George Meredith - Lord Ormont and His Aminta. Volume 4

One of the days of sovereign splendour in England was riding down the heavens, and drawing the royal mantle of the gold-fringed shadows over plain and wavy turf, blue water and woods of the country round Steignton. A white mansion shone to a length of oblong lake that held the sun-ball suffused in mild yellow.

'There's the place,' Lady Charlotte said to Weyburn, as they had view of it at a turn of the park. She said to herself—where I was born and bred! and her sight gloated momentarily on the house and side avenues, a great plane standing to the right of the house, the sparkle of a little river running near; all the scenes she knew, all young and lively. She sprang on her seat for a horse beneath her, and said, 'But this is healthy excitement,' as in reply to her London physician's remonstrances. 'And there's my brother Rowsley, talking to one of the keepers,' she cried. 'You see Lord Ormont? I can see a mile. Sight doesn't fail with me. He 's insisting. 'Ware poachers when Rowsley's on his ground! You smell the air here? Nobody dies round about Steignton. Their legs wear out and they lie down to rest them. It 's the finest air in the world. Now look, the third window left of the porch, first floor. That was my room before I married. Strangers have been here and called the place home. It can never be home to any but me and Rowsley. He sees the carriage. He little thinks! He's dressed in his white corduroy and knee-breeches. Age! he won't know age till he's ninety. Here he comes marching. He can't bear surprises. I'll wave my hand and call.'

She called his name.

In a few strides he was at the carriage window. 'You, Charlotte?'

'Home again, Rowsley! Bring down your eyebrows, and let me hear you're glad I 've come.'

'What made you expect you would find me here?'

'Anything-cats on the tiles at night. You can't keep a secret from me.

Here's Mr. Weyburn, good enough to be my escort. I 'll get out.'

She alighted, scorning help; Weyburn at her heels. The earl nodded to him politely and not cordially. He was hardly cordial to Lady Charlotte.

That had no effect on her. 'A glorious day for Steignton,' she said.

'Ah, there's the Buridon group of beeches; grander trees than grow at Buridon. Old timber now. I knew them slim as demoiselles. Where 's the ash? We had a splendid ash on the west side.'

'Dead and cut down long since,' replied the earl.

'So we go!'

She bent her steps to the spot: a grass-covered heave of the soil.

'Dear old tree!' she said, in a music of elegy: and to Weyburn: 'Looks like a stump of an arm lopped off a shoulder in bandages. Nature does it so. All the tenants doing well, Rowsley?'

'About the same amount of trouble with them.'

'Ours at Olmer get worse.'

'It's a process for the extirpation of the landlords.'

'Then down goes the country.'

'They 've got their case, their papers tell us.'

'I know they have; but we've got the soil, and we'll make a, fight of it.'

'They can fight too, they say.'

'I should be sorry to think they couldn't if they're Englishmen.'

She spoke so like his old Charlotte of the younger days that her brother partly laughed.

'Parliamentary fighting 's not much to your taste or mine. They 've lost their stomach for any other. The battle they enjoy is the battle that goes for the majority. Gauge their valour by that.'

'To be sure,' said his responsive sister. She changed her note. 'But what I say is, let the nobles keep together and stick to their class. There's nothing to fear then. They must marry among themselves, think of the blood: it's their first duty. Or better a peasant girl! Middle courses dilute it to the stuff in a publican's tankard. It 's an adulterous beast who thinks of mixing old wine with anything.'

'Hulloa!' said the earl; and she drew up.

'You'll have me here till over to-morrow, Rowsley, so that I may have one clear day at Steignton?'

He bowed. 'You will choose your room. Mr. Weyburn is welcome.'

Weyburn stated the purport of his visit, and was allowed to name an early day for the end of his term of service.

Entering the house, Lady Charlotte glanced at the armour and stag branches decorating corners of the hall, and straightway laid her head forward, pushing after it in the direction of the drawing room. She went in, stood for a minute, and came out. Her mouth was hard shut.

At dinner she had tales of uxorious men, of men who married mistresses, of the fearful incubus the vulgar family of a woman of the inferior classes ever must be; and her animadversions were strong in the matter of gew-gaw modern furniture. The earl submitted to hear.

She was, however, keenly attentive whenever he proffered any item of information touching Steignton. After dinner Weyburn strolled to the points of view she cited as excellent for different aspects of her old home.

He found her waiting to hear his laudation when he came back; and in the early morning she was on the terrace, impatient to lead him down to the lake. There, at the boat-house, she commanded him to loosen a skiff and give her a paddle. Between exclamations, designed to waken louder from him, and not so successful as her cormorant hunger for praise of Steignton required, she plied him to confirm with his opinion an opinion that her reasoning mind had almost formed in the close neighbourhood of the beloved and honoured person providing it; for abstract ideas were unknown to her. She put it, however, as in the abstract:—

'How is it we meet people brave as lions before an enemy, and rank cowards where there's a botheration among their friends at home? And tell me, too, if you've thought the thing over, what's the meaning of this? I 've met men in high places, and they've risen to distinction by their own efforts, and they head the nation. Right enough, you'd say. Well, I talk with them, and I find they've left their brains on the ladder that led them up; they've only the ideas of their grandfather on general subjects. I come across a common peasant or craftsman, and he down there has a mind more open—he's wiser in his intelligence than his rulers and lawgivers up above him. He understands what I say, and I learn from him. I don't learn much from our senators, or great lawyers, great doctors, professors, members of governing bodies—that lot. Policy seems to petrify their minds when they 've got on an eminence. Now explain it, if you can.'

'Responsibility has a certain effect on them, no doubt,' said Weyburn. 'Eminent station among men doesn't give a larger outlook. Most of them confine their observation to their supports. It happens to be one of the questions I have thought over. Here in England, and particularly on a fortnight's run in the lowlands of Scotland once, I have, like you, my lady, come now and then across the people we call common, men and women, old wayside men especially; slow-minded, but hard in their grasp of facts, and ready to learn, and logical, large in their ideas, though going a roundabout way to express them. They were at the bottom of wisdom, for they had in their heads the delicate sense of justice, upon which wisdom is founded. That is what their rulers lack. Unless we have the sense of justice abroad like a common air, there 's no peace, and no steady advance. But these humble people had it. They reasoned from it, and came to sound conclusions. I felt them to be my superiors. On the other hand, I have not felt the same with "our senators, rulers, and lawgivers." They are for the most part deficient in the liberal mind.'

'Ha! good, so far. How do you account for it?' said Lady Charlotte.

'I read it in this way: that the world being such as it is at present, demanding and rewarding with honours and pay special services, the men called great, who have risen to distinction, are not men of brains, but the men of aptitudes. These men of aptitudes have a poor conception of the facts of life to meet the necessities of modern expansion. They are serviceable in departments. They go as they are driven, or they resist. In either case, they explain how it is that we have a world moving so sluggishly. They are not the men of brains, the men of insight and outlook. Often enough they are foes of the men of brains.'