Part 9 (1/2)
”I am supposed to have everything a woman can require.”
”Can he possibly think it? And I have to warn you, child, that lawyers are not so absolving as the world is with some of the ladies Lord Ormont allows you to call your friends. I have been hearing--it is not mere airy tales one hears from lawyers about cases in Courts of Law. Tighten your lips as you like; I say nothing to condemn or reflect on Mrs.
Lawrence Finchley. I have had my eyes a little opened, that is all.
Oh, I know my niece Aminta, when it's a friend to stand by; but our position--thanks to your inscrutable lord and master--demands of us the utmost scrupulousness, or it soon becomes a whirl and scandal flying about, and those lawyers picking up and putting together. I have had a difficulty to persuade them!... and my own niece! whom I saw married at the British Emba.s.sy in Madrid, as I take good care to tell everybody; for it was my doing; I am the responsible person! and by an English Protestant clergyman, to all appearance able to walk erect in and out of any of these excellent new Life a.s.surance offices they are starting for the benefit of widows and orphans, and deceased within six days of the ceremony--if ceremony one may call the hasty affair in those foreign places. My dear, the instant I heard it I had a presentiment, 'All has gone well up to now.' I remember murmuring the words. Then your letter, received in that smelly Barcelona: Lord Ormont was carrying you off to Granada--a dream of my infancy! It may not have been his manoeuvre, but it was the beginning of his manoeuvres.”
Aminta shuddered. ”And tra-la-la, and castanets, and my Cid! my Cid! and the Alhambra, the Sierra Nevada, and ay di me, Alhama; and Boabdil el Chico and el Zagal and Fray Antonio Agapida!” She flung out the rattle, yawning, with her arms up and her head back, in the posture of a woman wounded. One of her aunt's chance shots had traversed her breast, flas.h.i.+ng at her the time, the scene, the husband, intensest sunniness on sword-edges of shade,--and now the wedded riddle; illusion dropping mask, romance in its anatomy, cold English mist. Ah, what a background is the present when we have the past to the fore! That filmy past is diaphanous on heaving ribs.
She smiled at the wide-eyed little gossip. ”Don't speak of manaoeuvres, dear aunt. And we'll leave Granada to the poets. I'm tired. Talk of our own people, on your side and my father's, and as much as you please of the Pagnell-Pagnells, they refresh me. Do they go on marrying?”
”Why, my child, how could they go on without it?”
Aminta pressed her hands at her eyelids. ”Oh, me!” she sighed, feeling the tear come with a sting from checked laughter. ”But there are marriages, aunty, that don't go on, though Protestant clergymen officiated. Leave them unnoticed, I have really nothing to tell.”
”You have not heard anything of Lady Eglett?”
”Lady Charlotte Eglett? No syllable. Or wait--my lord's secretary was with her at Olmer; approved by her, I have to suppose.”
”There, my dear, I say again I do dread that woman, if she can make a man like Lord Ormont afraid of her. And no doubt she is of our old aristocracy. And they tell me she is coa.r.s.e in her conversation--like a man. Lawyers tell me she is never happy but in litigation. Years back, I am given to understand, she did not set so particularly good an example.
Lawyers hear next to everything. I am told she lifted her horsewhip on a gentleman once, and then put her horse at him and rode him down.
You will say, the sister of your husband. No; not to make my niece a countess, would I, if I had known the kind of family! Then one asks, Is she half as much afraid of him? In that case, no wonder they have given up meeting. Was formerly one of the Keepsake Beauties. Well, Lady Eglett, and Aminta, Countess of Ormont, will be in that Peerage, as they call it, let her only have her dues. My dear, I would--if I ever did--swear the woman is jealous.”
”Of me, aunty!”
”I say more; I say again, it would be a good thing for somebody if somebody had his twitch of jealousy. Wives may be too meek. Cases and cases my poor Alfred read to me, where an ill-behaving man was brought to his senses by a clever little shuffle of the cards, and by the most innocent of wives. A kind of poison to him, of course; but there are poisons that cure. It might come into the courts; and the nearer the proofs the happier he in withdrawing from his charge and effecting a reconciliation. Short of guilt, of course. Men are so strange. Imagine now, if a handsome young woman were known to be admired rather more than enough by a good-looking gentleman near about her own age. Oh, I've no patience with, the man for causing us to think and scheme! Only there are men who won't be set right unless we do. My husband used to say, change is such a capital thing in life's jogtrot; that men find it refres.h.i.+ng if we now and then, reverse the order of our pillion-riding for them. A spiritless woman in a wife is what they bear least of all.
Anything rather. Is Mr. Morsfield haunting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley's house as usual?”
Aminta's cheeks unrolled their deep damask rose at the abrupt intrusion of the name. ”I meet him there.”
”Lord Adderwood, Sir John Randeller; and the rest?”
”Two or three times a week.”
”And the lady, wife of the captain, really a Lady Fair--Mrs.... month of May: so I have to get at it.”
”She may be seen there.”
”Really a contrast, when you two are together! As to reputation, there is an exchange of colours. Those lawyers hold the keys of the great world, and a naughty world it is, I fear--with exceptions, who are the salt, but don't taste so much. I can't help enjoying the people at Mrs.
Lawrence Finchley's. I like to feel I can amuse them, as they do me. One puzzles for what they say--in somebody's absence, I mean. They must take Lord Ormont for a perfect sphinx; unless they are so silly as to think they may despise him, or suppose him indifferent. Oh, that upper cla.s.s!
It's a garden, and we can't help pus.h.i.+ng to enter it; and fair flowers, indeed, but serpents too, like the tropics. It tries us more than anything else in the world--well, just as good eating tries the const.i.tution. He ought to know it and feel it, and give his wife all the protection of his name, instead of--not that he denies: I have brought him to that point; he cannot deny it with me. But not to present her--to shun the Court; not to introduce her to his family, to appear ashamed of her! My darling Aminta, a month of absence for reflection on your legally-wedded husband's conduct increases my astonishment. For usually men old enough to be the grandfathers of their wives--”
”Oh, pray, aunty, pray, pray!” Aminta cried, and her body writhed. ”No more to-night. You mean well, I am sure. Let us wait. I shall sleep, perhaps, if I go to bed early. I dare say I am spiritless--not worth more than I get. I gave him the lead altogether; he keeps it. In everything else he is kind; I have all the luxuries--enough to loathe them. Kiss me and say good night.”
Aminta made it imperative by rising. Her aunt stood up, kissed, and exclaimed, ”I tell you you are a queenly creature, not to be treated as any puny trollop of a handmaid. And although he is a great n.o.bleman, he is not to presume to behave any longer, my dear, as if your family had no claim on his consideration. My husband, Alfred Pagnell, would have laid that before him pretty quick. You are the child of the Farrells and the Solers, both old families; on your father's side you are linked with the oldest n.o.bility in Europe. It flushes one to think of it!
Your grandmother, marrying Captain Algernon Farrell, was the legitimate daughter of a Grandee of Spain; as I have told Lord Ormont often, and I defy him to equal that for a romantic marriage in the annals of his house, or boast of bluer blood. Again, the Solers--”
”We take the Solers for granted, aunty, good night.”