CHAPTER VI

Politeness required that General Ople should not appear to rejoice in

his dismissal as a suitor, and should at least make some show of holding

himself at the beck of a reconsidering mind. He was guilty of running up

to London early next day, and remaining absent until nightfall; and he

did the same on the two following days. When he presented himself

at Lady Camper’s lodge-gates, the astonishing intelligence, that her

ladyship had departed for the Continent and Egypt gave him qualms of

remorse, which assumed a more definite shape in something like awe of

her triumphant constitution. He forbore to mention her age, for he

was the most honourable of men, but a habit of tea-table talkativeness

impelled him to say and repeat an idea that had visited him, to the

effect, that Lady Camper was one of those wonderful women who are

comparable to brilliant generals, and defend themselves from the

siege of Time by various aggressive movements. Fearful of not being

understood, owing to the rarity of the occasions when the squat plain

squad of honest Saxon regulars at his command were called upon to

explain an idea, he re-cast the sentence. But, as it happened that the

regulars of his vocabulary were not numerous, and not accustomed to work

upon thoughts and images, his repetitions rather succeeded in exposing

the piece of knowledge he had recently acquired than in making his

meaning plainer. So we need not marvel that his acquaintances should

suppose him to be secretly aware of an extreme degree in which Lady

Camper was a veteran.

General Ople entered into the gaieties of the neighbourhood once more,

and passed through the Winter cheerfully. In justice to him, however, it

should be said that to the intent dwelling of his mind upon Lady Camper,

and not to the festive life he led, was due his entire ignorance of

his daughter’s unhappiness. She lived with him, and yet it was in other

houses he learnt that she was unhappy. After his last interview with

Lady Camper, he had informed Elizabeth of the ruinous and preposterous

amount of money demanded of him for a settlement upon her and Elizabeth,

like the girl of good sense that she was, had replied immediately, ‘It

could not be thought of, papa.’

He had spoken to Reginald likewise. The young man fell into a dramatic

tearing-of-hair and long-stride fury, not ill becoming an enamoured

dragoon. But he maintained that his aunt, though an eccentric, was a

cordially kind woman. He seemed to feel, if he did not partly hint, that

the General might have accepted Lady Camper’s terms. The young officer

could no longer be welcome at Douro Lodge, so the General paid him

a morning call at his quarters, and was distressed to find him

breakfasting very late, tapping eggs that he forgot to open--one of the

surest signs of a young man downright and deep in love, as the General

knew from experience--and surrounded by uncut sporting journals of

past weeks, which dated from the day when his blow had struck him, as

accurately as the watch of the drowned man marks his minute. Lady Camper

had gone to Italy, and was in communication with her nephew: Reginald

was not further explicit. His legs were very prominent in his

despair, and his fingers frequently performed the part of blunt combs;

consequently the General was impressed by his passion for Elizabeth. The

girl who, if she was often meditative, always met his eyes with a smile,

and quietly said ‘Yes, papa,’ and ‘No, papa,’ gave him little concern

as to the state of her feelings. Yet everybody said now that she was

unhappy. Mrs. Barcop, the widow, raised her voice above the rest. So

attentive was she to Elizabeth that the General had it kindly suggested

to him, that some one was courting him through his daughter. He gazed

at the widow. Now she was not much past thirty; and it was really

singular--he could have laughed--thinking of Mrs. Barcop set him

persistently thinking of Lady Camper. That is to say, his mad fancy

reverted from the lady of perhaps thirty-five to the lady of seventy.

Such, thought he, is genius in a woman! Of his neighbours generally,

Mrs. Baerens, the wife of a German merchant, an exquisite player on the

pianoforte, was the most inclined to lead him to speak of Lady Camper.

She was a kind prattling woman, and was known to have been a governess

before her charms withdrew the gastronomic Gottfried Baerens from his

devotion to the well-served City club, where, as he exclaimed (ever

turning fondly to his wife as he vocalized the compliment), he had found

every necessity, every luxury, in life, ‘as you cannot have dem out

of London--all save de female!’ Mrs. Baerens, a lady of Teutonic

extraction, was distinguishable as of that sex; at least, she was not

masculine. She spoke with great respect of Lady Camper and her

family, and seemed to agree in the General’s eulogies of Lady Camper’s

constitution. Still he thought she eyed him strangely.

One April morning the General received a letter with the Italian

postmark. Opening it with his usual calm and happy curiosity, he

perceived that it was composed of pen-and-ink drawings. And suddenly

his heart sank like a scuttled ship. He saw himself the victim of a

caricature.

The first sketch had merely seemed picturesque, and he supposed it a

clever play of fancy by some travelling friend, or perhaps an actual

scene slightly exaggerated. Even on reading, ‘A distant view of the city

of Wilsonople,’ he was only slightly enlightened. His heart beat

still with befitting regularity. But the second and the third sketches

betrayed the terrible hand. The distant view of the city of Wilsonople

was fair with glittering domes, which, in the succeeding near view,

proved to have been soap-bubbles, for a place of extreme flatness,

begirt with crazy old-fashioned fortifications, was shown; and in

the third view, representing the interior, stood for sole place of

habitation, a sentry-box.

Most minutely drawn, and, alas! with fearful accuracy, a military

gentleman in undress occupied the box. Not a doubt could exist as to the

person it was meant to be.

The General tried hard to remain incredulous. He remembered too well who

had called him Wilsonople.

But here was the extraordinary thing that sent him over the

neighbourhood canvassing for exclamations: on the fourth page was the

outline of a lovely feminine hand, holding a pen, as in the act of

shading, and under it these words: ‘What I say is, I say I think it

exceedingly unladylike.’

Now consider the General’s feelings when, turning to this fourth page,

having these very words in his mouth, as the accurate expression of his

thoughts, he discovered them written!

An enemy who anticipates the actions of our mind, has a quality of the

malignant divine that may well inspire terror. The senses of General

Ople were struck by the aspect of a lurid Goddess, who penetrated him,

read him through, and had both power and will to expose and make him

ridiculous for ever.

The loveliness of the hand, too, in a perplexing manner contested his

denunciation of her conduct. It was ladylike eminently, and it involved

him in a confused mixture of the moral and material, as great as young

people are known to feel when they make the attempt to separate them, in

one of their frenzies.

With a petty bitter laugh he folded the letter, put it in his

breast-pocket, and sallied forth for a walk, chiefly to talk to himself

about it. But as it absorbed him entirely, he showed it to the rector,

whom he met, and what the rector said is of no consequence, for General

Ople listened to no remarks, calling in succession on the Pollingtons,

the Goslings, the Baerens, and others, early though it was, and

the lords of those houses absent amassing hoards; and to the ladies

everywhere he displayed the sketches he had received, observing, that

Wilsonople meant himself; and there he was, he said, pointing at the

capped fellow in the sentry-box, done unmistakably. The likeness indeed

was remarkable. ‘She is a woman of genius,’ he ejaculated, with utter

melancholy. Mrs. Baerens, by the aid of a magnifying glass, assisted

him to read a line under the sentry-box, that he had taken for a mere

trembling dash; it ran, A gentlemanly residence.

‘What eyes she has!’ the General exclaimed; ‘I say it is miraculous what

eyes she has at her time of... I was saying, I should never have known

it was writing.’

He sighed heavily. His shuddering sensitiveness to caricature was

increased by a certain evident dread of the hand which struck; the

knowing that he was absolutely bare to this woman, defenceless, open to

exposure in his little whims, foibles, tricks, incompetencies, in what

lay in his heart, and the words that would come to his tongue. He felt

like a man haunted.

So deeply did he feel the blow, that people asked how it was that he

could be so foolish as to dance about assisting Lady Camper in her

efforts to make him ridiculous; he acted the parts of publisher and

agent for the fearful caricaturist. In truth, there was a strangely

double reason for his conduct; he danced about for sympathy, he had the

intensest craving for sympathy, but more than this, or quite as much, he

desired to have the powers of his enemy widely appreciated; in the first

place, that he might be excused to himself for wincing under them, and

secondly, because an awful admiration of her, that should be deepened

by a corresponding sentiment around him, helped him to enjoy luxurious

recollections of an hour when he was near making her his own--his own,

in the holy abstract contemplation of marriage, without realizing their

probable relative conditions after the ceremony.

‘I say, that is the very image of her ladyship’s hand,’ he was

especially fond of remarking, ‘I say it is a beautiful hand.’

He carried the letter in his pocket-book; and beginning to fancy that

she had done her worst, for he could not imagine an inventive malignity

capable of pursuing the theme, he spoke of her treatment of him with

compassionate regret, not badly assumed from being partly sincere.

Two letters dated in France, the one Dijon, the other Fontainebleau,

arrived together; and as the General knew Lady Camper to be returning to

England, he expected that she was anxious to excuse herself to him. His

fingers were not so confident, for he tore one of the letters to open

it.

The City of Wilsonople was recognizable immediately. So likewise was the

sole inhabitant.

General Ople’s petty bitter laugh recurred, like a weak-chested

patient’s cough in the shifting of our winds eastward.

A faceless woman’s shadow kneels on the ground near the sentry-box,

weeping. A faceless shadow of a young man on horseback is beheld

galloping toward a gulf. The sole inhabitant contemplates his largely

substantial full fleshed face and figure in a glass.

Next, we see the standard of Great Britain furled; next, unfurled and

borne by a troop of shadows to the sentry-box. The officer within

says, ‘I say I should be very happy to carry it, but I cannot quit this

gentlemanly residence.’

Next, the standard is shown assailed by popguns. Several of the shadows

are prostrate. ‘I was saying, I assure you that nothing but this

gentlemanly residence prevents me from heading you,’ says the gallant

officer.

General Ople trembled with protestant indignation when he saw himself

reclining in a magnified sentry-box, while detachments of shadows hurry

to him to show him the standard of his country trailing in the dust; and

he is maliciously made to say, ‘I dislike responsibility. I say I am

a fervent patriot, and very fond of my comforts, but I shun

responsibility.’

The second letter contained scenes between Wilsonople and the Moon.

He addresses her as his neighbour, and tells her of his triumphs over

the sex.

He requests her to inform him whether she is a ‘female,’ that she may be

triumphed over.

He hastens past her window on foot, with his head bent, just as the

General had been in the habit of walking.

He drives a mouse-pony furiously by.

He cuts down a tree, that she may peep through.

Then, from the Moon’s point of view, Wilsonople, a Silenus, is discerned

in an arm-chair winking at a couple too plainly pouting their lips for a

doubt of their intentions to be entertained.

A fourth letter arrived, bearing date of Paris. This one illustrated

Wilsonople’s courtship of the Moon, and ended with his ‘saying,’ in his

peculiar manner, ‘In spite of her paint I could not have conceived her

age to be so enormous.’

How break off his engagement with the Lady Moon? Consent to none of her

terms!

Little used as he was to read behind a veil, acuteness of suffering

sharpened the General’s intelligence to a degree that sustained him

in animated dialogue with each succeeding sketch, or poisoned arrow

whirring at him from the moment his eyes rested on it; and here are a

few samples:

‘Wilsonople informs the Moon that she is “sweetly pretty.”

‘He thanks her with “thanks” for a handsome piece of lunar green cheese.

‘He points to her, apparently telling some one, “my lady-friend.”

‘He sneezes “Bijou! bijou! bijou!”’

They were trifles, but they attacked his habits of speech; and he began

to grow more and more alarmingly absurd in each fresh caricature of his

person.

He looked at himself as the malicious woman’s hand had shaped him. It

was unjust; it was no resemblance--and yet it was! There was a corner

of likeness left that leavened the lump; henceforth he must walk abroad

with this distressing image of himself before his eyes, instead of the

satisfactory reflex of the man who had, and was happy in thinking that

he had, done mischief in his time. Such an end for a conquering man was

too pathetic.

The General surprised himself talking to himself in something louder

than a hum at neighbours’ dinner-tables. He looked about and noticed

that people were silently watching him.