CHAPTER IX.

A FLASH OF THE BRUISED WARRIOR

The winning of Lord Ormont's consent to look on at the little bout of

arms was counted an achievement; for even in his own rarefied upper

circle, where the fervid sentiments are not allowed to be seen plunging,

he had his troop of enthusiasts; and they were anxious that he should

make an appearance in public, to take what consolation a misunderstood

and injured man could get from evidence of the grateful esteem

entertained for him by a party of his countrymen, who might reasonably

expect at the same time to set eyes, at rather close quarters, on the

wonderful dark beauty, supposed a Spaniard, occasionally beheld riding

beside him. If it is possible to connect a woman with the devoutest of

their anticipations, the sons of leisure up there will do it. But, in

truth, an English world was having cause to ransack the dust-heaps for

neglected men of mettle. Our intermittent ague, known as dread of

invasion, was over the land. Twice down the columns of panic newspaper

correspondence Lord Ormont saw his name cited, with the effect on him

that such signs of national repentance approaching lodged a crabbed

sourness in his consulting-room, whether of head or breast.

He was assailed by a gusty appeal from Lady Charlotte, bidding him seize

the moment to proclaim his views while the secretary had a private

missive from her, wherein, between insistency and supplication, she

directed him to bring the subject before my lord every day, and be sure

to write out a fair copy of the epistle previous to the transmission of

it. 'Capua' was mentioned; she brought in 'a siren,' too. Her brother was

to be the soldier again--fling off silken bonds. The world might prate of

his morality; now was the hour for showing his patriotism, casting aside

his just anger, and backing his chief's opinion. 'A good chance to get

their names together.' To her brother she declared that the columns of

the leading journal were open to him--'in large type'; he was to take her

word for it; he had only to 'dictate away,' quite at his ease, just as he

talked at Olmer, and leave the bother of the scribe's business to his

aide. 'Lose no time,' she concluded; 'the country wants your ideas; let

us have your plan.'

The earl raised his shoulders, and kept his aide exclusively at the

Memoirs. Weyburn, however, read out to him, with accentuation, foolish

stuff in the recurrent correspondence of the daily sheets, and a

complacent burgess article, meant to be a summary of the controversy and

a recommendation to the country to bask in the sun of its wealth again.

'Ay, be the porker sow it's getting liker and liker to every year!' Lord

Ormont exclaimed, and sprang on his feet. 'Take a pen. Shut up that box.

We'll give 'em digestive biscuits for their weak stomachs. Invasion can't

be done, they say! I tell the doddered asses Napoleon would have been

over if Villeneuve had obeyed him to the letter. Villeneuve had a fit of

paralysis, owing to the prestige of Nelson--that 's as it happened. And

they swear at prestige, won't believe in it, because it's not fat bacon.

I tell them, after Napoleon's first battles, prestige did half his work

for him. It saved him at Essling from a plunge into the Danube; it saved

him at Moskowa; it would have marched him half over England at his first

jump on our shingle beach. But that squelch of fat citizens should be

told--to the devil with them! will they ever learn? short of a second

William!--there were eight-and-forty hours when the liberty of this

country hung wavering in the balance with those Boulogne boats. Now look

at Ulm and Austerlitz. Essling, Wagram; put the victors in those little

affairs to front our awkward squads. The French could boast a regimental

system, and chiefs who held them as the whist-player his hand of cards.

Had we a better general than the Archduke Charles? or cavalry and

artillery equal to the Hungarian? or drilled infantry numbering within

eighty thousand of the Boulogne-Wimereux camps? We had nothing but the

raw material of courage--pluck, and no science. Ask any boxing man what

he thinks of the chances. The French might have sacrificed a fleet to

land fifty thousand. Our fleet was our one chance. Any foreign General at

the head of fifty thousand trained, picked troops would risk it, and cut

an 'entrechat' for joy of the chance. We should have fought and bled and

been marched over--a field of Anglo-Saxon stubble! and Nelson riding the

Channel, undisputed lord of the waters. Heigh! by the Lord, this country

would have been like a man free to rub his skin with his hand and a

mortal disease in his blood. Are you ready? How anticipate a hostile

march on the capital, is our business.'

Striding up and down the library, Lord Ormont dropped his wrath to

dictate the practical measures for defence--detesting the cat's-cry

'defence,' he said; but the foe would bring his old growlers, and we

should have to season our handful of regulars and mob of levies, turn the

mass into troops. With plenty of food, and blows daily, Englishmen soon

get stomachs for the right way to play the game; bowl as well as bat; and

the sooner they give up the idea of shamming sturdy on a stiff hind leg,

the better for their chances. Only, it's a beastly thing to see that for

their favourite attitude;--like some dog of a fellow weak in the fists,

weaker in the midriff, at a fair, who cries, Come on, and prays his gods

you won't. All for peace, the rascal boasts himself, and he beats his

wife and kicks his curs at home. Is there any one to help him now, he

vomits gold and honours on the man he yesterday treated as a felon. Ha!

Bull the bumpkin disposed of, my lord drew leisurely back from the

foeman's landing-place, at the head of a body of serious Englishmen;

teaching them to be manageable as chess-pieces, ready as bow-strings to

let fly. Weyburn rejoiced to find himself transcribing crisp sentences,

hard on the matter, without garnish of scorn. Kent, Sussex, Surrey, all

the southern heights about London, round away to the south-western of the

Hampshire heathland, were accurately mapped in the old warrior's brain.

He knew his points of vantage by name; there were no references to

gazetteer or atlas. A chain of forts and earthworks enables us to choose

our ground, not for clinging to them, but for choice of time and place to

give battle. If we have not been playing double-dyed traitor to

ourselves, we have a preponderating field artillery; our yeomanry and

volunteer horsemen are becoming a serviceable cavalry arm; our infantry

prove that their heterogeneous composition can be welded to a handy mass,

and can stand fire and return it, and not be beaten by an acknowledged

defeat.

'That's English! yes, that's English! when they're at it,' my lord sang

out.

'To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end,' cried Weyburn; his

former enthusiasm for the hero mounting, enlightened by a reminiscence of

the precept he had hammered on the boys at Cuper's.

'They fall well. Yes, the English fall like men,' said my lord, pardoning

and embracing the cuffed nation. 'Bodies knocked over, hearts upright.

That's example; we breed Ironsides out of a sight like that. If it

weren't for a cursed feeble Government scraping 'conges' to the

taxpayer--well, so many of our good fellows would not have to fall. That

I say; for this thing is going to happen some day, mind you, sir! And I

don't want to have puncheons and hogsheads of our English blood poured

out merely to water the soil of a conquered country because English

Governments are a craven lot, not daring risk of office by offending the

taxpayer. But, on!'

Weyburn sent Lady Charlotte glowing words of the composition in progress.

They worked through a day, and a second day--talked of nothing else in

the intervals. Explanatory answers were vouchsafed to Aminta's modest

inquiries at Finch, as she pictured scenes of smoke, dust and blood from

the overpowering plain masculine lines they drew, terrible in bluntness.

The third morning Lord Ormont had map and book to verify distances and

attempt a scale of heights, take names of estates, farms, parishes,

commons, patches of woodland. Weyburn wrote his fair copy on folio paper,

seven-and-thirty pages. He read it aloud to the author on the afternoon

of the fourth day, with the satisfaction in his voice that he felt. My

lord listened and nodded. The plan for the defence of England's heart was

a good plan.

He signed to have the manuscript handed to him. A fortified London secure

of the Thames for abundant supplies, well able to breathe within

earthworks extending along the southern hills, was clearly shown to stand

the loss of two big battles on the Sussex weald or more East to

North-east, if fortune willed it.

He rose from his chair, paced some steps, with bent head, came back

thoughtfully, lifted the manuscript sheets for another examination. Then

he stooped to the fire, spreading the edges unevenly, so that they caught

flame. Weyburn spied at him. It was to all appearance the doing of a man

who had intended it and brought it to the predetermined conclusion.

'About time for you to be off for your turn at Chiallo's,' our country's

defender remarked, after tossing the last half-burnt lump under the grate

and shovelling at it.

'I will go, my lord,' said Weyburn--and he was glad to go.

He went, calculated his term of service under Lord Ormont. He was young,

not a philosopher. Waste of anything was abhorrent to a nature pointed at

store of daily gain, if it were only the gain in a new or a freshened

idea; and time lost, work lost, good counsel to the nation lost,

represented horrid vacuity to him, and called up the counter

demonstration of a dance down the halls of madness, for proof that we

should, at least, have jolly motion of limbs there before Perdition

struck the great gong. Ay, and we should be twirling with a fair form on

the arm: woman and man; as it ought to be; twirling downward, true, but

together. Such a companionship has a wisdom to raise it above the title

of madness. Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist

burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a

curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won't forgive an injury, nurses

rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can't--to use the old

schoolboy words--take a licking!

These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by

Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of

which they were the sign. He criticized impulsively, and fancied he did

no more, and was not doing much though, in fact, criticism is the end of

worship; the Brutus blow at that Imperial but mortal bosom.

The person criticized was manifest. Who was the woman he twirled with?

She was unfeatured, undistinguished, one of the sex, or all the sex: the

sex to be shunned as our deadly sapper of gain, unless we find the chosen

one to super-terrestrialize it and us, and trebly outdo our gift of our

whole self for her.

She was indistinguishable, absolutely unknown; yet she murmured, or

seemed to murmur--for there was no sound--a complaint of Lord Ormont. And

she, or some soundless mouth of woman, said he was a splendid military

hero, a chivalrous man, a man of inflexible honour; but had no

understanding of how to treat a woman, or belief in her having equal life

with him on earth.

She was put aside rather petulantly, and she took her seat out of the

whirl with submission. Thinking she certainly was not Browny, whom he

would have known among a million, he tried to quit the hall, and he

twirled afresh, necessarily not alone; it is the unpardonable offence

both to the Graces and the Great Mother for man to valse alone. She

twirled on his arm, uninvited; accepted, as in the course of nature;

hugged, under dictate of the nature of the man steeled against her by the

counting of gain, and going now at desperation's pace, by very means of

those defensive locked steam-valves meant to preserve him from this

madness,--for the words of the red-lipped mate, where there were no

words, went through him like a music when the bow is over the viol,

sweeping imagination, and they said her life was wasting.

Was not she a priceless manuscript cast to the flames? Her lord had been

at some trouble to win her. Or his great fame and his shadowed fortunes

had won her. He took her for his own, and he would not call her his own.

He comported himself with absolute, with kindly deference to the lady

whose more than vital spark he let the gossips puff at and blur. He

praised her courage, visibly admired her person, admitted her in private

to be his equal, degraded her in public. Could anything account for the

behaviour of so manly and noble a gentleman?--Rhetoric made the attempt,

and Weyburn gave up the windy business.

Discovering that his fair partner of the wasting life was--he struggled

to quench the revelation--Aminta, he stopped the dance. If there was no

gain in whirling fancifully with one of the sex, a spin of a minute with

her was downright bankruptcy.

He was young, full of blood; his heart led him away from the door Lord

Ormont had exposed; at which a little patient unemotional watchfulness

might have intimated to him something besides the simple source of the

old hero's complex chapter of conduct. As it was, Weyburn did see the

rancour of a raw wound in operation. But he moralized and disapproved;

telling himself, truly enough, that so it would not have been with him;

instead of sounding at my lord's character, and his condition of the

unjustly neglected great soldier, for the purpose of asking how that raw

wound would affect an injured veteran, who compressed, almost repressed,

the roar of Achilles, though his military bright name was to him his

Briseis.