CHAPTER V.

IN WHICH THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY ADVANCE AND RETIRE

"Emile 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, he looked away.

She had the grand manner by nature. She was the woman of the girl once

known.

"A soldier, is he?"

"Emile'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 shut 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 worthy man has a happy imagination. 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 enthusiasm 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?"

"Emile obeyed the command of his 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 flash, 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 not understand enthusiasm for the schoolmaster's

career.

Light of evidence was before him, that she had a friendly curiosity to

know what things had led to their new meeting under these conditions. He

sketched them cursorily; 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 Heidelberg, Asti, and

Florence; between four and five months at Athens (he was needlessly

precise), in tutorship with a young nobleman: no events, nor a spot of

colour. Thus did he wilfully, with pain to himself, 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

profession--must you not take...enter into orders if you aim at any

distinction?"

"And a member of the Anglican Church would not be allowed to exchange his

frock for a cavalry sabre," said he. "That is true. I do not propose to

settle as a schoolmaster 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! Companies of all kinds are forming. Colleges

are Companies. 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 face, he

insisted on reducing to hideous material wreck the fair illusion, which

had once arrayed him in alluring promise.

She explained; "I said, America. You would be among Protestants in

America."

"Catholics and Protestants are both welcome to us, according to our

scheme. And Germans, French, English, Americans, Italians, if they will

come; Spaniards and Portuguese, and Scandinavians, Russians 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. We think we may make it

serve."

"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 obits."

He waited for farther questions. They were at an end.

"You have your work to do, Mr. Weyburn."

Saying that, she bowed an implied apology 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 himself up when the questions bred of amazement 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 saying 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

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 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 "Schoolmaster"; 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 of the winking gold-piece, which is their 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 schoolmaster plucked him from the whirl.

She despised it; he upheld it. He stuck to his view, finding their

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 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 flaunters or the

tenderly-nurtured 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 undervalued--even by her.

He was taught to see again how Rhetoric haunts, and Rhetoric 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 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 infinite 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 the Profession she 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

antagonism 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 serviceable work, he must

be sore 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 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 was 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? Yea, 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. According

to his prescript, sharp exercise of lungs and limbs is a man's moral aid

against 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 indulgently, 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 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 stuff 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, nevertheless, 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 the victim is a young woman, a beautiful

young woman, she pleads to us poetically against the bearish sentences of

his composition. 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; bearing

which in view, it could be felt that this nonsensical puzzlement over his

relations to the moods and tenses of a married woman 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 woman'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 morning 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

must have sprang 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 deplorable 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

conversation; reviewed the manner of it, the words, the sound they had,

the feelings they touched; then owned that the question could not be

answered. Owning, further, that the recurrence of these idiotic

speculations, feelings, questions, wrote him down as both dull fellow and

impertinent, he was unabled to restore Aminta to the queenly place she

took above the schoolmaster, who was very soon laughing at his fever or

flash of the afternoon. The day had brought a great surprise, nothing

more. Twenty minutes of fencing in the a salle d'armes 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, inclinations 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 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 instance, 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 young people--the unlaunched,

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 profitable facts concerning his condition;

besides throwing a luminous ray on the arcane of our elusive youthful. If

they have no stout zest for eating, put Query against them.

His customary enjoyment of dinner convinced 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 concealing her disdain of the aspirant schoolmaster, quite

comprehending, by sympathy, why the woman should reproach the girl who

had worshipped heroes, if this was a full-grown specimen; and the reply

of the shamed girl, that in her ignorance she could not know better. He

spared the girl, but he laughed at the woman he commended, 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 supervision 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 intelligible 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 established 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 off 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 admitted of no

woefulness, nothing soothingly 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.