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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4481 ***
+
+LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA
+
+By George Meredith
+
+
+
+BOOK 5.
+
+XXIV.     LOVERS MATED
+XXXV.     PREPARATIONS FOR A RESOLVE
+XXVI.     VISITS OF FAREWELL
+XXVII.    A MARINE DUET
+XXVIII.   THE PLIGHTING
+XXIX.     AMINTA TO HER LORD
+XXX.      CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+LOVERS MATED
+
+He was benevolently martial, to the extent of paternal, in thinking his
+girl, of whom he deigned to think now as his countess, pardonably
+foolish.  Woman for woman, she was of a pattern superior to the world's
+ordinary, and might run the world's elect a race.  But she was pitifully
+woman-like in her increase of dissatisfaction with the more she got.
+Women are happier enslaved.  Men, too, if their despot is an Ormont.
+Colonel of his regiment, he proved that: his men would follow him
+anywhere, do anything.  Grand old days, before he was condemned by one
+knows not what extraordinary round of circumstances to cogitate on women
+as fluids, and how to cut channels for them, that they may course along
+in the direction good for them, imagining it their pretty wanton will to
+go that way!  Napoleon's treatment of women is excellent example.
+Peterborough's can be defended.
+
+His Aminta could not reason.  She nursed a rancour on account of the blow
+she drew on herself at Steignton, and she declined consolation in her
+being pardoned.  The reconcilement evidently was proposed as a finale of
+one of the detestable feminine storms enveloping men weak enough to let
+themselves be dragged through a scene for the sake of domestic
+tranquillity.
+
+A remarkable exhibition of Aminta the woman was, her entire change of
+front since he had taken her spousal chill.  Formerly she was passive,
+merely stately, the chiselled grande dame, deferential in her bearing
+and speech, even when argumentative and having an opinion to plant.
+She had always the independent eye and step; she now had the tongue of
+the graceful and native great lady, fitted to rule her circle and hold
+her place beside the proudest of the Ormonts.  She bore well the small
+shuffle with her jewel-box--held herself gallantly.  There had been no
+female feignings either, affected misapprehensions, gapy ignorances, and
+snaky subterfuges, and the like, familiar to men who have the gentle
+twister in grip.  Straight on the line of the thing to be seen she flew,
+and struck on it; and that is a woman's martial action.  He would right
+heartily have called her comrade, if he had been active himself.
+A warrior pulled off his horse, to sit in a chair and contemplate the
+minute evolutions of the sex is pettish with his part in such battle-
+fields at the stage beyond amusement.
+
+Seen swimming, she charmed him.  Abstract views of a woman summon
+opposite advocates: one can never say positively, That is she!  But the
+visible fair form of a woman is hereditary queen of us.  We have none of
+your pleadings and counter-pleadings and judicial summaries to obstruct a
+ravenous loyalty.  My lord beheld Aminta take her three quick steps on
+the plank, and spring and dive and ascend, shaking the ends of her bound
+black locks; and away she went with shut mouth and broad stroke of her
+arms into the sunny early morning river; brave to see, although he had to
+flick a bee of a question, why he enjoyed the privilege of seeing, and
+was not beside her.  The only answer confessed to a distaste for all
+exercise once pleasurable.
+
+She and her little friend boated or strolled through the meadows during
+the day; he fished.  When he and Aminta rode out for the hour before
+dinner, she seemed pleased.  She was amicable, conversable, all that was
+agreeable as a woman, and she was the chillest of wives.  My lord's
+observations and reflections came to one conclusion: she pricked and
+challenged him to lead up to her desired stormy scene.  He met her and
+meant to vanquish her with the dominating patience Charlotte had found
+too much for her: women cannot stand against it.
+
+To be patient in contention with women, however, one must have a
+continuous and an exclusive occupation; and the tax it lays on us
+conduces usually to impatience with men.  My lord did not directly
+connect Aminta's chillness and Morsfield's impudence; yet the sensation
+roused by his Aminta participated in the desire to punish Morsfield
+speedily.  Without wishing for a duel, he was moved by the social
+sanction it had to consider whether green youths and women might not
+think a grey head had delayed it too long.  The practice of the duel
+begot the peculiar animal logic of the nobler savage, which tends to
+magnify an offence in the ratio of our vanity, and hunger for a blood
+that is not demanded by the appetite.  Moreover, a waning practice, in
+disfavour with the new generation, will be commended to the conservative
+barbarian, as partaking of the wisdom of his fathers.  Further, too, we
+may have grown slothful, fallen to moodiness, done excess of service to
+Omphale, our tyrant lady of the glow and the chill; and then undoubtedly
+the duel braces.
+
+He left Aminta for London, submissive to the terms of intimacy dictated
+by her demeanour, his unacknowledged seniority rendering their harshness
+less hard to endure.  She had not gratified him with a display of her
+person in the glitter of the Ormont jewels; and since he was, under
+common conditions, a speechless man, his ineptitude for amorous
+remonstrances precipitated him upon deeds, that he might offer additional
+proofs of his esteem and the assurance of her established position as his
+countess.  He proposed to engage Lady Charlotte in a conflict severer
+than the foregoing, until he brought her to pay the ceremonial visit to
+her sister-in-law.  The count of time for this final trial of his
+masterfulness he calculated at a week.  It would be an occupation,
+miserable occupation though it was.  He hailed the prospect of chastising
+Morsfield, for a proof that his tussels with women, prolonged study of
+their tricks, manoeuvrings and outwittings of them, had not emasculated
+him.
+
+Aminta willingly promised to write from day to day.  Her senses had his
+absence insured to them by her anticipation of the task.  She did not
+conceive it would be so ponderous a task.  What to write to him when
+nothing occurred!  Nothing did occur, unless the arrival of Mr. Weyburn
+was to be named an event.  She alluded to it: 'Mr. Weyburn has come,
+expecting to find you here.  The dispatch-box is here.  Is he to await
+you?'
+
+That innocent little question was a day gained.
+
+One day of boating on the upper reaches of the pastoral river, and walks
+in woods and golden meadows, was felicity fallen on earth, the ripe fruit
+of dreams.  A dread surrounded it, as a belt, not shadowing the horizon;
+and she clasped it to her heart the more passionately, like a mother her
+rosy infant, which a dark world threatens and the universal fate.
+
+Love, as it will be at her June of life, was teaching her to know the
+good and bad of herself.  Women, educated to embrace principles through
+their timidity and their pudency, discover, amazed, that these are not
+lasting qualities under love's influence.  The blushes and the fears take
+flight.  The principles depend much on the beloved.  Is he a man whose
+contact with the world has given him understanding of life's laws, and
+can hold him firm to the right course in the strain and whirling of a
+torrent, they cling to him, deeply they worship.  And if they tempt him,
+it is not advisedly done.  Nature and love are busy in conjunction.  The
+timidities and pudencies have flown; they may hover, they are not
+present.  You deplore it, you must not blame; you have educated them so.
+Muscular principles are sown only out in the world; and, on the whole,
+with all their errors, the worldly men are the truest as well as the
+bravest of men.  Her faith in his guidance was equal to her dependence.
+The retrospect of a recent journey told her how he had been tried.
+
+She could gaze tenderly, betray her heart, and be certain of safety.
+Can wine match that for joy?  She had no schemes, no hopes, but simply
+the desire to bestow, the capacity to believe.  Any wish to be enfolded
+by him was shapeless and unlighted, unborn; though now and again for some
+chance word or undefined thought she surprised the strange tenant of her
+breast at an incomprehensibly faster beat, and knew it for her own and
+not her own, the familiar the stranger--an utter stranger, as one who had
+snared her in a wreath and was pulling her off her feet.
+
+She was not so guileless at the thought of little Selina Collett here,
+and of Selina as the letter-bearer of old; and the marvel that Matey and
+Browny and Selina were together after all!  Was it not a kind of summons
+to her to call him Matey just once, only once, in play?  She burned and
+ached to do it.  She might have taxed her ingenuity successfully to
+induce little Selina to the boldness of calling him Matey--and she then
+repeating it, as the woman who revived with a meditative effort
+recollections of the girl.  Ah, frightful hypocrite!  Thoughts of the
+pleasure of his name aloud on her lips in his hearing dissolved through
+her veins, and were met by Matthew Weyburn's open face, before which
+hypocrisy stood rent and stripped.  She preferred the calmer, the truer
+pleasure of seeing him modestly take lessons in the nomenclature of
+weeds, herbs, grasses, by hedge and ditch.  Selina could instruct him as
+well in entomology, but he knew better the Swiss, Tyrolese, and Italian
+valley-homes of beetle and butterfly species.  Their simple talk was a
+cool zephyr fanning Aminta.
+
+The suggestion to unite the two came to her, of course, but their
+physical disparity denied her that chance to settle her own difficulty,
+and a whisper of one physically the match for him punished her.  In
+stature, in healthfulness, they were equals, perhaps: not morally or
+intellectually.  And she could claim headship of him on one little point
+confided to her by his mother, who was bearing him, and startled by the
+boom of guns under her pillow, when her husband fronted the enemy:
+Matthew Weyburn, the fencer, boxer, cricketer, hunter, all things manly,
+rather shrank from firearms--at least, one saw him put on a screw to
+manipulate them.  In danger--among brigands or mutineers, for example--
+she could stand by him and prove herself his mate.  Intellectually,
+morally, she had to bow humbly.  Nor had she, nor could she do more than
+lean on and catch example from his prompt spiritual valiancy.  It shone
+out from him, and a crisis fulfilled the promise.  Who could be his mate
+for cheerful courage, for skill, the ready mind, easy adroitness, and for
+self-command?  To imitate was a woman's utmost.
+
+Matthew Weyburn appeared the very Matey of the first of May cricketing
+day among Cuper's boys the next morning, when seen pacing down the
+garden-walk.  He wore his white trousers of that happiest of old days--
+the 'white ducks' Aminta and Selina remembered.  Selina beamed.  'Yes, he
+did; he always wore them; but now it's a frock-coat instead of a jacket.'
+
+'But now he will be a master instead of a schoolboy,' said Aminta.
+'Let us hope he will prosper.'
+
+'He gives me the idea of a man who must succeed,' Selina said; and she
+was patted, rallied, asked how she had the idea, and kissed; Aminta
+saying she fancied it might be thought, for he looked so confident.
+
+'Only not what the boys used to call "cocky,"' said Selina.  'He won't be
+contemptuous of those he outstrips.'
+
+'His choice of the schoolmaster's profession points to a modesty in him,
+does it not, little woman?'
+
+'He made me tell him, while you were writing your letters yesterday, all
+about my brother and his prospects.'
+
+'Yes, that is like him.  And I must hear of your brother, "little
+Collett."  Don't forget, Sely, little Collett was our postman.'
+
+The Countess of Ormont's humorous reference to the circumstance passed
+with Selina for a sign of a poetic love of the past, and a present social
+elevation that allowed her to review it impassively.  She admired the
+great lady and good friend who could really be interested in the fortunes
+of a mere schoolmaster and a merchant's clerk.  To her astonishment, by
+some agency beyond her fathoming, she found herself, and hardly for her
+own pleasure, pushing the young schoolmaster animatedly to have an
+account of his aims in the establishment of the foreign school.
+
+Weyburn smiled.  He set a short look at Aminta; and she, conscious of her
+detected diplomacy, had an inward shiver, mixed of the fascination and
+repugnance felt by a woman who knows that under one man's eyes her
+character is naked and anatomized.  Her character?--her soul.  He held it
+in hand and probed it mercifully.  She had felt the sweet sting again and
+again, and had shrunk from him, and had crawled to him.  The love of him
+made it all fascination.  How did he learn to read at any moment right to
+the soul of a woman?  Did experience teach him, or sentimental sympathy?
+He was too young, he was too manly.  It must be because of his being in
+heart and mind the brother to the sister with women.
+
+Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes.  Bee-note and woodside
+blackbird and meadow cow, and the fish of the silver rolling rings,
+composed the leap of the music.
+
+She gave her mind to his voice, following whither it went; half was in
+air, higher than the swallow's, exalting him.
+
+How is it he is the brother of women?  They are sisters for him because
+he is neither sentimentalist nor devourer.  He will not flatter to feed
+on them.  The one he chooses, she will know love.  There are women who go
+through life not knowing love.  They are inanimate automatic machines,
+who lay them down at last, inquiring wherefore they were caused to move.
+She is not of that sad flock.  She will be mated; she will have the right
+to call him Matey.  A certain Browny called him Matey.  She lived and
+died.  A certain woman apes Browny's features and inherits her passion,
+but has forfeited her rights.  Were she, under happiest conditions,
+to put her hand in his, shame would burn her.  For he is just--he is
+Justice; and a woman bringing him less than his due, she must be a
+creature of the slime!
+
+This was the shadowy sentiment that made the wall of division between
+them.  There was no other.  Lord Ormont had struck to fragments that
+barrier of the conventional oath and ceremonial union.  He was unjust--
+he was Injustice.  The weak may be wedded, they cannot be married; to
+Injustice.  And if we have the world for the buttress of injustice, then
+is Nature the flaring rebel; there is no fixed order possible.  Laws are
+necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human
+being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of
+the savage's old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice.  There cannot be a
+based society upon such conditions.  An immolation of the naturally
+constituted individual arrests the general expansion to which we step,
+decivilizes more, and is more impious to the God in man, than temporary
+revelries of a licence that Nature soon checks.
+
+Arrows of thoughts resembling these shot over the half of Aminta's mind
+not listening.  Her lover's head was active on the same theme while he
+spoke.  They converged to it from looks crossing or catching profiles,
+or from tones, from a motion of hand, from a chance word.  Insomuch that
+the third person present was kept unobservant only by her studious and
+humble speculations on the young schoolmaster's grand project to bring
+the nationalities together, and teach Old England to the Continent--the
+Continent to Old England: our healthy games, our scorn of the lie,
+manliness; their intellectual valour, diligence, considerate manners.
+
+'Just to name a few of the things for interchange,' said Weyburn.  'As to
+method, we shall be their disciples.  But I look forward to our fellows
+getting the lead.  No hurry.  Why will they? you ask in petto.  Well,
+they 're emulous, and they take a thrashing kindly.  That 's the way to
+learn a lesson.  I 've seen our fellows beaten and beaten--never the
+courage beaten out of them.  In the end, they won and kept the field.
+They have a lot to learn--principally not to be afraid of ideas.  They
+lose heaps of time before they can feel at home with ideas.  They call
+themselves practical for having an addiction to the palpable.  It is a
+pretty wreath they clap on their deficiencies.  Practical dogs are for
+bones, horses for corn.  I want the practical Englishman to settle his
+muzzle in a nosebag of ideas.  When he has once got hold of them, he
+makes good stuff of them.  On the Continent ideas have wings and pay
+visits.  Here, they're stay-at-home.  Then I want our fellows to have the
+habit of speaking from the chest.  They shall return to England with the
+whoop of the mountains in them and ready to jump out.  They shall have
+an Achillean roar; and they shall sing by second nature.  Don't fear:
+they'll give double for anything they take.  I've known Italians, to whom
+an Englishman's honesty of mind and dealing was one of the dreams of a
+better humanity they had put in a box.  Frenchmen, too, who, when they
+came to know us, were astonished at their epithet of perfide, and loved
+us.'
+
+'Emile,' said Aminta.  'You remember Emile, Selina: the dear little
+French boy at Mr. Cuper's?'
+
+'Oh, I do,' Selina responded.
+
+'He will work with Mr. Weyburn in Switzerland.'
+
+'Oh, that will be nice!' the girl exclaimed.
+
+Aminta squeezed Selina's hand.  A shower of tears clouded her eyes.  She
+chose to fancy it was because of her envy of the modest, busy, peaceful
+girl, who envied none.  Conquers also sincerity in the sincerest.  She
+was vexed with her full breast, and had as little command of her thoughts
+as of her feelings.
+
+'Mr. Weyburn has ideas for the education of girls too,' she said.
+
+'There's the task,' said he.  'It's to separate them as little as
+possible.  All the--passez-moi le mot--devilry between the sexes begins
+at their separation.  They 're foreigners when they meet; and their
+alliances are not always binding.  The chief object in life, if happiness
+be the aim, and the growing better than we are, is to teach men and women
+how to be one; for, if they 're not, then each is a morsel for the other
+to prey on.  Lady Charlotte Eglett's view is, that the greater number of
+them on both sides hate one another.'
+
+'Hate!' exclaimed Selina; and Aminta said: 'Is Lady Charlotte Eglett an
+authority?'
+
+'She has observed, and she thinks.  She has in the abstract the justest
+of minds: and that is the curious point about her.  But one may say they
+are trained at present to be hostile.  Some of them fall in love and
+strike a truce, and still they are foreigners.  They have not the same
+standard of honour.  They might have it from an education in common.'
+
+'But there must be also a lady to govern the girls?' Selina interposed.
+
+'Ah, yes; she is not yet found!'
+
+'Would it increase their mutual respect?--or show of respect, if you
+like?' said Aminta, with his last remark at work as the shattering bell
+of a city's insurrection in her breast.
+
+'In time, under management; catching and grouping them young.  A boy who
+sees a girl do what he can't, and would like to do, won't take refuge in
+his muscular superiority--which, by the way, would be lessened.'
+
+'You suppose their capacities are equal?'
+
+'Things are not equal.  I suppose their excellencies to make a pretty
+nearly equal sum in the end.  But we 're not weighing them each.  The
+question concerns the advantage of both.'
+
+'That seems just!'
+
+Aminta threw no voice into the word 'just.' It was the word of the
+heavens assuaging earth's thirst, and she was earth to him.  Her soul
+yearned to the man whose mind conceived it.
+
+She said to Selina: 'We must plan an expedition next year or the year
+after, and see how the school progresses.'
+
+All three smiled; and Selina touched and held Aminta's hand shyly.
+Visions of the unseen Switzerland awed her.
+
+Weyburn named the Spring holiday time, the season of the flowering Alpine
+robes.  He promised welcome, pressed for a promise of the visit.  Warmly
+it was given.  'We will; we will indeed!'
+
+'I shall look forward,' he said.
+
+There was nothing else for him or for her, except to doat on the passing
+minute that slipped when seized.  The looking forward turned them to the
+looking back at the point they had flown from, and yielded a momentary
+pleasure, enough to stamp some section of a picture on their memories,
+which was not the burning now Love lives for, in the clasp, if but of
+hands.  Desire of it destroyed it.  They swung to the future, swung to
+the present it made the past, sensible to the quick of the now they could
+not hold.  They were lovers.  Divided lovers in presence, they thought
+and they felt in pieces.  Feelings and thoughts were forbidden to speech.
+She dared look the very little of her heart's fulness, without the
+disloyalty it would have been in him to let a small peep of his heart be
+seen.  While her hand was not clasped she could look tenderly, and her
+fettered state, her sense of unworthiness muffled in the deeps, would
+keep her from the loosening to passion.
+
+He who read through her lustrous, transiently dwelling eyes had not that
+security.  His part, besides the watch over the spring of his hot blood,
+was to combat a host, insidious among which was unreason calling her
+Browny, urging him to take his own, to snatch her from a possessor who
+forfeited by undervaluing her.  This was the truth in a better-ordered
+world: she belonged to the man who could help her to grow and to do her
+work.  But in the world we have around us, it was the distorted truth:
+and keeping passion down, he was able to wish her such happiness as
+pertained to safety from shipwreck, and for himself, that he might
+continue to walk in the ranks of the sober citizens.
+
+Oh, true and right, but she was gloriously beautiful!  Day by day she
+surpassed the wondrous Browny of old days.  All women were eclipsed by
+her.  She was that fire in the night which lights the night and draws the
+night to look at it.  And more: this queen of women was beginning to have
+a mind at work.  One saw already the sprouting of a mind repressed.  She
+had a distinct ability; the good ambition to use her qualities.  She
+needed life and air--that is, comprehension of her, encouragement, the
+companion mate.  With what strength would she now endow him!  The pride
+in the sharp imagination of possessing her whispered a boast of the
+strength her mate would have from her.  His need and her need rushed
+together somewhere down the skies.  They could not, he argued, be
+separated eternally.
+
+He had to leave her.  Selina, shocked at a boldness she could not
+understand in herself, begged him to stay and tell her of Switzerland
+and Alpine flowers and herbs, and the valleys for the gold beetle and
+the Apollo butterfly.  Aminta hinted that Lord Ormont might expect to
+find him there, if he came the next morning; but she would not try to
+persuade, and left the decision with him, loving him for the pain he
+inflicted by going.
+
+Why, indeed, should he stay?  Both could ask; they were one in asking.
+Anguish balanced pleasure in them both.  The day of the pleasure was
+heaven to remember, heaven to hope for; not so heavenly to pray for.
+The praying for it, each knew, implored their joint will to decree the
+perilous blessing.  A shadowy sentiment of duty and rectitude, born of
+what they had suffered, hung between them and the prayer for a renewal,
+that would renew the tempting they were conscious of when the sweet, the
+strained, throbbing day was over.  They could hope for chance to renew
+it, and then they would be irresponsible.  Then they would think and wish
+discreetly, so as to have it a happiness untainted.  In refusing now to
+take another day or pray for it, they deserved that chance should grant
+it.
+
+Aminta had said through Selina the utmost her self-defences could allow.
+But the idea of a final parting cut too cruelly into her life, and she
+murmured: 'I shall see you before you go for good?'
+
+'I will come, here or in London.'
+
+'I can trust?'
+
+'Quite certain.'
+
+A meeting of a few hasty minutes involved none of the dangers of a sunny,
+long summer day; and if it did, the heart had its claims, the heart had
+its powers of resistance.  Otherwise we should be base verily.
+
+He turned on a bow to leave her before there was a motion for the offer
+of her hand.
+
+After many musings and frettings, she reached the wisdom of that.  Wisdom
+was her only nourishment now.  A cold, lean dietary it is; but he
+dispensed it, and it fed her, or kept her alive.  It became a proud
+feeling that she had been his fellow in the achievement of a piece of
+wisdom; though the other feeling, that his hand's kind formal touching,
+without pressure of hers, would have warmed her to go through the next
+interview with her lord, mocked at pure satisfaction.  Did he distrust
+himself?  Or was it to spare her?  But if so, her heart was quite bare
+to him!  But she knew it was.
+
+Aminta drove her questioning heart as a vessel across blank circles of
+sea, where there was nothing save the solitary heart for answer.  It
+answered intelligibly and comfortingly at last, telling her of proof
+given that she could repose under his guidance with absolute faith.  Was
+ever loved woman more blest than she in such belief?  She had it firmly;
+and a blessedness, too, in this surety wavering beneath shadows of the
+uncertainty.  Her eyes knew it, her ears were empty of the words.  Her
+heart knew it, and it was unconfirmed by reason.  As for his venturing to
+love her, he feared none.  And no sooner did that reflection surge than
+she stood up beside him in revolt against her lion and lord.  Her
+instinct judged it impossible she could ever have yielded her heart to
+a man lacking courage.  Hence--what? when cowardice appeared as the sole
+impediment to happiness now!
+
+He had gone, and the day lived again for both of them--a day of sheer
+gold in the translation from troubled earth to the mind.  One another's
+beauty through the visage into the character was newly perceived and
+worshipped; and the beauties of pastoral Thames, the temple of peace,
+hardly noticed in the passing of the day--taken as air to the breather;
+until some chip of the scene, round which an emotion had curled, was
+vivid foreground and gateway to shrouded romance: it might be the
+stream's white face browning into willow-droopers, or a wagtail on a
+water-lily leaf, or the fore-horse of an up-river barge at strain of
+legs, a red-finned perch hung a foot above the pebbles in sun-veined
+depths, a kingfisher on the scud under alders, the forest of the bankside
+weeds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+PREPARATIONS FOR A RESOLVE
+
+That day receded like a spent billow, and lapsed among the others
+advancing, but it left a print deeper than events would have stamped.
+Aminta's pen declined to run to her lord; and the dipping it in ink was
+no acceleration of the process.  A sentence, bearing likeness to an
+artless infant's trot of the half-dozen steps to mother's lap, stumbled
+upon the full stop midway.  Desperate determination pushed it along, and
+there was in consequence a dead stop at the head of the next sentence.
+A woman whose nature is insurgent against the majesty of the man to whom
+she must, among the singular injunctions binding her, regularly write,
+sees no way between hypocrisy and rebellion.  For rebellion, she, with
+the pen in her hand, is avowedly not yet ripe, hypocrisy is abominable.
+
+If she abstained from writing, he might travel down to learn the cause;
+a similar danger, or worse, haunted the writing frigidly.  She had to be
+the hypocrite or else--leap.
+
+But an honest woman who is a feeling woman, when she consents to play
+hypocrite, cannot do it by halves.  From writing a short cold letter,
+Aminta wrote a short warm one, or very friendly.  Length she could avoid,
+because she was unable to fill a page.  It seemed that she could not
+compose a friendly few lines without letting her sex be felt in them.
+What she had put away from her, so as not to feel it herself, the
+simulation of ever so small a bit of feeling brought prominently back;
+and where she had made a cast for flowing independent simplicity, she
+was feminine, ultra-feminine to her reading of it.
+
+Better take the leap than be guilty of double-dealing even on paper!
+The nature of the leap she did not examine.
+
+Her keen apprehension of the price payable for his benevolent intentions
+caught scent of them in the air.  Those Ormont jewels shone as emblems of
+a detested subjection, the penalty for being the beautiful woman rageing
+men proclaimed.  Was there no scheme of some other sort, and far less
+agreeable, to make amends for Steignton?  She was shrewd at divination;
+she guessed her lord's design.  Rather than meet Lady Charlotte, she
+proposed to herself the 'leap' immediately; knowing it must be a leap in
+the dark, hoping it might be into a swimmer's water.  She had her own
+pin-money income, and she loathed the chain of her title.  So the leap
+would at least be honourable, as it assuredly would be unregretted,
+whatever ensued.
+
+While Aminta's heart held on to this debate, and in her bed, in her boat,
+across the golden valley meadows beside her peaceful little friend, she
+gathered a gradual resolution without sight of agencies or consequences,
+Lord Ormont was kept from her by the struggle to master his Charlotte a
+second time--compared with which the first was insignificant.  And this
+time it was curious: he could not subdue her physique, as he did before;
+she was ready for him each day, and she was animated, much more voluble,
+she was ready to jest.  The reason being, that she fought now on
+plausibly good grounds: on behalf of her independent action.
+
+Previously, her intelligence of the ultimate defeat hanging over the more
+stubborn defence of a weak position had harassed her to death's door.
+She had no right to retain the family jewels; she had the most perfect of
+established rights to refuse doing an ignominious thing.  She refused to
+visit the so-called Countess of Ormont, or leave her card, or take one
+step to warrant the woman in speaking of her as her sister-in-law.  And
+no,--it did not signify that her brother Rowsley was prohibited by her
+from marrying whom he pleased.  It meant, that to judge of his acts as
+those of a reasoning man, he would have introduced his wife to his
+relatives--the relatives he had not quarrelled with--immediately upon his
+marriage unless he was ashamed of the woman; and a wife he was ashamed of
+was no sister-in-law for her nor aunt for her daughters.  Nor should she
+come playing the Black Venus among her daughters' husbands, Lady
+Charlotte had it in her bosom to say additionally.
+
+Lord Ormont was disconcerted by her manifest pleasure in receiving him
+every day.  Evidently she consented to the recurrence of a vexatious
+dissension for the enjoyment of having him with her hourly.  Her
+dialectic, too, was cunning.  Impetuous with meaning, she forced her
+way to get her meaning out, in a manner effective to strike her blow.
+Anything for a diversion or a triumph of the moment!  He made no way.
+She was the better fencer at the tongue.
+
+Yet there was not any abatement of her deference to her brother; and this
+little misunderstanding put aside, he was the Rowsley esteemed by her as
+the chief of men.  She foiled him, it might seem, to exalt him the more.
+After he had left the house, visibly annoyed and somewhat stupefied, she
+talked of him to her husband, of the soul of chivalry Rowsley was, the
+loss to his country.  Mr. Eglett was a witness to one of the
+altercations, when she, having as usual the dialectical advantage,
+praised her brother, to his face, for his magnanimous nature; regretting
+only that it could be said he was weak on the woman side of him--which
+was, she affirmed, a side proper to every man worth the name; but in his
+case his country might complain.  Of what?--Well, of a woman.--What had
+she done, for the country to complain of her?--Why, then, arts or graces,
+she had bewitched and weaned him from his public duty, his military
+service, his patriotic ambition.
+
+Lord Ormont's interrogations, heightening the effect of Charlotte's
+charge, appeared to Mr. Eglett as a giving of himself over into her
+hands; but the earl, after a minute of silence, proved he was a tricky
+combatant.  It was he who had drawn on Charlotte, that he might have his
+opportunity to eulogize--'this lady, whom you continue to call the woman,
+after I have told you she is my wife.'  According to him, her appeals,
+her entreaties, that he should not abandon his profession or let his
+ambition rust, had been at one period constant.
+
+He spoke fervently, for him eloquently; and he gained his point; he
+silenced Lady Charlotte's tongue, and impressed Mr. Eglett.
+
+When the latter and his wife were alone, he let her see that the Countess
+of Ormont was becoming a personage in his consideration.
+
+Lady Charlotte cried out: 'Hear these men where it's a good-looking woman
+between the winds!  Do you take anything Rowsley says for earnest?  You
+ought to know he stops at no trifle to get his advantage over you in a
+dispute.  That 's the soldier in him.  It 's victory at any cost!--and I
+like him for it.  Do you tell me you think it possible my brother Rowsley
+would keep smothered years under a bushel the woman he can sit here
+magnifying because he wants to lime you and me: you to take his part, and
+me to go and call the noble creature decked out in his fine fiction my
+sister-in-law.  Nothing 'll tempt me to believe my brother could behave
+in such a way to the woman he respected!'
+
+So Mr. Eglett opined.  But he had been impressed.
+
+He relieved his mind on the subject in a communication to Lord Adderwood;
+who habitually shook out the contents of his to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley,
+and she, deeming it good for Aminta to have information of the war waging
+for her behoof, obtained her country address, with the resolve to drive
+down, a bearer of good news to the dear woman she liked to think of, look
+at, and occasionally caress; besides rather tenderly pitying her, now
+that a change of fortune rendered her former trials conspicuous.
+
+An incident, considered grave even in the days of the duel and the kicks
+against a swelling public reprehension of the practice, occurred to
+postpone her drive for four-and-twenty hours.  London was shaken by
+rumours of a tragic mishap to a socially well-known gentleman at the
+Chiallo fencing rooms.  The rumours passing from mouth to mouth acquired,
+in the nature of them, sinister colours as they circulated.  Lord Ormont
+sent Aminta word of what he called 'a bad sort of accident at Chiallo's,'
+without mentioning names or alluding to suspicions.
+
+He treated it lightly.  He could not have written of it with such
+unconcern if it involved the secretary!  Yet Aminta did seriously ask
+herself whether he could; and she flew rapidly over the field of his
+character, seizing points adverse, points favourably advocative,
+balancing dubiously--most unjustly: she felt she was unjust.  But in her
+condition, the heart of a woman is instantly planted in jungle when the
+spirits of the two men closest to her are made to stand opposed by a
+sudden excitement of her fears for the beloved one.  She cannot see
+widely, and is one of the wild while the fit lasts; and, after it, that
+savage narrow vision she had of the unbeloved retains its vivid print in
+permanence.  Was she unjust?  Aminta cited corroboration of her being
+accurate: such was Lord Ormont! and although his qualities of gallantry,
+courtesy, integrity, honourable gentleman, presented a fair low-level
+account on the other side, she had so stamped his massive selfishness
+and icy inaccessibility to emotion on her conception of him that the
+repulsive figure formed by it continued towering when her mood was
+kinder.
+
+Love played on love in the woman's breast.  Her love had taken a fever
+from her lord's communication of the accident at Chiallo's, and she
+pushed her alarm to imagine the deadliest, and plead for the right of
+confession to herself of her unrepented regrets.  She and Matey Weyburn
+had parted without any pressure of hands, without a touch.  They were,
+then, unplighted if now the grave divided them!  No touch: mere glances!
+And she sighed not, as she pleaded, for the touch, but for the plighting
+it would have been.  If now she had lost him, he could never tell herself
+that since the dear old buried and night-walking schooldays she had said
+once Matey to him, named him once to his face Matey Weyburn.  A sigh like
+the roll of a great wave breaking against a wall of rock came from her
+for the possibly lost chance of naming him to his face Matey,--oh, and
+seeing his look as she said it!
+
+The boldness might be fancied: it could not be done.  Agreeing with the
+remote inner voice of her reason so far, she toned her exclamatory
+foolishness to question, in Reason's plain, deep, basso-profundo
+accompaniment tone, how much the most blessed of mortal women could
+do to be of acceptable service to a young schoolmaster?
+
+There was no reply to the question.  But it became a nestling centre for
+the skiey flock of dreams, and for really temperate soundings of her
+capacities, tending to the depreciatory.  She could do little.  She
+entertained the wish to work, not only 'for the sake of Somebody,' as her
+favourite poet sang, but for the sake of working and serving--proving
+that she was helpfuller than a Countess of Ormont, ranged with all the
+other countesses in china and Dresden on a drawing-room mantelpiece for
+show.  She could organize, manage a household, manage people too, she
+thought: manage a husband?  The word offends.  Perhaps invigorate him,
+here and there perhaps inspire him, if he would let her breathe.
+Husbands exist who refuse the right of breathing to their puppet wives.
+Above all, as it struck her, she could assist, and be more than an echo
+of one nobler, in breathing manliness, high spirit, into boys.  With that
+idea she grazed the shallows of reality, and her dreams whirred from the
+nest and left it hungrily empty.
+
+Selina Collett was writing under the verandah letters to her people in
+Suffolk, performing the task with marvellous ease.  Aminta noted it as a
+mark of superior ability, and she had the envy of the complex nature
+observing the simple.  It accused her of some guiltiness, uncommitted and
+indefensible.  She had pushed her anxiety about 'the accident at
+Chiallo's' to an extreme that made her the creature of her sensibilities.
+In the midst of this quiet country life and landscape; these motionless
+garden flowers headed by the smooth white river, and her gentle little
+friend so homely here, the contemplation of herself was like a shriek in
+music.  Worse than discordant, she pronounced herself inferior, unfit
+mentally as well as bodily for the dreams of companionship with any noble
+soul who might have the dream of turning her into something better.
+There are couples in the world, not coupled by priestly circumstance, who
+are close to the true; union, by reason of generosity on the one part,
+grateful devotion, as for the gift of life, on the other.  For instance,
+Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord Adderwood, which was an instance without
+resemblance; but Aminta's heart beat thick for what it wanted, and they
+were the instance of two that did not have to snap false bonds of a
+marriage-tie in order to walk together composedly outside it--in honour?
+Oh yes, yes!  She insisted on believing it was in honour.
+
+She saw the couple issue from the boathouse.  She had stepped into the
+garden full of a presentiment; so she fancied, the moment they were seen.
+She had, in fact, heard a noise in the boathouse while thinking of them,
+and the effect on her was to spring an idea of mysterious interventions
+at the sight.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence rushed to her, and was embraced.  'You 're not astonished
+to see me?  Adder drove me down, and stopped his coach at the inn, and
+rowed me the half-mile up.  We will lunch, if you propose; but presently.
+My dear, I have to tell you things.  You have heard?'
+
+'The accident?'
+
+Aminta tried to read in Mrs. Lawrence's eyes whether it closely concerned
+her.
+
+Those pretty eyes, their cut of lids hinting at delicate affinities with
+the rice-paper lady of the court of China, were trying to peer
+seriously.
+
+'Poor man! One must be sorry for him: he--'
+
+'Who?'
+
+'You 've not heard, then?' Mrs. Lawrence dropped her voice: 'Morsfield.'
+
+Aminta shivered.  'All I have heard-half a line from my lord this
+morning: no name.  It was at the fencing-rooms, he said.'
+
+'Yes, he wouldn't write more;' said Mrs. Lawrence, nodding.  'You know,
+he would have had to do it himself if it had not been done for him.
+Adder saw him some days back in a brown consultation near his club with
+Captain May.  Oh, but of course it was accident!  Did he call it so in
+his letter to you?'
+
+'One word of Mr. Morsfield: he is wounded?'
+
+'Past cure: he has the thing he cried for, spoilt boy as he was from his
+birth.  I tell you truth, m' Aminta, I grieve to lose him.  What with his
+airs of the foreign-tinted, punctilious courtly gentleman covering a
+survival of the ancient British forest boar or bear, he was a picture in
+our modern set, and piquant.  And he was devoted to our sex, we must
+admit, after the style of the bears.  They are for honey, and they have a
+hug.  If he hadn't been so much of a madman, I should have liked him for
+his courage.  He had plenty of that, nothing to steer it.  A second
+cousin comes in for his estates.'
+
+'He is dead?' Aminta cried.
+
+'Yes, dear, he is gone.  What the women think of it I can't say.  The
+general feeling among the men is that some one of them would have had to
+send him sooner or later.  The curious point, Adder says, is his letting
+it be done by steel.  He was a dead shot, dangerous with the small sword,
+as your Mr. Weyburn said, only soon off his head.  But I used to be
+anxious about the earl's meeting him with pistols.  He did his best to
+provoke it.  Here, Adder,'--she spoke over her shoulder,--'tell Lady
+Ormont all you know of the Morsfield-May affair.'
+
+Lord Adderwood bowed compliance.  His coolness was the masculine of Mrs.
+Lawrence's hardly feminine in treating of a terrible matter, so that the
+dull red facts had to be disengaged from his manner of speech before they
+sank into Aminta's acceptance; of them as credible.
+
+'They fought with foils, buttons off, preliminary ceremonies perfect;
+salute in due order; guard, and at it.
+
+Odd thing was, nobody at Chiallo's had a notion of the business till
+Morsfield was pinked.  He wouldn't be denied; went to work like a fellow
+meaning to be skewered, if he couldn't do the trick: and he tried it.
+May had been practising some weeks.  He's well on the Continent by this
+time.  It'll blow over.  Button off sheer accident.  I wasn't lucky
+enough to see the encounter: came in just when Chiallo was lashing his
+poll over Morsfield flat on the ground.  He had it up to the hilt.  We
+put a buttoned foil by the side of Morsfield, and all swore to secrecy.
+As it is, it 'll go badly against poor Chiallo.  Taste for fencing won't
+be much improved by the affair.  They quarrelled in the dressing room,
+and fetched the foils and knocked off the buttons there.  A big rascal
+toady squire of Morsfield's did it for him.  Morsfield was just up from
+Yorkshire.  He said he was expecting a summons elsewhere, bound to await
+it, declined provocation for the present.  May filliped him on the
+cheek.'
+
+'Adder conveyed the information of her husband's flight to the consolable
+Amy,' said Mrs. Lawrence.
+
+'He had to catch the coach for Dover,' Adderwood explained.  'His wife
+was at a dinner-party.  I saw her at midnight.'
+
+'Fair Amy was not so very greatly surprised?'
+
+'Quite the soldier's wife!'
+
+'She said she was used to these little catastrophes.  But, Adder, what
+did she say of her husband?'
+
+'Said she was never anxious about him, for nothing would kill him.'
+
+Mrs. Lawrence shook a doleful head at Aminta.
+
+'You see, my dear Aminta, here's another, and probably her last, chance
+of sharing the marquisate gone.  Who can fail to pity her, except old
+Time!  And I 'm sure she likes her husband well enough.  She ought: no
+woman ever had such a servant.  But the captain has not been known to
+fight without her sanction, and the inference is--'Alas!  woe!  Fair Amy
+is doomed to be the fighting captain's bride to the end of the chapter.
+Adder says she looked handsome.  A dinner-party suits her cosmetic
+complexion better than a ball.  The account of the inquest is in the
+day's papers, and we were tolerably rejoiced we could drive out of London
+without having to reply to coroner's questions.'
+
+'He died-soon?' Aminta's voice was shaken.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence touched at her breast, it might be for heart or lungs.
+Judging by Aminta's voice and face, one could suppose she was harking
+back, in woman's way, to her original sentiment for the man, now that he
+lay prostrate.
+
+Aminta read the unreproachful irony in the smile addressed to her.  She
+was too convulsed by her many emotions and shouting thoughts to think of
+defending herself.
+
+Selina, in the drawing-room, diligently fingered and classed brown-black
+pressed weeds of her neophyte's botany-folios.  The sight of her and her
+occupation struck Aminta as that of a person in another world beyond this
+world of blood, strangely substantial to view; and one heard her speak.
+
+Guilty?--no.  But she had wished to pique her lord.  After the term of a
+length of months, could it be that the unhappy man and she were punished
+for the half-minute's acting of some interest in him?  And Lord Ormont
+had been seen consulting Captain May; or was it giving him directions?
+
+Her head burned.  All the barren interrogations were up, running and
+knocking for hollow responses; and, saving a paleness of face, she
+cloaked any small show of the riot.  She was an amiable hostess.  She had
+ceased to comprehend Mrs. Lawrence, even to the degree of thinking her
+unfeminine.  She should have known that the 'angelical chimpanzee,' as a
+friend, once told of his being a favourite with the lady, had called her,
+could not simulate a feeling, and had not the slightest power of pretence
+to compassion for an ill-fated person who failed to quicken her
+enthusiasm.  In that, too, she was a downright boy.  Morsfield was a kind
+of Bedlamite to her; amusing in his antics, and requiring to be
+manoeuvred and eluded while he lived: once dead, just a tombstone, of
+interest only to his family.
+
+She beckoned Aminta to follow her; and, with a smirk of indulgent fun,
+commended Lord Adderwood to a study of Selina Collett's botany-folios,
+which the urbanest of indifferent gentlemen had slid his eyes over his
+nose to inspect before the lunch.
+
+'You ought to know what is going on in town, my dear Aminta.  You have
+won the earl to a sense of his duty, and he 's at work on the harder task
+of winning Lady Charlotte Eglett to a sense of hers.  It 's tremendous.
+Has been forward some days, and no sign of yielding on either side.  Mr.
+Eglett, good man, is between them, catching it right and left; and he
+deserves his luck for marrying her.  Vows she makes him the best of
+wives.  If he 's content, I 've nothing to complain of.  You must be
+ready to receive her; my lord is sure to carry the day.  You gulp.  You
+won't be seeing much of her.  I 'm glad to say he is condescending to
+terms of peace with the Horse Guards.  We hear so.  You may be throning
+it officially somewhere next year.  And all 's well that ends well!  Say
+that to me!'
+
+'It is, when the end comes,' Aminta replied.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence's cool lips were pressed to her cheek.  The couple and
+their waterman rowed away to the party they had left with the four-in-
+hand at their inn.
+
+A wind was rising.  The trees gave their swish of leaves, the river
+darkened the patch of wrinkles, the bordering flags amid the reed-blades
+dipped and streamed.
+
+Surcharged with unassimilated news of events, that made a thunder in her
+head, Aminta walked down the garden path, meeting Selina and bearing her
+on.  She had a witch's will to rouse gales.  Hers was not the woman's
+nature to be driven cowering by stories of men's bloody deeds.  She took
+the field, revolted, dissevering herself from the class which tolerated
+them--actuated by a reflective moralty, she believed; and loathed herself
+for having aspired, schemed, to be a member of the class.  But it was not
+the class, it was against her lord as representative of the class,
+that she was now the rebel, neither naming him nor imaging him.  Her
+enveloping mind was black on him.  Such as one of those hard slaughtering
+men could call her his own?  She breathed short and breathed deep.  Her
+bitter reason had but the common pity for a madman despatched to his
+rest.  Yet she knew hatred of her lord in his being suspected as
+instigator or accomplice of the hand that dealt the blow.  He became to
+her thought a python whose coils were about her person, insufferable to
+the gaze backward.
+
+Moments like these are the mothers in travail of a resolve joylessly
+conceived, undesired to clasp, Necessity's offspring.  Thunderclouds have
+as little love of the lightnings they fling.
+
+Aminta was aware only of her torment.  The trees were bending, the water
+hissing, the grasses all this way and that, like hands of a delirious
+people in surges of wreck.  She scorned the meaningless shake of the
+garments of earth, and exclaimed: 'If we were by the sea to-night!'
+
+'I shall be to-morrow night,' said Selina.  'I shall think of you.  Oh!
+would you come with me?'
+
+'Would you have me?'
+
+'My mother will indeed be honoured by your consenting to come.'
+
+'Write to her before the post is out.'
+
+'We shall travel down together?'
+
+Aminta nodded and smiled, and Selina kissed her hand in joy, saying, that
+down home she would not be so shy of calling her Aminta.  She was bidden
+to haste.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+VISITS OF FAREWELL
+
+The noise in London over Adolphus Morsfield's tragical end disturbed Lord
+Ormont much less than the cessation of letters from his Aminta; and that
+likewise, considering his present business on her behalf, he patiently
+shrugged at and pardoned, foreseeing her penitent air.  He could do it
+lightly after going some way to pardon his offending country.  For Aminta
+had not offended, his robust observation of her was moved to the kindly
+humorous by a reflective view here and there of the downright woman her
+clever little shuffles exposed her to be, not worse.  It was her sex that
+made her one of the gliders in grasses, some of whom are venomous; but
+she belonged to the order only as an innocuous blindworm.  He could
+pronounce her small by-play with Morsfield innocent, her efforts to climb
+the stairs into Society quite innocent; judging her, of course, by her
+title of woman.  A woman's innocence has a rainbow skin.  Set this one
+beside other women, she comes out well, fairly well, well enough.
+
+Now that the engagement with Charlotte assumed proportions of a series of
+battle, properly to be entitled a campaign, he had, in his loneliness,
+fallen into the habit of reflecting at the close of his day's work; and
+the rubbing of that unused opaque mirror hanging inside a man of action
+had helped him piecemeal to perceive bits of his conduct, entirely
+approved by him, which were intimately connected, nevertheless, with a
+train of circumstances that he disliked and could not charge justly upon
+any other shoulders than his own.  What was to be thought of it?  He
+would not be undergoing this botheration of the prolonged attempt to
+bring a stubborn woman to a sense of her duty, if he had declared his
+marriage in the ordinary style, and given his young countess her
+legitimate place before the world.  What impeded it?  The shameful
+ingratitude of his countrymen to the soldier who did it eminent service
+at a crisis of the destinies of our Indian Empire!  He could not condone
+the injury done to him by entering among them again.  Too like the kicked
+cur, that!  He retired--call it 'sulked in his tent,' if you like.  His
+wife had to share his fortunes.  He being slighted, she necessarily was
+shadowed.  For a while she bore it contentedly enough; then began her
+mousy scratches to get into the room off the wainscot, without blame from
+him; she behaved according to her female nature.
+
+Yes, but the battles with Charlotte forced on his recognition once more,
+and violently, the singular consequences of his retirement and Coriolanus
+quarrel with his countrymen.  He had doomed himself ever since to a
+contest with women.  First it was his Queen of Amazons, who, if
+vanquished, was not so easily vanquished, and, in fact, doubtfully,
+--for now, to propitiate her, he had challenged, and must overcome or be
+disgraced, the toughest Amazonian warrior man could stand against at cast
+of dart or lock of arms.  No day scored an advantage; and she did not
+apparently suffer fatigue.  He did: that is to say, he was worried and
+hurried to have the wrangle settled and Charlotte at Aminta's feet.  He
+gained not an inch of ground.  His principle in a contention of the sort
+was to leave the woman to the practice of her obvious artifices, and
+himself simply hammer, incessantly hammer.  But Charlotte hammered as
+well.  The modest position of the defensive negative was not to her
+taste.  The moment he presented himself she flew out upon some
+yesterday's part of the argument and carried the war across the borders,
+in attacks on his character and qualities--his weakness regarding women,
+his incapacity to forgive, and the rest.  She hammered on that head.  As
+for any prospect of a termination of the strife, he could see none in her
+joyful welcome to him and regretful parting and pleased appointment of
+the next meeting day after day.
+
+The absurdest of her devices for winding him off his aim was to harp on
+some new word she had got hold of as, for example, to point out to him
+his aptitudes, compliment him on his aptitudes, recommend him to study
+and learn the limitations of his aptitudes!  She revelled in something
+the word unfolded to her.
+
+However, here was the point: she had to be beaten.  So, if she, too,
+persisted in hammering, he must employ her female weapon of artifice with
+her.  One would gladly avoid the stooping to it in a civil dispute, in
+which one is not so gloriously absolved for lying and entrapping as in
+splendid war.
+
+Weyburn's name was announced to him at an early hour on Thursday morning.
+My lord nodded to the footman; he nodded to himself over a suggestion
+started in a tactical intelligence by the name.
+
+'Ah!  you 're off?' he accosted the young man.
+
+'I have come to take my leave, my lord.'
+
+'Nothing new in the morning papers?'
+
+'A report that Captain May intends to return and surrender.'
+
+'Not before a month has passed, if he follows my counsel.'
+
+'To defend his character.'
+
+'He has none.'
+
+'His reputation.'
+
+'He has too much.'
+
+'These charges against him must be intolerable.'
+
+'Was he not a bit of a pupil of yours?'
+
+'We practised two or three times-nothing more.'
+
+'Morsfield was a wasp at a feast.  Somebody had to crush him.  I 've seen
+the kind of man twice in my life and exactly the kind of man.  If their
+law puts down duelling, he rules the kingdom!'
+
+'My lord, I should venture to say the kind of man can be a common
+annoyance because the breach of the law is countenanced.'
+
+'Bad laws are best broken.  A society that can't get a scouring now and
+then will be a dirty set.'
+
+With a bend of the head, in apology for speaking of himself, Weyburn
+said: 'I have acted on my view.  I declined a challenge from a sort of
+henchman of his.'
+
+'Oh! a poacher's lurcher?  You did right.  Fight such fellows with
+constables.  You have seen Lady Charlotte?'
+
+'I am on my way to her ladyship.'
+
+'Do me this favour.  Fourteen doors up the street of her residence, my
+physician lives.  I have to consult him at once.  Dr. Rewkes.'
+
+Weyburn bowed.  Lady Charlotte could not receive him later than half-past
+ten of the morning, he said.  'This morning she can,' said my lord.  'You
+will tell Dr. Rewkes that it is immediate.  I rather regret your going.
+I shall be in a controversy with the Horse Guards about our cavalry
+saddles.  It would be regiments of raw backs the first fortnight of a
+campaign.'
+
+The earl discoursed on saddles; and passed to high eulogy of our
+Hanoverian auxiliary troopers in the Peninsula; 'good husbands,' he named
+them quaintly, speaking of their management of their beasts.  Thence he
+diverged to Frederic's cavalry, rarely matched for shrewdness and
+endurance; to the deeds of the Liechtenstein Hussars; to the great
+things Blucher did with his horsemen.
+
+The subject was interesting; but Weyburn saw the clock at past the half
+after ten.  He gave a slight sign of restiveness, and was allowed to go
+when the earl had finished his pro and con upon Arab horses and Mameluke
+saddles.  Lord Ormont nicked his head, just as at their first interview:
+he was known to have an objection to the English shaking of hands.
+'Good-morning,' he said; adding a remark or two, of which et cetera may
+stand for an explicit rendering.  It concerned the young man's
+prosperity: my lord's conservative plain sense was in doubt of the
+prospering of a giddy pate, however good a worker.  His last look at the
+young man, who had not served him badly, held an anticipation of possibly
+some day seeing a tatterdemalion of shipwreck, a rueful exhibition of
+ideas put to the business of life.
+
+Weyburn left the message with Dr. Rewkes in person.  It had not seemed
+to him that Lord Ormont was one requiring the immediate attendance of a
+physician.  By way of accounting to Lady Charlotte for the lateness of
+his call, he mentioned the summons he had delivered.
+
+'Oh, that's why he hasn't come yet,' said she.  'We'll sit and talk till
+he does come.  I don't wonder if his bile has been stirred.  He can't oil
+me to credit what he pumps into others.  His Lady Ormont!  I believe in
+it less than ever I did.  Morsfield or no Morsfield--and now the poor
+wretch has got himself pinned to the plank, like my grandson Bobby's
+dragonflies, I don't want to say anything further of him--she doesn't
+have much of a welcome at Steignton!  If I were a woman to wager as men
+do, I 'd stake a thousand pounds to five on her never stepping across the
+threshold of Steignton.  All very well in London, and that place he hires
+up at Marlow.  He respects our home.  That 's how I know my brother
+Rowsley still keeps a sane man.  A fortune on it!--and so says Mr.
+Eglett.  Any reasonable person must think it.  He made a fool of some
+Hampton-Evey at Madrid, if he went through any ceremony--and that I
+doubt.  But she and old (what do they call her?) may have insisted upon
+the title, as much as they could.  He sixty; she under twenty, I'm told.
+Pagnell 's the name.  That aunt of a good-looking young woman sees a
+noble man of sixty admiring her five feet seven or so--she's tall--of
+marketable merchandise, and she doesn't need telling that at sixty he'll
+give the world to possess the girl.  But not his family honour!  He stops
+at that.  Why?  Lord Ormont 's made of pride!  He'll be kind to her,
+he'll be generous, he won't forsake her; she'll have her portion in his
+will, and by the course of things in nature, she'll outlive him and
+marry, and be happy, I hope.  Only she won't enter Steignton.  You
+remember what I say.  You 'll live when I 'm gone.  It 's the thirst of
+her life to be mistress of Steignton.  Not she!--though Lord Ormont would
+have us all open our doors to her; mine too, now he 's about it.  He sets
+his mind on his plan, and he forgets rights and dues--everything; he must
+have it as his will dictates.  That 's how he made such a capital
+soldier.  You know the cavalry leader he was.  If they'd given him a
+field in Europe!  His enemies admit that.  Twelve! and my clock's five
+minutes or more slow.  What can Rowsley be doing?'
+
+She rattled backward on the scene at Steignton, and her brother's
+handsome preservation of his dignity 'stood it like the king he is!' and
+to the Morsfield-May encounter, which had prevented another; and Mrs. May
+was rolled along in the tide, with a hint of her good reason for liking
+Lord Ormont; also the change of opinion shown by the Press as to Lord
+Ormont's grand exploit.  Referring to it, she flushed and jigged on her
+chair for a saddle beneath her.  And that glorious Indian adventure
+warmed her to the man who had celebrated it among his comrades when a boy
+at school.
+
+'You 're to teach Latin and Greek, you said.  For you 're right: we
+English can't understand the words we 're speaking, if we don't know a
+good deal of Latin and some Greek.  "Conversing in tokens, not standard
+coin," you said, I remember; and there'll be a "general rabble tongue,"
+unless we English are drilled in the languages we filched from.  Lots
+of lords and ladies want the drilling, then!  I'll send some over to you
+for Swiss air and roots of the English tongue.  Oh, and you told me you
+supported Lord Ormont on his pet argument for corps d'elite; and you
+quoted Virgil to back it.  Let me have that line again--in case of his
+condescending to write to the papers on the subject.'
+
+Weyburn repeated the half-line.
+
+'Good: I won't forget now.  And you said the French act on that because
+they follow human nature, and the English don't.  We "bully it," you
+said.  That was on our drive down to Steignton.  I hope you 'll succeed.
+You 'll be visiting England.  Call on me in London or at Olmer--only mind
+and give me warning.  I shall be glad to see you.  I 've got some ideas
+from you.  If I meet a man who helps me to read the world and men as
+they are, I 'm grateful to him; and most people are not, you 'll find.
+They want you to show them what they 'd like the world to be.  We don't
+agree about a lady.  You 're in the lists, lance in rest, all for
+chivalry.  You 're a man, and a young man.  Have you taken your leave of
+her yet?  She'll expect it, as a proper compliment.'
+
+'I propose running down to take my leave of Lady Ormont to-morrow,'
+replied Weyburn.
+
+'She is handsome?'
+
+She is very handsome.'
+
+'Beautiful, do you mean?'
+
+'Oh, my lady, it would only be a man's notion!'
+
+'Now, that 's as good an answer as could be made!  You 're sure to
+succeed.  I 'm not the woman's enemy.  But let her keep her place.  Why,
+Rowsley can't be coming to-day!  Did Lord Ormont look ill?'
+
+'It did not strike me so.'
+
+'He 's between two fires.  A man gets fretted.  But I shan't move a step.
+I dare say she won't.  Especially with that Morsfield out of the way.
+You do mean you think her a beauty.  Well, then, there'll soon be a
+successor to Morsfield.  Beauties will have their weapons, and they can
+hit on plenty; and it 's nothing to me, as long as I save my brother from
+their arts.'
+
+Weyburn felt he had done his penance in return for kindness.  He bowed
+and rose, Lady Charlotte stretched out her hand.
+
+'We shall be sending you a pupil some day,' she said, and smiled.
+
+'Forward your address as soon as you 're settled.' Her face gave a
+glimpse of its youth in a cordial farewell smile.
+
+Lord Ormont had no capacity to do the like, although they were strictly
+brother and sister in appearance.  The smallest difference in character
+rendered her complex and kept him simple.  She had a thirsting mind.
+
+Weyburn fancied that a close intimacy of a few months would have enabled
+him to lift her out of her smirching and depraving mean jealousies.  He
+speculated, as he trod the street, on little plots and surprises, which
+would bring Lady Charlotte and Lady Ormont into presence, and end by
+making friends of them.  Supposing that could be done, Lady Ormont might
+be righted by the intervention of Lady Charlotte after all.
+
+Weyburn sent his dream flying with as dreamy an after-thought: 'Funny it
+will be then for Lady Charlotte to revert to the stuff she has been
+droning in my ear half an hour ago!--Look well behind, and we see spots
+where we buzzed, lowed, bit and tore; and not until we have cast that
+look and seen the brute are we human creatures.'
+
+A crumb of reflection such as this could brace him, adding its modest
+maravedi to his prized storehouse of gain, fortifying with assurances of
+his having a concrete basis for his business in life.  His great youthful
+ambition had descended to it, but had sunk to climb on a firmer footing.
+
+Arthur Abner had his next adieu.  They talked of Lady Ormont, as to whose
+position of rightful Countess of Ormont Mr. Abner had no doubt.  He said
+of Lady Charlotte: 'She has a clear head; but she loves her "brother
+Rowsley" excessively; and any excess pushes to craziness.'
+
+He spoke to Weyburn of his prospects in the usually, perhaps necessarily,
+cheerless tone of men who recognize by contrast the one mouse's nibbling
+at a mountain of evil.  'To harmonize the nationalities, my dear boy!
+teach Christians to look fraternally on Jews!  David was a harper, but
+the setting of him down to roll off a fugue on one of your cathedral
+organs would not impose a heavier task than you are undertaking.  You
+have my best wishes, whatever aid I can supply.  But we 're nearer to
+King John's time than to your ideal, as far as the Jews go.'
+
+'Not in England.'
+
+'Less in England,' Abner shrugged.
+
+'You have beaten the Christians on the field they challenged you to enter
+for a try.  They feel the pinch in their interests and their vanity.
+That will pass.  I 'm for the two sides, under the name of Justice;
+and I give the palm to whichever of the two first gets hold of the idea
+of Justice.  My old schoolmate's well?'
+
+'Always asking after Matey Weyburn !'
+
+'He shall have my address in Switzerland.  You and I will be
+corresponding.'
+
+Now rose to view the visit to the lady who was Lady Ormont on the tongue,
+Aminta at heart; never to be named Aminta even to himself.  His heart
+broke loose at a thought of it.
+
+He might say Browny.  For that was not serious with the intense present
+signification the name Aminta had.  Browny was queen of the old school-
+time-enclosed it in her name; and that sphere enclosed her, not excluding
+him.  And the dear name of Browny played gently, humorously, fervently,
+too, with life: not, pathetically, as that of Aminta did when came a
+whisper of her situation, her isolation, her friendlessness; hardly
+dissimilar to what could be imagined of a gazelle in the streets of
+London city.  The Morsfields were not all slain.  The Weyburns would be
+absent.
+
+At the gate of his cottage garden Weyburn beheld a short unfamiliar
+figure of a man with dimly remembered features.  Little Collett he still
+was in height.  The schoolmates had not met since the old days of
+Cuper's.
+
+Little Collett delivered a message of invitation from Selina, begging Mr.
+Weyburn to accompany her brother on the coach to Harwich next day, and
+spend two or three days by the sea.  But Weyburn's mind had been set in
+the opposite direction--up Thames instead of down.
+
+He was about to refuse, but he checked his voice and hummed.  Words of
+Selina's letter jumped in italics.  He perceived Lady Ormont's hand.
+For one thing, would she be at Great Marlow alone?  And he knew that hand
+--how deftly it moved and moved others.  Selina Collett would not have
+invited him with underlinings merely to see a shoreside house and garden.
+Her silence regarding a particular name showed her to be under
+injunction, one might guess.  At worst, it would be the loss of a couple
+of days; worth the venture.  They agreed to journey by coach next day.
+
+Facing eastward in the morning, on a seat behind the coachman, Weyburn
+had a seafaring man beside him, bound for the good port of Harwich, where
+his family lived, and thence by his own boat to Flushing.  Weyburn set
+him talking of himself, as the best way of making him happy; for it is
+the theme which pricks to speech, and so liberates an uncomfortably
+locked-up stranger; who, if sympathetic to human proximity, is thankful.
+They exchanged names, delighted to find they were both Matthews;
+whereupon Matthew of the sea demanded the paw of Matthew of the land, and
+there was a squeeze.  The same with little Collett, after hearing of him
+as the old schoolmate of the established new friend.  Then there was
+talk.  Little Collett named Felixstowe as the village of his mother's
+house and garden sloping to the sands.  'That 's it-you have it,' said
+the salted Matthew: 'peace is in that spot, and there I 've sworn to
+pitch my tent when I 'm incapacitated for further exercise--profitable,
+so to speak.  My eldest girl has a bar of amber she picked up one wash of
+the tide at Felixstowe, and there it had been lying sparkling, unseen,
+hours, the shore is that solitary.  What I like!--a quiet shore and a
+peopled sea.  Ever been to Brighton?  There it 's t' other way.'
+
+Not long after he had mentioned the time of early evening for their entry
+into his port of Harwich, the coach turned quietly over on a bank of the
+roadside, depositing outside passengers quite safely, in so matter-of-
+course a way, that only the screams of an uninjured lady inside repressed
+their roars of laughter.  One of the wheels had come loose, half a mile
+off the nearest town.  Their entry into Harwich was thereby delayed until
+half-past nine at night.  Full of consideration for the new mates now
+fast wedded to his heart by an accident.  Matthew Shale proposed to
+Matthew Weyburn, instead of the bother of crossing the ferry with a
+portmanteau and a bag at that late hour, to sup at his house, try the
+neighbouring inn for a short sleep, and ship on board his yawl, the
+honest Susan, to be rowed ashore off the Swin to Felixstowe sands no
+later than six o'clock of a summer's morning, in time for a bath and a
+swim before breakfast.  It sounded well--it sounded sweetly.  Weyburn
+suggested the counter proposal of supper for the three at the inn.  But
+the other Matthew said: 'I married a cook.  She expects a big appetite,
+and she always keeps warm when I 'm held away, no matter how late.  Sure
+to be enough.'
+
+Beds were secured at the inn; after which came the introduction to Mrs.
+Shale, the exhibition of Susan Shale's bar of amber, the dish of fresh-
+fried whiting, the steak pudding, a grog, tobacco, rest at the inn, and
+a rousing bang at the sleepers' doors when the unwonted supper in them
+withheld an answer to the intimating knock.  Young Matthew Shale, who had
+slept on board the Susan, conducted them to her boat.  His glance was
+much drawn to the very white duck trousers Weyburn had put on, for a
+souvenir of the approbation they had won at Marlow.  They were on, and so
+it was of no use for young Matthew to say they were likely to bear away a
+token from the Susan.  She was one among the damsels of colour, and free
+of her tokens, especially to the spotless.
+
+How it occurred, nobody saw; though everybody saw how naturally it must
+occur for the white ducks to 'have it in the eye' by the time they had
+been on board a quarter of an hour.  Weyburn got some fun out of them,
+for a counterbalance to a twitch of sentimental regret scarcely
+decipherable, as that the last view of him should bear a likeness of
+Browny's recollection of her first.
+
+A glorious morning of flushed open sky and sun on sea chased all small
+thoughts out of it.  The breeze was from the west, and the Susan, lightly
+laden, took the heave of smooth rollers with a flowing current-curtsey in
+the motion of her speed.  Fore-sail and aft were at their gentle strain;
+her shadow rippled fragmentarily along to the silver rivulet and boat of
+her wake.  Straight she flew to the ball of fire now at spring above the
+waters, and raining red gold on the line of her bows.  By comparison she
+was an ugly yawl, and as the creature of wind and wave beautiful.
+
+They passed an English defensive fort, and spared its walls, in obedience
+to Matthew Shale's good counsel that they should forbear from sneezing.
+Little Collett pointed to the roof of his mother's house twenty paces
+rearward of a belt of tamarisks, green amid the hollowed yellows of
+shorebanks yet in shade, crumbling to the sands.  Weyburn was attracted
+by a diminutive white tent, of sentry-box shape, evidently a bather's,
+quite as evidently a fair bather's.  He would have to walk on some way
+for his dip.  He remarked to little Collett that ladies going into the
+water half-dressed never have more than half a bath.  His arms and legs
+flung out contempt of that style of bathing, exactly in old Matey's well-
+remembered way.  Half a mile off shore, the Susan was put about to flap
+her sails, and her boat rocked with the passengers.  Turning from a final
+cheer to friendly Matthew, Weyburn at the rudder espied one of those
+unenfranchised ladies in marine uniform issuing through the tent-slit.
+She stepped firmly, as into her element.  A plain look at her, and a
+curious look, and an intent look fixed her fast, and ran the shock on his
+heart before he knew of a guess.  She waded, she dipped; a head across
+the breast of the waters was observed: this one of them could swim.  She
+was making for sea, a stone's throw off the direction of the boat.
+Before his wits had grasped the certainty possessing them, fiery envy and
+desire to be alongside her set his fingers fretting at buttons.  A grand
+smooth swell of the waters lifted her, and her head rose to see her
+world.  She sank down the valley, where another wave was mounding for its
+onward roll: a gentle scene of Weyburn's favourite Sophoclean chorus.
+Now she was given to him--it was she.  How could it ever have been any
+other!  He handed his watch to little Collett, and gave him the ropes,
+pitched coat and waistcoat on his knees, stood free of boots and socks,
+and singing out, truly enough, the words of a popular cry, 'White ducks
+want washing,' went over and in.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+A MARINE DUET
+
+She soon had to know she was chased.  She had seen the dive from the
+boat, and received all illumination.  With a chuckle of delighted
+surprise, like a blackbird startled, she pushed seaward for joy of the
+effort, thinking she could exult in imagination of an escape up to the
+moment of capture, yielding then only to his greater will; and she meant
+to try it.
+
+The swim was a holiday; all was new--nothing came to her as the same old
+thing since she took her plunge; she had a sea-mind--had left her earth-
+mind ashore.  The swim, and Matey Weyburn pursuing her passed up, out of
+happiness, through the spheres of delirium, into the region where our
+life is as we would have it be a home holding the quiet of the heavens,
+if but midway thither, and a home of delicious animation of the whole
+frame, equal to wings.
+
+He drew on her, but he was distant, and she waved an arm.  The shout of
+her glee sprang from her: 'Matey!' He waved; she heard his voice.  Was it
+her name?  He was not so drunken of the sea as she: he had not leapt out
+of bondage into buoyant waters, into a youth without a blot, without an
+aim, satisfied in tasting; the dream of the long felicity.
+
+A thought brushed by her: How if he were absent?  It relaxed her stroke
+of arms and legs.  He had doubled the salt sea's rapture, and he had
+shackled its gift of freedom.  She turned to float, gathering her knees
+for the funny sullen kick, until she heard him near.  At once her stroke
+was renewed vigorously; she had the foot of her pursuer, and she called,
+'Adieu, Matey Weyburn!'
+
+Her bravado deserved a swifter humiliation than he was able to bring down
+on her: she swam bravely, and she was divine to see ahead as well as
+overtake.
+
+Darting to the close parallel, he said: 'What sea nymph sang me my name?'
+
+She smote a pang of her ecstasy into him: 'Ask mine!'
+
+'Browny!'
+
+They swam; neither of them panted; their heads were water-flowers that
+spoke at ease.
+
+'We 've run from school; we won't go back.'
+
+'We 've a kingdom.'
+
+'Here's a big wave going to be a wall.'
+
+'Off he rolls.'
+
+'He's like the High Brent broad meadow under Elling Wood.'
+
+'Don't let Miss Vincent hear you.'
+
+'They 're not waves; they 're sighs of the deep.'
+
+'A poet I swim with!  He fell into the deep in his first of May morning
+ducks.  We used to expect him.'
+
+'I never expected to owe them so much.'
+
+Pride of the swimmer and the energy of her joy embraced Aminta, that she
+might nerve all her powers to gain the half-minute for speaking at her
+ease.
+
+'Who 'd have thought of a morning like this?  You were looked for last
+night.'
+
+'A lucky accident to our coach.  I made friends with the skipper of the
+yawl.'
+
+'I saw the boat.  Who could have dreamed----?  Anything may happen now.'
+
+For nothing further would astonish her, as he rightly understood her; but
+he said: 'You 're prepared for the rites?  Old Triton is ready.'
+
+'Float, and tell me.'
+
+They spun about to lie on their backs.  Her right hand, at piano-work of
+the octave-shake, was touched and taken, and she did not pull it away.
+Her eyelids fell.
+
+'Old Triton waits.'
+
+'Why?'
+
+'We 're going to him.'
+
+'Yes?'
+
+'Customs of the sea.'
+
+'Tell me.'
+
+'He joins hands.  We say, "Browny-Matey," and it 's done.'
+
+She splashed, crying 'Swim,' and after two strokes, 'You want to beat me,
+Matey Weyburn.'
+
+'How?'
+
+'Not fair!'
+
+'Say what.'
+
+'Take my breath.  But, yes! we'll be happy in our own way.  We 're sea-
+birds.  We 've said adieu to land.  Not to one another.  We shall be
+friends?'
+
+'Always.'
+
+'This is going to last?'
+
+'Ever so long.'
+
+They had a spell of steady swimming, companionship to inspirit it.
+Browny was allowed place a little foremost, and she guessed not
+wherefore, in her flattered emulation.
+
+'I 'm bound for France.'
+
+'Slew a point to the right: South-east by South.  We shall hit
+Dunkerque.'
+
+'I don't mean to be picked up by boats.'
+
+'We'll decline.'
+
+'You see I can swim.'
+
+'I was sure of it.'
+
+They stopped their talk--for the pleasure of the body to be savoured in
+the mind, they thought; and so took Nature's counsel to rest their voices
+awhile.
+
+Considering that she had not been used of late to long immersions, and
+had not broken her fast, and had talked much, for a sea-nymph, Weyburn
+spied behind him on a shore seeming flat down, far removed.
+
+'France next time,' he said: 'we'll face to the rear.'
+
+'Now?' said she, big with blissful conceit of her powers and incredulous
+of such a command from him.
+
+'You may be feeling tired presently.'
+
+The musical sincerity of her 'Oh no, not I!' sped through his limbs; he
+had a willingness to go onward still some way.
+
+But his words fastened the heavy land on her spirit, knocked at the habit
+of obedience.  Her stroke of the arms paused.  She inclined to his
+example, and he set it shoreward.
+
+They swam silently, high, low, creatures of the smooth green roller.  He
+heard the water-song of her swimming.  She, though breathing equably at
+the nostrils, lay deep.  The water shocked at her chin, and curled round
+the under lip.  He had a faint anxiety; and, not so sensible of a weight
+in the sight of land as she was, he chattered, by snatches, rallied her,
+encouraged her to continue sportive for this once, letting her feel it
+was but a once and had its respected limit with him.  So it was not out
+of the world.
+
+Ah, friend Matey!  And that was right and good on land; but rightness and
+goodness flung earth's shadow across her brilliancy here, and any stress
+on 'this once' withdrew her liberty to revel in it, putting an end to
+perfect holiday; and silence, too, might hint at fatigue.  She began to
+think her muteness lost her the bloom of the enchantment, robbing her of
+her heavenly frolic lead, since friend Matey resolved to be as eminently
+good in salt water as on land.  Was he unaware that they were boy and
+girl again?--she washed pure of the intervening years, new born, by
+blessing of the sea; worthy of him here!--that is, a swimmer worthy of
+him, his comrade in salt water.
+
+'You're satisfied I swim well?' she said.
+
+'It would go hard with me if we raced a long race.'
+
+'I really was out for France.'
+
+'I was ordered to keep you for England.' She gave him Browny's eyes.
+
+'We've turned our backs on Triton.'
+
+'The ceremony was performed.'
+
+'When?'
+
+'The minute I spoke of it and you splashed.'
+
+'Matey!  Matey Weyburn!'
+
+'Browny Farrell!'
+
+'Oh, Matey!  she's gone!'
+
+'She's here.'
+
+'Try to beguile me, then, that our holiday's not over.  You won't forget
+this hour?'
+
+'No time of mine on earth will live so brightly for me.'
+
+'I have never had one like it.  I could go under and be happy; go to old
+Triton, and wait for you; teach him to speak your proper Christian name.
+He hasn't heard it yet,--heard "Matey,"--never yet has been taught
+"Matthew."'
+
+'Aminta!'
+
+'Oh, my friend! my dear!' she cried, in the voice of the wounded, like a
+welling of her blood: 'my strength will leave me.  I may play--not you:
+you play with a weak vessel.  Swim, and be quiet.  How far do you count
+it?'
+
+'Under a quarter of a mile.'
+
+'Don't imagine me tired.'
+
+'If you are, hold on to me.'
+
+'Matey, I'm for a dive.'
+
+He went after the ball of silver and bubbles, and they came up together.
+There is no history of events below the surface.
+
+She shook off her briny blindness, and settled to the full sweep of the
+arms, quite silent now.  Some emotion, or exhaustion from the strain of
+the swimmer's breath in speech, stopped her playfulness.  The pleasure
+she still knew was a recollection of the outward swim, when she had been
+privileged to cast away sex with the push from earth, as few men will
+believe that women, beautiful women, ever wish to do; and often and
+ardently during the run ahead they yearn for Nature to grant them their
+one short holiday truce.
+
+But Aminta forgave him for bringing earth so close to her when there was
+yet a space of salt water between her and shore; and she smiled at times,
+that he might not think she was looking grave.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE PLIGHTING
+
+They touched sand at the first draw of the ebb, and this being earth,
+Matey addressed himself to the guardian and absolving genii of matter-of-
+fact, by saying; 'Did you inquire about the tides?'
+
+Her head shook, stunned with what had passed.  She waded to shore,
+after motioning for him to swim on.  Men, in comparison beside their fair
+fellows, are so little sensationally complex, that his one feeling now,
+as to what had passed, was relief at the idea of his presence having been
+a warrantable protectorship.
+
+Aminta's return from the sea-nymph to the state of woman crossed
+annihiliation on the way back to sentience, and picked up meaningless
+pebbles and shells of life, between the sea's verge and her tent's
+shelter; hardly her own life to her understanding yet, except for the
+hammer Memory became, to strike her insensible, at here and there a
+recollected word or nakedness of her soul.
+
+He swam along by the shore to where the boat was paddled, spying at her
+bare feet on the sand, her woman's form.  He waved, and the figure in the
+striped tunic and trousers waved her response, apparently the same person
+he had quitted.
+
+Dry and clad, and decently formal under the transformation, they met at
+Mrs. Collett's breakfast-table, and in each hung the doubt whether land
+was the dream or sea.  Both owned to a swim; both omitted mention of the
+tale of white ducks.  Little Collett had brought Matey's and his
+portmanteau into the house, by favour of the cook, through the scullery.
+He, who could have been a pictorial and suggestive narrator, carried a
+spinning head off his shoulders from this wonderful Countess of Ormont to
+Matey Weyburn's dark-eyed Browny at High Brent, and the Sunday walk in
+Sir Peter Wensell's park.  Away and back his head went.  Browny was not
+to be thought of as Browny; she was this grand Countess of Ormont; she
+had married Matey Weyburn's hero: she would never admit she had been
+Browny.  Only she was handsome then, and she is handsome now; and she
+looks on Matey Weyburn now just as she did then.  How strange is the
+world!  Or how if we are the particular person destined to encounter the
+strange things of the world?  And fancy J. Masner, and Pinnett major, and
+young Oakes (liked nothing better than a pretty girl, he strutted
+boasting at thirteen), and the Frenchy, and the lot, all popping down at
+the table, and asked the name of the lady sitting like Queen Esther--how
+they would roar out!  Boys, of course--but men, too!--very few men have a
+notion of the extraordinary complications and coincidences and cracker-
+surprises life contains.  Here 's an instance; Matey Weyburn positively
+will wear white ducks to play before Aminta Farrell on the first of May
+cricketing-day.  He happens to have his white ducks on when he sees the
+Countess of Ormont swimming in the sea; and so he can go in just as if
+they were all-right bathing-drawers.  In he goes, has a good long swim
+with her, and when he comes out, says, of his dripping ducks, 'tabula
+votiva .  .  .  avida vestimenta,' to remind an old schoolmate of his
+hopping to the booth at the end of a showery May day, and dedicating them
+to the laundry in these words.  It seems marvellous.  It was a quaint
+revival, an hour after breakfast, for little Collett to be acting as
+intermediary with Selina to request Lady Ormont's grant of a five-
+minutes' interview before the church-bell summoned her.  She was writing
+letters, and sent the message: 'Tell Mr. Weyburn I obey.' Selina
+delivered it, uttering 'obey' in a demurely comical way, as a word of
+which the humour might be comprehensible to him.
+
+Aminta stood at the drawing-room window.  She was asking herself whether
+her recent conduct shrieked coquette to him, or any of the abominable
+titles showered on the women who take free breath of air one day after
+long imprisonment.
+
+She said: 'Does it mean you are leaving us?' the moment he was near.
+
+'Not till evening or to-morrow, as it may happen,' he answered: 'I have
+one or two things to say, if you will spare the time.'
+
+'All my time,' said she, smiling to make less of the heart's reply; and
+he stepped into the room.
+
+They had not long back been Matey and Browny, and though that was in
+another element, it would not sanction the Lady Ormont and Mr. Weyburn
+now.  As little could it be Aminta and Matthew.  Brother and sister they
+were in the spirit's world, but in this world the titles had a sound of
+imposture.  And with a great longing to call her by some allying name, he
+rejected 'friend' for its insufficiency and commonness, notwithstanding
+the entirely friendly nature of the burden to be spoken.  Friend, was a
+title that ran on quicksands: an excuse that tried for an excuse.  He
+distinguished in himself simultaneously, that the hesitation and beating
+about for a name had its origin in an imperfect frankness when he sent
+his message: the fretful desire to be with her, close to her, hearing
+her, seeing her, besides the true wish to serve her.  He sent it after
+swinging round abruptly from an outlook over the bordering garden
+tamarisks on a sea now featureless, desolately empty.
+
+However, perceptibly silence was doing the work of a scourge, and he
+said: 'I have been thinking I may have--and I don't mind fighting hard to
+try it before I leave England on Tuesday or Wednesday--some influence
+with Lady Charlotte Eglett.  She is really one of the true women living,
+and the heartiest of backers, if she can be taught to see her course.
+I fancy I can do that.  She 's narrow, but she is not one of the class
+who look on the working world below them as, we'll say, the scavenger
+dogs on the plains of Ilium were seen by the Achaeans.  And my failure
+would be no loss to you!  Your name shall not be alluded to as empowering
+me to plead for her help.  But I want your consent, or I may be haunted
+and weakened by the idea of playing the busy-body.  One has to feel
+strong in a delicate position.  Well, you know what my position with her
+has been--one among the humble; and she has taken contradictions,
+accepted views from me, shown me she has warmth of heart to an extreme
+degree.'
+
+Aminta slightly raised her hand.  'I will save you trouble.  I have
+written to Lord Ormont.  I have left him.'
+
+Their eyes engaged on the thunder of this.  'The letter has gone?'
+
+'It was posted before my swim: posted yesterday.'
+
+'You have fully and clearly thought it out to a determination?'
+
+'Bit by bit--I might say, blow by blow.'
+
+'It is no small matter to break a marriage-tie.'
+
+'I have conversed with your mother.'
+
+'Yes, she!  and the woman happiest in marriage!'
+
+'I know.  It was hatred of injustice, noble sympathy.  And she took me
+for one of the blest among wives.'
+
+'She loved God.  She saw the difference between men's decrees for their
+convenience, and God's laws.  She felt for women.  You have had a hard
+trial Aminta.'
+
+'Oh, my name!  You mean it?'
+
+'You heard it from me this morning.'
+
+'Yes, there!  I try to forget.  I lost my senses.  You may judge me
+harshly, on reflection.'
+
+'Judge myself worse, then.  You had a thousand excuses.  I had only my
+love of you.  There's no judgement against either of us, for us to see,
+if I read rightly.  We elect to be tried in the courts of the sea-god.
+Now we 'll sit and talk it over.  The next ten minutes will decide our
+destinies.'
+
+His eyes glittered, otherwise he showed the coolness of the man
+discussing business; and his blunt soberness refreshed and upheld her, as
+a wild burst of passion would not have done.
+
+Side by side, partly facing, they began their interchange.
+
+'You have weighed what you abandon?'
+
+'It weighs little.'
+
+'That may be error.  You have to think into the future.'
+
+'My sufferings and experiences are not bad guides.'
+
+'They count.  How can you be sure you have all the estimates?'
+
+'Was I ever a wife?'
+
+'You were and are the Countess of Ormont.'
+
+'Not to the world.  An unacknowledged wife is a slave, surely.'
+
+'You step down, if you take the step.'
+
+'From what?  Once I did desire that station--had an idea it was glorious.
+I despise it: or rather the woman who had the desire.'
+
+'But the step down is into the working world.'
+
+'I have means to live humbly.  I want no more, except to be taught to
+work.'
+
+'So says the minute.  Years are before you.  You have weighed well, that
+you attract?'
+
+She reddened and murmured: 'How small!' Her pout of spite at her
+attractions was little simulated.
+
+'Beauty and charm are not small matters.  You have the gift, called
+fatal.  Then--looking right forward--you have faith in the power of
+resistance of the woman living alone?'
+
+He had struck at her breast.  From her breast she replied.
+
+'Hear this of me.  I was persecuted with letters.  I read them and did
+not destroy them.  Perhaps you saved me.  Looking back, I see weakness,
+nothing worse; but it is a confession.'
+
+'Yes, you have courage.  And that comes of a great heart.  And therein
+lies the danger.'
+
+'Advise me of what is possible to a lonely woman.'
+
+'You have resolved on the loneliness?'
+
+'It means breathing to me.'
+
+'You are able to see that Lord Ormont is a gentleman?'
+
+'A chivalrous gentleman, up to the bounds of his intelligence.'
+
+The bounds of his intelligence closed their four walls in a rapid
+narrowing slide on Aminta's mind, and she exclaimed:
+
+'If only to pluck flowers in fields and know their names, I must be free!
+I say what one can laugh at, and you are good and don't.  Is the
+interrogatory exhausted?'
+
+'Aminta, my beloved, if you are free, I claim you.'
+
+'Have you thought--?'
+
+The sense of a dissolving to a fountain quivered through her veins.
+
+'Turn the tables and examine me.'
+
+'But have you thought--oh!  I am not the girl you loved.  I would go
+through death to feel I was, and give you one worthy of you.'
+
+'That means what I won't ask you to speak at present but I must have
+proof.'
+
+He held out a hand, and hers was laid in his.
+
+There was more for her to say, she knew.  It came and fled, lightened and
+darkened.  She had yielded her hand to him here on land, not with the
+licence and protection of the great holiday salt water; and she was
+trembling from the run of his blood through hers at the pressure of
+hands, when she said in undertones: 'Could we--we might be friends.'
+
+'Meet and part as friends, you and I,' he replied.
+
+His voice carried the answer for her, his intimate look had in it the
+unfolding of the full flower of the woman to him, as she could not
+conceal from such eyes; and feeling that, she was all avowal.
+
+'It is for life, Matthew.'
+
+'My own words to myself when I first thought of the chance.'
+
+'But the school?'
+
+'I shall not consider that we are malefactors.  We have the world against
+us.  It will not keep us from trying to serve it.  And there are hints of
+humaner opinions; it's not all a huge rolling block of a Juggernaut.  Our
+case could be pleaded before it.  I don't think the just would condemn us
+heavily.  I shall have to ask you to strengthen me, complete me.  If you
+love me, it is your leap out of prison, and without you, I am from this
+time no better than one-third of a man.  I trust you to weigh the
+position you lose, and the place we choose to take in the world.  It 's
+this--I think this describes it.  You know the man who builds his house
+below the sea's level has a sleepless enemy always threatening.  His
+house must be firm and he must look to the dykes.  We commit this
+indiscretion.  With a world against us, our love and labour are
+constantly on trial; we must have great hearts, and if the world is
+hostile we are not to blame it.  In the nature of things it could not be
+otherwise.  My own soul, we have to see that we do--though not publicly,
+not insolently, offend good citizenship.  But we believe--I with my whole
+faith, and I may say it of you--that we are not offending Divine law.
+You are the woman I can help and join with; think whether you can tell
+yourself that I am the man.  So, then, our union gives us powers to make
+amends to the world, if the world should grant us a term of peace for the
+effort.  That is our risk; consider it, Aminta, between now and tomorrow;
+deliberate.  We don't go together into a garden of roses.'
+
+'I know.  I should feel shame.  I wish it to look dark,' said Aminta, her
+hand in his, and yet with a fair-sailing mind on the stream of the blood.
+
+Rationally and irrationally, the mixed passion and reason in two clear
+heads and urgent hearts discussed the stand they made before a world
+defied, neither of them quite perceiving what it was which coloured
+reason to beauty, or what so convinced their intellects when passion
+spoke the louder.
+
+'I am to have a mate.'
+
+'She will pray she may be one.'
+
+'She is my first love.'
+
+Aminta's lips formed 'mine,' without utterance.
+
+Meanwhile his hand or a wizardry subdued her will, allured her body.  She
+felt herself being drawn to the sign and seal of their plighting for
+life.  She said, 'Matthew,' softly in protest; and he said, 'Never once
+yet!'  She was owing to his tenderness.  Her deepened voice murmured:
+'Is this to deliberate?'  Colour flooded the beautiful dark face, as of
+the funeral hues of a sun suffusing all the heavens; firing earth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+AMINTA TO HER LORD
+
+On Friday, on Saturday, on Sunday, Lady Charlotte waited for her brother
+Rowsley, until it was a diminished satisfaction that she had held her
+ground and baffled his mighty will to subdue her.  She did not sleep for
+thinking of him on the Sunday night.  Toward morning a fit of hazy
+horrors, which others would have deemed imaginings, drove her from her
+bed to sit and brood over Rowsley in a chair.  What if it was a case of
+heart with him too?  Heart disease had been in the family.  A man like
+Rowsley, still feeling the world before him, as a man of his energies and
+aptitudes, her humour added in the tide of his anxieties, had a right to
+feel, would not fall upon resignation like a woman.
+
+She was at the physician's door at eight o'clock.  Dr. Rewkes reported
+reassuringly; it was a simple disturbance in Lord Ormont's condition of
+health, and he conveyed just enough of disturbance to send the impetuous
+lady knocking and ringing at her brother's door upon the hour of nine.
+
+The announcement of Lady Charlotte's early visit informed my lord that
+Dr. Rewkes had done the spiriting required of him.  He descended to the
+library and passed under scrutiny.
+
+'You don't look ill, Rowsley,' she said, reluctantly in the sound.
+
+'I am the better for seeing you here, Charlotte.  Shall I order breakfast
+for you?  I am alone.'
+
+'I know you are.  I've eaten.  Rewkes tells me you've not lost appetite.'
+
+'Have I the appearance of a man who has lost anything?'  Prouder man, and
+heartier and ruddier, could not be seen, she thought.
+
+'You're winning the country to right you; that I know.'
+
+'I don't ask it.'
+
+'The country wants your services.'
+
+'I have heard some talk of it.  That lout comes to a knowledge of his
+wants too late.  If they promoted and offered me the command in India to-
+morrow--'My lord struck the arm of his chair.  'I live at Steignton
+henceforth; my wife is at a seaside place eastward.  She left the jewel-
+case when on her journey through London for safety; she is a particularly
+careful person, forethoughtful.  I take her down to Steignton two days
+after her return.  We entertain there in the autumn.  You come?'
+
+'I don't.  I prefer decent society.'
+
+'You are in her house now, ma'am.'
+
+'If I have to meet the person, you mean, I shall be civil.  The society
+you've given her, I won't meet.'
+
+'You will have to greet the Countess of Ormont if you care to meet your
+brother.'
+
+'Part, then, on the best terms we can.  I say this, the woman who keeps
+you from serving your country, she 's your country's enemy.'
+
+'Hear my answer.  The lady who is my wife has had to suffer for what you
+call my country's treatment of me.  It 's a choice between my country and
+her.  I give her the rest of my time.'
+
+'That's dotage.'
+
+'Fire away your epithets.'
+
+'Sheer dotage.  I don't deny she's a handsome young woman.'
+
+'You'll have to admit that Lady Ormont takes her place in our family with
+the best we can name.'
+
+'You insult my ears, Rowsley.'
+
+'The world will say it when it has the honour of her acquaintance.'
+
+'An honour suspiciously deferred.'
+
+'That's between the world and me.'
+
+'Set your head to work, you'll screw the world to any pitch you like--
+that I don't need telling.'
+
+Lord Ormont's head approved the remark.
+
+'Now,' said Lady Charlotte, 'you won't get the Danmores, the Dukerlys,
+the Carminters, the Oxbridges any more than you get me.'
+
+'You are wrong, ma'am.  I had yesterday a reply from Lady Danmore to a
+communication of mine.'
+
+'It 's thickening.  But while I stand, I stand for the family; and I 'm
+not in it, and while I stand out of it, there 's a doubt either of your
+honesty or your sanity.'
+
+'There's a perfect comprehension of my sister!'
+
+'I put my character in the scales against your conduct, and your Countess
+of Ormont's reputation into the bargain.'
+
+'You have called at her house; it 's a step.  You 'll be running at her
+heels next.  She 's not obdurate.'
+
+'When you see me running at her heels, it'll be with my head off.  Stir
+your hardest, and let it thicken.  That man Morsfield's name mixed up
+with a sham Countess of Ormont, in the stories flying abroad, can't hurt
+anybody.  A true Countess of Ormont--we 're cut to the quick.'
+
+'We 're cut!  Your quick, Charlotte, is known to court the knife.'
+
+Letters of the morning's post were brought in.
+
+The earl turned over a couple and took up a third, saying: 'I 'll attend
+to you in two minutes'; and thinking once more: Queer world it is, where,
+when you sheath the sword, you have to be at play with bodkins!
+
+Lady Charlotte gazed on the carpet, effervescent with retorts to his last
+observation, rightly conjecturing that the letter he selected to read was
+from 'his Aminta.'
+
+The letter apparently was interesting, or it was of inordinate length.
+He seemed still to be reading.  He reverted to the first page.
+
+At the sound of the paper, she discarded her cogitations and glanced up.
+His countenance had become stony.  He read on some way, with a sudden
+drop on the signature, a recommencement, a sound in the throat, as when
+men grasp a comprehensible sentence of a muddled rigmarole and begin to
+have hopes of the remainder.  But the eye on the page is not the eye
+which reads.
+
+'No bad news, Rowsley?'
+
+The earl's breath fell heavily.
+
+Lady Charlotte left her chair, and walked about the room.
+
+'Rowsley, I 'd like to hear if I can be of use.'
+
+'Ma'am?' he said; and pondered on the word 'use,' staring at her.
+
+'I don't intend to pry.  I can't see my brother look like that, and not
+ask.'
+
+The letter was tossed on the table to her.  She read these lines, dated
+from Felixstowe:
+
+     'MY DEAR LORD,
+
+     'The courage I have long been wanting in has come at last, to break
+     a tie that I have seen too clearly was a burden on you from the
+     beginning.  I will believe that I am chiefly responsible for
+     inducing you to contract it.  The alliance with an inexperienced
+     girl of inferior birth, and a perhaps immoderate ambition, has taxed
+     your generosity; and though the store may be inexhaustible, it is
+     not truly the married state when a wife subjects the husband to such
+     a trial.  The release is yours, the sadness is for me.  I have
+     latterly seen or suspected a design on your part to meet my former
+     wishes for a public recognition of the wife of Lord Ormont.  Let me
+     now say that these foolish wishes no longer exist.  I rejoice to
+     think that my staying or going will be alike unknown to the world.
+     I have the means of a livelihood, in a modest way, and shall trouble
+     no one.
+
+     'I have said, the sadness is for me.  That is truth.  But I have to
+     add, that I, too, am sensible of the release.  My confession of a
+     change of feeling to you as a wife, writes the close of all
+     relations between us.  I am among the dead for you; and it is a
+     relief to me to reflect on the little pain I give .  .  .'
+
+
+'Has she something on her conscience about that man Morsfield?' Lady
+Charlotte cried.
+
+Lord Ormont's prolonged Ah! of execration rolled her to a bundle.
+
+Nevertheless her human nature and her knowledge of woman's, would out
+with the words: 'There's a man!'
+
+She allowed her brother to be correct in repudiating the name of the dead
+Morsfield--chivalrous as he was on this Aminta's behalf to the last!--and
+struck along several heads, Adderwood's, Weyburn's, Randeller's, for the
+response to her suspicion.  A man there certainly was.  He would be
+probably a young man.  He would not necessarily be a handsome man. . . .
+or a titled or a wealthy man.  She might have set eyes on a gypsy
+somewhere round Great Marlow--blood to blood; such things have been.
+Imagining a wildish man for her, rather than a handsome one and one
+devoted staidly to the founding of a school, she overlooked Weyburn, or
+reserved him with others for subsequent speculation.
+
+The remainder of Aminta's letter referred to her delivery of the Ormont
+jewel-case at Lord Ormont's London house, under charge of her maid
+Carstairs.  The affairs of the household were stated very succinctly, the
+drawer for labelled keys, whatever pertained to her management, in London
+or at Great Marlow.
+
+'She 's cool,' Lady Charlotte said, after reading out the orderly array
+of items, in a tone of rasping irony, to convince her brother he was well
+rid of a heartless wench.
+
+Aminta's written statement of those items were stabs at the home she had
+given him, a flashed picture of his loss.  Nothing written by her touched
+him to pierce him so shrewdly; nothing could have brought him so closely
+the breathing image in the flesh of the woman now a phantom for him.
+
+'Will she be expecting you to answer, Rowsley?'
+
+'Will that forked tongue cease hissing!' he shouted, in the agony of a
+strong man convulsed both to render and conceal the terrible, shameful,
+unexampled gush of tears.
+
+Lady Charlotte beheld her bleeding giant.  She would rather have seen the
+brother of her love grimace in woman's manner than let loose those
+rolling big drops down the face of a rock.  The big sob shook him, and
+she was shaken to the dust by the sight.  Now she was advised by her deep
+affection for her brother to sit patient and dumb, behind shaded eyes:
+praising in her heart the incomparable force of the man's love of the
+woman contrasted with the puling inclinations of the woman for the man.
+
+Neither opened mouth when they separated.  She pressed and kissed a large
+nerveless hand.  Lord Ormont stood up to bow her forth.  His ruddied skin
+had gone to pallor resembling the berg of ice on the edge of Arctic seas,
+when sunlight has fallen away from it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+The peaceful little home on the solitary sandy shore was assailed,
+unwarned, beneath a quiet sky, some hours later, by a whirlwind, a dust-
+storm, and rattling volleys.  Miss Vincent's discovery, in the past
+school-days, of Selina Collett's 'wicked complicity in a clandestine
+correspondence' had memorably chastened the girl, who vowed at the time
+when her schoolmistress, using the rod of Johnsonian English for the
+purpose, exposed the depravity of her sinfulness, that she would never
+again be guilty of a like offence.  Her dear and lovely Countess of
+Ormont, for whom she then uncomplainingly suffered, who deigned now to
+call her friend, had spoken the kind good-bye, and left the house after
+Mr. Weyburn's departure that same day; she, of course, to post by Harwich
+to London; he to sail by packet from the port of Harwich for Flushing.
+The card of an unknown lady, a great lady, the Lady Charlotte Eglett, was
+handed to her mother at eight o'clock in the evening.
+
+Lady Charlotte was introduced to the innocent country couple; the mother
+knitting, the daughter studying a book of the botany of the Swiss Alps,
+dreaming a distant day's journey over historic lands of various hues to
+the unimaginable spectacle of earth's grandeur.  Her visit lasted fifteen
+minutes.  From the moment of her entry, the room was in such turmoil as
+may be seen where a water-mill wheel's paddles are suddenly set rounding
+to pour streams of foam on the smooth pool below.  A relentless catechism
+bewildered their hearing.  Mrs. Collett attempted an opposition of
+dignity to those vehement attacks for answers.  It was flooded and rolled
+over.  She was put upon her honour to reply positively to positive
+questions: whether the Countess of Ormont was in this house at present;
+whether the Countess of Ormont left the house alone or in company;
+whether a gentleman had come to the house during the stay of the Countess
+of Ormont; whether Lady Ormont had left the neighbourhood; the exact time
+of the day when she quitted the house, and the stated point of her
+destination.
+
+Ultimately, protesting that they were incapable of telling what they did
+not know--which Lady Charlotte heard with an incredulous shrug--they
+related piecemeal what they did know, and Weyburn's name gave her scent.
+She paid small heed to the tale of Mr. Weyburn's having come there in the
+character of young Mr. Collett's old schoolmate.  Mr. Weyburn had started
+for the port of Harwich.  This day, and not long subsequently, Lady
+Ormont had started for the port of Harwich, on her way to London, if we
+like to think it.  Further corroboration was quite superfluous.
+
+'Is there a night packet-boat from this port of yours?' Lady Charlotte
+asked.
+
+The household servants had to be consulted; and she, hurriedly craving
+the excuse of their tedious mistress, elicited, as far as she could
+understand them, that there might be and very nearly was, a night packet-
+boat starting for Flushing.  The cook, a native of Harwich, sent up word
+of a night packet-boat starting at about eleven o'clock last year.
+
+Lady Charlotte saw the chance as a wind-blown beacon-fire under press of
+shades.  Changeing her hawkish manner toward the simple pair, she gave
+them view of a smile magical by contrast, really beautiful--the smile she
+had in reserve for serviceable persons whom she trusted--while thanking
+them and saying, that her anxiety concerned Lady Ormont's welfare.
+
+Her brother had prophesied she would soon be 'running at his wife's
+heels,' and so she was, but not 'with her head off,' as she had rejoined.
+She might prove, by intercepting his Aminta, that her head was on.
+The windy beacon-fire of a chance blazed at the rapid rolling of her
+carriage-wheels, and sank to stifling smoke at any petty obstruction.
+Let her but come to an interview with his Aminta, she would stop all that
+nonsense of the woman's letter; carry her off--and her Weyburn plucking
+at her other hand to keep her.  Why, naturally, treated as she was by
+Rowsley, she dropped soft eyes on a good-looking secretary.  Any woman
+would--confound the young fellow!  But all 's right yet if we get to
+Harwich in time; unless .  .  .  as a certain coldfish finale tone of the
+letter playing on the old string, the irrevocable, peculiar to women who
+are novices in situations of the kind, appeared to indicate; they see in
+their conscience-blasted minds a barrier to a return home, high as the
+Archangelical gate behind Mother Eve, and they are down on their knees
+blubbering gratitude and repentance if the gate swings open to them.  It
+is just the instant, granting the catastrophe, to have a woman back to
+her duty.  She has only to learn she has a magnanimous husband.  If she
+learns into the bargain how he suffers, how he loves her,--well, she
+despises a man like that Lawrence Finchley all the more for the
+'magnanimity' she has the profit of, and perceives to be feebleness.
+But there 's woman in her good and her bad; she'll trick a man of age,
+and if he forgives her, owning his own faults in the case, she won't
+scorn him for it; the likelihood is, she 'll feel bound in honour to
+serve him faithfully for the rest of their wedded days.
+
+A sketch to her of Rowsley's deep love.  .  .  .  Lady Charlotte wandered
+into an amazement at it.  A sentence of her brother's recent speaking
+danced in her recollection.  He said of his country: That Lout comes to a
+knowledge of his wants too late.  True, Old England is always louting to
+the rear, and has to be pricked in the rear and pulled by the neck before
+she 's equal to the circumstances around her.  But what if his words were
+flung at him in turn!  Short of 'Lout,' it rang correctly.  'Too late,'
+we hope to clip from the end of the sentence likewise.  We have then, if
+you stress it--'comes to a knowledge of his wants;--a fair example of the
+creatures men are; the greatest of men; who have to learn from the loss
+of the woman--or a fear of the loss--how much they really do love her.
+
+Well, and she may learn the same or something sufficiently like it, if
+she 's caught in time, called to her face, Countess of Ormont, sister-in-
+law, and smoothed, petted, made believe she 's now understood and won't
+be questioned on a single particular--in fact, she marches back in a sort
+of triumph; and all the past in a cupboard, locked up, without further
+inquiry.
+
+Her brother Rowsley's revealed human appearance of the stricken man
+--stricken right into his big heart--precipitated Lady Charlotte's
+reflections and urged her to an unavailing fever of haste during the
+circuitous drive in moonlight to the port.  She alighted at the principal
+inn, and was there informed that the packetboat, with a favouring breeze
+and tide, had started ten minutes earlier.  She summoned the landlord,
+and described a lady, as probably one of the passengers: 'Dark, holds
+herself up high.  Some such lady had dined at the inn on tea, and gone
+aboard the boat soon after.
+
+Lady Charlotte burned with the question: Alone?  She repressed her
+feminine hunger and asked to see the book of visitors.  But the lady had
+not slept at the inn, so had not been requested to write her name.
+
+The track of the vessel could be seen from the pier, on the line of a bar
+of moonlight; and thinking, that the abominable woman, if aboard she was,
+had coolly provided herself with a continental passport--or had it done
+for two by her accomplice, that Weyburn, before she left London--Lady
+Charlotte sent a loathing gaze at the black figure of the boat on the
+water, untroubled by any reminder of her share in the conspiracy of
+events, which was to be her brother's chastisement to his end.
+
+
+Years are the teachers of the great rocky natures, whom they round and
+sap and pierce in caverns, having them on all sides, and striking deep
+inward at moments.  There is no resisting the years, if we have a heart,
+and a common understanding.  They constitute, in the sum of them, the
+self-examination, whence issues, acknowledged or not, a belated self-
+knowledge, to direct our final actions.  She had the heart.  Sight of the
+high-minded, proud, speechless man suffering for the absence of a runaway
+woman, not ceasing to suffer, never blaming the woman, and consequently,
+it could be fancied, blaming himself, broke down Lady Charlotte's
+defences and moved her to review her part in her brother Rowsley's
+unhappiness.  For supposing him to blame himself, her power to cast a
+shadow of blame on him went from her, and therewith her vindication of
+her conduct.  He lived at Olmer.  She read him by degrees, as those who
+have become absolutely tongueless have to be read; and so she gathered
+that this mortally (or lastingly) wounded brother of hers was pleased by
+an allusion to his Aminta.  He ran his finger on the lines of a map of
+Spain, from Barcelona over to Granada; and impressed his nail at a point
+appearing to be mountainous or woody.  Lady Charlotte suggested that he
+and his Aminta had passed by there.  He told a story of a carriage
+accident: added, 'She was very brave.' One day, when he had taken a
+keepsake book of England's Beauties off the drawing-room table, his eyes
+dwelt on a face awhile, and he handed it, with a nod, followed by a
+slight depreciatory shrug.  'Like her, not so handsome,' Lady Charlotte
+said.
+
+He nodded again.  She came to a knowledge of Aminta's favourite colours
+through the dwelling of his look on orange and black, deepest rose, light
+yellow, light blue.  Her grand-daughters won the satisfied look if they
+wore a combination touching his memory.  The rocky are not imaginative,
+and have to be struck from without for a kindling of them.  Submissive
+though she was to court and soothe her brother Rowsley, a spur of
+jealousy burned in the composition of her sentiments, to set her going.
+He liked visiting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley at her effaced good man's
+country seat, Brockholm in Berkshire, and would stay there a month at a
+time.  Lady Charlotte learnt why.  The enthusiast for Aminta, without
+upholding her to her late lord, whom she liked well, talked of her openly
+with him, confessed to a fondness for her.  How much Mrs. Lawrence
+ventured to say, Lady Charlotte could not know.  But rivalry pushed her
+to the extreme of making Aminta partially a topic; and so ready was he to
+follow her lead in the veriest trifles recalling the handsome runaway;
+that she had to excite his racy diatribes against the burgess English and
+the pulp they have made of a glorious nation, in order not to think him
+inclining upon dotage.
+
+Philippa's occasional scoff in fun concerning 'grandmama's tutor,' hurt
+Lady Charlotte for more reasons than one, notwithstanding the
+justification of her fore-thoughtfulness.  The girl, however, was
+privileged; she was Bobby Benlew's dearest friend, and my lord loved the
+boy; with whom nothing could be done at school, nor could a tutor at
+Olmer control him.  In fine, Bobby saddened the family and gained the
+earl's anxious affection by giving daily proofs of his being an Ormont
+in a weak frame; patently an Ormont, recurrently an invalid.  His moral
+qualities hurled him on his physical deficiencies.  The local doctor and
+Dr. Rewkes banished him twice to the seashore, where he began to bloom
+the first week and sickened the next, for want of playfellows, jolly
+fights and friendships.  Ultimately they prescribed mountain air, Swiss
+air, easy travelling to Switzerland, and several weeks of excursions at
+the foot of the Alps.  Bobby might possibly get an aged tutor, or find an
+English clergyman taking pupils, on the way.
+
+Thus it happened, that seven years after his bereavement, Lord Ormont and
+Philippa and Bobby were on the famous Bernese Terrace, grandest of
+terrestrial theatres where soul of man has fronting him earth's utmost
+majesty.  Sublime: but five minutes of it fetched sounds as of a plug in
+an empty phial from Bobby's bosom, and his heels became electrical.
+
+He was observed at play with a gentleman of Italian complexion.  Past
+guessing how it had come about, for the gentleman was an utter stranger.
+He had at any rate the tongue of an Englishman.  He had the style, too,
+the slang and cries and tricks of an English schoolboy, though visibly a
+foreigner.  And he had the art of throwing his heart into that bit of
+improvised game, or he would never have got hold of Bobby, shrewd to read
+a masker.
+
+Lugged-up by the boy to my lord and the young lady, he doffed and bowed.
+'Forgive me, pray,' he said; 'I can't see an English boy without having a
+spin with him; and I make so bold as to speak to English people wherever
+I meet them, if they give me the chance.  Bad manners?  Better than that.
+You are of the military profession, sir, I see.  I am a soldier, fresh
+from Monte Video.  Italian, it is evident, under an Italian chief there.
+A clerk on a stool, and hey presto plunged into the war a month after,
+shouldering a gun and marching.  Fifteen battles in eighteen months; and
+Death a lady at a balcony we kiss hands to on the march below.  Not a bit
+more terrible!  Ah, but your pardon, sir,' he hastened to say, observing
+rigidity on the features of the English gentleman; 'would I boast?  Not
+I.  Accept it as my preface for why I am moved to speak the English
+wherever I meet them:--Uruguay, Buenos Ayres, La Plata, or Europe.
+I cannot resist it.  At least, he bent gracefully, 'I do not.  We come
+to the grounds of my misbehaviour.  I have shown at every call I fear
+nothing, kiss hand of welcome or adieu to Death.  And I, a boy of the
+age of this youngster--he 's not like me, I can declare!--I was a sneak
+and a coward.  It follows, I was a liar and a traitor.  Who cured me of
+that vileness, that scandal?  I will tell you--an Englishman and an
+Englishwoman: my schoolmaster and his wife.  My schoolmaster--my friend!
+He is the comrade of his boys: English, French, Germans, Italians, a
+Spaniard in my time--a South American I have sent him--two from Boston,
+Massachusetts--and clever!--all emulous to excel, none boasting.  But,
+to myself; I was that mean fellow.  I did--I could let you know: before
+this young lady--she would wither me with her scorn, Enough, I sneaked,
+I lied.  I let the blame fall on a schoolfellow and a housemaid.  Oh!
+a small thing, but I coveted it--a scarf.  It reminded me of Rome.
+Enough, there at the bottom of that pit, behold me.  It was not
+discovered, but my schoolfellow was unpunished, the housemaid remained in
+service; I thought, I thought, and I thought until I could not look in my
+dear friend Matthew's face.  He said to me one day: "Have you nothing to
+tell me, Giulio?" as if to ask the road to right or left.  Out it all
+came.  And no sermon, no!  He set me the hardest task I could have.  That
+was a penance!--to go to his wife, and tell it all to her.  Then I did
+think it an easier thing to go and face death--and death had been my
+nightmare.  I went, she listened, she took my hand she said: "You will
+never do this again, I know, Giulio."  She told me no English girl would
+ever look on a man who was a coward and lied.  From that day I have made
+Truth my bride.  And what the consequence?  I know not fear!  I could
+laugh, knowing I was to lie down in my six-foot measure to-morrow.  If I
+have done my duty and look in the face of my dear Matthew and his wife!
+Ah, those two!  They are loved.  They will be loved all over Europe.  He
+works for Europe and America--all civilized people--to be one country.
+He is the comrade of his boys.  Out of school hours, it is Christian
+names all round--Matthew, Emile, Adolf, Emilio, Giulio, Robert, Marcel,
+Franz, et caetera.  Games or lessons, a boy can't help learning with him.
+He makes happy fellows and brave soldiers of them without drill.  Sir, do
+I presume when I say I have your excuse for addressing you because you
+are his countryman?  I drive to the old school in half an hour, and next
+week he and his dear wife and a good half of the boys will be on the
+tramp over the Simplon, by Lago Maggiore, to my uncle's house in Milan
+for a halt.  I go to Matthew before I see my own people.'
+
+He swept another bow of apology, chiefly to Philippa, as representative
+of the sex claiming homage.
+
+Lord Ormont had not greatly relished certain of the flowery phrases
+employed by this young foreigner.  'Truth his bride,' was damnable:
+and if a story had to be told, he liked it plain, without jerks and
+evolutions.  Many offences to our taste have to be overlooked in
+foreigners--Italians! considered, before they were proved in fire,
+a people classed by nature as operatic declaimers.  Bobby had shown
+himself on the road out to Bern a difficult boy, and stupefyingly
+ignorant.  My lord had two or three ideas working to cloudy combination
+in his head when he put a question, referring to the management of the
+dormitories at the school.  Whereupon the young Italian introduced
+himself as Giulio Calliani, and proposed a drive to inspect the old
+school, with its cricket and football fields, lake for rowing and
+swimming, gymnastic fixtures, carpenter's shed, bowling alley, and four
+European languages in the air by turns daily; and the boys, too, all the
+boys rosy and jolly, according to the last report received of them from
+his friend Matthew.  Enthusiasm struck and tightened the loose chord of
+scepticism in Lord Ormont; somewhat as if a dancing beggar had entered a
+kennel-dog's yard, designing to fascinate the faithful beast.  It is a
+chord of one note, that is tightened to sound by the violent summons to
+accept, which is a provocation to deny.  At the same time, the
+enthusiast's dance is rather funny; he is not an ordinary beggar; to see
+him trip himself in his dance would be rather funnier.  This is to say,
+inspect the trumpeted school and retire politely.  My lord knew the Bern
+of frequent visits: the woman was needed beside him to inspire a feeling
+for scenic mountains.  Philippa's admiration of them was like a new-
+pressed grape-juice after a draught of the ripe vintage.  Moreover, Bobby
+was difficult: the rejected of his English schools was a stiff Ormont at
+lessons, a wheezy Benlew in the playground: exactly the reverse of what
+should have been.  A school of four languages in bracing air, if a school
+with healthy dormitories, and a school of the trained instincts we call
+gentlemanly, might suit Master Bobby for a trial.  An eye on the boys of
+the school would see in a minute what stuff they were made of.  Supposing
+this young Italianissimo with the English tongue to be tolerably near the
+mark, with a deduction of two-thirds of the enthusiasm, Bobby might stop
+at the school as long as his health held out, or the master would keep
+him.  Supposing half a dozen things and more, the meeting with this Mr.
+Calliand was a lucky accident.  But lucky accidents are anticipated only
+by fools.
+
+Lord Ormont consented to visit the school.  He handed his card and
+invited his guest; he had a carriage in waiting for the day, he said;
+and obedient to Lady Charlotte's injunctions, he withheld Philippa from
+the party.  She and her maid were to pass the five hours of his absence
+in efforts to keep their monkey Bobby out of the well of the solicitious
+bears.
+
+My lord left his carriage at the inn of the village lying below the
+school-house on a green height.  The young enthusiast was dancing him
+into the condition of livid taciturnity, which could, if it would, flash
+out pungent epigrams of the actual world at Operatic recitative.
+
+'There's the old school-clock!  Just in time for the half-hour before
+dinner,' said Calliani, chattering two hundred to the minute, of the
+habits and usages of the school, and how all had meals together, the
+master, his wife, the teachers, the boys.  'And she--as for her!'
+Calliani kissed finger up to the furthest skies: into which a self-
+respecting sober Northener of the Isles could imagine himself to kick
+enthusiastic gesticulators, if it were polite to do so.
+
+The school-house faced the master's dwelling house, and these, with a
+block of building, formed a three-sided enclosure, like barracks!  Forth
+from the school-house door burst a dozen shouting lads, as wasps from the
+hole of their nest from a charge of powder.  Out they poured whizzing;
+and the frog he leaped, and pussy ran and doubled before the hounds, and
+hockey-sticks waved, and away went a ball.  Cracks at the ball anyhow,
+was the game for the twenty-five minutes breather before dinner.
+
+'French day!' said Calliani, hearing their cries.  Then he bellowed
+'Matthew!--Giulio !'
+
+A lusty inversion of the order of the names and an Oberland jodel
+returned his hail.  The school retreating caught up the Alpine cry
+in the distance.  Here were lungs! Here were sprites!
+
+Lord Ormont bethought him of the name of the master.  'Mr. Matthew, I
+think you said, sir,' he was observing to Calliani, as the master came
+nearer; and Calliani replied: 'His Christian name.  But if the boys are
+naughty boys, it is not the privilege.  Mr. Weyburn.'
+
+There was not any necessity to pronounce that name Calliani spoke it on
+the rush to his friend.
+
+Lord Ormont and Weyburn advanced the steps to the meeting.  Neither of
+them flinched in eye or limb.
+
+At a corridor window of the dwelling-house a lady stood.  Her colour was
+the last of a summer day over western seas; her thought: 'It has come!'
+Her mind was in her sight; her other powers were frozen.
+
+The two men conversed.  There was no gesture.
+
+This is one of the lightning moments of life for the woman, at the
+meeting of the two men between whom her person has been in dispute, may
+still be; her soul being with one.  And that one, dearer than the blood
+of her body, imperilled by her.
+
+She could ask why she exists, if a question were in her grasp.  She would
+ask for the meaning of the gift of beauty to the woman, making her
+desireable to those two men, making her a cause of strife, a thing of
+doom.  An incessant clamour dinned about her: 'It has come!'
+
+The two men walked conversing into the school-house.  She was unconscious
+of the seeing of a third, though she saw and at the back of her mind
+believed she knew a friend in him.  The two disappeared.  She was
+insensible stone, except for the bell-clang: 'It has come'; until they
+were in view again, still conversing: and the first of her thought to
+stir from petrifaction was: 'Life holds no secret.'
+
+She tried, in shame of the inanimate creature she had become,
+to force herself to think: and had, for a chastising result, a series
+of geometrical figures shooting across her brain, mystically expressive
+of the situation, not communicably.  The most vivid and persistent was a
+triangle.  Interpret who may.  The one beheld the two pass from view
+again, still conversing.
+
+They are on the gravel; they bow; they separate.  He of the grey head
+poised high has gone.
+
+Her arm was pressed by a hand.  Weyburn longed to enfold her, and she
+desired it, and her soul praised him for refraining.  Both had that
+delicacy.
+
+'You have seen, my darling,' Weyburn said.  'It has come, and we take our
+chance.  He spoke not one word, beyond the affairs of the school.  He has
+a grandnephew in want of a school: visited the dormitories, refectory,
+and sheds: tasted the well-water, addressed me as Mr. Matthew.  He had it
+from Giulio.  Came to look at the school of Giulio's "friend Matthew,":
+--you hear him.  Giulio little imagines!--Well, dear love, we stand with
+a squad in front, and wait the word.  It mayn't be spoken.  We have
+counted long before that something like it was bound to happen.  And
+you are brave.  Ruin's an empty word for us two.'
+
+'Yes, dear, it is: we will pay what is asked of us,' Aminta said.  'It
+will be heavy, if the school .  .  .  and I love our boys.  I am fit to
+be the school-housekeeper; for nothing else.'
+
+'I will go to the boys' parents.  At the worst, we can march into new
+territory.  Emile will stick to us.  Adolf, too.  The fresh flock will
+come.'
+
+Aminta cried in the voice of tears: 'I love the old so!'
+
+'The likelihood is, we shall hear nothing further.'
+
+'You had to bear the shock, Matthew.'
+
+'Whatever I bore, and you saw, you shared.'
+
+'Yes,' she said.
+
+'Mais, n'oublions pas que c'est aujourd'hui jour francais; si, madame,
+vous avez assez d'appetit pour diner avec nous?
+
+'Je suis, comme toujours, aux ordres de Monsieur.'  She was among the
+bravest of women.  She had a full ounce of lead in her breast when she
+sat with the boys at their midday meal, showing them her familiar
+pleasant face.
+
+Shortly after the hour of the evening meal, a messenger from Bern
+delivered a letter addressed to the Headmaster.  Weyburn and Aminta were
+strolling to the playground, thinking in common, as they usually did.
+They read the letter together.  These were the lines:
+
+'Lord Ormont desires to repeat his sense of obligation to Mr. Matthew for
+the inspection of the school under his charge, and will be thankful to
+Mr. Calliani, if that gentleman will do him the favour to call at his
+hotel at Bern to-morrow, at as early an hour as is convenient to him, for
+the purpose of making arrangements, agreeable to the Head-master's rules,
+for receiving his grandnephew Robert Benlew as a pupil at the school.'
+
+The two raised eyes on one another, pained in their deep joy by the
+religion of the restraint upon their hearts, to keep down the passion to
+embrace.
+
+'I thank heaven we know him to be one of the true noble men,' said
+Aminta, now breathing, and thanking Lord Ormont for the free breath
+she drew.
+
+Weyburn spoke of an idea he had gathered from the earl's manner.  But he
+had not imagined the proud lord's great-heartedness would go so far as to
+trust him with the guardianship of the boy.  That moved, and that humbled
+him, though it was far from humiliating.
+
+Six months later, the brief communication arrived from Lady Charlotte
+
+'She is a widow.
+
+'Unlikely you will hear from me again.  Death is always next door, you
+said once.  I look on the back of life.
+
+'Tell Bobby, capital for him to write he has no longing for home
+holidays.  If any one can make a man of him, you will.  That I know.
+
+                                   'CHARLOTTE EGLETT.'
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+
+Affected misapprehensions
+Any excess pushes to craziness
+Bad laws are best broken
+Being in heart and mind the brother to the sister with women
+Bounds of his intelligence closed their four walls
+Boys, of course--but men, too!
+But had sunk to climb on a firmer footing
+Challenged him to lead up to her desired stormy scene
+Could we--we might be friends
+Death is always next door
+Desire of it destroyed it
+Detestable feminine storms enveloping men weak enough
+Distaste for all exercise once pleasurable
+Divided lovers in presence
+Enthusiasm struck and tightened the loose chord of scepticism
+Exult in imagination of an escape up to the moment of capture
+Greatest of men; who have to learn from the loss of the woman
+He gave a slight sign of restiveness, and was allowed to go
+He had gone, and the day lived again for both of them
+I look on the back of life
+I married a cook  She expects a big appetite
+I want no more, except to be taught to work
+If the world is hostile we are not to blame it
+Increase of dissatisfaction with the more she got
+Learn--principally not to be afraid of ideas
+Look well behind
+Lucky accidents are anticipated only by fools
+Magnify an offence in the ratio of our vanity
+Man who helps me to read the world and men as they are
+Meant to vanquish her with the dominating patience
+Napoleon's treatment of women is excellent example
+Necessity's offspring
+One has to feel strong in a delicate position
+Our love and labour are constantly on trial
+Perhaps inspire him, if he would let her breathe
+Person in another world beyond this world of blood
+Practical for having an addiction to the palpable
+Screams of an uninjured lady
+Selfishness  and icy inaccessibility to emotion
+She had a thirsting mind
+She had to be the hypocrite or else--leap
+Silence was doing the work of a scourge
+Smile she had in reserve for serviceable persons
+Snatch her from a possessor who forfeited by undervaluing her
+So says the minute  Years are before you
+The next ten minutes will decide our destinies
+The woman side of him
+There are women who go through life not knowing love
+There is no history of events below the surface
+They want you to show them what they 'd like the world to be
+Things are not equal
+Titles showered on the women who take free breath of air
+Violent summons to accept, which is a provocation to deny
+We don't go together into a garden of roses
+Why he enjoyed the privilege of seeing, and was not beside her
+Women are happier enslaved
+World against us  It will not keep us from trying to serve
+Years are the teachers of the great rocky natures
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4481 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v5
+by George Meredith
+#87 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+Title: Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v5
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v5, by Meredith
+*********This file should be named 4481.txt or 4481.zip**********
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
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+
+
+LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA
+
+By George Meredith
+
+
+
+BOOK 5.
+
+XXIV.     LOVERS MATED
+XXXV.     PREPARATIONS FOR A RESOLVE
+XXVI.     VISITS OF FAREWELL
+XXVII.    A MARINE DUET
+XXVIII.   THE PLIGHTING
+XXIX.     AMINTA TO HER LORD
+XXX.      CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+LOVERS MATED
+
+He was benevolently martial, to the extent of paternal, in thinking his
+girl, of whom he deigned to think now as his countess, pardonably
+foolish.  Woman for woman, she was of a pattern superior to the world's
+ordinary, and might run the world's elect a race.  But she was pitifully
+woman-like in her increase of dissatisfaction with the more she got.
+Women are happier enslaved.  Men, too, if their despot is an Ormont.
+Colonel of his regiment, he proved that: his men would follow him
+anywhere, do anything.  Grand old days, before he was condemned by one
+knows not what extraordinary round of circumstances to cogitate on women
+as fluids, and how to cut channels for them, that they may course along
+in the direction good for them, imagining it their pretty wanton will to
+go that way!  Napoleon's treatment of women is excellent example.
+Peterborough's can be defended.
+
+His Aminta could not reason.  She nursed a rancour on account of the blow
+she drew on herself at Steignton, and she declined consolation in her
+being pardoned.  The reconcilement evidently was proposed as a finale of
+one of the detestable feminine storms enveloping men weak enough to let
+themselves be dragged through a scene for the sake of domestic
+tranquillity.
+
+A remarkable exhibition of Aminta the woman was, her entire change of
+front since he had taken her spousal chill.  Formerly she was passive,
+merely stately, the chiselled grande dame, deferential in her bearing
+and speech, even when argumentative and having an opinion to plant.
+She had always the independent eye and step; she now had the tongue of
+the graceful and native great lady, fitted to rule her circle and hold
+her place beside the proudest of the Ormonts.  She bore well the small
+shuffle with her jewel-box--held herself gallantly.  There had been no
+female feignings either, affected misapprehensions, gapy ignorances, and
+snaky subterfuges, and the like, familiar to men who have the gentle
+twister in grip.  Straight on the line of the thing to be seen she flew,
+and struck on it; and that is a woman's martial action.  He would right
+heartily have called her comrade, if he had been active himself.
+A warrior pulled off his horse, to sit in a chair and contemplate the
+minute evolutions of the sex is pettish with his part in such battle-
+fields at the stage beyond amusement.
+
+Seen swimming, she charmed him.  Abstract views of a woman summon
+opposite advocates: one can never say positively, That is she!  But the
+visible fair form of a woman is hereditary queen of us.  We have none of
+your pleadings and counter-pleadings and judicial summaries to obstruct a
+ravenous loyalty.  My lord beheld Aminta take her three quick steps on
+the plank, and spring and dive and ascend, shaking the ends of her bound
+black locks; and away she went with shut mouth and broad stroke of her
+arms into the sunny early morning river; brave to see, although he had to
+flick a bee of a question, why he enjoyed the privilege of seeing, and
+was not beside her.  The only answer confessed to a distaste for all
+exercise once pleasurable.
+
+She and her little friend boated or strolled through the meadows during
+the day; he fished.  When he and Aminta rode out for the hour before
+dinner, she seemed pleased.  She was amicable, conversable, all that was
+agreeable as a woman, and she was the chillest of wives.  My lord's
+observations and reflections came to one conclusion: she pricked and
+challenged him to lead up to her desired stormy scene.  He met her and
+meant to vanquish her with the dominating patience Charlotte had found
+too much for her: women cannot stand against it.
+
+To be patient in contention with women, however, one must have a
+continuous and an exclusive occupation; and the tax it lays on us
+conduces usually to impatience with men.  My lord did not directly
+connect Aminta's chillness and Morsfield's impudence; yet the sensation
+roused by his Aminta participated in the desire to punish Morsfield
+speedily.  Without wishing for a duel, he was moved by the social
+sanction it had to consider whether green youths and women might not
+think a grey head had delayed it too long.  The practice of the duel
+begot the peculiar animal logic of the nobler savage, which tends to
+magnify an offence in the ratio of our vanity, and hunger for a blood
+that is not demanded by the appetite.  Moreover, a waning practice, in
+disfavour with the new generation, will be commended to the conservative
+barbarian, as partaking of the wisdom of his fathers.  Further, too, we
+may have grown slothful, fallen to moodiness, done excess of service to
+Omphale, our tyrant lady of the glow and the chill; and then undoubtedly
+the duel braces.
+
+He left Aminta for London, submissive to the terms of intimacy dictated
+by her demeanour, his unacknowledged seniority rendering their harshness
+less hard to endure.  She had not gratified him with a display of her
+person in the glitter of the Ormont jewels; and since he was, under
+common conditions, a speechless man, his ineptitude for amorous
+remonstrances precipitated him upon deeds, that he might offer additional
+proofs of his esteem and the assurance of her established position as his
+countess.  He proposed to engage Lady Charlotte in a conflict severer
+than the foregoing, until he brought her to pay the ceremonial visit to
+her sister-in-law.  The count of time for this final trial of his
+masterfulness he calculated at a week.  It would be an occupation,
+miserable occupation though it was.  He hailed the prospect of chastising
+Morsfield, for a proof that his tussels with women, prolonged study of
+their tricks, manoeuvrings and outwittings of them, had not emasculated
+him.
+
+Aminta willingly promised to write from day to day.  Her senses had his
+absence insured to them by her anticipation of the task.  She did not
+conceive it would be so ponderous a task.  What to write to him when
+nothing occurred!  Nothing did occur, unless the arrival of Mr. Weyburn
+was to be named an event.  She alluded to it: 'Mr. Weyburn has come,
+expecting to find you here.  The dispatch-box is here.  Is he to await
+you?'
+
+That innocent little question was a day gained.
+
+One day of boating on the upper reaches of the pastoral river, and walks
+in woods and golden meadows, was felicity fallen on earth, the ripe fruit
+of dreams.  A dread surrounded it, as a belt, not shadowing the horizon;
+and she clasped it to her heart the more passionately, like a mother her
+rosy infant, which a dark world threatens and the universal fate.
+
+Love, as it will be at her June of life, was teaching her to know the
+good and bad of herself.  Women, educated to embrace principles through
+their timidity and their pudency, discover, amazed, that these are not
+lasting qualities under love's influence.  The blushes and the fears take
+flight.  The principles depend much on the beloved.  Is he a man whose
+contact with the world has given him understanding of life's laws, and
+can hold him firm to the right course in the strain and whirling of a
+torrent, they cling to him, deeply they worship.  And if they tempt him,
+it is not advisedly done.  Nature and love are busy in conjunction.  The
+timidities and pudencies have flown; they may hover, they are not
+present.  You deplore it, you must not blame; you have educated them so.
+Muscular principles are sown only out in the world; and, on the whole,
+with all their errors, the worldly men are the truest as well as the
+bravest of men.  Her faith in his guidance was equal to her dependence.
+The retrospect of a recent journey told her how he had been tried.
+
+She could gaze tenderly, betray her heart, and be certain of safety.
+Can wine match that for joy?  She had no schemes, no hopes, but simply
+the desire to bestow, the capacity to believe.  Any wish to be enfolded
+by him was shapeless and unlighted, unborn; though now and again for some
+chance word or undefined thought she surprised the strange tenant of her
+breast at an incomprehensibly faster beat, and knew it for her own and
+not her own, the familiar the stranger--an utter stranger, as one who had
+snared her in a wreath and was pulling her off her feet.
+
+She was not so guileless at the thought of little Selina Collett here,
+and of Selina as the letter-bearer of old; and the marvel that Matey and
+Browny and Selina were together after all!  Was it not a kind of summons
+to her to call him Matey just once, only once, in play?  She burned and
+ached to do it.  She might have taxed her ingenuity successfully to
+induce little Selina to the boldness of calling him Matey--and she then
+repeating it, as the woman who revived with a meditative effort
+recollections of the girl.  Ah, frightful hypocrite!  Thoughts of the
+pleasure of his name aloud on her lips in his hearing dissolved through
+her veins, and were met by Matthew Weyburn's open face, before which
+hypocrisy stood rent and stripped.  She preferred the calmer, the truer
+pleasure of seeing him modestly take lessons in the nomenclature of
+weeds, herbs, grasses, by hedge and ditch.  Selina could instruct him as
+well in entomology, but he knew better the Swiss, Tyrolese, and Italian
+valley-homes of beetle and butterfly species.  Their simple talk was a
+cool zephyr fanning Aminta.
+
+The suggestion to unite the two came to her, of course, but their
+physical disparity denied her that chance to settle her own difficulty,
+and a whisper of one physically the match for him punished her.  In
+stature, in healthfulness, they were equals, perhaps: not morally or
+intellectually.  And she could claim headship of him on one little point
+confided to her by his mother, who was bearing him, and startled by the
+boom of guns under her pillow, when her husband fronted the enemy:
+Matthew Weyburn, the fencer, boxer, cricketer, hunter, all things manly,
+rather shrank from firearms--at least, one saw him put on a screw to
+manipulate them.  In danger--among brigands or mutineers, for example--
+she could stand by him and prove herself his mate.  Intellectually,
+morally, she had to bow humbly.  Nor had she, nor could she do more than
+lean on and catch example from his prompt spiritual valiancy.  It shone
+out from him, and a crisis fulfilled the promise.  Who could be his mate
+for cheerful courage, for skill, the ready mind, easy adroitness, and for
+self-command?  To imitate was a woman's utmost.
+
+Matthew Weyburn appeared the very Matey of the first of May cricketing
+day among Cuper's boys the next morning, when seen pacing down the
+garden-walk.  He wore his white trousers of that happiest of old days--
+the 'white ducks' Aminta and Selina remembered.  Selina beamed.  'Yes, he
+did; he always wore them; but now it's a frock-coat instead of a jacket.'
+
+'But now he will be a master instead of a schoolboy,' said Aminta.
+'Let us hope he will prosper.'
+
+'He gives me the idea of a man who must succeed,' Selina said; and she
+was patted, rallied, asked how she had the idea, and kissed; Aminta
+saying she fancied it might be thought, for he looked so confident.
+
+'Only not what the boys used to call "cocky,"' said Selina.  'He won't be
+contemptuous of those he outstrips.'
+
+'His choice of the schoolmaster's profession points to a modesty in him,
+does it not, little woman?'
+
+'He made me tell him, while you were writing your letters yesterday, all
+about my brother and his prospects.'
+
+'Yes, that is like him.  And I must hear of your brother, "little
+Collett."  Don't forget, Sely, little Collett was our postman.'
+
+The Countess of Ormont's humorous reference to the circumstance passed
+with Selina for a sign of a poetic love of the past, and a present social
+elevation that allowed her to review it impassively.  She admired the
+great lady and good friend who could really be interested in the fortunes
+of a mere schoolmaster and a merchant's clerk.  To her astonishment, by
+some agency beyond her fathoming, she found herself, and hardly for her
+own pleasure, pushing the young schoolmaster animatedly to have an
+account of his aims in the establishment of the foreign school.
+
+Weyburn smiled.  He set a short look at Aminta; and she, conscious of her
+detected diplomacy, had an inward shiver, mixed of the fascination and
+repugnance felt by a woman who knows that under one man's eyes her
+character is naked and anatomized.  Her character?--her soul.  He held it
+in hand and probed it mercifully.  She had felt the sweet sting again and
+again, and had shrunk from him, and had crawled to him.  The love of him
+made it all fascination.  How did he learn to read at any moment right to
+the soul of a woman?  Did experience teach him, or sentimental sympathy?
+He was too young, he was too manly.  It must be because of his being in
+heart and mind the brother to the sister with women.
+
+Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes.  Bee-note and woodside
+blackbird and meadow cow, and the fish of the silver rolling rings,
+composed the leap of the music.
+
+She gave her mind to his voice, following whither it went; half was in
+air, higher than the swallow's, exalting him.
+
+How is it he is the brother of women?  They are sisters for him because
+he is neither sentimentalist nor devourer.  He will not flatter to feed
+on them.  The one he chooses, she will know love.  There are women who go
+through life not knowing love.  They are inanimate automatic machines,
+who lay them down at last, inquiring wherefore they were caused to move.
+She is not of that sad flock.  She will be mated; she will have the right
+to call him Matey.  A certain Browny called him Matey.  She lived and
+died.  A certain woman apes Browny's features and inherits her passion,
+but has forfeited her rights.  Were she, under happiest conditions,
+to put her hand in his, shame would burn her.  For he is just--he is
+Justice; and a woman bringing him less than his due, she must be a
+creature of the slime!
+
+This was the shadowy sentiment that made the wall of division between
+them.  There was no other.  Lord Ormont had struck to fragments that
+barrier of the conventional oath and ceremonial union.  He was unjust--
+he was Injustice.  The weak may be wedded, they cannot be married; to
+Injustice.  And if we have the world for the buttress of injustice, then
+is Nature the flaring rebel; there is no fixed order possible.  Laws are
+necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human
+being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of
+the savage's old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice.  There cannot be a
+based society upon such conditions.  An immolation of the naturally
+constituted individual arrests the general expansion to which we step,
+decivilizes more, and is more impious to the God in man, than temporary
+revelries of a licence that Nature soon checks.
+
+Arrows of thoughts resembling these shot over the half of Aminta's mind
+not listening.  Her lover's head was active on the same theme while he
+spoke.  They converged to it from looks crossing or catching profiles,
+or from tones, from a motion of hand, from a chance word.  Insomuch that
+the third person present was kept unobservant only by her studious and
+humble speculations on the young schoolmaster's grand project to bring
+the nationalities together, and teach Old England to the Continent--the
+Continent to Old England: our healthy games, our scorn of the lie,
+manliness; their intellectual valour, diligence, considerate manners.
+
+'Just to name a few of the things for interchange,' said Weyburn.  'As to
+method, we shall be their disciples.  But I look forward to our fellows
+getting the lead.  No hurry.  Why will they? you ask in petto.  Well,
+they 're emulous, and they take a thrashing kindly.  That 's the way to
+learn a lesson.  I 've seen our fellows beaten and beaten--never the
+courage beaten out of them.  In the end, they won and kept the field.
+They have a lot to learn--principally not to be afraid of ideas.  They
+lose heaps of time before they can feel at home with ideas.  They call
+themselves practical for having an addiction to the palpable.  It is a
+pretty wreath they clap on their deficiencies.  Practical dogs are for
+bones, horses for corn.  I want the practical Englishman to settle his
+muzzle in a nosebag of ideas.  When he has once got hold of them, he
+makes good stuff of them.  On the Continent ideas have wings and pay
+visits.  Here, they're stay-at-home.  Then I want our fellows to have the
+habit of speaking from the chest.  They shall return to England with the
+whoop of the mountains in them and ready to jump out.  They shall have
+an Achillean roar; and they shall sing by second nature.  Don't fear:
+they'll give double for anything they take.  I've known Italians, to whom
+an Englishman's honesty of mind and dealing was one of the dreams of a
+better humanity they had put in a box.  Frenchmen, too, who, when they
+came to know us, were astonished at their epithet of perfide, and loved
+us.'
+
+'Emile,' said Aminta.  'You remember Emile, Selina: the dear little
+French boy at Mr. Cuper's?'
+
+'Oh, I do,' Selina responded.
+
+'He will work with Mr. Weyburn in Switzerland.'
+
+'Oh, that will be nice!' the girl exclaimed.
+
+Aminta squeezed Selina's hand.  A shower of tears clouded her eyes.  She
+chose to fancy it was because of her envy of the modest, busy, peaceful
+girl, who envied none.  Conquers also sincerity in the sincerest.  She
+was vexed with her full breast, and had as little command of her thoughts
+as of her feelings.
+
+'Mr. Weyburn has ideas for the education of girls too,' she said.
+
+'There's the task,' said he.  'It's to separate them as little as
+possible.  All the--passez-moi le mot--devilry between the sexes begins
+at their separation.  They 're foreigners when they meet; and their
+alliances are not always binding.  The chief object in life, if happiness
+be the aim, and the growing better than we are, is to teach men and women
+how to be one; for, if they 're not, then each is a morsel for the other
+to prey on.  Lady Charlotte Eglett's view is, that the greater number of
+them on both sides hate one another.'
+
+'Hate!' exclaimed Selina; and Aminta said: 'Is Lady Charlotte Eglett an
+authority?'
+
+'She has observed, and she thinks.  She has in the abstract the justest
+of minds: and that is the curious point about her.  But one may say they
+are trained at present to be hostile.  Some of them fall in love and
+strike a truce, and still they are foreigners.  They have not the same
+standard of honour.  They might have it from an education in common.'
+
+'But there must be also a lady to govern the girls?' Selina interposed.
+
+'Ah, yes; she is not yet found!'
+
+'Would it increase their mutual respect?--or show of respect, if you
+like?' said Aminta, with his last remark at work as the shattering bell
+of a city's insurrection in her breast.
+
+'In time, under management; catching and grouping them young.  A boy who
+sees a girl do what he can't, and would like to do, won't take refuge in
+his muscular superiority--which, by the way, would be lessened.'
+
+'You suppose their capacities are equal?'
+
+'Things are not equal.  I suppose their excellencies to make a pretty
+nearly equal sum in the end.  But we 're not weighing them each.  The
+question concerns the advantage of both.'
+
+'That seems just!'
+
+Aminta threw no voice into the word 'just.' It was the word of the
+heavens assuaging earth's thirst, and she was earth to him.  Her soul
+yearned to the man whose mind conceived it.
+
+She said to Selina: 'We must plan an expedition next year or the year
+after, and see how the school progresses.'
+
+All three smiled; and Selina touched and held Aminta's hand shyly.
+Visions of the unseen Switzerland awed her.
+
+Weyburn named the Spring holiday time, the season of the flowering Alpine
+robes.  He promised welcome, pressed for a promise of the visit.  Warmly
+it was given.  'We will; we will indeed!'
+
+'I shall look forward,' he said.
+
+There was nothing else for him or for her, except to doat on the passing
+minute that slipped when seized.  The looking forward turned them to the
+looking back at the point they had flown from, and yielded a momentary
+pleasure, enough to stamp some section of a picture on their memories,
+which was not the burning now Love lives for, in the clasp, if but of
+hands.  Desire of it destroyed it.  They swung to the future, swung to
+the present it made the past, sensible to the quick of the now they could
+not hold.  They were lovers.  Divided lovers in presence, they thought
+and they felt in pieces.  Feelings and thoughts were forbidden to speech.
+She dared look the very little of her heart's fulness, without the
+disloyalty it would have been in him to let a small peep of his heart be
+seen.  While her hand was not clasped she could look tenderly, and her
+fettered state, her sense of unworthiness muffled in the deeps, would
+keep her from the loosening to passion.
+
+He who read through her lustrous, transiently dwelling eyes had not that
+security.  His part, besides the watch over the spring of his hot blood,
+was to combat a host, insidious among which was unreason calling her
+Browny, urging him to take his own, to snatch her from a possessor who
+forfeited by undervaluing her.  This was the truth in a better-ordered
+world: she belonged to the man who could help her to grow and to do her
+work.  But in the world we have around us, it was the distorted truth:
+and keeping passion down, he was able to wish her such happiness as
+pertained to safety from shipwreck, and for himself, that he might
+continue to walk in the ranks of the sober citizens.
+
+Oh, true and right, but she was gloriously beautiful!  Day by day she
+surpassed the wondrous Browny of old days.  All women were eclipsed by
+her.  She was that fire in the night which lights the night and draws the
+night to look at it.  And more: this queen of women was beginning to have
+a mind at work.  One saw already the sprouting of a mind repressed.  She
+had a distinct ability; the good ambition to use her qualities.  She
+needed life and air--that is, comprehension of her, encouragement, the
+companion mate.  With what strength would she now endow him!  The pride
+in the sharp imagination of possessing her whispered a boast of the
+strength her mate would have from her.  His need and her need rushed
+together somewhere down the skies.  They could not, he argued, be
+separated eternally.
+
+He had to leave her.  Selina, shocked at a boldness she could not
+understand in herself, begged him to stay and tell her of Switzerland
+and Alpine flowers and herbs, and the valleys for the gold beetle and
+the Apollo butterfly.  Aminta hinted that Lord Ormont might expect to
+find him there, if he came the next morning; but she would not try to
+persuade, and left the decision with him, loving him for the pain he
+inflicted by going.
+
+Why, indeed, should he stay?  Both could ask; they were one in asking.
+Anguish balanced pleasure in them both.  The day of the pleasure was
+heaven to remember, heaven to hope for; not so heavenly to pray for.
+The praying for it, each knew, implored their joint will to decree the
+perilous blessing.  A shadowy sentiment of duty and rectitude, born of
+what they had suffered, hung between them and the prayer for a renewal,
+that would renew the tempting they were conscious of when the sweet, the
+strained, throbbing day was over.  They could hope for chance to renew
+it, and then they would be irresponsible.  Then they would think and wish
+discreetly, so as to have it a happiness untainted.  In refusing now to
+take another day or pray for it, they deserved that chance should grant
+it.
+
+Aminta had said through Selina the utmost her self-defences could allow.
+But the idea of a final parting cut too cruelly into her life, and she
+murmured: 'I shall see you before you go for good?'
+
+'I will come, here or in London.'
+
+'I can trust?'
+
+'Quite certain.'
+
+A meeting of a few hasty minutes involved none of the dangers of a sunny,
+long summer day; and if it did, the heart had its claims, the heart had
+its powers of resistance.  Otherwise we should be base verily.
+
+He turned on a bow to leave her before there was a motion for the offer
+of her hand.
+
+After many musings and frettings, she reached the wisdom of that.  Wisdom
+was her only nourishment now.  A cold, lean dietary it is; but he
+dispensed it, and it fed her, or kept her alive.  It became a proud
+feeling that she had been his fellow in the achievement of a piece of
+wisdom; though the other feeling, that his hand's kind formal touching,
+without pressure of hers, would have warmed her to go through the next
+interview with her lord, mocked at pure satisfaction.  Did he distrust
+himself?  Or was it to spare her?  But if so, her heart was quite bare
+to him!  But she knew it was.
+
+Aminta drove her questioning heart as a vessel across blank circles of
+sea, where there was nothing save the solitary heart for answer.  It
+answered intelligibly and comfortingly at last, telling her of proof
+given that she could repose under his guidance with absolute faith.  Was
+ever loved woman more blest than she in such belief?  She had it firmly;
+and a blessedness, too, in this surety wavering beneath shadows of the
+uncertainty.  Her eyes knew it, her ears were empty of the words.  Her
+heart knew it, and it was unconfirmed by reason.  As for his venturing to
+love her, he feared none.  And no sooner did that reflection surge than
+she stood up beside him in revolt against her lion and lord.  Her
+instinct judged it impossible she could ever have yielded her heart to
+a man lacking courage.  Hence--what? when cowardice appeared as the sole
+impediment to happiness now!
+
+He had gone, and the day lived again for both of them--a day of sheer
+gold in the translation from troubled earth to the mind.  One another's
+beauty through the visage into the character was newly perceived and
+worshipped; and the beauties of pastoral Thames, the temple of peace,
+hardly noticed in the passing of the day--taken as air to the breather;
+until some chip of the scene, round which an emotion had curled, was
+vivid foreground and gateway to shrouded romance: it might be the
+stream's white face browning into willow-droopers, or a wagtail on a
+water-lily leaf, or the fore-horse of an up-river barge at strain of
+legs, a red-finned perch hung a foot above the pebbles in sun-veined
+depths, a kingfisher on the scud under alders, the forest of the bankside
+weeds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+PREPARATIONS FOR A RESOLVE
+
+That day receded like a spent billow, and lapsed among the others
+advancing, but it left a print deeper than events would have stamped.
+Aminta's pen declined to run to her lord; and the dipping it in ink was
+no acceleration of the process.  A sentence, bearing likeness to an
+artless infant's trot of the half-dozen steps to mother's lap, stumbled
+upon the full stop midway.  Desperate determination pushed it along, and
+there was in consequence a dead stop at the head of the next sentence.
+A woman whose nature is insurgent against the majesty of the man to whom
+she must, among the singular injunctions binding her, regularly write,
+sees no way between hypocrisy and rebellion.  For rebellion, she, with
+the pen in her hand, is avowedly not yet ripe, hypocrisy is abominable.
+
+If she abstained from writing, he might travel down to learn the cause;
+a similar danger, or worse, haunted the writing frigidly.  She had to be
+the hypocrite or else--leap.
+
+But an honest woman who is a feeling woman, when she consents to play
+hypocrite, cannot do it by halves.  From writing a short cold letter,
+Aminta wrote a short warm one, or very friendly.  Length she could avoid,
+because she was unable to fill a page.  It seemed that she could not
+compose a friendly few lines without letting her sex be felt in them.
+What she had put away from her, so as not to feel it herself, the
+simulation of ever so small a bit of feeling brought prominently back;
+and where she had made a cast for flowing independent simplicity, she
+was feminine, ultra-feminine to her reading of it.
+
+Better take the leap than be guilty of double-dealing even on paper!
+The nature of the leap she did not examine.
+
+Her keen apprehension of the price payable for his benevolent intentions
+caught scent of them in the air.  Those Ormont jewels shone as emblems of
+a detested subjection, the penalty for being the beautiful woman rageing
+men proclaimed.  Was there no scheme of some other sort, and far less
+agreeable, to make amends for Steignton?  She was shrewd at divination;
+she guessed her lord's design.  Rather than meet Lady Charlotte, she
+proposed to herself the 'leap' immediately; knowing it must be a leap in
+the dark, hoping it might be into a swimmer's water.  She had her own
+pin-money income, and she loathed the chain of her title.  So the leap
+would at least be honourable, as it assuredly would be unregretted,
+whatever ensued.
+
+While Aminta's heart held on to this debate, and in her bed, in her boat,
+across the golden valley meadows beside her peaceful little friend, she
+gathered a gradual resolution without sight of agencies or consequences,
+Lord Ormont was kept from her by the struggle to master his Charlotte a
+second time--compared with which the first was insignificant.  And this
+time it was curious: he could not subdue her physique, as he did before;
+she was ready for him each day, and she was animated, much more voluble,
+she was ready to jest.  The reason being, that she fought now on
+plausibly good grounds: on behalf of her independent action.
+
+Previously, her intelligence of the ultimate defeat hanging over the more
+stubborn defence of a weak position had harassed her to death's door.
+She had no right to retain the family jewels; she had the most perfect of
+established rights to refuse doing an ignominious thing.  She refused to
+visit the so-called Countess of Ormont, or leave her card, or take one
+step to warrant the woman in speaking of her as her sister-in-law.  And
+no,--it did not signify that her brother Rowsley was prohibited by her
+from marrying whom he pleased.  It meant, that to judge of his acts as
+those of a reasoning man, he would have introduced his wife to his
+relatives--the relatives he had not quarrelled with--immediately upon his
+marriage unless he was ashamed of the woman; and a wife he was ashamed of
+was no sister-in-law for her nor aunt for her daughters.  Nor should she
+come playing the Black Venus among her daughters' husbands, Lady
+Charlotte had it in her bosom to say additionally.
+
+Lord Ormont was disconcerted by her manifest pleasure in receiving him
+every day.  Evidently she consented to the recurrence of a vexatious
+dissension for the enjoyment of having him with her hourly.  Her
+dialectic, too, was cunning.  Impetuous with meaning, she forced her
+way to get her meaning out, in a manner effective to strike her blow.
+Anything for a diversion or a triumph of the moment!  He made no way.
+She was the better fencer at the tongue.
+
+Yet there was not any abatement of her deference to her brother; and this
+little misunderstanding put aside, he was the Rowsley esteemed by her as
+the chief of men.  She foiled him, it might seem, to exalt him the more.
+After he had left the house, visibly annoyed and somewhat stupefied, she
+talked of him to her husband, of the soul of chivalry Rowsley was, the
+loss to his country.  Mr. Eglett was a witness to one of the
+altercations, when she, having as usual the dialectical advantage,
+praised her brother, to his face, for his magnanimous nature; regretting
+only that it could be said he was weak on the woman side of him--which
+was, she affirmed, a side proper to every man worth the name; but in his
+case his country might complain.  Of what?--Well, of a woman.--What had
+she done, for the country to complain of her?--Why, then, arts or graces,
+she had bewitched and weaned him from his public duty, his military
+service, his patriotic ambition.
+
+Lord Ormont's interrogations, heightening the effect of Charlotte's
+charge, appeared to Mr. Eglett as a giving of himself over into her
+hands; but the earl, after a minute of silence, proved he was a tricky
+combatant.  It was he who had drawn on Charlotte, that he might have his
+opportunity to eulogize--'this lady, whom you continue to call the woman,
+after I have told you she is my wife.'  According to him, her appeals,
+her entreaties, that he should not abandon his profession or let his
+ambition rust, had been at one period constant.
+
+He spoke fervently, for him eloquently; and he gained his point; he
+silenced Lady Charlotte's tongue, and impressed Mr. Eglett.
+
+When the latter and his wife were alone, he let her see that the Countess
+of Ormont was becoming a personage in his consideration.
+
+Lady Charlotte cried out: 'Hear these men where it's a good-looking woman
+between the winds!  Do you take anything Rowsley says for earnest?  You
+ought to know he stops at no trifle to get his advantage over you in a
+dispute.  That 's the soldier in him.  It 's victory at any cost!--and I
+like him for it.  Do you tell me you think it possible my brother Rowsley
+would keep smothered years under a bushel the woman he can sit here
+magnifying because he wants to lime you and me: you to take his part, and
+me to go and call the noble creature decked out in his fine fiction my
+sister-in-law.  Nothing 'll tempt me to believe my brother could behave
+in such a way to the woman he respected!'
+
+So Mr. Eglett opined.  But he had been impressed.
+
+He relieved his mind on the subject in a communication to Lord Adderwood;
+who habitually shook out the contents of his to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley,
+and she, deeming it good for Aminta to have information of the war waging
+for her behoof, obtained her country address, with the resolve to drive
+down, a bearer of good news to the dear woman she liked to think of, look
+at, and occasionally caress; besides rather tenderly pitying her, now
+that a change of fortune rendered her former trials conspicuous.
+
+An incident, considered grave even in the days of the duel and the kicks
+against a swelling public reprehension of the practice, occurred to
+postpone her drive for four-and-twenty hours.  London was shaken by
+rumours of a tragic mishap to a socially well-known gentleman at the
+Chiallo fencing rooms.  The rumours passing from mouth to mouth acquired,
+in the nature of them, sinister colours as they circulated.  Lord Ormont
+sent Aminta word of what he called 'a bad sort of accident at Chiallo's,'
+without mentioning names or alluding to suspicions.
+
+He treated it lightly.  He could not have written of it with such
+unconcern if it involved the secretary!  Yet Aminta did seriously ask
+herself whether he could; and she flew rapidly over the field of his
+character, seizing points adverse, points favourably advocative,
+balancing dubiously--most unjustly: she felt she was unjust.  But in her
+condition, the heart of a woman is instantly planted in jungle when the
+spirits of the two men closest to her are made to stand opposed by a
+sudden excitement of her fears for the beloved one.  She cannot see
+widely, and is one of the wild while the fit lasts; and, after it, that
+savage narrow vision she had of the unbeloved retains its vivid print in
+permanence.  Was she unjust?  Aminta cited corroboration of her being
+accurate: such was Lord Ormont! and although his qualities of gallantry,
+courtesy, integrity, honourable gentleman, presented a fair low-level
+account on the other side, she had so stamped his massive selfishness
+and icy inaccessibility to emotion on her conception of him that the
+repulsive figure formed by it continued towering when her mood was
+kinder.
+
+Love played on love in the woman's breast.  Her love had taken a fever
+from her lord's communication of the accident at Chiallo's, and she
+pushed her alarm to imagine the deadliest, and plead for the right of
+confession to herself of her unrepented regrets.  She and Matey Weyburn
+had parted without any pressure of hands, without a touch.  They were,
+then, unplighted if now the grave divided them!  No touch: mere glances!
+And she sighed not, as she pleaded, for the touch, but for the plighting
+it would have been.  If now she had lost him, he could never tell herself
+that since the dear old buried and night-walking schooldays she had said
+once Matey to him, named him once to his face Matey Weyburn.  A sigh like
+the roll of a great wave breaking against a wall of rock came from her
+for the possibly lost chance of naming him to his face Matey,--oh, and
+seeing his look as she said it!
+
+The boldness might be fancied: it could not be done.  Agreeing with the
+remote inner voice of her reason so far, she toned her exclamatory
+foolishness to question, in Reason's plain, deep, basso-profundo
+accompaniment tone, how much the most blessed of mortal women could
+do to be of acceptable service to a young schoolmaster?
+
+There was no reply to the question.  But it became a nestling centre for
+the skiey flock of dreams, and for really temperate soundings of her
+capacities, tending to the depreciatory.  She could do little.  She
+entertained the wish to work, not only 'for the sake of Somebody,' as her
+favourite poet sang, but for the sake of working and serving--proving
+that she was helpfuller than a Countess of Ormont, ranged with all the
+other countesses in china and Dresden on a drawing-room mantelpiece for
+show.  She could organize, manage a household, manage people too, she
+thought: manage a husband?  The word offends.  Perhaps invigorate him,
+here and there perhaps inspire him, if he would let her breathe.
+Husbands exist who refuse the right of breathing to their puppet wives.
+Above all, as it struck her, she could assist, and be more than an echo
+of one nobler, in breathing manliness, high spirit, into boys.  With that
+idea she grazed the shallows of reality, and her dreams whirred from the
+nest and left it hungrily empty.
+
+Selina Collett was writing under the verandah letters to her people in
+Suffolk, performing the task with marvellous ease.  Aminta noted it as a
+mark of superior ability, and she had the envy of the complex nature
+observing the simple.  It accused her of some guiltiness, uncommitted and
+indefensible.  She had pushed her anxiety about 'the accident at
+Chiallo's' to an extreme that made her the creature of her sensibilities.
+In the midst of this quiet country life and landscape; these motionless
+garden flowers headed by the smooth white river, and her gentle little
+friend so homely here, the contemplation of herself was like a shriek in
+music.  Worse than discordant, she pronounced herself inferior, unfit
+mentally as well as bodily for the dreams of companionship with any noble
+soul who might have the dream of turning her into something better.
+There are couples in the world, not coupled by priestly circumstance, who
+are close to the true; union, by reason of generosity on the one part,
+grateful devotion, as for the gift of life, on the other.  For instance,
+Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord Adderwood, which was an instance without
+resemblance; but Aminta's heart beat thick for what it wanted, and they
+were the instance of two that did not have to snap false bonds of a
+marriage-tie in order to walk together composedly outside it--in honour?
+Oh yes, yes!  She insisted on believing it was in honour.
+
+She saw the couple issue from the boathouse.  She had stepped into the
+garden full of a presentiment; so she fancied, the moment they were seen.
+She had, in fact, heard a noise in the boathouse while thinking of them,
+and the effect on her was to spring an idea of mysterious interventions
+at the sight.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence rushed to her, and was embraced.  'You 're not astonished
+to see me?  Adder drove me down, and stopped his coach at the inn, and
+rowed me the half-mile up.  We will lunch, if you propose; but presently.
+My dear, I have to tell you things.  You have heard?'
+
+'The accident?'
+
+Aminta tried to read in Mrs. Lawrence's eyes whether it closely concerned
+her.
+
+Those pretty eyes, their cut of lids hinting at delicate affinities with
+the rice-paper lady of the court of China, were trying to peer
+seriously.
+
+'Poor man! One must be sorry for him: he--'
+
+'Who?'
+
+'You 've not heard, then?' Mrs. Lawrence dropped her voice: 'Morsfield.'
+
+Aminta shivered.  'All I have heard-half a line from my lord this
+morning: no name.  It was at the fencing-rooms, he said.'
+
+'Yes, he wouldn't write more;' said Mrs. Lawrence, nodding.  'You know,
+he would have had to do it himself if it had not been done for him.
+Adder saw him some days back in a brown consultation near his club with
+Captain May.  Oh, but of course it was accident!  Did he call it so in
+his letter to you?'
+
+'One word of Mr. Morsfield: he is wounded?'
+
+'Past cure: he has the thing he cried for, spoilt boy as he was from his
+birth.  I tell you truth, m' Aminta, I grieve to lose him.  What with his
+airs of the foreign-tinted, punctilious courtly gentleman covering a
+survival of the ancient British forest boar or bear, he was a picture in
+our modern set, and piquant.  And he was devoted to our sex, we must
+admit, after the style of the bears.  They are for honey, and they have a
+hug.  If he hadn't been so much of a madman, I should have liked him for
+his courage.  He had plenty of that, nothing to steer it.  A second
+cousin comes in for his estates.'
+
+'He is dead?' Aminta cried.
+
+'Yes, dear, he is gone.  What the women think of it I can't say.  The
+general feeling among the men is that some one of them would have had to
+send him sooner or later.  The curious point, Adder says, is his letting
+it be done by steel.  He was a dead shot, dangerous with the small sword,
+as your Mr. Weyburn said, only soon off his head.  But I used to be
+anxious about the earl's meeting him with pistols.  He did his best to
+provoke it.  Here, Adder,'--she spoke over her shoulder,--'tell Lady
+Ormont all you know of the Morsfield-May affair.'
+
+Lord Adderwood bowed compliance.  His coolness was the masculine of Mrs.
+Lawrence's hardly feminine in treating of a terrible matter, so that the
+dull red facts had to be disengaged from his manner of speech before they
+sank into Aminta's acceptance; of them as credible.
+
+'They fought with foils, buttons off, preliminary ceremonies perfect;
+salute in due order; guard, and at it.
+
+Odd thing was, nobody at Chiallo's had a notion of the business till
+Morsfield was pinked.  He wouldn't be denied; went to work like a fellow
+meaning to be skewered, if he couldn't do the trick: and he tried it.
+May had been practising some weeks.  He's well on the Continent by this
+time.  It'll blow over.  Button off sheer accident.  I wasn't lucky
+enough to see the encounter: came in just when Chiallo was lashing his
+poll over Morsfield flat on the ground.  He had it up to the hilt.  We
+put a buttoned foil by the side of Morsfield, and all swore to secrecy.
+As it is, it 'll go badly against poor Chiallo.  Taste for fencing won't
+be much improved by the affair.  They quarrelled in the dressing room,
+and fetched the foils and knocked off the buttons there.  A big rascal
+toady squire of Morsfield's did it for him.  Morsfield was just up from
+Yorkshire.  He said he was expecting a summons elsewhere, bound to await
+it, declined provocation for the present.  May filliped him on the
+cheek.'
+
+'Adder conveyed the information of her husband's flight to the consolable
+Amy,' said Mrs. Lawrence.
+
+'He had to catch the coach for Dover,' Adderwood explained.  'His wife
+was at a dinner-party.  I saw her at midnight.'
+
+'Fair Amy was not so very greatly surprised?'
+
+'Quite the soldier's wife!'
+
+'She said she was used to these little catastrophes.  But, Adder, what
+did she say of her husband?'
+
+'Said she was never anxious about him, for nothing would kill him.'
+
+Mrs. Lawrence shook a doleful head at Aminta.
+
+'You see, my dear Aminta, here's another, and probably her last, chance
+of sharing the marquisate gone.  Who can fail to pity her, except old
+Time!  And I 'm sure she likes her husband well enough.  She ought: no
+woman ever had such a servant.  But the captain has not been known to
+fight without her sanction, and the inference is--'Alas!  woe!  Fair Amy
+is doomed to be the fighting captain's bride to the end of the chapter.
+Adder says she looked handsome.  A dinner-party suits her cosmetic
+complexion better than a ball.  The account of the inquest is in the
+day's papers, and we were tolerably rejoiced we could drive out of London
+without having to reply to coroner's questions.'
+
+'He died-soon?' Aminta's voice was shaken.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence touched at her breast, it might be for heart or lungs.
+Judging by Aminta's voice and face, one could suppose she was harking
+back, in woman's way, to her original sentiment for the man, now that he
+lay prostrate.
+
+Aminta read the unreproachful irony in the smile addressed to her.  She
+was too convulsed by her many emotions and shouting thoughts to think of
+defending herself.
+
+Selina, in the drawing-room, diligently fingered and classed brown-black
+pressed weeds of her neophyte's botany-folios.  The sight of her and her
+occupation struck Aminta as that of a person in another world beyond this
+world of blood, strangely substantial to view; and one heard her speak.
+
+Guilty?--no.  But she had wished to pique her lord.  After the term of a
+length of months, could it be that the unhappy man and she were punished
+for the half-minute's acting of some interest in him?  And Lord Ormont
+had been seen consulting Captain May; or was it giving him directions?
+
+Her head burned.  All the barren interrogations were up, running and
+knocking for hollow responses; and, saving a paleness of face, she
+cloaked any small show of the riot.  She was an amiable hostess.  She had
+ceased to comprehend Mrs. Lawrence, even to the degree of thinking her
+unfeminine.  She should have known that the 'angelical chimpanzee,' as a
+friend, once told of his being a favourite with the lady, had called her,
+could not simulate a feeling, and had not the slightest power of pretence
+to compassion for an ill-fated person who failed to quicken her
+enthusiasm.  In that, too, she was a downright boy.  Morsfield was a kind
+of Bedlamite to her; amusing in his antics, and requiring to be
+manoeuvred and eluded while he lived: once dead, just a tombstone, of
+interest only to his family.
+
+She beckoned Aminta to follow her; and, with a smirk of indulgent fun,
+commended Lord Adderwood to a study of Selina Collett's botany-folios,
+which the urbanest of indifferent gentlemen had slid his eyes over his
+nose to inspect before the lunch.
+
+'You ought to know what is going on in town, my dear Aminta.  You have
+won the earl to a sense of his duty, and he 's at work on the harder task
+of winning Lady Charlotte Eglett to a sense of hers.  It 's tremendous.
+Has been forward some days, and no sign of yielding on either side.  Mr.
+Eglett, good man, is between them, catching it right and left; and he
+deserves his luck for marrying her.  Vows she makes him the best of
+wives.  If he 's content, I 've nothing to complain of.  You must be
+ready to receive her; my lord is sure to carry the day.  You gulp.  You
+won't be seeing much of her.  I 'm glad to say he is condescending to
+terms of peace with the Horse Guards.  We hear so.  You may be throning
+it officially somewhere next year.  And all 's well that ends well!  Say
+that to me!'
+
+'It is, when the end comes,' Aminta replied.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence's cool lips were pressed to her cheek.  The couple and
+their waterman rowed away to the party they had left with the four-in-
+hand at their inn.
+
+A wind was rising.  The trees gave their swish of leaves, the river
+darkened the patch of wrinkles, the bordering flags amid the reed-blades
+dipped and streamed.
+
+Surcharged with unassimilated news of events, that made a thunder in her
+head, Aminta walked down the garden path, meeting Selina and bearing her
+on.  She had a witch's will to rouse gales.  Hers was not the woman's
+nature to be driven cowering by stories of men's bloody deeds.  She took
+the field, revolted, dissevering herself from the class which tolerated
+them--actuated by a reflective moralty, she believed; and loathed herself
+for having aspired, schemed, to be a member of the class.  But it was not
+the class, it was against her lord as representative of the class,
+that she was now the rebel, neither naming him nor imaging him.  Her
+enveloping mind was black on him.  Such as one of those hard slaughtering
+men could call her his own?  She breathed short and breathed deep.  Her
+bitter reason had but the common pity for a madman despatched to his
+rest.  Yet she knew hatred of her lord in his being suspected as
+instigator or accomplice of the hand that dealt the blow.  He became to
+her thought a python whose coils were about her person, insufferable to
+the gaze backward.
+
+Moments like these are the mothers in travail of a resolve joylessly
+conceived, undesired to clasp, Necessity's offspring.  Thunderclouds have
+as little love of the lightnings they fling.
+
+Aminta was aware only of her torment.  The trees were bending, the water
+hissing, the grasses all this way and that, like hands of a delirious
+people in surges of wreck.  She scorned the meaningless shake of the
+garments of earth, and exclaimed: 'If we were by the sea to-night!'
+
+'I shall be to-morrow night,' said Selina.  'I shall think of you.  Oh!
+would you come with me?'
+
+'Would you have me?'
+
+'My mother will indeed be honoured by your consenting to come.'
+
+'Write to her before the post is out.'
+
+'We shall travel down together?'
+
+Aminta nodded and smiled, and Selina kissed her hand in joy, saying, that
+down home she would not be so shy of calling her Aminta.  She was bidden
+to haste.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+VISITS OF FAREWELL
+
+The noise in London over Adolphus Morsfield's tragical end disturbed Lord
+Ormont much less than the cessation of letters from his Aminta; and that
+likewise, considering his present business on her behalf, he patiently
+shrugged at and pardoned, foreseeing her penitent air.  He could do it
+lightly after going some way to pardon his offending country.  For Aminta
+had not offended, his robust observation of her was moved to the kindly
+humorous by a reflective view here and there of the downright woman her
+clever little shuffles exposed her to be, not worse.  It was her sex that
+made her one of the gliders in grasses, some of whom are venomous; but
+she belonged to the order only as an innocuous blindworm.  He could
+pronounce her small by-play with Morsfield innocent, her efforts to climb
+the stairs into Society quite innocent; judging her, of course, by her
+title of woman.  A woman's innocence has a rainbow skin.  Set this one
+beside other women, she comes out well, fairly well, well enough.
+
+Now that the engagement with Charlotte assumed proportions of a series of
+battle, properly to be entitled a campaign, he had, in his loneliness,
+fallen into the habit of reflecting at the close of his day's work; and
+the rubbing of that unused opaque mirror hanging inside a man of action
+had helped him piecemeal to perceive bits of his conduct, entirely
+approved by him, which were intimately connected, nevertheless, with a
+train of circumstances that he disliked and could not charge justly upon
+any other shoulders than his own.  What was to be thought of it?  He
+would not be undergoing this botheration of the prolonged attempt to
+bring a stubborn woman to a sense of her duty, if he had declared his
+marriage in the ordinary style, and given his young countess her
+legitimate place before the world.  What impeded it?  The shameful
+ingratitude of his countrymen to the soldier who did it eminent service
+at a crisis of the destinies of our Indian Empire!  He could not condone
+the injury done to him by entering among them again.  Too like the kicked
+cur, that!  He retired--call it 'sulked in his tent,' if you like.  His
+wife had to share his fortunes.  He being slighted, she necessarily was
+shadowed.  For a while she bore it contentedly enough; then began her
+mousy scratches to get into the room off the wainscot, without blame from
+him; she behaved according to her female nature.
+
+Yes, but the battles with Charlotte forced on his recognition once more,
+and violently, the singular consequences of his retirement and Coriolanus
+quarrel with his countrymen.  He had doomed himself ever since to a
+contest with women.  First it was his Queen of Amazons, who, if
+vanquished, was not so easily vanquished, and, in fact, doubtfully,
+--for now, to propitiate her, he had challenged, and must overcome or be
+disgraced, the toughest Amazonian warrior man could stand against at cast
+of dart or lock of arms.  No day scored an advantage; and she did not
+apparently suffer fatigue.  He did: that is to say, he was worried and
+hurried to have the wrangle settled and Charlotte at Aminta's feet.  He
+gained not an inch of ground.  His principle in a contention of the sort
+was to leave the woman to the practice of her obvious artifices, and
+himself simply hammer, incessantly hammer.  But Charlotte hammered as
+well.  The modest position of the defensive negative was not to her
+taste.  The moment he presented himself she flew out upon some
+yesterday's part of the argument and carried the war across the borders,
+in attacks on his character and qualities--his weakness regarding women,
+his incapacity to forgive, and the rest.  She hammered on that head.  As
+for any prospect of a termination of the strife, he could see none in her
+joyful welcome to him and regretful parting and pleased appointment of
+the next meeting day after day.
+
+The absurdest of her devices for winding him off his aim was to harp on
+some new word she had got hold of as, for example, to point out to him
+his aptitudes, compliment him on his aptitudes, recommend him to study
+and learn the limitations of his aptitudes!  She revelled in something
+the word unfolded to her.
+
+However, here was the point: she had to be beaten.  So, if she, too,
+persisted in hammering, he must employ her female weapon of artifice with
+her.  One would gladly avoid the stooping to it in a civil dispute, in
+which one is not so gloriously absolved for lying and entrapping as in
+splendid war.
+
+Weyburn's name was announced to him at an early hour on Thursday morning.
+My lord nodded to the footman; he nodded to himself over a suggestion
+started in a tactical intelligence by the name.
+
+'Ah!  you 're off?' he accosted the young man.
+
+'I have come to take my leave, my lord.'
+
+'Nothing new in the morning papers?'
+
+'A report that Captain May intends to return and surrender.'
+
+'Not before a month has passed, if he follows my counsel.'
+
+'To defend his character.'
+
+'He has none.'
+
+'His reputation.'
+
+'He has too much.'
+
+'These charges against him must be intolerable.'
+
+'Was he not a bit of a pupil of yours?'
+
+'We practised two or three times-nothing more.'
+
+'Morsfield was a wasp at a feast.  Somebody had to crush him.  I 've seen
+the kind of man twice in my life and exactly the kind of man.  If their
+law puts down duelling, he rules the kingdom!'
+
+'My lord, I should venture to say the kind of man can be a common
+annoyance because the breach of the law is countenanced.'
+
+'Bad laws are best broken.  A society that can't get a scouring now and
+then will be a dirty set.'
+
+With a bend of the head, in apology for speaking of himself, Weyburn
+said: 'I have acted on my view.  I declined a challenge from a sort of
+henchman of his.'
+
+'Oh! a poacher's lurcher?  You did right.  Fight such fellows with
+constables.  You have seen Lady Charlotte?'
+
+'I am on my way to her ladyship.'
+
+'Do me this favour.  Fourteen doors up the street of her residence, my
+physician lives.  I have to consult him at once.  Dr. Rewkes.'
+
+Weyburn bowed.  Lady Charlotte could not receive him later than half-past
+ten of the morning, he said.  'This morning she can,' said my lord.  'You
+will tell Dr. Rewkes that it is immediate.  I rather regret your going.
+I shall be in a controversy with the Horse Guards about our cavalry
+saddles.  It would be regiments of raw backs the first fortnight of a
+campaign.'
+
+The earl discoursed on saddles; and passed to high eulogy of our
+Hanoverian auxiliary troopers in the Peninsula; 'good husbands,' he named
+them quaintly, speaking of their management of their beasts.  Thence he
+diverged to Frederic's cavalry, rarely matched for shrewdness and
+endurance; to the deeds of the Liechtenstein Hussars; to the great
+things Blucher did with his horsemen.
+
+The subject was interesting; but Weyburn saw the clock at past the half
+after ten.  He gave a slight sign of restiveness, and was allowed to go
+when the earl had finished his pro and con upon Arab horses and Mameluke
+saddles.  Lord Ormont nicked his head, just as at their first interview:
+he was known to have an objection to the English shaking of hands.
+'Good-morning,' he said; adding a remark or two, of which et cetera may
+stand for an explicit rendering.  It concerned the young man's
+prosperity: my lord's conservative plain sense was in doubt of the
+prospering of a giddy pate, however good a worker.  His last look at the
+young man, who had not served him badly, held an anticipation of possibly
+some day seeing a tatterdemalion of shipwreck, a rueful exhibition of
+ideas put to the business of life.
+
+Weyburn left the message with Dr. Rewkes in person.  It had not seemed
+to him that Lord Ormont was one requiring the immediate attendance of a
+physician.  By way of accounting to Lady Charlotte for the lateness of
+his call, he mentioned the summons he had delivered.
+
+'Oh, that's why he hasn't come yet,' said she.  'We'll sit and talk till
+he does come.  I don't wonder if his bile has been stirred.  He can't oil
+me to credit what he pumps into others.  His Lady Ormont!  I believe in
+it less than ever I did.  Morsfield or no Morsfield--and now the poor
+wretch has got himself pinned to the plank, like my grandson Bobby's
+dragonflies, I don't want to say anything further of him--she doesn't
+have much of a welcome at Steignton!  If I were a woman to wager as men
+do, I 'd stake a thousand pounds to five on her never stepping across the
+threshold of Steignton.  All very well in London, and that place he hires
+up at Marlow.  He respects our home.  That 's how I know my brother
+Rowsley still keeps a sane man.  A fortune on it!--and so says Mr.
+Eglett.  Any reasonable person must think it.  He made a fool of some
+Hampton-Evey at Madrid, if he went through any ceremony--and that I
+doubt.  But she and old (what do they call her?) may have insisted upon
+the title, as much as they could.  He sixty; she under twenty, I'm told.
+Pagnell 's the name.  That aunt of a good-looking young woman sees a
+noble man of sixty admiring her five feet seven or so--she's tall--of
+marketable merchandise, and she doesn't need telling that at sixty he'll
+give the world to possess the girl.  But not his family honour!  He stops
+at that.  Why?  Lord Ormont 's made of pride!  He'll be kind to her,
+he'll be generous, he won't forsake her; she'll have her portion in his
+will, and by the course of things in nature, she'll outlive him and
+marry, and be happy, I hope.  Only she won't enter Steignton.  You
+remember what I say.  You 'll live when I 'm gone.  It 's the thirst of
+her life to be mistress of Steignton.  Not she!--though Lord Ormont would
+have us all open our doors to her; mine too, now he 's about it.  He sets
+his mind on his plan, and he forgets rights and dues--everything; he must
+have it as his will dictates.  That 's how he made such a capital
+soldier.  You know the cavalry leader he was.  If they'd given him a
+field in Europe!  His enemies admit that.  Twelve! and my clock's five
+minutes or more slow.  What can Rowsley be doing?'
+
+She rattled backward on the scene at Steignton, and her brother's
+handsome preservation of his dignity 'stood it like the king he is!' and
+to the Morsfield-May encounter, which had prevented another; and Mrs. May
+was rolled along in the tide, with a hint of her good reason for liking
+Lord Ormont; also the change of opinion shown by the Press as to Lord
+Ormont's grand exploit.  Referring to it, she flushed and jigged on her
+chair for a saddle beneath her.  And that glorious Indian adventure
+warmed her to the man who had celebrated it among his comrades when a boy
+at school.
+
+'You 're to teach Latin and Greek, you said.  For you 're right: we
+English can't understand the words we 're speaking, if we don't know a
+good deal of Latin and some Greek.  "Conversing in tokens, not standard
+coin," you said, I remember; and there'll be a "general rabble tongue,"
+unless we English are drilled in the languages we filched from.  Lots
+of lords and ladies want the drilling, then!  I'll send some over to you
+for Swiss air and roots of the English tongue.  Oh, and you told me you
+supported Lord Ormont on his pet argument for corps d'elite; and you
+quoted Virgil to back it.  Let me have that line again--in case of his
+condescending to write to the papers on the subject.'
+
+Weyburn repeated the half-line.
+
+'Good: I won't forget now.  And you said the French act on that because
+they follow human nature, and the English don't.  We "bully it," you
+said.  That was on our drive down to Steignton.  I hope you 'll succeed.
+You 'll be visiting England.  Call on me in London or at Olmer--only mind
+and give me warning.  I shall be glad to see you.  I 've got some ideas
+from you.  If I meet a man who helps me to read the world and men as
+they are, I 'm grateful to him; and most people are not, you 'll find.
+They want you to show them what they 'd like the world to be.  We don't
+agree about a lady.  You 're in the lists, lance in rest, all for
+chivalry.  You 're a man, and a young man.  Have you taken your leave of
+her yet?  She'll expect it, as a proper compliment.'
+
+'I propose running down to take my leave of Lady Ormont to-morrow,'
+replied Weyburn.
+
+'She is handsome?'
+
+She is very handsome.'
+
+'Beautiful, do you mean?'
+
+'Oh, my lady, it would only be a man's notion!'
+
+'Now, that 's as good an answer as could be made!  You 're sure to
+succeed.  I 'm not the woman's enemy.  But let her keep her place.  Why,
+Rowsley can't be coming to-day!  Did Lord Ormont look ill?'
+
+'It did not strike me so.'
+
+'He 's between two fires.  A man gets fretted.  But I shan't move a step.
+I dare say she won't.  Especially with that Morsfield out of the way.
+You do mean you think her a beauty.  Well, then, there'll soon be a
+successor to Morsfield.  Beauties will have their weapons, and they can
+hit on plenty; and it 's nothing to me, as long as I save my brother from
+their arts.'
+
+Weyburn felt he had done his penance in return for kindness.  He bowed
+and rose, Lady Charlotte stretched out her hand.
+
+'We shall be sending you a pupil some day,' she said, and smiled.
+
+'Forward your address as soon as you 're settled.' Her face gave a
+glimpse of its youth in a cordial farewell smile.
+
+Lord Ormont had no capacity to do the like, although they were strictly
+brother and sister in appearance.  The smallest difference in character
+rendered her complex and kept him simple.  She had a thirsting mind.
+
+Weyburn fancied that a close intimacy of a few months would have enabled
+him to lift her out of her smirching and depraving mean jealousies.  He
+speculated, as he trod the street, on little plots and surprises, which
+would bring Lady Charlotte and Lady Ormont into presence, and end by
+making friends of them.  Supposing that could be done, Lady Ormont might
+be righted by the intervention of Lady Charlotte after all.
+
+Weyburn sent his dream flying with as dreamy an after-thought: 'Funny it
+will be then for Lady Charlotte to revert to the stuff she has been
+droning in my ear half an hour ago!--Look well behind, and we see spots
+where we buzzed, lowed, bit and tore; and not until we have cast that
+look and seen the brute are we human creatures.'
+
+A crumb of reflection such as this could brace him, adding its modest
+maravedi to his prized storehouse of gain, fortifying with assurances of
+his having a concrete basis for his business in life.  His great youthful
+ambition had descended to it, but had sunk to climb on a firmer footing.
+
+Arthur Abner had his next adieu.  They talked of Lady Ormont, as to whose
+position of rightful Countess of Ormont Mr. Abner had no doubt.  He said
+of Lady Charlotte: 'She has a clear head; but she loves her "brother
+Rowsley" excessively; and any excess pushes to craziness.'
+
+He spoke to Weyburn of his prospects in the usually, perhaps necessarily,
+cheerless tone of men who recognize by contrast the one mouse's nibbling
+at a mountain of evil.  'To harmonize the nationalities, my dear boy!
+teach Christians to look fraternally on Jews!  David was a harper, but
+the setting of him down to roll off a fugue on one of your cathedral
+organs would not impose a heavier task than you are undertaking.  You
+have my best wishes, whatever aid I can supply.  But we 're nearer to
+King John's time than to your ideal, as far as the Jews go.'
+
+'Not in England.'
+
+'Less in England,' Abner shrugged.
+
+'You have beaten the Christians on the field they challenged you to enter
+for a try.  They feel the pinch in their interests and their vanity.
+That will pass.  I 'm for the two sides, under the name of Justice;
+and I give the palm to whichever of the two first gets hold of the idea
+of Justice.  My old schoolmate's well?'
+
+'Always asking after Matey Weyburn !'
+
+'He shall have my address in Switzerland.  You and I will be
+corresponding.'
+
+Now rose to view the visit to the lady who was Lady Ormont on the tongue,
+Aminta at heart; never to be named Aminta even to himself.  His heart
+broke loose at a thought of it.
+
+He might say Browny.  For that was not serious with the intense present
+signification the name Aminta had.  Browny was queen of the old school-
+time-enclosed it in her name; and that sphere enclosed her, not excluding
+him.  And the dear name of Browny played gently, humorously, fervently,
+too, with life: not, pathetically, as that of Aminta did when came a
+whisper of her situation, her isolation, her friendlessness; hardly
+dissimilar to what could be imagined of a gazelle in the streets of
+London city.  The Morsfields were not all slain.  The Weyburns would be
+absent.
+
+At the gate of his cottage garden Weyburn beheld a short unfamiliar
+figure of a man with dimly remembered features.  Little Collett he still
+was in height.  The schoolmates had not met since the old days of
+Cuper's.
+
+Little Collett delivered a message of invitation from Selina, begging Mr.
+Weyburn to accompany her brother on the coach to Harwich next day, and
+spend two or three days by the sea.  But Weyburn's mind had been set in
+the opposite direction--up Thames instead of down.
+
+He was about to refuse, but he checked his voice and hummed.  Words of
+Selina's letter jumped in italics.  He perceived Lady Ormont's hand.
+For one thing, would she be at Great Marlow alone?  And he knew that hand
+--how deftly it moved and moved others.  Selina Collett would not have
+invited him with underlinings merely to see a shoreside house and garden.
+Her silence regarding a particular name showed her to be under
+injunction, one might guess.  At worst, it would be the loss of a couple
+of days; worth the venture.  They agreed to journey by coach next day.
+
+Facing eastward in the morning, on a seat behind the coachman, Weyburn
+had a seafaring man beside him, bound for the good port of Harwich, where
+his family lived, and thence by his own boat to Flushing.  Weyburn set
+him talking of himself, as the best way of making him happy; for it is
+the theme which pricks to speech, and so liberates an uncomfortably
+locked-up stranger; who, if sympathetic to human proximity, is thankful.
+They exchanged names, delighted to find they were both Matthews;
+whereupon Matthew of the sea demanded the paw of Matthew of the land, and
+there was a squeeze.  The same with little Collett, after hearing of him
+as the old schoolmate of the established new friend.  Then there was
+talk.  Little Collett named Felixstowe as the village of his mother's
+house and garden sloping to the sands.  'That 's it-you have it,' said
+the salted Matthew: 'peace is in that spot, and there I 've sworn to
+pitch my tent when I 'm incapacitated for further exercise--profitable,
+so to speak.  My eldest girl has a bar of amber she picked up one wash of
+the tide at Felixstowe, and there it had been lying sparkling, unseen,
+hours, the shore is that solitary.  What I like!--a quiet shore and a
+peopled sea.  Ever been to Brighton?  There it 's t' other way.'
+
+Not long after he had mentioned the time of early evening for their entry
+into his port of Harwich, the coach turned quietly over on a bank of the
+roadside, depositing outside passengers quite safely, in so matter-of-
+course a way, that only the screams of an uninjured lady inside repressed
+their roars of laughter.  One of the wheels had come loose, half a mile
+off the nearest town.  Their entry into Harwich was thereby delayed until
+half-past nine at night.  Full of consideration for the new mates now
+fast wedded to his heart by an accident.  Matthew Shale proposed to
+Matthew Weyburn, instead of the bother of crossing the ferry with a
+portmanteau and a bag at that late hour, to sup at his house, try the
+neighbouring inn for a short sleep, and ship on board his yawl, the
+honest Susan, to be rowed ashore off the Swin to Felixstowe sands no
+later than six o'clock of a summer's morning, in time for a bath and a
+swim before breakfast.  It sounded well--it sounded sweetly.  Weyburn
+suggested the counter proposal of supper for the three at the inn.  But
+the other Matthew said: 'I married a cook.  She expects a big appetite,
+and she always keeps warm when I 'm held away, no matter how late.  Sure
+to be enough.'
+
+Beds were secured at the inn; after which came the introduction to Mrs.
+Shale, the exhibition of Susan Shale's bar of amber, the dish of fresh-
+fried whiting, the steak pudding, a grog, tobacco, rest at the inn, and
+a rousing bang at the sleepers' doors when the unwonted supper in them
+withheld an answer to the intimating knock.  Young Matthew Shale, who had
+slept on board the Susan, conducted them to her boat.  His glance was
+much drawn to the very white duck trousers Weyburn had put on, for a
+souvenir of the approbation they had won at Marlow.  They were on, and so
+it was of no use for young Matthew to say they were likely to bear away a
+token from the Susan.  She was one among the damsels of colour, and free
+of her tokens, especially to the spotless.
+
+How it occurred, nobody saw; though everybody saw how naturally it must
+occur for the white ducks to 'have it in the eye' by the time they had
+been on board a quarter of an hour.  Weyburn got some fun out of them,
+for a counterbalance to a twitch of sentimental regret scarcely
+decipherable, as that the last view of him should bear a likeness of
+Browny's recollection of her first.
+
+A glorious morning of flushed open sky and sun on sea chased all small
+thoughts out of it.  The breeze was from the west, and the Susan, lightly
+laden, took the heave of smooth rollers with a flowing current-curtsey in
+the motion of her speed.  Fore-sail and aft were at their gentle strain;
+her shadow rippled fragmentarily along to the silver rivulet and boat of
+her wake.  Straight she flew to the ball of fire now at spring above the
+waters, and raining red gold on the line of her bows.  By comparison she
+was an ugly yawl, and as the creature of wind and wave beautiful.
+
+They passed an English defensive fort, and spared its walls, in obedience
+to Matthew Shale's good counsel that they should forbear from sneezing.
+Little Collett pointed to the roof of his mother's house twenty paces
+rearward of a belt of tamarisks, green amid the hollowed yellows of
+shorebanks yet in shade, crumbling to the sands.  Weyburn was attracted
+by a diminutive white tent, of sentry-box shape, evidently a bather's,
+quite as evidently a fair bather's.  He would have to walk on some way
+for his dip.  He remarked to little Collett that ladies going into the
+water half-dressed never have more than half a bath.  His arms and legs
+flung out contempt of that style of bathing, exactly in old Matey's well-
+remembered way.  Half a mile off shore, the Susan was put about to flap
+her sails, and her boat rocked with the passengers.  Turning from a final
+cheer to friendly Matthew, Weyburn at the rudder espied one of those
+unenfranchised ladies in marine uniform issuing through the tent-slit.
+She stepped firmly, as into her element.  A plain look at her, and a
+curious look, and an intent look fixed her fast, and ran the shock on his
+heart before he knew of a guess.  She waded, she dipped; a head across
+the breast of the waters was observed: this one of them could swim.  She
+was making for sea, a stone's throw off the direction of the boat.
+Before his wits had grasped the certainty possessing them, fiery envy and
+desire to be alongside her set his fingers fretting at buttons.  A grand
+smooth swell of the waters lifted her, and her head rose to see her
+world.  She sank down the valley, where another wave was mounding for its
+onward roll: a gentle scene of Weyburn's favourite Sophoclean chorus.
+Now she was given to him--it was she.  How could it ever have been any
+other!  He handed his watch to little Collett, and gave him the ropes,
+pitched coat and waistcoat on his knees, stood free of boots and socks,
+and singing out, truly enough, the words of a popular cry, 'White ducks
+want washing,' went over and in.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+A MARINE DUET
+
+She soon had to know she was chased.  She had seen the dive from the
+boat, and received all illumination.  With a chuckle of delighted
+surprise, like a blackbird startled, she pushed seaward for joy of the
+effort, thinking she could exult in imagination of an escape up to the
+moment of capture, yielding then only to his greater will; and she meant
+to try it.
+
+The swim was a holiday; all was new--nothing came to her as the same old
+thing since she took her plunge; she had a sea-mind--had left her earth-
+mind ashore.  The swim, and Matey Weyburn pursuing her passed up, out of
+happiness, through the spheres of delirium, into the region where our
+life is as we would have it be a home holding the quiet of the heavens,
+if but midway thither, and a home of delicious animation of the whole
+frame, equal to wings.
+
+He drew on her, but he was distant, and she waved an arm.  The shout of
+her glee sprang from her: 'Matey!' He waved; she heard his voice.  Was it
+her name?  He was not so drunken of the sea as she: he had not leapt out
+of bondage into buoyant waters, into a youth without a blot, without an
+aim, satisfied in tasting; the dream of the long felicity.
+
+A thought brushed by her: How if he were absent?  It relaxed her stroke
+of arms and legs.  He had doubled the salt sea's rapture, and he had
+shackled its gift of freedom.  She turned to float, gathering her knees
+for the funny sullen kick, until she heard him near.  At once her stroke
+was renewed vigorously; she had the foot of her pursuer, and she called,
+'Adieu, Matey Weyburn!'
+
+Her bravado deserved a swifter humiliation than he was able to bring down
+on her: she swam bravely, and she was divine to see ahead as well as
+overtake.
+
+Darting to the close parallel, he said: 'What sea nymph sang me my name?'
+
+She smote a pang of her ecstasy into him: 'Ask mine!'
+
+'Browny!'
+
+They swam; neither of them panted; their heads were water-flowers that
+spoke at ease.
+
+'We 've run from school; we won't go back.'
+
+'We 've a kingdom.'
+
+'Here's a big wave going to be a wall.'
+
+'Off he rolls.'
+
+'He's like the High Brent broad meadow under Elling Wood.'
+
+'Don't let Miss Vincent hear you.'
+
+'They 're not waves; they 're sighs of the deep.'
+
+'A poet I swim with!  He fell into the deep in his first of May morning
+ducks.  We used to expect him.'
+
+'I never expected to owe them so much.'
+
+Pride of the swimmer and the energy of her joy embraced Aminta, that she
+might nerve all her powers to gain the half-minute for speaking at her
+ease.
+
+'Who 'd have thought of a morning like this?  You were looked for last
+night.'
+
+'A lucky accident to our coach.  I made friends with the skipper of the
+yawl.'
+
+'I saw the boat.  Who could have dreamed----?  Anything may happen now.'
+
+For nothing further would astonish her, as he rightly understood her; but
+he said: 'You 're prepared for the rites?  Old Triton is ready.'
+
+'Float, and tell me.'
+
+They spun about to lie on their backs.  Her right hand, at piano-work of
+the octave-shake, was touched and taken, and she did not pull it away.
+Her eyelids fell.
+
+'Old Triton waits.'
+
+'Why?'
+
+'We 're going to him.'
+
+'Yes?'
+
+'Customs of the sea.'
+
+'Tell me.'
+
+'He joins hands.  We say, "Browny-Matey," and it 's done.'
+
+She splashed, crying 'Swim,' and after two strokes, 'You want to beat me,
+Matey Weyburn.'
+
+'How?'
+
+'Not fair!'
+
+'Say what.'
+
+'Take my breath.  But, yes! we'll be happy in our own way.  We 're sea-
+birds.  We 've said adieu to land.  Not to one another.  We shall be
+friends?'
+
+'Always.'
+
+'This is going to last?'
+
+'Ever so long.'
+
+They had a spell of steady swimming, companionship to inspirit it.
+Browny was allowed place a little foremost, and she guessed not
+wherefore, in her flattered emulation.
+
+'I 'm bound for France.'
+
+'Slew a point to the right: South-east by South.  We shall hit
+Dunkerque.'
+
+'I don't mean to be picked up by boats.'
+
+'We'll decline.'
+
+'You see I can swim.'
+
+'I was sure of it.'
+
+They stopped their talk--for the pleasure of the body to be savoured in
+the mind, they thought; and so took Nature's counsel to rest their voices
+awhile.
+
+Considering that she had not been used of late to long immersions, and
+had not broken her fast, and had talked much, for a sea-nymph, Weyburn
+spied behind him on a shore seeming flat down, far removed.
+
+'France next time,' he said: 'we'll face to the rear.'
+
+'Now?' said she, big with blissful conceit of her powers and incredulous
+of such a command from him.
+
+'You may be feeling tired presently.'
+
+The musical sincerity of her 'Oh no, not I!' sped through his limbs; he
+had a willingness to go onward still some way.
+
+But his words fastened the heavy land on her spirit, knocked at the habit
+of obedience.  Her stroke of the arms paused.  She inclined to his
+example, and he set it shoreward.
+
+They swam silently, high, low, creatures of the smooth green roller.  He
+heard the water-song of her swimming.  She, though breathing equably at
+the nostrils, lay deep.  The water shocked at her chin, and curled round
+the under lip.  He had a faint anxiety; and, not so sensible of a weight
+in the sight of land as she was, he chattered, by snatches, rallied her,
+encouraged her to continue sportive for this once, letting her feel it
+was but a once and had its respected limit with him.  So it was not out
+of the world.
+
+Ah, friend Matey!  And that was right and good on land; but rightness and
+goodness flung earth's shadow across her brilliancy here, and any stress
+on 'this once' withdrew her liberty to revel in it, putting an end to
+perfect holiday; and silence, too, might hint at fatigue.  She began to
+think her muteness lost her the bloom of the enchantment, robbing her of
+her heavenly frolic lead, since friend Matey resolved to be as eminently
+good in salt water as on land.  Was he unaware that they were boy and
+girl again?--she washed pure of the intervening years, new born, by
+blessing of the sea; worthy of him here!--that is, a swimmer worthy of
+him, his comrade in salt water.
+
+'You're satisfied I swim well?' she said.
+
+'It would go hard with me if we raced a long race.'
+
+'I really was out for France.'
+
+'I was ordered to keep you for England.' She gave him Browny's eyes.
+
+'We've turned our backs on Triton.'
+
+'The ceremony was performed.'
+
+'When?'
+
+'The minute I spoke of it and you splashed.'
+
+'Matey!  Matey Weyburn!'
+
+'Browny Farrell!'
+
+'Oh, Matey!  she's gone!'
+
+'She's here.'
+
+'Try to beguile me, then, that our holiday's not over.  You won't forget
+this hour?'
+
+'No time of mine on earth will live so brightly for me.'
+
+'I have never had one like it.  I could go under and be happy; go to old
+Triton, and wait for you; teach him to speak your proper Christian name.
+He hasn't heard it yet,--heard "Matey,"--never yet has been taught
+"Matthew."'
+
+'Aminta!'
+
+'Oh, my friend! my dear!' she cried, in the voice of the wounded, like a
+welling of her blood: 'my strength will leave me.  I may play--not you:
+you play with a weak vessel.  Swim, and be quiet.  How far do you count
+it?'
+
+'Under a quarter of a mile.'
+
+'Don't imagine me tired.'
+
+'If you are, hold on to me.'
+
+'Matey, I'm for a dive.'
+
+He went after the ball of silver and bubbles, and they came up together.
+There is no history of events below the surface.
+
+She shook off her briny blindness, and settled to the full sweep of the
+arms, quite silent now.  Some emotion, or exhaustion from the strain of
+the swimmer's breath in speech, stopped her playfulness.  The pleasure
+she still knew was a recollection of the outward swim, when she had been
+privileged to cast away sex with the push from earth, as few men will
+believe that women, beautiful women, ever wish to do; and often and
+ardently during the run ahead they yearn for Nature to grant them their
+one short holiday truce.
+
+But Aminta forgave him for bringing earth so close to her when there was
+yet a space of salt water between her and shore; and she smiled at times,
+that he might not think she was looking grave.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE PLIGHTING
+
+They touched sand at the first draw of the ebb, and this being earth,
+Matey addressed himself to the guardian and absolving genii of matter-of-
+fact, by saying; 'Did you inquire about the tides?'
+
+Her head shook, stunned with what had passed.  She waded to shore,
+after motioning for him to swim on.  Men, in comparison beside their fair
+fellows, are so little sensationally complex, that his one feeling now,
+as to what had passed, was relief at the idea of his presence having been
+a warrantable protectorship.
+
+Aminta's return from the sea-nymph to the state of woman crossed
+annihiliation on the way back to sentience, and picked up meaningless
+pebbles and shells of life, between the sea's verge and her tent's
+shelter; hardly her own life to her understanding yet, except for the
+hammer Memory became, to strike her insensible, at here and there a
+recollected word or nakedness of her soul.
+
+He swam along by the shore to where the boat was paddled, spying at her
+bare feet on the sand, her woman's form.  He waved, and the figure in the
+striped tunic and trousers waved her response, apparently the same person
+he had quitted.
+
+Dry and clad, and decently formal under the transformation, they met at
+Mrs. Collett's breakfast-table, and in each hung the doubt whether land
+was the dream or sea.  Both owned to a swim; both omitted mention of the
+tale of white ducks.  Little Collett had brought Matey's and his
+portmanteau into the house, by favour of the cook, through the scullery.
+He, who could have been a pictorial and suggestive narrator, carried a
+spinning head off his shoulders from this wonderful Countess of Ormont to
+Matey Weyburn's dark-eyed Browny at High Brent, and the Sunday walk in
+Sir Peter Wensell's park.  Away and back his head went.  Browny was not
+to be thought of as Browny; she was this grand Countess of Ormont; she
+had married Matey Weyburn's hero: she would never admit she had been
+Browny.  Only she was handsome then, and she is handsome now; and she
+looks on Matey Weyburn now just as she did then.  How strange is the
+world!  Or how if we are the particular person destined to encounter the
+strange things of the world?  And fancy J. Masner, and Pinnett major, and
+young Oakes (liked nothing better than a pretty girl, he strutted
+boasting at thirteen), and the Frenchy, and the lot, all popping down at
+the table, and asked the name of the lady sitting like Queen Esther--how
+they would roar out!  Boys, of course--but men, too!--very few men have a
+notion of the extraordinary complications and coincidences and cracker-
+surprises life contains.  Here 's an instance; Matey Weyburn positively
+will wear white ducks to play before Aminta Farrell on the first of May
+cricketing-day.  He happens to have his white ducks on when he sees the
+Countess of Ormont swimming in the sea; and so he can go in just as if
+they were all-right bathing-drawers.  In he goes, has a good long swim
+with her, and when he comes out, says, of his dripping ducks, 'tabula
+votiva .  .  .  avida vestimenta,' to remind an old schoolmate of his
+hopping to the booth at the end of a showery May day, and dedicating them
+to the laundry in these words.  It seems marvellous.  It was a quaint
+revival, an hour after breakfast, for little Collett to be acting as
+intermediary with Selina to request Lady Ormont's grant of a five-
+minutes' interview before the church-bell summoned her.  She was writing
+letters, and sent the message: 'Tell Mr. Weyburn I obey.' Selina
+delivered it, uttering 'obey' in a demurely comical way, as a word of
+which the humour might be comprehensible to him.
+
+Aminta stood at the drawing-room window.  She was asking herself whether
+her recent conduct shrieked coquette to him, or any of the abominable
+titles showered on the women who take free breath of air one day after
+long imprisonment.
+
+She said: 'Does it mean you are leaving us?' the moment he was near.
+
+'Not till evening or to-morrow, as it may happen,' he answered: 'I have
+one or two things to say, if you will spare the time.'
+
+'All my time,' said she, smiling to make less of the heart's reply; and
+he stepped into the room.
+
+They had not long back been Matey and Browny, and though that was in
+another element, it would not sanction the Lady Ormont and Mr. Weyburn
+now.  As little could it be Aminta and Matthew.  Brother and sister they
+were in the spirit's world, but in this world the titles had a sound of
+imposture.  And with a great longing to call her by some allying name, he
+rejected 'friend' for its insufficiency and commonness, notwithstanding
+the entirely friendly nature of the burden to be spoken.  Friend, was a
+title that ran on quicksands: an excuse that tried for an excuse.  He
+distinguished in himself simultaneously, that the hesitation and beating
+about for a name had its origin in an imperfect frankness when he sent
+his message: the fretful desire to be with her, close to her, hearing
+her, seeing her, besides the true wish to serve her.  He sent it after
+swinging round abruptly from an outlook over the bordering garden
+tamarisks on a sea now featureless, desolately empty.
+
+However, perceptibly silence was doing the work of a scourge, and he
+said: 'I have been thinking I may have--and I don't mind fighting hard to
+try it before I leave England on Tuesday or Wednesday--some influence
+with Lady Charlotte Eglett.  She is really one of the true women living,
+and the heartiest of backers, if she can be taught to see her course.
+I fancy I can do that.  She 's narrow, but she is not one of the class
+who look on the working world below them as, we'll say, the scavenger
+dogs on the plains of Ilium were seen by the Achaeans.  And my failure
+would be no loss to you!  Your name shall not be alluded to as empowering
+me to plead for her help.  But I want your consent, or I may be haunted
+and weakened by the idea of playing the busy-body.  One has to feel
+strong in a delicate position.  Well, you know what my position with her
+has been--one among the humble; and she has taken contradictions,
+accepted views from me, shown me she has warmth of heart to an extreme
+degree.'
+
+Aminta slightly raised her hand.  'I will save you trouble.  I have
+written to Lord Ormont.  I have left him.'
+
+Their eyes engaged on the thunder of this.  'The letter has gone?'
+
+'It was posted before my swim: posted yesterday.'
+
+'You have fully and clearly thought it out to a determination?'
+
+'Bit by bit--I might say, blow by blow.'
+
+'It is no small matter to break a marriage-tie.'
+
+'I have conversed with your mother.'
+
+'Yes, she!  and the woman happiest in marriage!'
+
+'I know.  It was hatred of injustice, noble sympathy.  And she took me
+for one of the blest among wives.'
+
+'She loved God.  She saw the difference between men's decrees for their
+convenience, and God's laws.  She felt for women.  You have had a hard
+trial Aminta.'
+
+'Oh, my name!  You mean it?'
+
+'You heard it from me this morning.'
+
+'Yes, there!  I try to forget.  I lost my senses.  You may judge me
+harshly, on reflection.'
+
+'Judge myself worse, then.  You had a thousand excuses.  I had only my
+love of you.  There's no judgement against either of us, for us to see,
+if I read rightly.  We elect to be tried in the courts of the sea-god.
+Now we 'll sit and talk it over.  The next ten minutes will decide our
+destinies.'
+
+His eyes glittered, otherwise he showed the coolness of the man
+discussing business; and his blunt soberness refreshed and upheld her, as
+a wild burst of passion would not have done.
+
+Side by side, partly facing, they began their interchange.
+
+'You have weighed what you abandon?'
+
+'It weighs little.'
+
+'That may be error.  You have to think into the future.'
+
+'My sufferings and experiences are not bad guides.'
+
+'They count.  How can you be sure you have all the estimates?'
+
+'Was I ever a wife?'
+
+'You were and are the Countess of Ormont.'
+
+'Not to the world.  An unacknowledged wife is a slave, surely.'
+
+'You step down, if you take the step.'
+
+'From what?  Once I did desire that station--had an idea it was glorious.
+I despise it: or rather the woman who had the desire.'
+
+'But the step down is into the working world.'
+
+'I have means to live humbly.  I want no more, except to be taught to
+work.'
+
+'So says the minute.  Years are before you.  You have weighed well, that
+you attract?'
+
+She reddened and murmured: 'How small!' Her pout of spite at her
+attractions was little simulated.
+
+'Beauty and charm are not small matters.  You have the gift, called
+fatal.  Then--looking right forward--you have faith in the power of
+resistance of the woman living alone?'
+
+He had struck at her breast.  From her breast she replied.
+
+'Hear this of me.  I was persecuted with letters.  I read them and did
+not destroy them.  Perhaps you saved me.  Looking back, I see weakness,
+nothing worse; but it is a confession.'
+
+'Yes, you have courage.  And that comes of a great heart.  And therein
+lies the danger.'
+
+'Advise me of what is possible to a lonely woman.'
+
+'You have resolved on the loneliness?'
+
+'It means breathing to me.'
+
+'You are able to see that Lord Ormont is a gentleman?'
+
+'A chivalrous gentleman, up to the bounds of his intelligence.'
+
+The bounds of his intelligence closed their four walls in a rapid
+narrowing slide on Aminta's mind, and she exclaimed:
+
+'If only to pluck flowers in fields and know their names, I must be free!
+I say what one can laugh at, and you are good and don't.  Is the
+interrogatory exhausted?'
+
+'Aminta, my beloved, if you are free, I claim you.'
+
+'Have you thought--?'
+
+The sense of a dissolving to a fountain quivered through her veins.
+
+'Turn the tables and examine me.'
+
+'But have you thought--oh!  I am not the girl you loved.  I would go
+through death to feel I was, and give you one worthy of you.'
+
+'That means what I won't ask you to speak at present but I must have
+proof.'
+
+He held out a hand, and hers was laid in his.
+
+There was more for her to say, she knew.  It came and fled, lightened and
+darkened.  She had yielded her hand to him here on land, not with the
+licence and protection of the great holiday salt water; and she was
+trembling from the run of his blood through hers at the pressure of
+hands, when she said in undertones: 'Could we--we might be friends.'
+
+'Meet and part as friends, you and I,' he replied.
+
+His voice carried the answer for her, his intimate look had in it the
+unfolding of the full flower of the woman to him, as she could not
+conceal from such eyes; and feeling that, she was all avowal.
+
+'It is for life, Matthew.'
+
+'My own words to myself when I first thought of the chance.'
+
+'But the school?'
+
+'I shall not consider that we are malefactors.  We have the world against
+us.  It will not keep us from trying to serve it.  And there are hints of
+humaner opinions; it's not all a huge rolling block of a Juggernaut.  Our
+case could be pleaded before it.  I don't think the just would condemn us
+heavily.  I shall have to ask you to strengthen me, complete me.  If you
+love me, it is your leap out of prison, and without you, I am from this
+time no better than one-third of a man.  I trust you to weigh the
+position you lose, and the place we choose to take in the world.  It 's
+this--I think this describes it.  You know the man who builds his house
+below the sea's level has a sleepless enemy always threatening.  His
+house must be firm and he must look to the dykes.  We commit this
+indiscretion.  With a world against us, our love and labour are
+constantly on trial; we must have great hearts, and if the world is
+hostile we are not to blame it.  In the nature of things it could not be
+otherwise.  My own soul, we have to see that we do--though not publicly,
+not insolently, offend good citizenship.  But we believe--I with my whole
+faith, and I may say it of you--that we are not offending Divine law.
+You are the woman I can help and join with; think whether you can tell
+yourself that I am the man.  So, then, our union gives us powers to make
+amends to the world, if the world should grant us a term of peace for the
+effort.  That is our risk; consider it, Aminta, between now and tomorrow;
+deliberate.  We don't go together into a garden of roses.'
+
+'I know.  I should feel shame.  I wish it to look dark,' said Aminta, her
+hand in his, and yet with a fair-sailing mind on the stream of the blood.
+
+Rationally and irrationally, the mixed passion and reason in two clear
+heads and urgent hearts discussed the stand they made before a world
+defied, neither of them quite perceiving what it was which coloured
+reason to beauty, or what so convinced their intellects when passion
+spoke the louder.
+
+'I am to have a mate.'
+
+'She will pray she may be one.'
+
+'She is my first love.'
+
+Aminta's lips formed 'mine,' without utterance.
+
+Meanwhile his hand or a wizardry subdued her will, allured her body.  She
+felt herself being drawn to the sign and seal of their plighting for
+life.  She said, 'Matthew,' softly in protest; and he said, 'Never once
+yet!'  She was owing to his tenderness.  Her deepened voice murmured:
+'Is this to deliberate?'  Colour flooded the beautiful dark face, as of
+the funeral hues of a sun suffusing all the heavens; firing earth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+AMINTA TO HER LORD
+
+On Friday, on Saturday, on Sunday, Lady Charlotte waited for her brother
+Rowsley, until it was a diminished satisfaction that she had held her
+ground and baffled his mighty will to subdue her.  She did not sleep for
+thinking of him on the Sunday night.  Toward morning a fit of hazy
+horrors, which others would have deemed imaginings, drove her from her
+bed to sit and brood over Rowsley in a chair.  What if it was a case of
+heart with him too?  Heart disease had been in the family.  A man like
+Rowsley, still feeling the world before him, as a man of his energies and
+aptitudes, her humour added in the tide of his anxieties, had a right to
+feel, would not fall upon resignation like a woman.
+
+She was at the physician's door at eight o'clock.  Dr. Rewkes reported
+reassuringly; it was a simple disturbance in Lord Ormont's condition of
+health, and he conveyed just enough of disturbance to send the impetuous
+lady knocking and ringing at her brother's door upon the hour of nine.
+
+The announcement of Lady Charlotte's early visit informed my lord that
+Dr. Rewkes had done the spiriting required of him.  He descended to the
+library and passed under scrutiny.
+
+'You don't look ill, Rowsley,' she said, reluctantly in the sound.
+
+'I am the better for seeing you here, Charlotte.  Shall I order breakfast
+for you?  I am alone.'
+
+'I know you are.  I've eaten.  Rewkes tells me you've not lost appetite.'
+
+'Have I the appearance of a man who has lost anything?'  Prouder man, and
+heartier and ruddier, could not be seen, she thought.
+
+'You're winning the country to right you; that I know.'
+
+'I don't ask it.'
+
+'The country wants your services.'
+
+'I have heard some talk of it.  That lout comes to a knowledge of his
+wants too late.  If they promoted and offered me the command in India to-
+morrow--'My lord struck the arm of his chair.  'I live at Steignton
+henceforth; my wife is at a seaside place eastward.  She left the jewel-
+case when on her journey through London for safety; she is a particularly
+careful person, forethoughtful.  I take her down to Steignton two days
+after her return.  We entertain there in the autumn.  You come?'
+
+'I don't.  I prefer decent society.'
+
+'You are in her house now, ma'am.'
+
+'If I have to meet the person, you mean, I shall be civil.  The society
+you've given her, I won't meet.'
+
+'You will have to greet the Countess of Ormont if you care to meet your
+brother.'
+
+'Part, then, on the best terms we can.  I say this, the woman who keeps
+you from serving your country, she 's your country's enemy.'
+
+'Hear my answer.  The lady who is my wife has had to suffer for what you
+call my country's treatment of me.  It 's a choice between my country and
+her.  I give her the rest of my time.'
+
+'That's dotage.'
+
+'Fire away your epithets.'
+
+'Sheer dotage.  I don't deny she's a handsome young woman.'
+
+'You'll have to admit that Lady Ormont takes her place in our family with
+the best we can name.'
+
+'You insult my ears, Rowsley.'
+
+'The world will say it when it has the honour of her acquaintance.'
+
+'An honour suspiciously deferred.'
+
+'That's between the world and me.'
+
+'Set your head to work, you'll screw the world to any pitch you like--
+that I don't need telling.'
+
+Lord Ormont's head approved the remark.
+
+'Now,' said Lady Charlotte, 'you won't get the Danmores, the Dukerlys,
+the Carminters, the Oxbridges any more than you get me.'
+
+'You are wrong, ma'am.  I had yesterday a reply from Lady Danmore to a
+communication of mine.'
+
+'It 's thickening.  But while I stand, I stand for the family; and I 'm
+not in it, and while I stand out of it, there 's a doubt either of your
+honesty or your sanity.'
+
+'There's a perfect comprehension of my sister!'
+
+'I put my character in the scales against your conduct, and your Countess
+of Ormont's reputation into the bargain.'
+
+'You have called at her house; it 's a step.  You 'll be running at her
+heels next.  She 's not obdurate.'
+
+'When you see me running at her heels, it'll be with my head off.  Stir
+your hardest, and let it thicken.  That man Morsfield's name mixed up
+with a sham Countess of Ormont, in the stories flying abroad, can't hurt
+anybody.  A true Countess of Ormont--we 're cut to the quick.'
+
+'We 're cut!  Your quick, Charlotte, is known to court the knife.'
+
+Letters of the morning's post were brought in.
+
+The earl turned over a couple and took up a third, saying: 'I 'll attend
+to you in two minutes'; and thinking once more: Queer world it is, where,
+when you sheath the sword, you have to be at play with bodkins!
+
+Lady Charlotte gazed on the carpet, effervescent with retorts to his last
+observation, rightly conjecturing that the letter he selected to read was
+from 'his Aminta.'
+
+The letter apparently was interesting, or it was of inordinate length.
+He seemed still to be reading.  He reverted to the first page.
+
+At the sound of the paper, she discarded her cogitations and glanced up.
+His countenance had become stony.  He read on some way, with a sudden
+drop on the signature, a recommencement, a sound in the throat, as when
+men grasp a comprehensible sentence of a muddled rigmarole and begin to
+have hopes of the remainder.  But the eye on the page is not the eye
+which reads.
+
+'No bad news, Rowsley?'
+
+The earl's breath fell heavily.
+
+Lady Charlotte left her chair, and walked about the room.
+
+'Rowsley, I 'd like to hear if I can be of use.'
+
+'Ma'am?' he said; and pondered on the word 'use,' staring at her.
+
+'I don't intend to pry.  I can't see my brother look like that, and not
+ask.'
+
+The letter was tossed on the table to her.  She read these lines, dated
+from Felixstowe:
+
+     'MY DEAR LORD,
+
+     'The courage I have long been wanting in has come at last, to break
+     a tie that I have seen too clearly was a burden on you from the
+     beginning.  I will believe that I am chiefly responsible for
+     inducing you to contract it.  The alliance with an inexperienced
+     girl of inferior birth, and a perhaps immoderate ambition, has taxed
+     your generosity; and though the store may be inexhaustible, it is
+     not truly the married state when a wife subjects the husband to such
+     a trial.  The release is yours, the sadness is for me.  I have
+     latterly seen or suspected a design on your part to meet my former
+     wishes for a public recognition of the wife of Lord Ormont.  Let me
+     now say that these foolish wishes no longer exist.  I rejoice to
+     think that my staying or going will be alike unknown to the world.
+     I have the means of a livelihood, in a modest way, and shall trouble
+     no one.
+
+     'I have said, the sadness is for me.  That is truth.  But I have to
+     add, that I, too, am sensible of the release.  My confession of a
+     change of feeling to you as a wife, writes the close of all
+     relations between us.  I am among the dead for you; and it is a
+     relief to me to reflect on the little pain I give .  .  .'
+
+
+'Has she something on her conscience about that man Morsfield?' Lady
+Charlotte cried.
+
+Lord Ormont's prolonged Ah! of execration rolled her to a bundle.
+
+Nevertheless her human nature and her knowledge of woman's, would out
+with the words: 'There's a man!'
+
+She allowed her brother to be correct in repudiating the name of the dead
+Morsfield--chivalrous as he was on this Aminta's behalf to the last!--and
+struck along several heads, Adderwood's, Weyburn's, Randeller's, for the
+response to her suspicion.  A man there certainly was.  He would be
+probably a young man.  He would not necessarily be a handsome man. . . .
+or a titled or a wealthy man.  She might have set eyes on a gypsy
+somewhere round Great Marlow--blood to blood; such things have been.
+Imagining a wildish man for her, rather than a handsome one and one
+devoted staidly to the founding of a school, she overlooked Weyburn, or
+reserved him with others for subsequent speculation.
+
+The remainder of Aminta's letter referred to her delivery of the Ormont
+jewel-case at Lord Ormont's London house, under charge of her maid
+Carstairs.  The affairs of the household were stated very succinctly, the
+drawer for labelled keys, whatever pertained to her management, in London
+or at Great Marlow.
+
+'She 's cool,' Lady Charlotte said, after reading out the orderly array
+of items, in a tone of rasping irony, to convince her brother he was well
+rid of a heartless wench.
+
+Aminta's written statement of those items were stabs at the home she had
+given him, a flashed picture of his loss.  Nothing written by her touched
+him to pierce him so shrewdly; nothing could have brought him so closely
+the breathing image in the flesh of the woman now a phantom for him.
+
+'Will she be expecting you to answer, Rowsley?'
+
+'Will that forked tongue cease hissing!' he shouted, in the agony of a
+strong man convulsed both to render and conceal the terrible, shameful,
+unexampled gush of tears.
+
+Lady Charlotte beheld her bleeding giant.  She would rather have seen the
+brother of her love grimace in woman's manner than let loose those
+rolling big drops down the face of a rock.  The big sob shook him, and
+she was shaken to the dust by the sight.  Now she was advised by her deep
+affection for her brother to sit patient and dumb, behind shaded eyes:
+praising in her heart the incomparable force of the man's love of the
+woman contrasted with the puling inclinations of the woman for the man.
+
+Neither opened mouth when they separated.  She pressed and kissed a large
+nerveless hand.  Lord Ormont stood up to bow her forth.  His ruddied skin
+had gone to pallor resembling the berg of ice on the edge of Arctic seas,
+when sunlight has fallen away from it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+The peaceful little home on the solitary sandy shore was assailed,
+unwarned, beneath a quiet sky, some hours later, by a whirlwind, a dust-
+storm, and rattling volleys.  Miss Vincent's discovery, in the past
+school-days, of Selina Collett's 'wicked complicity in a clandestine
+correspondence' had memorably chastened the girl, who vowed at the time
+when her schoolmistress, using the rod of Johnsonian English for the
+purpose, exposed the depravity of her sinfulness, that she would never
+again be guilty of a like offence.  Her dear and lovely Countess of
+Ormont, for whom she then uncomplainingly suffered, who deigned now to
+call her friend, had spoken the kind good-bye, and left the house after
+Mr. Weyburn's departure that same day; she, of course, to post by Harwich
+to London; he to sail by packet from the port of Harwich for Flushing.
+The card of an unknown lady, a great lady, the Lady Charlotte Eglett, was
+handed to her mother at eight o'clock in the evening.
+
+Lady Charlotte was introduced to the innocent country couple; the mother
+knitting, the daughter studying a book of the botany of the Swiss Alps,
+dreaming a distant day's journey over historic lands of various hues to
+the unimaginable spectacle of earth's grandeur.  Her visit lasted fifteen
+minutes.  From the moment of her entry, the room was in such turmoil as
+may be seen where a water-mill wheel's paddles are suddenly set rounding
+to pour streams of foam on the smooth pool below.  A relentless catechism
+bewildered their hearing.  Mrs. Collett attempted an opposition of
+dignity to those vehement attacks for answers.  It was flooded and rolled
+over.  She was put upon her honour to reply positively to positive
+questions: whether the Countess of Ormont was in this house at present;
+whether the Countess of Ormont left the house alone or in company;
+whether a gentleman had come to the house during the stay of the Countess
+of Ormont; whether Lady Ormont had left the neighbourhood; the exact time
+of the day when she quitted the house, and the stated point of her
+destination.
+
+Ultimately, protesting that they were incapable of telling what they did
+not know--which Lady Charlotte heard with an incredulous shrug--they
+related piecemeal what they did know, and Weyburn's name gave her scent.
+She paid small heed to the tale of Mr. Weyburn's having come there in the
+character of young Mr. Collett's old schoolmate.  Mr. Weyburn had started
+for the port of Harwich.  This day, and not long subsequently, Lady
+Ormont had started for the port of Harwich, on her way to London, if we
+like to think it.  Further corroboration was quite superfluous.
+
+'Is there a night packet-boat from this port of yours?' Lady Charlotte
+asked.
+
+The household servants had to be consulted; and she, hurriedly craving
+the excuse of their tedious mistress, elicited, as far as she could
+understand them, that there might be and very nearly was, a night packet-
+boat starting for Flushing.  The cook, a native of Harwich, sent up word
+of a night packet-boat starting at about eleven o'clock last year.
+
+Lady Charlotte saw the chance as a wind-blown beacon-fire under press of
+shades.  Changeing her hawkish manner toward the simple pair, she gave
+them view of a smile magical by contrast, really beautiful--the smile she
+had in reserve for serviceable persons whom she trusted--while thanking
+them and saying, that her anxiety concerned Lady Ormont's welfare.
+
+Her brother had prophesied she would soon be 'running at his wife's
+heels,' and so she was, but not 'with her head off,' as she had rejoined.
+She might prove, by intercepting his Aminta, that her head was on.
+The windy beacon-fire of a chance blazed at the rapid rolling of her
+carriage-wheels, and sank to stifling smoke at any petty obstruction.
+Let her but come to an interview with his Aminta, she would stop all that
+nonsense of the woman's letter; carry her off--and her Weyburn plucking
+at her other hand to keep her.  Why, naturally, treated as she was by
+Rowsley, she dropped soft eyes on a good-looking secretary.  Any woman
+would--confound the young fellow!  But all 's right yet if we get to
+Harwich in time; unless .  .  .  as a certain coldfish finale tone of the
+letter playing on the old string, the irrevocable, peculiar to women who
+are novices in situations of the kind, appeared to indicate; they see in
+their conscience-blasted minds a barrier to a return home, high as the
+Archangelical gate behind Mother Eve, and they are down on their knees
+blubbering gratitude and repentance if the gate swings open to them.  It
+is just the instant, granting the catastrophe, to have a woman back to
+her duty.  She has only to learn she has a magnanimous husband.  If she
+learns into the bargain how he suffers, how he loves her,--well, she
+despises a man like that Lawrence Finchley all the more for the
+'magnanimity' she has the profit of, and perceives to be feebleness.
+But there 's woman in her good and her bad; she'll trick a man of age,
+and if he forgives her, owning his own faults in the case, she won't
+scorn him for it; the likelihood is, she 'll feel bound in honour to
+serve him faithfully for the rest of their wedded days.
+
+A sketch to her of Rowsley's deep love.  .  .  .  Lady Charlotte wandered
+into an amazement at it.  A sentence of her brother's recent speaking
+danced in her recollection.  He said of his country: That Lout comes to a
+knowledge of his wants too late.  True, Old England is always louting to
+the rear, and has to be pricked in the rear and pulled by the neck before
+she 's equal to the circumstances around her.  But what if his words were
+flung at him in turn!  Short of 'Lout,' it rang correctly.  'Too late,'
+we hope to clip from the end of the sentence likewise.  We have then, if
+you stress it--'comes to a knowledge of his wants;--a fair example of the
+creatures men are; the greatest of men; who have to learn from the loss
+of the woman--or a fear of the loss--how much they really do love her.
+
+Well, and she may learn the same or something sufficiently like it, if
+she 's caught in time, called to her face, Countess of Ormont, sister-in-
+law, and smoothed, petted, made believe she 's now understood and won't
+be questioned on a single particular--in fact, she marches back in a sort
+of triumph; and all the past in a cupboard, locked up, without further
+inquiry.
+
+Her brother Rowsley's revealed human appearance of the stricken man
+--stricken right into his big heart--precipitated Lady Charlotte's
+reflections and urged her to an unavailing fever of haste during the
+circuitous drive in moonlight to the port.  She alighted at the principal
+inn, and was there informed that the packetboat, with a favouring breeze
+and tide, had started ten minutes earlier.  She summoned the landlord,
+and described a lady, as probably one of the passengers: 'Dark, holds
+herself up high.  Some such lady had dined at the inn on tea, and gone
+aboard the boat soon after.
+
+Lady Charlotte burned with the question: Alone?  She repressed her
+feminine hunger and asked to see the book of visitors.  But the lady had
+not slept at the inn, so had not been requested to write her name.
+
+The track of the vessel could be seen from the pier, on the line of a bar
+of moonlight; and thinking, that the abominable woman, if aboard she was,
+had coolly provided herself with a continental passport--or had it done
+for two by her accomplice, that Weyburn, before she left London--Lady
+Charlotte sent a loathing gaze at the black figure of the boat on the
+water, untroubled by any reminder of her share in the conspiracy of
+events, which was to be her brother's chastisement to his end.
+
+
+Years are the teachers of the great rocky natures, whom they round and
+sap and pierce in caverns, having them on all sides, and striking deep
+inward at moments.  There is no resisting the years, if we have a heart,
+and a common understanding.  They constitute, in the sum of them, the
+self-examination, whence issues, acknowledged or not, a belated self-
+knowledge, to direct our final actions.  She had the heart.  Sight of the
+high-minded, proud, speechless man suffering for the absence of a runaway
+woman, not ceasing to suffer, never blaming the woman, and consequently,
+it could be fancied, blaming himself, broke down Lady Charlotte's
+defences and moved her to review her part in her brother Rowsley's
+unhappiness.  For supposing him to blame himself, her power to cast a
+shadow of blame on him went from her, and therewith her vindication of
+her conduct.  He lived at Olmer.  She read him by degrees, as those who
+have become absolutely tongueless have to be read; and so she gathered
+that this mortally (or lastingly) wounded brother of hers was pleased by
+an allusion to his Aminta.  He ran his finger on the lines of a map of
+Spain, from Barcelona over to Granada; and impressed his nail at a point
+appearing to be mountainous or woody.  Lady Charlotte suggested that he
+and his Aminta had passed by there.  He told a story of a carriage
+accident: added, 'She was very brave.' One day, when he had taken a
+keepsake book of England's Beauties off the drawing-room table, his eyes
+dwelt on a face awhile, and he handed it, with a nod, followed by a
+slight depreciatory shrug.  'Like her, not so handsome,' Lady Charlotte
+said.
+
+He nodded again.  She came to a knowledge of Aminta's favourite colours
+through the dwelling of his look on orange and black, deepest rose, light
+yellow, light blue.  Her grand-daughters won the satisfied look if they
+wore a combination touching his memory.  The rocky are not imaginative,
+and have to be struck from without for a kindling of them.  Submissive
+though she was to court and soothe her brother Rowsley, a spur of
+jealousy burned in the composition of her sentiments, to set her going.
+He liked visiting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley at her effaced good man's
+country seat, Brockholm in Berkshire, and would stay there a month at a
+time.  Lady Charlotte learnt why.  The enthusiast for Aminta, without
+upholding her to her late lord, whom she liked well, talked of her openly
+with him, confessed to a fondness for her.  How much Mrs. Lawrence
+ventured to say, Lady Charlotte could not know.  But rivalry pushed her
+to the extreme of making Aminta partially a topic; and so ready was he to
+follow her lead in the veriest trifles recalling the handsome runaway;
+that she had to excite his racy diatribes against the burgess English and
+the pulp they have made of a glorious nation, in order not to think him
+inclining upon dotage.
+
+Philippa's occasional scoff in fun concerning 'grandmama's tutor,' hurt
+Lady Charlotte for more reasons than one, notwithstanding the
+justification of her fore-thoughtfulness.  The girl, however, was
+privileged; she was Bobby Benlew's dearest friend, and my lord loved the
+boy; with whom nothing could be done at school, nor could a tutor at
+Olmer control him.  In fine, Bobby saddened the family and gained the
+earl's anxious affection by giving daily proofs of his being an Ormont
+in a weak frame; patently an Ormont, recurrently an invalid.  His moral
+qualities hurled him on his physical deficiencies.  The local doctor and
+Dr. Rewkes banished him twice to the seashore, where he began to bloom
+the first week and sickened the next, for want of playfellows, jolly
+fights and friendships.  Ultimately they prescribed mountain air, Swiss
+air, easy travelling to Switzerland, and several weeks of excursions at
+the foot of the Alps.  Bobby might possibly get an aged tutor, or find an
+English clergyman taking pupils, on the way.
+
+Thus it happened, that seven years after his bereavement, Lord Ormont and
+Philippa and Bobby were on the famous Bernese Terrace, grandest of
+terrestrial theatres where soul of man has fronting him earth's utmost
+majesty.  Sublime: but five minutes of it fetched sounds as of a plug in
+an empty phial from Bobby's bosom, and his heels became electrical.
+
+He was observed at play with a gentleman of Italian complexion.  Past
+guessing how it had come about, for the gentleman was an utter stranger.
+He had at any rate the tongue of an Englishman.  He had the style, too,
+the slang and cries and tricks of an English schoolboy, though visibly a
+foreigner.  And he had the art of throwing his heart into that bit of
+improvised game, or he would never have got hold of Bobby, shrewd to read
+a masker.
+
+Lugged-up by the boy to my lord and the young lady, he doffed and bowed.
+'Forgive me, pray,' he said; 'I can't see an English boy without having a
+spin with him; and I make so bold as to speak to English people wherever
+I meet them, if they give me the chance.  Bad manners?  Better than that.
+You are of the military profession, sir, I see.  I am a soldier, fresh
+from Monte Video.  Italian, it is evident, under an Italian chief there.
+A clerk on a stool, and hey presto plunged into the war a month after,
+shouldering a gun and marching.  Fifteen battles in eighteen months; and
+Death a lady at a balcony we kiss hands to on the march below.  Not a bit
+more terrible!  Ah, but your pardon, sir,' he hastened to say, observing
+rigidity on the features of the English gentleman; 'would I boast?  Not
+I.  Accept it as my preface for why I am moved to speak the English
+wherever I meet them:--Uruguay, Buenos Ayres, La Plata, or Europe.
+I cannot resist it.  At least, he bent gracefully, 'I do not.  We come
+to the grounds of my misbehaviour.  I have shown at every call I fear
+nothing, kiss hand of welcome or adieu to Death.  And I, a boy of the
+age of this youngster--he 's not like me, I can declare!--I was a sneak
+and a coward.  It follows, I was a liar and a traitor.  Who cured me of
+that vileness, that scandal?  I will tell you--an Englishman and an
+Englishwoman: my schoolmaster and his wife.  My schoolmaster--my friend!
+He is the comrade of his boys: English, French, Germans, Italians, a
+Spaniard in my time--a South American I have sent him--two from Boston,
+Massachusetts--and clever!--all emulous to excel, none boasting.  But,
+to myself; I was that mean fellow.  I did--I could let you know: before
+this young lady--she would wither me with her scorn, Enough, I sneaked,
+I lied.  I let the blame fall on a schoolfellow and a housemaid.  Oh!
+a small thing, but I coveted it--a scarf.  It reminded me of Rome.
+Enough, there at the bottom of that pit, behold me.  It was not
+discovered, but my schoolfellow was unpunished, the housemaid remained in
+service; I thought, I thought, and I thought until I could not look in my
+dear friend Matthew's face.  He said to me one day: "Have you nothing to
+tell me, Giulio?" as if to ask the road to right or left.  Out it all
+came.  And no sermon, no!  He set me the hardest task I could have.  That
+was a penance!--to go to his wife, and tell it all to her.  Then I did
+think it an easier thing to go and face death--and death had been my
+nightmare.  I went, she listened, she took my hand she said: "You will
+never do this again, I know, Giulio."  She told me no English girl would
+ever look on a man who was a coward and lied.  From that day I have made
+Truth my bride.  And what the consequence?  I know not fear!  I could
+laugh, knowing I was to lie down in my six-foot measure to-morrow.  If I
+have done my duty and look in the face of my dear Matthew and his wife!
+Ah, those two!  They are loved.  They will be loved all over Europe.  He
+works for Europe and America--all civilized people--to be one country.
+He is the comrade of his boys.  Out of school hours, it is Christian
+names all round--Matthew, Emile, Adolf, Emilio, Giulio, Robert, Marcel,
+Franz, et caetera.  Games or lessons, a boy can't help learning with him.
+He makes happy fellows and brave soldiers of them without drill.  Sir, do
+I presume when I say I have your excuse for addressing you because you
+are his countryman?  I drive to the old school in half an hour, and next
+week he and his dear wife and a good half of the boys will be on the
+tramp over the Simplon, by Lago Maggiore, to my uncle's house in Milan
+for a halt.  I go to Matthew before I see my own people.'
+
+He swept another bow of apology, chiefly to Philippa, as representative
+of the sex claiming homage.
+
+Lord Ormont had not greatly relished certain of the flowery phrases
+employed by this young foreigner.  'Truth his bride,' was damnable:
+and if a story had to be told, he liked it plain, without jerks and
+evolutions.  Many offences to our taste have to be overlooked in
+foreigners--Italians! considered, before they were proved in fire,
+a people classed by nature as operatic declaimers.  Bobby had shown
+himself on the road out to Bern a difficult boy, and stupefyingly
+ignorant.  My lord had two or three ideas working to cloudy combination
+in his head when he put a question, referring to the management of the
+dormitories at the school.  Whereupon the young Italian introduced
+himself as Giulio Calliani, and proposed a drive to inspect the old
+school, with its cricket and football fields, lake for rowing and
+swimming, gymnastic fixtures, carpenter's shed, bowling alley, and four
+European languages in the air by turns daily; and the boys, too, all the
+boys rosy and jolly, according to the last report received of them from
+his friend Matthew.  Enthusiasm struck and tightened the loose chord of
+scepticism in Lord Ormont; somewhat as if a dancing beggar had entered a
+kennel-dog's yard, designing to fascinate the faithful beast.  It is a
+chord of one note, that is tightened to sound by the violent summons to
+accept, which is a provocation to deny.  At the same time, the
+enthusiast's dance is rather funny; he is not an ordinary beggar; to see
+him trip himself in his dance would be rather funnier.  This is to say,
+inspect the trumpeted school and retire politely.  My lord knew the Bern
+of frequent visits: the woman was needed beside him to inspire a feeling
+for scenic mountains.  Philippa's admiration of them was like a new-
+pressed grape-juice after a draught of the ripe vintage.  Moreover, Bobby
+was difficult: the rejected of his English schools was a stiff Ormont at
+lessons, a wheezy Benlew in the playground: exactly the reverse of what
+should have been.  A school of four languages in bracing air, if a school
+with healthy dormitories, and a school of the trained instincts we call
+gentlemanly, might suit Master Bobby for a trial.  An eye on the boys of
+the school would see in a minute what stuff they were made of.  Supposing
+this young Italianissimo with the English tongue to be tolerably near the
+mark, with a deduction of two-thirds of the enthusiasm, Bobby might stop
+at the school as long as his health held out, or the master would keep
+him.  Supposing half a dozen things and more, the meeting with this Mr.
+Calliand was a lucky accident.  But lucky accidents are anticipated only
+by fools.
+
+Lord Ormont consented to visit the school.  He handed his card and
+invited his guest; he had a carriage in waiting for the day, he said;
+and obedient to Lady Charlotte's injunctions, he withheld Philippa from
+the party.  She and her maid were to pass the five hours of his absence
+in efforts to keep their monkey Bobby out of the well of the solicitious
+bears.
+
+My lord left his carriage at the inn of the village lying below the
+school-house on a green height.  The young enthusiast was dancing him
+into the condition of livid taciturnity, which could, if it would, flash
+out pungent epigrams of the actual world at Operatic recitative.
+
+'There's the old school-clock!  Just in time for the half-hour before
+dinner,' said Calliani, chattering two hundred to the minute, of the
+habits and usages of the school, and how all had meals together, the
+master, his wife, the teachers, the boys.  'And she--as for her!'
+Calliani kissed finger up to the furthest skies: into which a self-
+respecting sober Northener of the Isles could imagine himself to kick
+enthusiastic gesticulators, if it were polite to do so.
+
+The school-house faced the master's dwelling house, and these, with a
+block of building, formed a three-sided enclosure, like barracks!  Forth
+from the school-house door burst a dozen shouting lads, as wasps from the
+hole of their nest from a charge of powder.  Out they poured whizzing;
+and the frog he leaped, and pussy ran and doubled before the hounds, and
+hockey-sticks waved, and away went a ball.  Cracks at the ball anyhow,
+was the game for the twenty-five minutes breather before dinner.
+
+'French day!' said Calliani, hearing their cries.  Then he bellowed
+'Matthew!--Giulio !'
+
+A lusty inversion of the order of the names and an Oberland jodel
+returned his hail.  The school retreating caught up the Alpine cry
+in the distance.  Here were lungs! Here were sprites!
+
+Lord Ormont bethought him of the name of the master.  'Mr. Matthew, I
+think you said, sir,' he was observing to Calliani, as the master came
+nearer; and Calliani replied: 'His Christian name.  But if the boys are
+naughty boys, it is not the privilege.  Mr. Weyburn.'
+
+There was not any necessity to pronounce that name Calliani spoke it on
+the rush to his friend.
+
+Lord Ormont and Weyburn advanced the steps to the meeting.  Neither of
+them flinched in eye or limb.
+
+At a corridor window of the dwelling-house a lady stood.  Her colour was
+the last of a summer day over western seas; her thought: 'It has come!'
+Her mind was in her sight; her other powers were frozen.
+
+The two men conversed.  There was no gesture.
+
+This is one of the lightning moments of life for the woman, at the
+meeting of the two men between whom her person has been in dispute, may
+still be; her soul being with one.  And that one, dearer than the blood
+of her body, imperilled by her.
+
+She could ask why she exists, if a question were in her grasp.  She would
+ask for the meaning of the gift of beauty to the woman, making her
+desireable to those two men, making her a cause of strife, a thing of
+doom.  An incessant clamour dinned about her: 'It has come!'
+
+The two men walked conversing into the school-house.  She was unconscious
+of the seeing of a third, though she saw and at the back of her mind
+believed she knew a friend in him.  The two disappeared.  She was
+insensible stone, except for the bell-clang: 'It has come'; until they
+were in view again, still conversing: and the first of her thought to
+stir from petrifaction was: 'Life holds no secret.'
+
+She tried, in shame of the inanimate creature she had become,
+to force herself to think: and had, for a chastising result, a series
+of geometrical figures shooting across her brain, mystically expressive
+of the situation, not communicably.  The most vivid and persistent was a
+triangle.  Interpret who may.  The one beheld the two pass from view
+again, still conversing.
+
+They are on the gravel; they bow; they separate.  He of the grey head
+poised high has gone.
+
+Her arm was pressed by a hand.  Weyburn longed to enfold her, and she
+desired it, and her soul praised him for refraining.  Both had that
+delicacy.
+
+'You have seen, my darling,' Weyburn said.  'It has come, and we take our
+chance.  He spoke not one word, beyond the affairs of the school.  He has
+a grandnephew in want of a school: visited the dormitories, refectory,
+and sheds: tasted the well-water, addressed me as Mr. Matthew.  He had it
+from Giulio.  Came to look at the school of Giulio's "friend Matthew,":
+--you hear him.  Giulio little imagines!--Well, dear love, we stand with
+a squad in front, and wait the word.  It mayn't be spoken.  We have
+counted long before that something like it was bound to happen.  And
+you are brave.  Ruin's an empty word for us two.'
+
+'Yes, dear, it is: we will pay what is asked of us,' Aminta said.  'It
+will be heavy, if the school .  .  .  and I love our boys.  I am fit to
+be the school-housekeeper; for nothing else.'
+
+'I will go to the boys' parents.  At the worst, we can march into new
+territory.  Emile will stick to us.  Adolf, too.  The fresh flock will
+come.'
+
+Aminta cried in the voice of tears: 'I love the old so!'
+
+'The likelihood is, we shall hear nothing further.'
+
+'You had to bear the shock, Matthew.'
+
+'Whatever I bore, and you saw, you shared.'
+
+'Yes,' she said.
+
+'Mais, n'oublions pas que c'est aujourd'hui jour francais; si, madame,
+vous avez assez d'appetit pour diner avec nous?
+
+'Je suis, comme toujours, aux ordres de Monsieur.'  She was among the
+bravest of women.  She had a full ounce of lead in her breast when she
+sat with the boys at their midday meal, showing them her familiar
+pleasant face.
+
+Shortly after the hour of the evening meal, a messenger from Bern
+delivered a letter addressed to the Headmaster.  Weyburn and Aminta were
+strolling to the playground, thinking in common, as they usually did.
+They read the letter together.  These were the lines:
+
+'Lord Ormont desires to repeat his sense of obligation to Mr. Matthew for
+the inspection of the school under his charge, and will be thankful to
+Mr. Calliani, if that gentleman will do him the favour to call at his
+hotel at Bern to-morrow, at as early an hour as is convenient to him, for
+the purpose of making arrangements, agreeable to the Head-master's rules,
+for receiving his grandnephew Robert Benlew as a pupil at the school.'
+
+The two raised eyes on one another, pained in their deep joy by the
+religion of the restraint upon their hearts, to keep down the passion to
+embrace.
+
+'I thank heaven we know him to be one of the true noble men,' said
+Aminta, now breathing, and thanking Lord Ormont for the free breath
+she drew.
+
+Weyburn spoke of an idea he had gathered from the earl's manner.  But he
+had not imagined the proud lord's great-heartedness would go so far as to
+trust him with the guardianship of the boy.  That moved, and that humbled
+him, though it was far from humiliating.
+
+Six months later, the brief communication arrived from Lady Charlotte
+
+'She is a widow.
+
+'Unlikely you will hear from me again.  Death is always next door, you
+said once.  I look on the back of life.
+
+'Tell Bobby, capital for him to write he has no longing for home
+holidays.  If any one can make a man of him, you will.  That I know.
+
+                                   'CHARLOTTE EGLETT.'
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+
+Affected misapprehensions
+Any excess pushes to craziness
+Bad laws are best broken
+Being in heart and mind the brother to the sister with women
+Bounds of his intelligence closed their four walls
+Boys, of course--but men, too!
+But had sunk to climb on a firmer footing
+Challenged him to lead up to her desired stormy scene
+Could we--we might be friends
+Death is always next door
+Desire of it destroyed it
+Detestable feminine storms enveloping men weak enough
+Distaste for all exercise once pleasurable
+Divided lovers in presence
+Enthusiasm struck and tightened the loose chord of scepticism
+Exult in imagination of an escape up to the moment of capture
+Greatest of men; who have to learn from the loss of the woman
+He gave a slight sign of restiveness, and was allowed to go
+He had gone, and the day lived again for both of them
+I look on the back of life
+I married a cook  She expects a big appetite
+I want no more, except to be taught to work
+If the world is hostile we are not to blame it
+Increase of dissatisfaction with the more she got
+Learn--principally not to be afraid of ideas
+Look well behind
+Lucky accidents are anticipated only by fools
+Magnify an offence in the ratio of our vanity
+Man who helps me to read the world and men as they are
+Meant to vanquish her with the dominating patience
+Napoleon's treatment of women is excellent example
+Necessity's offspring
+One has to feel strong in a delicate position
+Our love and labour are constantly on trial
+Perhaps inspire him, if he would let her breathe
+Person in another world beyond this world of blood
+Practical for having an addiction to the palpable
+Screams of an uninjured lady
+Selfishness  and icy inaccessibility to emotion
+She had a thirsting mind
+She had to be the hypocrite or else--leap
+Silence was doing the work of a scourge
+Smile she had in reserve for serviceable persons
+Snatch her from a possessor who forfeited by undervaluing her
+So says the minute  Years are before you
+The next ten minutes will decide our destinies
+The woman side of him
+There are women who go through life not knowing love
+There is no history of events below the surface
+They want you to show them what they 'd like the world to be
+Things are not equal
+Titles showered on the women who take free breath of air
+Violent summons to accept, which is a provocation to deny
+We don't go together into a garden of roses
+Why he enjoyed the privilege of seeing, and was not beside her
+Women are happier enslaved
+World against us  It will not keep us from trying to serve
+Years are the teachers of the great rocky natures
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+***********************************************************************
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+
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