The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Case of General Opel
by George Meredith
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Title: The Case of General Opel

Author: George Meredith

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4493]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on March 5, 2002]


The Project Gutenberg Etext The Case of General Opel by George Meredith
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THE CASE OF GENERAL OPLE AND LADY CAMPER

By George Meredith

CHAPTER I

An excursion beyond the immediate suburbs of London, projected long
before his pony-carriage was hired to conduct him, in fact ever since his
retirement from active service, led General Ople across a famous common,
with which he fell in love at once, to a lofty highway along the borders
of a park, for which he promptly exchanged his heart, and so gradually
within a stone's-throw or so of the river-side, where he determined not
solely to bestow his affections but to settle for life.  It may be seen
that he was of an adventurous temperament, though he had thought fit to
loosen his sword-belt.  The pony-carriage, however, had been hired for
the very special purpose of helping him to pass in review the lines of
what he called country houses, cottages, or even sites for building, not
too remote from sweet London: and as when Coelebs goes forth intending to
pursue and obtain, there is no doubt of his bringing home a wife, the
circumstance that there stood a house to let, in an airy situation, at a
certain distance in hail of the metropolis he worshipped, was enough to
kindle the General's enthusiasm.  He would have taken the first he saw,
had it not been for his daughter, who accompanied him, and at the age of
eighteen was about to undertake the management of his house.  Fortune,
under Elizabeth Ople's guiding restraint, directed him to an epitome of
the comforts.  The place he fell upon is only to be described in the
tongue of auctioneers, and for the first week after taking it he modestly
followed them by terming it bijou.  In time, when his own imagination,
instigated by a state of something more than mere contentment, had been
at work on it, he chose the happy phrase, 'a gentlemanly residence.'  For
it was, he declared, a small estate.  There was a lodge to it, resembling
two sentry-boxes forced into union, where in one half an old couple sat
bent, in the other half lay compressed; there was a backdrive to
discoverable stables; there was a bit of grass that would have appeared a
meadow if magnified; and there was a wall round the kitchen-garden and a
strip of wood round the flower-garden.  The prying of the outside world
was impossible.  Comfort, fortification; and gentlemanliness made the
place, as the General said, an ideal English home.

The compass of the estate was half an acre, and perhaps a perch or two,
just the size for the hugging love General Ople was happiest in giving.
He wisely decided to retain the old couple at the lodge, whose members
were used to restriction, and also not to purchase a cow, that would have
wanted pasture.  With the old man, while the old woman attended to the
bell at the handsome front entrance with its gilt-spiked gates, he
undertook to do the gardening; a business he delighted in, so long as he
could perform it in a gentlemanly manner, that is to say, so long as he
was not overlooked.  He was perfectly concealed from the road.  Only one
house, and curiously indeed, only one window of the house, and further to
show the protection extended to Douro Lodge, that window an attic,
overlooked him.  And the house was empty.

The house (for who can hope, and who should desire a commodious house,
with conservatories, aviaries, pond and boat-shed, and other joys of
wealth, to remain unoccupied) was taken two seasons later by a lady, of
whom Fame, rolling like a dust-cloud from the place she had left,
reported that she was eccentric.  The word is uninstructive: it does not
frighten.  In a lady of a certain age, it is rather a characteristic of
aristocracy in retirement.  And at least it implies wealth.

General Ople was very anxious to see her.  He had the sentiment of humble
respectfulness toward aristocracy, and there was that in riches which
aroused his admiration.  London, for instance, he was not afraid to say
he thought the wonder of the world.  He remarked, in addition, that the
sacking of London would suffice to make every common soldier of the
foreign army of occupation an independent gentleman for the term of his
natural days.  But this is a nightmare! said he, startling himself with
an abhorrent dream of envy of those enriched invading officers: for Booty
is the one lovely thing which the military mind can contemplate in the
abstract.  His habit was to go off in an explosion of heavy sighs when he
had delivered himself so far, like a man at war with himself.

The lady arrived in time: she received the cards of the neighbourhood,
and signalized her eccentricity by paying no attention to them, excepting
the card of a Mrs. Baerens, who had audience of her at once.  By express
arrangement, the card of General Wilson Ople, as her nearest neighbour,
followed the card of the rector, the social head of the district; and the
rector was granted an interview, but Lady Camper was not at home to
General Ople.  She is of superior station to me, and may not wish to
associate with me, the General modestly said.  Nevertheless he was
wounded: for in spite of himself, and without the slightest wish to
obtrude his own person, as he explained the meaning that he had in him,
his rank in the British army forced him to be the representative of it,
in the absence of any one of a superior rank.  So that he was
professionally hurt, and his heart being in his profession, it may be
honestly stated that he was wounded in his feelings, though he said no,
and insisted on the distinction.  Once a day his walk for constitutional
exercise compelled him to pass before Lady Camper's windows, which were
not bashfully withdrawn, as he said humorously of Douro Lodge, in the
seclusion of half-pay, but bowed out imperiously, militarily, like a
generalissimo on horseback, and had full command of the road and levels
up to the swelling park-foliage.  He went by at a smart stride, with a
delicate depression of his upright bearing, as though hastening to greet
a friend in view, whose hand was getting ready for the shake.  This much
would have been observed by a housemaid; and considering his fine figure
and the peculiar shining silveriness of his hair, the acceleration of his
gait was noticeable.  When he drove by, the pony's right ear was flicked,
to the extreme indignation of a mettlesome little animal.  It ensued in
consequence that the General was borne flying under the eyes of Lady
Camper, and such pace displeasing him, he reduced it invariably at a step
or two beyond the corner of her grounds.

But neither he nor his daughter Elizabeth attached importance to so
trivial a circumstance.  The General punctiliously avoided glancing at
the windows during the passage past them, whether in his wild career or
on foot.  Elizabeth took a side-shot, as one looks at a wayside tree.
Their speech concerning Lady Camper was an exchange of commonplaces over
her loneliness: and this condition of hers was the more perplexing to
General Ople on his hearing from his daughter that the lady was very
fine-looking, and not so very old, as he had fancied eccentric ladies
must be.  The rector's account of her, too, excited the mind.  She had
informed him bluntly, that she now and then went to church to save
appearances, but was not a church-goer, finding it impossible to support
the length of the service; might, however, be reckoned in subscriptions
for all the charities, and left her pew open to poor people, and none but
the poor.  She had travelled over Europe, and knew the East.  Sketches in
watercolours of the scenes she had visited adorned her walls, and a pair
of pistols, that she had found useful, she affirmed, lay on the writing-
desk in her drawing-room.  General Ople gathered from the rector that she
had a great contempt for men: yet it was curiously varied with
lamentations over the weakness of women.  'Really she cannot possibly be
an example of that,' said the General, thinking of the pistols.

Now, we learn from those who have studied women on the chess-board, and
know what ebony or ivory will do along particular lines, or hopping, that
men much talked about will take possession of their thoughts; and
certainly the fact may be accepted for one of their moves.  But the whole
fabric of our knowledge of them, which we are taught to build on this
originally acute perception, is shattered when we hear, that it is
exactly the same, in the same degree, in proportion to the amount of work
they have to do, exactly the same with men and their thoughts in the case
of women much talked about.  So it was with General Ople, and nothing is
left for me to say except, that there is broader ground than the
chessboard.  I am earnest in protesting the similarity of the singular
couples on common earth, because otherwise the General is in peril of the
accusation that he is a feminine character; and not simply was he a
gallant officer, and a veteran in gunpowder strife, he was also (and it
is an extraordinary thing that a genuine humility did not prevent it, and
did survive it) a lord and conqueror of the sex.  He had done his pretty
bit of mischief, all in the way of honour, of course, but hearts had
knocked.  And now, with his bright white hair, his close-brushed white
whiskers on a face burnt brown, his clear-cut features, and a winning
droop of his eyelids, there was powder in him still, if not shot.

There was a lamentable susceptibility to ladies' charms.  On the other
hand, for the protection of the sex, a remainder of shyness kept him from
active enterprise and in the state of suffering, so long as indications
of encouragement were wanting.  He had killed the soft ones, who came to
him, attracted by the softness in him, to be killed: but clever women
alarmed and paralyzed him.  Their aptness to question and require
immediate sparkling answers; their demand for fresh wit, of a kind that
is not furnished by publications which strike it into heads with a
hammer, and supply it wholesale; their various reading; their power of
ridicule too; made them awful in his contemplation.

Supposing (for the inflammable officer was now thinking, and deeply
thinking, of a clever woman), supposing that Lady Camper's pistols were
needed in her defence one night: at the first report proclaiming her
extremity, valour might gain an introduction to her upon easy terms, and
would not be expected to be witty.  She would, perhaps, after the
excitement, admit his masculine superiority, in the beautiful old
fashion, by fainting in his arms.  Such was the reverie he passingly
indulged, and only so could he venture to hope for an acquaintance with
the formidable lady who was his next neighbour.  But the proud society of
the burglarious denied him opportunity.

Meanwhile, he learnt that Lady Camper had a nephew, and the young
gentleman was in a cavalry regiment.  General Ople met him outside his
gates, received and returned a polite salute, liked his appearance and
manners and talked of him to Elizabeth, asking her if by chance she had
seen him.  She replied that she believed she had, and praised his
horsemanship.  The General discovered that he was an excellent sculler.
His daughter was rowing him up the river when the young gentleman shot
by, with a splendid stroke, in an outrigger, backed, and floating
alongside presumed to enter into conversation, during which he managed to
express regrets at his aunt's turn for solitariness.  As they belonged to
sister branches of the same Service, the General and Mr. Reginald Roller
had a theme in common, and a passion.  Elizabeth told her father that
nothing afforded her so much pleasure as to hear him talk with Mr. Roller
on military matters.  General Ople assured her that it pleased him
likewise.  He began to spy about for Mr. Roller, and it sometimes
occurred that they conversed across the wall; it could hardly be avoided.
A hint or two, an undefinable flying allusion, gave the General to
understand that Lady Camper had not been happy in her marriage.  He was
pained to think of her misfortune; but as she was not over forty, the
disaster was, perhaps, not irremediable; that is to say, if she could be
taught to extend her forgiveness to men, and abandon her solitude.  'If,'
he said to his daughter, 'Lady Camper should by any chance be induced to
contract a second alliance, she would, one might expect, be humanized,
and we should have highly agreeable neighbours.'  Elizabeth artlessly
hoped for such an event to take place.

She rarely differed with her father, up to whom, taking example from the
world around him, she looked as the pattern of a man of wise conduct.

And he was one; and though modest, he was in good humour with himself,
approved himself, and could say, that without boasting of success, he was
a satisfied man, until he met his touchstone in Lady Camper.




CHAPTER II

This is the pathetic matter of my story, and it requires pointing out,
because he never could explain what it was that seemed to him so cruel in
it, for he was no brilliant son of fortune, he was no great pretender,
none of those who are logically displaced from the heights they have been
raised to, manifestly created to show the moral in Providence.  He was
modest, retiring, humbly contented; a gentlemanly residence appeased his
ambition.  Popular, he could own that he was, but not meteorically;
rather by reason of his willingness to receive light than his desire to
shed it.  Why, then, was the terrible test brought to bear upon him, of
all men?  He was one of us; no worse, and not strikingly or perilously
better; and he could not but feel, in the bitterness of his reflections
upon an inexplicable destiny, that the punishment befalling him,
unmerited as it was, looked like absence of Design in the scheme of
things, Above.  It looked as if the blow had been dealt him by reckless
chance.  And to believe that, was for the mind of General Ople the having
to return to his alphabet and recommence the ascent of the laborious
mountain of understanding.

To proceed, the General's introduction to Lady Camper was owing to a
message she sent him by her gardener, with a request that he would cut
down a branch of a wychelm, obscuring her view across his grounds toward
the river.  The General consulted with his daughter, and came to the
conclusion, that as he could hardly despatch a written reply to a verbal
message, yet greatly wished to subscribe to the wishes of Lady Camper,
the best thing for him to do was to apply for an interview.  He sent word
that he would wait on Lady Camper immediately, and betook himself
forthwith to his toilette.  She was the niece of an earl.

Elizabeth commended his appearance, 'passed him,' as he would have said;
and well she might, for his hat, surtout, trousers and boots, were worthy
of an introduction to Royalty.  A touch of scarlet silk round the neck
gave him bloom, and better than that, the blooming consciousness of it.

'You are not to be nervous, papa,' Elizabeth said.

'Not at all,' replied the General.  'I say,