Our young barbarians have it all their
own way with us when they fall into love-liking; they
lead us whither they please, and interest us in their
wishings, their weepings, and that fine performance,
their kissings. But when we see our veterans
tottering to their fall, we scarcely consent to their
having a wish; as for a kiss, we halloo at them if
we discover them on a byway to the sacred grove where
such things are supposed to be done by the venerable.
And this piece of rank injustice, not to say impoliteness,
is entirely because of an unsound opinion that Nature
is not in it, as though it were our esteem for Nature
which caused us to disrespect them. They, in truth,
show her to us discreet, civilized, in a decent moral
aspect: vistas of real life, views of the mind’s
eye, are opened by their touching little emotions;
whereas those bully youngsters who come bellowing at
us and catch us by the senses plainly prove either
that we are no better than they, or that we give our
attention to Nature only when she makes us afraid of
her. If we cared for her, we should be up and
after her reverentially in her sedater steps, deeply
studying her in her slower paces. She teaches
them nothing when they are whirling. Our closest
instructors, the true philosophers the
story-tellers, in short-will learn in time that Nature
is not of necessity always roaring, and as soon as
they do, the world may be said to be enlightened.
Meantime, in the contemplation of a pair of white
whiskers fluttering round a pair of manifestly painted
cheeks, be assured that Nature is in it: not
that hectoring wanton but let the young
have their fun. Let the superior interest of the
passions of the aged be conceded, and not a word shall
be said against the young.
If, then, Nature is in it, how has
she been made active? The reason of her launch
upon this last adventure is, that she has perceived
the person who can supply the virtue known to her by
experience to be wanting. Thus, in the broader
instance, many who have journeyed far down the road,
turn back to the worship of youth, which they have
lost. Some are for the graceful worldliness of
wit, of which they have just share enough to admire
it. Some are captivated by hands that can wield
the rod, which in earlier days they escaped to their
cost. In the case of General Ople, it was partly
her whippings of him, partly her penetration; her
ability, that sat so finely on a wealthy woman, her
indifference to conventional manners, that so well
beseemed a nobly-born one, and more than all, her
correction of his little weaknesses and incompetencies,
in spite of his dislike of it, won him. He began
to feel a sort of nibbling pleasure in her grotesque
sketches of his person; a tendency to recur to the
old ones while dreading the arrival of new. You
hear old gentlemen speak fondly of the swish; and they
are not attached to pain, but the instrument revives
their feeling of youth; and General Ople half enjoyed,
while shrinking, Lady Camper’s foregone outlines
of him. For in the distance, the whip’s-end
may look like a clinging caress instead of a stinging
flick. But this craven melting in his heart was
rebuked by a very worthy pride, that flew for support
to the injury she had done to his devotions, and the
offence to the sacred edifice. After thinking
over it, he decided that he must quit his residence;
and as it appeared to him in the light of duty, he,
with an unspoken anguish, commissioned the house-agent
of his town to sell his lease or let the house furnished,
without further parley.
From the house-agent’s shop
he turned into the chemist’s, for a tonic a
foolish proceeding, for he had received bracing enough
in the blow he had just dealt himself, but he had
been cogitating on tonics recently, imagining certain
valiant effects of them, with visions of a former
careless happiness that they were likely to restore.
So he requested to have the tonic strong, and he took
one glass of it over the counter.
Fifteen minutes after the draught,
he came in sight of his house, and beholding it, he
could have called it a gentlemanly residence aloud
under Lady Camper’s windows, his insurgency was
of such violence. He talked of it incessantly,
but forbore to tell Elizabeth, as she was looking
pale, the reason why its modest merits touched him
so. He longed for the hour of his next dose,
and for a caricature to follow, that he might drink
and defy it. A caricature was really due to him,
he thought; otherwise why had he abandoned his bijou
dwelling? Lady Camper, however, sent none.
He had to wait a fortnight before one came, and that
was rather a likeness, and a handsome likeness, except
as regarded a certain disorderliness in his dress,
which he knew to be very unlike him. Still it
despatched him to the looking-glass, to bring that
verifier of facts in evidence against the sketch.
While sitting there he heard the housemaid’s
knock at the door, and the strange intelligence that
his daughter was with Lady Camper, and had left word
that she hoped he would not forget his engagement
to go to Mrs. Baerens’ lawn-party.
The General jumped away from the glass,
shouting at the absent Elizabeth in a fit of wrath
so foreign to him, that he returned hurriedly to have
another look at himself, and exclaimed at the pitch
of his voice, ’I say I attribute it to an indigestion
of that tonic. Do you hear?’ The housemaid
faintly answered outside the door that she did, alarming
him, for there seemed to be confusion somewhere.
His hope was that no one would mention Lady Camper’s
name, for the mere thought of her caused a rush to
his head. ‘I believe I am in for a touch
of apoplexy,’ he said to the rector, who greeted
him, in advance of the ladies, on Mr. Baerens’
lawn. He said it smilingly, but wanting some show
of sympathy, instead of the whisper and meaningless
hand at his clerical band, with which the rector responded,
he cried, ‘Apoplexy,’ and his friend seemed
then to understand, and disappeared among the ladies.
Several of them surrounded the General,
and one inquired whether the series was being continued.
He drew forth his pocket-book, handed her the latest,
and remarked on the gross injustice of it; for, as
he requested them to take note, her ladyship now sketched
him as a person inattentive to his dress, and he begged
them to observe that she had drawn him with his necktie
hanging loose. ’And that, I say that has
never been known of me since I first entered society.’
The ladies exchanged looks of profound
concern; for the fact was, the General had come without
any necktie and any collar, and he appeared to be
unaware of the circumstance. The rector had told
them, that in answer to a hint he had dropped on the
subject of neckties, General Ople expressed a slight
apprehension of apoplexy; but his careless or merely
partial observance of the laws of buttonment could
have nothing to do with such fears. They signified
rather a disorder of the intelligence. Elizabeth
was condemned for leaving him to go about alone.
The situation was really most painful, for a word
to so sensitive a man would drive him away in shame
and for good; and still, to let him parade the ground
in the state, compared with his natural self, of scarecrow,
and with the dreadful habit of talking to himself
quite rageing, was a horrible alternative. Mrs.
Baerens at last directed her husband upon the General,
trembling as though she watched for the operations
of a fish torpedo; and other ladies shared her excessive
anxiousness, for Mr. Baerens had the manner and the
look of artillery, and on this occasion carried a
surcharge of powder.
The General bent his ear to Mr. Baerens,
whose German-English and repeated remark, ‘I
am to do it wid delicassy,’ did not assist his
comprehension; and when he might have been enlightened,
he was petrified by seeing Lady Camper walk on the
lawn with Elizabeth. The great lady stood a moment
beside Mrs. Baerens; she came straight over to him,
contemplating him in silence.
Then she said, ‘Your arm, General
Ople,’ and she made one circuit of the lawn
with him, barely speaking.
At her request, he conducted her to
her carriage. He took a seat beside her, obediently.
He felt that he was being sketched, and comported
himself like a child’s flat man, that jumps at
the pulling of a string.
‘Where have you left your girl, General?’
Before he could rally his wits to answer the question,
he was asked:
‘And what have you done with your necktie and
collar?’
He touched his throat.
‘I am rather nervous to-day,
I forgot Elizabeth,’ he said, sending his fingers
in a dotting run of wonderment round his neck.
Lady Camper smiled with a triumphing humour on her
close-drawn lips.
The verified absence of necktie and collar seemed
to be choking him.
‘Never mind, you have been abroad
without them,’ said Lady Camper, ’and
that is a victory for me. And you thought of Elizabeth
first when I drew your attention to it, and that is
a victory for you. It is a very great victory.
Pray, do not be dismayed, General. You have a
handsome campaigning air. And no apologies, if
you please; I like you well enough as you are.
There is my hand.’
General Ople understood her last remark.
He pressed the lady’s hand in silence, very
nervously.
’But do not shrug your head
into your shoulders as if there were any possibility
of concealing the thunderingly evident,’ said
Lady Camper, electrifying him, what with her cordial
squeeze, her kind eyes, and her singular language.
’You have omitted the collar. Well?
The collar is the fatal finishing touch in men’s
dress; it would make Apollo look bourgeois.’
Her hand was in his: and watching
the play of her features, a spark entered General
Ople’s brain, causing him, in forgetfulness of
collar and caricatures, to ejaculate, ’Seventy?
Did your ladyship say seventy? Utterly impossible!
You trifle with me.’
’We will talk when we are free
of this accompaniment of carriage-wheels, General,’
said Lady Camper.
‘I will beg permission to go and fetch Elizabeth,
madam.’
’Rightly thought of. Fetch
her in my carriage. And, by the way, Mrs. Baerens
was my old music-mistress, and is, I think, one year
older than I. She can tell you on which side of seventy
I am.’
‘I shall not require to ask, my lady,’
he said, sighing.
’Then we will send the carriage
for Elizabeth, and have it out together at once.
I am impatient; yes, General, impatient: for
what? forgiveness.’
‘Of me, my lady?’ The General breathed
profoundly.
’Of whom else? Do you know
what it is?-I don’t think you do. You English
have the smallest experience of humanity. I mean
this: to strike so hard that, in the end, you
soften your heart to the victim. Well, that is
my weakness. And we of our blood put no restraint
on the blows we strike when we think them wanted,
so we are always overdoing it.’
General Ople assisted Lady Camper
to alight from the carriage, which was forthwith despatched
for Elizabeth.
He prepared to listen to her with
a disconnected smile of acute attentiveness.
She had changed. She spoke of
money. Ten thousand pounds must be settled on
his daughter. ‘And now,’ said she,
’you will remember that you are wanting a collar.’
He acquiesced. He craved permission
to retire for ten minutes.
‘Simplest of men! what will
cover you?’ she exclaimed, and peremptorily
bidding him sit down in the drawing-room, she took
one of the famous pair of pistols in her hand, and
said, ’If I put myself in a similar position,
and make myself decodletee too, will that satisfy you?
You see these murderous weapons. Well, I am a
coward. I dread fire-arms. They are laid
there to impose on the world, and I believe they do.
They have imposed on you. Now, you would never
think of pretending to a moral quality you do not
possess. But, silly, simple man that you are!
You can give yourself the airs of wealth, buy horses
to conceal your nakedness, and when you are taken
upon the standard of your apparent income, you would
rather seem to be beating a miserly retreat than behave
frankly and honestly. I have a little overstated
it, but I am near the mark.’
‘Your ladyship wanting courage!’ cried
the General.
‘Refresh yourself by meditating
on it,’ said she. ’And to prove it
to you, I was glad to take this house when I knew
I was to have a gallant gentleman for a neighbour.
No visitors will be admitted, General Ople, so you
are bare-throated only to me: sit quietly.
One day you speculated on the paint in my cheeks for
the space of a minute and a half: I had
said that I freckled easily. Your look signified
that you really could not detect a single freckle
for the paint. I forgave you, or I did not.
But when I found you, on closer acquaintance, as indifferent
to your daughter’s happiness as you had been
to her reputation...’
‘My daughter! her reputation! her happiness!’
General Ople raised his eyes under a wave, half uttering
the outcries.
’So indifferent to her reputation,
that you allowed a young man to talk with her over
the wall, and meet her by appointment: so reckless
of the girl’s happiness, that when I tried to
bring you to a treaty, on her behalf, you could not
be dragged from thinking of yourself and your own
affair. When I found that, perhaps I was predisposed
to give you some of what my sisters used to call my
spice. You would not honestly state the proportions
of your income, and you affected to be faithful to
the woman of seventy. Most preposterous!
Could any caricature of mine exceed in grotesqueness
your sketch of yourself? You are a brave and a
generous man all the same: and I suspect it is
more hoodwinking than egotism or extreme
egotism that blinds you. A certain
amount you must have to be a man. You did not
like my paint, still less did you like my sincerity;
you were annoyed by my corrections of your habits of
speech; you were horrified by the age of seventy,
and you were credulous General Ople, listen
to me, and remember that you have no collar on you
were credulous of my statement of my great age, or
you chose to be so, or chose to seem so, because I
had brushed your cat’s coat against the fur.
And then, full of yourself, not thinking of Elizabeth,
but to withdraw in the chivalrous attitude of the
man true to his word to the old woman, only stickling
to bring a certain independence to the common stock,
because I quote you! and you have no collar
on, mind “you could not be at your
wife’s mercy,” you broke from your proposal
on the money question. Where was your consideration
for Elizabeth then?
’Well, General, you were fond
of thinking of yourself, and I thought I would assist
you. I gave you plenty of subject matter.
I will not say I meant to work a homoeopathic cure.
But if I drive you to forget your collar, is it or
is it not a triumph?
‘No,’ added Lady Camper,
’it is no triumph for me, but it is one for
you, if you like to make the most of it. Your
fault has been to quit active service, General, and
love your ease too well. It is the fault of your
countrymen. You must get a militia regiment, or
inspectorship of militia. You are ten times the
man in exercise. Why, do you mean to tell me
that you would have cared for those drawings of mine
when marching?’
‘I think so, I say I think so,’
remarked the General seriously.
‘I doubt it,’ said she.
’But to the point; here comes Elizabeth.
If you have not much money to spare for her, according
to your prudent calculation, reflect how this money
has enfeebled you and reduced you to the level of
the people round about us here who are,
what? Inhabitants of gentlemanly residences,
yes! But what kind of creature? They have
no mental standard, no moral aim, no native chivalry.
You were rapidly becoming one of them, only, fortunately
for you, you were sensitive to ridicule.’
‘Elizabeth shall have half my
money settled on her,’ said the General; ‘though
I fear it is not much. And if I can find occupation,
my lady...’
‘Something worthier than that,’
said Lady Camper, pencilling outlines rapidly on the
margin of a book, and he saw himself lashing a pony;
’or that,’ and he was plucking at a cabbage;
‘or that,’ and he was bowing to three
petticoated posts.
‘The likeness is exact,’ General Ople
groaned.
‘So you may suppose I have studied
you,’ said she. ’But there is no
real likeness. Slight exaggerations do more harm
to truth than reckless violations of it.
You would not have cared one bit for
a caricature, if you had not nursed the absurd idea
of being one of our conquerors. It is the very
tragedy of modesty for a man like you to have such
notions, my poor dear good friend. The modest
are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at vanity.
And reflect whether you have not been intoxicated,
for these young people have been wretched, and you
have not observed it, though one of them was living
with you, and is the child you love. There, I
have done. Pray show a good face to Elizabeth.’
The General obeyed as well as he could.
He felt very like a sheep that has come from a shearing,
and when released he wished to run away. But
hardly had he escaped before he had a desire for the
renewal of the operation. ‘She sees me
through, she sees me through,’ he was heard
saying to himself, and in the end he taught himself,
to say it with a secret exultation, for as it was
on her part an extraordinary piece of insight to see
him through, it struck him that in acknowledging the
truth of it, he made a discovery of new powers in human
nature.
General Ople studied Lady Camper diligently
for fresh proofs of her penetration of the mysteries
in his bosom; by which means, as it happened that
she was diligently observing the two betrothed young
ones, he began to watch them likewise, and took a
pleasure in the sight. Their meetings, their
partings, their rides out and home furnished him themes
of converse. He soon had enough to talk of, and
previously, as he remembered, he had never sustained
a conversation of any length with composure and the
beneficent sense of fulness. Five thousand pounds,
to which sum Lady Camper reduced her stipulation for
Elizabeth’s dowry, he signed over to his dear
girl gladly, and came out with the confession to her
ladyship that a well-invested twelve thousand comprised
his fortune. She shrugged she had left off pulling
him this way and that, so his chains were enjoyable,
and he said to himself: ’If ever she should
in the dead of night want a man to defend her!’
He mentioned it to Reginald, who had been the repository
of Elizabeth’s lamentations about her father
being left alone, forsaken, and the young man conceived
a scheme for causing his aunt’s great bell to
be rung at midnight, which would certainly have led
to a dramatic issue and the happy re-establishment
of our masculine ascendancy at the close of this history.
But he forgot it in his bridegroom’s delight,
until he was making his miserable official speech
at the wedding-breakfast, and set Elizabeth winking
over a tear. As she stood in the hall ready to
depart, a great van was observed in the road at the
gates of Douro Lodge; and this, the men in custody
declared to contain the goods and knick-knacks of
the people who had taken the house furnished for a
year, and were coming in that very afternoon.
‘I remember, I say now I remember,
I had a notice,’ the General said cheerily to
his troubled daughter.
‘But where are you to go, papa?’
the poor girl cried, close on sobbing.
‘I shall get employment of some
sort,’ said he. ’I was saying I want
it, I need it, I require it.’
‘You are saying three times
what once would have sufficed for,’ said Lady
Camper, and she asked him a few questions, frowned
with a smile, and offered him a lodgement in his neighbour’s
house.
‘Really, dearest Aunt Angela?’ said Elizabeth.
’What else can I do, child?
I have, it seems, driven him out of a gentlemanly
residence, and I must give him a ladylike one.
True, I would rather have had him at call, but as
I have always wished for a policeman in the house,
I may as well be satisfied with a soldier.’
‘But if you lose your character, my lady?’
said Reginald.
‘Then I must look to the General to restore
it.’
General Ople immediately bowed his head over Lady
Camper’s fingers.
‘An odd thing to happen to a
woman of forty-one!’ she said to her great people,
and they submitted with the best grace in the world,
while the General’s ears tingled till he felt
younger than Reginald. This, his reflections
ran, or it would be more correct to say waltzed, this
is the result of painting! that you can
believe a woman to be any age when her cheeks are
tinted!
As for Lady Camper, she had been floated
accidentally over the ridicule of the bruit of a marriage
at a time of life as terrible to her as her fiction
of seventy had been to General Ople; she resigned herself
to let things go with the tide. She had not been
blissful in her first marriage, she had abandoned
the chase of an ideal man, and she had found one who
was tunable so as not to offend her ears, likely ever
to be a fund of amusement for her humour, good, impressible,
and above all, very picturesque. There is the
secret of her, and of how it came to pass that a simple
man and a complex woman fell to union after the strangest
division.