Listen further. Here is an unknown girl: why should he marry her? A girl consenting to the place beside a man of his handsome ripe age, is either bought, or she is madly enamoured; she does not dictate terms. Ormont is not of the brute buyers in that market. One sees it is the girl who leads the dance. A girl is rarely so madly enamoured as when she falls in love with her grandfather; she pitches herself at his head. This had not happened for the first time in Ormonts case; and he had never proposed marriage. Why should he do it now?
But again, if the girl has breeding to some extent, he might think it her due that she should pass under the safeguard of his name, out of sight.
Then, so far the report is trustworthy. We blow the rumour out of belief. A young woman there is: she is not a wife. Lady Charlotte allowed her the fairly respectable post of Hecate of the Shades, as long as the girl was no pretender to the place and name in the upper sphere. Her deductions were plausible, convincing to friends shaken by her vehement manner of coming at them. She convinced herself by means of her multitude of reasons for not pursuing inquiry. Her brother said nothing. There was no need for him to speak. He seemed on one or two occasions in the act of getting himself together for the communication of a secret; and she made ready to listen hard, with ears, eyebrows, shut month, and a gleam at the back of her eyes, for a signification of something she would refer him to after he had spoken. He looked at her and held his peace, or virtually held it,that is, he said not one word on the subject she was to have told him she had anticipated. Lady Charlotte ascribed it to his recollection of the quick blusher, the pained blusher, she was in her girlhood at mention or print of the story of men and women. Who, not having known her, could conceive it! But who could conceive that, behind the positive, plain-dealing, downright woman of the world, there was at times, when a nerve was touched or an old blocked path of imagination thrown open, a sensitive youthfulness; still quick to blush as far as the skin of a grandmother matron might show it!
CHAPTER III. THE TUTOR
There was no counting now on Lord Ormonts presence in the British gathering seasons, when wheatears wing across our fields or swallows return to their eaves. He forsook the hunt to roam the Continent, one of the vulgar band of tourists, honouring town only when Mayflies had flown, and Londons indiscriminate people went about without their volatile heads.
Lady Charlotte put these changed conditions upon the behaviour of the military authorities to her brother, saying that the wonder was he did not shake the dust of his country from his feet. In her wise head she rejoiced to think he was not the donkey she sketched for admiration; and she was partly consoled, or played at the taking of a comfort needed in her perpetual struggle with a phantom of a fact, by the reflection that a young woman on his arm would tense him to feel himself more at home abroad. Her minds habit of living warmly beside him in separation was vexed by the fixed intrusion of a female third person, who checked the run of intimate chatter, especially damped the fancied talk over early daysof which the creature was ignorant; and her propinquity to him arrested or broke the dialogue Lady Charlotte invented and pressed to renew. But a wife, while letting him be seen, would have insisted on appropriating the thought of himall his days, past as well as present. An impassioned sisters jealousy preferred that it should not be a wife reigning to dispute her share of her brother in imagination.
Then came a rumour, telling of him as engaged upon the composition of his Memoirs.
Lady Charlottes impulsive outcry: Writing them? signified her grounds for alarm.
Happily, Memoirs are not among the silly deeds done in a moment; they were somewhere ahead and over the hills: a band of brigands rather than a homely shining mansion, it was true; but distant; and a principal question shrieked to know whether he was composing them for publication. She could look forward with a girls pleasure to the perusal of them in manuscript, in a woody nook, in a fervour of partizanship, easily avoiding sight of errors, grammatical or moral. She chafed at the possible printing and publishing of them. That would be equivalent to an exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run across Londonbrilliant in himself, spotty in the offence. Published Memoirs indicate the end of a mans activity, and that he acknowledges the end; and at a period of Lord Ormonts life when the denial of it should thunder. They are his final chapter, making mummy of the grand figure they wrap in the printed stuff. They are virtually his apology. Can those knowing Lord Ormont hear him apologize? But it is a craven apology if we stoop to expound: we are seen as pleading our case before the public. Call it by any name you please, and under any attitude, it is that. And set aside the writing: it may be perfect; the act is the degradation. It is a rousing of swarms. His friends and the public will see the proudest nobleman of his day, pleading his case in mangled English, in the headlong of an out-poured, undrilled, rabble vocabulary, doubling the ridicule by his imperturbability over the ridicule he excites: he who is no more ridiculous, cried the partizan sister, conjuring up the scene, not an ace more ridiculous, than a judge of assize calling himself miserable sinner on Sunday before the parson, after he has very properly condemned half a score of weekday miserable sinners to penal servitude or the rope. Nobody laughs at the judge. Everybody will be laughing at the scornful man down half-way to his knee-cape with a stutter of an apology for having done his duty to his country, after stigmatizing numbers for inability or ill-will to do it. But Ormonts weapon is the sword, not a pen! Lady Charlotte hunted her simile till the dogs had it or it ran to earth.
She struck at the conclusion, that the young woman had been persuading him. An adoring young woman is the person to imagine and induce to the commission of such folly. What do you think? You have seen her, you say? she asked of a man she welcomed for his flavour of the worldlings fine bile.
Lord Adderwood made answer: She may be having a hand in it. She worships, and that is your way of pulling gods to the ground.
Does she understand good English?
Speaks it.
Can she write?
I have never had a letter from her.
You tell me Morsfield admires the womanwould marry her to-morrow, if he could get her.
He would go through the ceremony Ormont has performed, I do not doubt.
I dont doubt all of you are ready. She doesnt encourage one?
On the contrary, all.
Shes clever. This has been going on for now seven years, and, as far as I know, she has my brother fast.
She may have done the clever trick of having him fast from the beginning.
Shed like people to think it.
She has an aunt to advertise it.
Ormont cant swallow the woman, Im told.
Trying, if one is bound to get her down!
Boasts of the connection everywhere shes admitted, Randeller says.
Randeller procures the admission to various parti-coloured places.
She must be a blinking moll-owl! And I ask any sane Christian or Paganproof enough!would my brother Rowsley let his wife visit those places, those people? Monstrous to have the suspicion that he would, you know him! Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, for example. I say nothing to hurt the poor woman; I back her against her imbecile of a husband. He brings a charge he cant support; she punishes him by taking three years lease of independence and kicks up the grass all over the paddock, and then comes cuckoo, barking his name abroad to have her home again. You can win the shyest filly to corn at last. She goes, and he digests ruefully the hotch-potch of a dish the woman brings him. Only the world spies a side-head at her, husbanded or not, though the main fault was his, and she had a right to insist that he should be sure of his charge before he smacked her in the face with it before the world. In dealing with a woman, a man commonly prudentput aside chivalry, justice, and the restshould bind himself to disbelieve what he cant prove. Otherwise, let him expect his whipping, with or without ornament. My opinion is, Lawrence Finchley had no solid foundation for his charge, except his being an imbecile. She wasnt one of the adventurous women to jump the bars,the gate had to be pushed open, and he did it. There she is; and I ask you, would my brother Rowsley let his wife be intimate with her? And there are others. And, sauf votre respect, the menMorsfield for one, Randeller another!
They have a wholesome dread of the lion.
If they smell a chance with the lions boneits the sweeter for being the lions. These metaphors carry us off our ground. I must let these Ormont Memoirs run and upset him, if they get to print. Ive only to oppose, printed theyll be. The same if I say a word of this woman, he marries her to-morrow morning. You speak of my driving men. Why cant I drive Ormont? Because Im too fond of him. There you have the secret of the subjection of women: they can hold their own, and a bit more, when theyve no enemy beating inside.
Hearts!ah, well, its possible. I dont say no; Ive not discovered them, Lord Adderwood observed.
They are rarely discovered in the haunts he frequented.
Her allusion to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley rapped him smartly, and she admired his impassiveness under the stroke. Such a spectacle was one of her pleasures.
Lady Charlotte mentioned incidentally her want of a tutor for her grandson Leo during the winter holidays. He suggested an application to the clergyman of her parish. She was at feud with the Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey, and would not take, she said, a man to be a bootblack in her backyard or a woman a scullery-wench in her kitchen upon his recommendation. She described the person of Mr. Hampton-Evey, his manner of speech, general opinions, professional doctrines; rolled him into a ball and bowled him, with a shrug for lamentation, over the decay of the good old order of manly English Protestant clergymen, who drank their port, bothered nobody about belief, abstained from preaching their sermon, if requested; were capital fellows in the hunting-field, too; for if they came, they had the spur to hunt in the devils despite. Now we are going to have a kind of bitter, clawed, forked female, in vestments over breeches. How do you like that bundling of the sexes?
Lord Adderwood liked the lines of division to be strictly and invitingly definite. He was thinking, as he reviewed the frittered appearance of the Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey in Lady Charlottes hinds, of the possibility that Lord Ormont, who was reputed to fear nobody, feared her. In which case, the handsome young woman passing among his associates as the pseudo Lady Ormont might be the real one after all, and Isabella Lawrence Finchley prove right in the warning she gave to dogs of chase.
The tutor required by Lady Charlotte was found for her by Mr. Abner. Their correspondence on the subject filled the space of a week, and then the gentleman hired to drive a creaky wheel came down from London to Olmer, arriving late in the evening.
Lady Charlottes blunt Oh! when he entered her room and bowed upon the announcement of his name, was caused by an instantaneous perception and refection that it would be prudent to keep her grand-daughter Philippa, aged between seventeen and eighteen, out of his way.
You are friend of Mr. Abners, are you?
He was not disconcerted. He replied, in an assured and pleasant voice, I have hardly the pretension to be called a friend, madam.
Are you a Jew?
Her abruptness knocked something like a laugh almost out of him, but he restrained the signs of it.
I am not.
You wouldnt be ashamed to tell me you were one if you were?
Not at all.
You like the Jews?
Those I know I like.
Not many Christians have the good sense and the good heart of Arthur Abner. Now go and eat. Come back to me when youve done. I hope you are hungry. Ask the butler for the wine you prefer.
She had not anticipated the enrolment in her household of a man so young and good-looking. These were qualifications for Cupids business, which his unstrained self-possession accentuated to a note of danger to her chicks, because she liked the taste of him. Her grand-daughter Philippa was in the girls waxen age; another, Beatrice, was coming to it. Both were under her care; and she was a vigilant woman, with an intuition and a knowledge of sex. She did not blame Arthur Abner for sending her a good-looking young man; she had only a general idea that tutors in a house, and even visiting tutors, should smell of dust and wear a snuffy appearance. The conditions will not always insure the tutors from foolishness, as her girls experience reminded her, but they protect the girl.
Your name is Weyburn; your father was an officer in the army, killed on the battle-field, Arthur Abner tells me, was her somewhat severely-toned greeting to the young tutor on his presenting himself the second time.
It had the sound of the preliminary of an indictment read in a Court of Law.
My father died of his wounds in hospital, he said.
Why did you not enter the service?
Want of an income, my lady.
Bad look-out. Army or Navy for gentlemen, if they stick to the school of honour. The sedentary professions corrupt men: bad for the blood. Those monastery monks found that out. They had to birch the devil out of them three times a day and half the night, howling like full-moon dogs all through their lives, till the flesh was off them. That was their exercise, if they were for holiness. My brother, Lord Ormont, has never been still in his youth or his manhood. See him now. He counts his years by scores; and he has about as many wrinkles as you when youre smiling. His cheeks are as red as yours now youre blushing. You ought to have left off that trick by this time. Its well enough in a boy.
Against her will she was drawn to the young man, and her consciousness of it plucked her back to caution with occasional jerksquaint alternations of the familiar and the harshly formal, in the strangers experience.
If I have your permission, Lady Charlotte, said he, the reason why I mount red a littleif I do itis, you mention Lord Ormont, and I have followed his career since I was the youngest of boys.
Good to begin with the worship of a hero. He cant sham, cant deceivenot even a woman; and youre old enough to understand the temptation: theyre so silly. All the more, its a point of honour with a man of honour to shield her from herself. When its a girl
The young mans eyebrows bent.
Chapters of stories, if you want to hear them, she resumed; and I can vouch some of them true. Lord Ormont was never one of the wolves in a hood. Whatever you hear of him; you may be sure he laid no trap. Hes just the opposite to the hypocrite; so hypocrites date him. Ive heard them called high-priests of decency. Then we choose to be indecent and honest, if theres a God to worship. Fear, theyre in the habit of sayingwe are to fear God. A man here, a Rev. Hampton-Evey, youll hear him harp on fear God. Hypocrites may: honest sinners have no fear. And see the cause: they dont deceive themselvesthat is why. Do you think we call love what we fear? They love God, or they disbelieve. And if they believe in Him, they know they cant conceal anything from Him. Honesty means piety: we cant be one without the other. And here are peopleparsonswho talk of dying as going into the presence of our Maker, as if He had been all the while outside the world He created. Those parsons, I told the Rev. Hampton-Evey here, make infidelsthey make a puzzle of their God. Im for a rational Deity. They preach up a supernatural eccentric. I dont say all: Ive heard good sermons, and met sound-headed clergymennot like that gaping Hampton-Evey, when a woman tells him she thinks for herself. We have him sitting on our pariah. A free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon; but a female free-thinker is one of Satans concubines. He took it upon himself to reproach meflung his glove at my feet, because I sent a cheque to a poor man punished for blasphemy. The man had the right to his opinions, and he had the courage of his opinions. I doubt whether the Rev. Hampton-Evey would go with a willing heart to prison for his. All the better for him if he comes head-up out of a trial. But now see: all these parsons and judges and mobcaps insist upon conformity. A man with common manly courage comes before them, and hes cast in penalties. Yet we know from history, in England, France, Germany, that the time of nonconformity brought out the manhood of the nation. Now, I say, a nation, to be a nation, must have menI mean brave men. Thats what those hosts of female men combine to try to stifle. They wont succeed, but we shall want a war to teach the country the value of courage. You catch what I am driving at? They accuse my brother of immorality because he makes no pretence to be better than the men of his class.