CHAPTER VII

Lady Camper’s return was the subject of speculation in the

neighbourhood, for most people thought she would cease to persecute the

General with her preposterous and unwarrantable pen-and-ink sketches

when living so closely proximate; and how he would behave was the

question. Those who made a hero of him were sure he would treat her

with disdain. Others were uncertain. He had been so severely hit that it

seemed possible he would not show much spirit.

He, for his part, had come to entertain such dread of the post, that

Lady Camper’s return relieved him of his morning apprehensions; and he

would have forgiven her, though he feared to see her, if only she had

promised to leave him in peace for the future. He feared to see

her, because of the too probable furnishing of fresh matter for her

ladyship’s hand. Of course he could not avoid being seen by her, and

that was a particular misery. A gentlemanly humility, or demureness

of aspect, when seen, would, he hoped, disarm his enemy. It should,

he thought. He had borne unheard-of things. No one of his friends and

acquaintances knew, they could not know, what he had endured. It has

caused him fits of stammering. It had destroyed the composure of his

gait. Elizabeth had informed him that he talked to himself incessantly,

and aloud. She, poor child, looked pale too. She was evidently anxious

about him.

Young Rolles, whom he had met now and then, persisted in praising his

aunt’s good heart. So, perhaps, having satiated her revenge, she might

now be inclined for peace, on the terms of distant civility.

‘Yes! poor Elizabeth!’ sighed the General, in pity of the poor girl’s

disappointment; ‘poor Elizabeth! she little guesses what her father has

gone through. Poor child! I say, she hasn’t an idea of my sufferings.’

General Ople delivered his card at Lady Camper’s lodgegates and escaped

to his residence in a state of prickly heat that required the brushing

of his hair with hard brushes for several minutes to comfort and

re-establish him.

He had fallen to working in his garden, when Lady Camper’s card was

brought to him an hour after the delivery of his own; a pleasing

promptitude, showing signs of repentance, and suggesting to the General

instantly some sharp sarcasms upon women, which he had come upon

in quotations in the papers and the pulpit, his two main sources of

information.

Instead of handing back the card to the maid, he stuck it in his hat and

went on digging.

The first of a series of letters containing shameless realistic

caricatures was handed to him the afternoon following. They came fast

and thick. Not a day’s interval of grace was allowed. Niobe under the

shafts of Diana was hardly less violently and mortally assailed. The

deadliness of the attack lay in the ridicule of the daily habits of one

of the most sensitive of men, as to his personal appearance, and the

opinion of the world. He might have concealed the sketches, but he could

not have concealed the bruises, and people were perpetually asking the

unhappy General what he was saying, for he spoke to himself as if he

were repeating something to them for the tenth time.

‘I say,’ said he, ‘I say that for a lady, really an educated lady, to

sit, as she must--I was saying, she must have sat in an attic to have

the right view of me. And there you see--this is what she has done.

This is the last, this is the afternoon’s delivery. Her ladyship has

me correctly as to costume, but I could not exhibit such a sketch to

ladies.’

A back view of the General was displayed in his act of digging.

‘I say I could not allow ladies to see it,’ he informed the gentlemen,

who were suffered to inspect it freely.

‘But you see, I have no means of escape; I am at her mercy from morning

to night,’ the General said, with a quivering tongue, ‘unless I stay at

home inside the house; and that is death to me, or unless I abandon the

place, and my lease; and I shall--I say, I shall find nowhere in England

for anything like the money or conveniences such a gent--a residence

you would call fit for a gentleman. I call it a bi... it is, in short, a

gem. But I shall have to go.’

Young Rolles offered to expostulate with his aunt Angela.

The General said, ‘Tha... I thank you very much. I would not have her

ladyship suppose I am so susceptible. I hardly know,’ he confessed

pitiably, ‘what it is right to say, and what not--what not. I-I-I never

know when I am not looking a fool. I hurry from tree to tree to shun the

light. I am seriously affected in my appetite. I say, I shall have to

go.’

Reginald gave him to understand that if he flew, the shafts would follow

him, for Lady Camper would never forgive his running away, and was quite

equal to publishing a book of the adventures of Wilsonople.

Sunday afternoon, walking in the park with his daughter on his arm,

General Ople met Mr. Rolles. He saw that the young man and Elizabeth

were mortally pale, and as the very idea of wretchedness directed his

attention to himself, he addressed them conjointly on the subject of his

persecution, giving neither of them a chance of speaking until they were

constrained to part.

A sketch was the consequence, in which a withered Cupid and a fading

Psyche were seen divided by Wilsonople, who keeps them forcibly asunder

with policeman’s fists, while courteously and elegantly entreating

them to hear him. ‘Meet,’ he tells them, ‘as often as you like, in my

company, so long as you listen to me’; and the pathos of his aspect

makes hungry demand for a sympathetic audience.

Now, this, and not the series representing the martyrdom of the old

couple at Douro Lodge Gates, whose rigid frames bore witness to the

close packing of a gentlemanly residence, this was the sketch General

Ople, in his madness from the pursuing bite of the gadfly, handed about

at Mrs. Pollington’s lawn-party. Some have said, that he should not have

betrayed his daughter; but it is reasonable to suppose he had no idea of

his daughter’s being the Psyche. Or if he had, it was indistinct, owing

to the violence of his personal emotion. Assuming this to have been the

very sketch; he handed it to two or three ladies in turn, and was heard

to deliver himself at intervals in the following snatches: ‘As you like,

my lady, as you like; strike, I say strike; I bear it; I say I bear it.

... If her ladyship is unforgiving, I say I am enduring.... I may go,

I was saying I may go mad, but while I have my reason I walk upright, I

walk upright.’

Mr. Pollington and certain City gentlemen hearing the poor General’s

renewed soliloquies, were seized with disgust of Lady Camper’s conduct,

and stoutly advised an application to the Law Courts.

He gave ear to them abstractedly, but after pulling out the whole

chapter of the caricatures (which it seemed that he kept in a case of

morocco leather in his breast-pocket), showing them, with comments on

them, and observing, ‘There will be more, there must be more, I say I am

sure there are things I do that her ladyship will discover and expose,’

he declined to seek redress or simple protection; and the miserable

spectacle was exhibited soon after of this courtly man listening to Mrs.

Barcop on the weather, and replying in acquiescence: ‘It is hot.--If

your ladyship will only abstain from colours. Very hot as you say,

madam,--I do not complain of pen and ink, but I would rather escape

colours. And I dare say you find it hot too?’

Mrs. Barcop shut her eyes and sighed over the wreck of a handsome

military officer.

She asked him: ‘What is your objection to colours?’

His hand was at his breast-pocket immediately, as he said: ‘Have you not

seen?’--though but a few minutes back he had shown her the contents of

the packet, including a hurried glance of the famous digging scene.

By this time the entire district was in fervid sympathy with General

Ople. The ladies did not, as their lords did, proclaim astonishment that

a man should suffer a woman to goad him to a state of semi-lunacy;

but one or two confessed to their husbands, that it required a

great admiration of General Ople not to despise him, both for his

susceptibility and his patience. As for the men, they knew him to

have faced the balls in bellowing battle-strife; they knew him to

have endured privation, not only cold but downright want of food and

drink--an almost unimaginable horror to these brave daily feasters; so

they could not quite look on him in contempt; but his want of sense was

offensive, and still more so his submission to a scourging by a woman.

Not one of them would have deigned to feel it. Would they have allowed

her to see that she could sting them? They would have laughed at her. Or

they would have dragged her before a magistrate.

It was a Sunday in early Summer when General Ople walked to morning

service, unaccompanied by Elizabeth, who was unwell. The church was of

the considerate old-fashioned order, with deaf square pews, permitting

the mind to abstract itself from the sermon, or wrestle at leisure with

the difficulties presented by the preacher, as General Ople often

did, feeling not a little in love with his sincere attentiveness for

grappling with the knotty point and partially allowing the struggle to

be seen.

The Church was, besides, a sanctuary for him. Hither his enemy did not

come. He had this one place of refuge, and he almost looked a happy man

again.

He had passed into his hat and out of it, which he habitually did

standing, when who should walk up to within a couple of yards of him

but Lady Camper. Her pew was full of poor people, who made signs of

retiring. She signified to them that they were to sit, then quietly took

her seat among them, fronting the General across the aisle.

During the sermon a low voice, sharp in contradistinction to the

monotone of the preacher’s, was heard to repeat these words: ‘I say I am

not sure I shall survive it.’ Considerable muttering in the same quarter

was heard besides.

After the customary ceremonious game, when all were free to move, of

nobody liking to move first, Lady Camper and a charity boy were the

persons who took the lead. But Lady Camper could not quit her pew, owing

to the sticking of the door. She smiled as with her pretty hand she

twice or thrice essayed to shake it open. General Ople strode to her

aid. He pulled the door, gave the shadow of a respectful bow, and no

doubt he would have withdrawn, had not Lady Camper, while acknowledging

the civility, placed her prayer-book in his hands to carry at her heels.

There was no choice for him. He made a sort of slipping dance back for

his hat, and followed her ladyship. All present being eager to witness

the spectacle, the passage of Lady Camper dragging the victim General

behind her was observed without a stir of the well-dressed members of

the congregation, until a desire overcame them to see how Lady Camper

would behave to her fish when she had him outside the sacred edifice.

None could have imagined such a scene. Lady Camper was in her carriage;

General Ople was holding her prayer-book, hat in hand, at the carriage

step, and he looked as if he were toasting before the bars of a furnace;

for while he stood there, Lady Camper was rapidly pencilling outlines in

a small pocket sketchbook. There are dogs whose shyness is put to it to

endure human observation and a direct address to them, even on the part

of their masters; and these dear simple dogs wag tail and turn their

heads aside waveringly, as though to entreat you not to eye them and

talk to them so. General Ople, in the presence of the sketchbook, was

much like the nervous animal. He would fain have run away. He glanced at

it, and round about, and again at it, and at the heavens. Her ladyship’s

cruelty, and his inexplicable submission to it, were witnessed of the

multitude.

The General’s friends walked very slowly. Lady Camper’s carriage whirled

by, and the General came up with them, accosting them and himself

alternately. They asked him where Elizabeth was, and he replied,

‘Poor child, yes! I am told she is pale, but I cannot, believe I am so

perfectly, I say so perfectly ridiculous, when I join the responses.’

He drew forth half a dozen sheets, and showed them sketches that Lady

Camper had taken in church, caricaturing him in the sitting down and the

standing up. She had torn them out of the book, and presented them to

him when driving off. ‘I was saying, worship in the ordinary sense will

be interdicted to me if her ladyship...,’ said the General, woefully

shuffling the sketch-paper sheets in which he figured.

He made the following odd confession to Mr. and Mrs. Gosling on the

road:--that he had gone to his chest, and taken out his sword-belt

to measure his girth, and found himself thinner than when he left the

service, which had not been the case before his attendance at the last

levee of the foregoing season. So the deduction was obvious, that

Lady Camper had reduced him. She had reduced him as effectually as a

harassing siege.

‘But why do you pay attention to her? Why...!’ exclaimed Mr. Gosling, a

gentleman of the City, whose roundness would have turned a rifle-shot.

‘To allow her to wound you so seriously!’ exclaimed Mrs. Gosling.

‘Madam, if she were my wife,’ the General explained, ‘I should feel

it. I say it is the fact of it; I feel it, if I appear so extremely

ridiculous to a human eye, to any one eye.’

‘To Lady Camper’s eye.’

He admitted it might be that. He had not thought of ascribing the

acuteness of his pain to the miserable image he presented in this

particular lady’s eye. No; it really was true, curiously true: another

lady’s eye might have transformed him to a pumpkin shape, exaggerated

all his foibles fifty-fold, and he, though not liking it, of course not,

would yet have preserved a certain manly equanimity. How was it Lady

Camper had such power over him?--a lady concealing seventy years with a

rouge-box or paint-pot! It was witchcraft in its worst character. He had

for six months at her bidding been actually living the life of a beast,

degraded in his own esteem; scorched by every laugh he heard; running,

pursued, overtaken, and as it were scored or branded, and then let go

for the process to be repeated.