has a fool of an aunt, I’m told; as often in
the house as not. Good proof of his fondness
for the woman, if he swallows half a year of the aunt!
Well, you won’t, unless you’ve mere man’s
eyes, be able to help seeing him trying to hide what
he suffers from that aunt. He bears it, like
the man he is; but woe to another betraying it!
She has a tongue that goes like the reel of a rod,
with a pike bolting out of the shallows to the snag
he knows—to wind round it and defy you to
pull. Often my brother Rowsley and I have fished
the day long, and in hard weather, and brought home
a basket; and he boasted of it more than of anything
he has ever done since. That woman holds him
away from me now. I say no harm of her.
She may be right enough from her point of view; or
it mayn’t be owing to her. I wouldn’t
blame a woman. Well, but my point with you is,
you swallow the woman’s aunt—the lady’s
aunt—without betraying you suffer at all.
Lord Ormont has eyes of an eagle for a speck above
the surface. All the more because the aunt is
a gabbling idiot does he—I say it seeing
it—fire up to defend her from the sneer
of the lip or half a sign of it! No, you would
be an your guard; I can trust you. Of course
you’d behave like the gentleman you are where
any kind of woman’s concerned; but you mustn’t
let a shadow be seen, think what you may. The
woman—lady—calling herself Lady
Ormont,—poor woman, I should do the same
in her place,—she has a hard game to play;
I have to be for my family: she has manners,
I’m told; holds herself properly. She fancies
she brings him up to the altar, in the end, by decent
behaviour. That’s a delusion. It’s
creditable to her, only she can’t understand
the claims of the family upon a man like my brother.
When you have spare time—’kick-ups,’
he need to call it, writing to me from school—come
here; you’re welcome, after three days’
notice. I shall be glad to see you again.
You’ve gone some way to make a man of Leo.”
He liked her well: he promised to come.
She was a sinewy bite of the gentle sex, but she
had much flavour, and she gave nourishment.
“Let me have three days’ notice,”
she repeated.
“Not less, Lady Charlotte,” said he.
Weyburn received intimation from Arthur Abner of the
likely day Lord Ormont would appoint, and he left
Olmer for London to hold himself in readiness.
Lady Charlotte and Leo drove him to meet the coach.
Philippa, so strangely baffled in her natural curiosity,
begged for a seat; she begged to be allowed to ride.
Petitions were rejected. She stood at the window
seeing “Grandmama’s tutor,” as she
named him, carried off by grandmama. Her nature
was avenged on her tyrant grandmama: it brought
up almost to her tongue thoughts which would have remained
subterranean, under control of her habit of mind, or
the nursery’s modesty, if she had been less
tyrannically treated. They were subterranean
thoughts, Nature’s original, such as the sense
of injustice will rouse in young women; and they are
better unstirred, for they ripen girls over-rapidly
when they are made to revolve near the surface.
It flashed on the girl why she had been treated tyrannically.