Part 15 (1/2)

Caressing her still, Aminta said: 'I don't know whether I embrace a boy.'

'That idea comes from a man!' said Mrs. Lawrence. It was admitted. The secretary was discussed.

Mrs. Lawrence remarked: 'Yes, I like talking with him; he's bright. You drove him out of me the day I saw him. Doesn't he give you the idea of a man who insists on capturing you and lets it be seen he doesn't care two snaps of a finger?'

Aminta pet.i.tioned on his behalf indifferently: 'He 's well bred.'

She was inattentive to Mrs. Lawrence's answer. The allusion of the Queen of Blondes had stung her in the unacknowledged regions where women discard themselves and are most sensitive.

'Decide on coming soon to Lady de Culme,' said Mrs. Lawrence. 'Now that her arms are open to you, she would like to have you in them. She is old--. You won't be rigorous? no standing on small punctilios?

She would call, but she does not--h'm, it is M. le Comte that she does not choose to--h'm. But her arms are open to the countess. It ought to be a grand step. You may be a.s.sured that Lady Charlotte Eglett would not be taken into them. My great-aunt has a great-aunt's memory. The Ormonts are the only explanation--if it 's an apology--she can offer for the behaviour of the husband of the Countess of Ormont. You know I like him.

I can't help liking a man who likes me. Is that the way with a boy, Mr.

Secretary? I must have another talk with the gentleman, my dear. You are Aminta to me.'

'Always Aminta to you,' was the reply, tenderly given.

'But as for comprehending him, I'm as far off that as Lady de Culme, who hasn't the liking for him I have.'

'The earl?' said Aminta, showing by her look that she was in the same position.

Mrs. Lawrence shrugged: 'I believe men and women marry in order that they should never be able to understand one another. The riddle's best read at a moderate distance. It 's what they call the golden mean; too close, too far, we're strangers. I begin to understand that husband of mine, now we're on bowing terms. Now, I must meet the earl to-morrow.

You will arrange? His hand wants forcing. Upon my word, I don't believe it 's more.'

Mrs. Lawrence contrasted him in her mind with the husband she knew, and was invigorated by the thought that a placable impenetrable giant may often be more pliable in a woman's hands than an irascible dwarf--until, perchance, the latter has been soundly cuffed, and then he is docile to trot like a squire, as near your heels as he can get. She rejoiced to be working for the woman she had fallen in love with.

Aminta promised herself to show the friend a livelier affection at their next meeting.

A seventh letter, signed 'Adolphus,' came by post, was read and locked up in her jewel-box. They were all nigh destruction for a wavering minute or so. They were placed where they lay because the first of them had been laid there, the box being a strong one, under a patent key, and discovery would mean the terrible. They had not been destroyed because they had, or seemed to her to have, the language of pa.s.sion. She could read them unmoved, and appease a wicked craving she owned to having, and reproached herself with having, for that language.

Was she not colour in the sight of men? Here was one, a mouthpiece of numbers, who vowed that homage was her due, and devotion, the pouring forth of the soul to her. What was the reproach if she read the stuff unmoved?

But peruse and reperuse it, and ask impressions to tell our deepest instinct of truthfulness whether language of this character can have been written to two women by one hand! Men are cunning. Can they catch a tone? Not that tone!

She, too, Mrs. Amy May, was colour in the sight of men. Yet it seemed that he could not have written so to the Queen of Blondes. And she, by repute, was as dangerous to slight as he to attract. Her indifference exonerated him. Besides, a Queen of Blondes would not draw the hearts out of men in England, as in Italy and in Spain. Aminta had got thus far when she found 'Queen of Brunes' expunged by a mist: she imagined hearing the secretary's laugh. She thought he was right to laugh at her.

She retorted simply: 'These are feelings that are poetry.'

A man may know nothing about them, and be an excellent schoolmaster.

Suggestions touching the prudence of taking Mrs. Lawrence into her confidence, as regarded these troublesome letters of the man with the dart in his breast, were shuffled aside for various reasons: her modesty shrank; and a sense of honour toward the man forbade it. She would have found it easier to do if she had conspired against her heart in doing it. And yet, cold-bloodedly to expose him and pluck the clothing from a pa.s.sion--dear to think of only when it is profoundly secret--struck her as an extreme baseness, of which not even the woman who perused and reperused his letters could be guilty.

Her head rang with some of the lines, and she accused her head of the crime of childishness, seeing that her heart was not an accomplice. At the same time, her heart cried out violently against the business of a visit to Lady de Culme, and all the steps it involved. Justly she accused her heart of treason. Heart and head were severed. This, as she partly apprehended, is the state of the woman who is already on the slope of her nature's mine-shaft, dreading the rush downwards, powerless to break away from the light.

Letters perused and reperused, coming from a man never fervently noticed in person, conjure features one would wish to put beside the actual, to make sure that the fiery lines he writes are not practising a beguilement. Aminta had lost grasp of the semblance of the impa.s.sioned man. She just remembered enough of his eyes to think there might be healing in a sight of him.

Latterly she had refused to be exhibited to a tattling world as the great n.o.bleman's conquest:--The 'Beautiful Lady Doubtful' of a report that had scorched her cars. Theatres, rides, pleasure-drives, even such houses as she saw standing open to her had been shunned. Now she asked the earl to ride in the park.

He complied, and sent to the stables immediately, just noted another of her veerings. The whimsy creatures we are matched to contrast with, s.h.i.+ft as the very winds or feather-gra.s.ses in the wind. Possibly a fine day did it. Possibly, too, her not being requested to do it.