Lady Camper’s return was the
subject of speculation in the neighbourhood, for most
people thought she would cease to persecute the General
with her preposterous and unwarrantable pen-and-ink
sketches when living so closely proximate; and how
he would behave was the question. Those who made
a hero of him were sure he would treat her with disdain.
Others were uncertain. He had been so severely
hit that it seemed possible he would not show much
spirit.
He, for his part, had come to entertain
such dread of the post, that Lady Camper’s return
relieved him of his morning apprehensions; and he
would have forgiven her, though he feared to see her,
if only she had promised to leave him in peace for
the future. He feared to see her, because of
the too probable furnishing of fresh matter for her
ladyship’s hand. Of course he could not
avoid being seen by her, and that was a particular
misery. A gentlemanly humility, or demureness
of aspect, when seen, would, he hoped, disarm his enemy.
It should, he thought. He had borne unheard-of
things. No one of his friends and acquaintances
knew, they could not know, what he had endured.
It has caused him fits of stammering. It had
destroyed the composure of his gait. Elizabeth
had informed him that he talked to himself incessantly,
and aloud. She, poor child, looked pale too.
She was evidently anxious about him.
Young Rolles, whom he had met now
and then, persisted in praising his aunt’s good
heart. So, perhaps, having satiated her revenge,
she might now be inclined for peace, on the terms
of distant civility.
‘Yes! poor Elizabeth!’
sighed the General, in pity of the poor girl’s
disappointment; ’poor Elizabeth! she little guesses
what her father has gone through. Poor child!
I say, she hasn’t an idea of my sufferings.’
General Ople delivered his card at
Lady Camper’s lodgegates and escaped to his
residence in a state of prickly heat that required
the brushing of his hair with hard brushes for several
minutes to comfort and re-establish him.
He had fallen to working in his garden,
when Lady Camper’s card was brought to him an
hour after the delivery of his own; a pleasing promptitude,
showing signs of repentance, and suggesting to the
General instantly some sharp sarcasms upon women,
which he had come upon in quotations in the papers
and the pulpit, his two main sources of information.
Instead of handing back the card to
the maid, he stuck it in his hat and went on digging.
The first of a series of letters containing
shameless realistic caricatures was handed to him
the afternoon following. They came fast and thick.
Not a day’s interval of grace was allowed.
Niobe under the shafts of Diana was hardly less violently
and mortally assailed. The deadliness of the
attack lay in the ridicule of the daily habits of one
of the most sensitive of men, as to his personal appearance,
and the opinion of the world. He might have concealed
the sketches, but he could not have concealed the
bruises, and people were perpetually asking the unhappy
General what he was saying, for he spoke to himself
as if he were repeating something to them for the
tenth time.
‘I say,’ said he, ’I
say that for a lady, really an educated lady, to sit,
as she must I was saying, she must have
sat in an attic to have the right view of me.
And there you see this is what she has done.
This is the last, this is the afternoon’s delivery.
Her ladyship has me correctly as to costume, but I
could not exhibit such a sketch to ladies.’
A back view of the General was displayed
in his act of digging.
‘I say I could not allow ladies
to see it,’ he informed the gentlemen, who were
suffered to inspect it freely.
’But you see, I have no means
of escape; I am at her mercy from morning to night,’
the General said, with a quivering tongue, ’unless
I stay at home inside the house; and that is death
to me, or unless I abandon the place, and my lease;
and I shall I say, I shall find nowhere
in England for anything like the money or conveniences
such a gent a residence you would call
fit for a gentleman. I call it a bi... it is,
in short, a gem. But I shall have to go.’
Young Rolles offered to expostulate with his aunt
Angela.
The General said, ’Tha...
I thank you very much. I would not have her ladyship
suppose I am so susceptible. I hardly know,’
he confessed pitiably, ’what it is right to
say, and what not what not. I-I-I never
know when I am not looking a fool. I hurry from
tree to tree to shun the light. I am seriously
affected in my appetite. I say, I shall have to
go.’
Reginald gave him to understand that
if he flew, the shafts would follow him, for Lady
Camper would never forgive his running away, and was
quite equal to publishing a book of the adventures
of Wilsonople.
Sunday afternoon, walking in the park
with his daughter on his arm, General Ople met Mr.
Rolles. He saw that the young man and Elizabeth
were mortally pale, and as the very idea of wretchedness
directed his attention to himself, he addressed them
conjointly on the subject of his persecution, giving
neither of them a chance of speaking until they were
constrained to part.
A sketch was the consequence, in which
a withered Cupid and a fading Psyche were seen divided
by Wilsonople, who keeps them forcibly asunder with
policeman’s fists, while courteously and elegantly
entreating them to hear him. ‘Meet,’
he tells them, ’as often as you like, in my
company, so long as you listen to me’; and the
pathos of his aspect makes hungry demand for a sympathetic
audience.
Now, this, and not the series representing
the martyrdom of the old couple at Douro Lodge Gates,
whose rigid frames bore witness to the close packing
of a gentlemanly residence, this was the sketch General
Ople, in his madness from the pursuing bite of the
gadfly, handed about at Mrs. Pollington’s lawn-party.
Some have said, that he should not have betrayed his
daughter; but it is reasonable to suppose he had no
idea of his daughter’s being the Psyche.
Or if he had, it was indistinct, owing to the violence
of his personal emotion. Assuming this to have
been the very sketch; he handed it to two or three
ladies in turn, and was heard to deliver himself at
intervals in the following snatches: ’As
you like, my lady, as you like; strike, I say strike;
I bear it; I say I bear it. ... If her ladyship
is unforgiving, I say I am enduring.... I may
go, I was saying I may go mad, but while I have my
reason I walk upright, I walk upright.’
Mr. Pollington and certain City gentlemen
hearing the poor General’s renewed soliloquies,
were seized with disgust of Lady Camper’s conduct,
and stoutly advised an application to the Law Courts.
He gave ear to them abstractedly,
but after pulling out the whole chapter of the caricatures
(which it seemed that he kept in a case of morocco
leather in his breast-pocket), showing them, with comments
on them, and observing, ’There will be more,
there must be more, I say I am sure there are things
I do that her ladyship will discover and expose,’
he declined to seek redress or simple protection; and
the miserable spectacle was exhibited soon after of
this courtly man listening to Mrs. Barcop on the weather,
and replying in acquiescence: ’It is hot. If
your ladyship will only abstain from colours.
Very hot as you say, madam, I do not complain
of pen and ink, but I would rather escape colours.
And I dare say you find it hot too?’
Mrs. Barcop shut her eyes and sighed
over the wreck of a handsome military officer.
She asked him: ‘What is your objection
to colours?’
His hand was at his breast-pocket
immediately, as he said: ’Have you not
seen?’ though but a few minutes back
he had shown her the contents of the packet, including
a hurried glance of the famous digging scene.
By this time the entire district was
in fervid sympathy with General Ople. The ladies
did not, as their lords did, proclaim astonishment
that a man should suffer a woman to goad him to a
state of semi-lunacy; but one or two confessed to
their husbands, that it required a great admiration
of General Ople not to despise him, both for his susceptibility
and his patience. As for the men, they knew him
to have faced the balls in bellowing battle-strife;
they knew him to have endured privation, not only
cold but downright want of food and drink an
almost unimaginable horror to these brave daily feasters;
so they could not quite look on him in contempt; but
his want of sense was offensive, and still more so
his submission to a scourging by a woman. Not
one of them would have deigned to feel it. Would
they have allowed her to see that she could sting
them? They would have laughed at her. Or
they would have dragged her before a magistrate.
It was a Sunday in early Summer when
General Ople walked to morning service, unaccompanied
by Elizabeth, who was unwell. The church was of
the considerate old-fashioned order, with deaf square
pews, permitting the mind to abstract itself from
the sermon, or wrestle at leisure with the difficulties
presented by the preacher, as General Ople often did,
feeling not a little in love with his sincere attentiveness
for grappling with the knotty point and partially
allowing the struggle to be seen.
The Church was, besides, a sanctuary
for him. Hither his enemy did not come.
He had this one place of refuge, and he almost looked
a happy man again.
He had passed into his hat and out
of it, which he habitually did standing, when who
should walk up to within a couple of yards of him
but Lady Camper. Her pew was full of poor people,
who made signs of retiring. She signified to
them that they were to sit, then quietly took her
seat among them, fronting the General across the aisle.
During the sermon a low voice, sharp
in contradistinction to the monotone of the preacher’s,
was heard to repeat these words: ’I say
I am not sure I shall survive it.’ Considerable
muttering in the same quarter was heard besides.
After the customary ceremonious game,
when all were free to move, of nobody liking to move
first, Lady Camper and a charity boy were the persons
who took the lead. But Lady Camper could not quit
her pew, owing to the sticking of the door. She
smiled as with her pretty hand she twice or thrice
essayed to shake it open. General Ople strode
to her aid. He pulled the door, gave the shadow
of a respectful bow, and no doubt he would have withdrawn,
had not Lady Camper, while acknowledging the civility,
placed her prayer-book in his hands to carry at her
heels. There was no choice for him. He made
a sort of slipping dance back for his hat, and followed
her ladyship. All present being eager to witness
the spectacle, the passage of Lady Camper dragging
the victim General behind her was observed without
a stir of the well-dressed members of the congregation,
until a desire overcame them to see how Lady Camper
would behave to her fish when she had him outside the
sacred edifice.
None could have imagined such a scene.
Lady Camper was in her carriage; General Ople was
holding her prayer-book, hat in hand, at the carriage
step, and he looked as if he were toasting before the
bars of a furnace; for while he stood there, Lady
Camper was rapidly pencilling outlines in a small
pocket sketchbook. There are dogs whose shyness
is put to it to endure human observation and a direct
address to them, even on the part of their masters;
and these dear simple dogs wag tail and turn their
heads aside waveringly, as though to entreat you not
to eye them and talk to them so. General Ople,
in the presence of the sketchbook, was much like the
nervous animal. He would fain have run away.
He glanced at it, and round about, and again at it,
and at the heavens. Her ladyship’s cruelty,
and his inexplicable submission to it, were witnessed
of the multitude.
The General’s friends walked
very slowly. Lady Camper’s carriage whirled
by, and the General came up with them, accosting them
and himself alternately. They asked him where
Elizabeth was, and he replied, ’Poor child,
yes! I am told she is pale, but I cannot, believe
I am so perfectly, I say so perfectly ridiculous,
when I join the responses.’ He drew forth
half a dozen sheets, and showed them sketches that
Lady Camper had taken in church, caricaturing him
in the sitting down and the standing up. She
had torn them out of the book, and presented them to
him when driving off. ’I was saying, worship
in the ordinary sense will be interdicted to me if
her ladyship...,’ said the General, woefully
shuffling the sketch-paper sheets in which he figured.
He made the following odd confession
to Mr. and Mrs. Gosling on the road: that
he had gone to his chest, and taken out his sword-belt
to measure his girth, and found himself thinner than
when he left the service, which had not been the case
before his attendance at the last levee of the foregoing
season. So the deduction was obvious, that Lady
Camper had reduced him. She had reduced him as
effectually as a harassing siege.
‘But why do you pay attention
to her? Why...!’ exclaimed Mr. Gosling,
a gentleman of the City, whose roundness would have
turned a rifle-shot.
‘To allow her to wound you so
seriously!’ exclaimed Mrs. Gosling.
‘Madam, if she were my wife,’
the General explained, ’I should feel it.
I say it is the fact of it; I feel it, if I appear
so extremely ridiculous to a human eye, to any one
eye.’
‘To Lady Camper’s eye.’
He admitted it might be that.
He had not thought of ascribing the acuteness of his
pain to the miserable image he presented in this particular
lady’s eye. No; it really was true, curiously
true: another lady’s eye might have transformed
him to a pumpkin shape, exaggerated all his foibles
fifty-fold, and he, though not liking it, of course
not, would yet have preserved a certain manly equanimity.
How was it Lady Camper had such power over him? a
lady concealing seventy years with a rouge-box or
paint-pot! It was witchcraft in its worst character.
He had for six months at her bidding been actually
living the life of a beast, degraded in his own esteem;
scorched by every laugh he heard; running, pursued,
overtaken, and as it were scored or branded, and then
let go for the process to be repeated.