CHAPTER VI.

IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR

Up in Aminta’s amber dressing-room; Mrs. Nargett Pagnell alluded sadly to the long month of separation, and begged her niece to let her have in plain words an exact statement of the present situation; adding, “Items will do.”  Thereupon she slipped into prattle and held the field.

She was the known, worthy, good, intolerable woman whom the burgess turns out for his world in regiments, that do and look and all but step alike; and they mean well, and have conventional worships and material aspirations, and very peculiar occult refinements, with a blind head and a haphazard gleam of acuteness, impressive to acquaintances, convincing themselves that they impersonate sagacity.  She had said this, done that; and it was, by proof, Providence consenting, the right thing.  A niece, written down in her girlhood, because of her eyes and her striking air and excellent deportment, as mate for a nobleman, marries, him before she is out of her teens.  “I said, She shall be a countess.”  A countess she is.  Providence does not comply with our predictions in order to stultify us.  Admitting the position of affairs for the moment as extraordinary, we are bound by what has happened to expect they will be conformable in the end.  Temporarily warped, we should say of them.

She could point to the reason:  it was Lord Ormont’s blunt misunderstanding of her character.  The burgess’s daughter was refining to an appreciation of the exquisite so rapidly that she could criticize patricians.  My lord had never forgiven her for correcting him in his pronunciation of her name by marriage.  Singular indeed; but men, even great men, men of title, are so, some of them, whom you could least suspect of their being so.  He would speak the “g” in Nargett, and he, declined—­after a remonstrance he declined—­to pass Pagnell under the cedilla.  Lord Ormont spoke the name like a man hating it, or an English rustic:  “Nargett Pagnell,” instead, of the soft and elegant “Naryett Pagnell,” the only true way of speaking it; and she had always taken that pronunciation of her name for a test of people’s breeding.  The expression of his lordship’s countenance under correction was memorable.  Naturally, in those honeymoony days, the young Countess of Ormont sided with her husband the earl; she declared that her aunt had never dreamed of the cedilla before the expedition to Spain.  When, for example, Alfred Nargett Pagnell had a laughing remark, which Aminta in her childhood must have heard:  “We rhyme with spaniel!”

That was the secret of Lord Ormont’s prepossession against Aminta’s aunt; and who can tell? perhaps of much of his behaviour to the beautiful young wife he at least admired, sincerely admired, though he caused her to hang her head—­cast a cloud on the head so dear to him!