a letter to a newspaper then.
Lady Charlotte paid an early visit to the office of the great London solicitor, Arthur Abner, who wielded the law as an instrument of protection for countless illustrious people afflicted by what they stir or attract in a wealthy metropolis. She went simply to gossip of her brother’s affairs with a refreshing man of the world, not given to circumlocutions, and not afraid of her: she had no deeper object; but fancying she heard the clerk, on his jump from the stool, inform her that Mr. Abner was out, “Out?” she cried, and rattled the room, thumping, under knitted brows. “Out of town?” For a man of business taking holidays, when a lady craves for gossip, disappointed her faith in him as cruelly as the shut-up, empty inn the broken hunter knocking at a hollow door miles off home.
Mr. Abner, hatted and gloved and smiling, came forth. “Going out, the man meant, Lady Charlotte. At your service for five minutes.”
She complimented his acuteness, in the remark, “You see I’ve only come to chat,” and entered his room.
He led her to her theme: “The excitement is pretty well over.”
“My brother’s my chief care—always was. I’m afraid he’ll be pitchforking at it again, and we shall have another blast. That letter ought never to have been printed. That editor deserves the horsewhip for letting it appear. If he prints a second one I shall treat him as a personal enemy.”
“Better make a friend of him.”
“How?”
“Meet him at my table.”
She jumped an illumined half-about on her chair. “So I will, then. What are the creature’s tastes?”
“Hunts, does he?” The editor rose in her mind from the state of neuter to something of a man. “I recollect an article in that paper on the Ormont duel. I hate duelling, but I side with my brother. I had to laugh, though. Luckily, there’s no woman on hand at present, as far as I know. Ormont’s not likely to be hooked by garrison women or blacks. Those coloured women—some of ours too—send the nose to the clouds; not a bad sign for health. And there are men like that old Cardinal Guicciardini tells of… hum! Ormont’s not one of them. I hope he’ll stay in India till this blows over, or I shall be hearing of provocations.”
“You have seen the Duke?”
She nodded. Her reserve was a summary of the interview. “Kind, as he always is,” she said. “Ormont has no chance of employment unless there’s a European war. They can’t overlook him in case of war. He’ll have to pray for that.”
“Let us hope we shan’t get it.”
“My wish; but I have to think of my brother. If he’s in England with no employment, he’s in a mess with women and men both. He kicks if he’s laid aside to rust. He has a big heart. That’s what I said: all he wants is to serve his country. If you won’t have war, give him Gibraltar or Malta, or command of one of our military districts. The South-eastern ‘ll be vacant soon. He’d like to be Constable of the Castle, and have an eye on France.”
“I think he’s fond of the French?”
“Loves the French. Expects to have to fight them all the same. He loves his country best. Here’s the man everybody’s abusing!”
“I demur, my lady. I was dining the other day with a client of mine, and a youngster was present who spoke of Lord Ormont in a way I should like you to have heard. He seemed to know the whole of Lord Ormont’s career, from the time of the ride to Paraguay up to the capture of the plotting Rajah. He carried the table.”
“Good boy! We must turn to the boys for justice, then. Name your day for this man, this editor.”
“I will see him. You shall have the day to-night.”
Lady Charlotte and the editor met. She was racy, he anecdotal. Stag, fox, and hare ran before them, over fields and through drawing-rooms: the scent was rich. They found that they could talk to one another as they thought; that he was not the Isle-bound burgess, nor she the postured English great lady; and they exchanged salt, without which your current scandal is of exhausted savour. They enjoyed the peculiar novel relish of it, coming from a social pressman and a dame of high society. The different hemispheres became known as one sphere to these birds of broad wing convening in the upper blue above a quartered carcase earth.
A week later a letter, the envelope of a bulky letter in Lord Ormont’s handwriting, reached Lady Charlotte. There was a line from the editor:
“Would it please your ladyship to have this printed?”
She read the letter, and replied:
“Come to me for six days; you shall have the best mount in the county.”
An editor devoid of malice might probably have forborne to print a letter that appealed to Lady Charlotte, or touched her sensations, as if a glimpse of the moon, on the homeward ride in winter on a nodding horse, had suddenly bared to view a precipitous quarry within two steps. There is no knowing: few men can forbear to tell a spicy story of their friends; and an editor, to whom an exhibition of the immensely preposterous on the part of one writing arrogantly must be provocative, would feel the interests of his Journal, not to speak of the claims of readers, pluck at him when he meditated the consignment of such a precious composition to extinction. Lady Charlotte withheld a sight of the letter from Mr. Eglett. She laid it in her desk, understanding well that it was a laugh lost to the world. Poets could reasonably feign it to shake the desk inclosing it. She had a strong sense of humour; her mind reverted to the desk in a way to make her lips shut grimly. She sided with her brother.
Only pen in hand did he lay himself open to the enemy. In his personal intercourse he was the last of men to be taken at a disadvantage. Lady Charlotte was brought round to the distasteful idea of some help coming from a legitimate adjunct at his elbow: a restraining woman—wife, it had to be said. And to name the word wife for Thomas Rowsley, Earl of Ormont, put up the porcupine quills she bristled with at the survey of a sex thirsting, and likely to continue thirsting, for such honour. What woman had she known fit to bear the name? She had assumed the judicial seat upon the pretensions of several, and dismissed them to their limbo, after testifying against them. Who is to know the fit one in these mines of deception? Women of the class offering wives decline to be taken on trial; they are boxes of puzzles—often dire surprises. Her brother knew them well enough to shy at the box. Her brother Rowsley had a funny pride, like a boy at a game, at the never having been caught by one among the many he made captive. She let him have it all to himself.
He boasted it to a sister sharing the pride exultant in the cry of the hawk, scornful of ambitions poultry, a passed finger-post to the plucked, and really regretful that no woman had been created fit for him. When she was not aiding with her brother, women, however contemptible for their weakness, appeared to her as better than barn-door fowl, or vermin in their multitudes gnawing to get at the cheese-trap. She could be humane, even sisterly, with women whose conduct or prattle did not outrage plain sense, just as the stickler for the privileges of her class was large-heartedly charitable to the classes flowing in oily orderliness round about below it—if they did so flow. Unable to read woman’s character, except upon the broadest lines as it were the spider’s main threads of its web, she read men minutely, from the fact that they were neither mysteries nor terrors to her; but creatures of importunate appetites, humorous objects; very manageable, if we leave the road to their muscles, dress their wounds, smoothe their creases, plume their vanity; and she had an unerring eye for the man to be used when a blow was needed, methods for setting him in action likewise. She knew how much stronger than ordinary men the woman who can put them in motion. They can be
