Part 12 (1/2)
Any foreign General at the head of fifty thousand trained, picked troops would risk it, and cut an 'entrechat' for joy of the chance. We should have fought and bled and been marched over--a field of Anglo-Saxon stubble! and Nelson riding the Channel, undisputed lord of the waters.
Heigh! by the Lord, this country would have been like a man free to rub his skin with his hand and a mortal disease in his blood. Are you ready?
How antic.i.p.ate a hostile march on the capital, is our business.'
Striding up and down the library, Lord Ormont dropped his wrath to dictate the practical measures for defence--detesting the cat's-cry 'defence,' he said; but the foe would bring his old growlers, and we should have to season our handful of regulars and mob of levies, turn the ma.s.s into troops. With plenty of food, and blows daily, Englishmen soon get stomachs for the right way to play the game; bowl as well as bat; and the sooner they give up the idea of shamming st.u.r.dy on a stiff hind leg, the better for their chances. Only, it's a beastly thing to see that for their favourite att.i.tude;--like some dog of a fellow weak in the fists, weaker in the midriff, at a fair, who cries, Come on, and prays his G.o.ds you won't. All for peace, the rascal boasts himself, and he beats his wife and kicks his curs at home. Is there any one to help him now, he vomits gold and honours on the man he yesterday treated as a felon. Ha!
Bull the b.u.mpkin disposed of, my lord drew leisurely back from the foeman's landing-place, at the head of a body of serious Englishmen; teaching them to be manageable as chess-pieces, ready as bow-strings to let fly. Weyburn rejoiced to find himself transcribing crisp sentences, hard on the matter, without garnish of scorn. Kent, Suss.e.x, Surrey, all the southern heights about London, round away to the south-western of the Hamps.h.i.+re heathland, were accurately mapped in the old warrior's brain. He knew his points of vantage by name; there were no references to gazetteer or atlas. A chain of forts and earthworks enables us to choose our ground, not for clinging to them, but for choice of time and place to give battle. If we have not been playing double-dyed traitor to ourselves, we have a preponderating field artillery; our yeomanry and volunteer hors.e.m.e.n are becoming a serviceable cavalry arm; our infantry prove that their heterogeneous composition can be welded to a handy ma.s.s, and can stand fire and return it, and not be beaten by an acknowledged defeat.
'That's Englis.h.!.+ yes, that's Englis.h.!.+ when they're at it,' my lord sang out.
'To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end,' cried Weyburn; his former enthusiasm for the hero mounting, enlightened by a reminiscence of the precept he had hammered on the boys at Cuper's.
'They fall well. Yes, the English fall like men,' said my lord, pardoning and embracing the cuffed nation. 'Bodies knocked over, hearts upright. That's example; we breed Ironsides out of a sight like that.
If it weren't for a cursed feeble Government sc.r.a.ping 'conges' to the taxpayer--well, so many of our good fellows would not have to fall. That I say; for this thing is going to happen some day, mind you, sir! And I don't want to have puncheons and hogsheads of our English blood poured out merely to water the soil of a conquered country because English Governments are a craven lot, not daring risk of office by offending the taxpayer. But, on!'
Weyburn sent Lady Charlotte glowing words of the composition in progress.
They worked through a day, and a second day--talked of nothing else in the intervals. Explanatory answers were vouchsafed to Aminta's modest inquiries at Finch, as she pictured scenes of smoke, dust and blood from the overpowering plain masculine lines they drew, terrible in bluntness.
The third morning Lord Ormont had map and book to verify distances and attempt a scale of heights, take names of estates, farms, parishes, commons, patches of woodland. Weyburn wrote his fair copy on folio paper, seven-and-thirty pages. He read it aloud to the author on the afternoon of the fourth day, with the satisfaction in his voice that he felt. My lord listened and nodded. The plan for the defence of England's heart was a good plan.
He signed to have the ma.n.u.script handed to him. A fortified London secure of the Thames for abundant supplies, well able to breathe within earthworks extending along the southern hills, was clearly shown to stand the loss of two big battles on the Suss.e.x weald or more East to North-east, if fortune willed it.
He rose from his chair, paced some steps, with bent head, came back thoughtfully, lifted the ma.n.u.script sheets for another examination.
Then he stooped to the fire, spreading the edges unevenly, so that they caught flame. Weyburn spied at him. It was to all appearance the doing of a man who had intended it and brought it to the predetermined conclusion.
'About time for you to be off for your turn at Chiallo's,' our country's defender remarked, after tossing the last half-burnt lump under the grate and shovelling at it.
'I will go, my lord,' said Weyburn--and he was glad to go.
He went, calculated his term of service under Lord Ormont. He was young, not a philosopher. Waste of anything was abhorrent to a nature pointed at store of daily gain, if it were only the gain in a new or a freshened idea; and time lost, work lost, good counsel to the nation lost, represented horrid vacuity to him, and called up the counter demonstration of a dance down the halls of madness, for proof that we should, at least, have jolly motion of limbs there before Perdition struck the great gong. Ay, and we should be twirling with a fair form on the arm: woman and man; as it ought to be; twirling downward, true, but together. Such a companions.h.i.+p has a wisdom to raise it above the t.i.tle of madness. Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won't forgive an injury, nurses rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can't--to use the old schoolboy words--take a licking!
These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of which they were the sign. He criticized impulsively, and fancied he did no more, and was not doing much though, in fact, criticism is the end of wors.h.i.+p; the Brutus blow at that Imperial but mortal bosom.
The person criticized was manifest. Who was the woman he twirled with?
She was unfeatured, undistinguished, one of the s.e.x, or all the s.e.x: the s.e.x to be shunned as our deadly sapper of gain, unless we find the chosen one to super-terrestrialize it and us, and trebly outdo our gift of our whole self for her.
She was indistinguishable, absolutely unknown; yet she murmured, or seemed to murmur--for there was no sound--a complaint of Lord Ormont.
And she, or some soundless mouth of woman, said he was a splendid military hero, a chivalrous man, a man of inflexible honour; but had no understanding of how to treat a woman, or belief in her having equal life with him on earth.
She was put aside rather petulantly, and she took her seat out of the whirl with submission. Thinking she certainly was not Browny, whom he would have known among a million, he tried to quit the hall, and he twirled afresh, necessarily not alone; it is the unpardonable offence both to the Graces and the Great Mother for man to valse alone. She twirled on his arm, uninvited; accepted, as in the course of nature; hugged, under dictate of the nature of the man steeled against her by the counting of gain, and going now at desperation's pace, by very means of those defensive locked steam-valves meant to preserve him from this madness,--for the words of the red-lipped mate, where there were no words, went through him like a music when the bow is over the viol, sweeping imagination, and they said her life was wasting.
Was not she a priceless ma.n.u.script cast to the flames? Her lord had been at some trouble to win her. Or his great fame and his shadowed fortunes had won her. He took her for his own, and he would not call her his own.
He comported himself with absolute, with kindly deference to the lady whose more than vital spark he let the gossips puff at and blur. He praised her courage, visibly admired her person, admitted her in private to be his equal, degraded her in public. Could anything account for the behaviour of so manly and n.o.ble a gentleman?--Rhetoric made the attempt, and Weyburn gave up the windy business.
Discovering that his fair partner of the wasting life was--he struggled to quench the revelation--Aminta, he stopped the dance. If there was no gain in whirling fancifully with one of the s.e.x, a spin of a minute with her was downright bankruptcy.