CHAPTER XXIV

LOVERS MATED

He was benevolently martial, to the extent of paternal, in thinking his

girl, of whom he deigned to think now as his countess, pardonably

foolish. Woman for woman, she was of a pattern superior to the world's

ordinary, and might run the world's elect a race. But she was pitifully

woman-like in her increase of dissatisfaction with the more she got.

Women are happier enslaved. Men, too, if their despot is an Ormont.

Colonel of his regiment, he proved that: his men would follow him

anywhere, do anything. Grand old days, before he was condemned by one

knows not what extraordinary round of circumstances to cogitate on women

as fluids, and how to cut channels for them, that they may course along

in the direction good for them, imagining it their pretty wanton will to

go that way! Napoleon's treatment of women is excellent example.

Peterborough's can be defended.

His Aminta could not reason. She nursed a rancour on account of the blow

she drew on herself at Steignton, and she declined consolation in her

being pardoned. The reconcilement evidently was proposed as a finale of

one of the detestable feminine storms enveloping men weak enough to let

themselves be dragged through a scene for the sake of domestic

tranquillity.

A remarkable exhibition of Aminta the woman was, her entire change of

front since he had taken her spousal chill. Formerly she was passive,

merely stately, the chiselled grande dame, deferential in her bearing and

speech, even when argumentative and having an opinion to plant. She had

always the independent eye and step; she now had the tongue of the

graceful and native great lady, fitted to rule her circle and hold her

place beside the proudest of the Ormonts. She bore well the small shuffle

with her jewel-box--held herself gallantly. There had been no female

feignings either, affected misapprehensions, gapy ignorances, and snaky

subterfuges, and the like, familiar to men who have the gentle twister in

grip. Straight on the line of the thing to be seen she flew, and struck

on it; and that is a woman's martial action. He would right heartily have

called her comrade, if he had been active himself. A warrior pulled off

his horse, to sit in a chair and contemplate the minute evolutions of the

sex is pettish with his part in such battle-fields at the stage beyond

amusement.

Seen swimming, she charmed him. Abstract views of a woman summon opposite

advocates: one can never say positively, That is she! But the visible

fair form of a woman is hereditary queen of us. We have none of your

pleadings and counter-pleadings and judicial summaries to obstruct a

ravenous loyalty. My lord beheld Aminta take her three quick steps on the

plank, and spring and dive and ascend, shaking the ends of her bound

black locks; and away she went with shut mouth and broad stroke of her

arms into the sunny early morning river; brave to see, although he had to

flick a bee of a question, why he enjoyed the privilege of seeing, and

was not beside her. The only answer confessed to a distaste for all

exercise once pleasurable.

She and her little friend boated or strolled through the meadows during

the day; he fished. When he and Aminta rode out for the hour before

dinner, she seemed pleased. She was amicable, conversable, all that was

agreeable as a woman, and she was the chillest of wives. My lord's

observations and reflections came to one conclusion: she pricked and

challenged him to lead up to her desired stormy scene. He met her and

meant to vanquish her with the dominating patience Charlotte had found

too much for her: women cannot stand against it.

To be patient in contention with women, however, one must have a

continuous and an exclusive occupation; and the tax it lays on us

conduces usually to impatience with men. My lord did not directly connect

Aminta's chillness and Morsfield's impudence; yet the sensation roused by

his Aminta participated in the desire to punish Morsfield speedily.

Without wishing for a duel, he was moved by the social sanction it had to

consider whether green youths and women might not think a grey head had

delayed it too long. The practice of the duel begot the peculiar animal

logic of the nobler savage, which tends to magnify an offence in the

ratio of our vanity, and hunger for a blood that is not demanded by the

appetite. Moreover, a waning practice, in disfavour with the new

generation, will be commended to the conservative barbarian, as partaking

of the wisdom of his fathers. Further, too, we may have grown slothful,

fallen to moodiness, done excess of service to Omphale, our tyrant lady

of the glow and the chill; and then undoubtedly the duel braces.

He left Aminta for London, submissive to the terms of intimacy dictated

by her demeanour, his unacknowledged seniority rendering their harshness

less hard to endure. She had not gratified him with a display of her

person in the glitter of the Ormont jewels; and since he was, under

common conditions, a speechless man, his ineptitude for amorous

remonstrances precipitated him upon deeds, that he might offer additional

proofs of his esteem and the assurance of her established position as his

countess. He proposed to engage Lady Charlotte in a conflict severer than

the foregoing, until he brought her to pay the ceremonial visit to her

sister-in-law. The count of time for this final trial of his

masterfulness he calculated at a week. It would be an occupation,

miserable occupation though it was. He hailed the prospect of chastising

Morsfield, for a proof that his tussels with women, prolonged study of

their tricks, manoeuvrings and outwittings of them, had not emasculated

him.

Aminta willingly promised to write from day to day. Her senses had his

absence insured to them by her anticipation of the task. She did not

conceive it would be so ponderous a task. What to write to him when

nothing occurred! Nothing did occur, unless the arrival of Mr. Weyburn

was to be named an event. She alluded to it: 'Mr. Weyburn has come,

expecting to find you here. The dispatch-box is here. Is he to await

you?'

That innocent little question was a day gained.

One day of boating on the upper reaches of the pastoral river, and walks

in woods and golden meadows, was felicity fallen on earth, the ripe fruit

of dreams. A dread surrounded it, as a belt, not shadowing the horizon;

and she clasped it to her heart the more passionately, like a mother her

rosy infant, which a dark world threatens and the universal fate.

Love, as it will be at her June of life, was teaching her to know the

good and bad of herself. Women, educated to embrace principles through

their timidity and their pudency, discover, amazed, that these are not

lasting qualities under love's influence. The blushes and the fears take

flight. The principles depend much on the beloved. Is he a man whose

contact with the world has given him understanding of life's laws, and

can hold him firm to the right course in the strain and whirling of a

torrent, they cling to him, deeply they worship. And if they tempt him,

it is not advisedly done. Nature and love are busy in conjunction. The

timidities and pudencies have flown; they may hover, they are not

present. You deplore it, you must not blame; you have educated them so.

Muscular principles are sown only out in the world; and, on the whole,

with all their errors, the worldly men are the truest as well as the

bravest of men. Her faith in his guidance was equal to her dependence.

The retrospect of a recent journey told her how he had been tried.

She could gaze tenderly, betray her heart, and be certain of safety. Can

wine match that for joy? She had no schemes, no hopes, but simply the

desire to bestow, the capacity to believe. Any wish to be enfolded by him

was shapeless and unlighted, unborn; though now and again for some chance

word or undefined thought she surprised the strange tenant of her breast

at an incomprehensibly faster beat, and knew it for her own and not her

own, the familiar the stranger--an utter stranger, as one who had snared

her in a wreath and was pulling her off her feet.

She was not so guileless at the thought of little Selina Collett here,

and of Selina as the letter-bearer of old; and the marvel that Matey and

Browny and Selina were together after all! Was it not a kind of summons

to her to call him Matey just once, only once, in play? She burned and

ached to do it. She might have taxed her ingenuity successfully to induce

little Selina to the boldness of calling him Matey--and she then

repeating it, as the woman who revived with a meditative effort

recollections of the girl. Ah, frightful hypocrite! Thoughts of the

pleasure of his name aloud on her lips in his hearing dissolved through

her veins, and were met by Matthew Weyburn's open face, before which

hypocrisy stood rent and stripped. She preferred the calmer, the truer

pleasure of seeing him modestly take lessons in the nomenclature of

weeds, herbs, grasses, by hedge and ditch. Selina could instruct him as

well in entomology, but he knew better the Swiss, Tyrolese, and Italian

valley-homes of beetle and butterfly species. Their simple talk was a

cool zephyr fanning Aminta.

The suggestion to unite the two came to her, of course, but their

physical disparity denied her that chance to settle her own difficulty,

and a whisper of one physically the match for him punished her. In

stature, in healthfulness, they were equals, perhaps: not morally or

intellectually. And she could claim headship of him on one little point

confided to her by his mother, who was bearing him, and startled by the

boom of guns under her pillow, when her husband fronted the enemy:

Matthew Weyburn, the fencer, boxer, cricketer, hunter, all things manly,

rather shrank from firearms--at least, one saw him put on a screw to

manipulate them. In danger--among brigands or mutineers, for example--she

could stand by him and prove herself his mate. Intellectually, morally,

she had to bow humbly. Nor had she, nor could she do more than lean on

and catch example from his prompt spiritual valiancy. It shone out from

him, and a crisis fulfilled the promise. Who could be his mate for

cheerful courage, for skill, the ready mind, easy adroitness, and for

self-command? To imitate was a woman's utmost.

Matthew Weyburn appeared the very Matey of the first of May cricketing

day among Cuper's boys the next morning, when seen pacing down the

garden-walk. He wore his white trousers of that happiest of old days--the

'white ducks' Aminta and Selina remembered. Selina beamed. 'Yes, he did;

he always wore them; but now it's a frock-coat instead of a jacket.'

'But now he will be a master instead of a schoolboy,' said Aminta. 'Let

us hope he will prosper.'

'He gives me the idea of a man who must succeed,' Selina said; and she

was patted, rallied, asked how she had the idea, and kissed; Aminta

saying she fancied it might be thought, for he looked so confident.

'Only not what the boys used to call "cocky,"' said Selina. 'He won't be

contemptuous of those he outstrips.'

'His choice of the schoolmaster's profession points to a modesty in him,

does it not, little woman?'

'He made me tell him, while you were writing your letters yesterday, all

about my brother and his prospects.'

'Yes, that is like him. And I must hear of your brother, "little

Collett." Don't forget, Sely, little Collett was our postman.'

The Countess of Ormont's humorous reference to the circumstance passed

with Selina for a sign of a poetic love of the past, and a present social

elevation that allowed her to review it impassively. She admired the

great lady and good friend who could really be interested in the fortunes

of a mere schoolmaster and a merchant's clerk. To her astonishment, by

some agency beyond her fathoming, she found herself, and hardly for her

own pleasure, pushing the young schoolmaster animatedly to have an

account of his aims in the establishment of the foreign school.

Weyburn smiled. He set a short look at Aminta; and she, conscious of her

detected diplomacy, had an inward shiver, mixed of the fascination and

repugnance felt by a woman who knows that under one man's eyes her

character is naked and anatomized. Her character?--her soul. He held it

in hand and probed it mercifully. She had felt the sweet sting again and

again, and had shrunk from him, and had crawled to him. The love of him

made it all fascination. How did he learn to read at any moment right to

the soul of a woman? Did experience teach him, or sentimental sympathy?

He was too young, he was too manly. It must be because of his being in

heart and mind the brother to the sister with women.

Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes. Bee-note and woodside

blackbird and meadow cow, and the fish of the silver rolling rings,

composed the leap of the music.

She gave her mind to his voice, following whither it went; half was in

air, higher than the swallow's, exalting him.

How is it he is the brother of women? They are sisters for him because he

is neither sentimentalist nor devourer. He will not flatter to feed on

them. The one he chooses, she will know love. There are women who go

through life not knowing love. They are inanimate automatic machines, who

lay them down at last, inquiring wherefore they were caused to move. She

is not of that sad flock. She will be mated; she will have the right to

call him Matey. A certain Browny called him Matey. She lived and died. A

certain woman apes Browny's features and inherits her passion, but has

forfeited her rights. Were she, under happiest conditions, to put her

hand in his, shame would burn her. For he is just--he is Justice; and a

woman bringing him less than his due, she must be a creature of the

slime!

This was the shadowy sentiment that made the wall of division between

them. There was no other. Lord Ormont had struck to fragments that

barrier of the conventional oath and ceremonial union. He was unjust--he

was Injustice. The weak may be wedded, they cannot be married; to

Injustice. And if we have the world for the buttress of injustice, then

is Nature the flaring rebel; there is no fixed order possible. Laws are

necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human

being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of

the savage's old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice. There cannot be a based

society upon such conditions. An immolation of the naturally constituted

individual arrests the general expansion to which we step, decivilizes

more, and is more impious to the God in man, than temporary revelries of

a licence that Nature soon checks.

Arrows of thoughts resembling these shot over the half of Aminta's mind

not listening. Her lover's head was active on the same theme while he

spoke. They converged to it from looks crossing or catching profiles, or

from tones, from a motion of hand, from a chance word. Insomuch that the

third person present was kept unobservant only by her studious and humble

speculations on the young schoolmaster's grand project to bring the

nationalities together, and teach Old England to the Continent--the

Continent to Old England: our healthy games, our scorn of the lie,

manliness; their intellectual valour, diligence, considerate manners.

'Just to name a few of the things for interchange,' said Weyburn. 'As to

method, we shall be their disciples. But I look forward to our fellows

getting the lead. No hurry. Why will they? you ask in petto. Well, they

're emulous, and they take a thrashing kindly. That 's the way to learn a

lesson. I 've seen our fellows beaten and beaten--never the courage

beaten out of them. In the end, they won and kept the field. They have a

lot to learn--principally not to be afraid of ideas. They lose heaps of

time before they can feel at home with ideas. They call themselves

practical for having an addiction to the palpable. It is a pretty wreath

they clap on their deficiencies. Practical dogs are for bones, horses for

corn. I want the practical Englishman to settle his muzzle in a nosebag

of ideas. When he has once got hold of them, he makes good stuff of them.

On the Continent ideas have wings and pay visits. Here, they're

stay-at-home. Then I want our fellows to have the habit of speaking from

the chest. They shall return to England with the whoop of the mountains

in them and ready to jump out. They shall have an Achillean roar; and

they shall sing by second nature. Don't fear: they'll give double for

anything they take. I've known Italians, to whom an Englishman's honesty

of mind and dealing was one of the dreams of a better humanity they had

put in a box. Frenchmen, too, who, when they came to know us, were

astonished at their epithet of perfide, and loved us.'

'Emile,' said Aminta. 'You remember Emile, Selina: the dear little French

boy at Mr. Cuper's?'

'Oh, I do,' Selina responded.

'He will work with Mr. Weyburn in Switzerland.'

'Oh, that will be nice!' the girl exclaimed.

Aminta squeezed Selina's hand. A shower of tears clouded her eyes. She

chose to fancy it was because of her envy of the modest, busy, peaceful

girl, who envied none. Conquers also sincerity in the sincerest. She was

vexed with her full breast, and had as little command of her thoughts as

of her feelings.

'Mr. Weyburn has ideas for the education of girls too,' she said.

'There's the task,' said he. 'It's to separate them as little as

possible. All the--passez-moi le mot--devilry between the sexes begins at

their separation. They 're foreigners when they meet; and their alliances

are not always binding. The chief object in life, if happiness be the

aim, and the growing better than we are, is to teach men and women how to

be one; for, if they 're not, then each is a morsel for the other to prey

on. Lady Charlotte Eglett's view is, that the greater number of them on

both sides hate one another.'

'Hate!' exclaimed Selina; and Aminta said: 'Is Lady Charlotte Eglett an

authority?'

'She has observed, and she thinks. She has in the abstract the justest of

minds: and that is the curious point about her. But one may say they are

trained at present to be hostile. Some of them fall in love and strike a

truce, and still they are foreigners. They have not the same standard of

honour. They might have it from an education in common.'

'But there must be also a lady to govern the girls?' Selina interposed.

'Ah, yes; she is not yet found!'

'Would it increase their mutual respect?--or show of respect, if you

like?' said Aminta, with his last remark at work as the shattering bell

of a city's insurrection in her breast.

'In time, under management; catching and grouping them young. A boy who

sees a girl do what he can't, and would like to do, won't take refuge in

his muscular superiority--which, by the way, would be lessened.'

'You suppose their capacities are equal?'

'Things are not equal. I suppose their excellencies to make a pretty

nearly equal sum in the end. But we 're not weighing them each. The

question concerns the advantage of both.'

'That seems just!'

Aminta threw no voice into the word 'just.' It was the word of the

heavens assuaging earth's thirst, and she was earth to him. Her soul

yearned to the man whose mind conceived it.

She said to Selina: 'We must plan an expedition next year or the year

after, and see how the school progresses.'

All three smiled; and Selina touched and held Aminta's hand shyly.

Visions of the unseen Switzerland awed her.

Weyburn named the Spring holiday time, the season of the flowering Alpine

robes. He promised welcome, pressed for a promise of the visit. Warmly it

was given. 'We will; we will indeed!'

'I shall look forward,' he said.

There was nothing else for him or for her, except to doat on the passing

minute that slipped when seized. The looking forward turned them to the

looking back at the point they had flown from, and yielded a momentary

pleasure, enough to stamp some section of a picture on their memories,

which was not the burning now Love lives for, in the clasp, if but of

hands. Desire of it destroyed it. They swung to the future, swung to the

present it made the past, sensible to the quick of the now they could not

hold. They were lovers. Divided lovers in presence, they thought and they

felt in pieces. Feelings and thoughts were forbidden to speech. She dared

look the very little of her heart's fulness, without the disloyalty it

would have been in him to let a small peep of his heart be seen. While

her hand was not clasped she could look tenderly, and her fettered state,

her sense of unworthiness muffled in the deeps, would keep her from the

loosening to passion.

He who read through her lustrous, transiently dwelling eyes had not that

security. His part, besides the watch over the spring of his hot blood,

was to combat a host, insidious among which was unreason calling her

Browny, urging him to take his own, to snatch her from a possessor who

forfeited by undervaluing her. This was the truth in a better-ordered

world: she belonged to the man who could help her to grow and to do her

work. But in the world we have around us, it was the distorted truth: and

keeping passion down, he was able to wish her such happiness as pertained

to safety from shipwreck, and for himself, that he might continue to walk

in the ranks of the sober citizens.

Oh, true and right, but she was gloriously beautiful! Day by day she

surpassed the wondrous Browny of old days. All women were eclipsed by

her. She was that fire in the night which lights the night and draws the

night to look at it. And more: this queen of women was beginning to have

a mind at work. One saw already the sprouting of a mind repressed. She

had a distinct ability; the good ambition to use her qualities. She

needed life and air--that is, comprehension of her, encouragement, the

companion mate. With what strength would she now endow him! The pride in

the sharp imagination of possessing her whispered a boast of the strength

her mate would have from her. His need and her need rushed together

somewhere down the skies. They could not, he argued, be separated

eternally.

He had to leave her. Selina, shocked at a boldness she could not

understand in herself, begged him to stay and tell her of Switzerland and

Alpine flowers and herbs, and the valleys for the gold beetle and the

Apollo butterfly. Aminta hinted that Lord Ormont might expect to find him

there, if he came the next morning; but she would not try to persuade,

and left the decision with him, loving him for the pain he inflicted by

going.

Why, indeed, should he stay? Both could ask; they were one in asking.

Anguish balanced pleasure in them both. The day of the pleasure was

heaven to remember, heaven to hope for; not so heavenly to pray for. The

praying for it, each knew, implored their joint will to decree the

perilous blessing. A shadowy sentiment of duty and rectitude, born of

what they had suffered, hung between them and the prayer for a renewal,

that would renew the tempting they were conscious of when the sweet, the

strained, throbbing day was over. They could hope for chance to renew it,

and then they would be irresponsible. Then they would think and wish

discreetly, so as to have it a happiness untainted. In refusing now to

take another day or pray for it, they deserved that chance should grant

it.

Aminta had said through Selina the utmost her self-defences could allow.

But the idea of a final parting cut too cruelly into her life, and she

murmured: 'I shall see you before you go for good?'

'I will come, here or in London.'

'I can trust?'

'Quite certain.'

A meeting of a few hasty minutes involved none of the dangers of a sunny,

long summer day; and if it did, the heart had its claims, the heart had

its powers of resistance. Otherwise we should be base verily.

He turned on a bow to leave her before there was a motion for the offer

of her hand.

After many musings and frettings, she reached the wisdom of that. Wisdom

was her only nourishment now. A cold, lean dietary it is; but he

dispensed it, and it fed her, or kept her alive. It became a proud

feeling that she had been his fellow in the achievement of a piece of

wisdom; though the other feeling, that his hand's kind formal touching,

without pressure of hers, would have warmed her to go through the next

interview with her lord, mocked at pure satisfaction. Did he distrust

himself? Or was it to spare her? But if so, her heart was quite bare to

him! But she knew it was.

Aminta drove her questioning heart as a vessel across blank circles of

sea, where there was nothing save the solitary heart for answer. It

answered intelligibly and comfortingly at last, telling her of proof

given that she could repose under his guidance with absolute faith. Was

ever loved woman more blest than she in such belief? She had it firmly;

and a blessedness, too, in this surety wavering beneath shadows of the

uncertainty. Her eyes knew it, her ears were empty of the words. Her

heart knew it, and it was unconfirmed by reason. As for his venturing to

love her, he feared none. And no sooner did that reflection surge than

she stood up beside him in revolt against her lion and lord. Her instinct

judged it impossible she could ever have yielded her heart to a man

lacking courage. Hence--what? when cowardice appeared as the sole

impediment to happiness now!

He had gone, and the day lived again for both of them--a day of sheer

gold in the translation from troubled earth to the mind. One another's

beauty through the visage into the character was newly perceived and

worshipped; and the beauties of pastoral Thames, the temple of peace,

hardly noticed in the passing of the day--taken as air to the breather;

until some chip of the scene, round which an emotion had curled, was

vivid foreground and gateway to shrouded romance: it might be the

stream's white face browning into willow-droopers, or a wagtail on a

water-lily leaf, or the fore-horse of an up-river barge at strain of

legs, a red-finned perch hung a foot above the pebbles in sun-veined

depths, a kingfisher on the scud under alders, the forest of the bankside

weeds.