Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Volume 4Meredith, George
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Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Volume 4
Meredith, George
English fiction -- 19th century
When her wild music of the blood had fallen to stillness with the stopped
wheels, she was in the musky, small, low room of the diamond window-
panes, at her companion's disposal for what he might deem the best: he
was her fate. But the more she leaned on a man of self-control, the more
she admired; and an admiration that may not speak itself to the object
present drops inward, stirs the founts; and if these are repressed, the
tenderness which is not allowed to weep will drown self-pity, hardening
the woman to summon scruples in relation to her unworthiness. He might
choose to forget, but the more she admired, the less could her feminine
conscience permit of an utter or of any forgetfulness that she was not
the girl Browny, whom he once loved--perhaps loved now, under some
illusion of his old passion for her--does love now, ill-omened as he is
in that! She read him by her startled reading of her own heart, and she
constrained her will to keep from doing, saying, looking aught that would
burden without gracing his fortunes. For, as she felt, a look, a word, a
touch would do the mischief; she had no resistance behind her cold face,
only the physical scruple, which would become the moral unworthiness if
in any way she induced him to break his guard and blow hers to shreds.
An honourable conscience before the world has not the same certificate in
love's pure realm. They are different kingdoms. A girl may be of both;
a married woman, peering outside the narrow circle of her wedding-ring,
should let her eyelids fall and the unseen fires consume her.
Their common thought was now, Will the chariot follow?
What will he do if it comes? was an unformed question with Aminta.
He had formed and not answered it, holding himself, sincerely at the
moment, bound to her wishes. Near the end of Ashead main street she had
turned to him in her seat beside the driver, and conveyed silently, with
the dental play of her tongue and pouted lips, 'No title.'
Upon that sign, waxen to those lips, he had said to the driver, 'You took
your orders from Lady Charlotte?
And the reply, 'Her ladyship directed me sir, exonerated Lord Ormont so
far.
Weyburn remembered then a passage of one of her steady looks, wherein an
oracle was mute. He tried several of the diviner's shots to interpret
it: she was beyond his reach. She was in her blissful delirium of the
flight, and reproached him with giving her the little bit less to resent
--she who had no sense of resentment, except the claim on it to excuse.
Their landlady entered the room to lay the cloth for tea and eggs. She
made offer of bacon as well, homecured. She was a Hampshire woman, and
understood the rearing of pigs. Her husband had been a cricketer, and
played for his county. He didn't often beat Hampshire! They had a good
garden of vegetables, and grass-land enough for two cows. They made
their own bread, their own butter, but did not brew.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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