CHAPTER VIII

Our young barbarians have it all their own way with us when they fall

into love-liking; they lead us whither they please, and interest us in

their wishings, their weepings, and that fine performance, their

kissings. But when we see our veterans tottering to their fall, we

scarcely consent to their having a wish; as for a kiss, we halloo at them

if we discover them on a byway to the sacred grove where such things are

supposed to be done by the venerable. And this piece of rank injustice,

not to say impoliteness, is entirely because of an unsound opinion that

Nature is not in it, as though it were our esteem for Nature which caused

us to disrespect them. They, in truth, show her to us discreet,

civilized, in a decent moral aspect: vistas of real life, views of the

mind's eye, are opened by their touching little emotions; whereas those

bully youngsters who come bellowing at us and catch us by the senses

plainly prove either that we are no better than they, or that we give our

attention to Nature only when she makes us afraid of her. If we cared for

her, we should be up and after her reverentially in her sedater steps,

deeply studying her in her slower paces. She teaches them nothing when

they are whirling. Our closest instructors, the true philosophers--the

story-tellers, in short-will learn in time that Nature is not of

necessity always roaring, and as soon as they do, the world may be said

to be enlightened. Meantime, in the contemplation of a pair of white

whiskers fluttering round a pair of manifestly painted cheeks, be assured

that Nature is in it: not that hectoring wanton--but let the young have

their fun. Let the superior interest of the passions of the aged be

conceded, and not a word shall be said against the young.

If, then, Nature is in it, how has she been made active? The reason of

her launch upon this last adventure is, that she has perceived the person

who can supply the virtue known to her by experience to be wanting. Thus,

in the broader instance, many who have journeyed far down the road, turn

back to the worship of youth, which they have lost. Some are for the

graceful worldliness of wit, of which they have just share enough to

admire it. Some are captivated by hands that can wield the rod, which in

earlier days they escaped to their cost. In the case of General Ople, it

was partly her whippings of him, partly her penetration; her ability,

that sat so finely on a wealthy woman, her indifference to conventional

manners, that so well beseemed a nobly-born one, and more than all, her

correction of his little weaknesses and incompetencies, in spite of his

dislike of it, won him. He began to feel a sort of nibbling pleasure in

her grotesque sketches of his person; a tendency to recur to the old ones

while dreading the arrival of new. You hear old gentlemen speak fondly of

the swish; and they are not attached to pain, but the instrument revives

their feeling of youth; and General Ople half enjoyed, while shrinking,

Lady Camper's foregone outlines of him. For in the distance, the

whip's-end may look like a clinging caress instead of a stinging flick.

But this craven melting in his heart was rebuked by a very worthy pride,

that flew for support to the injury she had done to his devotions, and

the offence to the sacred edifice. After thinking over it, he decided

that he must quit his residence; and as it appeared to him in the light

of duty, he, with an unspoken anguish, commissioned the house-agent of

his town to sell his lease or let the house furnished, without further

parley.

From the house-agent's shop he turned into the chemist's, for a tonic--a

foolish proceeding, for he had received bracing enough in the blow he had

just dealt himself, but he had been cogitating on tonics recently,

imagining certain valiant effects of them, with visions of a former

careless happiness that they were likely to restore. So he requested to

have the tonic strong, and he took one glass of it over the counter.

Fifteen minutes after the draught, he came in sight of his house, and

beholding it, he could have called it a gentlemanly residence aloud under

Lady Camper's windows, his insurgency was of such violence. He talked of

it incessantly, but forbore to tell Elizabeth, as she was looking pale,

the reason why its modest merits touched him so. He longed for the hour

of his next dose, and for a caricature to follow, that he might drink and

defy it. A caricature was really due to him, he thought; otherwise why

had he abandoned his bijou dwelling? Lady Camper, however, sent none. He

had to wait a fortnight before one came, and that was rather a likeness,

and a handsome likeness, except as regarded a certain disorderliness in

his dress, which he knew to be very unlike him. Still it despatched him

to the looking-glass, to bring that verifier of facts in evidence against

the sketch. While sitting there he heard the housemaid's knock at the

door, and the strange intelligence that his daughter was with Lady

Camper, and had left word that she hoped he would not forget his

engagement to go to Mrs. Baerens' lawn-party.

The General jumped away from the glass, shouting at the absent Elizabeth

in a fit of wrath so foreign to him, that he returned hurriedly to have

another look at himself, and exclaimed at the pitch of his voice, 'I say

I attribute it to an indigestion of that tonic. Do you hear?' The

housemaid faintly answered outside the door that she did, alarming him,

for there seemed to be confusion somewhere. His hope was that no one

would mention Lady Camper's name, for the mere thought of her caused a

rush to his head. 'I believe I am in for a touch of apoplexy,' he said to

the rector, who greeted him, in advance of the ladies, on Mr. Baerens'

lawn. He said it smilingly, but wanting some show of sympathy, instead of

the whisper and meaningless hand at his clerical band, with which the

rector responded, he cried, 'Apoplexy,' and his friend seemed then to

understand, and disappeared among the ladies.

Several of them surrounded the General, and one inquired whether the

series was being continued. He drew forth his pocket-book, handed her the

latest, and remarked on the gross injustice of it; for, as he requested

them to take note, her ladyship now sketched him as a person inattentive

to his dress, and he begged them to observe that she had drawn him with

his necktie hanging loose. 'And that, I say that has never been known of

me since I first entered society.'

The ladies exchanged looks of profound concern; for the fact was, the

General had come without any necktie and any collar, and he appeared to

be unaware of the circumstance. The rector had told them, that in answer

to a hint he had dropped on the subject of neckties, General Ople

expressed a slight apprehension of apoplexy; but his careless or merely

partial observance of the laws of buttonment could have nothing to do

with such fears. They signified rather a disorder of the intelligence.

Elizabeth was condemned for leaving him to go about alone. The situation

was really most painful, for a word to so sensitive a man would drive him

away in shame and for good; and still, to let him parade the ground in

the state, compared with his natural self, of scarecrow, and with the

dreadful habit of talking to himself quite rageing, was a horrible

alternative. Mrs. Baerens at last directed her husband upon the General,

trembling as though she watched for the operations of a fish torpedo; and

other ladies shared her excessive anxiousness, for Mr. Baerens had the

manner and the look of artillery, and on this occasion carried a

surcharge of powder.

The General bent his ear to Mr. Baerens, whose German-English and

repeated remark, 'I am to do it wid delicassy,' did not assist his

comprehension; and when he might have been enlightened, he was petrified

by seeing Lady Camper walk on the lawn with Elizabeth. The great lady

stood a moment beside Mrs. Baerens; she came straight over to him,

contemplating him in silence.

Then she said, 'Your arm, General Ople,' and she made one circuit of the

lawn with him, barely speaking.

At her request, he conducted her to her carriage. He took a seat beside

her, obediently. He felt that he was being sketched, and comported

himself like a child's flat man, that jumps at the pulling of a string.

'Where have you left your girl, General?'

Before he could rally his wits to answer the question, he was asked:

'And what have you done with your necktie and collar?'

He touched his throat.

'I am rather nervous to-day, I forgot Elizabeth,' he said, sending his

fingers in a dotting run of wonderment round his neck.

Lady Camper smiled with a triumphing humour on her close-drawn lips.

The verified absence of necktie and collar seemed to be choking him.

'Never mind, you have been abroad without them,' said Lady Camper, 'and

that is a victory for me. And you thought of Elizabeth first when I drew

your attention to it, and that is a victory for you. It is a very great

victory. Pray, do not be dismayed, General. You have a handsome

campaigning air. And no apologies, if you please; I like you well enough

as you are. There is my hand.'

General Ople understood her last remark. He pressed the lady's hand in

silence, very nervously.

'But do not shrug your head into your shoulders as if there were any

possibility of concealing the thunderingly evident,' said Lady Camper,

electrifying him, what with her cordial squeeze, her kind eyes, and her

singular language. 'You have omitted the collar. Well? The collar is the

fatal finishing touch in men's dress; it would make Apollo look

bourgeois.'

Her hand was in his: and watching the play of her features, a spark

entered General Ople's brain, causing him, in forgetfulness of collar and

caricatures, to ejaculate, 'Seventy? Did your ladyship say seventy?

Utterly impossible! You trifle with me.'

'We will talk when we are free of this accompaniment of carriage-wheels,

General,' said Lady Camper.

'I will beg permission to go and fetch Elizabeth, madam.'

'Rightly thought of. Fetch her in my carriage. And, by the way, Mrs.

Baerens was my old music-mistress, and is, I think, one year older than

I. She can tell you on which side of seventy I am.'

'I shall not require to ask, my lady,' he said, sighing.

'Then we will send the carriage for Elizabeth, and have it out

together at once. I am impatient; yes, General, impatient: for

what?--forgiveness.'

'Of me, my lady?' The General breathed profoundly.

'Of whom else? Do you know what it is?-I don't think you do. You English

have the smallest experience of humanity. I mean this: to strike so hard

that, in the end, you soften your heart to the victim. Well, that is my

weakness. And we of our blood put no restraint on the blows we strike

when we think them wanted, so we are always overdoing it.'

General Ople assisted Lady Camper to alight from the carriage, which was

forthwith despatched for Elizabeth.

He prepared to listen to her with a disconnected smile of acute

attentiveness.

She had changed. She spoke of money. Ten thousand pounds must be settled

on his daughter. 'And now,' said she, 'you will remember that you are

wanting a collar.'

He acquiesced. He craved permission to retire for ten minutes.

'Simplest of men! what will cover you?' she exclaimed, and peremptorily

bidding him sit down in the drawing-room, she took one of the famous pair

of pistols in her hand, and said, 'If I put myself in a similar position,

and make myself decodletee too, will that satisfy you? You see these

murderous weapons. Well, I am a coward. I dread fire-arms. They are laid

there to impose on the world, and I believe they do. They have imposed on

you. Now, you would never think of pretending to a moral quality you do

not possess. But, silly, simple man that you are! You can give yourself

the airs of wealth, buy horses to conceal your nakedness, and when you

are taken upon the standard of your apparent income, you would rather

seem to be beating a miserly retreat than behave frankly and honestly. I

have a little overstated it, but I am near the mark.'

'Your ladyship wanting courage!' cried the General.

'Refresh yourself by meditating on it,' said she. 'And to prove it to

you, I was glad to take this house when I knew I was to have a gallant

gentleman for a neighbour. No visitors will be admitted, General Ople, so

you are bare-throated only to me: sit quietly. One day you speculated on

the paint in my cheeks for the space of a minute and a half:--I had said

that I freckled easily. Your look signified that you really could not

detect a single freckle for the paint. I forgave you, or I did not. But

when I found you, on closer acquaintance, as indifferent to your

daughter's happiness as you had been to her reputation . . .'

'My daughter! her reputation! her happiness!'

General Ople raised his eyes under a wave, half uttering the outcries.

'So indifferent to her reputation, that you allowed a young man to talk

with her over the wall, and meet her by appointment: so reckless of the

girl's happiness, that when I tried to bring you to a treaty, on her

behalf, you could not be dragged from thinking of yourself and your own

affair. When I found that, perhaps I was predisposed to give you some of

what my sisters used to call my spice. You would not honestly state the

proportions of your income, and you affected to be faithful to the woman

of seventy. Most preposterous! Could any caricature of mine exceed in

grotesqueness your sketch of yourself? You are a brave and a generous man

all the same: and I suspect it is more hoodwinking than egotism--or

extreme egotism--that blinds you. A certain amount you must have to be a

man. You did not like my paint, still less did you like my sincerity; you

were annoyed by my corrections of your habits of speech; you were

horrified by the age of seventy, and you were credulous--General Ople,

listen to me, and remember that you have no collar on--you were credulous

of my statement of my great age, or you chose to be so, or chose to seem

so, because I had brushed your cat's coat against the fur. And then, full

of yourself, not thinking of Elizabeth, but to withdraw in the chivalrous

attitude of the man true to his word to the old woman, only stickling to

bring a certain independence to the common stock, because--I quote you!

and you have no collar on, mind--"you could not be at your wife's mercy,"

you broke from your proposal on the money question. Where was your

consideration for Elizabeth then?

'Well, General, you were fond of thinking of yourself, and I thought I

would assist you. I gave you plenty of subject matter. I will not say I

meant to work a homoeopathic cure. But if I drive you to forget your

collar, is it or is it not a triumph?

'No,' added Lady Camper, 'it is no triumph for me, but it is one for you,

if you like to make the most of it. Your fault has been to quit active

service, General, and love your ease too well. It is the fault of your

countrymen. You must get a militia regiment, or inspectorship of militia.

You are ten times the man in exercise. Why, do you mean to tell me that

you would have cared for those drawings of mine when marching?'

'I think so, I say I think so,' remarked the General seriously.

'I doubt it,' said she. 'But to the point; here comes Elizabeth. If you

have not much money to spare for her, according to your prudent

calculation, reflect how this money has enfeebled you and reduced you to

the level of the people round about us here--who are, what? Inhabitants

of gentlemanly residences, yes! But what kind of creature? They have no

mental standard, no moral aim, no native chivalry. You were rapidly

becoming one of them, only, fortunately for you, you were sensitive to

ridicule.'

'Elizabeth shall have half my money settled on her,' said the General;

'though I fear it is not much. And if I can find occupation, my lady...'

'Something worthier than that,' said Lady Camper, pencilling outlines

rapidly on the margin of a book, and he saw himself lashing a pony; 'or

that,' and he was plucking at a cabbage; 'or that,' and he was bowing to

three petticoated posts.

'The likeness is exact,' General Ople groaned.

'So you may suppose I have studied you,' said she. 'But there is no real

likeness. Slight exaggerations do more harm to truth than reckless

violations of it.

You would not have cared one bit for a caricature, if you had not nursed

the absurd idea of being one of our conquerors. It is the very tragedy of

modesty for a man like you to have such notions, my poor dear good

friend. The modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at

vanity. And reflect whether you have not been intoxicated, for these

young people have been wretched, and you have not observed it, though one

of them was living with you, and is the child you love. There, I have

done. Pray show a good face to Elizabeth.'

The General obeyed as well as he could. He felt very like a sheep that

has come from a shearing, and when released he wished to run away. But

hardly had he escaped before he had a desire for the renewal of the

operation. 'She sees me through, she sees me through,' he was heard

saying to himself, and in the end he taught himself, to say it with a

secret exultation, for as it was on her part an extraordinary piece of

insight to see him through, it struck him that in acknowledging the truth

of it, he made a discovery of new powers in human nature.

General Ople studied Lady Camper diligently for fresh proofs of her

penetration of the mysteries in his bosom; by which means, as it happened

that she was diligently observing the two betrothed young ones, he began

to watch them likewise, and took a pleasure in the sight. Their meetings,

their partings, their rides out and home furnished him themes of

converse. He soon had enough to talk of, and previously, as he

remembered, he had never sustained a conversation of any length with

composure and the beneficent sense of fulness. Five thousand pounds, to

which sum Lady Camper reduced her stipulation for Elizabeth's dowry, he

signed over to his dear girl gladly, and came out with the confession to

her ladyship that a well-invested twelve thousand comprised his fortune.

She shrugged she had left off pulling him this way and that, so his

chains were enjoyable, and he said to himself: 'If ever she should in the

dead of night want a man to defend her!' He mentioned it to Reginald, who

had been the repository of Elizabeth's lamentations about her father

being left alone, forsaken, and the young man conceived a scheme for

causing his aunt's great bell to be rung at midnight, which would

certainly have led to a dramatic issue and the happy re-establishment of

our masculine ascendancy at the close of this history. But he forgot it

in his bridegroom's delight, until he was making his miserable official

speech at the wedding-breakfast, and set Elizabeth winking over a tear.

As she stood in the hall ready to depart, a great van was observed in the

road at the gates of Douro Lodge; and this, the men in custody declared

to contain the goods and knick-knacks of the people who had taken the

house furnished for a year, and were coming in that very afternoon.

'I remember, I say now I remember, I had a notice,' the General said

cheerily to his troubled daughter.

'But where are you to go, papa?' the poor girl cried, close on sobbing.

'I shall get employment of some sort,' said he. 'I was saying I want it,

I need it, I require it.'

'You are saying three times what once would have sufficed for,' said Lady

Camper, and she asked him a few questions, frowned with a smile, and

offered him a lodgement in his neighbour's house.

'Really, dearest Aunt Angela?' said Elizabeth.

'What else can I do, child? I have, it seems, driven him out of a

gentlemanly residence, and I must give him a ladylike one. True, I would

rather have had him at call, but as I have always wished for a policeman

in the house, I may as well be satisfied with a soldier.'

'But if you lose your character, my lady?' said Reginald.

'Then I must look to the General to restore it.'

General Ople immediately bowed his head over Lady Camper's fingers.

'An odd thing to happen to a woman of forty-one!' she said to her great

people, and they submitted with the best grace in the world, while the

General's ears tingled till he felt younger than Reginald. This, his

reflections ran, or it would be more correct to say waltzed, this is the

result of painting!--that you can believe a woman to be any age when her

cheeks are tinted!

As for Lady Camper, she had been floated accidentally over the ridicule

of the bruit of a marriage at a time of life as terrible to her as her

fiction of seventy had been to General Ople; she resigned herself to let

things go with the tide. She had not been blissful in her first marriage,

she had abandoned the chase of an ideal man, and she had found one who

was tunable so as not to offend her ears, likely ever to be a fund of

amusement for her humour, good, impressible, and above all, very

picturesque. There is the secret of her, and of how it came to pass that

a simple man and a complex woman fell to union after the strangest

division.

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Can believe a woman to be any age when her cheeks are tinted

Modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at vanity

Nature is not of necessity always roaring

Only to be described in the tongue of auctioneers

Respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower

She seems honest, and that is the most we can hope of girls

Spare me that word "female" as long as you live

The mildness of assured dictatorship

When we see our veterans tottering to their fall

THE TALE OF CHLOE

AN EPISODE IN THE HISTORY OF BEAU BEAMISH

By George Meredith

'Fair Chloe, we toasted of old,

As the Queen of our festival meeting;

Now Chloe is lifeless and cold;

You must go to the grave for her greeting.

Her beauty and talents were framed

To enkindle the proudest to win her;

Then let not the mem'ry be blamed

Of the purest that e'er was a sinner!'

Captain Chanter's Collection.