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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v4
+by George Meredith
+#86 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+Title: Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v4
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4480]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 25, 2002]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v4, by Meredith
+*********This file should be named 4480.txt or 4480.zip**********
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+
+
+BOOK 4.
+
+XVII.     LADY CHARLOTTE'S TRIUMPH
+XVIII.    A SCENE ON THE ROAD BACK
+XIX.      THE PURSUERS
+XX.       AT THE SIGN OF THE JOLLY CRICKETERS
+XXI.      UNDER-CURRENTS IN THE MINDS OF LADY CHARLOTTE AND LORD ORMONT
+XXII.     TREATS OF THE FIRST DAY OF THE CONTENTION OF BROTHER AND SISTER
+XXIII.    THE ORMONT JEWELS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+LADY CHARLOTTE'S TRIUMPH
+
+One of the days of sovereign splendour in England was riding down the
+heavens, and drawing the royal mantle of the gold-fringed shadows over
+plain and wavy turf, blue water and woods of the country round Steignton.
+A white mansion shone to a length of oblong lake that held the sun-ball
+suffused in mild yellow.
+
+'There's the place,' Lady Charlotte said to Weyburn, as they had view of
+it at a turn of the park.  She said to herself--where I was born and
+bred!  and her sight gloated momentarily on the house and side avenues,
+a great plane standing to the right of the house, the sparkle of a little
+river running near; all the scenes she knew, all young and lively.  She
+sprang on her seat for a horse beneath her, and said, 'But this is
+healthy excitement,' as in reply to her London physician's remonstrances.
+'And there's my brother Rowsley, talking to one of the keepers,' she
+cried.  'You see Lord Ormont?  I can see a mile.  Sight doesn't fail with
+me.  He 's insisting.  'Ware poachers when Rowsley's on his ground!  You
+smell the air here?  Nobody dies round about Steignton.  Their legs wear
+out and they lie down to rest them.  It 's the finest air in the world.
+Now look, the third window left of the porch, first floor.  That was my
+room before I married.  Strangers have been here and called the place
+home.  It can never be home to any but me and Rowsley.  He sees the
+carriage.  He little thinks!  He's dressed in his white corduroy and
+knee-breeches.  Age! he won't know age till he's ninety.  Here he comes
+marching.  He can't bear surprises.  I'll wave my hand and call.'
+
+She called his name.
+
+In a few strides he was at the carriage window.  'You, Charlotte?'
+
+'Home again, Rowsley!  Bring down your eyebrows, and let me hear you're
+glad I 've come.'
+
+'What made you expect you would find me here?'
+
+'Anything-cats on the tiles at night.  You can't keep a secret from me.
+Here's Mr. Weyburn, good enough to be my escort.  I 'll get out.'
+
+She alighted, scorning help; Weyburn at her heels.  The earl nodded to
+him politely and not cordially.  He was hardly cordial to Lady Charlotte.
+
+That had no effect on her.  'A glorious day for Steignton,' she said.
+'Ah, there's the Buridon group of beeches; grander trees than grow at
+Buridon.  Old timber now.  I knew them slim as demoiselles.  Where 's the
+ash?  We had a splendid ash on the west side.'
+
+'Dead and cut down long since,' replied the earl.
+
+'So we go!'
+
+She bent her steps to the spot: a grass-covered heave of the soil.
+
+'Dear old tree!' she said, in a music of elegy: and to Weyburn: 'Looks
+like a stump of an arm lopped off a shoulder in bandages.  Nature does it
+so.  All the tenants doing well, Rowsley?'
+
+'About the same amount of trouble with them.'
+
+'Ours at Olmer get worse.'
+
+'It's a process for the extirpation of the landlords.'
+
+'Then down goes the country.'
+
+'They 've got their case, their papers tell us.'
+
+'I know they have; but we've got the soil, and we'll make a, fight of
+it.'
+
+'They can fight too, they say.'
+
+'I should be sorry to think they couldn't if they're Englishmen.'
+
+She spoke so like his old Charlotte of the younger days that her brother
+partly laughed.
+
+'Parliamentary fighting 's not much to your taste or mine.  They 've lost
+their stomach for any other.  The battle they enjoy is the battle that
+goes for the majority.  Gauge their valour by that.'
+
+'To be sure,' said his responsive sister.  She changed her note.  'But
+what I say is, let the nobles keep together and stick to their class.
+There's nothing to fear then.  They must marry among themselves, think
+of the blood: it's their first duty.  Or better a peasant girl!  Middle
+courses dilute it to the stuff in a publican's tankard.  It 's an
+adulterous beast who thinks of mixing old wine with anything.'
+
+'Hulloa!' said the earl; and she drew up.
+
+'You'll have me here till over to-morrow, Rowsley, so that I may have one
+clear day at Steignton?'
+
+He bowed.  'You will choose your room.  Mr. Weyburn is welcome.'
+
+Weyburn stated the purport of his visit, and was allowed to name an early
+day for the end of his term of service.
+
+Entering the house, Lady Charlotte glanced at the armour and stag
+branches decorating corners of the hall, and straightway laid her head
+forward, pushing after it in the direction of the drawing room.  She went
+in, stood for a minute, and came out. Her mouth was hard shut.
+
+At dinner she had tales of uxorious men, of men who married mistresses,
+of the fearful incubus the vulgar family of a woman of the inferior
+classes ever must be; and her animadversions were strong in the matter of
+gew-gaw modern furniture.  The earl submitted to hear.
+
+She was, however, keenly attentive whenever he proffered any item of
+information touching Steignton.  After dinner Weyburn strolled to the
+points of view she cited as excellent for different aspects of her old
+home.
+
+He found her waiting to hear his laudation when he came back; and in the
+early morning she was on the terrace, impatient to lead him down to the
+lake.  There, at the boat-house, she commanded him to loosen a skiff and
+give her a paddle.  Between exclamations, designed to waken louder from
+him, and not so successful as her cormorant hunger for praise of
+Steignton required, she plied him to confirm with his opinion an opinion
+that her reasoning mind had almost formed in the close neighbourhood of
+the beloved and honoured person providing it; for abstract ideas were
+unknown to her.  She put it, however, as in the abstract:--
+
+'How is it we meet people brave as lions before an enemy, and rank
+cowards where there's a botheration among their friends at home?  And
+tell me, too, if you've thought the thing over, what's the meaning of
+this?  I 've met men in high places, and they've risen to distinction by
+their own efforts, and they head the nation.  Right enough, you'd say.
+Well, I talk with them, and I find they've left their brains on the
+ladder that led them up; they've only the ideas of their grandfather on
+general subjects.  I come across a common peasant or craftsman, and he
+down there has a mind more open--he's wiser in his intelligence than his
+rulers and lawgivers up above him.  He understands what I say, and I
+learn from him.  I don't learn much from our senators, or great lawyers,
+great doctors, professors, members of governing bodies--that lot.  Policy
+seems to petrify their minds when they 've got on an eminence.  Now
+explain it, if you can.'
+
+'Responsibility has a certain effect on them, no doubt,' said Weyburn.
+'Eminent station among men doesn't give a larger outlook.  Most of them
+confine their observation to their supports.  It happens to be one of the
+questions I have thought over.  Here in England, and particularly on a
+fortnight's run in the lowlands of Scotland once, I have, like you, my
+lady, come now and then across the people we call common, men and women,
+old wayside men especially; slow-minded, but hard in their grasp of
+facts, and ready to learn, and logical, large in their ideas, though
+going a roundabout way to express them.  They were at the bottom of
+wisdom, for they had in their heads the delicate sense of justice, upon
+which wisdom is founded.  That is what their rulers lack.  Unless we have
+the sense of justice abroad like a common air, there 's no peace, and no
+steady advance.  But these humble people had it.  They reasoned from it,
+and came to sound conclusions.  I felt them to be my superiors.  On the
+other hand, I have not felt the same with "our senators, rulers, and
+lawgivers."  They are for the most part deficient in the liberal mind.'
+
+'Ha! good, so far.  How do you account for it?' said Lady Charlotte.
+
+'I read it in this way: that the world being such as it is at present,
+demanding and rewarding with honours and pay special services, the men
+called great, who have risen to distinction, are not men of brains, but
+the men of aptitudes.  These men of aptitudes have a poor conception of
+the facts of life to meet the necessities of modern expansion.  They are
+serviceable in departments.  They go as they are driven, or they resist.
+In either case, they explain how it is that we have a world moving so
+sluggishly.  They are not the men of brains, the men of insight and
+outlook.  Often enough they are foes of the men of brains.'
+
+'Aptitudes; yes, that flashes a light into me,' said Lady Charlotte.
+'I see it better.  It helps to some comprehension of their muddle.  A man
+may be a first-rate soldier, doctor, banker--as we call the usurer now-a
+-days---or brewer, orator, anything that leads up to a figure-head, and
+prove a foolish fellow if you sound him.  I 've thought something like
+it, but wanted the word.  They say themselves, "Get to know, and you see
+with what little wisdom the world is governed!"  You explain how it is.
+I shall carry "aptitudes" away.'
+
+She looked straight at Weyburn.  'If I were a younger woman I could kiss
+you for it.'
+
+He bowed to her very gratefully.
+
+'Remember, my lady, there's a good deal of the Reformer in that
+definition.'
+
+'I stick to my class.  But they shall hear a true word when there's one
+abroad, I can tell them.  That reminds me---you ought to have asked; let
+me tell you I'm friendly with the Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey.  We had a
+wrestle for half an hour, and I threw him and helped him up, and he
+apologized for tumbling, and I subscribed to one of his charities, and
+gave up about the pew, but had an excuse for not sitting under the
+sermon.  A poor good creature.  He 's got the aptitudes for his office.
+He won't do much to save his Church.  I knew another who had his aptitude
+for the classics, and he has mounted.  He was my tutor when I was a girl.
+He was fond of declaiming passages from Lucian and Longus and Ovid.  One
+day he was at it with a piece out of Daphnis and Chloe, and I said, "Now
+translate."  He fetched a gurgle to say he couldn't, and I slapped his
+check.  Will you believe it? the man was indignant.  I told him, if he
+would like to know why I behaved in "that unmaidenly way," he had better
+apply at home.  I had no further intimations of his classical aptitudes;
+but he took me for a cleverer pupil than I was.  I hadn't a notion of the
+stuff he recited.  I read by his face.  That was my aptitude--always has
+been.  But think of the donkeys parents are when they let a man have a
+chance of pouring his barley-sugar and sulphur into the ears of a girl.
+Lots of girls have no latent heckles and prickles to match his villany.
+--There's my brother come back to breakfast from a round.  You and I 'll
+have a drive before lunch, and a ride or a stroll in the afternoon.
+There's a lot to see.  I mean you to get the whole place into your head.
+I 've ordered the phaeton, and you shall take the whip, with me beside
+you.  That's how my husband and I spent three-quarters of our honeymoon.'
+
+Each of the three breakfasted alone.
+
+They met on the terrace.  It was easily perceived that Lord Ormont stood
+expecting an assault at any instant; prepared also to encounter and do
+battle with his redoubtable sister.  Only he wished to defer the
+engagement.  And he was magnanimous: he was in the right, she in the
+wrong; he had no desire to grapple with her, fling and humiliate.  The
+Sphinx of Mrs. Pagnell had been communing with himself unwontedly during
+the recent weeks.
+
+What was the riddle of him?  That, he did not read.  But, expecting an
+assault, and relieved by his sister Charlotte's departure with Weyburn,
+he went to the drawing-room, where he had seen her sniff her strong
+suspicions of a lady coming to throne it.  Charlotte could believe that
+he flouted the world with a beautiful young woman on his arm; she would
+not believe him capable of doing that in his family home and native
+county; so, then, her shrewd wits had nothing or little to learn.  But
+her vehement fighting against facts; her obstinate aristocratic
+prejudices, which he shared; her stinger of a tongue: these in ebullition
+formed a discomforting prospect.  The battle might as well be conducted
+through the post.  Come it must!
+
+Even her writing of the pointed truths she would deliver was an
+unpleasant anticipation.  His ears heated.  Undoubtedly he could crush
+her.  Yet, supposing her to speak to his ears, she would say: 'You
+married a young woman, and have been foiling and fooling her ever since,
+giving her half a title to the name of wife, and allowing her in
+consequence to be wholly disfigured before the world--your family
+naturally her chief enemies, who would otherwise (Charlotte would
+proclaim it) have been her friends.  What! your intention was (one could
+hear Charlotte's voice) to smack the world in the face, and you smacked
+your young wife's instead!'
+
+His intention had been nothing of the sort.  He had married, in a foreign
+city, a young woman who adored him, whose features, manners, and carriage
+of her person satisfied his exacting taste in the sex; and he had
+intended to cast gossipy England over the rail and be a traveller for the
+remainder of his days.  And at the first she had acquiesced, tacitly
+accepted it as part of the contract.  He bore with the burden of an
+intolerable aunt of hers for her sake.  The two fell to work to conspire.
+Aminta 'tired of travelling,' Aminta must have a London house.  She
+continually expressed a hope that 'she might set her eyes on Steignton
+some early day.' In fact, she as good as confessed her scheme to plot for
+the acknowledged position of Countess of Ormont in the English social
+world.  That was a distinct breach of the contract.
+
+As to the babble of the London world about a 'very young wife,' he
+scorned it completely, but it belonged to the calculation.  'A very
+handsome young wife,' would lay commands on a sexagenarian vigilance
+while adding to his physical glory.  The latter he could forego among
+a people he despised.  It would, however, be an annoyance to stand
+constantly hand upon sword-hilt.  There was, besides, the conflict with
+his redoubtable sister.  He had no dread of it, in contemplation of the
+necessity; he could crush his Charlotte.  The objection was, that his
+Aminta should be pressing him to do it.  Examine the situation at
+present.  Aminta has all she needs--every luxury.  Her title as Countess
+of Ormont is not denied.  Her husband justly refuses to put foot into
+English society.  She, choosing to go where she may be received,
+dissociates herself from him, and he does not complain.  She does
+complain.  There is a difference between the two.
+
+He had always shunned the closer yoke with a woman because of these
+vexatious dissensions.  For not only are women incapable of practising,
+they cannot comprehend magnanimity.
+
+Lord Ormont's argumentative reverie to the above effect had been pursued
+over and over.  He knew that the country which broke his military career
+and ridiculed his newspaper controversy was unforgiven by him.  He did
+not reflect on the consequences of such an unpardoning spirit in its
+operation on his mind.
+
+If he could but have passed the injury, he would ultimately--for his
+claims of service were admitted--have had employment of some kind.
+Inoccupation was poison to him; travel juggled with his malady of
+restlessness; really, a compression of the warrior's natural forces.
+His Aminta, pushed to it by the woman Pagnell, declined to help him in
+softening the virulence of the disease.  She would not travel; she would
+fix in this London of theirs, and scheme to be hailed the accepted
+Countess of Ormont.  She manoeuvred; she threw him on the veteran
+soldier's instinct, and it resulted spontaneously that he manoeuvred.
+
+Hence their game of Pull, which occupied him a little, tickled him and
+amused.  The watching of her pretty infantile tactics amused him too much
+to permit of a sidethought on the cruelty of the part he played.  She had
+every luxury, more than her station by right of birth would have
+supplied.
+
+But he was astonished to find that his Aminta proved herself clever,
+though she had now and then said something pointed.  She was in awe of
+him: notwithstanding which, clearly she meant to win and pull him over.
+He did not dislike her for it; she might use her weapons to play her
+game; and that she should bewitch men--a, man like Morsfield--was not
+wonderful.  On the other hand, her conquest of Mrs. Lawrence Finchley
+scored tellingly: that was unaccountably queer.  What did Mrs. Lawrence
+expect to gain? the sage lord asked.  He had not known women devoid of a
+positive practical object of their own when they bestirred themselves to
+do a friendly deed.
+
+Thanks to her conquest of Mrs. Lawrence, his Aminta was gaining ground
+--daily she made an advance; insomuch that he had heard of himself as
+harshly blamed in London for not having countenanced her recent and
+rather imprudent move.  In other words, whenever she gave a violent tug
+at their game of Pull, he was expected to second it.  But the world of
+these English is too monstrously stupid in what it expects, for any of
+its extravagances to be followed by interjections.
+
+All the while he was trimming and rolling a field of armistice at
+Steignton, where they could discuss the terms he had a right to dictate,
+having yielded so far.  Would she be satisfied with the rule of his
+ancestral hall, and the dispensing of hospitalities to the county?
+No, one may guess: no woman is ever satisfied.  But she would have to
+relinquish her game, counting her good round half of the honours.
+Somewhat more, on the whole.  Without beating, she certainly had
+accomplished the miracle of bending him.  To time and a wife it is no
+disgrace for a man to bend.  It is the form of submission of the bulrush
+to the wind, of courtesy in the cavalier to a lady.
+
+'Oh, here you are, Rowsley,' Lady Charlotte exclaimed at the drawing room
+door.  'Well, and I don't like those Louis Quinze cabinets; and that
+modern French mantelpiece clock is hideous.  You seem to furnish in
+downright contempt of the women you invite to sit in the room.  Lord help
+the wretched woman playing hostess in such a pinchbeck bric-a-brac shop,
+if there were one!  She 's spared, at all events.'
+
+He stepped at slow march to one of the five windows.  Lady Charlotte went
+to another near by.  She called to Weyburn--
+
+'We had a regatta on that water when Lord Ormont came of age.  I took an
+oar in one of the boats, and we won a prize; and when I was landing I
+didn't stride enough to the spring-plank, and plumped in.'
+
+Some labourers of the estate passed in front.
+
+Lord Ormont gave out a broken laugh.  'See those fellows walk!  That 's
+the raw material of the famous English infantry.  They bend their knees
+five-and-forty degrees for every stride; and when you drill them out of
+that, they 're stiff as ramrods.  I gymnasticized them in my regiment.
+I'd have challenged any French regiment to out-walk or out-jump us, or
+any crack Tyrolese Jagers to out-climb, though we were cavalry.'
+
+'Yes, my lord, and exercised crack corps are wanted with us,' Weyburn
+replied.  'The English authorities are adverse to it, but it 's against
+nature--on the supposition that all Englishmen might enrol untrained in
+Caesar's pet legion.  Virgil shows knowledge of men when he says of the
+row-boat straining in emulation, 'Possunt quia posse videntur.''
+
+He talked on rapidly; he wondered that he did not hear Lady Charlotte
+exclaim at what she must be seeing.  From the nearest avenue a lady had
+issued.  She stood gazing at the house, erect--a gallant figure of a
+woman--one hand holding her parasol, the other at her hip.  He knew her.
+She was a few paces ahead of Mrs. Pagnell, beside whom a gentleman
+walked.
+
+The cry came: 'It's that man Morsfield!  Who brings that man Morsfield
+here?  He hunted me on the road; he seemed to be on the wrong scent.  Who
+are those women?  Rowsley, are your grounds open every day of the week?
+She threatens to come in!'
+
+Lady Charlotte had noted that the foremost and younger of 'those women'
+understood how to walk and how to dress to her shape and colour.  She
+inclined to think she was having to do with an intrepid foreign-bred
+minx.
+
+Aminta had been addressed by one of her companions, and had hastened
+forward.  It looked like the beginning of a run to enter the house.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell ran after her.  She ran cow-like.
+
+The earl's gorge rose at the spectacle Charlotte was observing.
+
+With Morsfield he could have settled accounts at any moment, despatching
+Aminta to her chamber for an hour.  He had, though he was offended, an
+honourable guess that she had not of her free will travelled with the man
+and brought him into the grounds.  It was the presence of the intolerable
+Pagnell under Charlotte's eyes which irritated him beyond the common
+anger he felt at Aminta's pursuit of him right into Steignton.  His mouth
+locked.  Lady Charlotte needed no speech from him for sign of the
+boiling; she was too wary to speak while that went on.
+
+He said to Weyburn, loud enough for his Charlotte to heir.  'Do me the
+favour to go to the Countess of Ormont.  Conduct her back to London.  You
+will say it is my command.  Inform Mr. Morsfield, with my compliments, I
+regret I have no weapons here.  I understand him to complain of having to
+wait.  I shall be in town three days from this date.'
+
+'My lord,' said Mr. Weyburn; and actually he did mean to supplicate.  He
+could imagine seeing Lord Ormont's eyebrows rising to alpine heights.
+
+Lady Charlotte seized his arm.
+
+'Go at once.  Do as you are told.  I'll have your portmanteau packed and
+sent after you--the phaeton's out in the yard--to Rowsley, or Ashead, or
+Dornton, wherever they put up.  Now go, or we shall have hot work.  Keep
+your head on, and go.'
+
+He went, without bowing.
+
+Lady Charlotte rang for the footman.
+
+The earl and she watched the scene on the sward below the terrace.
+
+Aminta listened to Weyburn.  Evidently there was no expostulation.
+
+But it was otherwise with Mrs. Pagnell.  She flung wild arms of a
+semaphore signalling national events.  She sprang before Aminta to stop
+her retreat, and stamped and gibbed, for sign that she would not be
+driven.  She fell away to Mr. Morsfield, for simple hearing of her
+plaint.  He appeared emphatic.  There was a passage between him and
+Weyburn.
+
+'I suspect you've more than your match in young Weyburn, Mr. Morsfield,'
+Lady Charlotte said, measuring them as they stood together.  They turned
+at last.
+
+'You shall drive back to town with me, Rowsley,' said the fighting dame.
+
+She breathed no hint of her triumph.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+A SCENE ON THE ROAD BACK
+
+After refusing to quit the grounds of Steignton, in spite of the
+proprietor, Mrs. Pagnell burst into an agitation to have them be at
+speed, that they might 'shake the dust of the place from the soles of
+their feet'; and she hurried past Aminta and Lord Ormont's insolent
+emissary, carrying Mr. Morsfield beside her, perforce of a series of
+imperiously-toned vacuous questions, to which he listened in rigid
+politeness, with the ejaculation steaming off from time to time, 'A
+scandal!'
+
+He shot glances behind him.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell was going too fast.  She, however, world not hear of a halt,
+and she was his main apology for being present; he was excruciatingly
+attached to the horrid woman.
+
+Weyburn spoke the commonplaces about regrets to Aminta.
+
+'Believe me, it's long since I have been so happy,' she said.
+
+She had come out of her stupefaction, and she wore no theatrical looks of
+cheerfulness.
+
+'I regret that you should be dragged away.  But, if you say you do not
+mind, it will be pleasant to me.  I can excuse Lord Ormont's anger.
+I was ignorant of his presence here.  I thought him in Paris.  I supposed
+the place empty.  I wished to see it once.  I travelled as the niece of
+Mrs. Pagnell.  She is a little infatuated.  .  .  .  Mr. Morsfield heard
+of our expedition through her.  I changed the route.  I was not in want
+of a defender.  I could have defended myself in case of need.  We slept
+at Ashead, two hours from Steignton.  He and a friend accompanied us, not
+with my consent.  Lord Ormont could not have been aware of that.  These
+accidental circumstances happen.  There may be pardonable intentions on
+all sides.'
+
+She smiled.  Her looks were open, and her voice light and spirited;
+though the natural dark rose-glow was absent from her olive cheeks.
+
+Weyburn puzzled over the mystery of so volatile a treatment of a serious
+matter, on the part of a woman whose feelings he had reason to know were
+quick and deep.  She might be acting, as women so cleverly do.
+
+It could hardly be acting when she pointed to peeps of scenery, with a
+just eye for landscape.
+
+'You leave us for Switzerland very soon?' she said.
+
+'The Reversion I have been expecting has fallen in, besides my
+inheritance.  My mother was not to see the school.  But I shall not
+forget her counsels.  I can now make my purchase of the house and
+buildings, and buy out my partner at the end of a year.  My boys are
+jumping to start.  I had last week a letter from Emile.'
+
+'Dear little Emile!'
+
+'You like him?'
+
+'I could use a warmer word.  He knew me when I was a girl.'
+
+She wound the strings of his heart suddenly tense, and they sang to their
+quivering.
+
+'You will let me hear of you, Mr. Weyburn?'
+
+'I will write.  Oh! certainly I will write, if I am told you are
+interested in our doings, Lady Ormont.'
+
+'I will let you know that I am.'
+
+'I shall be happy in writing full reports.'
+
+'Every detail, I beg.  All concerning the school.  Help me to feel I am a
+boarder.  I catch up an old sympathy I had for girls and boys.  For boys!
+any boys! the dear monkey boys! cherub monkeys!  They are so funny.  I am
+sure I never have laughed as I did at Selina Collett's report, through
+her brother, of the way the boys tried to take to my name; and their
+sneezing at it, like a cat at a deceitful dish. "Aminta"--was that their
+way?'
+
+'Something--the young rascals!'
+
+'But please repeat it as you heard them.'
+
+'" Aminta."'
+
+He subdued the mouthing.
+
+'It didn't, offend me at all.  It is one of my amusements to think of it.
+But after a time they liked the name; and then how did they say it?'
+
+He had the beloved Aminta on his lips.
+
+He checked it, or the power to speak it failed.  She drew in a sharp
+breath.
+
+'I hope your boys will have plenty of fun in them.  They will have you
+for a providence and a friend.  I should wish to propose to visit your
+school some day.  You will keep me informed whether the school has
+vacancies.  You will, please, keep me regularly informed?'
+
+She broke into sobs.
+
+Weyburn talked on of the school, for a cover to the resuming of her
+fallen mask, as he fancied it.
+
+She soon recovered, all save a steady voice for converse, and begged him
+to proceed, and spoke in the flow of the subject; but the quaver of her
+tones was a cause of further melting.  The tears poured, she could not
+explain why, beyond assuring him that they were no sign of unhappiness.
+Winds on the great waters against a strong tidal current beat up the wave
+and shear and wing the spray, as in Aminta's bosom.  Only she could know
+that it was not her heart weeping, though she had grounds for a woman's
+weeping.  But she alone could be aware of her heart's running counter to
+the tears.
+
+Her agitation was untimely.  Both Mrs. Pagnell and Mr. Morsfield observed
+emotion at work.  And who could wonder?  A wife denied the admittance to
+her husband's house by her husband!  The most beautiful woman of her time
+relentlessly humiliated, ordered to journey back the way she had come.
+
+They had reached the gate of the park, and had turned.
+
+'A scandal!'
+
+Mr. Morsfield renewed his interjection vehemently, for an apology to his
+politeness in breaking from Mrs. Pagnell.
+
+Joining the lady, whose tears were of the nerves, he made offer of his
+devotion in any shape; and she was again in the plight to which a
+desperado can push a woman of the gentle kind.  She had the fear of
+provoking a collision if she reminded him, that despite her entreaties,
+he had compelled her, seconded by her aunt as he had been, to submit to
+his absurd protection on the walk across the park.
+
+He seemed quite regardless of the mischief he had created; and,
+reflecting upon how it served his purpose, he might well be.  Intemperate
+lover, of the ancient pattern, that he was, his aim to win the woman
+acknowledged no obstacle in the means.  Her pitiable position appealed to
+the best of him; his inordinate desire of her aroused the worst.  It was,
+besides, an element of his coxcombry, that he should, in apeing the
+utterly inconsiderate, rush swiftly to impersonate it when his passions
+were cast on a die.
+
+Weyburn he ignored as a stranger, an intruder, an inferior.
+
+Aminta's chariot was at the gate.
+
+She had to resign herself to the chances of a clash of men, and, as there
+were two to one, she requested help of Weyburn's hand, that he might be
+near her.
+
+A mounted gentleman, smelling parasite in his bearing, held the bridle of
+Morsfield's horse.
+
+The ladies having entered the chariot, Morsfield sprang to the saddle,
+and said: 'You, sir, had better stretch your legs to the inn.'
+
+'There is room for you, Mr. Weyburn,' said Aminta.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell puffed.
+
+'I can't think we've room, my dear.  I want that bit of seat in front for
+my feet.'
+
+Morsfield kicked at his horse's flanks, and between Weyburn and the
+chariot step, cried: 'Back, sir!'
+
+His reins were seized; the horse reared, the unexpected occurred.
+
+Weyburn shouted 'Off!' to the postillion, and jumped in.
+
+Morsfield was left to the shaking of a dusty coat, while the chariot
+rolled its gentle course down the leafy lane into the high-road.
+
+His friend had seized the horse's bridle-reins; and he remarked: 'I say,
+Dolf, we don't prosper to-day.'
+
+'He pays for it!' said Morsfield, foot in stirrup.  'You'll take him and
+trounce him at the inn.  I don't fight with servants.  Better game.  One
+thing, Cumnock: the fellow's clever at the foils.'
+
+'Foils to the devil!  If I tackle the fellow, it won't be with the
+buttons.  But how has he pushed in?'
+
+Morsfield reported 'the scandal!' in sharp headings.
+
+'Turned her away.  Won't have her enter his house--grandest woman in all
+England!  Sent his dog to guard.  Think of it for an insult!  It's insult
+upon insult.  I 've done my utmost to fire his marrow.  I did myself a
+good turn by following her up and entering that park with her.  I shall
+succeed; there 's a look of it.  All I have--my life--is that woman's.
+I never knew what this devil's torture was before I saw her.'
+
+His friend was concerned for his veracity.  'Amy!'
+
+'A common spotted snake.  She caught me young, and she didn't carry me
+off, as I mean to carry off this glory of her sex--she is: you've seen
+her!--and free her, and devote every minute of the rest of my days to
+her.  I say I must win the woman if I stop at nothing, or I perish; and
+if it 's a failure, exit 's my road.  I 've watched every atom she
+touched in a room, and would have heaped gold to have the chairs, tables,
+cups, carpets, mine.  I have two short letters written with her hand.
+I 'd give two of my estates for two more.  If I were a beggar, and kept
+them, I should be rich.  Relieve me of that dog, and I toss you a
+thousand-pound note, and thank you from my soul, Cumnock.  You know
+what hangs on it.  Spur, you dolt, or she'll be out of sight.'
+
+They cantered upon application of the spur.  Captain Cumnock was an
+impecunious fearless rascal, therefore a parasite and a bully duellist;
+a thick-built north-countryman; a burly ape of the ultra-elegant; hunter,
+gamester, hard-drinker, man of pleasure.  His known readiness to fight
+was his trump-card at a period when the declining custom of the duel
+taxed men's courage to brave the law and the Puritan in the interests of
+a privileged and menaced aristocracy.  An incident like the present was
+the passion in the dice-box to Cumnock.  Morsfield was of the order of
+men who can be generous up to the pitch of their desires.  Consequently,
+the world accounted him open-handed and devoted when enamoured.  Few men
+liked him; he was a hero with some women.  The women he trampled on; the
+men he despised.  To the lady of his choice he sincerely offered his
+fortune and his life for the enjoyment of her favour.  His ostentation
+and his offensive daring combined the characteristics of the peacock and
+the hawk.  Always near upon madness, there were occasions when he could
+eclipse the insane.  He had a ringing renown in his class.
+
+Chariot and horsemen arrived at the Roebuck Arms, at the centre of the
+small town of Ashead, on the line from Steignton through Rowsley.  The
+pair of cavaliers dismounted and hustled Weyburn in assisting the ladies
+to descend.
+
+The ladies entered the inn; they declined refection of any sort.  They
+had biscuits and sweetmeats, and looked forward to tea at a farther
+stage.  Captain Cumnock stooped to their verdict on themselves, with
+marvel at the quantity of flesh they managed to put on their bones from
+such dieting.
+
+'By your courtesy, sir, a word with you in the inn yard, if you please,'
+he said to Weyburn in the inn-porch.
+
+Weyburn answered, 'Half a minute,' and was informed that it was exactly
+the amount of time the captain could afford to wait.
+
+Weyburn had seen the Steignton phaeton and coachman in the earl's light-
+blue livery.  It was at his orders, he heard.  He told the coachman to
+expect hire shortly, and he followed the captain, with a heavy trifle of
+suspicion that some brew was at work.  He said to Aminta in the passage--
+
+'You have your settlement with the innkeeper.  Don't, I beg, step into
+the chariot till you see me.'
+
+'Anything?' said she.
+
+'Only prudence.'
+
+'Our posting horses will be harnessed soon, I hope.  I burn to get away.'
+
+Mrs. Pagnell paid the bill at the bar of the inn.  Morsfield poured out
+for the injured countess or no-countess a dram of the brandy of passion,
+under the breath.
+
+'Deny that you singled me once for your esteem.  Hardest-hearted of the
+women of earth and dearest! deny that you gave me reason to hope--and
+now!  I have ridden in your track all this way for the sight of you, as
+you know, and you kill me with frost.  Yes, I rejoice that we were seen
+together.  Look on me.  I swear I perish for one look of kindness.  You
+have been shamefully used, madam.'
+
+'It seems to me I am being so,' said Aminta, cutting herself loose from
+the man of the close eyes that wavered as they shot the dart.
+
+Her action was too decided for him to follow her up under the observation
+of the inn windows and a staring street.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell came out.  She went boldly to Morsfield and they conferred.
+He was led by her to the chariot, where she pointed to a small padded
+slab of a seat back to the horses.  Turning to the bar, he said:--
+My friend will look to my horse.  Both want watering and a bucketful.
+There!'--he threw silver--'I have to protect the ladies.'
+
+Aminta was at the chariot door talking to her aunt inside.
+
+'But I say I have been insulted--is the word--more than enough by Lord
+Ormont to-day!' Mrs. Pagnell exclaimed; 'and I won't, I positively refuse
+to ride up to London with any servant of his.  It's quite sufficient that
+it's his servant.  I'm not titled, but I 'in not quite dirt.  Mr.
+Morsfield kindly offers his protection, and I accept.  He is company.'
+
+Nodding and smirking at Morsfield's approach, she entreated Aminta to
+step up and in, for the horses were coming out of the yard.
+
+Aminta looked round.  Weyburn was perceived; and Morsfield's features
+cramped at thought of a hitch in the plot.
+
+'Possession,' Mrs. Pagnell murmured significantly.  She patted the seat.
+Morsfield sprang to Weyburn's place.
+
+That was witnessed by Aminta and Weyburn.  She stepped to consult him.
+He said to the earl's coachman--a young fellow with a bright eye for
+orders--
+
+'Drive as fast as you can pelt for Dornton.  I'm doing my lord's
+commands.'
+
+'Trust yourself to me, madam.' His hand stretched for Aminta to mount.
+She took it without a word and climbed to the seat.  A clatter of hoofs
+rang out with the crack of the whip.  They were away behind a pair of
+steppers that could go the pace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE PURSUERS
+
+For promptitude, the lady, the gentleman, and the coachman were in such
+unison as to make it a reasonable deduction that the flight had been
+concerted.
+
+Never did any departure from the Roebuck leave so wide-mouthed a body of
+spectators.  Mrs. Pagnell's shrieks of 'Stop, oh! stop!' to the backs of
+the coachman and Aminta were continued until they were far down the
+street.  She called to the innkeeper, called to the landlady and to
+invisible constables for help.  But her pangs were childish compared with
+Morsfield's, who, with the rage of a conceited schemer tricked and the
+fury of a lover beholding the rape of his beautiful, bellowed impotently
+at Weyburn and the coachman out of hearing, 'Stop! you!'  He was in the
+state of men who believe that there is a virtue in imprecations, and he
+shot loud oaths after them, shook his fist, cursed his friend Cumnock,
+whose name he vociferated as a summons to him,--generally the baffled
+plotter misconducted himself to an extreme degree, that might have
+apprised Mrs. Pagnell of a more than legitimate disappointment on his
+part.
+
+Pursuit was one of the immediate ideas which rush forward to look
+back woefully on impediments and fret to fever over the tardiness of
+operations.  A glance at the thing of wrinkles receiving orders to buckle
+at his horses and pursue convinced them of the hopelessness; and
+Morsfield was pricked to intensest hatred of the woman by hearing the
+dire exclamation, 'One night, and her character's gone!'
+
+'Be quiet, ma'am, if you please, or nothing can be done,' he cried.
+
+'I tell you, Mr. Morsfield--don't you see?--he has thrown them
+together.  It is Lord Ormont's wicked conspiracy to rid himself of her.
+A secretary!  He'll beat any one alive in plots.  She can't show her face
+in London after this, if you don't overtake her.  And she might have seen
+Lord Ormont's plot to ruin her.  He tired of her, and was ashamed of her
+inferior birth to his own, after the first year, except on the Continent,
+where she had her rights.  Me he never forgave for helping make him the
+happy man he might have been in spite of his age.  For she is lovely!
+But it's worse for a lovely woman with a damaged reputation.  And that 's
+his cunning.  How she could be so silly as to play into it!  She can't
+have demeaned herself to look on that secretary!  I said from the first
+he seemed as if thrown into her way for a purpose.  But she has pride: my
+niece Aminta has pride.  She might well have listened to flatterers--she
+had every temptation--if it hadn't been for her pride.  It may save her
+yet.  However good-looking, she will remember her dignity--unless he's a
+villain.  Runnings away!  drivings together!  inns oh!  the story over
+London!  I do believe she has a true friend in you, Mr. Morsfield; and I
+say, as I have said before, the sight of a devoted admirer would have
+brought any husband of more than sixty to his senses, if he hadn't hoped
+a catastrophe and determined on it.  Catch them we can't, unless she
+repents and relents; and prayers for that are our only resource.  Now,
+start, man, do!'
+
+The postillion had his foot in position to spring.  Morsfield bawled
+Cumnock's name, and bestrode his horse.  Captain Cumnock emerged from the
+inn-yard with a dubitative step, pressing a handkerchief to his nose,
+blinking, and scrutinizing the persistent fresh stains on it.
+
+Stable-boys were at the rear.  These, ducking and springing, surcharged
+and copious exponents of the play they had seen, related, for the benefit
+of the town, how that the two gentlemen had exchanged words in the yard,
+which were about beastly pistols, which the slim gentleman would have
+none of; and then the big one trips up, like dancing, to the other one
+and flicks him a soft clap on the check--quite friendly, you may say;
+and before he can square to it, the slim one he steps his hind leg half a
+foot back, and he drives a straight left like lightning off the shoulder
+slick on to t' other one's nob, and over he rolls, like a cart with the
+shafts up down a bank; and he' a been washing his 'chops' and threatening
+bullets ever since.
+
+The exact account of the captain's framework in the process of the fall
+was graphically portrayed in our blunt and racy vernacular, which a
+society nourished upon Norman-English and English-Latin banishes from
+print, largely to its impoverishment, some think.
+
+By the time the primary narrative of the encounter in the inn yard had
+given ground for fancy and ornament to present it in yet more luscious
+dress, Lord Ormont's phaeton was a good mile on the road.  Morsfield and
+Captain Cumnock--the latter inquisitive of the handkerchief pressed
+occasionally at his nose--trotted on tired steeds along dusty wheel-
+tracks.  Mrs. Pagnell was the solitary of the chariot, having a horrid
+couple of loaded pistols to intimidate her for her protection, and the
+provoking back view of a regularly jogging mannikin under a big white hat
+with blue riband, who played the part of Time in dragging her along, with
+worse than no countenance for her anxieties.
+
+News of the fugitives was obtained at the rampant Red Lion in Dudsworth,
+nine miles on along the London road, to the extent that the Earl of
+Ormont's phaeton, containing a lady and a gentleman, had stopped there
+a minute to send back word to Steignton of their comfortable progress,
+and expectations of crossing the borders into Hampshire before sunset.
+Morsfield and Cumnock shrugged at the bumpkin artifice.  They left their
+line of route to be communicated to the chariot, and chose, with
+practised acumen, that very course, which was the main road, and rewarded
+them at the end of half an hour with sight of the Steignton phaeton.
+
+But it was returning.  A nearer view showed it empty of the couple.
+
+Morsfield bade the coachman pull up, and he was readily obeyed.  Answers
+came briskly.
+
+Although provincial acting is not of the high class which conceals the
+art, this man's look beside him and behind him at vacant seats had
+incontestable evidence in support of his declaration, that the lady and
+gentleman had gone on by themselves: the phaeton was a box of flown
+birds.
+
+'Where did you say they got out, you dog?' said Cumnock.
+
+The coachman stood up to spy a point below.  'Down there at the bottom of
+the road, to the right, where there's a stile across the meadows, making
+a short cut by way of a bridge over the river to Busley and North
+Tothill, on the high-road to Hocklebourne.  The lady and gentleman
+thought they 'd walk for a bit of exercise the remains of the journey.'
+
+'Can't prove the rascal's a liar,' Cumnock said to Morsfield, who rallied
+him savagely on his lucky escape from another knock-down blow, and tossed
+silver on the seat, and said--
+
+'We 'll see if there is a stile.'
+
+'You'll see the stile, sir,' rejoined the man, and winked at their backs.
+
+Both cavaliers, being famished besides baffled, were in sour tempers,
+expecting to see just the dead wooden stile, and see it as a grin at
+them.  Cumnock called on Jove to witness that they had been donkeys
+enough to forget to ask the driver how far round on the road it was to
+the other end of the cross-cut.
+
+Morsfield, entirely objecting to asinine harness with him, mocked at his
+invocation and intonation of the name of Jove.
+
+Cumnock was thereupon stung to a keen recollection of the allusion to his
+knock-down blow, and he retorted that there were some men whose wit was
+the parrot's.
+
+Morsfield complimented him over the exhibition of a vastly superior and
+more serviceable wit, in losing sight of his antagonist after one trial
+of him.
+
+Cumnock protested that the loss of time was caused by his friend's
+dalliance with the Venus in the chariot.
+
+Morsfield's gall seethed at a flying picture of Mrs. Pagnell, coupled
+with the retarding reddened handkerchief business, and he recommended
+Cumnock to pay court to the old woman, as the only chance he would have
+of acquaintanceship with the mother of Love.
+
+Upon that Cumnock confessed in humility to his not being wealthy.
+Morsfield looked a willingness to do the deed he might have to pay for in
+tenderer places than the pocket, and named the head as a seat of poverty
+with him.
+
+Cumnock then yawned a town fop's advice to a hustling street passenger to
+apologize for his rudeness before it was too late.  Whereat Morsfield,
+certain that his parasitic thrasyleon apeing coxcomb would avoid
+extremities, mimicked him execrably.
+
+Now this was a second breach of the implied convention existing among the
+exquisitely fine-bred silken-slender on the summits of our mundane
+sphere, which demands of them all, that they respect one another's
+affectations.  It is commonly done, and so the costly people of a single
+pattern contrive to push forth, flatteringly to themselves, luxuriant
+shoots of individuality in their orchidean glass-house.  A violation of
+the rule is a really deadly personal attack.  Captain Cumnock was
+particularly sensitive regarding it, inasmuch as he knew himself not the
+natural performer he strove to be, and a mimicry affected him as a
+haunting check.
+
+He burst out: 'Damned if I don't understand why you're hated by men and
+women both!'
+
+Morsfield took a shock.  'Infernal hornet!' he muttered; for his
+conquests had their secret history.
+
+'May and his wife have a balance to pay will trip you yet, you 'll find.'
+
+'Reserve your wrath, sir, for the man who stretched you on your back.'
+
+The batteries of the two continued exchangeing redhot shots, with the
+effect, that they had to call to mind they were looking at the stile.
+A path across a buttercup meadow was beyond it.  They were damped to
+some coolness by the sight.
+
+'Upon my word, the trick seems neat!' said Cumnock staring at the
+pastoral curtain.
+
+'Whose trick?' he was asked sternly.
+
+'Here or there 's not much matter; they 're off, unless they 're under a
+hedge laughing.'
+
+An ache of jealousy and spite was driven through the lover, who groaned,
+and presently said--
+
+'I ride on.  That old woman can follow.  I don't want to hear her
+gibberish.  We've lost the game--there 's no reckoning the luck.  If
+there's a chance, it's this way.  It smells a trick.  He and she--by all
+the devils!  It has been done in my family--might have been done again.
+Tell the men on the plain they can drive home.  There's a hundred-pound
+weight on your tongue for silence.'
+
+Cumnock cried: 'But we needn't be parting, Dolf!  Stick together.  Bad
+luck's not repeated every day. Keep heart for the good.'
+
+'My heart's shattered, Cumnock.  I say it's impossible she can love a
+husband twice her age, who treats her--you 've seen.  Contempt of that
+lady!
+
+By heaven! once in my power, I swear she would have been sacred to me.
+But she would have been compelled to face the public and take my hand.
+I swear she would have been congratulated on the end of her sufferings.
+Worship!--that's what I feel.  No woman ever alive had eyes in her head
+like that lady's.  I repeat her name ten times every night before I go to
+sleep.  If I had her hand, no, not one kiss would I press on it without
+her sanction.  I could be in love with her cruelty, if only I had her
+near me.  I 've lost her--by the Lord, I 've lost her!'
+
+'Pro tem.,' said the captain.  'A plate of red beef and a glass of port
+wine alters the view.  Too much in the breast, too little in the belly,
+capsizes lovers.  Old story.  Horses that ought to be having a mash
+between their ribs make riders despond.  Say, shall we back to the town
+behind us, or on?  Back's the safest, if the chase is up.'
+
+Morsfield declared himself incapable of turning and meeting that chariot.
+He sighed heavily.  Cumnock offered to cheer him with a song of Captain
+Chanter's famous collection, if he liked; but Morsfield gesticulated
+abhorrence, and set out at a trot.  Song in defeat was a hiss of derision
+to him.
+
+He had failed.  Having failed, he for the first time perceived the
+wildness of a plot that had previously appeared to him as one of the
+Yorkshire Morsfields' moves to win an object.  Traditionally they stopped
+at nothing.  There would have been a sunburst of notoriety in the capture
+and carrying off of the beautiful Countess of Ormont.
+
+She had eluded him during the downward journey to Steignton.  He came on
+her track at the village at the junction of the roads above Ashead, and
+thence, confiding in the half-connivance or utter stupidity of the fair
+one's duenna, despatched a mounted man-servant to his coachman and
+footmen, stationed ten miles behind, with orders that they should drive
+forthwith to the great plain, and be ready at a point there for two
+succeeding days.  That was the plot, promptly devised upon receipt of
+Mrs. Pagnell's communication; for the wealthy man of pleasure was a
+strategist fit to be a soldier, in dexterity not far from rivalling the
+man by whom he had been outdone.
+
+An ascetic on the road to success, he dedicated himself to a term of hard
+drinking under a reverse; and the question addressed to the chief towns
+in the sketch counties his head contained was, which one near would be
+likely to supply the port wine for floating him through garlanding dreams
+of possession most tastily to blest oblivion.
+
+He was a lover, nevertheless, honest in his fashion, and meant not worse
+than to pull his lady through a mire, and wash her with Morsfield soap,
+and crown her, and worship.  She was in his blood, about him, above him;
+he had plunged into her image, as into deeps that broke away in
+phosphorescent waves on all sides, reflecting every remembered, every
+imagined, aspect of the adored beautiful woman piercing him to extinction
+with that last look of her at the moment of flight.
+
+Had he been just a trifle more sincere in the respect he professed for
+his lady's duenna, he would have turned on the road to Dornton and a
+better fortune.  Mrs. Pagnell had now become the ridiculous Paggy of Mrs.
+Lawrence Finchley and her circle for the hypocritical gentleman; and he
+remarked to Captain Cumnock, when their mutual trot was established:
+'Paggy enough for me for a month--good Lord!  I can't stand another dose
+of her by herself.'
+
+'It's a bird that won't roast or boil or stew,' said the captain.
+
+They were observed trotting along below by Lord Ormont's groom of the
+stables on promotion, as he surveyed the country from the chalk-hill rise
+and brought the phaeton to a stand, Jonathan Boon, a sharp lad, whose
+comprehension was a little muddled by 'the rights of it' in this
+adventure.  He knew, however, that he did well to follow the directions
+of one who was in his lordship's pay, and stretched out the fee with the
+air of a shake of the hand, and had a look of the winning side, moreover.
+A born countryman could see that.
+
+Boon watched the pair of horsemen trotting to confusion, and clicked in
+his cheek.  The provincial of the period when coaches were beginning to
+be threatened by talk of new-fangled rails was proud to boast of his
+outwitting Londoners on material points; and Boon had numerous tales of
+how it had been done, to have the laugh of fellows thinking themselves
+such razors.  They compensated him for the slavish abasement of his whole
+neighbourhood under the hectoring of the grand new manufacture of wit in
+London:--the inimitable Metropolitan PUN, which came down to the country
+by four-in-hand, and stopped all other conversation wherever it was
+reported, and would have the roar--there was no resisting it.  Indeed,
+to be able to see the thing smartly was an entry into community with the
+elect of the district; and when the roaring ceased and the thing was
+examined, astonishment at the cleverness of it, and the wonderful
+shallowness of the seeming deep hole, and the unexhausted bang it had to
+go off like a patent cracker, fetched it out for telling over again; and
+up went the roar, and up it went at home and in stable-yards, and at the
+net puffing of churchwardens on a summer's bench, or in a cricket-booth
+after a feast, or round the old inn's taproom fine.  The pun, the
+wonderful bo-peep of double meanings darting out to surprise and smack
+one another from behind words of the same sound, sometimes the same
+spelling, overwhelmed the provincial mind with awe of London's occult and
+prolific genius.
+
+Yet down yonder you may behold a pair of London gentlemen trotting along
+on as fine a fool's errand as ever was undertaken by nincompoops bearing
+a scaled letter, marked urgent, to a castle, and the request in it that
+the steward would immediately upon perusal down with their you-know-what
+and hoist them and birch them a jolly two dozen without parley.
+
+Boon smacked his leg, and then drove ahead merrily.
+
+For this had happened to his knowledge: the gentleman accompanying the
+lady had refused to make anything of a halt at the Red Lion, and had said
+he was sure there would be a small public-house at the outskirts of the
+town, for there always was one; and he proved right, and the lady and he
+had descended at the sign of the Jolly Cricketers, and Boon had driven on
+for half an hour by order.
+
+This, too, had happened, external to Boon's knowledge: the lady and the
+gentleman had witnessed, through the small diamond window-panes of the
+Jolly Cricketers' parlour, the passing-by of the two horsemen in pursuit
+of them; and the gentleman had stopped the chariot coming on some fifteen
+minutes later, but he did not do it at the instigation of the lady.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+AT THE SIGN OF THE JOLLY CRICKETERS
+
+The passing by of the pair of horsemen, who so little suspected the
+treasure existing behind the small inn's narrow window did homage in
+Aminta's mind to her protector's adroitness.  Their eyes met without a
+smile, though they perceived the grisly comic of the incident.  Their
+thoughts were on the chariot to follow.
+
+Aminta had barely uttered a syllable since the start of the flight from
+Ashead.  She had rocked in a swing between sensation and imagination,
+exultant, rich with the broad valley of the plain and the high green
+waves of the downs at their giant's bound in the flow of curves and sunny
+creases to the final fling-off of the dip on sky.  Here was a twisted
+hawthorn carved clean to the way of the wind; a sheltered clump of
+chestnuts holding their blossoms up, as with a thousand cresset-clasping
+hands; here were grasses that nodded swept from green to grey; flowers
+yellow, white, and blue, significant of a marvellous unknown through the
+gates of colour; and gorse-covers giving out the bird, squares of young
+wheat, a single fallow threaded by a hare, and cottage gardens, shadowy
+garths, wayside flint-heap, woods of the mounds and the dells, fluttering
+leaves, clouds: all were swallowed, all were the one unworried
+significance.  Scenery flew, shifted, returned; again the line of the
+downs raced and the hollows reposed simultaneously.  They were the same
+in change to an eye grown older; they promised, as at the first,
+happiness for recklessness.  The whole woman was urged to delirious
+recklessness in happiness, and she drank the flying scenery as an
+indication, a likeness, an encouragement.
+
+When her wild music of the blood had fallen to stillness with the stopped
+wheels, she was in the musky, small, low room of the diamond window-
+panes, at her companion's disposal for what he might deem the best: he
+was her fate.  But the more she leaned on a man of self-control, the more
+she admired; and an admiration that may not speak itself to the object
+present drops inward, stirs the founts; and if these are repressed, the
+tenderness which is not allowed to weep will drown self-pity, hardening
+the woman to summon scruples in relation to her unworthiness.  He might
+choose to forget, but the more she admired, the less could her feminine
+conscience permit of an utter or of any forgetfulness that she was not
+the girl Browny, whom he once loved--perhaps loved now, under some
+illusion of his old passion for her--does love now, ill-omened as he is
+in that!  She read him by her startled reading of her own heart, and she
+constrained her will to keep from doing, saying, looking aught that would
+burden without gracing his fortunes.  For, as she felt, a look, a word, a
+touch would do the mischief; she had no resistance behind her cold face,
+only the physical scruple, which would become the moral unworthiness if
+in any way she induced him to break his guard and blow hers to shreds.
+An honourable conscience before the world has not the same certificate in
+love's pure realm.  They are different kingdoms.  A girl may be of both;
+a married woman, peering outside the narrow circle of her wedding-ring,
+should let her eyelids fall and the unseen fires consume her.
+
+Their common thought was now, Will the chariot follow?
+
+What will he do if it comes? was an unformed question with Aminta.
+
+He had formed and not answered it, holding himself, sincerely at the
+moment, bound to her wishes.  Near the end of Ashead main street she had
+turned to him in her seat beside the driver, and conveyed silently, with
+the dental play of her tongue and pouted lips, 'No title.'
+
+Upon that sign, waxen to those lips, he had said to the driver, 'You took
+your orders from Lady Charlotte?
+
+And the reply, 'Her ladyship directed me sir, exonerated Lord Ormont so
+far.
+
+Weyburn remembered then a passage of one of her steady looks, wherein an
+oracle was mute.  He tried several of the diviner's shots to interpret
+it: she was beyond his reach.  She was in her blissful delirium of the
+flight, and reproached him with giving her the little bit less to resent
+--she who had no sense of resentment, except the claim on it to excuse.
+
+Their landlady entered the room to lay the cloth for tea and eggs.  She
+made offer of bacon as well, homecured.  She was a Hampshire woman, and
+understood the rearing of pigs.  Her husband had been a cricketer, and
+played for his county.  He didn't often beat Hampshire!  They had a good
+garden of vegetables, and grass-land enough for two cows.  They made
+their own bread, their own butter, but did not brew.
+
+Weyburn pronounced for a plate of her home-cured.  She had children, the
+woman told him--two boys and a girl.  Her husband wished for a girl.  Her
+eldest boy wished to be a sailor, and would walk miles to a pond to sail
+bits of wood on it, though there had never been a sea-faring man in her
+husband's family or her own.  She agreed with the lady and gentleman that
+it might be unwise to go contrary to the boy's bent.  Going to school or
+coming home, a trickle of water would stop him.
+
+Aminta said to her companion in French, 'Have you money?'
+
+She chased his blood.  'Some: sufficient.  I think.'  It stamped their
+partnership.
+
+'I have but a small amount.  Aunt was our paymaster.  We will buy the
+little boy a boat to sail.  You are pale.'
+
+'I 've no notion of it.'
+
+'Something happened it Ashead.'
+
+'It would not have damaged my complexion.'
+
+He counted his money.  Aminta covertly handed him her purse.  Their
+fingers touched.  The very minor circumstance of their landlady being in
+the room dammed a flood.
+
+Her money and his amounted to seventeen pounds.  The sum-total was a
+symbol of days that were a fiery wheel.
+
+Honour and blest adventure might travel together two days or three, he
+thought.  If the chariot did not pass:--Lord Ormont had willed it.  A man
+could not be said to swerve in his duty when acting to fulfil the
+master's orders, and Mrs. Pagnell was proved a hoodwinked duenna, and
+Morsfield was in the air.  The breathing Aminta had now a common purse
+with her first lover.  For three days or more they were, it would seem,
+to journey together, alone together: the prosecution of his duty imposed
+it on him.  Sooth to say, Weyburn knew that a spice of passion added to a
+bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess; but he fancied an absolute
+reliance on Aminta's dignity, and his respect for her was another
+barrier.  He begged the landlady's acceptance of two shillings for her
+boy's purchase of a boat, advising her to have him taught early to swim.
+Both he and Aminta had a feeling that they could be helpful in some
+little things on the road if the chariot did not pass.
+
+Justification began to speak loudly against the stopping of the chariot
+if it did pass.  The fact that sweet wishes come second, and not so
+loudly, assured him they were quite secondary; for the lover sunk to
+sophist may be self-beguiled by the arts which render him the potent
+beguiler.
+
+'We are safe here,' he said, and thrilled her with the 'we' behind the
+curtaining leaded window-panes.
+
+'What is it you propose?'  Her voice was lower than she intended.  To
+that she ascribed his vivid flush.  It kindled the deeper of her dark
+hue.
+
+He mentioned her want of luggage, and the purchase of a kit.
+
+She said, 'Have we the means?'
+
+'We can adjust the means to the ends.'
+
+'We must be sparing of expenses.'
+
+'Will you walk part of the way?'
+
+'I should like it.'
+
+'We shall be longer on the journey.'
+
+'We shall not find it tiresome, I hope.'
+
+'We can say so, if we do.'
+
+'We are not strangers.'
+
+The recurrence of the 'we' had an effect of wedding: it was fatalistic,
+it would come; but, in truth, there was pleasure in it, and the pleasure
+was close to consciousness of some guilt when vowing itself innocent.
+
+And, no, they were not strangers; hardly a word could they utter without
+cutting memory to the quick; their present breath was out of the far
+past.
+
+Love told them both that they were trembling into one another's arms,
+not voluntarily, against the will with each of them; they knew it would
+be for life; and Aminta's shamed reserves were matched to make an
+obstacle by his consideration for her good name and her station,
+for his own claim to honest citizenship also.
+
+Weyburn acted on his instinct at sight of the postillion and the chariot;
+he flung the window wide and shouted.  Then he said, 'It is decided,' and
+he felt the rightness of the decision, like a man who has given a
+condemned limb to the surgeon.
+
+Aminta was passive as a water-weed in the sway of the tide.  Hearing it
+to be decided, she was relieved.  What her secret heart desired, she kept
+secret, almost a secret from herself.  He was not to leave her; so she
+had her permitted wish, she had her companion plus her exclamatory aunt,
+who was a protection, and she had learnt her need of the smallest
+protection.
+
+'I can scarcely believe I see you, my dear, dear child!' Mrs. Pagnell
+cried, upon entering the small inn parlour; and so genuine was her
+satisfaction that for a time she paid no heed to the stuffiness of the
+room, the meanness of the place, the unfitness of such a hostelry to
+entertain ladies--the Countess of Ormont!
+
+'Eat here?' Mrs. Pagnell asked, observing the preparations for the meal.
+Her pride quailed, her stomach abjured appetite.  But she forbore from
+asking how it was that the Countess of Ormont had come to the place.
+
+At a symptom of her intention to indulge in disgust; Aminta brought up
+Mr. Morsfield by name; whereupon Mrs. Pagnell showed she had reflected on
+her conduct in relation to the gentleman, and with the fear of the earl
+if she were questioned.
+
+Home-made bread and butter, fresh eggs and sparkling fat of bacon invited
+her to satisfy her hunger.  Aminta let her sniff at the teapot
+unpunished; the tea had a rustic aroma of ground-ivy, reminding Weyburn
+of his mother's curiosity to know the object of an old man's plucking of
+hedgeside leaves in the environs of Bruges one day, and the simple reply
+to her French, 'Tea for the English.'  A hint of an anecdote interested
+and enriched the stores of Mrs. Pagnell, so she capped it and partook of
+the infusion ruefully.
+
+'But the bread is really good,' she said, 'and we are unlikely to be seen
+leaving the place by any person of importance.'
+
+'Unless Mr. Morsfield should be advised to return this way,' said Aminta.
+
+Her aunt proposed for a second cup.  She was a manageable woman; the same
+scourge had its instant wholesome effect on her when she snubbed the
+secretary.
+
+So she complimented his trencherman's knife, of which the remarkably fine
+edge was proof enough that he had come heart-whole out of the trial of an
+hour or so's intimate companionship with a beautiful woman, who had never
+been loved, never could be loved by man, as poor Mr. Morsfield loved her!
+He had sworn to having fasted three whole days and nights after his first
+sight of Aminta.  Once, he said, her eyes pierced him so that he dreamed
+of a dagger in his bosom, and woke himself plucking at it.  That was
+love, as a born gentleman connected with a baronetcy and richer than many
+lords took the dreadful passion.  A secretary would have no conception of
+such devoted extravagance.  At the most he might have attempted to
+insinuate a few absurd, sheepish soft nothings, and the Countess of
+Ormont would know right well how to shrivel him with one of her looks.
+No lady of the land could convey so much either way, to attract or to
+repel, as Aminta, Countess of Ormont!  And the man, the only man,
+insensible to her charm or her scorn, was her own wedded lord and
+husband.  Old, to be sure, and haughty, his pride might not allow him to
+overlook poor Mr. Morsfield's unintentional offence.  But the presence of
+the countess's aunt was a reply to any charge he might seek to establish.
+Unhappily, the case is one between men on their touchiest point, when
+women are pushed aside, and justice and religion as well.  We might be
+living in a heathen land, for aught that morality has to say.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell fussed about being seen on her emergence from the Jolly
+Cricketers.  Aminta sent Weyburn to spy for the possible reappearance of
+Mr. Morsfield.  He reported a horseman; a butcher-boy clattered by.
+Aminta took the landlady's hand, under her aunt's astonished gaze, and
+said: 'I shall not forget your house and your attention to us.' She spoke
+with a shake of her voice.  The landlady curtseyed and smiled, curtseyed
+and almost whimpered.  The house was a poor one, she begged to say; they
+didn't often have such guests, but whoever came to it they did their best
+to give good food and drink.
+
+Hearing from Weyburn that the chariot was bound to go through Winchester,
+she spoke of a brother, a baker there, the last surviving member of her
+family and, after some talk, Weyburn offered to deliver a message of
+health and greeting at the baker's shop.  There was a waving of hands,
+much nodding and curtseying, as the postillion resumed his demi-volts--
+all to the stupefaction of Mrs. Pagnell; but she dared not speak, she had
+Morsfield on the mouth.  Nor could she deny the excellent quality of the
+bread and butter, and milk, too, at the sign of the Jolly Cricketers.
+She admitted, moreover, that the food and service of the little inn
+belonged in their unpretentious honesty to the, kind we call old English:
+the dear old simple country English of the brotherly interchange in sight
+of heaven--good stuff for good money, a matter with a blessing on it.
+
+'But,' said she, 'my dear Aminta, I do not and I cannot understand looks
+of grateful affection at a small innkeeper's wife paid, and I don't doubt
+handsomely paid, for her entertainment of you.'
+
+'I feel it,' said Aminta; tears rushed to her eyelids, overflowing, and
+her features were steady.
+
+'Ah, poor dear! that I do understand,' her aunt observed.  'Any little
+kindness moves you to-day; and well it may.'
+
+'Yes, aunty,' said Aminta, and in relation to the cause of her tears she
+was the less candid of the two.
+
+So far did she carry her thanks for a kindness as to glance back through
+her dropping tears at the sign-board of the Jolly Cricketers; where two
+brave batsmen cross for the second of a certain three runs, if only the
+fellow wheeling legs, face up after the ball in the clouds, does but miss
+his catch: a grand suspensory moment of the game, admirably chosen by the
+artist to arrest the wayfarer and promote speculation.  For will he let
+her slip through his fingers when she comes down? or will he have her
+fast and tight?  And in the former case, the bats are tearing their legs
+off for just number nought.  And in the latter, there 's a wicket down,
+and what you may call a widower walking it bat on shoulder, parted from
+his mate for that mortal innings, and likely to get more chaff than
+consolation when he joins the booth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+UNDER-CURRENTS IN THE MINDS OF LADY CHARLOTTE AND LORD ORMONT
+
+Another journey of travellers to London, in the rear of the chariot, was
+not diversified by a single incident or refreshed by scraps of dialogue.
+Lady Charlotte had her brother Rowsley with her, and he might be
+taciturn,--she drove her flocks of thoughts, she was busily and
+contentedly occupied.  Although separation from him stirred her mind more
+excitedly over their days and deeds of boy and girl, her having him near,
+and having now won him to herself, struck her as that old time's harvest,
+about as much as can be hoped for us from life, when we have tasted it.
+
+The scene of the invasion of Steignton by the woman and her aunt, and
+that man Morsfield, was a steel engraving among her many rapid and
+featureless cogitations.  She magnified the rakishness of the woman's
+hand on hip in view of the house, and she magnified the woman's insolence
+in bringing that man Morsfield--to share probably the hospitality of
+Steignton during the master's absence!  Her trick of caricature, whenever
+she dealt with adversaries, was active upon the three persons under
+observation of the windows.  It was potent to convince her that her
+brother Rowsley had cast the woman to her native obscurity.  However,
+Lady Charlotte could be just: the woman's figure, and as far as could be
+seen of her face, accounted for Rowsley's entanglement.
+
+Why chastize that man Morsfield at all?  Calling him out would give a
+further dip to the name of Ormont.  A pretty idea, to be punishing a roan
+for what you thank him for!  He did a service; and if he's as mad about
+her as he boasts, he can take her and marry her now Rowsley 's free of
+her.
+
+Morsfield says he wants to marry her--wants nothing better.  Then let
+him.  Rowsley has shown him there 's no legal impediment.  Pity that
+young Weyburn had to be sent to do watch-dog duty.  But Rowsley would
+not have turned her back to travel alone: that is, without a man to
+guard.  He 's too chivalrous.
+
+The sending of Weyburn, she now fancied, was her own doing, and Lady
+Charlotte attributed it to her interpretation of her brother's heart of
+chivalry; though it would have been the wiser course, tending straight
+and swift to the natural end, if the two women and their Morsfield had
+received the dismissal to travel as they came.
+
+One sees it after the event.  Yes, only Rowsley would not have dismissed
+her without surety that she would be protected.  So it was the right
+thing prompted on the impulse of the moment.  And young Weyburn would
+meet some difficulty in protecting his 'Lady Ormont,' if she had no
+inclination for it.
+
+Analyzing her impulse of the moment, Lady Charlotte credited herself, not
+unjustly, with a certain considerateness for the woman, notwithstanding
+the woman's violent intrusion between brother and sister.  Knowing the
+world, and knowing the upper or Beanstalk world intimately, she winked at
+nature's passions.  But when the legitimate affection of a brother and
+sister finds them interposing, they are, as little parsonically as
+possible, reproved.  If persistently intrusive, they are handed to the
+constable.
+
+How, supposing the case of a wife?  Well, then comes the contest; and it
+is with an inferior, because not a born, legitimacy of union; which may
+be, which here and there is, affection; is generally the habit of
+partnership.  It is inferior, from not being the union of the blood; it
+is a matter merely of the laws and the tastes.  No love, she reasoned, is
+equal to the love of brother and sister: not even the love of parents for
+offspring, or of children for mother and father.  Brother and sister have
+the holy young days in common; they have lastingly the recollection of
+their youth, the golden time when they were themselves, or the best of
+themselves.  A wife is a stranger from the beginning; she is necessarily
+three parts a stranger up to the finish of the history.  She thinks she
+can absorb the husband.  Not if her husband has a sister living!  She may
+cry and tear for what she calls her own: she will act prudently in bowing
+her head to the stronger tie.  Is there a wife in Europe who broods on
+her husband's merits and his injuries as the sister of Thomas Rowsley,
+Earl of Ormont does? or one to defend his good name, one to work for his
+fortunes, as devotedly?
+
+Over and over Lady Charlotte drove her flocks, of much the same pattern,
+like billows before a piping gale.  They might be similar--a puffed
+iteration, and might be meaningless and wearisome; the gale was a power
+in earnest.
+
+Her brother sat locked-up.  She did as a wife would not have done, and
+held her peace.  He spoke; she replied in a few words--blunt, to the
+point, as no wife would have done.
+
+Her dear, warm-hearted Rowsley was shaken by the blow he had been obliged
+to deal to the woman--poor woman!--if she felt it.  He was always the
+principal sufferer where the feelings were concerned.  He was never for
+hurting any but the enemy.
+
+His 'Ha, here we dine!' an exclamation of a man of imprisoned yawns at
+the apparition of the turnkey, was delightful to her, for a proof of
+health and sanity and enjoyment of the journey.
+
+'Yes, and I've one bottle left, in the hamper, of the hock you like,' she
+said.  'That Mr. Weyburn likes it too.  He drank a couple coming down.'
+
+She did not press for talk; his ready appetite was the flower of
+conversation to her.  And he slept well, he said.  Her personal
+experience on that head was reserved.
+
+London enfolded them in the late evening of a day brewing storm.  My lord
+heard at the door of his house that Lady Ormont had not arrived.  Yet she
+had started a day in advance of him.  He looked down, up and round at
+Charlotte.  He looked into an empty hall.  Pagnell was not there.  A
+sight of Pagnell would, strange to say, have been agreeable.
+
+Storm was in the air, and Aminta was on the road.  Lightning has, before
+now, frightened carriage-horses.  She would not misconduct herself; she
+would sit firm.  No woman in England had stouter nerve--few men.
+
+But the carriage might be smashed.  He was ignorant of the road she had
+chosen for her return.  Out of Wiltshire there would be no cliffs,
+quarries, river-banks, presenting dangers.  Those dangers, however,
+spring up when horses have the frenzy.
+
+Charlotte was nodded at, for a signal to depart; and she drove off,
+speculating on the bullet of a grey eye, which was her brother's adieu
+to her.
+
+The earl had apparently a curiosity to inspect vacant rooms.  His
+Aminta's drawing-room, her boudoir, her bed-chamber, were submissive in
+showing bed, knickknacks, furniture.  They told the tale of a corpse.
+
+He washed and dressed, and went out to his club to dine, hating the faces
+of the servants of the house, just able to bear with the attentions of
+his valet.
+
+Thunder was rattling at ten at night.  The house was again the tomb.
+
+She had high courage, that girl.  She might be in a bed, with her window-
+blind up, calmly waiting for the flashes: lightning excited her.  He had
+seen her lying at her length quietly, her black hair scattered on the
+pillow, like shadow of twigs and sprays on moonlit grass, illuminated
+intermittently; smiling to him, but her heart out and abroad, wild as any
+witch's.  If on the road, she would not quail.  But it was necessary to
+be certain of her having a trusty postillion.
+
+He walked through the drench and scream of a burst cloud to the posting-
+office.  There, after some trouble, he obtained information directing him
+to the neighbouring mews.  He had thence to find his way to the
+neighbouring pot-house.
+
+The report of the postillion was, on the whole, favourable.  The man
+understood horses--was middle-aged--no sot; he was also a man with an
+eye for weather, proverbially in the stables a cautious hand--slow 'Old
+Slow-and-sure,' he was called; by name, Joshua Abnett.
+
+'Oh, Joshua Abnett?' said the earl, and imprinted it on his memory, for
+the service it was to do during the night.
+
+Slow-and-sure Joshua Abnett would conduct her safely, barring accidents.
+For accidents we must all be prepared.  She was a heroine in an accident.
+The earl recalled one and more: her calm face, brightened eyes, easy
+laughter.  Hysterics were not in her family.
+
+She did wrong to let that fellow Morsfield accompany her.  Possibly he
+had come across her on the road, and she could not shake him off.
+Judging by all he knew of her, the earl believed she would not have
+brought the fellow into the grounds of Steignton of her free will.  She
+had always a particular regard for decency.
+
+According to the rumour, Morsfield and the woman Pagnell were very thick
+together.  He barked over London of his being a bitten dog.  He was near
+to the mad dog's fate, as soon as a convenient apology for stopping his
+career could be invented.
+
+The thinking of the lesson to Morsfield on the one hand, and of the slow-
+and-sure postillion Joshua Abriett on the other, lulled Lord Ormont to a
+short repose in his desolate house.  Of Weyburn he had a glancing
+thought, that the young man would be a good dog to guard the countess
+from a mad dog, as he had reckoned in commissioning him.
+
+Next day was the day of sunlight Aminta loved.
+
+It happens with the men who can strike, supposing them of the order of
+civilized creatures, that when they have struck heavily, however deserved
+the blow, a liking for the victim will assail them, if they discover no
+support in hatred; and no sooner is the spot of softness touched than
+they are invaded by hosts of the stricken person's qualities, which plead
+to be taken as virtues, and are persuasive.  The executioner did rightly.
+But it is the turn for the victim to declare the blow excessive.
+
+Now, a just man, who has overdone the stroke, will indemnify and console
+in every way, short of humiliating himself.
+
+He had an unusually clear vision of the scene at Steignton.  Surprise and
+wrath obscured it at the moment, for reflection to bring it out in sharp
+outline; and he was able now to read and translate into inoffensive
+English the inherited Spanish of it, which violated nothing of Aminta's
+native 'donayre,' though it might look on English soil outlandish or
+stagey.
+
+Aminta stood in sunlight on the greensward.  She stood hand on hip,
+gazing at the house she had so long desired to see, without a notion that
+she committed an offence.  Implicitly upon all occasions she took her
+husband's word for anything he stated, and she did not consequently
+imagine him to be at Steignton.  So, then, she had no thought of running
+down from London to hunt and confound him, as at first it appeared.  The
+presence of that white-faced Morsfield vindicated her sufficiently so
+far.  And let that fellow hang till the time for cutting him down!  Not
+she, but Pagnell, seems to have been the responsible party.  And, by the
+way, one might prick the affair with Morsfield by telling him publicly
+that his visit to inspect Steignton was waste of pains, for he would not
+be accepted as a tenant in the kennels, et caetera.
+
+Well, poor girl, she satisfied her curiosity, not aware that a few weeks
+farther on would have done it to the full.
+
+As to Morsfield, never once, either in Vienna or in Paris, had she,
+warmly admired though she was, all eyes telescoping and sun-glassing on
+her, given her husband an hour or half an hour or two minutes of anxiety.
+Letters came.  The place getting hot, she proposed to leave it.
+
+She had been rather hardly tried.  There are flowers we cannot keep
+growing in pots.  Her fault was, that instead of flinging down her glove
+and fighting it out openly, she listened to Pagnell, and began the game
+of Pull.  If he had a zest for the game, it was to stump the woman
+Pagnell.  So the veteran fancied in his amended mind.
+
+This intrusive sunlight chased him from the breakfast-table and out of
+the house.  She would be enjoying it somewhere; but the house empty of a
+person it was used to contain had an atmosphere of the vaults, and inside
+it the sunlight she loved had an effect of taunting him singularly.
+
+He called on his upholsterer and heard news to please her.  The house
+hired for a month above Great Marlow was ready; her ladyship could enter
+it to-morrow.  It pleased my lord to think that she might do so, and not
+bother him any more about the presentation at Court during the current
+year.  In spite of certain overtures from the military authorities, and
+roused eulogistic citations of his name in the newspapers and magazines,
+he was not on friendly terms with his country yet, having contracted the
+fatal habit of irony, which, whether hitting or musing its object, stirs
+old venom in our wound, twitches the feelings.  Unfortunately for him,
+they had not adequate expression unless he raged within; so he had to
+shake up wrath over his grievances, that he might be satisfactorily
+delivered; and he was judged irreconcilable when he had subsided into the
+quietest contempt, from the prospective seat of a country estate, in the
+society of a young wife who adored him.
+
+An exile from the sepulchre of that house void of the consecration of
+ashes, he walked the streets and became reconciled to street sunlight.
+There were no carriage accidents to disturb him with apprehensions.
+Besides, the slowness of the postillion Joshua Abnett, which probably
+helped to the delay, was warrant of his sureness.  And in an accident the
+stringy fellow, young Weyburn, could be trusted for giving his attention
+to the ladies--especially to the younger of the two, taking him for the
+man his elders were at his age.  As for Pagnell, a Providence watches
+over the Pagnells!  Mortals have no business to interfere.
+
+An accident on water would be a frolic to his girl.  Swimming was a gift
+she had from nature.  Pagnell vowed she swam out a mile at Dover when she
+was twelve.  He had seen her in blue water: he had seen her readiness to
+jump to the rescue once when a market-woman, stepping out of a boat to
+his yacht on the Tabus, plumped in.  She had the two kinds of courage--
+the impulsive and the reasoned.  What is life to man or woman if we are
+not to live it honourably?  Men worthy of the name say this.  The woman
+who says and acts on it is--well, she is fit company for them.  But only
+the woman of natural courage can say it and act on it.
+
+Would she come by Winchester, or choose the lower road by Salisbury and
+Southampton, to smell the sea? perhaps-like her!--dismissing the chariot
+and hiring a yacht for a voyage round the coast and up the Thames.  She
+had an extraordinary love of the sea, yet she preferred soldiers to
+sailors.  A woman?  Never one of them more a woman!  But it came of her
+quickness to take the colour and share the tastes of the man to whom she
+gave herself.
+
+My lord was beginning to distinguish qualities in a character.
+
+He was informed at the mews that Joshua Abnett was on the road still.
+Joshua seemed to be a roadster of uncommon unprogressiveness, proper to a
+framed picture.
+
+While debating whether to lunch at his loathed club or at a home loathed
+more, but open to bright enlivenment any instant, Lord Ormont beheld a
+hat lifted and Captain May saluting him.  They were near a famous
+gambling-house in St. James's Street.
+
+'Good! I am glad to see you,' he said.  'Tell me you know Mr. Morsfield
+pretty well.  I'm speaking of my affair.  He has been trespassing down
+on my grounds at Steignton, and I think of taking the prosecution of him
+into my own hands. Is he in town?'
+
+'I 've just left his lame devil Cumnock, my lord,' said May, after a
+slight grimace.  'They generally run in tandem.'
+
+'Will you let me know?'
+
+'At once, when I hear.'
+
+'You will call on me?  Before noon?'
+
+'Any service required?'
+
+'My respects to your wife.'
+
+'Your lordship is very good.'
+
+Captain May bloomed at a civility paid to his wife.  He was a smallish,
+springy, firm-faced man, devotee of the lady bearing his name and
+wielding him.  In the days when duelling flourished on our land, frail
+women could be powerful.
+
+The earl turned from him to greet Lord Adderwood and a superior officer
+of his Profession, on whom he dropped a frigid nod.  He held that all but
+the rank and file, and a few subalterns, of the service had abandoned him
+to do homage to the authorities.  The Club he frequented was not his
+military Club.  Indeed, lunching at any Club in solitariness that day,
+with Aminta away from home, was bitter penance.  He was rejoiced by Lord
+Adderwood's invitation, and hung to him after the lunch; for a horrible
+prospect of a bachelor dinner intimated astonishingly that he must have
+become unawares a domesticated man.
+
+The solitary later meal of a bachelor was consumed, if the word will suit
+a rabbit's form of feeding.  He fatigued his body by walking the streets
+and the bridge of the Houses of Parliament, and he had some sleep under a
+roof where a life like death, or death apeing life, would have seemed to
+him the Joshua Abnett, if he had been one to take up images.
+
+Next day he was under the obligation to wait at home till noon.  Shortly
+before noon a noise of wheels drew him to the window.  A young lady, in
+whom he recognized Aminta's little school friend, of some name, stepped
+out of a fly.  He met her in the hall.
+
+She had expected to be welcomed by Aminta, and she was very timid on
+finding herself alone with the earl.  He, however, treated her as the
+harbinger bird, wryneck of the nightingale, sure that Aminta would keep
+her appointment unless an accident delayed.  He had forgotten her name,
+but not her favourite pursuit of botany; and upon that he discoursed,
+and he was interested, not quite independently of the sentiment of her
+being there as a guarantee of Aminta's return.  Still he knew his English
+earth, and the counties and soil for particular wild-flowers, grasses,
+mosses; and he could instruct her and inspire a receptive pupil on the
+theme of birds, beasts, fishes, insects, in England and other lands.
+
+He remained discoursing without much weariness till four of the
+afternoon.  Then he had his reward.  The chariot was at the door, and the
+mounted figure of Joshua Abnett, on which he cast not a look or a
+thought.  Aminta was alone.  She embraced Selina Collett warmly, and
+said, in friendly tones, 'Ah!  my lord, you are in advance of me.'
+
+She had dropped Mrs. Pagnell and Mr. Weyburn at two suburban houses;
+working upon her aunt's dread of the earl's interrogations as regarded
+Mr. Morsfield.  She had, she said, chosen to take the journey easily on
+her return, and enjoyed it greatly.
+
+My lord studied her manner more than her speech.  He would have
+interpreted a man's accurately enough.  He read hers to signify that she
+had really enjoyed her journey, 'made the best of it,' and did not intend
+to be humble about her visit to Steignton without his permission; but
+that, if hurt at the time, she had recovered her spirits, and was ready
+for a shot or two--to be nothing like a pitched battle.  And she might
+fire away to her heart's content: wordy retorts would not come from him;
+he had material surprises in reserve for her.  His question concerning
+Morsfield knew its answer, and would only be put under pressure.
+
+Comparison of the friends Aminta and Selina was forced by their standing
+together, and the representation in little Selina of the inferiority of
+the world of women to his Aminta; he thought of several, and splendid
+women, foreign and English.  The comparison rose sharply now, with
+Aminta's novel, airy, homely, unchallengeing assumption of an equal
+footing beside her lord, in looks and in tones that had cast off
+constraint of the adoring handmaid, to show the full-blown woman,
+rightful queen of her half of the dominion.  Between the Aminta of then
+and now, the difference was marked as between Northern and Southern
+women: the frozen-mouthed Northerner and the pearl and rose-nipped
+Southerner; those who smirk in dropping congealed monosyllables, and
+those who radiantly laugh out the voluble chatter.
+
+Conceiving this to the full in a mind destitute of imagery, but
+indicative of the thing as clearly as the planed, unpolished woodwork of
+a cabinet in a carpenter's shop, Lord Ormont liked her the better for the
+change, though she was not the woman whose absence from his house had
+caused him to go mooning half a night through the streets, and though it
+forewarned him of a tougher bit of battle, if battle there was to be.
+
+He was a close reader of surfaces.  But in truth, the change so notable
+came of the circumstance, that some little way down below the surface he
+perused, where heart weds mind, or nature joins intellect, for the two to
+beget a resolution, the battle of the man and the woman had been fought,
+and the man beaten.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+TREATS OF THE FIRST DAY OF THE CONTENTION OF BROTHER AND SISTER
+
+In the contest rageing at mid-sea still between the man and the woman,
+it is the one who is hard to the attractions of the other that will make
+choice of the spot and have the advantages.  A short time earlier Lord
+Ormont could have marked it out at his leisure.  He would have been
+unable to comprehend why it was denied him to do so now; for he was
+master of himself, untroubled by conscience, unaware, since he was
+assured of his Aminta's perfect safety and his restored sense of
+possession, that any taint of softness in him had reversed the condition
+of their alliance.  He felt benevolently the much he had to bestow, and
+was about to bestow.  Meanwhile, without complicity on his part, without
+his knowledge, yet absolutely involving his fate, the battle had gone
+against him in Aminta's breast.
+
+Like many of his class and kind, he was thoroughly acquainted with the
+physical woman, and he took that first and very engrossing volume of
+the great Book of Mulier for all the history.  A powerful wing of
+imagination, strong as the flappers of the great Roc of Arabian story,
+is needed to lift the known physical woman even a very little way up into
+azure heavens.  It is far easier to take a snap-shot at the psychic, and
+tumble her down from her fictitious heights to earth.  The mixing of the
+two make nonsense of her.  She was created to attract the man, for an
+excellent purpose in the main.  We behold her at work incessantly.  One
+is a fish to her hook; another a moth to her light.  By the various arts
+at her disposal she will have us, unless early in life we tear away the
+creature's coloured gauzes and penetrate to her absurdly simple
+mechanism.  That done, we may, if we please, dominate her.  High priests
+of every religion have successively denounced her as the chief enemy.
+To subdue and bid her minister to our satisfaction is therefore a right
+employment of man's unperverted superior strength.  Of course, we keep to
+ourselves the woman we prefer; but we have to beware of an uxorious
+preference, or we are likely to resemble the Irishman with his wolf, and
+dance imprisoned in the hug of our captive.
+
+For it is the creature's characteristic to be lastingly awake, in her
+moments of utmost slavishness most keenly awake to the chances of the
+snaring of the stronger.  Be on guard, then.  Lord Ormont had been on
+guard then and always: his instinct of commandership kept him on guard.
+He was on guard now when his Aminta played, not the indignant and the
+frozen, but the genially indifferent.  She did it well, he admitted.
+
+Had it been the indignant she played, he might have stooped to cajole the
+handsome queen of gypsies she was, without acknowledgement of her right
+to complain.  Feeling that he was about to be generous, he shrugged.  He
+meant to speak in deeds.
+
+Lady Charlotte's house was at the distance of a stroller's half-hour
+across Hyde Park westward from his own.  Thither he walked, a few minutes
+after noon, prepared for cattishness.  He could fancy that he had
+hitherto postponed the visit rather on her account, considering that
+he would have to crush her if she humped and spat, and he hoped to
+be allowed to do it gently.  There would certainly be a scene.
+
+Lady Charlotte was at home.
+
+'Always at home to you, Rowsley, at any hour.  Mr. Eglett has driven down
+to the City.  There 's a doctor in a square there's got a reputation for
+treating weak children, and he has taken down your grand-nephew Bobby to
+be inspected.  Poor boy comes of a poor stock on the father's side.  Mr.
+Eglett would have that marriage.  Now he sees wealth isn't everything.
+Those Benlews are rushlights.  However, Elizabeth stood with her father
+to have Robert Benlew, and this poor child 's the result.  I wonder
+whether they have consciences!'
+
+My lord prolonged the sibilation of his 'Yes,' in the way of absent-
+minded men.  He liked little Bobby, but had to class the boy second
+for the present.
+
+'You have our family jewels in your keeping, Charlotte?'
+
+'No, I haven't,--and you know I haven't, Rowsley.'  She sprang to arms,
+the perfect porcupine, at his opening words, as he had anticipated.
+
+'Where are the jewels?'
+
+'They're in the cellars of my bankers, and safe there, you may rely on
+it.'
+
+'I want them.'
+
+'I want to have them safe; and there they stop.'
+
+'You must get them and hand them over.'
+
+'To whom?'
+
+'To me.'
+
+'What for?'
+
+'They will be worn by the Countess of Ormont'
+
+'Who 's she?'
+
+'The lady who bears the title.'
+
+'The only Countess of Ormont I know of is your mother and mine, Rowsley;
+and she's dead.'
+
+'The Countess of Ormont I speak of is alive.'
+
+Lady Charlotte squared to him.  'Who gives her the title?'
+
+'She bears it by right.'
+
+'Do you mean to say, Rowsley, you have gone and married the woman since
+we came up from Steignton?'
+
+'She is my wife.'
+
+'Anyhow, she won't have our family jewels.'
+
+'If you had swallowed them, you'd have to disgorge.'
+
+'I don't give up our family jewels to such people.'
+
+'Do you decline to call on her?'
+
+'I do: I respect our name and blood.'
+
+'You will send the order to your bankers for them to deliver the jewels
+over to me at my house this day.'
+
+'Look here, Rowsley; you're gone cracked or senile.  You 're in the hands
+of one of those clever wenches who catch men of your age.  She may catch
+you; she shan't lay hold of our family jewels: they stand for the honour
+of our name and blood.'
+
+'They are to be at my house-door at four o'clock this afternoon.'
+
+'They'll not stir.'
+
+'Then I go down to order your bankers and give them the order.'
+
+'My bankers won't attend to it without the order from me.'
+
+'You will submit to the summons of my lawyers.'
+
+'You're bent on a public scandal, are you?'
+
+'I am bent on having the jewels.'
+
+'They are not yours; you 've no claim to them; they are heirlooms in our
+family.  Things most sacred to us are attached to them.  They belong to
+our history.  There 's the tiara worn by the first Countess of Ormont.
+There 's the big emerald of the necklace-pendant--you know the story
+of it.  Two rubies not counted second to any in England.  All those
+diamonds!  I wore the cross and the two pins the day I was presented
+after my marriage.'
+
+'The present Lady Ormont will wear them the day she is presented.'
+
+'She won't wear them at Court.'
+
+'She will.'
+
+'Don't expect the Lady Ormont of tradesmen and footmen to pass the Lord
+Chamberlain.'
+
+'That matter will be arranged for next season.  Now I 've done.'
+
+'So have I; and you have my answer, Rowsley.' They quitted their chairs.
+
+'You decline to call on my wife?' said the earl.
+
+Lady Charlotte replied: 'Understand me, now.  If the woman has won you
+round to legitimize the connection, first, I've a proper claim to see her
+marriage lines.  I must have a certificate of her birth.  I must have a
+testified account of her life before you met her and got the worst of it.
+Then, as the case may be, I 'll call on her.
+
+'You will behave yourself when you call.'
+
+'But she won't have our family jewels.'
+
+'That affair has been settled by me.'
+
+'I should be expecting to hear of them as decorating the person of one of
+that man Morsfield's mistresses.'
+
+The earl's brow thickened.  'Charlotte, I smacked your cheek when you
+were a girl.'
+
+'I know you did.  You might again, and I wouldn't cry out.  She travels
+with that Morsfield; you 've seen it.  He goes boasting of her.  Gypsy or
+not, she 's got queer ways.'
+
+'I advise you, you had better learn at once to speak of her
+respectfully.'
+
+'I shall have enough to go through, if what you say's true, with
+questions of the woman's antecedents and her people, and the date of the
+day of this marriage.  When was the day you did it?  I shall have to give
+an answer.  You know cousins of ours, and the way they 'll be pressing,
+and comparing ages and bawling rumours.  None of them imagined my brother
+such a fool as to be wheedled into marrying her.  You say it's done,
+Rowsley.  Was it done yesterday or the day before?'
+
+Lord Ormont found unexpectedly that she struck on a weak point.  Married
+from the first?  Why not tell me of it?  He could hear her voice as if
+she had spoken the words.  And how communicate the pell-mell of reasons?
+
+'You're running vixen.  The demand I make is for the jewels,' he said.
+
+'You won't have them, Rowsley--not for her.'
+
+'You think of compelling me to use force?'
+
+'Try it.'
+
+'You swear the jewels are with your bankers?'
+
+'I left them in charge of my bankers, and they've not been moved by me.'
+
+'Well, it must be force.'
+
+'Nothing short of it when the honour of our family's concerned.'
+
+It was rather worse than the anticipated struggle with this Charlotte,
+though he had kept his temper.  The error was in supposing that an hour's
+sharp conflict would settle it, as he saw.  The jewels required a siege.
+
+'When does Eglett return?' he asked.
+
+'Back to lunch.  You stay and lunch here, Rowsley we don't often have
+you.'
+
+The earl contemplated her, measuring her powers of resistance for a
+prolonged engagement.  Odd that the pride which had withdrawn him from
+the service of an offending country should pitch him into a series of
+tussles with women, for its own confusion!  He saw that, too, in his dim
+reflectiveness, and held the country answerable for it.
+
+Mr. Eglett was taken into confidence by him privately after lunch.
+Mr. Eglett's position between the brother and sister was perplexing;
+habitually he thought his wife had strong good sense, in spite of the
+costliness of certain actions at law not invariably confirming his
+opinion; he thought also that the earl's demand must needs be considered
+obediently.  At the same time, his wife's objections to the new Countess
+of Ormont, unmasked upon the world, seemed very legitimate; though it
+might be asked why the earl should not marry, marrying the lady who
+pleased him.  But if, in the words of his wife, the lady had no claim to
+be called a lady, the marriage was deplorable.  On the other hand, Lord
+Ormont spoke of her in terms of esteem, and he was no fondling dotard.
+
+How to compromise the matter for the sake of peace?  The man perpetually
+plunged into strife by his combative spouse, cried the familiar question
+again; and at every suggestion of his on behalf of concord he heard from
+Lady Charlotte that he had no principles, or else from Lord Ormont that
+his head must be off his shoulders.
+
+The man for peace had the smallest supply of language, and so, unless he
+took a side and fought, his active part was football between them.
+
+It went on through the afternoon up to five o'clock.  No impression was
+betrayed by Lady Charlotte.
+
+She congratulated her brother on the recruit he had enlisted.  He smiled
+his grimmest of the lips drawn in.  A combat, perceptibly of some
+extension, would soon give him command of the man of peace; and energy
+to continue attacks will break down the energies of any dogged defensive
+stand.
+
+He deferred the discussion with his unreasonable sister until the next
+day at half-past twelve o'clock.  Lady Charlotte nodded to the
+appointment.  She would have congratulated herself without irony on the
+result of the first day's altercation but for her brother Rowsley's
+unusual and ominous display of patience.  Twice during the wrangle she
+had to conceal a difficult breathing.  She felt a numbness in one arm
+now it was over, and mentally complimented her London physician on the
+unerringness of his diagnosis.  Her heart, however, complained of the
+cruelty of having in the end, perhaps, if the wrangle should be
+protracted, to yield, for sheer weakness, without ceasing to beat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE ORMONT JEWELS
+
+At half-past twelve of the noon next day Lord Ormont was at Lady
+Charlotte's house door.  She welcomed him affectionately, as if nothing
+were in dispute; he nodded an acceptance of her greetings, with a blunt
+intimation of the business to be settled; she put on her hump of the
+feline defensive; then his batteries opened fire and hers barked back on
+him.  Each won admiration of the other's tenacity, all the more
+determined to sap or split it.  They had known one another's character,
+but they had never seen it in such strong light.  Never had their mutual
+and similar, though opposed, resources been drawn out so copiously and
+unreservedly.  This was the shining scrawl of all that each could do to
+gain a fight.  They admired one another's contemptibly justifiable
+evasions, changes of front, statements bordering the lie, even to
+meanness in the withdrawal of admissions and the denial of the same ever
+having been made.  That was Charlotte!  That was Rowsley!  Anything to
+beat down the adversary.
+
+As to will, the woman's will, of these two, equalled the man's.  They
+were matched in obstinacy and unscrupulousness.
+
+Her ingenuitics of the defence eluded his attacks, and compelled him to
+fall on heavy iteration of his demand for the jewels, an immediate
+restitution of the jewels.  'Why immediate?' cried she.
+
+He repeated it without replying to her.
+
+'But, you tell me, Rowsley, why immediate?  If you're in want of money
+for her, you come to me, tell me, you shall have thousands.  I'll drive
+down to the City to-morrow and sell out stock.  Mr. Eglett won't mind
+when he hears the purpose.  I shall call five thousand cheap, and don't
+ask to see the money again.'
+
+'Ah! double the sum to have your own way!' said he.
+
+She protested that she valued her money.  She furnished instances of her
+carefulness of her money all along up to the present period of brutal old
+age.  Yet she would willingly part with five thousand or more to save the
+family honour.  Mr. Eglett would not only approve, he would probably
+advance a good part of the money himself.
+
+'Money!  Who wants money?' thundered the earl, and jumped out of her trap
+of the further diversion from the plain request.  'To-morrow, when I am
+here, I shall expect to have the jewels delivered to me.'
+
+'That you may hand them over to her.  Where are they likely to be this
+time next year?  And what do you know about jewels?  You may look at them
+when you ask to see them, and not know imitation paste--like the stuff
+Lady Beltus showed her old husband.  Our mother wore them, and she prized
+them.  I'm not sure I wouldn't rather hear they were exhibited in a Bond
+Street jeweller's shop or a Piccadilly pawnbroker's than have them on
+that woman.'
+
+'You speak of my wife.'
+
+'For a season, perhaps; and off they're likely to go, to pay bills, if
+her Adderwoods and her Morsfields are out of funds, as they call it.'
+
+'You are aware you are speaking of my wife, Charlotte?'
+
+'You daren't say my sister-in-law.'
+
+He did not choose to say it; and once more she dared him.  She could
+imagine she scored a point.
+
+They were summoned to lunch by Mr. Eglett; and there was an hour's
+armistice; following which the earl demanded the restitution of the
+jewels, and heard the singular question, childishly accentuated, 'What
+for?'
+
+Patience was his weapon and support, so he named his object with an air
+of inveteracy in tranquillity they were for his wife to wear.
+
+Lady Charlotte dared him to say they were for her sister-in-law.
+
+He despised the transparent artifice of the challenge.
+
+'But you have to own the difference,' she said.  'You haven't lost
+respect for your family, thank God!  No.  It 's one thing to say she 's
+a wife: you hang fire when it 's to say she 's my sister-in-law.'
+
+'You'll have to admit the fact, Charlotte.'
+
+'How long is it since I should have had to admit the fact?'
+
+'From the date of my marriage.'
+
+'Tell me the date.'
+
+'No, you don't wear a wig, Charlotte; but you are fit to practise in the
+Law-courts!' he said, exasperatedly jocular.
+
+She had started a fresh diversion, and she pressed him for the date.
+'I 'm supposed to have had a sister-in-law-how many weeks?--months?'
+
+'Years.'
+
+'Married years!  And if you've been married years, where were you
+married?  Not in a church.  That woman's no church-bride.'
+
+'There are some clever women made idiots of by their trullish tempers.'
+
+'Abuse away.  I've asked you where you were married, Rowsley.'
+
+'Go to Madrid.  Go to the Embassy.  Apply to the chaplain.'
+
+'Married in Madrid!  Who's ever married in Madrid!  You flung her a
+yellow handkerchief, and she tied it round her neck--that 's your
+ceremony!  Now you tell me you've been married years; and she's a young
+woman; you fetch her over from Madrid, set her in a place where those
+Morsfields and other fungi-fellows grow, and she has to think herself
+lucky to be received by a Lady Staines and a Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, and
+she the talk of the town, refused at Court, for all an honourable-enough
+old woman countenanced her in pity; and I 'm asked to believe she was my
+brother's wife, sister-in-law of mine, all the while!  I won't.'
+
+Lady Charlotte dilated on it for a length of time, merely to show she
+declined to believe it; pouring Morsfield over him and the talk of the
+town, the gypsy caught in Spain--now to be foisted on her as her sister-
+in-law!  She could fancy she produced an effect.
+
+She did indeed unveil to him a portion of the sufferings his Aminta had
+undergone; as visibly, too, the good argumentative reasons for his
+previous avoidance of the deadly, dismal wrangle here forced on him.
+A truly dismal, profitless wrangle!  But the finish of it would be
+the beginning of some solace to his Aminta.
+
+The finish of it must be to-morrow.  He refrained from saying so, and
+simply appointed to-morrow for the resumption of the wrestle, departing
+in his invincible coat of patience: which one has to wear when dealing
+with a woman like Charlotte, he informed Mr. Eglett, on his way out at
+a later hour than on the foregone day.  Mr. Eglett was of his opinion,
+that an introduction of lawyers into a family dispute was 'rats in the
+pantry'; and he would have joined him in his gloomy laugh, if the thought
+of Charlotte in a contention had not been so serious a matter.  She might
+be beaten; she could not be brought to yield.
+
+She retired to her bedroom, and laid herself flat on her bed, immoveable,
+till her maid undressed her for the night.  A cup of broth and strip of
+toast formed her sole nourishment.  As for her doctor's possible
+reproaches, the symptoms might crowd and do their worst; she fought for
+the honour of her family.
+
+At midday of the third day Lady Charlotte was reduced to the condition of
+those fortresses which wave defiantly the flag, but deliver no further
+shot, awaiting the assault.  Her body, affected by hideous old age,
+succumbed.  Her will was unshaken.  She would not write to her bankers.
+Mr. Eglett might go to them, if he thought fit.  Rowsley was to
+understand that he might call himself married; she would have no flower-
+basket bunch of a sister-in-law thrust upon her.
+
+Lord Ormont and Mr. Eglett walked down to her bankers in the afternoon.
+As a consequence of express injunctions given by my lady five years
+previously, the assistant-manager sought an interview with her.
+
+The jewels were lodged at her house the day ensuing.  They were examined,
+verified by the list in Lady Charlotte's family record-book, and then
+taken away--forcibly, of course--by her brother.
+
+He laughed in his dry manner; but the reminiscent glimpses, helping him
+to see the humour of it, stirred sensations of the tug it had been with
+that combative Charlotte, and excused him for having shrunk from the
+encounter until he conceived it to be necessary.
+
+Settlement of the affair with Morsfield now claimed his attention.  The
+ironical tolerance he practised in relation to Morsfield when Aminta had
+no definite station before the world changed to an angry irritability
+at the man's behaviour now that she had stepped forth under his
+acknowledgement of her as the Countess of Ormont.  He had come round
+to a rather healthier mind regarding his country, and his introduction
+of the Countess of Ormont to the world was his peace-offering.
+
+As he returned home earlier on the third day, he found his diligent
+secretary at work.  The calling on Captain May and the writing to the
+sort of man were acts obnoxious to his dignity; so he despatched Weyburn
+to the captain's house, one in a small street of three narrow tenements
+abutting on aristocracy and terminating in mews.  Weyburn's mission was
+to give the earl's address at Great Marlow for the succeeding days, and
+to see Captain May, if the captain was at home.  During his absence the
+precious family jewel-box was locked in safety.  Aminta and her friend,
+little Miss Collett, were out driving, by the secretary's report.  The
+earl considered it a wholesome feature of Aminta's character that she
+should have held to her modest schoolmate the fact spoke well for both of
+them.
+
+A look at the papers to serve for Memoirs was discomposing, and led him
+to think the secretary could be parted with as soon as he pleased to go:
+say, a week hence.
+
+The Memoirs were no longer designed for issue.  He had the impulse to
+treat them on the spot as the Plan for the Defence of the Country had
+been treated; and for absolutely obverse reasons.  The secretary and the
+Memoirs were associated: one had sprung out of the other.  Moreover, the
+secretary had witnessed a scene at Steignton.  The young man had done his
+duty, and would be thanked for that, and dismissed, with a touch of his
+employer's hand.  The young man would have made a good soldier--a better
+soldier, good as he might be as a scribe.  He ought to have been in his
+father's footsteps, and he would then have disciplined or quashed his
+fantastical ideas.  Perhaps he was right on the point of toning the
+Memoirs here and there.  Since the scene at Steignton Lord Ormont's views
+had changed markedly in relation to everybody about him, and most things.
+
+Weyburn came back at the end of an hour to say that he had left the
+address with Mrs. May, whom he had seen.
+
+'A handsome person,' the earl observed.
+
+'She must have been very handsome,' said Weyburn.
+
+'Ah! we fall into their fictions, or life would be a bald business, upon
+my word!'
+
+Lord Ormont had not uttered it before the sentiment of his greater luck
+with one of that queer world of the female lottery went through him on a
+swell of satisfaction, just a wave.
+
+An old-world eye upon women, it seemed to Weyburn.  But the man who could
+crown a long term of cruel injustice with the harshness to his wife at
+Steignton would naturally behold women with that eye.
+
+However, he was allowed only to generalize; he could not trust himself
+to dwell on Lady Ormont and the Aminta inside the shell.  Aminta and Lady
+Ormont might think as one or diversely of the executioner's blow she had
+undergone.  She was a married woman, and she probably regarded the
+wedding by law as the end a woman has to aim at, and is annihilated by
+hitting; one flash of success, and then extinction, like a boy's cracker
+on the pavement.  Not an elevated image, but closely resembling that
+which her alliance with Lord Ormont had been!
+
+At the same time, no true lover of a woman advises her--imploring is
+horrible treason--to slip the symbolic circle of the law from her finger,
+and have in an instant the world for her enemy.  She must consent to be
+annihilated, and must have no feelings; particularly no mind.  The mind
+is the danger for her.  If she has a mind alive, she will certainly push
+for the position to exercise it, and run the risk of a classing with
+Nature's created mates for reptile men.
+
+Besides, Lady Ormont appeared, in the company of her friend Selina
+Collett, not worse than rather too thoughtful; not distinctly unhappy.
+And she was conversable, smiling.  She might have had an explanation with
+my lord, accepting excuses--or, who knows? taking the blame, and offering
+them.  Weakness is pliable.  So pliable is it, that it has been known for
+a crack of the masterly whip to fling off the victim and put on the
+culprit!  Ay, but let it be as it may with Lady Ormont, Aminta is of a
+different composition.  Aminta's eyes of the return journey to London
+were haunting lights, and lured him to speculate; and for her sake he
+rejected the thought that for him they meant anything warmer than the
+passing thankfulness, though they were a novel assurance to him of her
+possession beneath her smothering cloud of the power to resolve, and show
+forth a brilliant individuality.
+
+The departure of the ladies and my lord in the travelling carriage for
+the house on the Upper Thames was passably sweetened to Weyburn by the
+command to him to follow in a day or two, and continue his work there
+until he left England.  Aminta would not hear of an abandonment of the
+Memoirs.  She spoke on the subject to my lord as to a husband pardoned.
+
+She was not less affable and pleasant with him out of Weyburn's hearing.
+My lord earned her gratitude for his behaviour to Selina Collett, to whom
+he talked interestedly of her favourite pursuit, as he had done on the
+day when, as he was not the man to forget, her arrival relieved him of
+anxiety.  Aminta, noticed the box on the seat beside him.
+
+They drove up to their country house in time to dress leisurely for
+dinner.  Nevertheless, the dinner-hour had struck several minutes before
+she descended; and the earl, as if not expecting her, was out on the
+garden path beside the river bank with Selina.  She beckoned from the
+step of the open French window.
+
+He came to her at little Selina's shuffling pace, conversing upon water-
+plants.
+
+'No jewelry to-day?' he said.
+
+And Aminta replied: 'Carstairs has shown me the box and given the key.
+I have not opened it.'
+
+'Time in the evening, or to-morrow.  You guess the contents?'
+
+'I presume I do.'
+
+She looked feverish and shadowed.
+
+He murmured kindly: 'Anything?'
+
+'Not now: we will dine.'
+
+She had missed, had lost, she feared, her own jewelbox; a casket of no
+great treasure to others, but of a largely estimable importance to her.
+
+After the heavy ceremonial entrance and exit of dishes, she begged the
+earl to accompany her for an examination of the contents of the box.
+
+As soon as her chamber-door was shut, she said, in accents of alarm:
+'Mine has disappeared.  Carstairs, I know, is to be trusted.  She
+remembers carrying the box out of my room; she believes she can remember
+putting it into the fly.  She had to confess that it had vanished,
+without her knowing how, when my boxes were unpacked.'
+
+'Is she very much upset?' said the earl.
+
+'Carstairs?  Why, yes, poor creature! you can imagine.  I have no doubt
+she feels for me; and her own reputation is concerned.  What do you think
+is best to be done?'
+
+'To be done!  Overhaul the baggage again in all the rooms.'
+
+'We've not failed to do that.'
+
+'Control yourself, my dear.  If, by bad luck, they're lost, we can
+replace them.  The contents of this box, now, we could not replace.
+Open it, and judge.'
+
+'I have no curiosity--forgive me, I beg.  And the servant's fly has been
+visited, ransacked inside and out, footmen questioned; we have not left
+anything we can conceive of undone.  My lord, will you suggest?'
+
+'The intrinsic value of the gems would not be worth--not worth Aminta's
+one beat of the heart.  Upon my word--not one!'
+
+An amatory knightly compliment breasting her perturbation roused an
+unwonted spite; and a swift reflection on it startled her with a
+suspicion.  She cast it behind her.  He could be angler and fish, he
+would not be cat and mouse.
+
+She said, however, more temperately: 'It is not the value of the gems.
+We are losing precious minutes!'
+
+'Association of them with the giver?  Is it that?  If that has a value
+for you, he is flattered.'
+
+This betrayed him to the woman waxing as intensely susceptible in all her
+being as powder to sparks.
+
+'There is to be no misunderstanding, my lord,' she said.  'I like--
+I value my jewels; but--I am alarmed lest the box should fall into hands
+--into strange hands.'
+
+'The box!' he exclaimed with an outline of a comic grimace; and, if
+proved a voluptuary in torturing, he could instance half a dozen points
+for extenuation: her charm of person, withheld from him, and to be
+embraced; her innocent naughtiness; compensation coming to her in excess
+for a transient infliction of pain.  'Your anxiety is about the box?'
+
+'Yes, the box,' Aminta said firmly. 'It contains--'
+
+'No false jewels?  A thief might complain.'
+
+'It contains letters, my lord.' 'Blackmail?'
+
+'You would be at liberty to read them.  I would rather they were burnt.'
+
+'Ah!'  The earl heaved his chest prodigiously.  'Blackmail letters are
+better in a husband's hands, if they can be laid there.'
+
+'If there is a necessity for him to read them--yes.'
+
+'There may be a necessity, there can't be a gratification,--though there
+are dogs of thick blood that like to scratch their sores,' he murmured to
+himself.  'You used to show me these declaration epistles.'
+
+'Not the names.'
+
+'Not the names--no!'
+
+'When we had left the country, I showed you why it had been my wish to
+go.'
+
+'Xarifa was and is female honour.  Take the key, open that box; I will
+make inquiries.  But, my dear, you guess everything.  Your little box was
+removed for the bigger impression to be produced by this one.'
+
+A flash came out of her dark eyes.
+
+'No, you guess wrong this time, you clever shrew!  I wormed nothing from
+you,' said he.  'I knew you kept particular letters in that receptacle of
+things of price: Aminta can't conceal.  The man has worried you.  Why not
+have come to me?'
+
+'Oblige me, my lord, by restoring me my box.'
+
+'This is your box.'
+
+Her bosom lifted with the words Oh, no!  unspoken.  He took the key and
+opened the box.  A dazzling tray of stones was revealed; underneath it
+the constellations in cases, very heavens for the worldly Eve; and he
+doubted that Eve could have gone completely out of her.  But she had, as
+observation instructed him, set her woman's mind on something else, and
+must have it before letting her eyes fall on objects impossible for any
+of her sex to see without coveting them.
+
+He bowed.  'I will fetch it,' he said magnanimously.  Her own box was
+brought from his room.  She then consented to look womanly at the Ormont
+jewels, over which the battle; whereof she knew nothing, and nothing
+could be told her, had been fought in her interests, for her sovereign
+pleasure.
+
+She looked and admired.  They were beautiful jewels the great emerald was
+wonderful, and there were two rubies to praise.  She excused herself for
+declining to put the circlet for the pendant round her neck, or a
+glittering ring on her finger.  Her remarks were encomiums, not quite so
+cold as those of a provincial spinster of an ascetic turn at an
+exhibition of the world's flycatcher gewgaws.  He had divided Aminta from
+the Countess of Ormont, and it was the wary Aminta who set a guard on
+looks and tones before the spectacle of his noble bounty, lest any, the
+smallest, payment of the dues of the countess should be demanded.
+Rightly interpreting him to be by nature incapable of asking pardon, or
+acknowledging a wrong done by him, however much he might crave exemption
+from blame and seek for peace, she kept to her mask of injury, though she
+hated unforgivingness; and she felt it little, she did it easily, because
+her heart was dead to the man.  My lord's hand touched her on her
+shoulder, propitiatingly in some degree, in his dumb way.
+
+Offended women can be emotional to a towering pride, that bends while it
+assumes unbendingness: it must come to their sensations, as it were a
+sign of humanity in the majestic, speechless king of beasts; and they are
+pathetically melted, abjectly hypocritical; a nice confusion of
+sentiments, traceable to a tender bosom's appreciation of strength and
+the perceptive compassion for its mortality.
+
+In a case of the alienated wife, whose blood is running another way, no
+foul snake's bite is more poisonous than that indicatory touch, however
+simple and slight.  My lord's hand, lightly laid on Aminta's shoulder,
+became sensible of soft warm flesh stiffening to the skeleton.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A bird that won't roast or boil or stew
+Acting is not of the high class which conceals the art
+Ah! we fall into their fictions
+Bad luck's not repeated every day Keep heart for the good
+Began the game of Pull
+By nature incapable of asking pardon
+Consciousness of some guilt when vowing itself innocent
+Having contracted the fatal habit of irony
+He had to shake up wrath over his grievances
+Her vehement fighting against facts
+His aim to win the woman acknowledged no obstacle in the means
+His restored sense of possession
+How to compromise the matter for the sake of peace?
+I could be in love with her cruelty, if only I had her near me
+Men who believe that there is a virtue in imprecations
+Not men of brains, but the men of aptitudes
+Not the indignant and the frozen, but the genially indifferent
+One is a fish to her hook; another a moth to her light
+One night, and her character's gone
+Passion added to a bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess
+Policy seems to petrify their minds
+Rage of a conceited schemer tricked
+Respect one another's affectations
+To time and a wife it is no disgrace for a man to bend
+Uncommon unprogressiveness
+When duelling flourished on our land, frail women powerful
+Where heart weds mind, or nature joins intellect
+With what little wisdom the world is governed
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+***********************************************************************
+The Project Gutenberg Etext Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v4, by Meredith
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+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v4
+by George Meredith
+
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