CHAPTER XVI

ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON

Unaccountable resolutions, if impromptu and springing from the female

breast, are popularly taken for caprices; and even when they divert the

current of a history, and all the more when they are very small matters

producing a memorable crisis. In this way does a lazy world consign

discussion to silence with the cynical closure. Man's hoary shrug at a

whimsy sex is the reading of his enigma still.

But ask if she has the ordinary pumping heart in that riddle of a breast:

and then, as the organ cannot avoid pursuit, we may get hold of it, and

succeed in spelling out that she is consequent, in her fashion. She is a

creature of the apparent moods and shifts and tempers only because she is

kept in narrow confines, resembling, if you like, a wild cat caged.

Aminta's journey down to Steignton turned the course of other fortunes

besides her own; and she disdained the minor adventure it was, while

dreaming it important; and she determined eagerly on going, without

wanting to go; and it was neither from a sense of duty nor in a spirit of

contrariety that she went. Nevertheless, with her heart in hand, her

movements are traceably as rational as a soldier's before the enemy or a

trader's matching his customer.

The wish to look on Steignton had been spoken or sighed for during long

years between Aminta and her aunt, until finally shame and anger clinched

the subject. To look on Steignton for once was now Aminta's phrasing of

her sudden resolve; it appeared as a holiday relief from recent worries,

and it was an expedition with an aim, though she had but the coldest

curiosity to see the place, and felt alien to it. Yet the thought, never

to have seen Steignton! roused phantoms of dead wishes to drive the

strange engine she was, faster than the living would have done. Her

reason for haste was rationally founded on the suddenness of her resolve,

which, seeing that she could not say she desired to go, seemed to come of

an external admonition; and it counselled quick movements, lest her

inspired obedience to the prompting should as abruptly breathe itself

out. 'And in that case I shall never have seen Steignton at all,' she

said, with perfect calmness, and did not attempt to sound her meaning.

She did know that she was a magazine of a great storage of powder. It

banked inoffensively dry. She had forgiven her lord, owning the real

nobleman he was in courtesy to women, whom his inherited ideas of them so

quaintly minimized and reduced to pretty insect or tricky reptile. They,

too, had the choice of being ultimately the one or the other in fact; the

latter most likely.

If, however, she had forgiven her lord, the shattering of their union was

the cost of forgiveness. In letting him stand high, as the lofty man she

had originally worshipped, she separated herself from him, to feel that

the humble she was of a different element, as a running water at a

mountain's base. They are one in the landscape; they are far from one in

reality. Aminta's pride of being chafed at the yoke of marriage.

Her aunt was directed to prepare for a start at an early hour the next

morning. Mrs. Pagnell wrote at her desk, and fussed, and ordered the

posting chariot, and bewailed herself submissively; for it was the

Countess of Ormont speaking when Aminta delivered commands, and the only

grievance she dared to mutter was 'the unexpectedness.' Her letters

having been despatched, she was amazed in the late evening to hear Aminta

give the footman orders for the chariot to be ready at the door an hour

earlier than the hour previously appointed. She remonstrated. Aminta

simply observed that it would cause less inconvenience to all parties. A

suspicion of her aunt's proceedings was confirmed by the good woman's

flustered state. She refrained from smiling.

She would have mustered courage to invite Matthew Weyburn as her escort,

if he had been at hand. He was attending to his affairs with

lawyers--mainly with his friend Mr. Abner. She studied map and gazetteer

till late into the night. Giving her orders to the postillion on the

pavement in the morning, she named a South-westerly direction out of

London, and after entering the chariot, she received a case from one of

the footmen.

'What is that, my dear?' said Mrs. Pagnell.

Aminta unlocked and laid it open. A pair of pistols met Mrs. Pagnell's

gaze.

'We shan't be in need of those things?' the lady said anxiously.

'One never knows, on the road, aunt.'

'Loaded? You wouldn't hesitate to fire; I'm sure.'

'At Mr. Morsfield himself, if he attempted to stop me.'

Mrs. Pagnell withdrew into her astonishment, and presently asked, in a

tone of some indignation: 'Why did you mention Mr. Morsfield, Aminta?'

'Did you not write to him yesterday afternoon, aunt?'

'You read the addresses on my letters!'

'Did you not supply him with our proposed route and the time for

starting?'

'Pistols!' exclaimed Mrs. Pagnell. 'One would fancy you think we are in

the middle of the last century. Mr. Morsfield is a gentleman, not a

highwayman.'

'He gives the impression of his being a madman.'

'The real madman is your wedded husband, Aminta, if wedding it was!'

It was too surely so, in Aminta's mind. She tried, by looking out of the

window, to forget her companion. The dullness of the roads and streets

opening away to flat fields combined with the postillion's unvarying jog

to sicken her thoughts over the exile from London she was undergoing, and

the chance that Matthew Weyburn might call at a vacant house next day, to

announce his term of service to the earl, whom he had said he much wanted

to see. He said it in his sharp manner when there was decision behind it.

Several times after contemplating the end of her journey, and not

perceiving any spot of pleasure ahead, an emotion urged her to turn back;

for the young are acutely reasoning when their breasts advise them to

quit a road where no pleasure beckons.

Unlike Matthew Weyburn, the tiptoe sparkle of a happy mind did not leap

from her at wayside scenes, a sweep of grass, distant hills, clouds in

flight. She required, since she suffered, the positive of events or

blessings to kindle her glow.

Matthew Weyburn might call at the house. Would he be disappointed? He had

preserved her letters of the old school-days. She had burnt his. But she

had not burnt the letters of Mr. Morsfield; and she cared nothing for

that man. Assuredly she merited the stigma branding women as

crack-brained. Yet she was not one of the fools; she could govern a

household, and she liked work, she had the capacity for devotedness. So,

therefore, she was a woman perverted by her position, and she shook her

bonds in revolt from marriage. Imagining a fall down some suddenly spied

chasm of her nature, she had a sisterly feeling for the women named

sinful. At the same time, reflecting that they are sinful only with the

sinful, she knelt thankfully at the feet of the man who had saved her

from such danger. Tears threatened. They were a poor atonement for the

burning of his younger letters. But not he--she was the sufferer, and she

whipped up a sensation of wincing at the flames they fell to, and at

their void of existence, committing sentimental idiocies worthy of a

lovesick girl, consciously to escape the ominous thought, which her

woman's perception had sown in her, that he too chafed at a marriage no

marriage: was true in fidelity, not true through infidelity, as she had

come to be. The thought implied misery for both. She entered a black

desolation, with the prayer that he might not be involved, for his own

sake: partly also on behalf of the sustaining picture the young

schoolmaster at his task, merry among his dear boys, to trim and point

them body and mind for their business in the world, painted for her a

weariful prospect of the life she must henceforth drag along.

Is a woman of the plain wits common to numbers ever deceived in her

perception of a man's feelings for her? Let her first question herself

whether she respects him. If she does not, her judgement will go easily

astray, intuition and observation are equally at fault, she has no key;

he has charmed her blood, that is all. But if she respects him, she

cannot be deceived; respect is her embrace of a man's character. Aminta's

vision was clear. She had therefore to juggle with the fact revealed,

that she might keep her heart from rushing out; and the process was a

disintegration of her feminine principle of docility under the world's

decrees. At each pause of her mental activity she was hurled against the

state of marriage. Compassion for her blameless fellow in misery brought

a deluge to sweep away institutions and landmarks.

But supposing the blest worst to happen, what exchange had she to bestow?

Her beauty? She was reputed beautiful. It had made a madman of one man;

and in her poverty of endowments to be generous with, she hovered over

Mr. Morsfield like a cruel vampire, for the certification that she had a

much-prized gift to bestow upon his rival.

But supposing it: she would then be no longer in the shiny garden of the

flowers of wealth; and how little does beauty weigh as all aid to an

active worker in the serious fighting world! She would be a kind of

potted rose-tree under his arm, of which he must eventually tire.

A very cold moment came, when it seemed that even the above supposition,

in the case of a woman who has been married, is shameful to her, a sin

against her lover, and should be obliterated under floods of scarlet.

For, if she has pride, she withers to think of pushing the most noble of

men upon his generosity. And, further, if he is not delicately

scrupulous, is there not something wanting in him? The very cold wave

passed, leaving the sentence: better dream of being plain friends.

Mrs. Pagnell had been quietly chewing her cud of the sullens, as was the

way with her after a snub. She now resumed her gossip of the naughty

world she knelt to and expected to see some day stricken by a bolt from

overhead; containing, as it did, such wicked members as that really

indefensible brazen Mrs. Amy May, who was only the daughter of a half-pay

naval captain, and that Marquis of Collestou, who would, they say,

decorate her with his title to-morrow, if her husband were but somewhere

else. She spread all sorts of report, about Mr. Morsfield, and he was

honour itself in his reserve about her. 'Depend upon it, Aminta--he was

not more than a boy then, and they say she aimed at her enfranchisement

by plotting the collision, for his Yorkshire revenues are immense, and he

is, you know, skilful in the use of arms, and Captain May has no

resources whatever: penury! no one cares to speculate how they

contrive!--but while that dreadful duelling--and my lord as bad as any in

his day-exists, depend upon it, an unscrupulous good-looking woman has as

many lives for her look of an eye or lift of a finger as a throned

Ottoman Turk on his divan.'

Aminta wished to dream. She gave her aunt a second dose, and the lady

relapsed again.

Power to dream had gone. She set herself to look at roadside things,

cottage gardens, old housewives in doorways, gaffer goodman meeting his

crony on the path, groups of boys and girls. She would take the girls,

Matthew Weyburn the boys. She had lessons to give to girls, she had

sympathy, pity, anticipation. That would be a life of happy service. It

might be a fruitful trial of the system he proposed, to keep the boys and

girls in company as much as possible, both at lessons and at games. His

was the larger view. Her lord's view appeared similar to that of her

aunt's 'throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.' Matthew Weyburn believed in

the bettering of the world; Lord Ormont had no belief like it.

Presently Mrs. Pagnell returned to the charge, and once more she was

nipped, and irritated to declare she had never known her niece's temper

so provoking. Aminta was launching a dream of a lass she had seen in a

field, near a white hawthorn, standing upright, her left arm aloft round

the pole of a rake, the rim of her bonnet tipped on her forehead; an

attitude of a rustic.

Britannia with helmet heeling at dignity. The girl's eyes hung to the

passing chariot, without movement of her head. It was Aminta who looked

back, and she saw the girl looking away. Among the superior dames and

damsels she had seen, there was not one to match that figure for stately

air, gallant ease, and splendour of pose. Matthew Weyburn would have

admired the girl. Aminta did better than envy, she cast off the last

vestiges of her bitter ambition to be a fine lady, and winged into the

bosom of the girl, and not shyly said 'yes' to Matthew Weyburn, and to

herself, deep in herself: 'A maid has no need to be shy.' Hardly

blushing, she walks on into the new life beside him, and hears him say:

'I in my way, you in yours; we are equals, the stronger for being

equals,' and she quite agrees, and she gives him the fuller heart for his

not requiring her to be absorbed--she is the braver mate for him. Does

not that read his meaning? Happiest of the girls of earth, she has

divined it at once, from never having had the bitter ambition to be a

slave, that she might wear rich tissues; and let herself be fettered,

that she might loll in idleness; lose a soul to win a title; escape

commonplace to discover it ghastlier under cloth of gold, and the animal

crowned, adored, fattened, utterly served, in the class called by consent

of human society the Upper.

Reason whispered a reminder of facts to her.

'But I am not the Countess of Ormont!' she said. She felt herself the

girl, her sensations were so intensely simple.

Proceeding to an argument, that the earl did not regard her as the

Countess of Ormont, or the ceremony at the British Embassy as one serious

and binding, she pushed her reason too far: sweet delusion waned. She

waited for some fresh scene to revive it.

Aminta sat unwittingly weaving her destiny.

While she was thus engaged, a carriage was rolling on the more westerly

road down to Steignton. Seated in it were Lady Charlotte Eglett and

Matthew Weyburn. They had met at Arthur Abner's office the previous day.

She went there straight from Lord Ormont's house-agent and upholsterer,

to have a queer bit of thunderous news confirmed, that her brother was

down at Steignton, refurnishing the house, and not for letting. She was

excited: she treated Arthur Abner's closed-volume reticence as a

corroboration of the house-agent's report, and hearing Weyburn speak of

his anxiety to see the earl immediately, in order to get release from his

duties, proposed a seat in her carriage; for down Steignton way she meant

to go, if only as excuse for a view of the old place. She kept asking

what Lord Ormont wanted down at Steignton refurnishing the house, and not

to let it! Her evasions of answers that, plain speculation would supply

were quaint. 'He hasn't my feeling for Steignton. He could let it--I

couldn't. Sacrilege to me to have a tenant in my old home where I was

born. He's furnishing to raise his rent. His country won't give him

anything to do, so he turns miser. That's my brother Rowsley's way of

taking on old age.'

Her brother Rowsley might also be showing another sign of his calamitous

condition. She said to Weyburn, in the carriage, that her brother Rowsley

might like having his hair clipped by the Philistine woman; which is one

of the ways of strong men to confess themselves ageing. 'Not,' said she,

with her usual keen justness 'not that I've, a word against Delilah. I

look upon her as a patriot; she dallied and she used the scissors on

behalf of her people. She wasn't bound to Samson in honour,--liked a

strong man, probably enough. She proved she liked her country better. The

Jews wrote the story of it, so there she stands for posterity to pelt

her, poor wretch.'

'A tolerably good analogy for the story of men and women generally,' said

Weyburn.

'Ah, well, you've a right to talk; you don't run miauling about women. It

's easy to be squashy on that subject. As for the Jews, I don't go by

their history, but now they 're down I don't side with the Philistines,

or Christians. They 're good citizens, and they 've got Samson in the

brain, too. That comes of persecution, a hard education. They beat the

world by counting in the head. That 's because they 've learnt the value

of fractions. Napoleon knew it in war, when he looked to the boots and

great-coats of his men; those were his fractions. Lord Ormont thinks he

had too hard-and-fast a system for the battle-field.'

'A greater strategist than tactician, my lady? It may be,' said Weyburn,

smiling at her skips.

'Massing his cannon to make a big hole for his cavalry, my brother says;

and weeding his infantry for the Imperial Guard he postponed the moment

to use.'

'At Moskowa?'

'Waterloo. I believe Lord Ormont would--there! his country 's lost him,

and chose it. They 'll have their day for repentance yet. What a rapture

to have a thousand horsemen following you! I suppose there never was a

man worthy of the name who roared to be a woman. I know I could have

shrieked half my life through to have been born male. It 's no matter

now. When we come to this hateful old age, we meet: no, we 're no sex

then--we 're dry sticks. I 'll tell you: my Olmer doctor--that 's an

impudent fellow who rode by staring into my carriage. The window's down.

He could see without pushing his hat in.'

Weyburn looked out after a man cantering on.

'A Mr. Morsfield,' he said. 'I thought it was he when I saw him go by.

I've met him at the fencing-rooms. He 's one of the violent fencers, good

for making his point, if one funks an attack.'

'That man Morsfield, is it? I wonder what he's doing on the road here. He

goes over London boasting--hum, nothing to me. But he 'll find Lord

Ormont's arm can protect a poor woman, whatever she is. He'd have had it

before, only Lord Ormont shuns a scandal. I was telling you, my Olmer

doctor forbade horse-riding, and my husband raised a noise like one of my

turkeycocks on the wing; so I 've given up the saddle, to quiet him. I

guessed. I went yesterday morning to my London physician. He sounded me,

pushed out his mouth and pulled down his nose, recommended avoidance of

excitement. "Is it heart?" I said. He said it was heart. That was the

best thing an old woman could hear. He said, when he saw I wasn't afraid,

it was likely to be quick; no doctors, no nurses and daily bulletins for

inquirers, but just the whites of the eyes, the laying-out, the

undertaker, and the family-vault. That's one reason why I want to see

Steignton before the blow that may fall any day, whether my brother

Rowsley's there or no. But that Olmer doctor of mine, Causitt, Peter

Causitt, shall pay me for being a liar or else an ignoramus when I told

him he was to tell me bluntly the nature of my disease.'

A horseman, in whom they recognized Mr. Morsfield, passed, clattering on

the road behind them.

'Some woman here about,' Lady Charlotte muttered. Weyburn saw him joined

by a cavalier, and the two consulted and pointed whips right and left.