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 Latest Date stamped below. 
 
 University of Illinois Library 
 
 JUL ^gio,. 
 
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 Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
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 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
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 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 This Edition, in 3 Vols., consists of 1500 copies.
 
 LORD OPiMONT AND HIS AMINTA 
 
 H IRovel 
 
 BY 
 
 GEOKGE MEREDITH 
 
 IN THREE VOLUMES 
 VOL. I. 
 
 LONDON : CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ld. 
 
 1894 
 
 [All rights rcseyved]
 
 Richard Clay & Sons, Limited. 
 London & Bungay.
 
 
 ^ TO 
 
 GEORGE BUCKSTON BROWNE, 
 
 SURGEON. 
 J 
 
 Jt 

 
 CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. LOVE AT A SCHOOL ... ... ... 1 
 
 II. LADY CHARLOTTE ... ... ... ... 39 
 
 III. THE TUTOR ... ... ... ... 77 
 
 IV. RECOGNITION ... ... ... ... 118 
 
 V. IN WHICH THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND 
 
 MATEY ADVANCE AND RETIRE ... 140 
 
 VI. IN A MOOD OP LANGUOR ... ... ... 169 
 
 VII. EXHIBITS EFFECTS OP A PRATTLER's DOSES 200 
 
 VIII. MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY ... ... 219
 
 ■*f%
 
 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 
 
 A PROCESSION of schoolboys having to 
 meet a procession of schoolgirls on the 
 Sunday's dead march, called a walk, round 
 the park, could hardly go by without 
 dropping to a hum in its chatter, and the 
 shot of incurious half-eyes at the petticoated 
 creatures — all so much of a swarm unless 
 you stare at them like lanterns. The boys 
 cast a glance because it relieved their heavi- 
 ness ; things were lumpish and gloomy 
 that day of the week. The girls, who 
 
 VOL. L B
 
 2 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 sped their peep of inquisition before the 
 moment of transit, let it be seen that 
 they had minds occupied with thoughts 
 of their own. 
 
 Our gallant fellows forgot the intrusion 
 of the foreign body as soon as it had passed. 
 A sarcastic discharge was jerked by chance 
 at the usher and the governess — at the old 
 game, it seemed ; or why did they keep 
 steering the columns to meet ? There was 
 no fun in meeting ; and it would never 
 be happening every other Sunday, and 
 oftener, by sheer toss-penny accident. 
 They were moved like pieces for the plea- 
 sure of these two. 
 
 Sometimes the meeting occurred twice 
 during the stupid march-out, when it 
 became so nearly vexatious to boys almost 
 biliously oppressed by the tedium of a day 
 merely allowing them to shove the legs 
 along, ironically naming it animal exercise, 
 that some among them pronounced the
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. S 
 
 sham variation of monotony to be a bother- 
 ing nuisance if it was going to happen 
 every Sunday, though Sunday required 
 diversions. They hated the absurdity in 
 this meeting and meeting; for they were 
 obliged to anticipate it, as a part of their 
 ignominious weekly performance ; and they 
 could not avoid reflecting on it, as a thing 
 done over again : it had them in front and 
 in rear ; and it was a kind of broadside 
 mirror, flashing at them the exact opposite 
 of themselves in an identically similar 
 situation, that forced a resemblance. 
 
 Touching the old game, Cuper's fold was 
 a healthy school, owing to the good lead 
 of the head boy. Matey Weyburn, a lad 
 with a heart for games to bring renown, 
 and no thought about girls. His emulation, 
 the fellows fancied, was for getting the 
 school into a journal of the Sports. He 
 used to read one sent him by a sporting 
 oflicer of his name, and talk enviously of
 
 4 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 public schools, printed whatever they did — 
 a privilege and dignity of which they had 
 unrivalled enjoyment in the past days, 
 when wealth was more jealously exclusive ; 
 and he was always prompting for challenges 
 and saving up to pay expenses ; and the 
 fellows were to laugh at kicks and learn 
 the art of self-defence — train to rejoice in 
 whipcord muscles. The son of a tradesman, 
 if a boy fell under the imputation, was 
 worthy of honour with him, let the fellow 
 but show grip and toughness. He loathed 
 a skulker, and his face was known for any 
 boy who would own to fatigue or confess 
 himself beaten. "Go to bed," was one of 
 his terrible stings. Matey was good at 
 lessons, too — liked them ; liked Latin and 
 Greek ; would help a poor stumbler. 
 
 Where he did such good work was in 
 sharpening the fellows to excel. He kept 
 them to the grindstone, so that they had 
 no time for rusty brooding ; and it was not
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 5 
 
 done by exhortations off a pedestal, like St. 
 Paul at the Athenians. It breathed out of 
 him every day of the week. He carried a 
 light for followers. Whatever he demanded 
 of them, he himself did it easily. He 
 would say to boys " You're going to be 
 men," meaning something better than 
 women. There was a notion that Matey 
 despised girls. Consequently, never much 
 esteemed, they were in disfavour. The old 
 game was mentioned only because of a 
 tradition of an usher and governess leering 
 sick eyes until they slunk away round a 
 corner and married, and set up a school 
 for themselves — an emasculate ending. 
 Comment on it came of a design to show 
 that the whole game had been examined 
 and dismissed as uninteresting and 
 profitless. 
 
 One of the boys alluded in Matey's 
 presence to their general view upon the 
 part played by womankind on the human
 
 6 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 stage, confident of a backing ; and lie had 
 it, in a way : their noble chief whisked the 
 subject was not worth a discussion ; but he 
 turned to a younger chap, who said he 
 detested girls, and asked him how about 
 a sister at home ; and the youngster 
 coloured, and Matey took him and spun 
 him round, with a friendly tap on the 
 shoulder. 
 
 Odd remarks at intervals caused it to be 
 suspected that he had ideas concerning 
 girls. They were high as his head above 
 the school ; and there they were left, with 
 Algebra and Homer, for they were not of 
 a sort to inflame ; until the boys noticed 
 how he gave up sjDcaking, and fell to hard 
 looking, on the march past Miss Vincent's 
 young ladies. A well-grown girl (calling 
 herself young lady) made usually the left 
 of the second couple from the front of the 
 line of bonnets, and was by consent good- 
 looking, though she was dark enough to get
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 7 
 
 herself named Browny. In the absence of 
 a fair girl of equal height to set beside her, 
 Browny shone. 
 
 She had a nice mouth, ready for a smile 
 at the corners ; or so it was before Matey 
 let her see that she was his mark. Now 
 she kept her mouth asleep and her eyes 
 half down, up to the moment of her nearing 
 to pass, when the girl opened on him, as 
 if lifting her eyelids from sleep to the 
 window, a full side-look, like a throb, and 
 no disguise — no slyness or boldness either, 
 not a bit of languishing. You might think 
 her heart came quietly out. 
 
 The look was like the fall of light on 
 the hills from the first of morning. It 
 lasted half a minute, and left a ruffle for 
 a good half-hour. Even the younger fellows, 
 without knowing what affected them, were 
 moved by the new picture of a girl, as if 
 it had been a frontispiece of a romantic 
 story some day to be read. She looked
 
 8 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 compelled to look, but consenting and un- 
 ashamed ; at home in submission ; just the 
 look that wins observant boys, shrewd as 
 dogs to read by signs, if they are interested 
 in the persons. They read Browny's mean- 
 ing : that Matey had only to come and 
 snatch her; he was her master, and she 
 was a brave girl, ready to go all over the 
 world with him ; had taken to him as he 
 to her, shot for shot. Her taking to the 
 pick of the school was a capital proof that 
 she was of the right sort. To be sure, 
 she could not much help herself. 
 
 Some of the boys regretted her not 
 being fair. But, as they felt, and sought 
 to explain, in the manner of the wag of 
 a tail, with elbows and eyebrows to one 
 another's understanding, fair girls could 
 never have let fly such a look ; fair girls 
 are softer, woollier, and when they mean 
 to look serious, overdo it by craping 
 solemn ; or they pinafore a jigging eagerness,
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 9 
 
 or hoist propriety on a chubby flaxen grin ; 
 or else they dart an eye, or they mince 
 and prim and pout, and are sigh-away 
 and dying-ducky, given to girls' tricks. 
 Browny, after all, was the girl for Matey. 
 
 She won a victory right away and out 
 of hand, on behalf of her cloud-and-moon 
 sisters, as against the sunny-meadowy; 
 for slanting intermediates are not espied 
 of boys in anything : conquered by Browny, 
 they went over to her colour, equal to 
 arguing, that Venus at her mightiest must 
 have been dark, or she would not have 
 stood a comparison with the forest Goddess 
 of the Crescent, swanning it through a 
 lake — on the leap for the run of the chase — 
 watching the dart, with her humming bow 
 at breast. The fair are simple sugary 
 things, prone to fat, like bread-sops in milk ; 
 but the others are milky nuts, good to bite, 
 Lacedaemonian virgins, hard to beat, putting 
 us on our mettle ; and they are for heroes,
 
 10 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 and they can be brave. So these boys 
 felt, conquered by Browny. A sneaking 
 native taste for the forsaken side, known 
 to renegades, hauled at them if her image 
 waned during the week; and it waned a 
 little, but Sunday restored and stamped it. 
 
 By a sudden turn the whole upper-school 
 had fallen to thinking of girls, and the 
 meeting on the Sunday was a prospect. 
 One of the day-boarders had a sister in the 
 seminary of Miss Vincent. He was plied 
 to obtain information concerning Browny' s 
 name and her parents. He had it pat to 
 hand in answer. No parents came to see 
 her; an aunt came now and then. Her 
 aunt's name was not wanted. Browny's 
 name was Aminta Farrell. 
 
 Farrell might pass ; Aminta was debated. 
 This female Christian name had a foreign 
 twang; it gave dissatisfaction. Boy after 
 boy had a try at it, with the same effect : 
 you could not speak the name without a
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 11 
 
 pursing of the moutli and a puckering of 
 the nose, beastly to see, as one little fellow 
 reminded them on a day when Matey was 
 in more than common favour, topping a 
 pitch of rapture, for clean bowling, first 
 ball, middle stump on the kick, the best 
 bat of the other eleven in a match ; and, 
 says this youngster, drawling, soon after the 
 cheers and claps had subsided to business, 
 " Aminta." 
 
 He made it funny by saying it as if to 
 himself and the ground, in a subdued way, 
 while he swung his leg on a half- circle, like 
 a skater, hands in pockets. He was a sly 
 young rascal, innocently precocious enough, 
 and he meant no disrespect either to Browny 
 or to Matey ; but he had to run for it, his 
 delivery of the name being so like what was 
 in the breasts of the senior fellows, as to 
 the inferiority of any Aminta to old Matey, 
 that be set them laughing ; and Browny 
 was on the field, to reprove them, left of
 
 12 LOKD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 the tea-booth, with her school-mates, part of 
 her head under a scarlet parasol. 
 
 A girl with such a name as Aminta might 
 not be exactly up to the standard of old 
 Matey, still, if he thought her so and she 
 had spirit, the school was bound to sub- 
 scribe ; and that look of hers warranted her 
 for taking her share in the story, like the 
 brigand's wife loading guns for him while 
 he knocks over the foremost carabineer on 
 the mountain-ledge below, who drops on 
 his back with a hellish expression. 
 
 Browny was then clearly seen all round, 
 instead of only front-face, as on the Sunday 
 in the park, when fellows could not spy 
 backward after passing. The pleasure they 
 had in seeing her all round involved no 
 fresh stores of observation, for none could 
 tell how she tied her back-hair, which was 
 the question put to them by a cynic of a 
 boy, said to be queasy with excess of sisters. 
 They could tell that she was tall for a girl.
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 13 
 
 or tallisli — not a maypole. She drank a 
 cup of tea, and ate a slice of bread-and- 
 butter ; no cake. 
 
 She appeared undisturbed when Matey, 
 wearing his holiday white ducks, and all 
 aglow, entered the booth. She was not 
 expected to faint, only she stood for the 
 foreign Aminta more than for their familiar 
 Browny in his presence. Not a sign of the 
 look which had fired the school did she 
 throw at him. Change the colour and you 
 might compare her to a bolster fixed on end, 
 with a chin and no eyes. Matey talked to 
 Miss Vincent up to the instant of his run- 
 ning to bat. She would have liked to guess 
 how he knew she had a brother on the 
 medical staff of one of the regiments in 
 India : she asked him twice, and his cheeks 
 were redder than cricket in the sun. He 
 said he read all the reports from India, and 
 asked her whether she did not admire Lord 
 Ormont, our general of cavalry, whose
 
 14 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 charge at the head of fifteen hundred horse 
 in the last great battle shattered the enemy's 
 right wing, and gave us the victory — rolled 
 him up and stretched ^him out like a carpet 
 for dusting. Miss Vincent exclaimed that 
 it was really strange, now, he should speak 
 of Lord Ormont, for she had been speaking 
 of him herself in the morning to one of her 
 young ladies, whose mind was bent on his 
 heroical deeds. Matey turned his face to 
 the group of young ladies, quite pleased 
 that one of them loved his hero ; and he 
 met a smile here and there — not from Miss 
 Aminta Farrell. She was a complete dis- 
 appointment to the boys that day. "Aminta " 
 was mouthed at any allusion to her. 
 
 So, she not being a match for Matey, 
 they let her drop. The flush that had 
 swept across the school withered to a 
 dry recollection, except when on one of their 
 Sunday afternoons she fanned the desert. 
 Lord Ormont became the subject of inquiry
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 15 
 
 and conversation ; and for liis own sake — 
 not altogether to gratify Matey. The 
 Saturday autumn evening's walk home, 
 after the race out to tea at a distant village, 
 too late in the year for cricket, too early for 
 regular football, suited Matey, going at long 
 strides, for the story of his hero's adven- 
 tures ; and it was nicer than talk about 
 girls, and puzzling. Here lay a clear field ; 
 for he had the right to speak of a cavalry 
 officer : his father died of wounds in the 
 service, and Matey naturally intended to 
 join the Dragoons, if he could get enough 
 money to pay for mess, he said, laughing. 
 Lord Ormont was his pattern of a warrior. 
 We had in him a lord who cast off luxury 
 to live like a Spartan when under arms, 
 with a passion to serve his country and 
 sustain the glory of our military annals. 
 He revived respect for the noble class in 
 the hearts of Englishmen. He was as good 
 an authority on horseflesh as any EngHsh-
 
 16 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 man alive ; the best for the management of 
 cavalry : there never was a better cavalry 
 leader. The boys had come to know that 
 Browny admired Lord Ormont, so they saw 
 a double reason why Matey should ; and 
 walking home at his grand swing in the 
 October dusk, their school hero drew their 
 national hero closer to them. 
 
 Every fellow present was dead against 
 the usher, Mr. Shalders, when he took 
 advantage of a pause to strike in with his 
 " Murat ! " 
 
 He harped on Murat whenever he had a 
 chance. Now he did it for the purpose of 
 casting eclipse upon Major-General Lord 
 Ormont, the son and grandson of English 
 earls ; for he was an earl by his title, and 
 Murat was the son of an innkeeper. Shalders 
 had to admit that Murat might have served 
 in the stables as a boy. Honour to Murat, 
 of course, for climbing the peaks ! Shalders, 
 too, might interest himself in military
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 17 
 
 affairs and Murat ; he did no liarm, and lie 
 could be amusing. It rather added to his 
 amount of dignity. It was rather absurd, 
 at the same time, for an English usher to 
 be spouting and glowing about a French 
 General, who had been a stable-boy and 
 became a king, with his Murat this, Murat 
 that, and hurrah Murat in red and white 
 and green uniform, tunic, and breeches, and 
 a chimney- afire of feathers ; and how the 
 giant he was charged at the head of ten 
 thousand horse, all going like a cataract 
 under a rainbow over the rocks, right into 
 the middle of the enemy and through ; and 
 he a spark ahead, and the enemy streaming 
 on all sides flat away, as you see pufl'ed 
 smoke and flame of a bonfire. That was 
 fun to set boys jigging. No wonder how in 
 Kussia the Cossacks feared him, and scamp- 
 ered from the shadow of his plumes — were 
 clouds flying off" his breath ! That was a 
 
 fine warm picture for the boys on late 
 VOL. I. c
 
 18 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 autumn or early winter evenings, Shalders 
 warming his back at the grate, describing 
 bivouacs in the snow. They liked well 
 enough to hear him when he was not oppos- 
 ing Matey and Lord Ormont. He perked 
 on his toes, and fetched his hand from 
 behind him to flourish it when his Murat 
 came out. The speaking of the name 
 clapped him on horseback — the only horse- 
 back he ever knew. He was as fond of 
 giving out the name Murat as you see 
 in old engravings of tobacco -shops men 
 enjoying the emission of their whiff of 
 smoke. 
 
 Matey was not inclined to class Lord 
 Ormont alongside Murat, a first-rate horse- 
 man and an eagle- eye, as Shalders rightly 
 said ; and Matey agreed that forty thousand 
 cavalry under your orders is a toss above 
 fifteen hundred ; but the claim for a French- 
 man of a superlative merit to swallow and 
 make nothing of the mention of our best
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 19 
 
 cavalry generals irritated him to call Murat 
 a mountebank. 
 
 Shalders retorted, that Lord Ormont was 
 a reprobate. 
 
 Matey hoped he would some day write 
 us an essay on the morals of illustrious 
 generals of cavalry ; and Shalders told him 
 he did not advance his case by talking 
 nonsense. 
 
 Each then repeated to the boys a famous 
 exploit of his hero. Their verdict was 
 favourable to Lord Ormont. Our English 
 General learnt riding before he was ten 
 years old, on the Pampas, where you ride 
 all day, and cook your steak for your dinner 
 between your seat and your saddle. He 
 rode with his father and his uncle, Mun- 
 castle, the famous traveller, into Paraguay. 
 He saw fighting before he was twelve. 
 Before he was twenty he was learning out- 
 post duty in the Austrian frontier cavalry. 
 He served in the Peninsula, served in
 
 20 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 Canada, served in India, volunteered for 
 any chance of distinction. No need to say 
 much of his mastering the picked Indian 
 swordsmen in single combat : he knew their 
 trick, and was quick to save his reins when 
 they made a dash threatening the head- 
 stroke — about the same as disabling sails in 
 old naval engagements. 
 
 That was the part for the officer ; we are 
 speaking of the General. For that matter, 
 he had as keen an eye for the field and the 
 moment for his arm to strike as any Murat. 
 One would have liked to see Murat matched 
 against the sabre of a wily Eajpoot ! As 
 to campaigns and strategy, Lord Ormont's 
 head was a map. What of Murat and Lord 
 Ormont horse to horse and sword to sword ? 
 Come, imagine that, if you are for com- 
 parisons. And if Lord Ormont never headed 
 a lot of thousands, it does not prove he was 
 unable. Lord Ormont was as big as Murat. 
 More, he was a Christian to his horses.
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 21 
 
 How about Murat in tliat respect ? Lord 
 Ormont cared for his men : did Murat so 
 particularly much ? And he was as cunning 
 fronting odds, and a thunderbolt at the 
 charge. Why speak of him in the past ? 
 He is an English lord, a lord by birth, and 
 he is alive ; things may be expected of him 
 to-morrow or next day. 
 
 Shalders here cut Matey short by meanly 
 objecting to that. 
 
 " Men are mortal," he said, with a lot of 
 pretended stuff, deploring our human con- 
 dition in the elegy strain ; and he fell to 
 reckoning the English hero's age — as that 
 he, Lord Ormont, had been a name in the 
 world for the last twenty-five years or more. 
 The noble lord could be no chicken. We 
 are justified in calculating, by the course of 
 nature, that his term of activity is approach- 
 ing, or has approached, or, in fact, has 
 drawn to its close. 
 
 " If your estimate, sir, approaches to
 
 22 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 correctness," rejoined Matey — tellingly, his 
 comrades thought. 
 
 " Sixty, as you may learn some day, is a 
 serious age, Matthew Weyburn." 
 
 Matey said he should be happy to reach 
 it with half the honours Lord Ormont had 
 won. 
 
 " Excepting the duels," Shalders had the 
 impudence to say. 
 
 " If the cause is a good one ! " cried 
 Matey. 
 
 " The cause, or Lord Ormont has been 
 maligned, was reprehensible in the ex- 
 tremest degree." Shalders cockhorsed on 
 his heels to his toes and back with a bang. 
 
 " What was the cause, if you please, sir ? " 
 a boy, probably naughty, inquired ; and, as 
 Shalders did not vouchsafe a re]3ly, the 
 bigger boys knew. 
 
 They revelled in the devilish halo of 
 skirts on the whirl encircling Lord Ormont's 
 laurelled head.
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 23 
 
 That was a spark in their blood struck 
 from a dislike of the tone assumed by 
 Mr. Shalders to sustain his argument; 
 with his " men. are mortal," and talk of 
 a true living champion as "no chicken," 
 and the wordy drawl over "justification 
 for calculating the approach of a close to 
 a term of activity " — in the case of a proved 
 hero ! 
 
 Guardians of boys should make sure that 
 the boys are on their side before they raise 
 the standard of virtue. Nor ought they 
 to summon morality for support of a 
 polemic. Matey Wey burn's object of wor- 
 ship rode superior to a morality puffing 
 its phrasy trumpet. And, somehow, the 
 sacrifice of an enormous number of women 
 to Lord Ormont's glory seemed natural ; 
 the very thing that should be, in the case 
 of a first-rate military hero and commander 
 — Scipio notwithstanding. It brightens his 
 flame, and it is agreeable to them. That
 
 24 LOED ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 is how they come to distinction : they have 
 no other chance ; they are only women ; 
 they are mad to be singed, and they rush 
 pell-mell, all for the honour of the candle. 
 
 Shortly after this discussion Matey was 
 heard informing some of the bigger fellows 
 he could tell them positively that Lord 
 Ormont's age was under fifty-four — the 
 prime of manhood, and a jolly long way off 
 death ! The greater credit to him, therefore, 
 if he had been a name in the world for 
 anything like the period Shalders insinuated, 
 "to get himself out of a sad quandary." 
 Matey sounded the queer word so as to fix it 
 sticking to the usher, calling him Mr. Peter 
 Bell Shalders, at which the boys roared, and 
 there was a question or two about names, 
 which belonged to verses, for people caring 
 to read poems. 
 
 To the joy of the school he displayed a 
 greater knowledge of Murat than Shalders 
 had : named the different places in Europe
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 25 
 
 where Lord Ormont and Murat were both 
 springing to the saddle at the same time — 
 one a Marshal, the other a lieutenant; one 
 a king, to be off his throne any day, the 
 other a born English nobleman, seated firm 
 as fate. And he accused Murat of careless- 
 ness of his horses, ingratitude to his bene- 
 factor, circussy style. Shalders went so far 
 as to defend Murat for attending to the 
 affairs of his kingdom, instead of galloping 
 over hedges and ditches to swell Napoleon's 
 ranks in distress. Matey listened to him 
 there ; he became grave ; he nodded like a 
 man saying, " I suppose we must examine 
 it in earnest." The school was damped to 
 hear him calling it a nice question. Still, 
 he said he thought he should have gone ; 
 and that settled it. 
 
 The boys inclined to speak contemptuously 
 of Shalders. Matey would not let them ; 
 he contrasted Shalders with the other ushers, 
 who had no enthusiasms. He said entliu-
 
 26 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 siasms were salt to a man ; and he liked 
 Slialders for spelling at his battles and 
 thinking he understood them, and admiring 
 Murat, and reading Virgil and parts of 
 Lucan for his recreation. He said he liked 
 the French because they could be splendidly 
 enthusiastic. He almost lost his English 
 flavour when he spoke in downright 
 approval of a small French fellow, coming 
 from Orthez, near the Pyrenees, for sense- 
 lessly dashing and kicking at a couple of 
 English who jeered to hear Orthez named — 
 a place trampled under Wellington's heels, 
 on his march across conquered France. 
 The foreign little cockerel was a clever lad, 
 learning English fast, and anxious to show 
 he had got hold of the English trick of not 
 knowing when he was beaten. His French 
 vanity insisted on his engaging the two, 
 though one of them stood aside, and the 
 other let him drive his nose all the compass 
 round at a poker fist. What was worse.
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 27 
 
 Matey examined these two, in the interests 
 of fair play, as if he doubted. 
 
 Little Emile Grenat set matters right 
 with his boast to vindicate his country 
 against double the number, and Matey 
 praised him, though he knew Emile had 
 been floored without effort by the extension 
 of a single fist. He would not hear the 
 French abused ; he said they were chival- 
 rous, they were fine fellows, topping the 
 world in some things ; his father had fought 
 them and learnt to respect them. Perhaps 
 his father had learnt to respect Jews, for 
 there was a boy named Abner, he pro- 
 tected, who smelt Jewish ; he said they ran 
 us Gentiles hard, and carried big guns. 
 
 Only a reputation like Matey's could 
 have kept his leadership from a challenge. 
 Joseph Masner, fomerly a rival, went about 
 hinting and shrugging; all to no purpose, 
 you find boys born to be chiefs. On the 
 day of the snow-fight Matey won the toss,
 
 28 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 and cliose J. Masner first pick ; and Masner, 
 aged seventeen and some months, big as a 
 navvy, lumbered across to him and took his 
 directions, proud to stand in the front 
 centre, at the head of the attack, and bear 
 the brunt — just what he was fit for. Matey 
 gave no offence by choosing, half-way down 
 the list, his little French friend, whom he 
 stationed beside himself, rather off his battle- 
 front, as at point at cricket, not quite so far 
 removed. Two boys at his heels piled 
 ammunition. The sides met midway of a 
 marshy ground, where a couple of flat and 
 shelving banks, formed for a broad new 
 road, good for ten abreast (counting a step 
 of the slopes), ran transverse ; and the order 
 of the game was to clear the bank and drive 
 the enemy on to the frozen ditch-water. 
 Miss Vincent heard in the morning from 
 the sister of little Collett of the great 
 engagement coming off; she was moved 
 by curiosity, and so the young ladies of her
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 29 
 
 establisliment beheld the young gentlemen 
 of Mr. Cuper's in furious division, and 
 Matey's sure aim and hard fling, equal to a 
 slinger's, relieving J. Masner of a foremost 
 assailant with a spanker on the nob. They 
 may have fancied him clever for selecting a 
 position rather comfortable, as things went, 
 until they had sight of him with his little 
 French ally and two others, ammunition 
 boys to rear, descending one bank and 
 scaling another right into the flank of the 
 enemy, when his old tower of a Masner was 
 being heavily pressed by numbers. Then 
 came a fight hand to hand, but the enemy 
 stood in a clamp ; not to split like a nut 
 between crackers, they gave way and rolled, 
 backing in lumps from bank to ditch. 
 
 The battle was over before the young 
 ladies knew. They wondered to see Matey 
 shuflfling on his coat and hopping along at 
 easy bounds to pay his respects to Miss 
 Vincent, near whom was Browny ; and tliis
 
 30 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 time he and Browny talked together. He 
 then introduced little ]5mile to her. She 
 spoke of Napoleon at Brienne, and comj^li- 
 mented Matey. He said he was cavalry, 
 not artillery, that day. They talked to hear 
 one another's voices. By constantly ap- 
 pealing to Miss Vincent he made their 
 conversation together seem as under her 
 conduct ; and she took a slide on some 
 French phrases with little Emile. Her 
 young ladies looked shrinking and envious 
 to see the fellows wet to the skin, laughing, 
 wrestling, linking arms ; and some, who 
 were clown- faced with a wipe of scarlet, 
 getting friends to rub their cheeks with 
 snow, all of them happy as larks in air, a 
 big tea steaming for them at the school. 
 Those girls had a leap and a fall of the 
 heart, glad to hug themselves in their dry 
 clothes, and not so warm as the dripping 
 boys were, nor so madly fond of their dress- 
 circle seats to look on at a play they
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 31 
 
 were not allowed even to desire to share. 
 They looked on at blows given and taken in 
 good temper, hardship sharpening jollity. 
 The thought of the difference between 
 themselves and the boys must have been 
 something like the tight band — call it 
 corset — over the chest, trying to lift and 
 stretch for draughts of air. But Browny's 
 feeling naturally was, that all this advantage 
 for the boys came of Matey Weyburn's 
 lead. 
 
 Miss Vincent with her young ladies 
 walked off in couples, orderly chicks, the 
 usual Sunday march of their every day. 
 The school was coolish to them ; one of the 
 fellows hummed bars of some hymn tune, 
 rather faster than church ; and next day 
 there was a murmur of letters passing 
 between Matey and Browny regularly, little 
 Collett for postman. Anybody might have 
 guessed it, but the report spread a feeling 
 that girls are not the entirely artificial
 
 32 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 beings or flat targets we suppose. The 
 school began to brood, like air deadening on 
 oven-heat. Winter is hen-mother to the 
 idea of love in schools, if the idea has fairly 
 entered. Various girls of difl'erent colours 
 were selected by boys for animated corre- 
 spondence, that never existed and was 
 vigorously prosecuted, with efl'orts to re- 
 press contempt of them in courtship for 
 their afi'ections. They found their part of 
 it by no means difficult when they imagined 
 the lines without the words, or, better still, 
 the letter without the lines. A holy satis- 
 faction belonged to the sealed thing; the 
 breaking of the seal and inspection of the 
 contents imposed perplexity on that senti- 
 ment. They thought of certain possible 
 sentences Matey and Browny would ex- 
 change ; but the plain, conceivable, almost 
 visible, outside of the letter had a stronger 
 spell for them than the visionary inside. 
 This fancied contemplation of the love-letter
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 33 
 
 was reversed in them at once by the start- 
 ling news of Miss Vincent's discovery and 
 seizure of the sealed thing, and her exami- 
 nation of the burden it contained. Then 
 their thirst was for drama — to see, to drink 
 every wonderful syllable those lovers had 
 written. 
 
 Miss Vincent's hand was upon one of 
 Matey's letters. She had come across the 
 sister of little CoUett, Selina her name was, 
 carrying it. She saw nothing of the others. 
 Aminta was not the girl to let her. Nor 
 did Mr. Cuper dare demand from Matey 
 a sight or restitution of the young lady's 
 half of the correspondence. He preached 
 heavily at Matey ; deplored that the boy he 
 most trusted, etc. — the school could have 
 repeated it without hearing. We know 
 the master's lecture in tones — it sings up to 
 sing down, and touches nobody. As soon 
 as he dropped to natural talk, and spoke of 
 his responsibility and Miss Vincent's, Matey 
 
 VOL. I. D
 
 34 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 gave the word of a man of honour that he 
 would not seek to communicate further with 
 Miss Farrell at the school. 
 
 Now there was a regular thunder-hush 
 among the boys on the rare occasions when 
 they met the girls. All that Matey and 
 Browny were forbidden to write they looked 
 — much like what it had been before the 
 discovery ; and they dragged the boys back 
 from promised instant events. It was, 
 nevertheless, a heaving picture, like the sea 
 in the background of a marine piece at the 
 theatre, which rouses anticipations of storm, 
 and shows readiness. Browny's full eye- 
 brow sat on her dark eye like a cloud of 
 winter noons over the vanishing sun. 
 Matey was the prisoner gazing at light of a 
 barred window and measuring the strength 
 of the bars. She looked unhappy, but 
 looked unbeaten more. Her look at him 
 fed the school on thoughts of what love 
 really is, when it is not fished out of
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 35 
 
 books and poetry. For tliougli she was 
 pale, starved and pale, they could see she 
 was never the one to be sighing ; and as for 
 him, he looked ground down all to edge. 
 However much they puzzled over things, 
 she made them feel they were sure, as to her, 
 that she drove straight and meant blood, 
 the life or death of it : all her own, if need 
 be, and confidence in the captain she had 
 chosen. She could have been imagined 
 saying, There's a storm, but I am ready to 
 embark with you this minute. 
 
 That sign of courage in real danger 
 ennobled her among girls. The name 
 Browny was put aside for a respectful 
 Aminta. Big and bright events to come 
 out in the world were hinted, from the love 
 of such a couple. The boys were not 
 ashamed to speak the very word love. 
 How he does love that girl ! Well, and 
 how she loves him ! She did, but the boys 
 had to be seeing her look at Matey if they
 
 36 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 were to put the girl on some balanced 
 equality with a fellow she was compelled to 
 love. It seemed to them that he gave, and 
 that she was a creature carried to him, like 
 driftwood along the current of the flood, 
 given, in spite of herself. When they saw 
 those eyes of hers they were impressed with 
 an idea of her as a voluntary giver too ; 
 pretty well the half to the bargain ; and it 
 confused their notion of feminine inferiority. 
 They resolved to think her an exceptional 
 girl, which, in truth, they could easily do, 
 for none but an excej^tional girl could win 
 Matey to love her. 
 
 Since nothing appeared likely to happen 
 at the school, they speculated upon what 
 would occur out in the world, and were 
 assisted to conjecture by a rumour, telling 
 of Aminta Farrell's aunt as a resident at 
 Dover. Those were days when the bene- 
 volently international M. de Porquet had 
 begun to act as interpreter to EngHsh
 
 LOVE AT A SCHOOL. 37 
 
 schools in the portico of the French 
 language ; and under his guidance it was 
 asked, in contempt of the answer, Comhien 
 de pastes cVici d Douvres ? But, accepting 
 the rumour as a piece of information, the 
 answer became important. Id was twenty 
 miles to the north-west of London. How 
 long would it take Matey to reach Douvres ? 
 Or at which of the comhien did he intend to 
 waylay and away with Aminta ? The boys 
 went about pounding at the interrogative 
 French phrase in due sincerity, behind the 
 burlesque of traveller bothering coachman. 
 Matey's designs could be guessed only by a. 
 knowledge of his character : that he was not 
 the fellow to give up the girl he had taken 
 to ; and impediments might multiply ; but 
 he would bear them down. Three days 
 before the break-up of the school another 
 rumour came tearing through it : Aminta's 
 aunt had withdrawn her from Miss Vincent's. 
 And now rose the question, two-dozen-
 
 38 LORD OEMOlsT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 mouthed, Did Matey know her address at 
 Douvres ? His face grew stringy and his 
 voice harder, and his eyes ready to burst 
 from a smother of fire. All the same he did 
 his work : he was the good old fellow at 
 games, considerate in school affairs, kind to 
 the youngsters ; he was heard to laugh. 
 He liked best the company of his little 
 French friend from Orthez, over whose 
 shoulder his hand was laid sometimes 
 as they strolled and chatted in two lan- 
 guages. He really went a long way to make 
 French fellows popular, and the boys were 
 sorry that little Emile was off to finish his 
 foreign education in Germany. His Eng- 
 lish was pretty good, thanks to Matey. He 
 went away, promising to remember Old 
 England, saying he was French first, and a 
 Briton next. He had lots of pluck ; which 
 accounted for Matey' s choice of him as a 
 friend among the juniors.
 
 CHAPTEE 11. 
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 
 
 Love-passages at a school must produce a 
 ringing crisis if they are to leave the rosy 
 impression which spans the gap of holidays. 
 Neither Matey nor Browny returned to 
 their yoke, and Cuper's boys recollected 
 the couple chiefly on Sundays. They re- 
 membered several of Matey's doings and 
 sayings : his running and high leaping, his 
 bowling, a maxim or two of his, and the tight 
 strong fellow he was ; also that the damsel's 
 colour distinctly counted for dark. She 
 became nearly black in their minds. AVell, 
 and Englishmen have been known to marry 
 Indian princesses : some have a liking for
 
 40 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 negresses. There are Nubians ratlier pretty 
 in pictures, if you can stand thick lips. 
 Her colour does not matter, provided the 
 girl is of the right sort. The exchange of 
 letters between the lovers was mentioned. 
 The discovery by Miss Vincent of their cool 
 habit of corresponding passed for an in- 
 cident ; and there it remained, stiff as a 
 post, not being heated by a story to run. 
 So the foregone excitement lost warmth, 
 and went out like a winter sun at noon 
 or a match lighted before the candle is 
 handy. 
 
 Lord Ormont continued to be a subject 
 of discussion from time to time, for he was 
 a name in the newspapers ; and Mr. Shalders 
 had been worked by Matey Weyburn into a 
 state of raw antagonism at the mention of 
 the gallant General ; he could not avoid 
 sitting in judgment on him. 
 
 According to Mr. Shalders, the opinion 
 of all thoughtful people in England was
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 41 
 
 with John Company and the better part of 
 the Press to condemn Lord Ormont in his 
 quarrel with the Commissioner of one of the 
 Indian provinces, who had the support of 
 the Governor of his Presidency and of the 
 Viceroy ; the latter not unreservedly, yet 
 ostensibly inclined to condemn a too prompt 
 military hand. The Gordian knot of a diffi- 
 culty cut is agreeable in the contemplation 
 of an official chief hesitating to use the 
 sword and benefiting by having it done 
 for him. Lord Ormont certainly cut the 
 knot. 
 
 Mr. Shalders was cornered by the boys, 
 coming at him one after another without 
 a stop, vowing it was the exercise of a 
 military judgment upon a military question 
 at a period of urgency, which had brought 
 about the quarrel with the Commissioner 
 and the reproof of the Governor. He 
 betrayed the man completely cornered by 
 generalizing. He said —
 
 42 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 " We are a civilian people ; we pride 
 ourselves on having civilian methods." 
 
 " How can that be if we have won India 
 with guns and swords ? " 
 
 " But that splendid jewel for England's 
 tiara won," said he (and he might as well have 
 said crown), " we are bound to sheathe the 
 sword and govern by the Book of the Law." 
 
 " But if they won't have the Book of the 
 Law ! " 
 
 " They know the power behind it." 
 
 " Not if we knock nothing harder than 
 the Book of the Law upon their skulls." 
 
 " Happily for the country, England's 
 councils are not directed by boys ! " 
 
 " Ah, but we're speaking of India, Mr. 
 Shalders." 
 
 " You are presuming to speak of an act 
 of insubordination committed by a military 
 officer under civilian command." 
 
 " What if we find an influential Indian 
 prince engaged in conspiracy ? "
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 43 
 
 " We look for proof." 
 
 " Suppose we have good proof ? " 
 
 "We summon him to exonerate himself" 
 
 "No, we mount and ride straight away 
 into his territory, spot the treason, deport 
 him, and rule in his place ! " 
 
 It was all very well for Mr. Shalders to 
 say he talked to boys ; he was cornered 
 again, as his shrug confessed. 
 
 The boys asked among themselves 
 whether he would have taken the same 
 view if his Murat had done it ! 
 
 These illogical boys fought for Matey 
 Weyburn in their defence of Lord Ormont. 
 Somewhere, they were sure, old Matey was 
 hammering to the same end — they could 
 hear him. Thought of him inspired them 
 to unwonted argumentative energy, that 
 they might support his cause, and scatter 
 the gloomy prediction of the school, as going 
 to the dogs now Matey had left. 
 
 The subject provoked everywhere in Great
 
 44 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 Britain a division similar to tliat between 
 master and boys at Cuper's establishment : 
 one party for our modern English magisterial 
 methods with Indians, the other for the 
 decisive Oriental at the early time, to suit 
 their native tastes ; and the Book of the 
 Law is to be conciliatingly addressed to 
 their sentiments by a benign civilizing 
 Power, or the sword is out smartly at the 
 hint of a warning to protect the sword's 
 conquests. Under one aspect we appear 
 potteringly European ; under another, drunk 
 of the East. 
 
 Lord Ormont's ride at the head of two 
 hundred horsemen across a stretch of country 
 including hill and forest, to fall like a bolt 
 from the blue on the suspected Prince in 
 the midst of his gathering warriors, was a 
 handsome piece of daring, and the high- 
 handed treatment of the Prince was held by 
 his advocates to be justified by the provoca- 
 tion and the result. He scattered on un-
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 45 
 
 prepared body of many hundreds, who 
 might have enveloped him, and who woukl 
 presumptively have stood their ground, had 
 they not taken his handful to be the advance 
 of regiments. These are the deeds that win 
 empires ! the argument in his favour ran. 
 Are they of a character to maintain empires ? 
 the counter-question was urged. Men of a 
 deliberative aspect were not wanting in 
 approval of the sharp and summary of the 
 sword in air when we have to deal with 
 Indians. They chose to regard it as a 
 matter of the dealing with Indians, and put 
 aside the question of the contempt of civil 
 authority. 
 
 Counting the cries. Lord Ormont won his 
 case. Festival aldermen, smoking clubmen, 
 buckskin squires, obsequious yet privately 
 excitable tradesmen, sedentary coachmen 
 and cabmen, of Viking descent, were set to 
 think like boys about him : and the boys, 
 the women, and the poets formed a tipsy
 
 46 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 chorus. Journalists, on the whole, were 
 fairly halved, as regarded numbers. In 
 relation to weight, they were with the 
 burgess and the presbyter ; they preponder- 
 ated heavily in the direction of England's 
 burgess view of all cases disputed between 
 civilian and soldier. But that was when 
 the peril was over. 
 
 Admirers of Lord Ormont enjoyed a 
 perusal of a letter addressed by him to 
 the burgess's journal ; and so did his 
 detractors. The printing of it was an act 
 of editorial ruthlessness. The noble soldier 
 had no mould in his intellectual or educa- 
 tional foundry for the casting of sentences ; 
 and the editor's leading type to the letter, 
 without further notice of the writer — who 
 was given a prominent place or scaffolding 
 for the execution of himself publicly, if 
 it pleased him to do that thing — tickled 
 the critical mind. Lord Ormont wrote 
 intemperately.
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 47 
 
 His Titanic liurling of blocks against 
 critics did no harm to an enemy skilled 
 in the use of trimmer weapons, notably 
 the fine one of letting big missiles rebound. 
 He wrote from India, with Indian heat — 
 " curry and capsicums," it was remarked. 
 He dared to claim the countenance of the 
 Commander-in-chief of the Army of India 
 for an act disapproved by the India House. 
 Other letters might be on their way, curryer 
 than the preceding, his friends feared ; and 
 might also be malevolently printed, similarly 
 commissioning the reverberation of them 
 to belabour his name before the public. 
 Admirers were still prepared to admire ; 
 but aldermen not at the feast, squirearchs 
 not in the saddle or at the bottle, some few 
 of the juvenile and female fervent, were 
 becoming susceptible to a frosty critical tone 
 in the public pronunciation of Lord Ormont's 
 name since the printing of his letter and 
 the letters it called forth. None of them
 
 48 LORD OKMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 doubted that his case was good. The doubt 
 concerned the effect on it of his manner of 
 pleading it. And if he damaged his case, 
 he compromised his admirers. Why, the 
 case of a man who has cleverly won a 
 bold stroke for his country must be good, as 
 long as he holds his tongue. A grateful 
 country will right him in the end : he has 
 only to wait, and not so very long. " This 
 I did: now examine it." Nothing more 
 needed to be said by him, if that. 
 
 True, he has a temper. It is owned that 
 he is a hero. We take him with his qualities, 
 impetuosity being one, and not unsuited to 
 his arm of the service, as he has shown. If 
 his temper is high, it is an element of a 
 character proved heroical. So has the sun 
 his blotches, and we believe that they go to 
 nourish the luminary, rather than that they 
 are a disease of the photosphere. 
 
 Lord Ormont's apologists had to contend 
 with anecdotes and dicta now pouring in
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 49 
 
 from offended Britons, for illustration of an 
 impetuosity fit to make another Charles XII. 
 of Sweden — a gratuitous Coriolanus haughti- 
 ness as well, new among a people accustomed 
 socially to bow the head to their nobles, and 
 not, of late, expecting a kick for their pains. 
 Newspapers wrote of him that, " a martinet 
 to subordinates, he was known for the most 
 unruly of lieutenants." They alluded to 
 current sayings, as that he " habitually took 
 counsel of his horse on the field when a 
 movement was entrusted to his discretion." 
 Numerous were the journalistic sentences 
 running under an air of eulogy of the lordly 
 warrior purposely to be tripped, and produc- 
 ing their damnable effect, despite the 
 obvious artifice. The writer of the letter 
 from Bombay, signed Ormont, was a born 
 subject for the antithetical craftsmen's tricky 
 springes. 
 
 He was, additionally, of infamous repute 
 for morals in burgess estimation, from his 
 
 VOL. I. E
 
 50 LORD ORMONT AND MIS AMINTA. 
 
 having a keen appreciation of female beauty 
 and a prickly sense of masculine honour. 
 The stir to his name roused pestilential 
 domestic stories. In those days the 
 aristocrat still claimed licence, and eminent 
 soldier-nobles, comporting themselves as 
 imitative servants of their god Mars, on the 
 fields of love and war, stood necessarily 
 prepared to vindicate their conduct on the 
 field of the measured paces, without deeming 
 themselves bounden to defend the course 
 they took. Our burgess, who bowed head 
 to his aristocrat, and hired the soldier to 
 fight for him, could not see that such mis- 
 behaviour necessarily ensued. Lord Ormont 
 had fought duels at home and abroad. His 
 readiness to fight again, and against odds, 
 and with a totally unused weapon, was 
 exhibited by his attack on the Press in the 
 columns of the Press. It wore the comical 
 face to the friends deploring it, which 
 belongs to things we do that are so very
 
 LADY CHAELOTTE. 51 
 
 like us. They agreed with his devoted 
 sister, Lady Charlotte Eglett, as to the 
 prudence of keeping him out of England for 
 a time, if possible. 
 
 At the first perusal of the letter. Lady 
 Charlotte quitted her place in Leicestershire, 
 husband, horses, guests, the hunt, to scour 
 across a vacant London and pick up ac- 
 quaintances under stress to be spots there 
 in the hunting season, with them to gossip 
 for counsel on the subject of " Ormont's 
 hand-grenade," and how to stop and 
 extinguish a second. She was a person 
 given to plain speech. " Stinkpot " she 
 called it, when acknowledging foul elements 
 in the composition and the harm it did to 
 the unskilful balist. Her view of the 
 burgess English imaged a mighty monster 
 behind bars, to whom we offer anything but 
 our hand. As soon as he gets hold of 
 that he has you ; he won't let it loose with 
 flesli on the l)()nes. We miisi ollrnd liini - 
 
 'jStnonuifoa
 
 52 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 we can't be man or woman without offend- 
 ing his tastes and his worships ; but while 
 we keep from contact {i. e. intercommunica- 
 tion) he may growl, he is harmless. Witness 
 the many occasions when her brother offended 
 worse, and had been un worried, only growled 
 at, and distantly, not in a way to rouse 
 concern ; and at the next review, or proces- 
 sion into the City, or public display of any 
 sort, Ormont had but to show himself, he 
 was the popular favourite immediately. He 
 had not committed the folly of writing a 
 letter to a newspaper then. 
 
 Lady Charlotte paid an early visit to the 
 office of the great London solicitor, Arthur 
 Abner, who wielded the Law as an instru- 
 ment of protection for countless illustrious 
 people afflicted by what they stir or attract 
 in a wealthy metropolis. She went simply 
 to gossip of her brother's affiiirs with a 
 refreshing man of the world, not given to 
 circumlocutions, and not afraid of her : she
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 53 
 
 had no deeper object ; but fancying she 
 heard the clerk, on his jump from the stool, 
 inform her that Mr. Abner was out, " Out ? " 
 she cried, and rattled the room, thumping, 
 under knitted brows. " Out of town ? " 
 For a man of business taking holidays, when 
 a lady craves for gossip, disappointed her 
 faith in him as cruelly as the shut-uj), empty 
 inn the broken hunter knocking at a hollow 
 door miles off home. 
 
 Mr. Abner, hatted and gloved and smiling, 
 came forth. " ' Going out,' the man meant, 
 Lady Charlotte. At your service for five 
 minutes." 
 
 She complimented his acuteness in the 
 remark, " You see I've only come to chat," 
 and entered his room. 
 
 He led her to her theme : " The excite- 
 ment is pretty well over." 
 
 " My brother's my chief care — always 
 was. I'm afraid he'll be pitchforking at 
 it a^ijain, and we shall have another blast.
 
 54 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 That letter ought never to have been 
 printed. That editor, deserves the horse- 
 whip for letting it appear. If he prints a 
 second one I shall treat him as a personal 
 enemy." 
 
 " Better make a friend of him." 
 
 ''How?" 
 
 " Meet him at my table." 
 
 She jumped an illumined half- about on 
 her chair. " So I will, then. What are the 
 creature's tastes ? " 
 
 " Hunting will do." 
 
 " Hunts, does he ? " The editor rose in 
 her mind from the state of neuter to some- 
 thing of a man. " I recollect an article in 
 that paper on the Ormont duel. I hate 
 duelling, but I side with my brother. I 
 had to laugh, though. Luckily, there's no 
 woman on hand at present, as far as I know. 
 Ormont' s not likely to be hooked by garrison 
 women or blacks. Those coloured women — • 
 some of ours too — send the nose to the
 
 LADY CHAKLOTTE. 55 
 
 clouds ; not a bad sign for healtli. And 
 there are men like that old Cardinal 
 Guicciardini tells of . . . hum ! Ormont's 
 not one of them. I hope he'll stay in India 
 till this blows over, or I shall be hearing of 
 provocations." 
 
 " You have seen the Duke ? " 
 
 She nodded. Her reserve was a summary 
 of the interview. " Kind, as he always is," 
 she said. " Ormont has no chance of 
 employment unless there's a European war. 
 They can't overlook him in case of war. 
 He'll have to pray for that." 
 
 " Let us hope we shan't get it." 
 
 " My wish ; but I have to think of my 
 brother. If he's in England with no 
 employment, he's in a mess with women 
 and men both. He kicks if he's laid aside 
 to rust. He has a big heart. That's what 
 I said : all he wants is to serve his country. 
 If you won't have war, give him Gibraltar 
 or Malta, or command of one of our military
 
 56 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 districts. The South-eastern '11 be vacant 
 soon. He'd like to be Constable of the 
 Castle, and have an eye on France." 
 
 '' I think he's fond of the French ? " 
 
 " Loves the French. Expects to have 
 to fight them all the same. He loves 
 his country best. Here's the man every- 
 body's abusing ! " 
 
 " I demur, my lady. I was dining the 
 other day with a client of mine, and a 
 youngster was present who spoke of Lord 
 Ormont in a way I should like you to have 
 heard. He seemed to know the whole of 
 Lord Ormont's career, from the time of 
 the ride to Paraguay up to the capture of 
 the plotting Kajah. He carried the table." 
 
 " Good boy ! We must turn to the boys 
 for justice, then. Name your day for this 
 man, this editor." 
 
 " I will see him. You shall have the day 
 to-night." 
 
 Lady Charlotte and the editor met. She
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 57 
 
 was racy, he anecdotal. Stag, fox, and 
 hare ran before them, over fields and 
 through drawing-rooms : the scent was rich. 
 They found that they could talk to one 
 another as they thought ; that he was not 
 the Isle-bound burgess, nor she the postured 
 English great lady ; and they exchanged 
 salt, without which your current scandal 
 is of exhausted savour. They enjoyed the 
 peculiar novel relish of it, coming from 
 a social pressman and a dame of high 
 society. The different hemispheres became 
 known as one sphere to these birds of broad 
 wing convening in the upper blue above a 
 quartered carcase earth. 
 
 A week later a letter, the enveloj)e of a 
 bulky letter in Lord Ormont's handwriting, 
 reached Lady Charlotte. There was a line 
 from the editor : 
 
 " Would it please your ladyship to have 
 this printed ? "
 
 58 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 She read the letter, and replied : 
 
 " Come to me for six days ; you shall 
 have the best mount in the county ^ 
 
 An editor devoid of malice might pro- 
 bably have forborne to print a letter that 
 appealed to Lady Charlotte, or touched her 
 sensations, as if a glimpse of the moon, 
 on the homeward ride in winter on a nod- 
 ding horse, had suddenly bared to view 
 a precipitous quarry within two steps. 
 There is no knowing : few men can forbear 
 to tell a spicy story of their friends ; and 
 an editor, to whom an exhibition of the 
 immensely preposterous on the part of one 
 writing arrogantly must be provocative, 
 would feel the interests of his journal, not 
 to speak of the claims of readers, pluck 
 at him when he meditated the consignment 
 of such a precious comjDosition to extinction. 
 Lady Charlotte withheld a sight of the 
 letter from Mr. Eglett. She laid it in
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 59 
 
 her desk, understanding well that it was 
 a laugh lost to the world. Poets could 
 reasonably feign it to shake the desk 
 inclosing it. She had a strong sense of 
 humour ; her mind reverted to the desk 
 in a way to make her lips shut grimly. 
 She sided with her brother. 
 
 Only pen in hand did he lay himself open 
 
 to the enemy. In his personal intercourse 
 
 he was the last of men to be taken at a 
 
 disadvantage. Lady Charlotte was brought 
 
 round to the distasteful idea of some help 
 
 coming from a legitimate adjunct at his 
 
 elbow : a restraining woman — wife, it had 
 
 to be said. And to name the word wife 
 
 for Thomas Eowsley, Earl of Ormont, put 
 
 up the porcupine quills she bristled with 
 
 at the survey of a sex thirsting, and likely 
 
 to continue thirsting, for such honour. 
 
 What woman had she known fit to bear 
 
 the name ? She had assumed the judicial 
 
 seat upon the pretensions of several, and
 
 60 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 dismissed them to their limbo, after testi- 
 fying against them. Who is to know the 
 fit one in these mines of deception ? 
 Women of the class offering wives decline 
 to be taken on trial; they are boxes of 
 puzzles — often dire surprises. Her brother 
 knew them well enough to shy at the 
 box. Her brother Rowsley had a funny 
 pride, like a boy at a game, at the never 
 having been caught by one among the 
 many he made captive. She let him have 
 it all to himself. 
 
 He boasted it to a sister sharing the 
 pride — exultant in the cry of the hawk, 
 scornful of ambitious poultry, a passed 
 finger-post to the plucked, and really re- 
 gretful that no woman had been created 
 fit for him. When she was not sidine: 
 with her brother, women, however con- 
 temptible for their weakness, appeared to 
 her as better than barn-door fowl, or vermin 
 in their multitudes gnawing to get at the
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 61 
 
 cheese-trap. She could be humane, even 
 sisterly, with women whose conduct or 
 prattle did not outrage plain sense, just 
 as the stickler for the privileges of her 
 class was large-heartedly charitable to the 
 classes flowing in oily orderliness round 
 about below it — if they did so flow. Unable 
 to read woman's character, except upon 
 the broadest lines, as it were the spider's 
 main threads of its web, she read men 
 minutely, from the fact that they were 
 neither mysteries nor terrors to her, but 
 creatures of importunate appetites, humorous 
 objects; very manageable, if we leave the 
 road to their muscles, dress their wounds, 
 smoothe their creases, plume their vanity ; 
 and she had an unerring eye for the man 
 to be used when a blow was needed, 
 methods for setting him in action likewise. 
 She knew how much stronger than ordinary 
 men the woman who can put them in 
 motion. They can be set to serve as pieces
 
 62 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AM INT A. 
 
 of cannon, under compliments on their 
 superior powers, which were not all under- 
 valued by her on their own merits, for she 
 worshipped strength. But she said, with 
 a certain amount of truth, that the women 
 unaware of the advantage Society gave 
 them (as to mastering men) were fools. 
 
 Tender, is not a word coming near to 
 Lady Charlotte. Thoughtful on behalf of 
 the poor foolish victims of men she was. 
 She had saved some, avenged others. It 
 should be stated that her notion of saving 
 was the saving of them from the public : 
 she had thrown up a screen. The saving 
 of them from themselves was another 
 matter — hopeless, to her thinking. How 
 preach at a creature on the bend of passion's 
 rapids ! One might as well read a chapter 
 from the Bible to delirious patients. When 
 once a woman is taken from the love- 
 passion, we must treat her as bitten ; hide 
 her antics from the public : that is the
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 63 
 
 principal business. If she recovers, she 
 resumes her place, and horrid old Nature, 
 who drove her to the frenzy, is unlikely 
 to bother or, at least, overthrow her again, 
 unless she is one of the detestable wantons, 
 past compassion or consideration. In the 
 case reviewed, the woman has gone through 
 fire, and is none the worse for her experi- 
 ences : worth ten times what she was, to 
 an honest man, if men could be got to see 
 it. Some do. Of those men who do not, 
 Lady Charlotte spoke with the old family- 
 nurse humour, which is familiar with the 
 tricks and frailties of the infants ; and it 
 is a knife to probe the male, while seem- 
 ingly it does the part of the na]3kin — pities 
 and pats. They expect a return of much 
 for the little that is next to nothing. They 
 are full of expectations : and of what else ? 
 They are hard bargainers. 
 
 She thought this of men; and slic liked 
 men by choice. She had old nurse's
 
 64 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 preference for the lustier male cliild. The 
 others are puling things, easier to rear, 
 because they bend better ; and less esteemed, 
 though they give less trouble, rouse less 
 care. But when it came to the duel between 
 the man and the woman, her sense of 
 justice was moved to join her with the 
 party of her unfairly handled sisters — a 
 strong party, if it were not so cowardly, 
 she had to think. 
 
 Mr. Eglett, her husband, accepted her — 
 accepted the position into which he naturally 
 fell beside her, and the ideas she imposed 
 on him ; for she never went counter to his 
 principles. These were the fixed principles 
 of a very wealthy man, who abhorred debt, 
 and was punctilious in veracity, scrupulous 
 in cleanliness of mind and body, devoted 
 to the honour of his country, the interests 
 of his class. She res23ected the high land- 
 mark possessing such principles, and she 
 was therefore enabled to lead without the
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 65 
 
 wish to rule. As it had been between them 
 at the beginning, so it was now, when they 
 were grandparents running on three lines 
 of progeny from two daughters and a son : 
 they were excellent friends. Few couples 
 can say more. The union was good English 
 grey — that of a prolonged November, to 
 which we are reconciled by occasions for 
 the hunt and the gun. She was, never- 
 theless, an impassioned woman. The feeling 
 for her brother helped to satisfy her heart's 
 fires, though as little with her brother as 
 with her husband was she demonstrative. 
 Lord Ormont disrelished the caresses of 
 relatives. 
 
 She, for her part, had so strong a 
 sympathy on behalf of poor gentlemen 
 reduced to submit to any but a young- 
 woman's hug, that when, bronzed from 
 India, he quitted the carriage and mounted 
 her steps at Olmer, the desire to fling 
 herself on his neck and breast took form 
 
 VOL. I. F
 
 66 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 in the words : " Here you are home 
 again, Kowsley ; glad to have you." 
 They shook hands firmly. 
 
 He remained three days at Olmer. His 
 temper was mild, his frame of mind bad as 
 could be. Angry evaporations had left a 
 residuum of solid scorn for these " English," 
 who rewarded soldierly services as though 
 it were a question of damaged packages 
 of calico. He threatened to take the first 
 offer of a foreign State "not in insurrec- 
 tion." But clear sky was overhead. He 
 was the Kowsley of the old boyish delight 
 in field sports, reminiscences of prowlings 
 and trappings in the woods, gropings along 
 water-banks, enjoyment of racy gossip. 
 He spoke wrathfully of " one of their 
 newspapers " which steadily persisted in 
 withholding from publication every letter 
 he wrote to it, after printing the first. 
 And if it printed one, why not the 
 others ?
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. Q7 
 
 Lady Charlotte put it on the quaiiitness 
 of editors. 
 
 He had found in London, perhaps, reason 
 for saying that he should do well to be 
 '' out of this country " as early as he 
 could ; adding, presently, that he meant 
 to go, though " it broke his heart to keep 
 away from a six months' rest at Steignton," 
 his Wiltshire estate. 
 
 No woman was in the held. Lady 
 Charlotte could have submitted to the 
 intrusion of one of those at times whole- 
 some victims, for the sake of the mollifica- 
 tion the unhappy proud thing might bring 
 to a hero smarting under injustice at the 
 hands of chiefs and authorities. 
 
 He passed on to Steignton, returned to 
 London, and left England for Spain, as 
 he wrote word, saying he hoped to settle 
 at Steignton next year. He was al)sent 
 the next year, and longer. Lady Charlotte 
 had the surprising news that Steignton
 
 68 LORD ORMONT AXD HLS AMINTA. 
 
 was let, shooting and all, for ^ve years ; 
 and lie had no appointment out of England 
 or at home. When he came to Olmer again 
 he was under one of his fits of reserve, best 
 undisturbed. Her sympathy with a great 
 soldier snubbed, an active man rusting, kept 
 her from remonstrance. 
 
 Three years later she was made meditative 
 by the discovery of a woman's being ab- 
 solutely in the field, mistress of the field, 
 and having been there for a considerable 
 period, dating from about the time when 
 he turned his back on England to visit a 
 comrade-in-arms condemned by the doctors 
 to pass the winter in Malaga ; and it was a 
 young woman, a girl in her teens, a hand- 
 some girl. Handsome was to be expected ; 
 Ormont bargained for beauty. But report 
 said the girl was very handsome, and showed 
 breeding : she seemed a foreigner, walked 
 like a Goddess, sat her horse the perfect 
 Amazon. Rumour called her a Spaniard.
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 69. 
 
 " Not if she rides ! " Lady Charlotte cut 
 that short. 
 
 Eumour had subsequently more to say. 
 The reporter in her ear did not confirm it, 
 and she was resolutely deaf to a story 
 incredible of her brother — the man, of all 
 men living, proudest of his name, blood, 
 station. So proud was he by nature, too, 
 that he disdained to complain of rank 
 injustice ; he maintained a cheerful front 
 against adversity and obloquy. And this 
 man of complete self-command, who has 
 every form of noble pride, gets cajoled like 
 a twenty-year-old yahoo at college ! Do 
 you imagine it ? To suppose of a man 
 cherishing the name of Ormont, that he 
 would bestow it legally on a woman, a 
 stranger, and imperil his race by mixing 
 blood with a creature of unknown lineage, 
 was — why, of course, it was to suppose 
 him struck mad, and there never had been 
 madness anion 2^ tlie Ormonts : thev were
 
 70 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 too careful of the purity of the strain. 
 Lady Charlotte talked. She was excited, 
 and ran her sentences to blanks, a cunning 
 way for ministering consolation to her 
 hearing, where the sentence intended a 
 question, and the blank ending caught up 
 the query tone and carried it dwindling 
 away to the most distant of throttled 
 interrogatives. She had, in this manner, 
 only to ask, — her hearing received the 
 comforting answer it desired ; for she could 
 take that thin far sound as a travelling 
 laughter of incredulity, triumphant derision. 
 
 This meant to her — though she scarcely 
 knew it, though the most wilful of women 
 declined to know it — a state of alarm. She 
 had said of her brother in past days that he 
 would have his time of danger after striking 
 sixty. The dangerous person was to be 
 young. 
 
 But, then, Ormont had high princij)les 
 with regard to the dues to his famil}^ His
 
 LADY CHARLOTTE. 71 
 
 principles could always be trusted. The 
 dangerous young person would have to be 
 a person of lineage, of a certain station at 
 least : no need for a titled w^oman, only for 
 warranted good blood. Is that to be found 
 certificated out of the rolls of Society ? It 
 may just possibly be found, without certifi- 
 cate, however, in those muddled caverns 
 w^here the excluded intermingle. Here and 
 there, in a j)6^s^iit family, or a small 
 country tradesman's just raised above a 
 peasant, honest regenerating blood will be 
 found. Nobles wanting refreshment from 
 the soil might do worse than try a slip of 
 one of those juicy weeds ; ill-fated, sickly 
 Koyalties would be set-up striding through 
 another half-century with such invigoration, 
 if it could be done for them ! There are 
 tales. The tales are honourably discredited 
 by the crazy constitutions of the heirs to 
 the diadem. 
 
 Yes, but we are speculating on the matter
 
 72 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMIKTA. 
 
 seriously, as though it were one of intimate 
 concern to the family. What is there to 
 make us think that Ormont would marry ? 
 Impossible to imagine him intimidated. 
 Unlikely that he, a practised reader of 
 women, having so little of the woman in 
 him, would be melted by a wily girl ; as 
 women in the twilight situation have often 
 played the trick to come into the bright 
 beams. How ? They do a desperate thing, 
 and call it generosity, and then they appeal 
 from it to my lord's generosity ; and so 
 the two generosities drive off in a close 
 carriage with a friend and a professional 
 landlady for the blessing of the parson, and 
 are legitimately united. Women have won 
 round fools to give way in that way. And 
 quite right too ! thought Lady Charlotte, 
 siding with nature and justice, as she re- 
 flected that no woman created would win 
 round her brother to give way in that way. 
 He was too acute. The moment the woman
 
 LADY CHAELOTTE. 73 
 
 showed sign of becoming an actress, lier 
 doom was written. " Poor idiot ! " was 
 not uncharitably inscribed by tlie sisterly 
 lady on the tombstone of hopes aimed 
 with scarce pardonable ambition at her 
 brother. 
 
 She blew away the rumour. Ormont, 
 she vowed, had not entitled any woman to 
 share and bear his title. And this was her 
 interpretation of the report : he permitted 
 (if he did permit) the woman to take his 
 name, that he might have a scornful fling 
 at the world maltreating him. Besides, the 
 name was not published, it was not to be 
 seen in the papers ; it passed mei'cly among 
 male friends, tradesmen, servants : no great 
 harm in that. 
 
 Listen further. Here is an unknown 
 girl : why should he marry her ? A girl 
 consenting to the place beside a man of his 
 handsome ripe age, is either bought, or she 
 is madly enamoured ; she does not dictate
 
 74 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMIXTA. 
 
 terms. Ormont is not of the brute buyers 
 in that market. One sees it is the girl who 
 leads the dance. A girl is rarely so madly 
 enamoured as when she falls in love with 
 her grandfather ; she pitches herself at his 
 head. This had not happened for the first 
 time in Ormont's case ; and he had never 
 projDosed marriage. "Why should he do it 
 now ? 
 
 But again, if the girl has breeding to 
 some extent, he might think it her due that 
 she should pass under the safeguard of his 
 name, out of sight. 
 
 Then, so far the report is trustworthy. 
 We blow the rumour out of belief. A 
 young woman there is : she is not a wife. 
 Lady Charlotte allowed her the fairly re- 
 spectable post of Hecate of the Shades, as 
 long as the girl was no pretender to the 
 place and name in the upper sphere. Her 
 deductions were plausible, convincing to 
 friends shaken by her vehement manner of
 
 LADY CHAELOTTE. 75 
 
 coming at them. She convinced herself by 
 means of her multitude of reasons for not 
 pursuing inquiry. Her brother said nothing. 
 There was no need for him to speak. He 
 seemed on one or two occasions in the act 
 of getting himself together for the com- 
 munication of a secret ; and she made ready 
 to listen hard, with ears, eyebrows, shut 
 mouth, and a gleam at the back of her 
 eyes, for a signification of something she 
 would refer him to after he had spoken. 
 He looked at her and held his peace, or 
 virtually held it, — that is, he said not one 
 word on the subject she was to have told 
 him she had anticipated. Lady Charlotte 
 ascribed it to his recollection of the quick 
 blusher, the pained blusher, she was in her 
 girlhood at mention or print of the story of 
 men and women. Who, not having known 
 her, could conceive it ! But who could 
 conceive that, behind the positive, plain- 
 dealing, downright woman of tlie world,
 
 76 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 there was at times, when a nerve was 
 touched or an old blocked path of imagin- 
 ation thrown open, a sensitive youthfulness, 
 still quick to blush as far as the skin of a 
 grandmother matron might show it !
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 THE TUTOK. 
 
 Theke was no counting now on Lord 
 Ormont's presence in tlie British gathering- 
 seasons, when wheatears wing across our 
 fields or swallows return to their eaves. 
 He forsook the hunt to roam the Continent, 
 one of the vulgar band of tourists, honour- 
 ing town only when May-flies had flown, 
 and London's indiscriminate people went 
 about without their volatile heads. 
 
 Lady Charlotte put these changed con- 
 ditions upon the behaviour of the military 
 authorities to her brother ; saying that the 
 wonder was he did not shake the dust 
 of his country from his feet. In her wise
 
 78 LORD ORMONT AND HI8 AMINTA. 
 
 head slie rejoiced to think he was not the 
 donkey she sketched for admiration ; and 
 she was partly consoled, or played at the 
 taking of a comfort needed in her perpetual 
 struggle with a phantom of a fact, by the 
 reflection that a young woman on his arm 
 would cause him to feel himself more at 
 home abroad. Her mind's habit of living 
 warmly beside him in separation was vexed 
 by the fixed intrusion of a female third 
 person, w^ho checked the run of intimate 
 chatter, especially damped the fancied talk 
 over early days — of which the creature was 
 ignorant ; and her propinquity to him ar- 
 rested or broke the dialogue Lady Charlotte 
 invented and pressed to renew. But a 
 wife, while letting him be seen, would have 
 insisted on appropriating the thought of him 
 — all his days, past as well as present. An 
 impassioned sister's jealousy preferred that 
 it should not be a wife reigning to dispute 
 her share of her brother in imagination.
 
 THE TUTOR. 79 
 
 Then came a rumour, telling of him as 
 engaged upon the composition of his 
 Memoirs. 
 
 Lady Charlotte's impulsive outcry : 
 " Writing them "? " signified her grounds 
 for alarm. 
 
 Happily, Memoirs are not among the 
 silly deeds done in a moment; they were 
 somewhere ahead and over the hills : a 
 band of brigands rather than a homely 
 shining mansion, it was true ; but distant ; 
 and a principal question shrieked to know 
 whether he was composing them for pub- 
 lication. She could look forward with a 
 girl's pleasure to the perusal of them in 
 manuscript, in a woody nook, in a fervour 
 of partisanship, easily avoiding sight of 
 errors, grammatical or moral. She chafed 
 at the possible printing and publishing of 
 them. That would be equivalent to an 
 exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run 
 across London — brilliant in himself, spotty
 
 80 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 ill the offence. Publislied Memoirs indicate 
 the end of a man's activity, and that he 
 acknowledges the end ; and at a period of 
 Lord Ormont's life when the denial of it 
 should thunder. They are his final chapter, 
 making mummy of the grand figure they 
 wrap in the printed stuff". They are virtu- 
 ally his apology. Can those knowing Lord 
 Ormont hear him apologize ? But it is a 
 craven apology if we stoop to expound : we 
 are seen as pleading our case before the 
 public. Call it by any name you please, 
 and under any attitude, it is that. And 
 set aside the writing : it may be perfect ; 
 the act is the degradation. It is a rousing 
 of swarms. His friends and the public will 
 see the proudest nobleman of his day, 
 pleading his case in mangled English, in 
 the headlong of an outpoured, undrilled, 
 rabble vocabulary, doubling the ridicule by 
 his imperturbability over the ridicule he 
 excites : he who is no more ridiculous, cried
 
 THE TUTOR. 81 
 
 the partisan sister, conjuring up the scene, 
 not an ace more ridiculous, than a judge of 
 assize calling himself miserable sinner on 
 Sunday before the parson, after he has very 
 properly condemned half-a-score of week- 
 day miserable sinners to penal servitude 
 or the rope. Nobody laughs at the judge. 
 Everybody will be laughing at the scornful 
 man down half-way to his knee-caps with 
 a stutter of an apology for having done 
 his duty to his country, after stigma- 
 tizing numbers for inability or ill-will to 
 do it. But Ormont's weapon is the sword, 
 not a pen ! Lady Charlotte hunted her 
 simile till the dogs had it or it ran to 
 earth. 
 
 She struck at the conclusion, that the 
 young woman had been persuading him. 
 An adoring young woman is the person to 
 imagine and induce to the commission of 
 such folly. "What do you think? You 
 have seen her, you say?" slic asked of a 
 
 VOL. I. G
 
 82 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 man she welcomed for his flavour of the 
 worldling's fine bile. 
 
 Lord Adderwood made answer : " She 
 may be having a hand in it. She worships, 
 and that is your way of pulling gods to 
 the ground." 
 
 " Does she understand good English ? " 
 
 " Speaks it." 
 
 " Can she write ? " 
 
 " I have never had a letter from 
 her." 
 
 " You tell me Morsfield admires the woman 
 — would marry her to-morrow, if he could 
 get her." 
 
 " He would go through the ceremony 
 Ormont has performed, I do not doubt." 
 
 " I don't doubt all of you are ready. 
 She doesn't encourage one ? " 
 
 " On the contrary, all." 
 
 " She's clever. This has been going on 
 for now seven years, and, as far as I know, 
 she has my brother fast."
 
 THE TUTOR. 83 
 
 " Slie may have done the clever trick of 
 having him fast from the beginning." 
 
 " She'd like people to think it." 
 
 " She has an aunt to advertise it." 
 
 " Ormont can't swallow the woman, I'm 
 told." 
 
 " Trying, if one is bound to get her 
 down ! " 
 
 " Boasts of the connection everywhere 
 she's admitted, Randeller says." 
 
 " Randeller procures the admission to 
 various parti-coloured places." 
 
 " She must be a blinking moll-owl ! And 
 I ask any sane Christian or Pagan — proof 
 enough ! — would my brother Rowsley let 
 his wife visit those places, those people ? 
 Monstrous to have the suspicion that he 
 would, if you know him ! Mrs. Lawrence 
 Finchley, for example. I say nothing to 
 hurt the poor woman ; I back her against 
 her imbecile of a husband. He brings a 
 charge he can't support ; she punishes him
 
 84 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 by taking three years' lease of independence, 
 and kicks up the grass all over tlie paddock, 
 and then comes cuckoo, barking his name 
 abroad to have her home again. You can 
 win the shyest filly to corn at last. She 
 goes, and he digests ruefully the hotch- 
 potch of a dish the woman brings him. 
 Only the w^orld spies a side-head at her, 
 husbanded or not, though the main fault 
 was his, and she had a right to insist that 
 he should be sure of his charge before he 
 smacked her in the face with it before the 
 world. In dealing with a woman, a man 
 commonly prudent — put aside chivalry, 
 justice, and the rest — should bind himself 
 to disbelieve what he can't prove. Other- 
 wise, let him expect his whipping, with or 
 without ornament. My opinion is, Lawrence 
 Finchley had no solid foundation for his 
 charge, except his being an imbecile. She 
 wasn't one of the adventurous women to 
 jump the bars, — the gate had to be pushed
 
 THE TUTOR. 85 
 
 open, and he did it. There she is ; and I 
 ask you, would my brother Eowsley let 
 his ivife be intimate with her? And 
 there are others. And, sauf voire resjject, 
 the men — Morsfield for one, Eandeller 
 another ! " 
 
 " They have a wholesome dread of the 
 lion." 
 
 " If they smell a chance with the lion's 
 bone — it's the sweeter for being the lion's. 
 These metaphors carry us off our ground. 
 I must let these Ormont Memoirs run and 
 upset, him, if they get to print. I've only 
 to oppose, printed they'll be. The same if 
 I say a word of this woman, he marries her 
 to-morrow morning. You speak of my 
 driving men. Why can't I drive Ormont ? 
 Because I'm too fond of him. There you 
 have the secret of the subjection of women : 
 they can hold their own, and a bit more, 
 when they've no enemy beating inside." 
 
 " Hearts ! — ah, well, it's possible. I don't
 
 S6 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 say no ; I've not discovered them," Lord 
 Adderwood observed. 
 
 They are rarely discovered in the haunts 
 he frequented. 
 
 Her allusion to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley 
 rapped him smartly, and she admired his 
 impassiveness under the stroke. Such a 
 sjDcctacle was one of her pleasures. 
 
 Lady Charlotte mentioned incidentally 
 her want of a tutor for her grandson Leo 
 during the winter holidays. He suggested 
 an application to the clergyman of her 
 parish. She was at feud with the^ Rev. 
 Stephen Hampton-Evey, and would not 
 take, she said, a man to be a bootblack in 
 her backyard or a woman a scullery-wxnch 
 in her kitchen upon his recommendation. 
 She described the person of Mr. Hampton- 
 Evey, his manner of speech, general 
 opinions, professional doctrines ; rolled him 
 into a ball and bowled him, with a shrug 
 for lamentation over the decay of the good
 
 THE TUTOR. 87 
 
 old order of manly Engiisli Protestant 
 clergymen, who drank their port, bothered 
 nobody about belief, abstained from preach- 
 ing their sermon, if requested ; were capital 
 fellows in the hunting-field, too ; for if 
 they came, they had the spur to hunt in 
 the devil's despite. Now we are going to 
 have a kind of bitter, clawed, forked female, 
 in vestments over breeches. " How do you 
 like that bundling of the sexes ? " 
 
 Lord Adderwood liked the lines of divi- 
 sion to be strictly and invitingly definite. 
 He was thinking, as he reviewed the frit- 
 tered appearance of the Rev. Stephen 
 Hampton-Evey in Lady Charlotte's hands, 
 of the possibility that Lord Ormont, • who 
 was reputed to fear nobody, feared her. Li 
 which case, the handsome young woman 
 passing among his associates as the pseudo 
 Lady Ormont might be the real one after all, 
 and Isabella Lawrence 1^'incliley prove right 
 in the warning she gave to dogs of chase.
 
 88 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 The tutor required by Lady Charlotte 
 was found for her by Mr. Abner. Their 
 correspondence on the subject filled the 
 space of a week, and then the gentleman 
 hired to drive a creaky wheel came down 
 from London to Olmer, arriving late in the 
 evening. 
 
 Lady Charlotte's blunt " Oh ! " when he 
 entered her room and bowed upon the an- 
 nouncement of his name, was caused by an 
 instantaneous perception and reflection that 
 it would be prudent to keep her grand- 
 daughter PhilijDpa, aged between seventeen 
 and eighteen, out of his way. 
 
 " You are a friend of Mr. Abner's, are 
 you?" 
 
 He was not disconcerted. He replied, 
 in an assured and pleasant voice, " I have 
 hardly the pretension to be called a friend, 
 madam." 
 
 "Are you a Jew? " 
 
 Her abruptness knocked something like a
 
 THE TUTOR. 89 
 
 laugh almost out of liim, but he rcstraiued 
 the signs of it. 
 
 " I am not." 
 
 " You wouldn't be ashamed to tell me 
 you were one if you were ? " 
 
 "Not at all." 
 
 " You like the Jews ? " 
 
 " Those I know I like." 
 
 " Not many Christians have the good 
 sense and the good heart of Arthur Abner. 
 Now go and eat. Come back to me when 
 you've done. I hoj)e you are hungry. 
 Ask the butler for the wine you prefer." 
 
 She had not anticipated the enrolment 
 in her household of a man so young and 
 good-looking. These were qualifications for 
 Cupid's business, which his unstrained self- 
 possession accentuated to a note of danger 
 to her chicks, because she liked the taste of 
 him. Her grand-daughter Philippa was in 
 the girl's waxen age ; another, Beatrice, was 
 coming to it. Both were under her care ;
 
 90 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 and she was a vigilant woman, with an 
 intuition and a knowledge of sex. She did 
 not blame Arthur Abner for sending her a 
 good-looking young man ; she had only a 
 general idea that tutors in a house, and even 
 visiting tutors, should smell of dust and 
 wear a snuffy appearance. The conditions 
 will not always insure the tutors from fool- 
 ishness, as her girl's experience reminded 
 her, but they protect the girl. 
 
 " Your name is Weyburn ; your father 
 was an officer in the army, killed on the 
 battle-field, Arthur Abner tells me," was her 
 somewhat severely -toned greeting to the 
 young tutor on his presenting himself the 
 second time. 
 
 It had the sound of the preliminary of an 
 indictment read in a Court of Law. 
 
 " My father died of his wounds in 
 hospital," he said. 
 
 " Why did you not enter the service ? " 
 
 " Want of an income, my lady."
 
 THE TUTOR. 91 
 
 "Bad look-out. Army or Navy for 
 gentlemen, if they stick to the school of 
 honour. The sedentary professions corrupt 
 men : bad for the blood. Those monastery 
 monks found that out. They had to birch 
 the devil out of them three times a day and 
 half the night, howling like full-moon dogs 
 all through their lives, till the flesh was off 
 them. That was their exercise, if they were 
 for hohness. My brother. Lord Ormont, 
 has never been still in his youth or his 
 manhood. See him now. He counts his 
 years by scores ; and he has about as many 
 wrinkles as you when you're smiling. His 
 cheeks are as red as yours now you're 
 blushing. You ought to have left off that 
 };rick by this time. It's well enough in 
 a boy." 
 
 Against her will she was drawn to the 
 young man, and her consciousness of it 
 plucked her back to caution with occasional 
 jerks — quaint alternations of the fjimiliar
 
 92 LOED ORMONT AND HIS AMIKTA. 
 
 and the harshly formal in the stranger's 
 experience. 
 
 "If I have your permission, Lady 
 Charlotte," said he, " the reason why I 
 mount red a little — if I do it — is, you men- 
 tion Lord Ormont, and I have followed his 
 career since I was the youngest of boys." 
 
 " Good to begin with the worship of a 
 hero. He can't sham, can't deceive — not 
 even a woman ; and you're old enough to 
 understand the temptation : they're so 
 silly. All the more, it's a point of honour 
 with a man of honour to shield her from 
 herself. When it's a girl " 
 
 The young man's eyebrows bent. 
 
 " Chapters of stories, if you want to hear 
 them," she resumed ; " and I can vouch 
 some of them true. Lord Ormont was 
 never one of the wolves in a hood. What- 
 ever you hear of him, you may be sure he 
 laid no trap. He's just the opposite to 
 the hypocrite ; so hypocrites hate him. I've
 
 THE TUTOR. 93 
 
 heard them called high-priests of decenc}^ 
 Then we choose to be indecent and honest, 
 if there's a God to worship. Fear, they're in 
 the habit of saying — we are to fear God. 
 A man here, a Rev. Hampton-Evey, you'll 
 hear him harp on 'fear God.' Hypocrites 
 may : honest sinners have no fear. And 
 see the cause : they don't deceive themselves 
 — that is why. Do you think we can love 
 what we fear ? They love God, or they 
 disbelieve. And if they believe in Him, 
 they know they can't conceal anything from 
 Him. Honesty means piety: we can't be 
 one without the other. And here are 
 people — parsons — who talk of dying as 
 going into the presence of our Maker, as if 
 He had been all the while outside the world 
 He created. Those parsons, I told the Rev. 
 Hampton-Evey here, make infidels — they 
 make a puzzle of their God. I'm for a 
 rational Deity. They preach up a super- 
 natural eccentric. I don't say all : I've heard
 
 94 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 good sermons, and met sound-headed clergy- 
 men — not like that gaping Hampton-Evey, 
 when a woman tells him she thinks for her- 
 self. We have him sitting on our parish. A 
 free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon ; 
 but a female free-thinker is one of Satan's 
 concubines. He took it upon himself to 
 reproach me — flung his glove at my feet, 
 because I sent a cheque to a poor man 
 jDunished for blasphemy. The man had the 
 right to his opinions, and he had the 
 courage of his opinions. I doubt whether 
 the Kev. Hampton-Evey would go with a 
 willing heart to prison for his. All the 
 better for him if he comes head-up out of 
 a trial. But now see : all these ^^^.rsons 
 and judges and mobcaps insist upon 
 conformity. A man with common manly 
 courage comes before them, and he's cast in 
 penalties. Yet we know from history, in 
 England, France, Germany, that the time of 
 nonconformity brought out the manhood of
 
 THE TUTOR. 95 
 
 the nation. Now, I say, a nation, to be a 
 nation, must have men — I mean brave men. 
 That's what those hosts of female men com- 
 bine to try to stifle. They won't succeed, 
 but we shall want a war to teach the country 
 the value of courage. You catch what I am 
 driving at ? They accuse my brother of 
 immorality because he makes no pretence to 
 be better than the men of his class." 
 
 Weyburn's eyelids fluttered. Her kite- 
 like ascent into the general, with the sudden 
 drop on her choice morsel, switched his 
 humour at the moment when he was respect- 
 fully considering that her dartings and 
 gyrations had motive as much as the flight 
 of the swallow for food. They had mean- 
 ing ; and here was one of the great ladies of 
 the land who thought for herself, and was 
 thoughtful for the country. If she came 
 down like a bird winged, it was her love of 
 her brother that did it. His look at Lady 
 Cliarlotte glistened.
 
 96 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 She raised her defences against the 
 basilisk fascinating Philippa ; and with a 
 vow to keep them apart and deprive him of 
 his chance, she rehapsed upon the stiff frigid- 
 ity which was not natural to her. It lasted 
 long enough to put him on his guard under 
 the seductions of a noble dame's condescen- 
 sion to a familiar tone. But, as he was too 
 well bred to show the change in his mind 
 for her change of manner, and as she was 
 the sister of his boyhood's hero, and could 
 be full of flavour, his eyes retained some- 
 thing of their sparkle. They were ready to 
 lighten again, in the way peculiar to him, 
 when she, quite forgetting her defence of 
 Philippa, disburdened herself of her an- 
 tagonisms and enthusiasms, her hates and 
 her loves all round the neighbourhood and 
 over the world, won to confidential com- 
 munication by this young man's face. She 
 confessed as much, had he been guided to 
 perceive it. She said, " Arthur Abner's a
 
 THE TUTOR. 97 
 
 reader of men : I can trust liis word about 
 them." 
 
 Presently, it is true, she added : " No 
 man's to be relied upon where there's a 
 woman." She refused her implicit trust to 
 saints — "if ever a man really was a saint 
 before he was canonized ! " 
 
 Her penetrative instinct of sex kindled 
 the scepticism. Sex she saw at play every- 
 where, dogging the conduct of affairs, 
 directing them at times ; she saw it as the 
 animation of nature, senselessly stigmatized, 
 hypocritically concealed, active in our 
 thoughts where not in our deeds ; and the 
 declining of the decorous to see it, or admit 
 the sight, got them abhorred bad names 
 from her, after a touch at the deadly 
 poison coming of that blindness, or blind- 
 foldedness, and a grimly melancholy shrug 
 over the cruelties resulting — cruelties chiefly 
 affecting women. 
 
 " You're too young to have thought upon 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 98 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 such matters," she said, for a finish to 
 them. 
 
 That was hardly true. 
 
 " I have thought," said Weyburn, and his 
 head fell to reckoning of the small sum of 
 his thoughts upon them. 
 
 He was pulled up instantly for close 
 inspection by the judge. " What is your 
 age ? " 
 
 " I am in my twenty-sixth year." 
 
 " You have been among men : have you 
 studied women ? " 
 
 "Not largely, Lady Charlotte. Oppor- 
 tunity has been wanting at French and 
 German colleges." 
 
 " It's only a large and a close and a pretty 
 long study of them that can teach you 
 anything; and you must get rid of the 
 poetry about them, and be sure you haven't 
 lost it altogether. That's what is called the 
 golden mean. I'm not for the golden mean 
 in every instance ; it's a way of exhorting
 
 THE TUTOR. 99 
 
 to brutal selfishness. I grant it's the right 
 way in those questions. You'll learn in 
 time." Her scanning gaze at the young 
 man's face drove him along an avenue of 
 his very possible chances of learning. 
 " Certain to. But don't tell me that at 
 your age you have thought about women. 
 You may say you have felt. A young 
 man's feelings about women are better 
 reading for him six or a dozen chapters 
 further on. Then he can sift and strain. 
 It won't be perfectly clear, but it will do." 
 
 Mr. Eglett hereupon threw the door open, 
 and ushered in Master Leo. 
 
 Lady Charlotte noticed that the tutor 
 shook the boy's hand offhandedly, with not 
 a whit of the usual obtrusive geniality, and 
 merely dropped him a word. Soon after, 
 he was talking to Mr. Eglett of games at 
 home and games abroad. Poor fun over 
 there ! We head the world in field games, 
 at all events. He drew a picture of a
 
 100 LORD OHMOXT ASD HIS AMIXTA. 
 
 foreigner of his acquaintance looking on at 
 footbaU. On the other hand, French boys 
 and German, having passed a year or two 
 at an English school, get the liking for our 
 games, and do a lot of good when they go 
 home. The things we learn from them are 
 to dance, to sing;, and to studv : — thev are 
 more in earnest than we about study. 
 They teach us at fencing too. The tutor 
 praised fencing as an exercise and an 
 accomplishment. He had large reserves of 
 eulogy for boxing. He knew the quahties 
 of the famous bruisers of the time, cited 
 fisty names, whose owners were then to be 
 seen all over an admiring land in prints, 
 in the glorious defensive-offensive attitude, 
 England's own — Touch me, if you dare ! 
 with bullish, or bull-dog, or oak-bole fronts 
 for the blow, handsome to pugilistic eyes. 
 
 The young tutor had lighted on a pet 
 theme of Mr Egiett's — the excelling virtues 
 of the practice of pugilism in Old England,
 
 THE TUTOR. 101 
 
 and the school of honour that it is to ouv 
 lower population. " Fifty times better for 
 them than cock-fighting," he exclaimed, 
 admitting that he could be an interested 
 spectator at a ring or the pit : cock-fighting 
 
 or ratting. 
 
 " Kattino; seems to have more excuse," 
 
 '& 
 
 the tutor said, and made no sign of a liking 
 for either of those popular pastimes. As he 
 disapproved without squeamishness, the 
 impulsive but sharply critical woman close 
 by nodded ; and she gave liim his dues for 
 beino: no courtier. 
 
 Leo had to be off to bed. The tutor 
 spared him any struggle over the shaking 
 of hands, and saying, " Good-night, Leo," 
 continued the conversation. The boy went 
 away visibly relieved of the cramp that seizes 
 on a youngster at the formalities pertaining 
 to these chilly and fateful introductions. 
 
 " What do you think of the look of him ? " 
 Mr. Egjlett asked.
 
 102 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 The tutor had not appeared to inspect 
 the boy. " Big head," he remarked. " Yes, 
 Leo won't want pushing at books when he's 
 once in harness. He will have six weeks 
 of me. It's more than the yeomanry get 
 for drill per annum, and they're expected 
 to know something of a soldier's duties. 
 There's a chance of putting him on the right 
 road in certain matters. We'll walk, or 
 ride, or skate, if the frost holds to-morrow : 
 no lessons the first day." 
 
 " Do as you think fit," said Lady 
 Charlotte. 
 
 The one defect she saw in the tutor did 
 not concern his pupiL And a girl, if hit, 
 would be unable to see that this tutor, 
 judged as a man, was to some extent 
 despicable for accepting tutorships, and, one 
 might say, dishonouring the family of a 
 soldier of rank and distinction, by coming 
 into houses at the back way, with foot- 
 ing enough to air his graces when once
 
 THE TUTOR. 103 
 
 established there. He ought to have 
 knocked at every door in the kingdom for 
 help, rather than accept tutorships, and 
 disturb households (or providently-minded 
 mistresses of them) with all sorts of probably 
 groundless apprehensions, founded naturally 
 enough on the good looks he intrudes. 
 
 This tutor committed the offence next day 
 of showing he had a firm and easy seat 
 in the saddle, which increased Lady 
 Charlotte's liking for him and irritated 
 her watchful forecasts. She rode with the 
 young man after lunch, " to show him the 
 country," and gave him a taste of what 
 he took for her variable moods. He mis- 
 judged her. Like a swimmer going through 
 warm and cold springs of certain lake 
 waters, he thought her a capricious lady- 
 ship, dangerous for intimacy, alluring to 
 the deeps and gripping with cramps. 
 
 She pushed him to defend his choice 
 of the tutor's profession.
 
 104 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 *' Think you understand boys ? " she 
 caught up his words ; " you can't. You 
 can humour them, as you humour women. 
 They're just as hard to read. And don't 
 tell me a young man can read women. 
 Boys and women go on their instincts. 
 Egyptologists can spell you hieroglyphs; 
 they'd be stumped, as Leo would say, to 
 read a spider out of an ink-pot over a 
 sheet of paper." 
 
 " One gets to interpret by degrees, by 
 observing their habits," the tutor said, and 
 vexed her with a towering complacency 
 under provocation that went some way 
 further to melt the woman she was, while 
 her knowledge of the softness warned her 
 still more of the duty of playing dragon 
 round such a young man in her house. 
 The despot is alert at every issue, to every 
 chance ; and she was one, the wakefuller 
 for being benevolent; her mind had no 
 sleep by day.
 
 THE TUTOR. 105 
 
 For a montli she subjected Mr. Matthew 
 Weyburn to the microscope of her observa- 
 tion and the probe of her instinct. He 
 proved that he could manage without 
 cajoling a boy. The practical fact estab- 
 lished, by agreement between herself and 
 the unobservant gentleman who was her 
 husband, Lady Charlotte allowed her medi- 
 tations to drop an indifferent glance at 
 the speculative views upon education 
 entertained by this young tutor. To her 
 mind they were flighty ; but she liked 
 him, and as her feelings dictated to her 
 mind when she had not to think for others, 
 she spoke of his views toleratingly, almost 
 with an implied aj)proval, after passing 
 them through the form of burlesque to 
 which she customarily treated things failing 
 to waft her enthusiasm. In regard to 
 Philippa, he behaved well : he bestowed 
 more of his attention on Beatrice, nearer 
 Leo's age, in talk about games and story-
 
 106 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 books and battles ; nothing that he did 
 when the girls were present betrayed the 
 strutting plumed cock, bent to attract, or 
 the sickly reptile, thirsty for a prize above 
 him and meaning to have it, like Satan in 
 Eden. Still, of course, he could not help 
 his being a handsome fellow, having a 
 vivid face and eyes transparent, whether 
 blue or green, to fiame of the brain exciting 
 them ; and that becomes a picture in the 
 dream of girls — a picture creating the 
 dream often. And Phihppa had asked 
 her grandmother, very ingenuously indeed, 
 with a most natural candour, why " they 
 saw so little of Leo's hero." Simple female 
 child ! 
 
 However, there was no harm done, and 
 Lady Charlotte liked him. She liked few. 
 Forthwith, in the manner of her particular 
 head, a restless head, she fell to work at 
 combinations. 
 
 Thus : — he is a nice young fellow, well-
 
 THE TUTOR. 107 
 
 bred, no cringing courtier, accompli sliecl, 
 good at classics, fairish at matliematics, a 
 scholar in French, German, Italian, with a 
 shrewd knowledge of the different races, 
 and with sound English sentiment too, 
 and the capacity for writing good English, 
 although in those views of his the ideas are 
 unusual, therefore un-English, profoundly 
 so. But his intentions are patriotic ; they 
 would not displease Lord Ormont. He has 
 a worship of Lord Ormont. All we can say 
 on behalf of an untried inferior is in that, — 
 only the valiant admire devotedly. Well, 
 he can write grammatical, readable English. 
 What if Lord Ormont were to take him 
 as a secretary while the Memoirs are in 
 hand ? He might help to chasten the 
 sentences laughed at by those newspapers. 
 Or he might, being a terrible critic of 
 writing, and funny about styles, put it in 
 an absurd light, that would cause the 
 Memoirs to be tossed into the fire. He
 
 108 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 was made for tlie post of secretary ! The 
 young man's good looks would be out of 
 harm's way then. If any sprig of woman- 
 kind come across him there, it will, at any 
 rate, not be a girl. Women must take 
 care of themselves. Only the fools among 
 them run to mischief in the case of a 
 handsome young fellow. 
 
 Supposing a certain woman to be one 
 of the fools ? Lady Charlotte merely sug- 
 gested it in the dashing current of her 
 meditations — did not strike it out interro- 
 gatively. The woman would be a fine 
 specimen among her class; that was all. 
 For the favourite of Lord Ormont to stoop 
 
 from her place beside him ay, but 
 
 women do ; heroes have had the woeful 
 experience of that fact. First we see them 
 aiming themselves at their hero ; next they 
 are shooting an eye at the handsome man. 
 The thirst of nature comes after that of 
 their fancy, in conventional women. Sick
 
 THE TUTOR. 109 
 
 of the hero tried, tired of their pLace in 
 the market, no longer ashamed to acknow- 
 ledge it, they begin to consult their own 
 taste for beauty — they have it cjuite as 
 much as the men have it ; and when 
 their worshipped figure of manliness, in a 
 romantic sombrero, is a threadbare giant, 
 showing bruises, they sink on their inherent 
 desire for a dance with the handsome man. 
 And the really handsome man is the most 
 extraordinary of the rarities. No wonder 
 that when he appears he slays them, w\alks 
 over them like a pestilence ! 
 
 This young Weyburn would touch the 
 fancy of a woman of a romantic turn. 
 Supposing her enthusiastic in her w^orship 
 of the hero, after a number of years — for 
 anything may be imagined where a woman 
 is concerned — why, another enthusiasm for 
 the same object, and on the part of a 
 stranger, a stranger with effective eyes, 
 rapidly leads to sympathy. Suppose the
 
 110 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 reverse — the enthusiasm gone to dust, or 
 become a wheezy old bellows, as it does 
 where there's disparity of age, or it fre- 
 quently does — then the sympathy with a 
 good-looking stranger comes more rapidly 
 still. 
 
 These were Lady Charlotte's glances right 
 and left — idle flights of the eye of a 
 mounted Amazon across hedges at the 
 canter along the main road of her scheme ; 
 which was to do a service to the young man 
 she liked and to the brother she loved, for 
 the marked advantage of both equally ; 
 perhaps for the chance of a little gossip 
 to follow about that tenacious woman by 
 whom her brother was held hard and fast, 
 kept away from friends and relatives, 
 isolated, insomuch as to have given up 
 living on his estate — the old home ! — - 
 because he would not disgrace it or incur 
 odium by taking her there. 
 
 In consequence of Lord Ormont's resistance
 
 THE TUTOR. Ill 
 
 to pressure from lier on two or three 
 occasions, she chose to nurse and be 
 governed by the maxim for herself : 
 Never propose a plan to him, if you want 
 it adopted. That w^as her way of harm- 
 lessly solacing love's vindictiveness for an 
 injury. 
 
 She sent Arthur Abner a letter, thanking 
 him for his recommendation of young Mr. 
 Weyburn, stating her benevolent wishes 
 as regarded the young man and " those 
 hateful Memoirs," requesting that her name 
 should not be mentioned in the affair, 
 because she was anxious on all grounds to 
 have the proposal accepted by her brother. 
 She could have vowed to herself that she 
 wrote sincerely. " He must want a secre- 
 tary. He would be shy at an offer of one 
 from me. Do you hint it, if you get a 
 chance. You gave us Mr. Weyburn, and 
 Mr. Eglett and I like him. Ormont would 
 too, I am certain. You have obliged him
 
 112 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 before ; this will be better than anything 
 you have done for iis. It will stop the 
 Memoirs, or else give them a polish. Your 
 young friend has made me laugh over 
 stufif taken for literature until w^e put on 
 our spectacles. Leo jogs along in harness 
 now, and may do some work at school yet." 
 
 Having posted her letter, she left the 
 issue to chance, as we may when conscience 
 is easy. An answer came the day before 
 Weyburn's departure. Arthur Abner had 
 met Lord Ormont in the street, had spoken 
 of the rumour of Memoirs promised to 
 the world, hinted at the possible need for 
 a secretary ; " Lord Ormont would appoint 
 a day to see Mr. Weyburn." 
 
 Lady Charlotte considered that to be 
 as good as the engagement. 
 
 "So we keep you in the family," she 
 said. " And now look here : you ought 
 to know my brother's ways, if you're going 
 to serve him. You'll have to guess at
 
 THE TUTOR. 113 
 
 • 
 
 half of everytliing lie tells you ; he'll expect 
 you to know the whole. There's no man 
 so secret. Why ? he fears nothing. I 
 can't tell why. And what his mouth shuts 
 on, he exposes as if in his hand. Of course 
 he's proud, and good reason. You'll see 
 when you mustn't offend. A lady's in 
 the house — I hear of it. She takes his 
 name, they say. She may be a respectable 
 woman — I've heard no scandal. We have 
 to hear of a Lady Ormont out of Society 1 
 We have to suppose it means there's not 
 to be a real one. He can't marry if he has 
 allowed her to go about bearing his name. 
 She has a fool of an aunt, I'm told ; as often 
 in the house as not. Good proof of his 
 fondness for the woman, if he swallows 
 half a year of the aunt ! Well, you won't, 
 unless you've mere man's eyes, be able to 
 help seeing him trying to hide what he 
 suffers from that aunt. He bears it, like 
 the man he is ; but woe to another betraying 
 
 VOL I. I
 
 114 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 it ! She has a tongue that goes like the 
 reel of a rod, with a pike bolting out of 
 the shallows to the snag he knows — to 
 wind round it and defy you to pull. Often 
 my brother Kowsley and I have fished the 
 day long, and in hard weather, and brought 
 home a basket ; and he boasted of it more 
 than of anything he has ever done 
 since. That woman holds him away from 
 me now. I say no harm of her. She may 
 be right enough from her point of view ; 
 or it mayn't be owing to her. I wouldn't 
 blame a woman. Well, but my point with 
 you is, you swallow the woman's aunt — 
 the lady's aunt — without betraying you 
 suffer at all. Lord Ormont has e3^es of 
 an eagle for a speck above the surface. 
 All the more because the aunt is a gabbling 
 idiot docs he — I say it seeing it — fire up 
 to defend her from the sneer of the lip 
 or half a sign of it ! No, you would be 
 on 3^our guard ; 1 can trust you. Of course
 
 THE TUTOR. 115 
 
 you'd behave like the gentleman you are 
 where any kind of woman's concerned; 
 but you mustn't let a shadow be seen, 
 think what you may. The woman— lady — 
 calling herself Lady Ormont, — poor woman, 
 I should do the same in her place, — she 
 has a hard game to play ; I have to be for 
 my family : she has manners, I'm told ; 
 holds herself properly. She fancies she 
 brings him up to the altar, in the end, 
 by decent behaviour. That's a delusion. 
 It's creditable to her, only she can't under- 
 stand the claims of the family upon a 
 man like my brother. When you have 
 spare time — ' kick-ups,' he used to call 
 it, writing to me from school — come here ; 
 you're welcome, after three days' notice. I 
 shall be glad to see you again. You've 
 gone some way to make a man of 
 Leo." 
 
 He Hked her well : he promised to come. 
 She was a sinewy ])ite of th(^ gentle sex,
 
 116 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 but she had much flavour, and she gave 
 nourishment. 
 
 " Let me have three days' notice," she 
 repeated. 
 
 " Not less, Lady Charlotte," said he. 
 Weyburn received intimation from 
 Arthur Abner of the likely day Lord 
 Ormont would appoint, and he left Olmer 
 for London to hold himself in readiness. 
 Lady Charlotte and Leo drove him to 
 meet the coach. Philippa, so strangely 
 baffled in her natural curiosity, begged 
 for a seat ; she begged to be allowed to 
 ride. Petitions were rejected. She stood 
 at the window seeing " Grandmama's tutor," 
 as she named him, carried off by grand- 
 mama. Her nature was avenged on her 
 tyrant grandmama : it brought up almost 
 to her tongue thoughts which would have 
 remained subterranean, under control of 
 her habit of mind, or the nursery's modesty, 
 if she had been less tyrannically treated.
 
 THE TUTOR. 117 
 
 They were subterranean thoughts, Nature's 
 original, such as the sense of injustice will 
 rouse in young women ; and they are better 
 unstirred, for they ripen girls over-rapidly 
 when they are made to revolve near the 
 surface. It flashed on the girl why she 
 had been treated tyrannically. 
 
 " Grandmama has good taste in tutors," 
 was all that she said while the thoughts 
 rolled over.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 RECOGNITION. 
 
 Our applicant for tlie post of secretary 
 entered tlie street of Lord Orniont's London 
 liouse, to present himself to liis boyhood's 
 hero by appointment. 
 
 He was to see, perhaps to serve, the great 
 soldier. Things had come to this ; and he 
 thought it singular. But for the previous 
 introduction to Lady Charlotte, he would 
 have thought it passing wonderful. He 
 ascribed it to the whirligig. 
 
 The young man was not yet of an age 
 to gather knowledge of himself and of life 
 from his present experience of the fact, 
 that passionate devotion to an object strike^
 
 BECOGNITION, 119 
 
 a vein tlirougli circumstances, as a travelling 
 run of flame darts the seeming haphazard 
 zigzags to catch at the dry of dead wood 
 amid the damp ; and when passion has 
 become quiescent in the admirer, there is 
 often the unsubsided first impulsion carrying 
 it on. He will almost surely embrace his 
 idol with one or other of the senses. 
 
 Weyburn still read the world as it came 
 to him, by bits, marvelling at this and that, 
 after the fashion of most of us. He had 
 not deserted his adolescent's hero, or fallen 
 upon analysis of a past season. But he was 
 now a young man, stoutly and cognizantly 
 on the climb, with a good aim overhead, 
 and green youth's enthusiasms a step beloW 
 his heels : one of the lovers of life, beautiful 
 to behold, when we spy into them ; generally 
 their aspect is an enlivenment, whatever 
 may be the carving of their features. For 
 the sake of holy unity, this lover of life, 
 whose gaze was to the front In hungry
 
 120 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 animation, held fast to his young dreams, 
 perceiving a soul of meaning in them, though 
 the fire might have gone out ; and he con- 
 fessed to a past pursuit of delusions. Young 
 men of this kind will have, for the like 
 reason, a similar rational sentiment on be- 
 half of our world's historic forward march, 
 while admitting that history has to be 
 taken from far backward if we would gain 
 assurance of man's advance. It nerves an 
 admonished ambition. 
 
 He was ushered into a London house's 
 library, looking over a niggard enclosure 
 of gravel and dull grass, against a wall 
 where ivy dribbled. An arm-chair was be- 
 side the fire-place. To right and left of it 
 a floreate company of books in high cases 
 paraded shoulder to shoulder, without a 
 gap, grenadiers on the line. Weyburn read 
 the titles on their scarlet-and-blue facings. 
 They were approved English classics ; 
 honoured veterans, who have emerged from
 
 RECOGNITION. 121 
 
 the conflict with contemporary opinion, 
 stamped excellent, or have been pushed by 
 the roar of contemporaneous applauses to 
 wear the leather-and-gilt uniform of our 
 Immortals, until a more qualmish posterity 
 disgorges them. The books had costly 
 bindings. Lord Ormont's treatment of 
 literature appeared to resemble Lady Char- 
 lotte's, in being reverential and uninquiring. 
 The books she bought to read w^ere Memoirs 
 of her time by dead men and women once 
 known to her. These did fatigue duty in 
 cloth or undress. It was high drill with all 
 of Lord Ormont's books, and there was not 
 a modern or a minor name among the regi- 
 ments. They smelt strongly of the book- 
 seller's lump lots by order ; but if a show 
 soldiery, they were not a sham, like a 
 certain row of venerably-titled backs, that 
 Lady Charlotte, without scruple, left stand- 
 ing to blow an ecclesiastical trumpet of 
 empty contents ; any one might have his
 
 122 LOED OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 battle of brains witli tliem, for tlie turning 
 of an absent key. 
 
 The door opened. Weyburn bowed to 
 his old star in human shape : a grey head 
 on square shoulders, filling the doorway. 
 He had seen at Olmer Lady Charlotte's 
 treasured miniature portrait of her brother ; 
 a perfect likeness, she said — complaining 
 the next instant of injustice done to the fire 
 of his look. 
 
 Fire was low down behind the eyes at 
 present. They were cjuick to scan and 
 take summary of their object, as the young 
 man felt while observing for himself. Height 
 and build of body were such as might be 
 expected in the brother of Lady Charlotte 
 and from the tales of his prowess. Weyburn 
 had a glance back at Cuper's boys listening 
 to the tales. 
 
 The soldier-lord's manner was courteously 
 military — that of an established superior 
 indifferent to the deferential attitude he
 
 RECOGNITION. 123 
 
 must needs exact. His curt nick of tlie head, 
 for a response to the visitor's formal saluta- 
 tion, signified the requisite acknowledgment, 
 like a city creditor's busy stroke of the 
 type-stamj) receipt upon payment. 
 
 The ceremony over, he pitched a bugle 
 voice to fit the contracted area : " 1 hear 
 from Mr. Abner that you have made ac- 
 quaintance with Olmer. Good hunting 
 country there." 
 
 " Lady Charlotte kindly gave me a mount, 
 my lord." 
 
 *' I knew your father by name — Colonel 
 Sidney Weyburn. You lost him at Tou- 
 louse. We were in the Peninsula ; I was 
 at Talavera with him. Bad day for our 
 cavalry." 
 
 "Our ofiicers were young at their w^ork 
 then." 
 
 "They taught the Emperor's troops to 
 respect a charge of English horse. It was 
 teaching their fox to set traps for them."
 
 124 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 Lord Ormont indicated a cliair. He 
 stood. 
 
 " The French had good cavalry leaders," 
 AVeyburn said, for cover to a continued 
 study of the face. 
 
 " Montbrun, yes ; Murat, Lassalle, Bes- 
 sieres. Under the Emperor they had." 
 
 " You think them not at home in the 
 saddle, my lord ? " 
 
 " Frenchmen have nerves ; horses are 
 nerves. They pile excitement too high. 
 When cool, they're among the best. None 
 of them had head for command of all the 
 arms." 
 
 " One might say the same of Seidlitz and 
 Ziethen ? " 
 
 " Of Ziethen. Seidlitz had a wider grasp, 
 I suppose." He pursed his mouth, ponder- 
 ing. " No ; and in the Austrian service, 
 too ; generals of cavalry are left to whistle 
 for an independent command. There's a 
 jealousy of our branch ! " The injured
 
 RECOGNITION. 125 
 
 warrior frowned and hummed. He spoke 
 his thought mildly : "Jealousy of the name 
 of soldier in this country ! Out of the 
 service is the place to recommend. I'd 
 have advised a son of mine to train for a 
 jockey rather than enter it. We deal with 
 that to-morrow, in my papers. You come to 
 me ? Mr. Abner has arranged the terms ? 
 So I see you at ten in the morning. I am 
 glad to meet a young man — Englishman — 
 who takes an interest in the service." 
 
 Weyburn fancied the hearing of a step ; 
 he heard the whispering dress. It passed 
 him ; a lady went to the arm-chair. She 
 took her seat, as she had moved, with 
 sedateness, the exchange of a toneless word 
 with my lord. She was a hnme.^ He saw 
 that when he rose to do homao^e. 
 
 Lord Ormont resumed : '' Some are born 
 to it, must be soldiers ; and in j)eace they 
 are snubbed by the heads ; in war they are 
 abused by the country. They don't under-
 
 126 LORD ORxMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 stand in England how to treat an army ; 
 how to make one either ! 
 
 " The gentleman — Mr. Weyburn : Mr. 
 Arthur Abner's recommendation," he added, 
 hurriedly, with a light wave of his hand 
 and a murmur, that might be the lady's 
 title ; continuing : "A young man of 
 military tastes should take service abroad. 
 They're in earnest about it over there. 
 Here they play at it ; and an army's shipped 
 to land without commissariat, ambulances, 
 medical stores, and march against the odds, 
 as usual — if it can march ! " 
 
 *' Albuera, my lord ? " 
 
 " Our men can spurt, for a flick o' the 
 whip. They're expected to be constantly 
 ready for doing prodigies — to repair the 
 country's omissions. All the country cares 
 for is to hope Dick Turpin may get to 
 York. Our men are good beasts ; they give 
 the best in 'em, aiid drop. More's the 
 scandal to a country that has grand material
 
 RECOGNITION. 127 
 
 and overtasks it. A blazing disaster ends 
 the chapter 1 " 
 
 This was talk of an injured veteran. It 
 did not deepen the hue of his ruddied skin. 
 He spoke in the tone of matter of fact. 
 Weyburn had been prepared for something 
 of the sort by his friend, Arthur Abner. 
 He noted the speaker's heightened likeness 
 under excitement to Lady Charlotte. Ex- 
 citement came at an early call of their 
 voices to both ; and both had handsome, 
 open features, bluntly cut, nothing of 
 aquiline or the supercilious ; eyes bluish- 
 grey, in arched recesses, horny between 
 the thick lids, lively to shoot their mean- 
 ing when the trap-mouth was active ; effect- 
 ively expressing promptitude for combat, 
 pleasure in attack, wrestle, tug, whatever 
 pertained to strife ; an absolute sense of 
 their right. 
 
 As there was a third person present nt 
 this discussion of military topics, the silence
 
 128 LORD ORMOKT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 of the lady drew Weyburn to consult her 
 opinion in her look. 
 
 It was on him. Strange are the woman's 
 eyes which can unofFendingly assume the 
 privilege to dwell on such a living object 
 as a man without becoming gateways for 
 his return look, and can seem in pursuit 
 of thoughts while they enfold. They 
 were large dark eyes, eyes of southern 
 night. They sped no shot; they rolled 
 forth an envelopment. A child among 
 toys, caught to think of other toys, may 
 gaze in that way. But these were a 
 woman's eyes. 
 
 He gave Lord Ormont his whole face, 
 as an auditor should. He was interested 
 besides, as he told a ruffled conscience. 
 He fell upon the study of his old hero 
 determinedly. 
 
 The pain of a memory waking under 
 pillows, unable to do more than strain for 
 breath, distracted his attention. There
 
 EEOOGNITION. 129 
 
 was a memory : that was all lie knew. Or 
 else he would have lashed himself for 
 hanging on the beautiful eyes of a woman. 
 To be seeing and hearing his old hero was 
 wonder enough. 
 
 Eecollections of Lady Charlotte's plain 
 hints regarding the lady present resolved 
 to the gross retort, that her eyes were 
 beautiful. And he knew them — there lay 
 the strangeness. They were known beauti- 
 ful eyes, in a foreign land of night and 
 mist. 
 
 Lord Ormont was discoursing with racy 
 eloquence of our hold on Lidia : his views 
 in which respect were those of Cuper's boys. 
 Weyburn ventured a dot-running description 
 of the famous ride, and out flew an English 
 soldier's grievance. But was not the un- 
 justly-treated great soldier well rewarded, 
 whatever the snubs and the bitterness, 
 with these large dark eyes in his house, 
 for his own ? Eyes like these are the 
 
 VOL. I. K
 
 130 LORD OEMONT Al^D HlS AMINTA. 
 
 beginning of a young man's world ; they 
 nerve, ins|)ire, arm him, colour his life ; 
 he would labour, fight, die for them. It 
 seemed to Weyburn a blessedness even to 
 behold them. So it had been with him at 
 the early stage ; and his heart went swifter, 
 memory fetched a breath. Memory quivered 
 eyelids, when the thought returned — of his 
 having known eyes as lustrous. First lights 
 of his world, they had more volume, 
 warmth, mystery — were sweeter. Still, 
 these in the room were sisters to them. 
 They quickened throbs ; they seemed a 
 throb of the heart made visible. 
 
 That was their endowment of light and 
 lustre simply, and the mystical curve of the 
 lids. For so they could look only because 
 the heart was disengaged from them. They 
 were but heavenly orbs. 
 
 The lady's elbow was on an arm of her 
 chair, her forefinger at her left temple. 
 Her mind was away, one might guess;
 
 RECOGNITION. 131 
 
 she could liardly be interested in talk of 
 soldiering and of foreign army systems, 
 jealous English authorities and officials, 
 games, field-sports. She had personal 
 matters to think of. 
 
 Adieu until to-morrow to the house she 
 inhabited ! The street was a banishment 
 and a relief when Weyburn's first interview 
 witli Lord Ormont was over. 
 
 He rejoiced to tell his previous anticipa- 
 tions that he had not been disappointed ; 
 and he bade hero-worshippers expect no 
 gilded figure. We gather heroes as we go, 
 if w^e are among the growing : our constancy 
 is shown in the not discarding of our old 
 ones. He held to his earlier hero, though 
 he had seen him, and though he could fancy 
 he saw round him. 
 
 Another, too, had been a hero-lover. 
 How did that lady of night's eyes come 
 to fall into her subjection ? 
 
 He put no (question as to the name she
 
 132 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 bore ; it hung in a black suspense — vividly 
 at its blackest illuminated her possessor. 
 A man is a hero to some effect who wins 
 a woman like this ; and, if his glory 
 bespells her, so that she flings all to the 
 winds for him, burns the world ; if, for 
 solely the desperate rapture of belonging 
 to him, she consents of her free will to be 
 one of the nameless and discoloured, he 
 shines in a way to make the marrow of 
 men thrill with a burning envy. For that 
 must be the idolatrous devotion desired by 
 them all. 
 
 Weyburn struck down upon his man's 
 nature — the bad in us, when beauty of 
 woman is viewed ; or say, the old original 
 revolutionary, best kept untouched ; for a 
 touch or a meditative pause above him, 
 fetches him up to roam the civilized world 
 devouringly and lawlessly. It is the special 
 peril of the young lover of life, that an 
 inflammability to beauty in women is at
 
 RECOGNITION. 133 
 
 a breath intense with him. He is, in truth, 
 a thinly- sealed volcano of our imperishable 
 ancient father, and has it in him to be the 
 multitudinously-amorous of the mythologic 
 Jove. Give him head, he can be civiliz- 
 ation's devil Is she fair and under a 
 shade ? — then is she doubly fair. The 
 shadow about her secretes mystery, just as 
 the forest breeds romance : and mystery is 
 a measureless realm. If we conceive it, we 
 have a mysterious claim on her who is the 
 heart of it. 
 
 He marched on that road to the music 
 of sonorous brass for some drunken minutes. 
 
 The question came, What of the man 
 who takes advantage of her self-sacrifice ? 
 
 It soon riorhted him, and he did Lord 
 Ormont justice, and argued the case against 
 Lady Charlotte's naked hints. 
 
 This dark-eyed heroine's bearing w\ts 
 assured, beyond an air of dependency. 
 Her deliberate short nod to him at his
 
 134 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 leave-taking, and the toneless few words 
 she threw to my lord, signified sufficiently 
 that she did not stand defying the world or 
 dreading it. 
 
 She had by miracle the eyes which had 
 once charmed him — could again — would 
 always charm. She reminded him of 
 Aminta Farrell's very eyes under the 
 couchant-dove brows — something of her 
 mouth, the dimple running from a corner. 
 She had, as Aminta had, the self-collected 
 and self-cancelled look, a realm in a look, 
 that was neither depth nor fervour, nor a 
 bestowal, nor an allurement ; nor was it an 
 exposure, though there seemed no reserve. 
 One would be near the meaning^ in declaring 
 it to bewilder men with the riddle of open- 
 handedness. We read it — all may read it 
 — as we read inexplicable plain life ; in 
 which let us have a confiding mind, despite 
 the blows at our heart, and some under- 
 standing will enter us.
 
 EECOGNITION. 135 
 
 He shut tlie door upon picture and 
 speculations, returning to them by another 
 door. The lady had not Aminta's fresh- 
 ness : she might be taken for an elder 
 sister of Aminta. But AYeyburn wanted 
 to have her position defined before he set 
 her beside Aminta. He writhed under 
 Lady Charlotte's tolerating scorn of " the 
 young woman." It roused an uneasy senti- 
 ment of semi-hostility in the direction of 
 my lord ; and he had no personal complaint 
 to make. 
 
 Lord Ormont was cordial on the day of 
 the secretary's installation ; as if — if one 
 might dare to guess it — some one had 
 helped him to a friendly judgement. 
 
 The lady of Aminta's eyes was absent at 
 the luncheon table. She came into the 
 room a step, to speak to Lord Ormont, 
 dressed for a drive to pay a visit. 
 
 The secretary was unnoticed. 
 
 Lord Ormont put inquiries to him at
 
 136 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 table, for tlie why of his having avoided 
 the profession of arms ; and apparently 
 considered that the secretary had made a 
 mistake, and that he would have committed 
 a greater error in becoming a soldier — " in 
 this country." A man with a grievance is 
 illogical under his burden. He mentioned 
 the name "Lady Ormont" distinctly during 
 some remarks on travel. Lady Ormont 
 preferred the Continent. 
 
 Two days later she came to the arm-chair, 
 as before, met Weyburn's eyes when he 
 raised them ; gave him no home in hers — 
 not a temporary shelter from the j)elting 
 of interrogations. She hardly sjDoke. AVhy 
 did she come ? 
 
 But how was it that he was drawn to 
 think of her ? Absent or present, she was 
 round him, like the hills of a valley. She 
 was round his thoughts — caged them ; how- 
 ever high, however far they flew, they were 
 conscious of her.
 
 RECOGNITION. 137 
 
 She took her place at the midday meal. 
 She had Aminta's voice in some tones ; a 
 mellower than Aminta's — the voice of one 
 of Aminta's family. She had the trick 
 of Aminta's upper lip in speaking. Her 
 look on him was foreign ; a civil smile 
 as they conversed. She was very much 
 at home with my lord, whom she rallied 
 for his addiction to his Club at a particular 
 hour of the afternoon. She conversed 
 readily. She reminded him incidentally 
 that her aunt would arrive early next day. 
 He informed her, some time after, of an 
 engagement " to tiffin with a brother officer," 
 and she nodded. 
 
 They drove away together while the 
 secretary was at his labour of sorting the 
 heap of autobiographical scraps in a worn 
 dispatch-box, pen and pencil jottings tossed 
 to swell the mass when they had relieved 
 an angry reminiscence. He noticed, heed- 
 lessly at the moment, feminine hand-
 
 138 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 writing on some few clear sheets among 
 them. 
 
 Next day he was alone in the library. 
 He sat before the box, opened it and 
 searched, merely to quiet his annoyance 
 for having left those sheets of the fair 
 amanuensis unexamined. They were not 
 discoverable. They had gone. 
 
 He stood up at the stir of the door. It 
 was she, and she acknowledged his bow ; 
 she took her steps to her chair. 
 
 He was informed that Lord Ormont had 
 an engagement, and he remarked, " I can 
 do the work very well." She sat cpite 
 silent. 
 
 He read first lines of the scraps, laid 
 them in various places, as in a preparation 
 for conjurer's tricks at cards ; refraining 
 from a glance, lest he should disconcert the 
 eyes he felt to be on him fitfully. 
 
 At last she spoke, and he knew Aminta 
 in his hearing and sight.
 
 RECOGNITION. 139 
 
 " Is Emile Grenat still anglomane ? " 
 An instant before her voice was heard 
 he had been persuading himself that the 
 points of nnlikeness between his young 
 Aminta and this tall and stately hady of 
 the proud reserve in her bearing flouted 
 the resemblance.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 IN WHICH THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND 
 MATEY ADVANCE AND RETIRE. 
 
 " ^MILE is as anglomane as ever, and 
 not a bit less a Frenchman," Weyburn said, 
 in a tone of one who muffles a shock at the 
 heart. 
 
 " It would be the poorer compliment to 
 us," she rejoined. 
 
 They looked at one another ; she dropped 
 her eyelids, lie looked away. 
 
 She had the grand manner by nature. 
 She was the woman of the girl once 
 known. 
 
 " A soldier, is he ? "
 
 THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY. 141 
 
 '' ]&mile's profession and mine are much 
 alike, or will be." 
 
 " A secretary ? " 
 
 Her deadness of accent was not designed 
 to carry her opinion of the post of 
 secretary. 
 
 It brought the reply : " We hope to be 
 schoolmasters." 
 
 She drew in a breath ; there was a thin 
 short voice, hardly voice, as when one of 
 the unschooled minor feelings has been 
 bruised. After a while she said — 
 
 " Does he think it a career ? " 
 
 *' Not brilliant." 
 
 " He was formed for a soldier." 
 
 " He had to go as the road led." 
 
 " A young man renouncing ambition ! " 
 
 " Considering what we can do best." 
 
 " It signifies the taste for what he does." 
 
 "Certainly that." 
 
 Weyburn had senses to read the word 
 "schoolmaster" in repetition behind her
 
 142 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 sliut mouth. He was sharply sensible of 
 a fall. 
 
 The task with his papers occupied him. 
 If he had a wish, it was to sink so low 
 in her esteem as to be spurned. A kick 
 would have been a refreshment. Yet 
 he was unashamed of the cause invoking 
 it. We are instruments to the touch of 
 certain women, and made to play strange 
 tunes. 
 
 " Mr. Cuper flourishes ? " 
 
 " The school exists. I have not been 
 down there. I met Mr. Shalders yesterday. 
 He has left the school." 
 
 " You come up from Olmer ? " 
 
 " I was at Olmer last week, Lady 
 Ormont." 
 
 An involuntary beam from her eyes 
 thanked him for her title at that juncture 
 of the dialogue. She grew more spirited. 
 
 "Mr. Shalders has joined the Dragoons, 
 has he ? "
 
 THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY. 143 
 
 " The worthy man has a happy imagin- 
 ation. He goes through a campaign daily." 
 
 " It seems to one to dignify his calling." 
 
 " I like his enthusiasm." 
 
 The lady withdrew into her thoughts ; 
 Weyburn fell upon his work. 
 
 Mention of the military cloak of enthusi- 
 asm covering Shalders, brought the scarce 
 credible old time to smite at his breast, in 
 the presence of these eyes. A ringing of 
 her title of Lady Ormont rendered the 
 present time the incredible. 
 
 " I can hardly understand a young 
 Frenchman's not entering the army," she 
 said. 
 
 " The Napoleonic legend is weaker now," 
 said he. 
 
 " The son of an officer ! " 
 
 " Grandson." 
 
 " It was his choice to be, — he gave it up 
 without reluctance "? " 
 
 " Emilc obeyed the command of his
 
 144 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 parents," Weyburn answered ; and he was 
 obedient to the veiled direction of her 
 remark, in speaking of himself: "I had a 
 reason, too." 
 
 " One wonders ! " 
 
 " It would have impoverished my mother s 
 income to put aside a small allowance for 
 me for years. She would not have hesitated. 
 I then set my mind on the profession of 
 schoolmaster." 
 
 " Emile Grenat was a brave boy. Has 
 he no regrets ? " 
 
 " Neither of us has a regret." 
 
 *' He began ambitiously." 
 
 " It's the way at the beginning." 
 
 "It is not usually abjured." 
 
 " I'm afraid we neither of us ' dignify our 
 calling ' by discontent with it ! " 
 
 A dusky flush, worth seeing, came on her 
 cheeks. " I respect enthusiasms," she said, 
 and it was as good to him to hear as the 
 begging pardon, though clearly she could
 
 THE SHADES OF BRO\YNY AND MATEY. 145 
 
 not understand entliusiasm for the scliool- 
 master's career. 
 
 Liglit of evidence was before liim, tliat 
 slie liad a friendly curiosity to know what 
 things had led to their new meeting under 
 these conditions. He sketched them cur- 
 sorily ; there was little to tell — little, that 
 is, appealing to a romantic mind for interest. 
 Aware of it, by sympathy, he degraded the 
 narrative to a flatness about as cheering as 
 a suburban London Sunday's promenade. 
 Sympathy caused the perverseness. He 
 felt her disillusionment, felt with it and 
 spread a feast of it. She had to hear of 
 studies at Caen and at a Paris Lycee ; 
 French fairly mastered ; German, the same ; 
 Italian, the same; after studies at Heidel- 
 berg, Asti, and Florence ; between four and 
 ^Yo months at Athens (he was needlessly 
 precise), in tutorship with a young noble- 
 man : no events, iioi* a s])()t of colour. 
 
 Thus did he wilfully, wiili pain to liini- 
 VOL. I. L
 
 14G LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 self, put an extinguisher on the youth 
 painted brilliant and eminent in a maiden's 
 imagination. 
 
 " So there can no longer be thought of 
 the army," she remarked ; and the remark 
 had a sort of sigh, though her breathing was 
 equable. 
 
 " Unless a big war knocks over all rules 
 and the country comes praying us to serve," 
 he said. 
 
 " You would not refuse then ? " 
 
 " Not in case of need. One may imagine 
 a crisis when they would give commissions 
 to men of my age or older for the cavalry — 
 heavy losses of officers." 
 
 She spoke, as if urged by a sting to 
 revert to the distasteful : " That profes- 
 sion — must you not take . . . enter into 
 orders if you would ... if you aim at any 
 distinction ? " 
 
 " And a member of the Anglican Church 
 would not be allowed to exchange his frock
 
 THE SHADES OF BEOWNY AND MATEY. 147 
 
 for a cavalry sabre," said he. " That is 
 true. I do not propose to settle as a school- 
 master in England." 
 
 " Where ? " 
 
 '' On the Continent." 
 
 " Would not America be better ? " 
 
 " It would not so well suit the purpose in 
 view for us." 
 
 " There are others besides ? " 
 
 " Besides Emile, there is a German and 
 an Italian and a Swiss." 
 
 " It is a Company ? " 
 
 " A Company of schoolmasters 1 Com- 
 panies of all kinds are forming. Colleges 
 are Com]3anies. And they have their 
 collegians. Our aim is at pupils ; we have 
 no ambition for any title higher than 
 School and Schoolmaster ; it is not a 
 Company." 
 
 So, like Nature parading her skeleton 
 to youthful adorers of her hce, he insisted 
 on reducing to hideous material wreck the
 
 148 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 fair illusion, wliicli liad once arrayed him in 
 alluring promise. 
 
 She explained : "I said, America. You 
 would be among Protestants in America." 
 
 " Catholics and Protestants are both wel- 
 come to us, according to our scheme. And 
 Germans, French, English, Americans, 
 Italians, if they will come ; Spaniards and 
 Portuguese, and Scandinavians, Kussians as 
 well. And Jews ; Mahommedans too, if 
 only they will come ! The more mixed, the 
 more it hits our object." 
 
 " You have not stated where on the 
 Continent it is to be." 
 
 " The spot fixed on is in Switzerland." 
 
 " You will have scenery." 
 
 " I hold to that, as an influence." 
 
 A cool vision of the Bernese Alps encircled 
 the young schoolmaster ; and she said, '' It 
 would influence girls, I dare say." 
 
 ''A harder matter with boys, of course — 
 at first. AVe think we may make it serve."
 
 THE SHADES OP BROWXY AND MATEY. 149 
 
 " And where is the spot ? Is that fixed 
 on ? " 
 
 " Fifteen miles from Berne, on elevated 
 land, neighbouring a water, not quite to 
 be called a lake, unless in an auctioneer's 
 advertisement." 
 
 " I am glad of the lake. I could not 
 look on a country home where there was 
 no swimming. You will be head of the 
 school." 
 
 '' There must be a head." 
 
 " Is the school likely to be established 
 soon ? " 
 
 He fell into her dead tone : " Money is 
 required for establishments. I have a 
 Reversion coming some day ; I don't dabble 
 in post ohits.'^ 
 
 He waited for further questions. They 
 were at an end. 
 
 " You have your work to do, Mr. 
 Weyburn." 
 
 Saying that, she bowed an implied apology
 
 150 LOKD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 for having kept him from it, and rose. 
 She bowed again as she passed through 
 the doorway, in acknowledgment of his 
 politeness. 
 
 Here, then, was the end of the story of 
 Browny and Matey. Such was his thought 
 under the truncheon- stroke of their colloquy. 
 Lines of Browny's letters were fiery waving 
 ribands about him, while the coldly gracious 
 bow of the lady wrote Finis. 
 
 The gulf between the two writings 
 remained unsounded. It gave a heave to 
 the old passion, but stirred no new one ; he 
 had himself in hand now, and he shut him- 
 self up when the questions bred of amaze- 
 ment buzzed and threatened to storm. 
 After all, what is not curious in this world ? 
 The curious thing would be if curious things 
 should fail to happen. Men have been say- 
 ing it since they began to count and turn 
 corners. And let us hold off from speculating 
 when there is or but seems a shadow of
 
 THE SHADES OF BEOWNY AND MATEY. 151 
 
 unholiness over that mole-like business. 
 There shall be no questions ; and as to 
 feelings, the same. They, if petted for a 
 moment beneath the shadow, corrupt our 
 blood. Weyburn was a man to have them 
 by the throat at the birth. 
 
 Still they thronged ; heavy work of 
 strangling had to be done. Her tone of 
 disappointment with the schoolmaster bit 
 him, and it flattered him. The feelings 
 leapt alive, equally venomous from the 
 wound and the caress. They pushed to 
 see, had to be repelled from seeing, the 
 girl Browny in the splendid woman ; they 
 had lightning memories : not the pain of his 
 grip could check their voice on the theme 
 touching her happiness or the reverse. And 
 this was an infernal cunning. He paused 
 perforce to inquire, giving them space for 
 the breeding of their multitudes. Was she 
 happy ? Did she not seem too meditative, 
 enclosed, toneless, at her age ? Vainly the
 
 152 LOKD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 persecuted fellow said to himself: "But 
 what is it to me now ? " — The Browny days 
 were over. The passion for the younger 
 Aminta was over — -buried ; and a dream of 
 power belonging to those days was not yet 
 more than visionary. It had moved her 
 once, when it was a young soldier's. She 
 treated the schoolmaster's dream as vapour, 
 and the old days as dead and ghostless. She 
 did rightly. How could they or she or he 
 be other than they were ! 
 
 With that sage exclamation, he headed 
 into the Browny days and breasted them ; 
 and he had about him the living foamy 
 sparkle of the very time, until the Countess 
 of Ormont breathed the word " School- 
 master " ; when, at once, it was dusty land 
 where buoyant waters had been, and the 
 armies of the facts, in uniform drab, with 
 some feathers and laces, and a significant 
 surpliced figure, decorously covering the 
 wildest of Cupids, marched the standard
 
 THE SHADES OF BROWN Y AND MATEY. 153 
 
 of the winking gold -piece, wliicli is tlieir 
 nourishing sun and eclipser of all suns that 
 foster dreams. 
 
 As you perceive, he was drawing swiftly 
 to the vortex of the fools, and round and 
 round he went, lucky to float. 
 
 His view of the business of the school- 
 master plucked him from the whirl. She 
 despised it ; he upheld it. He stuck to his 
 view, finding tlieir antagonism on the 
 subject wholesome for him. All that she 
 succeeded in doing was to rob it of the 
 aurora colour clothing everything on which 
 Matey Weyburn set his aim. Her contempt 
 of it, whether as a profession in itself or as 
 one suitable to the former young enthusiast 
 for arms, dwarfed it to appear like the 
 starved plants under Greenland skies. But 
 those are of a sturdy genus ; they mean to 
 live ; they live, perforce, of the right to 
 live ; they will prove their right in a coming 
 season, when some one steps near and
 
 154 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 wonders at them, and from more closely 
 observing, gets to understand, learning that 
 the significance and the charm of earth 
 will be as well shown by them as by her 
 tropical fair Haunters or the tenderly-nur- 
 tured exotics. 
 
 An unopened coffer of things to be said 
 in defence of — no, on behalf of — no, in 
 honour of the Profession of Schoolmaster, 
 perhaps to the convincing of Aminta, Lady 
 Ormont, was glanced at ; a sentence or two 
 leapt out and stepped forward, and had to 
 retire. He preferred to the fathering of 
 tricky, windy phrases, the being under- 
 valued — even by her. He was taught to 
 see again how Khetoric haunts, and Ehetoric 
 bedevils, the vindication of the clouded, 
 especially in the case of a disesteemed 
 Profession requiring one to raise it and 
 impose it upon the antagonistic senses for 
 the bewildering of the mind. One has to 
 sound it loudly ; there is no treating it, as
 
 THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY. 155 
 
 in the advocacy of the cases of flesh and 
 blood, with the masterly pathos of designed 
 simplicity. And Weyburn was Cuper's 
 Matey Weyburn still in his loathing of 
 artifice to raise emotion, loathing of the 
 affected, the stilted, the trumpet of speech 
 — always excepting school-exercises in the 
 tongues, the unmasking of a Catiline, the 
 address of a general, Athenian or other, to 
 troops. 
 
 He kept his coffer shut; and, for a 
 consequence, he saw the contents as an 
 avenue of blossom leading to vistas of in- 
 finite harvest. 
 
 She was Lady Ormont : Aminta shared 
 the title of his old hero ! He refused to 
 speculate upon how it had come to pass, 
 and let the curtain hang, though dramas 
 and romances, with the miracles involved in 
 them, were agitated by a transient glimpse 
 at the curtain. 
 
 Well ! and he hoped to be a member of
 
 156 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 the Profession slie despised : hoped it with 
 all his heart. And one good effect of his 
 giving his heart to the hope was, that he 
 could hold from speculating and from feeling, 
 even from pausing to wonder at the most 
 wonderful turn of events. Blessed antago- 
 nism drove him to be braced by thoughts 
 upon the hardest of the schoolmaster's tasks 
 — bright winter thoughts, prescribing to 
 him satisfaction with a faith in the sowing, 
 which may be his only reaping. Away fly 
 the boys in sheaves. After his toil with 
 them, to instruct, restrain, animate, point 
 their minds, they leave him, they plunge 
 into the world and are gone. Will he see 
 them again ? It is a flickering perhaps. To 
 sustain his belief that he has done service- 
 able work, he must be sure of his having 
 charged them with good matter. How 
 can the man do it, if, during his term of 
 apprenticeship, he has allowed himself to 
 dally here and there, down to moony
 
 THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY. 157 
 
 dreamings over inscrutable beautiful eyes 
 of a married lady ; for the sole reason that 
 he meets her unexpectedly, after an exchange 
 of letters with her in long-past days at 
 school, when she w^as an inexperienced girl, 
 who knew not what she vowed, and he a 
 flighty-headed youngster, crying out to be 
 the arrow of any bow that was handy ? Yes, 
 she was once that girl, named Browny by 
 the boys. 
 
 Temptation threw warm light on the 
 memory, and very artfully, by conjuring 
 up the faces, cries, characters, all the fun 
 of the boys. There was no possibility of 
 forgetting her image in those days ; he had, 
 therefore, to live with it and to live near 
 the grown woman — Time's present answer 
 to the old riddle. It seemed to him that, 
 instead of sorting ■ Lord Ormont's papers, 
 he ought to be at sharp exercise. Accord- 
 ing to his prcscripf, sliiirj) exercise of lungs 
 and limbs is a man's moral aid auainst
 
 158 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 temptation. He knew it as the one trusty 
 antidote for him, who was otherwise the 
 vessel of a temperament pushing to mutiny. 
 Certainly it is the best philosophy youth 
 can pretend to practise ; and Lord Ormont 
 kept him from it ! Worse than that, the 
 slips and sheets of paper in the dispatch-box 
 were not an exercise of the mind even ; 
 there was nothing to grapple with — no 
 diversion ; criticism passed by them indul- 
 gently, if not benevolently. 
 
 Quite apart from the subject inscribed 
 on them, Weyburn had now and again a 
 blow at the breast, of untraceable origin. 
 For he was well enough aware that the old 
 days when Browny imagined him a hero, 
 in drinking his praises of a brighter, were 
 drowned. They were dead ; but here was 
 she the bride of the proved hero. His praises 
 might have helped in causing her willingness 
 — devotional readiness — he could fancy — 
 to yield her hand. Perhaps at the moment
 
 THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY. 159 
 
 when the hero was penning some of the 
 Indian slips here, the boy at school was 
 preparing Aminta ; but he could not be 
 responsible for a sacrifice of the kind 
 suggested by Lady Charlotte. And no, 
 there had been no such sacrifice, although 
 Lord Ormont's inexplicable treatment of his 
 young countess, under cover of his notorious 
 reputation with women, conduced to the 
 suspicion. 
 
 While the vagrant in Weyburn was thus 
 engaged, his criticism of the soldier-lord's 
 field-English on paper let the stufi" go 
 tolerantly unexamined, but with a degree 
 of literary contempt at heart for the writer 
 who had that woman-scented reputation and 
 expressed himself so poorly. The sentiment 
 was outside of reason. We do, neverthe- 
 less, expect our Don Juans to deliver their 
 minds a trifle elegantly, if not in classic 
 English, on paper ; and when we find one 
 of them inflicting cruelty, as it appears, and
 
 IGO LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 the victim is a young woman, a beautiful 
 young woman, she pleads to us poetically 
 against the bearish sentences of his com- 
 position. We acknowledge, however, that 
 a mere sentiment, entertained possibly by 
 us alone, should not be permitted to 
 condemn him unheard. 
 
 Lady Ormont was not seen again. After 
 luncheon at a solitary table, the secretary 
 worked till winter's lamps were lit ; and 
 then shone freedom, with assurance to him 
 that he would escape from the miry mental 
 ditch he had been floundering in since 
 Aminta revealed herself. Sunday was the 
 glorious day to follow, with a cleansing bath 
 of a walk along the southern hills ; homely 
 English scenery to show to a German friend, 
 one of his "Company." Half-a-dozen good 
 lads were pledged to the walk ; l^earing 
 which in view, it could be felt that this 
 nonsensical puzzlement over liis relations to 
 the moods and tenses of a married woman
 
 THE SHADES OF BEOWNY AND MATEY. 161 
 
 would be bounced out of recollection before 
 nightfall. The landscape given off any of 
 the airy hills of Surrey would suffice to 
 do it. 
 
 A lady stood among her boxes below, as 
 he descended the stairs to cross the hall. 
 He knew her for the person Lady Charlotte 
 called " the w^oman's aunt," whom Lord 
 Ormont could not endure — a forgiven old 
 enemy, Mrs. Nargett Pagnell. 
 
 He saluted. She stared, and corrected 
 her incivility with " Ah, yes," and a formal 
 smile. 
 
 If not accidentally delayed on her journey, 
 she had been needlessly the cause why Lord 
 Ormont hugged his Club during the morn- 
 ing and afternoon. Weyburn was pushed 
 to think of the matter by remembrance of 
 his foregone resentment at her having 
 withdrawn Aminta from Miss Vincent's 
 three days earlier than the holiday time. 
 The resentment was over ; but a germ of it 
 
 VOL. I. M
 
 162 LOED ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 must have sprung from the dust to prompt 
 the kindling leap his memory took, out of 
 all due connection, like a lightning among 
 the crags. It struck Aminta smartly. He 
 called to mind the conversation at table 
 yesterday. Had she played on Lord 
 Ormont's dislike of the aunt to drive him 
 forth for some purpose of her own ? If so? 
 the little trick had been done with deplor- 
 able spontaneity or adeptness of usage. 
 What was the purpose ? — to converse with 
 an old acquaintance, undisturbed by Lord 
 Ormont and her aunt ? Neatly done, 
 supposing the surmise correct. 
 
 But what was there in the purpose ? He 
 sifted rapidly for the gist of the conver- 
 sation ; reviewed the manner of it, the 
 words, the sound they had, the feelings 
 they touched ; then owned that the ques- 
 tion could not be answered. Owning, 
 further, that the recurrence of these idiotic 
 speculations, feelings, questions, wrote him
 
 THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY. 163 
 
 clown as both dull fellow and impertinent, 
 lie was enabled to restore Aminta to the 
 queenly place she took above the school- 
 master, who was very soon laughing at his 
 fever or flush of the afternoon. The day 
 had brought a great surprise, nothing more. 
 Twenty minutes of fencing in the salle 
 dJarmes of an Italian captain braced him to 
 health, and shifted scenes of other loves, 
 lighter loves, following the Browny days — • 
 not to be called loves ; in fact, hardly 
 beyond inclinations. Nevertheless, inclin- 
 ations are an infidelity. To meet a 
 married woman, and be mooning over her 
 because she gave him her eyes and her 
 handwriting when a girl, was enough to 
 rouse an honest fellow's laugh at himself, 
 in the contemplation of his intermediate 
 amorous vagabondage. Had he ever known 
 the veritable passion after Browny sank 
 from his ken ? Let it be confessed, never 
 His first love was his only true love, despite
 
 16' 4 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 one shuddering episode, oddly humiliating 
 to recollect, though he had not behaved 
 badly. So, then, by right of his passion, 
 thus did eternal justice rule it : that 
 Browny belonged to Matey Weyburn, 
 Aminta to Lord Ormont. Aminta was a 
 lady blooming in the flesh, Browny was the 
 past's pale phantom ; for which reason he 
 could call her his own, without harm done 
 to any one, and with his usual appetite for 
 dinner, breakfast, lunch, whatever the meal 
 supplied by the hour. 
 
 It would somewhat alarmingly have got 
 to Mr. Weyburn's conscience through a 
 disturbance of his balance, telling him that 
 he was on a perilous road, if his relish for 
 food had been blunted. He had his axiom 
 on the subject, and he was wrong in the 
 general instances, for the appetites of rogues 
 and ogres are not known to fail. As 
 regarded himself, he was eminently right ; 
 and he could apply it to boys also, to all
 
 THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY. 165 
 
 young people — the unlaunclied, he called 
 them. He counted himself among the 
 launched, no doubt, and had breasted seas ; 
 but the boy was alive, a trencherman lad, in 
 the coming schoolmaster, and told him 
 23rofitable facts concerning his condition, 
 besides throwing a luminous ray on the 
 arcana of our elusive youthful. If they 
 have no stout zest for eating, put query" 
 against them. 
 
 His customary enjoyment of dinner con- 
 vinced Mr. Weyburn that he had not 
 brooded morbidly over his phantom 
 Browny, and could meet Aminta, Countess 
 of Ormont, on the next occasion with the 
 sentiments proper to a common official. 
 Did she not set him a commendable 
 example ? He admired her for not con- 
 cealing her disdain of the aspirant school- 
 master, quite comprehending, by sympathy, 
 why the woman should reproach the girl 
 who had worshipped heroes, if this was a
 
 166 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 full-grown specimen ; and the reply of the 
 shamed girl that, in her ingorance, she 
 could not know better. He spared the girl, 
 but he laughed at the woman he com- 
 mended, laughed at himself. 
 
 Aminta's humour was being stirred about 
 the same time. She and her aunt were at 
 the dinner-table in the absence of my lord. 
 The dinner had passed with the stiff 
 dialogue peculiar to couples under super- 
 vision of their inferiors ; and, as soon as the 
 room was clear, she had asked her aunt, 
 touching the secretary : '' Have you seen 
 him ? " 
 
 Mrs. Nargett Pagnell's answer could have 
 been amusing only to one whose intimate 
 knowledge of her found it characteristically 
 salt ; for she was a lady of speech addressed 
 ever directly or roundabout to the chief 
 point of business between herself and her 
 hearer, and the more she was brief, oblique, 
 far-shooting, the more comically intellioible
 
 THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY. 167 
 
 she was to her niece. She bent her head to 
 signify that she had seen the secretary, 
 and struck the table with both hands, 
 exclaiming : 
 
 " Well, to be sure, Lord Ormont ! " 
 
 Their discussion, before they descended 
 the stairs to dinner, concerned his lordship's 
 extraordinary indifference to the thronging 
 of handsome young men around his young 
 countess. 
 
 Here, the implication ran, is one estab- 
 lished in the house. 
 
 Aminta's thoughts could be phrased : 
 " Yes, that is true, for one part of it." 
 
 As for the other part, the ascent of a 
 Phoebus Apollo, with his golden bow and 
 quiver of the fairest of Eastern horizon 
 skies, followed suddenly by the sight of him 
 toppling over in Mr. Cuper's long-skirted 
 brown coat, with spectacles and cane, is an 
 image that hardly exceeds the degradation 
 she conceived. It was past ludicrous ; yet
 
 168 LOED ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 admitted of no woefulness, nothing sooth- 
 ingly pathetic. It smothered and barked at 
 the dreams of her blooming spring of life, 
 to which her mind had latterly been turning 
 back, for an escape from sour, one may say 
 cynical, reflections, the present issue of a 
 beautiful young woman's first savour of 
 battle with the world.
 
 CHAPTER YL 
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 
 
 Up in Aminta's amber dressing-room, Mrs. 
 Nargett Pagnell alluded sadly to the 
 long month of separation, and begged her 
 niece to let her have in plain words an 
 exact statement of the present situation ; 
 adding, "Items will do." Thereupon she 
 slipped into prattle and held the field. 
 
 She was the known, worthy, good, intoler- 
 able woman whom the burgess turns out for 
 his world in regiments, that do and look 
 and all but step alike ; and they mean well, 
 and have conventional worships and material 
 aspirations, and very peculiar occult refine- 
 ments, with a blind head and a haphazard
 
 170 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 gleam of acuteness, impressive to acquaint- 
 ances, convincing themselves tliat they 
 impersonate sagacity. She had said this, 
 done that ; and it was, by proof. Providence 
 consenting, the right thing. A niece, 
 written down in her girlhood, because of her 
 eyes and her striking air and excellent 
 deportment, as mate for a nobleman, marries 
 him before she is out of her teens. " I said. 
 She shall be a countess." A countess she is. 
 Providence does not comply with our pre- 
 dictions in order to stultify us. Admitting 
 the position of affairs for the moment as 
 extraordinary, we are bound by what has 
 happened to expect they will be conform- 
 able in the end. Temporarily warped, we 
 should say of them. 
 
 She could point to the reason: it was 
 Lord Ormont's blunt misunderstanding of 
 her character. The burgess's daughter was 
 refining to an appreciation of the exquisite 
 so rapidly that she could criticize patricians.
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 171 
 
 My lord had never forgiven her for correct- 
 ing him in his pronunciation of her name by 
 marriage. Singular indeed ; but men, even 
 great men, men of title, are so, some of 
 them, whom you could least suspect of their 
 being so. He would speak the "g"in 
 Nargett, and he declined — after a remon- 
 strance he declined — to pass Pagnell under 
 the cedilla. Lord Ormont spoke the name 
 like a man hating it, or an English rustic : 
 " Nargett Pagnell," instead of the soft and 
 elegant " Naryett Pagnell," the only true 
 way of speaking it ; and she had always 
 taken that pronunciation of her name for a 
 test of people's breeding. The expression of 
 his lordship's countenance under correction 
 was memorable. Naturally, in those honey- 
 moony days, the young Countess of 
 Ormont sided with her husband the ear] ; 
 she declared that her aunt had never 
 dreamed of the cedilla before the expedi- 
 tion to Spain. When, for example, Alfred
 
 172 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 Nargett Pagnell had a laughing remark, 
 which Aminta in her childhood must have 
 heard : '' We rhyme with spaniel ! " 
 
 That was the secret of Lord Ormont's 
 prepossession against Aminta' s aunt ; and 
 who can tell ? perhaps of much of his 
 behaviour to the beautiful young wife he at 
 least admired, sincerely admired, though he 
 caused her to hang her head — cast a cloud 
 on the head so dear to him ! 
 
 Otherwise there was no interpreting his 
 lordship. To think of herself as personally 
 disliked by a nobleman stupefied Mrs. 
 Pagnell, from her just expectation of 
 reciprocal dealings in high society ; for she 
 confessed herself a fly to a title. Where is 
 the shame, if titles are created to attract ? 
 Elsewhere than in that upper circle, we may 
 anticipate hard bargains ; the widow of a 
 solicitor had not to learn it. But when a 
 distinguished member and ornament of the 
 chosen seats above blew cold upon their
 
 m A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 173 
 
 gesticulatory devotee, and was besides un- 
 grateful, she was more than commonly 
 assured of his being, as she called him, " a 
 sphinx." His behaviour to his legally- 
 wedded wife confirmed the charge. 
 
 She checked her flow to resume the 
 question. "So, then, where are we now ? 
 He allows you liberally for pin-money in 
 addition to your own small independent 
 income. Satisfaction with that would 
 warrant him to suppose his whole duty done 
 by you." 
 
 "We are where we were, aunty; the 
 month has made no change," said Aminta, 
 in languor. 
 
 " And you as patient as ever ? " 
 
 " I am supposed to have everything a 
 woman can require." 
 
 " Can he possibly think it ? And I have 
 to warn you, child, that lawyers are not so 
 absolving as the world is with some of the 
 ladies Lord Ormont allows you to call your
 
 174 LOED ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 friends. I liave been hearing — it is not 
 mere airy tales one hears from lawyers 
 about cases in Courts of Law. Tighten 
 your lips as you like ; I say nothing to 
 condemn or reflect on Mrs. Lawrence 
 Finchley. I have had my eyes a little 
 opened, that is all. Oh, I know my niece 
 Aminta, when it's a friend to stand by ; 
 but our position — thanks to your inscrutable 
 lord and master — demands of us the utmost 
 scrupulousness, or it soon becomes a whirl 
 and scandal flying about, and those lawyers 
 picking up and putting together. I have 
 had a difliculty to persuade them ! ... 
 and my own niece ! whom I saw married at 
 the British Embassy in Madrid, as I take 
 good care to tell everybody ; for it was my 
 doing ; I am the responsible person ! and 
 by an English Protestant clergyman, to all 
 appearance able to walk erect in and out of 
 any of these excellent new Life Assurance 
 oftices they are starting for the benefit of
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 175 
 
 widows and orphans, and deceased within 
 six days of the ceremony — if ceremony one 
 may call the hasty affair in those foreign 
 places. My dear, the instant I heard it I 
 had a presentiment, ' All has gone well up to 
 now.' I remember murmuring the words. 
 Then your letter, received in that smelly 
 Barcelona : Lord Ormont was carrying you 
 off to Granada — a dream of my infancy ! 
 It may not have been his manoeuvre, but 
 it was the beginning of his manoeuvres." 
 
 Aminta shuddered. " And tra-la-la, and 
 castanets, and my Cid ! my Cid ! and the 
 Alhambra, the Sierra Nevada, and ay di 
 me, Alhama ; and Boabdil el Chico and el 
 Zagal and Fray Antonio Agapida ! " She 
 flung out the rattle, yawning, with her 
 arms up and her head back, in the posture 
 of a woman wounded. One of her aunt's 
 chance shots had traversed her breast, 
 flashing at her the time, the scene, the 
 husband, intensest sunniness on sword-
 
 176 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 edges of shade, — and now the wedded 
 riddle, illusion dropping mask, romance in 
 its anatomy, cold English mist. Ah, what 
 a background is the present when we have 
 the past to the fore ! That filmy past is 
 diaphanous on heaving ribs. 
 
 She smiled at the wide-eyed little gossip. 
 " Don't speak of manoeuvres, dear aunt. 
 And well leave Granada to the poets. I'm 
 tired. Talk of our own people, on your 
 side and my fatlier's, and as much as you 
 please of the Pagnell-Pagnells, they refresh 
 me. Do they go on marrying ? " 
 
 " Why, my child, how could they go on 
 without it ? " 
 
 Aminta pressed her hands at her eyelids. 
 " Oh, me ! " she sighed, feeling the tear 
 come with a sting from checked laughter. 
 " But there are marriages, aunty, that 
 don't go on, though Protestant clergymen 
 officiated. Leave them unnoticed, I have 
 really nothing to tell."
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 177 
 
 '' You have not heard anythmg of Lady 
 Eglett ? " 
 
 "Lady Charlotte Eglett? No syllable. 
 Or wait — my lord's secretary was with her 
 at Olmer ; approved by her, I have to 
 suppose." 
 
 " There, my dear, I say again I do dread 
 
 that woman, if she can make a man like 
 
 Lord Ormont afraid of her. And no doubt 
 
 she is of our old aristocracy. And they 
 
 tell me she is coarse in her conversation — 
 
 like a man. Lawyers tell me she is never 
 
 happy but in litigation. Years back, I am 
 
 given to understand, she did not set so 
 
 particularly good an example. Lawyers 
 
 hear next to everything. I am told she 
 
 lifted her horsewhip on a gentleman once, 
 
 and then put her horse at him and rode 
 
 him down. You will say, the sister of your 
 
 husband. No ; not to make my niece a 
 
 countess, would I, if I had known the kind 
 
 of family ! Tlicn one risks, Is slu' half as 
 VOL. I. N
 
 178 LORD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 mucli afraid of liim ? In that case, no 
 wonder tliey have given up meeting. Was 
 formerly one of the Keepsake Beauties. 
 Well, Lady Eglett, and Aminta, Countess 
 of Ormont, will be in that Peerage, as they 
 call it, let her only have her dues. My 
 dear, I would — if I ever did — swear the 
 woman is jealous." 
 
 " Of me, aunty ! " 
 
 " I say more ; I say again, it would be a 
 good thing for somebody if somebody had 
 his twitch of jealousy. Wives may be too 
 meek. Cases and cases my poor Alfred 
 read to me, where an ill-behaving man was 
 brought to his senses by a clever little 
 shuffle of the cards, and by the most 
 innocent of wives. A kind of poison to 
 him, of course ; but there are poisons that 
 cure. It might come into the courts ; and 
 the nearer the proofs the happier he in 
 withdrawing from his charge and effecting 
 a reconciliation. Short of guilt, of course.
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 179 
 
 Men are so strange. Imagine now, if a 
 handsome young woman were known to be 
 admired rather more than enough by a 
 good-looking gentleman near about her 
 own age. Oh, I've no patience with the man 
 for causing us to think and scheme ! Only 
 there are men who won't be set rio;ht unless 
 we do. My husband used to say, change 
 is such a capital thing in life's jog-trot, that 
 men find it refreshing if we now and then 
 reverse the order of our pillion-riding for 
 them. A spiritless woman in a wife is what 
 they bear least of all. Anything rather. 
 Is Mr. Morsfield haunting Mrs. Lawrence 
 Finchley's house as usual ? " 
 
 Aminta's cheeks unrolled their deep 
 damask rose at the abrupt intrusion of tlie 
 name. " I meet him there." 
 
 " Lord Adderwood, Sir John Kandeller, 
 and the rest ? " 
 
 "Two or three times a week." 
 
 " And the lady, wife of the captain,
 
 180 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 really a Lady Fair — Mrs. . . . month of 
 May ; so I have to get at it." 
 
 " She may be seen there." 
 
 " Really a contrast, when you two are 
 together ! As to reputation, there is an 
 exchange of colours. Those lawyers hold 
 the keys of the great world, and a naughty 
 world it is, I fear — with exceptions, who 
 are the salt, but don't taste so much. I 
 can't help enjoying the people at Mrs. 
 Lawrence Finchley's. I like to feel I can 
 amuse them, as they do me. One puzzles 
 for what they say — in somebody's absence, 
 I mean. They must take Lord Ormont for 
 a perfect sphinx ; unless they are so silly as 
 to think they may despise him, or suppose 
 him indifferent. Oh, that upper class ! 
 It's a garden, and we can't help pushing 
 to enter it; and fair flowers, indeed, Imt 
 serpents too, like the tropics. It tries us 
 more than anything else in the world — well, 
 just as good eating tries the constitution.
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 181 
 
 He ought to know it and feel it, and give 
 his wife all the protection of his name, 
 instead of — not that he denies : I have 
 brought him to that point ; he cannot deny 
 it with me. But not to present her — to 
 shun the Court; not to introduce her to 
 his family, to appear ashamed of her ! My 
 darling Aminta, a month of absence for 
 reflection on your legally- wedded husband's 
 conduct increases my astonishment. For 
 usually men old enough to be the grand- 
 fathers of their wives " 
 
 " Oh, pray, aunty, pray, pray ! " Aminta 
 cried, and her body writhed. " No more 
 to-night. You mean well, I am sure. Let 
 us wait. I shall sleep, perhaps, if I go to 
 bed early. I dare say I am spiritless — not 
 worth more than I get. I gave him the 
 lead altogether ; he keeps it. In every- 
 thing else he is kind ; I have all the 
 luxuries — enough to loathe them. Kiss me 
 and say good-night."
 
 182 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 Aminta made it imperative by rising. 
 Her aunt stood up, kissed, and exclaimed, 
 " I tell you you are a queenly creature, not 
 to be treated as any puny trollop of a 
 handmaid. And altliouo;h lie is a s^reat 
 nobleman, he is not to presume to behave 
 any longer, my dear, as if your family had 
 no claim on his consideration. My husband, 
 Alfred Pagnell, would have laid that before 
 him pretty quick. You are the child of the 
 Farrells and the Solers, both old families ; 
 on your father's side you are linked with 
 the oldest nobility in Europe. It flushes 
 one to think of it ! Your grandmother, 
 marrying Captain Algernon Farrell, was the 
 legitimate daughter of a Grandee of Spain, 
 as I have told Lord Ormont often, and I 
 defy him to equal that for a romantic 
 marriage in the annals of his house, or boast 
 of bluer blood. Again, the Solers " 
 
 " We take the Solers for granted, aunty : 
 good-night."
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 183 
 
 " Commoners, if you like ; but established 
 since tlie Conquest. That is, we trace the 
 pedigree. And to be treated, even by a 
 great nobleman, as if we were stuff picked 
 up out of the ditch ! I declare, there are 
 times when I sit and think and boil. Is it 
 chivalrous, is it generous — is it, I say, 
 decent — is it what Alfred would have 
 called a fair fulfilment of a pact, for your 
 wedded husband — ? You may close my 
 mouth ! But he pretends to be chivalrous 
 and generous, and he has won a Cjueen 
 any wealthy gentleman in England — I 
 know of one, if not two — would be proud 
 to have beside him in equal state ; and 
 what is he to her ? He is an extinguisher. 
 Or is it the very meanest miserliness, that 
 he may keep you all to himself? There 
 we are again ! I say he is an unreadable 
 sphinx." 
 
 Aminta had rung the bell for her maid. 
 Mrs. Pagnell could be counted on for
 
 184 LOUD OEMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 drawing in lier tongue when the domestics 
 were near. 
 
 A languor past delivery in sighs was on 
 the young woman's breast. She could have 
 heard without a regret that the heart w^as 
 to cease beating. Had it been downright 
 misery she would have looked about her 
 with less of her exanimate glassiness. The 
 unhappy have a form of life : until they 
 are worn out, they feel keenly. She felt 
 nothing. The blow to her pride of station 
 and womanhood struck on numbed sensa- 
 tions. She could complain that the blow 
 was not heavier. 
 
 A letter lying in her jewel-box called her 
 to read it, for the chance of some slight 
 stir. The contents were known. The 
 signature of Adolphus Morsfield had a new 
 meaning for her eyes, and dashed her at her 
 husband in a spasm of revolt and wrath 
 against the man exj^osing her to these 
 letters, which a motion of her hand could
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 185 
 
 turn to blood, and abstention from any sign 
 maintained in a Satanic wliisper, saying, 
 "Here lies one way of solving tlie riddle." 
 It was lier husband wlio drove lier to look 
 that way. 
 
 The look was transient, and the wrath : 
 she could not burn. A small portion of 
 contempt lodged in her mind to shadow 
 husbands precipitating women on their 
 armoury for a taste of vengeance. Women 
 can always be revenged — so speedily, so 
 completely : they have but to dip. Hus- 
 bands driving wives to taste their power 
 execrate the creature for her fall deep 
 downward. They are forgetful of causes. 
 
 Does it matter ? Aminta's languor asked. 
 The letter had not won a reply. Thought 
 of the briefest of replies was a mountain of 
 effort, and she moaned at her nervelessness 
 in body and mind. To reply, to reproach 
 the man, to be flame — an image of herself 
 under the form she desired — gave her a
 
 186 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 momentary false energy, wherein the daring 
 of the man, whose life was at a toss for the 
 writing of this letter, hung lighted. She 
 had therewith a sharp vision of his features, 
 repellent in correctness, Greek in lines, with 
 close eyes, hollow temples, pressed lips — a 
 face indicating the man who can fling 
 himself on a die. She had heard tales of 
 women and the man. Some had loved 
 him, report said. Here were words to say 
 that he loved her. They might, poor man, 
 be true. Otherwise she had never been 
 loved. 
 
 Memory had of late been paying visits 
 to a droopy plant in the golden summer 
 drought on a gorgeous mid-sea island, and 
 had taken her on board to refresh her with 
 voyages, always bearing down full sail on a 
 couple of blissful schools, abodes of bloom 
 and briny vigour, sweet merriment, inno- 
 cent longings, dreams the shyest, dreams 
 the mightiest. At night before sleep, at
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 187 
 
 morn before rising, often during day, and 
 when vexed or wlien dispirited, she had 
 issued her command for tlie voyage. Slieer 
 refreslmient followed, as is ever the case 
 if our vessel carries no freight of hopes. 
 There could be no hopes. It was forgotten 
 that they had ever been seriously alive. 
 But it carried an admiration. Now, an 
 admiration may endure, and this one had 
 been justified all round. The figure hero- 
 ical, the splendid, active youth, hallowed 
 Aminta's past. The past of a bitterly 
 humiliated Aminta was a garden in the 
 coming kiss of sunset, with that godlike 
 figure of young manhood to hallow it. 
 There he stayed, perpetually assuring her of 
 his triumphs to come. 
 
 She could have no further voyages. 
 Eidicule convulsed her home of refuge. 
 For the young soldier-hero to be unhorsed 
 by misfortune, was one thing ; but the 
 meanness of the ambition he had taken in
 
 188 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 exchange for the thirst of glory, accused 
 his nature. He so certainly involved her 
 in the burlesque of the transformation that 
 she had to quench memory. 
 
 She was, therefore, having smothered a 
 good part of herself, accountably languid 
 — a condition alternating with fire in 
 Aminta ; and as Mr. Morsfield's letter sup- 
 plied the absent element, her needy instinct 
 pushed her to read his letter through. She 
 had not yet done that with attention. 
 
 AVhether a woman loves a man or not, 
 he is her lover if he dare tell her he loves 
 her, and is heard with attention. Aware 
 that the sentences were poison, she sum- 
 moned her constitutional antagonism to the 
 mad step proposed, so far nullifying the 
 virus as to make her shrink from the mad- 
 ness. Even then her soul cried out to her 
 husband. Who drives me to read ? or rather, 
 to brood upon what she read. The brood- 
 ing ensued, was the thirst of her malady.
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 189 
 
 The best antidote she could hit on was 
 the writer's face. Yet it expressed him, 
 his fire and his courage — gifts she respected 
 in him, found wanting in herself. Eead by 
 Lord Ormont, this letter would mean a 
 deadly thing. 
 
 Aminta did her lord the justice to feel 
 sure of him, that Avith her name bearing 
 the superscription, it might be left on her 
 table, and would not have him to peruse it. 
 If he manoeuvred, it was never basely. De- 
 spite resentment, her deepest heart denied 
 his being indifferent either to her honour 
 or his own in relation to it. He would 
 vindicate both at a stroke, for a sign. 
 Nevertheless, he had been behaving cruelly. 
 She charged on him the guilt of the small 
 preludes, archeries, anglings, veilings, cvii- 
 sions, all done with the eyelids and the 
 mute of the lips, or a skirmisher word or 
 a fan's flourish, and which, intended to 
 pique tlio ]ms])and rntlicr tlinii incite the
 
 190 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 lover, had led Mrs. Lawrence Fincliley to 
 murmur at her ear, in close assembly, with- 
 out a distinct designation of Mr. Morsfield, 
 '' Dangerous man to play little games with ! " 
 It had brought upon her this letter of 
 declaration, proposal, entreaty. 
 
 This letter was the man's life in her 
 hands, and safe, of course. But surely it 
 was a proof that the man loved her ? 
 
 Aminta was in her five-and-twentieth 
 year ; when the woman who is uncertain 
 of the having been loved, and she reputed 
 beautiful, desirable, is impelled by a sombre 
 necessity to muse on a declaration, and 
 nibble at an idea of a test. If " a dangerous 
 man to play little games with," he could 
 scarcely be dangerous to a woman having 
 no love for him at all. It meant merely 
 that he would soon fall to writing letters 
 like this, and he could not expect an 
 answer to it. But her heart really thanked 
 him, and wished the poor gentleman to
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 191 
 
 take its dumb response as his reward, for 
 being the one sole one who had loved 
 her. 
 
 Aminta dwelt on "the one sole one." 
 Lord Ormont's treatment had detached 
 her from any belief in love on his part; 
 and the schoolboy, now ambitious to be- 
 come a schoolmaster, was behind the screen 
 unlikely to be lifted again by a woman 
 valuing her pride of youth, though he had 
 — behold our deceptions ! — the sympathetic 
 face entirely absent from that of Mr. Adol- 
 phus Morsfield, whom the world would 
 count quite as handsome — nay, it boasted 
 him. He enjoyed the reputation of a killer 
 of ladies. Women have odd tastes, Aminta 
 thought, and examined the gentleman's 
 handwriting. It pleased her better. She 
 studied it till the conventional phrases 
 took a fiery hue, and came at her with 
 an invasive rush. 
 
 The letter was cast back into the box.
 
 192 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 locked up ; there an end to it, or no inter- 
 diction of sleep. 
 
 Sleep was a triumph. Aminta's healthy 
 frame rode her over petty agitations of 
 a blood uninflamed, as lightly as she swam 
 the troubled sea-waters her body gloried 
 to cleave. She woke in the morning peace- 
 ful and mildly reflective, like one who 
 walks across green meadows. Only by 
 degrees, by glimpses, was she drawn to 
 remember the trotting, cantering, galloping, 
 leaping of an active heart during night. 
 We cannot, man or woman, control the 
 heart in sleep at night. There had been 
 wild leapings. Night will lead an unsatisfied 
 heart of a woman, by way of sleep, to scale 
 black mountains, jump jagged chasms. 
 Sleep is a horse that laughs at precipices 
 and abysses. We bid women, moreover, be 
 all heart. They are to cultivate their hearts, 
 pay much heed to their hearts. The vast 
 realm of feeling is open to these appointed
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 193 
 
 keepers of the sanctuary houseliold, wlio 
 
 may be withering virgins, may be childless 
 
 matrons, may be unhusbanded wives. 
 
 Wandering in the vast realm which they 
 
 are exhorted to call their own, for the 
 
 additional attractiveness it gives them, an 
 
 unsatisfied heart of woman will somewhat 
 
 audaciously cross the borderland a single 
 
 step into the public road of the vast realm 
 
 of thinking. Once there, and but a single 
 
 step on the road, she is a rebel against 
 
 man's law for her sex. Nor is it urgent on 
 
 her that she should think defiantly in order 
 
 to feel herself the rebel. She may think 
 
 submissively, with a heart (the enlarged, 
 
 the scientifically plumped, the pasture of 
 
 epicurean man), with her coveted heart in 
 
 revolt, and from the mere act of thinking 
 
 at all. 
 
 Aminta reviewed perforce, dead against her 
 
 will, certain of the near-to-happincss racings 
 VOL. L o
 
 194 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMIKTA. 
 
 over-niglit. She thinned her lips, and her 
 cheeks glowed. An arm, on the plea of 
 rescuing, had been round her. The choice 
 now offered her was, to yield to softness or 
 to think. She took the latter step, the 
 single step of an unaccustomed foot, which 
 women educated simply to feel, will, upon 
 extreme impulsion, take ; and it held a 
 candle in a windy darkness. She saw no 
 Justice there. The sensational immensity 
 touched sublime, short of that spirit of 
 Justice required for the true sublime. And 
 void of Justice, what a sunless place is any 
 realm ! Infants, the male and the female 
 alike, first begin to know they feel when 
 it is refused them. When they know they 
 feel, they have begun to reflect. The void 
 of Justice is a godless region. Women, to 
 whom the solitary thought has come as a 
 blown candle, illumining the fringes of their 
 storm, ask themselves whether they are
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 195 
 
 God's creatures or man's. The question 
 deals a sword- stroke of division between 
 them and their human masters. Young 
 women, animated by the passions their 
 feeling bosoms of necessity breed, and 
 under terror discover, do not distinguish 
 an abstract justice from a concrete. They 
 are of the tribe too long hereditarily en- 
 slaved to conceive an abstract. So it is 
 with them, that their God is the God of 
 the slave, as it is with all but the bravest 
 of boys. He is a Thing to cry to, a Punisher, 
 not much of a Supporter — the Biblical 
 Hebrew's right reading of Nature, favour- 
 ing man, yet prompt to confound him, and 
 with woman for the instrument of vengeance. 
 By such a maze the blindfolded are brought 
 round to see Justice on earth. If women 
 can only believe in some soul of justice, 
 they will feel they belong to God — of the 
 two ; and the peril for them then is, that
 
 196 LORD OKMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 they will set the one incomprehensible 
 Power in opposition to the other, urging 
 their unsatisfied natures to make secret 
 appeal away from man and his laws alto- 
 gether, at the cost of losing clear sight of 
 the God who shines in thought. It is a 
 manner whereby the desperately harried 
 among these creatures of the petted heart 
 arrive upon occasion at an agreeable, almost 
 reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of 
 God. 
 
 There is little pleasure to be on the 
 lecture-rostrum for a narrator sensible to 
 the pulses of his audience. Justice compels 
 at times. In truth, there are times when 
 the foggy obscurities of the preacher are 
 by comparison broad daylight beside the 
 whirling loose tissues of a woman unex- 
 plained. Aminta was one born to prize 
 rectitude, to walk on the traced line up- 
 rightly; and while the dark rose over-
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 197 
 
 flowed the soft brown of her cheeks, under 
 musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings 
 over-night, she not only pleaded for woe- 
 ful creatures of her sex burdened as she 
 and erring, she weighed them in the scales 
 with men, and put her heart where Justice 
 pointed, sending men to kick aloft. 
 
 Her husband, the man-riddle : she was 
 unable to rede or read him. Her will could 
 not turn him, nor her tongue combat ; nor 
 was it granted her to pique the mailed 
 veteran. Every poor innocent little bit of 
 an art had been exhausted. Her title was 
 Lady Ormont : her condition actually slave. 
 A luxuriously established slave, consorting 
 with a singularly enfranchised set, — as, for 
 instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord 
 Adderwood ; Sir John Eandeller and Lady 
 Staines ; Mrs. May, Amy May, notorious 
 wife of a fighting captain, the loveliest of 
 blondes ; and other ladies, other gentlemen,
 
 198 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 Mr. Morsfield in the list, paired or not yet 
 paired : gossip raged. Aminta was of a 
 disposition too generously cordial to let 
 lier be the rigorous critic of people with 
 whom she was in touch. But her mind 
 knew relief when she recollected that her 
 humble little school-mate, Selina CoUett, 
 who had suffered on her behalf in old 
 days, was coming up to her from the 
 Suffolk coast on a visit for a week. How- 
 ever much a slave and an unloved woman, 
 she could be a constant and protecting 
 friend. Besides, Lord Ormont was gracious 
 to little Selina. She thought of his re- 
 marks about the modest-minded girl after 
 first seeing her. From that she struck upon 
 a notion of reserves of humaneness being 
 in him, if she might find the path to them : 
 and thence, fortified by the repose her pic- 
 ture of little Selina's merit had bestowed, 
 she sprang to the idea of valiancy, that she
 
 IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR. 199 
 
 would WOO him to listen to her, without 
 inflicting a scene. He had been a listening 
 lover, seeming lover, once, later than the 
 Granada sunsets. The letter in her jewel- 
 box urged Aminta to clear her conscience 
 by some means, for leaving it unburnt.
 
 CHAPTEK VII. 
 
 EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PEATTLER's DUIsES. 
 
 The rules in Lord Ormont's household 
 assisted to shelter him for some hours of 
 the day from the lady who was like a 
 blast of sirocco under his roof. He had his 
 breakfast alone, as Lady Charlotte had it 
 at Olmer ; a dislike of a common table 
 in the morning was a family trait with 
 both. At ten o'clock the secretary arrived, 
 and they were shut up together. At the 
 luncheon table Aminta usually presided. 
 If my lord dined at home, he had by that 
 time established an equanimity rendering 
 his constant civility to Mrs. Pagnell less 
 arduous. The presence of a woman of
 
 EFFECTS OF A PRATTLERS DOSES. 201 
 
 tongue, perpetually on the spring to gratify 
 him and win him, was among the burdens 
 he bore for his Aminta. 
 
 Mrs. Pagnell soon perceived that the 
 secretary was in favour. My lord and 
 this Mr. Weyburn had their pet themes 
 of conversation, upon which the wary aunt 
 of her niece did not gaze like the wintry 
 sun with the distant smile her niece dis- 
 played over discussions concerning military 
 biographies, Hannibal's use of his elephants 
 and his Numidian horse, the Little St. 
 Bernard, modern artillery, ancient slingers, 
 English and Genoese bowmen. Napoleon's 
 tactics, his command to the trooj^ers to 
 " give point," and English officers' neglect 
 of sword exercise, and the " devil of a day " 
 Old England is to have on a day to come. 
 My lord connected our day of trial with 
 India. Mrs. Pagnell assumed an air of 
 studious interest ; she struck in to give her 
 niece a lead, that Lord Ormont might know
 
 202 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 his countess capable of joining the driest 
 of subjects occupying exalted minds. Aminta 
 did not follow her ; and she was extricated 
 gallantly by the gentlemen in turn. 
 
 The secretary behaved with a pretty civil- 
 ity. Aminta shook herself to think toler- 
 antly of him when he, after listening to the 
 suggestion, put interrogatively, that we 
 should profit by Hannibal's example and 
 train elephants to serve as a special army 
 corps for the perfect security of our priceless 
 Indian Empire, instanced the danger likely 
 to result from their panic fear of cannon, 
 and forbore to consult Lord Ormont's eye. 
 
 Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her 
 foot into it ; but women advised of being 
 fools in what they say, are generally sus- 
 tained by their sense of the excellent 
 motive which impelled them. Even to the 
 Countess of Ormont, she could have replied, 
 " We might have given them a higher idea 
 of us" — if, that meant, the Countess of
 
 EFFECTS OF A PRATTLERS DOSES. 203 
 
 Ormont had entered the field beside her, 
 to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta. 
 She hinted as much subsequently, and 
 Aminta's consciousness of the truth was 
 touched. The young schoolmaster's com- 
 pany sat on her spirits, deadened her 
 vocabulary. Her aunt spoke of passing 
 the library door and hearing the two gentle- 
 men loudly laughing. It seemed subser- 
 viency on the fallen young hero's part. 
 His tastes were low. He 'frequented the 
 haunts of boxing men ; her lord informed 
 her of his having made, or of his making, 
 matches to run or swim or walk certain 
 distances against competitors or within a 
 given time. He had also half-a-dozen 
 boys or more in tow, whom he raced out 
 of town on Sundays ; a nucleus of the 
 school he intended to form. 
 
 But will not Achilles become by com- 
 parison a common rushlight where was a 
 blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown's
 
 204 LOED ORMONT AND HIS AMmXA. 
 
 cap on the head whose golden helm was 
 fired by Pallas ? 
 
 Nay, and let him look the hero still : all 
 the more does he point finger on his mean- 
 ness of nature. 
 
 Turning to another, it is another kind of 
 shame that a woman feels, if she consents 
 to an exchange of letters — shameful indeed, 
 but not such a feeling of deadly sickness 
 as comes with the humiliating view of an 
 object of admiration degraded. Bad she 
 may be ; and she may be deceived, vilely 
 treated, in either case. And what is a 
 woman's pride but the stafi" and banner of 
 her soul, beyond all gifts ? He who wounds 
 it cannot be forgiven — never ! — he has 
 killed the best of her. Aminta found her- 
 self sliding along into the sentiment, that 
 the splendid idol of a girl's worship is, if 
 she discover him in the lapse of years as an 
 infinitesimally small one, responsible for the 
 woman's possible reckless fit of giddiness.
 
 EFFECTS OF A PHATTLEE's DOSES. 205 
 
 And she could see her nonsense ; she could 
 not correct it. Lines of the letters under 
 signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent 
 about her : they would recur ; and she 
 charged their doing so on the discovered 
 meanness of the girl's idol. Her wicked 
 memory was caused by his having plunged 
 her low. 
 
 Mrs. Pagnell performed the offices of 
 attention to Mr. Weyburn in lieu of the 
 countess, who seemed to find it a task to 
 sit at the luncheon table with him, when 
 Lady Ormont was absent. " Just peeped 
 in," she said, as she entered the library, 
 " to see if all was comfortable ; " and gossip 
 ensued, not devoid of object. She extracted 
 an astonishingly smooth description of Lady 
 Charlotte. Weyburn was brightness in 
 speaking of the much-misunderstood lady. 
 " She's one of the living women of the 
 world." 
 
 " You are sure you don't mean one of
 
 206 LOUD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 the worldly women ? " Mrs. Pagnell re- 
 joined. 
 
 " She has to be known to be liked/' he 
 owned. 
 
 "And you were, one hears, among the 
 favoured ? " 
 
 '' I can scarcely pretend to that, ma'am." 
 
 " You were recommended." 
 
 " Lady Charlotte is devoted to her 
 brother." 
 
 Mrs. Pagnell's bosom heaved. " How 
 strange Lord Ormont is ! One would sup- 
 pose, with his indignation at the country for 
 its treatment of him, admirers would be 
 welcome. Oh dear, no ! that is not the way. 
 On board the packet, on our voyage to 
 Spain, my niece in her cabin, imploring 
 mercy of Neptune, as they say, I heard of 
 Lord Ormont among the passengers. I 
 could hardly credit my ears. For I had 
 been hearinsr of him from mv niece ever 
 
 '& 
 
 my 
 
 since her return from a select establishment
 
 EFFECTS OF A PRATTLEr's DOSES. 207 
 
 for the education of young ladies, not 
 much more than a morning's drive out of 
 London, though Dover was my residence. 
 She had got a hero ! It was Lord Ormont ! 
 Lord Ormont ! all day : and when the be- 
 haviour of the country to him became 
 notorious, Aminta — my niece the countess — 
 she could hardly contain herself A secret : 
 — I promised her — it's not known to Lord 
 Ormont himself: — a printed letter in a 
 metropolitan paper, copied into the pro- 
 vincial papers, upholding him for one of 
 the greatest of our patriot soldiers and 
 the saviour of India, was the work of her 
 hands. You would, I am sure, think it 
 really well written. Meeting him on deck 
 — the outline of the coast of Portugal for 
 an introductory subject, our Peninsular 
 battles and so forth — I spoke of her en- 
 thusiasm. The effect was, to cut off all 
 communication between us. I had only to 
 appear, Lord Ormont vanished. I said
 
 208 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 to myself, tliis is a character. However, 
 the very mention of him to my niece, as 
 one of the passengers on board — medicine, 
 miraculous ! She was up in half-an-hour, 
 out pacing the deck before evening, hardly 
 leaning on my arm, and the colour positively 
 beginning to show on her cheeks again. 
 He fled, of course. I had prepared her 
 for his eccentricities. Next morning she 
 was out by herself. In the afternoon Lord 
 Ormont strode up to us — his military step — 
 and most courteously requested the honour 
 of an introduction. I had broken the ice 
 at last ; from that moment he was cordiality 
 itself, until — I will not say, until he had 
 called her his own — a few little misunder- 
 standings ! — not with his countess. You 
 see, a resident aunt is translated mother- 
 in-law by husbands ; though I spare them 
 pretty frequently ; I go to friends, they 
 travel. Here in London she must have a 
 duena. — The marriage at Madrid, at the
 
 EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER's DOSES. 209 
 
 Embassy : — well, perhaps it was a step for 
 us, for commoners, though w^e rank with 
 the independent. Has her own little pin- 
 money — an inheritance. Perhaps Lady 
 Eglett gives the world her version. She 
 may say, there was aiming at station. I 
 reply, never was there a more whole-hearted 
 love-match ! Absolutely the girl's heart 
 has been his from the period of her school- 
 days. Oh ! a little affair — she was perse- 
 cuted by a boy at a neighbouring school. 
 Her mistress wrote me word — a very deter- 
 mined Eomeo young gentleman indeed — 
 quite alarmed about him. In the bud ! I 
 carried her off on the spot, and snapped 
 it effectually. Warned he meant to be 
 desperate, I kept her away from my house 
 at Dover four months, place to place ; and 
 I did well. I heard on my return, that 
 a youth, answering to the schoolmistress's 
 description of him, had been calling several 
 
 times, the first two months nnd longer. 
 VOL. I. 1*
 
 210 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 You have me alluding to these little non- 
 sensical nothings, because she seemed born 
 to create violent attachments, even at that 
 early day ; and Lady Egiett — Lady Char- 
 lotte Eglett may hear; for there is no 
 end to them, and impute them to her, 
 when really ! — can she be made responsible 
 for eyes innocent of the mischief they 
 appear destined to do ? But I am dis- 
 turbing you in your work." 
 
 " You are very good, ma'am," said the 
 ghost of the determined young gentleman. 
 
 " A slight cold, have you ? " Mrs. Pagnell 
 asked solicitously. 
 
 '' Dear me, no ! " he gave answer with a 
 cleared throat. 
 
 In charging him with more than he 
 wanted to carry, she supplied him with 
 particulars he had wanted to know ; and 
 now he asked himself what could be the 
 gain of any amount of satisfied curiosity 
 regarding a married Aminta. She slew
 
 EFFECTS OF A PRATTLERS DOSES. 211 
 
 my lord on board a packet-boat ; slie 
 bears tlie arrows that slay. My lord 
 married lier where the first English chaplain 
 was to be found ; that is not wonderful 
 either. British Embassy, Madrid ! Wey- 
 burn believed the ceremony to have been 
 performed there : at the same time, he 
 could hear Lady Charlotte's voice repeating 
 with her varied intonation Mrs. Pagnell's 
 impressive utterances ; and he could imagine 
 how the somewhat silly duenna aunt, so 
 penetrable in her transparent artifices, 
 struck emphasis on the incredulity of people 
 inclined to judge of the rejDorted ceremony 
 by Lord Ormont's behaviour to his captive. 
 How explain that strange matter ? But 
 can tlicre be a gain in trying to sound it ? 
 Weyl)urn shuffled it away. Before the 
 fit of passion seized him, he could turn 
 his eager mind from anything which had 
 not a perceptible point of gain, eitlier for 
 l)odily strength or mental ;i((|uisiti<)ii. or
 
 212 LOED ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 for money, too, now that the school was 
 growing palj)able as an infant in arms and 
 agape for the breast. Thought of gain, 
 and the bent to pursue it, is the shield of 
 Athene over young men in the press of 
 the seductions. He had to confess his 
 having lost some bits of himself by reason 
 of his meditations latterly ; and that loss, 
 if we let it continue a space, will show in 
 cramp at the wrist, logs on the legs, a 
 wheezy wind, for any fellow vowed to 
 physical trials of strength and skill. It 
 will show likewise in the brain beating 
 broken wings — inability to shoot a thought 
 up out of the body for half a minute. 
 And, good Lord ! how quickly the tight- 
 strung fellow crumbles, when once the 
 fragmentary disintegration has begun ! 
 Weyburn cried out on a heart that bounded 
 off at prodigal gallops, and had to be nipped 
 with reminders of the place of good leader 
 he was for taking among the young. Hang
 
 EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER's DOSES. 213 
 
 superexcellence ! but we know those moan- 
 ine^s over the troubles of a married woman ; 
 we know their sources, know their goal, 
 or else we are the fiction-puppet or the 
 Bedlamite ; and she is a married woman, 
 married at the British Embassy, Madrid, if 
 you please ! after a few week's acquaintance 
 with her husband, who doubtless wrote 
 his name intelligibly in the registrar's book, 
 but does not prove himself much the hero 
 when he drives a pen, even for so little 
 as the signing of his name ! He signed 
 his name, apparently not more than partly 
 pledging himself to the bond. Lord 
 Ormont's autobiographical scraps combined 
 with Lady Charlotte's hints and Mrs. 
 Pagnell's communications, to provoke the 
 secretary's literary contempt of his behaviour 
 to his wife. However, the former might 
 be mended, and he resumed the task. 
 
 It had the restorative effect of touching 
 him to see his old hero in action ; whereby
 
 214 LOUD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 he was brought about to a proper modesty, 
 so that he really craved no more than 
 for the mistress of this house to breathe 
 the liberal air of a public acknowledgment 
 of her rightful position. Things constituted 
 by their buoyancy to float are remarkable 
 for lively bobbings when they are cast 
 upon the waters ; and such was the case 
 with Weyburn, until the agitation produced 
 by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to sail away 
 in the society of the steadiest. 
 
 He decided that by not observing, not 
 thinking, not feeling, about the circumstances 
 of the household into which Fate had 
 thrown him, he would best be able — 
 probably it was the one way — to keep 
 himself together ; and his resolution being 
 honest all round, he succeeded in it as 
 long as he abstained from a very wakeful 
 vigilance over simple eyesight. For if 
 one is nervously on guard to not-see, the 
 matter starts up winged, and enters us,
 
 EFFECTS OF A PRATTLEr's DOSES. 215 
 
 and kindles the mind, and tingles throngli 
 the blood ; it has us as a foe. The art 
 of blind vision requires not only practice, 
 but an intimate knowledge of the arts of 
 the traitor we carry within. Safest for 
 him, after all, was to lay fast hold of the 
 particularly unimportant person he was, 
 both there and anywhere else. The 
 Countess of Ormont's manner toward him 
 was to be read as a standing index of 
 the course he should follow ; and he thanked 
 her. He could not quite so sincerely thank 
 her aunt. His ingratitude for the sickly 
 dose she had administered to him sprang 
 a doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked 
 her aunt on account of services performed 
 at the British Embassy, Madrid. 
 
 Certain looks of those eyes recently, when 
 in colloquy with my lord, removed the 
 towering nobleman to a shadowed landscape. 
 
 Was it solely an effect of eyes command- 
 ing light, and having every shaft of the
 
 216 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 quiver of the rays at her disposal ? Or 
 was it a shot from a powerful individuality 
 issuing out of bondage to some jDhysical 
 oppressor no longer master of the soul, 
 in peril of the slipping away of the body ? 
 Her look on him was not hate : it was 
 larger, more terribly divine. Those eyes 
 had elsewhere once looked love : they had 
 planted their object in a throbbing Eden. 
 The man on whom they had looked shivered 
 over the thought of it after years of blank 
 division. 
 
 Kather than have those eyes to look on 
 him their displacing unintentness, the man 
 on whom they had once looked love would 
 have chosen looks of WTath, the darts that 
 kill — blest darts of the celestial Huntress, 
 giving sweet sudden cessation of pain, 
 in the one everlasting last flash of life with 
 thought that the shot was hers. Oh for the 
 ayavk f^sT^sa of the Merciful in splendour ! 
 
 These were the outcries of the man
 
 EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER's DOSES. 217 
 
 deciding simultaneously not to observe, 
 not to think, not to feel, and husbanding 
 calculations upon storage of gain for the 
 future. Softness held the song below. It 
 came of the fact that his enforced resolu- 
 tion, for the sake of sanity, drove his whole 
 reflective mind backward upon his younger 
 days, when an Evening and a Morning 
 star in him greeted the bright Goddess 
 Browny or sang adieu, and adored beyond 
 all golden beams the underworld whither 
 she had sunk, where she was hidden. 
 
 Meanwhile, the worthy dame who had 
 dosed him was out in her carriage, busy 
 paying visits to distinguished ladies of the 
 great world, with the best of excuses for 
 an early call, which was gossip to impart, 
 such as the Countess of Ormont had not 
 yet thought of mentioning ; and two or 
 three of them were rather amusedly in- 
 terested to hear that Lord Ormont had 
 engaged a handsome young secretary,
 
 218 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 " under the patronage of Lady Charlotte 
 Eglett, devoted to sports of all kinds, 
 immensely favoured by both." Gossip 
 must often have been likened to the 
 winged insect bearing pollen to the flowers ; 
 it fertilizes many a vacuous reverie. Those 
 flowers of the upper garden are not, indeed, 
 stationary and in need of the missionary 
 buzzer, but if they have been in one place 
 unmoved for one hour, they are o^en to take 
 animation from their visitors. Aminta was 
 pleasantly surprised next day by the receipt 
 of a note from Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, 
 begging to be invited to lunch if she came, 
 as she had a purpose in the wish to meet 
 my lord.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 MES. LAWEENCE FINCHLEY. 
 
 My lord had one of his wilful likings 
 for Isabella Lawrence Finchley, and he 
 consented to the torture of an hour of Mrs. 
 Nargett Pagnell in the middle of the day, 
 just to taste the favourite he welcomed at 
 home as he championed her abroad. The 
 reasons were numerous and intimate why 
 she pleased him. He liked the woman, 
 enjoyed the cause for battle that she gave. 
 Weyburn, on coming to the luncheon table, 
 beheld a lady with the head of a comely 
 boy, the manner, softened in delicate 
 feminine, of a capital comrade. Her air of 
 candour was her nature in her face ; and it
 
 220 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 carried a guileless roguery, a placid daring, 
 a supersensual naughtiness, a simplicity of 
 repose amid the smoky reputation she 
 created, that led one to think the vapour 
 calumnious or the creature privileged. That 
 young boy's look opened him at once ; he 
 had not to warm to her, — he flew. Ordin- 
 arily the sweetest ladies will make us pass 
 through cold mist and cross a stile or two, 
 or a broken bridge, before the formalities 
 are cleared away to grant us rights of 
 citizenship. She was like those frank lands 
 where we have not to hand out a pass- 
 port at the frontier and wait for dubious 
 inspection of it. 
 
 She prevailed with cognizant men and 
 with the frivolous. Women were capable 
 of appreciating her, too ; as Aminta did, 
 despite some hinted qualifications addressed 
 shyly to her husband. But these were the 
 very matters exciting his particular esteem. 
 He was of Lady Charlotte's mind, in her
 
 MRS. LAWEENCE FINCHLEY. 221 
 
 hot zeal against injustice done to the 
 creatures she despised ; and yet more than 
 she applauded a woman who took up her 
 idiot husband's challenge to defend her 
 good name, and cleared it, right or wrong, 
 and beat him down on his knees, and then 
 started for her spell of the merry canter 
 over turf: an example to the English of 
 the punishment they get for their stupid 
 Puritanic tyranny — sure to be followed by 
 a national helter-skelter down-hill headlong. 
 And Mrs. Lawrence was not one of the 
 corrupt, he argued : she concealed what it 
 was decent to conceal, without pouting 
 hypocritical pretences ; she had merely 
 dispensed with idle legal formalities, in the 
 prettiest curvetting airy wanton way, to 
 divorce the man who tried to divorce her, 
 and " whined to be forgiven when he found 
 he couldn't. Adderwood was ready to 
 marry her to-morrow, if the donkey hus- 
 band would l)i!t <;<) i\u(] ])i'iiv Ills last.
 
 222 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 Half-a-dozen others were heads off on the 
 same course to that goaL" 
 
 That was her champion's perusal of a 
 lady candidly asserting her right to have 
 breeched comrades, and paying for it in 
 the advocacy which compromises. She was 
 taken to be and she was used as a weapon 
 wherewith to strike at our Pharisees. 
 Women pushing out into the world for 
 independence, bleed heavy payments all 
 round. 
 
 The earl's double-edged defence of her 
 was partly a vindication of another hus- 
 band, who allowed his wife to call her 
 friend ; he was nevertheless assured of her 
 not being corrupt, both by his personal 
 knowledge of the lady, and his perception 
 of her imasre in the bosom of his wife. 
 She did no harm there, he knew well. 
 Although he was not a man to put his trust 
 in faces, as his young secretary inclined to 
 do, Mrs. Lawrence's look of honest boy did
 
 MRS. LAWEENCE FINCHLEY. 223 
 
 count among the pleadings. And somewlmt 
 so might a government cruiser observe the 
 intrusion of a white-sailed yacht in pro- 
 tected sea- waters, where licenced trawlers 
 are at the haul. 
 
 Talk over the table coursed as fluently as 
 might be, with Mrs. Pagnell for a boulder 
 in the stream. Uninformed by malice, she 
 led up to Lord Adderwood's name, and 
 perhaps more designedly spoke of Mr. 
 Morsfield, on whom her profound reading 
 into the female heart of the class above her 
 caused her to harp, as " a real Antinous," 
 that the ladies might discuss him and Lord 
 Ormont wax meditative. 
 
 Mrs. Lawrence pitied the patient gentle- 
 man, while asking him in her mind who 
 was the author of the domestic burden he 
 had to bear. 
 
 " It reminds me, I have a mission," she 
 said. " There's a fencing match down at a 
 ball in the West, near the barracks; private
 
 224 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 and select ; Soldier and Civilian ; I forget 
 who challenged — Civilian, one judges ; 
 Soldiers are the peaceful party. They want 
 you to act ^ umpire,' as they call it, on the 
 military side, my dear lord ; and you will ? 
 — I have given my word you will bring 
 Lady Ormont. You will ? — and not let 
 me be confounded ! Yes, and we shall 
 make a party. I see consent. Aminta will 
 enjoy the switch of steel. I love to see 
 fencing. It rouses all that is diabolical 
 in me." 
 
 She sent a skimming look at the secretary 
 sitting opposite. 
 
 " And I," said he, much freshened. 
 
 " You fence ? " 
 
 "Handle the foils." 
 
 " If you must speak modestly ! Are you 
 in practice ? " 
 
 " I spend an hour in Captain Chiallo's 
 fencing rooms generally every evening 
 before dinner. I heard there the first
 
 MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY. 225 
 
 outlines of the match proposed. You are 
 
 right; it was the civilian." 
 
 "Mr. Morsfielcl, as I suspected." 
 
 She smiled to herself, like one saying, 
 
 Not badly managed, Mr. Morsfield ! 
 
 " Italian school ? " Lord Ormont inquired, 
 
 with a screw of the eyelids. 
 "French, my lord." 
 " The only school for teaching." 
 " The simplest — has the most rational 
 
 method. Italians are apt to be tricky. 
 
 But they were masters once, and now and 
 
 then they send out a fencer the French 
 
 can't touch." 
 
 " How would you account for it ? " 
 
 " If I had to account for it, I should say, 
 
 hotter blood, cool nerve, quick brain." 
 " Hum. Where arc we, then ? " 
 " We don't shine with the small sword." 
 " We had men neatly pinked for their 
 
 slashings in the Peninsula." 
 "We've had clever Trisliiiicii." 
 
 VOL. I. Q
 
 226 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 " Hot enough blood ! This man Mors- 
 field — have you crossed the foils with 
 him ? " 
 
 " Goes at it like a Spaniard ; though 
 Spaniards in Paris have been found wary 
 enough." 
 
 My lord hummed. " Fellow looks as 
 if he would easily lose his head over 
 steel." 
 
 " He can be dangerous." 
 
 The word struck on something, and rang. 
 
 Mrs. Lawrence had a further murmur 
 within her lips. Her travelling eye met 
 Aminta's and passed it. 
 
 " But not dangerous, surely, if the breast 
 is padded ? " said Mrs. Pagnell. 
 
 " Oh no, oh no ; not in that case ! " 
 Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble assent, 
 and her eyelids blinked ; her fair boy's face 
 was mischief at school under shadow of the 
 master. 
 
 She said to Weyburn : " Are you one in
 
 MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY. 227 
 
 the list — to give our military a lesson ? 
 They want it." 
 
 His answer was unheard by Aminta. 
 She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's pleased 
 sparkle that he had been invited to stand 
 in the list ; and the strange, the absurd 
 spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking 
 the heroic attitude for attack and defence 
 wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly 
 vivid first-of-May cricketing-field, a scene 
 of snowballs flying, the vision of a strenuous 
 lighted figure scaling to noble young man- 
 hood. Isabella Lawrence's look at him 
 spirited the bright past out of the wretched 
 long-brown-coat shroud of the present, 
 prompting her to grieve that some woman's 
 hand had not smoothed a small tuft of liair, 
 disorderly on his head a little above the left 
 parting, because Isabella Lawrence Finchley 
 could have no recollection of how it used to 
 toss feathery-wild at his games. 
 
 My lord hummed again. " I suspect
 
 228 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 we're going to get a drubbing. This fellow 
 here has had his French mattre cVarmes. 
 Show me your hand, sir." 
 
 Weyburn smiled, and extended his 
 right hand, saying : " The wrist wants 
 exercise." 
 
 " Ha ! square thumb, flesh full at the 
 nail's ends; you were a bowler at cricket." 
 
 " Now examine the palms, my lord ; I 
 judge by the lines of the palms," Mrs. 
 Pagnell remarked. 
 
 He nodded to her and rose. 
 
 Coffee had not been served, she reminded 
 him ; it was coming in, so down he sat a 
 yard from the table ; outwardly equable, 
 inwardly cursing coff'ee, though he refused 
 to finish a meal without his cup. 
 
 " I think the palms do betray something," 
 said Mrs. Lawrence ; and Aminta said : 
 " Everything betrays." 
 
 " No, my dear," Mrs. Pagnell corrected 
 her ; " the extremities betray, and we
 
 MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY. 229 
 
 cannot read the centre. Is it not so, my 
 lord ? " 
 
 " It may be as yon say, ma'am." 
 
 She was disappointed in her scheme to 
 induce a general examination of palms, and 
 especially his sphinx lordship's. 
 
 Weyburn controlled the tongue she so 
 frequently tickled to an elvish gavotte, but 
 the humour on his face touched Mrs. 
 Lawrence's to a subdued good-fellow 
 roguishness, and he felt himself invited 
 to chat with her on the walk for a re- 
 poseful ten minutes in Aminta's drawing- 
 room. 
 
 Mrs. Pagnell, " quite enjoying the com- 
 pany," as she told her niece, was dismayed 
 to hear her niece tell her of a milliner's 
 appointment, positive for three o'clock ; and 
 she had written it in her head "p.m., four 
 o'clock," and she had mislaid or destroyed 
 the milliner's note ; and she still had 
 designs upon his lordship's palms, things
 
 230 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 to read and hint around lier off the lines. 
 She departed. 
 
 Lord Ormont became genial ; and there 
 was no one present who did not marvel 
 that he should continue to decree a state 
 of circumstances more or less necessitating 
 the infliction he groaned under. He was 
 too lofty to be questioned, even by his 
 favourites. Mrs. Lawrence conjured the 
 ghost of Lady Charlotte for an answer : this 
 being Lord Adderwood's idea. Weyburn 
 let his thoughts go on fermenting. Pride 
 froze a beginning stir in the bosom of 
 Aminta. 
 
 Her lord could captivate a reluctant 
 woman's bosom when he was genial. He 
 melted her and made her call up her 
 bitterest pride to perform its recent office. 
 That might have failed ; but it had sup- 
 port in a second letter received from the 
 man accounted both by Mrs. Lawrence and 
 by Mr. Weyburn ' dangerous ' ; and the
 
 MKS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY. 231 
 
 tliougiit of wlio it was that had precipitated 
 her to '' play little games " for the sole sake 
 of rousing him through jealousy to a sense 
 of righteous duty, armed her desperately 
 against him. She could exult in having 
 read the second letter right through on 
 receipt of it, and in remembering certain 
 phrases ; and notably in a reflection shot 
 across her bewildered brain by one of the 
 dangerous man's queer mad sentences : Be 
 as iron as you like, I ivill strike you to 
 heat; and her thought: Is there assurance 
 of safety in a ]Derjpetual defence ? — all while 
 she smiled on her genial lord, and signified 
 agreement, with a smiting of wonderment 
 at her heart, when he alluded to a panic 
 shout of the country for defence, and said : 
 " Much crying of that kind weakens the 
 power to defend when the real attack 
 comes." Was it true ? 
 
 " But say what you propose ? " she asked. 
 
 Lord Ormont proposed vigilance and
 
 232 LORD OEMONT AND HI8 AMINTA. 
 
 drill ; a small degree of self-sacrifice on the 
 part of the population, and a look-out head 
 in the War Department. He proposed to 
 have a nation of stout braced men laughing 
 at the foreign bully or bandit, instead of 
 being a pack of whimpering women ; whom 
 he likened to the randomly protestant geese 
 of our country roadside, heads out a yard 
 in a gabble of defence while they go 
 backing. 
 
 So thereupon Aminta's notion of a re- 
 semblance in the mutual thought subsided ; 
 she relapsed on the cushioning sentiment 
 that she was a woman. And — only a 
 woman ! he might exclaim, if it pleased 
 him ; though he would never be able to say 
 she was one of the whimpering. She, too, 
 had the choice to indulge in scorn of the 
 superior man stone blind to proceedings 
 intimately affecting him — if he cared ! One 
 might doubt it. 
 
 Mrs. Lawrence listened to him with a
 
 MKS. LAWEENCE FINCHLEY. 233 
 
 mind more disengaged, and a flitting dis- 
 approval of Aminta's unsympathetic ear, or 
 reluctance to stimulate the devout attention 
 a bruised warrior should have in his tent. 
 She did not press on him the post of 
 umjDire. He consented — at her request, he 
 said — to visit the show; but refused any 
 official position that w^ould, it was clearly 
 enough implied, bring his name in any 
 capacity whatever before the country which 
 had unpardonably maltreated him. 
 
 Feminine wits will be set working, when 
 a point has been gained ; and as Mrs. 
 Lawrence could now say she had persuaded 
 Lord Ormont to gratify her specially, she 
 warmed to fancy she read him, and that 
 she might have managed the wounded and 
 angry giant. Her minor intelligence, cara- 
 coling unhampered by harassing emotions, 
 rebuked Aminta's for not perceiving that to 
 win him round to whatever a woman may
 
 234 LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA. 
 
 desire, she must be with him, outstrip him 
 even, along the line he chooses for himself ; 
 abuse the country, rail at the Government, 
 ridicule the title of English Army, proscribe 
 the name of India in his hearing. Little 
 stings of jealousy are small insect bites, 
 and do not pique a wounded giant hardly 
 sensible of irritation under his huge, and 
 as we assume for our purpose, justifiable 
 wrath. We have to speculate which way 
 does the giant incline to go ? and turn him 
 according to the indication. 
 
 Mrs. Lawrence was driven by her critic 
 mood to think Aminta relied — erroneously, 
 after woman's old fashion — on the might of 
 superb dark eyes after having been captured. 
 It seemed to her worse than a beautiful 
 woman's vanity, a childishness. But her 
 boy's head held boy's brains ; and Lord 
 Ormont's praise of the splendid creature's 
 nerve when she had to smell powder in
 
 MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY. 235 
 
 Spain, and at bull-fights, and once at a 
 wrecking of their carriage down a gully 
 on the road over the Alpuj arras, sent her 
 away subdued, envious, happy to have 
 kissed the cheek of the woman who could 
 inspire it. 
 
 END OF VOL. I.