CHAPTER VII

Lady Camper's return was the subject of speculation in the neighbourhood,

for most people thought she would cease to persecute the General with her

preposterous and unwarrantable pen-and-ink sketches when living so

closely proximate; and how he would behave was the question. Those who

made a hero of him were sure he would treat her with disdain. Others were

uncertain. He had been so severely hit that it seemed possible he would

not show much spirit.

He, for his part, had come to entertain such dread of the post, that Lady

Camper's return relieved him of his morning apprehensions; and he would

have forgiven her, though he feared to see her, if only she had promised

to leave him in peace for the future. He feared to see her, because of

the too probable furnishing of fresh matter for her ladyship's hand. Of

course he could not avoid being seen by her, and that was a particular

misery. A gentlemanly humility, or demureness of aspect, when seen,

would, he hoped, disarm his enemy. It should, he thought. He had borne

unheard-of things. No one of his friends and acquaintances knew, they

could not know, what he had endured. It has caused him fits of

stammering. It had destroyed the composure of his gait. Elizabeth had

informed him that he talked to himself incessantly, and aloud. She, poor

child, looked pale too. She was evidently anxious about him.

Young Rolles, whom he had met now and then, persisted in praising his

aunt's good heart. So, perhaps, having satiated her revenge, she might

now be inclined for peace, on the terms of distant civility.

'Yes! poor Elizabeth!' sighed the General, in pity of the poor girl's

disappointment; 'poor Elizabeth! she little guesses what her father has

gone through. Poor child! I say, she hasn't an idea of my sufferings.'

General Ople delivered his card at Lady Camper's lodgegates and escaped

to his residence in a state of prickly heat that required the brushing of

his hair with hard brushes for several minutes to comfort and

re-establish him.

He had fallen to working in his garden, when Lady Camper's card was

brought to him an hour after the delivery of his own; a pleasing

promptitude, showing signs of repentance, and suggesting to the General

instantly some sharp sarcasms upon women, which he had come upon in

quotations in the papers and the pulpit, his two main sources of

information.

Instead of handing back the card to the maid, he stuck it in his hat and

went on digging.

The first of a series of letters containing shameless realistic

caricatures was handed to him the afternoon following. They came fast and

thick. Not a day's interval of grace was allowed. Niobe under the shafts

of Diana was hardly less violently and mortally assailed. The deadliness

of the attack lay in the ridicule of the daily habits of one of the most

sensitive of men, as to his personal appearance, and the opinion of the

world. He might have concealed the sketches, but he could not have

concealed the bruises, and people were perpetually asking the unhappy

General what he was saying, for he spoke to himself as if he were

repeating something to them for the tenth time.

'I say,' said he, 'I say that for a lady, really an educated lady, to

sit, as she must--I was saying, she must have sat in an attic to have the

right view of me. And there you see--this is what she has done. This is

the last, this is the afternoon's delivery. Her ladyship has me correctly

as to costume, but I could not exhibit such a sketch to ladies.'

A back view of the General was displayed in his act of digging.

'I say I could not allow ladies to see it,' he informed the gentlemen,

who were suffered to inspect it freely.

'But you see, I have no means of escape; I am at her mercy from morning

to night,' the General said, with a quivering tongue, 'unless I stay at

home inside the house; and that is death to me, or unless I abandon the

place, and my lease; and I shall--I say, I shall find nowhere in England

for anything like the money or conveniences such a gent--a residence you

would call fit for a gentleman. I call it a bi . . . it is, in short, a

gem. But I shall have to go.'

Young Rolles offered to expostulate with his aunt Angela.

The General said, 'Tha . . . I thank you very much. I would not have her

ladyship suppose I am so susceptible. I hardly know,' he confessed

pitiably, 'what it is right to say, and what not--what not. I-I-I never

know when I am not looking a fool. I hurry from tree to tree to shun the

light. I am seriously affected in my appetite. I say, I shall have to

go.'

Reginald gave him to understand that if he flew, the shafts would follow

him, for Lady Camper would never forgive his running away, and was quite

equal to publishing a book of the adventures of Wilsonople.

Sunday afternoon, walking in the park with his daughter on his arm,

General Ople met Mr. Rolles. He saw that the young man and Elizabeth were

mortally pale, and as the very idea of wretchedness directed his

attention to himself, he addressed them conjointly on the subject of his

persecution, giving neither of them a chance of speaking until they were

constrained to part.

A sketch was the consequence, in which a withered Cupid and a fading

Psyche were seen divided by Wilsonople, who keeps them forcibly asunder

with policeman's fists, while courteously and elegantly entreating them

to hear him. 'Meet,' he tells them, 'as often as you like, in my company,

so long as you listen to me'; and the pathos of his aspect makes hungry

demand for a sympathetic audience.

Now, this, and not the series representing the martyrdom of the old

couple at Douro Lodge Gates, whose rigid frames bore witness to the close

packing of a gentlemanly residence, this was the sketch General Ople, in

his madness from the pursuing bite of the gadfly, handed about at Mrs.

Pollington's lawn-party. Some have said, that he should not have betrayed

his daughter; but it is reasonable to suppose he had no idea of his

daughter's being the Psyche. Or if he had, it was indistinct, owing to

the violence of his personal emotion. Assuming this to have been the very

sketch; he handed it to two or three ladies in turn, and was heard to

deliver himself at intervals in the following snatches: 'As you like, my

lady, as you like; strike, I say strike; I bear it; I say I bear it.

. . . If her ladyship is unforgiving, I say I am enduring. . . .

I may go, I was saying I may go mad, but while I have my reason I walk

upright, I walk upright.'

Mr. Pollington and certain City gentlemen hearing the poor General's

renewed soliloquies, were seized with disgust of Lady Camper's conduct,

and stoutly advised an application to the Law Courts.

He gave ear to them abstractedly, but after pulling out the whole chapter

of the caricatures (which it seemed that he kept in a case of morocco

leather in his breast-pocket), showing them, with comments on them, and

observing, 'There will be more, there must be more, I say I am sure there

are things I do that her ladyship will discover and expose,' he declined

to seek redress or simple protection; and the miserable spectacle was

exhibited soon after of this courtly man listening to Mrs. Barcop on the

weather, and replying in acquiescence: 'It is hot.--If your ladyship will

only abstain from colours. Very hot as you say, madam,--I do not complain

of pen and ink, but I would rather escape colours. And I dare say you

find it hot too?'

Mrs. Barcop shut her eyes and sighed over the wreck of a handsome

military officer.

She asked him: 'What is your objection to colours?'

His hand was at his breast-pocket immediately, as he said: 'Have you not

seen?'--though but a few minutes back he had shown her the contents of

the packet, including a hurried glance of the famous digging scene.

By this time the entire district was in fervid sympathy with General

Ople. The ladies did not, as their lords did, proclaim astonishment that

a man should suffer a woman to goad him to a state of semi-lunacy; but

one or two confessed to their husbands, that it required a great

admiration of General Ople not to despise him, both for his

susceptibility and his patience. As for the men, they knew him to have

faced the balls in bellowing battle-strife; they knew him to have endured

privation, not only cold but downright want of food and drink--an almost

unimaginable horror to these brave daily feasters; so they could not

quite look on him in contempt; but his want of sense was offensive, and

still more so his submission to a scourging by a woman. Not one of them

would have deigned to feel it. Would they have allowed her to see that

she could sting them? They would have laughed at her. Or they would have

dragged her before a magistrate.

It was a Sunday in early Summer when General Ople walked to morning

service, unaccompanied by Elizabeth, who was unwell. The church was of

the considerate old-fashioned order, with deaf square pews, permitting

the mind to abstract itself from the sermon, or wrestle at leisure with

the difficulties presented by the preacher, as General Ople often did,

feeling not a little in love with his sincere attentiveness for grappling

with the knotty point and partially allowing the struggle to be seen.

The Church was, besides, a sanctuary for him. Hither his enemy did not

come. He had this one place of refuge, and he almost looked a happy man

again.

He had passed into his hat and out of it, which he habitually did

standing, when who should walk up to within a couple of yards of him but

Lady Camper. Her pew was full of poor people, who made signs of retiring.

She signified to them that they were to sit, then quietly took her seat

among them, fronting the General across the aisle.

During the sermon a low voice, sharp in contradistinction to the monotone

of the preacher's, was heard to repeat these words: 'I say I am not sure

I shall survive it.' Considerable muttering in the same quarter was heard

besides.

After the customary ceremonious game, when all were free to move, of

nobody liking to move first, Lady Camper and a charity boy were the

persons who took the lead. But Lady Camper could not quit her pew, owing

to the sticking of the door. She smiled as with her pretty hand she twice

or thrice essayed to shake it open. General Ople strode to her aid. He

pulled the door, gave the shadow of a respectful bow, and no doubt he

would have withdrawn, had not Lady Camper, while acknowledging the

civility, placed her prayer-book in his hands to carry at her heels.

There was no choice for him. He made a sort of slipping dance back for

his hat, and followed her ladyship. All present being eager to witness

the spectacle, the passage of Lady Camper dragging the victim General

behind her was observed without a stir of the well-dressed members of the

congregation, until a desire overcame them to see how Lady Camper would

behave to her fish when she had him outside the sacred edifice.

None could have imagined such a scene. Lady Camper was in her carriage;

General Ople was holding her prayer-book, hat in hand, at the carriage

step, and he looked as if he were toasting before the bars of a furnace;

for while he stood there, Lady Camper was rapidly pencilling outlines in

a small pocket sketchbook. There are dogs whose shyness is put to it to

endure human observation and a direct address to them, even on the part

of their masters; and these dear simple dogs wag tail and turn their

heads aside waveringly, as though to entreat you not to eye them and talk

to them so. General Ople, in the presence of the sketchbook, was much

like the nervous animal. He would fain have run away. He glanced at it,

and round about, and again at it, and at the heavens. Her ladyship's

cruelty, and his inexplicable submission to it, were witnessed of the

multitude.

The General's friends walked very slowly. Lady Camper's carriage whirled

by, and the General came up with them, accosting them and himself

alternately. They asked him where Elizabeth was, and he replied, 'Poor

child, yes! I am told she is pale, but I cannot, believe I am so

perfectly, I say so perfectly ridiculous, when I join the responses.' He

drew forth half a dozen sheets, and showed them sketches that Lady Camper

had taken in church, caricaturing him in the sitting down and the

standing up. She had torn them out of the book, and presented them to him

when driving off. 'I was saying, worship in the ordinary sense will be

interdicted to me if her ladyship . . .,' said the General, woefully

shuffling the sketch-paper sheets in which he figured.

He made the following odd confession to Mr. and Mrs. Gosling on the

road:--that he had gone to his chest, and taken out his sword-belt to

measure his girth, and found himself thinner than when he left the

service, which had not been the case before his attendance at the last

levee of the foregoing season. So the deduction was obvious, that Lady

Camper had reduced him. She had reduced him as effectually as a harassing

siege.

'But why do you pay attention to her? Why . . . !' exclaimed Mr. Gosling,

a gentleman of the City, whose roundness would have turned a rifle-shot.

'To allow her to wound you so seriously!' exclaimed Mrs. Gosling.

'Madam, if she were my wife,' the General explained, 'I should feel it. I

say it is the fact of it; I feel it, if I appear so extremely ridiculous

to a human eye, to any one eye.'

'To Lady Camper's eye.'

He admitted it might be that. He had not thought of ascribing the

acuteness of his pain to the miserable image he presented in this

particular lady's eye. No; it really was true, curiously true: another

lady's eye might have transformed him to a pumpkin shape, exaggerated all

his foibles fifty-fold, and he, though not liking it, of course not,

would yet have preserved a certain manly equanimity. How was it Lady

Camper had such power over him?--a lady concealing seventy years with a

rouge-box or paint-pot! It was witchcraft in its worst character. He had

for six months at her bidding been actually living the life of a beast,

degraded in his own esteem; scorched by every laugh he heard; running,

pursued, overtaken, and as it were scored or branded, and then let go for

the process to be repeated.