Arminell, Vol. 3

There are some people who suppose that every one else has the peculiarities of Leo X., and who never approach their fellows, even when they have to speak on matters of serious import, without putting on cap and bells. They labour under the conviction that “the motley,” as Jaques said to the Duke, “is the only wear,” especially when most inappropriate to the matter of discourse.

Mr. Welsh was desirous of doing what was kind, of conveying to Arminell what he knew was to her painful information, describing to her scenes which must stir her emotions, but he could not assume a sympathetic and serious tone. He was possessed by that perverse spirit which forces a man to garnish his story, however tragic, with quirks and scraps of illustration incongruous and out of taste. He was at heart full of pity for Arminell; he had not gone to Orleigh on journalistic ends, though not averse to paying his travelling expenses by turning what he had seen into type, but he had gone for the girl’s sake, and only learned the death of his brother-in-law on reaching Orleigh. He knew that she hungered for information which she could not receive through the channels formerly open to her. As he spoke to her, his heart swelled, and he had some difficulty in controlling his emotion. Nevertheless, he assumed a tone of half banter, that galled his own sense of propriety as much as it jarred on Arminell. And this masquerade was assumed by him as much to disguise his real self from himself as from the girl. Verily, in our horror of hypocrisy, we are arrant hypocrites. Essayists and satirists have united to wage a crusade against cant, and have succeeded so completely that we dread the semblance of piety, kindliness, sweetness, lest they be taken as an assumption only. In the reaction against false appearances of goodness we have run into the opposite extreme, and put on a false appearance of roughness, hardness, and cynicism. Lest we should be taken to be apricots, with sweet outside and hard interior, we affect to be walnuts, rugged and bitter. A woman poses to herself in the glass, and adorns herself with jewelry to give pleasure first to herself and then to others; but men cock their hats, smut their noses, make grimaces in the glass, and having sneered at their own buffoon appearance, pass off the same pranks on their acquaintance. They will neither allow to themselves nor to others that they acknowledge a serious interest in the drama of life, that they have respect for what is noble, pity for what is suffering, reverence for what is holy. They affect to cast burlesque into all relations of life, as salt is put into all dishes, to make them palatable.

Arminell was not deceived by the manner of James Welsh; under the affectation of selfishness and callousness she recognised the presence of generous sympathy, just as she had seen the same quality under the chatter and pretence of the wife.

At the beginning of this story we saw Arminell present at what we called the grand transformation scene in the pantomime of life; now she had reached another, and that a more startling, thorough-going transformation scene. She saw the world and the performers therein differently from the way in which she had seen them before, the world in a real light, the performers in undress. She had got behind the scenes, and into the green-room. Delusion was no longer possible; she saw the framework of the scenery, the contrivances for the production of effects, and the actors oiling their faces with cotton-wool to remove the paint.

In former times there existed in England a profession which has become extinct – the profession of dowsing. A dowser was a man who laid claim to the peculiar gift of discernment of metal and of water. He was employed to discover mines and springs. He took in his hands a forked hazel rod, holding in each hand one of the branches. When he walked over a hidden vein of metal, or a subterranean artery of water, the rod revolved in his hands, and pointed downwards, and wherever it pointed, there he ordered the sinking of a shaft or well.

But, although dowsing after minerals and fountains has ceased to be practised, we still have among us moral dowsers, and it is even possible for us to become adepts at dowsing ourselves.

The old dowsers insisted that their profession was not an art but an inherent faculty. The dowser was born, not made. But in moral dowsing this is not the case. The faculty can most certainly be acquired, but only on one condition, that we begin with dowsing our own selves. Fiat experimentum in corpore vili. Unconsciously Arminell had been invested with this power; it had come on her at once, on that morning when her folly, her error, had been revealed to her consciousness. From that memorable moment, when she came to know herself as she really was, not as she had fancied herself to be, the manner in which she viewed other natures with which she was brought in contact was radically changed. She found herself no longer as heretofore occupied with the outer surface, its ups and downs, its fertility or its barrenness; the invisible rod turned in her hands and revealed to her the hidden veins of ore and motive currents. She saw the silver thread deep below the most unpromising surface, the limpid spring under the most rugged exterior.

As she overlooked the superficial flaws in Mr. and Mrs. Welsh because she recognised their substantial goodness, so did she begin now to perceive what had before been unnoticed in the characters of her father and step-mother. She had had eyes previously only for their foibles and infirmities, now she saw how full of sterling qualities both had been, of punctual fulfilment of duties, of conscientious discharge of the obligations imposed on them by their position and wealth, of hearty good-will for all with whom they were brought in contact. She had disregarded her little half-brother, the present Baron Lamerton, because he was only a child with childish thoughts, childish pursuits, and childish prattle; and now she saw that his was a very tender, loving spirit, which it would have been worth her while to cultivate. In the first moment of disappointment, humiliation and anger, she had been incensed against Jingles for having assisted her in perpetrating her great mistake. She saw what a fool he had been, how conceited, how ungrateful, but even over this forbidding soil the divining rod turned, and revealed a vein of noble metal. If it had not been there, he would not have accepted his humiliation with frankness and have shown so decided a moral rebound.

When one who has the dowsing faculty is in the society of those who lack it, and listens to their talk, their disparagement of others, the captiousness with which they pick at trivial blemishes, sneer at infirmities, blame short-comings, that person listens with a sort of wonder at the blindness of the talkers, at their lack of perception, because their eyes never penetrate below the surface, and a sort of pity that they have never turned it inwards and searched themselves, not for silver but for dross.

The knight Huldbrand, when riding through the Enchanted Wood, had his eyes opened, and beneath the turf and the roots of the trees, he looked through, as it were, a sheet of green glass, and saw the gold and silver veins in the earth, and the spirits that worked at, and directed their courses, opening sluices here and stopping currents there. So it is with those invested with the dowsing gift – with them in the Enchanted Wood of Life.

In the twilight room Arminell listened to Mr. Welsh’s story of the funeral of her father, with tears running down her cheeks, regardless of the manner in which the story was told, in the intensity of her interest in the matter, and conscious of the intention of the narrator.

The death of Lord Lamerton had indeed evoked an amount of feeling and regret that showed how deeply-rooted was the estimation in which his good qualities were held, and how unreal was the agitation that had been provoked against him.

The county papers of all political complexions gave laudatory notices of the late nobleman. Every one who had come within range of his influence had good words to say of him, and lamented his loss as that of a relative. Selfish interest undoubtedly mixed with the general regret. The sportsmen feared that the subscription to the foxhounds would not be maintained on the same liberal scale; the parsons, that on the occurrence of a vacancy in the Lamerton patronage, their claims would be overlooked by the trustees; the medical men regretted that the death had been too sudden to advantage them professionally; the benevolent societies feared that the park would not be thrown open to them with the same liberality; the young ladies that there would be no ball at Orleigh next winter; the topers that they would not taste again the contents of a famous cellar; the tradesmen that money would not be spent in the little country town; the artisans that work would be abandoned and hands discharged. Of course there was self-interest in the minds of those who lamented the loss of Lord Lamerton, regret was not unmingled with selfish feeling; but, then, what motives, what emotions are unmixed? The coin of the realm is not pure, it consists of metal and alloy; and the feelings that pass current among men are not less adulterated. But are they the less estimable on that account? Would they pass if unmixed? Would they be as poignant if pure? Why, the very prayers in which we address Heaven have their stiffening of self-concern, and it is this that gives them their force. Are they less acceptable on that account?

Popular feeling was doubly stirred and sympathy for the family greatly deepened by the news of the almost simultaneous death of Miss Arminell Inglett. The notice of her death had appeared first in the Times, and then in all the papers; but the circumstances were only imperfectly known. It was rumoured that the shock of the news of her father’s death had affected her fatally – her heart having always been weak – whilst in London staying with her aunt. Such an account had appeared in one of the society papers, and perhaps Mr. Welsh could give the best explanation of how it came there. This was reported at Orleigh. Others said she had died at the second family place in Northamptonshire; all agreed that she had been buried there beside her mother. Strange rumours had circulated about Miss Inglett, but they had been traced to Mrs. Cribbage, and every one knew that the tongue of that lady, like that of an ox, must be taken with salt. Consequently the rumours died away, and were wholly discredited.

And it was true that Arminell Inglett was dead. That is to say, the old self-opinionated, supercilious, self-willed Arminell was no more.

In spring the new buds are sheathed in hard husks. One warm morning after a shower they thrust aside these horny sheaths, and the tender foliage appears. It was so with Arminell. She had hitherto worn her better part, the generous qualities of her soul, in a hard and ungracious shell; now this shell had fallen off, and they broke forth, ready to expand and clothe her with a new and unexpected beauty.

CHAPTER XLIV.

FRAMING

Mr. James Welsh did all that was requisite for the arrangement of Arminell’s money-matters. She was entitled to her mother’s dower, sufficient to maintain her in easy circumstances. The settlement of her affairs with the trustees, guardians, and the solicitors of the family was a delicate transaction; Arminell authorised Welsh to act for her, and he managed with adroitness and tact, without grudging time or trouble. Meanwhile she remained an inmate of his villa in the Avenue, Shepherd’s Bush. She did not wish to be hasty in securing a house for herself and engaging a companion. She would not, however, encroach on the hospitality of the Welshes, and she insisted on becoming their lodger, paying them a moderate weekly sum for her board. They were not rich, their circumstances somewhat strait; it was an object with Mrs. Welsh to save the penny on the ’bus by walking to the railway arch; and though, in their exuberant hospitality, they would have cheerfully kept her as their guest, and treated her to the best they could afford, she insisted on their accepting her on her own terms, not on theirs.

Only by degrees did she realise to the full extent what her social suicide implied. It was not possible for her to estimate its costs till she had committed the irrevocable act which severed her from the world to which she had belonged; as impossible, or almost as impossible as it is for the girl who jumps off London Bridge to conceive of the altered relations and strangeness of the region into which she will pass through the mud and water of the Thames.

I know that nothing surprised me more as a child than being told that water was composed of an infinite number of globules arranged like pebbles in a bag; but the stream of social life, which looks equally simple and elemental, is in reality made not only of the little component globules of individual life, but of a thousand other circles enclosing these globules, all distinct, self-contained, and rotating on their own axes and taking their own courses. Each of these circles has its special interests, its special tittle-tattle, its special spites, and its special ambitions. There are circles of all sorts, professional, and social, and intellectual, and those who pass from one to another have to undergo mental adjustment before they can understand the language and partake in the momentum of these spheres. Such is the parsonic circle, such the sporting circle, such the circle of politicians, such the legal circle. Let a hunter pitch his rider in pink over a hedge into a ditchful of picnicing clergy and their wives and daughters, and he will be as unable to talk with them as they to entertain him. Let Mrs. Brown drop through the ceiling into an officers’ mess, and she will not have a thought, a taste, a word in common. Suffer an archbishop to rise through a trap into the green-room of the ballet girls, and what would they have in common? The gods live on Olympus, mortals on the plain, and the demons in Tartarus, and all roll on together in one current. Dante divides heaven into constellations, and purgatory into mansions – all the blessed are separated by leagues of ether, and all the lost by adamantine walls. They do not associate, the former enjoy themselves by themselves in their cold planets and groups of stars, and the latter stop in their several torments by themselves. Their several virtues and several vices classify them and separate them from their fellows. It is not otherwise in this world. We are all boxed off from each other, and very uncomfortable when we step out of our proper box into another.

Arminell felt keenly the solitude of her condition, and it weighed on her spirits. It was not possible for her at once to accommodate herself to her new surroundings. She had Mrs. Welsh to talk, or rather to listen to, but Mrs. Welsh had no other subjects of conversation than the iniquities of servants and the scandals in high life. According to Mrs. Welsh, there was but one social circle in which reigned virtue, and that was the circle of the middle class to which she belonged. Servants as beneath that were bad, that her daily experience taught her, and the upper ten thousand, as she knew by the voice of gossip and the revelations of the press, were also corrupt. It is conceivable that one may tire of hearing only two subjects discussed, even though these subjects be of engrossing interest; and Arminell was fatigued with the relation of the misdeeds of domestics, and the disorders of the nobility. Shylock said to Antonio that he would talk with him, buy with him, sell with him, but would not eat with him. Arminell could do everything with Mrs. Welsh except think with her. The girl felt her friendless condition. She had no companion of her own age, class, and sex, to whom she could open her mind and of whom ask counsel. She could have no more communication with those in the upper world to which she had belonged, and which shared her intellectual and moral culture, than can a fish have communication with the bird. It looks up and sees the beautiful creatures skimming the surface of its element, sees their feet moving in it, their beaks dipped below it, but the birds do not belong to the aqueous element, nor the fish to the atmosphere, and they must live apart accordingly. The bird can pull out a fish and gobble it, and the fish can bite the toes of the swimming duck, and that is the limit of their association.

I have heard of the case of a lady who was either struck by lightning or so paralyzed by electricity that she lay as one dead, bereft of power of motion. She neither breathed nor did her pulse beat, she could not move a muscle or articulate a sound. She was pronounced to be dead, and was measured, shrouded, and put into her coffin. But though apparently dead, she could hear all that went on in the room, the blinds being drawn down, the number of feet and inches determined for her shell, the sobbing of her mother, and the tramp of those who brought in her coffin. She heard the undertaker ask her father on the day of the funeral, whether he should at once screw her down – then, by a supreme effort she succeeded in flickering an eyelid, and her father saw the movement and sent for a surgeon.

Arminell was dead – dead to her relations, to her friends, and to her acquaintance. They discussed her, and she was unable to defend herself. They wept over her, and she could not dry their tears. She was incapacitated by her own act from giving a token of life. She was separated from every one with whom for eighteen years she had associated, cut off from every interest which for all these years had occupied her mind, severed from that stream of intellectual life in which she had moved.

She would not quiver an eye in entreaty to be taken out of her shell, she had deliberately gone into that chest, and to it she must henceforth contract her interests and accommodate her habits. When we die we carry away nothing with us of our treasure, but we have our friends and relatives to associate with in the world of spirits; Arminell, by her social death, had carried away with her her patrimony, but that was all. She must make new acquaintances, and acquire fresh friends.

If there be any truth in the doctrine of the transmigration of spirits, then the souls after death enter into new existences, as dogs, oxen, elephants, cockatoos, or earth-worms. If so – the dog that fawns on us with such speaking eyes may be the wife we still lament; and when we cut a worm in two with our spade, we may be slicing in half our little lost babe; and the beef of the ox served at our table may have been worn by the wandering spirit of our most intimate friend.

There are two considerations which make me most reluctant to accept the doctrine of transmigration – the one is that when we leave our human frames and enter into those of dog or slug, what wretchedness it will be for us to adapt our minds and feelings to doggish or sluggish limits. And the other is that the distress must be insupportable to associate with those with whom we have lived without the power of communicating with them.

Now Arminell had transmigrated from the aristocratic order of beings into the middle class order of beings, and she had to accommodate her mind to the ways of this lower grade; and although sitting on a bench in Hyde Park, she might see those she had known, talked to, loved, pass in Rotten Row, she could no more communicate with them than can those who have migrated into dog, and cockatoo, and slug, communicate with us.

In course of time, no doubt, she would find congenial spirits, get to know and love nice girls in this new circle in which she found herself, but that would take time. In course of time, no doubt, she would find her place in this new order of life, be caught by its drift, and drive forward with it. When we are in a railway carriage and cast something from the window, that object is carried on by the momentum of the train, and does not drop perpendicularly to the ground. So Arminell in falling from her class was still for a while sensible of its impulses, but this would cease in time.

There are cases known to science, in which a person has fallen into a condition of mental blank, has forgotten everything acquired, and all acquaintances, and has to begin from the beginning again, to learn to know the relations and to acquire speech and every accomplishment. Now such a case was not that of Arminell, for she remembered all her past, nevertheless she had in this new condition to accept as lost a vast amount of what she had acquired in eighteen years, and begin to accumulate afresh.

Now – she was solitary. It had not occurred to her in her former life that solitude could be oppressive. Then she had counted it as an escape from the whirl of social intercourse. Then she had resented advice, and undervalued sympathy; but now, when she was deprived of these things, she felt the loss of them. The wife transmigrated into a dog may snap and bark, but cannot otherwise express her heartache, and reproach her husband when preparing for his second wife; nor can the worm plead and look at us out of our child’s blue eyes and tell us it is our own little one translated, when we lift the spade over it. So must Arminell remain silent and unrecognised before all those who had loved her and known her in her first existence.

The life she led in the Avenue, Shepherd’s Bush, was so unlike what she had been accustomed to that it was not possible for her to fit herself to it all at once. But Arminell had good sense, and a brave spirit. She did not waste her energies on vain repining. She did not recoil from and disparage that life into which she had entered. She accepted it, as she had accepted the revelation of her folly.

There is a serviceable Yorkshire word, descriptive of accommodation to circumstances, which is worthy of being rescued from a provincialism and of elevation into general acceptance, and that word is – to frame.

A raw country girl is taken into a household as servant. If she shows token of adaptability to the situation, teachableness, and willingness, she is said to frame.

A clerk settles into an office, is quick in acquiring the technicalities of the business, is interested in his work, obliging as to extension of hours under pressure, and he is said by his employers to frame.

A newly-married couple, if they make allowances for each other’s weaknesses, are not self-willed and unyielding, if ready to make the best of all circumstances, are said also to frame.

The frame is the situation, and it may be of all kinds, plain or rich, narrow or wide; it may be guilt and burnished, or of rude cross-pieces of oak. Into this frame the new life, like a picture, has to be fitted, so much of margin has to be shorn off, or so much of mount has to be added. The frame will not accommodate itself to the picture, the picture must be adapted to the frame.

Arminell was in the process of framing, and the frame was one of her own selection. Whether suitable or not, the situation could not be adapted to her, she must adapt herself to it; she must cut away here, and piece on there to fit it. The reader shall be shown some instances of the way in which Arminell progressed with her framing.

In the first place, the girl had been accustomed all her life to having a lady’s-maid in attendance on her, and putting to rights everything she left in disorder. When she changed her dress, she had been accustomed to throw her clothes about just where she had taken them off; she had not put her gloves away, tidied her dressing-table, arranged her dresses in the drawers. When, at first, she came to the Avenue, she did as she had been wont, and was unable to understand the hints thrown out by her hostess that the maid had too much of household work to do to be able to act as a lady’s-maid as well. Then Arminell discovered that it engaged Mrs. Welsh half-an-hour in the morning, another half-hour in the afternoon, and a third in the evening, to arrange her clothes and room. And as she was aware that Mrs. Welsh had no cook, and had to superintend the cooking herself, this imposed on her hostess an extra and arduous task. Mrs. Welsh expected before long to be a mother, and to accumulate work on the good woman at such a time was unjustifiable.

Accordingly Arminell began to put her room to rights herself, learned how to fold her gowns, and liked to arrange her boots tidily under the dressing-table, and put her towels straight on the horse, and the comb on the brush. After a week she found that the trouble she gave herself was very slight, and that it afforded her real pleasure to be her own lady’s-maid.