Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes. Bee-note and woodside blackbird and meadow cow, and the fish of the silver rolling rings, composed the leap of the music.
She gave her mind to his voice, following whither it went; half was in air, higher than the swallow"s, exalting him.
How is it he is the brother of women? They are sisters for him because he is neither sentimentalist nor devourer. He will not flatter to feed on them. The one he chooses, she will know love. There are women who go through life not knowing love. They are inanimate automatic machines, who lay them down at last, inquiring wherefore they were caused to move.
She is not of that sad flock. She will be mated; she will have the right to call him Matey. A certain Browny called him Matey. She lived and died. A certain woman apes Browny"s features and inherits her pa.s.sion, but has forfeited her rights. Were she, under happiest conditions, to put her hand in his, shame would burn her. For he is just--he is Justice; and a woman bringing him less than his due, she must be a creature of the slime!
This was the shadowy sentiment that made the wall of division between them. There was no other. Lord Ormont had struck to fragments that barrier of the conventional oath and ceremonial union. He was unjust--he was Injustice. The weak may be wedded, they cannot be married; to Injustice. And if we have the world for the b.u.t.tress of injustice, then is Nature the flaring rebel; there is no fixed order possible. Laws are necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of the savage"s old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice. There cannot be a based society upon such conditions. An immolation of the naturally const.i.tuted individual arrests the general expansion to which we step, decivilizes more, and is more impious to the G.o.d in man, than temporary revelries of a licence that Nature soon checks.
Arrows of thoughts resembling these shot over the half of Aminta"s mind not listening. Her lover"s head was active on the same theme while he spoke. They converged to it from looks crossing or catching profiles, or from tones, from a motion of hand, from a chance word. Insomuch that the third person present was kept un.o.bservant only by her studious and humble speculations on the young schoolmaster"s grand project to bring the nationalities together, and teach Old England to the Continent--the Continent to Old England: our healthy games, our scorn of the lie, manliness; their intellectual valour, diligence, considerate manners.
"Just to name a few of the things for interchange," said Weyburn. "As to method, we shall be their disciples. But I look forward to our fellows getting the lead. No hurry. Why will they? you ask in petto. Well, they "re emulous, and they take a thrashing kindly. That "s the way to learn a lesson. I "ve seen our fellows beaten and beaten--never the courage beaten out of them. In the end, they won and kept the field. They have a lot to learn--princ.i.p.ally not to be afraid of ideas. They lose heaps of time before they can feel at home with ideas. They call themselves practical for having an addiction to the palpable. It is a pretty wreath they clap on their deficiencies. Practical dogs are for bones, horses for corn. I want the practical Englishman to settle his muzzle in a nosebag of ideas. When he has once got hold of them, he makes good stuff of them. On the Continent ideas have wings and pay visits. Here, they"re stay-at-home. Then I want our fellows to have the habit of speaking from the chest. They shall return to England with the whoop of the mountains in them and ready to jump out. They shall have an Achillean roar; and they shall sing by second nature. Don"t fear: they"ll give double for anything they take. I"ve known Italians, to whom an Englishman"s honesty of mind and dealing was one of the dreams of a better humanity they had put in a box. Frenchmen, too, who, when they came to know us, were astonished at their epithet of perfide, and loved us."
"Emile," said Aminta. "You remember Emile, Selina: the dear little French boy at Mr. Cuper"s?"
"Oh, I do," Selina responded.
"He will work with Mr. Weyburn in Switzerland."
"Oh, that will be nice!" the girl exclaimed.
Aminta squeezed Selina"s hand. A shower of tears clouded her eyes. She chose to fancy it was because of her envy of the modest, busy, peaceful girl, who envied none. Conquers also sincerity in the sincerest. She was vexed with her full breast, and had as little command of her thoughts as of her feelings.
"Mr. Weyburn has ideas for the education of girls too," she said.
"There"s the task," said he. "It"s to separate them as little as possible. All the--pa.s.sez-moi le mot--devilry between the s.e.xes begins at their separation. They "re foreigners when they meet; and their alliances are not always binding. The chief object in life, if happiness be the aim, and the growing better than we are, is to teach men and women how to be one; for, if they "re not, then each is a morsel for the other to prey on. Lady Charlotte Eglett"s view is, that the greater number of them on both sides hate one another."
"Hate!" exclaimed Selina; and Aminta said: "Is Lady Charlotte Eglett an authority?"
"She has observed, and she thinks. She has in the abstract the justest of minds: and that is the curious point about her. But one may say they are trained at present to be hostile. Some of them fall in love and strike a truce, and still they are foreigners. They have not the same standard of honour. They might have it from an education in common."
"But there must be also a lady to govern the girls?" Selina interposed.
"Ah, yes; she is not yet found!"
"Would it increase their mutual respect?--or show of respect, if you like?" said Aminta, with his last remark at work as the shattering bell of a city"s insurrection in her breast.
"In time, under management; catching and grouping them young. A boy who sees a girl do what he can"t, and would like to do, won"t take refuge in his muscular superiority--which, by the way, would be lessened."
"You suppose their capacities are equal?"
"Things are not equal. I suppose their excellencies to make a pretty nearly equal sum in the end. But we "re not weighing them each. The question concerns the advantage of both."
"That seems just!"
Aminta threw no voice into the word "just." It was the word of the heavens a.s.suaging earth"s thirst, and she was earth to him. Her soul yearned to the man whose mind conceived it.
She said to Selina: "We must plan an expedition next year or the year after, and see how the school progresses."
All three smiled; and Selina touched and held Aminta"s hand shyly.
Visions of the unseen Switzerland awed her.
Weyburn named the Spring holiday time, the season of the flowering Alpine robes. He promised welcome, pressed for a promise of the visit.
Warmly it was given. "We will; we will indeed!"
"I shall look forward," he said.
There was nothing else for him or for her, except to doat on the pa.s.sing minute that slipped when seized. The looking forward turned them to the looking back at the point they had flown from, and yielded a momentary pleasure, enough to stamp some section of a picture on their memories, which was not the burning now Love lives for, in the clasp, if but of hands. Desire of it destroyed it. They swung to the future, swung to the present it made the past, sensible to the quick of the now they could not hold. They were lovers. Divided lovers in presence, they thought and they felt in pieces. Feelings and thoughts were forbidden to speech.
She dared look the very little of her heart"s fulness, without the disloyalty it would have been in him to let a small peep of his heart be seen. While her hand was not clasped she could look tenderly, and her fettered state, her sense of unworthiness m.u.f.fled in the deeps, would keep her from the loosening to pa.s.sion.
He who read through her l.u.s.trous, transiently dwelling eyes had not that security. His part, besides the watch over the spring of his hot blood, was to combat a host, insidious among which was unreason calling her Browny, urging him to take his own, to s.n.a.t.c.h her from a possessor who forfeited by undervaluing her. This was the truth in a better-ordered world: she belonged to the man who could help her to grow and to do her work. But in the world we have around us, it was the distorted truth: and keeping pa.s.sion down, he was able to wish her such happiness as pertained to safety from shipwreck, and for himself, that he might continue to walk in the ranks of the sober citizens.
Oh, true and right, but she was gloriously beautiful! Day by day she surpa.s.sed the wondrous Browny of old days. All women were eclipsed by her. She was that fire in the night which lights the night and draws the night to look at it. And more: this queen of women was beginning to have a mind at work. One saw already the sprouting of a mind repressed. She had a distinct ability; the good ambition to use her qualities. She needed life and air--that is, comprehension of her, encouragement, the companion mate. With what strength would she now endow him! The pride in the sharp imagination of possessing her whispered a boast of the strength her mate would have from her. His need and her need rushed together somewhere down the skies. They could not, he argued, be separated eternally.
He had to leave her. Selina, shocked at a boldness she could not understand in herself, begged him to stay and tell her of Switzerland and Alpine flowers and herbs, and the valleys for the gold beetle and the Apollo b.u.t.terfly. Aminta hinted that Lord Ormont might expect to find him there, if he came the next morning; but she would not try to persuade, and left the decision with him, loving him for the pain he inflicted by going.
Why, indeed, should he stay? Both could ask; they were one in asking.
Anguish balanced pleasure in them both. The day of the pleasure was heaven to remember, heaven to hope for; not so heavenly to pray for.
The praying for it, each knew, implored their joint will to decree the perilous blessing. A shadowy sentiment of duty and rect.i.tude, born of what they had suffered, hung between them and the prayer for a renewal, that would renew the tempting they were conscious of when the sweet, the strained, throbbing day was over. They could hope for chance to renew it, and then they would be irresponsible. Then they would think and wish discreetly, so as to have it a happiness untainted. In refusing now to take another day or pray for it, they deserved that chance should grant it.
Aminta had said through Selina the utmost her self-defences could allow.
But the idea of a final parting cut too cruelly into her life, and she murmured: "I shall see you before you go for good?"
"I will come, here or in London."
"I can trust?"
"Quite certain."
A meeting of a few hasty minutes involved none of the dangers of a sunny, long summer day; and if it did, the heart had its claims, the heart had its powers of resistance. Otherwise we should be base verily.
He turned on a bow to leave her before there was a motion for the offer of her hand.
After many musings and frettings, she reached the wisdom of that.
Wisdom was her only nourishment now. A cold, lean dietary it is; but he dispensed it, and it fed her, or kept her alive. It became a proud feeling that she had been his fellow in the achievement of a piece of wisdom; though the other feeling, that his hand"s kind formal touching, without pressure of hers, would have warmed her to go through the next interview with her lord, mocked at pure satisfaction. Did he distrust himself? Or was it to spare her? But if so, her heart was quite bare to him! But she knew it was.
Aminta drove her questioning heart as a vessel across blank circles of sea, where there was nothing save the solitary heart for answer. It answered intelligibly and comfortingly at last, telling her of proof given that she could repose under his guidance with absolute faith. Was ever loved woman more blest than she in such belief? She had it firmly; and a blessedness, too, in this surety wavering beneath shadows of the uncertainty. Her eyes knew it, her ears were empty of the words. Her heart knew it, and it was unconfirmed by reason. As for his venturing to love her, he feared none. And no sooner did that reflection surge than she stood up beside him in revolt against her lion and lord. Her instinct judged it impossible she could ever have yielded her heart to a man lacking courage. Hence--what? when cowardice appeared as the sole impediment to happiness now!
He had gone, and the day lived again for both of them--a day of sheer gold in the translation from troubled earth to the mind. One another"s beauty through the visage into the character was newly perceived and worshipped; and the beauties of pastoral Thames, the temple of peace, hardly noticed in the pa.s.sing of the day--taken as air to the breather; until some chip of the scene, round which an emotion had curled, was vivid foreground and gateway to shrouded romance: it might be the stream"s white face browning into willow-droopers, or a wagtail on a water-lily leaf, or the fore-horse of an up-river barge at strain of legs, a red-finned perch hung a foot above the pebbles in sun-veined depths, a kingfisher on the scud under alders, the forest of the bankside weeds.
CHAPTER XXV. PREPARATIONS FOR A RESOLVE
That day receded like a spent billow, and lapsed among the others advancing, but it left a print deeper than events would have stamped.
Aminta"s pen declined to run to her lord; and the dipping it in ink was no acceleration of the process. A sentence, bearing likeness to an artless infant"s trot of the half-dozen steps to mother"s lap, stumbled upon the full stop midway. Desperate determination pushed it along, and there was in consequence a dead stop at the head of the next sentence.
A woman whose nature is insurgent against the majesty of the man to whom she must, among the singular injunctions binding her, regularly write, sees no way between hypocrisy and rebellion. For rebellion, she, with the pen in her hand, is avowedly not yet ripe, hypocrisy is abominable.