Elizabeth came riding home to breakfast from a gallop round the park, and passing Lady Camper’s gates, received the salutation of her parasol. Lady Camper talked with her through the bars. There was not a sign to tell of a change or twist in her neighbourly affability. She remarked simply enough, that it was her nephew’s habit to take early gallops, and possibly Elizabeth might have seen him, for his quarters were proximate; but she did not demand an answer. She had passed a rather restless night, she said. ‘How is the General?’
‘Papa must have slept soundly, for he usually calls to me through his door when he hears I am up,’ said Elizabeth.
Lady Camper nodded kindly and walked on.
Early in the morning General Ople was ready for battle. His forces were, the anticipation of victory, a carefully arranged toilet, and an unaccustomed spirit of enterprise in the realms of speech; for he was no longer in such awe of Lady Camper.
‘You have slept well?’ she inquired.
‘Excellently, my lady:
‘Yes, your daughter tells me she heard you, as she went by your door in the morning for a ride to meet my nephew. You are, I shall assume, prepared for business.’
‘Elizabeth?... to meet...?’ General Ople’s impression of anything extraneous to his emotion was feeble and passed instantly. ‘Prepared! Oh, certainly’; and he struck in a compliment on her ladyship’s fresh morning bloom.
‘It can hardly be visible,’ she responded; ‘I have not painted yet.’
‘Does your ladyship proceed to your painting in the very early morning?’
‘Rouge. I rouge.’
‘Dear me! I should not have supposed it.’
‘You have speculated on it very openly, General. I remember your trying to see a freckle through the rouge; but the truth is, I am of a supernatural paleness if I do not rouge, so I do. You understand, therefore, I have a false complexion. Now to business.’
‘If your ladyship insists on calling it business. I have little to offer—myself!’
‘You have a gentlemanly residence.’
‘It is, my lady, it is. It is a bijou.’
‘Ah!’ Lady Camper sighed dejectedly.
‘It is a perfect bijou!’
‘Oblige me, General, by not pronouncing the French word as if you were swearing by something in English, like a trooper.’
General Ople started, admitted that the word was French, and apologized for his pronunciation. Her variability was now visible over a corner of the battlefield like a thunder-cloud.
‘The business we have to discuss concerns the young people, General.’
‘Yes,’ brightened by this, he assented: ‘Yes, dear Lady Camper; it is a part of the business; it is a secondary part; it has to be discussed; I say I subscribe beforehand. I may say, that honouring, esteeming you as I do, and hoping ardently for your consent....
‘They must have a home and an income, General.’
‘I presume, dearest lady, that Elizabeth will be welcome in your home. I certainly shall never chase Reginald out of mine.’
Lady Camper threw back her head. ‘Then you are not yet awake, or you practice the art of sleeping with open eyes! Now listen to me. I rouge, I have told you. I like colour, and I do not like to see wrinkles or have them seen. Therefore I rouge. I do not expect to deceive the world so flagrantly as to my age, and you I would not deceive for a moment. I am seventy.’
The effect of this noble frankness on the General, was to raise him from his chair in a sitting posture as if he had been blown up.
Her countenance was inexorably imperturbable under his alternate blinking and gazing that drew her close and shot her distant, like a mysterious toy.
‘But,’ said she, ‘I am an artist; I dislike the look of extreme age, so I conceal it as well as I can. You are very kind to fall in with the deception: an innocent and, I think, a proper one, before the world, though not to the gentleman who does me the honour to propose to me for my hand. You desire to settle our business first. You esteem me; I suppose you mean as much as young people mean when they say they love. Do you? Let us come to an understanding.’
‘I can,’ the melancholy General gasped, ‘I say I can—I cannot—I cannot credit your ladyship’s...’
‘You are at liberty to call me Angela.’
‘Ange...’ he tried it, and in shame relapsed. ‘Madam, yes. Thanks.’
‘Ah,’ cried Lady Camper, ‘do not use these vulgar contractions of decent speech in my presence. I abhor the word “thanks.” It is fit for fribbles.’
‘Dear me, I have used it all my life,’ groaned the General.
‘Then, for the remainder, be it understood that you renounce it. To continue, my age is...’
‘Oh, impossible, impossible,’ the General almost wailed; there was really a crack in his voice.
‘Advancing to seventy. But, like you, I am happy to say I have not a malady. I bring no invalid frame to a union that necessitates the leaving of the front door open day and night to the doctor. My belief is, I could follow my husband still on a campaign, if he were a warrior instead of a pensioner.’
General Ople winced.
He was about to say humbly, ‘As General of Brigade...’
‘Yes, yes, you want a commanding officer, and that I have seen, and that has caused me to meditate on your proposal,’ she interrupted him; while he, studying her countenance hard, with the painful aspect of a youth who lashes a donkey memory in an examination by word of mouth, attempted to marshal her signs of younger years against her awful confession of the extremely ancient, the witheringly ancient. But for the manifest rouge, manifest in spite of her declaration that she had not yet that morning proceeded to her paintbrush, he would have thrown down his glove to challenge her on the subject of her age. She had actually charms. Her mouth had a charm; her eyes were lively; her figure, mature if you like, was at least full and good; she stood upright, she had a queenly seat. His mental ejaculation was, ‘What a wonderful constitution!’
By a lapse of politeness, he repeated it to himself half aloud; he was shockingly nervous.
‘Yes, I have finer health than many a younger woman,’ she said. ‘An ordinary calculation would give me twenty good years to come. I am a widow, as you know. And, by the way, you have a leaning for widows. Have you not? I thought I had heard of a widow Barcop in this parish. Do not protest. I assure you I am a stranger to jealousy. My income...’
The General raised his hands.
‘Well, then,’ said the cool and self-contained lady, ‘before I go farther, I may ask you, knowing what you have forced me to confess, are you still of the same mind as to marriage? And one moment, General. I promise you most sincerely that your withdrawing a step shall not, as far as it touches me, affect my neighbourly and friendly sentiments; not in any degree. Shall we be as we were?’
Lady Camper extended her delicate hand to him.
He took it respectfully, inspected the aristocratic and unshrunken fingers, and kissing them, said, ‘I never withdraw from a position, unless I am beaten back. Lady Camper, I...’
‘My name is Angela.’
The General tried again: he could not utter the name.
To call a lady of seventy Angela is difficult in itself. It is, it seems, thrice difficult in the way of courtship.
‘Angela!’ said she.
‘Yes. I say, there is not a more beautiful female name, dear Lady Camper.’
‘Spare me that word “female” as long as you live. Address me by that name, if you please.’
The General smiled. The smile was meant for propitiation and sweetness. It became a brazen smile.
‘Unless you wish to step back,’ said she.
‘Indeed, no. I am happy, Lady Camper. My life is yours. I say, my life is devoted to you, dear madam.’
‘Angela!’
General Ople was blushingly delivered of the name.
‘That will do,’ said she. ‘And as I think it possible one may be admired too much as an artist, I must request you to keep my number of years a secret.’
‘To the death, madam,’ said the General.
‘And now we will take a turn in the garden, Wilson Ople. And beware of one thing, for a commencement, for you are full of weeds, and I mean to pluck out a few: never call any place a gentlemanly residence in my hearing, nor let it come to my ears that you have been using the phrase elsewhere. Don’t express astonishment. At present it is enough that I dislike it. But this only,’ Lady Camper added, ‘this only if it is not your intention to withdraw from your position.’
‘Madam, my lady, I was saying—hem!—Angela, I could not wish to withdraw.’
Lady Camper leaned with some pressure on his arm, observing, ‘You have a curious attachment to antiquities.’
‘My dear lady, it is your mind; I say, it is your mind: I was saying, I am in love with your mind,’ the General endeavoured to assure her, and himself too.
‘Or is it my powers as an artist?’
‘Your mind, your extraordinary powers of mind.’
‘Well,’ said Lady Camper, ‘a veteran General of Brigade is as good a crutch as a childless old grannam can have.’
And as a crutch, General Ople, parading her grounds with the aged woman, found himself used and treated.
The accuracy of his perceptions might be questioned. He was like a man stunned by some great tropical fruit, which responds to the longing of his eyes by falling on his head; but it appeared to him, that she increased in bitterness at every step they took, as if determined to make him realize her wrinkles.
He was even so inconsequent, or so little recognized his position, as to object in his heart to hear himself called Wilson.
It is true that she uttered Wilsonople as if the names formed one word. And on a second occasion (when he inclined to feel hurt) she remarked, ‘I fear me, Wilsonople, if we are to speak plainly, thou art but a fool.’ He, perhaps, naturally objected to that. He was, however, giddy, and barely knew.
Yet once more the magical woman changed. All semblance of harshness, and harridan-like spike-tonguedness vanished when she said adieu.
The astronomer, looking at the crusty jag and scoria of the magnified moon through his telescope, and again with naked eyes at the soft-beaming moon, when the crater-ridges are faint as eyebrow-pencillings, has a similar sharp alternation of prospect to that which mystified General Ople.
But between watching an orb that is only variable at our caprice, and contemplating a woman who shifts and quivers ever with her own, how vast the difference!
And consider that this woman is about to be one’s wife! He could have believed (if he had not known full surely that such things are not) he was in the hands of a witch.
Lady Camper’s ‘adieu’ was perfectly beautiful—a kind, cordial, intimate, above all, to satisfy his present craving, it was a lady-like adieu—the adieu of a delicate and elegant woman, who had hardly left her anchorage by forty to sail into the fifties.
Alas! he had her word for it, that she was not less than seventy. And, worse, she had betrayed most melancholy signs of sourness and agedness as soon as he had sworn himself to her fast and fixed.
‘The road is open to you to retreat,’ were her last words.
‘My road,’ he answered gallantly, ‘is forward.’
He was drawing backward as he said it, and something provoked her to smile.
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