bad
+habit of gambling with the luck against him.  Reckless in the cast, she
+was reckless of success.
+
+Her letter was unanswered.
+
+Then, and day by day more strongly, she felt for her name.  She put a
+false heart into it.  She called herself to her hearing the Countess of
+Ormont, and deigned to consult the most foolish friend she could have
+chosen--her aunt; and even listened to her advice, that she should run
+about knocking at all the doors open to her, and state her case against
+the earl.  It seemed the course to take, the moment for taking it.  Was
+she not asked if she could now at last show she had pride?  Her pride ran
+stinging through her veins, like a band of freed prisoners who head the
+rout to fire a city.  She charged her lord with having designedly--oh!
+cunningly indeed left her to be the prey of her enemies at the hour when
+he knew it behoved him to be her great defender.  There had been no
+disguise of the things in progress: they had been spoken of allusively,
+quite comprehensibly, after the fashion common with two entertaining a
+secret semi-hostility on a particular subject; one of them being the
+creature that blushes and is educated to be delicate, reserved, and
+timorous.  He was not ignorant, and he had left her, and he would not
+reply to her letter!
+
+So fell was her mood, that an endeavour to conjure up the scene of her
+sitting beside the death-bed of Matthew Weyburn's mother, failed to sober
+and smooth it, holy though that time was.  The false heart she had put
+into the pride of her name was powerfuller than the heart in her bosom.
+But to what end had the true heart counselled her of late?  It had been
+a home of humours and languors, an impotent insurgent, the sapper of her
+character; and as we see in certain disorderly States a curative
+incendiarism usurp the functions of the sluggish citizen, and the work
+of re-establishment done by destruction, in peril of a total extinction,
+Aminta's feverish anger on behalf of her name went a stretch to vivify
+and give her dulled character a novel edge.  She said good-bye to
+cowardice.  'I have no husband to defend me--I must do it for myself.'
+The peril of a too complete exercise of independence was just intimated
+to her perceptions.  On whom the blame?  And let the motively guilty go
+mourn over consequences!  That Institution of Marriage was eyed.  Is it
+not a halting step to happiness?  It is the step of a cripple,--and one
+leg or the other poses for the feebler sex,--small is the matter which!
+And is happiness our cry?  Our cry is rather for circumstance and
+occasion to use our functions, and the conditions are denied to women by
+Marriage--denied to the luckless of women, who are many, very many:
+denied to Aminta, calling herself Countess of Ormont, for one, denied to
+Mrs. Lawrence Finchley for another, and in a base bad manner.  She had
+defended her good name triumphantly, only to enslave herself for life or
+snatch at the liberty which besmirches.
+
+Reviewing Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta's real heart pressed forward at the beat,
+in tender pity of the woman for whom a yielding to love was to sin; and
+unwomanly is the woman who does not love: men will say it.  Aminta found
+herself phrasing.  'Why was she unable to love her husband?--he is not
+old.'  She hurried in flight from the remark to confidences imparted by
+other ladies, showing strange veins in an earthy world; after which, her
+mind was bent to rebuke Mrs. Pagnell for the silly soul's perpetual
+allusions to Lord Ormont's age.  She did not think of his age.  But she
+was vividly thinking that she was young.  Young, married, loveless,
+cramped in her energies, publicly dishonoured--a Lady Doubtful, courting
+one friend whom she liked among women, one friend whom she respected
+among men; that was the sketch of her.
+
+That was in truth the outline, as much as Aminta dared sketch of herself
+without dragging her down lower than her trained instinct would bear to
+look.  Our civilization shuns nature; and most shuns it in the most
+artificially civilized, to suit the market.  They, however, are always
+close to their mother nature, beneath their second nature's mask of
+custom; and Aminta's unconscious concluding touch to the sketch: 'My
+husband might have helped me to a footing in Society,' would complete
+it as a coloured picture, if writ in tones.
+
+She said it, and for the footing in Society she had lost her taste.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence brought the final word from high quarters: that the
+application must be deferred until Lord Ormont returned to town.  It was
+known before, that such would be the decision.  She had it from the
+eminent official himself, and she kicked about the room, setting her
+pretty mouth and nose to pout and sniff, exactly like a boy whose chum
+has been mishandled by a bully.
+
+'Your dear good man is too much for us.  I thought we should drive him.
+'C'est un ruse homme de guerre.'  I like him, but I could slap him.  He
+stops the way.  Upon my word, he seems tolerably careless of his
+treasure.  Does he suppose Mrs. Paggy is a protection?  Do you know she's
+devoted to that man Morsfield?  He listens to her stories.  To judge by
+what he shouts aloud, he intends carrying you off the first opportunity,
+divorcing, and installing you in Cobeck Hall.  All he fears is, that your
+lord won't divorce.  You should have seen him the other day; he marched
+up and down the room, smacking his head and crying out: "Legal measures
+or any weapons her husband pleases!"  For he has come to believe that the
+lady would have been off with him long before, if her lord had no claim
+to the marital title.  "It 's that husband I can't get over! that
+husband!"  He reminded me, to the life, of Lawrence Finchley with a
+headache the morning after a supper, striding, with his hand on the
+shining middle of his head: "It's that Welsh rabbit! that Welsh rabbit!"
+He has a poor digestion, and he will eat cheese.  The Welsh rabbit chased
+him into his bed.  But listen to me, dear, about your Morsfield.  I told
+you he was dangerous.'
+
+'He is not my Morsfield,' said Aminta.
+
+'Beware of his having a tool in Paggy.  He boasts of letters.'
+
+'Mine? Two: and written to request him to cease writing to me.'
+
+'He stops at nothing.  And, oh, my Simplicity!  don't you see you gave
+him a step in begging him to retire?  Morsfield has lived a good deal
+among our neighbours, who expound the physiology of women.  He anatomizes
+us; pulls us to pieces, puts us together, and then animates us with a
+breath of his "passion"--sincere upon every occasion, I don't doubt.  He
+spared me, although he saw I was engaged.  Perhaps it was because I 'm of
+no definite colour.  Or he thought I was not a receptacle for "passion."
+And quite true,--Adder, the dear good fellow, has none.  Or where should
+we be?  On a Swiss Alp, in a chalet, he shooting chamois, and I milking
+cows, with 'ah-ahio, ah-ahio,' all day long, and a quarrel at night over
+curds and whey.  Well, and that 's a better old pensioner's limp to his
+end for "passion" than the foreign hotel bell rung mightily, and one of
+the two discovered with a dagger in the breast, and the other a don't-
+look lying on the pavement under the window.  Yes, and that's better than
+"passion" splitting and dispersing upon new adventures, from habit, with
+two sparks remaining of the fire.'
+
+Aminta took Mrs. Lawrence's hands.  'Is it a lecture?'
+
+She was kissed.  'Frothy gabble.  I'm really near to "passion" when I
+embrace you.  You're the only one I could run away with; live with all
+alone, I believe.  I wonder men can see you while that silly lord of
+yours is absent, and not begin Morsfielding.  They're virtuous if they
+resist.  Paggy tells the world .  .  .  well?'  Aminta had reddened.
+
+'What does my aunt tell the world?'
+
+Mrs. Lawrence laid her smoothing hand absently on a frill of lace fichu
+above a sternly disciplined bosom at half-heave.  'I think I can
+judge now that you're not much hurt by this wretched business of the
+presentation.  The little service I could do was a moral lesson to me on
+the subject of deuce-may-care antecedents.  My brother Tom, too, was
+always playing truant, as a boy.  It 's in the blood.'
+
+She seemed to be teasing, and Aminta cried: 'My aunt!  Let me hear.
+She tells the world--?'
+
+'Paggy?  ah, yes.  Only that she says the countess has an exalted opinion
+of Mr. Secretary's handwriting--as witnessed by his fair copy of the
+Memoirs, of course.'
+
+'Poor woman!  How can she talk such foolishness!  I guessed it.'
+
+'You wear a dark red rose when you're guessing, 'ma mie,'--French for, my
+Aminta.'
+
+'But consider, Isabella, Mr. Weyburn has just had the heaviest of losses.
+My aunt should spare mention of him.'
+
+'Matthew Weyburn! we both like the name.'  Mrs. Lawrence touched at her
+friend and gazed.  'I've seen it on certain evenings--crimson over an
+olive sky.  What it forebodes, I can't imagine; but it's the end of a
+lovely day.  They say it threatens rain, if it begins one.  It 's an
+ominous herald.'
+
+'You make me,' said Aminta.  'I must redden if you keep looking at me so
+closely.'
+
+'Now frown one little bit, please.  I love to see you.  I love to see a
+secret disclose itself ingenuously.'
+
+'But what secret, my dear?' cried Aminta's defence of her innocence; and
+she gave a short frown.
+
+'Have no fear.  Mr. Secretary is not the man to be Morsfielding.  And he
+can enjoy his repast; a very good sign.  But is he remaining long?'
+
+'He is going soon, I hear.'
+
+'He's a good boy.  I could have taken to him myself, and not dreaded a
+worrying.  There 's this difference between you and me, though, my
+Aminta; one of us has the fireplace prepared for what's-his-name--
+"passion."  Kiss me.  How could you fancy you were going to have a woman
+for your friend and keep hidden from her any one of the secrets that
+blush! and with Paggy to aid!  I am sure it means very little.
+Admiration for good handwriting is--' a smile broke the sentence.
+
+'You're astray, Isabella.'
+
+'Not I, dear, I'm too fond of you.'
+
+'You read what is not.'
+
+'What is not yet written, you mean.'
+
+'What never could be written.'
+
+'I read what is in the blood, and comes out to me when I look.  That lord
+of yours should take to study you as I have done ever since I fell in
+love with you.  He 's not counselling himself well in keeping away.'
+
+'Now you speak wisely,' said Aminta.
+
+'Not a particle more wisely.  And the reason is close at hand--see.
+You are young, you attract--how could it be otherwise?--and you have
+"passion" sleeping, and likely to wake with a spring whether roused or
+not.  In my observation good-man t'other fellow--the poet's friend--is
+never long absent when the time is ripe--at least, not in places where we
+gather together.  Well, one is a buckler against the other: I don't say
+with lovely Amy May,--with an honourable woman.  But Aminta can smell
+powder and grow more mettlesome.  Who can look at you and be blind to
+passion sleeping!  The sight of you makes me dream of it--me, a woman,
+cool as a wine-cellar or a well.  So there's to help you to know yourself
+and be on your guard.  I know I'm not deceived, because I've fallen in
+love with you, and no love can be without jealousy, so I have the needle
+in my breast, that points at any one who holds a bit of you.  Kind of
+sympathetic needle to the magnet behind anything.  You'll know it, if you
+don't now.  I should have felt the thing without the aid of Paggy.  So,
+then, imagine all my nonsense unsaid, and squeeze a drop or two of 'sirop
+de bon conseil' out of it, as if it were your own wise meditations.'  The
+rest of Mrs. Lawrence's discourse was a swallow's wing skimming the city
+stream.  She departed, and Aminta was left to beat at her heart and ask
+whether it had a secret.
+
+But if there was one, the secret was out, and must have another name.
+It had been a secret for her until she heard her friend speak those pin-
+points that pricked her heart, and sent the blood coursing over her face,
+like a betrayal, so like as to resemble a burning confession.
+
+But if this confessed the truth, she was the insanest of women.
+No woman could be surer that she had her wits.  She had come to see
+things, previously mysteries, with surprising clearness. As, for example,
+that passion was part of her nature; therefore her very life, lying
+tranced.  She certainly could not love without passion such an
+abandonment was the sole justification of love in a woman standing where
+she stood.  And now for the first time she saw her exact position before
+the world; and she saw some way into her lord: saw that he nursed a
+wound, extracted balm from anything enabling him to show the world how he
+despised it, and undesigningly immolated her for the petty gratification.
+
+It could not, in consequence, be the truth.  To bear what she had borne
+she must be a passionless woman; and she was glad of her present safety
+in thinking it.  Once it was absolutely true.  She swam away to the
+golden-circled Island of Once; landed, and dwelt there solitarily and
+blissfully, looking forward to Sunday's walk round the park, looking back
+on it.  Proudly she could tell herself that her dreams of the Prince of
+the island had not been illusions as far as he was concerned; for he had
+a great soul.  He did not aim at a tawdry glory.  He was a loss to our
+army--no loss to his country or the world.  A woman might clasp her
+feeling of pride in having foreseen distinction for him; and a little,
+too, in distinguishing now the true individual distinction from the
+feathered uniform vulgar.  Where the girl's dreams had proved illusions,
+she beheld in a title and luxuries, in a loveless marriage.
+
+That was perilous ground.  Still it taught her to see that the
+substantial is the dust; and passion not being active, she could reflect.
+After a series of penetrative flashes, flattering to her intelligence the
+more startling they were, reflection was exhausted.  She sank on her
+nature's desire to join or witness agonistic incidents, shocks,
+wrestlings, the adventures which are brilliant air to sanguine energies.
+Imagination shot tap, and whirled the circle of a succession of them; and
+she had a companion and leader, unfeatured, reverently obeyed, accepted
+as not to be known, not to be guessed at, in the deepest hooded inmost of
+her being speechlessly divined.
+
+The sudden result of Aminta's turmoil was a determination that she must
+look on Steignton.  And what was to be gained by that?  She had no idea.
+And how had she stopped her imaginative flight with the thought of
+looking on Steignton?  All she could tell was, that it would close a
+volume.  She could not say why the volume must be closed.
+
+Her orders for the journey down to Steignton were prompt.  Mrs. Pagnell
+had an engagement at the house of Lady Staines for the next day to meet
+titles and celebrities, and it precluded her comprehension of the
+project.  She begged to have the journey postponed.  She had pledged her
+word, she said.
+
+'To Mr. Morsfield?' said Aminta.
+
+Her aunt was astounded.
+
+'I did tell him we should be there, my dear.'  'He appears to have a
+pleasure in meeting you.'  'He is one of the real gentlemen of the land.'
+
+'You correspond with him?'
+
+'I may not be the only one.'
+
+'Foolish aunty!  How can you speak to me in that senseless way?' cried
+Aminta.  'You know the schemer he is, and that I have no protection from
+his advances unless I run the risk of bloodshed.'
+
+'My dear Aminta, whenever I go into society, and he is present, I know I
+shall not be laughed at, or fall into that pit of one of their dead
+silences, worse for me to bear than titters and faces.  It is their way
+of letting one feel they are of birth above us.  Mr. Morsfield--purer
+blood than many of their highest titles--is always polite, always
+deferential; he helps me to feel I am not quite out of my element in the
+sphere I prefer.  We shall be travelling alone?'
+
+'Have you any fear?'
+
+'Not if nothing happens.  Might we not ask that Mr. Weyburn?'
+
+'He has much work to do.  He will not long be here.  He is absent
+to-day.'
+
+Mrs. Pagnell remarked: 'I must say he earns his money easily.'
+
+Aminta had softened herself with the allusion to the shortness of his
+time with them.  Her aunt's coarse hint, and the thought of his loss,
+and the banishment it would be to her all the way to Steignton, checked
+a sharp retort she could have uttered, but made it necessary to hide her
+eyes from sight.  She went to her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed.
+Even so little as an unspoken defence of him shook her to floods of
+tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON
+
+Unaccountable resolutions, if impromptu and springing from the female
+breast, are popularly taken for caprices; and even when they divert the
+current of a history, and all the more when they are very small matters
+producing a memorable crisis.  In this way does a lazy world consign
+discussion to silence with the cynical closure.  Man's hoary shrug at a
+whimsy sex is the reading of his enigma still.
+
+But ask if she has the ordinary pumping heart in that riddle of a breast:
+and then, as the organ cannot avoid pursuit, we may get hold of it, and
+succeed in spelling out that she is consequent, in her fashion.  She is a
+creature of the apparent moods and shifts and tempers only because she is
+kept in narrow confines, resembling, if you like, a wild cat caged.
+Aminta's journey down to Steignton turned the course of other fortunes
+besides her own; and she disdained the minor adventure it was, while
+dreaming it important; and she determined eagerly on going, without
+wanting to go; and it was neither from a sense of duty nor in a spirit
+of contrariety that she went.  Nevertheless, with her heart in hand,
+her movements are traceably as rational as a soldier's before the enemy
+or a trader's matching his customer.
+
+The wish to look on Steignton had been spoken or sighed for during long
+years between Aminta and her aunt, until finally shame and anger clinched
+the subject.  To look on Steignton for once was now Aminta's phrasing of
+her sudden resolve; it appeared as a holiday relief from recent worries,
+and it was an expedition with an aim, though she had but the coldest
+curiosity to see the place, and felt alien to it.  Yet the thought,
+never to have seen Steignton!  roused phantoms of dead wishes to drive
+the strange engine she was, faster than the living would have done.  Her
+reason for haste was rationally founded on the suddenness of her resolve,
+which, seeing that she could not say she desired to go, seemed to come of
+an external admonition; and it counselled quick movements, lest her
+inspired obedience to the prompting should as abruptly breathe itself
+out.  'And in that case I shall never have seen Steignton at all,' she
+said, with perfect calmness, and did not attempt to sound her meaning.
+
+She did know that she was a magazine of a great storage of powder.  It
+banked inoffensively dry.  She had forgiven her lord, owning the real
+nobleman he was in courtesy to women, whom his inherited ideas of them so
+quaintly minimized and reduced to pretty insect or tricky reptile.  They,
+too, had the choice of being ultimately the one or the other in fact; the
+latter most likely.
+
+If, however, she had forgiven her lord, the shattering of their union was
+the cost of forgiveness.  In letting him stand high, as the lofty man she
+had originally worshipped, she separated herself from him, to feel that
+the humble she was of a different element, as a running water at a
+mountain's base.  They are one in the landscape; they are far from one
+in reality.  Aminta's pride of being chafed at the yoke of marriage.
+
+Her aunt was directed to prepare for a start at an early hour the next
+morning.  Mrs. Pagnell wrote at her desk, and fussed, and ordered the
+posting chariot, and bewailed herself submissively; for it was the
+Countess of Ormont speaking when Aminta delivered commands, and the only
+grievance she dared to mutter was 'the unexpectedness.'  Her letters
+having been despatched, she was amazed in the late evening to hear Aminta
+give the footman orders for the chariot to be ready at the door an hour
+earlier than the hour previously appointed.  She remonstrated.  Aminta
+simply observed that it would cause less inconvenience to all parties.
+A suspicion of her aunt's proceedings was confirmed by the good woman's
+flustered state.  She refrained from smiling.
+
+She would have mustered courage to invite Matthew Weyburn as her escort,
+if he had been at hand.  He was attending to his affairs with lawyers--
+mainly with his friend Mr. Abner.  She studied map and gazetteer till
+late into the night.  Giving her orders to the postillion on the pavement
+in the morning, she named a South-westerly direction out of London, and
+after entering the chariot, she received a case from one of the footmen.
+
+'What is that, my dear?' said Mrs. Pagnell.
+
+Aminta unlocked and laid it open.  A pair of pistols met Mrs. Pagnell's
+gaze.
+
+'We shan't be in need of those things?' the lady said anxiously.
+
+'One never knows, on the road, aunt.'
+
+'Loaded?  You wouldn't hesitate to fire; I'm sure.'
+
+'At Mr. Morsfield himself, if he attempted to stop me.'
+
+Mrs. Pagnell withdrew into her astonishment, and presently asked, in a
+tone of some indignation: 'Why did you mention Mr. Morsfield, Aminta?'
+
+'Did you not write to him yesterday afternoon, aunt?'
+
+'You read the addresses on my letters!'
+
+'Did you not supply him with our proposed route and the time for
+starting?'
+
+'Pistols!' exclaimed Mrs. Pagnell.  'One would fancy you think we are in
+the middle of the last century.  Mr. Morsfield is a gentleman, not a
+highwayman.'
+
+'He gives the impression of his being a madman.'
+
+'The real madman is your wedded husband, Aminta, if wedding it was!'
+
+It was too surely so, in Aminta's mind.  She tried, by looking out of the
+window, to forget her companion.  The dullness of the roads and streets
+opening away to flat fields combined with the postillion's unvarying jog
+to sicken her thoughts over the exile from London she was undergoing, and
+the chance that Matthew Weyburn might call at a vacant house next day, to
+announce his term of service to the earl, whom he had said he much wanted
+to see.  He said it in his sharp manner when there was decision behind
+it.  Several times after contemplating the end of her journey, and not
+perceiving any spot of pleasure ahead, an emotion urged her to turn back;
+for the young are acutely reasoning when their breasts advise them to
+quit a road where no pleasure beckons.
+
+Unlike Matthew Weyburn, the tiptoe sparkle of a happy mind did not leap
+from her at wayside scenes, a sweep of grass, distant hills, clouds in
+flight.  She required, since she suffered, the positive of events or
+blessings to kindle her glow.
+
+Matthew Weyburn might call at the house.  Would he be disappointed?  He
+had preserved her letters of the old school-days.  She had burnt his.
+But she had not burnt the letters of Mr. Morsfield; and she cared nothing
+for that man.  Assuredly she merited the stigma branding women as crack-
+brained.  Yet she was not one of the fools; she could govern a household,
+and she liked work, she had the capacity for devotedness.  So, therefore,
+she was a woman perverted by her position, and she shook her bonds in
+revolt from marriage.  Imagining a fall down some suddenly spied chasm
+of her nature, she had a sisterly feeling for the women named sinful.
+At the same time, reflecting that they are sinful only with the sinful,
+she knelt thankfully at the feet of the man who had saved her from such
+danger.  Tears threatened.  They were a poor atonement for the burning of
+his younger letters.  But not he--she was the sufferer, and she whipped
+up a sensation of wincing at the flames they fell to, and at their void
+of existence, committing sentimental idiocies worthy of a lovesick girl,
+consciously to escape the ominous thought, which her woman's perception
+had sown in her, that he too chafed at a marriage no marriage: was true
+in fidelity, not true through infidelity, as she had come to be.  The
+thought implied misery for both.  She entered a black desolation, with
+the prayer that he might not be involved, for his own sake: partly also
+on behalf of the sustaining picture the young schoolmaster at his task,
+merry among his dear boys, to trim and point them body and mind for their
+business in the world, painted for her a weariful prospect of the life
+she must henceforth drag along.
+
+Is a woman of the plain wits common to numbers ever deceived in her
+perception of a man's feelings for her?  Let her first question herself
+whether she respects him.  If she does not, her judgement will go easily
+astray, intuition and observation are equally at fault, she has no key;
+he has charmed her blood, that is all.  But if she respects him, she
+cannot be deceived; respect is her embrace of a man's character.
+Aminta's vision was clear.  She had therefore to juggle with the fact
+revealed, that she might keep her heart from rushing out; and the process
+was a disintegration of her feminine principle of docility under the
+world's decrees.  At each pause of her mental activity she was hurled
+against the state of marriage.  Compassion for her blameless fellow in
+misery brought a deluge to sweep away institutions and landmarks.
+
+But supposing the blest worst to happen, what exchange had she to bestow?
+Her beauty?  She was reputed beautiful.  It had made a madman of one man;
+and in her poverty of endowments to be generous with, she hovered over
+Mr. Morsfield like a cruel vampire, for the certification that she had a
+much-prized gift to bestow upon his rival.
+
+But supposing it: she would then be no longer in the shiny garden of the
+flowers of wealth; and how little does beauty weigh as all aid to an
+active worker in the serious fighting world!  She would be a kind of
+potted rose-tree under his arm, of which he must eventually tire.
+
+A very cold moment came, when it seemed that even the above supposition,
+in the case of a woman who has been married, is shameful to her, a sin
+against her lover, and should be obliterated under floods of scarlet.
+For, if she has pride, she withers to think of pushing the most noble of
+men upon his generosity.  And, further, if he is not delicately
+scrupulous, is there not something wanting in him?  The very cold wave
+passed, leaving the sentence: better dream of being plain friends.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell had been quietly chewing her cud of the sullens, as was the
+way with her after a snub.  She now resumed her gossip of the naughty
+world she knelt to and expected to see some day stricken by a bolt from
+overhead; containing, as it did, such wicked members as that really
+indefensible brazen Mrs. Amy May, who was only the daughter of a half-pay
+naval captain, and that Marquis of Collestou, who would, they say,
+decorate her with his title to-morrow, if her husband were but somewhere
+else.  She spread all sorts of report, about Mr. Morsfield, and he was
+honour itself in his reserve about her.  'Depend upon it, Aminta--he was
+not more than a boy then, and they say she aimed at her enfranchisement
+by plotting the collision, for his Yorkshire revenues are immense,
+and he is, you know, skilful in the use of arms, and Captain May has no
+resources whatever: penury! no one cares to speculate how they contrive!
+---but while that dreadful duelling--and my lord as bad as any in his
+day-exists, depend upon it, an unscrupulous good-looking woman has as
+many lives for her look of an eye or lift of a finger as a throned
+Ottoman Turk on his divan.'
+
+Aminta wished to dream.  She gave her aunt a second dose, and the lady
+relapsed again.
+
+Power to dream had gone.  She set herself to look at roadside things,
+cottage gardens, old housewives in doorways, gaffer goodman meeting his
+crony on the path, groups of boys and girls.  She would take the girls,
+Matthew Weyburn the boys.  She had lessons to give to girls, she had
+sympathy, pity, anticipation.  That would be a life of happy service.
+It might be a fruitful trial of the system he proposed, to keep the boys
+and girls in company as much as possible, both at lessons and at games.
+His was the larger view.  Her lord's view appeared similar to that of her
+aunt's 'throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.'  Matthew Weyburn believed in
+the bettering of the world; Lord Ormont had no belief like it.
+
+Presently Mrs. Pagnell returned to the charge, and once more she was
+nipped, and irritated to declare she had never known her niece's temper
+so provoking.  Aminta was launching a dream of a lass she had seen in a
+field, near a white hawthorn, standing upright, her left arm aloft round
+the pole of a rake, the rim of her bonnet tipped on her forehead; an
+attitude of a rustic.
+
+Britannia with helmet heeling at dignity.  The girl's eyes hung to the
+passing chariot, without movement of her head.  It was Aminta who looked
+back, and she saw the girl looking away.  Among the superior dames and
+damsels she had seen, there was not one to match that figure for stately
+air, gallant ease, and splendour of pose.  Matthew Weyburn would have
+admired the girl.  Aminta did better than envy, she cast off the last
+vestiges of her bitter ambition to be a fine lady, and winged into the
+bosom of the girl, and not shyly said 'yes' to Matthew Weyburn, and to
+herself, deep in herself: 'A maid has no need to be shy.'  Hardly
+blushing, she walks on into the new life beside him, and hears him say:
+'I in my way, you in yours; we are equals, the stronger for being
+equals,' and she quite agrees, and she gives him the fuller heart for
+his not requiring her to be absorbed--she is the braver mate for him.
+Does not that read his meaning?  Happiest of the girls of earth, she has
+divined it at once, from never having had the bitter ambition to be a
+slave, that she might wear rich tissues; and let herself be fettered,
+that she might loll in idleness; lose a soul to win a title; escape
+commonplace to discover it ghastlier under cloth of gold, and the animal
+crowned, adored, fattened, utterly served, in the class called by consent
+of human society the Upper.
+
+Reason whispered a reminder of facts to her.
+
+'But I am not the Countess of Ormont!' she said.  She felt herself the
+girl, her sensations were so intensely simple.
+
+Proceeding to an argument, that the earl did not regard her as the
+Countess of Ormont, or the ceremony at the British Embassy as one serious
+and binding, she pushed her reason too far: sweet delusion waned.  She
+waited for some fresh scene to revive it.
+
+Aminta sat unwittingly weaving her destiny.
+
+While she was thus engaged, a carriage was rolling on the more westerly
+road down to Steignton.  Seated in it were Lady Charlotte Eglett and
+Matthew Weyburn.  They had met at Arthur Abner's office the previous day.
+She went there straight from Lord Ormont's house-agent and upholsterer,
+to have a queer bit of thunderous news confirmed, that her brother was
+down at Steignton, refurnishing the house, and not for letting.  She
+was excited: she treated Arthur Abner's closed-volume reticence as a
+corroboration of the house-agent's report, and hearing Weyburn speak of
+his anxiety to see the earl immediately, in order to get release from his
+duties, proposed a seat in her carriage; for down Steignton way she meant
+to go, if only as excuse for a view of the old place.  She kept asking
+what Lord Ormont wanted down at Steignton refurnishing the house, and not
+to let it!  Her evasions of answers that, plain speculation would supply
+were quaint.  'He hasn't my feeling for Steignton.  He could let it--
+I couldn't.  Sacrilege to me to have a tenant in my old home where I was
+born.  He's furnishing to raise his rent.  His country won't give him
+anything to do, so he turns miser.  That's my brother Rowsley's way of
+taking on old age.'
+
+Her brother Rowsley might also be showing another sign of his calamitous
+condition.  She said to Weyburn, in the carriage, that her brother
+Rowsley might like having his hair clipped by the Philistine woman; which
+is one of the ways of strong men to confess themselves ageing.  'Not,'
+said she, with her usual keen justness 'not that I've, a word against
+Delilah.  I look upon her as a patriot; she dallied and she used the
+scissors on behalf of her people.  She wasn't bound to Samson in honour,
+--liked a strong man, probably enough.  She proved she liked her country
+better.  The Jews wrote the story of it, so there she stands for
+posterity to pelt her, poor wretch.'
+
+'A tolerably good analogy for the story of men and women generally,' said
+Weyburn.
+
+'Ah, well, you've a right to talk; you don't run miauling about women.
+It 's easy to be squashy on that subject.  As for the Jews, I don't go by
+their history, but now they 're down I don't side with the Philistines,
+or Christians.  They 're good citizens, and they 've got Samson in the
+brain, too.  That comes of persecution, a hard education.  They beat the
+world by counting in the head.  That 's because they 've learnt the value
+of fractions.  Napoleon knew it in war, when he looked to the boots and
+great-coats of his men;  those were his fractions.  Lord Ormont thinks he
+had too hard-and-fast a system for the battle-field.'
+
+'A greater strategist than tactician, my lady?  It may be,' said Weyburn,
+smiling at her skips.
+
+'Massing his cannon to make a big hole for his cavalry, my brother says;
+and weeding his infantry for the Imperial Guard he postponed the moment
+to use.'
+
+'At Moskowa?'
+
+'Waterloo.  I believe Lord Ormont would--there! his country 's lost him,
+and chose it.  They 'll have their day for repentance yet.  What a
+rapture to have a thousand horsemen following you!  I suppose there never
+was a man worthy of the name who roared to be a woman.  I know I could
+have shrieked half my life through to have been born male.  It 's no
+matter now.  When we come to this hateful old age, we meet: no, we 're no
+sex then--we 're dry sticks.  I 'll tell you: my Olmer doctor--that 's an
+impudent fellow who rode by staring into my carriage.  The window's down.
+He could see without pushing his hat in.'
+
+Weyburn looked out after a man cantering on.
+
+'A Mr. Morsfield,' he said.  'I thought it was he when I saw him go by.
+I've met him at the fencing-rooms.  He 's one of the violent fencers,
+good for making his point, if one funks an attack.'
+
+'That man Morsfield, is it?  I wonder what he's doing on the road here.
+He goes over London boasting--hum, nothing to me.  But he 'll find Lord
+Ormont's arm can protect a poor woman, whatever she is.  He'd have had it
+before, only Lord Ormont shuns a scandal.  I was telling you, my Olmer
+doctor forbade horse-riding, and my husband raised a noise like one of my
+turkeycocks on the wing; so I 've given up the saddle, to quiet him.  I
+guessed.  I went yesterday morning to my London physician.  He sounded
+me, pushed out his mouth and pulled down his nose, recommended avoidance
+of excitement.  "Is it heart?"  I said.  He said it was heart.  That was
+the best thing an old woman could hear.  He said, when he saw I wasn't
+afraid, it was likely to be quick; no doctors, no nurses and daily
+bulletins for inquirers, but just the whites of the eyes, the laying-out,
+the undertaker, and the family-vault.  That's one reason why I want to
+see Steignton before the blow that may fall any day, whether my brother
+Rowsley's there or no.  But that Olmer doctor of mine, Causitt, Peter
+Causitt, shall pay me for being a liar or else an ignoramus when I told
+him he was to tell me bluntly the nature of my disease.'
+
+A horseman, in whom they recognized Mr. Morsfield, passed, clattering on
+the road behind them.
+
+'Some woman here about,' Lady Charlotte muttered.  Weyburn saw him joined
+by a cavalier, and the two consulted and pointed whips right and left.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+As well ask (women) how a battle-field concerns them!
+Boys who can appreciate brave deeds are capable of doing them
+Careful not to smell of his office
+Chose to conceive that he thought abstractedly
+Consign discussion to silence with the cynical closure
+Convictions we store--wherewith to shape our destinies
+Death is only the other side of the ditch
+Didn't say a word  No use in talking about feelings
+Enthusiast, when not lyrical, is perilously near to boring
+He took small account of the operations of the feelings
+Her duel with Time
+Hopeless task of defending a woman from a woman
+I hate old age  It changes you so
+Ignorance roaring behind a mask of sarcasm
+Men bore the blame, though the women were rightly punished
+Never nurse an injury, great or small
+No love can be without jealousy
+Old age is a prison wall between us and young people
+Orderliness, from which men are privately exempt
+People were virtuous in past days: they counted their sinners
+Professional Puritans
+Regularity of the grin of dentistry
+That pit of one of their dead silences
+The beat of a heart with a dread like a shot in it
+The good life gone lives on in the mind
+The shots hit us behind you
+The spending, never harvesting, world
+The terrible aggregate social woman
+Venus of nature was melting into a Venus of art
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+
+***********************************************************************
+The Project Gutenberg Etext Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v3, by Meredith
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+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v3
+by George Meredith
+
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