CHAPTER XV

SHOWING A SECRET FISHED WITHOUT ANGLING

That great couchant dragon of the devouring jaws and the withering

breath, known as our London world, was in expectation of an excitement

above yawns on the subject of a beautiful Lady Doubtful proposing

herself, through a group of infatuated influential friends, to a decorous

Court, as one among the ladies acceptable. The popular version of it

sharpened the sauce by mingling romance and cynicism very happily; for

the numerous cooks, when out of the kitchen, will furnish a piquant dish.

Thus, a jewel-eyed girl of half English origin (a wounded British officer

is amiably nursed in a castle near the famous Peninsula battlefield,

etc.), running wild down the streets of Seville, is picked up by Lord

Ormont, made to discard her tambourine, brought over to our shores, and

allowed the decoration of his name, without the legitimate adornment of

his title. Discontented with her position after a time, she now pushes

boldly to claim the place which will be most effective in serving her as

a bath. She has, by general consent, beauty; she must, seeing that she

counts influential friends, have witchery. Those who have seen her riding

and driving beside her lord, speak of Andalusian grace, Oriental lustre,

fit qualification for the fair slave of a notoriously susceptible old

warrior.

She won a party in the widening gossip world; and enough of a party in

the regent world to make a stream. Pretending to be the actual Countess

of Ormont, though not publicly acknowledged as his countess by the earl,

she had on her side the strenuous few who knew and liked her, some who

were pleased compassionately to patronize, all idle admirers of a

shadowed beautiful woman at bay, the devotees of any beauty in distress,

and such as had seen, such as imagined they had seen, such as could paint

a mental picture of a lady of imposing stature, persuasive appearance,

pathetic history, and pronounce her to be unjustly treated, with a

general belief that she was visible and breathing. She had the ready

enthusiasts, the responsive sentimentalists, and an honest active minor

number, of whom not every one could be declared perfectly unspotted in

public estimation, however innocent under verdict of the courts of law.

Against her was the livid cloud-bank over a flowery field, that has not

yet spoken audible thunder: the terrible aggregate social woman, of man's

creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless,

upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on to which our

human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner. She exhibits

virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and blood of

victims on it. Her fold is a genial climate and the material pleasures

for the world's sheepy: worshipping herself, she claims the

sanctification of a performed religion. She is gentle when unassailed,

going her way serenely, with her malady in the blood. When the skin bears

witness to it, she swallows an apothecary, and there is a short

convulsion. She is refreshed by cutting off diseased inferior members:

the superior betraying foul symptoms, she covers up and retains;

rationally, too, for they minister to her present existence, and she

lives all in the present. Her subjects are the mixed Subservient; among

her rebellious are earth's advanced, who have cold a morning on their

foreheads, and these would not dethrone her, they would but shame and

purify by other methods than the druggist. She loves nothing.

Undoubtedly, she dislikes the vicious. On that merit she subsists.

The vexatious thing in speaking of her is, that she compels to the use of

the rhetorician's brass instrument. As she is one of the Powers giving

life and death, one may be excused. This tremendous queen of the

congregation has brought discredit on her sex for the scourge laid on

quivering female flesh, and for the flippant indifference shown to misery

and to fine distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad; and

particularly for the undiscriminating hardness upon the starved of women.

We forget her having been conceived in the fear of men, shaped to gratify

them. She is their fiction of the state they would fain beguile

themselves to suppose her sex has reached, for their benefit; where she

may be queen of it in a corner, certain of a loyal support, if she will

only give men her half-the-world's assistance to uplift the fabric

comfortable to them; together with assurance of paternity, case of mind

in absence, exclusive possession, enormous and minutest, etc.; not by any

means omitting a regimental orderliness, from which men are privately

exempt, because they are men, or because they are grown boys--the brisker

at lessons after a vacation or a truancy, says the fiction.

In those days the world had oscillated, under higher leading than its

royal laxity, to rigidity. Tiny peccadilloes were no longer matter of

jest, and the sinner exposed stood 'sola' to receive the brand. A

beautiful Lady Doubtful needed her husband's countenance if she was to

take one of the permanent steps in public places. The party of Lady

Charlotte Eglett called on the livid cloud-bank aforesaid to discharge

celestial bolts and sulphur oil on the head of an impudent, underbred,

ambitious young slut, whose arts had bewitched a distinguished nobleman

not young in years at least, and ensnared the remainder wits of some

principal ancient ladies of the land. Professional Puritans, born

conservatives, malicious tattlers, made up a goodly tail to Lady

Charlotte's party. The epithet 'unbred' was accredited upon the quoted

sayings and doings of the pretentious young person's aunt, repeated

abroad by noblemen and gentlemen present when she committed herself; and

the same were absurd. They carried a laugh, and so they lived and

circulated. Lord Ormont submitted to the infliction of that horrid female

in his household! It was no wonder he stopped short of allying himself

with the family.

Nor was it a wonder that the naturally enamoured old warrior or invalided

Mars (for she had the gift of beauty) should deem it prudent to be out of

England when she and her crazy friends determined on the audacious move.

Or put it the other way--for it is just as confounding right side or

left--she and her friends take advantage of his absence to make the

clever push for an establishment, and socially force him to legalize

their union on his return. The deeds of the preceding reign had

bequeathed a sort of legendary credence to the wildest tales gossip could

invent under a demurrer.

But there was the fact, the earl was away. Lady Charlotte's party buzzed

everywhere. Her ladyship had come to town to head it. Her ladyship laid

trains of powder from dinner-parties, balls, routs, park-processions,

into the Lord Chamberlain's ear, and fired and exploded them, deafening

the grand official. Do you consider that virulent Pagan Goddesses and the

flying torch-furies are extinct? Error of Christians! We have

relinquished the old names and have no new ones for them; but they are

here, inextinguishable, threading the day and night air with their dire

squib-trail, if we would but see. Hissing they go, and we do not hear. We

feel the effects.

Upon the counsel of Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta sent a letter to Lord Ormont at

his hotel in Paris, informing him of the position of affairs. He had

delayed his return, and there had been none of his brief communications.

She wrote, as she knew, as she felt, coldly. She was guided by others,

and her name was up before the world, owing to some half-remembered

impulsion of past wishes, but her heart was numbed; she was not a woman

to have a wish without a beat of the heart in it. For her name she had a

feeling, to be likened rather to the losing gambler's contemplation of a

big stake he has flung, and sees it gone while fortune is undecided; and

he catches at a philosophy nothing other than his hug of a modest little

background pleasure, that he has always preferred to this accursed bad

habit of gambling with the luck against him. Reckless in the cast, she

was reckless of success.

Her letter was unanswered.

Then, and day by day more strongly, she felt for her name. She put a

false heart into it. She called herself to her hearing the Countess of

Ormont, and deigned to consult the most foolish friend she could have

chosen--her aunt; and even listened to her advice, that she should run

about knocking at all the doors open to her, and state her case against

the earl. It seemed the course to take, the moment for taking it. Was she

not asked if she could now at last show she had pride? Her pride ran

stinging through her veins, like a band of freed prisoners who head the

rout to fire a city. She charged her lord with having designedly--oh!

cunningly indeed left her to be the prey of her enemies at the hour when

he knew it behoved him to be her great defender. There had been no

disguise of the things in progress: they had been spoken of allusively,

quite comprehensibly, after the fashion common with two entertaining a

secret semi-hostility on a particular subject; one of them being the

creature that blushes and is educated to be delicate, reserved, and

timorous. He was not ignorant, and he had left her, and he would not

reply to her letter!

So fell was her mood, that an endeavour to conjure up the scene of her

sitting beside the death-bed of Matthew Weyburn's mother, failed to sober

and smooth it, holy though that time was. The false heart she had put

into the pride of her name was powerfuller than the heart in her bosom.

But to what end had the true heart counselled her of late? It had been a

home of humours and languors, an impotent insurgent, the sapper of her

character; and as we see in certain disorderly States a curative

incendiarism usurp the functions of the sluggish citizen, and the work of

re-establishment done by destruction, in peril of a total extinction,

Aminta's feverish anger on behalf of her name went a stretch to vivify

and give her dulled character a novel edge. She said good-bye to

cowardice. 'I have no husband to defend me--I must do it for myself.' The

peril of a too complete exercise of independence was just intimated to

her perceptions. On whom the blame? And let the motively guilty go mourn

over consequences! That Institution of Marriage was eyed. Is it not a

halting step to happiness? It is the step of a cripple,--and one leg or

the other poses for the feebler sex,--small is the matter which! And is

happiness our cry? Our cry is rather for circumstance and occasion to use

our functions, and the conditions are denied to women by Marriage--denied

to the luckless of women, who are many, very many: denied to Aminta,

calling herself Countess of Ormont, for one, denied to Mrs. Lawrence

Finchley for another, and in a base bad manner. She had defended her good

name triumphantly, only to enslave herself for life or snatch at the

liberty which besmirches.

Reviewing Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta's real heart pressed forward at the beat,

in tender pity of the woman for whom a yielding to love was to sin; and

unwomanly is the woman who does not love: men will say it. Aminta found

herself phrasing. 'Why was she unable to love her husband?--he is not

old.' She hurried in flight from the remark to confidences imparted by

other ladies, showing strange veins in an earthy world; after which, her

mind was bent to rebuke Mrs. Pagnell for the silly soul's perpetual

allusions to Lord Ormont's age. She did not think of his age. But she was

vividly thinking that she was young. Young, married, loveless, cramped in

her energies, publicly dishonoured--a Lady Doubtful, courting one friend

whom she liked among women, one friend whom she respected among men; that

was the sketch of her.

That was in truth the outline, as much as Aminta dared sketch of herself

without dragging her down lower than her trained instinct would bear to

look. Our civilization shuns nature; and most shuns it in the most

artificially civilized, to suit the market. They, however, are always

close to their mother nature, beneath their second nature's mask of

custom; and Aminta's unconscious concluding touch to the sketch: 'My

husband might have helped me to a footing in Society,' would complete it

as a coloured picture, if writ in tones.

She said it, and for the footing in Society she had lost her taste.

Mrs. Lawrence brought the final word from high quarters: that the

application must be deferred until Lord Ormont returned to town. It was

known before, that such would be the decision. She had it from the

eminent official himself, and she kicked about the room, setting her

pretty mouth and nose to pout and sniff, exactly like a boy whose chum

has been mishandled by a bully.

'Your dear good man is too much for us. I thought we should drive him.

'C'est un ruse homme de guerre.' I like him, but I could slap him. He

stops the way. Upon my word, he seems tolerably careless of his treasure.

Does he suppose Mrs. Paggy is a protection? Do you know she's devoted to

that man Morsfield? He listens to her stories. To judge by what he shouts

aloud, he intends carrying you off the first opportunity, divorcing, and

installing you in Cobeck Hall. All he fears is, that your lord won't

divorce. You should have seen him the other day; he marched up and down

the room, smacking his head and crying out: "Legal measures or any

weapons her husband pleases!" For he has come to believe that the lady

would have been off with him long before, if her lord had no claim to the

marital title. "It 's that husband I can't get over! that husband!" He

reminded me, to the life, of Lawrence Finchley with a headache the

morning after a supper, striding, with his hand on the shining middle of

his head: "It's that Welsh rabbit! that Welsh rabbit!" He has a poor

digestion, and he will eat cheese. The Welsh rabbit chased him into his

bed. But listen to me, dear, about your Morsfield. I told you he was

dangerous.'

'He is not my Morsfield,' said Aminta.

'Beware of his having a tool in Paggy. He boasts of letters.'

'Mine? Two: and written to request him to cease writing to me.'

'He stops at nothing. And, oh, my Simplicity! don't you see you gave him

a step in begging him to retire? Morsfield has lived a good deal among

our neighbours, who expound the physiology of women. He anatomizes us;

pulls us to pieces, puts us together, and then animates us with a breath

of his "passion"--sincere upon every occasion, I don't doubt. He spared

me, although he saw I was engaged. Perhaps it was because I 'm of no

definite colour. Or he thought I was not a receptacle for "passion." And

quite true,--Adder, the dear good fellow, has none. Or where should we

be? On a Swiss Alp, in a chalet, he shooting chamois, and I milking cows,

with 'ah-ahio, ah-ahio,' all day long, and a quarrel at night over curds

and whey. Well, and that 's a better old pensioner's limp to his end for

"passion" than the foreign hotel bell rung mightily, and one of the two

discovered with a dagger in the breast, and the other a don't-look lying

on the pavement under the window. Yes, and that's better than "passion"

splitting and dispersing upon new adventures, from habit, with two sparks

remaining of the fire.'

Aminta took Mrs. Lawrence's hands. 'Is it a lecture?'

She was kissed. 'Frothy gabble. I'm really near to "passion" when I

embrace you. You're the only one I could run away with; live with all

alone, I believe. I wonder men can see you while that silly lord of yours

is absent, and not begin Morsfielding. They're virtuous if they resist.

Paggy tells the world . . . well?' Aminta had reddened.

'What does my aunt tell the world?'

Mrs. Lawrence laid her smoothing hand absently on a frill of lace fichu

above a sternly disciplined bosom at half-heave. 'I think I can judge now

that you're not much hurt by this wretched business of the presentation.

The little service I could do was a moral lesson to me on the subject of

deuce-may-care antecedents. My brother Tom, too, was always playing

truant, as a boy. It 's in the blood.'

She seemed to be teasing, and Aminta cried: 'My aunt! Let me hear. She

tells the world--?'

'Paggy? ah, yes. Only that she says the countess has an exalted opinion

of Mr. Secretary's handwriting--as witnessed by his fair copy of the

Memoirs, of course.'

'Poor woman! How can she talk such foolishness! I guessed it.'

'You wear a dark red rose when you're guessing, 'ma mie,'--French for, my

Aminta.'

'But consider, Isabella, Mr. Weyburn has just had the heaviest of losses.

My aunt should spare mention of him.'

'Matthew Weyburn! we both like the name.' Mrs. Lawrence touched at her

friend and gazed. 'I've seen it on certain evenings--crimson over an

olive sky. What it forebodes, I can't imagine; but it's the end of a

lovely day. They say it threatens rain, if it begins one. It 's an

ominous herald.'

'You make me,' said Aminta. 'I must redden if you keep looking at me so

closely.'

'Now frown one little bit, please. I love to see you. I love to see a

secret disclose itself ingenuously.'

'But what secret, my dear?' cried Aminta's defence of her innocence; and

she gave a short frown.

'Have no fear. Mr. Secretary is not the man to be Morsfielding. And he

can enjoy his repast; a very good sign. But is he remaining long?'

'He is going soon, I hear.'

'He's a good boy. I could have taken to him myself, and not dreaded a

worrying. There 's this difference between you and me, though, my Aminta;

one of us has the fireplace prepared for what's-his-name--"passion." Kiss

me. How could you fancy you were going to have a woman for your friend

and keep hidden from her any one of the secrets that blush! and with

Paggy to aid! I am sure it means very little. Admiration for good

handwriting is--' a smile broke the sentence.

'You're astray, Isabella.'

'Not I, dear, I'm too fond of you.'

'You read what is not.'

'What is not yet written, you mean.'

'What never could be written.'

'I read what is in the blood, and comes out to me when I look. That lord

of yours should take to study you as I have done ever since I fell in

love with you. He 's not counselling himself well in keeping away.'

'Now you speak wisely,' said Aminta.

'Not a particle more wisely. And the reason is close at hand--see. You

are young, you attract--how could it be otherwise?--and you have

"passion" sleeping, and likely to wake with a spring whether roused or

not. In my observation good-man t'other fellow--the poet's friend--is

never long absent when the time is ripe--at least, not in places where we

gather together. Well, one is a buckler against the other: I don't say

with lovely Amy May,--with an honourable woman. But Aminta can smell

powder and grow more mettlesome. Who can look at you and be blind to

passion sleeping! The sight of you makes me dream of it--me, a woman,

cool as a wine-cellar or a well. So there's to help you to know yourself

and be on your guard. I know I'm not deceived, because I've fallen in

love with you, and no love can be without jealousy, so I have the needle

in my breast, that points at any one who holds a bit of you. Kind of

sympathetic needle to the magnet behind anything. You'll know it, if you

don't now. I should have felt the thing without the aid of Paggy. So,

then, imagine all my nonsense unsaid, and squeeze a drop or two of 'sirop

de bon conseil' out of it, as if it were your own wise meditations.' The

rest of Mrs. Lawrence's discourse was a swallow's wing skimming the city

stream. She departed, and Aminta was left to beat at her heart and ask

whether it had a secret.

But if there was one, the secret was out, and must have another name. It

had been a secret for her until she heard her friend speak those

pin-points that pricked her heart, and sent the blood coursing over her

face, like a betrayal, so like as to resemble a burning confession.

But if this confessed the truth, she was the insanest of women. No woman

could be surer that she had her wits. She had come to see things,

previously mysteries, with surprising clearness. As, for example, that

passion was part of her nature; therefore her very life, lying tranced.

She certainly could not love without passion such an abandonment was the

sole justification of love in a woman standing where she stood. And now

for the first time she saw her exact position before the world; and she

saw some way into her lord: saw that he nursed a wound, extracted balm

from anything enabling him to show the world how he despised it, and

undesigningly immolated her for the petty gratification.

It could not, in consequence, be the truth. To bear what she had borne

she must be a passionless woman; and she was glad of her present safety

in thinking it. Once it was absolutely true. She swam away to the

golden-circled Island of Once; landed, and dwelt there solitarily and

blissfully, looking forward to Sunday's walk round the park, looking back

on it. Proudly she could tell herself that her dreams of the Prince of

the island had not been illusions as far as he was concerned; for he had

a great soul. He did not aim at a tawdry glory. He was a loss to our

army--no loss to his country or the world. A woman might clasp her

feeling of pride in having foreseen distinction for him; and a little,

too, in distinguishing now the true individual distinction from the

feathered uniform vulgar. Where the girl's dreams had proved illusions,

she beheld in a title and luxuries, in a loveless marriage.

That was perilous ground. Still it taught her to see that the substantial

is the dust; and passion not being active, she could reflect. After a

series of penetrative flashes, flattering to her intelligence the more

startling they were, reflection was exhausted. She sank on her nature's

desire to join or witness agonistic incidents, shocks, wrestlings, the

adventures which are brilliant air to sanguine energies. Imagination shot

tap, and whirled the circle of a succession of them; and she had a

companion and leader, unfeatured, reverently obeyed, accepted as not to

be known, not to be guessed at, in the deepest hooded inmost of her being

speechlessly divined.

The sudden result of Aminta's turmoil was a determination that she must

look on Steignton. And what was to be gained by that? She had no idea.

And how had she stopped her imaginative flight with the thought of

looking on Steignton? All she could tell was, that it would close a

volume. She could not say why the volume must be closed.

Her orders for the journey down to Steignton were prompt. Mrs. Pagnell

had an engagement at the house of Lady Staines for the next day to meet

titles and celebrities, and it precluded her comprehension of the

project. She begged to have the journey postponed. She had pledged her

word, she said.

'To Mr. Morsfield?' said Aminta.

Her aunt was astounded.

'I did tell him we should be there, my dear.' 'He appears to have a

pleasure in meeting you.' 'He is one of the real gentlemen of the land.'

'You correspond with him?'

'I may not be the only one.'

'Foolish aunty! How can you speak to me in that senseless way?' cried

Aminta. 'You know the schemer he is, and that I have no protection from

his advances unless I run the risk of bloodshed.'

'My dear Aminta, whenever I go into society, and he is present, I know I

shall not be laughed at, or fall into that pit of one of their dead

silences, worse for me to bear than titters and faces. It is their way of

letting one feel they are of birth above us. Mr. Morsfield--purer blood

than many of their highest titles--is always polite, always deferential;

he helps me to feel I am not quite out of my element in the sphere I

prefer. We shall be travelling alone?'

'Have you any fear?'

'Not if nothing happens. Might we not ask that Mr. Weyburn?'

'He has much work to do. He will not long be here. He is absent to-day.'

Mrs. Pagnell remarked: 'I must say he earns his money easily.'

Aminta had softened herself with the allusion to the shortness of his

time with them. Her aunt's coarse hint, and the thought of his loss, and

the banishment it would be to her all the way to Steignton, checked a

sharp retort she could have uttered, but made it necessary to hide her

eyes from sight. She went to her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed.

Even so little as an unspoken defence of him shook her to floods of

tears.