CHAPTER II

This is the pathetic matter of my story, and it requires pointing out,

because he never could explain what it was that seemed to him so

cruel in it, for he was no brilliant son of fortune, he was no great

pretender, none of those who are logically displaced from the heights

they have been raised to, manifestly created to show the moral in

Providence. He was modest, retiring, humbly contented; a gentlemanly

residence appeased his ambition. Popular, he could own that he was, but

not meteorically; rather by reason of his willingness to receive light

than his desire to shed it. Why, then, was the terrible test brought

to bear upon him, of all men? He was one of us; no worse, and not

strikingly or perilously better; and he could not but feel, in the

bitterness of his reflections upon an inexplicable destiny, that the

punishment befalling him, unmerited as it was, looked like absence of

Design in the scheme of things, Above. It looked as if the blow had been

dealt him by reckless chance. And to believe that, was for the mind of

General Ople the having to return to his alphabet and recommence the

ascent of the laborious mountain of understanding.

To proceed, the General’s introduction to Lady Camper was owing to a

message she sent him by her gardener, with a request that he would cut

down a branch of a wychelm, obscuring her view across his grounds toward

the river. The General consulted with his daughter, and came to the

conclusion, that as he could hardly despatch a written reply to a verbal

message, yet greatly wished to subscribe to the wishes of Lady Camper,

the best thing for him to do was to apply for an interview. He sent

word that he would wait on Lady Camper immediately, and betook himself

forthwith to his toilette. She was the niece of an earl.

Elizabeth commended his appearance, ‘passed him,’ as he would have

said; and well she might, for his hat, surtout, trousers and boots, were

worthy of an introduction to Royalty. A touch of scarlet silk round the

neck gave him bloom, and better than that, the blooming consciousness of

it.

‘You are not to be nervous, papa,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Not at all,’ replied the General. ‘I say, not at all, my dear,’ he

repeated, and so betrayed that he had fallen into the nervous mood. ‘I

was saying, I have known worse mornings than this.’ He turned to her and

smiled brightly, nodded, and set his face to meet the future.

He was absent an hour and a half.

He came back with his radiance a little subdued, by no means eclipsed;

as, when experience has afforded us matter for thought, we cease to

shine dazzlingly, yet are not clouded; the rays have merely grown

serener. The sum of his impressions was conveyed in the reflective

utterance--‘It only shows, my dear, how different the reality is from

our anticipation of it!’

Lady Camper had been charming; full of condescension, neighbourly,

friendly, willing to be satisfied with the sacrifice of the smallest

branch of the wych-elm, and only requiring that much for complimentary

reasons.

Elizabeth wished to hear what they were, and she thought the request

rather singular; but the General begged her to bear in mind, that they

were dealing with a very extraordinary woman; ‘highly accomplished,

really exceedingly handsome,’ he said to himself, aloud.

The reasons were, her liking for air and view, and desire to see into

her neighbour’s grounds without having to mount to the attic.

Elizabeth gave a slight exclamation, and blushed.

‘So, my dear, we are objects of interest to her ladyship,’ said the

General.

He assured her that Lady Camper’s manners were delightful. Strange to

tell, she knew a great deal of his antecedent history, things he had

not supposed were known; ‘little matters,’ he remarked, by which his

daughter faintly conceived a reference to the conquests of his dashing

days. Lady Camper had deigned to impart some of her own, incidentally;

that she was of Welsh blood, and born among the mountains. ‘She has a

romantic look,’ was the General’s comment; and that her husband had been

an insatiable traveller before he became an invalid, and had never cared

for Art. ‘Quite an extraordinary circumstance, with such a wife!’ the

General said.

He fell upon the wych-elm with his own hands, under cover of the

leafage, and the next day he paid his respects to Lady Camper, to

inquire if her ladyship saw any further obstruction to the view.

‘None,’ she replied. ‘And now we shall see what the two birds will do.’

Apparently, then, she entertained an animosity to a pair of birds in the

tree.

‘Yes, yes; I say they chirp early in the morning,’ said General Ople.

‘At all hours.’

‘The song of birds...?’ he pleaded softly for nature.

‘If the nest is provided for them; but I don’t like vagabond chirping.’

The General perfectly acquiesced. This, in an engagement with a clever

woman, is what you should do, or else you are likely to find yourself

planted unawares in a high wind, your hat blown off, and your

coat-tails anywhere; in other words, you will stand ridiculous in your

bewilderment; and General Ople ever footed with the utmost caution

to avoid that quagmire of the ridiculous. The extremer quags he had

hitherto escaped; the smaller, into which he fell in his agile evasions

of the big, he had hitherto been blest in finding none to notice.

He requested her ladyship’s permission to present his daughter. Lady

Camper sent in her card.

Elizabeth Ople beheld a tall, handsomely-mannered lady, with good

features and penetrating dark eyes, an easy carriage of her person and

an agreeable voice, but (the vision of her age flashed out under the

compelling eyes of youth) fifty if a day. The rich colouring confessed

to it. But she was very pleasing, and Elizabeth’s perception dwelt on it

only because her father’s manly chivalry had defended the lady against

one year more than forty.

The richness of the colouring, Elizabeth feared, was artificial, and

it caused her ingenuous young blood a shudder. For we are so devoted to

nature when the dame is flattering us with her gifts, that we loathe the

substitute omitting to think how much less it is an imposition than a

form of practical adoration of the genuine.

Our young detective, however, concealed her emotion of childish horror.

Lady Camper remarked of her, ‘She seems honest, and that is the most we

can hope of girls.’

‘She is a jewel for an honest man,’ the General sighed, ‘some day!’

‘Let us hope it will be a distant day.’

‘Yet,’ said the General, ‘girls expect to marry.’

Lady Camper fixed her black eyes on him, but did not speak.

He told Elizabeth that her ladyship’s eyes were exceedingly searching:

‘Only,’ said he, ‘as I have nothing to hide, I am able to submit to

inspection’; and he laughed slightly up to an arresting cough, and made

the mantelpiece ornaments pass muster.

General Ople was the hero to champion a lady whose airs of haughtiness

caused her to be somewhat backbitten. He assured everybody, that Lady

Camper was much misunderstood; she was a most remarkable woman; she was

a most affable and highly intelligent lady. Building up her attributes

on a splendid climax, he declared she was pious, charitable, witty,

and really an extraordinary artist. He laid particular stress on

her artistic qualities, describing her power with the brush, her

water-colour sketches, and also some immensely clever caricatures. As he

talked of no one else, his friends heard enough of Lady Camper, who was

anything but a favourite. The Pollingtons, the Wilders, the Wardens, the

Baerens, the Goslings, and others of his acquaintance, talked of Lady

Camper and General Ople rather maliciously. They were all City people,

and they admired the General, but mourned that he should so abjectly

have fallen at the feet of a lady as red with rouge as a railway

bill. His not seeing it showed the state he was in. The sister of Mrs.

Pollington, an amiable widow, relict of a large City warehouse, named

Barcop, was chilled by a falling off in his attentions. His apology for

not appearing at garden parties was, that he was engaged to wait on Lady

Camper.

And at one time, her not condescending to exchange visits with the

obsequious General was a topic fertile in irony. But she did condescend.

Lady Camper came to his gate unexpectedly, rang the bell, and was let

in like an ordinary visitor. It happened that the General was

gardening--not the pretty occupation of pruning--he was digging--and of

necessity his coat was off, and he was hot, dusty, unpresentable.

From adoring earth as the mother of roses, you may pass into a lady’s

presence without purification; you cannot (or so the General thought)

when you are caught in the act of adoring the mother of cabbages. And

though he himself loved the cabbage equally with the rose, in his heart

respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower, for he

gloried in his kitchen garden, this was not a secret for the world to

know, and he almost heeled over on his beam ends when word was brought

of the extreme honour Lady Camper had done him. He worked his arms

hurriedly into his fatigue jacket, trusting to get away to the house and

spend a couple of minutes on his adornment; and with any other visitor

it might have been accomplished, but Lady Camper disliked sitting alone

in a room. She was on the square of lawn as the General stole along the

walk. Had she kept her back to him, he might have rounded her like the

shadow of a dial, undetected. She was frightfully acute of hearing. She

turned while he was in the agony of hesitation, in a queer attitude, one

leg on the march, projected by a frenzied tip-toe of the hinder leg,

the very fatallest moment she could possibly have selected for unveiling

him.

Of course there was no choice but to surrender on the spot.

He began to squander his dizzy wits in profuse apologies. Lady Camper

simply spoke of the nice little nest of a garden, smelt the flowers,

accepted a Niel rose and a Rohan, a Cline, a Falcot, and La France.

‘A beautiful rose indeed,’ she said of the latter, ‘only it smells of

macassar oil.’

‘Really, it never struck me, I say it never struck me before,’ rejoined

the General, smelling it as at a pinch of snuff. ‘I was saying, I always

....’ And he tacitly, with the absurdest of smiles, begged permission to

leave unterminated a sentence not in itself particularly difficult

‘I have a nose,’ observed Lady Camper.

Like the nobly-bred person she was, according to General Ople’s

version of the interview on his estate, when he stood before her in his

gardening costume, she put him at his ease, or she exerted herself to

do so; and if he underwent considerable anguish, it was the fault of his

excessive scrupulousness regarding dress, propriety, appearance.

He conducted her at her request to the kitchen garden and the handful of

paddock, the stables and coach-house, then back to the lawn.

‘It is the home for a young couple,’ she said.

‘I am no longer young,’ the General bowed, with the sigh peculiar to

this confession. ‘I say, I am no longer young, but I call the place a

gentlemanly residence. I was saying, I...’

‘Yes, yes!’ Lady Camper tossed her head, half closing her eyes, with a

contraction of the brows, as if in pain.

He perceived a similar expression whenever he spoke of his residence.

Perhaps it recalled happier days to enter such a nest. Perhaps it had

been such a home for a young couple that she had entered on her marriage

with Sir Scrope Camper, before he inherited his title and estates.

The General was at a loss to conceive what it was.

It recurred at another mention of his idea of the nature of the

residence. It was almost a paroxysm. He determined not to vex her

reminiscences again; and as this resolution directed his mind to his

residence, thinking it pre-eminently gentlemanly, his tongue committed

the error of repeating it, with ‘gentleman-like’ for a variation.

Elizabeth was out--he knew not where. The housemaid informed him, that

Miss Elizabeth was out rowing on the water.

‘Is she alone?’ Lady Camper inquired of him.

‘I fancy so,’ the General replied.

‘The poor child has no mother.’

‘It has been a sad loss to us both, Lady Camper.’

‘No doubt. She is too pretty to go out alone.’

‘I can trust her.’

‘Girls!’

‘She has the spirit of a man.’

‘That is well. She has a spirit; it will be tried.’

The General modestly furnished an instance or two of her spiritedness.

Lady Camper seemed to like this theme; she looked graciously interested.

‘Still, you should not suffer her to go out alone,’ she said.

‘I place implicit confidence in her,’ said the General; and Lady Camper

gave it up.

She proposed to walk down the lanes to the river-side, to meet Elizabeth

returning.

The General manifested alacrity checked by reluctance. Lady Camper had

told him she objected to sit in a strange room by herself; after that,

he could hardly leave her to dash upstairs to change his clothes; yet

how, attired as he was, in a fatigue jacket, that warned him not to

imagine his back view, and held him constantly a little to the rear of

Lady Camper, lest she should be troubled by it;--and he knew the habit

of the second rank to criticise the front--how consent to face the outer

world in such style side by side with the lady he admired?

‘Come,’ said she; and he shot forward a step, looking as if he had

missed fire.

‘Are you not coming, General?’

He advanced mechanically.

Not a soul met them down the lanes, except a little one, to whom Lady

Camper gave a small silver-piece, because she was a picture.

The act of charity sank into the General’s heart, as any pretty

performance will do upon a warm waxen bed.

Lady Camper surprised him by answering his thoughts. ‘No; it’s for my

own pleasure.’

Presently she said, ‘Here they are.’

General Ople beheld his daughter by the river-side at the end of the

lane, under escort of Mr. Reginald Rolles.

It was another picture, and a pleasing one. The young lady and the

young gentleman wore boating hats, and were both dressed in white, and

standing by or just turning from the outrigger and light skiff they were

about to leave in charge of a waterman. Elizabeth stretched a finger at

arm’s-length, issuing directions, which Mr. Rolles took up and worded

further to the man, for the sake of emphasis; and he, rather than

Elizabeth, was guilty of the half-start at sight of the persons who were

approaching.

‘My nephew, you should know, is intended for a working soldier,’ said

Lady Camper; ‘I like that sort of soldier best.’

General Ople drooped his shoulders at the personal compliment.

She resumed. ‘His pay is a matter of importance to him. You are aware of

the smallness of a subaltern’s pay.

‘I,’ said the General, ‘I say I feel my poor half-pay, having always

been a working soldier myself, very important, I was saying, very

important to me!’

‘Why did you retire?’

Her interest in him seemed promising. He replied conscientiously,

‘Beyond the duties of General of Brigade, I could not, I say I could

not, dare to aspire; I can accept and execute orders; I shrink from

responsibility!’

‘It is a pity,’ said she, ‘that you were not, like my nephew Reginald,

entirely dependent on your profession.’

She laid such stress on her remark, that the General, who had just

expressed a very modest estimate of his abilities, was unable to

reject the flattery of her assuming him to be a man of some fortune. He

coughed, and said, ‘Very little.’ The thought came to him that he might

have to make a statement to her in time, and he emphasized, ‘Very little

indeed. Sufficient,’ he assured her, ‘for a gentlemanly appearance.’

‘I have given you your warning,’ was her inscrutable rejoinder, uttered

within earshot of the young people, to whom, especially to Elizabeth,

she was gracious. The damsel’s boating uniform was praised, and her

sunny flush of exercise and exposure.

Lady Camper regretted that she could not abandon her parasol: ‘I freckle

so easily.’

The General, puzzling over her strange words about a warning, gazed at

the red rose of art on her cheek with an air of profound abstraction.

‘I freckle so easily,’ she repeated, dropping her parasol to defend her

face from the calculating scrutiny.

‘I burn brown,’ said Elizabeth.

Lady Camper laid the bud of a Falcot rose against the young girl’s

cheek, but fetched streams of colour, that overwhelmed the momentary

comparison of the sunswarthed skin with the rich dusky yellow of the

rose in its deepening inward to soft brown.

Reginald stretched his hand for the privileged flower, and she let him

take it; then she looked at the General; but the General was looking,

with his usual air of satisfaction, nowhere.