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 Hampshire 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 English! yes, that"s English! 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 companionship 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 worship; 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.
He was young, full of blood; his heart led him away from the door Lord Ormont had exposed; at which a little patient unemotional watchfulness might have intimated to him something besides the simple source of the old hero"s complex chapter of conduct. As it was, Weyburn did see the rancour of a raw wound in operation. But he moralized and disapproved; telling himself, truly enough, that so it would not have been with him; instead of sounding at my lord"s character, and his condition of the unjustly neglected great soldier, for the purpose of asking how that raw wound would affect an injured veteran, who compressed, almost repressed, the roar of Achilles, though his military bright name was to him his Briseis.
CHAPTER X. A SHORT Pa.s.sAGE IN THE GAME PLAYED BY TWO
Politest of men in the domestic circle and everywhere among women, Lord Ormont was annoyed to find himself often gruffish behind the tie of his cravat. Indeed, the temper of our eminently serene will feel the strain of a doldrum-dulness that is goaded to activity by a nettle. The forbearance he carried farther than most could do was tempted to kick, under pressure of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell. Without much blaming Aminta, on whose behalf he submitted to it, and whose resolution to fix in England had brought it to this crisis, he magnanimously proposed to the Fair Enemy he forced her to be, and liked to picture her as being, a month in Paris.
Aminta declined it for herself; after six or more years of travelling, she wished to settle, and know her country, she said: a repet.i.tion remark, wide of the point, and indicatory to the game of Pull she was again playing beneath her smooth visage, unaware that she had the wariest of partners at the game.
"But go you--do, I beg," she entreated. "It will give you new impressions; and I cannot bear to tie you down here."
"How you can consent to be tied down here, is the wonder to me!" said he. "When we travelled through the year, just visited England and were off again, we were driving on our own road. Vienna in April and May--what do you say? You like the reviews there, and the dances, concerts, Zigeuner bands, military Bohemian bands. Or Egypt to-morrow, if you like--though you can"t be permitted to swim in the Nile, as you wanted. Come, Xarifa, speak it. I go to exile without you. Say you come."
She smiled firmly. The name of her honeymoon days was not a cajolery to her.
His name had been that of the Christian Romancero Knight Durandarte, and she gave it to him, to be on the proper level with him, while she still declined.
"Well, but just a month in Paris! There"s nothing doing here. And we both like the French theatre."
"London will soon be filling."
"Well, but--" He stopped; for the filling of London did really concern her, in the game of Pull she was covertly playing with him. "You seem to have caught the fever of this London;... no bands.... no reviews ....
Low comedy acting." He muttered his objections to London.
"The society of people speaking one"s own tongue, add that," she ventured to say.
"You know you are ten times more Spanish than English. Moorish, if you like."
"The slave of the gallant Christian Knight, converted, baptized, and blissful. Oh, I know. But now we are settled in England, I have a wish to study English society."
"Disappointing, I a.s.sure you;--dinners heavy, dancing boorish, intrigue a blind-man"s-buff. We"ve been over it all before!"
"We have."
"Admired, I dare say. You won"t be understood."
"I like my countrymen."
"The women have good looks--of the ungarnished kind. The men are louts."
"They are brave."
"You"re to see their fencing. You"ll own a little goes a long way."
"I think it will amuse me."
"So I thought when I gave the nod to Isabella your friend."
"You like her?"
"You, too."