The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper | Page 6

the feet of a lady
as red with rouge as a railway bill. His not seeing it showed the state he
was in. The sister of Mrs. Pollington, an amiable widow, relict of a
large City warehouse, named Barcop, was chilled by a falling off in his
attentions. His apology for not appearing at garden parties was, that he
was engaged to wait on Lady Camper.
And at one time, her not condescending to exchange visits with the
obsequious General was a topic fertile in irony. But she did condescend.
Lady Camper came to his gate unexpectedly, rang the bell, and was let
in like an ordinary visitor. It happened that the General was gardening--
not the pretty occupation of pruning--he was digging--and of necessity
his coat was off, and he was hot, dusty, unpresentable. From adoring
earth as the mother of roses, you may pass into a lady's presence
without purification; you cannot (or so the General thought) when you
are caught in the act of adoring the mother of cabbages. And though he
himself loved the cabbage equally with the rose, in his heart respected
the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower, for he gloried in
his kitchen garden, this was not a secret for the world to know, and he
almost heeled over on his beam ends when word was brought of the

extreme honour Lady Camper had done him. He worked his arms
hurriedly into his fatigue jacket, trusting to get away to the house and
spend a couple of minutes on his adornment; and with any other visitor
it might have been accomplished, but Lady Camper disliked sitting
alone in a room. She was on the square of lawn as the General stole
along the walk. Had she kept her back to him, he might have rounded
her like the shadow of a dial, undetected. She was frightfully acute of
hearing. She turned while he was in the agony of hesitation, in a queer
attitude, one leg on the march, projected by a frenzied tip-toe of the
hinder leg, the very fatallest moment she could possibly have selected
for unveiling him.
Of course there was no choice but to surrender on the spot.
He began to squander his dizzy wits in profuse apologies. Lady Camper
simply spoke of the nice little nest of a garden, smelt the flowers,
accepted a Niel rose and a Rohan, a Cline, a Falcot, and La France.
'A beautiful rose indeed,' she said of the latter, 'only it smells of
macassar oil.'
'Really, it never struck me, I say it never struck me before,' rejoined the
General, smelling it as at a pinch of snuff. 'I was saying, I always . . .'
And he tacitly, with the absurdest of smiles, begged permission to leave
unterminated a sentence not in itself particularly difficult
'I have a nose,' observed Lady Camper.
Like the nobly-bred person she was, according to General Ople's
version of the interview on his estate, when he stood before her in his
gardening costume, she put him at his ease, or she exerted herself to do
so; and if he underwent considerable anguish, it was the fault of his
excessive scrupulousness regarding dress, propriety, appearance.
He conducted her at her request to the kitchen garden and the handful
of paddock, the stables and coach-house, then back to the lawn.
'It is the home for a young couple,' she said.

'I am no longer young,' the General bowed, with the sigh peculiar to
this confession. 'I say, I am no longer young, but I call the place a
gentlemanly residence. I was saying, I . . .'
'Yes, yes!' Lady Camper tossed her head, half closing her eyes, with a
contraction of the brows, as if in pain.
He perceived a similar expression whenever he spoke of his residence.
Perhaps it recalled happier days to enter such a nest. Perhaps it had
been such a home for a young couple that she had entered on her
marriage with Sir Scrope Camper, before he inherited his title and
estates.
The General was at a loss to conceive what it was.
It recurred at another mention of his idea of the nature of the residence.
It was almost a paroxysm. He determined not to vex her reminiscences
again; and as this resolution directed his mind to his residence, thinking
it pre-eminently gentlemanly, his tongue committed the error of
repeating it, with 'gentleman-like' for a variation.
Elizabeth was out--he knew not where. The housemaid informed him,
that Miss Elizabeth was out rowing on the water.
'Is she alone?' Lady Camper inquired of him.
'I fancy so,' the General replied.
'The poor child has no mother.'
'It has been a sad loss to us both, Lady Camper.'
'No doubt. She is too pretty